Microsoft’s Ignite developer conference is underway, and the company has used this as a platform to announce new recovery options for Windows 11. This is something which is being pushed not as an evolution of recovery, but a reinvention. Having already released Quick Machine Recovery a few months ago, Microsoft is now switching focus. With Intune remote recovery via WinRE, the company enables admins to not only see the Intune console when a managed PC has entered recovery, but also perform recovery actions. This is where the new features sit. Microsoft has two new recovery actions that will soon be… [Continue Reading]

It is that time once again – there is a new version of PowerToys to install. Microsoft has just unleashed PowerToys v0.96.0 as part of a release cycle that focuses on “new features, stability, optimization improvements, and automation”. First things first: are there any new modules here? Sadly not. But while there may not be any brand new utilities to play with, PowerToys v0.96.0 does see a number of significant changes and additions to the tools you already know and love – including Command Palette and Advanced Paste. This last tool is the latest to receive an AI upgrade. Microsoft… [Continue Reading]

The tech titan previewed a sweeping set of AI advances that it says will reshape how organizations ideate, build, deploy, and govern AI systems.

The post Ignite 2025: Microsoft Showcases AI Lifecycle Vision appeared first on TechRepublic.

Windows 11 power users will be pleased to learn that Microsoft is planning to bring the Sysmon (System Monitor) tool to Windows as a native utility. Usually part of the Sysinternals suite of utilities, Sysmon will be integrated into not only Windows 11, but also Windows Server 2025 starting next year. The announcement was made not by Microsoft, but by Sysinternals creator Mark Russinovich. He says that by integrating the Sysmon utility into Windows, administrators will simplify deployment and bring additional functionality. While Russinovich points to various benefits of going native with Sysmon, there is one that stands out for… [Continue Reading]

A blog post published Tuesday night by Cloudflare cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince has details on what caused its “worst outage since 2019,” pinning the issue to a problem in the Bot Management system that is supposed to control which automated crawlers are allowed to scan particular websites using its CDN.

Cloudflare said last year that about 20 percent of the web runs through its network, which is supposed to share the load to keep websites online in the face of traffic spikes and DDoS attacks. But today’s crash disconnected many of them, knocking out everything from X to ChatGPT to the well-known outage tracker Downdetector for several hours and resembling recent outages caused by problems with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

Cloudflare’s bot controls are supposed to help deal with problems like crawlers scraping information to train generative AI. It also recently announced a system that uses Generative AI to build the “AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect ‘no crawl’ directives.”

However, it says the problems today were due to changes to the permissions system of a database, not the generative AI tech, not DNS, and not what Cloudflare initially suspected, a cyberattack or malicious activity like a “hyper-scale DDoS attack.”

According to Prince, the machine learning model behind Bot Management that generates bot scores for the requests that travel over its network has a frequently updated configuration file that helps ID automated requests; however, “A change in our underlying ClickHouse query behaviour that generates this file caused it to have a large number of duplicate ‘feature’ rows.”

There’s more detail in the post about what happened next, but the query change caused its ClickHouse database to generate duplicates of information. As the configuration file rapidly grew to exceed preset memory limits, it took down “the core proxy system that handles traffic processing for our customers, for any traffic that depended on the bots module.”

As a result, companies that used Cloudflare’s rules to block certain bots returned false positives and cut off real traffic, while Cloudflare customers who didn’t use the generated bot score in their rules remained online.

For now, it lists four specific plans to keep this kind of problem from happening again, even if the growing centralization of internet services may make these outages inevitable:

• Hardening ingestion of Cloudflare-generated configuration files in the same way we would for user-generated input
• Enabling more global kill switches for features
• Eliminating the ability for core dumps or other error reports to overwhelm system resources
• Reviewing failure modes for error conditions across all core proxy modules

The following originally appears on fast.ai and is reposted here with the author’s permission.

I’ve spent decades teaching people to code, building tools that help developers work more effectively, and championing the idea that programming should be accessible to everyone. Through fast.ai, I’ve helped millions learn not just to use AI, but to understand it deeply enough to build things that matter.

But lately, I’ve been deeply concerned. The AI agent revolution promises to make everyone more productive, yet what I’m seeing is something different: developers abandoning the very practices that lead to understanding, mastery, and software that lasts. When CEOs brag about their teams generating 10,000 lines of AI-written code per day, when junior engineers tell me they’re “vibe-coding” their way through problems without understanding the solutions, are we racing toward a future where no one understands how anything works, and competence craters?

I needed to talk to someone who embodies the opposite approach: someone whose code continues to run the world decades after he created it. That’s why I called Chris Lattner, cofounder and CEO of Modular AI and creator of LLVM, the Clang compiler, the Swift programming language and the MLIR compiler infrastructure.

Chris and I chatted on Oct 5, 2025, and he kindly let me record the conversation. I’m glad I did, because it turned out to be thoughtful and inspiring. Check out the video for the full interview.

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Read Jeremy’s full thoughts about the episode on his post on fast.ai‘s blog.