Microsoft recently announced that it has disabled the MSIX ms-appinstaller protocol handler to help stop the spread of viruses and other common threats that target Windows users. The change mainly impacts developers who might list MSIX files on their websites and addresses a Windows vulnerability first raised by Microsoft in December of 2021.

For those unfamiliar, the MSIX ms-appinstaller protocol handler is a Windows feature that was intended to allow users to install a Windows app without having to download an entire MSIX package. It was in use by many developers so that folks could install an app directly from a web server, but those with bad intent were also using the feature to their advantage. As an example, Microsoft indicated the AppX installer was being spoofed to inject malware like Emotet, Trickbot, and Bazaloader.

Microsoft is actively working to address the issue, and the first part of that involves disabling the feature. For a bigger solution down the line, Microsoft is looking into creating a Group Policy so that IT admins can re-enable the protocol and control the usage of it within their organization.

As a workaround in the meantime, users will need to first download these kinds of MSIX apps to their device, and then install the package with App Installer. The one caveat to this, though, is that the download size for packages might be increased. Microsoft also recommends that developers update the link to an application by removing ‘ms-appinstaller:?source=’ so that the MSIX package or App Installer file will be downloaded to an end user’s machine.

Rockstar Games recently made an announcement, indicating that GTA 5 will be available on both Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on March 15th, 2022. Gamers should expect impressive upgrades, both visual and performance-wise.

The new upgrades for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S series includes:

• New graphic modes with up to 4K resolution and up to 60 frames-per-second
• Texture and draw distance upgrades
• Enhanced 3D audio
• HDR options and ray-tracing
• Advanced haptic feedback
• Faster loading times for the consoles.

Note: GTA V is already available on Xbox Series X|S. These are upgrades that will be made come March 15, 2022.

Grand Theft Auto Online

Moreover, GTA Online for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series has also not been left out. Players will have the ability to skip the GTAV Story Mode prologue before they even get online. GTA V also comes with a brand new GTA online Tutorial.

Furthermore, GTA Online players will be able to get to the Career Builder with full access to either one of the four illicit businesses comprising of:

• Executive
• Gunrunner
• Nightclub Owner
• Biker

Other notable features include access to a high-end vehicle, firepower that one would need to start an enterprise, and a sizable $GTA windfall that will help in the selection of a property. Players also have the ability to restart their character, thus, allowing them to capitalize on the Career Builder feature as they please.

Hao’s Special Works

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions of Grand Theft Auto Online will also feature Hao’s Special Works, a new auto-shop located within the LS Car Meet. Players will be able to upgrade their vehicles here. The auto shop already has 5 new vehicles and 5 existing vehicles at the start of the game.

In the announcement, Rockstar Games also highlighted that they are actively working on a new entry for the Grand Theft Auto series.

What feature are you most excited about? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.

Minecraft Education Edition is a popular learning tool built upon the best-selling video game of all time. It features a broad array of lesson plans that use the game in combination with other assets to teach everything from science and mathematics to coding, language arts, lessons on cultural diversity, and so on.

Another subject Minecraft Edu teaches is Digital Citizenship, obviously a very fundamental topic in today’s world.

What is Minecraft Edu’s digital citizenship course?

The course, which is aimed at upper elementary students, is intended to teach kids the basic tenets of being a good and responsible digital citizen. And what are these, you may ask? They are 1) respecting the feelings of others (remember that on the other side of that screen is a human being, just like you); 2) respecting digital copyright, including intellectual property; and 3) leaving a clean digital footprint.

How does it work?

The lesson curriculum goes as follows: students watch a video courtesy of GCFLearnFree.org titled “Being a good digital citizen.” After viewing the video, students are then logged into the Minecraft “Digital Citizenship” world, where they are put into four groups.

These groups explore different aspects of bad digital citizenship e.g., trolling, digital theft, etc. Groups are assigned projects such as building a structure or collecting resources, and so on. However, in each group a character called “The Agent” will sabotage the effort by practicing bad citizenship – in one group, for instance, the Agent will at some point steal the groups resources (representing digital theft), and in another the Agent will destroy part of a structure, an analog to a form of online trolling called “griefing.”

The point is that the students experience first-hand the effects of bad citizenship. Afterwards, students return to the game world’s campsite, or hub, to discuss their experiences and how it made them feel.

The ultimate objective of the lesson is to instill in students the importance of respecting others in the online sphere just as they would in “real life,” including respecting digital property. The lesson also includes a discussion of lesson keywords, such as an explanation of what a “digital footprint is.”

Conclusion

Now that we know a little about how digital citizenship is taught in schools it begs the question: does teaching it really work? Will tools such as Minecraft Edu’s course really raise a more socially conscious generation of internet users? Only time will tell.

Feature image credit: education.minecraft.net

Welcome back to our Windows news recap, where we go over the top stories of the past week in the world of Microsoft’s flagship operating system.

Google brings its Flutter development tool to Windows

Google has announced that it is bringing Flutter, an open-source framework for developers to develop for and target multiple platforms with a single code base. This announcement will mean that developers will be able to target Windows as a platform, expanding Flutter beyond web and mobile development.

Oracle Linux comes to the Microsoft Store

There’s now a wider variety of flavours of Linux to choose from in the Microsoft Store, as Oracle Linux has made its appearance in the store.

Microsoft designer says Windows 11 3D emoji are still being worked on

All may not be lost with having 3D emojis on Windows 11, as a Microsoft designer says that they are still being worked on. This follows disappointment that Microsoft appeared to imply 3D emojis would be on Windows 11, but then users discovered they were not upon launch of the OS, and Microsoft later clarified that they would only be available in certain apps that support them.

Thank you and agreed! We're working on that. ????

— Nando Costa (@nandocosta_art) January 28, 2022

That’s it for this week. We will be back next week with more Windows news.

If you’re on the stable version of Microsoft Edge, it’s time to check for updates. Now up to version 98.0.110.8.43, the latest version of Edge Stable is getting some new features, including a browsing mode in Microsoft Edge where security takes priority.

The new security features are all about helping protect against in-the-wild exploits known as 0-days. These features, though, are hidden behind some group policies. One for Security Mode, another for Bypassing List Domains, and a final for Enforcing List Domains. You can visit the links to learn more on how to enable it.

Other than the security stuff, Edge version 98.0.110.8.43 adds the ability to personalize multi-profile experiences. You’ll now be able to create a customized list of sites for automatic profile switching in Microsoft Edge. Under the hood, meanwhile, Microsoft added three-digit version numbers in the user agent string, depreciated WebRTC’s Plan B SDP semantics, and updated scrollbars with an overlay-based design. This feature will be in edge://flags.

As always, this release brings a ton of policy updates, too. These cover the address bar, auto launching, Sync Types, and more. We invite you to read Microsoft’s changelogs for the full technicalities of these. Happy downloading, Edge users!

It’s been a year since Microsoft launched Viva, an employee experience platform integrated in Microsoft Teams, and the company just shared some new numbers behind the service.

Microsoft now says that Viva has 10 million monthly active users. Of those 10 million monthly active users, Microsoft says included in the figure are 1,000 paying customers. These range from groups such as Blum, Nationwide, Old Mutual, PayPal, REI, and Unilever. And, these customers sent more than 9 million praises, with 48 billion focus hours booked per month.

In the one year, Microsoft even has recruited more than 200 Viva partner solutions from firms like Accenture/Avanade, EY, KPMG, PwC, and Tata Consultancy Services. But what’s ahead for Viva? In today’s announcement, Microsoft detailed that it’s working closely with LinkedIn to integrate LinkedIn Learning and Glint into Viva.

If you haven’t heard about it, you can learn more about Viva over on Microsoft’s website.

It’s been a whirlwind week for the metaverse, marked by three separate but important events. First, as we reported, Business Insider posted on troubles at Microsoft for HoloLens, then an interview in the Financial Times (via Ars Technica) with Satya Nadella focused on Microsoft’s plans for the metaverse, and third, Meta/Facebook took a beating on Wall Street, perhaps in part due to the $10 billion in losses it posted from its AR/VR divisions.

A number of factors have brought “the metaverse” to the forefront recently, most notably Facebook’s attempts to pivot to become a “metaverse company,” even going so far as to change its name to Meta. The pandemic has also thrust the workplace into a suddenly much more digital space, and it’s becoming ever more clear that we’re simply not going back. As Nadella says in the FT interview:

“When the constraints are removed, we’re not going to say: “Oh, let’s go back to 2019.” Nor are we going to be like 2020 or 2021. We’re going to find what we describe as this hybrid workplace… Any meeting at Microsoft will have at least some people, maybe 10, 20, 15 percent of people calling from remote. There will always be people in the conference room and there will be remote participants.

The remote participants’ expectation has changed forever. They’re not going to be second class. They want a first-class experience. You now need to accommodate for that with cameras in the conference room, the segmentation of each person in the conference room showing up as their own box, the ability to use chat. We really have some new invention to do—in such a way that the people who are together and people who are remote can come together and team [up] effectively.”

In fact, the thread running through the FT interview is that Nadella and Microsoft are thinking *a lot* about the metaverse. About what that hybrid remote experience will be like, to how the digital worlds created in games will spill over into the workplace, and of course to how games themselves will become more “meta.”

It’s not good news that there are problems with HoloLens. As Mary Jo Foley posted, though, those problems probably don’t have much to do with Microsoft’s overall strategy, at all:

Even as Microsoft builds up its gaming side of the house, HoloLens hasn’t figured into the consumer picture. No doubt that’s been frustrating to some employees who are more interested in consumer than enterprise. Is that why hundreds of Microsoft employees have quit to work for Meta and other companies doing work on bringing AR/VR/XR to consumers? Maybe. I hear crazy competitive salaries and frustrations working for Kipman, a visionary who may not be the best at managing and collaborating with others, may be equally or more the reasons.

As to claims that Microsoft’s “metaverse strategy” is in disarray due to HoloLens team tensions, I say, as I do about the metaverse all-up, that this is a lot of hoo-ha. (Achievement unlocked: Used hoo-ha in a story.)

Alex Kipman responded to some of the controversy surrounding HoloLens, tweeting:

don't believe what you read on the internet. #HoloLens is doing great and if you search said internet they also said we had cancelled #HoloLens2… which last I checked we shipped with success [)-)

— Alex Kipman (@akipman) February 3, 2022

However Microsoft watcher Brad Sams wasn’t impressed.

Although Meta/Facebook took a hit on Wall Street, it probably hasn’t done much to dull their enthusiasm for the metaverse, either. Nadella has high hopes for an open metaverse, where a “syndication of identity,” with users being able to have “multiple identities and multiple (store) relationships.” But it’s difficult to believe that Mark Zuckerberg will hold those same idealistic views, especially as he’s fighting to keep keep growing his company. A walled garden is going to be where Meta makes the most money, regardless of what it does for Microsoft.

Both Zuckerberg and Nadella, though, are betting on the metaverse as “the next big thing.” Nadella calls this next platform “essentially the next internet: the embodied presence.” He goes on to say:

Today, I play a game, but I’m not in the game. Now, we can start dreaming [that] through these metaverses: I can literally be in the game, just like I can be in a conference room with you in a meeting. That metaphor and the technology… will manifest itself in different contexts.

But as we’re seeing with HoloLens now, and we’ve seen all the way from Google Glass to Magic Leap, is that providing an entrance into the metaverse just isn’t that simple. HoloLens had field of view problems that literally made people sick, and there was a privacy backlash from Google Glass that effectively doomed it as a consumer ploy, at least for the time being. Magic Leap (and possibly all metaverse hardware up until now) promised much more than it could deliver. This transformance to “the next internet,” a metaverse where we’ll all exist in an “embodied presence,” isn’t going to be easy, if indeed it happens at all.

It’s far more likely we’ll move in fits and starts toward a blurring of lines between digital and physical space, and HoloLens may, but may not be a part of that transformation. With or without it, however, Microsoft will have a big part to play in a hybrid digital world.

It is truly an exciting time to be a Windows developer. Just when you think things could not get any better, they do, as Google has announced Flutter for Windows.

For those unfamiliar with Flutter, this is an open-source framework by Google which aims to give developers the power to target multiple platforms from a single code base. What sets Flutter apart is the fact that it compiles down to machine code giving it a performance edge over some of its alternatives.

Traditionally used mostly for web and mobile development, the Flutter team has now expanded the experience to target Windows. Even though this is the first production release with support for Windows, it does not mean it lacks features developers have come to expect. It comes with a mature ecosystem of packages covering a large number of scenarios, as well as core features like hot-reload make adopting Flutter an easy experience.

More importantly, this is not just a thoughtless port. The Flutter team understands that desktop experiences differ from web and mobile. This means Flutter has been updated to handle traditional desktop interactions through input devices like mice and keyboards. There is even support for the Windows Registry and the ability to interact with Win32, COM, and Windows Runtime APIs through Dart’s C interop. For those with very specific needs, you can write your very own C++ plugin!

The community has also stepped up big time, with support for a ton of use cases and scenarios, and even vendors like Realm, Syncfusion, and others have updated their offerings to take full advantage of the Windows desktop experience.

However it’s not just good news for Windows developers, support is coming for other desktop platforms as well as explained by Tim Sneath.

In the coming months, you’ll hear more from us on completing stable support for macOS and Linux, making the full set of desktop, web, and mobile platforms available for your production Flutter apps.

– Tim Sneath, Product Manager for Flutter at Google

All in all, this is great news for Windows developers and users. This opens up a world of possibilities and amazing experiences. With what’s already possible natively on Windows via .NET MAUI and WPF. This is definitely icing on the cake. To read more about this announcement, head over to Tim Sneath’s post on Medium.

If the Windows Insider team won’t have a new Dev Channel build ready until next week, Amanda Langowski, the head of the Windows Insider Program penned a long blog post to detail what to expect from the program in 2022. First of all, the program has a brand new icon you can see in the feature image above, and it will appear soon in Windows 11 Dev Channel builds, emails, and other places.

As Langowski explained today, the Windows Insider Dev, and Beta, and Release Preview channels are here to stay, and the Dev Channel will remain the place where Insiders see new features that may or may not ship to all Windows 11 users when they’re fully baked. “In some cases, these concepts will never ship, but by experimenting more, we can better refine experiences, and deliver solutions in Windows that truly empower our customers to achieve more,” Langowski explained.

The Windows Insider team will continue to use A/B testing when introducing new features on the Dev Channel, and Langowski also acknowledged that some builds ship with hidden features that are disabled on purpose. “This is by design, and in those cases, we will only communicate about features that we are purposefully enabling for Insiders to try out and give feedback on,” wrote the Windows Insider chief.

The Windows Insider team really wants Insiders to keep in mind that builds coming to the Dev Channel are not matched to a specific release, and some of the new features seen in these builds may never see the light of day. The Beta Channel, however, will continue to provide a more accurate picture of what to expect from the next Windows 11 update. “Because the Dev and Beta Channels represent parallel development paths from our engineers, there may be cases where features and experiences show up in the Beta Channel first,” Langowski also emphasized.

The Windows Insider chief also highlighted that the Windows Insider team doesn’t necessarily need Dev and Beta Channel Insiders to install new builds to give them access new features: These new experiences can also be introduced via Feature, Web, and Online Service Experience Packs, which are downloaded via Windows Update and don’t require a reboot.

As of today, Windows Insiders on the Dev Channel can’t switch to another channel without doing a clean install, but Microsoft will make it possible for a limited time in the coming weeks. “We will soon be giving Insiders a window in which they will be able to switch from the Dev Channel to the Beta Channel. Stay tuned for details in the coming weeks,” Langowski said today.

Lastly, if you’re on the Release Preview Channel, nothing is going to change for you. “The Release Preview Channel remains the best spot for previewing what’s coming to general customers soon,” explained Langowski. Microsoft still uses this channel to release new builds for Windows 10, in addition to Windows 11. “We have more people running preview builds of Windows 11 than we did Windows 10, and we are energized by all the feedback we’re seeing from Insiders and excited to use those insights to make Windows 11 even better for our customers,” Langowski said today.

Microsoft just announced that they are adding new translations to the Microsoft Translator. This move will allow the inclusion of both Inuinnaqtun and Romanized Inuktitut with the goal of enhancing the number of languages it supports.

The Microsoft Translator supports over 100 different languages including the two that have just been included. and the feature cuts across the board as users can access it on Office, Translator for Bing, and Microsoft Translator apps.

Additional support

According to Microsoft, you can now add Inuinnaqtun and Romanized Inuktitut text and document translation to applications, tools, websites, and workflows using Azure Cognitive Services Translator. Moreover, users have the ability to use the feature with Cognitive Services like Speech or Computer Vision. In return, you get additional features such as speech-to-text as well as image translation on your applications.

In January 2021, Microsoft used the traditional syllabic script to add Inuktitut to Microsoft Translator. They have taken quite some time to work on this with the aim of enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of the translation models.  The move has further enhanced their cause to break language barriers.

As such, they are able to work with people that come from all walks of life despite their language barrier thanks to Microsoft Translator, preserving endangered languages such as Inuinnaqtun and Romanized Inuktitut. According to the post by Microsoft, there are over 7,000 languages spoken across the world. Unfortunately, a language becomes extinct every two weeks.

Endangered languages on the verge of becoming extinct

Based on predictions made, around 50% to 90% of the endangered languages are said to completely disappear from the phase of the earth in the next century. Nunavut’s government has worked with Microsoft Translator and community groups such as the Kitikmeot Heritage Society to ensure that Inuinnaqtun and Inuktitut are not among the languages that become extinct.

What are your thoughts on Microsoft’s move to try and preserve endangered languages? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.