The European cloud saga of Microsoft persists.

A group of 27 European cloud infrastructure providers has issued a harsh ultimatum to Microsoft, claiming that the company must stop what they refer to as "unjustified feature and pricing discriminations against fair competition."

The announcement is an extension of the antitrust lawsuit that the non-profit Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), with headquarters in Brussels, brought against Microsoft in November 2022.

In the case, Microsoft is accused of discriminatory actions by making it more expensive for rivals to operate Microsoft products in their own clouds by giving discounts on its own software when it is combined with Azure cloud services.

The European cloud case against Microsoft is still ongoing.

Reportedly, CISPE and the massive Redmond company have resumed their negotiations, which is why the European organization is putting further pressure on Microsoft by threatening legal action.

CISPE demonstrated cost differences using the Azure Pricing Calculator, claiming that CISPE members pay significantly more to serve the same number of users with Microsoft software, even in cases when hardware costs are lower.

"The unjustified feature and pricing discriminations imposed by Microsoft on its dominant software, Office and Windows, outside of Azure, squeeze the margins of rival cloud infrastructure providers, lock in customers, and raise prices," stated Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General of CISPE, in reference to the nature of the ongoing case.

The EU antitrust regulator and the US FTC are both looking into Microsoft's cloud licensing terms, which is an additional layer of scrutiny on the company's already stringent policies. AWS and Google have expressed worries about Microsoft's tactics, despite being under scrutiny themselves. Google lodged a complaint with the UK's CMA in December 2023.

In an email, a Microsoft representative informed TechRadar Pro:

"This material is out of date, doesn't offer anything fresh, and seems to be more of the same advocacy that Amazon funds in an effort to hold onto market share. We are still committed to helping European cloud providers with their issues."

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Chrome augmentations take on the appearance of authentic program utilities

A bunch of pernicious Google Chrome expansions intended to screen perusing action have been introduced on more than 1.4 million gadgets, scientists have detailed.

As portrayed in a blog post(opens in new tab) from security organization McAfee, the motivation behind the trick is to change the casualty's program treats each time they visit an online business site, in this manner netting the administrator an offshoot expense for any buys made.

Albeit two augmentations marked as "Netflix Party" have now been taken out from the authority expansion commercial center, McAfee says the rest of still accessible to download.

As exhibited by the flooding prominence of VPN administrations and different arrangements intended to cloud web movement, present-day web clients are progressively reluctant to leave behind their perusing information - and particularly not, one would envision, in these conditions.

What makes this trick especially hard to recognize is that the expansions all fill a genuine need, on top of giving an establishment to the partner income ploy. They are likewise comprehensively very much investigated, leaving possible casualties with little sign of the trick working out right in front of them.

"The expansions offer different capabilities, for example, empowering clients to watch Netflix shows together, site coupons, and taking screen captures of a site," which made sense of McAfee.

"The clients of the expansions know nothing about [the malevolent functionality] and the protection chance of each and every site being visited being shipped off the servers of the augmentation creators."

With an end goal to sidestep discovery by investigators, in the interim, the administrators customized a portion of the expansions to start intruding with program treats a long time after the date of establishment.

Chrome clients that find they have introduced the culpable expansions are encouraged to play out a manual uninstall right away.

Twitter photo size limit finally increases in 2021

(Image credit: Twitter)

After a brief testing period, Twitter's iOS and Android app now allow users to upload and consider 4K images, consistent with a politician company statement. This lets everyone tweet images within the higher resolutions that their phones’ fancy cameras are capable of shooting. 

Twitter initially allowed select users to undertake this call in March, but now it’s hospitable to all users of its Android and iOS apps as of today. You’ll need to change your preferences to upload photos in 4K – head to Settings and Privacy > Data Usage > High-Quality Image Uploads and choose whether to permit photos up to 4K to be uploaded using your mobile data or simply over Wi-Fi.

Time to Tweet those high res pics –– the choice to upload and consider 4K images on Android and iOS is now available for everybody. To start uploading and viewing images in 4K, update your high-quality image preferences in “Data usage” settings. 

Not every phone camera can take 4K photos, but most can: broadly, cameras above 10MP take photos in 4K or greater resolution, and even the iPhone 12 line’s suite of main, ultra-wide, and telephoto cameras are all 12MP. Users will need to confirm their phone cameras are taking the highest-quality 4K-and-higher-resolution photos, though, which may be toggled either within the camera app’s settings or nested within the phone’s settings app, as in iOS (Settings > Camera > Formats > High Efficiency).

• iPhone 13 colorized renders show smaller notch and rearranged rear cameras
• Best camera phone 2021: our picks for the simplest smartphone cameras immediately 
• Apple’s ‘Center Stage’ camera follow feature is here to remain – quit hiding
• You can tweet 4K, but on mobile, you can’t see 4K

The other side of the update now allows Twitter mobile app users to look at 4K photos on their phones – but given how few smartphones even have displays with resolutions reaching 4K, you almost certainly won’t be ready to see the photos at that sharpness on your device.

Most phones released today have Full HD displays (1920 x 1080, though that first number could be greater if the phone is taller), which are 1 / 4 of the resolution of 4K (3840 x 2160) screens. Even flagship phones just like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G have taller versions of Quad HD (2560 x 1440) resolution screens, while Apple’s phones have their own oddball resolutions somewhere between Full HD and QHD (iPhone 12: 2532 x 1170) – but all are below the 4K threshold, and won’t be ready to see 4K photos in their full glory.

Only a couple of phones sold today have 4K displays and include the Sony Xperia 1 II. That doesn’t make Twitter’s new mobile app feature useless, in fact – you’ll still be ready to upload 4K photos for all of your fans on computer reception, but they’ll get to have their own 4K-and-fancier displays to ascertain their fully resolution.

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New Tech Update: iOS 14 and iPadOS 14's first public beta is here, but you'll not want to download it

Along with the tvO, and macOS 11 Big Sur public betas

It’s finally here for the people: the iOS 14 public beta is out there for download, alongside the tvOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS 11 Big Sur public betas.

Apple formally introduced subsequent versions of its device operating systems at WWDC 2020, teasing exciting new features that members of its developer beta program would be ready to try straight away, with public betas to follow.

Most of these public betas – iOS 14, iPadOS 14, macOS 11 Big Sur, and tvOS 14 – are available today, though, at the time of writing, the watchOS 7 public beta is ‘coming soon,’ consistent with Apple’s beta site. It’s unclear when it'll be available.

For broad directions on the way to download the general public betas, read below. We do have detailed guides for a way to urge a number of the operating systems, but they’re geared toward getting the developer betas – which are still worth exploring since they typically get bug fixes and promised features before the general public betas.

Take a flash before downloading to think about if you would like to place the general public beta on your phone. this is often likely to be a buggy version of the upcoming software update, and there is no guarantee that there won't be software issues on your phone when you've downloaded the iOS 14 update.

Happy to proceed? we have a guide to iOS 14's public beta below and if you click through the link at rock bottom of the page you'll also find a full guide the way to download to your phone.

How to get the iOS 14 public beta, iPadOS 14 public beta, et al.
Getting any of those public betas is straightforward, though you’ll need an Apple ID. Before you are doing anything, copy your apps and data: public betas are generally more stable than developer betas, but they aren’t foolproof, and installing an advanced OS always contains risks.


Once protected, head to beta.apple.com and click on on the ‘Sign Up’ button. You’ll be directed to enter your Apple ID and register with the Apple Beta Program, also assign an agreement acknowledging the risks.

That done, return to the Apple Beta Program site, and click on ‘Get Started,’ which takes you to the program’s guide page. You’ll get to visit on each device you’d wish to download a replacement OS beta on; click the relevant tab (iOS for iPhones than on) and under the start section, click ‘enroll your device.’

That will take you to an OS-specific beta page which can, again, urge you to copy your device. Each OS has its own steps for downloading.

But as an example, on the iOS device-enrolling page, follow the Install profile link to download a configuration profile, which can show up as a replacement option in Settings to put in. Once you've got a replacement beta profile, head to Settings > General > Software Update and you’ll have the choice to download and install the iOS 14 beta. Congrats!



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Tech Update: Intel Tiger Lake integrated Xe graphics beats Nvidia recent MX350 laptop GPU

Another clue that 11th-gen Tiger Lake integrated GPUs are going to be impressive for gaming

Intel’s Core i7-1165G7 Tiger Lake processor for laptops has been spotted in leaked benchmarks, which show integrated graphics (just about) outperforming the GeForce MX350, a standalone notebook graphics card which was released by Nvidia just a couple of months back.

The Intel Core i7-1165G7 has Xe graphics with 96 execution units (EUs) and 768 cores, clocked at 1.3GHz within the benchmark comparison which is highlighted by Rogaine, a really active leaker on Twitter (as spotted by Videocardz).


The Intel CPU is rated with a 15W base TDP, and note that it'll sit below the Core i7-1185G7, so won’t be the top-end Tiger Lake model for laptops (11th-gen high-end parts are often pushed to 28W), and as Videocardz observes, the MX350 is obtainable in 25W and 15W variants.

In the Geekbench 4 OpenCL benchmark, Intel’s Xe integrated graphics manage to rack up a score of 59,845, which just sneaks before the MX350 on 59,828.

There are slight variations within the individual benchmarks, with the Intel solution having a transparent win when it involves the Gaussian Blur test, and Nvidia’s GeForce GPU romping home with a simple win for the high-energy physics test.

Another leaked Geekbench 4 compute benchmark highlighted by Tum_Apisak on Twitter compared the performance of the Core i7-1165G7 versus Intel’s Core i5-1135G7 (with 80 EUs), with the results of the latter around 13.5% slower, which is just about needless to say.

Game on

TigerLake i7-1165G7 iGPU with 96EU & 1.3GHz core clock is matching 25W MX350 from Nvidia

TigerLake G7
> 96EU
> 1.3GHz base
> LPDDR4x 4266MHz

Nvidia MX350
> 5SM
> 1.47GHz
> 2GB GDDR5
> 25W

Impressive ! I've seen similar results in 3dmarkhttps://t.co/7yamNE9yqD pic.twitter.com/OICPKkKvXD

— _rogame (@_rogame) July 3, 2020

On the face of it, the fight against the MX350 seems like a really impressive win for Intel’s Tiger Lake silicon, although we've to require any leaked benchmark with an appropriate dose of salt. And albeit it's genuine, this result's just one benchmark – and a computer-related one at that, with a gaming benchmark being a really different matter.

That said, Rogaine specifically notes that similar results are observed in 3DMark, suggesting that this does reflect gaming prospects pretty accurately. And indeed we've also recently seen Intel showing off Battlefield V running on a laptop using integrated Xe graphics, managing a solid 30 frames per second approximately on top quality graphics settings at 1080p resolution.

Of course, that was on a prototype laptop too, therefore the results with a finished product could rather be better still.

Future thin-and-light laptops that don’t have a discrete (standalone) graphics card could, then, offer some pretty impressive gaming performance levels when equipped with Tiger Lake processors.

As to when these notebooks could be available, Intel’s 11th-gen mobile processors are expected to ship to manufacturers soon, and that they should be appearing in laptops on the shelves at the top of 2020, ready combat AMD’s Ryzen 4000 models.




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