Microsoft is beginning the rollout of a Windows 11 preview update that finally addresses a persistent power user complaint with the operating system: the right-click menu that obliterated years of muscle memory on command locations, and hid others behind an additional click. The timing for the release is notable, as the announcement comes alongside Microsoft's quarterly financial report that saw a continued decline in the business of selling Windows licenses for new PCs.
The preview update, KB5127936, is cumulative for Windows 11 versions 26H2 and 25H2. The update will be a gradual rollout before eventually moving on to a normal rollout for all Windows 11 devices once it reaches general availability. The highlight of the new update should calm annoyed users who have spent years with custom scripts and services in an attempt to shape Windows the way they'd prefer it. Users will get a "customize menu" button that controls what commands appear when they right-click their mouse. Users can toggle built-in commands such as Send To or Create Shortcut on or off, rearrange what appears on the main menu, and control which third-party extensions show up in either the main or submenus. The gripe with the right-click menu had been that Microsoft hid familiar command locations behind a top row of icons while moving other familiar commands under the "Show more options" submenu. Now, Windows users will have the ability to customize the whole thing around their habits.
The original Windows 11 right-click menu is a mess.
Credit:
Microsoft
The new preview also highlights a new Windows feature called Cloud Rebuild, a recovery option that can reinstall Windows 11 directly from the cloud, even when an existing Windows 11 fails to boot. Cloud Rebuild will pull the Windows 11 image and needed system drivers directly from Windows Update. Users will not need a custom recovery image or external media to reinstall Windows. There is an important distinction to note however. Microsoft classified Cloud Rebuild as a recovery option, but it behaves more like a fresh Windows install than a repair, as existing applications and files will not be included. Those worried about data security have the option to sanitize entire system drives prior to reinstalling. For a full list of improvements coming to Windows 11, including changes to Xbox mode and settings, you can view the official Microsoft release announcement.
Welcome to Edition 9.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of SpaceX-related news this week including a couple of Thursday shockers. In one story, the company told the US Space Force thanks, but no thanks after being offered three military launch contracts. Then, on the civil space side of things, SpaceX's Starship may required up to 22 refuelings to support a lunar landing, a NASA safety panel said.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Miura 5 getting closer to launch. PLD Space says its Miura 5 rocket, due to undertake its inaugural launch next year, is nearing final integration, Aviation Week reports. The rocket is one of three Miura 5s the company has already manufactured, with the other two designed to qualify key system elements, CEO Raúl Torres said in an October 19 program update. PLD Space now targets a first flight of the small-lift vehicle before mid-2027.
Welcome to Edition 9.15 of the Rocket Report! The launch I'm most looking forward to in the next few weeks is that of Japan's Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. MMX is one of the marquee space science missions launching this year, and it's set to leave Earth as soon as Monday (US time) aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. The spacecraft will visit Phobos and Deimos, the two asteroid-like moons of Mars, deploying a rover and collecting specimens for return to Earth in 2031. Exploration at its finest.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot's Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U.
PwC’s survey found that only 22% of leaders would use fully autonomous AI for cyber defense, while just 21% are implementing quantum-resistant security measures.
“AI could be a great equalizer — or widen the gap,” Bill Gates writes in a new Gates Foundation report. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
The Gates Foundation is pledging to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on artificial intelligence for health workers, farmers and teachers, largely in the world’s poorest countries, funding AI tools for people the market would otherwise overlook.
The bet is that AI can help reaccelerate the world’s progress against child mortality, poverty and disease, which has slowed sharply as governments cut global health funding.
The Seattle-based foundation’s new financial commitment, released Monday evening in conjunction with its 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, illustrates the double-edged sword of AI at a moment when the U.S. in particular is preoccupied with what the technology might damage or destroy.
Bill Gates, who issued his own AI warnings in an essay three weeks ago, writes in the new report that the risks “are real and deserve serious attention.” He adds, “AI could be a great equalizer — or widen the gap. This is not a long-range prediction. It’s a present-tense choice.”
In this case, Gates writes, he’s focusing on “the possibility that AI, if shaped well, could expand who has access to solutions, opportunities, and knowledge that has too often been out of reach.”
The window is short, he writes: “I believe that the decisions made in the next 12 to 18 months — about how AI is built, funded, and deployed — will determine whether this technology primarily benefits the people who already have the most or reaches those who have the least.”
Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, in an interview with GeekWire, called the $1 billion a “down payment,” saying he expects the figure to grow significantly after the first two years.
For this first installment, 40% of the money will go to education, 40% to health care, 10% to agriculture and 10% to digital infrastructure, including datasets in languages the models don’t handle, according to the foundation.
More than 90% of the data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources, according to the report. Leading AI speech recognition systems make errors less than 6% of the time in English and more than 60% of the time in Yoruba, a West African language spoken by tens of millions of people, for example.
Most people in Africa use feature phones rather than smartphones, Suzman said, so the tools have to work by voice. That means collecting recordings of speech, not just written text, in local accents and including children’s voices. He said the foundation works with Google and Microsoft on AI language initiatives.
Winding down: Gates announced in May 2025 that he would give away virtually all his wealth and close the foundation in 2045, which requires doubling its spending over those 20 years. The foundation had previously planned to close 20 years after his death.
As part of that plan, the foundation will need to give away $200 billion before it shuts down. Its budgeted payout is $9 billion this year, the largest in its history. Suzman said the $1 billion over two years comes out of its core budget.
Goals for its final two decades include cutting preventable child deaths in half again, eradicating polio and malaria, and bringing tuberculosis and HIV under control.
The report’s data section shows how far off the pace the world is. Child mortality, neonatal mortality and HIV are all projected to miss their 2030 targets. HIV incidence is on track to fall only to 0.22 new cases per 1,000 people, more than 10 times the target of 0.02.
Early AI results: The report makes the case that AI could change those trajectories. It points to a number of tools already in use in different settings:
Penda Health, a network of affordable clinics in Nairobi, Kenya, where an AI tool built into patient records has raised diagnostic accuracy by 16 percentage points.
In the U.S., seventh graders using a tool called Kiddom Atlas across 21 middle schools gained the equivalent of six extra months of learning in a single year.
In India, the state of Maharashtra runs a free AI advisory service called MahaVISTAAR that has signed up more than 740,000 farmers, with 70,000 more joining every month.
The foundation has supported all three, according to the report’s endnotes. The endnotes also cite OpenAI’s account of its work with Penda Health on the clinical copilot.
One caveat: the evidence behind the examples is early. Suzman said the education work is “still on a relatively small scale,” and pointed to agriculture as the area already operating at size.
Suzman said the foundation spent years experimenting with AI without committing at this scale, wary of getting ahead of what the technology could actually deliver in its areas. Progress in the models over the past year, and results from early investments, convinced him otherwise.
“We now can state with a pretty high degree of confidence there are real deliverables that we can see across health, across education, across agricultural development,” he said.
What AI won’t fix: Asked whether AI can substitute for the money the U.S. and other governments have cut from global health, Suzman said: “Sadly, no.” The cuts run to “tens of billions of dollars,” he said, and they are hitting basic services now. He cited the purchase of bed nets and antiretroviral drugs, and care for mothers before and after birth.
“That’s affecting families right now with a real impact,” he said. “Ideally, you combine the two [AI and aid funding], and that’s how you get hugely accelerated progress.”
Suzman said the foundation will keep pressing the U.S. to remain a leader in global health. Despite the cuts, he said, it has been encouraging to see the country stay a partner in programs such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and he noted that Congress has moved to fund these areas more fully than the administration has.
“We believe that currently reflects the U.S. public’s broad view and support for these areas, when you can see the concrete results,” he said.
The Epstein review: Asked how the scrutiny of Gates’ ties to Jeffrey Epstein has affected the foundation’s work, Suzman pointed to the external review the foundation released in July.
Conducted by the law firm WilmerHale, it found no evidence that Epstein received foundation money or that the foundation knew of his crimes. It counted roughly 30 meetings from 2011 to 2014, involving Gates and nine other foundation leaders and staff, and found that staff had repeatedly raised concerns about associating with him.
The board adopted the recommendations that followed, among them centralized vetting of brokers and co-funders and tougher conflict-of-interest rules.
Suzman expressed optimism that the review has cleared the way for the foundation to keep working across the full range of governmental and philanthropic partnerships. “Hopefully it’s full speed ahead,” he said, “and with these AI shifts, that’s more important than ever.”
The question has shifted. Security leaders spent several years debating whether AI would reshape security operations. That debate has settled. Now the conversation is about pace. How fast can the foundation be built, and what do organizations that moved early have to show for it?
For the second year, SentinelOne® commissioned 451 Research to survey 611 North American cybersecurity decision-makers and practitioners on the state of security operations strategy. The results confirm what we’ve been building toward, and they surface a finding that should recalibrate how most security leaders sequence their AI investments.
The Returns Didn’t Wait for the Roadmap
Many product roadmaps assume a clear sequence and start with building toward higher maturity first with returns following. The data shows that AI is running ahead of schedule.
Nearly all organizations surveyed (96%) are still operating AI at the earliest maturity levels:
Level 2: More senior triage analyst / basic incident responder and investigator
By most measures, AI adoption in the SOC is still early. And yet, 99% of those same organizations already report improvements in incident response and remediation.
The numbers are consistent. Early-stage AI (chatbots handling initial alert triage, automated tools sorting true positives from noise) is delivering before organizations reach advanced maturity. The gap between where most organizations are and what they are already getting is real and consistent across survey respondents.
Organizations waiting for higher AI maturity before building the supporting infrastructure are running the sequence backward. The returns are available now. The foundation built today determines how far those returns scale.
Platformization Has Reached A Verdict
The organizations accelerating AI adoption are also the ones consolidating onto platforms. A platform-oriented security architecture means moving from siloed, specialized tools to an integrated stack built on a foundation that coordinated AI decision-making can actually run on, and one that lets each new capability compound on the last.
The platformization numbers from this year’s survey are clear. 82% of organizations describe themselves as platform-oriented, a 13-point jump in a single year, and 94% expect to be there within three years.
A common assumption is that platform adoption means replacing specialized tools. The data complicates that picture. The same technologies most frequently deployed as standalone tools (EDR, SIEM, CNAPP) are also the top anchors for integrated platforms. Organizations typically start with one of these and expand outward. What changes is the common data layer that enables coordinated AI decision-making, serving as the connective tissue underneath.
Platformization is not coincidental with AI’s emergence. Agentic AI needs connected, continuously updated data to accurately reason across signals and take autonomous action. Fragmented architectures, where telemetry is siloed and pipelines require manual effort, cannot support AI-driven SOC operations at scale. Platform adoption and AI adoption are converging because AI’s data requirements have made integration a structural necessity.
The survey makes the infrastructure connection an explicit one. The top-cited benefit of investing in a data lake for SecOps is supporting AI-driven SOC workloads and agents. Organizations that built the data foundation early have already cleared the barrier stalling others. Those who haven’t, face a prerequisite gap, and the distance is widening rapidly. Architectural readiness is the variable that determines how far AI investments can scale.
Job Satisfaction Is Rising
Every discussion of AI in the SOC centers on detection and response metrics. This report has those too, but there is a finding that security leaders managing attrition should weigh: analyst burnout is declining.
As AI handles repetitive, high-volume triage work, analysts report rising job satisfaction. The role is shifting away from processing an endless queue and toward investigation, threat hunting, and judgment-intensive work. In a market where SOC analyst turnover remains a persistent operational cost, that shift carries real dollar value.
The analyst role evolves, becoming more strategic and more consequential.
A New Attack Surface
The same AI systems changing how SOCs operate are also creating new targets. Adversaries are already probing AI infrastructure including agents, data pipelines, model endpoints, and the governance gaps that emerge when controls lag behind adoption. The report surfaces this tension clearly: Organizations are deploying AI faster than they are securing it.
An AI agent with misconfigured access or an unmonitored data pipeline is an exposure. Securing the AI infrastructure that powers the SOC is happening alongside deployment, whether organizations have planned for it or not. Those without a clear governance posture are accepting risk that may not be priced into their AI investment case.
The potential of GenAI and agentic AI in the SOC is already being realized. The organizations that capture it fully are those building governance alongside deployment. The platform that runs the Autonomous SOC and the platform that secures it are, increasingly, the same platform.
SentinelOne’s Vision: The Autonomous SOC
Everything the report surfaces, from AI returns arriving before maturity to platform consolidation to the improving analyst experience, points to how these are expressions of the same shift. The foundation that enables early AI returns is the same one that determines how far those returns scale, how capable analysts become, and how well the security of AI itself is governed.
The findings align with how SentinelOne has defined the path to autonomous security operations: A progression from AI-assisted triage at early maturity levels to increasingly autonomous investigation, threat hunting, and response, with humans in strategic and governing roles. The report validates that the market is moving through exactly that sequence. Organizations that understand the architecture behind it (the platform integration, the common data layer, the governance controls) are positioning themselves to capture returns at every stage rather than waiting for the destination.
The full 451 Research report goes further into detail, covering what progression looks like at each maturity level, the specific barriers organizations are encountering, and the data behind each finding in full.
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This blog may include discussion of unreleased services or features. Any unreleased services or features referenced here are still in development and subject to change. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.
The Forescout 2026 H1 Threat Reviewfound that more than 37,000 vulnerabilities were published during the first six months of the year, representing a 51% increase year on year. More than half were classified as high or critical severity, while ransomware attack claims rose by 25% to 4,544 incidents, averaging 25 attacks every day.
The report, published by Forescout Research – Vedere Labs, analysed more than 37,000 vulnerabilities, over 1,000 tracked threat actors and thousands of cyberattacks observed between January and June 2026. Researchers found that rapid advances in AI, alongside growing geopolitical tensions, are increasing the pressure on security teams already struggling to prioritise risk.
Among the report‘s key findings, researchers discovered that nearly half of all additions to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalogue related to vulnerabilities published before 2026, reinforcing the continued risk posed by older, unpatched flaws. The number of active ransomware groups also increased to 103, while China, Russia and Iran collectively accounted for almost a third of tracked threat actors with significant activity during the reporting period.
The research also highlights the growing use of AI by threat actors to accelerate attacks, alongside increasingly sophisticated software supply chain compromises. At the same time, attackers continue to focus on network infrastructure, operational technology, IoT and IoMT devices, many of which receive less security oversight than traditional endpoints.
“AI is dramatically increasing the speed and scale of cyberattacks,” said Daniel dos Santos, VP of Research at Forescout.
“In observing attack patterns and threat actor activity, we can see that AI is helping threat actors discover and exploit vulnerabilities faster than security teams can realistically remediate them. At the same time, geopolitical conflicts are fuelling waves of opportunistic and state-aligned cyber activity, with organisations in critical infrastructure sectors increasingly at risk.”
He added that organisations need a better understanding of the assets connected to their networks so they can prioritise risk and contain threats before attackers can move laterally into critical systems.
The report also examines the evolution of Iranian cyber operations, noting that the distinction between state-sponsored actors, hacktivist groups and cybercriminal organisations is becoming increasingly blurred. Researchers found these groups are using a mix of espionage campaigns, ransomware and attacks targeting critical infrastructure and operational technology.
Barry Mainz, CEO of Forescout, said organisations must extend their focus beyond traditional endpoints to address unmanaged assets and connected devices.
“As attack surfaces continue to expand, security teams can no longer focus exclusively on traditional endpoints,” he said.
“Many organisations still have significant blind spots across unmanaged assets and IoT, OT, and IoMT devices. Threat actors understand this and are increasingly exploiting those gaps.”
The report recommends that organisations should continuously identify vulnerable assets, strengthen network segmentation, prioritise the highest-risk systems and accelerate response capabilities to reduce exposure across increasingly complex environments.
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The original Windows 11 right-click menu is a mess.
Credit:
Microsoft
