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When Microsoft Office 2024 launches in October, ActiveX will be turned off by default, according to Bleeping Computer. The change affects desktop versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Visio, and will apply to Microsoft 365 beginning in April 2025.

The reason behind the move: hackers in recent years have used various vulnerabilities in ActiveX to install malicious code on computers.

Launched in 1996, ActiveX is a framework used to embed interactive elements into Office documents.

This week, Intel launched its Lunar Lake chip, designed to power AI applications, as part of its push to regain a competitive edge. However, Intel outsourced significant portions of the chip’s fabrication to TSMC, a shift from its historical reliance on in-house production.

Qualcomm’s expansion strategy

With the potential acquisition, Qualcomm could significantly expand its footprint in the PC chip market, which is becoming increasingly intertwined with AI-driven computing. Gogia adds that such a deal would “allow Qualcomm to carve out a niche for supporting devices that allow AI tasks to be run without an internet connection.” This could further strengthen Qualcomm’s relationship with Microsoft, especially as both companies continue to explore opportunities in AI PCs.

Qualcomm may also be interested in Intel’s server and HPC segments, opined Neil Shah, VP for Research at Counterpoint Research. “This is a key market where Qualcomm is not yet playing, but where Intel is struggling against NVIDIA and AMD,” he said adding that Intel’s Altera (FPGA) and Movidius (Visual Processing Units) would help fill gaps in Qualcomm’s portfolio.

The next step is to select the Default Switch option for the Connection field under the Configure Networking heading, as shown in Figure 17. Here again, it’s important to note the default is “Not connected,” which means the VM cannot access any networks. Default Switch enables the VM to connect to the networks to which the host PC has access. If you have other switches defined in your host configuration, they should appear in the pull-down menu for this VM setup item (and you’ll be able to use them, if you like).

The next step is to connect a virtual hard disk for the VM to use. Here again we’ll use the default location mentioned earlier. Other options include “Use an existing virtual hard disk” (this is how the dev environment described earlier gets its contents) and “Attach a virtual hard disk later” (allows users to otherwise finish configuring a VM without allocating or linking to a virtual hard disk). See Figure 18 for the details for Win11.24H2.vhdx.

Next comes the fun part: providing a file system link to an ISO and electing how (or if) to install that image. This reads “Installation Options” on the left-hand side. In this case, we’ll link to the ISO I downloaded from the Insider Preview downloads page, and tell it to install the OS from that file, as shown in Figure 19.

At this point, the wizard is finished, so click Summary on the left to show your work so far. It will show all the settings you’ve made. Click Finish to complete the VM creation process. Then, you’ll return to Hyper-V Manager, where you now see a VM named Win11.24H2 in the upper center “Virtual Machines” pane, as shown in Figure 20.

You could try to connect to and start the install process for Win11.24H2 now, but we know one more change is needed — namely, to enable TPM under the new VM’s Security settings, as detailed before Figure 11 above. Once you’ve done so, you can get going on the install for this Windows 11 OS image, as described earlier in this story as well.

We’re done with the introduction to Hyper-V Manager and creating VMs. Now it’s time to dig into some down and dirty details.

A big Hyper-V Manager gotcha: remote VM access

By definition, all VM access is remote — that is, there’s no physical mouse, keyboard, or monitor attached to any VM. To interact with a VM, you must map virtual stuff onto real stuff — including the aforementioned peripherals but also CPUs, RAM, storage, networking, and yadda yadda yadda. Remember further that remote access is one of the benefits of VMs: indeed, they should readily support access across any network connection to a parent hypervisor.

Alas, when a remote connection uses the Windows remote desktop protocol (RDP) through Remote Desktop Connection or the Remote Desktop app, and that hypervisor is Hyper-V, things can get interesting. Let me explain how this can present obstacles above and beyond the gotchas I’ve already mentioned (issues getting the Windows Installer to start up for an ISO-based install, and the need to enable TPM for that install to actually work).

For starters, you can’t start a new Windows 11 VM from inside an RDP session, as it seeks to read and mount the targeted Windows 11 ISO to run its Setup.exe. For whatever odd reason, this works only from a local login on the host PC (not in an RDP session). If you click the Start button shown in Figure 7 in an RDP session, the VM won’t boot to run Setup.exe.

Indeed, if you click Start, you’ll get a black screen in the VM window, instead of running the Windows 11 installer. You must turn off the VM (click Action in the top menu, then click Turn off). Then click the Start button shown in Figure 7 from the physical host PC, using the local mouse or keyboard. Once Setup.exe is running, however, an RDP session shows the VM as you’d expect to see it, with the initial Windows 11 installer screen (see Figure 21).

The next gotcha that makes itself felt occurs after you elect the Install now option that appears next. You will find you cannot copy and paste a Windows activation key into the Activate Windows prompt shown in Figure 22. Why? Because this only works in an enhanced session inside RDP, and you can’t elect that option until after Windows 11 is installed. Indeed, fixing this requires some fiddling to the Windows Hello login options. (Turned on by default, they don’t work with an enhanced session that permits copying and pasting from outside the RDP session into that session.)

You’ll have to enter the 25-character (letters and numbers) string for your chosen Windows key manually. Or you can use the 30-day eval for the Windows 11 developer environment instead (no key required but access doesn’t last very long).

But there’s one more RDP gotcha to surmount: you can’t log in to your new desktop until you uncheck the “Enhanced session” option in the View menu for the RDP session. Once you do that and log in, click Settings > Accounts > Sign-in options, then turn off the toggle under “Additional settings” that reads For improved security…, as shown in Figure 23. Then you can switch back to an enhanced session and log in using a password or a PIN.

Getting past plain-vanilla VMs

Thanks to our earlier efforts in this story, you’ve got yourself some working Windows 11 VMs set up mostly using Hyper-V Manager’s defaults. By setting up the plain-vanilla, all-default Win11.26100 VM via Quick Create and the slightly modified Win11.24H2 VM that follows it through the New Virtual Machine Wizard, you can learn a lot about what makes a VM tick, as well as provisioning defaults.

Those defaults will change according to the configuration of the host physical PC on which Hyper-V Manager runs. That is, machines with fewer cores, less RAM, and less storage will produce default VMs with fewer cores, less RAM, and less storage than those machines with more cores, more RAM and more storage, like the formidable Lenovo P16 Mobile Workstation I used as my test machine, with 24 cores, 64GB RAM, and ~4 TB total storage, 2 TB on the boot/system drive.

In most cases, the defaults that Hyper-V Manager chooses for the VMs it creates on your behalf work reasonably well. For those already familiar with Hyper-V, feel free to change values up or down. IMO, reducing values from their defaults doesn’t make too much sense except perhaps for special cases (or underwhelming physical PCs).

For more info on Hyper-V and VMs: Microsoft Learning offers a free 45-minute module entitled “Configure and Manage Hyper-V virtual machines” for those who want more details. Also, there’s a series of tutorials at Windows 11 Forum under its Virtualization heading (54 in all, across a range of VM topics) for those who really want all the minutiae.

Creating VMs with Dev Home (Preview)

When Microsoft released v0.13 of its Dev Home (Preview) developer toolbox on April 23, 2024, I noticed they added support for “Environments” as something new. Microsoft explains that environments provide “… the ability to create, manage, and configure Hyper-V VMs and Microsoft Dev Boxes” (see the GitHub Dev Home Preview v0.13 release notes).

Many readers may be indifferent to Dev Boxes (an Azure service to enhance developer productivity through self-service access to preconfigured, project-oriented development environments in the cloud via Azure, for which a subscription is required). If those readers want to use Hyper-V VMs, however, they should NOT be indifferent to its VM capabilities, which require Windows 11 22H2 or later.

Because I’m only too familiar with the gotchas outlined in the previous section that can impede creation (and use) of VMs through Hyper-V Manager, I wanted to see if Dev Home (Preview) could do any better. I deliberately used an RDP session to run Dev Home on a remote PC. Inside Dev Home, I opened the Environments option, shown with a small blue highlight bar to its left in Figure 24.

Notably, Dev Home brought up all VMs already defined on the P16, and their status (Stopped, Running, Saved); I guess that means they count as “Environments” from the tool’s perspective. More notably, clicking the Create Environment button at the upper right sped me through the steps to create a new Hyper-V VM:

1. Select Microsoft Hyper-V as the “environment provider.”
2. Enter NewVM2 in the field tagged “New virtual machine name.”
3. Select the 30-day evaluation for the “Windows 11 dev environment” as the Windows OS image source (it’s labeled an “Environment” below), purely as a test, as shown in Figure 25.
4. Click Create Environment (see lower right, Figure 25).

Once you’ve clicked the Create Environment button, be prepared to wait a while. Dev Home must download the Windows 11 dev environment (over 20GB in size), then extract its interior files. On the P16 Mobile Workstation, that took about 15 minutes. Dev Home does report progress during this process, as you can see in Figure 26, which shows the download 76% complete.

When the extraction process ends, the ISO is mounted and the VM ready to launch. You’ll see Environment information for your new VM (NewVM2, in this case) like that shown in Figure 27. You must click the Launch button (far right) to start the VM installation process.

When you do that, a small VM window opens to present you with a Start button to fire things off. Figure 28 depicts that VM window: click that Start button!

This starts the VM, which fires off the ISO image’s Setup.exe, at which point you’ll see a larger VM window labelled Hyper-V and a circular progress indicator. Then, you’ll be asked to size the VM window for further display (I recommend at least 1680 x 1050). At this point, a login window for a generic “User” (no password) appears, as shown in Figure 29. Remarkably, this took two minutes or less to complete. Click Sign in to get to the desktop.

The next thing you’ll see is the NewVM2 desktop, a mostly bare-bones Windows 11 install that also includes Visual Studio 2022 and Ubuntu on Windows. It’s running the current build as I write this for an Enterprise Evaluation (22621.3447) version. I also checked: you cannot use a valid Windows 11 Enterprise key to activate this install (it rejects all keys).

But here we are, having installed a working Hyper-V VM for Windows 11 from start to finish inside an RDP session! Thus, the Dev Home approach completely sidesteps all gotchas one encounters when using Hyper-V manager, to wit:

• There’s no need to stop the VM after its first start, visit its Security settings and check the Enable TPM option as in Hyper-V Manager. Home Dev is smart enough to handle this in the background.
• It starts, installs and boots from inside an enhanced RDP session. No local login is required to start up the VM to run setup.exe for the first time.
• Built-in support for enhanced sessions also fixes the missing login prompt problem once the VM is up and running. There’s no need to tweak sign-in options, either. In fact, the OS doesn’t even show the “Only allow Hello logins” entry under Additional settings in Settings > Accounts > Sign-in options as shown in Figure 4 earlier.
• Because enhanced sessions are turned on by default, you can cut and paste strings from outside the RDP session into the RDP session. That’s how I determined that a valid Windows 11 Enterprise key did not work to re-key the Windows 11 Dev image that Dev Home downloads and uses.

There’s just one problem: Dev Home environments don’t let you grab an arbitrary local ISO on a drive. You can only use Environments that Microsoft makes available (these are essentially the same as the “gallery images” shown in Figure 9 earlier in this story).

For any other Windows images you might want to run as VMs, you must use Hyper-V Manager and its quick or slow create processes — that is, unless Microsoft responds to my feature request to add access to local ISOs to Dev Home’s existing image options when creating a VM.

Net-Net: It really could be easier

What I learned from digging into Dev Home and its capabilities — especially when using RDP — is that it’s entirely possible for Microsoft to update and rationalize its Hyper-V VM creation process. Whether or not they choose to do so is up to them. I certainly hope they’ll figure this out, and do just that.

Ideally, Microsoft would fix Hyper-V Manager to make it Windows 11-aware (and friendly). And then they might add local ISO access to image selection options in Dev Home. Frankly, I’d be happy with either of these approaches (you can always tweak a VM created in Dev Home in Hyper-V Manager through its many Settings categories and options). Although it would be great to see both happen, I’m not holding my breath…

Salesforce, which offers cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software, is eyeing a new pricing model that would require customers to pay per AI chat every time Salesforce’s AI-based services are used for a conversation, According to The Register.

Speaking to investors, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has said that his goal is for the company to introduce 1 billion AI agents into the user environment through the Agentforce AI platform by the end of fiscal year 2026. And thinks the price per call will be around $2.

The pricing model is designed to reflect the value Salesforce believes its AI services offer and to give customers greater flexibility.

The recent 20 million downloads could be seen as an effect of the company’s Llama 3.1 update that included a 405 billion parameter model as well as 70 billion parameter and 8 billion parameter variants — all of which performed better on various benchmarking tests, such as MATH and HumanEval.

“Hosted Llama usage by token volume across our major cloud service provider partners more than doubled May through July 2024 when we released Llama 3.1,” Al-Dahle wrote, adding that the company’s largest variant of LLM, the 405 billion parameter variant, was also gaining traction.

Separately, Meta has been actively trying to increase the number of partners that either host or distribute the Llama family of models. These partners include the likes of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Databricks, Dell, Google Cloud, Groq, NVIDIA, IBM watsonx, Scale AI, and Snowflake among others.

Meta has signed an agreement with Sage Geosystems to purchase up to 150 megawatts of geothermal energy to power its US data centers. The first phase of the project is expected to be operational in 2027, according to Reuters. And, according to Meta, it will significantly increase the use of geothermal energy in the United States.

Geothermal energy is renewable energy that uses the heat stored in the earth’s crust, which originates in the earth’s formation and decay of radioactive elements.

The new agreement is part of Meta’s ongoing efforts to meet the increasing demand for energy that has arisen with the company’s major investment in generative AI (genAI) technology, which is very energy-intensive. The financial terms of the agreement were not released.

Google provided the startup with more funding in return for a non-exclusive license for its current LLM technology.

Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas — with whom he cofounded Character.ai in 2021 — were expected to join Google as part of the deal.

Other Character.ai employees were expected to stay with the company, though, expanding on the startup’s products, with the company’s general counsel, Dominic Perella, stepping in the role of interim CEO.

What the researchers said

Francesco Benvenuto, Sr. Vulnerability Researcher with Cisco Talos, wrote:

“Microsoft appears to use the com.apple.security.cs.disable-library-validation entitlement for certain apps to support some kind of ‘plug-ins.’ According to Apple, this entitlement allows the loading of plug-ins signed by third-party developers. Yet, as far as we know, the only ‘plug-ins’ available to Microsoft’s macOS apps are web-based and known as ‘Office add-ins.’

“If this understanding is correct, it raises questions about the necessity of disabling library validation, especially if no additional libraries are expected to be loaded. By using this entitlement, Microsoft is circumventing the safeguards offered by the hardened runtime, potentially exposing its users to unnecessary risks.”

What experts say

Michael Covington, Jamf VP of strategy, describes the third-party plug-in support Microsoft has used as a weakness in Apple’s own security. 

“This is a noteworthy flaw in apps that naturally require permissions to Apple’s controlled resources, like the camera or microphone, because users are inclined to grant such permissions to collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams or logging tools like OneNote. Fortunately, Microsoft agreed to update these applications,” he told The Channel Company.