PCWorld March 2023

Microsoft has unveiled the “age of AI,” with new conversational ChatGPT features for Bing that the company described as the “AI-powered copilot for the web.” Microsoft will add contextual searches to Bing, powered by its own version of the ChatGPT algorithm. Microsoft will also integrate a separate, dedicated chat interface for Bing, complete with footnoted links. Finally, AI will be integrated into Edge, allowing users to summarize a financial earnings report, for example. Bing’s new search engine interface is live, but at this writing people who want to try it must sign up for a waitlist. It will expand in coming weeks. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, likened AI and the launch of ChatGPT to the opening of the Web. “It was the Mosaic moment,” Nadella said. “I think this technology will…

Bing’s new AI-powered chatbot (see page 7) is basically ChatGPT with ads…and one that refuses to do your homework for you. Well, sometimes. That’s not necessarily a derogatory criticism; the new Bing is pretty amazing. In your first few minutes with the new Bing chat interface, you’ll probably see even more sophistication than the free version of ChatGPT currently offers, with lengthy, detailed responses that can help you in many walks of life. But they may end with a jarring ad that looks (and probably is) ripped straight from Bing. That said, the fresh AI experience already works shockingly well more often than not. The new Bing experience is basically two parts. There’s the traditional search, with a list of search results and a new contextual interface to the right; and…

Just a couple months ago, sharp-eyed Redditors noticed that searching for AMD graphics card drivers on Google served up a shady text ad as the first result. Our advice then (as now) was to be careful when you’re looking for Radeon software, plus maintain good search habits in general. Life’s a whole lot easier when you sidestep malware. At the time, this incident seemed more of a one-off reason for heightened awareness. Even with the more recent report about Bitwarden suffering from a similar issue, using Google seemed mostly business as usual. Turns out, though, our threat alert should be set much higher—other major downloads like Adobe Reader, Microsoft Teams, OBS, Slack, and Gimp are being targeted, too. As thoughtfully detailed by Ars Technica, the sharp rise in malvertising is a new…

Like its rivals, Microsoft’s Edge browser sports a built-in PDF reader that’s bare-bones but functional. You click a PDF link and a tab opens with the document that you can read, search, and lightly annotate. But that experience is getting supercharged: Microsoft and Adobe have teamed up to bring Adobe Acrobat to Edge, in what will become a wholesale replacement of the browser’s current PDF engine. This move will enable more features when viewing PDFs from the web, like markup tools, stronger security for PDFs, and greater accessibility (that is, read-aloud narration). The increase in Edge’s PDF capabilities will be native, without the need to install a separate add-on. Users with an Adobe subscription will still need to install a browser extension to access additional advanced features like text and image…

For some people, offline email is still the way to go. Whether it’s due to habit, mistrust of cloud services, or sensible prudence about backups, downloading email to a client still factors large in the routines of many users. Mozilla Thunderbird is a key part of such setups thanks to its hefty set of features and zero-cost price tag. But Thunderbird has long been criticized for its outdated interface, and not without cause—it still looks like it’s stuck in 2003. That will finally change in July, with the upcoming launch of version 115. As detailed in a Thunderbird blog post, this year’s update of the client will sport a “simple and clean” user interface friendlier to new adopters. Customization options will also be available, allowing the client to retain a familiar…

If you think games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto are “retro,” you’ve probably never heard of 3DFX. It was a scrappy little company that competed with Nvidia in the early days of discrete graphics cards for home PCs. While the Voodoo series of GPUs can just about handle a modern version of Tetris (if you leave ray tracing off), they were beloved back in the 1990s…so much so that someone just spent a huge chunk of cash to own one of the last 3DFX prototype cards. The Voodoo 5 6000 was 3DFX’s final GPU design before the company was sold to Nvidia. According to Wikipedia, a little over 100 of the experimental graphics cards were created in 2000. The last few of these cards were intended to be the final…