Back in March, Valve launched a new feature for Steam Beta users called Steam Families, a collection of features that can come in handy if you aren’t the only gamer in your family. Today, Steam Families is now out of beta and available to all Steam users.

Steam Families combines and replaces both Family Sharing (used to lend games to family members) and Family View (now known as Parental Controls, used to limit a family member’s access to certain Steam features and content), and also makes it possible for restricted family members to make purchase requests for approval.

The big change is that Steam Families now allows up to six people to play games simultaneously from a shared game library. However, if two or more people want to play the exact same game at the same time, multiple copies of that game will be needed. It’s also possible to play games offline as long as the game in question supports Family Sharing.

Note: Not all Steam games support Family Sharing. Developers may opt out on a per-game basis for any reason. Visit the Steam Store listing page for any game to see if it’s eligible to be shared with family members.

To make use of these features, you must either create a Steam Family or join an existing one. If you create one, you can then invite up to five others to join you. Each member of a Steam Family retains their own save files, achievements, and Workshop subscriptions.

Who can join your Steam Family? Right now, anyone can join. However, Valve intends this feature to be for a “household” of “close family members” — even if there aren’t any hard restrictions yet, it’s reasonable to assume that Valve will introduce them if people abuse it.

Also, if someone gets banned for cheating while playing your shared copy of a game, you will ALSO be banned for that game. For this reason, you should only join Steam Families with whom you trust.

PCWorld

To prevent another CrowdStrike update fiasco, Microsoft is looking at creating a new platform within the Windows OS specifically designed for antivirus monitoring, nudging security products out of kernel.

The platform is what Microsoft discussed with the antivirus industry during a summit earlier this week on Sept. 10. The event was closed off to journalists, but the company on Thursday decided to share some of the results, which included exploring “new platform capabilities Microsoft plans to make available in Windows.”

“Although this was not a decision-making meeting, we believe in the importance of transparency and community engagement,” Redmond added in the blog post.

The company held the summit in response to July’s infamous Windows outage, which the IT security vendor CrowdStrike accidentally caused through a faulty software update. One reason why the update temporarily bricked millions of computers is because CrowdStrike’s software —like many antivirus programs— has access to the Windows kernel, the essential brains to the operating system.
(Photo by Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Antivirus programs will harness the kernel privileges to monitor malicious changes to the deepest parts of the OS. But the same access also acts as a double-edge sword if the antivirus software ever malfunctions. In CrowdStrike’s case, a fault in the company’s validation processes let a buggy update slip through, triggering its security software to crash Windows machines.

The outage initially caused Microsoft to consider revoking the kernel access, potentially turning Windows into a more closed operating system akin to Apple’s macOS. But in Thursday’s blog post discussing the results of the Sept. 10th summit, the company stopped short of clamping down on the Windows kernel.

Instead, Microsoft mentioned how both customers and partners have called on the company to “provide additional security capabilities outside of kernel mode,” which antivirus software can also harness to provide protection.

“At the summit, Microsoft and partners discussed the requirements and key challenges in creating a new platform which can meet the needs of security vendors,” the company said. The areas discussed include the “performance needs and challenges outside of kernel mode,” providing an anti-tampering mechanism for security programs and the “security sensor requirements” for the antivirus monitoring.

Redmond didn’t offer more details to the security layer, which it describes as a longer-term project. But the company added: “As a next step, Microsoft will continue to design and develop this new platform capability with input and collaboration from ecosystem partners to achieve the goal of... [Read More]

Microsoft is holding a OneDrive digital event on October 8th that will cover the “latest innovations in AI across Microsoft 365 and OneDrive.” It’s the second annual event after Microsoft held a similar stream last year to introduce a big new design update for the cloud storage service, AI Copilot integration, and lots more.

This year, Microsoft is promising to announce “what’s coming for Copilot in OneDrive,” alongside enhancements to the OneDrive mobile app and an “improved photos experience.” The event will also cover OneDrive features across work and personal accounts.

The OneDrive digital event will be hosted on Microsoft Teams and will include the ability to ask the OneDrive product team questions about the cloud storage service. It follows a special Copilot event on September 16th, where Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and vice president of AI at work Jared Spataro will focus on what’s next for Microsoft’s AI assistant.

Microsoft is expected to announce a subtle rebranding of its business-focused Copilot assistant and introduce new Copilot features for Microsoft 365 that will try to tempt more businesses to sign up for the $30 per user per month service.

The Verge

As we wait for this fall's Windows 11 24H2 update to be released to the general public, work continues on other new features that could be part of other future Windows updates. A new Canary channel Windows Insider build released yesterday fixes a decades-old and arbitrary limitation that restricted new FAT32 partitions to 32GB in size, even though the filesystem itself has a maximum supported size of 2TB (and Windows can read and recognize 2TB FAT32 partitions without an issue).

For now, this limit is only being lifted for the command-line formatting tools in Windows. The disk formatting UI, which looks more or less the same now as it did when it was introduced in Windows NT 4.0 almost 30 years ago, still has the arbitrary 32GB capacity restriction.

The 32GB limit can allegedly be pinned on former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer, who occasionally shares stories about his time working on Windows in the 1990s and early 2000s. Plummer says that he wrote the file format dialog, intending it as a "temporary" solution, and arbitrarily chose 32GB as a size limit for disks, likely because it seemed big enough at the time (Windows NT 4.0 required 110MB of disk space).

There aren't a ton of reasons to actually use a FAT32 disk in 2024, and it's been replaced by other filesystems for just about everything. As a filesystem for your main OS drive, it was replaced by NTFS decades ago; as a widely compatible filesystem for external drives that can be read from and written to by many operating systems, you'd probably want to use exFAT instead. FAT32 still has a 4GB limit on the size of individual files.

But if you're formatting a disk to use with an old version of Windows, or with some older device that can only work with FAT32 disks, this tweak could make Windows a tiny bit more useful for you.

Ars Technica

Paint 3D, once Microsoft’s biggest update to its Paint app, is being removed from the Microsoft Store later this year and no longer supported. The app was originally released as part of Microsoft’s focus on creators with Windows 10 and was even set to replace the original MS Paint at one point.

“Paint 3D is deprecated and will be removed from the Microsoft Store on November 4th, 2024,” reads a support note from Microsoft. Users of the app will also see a banner inside the app warning them about the end of support. Microsoft is recommending Windows users install its 3D Viewer app if they need to view 3D content.

Microsoft has now put most of its focus on the existing Paint app within Windows 11 instead, adding some of Photoshop’s best features to the app and even updating it with AI-powered features.

Paint 3D is the latest victim of Microsoft’s varied Windows features and apps that eventually get removed and discontinued. Windows Mixed Reality suffered a similar fate last year, alongside Microsoft Teams integration being removed from Windows 11. Microsoft is also ending its Android apps support for Windows 11 next year.

The Verge

TikTok is rolling out some direct message updates, including "highly requested" group chats. Owner ByteDance notes that group chats aren't available everywhere just yet, but those who do have access to the feature will be able to chat in groups of up to 32 people.

You can start a group chat in a couple of ways. From your inbox, you can tap the Chat button at the top of the screen or a name in the messages list and then the "More options..." button. You can then choose which friends you want to include and then tap "Start group chat."

The other method to start a group chat is by sharing a post with a bunch of people. When you have a video you'd like to chat about with more than one person, tap the Share button, then select "Create group chat." Pick the friends you want to send it to, add a message if you like, then start chatting with your buds about the video.

You can accept any group chat invites you receive via your inbox. You can only invite people you mutually follow to a group chat. As with regular DMs, group chats are not available to users aged between 13 and 15. As for 16- and 17-year-olds, they'll only be able to join a group chat if they have at least one mutual friend in there. If they create a group chat, they'll have to review and manually approve anyone new who joins.

TikTok is also bringing stickers to DMs. That gives folks another way to engage with each other visually. You can create and upload custom stickers for anyone to use.

Engadget