Windows 10 is possibly making unwanted changes to your gaming rig. Microsoft’s first big update for its operating-system-as-a-service is deleting some user-installed apps without asking Windows owners for permission.

The affected programs include hardware monitoring tools CPU-Z and Speccy as well as the AMD Catalyst Control Center for tweaking your Radeon graphics cards. In all of these instances, it seems that the programs no longer functioned properly with the newest version of Windows 10, and the apps were often causing crashes and the blue screen of death.

Remember when Microsoft developed a tool that tried to guess our age? Of course you do – social media feeds were saturated for weeks with outraged 30-year-olds being told they were 50, and 14-year-olds given a glimmer of hope before attempting to buy alcohol.

Now Microsoft’s going further by trying to guess our emotions. Which isn’t at all creepy. Not at all. Try and guess my emotion, Microsoft. All a person has to do is upload a photograph to Microsoft’s Project Oxford website, where its beta tools are hosted. Using facial recognition software and artificial intelligence, the emotion recognition engine will create a string of numbers in relation to emotions.

Hackers have created Android malware that hides itself as a Microsoft Word document in order to trick users into opening it and steal data. The malware was discovered by IT security firm Zscaler. When triggered, the malware scans all of the smartphone's data and sends it to the hacker via email.

The researchers said the attack was reminiscent of early Windows malware attacks with files named with eye-catching titles and common icons to entice victims to open the file. The malware is often downloaded from an unofficial source and portrays itself as a data file with an icon similar to that used by Microsoft Word documents. It runs with Administrative access and hence cannot be easily uninstalled.

It has been nearly two months since the launch of Windows 10, and Microsoft is finally responding to the growing privacy concerns around the new operating system. In a detailed blog post from Windows chief Terry Myerson, Microsoft details all of the ways Windows 10 collects and uses data.

There have been a number of concerns over the content of application crash data, but Myerson reveals Microsoft doesn't collect content or files, and that the company takes "several steps to avoid collecting any information that directly identifies you, such as your name, email address or account ID."

Tech support scammers have mocked up a web page with an even more dire version of Microsoft’s infamous Blue Screen of Death error page.

The website, registered behind an anonymity service, wants to convince surfers tricked into visiting it that their PC has been derailed in order to dupe prospective marks into phoning scammers, who will attempt to extract a big fat fee for solving non-existent problems. Victims are lured to scam pages via either spam messages or malicious advert redirects. Surfers with Javascript enabled will get nagged with a pop-up message featuring an even more dire warning until they kill the browser instance.

In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over text messages between suspects using iPhones.

Government officials had warned for months that this type of standoff was inevitable as technology companies like Apple and Google embraced tougher encryption. The case, coming after several others in which similar requests were rebuffed, prompted some senior Justice Department and FBI officials to advocate taking Apple to court, several current and former law enforcement officials said.

The level of Windows 10 paranoia reached new heights this week when reports suggested that Microsoft would wipe torrents and pirated software from people's hard drives.

Nonsense, of course, but all the recent privacy concerns were enough to have the operating system banned from several torrent trackers. Since the release of Windows 10 last month many media reports have focused on various privacy intrusions. The WiFi password sharing feature, for example, or the extensive sharing of personal data and information back to Microsoft’s servers. The list goes on and on.

Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features. The operating system also sports numerous knobs to twiddle that are supposed to disable most of these features and the potentially privacy-compromising connections that go with them.

Unfortunately for privacy advocates, these controls don't appear to be sufficient to completely prevent the operating system from going online and communicating with Microsoft's servers. For many users these trade-offs will be worthwhile; services such as Cortana, cloud syncing of files, and many other modern features are all valuable, and many will feel that the loss of privacy is an acceptable price to pay.

If you think that the patches delivered through Windows update can not be laced with malware, think again. Security researchers have shown that Hackers could intercept Windows Update to deliver and inject malware in organizations.

Security researchers from UK-based security firm ‘Context’ have discovered a way to exploit insecurely configured implementations of Windows Server Update Services for an enterprise. WSUS allows an administrator to deploy the Windows software update to servers and desktops throughout the organization. These updates come from the WSUS server and not Windows server.

As we have seen numerous times in the past, cybercriminals are quick off the mark when it comes to taking advantage of trending news events.

Whether it's the birth of a royal baby, an airline crash, or the untimely death of a well-known actor, hackers are quick to try and trick people into clicking malicious links or downloading infected files. It comes as little surprise that criminals are looking to lure victims into installing ransomware on their PCs under the guise of being a Windows 10 upgrade. Microsoft launched its Windows 10 and it is rolling the update out in waves to users around the world, meaning that some people will still be waiting to install the new software.