News

Microsoft Tightens Windows 11 Setup To Enforce Online Accounts

The tech giant is making moves to shut down the remaining workarounds that let users skip online sign-in during Windows 11 setup.

Published

1 year ago

October 7, 2025

Nour Nasir

microsoft tightens windows 11 setup to enforce online accounts

Microsoft is closing the last gaps that allowed Windows 11 to be installed without a Microsoft account or internet connection. The latest Insider build disables long-used tricks for creating local accounts during setup, tightening a requirement that has frustrated privacy-focused users since Windows 11 launched.

Amanda Langowski, head of the Windows Insider Program, said Microsoft is “removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE),” warning that these bypasses can skip “critical setup screens” and leave devices incomplete.

The update extends a series of steps Microsoft has taken over the past year to tie Windows installations to its cloud ecosystem. The company already removed the “bypassnro” command earlier in 2024. The new build now blocks the “start ms-cxh:localonly” command, which users discovered soon after the first fix. Attempting it now simply resets the setup process instead of moving past the account requirement.

For years, these commands were shared across forums and IT circles as an easy workaround to install Windows 11 Pro or Home offline. Removing them means users who want a purely local profile will need to rely on more complex setup files or post-install tweaks.

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Some users turn to local accounts to keep work and personal devices separate or to avoid syncing data across Microsoft’s services. Others simply want to name their main user folder without Windows generating it from their email address. Microsoft has added a narrow option for that: a command that lets users rename the folder during setup, though it remains buried in command-line tools.

The shift marks a broader move to anchor Windows 11 inside Microsoft’s identity and cloud framework — one that streamlines management for enterprises but leaves individual users with less control over how their devices start up.

News

ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

5 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

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“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.