Surgeons in the United Kingdom have performed the first operation in the country using Apple's Vision Pro headset. TechSpot reports: During a recent operation to repair a patient's spine at the private Cromwell Hospital in London, a scrub nurse working alongside the surgeon used the Vision Pro to help prepare, keep track of the procedure, and choose the right tools, reports the Daily Mail. This marked the first operation in the UK where the Vision Pro was used. The software running on Apple's headset during the operation comes from US company eXeX, which has made similar programs for Microsoft's HoloLens. It offers nurses and technicians both holographic and touch-free access to the surgical setup and the procedural guides from within the sterile field of the operating room, according to the press release. The software also tracks each stage of an operation and can measure how well the op went compared to previous procedures performed by other surgeons.

"It eliminates human error and eliminates the guesswork," said Suvi Verho, lead scrub nurse at London Independent Hospital. "It gives you confidence in surgery." While this marked the first time that the Vision Pro was used during a UK surgery, the first-ever time the device was used in an operating room was last month, just three days after its release, when Orlando resident and world-renowned Neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Masson wore it during several spine reconstruction surgeries. "We are in a new era of surgery, and for the first time, our surgical teams have the brilliance of visual holographic guidance and maps, improving visuospatial and temporal orientation for each surgical team and for each surgery in all specialties," said Masson.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A lengthy investigation into the European Union's use of Microsoft 365 has found the Commission breached the bloc's data protection rules through its use of the cloud-based productivity software. Announcing its decision in a press release today, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) said the Commission infringed "several key data protection rules when using Microsoft 365." "The Commission did not sufficiently specify what types of personal data are to be collected and for which explicit and specified purposes when using Microsoft 365," the data supervisor, Wojciech Wiewiorowski, wrote, adding: "The Commission's infringements as data controller also relate to data processing, including transfers of personal data, carried out on its behalf." The EDPS has imposed corrective measures requiring the Commission to address the compliance problems it has identified by December 9 2024, assuming it continues to use Microsoft's cloud suite. The regulator, which oversees' EU institutions' compliance with data protection rules, opened a probe of the Commission's use of Microsoft 365 and other U.S. cloud services back in May 2021. [...]

The Commission confirmed receipt of the EDPB's decision and said it will need to analyze the reasoning "in detail" before taking any decision on how to proceed. In a series of statements during a press briefing, it expressed confidence that it complies with "the applicable data protection rules, both in fact and in law." It also said "various improvements" have been made to contracts, with the EDPS, during its investigation. "We have been cooperating fully with the EDPS since the start of the investigation, by providing all relevant documents and information to the EDPS and by following up on the issues that have been raised in the course of the investigation," it said. "The Commission has always been ready to implement, and grateful for receiving, any substantiated recommendation from the EDPS. Data protection is a top priority for the Commission."

"The Commission has always been fully committed to ensuring that its use of Microsoft M365 is compliant with the applicable data protection rules and will continue to do so. The same applies to all other software acquired by the Commission," it went on, further noting: "New data protection rules for the EU institutions and bodies came into force on 11 December 2018. The Commission is actively pursuing ambitious and safe adequacy frameworks with international partners. The Commission applies those rules in all its processes and contracts, including with individual companies such as Microsoft." While the Commission's public statements reiterated that it's committed to compliance with its legal obligations, it also claimed that "compliance with the EDPS decision unfortunately seems likely to undermine the current high level of mobile and integrated IT services." "This applies not only to Microsoft but potentially also to other commercial IT services. But we need to first analyze the decision's conclusions and the underlying reasons in detail. We cannot provide further comments until we have concluded the analysis," it added.

Elon Musk's AI startup xAI will open-source Grok, its chatbot rivaling ChatGPT, this week, the entrepreneur said, days after suing OpenAI and complaining that the Microsoft-backed startup had deviated from its open-source roots. From a report: xAI released Grok last year, arming it with features including access to "real-time" information and views undeterred by "politically correct" norms. The service is available to customers paying for X's $16 monthly subscription.

As reported by The Information (paywalled), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will return to the company's board along with three new directors. Reuters reports: The company has also concluded the investigation around Altman's November firing, the Information said, referring to the ouster that briefly threw the world's most prominent artificial intelligence company into chaos. Employees, investors and OpenAI's biggest financial backer, Microsoft had expressed shock over Altman's ouster, which was reversed within days. The company will also announce the appointment of three new directors, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, a former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Nicole Seligman, a former president of Sony Entertainment, and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart, the Information said. "I'm pleased this whole thing is over," Altman said.

"We are excited and unanimous in our support for Sam and Greg [Brockman]," OpenAI chair and former Salesforce executive Bret Taylor told reporters. Taylor said they also adopted "a number of governance enhancements," such as a whistleblower hotline and a new mission and strategy committee on the board. "The mission has not changed, because it is more important than ever before," added Taylor.

An independent investigation by the law firm WilmerHale determined that "the prior Board acted within its broad discretion to terminate Mr. Altman, but also found that his conduct did not mandate removal." The summary, provided by OpenAI, continued: "The prior Board believed at the time that its actions would mitigate internal management challenges and did not anticipate that its actions would destabilize the Company. The prior Board's decision did not arise out of concerns regarding product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI's finances, or its statements to investors, customers, or business partners. Instead, it was a consequence of a breakdown in the relationship and loss of trust between the prior Board and Mr. Altman."

Microsoft has abruptly pulled a feature from OneDrive that allows users to upload files to the cloud storage service directly from a URL. From a report: The feature turned up as a preview in 2021 and was intended for scenarios "where the file contents aren't available, or are expensive to transfer," according to Microsoft. It was particularly useful for mobile users, for whom uploading files directly through their apps could be costly. Much better to simply point OneDrive at a given URL and let it handle the upload itself.

However, the experimental feature never made it past the consumer version of OneDrive. It also didn't fit with Microsoft's "vision for OneDrive as a cloud storage service that syncs your files across devices." Indeed, the idea of hosing data into OneDrive from a remote source sits at odds with the file synchronization model being championed by Microsoft and conveniently available from macOS and Windows.

Microsoft revealed earlier this year that Russian state-sponsored hackers had been spying on the email accounts of some members of its senior leadership team. Now, Microsoft is disclosing that the attack, from the same group behind the SolarWinds attack, has also led to some source code being stolen in what Microsoft describes as an ongoing attack. From a report: "In recent weeks, we have seen evidence that Midnight Blizzard [Nobelium] is using information initially exfiltrated from our corporate email systems to gain, or attempt to gain, unauthorized access," explains Microsoft in a blog post. "This has included access to some of the company's source code repositories and internal systems. To date we have found no evidence that Microsoft-hosted customer-facing systems have been compromised."

It's not clear what source code was accessed, but Microsoft warns that the Nobelium group, or "Midnight Blizzard," as Microsoft refers to them, is now attempting to use "secrets of different types it has found" to try to further breach the software giant and potentially its customers. "Some of these secrets were shared between customers and Microsoft in email, and as we discover them in our exfiltrated email, we have been and are reaching out to these customers to assist them in taking mitigating measures," says Microsoft.

A directive known as Document 79 ramps up Beijing's effort to replace U.S. tech with homegrown alternatives. From a report: For American tech companies in China, the writing is on the wall. It's also on paper, in Document 79. The 2022 Chinese government directive expands a drive that is muscling U.S. technology out of the country -- an effort some refer to as "Delete A," for Delete America. Document 79 was so sensitive that high-ranking officials and executives were only shown the order and weren't allowed to make copies, people familiar with the matter said. It requires state-owned companies in finance, energy and other sectors to replace foreign software in their IT systems by 2027.

American tech giants had long thrived in China as they hot-wired the country's meteoric industrial rise with computers, operating systems and software. Chinese leaders want to sever that relationship, driven by a push for self-sufficiency and concerns over the country's long-term security. The first targets were hardware makers. Dell, International Business Machines and Cisco Systems have gradually seen much of their equipment replaced by products from Chinese competitors.

Document 79, named for the numbering on the paper, targets companies that provide the software -- enabling daily business operations from basic office tools to supply-chain management. The likes of Microsoft and Oracle are losing ground in the field, one of the last bastions of foreign tech profitability in the country. The effort is just one salvo in a yearslong push by Chinese leader Xi Jinping for self-sufficiency in everything from critical technology such as semiconductors and fighter jets to the production of grain and oilseeds. The broader strategy is to make China less dependent on the West for food, raw materials and energy, and instead focus on domestic supply chains.

Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer, has been indicted for stealing trade secrets related to AI to benefit two Chinese companies. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each criminal count. Reuters reports: Ding's indictment was unveiled a little over a year after the Biden administration created an interagency Disruptive Technology Strike Force to help stop advanced technology being acquired by countries such as China and Russia, or potentially threaten national security. "The Justice Department just will not tolerate the theft of our trade secrets and intelligence," U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a conference in San Francisco.

According to the indictment, Ding stole detailed information about the hardware infrastructure and software platform that lets Google's supercomputing data centers train large AI models through machine learning. The stolen information included details about chips and systems, and software that helps power a supercomputer "capable of executing at the cutting edge of machine learning and AI technology," the indictment said. Google designed some of the allegedly stolen chip blueprints to gain an edge over cloud computing rivals Amazon.com and Microsoft, which design their own, and reduce its reliance on chips from Nvidia.

Hired by Google in 2019, Ding allegedly began his thefts three years later, while he was being courted to become chief technology officer for an early-stage Chinese tech company, and by May 2023 had uploaded more than 500 confidential files. The indictment said Ding founded his own technology company that month, and circulated a document to a chat group that said "We have experience with Google's ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it." Google became suspicious of Ding in December 2023 and took away his laptop on Jan. 4, 2024, the day before Ding planned to resign. A Google spokesperson said: "We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we found that this employee stole numerous documents, and we quickly referred the case to law enforcement."

An anonymous reader shares a report: On a late night in December, Shane Jones, an AI engineer at Microsoft, felt sickened by the images popping up on his computer. Jones was noodling with Copilot Designer, the AI image generator that Microsoft debuted in March 2023, powered by OpenAI's technology. Like with OpenAI's DALL-E, users enter text prompts to create pictures. Creativity is encouraged to run wild. Since the month prior, Jones had been actively testing the product for vulnerabilities, a practice known as red-teaming. In that time, he saw the tool generate images that ran far afoul of Microsoft's oft-cited responsible AI principles.

The AI service has depicted demons and monsters alongside terminology related to abortion rights, teenagers with assault rifles, sexualized images of women in violent tableaus, and underage drinking and drug use. All of those scenes, generated in the past three months, have been recreated by CNBC this week using the Copilot tool, which was originally called Bing Image Creator. "It was an eye-opening moment," Jones, who continues to test the image generator, told CNBC in an interview. "It's when I first realized, wow this is really not a safe model."

Jones has worked at Microsoft for six years and is currently a principal software engineering manager at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. He said he doesn't work on Copilot in a professional capacity. Rather, as a red teamer, Jones is among an army of employees and outsiders who, in their free time, choose to test the company's AI technology and see where problems may be surfacing. Jones was so alarmed by his experience that he started internally reporting his findings in December. While the company acknowledged his concerns, it was unwilling to take the product off the market. Jones said Microsoft referred him to OpenAI and, when he didn't hear back from the company, he posted an open letter on LinkedIn asking the startup's board to take down DALL-E 3 (the latest version of the AI model) for an investigation.

According to the latest data from StatCounter, Linux's market share has reached 4.03% -- surging by an additional 1% in the last eight months. What's the reason behind this recent growth? "That's a good question," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "While Windows is the king of the hill with 72.13% and MacOS comes in a distant second at 15.46%, it's clear that Linux is making progress." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares the five reasons why Vaughan-Nichols thinks it's growing: 1. Microsoft isn't that interested in Windows
If you think Microsoft is all about the desktop and Windows, think again. Microsoft's profits these days come from its Azure cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Microsoft 365 in particular. Microsoft doesn't want you to buy Windows; the Redmond powerhouse wants you to subscribe to Windows 365 Cloud PC. And, by the way, you can run Windows 365 Cloud PC on Macs, Chromebooks, Android tablets, iPads, and, oh yes, Linux desktops.

2. Linux gaming, thanks to Steam, is also growing
Gaming has never been a strong suit for Linux, but Linux gamers are also a slowly growing group. I suspect that's because Steam, the most popular Linux gaming platform, also has the lion's share of the gaming distribution market

3. Users are finally figuring out that some Linux distros are easy to use
Even now, you'll find people who insist that Linux is hard to master. True, if you want to be a Linux power user, Linux will challenge you. But, if all you want to do is work and play, many Linux distributions are suitable for beginners. For example, Linux Mint is simple to use, and it's a great end-user operating system for everyone and anyone.

4. Finding and installing Linux desktop software is easier than ever
While some Linux purists dislike containerized application installation programs such as Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage, developers love them. Why? They make it simple to write applications for Linux that don't need to be tuned just right for all the numerous Linux distributions. For users, that means they get more programs to choose from, and they don't need to worry about finicky installation details.

5. The Linux desktop is growing in popularity in India
India is now the world's fifth-largest economy, and it's still growing. Do you know what else is growing in India? Desktop Linux. In India, Windows is still the number one operating system with 70.37%, but number two is Linux, with 15.23%. MacOS is way back in fourth place with 3.11%. I suspect this is the case because India's economy is largely based on technology. Where you find serious programmers, you find Linux users.

Richard Speed reports via The Register: Copilot in Windows is set to get even more assertive after Microsoft added a function that makes the AI assistant's window pop up after a user's cursor hovers over the icon in the task bar. [...] Windows Insiders on the Beta Channel â" with the option to get the latest updates turned on â" will soon find themselves on the receiving end of what Microsoft calls "a new hover experience for Copilot in Windows" from build 22635.3276.

If your mouse cursor happens to drift over to the Copilot icon on the taskbar, the Copilot pane will open to make users aware of the delights on offer. The result, we suspect, will be to educate users in the art of switching off the function. Much like Widgets, which will also make its unwanted presence felt should a user move a mouse over its icon. A swift hop into taskbar settings is all it takes to make the icons disappear, for now at least. The new feature is being piloted but considering the proximity of the Beta Channel to Release Preview, there is every chance the pop-up will, er, pop up in a release version of Windows before long.

Microsoft is ending support for its Android subsystem in Windows 11 next year. From a report: The software giant first announced it was bringing Android apps to Windows 11 with Amazon's Appstore nearly three years ago, but this Windows Subsystem for Android will now be deprecated starting March 5th, 2025. "Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA)," reads a new support document from Microsoft. "As a result, the Amazon Appstore on Windows and all applications and games dependent on WSA will no longer be supported beginning March 5, 2025."

If you currently use Android apps from the Amazon Appstore, then you'll continue to have access to these past the support cutoff date, but you won't be able to download any new ones once Microsoft makes its Android subsystem end of life next year. On March 6th (tomorrow), Windows 11 users will no longer be able to search for Amazon Appstore or associated Android apps from the Microsoft Store.

Microsoft has filed a motion seeking to dismiss key parts of a lawsuit The New York Times filed against the company and Open AI, accusing them of copyright infringement. From a report: If you'll recall, The Times sued both companies for using its published articles to train their GPT large language models (LLMs) without permission and compensation. In its filing, the company has accused The Times of pushing "doomsday futurology" by claiming that AI technologies pose a threat to independent journalism. It follows OpenAI's court filing from late February that's also seeking to dismiss some important elements on the case.

Like OpenAI before it, Microsoft accused The Times of crafting "unrealistic prompts" in an effort to "coax the GPT-based tools" to spit out responses matching its content. It also compared the media organization's lawsuit to Hollywood studios' efforts to " stop a groundbreaking new technology:" The VCR. Instead of destroying Hollywood, Microsoft explained, the VCR helped the entertainment industry flourish by opening up revenue streams. LLMs are a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, it continued, and Microsoft collaborated with OpenAI to "help bring their extraordinary power to the public" because it "firmly believes in LLMs' capacity to improve the way people live and work."

Hackers backed by the North Korean government gained a major win when Microsoft left a Windows zero-day unpatched for six months after learning it was under active exploitation. From a report: Even after Microsoft patched the vulnerability last month, the company made no mention that the North Korean threat group Lazarus had been using the vulnerability since at least August to install a stealthy rootkit on vulnerable computers. The vulnerability provided an easy and stealthy means for malware that had already gained administrative system rights to interact with the Windows kernel. Lazarus used the vulnerability for just that. Even so, Microsoft has long said that such admin-to-kernel elevations don't represent the crossing of a security boundary, a possible explanation for the time Microsoft took to fix the vulnerability.

"When it comes to Windows security, there is a thin line between admin and kernel," Jan Vojtesek, a researcher with security firm Avast, explained last week. "Microsoft's security servicing criteria have long asserted that '[a]dministrator-to-kernel is not a security boundary,' meaning that Microsoft reserves the right to patch admin-to-kernel vulnerabilities at its own discretion. As a result, the Windows security model does not guarantee that it will prevent an admin-level attacker from directly accessing the kernel." The Microsoft policy proved to be a boon to Lazarus in installing "FudModule," a custom rootkit that Avast said was exceptionally stealthy and advanced. Rootkits are pieces of malware that have the ability to hide their files, processes, and other inner workings from the operating system itself and at the same time control the deepest levels of the operating system. To work, they must first gain administrative privileges -- a major accomplishment for any malware infecting a modern OS. Then, they must clear yet another hurdle: directly interacting with the kernel, the innermost recess of an OS reserved for the most sensitive functions.

Microsoft built two datacenters west of Phoenix, with plans for seven more (serving, among other companies, OpenAI). "Microsoft has been adding data centers at a stupendous rate, spending more than $10 billion on cloud-computing capacity in every quarter of late," writes the Atlantic. "One semiconductor analyst called this "the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen."

But is this part of a concerning trend? Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year. That might be a burden in the best of times. As of 2023, it seemed absurd. Phoenix had just endured its hottest summer ever, with 55 days of temperatures above 110 degrees. The weather strained electrical grids and compounded the effects of the worst drought the region has faced in more than a millennium. The Colorado River, which provides drinking water and hydropower throughout the region, has been dwindling. Farmers have already had to fallow fields, and a community on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix went without tap water for most of the year... [T]here were dozens of other facilities I could visit in the area, including those run by Apple, Amazon, Meta, and, soon, Google. Not too far from California, and with plenty of cheap land, Greater Phoenix is among the fastest-growing hubs in the U.S. for data centers....

Microsoft, the biggest tech firm on the planet, has made ambitious plans to tackle climate change. In 2020, it pledged to be carbon-negative (removing more carbon than it emits each year) and water-positive (replenishing more clean water than it consumes) by the end of the decade. But the company also made an all-encompassing commitment to OpenAI, the most important maker of large-scale AI models. In so doing, it helped kick off a global race to build and deploy one of the world's most resource-intensive digital technologies. Microsoft operates more than 300 data centers around the world, and in 2021 declared itself "on pace to build between 50 and 100 new datacenters each year for the foreseeable future...."

Researchers at UC Riverside estimated last year... that global AI demand could cause data centers to suck up 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of freshwater by 2027. A separate study from a university in the Netherlands, this one peer-reviewed, found that AI servers' electricity demand could grow, over the same period, to be on the order of 100 terawatt hours per year, about as much as the entire annual consumption of Argentina or Sweden... [T]ensions over data centers' water use are cropping up not just in Arizona but also in Oregon, Uruguay, and England, among other places in the world.
The article points out that Microsoft "is transitioning some data centers, including those in Arizona, to designs that use less or no water, cooling themselves instead with giant fans." And an analysis (commissioned by Microsoft) on the impact of one building said it would use about 56 million gallons of drinking water each year, equivalent to the amount used by 670 families, according to the article. "In other words, a campus of servers pumping out ChatGPT replies from the Arizona desert is not about to make anyone go thirsty."

Microsoft is "delighted to introduce some useful new features" for its "Copilot Preview for Windows 11," according to a recent blog post.

TechRepublic adds that "most features will be enabled by default... rolling out from today until April 2024." Windows 11 users will be able to change system settings through prompts typed directly into Copilot in Windows, currently accessible in the Copilot Preview via an icon on the taskbar, or by pressing Windows + C. Microsoft Copilot will be able to perform the following actions:

- Turn on/off battery saver.
- Show device information.
- Show system information.
- Show battery information.
- Open storage page.
- Launch Live Captions.
- Launch Narrator.
- Launch Screen Magnifier.
- Open Voice Access page.
- Open Text size page.
- Open contrast themes page.
- Launch Voice input.
- Show available Wi-Fi network.
- Display IP Address.
- Show Available Storage.

The new third-party app integrations for Copilot will give Windows 11 users new ways to interact with various applications. For example, making business lunch reservations through OpenTable...

Other new AI features for Windows 11 rolling out today include a new, AI-powered Generative Erase tool, which sounds reminiscent of Google's Magic Eraser tool for Google Photos. Generative Erase allows users to remove unwanted objects or artifacts from their photos in the Photos app.

Likewise, Microsoft's video editing tool Clipchamp is receiving a Silence Removal tool, which functions much as the name implies  — it allows users to remove gaps in conversation or audio from a video clip.

Voice access is another focal point of Microsoft's latest Windows 11 update, detailed in a separate blog post by Windows Commercial Product Marketing Manager Harjit Dhaliwal. Users can now use voice controls to navigate between multiple displays, aided by number and grid overlays that provide easy switching between screens.
A Copilot icon has already started appearing in the taskbar of some Windows systems. If you Google "microsoft installs copilot preview windows," Google adds these helpful suggestions.

People also ask: Why is Copilot preview on my computer?

How do I get rid of Copilot preview on Windows 10?

"Apparently there was some sort of update..." writes one Windows users. "Anyway, there is a logo at the bottom of the screen that is distracting and I'd like to get rid of it."

Lifehacker has already published an article titled "How to Hide (or Disable) Copilot in Windows 11."

"Artificial intelligence is feeling harder and harder to avoid," it begins, "but you still have options."

An upcoming April release of Copilot for OneDrive will be able to find, summarize, and extract information from a wide range of files, including text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, HTML pages and PDF files. "Users can ask Copilot to tailor summaries to their liking, such as only including key points or highlights from a specific section," reports The Verge. From the report: The chatbot will also be able to respond to natural language prompts and answer highly specific questions about the contents of a user's files. Some examples given by Microsoft included asking Copilot to tabulate a week's worth of beverage sales and throw the data in a table view by day. Or, asking it to list the pros and cons of a project, or display the most recent or relevant files. Users can even ask Copilot for advice on how to make their documents better. Copilot on OneDrive will also be able to create outlines, tables, and lists for users, based on existing files. A few examples given were:

- Using the /sales-enablement.docx as reference, create an outline of a sales pitch to a new customer.
- For these selected resumes, create a table with names, current title, years of experience, educational qualifications, and current location.
- Create a list of frequently asked questions about project Moonshot.

Elon Musk has sued OpenAI, its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman and affiliated entities, alleging the ChatGPT makers have breached their original contractual agreements by pursuing profits instead of the non-profit's founding mission to develop AI that benefits humanity. TechCrunch: Musk, a co-founder and early backer of OpenAI, claims Altman and Brockman convinced him to help found and bankroll the startup in 2015 with promises it would be a non-profit focused on countering the competitive threat from Google. The founding agreement required OpenAI to make its technology "freely available" to the public, the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit, filed in a court in San Francisco late Thursday, says that OpenAI, the world's most valuable AI startup, has shifted to a for-profit model focused on commercializing its AGI research after partnering with Microsoft, the world's most valuable company that has invested about $13 billion into the startup. "In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity," the lawsuit adds. "This was a stark betrayal of the Founding Agreement."

Microsoft has outlined a new Windows API designed to offer a seamless way for game developers to integrate super resolution AI-upscaling features from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. From a report: In a new blog post, program manager Joshua Tucker describes Microsoft's new DirectSR API as the "missing link" between games and super resolution technologies, and says it should provide "a smoother, more efficient experience that scales across hardware."

"This API enables multi-vendor SR [super resolution] through a common set of inputs and outputs, allowing a single code path to activate a variety of solutions including Nvidia DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, and Intel XeSS," the post reads. The pitch seems to be that developers will be able to support this DirectSR API, rather than having to write code for each and every upscaling technology.

The blog post comes a couple of weeks after an "Automatic Super Resolution" feature was spotted in a test version of Windows 11, which promised to "use AI to make supported games play more smoothly with enhanced details." Now, it seems the feature will plug into existing super resolution technologies like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS rather than offering a Windows-level alternative.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the lead developers of Django, writes in a long post that he says has come from a place of frustration: [...] Instead, every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, people show up to criticize and complain. Non-OSI licenses "don"t count" as open source. Someone employed by Microsoft is "beholden to corporate interests" and not to be trusted. Patreon is "asking for handouts." Raising money through GitHub sponsors is "supporting Microsoft's rent-seeking." VC funding means we're being set up for a "rug pull" or "enshitification." Open Core is "bait and switch."

None of this is hypothetical; each of these examples are actual things I've seen said about maintainers who take money for their work. One maintainer even told me he got criticized for selling t-shirts! Look. There are absolutely problems with every tactic we have to support maintainers. It's true that VC investment comes with strings attached that often lead to problems down the line. It sucks that Patreon or GitHub (and Stripe) take a cut of sponsor money. The additional restrictions imposed by PolyForm or the BSL really do go against the Freedom 0 ideal. I myself am often frustrated by discovering that some key feature I want out of an open core tool is only available to paid licensees.

But you can criticize these systems while still supporting and celebrating the maintainers! Yell at A16Z all you like, I don't care. (Neither do they.) But yelling at a maintainer because they took money from a VC is directing that anger in the wrong direction. The structural and societal problems that make all these different funding models problematic aren't the fault of the people trying to make a living doing open source. It's like yelling at someone for shopping at Dollar General when it's the only store they have access to. Dollar General's predatory business model absolutely sucks, as do the governmental policies that lead to food deserts, but none of that is on the shoulders of the person who needs milk and doesn't have alternatives.