Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff has doubled down on his criticism of Microsoft's Copilot, the AI-powered tool that can write Word documents, create PowerPoint presentations, analyze Excel spreadsheets and even reply to emails through Outlook. In a post on X, he writes: When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it's disappointing. It just doesn't work, and it doesn't deliver any level of accuracy. Gartner says it's spilling data everywhere, and customers are left cleaning up the mess.

To add insult to injury, customers are then told to build their own custom LLMs. I have yet to find anyone who's had a transformational experience with Microsoft Copilot or the pursuit of training and retraining custom LLMs. Copilot is more like Clippy 2.0.

During its MAX event yesterday, Adobe teased some experimental photo and video editing tools for PhotoShop and Premiere Pro. There are a total of nine features, which include being able to rotate vector images, produce sound effects from text descriptions, and generate images in various shapes and sizes. Engadget reports: [W]e'll start with Project Perfect Blend for PS, which improves natural blending and makes shadow casting more realistic, creating more lifelike images. Project Clean Machine removes photo flashes, fireworks and objects blocking the camera's view. One feature that stands out is Project In Motion, which lets users transform custom shape animations into video by entering a prompt, while Project Know How is a content authenticator tool that can search for a video file's source online. Project Turntable lets users rotate 2D vector art in 3D, thereby allowing the 2D vector art to face a direction of their choice. The generative AI model fills in any blanks to create presentable 3D vector art.

Another standout tool is Project Super Sonic, which generates sound effects via prompts or clicking on objects in a video. The latter method can create sounds without typing prompts into the generative AI model. Project Super Sonic seems helpful for people looking to design the sounds they want. Adobe is also working on Microsoft Copilot integration in Project Scenic. This tool creates 3D scene layouts using Copilot prompts, and the camera and objects in the layout can be tweaked. Project Remix A Lot leverages generative AI to create images in various shapes and sizes, all fully editable. In other words, users can "remix" creations into shapes they like, including unusual ones. Finally, we have Project Hi-Fi. With this tool, it's possible to transform sketches and concepts into high-quality images. These images can easily be dragged into PhotoShop for editing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: A new ClickFix campaign is luring users to fraudulent Google Meet conference pages showing fake connectivity errors that deliver info-stealing malware for Windows and macOS operating systems. ClickFix is a social-engineering tactic that emerged in May, first reported by cybersecurity company Proofpoint, from a threat actor (TA571) that used messages impersonating errors for Google Chrome, Microsoft Word, and OneDrive. The errors prompted the victim to copy to clipboard a piece of PowerShell code that would fix the issues by running it in Windows Command Prompt. Victims would thus infect systems with various malware such as DarkGate, Matanbuchus, NetSupport, Amadey Loader, XMRig, a clipboard hijacker, and Lumma Stealer.

In July, McAfee reported that the ClickFix campaigns were becoming mode frequent, especially in the United States and Japan. A new report from Sekoia, a SaaS cybersecurity provider, notes that ClickFix campaigns have evolved significantly and now use a Google Meet lure, phishing emails targeting transport and logistics firms, fake Facebook pages, and deceptive GitHub issues. According to the French cybersecurity company, some of the more recent campaigns are conducted by two threat groups, the Slavic Nation Empire (SNE) and Scamquerteo, considered to be sub-teams of the cryptocurrency scam gangs Marko Polo and CryptoLove.

The business world's favourite software program enters its 40th year. The Economist: Excel has featured in plenty of workplace blunders -- though its defenders will be quick to blame human error. The financial world is littered with tales of costly spreadsheet errors. Excel has also been blamed for botching gene names in over a third of genomics papers (because it labelled them as dates); underreporting covid-19 cases in England (because it only had a limited number of rows in which to record the results); and disrupting the trial of January 6th rioters in America (because sensitive information was left in hidden cells).

Such snafus have not dented Excel's dominance. Might artificial intelligence (AI) steal its crown? With whizzy new tools powered by the technology promising to make data analysis easier, the familiar grid of numbers and calculations could soon feel outdated. Rather than replacing spreadsheets, though, AI might make them even better. Last month Microsoft introduced an AI assistant for Excel which lets users crunch data using natural-language prompts. Excel, and its faithful, aren't ready to be filtered out just yet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hackread: The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has indicted two Sudanese nationals for their alleged role in operating the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan. The group claimed fame for conducting "tens of thousands" of large-scale and crippling Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS attacks) targeting critical infrastructure, corporate networks, and government agencies globally. Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer, 22, and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, 27, stand accused of conspiracy to damage protected computers. Ahmed Salah faces additional charges for damaging protected computers. The duo is believed to have controlled Anonymous Sudan, which, since early 2023, launched attacks on high-profile entities such as ChatGPT, UAE's Flydubai Airline, London Internet Exchange, Microsoft, and the Israeli BAZAN Group.

The group and its clients also utilized the Distributed Cloud Attack Tool (DCAT) to conduct over 35,000 DDoS attacks. These attacks targeted sensitive government and critical infrastructure in the U.S. and globally, including the Department of Justice, Department of Defense, FBI, State Department, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The attacks, which sometimes lasted days, reportedly caused major damage, often crippling websites and networks. For instance, the attack on Cedars-Sinai Medical Center forced the redirection of incoming patients for eight hours, causing over $10 million in damages to U.S. victims.

New submitter king*jojo writes: The owners of WinAmp have just deleted their entire repo one month after uploading the source code to GitHub. Lots of source code, and quite possibly, not all of it theirs. The deletion happened soon after The Register enquired about the seeming inclusion of Shoutcast DNAS code and some Microsoft and Intel codecs.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: Intel and AMD have jointly announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group to bring together the two companies as well as other industry leaders -- both companies and individuals such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Intel and AMD are forming this x86 ecosystem advisory group to help foster collaboration and innovations around the x86 (x86_64) ISA. [...] Besides Intel amd AMD, other founding members include Broadcom, Dell, Google, HPE, HP Inc, Lenovo, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat. Here are the "intended outcomes" for the group, as stated in the press release: The intended outcomes include:
- Enhancing customer choice and compatibility across hardware and software, while accelerating their ability to benefit from new, cutting-edge features.
- Simplifying architectural guidelines to enhance software consistency and standardize interfaces across x86 product offerings from Intel and AMD.
- Enabling greater and more efficient integration of new capabilities into operating systems, frameworks and applications.

One year from today, on October 14, 2025, Microsoft will stop releasing security updates for PCs that are still running Windows 10. From a report: Organizations and individuals will still be able to pay for three more years of updates, with prices that go up steadily each year (Microsoft still hasn't provided pricing for end users, only saying that it will release pricing info "closer to the October 2025 date.") But for most PCs running Windows 10, the end of the line is in sight.

WordPress.org has seized control of WP Engine's Advanced Custom Fields plugin, renaming it "Secure Custom Fields" and removing commercial elements, according to WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. The move, justified by alleged security concerns and linked to ongoing litigation between WP Engine and Automattic, marks an unprecedented forcible takeover in the WordPress ecosystem.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder and chief technology officer of Basecamp-maker 37signals, opines on the situation: For a dispute that started with a claim of "trademark confusion", there's an incredible irony in the fact that Automattic is now hijacking users looking for ACF onto their own plugin. And providing as rational for this unprecedented breach of open source norms that ACF needs maintenance, and since WPE is no longer able to provide that (given that they were blocked!), Automattic has to step in to do so. I mean, what?!

Imagine this happening on npm? Imagine Meta getting into a legal dispute with Microsoft (the owners of GitHub, who in turn own npm), and Microsoft responding by directing GitHub to ban all Meta employees from accessing their repositories. And then Microsoft just takes over the official React repository, pointing it to their own Super React fork. This is the kind of crazy we're talking about.

Weaponizing open source code registries is something we simply cannot allow to form precedence. They must remain neutral territory. Little Switzerlands in a world of constant commercial skirmishes.

And that's really the main reason I care to comment on this whole sordid ordeal. If this fight was just one between two billion-dollar companies, as Automattic and WPE both are, I would not have cared to wade in. But the principles at stake extend far beyond the two of them.

Using an open source project like WordPress as leverage in this contract dispute, and weaponizing its plugin registry, is an endangerment of an open source peace that has reigned decades, with peace-time dividends for all. Not since the SCO-Linux nonsense of the early 2000s have we faced such a potential explosion in fear, doubt, and uncertainty in the open source realm on basic matters everyone thought they could take for granted.

wiredmikey writes: As the dust settles following the massive Windows BSOD tech outages caused by CrowdStrike in July 2024, the question is now, how do we prevent this happening again? While there was no current way Microsoft could have prevented this incident, the OS firm is obviously keen to prevent anything similar happening in the future. SecurityWeek talked to David Weston, VP enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, to discuss Windows kernel access and safe deployment practices (or SDP).
Former Ukranian officer Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov created a Signal channel where military communications specialists could talk with civilian radio experts, reports MIT's Technology Review. But radio communications are crucial for drones, so... About once a month, he drives hundreds of kilometers east in a homemade mobile intelligence center: a black VW van in which stacks of radio hardware connect to an array of antennas on the roof that stand like porcupine quills when in use. Two small devices on the dash monitor for nearby drones. Over several days at a time, Flash studies the skies for Russian radio transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops in the fields and in the trenches.

He is, at least in an unofficial capacity, a spy. But unlike other spies, Flash does not keep his work secret. In fact, he shares the results of these missions with more than 127,000 followers — including many soldiers and government officials — on several public social media channels. Earlier this year, for instance, he described how he had recorded five different Russian reconnaissance drones in a single night — one of which was flying directly above his van... Drones have come to define the brutal conflict that has now dragged on for more than two and a half years. And most rely on radio communications — a technology that Flash has obsessed over since childhood. So while Flash is now a civilian, the former officer has still taken it upon himself to inform his country's defense in all matters related to radio...

Flash has also become a source of some controversy among the upper echelons of Ukraine's military, he tells me. The Armed Forces of Ukraine declined multiple requests for comment, but Flash and his colleagues claim that some high-ranking officials perceive him as a security threat, worrying that he shares too much information and doesn't do enough to secure sensitive intel... [But] His work has become greatly important to those fighting on the ground, and he recently received formal recognition from the military for his contributions to the fight, with two medals of commendation — one from the commander of Ukraine's ground forces, the other from the Ministry of Defense...

And given the mounting evidence that both militaries and militant groups in other parts of the world are now adopting drone tactics developed in Ukraine, it's not only his country's fate that Flash may help to determine — but also the ways that armies wage war for years to come.
He's also written guides on building cheap anti-drone equipment...

Microsoft will offer direct game purchases through its Xbox app for Android starting November, following a U.S. court ruling against Google's app store monopoly. The move allows Microsoft to circumvent Google's revenue cut on in-app purchases and signals renewed focus on mobile gaming, bolstered by its recent $75.4 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition.

AMD is launching a new chip to rival Nvidia's upcoming Blackwell chips, which Nvidia called the "world's most powerful chip" for AI when unveiled earlier this year. CNBC reports: The Instinct MI325X, as the chip is called, will start production before the end of 2024, AMD said Thursday during an event announcing the new product. If AMD's AI chips are seen by developers and cloud giants as a close substitute for Nvidia's products, it could put pricing pressure on Nvidia, which has enjoyed roughly 75% gross margins while its GPUs have been in high demand over the past year. In the past few years, Nvidia has dominated the majority of the data center GPU market, but AMD is historically in second place. Now, AMD is aiming to take share from its Silicon Valley rival or at least to capture a big chunk of the market, which it says will be worth $500 billion by 2028.

AMD didn't reveal new major cloud or internet customers for its Instinct GPUs at the event, but the company has previously disclosed that both Meta and Microsoft buy its AI GPUs and that OpenAI uses them for some applications. The company also did not disclose pricing for the Instinct MI325X, which is typically sold as part of a complete server. With the launch of the MI325X, AMD is accelerating its product schedule to release new chips on an annual schedule to better compete with Nvidia and take advantage of the boom in AI chips. The new AI chip is the successor to the MI300X, which started shipping late last year. AMD's 2025 chip will be called MI350, and its 2026 chip will be called MI400, the company said.

Microsoft is enhancing passkey support in Windows 11 with a redesigned Windows Hello experience that allows users to sync passkeys to their Microsoft account or third-party providers like 1Password and Bitwarden. The Verge reports: A new API for third-party password and passkey managers means developers can plug directly into the Windows 11 experience, so you can use the same passkey from your mobile device to authenticate on your PC. Right now it's possible in some apps to do this through QR codes and other ways to authenticate from a mobile device, but Microsoft's full support means the passkeys experience on Windows is about to get a lot better.

Microsoft is also redesigning the Windows Hello prompt, including the ability to setup syncing of passkeys to your Microsoft account or saving them elsewhere. Once you've completed a one-time setup process you can use facial recognition, fingerprint, or PIN to authenticate with a passkey across multiple Windows 11 devices. Windows Insiders will get access to these new passkey features "in the coming months."

Veteran Microsoft engineer Larry Osterman is the latest to throw his hat into the "tabs versus spaces" ring. From a report: The debate has vexed engineers for decades -- is it best to indent code with tabs or spaces? Osterman, a four-decade veteran of Microsoft, was Team Tabs when storage was tight, but has since become Team Spaces with the advent of terabytes of relatively inexpensive storage. "Here's the thing," he said. "When you've got 512 kilobytes, and you're writing a program in Pascal with lots of indentation, if you're taking eight bytes for every one of those indentations, for eight spaces, you could save seven bytes in your program by using a tab character."

It all added up, even when floppy disks were part of the equation.

However, according to Osterman, things have changed. Storage is less of an issue, so why not use spaces? A cynic might wonder if that sort of attitude has led to the bloatware of today, where software requires ever-increasing amounts of storage in return for precious little extra functionality and a never-ending stream of patches. Any decent compiler should strip out any extraneous characters, assuming the code is indeed being compiled beforehand and not interpreted at run-time. For his part, Osterman is now a member of team spaces. "I like spaces simply because it always works and it's always consistent," he said.

Apple has rolled out an update to macOS 15 Sequoia that addresses compatibility issues with third-party security software that emerged in the initial release. The update, macOS 15.0.1, aims to resolve problems affecting products from CrowdStrike and Microsoft. The compatibility problems had disrupted the functionality of several cybersecurity tools when macOS 15 first launched in September.

Tech giants Amazon and Microsoft have inked major deals with U.S. nuclear power plants to fuel their energy-hungry data centers, marking a shift in the industry's power sourcing strategy. The move comes as AI-driven facilities strain companies' climate goals, pushing them towards carbon-free electricity sources.

Microsoft plans to revive the shuttered Three Mile Island plant by 2028, while Amazon secured power from Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Nuclear facility in a $650 million deal. Google is also exploring nuclear options, including small modular reactors still under development. This trend could potentially triple U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050, according to a Department of Energy report.

He's the long-time Slashdot reader who installed Linux on a 1993 PC — and then installed a 1994 version of MS-DOS on a modern Thinkpad X13. (And somewhere along the way, he even built a ChatGPT client for DOS...)

But in a new blog post, yeokm1 reveals "I recently built myself a PC," salvaging parts from a previous desktop system to bootstrap an upgrade. And "I decided to build one with the ability to still reach back into the past to run MS-DOS..."

The result? A Ryzen 5 7600 and GeForce 4060 Ti system, but with a floppy drive, optical drive, Sound Blaster card, serial, parallel and PS/2 ports — that runs MS-DOS. The fact that a 30-year-old MS-DOS 6.22 can still work well enough on such a modern hardware is testament to the efforts made by the industry to ensure good x86 PC backward compatibility. AMD, Nvidia and Asus deserve to be commended on their efforts here.

I'm also impressed that the modern Nvidia Geforce 4060 Ti still supports some legacy video BIOS modes to a usable level although this is not complete. I didn't document in this blog post but brief tests with other VESA modes and resolutions didn't work so well. I wonder how long more this amount of x86 PC backward-compatibility will continue to last though... It definitely feels like the end is near.
Their blog post includes a video about their system. (And yes, it plays Doom.) But their ultimate goal is to use it to play modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Flight Simulator 2020 (as well as the upcoming Flight Simulator 2024) "at reasonably good settings and performance." (And also to experiment with light machine-learning workloads, do basic video editing, run virtual machines.)

After successfully building their DOS-running system, they asked ChatGPT what it thought. Would the system's specs be powerful enough to handle the 30-year-old operation system? And ChatGPT confidently replied:

"Neither the Ryzen 5 7600 nor the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is designed to run DOS natively. DOS is an older operating system that was primarily used on x86 architecture from the late 20th century, and modern hardware like the Ryzen 5 7600 and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti are not compatible with DOS due to their 64-bit architecture and lack of necessary drivers to interface correctly with DOS, which relied on much older technology..."

yeokm1's blog post concludes: "I think I just proved ChatGPT wrong :P"

Google is testing a new verification feature in search, in a move aimed at helping users avoid fake or fraudulent websites. The Verge's Jess Weatherbed reports: My colleague Jay Peters spotted checkmarks next to official site links for Microsoft, Meta, Epic Games, Apple, Amazon, and HP, but these were no longer displayed once he logged into a different Google account -- meaning this experiment isn't being rolled out widely just yet. Hovering over a checkmark will display a message that explains "Google's signals suggest that this business is the business that it says it is," which is determined by things like website verification, Merchant Center data, and manual reviews according to Shaheen.

Microsoft has released Windows 11 Dev build 26120.1930, which contains the ability to remap the Copilot key. The changes are rolling out gradually to Dev Insiders with the "Get the latest features as soon as they are available" toggle on. Neowin reports: [H]ere are the updates that are also gradually rolling out, but this time for all Dev Insiders: "We are adding the ability to configure the Copilot key. You can choose to have the Copilot key launch an app that is MSIX packaged and signed, thus indicating the app meets security and privacy requirements to keep customers safe. The key will continue to launch Copilot on devices that have the Copilot app installed until a customer selects a different experience. This setting can be found via Settings - Personalization - Text input. If the keyboard connected to your PC does not have a Copilot key, adjusting this setting will not do anything. We are planning further refinements to this experience in a future flight." Other changes introduced in the build include a new simplified Chinese font, Windows Sandbox improvements, and several bug fixes. Full release notes are available here.

Microsoft has discontinued Windows Mixed Reality support in its latest Windows 11 update, rendering a number of VR headsets obsolete. The move, reported by UploadVR, affects devices from major manufacturers. An estimated 80,000 users will lose access to their headsets upon upgrading to Windows 11 24H2. UploadVR adds: Despite the name, all Windows MR headsets were actually VR-only, and are compatible with most SteamVR content via Microsoft's SteamVR driver. The first Windows MR headsets arrived in late 2017 from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, aiming to compete with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that had launched a year earlier. They were the first consumer VR products to deliver inside-out positional tracking, for both the headset and controllers.

All the original Windows MR OEMs except Samsung used the same cheap fixed panels LCD design with fixed lenses, while the Samsung Odyssey had IPD adjustment and OLED panels - the same OLED panels that would be featured in HTC Vive Pro and Oculus Quest a year and a half later. Even though the LCD headsets were sold for as low as $200 at times, and even though Samsung offered (for the time) high-resolution OLED panels, Windows MR headsets failed to ever reach widespread adoption amongst PC VR gamers. On the Steam Hardware Survey Windows MR peaked at around 10% of SteamVR usage share in 2019, and now sits around 3.5%. The move follows Microsoft recently discontinuing the HoloLens 2.