Developer and librarian Misty De Meo, writing about her frustrating experience using GitHub: To me, one of GitHub's killer power user features is its blame view. git blame on the commandline is useful but hard to read; it's not the interface I reach for every day. GitHub's web UI is not only convenient, but the ease by which I can click through to older versions of the blame view on a line by line basis is uniquely powerful. It's one of those features that anchors me to a product: I stopped using offline graphical git clients because it was just that much nicer.

The other day though, I tried to use the blame view on a large file and ran into an issue I don't remember seeing before: I just couldn't find the line of code I was searching for. I threw various keywords from that line into the browser's command+F search box, and nothing came up. I was stumped until a moment later, while I was idly scrolling the page while doing the search again, and it finally found the line I was looking for. I realized what must have happened. I'd heard rumblings that GitHub's in the middle of shipping a frontend rewrite in React, and I realized this must be it. The problem wasn't that the line I wanted wasn't on the page -- it's that the whole document wasn't being rendered at once, so my browser's builtin search bar just couldn't find it. On a hunch, I tried disabling JavaScript entirely in the browser, and suddenly it started working again. GitHub is able to send a fully server-side rendered version of the page, which actually works like it should, but doesn't do so unless JavaScript is completely unavailable.

[...] The corporate branding, the new "AI-powered developer platform" slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as "GitHub" -- the traditional website, what are to me the core features -- simply isn't Microsoft's priority at this point in time. I know many talented people at GitHub who care, but the company's priorities just don't seem to value what I value about the service. This isn't an anti-AI statement so much as a recognition that the tool I still need to use every day is past its prime. Copilot isn't navigating the website for me, replacing my need to the website as it exists today. I've had tools hit this phase of decline and turn it around, but I'm not optimistic. It's still plenty usable now, and probably will be for some years to come, but I'll want to know what other options I have now rather than when things get worse than this.

merbs writes: Video games -- and the people who make them -- are in trouble. An estimated 10,500 people in the industry were laid off in 2023 alone. This year, layoffs in the nearly $200 billion sector have only gotten worse, with studios axing what is believed to be 11,000 more, and counting. Microsoft, home of the Xbox and parent company to several studios, including Activision Blizzard, shuttered Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games in May. All the while, generative AI systems built by OpenAI and its competitors have been seeping into nearly every industry, dismantling whole careers along the way.

But gaming might be the biggest industry AI stands poised to conquer. Its economic might has long since eclipsed Hollywood's, while its workforce remains mostly nonunion. A recent survey from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference found that 49 percent of the survey's more than 3,000 respondents said their workplace used AI, and four out of five said they had ethical concerns about its use. "It's here. It's definitely here, right now," says Violet, a game developer, technical artist, and a veteran of the industry who has worked on AAA games for over a decade. "I think everyone's seen it get used, and it's a matter of how and to what degree. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora's box is opened." The story adds: "At Activision, it was the same. 'A lot of 2D artists were laid off,' Noah says. The department was slashed. 'Remaining concept artists,' he claims, 'were then forced to use AI to aid in their work.' Employees, according to Noah, have been made to sign up for AI trainings, and its use is being promoted throughout the org."

smooth wombat writes: The FTC has sent mandatory notices for information to eight companies it says engages in "surveillance pricing", the process by which prices are rapidly changed using AI based on data about customer behavior and characteristics. This process, the FTC claims, allows companies to charge different customers different prices for the same product.

The list includes Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, Accenture and consulting giant McKinsey. It also includes software firm Task, which counts McDonald's and Starbucks as clients; Revionics, which works with Home Depot, Tractor Supply and grocery chain Hannaford; Bloomreach, which services FreshDirect, Total Wine and Puma; and Pros, which was named Microsoft's internet service vendor of the year this year. "Firms that harvest Americans' personal data can put people's privacy at risk," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a news release. "Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices."

Meta has released Llama 3.1, its largest open-source AI model to date, in a move that challenges the closed approaches of competitors like OpenAI and Google. The new model, boasting 405 billion parameters, is claimed by Meta to outperform GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicting that Meta AI will become the most widely used assistant by year-end.

Llama 3.1, which Meta says was trained using over 16,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, is being made available to developers through partnerships with major tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, potentially reducing deployment costs compared to proprietary alternatives. The release includes smaller versions with 70 billion and 8 billion parameters, and Meta is introducing new safety tools to help developers moderate the model's output. While Meta isn't disclosing what all data it used to train its models, the company confirmed it used synthetic data to enhance the model's capabilities. The company is also expanding its Meta AI assistant, powered by Llama 3.1, to support additional languages and integrate with its various platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as its Quest virtual reality headset.

The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association claims that AI-powered search engines by U.S. tech giants like Google and Microsoft likely infringe on copyright by using news articles without permission. Therefore, they're urging the Japanese government to quickly review and revise intellectual property laws to address these issues. Kyodo News reports (translated in English): The association argued in the statement that while traditional search engines direct users to various copyrighted material available online, AI search engines disclose the content, making them a completely different type of service. While stressing that in many instances, the essential content of the referenced article is reprinted in its entirety and therefore constitutes copyright infringement, the association also highlighted the issue of "zero-click searches," where users do not visit the source site. It warned that the lack of traffic could lead to the diminution of news organizations' reporting activities, which would then have a negative impact on democracy and culture.

The statement also expressed concern over potential inaccuracies in responses generated by AI search engines, which could give the impression that the source articles themselves were erroneous and damage the credibility of news organizations. The association added that providing AI search engine services without obtaining permission to use the source articles could violate the antimonopoly law. "There are many reasons AI companies are attracted to Japan, including the need for its companies to rapidly develop their digital capabilities and the country's declining population, which is very open to AI," said Yutaka Matsuo, a professor at Tokyo University and chair of the government's AI council, in a statement to the Financial Times. "One other attraction is that AI companies are permitted to learn from information without infringing copyright laws," he added.

The Financial Times says the push to bring AI companies to Japan has raised alarm for some content creators who worry their work isn't being protected. "As it relates to generative AI, Japan's existing Copyright Act does not contribute to protecting creators. In fact, it is focused on restricting the rights of creators," the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers said in a statement.

Azure used to be a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. Now, it's the most widely used operating system on Microsoft Azure. The New Stack's Joab Jackson writes: These days, Microsoft expends considerable effort that Linux runs as smoothly as possible on Azure, according to a talk given earlier this year at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit given by two Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program managers, Jack Aboutboul, and Krum Kashan. "Linux is the #1 operating system in Azure today," Aboutoul said. And all must be supported in a way that Microsoft users have come to expects. Hence, the need for the Microsoft's Linux Platforms Group, which provides support Linux to both the internal customers and to Azure customers. These days, the duo of engineers explained, Microsoft knows about as much as anyone about how to operate Linux at hyperscale. [...]

As of today, there are hundreds of Azure and Azure-based services running on Linux, including the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), OpenAI, HDInsight, and many of the other database services. "A lot of the infrastructure powering everything else is running on Linux," Aboutoul said. "They're different flavors of Linux running all over the place," Aboutoul said. To run these services, Microsoft maintains its own kernel, Azure Linux, and in 2023 the company released its own version of Linux, Azure Linux. But Azure Linux is just a small portion of all the other flavors of Linux running on Azure, all of which Microsoft must work with to support.

Overall, there are about 20,000 third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) packages in the Azure marketplace that rely on some Linux distribution. And when things go wrong, it is the Azure service engineers who get the help tickets. The company keeps a set of endorsed Linux distributions, which include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Flatcar, Suse, Canonical, and Oracle Linux and CentOS (as managed by OpenLogic, not Red Hat). [...] Overall, the company gets about 1,000 images a month from these endorsed partners alone. Many of the distributions have multiple images (Suse has a regular one, and another one for high-performance computing, for instance).

An anonymous reader writes: Windows users are being notified that their systems aren't backed up with the built-in Windows backup solution. A corresponding message appears with the advice that it's best to make backups so that all data is stored "in case something happens to the PC." It almost reads like an indirect threat, but Microsoft is actually just pointing out the option to store file backups on its own OneDrive cloud service. And it's also advertising more storage space.

A Microsoft spokesman says that a 2009 European Commission agreement prevents the company from restricting third-party access to Windows' core functions, shedding light on factors contributing to Friday's widespread outage that affected millions of computers globally. The disruption, which caused the infamous "blue screen of death" on Windows machines across various industries, originated from a faulty update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The incident highlighted the vulnerability of Microsoft's open ecosystem, mandated by the EU agreement, which requires the tech giant to provide external security software developers the same level of system access as its own products. This policy stands in stark contrast to more closed systems like Apple's.

8.5 million Windows devices were ultimately affected by the Crowdstrike outage, according to figures from Microsoft cited by CNN.

And now an anonymous Slashdot reader shares CNN's report on the ramifications: What one cybersecurity expert said appears to be the "largest IT outage in history" led to the cancellation of more than 5,000 commercial airline flights worldwide and disrupted businesses from retail sales to package deliveries to procedures at hospitals, costing revenue and staff time and productivity... While CrowdStrike has apologized, it has not mentioned whether or not it intends to provide compensation to affected customers. And when asked by CNN about whether it plans to provide compensation, its response did not address that question. Experts say they expect that there will be demands for remuneration and very possibly lawsuits.

"If you're a lawyer for CrowdStrike, you're probably not going to enjoy the rest of your summer," said Dan Ives, a tech analyst for Wedbush Securities....

But there could be legal protections for CrowdStrike in its customer contracts to shield it from liability, according to one expert. "I would guess that the contracts protect them," said James Lewis, researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies...

It's also not clear how many customers CrowdStrike might lose because of Friday. Wedbush Securities' Ives estimates less than 5% of its customers might go elsewhere. "They're such an entrenched player, to move away from CrowdStrike would be a gamble," he said. It will be difficult, and not without additional costs, for many customers to switch from CrowdStrike to a competitor. But the real hit to CrowdStrike could be reputational damage that will make it difficult to win new customers... [E]ven if customers are understanding, it's likely that CrowdStrike's rivals will be seeking to use Friday's events to try to lure them away.
One final note from CNN. Patrick Anderson, CEO of a Michigan research firm called the Anderson Economic Group, "added that the costs could be particularly significant for airlines, due to lost revenue from canceled flights and excess labor and fuel costs for the planes that did fly but faced significant delays."

See also: Third Day of 1,000+ Cancelled Flights, Just in the US, After Crowdstrike Outage .

A ransomware attack has taken down the computer system of America's largest trial court, reports the Associated Press: The cybersecurity attack began early Friday and is not believed to be related to the faulty CrowdStrike software update that has disrupted airlines, hospitals and governments around the world, officials said in a statement Friday. The court disabled its computer network systems upon discovery of the attack, and it will remain down through at least the weekend.
Friday's statement called it "a serious security event," adding that the court is receiving help from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. "At this time, the preliminary investigation shows no evidence of court users' data being compromised." Over the past few years, the Court has invested heavily in its cybersecurity operations, modernizing its cybersecurity infrastructure and making strategic staff investments in the Cybersecurity Division within Court Technology Services. As a result of this investment, the Court was able to quickly detect an intrusion and address it immediately.

Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, remediation, and recovery, the Court will not comment further until additional information is available for public release.
Sunday the Court posted on X.com that they're "working diligently to get the Court's network systems back up and running...

"When we have a better understanding of the extent to which the Court will be operational tomorrow, July 22, we will provide information and direction to court users and jurors, likely later this evening."

The BBC reports that "while most of the world was grappling with the blue screen of death on Friday," there was one country that managed to escape largely unscathed: China. The reason is actually quite simple: CrowdStrike is hardly used there. Very few organisations will buy software from an American firm that, in the past, has been vocal about the cyber-security threat posed by Beijing. Additionally, China is not as reliant on Microsoft as the rest of the world. Domestic companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei are the dominant cloud providers.

So reports of outages in China, when they did come, were mainly at foreign firms or organisations. On Chinese social media sites, for example, some users complained they were not able to check into international chain hotels such as Sheraton, Marriott and Hyatt in Chinese cities. Over recent years, government organisations, businesses and infrastructure operators have increasingly been replacing foreign IT systems with domestic ones. Some analysts like to call this parallel network the "splinternet".

"It's a testament to China's strategic handling of foreign tech operations," says Josh Kennedy White, a cybersecurity expert based in Singapore. "Microsoft operates in China through a local partner, 21Vianet, which manages its services independently of its global infrastructure. This setup insulates China's essential services — like banking and aviation — from global disruptions."
"Beijing sees avoiding reliance on foreign systems as a way of shoring up national security."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the article.

The Verge reports that for machines that aren't automatically receiving Crowdstrike's newly-released software fix, Microsoft has released a recovery tool that creates a bootable USB drive. Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file. Microsoft's recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly. This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows. If a disk is protected by BitLocker encryption, the tool will prompt for the BitLocker recovery key and then continue to fix the CrowdStrike update.

Who wrote the code for Windows' notorious "Blue Screen of Death? It's "been a source of some contention," writes SFGate: A Microsoft developer blog post from Raymond Chen in 2014 said that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1. That very benign post led to countless stories from tech media claiming Ballmer was the inventor of the "Blue Screen of Death." That, in turn, prompted a follow-up developer blog post from Chen titled "Steve Ballmer did not write the text for the blue screen of death...."

Chen then later tried to claim he was responsible for the "Blue Screen of Death," saying he coded it into Windows 95. Problem is, it already existed in previous iterations of Windows, and 95 simply removed it. Chen added it back in, which he sort of cops to, saying: "And I'm the one who wrote it. Or at least modified it last." No one challenged Chen's 2014 self-attribution, until 2021, when former Microsoft developer Dave Plummer stepped in. According to Plummer, the "Blue Screen of Death" was actually the work of Microsoft developer John Vert, whom logs revealed to be the father of the modern Windows blue screen way back in version 3.1.
Plummer spoke directly with Vert, according to Vert, who'd remembered that he got the idea because there was already a blue screen with white text in both his machine at the time (a MIPS RISC box) and this text editor (SlickEdit)...

Shares of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings dropped 15% on Friday after the company's software update resulted in what may turn out to be the largest IT outage ever. CrowdStrike stock "is on pace for its steepest daily loss since November 2022 and its $290 low share price is the lowest intraday mark since April 25," reports Forbes. "CrowdStrike is on track for the third-worst day in its five-year history as a publicly traded company." From the report: Microsoft, which was swept up in the outage as the downed systems are those running CrowdStrike's cybersecurity applications and Microsoft's Windows software, also slumped, with its shares down about 1% to the $3.2 trillion behemoth's lowest share price since June 11. CrowdStrike competitor Palo Alto Networks enjoyed a 4% rally Friday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite stock index gained about 0.2%, held up by the likes of Microsoft rival Apple's 1% stock gain and a 1% rise for shares of Alphabet, which is reportedly in talks to buy cybersecurity firm Wiz for $23 billion.

The CrowdStrike selloff is "an overreaction to a temporary setback," Rosenblatt analyst Catharine Trebnick wrote in a note to clients Friday. It's a "compelling buying opportunity" as it "creates a window for investors to buy into a high-quality, growth-oriented cybersecurity company at a discounted valuation," Trebnick continued. To her point, CrowdStrike stock's relative valuation, according to its price-to-earnings ratio (P/E), which compares its market value to its projected profits over the next four quarters, fell Friday to its lowest number since April. Still, CrowdStrike's P/E of about 70 is very high for a company of its size, meaning investors will need to express significant confidence in the business' ability to grow earnings, a challenge if Friday's incident were to impact CrowdStrike's client base.

OpenAI escaped a copyright lawsuit from a group of open-source programmers after they voluntarily dismissed their case against the company in federal court. From a report: The programmers, who allege the generative AI programming tool Copilot was trained on their code without proper attribution, filed their notice of voluntary dismissal Thursday, but will still have their case against GitHub and parent company Microsoft, which collaborated with OpenAI in developing the tool. The proposed class action filed in 2022 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California was the first major copyright case against OpenAI, which has since been hit with numerous lawsuits from authors and news organizations including the New York Times.

The FTC says the across-the-board price increases that Microsoft recently announced for its Xbox Game Pass subscription service tiers represent "exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged" when it sought to block Microsoft's merger with Activision. From a report: In a letter to the court posted as part of an ongoing appeal by the FTC in the case, the federal regulator alleges Microsoft's moves are a clear example of "product degradation" brought about by "a firm exercising market power post-merger." The letter's primary focus is on the soon-to-be-discontinued $10.99/month Console Game Pass tier. That's being replaced with a $14.99/month Game Pass Standard tier (a 36 percent price increase) that no longer includes "day one" access to all of Microsoft's first-party titles. To maintain that key benefit, "Console" subscribers will have to spend 81 percent more for the $19.99 Game Pass Ultimate tier, which also includes a number of additional benefits over the current $10.99/month option.

The FTC notes that these changes "coincide with adding Call of Duty to Game Pass's most expensive tier." Previously, Microsoft publicly promised that this Game Pass access to Activision's ultra-popular shooter would come "with no price increase for the service based on the acquisition." It's that "based on the acquisition" clause that's likely to give Microsoft some wiggle room in arguing for its planned pricing changes. Inflation is also a sufficient explanation for a large portion of the price increase in nominal terms -- the $14.99 Microsoft charged for a month of Game Pass Ultimate when it launched in 2019 is the equivalent of $18.39 today, according to the BLS CPI calculator.

Russian officials boasted on Friday that Moscow was spared the impact of the global IT systems outage because of its increased self-sufficiency after years of Western sanctions, though some experts said Russian systems could still be vulnerable. From a report: Microsoft and other IT firms have suspended sales of new products in Russia and have been scaling down their operations in line with sanctions imposed over Russia's war in Ukraine, which Moscow describes as a special military operation. The Kremlin, along with companies from state nuclear giant Rosatom, which operates all of Russia's nuclear plants, to major lenders and airlines, reported no glitches amid the outage that affected international companies across the globe. "The situation once again highlights the significance of foreign software substitution," Russia's digital development ministry said. Russian financial and currency markets also ran smoothly.

An anonymous reader shares a report, which expands on the ongoing global outage: The incident will exacerbate concerns about concentration risk in the cyber security industry. Just 15 companies worldwide account for 62 per cent of the market in cyber security products and services, according to SecurityScorecard. In modern endpoint security, the business of securing PCs, laptops and other devices, the problem is worse: three companies, with Microsoft and CrowdStrike by far the largest, controlled half the market last year, according to IDC.

While the US Cyber Safety Review Board dissects large cyber attacks for lessons learned, there is no obvious body charged with analysing these technical failures to improve the resilience of global tech infrastructure, said Ciaran Martin, former head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre. The current global outage should spur clients -- and perhaps even governments and regulators -- to think more about how to build diversification and redundancy into their systems. Further reading: Without Backup Plans, Global IT Outages Will Happen Again.

Microsoft has a suggested solution for individual customers affected by what may turn out to be the largest IT outage that has ever happened: Just reboot it a lot. From a report: Customers can delete a specific file called C00000291*.sys, which is seemingly tied to the bug, Microsoft said in a status update published Friday. But in some cases, people can't even get to a spot where they can delete that file. In an update posted Friday morning, Microsoft told users that they should simply reboot Virtual Machines (VMs) experiencing a BSoD over and over again until they can fix the issue.

[...] "We have received reports of successful recovery from some customers attempting multiple Virtual Machine restart operations on affected Virtual Machines," Microsoft told users. "We have received feedback from customers that several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage."

A widespread IT outage, caused by a defective software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, is affecting businesses worldwide, causing significant disruptions across various sectors. The issue has primarily impacted computers running Windows, resulting in system crashes and "blue screen of death" errors. The travel industry appears to be among the hardest hit, with airlines and airports in multiple countries reporting problems with check-in and ticketing systems, leading to flight delays. Other affected sectors include banking, retail, and healthcare.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz confirmed the outage was due to a "defect" in a content update for Windows hosts, ruling out a cyberattack. The company is working on a fix. CrowdStrike said the crash reports were "related to the Falcon Sensor" -- its cloud-based security service that it describes as "real-time threat detection, simplified management, and proactive threat hunting."

A Microsoft spokesperson told TechCrunch that the previous Microsoft 365 service disruption overnight July 18-19 was unrelated to the widespread outage triggered by the CrowdStrike update.

Editor's note: The story has been updated throughout the day and moved higher on the front page.