After months of high-level meetings and discussions, government officials and Big Tech leaders have agreed on one thing about artificial intelligence: The potentially world-changing technology needs some ground rules. But many in Silicon Valley are skeptical. WashingtonPost: A growing group of tech heavyweights -- including influential venture capitalists, the CEOs of midsize software companies and proponents of open-source technology -- are pushing back, claiming that laws for AI could snuff out competition in a vital new field. To these dissenters, the willingness of the biggest players in AI, such as Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI to embrace regulation is simply a cynical ploy by those firms to lock in their advantages as the current leaders, essentially pulling up the ladder behind them. These tech leaders' concerns ballooned last week, when President Biden signed an executive order laying out a plan to have the government develop testing and approval guidelines for AI models -- the underlying algorithms that drive "generative" AI tools such as chatbots and image-makers.

"We are still in the very early days of generative AI, and it's imperative that governments don't preemptively anoint winners and shut down competition through the adoption of onerous regulations only the largest firms can satisfy," said Garry Tan, the head of Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based start-up incubator that helped nurture companies including Airbnb and DoorDash when they were just starting. The current discussion hasn't incorporated the voices of smaller companies enough, Tan said, which he believes is key to fostering competition and engineering the safest ways to harness AI. Companies like influential AI start-up Anthropic and OpenAI are closely tied to Big Tech, having taken huge amounts of investment from them.

"They do not speak for the vast majority of people who have contributed to this industry," said Martin Casado, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which made early investments in Facebook, Slack and Lyft. Most AI engineers and entrepreneurs have been watching the regulatory discussions from afar, focusing on their companies instead of trying to lobby politicians, he said. "Many people want to build, they're innovators, they're the silent majority," Casado said. The executive order showed those people that regulation could come sooner than expected, he said. Casado's venture capital firm sent a letter to Biden laying out its concerns. It was signed by prominent AI start-up leaders including Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Mistral's Arthur Mensch, as well as more established tech leaders such as e-commerce company Shopify's CEO Tobi Lutke, who had tweeted "AI regulation is a terrible idea" after the executive order was announced.

Windows Central: Microsoft began rolling out its new AI assistant for Windows earlier this year with the Windows 11 version 23H2 release, which adds a new Microsoft Copilot button directly to the Taskbar. Microsoft has been putting its Copilot in front of every user it can, but there's still a large chunk of PC users on the older Windows 10 OS which hasn't seen any of Microsoft's recent AI additions. That may soon be changing. According to my sources, Microsoft is planning to bring the same Microsoft Copilot to Windows 10 in an update coming soon. Just like Windows 11, this update to Windows 10 will place a Copilot button directly on the Windows 10 taskbar, which will open the exact same Copilot sidebar experience found on Windows 11.

The App Defense Alliance (ADA), an initiative set up by Google back in 2019 to combat malicious Android apps infiltrating the Play app store, has joined the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), a Linux Foundation project focused on helping organizations working on technical specifications, standards, and related efforts. From a report: The App Defense Alliance had, in fact, already expanded beyond its original Android malware detection roots, covering areas such as malware mitigation, mobile app security assessments (MASA), and cloud app security assessments (CASA). And while its founding members included mobile security firms such as ESET, Lookout and Zimperium, it has ushered in new members through the years including Trend Micro and McAfee. Today's news, effectively, sees ADA join an independent foundation, a move designed to open up the appeal to other big tech companies, such as Facebook parent Meta and Microsoft, both of which are now joining the ADA's steering committee. The ultimate goal is to "improve app security" through fostering greater "collaborative implementation of industry standards," according to a joint statement today.

In the midst of an AI chip shortage, Microsoft wants to give a privileged few startups free access to "supercomputing" resources from its Azure cloud for developing AI models. From a report: Microsoft today announced it's updating its startup program, Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, to include a no-cost Azure AI infrastructure option for "high-end," Nvidia-based GPU virtual machine clusters to train and run generative models, including large language models along the lines of ChatGPT. Y Combinator and its community of startup founders will be the first to gain access to the clusters in private preview. Why Y Combinator? Annie Pearl, VP of growth and ecosystems, Microsoft, called YC the "ideal initial partner," given its track record working with startups "at the earliest stages."

"We're working closely with Y Combinator to prioritize the asks from their current cohort, and then alumni, as part of our initial preview," Pearl said. "The focus will be on tasks like training and fine-tuning use cases that unblock innovation." It's not the first time Microsoft's attempted to curry favor with Y Combinator startups. In 2015, the company said it would give $500,000 in Azure credits to YC's Winter 2015 batch, a move that at the time was perceived as an effort to draw these startups away from rival clouds. One might argue the GPU clusters for AI training and inferencing are along the same self-serving vein.

Microsoft is partnering with Inworld AI to develop Xbox tools that will allow developers to create AI-powered characters, stories, and quests. From a report: The multiyear partnership will include an "AI design copilot" system that Xbox developers can use to create detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quest lines, and more. "At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games," explains Haiyan Zhang, general manager of gaming AI at Xbox. "This partnership will bring together: Inworld's expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft's cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research's technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox's strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers." The multiplatform AI toolset will include the AI design copilot for scripts and dialogue, and an AI character engine that can be integrated into games and used to dynamically generate stories, quests, and dialogue.

"Microsoft Exchange is impacted by four zero-day vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit remotely to execute arbitrary code or disclose sensitive information on affected installations," reports Bleeping Computer, citing disclosures Thursday from Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, who reported them to Microsoft on September 7th and 8th, 2023.

In an email to the site, a Microsoft spokesperson said customers who applied the August Security Updates are already protected from the first vulnerability, while the other three require attackers to have prior access to email credentials. (And for two of them no evidence was presented that it can be leveraged to gain elevation of privilege.)

"We've reviewed these reports and have found that they have either already been addressed, or do not meet the bar for immediate servicing under our severity classification guidelines and we will evaluate addressing them in future product versions and updates as appropriate."

From Bleeping Computer's report: ZDI disagreed with this response and decided to publish the flaws under its own tracking IDs to warn Exchange admins about the security risks... All these vulnerabilities require authentication for exploitation, which reduces their severity CVSS rating to between 7.1 and 7.5... It should be noted, though, that cybercriminals have many ways to obtain Exchange credentials, including brute-forcing weak passwords, performing phishing attacks, purchasing them, or acquiring them from info-stealer logs...

ZDI suggests that the only salient mitigation strategy is to restrict interaction with Exchange apps. However, this can be unacceptably disruptive for many businesses and organizations using the product. We also suggest implementing multi-factor authentication to prevent cybercriminals from accessing Exchange instances even when account credentials have been compromised.

It happened a quarter of a century ago. The New York Times wrote that "An internal memorandum reflecting the views of some of Microsoft's top executives and software development managers reveals deep concern about the threat of free software and proposes a number of strategies for competing against free programs that have recently been gaining in popularity." The memo warns that the quality of free software can meet or exceed that of commercial programs and describes it as a potentially serious threat to Microsoft. The document was sent anonymously last week to Eric Raymond, a key figure in a loosely knit group of software developers who collaboratively create and distribute free programs ranging from operating systems to Web browsers. Microsoft executives acknowledged that the document was authentic...

In addition to acknowledging that free programs can compete with commercial software in terms of quality, the memorandum calls the free software movement a "long-term credible" threat and warns that employing a traditional Microsoft marketing strategy known as "FUD," an acronym for "fear, uncertainty and doubt," will not succeed against the developers of free software. The memorandum also voices concern that Linux is rapidly becoming the dominant version of Unix for computers powered by Intel microprocessors.

The competitive issues, the note warns, go beyond the fact that the software is free. It is also part of the open-source software, or O.S.S., movement, which encourages widespread, rapid development efforts by making the source code — that is, the original lines of code written by programmers — readily available to anyone. This enables programmers the world over to continually write or suggest improvements or to warn of bugs that need to be fixed. The memorandum notes that open software presents a threat because of its ability to mobilize thousands of programmers. "The ability of the O.S.S. process to collect and harness the collective I.Q. of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing," the memo states. "More importantly, O.S.S. evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale."
Back in 1998, Slashdot's CmdrTaco covered the whole brouhaha — including this CNN article: A second internal Microsoft memo on the threat Linux poses to Windows NT calls the operating system "a best-of-breed Unix" and wonders aloud if the open-source operating system's momentum could be slowed in the courts.

As with the first "Halloween Document," the memo — written by product manager Vinod Valloppillil and another Microsoft employee, Josh Cohen — was obtained by Linux developer Eric Raymond and posted on the Internet. In it, Cohen and Valloppillil, who also authored the first "Halloween Document," appear to suggest that Microsoft could slow the open-source development of Linux with legal battles. "The effect of patents and copyright in combating Linux remains to be investigated," the duo wrote.
Microsoft's slogain in 1998 was "Where do you want to go today?" So Eric Raymond published the documents on his web site under the headline "Where will Microsoft try to drag you today? Do you really want to go there?"

25 years later, and it's all still up there and preserved for posterity on Raymond's web page — a collection of leaked Microsoft documents and related materials known collectively as "the Halloween documents." And Raymond made a point of thanking the writers of the documents, "for authoring such remarkable and effective testimonials to the excellence of Linux and open-source software in general."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mtaht for remembering the documents' 25th anniversary...

Microsoft has changed its mind, the Verge reported Friday, and now will continue giving a free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to most of its 238,000 employees, according to an announcement from Xbox chief Phil Spencer.

Earlier reports had suggested that Microsoft was removing the free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefit — and some employees weren't happy about it.

CNN decries "false and bizarre" news stories being published by Microsoft on MSN.com, "one of the world's most trafficked websites and a place where millions of Americans get their news every day." Microsoft's decision to increasingly rely on the use of automation and artificial intelligence over human editors to curate its homepage appears to be behind the site's recent amplification of false and bizarre stories, people familiar with how the site works told CNN.

The site, which comes pre-loaded as the default start page on devices running Microsoft software, including on Microsoft's latest "Edge" browser... employed more than 800 editors in 2018 to help select and curate news stories shown to millions of readers around the world. But in recent years Microsoft has laid off editors, some of whom were told they were being replaced by "automation," what they understand to be AI.
CNN points out that while Microsoft's president "has publicly lectured on the responsible use" of AI, "the apparent role of AI in Microsoft's recent amplification of bogus stories raises questions about the company's public adoption of the nascent technology and for the journalism industry as a whole." CNN notes that an AI-generated poll urging readers to guess the cause of a swimmer's death "was not the first public blunder caused by Microsoft's embrace of AI." In September Microsoft republished a story about Brandon Hunter, a former NBA player who died unexpectedly at the age of 42, under the headline, "Brandon Hunter useless at 42." Then, in October, Microsoft republished an article that claimed that San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston had resigned from his position after criticism from Elon Musk. The story was entirely false.

Some of the articles featured by Microsoft were initially published by obscure websites that might have gone unnoticed amid the daily deluge of online misinformation that circulates every day. But Microsoft's decision to republish articles from fringe outlets has elevated those stories to potentially millions of additional readers, breathing life into their claims. Editors who formerly worked for Microsoft told CNN that these kinds of false stories, or virtually any other articles from low-quality websites, would not be prominently featured by Microsoft were it not for its use of AI. Ryn Pfeuffer, who worked intermittently as a contractor for Microsoft for eight years, said she received a call in May 2020 with the news that her entire team was being laid off. 2020 was the year, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNN in a statement on Wednesday, that the company began transitioning to a "personalized feed" that is "tailored by an algorithm to the interests of our audiences."
MSN "has also published other junk content, including bogus stories about fishermen catching mermaids and Bigfoot spottings," reports the tech news site Futurism, "in the wake of ditching its human editors in favor of automation.

"Noticing a pattern yet? The company pumps out trash-tier AI content, then waits until it's called out publicly to quietly delete it and move onto the next trainwreck." We've known that Microsoft's MSN news portal has been pumping out a garbled, AI-generated firehose for well over a year now. The company has been using the website to distribute misleading and oftentimes incomprehensible garbage to hundreds of millions of readers per month... And if MSN presents a vision of how the tech industry's obsession with AI is going to play out in the information ecosystem, we're in for a rough ride.
CNN got this reaction from a user whose default browser changed from Chrome to Microsoft Edge after a software update — and discovered their home page had switched to MSN.com. "It felt like I was standing in line at the grocery store reading a National Enquirer front page."

A company spokesperson assured CNN that Microsoft was "committed to addressing the recent issue of low quality articles."

Microsoft has updated its Surface support documentation, committing to supporting some Surface Pcs with six years of firmware updates -- up from the four years it originally offered. Windows Central reports: The updated documentation states that any Surface PC shipped after January 1, 2021 will receive six years of firmware updates. Surface devices shipped before that date will remain on four years of firmware updates. This means Surface Pro 7+, Surface Go 3, Surface Laptop 4, Surface Laptop Go 2, Surface Studio 2+, Surface Laptop Studio 1 and newer have all had their support cycles extended by two additional years.

Here's what the documentation says:

- For devices released before January 1, 2021: Surface devices will receive driver and firmware updates for at least four years from when the device was first released. In cases where the support duration is longer than four years, an updated end-of-servicing date will be published before the date of the last servicing.
- For devices released on and after January 1, 2021: Surface devices will receive driver and firmware updates for at least six years from when the device was first released. In cases where the support duration is longer than six years, an updated end-of-servicing date will be published before the date of the last servicing.

YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers is in full swing, leading to a wave of ad blocker uninstalls. 9to5Google reports: As Wired reports, this rollout has led to "hundreds of thousands" of uninstalls, not of YouTube but of ad blockers. The figures apparently come from various ad-blocking companies, where October saw a "record number" of people uninstalling ad blockers. Meanwhile, it also led to a record number of new installs, as many users looked to switch from one blocker to another in an effort to keep blocking ads.

One ad-blocking company, Ghostery, shared that 90% of users who completed a survey when uninstalling their ad blocker cited YouTube's changes as the reason. AdGuard told Wired that daily uninstalls were up for the entirety of October, spiking to 52,000 in a single day on October 18 as YouTube's notices started rolling out more widely. It was added that use of the Ghostery blocker is up 30% on Microsoft Edge, as some users have noticed that switching browsers at least temporarily lifts the blocking of their ad blocker. AdGuard, meanwhile, saw its paid subscription rise as some users reportedly saw success with containing to block ads using the tool.

UPDATE (6/4/2023): Microsoft has changed its mind, the Verge reported Friday, and now will continue giving a free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to most of its 238,000 employees, according to an announcement from Xbox chief Phil Spencer.

Earlier reports had suggested that Microsoft was removing the free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefit — and some employees weren't happy about it. From the Verge's earlier report: Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the company started informing employees this week that in January 2024 the free Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefit for permanent Microsoft employees will no longer be available. I understand that Xbox employees will continue to keep the benefit, but the vast majority of Microsoft employees who aren't part of Xbox / Microsoft Gaming will see the benefit disappear next year.

Microsoft employees will be able to purchase a discounted 12-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Subscription at the company's internal store. Some Microsoft employees have taken to the company's internal messaging platform to voice their objections about the benefit being removed. The employee posts even prompted Xbox chief Phil Spencer to respond, noting that he wasn't aware of the changes and is looking into the situation.

Microsoft has changed the terms and conditions for its online services to include a warning that "excessive" users of its generative AI services will have their access restricted. From a report: The new language appeared in a November 1 update to Microsoft's legalese spotted by licensing-watchers Cloudy With A Chance Of Licensing. The restrictions are described in a new clause of the document titled "Capacity Limitations," is: "Excessive use of a Microsoft Generative AI Service may result in temporary throttling of Customer's access to the Microsoft Generative AI Service." The document does not, however, define "excessive use", how long a "temporary" restriction might last, or exactly what happens during "throttling."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Coming out of the ongoing Google antitrust trial, an internal Apple presentation has surfaced (via The Verge) in which the company called Android a "massive tracking device." The presentation in question was regarding a push within Apple to start "Competing on Privacy." The slides, made in January 2013, dove into how Apple's competitors (Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft primarily) handled privacy matters and user data. A "privacy timeline" includes some 2000s and 2010s events that made headlines regarding privacy, such as Google's Street View cars recording private Wi-Fi networks and Instagram's aim to use user photos in its ads, as well as Google's privacy policy move to combining user data across services. Apple went on to compare how its products handle privacy differently from Google and others.

The presentation culminates in the full-page statement [...] where Apple says that "Android is a massive tracking device." The slideshow is partially redacted and abridged, which leaves out the context of this statement, but it's certainly a bold way to talk about a competitor. Of course, all mobile devices do a whole lot of tracking, whether it's Android or iOS.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has had a rough few years of cybersecurity incidents. It found itself at the center of the SolarWinds attack nearly three years ago, one of the most sophisticated cybersecurity attacks we've ever seen. Then, 30,000 organizations' email servers were hacked in 2021 thanks to a Microsoft Exchange Server flaw. If that weren't enough already, Chinese hackers breached US government emails via a Microsoft cloud exploit earlier this year. Something had to give.

Microsoft is now announcing a huge cybersecurity effort, dubbed the Secure Future Initiative (SFI). This new approach is designed to change the way Microsoft designs, builds, tests, and operates its software and services today. It's the biggest change to security efforts inside Microsoft since the company announced its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) in 2004 after Windows XP fell victim to a huge Blaster worm attack that knocked PCs offline in 2003. That push came just two years after co-founder Bill Gates had called on a trustworthy computing initiative in an internal memo.

Microsoft now plans to use automation and AI during software development to improve the security of its cloud services, cut the time it takes to fix cloud vulnerabilities, enable better security settings out of the box, and harden its infrastructure to protect against encryption keys falling into the wrong hands. In an internal memo to Microsoft's engineering teams today, the company's leadership has outlined its new cybersecurity approach. It comes just months after Microsoft was accused of "blatantly negligent" cybersecurity practices related to a major breach that targeted its Azure platform. Microsoft has faced mounting criticism of its handling of a variety of cybersecurity issues in recent years.

Microsoft has decided to axe the Windows Insider MVP program, which is now scheduled to be discontinued at the end of the year. From a report: A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: "In an effort to consolidate MVP-style programs across Microsoft, we have decided to retire the Windows Insider MVP Program effective December 31, 2023. All our existing Windows Insider MVPs will be nominated to participate in the Microsoft MVP Program which has similar benefits and opportunities to continue networking with us and interacting with many other Microsoft MVPs globally."

The Windows Insider MVPs are usually enthusiasts of Microsoft's wares who are rewarded for their loyalty with access to the engineering teams, complimentary subscriptions to products such as Visual Studio Enterprise and Office 365, as well as the odd paperweight or two. A nomination must come from another MVP or a Microsoft employee to achieve this coveted status. An application is then scrutinized, and if one has demonstrated sufficient passion for all things Microsoft, the nod is given. Microsoft has plenty of Insider programs where users can play with pre-release versions of the company's software.

LinkedIn, the business-focused social network owned by Microsoft, on Wednesday said it now has more than 1 billion members and is adding more AI features for paying users. From a report: Crossing the billion-users mark puts LinkedIn -- where members maintain a resume-like profile of their education, work experience and professional skills -- in the top-tier of social media networks that include rivals such as Meta Platforms. About 80% of recent members are signing up from outside of the United States, the company has said.

LinkedIn has a free tier of membership but also offers subscriptions. Members of its $39.99-a-month tier will get new AI features that can tell a user, who may be plowing through dozens of job postings, whether they're a good candidate based on the information in their profile. The system can also recommend profile changes to make the user more competitive for a job.

Dan Milmo reports via The Guardian: The Guardian has accused Microsoft of damaging its journalistic reputation by publishing an AI-generated poll speculating on the cause of a woman's death next to an article by the news publisher. Microsoft's news aggregation service published the automated poll next to a Guardian story about the death of Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach who was found dead with serious head injuries at a school in Sydney last week.

The poll, created by an AI program, asked: "What do you think is the reason behind the woman's death?" Readers were then asked to choose from three options: murder, accident or suicide. Readers reacted angrily to the poll, which has subsequently been taken down -- although highly critical reader comments on the deleted survey were still online as of Tuesday morning. A reader said one of the Guardian reporters bylined on the adjacent story, who had nothing to do with the poll, should be sacked. Another wrote: "This has to be the most pathetic, disgusting poll I've ever seen."

The chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, Anna Bateson, outlined her concerns about the AI-generated poll in a letter to Microsoft's president, Brad Smith. She said the incident was potentially distressing for James's family and had caused "significant reputational damage" to the organization as well as damaging the reputation of the journalists who wrote the story. "This is clearly an inappropriate use of genAI [generative AI] by Microsoft on a potentially distressing public interest story, originally written and published by Guardian journalists," she wrote. Bateson added that it had demonstrated "the important role that a strong copyright framework plays in enabling publishers to be able to negotiate the terms on which our journalism is used." A Microsoft spokesperson said: "We have deactivated Microsoft-generated polls for all news articles and we are investigating the cause of the inappropriate content. A poll should not have appeared alongside an article of this nature, and we are taking steps to help prevent this kind of error from reoccurring in the future."

AV1 -- a next-generation, royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium including tech giants like Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, Intel, and Apple -- is finally making inroads. From a report: We are finally seeing more hardware support for this codec. The new M3 chips from Apple support AV1 decode. The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max also feature an AV1 hardware decoder. The official Android 14 Compatibility Definition makes support for AV1 mandatory. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, widely used by Android phones released in 2023, supports AV1. With the exception of Microsoft Edge, all browsers support AV1.

"Windows 11's last major update, 22H2 introduced native support for managing RAR archives, eliminating the need for third-party software," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "This enhancement is part of the OS's broader capability improvements for handling various archive file formats." TechSpot reports: Microsoft finally introduced native support for RAR archives earlier this year, just three decades after the format's official introduction in 1993. Windows 11 development is now progressing at an accelerated pace, therefore support for a whole lot of new (ancient) archive formats is coming soon.

Microsoft recently released KB5031455, an optional, feature-rich preview cumulative update for Windows 11, refreshing the list of archive formats natively supported in the OS. Windows 11 22H2 and later versions can now manage files compressed in the following archive types: .rar, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.zst, .tar.xz, .tgz, .tbz2, .tzst, .txz. Support for password-encrypted archives is not available yet.

Redmond programmers added support for the aforementioned archive files thanks to the libarchive library, an open source project designed to develop a portable, efficient C library that can "read and write streaming archives" in a variety of formats. Libarchive supports additional archive types (Lzh, Xar) that could eventually come to Windows 11 as well.