Microsoft grappled with a major service outage, leaving users across the world unable to access its cloud computing platforms and causing airlines to cancel flights. From a report: Thousands of users across the world reported problems with Microsoft 365 apps and services to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks service disruptions. "We're investigating an issue impacting users' ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services," Microsoft 365 Status said on X early Friday. On its status page for Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, the company said the issue began just before 10 p.m. ET Thursday, affecting systems across the central U.S. In an update, Microsoft said it had determined the cause and was working to restore access to its users.

Valve had its employee and payroll data leaked through a poorly redacted document in an antitrust lawsuit in May, offering a rare glimpse into the company's small but impactful workforce over the years. As first noticed by SteamDB's Pavel Djundik, Valve's significant influence in PC gaming transactions has been maintained by just a few hundred employees. Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: It's striking to consider just how small Valve is compared to other major players in the game industry. In 2021, Microsoft estimated Valve's annual revenue at $6.5 billion, roughly on the same scale as EA's $7.5 billion in 2024 revenue. But Steam achieved those numbers with around 350 employees, compared to well over 13,000 people employed by EA. The disparity highlights just how much money Valve brings in with a relatively small workforce. And a lot of that is thanks to the chunk of revenue Valve takes from every sale on Steam. The dominant PC gaming marketplace has seen a massive increase in the number of annual game releases since 2012 or so, thanks to initiatives like Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct.

Yet, surprisingly, the size of the "Steam" department inside Valve has shrunk in recent years, from a peak of 142 employees in 2015 down to just 79 in 2021. From the outside, having just 79 employees keeping track of more than 11,000 Steam releases in 2021 is a pretty incredible ratio. Some readers may also be surprised that Valve's "Games" department has represented a majority of the company's headcount since 2003. That has remained true (though to a lesser extent) even in more recent years, as Valve's output of new games has become much more occasional. It seems likely a large number of those Games department employees are devoted to ultra-popular Valve games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, which enjoy tens of millions of players and need significant support work.

The leaked data also shows the slow rise of Valve's small Hardware department, which started with just three employees in 2011 as the company began work on its doomed Steam Machines initiative. Transitioning into the Valve Index era in the late 2010s, the hardware department still represented just a few dozen people and a paltry 3 to 4 percent of the company's annual payroll. By the time we hit 2021 and the run-up to the Steam Deck, the Hardware division still makes up just 12 percent of Valve's small total headcount. Looking back, it's impressive that such a small team was able to create a portable gaming device that quickly spawned a whole micro-industry of imitators. We can only hope the Hardware team got a little more employee support in the wake of the Steam Deck's market success.

Ashley Belanger reports via Ars Technica: Google tried to derail a Microsoft antitrust settlement over anticompetitive software licensing in the European Union by offering a $500 million alternative deal to the group of cloud providers behind the EU complaint, Bloomberg reported. According to Bloomberg, Google's offer to the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) required that the group maintain its EU antitrust complaint. It came "just days" before CISPE settled with Microsoft, and it was apparently not compelling enough to stop CISPE from inking a deal with the software giant that TechCrunch noted forced CISPE to accept several compromises.

Bloomberg uncovered Google's attempted counteroffer after reviewing confidential documents and speaking to "people familiar with the matter." Apparently, Google sought to sway CISPE with a package worth nearly $500 million for more than five years of software licenses and about $15 million in cash. But CISPE did not take the bait, announcing last week that an agreement was reached with Microsoft, seemingly frustrating Google. CISPE initially raised its complaint in 2022, alleging that Microsoft was "irreparably damaging the European cloud ecosystem and depriving European customers of choice in their cloud deployments" by spiking costs to run Microsoft's software on rival cloud services. In February, CISPE said that "any remedies and resolution must apply across the sector and to be accessible to all cloud customers in Europe." They also promised that "any agreements will be made public."

But the settlement reached last week excluded major rivals, including Amazon, which is a CISPE member, and Google, which is not. And despite CISPE's promise, the terms of the deal were not published, apart from a CISPE blog roughly outlining central features that it claimed resolved the group's concerns over Microsoft's allegedly anticompetitive behaviors. What is clear is that CISPE agreed to drop their complaint by taking the deal, but no one knows exactly how much Microsoft paid in a "lump sum" to cover CISPE legal fees for three years, TechCrunch noted. However, "two people with direct knowledge of the matter" told Reuters that Microsoft offered about $22 million.

Microsoft's investment into Inflection AI will get a full-blown UK antitrust probe, after the watchdog said it needed to take a closer look at the hiring of former employees from the artificial intelligence startup. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said Tuesday it was opening the formal phase one merger probe into the partnership, setting a Sept. 11 deadline on whether to escalate it to an in-depth investigation. The agency has been swift to act against big tech's AI startup investments after it found a pattern of large tech firms piling money into start ups.

Microsoft has quietly announced the first details of its new "SpreadsheetLLM," claiming it has the "potential to transform spreadsheet data management and analysis, paving the way for more intelligent and efficient user interactions." You can read more details about the model in a pre-print paper available here. Jasper Hamill reports via The Stack: One of the problems with using LLMs in spreadsheets is that they get bogged down by too many tokens (basic units of information the model processes). To tackle this, Microsoft developed SheetCompressor, an "innovative encoding framework that compresses spreadsheets effectively for LLMs." "It significantly improves performance in spreadsheet table detection tasks, outperforming the vanilla approach by 25.6% in GPT4's in-context learning setting," Microsoft added. The model is made of three modules: structural-anchor-based compression, inverse index translation, and data-format-aware aggregation.

The first of these modules involves placing "structural anchors" throughout the spreadsheet to help the LLM understand what's going on better. It then removes "distant, homogeneous rows and columns" to produce a condensed "skeleton" version of the table. Index translation addresses the challenge caused by spreadsheets with numerous empty cells and repetitive values, which use up too many tokens. "To improve efficiency, we depart from traditional row-by-row and column-by-column serialization and employ a lossless inverted index translation in JSON format," Microsoft wrote. "This method creates a dictionary that indexes non-empty cell texts and merges addresses with identical text, optimizing token usage while preserving data integrity." [...]

After conducting a "comprehensive evaluation of our method on a variety of LLMs" Microsoft found that SheetCompressor significantly reduces token usage for spreadsheet encoding by 96%. Moreover, SpreadsheetLLM shows "exceptional performance in spreadsheet table detection," which is the "foundational task of spreadsheet understanding." The new LLM builds on the Chain of Thought methodology to introduce a framework called "Chain of Spreadsheet" (CoS), which can "decompose" spreadsheet reasoning into a table detection-match-reasoning pipeline.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: During an interview with Sequoia Capital's Training Data podcast published last Tuesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott doubled down on his belief that so-called large language model (LLM) "scaling laws" will continue to drive AI progress, despite some skepticism in the field that progress has leveled out. Scott played a key role in forging a $13 billion technology-sharing deal between Microsoft and OpenAI. "Despite what other people think, we're not at diminishing marginal returns on scale-up," Scott said. "And I try to help people understand there is an exponential here, and the unfortunate thing is you only get to sample it every couple of years because it just takes a while to build supercomputers and then train models on top of them."

LLM scaling laws refer to patterns explored by OpenAI researchers in 2020 showing that the performance of language models tends to improve predictably as the models get larger (more parameters), are trained on more data, and have access to more computational power (compute). The laws suggest that simply scaling up model size and training data can lead to significant improvements in AI capabilities without necessarily requiring fundamental algorithmic breakthroughs. Since then, other researchers have challenged the idea of persisting scaling laws over time, but the concept is still a cornerstone of OpenAI's AI development philosophy. Scott's comments can be found around the 46-minute mark.

An anonymous reader shares a report: During an interview with Sequoia Capital's Training Data podcast published last Tuesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott doubled down on his belief that so-called large language model (LLM) "scaling laws" will continue to drive AI progress, despite some skepticism in the field that progress has leveled out. Scott played a key role in forging a $13 billion technology-sharing deal between Microsoft and OpenAI. "Despite what other people think, we're not at diminishing marginal returns on scale-up," Scott said. "And I try to help people understand there is an exponential here, and the unfortunate thing is you only get to sample it every couple of years because it just takes a while to build supercomputers and then train models on top of them."

LLM scaling laws refer to patterns explored by OpenAI researchers in 2020 showing that the performance of language models tends to improve predictably as the models get larger (more parameters), are trained on more data, and have access to more computational power (compute). The laws suggest that simply scaling up model size and training data can lead to significant improvements in AI capabilities without necessarily requiring fundamental algorithmic breakthroughs. Since then, other researchers have challenged the idea of persisting scaling laws over time, but the concept is still a cornerstone of OpenAI's AI development philosophy.

Cybercriminals are using Facebook business pages and advertisements to promote fake Windows themes that infect unsuspecting users with the SYS01 password-stealing malware. From a report: Trustwave researchers who observed the campaigns said the threat actors also promote fake downloads for pirated games and software, Sora AI, 3D image creator, and One Click Active. While using Facebook advertisements to push information-stealing malware is not new, the social media platform's massive reach makes these campaigns a significant threat.

The threat actors take out advertisements that promote Windows themes, free game downloads, and software activation cracks for popular applications, like Photoshop, Microsoft Office, and Windows. These advertisements are promoted through newly created Facebook business pages or by hijacking existing ones. When using hijacked Facebook pages, the threat actors rename them to suit the theme of their advertisement and to promote the downloads to the existing page members.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, is reportedly in advanced negotiations to acquire cloud security startup Wiz for approximately $23 billion, Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The potential deal, which would value Wiz at nearly double its most recent private valuation of $12 billion, underscores the growing importance of cybersecurity in Alphabet's enterprise strategy as it seeks to narrow the gap with cloud computing rivals such as Microsoft, Morgan Stanley said in a note.

Founded in January 2020, Wiz has quickly established itself as a leading player in the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) space, utilizing an agentless approach to secure cloud application deployments throughout their lifecycle. The company's platform continuously assesses and prioritizes critical risks across various security domains, providing customers with a comprehensive view of their cloud security posture. Wiz has experienced rapid growth since its inception, with annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeding $350 million as of January 2024, representing a year-over-year increase of over 75%. The company boasts an impressive client roster, with more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies among its customers, and has raised nearly $2 billion in funding to date.

If confirmed, the acquisition would mark Alphabet's largest to date, significantly expanding its footprint in the burgeoning cloud security market. The move follows previous security-focused acquisitions by the tech giant, including the $5.4 billion purchase of Mandiant in 2022 and the $500 million acquisition of Siemplify. Morgan Stanley adds that the potential acquisition could raise questions about Wiz's ability to maintain neutrality across multiple cloud platforms, potentially benefiting competitors such as Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike in the near term.

As the number of autism diagnoses rises in America, a number of large employers "are taking steps to make workplaces more accessible and welcoming for neurodivergent employees," reports the New York Times — including Microsoft, Dell and Ford. [Alternate URL here.] The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 in 36 8-year-olds in the United States has autism. That's up from 1 in 44 in 2018 and 1 in 150 in 2000, an increase that experts attribute, in part, to better screening. In addition, 2.2% of adults in the country, or 5.4 million people, are autistic, according to the CDC...

Autism activists have praised companies that have become more accepting of remote work since the coronavirus pandemic. Workplaces with too much light and noise can overwhelm those who are autistic, leading to burnout, said Jessica Myszak, a clinical psychologist in Chicago who specializes in testing and evaluations for autism. Remote work "reduces the social demands and some of the environmental sensitivities" that autistic people struggle with, Myszak added.
The article notes Microsoft's neurodiversity hiring program, which was established in 2015. The company's program was modeled after a venture created by the German software firm SAP, and has since been adopted in some form by companies including Dell and Ford. The initiative has brought in about 300 full-time neurodivergent employees to Microsoft, said Neil Barnett, the company's director for inclusive hiring and accessibility. "All they needed was this different, more inclusive process," Barnett said, "and once they got into the company, they flourished."

[One job applicant] was given a job coach to help her with time management and prioritization. Microsoft also paired her with a mentor who showed her around the company's campus in Redmond. Perhaps more important, she works with managers who have received neurodiversity training. The Microsoft campus also has "focus rooms," where lights can be dimmed and the heights of desks can be changed to fit sensory preferences. Employees seated in the open office may also request to sit away from busy aisles or receive noise-canceling headphones.

Slashdot reader joshuark shared this report from BetaNews: Check Point Research has identified a critical zero-day spoofing attack exploiting Microsoft Internet Explorer on modern Windows 10/11 systems, despite the browser's retirement.

Identified as CVE-2024-38112, this vulnerability allows attackers to execute remote code by tricking users into opening malicious Internet Shortcut (.url) files. This attack method has been active for over a year and could potentially impact millions... Attackers use a sophisticated trick to mask the malicious .hta extension, making use of the outdated security of Internet Explorer to compromise systems running updated Windows operating systems.
From Check Point Research: Even though IE has been proclaimed "retired and out-of-support," technically speaking, IE is still part of the Windows OS and is "not inherently unsafe, as IE is still serviced for security vulnerabilities, and there should be no known exploitable security vulnerabilities," according to our communications with Microsoft.

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams writes: Palestinians living abroad have accused Microsoft of closing their email accounts without warning -- cutting them off from crucial online services. They say it has left them unable to access bank accounts and job offers -- and stopped them using Skype, which Microsoft owns, to contact relatives in war-torn Gaza. Microsoft says they violated its terms of service -- a claim they dispute. He also said being cut off from Skype was a huge blow for his family. The internet is frequently disrupted or switched off there because of the Israeli military campaign - and standard international calls are very expensive. [...] With a paid Skype subscription, it is possible to call mobiles in Gaza cheaply -- and while the internet is down -- so it has become a lifeline to many Palestinians.

Some of the people the BBC spoke to said they suspected they were wrongly thought to have ties to Hamas, which Israel is fighting, and is designated a terrorist organization by many countries. Microsoft did not respond directly when asked if suspected ties to Hamas were the reason for the accounts being shut. But a spokesperson said it did not block calls or ban users based on calling region or destination. "Blocking in Skype can occur in response to suspected fraudulent activity," they said, without elaborating.

Speaking of Xbox, the Xbox 360 Store and Marketplace are coming to a close later this month. From a report: Microsoft announced this last year and put an official end date of July 29, according to its official FAQ page. In case you didn't notice, the end of July is fast approaching. All of the games, DLC and any gaming tidbits for Microsoft's second generation console won't be available to purchase or download on the Xbox 360 console. Your games and movie purchases are still safe, however, if you've got any throwback titles on your Xbox One or Series X/S console. You can also still watch your purchased movies and shows on Windows 10 and 11 devices.

Alphabet unit Google's cloud subsidiary will look into other options in its fight against Microsoft's licensing practices, the head of Google Cloud head said on Wednesday. From a report: The comments by Amit Zavery came after Microsoft reached a deal with trade body CISPE to resolve the latter's antitrust complaint about its cloud licensing practices. "Many regulatory bodies have opened inquiries into Microsoft's licensing practices, and we are hopeful there will be remedies to protect the cloud market from Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior," he said.

"We are exploring our options to continue to fight against Microsoft's anti-competitive licensing in order to promote choice, innovation, and the growth of the digital economy in Europe."

A group of residents in Tokyo said on Wednesday they were aiming to block construction of a massive logistics and data centre planned by Singaporean developer GLP, in a worrying sign for businesses looking to Japan to meet growing demand. From a report: The petition by more than 220 residents of Akishima city in western Tokyo follows a successful bid in December in Nagareyama city to quash a similar data-centre plan. The Akishima residents were concerned the centre would threaten wildlife, cause pollution and a spike in electricity usage, and drain its water supply which comes solely from groundwater. They filed a petition to audit the urban planning procedure that approved GLP's 3.63-million-megawatt data centre, which GLP estimated would likely emit about 1.8 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. "One company will be responsible for ruining Akishima. That's what this development is," Yuji Ohtake, a representative of the residents' group, told a press conference. Global tech firms such as Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle also have plans to build data centres in Japan. The residents estimated that 3,000 of 4,800 trees on the site would have to be cut down, threatening the area's Eurasian goshawk birds and badgers.

Microsoft is under fire for its handling of customer notifications following a data breach by Russian state-sponsored hackers. The tech giant confirmed in March that the group known as Midnight Blizzard had accessed its systems, potentially compromising customer data. Cybersecurity experts, including former Microsoft employee Kevin Beaumont, have raised concerns about the notification process. Beaumont warned on social media that the company's emails may be mistaken for spam or phishing attempts due to their format and the use of unfamiliar links. "The notifications aren't in the portal, they emailed tenant admins instead," Beaumont stated, adding that the emails could be easily overlooked. Some recipients have reported confusion over the legitimacy of the notifications, with many seeking confirmation through support channels and account managers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For years now, Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass has set itself apart by offering subscribers launch-day access to new first-party titles in addition to a large legacy library of older games. That important "day one" perk is now set to go away for all but the highest tier of Game Pass' console subscribers, even as Microsoft asks for more money for Game Pass across the board. Let's start with the price increases for existing Game Pass tiers, which are relatively straightforward:

"Game Pass Ultimate" is going from $16.99 to $19.99 per month.
"Game Pass for PC" is going from $9.99 to $11.99 per month.
"Game Pass Core" (previously known as Xbox Live Gold) is going from $59.99 to $74.99 for annual subscriptions (and remains at $9.99 for monthly subscriptions).
Things get a bit more complicated for the $10.99/month "Xbox Game Pass for Console" tier.

Microsoft announced that it will no longer accept new subscriptions for that tier after today, though current subscribers will be able to keep it (for now) if they auto-renew their subscriptions.

Microsoft and Apple dropped plans to take board roles at OpenAI in a surprise decision that underscores growing regulatory scrutiny of Big Tech's influence over artificial intelligence. From a report: Microsoft, which invested $13 billion in the ChatGPT creator, will withdraw from its observer role on the board, the company said in a letter to OpenAI on Tuesday, which was seen by Bloomberg News. Apple was due to take up a similar role, but an OpenAI spokesperson said the startup won't have board observers after Microsoft's departure. Regulators in the US and Europe had expressed concerns about Microsoft's sway over OpenAI, applying pressure on one of the world's most valuable companies to show that it's keeping the relationship at arm's length. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI's services into its Windows and Copilot AI platforms and, like other big US tech companies, is banking on the new technology to help drive growth.

A US District Court judge in San Francisco has largely dismissed a class-action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI, which challenged the legality of using code samples to train GitHub Copilot. The judge ruled that the plaintiffs failed to establish a claim for restitution or unjust enrichment but allowed the claim for breach of open-source license violations to proceed. InfoWorld reports: The lawsuit, first filed in Nov. 2022, claimed that GitHub's training of the Copilot AI on public GitHub code repositories violated the rights of the "vast number of creators" who posted code under open-source licenses on GitHub. The complaint (PDF) alleged that "Copilot ignores, violates, and removes the Licenses offered by thousands -- possibly millions -- of software developers, thereby accomplishing software piracy on an unprecedented scale." [...]

In a decision first announced on June 24, but only unsealed and made public on July 5, California Northern District judge Jon S. Tigar wrote that "In sum, plaintiff's claims do not support the remedy they seek. Plaintiffs have failed to establish, as a matter of law, that restitution for any unjust enrichment is available as a measure of plaintiffs' damages for their breach of contract claims." Judge Tigar went on to state that "court dismisses plaintiffs' section 1202(b) claim, this time with prejudice. The Court declines to dismiss plaintiffs' claim for breach of contract of open-source license violations against all defendants. Finally, the court dismisses plaintiffs' request for monetary relief in the form of unjust enrichment, as well as plaintiffs' request for punitive damages."

williamyf writes: Mozilla has released version 128 of the Firefox web browser. Some noteworthy features include: "Firefox can now translate selections of text and hyperlinked text to other languages from the context menu. [...] Firefox now has a simpler and more unified dialog for clearing user data. In addition to streamlining data categories, the new dialog also provides insights into the site data size corresponding to the selected time range. [...] On macOS, microphone capture through getUserMedia will now use system-provided voice processing when applicable, improving audio quality." More info in the release notes here.

But the most important feature of 128 is that it is the newest ESR. Why is this important? Glad you asked:

* Firefox ESR is the browser of choice for many Linux distros (including Debian), so this is important for the Linux community at large.
* Many downstream projects (like Thunderbird or KAiOS) use Firefox ESR as their base, so whatever is included in 128 will determine the capabilities of those projects for the next year.
* Many ISVs (software makers), both big and small, test/certify their software only against the ESR version of Firefox. For users of such software, the new ESR is very important.
* Many companies and individuals value stability of the UI/Workflow over new bells and whistles, for them, ESR is important.
* When an OS is discontinued, Mozilla lets the ESR be the last browser on the platform, exceeding the support window of the likes of Alphabeth, Apple or Microsoft, so for people on older OSs, ESR is important.

Link to download (the ESR) here.