Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed tens of terabytes of sensitive data, including private keys and passwords, while publishing a storage bucket of open source training data on GitHub. From a report: In research shared with TechCrunch, cloud security startup Wiz said it discovered a GitHub repository belonging to Microsoft's AI research division as part of its ongoing work into the accidental exposure of cloud-hosted data. Readers of the GitHub repository, which provided open source code and AI models for image recognition, were instructed to download the models from an Azure Storage URL. However, Wiz found that this URL was configured to grant permissions on the entire storage account, exposing additional private data by mistake. This data included 38 terabytes of sensitive information, including the personal backups of two Microsoft employees' personal computers. The data also contained other sensitive personal data, including passwords to Microsoft services, secret keys and more than 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages from hundreds of Microsoft employees.

Panos Panay, the chief product officer at Microsoft leading Windows development and the company's Surface line, is leaving Microsoft. From a report: In an announcement on Monday, Microsoft told employees: "After nearly 20 years at the company, Panos Panay has decided to leave Microsoft." Panay first joined Microsoft in 2004 as a group program manager. After overseeing the company's Surface line, Panay became the company's chief product officer in 2018, where he led the development of Windows 11.

The Wall Street Journal reports that more companies are phasing out "feedback" bosses give to workers — and replacing it with "feedforward."

"The idea is that 'feedforward' gives people less anxiety," the Journal's reporter said in a video interview. "It's a little bit gentler. When people hear 'feedback', they think immediately, 'What have I done wrong? What are the bad things my boss is going to tell me to fix?'" And another reason that we're hearing "feedforward" at these companies over and over is employees are younger. Younger employees make up a larger percentage of the workforce today, and a number of experts with whom we spoke said that younger employees are more comfortable with gentler terms like "feedforward"...

Q: So they're trying to appeal to the younger employees who are sensitive to harsher reviews, feedback or criticism. But do the employees need to learn how to better receive this type of constructive criticism, regardless of what you call it?

A: Some experts say that younger employees do need to be prepared for negative feedback. And just the rebranding or replacing of a word could have a negative effect, and perhaps managers won't be as comfortable providing negative feedback if they're just thinking about this as a way to tell an employee what they've done well...

Certain companies are really revamping their entire review process, trying to make it so that employees and managers are more communicative and really addressing any issues or concerns, so that they can work more productively. In some cases if companies are just rebranding "feedback" with "feedforward" or other terms, people with whom I spoke were concerned that this is just a hollow effort.

And there is a possibility that younger generations won't learn about what they're doing wrong and how to improve... [W]e did speak with an expert who said that baby boomers learned to suck it up and perform. And this trend really is generational.
From the Journal's article: At Microsoft, managers are encouraged to use the word "perspectives" instead of traditional feedback, according to current and former employees. Reviews, meanwhile, have been branded as "connect" conversations. The company also recently stopped including anonymous comments from peers in employee reviews, instead showing the names of the colleagues in question... Jennifer Solomon-Baum, a former Microsoft marketing director who left early this year, says she understands why the company chose to rethink its approach to feedback, which she feels may have made employees more open to giving feedback. On the other hand, she says Microsoft's recent decision to put an end to anonymous peer feedback in reviews completely backfired. In the wake of the change, "we didn't get the richness of constructive criticism," says Solomon-Baum, who is now consulting and leading marketing for a new ballet company in Los Angeles. "It became a praise festival...."

The divide on the issue is partially generational, several HR specialists say... Many younger employees entered the workforce while managers had loosened expectations on productivity and performance, and may have had less stringent grading in college amid remote classes, making the postpandemic adjustment more difficult. "It's the first time that they have not just gotten professional feedback, but it might be the first time in quite a while that somebody said, 'You know, this isn't good enough,'" says Megan Gerhardt, a management professor at Miami University and the author of a book on leading intergenerational workforces.
"I refuse to believe this is true," writes Apple blogger John Gruber, "and if it is true, my feedback is that any company that encounters an employee who bristles at the word feedback should fire them on the spot."

"Until now, China's influence campaigns have been focused on amplifying propaganda defending its policies on Taiwan and other subjects," reports the New York Times.

But a new piece co-authored by the newspaper's national security correspondent and its misinformation investigative reporter notes a new effort identified by researchers from Microsoft, the RAND Corporation, the University of Maryland, the intelligence company Recorded Future, and news-rating service NewsGuard. And that newly-discovered effort "suggests that Beijing is making more direct attempts to sow discord in the United States."

It began when, sensing an opportunity,"China's increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced" after high winds in Hawaii downed three power lines that sparked wildfires in Hawaii on August 8th... The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret "weather weapon" being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign... Recorded Future first reported that the Chinese government mounted a covert campaign to blame a "weather weapon" for the fires, identifying numerous posts in mid-August falsely claiming that MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, had revealed "the amazing truth behind the wildfire." Posts with the exact language appeared on social media sites across the internet, including Pinterest, Tumblr, Medium and Pixiv, a Japanese site used by artists. Other inauthentic accounts spread similar content, often accompanied with mislabeled videos, including one from a popular TikTok account, The Paranormal Chic, that showed a transformer explosion in Chile...

The Chinese campaign operated across many of the major social media platforms — and in many languages, suggesting it was aimed at reaching a global audience. Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center identified inauthentic posts in 31 languages, including French, German and Italian, but also in less prominent ones like Igbo, Odia and Guarani. The artificially generated images of the Hawaii wildfires identified by Microsoft's researchers appeared on multiple platforms, including a Reddit post in Dutch. "These specific A.I.-generated images appear to be exclusively used" by Chinese accounts used in this campaign, Microsoft said in a report. "They do not appear to be present elsewhere online."
The researchers "suggested that China was building a network of accounts that could be put to use in future information operations, including the next U.S. presidential election," according to the article. It adds that president Biden "has cut off China's access to the most advanced chips and the equipment made to produce them."

The article adds that the impact of China's misinformation campaign "is difficult to measure, though early indications suggest that few social media users engaged with the most outlandish of the conspiracy theories."

According to The Information, Google is nearing the release of Gemini, its conversational artificial intelligence software intended to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4 model. Reuters reports: For Google, the stakes of Gemini's launch are high. Google has intensified investments in generative AI this year as it plays catch-up after Microsoft-backed OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT last year took the tech world by storm. Gemini is a collection of large-language models that power everything from chatbots to features that either summarize text or generate original text based on what users want to read like email drafts, music lyrics, or news stories, the report said. It is also expected to help software engineers write code and generate original images based on what users ask to see.

Google is currently giving developers access to a relatively large version of Gemini, but not the largest version it is developing which would be more on par with GPT-4, the report said. The search and advertising giant plans to make Gemini available to companies through its Google Cloud Vertex AI service.

Iranian hackers have hacked dozens of companies in the defense, satellite and pharmaceutical sectors this year using a fairly unsophisticated, blunt hacking technique, Microsoft warned in a new report. From a report: Many of these companies are based in the U.S., and the breaches come amid heavy U.S. sanctions targeting Iranian oil and petrochemical sales. Microsoft said Thursday that Iranian hacking group Peach Sandstorm -- which other firms also refer to as APT33, Elfin or Refined Kitten -- has been breaking into these companies by trying to guess multiple user accounts' passwords.

The password-spraying campaign took place between February and July this year, Microsoft found. In some cases, the hackers were able to exfiltrate data, and in others, they just lurked on the networks to see what intelligence they could gather. The Iranian group targeted thousands of companies as part of this monthslong campaign -- but was able to access only a small percentage of those organizations, Microsoft said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s career with the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic. But in an unhinged twist on what was otherwise a somber news story, Microsoft's MSN news portal published a garbled, seemingly AI-generated article that derided Hunter as "useless" in its headline. "Brandon Hunter useless at 42," read the article, which was quickly called out on social media. The rest of the brief report is even more incomprehensible, informing readers that Hunter "handed away" after achieving "vital success as a ahead [sic] for the Bobcats" and "performed in 67 video games." Condemnation for the disrespectful article was swift and forceful. "AI should not be writing obituaries," posted one reader. "Pay your damn writers â¦MSN." "The most dystopian part of this is that AI which replaces us will be as obtuse and stupid as this translation," wrote a redditor, "but for the money men, it's enough."

A week ago, GitHub fused its home page feed with algorithmic recommendations, infuriating more than a few users of the Microsoft-owned code-hosting giant. The Register reports: On Tuesday, GitHub responded to the hostile feedback by stating that some of the questioned behavior was actually due to bugs that have now been fixed, even as it doubled down on its decision to combine the previously separate "Following" and "For You" feeds. The "Following" feed included "activity by people you follow and from repositories you watch." It was the result of deliberate user choice: developers selected the code and contributors they were interested in. The "For You" feed included "activity and recommendations based on your GitHub network." It was the result of GitHub's social algorithm and user behavior data.

As of last week, GitHub combined the two to lighten the burden on its servers, or so the company claimed. "When we launched the latest version of your feed on September 6, 2023, we made changes to the underlying technology of the feed in order to improve overall platform performance," the biz explained in a post on Tuesday. "As a result, we removed the functionality for 'push events for repositories a user is subscribed to'. We don't take these changes lightly, but as our community continues to grow tremendously, we have to prioritize our availability, user experience, and performance."

Bram Borggreve, founder of Columbia-based dev shop BeeSoft Labs, offered one of the more polite objections to the unrequested feed change among the almost two hundred people who commented, not to mention those participating in adjacent discussion threads who asked for a reversal [...]. An engineer at an IT infrastructure management software developer, who wished to remain anonymous as he is not authorized to speak to the media, told The Register in an email, "GitHub tried this before, and their users said no. They are taking away a useful feature and replacing it with social media algorithm garbage. It's like they forgot that people use their platform to do actual work, and not just doom scroll issues, pull requests, and new JavaScript frameworks." "We understand that many of you are upset with the recent changes to your feed," the company stated. "We should have done a better job communicating recent changes and how those decisions relate to our broader platform goals. Your continued feedback is invaluable as we evolve and continue to strive to provide a first-class developer experience that helps every developer be happier and more productive."

HP is the latest company to announce a foldable-screen PC. From a report: The 17-inch Spectre Foldable PC has a keyboard that can be used wirelessly with the device propped up on its kickstand. Or you could magnetically attach the keyboard to the screen's bottom half or even slide the keyboard toward you for a 1.5-screen-like experience. The OLED device addresses concerns around battery life and portability by including two battery packs instead of one. But the bendy, Intel 12th-gen computer will have to do quite a lot to even begin rationalizing its staggering $5,000 price. The Spectre Fold works as a 17-inch, 0.33-inch (8.5 mm) thick OLED tablet. Uniquely, it has an integrated kickstand for propping the PC up at a 120-degree angle. This is key because HP cites the kickstand as one of the reasons the computer is so costly, but this also means you don't have to deal with separate origami stands/sleeves.

With the PC propped up, it should be easy to work with the included wireless keyboard or stylus, which both charge wirelessly on the device. The Bluetooth keyboard can attach to the bottom half of the PC's screen for a 12.3-inch laptop view. If you slide the keyboard down toward you, revealing more of the OLED, the PC will automatically display windows north of the keyboard. This scenario is like working on a 14-inch laptop. HP says it worked with Microsoft to customize Windows 11's Snap feature so it's easy to bring a window or two to the space above the docked keyboard. Lenovo's Yoga Book 9i, a clamshell laptop with a second OLED screen where you'd expect the keyboard and touchpad to be, also lets you place windows on top of a docked keyboard. But when I tested that laptop, I typically found looking down physically uncomfortable.

Microsoft's attempt at avoiding deeper European Union scrutiny of its Teams video-conferencing app fell flat with the bloc's antitrust enforcers readying a formal complaint against the firm's conduct. From a report: Microsoft's recent proposal to split its Teams from a broader business software package and sell it to customers separately with an annual discount wasn't enough to satisfy regulators' concerns, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The European Commission is preparing a statement of objections to send to the company, which could come in the next few months, the people said. At the end of August, Microsoft attempted to allay concerns raised by the EU's antitrust arm as part of a new investigation into how it ties Teams to its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 packages. The EU's investigation followed a complaint from Salesforce's messaging platform Slack some three years ago.

The Justice Department sought on Wednesday to show how Google did all it could to get people to use its search engine and build itself into a $1 trillion search and advertising giant on the second day of a once-in-a-generation antitrust trial. From a report: First out of the gate, the government questioned a former Google executive, Chris Barton, about billion-dollar deals with mobile carriers and others that helped make Google the default search engine. Barton, who was at Google from 2004 to 2011, said the number of Google executives working to win default status with mobile carriers grew dramatically when he was with the company, recognizing the potential growth of handheld devices and early versions of smartphones.

Google's clout in search, the government argues, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Since search is free, Google makes money through advertising. The government says the Alphabet unit paid $10 billion annually to wireless companies like AT&T, device makers like Apple and browser makers like Mozilla to fend off rivals and keep its search engine market share near 90%. In revenue-sharing deals with mobile carriers and Android smartphone makers, Google pressed for its search to be the default and exclusive. If Microsoft's search engine Bing was the default on an Android phone, Barton said, then users would have a "difficult time finding or changing to Google."

Barton said on his LinkedIn profile that he was responsible for leading Google's partnerships with mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T, estimating that the deals "drive hundreds of millions in revenue." Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, told the court that scale, or the number of search queries Google received, was important, but pushed back during questioning on how important. He also acknowledged giving a speech in which he said certain search queries, for instance for a tennis racquet, were important in effectively advertising to the person who made the query and to subsequent ad revenues.

Microsoft's improved combat goggles have passed their first round of intensive testing by soldiers, and the tech giant has been awarded an order for another batch to be used for a make-or-break combat evaluation in 2025, according to a US Army spokesman. From a report: The first 20 prototype IVAS 1.2 goggles were delivered in late July and assessed by two squads of solders in late August to check for improvements in reliability, low-light performance and how well they fit without repeats of the nausea and dizziness that halted the deployment of earlier versions. The devices, based on Microsoft's HoloLens "mixed reality" goggles, "demonstrated improvements in reliability, low light sensor performance, and form factor" in tests last month at Fort Drum, New York, and "soldier feedback was positive," spokesman David Patterson said in an email.

Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and other technology heavyweights debated the possibilities and risks of artificial intelligence Wednesday in a closed-door meeting with more than 60 U.S. Senators who are contemplating legislation to regulate the technology. WSJ: Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X (formerly Twitter), warned about what he views as AI's potential to threaten humanity, according to a participant. Microsoft founder Gates said the technology could help address world hunger, said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who convened the session. Other speakers included Facebook founder Zuckerberg and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and IBM, along with union leaders. Schumer at one point asked the guests if they agreed that the government needed to play a role in regulating artificial intelligence. Everyone present raised their hands, Schumer said during a break in the day-long session.

Despite that consensus -- and Schumer's vow to move toward passing legislation within months -- the meeting also laid bare some of the tension points ahead. One debate centered on the practice of making certain AI programs "open source," or available for the public to download and modify. Some in the room raised concerns about the practice, which has the potential to put powerful AI systems in the hands of bad actors, according to one participant. But Zuckerberg, whose company Meta Platforms has released powerful open source models, defended the practice. He told Senators in his opening statement that open source "democratizes access to these tools, and that helps level the playing field and foster innovation for people and businesses," according to excerpts released by the company. Another point of tension related to workers who see AI as a potential threat to their jobs. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) recounted a moment where the head of the Writers Guild of America West, Meredith Stiehm, described the views of members who are on strike seeking a new contract with Hollywood studios in part to address those fears.

Companies choose Alphabet's Google as the default search engine for their browsers and smartphones because it is the best one, and not because of a lack of competition, a Google lawyer said Tuesday at the start of a high-stakes antitrust trial in Washington. From a report: Consumers use Google "because it delivers value to them, not because they have to," John Schmidtlein, a partner at Williams & Connolly LLP who is representing the company, said during his opening statements on the first day of the trial. "Users today have more search options and ways to access information online than ever before."

Schmidtlein pushed back on claims by US Justice Department antitrust enforcers that Google has used its market power -- and billions of dollars in exclusive deals with web browsers -- to illegally block rivals. Users have choices, and it's easy to switch, he said. For example, Microsoft pre-selects its own search engine, Bing, on Windows PCs, yet most PC users switch to Google because it's a better product, he said. Web browsers offered by Apple and Mozilla, which makes Firefox, have long chosen a default search engine in exchange for a revenue-share that helps pay for innovations, Schmidtlein said.

Adobe, IBM, Nvidia and five other firms have signed President Joe Biden's voluntary commitments governing artificial intelligence, which requires steps such as watermarking AI-generated content, the White House said. From a report: The original commitments, which were announced in July, were aimed at ensuring that AI's considerable power was not used for destructive purposes. Google, OpenAI and OpenAI partner Microsoft signed onto the commitments in July.

Microsoft has made it clear: it will ax third-party printer drivers in Windows. From a report: The death rattle will be lengthy, as the timeline for the end of servicing stretches into 2027 -- although Microsoft noted that the dates will be subject to change. There is, after all, always that important customer with a strange old printer lacking Mopria support.

Mopria is part of the Windows' teams justification for removing support. Founded in 2013 by Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, the Mopria Alliance's mission is to provide universal standards for printing and scanning. Epson, Lexmark, Adobe and Microsoft have also joined the gang since then. Since Windows 10 21H2, Microsoft has baked Mopria support into the flagship operating system, with support for devices connected via the network or USB, thanks to the Microsoft IPP Class driver. Microsoft said: "This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on."

Microsoft is done supporting the original Surface Duo, three years after it first launched on September 10. From a report: The company has stated from the very start that the Surface Duo would receive just three years of OS updates, meaning today is the last day that Microsoft has to stay true to its word. Going forward, Microsoft will no longer ship new OS updates or security patches for the original Surface Duo, meaning Android 12L is the last version of the OS it will ever officially receive. Surface Duo only ever got two major OS updates, one shy of the average three that most high-end flagship Android devices get these days.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg: China-linked hackers breached the corporate account of a Microsoft engineer and are suspected of using that access to steal a valuable key that enabled the hack of senior U.S. officials' email accounts, the company said in a blog post. The hackers used the key to forge authentication tokens to access email accounts on Microsoft's cloud servers, including those belonging to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Representative Don Bacon and State Department officials earlier this year.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Microsoft disclosed the breach in June, but it was still unclear at the time exactly how hackers were able to steal the key that allowed them to access the email accounts. Microsoft said the key had been improperly stored within a "crash dump," which is data stored after a computer or application unexpectedly crashes...

The incident has brought fresh scrutiny to Microsoft's cybersecurity practices.
Microsoft's blog post says they corrected two conditions which allowed this to occur. First, "a race condition allowed the key to be present in the crash dump," and second, "the key material's presence in the crash dump was not detected by our systems." We found that this crash dump, believed at the time not to contain key material, was subsequently moved from the isolated production network into our debugging environment on the internet connected corporate network. This is consistent with our standard debugging processes. Our credential scanning methods did not detect its presence (this issue has been corrected).

After April 2021, when the key was leaked to the corporate environment in the crash dump, the Storm-0558 actor was able to successfully compromise a Microsoft engineer's corporate account. This account had access to the debugging environment containing the crash dump which incorrectly contained the key. Due to log retention policies, we don't have logs with specific evidence of this exfiltration by this actor, but this was the most probable mechanism by which the actor acquired the key.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shares this report from the Associated Press: The cost of building an artificial intelligence product like ChatGPT can be hard to measure. But one thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water, pulled from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa to cool a powerful supercomputer as it helped teach its AI systems how to mimic human writing.

As they race to capitalize on a craze for generative AI, leading tech developers including Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have acknowledged that growing demand for their AI tools carries hefty costs, from expensive semiconductors to an increase in water consumption. But they're often secretive about the specifics. Few people in Iowa knew about its status as a birthplace of OpenAI's most advanced large language model, GPT-4, before a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it "was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines."

Building a large language model requires analyzing patterns across a huge trove of human-written text. All of that computing takes a lot of electricity and generates a lot of heat. To keep it cool on hot days, data centers need to pump in water — often to a cooling tower outside its warehouse-sized buildings. In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years that outside researchers tie to its AI research. "It's fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI," including "its heavy investment in generative AI and partnership with OpenAI," said Shaolei Ren, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside who has been trying to calculate the environmental impact of generative AI products such as ChatGPT. In a paper due to be published later this year, Ren's team estimates ChatGPT gulps up 500 milliliters of water (close to what's in a 16-ounce water bottle) every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions...

Google reported a 20% growth in water use in the same period, which Ren also largely attributes to its AI work.
OpenAI and Microsoft both said they were working on improving "efficiencies" of their AI model-training.

Dennis Austin, the principal software developer of PowerPoint, passed away from lung cancer on Sept. 1. He was 76. The Washington Post reports: Released in 1987 by Forethought, a small software firm, PowerPoint was the digital successor to overhead projectors, transforming the labor-intensive process of creating slides -- a task typically assigned to design departments or outsourced -- to one where any employee with a computer could point, click and rearrange information with a mouse. "Our users were familiar with computers, but probably not graphics software," Mr. Austin wrote in an unpublished history of the software's development. "They were highly motivated to look their best in front of others, but they weren't savvy in graphics design."

Working alongside Robert Gaskins, the Forethought executive who conceived the software, it was Mr. Austin's job as the software engineer to make PowerPoint (originally called Presenter) easy to operate. He accomplished this with a "direct-manipulation interface," he wrote, meaning that "what you are editing looks exactly like the final product." Originally targeted for Macintosh computers, which had a graphical interface, Presenter included ways for users to incorporate graphics, clip art and multiple fonts. In addition, the slides could be uniform with graphic borders, corporate logos and slide numbers. The goal, Mr. Austin wrote, was "to create presentations -- not simply slides."

In his book "Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint" (2012), Gaskins wrote that "Dennis came up with at least half of the major design ideas," and was "completely responsible for the fluid performance and the polished finish of the implementation." "It's a good bet," Gaskins added, "that if Dennis had not been the person designing PowerPoint, no one would ever have heard of it."