BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedly continued using insecure port 110 connections even when encryption was enabled in the application settings. The issue surfaced after Dovecot 2.4 disabled plaintext authentication on non secure connections by default, causing Outlook users to suddenly lose mailbox access after the Fedora 43 upgrade.

The report suggests the behavior may date back as far as Outlook 2007, although modern Outlook builds were not fully tested. Fedora admins stress that the problem could be limited to legacy account configurations rather than current versions of Outlook itself. Still, the discovery has sparked discussion among Linux admins and security folks because many users likely assumed their email traffic was encrypted simply because Outlook claimed SSL/TLS was enabled. The incident also highlights how stricter defaults in modern open source infrastructure can expose ancient assumptions and questionable behaviors that quietly survived for decades.

Ancient Slashdot reader whitroth shares a report from Politico, with the caption: "shutting down Microsoft Office for the International Criminal Court (ICC) was clearly a wake-up call." From the report: The EU is moving to counter American dominance in technology by reaching for one of the oldest tools in its arsenal: industrial strategy. As the European Commission unveiled a plan Wednesday to reduce Europe's reliance on the foreign technology providers that underpin the modern economy, it was careful to stress that it was not picking a fight with U.S. digital giants. Instead, the tech sovereignty package -- motivated in no small part by U.S. President Donald Trump's weaponization of Europe's dependence on American firms -- takes a longer-term view: boost the continent's players so they can eventually challenge their U.S. rivals.

[...] If adopted, the package will direct public money toward products that contribute to Europe's economy and independence from foreign firms; cut red tape for data centers; beef up research and innovation through "leadership initiatives"; incentivize countries to share digital capacities in a new "Eurocloud" forum; and require EU governments to come up with national strategies to boost the adoption of cutting-edge tech, including AI. The package will also seek to ramp up the bloc's demand for advanced chips -- a response to criticism by the industry -- with a series of industrial initiatives to revise a 2023 chips law.

[...] As part of its proposal to keep a list of trustworthy countries, the Commission would require EU governments to run a so-called "sovereignty risk assessment" for every digital service they rely on, measuring foreign control, potential access to sensitive data and the risk of operational disruption. Within a year, they would have to determine the appropriate level of protection for each public sector and procure digital services accordingly -- unless they can prove doing so would come at a "disproportionate cost," the proposal reads. However, the Commission reserves the right to overrule their assessment in future legislation if it believes they downplayed the risks. The Commission estimated that just one percent of Europe's public services are so sensitive that they would be required under the proposed certification scheme to rely on the strict level that totally excludes foreign technology. "We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure," Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. "This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests and making our own choices."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off today, and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft's opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. [...] On the hardware front, we didn't get any updates for existing Surface devices (not counting yesterday's Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is "a compact developer PC" built around Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of built-in memory. The Dev Box looks a little like a cartoon anvil or piano fell onto an Xbox Series X and flattened it. Its aluminum casing was designed "to double as a heatsink," and its preloaded version of Windows 11 Pro will include a "purposeful" set of developer-centric default settings and preinstalled tools.

This is a follow-up of sorts to the Windows Dev Kit 2023, also known as "Project Volterra." This Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3-powered PC was essentially the system board from a Surface Pro tablet stuffed into a plastic box, and it was introduced alongside Arm-native versions of several Microsoft developer tools. It helped to set the stage for the Arm-based flagship Surface devices that launched the next year, which benefitted from a better and faster x86-to-Arm code translation technology called Prism and a greater number of Arm-native third-party apps that didn't need to be translated in the first place. Microsoft didn't announce pricing or specific specs for the RTX Spark Dev Box, but you can probably expect it to cost quite a bit more than the $600 that Project Volterra did. Hopefully, Microsoft can keep the price at least somewhat lower than the $4,699 asking price for Nvidia's similarly specced DGX Spark box.

On the software side, several developer-centric changes are coming to Windows 11, particularly for users of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Microsoft is introducing a Windows-native version of the coreutils command line tools, so that commands or scripts made for Linux work within Windows and the other way around; the ability to run WSL inside of containers, said to be arriving in "the coming months"; and something called Windows Developer Configurations that uses the WinGet tool to quickly set up "a distraction-free dev environment with VS Code, GitHub Copilot, WSL, PowerShell 7 and developer-optimized settings with one command on any Windows 11 device." Microsoft also introduced Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), as "enterprise-grade sandboxed environments" that let AI agents like OpenClaw operate on Windows without getting unrestricted access to the whole system. In theory, MXC could let organizations enforce agent-specific limits, such as blocking access to personal accounts, separating work and personal data, or requiring permission before deleting files.

The MXC GitHub repo also notes support for "multiple containment backends," meaning the same sandboxing concept could apply beyond AI agents to other plugins, tools, and workloads.

Further reading: Microsoft Unveils Scout, an Autonomous AI Agent Built On OpenClaw

Microsoft says its new Majorana 2 quantum chip is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor, with qubits lasting about 20 seconds instead of milliseconds, and claims it could have a commercially useful quantum machine by 2029. The BBC reports: "We will have a quantum machine in 2029 that can solve commercially viable, reasonable problems," said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum. That would still require huge further advances as such a device would require millions of qubits - the current chip, Alam said, has 12. Assessing the firm's claims are difficult because it does not release the full details of what it has discovered publicly, citing commercial confidentiality.

Microsoft has spent 20 years pursuing an approach to quantum computing known as "topological." The firm's approach to this is based on exploiting the properties of a so-called quasi-particle, which had existed only in theory, since it was first predicted in the 1930s by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana. To do this it had to exploit a novel state of matter - different from the three familiar states of liquid, solid or gas.

Paul Stevenson, a physics professor at the University of Surrey, said the tech giant's timeline sounded plausible - if its research lived up to its claims. "Microsoft appears to have made a leap in their attempt to produce viable topological qubits," he said. "If they succeed, they will leap from being a player with no production quantum computer, to being a serious player in the race to make the next generation of fault-tolerant machines."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: A team inside Microsoft has been quietly building a platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps, based on Android instead of Windows, with two working hardware designs so far, and an initial set of big-name companies lined up to run pilots. The platform, dubbed "Project Solara," is Microsoft's bet that AI will open up entirely new scenarios for computing -- using agents to avoid the constraints of traditional software, and off-the-shelf components to develop new devices quickly and inexpensively. [...] The company unveiled Solara on Tuesday at its Build conference in San Francisco, describing it as a new platform that spans from chip to cloud. GeekWire got a behind-the-scenes look at the project during a briefing last week in Redmond, including demos of the first two concept devices based on the platform:

- A desktop hub that sits beside a PC and responds to voice commands, signs users in using facial recognition, and surfaces the day's most pressing items. With a monitor attached, it becomes a full Windows machine running in the cloud.
- A wearable badge that reimagines the standard employee ID card. A fingerprint button wakes an agent in one press; a single tap records and transcribes a conversation; and a built-in camera lets the agent act on what the user sees.

Microsoft says it won't ship these devices itself. Instead, it envisions hardware makers and other industry partners turning the reference designs into implementations of their own, each intended for a specific industry, company, or scenario. For example, in one demo shown by the company, the high-tech badge ran on agents designed for use by a health-care worker, including the ability to scan a patient's QR code, record and transcribe the visit, log vitals, and start a prescription. In another application of the same badge, the built-in camera scanned a brainstorm board with ideas for an office revamp, and made a suggestion: add some plants.

The two devices are a starting point. The bigger opportunity, the company says, is all the tasks and workflows where a PC or phone gets in the way or isn't practical to use. [...] In the coming months, companies including AccuWeather, Best Buy, CVS Health, Levi's, and Target are expected to begin pilots of devices based on the reference designs. The operating system is the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform, or MDEP, an enterprise version of Android that Microsoft developed for devices including Teams meeting-room hardware. The company says it chose MDEP over Windows deliberately, to run on smaller, lower-power devices while keeping the management and security features IT departments expect: patch and over-the-air updates, device integrity, Microsoft Defender, Intune, and Entra ID sign-in. While the project is still in the early stages, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella encouraged the team to show it at Build sooner than the company would normally show its work in public. "That underscores just how competitive and fast-moving the AI world is right now, but it also illustrates the pace that the new technologies are enabling," reports GeekWire.

The report notes that the business model for the platform still needs to be worked out. The devices run on Microsoft's Azure cloud, but beyond that, "the economics are still taking shape."

Qualcomm and MediaTek have been chosen as the first chip partners. "The badge runs on a new Qualcomm wearable chip; the desk hub runs on MediaTek IoT silicon," reports GeekWire. "Both are off-the-shelf, not custom, which is central to how Microsoft plans to keep devices cheap and fast to build."

Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac will reportedly drop into "reduced functionality mode" on July 13, 2026, when a license-validation certificate expires, leaving perpetually licensed apps able to open files but not edit or save them. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from OSnews: "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires," reports the Consumer Rights Wiki. "After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would 'continue to function.' The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined 'reduced functionality mode,' in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved. By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the 'continue to function' clause was removed."

Microsoft's advice to the users they're stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it's not because the software industry is a clown show.

Microsoft has unveiled Scout, an experimental always-on AI "autopilot" agent for Microsoft 365 that can operate across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, calendars, contacts, browsers, and external apps via MCP. "Autopilots stay active in the background, understand how work gets done across your apps and systems, and take action without needing to be prompted each time," said Omar Shahine, a Microsoft veteran who recently announced he is leading a new team to bring OpenClaw-based personal assistants to Microsoft 365 apps. Computerworld reports: Shahine said Scout can reduce mundane tasks that office workers face, such as coordinating and scheduling meeting times with colleagues, or blocking times in a user's calendar based on upcoming work commitments. "It can also spot risks, like stalled decisions, so you can address them before they become blockers," he said. It's available as an "experimental release" to customers of the company's Frontier program, Microsoft said, and will require Intune policy configuration and "opt-in attestation." [...] It's not clear whether Scout will be included in Microsoft 365 Copilot subscriptions or charged separately. Microsoft did not immediately provide additional details about pricing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In April, GitHub announced that it was moving subscribers from request-based billing to a usage-based model for its AI-powered Copilot service. As that new pricing model goes into effect today, many GitHub Copilot users are reporting some extreme sticker shock as they realize just how quickly their previous "normal" usage is burning through their newly limited monthly allotment of AI credits. Across social media and forums, many Copilot users are sharing personal statistics showing how just a few hours of AI usage can now account for a large chunk of their new monthly subscription caps. For some users, it reportedly took less than a day to use up a month's usage quota.

That's a big change from previous months, when GitHub Copilot subscribers were allocated a certain number of "requests" and "premium requests" based on their payment tier. GitHub said that the old system meant that "a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session [could] cost the user the same amount," forcing Copilot itself to "absorb much of the escalating inference cost behind that usage." [...] Indeed, some Copilot users have been sharing estimates from GitHub's own tool showing that their previous monthly usage would rack up bills in the thousands of dollars under the new pricing plan. Under GitHub's new usage-based pricing system, paid Copilot subscriptions instead grant users a certain number of AI "credits" each month, with one credit corresponding to $0.01 of usage. Subscribers also get bonus credits depending on their subscription level: the $10/month Pro plan includes 1,500 credits ($15 worth); the $39 Pro+ plan includes 7,000 credits ($70 worth); and the $100/month Copilot Max plan includes 20,000 credits ($200 worth).

The precise number of Copilot credits used by a given prompt is determined by the number of input and output tokens used and the rates charged by the underlying large language model. That means pricing is highly dependent not just on the type of request but on the specific model that a user chooses. One million output tokens from OpenAI's GPT-5.4 nano would run just $1.25 on GitHub Copilot, but that same level of output would run $30 on the frontier GPT-5.5 model (Copilot users who rely on "Auto" mode to pick the most appropriate available model for any request should be extremely careful, as some users report it can switch to expensive models for extremely simple queries).

"The company best known for powering the AI boom is coming for the PC," reports Axios.

Nvidia's CEO unveiled a new ARM-based "N1X processor made alongside Microsoft," reports CNBC, that "will be incorporated into a new RTX Spark superchip, debuting in the fall on a fresh line of Windows PCs from Microsoft, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo and MSI."

More details from Engadget: It was only a matter of time before NVIDIA released a powerful system-on-a-chip (SOC) to take on AMD's Ryzen AI Max and Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon X2 chips. At Computex today, NVIDIA unveiled the RTX Spark, a "superchip" meant to give both laptops and small desktops fast AI and graphics performance...

The company says it offers 1 petaflop of AI computing power, and that it has 6,144 Blackwell RTX cores and 20 Mediatek Arm CPU cores. NVIDIA claims it's similar to the RTX 5070 laptop GPU but with much lower power draw. RTX Spark also has an NPU that's fast enough to be part of Microsoft's Copilot+ initiative, which requires a 40 TOPS NPU, but NVIDIA says it's mainly touting the tensor cores as part of the chip's Blackwell GPU for AI performance. RTX Spark's GPU can directly draw on the chip's large pool of unified memory, which can span from 16GB to 128GB, and the chip itself can use anywhere from single-digit wattage up to 80W...

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang positions RTX Spark as a complete reinvention of the PC, eventually turning them more into devices meant for AI agents than manual human input... NVIDIA has been working together with Microsoft for "several years" while designing the RTX Spark, according to NVIDIA representatives... In a blog post provided to media, Microsoft head of Windows and devices, Pavan Davuluri, noted that the company optimized Windows 11's workload profile scheduling for the RTX Spark. "Whether you're checking your email or running an agent locally to debug code, the Windows scheduler on RTX Spark will ensure you get the best performance and efficiency out of your CPU," he wrote.

Axios reports: The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers' union in the U.S., released a 10-point plan to introduce AI and screen-time guardrails in classrooms. The plan would limit AI use and ban screens for students in prekindergarten through second grade "unless there is a compelling reason," such as supporting students with special needs.
The teacher union's president Randi Weingarten warned that young students "are drowning in tech," according to the New York Times, which reports the union president also "called on schools on Wednesday to stop giving digital devices like iPads to children in prekindergarten through second grade." In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, Weingarten also urged elementary schools to avoid using artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Khan Academy's Khanmigo with children [and] called for new national privacy and safety standards for A.I. tools in all schools... "The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without A.I."

The union's effort reflects a backlash among parents and educators against heavy use of school-issued laptops and apps. Some parents and nonprofit children's groups are also pushing back against campaigns by tech giants like Google and OpenAI to spread their A.I. products in schools... Weingarten said that the union was negotiating safety and privacy standards for A.I. use in schools with "our partners in the A.I. academy," and that Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic had agreed in principle to those standards.
Weingarten "laid out a plan for reorienting public schooling toward human abilities and student well-being," according to the article, calling it "a devices down, eyes up, hands-on strategy."

And meanwhile school cellphone bans are expanding into broader efforts to establish guardrails around AI in education and limit screen use, reports Axios. "At least 16 states — both red and blue — have introduced bills to limit classroom technology." Schools Beyond Screens formed with fewer than a dozen parents in Los Angeles Unified School District last year, but the nonprofit has grown to include thousands of parents and educators nationwide, SBS policy director Kate Brody tells Axios... McPherson Middle School principal Inge Esping told Axios that the suspension rate at her Kansas school fell 70% after cellphones were banned in 2022. Students also started speaking more with one another and with teachers.

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

"A security researcher published a series of unpatched bugs in Microsoft products," reports TechCrunch, "along with code to exploit them."

Microsoft's response to the researcher? "Threatening to take legal action and call the cops on them." On Wednesday, Microsoft published a blog post criticizing the researcher, who goes by the handle "Nightmare Eclipse," for publicly disclosing a series of bugs, including BlueHammer, RedSun, UnDefend, and YellowKey. The flaws affected products such as the Windows built-in antivirus engine Defender and the disk-encryption tool BitLocker.

The core of Microsoft's complaints is that the researcher did not attempt to report the bugs so that the company could fix them. That would have been "responsible," as Microsoft's blog put it. The other side of the company's argument is that by publishing the details of the bugs and how to exploit them before they were patched, Nightmare Eclipse may have aided malicious hackers. Some of the vulnerabilities Nightmare Eclipse disclosed have since been used by hackers in real-world attacks, according to Microsoft, as well as the U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA. "Our Digital Crimes Unit will continue bringing cases against these actors and those that enable their criminal activity — coordinating as needed with law enforcement around the world," Microsoft wrote...

In a series of blog posts published in the last couple of weeks — without providing many specific details — Nightmare Eclipse claimed to have been in contact with Microsoft, but the company allegedly mistreated them, including revoking access to their Microsoft Security Response Center account, the portal where researchers can report vulnerabilities to the tech giant. Nightmare Eclipse's implication was that they had no choice but to release the vulnerabilities publicly... The researchers published the bugs on open source repositories GitHub (owned by Microsoft) and GitLab. The researchers' accounts on those platforms have been banned...

In response to this latest controversy with Nightmare Eclipse, countless researchers have shared their bad experiences reporting bugs to Microsoft.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Elektroschock for sharing the news.

Wix is laying off roughly 20% of its workforce, about 1,000 employees, as CEO Avishai Abrahami cites both the rapid evolution of AI and currency pressure from a stronger Israeli shekel against the dollar. The web developer joins a growing list of tech companies making similar cuts, including Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Intuit. Fast Company reports: "We have witnessed the most significant shift in how companies are built since the invention of modern programming languages in the 1970s," [wrote Abrahami]. "This is not just about adopting new tools -- it is about rewiring how companies are built, how they think, how they manage, and how they operate. Companies that embrace this change will not only build faster; they will build things the previous generation literally could not have imagined."

Abrahami also cited the poor exchange rate between the Israeli shekel and the U.S. dollar. The Israeli currency has significantly strengthened in the past few quarters against a weakening dollar, and the shekel is up nearly 30% against the greenback over the last year.

"As the majority of our teams are Israel-based, a very meaningful portion of our costs are shekel-denominated, while our revenue is largely dollar-denominated," Abrahami explained on X. "This creates a structural pressure on our ability to operate at our current scale. It is a reality that directly shapes what is sustainable for our company."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cybernews: The technology giant Microsoft has been accused of leaking the data of civil servants working for the Netherlands' regulatory agencies to the US House of Representatives. The civil servants affected by the leak work at the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) and the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP), according to the NL Times. They are involved in implementing the Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Union regulation on online services, aimed at combating illegal content and protecting user rights.

NL Times reports that Microsoft shared emails, minutes, and invitations sent by the civil servants without redacting their names in the documents. Willemijn Aerdts, Dutch State Secretary for Digital Economy and Sovereignty, said she discussed the allegations with US Ambassador to the Netherlands Joe Popolo. [...] The allegations against Microsoft further strengthen concerns over Europe's dependence on American technologies, which poses major risks to data privacy. Further reading: Netherlands Blocks US Takeover of Vital Digital Supplier

Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman says Rust can help Linux deal with a flood of AI-discovered security bugs (namely Dirty Frag, Copy Fail, and Fragnesia) by preventing common C mistakes around memory, locking, error handling, and untrusted data at build time rather than during human review. It's "not a silver bullet" and does not mean rewriting the whole kernel, but he said new drivers and subsystems will increasingly use Rust as Linux evolves forward. ZDNet reports: Kroah-Hartman illustrated those pitfalls with real C bugs in the kernel, including a 15-year-old Bluetooth bug that dereferenced a pointer without checking it and a Xen bug where "we forgot to unlock" in an error path. "The majority of the bugs in the kernel are this tiny, minor stuff," he explained. "Error conditions aren't checked, locks aren't forgotten, unreleased memories leak, and vulnerabilities add up over time. They crash the kernel. This is what we live with in C. This is why we don't like it." Kroah-Hartman argued that the "best beauty of Rust" is catching those mistakes at build time rather than in review. For example, when it comes to locking, he highlighted Rust's locking abstractions in the kernel: "The only way you can get access to inner pointers of structures is by grabbing that lock, and releasing the lock automatically. The compiler does it, it's guarded, the lock happens, everything's happy. You just can't write code to access these values...without grabbing the lock. The compiler will not let you."

Those properties, he argued, directly remove a huge fraction of the bugs he sees: "This is going to save us those two things. First, 60% of the bugs in the kernel right there, they're gone. Thank you." The payoff is earlier, more automated enforcement: "If this happens at build time, not review time, don't make me a maintainer who has to read your code [and] say, 'Oh, then you properly check that error value. Oh, did you properly grab the locks in the right spot?' Rust gives us that for free. This is the best thing ever." Even if Rust vanished tomorrow, Kroah-Hartman argued, it has already forced the kernel to clean up C code and interfaces. He credited Rust's influence outright: "We stole this from Rust. Thank you. It's a good idea, so if Rust disappeared tomorrow, we have cleaned up the C code in the kernel so much and taken in the ideas. We thank you, you've made Linux better with it just by existing."

[...] What ultimately sold a number of core maintainers, including him, on Rust was how it "makes reviewing code easier." With CI [Continuous Integration] bots enforcing builds and Rust's type system enforcing key invariants, maintainers can "focus on the logic" rather than resource bookkeeping: "I can care about that one function. I don't have to worry about the rest of this stuff, because I assume that it works properly, because it was built properly." Internally, he said, the top maintainers have already made their call on Rust's status: "The Linux kernel maintainers, we get together every year and talk about what the processes are doing. Last year, we said the Rust experiment is over. It's not an experiment. This is for real." The rationale: "The people behind it are real. We trust them. We know what they're doing. They've shown and put in the work to make Rust a viable language in the kernel, and we're going to make this stick. Let's go full speed ahead. And, as always," he said wryly, "world domination proceeds." "If you never remember anything else in my talk, just remember these four words. It came from Microsoft Security many, many years ago," Kroah-Hartman told attendees. "They realized all input is evil. You have to validate all input."

Nvidia is retiring its classic Control Panel for GeForce Game Ready and Studio Driver users after 20 years, as it pushes users to a newer, more unified "NVIDIA" app. Longtime Slashdot reader BrendaEM first shared the news, commenting: "Nvidia seems to no long want you to have control over your own video card that you paid your hard-earned money for? WTF!?" VideoCardz.com reports: Existing Control Panel installs will remain on users' systems. NVIDIA says the old panel will only disappear after a clean driver installation. Users who still need it can continue to download it from the Microsoft Store, but NVIDIA will no longer add new features, fixes, or other changes.

The retirement currently applies to Game Ready and Studio Drivers. NVIDIA RTX PRO users will continue to receive Control Panel support until the company moves professional features to the NVIDIA app. For GeForce users, NVIDIA says the app now includes the modern functionality previously available through Control Panel. [...] The classic panel is therefore not being removed from every system overnight. It is being moved into maintenance mode for GeForce users...

Tech industry layoffs may be worse at large tech companies than the rest of the IT industry. The New York Times argues those layoffs have now shifted the culture at Big Tech companies, after interviewing more than two dozen of their workers. "Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation.

"Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone..." Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000... By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success...

The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren't constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy.

Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a "tech layoff tracker" that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. "I was on Blind five days a week," said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. "I was trying to get prepared mentally," she said.

Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.

Thursday California's governor issued an executive order "directing state agencies to prepare workers and businesses for AI-driven workforce disruption," reports San Francisco's KQED. In a statement the governor said "This moment demands that we reimagine the entire system — how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future." The order mandates agencies to explore a range of policy options, including severance standards, expanded unemployment insurance, job retraining programs aimed specifically at white-collar workers, worker ownership models and a concept the governor called "universal basic capital," giving all residents a stake in assets such as corporate stocks, bonds or wealth funds...

Tom Kemp, executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency, applauded the fact that the order named data privacy as a consumer protection concern and highlighted the CPPA's automated decision-making technology regulations, which he called "the nation's most comprehensive." Others are more skeptical. "Catastrophic job loss from AI is not inevitable, it's a political choice," Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO, wrote in a statement. However, Gonzalez noted one area of genuine agreement: the order's emphasis on collective bargaining as a tool for protecting workers from AI displacement...

According to Stanford HAI's 2026 AI Index, software developers ages 22 to 25 are among those most likely to see their skills made redundant earliest. This year, U.S. employment fell nearly 20% from 2024, even as headcount for older developers continued to grow. Following the job cuts announced at Meta, a union of Alphabet workers in the U.S. and Canada released a statement that suggests Silicon Valley's own labor force may seek to organize... "It's undeniable that our whole industry is being transformed by the corporate push to adopt new AI tools," [Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Local 9009 said in a statement]. "It's hard not to feel anxiety and fear when we can see more and more tech companies cutting huge portions of their workforce both in anticipation of replacing them with AI, and to fund their multi-billion-dollar bets on AI as the future of the industry..."

In February, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Gonzalez delivered what amounted to an ultimatum to Newsom: regulate AI or lose labor's support for any future presidential run. Shuler called a potential AI-driven economic collapse a coming "crisis." In August 2025, Newsom announced a partnership with Google, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe to expand AI education in California schools and community colleges, a workforce preparation push that now looks like a precursor to Thursday's more sweeping order.
The article notes that after signing the bill the governor shared this comment on X.com. "California will pursue new policies that make sure working Californians — not just Big Tech — benefit from the wealth and breakthroughs coming out of this space."

Newsom telegraphed Thursday's order earlier this week, when he appeared at the Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference in Washington. "Businesses are going to make a fortune, and that's why you cannot continue to have a payroll tax system that taxes jobs and then subsidizes automation."

Phoronix reports on a presentation about trying FreeBSD on modern Framework laptop from last week's Open Source Summit hosted by the Linux Foundation: With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBSD, FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director has been trying to daily drive FreeBSD on laptops...

With the Framework Laptop, the touchscreen "just worked" as did other basic functionality from the KDE desktop on FreeBSD, including peripherals like a wireless mouse. Among the challenges were Zoom failing for video calls but eventually working, the web camera took steps to enable, and Microsoft Teams only partially worked. With the help of online resources, ultimately she was able to succeed in her journey of running FreeBSD daily on a laptop.

"For months, scammers have been taking advantage of a loophole that allows them to send spammy emails from an internal Microsoft email address typically used for sending legitimate account alerts," TechCrunch reports: [The scammers] have been able to set up new Microsoft accounts as if they are new customers and use that access to send out emails purportedly from the tech giant, potentially tricking people into thinking these emails are genuine...

Last week, I received several, similarly structured emails containing subject lines and web links to scammy sites from Microsoft across different email accounts. These crudely made emails were sent from msonlineservicesteam@microsoftonline.com, an email account that Microsoft uses to send important notifications to users, such as two-factor authentication codes and other critical alerts about their online account. Some of these emails' subject lines resembled official emails that would alert users to fraudulent transactions, while other emails claimed to have a private message waiting for the recipient at a web address mentioned in the email body.

In a social post on Tuesday, anti-spam nonprofit The Spamhaus Project said it had also seen Microsoft's account notification email address being abused to send spam and that the activity dated back "several months."
A PR representative told TechCrunch that Microsoft was "actively investigating" and "taking action against these phishing reports to help keep customers protected," with measures that include "removing accounts that violate our Terms of Use" and "further strengthening our detection and blocking mechanisms."

TechCrunch suggests the issue may not be limited to Microsoft. "Other users commenting on social media say that other companies' email addresses are also being used to send out spam."

Developers for several top videogames have joined unions under the Communication Workers of America — including Call of Duty, Fallout, Overwatch, Diablo and World of Warcraft. Last month workers on the online game Magic: The Gathering Arena team announced their own CWA union.

The gaming news site Aftermath shares some interesting details: Owner Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast could have voluntarily agreed to the union, but instead the issue is going to an official vote with the National Labor Relations Board in June... [O]ne Arena developer shared on Bluesky that one of the reasons they were inspired to organize was because Wizards changed its remote work policy, requiring them to move across the country or to a more expensive state to remain employed. (Changes to remote work have been one of the big drivers of unionization and union action among video game developers.) If the union is successful, the company wouldn't be able to unilaterally change working conditions like remote work; it would have to negotiate with the union over the decision. There's no guarantee unionized employees would get what they want, but they'd have more of a say, and the opportunity to directly influence their work situation, than they would without a union.