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 Austin wrote in an unpublished history of the software's development.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."

Microsoft is teaming up with digital pathology provider Paige to build the world's largest image-based artificial intelligence model for identifying cancer. From a report: The AI model is training on an unprecedented amount of data that includes billions of images, according to a release. It can identify both common cancers and rare cancers that are notoriously difficult to diagnose, and researchers hope it will eventually help doctors who are struggling to contend with staffing shortages and growing caseloads. Paige develops digital and AI-powered solutions for pathologists, which are doctors who carry out lab tests on bodily fluids and tissues to make a diagnosis. It's a specialty that often operates behind the scenes, and it's crucial for determining a patient's path forward.

"You don't have cancer until the pathologist says so. That's the critical step in the whole medical edifice," Thomas Fuchs, co-founder and chief scientist at Paige, told CNBC in an interview. But despite pathologists' essential role in medicine, Fuchs said their workflow has not changed much in the last 150 years. To diagnose cancer, for instance, pathologists usually examine a piece of tissue on a glass slide under a microscope. The method is tried and true, but if pathologists miss something, it can have dire consequences for patients.

In a deal that could be worth $200 million, Microsoft announced that it is purchasing 315,000 metric tons of carbon removal over a multi-year period from climate tech startup Heirloom Carbon. It's one of the biggest deals of its kind, reports The Wall Street Journal (paywalled). GeekWire reports: San Francisco-based Heirloom is harnessing a geologic approach to catching and holding carbon dioxide. Limestone naturally binds to carbon, but Heirloom's technology dramatically speeds up the process, cutting it from years to days. The startup operates the only U.S. facility permanently capturing carbon. Even more important than the volume of carbon to be removed is the deal's ability to unlock additional funding and investments to grow Heirloom's business and the sector more broadly.

Microsoft previously invested in Heirloom through its $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund. The new deal represents a financially empowering "bankable agreement," said Heirloom CEO Shashank Samala. "Bankable agreements of this magnitude enable Heirloom to raise project finance for our rapid scale-up, fueling exponential growth like what we've seen in the renewable energy industry," Samala said in a statement. The guaranteed cash flow can facilitate financing needed to build Heirloom's next two commercial sites. The deal is also "an example of the impact of the Biden administration's 2021 infrastructure bill," notes the report. "[T]he purchase was tied to Heirloom being selected by the U.S. Department of Energy as one of the nation's direct air capture (DAC) hubs. It will receive $600 million of matching funding thanks to the designation."

Microsoft is rolling out a new feature to Windows Insiders that lets you remove an image's background in Paint with a single click. The Verge reports: To use the tool, testers can open an image with Paint and then hit the background removal button on the left side of Paint's toolbar. From there, Paint will automatically detect the subject of an image and cut away the background. Microsoft notes that you can also manually select the portion of the background that you want to remove.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Chinese state-aligned influence and disinformation campaigns are impersonating U.S. voters and targeting political candidates on multiple social media platforms with improved sophistication, Microsoft said in a threat analysis report Thursday. Chinese Communist Party-affiliated "covert influence operations have now begun to successfully engage with target audiences on social media to a greater extent than previously observed," according to the report, which focused on the rise in "digital threats from East Asia." The Microsoft report also cautioned that some Chinese influence campaigns are now using generative artificial intelligence to create visual content that's "already drawn higher levels of engagement from authentic" users, a trend the company said began around March.

Chinese influence campaigns have historically struggled to gain traction with intended targets, who in this case are U.S. voters and residents. But since the 2022 midterm elections, those efforts have become more effective, Microsoft warned. Microsoft found content from Chinese influence campaigns on multiple apps, including Meta's Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, and X. In August, Facebook parent Meta announced it had disrupted the largest ever identified disinformation campaign and linked it to China state-affiliated actors. Microsoft's report included screenshots of two different X posts in April that were identified as CCP-affiliated disinformation. Both were about the Black Lives Matter movement and had the same graphic. The first came from an automated CCP-affiliated account. The second, Microsoft said, was uploaded by an account impersonating a conservative U.S. voter seven hours later.

Microsoft says it will defend buyers of its artificial intelligence products from copyright infringement lawsuits, an effort by the software giant to ease concerns customers might have about using its AI "Copilots" to generate content based on existing work. From a report: The Microsoft Copilot Copyright Commitment will protect customers as long as they've "used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products" Hossein Nowbar, General Counsel, Corporate Legal Affairs and Corporate Secretary at Microsoft, said in a blog post Thursday. Microsoft also pledged to pay related fines or settlements and said it has taken steps to ensure its Copilots respect copyright.

"We believe in standing behind our customers when they use our products," Nowbar said. "We are charging our commercial customers for our Copilots, and if their use creates legal issues, we should make this our problem rather than our customers' problem." Generative AI applications scoop up existing content such as art, articles and programming code and use it to generate new material that can simplify or automate a range of tasks. Microsoft is baking the technology, developed with partner OpenAI, into many of its biggest products, including Office and Windows, potentially putting customers in legal jeopardy.

Due to confidence issues and difficulties interviewing, neurodivergent individuals often face higher unemployment rates than their non-neurodivergent counterparts. However, they may possess specialized skills that can enhance team productivity by up to 30% in suitable work settings. A startup backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman aims to help these job seekers find suitable employment opportunities, leveraging technology and assessments to match individuals with roles that best align with their abilities and skills. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from TechCrunch: Enter Mentra. The Charlotte, N.C.-based startup, whose three co-founders are all autistic is building what it describes as an AI-powered "neuroinclusive employment network." Specifically, its tech platform leverages artificial intelligence to help large enterprises hire employees with cognitive differences such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The startup's unique premise caught the early attention of OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, who first invested in the company with a $1 million pre-seed investment in February 2022 through his venture firm, Hydrazine Capital. Mentra also won an AI for accessibility grant from Microsoft. Shine Capital led its $3.5 million seed round this year, which also included participation from Altman's fund, Verissimo, Full Circle, Charlotte Fund, as well as angel investors including David Apple and Dawn Dobras.

What sets Mentra apart is its approach to job fit, maintains Mentra co-founder and CEO Jhillika Kumar. The startup goes beyond keywords in resumes to match employers with talent, she said, considering factors around a person's neurotype, aptitude, environmental sensitivities. To date, its one-year retention rate has remained at an impressive 97.5%. [...] One way Mentra uses AI is to parse through job descriptions to make sure they are cognitively accessible and broken down in a consistent format that is not exclusionary. "Then we are able to use an algorithm to go through the jobseekers on our platform to identify who's the best fit based on mostly neuro type," Kumar told TechCrunch. "One person might be extremely good at hyper focusing, very detail-oriented, very process-oriented or very strategic, and you have specific skills that map to their strengths in the role." Over 70% of the data Mentra collects is not collected by an Indeed or a traditional job-finding platform. It uses that holistic data to make the match between the job and the individual.

The startup's current revenue model is free for neurodivergent jobseekers, and it charges an annual subscription for enterprise companies to access the platform. It is also building out a neuroinclusion marketplace for service providers such as consultancies and training firms to provide hands-on services to companies that accompany Mentra's core platform. "In the future, we plan to have a similar marketplace available for neurodivergents to access tailored services as well throughout the life of their career such as bootcamps and job coaches," Kumar added.

An exploit for a bug in Windows appears to increase the performance of File Explorer in Microsoft's flagship operating system. From a report: Spotted over the weekend by Xitter user @VivyVCCS, the hack is triggered by a swift jab of the F11 key to switch File Explorer in and out of full-screen mode. According to the post, load performance is improved markedly.

schwit1 writes: The Justice Department has spent three years over two presidential administrations building the case that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. To defend itself, Google has enlisted hundreds of employees and three powerful law firms and spent millions of dollars on legal fees and lobbyists. On Tuesday, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will begin considering their arguments at a trial that cuts to the heart of a long-simmering question: Did today's tech giants become dominant by breaking the law?

The case -- U.S. et al v. Google -- is the federal government's first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor. The trial moves the antitrust battle against those companies to a new phase, shifting from challenging their mergers and acquisitions to more deeply examining the businesses that thrust them into power. Such a consequential case over tech power has not unfolded since the Justice Department took Microsoft to court in 1998 for antitrust violations.

Microsoft will finally stop forcing Windows 11 users in Europe into Edge if they click a link from the Windows Widgets panel or from search results. From a report: The software giant has started testing the changes to Windows 11 in recent test builds of the operating system, but the changes are restricted to countries within the European Economic Area (EEA). "In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links," reads a change note from a Windows 11 test build released to Dev Channel testers last month. Microsoft has been ignoring default browser choices in its search experience in Windows 10 and the taskbar widget that forces users into Edge if they click a link instead of their default browser. Windows 11 continued this trend, with search still forcing users into Edge and a new dedicated widgets area that also ignores the default browser setting.

Apple and Microsoft, the most valuable companies in the US, have argued some of their flagship services are insufficiently popular to be designated "gatekeepers" under landmark new EU legislation designed to curb the power of Big Tech. FT: Brussels' battle with Apple over its iMessage chat app and Microsoft's search engine Bing comes ahead of Wednesday's publication of the first list of services that will be regulated by the Digital Markets Act. The legislation imposes new responsibilities on the tech companies, including sharing data, linking to competitors and making their services interoperable with rival apps.

belmolis writes: Canadian prisons allow prisoners to buy devices such as personal computers and gaming consoles but severely restrict the technology, nominally on security grounds. Modern gaming consoles are forbidden on the grounds that they can connect to the internet, so the typical purchase is a Playstation 1. No version of Microsoft Windows more recent than Windows 98 is allowed. No device that can play MP3 files is allowed. The regulations forbid operating systems other than Microsoft DOS or Windows and any software capable of creating a program, such as a compiler as are "database programs capable of altering or manipulating SQL databases". Although learning job skills is encouraged, programming is evidently not considered appropriate. The relationship of most of these restrictions to security is obscure.

Microsoft has announced billing in public preview for Teams recording and transcription APIs, with pricing starting at 3 cents per minute for recordings. From a report: Getting meeting transcripts and recordings using Graph APIs is currently in public developer preview, so the billing, which started on September 1, might irk coders keen to use these features in their applications. The API for recording is billed at $0.03 per minute, and the API for transcription is $0.024 per minute.

Microsoft cited line-of-business applications or ISV solutions in sales or HR as potential use cases for the technology, which permits recordings as an MP4 video file or transcripts as VTT files to be downloaded. VTT includes handy information such as the spoken words, timings, language, and the names of the speakers. A developer could automatically generate notes and attach meeting clips using one or both content API sets. Other information, such as sentiment and engagement metrics, could also be generated.

"Microsoft has quietly revealed that WordPad, the basic word processor that's been included with Windows since 1995, is being retired," reports Windows blog Paul Thurrott: "WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows," the Deprecated features for Windows client page on Microsoft Learn notes in a September 1, 2023 addition. "We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt...."

[W]hile Microsoft's advice to use Microsoft Word instead seems a bit off-base, given that Word is a paid product, RTF is rarely used these days, and anyone can access the web versions of Word for free if needed.
The actual date of removal is unclear. But Neowin isn't the only thing Microsoft is removing from Windows: The company recently turned off Cortana, its neglected voice assistant, and announced the end of Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT). Also, Microsoft will soon disable old Transport Layer Security protocols to make Windows 11 more secure.

The Verge argues we're seeing "the end of the Googleverse. For two decades, Google Search was the invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content.

"Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question... all around us are signs that the era of 'peak Google' is ending or, possibly, already over." There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta's Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there's been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users...

Google Reader shut down in 2013, taking with it the last vestiges of the blogosphere. Search inside of Google Groups has repeatedly broken over the years. Blogger still works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more recently, TikTok. Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google's results but for Reddit content. Google's place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago. On top of it all, OpenAI's massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI.
Their article quotes the founder of the long-ago Google-watching blog, "Google Blogoscoped," who remembers that when Google first came along, "they were ad-free with actually relevant results in a minimalistic kind of design. If we fast-forward to now, it's kind of inverted now. The results are kind of spammy and keyword-built and SEO stuff. And so it might be hard to understand for people looking at Google now how useful it was back then."

The question, of course, is when did it all go wrong? How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town? Well, if you ask Anil Dash, it was all the way back in 2003 — when the company turned on its AdSense program. "Prior to 2003-2004, you could have an open comment box on the internet. And nobody would pretty much type in it unless they wanted to leave a comment. No authentication. Nothing. And the reason why was because who the fuck cares what you comment on there. And then instantly, overnight, what happened?" Dash said. "Every single comment thread on the internet was instantly spammed. And it happened overnight...."

As he sees it, Google's advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet. "At that point it was really clear where the next 20 years were going to go," he said.

Microsoft has patented an AI-powered backpack design featuring a plethora of sensors that may include cameras, microphones, GPS, and a compass. Tom's Hardware reports: Additionally, Microsoft thinks it may be useful to add in LEDs and speakers, as well as a haptic actuator, into the straps. Some real-time processing is deemed necessary to the smart wearable. Thus, various recognition modules are proposed to provide image, text, speech, facial, and cognitive recognition. As well as real-time monitors feeding data to the built-in processing power for AI smarts, the system housed in the backpack also will boast a recording device (using on-board storage), wireless connectivity, battery power / charging and more.

With all the above sensing and processing on your person, in the backpack, it is envisioned that wearers will benefit from AI enhanced object identification and analysis, nearby device interaction, and be able to gain contextual insights. A flow chart shows how the backpack and its data feed might work alongside personal computers and cloud servers. Other illustrations show the wandering backpack wearer navigating a ski resort, and checking out supermarket prices, as well as considering booking concert tickets. Sometimes the user may interact with the backpack's on-board AI via speech, e.g. "Hey Backpack, add this poster to my calendar." Alternatively some AI actions or contextual tasks may be instigated by interacting with sensors on the straps. You can view the patent application here.

The stakes are high for Bethesda's newest role-playing game. Microsoft needs an Xbox hit, and players are hungry for an expansive and satisfying space adventure. From a report: Starfield almost immediately nudges its players to the edges of the cosmos. In the opening hours of the role-playing video game, it's possible to land your spaceship on Earth's moon or zip 16 light-years to Alpha Centauri. When you open your map and zoom out from a planet, you can behold its surrounding solar system; zoom out again, and you're scrolling past luminous stars and the mysterious worlds that orbit them. That sprawling celestial journey within Starfield, developed by Bethesda Game Studios, reveals both the tremendous potential and the monumental challenge of an open-world space adventure. Bethesda has hyped an expansive single-player campaign with 1,000 explorable planets. And expectations around the game, officially releasing on Sept. 6 after a 10-month delay, are nearly as vast.

It's the first new universe in 25 years for Bethesda, known for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. It's also a high-stakes moment for Microsoft, which makes the Xbox and has long faced criticism that it produces fewer hit games than its console rivals, Sony and Nintendo. To compete, Microsoft went on a spending spree, acquiring Bethesda's parent company in 2020 and agreeing to purchase Activision Blizzard in 2022, a $69 billion bet that is being challenged by regulators. Now Bethesda must deliver. Known for letting players navigate competing factions and undertake eccentric quests, the studio hopes Starfield will dazzle those clamoring for engaging encounters with alien life-forms or space mercenaries as well as a sense of boundless exploration.

A tiny island in the Caribbean is now sitting on a digital treasure. From a report: Anguilla, a tropical British territory, is known for its coral reefs and white sand beaches. Since the 1990s, however, it's also been in charge of assigning internet addresses that end in .ai to residents and businesses looking to register websites. It was one of hundreds of country-specific domain names and easy to overlook -- until recently. Stability.ai, Elon Musk's X.ai and Character.ai are just a few of the hot artificial intelligence startups that have snapped up the .ai domain assigned to the islands and cays that comprise Anguilla. Plenty of tech giants have their own web addresses ending in .ai as well: Google.ai and Facebook.ai route visitors to their company's AI-focused webpages and Microsoft.ai shows off the company's Azure AI services.

The total number of registrations of sites ending with these two letters has effectively doubled in the past year to 287,432, according to Vince Cate, who for decades has managed the .ai domain for Anguilla. Cate estimates Anguilla will bring in as much as $30 million in domain-registration fees for 2023. Once one of the many obscure top-level domains assigned to countries and territories, .ai websites experienced a slow but steady increase in demand in recent years. But the sudden spike in .ai domains nine months ago highlights the broader frenzy around artificial intelligence and its ripple effects throughout the global economy. Since ChatGPT launched, a growing number of tech companies have raced to raise billions in capital, scoop up engineering talent and secure powerful but increasingly scarce chips. A domain may sound less essential, but for an industry obsessed with clever branding, the right name can be everything. "Since November 30, things are very different here," Cate said, referring to the date when ChatGPT launched publicly.

Microsoft will unbundle its chat and video app Teams from its Office suite and make it easier for rival products to work with its software, the U.S. company said on Thursday in a move aimed at staving off a possible EU antitrust fine. From a report: The proposed changes came a month after the European Commission launched an investigation into Microsoft's tying of Office and Teams following a complaint by Salesforce-owned workspace messaging app Slack in 2020. Microsoft's preliminary concessions failed to address concerns. The EU competition enforcer on Thursday said it took note of the company's announcement and declined further comment.

Teams was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free. It eventually replaced Skype for Business and gained in popularity during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. "Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission's investigation continues and we cooperate with it," [...] The changes, effective from Oct. 1, will apply in Europe and Switzerland.

An anonymous reader writes: A Guangdong-based state-backed enterprise in charge of e-government projects in the Southern Chinese province has apologized after admitting that its "home-developed" software was based on open-source code from US tech giant Microsoft. Digital Guangdong, known as DigitalGD, published an apology last week after it was revealed that its CEC-IDE software application, which helps programmers write code, was based on Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code), with just minor modifications and certain functions added.

VS Code is available under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology licence, a permissive open source licence allowing for reuse even for commercial purposes. DigitalGD said this fact was not disclosed due to "negligence," and admitted that its description of its software as "self-developed" has met scrutiny and doubt from Chinese programmers. "We are deeply sorry and humiliated for this, and relevant teams have been ordered to make rectifications," the company said. "Chinese authorities have repeatedly demanded 'safe and controllable' hardware and software for key infrastructure, rewarding businesses for indigenous innovations, but this has motivated some companies to make false claims about their products," notes the South China Morning Post.

A similar incident happened in May when a Shenzhen-based Powerleader announced a "home developed" Powerstar P3-01105 CPU that was later revealed to be Intel's Core i3-10105 Comet Lake CPU.