The FTC has asked a federal court to temporarily halt Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard. Microsoft won its fight against the FTC on Tuesday, after a California judge said the agency had failed to show the deal would be illegal under antitrust law. The FTC appealed that loss yesterday, and Microsoft said it would fight that appeal. Reuters reports: In its motion, the FTC asked for an order that would prevent the deal from closing until after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled on a separate stay request filed with that court. Any outstanding regulatory hurdle makes it more likely the agreement between Microsoft and Activision will expire on July 18 without the deal having been completed. After July 18, either company will be free to walk away from the deal unless they negotiate an extension.

In its motion for the stay to Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, the FTC argued her denial of a preliminary injunction to halt the deal "raises serious, substantial issues for the Court of Appeals to resolve." Specifically, the FTC said she had applied the wrong standard in considering the agency's request for a preliminary injunction. "Granting an injunction pending appeal is warranted because the FTC is likely to succeed on appeal," the agency wrote.

Microsoft is replacing its Calibri default font with Aptos, a new sans-serif typeface that's inspired by mid-20th-century Swiss typography. From a report: Previously known as Bierstadt, Microsoft has been on the hunt for its new Aptos default font over the past couple of years. The software giant commissioned five new custom fonts for Office in 2021, and the Aptos font was picked as the default after years of feedback.

"Today we begin the final phase of this major change where Aptos will start appearing as the new default font across Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel for hundreds of millions of users," explains Si Daniels, a principal program manager at Microsoft, in a design blog post today. "And, over the next few months it will roll out to be the default for all our customers." Aptos was created by Steve Matteson, a leading type designer. Matteson previously created Segoe, which was licensed by Microsoft to be used as the Windows default font. Microsoft first started using the Segoe UI font subfamily in Windows Vista, and it's still used in Windows 11 today. Matteson also worked on the development of the original Windows TrueType core fonts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: The macOS Sonoma update that is in testing allows Mac owners who opt to use Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or another browser to use Apple's Password Manager for filling passwords. Developers and public beta testers running macOS Sonoma can use their iCloud Keychain passwords with non-Safari browsers at this time, autofilling passwords and one-time codes. Third-party browsers can also save new passwords.

Apple has made an iCloud Passwords Chrome extension available for macOS Sonoma users, and it can be downloaded and installed to access Apple passwords on the Chrome browser or any Chromium-based browser. Apple plans to release a similar extension for the Microsoft Edge browser in the near future. Google and other browser developers are also working on implementing support for Passkeys, the password alternative that Apple introduced last year.

Elon Musk announced the formation of what he's calling xAI, whose goal is to "understand the true nature of the universe." The team at xAI, led by Musk, includes individuals who have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto.

"Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples. We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and uTransfer. We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4," xAI said in a blog post.

Chinese hackers exploited a flaw in Microsoft's cloud email service to gain access to the email accounts of U.S. government employees, the technology giant has confirmed. From a report: The hacking group, tracked as Storm-0558, compromised approximately 25 email accounts, including government agencies, as well as related consumer accounts linked to individuals associated with these organizations, according to Microsoft. [...]

Microsoft's investigation determined that Storm-0558, a China-based hacking group that the firm describes as a "well-resourced" adversary, gained access to email accounts using Outlook Web Access in Exchange Online (OWA) and Outlook.com by forging authentication tokens to access user accounts.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan is taking on the world's biggest technology companies -- and losing. From a report: Khan failed Tuesday in her latest effort to block a big-tech deal when a federal judge denied her agency's bid to block Microsoft from closing its purchase of videogame publisher Activision Blizzard. The FTC suffered a similar setback earlier this year when it tried to thwart Meta Platforms' purchase of a virtual-reality gaming company. Khan, who gained prominence as a critic of Amazon, entered office in 2021 vowing to stiffen antitrust enforcement. Past enforcers were too cautious about bringing tough cases, she has said, and failed to confront the rise of companies such as Facebook owner Meta that gained monopoly-like power in digital industries, she said.

"I'm certainly not someone who thinks success is marked by a 100% court record," Khan said last year in remarks at the University of Chicago. "If you just never bring those hard cases, I think there is severe cost to that, that can lead to stagnation and stasis." Under the Biden administration, antitrust agencies have challenged more mergers than in previous years, including some that historically the government wouldn't have tried to block. Microsoft and Activision aren't head-to-head competitors, making the case against the deal less straightforward and more dependent on the FTC's prediction that the combined company would abuse its power to hurt competition in the future.

A California judge is allowing Microsoft to close its acquisition of Activision Blizzard after five days of grueling testimony. From a report: Microsoft still faces an ongoing antitrust case by the Federal Trade Commission, but Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley has listened to arguments from both the FTC and Microsoft and decided to deny the regulator's request for a preliminary injunction. In a ruling submitted today, Judge Corley said the following: Microsoft's acquisition of Activision has been described as the largest in tech history. It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off: Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox. It made an agreement with Nintendo to bring Call of Duty to Switch. And it entered several agreements to for the first time bring Activision's content to several cloud gaming services. This Court's responsibility in this case is narrow. It is to decide if, notwithstanding these current circumstances, the merger should be halted -- perhaps even terminated -- pending resolution of the FTC administrative action. For the reasons explained, the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is testing its Med-PaLM 2 AI chat technology at the Mayo Clinic and other hospitals. It's based on the company's PaLM 2 large language model (LLM) that underpins Bard, Google's ChatGPT rival. Engadget reports: Unlike the base model, Med-PaLM-2 has been trained on questions and answer from medical licensing exams, along with a curated set of medical expert demonstrations. That gives it expertise in answering health-related questions, and it can also do labor-intensive tasks like summarizing documents and organizing research data, according to the report. During I/O, Google released (PDF) a paper detailing its work on Med-PaLM2. On the positive side, it demonstrated features like "alignment with medical consensus," reasoning ability, and even the ability to generate answers that were preferred by respondents over physician-generated responses. More negatively, it showed the same accuracy problems we've seen on other Chat AI models.

In an internal email seen by the WSJ, Google said it believes the updated model could "be of tremendous value in countries that have more limited access to doctors." Still, Google has admitted that the technology is still in its early stages. "I don't feel that this kind of technology is yet at a place where I would want it in my family's healthcare journey," said Google senior research director Greg Corrado. However, he added that the tech "takes the places in healthcare where AI can be beneficial and expands them by 10-fold."

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you have any interest in retro-computing, you know it can be difficult to round up the last official bug fixes and updates available for early Internet-era versions of Windows like 95, 98, and NT 4.0. A new independent project called "Windows Update Restored" is aiming to fix that, hosting lightly modified versions of old Windows Update sites and the update files themselves so that fresh installs of these old operating systems can grab years' worth of fixes that aren't present on old install CDs and disks. These old versions of Windows relied primarily on a Windows Update web app to function rather than built-in updaters like the ones used in current Windows versions. Microsoft took down the version of the site that could scan and update Windows 95 and 98 sometime in mid-2011. The Windows Update Restored site is a lightly modified version of Microsoft's original code, and the site itself doesn't use any kind of SSL or TLS encryption, so ancient Internet Explorer versions can still access it without modification. You'll need at least Internet Explorer 5 to access the Windows Update Restored update sites; that browser is no longer available directly from Microsoft, but the Windows Update Restored site offers download links to IE5 and IE5.5 in all supported languages.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Recalling a past Computer History Museum look at the evolution of programming languages, Doug Meil ponders the age-old question of Why Are There So Many Programming Languages? in a new Communications of the ACM blog post.

"It's worth noting and admiring the audacity of PL/I (1964)," Meil writes, "which was aiming to be that 'one good programming language.' The name says it all: Programming Language 1. There should be no need for 2, 3, or 4. [Meil expands on this thought in Lessons from PL/I: A Most Ambitious Programming Language.] Though PL/I's plans of becoming the Highlander of computer programming didn't play out like the designers intended, they were still pulling on a key thread in software: why so many languages? That question was already being asked as far back as the early 1960's."

One of PL/I's biggest fans was Digital Research Inc. (DRI) founder Gary Kildall, who crafted the PL/I-inspired PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers) in 1973 for Intel. But IBM priced PL/I higher than the languages it sought to replace, contributing to PL/I's failure to gain traction. (Along the lines of how IBM's deal with Microsoft gave rise to a price disparity that was the undoing of Kildall's CP/M OS, bundled with every PC in a 'non-royalty' deal. Windows was priced at $40 while CP/M was offered 'a la carte' at $240.) As a comp.lang.pl1 poster explained in 2006, "The truth of the matter is that Gresham's Law: 'Bad money drives out good' or Ruskin's principle: 'The hoi polloi always prefer an inferior, cheap product over a superior, more expensive one' are what govern here."

The public cloud services market jumped in value by nearly 23pc last year, reaching $545.8bn in global revenue. SiliconRepublic: A new report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) claims that all sections in this market saw growth last year, with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications retaining the top spot and representing more than 45pc of total revenue last year.

The report found that revenue for foundational cloud services "that support digital-first strategies" grew by nearly of 29pc. The IDC said this increased growth highlights an increasing reliance of enterprises on cloud platforms built around "widely deployed compute services, data/AI services and app framework services." Dave McCarthy, vice president in IDC's worldwide infrastructure practice, said cloud providers are making "significant investments" in high-performance infrastructure, which can help create the "foundation for new AI software that can be quickly deployed at scale." This verdict was shared by Rick Villars, group VP of ICD worldwide research, who said the use of AI is starting to "dominate the long-term investment agendas of businesses and cloud providers."

ChatGPT, the wildly popular AI chatbot launched in November, saw monthly traffic to its website and unique visitors decline for the first time ever in June, according to analytics firm Similarweb. From a report: Worldwide desktop and mobile traffic to the ChatGPT website decreased by 9.7% in June from May, while unique visitors to ChatGPT's website dropped 5.7%. The amount of time visitors spent on the website was also down 8.5%, Similarweb data shows.

ChatGPT set off a frenzied use of generative AI in daily tasks from writing to coding and reached 100 million monthly active users in January, two months after its launch. It is the fastest-growing consumer application ever, and now boasts over 1.5 billion monthly visits, one of the top 20 websites in the world. For instance, ChatGPT has far surpassed Bing, the search engine run by Microsoft which uses OpenAI's technology.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, gained a new feature dubbed Browse with Bing. The feature shipped exclusively to ChatGPT Plus subscribers. Microsoft promised to bring Bing integration to the platform to enhance its search experience during its annual developer conference for developers, Build 2023. Before this inclusion, ChatGPT depended on OpenAI's GPT-4 model, which limited its capabilities. This is because the chatbot could only access information up until September 2021.

However, shortly after incorporating the new feature into the chatbot, OpenAI discovered that there are instances where it malfunctions. "For example, if a user specifically asks for a URL's full text, it might inadvertently fulfill this request," said OpenAI. As such, the company disabled the Browse with Bing beta feature on July 3, 2023.

Microsoft thinks we're getting a PS5 Slim model later this year that might be priced at $399.99. From a report: The software giant is currently waiting a ruling in the FTC v. Microsoft hearing and as part of the case Microsoft has filed documents which reveal it thinks a PS5 Slim is on the way "later this year." Here's exactly what Microsoft says: "PlayStation likewise sells a less expensive Digital Edition for $399.99, and is expected to release a PlayStation 5 Slim later this year at the same reduced price point."

The Biden administration is preparing to restrict Chinese companies' access to U.S. cloud-computing services, WSJ reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the situation, in a move that could further strain relations between the world's economic superpowers. From the report: The new rule, if adopted, would likely require U.S. cloud-service providers such as Amazon.com and Microsoft to seek U.S. government permission before they provide cloud-computing services that use advanced artificial-intelligence chips to Chinese customers, the people said. The Biden administration's move would follow other recent measures as Washington and Beijing wage a high-stakes conflict over access to the supply chain for the world's most advanced technology.

Beijing Monday announced export restrictions on metals used in advanced chip manufacturing, days ahead of a visit to China by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. The proposed restriction is seen as a means to close a significant loophole. National-security analysts have warned that Chinese AI companies might have bypassed the current export controls rules by using cloud services. These services allow customers to gain powerful computing capabilities without purchasing advanced equipment -- including chips -- on the control list, such as the A100 chips by American technology company Nvidia.

CNBC has created a 15-minute video titled "The Rise and Fall of Skype," telling the story of how Skype was developed in just nine months in 2003 by a six-person group of childhood friends in Estonia. "We were smart engineers," says Skype's former chief technical architect Ahti Heinla. "We learned on the go. None of us had any telecoms background." But at the end of the interview, he concedes "I myself use Skype right now fairly little. I still have it installed on my phone, but my primary communication methods now are elsewhere."

GigaOm founder Om Malik tells CNBC it was Skype's missteps that enabled the massive growth of WhatsApp, and shared this succinct diagnosis of what's happening to Skype. "Microsoft is where consumer brands go to die." From an accompanying article on CNBC's web site: In 2005 eBay bought it. That deal didn't work out as planned, and an investor group led by Silver Lake purchased a majority stake. Microsoft then stepped in, shelling out $8.5 billion for the company in 2011. Even backed by the world's largest software company, Skype is falling by the wayside. During the pandemic, consumers and business workers turned to tools like Zoom and Meta's WhatsApp, and now there are any number of options to quickly connect with groups of friends and colleagues over smartphones... Microsoft has promoted Skype in Outlook and Windows and even enriched the app with its Bing generative artificial intelligence chatbot. But the numbers still don't look great.

In March 2020, Microsoft said Skype had 40 million daily active users, a number that's since slipped to 36 million, according to a spokesperson. Microsoft's newer Teams communication app, by contrast, is growing in popularity, rising from nearly 250 million monthly users in July 2021 to a record of over 300 million in the first quarter.
Microsoft Teams reached an all-time high of 300 million active users in the second quarter of 2023, according to CNBC's video report. But a research VP at International Data Corp says Microsoft Teams was successful — in taking users away from Skype.

GigaOm's Malik says Microsoft "failed to capitalize on Skype, 100%. Steve Balmer was the king of buying things and not knowing what to do with them... What happened with Skype is the story of every large company with a lot of middle management: they didn't innovate on the product for a very long time."

Jordan Novet from CNBC Business News calls Skype "a product with an uncertain future," arguing that Microsoft "is pouring a lot of engineering resources into making Teams a big destination for communication. It's not doing the same thing with Skype." Could Skype make a comeback? "Anything is possible," Novet concedes. "Microsoft is trying to make Skype happen in a bigger way now." He points out that Skype is now equipped with Bing's AI-powered chatbot, so "You can talk to Bing in Skype. Will that make Skype explode in popularity, or make a comeback? I don't think so."

Microsoft's current head of Skype was not available for CNBC's video. But as a kind of epilogue, they report that Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype's original programmers, now "spends most of his time discussing the dangers of unchecked AI development."

"I don't know what the future holds for Skype..." he tells CNBC. "I'm concerned about humans being wiped out, so it's unlikely that we'll need Skype if that happens."

"A developer brought Clippy back from the dead, giving it new AI powers," writes BGR.

"This unofficial version of Clippy will bring ChatGPT to your computer in the form of Microsoft's infamous Office assistant." You can take advantage of FireCube's unofficial Clippy app. It's available as a free download from the Microsoft Store. The app adds a Clippy icon to your desktop. The unofficial Clippy works both on Windows 10 and Windows 11. Tap on the Clippy icon, and you'll get access to the free ChatGPT 3.5 generative AI bot from OpenAI. It's the same ChatGPT that you load in your browser.
The app "was put on Github only a couple of days ago, with the developer FireCube observing that there are still issues with random crashes," notes TechRadar. "So, stability is likely to be somewhat wonky for the time being, we'd imagine." A further sticking point is that an OpenAI key is required to use this preview version of the Clippy app. If you haven't paid for one of those, you won't be able to fire up Clippy. As noted by the dev, this is one of the most pressing known issues for the application, and FireCube is working on a way around this that'll hopefully be implemented soon enough.

Further work promised in the near future is the ability to drag and resize Clippy, and FireCube aims to bring more classic characters into the mix alongside the paperclip — like Microsoft Bob.

"Picture a world where computing is not limited by the binary confines of zeros and ones, but instead, is free to explore the vast possibilities of continuous value data." That's Microsoft's research blog, describing its newly-developed Analog Iterative Machine, an analog optical computer designed for solving difficult optimization problems.

"For a multidisciplinary group of researchers at the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, U.K., the mission was to build a new kind of computer that would transcend the limitations of the binary systems," says a Microsoft blog post.

Neowin describes it as a computer "that uses photons and electrons, rather than transistors, to process data." Light "passes through several layers, making impressions on each part of what's known as a 'modular array'," writes PC Gamer. "It's this process of projecting light through the array that replaces the function of a standard transistor."

Microsoft says it can "solve practical problems at the speed of light." And "it's already shown potential for surpassing state-of-the art digital (silicon-based) technology," adds TechSpot, "or even the most powerful quantum computers being designed right now." The AIM machine is built using commodity opto-electronic technologies that are low-cost and scalable, Microsoft says, and is based on an "asynchronous data flow architecture" which doesn't require data exchange between storage units and "compute locations."

AIM isn't designed for general purpose computing tasks, though. The analog optical computer is useful to solve difficult "optimization problems" like the well-known travelling salesman riddle, Microsoft says, which are at the heart of many, math-intensive industries including finance, logistics, transportation, energy, healthcare, and manufacturing. When it comes to crunching all the possible combinations of an exponentially growing problem, traditional, digital computers struggle to provide a solution in a "timely, energy-efficient and cost-effective manner."

AIM was conceived to address two simultaneous trends, Microsoft explains, which are sidestepping the unraveling of Moore's Law and overcoming the limitations of specialized machines designed for solving optimization problems... AIM works at the speed of light, and it seemingly provides a 100x increase in performance compared to the most advanced digital approaches available today. For now, AIM is still a research project with limited access for potential customers. The machine, however, is already being tested by UK financial company Barclays, which is using it to track transactions of money into stock purchases.
Microsoft says it's now releasing its "AIM simulator as a service, allowing selected users to get first-hand experience. The initial users are the team's collaborators at Princeton University and at Cambridge University."

VentureBeat is enjoying "secrets that spilled out" in the Microsoft/Activision Blizzard antitrust hearings. "Whether the Federal Trade Commission wins its antitrust case or not, its attempt to stop Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard has revealed a trove of new data for everyone." The FTC has argued in a federal court that the merger would harm competition in the game industry and be bad for consumers, as Microsoft could pull Activision Blizzard's games like Call of Duty away from the Sony PlayStation, despite Microsoft's stated intention of not doing so for at least 10 years. In this case, the FTC might not have had an obvious winning hand, as the industry has an odd situation. Microsoft has the highest value ($104 billion in cash alone, versus $13.4 billion for Sony) at $2.49 trillion as a company compared to $115 billion for Sony, and yet it is in third place behind Sony and Nintendo.

Hence, there's some significance to Microsoft's Xbox first-party head, Matt Booty, sending an ill-advised email in 2019 saying Microsoft "has the ability to spend Sony out of business." That was long before the deal was announced 17 months ago, but it could be used as a sign of intent. Microsoft said it never pursued this strategy. While competing fiercely is fine, using monopoly power to drive a rival out of business so you can raise prices later is a no-no...

Did the FTC prove its case? I can't say just yet. Microsoft makes a decent point in saying all the regulators of the world except the U.S. and the United Kingdom have approved the deal. But I hope to have more reasons to binge on popcorn.
In January Ars Technica noted Microsoft's contract set July 18th as the deadline for closing the deal — or else paying a $3 billion "breakup fee". The Verge spotted that some of Sony's documents were poorly redacted. While looking at the lines that were crossed out with black pens, they could see that The Last of Us Part 2 cost the company $220 million to make, with 200 people working on it, while Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million to make, with 300 working on it for over five years. Both games made considerably more money... In the unSharpied documents, Sony also revealed that a million Call of Duty players spent 100% of their time playing Call of Duty in 2021. It also said that Call of Duty generated $800 million for PlayStation in 2021 alone in the U.S. and perhaps $1.5 billion globally. It also looks like Sony's exclusive marketing deal with Activision for Call of Duty will expire in late 2023. Sony went on to say half of PS5 owners also have a Nintendo Switch.

Microsoft also failed to redact some of its acquisition targets. Those were later marked up, but not before Axios noted that the list included Thunderful, Supergiant Games, Niantic, Playrix, Zynga, Bungie, Square Enix, Warner Bros., Sega, IO Interactive and Scopely... Among the secrets revealed among the companies Microsoft acquired: Microsoft bought Ninja Theory, maker of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, for $117 million.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ole_timer for sharing the news.

VMware has joined AMD, Samsung, and members of the RISC-V community to work on an open and cross-platform framework for the development and operation of applications using confidential computing hardware. The Register reports: Revealing the effort at the Confidential Computing Summit 2023 in San Francisco, the companies say they aim to bring about an industry transition to practical confidential computing by developing the open source Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing project. Among other goals, the project aims to standardize on a set of platform-independent developer APIs that can be used to develop or adapt application code to run in a confidential computing environment, with a Certifier Service overseeing them in operation. VMware claims to have researched, developed and open sourced the Certifier Framework, but with AMD on board, plus Samsung (which develops its own smartphone chips), the group has the x86 and Arm worlds covered. Also on board is the Keystone project, which is developing an enclave framework to support confidential computing on RISC-V processors.

Confidential computing is designed to protect applications and their data from theft or tampering by protecting them inside a secure enclave, or trusted execution environment (TEE). This uses hardware-based security mechanisms to prevent access from everything outside the enclave, including the host operating system and any other application code. Such security protections are likely to be increasingly important in the context of applications running in multi-cloud environments, VMware reckons.

Another scenario for confidential computing put forward by Microsoft, which believes confidential computing will become the norm -- is multi-party computation and analytics. This sees several users each contribute their own private data to an enclave, where it can be analyzed securely to produce results much richer than each would have got purely from their own data set. This is described as an emerging class of machine learning and "data economy" workloads that are based on sensitive data and models aggregated from multiple sources, which will be enabled by confidential computing. However, VMware points out that like many useful hardware features, it will not be widely adopted until it becomes easier to develop applications in the new paradigm.