Razer today unveiled Project Motoko, a concept pair of over-ear headphones equipped with dual cameras that the gaming peripherals company believes could serve as an alternative to the smart glasses that have proliferated across the wearable AI market. The headphones feature two 4K cameras positioned on the earcups along with near and far field microphones, all powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. Users can point the cameras at objects and ask questions to AI assistants including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Microsoft.

Basic queries run locally on the device while more complex requests require a phone or PC connection. Razer's pitch centers on battery life: the wireless headset has achieved up to 36 hours on a charge during testing, according to the company, compared to the eight hours rated for Meta's second-generation Ray-Ban AI glasses. The company also argues that over-ear headphones offer more privacy since audio responses aren't audible to bystanders.

The concept remains unfinished, Bloomberg News cautioned. During a product demonstration, the headset's dual cameras failed occasionally to recognize objects even in a moderately lit room. Razer has not committed to final pricing but indicated the headphones would command a "slight premium" over other high-end headphones and would be available later this year. The company's most expensive current headset costs $400.

Longtime reader joshuark shares a report: As spotted by Bluesky user DodgerFanLA, going to Office.com now greets you with the following helpful explainer: "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) lets you create, share, and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps now including Copilot.*"

Never has an asterisk been more relevant to me than following the words "your favorite apps now including Copilot."

About a decade ago, hardware company Corsair attempted to pivot from its classic logo -- a subtle trio of ship sails -- to a newer, edgier look, a pair of crossed swords that gave off regrettable '2000s tribal tattoo' energy. The rebrand didn't last long: after a fierce outcry from people who correctly thought the new logo sucked, Corsair swapped to a refreshed take on the sail logo, which it's been using ever since. Corsair was established in 1994, and made about $1.4 billion last year -- which I bring up because today Microsoft, a slightly bigger company, has slipped on its own rebranding banana peel. The company is seemingly all but ditching the Office name -- which it introduced four years before Corsair existed, and which drove more than $30 billion in revenue just last quarter -- with a catchy new name: "Microsoft 365 Copilot app."

The company had already downplayed the Office name, despite it being perhaps the most universally recognized software in existence, by renaming its cloud version of Word, Powerpoint, etc. Office 365 in 2010, then Microsoft 365 in 2017. Now when you want to open up a Word document, you can get to them by launching the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Intuitive!

Should Microsoft just go ahead and rebrand Windows, the only piece of its arsenal more famous than Office, as Copilot, too? I do actually think we're not far off from that happening. Facebook rebranded itself "Meta" when it thought the metaverse would be the next big thing, so it seems just as plausible that Microsoft could name the next version of Windows something like "Windows with Copilot" or just "Windows AI."

Copilot is the app for launching the other apps, but it's also a chatbot inside the apps. Any questions? Correction: Office hasn't been renamed to "Microsoft 365 Copilot app." The Verge adds: The confusion comes from Microsoft's own Office.com domain, which for the past year has acted as a way to push businesses and consumers to use the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. This app is a hub app that provides access to Copilot, as well as all the Office apps. Microsoft used to call this app simply Office, before the company rebranded Office to Microsoft 365 in 2022.

If you visit Office.com you'll see a big welcome to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, and a note from Microsoft that would confuse anyone not following the company's confusing branding: "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)..." That mention of "formerly Office" is Microsoft referring to the very old Office app that launched in 2019 as a way to try and convince people to use online versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Until a year ago it used to be called the Microsoft 365 app. Microsoft then announced it was rebranding its Microsoft 365 app in November 2024 to a Copilot one, which I and everyone else were very confused at. The new app icon and name -- Microsoft 365 Copilot -- then rolled out on January 15th last year to Windows, iOS, and Android users.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Popular AI-powered integrated development environment solutions, such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity, and Trae, recommend extensions that are non-existent in the OpenVSX registry, allowing threat actors to claim the namespace and upload malicious extensions.

These AI-assisted IDEs are forked from Microsoft VSCode, but cannot use the extensions in the official store due to licensing restrictions. Instead, they are supported by OpenVSX, an open-source marketplace alternative for VSCode-compatible extensions. As a result of forking, the IDEs inherit the list of officially recommended extensions, hardcoded in the configuration files, which point to Microsoft's Visual Studio Marketplace.

Microsoft has started testing a "significant" visual overhaul for Edge in its Canary and Dev Channel preview builds, and the redesigned interface borrows heavily from the design language that first appeared in the company's standalone Copilot app rather than the Fluent Design system used across Windows 11, Xbox, and Office.

The updated look touches context menus, the new tab page and settings areas, introducing rounder corners and the same color palette and typography found in Copilot. The new interface appears regardless of whether users have Copilot Mode enabled, though the new tab page reverts to MSN news articles and Bing search when Copilot Mode is turned off.

Edge is not alone in this shift, Windows Central writes. Microsoft is also applying the Copilot design language to Copilot Discover, an AI-powered version of MSN.com that may be internally codenamed "Ruby." Windows and Xbox have not yet received similar treatment. The rollout remains uneven -- the refreshed UI is not appearing on all test machines -- and production releases are likely weeks away. If Microsoft continues down this path, Copilot, MSN and Edge will share a visual identity that looks noticeably different from the rest of the company's software lineup, the publication adds.

"Microsoft is hoping that Windows can once again serve as the platform where it all takes off," reports GeekWire: A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced in December as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through what's known as a manifest, which then lets the agent show up in the Windows taskbar, inside Microsoft Copilot, and across other apps... "We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe tools use," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a blog post this week looking ahead to 2026. "This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to build to get value out of AI in the real world...." [The article notes Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude will also offer desktop-style agentsthrough browsers and native apps, while Amazon is developing "frontier agents" for automating business processes in the cloud.]

But Microsoft's Windows team is betting that agents tightly linked to the operating system will win out over ones that merely run on top of it, just as a new class of Windows apps replaced a patchwork of DOS programs in the early days of the graphical operating system. Microsoft 365 Copilot is using the Agent Launchers framework for first-party agents like Analyst, which helps users dig into data, and Researcher, which builds detailed reports. Software developers will be able to register their own agents when an app is installed, or on the fly based on things like whether a user is signed in or paying for a subscription...

Agents are meant to maintain this context across apps, ask follow-up questions, and take actions on a user's behalf. That requires a different level of trust than Windows has ever had to manage, which is already raising difficult questions for the company. Microsoft acknowledges that agents introduce unique security risks. In a support document, the company warned that malicious content embedded in files or interface elements could override an agent's instructions — potentially leading to stolen data or malware installation. To address this, Microsoft says it has built a security framework that runs agents in their own contained workspace, with a dedicated user account that has limited access to user folders. The idea is to create a boundary between the agent and what the rest of the system can access. The agentic features are off by default, and Microsoft is advising users to "understand the security implications of enabling an agent on your computer" before turning them on...

There is a business reality driving all of this. In Microsoft's most recent fiscal year, Windows and Devices generated $17.3 billion in revenue — essentially flat for the past three years. That's less than Gaming ($23.5 billion) and LinkedIn ($17.8 billion), and a fraction of the $98 billion in revenue from Azure and cloud services or the nearly $88 billion from Microsoft 365 commercial.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Neowin: Offline Windows activation has been possible to do using the phone. However, it looks like Microsoft has quietly killed off that method as users online have found that they are no longer able to activate the OS using it... [As documented by Windows user Ben Kleinberg on his YouTube channel], Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"

If you are wondering, that link takes users to the Microsoft Product Activation Portal for online activation. Thus it appears that offline ways to activate Windows may no longer be available even though the official support documentation by the company may not reflect it yet.

"While a growing number of U.S. employers are mandating workers return to the office five days a week," reports the Washington Post, "some companies say AI is saving them enough time to launch or sustain a four-day workweek.

"More companies may move toward a shortened workweek, several executives and researchers predict, as workers, especially those in younger generations, continue to push for better work-life balance." And "several companies — especially those with a largely remote workforce — have adjusted their work rhythm after delegating many tasks to AI..." AI "has such a potential to have so much labor savings, you'll see firms shift to a four-day week in an evolutionary way," said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who has studied the subject. "There's enough social consensus that people are exhausted and stressed...." Small and medium businesses often adopt shortened workweeks to compete with big salaries for new hires and retention, Schor said. That's how Peak PEO, a London-based service that helps companies expand globally with teams in different locations, thought about its strategy... CEO Alex Voakes said that job openings that used to get two applications jumped to 350 after the change.
"Some of the world's most influential business leaders have publicly suggested the shift may be inevitable," adds Fortune: Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has said advancing technology could eventually push the workweek down to just three-and-a-half days. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has gone further, openly questioning whether a two-day workweek could be the future. Elon Musk has taken the idea to its logical extreme, positing that the need to work altogether could cease... Tech innovation could "probably" lead to a transition toward four-day workweeks, [Nvidia CEO Jensen] Huang said on Fox Business in August...

The tech industry needs to move "beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication" and develop a new "theory of the mind" that accounts for humans now equipped with "cognitive amplifier tools," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a year-end reflection blog. The post frames 2026 as yet another "pivotal year for AI" -- but one that "feels different in a few notable ways." Nadella claims the industry has moved past the initial discovery phase and is now "beginning to distinguish between 'spectacle' and 'substance.'" He argues for evolving beyond Steve Jobs' famous "bicycles for the mind" framing, positioning AI instead as "scaffolding" for human potential rather than a substitute.

"We will evolve from models to systems when it comes to deploying AI for real world impact," Nadella writes, adding that these systems must consider their societal impact on people and the planet. "For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact."

President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon's cloud computing systems. From a report: The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the Defense Department's computer systems for nearly a decade -- a practice that left some of the country's most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary.

U.S.-based supervisors, known as "digital escorts," were supposed to serve as a check on these foreign employees, but we found they often lacked the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills. In the wake of the reporting, leading members of Congress called on the Defense Department to strengthen its security requirements while blasting Microsoft for what some Republicans called "a national betrayal." Cybersecurity and intelligence experts have told ProPublica that the arrangement posed major risks to national security, given that laws in China grant the country's officials broad authority to collect data.

Nokia, the Finnish company whose iconic ringtone was played an estimated 1.8 billion times daily at the height of its mobile phone dominance and whose 3310 "brick" sold 126 million units, has reinvented itself again -- this time as a key piece of AI infrastructure. In October, Nvidia announced a $1 billion investment in Nokia and a strategic partnership to incorporate AI into telecommunications networks.

The company that was once worth $335 billion and controlled more than a quarter of the global handset market seemed destined for irrelevance after the iPhone's 2007 arrival. A last-ditch bet on Microsoft's Windows phone system in 2011 failed, and Nokia sold its devices division to Microsoft for $6.34 billion in 2014. Revenues had fallen from $44.27 billion in 2007 to $12.56 billion. Nokia rebuilt around its $2 billion acquisition of Siemens' networks stake in 2013, then added French network provider Alcatel-Lucent for $18.32 billion in 2015.

Current CEO Justin Hotard, who took over in April, has pushed the company further into cloud services, data centers and optical networks. Nokia acquired optical specialist Infinera for $2.3 billion in February. The company's optical technology enables information to pass between data centers, and it produces routers for cloud-based services.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cyber Press: A newly uncovered Chinese threat group, DarkSpectre, has been linked to one of the most widespread browser-extension malware operations to date, compromising more than 8.8 million users of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera over the past seven years. According to research by Koi.ai, the group operates three interconnected campaigns: ShadyPanda, GhostPoster, and a newly identified one named The Zoom Stealer, forming a single, strategically organized operation.

DarkSpectre's structure differs from that of ordinary cybercrime operations. The group runs separate but interconnected malware clusters, each with distinct goals. The ShadyPanda campaign, responsible for 5.6 million infections, focuses on long-term user surveillance and e-commerce affiliate fraud. Its extensions have appeared legitimate for years, offering new tab pages and translation utilities, before secretly downloading malicious configurations from command-and-control servers such as jt2x.com and infinitynewtab.com. Once activated, they inject remote scripts, hijack search results, and track browsing activity.

The second campaign, GhostPoster, spreads via Firefox and Opera extensions that conceal malicious payloads in PNG images via steganography. After lying dormant for several days, the extensions extract and execute JavaScript hidden within images, enabling stealthy remote code execution. This campaign has affected over one million users and relies on domains like gmzdaily.com and mitarchive.info for payload delivery.

The most recent discovery, The Zoom Stealer, exposes around 2.2 million users to corporate espionage. These extensions masquerade as productivity tools or video downloaders while secretly harvesting corporate meeting links, credentials, and speaker profiles from more than 28 video conferencing platforms, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. The extensions use real-time WebSocket connections to exfiltrate data to Firebase databases, such as zoocorder.firebaseio.com, and to Google Cloud functions, such as webinarstvus.cloudfunctions.net.

The six-decade flow of highly skilled Indian immigrants to the United States -- a migration pattern that produced some of the country's highest-earning households, several Nobel laureates, and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Pepsi -- appears to be grinding to a halt amid rising anti-Indian rhetoric from Republican officials and chaos in the visa system, according to New York Times.

Indian student arrivals at American universities fell 44% this year, even as Indians had just become the largest contingent of foreign students the previous year. The decline comes as top Trump administration officials have publicly accused Indian immigrants of gaming the system. Stephen Miller, the architect of the president's immigration crackdown, declared on Fox News that Indians "engage in a lot of cheating on immigration policies that is very harmful to American workers." Governor Ron DeSantis called the H-1B visa program "chain migration run amok."

The hostility extends beyond policy circles. At a Hindu temple in Sugar Land, Texas, conservative Christian protesters gathered during the dedication of a 90-foot Hanuman statue, calling the deity "a demon god." A U.S. Senate candidate wrote on social media: "Why are we allowing a false statue of a false Hindu God to be here in Texas? We are a CHRISTIAN nation." Indian Americans' median household income significantly outstrips that of white Americans, and about three-quarters hold at least a college degree. Foreign students have earned more engineering and computer science doctorates than American citizens and permanent residents for over two decades, according to the National Science Foundation. American tech giants have announced $67.5 billion in new investments in India in just the past few months.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is "reliving some of the best moments for Fedora Linux in 2025" by highlighting the year's most popular news around the distro. Throughout 2025, Fedora continued to lead upstream Linux innovation with bold changes like Wayland-only GNOME, newer kernels, architecture cleanups, and experimental features -- while openly grappling with controversial shifts such as dropping 32-bit support and modernizing long-standing subsystems.

"Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world," writes Larabel. "Fedora enjoyed the successful Fedora 42 and Fedora 43 releases this year, including going with Wayland-noly GNOME and further phasing of 32-bit packages. Fedora's KDE spin continued improving too and the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution enjoyed a wealth of other improvements this year."

Windows 10's formal end-of-support arrived in October, and while the operating system is generally remembered as one of the "good" versions of Windows -- the most widely used since XP -- many of the annoyances people complain about in Windows 11 actually started during the Windows 10 era, ArsTechnica writes.

Windows 10 earned its positive reputation primarily by not being Windows 8. It restored a version of the traditional Start menu, rolled out as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and 8 users, and ran on virtually all the same hardware as those older versions. Microsoft introduced the Windows Subsystem for Linux during this period and eventually rebuilt Edge on Chromium. The company seemed more willing to meet users where they were rather than forcing them to change their behavior.

But Windows 10 also began collecting more information about how users interacted with the operating system, cluttered the lock screen with advertisements and news articles, and added third-party app icons to the Start menu without user consent. The mandatory Microsoft Account sign-in requirement -- one of Windows 11's most frequently complained-about features -- was a Windows 10 innovation, easier to circumvent at the time but clearly a step down the road Windows 11 is currently traveling.

To be sure, Windows 11 has made things worse by stacking new irritants on top of old ones. The Microsoft Account requirement expanded to both Home and Pro editions, the SCOOBE screen now regularly nags users to "finish setting up" years-old installations and Microsoft's Copilot push changed the default PC keyboard layout for the first time in 30 years.

About 60 workers in Halifax, Nova Scotia have formed Ubisoft's first union in North America, reports the CBC (though its 17,000 employees include some unionized workforces in other parts of the world): T.J. Gillis, a senior server developer at Ubisoft Halifax, says he became increasingly concerned about the growth of artificial intelligence in the industry and after the closure of a Microsoft gaming studio in Halifax, Alpha Dog, in 2024. "We're seeing a ton of studios, especially larger studios, just letting people go with no unions or support, people were just being left to fend for themselves. Often times having to leave industry," said Gillis.

Gillis said he got into contact with CWA Canada to begin efforts to build a union with other colleagues... The union was formed six months after filing union certification and after 74 per cent of staff at Ubisoft Halifax voted to join CWA Canada... A spokesperson for Ubisoft said in a statement to CBC News that they "acknowledge the decision issued by the Nova Scotia Labour Board and reaffirm our commitment to maintaining full cooperation with the Board and union representatives."

Carmel Smyth is the president of CWA Canada and says she is already hearing from other employees at tech companies who want to follow Ubisoft Halifax's lead.

The Register reports on challenges facing Europe's pursuit of "digital sovereignty": The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... Furthermore, these warrants often come with a gag order, legally prohibiting the provider from informing their customer that their data has been accessed. This renders any contractual clauses requiring transparency or notification effectively meaningless. While technical measures like encryption are often proposed as a solution, their effectiveness depends entirely on who controls the encryption keys. If the US provider manages the keys, as is common in many standard cloud services, they can be forced to decrypt the data for authorities, making such safeguards moot....

American hyperscalers have recognized the market demand for sovereignty and now aggressively market 'sovereign cloud' solutions, typically by placing datacenters on European soil or partnering with local operators. Critics call this 'sovereignty washing'... [Cristina Caffarra, a competition economistand driving force behind the Eurostack initiative] warns that this does not resolve the fundamental problem. "A company subject to the extraterritorial laws of the United States cannot be considered sovereign for Europe," she says. "That simply doesn't work." Because, as long as the parent company is American, it remains subject to the CLOUD Act...

Even when organizations make deliberate choices in favour of European providers, those decisions can be undone by market forces. A recent acquisition in the Netherlands illustrates this risk. In November 2025, the American IT services giant Kyndryl announced its intention to acquire Solvinity, a Dutch managed cloud provider. This came as an "unpleasant surprise" to several of its government clients, including the municipality of Amsterdam and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. These bodies had specifically chosen Solvinity to reduce their dependence on American firms and mitigate CLOUD Act risks.
Still, The Register provides several examples of government systems that are "taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT."

• Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism now has 1,200 employees on the European open-source collaboration platform Nextcloud, leading several other Austrian ministries to also implement Nextcloud. (The Ministry's CISO tells the Register "We can see our input in Nextcloud releases. That is a feeling we never had with Microsoft.")

• France's Ministry of Economics and Finance recently completed NUBO (which the Register describes as "an OpenStack-based private cloud initiative designed to handle sensitive data and services.")

• In November the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced it was replacing its Microsoft office software with a European alternative.

• The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is replacing Microsoft products with open-source alternatives for 30,000 civil servants

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

Phoronix reports on "an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list" proposing "a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the 'Modern Standby' functionality found with Microsoft Windows..." Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain connected to the network and appear "sleeping" but will allow for instant wake-up for notifications, music playback, and other functionality. The display is off, the network remains online, and background tasks can wake-up the system if needed with Microsoft Modern Standby...

"This series introduces a new runtime standby ABI to allow firing Modern Standby firmware notifications that modify hardware appearance from userspace without suspending the kernel," [according to the email about the proposed patch series]. "This allows userspace to set the inactivity state of the device so that it looks like it is asleep (e.g., flashing the power button) while still being able to perform basic computations..."

Those interested can see the RFC patch series for the work in its current form, in particular the documentation patch outlines the proposed /sys/power/standby interface.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A typosquatted domain impersonating the Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) tool was used to distribute malicious PowerShell scripts that infect Windows systems with the 'Cosmali Loader'. BleepingComputer has found that multiple MAS users began reporting on Reddit yesterday that they received pop-up warnings on their systems about a Cosmali Loader infection.

Based on the reports, attackers have set up a look-alike domain, "get[dot]activate[dot]win," which closely resembles the legitimate one listed in the official MAS activation instructions, "get[dot]activated[dot]win." Given that the difference between the two is a single character ("d"), the attackers bet on users mistyping the domain.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: It's harder than ever to mine bitcoin. And less profitable, too. But mining-company stocks are still flying, even with cryptocurrency prices in retreat. That's because these firms have something in common with the hottest investment theme on the planet: the massive, electricity-hungry data centers expected to power the artificial-intelligence boom. Some companies are figuring out how to remake themselves as vital suppliers to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and other "hyperscalers" bent on AI dominance.

Bitcoin-mining -- using vast computer power to solve equations to unlock the digital currency -- has been a lucrative and cutting-edge pursuit in its own right. Lately, however, increased competition and other challenges have eroded profit margins. But just as the bitcoin-mining business began to cool, the AI build-out turned white hot. The AI arms race has created an insatiable demand for some assets the miners already have: data centers, cooling systems, land and hard-to-obtain contracts for electrical power -- all of which can be repurposed to train and power AI models.

It's not a seamless process. Miners often have to build new, specialized facilities, because running AI requires more-advanced cooling and network systems, as well as replacing bitcoin-mining computers with AI-focused graphics processing units. But signing deals with miners allows AI giants to expand faster and cheaper than starting new facilities from scratch. These companies still mine some bitcoin, but the transition gives miners a new source of deep-pocketed customers willing to commit to longer-term leases for their data centers.

"The opportunity for miners to convert to AI is one of the greatest opportunities I could possibly imagine," said Adam Sullivan, chief executive of Core Scientific, which has pivoted to AI data centers. The shift has boosted miners' stocks. The CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF has surged about 90% this year, a rally that has accelerated even as bitcoin erased its gains for 2025. The ETF holds shares of miners including Cipher Mining and IREN, both of which have surged following long-term deals with companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. Shares of Core Scientific quadrupled in 2024 after the company signed its first AI contract that February. The stock has gained 10% this year. The company now expects to exit bitcoin mining entirely by 2028.

Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company's goal was to "eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030."

Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for several large-scale research projects at Microsoft, made the claim in what was originally a hiring post for his team. His original wording described a "North Star" of "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code" and outlined a strategy to "combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases." The repeated use of "our" in the post led many to interpret it as an official company direction rather than a personal research ambition.

Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft's head of communications, told Windows Latest that the company has no such plans. Hunt subsequently edited his LinkedIn post to clarify that "Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI" and that his team's work is a research project focused on building technology to enable language-to-language migration. He characterized the reaction as "speculative reading between the lines."