An anonymous reader shares a post: Google Chrome for Android has a feature that gives Google Search an unfair advantage over its competition. Sure, it's the default search engine and that's a huge hurdle to overcome for any competitor. However, Chrome also reserves a performance-boosting feature for Google Search exclusively. I recently poked around in the Chromium project source code; the open-source foundation for Google's Chrome web browser. The Chromium project is co-developed by Google, and other corporate and individual contributors. The project is managed and controlled by Google, however. I was looking for something else when I stumbled upon a feature called PreconnectToSearch. When enabled, the feature preemptively opens and maintains a connection to the default search engine.

The preconnection feature resolves the domain name, and negotiates and sets up a secure connection to the server. All these things take time and they must happen before the search engine can receive the users' search queries. Preempting these steps can save a dozen seconds on a slow network connection or half a second on a fast connection. This optimization can yield a nice performance boost for Google's customers. Assuming the connection only requires a trivial amount of processing power and network bandwidth, of course. Setting up the connection early can be wasteful or slow down the loading of other pages if the user isn't going to search the web. There's just one small catch: Chromium checks the default search engine setting, and only enables the feature when it's set to Google Search. This preferential treatment means no other search engine can compete with Google Search on the time it takes to load search results. Every competitor must wait until the user has started to type a search query before Chrome will establish a connection.

Microsoft is to give its non-executive staff a $1,500 bonus for their work during the pandemic. From a report: The company told the BBC it was a symbol of appreciation "during a uniquely challenging year." It added: "We are proud to recognise our employees with a one-time monetary gift." In the first quarter of 2021 Microsoft's profits rose 38% on the same period last year. The Verge reported that employees below vice-president level who joined no later than 31 March 2021 would receive the payment, including part-time workers. The big tech firms have done well during the pandemic and Microsoft is not the only firm to have made bonus payments to staff. In March 2020, Facebook gave employees a $1,000 bonus to help them with increased expenses caused by the pandemic, such as those associated with setting up a home office. Google made a similar $1,000 payment in May 2020. In December, Amazon gave front-line employees a $300 dollar bonus with part-time workers receiving $150.

Ministers back down after hundreds of government offices insist banishing fax would be impossible. From a report: Most bureaucrats might be expected to welcome the chance to be freed from the tyranny of the fax machine. But in Japan, government plans to send the must-have item of 1980s office equipment the way of telex have in effect been scrapped after they encountered resistance from "faxophile" officials. A cabinet body that promotes administrative reform said in June it had decided to abolish the use of fax machines "as a rule" by the end of the month and switch to emails at ministries and agencies in the Tokyo district of Kasumigaseki, Japan's bureaucratic nerve centre. The move would enable more people to work from home, it said, citing concerns that too many people were still going to the office during the coronavirus pandemic to send and receive faxes. Exceptions would be made for disaster response and interactions with the public and businesses that had traditionally depended on faxes. Instead of embracing the digital age, however, hundreds of government offices mounted a defence of the much-maligned machine, insisting that banishing them would be "impossible," according to the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper.

The backlash has forced the government to abandon its mission to turn officialdom into a digital-only operation, the newspaper said on Wednesday. Members of the resistance said there were concerns over the security of sensitive information and "anxiety over the communication environment" if, as the government had requested, they switched exclusively to email. Japanese ministries and agencies use faxes when handling highly confidential information, including court procedures and police work, and the Hokkaido Shimbun said there were fears that exclusively online communication would result in security lapses. "Although many ministries and agencies may have stopped using fax machines, I can't say with pride that we managed to get rid of most of them," an official at the cabinet body told the newspaper.

The US Department of Commerce has sanctioned 14 Chinese tech companies over links to human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, including one backed by a top Silicon Valley investment firm. From a report: DeepGlint, also known as Beijing Geling Shentong Information Technology Co., Ltd., is a facial recognition company with deep ties to Chinese police surveillance, and funding from US-based Sequoia Capital. Today the Commerce Department added it to its Entity List, which restricts US companies from doing business with listed firms without a special license. Sequoia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. DeepGlint co-founded a facial recognition lab in 2018 with Chinese authorities in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, according to the South China Morning Post. It has also gained international bragging rights through the US National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Face Recognition Vendor Test. DeepGlint claimed top accuracy in the test as of January 2021, giving it a potent marketing tool in the security and surveillance industry. While DeepGlint has been accepted for a public offering on Shanghai's STAR stock exchange, the firm hasn't seen the commercial success of other AI startups in the country, explained Jeffrey Ding in his ChinAI newsletter last month. Since the firm is so heavily invested in government work, it has to follow slow government procurement cycles and is unlikely to score huge infrastructure projects, Ding writes.

President Biden is signing an executive order Friday urging federal agencies to more aggressively police conduct by Big Tech -- including to more closely review acquisitions that thwart competition. The action comes amid a growing backlash by lawmakers and regulators against massive Silicon Valley firms. From a report: Biden's order doesn't name the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple but the White House says it addresses "areas in which dominant tech firms are undermining competition and reducing innovation," including M&A, data collection and the "right to repair" devices. The order, "Promoting Competition in the American Economy," isn't just aimed at Big Tech. The sweeping set of recommendations also includes provisions targeted at internet service providers -- including an official call to restore net neutrality rules repealed under Trump -- as well as healthcare, agriculture, transportation, and banking and consumer finance. All told, Biden's executive order includes 72 initiatives directed at more than a dozen federal agencies to "promptly tackle some of the most pressing competition problems across our economy," according to a White House press release.

Microsoft awarded $13.6 million to security researchers in the past 12 months, From a report: Microsoft said it awarded more than $13.6 million as monetary rewards to security researchers through its public bug bounty programs over the past 12 months. According to Microsoft:
The funds were awarded for 1,261 bugs reported by 341 security researchers across 17 bug bounty platforms between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021.

The highest awarded bounty was $200,000 for a vulnerability reported in Hyper-V, Microsoft's OS virtualization technology.
The average bounty was more than $10,000 per valid bug report across all programs.
Most bug reports came from researchers residing in China, the US, and Israel.
The company said it plans to announce the 2021 Most Valuable Security Researcher next month.
The sum awarded this year is identical to what Microsoft reported one year ago when the company said it awarded $13.7 million to 327 security researchers for 1,226 vulnerability reports across 15 bug bounty programs in the previous 12 months (July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020).

Motherboard bought an FBI "Anom" phone that the agency secretly sells to criminals to monitor their communications. Joseph Cox reports: The sleek, black phone seems perfectly normal. Unlocking the Google Pixel 4a with a PIN code reveals some common apps: Tinder, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, and even Candy Crush. But none of those apps work, and tapping their icons doesn't do anything. Resetting the phone and typing in another PIN opens up an entirely different section of the device, with a new background and new apps. Now in place of the old apps sit a clock, a calculator, and the device's settings. Clicking the calculator doesn't open a calculator -- it opens a login screen.

"Enter Anom ID" and a password, the screen reads. Hidden in the calculator is a concealed messaging app called Anom, which last month we learned was an FBI honeypot. On Anom, criminals believed they could communicate securely, with the app encrypting their messages. They were wrong: an international group of law enforcement agencies including the FBI were monitoring their messages and announced hundreds of arrests last month. International authorities have held press conferences to tout the operation's success, but have provided few details on how the phones actually functioned.

Motherboard has obtained and analyzed an Anom phone from a source who unknowingly bought one on a classified ads site. On that site, the phone was advertised as just a cheap Android device. But when the person received it, they realized it wasn't an ordinary phone, and after being contacted by Motherboard, found that it contained the secret Anom app. When booting up the phone, it displays a logo for an operating system called "ArcaneOS." Very little information is publicly available on ArcaneOS. It's this detail that has helped lead several people who have ended up with Anom phones to realize something was unusual about their device. Most posts online discussing the operating system appear to be written by people who have recently inadvertently bought an Anom device, and found it doesn't work like an ordinary phone. After the FBI announced the Anom operation, some Anom users have scrambled to get rid of their device, including selling it to unsuspecting people online. The person Motherboard obtained the phone from was in Australia, where authorities initially spread the Anom devices as a pilot before expanding into other countries.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, eight tech companies were accused of funneling their users' data to the U.S. National Security Agency under the so-called PRISM program, according to highly classified government documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Six months later, the tech companies formed a coalition under the name Reform Government Surveillance, which as the name would suggest was to lobby lawmakers for reforms to government surveillance laws. The idea was simple enough: to call on lawmakers to limit surveillance to targeted threats rather than conduct a dragnet collection of Americans' private data, provide greater oversight and allow companies to be more transparent about the kinds of secret orders for user data that they receive.

Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo and AOL were the founding members of Reform Government Surveillance, or RGS, and over the years added Amazon, Dropbox, Evernote, Snap and Zoom as members. But then sometime in June 2019, Evernote quietly disappeared from the RGS website without warning. What's even more strange is that nobody noticed for two years, not even Evernote. "We hadn't realized our logo had been removed from the Reform Government Surveillance website," said an Evernote spokesperson, when reached for comment by TechCrunch. "We are still members."

Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler spent years illegally colluding to slow the deployment of cleaner emissions technology, says the European Union, which is dishing out fines as a result. From a report: The EU's executive branch hit the Volkswagen Group (which owns Audi and Porsche) and BMW with a collective $1 billion fine on Thursday for their role in the scheme. Volkswagen Group must pay $595 million, while BMW will pay $442 million. Daimler, however, evaded a $861 million fine of its own because the automaker revealed the collusion to the regulators.

The scheme described by EU authorities is separate from the Volkswagen Group's massive Dieselgate scandal, in which the company installed software on its diesel vehicles that helped fool environmental regulators into believing they were compliant, when in reality, they were polluting far more than the legal limit. Dieselgate ultimately led to nearly $40 billion in fines, buybacks, and legal fees for the Volkswagen Group. Daimler also installed software on some of its diesel vehicles to cheat emissions tests and has paid billions of dollars in fines. BMW was careful to point out Thursday that, unlike the other companies it was caught colluding with, it had not cheated emissions testing.

A $150 million chip-making tool from a Dutch company has become a lever in the U.S.-Chinese struggle. It also shows how entrenched the global supply chain is. New York Times: President Biden and many lawmakers in Washington are worried these days about computer chips and China's ambitions with the foundational technology. But a massive machine sold by a Dutch company has emerged as a key lever for policymakers -- and illustrates how any country's hopes of building a completely self-sufficient supply chain in semiconductor technology are unrealistic. The machine is made by ASML Holding, based in Veldhoven. Its system uses a different kind of light to define ultrasmall circuitry on chips, packing more performance into the small slices of silicon. The tool, which took decades to develop and was introduced for high-volume manufacturing in 2017, costs more than $150 million. Shipping it to customers requires 40 shipping containers, 20 trucks and three Boeing 747s.

The complex machine is widely acknowledged as necessary for making the most advanced chips, an ability with geopolitical implications. The Trump administration successfully lobbied the Dutch government to block shipments of such a machine to China in 2019, and the Biden administration has shown no signs of reversing that stance. Manufacturers can't produce leading-edge chips without the system, and "it is only made by the Dutch firm ASML," said Will Hunt, a research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, which has concluded that it would take China at least a decade to build its own similar equipment. "From China's perspective, that is a frustrating thing."

Google used anticompetitive practices in an attempt to "preemptively quash" Samsung's Galaxy Store, and prevent it from becoming a viable competitor to its own Play Store. From a report: That's according to an antitrust lawsuit filed by a coalition of three dozen state attorney general, which accuses Google of illegally attempting to control app distribution on Android. The suit also alleges Google paid off app developers to stop them circumventing its store. The allegations challenge one of Google's core defenses of its policies, which is that unlike Apple's iOS rules, Android allows both competing app stores and side-loading apps directly. The lawsuit is effectively claiming that this openness is a facade, because while customers technically have the choice of where to get their apps from, Google's business practices have prevented a viable app store competitor from emerging.

"Google felt deeply threatened when Samsung began to revamp its own app store, the Samsung Galaxy Store," the suit says, and describes Google's approach to the competing store as "a threat it needed to preemptively quash." The suit outlines a range of tactics Google allegedly used to prevent Samsung's store from becoming a viable competitor. It claims Google used revenue share agreements with Android phone manufacturers that "outright prohibited" pre-installing some other app stores, and that it made "a direct attempt to pay Samsung to abandon relationships with top developers and scale back competition through the Samsung Galaxy Store."

The computer code behind the massive ransomware attack by the Russian-speaking hacking ring REvil was written so that the malware avoids systems that primarily use Russian or related languages, according to a new report by a cybersecurity firm. NBC News reports: It's long been known that some malicious software includes this feature, but the report by Trustwave SpiderLabs, obtained exclusively by NBC News, appears to be the first to publicly identify it as an element of the latest attack, which is believed to be the largest ransomware campaign ever. "They don't want to annoy the local authorities, and they know they will be able to run their business much longer if they do it this way," said Ziv Mador, Trustwave SpiderLabs' vice president of security research.

Trustwave said the ransomware "avoids systems that have default languages from what was the USSR region. This includes Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Tajik, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Uzbek, Tatar, Romanian, Russian Moldova, Syriac, and Syriac Arabic." In May, cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs noted that ransomware by DarkSide, the Russia-based group that attacked Colonial Pipeline in May, "has a hard-coded do-not-install list of countries," including Russia and former Soviet satellites that mostly have favorable relations with the Kremlin. In general, criminal ransomware groups are allowed to operate with impunity inside Russia and other former Soviet states as long as they focus their attacks on the United States and the West, experts say. Krebs noted that in some cases, the mere installation of a Russian language virtual keyboard on a computer running Microsoft Windows will cause malware to bypass that machine.

A prenatal test taken by millions of pregnant women globally was developed by Chinese gene company BGI Group in collaboration with the Chinese military and is being used by the firm to collect genetic data, a Reuters review of publicly available documents found. From the report: The report is the first to reveal that the company collaborated with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to develop and improve the test, taken in early pregnancy, as well as the scope of BGI's storage and analysis of the data. The United States sees BGI's efforts to collect and analyze human gene data as a national security threat. China's biggest genomics firm, BGI began marketing the test abroad in 2013. Branded NIFTY, it is among the world's top selling non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT). These screen a sample of blood from a pregnant woman to detect abnormalities such as Down's syndrome in a developing fetus. So far more than 8 million women globally have taken BGI's prenatal tests, BGI has said. NIFTY is sold in at least 52 countries, including Britain, Europe, Canada, Australia, Thailand and India, but not the United States.

BGI uses leftover blood samples sent to its laboratory in Hong Kong and genetic data from the tests for population research, the company confirmed to Reuters. Reuters found the genetic data of over 500 women who took the test, including women in Europe and Asia, is also stored in the government-funded China National GeneBank in Shenzhen, which BGI runs. Reuters found no evidence BGI violated privacy agreements or regulations; the company said it obtains signed consent and destroys overseas samples and data after five years. "At no stage throughout the testing or research process does BGI have access to any identifiable personal data," the company said. However, the test's privacy policy says data collected can be shared when it is "directly relevant to national security or national defense security" in China. BGI said it "has never been asked to provide -- nor provided -- data from its NIFTY tests to Chinese authorities for national security or national defense purposes." "Non-invasive prenatal testing kits marketed by Chinese biotech firms serve an important medical function, but they can also provide another mechanism for the People's Republic of China and Chinese biotech companies to collect genetic and genomic data from around the globe," the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center said.

China's foreign ministry said Reuters' findings reflected "groundless accusations and smears" of U.S. agencies.

The attorneys general of 36 states and Washington, D.C., sued Google "alleging that the company illegally abused its power over developers that distribute apps through the Google Play store on mobile devices," according to Bloomberg. From the report: State attorneys general are targeting the fees Google takes from developers for purchases and subscriptions inside apps. The complaint was filed by 36 states and the District of Columbia in San Francisco federal court Wednesday. The complaint marks a new attack by government officials in the U.S. against the search engine's business practices. The Justice Department and a group of states filed separate complaints over Google's search business last year, while another state coalition sued over Google's digital advertising business. The states are taking on Google even after a federal judge in Washington last week threw out their antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. That case accused Facebook of illegally crushing competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp because it saw them as threats to its business. The judge said the states waited too long to challenge the acquisitions.

Popular benchmark site Geekbench has removed OnePlus 9 benchmarks from its charts due to allegations that the company designed Oxygen OS optimization tools in such a way that they could be viewed as cheating. Android Authority reports: Yesterday, AnandTech posted some information about "weird behavior" it spotted with the OnePlus 9 Pro. According to the team's research, Oxygen OS apparently limits the performance of some popular Android apps -- but none of those apps are benchmark suites. Geekbench, one of the more popular benchmarking sites, took these allegations seriously. After conducting its own investigation, Geekbench recently announced that it has removed all OnePlus 9 benchmarks from its charts. Geekbench, one of the more popular benchmarking sites, took these allegations seriously. After conducting its own investigation, Geekbench recently announced that it has removed all OnePlus 9 benchmarks from its charts. Geekbench called Oxygen OS's behavior a form of "benchmark manipulation." OnePlus has yet to issue a statement on the matter. In some of our own testing, we found that AnandTech's data is on the mark. We found that the OnePlus 9 series limits the performance of Google Chrome while older OnePlus phones do not. OnePlus issued a statement to Android Authority addressing the matter: "Our top priority is always delivering a great user experience with our products, based in part on acting quickly on important user feedback. Following the launch of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro in March, some users told us about some areas where we could improve the devices' battery life and heat management. As a result of this feedback, our R&D team has been working over the past few months to optimize the devices' performance when using many of the most popular apps, including Chrome, by matching the app's processor requirements with the most appropriate power. This has helped to provide a smooth experience while reducing power consumption. While this may impact the devices' performance in some benchmarking apps, our focus as always is to do what we can to improve the performance of the device for our users."

This is reminiscent of when the company was caught pushing the OnePlus 5's performance capabilities when the OS detected a benchmark app. This resulted in artificially inflated scores that users would not see during real-world usage.

A cyber-espionage group has been observed targeting Indian targets with government and military-related lures in a broad campaign to infect victims with malware. From a report: Tracked under the name of SideCopy, this cyber-espionage group has been active since 2019, according to Seqrite, Quick Heal's threat intelligence team, which first documented its spear-phishing campaigns last September. But in a report published today, Cisco Talos, one of the networking giant's cybersecurity divisions, said the group did not retreat or stop its operations after having its attacks and tooling exposed last year.

The University of Oxford this week started vaccinations of a novel HIV vaccine candidate as part of a Phase I clinical trial in the UK. From a report: The goal of the trial, known as HIV-CORE 0052, is to evaluate the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of the HIVconsvX vaccine -- a mosaic vaccine targeting a broad range of HIV-1 variants, making it potentially applicable for HIV strains in any geographical region. Thirteen healthy, HIV-negative adults, aged 18-65 and who are considered not to be at high risk of infection, will initially receive one dose of the vaccine followed by a further booster dose at four weeks. The trial is part of the European Aids Vaccine Initiative (EAVI2020), an internationally collaborative research project funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 health programme for research and innovation.

Professor Tomas Hanke, Professor of Vaccine Immunology at the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford, and lead researcher on the trial, said: 'An effective HIV vaccine has been elusive for 40 years. This trial is the first in a series of evaluations of this novel vaccine strategy in both HIV-negative individuals for prevention and in people living with HIV for cure.' While most HIV vaccine candidates work by inducing antibodies generated by B-cells, HIVconsvX induces the immune system's potent, pathogen obliterating T cells, targeting them to highly conserved and therefore vulnerable regions of HIV -- an "Achilles heel" common to most HIV variants.

If you use an iPhone or Android phone, chances are the majority of your most-used apps were made by Apple and Google. From a report: That's the takeaway from a new Comscore study that ranks the popularity of preinstalled iOS and Android apps, such as Apple's Messages, alongside apps made by other developers. The results show that the majority of apps people use on their phones in the US come preinstalled by either Apple or Google. The first-of-its-kind report was commissioned by Facebook, one of Apple's loudest critics, and shared exclusively with The Verge. Preinstalled services dominate when it comes to basics like weather, photos, and clocks, according to the report, suggesting these categories will be difficult for other apps to compete in. Defaults don't win out exclusively, though: Apple Maps and Music don't appear on the iOS list at all, and Gmail makes the iOS list several entries below Apple Mail.

The timing, as Facebook likely intentioned, is apt: Apple and Google are increasingly under scrutiny for how they favor their own services over competitors like Spotify. US lawmakers are currently reviewing a new set of bills designed to curb the power of Big Tech, including legislation that could potentially bar Apple and Google from giving their services the upper hand against rivals. The pushback stems from how Apple and Google bundle their apps and services with their mobile operating systems in ways that some of their competitors think is unfair. The criticism is harsher against Apple, given that it more tightly controls the apps that come preinstalled on the iPhone and doesn't allow developers to circumvent its App Store.

According to the Financial Times, Croatian electric supercar startup Rimac Automobili is taking over Bugatti. Rimac will own a controlling 55% share in the new company, Bugatti-Rimac, with VW's Porsche owning the remaining 45%. TechCrunch reports: "Rimac and Bugatti are a perfect match in terms of what we each bring to the table," said founder and CEO of Rimac, Mate Rimac, in a statement. "As a young, agile and fast-paced automotive and technology company, we have established ourselves as an industry pioneer in electric technologies. With the Nevera, we have also proven that we can develop and manufacture outstanding hypercars, that are not only fast but also exciting and high-quality. Bugatti, with over a century of experience in engineering excellence, also possesses one of the most exceptional heritage of any car company in history." The company recently unveiled the Nevera, a hypercar powered by a 120kWh battery pack and four motors to achieve a staggering 1.4MW of power, which is about 1,914 horsepower. It can go from 0 to 60 mph in 1.85 seconds and has a top speed of 258 mph. The Nevera is expected to be the fastest sports car, a spot previously held by the Bugatti Chiron's.

Rimac's meteoric rise from bootstrapping in a garage in 2009 to building supercars with one of the most desirable and well-known car brands demonstrates how electric vehicles are beginning to take over the luxury and sports car market. It's not just about doing what's right for the environment -- it's about pioneering speed in the future of automobiles. Along with this announcement, Rimac said it would separate the development, production and supply of battery systems, drivetrains and other EV components into a new entity owned by Rimac Group called Rimac Technology, which will work independently with other global car manufacturers.

Microsoft has suspended its SQL Server on Windows Container beta "with immediate effect." The Register reports: The statement yesterday (early on a US public holiday) by Microsoft senior program manager Amit Khandelwal said: "Due to the existing ecosystem challenges and usage patterns we have decided to suspend the SQL Server on Windows Containers beta program for foreseeable future. Should the circumstances change, we will revisit the decision at appropriate time." Ecosystem challenges? Microsoft introduced Windows Server Containers in Windows Server 2016, enlisting the support of Docker so that developers could easily deploy containerised Windows applications in a similar manner to Linux. Windows containers are important to the company, used in its Application Guard security feature, which opens untrusted websites and Office documents in an isolated Hyper-V container. Containers were a key component of the abandoned Windows 10X.
[...]
The beta program for SQL Server on Windows containers began in 2017, said [Microsoft senior program manager Amit Khandelwal], which is a while back, and the fact that it has not hit general availability probably comes as no surprise to its relatively few users. That said, Microsoft has also decided to delete the Windows SQL Server images in the Docker Hub repository immediately, which did not go down well. "Could you please not delete those repos and images? That is going to break stuff. Folks have builds that depend on these images. At least give some warning rather than 'immediate effect,'" pleaded developer David Gardiner. Khandelwal replied saying that these container images were now three years old and "we do want any new users and customers downloading it." Since it was a beta, not supported in production, customers used it at their own risk.

In July 2019, Microsoft introduced an Early Adopters Program for SQL Server 2019 on Windows containers, the link for which leads appropriately to "Error 403 -- this web app is stopped." SQL Server running directly on Windows or in a Windows VM remains, of course, in rude health. Microsoft also recently introduced a preview of SQL Server for Azure Arc, supporting both Windows and Linux instances.