Microsoft completed its $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard after a nearly two-year fight with global regulators threatened to scuttle the deal. From a report: The biggest-ever acquisition in the video game industry gives the maker of Xbox consoles a more formidable position against rivals, vaulting it from fifth to third place globally, behind Tencent Holdings and Sony Group. The acquisition is a stunning turnaround after Microsoft executives underestimated the magnitude and longevity of antitrust objections, forcing the software giant to seek a three-month extension of the deal's expiration period from Activision.

Microsoft was able to close after making alterations to its merger agreement to win over UK authorities. The US Federal Trade Commission, which lost an attempt to block the transaction in court, continues to pursue legal action in its own administrative hearing. That could still force the two companies to unwind the deal if the commission is successful. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority announced on Friday that it had approved the deal after accepting a restructuring plan involving selling some gaming rights to French publisher Ubisoft Entertainment SA. The regulator was concerned about preserving competition in the nascent market for games streamed via the cloud.

French technology company Shadow has confirmed a data breach involving customers' personal information. TechCrunch: The Paris-headquartered startup, which offers gaming through its cloud-based PC service, said in an email to customers this week that hackers had accessed their personal information after a successful social engineering attack targeted the company. "At the end of September, we were the victim of a social engineering attack targeting one of our employees," Shadow CEO Eric Sele said in the email, seen by TechCrunch. "This highly sophisticated attack began on the Discord platform with the downloading of malware under cover of a game on the Steam platform, proposed by an acquaintance of our employee, himself a victim of the same attack."

Shadow said that though its security team took unspecified "immediate action," the hackers were able to connect to the management interface of one of the company's software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to obtain customers' private data. That data includes full names, email addresses, dates of birth, billing addresses and credit card expiry dates. Shadow says no passwords or sensitive banking data were compromised.

Google said on Thursday that it will defend users of generative AI systems in its Google Cloud and Workspace platforms if they are accused of intellectual property violations, joining Microsoft, Adobe and other companies that have made similar pledges. From a report: Major technology companies like Google have been investing heavily in generative AI and racing to incorporate it into their products. Prominent writers, illustrators and other copyright owners have said in several lawsuits that both the use of their work to train the AI systems and the content the systems create violate their rights. "To our knowledge, Google is the first in the industry to offer a comprehensive, two-pronged approach to indemnity" that specifically covers both types of claims, a company spokesperson said. Google said its new policy applies to software, including its Vertex AI development platform and Duet AI system, which generates text and images in Google Workspace and Cloud programs.

After Microsoft recently imposed storage limits for photos in a user's OneDrive account, Microsoft has now reversed course after receiving a barrage of backlash. From a report: In August, Microsoft announced that photos in a user's OneDrive Gallery and in each of their saved photo albums would count separately toward the company's cloud-based limit of five gigabytes, according to Neowin. The update was expected to roll out on October 16, which would force some users to encounter storage ceilings as the extra data was added to their OneDrive, preventing additional files from syncing. Customers were surprised by the abrupt policy change, so surprised in fact that the company caved to user backlash and recently announced that the change was no longer on the table.

"On August 31, 2023, we began to communicate an upcoming update to our cloud storage infrastructure that would result in a change in how OneDrive photos and photo albums data is counted against your overall cloud storage quota," Microsoft said in an email to customers, which has also been posted to the company's Support page. "This change was scheduled to start rolling out on October 16, 2023. Based on the feedback we received, we have adjusted our approach, we will no longer roll out this update."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: As part of its MAX conference, Adobe traditionally shows off some of its more forward-looking tech, which may or may not end up in its Creative Cloud apps at some point in the future. The idea here is to show what its engineers are working on; right now, as you can imagine, that's a lot of generative AI. With Firefly now being part of Photoshop and now also Illustrator, the next frontier here is video and unsurprisingly, that's where Adobe's most interesting "sneak" of this year comes in. Project Fast Fill is, at its core, the generative fill the company introduced in Photoshop, but for video.

Project Fast Fill simply lets editors remove objects from a video or change backgrounds as if they were working with a still image, all with a simple text prompt. Users only have to do this once and the edit will then propagate to the rest of the scene. Adobe says this even works in very complex scenes with changing lighting conditions. Over the course of the last few months, we've seen an increase in AI-powered tools across video editors, including Adobe Premiere Pro competitors like Davinci Resolve. These typically start with voice recognition for captions and object recognition for masking, but generative fill may just be the kind of feature where Adobe has a major advantage, thanks to its work on building its own Firefly models.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced plans to launch cloud streaming for PlayStation 5 this month. From a report: The feature, which will be available to PlayStation Plus Premium members, will receive a staggered rollout. Sony is targeting an October 17 launch for Japan, October 23 for Europe and October 30 for North America. "Select PS5 games will be available for streaming, and we're planning to have hundreds of PS5 titles to support this new benefit," said Hideaki Nishino, SIE's senior VP of platform experience.

Supported titles will include Game Catalogue offerings like Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Tsushima, Mortal Kombat 11 and Saints Row IV. Some PS5 digital titles that players own will be available for streaming too including Resident Evil 4, Dead Island 2, Genshin Impact, Fall Guys and Fortnite. Game Trials for PS5 titles like Hogwarts Legacy, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and The Calisto Protocol will also be available. Sony said DLC and in-game purchases will be available for PS5 game streaming too.

Hell freezes over and pigs fly south to their winter feeding grounds. Microsoft has published guidance on how to download and install Linux. From a report: The Seattle-area proprietary OS vendor has published a helpful guide entitled "How to download and install Linux," inspiring reactions from incredulity to amusement. In the humble opinion of The Reg FOSS Desk, it really isn't bad at all. Microsoft suggests four alternative installation methods: using Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, using a local VM, using a cloud VM, or on bare metal. It almost feels cruel to criticize it, but it seems that this really amounts to two methods. WSL version 2 is a VM. It's right there in the screenshots, where it says:

Installing: Virtual Machine Platform
Virtual Machine Platform has been installed.

So the choices boil down to either on the metal, or in a VM. That leaves only the question of what kind of VM: the built-in one, an add-on VM, or a cloud VM. Perhaps the subtext of the article is something more subtle. Could it be a tacit admission that you might need a free-of-charge OS for your PC? The Windows 10 upgrade program that began back in 2015 was meant to end a year later. In fact, it didn't. We described a documented workaround in 2016, but the free upgrades continued to work, even in 2020. Which? magazine reported it was still working in July 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Here's how your computer should work, according to Mustafa Abdelhai, the co-founder and CEO of a startup called Deta. Instead of a big empty screen full of icons, your desktop should be an infinite canvas on which you can take notes or watch movies or run full apps just by drawing a rectangle on the screen. Instead of logging in to a bunch of cloud services over which you ultimately have no control, you should be able to download software like PC users did 20 years ago, and the stuff you download should be completely yours. All your apps should talk to each other, so you can move data between them or even use multiple apps' features simultaneously. You should be able to use AI to accomplish almost anything. And it should all happen in a browser tab.

For the last couple of years, the Berlin-based Deta has been building what it calls "the personal cloud computer." The product Deta is launching today is called Space OS, and the way Abdelhai explains it, it's the first step in putting the personal back in the personal computer. "Personal computing took a dive at the turn of the century," he says, "when cloud computing became the big thing. We all moved to the cloud, moved our data, and we don't own it anymore. It's just somebody else's computer." Deta wants to give it back. [...]

Deta's idea is both a very new one and a very old one. It harkens back to the early days of computers when you bought software in a box at a store and installed it on your computer. The cloud era, of course, made computing vastly easier and more powerful but also systematically ate away at the idea that you could control anything on your devices. It's an interesting thought experiment, actually: if every cloud service shut down tomorrow, what would be left on your phone or your laptop? Odds are, not much. Deta's trying to undo that a bit, to embrace the cloud and the expansive universe of apps while giving you back the feeling that your computer -- and everything on it -- is yours and no one else's. Because your computer should be yours -- even if it's on somebody's server.

wiredmikey writes: A zero-day vulnerability named 'HTTP/2 Rapid Reset' has been exploited by malicious actors to launch the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in internet history. One of the attacks seen by Cloudflare was three times larger than the record-breaking 71 million requests per second (RPS) attack reported by company in February. Specifically, the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset DDoS campaign peaked at 201 million RPS, while Google's observed a DDoS attack that peaked at 398 million RPS. The new attack method abuses an HTTP/2 feature called 'stream cancellation', by repeatedly sending a request and immediately canceling it.

Microplastics have been found everywhere from the oceans' depths to the Antarctic ice, and now new research has detected it in an alarming new location -- clouds hanging atop two Japanese mountains. From a report: The clouds around Japan's Mount Fuji and Mount Oyama contain concerning levels of the tiny plastic bits, and highlight how the pollution can be spread long distances, contaminating the planet's crops and water via "plastic rainfall." The plastic was so concentrated in the samples researchers collected that it is thought to be causing clouds to form while giving off greenhouse gasses.

"If the issue of 'plastic air pollution' is not addressed proactively, climate change and ecological risks may become a reality, causing irreversible and serious environmental damage in the future," the study's lead author, Hiroshi Okochi, a professor at Waseda University, said in a statement. The peer-reviewed paper was published in Environmental Chemistry Letters, and the authors believe it is the first to check clouds for microplastics. The pollution is made up of plastic particles smaller than five millimeters that are released from larger pieces of plastic during degradation. They are also intentionally added to some products, or discharged in industrial effluent. Tires are thought to be among the main sources, as are plastic beads used in personal care products. Recent research has found them to be widely accumulating across the globe -- as much as 10m tons are estimated to end up in the oceans annually.

Microsoft, Google and others experiment with how to produce, market and charge for new tools. From a report: Microsoft has lost money on one of its first generative AI products, said a person with knowledge of the figures. It and Google are now launching AI-backed upgrades to their software with higher price tags. Zoom has tried to mitigate costs by sometimes using a simpler AI it developed in-house. Adobe and others are putting caps on monthly usage and charging based on consumption. "A lot of the customers I've talked to are unhappy about the cost that they are seeing for running some of these models," said Adam Selipsky, the chief executive of Amazon.com's cloud division, Amazon Web Services, speaking of the industry broadly. It will take time for companies and consumers to understand how they want to use AI and what they are willing to pay for it, said Chris Young, Microsoft's head of corporate strategy.

"We're clearly at a place where now we've got to translate the excitement and the interest level into true adoption," he said. Building and training AI products can take years and hundreds of millions of dollars, more than with other types of software. AI often doesn't have the economies of scale of standard software because it can require intense new calculations for each query. The more customers use the products, the more expensive it is to cover the infrastructure bills. These running costs expose companies charging flat fees for AI to potential losses.

Microsoft used AI from its partner OpenAI to launch GitHub Copilot, a service that helps programmers create, fix and translate code. It has been popular with coders -- more than 1.5 million people have used it and it is helping build nearly half of Copilot users' code -- because it slashes the time and effort needed to program. It has also been a money loser because it is so expensive to run. Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Gizmodo: Zoom is setting out to compete with Google and Microsoft by introducing Zoom Docs at its annual Zoomtopia 2023 event on Tuesday. Zoom Docs is the company's own version of an AI-powered workspace that will provide users with AI capabilities to draft, edit, summarize, and include information from meeting discussions.

The company said in a press release that its new feature will be integrated into the meetings feature, and says it will make it "easy for teams and individuals to create, collaborate, manage projects, and stay organized." It will also reportedly include the option to include tables, charts, and images in the Zoom Doc function, according to the press release...
Zoom's press release calls it "a next-gen way of collaborating, built from the ground up with AI at its core," with "traditional document capabilities, as well as wikis and drag-and-drop content blocks for tables, charts, and images" Zoom Docs users can also leverage its AI-powered functionality to populate docs with content from Zoom Meetings to inform and jumpstart creation, generate content with Zoom AI Companion, summarize content quickly, easily search documents, and more. Zoom Docs is scheduled to be generally available in 2024.
Gizmodo notes that in March Microsoft added ChatGPT to its Suite 365 business software, and Google announced it was adding generative AI to Google Docs and Google Excel.

Britain's anti-competition regulators have been tasked with investigating Microsoft and Amazon's dominance of the cloud computing market. From a report: Media watchdog Ofcom on Thursday referred its inquiry for further investigation to the Competition and Markets Authority, kickstarting the process. Ofcom said that it had identified features which make it more difficult for U.K. businesses to switch cloud providers, or use multiple cloud services, and that it is "particularly concerned" about the position of market leaders Amazon and Microsoft. "Some UK businesses have told us they're concerned about it being too difficult to switch or mix and match cloud provider, and it's not clear that competition is working well," Fergal Farragher, Ofcom's director responsible for the market study, said in a statement Thursday.

"So, we're referring the market to the CMA for further scrutiny, to make sure business customers continue to benefit from cloud services." Ofcom is concerned that so-called "hyperscalers" like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are limiting competition in the cloud computing market. These are companies that allow businesses of all stripes to carry out critical computing tasks -- like storage and management of data, delivery of content, analytics and intelligence -- over the internet, rather than through servers stored on site, or "on premise."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Resin printer company Peopoly created quite a buzz with the unveiling of a prototype beltless FDM 3D printer, the Magneto X, at the East Coast RepRap Festival. The new printer is a desk top machine with a huge 400 x 300 x 300 mm build volume and print speeds up to 800mm/s. It borrows a design feature seen on CNC machines: magnetic linear motors. Normally, 3D printers move their components with rotating stepper motors attached to gears and pulleys. The linear motor can be thought of as a flat, unrolled motor with the "rotor" attached to the moving component -- the tool head -- and the stator forming a track along one axis. Dubbed the "MagXY" system, the tool head seems to levitate across the gantry without obvious means. It has a top print speed of 800 mm/s with a max acceleration of 22,000 mm/s, which would make it faster than modern Core XY printers from Bambu Lab.

Peopoly is using and supporting both Klipper firmware and OrcaSlicer, which founder Mark Peng said greatly helped speed up their development time. [...] Peopoly is leaning hard into the Open Source community. Not only have they become backers of Klipper firmware, they are also using -- and supporting -- Open Source OcraSlicer. The Magneto X's nozzles are compatible with the popular E3D's V6 volcano which suggests the machine will be open to modification by users. Peopoly also states its machine can be used without joining a cloud-based system and promises customer data will not be collected.

Tom Warren writes via The Verge: Microsoft is announcing the third generation of its OneDrive cloud storage today, complete with the company's AI-powered Copilot system, a Fluent design refresh, and big improvements to the way businesses share and use cloud documents. [...] Microsoft is overhauling the main OneDrive web app with a new Fluent design. It more closely matches the Windows 11 interface and recent changes to Office apps, and it also fits in with the latest File Explorer design updates. There is now an AI-powered file recommendations "For you" section up the top, much like File Explorer. Files that matter to your workday are surfaced here immediately and can appear here whether they're in your OneDrive, Teams, or elsewhere. [...] You can also now choose the colors of your folders, and when you share with co-workers, they will also see the color choice. [...]

One thing many OneDrive business users have been asking for is the ability to open any document from OneDrive on the web into the native desktop apps. Microsoft is adding this feature in December, with the ability to open things like CAD files or PDFs. Microsoft is also adding a new media view that includes all photos and video assets in a single location. This new OneDrive experience will also soon be available in the files section of Microsoft Teams and the file navigation part of Outlook. Microsoft expects the new OneDrive in Outlook view to be available in December.

Microsoft is also planning to integrate its Copilot AI system into OneDrive in December for everyone with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Copilot will offer up a daily digest of files, like a catch-up feature for documents you and your colleagues are working on. This will include a list of important changes to files and a summarized look at new comments. Microsoft says it will intelligently organize these summaries based on context and relevance. Most of the interface changes can be experienced now at onedrive.com, with more arriving in early 2024. You can view the full list of changes here.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from The Intercept: The Heat Initiative, a nonprofit child safety advocacy group, was formed earlier this year to campaign against some of the strong privacy protections Apple provides customers. The group says these protections help enable child exploitation, objecting to the fact that pedophiles can encrypt their personal data just like everyone else. When Apple launched its new iPhone this September, the Heat Initiative seized on the occasion, taking out a full-page New York Times ad, using digital billboard trucks, and even hiring a plane to fly over Apple headquarters with a banner message. The message on the banner appeared simple: 'Dear Apple, Detect Child Sexual Abuse in iCloud' -- Apple's cloud storage system, which today employs a range of powerful encryption technologies aimed at preventing hackers, spies, and Tim Cook from knowing anything about your private files.

Something the Heat Initiative has not placed on giant airborne banners is who's behind it: a controversial billionaire philanthropy network whose influence and tactics have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the right-wing Koch network. Though it does not publicize this fact, the Heat Initiative is a project of the Hopewell Fund, an organization that helps privately and often secretly direct the largesse -- and political will -- of billionaires. Hopewell is part of a giant, tightly connected web of largely anonymous, Democratic Party-aligned dark-money groups, in an ironic turn, campaigning to undermine the privacy of ordinary people.

For an organization demanding that Apple scour the private information of its customers, the Heat Initiative discloses extremely little about itself. According to a report in the New York Times, the Heat Initiative is armed with $2 million from donors including the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, an organization founded by British billionaire hedge fund manager and Google activist investor Chris Cohn, and the Oak Foundation, also founded by a British billionaire. The Oak Foundation previously provided $250,000 to a group attempting to weaken end-to-end encryption protections in EU legislation, according to a 2020 annual report. The Heat Initiative is helmed by Sarah Gardner, who joined from Thorn, an anti-child trafficking organization founded by actor Ashton Kutcher. [...] Critics say these technologies aren't just uncovering trafficked children, but ensnaring adults engaging in consensual sex work. "My goal is for child sexual abuse images to not be freely shared on the internet, and I'm here to advocate for the children who cannot make the case for themselves," Gardner said, declining to name the Heat Initiative's funders. "I think data privacy is vital. I think there's a conflation between user privacy and known illegal content."

Microsoft will deprecate the classic edition of its Azure Virtual Desktop desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and has given customers three years to keep using the service before they'll need to find an alternative. From a report: The software giant seems to have spent years trying to confuse cloudy DaaS users, as it has offered two products called Azure Virtual Desktop, with varying degrees of integration with Azure.

The "classic" service has a management GUI that's not part of the Azure Portal and isn't addressable with the Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Microsoft's main deployment and management service for its cloud. The successor to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) classic is called -- wait for it -- "Azure Virtual Desktop." This from the innovative minds that suddenly and inexplicably renamed Azure Active Directory as "Entra" and kept the name "Active Directory" for on-prem directories.

"We're committed to developing AI responsibly," says Google's VP of Trust, "guided by our AI principles and in line with our consumer privacy commitment. However, we've also heard from web publishers that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases."

And so, Mashable reports, "Websites can now choose to opt out of Google Bard, or any other future AI models that Google makes." Google made the announcement on Thursday introducing a new tool called Google-Extended that will allow sites to be indexed by crawlers (or a bot creating entries for search engines), while simultaneously not having their data accessed to train future AI models. For website administrators, this will be an easy fix, available through robots.txt — or the text file that allows web crawlers to access sites...

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, recently launched a web crawler of its own, but included instructions on how to block it. Publications like Medium, the New York Times, CNN and Reuters have notably done so.
As Google's blog post explains, "By using Google-Extended to control access to content on a site, a website administrator can choose whether to help these AI models become more accurate and capable over time..."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp spotted a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) this week with the Microsoft engineering team that created Python in Excel, a new feature that makes it possible to natively combine Python and Excel analytics in Excel workbooks. (Copilot integration is coming soon). Redditors expressed a wish to be able to run Python in environments other than the confines of the locked down, price-to-be-determined Microsoft Azure cloud containers employed by Python in Excel.

But "There were three main reasons behind starting with the cloud (as a GDPR Compliant Microsoft 365 Connected experience) first," MicrosoftExcelTeam explained:

1. Running Python securely on a local machine is a difficult problem. We treat all Python code in the workbook as untrusted, so we execute it in a hypervisor-isolated container on Azure that does not have any outbound network access. Python code and the data that it operates on is sent to be executed in the container. The Microsoft-licensed Python environment in the container is provided by Anaconda and was prepared using their stringent security practices as documented here.

2. Sharing Excel workbooks with others is a really important scenario. We wanted to ensure that the Python code in a workbook you share behaves the same when your teammates open it â" without requiring them to install and manage Python.

3. We need to ensure that the Python in Excel feature always works for our customers. The value of Python is in its ecosystem of libraries, not just in providing a Python interpreter. But managing a local Python environment is challenging even for the most experienced developers. By running on Azure, we remove the need for users or their systems administrators to maintain a local installation of Python on every machine that uses the feature in their organization...


So, how does one balance tradeoffs between increased security and ease-of-maintenance with the loss of functionality and increased costs when it comes to programming language use? Is it okay to just give up on making certain important basic functionality available, as Microsoft is doing here with Python and has done in the past by not supporting Excel VBA in the Cloud and no longer making BASIC available on PCs and Macs?
Microsoft's team added at one point that "For our initial release, we are targeting data analytics scenarios, and bringing the power of Python analytics libraries into Excel.

"We believe the approach weâ(TM)ve taken will appeal to analysts who use both Excel and Python Notebooks in their workflows. Today, these users need to import/export data and have no way of creating a self-contained artifact that can be easily and securely shared with their colleagues."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Liliputing.com: Web browsers have had tools that let you translate websites for years. But they typically rely on cloud-based translation services like Google Translate or Microsoft's Bing Translator. The latest version of Mozilla's Firefox web browser does things differently. Firefox 118 brings support for Fullpage Translation, which can translate websites entirely in your browser. In other words, everything happens locally on your computer without any data sent to Microsoft, Google, or other companies.

Here's how it works. Firefox will notice when you visit a website in a supported language that's different from your default language, and a translate icon will show up in the address bar. Tap that icon and you'll see a pop-up window that asks what languages you'd like to translate from and to. If the browser doesn't automatically detect the language of the website you're visiting, you can set these manually... You can also tap the settings icon in the translation menu and choose to "always translate" or "never translate" a specific language so that you won't have to manually invoke the translation every time you visit sites in that language.
Firefox is support nine languages so far.