Staffers at Google DeepMind’s headquarters have voted to unionize in an effort to prevent the AI firm’s technology from being used by Israel and the US military. In a letter to Google management on Tuesday, employees requested that the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and Unite the Union be recognized as joint representatives, with 98 percent…
Microsoft is finally giving up on showing the junk feed of MSN news when you open the widgets feature in Windows 11. After allowing Windows 11 users to disable the MSN feed more than two years ago, Microsoft says it will soon hide it by default as part of an effort to make widgets “quiet…
The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is ordering all of its technology leaders to temporarily wall off the organization’s open source projects over concerns relating to advanced AI and Anthropic’s Mythos. According to guidance shared internally within the organization and seen by The Register, GitHub repositories must be set from public to private by May…
Opinion It’s been another shabby week for Microsoft, and a shabbier one for its users. We learnt that Windows 11’s epic habit of trying to corral customers into paid-for Microsoft services just got worse with a low-rent trick. Remote Desktop got a bit more secure, which is good, but in a way that suggests not…
Antiques Code Show Admirers of Roguelike games have a new distraction: Version 5.0 of NetHack dropped last weekend. NetHack and its ilk trace their origins back to Rogue, a game for Unix systems launched in 1980 that took the DNA of very early text games like Star Trek and Colossal Cave Adventure and mashed that…
Microsoft will stop offering long-term rentals for 17 Azure instance types – most of them powered by CPUs Intel released in the 2010s – again showing that cloud computing isn’t always a seamless and easy choice. The fun starts on July 1st when Microsoft will stop taking orders for one-year reservations for 13 instance types…
Academics from Singapore and China have found a way to make AI useful for cyber-defenders, by creating a technique that translates rules from diverse Security Information and Event Managements (SIEMs) so they’re easier to consume across multiple systems. SIEMs collect log files from many sources and allow users to set rules that trigger alerts that…
The Iran War has been great for business at Palantir, as the Department of Defense has doubled usage of the company’s Maven targeting system in four months. “Maven met its moment across real world events in Q1 … When the stakes are highest, when failure is measured in lives and readiness. This is where we…
We still don’t know when Valve will launch the Steam Machine, but we may not have to wait too long. Valve just imported roughly 50 tons of “Game Consoles” into the United States in the two-day period between May 1st and April 30th, according to import records viewed by The Verge. That’s on top of…
The strongest witness for Elon Musk’s case against OpenAI so far has been Greg Brockman’s journal. Brockman himself is running as a close second. Brockman was called to the stand in a rather unusual way — he was cross-examined first, followed by a direct examination — and he had some serious high school debate club…