An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group of Russian government hackers have hijacked thousands of home and small business routers around the world as part of an ongoing campaign aimed at redirecting victim's internet traffic to steal their passwords and access tokens, security researchers and government authorities warned on Tuesday. [...] The hacking group targeted unpatched routers made by MikroTik and TP-Link using previously disclosed vulnerabilities according to the U.K. government's cybersecurity unit NCSC and Lumen's research arm Black Lotus Labs, which released new details of the campaign Tuesday.

According to the researchers, the hackers were able to spy on large numbers of people over the course of several years by compromising their routers, many of which run outdated software, leaving them vulnerable to remote attacks without their owners' knowledge. The NCSC said that these operations are "likely opportunistic in nature, with the actor casting a wide net to reach many potential victims, before narrowing in on targets of intelligence interest as the attack develops." Per the researchers and government advisories, the Russian hackers hacked routers to modify the device's settings so that the victim's internet requests are surreptitiously passed to infrastructure run by the hackers. This allows the hackers to redirect victims to spoof websites under their control, then steal passwords and tokens that let the hackers log in to that victim's online accounts without needing their two-factor authentication codes.

Black Lotus Labs said that Fancy Bear compromised at least 18,000 victims in around 120 countries, including government departments, law enforcement agencies, and email providers across North Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia. Microsoft, which also released details of the campaign on Tuesday, said in a blog post that its researchers identified over 200 organizations and 5,000 consumer devices affected by these hacking operations, including at least three government organizations in Africa. The Justice Department said Tuesday it neutralized compromised routers in the U.S. under court authorization. As the DOJ put it, the FBI "developed a series of commands to send to compromised routers" to collect evidence, reset settings, and prevent hackers from breaking back in.

theodp writes: "Gates Computer Science Building renamed Peter Thiel Center for Panoptic Computing" reads the headline of an April Fools' Day story that ran in the Humor section of The Stanford Daily (with the further disclaimer that "This article is purely satirical and fictitious"). The story begins: "Following revelations that the billionaire founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, had a longstanding relationship with convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Stanford has announced it will strip Gates' name from the William H. Gates Computer Science Building and instead honor alumnus Peter Thiel B.A. '89, JD '92. Gates, who is not a Stanford alumnus, gave an initial gift of $6 million toward the building's construction in 1992."

While fictional, the story does make one wonder what may become of the academic and institutional buildings worldwide named after Bill Gates in the blowback over his past ties to Epstein, which have already played a factor in the breakdown of his marriage to Melinda French Gates and friendship with Warren Buffet. In addition to The Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford, this includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex at the University of Texas at Austin, Bill and Melinda Gates Hall at Cornell, The Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and The William H. Gates Building at MIT's Stata Center. Buildings named after Gates' parents include Mary Gates Hall and William H. Gates Hall at the University of Washington, and The William Gates Building at the University of Cambridge (UK).

Aside from the Thiel angle, The Stanford Daily's April Fools' Day story may not be as far-fetched as it may seem -- many universities' naming policies include provisions allowing donors' names to be removed from buildings, programs, or other facilities under extraordinary circumstances. For example, the University of Washington's Regent Policy No. 50 states, "The University reserves the right to revoke and terminate any naming on reasonable grounds not limited to the revelation of corporate or individual acts detracting from the University's mission, integrity, or reputation." Then again, UW notes that Bill's parents and siblings served as UW Regents for decades, so one expects Bill will be granted some leeway here for what he has characterized as 'foolish' choices on his part.

LinkedIn is facing allegations that it quietly scans users' browsers for installed Chrome extensions. The German group Fairlinked e.V. goes so far as to claim that the site is "running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history."

"The program runs silently, without any visible indicator to the user," the group says. "It does not ask for consent. It does not disclose what it is doing. It reports the results to LinkedIn's servers. This is not a one-time check. The scan runs on every page load, for every visitor." PCMag reports: This browser extension "fingerprinting" technique has been spotted before, but it was previously found to probe only 2,000 to 3,000 extensions. Fairlinked alleges that LinkedIn is now scanning for 6,222 extensions that could indicate a user's political opinions or religious views. For example, the extensions LinkedIn will look for include one that flags companies as too "woke," one that can add an "anti-Zionist" tag to LinkedIn profiles, and two others that can block content forbidden under Islamic teachings.

It would also be a cakewalk to tie the collected extension data to specific users, since LinkedIn operates as a vast professional social network that covers people's work history. Fairlinked's concern is that Microsoft and LinkedIn can allegedly use the data to identify which companies use competing products. "LinkedIn has already sent enforcement threats to users of third-party tools, using data obtained through this covert scanning to identify its targets," the group claims. However, LinkedIn claims that Fairlinked mischaracterizes a LinkedIn safeguard designed to prevent web scraping by browser extensions. "We do not use this data to infer sensitive information about members," the company says. "To protect the privacy of our members, their data, and to ensure site stability, we do look for extensions that scrape data without members' consent or otherwise violate LinkedIn's Terms of Service," LinkedIn adds.

[...] The statement goes on to allege that Fairlinked is from a developer whose account was previously suspended for web scraping. One of the group's board members is listed as "S.Morell," which appears to be Steven Morell, the founder of Teamfluence, a tool that helps businesses monitor LinkedIn activity. [...] Still, the Microsoft-owned site is facing some blowback for not clearly disclosing the browser extension scanning in LinkedIn's privacy policy. Fairlinked is soliciting donations for a legal fund to take on Microsoft and is urging the public to encourage local regulators to intervene.

Artemis II has broken the Apollo 13 record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth. NASA reports: The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen have set the record for the farthest distance from Earth traveled by a human mission, surpassing the Apollo 13 record of 248,655 miles set in 1970.

NASA Flight Director Brandon Lloyd, Capsule Communicator Amy Dill, and Command and Handling Data Officer Brandon Borter also marked a lighthearted milestone today by emailing the crew what is now assumed to be the longest person-to-person message ever sent in human history. After breaking the record for human spaceflight, crew also took a moment to provisionally name a couple of craters on the Moon, noting they were able to see them with their naked eye.

Just northwest of Orientale basin highlighted above is a crater they would like to name Integrity after their spacecraft and this historic mission. Just northeast of Integrity, on the near and far side boundary, and sometimes visible from Earth, the crew suggested Carroll crater in honor of Reid Wiseman's late wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman. After this mission is complete, the crater name proposals will be formally submitted to the International Astronomical Union, the organization that governs the naming of celestial bodies and their surface features. On April 1, NASA successfully launched humanity's first crewed trip around the Moon in more than 50 years. A couple of days into the mission, attention turned to a more mundane problem when reports said the astronauts had access to "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither was working properly. By April 4, the crew had passed 100,000 miles from Earth as they continued deeper into space, and by April 6, they had entered the Moon's gravitational pull and caught their first views of the lunar far side.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: AI skeptics aren't the only ones warning users not to unthinkingly trust models' outputs -- that's what the AI companies say themselves in their terms of service. Take Microsoft, which is currently focused on getting corporate customers to pay for Copilot. But it's also been getting dinged on social media over Copilot's terms of use, which appear to have been last updated on October 24, 2025. "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only," the company warned. "It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don't rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk." Microsoft described the terms of service as "legacy language," saying it will be updated.

Tom's Hardware notes that similar AI warnings remain common across the industry, with companies like OpenAI and xAI also cautioning users not to treat chatbot output as "the truth" or as "a sole service of truth or factual information."

"Google has announced that it's currently testing a new feature for Chrome 148 that could speed up day-to-day browsing," reports PC World: [T]he browser can intelligently postpone the loading of certain elements. Why load all images at the start when it can instead load images as you get close to them while scrolling? Chrome and Chromium-based browsers have had built-in lazy loading support for images and iframes since 2019, but this feature would make browsers capable of lazy loading video and audio elements, too. Note, however, that this won't benefit YouTube video embeds — those are already lazy loadable since they're embedded using iframes. Actual video and audio elements are rarer but not uncommon. In addition to Chrome, lazy loading of video and audio elements is also expected to be added to other Chromium-based browsers, including Microsoft Edge and Vivaldi.

"Canonical is no longer pretending that 4GB is enough," writes the blog How-to-Geek, noting Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "raises the baseline memory to 6GB, alongside a 2GHz dual-core processor, and 25GB of storage..." Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) set the floor at 1GB — a modest ask when it launched more than a decade ago in 2014. Then came the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) that pushed the number to 4GB, surviving quite well in the era of 16GB being considered standard for mid-range laptops.... Ubuntu's new minimum requirement lands in an interesting spot when compared against Windows 11. Microsoft's operating system requires just 4GB RAM, although real-world usage often tells a different story. Usually, 8GB is considered the sweet spot to handle modern apps and multitasking.
The blog OMG Ubuntu argues this change is "not because Ubuntu requires 2GB more memory than it did, but more the way we compute does." it's more of an honesty bump. Components that make up the distro — the GNOME desktop and extensions, modern web browsers (and the sites we load in them) and the kinds of apps we use (and keep running) whilst multitasking are more demanding... The Resolute Raccoon's memory requirements better reflect real-world multitasking.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS can be installed on devices with less than 6GB RAM (but not less than 25GB of disk space). The experience may not be as smooth or as responsive as developers intend (so you don't get to complain), but it will work. I installed Ubuntu 26.04 Beta on a laptop with just 2 GB of memory — slow to the point of frustration in use, but otherwise functional.

If you have a device with 4 GB RAM and you can't upgrade (soldered memory is a thing, and e-waste can be avoided), then alternatives exist. Many Ubuntu flavours, like Lubuntu, have lower system requirements than the main edition. Plus, there's always the manual option using the Ubuntu netboot installer to install a base system and then built out a more minimal system from there.

"Hackers briefly turned a widely trusted developer tool into a vehicle for credential-stealing malware that could give attackers ongoing access to infected systems," the news site Axios.com reported Tuesday, citing security researchers at Google.

The compromised package — also named axios — simplifies HTTP requests, and reportedly receives millions of downloads each day: The malicious versions were removed within roughly three hours of being published, but Google warned the incident could have "far-reaching impacts" given the package's widespread use, according to John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group. Wiz estimates Axios is downloaded roughly 100 million times per week and is present in about 80% of cloud and code environments. So far, Wiz has observed the malicious versions in roughly 3% of the environments it has scanned.
Friday PCMag notes the maintainer's compromised account had two-factor authentication enabled, with the breach ultimately traced "to an elaborate AI deepfake from suspected North Korean hackers that was convincing enough to trick a developer into installing malware," according to a post-mortem published Thursday by lead developer Jason Saayman: [Saayman] fell for a scheme from a North Korean hacking group, dubbed UNC1069, which involves sending out phishing messages and then hosting virtual meetings that use AI deepfakes to clone the face and voices of real executives. The virtual meetings will then create the impression of an audio problem, which can only be "solved" if the victim installs some software or runs a troubleshooting command. In reality, it's an effort to execute malware. The North Koreans have been using the tactic repeatedly, whether it be to phish cryptocurrency firms or to secure jobs from IT companies.

Saayman said he faced a similar playbook. "They reached out masquerading as the founder of a company, they had cloned the company's founders likeness as well as the company itself," he wrote. "They then invited me to a real Slack workspace. This workspace was branded... The Slack was thought out very well, they had channels where they were sharing LinkedIn posts. The LinkedIn posts I presume just went to the real company's account, but it was super convincing etc." The hackers then invited him to a virtual meeting on Microsoft Teams. "The meeting had what seemed to be a group of people that were involved. The meeting said something on my system was out of date. I installed the missing item as I presumed it was something to do with Teams, and this was the remote access Trojan," he added. "Everything was extremely well coordinated, looked legit and was done in a professional manner."
Friday developer security platform Socket wrote that several more maintainers in the Node.js ecosystem "have come out of the woodwork to report that they were targeted by the same social engineering campaign." The accounts now span some of the most widely depended-upon packages in the npm registry and Node.js core itself, and together they confirm that axios was not a one-off target. It was part of a coordinated, scalable attack pattern aimed at high-trust, high-impact open source maintainers. Attackers also targeted several Socket engineers, including CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator of WebTorrent, StandardJS, buffer, and dozens of widely used npm packages with billions of downloads... Commenting on the axios post-mortem thread, he noted that this type of targeting [against individual maintainers] is no longer unusual... "We're seeing them across the ecosystem and they're only accelerating."

Jordan Harband, John-David Dalton, and other Socket engineers also confirmed they were targeted. Harband, a TC39 member, maintains hundreds of ECMAScript polyfills and shims that are foundational to the JavaScript ecosystem. Dalton is the creator of Lodash, which sees more than 137 million weekly downloads on npm. Between them, the packages they maintain are downloaded billions of times each month. Wes Todd, an Express TC member and member of the Node Package Maintenance Working Group, also confirmed he was targeted. Matteo Collina, co-founder and CTO of Platformatic, Node.js Technical Steering Committee Chair, and lead maintainer of Fastify, Pino, and Undici, disclosed on April 2 that he was also targeted. His packages also see billion downloads per year... Scott Motte, creator of dotenv, the package used by virtually every Node.js project that handles environment variables, with more than 114 million weekly downloads, also confirmed he was targeted using the same Openfort persona.
Socket reports that another maintainer was targetted with an invitation to appear on a podcast. (During the recording a suspicious technical issue appeared which required a software fix to resolve....)

Even just technical implementation, "This is among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm package," the CI/CD security company StepSecurity wrote Tuesday The dropper contacts a live command-and-control server, delivers separate second-stage payloads for macOS, Windows, and Linux, then erases itself and replaces its own package.json with a clean decoy... Three payloads were pre-built for three operating systems. Both release branches were poisoned within 39 minutes of each other. Every artifact was designed to self-destruct. Within two seconds of npm install, the malware was already calling home to the attacker's server before npm had even finished resolving dependencies... Both versions were published using the compromised npm credentials of a lead axios maintainer, bypassing the project's normal GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline.
"As preventive steps, Saayman has now outlined several changes," reports The Hacker News, "including resetting all devices and credentials, setting up immutable releases, adopting OIDC flow for publishing, and updating GitHub Actions to adopt best practices."

The Wall Street Journal called it "the latest in a string of incidents exposing risks in the systems that underpin how modern software is built."

Nine days ago Microsoft released a non-security "preview" update for Windows 11 — not mandatory for the average Windows user, notes ZDNet, "but rather as optional, more for IT admins and power users who want to test them."

TechRepublic adds that the update "was to bring 'production-ready improvements' and generally ensure system stability by optimizing different Windows services." So it's ironic that some (but not all) users reported instead that the update "blocks users at the door, refusing to install or crashing midway through the process."

"It apparently impacted enough people to force Microsoft to take action," writes ZDNet. "Microsoft paused and then pulled the update," and then Tuesday released a new update "designed to replace the glitchy one. This one includes all the new features and improvements from the previous preview update, but also fixes the installation issues that clobbered that update."

Meanwhile, as Windows 11 version 24H2 approaches its end of life this October, Microsoft is now force-updating users to the latest version, reports BleepingComputer: "The machine learning-based intelligent rollout has expanded to all devices running Home and Pro editions of Windows 11, version 24H2 that are not managed by IT departments," Microsoft said in a Monday update to the Windows release health dashboard... "No action is required, and you can choose when to restart your device or postpone the update."
Neowin reports: The good news is that the update from version 24H2 to 25H2 is a minor enablement package, as the two operating systems share the same codebase. As such, the update won't take long, and you should not encounter any disruptions, compatibility issues, or previously unseen bugs... Microsoft recently promised to implement big changes in how Windows Update works, including the ability to postpone updates for as long as you want. However, Microsoft has yet to clarify if that includes staying on a release beyond its support period.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc for sharing the news.

Iranian strikes have reportedly knocked out key AWS availability zones in Bahrain and Dubai, leaving parts of both regions effectively offline for an extended period and forcing Amazon to urge teams and customers to shift workloads elsewhere. "These two regions continue to be impaired, and services should not expect to be operating with normal levels of redundancy and resiliency," an internal Amazon communication memo reads. "We are actively working to free and reserve as much capacity as possible in the region for customers, and services should be scaled to the minimal footprint required to support customer migration." Big Technology reports: With the war now nearing its sixth week, Iran has made Amazon infrastructure in the Gulf an economic target and is now eyeing its peers. Amazon's Bahrain facilities have been hit multiple times, including a Wednesday strike that caused a fire. And its facilities in the UAE also sustained multiple hits. The IRGC is threatening multiple other U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

Amazons infrastructure in Bahrain and Dubai each have three 'availability zones' or clusters of compute. Both Bahrain and Dubai have a zones that are "hard down" and and "impaired but functioning," per the internal communication. "We do not have a timeline for when DXB and BAH will return to normal operations," the internal post said.

Microsoft plans to invest $10 billion in Japan from 2026 to 2029 to expand AI infrastructure, boost local cloud capacity, train 1 million engineers and developers, and deepen cybersecurity cooperation with the Japanese government. Reuters reports: The investment includes the training of 1 million engineers and developers by 2030, Microsoft said, which was unveiled during a visit to Tokyo by Vice Chair and President Brad Smith. In a statement, the company said the plan aligns with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's goal to boost growth through advanced, strategic technologies while safeguarding national security.

Microsoft will work with domestic firms including SoftBank and Sakura Internet to expand Japan-based AI computing capacity, allowing Ecompanies and government agencies to keep sensitive data within the country while accessing Microsoft Azure services, it said. It will also deepen cooperation with Japanese authorities on sharing intelligence related to cyber threats and crime prevention.

IBM and Arm are teaming up to let Arm-based software run on IBM Z mainframes. Network World reports: The two companies plan to work on three things: building virtualization tools so Arm software can run on IBM platforms; making sure Arm applications meet the security and data residency rules that regulated industries must follow; and creating common technology layers so enterprises have more software options across both platforms, IBM said in a statement.

IBM has not said whether the virtualization work will happen at the hypervisor level, through its existing PR/SM partitioning technology, or via containers -- a question enterprise architects will need answered before they can assess the collaboration's practical value. IBM described the effort as serving enterprises that run regulated workloads and cannot simply move them to the cloud, the statement said. IBM mainframe customers have largely missed out on the efficiency and price-performance gains Arm has already delivered in the cloud. "Arm says close to half of all compute shipped to top hyperscalers in 2025 runs on Arm chips, with AWS, Google, and Microsoft deploying their own Arm silicon through Graviton, Axion, and Cobalt, respectively," reports Network World.

That gap is precisely what IBM and Arm's collaboration intends to address. "This is a mainframe adjacency play," says Rachita Rao, senior analyst at Everest Group. "The intent is to extend IBM Z and LinuxONE environments by enabling Arm-compatible workloads to run closer to systems of record. While hyperscalers use Arm to lower their own internal power costs and pass savings to cloud-native tenants, IBM is targeting the sovereign and air-gapped market."

Even on NASA's Artemis II mission around the moon, astronauts apparently still have to deal with broken Microsoft Outlook. One of the crew members, Reid Wiseman, jokingly reported that he had "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither worked. 404 Media reports: On April 1, four astronauts from the U.S. and Canada embarked on a 10-day flight to loop around the moon. Spotted by VGBees podcast host Niki Grayson on the NASA livestream of live views from the , around 2 a.m. ET, mission control acknowledges an issue with a process control system and offers to remote in -- yes, like how your office IT guy would pause his CoD campaign to log into Okta for you because you used the wrong password too many times.

One of the astronauts, Reid Wiseman, says that's chill, but while they're in there: "I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working." Astronauts are trained for decades in some of the most physically and mentally grueling environments of any career. They're some of the smartest people on the planet, and they have to be, before we strap them to 3.2 million pounds of jet fuel and make them do complex experiments and high-stakes decisions for days on end. And yet, once they get up there, fucking Outlook is borked.

darwinmac writes: OnlyOffice has suspended its partnership with Nextcloud after the latter forked its editors into a new project called Euro-Office, according to a report from Neowin. The move comes just days after Nextcloud and partners like IONOS announced the fork as part of a broader push for European digital sovereignty. In a statement, the company accused the project of violating its licensing terms and international intellectual property law, claiming that Euro-Office uses its technology without proper compliance. OnlyOffice also pointed to missing attribution requirements and branding obligations tied to its AGPL-based licensing model.

As a result, its 8-year-old partnership, which allowed Nextcloud users to edit and collaborate on office documents right inside their own instance, has been suspended. OnlyOffice also accused Nextcloud of not behaving in a manner expected of a partner, alleging attempts to poach its employees and influence customers against the company. Nextcloud said it forked the OnlyOffice repository instead of collaborating with the company because the project is notoriously difficult to contribute to. It also pointed out that OnlyOffice is a Russian company with Russian employees who leave code comments in Russian. In addition to that, some users may feel uncomfortable using software that could be linked to the Russian government.

Euro-Office is a new open-source project supported by several European companies that aims to offer a "truly open, transparent and sovereign solution for collaborate document editing," using OnlyOffice as a starting point. The project is positioned around European digital independence and familiar Office-style editing, though it has already drawn pushback from OnlyOffice over alleged licensing violations. "The company behind OnlyOffice is also based in Russia, and Russia is still heavily sanctioned by most European nations due to the country's ongoing invasion of Ukraine," adds How-To Geek. From the report: Euro-Office is a new open-source project supported by Nextcloud, EuroStack, Wiki, Proton, Soverin, Abilian, and other companies based in Europe. The goal is to build an online office suite that can open and edit standard Microsoft Office documents (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX) and the OpenDocument format (ODS, ODT, ODP) used by LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The current design is remarkably close to Microsoft Office and its tabbed toolbars, so there shouldn't be much of a learning curve for anyone used to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Importantly, Euro-Office is only the document editing component. It's designed to be added to cloud storage services, online wikis, project management tools, and other software. For example, you could have some Word documents in your Nextcloud file storage, and clicking them in a browser could open the Euro-Office editor. That way, Nextcloud (or Proton, or anyone else) doesn't have to build its own document editor from scratch.

Euro-Office is based on OnlyOffice, which is open-source under the AGPL license. The project explained that "Contributing is impossible or greatly discouraged" with OnlyOffice's developers, with outside code changes rarely accepted, so a hard fork was required. The company behind OnlyOffice is also based in Russia, and Russia is still heavily sanctioned by most European nations due to the country's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The project's home page explains, "A lot of users and customers require software that is not potentially influenced or controlled by the Russian government." As for why OnlyOffice was chosen over LibreOffice, the project simply said: "We believe open source is about collaboration, and we look for opportunities to integrate and collaborate with the LibreOffice community and companies like Collabora."

UPDATE: Slashdot reader Elektroschock shares a statement from OnlyOffice CEO Lev Bannov, expressing his concerns about the Euro-Office inclusion of its software with trademarks removed: "We liked the AGPL v3 license because its 7th clause allows us to ensure that our code retains its original attributes, so that users are able to clearly identify the developers and the brand behind the program..."

Bannov continued: "The core issue here isn't just about what the AGPL license states, but about the additional provisions we, as the authors, have included. This is a critical distinction, even if some may argue otherwise. We firmly assert that the Euro-Office project is currently infringing on our copyright in a deliberate and unacceptable manner."

"As the creators of ONLYOFFICE, we want to make our position unequivocally clear: we do not grant anyone the right to remove our branding or alter our open-source code without proper attribution. This principle is non-negotiable and will never change. We demand that the Euro-Office project either restore our branding and attributions or roll back all forks of our project, refraining from using our code without proper acknowledgment of ONLYOFFICE."

Microsoft is reportedly shifting Windows 11 app development back toward fully native apps. Rudy Huyn, a Partner Architect at Microsoft working on the Store and File Explorer, said in a post on X that he is building a new team to work on Windows apps. "You don't need prior experience with the platform.. what matters most is strong product thinking and a deep focus on the customer," he wrote. "If you've built great apps on any platform and care about crafting meaningful user experiences, I'd love to hear from you." Huyn later said in a reply on X that the new Windows 11 apps will be "100% native." TechSpot reports: The description stands out at a time when many of Microsoft's built-in tools, including Clipchamp and Copilot, rely on web technologies and Progressive Web App architectures. The company's commitment to native performance suggests that some long-standing frustrations around responsiveness, memory use, and interface consistency could finally be addressed.

For Windows developers, Huyn's comments hint at a change in direction. Microsoft's recent development priorities have leaned heavily on web-based approaches, with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) replacing or supplementing many native programs. [...] Exactly which applications will be rebuilt, or how strictly "100% native" will be enforced, remains unclear. Some current Microsoft apps classified as native still depend on WebView for specific features. But the renewed emphasis already has developers paying attention.

Microsoft Copilot is reportedly injecting promotional "tips" into GitHub pull requests, with Neowin claiming more than 1.5 million PRs have been affected by messages advertising integrations like Raycast, Slack, Teams, and various IDEs. From the report: According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR's description to include this message: "Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast." A quick search of that phrase on GitHub shows that the same promotional text appears in over 11,000 pull requests across thousands of repositories. Even merge requests on GitLab aren't safe from the injection.

So what's happening? Well, Raycast has a Copilot extension that can do things like create pull requests from a natural language command. The ad directly names Raycast, so you might think that Raycast is injecting the promo into the PRs to market its own app. But it is more likely that Microsoft is the one doing the injecting. If you look at the raw markdown of the affected pull requests, there is a hidden HTML comment, "START COPILOT CODING AGENT TIPS" placed right just before the ad tip. This suggests Microsoft is using the comment to insert a "tip" that points back to its own developer ecosystem or partner integrations. UPDATE: Following backlash from developers, Microsoft has removed Copilot's ability to insert "tips" into pull requests. Tim Rogers, principal product manager for Copilot at GitHub, said the move was intended "to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow."

"On reflection," Rogers said he has since realized that letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement call."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Sweeping job cuts at Big Tech companies have become an annual tradition. How executives explain those decisions, however, has changed. Out are buzzwords like efficiency, over-hiring, and too many management layers. Today, all explanations stem from artificial intelligence (AI). In recent weeks, giants including Google, Amazon, Meta, as well as smaller firms such as Pinterest and Atlassian, have all announced or warned of plans to shrink their workforce, pointing to developments in AI that they say are allowing their firms to do more with fewer people. [...] But explaining cuts by pointing to advances in AI sounds better than citing cost pressures or a desire to please shareholders, says tech investor Terrence Rohan, who has had a seat on many company boards. "Pointing to AI makes a better blog post," Rohan says. "Or it at least doesn't make you seem as much the bad guy who just wants to cut people for cost-effectiveness."

That does not mean there is no substance behind the words, Rohan added. Some of the companies he's backing are using code that is 25% to 75% AI-generated. That is a sign of the real threat that AI tools for writing code represent to jobs such as software developer, computer engineer and programmer, posts once considered a near-guarantee of highly paid, stable careers. "Some of it is that the narrative is changing, some of it is that we really are starting to see step changes in productivity," Anne Hoecker, a partner at Bain who leads the consultancy's technology practice, says of the recent job cuts. "Leaders more recently are seeing these tools are good enough that you really can do the same amount of work with fundamentally less people."

There is another way that AI is driving job cuts -- and it has nothing to do with the technical abilities of coding tools and chatbots. Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft are collectively planning to pour $650 billion into AI in the coming year. As executives hunt for ways to try to ease investor shock at those costs, many are landing on payroll, typically tech firms' single biggest expense. [...] Although the expense of, for example, 30,000 corporate Amazon employees is dwarfed by that company's AI spending plans, firms of this size will now take any opportunity to cut costs, Rohan says. "They're playing a game of inches," Rohan says of cuts at Big Tech firms. "If you can even slightly tune the machine, that is helpful." Hoecker says cutting jobs also signals to stock market investors worried about the "real and huge" cost of AI development that executives are not blithely writing blank cheques. "It shows some discipline," says Hoecker. "Maybe laying off people isn't going to make much of a dent in that bill, but by creating a little bit of cashflow, it helps."

Apple unveiled new device-level age restrictions in the UK on Wednesday. "After downloading a new update, users will now have to confirm that they are 18 or older to access unrestricted features," reports Gizmodo.

"Users will be able to confirm their age with a credit card or by scanning an ID." For those underage or who have not confirmed their age, Apple will turn on Web Content Filter and Communication Safety, which will not only restrict access to certain apps or websites, but will also monitor messages, shared photo albums, AirDrop, and FaceTime calls for nudity. Apple didn't specify exactly which services and features are banned for under-18 users, but it will likely be in compliance with UK legislation...

The British government does not require Apple and other OS providers to institute device-level age checks, but it does restrict minor access to online pornography under the Online Safety Act, which passed in 2023. So far, that restriction has only been implemented at the website level, but UK officials have been worried about easy loopholes to evade the age restrictions, like VPNs.

The broader tech industry has been campaigning for some time to use device-level age checks instead in response to the rising tide of under-16 social media and internet bans around the world. Last month, in a landmark social media trial in California, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also supported this idea, saying that conducting age verification "at the level of the phone is just a lot clearer than having every single app out there have to do this separately." Pornhub-operator Aylo had advocated for device-level restrictions in the UK as well, and even sent out letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft in November asking for OS-level age verification...

The most obvious question: Could this be brought stateside?

"Emergency out-of-band fixes issued by enterprise IT giants Microsoft and Oracle have shone a spotlight on issues around both update cycles and patching," reports Computer Weekly: Microsoft's emergency update, KB5085516, addresses an issue that arose after installing the mandatory cumulative updates pushed live on Patch Tuesday earlier this month. According to Microsoft, it has since emerged that many users experienced problems signing into applications with a Microsoft account, seeing a "no internet" error message even though the device had a working connection. This had the effect of preventing access to multiple services and applications. It should be noted that organisations using Entra ID did not experience the issue.

But Microsoft's emergency patch comes just days after it doubled down on a commitment to software quality, reliability and stability. In a blog post published just 24 hours prior to the latest update, Pavan Davuluri of Microsoft's Windows Insider Program Team said updates should be "predictable and easy to plan around".
Michael Bell, founder/CEO of Suzu Labs tells Computer Weekly that Microsoft's patch for the sign-in bug follows "separate hotpatches for RRAS remote code execution flaws and a Bluetooth visibility bug. Three emergency fixes in eight days does not shout reliability era." Oracle's patch, meanwhile, addresses CVE-2026-21992, a remote code execution flaw in the REST:WebServices component of Oracle Identity Manager and the Web Services Security component of Oracle Web Services Manager in Oracle Fusion Middleware. It carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker with network access over HTTP.