Microsoft aiuterà il Governo di Tokyo nella trasformazione digitale del Paese

Microsoft ha annunciato un piano di investimenti di circa 2,9 miliardi di dollari in Giappone nei prossimi due anni. Diversi i settori strategici su cui il gigante tecnologico americano spenderà le risorse finanziarie, dall’intelligenza artificiale (AI) all’infrastruttura cloud, dalla formazione specializzata alla sicurezza informatica, con un occhio alla ricerca e l’innovazione.

Il piano è stato comunicato durante la visita del Primo ministro giapponese, Fumio Kishida, che ha incontrato i rappresentanti della Camera di Commercio degli Stati Uniti, tra cui la Presidente Suzanne P. Clark, e certamente il management di Microsoft, tra cui il Presidente Brad Smith e il Chief Technology Officer e Vicepresidente esecutivo di AI, Kevin Scott.

In particolare, tra gli obiettivi più rilevanti di Redmond in Giappone c’è l’ampliamento dei programmi di formazione, con l’obiettivo, nei prossimi tre anni, di fornire competenze adeguate allo sviluppo dell’intelligenza artificiale a più di 3 milioni di persone e l’apertura del primo laboratorio Microsoft Research Asia nel Paese.

Sicurezza e Difesa, con un occhio al contenimento dell’espansione cinese nel Pacifico

Nel comunicato ufficiale si afferma la volontà di aiutare il Governo di Tokyo nella trasformazione digitale nazionale, attraverso un sostegno concreto allo sviluppo tecnologico, accrescendo le infrastrutture di base, formando nuovi professionisti ICT, migliorando i livelli di cyberdifesa, potenziando la rete cloud e ampliando le applicazioni dell’AI.

L’impegno di Microsoft nel paese asiatico è il più grande, in termini di risorse finanziarie, in 46 anni di presenza e probabilmente giunge in un momento storico molto particolare, che vede gli Stati Uniti e i suoi alleati, tra cui il Giappone, impegnati nel contenimento dell’espansione cinese nel Pacifico e non solo (vedi la Belt and Road Initiative, o Nuova Via della Seta).

Non va dimenticato che è stato proprio il Presidente Joe Biden a chiedere alle Big Tech statunitensi di impegnarsi direttamente sul fronte dello scontro Washington-Pechino, in particolare nella difesa degli interessi nazionali americani su scala planetaria e quindi del know-how chiave e delle tecnologie più strategiche, tra cui l’AI, il cloud e la cybersecurity.

Le relazioni tra Tokyo e Pechino si sviluppano sul doppio binario cooperazione/competizione. Un rapporto complesso, frutto di un momento storico estremamente critico, ma che vede il Giappone svolgere anche un ruolo chiave nel processo di promozione della BRI.

Tra Tokyo e Pechino un rapporto di “coopetion”

Il Governo nipponico da anni lavora a due Vie alternative alla BRI per lo sviluppo dei rapporti commerciali e finanziari con il Sud-Est asiatico: l’East-West Economic Corridor e il Southern Economic Corridor. Entrambi i corridoi fanno parte della Free and Open Indo Pacific strategy.

Progetti di rilievo globale che sono nati in seno al Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Economic Cooperation Program, nato nel 1992 con il sostegno dell’Asian Development Bank e che vede una forte collaborazione con la Cina fin dal principio.

Esempi diretti di questa partecipazione cinese al GMS sono il corridoio economico Cina-India-Myanmar, il corridoio economico Cina-penisola dell’Indocina e il corridoio economico diretto Cina-Myanmar.

Esempi pratici di cooperazione e competizione continue, anche perché molti di questi corridoi concorrenti sono spesso finanziati da prestatori statunitensi ed occidentali, come anche cinesi e mediorientali, gestiti attraverso joint venture multinazionali, che impediscono ogni analisi superficiale in chiave geopolitica.

https://www.key4biz.it/ai-e-cloud-microsoft-investira-29-miliardi-di-dollari-in-giappone/486271/

Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.

As spotted by The Document Foundation, the government has apparently finished its pilot run of LibreOffice and is now announcing plans to expand to more open source offerings.

In 2021, the state government announced plans to move 25,000 computers to LibreOffice by 2026. At the time, Schleswig-Holstein said it had already been testing LibreOffice for two years.

As announced on Minister-President Daniel Gunther’s webpage this week, the state government confirmed that it’s moving all systems to the Linux operating system (OS), too. Per a website-provided translation:

With the cabinet decision, the state government has made the concrete beginning of the switch away from proprietary software and towards free, open-source systems and digitally sovereign IT workplaces for the state administration’s approximately 30,000 employees.

The state government is offering a training program that it said it will update as necessary.

Regarding LibreOffice, the government maintains the possibility that some jobs may use software so specialized that they won’t be able to move to open source software.

In 2021, Jan Philipp Albrecht, then-minister for Energy, Agriculture, the Environment, Nature, and Digitalization of Schleswig-Holstein, discussed interest in moving the state government off of Windows.

“Due to the high hardware requirements of Windows 11, we would have a problem with older computers. With Linux we don’t have that,” Albrecht told Heise magazine, per a Google translation.

This week’s announcement also said that the Schleswig-Holstein government will ditch Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange/Outlook in favor of open source offerings Nextcloud and Open-Xchange, and Mozilla Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention active directory connector.

Schleswig-Holstein is also developing an open source directory service to replace Microsoft’s Active Directory and an open source telephony offering.

Digital sovereignty dreams

Explaining the decision, the Schleswig-Holstein government’s announcement named enhanced IT security, cost efficiencies, and collaboration between different systems as its perceived benefits of switching to open source software.

Further, the government is pushing the idea of digital sovereignty, with Schleswig-Holstein Digitalization Minister Dirk Schrödter quoted in the announcement as comparing the concept’s value to that of energy sovereignty. The announcement also quoted Schrödter as saying that digital sovereignty isn’t achievable “with the current standard IT workplace products.”

Schrödter pointed to the state government’s growing reliance on cloud services and said that with related proprietary software, users have no influence on data flow and whether that data makes its way to other countries.

Schrödter also claimed that the move would help with the state’s budget by diverting money from licensing fees to “real programming services from our domestic digital economy” that could also create local jobs.

In 2021, Albrecht said the state was reaching its limits with proprietary software contracts because “license fees have continued to rise in recent years,” per Google’s translation.

“Secondly, regarding our goals for the digitalization of administration, open source simply offers us more flexibility,” he added.

At the time, Albrecht claimed that 90 percent of video conferences in the state government ran on the open source program Jitsi, which was advantageous during the COVID-19 pandemic because the state was able to quickly increase video conferencing capacity.

Additionally, he said that because the school portal was based on (unnamed) open source software, “we can design the interface flexibly and combine services the way we want.”

There are numerous other examples globally of government entities switching to Linux in favor of open source technology. Federal governments with particular interest in avoiding US-based technologies, including North Korea and China, are some examples. The South Korean government has also shared plans to move to Linux by 2026, and the city of Barcelona shared migration plans in 2018.

But some government bodies that have made the move regretted it and ended up crawling back to Windows. Vienna released the Debian-based distribution WIENUX in 2005 but gave up on migration by 2009.

In 2003, Munich announced it would be moving some 14,000 PCs off Windows and to Linux. In 2013, the LiMux project finished, but high associated costs and user dissatisfaction resulted in Munich announcing in 2017 that it would spend the next three years reverting back to Windows.

Albrecht in 2021 addressed this failure when speaking to Heise, saying, per Google’s translation:

The main problem there was that the employees weren’t sufficiently involved. We do that better. We are planning long transition phases with parallel use. And we are introducing open source step by step where the departments are ready for it. This also creates the reason for further rollout because people see that it works.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2015137

In January, Microsoft introduced a new key to Windows PC keyboards for the first time in 30 years. The Copilot key, dedicated to launching Microsoft’s eponymous generative AI assistant, is already on some Windows laptops released this year. On Monday, Tom’s Hardware dug into the new addition and determined exactly what pressing the button does, which is actually pretty simple. Pushing a computer’s integrated Copilot button is like pressing left-Shift + Windows key + F23 simultaneously.

Tom’s Hardware confirmed this after wondering if the Copilot key introduced a new scan code to Windows or if it worked differently. Using the scripting program AuthoHotkey with a new laptop with a Copilot button, Tom’s Hardware discovered the keystrokes registered when a user presses the Copilot key. The publication confirmed with Dell that “this key assignment is standard for the Copilot key and done at Microsoft’s direction.”

F23

Surprising to see in that string of keys is F23. Having a computer keyboard with a function row or rows that take you from F1 all the way to F23 is quite rare today. When I try to imagine a keyboard that comes with an F23 button, vintage keyboards come to mind, more specifically buckling spring keyboards from IBM.

IBM’s Model F, which debuted in 1981 and used buckling spring switches over a capacitive PCB, and the Model M, which launched in 1985 and used buckling spring switches over a membrane sheet, both offered layouts with 122 keys. These layouts included not one, but two rows of function keys that would leave today’s 60 percent keyboard fans sweating over the wasted space.

But having 122 keys was helpful for keyboards tied to IBM business terminals. The keyboard layout even included a bank of keys to the left of the primary alpha block of keys for even more forms of input.

The 122-key keyboard layout with F23 lives on. Beyond people who still swear by old Model F and M keyboards, Model F Labs and Unicomp both currently sell modern buckling spring keyboards with built-in F23 buttons. Another reason a modern Windows PC user might have access to an F23 key is if they use a macro pad.

But even with those uses in mind, the F23 key remains rare. That helps explain why Microsoft would use the key for launching Copilot; users are unlikely to have F23 programmed for other functions. This was also likely less work than making a key with an entirely new scan code.

The Copilot button is reprogrammable

When I previewed Dell’s 2024 XPS laptops, a Dell representative told me that the integrated Copilot key wasn’t reprogrammable. However, in addition to providing some interesting information about the newest PC key since the Windows button, Tom’s Hardware’s revelation shows why the Copilot key is actually reprogrammable, even if OEMs don’t give users a way to do so out of the box. (If you need help, check out the website’s tutorial for reprogramming the Windows Copilot key.)

I suspect there’s a strong interest in reprogramming that button. For one, generative AI, despite all its hype and potential, is still an emerging technology. Many don’t need or want access to any chatbot—let alone Microsoft’s—instantly or even at all. Those who don’t use their system with a Microsoft account have no use for the button, since being logged in to a Microsoft account is required for the button to launch Copilot.

Additionally, there are other easy ways to launch Copilot on a computer that has the program downloaded, like double-clicking an icon or pressing Windows + C, that make a dedicated button unnecessary. (Ars Technica asked Microsoft why the Copilot key doesn’t just register Windows + C, but the company declined to comment. Windows + C has launched other apps in the past, including Cortana, so it’s possible that Microsoft wanted to avoid the Copilot key performing a different function when pressed on computers that use Windows images without Copilot.)

In general, shoehorning the Copilot key into Windows laptops seems premature. Copilot is young and still a preview; just a few months ago, it was called Bing Chat. Further, the future of generative AI, including its popularity and top uses, is still forming and could evolve substantially during the lifetime of a Windows laptop. Microsoft’s generative AI efforts could also flounder over the years. Imagine if Microsoft went all-in on Bing back in the day and made all Windows keyboards have a Bing button, for example. Just because Microsoft wants something to become mainstream doesn’t mean that it will.

This all has made the Copilot button seem more like a way to force the adoption of Microsoft’s chatbot than a way to improve Windows keyboards. Microsoft has also made the Copilot button a requirement for its AI PC certification (which also requires an integrated neural processing unit and having Copilot pre-installed). Microsoft plans to make Copilot keys a requirement for Windows 11 OEM PCs eventually, it told Ars Technica in January.

At least for now, the basic way that the Copilot button works means you can turn the key into something more useful. Now, the tricky part would be finding a replacement keycap to eradicate Copilot’s influence from your keyboard.

Listing image by Microsoft

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2014584

Il supercomputer “Stargate”

Un progetto pioneristico e costosissimo, che vede unite insieme in quest’impresa il gigante Microsoft e la star dell’intelligenza artificiale OpenAI. Secondo quanto riferito da entrambe le società, l’obiettivo è arrivare a realizzare un data center negli Stati Uniti in grado di ospitare un supercomputer composto da milioni di chip avanzati che supporterebbero lo sviluppo di nuove generazioni di intelligenza artificiale (AI).

Si chiamerà “Stargate” e potrebbe arrivare a costare 100 miliardi di dollari, cifra che supera anche di 100 volte i costi sostenuti per mettere in piedi alcuni dei data center più importanti del mondo, secondo The Information.

Starà a Redmond tirare fuori la stragrande maggioranza delle risorse necessarie e “Stargate” potrebbe essere operativo entro il 2028.

Ma non solo, il progetto in realtà prevede il lancio di cinque macchine in totale da realizzare entro i prossimi sei anni.

Una nuova generazione di AI

Attualmente, le due società sono alla terza fase di questa iniziativa, che si presenta molto impegnativa sotto vari aspetti, mentre la quarta comprenderà lo sviluppo del supercomputer, di cui si occuperà Microsoft e che potrebbe essere attivato entro il 2026.

Nel frattempo, ad inizio 2025 dovrebbe arrivare da OpenAI una nuova generazione di intelligenza artificiale.

Il rapporto di collaborazione e partnership avviato da Microsoft e OpenAI dura ormai da qualche tempo e si sta facendo sempre più stretto.

La Big Tech aveva infatti investito rilevanti somme finanziarie nel progetto ChatGPT di OpenAI, sollevando le proteste del CEO di Tesla, Elon Musk, che ha citato in giudizio OpenAI e attirando l’attenzione delle autorità regolatorie dell’Unione europea e del Regno Unito.

AI, mercato e geopolitica

D’altronde, il mercato AI globale fa gola a tante società, visto che entro il 2032 si sima potrebbe raggiungere e superare gli 1,3 trilioni di dollari di valore.

Non solo, perché l’AI in fondo rappresenta anche uno strumento di grande portata politica, economica, sociale e geopolitica. Tutti hanno ben compreso l’enorme potere di questa tecnologica e i potenziali vantaggi per il Paese che riuscirà a disporre della generazione più avanzata di soluzioni AI da applicare in ogni settore.

Su questo si è innescata una competizione mondiale tra superpotenze che probabilmente durerà anni e che in qualche modo ricalca quanto accaduto con l’atomica o la corsa allo spazio (ancora oggi in gran voga a dire il vero), sia per l’enorme capacità dell’AI di elaborare dati, sia per la velocità con cui questa tecnologia può trasformare la nostra società.

https://www.key4biz.it/un-supercomputer-da-100-miliardi-di-dollari-microsoft-e-openai-lo-hanno-chiamato-stargate/485288/

Months after unbundling the apps in the European Union, Microsoft is taking the Office and Teams breakup worldwide. Reuters reports that Microsoft will begin selling Teams and the other Microsoft 365 apps to new commercial customers as separate products with separate price tags beginning today.

“To ensure clarity for our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. “Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”

The unbundling is a win for other team communication apps like Slack and videoconferencing apps like Zoom, both of which predate Teams but haven’t had the benefits of the Office apps’ huge established user base.

The separation follows an EU regulatory investigation that started in July of 2023, almost exactly three years after Slack initially filed a complaint alleging that Microsoft was “abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law.”

In August of 2023, Microsoft announced that it would be unbundling the apps in the EU and Switzerland in October. Bloomberg reported in September that Zoom had met with EU and US Federal Trade Commission regulators about Microsoft, further ratcheting up regulatory pressure on Microsoft.

In October, Microsoft European Government Affairs VP Nanna-Louise Linde described the unbundling and other moves as “proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way,” though the EU investigation is ongoing, and the company may yet be fined. Linde also wrote that Microsoft would allow third-party apps like Zoom and Slack to integrate more deeply with the Office apps and that it would “enable third-party solutions to host Office web applications.”

Microsoft has put up a blog post detailing its new pricing structure here—for now, the changes only affect the Microsoft 365 plans for the Business, Enterprise, and Frontline versions of Microsoft 365. Consumer, Academic, US Government, and Nonprofit editions of Microsoft 365 aren’t changing today and will still bundle Teams as they did before.

Current Office/Microsoft 365 Enterprise customers who want to keep using the Office apps and Teams together can continue to subscribe to both at their current prices. New subscribers to the Enterprise versions of Microsoft 365/Office 365 can pay $5.25 per user per month for Teams, whether they’re buying Teams as standalone software or adding it on top of a Teams-free Office/Microsoft 365 subscription.

For the Business and Frontline Microsoft 365 versions, you can either buy the version with Teams included for the same price as before, or choose a new Teams-less option that will save you a couple of dollars per user per month. For example, the Teams-less version of Microsoft 365 Business Standard costs $10.25 per user per month, compared to $12.50 for the version that includes Teams.

Updated April 1, 2024, at 4:12 pm to add more details about pricing and a link to Microsoft’s official blog post about the announcement; also added a statement from a Microsoft spokesperson.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2013950

Microsoft said in January that 2024 would be the year of the “AI PC,” and we know that AI PCs will include a few hardware components that most Windows systems currently do not include—namely, a built-in neural processing unit (NPU) and Microsoft’s new Copilot key for keyboards. But so far we haven’t heard a whole lot about what a so-called AI PC will actually do for users.

Microsoft and Intel are starting to talk about a few details as part of an announcement from Intel about a new AI PC developer program that will encourage software developers to leverage local hardware to build AI features into their apps.

The main news comes from Tom’s Hardware, confirming that AI PCs would be able to run “more elements of Copilot,” Microsoft’s AI chatbot assistant, “locally on the client.” Currently, Copilot relies on server-side processing even for small requests, introducing lag that is tolerable if you’re making a broad request for information but less so if all you want to do is change a setting or get basic answers. Running generative AI models locally could also improve user privacy, making it possible to take advantage of AI-infused software without automatically sending information to a company that will use it for further model training.

Right now, Windows doesn’t use local NPUs for much, since most current PCs don’t have them. The Surface Studio webcam features can use NPUs for power-efficient video effects and background replacement, but as of this writing that’s pretty much it. Apple’s and Google’s operating systems both use NPUs for a wider swatch of image and audio processing features, including facial recognition and object recognition, OCR, live transcription and translation, and more.

Intel also said that Microsoft would require NPUs in “next-gen AI PCs” to hit speeds of 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) to meet its requirements. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and others sometimes use TOPS as a high-level performance metric when comparing their NPUs; Intel’s Meteor Lake laptop chips can run 10 TOPS, while AMD’s Ryzen 7040 and 8040 laptop chips hit 10 TOPS and 16 TOPS, respectively.

Unfortunately for Intel, the first company to put out an NPU suitable for powering Copilot locally may come from Qualcomm. The company’s upcoming Snapdragon X processors, long seen as the Windows ecosystem’s answer to Apple’s M-series Mac chips, promise up to 45 TOPS. Rumors suggest that Microsoft will shift the consumer version of its Surface tablet to Qualcomm’s chips after a few years of offering both Intel and Qualcomm options; Microsoft announced a Surface Pro update with Intel’s Meteor Lake chips last week but is only selling it to businesses.

All of that said, TOPS are just one simplified performance metric. As when using FLOPS to compare graphics performance, it’s imprecise and won’t capture variations in how each NPU handles different tasks. And the Arm version of Windows still has software and hardware compatibility issues that could continue to hold it back.

As part of its developer program, Intel is also offering an “AI PC development kit” centered on an Asus NUC Pro 14, a mini PC built around Intel’s Meteor Lake silicon. Intel formally stopped making its NUC mini PCs last year, passing the brand and all of its designs off to Asus. Asus is also handling all remaining warranty service and software support for older NUCs designed and sold by Intel. The NUC Pro 14 is one of the first new NUCs announced since the transition, along with the ROG NUC mini gaming PC.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2012793

It seems like AI large language models (LLMs) are everywhere these days due to the rise of ChatGPT. Now, a software developer named Ishan Anand has managed to cram a precursor to ChatGPT called GPT-2—originally released in 2019 after some trepidation from OpenAI—into a working Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It’s freely available and is designed to educate people about how LLMs work.

“By using a spreadsheet anyone (even non-developers) can explore and play directly with how a ‘real’ transformer works under the hood with minimal abstractions to get in the way,” writes Anand on the official website for the sheet, which he calls “Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.” It’s a nod to the 2017 research paper “Attention is All You Need” that first described the Transformer architecture that has been foundational to how LLMs work.

Anand packed GPT-2 into an XLSB Microsoft Excel binary file format, and it requires the latest version of Excel to run (but won’t work on the web version). It’s completely local and doesn’t do any API calls to cloud AI services.

Even though the spreadsheet contains a complete AI language model, you can’t chat with it like ChatGPT. Instead, users input words in other cells and see the predictive results displayed in different cells almost instantly. Recall that language models like GPT-2 were designed to do next-token prediction, which means they try to complete an input (called a prompt, which is encoded into chunks called tokens) with the most likely text. The prediction could be the continuation of a sentence or any other text-based task, such as software code. Different sheets in Anand’s Excel file allow users to get a sense of what is going on under the hood while these predictions are taking place.

Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need only supports 10 tokens of input. That’s tiny compared to the 128,000-token context window of GPT-4 Turbo, but it’s enough to demonstrate some basic principles of how LLMs work, which Anand has detailed in a series of free tutorial videos he has uploaded to YouTube.

In an interview with Ars Technica, Anand says he started the project so he could satisfy his own curiosity and understand the Transformer in detail. “Modern AI is so different from the AI I learned when I was getting my CS degree that I felt I needed to go back to the fundamentals to truly have a mental model for how it worked.”

He says he was originally going to re-create GPT-2 in JavaScript, but he loves spreadsheets—he calls himself “a spreadsheet addict.” He pulled inspiration from data scientist Jeremy Howard’s fast.ai and former OpenAI engineer Andrej Karpathy’s AI tutorials on YouTube.

“I walked away from Karpathy’s videos realizing GPT is mostly just a big computational graph (like a spreadsheet),” he says, “And [I] loved how Jeremy often uses spreadsheets in his course to make the material more approachable. After watching those two, it suddenly clicked that it might be possible to do the whole GPT-2 model in a spreadsheet.”

We asked: Did he have any difficulty implementing a LLM in a spreadsheet? “The actual algorithm for GPT2 is mostly a lot of math operations which is perfect for a spreadsheet,” he says. “In fact, the hardest piece is where the words are converted into numbers (a process called tokenization) because it’s text processing and the only part that isn’t math. It would have been easier to do that part in a traditional programming language than in a spreadsheet.”

When Anand needed assistance, he naturally got a little help from GPT-2’s descendant: “Notably ChatGPT itself was very helpful in the process in terms helping me solve thorny issues I would come across or understanding various stages of the algorithm, but it would also hallucinate so I had to double-check it a lot.”

GPT-2 rides again

This whole feat is possible because OpenAI released the neural network weights and source code for GPT-2 in November 2019. It’s particularly interesting to see that particular model baked into an educational spreadsheet because when it was announced in February 2019, OpenAI was afraid to release it—the company saw the potential that GPT-2 might be “used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale.”

Still, the company released the full GPT-2 model (including weights files needed to run it locally) in November 2019, but the company’s next major model, GPT-3, which launched in 2020, has not received an open-weights release. A variation of GPT-3 later formed the basis for the initial version of ChatGPT, launched in 2022.

Anand’s spreadsheet implementation runs “GPT-2 Small,” which unlike the full 1.5-billion-parameter version of GPT-2 clocks in at 124 million parameters. (Parameters are numerical values in AI models that store patterns learned from training data.) Compared to the 175 billion parameters in GPT-3 (and even larger models), it probably would not qualify as a “large” language model if released today. But in 2019, GPT-2 was considered state-of-the-art.

You can download the GPT-2-infused spreadsheet on GitHub, though be aware that it’s about 1.2GB. Because of its complexity, Anand said it can frequently lock up or crash Excel, especially on a Mac; he recommends running the sheet on Windows. “It is highly recommended to use the manual calculation mode in Excel and the Windows version of Excel (either on a Windows directory or via Parallels on a Mac),” he writes on his website.

And before you ask, Google Sheets is currently out of the question: “This project actually started on Google Sheets, but the full 124M model was too big and switched to Excel,” Anand writes. “I’m still exploring ways to make this work in Google Sheets, but it is unlikely to fit into a single file as it can with Excel.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2010453

In the annals of PC history, IBM’s OS/2 represents a road not taken. Developed in the waning days of IBM’s partnership with Microsoft—the same partnership that had given us a decade or so of MS-DOS and PC-DOS—OS/2 was meant to improve on areas where DOS was falling short on modern systems. Better memory management, multitasking capabilities, and a usable GUI were all among the features introduced in version 1.x.

But Microsoft was frustrated with some of IBM’s goals and demands, and the company continued to develop an operating system called Windows on its own. Where IBM wanted OS/2 to be used mainly to boost IBM-made PCs and designed it around the limitations of Intel’s 80286 CPU, Windows was being created with the booming market for PC-compatible clones in mind. Windows 1.x and 2.x failed to make much of a dent, but 1990’s Windows 3.0 was a hit, and it came preinstalled on many consumer PCs; Microsoft and IBM broke off their partnership shortly afterward, making OS/2 version 1.2 the last one publicly released and sold with Microsoft’s involvement.

But Microsoft had done a lot of work on version 2.0 of OS/2 at the same time as it was developing Windows. It was far enough along that preview screenshots appeared in PC Magazine, and early builds were shipped to developers who could pay for them, but it was never formally released to the public.

But software archaeologist Neozeed recently published a stable internal preview of Microsoft’s OS/2 2.0 to the Internet Archive, along with working virtual machine disk images for VMware and 86Box. The preview, bought by Brian Ledbetter on eBay for $650 plus $15.26 in shipping, dates to July 1990 and would have cost developers who wanted it a whopping $2,600. A lot to pay for a version of an operating system that would never see the light of day!

The Microsoft-developed build of OS/2 2.0 bears only a passing resemblance to the 32-bit version of OS/2 2.0 that IBM finally shipped on its own in April 1992. Neozeed has published a more thorough exploration of Microsoft’s version, digging around in its guts and getting some early Windows software running (the ability to run DOS and Windows apps was simultaneously a selling point of OS/2 and a reason for developers not to create OS/2-specific apps, one of the things that helped to doom OS/2 in the end). It’s a fascinating detail from a turning point in the history of the PC as we know it today, but as a usable desktop operating system, it leaves something to be desired.

This unreleased Microsoft-developed OS/2 build isn’t the first piece of Microsoft-related software history that has been excavated in the last few months. In January, an Internet Archive user discovered and uploaded an early build of 86-DOS, the software that Microsoft bought and turned into MS-DOS/PC-DOS for the original IBM PC 5150. Funnily enough, these unreleased previews serve as bookends for IBM and Microsoft’s often-contentious partnership.

As part of the “divorce settlement” between Microsoft and IBM, IBM would take over the development and maintenance of OS/2 1.x and 2.x while Microsoft continued to work on a more advanced far-future version 3.0 of OS/2. This operating system was never released as OS/2, but it would eventually become Windows NT, Microsoft’s more stable business-centric version of Windows. Windows NT merged with the consumer versions of Windows in the early 2000s with Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and those versions gradually evolved into Windows as we know it today.

It has been 18 years since IBM formally discontinued its last release of OS/2, but as so often happens in computing, the software has found a way to live on. ArcaOS is a semi-modernized, intermittently updated branch of OS/2 updated to run on modern hardware while still supporting the ability to run MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows apps.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2009911

Microsoft said that Kremlin-backed hackers who breached its corporate network in January have expanded their access since then in follow-on attacks that are targeting customers and have compromised the company’s source code and internal systems.

The intrusion, which the software company disclosed in January, was carried out by Midnight Blizzard, the name used to track a hacking group widely attributed to the Federal Security Service, a Russian intelligence agency. Microsoft said at the time that Midnight Blizzard gained access to senior executives’ email accounts for months after first exploiting a weak password in a test device connected to the company’s network. Microsoft went on to say it had no indication any of its source code or production systems had been compromised.

Secrets sent in email

In an update published Friday, Microsoft said it uncovered evidence that Midnight Blizzard had used the information it gained initially to further push into its network and compromise both source code and internal systems. The hacking group—which is tracked under multiple other names, including APT29, Cozy Bear, CozyDuke, The Dukes, Dark Halo, and Nobelium—has been using the proprietary information in follow-on attacks, not only against Microsoft but also its customers.

“In recent weeks, we have seen evidence that Midnight Blizzard is using information initially exfiltrated from our corporate email systems to gain, or attempt to gain, unauthorized access,” Friday’s update said. “This has included access to some of the company’s source code repositories and internal systems. To date we have found no evidence that Microsoft-hosted customer-facing systems have been compromised.

In January’s disclosure, Microsoft said Midnight Blizzard used a password-spraying attack to compromise a “legacy non-production test tenant account” on the company’s network. Those details meant that the account hadn’t been removed once it was decommissioned, a practice that’s considered essential for securing networks. The details also meant that the password used to log in to the account was weak enough to be guessed by sending a steady stream of credentials harvested from previous breaches—a technique known as password spraying.

In the months since, Microsoft said Friday, Midnight Blizzard has been exploiting the information it obtained earlier in follow-on attacks that have stepped up an already high rate of password spraying.

Unprecedented global threat

Microsoft officials wrote:

It is apparent that Midnight Blizzard is attempting to use secrets of different types it has found. Some of these secrets were shared between customers and Microsoft in email, and as we discover them in our exfiltrated email, we have been and are reaching out to these customers to assist them in taking mitigating measures. Midnight Blizzard has increased the volume of some aspects of the attack, such as password sprays, by as much as 10-fold in February, compared to the already large volume we saw in January 2024.

Midnight Blizzard’s ongoing attack is characterized by a sustained, significant commitment of the threat actor’s resources, coordination, and focus. It may be using the information it has obtained to accumulate a picture of areas to attack and enhance its ability to do so. This reflects what has become more broadly an unprecedented global threat landscape, especially in terms of sophisticated nation-state attacks.

The attack began in November and wasn’t detected until January. Microsoft said then that the breach allowed Midnight Blizzard to monitor the email accounts of senior executives and security personnel, raising the possibility that the group was able to read sensitive communications for as long as three months. Microsoft said one motivation for the attack was for Midnight Blizzard to learn what the company knew about the threat group. Microsoft said at the time and reiterated again Friday that it had no evidence the hackers gained access to customer-facing systems.

Midnight Blizzard is among the most prolific APTs, short for advanced persistent threats, the term used for skilled, well-funded hacking groups that are mostly backed by nation-states. The group was behind the SolarWinds supply-chain attack that led to the hacking of the US Departments of Energy, Commerce, Treasury, and Homeland Security and about 100 private-sector companies.

Last week, the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and international partners warned that in recent months, the threat group has expanded its activity to target aviation, education, law enforcement, local and state councils, government financial departments, and military organizations.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2008953

For months, some of the biggest tech companies have been wrapped up in discussions with the European Commission (EC), seeking feedback and tweaking their plans to ensure their core platform services comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) ahead of that law taking force in the European Union tomorrow.

Under the DMA, companies designated as gatekeepers—Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft—must follow strict rules to ensure that they don’t engage in unfair business practices that could limit consumer choice in core platform services. These include app stores, search engines, social networking services, online marketplaces, operating systems, web browsers, advertising services, cloud computing services, virtual assistants, and certain messaging services.

At its heart, the DMA requires more interoperability than ever, making it harder for gatekeepers to favor their own services or block other businesses from reaching consumers on their platforms.

Each gatekeeper will publish compliance reports in the coming days, detailing for the first time what changes they’ve made to comply with the DMA. All companies have already previewed changes coming in the buildup to the deadline. Some companies, like Google, have announced various changes impacting businesses and users, while others, like TikTok-owner ByteDance, are begrudgingly updating services now while still contesting their gatekeeper status.

Although the EC has said that the DMA is intended to protect fair and open markets—theoretically offering users more choices to enhance transparency, privacy, security, and competition online—some tech companies have warned that some of the changes coming under the DMA may increase risks or decrease choices for their users.

Last January, Apple warned that complying with the DMA required the company to take additional new steps “to reduce privacy and security risks the DMA creates.” According to Apple, DMA requirements linked to user choice—such as options to choose an alternative default contactless payment method other than Apple’s—could introduce new threats, like malware or malicious code used to scam users, that Apple can’t promise to protect against.

So far, all gatekeepers except for ByteDance have specified that changes coming soon will only impact users in the EU, the European Economic Area (EEA), and Switzerland. In a TikTok blog, ByteDance announced in March that new functionality added for DMA compliance will “roll out globally in the near future.”

However, it’s possible that other gatekeepers adjusting services may end up doing a cost-benefit analysis and, like ByteDance, eventually updating services in other parts of the world. This would potentially extend the DMA’s reach beyond the EU’s borders.

It also seems possible that other regions will quickly adopt the DMA’s standards. The EU and the US, for example, formed the EU-US Trade and Technology Council in 2021, which has been meeting more consistently in the ramp-up to DMA enforcement. Partly formed to cooperate on setting best practice technology standards, the next meeting is scheduled for this spring, just after the EC publishes summaries of gatekeepers’ compliance reports. Other countries, including Turkey, Australia, Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom, have already embraced the DMA model, according to the nonprofit tech policy think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

Some critics of the DMA, including ITIF, have urged countries to “carefully consider the full implications before copying the EU’s digital regulatory system,” warning of potentially burdensome restrictions possibly hampering innovation and distorting competition.

Now that the EC is preparing to enforce the DMA officially, its impact will soon become clearer. However, the EC does not expect the online world to immediately look different tomorrow in the EU than it does today.

Some companies, like Microsoft, have estimated that DMA updates may not be available to all EU users until April, while other companies may fall short of DMA standards and be ordered to make more changes after submitting their first compliance reports.

Gatekeepers are expected to share compliance reports starting this afternoon, but for now, here’s a brief overview of changes coming to core services offered in the EU by all six gatekeepers.

Apple warns DMA creates potential risks

In January, Apple announced changes coming to iOS, Safari, and the App Store that will “become available to users in the 27 EU countries beginning in March 2024.”

Some changes are small. The only change in Safari, for example, is that users will be prompted to choose a default browser when they first open Safari in iOS 17.4 or later.

But changes to the App Store and iOS are more significant.

In the App Store, developers can expect extensive changes “affecting apps across Apple’s operating systems, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.” These include new options to process payments for digital goods with alternative service providers or by linking out to a website. Developers can now offer deals, discounts, and promotions outside their apps, too.

To help developers navigate these options, Apple also developed business tools to estimate fees or potentially reduced commissions.

Specifically for iOS, updates include new options to distribute iOS apps in alternative marketplaces and new APIs enabling developers to create alternative app marketplaces, use alternative web browser engines for in-app browsing, and “submit additional requests for interoperability with iPhone and iOS hardware and software features.”

Perhaps more significantly for users, Apple introduced “new controls that allow users to select a third-party contactless payment app—or an alternative app marketplace—as their default.”

Using these alternatives, Apple warned, may diminish the user experience by impacting system performance or draining battery life. And some features, like Family Purchase Sharing and Ask to Buy, won’t work “with apps downloaded from outside of the App Store.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2008325