A gaming education

Unlike Spencer, who spent years at Microsoft Game Studios before heading Microsoft’s gaming division, Sharma has no professional experience in the video game industry. And her personal experience with Xbox also seems somewhat limited; after sharing her Gamertag on social media over the weekend, curious gamers found that her Xbox play history dates back roughly one month. That’s also in stark contrast to Spencer, who has amassed a score of over 121,000 across decades of play.

In her interview with Variety, Sharma cited 2016’s Firewatch as an example of the kinds of games with “deep emotional resonance” and “a distinct point of view” that she’s looking for from Microsoft. And on social media, Sharma shared her list of the three greatest games ever: “Halo, Valheim, Goldeneye,” for what it’s worth. Sharma also seems to be taking recommendations for games to catch up on; after saying on social media that she would try Borderlands 2, the game appeared in her recently played games over the weekend.

A look at some of Sharma’s recently played Xbox games, as of this writing.

Being a personal fan of video games isn’t necessarily required to succeed in running a gaming company. Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi famously didn’t care for video games even as he launched the Famicom and Nintendo Entertainment System to worldwide success in the 1980s. Still, the lack of direct experience with the gaming world marks a sharp change after Spencer’s long tenure at a time when Microsoft is struggling to redefine the Xbox brand amid cratering hardware sales, a pivot away from software exclusives, and a move to extend the Xbox brand to many different devices.

Xbox President and COO Sarah Bond, who by all accounts was being set up to succeed Spencer, also announced her departure from Microsoft on Friday, ending a nearly nine-year stint as a public face for the company’s gaming efforts. The Verge reports that Bond caused a lot of friction within the Xbox team when she championed the “Xbox Everywhere” strategy and “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign, which focused on streaming Xbox games to hardware like mobile phones and tablets, according to anonymous sources. Shortly before the launch of that campaign in 2024, Microsoft lost marketing executives Jerrett West and Kareem Choudry, leading to significant internal reorganization.

Longtime Xbox Game Studios executive Matt Booty, whose history in the game industry dates back to working for Williams Electronics in the ’90s, has been promoted to executive vice president and chief content officer for Xbox and “will continue working closely with [Sharma] to ensure a smooth transition,” Microsoft said in its announcement Friday.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/02/new-microsoft-gaming-chief-has-no-tolerance-for-bad-ai/

Microsoft Executive Vice President for Gaming Phil Spencer announced he will retire after 38 years at Microsoft and 12 years leading the company’s video game efforts. Asha Sharma, an executive currently in charge of Microsoft’s CoreAI division, will take his place.

Xbox President Sarah Bond, who many assumed was being groomed as Spencer’s eventual replacement, is also resigning from the company. Current Xbox Studios Head Matt Booty, meanwhile, is being promoted to Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer and will work closely with Sharma.

In his departure note, Spencer said he told Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last fall that he was “thinking about stepping back and starting the next chapter of my life.” Spencer will remain at Microsoft “in an advisory role” through the summer to help Sharma during the transition, he wrote.

Spencer, who got his start at Microsoft as an intern in 1988, served as a manager and executive at Microsoft Game Studios in 2003. In 2014, he took over as Head of Xbox, guiding the company through the aftermath of the troubled, Kinect-bundled launch of the Xbox One. More recently, he helped shepherd the company’s 2020 purchase of Bethesda Softworks and its $68.7 billion merger with Activision Blizzard, including the many regulatory battles that followed that latter announcement.

Meet the new boss

Sharma, who joined Microsoft just two years ago after stints at Meta and Instacart, promised in an introductory message to preside over “the return of Xbox,” and a “recommit[ment] to our core fans and players.” That commitment would “start with console which has shaped who we are,” but expand “across PC, mobile, and cloud,” Sharma wrote.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/02/microsoft-gaming-chief-phil-spencer-steps-down-after-38-years-with-company/

“I think that the regurgitation and the creation of fan fiction, they both could flag copyright issues, in that fan fiction often has to take from the expressive elements, a copyrighted character, a character that’s famous enough to be protected by a copyright law or plot stories or sequences,” Smith said. “If these things are copied and reproduced, then that output could be potentially infringing.”

But it’s also still a gray area. Looking at the blog, Smith said, “I would be concerned,” but “I wouldn’t say it’s automatically infringement.”

Smith told Ars that, in pulling the blog, Microsoft “was probably smart,” since courts have only generally said that training AI on copyrighted books is fair use. But courts continue to probe questions about pirated AI training materials.

On the deleted Kaggle dataset page, Maindola previously explained that to source the data, he “downloaded the ebooks and then converted them to txt files.”

Microsoft may have infringed copyrights

If Microsoft ever faced questions as to whether the company knowingly used pirated books to train the example models, fair use “could be a difficult argument,” Smith said.

Hacker News commenters suggested the blog could be considered fair use, since the training guide was for “educational purposes,” and Smith said that Microsoft could raise some “good arguments” in its defense.

However, she also suggested that Microsoft could be deemed liable for contributing to infringement on some level after leaving the blog up for a year. Before it was removed, the Kaggle dataset was downloaded more than 10,000 times.

“The ultimate result is to create something infringing by saying, ‘Hey, here you go, go grab that infringing stuff and use that in our system,’” Smith said. “They could potentially have some sort of secondary contributory liability for copyright infringement, downloading it, as well as then using it to encourage others to use it for training purposes.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/microsoft-removes-guide-on-how-to-train-llms-on-pirated-harry-potter-books/

To read the data back, there are several options. We’ve already had great success using lasers to read data from optical disks, albeit slowly. But anything that can pick up the small features etched into the glass could conceivably work.

With the above considerations in mind, everything was in place on a theoretical level for Project Silica. The big question is how to put them together into a functional system. Microsoft decided that, just to be cautious, it would answer that question twice.

A real-world system

The difference between these two answers comes down to how an individual unit of data (called a voxel) is written to the glass. One type of voxel they tried was based on birefringence, where refraction of photons depends on their polarization. It’s possible to etch voxels into glass to create birefringence using polarized laser light, producing features smaller than the diffraction limit. In practice, this involved using one laser pulse to create an oval-shaped void, followed by a second, polarized pulse to induce birefringence. The identity of a voxel is based on the orientation of the oval; since we can resolve multiple orientations, it’s possible to save more than one bit in each voxel.

The alternative approach involves changing the magnitude of refractive effects by varying the amount of energy in the laser pulse. Again, it’s possible to discern more than two states in these voxels, allowing multiple data bits to be stored in each voxel.

The map data from Microsoft Flight Simulator etched onto the Silica storage medium.

Credit: Microsoft Research

Reading these in Silica involves using a microscope that can pick up differences in refractive index. (For microscopy geeks, this is a way of saying “they used phase contrast microscopy.”) The microscopy sets the limits on how many layers of voxels can be placed in a single piece of glass. During etching, the layers were separated by enough distance so only a single layer would be in the microscope’s plane of focus at a time. The etching process also incorporates symbols that allow the automated microscope system to position the lens above specific points on the glass. From there, the system slowly changes its focal plane, moving through the stack and capturing images that include different layers of voxels.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/microsofts-new-10000-year-data-storage-medium-glass/

The second thing to check is the “default db,” which shows whether the new Secure Boot certificates are baked into your PC’s firmware. If they are, even resetting Secure Boot settings to the defaults in your PC’s BIOS will still allow you to boot operating systems that use the new certificates.

To check this, open PowerShell or Terminal again and type ([System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString((Get-SecureBootUEFI dbdefault).bytes) -match 'Windows UEFI CA 2023'). If this command returns “true,” your system is running an updated BIOS with the new Secure Boot certificates built in. Older PCs and systems without a BIOS update installed will return “false” here.

Microsoft’s Costa says that “many newer PCs built since 2024, and almost all the devices shipped in 2025, already include the certificates” and won’t need to be updated at all. And PCs several years older than that may be able to get the certificates via a BIOS update.

In the US, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft all have lists of specific systems and firmware versions, while Asus provides more general information about how to get the new certificates via Windows Update, the MyAsus app, or the Asus website. The oldest of the PCs listed generally date back to 2019 or 2020. If your PC shipped with Windows 11 out of the box, there should be a BIOS update with the new certificates available, though that may not be true of every system that meets the requirements for upgrading to Windows 11.

Microsoft encourages home users who can’t install the new certificates to use its customer support services for help. Detailed documentation is also available for IT shops and other large organizations that manage their own updates.

“The Secure Boot certificate update marks a generational refresh of the trust foundation that modern PCs rely on at startup,” writes Costa. “By renewing these certificates, the Windows ecosystem is ensuring that future innovations in hardware, firmware, and operating systems can continue to build on a secure, industry‐aligned boot process.”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/microsoft-sounds-the-alarm-about-secure-boot-certificates-expiring-later-this-year/

Bad news for Valve in particular?

On the surface, it might seem like every company making gaming hardware would be similarly affected by increasing component costs. In practice, though, analysts suggested that Valve might be in a uniquely bad position to absorb this ongoing market disruption.

Large console makers like Sony and Microsoft “can commit to tens of millions of orders, and have strong negotiating power,” Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out. The Steam Machine, on the other hand, is “a niche product that cannot benefit in the same way when it comes to procurement,” meaning Valve has to shoulder higher component cost increases.

F-Squared’s Futter echoed that Valve is “not an enormous player in the hardware space, even with the Steam Deck’s success. So they likely don’t have the same kind of priority as a Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft when it comes to suppliers.”

Sony and Microsoft might have an advantage when negotiating volume discounts with suppliers.

Credit: Sam Machkovech

The size of the Steam Machine price adjustment also might depend on when Valve made its supply chain commitments. “It’s not clear when or if Valve locked in supply contracts for the Steam Machine, or if supply can be diverted from the Steam Deck for the new product,” Tech Insights analyst James Sanders noted. On the other hand, “Sony and Microsoft likely will have locked in more favorable component pricing before the current spike,” Van Dreunen said.

That said, some other aspects of the Steam Machine design could give Valve some greater pricing flexibility. Sanders noted that the Steam Machine’s smaller physical size could mean smaller packaging and reduced shipping costs for Valve. And selling the system primarily through direct sales via the web and Steam itself eliminates the usual retailer markups console makers have to take into account, he added.

“I think Valve was hoping for a much lower price and that the component issue would be short-term,” Cole said. “Obviously it is looking more like a long-term issue.”

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/02/why-a-bump-to-700-could-be-a-death-sentence-for-the-steam-machine/

As Neocities grew, Drake told Ars that much of his focus has been on improving content moderation. He works closely with a full-time dedicated content moderation staffer to quickly take down any problematic sites within 24 hours, he said. That effort includes reviewing reports and proactively screening new sites, with Drake noting that “our name domain provider requires us to take them down within 48 hours.”

Microsoft prohibits things like scraping content that could be considered copyright infringement or automatically generating content using “garbage text” to game the rankings. It also monitors for malicious behavior like phishing, as well as for prompt injection attacks on Bing’s large language model.

It’s unclear what kind of violations Microsoft found ahead of instituting the complete block; however, Drake told Ars that he has yet to identify any content that may have triggered it. He said he would promptly remove any websites flagged by Microsoft, if he could only talk to someone who could share that information.

“Naturally, we still don’t catch 100 percent of the sites with proactive moderation, and occasionally some problematic sites do get missed,” Drake said.

Although Drake is curious to learn more about what triggered the blocks, he told Ars that it’s clear that non-violative sites are still invisible on Bing.

One of the longest-running and most popular Neocities sites, Wired Sound for Wired People, is a perfect example. The bizarre, somewhat creepy anime fanpage is “very popular” and “has a lot of links to it all over the web,” Drake said. Yet if you search for its subdomain, “fauux,” the site no longer appears in Bing search results, as of this writing, while Google reliably spits it out as the top result.

Drake said that he still believes that Bing is blocking content by mistake, but Bing’s automated support tools aren’t making it easy to defend creators who are randomly blocked by one of the world’s biggest search engines.

“We have one of the lowest ratios of crap to legitimate content, human-made content, on the Internet,” Drake said. “And it’s really frustrating to see that all these human beings making really cool sites that people want to go to are just not available on the default Windows search engine.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/neocities-founder-stuck-in-chatbot-hell-after-bing-blocked-1-5m-sites/

Russian-state hackers wasted no time exploiting a critical Microsoft Office vulnerability that allowed them to compromise the devices inside diplomatic, maritime, and transport organizations in more than half a dozen countries, researchers said Wednesday.

The threat group, tracked under names including APT28, Fancy Bear, Sednit, Forest Blizzard, and Sofacy, pounced on the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-21509, less than 48 hours after Microsoft released an urgent, unscheduled security update late last month, the researchers said. After reverse-engineering the patch, group members wrote an advanced exploit that installed one of two never-before-seen backdoor implants.

Stealth, speed, and precision

The entire campaign was designed to make the compromise undetectable to endpoint protection. Besides being novel, the exploits and payloads were encrypted and ran in memory, making their malice hard to spot. The initial infection vector came from previously compromised government accounts from multiple countries and were likely familiar to the targeted email holders. Command and control channels were hosted in legitimate cloud services that are typically allow-listed inside sensitive networks.

“The use of CVE-2026-21509 demonstrates how quickly state-aligned actors can weaponize new vulnerabilities, shrinking the window for defenders to patch critical systems,” the researchers, with security firm Trellix, wrote. “The campaign’s modular infection chain—from initial phish to in-memory backdoor to secondary implants was carefully designed to leverage trusted channels (HTTPS to cloud services, legitimate email flows) and fileless techniques to hide in plain sight.”

The 72-hour spear phishing campaign began January 28 and delivered at least 29 distinct email lures to organizations in nine countries, primarily in Eastern Europe. Trellix named eight of them: Poland, Slovenia, Turkey, Greece, the UAE, Ukraine, Romania, and Bolivia. Organizations targeted were defense ministries (40 percent), transportation/logistics operators (35 percent), and diplomatic entities (25 percent).

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/02/russian-state-hackers-exploit-office-vulnerability-to-infect-computers/

Software developers have spent the past two years watching AI coding tools evolve from advanced autocomplete into something that can, in some cases, build entire applications from a text prompt. Tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex can now work on software projects for hours at a time, writing code, running tests, and, with human supervision, fixing bugs. OpenAI says it now uses Codex to build Codex itself, and the company recently published technical details about how the tool works under the hood. It has caused many to wonder: Is this just more AI industry hype, or are things actually different this time?

To find out, Ars reached out to several professional developers on Bluesky to ask how they feel about these tools in practice, and the responses revealed a workforce that largely agrees the technology works, but remains divided on whether that’s entirely good news. It’s a small sample size that was self-selected by those who wanted to participate, but their views are still instructive as working professionals in the space.

David Hagerty, a developer who works on point-of-sale systems, told Ars Technica up front that he is skeptical of the marketing. “All of the AI companies are hyping up the capabilities so much,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong—LLMs are revolutionary and will have an immense impact, but don’t expect them to ever write the next great American novel or anything. It’s not how they work.”

Roland Dreier, a software engineer who has contributed extensively to the Linux kernel in the past, told Ars Technica that he acknowledges the presence of hype but has watched the progression of the AI space closely. “It sounds like implausible hype, but state-of-the-art agents are just staggeringly good right now,” he said. Dreier described a “step-change” in the past six months, particularly after Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5. Where he once used AI for autocomplete and asking the occasional question, he now expects to tell an agent “this test is failing, debug it and fix it for me” and have it work. He estimated a 10x speed improvement for complex tasks like building a Rust backend service with Terraform deployment configuration and a Svelte frontend.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/developers-say-ai-coding-tools-work-and-thats-precisely-what-worries-them/

Il peggior risultato dal 2020, crollano le azioni Microsoft

La promessa di una crescita futura non basta più. Wall Street è stata chiara nelle ultime ore. È il momento di dimostrare che l’intelligenza artificiale (AI) può e “deve” generare non solo innovazione, ma anche ritorni economici sostenibili. I conti trimestrali da record di Microsoft sono la prova di questo nuovo corso, in parte già anticipato dai continui allarmi sulla “bolla non bolla” dell’AI.

Il gigante di Redmond ha chiuso i conti al 31 dicembre con un fatturato in crescita del 17% su base annua a 81,3 miliardi di dollari, ma qualcosa non ha convinto gli investitori e le azioni sono crollate del 12%. Il motivo? La mega spesa in data center, di cui l’azienda ha un disperato bisogno per stare al passo della domanda di servizi cloud.

Il risultato finale è stato un drastico taglio della capitalizzazione di mercato di Microsoft, mandando in fumo 357 miliardi di dollari, portandola a 3,22 trilioni di dollari alla fine delle contrattazioni di giovedì.

I dubbi sulla sostenibilità della crescente spesa per i data center e il cloud, trainata dall’AI

A mettere paura è stata la spesa in conto capitale, aumentata di ulteriori 37,5 miliardi di dollari. Parliamo di un +65%. Ssoprattutto, ha spiegato Davide Fumagalli su Mercati Finanziari, parliamo di spese di molto superiori alle aspettative, legate alla necessità di aumentare i propri datacenter e avere capacità computazionale sufficiente a sostenere la domanda di servizi cloud.
Una domanda sulla cui sostenibilità e profittabilità molti investitori iniziano a porsi dei dubbi, portando così a cancellare oltre 350 miliardi di capitalizzazione in un solo giorno.

Un tonfo pesantissimo, il peggiore dai tempi dell’emergenza sanitaria legata alla pandemia da Covid-19, spigato dal fatto che i ricavi di Microsoft nel settore del cloud non hanno impressionato e hanno alimentato i timori che le ingenti spese sostenute per la sua alleanza OpenAI non si traducano in una monetizzazione rapida.

Un giudizio che non sorprende, per chi ha seguito gli allarmi lanciati da più parti negli ultimi mesi, ma che comunque colpisce, perché il gigante tecnologico americano aveva comunque registrato utili in crescita del 26% a 51,5 miliardi di dollari.

La limitata disponibilità di GPU indebolisce Azure, deluse le aspettative degli analisti

La chiave di lettura è nell’analisi delle vendite di Azure, l’unità per il cloud computing, che sono risultate in rialzo del 38% e in linea con le previsioni degli analisti, ma in frenata dal trimestre precedente.

Microsoft ha spiegato che la crescita dellla business cloud unit sarebbe stata più robusta se l’azienda avesse destinato a questa divisione “una quota maggiore della propria flotta di server GPU”, invece di impiegarla per la ricerca e sviluppo interna e per il servizio Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Non è andata così e la crescita di Azure nel trimestre ha deluso le aspettative degli analisti. “Microsoft è un’azienda enorme, con diversi segmenti di dimensioni imponenti, basti pensare che sia Azure, sia M365 Commercial Cloud, superano i 20 miliardi di dollari a trimestre, ma il titolo in borsa si muove principalmente in funzione del dato di Azure”, ha scritto John DiFucci di Guggenheim.

“Se avessi preso le GPU appena entrate in funzione nel primo e nel secondo trimestre e le avessi assegnate tutte ad Azure, il KPI sarebbe stato superiore a 40”, ha affermato Amy Hood, responsabile finanziario di Microsoft.

Paradossalmente, il gigante di Redmond ora non ha altra strada che continuare ad investire sempre di più e allo stesso tempo dimostrare che “questi sono buoni investimenti”, come si legge in un’analisi proposta da UBS.

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