Microsoft plans to invest $3 billion to expand its artificial intelligence and cloud Azure services in India, turning to the world's most populous nation to fuel its revenue growth engine. From a report: The firm, which has been operating in India for more than two decades, will also train an additional 10 million people in the country with AI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Bengaluru Tuesday.

"The investments in infrastructure and skilling we are announcing today reaffirm our commitment to making India AI-first, and will help ensure people and organizations across the country benefit broadly," said Nadella. "The diffusion rate of AI in India is exciting." India is a key overseas market for American tech giants that have poured tens of billions of dollars in building and scaling their operations in the South Asian market over the past two decades as they work to court businesses serving hundreds of millions of users.

Intel, which has been fending off mounting competition in notebook processors, says a new range of chips will help enable the longest battery life available in laptops. From a report: New computers based on the latest version of its Core Ultra processors will go on sale starting this month, the company said Monday at CES, an annual consumer electronics show.

Intel was for decades the world's largest chipmaker thanks to its dominance of the computer processor market. Production technology stumbles and slow product introductions have opened the door to both long-time rivals and firms just entering the space. The company's board last month ousted its chief executive officer, citing the need to improve its offerings.

The new chips, intended for corporate PCs and high-end consumer devices, are aimed at boosting performance in two areas the company considers key selling points: battery life and the ability to run artificial intelligence functions. According to Intel, an HP laptop that uses one of the new processors can run Microsoft's Teams software for as long as 10.5 hours on a single charge. It can go 20.3 hours between charges when the user is running Microsoft's cloud-based 365 suite, Intel added. By comparison, Intel says a Dell device using a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor can last as long as 9.2 hours and 18.5 hours, respectively, under those conditions.

Microsoft's Bing search engine has deployed a controversial interface change that mimics Google's appearance when users search for "Google" or "Google.com" while logged out, blog WindowsLatest reports.

The new design adjusts the page layout to conceal Bing's search bar and navigation, displaying instead a Google-like interface with a central search box that redirects queries to Bing's results.

Microsoft is pushing users to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 ahead of the operating system's end of support in October 2025. The company's consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi declared 2025 "the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh," positioning PC upgrades as more crucial than TV or phone purchases. The Verge adds: Mehdi believes that "Windows 11 is available at a time when the world needs it most" and that "the forefront of AI innovation will be realized on Windows."

"Millions of computers are heading towards a security crisis as Microsoft plans to end support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025," writes BetaNews: 32 million devices — roughly 65 percent of household computers in Germany — are still running the aging operating system. In the DACH region, including Austria and Switzerland, over 35 million systems rely on Windows 10, leaving millions of users exposed to potential cyberattacks once updates stop. By contrast, only about 33 percent of German devices have transitioned to Windows 11, and over a million are still running even older systems like Windows 8, 7, or XP.

Thorsten Urbanski, an IT security expert at ESET, is sounding the alarm. "It's five minutes to midnight to prevent a security fiasco in 2025. We strongly urge users not to wait until October. Upgrade to Windows 11 now or choose an alternative operating system if your device cannot support the latest version. Otherwise, users are exposing themselves to significant security risks, including dangerous cyberattacks and data breaches...."

Urbanski also points out that the current situation is worse than when Windows 7 support ended in 2020. By late 2019, over 70 percent of users had already switched to Windows 10, while only about 20 percent remained on Windows 7. Today, the transition to Windows 11 is far slower, creating a dangerous environment. "Cybercriminals know these numbers well and are waiting for the end-of-support date. Once that hits, vulnerabilities will be exploited en masse."
"Those unable to move to Windows 11 are being advised to consider Linux as a secure alternative, especially for older hardware."

Thanks to Slashdot reader BrianFagioli for sharing the news.

As America begins a six-day state funeral for former president Jimmy Carter, Microsoft co-founder/philanthropist Bill Gates shared "my fondest memory" this week. "He and Rosalynn were among my first and most inspiring role models in global health." They played a pretty profound role in the early days of the Gates Foundation. I'm especially grateful that they introduced us to Dr. Bill Foege, who once helped eradicate smallpox and was a key advisor for our global health work.

Jimmy and Rosalynn were also good friends to my dad. One of my favorite photographs of all time shows Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, and my dad in South Africa holding babies at a medical clinic. I remember my dad coming back from that trip with a whole new appreciation for Jimmy's passion for helping people with HIV. At the time, then-President Thabo Mbeki was refusing to let people with HIV get treatment, and my dad watched Jimmy almost get into a fist fight with Mbeki over the issue. As Jimmy said in a 2012 conversation at the Gates Foundation hosted by my dad, "He was claiming there was no relationship between HIV and AIDS and that the medicines that we were sending in, the antiretroviral medicines, were a white person's plot to help kill black babies." At a time when a quarter of all people in South Africa were HIV positive, Jimmy just couldn't accept Mbeki's obstructionism.
Ars Technica reported it was also Jimmy Carter who saved America's space shuttle program.

And Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House (which "were later removed by his successor, Ronald Reagan," according to Boiling Point, an environmental newsletter from the Los Angeles Times): He tried and largely failed to block construction of more than a dozen expensive, environmentally destructive water infrastructure projects such as dams, canals and reservoirs. He also tried to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, implementing the first vehicle fuel-efficiency standards and tasking researchers with bringing down the cost of solar panels — an effort he predicted could be "a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people...." And although he was largely thinking about how to free Americans from geopolitical crises that could wreak havoc on oil supplies and gasoline prices, he also had heat-trapping greenhouse gases in mind... The final report from the White House Council on Environmental Quality warned that fossil fuel combustion could cause "widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social, and agricultural patterns." It advised that to avoid such risks, we should limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the goal eventually agreed to by nearly 200 nations, 35 years later.

Even if Carter's actions were targeted more at reducing oil imports than at cutting planet-warming pollution — he was willing to increase domestic coal production if it meant less dependence on foreign crude — the political battles he fought, particularly those he lost, have lessons for those of us who care about the climate today. The historian Kai Bird, for instance, notes that after struggling to pass a tax on gas-guzzling cars, Carter wrote in his diary, "The influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable, and it's impossible to arouse the public to protect themselves." Indeed, oil and gas companies still wield huge influence. SUVs are more popular than ever.
The newsletter argues the story of Carter's life can be an inspiration, since Carter saw a lot of changes in his 100 years.

"We need to see more changes to survive. May we all be as lucky as Carter was."

This week New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose published his annual "Good Tech" awards to "shine the spotlight on a few tech projects that I think contributed positively to humanity."

And high on the list is "Andres Freund, and every open-source software maintainer saving us from doom." The most fun column I wrote this past year was about a Microsoft database engineer, Andres Freund, who got some odd errors while doing routine maintenance on an obscure open-source software package called xz Utils. While investigating, Freund inadvertently discovered a huge security vulnerability in the Linux operating system, which could have allowed a hacker to take control of hundreds of millions of computers and bring the world to its knees.

It turns out that much of our digital infrastructure rests on similar acts of nerdy heroism. After writing about Freund's discovery, I received tips about other near disasters involving open-source software projects, many of which were averted by sharp-eyed volunteers catching bugs and fixing critical code just in time to foil the bad guys. I could not write about them all, but this award is to say: I see you, open-source maintainers, and I thank you for your service.
Roose also acknowledges the NASA engineers who kept Voyager 1 transmitting back to earth from interstellar space — and Bluesky, "for making my social media feeds interesting again."

Roose also notes it was a big year for AI. There's a shout-out to Epoch AI, a small nonprofit research group in Spain, "for giving us reliable data on the AI boom." ("The firm maintains public databases of AI models and AI hardware, and publishes research on AI trends, including an influential report last year about whether AI models can continue to grow at their current pace. Epoch AI concluded they most likely could until 2030.") And there's also a shout-out to groups "pushing AI forward" and positive uses "to improve health care, identify new drugs and treatments for debilitating diseases and accelerate important scientific research."

• The nonprofit Arc Institute released Evo, an AI model that "can predict and generate genomic sequences, using technology similar to the kind that allows systems like ChatGPT to predict the next words in a sequence."

• A Harvard University lab led by Dr. Jeffrey Lichtman teamed with researchers from Google for "the most detailed map of a human brain sample ever created. The team used AI to map more than 150 million synapses in a tiny sample of brain tissue at nanometer-level resolution..."

• Researchers at Stanford and McMaster universities developed SyntheMol, "a generative AI model that can design new antibiotics from scratch."

"It's fair to say that by 1995, OS/2 was dead software walking," remembers a new article from the Register (which begins with a 1995 Usenet post from Gordon Letwin, Microsoft's lead architect on the OS/2 project).

But the real question is why this Microsoft-IBM collaboration on a DOS-replacing operating system ultimately lost out to Windows...? If OS/2 1.0 had been an 80386 OS, and had been able to multitask DOS apps, we think it would have been a big hit.... OS/2's initial 1980s versions were 16-bit products, at IBM's insistence. That is when the war was lost. That is when OS/2 flopped. Because its initial versions were even more crippled than the Deskpro 386...

Because OS/2 1.x flopped, Microsoft launched a product that fixed the key weakness of OS/2 1.x. That product was Windows 3, which worked perfectly acceptably on 286 machines, but if you ran the same installed copy on a 32-bit 386 PC, it worked better. Windows 3.0 could use the more sophisticated hardware of a 386 to give better multitasking of the market-dominating DOS apps...

IBM's poor planning shaped the PC industry of the 1990s more than Microsoft's successes. Windows 3.0 wasn't great, but it was good enough. It reversed people's perception of Windows after the failures of Windows 1 and Windows 2. Windows 3 achieved what OS/2 had intended to do. It transformed IBM PC compatibles from single-tasking text-only computers into graphical computers, with poor but just about usable multitasking...

Soon after Windows 3.0 turned out to be a hit, OS/2 NT was rebranded as Windows NT. Even the most ardent Linux enthusiast must c\oncede that Windows NT did quite well over three decades.
Back in 1995, the Register's author says they'd moved from OS/2 to Windows 95 "while it was still in beta.

"The UI was far superior, more hardware worked, and Doom ran much better."

TPM is a dedicated chip or firmware enabling hardware-level security, housing encryption keys, certificates, passwords, and sensitive data, "and shielding them from unauthorized access," Microsoft senior product manager Steven Hosking wrote last month, declaring TPM 2.0 to be "a non-negotiable standard for the future of Windows."

Or, as BleepingComputer put it, Microsoft "made it abundantly clear... that Windows 10 users won't be able to upgrade to Windows 11 unless their systems come with TPM 2.0 support." (This despite the fact that Statcounter Global data "shows that more than 61% of all Windows systems worldwide still run Windows 10.") They add that Microsoft "announced on October 31 that Windows 10 home users will be able to delay the switch to Windows 11 for one more year if they're willing to pay $30 for Extended Security Updates."

But last week the Free Software Foundation's campaigns manager delivered a message on the FSF's official blog: "Keep putting pressure on Microsoft." Grassroots organization against a corporation as large as Microsoft is never easy. They have the advertising budget to claim that they "love Linux" (sic), not to mention the money and political willpower to corral free software developers from around the world on their nonfree platform Microsoft GitHub. This year's International Day Against DRM took aim at one specific injustice: their requiring a hardware TPM module for users being forced to "upgrade" to Windows 11. As Windows 10 will soon stop receiving security updates, this is a (Microsoft-manufactured) problem for users still on this operating system. Normally, offloading cryptography to a different hardware module could be seen as a good thing — but with nonfree software, it can only spell trouble for the user...

What's crucial now is to keep putting pressure on Microsoft, whether that's through switching to GNU/Linux, avoiding new releases of their software, or actions as simple as moving your projects off of Microsoft GitHub. If you're concerned about e-waste or have friends who work to combat climate change, getting them together to tell them about free software is the perfect way to help our movement grow, and free a few more users from Microsoft's digital restrictions. If you're concerned about e-waste or have friends who work to combat climate change, getting them together to tell them about free software is the perfect way to help our movement grow, and free a few more users from Microsoft's digital restrictions.

If we dissolve acid-neutralizing rocks in the ocean, will it absorb more carbon dioxide?

Climate ventures and philanthropic funders have been spending millions of dollars to find out, reports the Washington Post. "Researchers have been exploring this technology for the last five years, but over the last two months, at least a couple of start-ups have begun operation along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts." Planetary, a start-up based in Nova Scotia, removed 138 metric tons of carbon last month for Shopify and Stripe. The start-up Ebb Carbon is running a small site in Washington that can remove up to 100 carbon metric tons per year and committed in October to remove 350,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere over the next decade for Microsoft.

Proponents of the technology say it's one of the most promising forms of carbon removal, which experts say will be necessary to meet climate goals even as the world cuts emissions. But in order for this to make a dent, it will need to be scaled up to remove billions, not hundreds of thousands, of metric tons of carbon per year, Yale associate professor of earth and planetary sciences Matthew Eisaman said... Removing carbon could also help prevent ocean acidification. Although the ocean's chemistry has varied through geologic time, it has become more acidic as it has absorbed more carbon from human-generated emissions, said Andy Jacobson, a geochemist at Northwestern University. The increased acidity makes it difficult for some marine organisms to build their skeletons and shells...

Researchers are still investigating the best strategy to implement the method. Ebb Carbon, for example, takes existing saltwater waste streams from treatment and desalination plants and uses electricity to alkalize it before returning it to the ocean, said Eisaman, who is the start-up's co-founder and chief scientist. Another method is depositing alkaline minerals or solution into the ocean using a ship; others want to enhance the rock weathering that already occurs on the coast...

The growing evidence from early studies in labs and controlled outdoor settings suggest no serious impacts on plankton, which are at the bottom of the food web.

"The Washington Post's crossword puzzle was recently deemed too offensive for advertisers," reports the Wall Street Journal. "So was an article about thunderstorms. And a ranking of boxed brownie mixes.

"Marketers have long been wary about running ads in the news media, concerned that their brands will land next to pieces about terrorism or plane crashes or polarizing political stories." But "That advertising no-go zone seems to keep widening." It is a headache that news publishers can hardly afford. Many are also grappling with subscriber declines and losses in traffic from Google and other tech platforms, and are now making an aggressive push to change advertisers' perceptions... News organizations recently began publicizing studies that show it really isn't dangerous for a brand to appear near a sensitive story. At the same time, they say blunt campaign-planning tools wind up fencing off even harmless content — and those stories' potentially large audiences — from advertisements. Forty percent of the Washington Post's material is deemed "unsafe" at any given time, said Johanna Mayer-Jones, the paper's chief advertising officer, referencing a study the company did about a year ago. "The revenue implications of that are significant."

The Washington Post's crossword page was blocked by advertisers' technology seven times during a weekslong period in October because it was labeled as politics, news and natural disaster-related material. (A tech company recently said it would ensure the puzzle stops getting blocked, according to the Post.) The thunderstorm story was cut off from ad revenue when a sentence about "flashing and pealing volleys from the artillery of the atmosphere" triggered a warning that it was too much like an "arms and ammunition" story. As for the brownies, a reference to research from "grocery, drug, mass-market" and other retailers was automatically flagged by advertisers for containing the word "drug."

While some brands avoid news entirely, many take what they consider to be a more surgical approach. They create lengthy blacklists of words or websites that the company considers off-limits and employ ad technology to avoid such terms. Over time, blacklists have become extremely detailed, serving as a de facto news-blocking tool, publishers said... The lists are used in automated ad buying. Brands aim their ads not at specific websites, but at online audiences with certain characteristics — people with particular shopping or web-browsing histories, for example. Their ads are matched in real-time to available inventory for thousands of websites... These days, less than 5% of client ad spending for GroupM, one of the largest ad-buying firms in the world, goes to news, according to Christian Juhl, GroupM's former chief executive who revealed spending figures during a congressional hearing over the summer.
A recent blacklist from Microsoft included about 2,000 words including "collapse," according to the article. ("Microsoft declined to comment.")

Windows 11 24H2 continues to experience issues with multifunction devices using the eSCL scan protocol, despite Microsoft marking the problem as resolved. According to a Register reader, "It works on a Windows 10 machine, but not on Windows 11, unless both the computer and the scanner are on wired Ethernet." From the report: Microsoft issued a compatibility safeguard hold on USB-connected devices using the Scanner Communication Language (eSCL) protocol in November after users who installed the Windows update experienced glitches with device discovery. The issue was reported resolved by Microsoft in December. However, it seems that KB5048667 might not have fixed all the problems for Canon owners. According to our reader: "Canon support tells me that the 24H2 eSCL issue still is not fixed." We asked Microsoft about the situation, but despite telling us it was looking into the problem on Friday, December 20, the company has yet to provide any further details. Canon was more forthcoming. A spokesperson told The Register it was aware of a problem impacting devices using ScanGear MF.

ScanGear MF is a scanner driver provided by Canon and allows customers to configure advanced settings for scanning. Canon does not appear to be changing its code to rectify whatever problems had been brought on by the Windows 11 update. The spokesperson said: "Microsoft is currently working on an OS amendment to resolve this and we are keeping in close contact with them. The timing for resolving this is yet to be confirmed by Microsoft, however we expect to receive the plan to fix in January 2025." Customers affected by the issue, which manifests itself with a communications error message, according to Canon's support forum, are advised to use either native Microsoft software solutions or go fully wired via USB.

Samsung and Google are introducing Eclipsa Audio, an open-source 3D audio standard set to debut on select YouTube videos and Samsung's 2025 TVs and soundbars. The new format "could eventually serve as a free alternative to Dolby Atmos, the dominant 3D audio format that hardware makers like Samsung pay to license for TVs and other equipment," reports The Verge. "Samsung says that similar to Atmos, this audio format supports adjusting 'audio data such as the location and intensity of sounds, along with spatial reflections' to create a 3D experience." From the report: The two companies first announced a partnership to develop spatial audio technology in 2023, initially calling it Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF). At the time, Samsung spatial audio head WooHyun Nam said the format would provide "a complete open-source framework for 3D audio, from creation to delivery and playback."

The IAMF spec has also been adopted by the Alliance for Open Media, a group that has been pushing for royalty-free codec support since 2015 and counts companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix -- along with Samsung and Google -- among its members. If they also add support for this audio format, it could help it catch on, although it's already taken years for their AV1 video codec to see more use. Samsung and Google are also creating a certification program with the Telecommunications Technology Association "to ensure consistent audio quality" across devices using the format, which also sounds similar to the way companies like Dolby and THX manage the labeling for their specs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A U.S. online gift card store has secured an online storage server that was publicly exposing hundreds of thousands of customer government-issued identity documents to the internet. A security researcher, who goes by the online handle JayeLTee, found the publicly exposed storage server late last year containing driving licenses, passports, and other identity documents belonging to MyGiftCardSupply, a company that sells digital gift cards for customers to redeem at popular brands and online services.

MyGiftCardSupply's website says it requires customers to upload a copy of their identity documents as part of its compliance efforts with U.S. anti-money laundering rules, often known as "know your customer" checks, or KYC. But the storage server containing the files had no password, allowing anyone on the internet to access the data stored inside. JayeLTee alerted TechCrunch to the exposure last week after MyGiftCardSupply did not respond to the researcher's email about the exposed data. [...]

According to JayeLTee, the exposed data -- hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud -- contained over 600,000 front and back images of identity documents and selfie photos of around 200,000 customers. It's not uncommon for companies subject to KYC checks to ask their customers to take a selfie while holding a copy of their identity documents to verify that the customer is who they say they are, and to weed out forgeries. MyGiftCardSupply founder Sam Gastro told TechCrunch: "The files are now secure, and we are doing a full audit of the KYC verification procedure. Going forward, we are going to delete the files promptly after doing the identity verification." It's not known how long the data was exposed or if the company would commit to notifying affected individuals.

Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion in fiscal 2025 on the construction of data centers that can handle AI workloads, the company said in a Friday blog post. From a report: Over half of the expected AI infrastructure spending will take place in the U.S., Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote. Microsoft's 2025 fiscal year ends in June.

Researchers from Inria and Microsoft have developed a system to automatically convert specific types of C programming code into memory-safe Rust code, addressing growing cybersecurity concerns about memory vulnerabilities in software systems.

The technique, detailed in a new paper, requires programmers to use a restricted version of C called "Mini-C" that excludes features like pointer arithmetic. The researchers successfully tested their conversion system on two major code libraries, including the 80,000-line HACL* cryptographic library. Parts of the converted code have already been integrated into Mozilla's NSS and OpenSSH security systems, according to the researchers. Memory safety errors account for 76% of Android vulnerabilities in 2019.

Despite Microsoft's push for Windows 11, Windows 10 continues to dominate the desktop OS market, rising to 62.7% market share in December 2024. The Register reports: Figures for December 2024 from Statcounter -- used because Microsoft rarely shares usage data unless it has something to boast about -- confirm Windows 10's market share has inched up to 62.7 percent compared to the previous month while Windows 11's share fell back to 34.12 percent (from 34.94 percent in November 2024). Even though Windows 11's percentage of the pie is still bigger than it was this time last year (when Statcounter pegged it at 26.54 percent), the fact the new OS is still nowhere near to overtaking Windows 10 may alarm some Microsoft executives. [...]

Canalys analyst, Kieren Jessop, noted that when looking at the more than 230 countries and regions tracked by Statcounter, Windows 10 share had actually only increased in just under a quarter of them, but that increase made an outsized impacted. Jessop cited the example of the US, where Windows 10 market share had gone from 58 percent in October 2024 to 67 percent in December. [...] Many editions of Windows 10 are due to drop out of free support on October 14, 2025. Affected users will then have the option to purchase Extended Security Updates (ESU) to keep the lights on a little longer or keep using the operating system and risk falling foul of unpatched vulnerabilities. Further reading: Ex-Microsoft Designer Reveals Windows 11's Dynamic Wallpapers That May Have Been Shelved

Former Microsoft designer Sergey Kisselev has shared previously unseen concepts for Windows 11 dynamic wallpapers, intended for educational devices. The animated backgrounds were designed to complement Windows 11's centered interface but never shipped with the operating system's 23H2 update as initially planned.

SvarDOS, a compact open-source operating system derived from DR-DOS, has switched to using the EDRDOS kernel, marking a shift from its FreeDOS distribution roots. The change allows the operating system to fit on a single 1.4MB floppy disk while offering a network-capable package manager that can fetch from a repository of over 400 packages.

Unlike its rival FreeDOS, SvarDOS can run Microsoft Windows 3.1 natively, though the capability currently requires additional configuration. The system maintains compatibility with legacy DOS applications while providing modern features like FAT32 support and network connectivity.

The long-anticipated "year of the Linux desktop" could see renewed interest in 2025 as Microsoft's planned end of support for Windows 10 approaches, potentially driving users to explore alternatives.

With Windows 10 reaching end of support in October 2025, many users will face decisions about upgrading hardware for Windows 11 or considering different operating systems entirely. Linux distributions have evolved to offer increasingly polished desktop experiences, with improving hardware compatibility and familiar user interfaces.

2024 saw Linux adoption grow thanks to the Steam Deck's success, reaching a 4.04% market share in December, up from 3.85% during the same time last year. More Linux laptops, improved gaming compatibility, and growing awareness of its benefits also contributed to its steady rise.