Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft's accelerated aging experiments suggest the data etched into them would remain stable for over 10,000 years at room temperature, requiring zero energy to preserve.

The system writes data by firing laser pulses lasting just 10^-15 seconds to create tiny features called voxels inside the glass, each capable of storing more than one bit, and reads it back using phase contrast microscopy paired with a convolutional neural network trained to interpret the images. Writing remains the main bottleneck -- four lasers operating simultaneously achieve 66 megabits per second, meaning a full slab would take over 150 hours to write, though the team believes adding more lasers is feasible.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector's explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacenters, the analysis of 154 statements found.

The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate Action Against Disinformation, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google's Gemini or Microsoft's Copilot were leading to a "material, verifiable, and substantial" reduction in planet-heating emissions. Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry's tactics were "diversionary" and relied on tried and tested methods that amount to "greenwashing."

He likened it to fossil fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture. "These technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business," said Joshi. "Big tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it." [...] Joshi said the discourse around AI's climate benefits needed to be "brought back to reality." "The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacenter expansion," he said.

Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information. From a report: According to a service alert seen by BleepingComputer, this bug (tracked under CW1226324 and first detected on January 21) affects the Copilot "work tab" chat feature, which incorrectly reads and summarizes emails stored in users' Sent Items and Drafts folders, including messages that carry confidentiality labels explicitly designed to restrict access by automated tools.

Copilot Chat (short for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat) is the company's AI-powered, content-aware chat that lets users interact with AI agents. Microsoft began rolling out Copilot Chat to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for paying Microsoft 365 business customers in September 2025.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than two years after Broadcom took over VMware, the virtualization company's customers are still grappling with higher prices, uncertainty, and the challenges of reducing vendor lock-in. Today, CloudBolt Software released a report, "The Mass Exodus That Never Was: The Squeeze Is Just Beginning," that provides insight into those struggles. CloudBolt is a hybrid cloud management platform provider that aims to identify VMware customers' pain points so it can sell them relevant solutions. In the report, CloudBolt said it surveyed 302 IT decision-makers (director-level or higher) at North American companies with at least 1,000 employees in January. The survey is far from comprehensive, but it offers a look at the obstacles these users face.

Broadcom closed its VMware acquisition in November 2023, and last month, 88 percent of survey respondents still described the change as "disruptive." Per the survey, the most cited drivers of disruption were price increases (named by 89 percent of respondents), followed by uncertainty about Broadcom's plans (85 percent), support quality concerns (78 percent), Broadcom shifting VMware from perpetual licenses to subscriptions (72 percent), changes to VMware's partner program (68 percent), and the forced bundling of products (65 percent).

When Broadcom bought VMware, some customers shared horror stories about receiving quotes that showed prices increasing by as much as 1,000 percent. CloudBolt's survey paints a more modest picture. Fourteen percent of respondents said their VMware costs have at least doubled, while 12 percent reported increases of 50-99 percent, 33 percent reported increases of 24-49 percent, and 31 percent reported increases of less than 25 percent. Despite survey participants suggesting smaller price hikes than originally anticipated under Broadcom, companies are still struggling with the pricing changes. Eighty-five percent are concerned that VMware will become even more expensive, according to CloudBolt's survey. [...]

CloudBolt's survey also examined how respondents are migrating workloads off of VMware. Currently, 36 percent of participants said they migrated 1-24 percent of their environment off of VMware. Another 32 percent said that they have migrated 25-49 percent; 10 percent said that they've migrated 50-74 percent of workloads; and 2 percent have migrated 75 percent or more of workloads. Five percent of respondents said that they have not migrated from VMware at all. Among migrated workloads, 72 percent moved to public cloud infrastructure as a service, followed by Microsoft's Hyper-V/Azure stack (43 percent of respondents). Overall, 86 percent of respondents "are actively reducing their VMware footprint," CloudBolt's report said.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects "human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks" from AI, and believes most work involving "sitting down at a computer" -- accounting, legal, marketing, project management -- will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will soon be as easy as "creating a podcast or writing a blog."

"More than two years after the last major 9.1 release, the Vim project has announced Vim 9.2," reports the blog Linuxiac: A big part of this update focuses on improving Vim9 Script as Vim 9.2 adds support for enums, generic functions, and tuple types.

On top of that, you can now use built-in functions as methods, and class handling includes features like protected constructors with _new(). The :defcompile command has also been improved to fully compile methods, which boosts performance and consistency in Vim9 scripts.

Insert mode completion now includes fuzzy matching, so you get more flexible suggestions without extra plugins. You can also complete words from registers using CTRL-X CTRL-R. New completeopt flags like nosort and nearest give you more control over how matches are shown. Vim 9.2 also makes diff mode better by improving how differences are lined up and shown, especially in complex cases.
Plus on Linux and Unix-like systems, Vim "now adheres to the XDG Base Directory Specification, using $HOME/.config/vim for user configuration," according to the release notes.

And Phoronix Mcites more new features: Vim 9.2 features "full support" for Wayland with its UI and clipboard handling. The Wayland support is considered experimental in this release but it should be in good shape overall...

Vim 9.2 also brings a new vertical tab panel alternative to the horizontal tab line.

The Microsoft Windows GUI for Vim now also has native dark mode support.
You can find the new release on Vim's "Download" page.

The US Federal Trade Commission is accelerating scrutiny of Microsoft as part of an ongoing probe into whether the company illegally monopolizes large swaths of the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings, including Copilot. From a report: The agency has issued civil investigative demands in recent weeks to companies that compete with Microsoft in the business software and cloud computing markets, according to people familiar with the matter. The demands feature an array of questions on Microsoft's licensing and other business practices, according to the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential investigation.

With the demands, which are effectively like civil subpoenas, the FTC is seeking evidence that Microsoft makes it harder for customers to use Windows, Office and other products on rival cloud services. The agency is also requesting information on Microsoft's bundling of artificial intelligence, security and identity software into other products, including Windows and Office, some of the people said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US AI models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News.

In the memo, sent Thursday to the House Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of "ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs." The company said it had detected "new, obfuscated methods" designed to evade OpenAI's defenses against misuse of its models' output.

OpenAI began privately raising concerns about the practice shortly after the R1 model's release last year, when it opened a probe with partner Microsoft Corp. into whether DeepSeek had obtained its data in an unauthorized manner, Bloomberg previously reported. In distillation, one AI model relies on the output of another for training purposes to develop similar capabilities.

Distillation, largely tied to China and occasionally Russia, has persisted and become more sophisticated despite attempts to crack down on users who violate OpenAI's terms of service, the company said in its memo, citing activity it has observed on its platform.

theodp writes: West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday introduced House Bill 5387 (PDF), which would repeal the state's recently enacted mandatory stand-alone computer science graduation requirement and replace it with a new computer literacy proficiency requirement. Not too surprisingly, the Bill is being opposed by tech-backed nonprofit Code.org, which lobbied for the WV CS graduation requirement (PDF) just last year. Code.org recently pivoted its mission to emphasize the importance of teaching AI education alongside traditional CS, teaming up with tech CEOs and leaders last year to launch a national campaign to mandate CS and AI courses as graduation requirements.

"It would basically turn the standalone computer science course requirement into a computer literacy proficiency requirement that's more focused on digital literacy," lamented Code.org as it discussed the Bill in a Wednesday conference call with members of the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, including reps from Microsoft's Education and Workforce Policy team. "It's mostly motivated by a variety of different issues coming from local superintendents concerned about, you know, teachers thinking that students don't need to learn how to code and other things. So, we are addressing all of those. We are talking with the chair and vice chair of the committee a week from today to try to see if we can nip this in the bud." Concerns were also raised on the call about how widespread the desire for more computing literacy proficiency (over CS) might be, as well as about legislators who are associating AI literacy more with digital literacy than CS.

The proposed move from a narrower CS focus to a broader goal of computer literacy proficiency in WV schools comes just months after the UK's Department for Education announced a similar curriculum pivot to broader digital literacy, abandoning the narrower 'rigorous CS' focus that was adopted more than a decade ago in response to a push by a 'grassroots' coalition that included Google, Microsoft, UK charities, and other organizations.

Microsoft has patched a high-severity vulnerability in Windows 11's Notepad that allowed attackers to silently execute local or remote programs when a user clicked a specially crafted Markdown link, all without triggering any Windows security warning.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20841 and fixed in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday update, stemmed from Notepad's relatively new Markdown support -- a feature Microsoft added after discontinuing WordPad and rewriting Notepad to serve as both a plain text and rich text editor. An attacker only needed to create a Markdown file containing file:// links pointing to executables or special URIs like ms-appinstaller://, and a Ctrl+click in Markdown mode would launch them. Microsoft's fix now displays a warning dialog for any link that doesn't use http:// or https://, though the company did not explain why it chose a prompt over blocking non-standard links entirely. Notepad updates automatically through the Microsoft Store.

Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Greenoaks and Temasek. Anthropic raised its funding target by $10 billion during the process after the round was several times subscribed.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, now has a $14 billion revenue run rate, about 80% of which comes from enterprise customers. It claims more than 500 customers spending over $1 million a year on its workplace tools. The round includes a portion of the $15 billion commitment from Microsoft and Nvidia announced late last year.

Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone-style app permission prompts to Windows 11, requiring apps to get explicit user consent before they can access sensitive resources like the file system, camera and microphone. The company's Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said the move was prompted by applications increasingly overriding user settings, installing unwanted software, and modifying core Windows experiences without permission.

A separate initiative called Windows Baseline Security Mode will enforce runtime integrity safeguards by default, allowing only properly signed apps, services, and drivers to run. Both changes will roll out in phases as part of Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative, which the company launched in November 2023 after a federal review board called its security culture "inadequate."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Trump administration wants some of the world's largest technology companies to publicly commit to a new compact governing the rapid expansion of AI data centers, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

A draft of the compact obtained by POLITICO lays out commitments designed to ensure energy-hungry data centers do not raise household electricity prices, strain water supplies or undermine grid reliability, and that the companies driving demand also carry the cost of building new infrastructure.

The proposed pact, which is not final and could be subject to change, is framed as a voluntary agreement between President Donald Trump and major U.S. tech companies and data center developers. It could bind OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other AI giants to a broad set of energy, water and community principles. None of these companies immediately responded to a request for comment.

Microsoft has begun automatically replacing the original Secure Boot security certificates on Windows devices through regular monthly updates, a necessary move given that the 15-year-old certificates first issued in 2011 are set to expire between late June and October 2026.

Secure Boot, which verifies that only trusted and digitally signed software runs before Windows loads, became a hardware requirement for Windows 11. A new batch of certificates was issued in 2023 and already ships on most PCs built since 2024; nearly all devices shipped in 2025 include them by default. Older hardware is now receiving the updated certificates through Windows Update, starting last month's KB5074109 release for Windows 11. Devices that don't receive the new certificates before expiration will still function but enter what Microsoft calls a "degraded security state," unable to receive future boot-level protections and potentially facing compatibility issues down the line.

Windows 10 users must enroll in Microsoft's paid Extended Security Updates program to get the new certificates. A small number of devices may also need a separate firmware update from their manufacturer before the Windows-delivered certificates can be applied.

Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year. From a report: The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google's parent company, according to people familiar with the matter. Alphabet was also selling $15bn of dollar bonds on Monday and lining up a Swiss franc bond sale, the people said.

Century bonds -- long-term borrowing at its most extreme -- are highly unusual, although a flurry were sold during the period of very low interest rates that followed the financial crisis, including by governments such as Austria and Argentina. The University of Oxford, EDF and the Wellcome Trust -- the most recent in 2018 -- are the only issuers to have previously tapped the sterling century market.

Such sales are even rarer in the tech sector, with most of the industry's biggest groups issuing up to 40 years, although IBM sold a 100-year bond back in 1996. Big Tech companies and their suppliers are expected to invest almost $700bn in AI infrastructure this year and are increasingly turning to the debt markets to finance the giant data centre build-out. Michael Burry, writing on Substack: Alphabet looking to issue a 100-year bond. Last time this happened in tech was Motorola in 1997, which was the last year Motorola was considered a big deal.

At the start of 1997, Motorola was a top 25 market cap and top 25 revenue corporation in America. Never again. The Motorola corporate brand in 1997 was ranked #1 in the US, ahead of Microsoft. In 1998, Nokia overtook Motorola in cell phones, and after the iPhone it fell out of the consumer eye. Today Motorola is the 232nd largest market cap with only $11 billion in sales.

Fortune reports on "a watershed moment" in American's nuclear power industry: In January, Meta partnered with Gates' TerraPower and Sam Altman-backed Oklo to develop about 4 gigawatts of combined SMR projects — enough to power almost 3 million homes — for "clean, reliable energy" both for Meta's planned Prometheus AI mega campus in Ohio and beyond. Analysts see Meta as the start of more Big Tech nuclear construction deals — not just agreements with existing plants or restarts such as the now-Microsoft-backed Three Mile Island. "That was the first shot across the bow," said Dan Ives, head of tech research for Wedbush Securities, of the Meta deals. "I would be shocked if every Big Tech company doesn't make some play on nuclear in 2026, whether a strategic partnership or acquisitions."

Ives pointed out there are more data centers under construction than there are active data centers in the U.S. "I believe clean energy around nuclear is going to be the answer," he said. "I think 2030 is the key threshold to hit some sort of scale and begin the next nuclear era in the United States." Smaller SMR reactors can be built in as little as three years instead of the decade required for traditional large reactors. And they can be expanded, one or two modular reactors at a time, to meet increasingly greater energy demand from 'hyperscalers,' the companies that build and operate data centers. "There's major risk if nuclear doesn't happen," Oklo chairman and CEO Jacob DeWitte told Fortune, citing the need for emission-free power and consistent baseload electricity to meet skyrocketing demand. "The hyperscalers, as the ultimate consumers of power are, are looking at the space and seeing that the market is real. They can play a major role in helping make that happen," DeWitte said, speaking in his fast-talking, Silicon Valley startup mode.

The Mozilla executive in charge of Firefox says that while some people just want AI tools that are genuinely useful, "We've heard from many who want nothing to do with AI..."

"Listening to our community, alongside our ongoing commitment to offer choice, led us to build AI controls." Starting with Firefox 148, which rolls out on Feb. 24, you'll find a new AI controls section within the desktop browser settings. It provides a single place to block current and future generative AI features in Firefox... This lets you use Firefox without AI while we continue to build AI features for those who want them...

At launch, AI controls let you manage these features individually:

— Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
— Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
— AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
— Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
— AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral.

You can choose to use some of these and not others. If you don't want to use AI features from Firefox at all, you can turn on the Block AI enhancements toggle. When it's toggled on, you won't see pop-ups or reminders to use existing or upcoming AI features. Once you set your AI preferences in Firefox, they stay in place across updates... We believe choice is more important than ever as AI becomes a part of people's browsing experiences. What matters to us is giving people control, no matter how they feel about AI.

If you'd like to try AI controls early, they'll be available first in Firefox Nightly.
Some context from The Register It's a refreshingly unsubtle stance, and one that lands just days after a similar bout of AI skepticism elsewhere in browser land, with Vivaldi's latest release leaning away from generative features entirely. CEO Jon von Tetzchner summed up the mood, telling The Register: "Basically, what we are finding is that people hate AI..." Mozilla's kill switch isn't the end of AI in browsers, but it does suggest the hype has met resistance.
When it comes to AI kill switches in browsers, Jack Wallen writes at ZDNet that "Most browsers already offer this feature. With Edge, you can disable Copilot. With Chrome, you can disable Gemini. With Opera, you can disable Aria...."

Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft's automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013.

Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought it was resolved, but a second complete block went into effect in January, cratering Bing traffic from roughly half a million daily visitors to zero. He submitted nearly a dozen tickets through Bing's webmaster tools but could not get past the AI chatbot to reach a human. After Ars Technica contacted Microsoft, the company restored the Neocities front page within 24 hours but most subdomains remain blocked. Microsoft cited policy violations related to low-quality content yet declined to identify the offending sites or work directly with Drake to fix the problem.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) -- signed contracts for cloud computing services that can't yet be filled and haven't yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.

The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams.

Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven too inflexible for an organization the Commission's size, it said. The Matrix-based solution could also eventually connect the Commission to other EU bodies like the Parliament.