Microsoft will deprecate the classic edition of its Azure Virtual Desktop desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and has given customers three years to keep using the service before they'll need to find an alternative. From a report: The software giant seems to have spent years trying to confuse cloudy DaaS users, as it has offered two products called Azure Virtual Desktop, with varying degrees of integration with Azure.

The "classic" service has a management GUI that's not part of the Azure Portal and isn't addressable with the Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Microsoft's main deployment and management service for its cloud. The successor to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) classic is called -- wait for it -- "Azure Virtual Desktop." This from the innovative minds that suddenly and inexplicably renamed Azure Active Directory as "Entra" and kept the name "Active Directory" for on-prem directories.

"We're committed to developing AI responsibly," says Google's VP of Trust, "guided by our AI principles and in line with our consumer privacy commitment. However, we've also heard from web publishers that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases."

And so, Mashable reports, "Websites can now choose to opt out of Google Bard, or any other future AI models that Google makes." Google made the announcement on Thursday introducing a new tool called Google-Extended that will allow sites to be indexed by crawlers (or a bot creating entries for search engines), while simultaneously not having their data accessed to train future AI models. For website administrators, this will be an easy fix, available through robots.txt — or the text file that allows web crawlers to access sites...

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, recently launched a web crawler of its own, but included instructions on how to block it. Publications like Medium, the New York Times, CNN and Reuters have notably done so.
As Google's blog post explains, "By using Google-Extended to control access to content on a site, a website administrator can choose whether to help these AI models become more accurate and capable over time..."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp spotted a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) this week with the Microsoft engineering team that created Python in Excel, a new feature that makes it possible to natively combine Python and Excel analytics in Excel workbooks. (Copilot integration is coming soon). Redditors expressed a wish to be able to run Python in environments other than the confines of the locked down, price-to-be-determined Microsoft Azure cloud containers employed by Python in Excel.

But "There were three main reasons behind starting with the cloud (as a GDPR Compliant Microsoft 365 Connected experience) first," MicrosoftExcelTeam explained:

1. Running Python securely on a local machine is a difficult problem. We treat all Python code in the workbook as untrusted, so we execute it in a hypervisor-isolated container on Azure that does not have any outbound network access. Python code and the data that it operates on is sent to be executed in the container. The Microsoft-licensed Python environment in the container is provided by Anaconda and was prepared using their stringent security practices as documented here.

2. Sharing Excel workbooks with others is a really important scenario. We wanted to ensure that the Python code in a workbook you share behaves the same when your teammates open it â" without requiring them to install and manage Python.

3. We need to ensure that the Python in Excel feature always works for our customers. The value of Python is in its ecosystem of libraries, not just in providing a Python interpreter. But managing a local Python environment is challenging even for the most experienced developers. By running on Azure, we remove the need for users or their systems administrators to maintain a local installation of Python on every machine that uses the feature in their organization...


So, how does one balance tradeoffs between increased security and ease-of-maintenance with the loss of functionality and increased costs when it comes to programming language use? Is it okay to just give up on making certain important basic functionality available, as Microsoft is doing here with Python and has done in the past by not supporting Excel VBA in the Cloud and no longer making BASIC available on PCs and Macs?
Microsoft's team added at one point that "For our initial release, we are targeting data analytics scenarios, and bringing the power of Python analytics libraries into Excel.

"We believe the approach weâ(TM)ve taken will appeal to analysts who use both Excel and Python Notebooks in their workflows. Today, these users need to import/export data and have no way of creating a self-contained artifact that can be easily and securely shared with their colleagues."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Liliputing.com: Web browsers have had tools that let you translate websites for years. But they typically rely on cloud-based translation services like Google Translate or Microsoft's Bing Translator. The latest version of Mozilla's Firefox web browser does things differently. Firefox 118 brings support for Fullpage Translation, which can translate websites entirely in your browser. In other words, everything happens locally on your computer without any data sent to Microsoft, Google, or other companies.

Here's how it works. Firefox will notice when you visit a website in a supported language that's different from your default language, and a translate icon will show up in the address bar. Tap that icon and you'll see a pop-up window that asks what languages you'd like to translate from and to. If the browser doesn't automatically detect the language of the website you're visiting, you can set these manually... You can also tap the settings icon in the translation menu and choose to "always translate" or "never translate" a specific language so that you won't have to manually invoke the translation every time you visit sites in that language.
Firefox is support nine languages so far.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Even more Google products are getting the ax this week. Next up is Google Jamboard, a $5,000 digital whiteboard (and its $600-a-year fee) and software ecosystem marketed to schools and corporations. Google has a new post detailing the "Next phase of digital whiteboarding for Google Workspace," and the future for Jamboard is that there is no future. In "late 2024," the whole project will shut down, and we don't just mean the hardware will stop being for sale; the cloud-based apps will stop working, too.

Most people probably haven't ever heard of Jamboard, but this was a giant 55-inch, 4K touchscreen on a rolling stand that launched in 2016. Like most Google touchscreens, this ran Android with a locked-down custom interface on top instead of the usual phone interface. The digital whiteboard could be drawn on using the included stylus or your fingers, and it even came with a big plastic "eraser" that would remove items. The SoC was an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (a quad-core Cortex-A57 CPU attached to a beefy Maxwell GPU), and it had a built-in camera, microphone, and speakers for video calls. There was HDMI input and Google cast support, and it came in whimsical colors like red, gray, and blue (it feels like Google was going for an iMac rainbow and quit halfway). "We're grateful to the consumers, educators, students, and businesses who have used Jamboard since its launch in 2016," says Google. "While Jamboard users make up a small portion of our Workspace customer base, we understand that this change will impact some of you, and we're committed to helping you transition..."

"Over the coming months, we'll provide Jamboard app users and admins clear paths to retain their Jamboard data or migrate it," Google tells users in its blog post. Third-party options include Figma's FigJam, Lucid Software's Lucidspark, and Miro.

Ars Technica notes: "[T]he whole cloud system is going down, too, so all of your existing $5,000 whiteboards will soon be useless, and you won't be able to open the cloud data on other devices."

According to the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia's French offices were raided this week on suspicion the chipmaker engaged in anticompetitive practices. Reuters reports: The French competition authority, which disclosed the dawn raid on Wednesday, did not say what practices it was investigating or which company it had targeted, beyond saying it was in the "graphics cards sector." The French competition authority said that its operation this week followed a broader inquiry into the cloud-computing sector. The broader inquiry revolves around concerns that cloud-computing companies could use their access to computing power to exclude smaller competitors.

This week's operation had targeted Nvidia, which is the world's largest maker of chips used both for artificial intelligence and for computer graphics, the WSJ report added, citing people familiar with the raid. Chips originally made for computer graphics are suited for AI-related computing.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has returned to Shanghai for the city's first Kubecon since the pandemic. During a keynote that switched languages several times, demonstrating the challenges faced by both AI and human translators in keeping up, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, threw out several crowd-pleasing statistics while also highlighting some projects likely to make one or two companies squirm a little. On the statistics front, Zemlin joked that the Linux Foundation was likely the largest software company in the world, noting that if one took an average software developer's salary -- he put the worldwide mean as being $40,000 -- and multiplied it by the number of developers contributing to the foundation, the payroll would come to around $26 billion -- more than Microsoft's $24 billion R&D payroll.

The statistic was somewhat tongue in cheek as Zemlin pointed out that none of the developers working on Linux Foundation projects actually work for the Linux Foundation. However, the sheer quantity of engineers involved highlighted another issue noted by Zemlin: the "paradox of choice" when selecting the correct open source project for a given purpose when the number on offer reaches the hundreds, thousands, and beyond. Reflecting the increasing maturity of some elements of the open source world, he also emphasized the opportunities for companies to increase revenues and profits through the use of open source. WeChat, Alibaba, and Huawei all received nods -- unsurprising considering the location -- as Zemlin noted a virtuous circle whereby improvements go back into projects, meaning better profits, meaning more improvements, and so on. It all sounded very utopian, although darkening clouds were signaled by the addition of OpenTofu to the list of projects Zemlin was keen to boast about, including open source efforts around large language models.

The next-generation of Meta Quest hardware is here, and Meta announced a bunch of software news alongside the Quest 3 VR headset hardware reveal at its Connect conference. One such announcement was the debut of Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming service on Meta Quest 3, which is actually a huge boon for fans of the Facebook owner's mixed reality gear. From a report: The Xbox Cloud Gaming implementation in Quest resembles a lot of how Apple showed its own vision for mixed reality with the Vision Pro headset: It's primarily a virtual screen that can float in either a virtual or mixed reality space, which appears to be reposition-able and resizable, but which basically works exactly as you'd expect an Xbox game to work with a large TV. This is a key acknowledgement on the part of Meta that while immersive, native gaming is undoubtedly a draw for users, so too is a more traditional gaming experience that basically just benefits from taking place in your own private face-mounted theater.

The Philips Hue ecosystem of home automation devices is "collapsing into stupidity," writes Rachel Kroll, veteran sysadmin and former production engineer at Facebook. "Unfortunately, the idiot C-suite phenomenon has happened here too, and they have been slowly walking down the road to full-on enshittification." From her blog post: I figured something was up a few years ago when their iOS app would block entry until you pushed an upgrade to the hub box. That kind of behavior would never fly with any product team that gives a damn about their users -- want to control something, so you start up the app? Forget it, we are making you placate us first! How is that user-focused, you ask? It isn't.

Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can't access your stuff. But that's just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it's getting worse.

It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across the local network. Now it will have yet another garbage "cloud" "integration" involved, and they certainly will find a way to make things suck even worse for you. If you have just the lights and smart outlets, Kroll recommends deleting the units from the Hue Hub and adding them to an IKEA Dirigera hub. "It'll run them just fine, and will also export them to HomeKit so that much will keep working as well." That said, it's not a perfect solution. You will lose motion sensor data, the light level, the temperature of that room, and the ability to set custom behaviors with those buttons.

"Also, there's no guarantee that IKEA won't hop on the train to sketchville and start screwing over their users as well," adds Kroll.

What has your experience been with the Philips Hue ecosystem? Do you have any alternatives you recommend?

Microsoft's push to put artificial intelligence into its software has hinged almost entirely on OpenAI, the startup Microsoft funded in exchange for the right to use its cutting-edge technology. But as the costs of running advanced AI models rise, Microsoft researchers and product teams are working on a plan B. The Information: In recent weeks, Peter Lee, who oversees Microsoft's 1,500 researchers, directed many of them to develop conversational AI that may not perform as well as OpenAI's but that is smaller in size and costs far less to operate, according to a current employee and another person who recently left the company. Microsoft's product teams are already working on incorporating some of that Microsoft-made AI software, powered by large language models, in existing products, such as a chatbot within Bing search that is similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, these people said.

[...] Microsoft's research group doesn't have illusions about developing a large AI like GPT-4. The team doesn't have the same computing resources as OpenAI, nor does it have armies of human reviewers to give feedback about how well their LLMs answer questions so engineers can improve them. Undeniably, OpenAI and other developers -- including Google and Anthropic, which on Monday received $4 billion from Amazon Web Services -- are firmly ahead of Microsoft when it comes to developing advanced LLMs. But Microsoft may be able to compete in a race to build AI models that mimic the quality of OpenAI software at a fraction of the cost, as Microsoft showed in June with the release of one in-house model it calls Orca.

The White House is considering requiring cloud computing firms to report some information about their customers to the U.S. government, Semafor reported Friday, citing people familiar with an upcoming executive order on AI. From the report: The provision would direct the Commerce Department to write rules forcing cloud companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to disclose when a customer purchases computing resources beyond a certain threshold. The order hasn't been finalized and specifics of it could still change. Similar "know-your-customer" policies already exist in the banking sector to prevent money laundering and other illegal activities, such as the law mandating firms to report cash transactions exceeding $10,000.

In this case, the rules are intended to create a system that would allow the U.S. government to identify potential AI threats ahead of time, particularly those coming from entities in foreign countries. If a company in the Middle East began building a powerful large language model using Amazon Web Services, for example, the reporting requirement would theoretically give American authorities an early warning about it. The policy proposal represents a potential step toward treating computing power -- or the technical capacity AI systems need to perform tasks -- like a national resource. Mining Bitcoin, developing video games, and running AI models like ChatGPT all require large amounts of compute.

Brazilian engineer Luiz Andre Barroso, who ripped up the rulebook at Google, has died. His radical ideas for data centers laid the foundations for cloud computing. Wired: Luiz Andre Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley's development of cloud computing.

Barroso, a 22-year veteran of Google who unexpectedly died on September 16 at age 59, built his data centers with low-cost components instead of expensive specialized hardware. He reimagined how they worked together to develop the concept of "the data center as a computer," which now underpins the web, mobile apps, and other internet services.

Jen Fitzpatrick, senior vice president of Google's infrastructure organization, says Barroso left an indelible imprint at the company whose contributions to the industry are countless. "We lost a beloved friend, colleague and respected leader," she writes in a statement on behalf of the company.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When HashiCorp announced it was changing its Terraform license in August, it set off a firestorm in the open source community, and actually represented an existential threat to startups that were built on top of the popular open source project. The community went into action and within weeks they had written a manifesto, and soon after that launched an official fork called OpenTF. Today, that group went a step further when the Linux Foundation announced OpenTofu, the official name for the Terraform fork, which will live forever under the auspices of the foundation as an open source project. At the same time, the project announced it would be applying for entry into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

"OpenTofu is an open and community-driven response to Terraform's recently announced license change from a Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPLv2) to a Business Source License v1.1 providing everyone with a reliable, open source alternative under a neutral governance model," the foundation said in a statement. The name is deliberately playful says Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman from the OpenTofu founding team, who is also co-founder of Gruntwork. "I'm glad your reaction was to laugh. That's a good thing. We're trying to keep things a little more humorous," Brikman told TechCrunch, but the group is dead serious when it comes to building an open fork. [...]

"The first thing was to get an alpha release out there. So you can go to the OpenTofu website and download OpenTofu and start using it and trying it out," he said. "Then the next thing is a stable release. That's coming in the very near future, but there's work to do. Once you have a stable release, people can start using it. Then we can start growing adoption, and once we start growing adoption, some of the big players will start stepping in when some of the big players start stepping in other big players will start stepping in as well."

At the Open Source Summit Europe in Bilbao, Spain, the Linux Foundation this week announced the launch of the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation. The group's mission is to deliver "an open standard accelerator programming model that simplifies development of performant, cross-platform applications." From a report: The foundation's founding members include the likes of Arm, Fujitsu, Google Cloud, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung. The company most conspicuously missing from this list is Nvidia, which offers its own CUDA programming model for working with its GPUs. At its core, this new foundation is an evolution of the oneAPI initiative, which is also aimed to create a new programming model to make it easier for developers to support a wide range of accelerators, no matter whether they are GPUs, FPGAs or other specialized accelerators. Like with the oneAPI spec, the aim of the new foundation is to ensure that developers can make use of these technologies without having to delve deep into the specifics of the underlying accelerators and the infrastructure they run on.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The International Criminal Court said Tuesday that it detected "anomalous activity affecting its information systems" last week and took urgent measures to respond. It didn't elaborate on what it called a "cybersecurity incident." Court spokesman Fadi El Abdallah said in a written statement that extra "response and security measures are now ongoing" with the assistance of authorities in the Netherlands, where the court is based. "Looking forward, the Court will be building on existing work presently underway to strengthen its cyber security framework, including accelerating its use of cloud technology," his statement added. The court declined to go into any more detail about the incident, but said that as it "continues to analyze and mitigate the impact of this incident, priority is also being given to ensuring that the core work of the Court continues."

Microsoft is planning to refresh its Xbox Series X console in 2024 with an all-new design and features. The Verge reports: Codenamed Brooklin, the unannounced console refresh has been accidentally revealed in new FTC v. Microsoft documents this week. The new Xbox Series X design looks a lot more cylindrical than the existing console and will ship without a disc drive. Internal confidential Microsoft documents reveal it has 2TB of storage (up from 1TB), a USB-C front port with power delivery, and an "all-new, more immersive controller."

The new controller, codenamed Sebile, is set to be announced early next year for $69.99 and will include an accelerometer which should let you merely lift it to wake the gamepad. It has a two-tone color scheme and will support a direct connection to cloud, Bluetooth 5.2, and a presumably updated âoeXbox Wireless 2â connection. Microsoft also lists "precision haptic feedback" and "VCA haptics double as speakers" as specs for the controller. It will also have quieter buttons and thumbsticks, a rechargeable and swappable battery, and modular thumbsticks.

Inside the new Xbox Series X design, Microsoft is also adding Wi-Fi 6E support, a Bluetooth 5.2 radio, and the company is shrinking the existing die to 6nm "for improve efficiency." The PSU power will be reduced by 15 percent, according to Microsoft's document. Microsoft is targeting the same $499 launch price of the Xbox Series X. Microsoft lists a roadmap for this new Xbox Series X console and controller, alongside a refreshed Xbox Series S with 1TB of storage. Microsoft just launched a refreshed Xbox Series S in black, but there could be another refresh on the way in 2024 with Wi-Fi 6E support and Bluetooth 5.2. It will also include this new Xbox controller. [...] Microsoft is tentatively planning to launch this new Xbox Series S refresh next September, with the Xbox Series X refresh in November.

Intel Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger, plotting a comeback for the once-dominant chipmaker, made the case that the company's technology will be vital to an industrywide boom in artificial intelligence computing. From a report: Speaking at Intel's annual Innovation conference, Gelsinger pointed to advances that his company is making in production technology and software developer tools for AI. The opportunity will only grow as more artificial intelligence capabilities are powered by personal computers, he said. "AI represents a generational shift, giving rise to a new era of global expansion where computing is even more foundational to a better future for all," Gelsinger said.

"For developers, this creates massive societal and business opportunities to push the boundaries of what's possible, to create solutions to the world's biggest challenges." Gelsinger is trying to fire up interest in Intel's technology and return to an era when its annual conferences offered a road map for the whole computing industry. He argues that artificial intelligence use won't be confined to the data centers of giant cloud providers, which rely heavily on chips from Nvidia. Instead, it will fan out into new areas, including the now-moribund PC market.

The documents in the FTC v. Microsoft case also reveal Microsoft's far future plans for 2028 -- by which the company believed it could achieve "full convergence" of its cloud gaming platform and physical hardware to deliver "cloud hybrid games." From a report: "Our vision: develop a next generation hybrid game platform capable of leveraging the combined power of the client and cloud to deliver deeper immersion and entirely new classes of game experiences." Those are the words on just one slide from a leaked presentation dubbed "The Next Generation of Gaming at Microsoft," which appears to be a May 2022 pitch document entirely around this idea. The company imagined you playing these games using the combined power of a sub-$99 gadget -- possibly a handheld -- and its xCloud platform simultaneously.

David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of SaaS project management outfit 37Signals, has posted an update on the cloud repatriation project he's led, writing that it's already saved the company $1 million. The Register: Hansson has previously revealed that his company spent $3.2 million a year on cloud computing, most of it at Amazon Web Services. His repatriation plan called for the company to spend $600,000 on eight meaty servers that each pack 256 virtual CPUs, and have them hosted at an outfit called Deft. That plan was projected to save $7 million over five years. In his Saturday post, Hansson wrote he now thinks he can find $10 million of savings in the same period.

"Our cloud spend is down by 60 percent already... from around $180,000/month to less than $80,000," he wrote, qualifying that the number excludes the cost of Amazon Web Services's Simple Storage Service. "That's a cool million dollars in savings at the yearly run rate, and we have another big drop coming in September, before the remaining spend will petter out through the rest of the year," he added. The CTO revealed that the 37 Signals ops team remains the same size even though it now tends its own hardware, which cost "about half a million dollars."

Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed tens of terabytes of sensitive data, including private keys and passwords, while publishing a storage bucket of open source training data on GitHub. From a report: In research shared with TechCrunch, cloud security startup Wiz said it discovered a GitHub repository belonging to Microsoft's AI research division as part of its ongoing work into the accidental exposure of cloud-hosted data. Readers of the GitHub repository, which provided open source code and AI models for image recognition, were instructed to download the models from an Azure Storage URL. However, Wiz found that this URL was configured to grant permissions on the entire storage account, exposing additional private data by mistake. This data included 38 terabytes of sensitive information, including the personal backups of two Microsoft employees' personal computers. The data also contained other sensitive personal data, including passwords to Microsoft services, secret keys and more than 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages from hundreds of Microsoft employees.