Starting this week millions will see AI-generated answers in Google's search results by default. But the announcement Tuesday at Google's annual developer conference suggests a future that's "not without its risks, both to users and to Google itself," argues the Washington Post: For years, Google has been shielded for liability for linking users to bad, harmful or illegal information by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But legal experts say that shield probably won't apply when its AI answers search questions directly. "As we all know, generative AIs hallucinate," said James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech. "So when Google uses a generative AI to summarize what webpages say, and the AI gets it wrong, Google is now the source of the harmful information," rather than just the distributor of it...

Adam Thierer, senior fellow at the nonprofit free-market think tank R Street, worries that innovation could be throttled if Congress doesn't extend Section 230 to cover AI tools. "As AI is integrated into more consumer-facing products, the ambiguity about liability will haunt developers and investors," he predicted. "It is particularly problematic for small AI firms and open-source AI developers, who could be decimated as frivolous legal claims accumulate." But John Bergmayer, legal director for the digital rights nonprofit Public Knowledge, said there are real concerns that AI answers could spell doom for many of the publishers and creators that rely on search traffic to survive — and which AI, in turn, relies on for credible information. From that standpoint, he said, a liability regime that incentivizes search engines to continue sending users to third-party websites might be "a really good outcome."

Meanwhile, some lawmakers are looking to ditch Section 230 altogether. [Last] Sunday, the top Democrat and Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a draft of a bill that would sunset the statute within 18 months, giving Congress time to craft a new liability framework in its place. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) argued that the law, which helped pave the way for social media and the modern internet, has "outlived its usefulness."

The tech industry trade group NetChoice [which includes Google, Meta, X, and Amazon] fired back on Monday that scrapping Section 230 would "decimate small tech" and "discourage free speech online."
The digital law professor points out Google has traditionally escaped legal liability by attributing its answers to specific sources — but it's not just Google that has to worry about the issue. The article notes that Microsoft's Bing search engine also supplies AI-generated answers (from Microsoft's Copilot). "And Meta recently replaced the search bar in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp with its own AI chatbot."

The article also note sthat several U.S. Congressional committees are considering "a bevy" of AI bills...

Microsoft plans a major shakeup of its videogame sales strategy by releasing the coming installment of Call of Duty to its subscription service instead of the longtime, lucrative approach of only selling it a la carte. WSJ: The plans, which mark the biggest change to Microsoft's gaming division since it closed the $75 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard, are expected to be announced at the company's annual Xbox showcase next month, according to people familiar with the matter. Call of Duty is one of the most successful entertainment properties ever, generating over $30 billion in lifetime revenue. Activision, which makes it, has long released new editions annually, selling about 25 million copies on average, selling for around $70 each in recent years.

Before the Microsoft deal last year, Activision was reluctant to fully embrace subscription-based models for a game that still attracts a premium price. Microsoft's subscription service, Game Pass, costs $9.99 to $16.99 a month, and provides access to hundreds of games from Microsoft and dozens of other companies.

Seven Spirals writes: NetBSD committers are now banned from using any AI-generated code from ChatGPT, CoPilot, or other AI tools. Time will tell how this plays out with both their users and core team. "If you commit code that was not written by yourself, double check that the license on that code permits import into the NetBSD source repository, and permits free distribution," reads NetBSD's updated commit guidelines. "Check with the author(s) of the code, make sure that they were the sole author of the code and verify with them that they did not copy any other code. Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core."

In an op-ed on Windows Central, the site's co-managing editor Jez Corden laments Microsoft's "short-sighted" decision-making and "inconsistent" investment in its products and services, which he argues has led to a loss of trust among customers and missed opportunities in the tech industry. Despite Microsoft's advancements in AI and cloud computing, the company has made "baffling" decisions such as shutting down Windows Phone, under-investing in Xbox, and canceling promising Surface products.

The author argues that Microsoft's lack of commitment to security, customer support, and long-term quality has "damaged" its reputation and hindered its potential for growth. Examples include recent hacking scandals, poor customer service experiences, and the aggressive promotion of Microsoft Edge at the expense of user choice. The author also expresses concern over Microsoft's handling of the Xbox brand, particularly the decision to release exclusive games on PlayStation, which could undermine the reasons for customers to choose Xbox. The op-ed concludes that while Microsoft has the potential to be a leader in the tech industry, its pattern of short-sighted decisions and failure to learn from past mistakes has led to a growing sense of doubt among its customers and observers.

Microsoft is asking hundreds of employees in its China-based cloud-computing and AI operations to consider transferring outside the country, as tensions between Washington and Beijing mount around the critical technology. WSJ: Such staff, mostly engineers with Chinese nationality, were recently offered the opportunity to transfer to countries including the U.S., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, people familiar with the matter said. The company is asking about 700 to 800 people [non-paywalled link], who are involved in machine learning and other work related to cloud computing, one of the people said.ÂThe move by one of America's biggest cloud-computing and AI companies comes as the Biden administration seeks to put tighter curbs around China's capability to develop state-of-the-art AI. The White House is considering new rules that would require Microsoft and other U.S. cloud-computing companies to get licenses before giving Chinese customers access to AI chips.

Microsoft's ambitious goal to be carbon negative by 2030 is threatened by its expanding AI operations, which have increased its carbon footprint by 30% since 2020. To meet its targets, Microsoft must quickly adopt green technologies and improve efficiency in its data centers, which are critical for AI but heavily reliant on carbon-intensive resources. Bloomberg reports: Now to meet its goals, the software giant will have to make serious progress very quickly in gaining access to green steel and concrete and less carbon-intensive chips, said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Green. "In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence," he said. "So in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs." [...]

Despite AI's ravenous energy consumption, this actually contributes little to Microsoft's hike in emissions -- at least on paper. That's because the company says in its sustainability report that it's 100% powered by renewables. Companies use a range of mechanisms to make such claims, which vary widely in terms of credibility. Some firms enter into long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with renewable developers, where they shoulder some of a new energy plant's risk and help get new solar and wind farms online. In other cases, companies buy renewable energy credits (RECs) to claim they're using green power, but these inexpensive credits do little to spur new demand for green energy, researchers have consistently found. Microsoft uses a mix of both approaches. On one hand, it's one of the biggest corporate participants in power purchase agreements, according to BloombergNEF, which tracks these deals. But it's also a huge purchaser of RECs, using these instruments to claim about half of its energy use is clean, according to its environmental filings in 2022. By using a large quantity of RECs, Microsoft is essentially masking an even larger growth in emissions. "It is Microsoft's plan to phase out the use of unbundled RECs in future years," a spokesperson for the company said. "We are focused on PPAs as a primary strategy."

So what else can be done? Smith, along with Microsoft's Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa, has laid out clear steps in the sustainability report. High among them is to increase efficiency, which is to use the same amount of energy or computing to do more work. That could help reduce the need for data centers, which will reduce emissions and electricity use. On most things, "our climate goals require that we spend money," said Smith. "But efficiency gains will actually enable us to save money." Microsoft has also been at the forefront of buying sustainable aviation fuels that has helped reduce some of its emissions from business travel. The company also wants to partner with those who will "accelerate breakthroughs" to make greener steel, concrete and fuels. Those technologies are starting to work at a small scale, but remain far from being available in commercial quantities even if expensive. Cheap renewable power has helped make Microsoft's climate journey easier. But the tech giant's electricity consumption last year rivaled that of a small European country -- beating Slovenia easily. Smith said that one of the biggest bottlenecks for it to keep getting access to green power is the lack of transmission lines from where the power is generated to the data centers. That's why Microsoft says it's going to increase lobbying efforts to get governments to speed up building the grid. If Microsoft's emissions remain high going into 2030, Smith said the company may consider bulk purchases of carbon removal credits, even though it's not "the desired course."

"You've got to be willing to invest and pay for it," said Smith. Climate change is "a problem that humanity created and that humanity can solve."

Lauren Forristal writes via TechCrunch: Netflix announced during its Upfronts presentation on Wednesday that it's launching its own advertising technology platform only a year and a half after entering the ads business. This move pits it against other industry heavyweights with ad servers, like Google, Amazon and Comcast. The announcement signifies a significant shake-up in the streaming giant's advertising approach. The company originally partnered with Microsoft to develop its ad tech, letting Netflix enter the ad space quickly and catch up with rivals like Hulu, which has had its own ad server for over a decade.

With the launch of its in-house ad tech, Netflix is poised to take full control of its advertising future. This strategic move will empower the company to create targeted and personalized ad experiences that resonate with its massive user base of 270 million subscribers. [...] Netflix didn't say exactly how its in-house solution will change the way ads are delivered, but it's likely it'll move away from generic advertisements. According to the Financial Times, Netflix wants to experiment with "episodic" campaigns, which involve a series of ads that tell a story rather than delivering repetitive ads. During the presentation, Netflix also noted that it'll expand its buying capabilities this summer, which will now include The Trade Desk, Google's Display & Video 360 and Magnite as partners. Notably, competitor Disney+ also has an advertising agreement with The Trade Desk. Netflix also touted the success of its ad-supported tier, reporting that 40 million global monthly active users opt for the plan. The ad tier had around 5 million users within six months of launching.

Tech columnist and venture investor MG Siegler, commenting on the new iPad Pro: I love the iPad for the things it's good at. And I love the MacBook for the things it's good at. What I want is less a completely combined device and more a single device that can run both macOS and iPadOS. And this new iPad Pro, again equipped with a chip faster than any MacBook, can do that if Apple allowed it to.

At first, maybe it's dual boot. That is, just let the iPad Pro load up macOS if it's attached to the Magic Keyboard and use the screen as a regular (but beautiful) monitor -- no touch. Over time, maybe macOS is just a "mode" inside of iPadOS -- complete with some elements updated to be touch-friendly, but not touch-first. Steven Sinofsky, the former head of Microsoft's Windows division, chiming in: It is not unusual for customers to want the best of all worlds. It is why Detroit invented convertibles and el caminos.

But the idea of a "dual boot" device is just nuts. It is guaranteed the only reality is it is running the wrong OS all the time for whatever you want to do. It is a toaster-refrigerator. Only techies like devices that "presto-change" into something else. Regular humans never flocked to El Caminos, and even today SUVs just became station wagons and almost none actually go off road :-)

Two things that keep going unanswered if you really want macOS on an iPad device:

1. What software on Mac do you want for an iPad device experience? What software will get rewritten for touch? If you want "touch-enabled" check out what happened on the Windows desktop. Nearly everything people say they want isn't features as much as the mouse interaction model. People want overlapping windows, a desktop of folders, infinitely resizable windows, and so on. These don't work on touch very well and certainly not for people who don't want to futz.
2. Will you be happy with battery life? The physics of an iPad mean the battery is 2/3rds the size of a Mac battery. Do you really want that? I don't. The reason the iPad is the 5.x mm device is because the default doesn't have a keyboard holding the battery. This is about the realities. The metaphors that people like on a desktop, heck that they love, just don't work with the blunt instrument of touch. It might be possible to build all new metaphors that use only tough and thus would be great on an iPad but that isn't what they tried. The device grew out of a phone. It's only their incredible work on iPhone that led to Mx silicon and their tireless work on the Mac-centric frameworks that delivered a big chunk (but not all) the privacy, reliability, battery life, security, etc. of the phone on Mac. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Return-to-office mandates at some of the most powerful tech companies -- Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX -- were followed by a spike in departures among the most senior, tough-to-replace talent, according to a case study published last week by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Researchers drew on resume data from People Data Labs to understand the impact that forced returns to offices had on employee tenure and the movement of workers between companies. What they found was a strong correlation between the departures of senior-level employees and the implementation of a mandate, suggesting that these policies "had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce." High-ranking employees stayed several months less than they might have without the mandate, the research suggests -- and in many cases, they went to work for direct competitors.

At Microsoft, the share of senior employees as a portion of the company's overall workforce declined more than five percentage points after the return-to-office mandate took effect, the researchers found. At Apple, the decline was four percentage points, while at SpaceX -- the only company of the three to require workers to be fully in-person -- the share of senior employees dropped 15 percentage points. "We find experienced employees impacted by these policies at major tech companies seek work elsewhere, taking some of the most valuable human capital investments and tools of productivity with them," said Austin Wright, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and one of the study's authors. "Business leaders should weigh carefully employee preferences and market opportunities when deciding when, or if, they mandate a return to office." While the corporate culture and return-to-office policies differ "markedly" between the three companies, the similar effects of the RTO mandates suggest that "the effects are driven by common underlying dynamics," wrote the authors of the study.

"Our findings suggest that RTO mandates cost the company more than previously thought," said David Van Dijcke, a researcher at the University of Michigan who worked on the study. "These attrition rates aren't just something that can be managed away."

Robert Ployhart, a professor of business administration and management at the University of South Carolina, said executives haven't provided much evidence that RTO mandates actually benefit their workforces. "The people sitting at the apex may not like the way they feel the organization is being run, but if they're not bringing data to that point of view, it's really hard to argue why people should be coming back to the workplace more frequently," Ployhart said.

Senior employees, he said, are "the caretakers of a company's culture," and having to replace them can have negative effects on team morale and productivity. "By driving those employees away, they've actually enhanced and sped up the very thing they were trying to stop," Ployhart said.

Melinda French Gates announced today she is stepping down from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, three years after announcing her separation from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. With her departure as co-chair, the foundation will change its name to Gates Foundation and Bill Gates will be its sole chairperson, said CEO Mark Suzman. NBC News reports: In a statement posted on her Instagram account, she said that as part of her agreement to step down from the foundation, she will retain $12.5 billion that she plans to put toward her ongoing work supporting women and families. "This is not a decision I came to lightly," French Gates wrote. "I am immensely proud of the foundation that Bill and I built together and of the extraordinary work it is doing to address inequities around the world." In a separate statement, Bill Gates said, "I am sorry to see Melinda leave, but I am sure she will have a huge impact in her future philanthropic work."

Now worth $75.2 billion, the Gates Foundation has over the course of its three-decade lifespan made $77.6 billion worth of grant payments, making it one of the largest donor organizations in the world, with a focus on health and developmental goals. It is one of the largest contributors to the World Health Organization, and played a key role in efforts to address the Covid pandemic. "After a difficult few years watching women's rights rolled back in the U.S. and around the world, she wants to use this next chapter to focus specifically on altering that trajectory," Suzman said of French Gates.

"I want to reassure you that the millions of people our work serves and the thousands of partners we work alongside can continue to count on the foundation. The foundation today is stronger than it has ever been."

"I know we all wish Melinda the best in her next chapter," he added, noting that French Gates "will not be bringing any of the foundation's work with her when she leaves."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is attempting to solve the hassle of coordinating with colleagues on when everyone will be in the office. It's a problem that emerged with the increase in hybrid and flexible work after the recent covid-19 pandemic, with workers spending less time in the office. Microsoft Places is an AI-powered app that goes into preview today and should help businesses that rely on Outlook and Microsoft Teams to better coordinate in-office time together.

"When employees get to the office, they don't want to be greeted by a sea of empty desks -- they want face-time with their manager and the coworkers they collaborate with most frequently," says Microsoft's corporate vice president of AI at work, Jared Spataro, in a blog post. "With Places, you can more easily coordinate across coworkers and spaces in the office."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The default pasting behavior of Microsoft Word is a nightmare, and has been forever. If you want to add a text or image using the standard option, you can easily mess up the entire formatting in the text if a completely different font suddenly appears. After many years of complaints, Microsoft is finally listening to user feedback and changing the default behavior when pasting in Word.

From now on, the source's formatting will no longer be automatically retained. Instead, "Merge formatting" will be the new default for everyone, as Microsoft explained in a blog post this week. This means that after the update, newly pasted text will take on the font size, font type, and color of the text written in Word. However, special features such as lists or italicized elements will be retained. If you want these elements to be automatically adapted to the Word text, you must select the option "Keep text only."

The European Commission is set to issue new antitrust charges [non-paywalled link] against Microsoft over concerns that the tech giant is undermining competitors to its videoconferencing app Teams, according to FT. The move comes after Microsoft offered concessions last month, including a global plan to unbundle Teams from other software such as Office, in an attempt to avoid regulatory action.

The EU officials remain concerned that the company's efforts do not sufficiently ensure fairness in the market, the newspaper said. Rivals worry that Microsoft will make Teams run more compatibly with its own software compared to competitor apps, and that the lack of data portability makes it difficult for existing Teams users to switch to alternatives. The case, which originated from a formal complaint submitted by Slack (now owned by Salesforce) in 2020, is now escalating with the Commission's impending formal charge sheet against Microsoft.

The non-profit environmental site Grist reports on "an internal, employee-led effort to raise ethical concerns about Microsoft's work helping oil and gas producers boost their profits by providing them with cloud computing resources and AI software tools." There's been some disappointments — but also some successes, starting with the founding of an internal sustainability group within Microsoft that grew to nearly 10,000 employees: Former Microsoft employees and sources familiar with tech industry advocacy say that, broadly speaking, employee pressure has had an enormous impact on sustainability at Microsoft, encouraging it to announce industry-leading climate goals in 2020 and support key federal climate policies.

But convincing the world's most valuable company to forgo lucrative oil industry contracts proved far more difficult... Over the past seven years, Microsoft has announced dozens of new deals with oil and gas producers and oil field services companies, many explicitly aimed at unlocking new reserves, increasing production, and driving up oil industry profits...

As concerns over the company's fossil fuel work mounted, Microsoft was gearing up to make a big sustainability announcement. In January 2020, the company pledged to become "carbon negative" by 2030, meaning that in 10 years, the tech giant would pull more carbon out of the air than it emitted on an annual basis... For nearly two years, employees watched and waited. Following its carbon negative announcement, Microsoft quickly expanded its internal carbon tax, which charges the company's business groups a fee for the carbon they emit via electricity use, employee travel, and more. It also invested in new technologies like direct air capture and purchased carbon removal contracts from dozens of projects worldwide.

But Microsoft's work with the oil industry continued unabated, with the company announcing a slew of new partnerships in 2020 and 2021 aimed at cutting fossil fuel producers' costs and boosting production.
The last straw for one technical account manager was a 2023 LinkedIn post by a Microsoft technical architect about the company's work on oil and gas industry automation. The post said Microsoft's cloud service was "unlocking previously inaccessible reserves" for the fossil fuel industry, promising that with Microsoft's Azure service, "the future of oil and gas exploration and production is brighter than ever."

The technical account manager resigned from the position they'd held for nearly a decade, citing the blog post in a resignation letter which accused Microsoft of "extending the age of fossil fuels, and enabling untold emissions."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

The Dillo browser dates back to 1999, writes the Register, with its own rendering engine. And now Dillo "has returned with a new release, version 3.1.

"It's nearly nine years after version 3.05 appeared on the last day of June 2015." Version 3.1 incorporates dozens of fixes and improvements, as the official announcement describes.

Project lead Rodrigo Arias Mallo announced his resurrection attempt on Hacker News early this year. He has taken the last available code from the project's Mercurial repository, incorporated about 25 outstanding fixes, and added as many again of his own.

Dillo is a super-lightweight graphical web browser for Unix-like OSes, written using the Fast Light Toolkit. The latest version has a number of new features, although one of the most significant is support for Transport Layer Security. TLS is the successor to SSL, with a Microsoft-approved name. Dillo 3.1 supports it thanks to the Mbed-TLS library.
It doesn't support frames, embedded media playback, or JavaSccript — but it can run on very low-end hardware...

Thanks to Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030) for sharing the news.

What happened when OpenAI ran out of English-language training data in 2021?

They just created a speech recognition tool that could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, reports The New York Times, as part of an investigation arguing that tech companies "including OpenAI, Google and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies and debated bending the law" in their search for AI training data. [Alternate URL here.] Some OpenAI employees discussed how such a move might go against YouTube's rules, three people with knowledge of the conversations said. YouTube, which is owned by Google, prohibits use of its videos for applications that are "independent" of the video platform. Ultimately, an OpenAI team transcribed more than 1 million hours of YouTube videos, the people said. The team included Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, who personally helped collect the videos, two of the people said. The texts were then fed into a system called GPT-4...

At Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, managers, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by the Times. They also conferred on gathering copyrighted data from across the internet, even if that meant facing lawsuits. Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long, they said.

Like OpenAI, Google transcribed YouTube videos to harvest text for its AI models, five people with knowledge of the company's practices said. That potentially violated the copyrights to the videos, which belong to their creators. Last year, Google also broadened its terms of service. One motivation for the change, according to members of the company's privacy team and an internal message viewed by the Times, was to allow Google to be able to tap publicly available Google Docs, restaurant reviews on Google Maps and other online material for more of its AI products...

Some Google employees were aware that OpenAI had harvested YouTube videos for data, two people with knowledge of the companies said. But they didn't stop OpenAI because Google had also used transcripts of YouTube videos to train its AI models, the people said. That practice may have violated the copyrights of YouTube creators. So if Google made a fuss about OpenAI, there might be a public outcry against its own methods, the people said.
The article adds that some tech companies are now even developing "synthetic" information to train AI.

"This is not organic data created by humans, but text, images and code that AI models produce — in other words, the systems learn from what they themselves generate."

SiliconANGLE looks at how starting in 2021, Microsoft and Red Hat have formed "an unlikely partnership set to reshape the landscape of cloud computing..." First, their collective open-source capabilities will lead to co-developed solutions to simplify the modernization and migration of Red Hat technologies to the cloud, seamlessly integrating them with Microsoft's Azure platform, according to João Couto, EMEA VP and COO of cloud commercial solutions at Microsoft. "We have acquired GitHub, which is also one of the largest repositories of open source worldwide," he said. "In that context, it makes a lot of sense to work together with Red Hat."
Transcribed from their interview: What we have been doing so far is making sure that we are co-developing solutions together with Red Hat. And making these solutions available to our customers — making it easy for customers to transform, to modernize [their] Red Hat technology running on-prem, and moving them into cloud using our own Microsoft cloud technology, but Red Hat solutions, in a very, very seamless, integrated way. And also leveraging all the entire portfolio of Red Hat automation tools, so that they can make it easier for customers not just to do the migration, but also to do management, run the operation, and all the troubleshooting also from the customer-care perspective. So that's basically an end-to-end partnership approach that we are taking...

"[Customers] get an integrated support experience from Red Hat technical teams and Microsoft technical teams. And this means that these two technical teams are often colocated, so whenever a customer has a challenge, they are being answered by Microsoft and Red Hat technical teams, all working together to solve this challenge from the customer. So this brings also an increased level of confidence to customers to move to cloud...

"We have both engineering teams from both sides working together to achieve this level of integration between the two solutions. So when you talk about Red Hat Enterprise Linux or when you have the Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which is a new solution that we have recently launched — these are solutions that using open source, are bringing in an additional level of integration, flexibility, automation to customers. So that they can migrate, and manage, their solutions in a more seamless way, and in a more easy way. So we are embedding this kind of overlying partnership from an open source perspective to bring these innovations live to customers."

The head of the world's biggest advertising group was the target of an elaborate deepfake scam that involved an AI voice clone. From a report: The CEO of WPP, Mark Read, detailed the attempted fraud in a recent email to leadership, warning others at the company to look out for calls claiming to be from top executives. Fraudsters created a WhatsApp account with a publicly available image of Read and used it to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting that appeared to be with him and another senior WPP executive, according to the email obtained by the Guardian.

During the meeting, the impostors deployed a voice clone of the executive as well as YouTube footage of them. The scammers impersonated Read off-camera using the meeting's chat window. The scam, which was unsuccessful, targeted an "agency leader," asking them to set up a new business in an attempt to solicit money and personal details. "Fortunately the attackers were not successful," Read wrote in the email. "We all need to be vigilant to the techniques that go beyond emails to take advantage of virtual meetings, AI and deepfakes."

During a Bloomberg event today, Xbox president Sarah Bond said the company plans to launch a mobile gaming store to rival Apple and Google. "According to Bond, the as-yet-unnamed store will launch in July on web browsers, rather than a designated app, with Microsoft's recently-acquired Candy Crush Saga serving as a day-one tentpole franchise," reports GeekWire. From the report: Microsoft's entry into the mobile gaming market -- the most lucrative arm of the games industry -- has been anticipated, particularly since the company's recent $69 billion acquisition of California-based mega-developer Activision Blizzard King. In November, Xbox head Phil Spencer that the company was "talking to other partners" to potentially launch a mobile store.

The move sets the stage for a new competition between Microsoft and both Google and Apple, since most mobile games are sold and downloaded through their respective app stores. Bond told Bloomberg that the new Microsoft mobile store "goes truly across devices -- where who you are, your library, your identity, your rewards travel with you versus being locked to a single ecosystem."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: In 2022, at the height of the "great resignation," a record 4.5 million workers each month -- about 3% of the U.S. workforce -- were quitting their jobs. While some economists have said this pandemic-era trend is over, new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn forecasts that even more people plan to leave their jobs in 2024. Nearly half (46%) of professionals say they're considering quitting in the year ahead -- higher than the 40% who said the same ahead of 2021s great resignation, according to new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn, which surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries between February and March 2024.

In the U.S., LinkedIn has seen a 14% increase in job applications per opening since last fall, with 85% of workers saying they plan to look for a new role in 2024, a survey of 1,013 U.S. professionals conducted between November and December 2023 found. And Americans' confidence in their job-hunting prospects has reached its highest point in two years, a February 2024 ZipRecruiter survey of more than 2,000 jobseekers shows. This renewed sense of optimism is aided by the fact that the U.S. economy avoided the recession forecast for 2023, ZipRecruiter chief economist Julia Pollak tells CNBC Make It. [...]

It's not just better labor market conditions driving more U.S. workers to consider a career change in 2024. Inflation is still squeezing Americans' budgets; nearly half (45%) of workers planning to switch jobs this year say they need a higher income, according to Monster's 2024 Work Watch Report. Job switchers tend to increase their salaries more quickly than those who stay put, per data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Changing jobs is coming with greater pay gains: New data from ADP shows the median year-over-year pay increase for job switchers was 10% in March, up from 2.9% six months prior. With salaries finally keeping up with inflation, Pollak adds, the return on investment of switching jobs feels "much higher" than it did six months ago.