Waymo is issuing a voluntary software recall after one of its driverless vehicles collided with a telephone pole in Phoenix, Arizona, last month, the company said. The vehicle was damaged, but no passengers or bystanders were hurt in the incident. From a report: The company is filing the recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) after completing a software update to 672 vehicles -- the total number of driverless-capable vehicles in Waymo's fleet. The update corrects an error in the software that "assigned a low damage score" to the telephone pole, and updates its map to account for the hard road edge in the alleyway that was not previously included. This is Waymo's second recall ever, after two minor collisions prompted a recall of 444 vehicles last February. And it comes at a time of increased regulatory scrutiny of the driverless vehicle industry, in which federal investigators are probing almost all the major companies operating autonomous vehicles in the US.

According to The Verge, Best Buy conducted another round of layoffs and job restructurings to "right size" the business in response to declining sales post-pandemic. Further layoffs and changes are expected throughout the year. From the report: The layoffs appeared to have mostly targeted in-home sales roles called designers, who would go to customers' homes to help identify products that would work in their space. It's not clear how many were let go, but designers who weren't laid off have been moved into a different, largely in-store role. Also, pay scales for a similar, existing in-store "consultant" position were revamped. Best Buy confirmed the layoffs in an email to The Verge but declined to share how many people were let go or how pay was changing. "Many of our team members were moved to new areas or roles where our customers need it most," Best Buy spokesperson Ryan Furlong told The Verge. He said some employees in Best Buy's "Design and Consult workforce" -- the collection of roles with in-store workers (called consultants) and in-home field sales positions (called designers) -- will be transitioned into a new "Premium Designer role."

Best Buy has been drastically restructuring in recent months, responding to factors like falling sales after the pandemic spiked consumer electronics spending. Best Buy CEO Corie Barry told investors in February that they should expect layoffs this year, and two months ago, mass layoffs of Geek Squad employees were reported. Barry repeated similar things during the company's first quarter earnings call in May, saying that many of Best Buy's moves to "right size" its business "are being implemented throughout this year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Mercury News: Krista DeWeese has been laid off four times in the last eight years. She wakes up every morning feeling anxious. Will I lose my job today -- again? Will I have enough to pay the rent? Even though she's an educated, experienced marketing professional, worrisome thoughts trail the 47-year-old Fremont native's every waking moment. Currently a contract worker at a health science company, she has been struggling to find secure work that pays enough to keep up with the exorbitant cost of living in the Bay Area. She has a lot of company. The past year has been tough for the Bay Area, as thousands of layoffs skittered across the region. Even workers at Silicon Valley's tech titans -- including Meta, Apple and Google -- have faced job cuts. Since 2022, tech companies in the region have slashed roughly 40,000 jobs. And with each layoff, workers are entering a market that is less friendly to job seekers than it used to be.

New research from tech advocacy organization Women Impact Tech, which examined job and salary data nationwide from 2020 to 2023, affirmed what many people already know: companies are tightening their belts -- slicing jobs and salaries alike -- and many people are struggling to find work that pays enough to live comfortably in the Bay Area. Despite having the highest tech salaries in the country, Silicon Valley has experienced the biggest drop in pay compared to other tech hubs, falling 15% from 2022 to 2023, according to Women Impact Tech. And with inflation, DeWeese and others are watching their spending power shrink. More than 10 years ago, she was earning over $100,000 in total compensation. That amount has dropped 15% since she was laid off from Yahoo in 2016, and has not increased since. "I feel like my career has been frozen in time," DeWeese said. "Things have been at a standstill."

Paula Bratcher Ratliff, president of New York-based Women Impact Tech, said that the shrinking pay hits especially hard for women, given the continuing gender pay gap. "The Bay Area took one of the largest hits," Ratliff said. "Women make up about 28% of the entire workforce in tech. When you're seeing an overall decline at 15%, and for pay equity, women have not made much traction." [...] Despite the trend of shrinking salaries in the world's tech capital, Ratliff, with Women Impact Tech, doesn't believe it's necessarily a race to the bottom. "Today, about every company is a tech company, whether they're in retail, consumer goods or hospitality," Ratliff said. "There's so many opportunities in tech without having to focus on those jobs with the tech organizations alone. We're seeing great companies emerge." While it's still unclear where the light is at the end of the tunnel for DeWeese, she remains hopeful her situation will improve. "You have to have hope or else you're just going to live in fear of being let go, again and again," she said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A Finnish startup called Flow Computing is making one of the wildest claims ever heard in silicon engineering: by adding its proprietary companion chip, any CPU can instantly double its performance, increasing to as much as 100x with software tweaks. If it works, it could help the industry keep up with the insatiable compute demand of AI makers. Flow is a spinout of VTT, a Finland state-backed research organization that's a bit like a national lab. The chip technology it's commercializing, which it has branded the Parallel Processing Unit, is the result of research performed at that lab (though VTT is an investor, the IP is owned by Flow). The claim, Flow is first to admit, is laughable on its face. You can't just magically squeeze extra performance out of CPUs across architectures and code bases. If so, Intel or AMD or whoever would have done it years ago. But Flow has been working on something that has been theoretically possible -- it's just that no one has been able to pull it off.

Central Processing Units have come a long way since the early days of vacuum tubes and punch cards, but in some fundamental ways they're still the same. Their primary limitation is that as serial rather than parallel processors, they can only do one thing at a time. Of course, they switch that thing a billion times a second across multiple cores and pathways -- but these are all ways of accommodating the single-lane nature of the CPU. (A GPU, in contrast, does many related calculations at once but is specialized in certain operations.) "The CPU is the weakest link in computing," said Flow co-founder and CEO Timo Valtonen. "It's not up to its task, and this will need to change."

CPUs have gotten very fast, but even with nanosecond-level responsiveness, there's a tremendous amount of waste in how instructions are carried out simply because of the basic limitation that one task needs to finish before the next one starts. (I'm simplifying here, not being a chip engineer myself.) What Flow claims to have done is remove this limitation, turning the CPU from a one-lane street into a multi-lane highway. The CPU is still limited to doing one task at a time, but Flow's Parallel Processing Unit (PPU), as they call it, essentially performs nanosecond-scale traffic management on-die to move tasks into and out of the processor faster than has previously been possible. [...] Flow is just now emerging from stealth, with [about $4.3 million] in pre-seed funding led by Butterfly Ventures, with participation from FOV Ventures, Sarsia, Stephen Industries, Superhero Capital and Business Finland. The primary challenge Flow faces is that for its technology to be integrated, it requires collaboration at the chip-design level. This means chipmakers need to redesign their products to include the PPU, which is a substantial investment.

Given the industry's cautious nature and the existing roadmaps of major chip manufacturers, the uptake of this new technology might be slow. Companies are often reluctant to adopt unproven technologies that could disrupt their long-term plans.

The white paper can be read here. A Flow Computing FAQ is also available here.

A Chromebook refresh looms despite Google trying to extend the life of laptops by offering a decade of service updates for models sold since 2021. From a report: Sales of the hardware, which flew off the shelves during the pandemic, ran out of steam in 2022 after buyers had their fill. The US education market generally accounts for 70 to 80 percent of annual orders. The sharp downturn left some vendors holding excess inventory. Yet the refresh cycle may be starting again, according to HP boss Enrique Lores.

"So we have started to see a pickup of demand in education, and this, especially in the US, is a Chromebook opportunity," he told an audience of investors at Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decision Conference. He forecast a flurry of activity in 2025 for "many million of units" from education but downplayed the impact on HP's balance sheet because the company pulled back from the product line after the pandemic. Lores said: "We are going after these deals because we think it's good, but it's not like ... a huge impact on the company."

The dream of perpetual, emissionless flight is getting closer to reality. Aviation giants, telecoms, investors, and military agencies are pouring millions into developing these prototypes, which could revolutionize aerial surveillance, emergency communications, and more.

Solar planes absorb energy via panels covering their wings and bodies, allowing them to fly indefinitely as long as the sun shines. Advances in battery technology now enable longer flights and overnight operation, albeit with less power than jet fuel. These slow, lightweight aircraft can fly at altitudes and durations impossible for humans, making them ideal for monitoring, telecom, and disaster response. Companies like BAE Systems, Airbus, and Skydweller are racing to commercialize solar planes, with hopes of offering services by 2026-2027. The unregulated stratosphere is a key focus, with planes acting as "steerable satellites." WSJ adds: Most of the companies trying to commercialize solar planes are building aircraft that are lightweight, autonomous and can fly at altitudes and for lengths of time that humans can't tolerate. Unlike balloons, solar planes are steerable, a big advantage for monitoring a target on the ground or providing telecom coverage without being blown off course. They are also cheaper and closer to Earth than satellites, putting them in a sweet spot for services that can't currently be offered by either, executives in charge of solar-aircraft projects say. The planes can capture higher resolution photos or video than satellites, or deliver broadband internet from the air, another thing satellites can't do.

storkus shares a report: Starting from 2030, Mastercard will no longer require Europeans to enter their card numbers manually when checking out online -- no matter what platform or device they're using. Mastercard will announce Tuesday in a fireside chat with CNBC that, by 2030, all cards it issues on its network in Europe will be tokenized. In other words, instead of the 16-digit card number we're all accustomed to using for transactions, this will be replaced with a randomly generated "token."

The firm says it's been working with banks, fintechs, merchants and other partners to phase out manual card entry for e-commerce by 2030 in Europe, in favor of a one-click button across all online platforms. This will ensure that consumers' cards are secure against fraud attempts, Mastercard says. Users won't have to keep entering passwords every time they try to make a payment, as Mastercard is introducing passkeys that replace passwords.

storkus comments: "This story, as currently written, says nothing about their plans outside Europe but in the past the USA in particular has been dead last in getting this kind of tech."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Who would have thought that Raspberry Pi, the maker of the tiny, cheap, single-board computers, would become a public company? Yet, this is exactly what's happening: Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at $3.56 per share, valuing it at $689 million. Shortly after that, the company's shares jumped a nice 32% to $4.70. It means that Raspberry Pi could end up raising more than $200 million during its IPO process.

Raspberry Pi has sold 60 million units since its inception. In 2023 alone, Raspberry Pi generated $266 million in revenue and $66 million in gross profit. Raspberry Pi Ltd, the public company, is the commercial subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Foundation says it wants to make it easier for people to learn coding through a low-cost, programmable computer. It also remains the main shareholder of Raspberry Pi Ltd.

After announcing a shut down date in February, Google's "GPay" app has officially stopped working for users in the U.S. "Starting on June 4, GPay -- as was the name of the app on Android homescreens -- automatically signed US users out," reports 9to5Google. "Attempting to login again explains how: 'The Google Pay US app is no longer available. You can still tap to pay using the Google Wallet app.'" From the report: Additionally, Google no longer offers peer-to-peer payments in the US. You can use the Google Pay website to view and transfer your balance -- money you've received or rewards -- to a bank account after June. The focus is now on Google Wallet and digitizing everything in your physical wallet. There's no equivalent finance tracking functionality. Meanwhile, "Google Pay" still exists as the name for what you're actually using when making a physical or online purchase with your phone.

The definition of the word "bot" is shifting to become an insult to someone you know is human, according to researchers who analyzed more than 22 million tweets. Researchers found this shift began around 2017, with left-leaning users more likely to accuse right-leaning users of being bots. "A potential explanation might be that media frequently reported about right-wing bot networks influencing major events like the [2016] US election," says Dennis Assenmacher at Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany. "However, this is just speculation and would need confirmation." NewScientist reports: To investigate, Assenmacher and his colleagues looked at how users perceive what is a bot or not. They did so by looking at how the word "bot" was used on Twitter between 2007 and December 2022 (the social network changed its name to X in 2023, following its purchase by Elon Musk), analyzing the words that appeared next to it in more than 22 million English-language tweets. The team found that before 2017, the word was usually deployed alongside allegations of automated behavior of the type that would traditionally fit the definition of a bot, such as "software," "script" or "machine." After that date, the use shifted. "Now, the accusations have become more like an insult, dehumanizing people, insulting them, and using this as a technique to deny their intelligence and deny their right to participate in a conversation," says Assenmacher. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Eighteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.

Apple has announced visionOS 2 for its Vision Pro spatial computing headset, bringing mouse support, an ultrawide virtual Mac display option, and new Photo features. The company says it's expected to launch "later this year." The Verge reports: The most significant update, for all the productivity heads out there, is a new ultrawide virtual display feature. Apple says that in visionOS 2, you'll be able to connect a Vision Pro to a Mac to generate a dual 4K-equivalent curved ultrawide display. Right now, the virtual display feature only does a single up to 5K one. Also, the company will finally add mouse support to the Vision Pro -- at launch, the headset could work with trackpads like the one on a MacBook Air or the standalone Magic Trackpad 2, but oddly left out mouse support. You can still use one inside a mirrored display in the Vision Pro, but not outside of that screen in, say, an iPad or Vision Pro app.

Apple says that in the new update, users will be able to convert any image in the Photos app to a spatial one. Also, visionOS 2 will have train support, so the Vision Pro's travel mode will no longer be limited to just airplanes. The company also says it's adding SharePlay to the visionOS Photos app, which means that you can share the app with another Vision Pro owner using Spatial Personas [...]. The company says Red Bull is making a new immersive sports series, while Apple is making its first scripted immersive feature. Apple also said that Canon is releasing a new spatial lens for the EOS R7, one designed specifically for creating content for the Vision Pro.

Finally, the company is rolling out the Vision Pro abroad. Apple is going to start taking preorders in China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore on June 13th at 6PM PT, and it'll be available in those countries on June 28th. Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK will get preorders later, on June 28th at 5AM PT, with the headset officially available on July 12th.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Internet service providers are again urging the Federal Communications Commission to impose new fees on Big Tech firms and use the money to subsidize broadband network deployment and affordability programs. If approved, the request would force Big Tech firms to pay into the FCC's Universal Service Fund (USF), which in turn distributes money to broadband providers. The request was made on June 6 by USTelecom, a lobby group for AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink/Lumen, and smaller telcos. USTelecom has made similar arguments before, but its latest request to the FCC argues that the recent death of a broadband discount program should spur the FCC to start extracting money from Big Tech.

"Through focusing on the Big Tech companies who benefit most from broadband connectivity, the Commission will fairly allocate the burden of sustaining USF," USTelecom wrote in the FCC filing last week. The USF spends about $8 billion a year. Phone companies must pay a percentage of their revenue into the fund, and telcos generally pass those fees on to consumers with a "Universal Service" line item on telephone bills. The money is directed back to the telco industry with programs like the Connect America Fund and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which subsidize network construction in unserved and underserved areas. The USF also funds Lifeline program discounts for people with low incomes.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel hasn't stated any intention to expand USF contributions to Big Tech. Separately, she rejected calls to impose Universal Service fees on broadband, leaving phone service as the only source of USF revenue. The USTelecom filing came in response to the FCC asking for input on its latest analysis of competition in the communications marketplace. USTelecom says the USF is relevant to the proceeding because "the Universal Service Fund is critical for maintaining a competitive marketplace and an expanded contributions base is necessary to sustain the fund." No changes to the USF would be made in this proceeding, though USTelecom's comments could be addressed in the FCC's final report.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A study claims to have proof of what some have suspected: return to office mandates are just back-channel layoffs and post-COVID work culture is making everyone miserable. HR software biz BambooHR surveyed more than 1,500 employees, a third of whom work in HR. The findings suggest the return to office movement has been a poorly-executed failure, but one particular figure stands out - a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped RTO mandates would result in staff leaving.

While that statistic essentially admits the quiet part out loud, there was some merit to that belief. People did quit when RTO mandates were enforced at many of the largest companies, but it wasn't enough, the study reports. More than a third (37 percent) of respondents in leadership roles believed their employers had undertaken layoffs in the past 12 months as a result of too few people quitting in protest of RTO mandates, the study found. Nearly the same number thought their management wanted employees back in the office to monitor them more closely. The end result has been the growth of a different office culture, one that's even more performative, suspicious, and divisive than before the COVID pandemic, the study concludes.

Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark made the world's first phone call using "immersive audio and video" technology, which improves call quality with "three-dimensional" sound. The technology, part of the upcoming 5G Advanced standard, makes interactions more lifelike and is the biggest leap forward in voice calling since monophonic telephony. Nokia aims to license the technology, but widespread availability may take a few years.

In November Google agreed to pay Canadian news publishers $100 million annually "in order to be exempt from the Online News Act, which compels tech companies to enter into agreements with news publishers," writes the Canadian Press.

On Friday Google "named the organization it has selected to distribute the $100 million..." The Canadian Journalism Collective will be responsible for ensuring eligible news organizations get their share of the money. The collective is a federally incorporated non-profit organization that was created for this purpose. It was founded in May by a group of independent publishers and broadcasters... "We hope these next steps will be completed as quickly as possible, so Canadian publishers and journalists can soon begin to receive the proceeds of this new contribution model," Google said in a blog entry posted on their website Friday...

The money will be distributed proportionately based on how many full time-journalists the companies employ. Small print and digital outlets can expect to receive about $17,000 per journalist that they employ, an official with the Canadian Heritage Department has said.
Google's money will go to 1,520 news organizations, according to Google's blog post — which describes the arrangement as "addressing our concerns with the Online News Act" and "a viable path to an exemption at a clear and commercially acceptable commitment level..." As part of this transition, we have advised partners in our Google News Showcase program (our online news experience and licensing program for news organizations) will cease to operate in Canada later this year as we transition to this new contribution model. We will be maintaining some Google News Initiative programming in Canada. This includes a range of collaborative tools and resources that can support the advancement of quality journalism. However, with our monetary contribution in Canada now streamlined into the new single collective model, these investments will be non-monetary in nature.

Wired visits Chula Vista, California (population: 275,487) — where since 2018 drones have been dispatched by police "teleoperators" monitoring 911 calls. ("Noise complaints, car accidents, overdoses, domestic disputes...") After nearly 20,000 drone flights, it's become the envy of other police departments, according to Wired's article, as other police departments "look to expand their use of unmanned aerial aircraft." The [Chula Vista] department says that its drones provide officers with critical intelligence about incidents they are responding to ahead of initiating in-person contact — which the CVPD says has reduced unnecessary police contacts, decreased response times, and saved lives. But a WIRED investigation paints a complicated picture of the trade-offs between public safety and privacy. In Chula Vista, drone flight paths trace a map of the city's inequality, with poorer residents experiencing far more exposure to the drones' cameras and rotors than their wealthier counterparts, a WIRED analysis of nearly 10,000 drone flight records from July 2021 to September 2023 found. The drones, often dispatched for serious incidents like reports of armed individuals, are also routinely deployed for minor issues such as shoplifting, vandalism, and loud music. [Drones are sent in response to about 1 in every 14 calls.] Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the city even used drones to broadcast public service announcements to homeless encampments.

Despite the police promoting the benefits of the "Drone as First Responder" program, residents who encounter the technology day-to-day report feeling constantly watched. Some say they are afraid to spend time in their backyards; they fear that the machines are following them down the street, spying on them while they use the public pool or change their clothes. One resident says that he was so worried that the drones were harassing him that he went to the emergency room for severe depression and exhaustion. [A 60-year-old professor told Wired that the sound of drones kept them awake at night.]

The police drones, equipped with cameras and zoom lenses powerful enough to capture faces clearly and constantly recording while in flight, have amassed hundreds of hours of video footage of the city's residents. Their flight paths routinely take them over backyards and above public pools, high schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, immigration law firms, and even the city's Planned Parenthood facility. Privacy advocates argue that the extensive footage captured by the drones makes it difficult to distinguish between flights responding to specific incidents and mass surveillance from the sky. Department secrecy around the recordings remains the subject of ongoing litigation... At the time of our analysis, approximately one in 10 drone flights listed on the department's transparency portal lacked a stated purpose and could not be connected to any relevant 911 call.

As reported by Jon Peddie Research, Nvidia now holds 88% of the GPU market after its market share jumped 8% in its most recent quarter. "This jump shaves 7% off of AMD's share, putting it down to 19% total," reports XDA Developers. "And if you're wondering where that extra 1% went, it came from all of Intel's market share, squashing it down to 0%." From the report: Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, mentions how the GPU market hasn't really looked "normal" since the 2007 recession. Ever since then, everything from the crypto boom to COVID has messed with the usual patterns. Usually, the first quarter of a year shows a bit of a dip in GPU sales, but because of AI's influence, it may seem like that previous norm may be forever gone: "Therefore, one would expect Q2'24, a traditional quarter, to also be down. But, all the vendors are predicting a growth quarter, mostly driven by AI training systems in hyperscalers. Whereas AI trainers use a GPU, the demand for them can steal parts from the gaming segment. So, for Q2, we expect to see a flat to low gaming AIB result and another increase in AI trainer GPU shipments. The new normality is no normality."

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Independent: A potential disaster was narrowly avoided when a packed passenger plane took off just seconds before it was about to run out of runway because of a software glitch. The Boeing aircraft, operated by TUI, departed from Bristol Airport for Las Palmas, Gran Canaria on 9 March with 163 passengers on board when it struggled to take off. The 737-800 plane cleared runway nine with just 260 metres (853ft) of tarmac to spare at a height of 10ft. It then flew over the nearby A38 road at a height of just 30 metres (100ft) travelling at the speed of around 150kts (about 173mph). The A38 is a major A-class busy road, connecting South West England with the Midlands and the north.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), part of the Department for Transport, said the incident was the result of insufficient thrust being used during take-off. Pilots manually set the thrust level following a software glitch that Beoing was aware of before take-off. "A Boeing 737-800 completed a takeoff from Runway 09 at Bristol Airport with insufficient thrust to meet regulated performance," the AAIB report said. "The autothrottle (A/T) disengaged when the takeoff mode was selected, at the start of the takeoff roll, and subsequently the thrust manually set by the crew (84.5% N1 ) was less than the required takeoff thrust (92.8% N1 ). Neither pilot then noticed that the thrust was set incorrectly, and it was not picked up through the standard operating procedures (SOPs)."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After acquiring VMware, Broadcom swiftly enacted widespread changes that resulted in strong public backlash. A new survey of 300 director-level IT workers at companies that are customers of North American VMware provides insight into the customer reaction to Broadcom's overhaul. The survey released Thursday doesn't provide feedback from every VMware customer, but it's the first time we've seen responses from IT decision-makers working for companies paying for VMware products. It echos concerns expressed at the announcement of some of Broadcom's more controversial changes to VMware, like the end of perpetual licenses and growing costs. [...] Every person surveyed said that they expect VMware prices to rise under Broadcom. In a March "User Group Town Hall," attendees complained about "price rises of 500 and 600 percent," according to The Register. We heard in February from ServeTheHome that "smaller" cloud service providers were claiming to see costs grow tenfold. In this week's survey, 73 percent of respondents said they expect VMware prices to more than double. Twelve percent of respondents expect a price hike of 301 to 500 percent. Only 1 percent anticipate price hikes of 501 to 1,000 percent. "At this juncture post-acquisition, most larger enterprises seem to have a clear understanding of how their next procurement cycle with Broadcom will be impacted from a pricing and packaging standpoint," the report noted.

Further, 95 percent of survey respondents said they view Broadcom buying VMware as disruptive to their IT strategy, with 46 percent considering it extremely or very disruptive. Widespread concerns about cost and IT strategy help explain why 99 percent of the 300 respondents said they are concerned about Broadcom owning VMware, with 46 percent being "very concerned" and 30 percent "extremely concerned." Despite widespread anxiety over Broadcom's VMware, most of the respondents said they will likely stay with VMware either partially (43 percent of respondents) or fully (40 percent). A smaller percentage of respondents said they would move more workloads to the public cloud (38 percent) or a different hypervisor (34 percent) or move entirely to the public cloud (33 percent). This is with 69 percent of respondents having at least one contract expiring with VMware within the next 12 months. [...] Top reasons cited for considering abandoning VMware partially or totally were uncertainty about Broadcom's plans, concerns about support quality under Broadcom, and changes to relationships with channel partners (each named by 36 percent of respondents). Following closely was the shift to subscription licensing (34 percent), expected price bumps (33 percent), and personal negative experiences with Broadcom (33 percent). Broadcom's history with big buys like Symantec and CA Technologies also has 32 percent of people surveyed considering leaving VMware. "The emotional shock has started to metabolize inside of the Broadcom customer base, but it's metabolized in the form of strong commitment to mitigating the negative impacts of the Broadcom VMware acquisition," said Kyle Campos, CTPO for CloudBolt Software, the company that commissioned the study.

He warned that Broadcom could see backlash continue "for months and even years to come."

Microsoft says it's making its new Recall feature in Windows 11 that screenshots everything you do on your PC an opt-in feature and addressing various security concerns. From a report: The software giant first unveiled the Recall feature as part of its upcoming Copilot Plus PCs last month, but since then, privacy advocates and security experts have been warning that Recall could be a "disaster" for cybersecurity without changes. Thankfully, Microsoft has listened to the complaints and is making a number of changes before Copilot Plus PCs launch on June 18th. Microsoft had originally planned to turn Recall on by default, but the company now says it will offer the ability to disable the controversial AI-powered feature during the setup process of new Copilot Plus PCs. "If you don't proactively choose to turn it on, it will be off by default," says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri.