This week the Microsoft Security Response Center celebrated the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday updates.

In a blog post they call the updates "an initiative that has become a cornerstone of the IT world's approach to cybersecurity." Originating from the Trustworthy Computing memo by Bill Gates in 2002, our unwavering commitment to protecting customers continues to this day and is reflected in Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative announced this month. Each month, we deliver security updates on the second Tuesday, underscoring our pledge to cyber defense. As we commemorate this milestone, it's worth exploring the inception of Patch Tuesday and its evolution through the years, demonstrating our adaptability to new technology and emerging cyber threats...

Before this unified approach, our security updates were sporadic, posing significant challenges for IT professionals and organizations in deploying critical patches in a timely manner. Senior leaders of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) at the time spearheaded the idea of a predictable schedule for patch releases, shifting from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence...

This led to a shift from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence. In addition to consolidating patch releases into a monthly schedule, we also organized the security update release notes into a consolidated location. Prior to this change, customers had to navigate through various Knowledge Base articles, making it difficult to find the information they needed to secure themselves. Recognizing the need for clarity and convenience, we provided a comprehensive overview of monthly releases. This change was pivotal at a time when not all updates were delivered through Windows Update, and customers needed a reliable source to find essential updates for various products.

Patch Tuesday has also influenced other vendors in the software and hardware spaces, leading to a broader industry-wide practice of synchronized security updates. This collaborative approach, especially with hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel, aims to provide a united front against vulnerabilities, enhancing the overall security posture of our ecosystems. While the volume and complexity of updates have increased, so has the collaboration with the security community. Patch Tuesday has fostered better relationships with security researchers, leading to more responsible vulnerability disclosures and quicker responses to emerging threats...

As the landscape of security threats evolves, so does our strategy, but our core mission of safeguarding our customers remains unchanged.

Bill Gates argues that when it comes to climate change, "there are more reasons to be hopeful than many people realize — and it's not just that renewable energy sources like wind and solar are getting cheaper.

"And it's not just because many of the steps already taken to reduce carbon emissions are working: Carbon emissions from fossil fuels will probably peak in 2025." The main thing that makes me optimistic is all the innovation I'm seeing. As someone who has been funding climate solutions for years, I get to learn from ingenious scientists who are working on ideas that will help the world solve climate change. And their work makes me confident that innovation will help the world get on track to meet its climate goals.

Some people are skeptical when a technology person like me says innovation is the answer. And it's true that new tools aren't the only thing we need. But we won't solve the climate problem without them.

There are two reasons for this. First, we need to eliminate emissions from every sector of the economy. Although some behavior change will help, the world can't achieve its zero-emissions goals without inventing new ways of doing things. For example, the production of concrete and steel alone accounts for around 10 percent of the world's annual greenhouse gases, but right now, we don't have practical ways to make either one without releasing carbon dioxide.

The second reason is that, in a world with limited resources, innovations allow us to magnify the impact of our efforts... We couldn't solve the climate problem with existing technology even if we had unlimited resources — and, of course, we don't have unlimited resources. So we need to be as rigorous as possible about doing the most good with the funding that is available. In my view, that boils down to inventing and deploying new ways to cut emissions and to help people survive and thrive in a warming world.
Gates believes we're at "the beginning of a Clean Industrial Revolution" --pointing readers to Breakthrough Energy's recent State of the Transition Report for more details.

But Gates also provides some specific examples of optimism-fuleing breakthroughs"

• "To reduce emissions, we need to replace the synthetic fertilizers that release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, when broken down by microbes in the soil; Pivot Bio has genetically modified microbes to provide plants with the nitrogen they need without the excess greenhouse gases that synthetic alternatives produce."

• "Cement and steel are two of the biggest sources of emissions in this category. Boston Metal is well on the way to making steel with electricity (which can be generated without emissions) instead of coal. CarbonCure and Ecocem have developed low-carbon processes for making cement, and Brimstone has a way to do it while actually removing carbon from the air."

• "Because of inefficient windows and gaps in what's known as the building envelope, as much as 40% of heated or cooled air leaks out of the typical building. If we can drive that number down, buildings will require less heating and cooling — which will substantially lower our emissions. Aeroseal has developed a polymer that can seal ducts and other crevices; more than a quarter of a million buildings in the U.S. and Canada are already using their product. Another company, Luxwall, has developed a window that's many times more efficient than the single-pane windows used in most buildings. And unlike double-paned windows, it's thin enough to replace single-paned glass without having to rebuild the frame."

According to Reuters, Meta's head of augmented reality software is stepping down from his role. From the report: VP of Engineering Don Box announced the end of his tenure at Meta internally this week, without elaborating on what he would do next, according to a source familiar with the matter. A Meta spokesperson confirmed Box would be leaving the company at the end of this week and said he was doing so for personal reasons. There would be no change in product roadmap as a result of his decision, she added.

The departure of Box, a veteran engineer with experience building major technology systems from their infancy, could be a setback to progress on the operating system, a key component of Meta's AR glasses project, the source told Reuters. Meta has been planning to deliver a first generation of its AR glasses by next year, although those are meant to be used only internally and by a select group of developers, the source said. It aims to ship its first AR glasses to consumers in 2027. The Meta spokesperson declined to address the roadmap or whether the OS that Box's team was building would be in the first generation AR glasses. [...]

Meta initially hired Box in 2021 to chart a path forward after the failure of its XROS project, which aimed to create a unified custom operating system for its virtual reality headsets, Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses and planned augmented reality glasses, the source said. Box broke up the 300-person XROS unit into dedicated teams for each device line early last year and personally took over the team focused on AR software, according to both the source and Box's LinkedIn profile. Prior to joining Meta, Box had worked at Microsoft since 2002. In his final role at Microsoft, he ran engineering for mixed reality, which involved developing software for the HoloLens2 headset and related AR/VR services. Box is known for having led the creation of the Xbox One operating system and later heading Microsoft's core operating system group, which works across all Windows products.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft will soon let Windows 11 users in the European Economic Area (EEA) disable its Bing web search, remove Microsoft Edge, and even add custom web search providers -- including Google if it's willing to build one -- into its Windows Search interface. All of these Windows 11 changes are part of key tweaks that Microsoft has to make to its operating system to comply with the European Commission's Digital Markets Act, which comes into effect in March 2024. Microsoft will be required to meet a slew of interoperability and competition rules, including allowing users "to easily un-install pre-installed apps or change default settings on operating systems, virtual assistants, or web browsers that steer them to the products and services of the gatekeeper and provide choice screens for key services."

Alongside clearly marking which apps are system components in Windows 11, Microsoft is also responding by adding the ability to uninstall the following apps: Camera, Cortana, Web Search from Microsoft Bing in the EEA, Microsoft Edge in the EEA, and Photos. Only Windows 11 users in the EEA will be able to fully remove Microsoft Edge and the Bing-powered web search from Windows Search. Microsoft could easily extend this to all Windows 11 users, but it's limiting this extra functionality to EEA markets to comply with the rules.

In EEA markets -- which includes EU countries and also Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway -- Windows 11 users will also get access to new interoperability features for feeds in the Windows Widgets board and web search in Windows Search. This will allow search providers like Google to extend the main Windows Search interface with their own custom web searches. Microsoft will allow EEA machines to remove the Bing results, so Google could provide its own search results here and effectively become the default if a user has uninstalled Bing. "If the user has more than one search provider installed, Windows Search will show the last one used when opened," explains Aaron Grady, partner group product manager for Windows, in a statement to The Verge.

Amazon is the driving force behind a trio of advocacy groups working to thwart Microsoft's growing ambition to become a major cloud computing contractor for governments, a Bloomberg analysis shows. From the report: The groups -- the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing and the Alliance for Digital Innovation -- want to convince policymakers that Microsoft has improperly locked customers into Azure, its cloud computing service, choking off its rivals and hindering the advancement of technology within the government and beyond. These groups have dozens of members. But Amazon is the biggest funder for two of them and the largest company, measured by revenue, that funds another.

Spokespeople for the groups say no single company determines their agendas. But according to a Bloomberg News review of tax filings, documents and interviews with people familiar with the three groups' operations, Amazon Web Services plays a direct role in shaping their efforts in ways that would boost the cloud giant. Through aggressive lobbying of policymakers, these groups want to ensure that customers can use popular Microsoft products like Office Suite or Windows on any cloud computing system -- and, in particular, on Amazon Web Services, the world's number one cloud infrastructure provider and the retail giant's top profit driver.

To hammer that message, they've filed complaints, lobbied regulators and sought to shape the views of policymakers probing the cloud market. In one case, an Amazon executive is listed as the author of a public comment to the Federal Trade Commission, as well as testimony and letters to Congress on behalf of the group, according to an analysis of the documents' metadata, revealing the tech giant's role in the lobbying campaign. (The group says the documents reflect the consensus position of its members.) Amazon denied it authored statements for the group.

Microsoft has created a Windows App for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows, and web browsers. From a report: The app essentially takes the previous Windows 365 app and turns it into a central hub for streaming a copy of Windows from a remote PC, Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, and Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services.

Microsoft supports multiple monitors through its Windows App, custom display resolutions and scaling, and device redirection for peripherals like webcams, storage devices, and printers. The preview version of the Windows App isn't currently available for Android, though. The Windows App is also limited to Microsoft's range of business accounts, but there are signs it will be available to consumers, too. The sign-in prompt on the Windows App on Windows (yes that's a mouthful) suggests you can access the app using a personal Microsoft Account, but this functionality doesn't work right now.

In what may be a potentially confusing rebranding move, Microsoft today has rebranded Bing Chat to Copilot, sharing the same brand name as multiple other Microsoft AI products. Search Engine Land reports: Bing is no longer "your AI-powered copilot for the web." However, Microsoft Bing will still provide a combined Search and chat experience. It will just be called CoPilot heading forward. For people who may not want that combined experience, CoPilot will have its own standalone ChatGPT-style experience at https://copilot.microsoft.com/.

Microsoft said the rebrand is to unify the Copilot experience: "Our efforts to simplify the user experience and make Copilot more accessible to everyone starts with Bing, our leading experience for the web. Beginning today, Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise are becoming Copilot, with commercial data protection enforced when any eligible user is signed in with Microsoft Entra ID."

While it's definitely a more unified experience, it also seems a bit confusing because Microsoft's chatbot "companion" is used across multiple apps, including Microsoft 365, Edge, Windows and more -- some free, some not. In addition to Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise is also rebranded as Copilot Pro. It offers the same chat functionality with greater commercial data protection for Microsoft 365 subscribers.

Microsoft and Nvidia want to help developers run and configure AI models on their Windows PCs. During the Microsoft Ignite event on Wednesday, Microsoft announced Windows AI Studio: a new hub where developers can access AI models and tweak them to suit their needs. From a report: Windows AI Studio allows developers to access development tools and models from the existing Azure AI Studio and other services like Hugging Face. It also offers an end-to-end "guided workspace setup" with model configuration UI and walkthroughs to fine-tune various small language models (SLMs), such as Microsoft's Phi, Meta's Llama 2, and Mistral.

Windows AI Studio lets developers test the performance of their models using Prompt Flow and Gradio templates as well. Microsoft says it's going to roll out Windows AI Studio as a Visual Studio Code extension in the "coming weeks." Nvidia, similarly, revealed updates to TensorRT-LLM, which the company initially launched for Windows as a way to run large language models (LLMs) more efficiently on H100 GPUs. However, this latest update brings TensorRT-LLM to PCs powered by GeForce RTX 30 and 40 Series GPUs with 8GB of RAM or more.

Rick Lane reports via PC Gamer: KeeperFX has been in the process of rescuing Dungeon Keeper for a decade and a half. The project originally started in 2008, and experienced something of a bumpy road up until 2016. Since then, though, it has gradually added support for Windows 7, 10, and 11, support for hi-res and 4k screens, modernized controls, and even additional campaigns. With this latest version, KeeperFX's developers say "all original Dungeon Keeper code has been rewritten, establishing KeeperFX as a true open-source standalone game." 1.0 also introduces some new features, such as higher framerates, AI that is better at digging and less likely to "instantly" throw its entire army at you, and "higher quality landview speeches" for the additional campaigns. That refers to the introductions and epilogues to missions which, in the game's original campaign, were voiced by Richard Ridings, aka Daddy Pig.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, KeeperFX's 1.0 adds a couple of new units to play with. First up is the Druid, a sort-of color-flipped version of the Warlock who uses ice spells rather than fire. The other unit is the excitingly named Time Mage, a recolor of the Wizard who can cast teleport and speed spells, and also turn enemy units into chickens (presumably through rapid devolution). You won't find these units in the original campaign, but you will encounter them in the custom campaigns bundled with the 1.0 version. You can download KeeperFX here, although it still requires you to own Dungeon Keeper "for copyright reasons."

The senior security editor at Ars Technica writes: Highly invasive malware targeting software developers is once again circulating in Trojanized code libraries, with the latest ones downloaded thousands of times in the last eight months, researchers said Wednesday.

Since January, eight separate developer tools have contained hidden payloads with various nefarious capabilities, security firm Checkmarx reported. The most recent one was released last month under the name "pyobfgood." Like the seven packages that preceded it, pyobfgood posed as a legitimate obfuscation tool that developers could use to deter reverse engineering and tampering with their code. Once executed, it installed a payload, giving the attacker almost complete control of the developerâ(TM)s machine. Capabilities include:


- Exfiltrate detailed host information
- Steal passwords from the Chrome web browser
- Set up a keylogger
- Download files from the victim's system
- Capture screenshots and record both screen and audio
- Render the computer inoperative by ramping up CPU usage, inserting a batch script in the startup directory to shut down the PC, or forcing a BSOD error with a Python script
- Encrypt files, potentially for ransom
- Deactivate Windows Defender and Task Manager
- Execute any command on the compromised host


In all, pyobfgood and the previous seven tools were installed 2,348 times. They targeted developers using the Python programming language... Downloads of the package came primarily from the US (62%), followed by China (12%) and Russia (6%)
Ars Technica concludes that "The never-ending stream of attacks should serve as a cautionary tale underscoring the importance of carefully scrutinizing a package before allowing it to run."

This week GitHub announced the approaching general availability of the GPT-4-powered GitHub Copilot Chat in December "as part of your existing GitHub Copilot subscription" (and "available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects.")

And this "code-aware guidance and code generation" will also be integrated directly into github.com, "so developers can dig into code, pull requests, documentation, and general coding questions with Copilot Chat providing suggestions, summaries, analysis, and answers." With GitHub Copilot Chat we're enabling the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language for every developer on the planet. Whether it's finding an error, writing unit tests, or helping debug code, Copilot Chat is your AI companion through it all, allowing you to write and understand code using whatever language you speak...

Copilot Chat uses your code as context, and is able to explain complex concepts, suggest code based on your open files and windows, help detect security vulnerabilities, and help with finding and fixing errors in code, terminal, and debugger...

With the new inline Copilot Chat, developers can chat about specific lines of code, directly within the flow of their code and editor.
InfoWorld notes it will chat in "whatever language a developer speaks." (And that Copilot Chat will also be available in GitHub's mobile app.) But why wait until December? GitHub's blog post says that Copilot Chat "will come to the JetBrains suite of IDEs, available in preview today."

GitHub also plans to introduce "slash commands and context variables" for GitHub Copilot, "so fixing or improving code is as simple as entering /fix and generating tests now starts with /tests."

"With Copilot in the code editor, in the CLI, and now Copilot Chat on github.com and in our mobile app, we are making Copilot ubiquitous throughout the software development lifecycle and always available in all of GitHub's surface areas..."

CNBC adds that "Microsoft-owned GitHub" also plans to introduce "a more expensive Copilot assistant" in February "for developers inside companies that can explain and provide recommendations about internal source code."

Wednesday's blog post announcing these updates was written by GitHub's CEO, who seemed to be predicting an evolutionary leap into a new future. "Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot." He promised they'd built on their vision of a future "where AI infuses every step of the developer lifecycle." Open source and Git have fundamentally transformed how we build software. It is now evident that AI is ushering in the same sweeping change, and at an exponential pace... We are certain this foundational transformation of the GitHub platform, and categorically new way of software development, is necessary in a world dependent on software. Every day, the world's developers balance an unsustainable demand to both modernize the legacy code of yesterday and build our digital tomorrow. It is our guiding conviction to make it easier for developers to do it all, from the creative spark to the commit, pull request, code review, and deploy — and to do it all with GitHub Copilot deeply integrated into the developer experience.
And if you're worried about the security of AI-generated code... Today, GitHub Copilot applies an LLM-based vulnerability prevention system that blocks insecure coding patterns in real-time to make GitHub Copilot's suggestions more secure. Our model targets the most common vulnerable coding patterns, including hardcoded credentials, SQL injections, and path injections. GitHub Copilot Chat can also help identify security vulnerabilities in the IDE, explain the mechanics of a vulnerability with its natural language capabilities, and suggest a specific fix for the highlighted code.
But for Enterprise accounts paying for GitHub Advanced Security, there's also an upgrade coming: "new AI-powered application security testing features designed to detect and remediate vulnerabilities and secrets in your code." (It's already available in preview mode.)

GitHub even announced plans for a new AI assistant in 2024 that generates a step-by-step plan for responding to GitHub issues. (GitHub describes it as "like a pair programming session with a partner that knows about every inch of the project, and can follow your lead to make repository-wide changes from the issue to the pull request with the power of AI.")

CNBC notes that AI-powered coding assistants "are still nascent, though, with less than 10% enterprise adoption, according to Gartner, a technology industry research firm."

But last month Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts GitHub Copilot already had one million paying users...

And GitHub's blog post concludes, "And we're just getting started."

A a report from TechSpot says AMD has recently increased its market share in the CPU sector for desktops, laptops, and servers: According to Mercury Research (via Tom's Hardware), AMD gained 5.8% unit share in desktops, 3.8% in laptops, and 5.8% in servers. In terms of revenue share, Team Red gained 4.1% in desktops, 5.1% in laptops, and 1.7% in servers. The report does not mention competitors by name, but the global PC industry only has one other major CPU supplier, Intel, which has a major stake in all the market segments.

While Intel and AMD make x86 processors for PCs, Qualcomm offers Arm-based SoCs for Windows notebooks, but its market share is minuscule by comparison. So, while the report doesn't say anything about the market share of Intel or Qualcomm, it is fair to assume that most of AMD's gains came at Intel's expense.
Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco writes: Forty years ago today Microsoft introduced its new Graphical User Interface for MS-DOS. Inspired by the Xerox PARC project Alto, as was the Apple Mac, it was their first attempt to address the user unfriendliness of the standard computer interface. Named Windows 1.0 after the "windows" it created to view individual running programs, it generated quite a bit of interest at the initial reveal. Unfortunately, difficulty in ironing out bugs (especially in memory management) delayed release for two years, to November 1985.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Modern versions of Windows have become more annoying as time has gone on, pushing additional Microsoft products and services on users who are just trying to turn on their computers and get something done. Often, as we've covered, these notifications and reminders ignore or actively push back against user intent -- prompting you to sign up for Microsoft 365 if you already said no, or trying to make you use Edge or Bing after you've already installed Chrome. Microsoft took another step down this path this week when it began testing a new addition to the Windows OneDrive app that would force users to explain themselves when quitting the app. Initially spotted by NeoWin, the survey took the form of a drop-down menu, not unlike the ones you sometimes see when you try to unsubscribe from marketing or fundraising mailing lists.

Until you chose an answer from the drop-down, the "quit" button would be grayed out, preventing you from actually closing OneDrive. This was an escalation from the previous behavior, which would ask you if you were sure before allowing you to quit but allowing you to actually click the "quit" button without interacting with any other menus. The old prompt was an explanation; the newer one was an imposition. For its part, Microsoft told The Verge that the new prompt was a test that was only rolled out to a subset of OneDrive users and that the change has been reverted as of a couple of days ago.

"Between Nov. 1 and 8, a small subset of consumer OneDrive users were presented with a dialog box when closing the OneDrive sync client, asking for feedback on the reason they chose to close the application," reads Microsoft's statement. "This type of user feedback helps inform our ongoing efforts to enhance the quality of our products."

As AMD is now well into their third generation of RDNA architecture GPUs, the sun has been slowly setting on AMD's remaining Graphics Core Next (GCN) designs, better known by the architecture names of Polaris and Vega. From a report: In recent weeks the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, and now we have confirmation that the company is slowly winding down support for these architectures in their Windows drivers as well. Under AMD's extended driver support schedule for Polaris and Vega, the drivers for these architectures will no longer be kept at feature parity with the RDNA architectures. And while AMD will continue to support Polaris and Vega for some time to come, that support is being reduced to security updates and "functionality updates as available."

For AMD users keeping a close eye on their driver releases, they'll likely recognize that AMD already began this process back in September -- though AMD hasn't officially documented the change until now. As of AMD's September Adrenaline 23.9 driver series, AMD split up the RDNA and GCN driver packages, and with that they have also split the driver branches between the two architectures. As a result, only RDNA cards are receiving new features and updates as part of AMD's mainline driver branch (currently 23.20), while the GCN cards have been parked on a maintenance driver branch - 23.19.

Microsoft now wants you to explain exactly why you're attempting to close its OneDrive for Windows app before it allows you to do so. From a report: Neowin has spotted that the latest update to OneDrive now includes an annoying dialog box that asks you to select the reason why you're closing the app every single time you attempt to close OneDrive from the taskbar. Closing OneDrive is already buried away and not a simple task, with Microsoft hiding it under a "pause syncing" option when you right-click on OneDrive in the taskbar. But now, the quit option is grayed out until you select a reason for quitting OneDrive from a drop-down box. Here are the options:
1. I don't want OneDrive running all the time
2. I don't know what OneDrive is
3. I don't use OneDrive
4. I'm trying to fix a problem with OneDrive
5. I'm trying to speed up my computer
6. I get too many notifications
7. Other

Windows Central: Microsoft began rolling out its new AI assistant for Windows earlier this year with the Windows 11 version 23H2 release, which adds a new Microsoft Copilot button directly to the Taskbar. Microsoft has been putting its Copilot in front of every user it can, but there's still a large chunk of PC users on the older Windows 10 OS which hasn't seen any of Microsoft's recent AI additions. That may soon be changing. According to my sources, Microsoft is planning to bring the same Microsoft Copilot to Windows 10 in an update coming soon. Just like Windows 11, this update to Windows 10 will place a Copilot button directly on the Windows 10 taskbar, which will open the exact same Copilot sidebar experience found on Windows 11.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [A] new tech startup, Prophetic, aims to bring lucid dreams to a much wider audience by developing a wearable device designed to spark the experience when desired. Prophetic is the brainchild of Eric Wollberg, its chief executive officer, and Wesley Louis Berry III, its chief technology officer. The pair co-founded the company earlier this year with the goal of combining technologies, such as ultrasound and machine learning models, "to detect when dreamers are in REM to induce and stabilize lucid dreams" with a device called the Halo according to the company's website. [...]

Prophetic does not make any medical claims about its forthcoming products -- Halo is tentatively slated for a 2025 release -- though Wollberg and Berry both expressed optimism about broader scientific research that suggests lucid dreams can reduce PTSD-related nightmares, promote mindfulness, and open new windows into the mysterious nature of consciousness. To explore those links further, Prophetic has partnered with the Donders Institute, a research center at Radboud University in the Netherlands that is focused on neuroscience and cognition, to generate the largest dataset of electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) observations of lucid dreamers, according to the company. The collaboration will also explore one of central technologies behind Prophetic's vision, known as transcranial focused ultrasound (TUS). This non-invasive technique uses low-intensity ultrasound pulses to probe the brain, and interact with neural activity, with a depth and precision that cannot be achieved with previous methods, such as transcranial electrical stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation.

At this point, both the possibilities and limits of Prophetic's concept remain unclear. While ultrasound devices have been widely used in medicine for decades, the process of stimulating parts of the brain with TUS is a relatively new development. Within the past few years, scientists have shown that TUS "has the potential to be used both as a scientific instrument to investigate brain function and as a therapeutic modality to modulate brain activity," according to a 2019 study, and "could be a useful tool in the treatment of clinical disorders characterized by negative mood states, like depression and anxiety disorders," according to a 2020 study. What is not known, yet, is whether TUS can induce or stabilize lucid dreams, though the Prophetic team is banking on a positive answer to this open question. Its wearable headband prototype, the Halo, was developed with the company Card79 and can currently read EEG data of users. Over the next year, Prophetic aims to use the dataset from their partnership with the Donders Institute to train machine learning models that will stimulate targeted neural activity in users with ultrasound transducers as a means of inducing lucid dreams.

Bill Gates, noted billionaire philanthropist, discussed the need for "impatient optimism" about both climate change and global development last month during an interview at an international affairs think tank: Q: If you go back a decade, are you more or less optimistic about where we are on climate change now, or then?

Bill Gates: I'm certainly more optimistic because in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, there were so many areas of emission where there wasn't any activity...

Q: if you go back a decade, solar and wind were the most expensive energy sources we had. Since then, the price of solar has dropped 90%, and the price of wind has dropped 70%, and electric vehicles are now economically viable... I know you get excited about innovation. What are some of the areas that you're most excited about for innovation?

Bill Gates: Across this portfolio of 100 companies it's hard to pick my favorite. Some are kind of straightforward, like a company that makes windows where the temperature doesn't cross over, but instead, it blocks getting cold in the winter or hot in the summer, which is very cheap. Or there is a company where you leave your home, and you pump this air through, but it's got a chemical in it. When it sees cracks, it actually seals those cracks. You don't have to find the cracks; you just pump the air in. You can reduce the amount of heat loss between the windows and getting rid of those cracks. You can reduce the energy bill by a factor of two, which then means less load on the overall energy system...

The cement and steel ones are the ones, in a way, I'm most impressed by, because I wasn't sure we'd find anything in those spaces...

Q: The problem, I guess, with cement is that you are taking basically limestone, and then you are converting it to calcium oxide. But the byproduct you get in that conversion process is CO2. Basically, you need a way to capture that CO2....

Bill Gates: As you heat the limestone, that releases CO2. It's exactly as you say, it's an equal number amount of emissions. One of our companies doesn't use limestone. They actually go and find another source of calcium, which fortunately turns out to be quite abundant and cheap. They make exactly the same cement that we make today, but not using limestone as the input. I was stunned that you could do that.
Gates also hopes to see nuclear power in an economically viable form. "The nuclear industry basically failed, because their product was too expensive. It wasn't because of the waste or safety-type issues, which we can get into those, but it was economics." Bill Gates: First and foremost, you must have a much different economic proposition. The nuclear reactor I'm involved in, TerraPower, we only generate electricity when the renewable sources that have very little marginal costs aren't generating. We just make heat all day, and then only when the bid price of electricity is high enough, do we actually generate electricity, because otherwise, you have all this capital cost that half the time, the solar bid into that market is going to be very low.

I think fission, we shouldn't give up on it. I'm involved in that company only because it may be able to make a significant contribution to [fighting] climate change... I can't overstate how much easier it is to solve the problem if you can mix in some degree of fission or fusion that are there to fill in the periods where renewables are not generating. Cold snaps or where you have these cold fronts just sitting there, that's when houses need the most heating. That's when neither wind nor solar are generating.

It happened a quarter of a century ago. The New York Times wrote that "An internal memorandum reflecting the views of some of Microsoft's top executives and software development managers reveals deep concern about the threat of free software and proposes a number of strategies for competing against free programs that have recently been gaining in popularity." The memo warns that the quality of free software can meet or exceed that of commercial programs and describes it as a potentially serious threat to Microsoft. The document was sent anonymously last week to Eric Raymond, a key figure in a loosely knit group of software developers who collaboratively create and distribute free programs ranging from operating systems to Web browsers. Microsoft executives acknowledged that the document was authentic...

In addition to acknowledging that free programs can compete with commercial software in terms of quality, the memorandum calls the free software movement a "long-term credible" threat and warns that employing a traditional Microsoft marketing strategy known as "FUD," an acronym for "fear, uncertainty and doubt," will not succeed against the developers of free software. The memorandum also voices concern that Linux is rapidly becoming the dominant version of Unix for computers powered by Intel microprocessors.

The competitive issues, the note warns, go beyond the fact that the software is free. It is also part of the open-source software, or O.S.S., movement, which encourages widespread, rapid development efforts by making the source code — that is, the original lines of code written by programmers — readily available to anyone. This enables programmers the world over to continually write or suggest improvements or to warn of bugs that need to be fixed. The memorandum notes that open software presents a threat because of its ability to mobilize thousands of programmers. "The ability of the O.S.S. process to collect and harness the collective I.Q. of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing," the memo states. "More importantly, O.S.S. evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale."
Back in 1998, Slashdot's CmdrTaco covered the whole brouhaha — including this CNN article: A second internal Microsoft memo on the threat Linux poses to Windows NT calls the operating system "a best-of-breed Unix" and wonders aloud if the open-source operating system's momentum could be slowed in the courts.

As with the first "Halloween Document," the memo — written by product manager Vinod Valloppillil and another Microsoft employee, Josh Cohen — was obtained by Linux developer Eric Raymond and posted on the Internet. In it, Cohen and Valloppillil, who also authored the first "Halloween Document," appear to suggest that Microsoft could slow the open-source development of Linux with legal battles. "The effect of patents and copyright in combating Linux remains to be investigated," the duo wrote.
Microsoft's slogain in 1998 was "Where do you want to go today?" So Eric Raymond published the documents on his web site under the headline "Where will Microsoft try to drag you today? Do you really want to go there?"

25 years later, and it's all still up there and preserved for posterity on Raymond's web page — a collection of leaked Microsoft documents and related materials known collectively as "the Halloween documents." And Raymond made a point of thanking the writers of the documents, "for authoring such remarkable and effective testimonials to the excellence of Linux and open-source software in general."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mtaht for remembering the documents' 25th anniversary...