Microsoft is adding a Copilot AI assistant to Windows 11. Much like the Copilot sidebars we've seen in Edge, Office apps, and even GitHub, Windows Copilot will be integrated directly into Windows 11 and available to open and use from the taskbar across all apps and programs. From a report: "Once open, the Windows Copilot side bar stays consistent across your apps, programs, and windows, always available to act as your personal assistant," explains Panos Panay, Microsoft's head of Windows and devices. "It makes every user a power user, helping you take action, customize your settings, and seamlessly connect across your favorite apps."

The Windows Copilot can summarize content you're viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. It looks very similar to the dialog box that's found in Bing Chat, so you can ask it general questions and things you might usually ask a search engine. It won't directly replace the search bar on the Windows 11 taskbar and is a separate Copilot button alongside it instead, much like how Cortana had its own dedicated space on the taskbar in Windows 10. Windows Copilot is a "personal assistant," according to Microsoft, which sounds a lot like how Microsoft described Cortana as a "personal productivity assistant."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft cloud services are scanning for malware by peeking inside users' zip files, even when they're protected by a password, several users reported on Mastodon on Monday. Compressing file contents into archived zip files has long been a tactic threat actors use to conceal malware spreading through email or downloads. Eventually, some threat actors adapted by protecting their malicious zip files with a password the end user must type when converting the file back to its original form. Microsoft is one-upping this move by attempting to bypass password protection in zip files and, when successful, scanning them for malicious code.

While analysis of password-protected in Microsoft cloud environments is well-known to some people, it came as a surprise to Andrew Brandt. The security researcher has long archived malware inside password-protected zip files before exchanging them with other researchers through SharePoint. On Monday, he took to Mastodon to report that the Microsoft collaboration tool had recently flagged a zip file, which had been protected with the password "infected." "While I totally understand doing this for anyone other than a malware analyst, this kind of nosy, get-inside-your-business way of handling this is going to become a big problem for people like me who need to send their colleagues malware samples," Brandt wrote. "The available space to do this just keeps shrinking and it will impact the ability of malware researchers to do their jobs."

Fellow researcher Kevin Beaumont joined the discussion to say that Microsoft has multiple methods for scanning the contents of password-protected zip files and uses them not just on files stored in SharePoint but all its 365 cloud services. One way is to extract any possible passwords from the bodies of email or the name of the file itself. Another is by testing the file to see if it's protected with one of the passwords contained in a list. "If you mail yourself something and type something like 'ZIP password is Soph0s', ZIP up EICAR and ZIP password it with Soph0s, it'll find (the) password, extract and find (and feed MS detection)," he wrote. "A Google representative said the company doesn't scan password-protected zip files, though Gmail does flag them when users receive such a file," notes Ars.

"One other thing readers should remember: password-protected zip files provide minimal assurance that content inside the archives can't be read. As Beaumont noted, ZipCrypto, the default means for encrypting zip files in Windows, is trivial to override. A more dependable way is to use an AES-256 encryptor built into many archive programs when creating 7z files."

KDE developer/QA manager Nate Graham describes the week-long development sprint for the next major release of Plasma desktop environment. And one big focus was "better default settings" to "improve the UX out of the box."

Some highlights from Nate's blog post: - Plasma 6 will default to opening files and folders with a double-click, not a single-click. Even though almost everyone in the room for the discussion actually uses and prefers opening with single-click, we had to admit that it's probably not the ideal default setting for people who are migrating from other platforms, which is most of them. They can still learn the benefits of single-click later.

- We decided to use the "Thumbnail Grid" Task Switcher by default and make some UI changes...

- We're going to make a very strong push for Wayland to be the default session type for Plasma 6. The X11 session will still be there of course, and distros will be free to override this and continue defaulting to X11 if they feel like it suits them better. But we want Wayland to be our official recommendation...

- For Plasma 6, we're going to try a slower release schedule of two per year once we feel like it's stabilized enough after its initial release. And we're going to be reaching out to distros with twice-yearly release schedules themselves to see if we can find release dates that will allow all of them to ship the latest version of Plasma soon after it's released rather than skipping it in favor of something older. Making use of these lengthened release periods, we're also going to lengthen our Beta releases and update them on a weekly basis, so there's more time to find and fix bugs.
Nate also shared this explanation for switching to a floating Panel by default: Microsoft has blatantly copied us in Windows 11, and as a result, people are starting to see Plasma as a cheap clone of Windows again. We see this all the time in the Visual Design Group room... Making the panel float by default provides an immediate visual differentiation from Windows 11 and we hope this will help jolt users' brains out of "ew, it's slightly different from Windows 11" mode and into "wow, this is new and cool and I wonder what's in it" mode.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: AWS offered A Look Inside the Making of an NFL Football Schedule in conjunction with Thursday's release of the 2023 NFL Schedule Powered by AWS. AWS notes that producing the schedule required the use of 4,000+ AWS EC2 Spot Instances. An AWS promotional video claims they "saved the NFL an estimated $2 million each season" by leveraging AWS Spot Instances for a discount of up to 90% off compared to AWS On-Demand pricing..

"In just three months," AWS explains, "National Football League (NFL) schedule makers methodically build an exciting 18 week 272-game schedule spanning 576 possible game windows." Up until 10 years ago, AWS notes in an accompanying infographic, the NFL used a white-boarding process to manually craft its schedule.

Not to diminish the NFL's and AWS's 2023 scheduling achievement, but the 2013 documentary The Schedule Makers told the remarkable tale of the husband-and-wife duo of Henry and Holly Stephenson, who for almost a quarter of a century in the pre-Cloud era managed the scheduling for 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams who each played 162 regular season games a year. According to the May 1985 Atari Compendium (pg. 38), the Stephensons were using a self-written program running on a 64K IMS-8000 to help schedule games for the MLB (2,106 games over a 6-month season), NBA, and NASL/MISL (defunct soccer leagues). So perhaps the NFL's claim that "There's no way the NFL could deliver the quality of schedule that we put out every year for our fans and television partners without the contributions of our friends at AWS" should be taken with a grain of salt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this week, Microsoft released a patch to fix a Secure Boot bypass bug used by the BlackLotus bootkit we reported on in March. The original vulnerability, CVE-2022-21894, was patched in January, but the new patch for CVE-2023-24932 addresses another actively exploited workaround for systems running Windows 10 and 11 and Windows Server versions going back to Windows Server 2008. The BlackLotus bootkit is the first-known real-world malware that can bypass Secure Boot protections, allowing for the execution of malicious code before your PC begins loading Windows and its many security protections. Secure Boot has been enabled by default for over a decade on most Windows PCs sold by companies like Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, and others. PCs running Windows 11 must have it enabled to meet the software's system requirements.

Microsoft says that the vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker with either physical access to a system or administrator rights on a system. It can affect physical PCs and virtual machines with Secure Boot enabled. We highlight the new fix partly because, unlike many high-priority Windows fixes, the update will be disabled by default for at least a few months after it's installed and partly because it will eventually render current Windows boot media unbootable. The fix requires changes to the Windows boot manager that can't be reversed once they've been enabled. Additionally, once the fixes have been enabled, your PC will no longer be able to boot from older bootable media that doesn't include the fixes. On the lengthy list of affected media: Windows install media like DVDs and USB drives created from Microsoft's ISO files; custom Windows install images maintained by IT departments; full system backups; network boot drives including those used by IT departments to troubleshoot machines and deploy new Windows images; stripped-down boot drives that use Windows PE; and the recovery media sold with OEM PCs.

Not wanting to suddenly render any users' systems unbootable, Microsoft will be rolling the update out in phases over the next few months. The initial version of the patch requires substantial user intervention to enable -- you first need to install May's security updates, then use a five-step process to manually apply and verify a pair of "revocation files" that update your system's hidden EFI boot partition and your registry. These will make it so that older, vulnerable versions of the bootloader will no longer be trusted by PCs. A second update will follow in July that won't enable the patch by default but will make it easier to enable. A third update in "first quarter 2024" will enable the fix by default and render older boot media unbootable on all patched Windows PCs. Microsoft says it is "looking for opportunities to accelerate this schedule," though it's unclear what that would entail.

According to Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, the most recent Windows 11 Insider Preview build is the first to include the memory-safe programming language Rust. Thurrott reports: "If you're on the Win11 Insider ring, you're getting the first taste of Rust in the Windows kernel," Russinovich tweeted last night. It's not clear which Insider channel he is referring to, however.

Regardless, that that was quick: Microsoft only went public with its plans to replace parts of the Windows kernel with Rust code in mid-April at its BlueHat IL 2023 security conference in Israel. At that event, Microsoft vice president David Weston said that "we're using Rust on the operating system along with other constructs" as part of an "aggressive and meaningful pursuit of memory safety," a key source of exploits. And it's not just the Windows kernel. Microsoft is bringing Rust to its Pluton security processor as well.

Roblox's new anti-cheat software puts a stop to in-game exploits, but at what cost? According to Liam Dawe from Gaming On Linux, it's blocking the Wine application, meaning "you won't be able to play it on Linux any more, at all, unless you find some sort of special workaround." He adds: "Previously the roll-out of this update was being tested only with some users. Now though it's here for everyone giving a 64 bit client and introducing their Hyperion anti-cheat software which they are intentionally blocking Wine with." Here's what one of their staff had to say about this: Hi - thanks for the question. I definitely get where you're coming from, and as you point out, you deserve a clear, good-faith answer. Unfortunately that answer is essentially "no."

From a personal perspective, a lot of people at Roblox would love to support Linux (including me). Practically speaking, there's just no way for us to justify it. If we release a client, we have to support it, which means QA, CS, documentation, etc., all of which is much more difficult on a fragmented platform. We release weekly on a half-dozen platforms. Adding in the time to test, debug, and release a Linux client would be expensive, which means time taken away from improving Roblox on our current platforms.

Even Wine support is difficult because of anti-cheat. As wonderful as it would be to allow Roblox under Wine, the number of users who would take advantage of that is minuscule compared with our other platforms, and it's not worthwhile if it makes it easy for exploiters to cheat.

I'm sorry to be such a downer about this, but it's the reality. We have to spend our time porting to and supporting the platforms that will grow our community.

Again, I'm personally sorry to have to say this. Way back in 2000 I had a few patches accepted into the kernel, and I led the port of Roblox game servers from Windows to Linux several years ago. From a technical and philosophical perspective, it would be a wonderful thing to do. But our first responsibility is to our overall community, and the opportunity cost of supporting a Linux client is far, far too high to justify.

Windows 11's Settings panel has been seen with a number of adverts in test builds of the OS, in what's becoming a sadly familiar theme for preview builds of late. From a report: As spotted by German tech site Deskmodder, this was flagged up by a respected source for Microsoft leaks, Albacore, on Twitter. Albacore shared some screenshots of the new home page for the Settings app, as uncovered by digging into a Windows 11 preview from the Canary channel (the earliest test builds). The first screen grab (on the left in the above tweet) shows an ad for Microsoft 365 at the top of the panel, telling users what they get with the service and that they can try it for free (for a trial period). Under that, there's a prompt to 'finish setting up your account,' which refers to completing the setup of your Microsoft Account. The other screenshots also have prompts relating to the Microsoft Account, this time urging users to sign into the account, one of which is shown on the Settings home page and another in the Accounts section. In the latter, users are told to 'Sign in to get the most out of Windows.'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Back in 2017, Brynjolfsson published a paper (PDF) in one of the top academic journals, Science, which outlined the kind of work that he believed AI was capable of doing. It was called "What Can Machine Learning Do? Workforce Implications." Now, Brynjolfsson says, "I have to update that paper dramatically given what's happened in the past year or two." Sure, the current pace of change can feel dizzying and kinda scary. But Brynjolfsson is not catastrophizing. In fact, quite the opposite. He's earned a reputation as a "techno-optimist." And, recently at least, he has a real reason to be optimistic about what AI could mean for the economy. Last week, Brynjolfsson, together with MIT economists Danielle Li and Lindsey R. Raymond, released what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first empirical study of the real-world economic effects of new AI systems. They looked at what happened to a company and its workers after it incorporated a version of ChatGPT, a popular interactive AI chatbot, into workflows.

What the economists found offers potentially great news for the economy, at least in one dimension that is crucial to improving our living standards: AI caused a group of workers to become much more productive. Backed by AI, these workers were able to accomplish much more in less time, with greater customer satisfaction to boot. At the same time, however, the study also shines a spotlight on just how powerful AI is, how disruptive it might be, and suggests that this new, astonishing technology could have economic effects that change the shape of income inequality going forward. Brynjolfsson and his colleagues described how an undisclosed Fortune 500 company implemented an earlier version of OpenAI's ChatGPT to assist its customer support agents in troubleshooting technical issues through online chat windows. The AI chatbot, trained on previous conversations between agents and customers, improved the performance of less experienced agents, making them as effective as those with more experience. The use of AI led to an, on average, 14% increase in productivity, higher customer satisfaction ratings, and reduced turnover rates. However, the study also revealed that more experienced agents did not experience significant benefits from using AI.

The findings suggest that AI has the potential to improve productivity and reduce inequality by benefiting workers who were previously left behind in the technological era. Nonetheless, it raises questions about how the benefits of AI should be distributed and whether it may devalue specialized skills in certain occupations. While the impact of AI is still being studied, its ability to handle non-routine tasks and learn on the fly indicates that it could have different effects on the job market compared to previous technologies.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has now started notifying IT admins that it will force Outlook and Teams to ignore the default web browser on Windows and open links in Microsoft Edge instead. Reddit users have posted messages from the Microsoft 365 admin center that reveal how Microsoft is going to roll out this change. "Web links from Azure Active Directory (AAD) accounts and Microsoft (MSA) accounts in the Outlook for Windows app will open in Microsoft Edge in a single view showing the opened link side-by-side with the email it came from," reads a message to IT admins from Microsoft. While this won't affect the default browser setting in Windows, it's yet another part of Microsoft 365 and Windows that totally ignores your default browser choice for links. Microsoft already does this with the Widgets system in Windows 11 and even the search experience, where you'll be forced into Edge if you click a link even if you have another browser set as default. Further reading: Microsoft Broke a Chrome Feature To Promote Its Edge Browser.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Microsoft issued a Windows update that broke a Chrome feature, making it harder to change your default browser and annoying Chrome users with popups, Gizmodo has learned. An April Windows update borked a new button in Chrome -- the most popular browser in the world -- that let you change your default browser with a single click, but the worst was reserved for users on the enterprise version of Windows. For weeks, every time an enterprise user opened Chrome, the Windows default settings page would pop up. There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update. It forced Google to disable the setting, which had made Chrome more convenient.

This petty chapter of the browser wars started in July 2022 when Google quietly rolled out a new button in Chrome for Windows. It would show up near the top of the screen and let you change your default browser in one click without pulling up your system settings. For eight months, it worked great. Then, in April, Microsoft issued Windows update KB5025221, and things got interesting. "Every time I open Chrome the default app settings of Windows will open. I've tried many ways to resolve this without luck," one IT administrator said on a Microsoft forum. A Reddit user noticed that the settings page also popped up any and every time you clicked on a link, but only if Chrome was your default browser. "It doesn't happen if we change the default browser to Edge," the user said. Others made similar complaints on Google support forums, some saying that entire organizations were having the issue. Users quickly realized the culprit was the operating system update.

For people on the regular consumer version of Windows, things weren't quite as bad; the one-click "Make Default" button just stopped working. Gizmodo was able to replicate the problem. In fact, we were able to circumvent the issue just by changing the name of the Chrome app on a Windows desktop. It seems that Microsoft threw up the roadblock specifically for Chrome, the main competitor to its Edge browser. [...] In response, Google had to disable its one-click default button; the issue stopped after it did. In other words, Microsoft seems to have gone out of its way to break a Chrome feature that made life easier for users. Google confirmed the details of this story, but declined to comment further.

According to Windows Latest, Microsoft is working on new ARM chips to compete against Apple Silicon. "I have also spotted some job listings that suggest the company is building its own Silicon-based ARM chips for client devices" writes Mayank Parmar. "Additionally, I understand that Microsoft is optimizing Windows 12 for Silicon-ARM architecture." From the report: These developments coincide with the upcoming launch of Windows 12, which has a special version optimized for silicon and designed to leverage AI capabilities. The job listings (most of them have now been taken down) describe positions related to custom silicon accelerators, System on Chips (SoCs), and high-performance, high-bandwidth designs. This suggests that Microsoft is building its own ARM-based chips, aiming to compete with Apple's M chips lineup in terms of performance and efficiency.

For Red Hat's 30th anniversary, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles.

In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of the Year" award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of the market. "How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source software.

"Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's engineering team on Windows, and I don't really care how many people they have," Young would say. "Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison...."

Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.] It's pretty primitive, but it's going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing's Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. "I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help," said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. "So we put our two little businesses together."

Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing's Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out.
The four articles capture the highlights. ("A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.") And it doesn't leave out Red Hat's skirmishes with Microsoft. ("Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. ") "We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us," says Michael Ferris, Red Hat's VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and "making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees."

But there's also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat's headquarters in Durham: "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era..." It's fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like "It started with a student from Finland" and "Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath."

Something I'd never thought of. 2001's 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center "destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter." And by the mid-2000s, "Red Hat was the world's largest provider of Linux...' according to part two of the series. "Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies." By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat's kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally," Microsoft President Brad Smith later said.

In the 2010s, "open source has won" became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. "There was never gloating," Tiemann said.

"But there was always pride."
In 2017 Red Hat's CEO answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Linux Magazine argues that System76's Pop!_OS offers "something rare: a commercial distribution that was integrated into the hardware, with utilities designed specifically for System76 computers and keyboards." The only other example of an integrated commercial distro of which I am aware is Purism, a company in the same niche... With hardware and software coming from the same source — what business calls vertical integration — distributions like System76/Pop!_OS offer Linux users their first experiences with what Windows and macOS users have always enjoyed — to say nothing of the closest they can currently get to open hardware. Could Linux be finally becoming mainstream at last?
They interviewed System76 CEO Carl Richell (along with a marketing director and media relations manager), who remembered how System76 was actually founded in Carl's basement around 2005: He wanted to show the world how far Linux and open source software had come by delivering it preinstalled on high-quality computers backed by caring, knowledgeable customer support. Carl felt that making Linux computers that highlight the work of the community would be a great way to introduce the broader public to open source technology and its potential...

LM: What other hardware might System76 offer in the future?

S76: We are in the research and development process of designing our own in-house laptop. We'll eventually refresh our Meerkat mini desktop with a new Thelio-style aesthetic. That project will start sometime after our first in-house laptops start shipping. [In addition,] Launch keyboards and the System76 Keyboard Configurator work on macOS and Windows! We've also prepared ISO layouts for most Launch models but don't have a time frame for release.

LM: What are you willing to say at this point about the company's future directions?

S76: We're developing COSMIC DE — a desktop environment written in Rust — as well as a prototype for an open hardware laptop manufactured in-house. Finally, Nebula, a line of computer cases based on Thelio desktops will be arriving in the coming months.
My favorite line from the interview? "Seeing a flat sheet of aluminum transformed into a beautiful desktop is strikingly rewarding."

Microsoft is rewriting core Windows libraries in the Rust programming language, and the more memory-safe code is already reaching developers. From a report: David "dwizzle" Weston, director of OS security for Windows, announced the arrival of Rust in the operating system's kernel at BlueHat IL 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel, last month. "You will actually have Windows booting with Rust in the kernel in probably the next several weeks or months, which is really cool," he said. "The basic goal here was to convert some of these internal C++ data types into their Rust equivalents."

Microsoft showed interest in Rust several years ago as a way to catch and squash memory safety bugs before the code lands in the hands of users; these kinds of bugs were at the heart of about 70 percent of the CVE-listed security vulnerabilities patched by the Windows maker in its own products since 2006. The Rust toolchain strives to prevent code from being built and shipped that is exploitable, which in an ideal world reduces opportunities for miscreants to attack weaknesses in software. Simply put, Rust is focused on memory safety and similar protections, which cuts down on the number of bad bugs in the resulting code. Rivals like Google have already publicly declared their affinity for Rust.

Windows 10 22H2 will be the final version of the operating system, Microsoft said in a blog post on Thursday. From a report: Moving forward, all editions of Windows 10 will be supported with monthly security updates until October 14th, 2025, when Microsoft will end support. (Some releases on the Long-Term Servicing Channel, or LTSC, will get updates past that end of support date.) Microsoft is encouraging users to now transition to Windows 11 because Windows 10 won't be getting any new features.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hacker News: Google on Wednesday said it obtained a temporary court order in the U.S. to disrupt the distribution of a Windows-based information-stealing malware called CryptBot and "decelerate" its growth. The tech giant's Mike Trinh and Pierre-Marc Bureau said the efforts are part of steps it takes to "not only hold criminal operators of malware accountable, but also those who profit from its distribution." CryptBot is estimated to have infected over 670,000 computers in 2022 with the goal of stealing sensitive data such as authentication credentials, social media account logins, and cryptocurrency wallets from users of Google Chrome. The harvested data is then exfiltrated to the threat actors, who then sell the data to other attackers for use in data breach campaigns. CryptBot was first discovered in the wild in December 2019.

The malware has been traditionally delivered via maliciously modified versions of legitimate and popular software packages such as Google Earth Pro and Google Chrome that are hosted on fake websites. [...] The major distributors of CryptBot, per Google, are suspected to be operating a "worldwide criminal enterprise" based out of Pakistan. Google said it intends to use the court order, granted by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, to "take down current and future domains that are tied to the distribution of CryptBot," thereby kneecapping the spread of new infections.

In the company's first-quarter earnings results (PDF) on Wednesday, Intel reported a 133% annual reduction in earnings per share. "Revenue dropped nearly 36% year over year to $11.7 billion," adds CNBC. From the report: In the first quarter, Intel swung to a net loss of $2.8 billion, or 66 cents per share, from a net profit of $8.1 billion, or $1.98 per share, last year. Excluding the impact of inventory restructuring, a recent change to employee stock options and other acquisition-related charges, Intel said it lost 4 cents a share, which was a narrower loss than analyst had expected. Revenue decreased to $11.7 billion from $18.4 billion a year ago.

It's the fifth consecutive quarter of falling sales for the semiconductor giant and the second consecutive quarter of losses. It's also Intel's largest quarterly loss of all time, beating out the fourth quarter of 2017, when it lost $687 million. Intel hopes that by 2026 that it can manufacture chips as advanced as those made by TSMC in Taiwan, and it can compete for custom work like Apple's A-series chips in iPhones. Intel said on Thursday it was still on track to hit that goal.

Intel's Client Computing group, which includes the chips that power the majority of desktop and laptop Windows PCs, reported $5.8 billion in revenue, down 38% on an annual basis. Intel's server chip division, under its Data Center and AI segment suffered an even worse decline, falling 39% to $3.7 billion. Its smallest full line of business, Network and Edge, posted $1.5 billion in sales, down 30% from the same time last year. One bright spot was Mobileye, which went public last year but is still controlled by Intel. Mobileye makes systems and software for self-driving cars, and reported 16% sales growth to $458 million.

Microsoft will no longer manufacture mice, keyboards, and webcams that are Microsoft-branded. Instead, Microsoft is now focusing on its Surface-branded PC accessories, which include mice, keyboards, pens, and more. From a report: It brings an end to the legacy of Microsoft-branded PC hardware after the company first launched its first mouse in 1983 and bundled it with Microsoft Word and Notepad. "Going forward, we are focusing on our Windows PC accessories portfolio under the Surface brand," says Dan Laycock, senior communications manager at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. "We will continue to offer a range of Surface branded PC Accessories -- including mice, keyboards, pens, docks, adaptive accessories, and more. Existing Microsoft branded PC accessories like mice, keyboards, and webcams will continue to be sold in existing markets at existing sell-in prices while supplies last."

In early April with the start of previews for "Windows Frontline" -- a service that provides a single license for frontline employees to use up to three Cloud PCs, Microsoft floated the idea that businesses should buy fewer PCs. The Register reports: The "Frontline" name hints at its purpose: Microsoft thinks this license will benefit organizations that employ shift workers in roles like customer support or healthcare. Microsoft imagines shift workers will log on for eight hours, then the next worker on duty will do likewise, and advances this as a fairer way to charge than assuming cloud PCs are used 24x7. To burnish that argument, Microsoft's launch material for Windows Frontline included research (PDF) by tech sustainability consultancy Px3 that tries to answer the question "Can modern work applications and endpoints abate end user computing greenhouse gas emissions and drive climate action?" The answer is "Yes," when one considers cloudy PCs to be "modern endpoints."

The research reaches that conclusion with analysis of the energy consumption of desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and thin clients, compared to the impact of running a Cloud PC. The research also considers bring your own PC plans that see business fund the acquisition of PCs that their staff use for personal and employment purposes, meaning fewer devices need to be summoned into existence and fewer resources are consumed because users operate one machine instead of two. Px3 instead imagines that end users and their sole device to access a Windows365 Cloud PC when they're on the clock. Doing so would mean corporate PC replacement cycles could stretch to eight years!

Readers will not be surprised that the research found the combination of Windows365 and a bring your own PC plan has significantly lower environmental impact and is therefore a jolly good idea. The research's concluding paragraph states "it is reasonable to state that modern work applications and endpoint computers not only abate GHG emissions, they are perhaps critical to securing a sustainable future." That's perhaps a little overblown but the point is made: slowing consumption is a good idea and it's now possible to turn down the speed of the PC upgrade treadmill.