By late 2021, major updates for Windows' built-in Notepad text editor had been so rare for so long that a gentle redesign and a handful of new settings were rated as a major update. New updates have become much more common since then, but like the rest of Windows, recent additions have been overwhelmingly weighted in the direction of generative AI.
In November, Microsoft began testing an update that allowed users to rewrite or summarize text in Notepad using generative AI. Another preview update today takes it one step further, allowing you to write AI-generated text from scratch with basic instructions (the feature is called Write, to differentiate it from the earlier Rewrite).
Like Rewrite and Summarize, Write requires users to be signed into a Microsoft Account, because using it requires you to use your monthly allotment of Microsoft's AI credits. Per this support page, users without a paid Microsoft 365 subscription get 15 credits per month. Subscribers with Personal and Family subscriptions get 60 credits per month instead.
Earlier this month, Nintendo received a lot of negative attention for an end-user license agreement (EULA) update granting the company the claimed right to render Switch consoles "permanently unusable in whole or in part" for violations such as suspected hacking or piracy. As it turns out, though, Nintendo isn't the only console manufacturer that threatens to remotely brick systems in response to rule violations. And attorneys tell Ars Technica that they're probably well within their legal rights to do so.
Sony's System Software License Agreement on the PS5, for instance, contains the following paragraph of "remedies" it can take for "violations" such as use of modified hardware or pirated software (emphasis added).
If SIE Inc determines that you have violated this Agreement's terms, SIE Inc may itself or may procure the taking of any action to protect its interests such as disabling access to or use of some or all System Software, disabling use of this PS5 system online or offline, termination of your access to PlayStation Network, denial of any warranty, repair or other services provided for your PS5 system, implementation of automatic or mandatory updates or devices intended to discontinue unauthorized use, or reliance on any other remedial efforts as reasonably necessary to prevent the use of modified or unpermitted use of System Software.
The same exact clause appears in the PlayStation 4 EULA as well. The PlayStation 3 EULA was missing the "disabling use... online or offline" clause, but it does still warn that Sony can take steps to "discontinue unauthorized use" or "prevent the use of a modified PS3 system, or any pirated material or equipment."
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has officially dropped its case against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The FTC filed an order to dismiss its complaint on Thursday, just days after it lost an appeal for a preliminary injunction to prevent Microsoft from finalizing its acquisition.
“The Commission has determined that the public interest is best served by dismissing the administrative litigation in this case,“ says the FTC in its filing. The filing brings an end to the FTC’s fight to try and block Microsoft’s $68.7 billion deal, nearly two years after it originally sought a temporary restraining order and injunction from a US federal district court.
Today’s decision is a victory for players across the country and for common sense in Washington, D.C. We are grateful to the FTC for today’s announcement. https://t.co/nnmUI76q0lpic.twitter.com/KgLxhZppx3
Microsoft won its FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard in July 2023, and the deal was completed several months later, in October, nearly two years after the acquisition was first announced. The FTC had appealed the ruling nearly two years ago, but an appeals court panel affirmed the denial of an injunction earlier this month.
“Today’s decision is a victory for players across the country and for common sense in Washington, DC,” says Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith. “We are grateful to the FTC for today’s announcement.”
An outdated Meta AI model was apparently at the center of the Department of Government Efficiency's initial ploy to purge parts of the federal government.
Wired reviewed materials showing that affiliates of Elon Musk's DOGE working in the Office of Personnel Management "tested and used Meta’s Llama 2 model to review and classify responses from federal workers to the infamous 'Fork in the Road' email that was sent across the government in late January."
The "Fork in the Road" memo seemed to copy a memo that Musk sent to Twitter employees, giving federal workers the choice to be "loyal"—and accept the government's return-to-office policy—or else resign. At the time, it was rumored that DOGE was feeding government employee data into AI, and Wired confirmed that records indicate Llama 2 was used to sort through responses and see how many employees had resigned.
Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Harvey; Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
Harvey committed $150 million to Azure cloud services over two years.
The startup, which builds software for lawyers, has partnered with Microsoft since at least 2024.
Harvey's expansion includes clients like Comcast and Verizon, and new foundation model integrations.
Legaltech startup Harvey has agreed to a two-year, $150 million commitment to use Azure cloud services, according to an internal email seen by Business Insider.
Jay Parikh, who leads Microsoft's new CoreAI unit, included the deal in an internal memo, writing that his unit "announced expanded partnership with Harvey Al with a 2-year $150M MACC and $3.5M unified expansion." Parikh joined Microsoft in October to lead a new engineering group responsible for building its artificial-intelligence tools.
Microsoft declined to comment, and Harvey declined to comment on the agreement.
MACC, or Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, is an agreement customers make to spend a specific amount on Azure for a period of time, often for a discount.
Harvey, which builds chatbots and agents tailored for legal and professional services, is scaling up and entering the enterprise market. It's adding legal teams at Comcast and Verizon as clients, while developing bespoke workflow software for large law firm customers.
It has raised more than $500 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and OpenAI Startup Fund, a Harvey spokesperson told BI.
Harvey has closely partnered with Microsoft since at least early 2024. That year, the company deployed its platform on Microsoft Azure, followed by a Word plug-in designed for lawyers.It also introduced a SharePoint integration, allowing users to securely access files from their Microsoft storage system through Harvey's apps.
For years, Harvey, founded in 2022, ran its platformon OpenAI models, primarily because they're hosted in Microsoft's data centers, Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg told BI last month. Law firms handle highly sensitive information and trusted Microsoft to keep it safe, Weinberg said.
"Law firms refused to use anything that wasn't through Azure," Weinberg said. That's now changing, he said, as vendors like Anthropic build the features enterprises require.
Last week, Harvey expanded its use of foundation models to Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude.
Still, Harvey's $150 million Azure deal signals it's not backing away from Microsoft anytime soon. The company's growing cloud footprint suggests that, while other partners are gaining traction with the legaltech start, Azure remains integral to Harvey's growth for now.
Notepad’s new Write feature uses generative AI to create content for you based on a prompt. | Image: Microsoft
Microsoft is now testing a new feature in Notepad that can generate text for you using AI. It’s part of a Windows 11 update being released to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels with Copilot Plus PCs. The update also includes new AI-powered features for Paint like a sticker generator, and improvements to the Snipping Tool that can automatically crop and resize screenshots based on what you’re selecting.
Notepad’s new Write feature can be used to “quickly draft text based on your prompt,” according to the Windows Insider Blog, “or build upon existing content with AI-powered assistance.” You can either right-click where you want new text to be inserted in a document or after selecting existing text you want to use as a reference.
After selecting the new Write feature in Windows’ Copilot menu, a prompt will appear where instructions can be entered. The AI-generated output will appear in the document but you’ll have the option to keep it, discard it if it’s not what you’re looking for, or refine the output by entering follow-up prompts. The feature was first discovered earlier this year in code included in test builds of Windows 11.
Write follows two other AI-powered tools Microsoft has been testing with Notepad. Summarize, first introduced last March, can generate a summary of the text in a document while Rewrite, which began testing last November, can adjust the tone of text, shorten or lengthen it, and rephrase sentences.
Joining AI features already being tested in Microsoft Paint like Generative Fill, Generative Erase, and the Cocreator tool that can create images based on text prompts and reference sketches, is a new Sticker generator. A new button in the Copilot menu opens a prompt where you can describe the sticker you want to create. Paint will then generate a small set of stickers based on your description that can be added to your canvas or copied over to other applications.
Paint is also getting a new Object select tool that relies on AI to create smart selections that takes most of the grunt work out of isolating and manipulating specific elements in a photo or painting.
To potentially make it easier to screenshot exactly what you need and immediately share it without edits, Windows 11’s Snipping Tool is gaining a new Perfect screenshot button on its toolbar. When framing a screenshot using the rectangle tool Perfect screenshot will use AI to “intelligently resize based on the content in your selection,” but you’ll still have the option to resize or reposition the selected region of your screen before capturing it.
It’s being joined by a new Color picker in the Snipping tool that lets you see the HEX, RGB or HSL color values below an eyedropper cursor, and it can be zoomed for more precision by either scrolling or using Ctrl +/- keyboard shortcuts.
You’ll need to be signed into your Microsoft account to use Notepad’s new Write feature which will use the same credits system as other AI-powered Windows 11 features do. Microsoft hasn’t yet announced what pricing for these credits will be if it eventually starts charging for them.
When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ran into Meta's former engineering chief, Jay Parikh, at a conference last summer, he had the future of AI top of mind. The pair have known each other for around 15 years, but this meeting was different, and Nadella called Parikh shortly after bumping into him to dig into what was really on his mind.
"We were chatting about the future and chatting about all the stuff he needs to do here and that the team needs to do around AI," Parikh, now head of Microsoft's CoreAI team, tells The Verge. "That's when he said, 'Hey, why don't you come join and help me transform the company around all of this AI stuff?'"
Nadella regularly talks about Microsoft being part of a new AI era, but he now wants the company to overhaul how it builds software to meet this new era head-on. Parikh, who transformed Facebook engineering teams, now leads a transformation that he describes as building an AI "agent factory" for Microsoft's customers.
"I described this agent factory idea to Bill [Gates], not knowing that he and Paul [Allen] described Microsoft 50 years ago as the software factory," Parikh says. "Just like how Bill had this idea of Microsoft being a bunch of softw …
In January, Nadella put Jay Parikh in charge of a new AI unit called CoreAI, central to Microsoft's ambition to help developers build digital personal assistants capable of taking over tasks from human workers.
Amid Parikh's first Microsoft Build developer conference in this new role, internal memos reveal his goals for the unit, its early accomplishments, and his advice to address what he sees as problems within the company. Microsoft declined to comment.
A fresh perspective for the 'next phase of Microsoft'
Behind the scenes at Microsoft, Nadella prides himself on hiring outside talent from other big technology companies to add fresh perspective and giving them wide latitude to change how things are done, several people close to the CEO told BI.
Parikh joined their ranks in October after running cloud security company Laceworks, acquired in 2024. He previously was vice president and global head of engineering for Meta. Zuckerberg has publicly credited Parikh for many technological achievements during his 11-year tenure at the company.
When Nadella announced Parikh's hiring in an email to employees, he wrote that the "next phase of Microsoft" would require "adding exceptional talent" from outside the company.
In January, when Microsoft reorganized to create a new organization under Parikh. The group, called CoreAI, combined teams from Parikh's new direct reports like Eric Boyd, a corporate vice president of AI platform; Jason Taylor, a deputy CTO for AI infrastructure; Julia Liuson, president of the developer division; and Tim Bozarth, a corporate vice president of developer infrastructure.
Nadella said at the time that Parikh would also work closely with the cloud-and-AI chief Scott Guthrie; the experiences-and-devices leader Rajesh Jha; Bell, the security boss; Suleyman, Microsoft's AI CEO; and Kevin Scott, the company's CTO.
A copy of Parikh's latest org chart viewed by Business Insider shows he has nearly 10,000 reports, most of whom (about 7,000) are in the developer division under Liuson.
Microsoft
Parikh's 'agent factory' vision
Four months in, Parikh has started to make his mark on Microsoft with a vision to create an AI "agent factory." In the early days of Microsoft, cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen had ambitions to create the world's first "software factory," a company full of programmers who would build everything from applications to operating systems.
Parikh said he met with Gates and discussed his own concept, a production line for AI agents and applications.
"Building our vision demands this type of culture — one where Al is embedded in how we think, design, and deliver," Parikh wrote in an April 14 email to his team. "The Agent Factory reflects this shift — not just in what we build, but in how we build it together. If we want every developer (and everyone) to shape the future, we have to get there first."
The memos reveal some of the developments at CoreAI since Parikh's arrival.
Since January, Foundry — Microsoft's AI platform for developers — has "delivered $337 million of favorable COGS (cost of goods sold) impact year-to-date, with a projected $606 million on an annualized basis," according to one of Parikh's memos.
Microsoft won new customers for its AI programming tool GitHub Copilot, deploying "5,000+ Copilot Business seats" for Fidelity with 5,000 more expected, another memo stated. Copilot Business sells for $19 per user per month, which would make the deal worth as much as $2.28 million annually at full price, though customers often get discounts for large deals. Fidelity declined to comment.
Startup Harvey AI, meanwhile, has agreed to a two-year $150 million commitment to consume Azure cloud services, according to one of Parikh's memos. Harvey AI declined to comment.
Making Microsoft think macro
The memos viewed by BI show how Parikh appears to be taking seriously his mandate to introduce a new perspective to the company and fix procedural problems that Microsoft may not be able to see that it has.
In a May 10 email to his team, Parikh said shifting the company's culture is "essential" to its future, and outlined progress toward priorities like accelerating the pace at which employees work, breaking down siloes to work better as one team, and making products more reliable and secure.
"One of my early observations coming into Microsoft is that we sometimes treat symptoms rather than systems," Parikh wrote in a May 5 email. "We often focus too much on the micro, which results in band-aids and bolt-ons vs taking a broader system view (which may mean thinking beyond what one team directly owns). This often leads to more complexity and operational burden. We'll help each other get better at this."
Parikh's plan to get Microsoft to focus on the macro is to create a "learning loop" with a debrief after every product launch, incident, customer meeting, internal meeting, or decision. He's started new processes to make this happen, according to the memos.
Parikh has an "Ops Review" series, going team by team to make specific improvements but also to "find common patterns of engineering pain that need broader improvements," he wrote. The reviews, he explained, focus on longer-term operational metrics to help with strategy. "We are zooming out and taking a more end-to-end view of a team's operational setup, creating space for an open discussion around what's working and what's not." The reviews began in April with the App Services team.
Also among Parikh's mandates: more customer focus. His organization is required to conduct reviews of major incidents, like outages, that could impact customers, and chart how quickly the teams identified the problem and deployed a fix.
He also started "get well plans" for unhappy customers after he "encountered a couple of fairly unhappy customers" in recent meetings, according to an April 26 email. His solution? Weekly reviews to "understand where we went off track, identify solutions, and execute the recovery plan," tracking progress until the accounts "get well again."
What Parikh thinks Microsoft should change so far
In the May 5 email, Parikh shared "several recurring themes and insights" within Microsoft that he believes the company should seek to change or simplify.
First, he encouraged his organization to engage engineers from outside their direct team because "different perspectives help."
In his view, Microsoft also takes too long and the process is too hard to deprecate, or discourage use of, old versions of software. "Supporting too many versions is unattainable," Parikh wrote. "We are following up with C+Al (the Cloud + AI organization, under Scott Guthrie) to brainstorm how we can modernize and streamline this."
Incident reviews are overloaded with metrics that don't have enough value, Parikh wrote, and Microsoft sends out too many alerts, which creates noise. "It's important to periodically zoom out and audit how your monitoring is running and to simplify if you are overloaded on alerts and metrics. Use Al to help triage complex alerting situations," he urged.
Parikh encouraged his teams to "see the forest for the trees on scalability," and to organize brainstorming sessions when faced with a traffic load they can't support to see what it would take to support five or 10 times as much traffic. "You may be stuck in a local maxima with incremental improvements, and it might be time to brainstorm how you can get a step function more scale," he wrote.
He also recommended employees seek to address classes of problems, not just one-offs. "Quick fixes lead to complexity," Parikh wrote. "Instead of band-aids, we should aim for broader system improvements that solve whole categories of issues and boost long-term efficiency."
"We're building muscle in spotting patterns, not just patching symptoms," Parikh wrote. "And that's a big deal."
Got a tip? Contact the reporter Ashley Stewart via the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email ([email protected]). Use a nonwork device.
Signal said today that it is updating its Windows app to prevent the system from capturing screenshots, thereby protecting the content that is on display. The company said that this new “screen security” setting is enabled by default on Windows 11. Signal said that this new feature is designed to protect users’ privacy from Microsoft’s […]
Microsoft employees have discovered that any emails they send with the terms "Palestine" or "Gaza" are getting temporarily blocked from being sent to recipients inside and outside the company. The No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) protest group reports that "dozens of Microsoft workers" have been unable to send emails with the words "Palestine," "Gaza," and "Genocide" in email subject lines or in the body of a message.
"Words like 'Israel' or 'P4lestine' do not trigger such a block," says NOAA organizer Hossam Nasr. "NOAA believes this is an attempt by Microsoft to silence worker free speech and is a censorship enacted by Microsoft leadership to discriminate against Palestinian workers and their allies."
Microsoft confirmed to The Verge that it has implemented some form of email changes to reduce "politically focused emails" inside the company.
"Emailing large numbers of employees about any topic not related to work is not appropriate. We have an established forum for employees who have opted in to political issues," says Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw in a statement to The Verge. "Over the past couple of days, a number of politically focused emails have been sent to tens of tho …
Signal is taking proactive steps to ensure Microsoft’s Recall feature can’t screen capture your secured chats, by rolling out a new version of the Signal for Windows 11 client that enables screen security by default. This is the same DRM that blocks users from easily screenshotting a Netflix show on their computer or phone, and using it here could cause problems for people who use accessibility features like screen readers.
While Signal says it’s made the feature easy to disable, under Signal Settings > Privacy > Screen Security, it never should’ve come to this. Developer Joshua Lund writes that operating system vendors like Microsoft “need to ensure that the developers of apps like Signal always have the necessary tools and options at their disposal to reject granting OS-level AI systems access to any sensitive information within their apps.”
Despite delaying Recall twice before finally launching it last month, the “photographic memory” feature doesn’t yet have an API for app developers to opt their users’ sensitive content out of its AI-powered archives. It could be useful for finding emails or chats (including ones in Signal) using whatever you can remember, like a description of a picture you’ve received or a broad conversation topic, but it could also be a massive security and privacy problem.
Lund notes that Microsoft already filters out private or incognito browser window activity by default, and users who have a Copilot Plus PC with Recall can filter out certain apps under the settings, but only if they know how to do that. For now, Lund says that “Signal is using the tools that are available to us even though we recognize that there are many legitimate use cases where someone might need to take a screenshot.”
Signal Messenger is warning the users of its Windows Desktop version that the privacy of their messages is under threat by Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store almost everything a user does every three seconds.
Effective immediately, Signal for Windows will by default block the ability of Windows to screenshot the app. Signal users who want to disable the block—for instance to preserve a conversation for their records or make use of accessibility features for sight-impaired users—will have to change settings inside their desktop version to enable screenshots.
My kingdom for an API
“Although Microsoft made several adjustments over the past twelve months in response to critical feedback, the revamped version of Recall still places any content that’s displayed within privacy-preserving apps like Signal at risk,” Signal officials wrote Wednesday. “As a result, we are enabling an extra layer of protection by default on Windows 11 in order to help maintain the security of Signal Desktop on that platform even though it introduces some usability trade-offs. Microsoft has simply given us no other option.”
Artist and musician Brian Eno — who also composed the iconic Windows 95 operating system startup chime — called on Microsoft today to “suspend all services that support any operations that contribute to violations of international law,” saying the company plays a role in “surveillance, violence, and destruction in Palestine.” It’s the latest high-profile instance of the tech giant being pressed on its contracts with the Israeli government.
“I gladly took on the [Windows 95] project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company,” Eno wrote on Instagram. “I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war.”
The musician — who was a member of the influential rock band Roxy Music and has also had a long, storied solo career — specifically called out Microsoft’s contracts with Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Microsoft acknowledged last week that it has contracts with the Israeli government for cloud and AI services, but claimed that an internal review conducted found “no evidence” that its tools were used to “target or harm people” in Gaza.
Microsoft has been taken to task in recent weeks over its business dealings with the Israeli government specifically. The outcry over Microsoft’s contracts relates to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza following the October 7th, 2023, Hamas attack. Human rights groups, including commissions at the United Nations, have accused Israel of war crimes and genocidal acts in its military operation that has killed thousands; as of this month, the Gaza Health Ministry reported more than 52,000 deaths, though some researchers say that number could be as high as 109,000 people.
Some of Microsoft’s fiercest critics are its own employees opposed to the company’s ties to Israel.
Earlier this week during Microsoft’s developer conference, multiple onstage events were disrupted, including CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote speech on Monday. During the event, Microsoft employee Joe Lopez interrupted Nadella, yelling, “How about you show Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?” The following day, a protester described only as a “Palestinian tech worker” disrupted another executive’s presentation. On Wednesday, protesters disrupted a third session — and in the commotion, Microsoft inadvertently revealed internal messages regarding Walmart’s use of AI.
In April, Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad disrupted a 50th-anniversary event, calling Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman “a war profiteer.” Another employee disrupted a second Microsoft event the same day. The acts of protest were organized by the No Azure for Apartheid group, which calls for Microsoft to terminate contracts with the Israeli government and endorse a permanent ceasefire, among other demands. Aboussad was fired from the company; the second protester, Vaniya Agrawal, was dismissed early after putting in her resignation.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Eno, a longtime critic of the Israeli government who’s backed pro-Palestine efforts, said on Instagram he would use his original earnings from the Windows 95 startup chime to help “the victims of the attacks on Gaza.”
Microsoft’s Ninja Theory studio is bringing Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II to the PS5 “this summer.” Set in a dark ninth-century Iceland, Hellblade IIoriginally debuted on Xbox Series S / X and PC last year, and it’s now making its way to Sony’s console just over a year later.
Hellblade II is the latest Xbox game to make its way to PS5 this year, with Microsoft bringing Forza Horizon 5 to Sony’s rival console soon, alongside Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition and the Age of Mythology: Retold release on PS5 in March. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle also arrived on PS5 this spring, with Doom: The Dark Ages following on May 15th. The original Gears of War is also coming to PS5 in August as a remastered version, and Microsoft also released its Oblivion remaster on PS5 recently.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is coming to PlayStation 5 this summer with some exciting new features.
These features will also be available at the same time as a free update for players on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox PC and Steam.
The original Hellblade was a timed console exclusive for the PS4 in 2017, before it arrived on Xbox One the following year. Hellblade II is part of Microsoft’s wave of Project Latitude titles, which see the software giant evolving the Xbox platform to bring more games to rival platforms.
I revealed last year that Hellblade II was under consideration for a PS5 release, alongside other titles like Gears of War, Halo: Combat Evolved, and Microsoft Flight Simulator. Microsoft is also working on some Xbox ports for Nintendo’s Switch 2, which I expect we’ll hear about soon.
Microsoft is working on a new “Cross Device Resume” feature for Windows 11 that works similarly to Apple’s Handoff feature in macOS. The feature was spotted in a Microsoft Build 2025 session, before Windows Central noticed Microsoft editing out the demo that showed a mobile Spotify session resuming on a PC.
“When you open the app on your mobile device or tablet, Windows can show a subtle badge right on your app’s taskbar icon,” explains Aakash Varshney, a senior product manager for cross devices and experiences at Microsoft, in a “Create Seamless Cross-Device Experiences with Windows for your app” Build session for developers. “It’s a visual nudge that when clicked launches your app directly into the task, delivering a smooth intuitive handoff from PC to phone.”
Varshney’s now-deleted demo shows a Spotify app icon with a badge on it in the taskbar, and a message when you hover over the badge that says “resume, recently opened on your mobile device.” It’s designed to let you resume the Spotify app on PC right from where you left off on mobile. “Spotify launches and I’m instantly back in the same song, now playing on my PC,” says Varshney. “No need to search or start over, it’s a smooth one-click transition that keeps the music and user experience uninterrupted.”
Microsoft first started testing an app handoff feature in Windows 10, back in 2016. Codenamed Project Rome, the cross-device experience for apps was designed for developers to write apps that can “run on multiple devices and travel with the user as they switch between devices.” We’ve not seen much adoption of Project Rome in reality though, so hopefully this new Cross Device Resume is more widely adopted.
A year ago Xbox president Sarah Bond revealed that Microsoft was planning to launch a new Xbox mobile web store in July 2024. That never happened. I’ve been wondering what the hold up has been over the past year, and it seems we might have an answer: Apple.
Microsoft filed an amicus brief late on Tuesday, in support of Epic Games’ ongoing fight with Apple’s control over the App Store. The brief takes issue with Apple’s attempt to overturn the injunction that allows Epic and other developers to freely advertise alternative payment methods in their apps, and not have to pay Apple additional fees for purchases made outside of apps.
It’s a key ruling that has already allowed Fortnite to return to the App Store in the US, complete with the ability for Epic Games to link out to its own payment system inside the game. Microsoft has wanted to offer a similar experience for its Xbox mobile store prior to the ruling, but it says its solution “has been stymied by Apple.” Here’s how Microsoft explains it:
The district court’s injunction allows Apple to maintain its in-app exclusivity but at least should have enabled Microsoft to offer consumers a workable solution by launching its own online store — accessible via link-out — for in-app items to be purchased off-app and used in games or other apps. And that is what Microsoft wants to do. But even this solution has been stymied by Apple. Prior to the district court’s most recent order, Microsoft had been unable to implement linked-out payments (or even inform customers that alternative purchase methods exist) because of Apple’s new anti-steering policies that restrict Microsoft’s communication to users and impose an even higher economic cost to Microsoft than before the injunction.
The court ruling makes it possible for Microsoft to now launch its Xbox mobile store, but it’s clear that the software giant also wants to ensure Apple’s appeal against the ruling isn’t successful. If Microsoft did launch its Xbox mobile store and then Apple won a temporary stay, it may have to pull that store pending the appeal process.
Microsoft even notes in its filing that “Apple makes no argument that the technical or policy changes cannot be undone,” so it’s urging the ruling to be enforced pending Apple’s appeal. “Microsoft’s own experience managing app stores confirms that Apple’s policies could be restored if Apple ultimately prevails on appeal.”
The court ruling also impacts Microsoft’s main Xbox mobile app. “Similarly, Microsoft has long sought to enable Xbox app users on iOS to both buy and stream games in the app from the cloud or their other devices,” says Microsoft in its filing. “Apple’s policies have restricted Microsoft’s ability to offer these functionalities together; the injunction allows Microsoft to explore this possibility.”
Microsoft started rolling out the ability to purchase games and DLC inside the Xbox mobile app last month, but it had to remove the remote play option to adhere to Apple’s App Store policies. You can’t currently buy an Xbox game in the Xbox mobile app on iOS and then stream it inside that same app. You have to manually navigate to the Xbox Cloud Gaming mobile website on a browser to get access to cloud gaming.
Sarah Bond also announced plans to let players purchase and play games within the Xbox app on Android in October, just days after a court ruled that Google must crack open Android to third-party app stores. The feature was supposed to arrive in November, but Bond then blamed a “temporary administrative stay” for holding it back.
Microsoft’s head of security for AI, Neta Haiby, accidentally revealed confidential messages about Walmart’s use of Microsoft’s AI tools during a Build talk that was disrupted by protesters.
The Build livestream was muted and the camera pointed down, but the session resumed moments later after the protesters were escorted out. In the aftermath, Haiby then accidentally switched to Microsoft Teams while sharing her screen, revealing confidential internal messages about Walmart’s upcoming use of Microsoft’s Entra and AI gateway services.
Haiby was co-hosting a Build session on best security practices for AI, alongside Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s head of responsible AI, when two former Microsoft employees disrupted the talk to protest against the company’s cloud contracts with the Israeli government.
“Sarah, you are whitewashing the crimes of Microsoft in Palestine, how dare you talk about responsible AI when Microsoft is fueling the genocide in Palestine,” shouted Hossam Nasr, an organizer with the protest group No Azure for Apartheid, and a former Microsoft employee who was fired for holding a vigil outside Microsoft’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza.
Walmart is one of Microsoft’s biggest corporate customers, and already uses the company’s Azure OpenAI service for some of its AI work. “Walmart is ready to rock and roll with Entra Web and AI Gateway,” says one of Microsoft’s cloud solution architects in the Teams messages. The chat session also quoted a Walmart AI engineer, saying: “Microsoft is WAY ahead of Google with AI security. We are excited to go down this path with you.”
We asked Microsoft to comment on this protest and the Teams messages, but the company did not respond in time for publication.
Both of the protesters involved in this latest Microsoft Build disruption were former Microsoft employees, with Vaniya Agrawal appearing alongside Nasr. Agrawal interrupted Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former CEO Steve Ballmer, and CEO Satya Nadella later during the company’s 50th anniversary event last month. Agrawal was dismissed shortly after putting in her two weeks’ notice at Microsoft before the protest, according to an email seen by The Verge.
This latest protest comes days after Microsoft announced last week that it had conducted an internal review and used an unnamed external firm to assess how its technology is used in the war in Gaza. Microsoft says that its relationship with Israel’s Ministry of Defense (IMOD) is “structured as a standard commercial relationship” and that it has “found no evidence that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people or that IMOD has failed to comply with our terms of service or our AI Code of Conduct.”
Microsoft is updating Windows 11 with a set of new encryption algorithms that can withstand future attacks from quantum computers in a move aimed at jump-starting what’s likely to be the most formidable and important technology transition in modern history.
Computers that are based on the physics of quantum mechanics don’t yet exist outside of sophisticated labs, but it’s well-established science that they eventually will. Instead of processing data in the binary state of zeros and ones, quantum computers run on qubits, which encompass myriad states all at once. This new capability promises to bring about new discoveries of unprecedented scale in a host of fields, including metallurgy, chemistry, drug discovery, and financial modeling.
Averting the cryptopocalypse
One of the most disruptive changes quantum computing will bring is the breaking of some of the most common forms of encryption, specifically, the RSA cryptosystem and those based on elliptic curves. These systems are the workhorses that banks, governments, and online services around the world have relied on for more than four decades to keep their most sensitive data confidential. RSA and elliptic curve encryption keys securing web connections would require millions of years to be cracked using today’s computers. A quantum computer could crack the same keys in a matter of hours or minutes.
