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Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody -- possibly not even Microsoft -- can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes. The brand started as a powerful video game console, but Game Pass and cloud gaming pushed it toward a hazier identity: the "This is an Xbox" ad campaign tried to redefine it as any device that could play Xbox games, whether a PC, a smart TV, a phone, or a Windows handheld. Microsoft then went further and started publishing its biggest franchises on PlayStation, making it one of the largest third-party publishers on a rival's platform. Phil Spencer, who led the division for over a decade and drove the subscription pivot, announced his retirement last week, and incoming CEO Asha Sharma has pledged "the return of Xbox" -- though her memo also talks about expanding across PC, mobile, and cloud, which sounds a lot like the status quo.

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With Server 2016 and other OSes for the chop, security fixes can continue to flow for a price

Microsoft is giving Windows customers the "gift of time" but expects compensation for its generosity.…

Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord's head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded." After Discord announced plans to implement age verification globally starting next month, users across social media accused Discord of "lying" about how it plans on handling face scans and ID uploads. Much of the criticism was directed toward Discord's partnership with Persona, an age verification provider also used by Reddit and Roblox.

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No, customers aren't laughing either as pressure from memory shortages bites

Hosting biz Hetzner, one of Europe's largest datacenter operators, is warning customers that prices are scheduled to jump by as much as 50 percent from April 1.…

Russia has opened an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for "abetting terrorist activities," [non-paywalled source] in the latest sign that his uneasy relationship with the Kremlin has broken down. From a report: Two Russian newspapers, including the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, alleged on Tuesday that the messaging app had become a tool of western and Ukrainian intelligence services. The articles, credited to materials from Russia's FSB security service, accused Telegram of enabling attacks in Russia and said that Durov's "actions ... are under criminal investigation." Russia has restricted Telegram's functions, accusing it of flouting the law and is seeking to divert users towards Max, a state-run rival messenger. The steps escalate pressure on a platform that remains deeply embedded in Russian public life.

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Social media giant retorts it doesn't want to collect 'private' data, and plans to appeal

The UK's data protection regulator has fined social media giant Reddit £14.47 million ($19.5 million) over its use of children's data.…

Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link previews, and AI chatbot providers in the sidebar. Firefox 148 also brings Firefox for Android, support for the Trusted Types API, CSS shape() function support, Sanitizer API support, WebGPU enhancements, and a variety of other changes. Developer chances can be found at developer.mozilla.org. Binaries are available from ftp.mozilla.org.

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BSD support improves, FreeBSD eyes a desktop option, and the init wars refuse to die

The latest KDE desktop environment is out. Among other things, it comes with a pledge that it won't require systemd, and this version has improved OpenBSD support. FreeBSD 15.1's installer offers KDE too.…

Public prosecutor mulls sentencing following investigations into two separate attacks

Two South Korean teenagers were this week charged with breaching Seoul's public bike service, Ttareungyi.…

Parliament committee finds AI BS helped shape a real-world decision

UK Parliament has delivered the official postmortem on West Midlands Police's Copilot saga, and it reads like a case study in how not to mix generative AI with public order decision-making.…

Upstart's 5th-gen RDU aims to undercut Nvidia's B200 on speed and cost

AI infrastructure company SambaNova has raised $350 million to advance its dataflow architecture, which it pitches as an alternative to GPU-based AI systems.…

Visa applications down, executives emigrating, and AI blamed for the rest

The number of international workers applying for a visa to work in the UK's tech sector dropped 11 percent between Q2 and Q3 2025, and was down 6 percent year-on-year, according to consultancy RSM UK.…

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task -- known as complement sampling -- dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem. "We stumbled upon the core result of this work by chance while working on a different project," Harry Buhrman, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. "We had a set of items and two quantum states: one formed from half of the items, the other formed from the remaining half. Even though the two states are fundamentally distinct, we showed that a quantum computer may find it hard to tell which one it is given. Surprisingly, however, we then realized that transforming one state into the other is always easy, because a simple operation can swap between them."

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We like our surface-to-air weapons affordable

Britain has joined a handful of European allies in a program to develop low-cost air defense systems, including autonomous drones or missiles, with project delivery of the first elements scheduled for as early as 2027.…

Redmond also offers to take the OneDrive name out of your OneDrive

Microsoft has teased a significant upgrade to its SharePoint collaborationware package.…

U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ(TM)s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times higher than totals from just three years ago. The US had a total of 137 GWh of utility-scale storage installed as of 2025, plus 19 GWh of commercial and industrial systems and 9 GWh of residential storage. Analysts expect the growth streak to continue. More than 600 GWh of energy storage is projected to be deployed nationwide by 2030, even as the Trump administration targets clean energy industries. Two-thirds of utility-scale storage installed in 2025 was built in red states, including nine of the top 15 states for new installations. Texas is projected to surpass California as the countryâ(TM)s largest battery storage market in 2026. Standalone battery projects accounted for nearly 30 GWh of new capacity in 2025, while solar-plus-storage installations made up about 20 GWh. Residential storage deployments reached 3.1 GWh last year, a 51% increase year-over-year. Analysts say virtual power plant programs in states such as Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, and Illinois are helping drive adoption by reducing costs and easing strain during peak demand periods. The supply chain is shifting to support the boom. In 2025, some battery cell manufacturers pivoted production from EV batteries to dedicated stationary storage cells, converting existing lines and adjusting future plans. Lithium-ion cell manufacturing for stationary storage reached more than 21 GWh in 2025, enough to power Houston overnight, according to SEIAâ(TM)s Solar and Storage Supply Chain Dashboard. Meanwhile, US factories now have the capacity to manufacture 69.4 GWh of battery energy storage systems annually.

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As Pure Storage adopts a watered-down name for a rebrand

Logowatch Cisco and the vendor formerly known as Pure Storage have let their designers and marketers loose on the internet to explain some recent decisions.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston's door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men's client, an unnamed "Fortune 100 company," sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement. More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer (PDF) had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity. The unknown company was building a datacenter. "You don't have enough to buy me out. I'm not for sale. Leave me alone, I'm satisfied," Huddleston, 82, later told the men. As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston's land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development -- are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use. Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land's recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston's neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price. In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he'd worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre -- prices unimaginable just a few years ago. The rebuffs are a jarring reminder of AI's physical bounds, and limits of the dollars behind the technology. [...] As AI promises to transcend corporeal fallibility, these standoffs reveal its very physical constraints -- and Wall Street's miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason county and farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.

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In her first major interview as Microsoft's new gaming chief, Asha Sharma said that "great games" must deliver emotional resonance and a distinct creative voice, while making clear that she has "no tolerance for bad AI." Stepping in after Phil Spencer's retirement, she's pledging consistency, community trust, and a human-first approach to storytelling as Xbox enters a new era. Variety reports: Sharma was quick in laying out her top priorities for Microsoft Gaming in an internal memo announcing her promotion, noting "great games," "the return of Xbox" and the "future of play" as her three main commitments to the gaming community. So first, what makes a great game for Sharma, whose roles prior to CoreAI include top positions at Instacart and Meta? The new Microsoft Gaming CEO tells Variety it's all about games with "deep emotional resonance" and "a distinct point of view." She wants to develop stories that make players "feel something," like the kind of feelings Campo Santo's 2016 first-person mystery "Firewatch" elicited in her. Sharma takes on the mantle as head of the leading competitor to Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo knowing full well she's entering the role as an outsider to the larger gaming community and has "a lot to learn" still. But Sharma says she's got a commitment to "being grounded in what the community is telling us." "I'm coming into gaming as a platform builder," Sharma said, adding that her goal is to "earn the right to be trusted by players and developers" and show the fanbase that "consistency" over time. In her interview with Variety, Sharma acknowledged the tumultuous state of the gaming industry, referencing Matthew Ball's recent State of Video Gaming in 2026 report as evidence that the larger "transformation" of the sector is "protecting what we believe in while remaining open-minded about the future." Due to her strong background in AI, initial reactions to Sharma's appointment have raised concerns about what her specific views are on the use of generative AI in game development. Sharma says her stance is simple: she has "no tolerance for bad AI." "AI has long been part of gaming and will continue to be," Sharma said, noting that gaming needs new "growth engines," but that "great stories are created by humans."

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joshuark quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the mouse pointer to disappear in the classic Outlook desktop email client for some users. This bug has been acknowledged almost two months after the first reports started surfacing online, with users saying that Outlook became unusable after the mouse pointer vanished while using the app. [...] Microsoft explained in a recent support document that the mouse pointer (and in some cases the cursor) will suddenly vanish as users move it across Outlook's interface. "When using classic Outlook, you may find that the mouse pointer or mouse cursor disappears as you move the pointer over the Outlook interface," it said. "Although the mouse pointer is not there, the email in the message list will change color as you hover over it. This issue has also been reported with OneNote and other Microsoft 365 apps to a lesser degree." Microsoft added that the Outlook team is investigating the issues and will provide updates as more information becomes available. While a timeline for a permanent fix is not yet available, Microsoft has offered three temporary workarounds that require affected users to click an email in the message list when the cursor disappears, which may cause it to reappear. Alternatively, switching to PowerPoint, clicking into an editable area, and then returning to Outlook may also restore the mouse pointer.

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