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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: OpenAI executives have discussed filing an antitrust complaint with US regulators against Microsoft, the company's largest investor, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, marking a dramatic escalation in tensions between the two long-term AI partners. OpenAI, which develops ChatGPT, has reportedly considered seeking a federal regulatory review of the terms of its contract with Microsoft for potential antitrust law violations, according to people familiar with the matter. The potential antitrust complaint would likely argue that Microsoft is using its dominant position in cloud services and contractual leverage to suppress competition, according to insiders who described it as a "nuclear option," the WSJ reports. The move could unravel one of the most important business partnerships in the AI industry -- a relationship that started with a $1 billion investment by Microsoft in 2019 and has grown to include billions more in funding, along with Microsoft's exclusive rights to host OpenAI models on its Azure cloud platform. The friction centers on OpenAI's efforts to transition from its current nonprofit structure into a public benefit corporation, a conversion that needs Microsoft's approval to complete. The two companies have not been able to agree on details after months of negotiations, sources told Reuters. OpenAI's existing for-profit arm would become a Delaware-based public benefit corporation under the proposed restructuring. The companies are discussing revising the terms of Microsoft's investment, including the future equity stake it will hold in OpenAI. According to The Information, OpenAI wants Microsoft to hold a 33 percent stake in a restructured unit in exchange for foregoing rights to future profits. The AI company also wants to modify existing clauses that give Microsoft exclusive rights to host OpenAI models in its cloud. The restructuring debate attracted criticism from multiple quarters. Elon Musk alleges that OpenAI violated contract provisions by prioritizing profit over the public good in its push to advance AI and has sued to block the conversion. In December, Meta Platforms also asked California's attorney general to block OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit company.

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A symbolic political move

Taiwan has added China's leading foundry operator Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC) and IT giant Huawei to its export control list. The move effectively blacklists the duo from doing business with the chip manufacturing mecca.…

China's 'little dragons' pose big challenge to US AI firms

MiniMax, an AI firm based in Shanghai, has released an open-source reasoning model that challenges Chinese rival DeepSeek and US-based Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in terms of performance and cost.…

Third time's a charm?

Apple has escaped a $300 million patent infringement damages penalty – for now – due to what a trio of judges said comes down to faulty jury instructions.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Iran's cybersecurity authority has banned officials from using devices that connect to the internet, apparently fearing being tracked or hacked by Israel. According to the state-linked Fars news agency, Iranian officials and their bodyguards have been told they are not allowed to use any equipment that connects to public internet or telecommunications networks.

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Amazon's satellite constellation hits another snag as ULA rocket aborts on pad

A hardware glitch on United Launch Alliance's (ULA) workhorse Atlas V rocket delayed the launch of the second batch of Project Kuiper satellites.…

Hardcoded passwords and path traversals keeping bug hunters in work

Security researchers have issued a warning about a pre-authentication exploit chain affecting a CMS used by some of the biggest companies in the world.…

Salesforce will raise prices by an average of 6% across its Enterprise and Unlimited Editions starting August 1, 2025, while simultaneously launching new AI-focused product tiers that significantly expand the cost structure for its platform. The price increases will affect Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Field Service, and select Industries Clouds, though the company's Foundations, Starter, and Pro Editions will remain unchanged, the company said Tuesday. Salesforce is justifying the move by citing "significant ongoing innovation and customer value delivered through our products." The company is also rolling out new Agentforce add-ons starting at $125 per user monthly, which provide unlimited AI agent usage for employees, while premium Agentforce 1 Editions begin at $550 per user monthly and include comprehensive AI capabilities plus cloud-specific features. Slack pricing has also been restructured, with the Business+ plan now costing $15 per user monthly and a new Enterprise+ tier added, though basic Slack access will be free for all Salesforce customers.

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Layoffs loom at Foundry biz despite CHIPS Act relief on the horizon

Intel is reportedly set to shed 15 to 20 percent of its fabrication plant staff from next month, blaming company finances for the move, but the chip giant may get a boost from increased tax credits in a draft bill passing through the US Senate.…

Promises silos for VMs, storage, and networks are out. Happy cloud-like days are in, without hyperscale complications

573 days after closing the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom has released the product that expresses its vision for the virtualization giant's future and what it claims is the template for a modern private cloud.…

Meetings starting after 8 p.m. are up 16% compared to a year ago, and at 10 p.m. almost a third of active workers are still monitoring their inboxes, according to research from Microsoft. Bloomberg: The company's annual work trends study, which is based on aggregated and anonymized data from Microsoft 365 users and a global survey of 31,000 desk workers, also found that almost 20% of employees actively working weekends are checking email before noon on Saturdays and Sundays [non-paywalled source], while over 5% are active on email again on Sunday evenings, gearing up for the start of the work week. [...] Meetings are often spontaneous. Some 57% of the gatherings tallied by Microsoft came together without a calendar invite, and even 10% of scheduled meetings were booked at the last minute. [...] Mass emails, those which loop in more than 20 participants, are on the rise, climbing 7% from last year.

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Out-of-band getting out of hand

Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to deal with a Surface Hub problem introduced with June's Patch Tuesday fixes.…

Veteran columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols declared that Firefox was "dead" to him in a scathing opinion piece Tuesday that cites Mozilla's strategic missteps and the browser's declining technical performance as evidence of terminal decline. Vaughan-Nichols argues that Mozilla has fundamentally betrayed user trust by removing a longstanding promise never to sell personal data from its privacy policy in February, replacing it with a weaker pledge to "protect your personal information." The veteran technology writer also criticized Mozilla's decision to discontinue Pocket, a popular article-saving service, and Fakespot, which identified fake online reviews, while pursuing what he called a misguided AI strategy. He cited user reports of Firefox running up to 30% slower than Chrome, consuming excessive memory, and failing to properly load major websites. Mozilla has also become financially more vulnerable, he argued, noting CFO Eric Muhlheim's admission that the company depends on Google for 90% of its revenue. According to federal data he cited, Firefox holds just 1.9% of the browser market, leading him to conclude the browser is "done."

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AI use among U.S. workers has nearly doubled over two years, with 40% of employees now using artificial intelligence tools at least a few times annually, up from 21% in 2023, according to new Gallup research. Daily AI usage has doubled in the past year alone, jumping from 4% to 8% of workers. The growth concentrates heavily among white-collar employees, where 27% report frequent AI use compared to just 9% of production and front-line workers.

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Still buying B200s and MI300Xs? Don't feel bad, Nvidia and AMD's NVL72 and Helios rack systems aren't really for the enterprise anyway

Analysis With all the hype around Nvidia's NVL72, AMD's newly announced Helios, and Intel's upcoming Jaguar Shores rack systems, you'd be forgiven for thinking the days of eight-way HGX servers are numbered.…

A new benchmark assembled by a team of International Olympiad medalists suggests the hype about large language models beating elite human coders is premature. LiveCodeBench Pro, unveiled in a 584-problem study [PDF] drawn from Codeforces, ICPC and IOI contests, shows the best frontier model clears just 53% of medium-difficulty tasks on its first attempt and none of the hard ones, while grandmaster-level humans routinely solve at least some of those highest-tier problems. The researchers measured models and humans on the same Elo scale used by Codeforces and found that OpenAI's o4-mini-high, when stripped of terminal tools and limited to one try per task, lands at an Elo rating of 2,116 -- hundreds of points below the grandmaster cutoff and roughly the 1.5 percentile among human contestants. A granular tag-by-tag autopsy identified implementation-friendly, knowledge-heavy problems -- segment trees, graph templates, classic dynamic programming -- as the models' comfort zone; observation-driven puzzles such as game-theory endgames and trick-greedy constructs remain stubborn roadblocks. Because the dataset is harvested in real time as contests conclude, the authors argue it minimizes training-data leakage and offers a moving target for future systems. The broader takeaway is that impressive leaderboard jumps often reflect tool use, multiple retries or easier benchmarks rather than genuine algorithmic reasoning, leaving a conspicuous gap between today's models and top human problem-solvers.

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Penalty follows year-long probe into flaws that allowed attack to affect so many

The UK's data watchdog is fining beleaguered DNA testing outfit 23andMe £2.31 million ($3.13 million) over its 2023 mega breach.…

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: A new documentary released last week on Netflix goes into detail about events leading up to the destruction of OceanGate's submersible, Titan that imploded on June 18, 2023 while attempting to visit the wreckage of the RMS Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland. The Titan used a carbon-fiber hull instead of more traditional materials like steel or titanium. "Through exclusive access to whistleblower testimony, pivotal audio recordings, and footage from the company's early days, the film provides an unprecedented look at the technical challenges, moral dilemmas, and shockingly poor decisions that culminated in the catastrophic expedition," explains Netflix in an article. Some highlights: - Titan's original carbon-fiber hull had been replaced with a second carbon-fiber one after the first one developed noticeable cracks. - Three scale models of the second hull failed tests. OceanGate decided to manufacture the second hull regardless of these failures. - Loud pops were heard in many dives; CEO Stockton Rush dismissed these as "seasoning". - Many employees raised numerous safety concerns. They were fired like lead pilot and head of marine operations, David Lochridge. Or they quit. - Some employees like Emily Hammermeister wanted to quit earlier, but external conditions like the COVID pandemic made it difficult. After the scale models failed, she refused to bolt anyone in the future submersible. She was given the two options of being fired or quit; she quit in the middle of the pandemic. - Rush's blindness to inconvenient facts: After the crack was discovered, Rush questioned Director of Engineering, Tony Nissen, about why Nissen did not anticipate the possibility of a crack. Nissen: "I wrote you a report that showed you it was there." Nissen had warned repeatedly that the hull's fibers were breaking (the pops) with each dive. Rush: "Well, one of us has to go." - Poor decisions by Rush extended beyond engineering decisions. After Rush fired Lochridge for raising safety concerns , Rush wanted Bonnie Carl, the company's accountant, to be his replacement pilot. While Carl was an experienced scuba diver, she quit as she was extremely uncomfortable being a pilot. Her explanation: "Are you nuts? I'm an accountant."

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Forms Library blamed for issues experienced by some users

Microsoft is so keen for users to migrate to the New Outlook email client that it has broken Classic Outlook again. This time, affected users are unable to open or create a message.…

Parent company Mozilla's not my fave either

Opinion I know some people still love Firefox. But, folks, it's a bad relationship, and the problems have been going on for a while now.…