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Microsoft plans to offer voluntary buyouts for the first time. According to CNBC, "about 7% of U.S. employees are eligible," with the program being "available to U.S. workers at the senior director level and below whose years of employment and age add up to 70 or higher." Further details will be provided on May 7. From the report: Last year Microsoft removed some costs through multiple rounds of layoffs. As of June 2025, the company had 228,000 employees. "Our hope is that this program gives those eligible the choice to take that next step on their own terms, with generous company support," Amy Coleman, Microsoft's executive vice president and chief people officer, wrote in a memo viewed by CNBC. Additionally, Microsoft is adjusting the way it doles out stock to employees for annual rewards. The company will no longer make managers tie stock directly to cash bonuses. This way, "managers have more flexibility to meaningfully recognize high performance," Coleman wrote. The company is also simplifying the review process for managers, so they can choose from five pay options for employees instead of nine.

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Push to protect minors risks hitting everyone online

Proton's boss has waded into the age verification fight with a warning that sounds less like child safety and more like an identity checkpoint for the entire internet.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: New York is suing Coinbase and Gemini, two of the newest players in the prediction market industry, arguing that the companies' unregulated and unlicensed platforms are illegal gambling operations. Attorney General Letitia James' lawsuit, filed Tuesday in state court in Manhattan, seeks to bar the companies' platforms from operating in the state unless and until they obtain licenses from the state Gaming Commission. "Gambling by another name is still gambling, and it is not exempt from regulation under our state laws and Constitution," James said in a statement. "Gemini and Coinbase's so-called prediction markets are just illegal gambling operations, exposing young people to addictive platforms that lack the necessary guardrails." Both companies began as cryptocurrency trading platforms before branching into the prediction space, which has been dominated by Kalshi and Polymarket. [...] New York's lawsuit alleges that the Coinbase and Gemini are seeking "to avoid the legal and financial consequences" of the state's close regulation of gambling "by offering what is quintessentially wagering under the guise of offering 'event contracts' on a 'prediction market.'" By operating without licenses, the lawsuit says, Coinbase's and Gemini's prediction market businesses aren't paying the same taxes as licensed casinos and mobile sportsbooks, which are taxed by the state at a rate of approximately 51% of gross revenues. In addition, the lawsuit says, Coinbase and Gemini allow users as young as 18, while state law prohibits wagering by anyone under 21.

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Also rolls out agentic Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint, letting 21st century Clippy lend a... hand

Microsoft is giving Copilot the power to stop suggesting edits and start making them.…

Down to you to work out the value

Datadog has added GPU monitoring to its observability stack, giving AI-hungry organizations more insight into exactly what's happening on their most expensive silicon.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday the EV maker plans to use Intel's next-generation 14A manufacturing process to make chips at its Terafab project, an advanced AI chip complex Musk has envisioned in Austin. The contract would mark Intel's first major customer for the technology, a breakthrough for the chipmaker which has struggled to stand up its contract manufacturing business essential for taking on top rival TSMC. Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan has said that the company would exit the chip manufacturing business altogether if it failed to secure an external customer. Intel has previously said it was in discussions with large customers about 14A, but has not yet disclosed a major external customer. It declined to comment on Musk's remarks. [...] "Given that by the time Terafab scales up, 14A will be probably fairly mature or ready for prime time," Musk said. "14A seems like the right move, and we have a great relationship with Intel," he said. Ben Bajarin, head of technology consultancy Creative Strategies, said that Intel's 14A technology could "turn out to be a bigger deal for Intel than folks thought." "It's important to have multiple partners as early design partners to help clean the pipe and work through needed learnings at the leading edge. They will definitely have scale, so a great first non-Intel customer," Bajarin said. Seaport Research Partners analyst Jay Goldberg said Musk's vote of confidence in Intel's technology outweighed the unknowns about the Terafab project. "Having a customer is more important than the timing," he said. Goldberg said that Musk's lofty estimates of how many chips its robots could one day require may or may not materialize, but even making chips for Tesla's existing businesses would be a significant win for Intel. "It's not equivalent to Apple or Nvidia" in terms of chip volumes, Goldberg said. "But it's a real customer. It can be real volumes."

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Storage vendor predicts current crunch will outlast COVID disruptions

The supply crunch gripping the storage market has pushed Everpure – the artist formerly known as Pure Storage – to reassure customers it won't make things worse.…

Revolutionary telescope aiming for space after multiple near death experiences

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is ready for launch ahead of schedule despite repeated attempts by both Donald Trump's first and second administrations to cut funding.…

Wins $300M deal over Salesforce, IBM because of 'integration with existing USDA systems,' among other things

Palantir has won a $300 million contract from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to support the National Farm Security Action Plan (NFSAP) and modernize how USDA delivers services to America's farmers.…

Bad news for multiple general server components as vendors switch to more lucrative gear

The chip shortage is spreading to power and management controller silicon, threatening server shipments as vendors prioritize capacity for higher-margin AI server products.…

World's largest biomedical dataset lifted and shifted on Chinese mega marketplace

Breaking Details of volunteers of UK-based Biobank, which describes itself as the custodian of the world's most comprehensive biomedical dataset, are for sale on Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba.…

Windows Admin Center flaws mean on-prem can attack cloud, and vice-versa

Black Hat Asia Israeli researchers found a series of flaws in Microsoft's Windows Admin Center (WAC) and suggest this shows hybrid cloud management tools are a two-way attack surface that users don't spend enough time worrying about.…

EV maker leaning on still-in-development 14A process for Terafab, says it needs to build own silicon

Elon Musk used Tesla's latest earnings call to reveal plans to build AI chips on Intel's not-yet-finished 14A process – a bet on silicon that doesn't exist.…

Sony project claims a significant breakthrough with applications in task requiring speed and accuracy

Rise of the Machines The ancient games of chess and Go are now mere staging posts in the journey toward robots demonstrating their superior performance to humans - the machines can now beat us fleshbags at ping-pong.…

Ancient Slashdot reader hwstar shares a report from The Conversation: For the first time ever, more than 50 nations will gather next week in Colombia to hash out how to wind down and end their dependence on coal, oil and gas. The history-making conference was planned before the Iran war. But this year's energy crisis has greatly raised the stakes. [...] Around 80% of the trapped oil was destined for the Asia-Pacific. Faced with dwindling supply, the region's governments are implementing emergency measures such as sending workers home, banning government travel, rationing fuel and cutting school hours. The problem is especially bad in the Pacific. Many island nations use diesel for power generation. In response, leaders declared a regional emergency. [...] But the real difference from half a century ago is that fossil fuel alternatives are ready for prime time. Since the 1970s, the price of solar panels has fallen 99.9%, while the cost of wind has fallen 91% since 1984. Battery prices have fallen 99% since 1991. [...] This year's oil shock shows signs of creating an unplanned social tipping point -- a threshold for self-propelling change beyond which systems shift from one state to another. Climate scientists warn of climate tipping points which amplify feedback and accelerate warming. But social scientists also point to positive tipping points -- collective action that rapidly accelerates climate action. [...] The routine burning of coal, oil and gas is the primary driver of the climate crisis. The world's highest court last year made clear nations have obligations to stop burning fossil fuels. But fossil fuels have barely been mentioned in 30 years of global climate negotiations, due in part to blocking efforts by big fossil fuel exporters and lobbyists. Frustrated by slow progress, a coalition of nations has bypassed global climate talks to discuss how to actually phase out fossil fuels. The first of these summits will take place next week. More than 50 nations will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss a potential standalone treaty to manage fossil-fuel phaseout while protecting workers and financial systems.

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Orgs can now buy UK cyber agency engineered commercial gadget, but details are slim

GCHQ's cyber arm has entered the hardware game with its first device designed to prevent cyberattacks on display devices.…

Video conferencing has tripped us all up. Now cloud chief Thomas Kurian gets his turn

Bork!Bork!Bork! The curse of Bork is no respecter of status or class. It does not differentiate between a high-flying executive and a lowly worker. And so it was that Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian came unstuck due to some all-too-familiar video-conferencing struggles.…

Keeping it simple for the developers can lead to very complex headaches later

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we celebrate the people who’ve taught us how not to secure a server. If you’ve ever tied your own shoelaces together, then tripped over them, or attempted to dive into a swimming pool but hit your head on the diving board, we’ll be talking about your cyber equivalent.…

Whitehall content teams play whack-a-mole with zombie pages as Google hoovers up the lot

AI overviews from the likes of Google are serving up false summaries of UK government information by drawing on stale GOV.UK pages, according to content designers at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT).…

NCSC passes judgment: passkeys pass muster, passwords fail

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has officially endorsed passkeys as the default authentication standard, marking the first time the agency has told consumers to move away from passwords entirely.…