Displaying items by tag: Microsoft

There is a quote from the movie “The Matrix” that has always stuck with me. It was a scene where Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) is explaining to Neo (Keanu Reeves) the state of the real world and the history that allowed it to get there. The line is “We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.” There is another important line from the HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon. This line take place when Frank Borman (David Andrews) was asked what caused the Apollo One fire, he replied “A failure of imagination.” These two lines compete for how I view the state of AI development. As we marvel at our own magnificence, we should not stop thinking about the potential risks involved as we push to advance AI. Yet that seems to be what is happening.

It looks like the folks at the European Commission have decided that Microsoft buying out Activision Blizzard for $69 billion (with a B) is not going to be a violation of their antitrust rules. The approval means that there are only a few roadblocks to the deal going through. South Korea and China have not decided yet, while the US and UK have challenged it. The deal has been called the world’s biggest gaming takeover and is viewed by many as a bad thing for competition as it would leave Microsoft in control of a majority of game development groups.

The UK’s CMA (Competition and Markets Authority has added new restrictions on Microsoft and Activision Blizzard after already issuing a formal anti-trust warning over the deal back in January. Now the regulator has added additional orders that prevent either party from “acquiring an interest” in each other without written permission from the CMA.

After Phill Spencer’s recent comments on why Microsoft can’t beat Sony or Nintendo via “normal methods” we started to wonder why he would make this kind of statement. So, with our usual OCD we dove into some of the things that are happening at both Microsoft and Microsoft Gaming. Microsoft has been in an interesting spot and not for the first time. They seem to get into this spot where they are in between strategic and tactical projects. In this “down” time we tend to seem them look to shore up documentation, investigate acquisitions to expand their reach, and start to plan for their next conquest.

Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming recently admitted that Xbox is not able to beat rivals Nintendo and Sony using normal methods. The means that Spender is talking about is the release of console specific titles. He feels that gamers are not likely to change allegiances simply because Xbox comes out with a new Xbox only title regardless of how anticipated that title is. He is right about this, but it also works in the opposite direction. Xbox gamers are not likely to switch to Sony or Nintendo simply because of a premier title.

A recent incident where ChatGPT users at Samsung unknowingly exposed sensitive data via ChatGPT has raised concerns in multiple industries. The banking and finance industry saw several companies put a stop on the use of ChatGPT and certain regulators began investigating how its use could leak PII, or other financial information. To combat this new obstacle to business adoption, Microsoft is looking to offer a private business model which would exclude user input from being used to train the LLM.

It Cloud services are exceptionally popular as a cost effective and simple method to maintain common operational needs. Everything from email to fully fledged infrastructures can be maintained in the “cloud”. All of these can be accomplished at lower overall cost than trying to maintain the same systems on prem. By shifting the general operation, maintenance and even security to the cloud service provider organizations get to reduce their total ownership cost including reducing the number of skilled employees they need to keep on staff. This reduction in the total cost of ownership and maintenance is a huge item when you are trying to ensure profitability.

TA542 the wonderful people that brought you Emotet appears to be in the middle of a development and testing cycle on new delivery methods. According to researchers at ProofPoint the creators or the Emotet Botnet are potentially looking to find a new delivery method in response to the, long overdue, default disabling of VBA based Macros by Microsoft in their office products. Although ProofPoint seems to think this is development testing, the activity could also be part of a more targeted campaign.

Yesterday we reported that the source code stealing group, Lapsus$, claimed they have breached and stollen source code from Microsoft. They made the announcement on their Telegram account by posting a screenshot of the projects they claimed to have access to. Now, as with other leaks, they have dropped a compressed file (7zip) via Torrent which appears to contain around 37GB of source code.

The Lapsus$ group has been in the news recently for theft of source code form some high-profile targets. These targets have included companies like NVIDIA, Samsung, Vodafone, and Ubisoft. The NVIDIA event was noteworthy as it included a claim that NVIDIA hacked the attackers back in order to encrypt the data that have been taken out of their environment.