The Washington Post reports: Years before the internet was created and the first smartphones buzzed to life, an educational platform called PLATO offered a glimpse of the digital world to come. Launched in 1960 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [UIUC], it was the first generalized, computer-based instructional system, and grew into a home for early message boards, emails, chatrooms, instant messaging and multiplayer video games.

The platform's developer, Donald Bitzer, was a handball-playing, magic-loving electrical engineer who opened his computer lab to practically everyone, welcoming contributions from Illinois undergrads as well as teenagers who were still in high school. Dr. Bitzer, who died Dec. 10 at age 90, spent more than two decades working on PLATO, managing its growth and development while also pioneering digital technologies that included the plasma display panel, a forerunner of the ultrathin screens used on today's TVs and tablets. "All of the features you see kids using now, like discussion boards or forums and blogs, started with PLATO," he said during a 2014 return to Illinois, his alma mater. "All of the social networking we take for granted actually started as an educational tool."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp found another remembrance online. "Ray Ozzie, whose LinkedIn profile dedicates more space to describing his work as a PLATO developer as a UIUC undergrad than it does to his later successes as a creator of Lotus Notes and as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, offers his own heartfelt mini-obit." Ozzie writes: It's difficult to adequately convey how much impact he had on so many, and I implore you to take a few minutes to honor him by reading a bit about him and his contributions. Links below. As an insecure young CS student at UIUC in 1974, Paul Tenczar, working for/with Don, graciously gave me a chance as a jr. systems programmer on the mind-bogglingly forward thinking system known as PLATO. A global, interactive system for learning, collaboration, and community like no other at the time. We were young and in awe of how Don led, inspired, and managed to keep the project alive. I was introverted; shaking; stage fright. Yeah I could code. But how could such a deeply technical engineer assemble such a strong team to execute on such a totally novel and inspirational vision, secure government funding, and yet also demo the product on the Phil Donahue show?

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules." You touched so many of us and shaped who we became and the risks we would take, having an impact well beyond that which you created. You made us think and you made us laugh. I hope we made you proud."

Bad news for anyone out there who still uses Skype: The Microsoft-owned phone and messaging platform has quietly stopped letting users top-up accounts with credit and buy Skype phone numbers. From a report: Instead, Skype is locking into SaaS mode: It's pushing users to take monthly subscriptions for regional and global Skype-to-phone plans, for a set monthly fee, likely impacting millions of people. The most recent figures Microsoft released for Skype last year said it had 36 million daily active users.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware, written by Avram Piltch: Microsoft's Recall feature recently made its way back to Windows Insiders after having been pulled from test builds back in June, due to security and privacy concerns. The new version of Recall encrypts the screens it captures and, by default, it has a "Filter sensitive information," setting enabled, which is supposed to prevent it from recording any app or website that is showing credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other important financial / personal info. In my tests, however, this filter only worked in some situations (on two e-commerce sites), leaving a gaping hole in the protection it promises.

When I entered a credit card number and a random username / password into a Windows Notepad window, Recall captured it, despite the fact that I had text such as "Capital One Visa" right next to the numbers. Similarly, when I filled out a loan application PDF in Microsoft Edge, entering a social security number, name and DOB, Recall captured that. (Note that all info in these screenshots is made up). I also created my own HTML page with a web form that said, explicitly, "enter your credit card number below." The form had fields for Credit card type, number, CVC and expiration date. I thought this might trigger Recall to block it, but the software captured an image of my form filled out, complete with the credit card data. Recall did refuse to capture the credit card fields on the payment pages of Pimoroni and Adafruit. "So, when it came to real-world commerce sites that I visited, Recall got it right," adds Piltch. "However, what my experiment proves is that it's pretty much impossible for Microsoft's AI filter to identify every situation where sensitive information is on screen and avoid capturing it."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Copilot has gone native for Windows Insiders and commandeered a popular keyboard shortcut in the process. The move from a Progressive Web App (PWA) to a native binary -- although most of it appears to still be a website, just not running as a PWA -- will be welcomed. Microsoft noted that once the app update has been installed, Copilot will appear in the system tray.

However, the assistant's quick view feature has been given the Alt+Space keyboard shortcut. This is already used by many other applications, including Microsoft's own PowerToys. PowerToys Run, for example, uses Alt+Space to open a launcher into which users can type in the name of the service they are seeking. Alt+Space is also used to show the context menu of the active window. Therefore, Microsoft's decision to hand the shortcut over to Copilot is unlikely to please keyboard warriors who are used to their shortcuts working in a particular way.

The Windows vendor acknowledged that the shortcut was already in use by many apps, saying: "For any apps installed on your PC that might utilize this keyboard shortcut, Windows will register whichever app is launched first on your PC and running in the background as the app that is invoked when using Alt+Space."

Amazon has postponed implementing Microsoft's cloud-based Office suite for its workforce by one year, citing security concerns following a Russian cyber attack on Microsoft's systems. The delay affects a $1 billion, five-year contract signed last year to provide Microsoft 365 to Amazon's 1.5 million employees, making the e-commerce giant one of the largest customers of Microsoft's cloud productivity suite.

The decision came after Microsoft revealed that Midnight Blizzard, a Russia-linked hacking group, had breached several employee email accounts, including those of senior executives and cybersecurity staff. Amazon subsequently conducted its own security review and requested enhanced protection measures from Microsoft.

Harvard University announced Thursday it's releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly one million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. From a report: The dataset was created by Harvard's newly formed Institutional Data Initiative with funding from both Microsoft and OpenAI. It contains books scanned as part of the Google Books project that are no longer protected by copyright.

Around five times the size of the notorious Books3 dataset that was used to train AI models like Meta's Llama, the Institutional Data Initiative's database spans genres, decades, and languages, with classics from Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Dante included alongside obscure Czech math textbooks and Welsh pocket dictionaries. Greg Leppert, executive director of the Institutional Data Initiative, says the project is an attempt to "level the playing field" by giving the general public, including small players in the AI industry and individual researchers, access to the sort of highly-refined and curated content repositories that normally only established tech giants have the resources to assemble. "It's gone through rigorous review," he says.

Leppert believes the new public domain database could be used in conjunction with other licensed materials to build artificial intelligence models. "I think about it a bit like the way that Linux has become a foundational operating system for so much of the world," he says, noting that companies would still need to use additional training data to differentiate their models from those of their competitors.

Google has announced an experimental AI-powered code agent called "Jules" that can automatically fix coding errors for developers. From a report: Jules was introduced today alongside Gemini 2.0, and uses the updated Google AI model to create multi-step plans to address issues, modify multiple files, and prepare pull requests for Python and Javascript coding tasks in GitHub workflows.

Microsoft introduced a similar experience for GitHub Copilot last year that can recognize and explain code, alongside recommending changes and fixing bugs. Jules will compete against Microsoft's offering, and also against tools like Cursor and even Claude and ChatGPT's coding abilities. Google's launch of a coding-focused AI assistant is no surprise -- CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that more than a quarter of all new code at the company is now generated by AI.

"Jules handles bug fixes and other time-consuming tasks while you focus on what you actually want to build," Google says in its blog post. "This effort is part of our long-term goal of building AI agents that are helpful in all domains, including coding."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google recently asked the U.S. government to break up Microsoft's exclusive agreement to host OpenAI's technology on its cloud servers, according to a person who has been directly involved in the effort. The conversation took place after the Federal Trade Commission, one of the primary federal antitrust enforcement agencies, asked Google about Microsoft's business practices as part of a broader investigation, this person said.

Firms that compete with Microsoft in renting out cloud servers, including Google and Amazon, want to host OpenAI's artificial intelligence themselves so their cloud customers don't need to also tap Microsoft servers to get access to the startup's technology, this person said.

Microsoft, trying to mitigate the climate impact of its data center building boom, is starting to roll out a new design that uses zero water to cool the facilities' chips and servers. From a report: Launched in August, the new design will eliminate the more than 125 million liters of water each data center typically uses per year, the company said in a statement. The new system use a "closed loop" to recycle water; liquid is added during construction and continually circulated -- obviating the need for fresh supplies. Data centers will still require fresh water for worker facilities like bathrooms and kitchens.

Microsoft spent more than $50 billion on capital expenditures in the fiscal year ended June 30, the vast majority related to data center construction fueled by demand for artificial intelligence services. It plans to top that figure in the current year, requiring rapidly rising amounts of energy to run the networks and water to cool equipment. Many of latest facilities are going up in hot, dry areas like Arizona and Texas, making it even more critical to find ways to conserve water. Microsoft's existing data centers will continue to use a mix of older technologies, but new projects in Phoenix and Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, will begin using the zero-water designs in 2026.

As tech giants struggle to profit from AI, a growing industry of specialized AI training firms is emerging by hiring doctors, radiologists and other experts to develop commercially viable applications. The $20 billion data services sector, projected to grow 20% annually, is attracting major investment by focusing on high-value, specialized AI applications.

Companies like iMerit and Centaur Labs are recruiting specialists worldwide, from radiologists in Kazakhstan to agricultural experts in Bhutan, paying premium rates for domain expertise rather than basic data processing. While Microsoft and Alphabet post losses on AI development, this specialized sector is finding profitability by bridging the gap between raw AI capabilities and practical business applications.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts conversational AI will become the primary way people interact with technology, replacing traditional web browsers and search engines within the next few years. In an interview with The Verge, Suleyman, who oversees Microsoft's consumer AI products including Bing and Copilot, called current search interfaces "completely broken" and "a total pain," arguing that voice-based AI interactions will prove "100 times easier" for users. He said: The UI that you experience is going to be automagically produced by an LLM in three or five years, and that is going to be the default. And they'll be representing the brands, businesses, influencers, celebrities, academics, activists, and organizations, just as each one of those stakeholders in society ended up getting a podcast, getting a website, writing a blog, maybe building an app, or using the telephone back in the day.

The technological revolution produces a new interface, which completely shuffles the way that things are distributed. And some organizations adapt really fast and they jump on board and it kind of transforms their businesses and their organizations, and some don't. There will be an adjustment. We'll look back by 2030 and be like, "Oh, that really was the kind of moment when there was this true inflection point because these conversational AIs really are the primary way that we have these interactions." And so, you're absolutely right. A brand and a business are going to use that AI to talk to your personal companion AI because I don't really like doing that kind of shopping. And some people do, and they'll do that kind of direct-to-consumer browsing experience. Many people don't like it, and it's actually super frustrating, hard, and slow.

And so, increasingly you'll come to work with your personal AI companion to go and be that interface, to go and negotiate, find great opportunities, and adapt them to your specific context. That'll just be a much more efficient protocol because AIs can talk to AIs in super real-time. And by the way, let's not fool ourselves. We already have this on the open web today. We have behind-the-scenes, real-time negotiation between buyers and sellers of ad space, or between search ranking algorithms. So, there's already that kind of marketplace of AIs. It's just not explicitly manifested in language. It's operating in vector space.

Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.

But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."

Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

"Generative AI is transforming software development by enabling natural language prompts to generate code, reducing the need for traditional programming skills," argues Analytics India magazine. Traditionally, coding was the bastion of the select few who had mastered mighty languages like C++, Python, or Java. The idea of programming seemed exclusively reserved for those fluent in syntax and logic. However, the narrative is now being challenged by natural language coding being implemented in AI tools like GitHub Copilot. Andrej Karpathy, senior director of AI at Tesla predicted this trend last year.... English is emerging as the universal coding language.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang believes that English is becoming a new programming language thanks to AI advancements. Speaking at the World Government Summit, Huang explained, "It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human"... He calls this a "miracle of AI," emphasising how it closes the technology divide and empowers people from all fields to become effective technologists without traditional coding skills... "In the future, you will tell the computer what you want, and it will do it,"â Huang commented. Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 and its successors have made this possible...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been equally vocal about the potential of English for coding. Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, an AI code assistant, enables developers to describe their needs in natural language and receive functional code in response. Nadella describes this as part of a broader mission to "empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more".... In a discussion earlier last year, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque claimed, "41% of codes on GitHub are AI-generated"...

In 2024, the ability to program is no longer reserved for a few. It's a skill anyone can wield, thanks to the power of natural language processing and AI
"No longer is the power to create software restricted to those who can decipher programming languages," the article concludes. "Anyone with a problem to solve and a clear enough articulation of that problem can now write software."

Although the article also includes this consoling quote from Nvidia's Huang in March. "There is an artistry to prompt engineering. It's how you fine-tune the instructions to get exactly what you want"

This year Marvell's stock rose 95%, giving it a $100 billion market capitalization, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"The latest gains have even put Marvell's market cap ahead of much-beleaguered Intel, which still generates 10 times as much annual revenue." Marvell's recent trajectory suggests that the revenue gap will continue to narrow. The explosive growth of its data center business has finally reached a point where it can more fully offset weakness in the company's more legacy segments, which sell chips used in goods such as telecommunications gear, cable TV boxes and autos. Data center sales nearly doubled year over year to $1.1 billion in the just-ended quarter, and Marvell's projection for the current period indicates the company will end its fiscal year in January with the data center unit encompassing about 72% of its total revenue, up from 40% in the previous year.

The next year is looking bright as well. Marvell's latest deal with Amazon is a five-year "multigenerational" agreement that has Marvell helping Amazon design its own artificial intelligence chips. Amazon, which runs the world's largest cloud computing service, has been expanding its internal chip efforts significantly, in part to reduce its reliance on Nvidia for crucial AI components. Amazon announced the next generation of its largest AI chip, called Trainium, at its annual developers conference this week. Analysts believe Trainium will play a role in Marvell's AI custom revenue more than doubling in the next fiscal year ending January of 2026.

That is expected to help propel Marvell's annual revenue to more than $8 billion in fiscal 2026, up 40% from what is expected for this year, according to consensus estimates from Visible Alpha. In addition, 20% growth is expected for the following year, when Marvell expects to be in production of custom AI chips for another unnamed big tech customer that analysts believe to be Microsoft. Analyst Mark Lipacis of Evercore ISI projects that the industry for custom AI chips will reach $30 billion to $50 billion in sales by 2030. In a note to clients last week, he said Marvell "has the potential to capture one-third of that market."
Marvell's CEO "has been among the few names floated as potential replacements for the recently ousted Pat Gelsinger at Intel's corner office," the article points out — which meant he had to reassure investors on an earnings call that he was staying at Marvell.

"The company is outstanding. The technology is best-in-class. I can't think of a better place to work than Marvell."

"We're excited to be working with Microsoft to keep Xboxes running longer and out of the waste heap," iFixit's director of sustainability told The Verge. iFixit now sells genuine Xbox parts you can use to repair your Xbox Series X or S and offers official guides to help with fixes [including both the all-digital and disk drive editions]...

iFixit's Microsoft Repair Hub also features iFixit's parts for repairing Microsoft Surface devices, which it started selling in 2023. "Since we launched our Surface parts collaboration with Microsoft last year, we've been helping our customers repair their own Microsoft laptops and tablets — and it's awesome to be able to offer Xbox owners the same opportunity," says Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit's director of sustainability.
The article points out that iFixit also sells "nearly every part of the Steam Deck" and "a bunch of repair guides for Valve's handheld PC, too," along with genuine repair parts for Google's Pixel phones and the Pixel Tablet.

"With Microsoft, we've created a one-stop place for guides, tools, and spare parts to make self-service repair accessible to anyone," says iFixit's new web page. "Imagine how different the world would be if repairing every device could be this easy."

The Verge thinks Valve "could make a play to dethrone the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft." And it's not just because there's lots of new SteamOS hardware on the way (including a wireless VR headset and a pair of trackable wands, a Steam Controller 2 gamepad, and a living room console.

"Valve has also now seemingly revealed plans for partners to create third-party SteamOS hardware too." It won't be easy to take on Sony, Microsoft, or Meta. Those companies have a lot to lose, and they're deeply entrenched. But the Steam Deck has revealed a massive weakness in each of their businesses that may take them years to correct — the desire to play a huge library of games anytime, anywhere. And while they figure that out, Valve may be building an entire new ecosystem of SteamOS hardware, one that could finally let PC and peripheral makers tap into the huge and growing library of Windows games on all sorts of different hardware without relying on Microsoft or subjecting their customers to the many annoyances of Windows...

Valve has long said it will open up SteamOS to other manufacturers, even recently committing to some direct support for rival handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally — and the other week, Valve quietly updated a document that may reveal its larger overarching strategy. It won't just leave SteamOS sitting around and hope manufacturers build something — it'll hold their hand. Valve now has an explicit label for third parties to create "Powered by SteamOS" devices, which it explicitly defines as "hardware running the SteamOS operating system, implemented in close collaboration with Valve." It additionally lets companies create "Steam Compatible" hardware that ships with "Valve approved controller inputs," as well as SteamVR hardware and Steam Link hardware that lets you stream games from one device to another...

When Valve asked PC manufacturers to sign onto its Steam Machines initiative over a decade ago, with the idea of building living room PC consoles, it asked for a leap of faith with very little to show and a tiny chance of success. It took years for Valve to even build the oddball living room controller for its Steam Machines, and it didn't get far in convincing Windows game developers to port their games to Linux. But by the time it announced the Steam Deck, Valve had hammered out a Proton software compatibility layer so good that many Windows games now run better on Linux, and created the most customizable yet familiar set of controls ever made. If manufacturers could build their own Steam Machines rather than equivalent Windows machines, they could offer better gaming products than they do today. Maybe they'd even want to release a VR headset that isn't tied to Microsoft or Meta if it doubled as a Steam Deck, portably playing decades of flatscreen games.

It's not clear any of this will pan out; Valve is an exceedingly small company that tries not to chase too many things at a time. When I speak to PC industry executives about why they pick Windows over SteamOS, some say they're concerned about whether Valve would truly be able to support them. But it's just as intriguing an idea as it was 12 years ago when Gabe Newell explained the initial vision to us, and this time, there's a far better chance it'll work.
"Today, every major PC company is building one or more Steam Deck rivals," the article points out. "But without Valve's blessing and support, they're saddled with a Windows OS that doesn't start, pause, and resume games quickly and seamlessly enough to feel portable and easy..."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog Windows Central: Microsoft has ended production on the Surface Studio 2+, its ultra-premium all-in-one desktop PC designed for creatives and commercial customers. Starting at a whopping $4,500, the Studio 2+ was the ultimate Windows all-in-one with the best touchscreen display on a unique hinge that allowed the screen to lay down like a draft board... So, if you're interested in buying a Surface Studio 2+, you better hurry, as whatever stock is remaining is all that's left. Unfortunately, it's likely that the end of production on the Surface Studio 2+ also marks an end to the Surface Studio line as a whole. My own sources tell me there's no Studio 2+ successor lined up currently.
Ars Technica points out that over the eight-year run of the Surface Studio, Microsoft only updated it twice. Like the Surface Laptop Studio, the desktop's claim to fame was a unique hinge design for its screen, which could reposition it to make it easier to draw on with the Surface Pen. But the desktop's high cost and its perennially outdated internal components made it a less appealing machine than it could have been...

The longest-lived Studio desktop was the Surface Studio 2, which was released in 2018 and wasn't replaced until a revised Surface Studio 2+ was announced in late 2022. It used an even higher-quality display panel, but it still used previous-generation internal components. This might not have been so egregious if Microsoft had updated it more consistently, but this model went untouched for so long that Microsoft had to lower Windows 11's system requirements specifically to cover the Studio 2 so that the company wouldn't be ending support for a PC that it was still actively selling.

The Studio 2+ was the desktop's last hurrah, and despite jumping two GPU generations and four CPU generations, it still didn't use the latest components available at the time. Again, more consistent updates like the ones Microsoft provides for the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop could have made this less of a problem, but the Studio 2+ once again sat untouched for two years after being updated.

"Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok is now available to free users on X," reports the Verge: Several users noticed the change on Friday, which gives non-Premium subscribers the ability to send up to 10 messages to Grok every two hours.

xAI launched Grok last year as a "humorous AI assistant," but it was only available to Premium subscribers... Making Grok more widely available might help it compete with the already-free chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Anthropic's Claude.

Getty Images CEO has criticized AI companies' stance on copyright, particularly pushing back against claims that all web content is fair use for AI training. The statement comes amid Getty's ongoing litigation against Stability AI for allegedly using millions of Getty-owned images without permission to train its Stable Diffusion model, launched in August 2022.

Acknowledging AI's potential benefits in areas like healthcare and climate change, Getty's chief executive argued against the industry's "all-or-nothing" approach to copyright. He specifically challenged Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's assertion that web content has been "freeware" since the 1990s. The Getty chief advocated for applying fair use principles case-by-case, distinguishing between AI models for scientific advancement and commercial content generation. He also drew parallels to music streaming's evolution from Napster to licensed platforms like Spotify, suggesting AI companies could develop similar permission-based models.

He adds: As litigation slowly advances, AI companies advance an argument that there will be no AI absent the ability to freely scrape content for training, resulting in our inability to leverage the promise of AI to solve cancer, mitigate global climate change, and eradicate global hunger. Note that the companies investing in and building AI spend billions of dollars on talent, GPUs, and the required power to train and run these models -- but remarkably claim compensation for content owners is an unsurmountable challenge.

My focus is to achieve a world where creativity is celebrated and rewarded AND a world that is without cancer, climate change, and global hunger. I want the cake and to eat it. I suspect most of us want the same.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Cloud dangled hundreds of million of euros worth of financial incentives to ally itself with an association of European cloud providers that had lodged a complaint against Microsoft, according to confidential documents seen by The Register.

Amit Zavery, the former Vice President of Google Cloud Platform, presented to a selection of members of the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body, then to the board and finally to the entire organization, according to sources that asked to remain anonymous.

In the presentation, seen by us, Zavery offered to provide a Members Innovation Fund of $4.2 million, which Google described as $105,000 per member to be used as "immediate funding for projects and license fees of CISPE members to support innovation in open cloud ecosystems." CISPE actually has 36 members now, including Oxya, Leaseweb, UpCloud and AWS -- the latter being the only non-European participant. The number has grown from 27 in July. Google also offered to contribute an additional $10.6 million to the trade association, described in the presentation as "participating and membership resources."