The next generation of USB devices might support data transfer speeds as high as 80 Gbps, which would be twice as fast as current-gen Thunderbolt 4 products. From a report: The USB Promotor Group says it plans to publish the new USB4 version 2.0 specification ahead of this year's USB Developer Days events scheduled for November, but it could take a few years before new cables, hubs, PCs, and mobile devices featuring the new technology are available for purchase. According to the group, the new protocol will make use of the same USB Type-C cables and connectors as USB4 version 1.0. In fact, if you've already got a USB Type-C passive cable that's capable of 40 Gbps speeds, you should be able to use that same cable with next-gen hardware to achieve speeds up to 80 Gbps. But the new standard will also introduce a new USB Type-C active cable designed specifically for speeds up to 80 Gbps. The new standard is also backward compatible, which means that if you buy a new device with USB 4 v2 support, it will still work with older hardware featuring USB 2.0, 3.2, or Thunderbolt 3 connectivity. You just won't be able to take advantage of the full speeds.

Micron will invest about $15 billion over the next 10 years in a new memory-chip manufacturing facility in Boise, Idaho, where it is based, the company said on Thursday. From a report: The investment takes into account anticipated federal grants and credits under the CHIPS and Science Act and will create 17,000 jobs by the end of the decade. President Joe Biden last month signed a bill to provide $52.7 billion in subsidies for semiconductor production and research and to boost efforts to make the United States more competitive. "Today's announcement by Micron is another big win for America," Biden said in a statement. "We will make EVs, chips, fiber optics and other critical components here in America and we will have an economy built from the bottom up and middle out." Micron did not provide details of the new facility's capacity or the kind of chips it will produce. The expansion comes at a time when Micron has cut its fourth-quarter revenue forecast due to weak demand. Peer Seagate too has slashed its first-quarter expectations.

Google has announced $20 million in new commitments to expand computer science education among communities that are underrepresented in the field. The company expects its funds to improve educational access for more than 11 million American students. From a report: "If we don't get this right, the gaps that exist today will be exacerbated," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on Wednesday. "Technology will end up playing such a big role in the future. That's the fundamental reason we do it." Google's goal in distributing funds, Pichai says, was to support groups with "deep expertise in education" who work with underrepresented communities -- including students in rural areas, as well as racial and gender minorities.

The slate includes a mix of newer organizations and longtime Google partners. 4-H, receiving $5 million, has been working with the company since 2017. The Oakland-based Hidden Genius Project, also receiving funds, was a winner of Google's 2015 Impact Challenge. Other beneficiaries include UT Austin's Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, CUNY's Computing Integrated Teacher Education project, and the nonprofit CodePath. Urban funding will focus on Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. "Living in the Bay Area... it's clear to me how many schools here have already transitioned and incorporated exposure to CS education as part of their curriculum," Pichai says. "It's important that this happens across the country, to rural areas, to places that are historically underrepresented."

Twitter is launching an edit button for the first time, after years of debate both internally and externally as to whether such a feature was a good idea for a product known for making posts go viral. From a report: The edit feature will soon be available to users who pay $4.99 per month for a subscription to Twitter Blue. Edit Tweet, as the feature will be called, will let users make changes to their tweet for up to 30 minutes after it's originally published. Tweets that are edited will carry a label, and others on Twitter will be able to click on the label to see prior versions of the post. The company is specifically testing the edit button with a small group of users in hopes of quickly resolving possible issues, the company wrote in a blog post. The edit button will then roll out to Twitter Blue users in the coming weeks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: In the spring of 2022, Twitter considered making a radical change to the platform. After years of quietly allowing adult content on the service, the company would monetize it. The proposal: give adult content creators the ability to begin selling OnlyFans-style paid subscriptions, with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue. Had the project been approved, Twitter would have risked a massive backlash from advertisers, who generate the vast majority of the company's revenues. But the service could have generated more than enough to compensate for losses. OnlyFans, the most popular by far of the adult creator sites, is projecting $2.5 billion in revenue this year -- about half of Twitter's 2021 revenue -- and is already a profitable company.

Some executives thought Twitter could easily begin capturing a share of that money since the service is already the primary marketing channel for most OnlyFans creators. And so resources were pushed to a new project called ACM: Adult Content Monetization. Before the final go-ahead to launch, though, Twitter convened 84 employees to form what it called a "Red Team." The goal was "to pressure-test the decision to allow adult creators to monetize on the platform, by specifically focusing on what it would look like for Twitter to do this safely and responsibly," according to documents obtained by The Verge and interviews with current and former Twitter employees. What the Red Team discovered derailed the project: Twitter could not safely allow adult creators to sell subscriptions because the company was not -- and still is not -- effectively policing harmful sexual content on the platform.

"Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale," the Red Team concluded in April 2022. The company also lacked tools to verify that creators and consumers of adult content were of legal age, the team found. As a result, in May -- weeks after Elon Musk agreed to purchase the company for $44 billion -- the company delayed the project indefinitely. If Twitter couldn't consistently remove child sexual exploitative content on the platform today, how would it even begin to monetize porn? Launching ACM would worsen the problem, the team found. Allowing creators to begin putting their content behind a paywall would mean that even more illegal material would make its way to Twitter -- and more of it would slip out of view. Twitter had few effective tools available to find it. Taking the Red Team report seriously, leadership decided it would not launch Adult Content Monetization until Twitter put more health and safety measures in place. "Twitter still has a problem with content that sexually exploits children," reports The Verge, citing interviews with current and former staffers, as well as 58 pages of internal documents. "Executives are apparently well-informed about the issue, and the company is doing little to fix it."

"While the amount of [child sexual exploitation (CSE)] online has grown exponentially, Twitter's investment in technologies to detect and manage the growth has not," begins a February 2021 report from the company's Health team. "Teams are managing the workload using legacy tools with known broken windows. In short, [content moderators] are keeping the ship afloat with limited-to-no-support from Health."

Part of the problem is scale while the other part is mismanagement, says the report. "Meanwhile, the system that Twitter heavily relied on to discover CSE had begun to break..."

Apple has released an iOS 12 update users of older iPhone and iPad devices should download as soon as possible. Engadget reports: The new version of the company's 2018 operating system addresses a major vulnerability that Apple recently patched within iOS 15. According to a support document, the WebKit flaw could have allowed a website to run malicious code on your device. In its usual terse manner, Apple notes it is "aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited."

For that reason, you should download the update as soon as possible if you're still using an iOS 12 device. That's a list that includes the iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, as well as iPad Air, iPad mini 2 and iPad mini 3. You can download iOS 12.5.6 by opening the Settings app, tapping on "General" and then selecting "Software Update."

New submitter xwin shares a report from WTVO: With California's power grid under strain due to extreme heat and high demand, the utility grid operator is asking residents to avoid charging their electric vehicles. This comes days after the state announced a plan to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035. The California Independent System Operator is asking residents for "voluntary energy conservation" over the Labor Day weekend.

According to the National Weather Service, the western United States is facing a "prolonged and record heat wave." "The top three conservation actions are to set thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, avoid using large appliances and charging electric vehicles, and turn off unnecessary lights,â the American Public Power Association said, asking residents to limit energy usage during 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. "Today, most people charge their electric cars when they come home in the evening -- when electricity demand is typically at its peak," according to Cornell University's College of Engineering. "If left unmanaged, the power demanded from many electric vehicles charging simultaneously in the evening will amplify existing peak loads, potentially outstripping the grid's current capacity to meet demand."

Facing European antitrust scrutiny, Microsoft has made it easier to virtualize its software on non-Microsoft cloud infrastructure -- just so long as that infrastructure isn't owned by notable competitors Amazon, Google, or Alibaba. From a report: The conflict, months in the making, is striking for a company that has largely avoided the antitrust scrutiny of its rivals, and eagerly sought to distance itself from the anti-competitive complaints and government actions that beset Microsoft in the late 1990s. Microsoft outlined the changes that would take effect on October 1 in a blog post. Nicole Dezen, chief partner officer, wrote that Microsoft "believes in the value of the partner ecosystem" and changed outsourcing and hosting terms that "will benefit partners and customers globally."

New licensing terms would make it easier for Microsoft's enterprise customers to bring Microsoft software to non-Microsoft infrastructure and scale the cost and size of theirs or their customer's Microsoft systems on their own hardware, according to Dezen's post. But Microsoft wants to be clear about something: Its Services Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) was meant for customers that are offering hosting "from their own data centers," not buying Microsoft licenses to "host on others' data centers." To "strengthen the hoster ecosystem," Dezen writes, Microsoft will remove the ability to outsource to Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft's Azure cloud, or anybody using those companies as part of their hosting. Amazon and Google have weighed in, and they do not believe Microsoft is showing its newer, less anti-competitive side. "Microsoft is now doubling down on the same harmful practices by implementing even more restrictions in an unfair attempt to limit the competition it faces -- rather than listening to its customers and restoring fair software licensing in the cloud for everyone," an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters.

A jeweler. A plastic surgeon. An OnlyFans Model. They and others received a blue check in likely the biggest Instagram verification scheme revealed to date. After ProPublica started asking questions, Meta removed badges from over 300 accounts. From a report: To his more than 150,000 followers on Instagram, Dr. Martin Jugenburg is Real Dr. 6ix, a well-coiffed Toronto plastic surgeon posting images and video of his work sculpting the decolletage, tucking the tummies and lifting the faces of his primarily female clientele.

Jugenburg's physician-influencer tendencies led to a six-month suspension of his Ontario medical license in 2021 after he admitted to filming patient interactions and sharing images of procedures without consent. He apologized for the lapse and is currently facing a class-action lawsuit from female patients who say their privacy was violated. But on Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer, and in roughly a dozen sponsored posts scattered across the web, Jugenburg's career and controversial history was eclipsed by a new identity. On those platforms, he was DJ Dr. 6ix, a house music producer who's celebrated for his "inherent instinctual ability for music composition" and who "assures his followers that his music is absolutely unique." It's an unconvincing persona -- perhaps even less so once his "music" is played. But it was enough to secure what he wanted: a verification badge for his Instagram account.

The coveted blue tick can be difficult to obtain and is supposed to assure that anyone who bears one is who they claim to be. A ProPublica investigation determined that Jugenburg's dubious alter ego was created as part of what appears to be the largest Instagram account verification scheme ever uncovered. With a generous greasing of cash, the operation transformed hundreds of clients into musical artists in an attempt to trick Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, into verifying their accounts and hopefully paving the way to lucrative endorsements and a coveted social status. Since at least 2021, at least hundreds of people -- including jewelers, crypto entrepreneurs, OnlyFans models and reality show TV stars -- were clients of a scheme to get improperly verified as musicians on Instagram, according to the investigation's findings and information from Meta.

Amazon is lagging its chief rival Flipkart in India on several key metrics and struggling to make inroads in smaller Indian cities and towns, according to a scathing report by investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein. TechCrunch: The American e-commerce giant's 2021 gross merchandise value in the country, where it has deployed over $6.5 billion, stood between $18 billion to $20 billion, lagging Flipkart's $23 billion, the analysts said in a report to clients Tuesday that was obtained by TechCrunch.

India is a key overseas market for Amazon, where it competes with tycoon Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Retail, which launched grocery shopping on WhatsApp this week, Walmart-owned Flipkart and social commerce startups SoftBank-backed Meesho and Tiger Global-backed DealShare. Amazon has so far offered "a weaker proposition in 'new' commerce" in the country, the report added. At stake is one of the world's last great growth markets. The e-commerce spending in India, the world's second largest internet market, is expected to double in size to over $130 billion by 2025.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Road to VR: NVIDIA, one of the tech sector's power players, is pushing the Universal Scene Description protocol as the foundation of interoperable content and experiences in the metaverse. In a recent post the company explains why it believes the protocol, originally invented by Pixar, fits the needs of the coming metaverse. Though the word metaverse is presently being used as a catchall for pretty much any multi-user application these days, the truth is that the vast majority of such platforms are islands unto themselves that have no connectivity to virtual spaces, people, or objects on other platforms. The 'real' metaverse, most seem to agree, must have at least some elements of interoperability, allowing users to seamlessly move from one virtual space to the next, much like we do today on the web. To that end, Nvidia is pushing Universal Scene Description (USD) as the "HTML of the metaverse," the company described in a recent post.

Much like HTML forms a description of a webpage -- which can be hosted anywhere on the internet -- and is retrieved and rendered locally by a web browser, USD is a protocol for describing complex virtual scenes which can be retrieved and rendered to varying degrees depending upon local hardware capabilities. With a 'USD browser' of sorts, Nvidia is suggesting that USD could be the common method by which virtual spaces are defined in a way that's easy for anyone to decipher and render. "[USD] includes features necessary for scaling to large data sets like lazy loading and efficient retrieval of time-sampled data," [writes Nvidia's Rev Lebaredian and Michael Kass]. "It is tremendously extensible, allowing users to customize data schemas, input and output formats, and methods for finding assets. In short, USD covers the very broad range of requirements that Pixar found necessary to make its feature films."

Indeed, CGI pioneer Pixar created USD to make collaboration on complex 3D animation projects easier. The company open-sourced the protocol back in 2015. USD is more than just a file format for 3D geometry. Not only can USD describe a complex scene with various objects, textures, and lighting, it can also include references to assets hosted elsewhere, property inheritance, and layering functionality which allows non-destructive editing of a single scene with efficient asset re-use. While Nvidia thinks USD is the right starting point for an interoperable platform, the company also acknowledges that "USD will need to evolve to meet the needs of the metaverse." On that front the company laid out a fairly extensive roadmap of features that it's working on for USD to successfully serve as the foundation of the metaverse. The newly formed Metaverse Standards Forum, of which Nvidia and thousands of other companies are members, has also pointed to USD as a promising foundation for interoperable virtual spaces and experiences.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Germany's three-month experiment with 9-euro tickets for a month's unlimited travel on regional train networks, trams and buses saved about 1.8 million tons of CO2 emissions, it has been claimed. Since its introduction on June 1 to cut fuel consumption and relieve a cost of living crisis, about 52 million tickets have been sold, a fifth of these to people who did not ordinarily use public transport. The scheme is due to end on Wednesday.

The Association of German Transport Companies (VDV), which carried out the research, said the number of people who switched from cars to public transport as a result of the 9-euro ticket was behind the saving in emissions. "The popularity of the 9-euro tickets had been unabated and the positive effect on it in tackling climate change is verifiable," the VDV said. It said the emissions saved were equivalent to the powering of 350,000 homes, and a similar drop would be seen over the period of a year if Germany introduced a speed limit on its motorways. A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 tons of carbon a year. The scheme is also believed to have helped keep inflation, currently at about 8%, slightly lower than it otherwise would have been. Additionally, the scheme "cut through swathes of complication ranging from myriad transport zones to ticket categories that differ greatly from region to region," reports The Guardian. "Just over 37% of people who bought the ticket used it to get to work, 50% used it for everyday journeys such as to go shopping or visit the doctor, 40% used it to visit people, and 33% used it for day trips."

"The government and regional administrations are under huge pressure to continue the ticket in some form. The expectation is that any replacement would be priced at least six times higher, but surveys show enthusiasm for such a scheme is high."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Google in November will prohibit Android VPN apps in its Play store from interfering with or blocking advertising, a change that may pose problems for some privacy applications. The updated Google Play policy, announced last month, will take effect on November 1. It states that only apps using the Android VPNService base class, and that function primarily as VPNs, can open a secure device-level tunnel to a remote service. Such VPNs, however, cannot "manipulate ads that can impact apps monetization."

The rules appear to be intended to deter data-grabbing VPN services, such as Facebook's discontinued Onavo, and to prevent ad fraud. The T&Cs spell out that developers must declare the use of VPNservice in their apps' Google Play listing, must encrypt data from the device to the VPN endpoint, and must comply with Developer Program Policies, particularly those related to ad fraud, permissions, and malware.

Blokada, a Sweden-based maker of an ad-blocking VPN app, worries this rule will hinder at least the previous iteration of its software, v5, and other privacy-oriented software. "Google claims to be cracking down on apps that are using the VPN service to track user data or rerouting user traffic to earn money through ads," Reda Labdaoui, marketing and sales manager at Blokada, wrote last week in a a forum post. "However, these policy changes also apply to apps that use the service to filter traffic locally on the device." Labdaoui suggests Blokada v6, which launched in June, should not be affected because it does filtering in the cloud without violating Google's device policies. But other apps may not be so fortunate.

Just over two years after its launch, Facebook is shutting down the Facebook Gaming app on October 28, 2022. Now, when you open the app, you'll see a banner stating that the app will no longer be available on iOS and Android after that date. The app also won't be available on the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. From a report: "Despite this news, our mission to connect players, fans and creators with the games they love hasn't changed, and you'll still be able to find your games, streamers and groups when you visit Gaming in the Facebook app," the notice reads. "We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to all of you for everything that you've done to build a thriving community for gamers and fans since this app first launched."

If you've been using the app, you can download your search data before the app is discontinued. The app launched in April 2020 toward the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way for users to watch their favorite streamers, play instant games and take part in gaming groups. Facebook experienced some hurdles trying to launch the app, as Apple rejected the app numerous times, citing its rules that prohibit apps with the main purpose of distributing casual games. Apple's rules forced Facebook to remove actual gameplay functionality from the app.

Google has introduced a new vulnerability rewards program to pay researchers who find security flaws in its open-source software or in the building blocks that its software is built on. It'll pay anywhere from $101 to $31,337 for information about bugs in projects like Angular, GoLang, and Fuchsia or for vulnerabilities in the third-party dependencies that are included in those projects' codebases. From a report: While it's important for Google to fix bugs in its own projects (and in the software that it uses to keep track of changes to its code, which the program also covers), perhaps the most interesting part is the bit about third-party dependencies. Programmers often use code from open-source projects so they don't continuously have to reinvent the same wheel. But since developers often directly import that code, as well as any updates to it, that introduces the possibility of supply chain attacks. That's when hackers don't target the code directly controlled by Google itself but go after these third-party dependencies instead.

As SolarWinds showed, this type of attack isn't limited to open-source projects. But in the past few years, we've seen several stories where big companies have had their security put at risk thanks to dependencies. There are ways to mitigate this sort of attack vector -- Google itself has begun vetting and distributing a subset of popular open-source programs, but it's almost impossible to check over all the code a project uses. Incentivizing the community to check through dependencies and first-party code helps Google cast a wider net.

ArsTechnica reports: In mid-August, the Federal Communications Commission succeeded in its long-held plan to reallocate a portion of the spectrum from car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication (known as V2X) to Wi-Fi instead. However, the FCC didn't reassign that entire region of bandwidth -- 30 MHz remains set aside for "intelligent transportation systems." And the FCC should grant automakers a waiver to allow them to start deploying cellular-based V2X (C-V2X) safety systems, said the National Transportation Safety Board in a letter it sent the FCC on Monday. The saga of V2X is a long-running one. The FCC originally saved the spectrum around 5.9 GHz for use with V2X in 1999, but despite keen interest from some automakers and industry groups like the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America), the technology still has not been deployed.

Seeing that failure, the FCC decided in 2020 to reallocate some of the bandwidth to Wi-Fi, leaving the frequencies between 5.895 and 5.925 GHz for V2X. ITS America and AASHTO sued the FCC to prevent this, but the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the FCC in August, allowing the commission to go through with its plan. This has dismayed the NTSB, which has written to the FCC as part of the commission's public comment period as it considers a waiver requested by automakers to deploy C-V2X technology. Conceptually, C-V2X works the same as the older V2X -- direct vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communication but using cellular radio protocols instead of the dedicated short-range radio communication protocol. The FCC should grant this waiver, said the NTSB, which notes in its letter that it has recommended that the nation adopt wireless-based collision-avoidance technology since 1995. Connected vehicle technology would reduce the ever-escalating carnage on US roads, said the NTSB, and the agency also urged the FCC to make sure that Wi-Fi devices don't encroach on the remaining 30 MHz of intelligent transportation system frequencies.

A massive Chinese database storing millions of faces and vehicle license plates was left exposed on the internet for months before it quietly disappeared in August. From a report: While its contents might seem unremarkable for China, where facial recognition is routine and state surveillance is ubiquitous, the sheer size of the exposed database is staggering. At its peak the database held over 800 million records, representing one of the biggest known data security lapses of the year by scale, second to a massive data leak of 1 billion records from a Shanghai police database in June. In both cases, the data was likely exposed inadvertently and as a result of human error.

The exposed data belongs to a tech company called Xinai Electronics based in Hangzhou on China's east coast. The company builds systems for controlling access for people and vehicles to workplaces, schools, construction sites, and parking garages across China. Its website touts its use of facial recognition for a range of purposes beyond building access, including personnel management, like payroll, monitoring employee attendance and performance, while its cloud-based vehicle license plate recognition system allows drivers to pay for parking in unattended garages that are managed by staff remotely. It's through a vast network of cameras that Xinai has amassed millions of face prints and license plates, which its website claims the data is "securely stored" on its servers. But it wasn't. Security researcher Anurag Sen found the company's exposed database on an Alibaba-hosted server in China and asked for TechCrunch's help in reporting the security lapse to Xinai. Sen said the database contained an alarming amount of information that was rapidly growing by the day, and included hundreds of millions of records and full web addresses of image files hosted on several domains owned by Xinai.

Among the Inflation Reduction Act's little-noticed yet potentially game-changing provisions: a big incentive for "smart glass," which can make buildings significantly more energy efficient. From a report: Buildings account for 27% of annual global carbon dioxide emissions, by one estimate. While eco-friendly buildings aren't as sexy or exciting as electric cars, anything that makes them greener is a big win for hitting climate goals. The IRA, which President Biden signed into law earlier this month, includes a 30% smart glass tax credit. While it didn't get much mainstream attention, that credit stands to increase adoption by reducing the effective cost of retrofitting old buildings or using smart glass in new construction.

Smart glass, also called "dynamic glass" or "electrochromic glass," differs from regular glass in that its tint level can be adjusted on demand -- think Transitions glasses, but for buildings. Smart glass contains thin layers of metal oxide. When small amounts of electricity are applied to those layers, ions move between them, changing the glass' tint level. When the summer sun is hitting the side of a building, the tint level can be increased, allowing visible light to pass but blocking some solar radiation -- thereby reducing incoming heat. Conversely, the tint can be decreased in colder seasons, allowing more natural heat to pass through. Smart glass can help reduce a building's heating or cooling energy needs by about 20%, per a U.S. Department of Energy estimate. Plus, if lots of buildings in a single city adopt smart glass, it can reduce the peak load on the local electric grid during times of heavy use.

Google hasn't yet approved Truth Social's Android app for distribution via its Play Store because of insufficient content moderation, a Google spokesperson tells Axios. From the report: Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes last week claimed the decision about when the app would be available on Android "is up to Google," but Google insists that the ball is in Truth Social's court. What Nunes is saying: "I don't know what's taking them so long."

What Google is saying: "On Aug. 19, we notified Truth Social of several violations of standard policies in their current app submission and reiterated that having effective systems for moderating user-generated content is a condition of our terms of service for any app to go live on Google Play." "Last week Truth Social wrote back acknowledging our feedback and saying that they are working on addressing these issues." A source says that Google's concerns relate to content such as physical threats and incitements to violence.

Responding to a three-year-old complaint, Microsoft today said that it would fix its unfair licensing terms in the EU. From a report: "We recognize the importance of a competitive environment in the European cloud provider market, in which smaller competitors can thrive," a new post to the Microsoft Corporate Blogs notes. "It is therefore critical for us to remain mindful of our responsibilities as a major technology company." In 2019, several Microsoft customers in the EU complained that the software giant was making it prohibitively expensive to run Windows and Office workloads on non-Azure cloud platforms like AWS and Google Cloud, triggering inquiries from EU antitrust regulators. Microsoft immediately responded that the complaints were "valid," but it did nothing to address them in any material way.

In May 2022, Microsoft finally came up with a response, announcing that it would make it less expensive for customers to run Microsoft software like Windows, Windows Server, Office, and SQL Server on non-Microsoft cloud platforms in the EU. But it wasn't until today that the software giant announced the details and timing of this plan. Now, Microsoft says that it will implement "major revisions and upgrades to its outsourcing and hosting terms" that go into effect on October 1, 2022. It will be easier and more cost-effective for customers to use Microsoft software on competing cloud platforms, it says, and for its partners to build hosted desktop and server solutions that meet their customers' needs.