Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

OpenAI’s rollercoaster November — the firing and swift rehiring of CEO Sam Altman — has brought the artificial intelligence firm closer to 49% stakeholder Microsoft. The tech giant now holds a non-voting seat on OpenAI’s board amid transition and expansion plans.

After Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI late last month, the startup’s employees threatened to leave and accept a blanket offer from Microsoft to hire them all. This was an audacious bluff and most staffers had no real interest in working for Microsoft, several current and former employees told Business Insider.

Amazon has told Britain’s antitrust authority its rival Microsoft uses business practices that restrict customer choice in the cloud computing market, the second major company to criticise the U.S. tech giant’s operations.

Microsoft has quietly reduced the amount of Microsoft Rewards points users can earn, enraging users who have used the points to offset some of Microsoft’s more expensive services, like Game Pass.

Google has called on Britain’s antitrust regulator to take action against Microsoft, claiming its business practices had left rivals at a significant disadvantage, according to a letter seen by Reuters.

Microsoft’s plan to pump 2.5 billion pounds ($3.2 billion) into Britain over the next three years, its single largest investment in the country to date, will underpin future growth in artificial intelligence (AI), the UK government said. The funding will more than double Microsoft’s datacentre footprint in Britain, providing the infrastructure crucial for new AI models to work.

Microsoft will soon let Windows 11 users in the European Economic Area (EEA) disable its Bing web search, remove Microsoft Edge, and even add custom web search providers — including Google if it’s willing to build one — into its Windows Search interface.

Today is Microsoft’s November 2023 Patch Tuesday, which includes security updates for a total of 58 flaws and five zero-day vulnerabilities. While fourteen remote code execution (RCE) bugs were fixed, Microsoft only rated one as critical. The three critical flaws fixed today are an Azure information disclosure bug, an RCE in Windows Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), and a Hyper-V escape flaw that allows the executions of programs on the host with SYSTEM privileges.

Microsoft has resolved a known issue causing significant delays for Microsoft 365 customers when saving attachments in Outlook Desktop. The bug is known to impact Outlook users trying to save an attachment to a network share, according to a support document published by Redmond when the bug was first acknowledged in July.

Microsoft publicly acknowledged a known issue causing Windows Server 2022 virtual machine (VM) blue screens and boot failures on VMware ESXi hosts.