Programming

Rust Creator Graydon Hoare Thanks Its Many Stakeholders - and Mozilla - on Rust's 10th Anniversary (rustfoundation.org) 35

Thursday was Rust's 10-year anniversary for its first stable release. "To say I'm surprised by its trajectory would be a vast understatement," writes Rust's original creator Graydon Hoare. "I can only thank, congratulate, and celebrate everyone involved... In my view, Rust is a story about a large community of stakeholders coming together to design, build, maintain, and expand shared technical infrastructure." It's a story with many actors:

- The population of developers the language serves who express their needs and constraints through discussion, debate, testing, and bug reports arising from their experience writing libraries and applications.

- The language designers and implementers who work to satisfy those needs and constraints while wrestling with the unexpected consequences of each decision.

- The authors, educators, speakers, translators, illustrators, and others who work to expand the set of people able to use the infrastructure and work on the infrastructure.

- The institutions investing in the project who provide the long-term funding and support necessary to sustain all this work over decades.

All these actors have a common interest in infrastructure.

Rather than just "systems programming", Hoare sees Rust as a tool for building infrastructure itself, "the robust and reliable necessities that enable us to get our work done" — a wide range that includes everything from embedded and IoT systems to multi-core systems. So the story of "Rust's initial implementation, its sustained investment, and its remarkable resonance and uptake all happened because the world needs robust and reliable infrastructure, and the infrastructure we had was not up to the task." Put simply: it failed too often, in spectacular and expensive ways. Crashes and downtime in the best cases, and security vulnerabilities in the worst. Efficient "infrastructure-building" languages existed but they were very hard to use, and nearly impossible to use safely, especially when writing concurrent code. This produced an infrastructure deficit many people felt, if not everyone could name, and it was growing worse by the year as we placed ever-greater demands on computers to work in ever more challenging environments...

We were stuck with the tools we had because building better tools like Rust was going to require an extraordinary investment of time, effort, and money. The bootstrap Rust compiler I initially wrote was just a few tens of thousands of lines of code; that was nearing the limits of what an unfunded solo hobby project can typically accomplish. Mozilla's decision to invest in Rust in 2009 immediately quadrupled the size of the team — it created a team in the first place — and then doubled it again, and again in subsequent years. Mozilla sustained this very unusual, very improbable investment in Rust from 2009-2020, as well as funding an entire browser engine written in Rust — Servo — from 2012 onwards, which served as a crucial testbed for Rust language features.

Rust and Servo had multiple contributors at Samsung, Hoare acknowledges, and Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, and others "hired key developers and contributed hardware and management resources to its ongoing development." Rust itself "sits atop LLVM" (developed by researchers at UIUC and later funded by Apple, Qualcomm, Google, ARM, Huawei, and many other organizations), while Rust's safe memory model "derives directly from decades of research in academia, as well as academic-industrial projects like Cyclone, built by AT&T Bell Labs and Cornell."

And there were contributions from "interns, researchers, and professors at top academic research programming-language departments, including CMU, NEU, IU, MPI-SWS, and many others." JetBrains and the Rust-Analyzer OpenCollective essentially paid for two additional interactive-incremental reimplementations of the Rust frontend to provide language services to IDEs — critical tools for productive, day-to-day programming. Hundreds of companies and other institutions contributed time and money to evaluate Rust for production, write Rust programs, test them, file bugs related to them, and pay their staff to fix or improve any shortcomings they found. Last but very much not least: Rust has had thousands and thousands of volunteers donating years of their labor to the project. While it might seem tempting to think this is all "free", it's being paid for! Just less visibly than if it were part of a corporate budget.

All this investment, despite the long time horizon, paid off. We're all better for it.

He looks ahead with hope for a future with new contributors, "steady and diversified streams of support," and continued reliability and compatability (including "investment in ever-greater reliability technology, including the many emerging formal methods projects built on Rust.")

And he closes by saying Rust's "sustained, controlled, and frankly astonishing throughput of work" has "set a new standard for what good tools, good processes, and reliable infrastructure software should be like.

"Everyone involved should be proud of what they've built."
Hardware

Linux Swap Table Code Shows The Potential For Huge Performance Gains (phoronix.com) 87

A new set of 27 Linux kernel patches introduces a "Swap Tables" mechanism aimed at enhancing virtual memory management. As Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports, "the hope is for lower memory use, higher performance, dynamic swap allocation and growth, greater extensibility, and other improvements over the existing swap code within the Linux kernel." From the report: Engineer Kairui Song with Tencent posted the Swap Table patch series today for implementing the design ideas discussed in recent months by kernel developers. The results are very exciting so let's get straight to it: "With this series, swap subsystem will have a ~20-30% performance gain from basic sequential swap to heavy workloads, for both 4K and mTHP folios. The idle memory usage is already much lower, the average memory consumption is still the same or will also be even lower (with further works). And this enables many more future optimizations, with better defined swap operations." "The patches also clean-up and address various historical issues with the SWAP subsystem," notes Larabel.

Context: In Linux, swap space acts as an overflow for RAM, storing inactive memory pages on disk to free up RAM for active processes. Traditional swap mechanisms are limited in flexibility and performance. The proposed "Swap Tables" aim to address these issues by allowing more efficient and dynamic management of swap space, potentially leading to better system responsiveness and resource utilization.
Open Source

Microsoft Is Open-Sourcing Its Linux Integration Services Automation Image-Testing Service (zdnet.com) 22

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Would you believe Microsoft has announced a new Linux distribution service for its Azure cloud service? You should. For many years, the most popular operating system on Azure has not been Windows Server, it's been Linux. Last time I checked, in 2024, Azure Linux Platforms Group Program Manager Jack Aboutboul told me that 60% of Azure Marketplace offerings and more than 60% of virtual machine cores use Linux. Those figures mean it's sensible for Microsoft to make it easier than ever for Linux distributors to release first-class Linux distros on Azure. The tech giant is taking this step, said Andrew Randall, principal manager for the Azure Core Linux product management team, by making "Azure Image Testing for Linux (AITL) available 'as a service' to distro publishers."

ATIL is built on Microsoft's Linux Integration Services Automation project (LISA). Microsoft's Linux Systems Group originally developed this initiative to validate Linux OS images. LISA is a Linux quality validation system with two parts: a test framework to drive test execution and a set of test suites to verify Linux distribution quality. LISA is now open-sourced under the MIT License. The system enables continuous testing of Linux images, covering a wide range of scenarios from kernel updates to complex cloud-native workloads. [...] Specifically, the ATIL service is designed to streamline the deployment, testing, and management of Linux images on Azure. The service builds on the company's internal expertise and open-source tools to provide:

- Curated, Azure-optimized, security-hardened Linux images
- Automated quality assurance and compliance testing for Linux distributions
- Seamless integration with Azure's cloud-native services and Kubernetes environments
Krum Kashan, Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program manager, said in a statement: "While numerous testing tools are available for validating Linux kernels, guest OS images, and user space packages across various cloud platforms, finding a comprehensive testing framework that addresses the entire platform stack remains a significant challenge. A robust framework is essential, one that seamlessly integrates with Azure's environment while providing coverage for major testing tools, such as LTP and kselftest, and covers critical areas like networking, storage, and specialized workloads, including Confidential VMs, HPC, and GPU scenarios. This unified testing framework is invaluable for developers, Linux distribution providers, and customers who build custom kernels and images."
Iphone

Apple To Lean on AI Tool To Help iPhone Battery Lifespan for Devices in iOS 19 (bloomberg.com) 25

Apple is planning to use AI technology to address a frequent source of customer frustration: the iPhone's battery life. From a report: The company is planning an AI-powered battery management mode for iOS 19, an iPhone software update due in September, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The enhancement will analyze how a person uses their device and make adjustments to conserve energy, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the service hasn't been announced.

To create the technology -- part of the Apple Intelligence platform -- the company is using battery data it has collected from users' devices to understand trends and make predictions for when it should lower the power draw of certain applications or features. There also will be a lock-screen indicator showing how long it will take to charge up the device, said the people.

AI

Can an MCP-Powered AI Client Automatically Hack a Web Server? (youtube.com) 12

Exposure-management company Tenable recently discussed how the MCP tool-interfacing framework for AI can be "manipulated for good, such as logging tool usage and filtering unauthorized commands." (Although "Some of these techniques could be used to advance both positive and negative goals.")

Now an anonymous Slashdot reader writes: In a demonstration video put together by security researcher Seth Fogie, an AI client given a simple prompt to 'Scan and exploit' a web server leverages various connected tools via MCP (nmap, ffuf, nuclei, waybackurls, sqlmap, burp) to find and exploit discovered vulnerabilities without any additional user interaction

As Tenable illustrates in their MCP FAQ, "The emergence of Model Context Protocol for AI is gaining significant interest due to its standardization of connecting external data sources to large language models (LLMs). While these updates are good news for AI developers, they raise some security concerns." With over 12,000 MCP servers and counting, what does this all lead to and when will AI be connected enough for a malicious prompt to cause serious impact?

Open Source

Pentagon Targets Open Source Security Risks in Software Procurement Overhaul (theregister.com) 39

The Department of Defense is revamping its "outdated" software procurement systems through a new Software Fast Track initiative. The SWFT program aims to reform how software is acquired, tested, and authorized with security as the primary focus. "Widespread use of open source software, with contributions from developers worldwide, presents a significant and ongoing challenge," DoD CIO Katie Arrington wrote in the initiative memo.

The DoD currently "lacks visibility into the origins and security of software code," hampering security assurance efforts. The initiative will establish verification procedures for software products and expedite authorization processes. Multiple requests for information are running until late May seeking industry input, including how to leverage AI for software authorization and define effective supply chain risk management requirements.

The push comes amid recent DoD security incidents, from malware campaigns targeting procurement systems to sensitive information leaks.
The Military

Stratolaunch's Talon-A2 Prototype Goes Hypersonic After Dropping From World's Largest Airplane (space.com) 13

Stratolaunch successfully flew its uncrewed Talon-A2 prototype to hypersonic speeds twice -- once in December and again in March. "We've now demonstrated hypersonic speed, added the complexity of a full runway landing with prompt payload recovery and proven reusability," Stratolaunch President and CEO Zachary Krevor said in a statement on Monday. "Both flights were great achievements for our country, our company and our partners." Space.com reports: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen established Stratolaunch in 2011, with the goal of air-launching satellites from a giant carrier plane called Roc, which has a wingspan of 385 feet (117 meters). That vision changed after Allen's 2018 death, however; the company is now using Roc as a platform to test hypersonic technology.

Hypersonic vehicles are highly maneuverable craft capable of flying at least five times the speed of sound. Their combination of speed and agility make them much more difficult to track and intercept than traditional ballistic missiles. The United States, China and other countries view hypersonic tech as vital for national security, and are therefore developing and testing such gear at an ever-increasing pace. Stratolaunch, Roc and the winged, rocket-powered Talon-2A are part of this evolving picture, as the two newly announced test flights show. They were both conducted for the U.S. military's Test Resource Management Center Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) program, under a partnership with the Virginia-based company Leidos.

On both occasions, Roc lifted off from California and dropped Talon-2A over the Pacific Ocean. The hypersonic vehicle then powered its way to a landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base, on California's Central Coast. "These flights were a huge success for our program and for the nation," Scott Wilson, MACH-TB program manager, said in the same statement. "The data collected from the experiments flown on the initial Talon-A flight has now been analyzed and the results are extremely positive," he added. "The opportunity for technology testing at a high rate is highly valuable as we push the pace of hypersonic testing. The MACH-TB program is pleased with the multiple flight successes while looking forward to future flight tests with Stratolaunch."

Government

CISA Budget Faces Possible $500 Million Cut (theregister.com) 50

President Trump's proposed 2026 budget seeks to cut nearly $500 million from CISA, accusing the agency of prioritizing censorship over cybersecurity and election protection. "The proposed cuts -- which are largely symbolic at this stage as they need to be approved by Congress -- are framed as a purge of the so-called 'censorship industrial complex,' a term the White House uses to describe CISA's work countering misinformation," reports The Register. From the report: In its fiscal 2024 budget request, the agency had asked [PDF] for a total of just over $3 billion to safeguard the nation's online security across both government and private sectors. The enacted budget that year was about $34 million lower than the previous year's. Now, a deep cut has been proposed [PDF], as the Trump administration decries the agency's past work tackling the spread of misinformation on the web by America's enemies, as well as the agency's efforts safeguarding election security. [...]

"The budget eliminates programs focused on so-called misinformation and propaganda as well as external engagement offices such as international affairs," it reads [PDF]. "These programs and offices were used as a hub in the censorship industrial complex to violate the First Amendment, target Americans for protected speech, and target the President. CISA was more focused on censorship than on protecting the nation's critical systems, and put them at risk due to poor management and inefficiency, as well as a focus on self-promotion."

Microsoft

Microsoft Labels Some Fired Staff as 'Good Attrition', Imposes Two-Year Rehiring Ban (businessinsider.com) 57

Microsoft has instituted a stringent new performance management system that places ousted employees on a two-year rehiring block list and categorizes their departures as "good attrition," Business Insider reported Tuesday, citing internal documents. The company now tracks staff departures it considers beneficial, mirroring Amazon's "unregretted attrition" metric, though no specific targets have been established yet.

Microsoft recently terminated 2,000 underperforming employees without severance and implemented a new performance improvement plan (PIP). Employees facing performance issues now must choose between entering the PIP or accepting a "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" with 16 weeks of pay.

Further reading: Microsoft Offers Underperformers Cash To Quit.
IT

WSJ: Tech-Industry Workers Now 'Miserable', Fearing Layoffs, Working Longer Hours (msn.com) 166

"Not so long ago, working in tech meant job security, extravagant perks and a bring-your-whole-self-to-the-office ethos rare in other industries," writes the Wall Street Journal.

But now tech work "looks like a regular job," with workers "contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same pay." Now employees find themselves doing the work of multiple laid-off colleagues. Some have lost jobs only to be rehired into positions that aren't eligible for raises or stock grants. Changing jobs used to be a surefire way to secure a raise; these days, asking for more money can lead to a job offer being withdrawn.

The shift in tech has been building slowly. For years, demand for workers outstripped supply, a dynamic that peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic. Big tech companies like Meta and Salesforce admitted they brought on too many employees. The ensuing downturn included mass layoffs that started in 2022...

[S]ome longtime tech employees say they no longer recognize the companies they work for. Management has become more focused on delivering the results Wall Street expects. Revenue remains strong for tech giants, but they're pouring resources into costly AI infrastructure, putting pressure on cash flow. With the industry all grown up, a heads-down, keep-quiet mentality has taken root, workers say... Tech workers are still well-paid compared with other sectors, but currently there's a split in the industry. Those working in AI — and especially those with Ph.D.s — are seeing their compensation packages soar. But those without AI experience are finding they're better off staying where they are, because companies aren't paying what they were a few years ago.

Other excepts from the Wall Street Journal's article:
  • "I'm hearing of people having 30 direct reports," says David Markley, who spent seven years at Amazon and is now an executive coach for workers at large tech companies. "It's not because the companies don't have the money. In a lot of ways, it's because of AI and the narratives out there about how collapsing the organization is better...."
  • Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a group of employees in February that 60 hours a week was the sweet spot of productivity, in comments reported earlier by the New York Times.
  • One recruiter at Meta who had been laid off by the company was rehired into her old role last year, but with a catch: She's now classified as a "short-term employee." Her contract is eligible for renewal, but she doesn't get merit pay increases, promotions or stock. The recruiter says she's responsible for a volume of work that used to be spread among several people. The company refers to being loaded with such additional responsibilities as "agility."
  • More than 50,000 tech workers from over 100 companies have been laid off in 2025, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts and crowdsources lists of laid off workers...

Even before those 50,000 layoffs in 2025, Silicon Valley's Mercury News was citing some interesting statistics from economic research/consulting firm Beacon Economics. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, the San Francisco Bay Area added 74,700 tech jobs But then in 2023 and 2024 the industry had slashed even more tech jobs -- 80,200 -- for a net loss (over five years) of 5,500.

So is there really a cutback in perks and a fear of layoffs that's casting a pall over the industry? share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Do you agree with the picture that's being painted by the Wall Street Journal?

They told their readers that tech workers are now "just like the rest of us: miserable at work."


Microsoft

Microsoft's Big AI Hire Can't Match OpenAI (newcomer.co) 25

An anonymous reader shares a report: At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT's growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users.

OpenAI's iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft's best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft's consumer AI team and the man who's been leading it for the past year, Mustafa Suleyman. Microsoft brought Suleyman aboard in March of 2024, along with much of the talent at his struggling AI startup Inflection, in return for a $650 million licensing fee that made Inflection's investors whole, and then some.

[...] Yet from the very start, people inside the company told me they were skeptical. Many outsiders have struggled to make an impact or even survive at Microsoft, a company that's full of lifers who cut their tech teeth in a different era. My skeptical sources noted Suleyman's previous run at a big company hadn't gone well, with Google stripping him of some management responsibilities following complaints of how he treated staff, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. There was also much eye-rolling at the fact that Suleyman was given the title of CEO of Microsoft AI. That designation is typically reserved for the top executive at companies it acquires and lets operate semi-autonomously, such as LinkedIn or Github.

Businesses

Intel Says Employees Must Return To the Office 4 Days a Week (oregonlive.com) 125

New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has mandated that employees return to the office four days a week starting September 1 to boost collaboration and decision-making. Tan also signaled upcoming job cuts and organizational changes, including a flatter management structure and fewer meetings. "When we spend time together in person, it fosters more engaging and productive discussion and debate," Tan wrote in a note to employees posted on Intel's website Thursday. "It drives better and faster decision-making. And it strengthens our connection with colleagues." Oregon Live reports: Intel factory workers and many researchers are already on site every day, in cleanrooms and labs. But Intel has thousands of employees in corporate roles who have spent at least part of their time working from home since the pandemic. The company adopted a "hybrid-first" approach in 2021, allowing most employees the flexibility to work from home much of the time. More recently, it sought to have workers on site about three days a week.

"Adherence to this policy has been uneven at best," Tan said Thursday. "I strongly believe that our sites need to be vibrant hubs of collaboration that reflect our culture in action." Intel is Oregon's largest corporate employer, with 20,000 employees in the state, so bringing workers back to the office will have a big impact and could set a benchmark for other organizations. [...] On Thursday, Tan said he wants fewer and smaller meetings to free up employees to do their work. He also told employees to expect "several months" of job cuts, but Tan didn't specify how many positions he plans to eliminate.

Businesses

You'll Soon Manage a Team of AI Agents, Says Microsoft's Work Trend Report (zdnet.com) 56

ZipNada shares a report from ZDNet: Microsoft's latest research identifies a new type of organization known as the Frontier Firm, where on-demand intelligence requirements are managed by hybrid teams of AI agents and humans. The report identified real productivity gains from implementing AI into organizations, with one of the biggest being filling the capacity gap -- as many as 80% of the global workforce, both employees and leaders, report having too much work to do, but not enough time or energy to do it. ... According to the report, business leaders need to separate knowledge workers from knowledge work, acknowledging that humans who can complete higher-level tasks, such as creativity and judgment, should not be stuck answering emails. Rather, in the same way working professionals say they send emails or create pivot tables, soon they will be able to say they create and manage agents -- and Frontier Firms are showing the potential possibilities of this approach. ... "Everyone will need to manage agents," said Cambron. "I think it's exciting to me to think that, you know, with agents, every early-career person will be able to experience management from day one, from their first job."
Open Source

AMD Publishes Open-Source GIM Driver For GPU Virtualization, Radeon 'In The Roadmap' (phoronix.com) 3

AMD has open-sourced its "GPU-IOV Module" for enabling SR-IOV-based virtualization on Instinct accelerators using the Linux kernel and KVM hypervisor, with features like GPU scheduling and VF/PF management. Notably, AMD plans to extend this virtualization support to client Radeon GPUs. Phoronix reports: The AMD GPU-IOV Module is for the Linux kernel and for providing SR-IOV based hardware virtualization in conjunction with the KVM hypervisor. GIM provides the GPU IOV virtualization, virtual function (VF) configuration and enablement, GPU scheduling for world switch, hang detection and FLR reset, and PF/VF handshake capabilities. Initially the AMD GIM driver is for the Instinct MI300X hardware and tested atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with ROCm 6.4. Those interested can find the AMD GIM code currently via GitHub. It's not laid out in the repository or any other public communications I've seen what any upstreaming plans are for this GIM driver to get it into the mainline Linux kernel.
The Courts

New Jersey Sues Property Management Software Firm RealPage, Says Collusion With Landlords Drives Up Rents (reuters.com) 17

New Jersey sued the property management software company RealPage, accusing it and 10 of the state's largest landlords of conspiring to drive up residential rents, violating federal and state antitrust laws and New Jersey consumer fraud laws. From a report: The complaint filed on Wednesday by state Attorney General Matthew Platkin said the defendants, including AvalonBay Communities illegally used RealPage's revenue management software and algorithms to inflate rents for apartments in multifamily properties.

New Jersey said the defendants also quietly exchanged non-public data such as lease prices, amenities, concessions offered, property values and housing inventory, in order to align pricing and avoid competition to lower rents. The state said the collusion has inflated rents for hundreds of thousands of residents, with half of low-income renters paying more than 30% of their gross incomes toward rent. Many real estate and financial experts recommend a 30% limit.

Microsoft

Microsoft Implements Stricter Performance Management System With Two-Year Rehire Ban (businessinsider.com) 52

Microsoft is intensifying performance scrutiny through new policies that target underperforming employees, according to an internal email from Chief People Officer Amy Coleman. The company has introduced a formalized Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) system that gives struggling employees two options: accept improvement targets or exit the company with a Global Voluntary Separation Agreement.

The policy establishes a two-year rehire blackout period for employees who leave with low performance ratings (zero to 60% in Microsoft's 0-200 scale) or during a PIP process. These employees are also barred from internal transfers while still at the company.

Coming months after Microsoft terminated 2,000 underperformers without severance, the company is also developing AI-supported tools to help managers "prepare for constructive or challenging conversations" through interactive practice environments. "Our focus remains on enabling high performance to achieve our priorities spanning security, quality, and leading AI," Coleman wrote, emphasizing that these changes aim to create "a globally consistent and transparent experience" while fostering "accountability and growth."
AI

Cursor AI's Own Support Bot Hallucinated Its Usage Policy (theregister.com) 9

Cursor AI users recently encountered an ironic AI failure when the platform's support bot falsely claimed a non-existent login restriction policy. Co-founder Michael Truell apologized for the issue, clarified that no such policy exists, and attributed the mishap to AI hallucination and a session management bug. The Register reports: Users of the Cursor editor, designed to generate and fix source code in response to user prompts, have sometimes been booted from the software when trying to use the app in multiple sessions on different machines. Some folks who inquired about the inability to maintain multiple logins for the subscription service across different machines received a reply from the company's support email indicating this was expected behavior. But the person on the other end of that email wasn't a person at all, but an AI support bot. And it evidently made that policy up.

In an effort to placate annoyed users this week, Michael Truell co-founder of Cursor creator Anysphere, published a note to Reddit to apologize for the snafu. "Hey! We have no such policy," he wrote. "You're of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines. Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line AI support bot. We did roll out a change to improve the security of sessions, and we're investigating to see if it caused any problems with session invalidation." Truell added that Cursor provides an interface for viewing active sessions in its settings and apologized for the confusion.

In a post to the Hacker News discussion of the SNAFU, Truell again apologized and acknowledged that something had gone wrong. "We've already begun investigating, and some very early results: Any AI responses used for email support are now clearly labeled as such. We use AI-assisted responses as the first filter for email support." He said the developer who raised this issue had been refunded. The session logout issue, now fixed, appears to have been the result of a race condition that arises on slow connections and spawns unwanted sessions.

The Internet

Verizon Consumer CEO Says Net Neutrality 'Went Literally Nowhere' (theverge.com) 76

Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath has declared that net neutrality regulations "went literally nowhere." Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules. "I don't know what net neutrality does," Sampath told The Verge. "I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve with net neutrality."

When pressed about potential anti-competitive behaviors like zero-rating services, Sampath deflected by focusing exclusively on traffic management concerns, arguing that networks require prioritization capabilities during congestion. "For traffic management purposes, we need to have some controls in the network," he stated. The interview comes as Verizon faces a different regulatory challenge from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who is holding up Verizon's Frontier acquisition over the company's diversity initiatives.
United States

US Halts $5 Billion New York Offshore Wind Project Mid-Build 188

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York's coast. Norwegian developer Equinor announced yesterday that it received notice from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) ordering Empire Wind 1 to halt all activities on the outer continental shelf until BOEM has completed its review. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted this tweet yesterday: ".@Interior, in consultation with @HowardLutnick, is directing @BOEM to immediately halt all construction activities on the Empire Wind Project until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis."

Burgum gave no indication of what insufficiencies there were in the approval process for the fully permitted offshore wind project, despite Trump's recent declaration of a national energy emergency that speeds up permitting processes. The commercial lease for the 810-megawatt (MW) Empire Wind 1's federal offshore wind area was signed in March 2017 during the first Trump administration. It was approved by the Biden administration in November 2023 and began construction in 2024. The project is being developed under contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Empire Wind 1, which was due to come online in 2027, has the potential to power 500,000 New York homes.
Equinor says it's considering appealing the order.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued a statement: "Every single day, I'm working to make energy more affordable, reliable and abundant in New York and the federal government should be supporting those efforts rather than undermining them. Empire Wind 1 is already employing hundreds of New Yorkers, including 1,000 good-paying union jobs as part of a growing sector that has already spurred significant economic development and private investment throughout the state and beyond. As Governor, I will not allow this federal overreach to stand. I will fight this every step of the way to protect union jobs, affordable energy and New York's economic future."
Software

Companies Are Slashing Their SaaS Spends, UBS Says 55

Enterprise software optimization is accelerating as companies face potential budget freezes in 2025, according to new research from UBS reviewed by Slashdot. Following discussions with two leading SaaSOps vendors, analysts report that 21% of organizations cut their SaaS spend last year, with a staggering 30% of existing licenses sitting unused.

SaaS rationalization efforts are targeting familiar categories: collaboration tools (Zoom, Teams, Slack), project management solutions, and sales engagement platforms. Back-office systems like Workday remain relatively insulated due to their stickiness and pricing leverage, while front-office software faces mixed pressures. "Companies were looking to return to spend growth in 2HF25 from cost cutting but now that might no longer be the case," one CEO told UBS.

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