To make America the "crypto capital of the planet," former U.S. President Donald Trump promised crypto-friendly policies, writes Politico, which "could have a new beneficiary: his own family." Trump has vowed to enact an array of pro-crypto policies in a bid to win votes — and campaign cash — from digital asset enthusiasts in recent months. Now, he's weaving the overtures into his pitch for his sons' forthcoming startup... It remains unclear what the Trump sons' crypto venture will look like. They have been teasing their plans to launch it for weeks, in part by positioning it as an alternative to the use of big banks.... ["Be defiant," reads the tagline on their World Liberty Financial home page — with nothing more than its name and the words "Coming soon."]

Trump's sons took over control of their father's business, the Trump Organization, after he became president in 2017, but he retained ownership of the company... It is unclear whether the crypto startup would be launched as part of the Trump Organization or as a separate entity. Either way, ethics experts and watchdogs say the crypto business could create the appearance of a conflict of interest if Trump wins back the White House this fall... From an "optics perspective, it's terrible," said Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush and later ran for Congress as a Democrat. But he said it wouldn't violate any ethics laws.

The family venture is the latest way Trump has embraced the digital asset industry, which is pouring more than $160 million into the 2024 elections as it seeks to help elect allies up and down the ballot. Trump has also marketed his own line of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which are digital images of the former president that fans can purchase for $99... Trump's NFT sales could also raise ethics concerns, said Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington....

"[P]rior conflicts and illegalities took advantage of preexisting loopholes," said Norman Eisen, an ethics lawyer who served in the Obama White House and later helped build the first impeachment case against Trump. "Here, Trump appears to be promising to create the loopholes while his family is simultaneously designing a business venture to exploit them."
The article notes that Trump promoted his son's crypto venture on X this week with audio from Trump's speech at a crypto conference in July. "He first revealed his pro-crypto leanings — after previously deriding digital currency — at a Mar-a-Lago event in May with supporters who bought his crypto-linked digital trading cards..."

"Trump is also facing new questions about what he would do with his stake in the parent company of the social media service Truth Social," the article adds. (Although this week the stock hit a new low. After losing 50% of its value in six weeks, it's dropped below $20 per share for the first time since it started publicly trading...)

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The Contingency Contingent, is Leigh Claire La Berge's amazing tale of what she calls her "fake job in Y2K preparedness." La Berge offers an insider's view of the madness that ensued when Y2K panic gave rise to seemingly-limitless spending at mega-corporations for massive enterprise-wide Y2K remediation projects led by management consulting firms that left clients with little to show for their money. (La Berge was an analyst for consulting firm Arthur Andersen, where "the Andersen position was that 'Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem'.... At a certain point all that had happened yesterday was our documenting, so then we documented that. Then, exponentially, we had to document ourselves documenting our own documentation."). In what reads like the story treatment for an Office Space sequel, La Berge writes that it was a fake job "because Andersen was faking it."
From the article: The firm spent the late 1990s certifying fraudulent financial statements from Enron, the Texas-based energy company that made financial derivatives a household phrase, until that company went bankrupt in a cloud of scandal and suicide and Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice, surrendered its accounting licenses, and shuttered. But that was later.

Finally, it was a fake job because the problem that the Conglomerate had hired Andersen to solve was not real, at least not in the sense that it needed to be solved or that Andersen could solve it. The problem was known variously as Y2K, or the Year 2000, or the Y2K Bug, and it prophesied that on January 1, 2000, computers the world over would be unable to process the thousandth-digit change from 19 to 20 as 1999 rolled into 2000 and would crash, taking with them whatever technology they were operating, from email to television to air-traffic control to, really, the entire technological infrastructure of global modernity. Hospitals might have emergency power generators to stave off the worst effects (unless the generators, too, succumbed to the Y2K Bug), but not advertising firms.

With a world-ending scenario on the horizon, employment standards were being relaxed. The end of the millennium had produced a tight labor market in knowledge workers, and new kinds of companies, called dot-coms, were angling to dominate the emergent world of e-commerce. Flush with cash, these companies were hoovering up any possessors of knowledge they could find. Friends from my gradeless college whose only experience in business had been parking-lot drug deals were talking stock options.
Looking back, the author remembers being "surprised by how quickly Y2K disappeared from office discourse as though censored..."

Their upcoming book is called Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke.

Paramount Global has agreed to merge with Skydance in a significant deal that will see the Redstone family relinquish control of the storied movie studio and media company. The merger, valued at over $8 billion, involves a consortium including RedBird Capital Partners and KKR, and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2025, subject to regulatory approval. CNBC reports: The deal gives National Amusements an enterprise value of $2.4 billion, which includes $1.75 billion in equity. Paramount's class A shareholders will receive $23 apiece in cash or stock, while class B stockholders will receive $15 per share, equating to a cash consideration totaling $4.5 billion available to public shareholders. As part of the deal Skydance will also inject $1.5 billion of capital into Paramount's balance sheet. "It's a new Paramount; it's not just a catchphrase," said RedBird's Jeff Shell, former CEO of NBCUniversal, on a call with investors Monday. "We think it's going to be a new day for these combined assets."

Skydance founder David Ellison will lead the combined company as CEO, while Shell will serve as president. The merger is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close in the third quarter of 2025. It also includes a 45-day "go-shop period," in which the Paramount special committee can solicit other offers. A completed Skydance merger would mark a major shift for the ownership of Paramount, as well as for Hollywood as a whole. The Redstone family has long controlled the movie studio -- known for films such as "The Godfather," "Top Gun" and "Forrest Gump" -- as well as the CBS broadcast network and cable TV networks including MTV and Nickelodeon. Now, Ellison, 41, son of Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison, will be at the helm of a major movie studio and among Hollywood's elite. "It's been a long time since a creative executive ran one of the big Hollywood companies," Shell said on Monday's call. "And I think it's really important when creative is the core."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: Gilead's experimental twice-yearly medicine to prevent HIV was 100% effective in a late-stage trial, the company said Thursday. None of the roughly 2,000 women in the trial who received the lenacapavir shot had contracted HIV by an interim analysis, prompting the independent data monitoring committee to recommend Gilead unblind the Phase 3 trial and offer the treatment to everyone in the study. Other participants had received standard daily pills.
The company expects to share more data by early next year, the article adds, and if its results are positive, the company could bring its drug to the market as soon as late 2025. (By Fridayt the company's stock price had risen nearly 12%.)

There's already other HIV-preventing options, the article points out, but they're taken by "only a little more than one-third of people in the U.S. who could benefit...according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." Part of the problem?

"Daily pills dominate the market, but drugmakers are now focusing on developing longer-acting shots... Health policymakers and advocates hope longer-acting options could reach people who can't or don't want to take a daily pill and better prevent the spread of a virus that caused about 1 million new infections globally in 2022."

The WeWork founder Adam Neumann has shelved his bid to acquire the bankrupt shared office space provider. From a report: It emerged earlier this year that Neumann, who was ousted from the business in 2019 following a botched attempt to take it public on the stock market, was seeking to buy the business. His new real estate venture, Flow Global, submitted a bid of more than $500m to take over WeWork and its assets. On Tuesday morning, however, Neumann confirmed that Flow was walking away from his dream to take back control of the firm.

"For several months, we tried to work constructively with WeWork to create a strategy that would allow it to thrive," he told DealBook. "Instead, the company looks to be emerging from bankruptcy with a plan that appears unrealistic and unlikely to succeed." WeWork, with over $13bn in long-term leases, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last November in order to renegotiate these agreements. At its peak, the company had been valued at $47bn as investors including the Japanese multinational SoftBank lined up to back it. As it prepared to go public in 2019, however, analysts gave it a far lower valuation. After it eventually went public, in 2021, its market valuation tumbled to less than $50m.

Sony Pictures Entertainment and Apollo Global Management have made a bid to acquire Paramount for $26 billion and take it private. Variety reports: Sony and private-equity giant Apollo submitted a letter with the non-binding offer Wednesday to Paramount Global, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The bid, which would include the assumption of debt and could be negotiated, would be a premium over the company's current $22 billion enterprise value. Shares of Paramount Global jumped 13% on news of the offer from Apollo and Sony Entertainment, closing at $13.86 per share Thursday.

It's not clear how Paramount's board will proceed on the Sony-Apollo proposal, having rejected previous overtures from the private-equity firm. The company has an exclusive negotiating window with Skydance that ends Friday (May 3), but discussions among the parties could extend beyond that. If it happens, the combination of Sony Pictures with Paramount Pictures would likely result in mass layoffs -- and knock the number of major Hollywood studios from five to four, after Disney took over 20th Century. Sony Corp., which acquired Columbia Pictures in 1990 for $3.5 billion, is the largest studio operator in the industry that does not have a broad-scale direct-to-consumer streaming play.

Under the proposed bid with Apollo, Sony would be the majority owner of the combined company. Sony Corp. would merge Sony Pictures Entertainment into a joint venture with Paramount Global. Sony and Apollo would both contribute cash to finance the deal. What's unclear is what would happen to the 28 local TV stations CBS owns; FCC rules bar foreign entities (i.e. Tokyo-based Sony) from having majority ownership control of broadcast TV stations, so Sony would need to carve out a separate U.S. ownership structure for the station group.

In the Skydance scenario, Redstone would sell her stake in National Amusements, which holds 77% of the voting shares in Paramount Global, to Skydance, whereupon Skydance would merge with Paramount Global in an all-stock deal that would value Skydance at roughly $5 billion. Paramount Global would remain a publicly traded company. Redstone would receive up to $2 billion from the Skydance-NAI transaction; in addition, Skydance would pay a premium for Paramount Global shares and pay $3 billion to the company to help pay down debt. Ellison would serve as CEO of the merged Paramount-Skydance, while Jeff Shell, the former NBCUniversal CEO who is chairman of sports and media at RedBird and works under founder and managing partner Gerry Cardinale, would take on a key management role.

Ashley Capoot reports via CNBC: Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of 23andMe, is considering a proposal to take the genetic testing company private after its stock price tumbled more than 95% from its 2021 highs. A late Wednesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said Wojcicki is working with advisors and plans to speak with possible financing sources and partners. She "wishes to maintain control" of the company and will "not be willing to support any alternative transaction," the filing said. [...] In November, 23andMe received a deficiency letter from the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Department, which said the company had 180 days to bring its share price back above $1. The company's board of directors formed a "Special Committee" in late March to help explore options that could juice the stock.

A press release on Thursday said the committee was made aware of Wojcicki's interest in acquiring all of 23andMe's outstanding shares. Wojcicki owns shares that make up more than 20% of those outstanding, which equates to about 49% of voting power, the release said. "The Special Committee will carefully review Ms. Wojcicki's proposal when and if it is made available and evaluate it in light of other available strategic alternatives, including continuing to operate as a publicly traded company," the committee said in the release. "The Special Committee is committed to acting in the best interests of 23andMe and its shareholders." The committee has engaged Wells Fargo as its financial advisor, and it said there is "no assurance" that Wojcicki's offer would result in the proposed outcome.

The Seattle Times has a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist named Dominic Gates. Sunday he published an expose on "a yearslong decline of safety standards" at Boeing.

After a 1997 merger, its new executive leaders "treated experienced engineers and machinists as expendable, ignoring the potential damage to Boeing's essential mission of designing and building high-quality airplanes...." The arc of Boeing's fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory. "Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first," was Boeing's philosophy, he said. It was, he said, "a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities...." Its leaders outsourced work, sold off whole divisions and discarded key capabilities such as developing avionics, machining parts and building fuselages. On the 787, they even outsourced the jet's wings to Japan. They moved work away from Boeing's highly skilled, unionized base in the Puget Sound region. They weakened unions and extorted state government with repeated threats to build future airplanes elsewhere. They squeezed suppliers by demanding price cuts every year that in turn forced the suppliers into ruinous cost-cutting and left them vulnerable to collapse during shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic....

Belatedly, Boeing's current leaders, overwhelmed by criticism, mockery and outrage since January, have finally admitted publicly that some key strategies they pursued for decades were flawed. "Boeing, more than 20 years ago, probably got a little too far ahead of itself on the topic of outsourcing," Chief Financial Officer Brian West said last month. And in January, on CNBC, Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun conceded: "Did it go too far? Yeah, probably did."

Both were speaking about major supplier Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kan., part of Boeing until it was sold off two decades ago, part of a broad divestment of assets to please Wall Street and boost the stock. Following a litany of quality lapses in Wichita, Boeing is now admitting a mistake and trying to buy Spirit back — "for safety and for quality," said West. Another mistake belatedly recognized: With annual bonuses for Boeing's factory managers based largely on meeting cost and schedule targets, it was long a cardinal sin to stop the assembly line. That meant unfinished jobs piled up on aircraft as they moved forward down the line, what Boeing calls "traveled work." Done out of sequence, this work is more difficult and takes much longer. If too much traveled work piles up, it creates chaos. That's what happened in Renton on the 737 assembly line. "For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that's got to change," West said. "Once you reduce traveled work, your quality gets better...."

Speaking of how Spirit might be fixed, West said: "It's really about focus and running it, not as a business, as a factory. Run it as a factory and stay focused on safety and quality and stability."
Phil Chandler, a highly skilled Boeing machinist for more than 42 years (retiring in 2020), saw a "dictatorial" approach on the factory floor, according to the article. "Whereas in the past, first-level and even second-level managers in the factory had come up through the ranks as mechanics and had deep knowledge of the work, after [Boeing president Harry] Stonecipher came in those jobs shifted to white-collar people with degrees, often with MBAs."

And a former Boeing physicist also complains about the "shoot-the-messenger" management approach when developing their 787, according to the article: "Engineers who raised technical doubts were told: 'Follow the plan. If you can't do your job, I'll fire you and get someone who can.'"

Tech journalist Kara Swisher disagrees that Sam Altman's (temporary) firing stemmed from a conflict between the "go-faster" people pushing for commercialization and a rival contingent wanting more safety-assuring guardrails. "He's being talking about the problems," Swisher said on CNN. "Compared to a lot of tech people, he's talking about the problems. I think that's a false dichotomy."

At the same time, NPR argues, the firing and re-hiring of Sam Altman "didn't come out of nowhere. In fact, the boardroom drama represented the boiling over of tensions that have long simmered under the surface of the company." The chaos at OpenAI can be traced back to the unusual way the company was structured. OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Altman, Elon Musk and others as a non-profit research lab. It was almost like an anti-Big Tech company; it would prioritize principles over profit. It wanted to, as OpenAI put it back then, develop AI tools that would "benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return."

But in 2018, two things happened: First, Musk quit the board of OpenAI after he said he invested $50 million, cutting the then-unknown company off from more of the entrepreneur's crucial financial backing. And secondly, OpenAI's leaders grew increasingly aware that developing and maintaining advanced artificial intelligence models required an immense amount of computing power, which was incredibly expensive.

A year after Musk left, OpenAI created a for-profit arm. Technically, it is what's known as a "capped profit" entity, which means investors' possible profits are capped at a certain amount. Any remaining money is re-invested in the company. Yet the nonprofit's board and mission still governed the company, creating two competing tribes within OpenAI: adherents to the serve-humanity-and-not-shareholders credo and those who subscribed to the more traditional Silicon Valley modus operandi of using investor money to release consumer products into the world as rapidly as possible in hopes of cornering a market and becoming an industry pacesetter... The question was, did Altman abandon OpenAI's founding principles to try to scale up the company and sign up customers as fast as possible? And, if so, did that make him unsuited to helm a nonprofit created to develop AI products "free from financial obligations"?
Microsoft's stock price hit an all-time high this week, reports the Wall Street Journal. (They also note that when OpenAI employees considered moving to Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella "assured their potential colleagues that they wouldn't even have to use Microsoft's workplace-communications app Teams.")

"But the ideal outcome for Microsoft was Altman going back to OpenAI as CEO, according to a person familiar with Nadella's thinking. By opening Microsoft's doors to the OpenAI team, Nadella increased Altman's leverage to get his position back..." Even after investing $13 billion, Microsoft didn't have a board seat or visibility into OpenAI's governance, since it worried that having too much sway would alarm increasingly aggressive regulators. That left Microsoft exposed to the risks of OpenAI's curious structure... Microsoft has had to strike a tricky balance with OpenAI: safeguarding its investment while ensuring that its ownership stake remained below 50% to avoid regulatory pitfalls... AI is wildly expensive, and Microsoft's spending is expected to soar as the company builds out the necessary computing infrastructure. And it's unclear when or if it will be able to make back these upfront costs in added new revenue...

Nadella is banking on OpenAI's independence leading to innovations that benefit Microsoft as much as humanity. But the uncertainty of the past week has shown the risks in one of the world's most valuable companies outsourcing the future to a startup beyond its control.
When Chris Wallace asked Swisher if he should be more concerned about the dangers of AI now — and of its potential to take jobs — Swisher had a different answer. "One of the concerns you should have is the consolidation of this into bigger companies. Microsoft really want to win here..."

But she didn't let the conversation end without wryly underscoring the potential for AI. "I'd be concerned that there's not enough innovation... It could be a good thing, Chris. Trust me, it could be a good thing. But it could also, you know, kill you."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Isaac for sharing the article.

Microsoft's stock price plumetted 16% after OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman — but appears to have immediately recovered most of the drop in after-hours trading. Yet OpenAI's move "also blindsided key investor and minority owner Microsoft," writes Ars Technica, "reportedly making CEO Satya Nadella furious."

Tech reporter Kara Swisher called the firing a "badly managed coup de Sam," tweeting more details Friday night. "Sources tell me that the profit direction of the company under Altman and the speed of development, which could be seen as too risky, and the nonprofit side dedicated to more safety and caution were at odds. One person on the Sam side called it a 'coup,' while another said it was the the right move."

Ars Technica fills in the story: Sources told reporter Kara Swisher that OpenAI's Dev Day event on November 6, with Altman front and center in a keynote pushing consumer-like products, was an "inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast."

In a joint statement released Friday night, Altman and Brockman said they were "shocked and saddened" by the board's actions... OpenAI has an unusual structure where its for-profit arm is owned and controlled by a non-profit 501(c)(3) public charity... Insiders say the move was mostly a power play that resulted from a cultural schism between Altman and [cofounder/board member Ilya] Sutskever over Altman's management style and drive for high-profile publicity. On September 29, Sutskever tweeted, "Ego is the enemy of growth." The schism is causing further turmoil on the inside. Three AI researchers loyal to Altman departed the company as well on Friday, resigning in reaction to the news: Jakub Pachocki, GPT-4 lead and OpenAI's director of research; Aleksander Madry, head of a team evaluating AI risk, and Szymon Sidor, an open source baselines researcher.

Rumors have already begun swirling about potential internal breakthroughs at OpenAI that may have intensified the slow/fast rift within the company, owing to Sutskever's role as co-lead of a "Superalignment" team that is tasked with figuring out how to control hypothetical superintelligent AI. At the APEC CEO Summit on Thursday, Altman said, "Four times now in the history of OpenAI — the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks — I've gotten to be in the room when we push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward. And getting to do that is like the professional honor of a lifetime."

The concern here not necessarily being that OpenAI has developed superintelligence, which experts say is unlikely, but that the new breakthrough Altman mentioned may have added pressure to a company that is fighting within itself to proceed safely (from its non-profit branch) but also make money (from its for-profit subsidiary).
Former Google CEO/chairman Eric Schmidt tweeted, "Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 Billion in value, and changed our collective world forever. I can't wait to see what he does next. I, and billions of people, will benefit from his future work- it's going to be simply incredible."

And reacting to the news, angel investor Ron Conway tweeted Friday that it looked like "a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI."

Addressing the charges of a "coup," OpenAI held "an impromptu all-hands meeting" Friday after the firing, according to a (paywalled) article from The Information: "You can call it this way," Sutskever said about the coup allegation. "And I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity...." When Sutskever was asked whether "these backroom removals are a good way to govern the most important company in the world?" he answered: "I mean, fair, I agree that there is not an ideal element to it. 100%."
Reporter Kara Swisher predicted that Altman "will have a new company up by Monday."

"If i start going off, the openai board should go after me for the full value of my shares," Sam Altman posted on X Saturday — although Swisher wondered if Altman was simply trolling the company that had fired him.

"He has almost no shares, I believe."

Citigroup's managers and consultants working on CEO Jane Fraser's reorganization have discussed job cuts of at least 10% in several major businesses, CNBC reported on Monday, citing people with knowledge of the process. Reuters: The bank has warned of job cuts as part of a sweeping overhaul it unveiled in September, but has said it will estimate the scale of layoffs and cost savings in the current quarter. The reorganization, known internally as "Project Bora Bora" according to CNBC, is intended to give Fraser more direct control as she seeks to simplify the Wall Street giant and boost its stock price.

The discussions are at an early stage and the number of people axed could change, CNBC said, adding that the lender had hired Boston Consulting Group for the plan. Fraser's push to eliminate regional managers, co-heads and others with overlapping roles will translate into job cuts beyond 10% for executives, the report said. Last month, Citi said it would cut management layers from 13 to eight. In the two top layers of leadership, 15% of functional roles were reduced and 60 committees were eliminated, it said The bank's global headcount has stayed at 240,000 this year, it disclosed in its latest quarterly supplement last month.

What Iran's military called "the first product of the quantum processing algorithm" of the Naval university appears to be a stock development board, available widely online for around $600. Motherboard reports: According to multiple state-linked news agencies in Iran, the computer will help Iran detect disturbances on the surface of water using algorithms. Iranian Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari showed off the board during the ceremony and spoke of Iran's recent breakthroughs in the world of quantum technology. The touted quantum device appears to be a development board manufactured by a company called Diligent. The brand "ZedBoard" appears clearly in pictures. According to the company's website, the ZedBoard has everything the beginning developer needs to get started working in Android, Linux, and Windows. It does not appear to come with any of the advanced qubits that make up a quantum computer, and suggested uses include "video processing, reconfigurable computing, motor control, software acceleration," among others.

"I'm sure this board can work perfectly for people with more advanced [Field Programmable Gate Arrays] experience, however, I am a beginner and I can say that this is also a good beginner-friendly board," said one review on Diligent's website. Those interested in the board can buy one on Amazon for $589. It's impossible to know if Iran has figured out how to use off-the-shelf dev boards to make quantum algorithms, but it's not likely.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Seven weeks after Alibaba announced its historic restructuring plan to split itself into six independent companies, the juggernaut is gearing up to spin off its intelligence group. Alibaba went public in New York back in 2014, marking the largest IPO at the time. Not long after Hong Kong relaxed rules around dual-class structures, which allow founders to retain certain control while opening the company to outside investment, in 2019, Alibaba sought a secondary listing in the city. Rising tensions between the U.S. and China also prompted many Chinese companies to retreat from the NASDAQ and NYSE in recent years.

"We are taking concrete steps towards unlocking value from our businesses and are pleased to announce that our board has approved a full spin-off of the Cloud Intelligence Group via a stock dividend distribution to shareholders, with intention for it to become an independent publicly listed company," Daniel Zhang, chairman and chief executive officer of Alibaba Group, announced in the firm's earnings report today. Zhang is also one of the cloud arm's board of directors. Alibaba aims to complete the spinoff in the next 12 months and plans to include external strategic investors in the group through private financings.

You might not be familiar with Alibaba's cloud intelligence group, but think of its main product lines roughly as "AWS+Slack+OpenAI". Its cloud business Alibaba Cloud dominates China's market. Globally, Alibaba Cloud was the third largest infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud provider in 2021, according to market research firm Gartner. Add platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and private cloud to the mix, Alibaba came in fourth in Q4 2021, according to another market insight firm Synergy Research Group. Alibaba's Dingtalk, an enterprise chat app and productivity platform, surpassed 600 million users as of Q3 2022, with 15 million paid daily active users and 23 million enterprise users, the company said previously. [...] It makes sense that Alibaba is grouping its cloud business and AI research team under one umbrella as these two go hand in hand. With each new breakthrough in AI, the amount of computational power needed to train data increases exponentially -- so does the cost. "The cloud business generated $2.7 billion in revenue during the first quarter, making up 9% of Alibaba's total revenues," notes TechCrunch. You can read a deep dive into the cloud spinout here.

Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign dating back to 2014, soldiers in Ukraine are now using Steam Decks to remotely operate a high-caliber machine gun turret. The weapon is called the "Sabre" and is unique to Ukraine. Motherboard reports: Ukrainian news outlet TPO Media recently reported on the deployment of a new model of the Sabre on its Facebook page. Photos and videos of the system show soldiers operating a Steam Deck connected to a large machine gun via a heavy piece of cable. According to the TPO Media post, the Sabre system allows soldiers to fight the enemy from a great distance and can handle a range of calibers, from light machine guns firing anti-tank rounds to an AK-47.

In the TPO footage, the Sabre is firing what appears to be a PKT belt-fed machine gun. The PKT is a heavy barrelled machine that doesn't have a stock and is typically mounted on vehicles like armored personnel carriers. It uses a solenoid trigger so it can be fired remotely, which is the cable running out of the back of the gun and into the complex of metal and wires on the side of the turret.

The Sabre system wasn't always controlled with a Steam Deck [...]. The first instances of the weapon appeared in 2014. The U.S. and the rest of NATO is giving Ukraine a lot of money for defense now, but that wasn't the case when Russia first invaded in 2014. To fill its funding gaps, Ukrainians ran a variety of crowdfunding campaigns. Over the years, Ukraine has used crowdfunding to pay for everything from drones to hospitals. One of the most popular websites is The People's Project, and it's there that the Sabre was born. The People's Project launched the crowdfunding campaign for Sabre in 2015 and collected more than $12,000 for the project over the next two years. It's initial goal was to deploy 10 of these systems.

"Since the pandemic began, Lyft employees have been able to work remotely," notes the New York Times, "logging into videoconferences from their homes and dispersing across the country like many other tech workers. Last year, the company made that policy official, telling staff that work would be 'fully flexible' and subleasing floors of its offices in San Francisco and elsewhere." No longer. On Friday, David Risher, the company's new chief executive, told employees in an all-hands meeting that they would be required to come back into the office at least three days a week, starting this fall. [Although the Times adds later that "People will be allowed to work remotely for one month each year, and those living far from offices would not be required to come in."]

It was one of the first major changes he has made at the struggling ride-hailing company since starting this month, and it came just a day after he laid off 26 percent of Lyft's work force. "Things just move faster when you're face to face," Mr. Risher said in an interview. Remote work in the tech industry, he said, had come at a cost, leading to isolation and eroding culture. "There's a real feeling of satisfaction that comes from working together at a whiteboard on a problem."

The decision, combined with the layoffs and other changes, signals the beginning of a new chapter at Lyft. It could also be an indication that some tech companies — particularly firms that are struggling — may be changing their minds on flexibility about where employees work. Nudges toward working in the office could soon turn into demands, as they have at companies like Disney and Apple...

Lyft also planned to tell employees that it would reduce their stock grants this year, according to a person familiar with the decision.
Risher "said the cost savings from the layoffs would go toward lower prices for riders and higher earnings for drivers," the Times adds, noting that last month Lyft's two founders said they'd step down after disappointing financial results. (Lyft's stock price closed Friday at $10.25 — down from a peak of $78.)

Bob Sutton, a Stanford professor and organizational psychologist, suggests another possible motivation to the Times: executives worried about financial stress "feel compelled to increase their own illusion of control."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The founder of WallStreetBets, which has been credited with helping ignite investors' frenzy into "meme" stocks, sued Reddit on Wednesday, accusing it of wrongly banning him from moderating the community and undermining his trademark rights. Jaime Rogozinski said his ouster, ostensibly for violating Reddit policy by "attempting to monetize a community," was a pretext to keep him from trying to control "a famous brand that helped Reddit rise to a $10 billion valuation" by late 2021.

According to the complaint filed in federal court in Oakland, California, Rogozinski applied to trademark "WallStreetBets" in March 2020, one month before his ouster, when the community reached 1 million subscribers. Founded in 2012, the community now has 13.6 million subscribers. "If you build it, they will come," the complaint said, quoting from the 1989 movie "Field of Dreams. "Reddit's dreams, however, turned out to be Mr. Rogozinski's nightmare as the company insists, 'if you build it, we will take it from you.'" Rogozinski said he is a dual U.S.-Mexican citizen, and lives in Mexico City. He is seeking at least $1 million in damages for breach of contract and violations of his publicity rights, and a ban on Reddit's use of WallStreetBets unless it reinstates him as senior moderator of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. Reddit rejected Rogozinski's claims. "This is a completely frivolous lawsuit with no basis in reality," a spokeswoman said. "Jamie was removed as a moderator of r/WallStreetBets by Reddit and banned by the community moderators for attempting to enrich himself. This lawsuit is another transparent attempt to enrich himself."

"Code-hosting platform GitHub has announced that 100 million developers are now using the platform," reports TechCrunch: The figure represents a substantial hike on the 3 million users GitHub counted 10 years ago, the 28 million it claimed when Microsoft acquired it for $7.5 billion five years ago and the 90 million-plus it revealed just three months ago.

GitHub has come a long way since its launch back in 2008, and now serves as the default hosting service for millions of open source and proprietary software projects, allowing developers to collaborate around shared codebases from disparate locations.
GitHub's announcement argues that "From creating the pull request to empowering developers with AI through GitHub Copilot, everything we do has been to put the developer first."

But TechCrunch notes that GitHub's various paid plans "now contribute around $1 billion annually to [Microsoft's] coffers."

OS News cheers the first official release of Vanilla OS, calling it "an immutable desktop Linux distribution that brings some interesting new technologies to the table, such as the Apx package manager."

From the official release announcement: "By default, Apx provides a container based on your Linux distribution (Ubuntu 22.10 for Vanilla OS 22.10) and wraps all commands from the distribution's package manager (apt for Ubuntu). Nevertheless, you can install packages from other package distributions.... Using the --dnf flag with apx will create a new container based on Fedora Linux. Here, apx will manage packages from Fedora's DNF repository, tightly integrating them with the host system.
ZDNet calls Vanilla OS "a new take on Linux that is equal parts heightened security and user-friendly." Among other things, "the developers opted to switch to ABRoot, which allows for fully atomic transactions between 2 root partitions." The official release announcement explains: ABRoot will check which partition is the present root partition (i.e A), then it will mount an overlay on top of it and perform the transaction. If the transaction succeeds, the overlay will be merged with the future root partition (i.e B). On your next boot, the system will automatically switch to the new root partition (B). In case of failure, the overlay will be discarded and the system will boot normally, without any changes to either partition.
But ZDNet explains why this comes in handy: Another really fascinating feature is called Smart Updates, which is enabled in the Vanilla OS Control Center, and ensures the system will not update if it's either under a heavy load or the battery is low. To enable this, open the Vanilla OS Control Center, click on the Updates tab, and then click the ON/OFF slider for SmartUpdate. Once enabled, updates will go through ABRoot transitions and aren't applied until the next reboot. Not only does this allow the updates to happen fully in the background, but it also makes them atomic, so they only proceed when it's guaranteed they will succeed.

The only caveat to this system is that you are limited to either weekly or monthly updates, as there is no daily option for scheduling. However, if you're doing weekly updates, you should be good to go.... Setting aside that which makes Vanilla OS special, the distribution is as stock a GNOME experience as you'll find and does a great job serving as your desktop operating system. It's easy to use, reliable, and performs really well...especially considering this is the first official release.
"Every wallpaper has a light and a dark version," adds the release announcement, "so you can choose the one that best suits your needs."

FTX sought a U.S. bankruptcy court's help amid a battle over ownership of about $450 million worth of stock in Robinhood Markets (HOOD), according to a filing (PDF) Thursday. CoinDesk reports: At issue are about 56 million shares of the brokerage owned by Emergent Fidelity Technologies Ltd., a corporate entity organized in Antigua and Barbuda and 90% controlled by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, according to the filing. Three parties, the filing says, have tried to get control of those shares: BlockFi (a lender that FTX had helped prop up earlier this year), Yonathan Ben Shimon (an FTX creditor appointed as a receiver in Antigua and granted permission to sell the shares under supervision of a court there) and Bankman-Fried himself (who has legal bills).

FTX's bankruptcy estate told ED&F Man Capital Markets, the brokerage where the shares are parked, to freeze the stock around the time the Chapter 11 case began on Nov. 11. FTX has determined that Emergent only "nominally" owns the shares and that they truly belong to FTX. "Emergent is a special-purpose holding company that appears to have no other business," the crypto exchange said in the filing. The judge overseeing the bankruptcy case should force the shares to remain frozen while FTX tries to figure out how to repay all its creditors, FTX argued in the filing.

FTX suffered a "complete failure of corporate controls" according to the company's new chief executive who was appointed as part of the crypto exchange's bankruptcy process. From a report: In a filing [PDF] to federal bankruptcy court, John J. Ray, who has helped oversee some of the biggest bankruptcies ever, including Enron's, said despite his 40 years in the business of restructuring companies, he's never seen anything as bad as FTX.

"Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented."