Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Dispute over in-app purchases is seen as proxy war over future of App Store
Microsoft has joined the court battle between Apple and Epic Games, filing a legal brief supporting the Fortnite developer’s right to carry on developing software for Mac and iOS while the case continues.
The submission, signed by Kevin Gammill, the executive in charge of supporting developers on Microsoft’s Xbox console, is further evidence that the lawsuit over in-app purchases in Fortnite is set to become a proxy war over the future of the App Store.
Jury is out on whether video-sharing site could make Microsoft a social media giant
As the clock ticks on Microsoft’s fast-track talks to buy TikTok the jury is out on whether it marks a unique opportunity to become a global social media giant overnight, or a $50bn (£38bn) geopolitically fuelled business blunder.
Donald Trump’s trade war with China has forced ByteDance, the privately owned Beijing-based parent of the video-sharing site TikTok, to pursue a sale of its US business after the president signed an executive order last week that could shut it down on 15 September.
Proposed deal would see Microsoft take over TikTok in US, insiders say, after president said he would ban video app
China’s ByteDance has agreed to divest the US operations of TikTok completely in a bid to save a deal with the White House, after Donald Trump said on Friday he had decided to ban the popular short-video app, two people familiar with the matter said on Saturday.
US officials have said TikTok under its Chinese parent poses a national risk because of the personal data it handles. ByteDance’s concession will test whether Trump’s threat to ban TikTok is a negotiating tactic or whether he is intent on cracking down on a social media app that has up to 80 million daily active users in the US.
Cut of up to 30% charged by app stores obstructs fair competition, claims Brad Smith
Microsoft has thrown its weight behind calls for an antitrust investigation into App Store monopolies, piling yet more pressure on Apple as the iPhone maker prepares for its annual developer conference on Monday.
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, criticised the 30% cut that app stores take from developers this month, and argued that the policy is a far higher burden on fair competition than the issues that led to Microsoft’s antitrust case in the early 2000s.
Users of the homepages of the MSN website and Edge browser will now see news stories generated by AI
Dozens of journalists have been sacked after Microsoft decided to replace them with artificial intelligence software.
Staff who maintain the news homepages on Microsoft’s MSN website and its Edge browser – used by millions of Britons every day – have been told that they will be no longer be required because robots can now do their jobs.
Exclusive: former Microsoft contractor says he was emailed login after minimal vetting
A Microsoft programme to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with “no security measures”, according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company.
The recordings, both deliberate and accidentally invoked activations of the voice assistant, as well as some Skype phone calls, were simply accessed by Microsoft workers through a web app running in Google’s Chrome browser, on their personal laptops, over the Chinese internet, according to the contractor.
A landmark legal case has been launched against the world’s largest tech companies by Congolese families who say their children were killed or maimed while mining for cobalt used to power smartphones, laptops and electric cars, the Guardian can reveal.
Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla have been named as defendants in a lawsuit filed in Washington DC by human rights firm International Rights Advocates on behalf of 14 parents and children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The lawsuit accuses the companies of aiding and abetting in the death and serious injury of children who they claim were working in cobalt mines in their supply chain.
The experiment for the month of August led to more efficient meetings and happier workers who took less time off
Microsoft tested out a four-day work week in its Japan offices and found as a result employees were not only happier – but significantly more productive.
For the month of August, Microsoft Japan experimented with a new project called Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019, giving its entire 2,300 person workforce five Fridays off in a row without decreasing pay.
Jacinda Ardern and Emmanuel Macron met companies and G7 nations in Paris for Christchurch Call summit
World leaders and heads of global technology companies have pledged at a Paris summit to tackle terrorist and extremist violence online in what they described as an “unprecedented agreement”.
Wednesday’s event, organised two months to the day since the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, drew up a “plan of action” to be adopted by countries and companies to prevent extreme material going viral on the internet.
Company beat sales and profit expectations to join Apple and Amazon in prestigious club
Microsoft has become the third publicly listed US company, after Apple and Amazon, to boast a market value of more than $1tn after bumper quarterly results boosted its share price.
The company beat sales and profits expectations in the three months to 31 March, thanks in part to its cloud computing business, which signed up major corporate clients over the period.
A letter on Github demanded companies comply with labor laws, limiting workers to 40 hours a week versus a 12-hour day standard
Microsoft employees have published a letter on the software development platform Github in solidarity with tech workers in China.
Workers at tech companies in the country have used the Microsoft-owned platform to complain about grueling working conditions and the “996” standard in the industry, a philosophy endorsed by the tech billionaire Jack Ma. The name is based on the idea of working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
Stratolaunch jet, brainchild of late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, may be used to launch small satellites into space
A giant six-engine aircraft with the world’s longest wingspan – surpassing Howard Hughes’ infamous Spruce Goose – took off from California on its first flight on Saturday.
The behemoth, twin-fuselage Stratolaunch jet lifted off from Mojave Air and Space Port and climbed into the desert sky 70 miles north of Los Angeles. It landed two hours later.
On Oct. 3, 1993, the two-day Battle of Mogadishu began during the Somali Civil War, killing 19 Americans and between 200 and 300 Somalis. A U.S. Marine UH-1N "Huey" helicopter flies over a Mogadishu residential area on a patrol mission to look for signs of hostilities on December 1, 1992.
The world's biggest retailer has united a plucky band of tech companies-including Google, Microsoft and JD.com-over a shared fear of Jeff Bezos. Walmart has in recent years forged alliances with Google, Microsoft, China's JD.com and other tech players.
Steven Pinker is famous for observing that human material well-being has undergone tremendous, and vastly underrated, improvement over the last few hundred years. "We've got this problem called obesity," the famous Harvard linguist and psychologist wryly notes.
San Francisco, April 1 - The US Department of Justice has asked the Supreme Court to abandon its case against Microsoft over international data privacy after a law was signed to legally collect the data stored on foreign soil. The DoJ, in a court filing posted late on Saturday, said the new law signed by President Donald Trump last week answered the legal question at the heart of Microsoft's case.
Some say the CLOUD Act, included in the spending bill President Trump signed, will make it too easy for countries with poor human rights records to see US databases. Imagine you're a detective in London, investigating a robbery.
Police in other countries will be able to get emails and other electronic communication more easily from their own citizens and from Americans under a bill that Congress stuffed inside the massive $1.3 trillion spending deal passed this week. Supporters say the bill, dubbed the CLOUD Act, will simplify the process for the U.S. government and its allies to get evidence of serious crimes and terrorist threats when that evidence is stored on a server in another country.
Microsoft fought a court battle with the Department of Justice all the way to the Supreme Court - but the saga could soon be coming to an end. The Cloud Act, which is tucked into the spending bill that Trump signed Friday, addresses the question at the heart of the issue: Can law enforcement officials force US companies to hand over data that's stored on servers in foreign countries? The Cloud Act establishes a legal pathway for the US to form agreements with other nations that make it easier for law enforcement to collect data stored on foreign soil.
Christopher Liddell, ex-Microsoft and GM executive, is strong candidate to become Trump's new economic guru Christopher Liddell, an ex-Microsoft and General Motors executive, is currently the White House's director of strategic initiatives. Check out this story on USATODAY.com: https://usat.ly/2GiTFL2 Christopher Liddell is under strong consideration to become President Trump's next economic adviser, replacing Gary Cohn, who announced his resignation last week.