In a post on X earlier this week, Microsoft's head of search, Jordi Ribas, pointed out that the company "provided all publishers including Reddit with webmaster crawling controls in September 2023". Even with this feature, Ribas stated in a follow-up post that Reddit decided to block Bing from its data anyway "favoring another search engine and impacting competition from Bing and Bing-powered engines."

Today, as part of a new interview on The Verge, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman offered his side of the story. He claims that Microsoft had already been taking data from Reddit and using it to train its AI service, along with summarizing its content in the Bing search engine "without telling us".

Huffman added that two more AI companies, Anthropic and Perplexity, were also training their systems via Reddit's data. He stated:

We’ve had Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity act as though all of the content on the internet is free for them to use . . . That’s their real position.

Indeed, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman recently said in a separate interview that in terms of using data for AI, " Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” that’s been the understanding."

Huffman stated it was "a real pain in the ass to block these companies". However, he does feel that the idea of a search engine taking content from a site and reusing it without some kind of compensation is changing, adding "he value exchange of crawling in exchange for traffic back is becoming muddied.”

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According to Samsung and its official announcement post, the newest microSD cards feature Samsung's eight-generation V-NAND memory, which enabled the manufacturer to increase the maximum capacity. While 1TB microSD cards are not a new concept (there are 1.5TB models and 2TB variants are incoming), Samsung boasts "enhanced performance" for everyday use in modern devices.

The 1 TB Samsung PRO Plus microSD is rated for UHS Speed Class 3 (U3), Video Speed Class 30 (V30), and App Performance Class A2. That means customers can expect the card to operate at peak sequential speeds of 180 MB/s read and 130 MB/s write. The 1TB EVO Plus model has a slightly lower max speed of up to 160 MB/s.

Samsung also upgraded its latest microSD cards with a new controller, which switched from a 55 nm process to a 28 nm one. The main benefit is that the cards now consume less power when writing or reading data.

The new 1 TB PRO Plus and EVO Plus microSD cards come with a limited 10-year warranty and additional protections that allow them to withstand water, temperatures, X-rays, and magnetic fields. In addition, these cards have longer lifespans thanks to an increased number of write/erase cycles.

The 1 TB Samsung PRO Plus and EVO Plus memory cards will be available worldwide this month. The PRO Plus model will set you back $153.99, and the EVO Plus costs $131.99. Both cards work with most microSD-compatible devices, such as Windows PCs, Android smartphones and tablets, digital cameras, dashcams, and more.

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The feature in question was called Tag Suggestion. Facebook rolled it out in 2011 to provide quick suggestions for users to tag their friends on the photographs they publish. As the Texas Attorney General's Office explained:

“Meta automatically turned this feature on for all Texans without explaining how the feature worked. Unbeknownst to most Texans, for more than a decade Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted. Meta did this despite knowing that CUBI forbids companies from capturing biometric identifiers of Texans, including records of face geometry, unless the business first informs the person and receives their consent to capture the biometric identifier.”

CUBI stands for Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act, which was signed into law back in 2009, two years before the introduction of the Tag Suggestion feature.

“This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans’ privacy rights. Any abuse of Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law,” commented Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

This settlement is the largest ever obtained from an action brought by a single U.S. state. The previous record holder was Google, which had to pay far less – $390 million – to a group of 40 states in late 2022.

As TechCrunch reminded, Facebook made the feature explicitly opt-in in 2019; however, that didn’t save the company from being responsible for the prior decisions made during the years before.

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Publishing their results in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the scientists describe using a large language model—an AI tool like the one that powers ChatGPT—to engineer a version of a bacteria-killing drug that was previously toxic in humans, so that it would be safe to use.

The prognosis for patients with dangerous bacterial infections has worsened in recent years as antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains spread and the development of new treatment options has stalled. However, UT researchers say AI tools are game-changing.

"We have found that large language models are a major step forward for machine learning applications in protein and peptide engineering," said Claus Wilke, professor of integrative biology and statistics and data sciences, and co-senior author of the new paper.

"Many use cases that weren't feasible with prior approaches are now starting to work. I foresee that these and similar approaches are going to be used widely for developing therapeutics or drugs going forward."

Large language models, or LLMs, were originally designed to generate and explore sequences of text, but scientists are finding creative ways to apply these models to other domains. For example, just as sentences are made up of sequences of words, proteins are made up of sequences of amino acids. LLMs cluster together words that share common attributes (such as cat, dog and hamster) in what's known as an "embedding space" with thousands of dimensions.

Similarly, proteins with similar functions, like the ability to fight off dangerous bacteria without hurting the people who host said bacteria, may cluster together in their own version of an AI embedding space.

"The space containing all molecules is enormous," said Davies, co-senior author of the new paper. "Machine learning allows us to find the areas of chemical space that have the properties we're interested in, and it can do it so much more quickly and thoroughly than standard one-at-a-time lab approaches."

For this project, the researchers employed AI to identify ways to reengineer an existing antibiotic called Protegrin-1 that is great at killing bacteria, but toxic to people. Protegrin-1, which is naturally produced by pigs to combat infections, is part of a subtype of antibiotics called antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). AMPs generally kill bacteria directly by disrupting cell membranes, but many target both bacterial and human cell membranes.

First, the researchers used a high-throughput method they had previously developed to create more than 7,000 variations of Protegrin-1 and quickly identify areas of the AMP which could be modified without losing its antibiotic activity.

Next, they trained a protein LLM on these results so that the model could evaluate millions of possible variations for three features:

selectively targeting bacterial membranes, potently killing bacteria and not harming human red blood cells to find those that fell in the sweet spot of all three. The model then helped guide the team to a safer, more effective version of Protegrin-1, which they dubbed bacterially selective Protegrin-1.2 (bsPG-1.2).

Mice infected with multidrug-resistant bacteria and treated with bsPG-1.2 were much less likely to have detectable bacteria in their organs six hours after infection, compared to untreated mice. If further testing offers similarly positive results, the researchers hope eventually to take a version of the AI-informed antibiotic drug into human trials.

"Machine learning's impact is twofold," Davies said. "It's going to point out new molecules that could have potential to help people, and it's going to show us how we can take those existing antibiotic molecules and make them better and focus our work to more quickly get those to clinical practice."

This project highlights how academic researchers are advancing artificial intelligence to meet societal needs, a key theme this year at UT Austin, which has declared 2024 the Year of AI.

The study's other authors are research associate Justin Randall and graduate student Luiz Vieira, both at UT Austin.

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A few days ago, rumors started that Nvidia RTX 4000 graphics cards are going to face shortages in some countries.

It was later revealed that it’s due to possible shortages of GDRR6X VRAM used in RTX 4070 and above graphics cards.

While the above rumors aren’t confirmed, new rumors suggest that Nvidia is purposely cutting their production.

RTX 4000 Production Cut Up To 50%

IT Home reports (via @harukaze5719) that Nvidia is reducing the production of the GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards by up to 50%. While the production of all the GPUs in the series isn’t reduced, the highest reduction is up to 50%. Especially for the RTX 4070 and above.

The report gives two reasons for it. Nvidia is transferring the production capacity of the RTX 4000 to the RTX 5000 graphics cards. Second reason being Nvidia (purposely) tightening the RTX 4000 supply to prepare for the RTX 5000 graphics cards.

It also reveals that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, RTX 4060 Ti started to experience shortages in the first quarter of this year. Then RTX 4060, RTX 3050 and GTX 1650 began to see increase in prices. Now RTX 4070, RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 are expected to see their prices increase. It’s to seen whether it’s limited to just one country or region or is going to happen worldwide.

The report further states that ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock are intending to increase the prices of the graphics cards further.

Conclusion

It’s common to cut the production of current generation of graphics cards to prepare for the next-generation.

The problem happens when the prices increase. So it’s suggested that those who want to buy them should do so before they become more expensive.

Nvidia RTX 5000 graphics cards were earlier expected to release next year. But there are mixed rumors suggesting that RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 could release earlier. The RTX 5090 too is expected to hit 2.9GHz in base clock.

It’s to be seen whether this rumors actually turn out to be true or there are some changes to it.

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AMD just announced its second quarter 2024 earnings today, and the highlight was this: nearly half the company’s sales are now data center products — not chips for personal computers, not game consoles, not embedded chips for industry or vehicles.

 

The company’s data center business has doubled in a single year, and this quarter’s growth was primarily due to a single chip: the AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator, which competes with Nvidia’s infamously influential H100 AI chip. The AMD chip just did over $1 billion in sales in a single quarter, according to CEO Lisa Su, up from its previous milestone of $1 billion cumulatively since its December 2023 debut. (AMD says its Epyc server CPUs also contributed.)

 

AMD’s earnings by segment: clock that 115 percent rise in data center.

Image: AMD

 

It looks like AMD is following a similar path to Nvidia itself, which has profited so phenomenally from the Nvidia H100 that it will now make new AI chips every year, accelerating all of its research and development to stay ahead, focusing its business on the product that’s so popular it can’t keep on shelves.

 

AMD, too, plans to release new AI chips every year: it has the MI325X coming in the fourth quarter of this year, the MI350 in 2025, and it plans to have the MI400 in 2026, the company reiterated today on its earnings call. Su said the MI350 should be “very competitive” with Nvidia’s Blackwell, which it revealed this March as “the world’s most powerful chip” for AI and recently began sampling to buyers.

 

As far as today’s MI300, Su says she’s still selling as many as AMD can make. Despite supply chain improvements, “supply will remain tight through 2025.”

 

Nvidia has a tremendous headstart over AMD, and despite doubling this year, AMD’s data center business is a tiny fraction of the size of Nvidia’s — $2.8 billion in a quarter vs. $22.6 billion in a quarter for Nvidia, which also just had record results in data center.

 

What does all this mean for PC gamers and others looking for new chips? It could be that the rising tide raises all boats — each new GPU architecture, funded by AI dollars, could be handed down for other tasks, yielding faster improvements than before. But in 2024, at least, the AI fervor seems to mean no new GPUs for gamers.

 

That said, AMD’s personal computing CPU and GPU businesses were up, not down, this past quarter. Ryzen CPUs were up 49 percent year over year and slightly up quarter over quarter, and while flagging PlayStation and Xbox sales made gaming revenue decline 59 percent, AMD said its Radeon 6000 GPUs actually increased sales year over year.

 

In case you’re wondering where all the AMD Zen 5 laptops are, AMD says there are more than 100 different “platforms” on track to ship with its Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Point” chips. While I think we’ve only seen the Asus ones hit shelves so far, plus a single HP announcement and an MSI preview, Su confirmed that Acer and Lenovo will have them, too.

 

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The press announcement from Intel stated the company's executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, along with its senior vice president and general manager of the Client Business Group, Jim Johnson, would be part of the presentation. It added:

During the livestreamed event, they will reveal details on the new processors’ breakthrough x86 power efficiency, exceptional core performance, massive leaps in graphics performance and the unmatched AI computing power that will drive this and future generations of Intel products.

The two executives will also be joined during the live stream event with unnamed "Intel partners." We are nearly certain one of those partners will be Microsoft. Intel previously stated its first Lunar Lake processors would also be the first to support Microsoft's Copilot+ PC program, which offers AI features on devices with a separate NPU processor.

Intel has previously said it expects 80 different Windows laptops to be released by the end of 2024 with its next-gen Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra CPUs, with about 20 PC makers offering those kinds of notebooks.

Copilot+ PCs first became available in June with laptops that had Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus and Elite chips inside. However, those notebooks did not launch with the controversial Recall feature. It was supposed to take "images of your active screen every few seconds" so that users could find anything they did on their PC using search.

However, security fears about the feature started hitting the internet and caused Microsoft to delay the release of Recall out of Copilot+ PCs. So far, there's no word on when Recall will be added to those PCs.

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Net income for the quarter was $22 billion. That was up by 10 percent compared to the $20.1 billion in net income Microsoft got from the same period a year ago. Both of these numbers also beat the expectations of financial analysts, according to CNBC.

Normally, Microsoft's stock price is expected to be higher in after-hours trading. However, CNBC reports that shares are down by over 5 percent as of this writing. That's because Microsoft stated that revenues from Azure and other cloud services went up by 29 percent during the quarter. While that's a pretty huge amount, CNBC claims financial analysts were expecting a growth of 31 percent for those services.

Revenues from the company's Productivity and Business Processes divisions were $20.3 billion for the quarter, up by 11 percent from the same period a year ago.

Revenues from Microsoft's More Personal Computing divisions were $15.9 billion for the quarter, up by 14 percent from a year ago. In that division, Windows revenue saw an increase of 7 percent. Xbox revenues were up by 61 percent, but the acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October 2023 was the main reason, with "58 points of net impact".

Devices remain a sore spot for Microsoft. Revenues from that division went down by 11 percent. Microsoft just launched its consumer Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 PCs in the last few days of the fiscal quarter. We may have to wait until the next quarter to find out anything about the sales of those PCs.

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What you need to know

• Microsoft's heavy investment in AI projects is raising concern among investors.
• Its Azure cloud business' growth remained steady quarter-over-quarter at about 31% between April and June, despite Microsoft's significant investment.
• Microsoft says it needs to continue investing in data centers to meet the ever-growing and high demand for AI.

Microsoft's recent shift and absolute focus on AI has raised concern among its investors. The tech giant ventured into the AI landscape face-first after investing billions of dollars in OpenAI to further extend their complicated partnership.

"Microsoft Copilot and Copilot stack are orchestrating a new era of AI transformation, driving better business outcomes across every role and industry," indicated Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during the company's earnings call for FY24 Q3. Admittedly, the company reported revenue increases (up 17%), operating income (up 23%), net income (up 20%), and diluted earnings per share (up 20%). 

According to a report by The AI Wired, investors have raised concern over Microsoft's spending on its cloud business. Admittedly, Microsoft's Azure cloud business has been positively impacted by the company's AI ventures. However, whether it justifies the billions invested in the category is unclear.

Interestingly, this news comes after a report suggested that OpenAI might be on the precipice of bankruptcy, with projections of $5 billion in losses. The ChatGPT maker might need another round of funding to remain afloat. 

A recent study indicates that 30% of AI projects might be abandoned after proof of concept by 2025. It attributes its predictions to poor data quality, a lack of guardrails, and high operation costs. 

While AI played a significant role in Microsoft's financial success in its latest earnings call, investors hope to spot a more considerable difference in the fiscal fourth quarter. Microsoft's Azure cloud business grew by 7% in the first three months of the year, with expert analysts predicting an expenditure of $13.64 billion compared to the $10.95 billion from the previous quarter. 

The AI landscape is a hard market to crack

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Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop 3 during a special event on October 2, 2019. It was a special launch for the lineup because, for the first time, Microsoft offered customers a larger, 15-inch laptop that was not the expensive Surface Book. In addition, the Surface Laptop 3 was the first Surface product to feature AMD processors. Microsoft partnered with AMD to create customized versions of Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 processors (Ryzen 3000 mobile series).

Although the computer retained its familiar look, it received some notable hardware upgrades, such as a larger display, faster charging, shorter key travel, a USB-C port (not a Thunderbolt), and, of course, much more powerful processors with built-in graphics. Also, for the first time, Microsoft offered customers a Surface Laptop with 32GB of RAM, while the Surface Laptop 2 peaked at just 16GB.

While storage options remained unchanged, the Surface Laptop 3 became the first Surface Laptop with user-removable storage and a much easier opening procedure, which received praise from iFixit and a relatively high repairability score.

The Surface Laptop lineup is one of Microsoft's most successful devices. Like other generations, the Surface Laptop 3 was overall well-received. However, it also got its fair share of criticism, namely for inferior performance in the AMD configuration, an uninspiring keyboard, and quite mediocre battery life. Microsoft promised up to 11.5 hours of "typical use," but real-world tests in Neowin's review showed a significantly different picture.

The Surface Laptop 3 received almost five years of active support with regular firmware updates. Now, Microsoft is sunsetting the device and abandoning its owners. That, of course, does not mean that your Surface Laptop 3 will suddenly stop working. You can continue using it if you are happy with it; just do not expect new driver updates. Also, Windows will continue receiving feature updates since it has a separate lifecycle.

Microsoft replaced the Surface Laptop 3 with the fourth generation on April 13, 2021. It received a new color, more recent AMD and Intel processors, and other minor improvements. According to the official documentation, the Surface Laptop 4 will reach its end of support on April 15, 2027.

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In a nutshell: Back in 2021, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made waves by creating an entirely new type of ferroelectric material. Now, those same researchers have one-upped themselves by using that substance to build a transistor that utterly smokes the conventional chips powering today's gadgets – with nanosecond switching speeds and incredible durability.

The transistor's killer performance stems from the unique properties of the 2021 ferroelectric material, which is composed of razor-thin layers of boron nitride stacked parallel to each other.

The broad definition of a ferroelectric material is that it's a special crystal that can spontaneously generate positive and negative charges within itself, and these charges can be flipped by applying an electric field.

However, the new material seems to behave a bit differently. When an electric field is applied to it, the parallel layers slightly shift positions, nudging the boron and nitrogen atoms just a hair's breadth. That leads to an extreme makeover in the material's electronic properties. The researchers explain it's like pressing your hands together, then sliding one above the other.

"So the miracle is that by sliding the two layers a few angstroms, you end up with radically different electronics," lead co-author of the paper Raymond Ashoori said, putting the tiny displacement into perspective – an angstrom is just one-billionth of a meter.

The resultant transistor exhibits several game-changing properties. For starters, it can rapidly flip between positive and negative charges (the 1s and 0s of digital data) at nanosecond speeds. Rapid switching is key for high-performance computing and data processing.

Moreover, because "nothing wears out in the sliding," Ashoori notes the transistor could theoretically switch over 100 billion times without degrading. That's unlike conventional flash memory, which slowly degrades from repetitive write/erase cycles.

Since the ferroelectric material is remarkably thin (measuring just billionths of a meter), it could enable much denser computer memory storage. This characteristic also means that the transistors require lower operating voltages since the switching voltage scales with thickness, enabling more energy-efficient transistors overall.

The team has only developed a single prototype transistor in the lab so far. But according to Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, a co-lead of the research, "in several aspects, its properties already meet or exceed industry standards" for current ferroelectric transistors.

Ashoori appears to be quite enthusiastic about the breakthrough, telling MIT News, "When I think of my whole career in physics, this is the work that I think 10 to 20 years from now could change the world."

That's a bold claim, but if this transistor lives up to the massive potential they're touting, he may be onto something. The full paper can be found in a recent issue of Science.

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In his two decades running the company now known as Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has gone through many transformations. More recently, he’s been showing off a seemingly less filtered version of himself. But during a live streamed conversation with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, the Meta CEO seemed to veer a little more off script than he intended.

The conversation began normally enough, with the two billionaire executives congratulating each other on their AI dominance. Zuckerberg made sure to talk up the company’s recent AI Studio announcement before settling into his usual talking points, which recently have included pointed criticism of Apple.

Zuckerberg then launched into a lengthy rant about his frustrations with “closed” ecosystems like Apple’s App Store. None of that is particularly new, as the Meta founder has been feuding with Apple for years. But then Zuckerberg, who is usually quite controlled in his public appearances, revealed just how frustrated he is, telling Huang that his reaction to being told “no” is “fuck that.”

“I mean, this is sort of selfish, but, you know, after building this company for awhile, one of my things for the next 10 or 15 years is like, I just want to make sure that we can build the fundamental technology that we're going to be building social experiences on, because there just have been too many things that I've tried to build and then have just been told ‘nah you can't really build that by the platform provider,’ that at some level I'm just like, ‘nah, fuck that,’” Zuckerberg said.

“There goes our broadcast opportunity,” Huang said. “Sorry,” Zuckerberg said. “Get me talking about closed platforms, and I get angry.”

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YouTube has been cracking down on ad blockers rather aggressively since last year, in a bid to get users to switch to YouTube Premium, which starts at $13.99 for a month's subscription.

Brief recap on YouTube's war against ad blockers

The streaming service allegedly began delaying the videos, creating an artificial lag on browsers other than Chrome and Edge. But, reports indicated that the problem affected users who had an ad blocker installed.

The Mountain View company had revealed in April this year, that it was displaying an anti-ad block prompt for users who were blocking ads, and encouraged them to subscribe to its Premium subscription. But ad blockers came to the rescue once again, allowing users to bypass the nag screen. Less than a month later, it appeared that Google stepped up its efforts by causing videos to skip automatically if it detected an ad blocker, but it turned out to be a bug related to Adblock Plus. Firefox users have accused YouTube of deliberately offering an inferior experience on non-Chromium browsers, but it has never been proven definitively.

Anyway, Google wasn't done with its shenanigans. YouTube decided to inject server-side ads into the videos, i.e. unlike ads that run separately, these new ads are embedded directly into the video stream, and are tricky to block, but it was not an impossible task for the good-old ad blockers.

Seeing a black screen on YouTube? It's not just you.

Mashable reports that users ran into a black screen on YouTube, and that it stayed for about 6 seconds before the video began playing. The reports indicate it affected several browsers including Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi.

Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad. While that's certainly a better experience, it does waste precious seconds of our time. A simple workaround for the black screen on YouTube is to just refresh the page, hit F5 as soon as the page starts loading. uBlock Origin's filters were updated with a patch to resolve the problem, the add-on updates its filters automatically. If you are still experiencing the black screen issue, just open the extension's dashboard and manually update the filters. This tug-of-war is getting annoying, but it appears to me that Google's efforts are actively promoting the use of ad blockers, instead of attracting new subscribers.

I did not run into the issue in Firefox, but that's mostly because I don't use it for YouTube anymore. However, I can confirm that FreeTube had a similar issue at about the same time. Videos were failing to load when using LocalAPI. This bug was quickly fixed in an update, and I think it is possible that the two problems could have been related to each other. And for those of you who are experiencing the auto-scrolling window issue in FreeTube, here's a workaround for the annoying bug.

On a side note, Google Chrome users may notice a warning that says "These extensions may soon no longer be supported". You can learn more about it by reading Martin's article.

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Gartner gave some examples of how gen AI is being used, some applications include coding assistants, personalized sales content creation, document search with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), virtual assistants, and medical, insurance, or financial services LLMs.

Coding assistants are the most cost-effective applications with upfront costs ranging from $100K to $200K and recurring costs per user per year ranging from $280 to $550. Costs balloon when you start building LLMs from scratch to offer medical, insurance, or financial services LLMs with upfront costs ranging from $8 million to $20 million and recurring costs ranging from $11K to $21K.

Commenting on the prediction, Rita Sallam, a Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, said:

"After last year's hype, executives are impatient to see returns on GenAI investments, yet organizations are struggling to prove and realize value. As the scope of initiatives widen, the financial burden of developing and deploying GenAI models is increasingly felt.

 

Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all with GenAI, and costs aren’t as predictable as other technologies. What you spend, the use cases you invest in and the deployment approaches you take, all determine the costs. Whether you’re a market disruptor and want to infuse AI everywhere, or you have a more conservative focus on productivity gains or extending existing processes, each has different levels of cost, risk, variability and strategic impact."

It is not too surprising to hear that some businesses will not carry on with their use of some generative AI applications, that is what a proof of concept is for after all. As language models become more capable, businesses could have another look at finding use cases for them too.

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Dark mode, night mode, light-on-dark design, or whatever you want to call the version of computer content that doesn't feel blindingly bright at night, had something of a peak moment around 2019–2020. That's when Android and iOS designed a system-wide way to implement a darker theme, and signal to compatible apps to do the same. Many, many systems, apps, websites, and other digital tools soon followed.

 

Except, most notably, Wikipedia. Despite being one of the sites most sympathetic to late-night mind wandering, Wikipedia had no official way to switch its iconic white pages into something more sleep and eyeball-friendly. Now, after great effort from its community, a dark mode (technically a dark "Color" setting) is available to most Wikipedia visitors on both desktop and mobile.

 

On desktop, look for a sidebar on the right-hand side that has buttons for setting text size and width, and then "Color (beta)." If you don't see a sidebar, look for an eyeglasses-like icon in the upper-right corner near the search and account tools. On mobile, look for the three horizontal bars (aka hamburger button) in the upper-left corner of a page, choose Settings, then pick your Color. There is the standard Light you know, Dark, and Automatic, which takes its color cues from your system.

 

More than a year ago, a dark mode handily won out as the most-requested feature in Wikipedia's Community Wishlist Survey for 2023. It might seem simple to flip the colors on a predominantly text-based website to their inverse opposites. But as noted in a discussion on the 2023 survey on Reddit, though, it's never quite so simple. Many of Wikipedia's inline styles have hard-coded colors. Browser extensions that turn Wikipedia dark tend to contain a huge number of manual overrides for those. As redditor gwern put it:

 

It's truly one of those things where you can get 95% of the way by simply adding 1 line of CSS like body{filter: invert(100%);}, but then to get to 99% correctness and squash all the annoying bugs, you have to completely rewrite your entire site design, and getting to 100% is impossible.

Wikipedia's tracker for bugs and issues, Phabricator, shows a "Provide a dark / night mode skin or theme" ticket going back to June 22, 2010. Things really start picking up in early 2022, and the discussion goes lots of places, including accessibility, machine learning, and color-coded map keys. The broad task was marked as "Resolved" on July 12, though many subtasks remain.

 

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What you need to know

• Intel says it has identified the root cause of 13th and 14th Gen desktop CPU instability; a microcode fix is expected mid-August.
• More Intel CPUs than first thought are potentially affected by the microcode bug, including K, KS, KF, and non-K 65W (and higher) variants.
• Intel isn't planning on a full recall, instead urges affected users to contact customer support.

It's been a busy few weeks for Intel and its attempts to stop the bleeding from 13th and 14th Gen processors (CPU). The bleeding I'm talking about involves instability issues that have plagued Intel's most recent "Raptor Lake" (and the 14th Gen Raptor Lake refresh) desktop chips for the past two years.

Widespread reports of crashes and BSODs have been under investigation by Intel for years, but on July 22 we got a major update. Intel's Thomas Hannaford posted on Intel's community board that the company had finally found the root cause of the instability issues. Here's what Hannaford delivered:

"Based on extensive analysis of Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors returned to us due to instability issues, we have determined that elevated operating voltage is causing instability issues in some 13th/14th Gen desktop processors. Our analysis of returned processors confirms that the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.

Intel is delivering a microcode patch which addresses the root cause of exposure to elevated voltages. We are continuing validation to ensure that scenarios of instability reported to Intel regarding its Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors are addressed. Intel is currently targeting mid-August for patch release to partners following full validation.

Intel is committed to making this right with our customers, and we continue asking any customers currently experiencing instability issues on their Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance."

To pare that back a bit, Intel has acknowledged that its microcode — which is sort of like a firmware-lite — is the root of the instability problem and will hopefully have a solution via motherboard BIOS updates in the coming weeks.

Intel Community Manager Lex Hoyos also acknowledged that the elevated voltages due to the microcode issue aren't the only possible cause of instability. In a post on the Intel subreddit, Hoyos acknowledged that there was a manufacturing issue leading to oxidation discovered and fixed in 2023. This issue only affected some 13th Gen chips.

What you need to know

• AMD's latest Ryzen 9000 Series desktop processors are delayed on their planned July launch until at least August 8, 2024.
• Of the four planned chips, at least the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X have exhibited production issues.
• While AMD vaguely confirms the problems, it comes alongside Intel's struggles with widespread and permanent damages to its 13th and 14th Gen Raptor Lake processors caused by microcode (firmware) errors.

It's a turbulent time for custom PC builders looking for the latest desktop processors. AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9000 chips were initially set for what would have been a late July release, but the new Zen 5 APUs have been officially pushed back with "a short delay" due to a failure to "meet (our) full quality expectations." The launch date change came with an official statement from Jack Huynh, AMD SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics, who confirmed August 8 as the earliest availability for the new 65W Ryzen 7 9600X and Ryzen 5 9700X chips and August 15 for the 120W 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X.

A representative from AMD spoke with Tom's Hardware about how the company had "identified an issue with our package product testing process for Ryzen 9000 series processors" without detailing the specifics. However, leaks quickly exposed a potential culprit for this rapid recall, and it's hardly as severe as it first seemed. Misprints with the engraved branding on at least two of the 4nm APUs, namely the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X, led to them accidentally being branded as more powerful Ryzen 9 variants. Whether this typo expands to the Ryzen 9000 retail packaging isn't clear, but even this seemingly minor mistake can be enough to trigger a launch delay.

Today, AMD is launching yet another preview release for its drivers. This time it's for the new Fluid Motion Frames 2 technology. The company claims this is a "significant upgrade from our initial version" that promises to give PC gamers with Radeon RX 7000 or 6000 GPUs "improved quality, lower latency, and better performance."

In a blog post, AMD says that it has added two new modes for AFMF 2 to give gamers more control over the feature. One is Search Mode, which has a default Auto setting that "reduces fallback for improved AFMF smoothness" for games that are run in 1440p resolution and higher. You can also switch to the Standard” setting for 1080p resolution. The second mode is Performance Mode which is supposed to cut down the AFMF 2 overhead in favor of higher frame rates on more devices.

AMD has also cut the latency on many games with the use of AFMF 2. That includes Cyberpunk 2077, which got a 28 percent reduction in latency, and Counter-Strike 2 with a 12 percent cut in latency. The new version also supports games that use Vulkan and OpenGL.

For people who want to keep frame rates on games to a certain level, AFMF 2 adds what the company calls AMD Radeon Chill. The company claims:

When you enable Radeon Chill after enabling AFMF 2, it will automatically set the native FPS cap to be half of your AMD FreeSync monitor’s maximum refresh rate. Then, once AFMF 2 frame generation is applied, Radeon Chill will prevent the FPS going above the max refresh rate (which can cause screen-tearing and reduce image quality).

You can download the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition Preview Driver for AFMF 2 right now. Keep in mind this is a preview drive so you may experience some bugs and other issues. AMD plans to officially release AFMF 2 something in the fourth quarter of 2024.

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Spotted by Timur222 on the X platform, a Bethesda trademark filing displaying the name STARBORN has gone up on US Patent and Trademark Office website, with it being entered on July 12, 2024.

For those who have yet to complete Starfield's main campaign quest, there will be some spoilers in the following paragraph about the Starborn. Skip ahead if you would like to keep it a surprise for your own playthrough.

Starborn are a group of individuals in Starfield who travel between universes using the Unity, a portal system. Players only encounter the Starborn after they collect Artifacts throughout the game's universe, gaining various supernatural powers as a side effect.

If Starborn is indeed the game's second major expansion, it could be following up on this mysterious group with a dedicated storyline. Bethesda's Todd Howard, game director behind Starfield, has already confirmed that more Starfield content is in development, which are slated to land after the Shattered Space expansion that's slated for fall this year for Xbox consoles and PC.

Revealed in full just a few months ago, the Starfield Shattered Space expansion will let players delve into the hidden homeworld of the House Va'ruun group. The story will focus mostly on this one planet, offering a more focused RPG experience than the space exploration-heavy angle that the base game employs.

As usual, take this report with a grain of salt until some official announcements arrive from Microsoft or Bethesda regarding future Starfield expansions.

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With the country's stance on China being a major issue during the upcoming US elections, these companies are concerned about potential stricter control policies that could impact their ability to access chipmaking capacity on advanced nodes. For many, Samsung is now the most viable alternative.

Samsung stands to benefit from these geopolitical dynamics

Reports suggest that Chinese chip designers are rushing to place orders with TSMC for chip production on advanced nodes. They anticipate stricter control policies being imposed by the US after the elections. These companies have also formulated a backup plan which involves shifting more orders to Samsung's foundry.

Their concern is that the US might ban Chinese companies from using Taiwanese foundries. Taiwan is a major US ally and is likely to follow the guidance from the US on imposing bans on Chinese IT companies. This would leave Samsung as the alternative. Even though it's based in South Korea which is another major US ally, Korean companies have been able to handle these geopolitical dynamics between the US and China more diplomatically.

TSMC's financial report for the second quarter of this year revealed that the company's revenue proportion from China has jumped to 16%, making it the highest among all Asia-Pacific countries. China is now the second biggest source of revenue for TSMC after North America. This suggests that Chinese chip design companies are placing orders in advance to stockpile chips to minimize potential disruption in the event that the new US administration places stricter controls.

Shifting orders to Samsung would enable these companies to diversify their production and ensure that in the event of TSMC being unable to provide them with production capacity, they have another viable option.

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Nearly four-fifths of technology leaders think traditional customer experience (CX) technologies “will be dead” in the next three years, prompting not just a revamp, but a radical overhaul of the industry, according to a survey from Zendesk.

The customer experience technology provider’s Future of AI-powered CX report surveyed over 1,300 senior CX leaders, those at the vice-president level or higher, from countries including Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the US, to gather insights into their perspectives and predictions for the next three years.

Among the top-line findings of the study was the emergence of a new CX organisation. In this paradigm, CX organisations will become leaner, faster and more effective, with artificial intelligence (AI) at the helm to streamline processes, personalise engagement and handle a higher volume of customer interactions. The study noted that this evolution will likely lead to smaller CX teams, as 64% of industry experts predict a downsizing due to AI’s ability to simplify operations while delivering high-quality service to customers.

A fivefold increase in customer service interactions is also anticipated by the study, with IT leaders confident in AI’s ability to maintain quality service. This shift, said Zendesk, will make operations smoother, decisions sharper and boost market competitiveness. As AI takes over routine tasks, it will enable teams to be more efficient and control costs, allowing for effective scaling of business operations even as customer interactions increase.

Another key expectation was that tech-savvy agents will become the new norm. It said AI’s impact on CX organisations promises to be significant, reshaping the roles of agents, admins and leaders to prioritise specialised skills. Agents will see their roles expand to include enhanced technical skills and a deeper understanding of technology.

The report also plots out AI playing a pivotal role in every customer interaction, stepping in to handle initial inquiries and maintain consistency across all service platforms. It will also track the performance of both human and AI agents to deliver exceptional service.

With AI projected to resolve 80% of interactions, the study predicts that as a consequence, human agents will turn their focus to more complex tasks, with AI using data to tailor and improve each customer’s experience.

Ultimately though, the survey said industry leaders will transform into customer-centric visionaries, equipped with a deep understanding of the offerings that truly resonate with customers. This transition, it said, will empower CX leaders to deploy AI strategically, make smarter decisions, and effectively guide their teams through emerging tech trends and evolving customer behaviours.

“In the near future, AI will play a role in all customer interactions, moving us beyond traditional, manual service to more advanced, technological-driven experiences,” said Craig Flower, chief information officer at Zendesk.

“That’s why leaders are proactively adjusting their strategies now to navigate the anticipated changes and leverage AI to its fullest potential. A transformation won’t happen overnight, but there will be a steady progression that develops over time. It’s going to redefine roles and improve experiences for CX teams and their customers.”

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Table of contents:

1. Windows 10 and 11 news
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Gaming news

Windows 11 and 10

Here we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And of course, you may find a word or two about older but still supported versions.

As sleepless IT admins continue to deal with the recent CrowdStrike outage, Microsoft and CrowdStrike continue releasing new tools and guidance to help fix the situation. CrowdStrike released detailed guides, and Microsoft outed an updated tool with new methods to resuscitate knocked-out computers. Sadly, the problem caused an influx of malware disguised as recovery utilities and recovery manuals, so beware.

Besides offering guidance and even a brief analysis of what happened, CrowdStrike issued ... $10 Uber Eats gift cards to the affected customers. We are not sure what to say about this one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Microsoft, on the other hand, published a blog post where it highlighted the importance of "change and innovation in resiliency" after what happened with CrowdStrike.

Speaking of Windows and security, a Microsoft spokesperson recently blamed the EU, calling it the reason why Microsoft cannot lock down and secure its operating system. Windows is allegedly not as secure as it could be because Microsoft is forced to give developers the same OS access as it has.

Windows 10 users received a new non-security update. KB5040525 arrived in the form of build number 19045.4717 with different updates and changes to improve the overall experience. As for Windows 11 users, they have got KB5040527. And if you prefer not to download previews of cumulative updates, think twice because this time, the update has some much-needed improvements for the Start menu and File Explorer.

Also, there was an update for OOBE in Windows 11 versions 22H2 and 24H2.

Also, Microsoft confirmed a bug with Windows 11 and 10 PCs booting into BitLocker recovery after applying some of the recent updates. While Microsoft is investigating the root of the problem, the company suggests typing your BitLocker key and booting it as usual.

Apple recently approved the first PC emulator in the App Store. Naturally, users are already trying to install Windows 11 on Apple devices. Thanks to the tiny11 project, you can now run Windows 11 on the iPhone 15 Pro. Of course, it is barely usable, so do not expect to turn your iPad Pro or iPhone into a Windows 11 tablet any time soon.

Another piece of Windows trivia and whackery from this week is this project attempting to convert Windows 10 into an extremely similar Windows 7 replica. Some users just won't let Windows 7 die, so they go above and beyond to preserve its beautiful aesthetics in modern Windows versions.

Windows Insider Program

Here is what Microsoft Released this week for testing in the Windows Insider Program:

Build 26257, which was released this week in the Canary Channel, introduced new mouse settings, File Explorer improvements (you can now duplicate tabs), some networking changes, and more. There are also a lot of new features and improvements in build 26100.1297 (Release Preview).

However, probably the biggest announcement in the Windows Insider program this week was a new feature in File Explorer that now lets you wirelessly browse your phone's file system without using any cables. It now neatly integrates into File Explorer and shows up right under the "This PC" section in the side pane.

By the way, Microsoft quietly turned off the recently introduced simplified tray area in Windows 11 preview builds. The company said it temporarily disabled the new feature to fix a bunch of technical issues.

Updates are available

This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more from Microsoft and third parties.

As usual, this week brought a bunch of browser updates, namely changes in their development plans. Microsoft, for one, decided to give systems without SSE3 support a little more time. Initially, the company planned to ditch SSE3-less processors in Edge 126, but now, that is scheduled for Edge 128.

Also, Edge received its weekly feature update for testing in the Dev Channel under version 128.0.2730.0. As for customers in the Stable Channel, they have been updated to version 127. It contains plenty of security improvements, some policy changes, bug fixes, and more.

Next, Google decided to do a U-turn and continue supporting third-party cookies in the Chrome browser. Instead of phasing out third-party cookies, Google now wants to introduce "a new experience" that would let people "make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing" and have the ability to change it at any time.

Third, Mozilla issued a bug-fixing update for Firefox 128. Version 128.0.2 arrived with various improvements, including fixes for visual glitches on Windows PCs powered by ARM processors, such as the Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7. Firefox 128.0.3 followed shortly with three more fixes.

Fourth, we have the Arc Browser, a new player on the market. Its developer, The Browser Company, announced a public preview of the browser, giving everyone a chance to sign up for the program and access new features early. Developers also confirmed that Arc is getting a native ad-blocker, tracking prevention capabilities, and the ability to dismiss cookie banners automatically.

Moving to other apps and services, we have Logitech's Options app, which will soon be retired in favor of the Options+ app, the more modern variant with broader device support and some interesting features, including generative AI integration. However, there is no information on when exactly Logitech plans to discontinue the old Options app.

There is a new update for VirtualBox users, namely for those not scared of pre-release software. VirtualBox 7.1 Beta 1 is now available with a reworked UI, new features, ARM virtualization for Linux, IPv6 for NAT, and more.

Following the recent Azure Lab Services shutdown, Microsoft decided to retire another Azure-based feature. This time, Virtual Network Injection for Azure Data Explorer customers is getting the axe.

Some interesting updates happened in Bing, Microsoft's ill-fated search engine. For one, it now mixes search results with AI-generated answers. Also, it lost access to Reddit after the platform shut the door for companies not paying it to scrub its multitude of data.

Microsoft 365 Insiders received a bunch of updates this week. On Mac, Excel users can try a new way to refresh data. Also, Microsoft added more features to Copilot in Planner preview release for Teams and made it much easier to edit tables in Word documents on the web.

Other notable updates include the following:

• Microsoft Reflect app is now available for download in the Microsoft Store.

• Microsoft Copilot Dashboard is now rolling out to Copilot for Microsoft 365 subscribers.

• Microsoft Copilot for Sales added new ways to share info from Outlook to Teams.

• There is a new app that promises to optimize processor performance when overheating.

• Microsoft SharePoint users can access a new content pane for their pages and news creations.

• Microsoft announced a new partnership with Lumen to help expand its network capacity.

• Microsoft now allows developers to fine-tune Phi-3-mini and Phi-3-medium models.

   

And here are the newest drivers and firmware updates released this week:

• The Surface Studio 2+ received camera and security fixes.
• AMD Chipset Software 6.07.22.037 with bug fixes and some new drivers.

Finally, here is this week's Microsoft 365 Roadmap Weekly, which is full of new features that are coming soon to Outlook on various platforms.

Reviews are in

Here are the software and hardware we reviewed this week.

Robbie Khan is back with another accessory review. This time, he tried out the Melgeek Made68 gaming keyboard with exclusive magnetic hall-effect switches. This keyboard has some neat switches, very capable software, a premium build, and great features. However, its keycaps are not illuminated, and the keyboard is only available in one layout and size. Check out the complete review here.

That was not the only keyboard reviewed this week. We also published a review of the Ducky Zero 6108, an interesting keyboard with some strong sides and a bunch of odd weaknesses.

Finally, Steven Parker put the Radeon RX 7800 XT against the GeForce RTX 4070 to see which card can deliver better performance for roughly a similar amount of money.

On the gaming side

Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts and more.

This week's gaming section kicks off with a reminder that the Xbox 360 Marketplace is closing on July 29. Therefore, act fast if there are some games you want to buy for the legendary console from two decades ago.

A new report emerged about Microsoft working on another Game Pass tier. This time, the company explored a possible cloud-only plan, which would be significantly cheaper than the current $19.99 Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Sadly, the details about cloud-only Game Pass are very scarce at the moment.

On the PC side of the gaming world, Valve announced a big rework of how Steam serves game demos to customers. Now, developers can list demos as separate products with their dedicated listings, reviews, and more. Gamers will also receive a notification if a game on their wishlists now has a free demo.

Remember the Deadpool-inspired butt controller? Now, there is another one, this time in yellow, made after Wolverine. Sadly, this sick-ass gamepad is not available for purchase. You can only win it as part of the latest Xbox Sweepstakes.

On July 23, Microsoft confirmed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III is coming to Xbox Game Pass. On the next day, July 24, the game arrived in the catalog, giving subscribers free access to the popular first-person shooter from Activision. You can now go to the Microsoft Store and download the game to your console or PC.

State of Decay, another Microsoft-owned title, received a new content update this week. Update 37 brings a Red Cross-themed mission, a bunch of new items, and various improvements for other aspects of the game, such as flashlights.

The next is Microsoft Flight Simulator, everyone's favorite airplane game. Its latest update delivered rework, improvements, and a whole bunch of details for multiple cities in the UK and Ireland, namely Bristol, Brighton, Greater London, Heathrow, Cork, Dublin, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and more. There are 79 new points of interest and five new hand-crafted airports to check out. The update is available for free for all users, including Game Pass subscribers. You can get it from the in-game marketplace.

Halo Infinite is getting a new old game mode. On July 30, the game will get an update with the so-called VIP mode. This mode comes from the classic Halo 3 game, where teams of four players have a VIP they have to protect at all costs while also attempting to eliminate the other team's VIP. The update will also let Forge editors add announcers to maps.

Sea of Thieves received its Season 13 update with a fire-breathing ship equipped with 10 cannons, new Skeleton Camps, and some new cosmetic rewards. You can now play the Season 3 updates on all supported platforms, including PlayStation 5.

If you are eagerly waiting for the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, bad news: the game was delayed again. The good news is that it was delayed not for very long. It is now scheduled for public release in November 2024. Before that, developers will hold a Developer Deep Dive event where you can expect to hear a lot about the upcoming game.

Finally, Nvidia expanded the list of playable games on its GeForce NOW streaming service with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, F1 Manager 2024, Gang Beast, and six more games. Check them out here.

Deals and freebies

Now to that part where you add free games to your library or waste spend money on discounted titles. The Epic Games Store is giving away FIST: Forged In Shadow Torch. It is available for free until the next Thursday when another free game will replace it.

If you want more, there is always something to check out in our weekly Weekend PC Game Deals series that gathers dozens of PC game discounts and specials in one place.

Other gaming news include the following:

• Ubisoft's pirate game Skull and Bones is coming to Steam in August.
• Blizzard's World of Warcraft team has voted to unionize and join Bethesda Game Studios.
• Xbox Insiders can access the New World: Aeternum Closed Beta for free until July 31.
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard won't require EA App on Steam.
• "DLC-sized" Fallout: London mod for Fallout 4 is now available on GOG.

• Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns DLC launches Sept. 24 with a new story, fighters and Animalities.

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Microsoft yesterday published their detailed technical analysis of this outage caused by the CrowdStrike driver. Microsoft's analysis confirmed the findings of CrowdStrike that the crash was due to a read-out-of-bounds memory safety error in CrowdStrike's CSagent.sys driver. The csagent.sys module is registered in a Windows PC as a file system filter driver to receive notifications about file operations, including the creation or modification of a file. This allows security products, including CrowdStrike, to scan any new file saved to disk.

When the incident happened, there was a lot of criticism around Microsoft allowing 3rd party software developers kernel-level access. In the blog post, Microsoft explained why they offer kernel-level access for security products:

• Kernel drivers allow for system-wide visibility and the capability to load early in the boot process to detect threats like boot kits and root kits, which can load before user-mode applications.
• Microsoft offers features such as system event callbacks for process and thread creation, file filter drivers, and more.
• Kernel drivers offer better performance for cases like high-throughput network activity.
• Security solutions want to ensure that their software cannot be disabled by malware, targeted attacks, or malicious insiders, even when those attackers have admin-level privileges. Windows offers Early Launch Antimalware (ELAM) early in the boot process for this reason.

However, kernel drivers also come with a tradeoff since they run at the most trusted level of Windows, increasing risks. Microsoft is also working to move complex Windows core services from kernel to user mode, such as font file parsing.

Microsoft recommends security solution providers balance needs like visibility and tamper resistance with the risk of operating within kernel mode. For example, they can use minimal sensors that run in kernel mode for data collection and enforcement, limiting exposure to availability issues. The rest of the features, like managing updates, parsing content, and other operations, can occur isolated within user mode.

In the blog post, Microsoft also explained the built-in security features of the Windows OS. These security capabilities offer layers of protection against malware and exploitation attempts in Windows. Microsoft will work with the anti-malware ecosystem through the Microsoft Virus Initiative (MVI) to take advantage of Windows built-in security features to further increase security along with reliability.

Microsoft has planned the following for now:

• Providing safe rollout guidance, best practices, and technologies to make it safer to perform updates to security products.
• Reducing the need for kernel drivers to access important security data.
• Providing enhanced isolation and anti-tampering capabilities with technologies like the recently announced VBS enclaves.
• Enabling zero-trust approaches like high-integrity attestation, which provides a method to determine the security state of the machine based on the health of Windows native security features.

While over 97% of Windows PCs affected by this issue are back online as of July 25, Microsoft is now looking ahead to prevent such issues in the future. John Cable, Vice President of Windows Program Management at Microsoft, recently published a blog post on this CrowdStrike issue where he mentioned that Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience, which is exactly what customers will expect from Microsoft.

Source: Microsoft

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The insurance company Parametrix estimates the impact on 2023 Fortune 500 companies to be roughly $5.4 billion. However, the analysis does not include Microsoft which Parametrix considered “a key player in the event.”

In total, 125 corporations, respectively 25 % of the Fortune 500 list were negatively affected. Although the damages are significant, only a fraction – 10 to 20 % – of the losses were insured. This represents $0.54 to $1.08 billion.

By far the worst affected sector was the airline companies. All airliners on the list were impacted with the damages averaging $148,38 million, easily the worst average among all industry sectors. The highest cumulative losses, $1.94 billion, are expected in the healthcare sector with banking being a distant second ($1.15 billion). The average loss of a Fortune 500 company is estimated to be $43.64 million.

The global numbers sound even crazier, though. Parametrix CEO Jonatan Hatzor told Reuters that the CrowdStrike outage could total $15 billion in losses worldwide. Only a fraction, $1.5 to $3 billion, would be covered by insurance.

Shortly after the unprecedented event, Microsoft confirmed that CrowdStrike's update issue affected 8.5 million Windows devices, less than one percent of all Windows machines. And while CrowdStrike claims that over 97 % of Windows sensors are now back online, Microsoft expects that full recovery of all computers may take several weeks.

All the devices were “infected” by a faulty update within just a 78-minute-long window before CrowdStrike reverted the update.

“I am deeply sorry for the disruption this outage has caused and personally apologize to everyone impacted. While I can’t promise perfection, I can promise a response that is focused, effective, and with a sense of urgency,” said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.

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