Slashdot

The US Federal Trade Commission is accelerating scrutiny of Microsoft as part of an ongoing probe into whether the company illegally monopolizes large swaths of the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings, including Copilot. From a report: The agency has issued civil investigative demands in recent weeks to companies that compete with Microsoft in the business software and cloud computing markets, according to people familiar with the matter. The demands feature an array of questions on Microsoft's licensing and other business practices, according to the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential investigation. With the demands, which are effectively like civil subpoenas, the FTC is seeking evidence that Microsoft makes it harder for customers to use Windows, Office and other products on rival cloud services. The agency is also requesting information on Microsoft's bundling of artificial intelligence, security and identity software into other products, including Windows and Office, some of the people said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US AI models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News. In the memo, sent Thursday to the House Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of "ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs." The company said it had detected "new, obfuscated methods" designed to evade OpenAI's defenses against misuse of its models' output. OpenAI began privately raising concerns about the practice shortly after the R1 model's release last year, when it opened a probe with partner Microsoft Corp. into whether DeepSeek had obtained its data in an unauthorized manner, Bloomberg previously reported. In distillation, one AI model relies on the output of another for training purposes to develop similar capabilities. Distillation, largely tied to China and occasionally Russia, has persisted and become more sophisticated despite attempts to crack down on users who violate OpenAI's terms of service, the company said in its memo, citing activity it has observed on its platform. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday introduced House Bill 5387 (PDF), which would repeal the state's recently enacted mandatory stand-alone computer science graduation requirement and replace it with a new computer literacy proficiency requirement. Not too surprisingly, the Bill is being opposed by tech-backed nonprofit Code.org, which lobbied for the WV CS graduation requirement (PDF) just last year. Code.org recently pivoted its mission to emphasize the importance of teaching AI education alongside traditional CS, teaming up with tech CEOs and leaders last year to launch a national campaign to mandate CS and AI courses as graduation requirements. "It would basically turn the standalone computer science course requirement into a computer literacy proficiency requirement that's more focused on digital literacy," lamented Code.org as it discussed the Bill in a Wednesday conference call with members of the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, including reps from Microsoft's Education and Workforce Policy team. "It's mostly motivated by a variety of different issues coming from local superintendents concerned about, you know, teachers thinking that students don't need to learn how to code and other things. So, we are addressing all of those. We are talking with the chair and vice chair of the committee a week from today to try to see if we can nip this in the bud." Concerns were also raised on the call about how widespread the desire for more computing literacy proficiency (over CS) might be, as well as about legislators who are associating AI literacy more with digital literacy than CS. The proposed move from a narrower CS focus to a broader goal of computer literacy proficiency in WV schools comes just months after the UK's Department for Education announced a similar curriculum pivot to broader digital literacy, abandoning the narrower 'rigorous CS' focus that was adopted more than a decade ago in response to a push by a 'grassroots' coalition that included Google, Microsoft, UK charities, and other organizations. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration. From a report: In a statement published on Ring's blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: "Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners ... The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety." [...] Over the last few weeks, the company has faced significant public anger over its connection to Flock, with Ring users being encouraged to smash their cameras, and some announcing on social media that they are throwing away their Ring devices. The Flock partnership was announced last October, but following recent unrest across the country related to ICE activities, public pressure against the Amazon-owned Ring's involvement with the company started to mount. Flock has reportedly allowed ICE and other federal agencies to access its network of surveillance cameras, and influencers across social media have been claiming that Ring is providing a direct link to ICE. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has patched a high-severity vulnerability in Windows 11's Notepad that allowed attackers to silently execute local or remote programs when a user clicked a specially crafted Markdown link, all without triggering any Windows security warning. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20841 and fixed in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday update, stemmed from Notepad's relatively new Markdown support -- a feature Microsoft added after discontinuing WordPad and rewriting Notepad to serve as both a plain text and rich text editor. An attacker only needed to create a Markdown file containing file:// links pointing to executables or special URIs like ms-appinstaller://, and a Ctrl+click in Markdown mode would launch them. Microsoft's fix now displays a warning dialog for any link that doesn't use http:// or https://, though the company did not explain why it chose a prompt over blocking non-standard links entirely. Notepad updates automatically through the Microsoft Store. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM said it will triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026, even as AI appears to be weighing on broader demand for early-career workers. From a report: While the company declined to disclose specific hiring figures, it said the expansion will be "across the board," affecting a wide range of departments. "And yes, it's for all these jobs that we're being told AI can do," said Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM's chief human resources officer, speaking at a conference this week in New York. LaMoreaux said she overhauled entry-level job descriptions for software developers and other roles to make the case internally for the recruitment push. "The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them," she said at Charter's Leading With AI Summit. "So, if you're going to convince your business leaders that you need to make this investment, then you need to be able to show the real value these individuals can bring now. And that has to be through totally different jobs." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Greenoaks and Temasek. Anthropic raised its funding target by $10 billion during the process after the round was several times subscribed. The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, now has a $14 billion revenue run rate, about 80% of which comes from enterprise customers. It claims more than 500 customers spending over $1 million a year on its workplace tools. The round includes a portion of the $15 billion commitment from Microsoft and Nvidia announced late last year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.