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Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 28, 2023
> The European Commission today disclosed that it’s investigating Microsoft Corp. over the way it distributes Teams to customers.
> Microsoft ships Teams with Microsoft 365, a product bundle that includes the Office productivity suite. The videoconferencing and messaging service was previously a part of Office 365, a predecessor to Microsoft 365 that included many of the same products. European Union antitrust officials believe that this product bundling may amount to a breach of the bloc’s competition laws.
> In its announcement of the antitrust probe, the European Commission highlighted two specific areas of concern.
> European Union regulators Thursday opened an antitrust investigation into concerns that Microsoft's bundling of its Teams app with other Office products was giving it an unfair advantage.
> Teams is the company's popular communication and collaborative tool used by thousands of businesses worldwide. The company includes Teams with other popular suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365.
> The European Commission, the European Union's top competition enforcer, said bundling them may constitute anti-competitive behavior. It said it would carry out an investigation as "matter of priority."
> When Microsoft acknowledged the [breach] and the stolen MSA key, the software giant said Outlook.com and Exchange Online were the only applications known to have been affected via the token-forging technique but new research shows that the stolen key gave Chinese [crackers] access to data beyond Exchange Online and Outlook.com.
> The [breach], which led to the theft of email from approximately 25 organizations, turned into a bigger embarrassment for Microsoft when customers complained they had zero visibility to investigate because they were not paying for the high-tier E5/G5 license. After intense public pressure, the company announced it would expand logging defaults for lower-tier M365 customers.
> According to Senator Wyden, Microsoft never took responsibility for its role in the SolarWinds [breach] campaign and instead blamed federal agencies and customers while using the incident to promote its Azure AD product.
> The SEC proposed the changes last March, and on Wednesday the financial watchdog voted to adopt the requirements [PDF]. The rules, which take effect 30 days after being signed into the Federal Register later this year, will require publicly traded firms to openly disclose in a new section (Item 1.05) of Form 8-K any cybersecurity incident that has a material impact on their business.
> Companies must make this determination "without reasonable delay," according to the new rules. If they decide a security breach is material, then they have four days to submit an Item 1.05 Form 8-K report detailing the material impact of the incident's "nature, scope, and timing," plus any impact or likely impact on the business. Those 8-K forms are made public by the SEC.
> The clarification comes after the Department of Transportation earlier listed ChatGPT in a catalog of current AI use cases published on the department’s website. In that reference, the agency said the FAA — and in particular, the agency’s air traffic organization (ATO) — was using “ChatGPT in code writing assistance.”
> The file noted that the ChatGPT use case had been in production for less than a year and that ATO had not used agency training in its described work with the chatbot.
Windows TCO
> Hot off the heels of their stock soaring due to their advancements in artificial intelligence, and then dipping after not advancing AI fast enough, Microsoft has cut 1,000 more jobs. The most recent layoffs affected the deals and client administration divisions, as well as marketing and engineering project managers.
> With the layoffs, Microsoft eliminated its “Digital Sales and Success group,” which was aimed at sales and customer service. Microsoft also got rid of the customer solutions manager role. While the customer service department was largely affected, some employees were moved to customer success account management, Times of India shared. An additional report shared the tech giant cut 276 employees in their home offices in Washington. Sixty-six of those employees were virtual only, GeekWire shared.
> “Organizational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business. We will continue to prioritize and invest in strategic growth areas for our future and in support of our customers and partners,” a spokesperson for Microsoft said in a statement.
> These layoffs are separate from the 10,000 jobs that Microsoft cut earlier this year, and it is unclear why they are still laying off people in droves. Last week, Amazon laid off employees in their pharmacy division, creating uncertainty in their healthcare division.
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