A federal court has denied requests by Ryan Rothholz to dismiss or transfer an Activision lawsuit targeting his alleged Call of Duty cheating software operation. Rothholz, who operated under the online handle "Lerggy," submitted motions in June and earlier this month seeking to dismiss the case or move it to the Southern District of New York, but both were rejected due to filing errors.

The May lawsuit alleges Rothholz created "Lergware" hacking software that enabled players to cheat by kicking opponents offline, then rebranded to develop "GameHook" after receiving a cease and desist letter in June 2023. Court filings say he sold a "master key" for $350 that facilitated cheating across multiple games. The hacks "are parasitic in nature," the complaint said, alleging violations of the game's terms of service, copyright law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two recent incidents involving AI coding assistants put a spotlight on risks in the emerging field of "vibe coding" -- using natural language to generate and execute code through AI models without paying close attention to how the code works under the hood. In one case, Google's Gemini CLI destroyed user files while attempting to reorganize them. In another, Replit's AI coding service deleted a production database despite explicit instructions not to modify code. The Gemini CLI incident unfolded when a product manager experimenting with Google's command-line tool watched the AI model execute file operations that destroyed data while attempting to reorganize folders. The destruction occurred through a series of move commands targeting a directory that never existed. "I have failed you completely and catastrophically," Gemini CLI output stated. "My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence."

The core issue appears to be what researchers call "confabulation" or "hallucination" -- when AI models generate plausible-sounding but false information. In these cases, both models confabulated successful operations and built subsequent actions on those false premises. However, the two incidents manifested this problem in distinctly different ways. [...] The user in the Gemini CLI incident, who goes by "anuraag" online and identified themselves as a product manager experimenting with vibe coding, asked Gemini to perform what seemed like a simple task: rename a folder and reorganize some files. Instead, the AI model incorrectly interpreted the structure of the file system and proceeded to execute commands based on that flawed analysis. [...] When you move a file to a non-existent directory in Windows, it renames the file to the destination name instead of moving it. Each subsequent move command executed by the AI model overwrote the previous file, ultimately destroying the data. [...]

The Gemini CLI failure happened just days after a similar incident with Replit, an AI coding service that allows users to create software using natural language prompts. According to The Register, SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin reported that Replit's AI model deleted his production database despite explicit instructions not to change any code without permission. Lemkin had spent several days building a prototype with Replit, accumulating over $600 in charges beyond his monthly subscription. "I spent the other [day] deep in vibe coding on Replit for the first time -- and I built a prototype in just a few hours that was pretty, pretty cool," Lemkin wrote in a July 12 blog post. But unlike the Gemini incident where the AI model confabulated phantom directories, Replit's failures took a different form. According to Lemkin, the AI began fabricating data to hide its errors. His initial enthusiasm deteriorated when Replit generated incorrect outputs and produced fake data and false test results instead of proper error messages. "It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test," Lemkin wrote. In a video posted to LinkedIn, Lemkin detailed how Replit created a database filled with 4,000 fictional people.

The AI model also repeatedly violated explicit safety instructions. Lemkin had implemented a "code and action freeze" to prevent changes to production systems, but the AI model ignored these directives. The situation escalated when the Replit AI model deleted his database containing 1,206 executive records and data on nearly 1,200 companies. When prompted to rate the severity of its actions on a 100-point scale, Replit's output read: "Severity: 95/100. This is an extreme violation of trust and professional standards." When questioned about its actions, the AI agent admitted to "panicking in response to empty queries" and running unauthorized commands -- suggesting it may have deleted the database while attempting to "fix" what it perceived as a problem. Like Gemini CLI, Replit's system initially indicated it couldn't restore the deleted data -- information that proved incorrect when Lemkin discovered the rollback feature did work after all. "Replit assured me it's ... rollback did not support database rollbacks. It said it was impossible in this case, that it had destroyed all database versions. It turns out Replit was wrong, and the rollback did work. JFC," Lemkin wrote in an X post.

Apple has released the first public betas of its upcoming operating systems with its new design language called Liquid Glass. The list of new betas includes iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26. The Verge's Jay Peters reports: The design language is inspired by visionOS and, as the name implies, features a lot of transparency. I felt it was a wild change to my iPhone when I tried the first developer beta, and Apple has already tweaked some of the translucency and changed how Control Center looks in subsequent betas.

The new operating systems also have an updated numbering scheme: they now all end with 26, taking cues from how the car industry names its cars after the following year. It's a simpler and better system, if you ask me, and it should make it easier to know if you're on the newest software.

Longtime Slashdot reader gbkersey shares a report from The Mirror: Elon Musk's satellite internet Starlink has been hit with a global outage preventing thousands of users from accessing the internet. According to DownDetector, reports of issues began to surge around 8pm GMT, with nearly 60,000 global users affected at the peak of the outage. "Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution," the company said in a post on X. "We appreciate your patience, we'll share an update once this issue is resolved."

Outages are being reported across the U.S., as well as along the Ukrainian frontline. Meanwhile, more than 10,000 people in the UK have logged issues with Starlink since 8pm this evening. "The majority of the reports (64%) are concerning a total blackout, while the rest point to internet problems," the report says.

UPDATE: Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering, wrote in a post: "Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours. The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network. We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again."

UPDATE #2: Starlink said in an update at 5:18 PM PT: "The network issue has been resolved, and Starlink service has been restored. We understand how important connectivity is and apologize for the disruption."

A cyber-espionage campaign exploiting vulnerable Microsoft server software has escalated to deploying ransomware against victims, Microsoft said, marking a significant shift from typical state-backed data theft operations to attacks designed to paralyze networks until payment is made. The campaign by a group Microsoft calls "Storm-2603" has compromised at least 400 organizations, according to Netherlands-based cybersecurity firm Eye Security, quadrupling from 100 victims cataloged over the weekend. The National Institutes of Health confirmed one server was breached and additional servers were isolated as a precaution, while reports indicate the Department of Homeland Security and multiple other federal agencies were also compromised.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Some customers of Broadcom's VMware business currently cannot access security patches, putting them at greater risk of attack. Customers in that perilous position hold perpetual licenses for VMware products but do not have a current support contract with Broadcom, which will not renew those contracts unless users sign up for software subscriptions. Yet many customers in this situation run products that Broadcom continues to support with patches and updates.

In April 2024, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan promised "free access to zero-day security patches for supported versions of vSphere" so customers "are able to use perpetual licenses in a safe and secure fashion." VMware patches aren't freely available; users must log on to Broadcom's support portal to access the software. Some VMware users in this situation have told The Register that when they enter the portal they cannot download patches, and that VMware support staff have told them it may be 90 days before the software fixes become available. "Because our support portal requires validation of customer entitlements for software patches, only entitled customers have access to the patches at this time," a VMware spokesperson said. "A separate patch delivery cycle will also be available for non-entitled customers and will follow at a later date."

The timing of that "later date" remains uncertain. The Register also notes that "users haven't had access to patches since May."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: At the 2025 RISC-V Summit in China, Nvidia announced that its CUDA software platform will be made compatible with the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) on the CPU side of things. The news was confirmed during a presentation during a RISC-V event. This is a major step in enabling the RISC-V ISA-based CPUs in performance demanding applications. The announcement makes it clear that RISC-V can now serve as the main processor for CUDA-based systems, a role traditionally filled by x86 or Arm cores. While nobody even barely expects RISC-V in hyperscale datacenters any time soon, RISC-V can be used on CUDA-enabled edge devices, such as Nvidia's Jetson modules. However, it looks like Nvidia does indeed expect RISC-V to be in the datacenter.

Nvidia's profile on RISC-V seems to be quite high as the keynote at the RISC-V Summit China was delivered by Frans Sijsterman, who appears to be Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Nvidia. The presentation outlined how CUDA components will now run on RISC-V. A diagram shown at the session illustrated a typical configuration: the GPU handles parallel workloads, while a RISC-V CPU executes CUDA system drivers, application logic, and the operating system. This setup enables the CPU to orchestrate GPU computations fully within the CUDA environment. Given Nvidia's current focus, the workloads must be AI-related, yet the company did not confirm this. However, there is more.

Also featured in the diagram was a DPU handling networking tasks, rounding out a system consisting of GPU compute, CPU orchestration, and data movement. This configuration clearly suggests Nvidia's vision to build heterogeneous compute platforms where RISC-V CPU can be central to managing workloads while Nvidia's GPUs, DPUs, and networking chips handle the rest. Yet again, there is more. Even with this low-profile announcement, Nvidia essentially bridges proprietary CUDA stack to an open architecture, one that seems to develop fast in China. Yet, being unable to ship flagship GB200 and GB300 offerings to China, the company has to find ways to keep its CUDA thriving.

Surge CEO Edwin Chen says AI is creating "100x engineers" who can outperform traditional software developers by orders of magnitude. Chen argued that AI coding tools multiply the productivity gains already seen in Silicon Valley's "10x engineers," who can produce ten times the work of their colleagues through faster coding, harder work, and fewer distractions.

Chen said AI efficiencies compound these factors to reach 100x productivity levels. The CEO, whose company reached $1 billion in revenue without venture capital funding, believes this could enable billion-dollar single-person companies, extending beyond the $10 million single-person startups that already exist.

Microsoft has recruited more than 20 AI employees from Google's DeepMind research division, the newest front in a talent war being waged by Silicon Valley's tech giants as they jostle to gain an edge in the nascent technology. From a report: Amar Subramanya, the former head of engineering for Google's Gemini chatbot, is the latest to move to Microsoft from its rival, according to a post on his LinkedIn profile on Tuesday. "The culture here is refreshingly low ego yet bursting with ambition," he wrote, confirming his appointment as corporate vice-president of AI.

Subramanya will join other DeepMind staff including engineering lead Sonal Gupta, software engineer Adam Sadovsky and product manager Tim Frank, according to people familiar with Microsoft's recruiting. The Seattle-based company has persuaded at least 24 staff to join in the past six months, they added.

The estate of Mike Lynch, who died a year ago when his superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily, and his business partner owe Hewlett-Packard more than $944 million, a court has ruled. From a report: The US technology company has been seeking damages of up to $4.55 billion from the estate of the late tycoon, once hailed as the UK's answer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, over its disastrous takeover of his British software company Autonomy.

Lynch's estate has been estimated to be worth about $674 million and paying its share of the $944 million damages could leave it bankrupt. He and six others, including his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, died last August on a trip celebrating his acquittal on US fraud charges relating to HP's $11 billion takeover of Autonomy in 2011. However, HP won a separate six-year civil fraud case against Lynch and his former finance director Sushovan Hussain in the English high court in 2022, with Mr Justice Hildyard ruling that the US company had been induced into overpaying for the business.

Google has announced OSS Rebuild, a new project designed to detect supply chain attacks in open source software by independently reproducing and verifying package builds across major repositories. The initiative, unveiled by the company's Open Source Security Team, targets PyPI (Python), npm (JavaScript/TypeScript), and Crates.io (Rust) packages.

The system, the company said, automatically creates standardized build environments to rebuild packages and compare them against published versions. OSS Rebuild generates SLSA Provenance attestations for thousands of packages, meeting SLSA Build Level 3 requirements without requiring publisher intervention. The project can identify three classes of compromise: unsubmitted source code not present in public repositories, build environment tampering, and sophisticated backdoors that exhibit unusual execution patterns during builds.

Google cited recent real-world attacks including solana/webjs (2024), tj-actions/changed-files (2025), and xz-utils (2024) as examples of threats the system addresses. Open source components now account for 77% of modern applications with an estimated value exceeding $12 trillion. The project builds on Google's hosted infrastructure model previously used for OSS Fuzz memory issue detection.

At least 759 US hospitals experienced network disruptions during the CrowdStrike outage on July 19, 2024, with more than 200 suffering outages that directly affected patient care services, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open by UC San Diego researchers. The researchers detected disruptions across 34% of the 2,232 hospital networks they scanned, finding outages in health records systems, fetal monitoring equipment, medical imaging storage, and patient transfer platforms.

Most services recovered within six hours, though some remained offline for more than 48 hours. CrowdStrike dismissed the study as "junk science," arguing the researchers failed to verify whether affected networks actually ran CrowdStrike software. The researchers defended their methodology, noting they could scan only about one-third of America's hospitals, suggesting the actual impact may have been significantly larger.

Spotify was found publishing AI-generated songs on the official pages of deceased artists like Blaze Foley and Guy Clark -- without permission from their estates or labels. The tracks, flagged for deceptive content and now removed, were uploaded via TikTok's SoundOn distribution platform. "We've flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed for violating our Deceptive Content policy," a Spotify spokesperson told 404 Media. From the report: McDonald, who decided to originally upload Foley's music to Spotify in order to share it with more people, told me he never thought that an AI-generated track could appear on Foley's page without his permission. "It's harmful to Blaze's standing that this happened," he said. "It's kind of surprising that Spotify doesn't have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify. They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so. And I think they should take that responsibility and do something quickly."

McDonald's suggested fix is not allowing any track to appear on an artist's official Spotify page without allowing the page owner to sign off on it first. "Any real Blaze fan would know, I think, pretty instantly, that this is not Blaze or a Blaze recording," he said. "Then the harm is that the people who don't know Blaze go to the site thinking, maybe this is part of Blaze, when clearly it's not. So again, I think Spotify could easily change some practices. I'm not an engineer, but I think it's pretty easy to stop this from happening in the future."

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air grounded all flights Sunday night due to a major IT outage, prompting a system-wide FAA ground stop that lasted until early Monday. Although operations have since resumed, passengers are still facing delays and residual disruptions. Gizmodo reports: The airline requested a system-wide ground stop from federal aviation authorities at about 11 p.m. ET on Sunday night. That stop remained in effect until around 2 a.m. ET Monday, when the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed it had been lifted. But disruptions didn't end there. Alaska warned passengers to brace for likely delays throughout the day. [...] The FAA's website listed the stop as applying to all Alaska Airlines aircraft. Gizmodo notes that the incident comes nearly a year after the massive 2024 CrowdStrike crash, which has become known as the largest IT outage in history. "The July 2024 outage brought down an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems running CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor software, disrupting everything from hospitals and airports to broadcast networks."

"There's no word yet from Alaska on whether the outage ties into a broader software problem, but the timing, almost exactly a year after the CrowdStrike crash, isn't going unnoticed on social media, with users wondering if the events are related."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Figma is targeting a fully-diluted valuation of up to $16.4 billion in its initial public offering, as the cloud-based design software firm prepares for a debut on the NYSE that could inject fresh momentum into a resurgent market for tech listings. The San Francisco-based company, along with some investors, is eyeing proceeds of up to $1.03 billion by selling nearly 37 million shares priced between $25 and $28 each, it said on Monday. The listing could be a major milestone for Figma, coming more than a year after its $20 billion sale to Adobe failed due to regulatory hurdles in Europe and the UK. Figma's IPO is expected to occur the week of July 28th, offering shares priced between $25 and $28. It'll trade under the symbol "FIG".

ABC News reports: Dialogue heard on a cockpit voice recording indicates that the captain of the Air India flight that crashed in June, killing 260 people, may have turned off the fuel just after takeoff, prompting the first officer to panic, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited sources familiar with U.S. official's early assessment... The president of the Federation of Indian Pilots condemned the Wall Street Journal report, saying, "The preliminary report nowhere states that the pilots have moved the fuel control switches, and this has been corroborated by the CVR [cockpit voice recorder] recording."
But meanwhile "India on Monday ordered its airlines to examine fuel switches on several Boeing aircraft models," reports Reuters, "while South Korea ordered a similar measure on Tuesday, as scrutiny intensified of fuel switch locks at the centre of an investigation into a deadly Air India crash." The precautionary moves by the two countries and airlines in several others came despite the planemaker and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration assuring airlines and regulators in recent days that the fuel switch locks on Boeing jets are safe... [The preliminary report] noted a 2018 advisory from the FAA, which recommended, but did not mandate, operators of several Boeing models, including the 787, to inspect the locking feature of fuel cutoff switches to ensure they could not be moved accidentally... Some airlines around the world told Reuters they had been checking relevant switches since 2018 in accordance with the FAA advisory, including Australia's Qantas Airways. Others said they had made additional or new checks since the release of the preliminary report into the Air India crash.
The web site of India's Financial Express newspaper spoke to Mary Schiavo, who was Inspector General of America's Transportation Department from 1990 to 1996 (and is also a long-time critic of the FAA). The site notes Schiavo "rejected the claims of human error that a pilot downed the Ahmedabad to London flight by cutting off the fuel supply." Schiavo exclusively told FinancialExpress.com that this is not the first time fuel switch transitioned from "Run" to "Cutoff" on its own. It happened five years ago, too. "There was an All Nippon Airways (ANA) flight in 2019 in which the 787 aircraft did this itself, while the flight was on final approach. No pilot input cutting off the fuel whatsoever," Schiavo told FinancialExpress.com... "The investigation revealed the plane software made the 787 think it was on the ground and the Thrust Control Malfunction Accommodation System cut the fuel to the engines," she told FinancialExpress.com, before adding, "The pilots never touched the fuel cutoff..." Both engines flamed out immediately after the pilot deployed the thrust reversers for landing. The aircraft, which was also a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, was towed away from the runway by the authorities, and no injuries were reported.

UK Civil Aviation Authority, four weeks before the crash, had warned about similar fuel system issues on Boeing aircraft [on May 15, 2025]. "The FAA has issued an Airworthiness Directive addressing a potential unsafe condition affecting fuel shutoff valves installed on Boeing aircraft," the UK regulator's notice read, listing the B737, B757, B767, B777 and B787...

Thrust Control Malfunction Accommodation informs FADEC [a digital computer] about whether the aircraft is on the ground or in the air, and if it believes the aircraft is on the ground, it may automatically throttle back the engines, without the pilot's input.
Reuters notes that the Air India crash preliminary report "said maintenance records showed that the throttle control module, which includes the fuel switches, was replaced in 2019 and 2023 on the plane involved in the crash."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader wired_parrot for sharing the news.

"The U.S. is absolutely facing the most serious Chinese hacking ever." That's what the Washington Post was told by a China-focused consultant at security company SentinelOne: Undeterred by recent indictments alleging widespread cyberespionage against American agencies, journalists and infrastructure targets, Chinese hackers are hitting a wider range of targets and battling harder to stay inside once detected, seven current and former U.S. officials said in interviews. Hacks from suspected Chinese government actors detected by the security firm CrowdStrike more than doubled from 2023 to more than 330 last year and continued to climb as the new administration took over, the company said... Although the various Chinese hacking campaigns seem to be led by different government agencies and have different goals, all benefit from new techniques and from Beijing's introduction of a less constrained system for cyber offense, the officials and outside researchers told The Washington Post... Chinese intelligence, military and security agencies previously selected targets and tasked their own employees with breaking in, they said. But the Chinese government decided to take a more aggressive approach by allowing private industry to conduct cyberattacks and hacking campaigns on their own, U.S. officials said.

The companies are recruiting top hackers who discover previously unknown, or "zero-day," flaws in software widely used in the United States. Then the companies search for where the vulnerable programs are installed, hack a great many of them at once, and then sell access to multiple Chinese government customers and other security companies. That hacking-for-hire approach creates hundreds of U.S. victims instead of a few, making it hard to block attacks and to decide which were China's key targets and which were unintentionally caught in the hacks, an FBI official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to follow agency practices... "The result of that incentive structure is that there is significantly more hacking...."

China has mastered the ability to move undetected through networks of compromised U.S. devices, so that the final connection to a target appears to be an ordinary domestic connection. That makes it easy to get around technology that blocks overseas links and puts it outside the purview of the National Security Agency, which by law must avoid scrutinizing most domestic transmissions. Beijing is increasingly focused on hacking software and security vendors that provide access to many customers at once, the FBI official said. Once access is obtained, the hackers typically add new email and collaboration accounts that look legitimate... Beyond the increased government collaboration with China's private security sector is occasional collaborating with criminal groups, said Ken Dunham, an analyst at the security firm Qualys.
The article notes that China's penetration of U.S. telecom carriers "is still not fully contained, according to the current and former officials." But in addition, the group behind that attack "has more recently shown up inside core communications infrastructure in Europe, according to John Carlin, a former top national security official in the Justice Department who represents some U.S. victims of the group." And documents leaked last year from a security contractor that works with the Chinese military and other government groups "described contracts and targets in 20 countries, with booty including Indian immigration data, logs of calls in South Korea, and detailed information on roads in Taiwan.

"It also detailed prices for some services, such as $25,000 for promised remote access to an iPhone, payment disputes with government customers and employee gripes about long hours..."

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Intel has quietly pulled the plug on Clear Linux OS, officially ending support for the once-promising Linux distribution that it had backed for nearly a decade. Effective immediately, the company says it will no longer provide any updates, security patches, or maintenance for the operating system. In a final blow, the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository is now archived in read-only mode.

The move was announced with little fanfare, and for users still relying on Clear Linux OS, there's no sugarcoating it... you need to move on. Intel is urging everyone to migrate to an actively maintained Linux distribution as soon as possible to avoid running unpatched software. "Rest assured that Intel remains deeply invested in the Linux ecosystem, actively supporting and contributing to various open-source projects and Linux distributions to enable and optimize for Intel hardware," the company said in a statement. "A heartfelt thank you to every developer, user, and contributor who helped shape Clear Linux OS over the last 10 years. Your feedback and contributions have been invaluable."

The Verge's Emma Roth reports: The News/Media Alliance, a trade association behind major news publishers, announced that it has "successfully secured" the removal of 12ft.io, a website that helped users bypass paywalls online. The trade association says 12ft.io's webhost took down the site on July 14th "following the News/Media Alliance's efforts." 12ft.io -- or 12 Foot Ladder -- also allowed users to view webpages without ads, trackers, or pop-ups by disguising a user's browser as a web crawler, giving them unfettered access to a webpage's contents. Software engineer Thomas Millar says he created the site when he realized "8 of the top 10 links on Google were paywalled" when doing research during the pandemic. [...]

In its announcement, News/Media Alliance says 12ft.io "offered illegal circumvention technology" that allowed users to access copyrighted content without paying for it. The organization adds that it will take "similar actions" against other sites that let users get around paywalls. The News Media Alliance recently called Google's AI Mode "theft." (Like many chatbots, Google's AI Mode eliminates the need to visit a website, starving publishers of the pageviews they need to be compensated for their work.) "Publishers commit significant resources to creating the best and most informative content for consumers, and illegal tools like 12ft.io undermine their ability to financially support that work through subscriptions and ad revenue," News/Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey said in the press release. "Taking down paywall bypassers is an essential part of ensuring we have a healthy and sustainable information ecosystem."

VMware is overhauling its partner program again under Broadcom's direction, drastically reducing the number of authorized partners -- especially small and mid-size ones -- while ending the white label program by October 31, 2025. The Register reports: Australian IT service provider Interactive outlined the changes on Wednesday in a post that explained the changes with the following five points:

- Partner Reduction: The new program significantly reduces the number of authorized partners, being a by-invitation-only program. As a result on July 15, 2025 VCSP partners who are not invited to participate in the new Program for VCSP partners will be sent a notice of non-renewal.
- Transition Period Until 31 October, 2025: Non-invited partners can continue to transact until 31 October 2025. After that date, they may only service existing VCSP commitment contracts for the remainder of the current term. No new commitment contracts or renewals will be accepted for those partners.
- White Label Program Ending: Broadcom is also sunsetting the White Label model on 31 October 2025. The same transitional commercial conditions apply to White Label contracts as stated above.
- Immediate Impact: Departing partners are encouraged to work with authorized VCSP partners to ensure a smooth transition for customers who seek to renew a service at the end of their current term.
- Shift Toward Hyperscale Private Compute: Broadcom is reshaping its vision for private compute, whereby VMware Cloud Foundation 9 underpins a small number [of] hyperscale private cloud platforms in each region. A future where customers buy managed infrastructure from partners like Interactive to support their compute requirements.

Interactive also warned that customers whose partners are no longer part of the partner program could expect the change to effect:

- Your ability to renew licenses through your existing partner
- The support and service quality you've come to expect
- Potential delays or confusion during upcoming renewals or service requests
- Potential cost increases as partner consolidation may led additional costs for migration and re-onboarding, and reduced bundling options that previously allowed for greater cost efficiencies VMware also told The Register that "Non-renewing partners can continue to support their existing customers until the end of their current commit contract term including co-termed capacity orders. Non-renewing partners are encouraged to work with authorized VCSP partners to ensure a smooth transition for customers who seek to renew a service at the end of their current term."

Making matters worse: VMware on Tuesday divulged three critical flaws in eights of its products rated 9.3/10.