The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is opening a formal investigation into whether Microsoft's bundling of Windows, Office, Teams, Copilot, and related products harms competition. Engadget reports: "Our aim is to understand how these markets are developing, Microsoft's position within them and to consider what, if any, targeted action may be needed to ensure UK organizations can benefit from choice, innovation and competitive prices," CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement published by Reuters.

She also stressed the importance of the investigation by noting that hundreds of thousands of UK residents use business software and Microsoft products. The organization will take a look into the company's cloud licensing practices. The CMA has stated that the inquiry will conclude by February. At that point, Microsoft could get slapped with a strategic market label.

Microsoft says it's "committed to working quickly and constructively with the CMA to facilitate its review of the business software market." A strategic market designation doesn't automatically assume wrongdoing, but will give the CMA more leeway when conducting further interventions.

AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have agreed in principle to form a joint venture (JV) aimed at reducing U.S. mobile dead zones through satellite connectivity, especially in rural areas and during emergencies when ground networks fail. Here are three of the customer benefits listed by the JV (as highlighted by Droid Life): Fewer coverage gaps: Will nearly eliminate dead zones in the U.S. currently without mobile service, reaching previously unserved areas.
Reliable connectivity in emergencies: Redundant connectivity will become available when existing ground-based networks are unavailable due to extreme natural disasters or other unusual disruptions.
Improved network performance: Will give customers more consistent performance and simpler access to satellite services across providers. This will speed up feature updates and improve connectivity for everyone, everywhere. "It will still take time for these improvements to be available to customers, but this all seems like a positive step," writes Droid Life's Tim Wrobel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Princeton University will soon require exams to be supervised for the first time in 100 years -- all thanks to students using artificial intelligence to cheat. For 133 years, the Ivy League school's honor code allowed students to take exams without a professor present, but on Monday, faculty voted to require proctoring for all in-person exams starting this summer. A "significant" number of undergraduate students and faculty requested the change, "given their perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread," the college's dean, Michael Gordin, wrote in a letter, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Princeton's honor system dates back to 1893, when students petitioned to eliminate proctors -- or an impartial person to supervise students -- during examinations, according to the school's newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. The honor code has long been a point of pride for Princeton. However, artificial intelligence and cellphones have made it easier for students to cheat -- and even harder for others to spot, Gordin wrote. Despite the changes to the policy, Princeton will still require students to state: "I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination," according to the Journal.

Students are also more reluctant to report cheating, according to the policy proposal. Students are more likely now to anonymously report cheating due to fears of "doxxing or shaming among their peer groups" online, the proposal says, according to the school newspaper. Under the new guidelines, instructors will be present during exams to act "as a witness to what happens," but are instructed not to interfere with students. If a suspected honor code infraction occurs, they will report it to a student-run honor committee for adjudication.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CNBC: The U.S. has cleared around 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia's second-most powerful AI chip, the H200, but not a single delivery has been made so far, three people familiar with the matter said, leaving a major technology deal in limbo as CEO Jensen Huang seeks a breakthrough in China this week. [...] Before U.S. export curbs tightened, Nvidia commanded about 95% of China's advanced chip market. China once accounted for 13% of its revenue, and Huang has previously estimated the country's AI market alone would be worth $50 billion this year.

The U.S. Commerce Department has approved around 10 Chinese companies including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com to purchase Nvidia's H200 chips, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. A handful of distributors including Lenovo and Foxconn have also been approved, they said. Buyers are permitted to purchase either directly from Nvidia or through those intermediaries and each approved customer can purchase up to 75,000 chips under the U.S. licensing terms, two of them said.

Despite U.S. approval, deals have stalled, as Chinese firms pulled back after guidance from Beijing, one source said. The shift in China was partly triggered by changes on the U.S. side, though exactly what changed remains unclear, the person added. In Beijing, pressure is mounting to block or tightly vet the orders, a separate fourth source said. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick echoed that view, telling a Senate hearing last month that "the Chinese central government has not let them, as of yet, buy the chips, because they're trying to keep their investment focused on their own domestic industry."

Anthropic announced today that it is partnering with the Gates Foundation to "commit $200 million in grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support for programs in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility over the next four years."

"This commitment is central to Anthropic's efforts to extend the benefits of AI in areas where markets alone will not," the company says. Reuters reports: One area of focus is language accessibility. AI systems have performed poorly in writing and translating dozens of African languages, so Anthropic and the foundation want to support better data collection and labeling that would be released publicly to help improve models across the industry, said Janet Zhou, a Gates Foundation director.

Another area under consideration is releasing so-called knowledge graphs that could help AI systems better meet the needs of teachers in sub-Saharan Africa and India, Zhou said. The public-goods focus has come from "the needs of different partners and governments, including some of the fears that they may have around proprietary lock-in and sovereignty," Zhou said.

One initiative will equip research centers to use Claude to predict drug candidates for treating HPV and preeclampsia, diseases that have been less commercially attractive for pharmaceutical companies to research, Zhou and Anthropic's Elizabeth Kelly said. Anthropic [...] is embracing the work to fulfill what Kelly described as its founding mission to benefit humanity. "This announcement is really core to who we are as a company," said Kelly, who leads Anthropic's beneficial deployments team.

Harvard faculty are voting on a proposal (PDF) to curb grade inflation by limiting solid A grades to 20% of students in a class, plus four additional A's per course. Axios reports: Grade inflation is at a tipping point at Harvard. A move to make A grades harder to come by at one of the world's leading universities could influence grading debates at peer institutions. Solid A's account for nearly two-thirds of all undergraduate letter grades. That's up from roughly a quarter 20 years ago. More than 50 members of last year's class graduated with perfect GPAs.

[...] Faculty are voting on three separate provisions. Each requires a simple majority to pass. A cap to limit solid-A grades to 20% of enrolled students in a class, plus four additional A's per course. Changes to how internal honors are calculated, moving from traditional grade point average scoring to an average percentile rank. Allowing courses to use new "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" marks with a "satisfactory-plus" distinction.

A pre-vote faculty poll showed around 60% of the 205 respondents favored the 20-plus-four formula over an alternative. Supporters of the cap argue it's intentionally modest as it places no restrictions on A-minuses. The four-grade buffer is designed to protect small seminars where a higher proportion of students may succeed. [...] If passed, changes would take effect in fall 2027, followed by a mandatory three-year review.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta employees distributed flyers at multiple U.S. offices on Tuesday to protest the company's recent installation of mouse-tracking software on their computers, according to photos of the pamphlets seen by Reuters. The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and atop toilet paper dispensers at the Facebook owner's offices, encouraged staffers to sign an online petition against the move. "Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?" they asked, according to the photos seen by Reuters. [...]

The pamphlets and the petition both cite the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, saying "workers are legally protected when they choose to organize for the improvement of working conditions." In the UK, a group of Meta employees has started organizing a drive for unionization with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a branch of the Communication Workers Union. The employees set up a website to recruit members using the URL "Leanin.uk," a reference to former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's best-selling book encouraging women to seek equal footing in the workplace. "Meta's workers are paying the price for management's reckless and expensive bets. While executives chase speculative AI strategies, staff are facing devastating job cuts, draconian surveillance, and the cruel reality of being forced to train the inefficient systems being positioned to replace them," said Eleanor Payne, an organizer with UTAW. "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them -- things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus," said a statement Meta issued earlier.

Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: CERN, a longtime Open Source pioneer, has made several contributions over the years to KiCad ("KEE-kad"), an Open Source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) package widely used in the hobbyist and professional electronics communities. It's gotten so widely used that users can now submit their KiCad design files directly to several electronics fabricators (rather than the traditional step of converting the layouts to Gerber files). Over the years, CERN has also developed their own symbol and footprint libraries to support their own internal electronic designs. Last week, CERN released those KiCad component libraries, containing over 17,000 symbols, under the CERN Open Hardware License.

Instructure, the company behind the widely used Canvas learning platform, says it reached an agreement with the hackers who stole 3.5 terabytes of student and university data. The company says it received "digital confirmation" that the information was destroyed and that affected schools and students would not be extorted. The BBC reports: Paying cyber criminals goes against the advice of law enforcement agencies around the world, as it can fuel further attacks and offers no guarantee the data has been deleted. In previous cases, criminals have accepted ransom payments but lied about destroying stolen data, instead keeping it for resale. For example, when the notorious LockBit ransomware group was hacked by the National Crime Agency, police found stolen data had not been deleted even after payments had been made.

Instructure said in a statement on its website that protecting students' and education staff data was its primary motivation. "While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cyber criminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible," the company said. Instructure did not set out the terms of the agreement but said that it meant that:
- the data was returned to the company
- it received "digital confirmation of data destruction"
- it had been informed that no Instructure customers would be extorted as a result of the incident
- the agreement covers all affected customers, with no need for individuals to engage with the hackers

A Georgia data center developed by QTS used nearly 30 million gallons of water through two unaccounted-for connections before residents complained about low water pressure and the county utility discovered the issue. "All told, the developer, Quality Technology Services, owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons of unaccounted-for water," reports Politico. "That is equivalent to 44 Olympic-size swimming pools and far exceeds the peak limit agreed to during the data center planning process." From the report: The details were revealed in a May 15, 2025 letter from the Fayette County water system to Quality Technology Services, which outlined the retroactive charge of $147,474. The letter did not specify how many months the unpaid bill covered, but when asked about it Wednesday, Vanessa Tigert, the Fayette County water system director, said it was likely about four months. A QTS spokesperson said the timeframe was 9-15 months. Once the data center was notified, it paid all retroactive charges, a QTS spokesperson said in an email, noting the unmetered water consumption occurred while the county converted its system to smart meters.

The Fayette County water system confirmed the data center's meters are now fully integrated and tracked. Tigert, the water system director, blamed the issue on a procedural mix-up. "Fayette County is a suburb, it's mostly residential, and we don't have much commercial meters in our system anyway," she said. "And so we didn't realize our connection point wasn't working." The incident became public last week when a county resident obtained the 2025 letter to QTS through a public records request and posted it on Facebook, prompting outrage from residents concerned about the data center's water consumption. [...]

Tigert, who sent the 2025 letter to QTS, said the utility didn't know about the water hookups because the connection process "got mixed up" as the county transitioned to a cloud-based system while also trying to accommodate an industrial customer. Tigert also said her staff is small and at capacity. "Just like any water system, we don't have enough staff. We can't keep staff," she said. "I've got one person that's doing inspections and plan review, and so he's spread pretty thin." She said it's possible her staff did know about hookups but that she hadn't been able to locate the inspection report. "I may have hit 'send' too soon," she said about the 2025 letter to QTS. While the utility charged the data center a higher construction rate for the unapproved water consumption, Tigert confirmed the utility did not penalize or fine the data center. For what it's worth, the Blackstone-owned company says its data centers use a closed-loop cooling system that does not consume water for cooling. The reason for last year's high water use, according to QTS, was the temporary construction work such as concrete, dust control, and site preparation.

Once the campus is fully operational, it should only use a small amount of water for things like bathrooms and kitchens. But that point could still be years away, as construction and expansion in Fayetteville may continue for another three to five years.

Digg is relaunching again, this time as an AI-focused news aggregator rather than the Reddit-style community site it recently abandoned. TechCrunch reports: On Friday evening, the founder previewed a link to the newly redesigned Digg, which now looks nothing like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was. This time around, the site is focused on ranking news -- specifically, AI news to start. In an email to beta testers, the company said the site's goal is to "track the most influential voices in a space" and to surface the news that's actually worth "paying attention to." AI is the area it's testing this idea with, but if successful, Digg will expand to include other topics. The email warned that the site was still raw and "buggy," and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut.

On the current homepage, Digg showcases four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story seeing rising discussion, the fastest-climbing story, and one "In case you missed it" headline. Below that is a ranked list of top stories for the day, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics aren't the ones generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg is ingesting content from X in real-time to determine what's being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal detection to determine what matters most. [...] The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and the top politicians focused on AI issues.

Apple now requires Education Store shoppers in the U.S. and several other countries to verify their student, educator, parent, or homeschool-teacher status through UNiDAYS, ending the previous honor-system approach. 9to5Mac reports: Starting today, Apple requires shoppers in the United States to complete verification when making a purchase via the Education Store. This change also applies to Australia, Hong Kong, Turkey, Canada, and Chile. In many other markets around the world, such as the UK, Apple already required verification. As a refresher, people eligible for Apple's Education Store include current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers across all grade levels.

Apple is teaming up with UNiDAYS to handle the verification process. Students and educators will be asked to create a UNiDAYS ID and then verify their academic status by logging in to their school's academic portal. Alternatively, users can upload a photo of their student or faculty IDs. Homeschool teachers, meanwhile, will need to provide an identity document such as a driver's license, state ID card, or passport. They'll also need to provide one homeschool document, such as a Letter of Intent (LOI) or Letter of Acknowledgment. Most customers will be verified instantly, and those requiring manual verification should hear back within 24 hours. The same verification process applies both in-store and online for Apple Education Store shoppers. Meanwhile, Apple has added Apple Watch to the Education Store for the first time, offering discounts on the Series 11, SE 3, and Ultra 3.

The free/open source project OrcaSlicer is a popular fork of 3D printer slicing software from Bambu Lab. But Tuesday independent developer Pawel Jarczak shuttered the project "following legal threats from Bambu Lab," reports Tom's Hardware: Jarczak's fork of OrcaSlicer would have allowed users to bypass Bambu Connect, a middleware application that severely limits OrcaSlicer's access to remote printer functions in the name of security. Jarczak said in a note on GitHub that Bambu Lab threatened him with a cease and desist letter and accused him of reverse engineering its software in order to impersonate Bambu Studio.
From Bambu Lab's blog post: Bambu Studio is an open-source project under the AGPL-3.0 license. Anyone can take its code, modify it, and distribute it... That's what OrcaSlicer does, and 734 other forks do as well. We have no issue with that and never have. At the same time, a license for code is not a pass to our cloud infrastructure... Our cloud is a private service. Access to it is governed by a user agreement, not the AGPL license... [T]he modification in question worked by injecting falsified identity metadata into network communication. In simple terms: it pretended to be the official Bambu Studio client when communicating with our servers... If this method were widely adopted or incorrectly configured, thousands of clients could simultaneously hit our servers while impersonating the official client.
"User-Agent is not authentication," counters OrcaSlicer's developer. "It is only self-declared client metadata. Any program can set any User-Agent." And "the User-Agent construction comes directly from Bambu Lab's own public AGPL Bambu Studio code.... So on what basis can anyone claim that I am not allowed to use this specific part of AGPL-licensed code under the AGPL license...? My work was based on publicly available Bambu Studio source code together with my own integration layer."

But the bottom line is that Bambu Lab "contacted me directly and demanded removal of the solution." I asked whether I could publish the private correspondence in full for transparency. That request was refused... They also referred to legal materials and stated that a cease and desist letter had been prepared...

I removed the repository voluntarily. That removal should not be interpreted as an admission that all legal or technical allegations made against the project were correct. I removed it because I have no interest in maintaining a prolonged dispute around this particular implementation, and no interest in continuing to distribute it.
YouTuber and right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann reviewed the correspondence from Bambu Lab — then pledged $10,000 for legal expenses if the developer returned his code online. ("I think that their legal claim is bullshit," Rossman said Saturday in a YouTube video for his 2.5 million subscribers. "I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is.")

The video now has over 129,000 views so far. "Rossman has not started a crowdfunding site yet," Tom's Hardware notes, "stating in the comments that he wants to prove to Jarczak that he has supporters willing to put their money where their mouth is. The video had over 129,000 views so far, with commenters vowing to back the case as requested."

In Polymarket's prediction market, "most people end up losing money," reports the Washington Post — typically a few bucks.

"Since Polymarket launched in 2022, a few thousand people have lost the bulk of the money... and an even smaller group — .05 percent of users — has gone home with most of the overall profits, according to a new analysis from finance researcher Pat Akey and colleagues." A lot of users aren't that good at predicting the future. They're losing money at roughly the same rate as online gamblers betting on sports and other real-life events at traditional sportsbooks, according to the U.K. gambling regulator's analysis of 2024 data. On Polymarket, the odds of making a profit are slightly higher on weather and tech markets — and a little lower on sports...

On Polymarket, just 1,200 people took more than half the profits — $591 million, or more than $100,000 each. ["The top 1% of users capture 76.5% of all trading gains," the researchers write.] When you dabble in prediction markets, you're competing against these sophisticated players who consistently win. Most of those 1,200 big winners didn't place just a few smart bets. They appear to be pros making thousands of trades, mostly in the past year and a half, that were probably automated. One user made $3 million since January on more than a million trades about the Oscars, according to TRM Labs...

The most profitable participants are also just good at picking what to bet on, Akey found, winning so often it was statistically unlikely to be dumb luck. They had some sort of edge — expertise, deep research or, perhaps, inside knowledge.
"Our results suggest that the informational benefits of prediction markets come at a cost to unsophisticated participants," the researchers conclude.

Under the nonprofit Linux Foundation, "a new Sustaining Package Registries Working Group will seek to identify concrete funding, governance, and security practices," reports ZDNet, "to keep code flowing as download counts grow.... Because software builds, continuous integration pipelines, and AI systems hammer registries at machine speed rather than human speed, the sites can't keep up.

"That growth has brought a surge in bot traffic, automated publishing, security reports, and outright abuse, exposing what the working group bluntly calls a 'sustainability gap'." Sonatype CTO Brian Fox, who oversees the Maven Central Java registry, estimates open-source registries saw 10 trillion downloads in 2025. And "The same pattern is appearing across ecosystems. More machine traffic. More automation. More scanning. More expectations around uptime, integrity, provenance, and policy enforcement. More cost. More support burden. More dependency on infrastructure that the industry still talks about as though it runs on goodwill and spare time."

ZDNet reports that "To tackle that, Sonatype has teamed up with the Linux Foundation and other package registry leaders, including Alpha-Omega, Eclipse Foundation (OpenVSX), OpenJS Foundation, OpenSSF, Packagist, Python Software Foundation, Ruby Central (RubyGems), and the Rust Foundation (Crates)." The idea is to give operators a neutral forum to discuss money, governance, and shared operational burdens openly. Once that's dealt with, they'll coordinate how to explain those realities back to companies and organizations that have long assumed registries are "free." No, they're not. They never were. As the Linux Foundation pointed out, "Registries today run primarily on two things: (1) infrastructure donations and credits; and (2) heroic efforts from small paid teams (themselves funded by donations and grants) and unpaid volunteers that operate and maintain registry services. The bulk of donations and grants comes from a small set of donors and doesn't scale with demands on the registry."

The working group is explicitly positioned as a venue where registry leaders and ecosystem stakeholders can align on "practical, community-minded" ways to sustain that infrastructure, rather than each operator improvising its own survival plan in isolation.
ZDNet says the group will also coordinate security practices and information, and craft frameworks "that make it politically and legally possible to introduce sustainable funding models without fracturing communities." And they will also "align messaging and educational content so developers, companies, and policymakers finally understand what it costs to run these services."