Month: September 2024

Enlarge / An updated onboarding screen for Recall, with clearly visible buttons for opting in or out; Microsoft says Recall will be opt-in by default and can even be removed from PCs entirely. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is having another whack at its controversial Recall feature for Copilot+ Windows PCs, after the original version crashed and burned amid scrutiny from security researchers and testers over the summer. The former version of Recall recorded screenshots and OCR text of all user activity, and stored it unencrypted on disk where it could easily be accessed by another user on the PC or an attacker with remote access.

The feature was announced in late May, without having gone through any of the public Windows Insider testing that most new Windows features get, and was scheduled to ship on new PCs by June 18; by June 13, the company had delayed it indefinitely to rearchitect it and said that it would be tested through the normal channels before it was rolled out to the public.

Today, Microsoft shared more extensive details on exactly how the security of Recall has been re-architected in a post by Microsoft VP of Enterprise and OS Security David Weston.

Enlarge / Former US President Donald Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum on September 11, 2024 in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Michael M. Santiago)

Elon Musk's X is blocking links to the JD Vance "dossier" containing the Trump campaign's research on the vice presidential nominee. X also suspended Ken Klippenstein, the journalist who published the dossier that apparently comes from an Iranian hack of the Trump campaign.

"Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. Vance's physical addresses and the majority of his Social Security number," X's safety account wrote yesterday. Klippenstein's account was still suspended as of this writing.

X is blocking attempts to post links to the Klippenstein article in which he explained why he published the leaked dossier. An error message says, "We can't complete this request because the link has been identified by X or our partners as being potentially harmful."

Enlarge / Tesla's factory in Gruenheide, Germany. (credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Tesla's German car factory on the outskirts of Berlin allegedly operates under a "culture of fear," and its workers take sick leave at more than three times the industry average. The plant, which was targeted by arsonists earlier this year, is now experiencing a degree of discord between workers and management, according to reports in Handelsblatt and the Guardian.

"We will not tolerate some people bending their backs for others who just don’t feel like coming to work. There is no room in this factory for people who don't get out of bed in the morning," said André Thierig, manufacturing director Tesla's Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg.

It seems the company has been taking that directive seriously. Frustrated by a rate of sick leave that reached as high as 17 percent this summer—compared to a German auto industry average of 5.2 percent—Tesla started checking up on some employees at home, sending managers to visit 30 employees while they were on sick leave.

Enlarge / NYC Mayor Eric Adams, in happier times, holding an AirTag. (credit: NYC Mayor's Office/YouTube)

New York City mayor Eric Adams was stopped on the street by the FBI after an event in November 2023. Agents had a warrant for his electronic devices, which they seized. At the time, Adams made clear that he had nothing to hide, saying in a statement, "As a former member of law enforcement, I expect all members of my staff to follow the law and fully cooperate with any sort of investigation—and I will continue to do exactly that."

Thanks to this week's federal indictment (PDF) of Adams—the first for a sitting NYC mayor, and one that alleges bribery from Turkish sources—we now have the same story from the government's perspective. It sounds quite a bit different.

According to the feds, agents seized not one but two cell phones from Adams on November 6, 2023—but neither of these was Adams' "personal" phone, which he was not carrying. It was the personal phone that Adams allegedly used "to communicate about the conduct described in this indictment."

Enlarge / The small quantum processor (center) surrounded by cables that carry microwave signals to it, and the refrigeration hardware. (credit: IBM)

As we described earlier this year, operating a quantum computer will require a significant investment in classical computing resources, given the amount of measurements and control operations that need to be executed and interpreted. That means that operating a quantum computer will also require a software stack to control and interpret the flow of information from the quantum side.

But software also gets involved well before anything gets executed. While it's possible to execute algorithms on quantum hardware by defining the full set of commands sent to the hardware, most users are going to want to focus on algorithm development, rather than the details of controlling any single piece of quantum hardware. "If everyone's got to get down and know what the noise is, [use] performance management tools, they've got to know how to compile a quantum circuit through hardware, you've got to become an expert in too much to be able to do the algorithm discovery," said IBM's Jay Gambetta. So, part of the software stack that companies are developing to control their quantum hardware includes software that converts abstract representations of quantum algorithms into the series of commands needed to execute them.

IBM's version of this software is called Qiskit (although it was made open source and has since been adopted by other companies). Recently, IBM made a couple of announcements regarding Qiskit, both benchmarking it in comparison to other software stacks and opening it up to third-party modules. We'll take a look at what software stacks do before getting into the details of what's new.