After a US court ruled earlier this week that Google must open its Play Store to allow for third-party app stores and alternative payment options, Microsoft is moving quickly to slide into this slightly ajar door.
Sarah Bond, president of Xbox, posted on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday evening that the ruling “will allow more choice and flexibility.” “Our mission is to allow more players to play on more devices so we are thrilled to share that starting in November, players will be able to play and purchase Xbox games directly from the Xbox App on Android,” Bond wrote.
Because the court order requires Google to stop forcing apps to use its own billing system and allow for third-party app stores inside Google Play itself, Microsoft now intends to offer Xbox games directly through its app. Most games will likely not run directly on Android, but a revamped Xbox Android app could also directly stream purchased or subscribed games to Android devices.
Until now, buying Xbox games (or most any game) on a mobile device has typically involved either navigating to a web-based store in a browser—while avoiding attempts by the phone to open a store’s official app—or simply using a different device entirely to buy the game, then playing or streaming it on the phone.
A look at some of the changes and odds and ends in this year’s Windows release.
The Windows 11 2024 Update, also known as Windows 11 24H2, started rolling out last week. Your PC may have even installed it already!
The continuous feature development of Windows 11 (and Microsoft’s phased update rollouts) can make it a bit hard to track exactly what features you can expect to be available on any given Windows PC, even if it seems like it’s fully up to date.
This isn’t a comprehensive record of all the changes in the 2024 Update, and it doesn’t reiterate some basic but important things like Wi-Fi 7 or 80Gbps USB4 support. But we’ve put together a small list of new and interesting changes that you’re guaranteed to see when your version number rolls over from 22H2 or 23H2 to 24H2. And while Microsoft’s announcement post spent most of its time on Copilot and features unique to Copilot+ PCs, here, we’ll only cover things that will be available on any PC you install Windows 11 on (whether it’s officially supported or not).
Quick Settings improvements
The Quick Settings panel sees a few nice quality-of-life improvements. The biggest is a little next/previous page toggle that makes all of the Quick Settings buttons accessible without needing to edit the menu to add them. Instead of clicking a button and entering an edit menu to add and remove items from the menu, you click and drag items between pages. The downside is that you can’t see all of the buttons at once across three rows as you could before, but it’s definitely more handy if there are some items you want to access sometimes but don’t want to see all the time.
A couple of individual Quick Settings items see small improvements: a refresh button in the lower-right corner of the Wi-Fi settings will rescan for new Wi-Fi networks instead of making you exit and reopen the Wi-Fi settings entirely. Padding in the Accessibility menu has also been tweaked so that all items can be clearly seen and toggled without scrolling. If you use one or more VPNs that are managed by Windows’ settings, it will be easier to toggle individual VPN connections on and off, too. And a Live Captions accessibility button to generate automatic captions for audio and video is also present in Quick Settings starting in 24H2.
More Start menu “suggestions” (aka ads)
Amid apps I’ve recently installed and files I’ve recently opened, the “recommended” area of the Start menu will periodically recommend apps to install. These change every time I open the Start menu and don’t seem to have anything to do with my actual PC usage. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
One of the first things a fresh Windows install does when it connects to the Internet is dump a small collection of icons into your Start menu, things grabbed from the Microsoft Store that you didn’t ask for and may not want. The exact apps change from time to time, but these auto-installs have been happening since the Windows 10 days.
The 24H2 update makes this problem subtly worse by adding more “recommendations” to the lower part of the Start menu below your pinned apps. This lower part of the Start menu is usually used for recent files or newly (intentionally) installed apps, but with recommendations enabled, it can also pull recommended apps from the Microsoft Store, giving Microsoft’s app store yet another place to push apps on you.
These recommendations change every time you open the Start menu—sometimes you’ll see no recommended apps at all, and sometimes you’ll see one of a few different app recommendations. The only thing that distinguishes these items from the apps and files you have actually interacted with is that there’s no timestamp or “recently added” tag attached to the recommendations; otherwise, you’d think you had downloaded and installed them already.
These recommendations can be turned off in the Start menu section of the Personalization tab in Settings.
Context menu labels
Text labels added to the main actions in the right-click/context menu. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
When Windows 11 redesigned the right-click/context menu to help clean up years of clutter, it changed basic commands like copy and paste from text labels to small text-free glyphs. The 2024 Update doesn’t walk this back, but it does add text labels back to the glyphs, just in case the icons by themselves didn’t accurately communicate what each button was used for.
Windows 11’s user interface is full of little things like this—stuff that was changed from Windows 10, only to be changed back in subsequent updates, either because people complained or because the old way was actually better (few text-free glyphs are truly as unambiguously, universally understood as a text label can be, even for basic commands like cut, copy, and paste).
To recap, each annual Windows update also has a new major build number; for 24H2, that build number is 26100. In 22H2 and 23H2, it was 22621 and 22631. There’s also a minor build number, which is how you track which of Windows’ various monthly feature and security updates you’ve installed. This number starts at zero for each new annual update and slowly increases over time. The PC I’m typing this on is running Windows 11 build 26100.1882; the first version released to the Release Preview Windows Insider channel in June was 26100.712.
In previous versions of Windows, any monthly cumulative update that your PC downloads and installs can update any build of Windows 11 22H2/23H2 to the newest build. That’s true whether you’re updating a fresh install that’s missing months’ worth of updates or an actively used PC that’s only a month or two out of date. As more and more updates are released, these cumulative updates get larger and take longer to install.
Starting in Windows 11 24H2, Microsoft will be able to designate specific monthly updates as “checkpoint” updates, which then become a new update baseline. The next few months’ worth of updates you download to that PC will contain only the files that have been changed since the last checkpoint release instead of every single file that has been changed since the original release of 24H2.
If you’re already letting Windows do its update thing automatically in the background, you probably won’t notice a huge difference. But Microsoft says these checkpoint cumulative updates will “save time, bandwidth, and hard drive space” compared to the current way of doing things, something that may be more noticeable for IT admins with dozens or hundreds of systems to keep updated.
Sudo for Windows
A Windows version of the venerable Linux sudo command—short for “superuser do” or “substitute user do” and generally used to grant administrator-level access to whatever command you’re trying to run—first showed up in experimental Windows builds early this year. The feature has formally been added in the 24H2 update, though it’s off by default, and you’ll need to head to the System settings and then the “For developers” section to turn it on.
When enabled, Sudo for Windows (as Microsoft formally calls it) allows users to run software as administrator without doing the dance of launching a separate console window as an administrator.
By default, using Sudo for Windows will still open a separate console window with administrator privileges, similar to the existing runas command. But it can also be configured to run inline, similar to how it works from a Linux or macOS Terminal window, so you could run a mix of elevated and unelevated software from within the same window. A third option, “with input disabled,” will run your software with administrator privileges but won’t allow additional input, which Microsoft says reduces the risk of malicious software gaining administrator privileges via the sudo command.
One thing the runas command supports that Sudo for Windows doesn’t is the ability to run software as any local user—you can run software as the currently-logged-in user or as administrator, but not as another user on the machine, or using an account you’ve set up to run some specific service. Microsoft says that “this functionality is on the roadmap for the sudo command but does not yet exist.”
Protected print mode
Enabling the (currently optional) protected print mode in Windows 11 24H2. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Microsoft is gradually phasing out third-party print drivers in Windows in favor of more widely compatible universal drivers. Printer manufacturers will still be able to add things on top of those drivers with their own apps, but the drivers themselves will rely on standards like the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), defined by the Mopria Alliance.
Windows 11 24H2 doesn’t end support for third-party print drivers yet; Microsoft’s plan for switching over will take years. But 24H2 does give users and IT administrators the ability to flip the switch early. In the Settings app, navigate to “Bluetooth & devices” and then to “Printers & scanners” and enable Windows protected print mode to default to the universal drivers and disable compatibility. You may need to reconnect to any printer you had previously set up on your system—at least, that was how it worked with a network-connected Brother HL-L2340D I use.
This isn’t a one-way street, at least not yet. If you discover your printer won’t work in protected print mode, you can switch the setting off as easily as you turned it on.
New setup interface for clean installs
When you create a bootable USB drive to install a fresh copy of Windows—because you’ve built a new PC, installed a new disk in an existing PC, or just want to blow away all the existing partitions on a disk when you do your new install—the interface has stayed essentially the same since Windows Vista launched back in 2006. Color schemes and some specific dialog options have been tweaked, but the interface itself has not.
For the 2024 Update, Microsoft has spruced up the installer you see when booting from an external device. It accomplishes the same basic tasks as before, giving you a user interface for entering your product key/Windows edition and partitioning disks. The disk-partitioning interface has gotten the biggest facelift, though one of the changes is potentially a bit confusing—the volumes on the USB drive you’re booted from also show up alongside any internal drives installed in your system. For most PCs with just a single internal disk, disk 0 should be the one you’re installing to.
Wi-Fi drivers during setup
Microsoft’s obnoxious no-exceptions Microsoft account requirement for all new PCs (and new Windows installs) is at its most obnoxious when you’re installing on a system without a functioning network adapter. This scenario has come up most frequently for me when clean-installing Windows on a brand-new PC with a brand-new, as-yet-unknown Wi-Fi adapter that Windows 11 doesn’t have built-in drivers for. Windows Update is usually good for this kind of thing, but you can’t use an Internet connection to fix not having an Internet connection.
Microsoft has added a fallback option to the first-time setup process for Windows 11 that allows users to install drivers from a USB drive if the Windows installer doesn’t already include what you need. As a failover, would we prefer to see an easy-to-use option that didn’t require Microsoft account sign-in? Sure. But this is better than it was before.
To bypass this entirely, there are still local account workarounds available for experts. Pressing Shift + F10, typing OOBEBYPASSNRO in the Command Prompt window that opens, and hitting Enter is still there for you in these situations.
Boosted security for file sharing
The 24H2 update has boosted the default security for SMB file-sharing connections, though, as Microsoft Principal Program Manager Ned Pyle notes, it may result in some broken things. In this case, that’s generally a good thing, as they’re only breaking because they were less secure than they ought to be. Still, it may be dismaying if something suddenly stops functioning when it was working before.
The two big changes are that all SMB connections need to be signed by default to prevent relay attacks and that Guest access for SMB shares is disabled in the Pro edition of Windows 11 (it had already been disabled in Enterprise, Education, and Pro for Workstation editions of Windows in the Windows 10 days). Guest fallback access is still available by default in Windows 11 Home, though the SMB signing requirement does apply to all Windows editions.
Microsoft notes that this will mainly cause problems for home NAS products or when you use your router’s USB port to set up network-attached storage—situations where security tends to be disabled by default or for ease of use.
If you run into network-attached storage that won’t work because of the security changes to 24H2, Microsoft’s default recommendation is to make the network-attached storage more secure. That usually involves configuring a username and password for access, enabling signing if it exists, and installing firmware updates that might enable login credentials and SMB signing on devices that don’t already support it. Microsoft also recommends replacing older or insecure devices that don’t meet these requirements.
That said, advanced users can turn off both the SMB signing requirements and guest fallback protection by using the Local Group Policy Editor. Those steps are outlined here. That post also outlines the process for disabling the SMB signing requirement for Windows 11 Home, where the Local Group Policy Editor doesn’t exist.
Windows Mixed Reality is dead and gone
Several technology hype cycles ago, before the Metaverse and when most “AI” stuff was still called “machine learning,” Microsoft launched a new software and hardware initiative called Windows Mixed Reality. Built on top of work it had done on its HoloLens headset in 2015, Windows Mixed Reality was meant to bring in app developers and the PC makers and allowed them to build interoperable hardware and software for both virtual reality headsets that covered your eyes entirely and augmented reality headsets that superimpose objects over the real world.
But like some other mid-2010s VR-related initiatives, both HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality kind of fizzled and flailed, and both are on their way out. Microsoft officially announced the end of HoloLens at the beginning of the month, and Windows 11 24H2 utterly removes everything Mixed Reality from Windows.
Microsoft announced this in December of 2023 (in a message that proclaims “we remain committed to HoloLens”), though this is a shorter off-ramp than some deprecated features (like the Android Subsystem for Windows) have gotten. Users who want to keep using Windows Mixed Reality can continue to use Windows 23H2, though support will end for good in November 2026 when support for the 23H2 update expires.
WordPad is also dead
WordPad running in Windows 11 22H2. It will continue to be available in 22H2/23H2, but it’s been removed from the 2024 update. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
We’ve written plenty about this already, but the 24H2 update is the one that pulls the plug on WordPad, the rich text editor that has always existed a notch above Notepad and many, many notches below Word in the hierarchy of Microsoft-developed Windows word processors.
WordPad’s last update of any real substance came in 2009, when it was given the then-new “ribbon” user interface from the then-recent Office 2007 update. It’s one of the few in-box Windows apps not to see some kind of renaissance in the Windows 11 era; Notepad, by contrast, has gotten more new features in the last two years than it had in the preceding two decades. And now it has been totally removed, gone the way of Internet Explorer and Encarta.
Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.
Google called the DOJ extending search remedies to AI “radical,” an “overreach.”
The US Department of Justice finally proposed sweeping remedies to destroy Google’s search monopoly late yesterday, and, predictably, Google is not loving any of it.
On top of predictable asks—like potentially requiring Google to share search data with rivals, restricting distribution agreements with browsers like Firefox and device makers like Apple, and breaking off Chrome or Android—the DOJ proposed remedies to keep Google from blocking competition in “the evolving search industry.” And those extra steps threaten Google’s stake in the nascent AI search world.
This is only the first step in the remedies stage of litigation, but Google is already showing resistance to both expected and unexpected remedies that the DOJ proposed. In a blog from Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company accused the DOJ of “overreach,” suggesting that proposed remedies are “radical” and “go far beyond the specific legal issues in this case.”
From here, discovery will proceed as the DOJ makes a case to broaden the scope of proposed remedies and Google raises its defense to keep remedies as narrowly tailored as possible. After that phase concludes, the DOJ will propose its final judgement on remedies in November, which must be fully revised by March 2025 for the court to then order remedies.
Even then, however, the trial is unlikely to conclude, as Google plans to appeal. In August, Mozilla’s spokesperson told Ars that the trial could drag on for years before any remedies are put in place.
In the meantime, Google plans to continue focusing on building out its search empire, Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, said in August. This presumably includes innovations in AI search that the DOJ fears may further entrench Google’s dominant position.
Scrutiny of Google’s every move in the AI industry will likely only be heightened in that period. As Google has already begun seeking exclusive AI deals with companies like Apple, it risks appearing to engage in the same kinds of anti-competitive behavior in AI markets as the court has already condemned. And giving that impression could not only impact remedies ordered by the court, but also potentially weaken Google’s chances of winning on appeal, Lee Hepner, an antitrust attorney monitoring the trial for the American Economic Liberties Project, told Ars.
Ending Google’s monopoly starts with default deals
In the DOJ’s proposed remedy framework, the DOJ says that there’s still so much more to consider before landing on final remedies that it reserves “the right to add or remove potential proposed remedies.”
Through discovery, DOJ said that it plans to continue engaging experts and stakeholders “to learn not just about the relevant markets themselves but also about adjacent markets as well as remedies from other jurisdictions that could affect or inform the optimal remedies in this action.
“To be effective, these remedies… must include some degree of flexibility because market developments are not always easy to predict and the mechanisms and incentives for circumvention are endless,” the DOJ said.
Ultimately, the DOJ said that any remedies sought should be “mutually reinforcing” and work to “unfetter” Google’s current monopoly in general search services and general text advertising markets. That effort would include removing barriers to competition—like distribution and revenue-sharing agreements—as well as denying Google monopoly profits and preventing Google from monopolizing “related markets in the future,” the DOJ said.
Any effort to undo Google’s monopoly starts with ending Google’s control over “the most popular distribution channels,” the DOJ said. At one point during the trial, for example, a witness accidentally blurted out that Apple gets a 36 percent cut from its Safari deal with Google. Lucrative default deals like that leave rivals with “little-to-no incentive to compete for users,” the DOJ said.
“Fully remedying these harms requires not only ending Google’s control of distribution today, but also ensuring Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow,” the DOJ warned.
To dislodge this key peg propping up Google’s search monopoly, some options include ending Google’s default deals altogether, which would “limit or prohibit default agreements, preinstallation agreements, and other revenue-sharing arrangements related to search and search-related products, potentially with or without the use of a choice screen.”
A breakup could be necessary
Behavior and structural remedies may also be needed, the DOJ proposed, to “prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features—including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence—over rivals or new entrants.” That could mean spinning off the Chrome browser or restricting Google from preinstalling its search engine as the default in Chrome or on Android devices.
In her blog, Mulholland conceded that “this case is about a set of search distribution contracts” but claimed that “overbroad restrictions on distribution contracts” would create friction for Google users and “reduce revenue for companies like Mozilla” as well as Android smart phone makers.
Asked to comment on supposedly feared revenue losses, a Mozilla spokesperson told Ars, “[We are] closely monitoring the legal process and considering its potential impact on Mozilla and how we can positively influence the next steps. Mozilla has always championed competition and choice online, particularly in search. Firefox continues to offer a range of search options, and we remain committed to serving our users’ preferences while fostering a competitive market.”
Mulholland also warned that “splitting off” Chrome or Android from Google’s search business “would break them” and potentially “raise the cost of devices,” because “few companies would have the ability or incentive to keep them open source, or to invest in them at the same level we do.”
“We’ve invested billions of dollars in Chrome and Android,” Mulholland wrote. “Chrome is a secure, fast, and free browser and its open-source code provides the backbone for numerous competing browsers. Android is a secure, innovative, and free open-source operating system that has enabled vast choice in the smartphone market, helping to keep the cost of phones low for billions of people.”
Google has long argued that its investment in open source Chrome and Android projects benefits developers whose businesses and customers would be harmed if those efforts lost critical funding.
“Features like Chrome’s Safe Browsing, Android’s security features, and Play Protect benefit from information and signals from a range of Google products and our threat-detection expertise,” Mulholland wrote. “Severing Chrome and Android would jeopardize security and make patching security bugs harder.”
Hepner told Ars that Android could potentially thrive if broken off from Google, suggesting that through discovery, it will become clearer what would happen if either Google product was severed from the company.
“I think others would agree that Android is a company that is capable [being] a standalone entity,” Hepner said. “It could be independently monetized through relationships with device manufacturers, web browsers, alternative Play Stores that are not under Google’s umbrella. And that if that were the case, what you would see is that Android and the operating system marketplace begins to evolve to meet the needs and demands of innovative products that are not being created just by Google. And you’ll see that dictating the evolution of the marketplace and fundamentally the flow of information across our society.”
Mulholland also claimed that sharing search data with rivals risked exposing users to privacy and security risks, but the DOJ vowed to be “mindful of potential user privacy concerns in the context of data sharing” while distinguishing “genuine privacy concerns” from “pretextual arguments” potentially misleading the court regarding alleged risks.
One possible way around privacy concerns, the DOJ suggested, would be prohibiting Google from collecting the kind of sensitive data that cannot be shared with rivals.
Finally, to stop Google from charging supra-competitive prices for ads, the DOJ is “evaluating remedies” like licensing or syndicating Google’s ad feed “independent of its search results.” Further, the DOJ may require more transparency, forcing Google to provide detailed “search query reports” featuring currently obscured “information related to its search text ads auction and ad monetization.”
Stakeholders were divided on whether the DOJ’s initial framework is appropriate.
Matt Schruers, the CEO of a trade association called the Computer & Communications Industry Association (which represents Big Tech companies like Google), criticized the DOJ’s “hodgepodge of structural and behavioral remedies” as going “far beyond” what’s needed to address harms.
“Any remedy should be narrowly tailored to address specific conduct, which in this case was a set of search distribution contracts,” Schruers said. “Instead, the proposed DOJ remedies would reshape numerous industries and products, which would harm consumers and innovation in these dynamic markets.”
But a senior vice president of public affairs for Google search rival DuckDuckGo, Kamyl Bazbaz, praised the DOJ’s framework as being “anchored to the court’s ruling” and appropriately broad.
“This proposal smartly takes aim at breaking Google’s illegal hold on the general search market now and ushers in a new era of enduring competition moving forward,” Bazbaz said. “The framework understands that no single remedy can undo Google’s illegal monopoly, it will require a range of behavioral and structural remedies to free the market.”
Bazbaz expects that “Google is going to use every resource at its disposal to discredit this proposal,” suggesting that “should be taken as a sign this framework can create real competition.”
AI deals could weaken Google’s appeal, expert says
Google appears particularly disturbed by the DOJ’s insistence that remedies must be forward-looking and prevent Google from leveraging its existing monopoly power “to feed artificial intelligence features.”
As Google sees it, the DOJ’s attempt to attack Google’s AI business “comes at a time when competition in how people find information is blooming, with all sorts of new entrants emerging and new technologies like AI transforming the industry.”
But the DOJ has warned that Google’s search monopoly potentially feeding AI features “is an emerging barrier to competition and risks further entrenching Google’s dominance.”
The DOJ has apparently been weighing some of the biggest complaints about Google’s AI training when mulling remedies. That includes listening to frustrated site owners who can’t afford to block Google from scraping data for AI training because the same exact crawler indexes their content in Google search results. Those site owners have “little choice” but to allow AI training or else sacrifice traffic from Google search, The Seattle Times reported.
Remedy options may come with consequences
Remedies in the search trial might change that. In their proposal, the DOJ said it’s considering remedies that would “prohibit Google from using contracts or other practices to undermine rivals’ access to web content and level the playing field by requiring Google to allow websites crawled for Google search to opt out of training or appearing in any Google-owned artificial-intelligence product or feature on Google search,” such as Google’s controversial AI summaries.
Hepner told Ars that “it’s not surprising at all” that remedies cover both search and AI because “at the core of Google’s monopoly power is its enormous scale and access to data.”
“The Justice Department is clearly thinking creatively,” Hepner said, noting that “the ability for content creators to opt out of having their material and work product used to train Google’s AI systems is an interesting approach to depriving Google of its immense scale.”
The DOJ is also eyeing controls on Google’s use of scale to power AI advertising technologies like Performance Max to end Google’s supracompetitive pricing on text ads for good.
It’s critical to think about the future, the DOJ argued in its framework, because “Google’s anticompetitive conduct resulted in interlocking and pernicious harms that present unprecedented complexities in a highly evolving set of markets”—not just in the markets where Google holds monopoly powers.
Google disagrees with this alleged “government overreach.”
“Hampering Google’s AI tools risks holding back American innovation at a critical moment,” Mulholland warned, claiming that AI is still new and “competition globally is fierce.”
“There are enormous risks to the government putting its thumb on the scale of this vital industry—skewing investment, distorting incentives, hobbling emerging business models—all at precisely the moment that we need to encourage investment, new business models, and American technological leadership,” Mulholland wrote.
Hepner told Ars that he thinks that the DOJ’s proposed remedies framework actually “meets the moment and matches the imperative to deprive Google of its monopoly hold on the search market, on search advertising, and potentially on future related markets.”
To ensure compliance with any remedies pursued, the DOJ also recommended “protections against circumvention and retaliation, including through novel paths to preserving dominance in the monopolized markets.”
That means Google might be required to “finance and report to a Court-appointed technical committee” charged with monitoring any Google missteps. The company may also have to agree to retain more records for longer—including chat messages that the company has been heavily criticized for deleting. And through this compliance monitoring, Google may also be prohibited from owning a large stake in any rivals.
If Google were ever found willfully non-compliant, the DOJ is considering a “range of provisions,” including risking more extreme structural or behavioral remedies or enduring extensions of compliance periods.
As the remedies stage continues through the spring, followed by Google’s prompt appeal, Hepner suggested that the DOJ could fight to start imposing remedies before the appeal concludes. Likely Google would just as strongly fight for any remedies to be delayed.
While the trial drags on, Hepner noted that Google already appears to be trying to strike another default deal with Apple that appears pretty similar to the controversial distribution deals at the heart of the search monopoly trial. In March, Apple started mulling using Google’s Gemini to exclusively power new AI features for the iPhone.
“This is basically the exact same anticompetitive behavior that they were found liable for,” Hepner told Ars, suggesting this could “weaken” Apple’s defense both against the DOJ’s broad framework of proposed remedies and during the appeal.
“If Google is actually engaging in the same anti-competitive conduct and artificial intelligence markets that they were found liable for in the search market, the court’s not going to look kindly on that relative to an appeal,” Hepner said.
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
Whether you care about Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant or not, many new PCs introduced this year have included a dedicated Copilot key on the keyboard; this is true whether the PC meets the requirements for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC program or not. Microsoft’s commitment to putting AI features in all its products runs so deep that the company changed the Windows keyboard for the first time in three decades.
But what happens if you don’t use Copilot regularly, or you’ve disabled or uninstalled it entirely, or if you simply don’t need to have it available at the press of a button? Microsoft is making allowances for you in a new Windows Insider Preview build in the Dev channel, which will allow the Copilot key to be reprogrammed so that it can launch more than just Copilot.
The area in Settings where you can reprogram the Copilot key in the latest Windows Insider Preview build in the Dev channel. Credit: Microsoft
There are restrictions. To appear in the menu of options in the Settings app, Microsoft says an app must be “MSIX packaged and signed, thus indicating the app meets security and privacy requirements to keep customers safe.” Generally an app installed via the Microsoft Store or apps built into Windows will meet those requirements, though apps installed from other sources may not. But you can’t make the Copilot key launch any old executable or batch file, and you can’t customize it to do anything other than launch apps (at least, not without using third-party tools for reconfiguring your keyboard).
On Monday, Microsoft unveiled updates to its consumer AI assistant Copilot, introducing two new experimental features for a limited group of $20/month Copilot Pro subscribers: Copilot Labs and Copilot Vision. Labs integrates OpenAI’s latest o1 “reasoning” model, and Vision allows Copilot to see what you’re browsing in Edge.
Microsoft says Copilot Labs will serve as a testing ground for Microsoft’s latest AI tools before they see wider release. The company describes it as offering “a glimpse into ‘work-in-progress’ projects.” The first feature available in Labs is called “Think Deeper,” and it uses step-by-step processing to solve more complex problems than the regular Copilot. Think Deeper is Microsoft’s version of OpenAI’s new o1-preview and o1-mini AI models, and it has so far rolled out to some Copilot Pro users in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.
Copilot Vision is an entirely different beast. The new feature aims to give the AI assistant a visual window into what you’re doing within the Microsoft Edge browser. When enabled, Copilot can “understand the page you’re viewing and answer questions about its content,” according to Microsoft.
Microsoft’s Copilot Vision promo video.
The company positions Copilot Vision as a way to provide more natural interactions and task assistance beyond text-based prompts, but it will likely raise privacy concerns. As a result, Microsoft says that Copilot Vision is entirely opt-in and that no audio, images, text, or conversations from Vision will be stored or used for training. The company is also initially limiting Vision’s use to a pre-approved list of websites, blocking it on paywalled and sensitive content.
The rollout of these features appears gradual, with Microsoft noting that it wants to balance “pioneering features and a deep sense of responsibility.” The company said it will be “listening carefully” to user feedback as it expands access to the new capabilities. Microsoft has not provided a timeline for wider availability of either feature.
Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, told Reuters that he sees Copilot as an “ever-present confidant” that could potentially learn from users’ various Microsoft-connected devices and documents, with permission. He also mentioned that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has shown particular interest in Copilot’s potential to read and parse emails.
But judging by the visceral reaction to Microsoft’s Recall feature, which keeps a record of everything you do on your PC so an AI model can recall it later, privacy-sensitive users may not appreciate having an AI assistant monitor their activities—especially if those features send user data to the cloud for processing.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has now raised $6.6 billion in a new funding round that values the company at $157 billion, nearly doubling its previous valuation of $86 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The funding round comes with strings attached: Investors have the right to withdraw their money if OpenAI does not complete its planned conversion from a nonprofit (with a for-profit division) to a fully for-profit company.
Venture capital firm Thrive Capital led the funding round with a $1.25 billion investment. Microsoft, a longtime backer of OpenAI to the tune of $13 billion, contributed just under $1 billion to the latest round. New investors joined the round, including SoftBank with a $500 million investment and Nvidia with $100 million.
The United Arab Emirates-based company MGX also invested in OpenAI during this funding round. MGX has been busy in AI recently, joining an AI infrastructure partnership last month led by Microsoft.
Notably, Apple was in talks to invest but ultimately did not participate. WSJ reports that the minimum investment required to review OpenAI’s financial documents was $250 million. In June, OpenAI hired its first chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, who played an important role in organizing this funding round, according to the WSJ.
Enlarge/ The Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California.
A few weeks back, it was reported that Apple was exploring investing in OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, the GPT model, and other popular generative AI products. Now, a new report from The Wall Street Journal claims that Apple has abandoned those plans.
The article simply says Apple “fell out of the talks to join the round.” The round is expected to close in a week or so and may raise as much as $6.5 billion for the growing Silicon Valley company. Had Apple gone through with the move, it would have been a rare event—though not completely unprecedented—for Apple to invest in another company that size.
OpenAI is still expected to raise the funds it seeks from other sources. The report claims Microsoft is expected to invest around $1 billion in this round. Microsoft has already invested substantial sums in OpenAI, whose GPT models power Microsoft AI tools like Copilot and Bing chat.
Nvidia is also a likely major investor in this round.
Apple will soon offer limited ChatGPT integration in an upcoming iOS update, though it plans to support additional models like Google’s Gemini further down the line, offering users a choice similar to how they pick a default search engine or web browser.
OpenAI has been on a successful tear with its products and models, establishing itself as a leader in the rapidly growing industry. However, it has also been beset by drama and controversy—most recently, some key leaders at OpenAI departed the company abruptly, and it shifted its focus from a research-focused organization that was beholden to a nonprofit, to a for-profit company under CEO Sam Altman. Also, former Apple design lead Jony Ive is confirmed to be working on a new AI product of some kind.
But The Wall Street Journal did not specify which (if any) of these facts are reasons why Apple chose to back out of the investment.
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.
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.
More secure, also optional
Enlarge/ An abstraction of Recall’s new security architecture, which replaces the old, largely nonexistent security architecture.
Microsoft
The broad strokes of today’s announcement are similar to the changes Microsoft originally announced for Recall over the summer: that the feature would be opt-in and off-by-default instead of opt-out, that users would need to re-authenticate with Windows Hello before accessing any Recall data, and that locally stored Recall data will be protected with additional encryption.
However, some details show how Microsoft is attempting to placate skeptical users. For instance, Recall can now be removed entirely from a system using the “optional features” settings in Windows (when a similar removal mechanism showed up in a Windows preview earlier this month, Microsoft claimed it was a “bug,” but apparently not).
The company is also sharing more about how Windows will protect data locally. All Recall data stored locally, including “snapshots and any associated information in the vector database,” will be encrypted at rest with keys stored in your system’s TPM; according to the blog post, Recall will only function when BitLocker or Device Encryption is fully enabled. Recall will also require Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) and Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity (HVCI) enabled; these are features that people sometimes turn off to improve game performance, but Recall will reportedly refuse to work unless they’re turned on.
This is because the new Recall operates inside of a VBS enclave, which helps to isolate and secure data in memory from the rest of the system.
“This area acts like a locked box that can only be accessed after permission is granted by the user through Windows Hello,” writes Weston. “VBS enclaves offer an isolation boundary from both kernel and administrative users.”
Windows doesn’t allow any code to run within these enclaves that hasn’t been signed by Microsoft, which should lower the risk of exposing Recall data to malware or other rogue applications. Other malware protections new to this version of Recall include “rate-limiting and anti-hammering measures.”
OpenAI hopes to convince the White House to approve a sprawling plan that would place 5-gigawatt AI data centers in different US cities, Bloomberg reports.
The AI company’s CEO, Sam Altman, supposedly pitched the plan after a recent meeting with the Biden administration where stakeholders discussed AI infrastructure needs. Bloomberg reviewed an OpenAI document outlining the plan, reporting that 5 gigawatts “is roughly the equivalent of five nuclear reactors” and warning that each data center will likely require “more energy than is used to power an entire city or about 3 million homes.”
According to OpenAI, the US needs these massive data centers to expand AI capabilities domestically, protect national security, and effectively compete with China. If approved, the data centers would generate “thousands of new jobs,” OpenAI’s document promised, and help cement the US as an AI leader globally.
But the energy demand is so enormous that OpenAI told officials that the “US needs policies that support greater data center capacity,” or else the US could fall behind other countries in AI development, the document said.
Energy executives told Bloomberg that “powering even a single 5-gigawatt data center would be a challenge,” as power projects nationwide are already “facing delays due to long wait times to connect to grids, permitting delays, supply chain issues, and labor shortages.” Most likely, OpenAI’s data centers wouldn’t rely entirely on the grid, though, instead requiring a “mix of new wind and solar farms, battery storage and a connection to the grid,” John Ketchum, CEO of NextEra Energy Inc, told Bloomberg.
That’s a big problem for OpenAI, since one energy executive, Constellation Energy Corp. CEO Joe Dominguez, told Bloomberg that he’s heard that OpenAI wants to build five to seven data centers. “As an engineer,” Dominguez said he doesn’t think that OpenAI’s plan is “feasible” and would seemingly take more time than needed to address current national security risks as US-China tensions worsen.
OpenAI may be hoping to avoid delays and cut the lines—if the White House approves the company’s ambitious data center plan. For now, a person familiar with OpenAI’s plan told Bloomberg that OpenAI is focused on launching a single data center before expanding the project to “various US cities.”
Bloomberg’s report comes after OpenAI’s chief investor, Microsoft, announced a 20-year deal with Constellation to re-open Pennsylvania’s shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant to provide a new energy source for data centers powering AI development and other technologies. But even if that deal is approved by regulators, the resulting energy supply that Microsoft could access—roughly 835 megawatts (0.835 gigawatts) of energy generation, which is enough to power approximately 800,000 homes—is still more than five times less than OpenAI’s 5-gigawatt demand for its data centers.
Ketchum told Bloomberg that it’s easier to find a US site for a 1-gigawatt data center, but locating a site for a 5-gigawatt facility would likely be a bigger challenge. Notably, Amazon recently bought a $650 million nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania with a 2.5-gigawatt capacity. At the meeting with the Biden administration, OpenAI suggested opening large-scale data centers in Wisconsin, California, Texas, and Pennsylvania, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC.
During that meeting, the Biden administration confirmed that developing large-scale AI data centers is a priority, announcing “a new Task Force on AI Datacenter Infrastructure to coordinate policy across government.” OpenAI seems to be trying to get the task force’s attention early on, outlining in the document that Bloomberg reviewed the national security and economic benefits its data centers could provide for the US.
In a statement to Bloomberg, OpenAI’s spokesperson said that “OpenAI is actively working to strengthen AI infrastructure in the US, which we believe is critical to keeping America at the forefront of global innovation, boosting reindustrialization across the country, and making AI’s benefits accessible to everyone.”
Big Tech companies and AI startups will likely continue pressuring officials to approve data center expansions, as well as new kinds of nuclear reactors as the AI explosion globally continues. Goldman Sachs estimated that “data center power demand will grow 160 percent by 2030.” To ensure power supplies for its AI, according to the tech news site Freethink, Microsoft has even been training AI to draft all the documents needed for proposals to secure government approvals for nuclear plants to power AI data centers.
Enlarge/ Emojipedia sample images of the new Unicode 16.0 emoji.
The Unicode Consortium has finalized and released version 16.0 of the Unicode standard, the elaborate character set that ensures that our phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices can all communicate and interoperate with each other. The update adds 5,185 new characters to the standard, bringing the total up to a whopping 154,998.
Of those 5,185 characters, the ones that will get the most attention are the eight new emoji characters, including a shovel, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a radish (formally classified as “root vegetable”), a harp, a purple splat that evokes the ’90s Nickelodeon logo, and a flag for the island of Sark. The standout, of course, is “face with bags under eyes,” whose long-suffering thousand-yard stare perfectly encapsulates the era it has been born into. Per usual, Emojipedia has sample images that give you some idea of what these will look like when they’re implemented by various operating systems, apps, and services.
We last got new emoji in 2023’s Unicode 15.1 update, though all of these designs were technically modifications of existing emoji rather than new characters—many emoji, most notably for skin and hair color variants, use a base emoji plus a modifier emoji, combined together with a “zero-width joiner” (ZWJ) character that makes them display as one character instead. The lime emoji in Unicode 15.1 was actually a lemon emoji combined with the color green; the phoenix was a regular bird joined to the fire emoji. This was likely because 15.1 was only intended as a minor update to 2022’s Unicode 15.0 standard.
Most of the Unicode 16.0 emoji, by contrast, are their own unique characters. The one exception is the Sark flag emoji; flag sequences are created by placing two “regional indicator letters” directly next to each other and don’t require a ZWJ character between them.
Incorporation into the Unicode standard is only the first step that new emoji and other characters take on their journey from someone’s mind to your phone or computer; software makers like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and others need to design iterations that fit with their existing spin on the emoji characters, they need to release software updates that use the new characters, and people need to download and install them.
We’ve seen a few people share on social media that the Unicode 16.0 release includes a “greenwashing” emoji designed by Shepard Fairey, an artist best known for the 2008 Barack Obama “Hope” poster. This emoji, and an attempt to gin up controversy around it, is all an elaborate hoax: there’s a fake Unicode website announcing it, a fake lawsuit threat that purports to be from a real natural gas industry group, and a fake Cory Doctorow article about the entire “controversy” published in a fake version of Wired. These were all published to websites with convincing-looking but fake domains, all registered within a couple of weeks of each other in August 2024. The face-with-bags-under-eyes emoji feels like an appropriate response.
On Tuesday, Microsoft made a series of announcements related to its Azure Quantum Cloud service. Among them was a demonstration of logical operations using the largest number of error-corrected qubits yet.
“Since April, we’ve tripled the number of logical qubits here,” said Microsoft Technical Fellow Krysta Svore. “So we are accelerating toward that hundred-logical-qubit capability.” The company has also lined up a new partner in the form of Atom Computing, which uses neutral atoms to hold qubits and has already demonstrated hardware with over 1,000 hardware qubits.
Collectively, the announcements are the latest sign that quantum computing has emerged from its infancy and is rapidly progressing toward the development of systems that can reliably perform calculations that would be impractical or impossible to run on classical hardware. We talked with people at Microsoft and some of its hardware partners to get a sense of what’s coming next to bring us closer to useful quantum computing.
Making error correction simpler
Logical qubits are a route out of the general despair of realizing that we’re never going to keep hardware qubits from producing too many errors for reliable calculation. Error correction on classical computers involves measuring the state of bits and comparing their values to an aggregated value. Unfortunately, you can’t analogously measure the state of a qubit to determine if an error has occurred since measurement causes it to adopt a concrete value, destroying any of the superposition of values that make quantum computing useful.
Logical qubits get around this by spreading a single bit of quantum information across a collection of bits, which makes any error less catastrophic. Detecting when one occurs involves adding some additional bits to the logical qubit such that their value is dependent upon the ones holding the data. You can measure these ancillary qubits to identify if any problem has occurred and possibly gain information on how to correct it.
There are many potential error correction schemes, some of which can involve dedicating around a thousand qubits to each logical qubit. It’s possible to get away with far less than that—schemes with fewer than 10 qubits exist. But in general, the fewer hardware qubits you use, the greater your chance of experiencing errors that you can’t recover from. This trend can be offset in part through hardware qubits that are less error-prone.
The challenge is that this only works if error rates are low enough that you don’t run into errors during the correction process. In other words, the hardware qubits have to be good enough that they don’t produce so many errors that it’s impossible to know when an error has occurred and how to correct it. That threshold has been passed only relatively recently.
Microsoft’s earlier demonstration involved the use of hardware from Quantinuum, which uses qubits based on ions trapped in electrical fields. These have some of the best error rates yet reported, and Microsoft had shown that this allowed it to catch and correct errors over several rounds of error correction. In the new work, the collaboration went further, performing multiple logical operations with error correction on a collection of logical qubits.
According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Apple is in talks to invest in OpenAI, the generative AI company whose ChatGPT will feature in future versions of iOS.
If the talks are successful, Apple will join a multi-billion dollar funding round led by Thrive Capital that would value the startup at more than $100 billion.
The report doesn’t say exactly how much Apple would invest, but it does note that it would not be the only participant in this round of funding. For example, Microsoft is expected to invest further, and Bloomberg reports that Nvidia is also considering participating.
Microsoft has already invested $13 billion in OpenAI over the past five years, and it has put OpenAI’s GPT technology at the heart of most of its AI offerings in Windows, Office, Visual Studio, Bing, and other products.
Apple, too, has put OpenAI’s tech in its products—or at least, it will by the end of this year. At its 2024 developer conference earlier this summer, Apple announced a suite of AI features called Apple Intelligence that will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro and later. But there are guardrails and limitations for Apple Intelligence compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, so Apple signed a deal to refer user requests that fall outside the scope of Apple Intelligence to ChatGPT inside a future version of iOS 18—kind of like how Siri turns to Google to answer some user queries.
Apple says it plans to add support for other AI chatbots for this in the future, such as Google’s Gemini, but Apple software lead Craig Federighi said the company went with ChatGPT first because “we wanted to start with the best.”
It’s unclear precisely what Apple looks to get out of the investment in OpenAI, but looking at similar past investments by the company offers some clues. Apple typically invests either in suppliers or research teams that are producing technology it plans to include in future devices. For example, it has invested in supply chain partners to build up infrastructure to get iPhones manufactured more quickly and efficiently, and it invested $1 billion in the SoftBank Vision Fund to “speed the development of technologies which may be strategically important to Apple.”
ChatGPT integration is not expected to make it into the initial release of iOS 18 this September, but it will probably come in a smaller software update later in 2024.
