The Register's Richard Speed commemorates the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM Model 5150: IBM was famously late to the game when the Model 5150 (or IBM PC) put in an appearance. The likes of Commodore and Apple pretty much dominated the microcomputer world as the 1970s came to a close and the 1980s began. Big Blue, on the other hand, was better known for its sober, business-orientated products and its eyewatering price tags. However, as its customers began eying Apple products, IBM lumbered toward the market, creating a working group that could dispense with the traditional epic lead-times of Big Blue and take a more agile approach. A choice made was to use off-the-shelf hardware and software and adopt an open architecture. A significant choice, as things turned out.

Intel's 8088 was selected over the competition (including IBM's own RISC processor) and famously, Microsoft was tapped to provide PC DOS as well as BASIC that was included in the ROM. So this marks the 40th anniversary of PC DOS, aka MS-DOS, too. You can find Microsoft's old MS-DOS source code here. The basic price for the 5150 was $1,565, with a fully loaded system rising to more than $3,000. Users could enjoy high resolution monochrome text via the MDA card or some low resolution graphics (and vaguely nauseating colors) through a CGA card (which could be installed simultaneously.) RAM landed in 16 or 64kB flavors and could be upgraded to 256kB while the Intel 8088 CPU chugged along at 4.77 MHz.

Storage came courtesy of up to two 5.25" floppy disks, and the ability to attach a cassette recorder -- an option swiftly stripped from later models. There was no hard disk, and adding one presented a problem for users with deep enough pockets: the motherboard and software didn't support it and the power supply was a bit weedy. IBM would resolve this as the PC evolved. Importantly, the motherboard also included slots for expansion, which eventually became known as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus as the IBM PC clone sector exploded. IBM's approach resulted in an immense market for expansion cards and third party software. While the Model 5150 "sold like hotcakes," Speed notes that it was eventually discontinued in 1987.

A senior Apple executive defended the company's new software to fight child pornography after the plans raised concerns about an erosion of privacy on the iPhone, revealing greater detail about safeguards to protect from abuse. From a report: Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, in an interview emphasized that the new system will be auditable. He conceded that the tech giant stumbled in last week's unveiling of two new tools. One is aimed at identifying known sexually explicit images of children stored in the company's cloud storage service and the second will allow parents to better monitor what images are being shared with and by their children through text messages. "It's really clear a lot of messages got jumbled pretty badly in terms of how things were understood," Mr. Federighi said. "We wish that this would've come out a little more clearly for everyone because we feel very positive and strongly about what we're doing."

The Cupertino, Calif., iPhone maker has built a reputation for defending user privacy and the company has framed the new tools as a way to continue that effort while also protecting children. Apple and other tech companies have faced pressure from governments around the world to provide better access to user data to root out illegal child pornography. While Apple's new efforts have drawn praise from some, the company has also received criticism. An executive at Facebook's WhatsApp messaging service and others, including Edward Snowden, have called Apple's approach bad for privacy. The overarching concern is whether Apple can use software that identifies illegal material without the system being taken advantage of by others, such as governments, pushing for more private information -- a suggestion Apple strongly denies and Mr. Federighi said will be protected against by "multiple levels of auditability." "We, who consider ourselves absolutely leading on privacy, see what we are doing here as an advancement of the state of the art in privacy, as enabling a more private world," Mr. Federighi said.

If the bipartisan infrastructure bill moves forward, Bill Gates says his climate investment fund will match $1.5 billion in government funds and put that money towards projects that are developing green technologies. The Verge reports: Breakthrough Energy, Gates' climate fund, laid out four different uses for the money: developing green hydrogen fuels, sustainable aviation fuels, energy storage, and technologies that take carbon dioxide out of the air. It said on Twitter that the money could "fast-track" commercial demonstration projects across the US. "Critical for all these climate technologies is to get the costs down and to be able to scale them up to a pretty gigantic level," Gates told The Wall Street Journal, which was the first to report on the announcement. "You'll never get that scale up unless the government's coming in with the right policies, and the right policy is exactly what's in that infrastructure bill."

The funding depends on whether a bipartisan infrastructure package ultimately becomes law. The bill still needs to pass the House after it passed in the Senate earlier this week. The package includes $25 billion for the Department of Energy for public-private partnerships, The Wall Street Journal reports. If the bill becomes law, Breakthrough Energy can apply for matching funds. If the bill fails, Breakthrough Energy could funnel its $1.5 billion toward projects in Europe and Asia instead, The Wall Street Journal says. Breakthrough Energy tweeted that it wants to work with the Energy Department to spur up to $15 billion in investments in technologies that might be able to help the US bring its carbon dioxide emissions down to net-zero. "Both Breakthrough Energy and the Biden administration have prioritized developing so-called 'direct air capture' tech," adds The Verge. "The infrastructure package includes $3.5 billion for four proposed regional hubs across the US, each with the ability to capture at least 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually (about as much as 120,000 US homes might generate from their energy use in a year). There's billions more in funding in the bill to build out a new network of pipelines and storage for captured CO2."

The report also notes that there's "$8 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure package to develop four regional hubs for 'clean hydrogen,' another focus of Breakthrough Energy's work."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from FedScoop: The Department of Defense has awarded a task order worth up to $979 million over a five-year period to Peraton to counter misinformation from U.S. adversaries. The contractor will provide services to U.S. Central Command and its mission partners with operational planning, implementation and assessment services. Peraton has undertaken such work for Central Command since 2016 under its counter-threat messaging support program, and according to the company, the latest contract represents a doubling of work already scheduled to be carried out under the program.

Commenting on the contract, Tom Afferton, president of Peraton's cyber missions sector, said: "Since 2016, Peraton has executed campaigns to promote regional security and stability. Our ability to provide the U.S. government with insight, expertise, and influence helps ensure the safety of Americans, our allies, and the more than 550 million people under U.S. Central Command's area of responsibility, spanning three continents and 20 nations." The award comes after Peraton earlier this month won an IT infrastructure contract from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which could be worth up to $497 million over seven years. The Virginia company will provide infrastructure-as-a-managed service for storage and computing infrastructure facilities across the U.S. and globally. Announcing the award, Peraton said it will deliver an enterprise-scale solution that integrates on-premise infrastructure with the VA's enterprise cloud architecture.

Today, Samsung launched the Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic -- two new wearables that are "the fruits of Samsung's smartwatch collaboration with Google," writes Becca Farsace via The Verge. From the report: The Watch 4 Classic starts at $349 for the Bluetooth model, rising to $399 for the LTE model, while the Watch 4 is a little less expensive with a starting price of $249 (or $299 with LTE). Both are available to preorder today, and ship August 27th. The big difference between the two models is that the Watch 4 Classic has one of those physical rotating bezels that we've liked so much on Samsung's previous smartwatches, while if you opt for the standard Watch 4, there's a touch-sensitive bezel accessible by swiping at the edges of the screen. The Watch 4 Classic is also made of a more premium stainless steel rather than the aluminum you'll find on the Watch 4. On the right of both watches are a pair of control buttons.

External differences aside, internally both watches share a lot of the same specs. They're both powered by the same 5nm Exynos W920 processor Samsung detailed yesterday, paired with 1.5GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. Battery capacity varies between sizes, but Samsung reckons you'll average around 40 hours of battery life regardless of model. There's LTE on select models, but if you were hoping for 5G, you'll be disappointed -- Samsung says it doesn't think it's worth it because the amount of data smartwatches process is too small.

But the biggest departure from Samsung's previous smartwatches is that the Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic aren't running its own Tizen operating system. Instead, their software is the result of a collaboration between Samsung and Google, which was announced in May. Samsung is branding the watches' operating system as "Wear OS Powered by Samsung" although Google has called it Wear OS 3. But either way, the hope is that it combines the best of Tizen with the best of Wear OS. On Samsung's watches specifically, the interface you're looking at is One UI Watch, which is effectively Samsung's skin sitting on top of Wear OS. Think of it as Samsung's One UI software on phones, which works with Google's Android. It gives the Watch 4's interface a similar look and feel to Samsung's previous Tizen-powered watches. Google has promised its collaboration with Samsung will lead to a host of high-level benefits for Wear OS, like improved battery life, faster loading apps, and smoother animations.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After spending years battling over the Defense Department's $10 billion JEDI cloud services contract, Microsoft and Amazon are fighting over another government deal. Now it's the National Security Agency offering a contract that could pay up to $10 billion as it shifts away from on-premises servers to a commercial provider. However, as Washington Technology reported first, this time around, Amazon Web Services won the $10 billion contest, and it's Microsoft's turn to file a protest with the Government Accountability Office.

Washington Technology reports that Microsoft's claim is the NSA didn't conduct a proper evaluation while considering a provider for its new project, code-named WildandStormy. In a statement to NextGov, an NSA spokesperson confirmed the award and protests, saying, "The Agency will respond to the protest in accordance with appropriate federal regulations." The NSA is pursuing a "Hybrid Compute Initiative" to meet its processing and analytical requirements while also holding onto intelligence data (although it might not need as much storage as it used to). AWS already holds many government cloud contracts, but the JEDI process revealed Microsoft as a formidable competitor.

WIth the release of Firefox 91 on Tuesday, Mozilla has introduced a bigger hammer for smashing the cookies that websites, advertisers and tracking companies can use to record your online behavior. From a report: The new feature, called enhanced cookie clearing, is designed to block tracking not just from a website, but also from third parties whose code appears on the site. The technology is designed to let you clear cookies for a particular website but also the more aggressive "supercookies" designed to evade lesser privacy protections. The feature is an option if you enable Firefox's strict mode for cookie handling, which partitions website data into separate storage containers. "You can easily recognize and remove all data a website has stored on your computer, without having to worry about leftover data from third parties embedded in that website," Mozilla said in a blog post.

Apple defended its new system to scan iCloud for illegal child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) on Monday during an ongoing controversy over whether the system reduces Apple user privacy and could be used by governments to surveil citizens. From a report: Last week, Apple announced it has started testing a system that uses sophisticated cryptography to identify when users upload collections of known child pornography to its cloud storage service. It says it can do this without learning about the contents of a user's photos stored on its servers. Apple reiterated on Monday that its system is more private than those used by companies like Google and Microsoft because its system uses both its servers and software running on iPhones.

Privacy advocates and technology commentators are worried Apple's new system, which includes software that will be installed on people's iPhones through an iOS update, could be expanded in some countries through new laws to check for other types of images, like photos with political content, instead of just child pornography. Apple said in a document posted to its website on Sunday governments cannot force it to add non-CSAM images to a hash list, or the file of numbers that correspond to known child abuse images Apple will distribute to iPhones to enable the system.

NBC News reports: Colombia-based call center workers who provide outsourced customer service to some of the nation's largest companies are being pressured to sign a contract that lets their employer install cameras in their homes to monitor work performance, an NBC News investigation has found. Six workers based in Colombia for Teleperformance, one of the world's largest call center companies, which counts Apple, Amazon and Uber among its clients, said that they are concerned about the new contract, first issued in March. The contract allows monitoring by AI-powered cameras in workers' homes, voice analytics and storage of data collected from the worker's family members, including minors.

Teleperformance employs more than 380,000 workers globally, including 39,000 workers in Colombia. "The contract allows constant monitoring of what we are doing, but also our family," said a Bogota-based worker on the Apple account who was not authorized to speak to the news media. "I think it's really bad. We don't work in an office. I work in my bedroom. I don't want to have a camera in my bedroom." The worker said that she signed the contract, a copy of which NBC News has reviewed, because she feared losing her job. She said that she was told by her supervisor that she would be moved off the Apple account if she refused to sign the document. She said the additional surveillance technology has not yet been installed.

The concerns of the workers, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, highlight a pandemic-related trend that has alarmed privacy and labor experts: As many workers have shifted to performing their duties at home, some companies are pushing for increasing levels of digital monitoring of their staff in an effort to recreate the oversight of the office at home... "Surveillance at home has really been normalized in the context of the pandemic," said Veena Dubal, a labor law professor at the University of California, Hastings. "Companies see a lot of benefit in putting in software to do all kinds of monitoring they would have otherwise expected their human managers to do, but the reality is that it's much more intrusive than surveillance conducted by a boss."
An Uber spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that it Uber actually requested the monitoring of its workers, the article reports. Interviewed by NBC News, an Uber spokespreson "said that its customer service agents have access to private and sensitive user information, including credit card details and trip data, and that protecting that information is a priority for Uber.

"As a result, Uber requested Teleperformance to monitor staff working on its accounts to verify that only a hired employee is accessing the data; that outsourced staff weren't recording screen data on another device such as a phone; and that no unauthorized person was near the computer."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: Scientists have created key parts of synthetic brain cells that can hold cellular "memories" for milliseconds. The achievement could one day lead to computers that work like the human brain. In the new study, published in the journal Science on Aug. 6, researchers at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, France created a computer model of artificial neurons that could produce the same sort of electrical signals neurons use to transfer information in the brain; by sending ions through thin channels of water to mimic real ion channels, the researchers could produce these electrical spikes. And now, they have even created a physical model incorporating these channels as part of unpublished, ongoing research. At a finer level, the researchers created a system that mimics the process of generating action potentials -- spikes in electrical activity generated by neurons that are the basis of brain activity. To generate an action potential, a neuron starts to let in more positive ions, which are attracted to the negative ions inside of the cell. The electrical potential, or voltage across the cell membrane, causes doorways on the cell called voltage-gated ion channels to open, raising the charge even more before the cell reaches a peak and returns to normal a few milliseconds later. The signal is then transmitted to other cells, enabling information to travel in the brain.

To mimic voltage-gated ion channels, the researchers modeled a thin layer of water between sheets of graphene, which are extremely thin sheets of carbon. The water layers in the simulations were one, two, or three molecules in depth, which the researchers characterized as a quasi-two-dimension slit. [T]he researchers wanted to use this two-dimensional environment because particles tend to react much more strongly in two dimensions than in three, and they exhibit different properties in two dimensions, which the researchers thought might be useful for their experiment. Testing out the model in a computer simulation, the researchers found that when they applied an electric field to the channel, the ions in the water formed worm-like structures. As the team applied a greater electric field in the simulation, these structures would break up slowly enough to leave behind a "memory," or a hint of the elongated configuration.

When the researchers ran a simulation linking two channels and other components to mimic the behavior of a neuron, they found the model could generate spikes in electrical activity like action potentials, and that it "remembered" consistent properties in two different states -- one where ions conducted more electricity and one where they conducted less. In this simulation, the "memory" of the previous state of the ions lasted a few milliseconds, around the same time as it takes real neurons to produce an action potential and return to a resting state. This is quite a long time for ions, which usually operate on timescales of nanoseconds or less. In a real neuron, an action potential equates to a cellular memory in the neuron; our brains use the opening and closing of ion channels to create this kind of memory. The new model is a version of an electronic component called a memristor, or a memory resistor, which has the unique property of retaining information from its history. But existing memristors don't use liquid, as the brain does.

phalse phace shares a report from Los Angeles Times: In a sign of the region's worsening drought, state water officials announced Thursday the shutdown of a major hydroelectric power plant at Lake Oroville in Northern California, citing the lowest-ever recorded water level at the reservoir. It marks the first time that officials have been forced to close the Edward Hyatt Powerplant, which was completed in 1967, on account of low water at the lake. The loss of the hydroelectric power source at Lake Oroville, about 75 miles north of Sacramento, could contribute to rolling blackouts in the state during heat waves in coming months.

Officials had warned that once the water level in Lake Oroville fell to 640 feet above sea level, the plant could no longer produce power; at that level, the water cannot reach the intake pipes that flow toward the underground hydroelectric facility. On Thursday, Lake Oroville was at 641 feet with 863,516 acre-feet of storage, which is 24% of its overall capacity and 34% of its historical average for this time, according to the Department of Water Resources. The Hyatt plant is designed to produce up to 750 megawatts of power but has often generated 100 to 400 megawatts, or slightly less than 1% of the state's average daily peak usage.

Rare earth magnet recycling is about so much more than sustainable data centers. From a report: The U.S. alone generates nearly 17 percent of all used hard disk drives -- the largest share globally -- and researchers have estimated that if all of these data storage devices were recycled, they could supply more than 5 percent of all rare earth magnet demand outside of China, potentially helping meet the demand of the information technology sector as well as clean energy companies. A consortium of U.S. researchers, tech companies, hardware manufacturers, and electronic waste recyclers has recently begun exploring exactly how those rare earths can be re-harvested and given a second life.

In 2019, these stakeholders published a report identifying a host of potential strategies, including wiping and re-using entire hard disk drives, removing and reusing the magnet assemblies, grinding up old hard drive magnets and using the powder to manufacture new ones, and extracting purified rare earth elements from shredded drives. Each of these strategies has its own challenges -- removing magnet assemblies by hand is labor intensive; extracting rare earths from technology can be chemical or energy intensive and produce significant waste -- and for any of them to be scaled up, there needs to be buy-in from numerous actors across global supply chains.

Making even the relatively minor supply chain adjustments needed to place used or recycled rare earth magnets inside new drives "is difficult," said Hongyue Jin, a scientist at the University of Arizona who studies rare earth recycling. "And especially when you've got to start from some small amount with a new technology." Still, some companies have begun taking the first steps. In 2018, Google, hard disk drive manufacturer Seagate, and electronics refurbisher Recontext (formerly Teleplan) conducted a small demonstration project that involved removing the magnet assemblies from six hard disk drives and placing them in new Seagate drives. This demonstration, said Kali Frost, a doctoral student in industrial sustainability at Purdue University, was the "catalyst" for the larger 2019 study in which 6,100 magnet assemblies were extracted from Seagate hard drives in a Google data center before being inserted into new hard drives in a Seagate manufacturing facility. Frost, who led the 2019 study, believes it is the largest demonstration of its kind ever done.

The results, which will be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Resources, Conservation, and Recycling, not only showed that rare earth magnets could be harvested and reused at larger scale, but that there were significant environmental benefits to doing so: Overall, re-used magnet assemblies had a carbon footprint 86 percent lower than new ones, according to the study. Frost says that this estimate conservatively took into account the energy mix of the local power grid where the data center operated. Considering Google's near round-the-clock renewable energy usage at this particular data center, the carbon footprint of the reused magnets was even lower.

Google announced arguably its most serious attempt at hardware this week when it said it will be ditching Qualcomm chips and creating its own, including those used for its flagship Pixel phone. From a report: It also has been using its own chips for its growing number of data centers across the country. In January, it completed the acquisition of fitness tracking hardware company Fitbit, which had been held up in regulatory review for more than a year. One building in particular is getting a major overhaul. 20% of that building is designated for office space and 80% for manufacturing, storage, distribution, and other purposes, according to plans. The company has been planning the site since at least 2018, according to documents. "New interior space will be used for device warehouse, distribution and supporting office functions," the plans state. Plans show the space can hold up to 169 people but a Google spokesperson declined to specify how many employees it will house.

One planning document describes dressing the interior in ocean-themed items, including with art installations, murals, drift wood accents, seashell statement pieces from Etsy and a surfboard suspending on ceilings of meeting and training rooms, plans show. Meeting rooms are named after seaside areas in and around Monterey, Calif., including Cannery Row, Pacific Grove, Fisherman's Wharf and Del Monte. Other proposed modifications to the site include parking lot reconfigurations, new equipment pads, rooftop equipment enclosures, ADA upgrades, and updates to the faces of the buildings.

In addition to new hardware announced today, Google has made a big change to its new line of Nest cameras: they no longer require a monthly subscription fee to record video. Ars Technica reports: We'll get to the new models in a minute (editor's note: no we won't because this isn't a slashvertisement; you'll have to visit the article), but the biggest news is that Google is making the cameras more useful without a monthly subscription. Previously, core camera features like recording video were locked behind a $6-$12 monthly subscription plan called "Nest Aware," but the new cameras can now record local video. You only get three hours' worth of "events" (motion detection, as opposed to 24/7 video), but it's a start. Google has also moved activity zones and some image recognition features from the cloud-based pay-per-month service to on-device processing, so they work without a subscription, too.

If you still want to pay for the "Nest Aware" subscription, it comes in two tiers. There's the $6 "Nest Aware," which gives you 30 days of "event" video history and facial recognition. The free tier can detect and alert you about people, animals, and vehicles, but the subscription adds facial recognition for "familiar faces" so Nest can tell if a loved one or stranger is at the door and alert you accordingly. The $12-per-month tier is "Nest Aware Plus," which provides 60 days of event video history and 10 days of 24/7 video history if you have a wired (not battery-powered) Google Nest Cam (the doorbell can't record continuous video). Another big added quality-of-life feature is that the cameras can now work offline. Local storage and on-device processing mean the cameras can function without the Internet; previously, the cloud was the only way they had to process and store video.

The U.S. government regularly holds auctions for its stockpile of bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and other cryptocurrencies it seizes and then holds in crypto wallets. "In fiscal year 2019, we had about $700,000 worth of crypto seizures. In 2020, it was up to $137 million. And so far in 2021, we're at $1.2 billion," said Jarod Koopman, director of the IRS' cybercrime unit. CNBC reports: As cybercrime picks up -- and the haul of digital tokens along with it -- government crypto coffers are expected to swell even further. Interviews with current and former federal agents and prosecutors suggest the U.S. has no plans to step back from its side hustle as a crypto broker. The crypto seizure and sale operation is growing so fast that the government just enlisted the help of the private sector to manage the storage and sales of its hoard of crypto tokens.
[...]
Once a case is closed and the crypto has been exchanged for fiat currency, the feds then divvy the spoils. The proceeds of the sale are typically deposited into one of two funds: The Treasury Forfeiture Fund or the Department of Justice Assets Forfeiture Fund. "The underlying investigative agency determines which fund the money goes to," said [Sharon Cohen Levin, who worked on the first Silk Road prosecution and spent 20 years as chief of the money laundering and asset forfeiture unit in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York]. Koopman said the crypto traced and seized by his team accounts for roughly 60% to 70% of the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, making it the largest individual contributor.

Once placed into one of these two funds, the liquidated crypto can then be put toward a variety of line items. Congress, for example, can rescind the money and put that cash toward funding projects. "Agencies can put in requests to gain access to some of that money for funding of operations," said Koopman. "We're able to put in a request and say, "We're looking for additional licenses or additional gear,' and then that's reviewed by the Executive Office of Treasury." Some years, Koopman's team receives varying amounts based on the initiatives proposed. Other years, they get nothing because Congress will choose to rescind all the money out of the account.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Late last year, researchers at the Los Angeles-based cybersecurity company Resecurity stumbled across a massive trove of stolen data while investigating the hack of an Italian retailer. Squirreled away on a cloud storage platform were five gigabytes of data that had been stolen during the previous three and half years from foreign ministries and energy companies by hacking their on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers. In all, Resecurity researchers found documents and emails from six foreign ministries and eight energy companies in the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe.

The attacks, which haven't been previously reported, served as a prequel to a remarkably similar, widely publicized hack of Microsoft Exchange servers from January to March of this year, according to Resecurity. A person familiar with the investigation into the 2021 attack, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity, made a similar allegation, saying the data theft discovered by Resecurity followed the same methods. The 2021 hack was extraordinary for its scope, infecting as many as 60,000 global victims with malware. Microsoft quickly pinned the 2021 cyberattack on a group of Chinese state-sponsored hackers it named Hafnium, and the U.S., U.K., and their allies made a similar claim last month, attributing it to hackers affiliated with the Chinese government. Resecurity can't say for sure the attacks were perpetrated by the same group. Even so, the cache of documents contained information that would have been of interest to the Chinese government, according to Gene Yoo, Resecurity's chief executive officer. The person familiar said the victims selected by the hackers and type of intelligence gathered by attackers also pointed to a Chinese operation.

Microsoft launched its new cloud PC Windows 365 service earlier this week, and the company has already had to pause free trials due to demand. From a report: Windows 365 lets you rent a cloud PC -- with a variety of CPU, RAM, and storage options -- and then stream Windows 10 or Windows 11 via a web browser. The service reached max capacity after only a day of signups. "Following significant demand, we have reached capacity for Windows 365 trials," reads a statement from the Microsoft 365 Twitter account. "We have seen unbelievable response to Windows 365 and need to pause our free trial program while we provision additional capacity," explains Scott Manchester, director of Windows 365 program management.

When Microsoft unveiled its Windows 365 Cloud PC desktop-as-a-service product last month, officials said they'd release pricing on the day the service became generally available, August 2. As promised, the company has published pricing, and it ranges from $20 per user per month for the lowest end SKU, to $162 per user per month for the most expensive one. From a report: Windows 365 is available in two editions: Windows 365 Business and Windows 365 Enterprise. The Windows 365 Business SKUs are capped at 300 users per organization. The $20 per user per month Business price is for a single virtual core, 2 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage -- and requires the Windows Hybrid Benefit. (Hybrid Benefits are Microsoft's Bring-Your-Own license model, which allows customers to apply existing (or new) licenses toward the cost of a product.) Without the Hybrid Benefit discount, that same SKU is $24 per user per month.

At the high end, the Business SKU with eight virtual cores, 32 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage costs $162 per user per month --- or $158 per user per month with the Windows Hybrid Benefit. The Enterprise SKUs for Windows 365 are priced similarly. A single virtual core, 2 GB of RAM and 64 GV of storage will go for $20 per user per month. At the high end, the 8 virtual core, 32 GB of RAM, 512 GB of storage SKU will go for $158 per user per month.

China ordered more than two dozen technology firms to carry out internal inspections as part of a campaign to root out illegal online activity. From a report: The Ministry of Industry Information Technology on Friday told 25 of its largest internet and hardware companies including Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings to carry out internal reviews and rectify issues ranging from data security to consumer rights protections. The twin giants and 10 other firms were also asked separately on Wednesday to step up data security protections, including the export of key information, by the Internet Society of China, which was acting on behalf of MIIT.

The meetings this week come after the internet industry regulator announced on Monday it was beginning a six-month campaign to crackdown on illegal online activity. Days later, it told Tencent and 13 other corporations to address problems related to pop-ups within their ads. The crackdown is the latest move by Beijing to rein in the country's internet leaders in areas from antitrust to data security and ride-hailing. Meituan, Xiaomi and ByteDance were among firms summoned to both meetings. On Friday, the MIIT ordered the companies to address eight types of problematic behavior including pop-ups, data collection and storage as well as the blocking of external links.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. unveiled a sodium-ion battery Thursday, a type of lower-density cell that uses cheaper raw materials than batteries made from lithium-ion metals. As well as a first generation of sodium batteries, the Ningde, Fujian-based company also launched a battery-pack solution that can integrate sodium-ion cells and lithium-ion cells into one case, compensating for the energy-density shortage of the former while preserving its advantages.

"Sodium-ion batteries have unique advantages in low-temperature performance, fast charging and environmental adaptability," CATL Chairman Zeng Yuqun said. "Moreover, they're compatible and complementary with lithium-ion batteries. Diversified technical routes are an important guarantee for the long-term development of the industry." While China's CATL is the world's biggest battery maker, supplying Telsa and selling 34.1 gigawatt hours in the first half, up 234% year-on-year for a market share of 30%, like other manufacturers it has been hit by rising raw materials costs. The price of lithium carbonate, a core ingredient in most electric vehicle batteries, has doubled this year while the price of nickel, another key metal, is at a five-month high.

Outside of their lower raw materials costs -- there are abundant sodium resources in the Earth's crust -- sodium-ion batteries have a few advantages. A long charging time won't cause battery damage and their chemical reaction is free of corrosivity. But their lower energy density tends to exclude them from powering passenger vehicles that require decent range, so they're mainly used for low-speed electric vehicles and low-end energy storage solutions. Notwithstanding, CATL said that through breakthroughs in R&D, its first-generation sodium-ion batteries have reached 160 watt-hours/kilogram, a measure of energy density of energy, and should exceed 200 Wh/kg in coming generations.