While there are dozens of tools available for static analysis of code in various languages to find security flaws, researchers have been exploring techniques that use machine learning to improve the ability to both detect flaws and fix them. That’s because finding and fixing bugs in code can be hard and costly, even when using AI to find them. Researchers at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK have detailed their work on BugLab, a Python implementation of “an approach for self-supervised learning of bug detection and repair”....

It’s been two years since privacy advocates branded Microsoft’s Productivity Score dashboard a “full-fledged workplace surveillance tool” because it allowed IT admins to monitor individual employees’ usage of Microsoft 365 apps, such as who opened an application like Outlook or Teams, what time they had it active, and so forth. The furore over the feature happened six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, when some employers, lacking pre-pandemic oversight at the office, started using intrusive employee surveillance software....

In the December 2018 index, Visual Basic .Net now ranks fifth, the highest it’s ever been since the company started tracking the Microsoft language in 2001. A year ago Visual Basic .Net was ranked seventh, and it surprised Tiobe analysts in February when it climbed to sixth. Visual Basic .Net’s continued ascent comes despite Microsoft last year announcing it would end the co-evolution of Visual Basic and C# and focus on “core scenarios and domains” where Visual Basic ....

The company added more than 450 capabilities to Teams in the past yearTeams is taking share in every category: chat, meetings, calling Teams Phone now has more than 12 million PSTN users, nearly two times the number a year ago More than 60% of the Fortune 500 have chosen Teams Rooms to connect across their hybrid workplaces 25% of the Fortune 500 use the Viva employee-experience platform, which is built on Teams...

You’ve become used to videoconferencing. You know when to mute your microphone, hide your camera or pretend you’re somewhere you’re not. But have you ever asked yourself this: What it would it look like if the likes of Microsoft Teams and Zoom had been designed by gamers? No, I haven’t either. You might admit, though, that the world of gaming is so much more enticing and fun than the world of, say, work....

Also: Best Microsoft certification: Top technical exams Officials said the new M365 A1 for devices plan includes the full suite of Microsoft 365 apps, including Office and Teams; cloud management; and Minecraft: Education Edition. Microsoft officials are pitching the $38 per device license as “providing more for students and educators relative to competitive offerings at the same price.” I’m assuming Microsoft means Google in terms of “competitive offerings,” though I’m having trouble figuring out the exact calculation Microsoft is using here, given the most expensive Google Workspace for Education SKU is $5 per student per year and includes advanced security, analytics, teaching and learning tools and more....

The Pax8 distributors have a good explainer about NCE on their site. Here’s Microsoft’s public-facing blog post about it. Earlier this fall, Microsoft officials said the NCE “per seat” model would be expanding to include Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Windows 365, and the Power Platform. NCE will be available to partners in January 2022 and phased in over time through mid-2022. Under the NCE terms, daily invoicing will become monthly, and a one-month subscription will be 20% more expensive than an annual subscription....

Have you ever tried it? Have you ever tried to spend even a day attempting to please everyone you come into contact with? You always, always end up annoying someone. Because that’s how people are. Microsoft, however, is coming from behind on this one. It’s made far too many people angry far too many times with far too little justification. So even as it’s greatly improved its behavior since Satya Nadella became CEO, the company doesn’t always seem as prepared to handle flak as it might be....

The new Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is an extensible SaaS solution that provides comprehensive and automated sustainability management for organizations at any stage of their sustainability journey. Microsoft said the tool was designed to enable organizations to “streamline data connections and more easily and effectively record, report and reduce their emissions on a path to net-zero.” The SaaS solution centralizes the data available and is meant to help enterprises set industry-aligned sustainability targets while also providing “actionable insights and reduction strategies to expedite their sustainability journeys....

Recent research shows the approaches pioneered by AlphaFold are spreading to the broader biology community. In a paper in the journal PNAS this month, “Deep learning guided optimization of human antibody against SARS-CoV-2 variants with broad neutralization,” scientists describe modifying a known antibody against COVID-19 in such a way as to boost its efficacy against multiple variants of the disease. “We enable expanded antibody breadth and improved potency by ∼10- to 600-fold against SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Delta,” starting from an antibody that had no effectiveness against the Delta variant, the scientists write....

More than 50% of executives and 53% of managers and directors said they planned to look for a new job in the next year, according to the Qualtrics study. The majority of respondents cited stress and burnout as the reasons they were deciding to leave their current roles, with others saying they planned to move on in search of more growth opportunities. More than 63% of respondents said they were not offered any networking or mentoring opportunities last year, and 60% said they were given no professional development or training in that same time period....

Some 57% of businesses from the education, financial services, insurance, technology and telecommunications, healthcare, and retail sectors are targeted by cybercriminals frequently, according to a survey by Instituto Datafolha commissioned by Mastercard. On the other hand, the study has found that only 32% of the organizations polled have dedicated cybersecurity teams. While 80% of respondents claimed digital security matters are important to them and most have some kind of plan in place to deal with potential cyberattacks, it is not among the budgetary priorities for 39% of those polled....

We founded the company because we realized something was missing in the IAM area. We’ve been implementing IAM in different organizations, but we couldn’t provide the full required solution because the current technology lacked the abilities we needed. To those who are not familiar, can you give us an overview of what is IAM? Identity and Access Management typically deals with 3 main areas: Identity- how do you see the user in the online world Authentication- how do you prove the identity of that user Authorization- how and which permissions do you grant that user or what can the user do and see...

The US space agency has hauled its huge Space Launch System (SLS) off the launch pad and back into the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) maintenance facility in advance of Hurricane Ian’s expected arrival in Florida on Wednesday. NASA hoped to keep SLS on the launch pad to preserve the October 3 backup launch date after cancelling its September 27 date – its third attempt to launch SLS and send the Orion spacecraft around the moon for a test run....

The consultation was kicked off at the start of 2020 as Australian enterprise telcos complained of NBN overbuilding existing networks. In an update posted last week, NBN after receiving quotes from six parties covering 31 sites as a proof of concept (PoC), and a mixture of fibre to the basement, fibre to the node, and fibre to the curb, said it was not impressed with any of them. “There is no evidence to suggest that an industry-wide procurement model for third party dark fibre connections to deliver wholesale enterprise services would be commercial or operationally feasible based on current NBN build costs, available third-party footprint, operational timelines and SLAs....

Educating buyers on what’s new can be difficult, but showing them how those things can be used can be even more difficult. The real-world uses cases are what I thought made the ad compelling. As an analyst and IT pro before that, I’ve been looking at collaboration tools since the days of the roll-around video carts. During that time, I do not remember a year in which there has been as much innovation as this past one....

Arcade, a DeFi marketplace and lending platform for loans backed by NFTs, officially launched today to the public, enabling NFT owners – from novice to high-net-worth – the ability to unlock liquidity on one or more of their NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain; providing the means for lenders and borrowers to come together to turn NFT holdings into liquid assets. According to the company’s announcement today, lenders that hold stablecoin or ERC 20 tokens can participate in a new source of decentralized finance yield by underwriting fixed-rate term loans collateralized by borrowers’ NFTs....

Nintendo has been a household name in the growth of the current generation and, if sales alone are any indication, it continues to own one of the top spots in the heart of the gaming community. Its top two models, the Nintendo Switch OLED vs the Nintendo Switch make it hard to choose the right one. As a run-of-the-mill millennial, some of my best core memories with my siblings happened around a Nintendo console in the early to mid nineties....

At its spring Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) this week, Nvidia demonstrated a new approach to inverse rendering – the process of reconstructing 3D scenes from a handful of 2D images. Inverse rendering uses AI to approximate how light behaves in the real world. With the approach developed by the Nvidia Research team, the whole process happens almost instantly. The method, Nvidia explained, could be applied to a wide range of use cases....

The Nvidia Omniverse platform gives 3D designers a shared virtual world from which they can collaborate across different software applications and from different geographic locations. Now, Omniverse is becoming more accessible. First, Nvidia announced Omniverse Cloud, which gives artists, designers and developers instant access to Omniverse, even if they don’t have an Nvidia RTX-based system. “This is an answer to a huge demand we’ve had from a number of customers who wanted access to this platform but were limited because of the platform they’re on,” Richard Kerris, Nvidia’s Omniverse VP, said to reporters this week....