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In January, the Biden Administration released its new cybersecurity strategy following President Biden’s May 2021 executive order (EO 14028), signed in the wake of the SolarWinds software supply chain attack and ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure like Colonial Pipeline. Core to that strategy are ‘zero trust’ architectures, for which US tech and cybersecurity vendors were canvassed for suggestions by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), specifically about how to protect software supply chains from attack....

“If I had to encapsulate what I hear Satya Nadella say and others support at Envision it is that Microsoft is not going to be a software company per se any longer but a company that is devoted to being a critical part of the infrastructure of business via Azure and businesses via thoroughly contemporary versions of Office and various Dynamics applications - and that Dynamics would become a business solutions platform and Office a unified communications platform - all with the express purpose of providing those highly personalized outcomes that lead to major gains in productivity....

“No customer code or data was involved in the observed activities. Our investigation has found a single account had been compromised, granting limited access. Our cybersecurity response teams quickly engaged to remediate the compromised account and prevent further activity,” Microsoft said. “Microsoft does not rely on the secrecy of code as a security measure and viewing source code does not lead to elevation of risk. “Our team was already investigating the compromised account based on threat intelligence when the actor publicly disclosed their intrusion....

Also: Tech leaders sign petition to halt further AI developments Since then, the tech giant has worked to gradually expand its chat limit and the biggest limit yet is here. Last week, Bing Chat users began noticing that their chat and session limits had increased to 20 chats per session and 200 total chats per day. Also: ChatGPT vs Bing: Which is better? Michael Schechter, vice president, growth and distribution at Microsoft, confirmed via Twitter, that Microsoft was testing the increase over the weekend to see how things went....

The new feature is being tested now in the latest daily builds of Edge in the Canary Channel, according to The Verge. After enabling the experimental feature in Canary Edge, a split-screen icon is located to the right of the address bar. Clicking the icon splits the open tab into two equally-sized tabs, with the current window appearing on the left while the other window is populated by a grid of opened tabs as thumbnails....

Smiling while seething, for example. Then there’s pretending to focus when you’re half asleep, nodding on a Zoom call when you have no idea what’s being said, and knowing who to go to when you want to scream and be understood. There’s also another useful skill. Damage control. You often know when you’ve said or done something silly, ignorant, or plain offensive. But you believe you have time to fix it before it spirals beyond your pay grade and into an ether whose gases you don’t breathe....

According to The Verge’s sources at Microsoft, the company has been testing the new Teams client broadly within the company. Also: These people are switching to a four-day working week Microsoft hasn’t been secret about the fact it is building a Teams 2.0 app. The initiative has involved moving from Angular to the React JavaScript framework, and switching from Electron, the cross-platform desktop app development framework, to Edge’s WebView2. Over the past year, it’s revealed performance improvements across messaging, calling, and meetings....

ZeroOps is a NoOps variant. The name of the game here is to automate and abstract the underlying infrastructure, so programmers can focus on building code that can easily and transparently be moved from their desktops to production. The idea’s core is in amazee.io’s open-source project Lagoon. This is an Apache 2.0-licensed application delivery platform for cloud-native application deployment, management, security, and operation. As Franz Karlsberger, amazee.io’s CEO, explained in a press release, “We built amazee....

Mozilla VPN 2.7’s addition of multi-account containers will allow users to separate personal and work profiles as well as others for shopping, banking and more. The tool in Firefox allowed people to separate each profile into color-coded tabs and custom labels. “Combined with Mozilla’s VPN, it adds an extra layer of protection to their compartmentalized browsing activity, and additional safeguarding of their location information, as well,” a Mozilla spokesperson said....

“What we’re seeing in enterprises is an incredible proliferation of applications, deployment models, hybrid ecosystems being stood up everywhere,” Shaun Clowes, MuleSoft SVP Product Management, said to ZDNet. “People are managing workloads across their own on-prem data centers and multiple clouds. What they have is complex environments; they have data held in silos, an inability to even know what exists, how to take advantage of it, or whether it is safe and reliable....

NASA’s 12-inch wide cube-shaped robots are more like a flying Roomba than a Boston Dynamics dog or humanoid; more like Weebo, the flying assistant in the 90s’ Robin Williams sci-fi/comedy Flubber, than Terminator. NASA has sent up three Astrobee “free flying” robots to the ISS since work started in 2018. Bumble and Honey were launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in April 2019 and Queen left for the ISS in July 2019....

From today, over 50,000 FttN lines can be upgraded to fibre to the premises (FttP) provided they order a plan of 100Mbps or over. NBN said it is looking to add 60,000 FttN lines each month, and is targeting 230,000 eligible lines by mid-year, and 600,000 by year end. At the end of 2023, NBN says it will have up to two million premises eligible. Customers looking to upgrade need to head to NBN’s site to register their interest, and if eligible will be linked out to participating ISPs....

Netflix subscribers in Canada, Portugal, Spain, and New Zealand on the standard or premium plans can now add an extra member for CAD$7.99 a month per person in Canada, NZD$7.99 in New Zealand, €3.99 in Portugal, and €5.99 in Spain, according to its update on paid sharing. Also: The best movies and shows to stream right now: Our top picks for February Netflix has long made clear it would expand its crackdown on inter-household account sharing, but hadn’t revealed when it would start doing so and how much it would charge in each market....

The issue – discovered by researchers at the NCC Group – allows someone “to create and store fake vaccine credentials in their NYS Excelsior Pass Wallet that might allow them to gain access to physical spaces (such as businesses and event venues) where they would not be allowed without a vaccine credential, even when they have not received a COVID-19 vaccine.” The researchers found that the application did not validate vaccine credentials added to it, allowing forged credentials to be stored by users....

The funding came from eight investing firms, including Pantera Capital, Castle Island Ventures and Franklin Templeton Blockchain Fund, as well as angel investors Zac Prince, CEO of BlockFi and Richard Ma, CEO of Quantstamp. Proceeds from the $15 million funding will go toward building the Arcade platform. Formed in 2020, Arcade is an NFT marketplace for lending that independently appraises, validates and curates NFT collections and that enables owners of highly valued NFTs to use them as collateral for loans....

Fake Chinese antiques aren’t only limited to Beijing’s dirt markets; they have also appeared at auction houses and in museum collections worldwide. As the incomes of China’s wealthy and middle classes rise, a mixture of national pride and get-rich-quick dreams have led to a surge in demand for antiques – and a boom in forgeries to meet that demand. In fact, the fake art market in China is so large that, according to Artron, a Chinese art research company, some 250,000 people are believed to be working in the industry....

Opera was quick to jump onto Web3 with its Opera Crypto Browser and now apparently plans to do the same with generative AI. Opera plans to roll out the generative AI features in the sidebar of the browser. Also: How to use Opera’s Pinboards feature as a kanban board It’s not the first browser to add new AI features: Microsoft has also said it is adding AI to its Edge Sidebar, allowing users to ask for a summary of a company report “to get the key takeaways” for example, and then using the chat function to ask for a comparison to a competing company’s financials and automatically put it in a table....

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg details its desktop browser in a blogpost recapping its milestones for 2021, including 150 million downloads of its all-in-one privacy apps for iOS and Android, and Chromium extensions. Weinberg attempts to distinguish the DuckDuckGo desktop browser from the likes of Chromium-based Brave and Mozilla Firefox by arguing it is not a “privacy browser”. Instead, it’s just a browser that offers “robust privacy protection” by default and works across search, browsing, email and more....