Edit, Microsoft’s open-source command-line text editor, added syntax highlighting, improved regex handling in Find & Replace and new editing shortcuts in its v2.0.0 update. Microsoft open-sourced Edit last year. It’s a small, cross-platform text editor with VS Code-style keybindings, mouse support, handles LF and CRLF line endings and lets you open multiple file. The clean terminal user interface (TUI) is super easy to use. The Edit v2.0.0 release came out earlier this year, but the unofficial Linux snap package (msedit, maintained by Canonical’s Aaron Prisk) only updated on 14 September – that update is how I heard a new version […]

You're reading Microsoft’s open-source CLI text editor adds syntax highlighting, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

For years, Microsoft and OpenAI have fought to keep certain information out of the public eye in their fight with news organizations that have accused the AI firms of teaming up to violate copyright laws by stealing tons of news content to train AI.

However, now the details that should never have been marked confidential are starting to leak. In a motion for summary judgment that was unsealed Thursday from news plaintiffs led by The New York Times, internal documents are exposed that news groups alleged show exactly how Microsoft and OpenAI viewed the threat to news before unleashing new AI products like ChatGPT and Copilot.

Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”

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Edit, Microsoft’s open-source command-line text editor, added syntax highlighting, improved regex handling in Find & Replace and new editing shortcuts in its v2.0.0 update. Microsoft open-sourced Edit last year. It’s a small, cross-platform text editor with VS Code-style keybindings, mouse support, handles LF and CRLF line endings and lets you open multiple file. The clean terminal user interface (TUI) is super easy to use. The Edit v2.0.0 release came out earlier this year, but the unofficial Linux snap package (msedit, maintained by Canonical’s Aaron Prisk) only updated on 14 September – that update is how I heard a new version […]

You're reading Microsoft’s open-source CLI text editor adds syntax highlighting, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Former Doom: The Dark Ages producer Andrew Willis has shared tuppence on the state of the blockbuster videogame trade, arguing that the biggest companies and most popular series are going through a familiar "cycle" whereby the moneyfolk finally displace the creatives, and start messing games up in the name of short-term returns. He reckons that the likes of Halo are well on their way to becoming "a dried husk of a product that everyone just now associates with like, slop".

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Former Thief: The Dark Project designer, Ion Storm game director, and sometime Spielberg collaborator Randy Smith Evergreen has shared his probably-incendiary view that photorealistic videogame graphics need not have advanced any further than Remedy's original Alan Wake. For context, Alan Wake released back in 2010, when some of you people were screaming babies. Every touted breakthrough in visual fidelity since that golden year? A pointless indulgence and a reckless travesty. A middle finger jammed up the nose of god.

Smith Evergreen is entirely wrong, of course: videogame graphics actually topped out with PS1's MediEvil, still definitively the most faithful and convincing portrayal of an incompetent walking skeleton known to science. That said, this is an OG Thief designer we're talking about. Let's hear the poor soul out.

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In 2020, Microsoft announced that Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions would include unlimited access to its new Xbox Cloud Gaming service (then still known as Project xCloud). Now, that kind of streaming buffet service is coming to an end, as Microsoft announced strict new limits on how much streaming is included in its various Game Pass subscriptions.

Starting in November, Game Pass subscriptions will include the following monthly limits on game streaming time:

• Game Pass Ultimate ($23/month): 15 hours
• Game Pass Premium ($15/month): 10 hours
• Game Pass Essential ($10/month): 5 hours

Subscribers who use up their monthly streaming allotment will be able to buy additional time, Microsoft said, without sharing specific pricing or availability for that streaming time. Access to downloadable versions of games included in a Game Pass subscription remains unaffected.

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For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both worlds for thousands of supported titles as part of a newly announced disc-to-digital program.

The program—announced today ahead of testing for Xbox Insiders starting August 31—will let players claim a "digital entitlement" for "most Xbox One and Xbox Series X disc-based games" simply by inserting the disc into a console and launching it. That game will then be playable completely digitally, without the need to ever insert the disc, as long as you (or a member of your family account) is logged in. The digital entitlement will also allow access to features like Xbox Play Anywhere (for play on PC) and Xbox Cloud Gaming, for supported titles.

Microsoft says that your physical disc will "continue to work exactly as it always has" after the digital entitlement is claimed. But before you get any ideas, the fine print on the announcement mentions that there is only "one revokable license per game disc," so if you resell that disc or loan it to a friend, that digital entitlement could be transferred to a new account when someone else puts it into their console.

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Yesterday, August 18th, further union rallies against Microsoft's mass layoffs across Xbox studios were held across North America. As the One Bethesda Game Studio (OneBGS) union and the Communication Workers of America (CWA)-supported protests continue, one unionised Bethesda developer has said that while work-related morale for those who remain at the studio is low, there's optimism about their efforts to organise.

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It’s not every day that attackers can force a frontier AI model to cough up user passwords and other sensitive data without user confirmation. That’s exactly what researchers recently did to Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise. Even more unusual is the source they tapped to discover the critical vulnerability that made their exploit possible. Rather than employing reverse engineering or other traditional vulnerability-hunting methods, they asked Copilot. The LLM assistant readily complied.

Researchers at security firm Varonis knew they wanted to create an exploit that would exfiltrate user data when a user did nothing more than click on a link. Like most AI assistants today, Copilot steadfastly refused and made clear that sensitive prompts like that require explicit user consent in the form of a gesture, such as pressing a return key or other key. In response, the researchers peppered Copilot with questions about the guardrails that required user confirmation before the assistant could execute powerful commands.

Loose lips sink ships

The dialog was like a game of 20 questions. Each answer provided a new clue that divulged information about the complex safety mechanism. Why was auto-execution impossible, they asked. What URL structures and deep links were involved? What happens when a page is loaded with input already in the prompt field? Each answer provided a deeper view into the guardrail and its limits. Eventually, Copilot provided a stunning Microsoft trade secret—an undocumented prompt parameter that completely bypassed the requirement for user consent.

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This year is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the original Quake by id Software, if you could believe it. To commemorate that, publisher Bethesda has released a new campaign chapter for the game, titled "Dawn of the Machine."

This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames "in collaboration with id Software." MachineGames is best known for making the games in the relatively recent Wolfenstein reboot series, as well as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The Quake maps are made by a team dubbed "Quake Club," which includes several MachineGames employees who work on Quake maps in their spare time.

The ambition and scope of some of these maps is beyond what was typical for Quake maps back in the late '90s, thanks in part to the team's use of TrenchBroom, a newer map editor that works well on modern systems and is easier to work with and more capable than what folks were using in those days.

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Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, equity firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity partners have completed their $55 billion acquisition of EA Sports FC, Battlefield, The Sims, Mass Effect and Dragon Age publisher EA. This comes following a filing from EA to the US Securities and Exchange Commission last week, and confirmation that the European Commission had no intention to stop the deal.

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Microsoft, they of the recent mass layoffs and reported Israeli military links, are reportedly set to offer devs a chance to bring their Xbox 360 games to PC as part of an ongoing backwards compatibility push.

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Efforts by those now running Xbox to convince onlookers that the gaming division of Microsoft is now in a better place to start hauling in the ever-growing money numbers those overseeing it crave have continued alongside Microsoft first financial report since this month's mass layoffs. Both Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and her boss Satya Nadella have declared they're looking for the division to be growing financially again by about this time next year.

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On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of Microsoft engineers and their managers gathered online and in a conference room at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to discuss Project Glasswing.

The tech giant was racing to fix weaknesses in its code that a new AI model known as Mythos was uncovering at an unprecedented clip. The AI behemoth Anthropic, which developed Mythos, had given access to select organizations that make software used by regular people, companies, and governments across the world. The goal was to find and fix the vulnerabilities before hackers and adversarial governments like China began using similar tools to find and exploit them for espionage and sabotage.

As the group settled in, one engineer asked the question that loomed over the meeting: Did Mythos “live up to the hype that Anthropic claimed it would have had?”

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Microsoft is introducing new AI tools designed to help customers continuously streamline and automate the process of identifying and reducing their exposure to security risks.

The new tools come less than a week after OpenAI lost control of two of its security models when they infiltrated the servers of startup Hugging Face. The hack, Hugging Face added, involved “a swarm of tens of thousands of automated actions” that stole internal Hugging Face credentials. The OpenAI models achieved this feat by exploiting a zero-day flaw in Hugging Face’s data-processing pipeline to run malicious code that escalated the models’ access to the company’s high-value cloud and server clusters.

Microsoft’s announcements on Monday made no reference to the event, which OpenAI said was “unprecedented.” The company also didn’t say what would prevent the new tools from similarly going rogue.

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LG is reportedly pulling a McAfee pop-up ad from a controversial app that some of its monitors have stealthily installed on connected computers.

An example of the pop-up ad is seen in a still from Gamers Nexus' video. Credit: Gamers Nexus/Windows/YouTube

The app, LG Monitor App Installer, installs itself through a Windows Update alongside monitor driver updates. LG Monitor App Installer then pushes ads for a 30-day free trial for McAfee, as well as other software, via a pop-up on affected systems, multiple users have reported.

This has drawn negative attention recently, with complaints surfacing on Reddit and a subsequent video from YouTube channel Gamers Nexus. In the video, editor-in-chief Steve Burke said that the publication paid $1,200 for an LG UltraGear 3GX900A-B gaming monitor (the monitor’s price dropped to $600 two days later, Burke said) for testing and replicated the behavior “several times” across “multiple” Windows 11 systems.

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For years, Microsoft has leaned heavily into extensive backward compatibility across multiple generations of Xbox hardware as a major selling point for its consoles. Today, that effort expands past the console ecosystem, making select original Xbox titles officially playable (and purchasable) on Windows PCs for the first time.

The appropriately and bluntly named "Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC" program kicks off today with compatibility for BLiNX: The Time Sweeper, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, and Fuzion Frenzy. PC players can download each title for $10, but those with Xbox Game Pass subscriptions or existing digital licenses for these games on console will have instant access without an additional purchase (no such luck if you simply stick an original Xbox disc in your PC drive, alas).

Playing these older Xbox titles on PC enables some bonus graphical features like Vsync support, anisotropic filtering, enhanced anti-aliasing, and up to 4x resolution scaling of the original SD signal (to 2560x1920). Games are limited to their original frame rates and aspect ratios, though, which means a 30 fps 4:3 image in most cases. Microsoft says this first batch of games should be playable with 11-year-old GTX 950 graphics hardware, but recommends a 2017-era GTX 1070 Ti with 8GB of VRAM for best performance.

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ROCKVILLE, Maryland—Hundreds of Bethesda Game Studios and Zenimax Online Studios employees and their supporters braved nearly 100° F temperatures to protest sweeping layoffs across Xbox during a lunchtime rally in front of parent company Zenimax's headquarters today. The rally was one of five today organized by Zenimax Workers United and its parent union, the Communication Workers of America, at offices across Texas, California, and Montreal.

Attendees held up signs with messages like "Layoffs... layoffs never change" and "Our players deserve better" as union organizers and employees rallied the crowd with speeches and songs. The overwhelming message was one of solidarity and a willingness to push back against job cuts they say have decimated their development and quality assurance teams.

"It's about us building our movement and making sure that we get seen and we're visible," Bethesda technical producer and union volunteer organizer Nathan Hahn told Ars. "Because we want to make sure that we're not okay with these layoffs and that Xbox knows."

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Right on the heels of Microsoft releasing a record number of security patches, a researcher has published exploit code that can enable low-privilege Windows accounts to make sensitive changes to administrator accounts.

The exploit, which multiple researchers say works, is sending Microsoft scrambling, yet again, to patch a zero-day released by an anonymous researcher who has complained about the software maker’s handling of their bug reports. To date, the pseudonymous NightmareEclypse has published nine such exploits, including Tuesday’s HiveLegacy. The researcher said the proof-of-concept code included in the report was stripped down to prevent attackers from using it maliciously.

A “pretty powerful primitive”

HiveLegacy is an elevation-of-privilege exploit that targets a vulnerability residing in the Windows User Profile Service. It allows users (and with more work likely processes) with limited system rights to compromise an admin user's account by modifying its classes registry hive, a resource that ensures the correct application opens when certain types of files are clicked on in Windows Explorer.

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