Microsoft is intensifying performance scrutiny through new policies that target underperforming employees, according to an internal email from Chief People Officer Amy Coleman. The company has introduced a formalized Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) system that gives struggling employees two options: accept improvement targets or exit the company with a Global Voluntary Separation Agreement. The policy establishes a two-year rehire blackout period for employees who leave with low performance ratings (zero to 60% in Microsoft's 0-200 scale) or during a PIP process. These employees are also barred from internal transfers while still at the company. Coming months after Microsoft terminated 2,000 underperformers without severance, the company is also developing AI-supported tools to help managers "prepare for constructive or challenging conversations" through interactive practice environments. "Our focus remains on enabling high performance to achieve our priorities spanning security, quality, and leading AI," Coleman wrote, emphasizing that these changes aim to create "a globally consistent and transparent experience" while fostering "accountability and growth."

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Amazon has delayed some commitments around new data center leases, Wells Fargo analysts said Monday, the latest sign that economic concerns may be affecting tech companies' spending plans. From a report: A week ago, a Microsoft executive said the software company was slowing down or temporarily holding off on advancing early build-outs. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are the leading providers of cloud infrastructure, and both have ramped up their capital expenditures in recent quarters to meet the demands of the generative artificial intelligence boom. "Over the weekend, we heard from several industry sources that AWS has paused a portion of its leasing discussions on the colocation side (particularly international ones)," Wells Fargo analysts wrote in a note. They added that "the positioning is similar to what we've heard recently from MSFT," in that both companies are reeling in some new projects but not canceling signed deals.

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The European Union is determined to enforce its full digital rule book no matter who is in charge of companies such as X, Meta, Apple and Tiktok or where they are based, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Politico. From a report: "That's why we've opened cases against TikTok, X, Apple, Meta just to name a few. We apply the rules fairly, proportionally, and without bias. We don't care where a company's from and who's running it. We care about protecting people," Politico quoted von der Leyen as saying on Sunday. The EU's Digital Markets Act has been strongly criticised by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

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The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Uber on Monday, alleging the transportation giant violated federal consumer protection laws through deceptive billing and cancellation practices for its Uber One subscription service. According to the complaint, Uber violated both the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act by misleading consumers about subscription terms, charging users without consent, and implementing deliberately complicated cancellation processes. "Americans are tired of getting signed up for unwanted subscriptions that seem impossible to cancel," FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said in announcing the action. The $9.99 monthly service, launched in 2021, offers benefits including fee-free delivery and discounted rides.

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Google is confronting an existential threat as the U.S. government tries to break up the company as punishment for turning its revolutionary search engine into an illegal monopoly. From a report: The drama began to unfold Monday in a Washington courtroom as three weeks of hearings kicked off to determine how the company should be penalized for operating a monopoly in search. In its opening arguments, federal antitrust enforcers also urged the court to impose forward-looking remedies to prevent Google from using artificial intelligence to further its dominance. "This is a moment in time, we're at an inflection point, will we abandon the search market and surrender them to control of the monopolists or will we let competition prevail and give choice to future generations," said Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist. The proceedings, known in legal parlance as a "remedy hearing," are set to feature a parade of witnesses that includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to order a radical shake-up that would ban Google from striking the multibillion dollar deals with Apple and other tech companies that shield its search engine from competition, share its repository of valuable user data with rivals and force a sale of its popular Chrome browser. Google's attorney, John Schmidtlein, said in his opening statement that the court should take a much lighter touch. He said the government's heavy-handed proposed remedies wouldn't boost competition but instead unfairly reward lesser rivals with inferior technology. "Google won its place in the market fair and square," Schmidtlein said.

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Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath has declared that net neutrality regulations "went literally nowhere." Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules. "I don't know what net neutrality does," Sampath told The Verge. "I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve with net neutrality." When pressed about potential anti-competitive behaviors like zero-rating services, Sampath deflected by focusing exclusively on traffic management concerns, arguing that networks require prioritization capabilities during congestion. "For traffic management purposes, we need to have some controls in the network," he stated. The interview comes as Verizon faces a different regulatory challenge from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who is holding up Verizon's Frontier acquisition over the company's diversity initiatives.

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Major scholarly databases have removed dozens of academic journals after researchers discovered they had been purchased by questionable companies and transformed into predatory publications. A January 2025 study identified 36 legitimate journals acquired by recently formed firms with no publishing experience, who then dramatically increased publication fees and output while lowering quality standards. According to information scientist Alberto Martin-Martin from the University of Granada, publishers are being offered up to hundreds of thousands of euros per journal title. Once acquired, journals typically introduce or raise article-processing charges while churning out papers often outside the publication's original scope. Scopus has delisted all 36 identified journals, and Web of Science removed 11 of 17 affected titles from its index. "As there has been significant change (different ownership), there is no guarantee that review quality is at the same level as the original journals," an Elsevier spokesperson told Nature.

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The FBI says it is unable to find records related to its purchase of a series of hacking tools, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and those purchases initially being included in a public U.S. government procurement database before being quietly scrubbed from the internet. From a report: The news highlights the secrecy the FBI maintains around its use of hacking tools. The agency has previously used classified technology in ordinary criminal investigations, pushed back against demands to provide details of hacking operations to defendants, and purchased technology from surveillance vendors. "Potentially responsive records were identified during the search," a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request I sent about a specific hacking tool contract says. "However, we were advised that they were not in their expected locations. An additional search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results. Since we were unable to review the records, we were unable to determine if they were responsive to your request." In other words, the FBI says it identified related records, then couldn't actually find them when it went looking.

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Over 100 mid-market software companies are caught in a dangerous "squeeze" between AI-native startups and tech giants, according to a new AlixPartners study released Monday. The consulting firm warns many face "threats to their survival over the next 24 months" as generative AI fundamentally reshapes enterprise software. The squeeze reflects a dramatic shift: AI agents are evolving from mere assistants to becoming applications themselves, potentially rendering traditional SaaS architecture obsolete. High-growth companies in this sector plummeted from 57% in 2023 to 39% in 2024, with further decline expected. Customer stickiness is also deteriorating, with median net dollar retention falling from 120% in 2021 to 108% in Q3 2024.

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Global alcohol consumption has entered what appears to be a permanent decline, with total volume peaking at 25.4 billion liters in 2016 and falling approximately 13% since then, according to data from market research firm IWSR. Per-capita consumption has dropped dramatically from 5 liters of pure alcohol per adult annually in 2013 to 3.9 liters in 2023. Wine production, which reached its maximum of 37.5 million metric tons in 1979, has already decreased by 27%. Beer production peaked more recently in 2016 at 190 million tons and has since declined 2.6%. Industry experts attribute this shift to changing generational habits, with younger consumers preferring event-driven drinking rather than habitual consumption. The proliferation of non-alcoholic alternatives, increased marijuana availability, and health consciousness accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic have further driven moderation trends.

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Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, the Vatican said Monday. The pontiff, who was Bishop of Rome and head of the Catholic Church, became pope in 2013 after his predecessor Benedict XVI resigned. On February 14, the Pope was admitted to hospital for bronchitis treatment. From a report: Born in 1936, Francis was the first pope from South America. His papacy was marked by his championing of those escaping war and hunger, as well as those in poverty, earning him the moniker the "People's Pope." In 2016, he washed the feet of refugees from different religions at an asylum centre outside Rome in a "gesture of humility and service." He also made his views known on a wide range of issues, from climate change to wealth inequality and the role of women in the Catholic Church.

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About one sixth of global cropland is contaminated by toxic heavy metals, researchers have estimated, with as many as 1.4 billion people living in high-risk areas worldwide. From a report: Approximately 14 to 17% of cropland globally -- roughly 242m hectares -- is contaminated by at least one toxic metal such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel or lead, at levels that exceed agricultural and human health safety thresholds. The analysis, which was conducted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and published in the journal Science, collected data from more than 1,000 regional studies across the globe, as well as using machine learning technology. Dr Liz Rylott, a senior lecturer in the department of biology at the University of York, who was not involved in the research, said: "These findings reveal the deeply worrying extent to which these natural poisons are polluting our soils, entering our food and water, and affecting our health and our environment. Often collectively called heavy metals, these elements cause a range of devastating health problems, including skin lesions, reduced nerve and organ functions, and cancers." Toxic metal pollution in soil originates from both natural and human activity. Contaminated soil causes significant risks to ecosystems and human health as well as reducing crop yields, jeopardising water quality and food safety owing to bioaccumulation in farm animals. Toxic metal contamination can persist for decades once pollution has been introduced into soil.

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OpenAI's latest reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, hallucinate more frequently than the company's previous AI systems, according to both internal testing and third-party research. On OpenAI's PersonQA benchmark, o3 hallucinated 33% of the time -- double the rate of older models o1 (16%) and o3-mini (14.8%). The o4-mini performed even worse, hallucinating 48% of the time. Nonprofit AI lab Transluce discovered o3 fabricating processes it claimed to use, including running code on a 2021 MacBook Pro "outside of ChatGPT." Stanford adjunct professor Kian Katanforoosh noted his team found o3 frequently generates broken website links. OpenAI says in its technical report that "more research is needed" to understand why hallucinations worsen as reasoning models scale up.

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Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos pushed back on director James Cameron's recent assertion that AI could slash film production costs by half, arguing instead for quality improvements over cost reduction during Netflix's first-quarter earnings call Thursday. "I read the article too about what Jim Cameron said about making movies 50% cheaper," Sarandos said. "I remain convinced that there's an even bigger opportunity to make movies 10% better." Sarandos pointed to Netflix's current AI implementations in set references, pre-visualization, VFX sequence preparation, and shot planning. He said AI-powered tools have democratized high-end visual effects that were once exclusive to big-budget productions. The executive cited 2019's "The Irishman" as a benchmark, noting its "very cutting-edge, very expensive de-aging technology that still had massive limitations." In contrast, he referenced cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto's directorial debut "Pedro Paramo," which employed AI-powered de-aging at "a fraction" of The Irishman's cost. "The entire budget of the film was about what the VFX cost on The Irishman," Sarandos explained. "Same creator using new tools, better tools, to do what was impossible five years ago."

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A new Seagate report reveals that hard drives significantly outperform solid-state drives in environmental sustainability metrics, particularly when accounting for manufacturing processes. According to the storage-maker's ""Decarbonizing Data">Decarbonizing Data" [PDF] study, the embodied carbon from manufacturing a 30TB SSD reaches 4,915 kg of CO2 -- approximately 160 times higher than the 29.7 kg produced in creating a comparable hard drive. The analysis measures the full manufacturing footprint, including "upstream extraction, production, transport, bill of material, manufacturing, packaging, and distribution stages" of each technology's lifecycle. When calculated per terabyte annually, the difference remains stark: less than 0.2 kg CO2/TB/year for hard drives versus 32 kg for SSDs. Operational efficiency follows similar patterns, with hard drives consuming 9.6 watts during use versus 20 watts for SSDs, translating to 0.32 and 0.5 watts per terabyte respectively.

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Bruce66423 shares a report: Toothpaste can be widely contaminated with lead and other dangerous heavy metals, new research shows. Most of 51 brands of toothpaste tested for lead contained the dangerous heavy metal, including those for children or those marketed as green. The testing, conducted by Lead Safe Mama, also found concerning levels of highly toxic arsenic, mercury and cadmium in many brands. About 90% of toothpastes contained lead, 65% contained arsenic, just under half contained mercury, and one-third had cadmium. Many brands contain a number of the toxins. The highest levels detected violated the state of Washington's limits, but not federal limits. The thresholds have been roundly criticized by public health advocates for not being protective -- no level of exposure to lead is safe, the federal government has found. Bruce66423 asks: "As ever the question that should be asked is: 'What level is worth worrying about and why?'"

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Members of the European Parliament were offered special pouches to protect digital devices from espionage and tampering for a visit to Hungary this week, a sign of rising spying fears within Europe. Five lawmakers from the Parliament's civil liberties committee traveled to Hungary on Monday for a three-day visit to inspect the EU member country's progress on democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights. One lawmaker on the trip confirmed to POLITICO that the Parliament officials joining the delegation were offered Faraday bags -- special metal-lined pouches that block electromagnetic signals -- by the Parliament's services and were also advised to be cautious about using public Wi-Fi networks or charging facilities.

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A communication error between GoDaddy Registry and Markmonitor took Zoom's services offline for almost two hours on Wednesday when GoDaddy mistakenly blocked the zoom.us domain. The outage affected all services dependent on the zoom.us domain. GoDaddy's block prevented top-level domain nameservers from maintaining proper DNS records for zoom.us. This created a classic domain resolution failure -- when users attempted to connect to any zoom.us address, their requests couldn't be routed to Zoom's servers because the domain effectively disappeared from the internet's addressing system. Video meetings abruptly terminated mid-session with browser errors indicating the domain couldn't be found. Zoom's status page (status.zoom.us) went offline, hampering communication efforts. Even Zoom's main website at zoom.com failed as the content delivery network couldn't reach backend services hosted on zoom.us servers. Customer support capabilities collapsed when account managers using Zoom's VoIP phones lost connectivity. Resolution required coordinated effort between Zoom, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy to identify and remove the block. After service restoration, users needed to manually flush their DNS caches using command line instructions (including the sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder command for Mac users).

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Rice, the world's most consumed grain, will become increasingly toxic as the atmosphere heats and as carbon dioxide emissions rise, potentially putting billions of people at risk of cancers and other diseases, according to new research published this week in The Lancet. From a report: Eaten every day by billions of people and grown across the globe, rice is arguably the planet's most important staple crop, with half the world's population relying on it for the majority of its food needs, especially in developing countries. But the way rice is grown -- mostly submerged in paddies -- and its highly porous texture mean it can absorb unusually high levels of arsenic, a potent carcinogenic toxin that is especially dangerous for babies. After growing rice in controlled fields for six years, researchers from Columbia University and international partners found that when both temperature and CO2 increased in line with climate projections, arsenic levels in rice grains rose significantly. "When we put both of them together, then wow, that was really something we were not expecting," said Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at Columbia University who led the study. "You're looking at a crop staple that's consumed by a billion people every day, and any effect on toxicity is going to have a pretty damn large effect." Inorganic arsenic exposure has been linked to cancers, heart disease, and neurological problems in infants. Disease risk rose across all seven top rice-consuming Asian countries analyzed. "This is one more reason to intervene -- to control people's exposure," said co-author Keeve Nachman of Johns Hopkins University. "The No. 1 thing we can do is everything in our power to slow climate change."

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Nature has published an analysis of the 21st century's most-cited scientific papers, revealing a surprising pattern: breakthrough discoveries like mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, and gravitational waves don't make the list. Instead, a 2016 Microsoft paper on "deep residual learning" networks claims the top spot, with citations ranging from 103,756 to 254,074 depending on the database. The list overwhelmingly features methodology papers and software tools rather than groundbreaking discoveries. AI research dominates with four papers in the top ten, including Google's 2017 "Attention is all you need" paper that underpins modern language models. The second-most-cited paper -- a 2001 guide for analyzing gene expression data -- was explicitly created to be cited after journal reviewers rejected references to a technical manual. As sociologist Misha Teplitskiy noted, "Scientists say they value methods, theory and empirical discoveries, but in practice the methods get cited more."

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