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Ryan Roslansky is leaving Microsoft and LinkedIn after nearly 18 years, triggering another leadership shuffle across Office and Teams. "Roslansky, who until recently was the CEO of LinkedIn, was promoted to the head of Office last year and then took control of Microsoft Teams earlier this year," notes The Verge. From the report: "Ryan leaves the organization in a strong position," says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an internal memo. "Over the past year, Ryan's team has done critical work bringing together the product, engineering, and design foundations that have made this next phase possible." Roslansky is leaving a week after Microsoft announced its new Copilot, which the company is positioning as "the OS for work." He's also leaving around a month after calling fully AI-generated documents "a doom loop" for workers. "If we're not careful, we'll end up with a very expensive way to avoid writing and reading in an ocean of sameness, genericness," said Roslansky in his LinkedIn post. Microsoft is now moving the teams behind Office and Microsoft Teams over to Charles Lamanna, as part of the Copilot, Agents, and Platform (CAP) organization. [...] Microsoft's chief design officer, Jon Friedman, is also moving to report to Copilot chief Jacob Andreou. Microsoft appointed Dan Shapero as its LinkedIn CEO earlier this year, and he will continue in this role and report directly to Nadella.

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Micron says the global RAM and storage shortage will tighten further through 2027 and 2028, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra saying the company has already sold most of next year's capacity. "In calendar 2027 as well as 2028, we see demand exceeding supply. In fact, we see greater tightness in the industry in 2027 and in 2028 versus 2026. Overall, supply-demand environment is only getting tighter," Mehrotra said. "We do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance." As a result, the company is forecasting record revenue and an 86.25% gross margin. Tom's Hardware reports: The memory and storage industry is not holding back on increasing production, though, with Micron saying that NAND and DRAM shipments are expected to grow in the low-to-mid 20s percentage range for the next two years. However, it seems that this is not enough to match growing demand, as it expects "the industry to remain supply constrained in both years." Still, it seems that manufacturers are prioritizing HBM demand for AI data centers, with the company expecting shipments of these chips to grow faster than conventional DRAM. Micron and other chip manufacturers are bringing new factories online to increase output, but it's going to take years before they can start producing chips. But even as we're amid an unprecedented multi-year memory chip shortage, Micron also announced record financial guidance. It forecasted a record $61.5 billion FQ1 revenue and a gross margin of 86.25%, implying a gross profit of more than $53 billion. After accounting for an estimated $2.06 billion in operating expenses and a tax rate of around 15.5%, the company said its earnings per share sit at $38.15, plus or minus $1.00, for approximately 1.15 billion shares.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A company that makes phone hacking devices claims to have developed a solution that freezes iPhones in a state that lets cops more easily access sensitive data inside them, according to a video obtained by 404 Media. [...] The new technology to get around inactivity reboot was developed by Magnet Forensics, the company behind GrayKey, a popular tool sold to law enforcement agencies that allows them to unlock and access data stored in iPhones and Android smartphones. Magnet has developed a new device called GrayKey Preserve and a feature for its regular GrayKey devices called Evidence Preservation Mode, according to the video. "This is an absolute game changer for iOS forensics and a function that I wish we had years ago," a Magnet employee says in the leaked video, specifically mentioning that the solution is targeted at the iPhone's inactivity reboot feature and the data it makes unavailable. GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode are also designed to combat another iPhone feature that automatically deletes certain data -- such as cached locations, and recently deleted photos and iMessages -- after a certain number of days. "We're gonna be able to preserve that data for an infinite amount of time." [...] 404 Media shared a transcript of the video with Jiska Classen, a researcher at the Hasso Plattner Institute who studies iPhone security. While Classen said that it's impossible to know for sure how Magnet's new feature works based on the video, she posited some theories and agreed that it is "quite a game changer" or "at least puts things back to where they were before inactivity reboot." She thinks Magnet has found a way to manipulate the iPhone's clock, effectively "slowing down time" or even "stopping the clock from ticking, even after a reboot." Most likely, according to her, the GrayKey may disable the iPhone tasks that set data to expire. The "inactivity reboot" feature mentioned above was added to iOS in November 2024 and automatically restarts iPhones that have not been unlocked for 72 hours, making them harder for police to access using forensic tools.

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Longtime Slashdot reader ThurstonMoore shares a report from Reuters: U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced the creation of a new military command that would be dedicated to building and providing autonomous and robotic capabilities across the U.S. military. The command, which Hegseth said would be called "Autonomous Warfare Command," highlights the rapidly changing nature of warfare and the need to make progress on systems like drones and the use of artificial intelligence. Speaking in front of hundreds of junior officers and enlisted personnel at Quantico, Virginia, in a speech peppered with attacks on the media, Hegseth said the command would be led by a four-star officer. "The pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it," Hegseth said in a speech called the "State of the Force," in which he announced other changes, including the creation of the office of religious affairs. "Cheap compute, superintelligence, and advanced commercial manufacturing have enabled the proliferation of low-cost, high-precision strike," Hegseth added. [...] The United States has long relied on its vast military budget to field some of the world's most expensive weapons systems. But there is an increasing realization within the Pentagon that this is not sustainable. "Today we need both quality and quantity," Hegseth said.

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The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over potential consumer and safety risks posed by their products, with the agency reportedly preparing requests for documents and executive testimony. CNBC reports: OpenAI stunned the industry in July when it disclosed that its agents broke out of a testing environment and hacked into open-source platform Hugging Face. [...] Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei rocked the tech sector by urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models and calling for stronger government oversight. He published a three-step proposal aimed at tempering the pace of development without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI." CEO Jensen Huang, argued that individual companies should be responsible for ensuring the safety of their products. President Donald Trump convened top executives from Alphabet, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies on Tuesday to discuss the issue. The group signed a short voluntary, nonbinding accord, which says that "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public."

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HP is taking aim at Apple's MacBook Neo with the new OmniBook 5 14, a $699.99 Windows laptop that starts with an Intel Core 5 315 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage but includes an OLED display even on the base model. It's also slightly thinner and lighter than the Neo. The Verge reports: The OmniBook 5 14 can be configured much higher, with up to a Core 7 350 chip, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, but all models include a 1080p webcam, dual speakers, HDMI, 3.5mm audio jack, and just two 10Gbps USB-C ports. And while the inclusion of OLED across the range is a major draw to the new OmniBook, the base config only has a passable 1920 x 1200 resolution and 300 nits of max brightness on its non-touch panel. A touchscreen version will be available when the OmniBook 5 launches in October, but a version with a 2560 x 1600 resolution OLED and 400 nits of brightness isn't coming until March 2027. While the OmniBook 5 14 doesn't seem poised to best the MacBook Neo in raw processing power (based on our other reviews of Wildcat Lake laptops) or screen brightness, it's quite thin, light, and colorful. HP even gave it the nicer, sleeker lid logo usually reserved for pricier models. It starts at just 2.56 pounds, and it's as thin as 0.46 inches / 11.7mm. That's slightly lighter and thinner than a Neo. And I'd expect its Wildcat Lake chips to offer some good-to-great battery life. But we'll have to see how it delivers in actual testing. HP also announced a new ProBook 4 G2iS that is the company's "thinnest business notebook," measuring in at 0.47 inches / 12mm. It'll launch in December with Intel Wildcat Lake chips, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, though pricing hasn't been announced.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a long time, PC gamers could access many PlayStation 5 games only if the publisher invested in a bespoke port (something Sony has recently said it will be scaling back). Now, though, rapid advancements in PS5 emulators and other tools are making recent PlayStation titles increasingly playable on generic PCs. SharpEmu was the first of these emulators, advancing from a "very early alpha stage" in May to a current state that can "load the eboot.bin of real games, execute native CPU instructions, and partially handle GPU-related functionality." The most recent release boasts 10 tested games that reach a "playable" state, including six that developer CursedIfElse says are "fully playable at 60 fps." That includes simple 2D games like Tetris Forever but also 3D titles like Astro Bot and the PS5 Demon's Souls remaster running at playable frame rates. [...] Amid that SharpEmu progress, fellow PS5 emulator KytyPS5 launched its first public version last week. The major expansion of PS4-focused emulator Kyty "can boot 2D games and a selection of 3D games, including titles built with Unreal Engine 4/5, Unity, and custom engines," according to its GitHub page. An extensive compatibility list for KytyPS5 already shows 134 titles with "controllable gameplay" on the new emulator, though many of those still include reports of persistent, game-breaking bugs. But you can already find YouTube footage of PS5 titles like Astro's Playroom and Demon's Souls running quite capably under the emulator. On top of those more traditional emulators, AnyPS5 might be the most interesting effort to get PS5 games running on PC. The self-described "tool for automatic executables porting" works kind of like Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, relinking a PS5 game's original x86 game code directly to native executable instructions that can run on PC. That puts the effort somewhere between direct static decompilation of a game's source code and more complete emulation of the entire PS5 environment.

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Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, a new frontier AI model that it says leads or ties rivals on 13 of 18 disclosed benchmarks. The model is initially being released only to trusted cyber defenders and select pre-release testers, with broader availability planned later. VentureBeat reports: Google is not claiming that Gemini 4 Argon wins every benchmark. But across the benchmark table disclosed in the company's embargoed materials, Argon posts the highest score, or ties for the highest score, in more categories than GPT-6 Astra or Claude Opus 5.5. Across the 18 benchmarks Google disclosed, Argon leads outright on 12 and ties for first on one. GPT-6 Astra leads outright on three and ties Argon on one. Claude Opus 5.5 leads outright on two. That makes Argon the leading frontier model by total number of benchmark leads or top scores in Google's comparison set, even though the results show a still-close race in which OpenAI and Anthropic retain advantages in several important technical categories. [...] The result is a more nuanced claim than "best model across the board." Argon appears to have the broadest top-score profile among the three frontier models in Google's disclosed comparison, but GPT-6 Astra remains ahead in several software, science-terminal and computer-use tasks, while Claude Opus 5.5 remains ahead in terminal-agent and post-training workflows. For enterprise buyers, that means model choice is still workload-dependent, even if Argon now gives Google its strongest claim yet to overall frontier leadership by benchmark count. [...] Argon also expands Google's output ceiling. The company says the model supports an industry-leading 1 million output tokens, up from a previous 64,000-token limit. That is a notable distinction for agentic software engineering, audit, migration and legal-review workloads where the value of a model often depends on how long it can sustain a chain of work before handing control back to a human.

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Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says Microsoft has no plans to sell the gaming business, telling The New York Times that "Xbox is not for sale" and that the company intends to take a long-term view. Windows Central reports: Microsoft's vast layoffs across the summer have hit Xbox in their thousands, with studios like Ninja Theory on the path to being closed, and others like Double Fine being divested completely. Microsoft has effectively shut down Halo Studios itself and handed off the franchise to Call of Duty showrunners instead, as Xbox aggressively seeks to restructure for its next decade. [...] The NYT interviewed (paywall) Sharma recently covering the Xbox layoffs generally. The outlet said that Asha "did not stall" in declaring Xbox not-for-sale. "Xbox is not for sale. [...] We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that. [...] We've got a long way to go with Microsoft and we're going to take the long-term view." The NYT quite patronizingly called the comment a "bob and weave" seemingly unwilling to let go of the idea of divestiture. It's great shareholder bait; Xbox has long been an aspirational type of product, and it has been a loss leader in some regards. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has remarked in the past about how, despite the fact Xbox isn't a huge profit generator, fandom of the brand has led to lucrative deals for Azure on the business side of things. Yet, shareholders would love nothing more than for Microsoft to quit the difficult and risky game industry to dive all-in on AI psychosis products instead...

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A months-long breach of the Defense Manpower Data Center exposed personal information belonging to roughly 2.8 million living current and former U.S. military personnel and staff, plus records for nearly 300,000 deceased people. Attackers reportedly exploited a file-sharing vulnerability between October 2025 and July 2026, accessing unencrypted records that included Social Security numbers, dates of birth, demographic information, and military service details. TechCrunch reports: The DMDC may not be widely known to the general public, but serves as one of the Department of Defense's records-keeping units. The DMDC maintains over 60 million records for U.S. military and civilian staff and their family members to help determine benefits and entitlements, such as healthcare and retirement. The unit also provides a critical service as the military's "leading identity management provider," which links active service members, employees, and contractors to credentials, such as smart cards and passwords. These are used to access Pentagon computer systems, buildings, and bases. "We make sure that the right people get access and the wrong people don't: security of identity information is paramount," the DMDC's website reads. The Department of Defense, which oversees the DMDC, said it does not have any indication that the information was misused, but did not say how it reached that conclusion. TechCrunch contacted a Pentagon spokesperson to ask if officials had any communications from the hackers, whose identities are not known, but we did not hear back.

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