InfoWorld AI·
Microsoft has open-sourced two new tools aimed at bringing AI safety checks much earlier into the agent development lifecycle. The tools, called Rampart and Clarity, were announced this week as part of Microsoft’s broader push to operationalize safety engineering for agentic AI. “We built these tools because we believe that AI safety has to become a continuous engineering discipline rather than a periodic checkpoint, and we think the best way to make that happen is to put practical, open tools in the hands of the people doing the building,” Microsoft’s AI red team founder Ram Shankar Siva Kumar said in a security blog post. The announcement comes as AI agents evolve from chatbot-style assistants into systems with real operational privileges. According to Microsoft, these newer agents introduce risks that traditional application security workflows were not designed to handle, including prompt injection, unsafe tool use, privilege escalation, and unintended autonomous actions. Both Rampa
Read full articleCentralizing software procurement could streamline defense operations, reduce costs, and set a precedent for future government IT contracts. The post Pentagon awards Microsoft $9.7B deal to centralize software licenses appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
Illinois' AI safety bill could set a national precedent, pushing companies to adopt comprehensive safety audits and transparency standards. The post Illinois passes nation’s strongest AI safety bill requiring audits of major labs appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
If ever there were a lawsuit in which a jury and judge should have ruled against both the accuser and the defendants, Elon Musk’s suit against OpenAI and Microsoft was it. The high-profile legal battle pitted the world’s richest man against a company worth more than $3 trillion, another that might soon launch a $1 trillion IPO, and tech execs claiming to have only the good of the world in mind, not mere filthy lucre, while they develop a technology some fear could eventually destroy humankind. The lawsuit was eventually thrown out, but only on technical grounds. Meanwhile, unregulated AI marches on, with Musk, OpenAI and Microsoft all getting richer. The only winner in this suit was hypocrisy. Here’s why. Back to the beginning To understand how this unfolded, we need to go back to OpenAI’s beginnings. The company was founded by current CEO Sam Altman, Musk and others in 2015 — back when AI was a niche technology, used primarily for image and speech recognition, robotics, and experimen
Bitmine and Galaxy Digital may also be eligible for the Russell 1000, an index tracking the largest 1,000 US companies that includes Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
Microsoft is previewing a new automatic device isolation capability in Defender for Endpoint’s auto attack disruption tool to help security pros contain cyber attacks in progress on their IT networks. The company announced the capability earlier this month in a column about new features in Defender. There’s no word on when automatic device isolation will be in full production. However, a new SANS Institute research paper warns that, in certain conditions, an attacker could leverage the new function to disable all user accounts. The lesson, said Johannes Ullrich, the institute’s dean of research, is that autonomous AI action tools have to be tuned and tested like any other automation capability. “Automatic isolation and attack disruption are not new concepts,” Ullrich said in an email, “but ideas like these have been used in the past in open source and commercial tools. This feature is most important in organizations with under-resourced IT security teams, as it automates attack respons
IREN's strategic pivot to AI infrastructure, backed by substantial investments, positions it for growth but ties its fortunes closely to Microsoft's plans. The post IREN Limited signs $1.6B deal with Dell for AI cloud systems appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
Microsoft is preparing to make a significant change to the Secure Boot system in Windows that will impact operations for both clients and servers. In a nutshell: The Secure Boot certificates that Microsoft issued 15 years ago are being replaced by newer ones, with the older certificates set to expire beginning in June. To continue to receive the most up-to-date security protections for the Windows boot-up process, individual users and IT administrators alike need to make sure their Windows devices have the new Secure Boot certificates installed. Have questions? Of course you do. Here are answers to eight key questions about the Secure Boot certificate updates. What is Secure Boot? Secure Boot is a security feature that verifies that all firmware-based software is signed by a trusted certificate when Windows starts up. If something doesn’t match, it gets blocked. This all happens immediately on boot, before Windows or anything else loads. Secure Boot is a part of the UEFI firmware stand
Need to get up to speed on the latest features in Excel? Wrestling with an old version of Word? Looking to get more out of Windows 11? Computerworld’s cheat sheets are easy-to-use guides to help you navigate Microsoft’s core productivity software. Here’s a one-stop resource where you can find in-depth stories on several generations of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook for Windows, focusing on what’s new in each major release. We’ve also got guides for Windows itself, as well as Microsoft Teams, OneDrive (both in Windows and on the web), OneNote, Loop, Whiteboard, Forms, Visio, Planner, and Power Automate. Microsoft’s subscription-based office suite, called Microsoft 365, is continually updated with new features, so we periodically refresh the cheat sheets for the “365” versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other apps in the suite. But some companies and individuals will likely stay on older versions of the non-subscription software (Office 2021, for example) for some ti
