People on foot, riding bicycles, and even those cruising on electric skateboards crisscrossed over a busy highway between Microsoft’s old and new campuses on Monday as a dramatic new pedestrian bridge officially opened in Redmond, Wash.

The Redmond Technology Station Bridge, an 1,100-foot span that crosses more than 20 lanes of roadway beneath — and two sets of light rail track — is being ushered in as a greener, safer way to move the tech giant’s employees and other commuters and community members around what’s hoped will be a bustling Sound Transit station.

Under a series of large, interconnecting, white canopies that run the length of the bridge over SR 520, officials from Microsoft, the City of Redmond, King County and Sound Transit welcomed those who made the bridge a reality and those who will use it.

“We are very happy to offer this, to see this new way of traveling for our employees,” said Barb Wilson, a public affairs representative for Microsoft. “I think it’s going to be an immediate impact.”

Making it easier to get to work might be viewed as a way to lure more remote or hybrid workers back to the office more regularly. Or perhaps the bridge acts as a recruitment tool for Microsoft, leveraging whatever it can in the competition for regional tech talent.

“We have employees all over the region,” Wilson said. “For people to be able to hop on light rail, ride their bike, or be able to get the commuter bus or Metro buses, there’s all kinds of amenities, not just for our employees but also for their families, for the community.”

A large red ribbon was cut to officially open the span, and soon the bridge was carrying Microsoft workers gawking at the structure, taking selfies, or simply using it to increase their lunch options between the west and east campuses.

Microsoft paid for construction of the bridge, which features a wide walking path, two lanes for bicycles, benches, and native Northwest plantings along both sides. The bridge was designed by AECOM and engineered by Kiewit Engineering Group. Microsoft is partnering with the City of Redmond to maintain it.

This bridge connects to Sound Transit’s new Redmond Technology light rail station, the SR 520 transit “flyer” stop, a regional bike trail, and Microsoft’s campus, which is undergoing a major refresh that highlights pedestrian and bike friendly amenities and accessibility for 47,000 employees.

The opening of the bridge is timed to the official opening celebration this Saturday of the light rail station, the last of eight stations on 6 1/2 miles of rail that make up the 2 Line between Bellevue and Redmond. The plan is to eventually connect the line to Seattle when light rail eventually starts running across Lake Washington on I-90.

Redmond Mayor Angela Birney, King County Executive and Sound Transit Board Chair Dow Constantine, King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, and Sound Transit Interim CEO Goran Sparrman all praised the collaboration between Microsoft and various partners, including local government agencies and the Washington State Department of Transportation.

“Today’s grand opening is an important milestone in the effort to create a multimodal transportation system that supports the region’s economy and quality of life,” said Alice Jolla, chief accounting officer and corporate vice president at Microsoft. “This bridge is a symbol of Microsoft’s commitment to our local community.”

As traffic zipped beneath on a highway known to back up during busier rush hour traffic, the bridge felt like a floating respite for workers making the easy 2-minute walk from one side to the other.

Ron James, a security guard with Securitas, which patrols the Microsoft campus, was waiting with his bike for the bridge to open. He rides about 60 hours per week, and the bridge will improve many of his movements.

“We have an ops 2.0 over here,” he said pointing to the new east campus. “But our original ops building is over there,” he said, pointing at older buildings to the west. “We can get back and forth between the two a lot more. We could help answer different calls if we’re short on responders that day because this thing just bridged that gap.”

Keep scrolling for more images from Monday’s opening event:

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Meta executive Jason Taylor is joining Microsoft’s AI supercomputing team. In a LinkedIn post on Monday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott says Taylor will take on the role of corporate vice president and deputy CTO to help “build the next set of systems that will push the frontier of AI forward.”

Taylor worked at Meta from 2009 to 2022, where he most recently served as the company’s vice president of infrastructure. He handled AI, data, and privacy infrastructure, as well as managing the company’s server budgets, according to his LinkedIn profile. Taylor was also the chair of the Open Compute Project Foundation from 2015 to 2017, an organization that promotes open-source designs in data centers.

Microsoft and OpenAI need more robust...

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Meta has started licensing the operating system for its Quest headset to other hardware makers, starting with Lenovo and Asus. It’s also making a limited-run, gaming-focused Quest with Xbox.

On the theme of opening up, Meta is also pushing for more ways to discover alternative app stores. It’s making its experimental App Lab store more prominent and even inviting Google to bring the Play Store to its operating system, which is now called Horizon OS. In a blog post, Meta additionally said that it’s working on a spatial framework for developers to more easily port their mobile apps to Horizon OS.

Crucially for Meta, Horizon OS includes the Horizon social layer, a 3D, Roblox-meets-The Sims open-world platform. After a buggy and sluggish...

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This year, more people than at any point in human history will have an opportunity to cast a vote, and this momentous election year is already well underway. The European Union will hold parliamentary elections this summer and roughly half of European countries will hold national or regional elections this year. All of this is happening at the same time as people around the world are trying to understand the impact of generative AI on elections and on the information ecosystem.

Today, we are announcing the expansion of the private preview of our Content Integrity tools to EU political parties and campaigns and news organizations from around the world. At Microsoft, we deeply believe that healthy democracies depend on healthy information ecosystems. Through this expansion we are delivering tools these organizations can use to help voters understand the information they encounter online.

Microsoft built its Content Integrity tools to help organizations such as political campaigns and newsrooms send a signal that the content someone sees online is verifiably from their organization. These tools, already available to U.S. political campaigns, give organizations control over their own content, and combat the risks of AI-generated content and deepfakes. By attaching secure “Content Credentials” to their original media, the organizations can increase transparency as to who created or published an image, where and when content was created, whether it was generated by AI, and whether the image has been edited or tampered with since it was created.

When people see media with valid Content Credentials, they can be certain that the content was in fact released by the newsroom, campaign, or political party. And they can understand whether the media has been altered in any way because they can see the editing history from the time that the organization added Content Credentials. This is made possible by leveraging the open-source industry standard published by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). These tools will be made available in private preview at no cost through 2024.

What’s included in Microsoft Content Integrity tools?

The content integrity tool consists of three components:

• An easy-to-use private web application available to political campaigns, news organizations, and election officials so they can add Content Credentials to their owned, authoritative content
• A private mobile application to capture secure and authenticated photographs, video, and audio by adding Content Credentials in real-time from a smartphone, developed in partnership with Truepic
• A public website for factcheckers and any member of the public to check images, audio, or videos for the existence of Content Credentials

We are expanding access to Content Integrity tools to help candidates, the press, and voters to navigate the elections ahead. While we recognize that Content Credentials alone are not a panacea to solve the problem of deepfakes, they are a critical component of a defense strategy for trusted media. Protecting access to indicators of authenticity is just one key step as we deliver on our commitments to help protect elections around the world.

Earlier this year, Microsoft, along with 20 other companies, announced the Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI to combat the use of video, audio, and images that alter the appearance, voice, or actions of political candidates and election officials. In addition, we are working with global political parties to deliver support and training as they navigate the new world of AI and providing security assistance from nation-state cyberattacks with the Campaign Success team and AccountGuard program.

High quality, trusted journalism is also integral to healthy democracies, and our Journalism Initiative has long supported the role of a free press in strong democratic institutions.

Interested news organizations can request access to the Content Integrity preview by visiting the Journalism Hub, and filling in the interest form.

Interested political parties in the EU, the UK, and the U.S. can request access to the Content Integrity preview by contacting the Campaign Success team.

The post Expanding our Content Integrity tools to support global elections appeared first on Microsoft On the Issues.

Author: Akihiro Suda (NTT)

Read-only volume mounts have been a feature of Kubernetes since the beginning. Surprisingly, read-only mounts are not completely read-only under certain conditions on Linux. As of the v1.30 release, they can be made completely read-only, with alpha support for recursive read-only mounts.

Read-only volume mounts are not really read-only by default

Volume mounts can be deceptively complicated.

You might expect that the following manifest makes everything under /mnt in the containers read-only:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
spec:
 volumes:
 - name: mnt
 hostPath:
 path: /mnt
 containers:
 - volumeMounts:
 - name: mnt
 mountPath: /mnt
 readOnly: true

However, any sub-mounts beneath /mnt may still be writable! For example, consider that /mnt/my-nfs-server is writeable on the host. Inside the container, writes to /mnt/* will be rejected but /mnt/my-nfs-server/* will still be writeable.

New mount option: recursiveReadOnly

Kubernetes 1.30 added a new mount option recursiveReadOnly so as to make submounts recursively read-only.

The option can be enabled as follows:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
spec:
 volumes:
 - name: mnt
 hostPath:
 path: /mnt
 containers:
 - volumeMounts:
 - name: mnt
 mountPath: /mnt
 readOnly: true
 # NEW
 # Possible values are `Enabled`, `IfPossible`, and `Disabled`.
 # Needs to be specified in conjunction with `readOnly: true`.
 recursiveReadOnly: Enabled

This is implemented by applying the MOUNT_ATTR_RDONLY attribute with the AT_RECURSIVE flag using mount_setattr(2) added in Linux kernel v5.12.

For backwards compatibility, the recursiveReadOnly field is not a replacement for readOnly, but is used in conjunction with it. To get a properly recursive read-only mount, you must set both fields.

Feature availability

To enable recursiveReadOnly mounts, the following components have to be used:

• Kubernetes: v1.30 or later, with the RecursiveReadOnlyMounts feature gate enabled. As of v1.30, the gate is marked as alpha.

• CRI runtime:

  • containerd: v2.0 or later

• OCI runtime:

  • runc: v1.1 or later
  • crun: v1.8.6 or later

• Linux kernel: v5.12 or later

What's next?

Kubernetes SIG Node hope - and expect - that the feature will be promoted to beta and eventually general availability (GA) in future releases of Kubernetes, so that users no longer need to enable the feature gate manually.

The default value of recursiveReadOnly will still remain Disabled, for backwards compatibility.

How can I learn more?

Please check out the documentation for the further details of recursiveReadOnly mounts.

How to get involved?

This feature is driven by the SIG Node community. Please join us to connect with the community and share your ideas and feedback around the above feature and beyond. We look forward to hearing from you!