U.S. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz in the White House Oval Office on March 13, 2025. | Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images<br>
Last week, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz inadvertently invited a journalist to a Signal chat discussing a planned military strike. Today, a new Washington Post report says that he has also discussed “sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict,” using his personal Gmail account.
Waltz, along with other members of the National Security Council, used Gmail “for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies,” according to emails the Post saw, with headers showing that others on the emails used their government-issued accounts. Waltz also had “less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information sent to his Gmail,” like his schedule and “other work documents,” some unnamed government officials told the outlet. The Post quotes National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes saying, “Waltz didn’t and wouldn’t send classified information on an open account,” and that Hughes says he’s “seen no evidence of Waltz using his personal email as described.”
The Post’s report puts the adviser’s communications practices back in the spotlight after Waltz invited The Atlantic editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal chat about a military strike in Yemen that took place later that day. Attorney General Pam Bondi indicated that the incident probably won’t be criminally investigated in response to questions at a press conference Sunday night, while suggesting that people should be discussing “what was in Hillary Clinton’s home,” seemingly referring to the personal email server scandal that cropped up late in her last Presidential campaign.
Since then, a Wired report detailed how his public Venmo account had revealed “the names of hundreds” of his associates, including journalists and military officers. And like most of us, personal online account info for Waltz and other Trump administration officials has been found in online database leaks, including “several passwords for Waltz’s email address,” writes Spiegel International.
Patti Thibodeau, Microsoft Archivist, left, shows Microsoft’s Albuquerque team photo and a related memo. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
[Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.]
REDMOND, Wash. — You’ve probably seen Microsoft’s iconic 1978 team photo. But have you read the memo that made it happen?
“As a suitable culmination of Microsoft’s productive stay in Albuquerque, I have arranged a sitting to make a company-wide portrait,” read the Dec. 6, 1978, memo from early Microsoft employee Bob Greenberg, under the subject “ESPRIT DE CORPS,” providing the logistics and suggesting “Regular informal attire.”
A close-up of the 1978 memo. Click to enlarge. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
They definitely followed the dress code, resulting in a classic photograph that captured the moment in time before the company relocated to the Seattle region.
This memo is the kind of gem that can be found in the Microsoft Archives, which includes a 4,300-square-foot, climate-controlled vault in Redmond that holds everything from original boxed software and prototypes to internal communications, campaign buttons, and press materials.
For this installment in our Microsoft@50 series, my GeekWire colleague John Cook and I explored the Microsoft Archives with Patti Thibodeau, Microsoft Archivist; and Kimberly Engelkes, Director of the Microsoft Library and Archives.
We were there for more than an hour. The collection is so immense, we could have spent weeks.
GeekWire’s John Cook looks at memorabilia from Microsoft’s 20th anniversary, including a bubble blower and bottle of bubbles, on a tour with Patti Thibodeau, Microsoft Archivist. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Founded in 1986 and staffed by a team of six, the Microsoft Archives preserve nearly 135,000 physical artifacts, 170,000 digital records, and half a petabyte of digitized video content. The Microsoft Archives has been in its current building in Redmond since 1997.
There are costumes from the Halo TV series; a doorframe from Bill Gates’ former Microsoft office; “Save the Blibbet” materials from an internal protest over the company’s 1980s logo change; and a computer server that accompanied former CEO Steve Ballmer during a launch event.
“It became a historical artifact the moment that it was on stage with him,” Thibodeau explained.
One wall display features historical images of Microsoft leaders, including current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, giving a demo about the power of Microsoft Excel.
A wall display shows Microsoft historical photos, including a 10th anniversary poster in 1980s style. Click to enlarge. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Inside the vault, a nearly life-sized cardboard cutout of former Microsoft President Jon Shirley has been carefully preserved for posterity in a plastic wrapping.
A display of press clippings from the company’s history. Click to enlarge. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
A wall-sized collage of newspaper and magazine clippings recalls the media frenzy surrounding the launch of Windows 95 — including a BusinessWeek cover story explaining, “How it will change computing.”
A Windows XP countdown clock and other Microsoft artifacts. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Nearby is a sign from the Windows XP launch, autographed by the development team, that once counted down the days to RTM, or release to manufacturing.
A display in the Microsoft Archives lobby includes a custom-painted Windows XP launch guitar, a gold commemorative plate from the opening of the company’s office in Hyderabad, India, and a shirt from an early Microsoft cloud initiative.
The lobby display case at the Microsoft Archives. (Microsoft Photo)
But it’s not just about the successes. A framed poster near the door, for example, commemorates the launch of Microsoft’s ill-fated Zune music player.
Wrapped in plastic inside the vault are two Clippy costumes, sometimes used for internal events, with the famous Groucho eyebrows that defined the discontinued Microsoft Office assistant.
A display table in the vault includes a pair of ActiMates interactive dolls — Arthur and a Teletubby — illustrating Microsoft’s foray into smart toys and educational tech in the 1990s. It was an ambitious effort that never quite took off but hinted at future directions in artificial intelligence and interactivity.
A display of vintage and discontinued tech products, including the Microsoft Kin and ActiMates interactive toys. Click to enlarge. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Next to those is a product box for the Microsoft Kin mobile phone. “If you ever get asked what the shortest product in Microsoft history was, it lasted three months before it got pulled from the market,” Thibodeau said.
“We want to make sure that we’re able to look back to see all the amazing things we’ve done, but also possibly learn from our mistakes,” she explained.
Thibodeau joined Microsoft in 2023, bringing an unconventional approach to her role as archivist. With an MBA, a degree in anthropology, and a background in museum studies, she was drawn to the field because she wanted to work with people and tell stories, not just manage data.
The goal is “to collect, preserve and share out the history of Microsoft,” she explained. “There’s this stereotype sometimes that archives are a black box — things come in and don’t come out. And so we’re trying to reposition the archive as a living community archive for Microsoft.”
With Microsoft set to mark its 50th anniversary this week, the Microsoft Archives staff has been especially busy. Requests have roughly doubled in recent months, as teams across the organization dig into the past to prepare for milestones, campaigns, and retrospectives.
It’s especially important for new Microsoft employees to have access to the company’s historical context, said Kimberly Engelkes, the Director for Library and Archives at Microsoft, who oversees four physical libraries and an online content portal for Microsoft employees.
The Gears of War motorcycle trike, originally built for Comic-Con 2013, had to be partially disassembled to fit through the archive’s old single doors and reassembled inside. Click to enlarge. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
A library scientist with an MBA, Engelkes was hired as a researcher at Microsoft in 1998. She worked on projects like the Surface Table, Xbox, and MSN products, and started Microsoft’s Competitive Intelligence program, establishing legal and ethical guidelines for data collection.
“We have people coming in now who weren’t even born yet when Microsoft was founded,” Engelkes said. “For them to understand our cultural history, our technological history, our place in the world right now, and in the past, gives them a sense of depth of who they’ve come to work for.”
The facility isn’t just about memories and nostalgia. The Microsoft Archives regularly fields inquiries from Microsoft’s legal team, often to retrieve original packaging, license agreements, or sealed copies of legacy software needed for ongoing cases or compliance reviews.
It’s also used by branding, product, and communications teams looking to reference past initiatives or provide historical context for current work.
Exhibit materials are drawn from the Microsoft Archives for internal events and public displays, including those at the Microsoft Visitor Center. Some teams request artifacts to illustrate the company’s history in presentations or internal campaigns and occasional giveaways of extra items.
An early Microsoft Word product box with historical Microsoft photos and software. Click to enlarge. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
In addition to responding to requests, Microsoft’s archivists track major product launches and internal milestones, reaching out to teams and collecting materials while they’re still recent. The idea is to capture history in the moment, before documents are lost or forgotten.
“We want to know what we’ve done. We want to have copies of our product,” Thibodeau said. “But we also want to know how we got there, because so much can change in that process.”
The Microsoft Archives receives donations primarily through internal referrals and word of mouth. (Have an item to donate? See information below.) Often, employees or teams who are moving offices, shutting down labs, or cleaning out storage will reach out and ask, “Would you want this?”
Ads reflecting Microsoft’s international expansion. Click to enlarge. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Archivists also build relationships with product teams, especially around major launches or anniversaries, to encourage contributions.
In some cases, items arrive unexpectedly — like the expected 50 VHS tapes that turned out to be 50 boxes containing a variety of media, including vintage Betacam tapes. The team reviews, catalogs, and evaluates each donation to determine what’s historically significant and worth preserving.
But not everything in Microsoft’s history can be boxed up and stored on a shelf. The rise of cloud computing and AI has introduced a new set of challenges. Unlike shrink-wrapped software or branded hardware, many modern Microsoft products exist only as digital services — automatically updated, distributed online, and constantly evolving.
“How do you archive the cloud, or AI?” Thibodeau said. “Ten years from now, when someone’s wondering what was going on when Microsoft was launching AI, how do we make sure we’re able to tell that story?”
In short, they’re still figuring it out.
A wall of software boxes inside the Microsoft Archives vault. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
To start, instead of collecting just physical media, the team is gathering internal communications, promotional materials, product documentation, and other digital records that capture how cloud and AI technologies are developed, launched, and discussed inside the company.
They’re also working with Microsoft researchers to explore long-term solutions such as emulating software environments, so people in the future will be able to experience what it feels like to use today’s technology.
In the meantime, there are plenty of physical artifacts to preserve.
Walking into the Microsoft Archives vault, two walls of software packages line the entrance, and rows of boxes stretch across metal shelves, each labeled, cataloged, and climate-protected at a constant 55 degrees Fahrenheit and 45% humidity.
Patti Thibodeau, Microsoft Archivist, inside the vault. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
The climate-controlled environment is optimal for preserving paper, tapes, CDs, textiles, and other materials.
The Microsoft Archives uses museum-quality, archival-grade materials such as acid-free paper, special archival plastics, and custom-built boxes to protect unique artifacts. These storage materials are proactively replaced every 5 to 10 years to ensure long-term preservation.
Extensive metadata is compiled to describe items in the Microsoft Archives, in conjunction with a database and barcodes for locating objects. And the archivists aim to keep three copies, at least, of Microsoft software: one for preservation, one for display, and one for research.
It remains to be seen whether Microsoft will make it to 100 years. But in the meantime, these precautions will help to ensure that its history does.
For a public glimpse of the collection, Microsoft’s Visitor Center at Building 92 features selected artifacts from the Microsoft Archives.
The Microsoft Archives is not open to the public. (A previous Microsoft Museum closed in 2020 at the onset of the pandemic.) Limited tours of the Microsoft Archives are offered for employees, and their friends and family.
If you have an item you’d like to contribute, Microsoft suggests contacting artifact@microsoft.com so that potential donations can be assessed.
Our global team provides comprehensive services spanning 150 countries across Microsoft’s entire enterprise. Our unique alliance with Microsoft and Avanade is one-of-a-kind and positions us to deliver transformation and innovation for the next 50 years and beyond.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump shake hands during a campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona in August 2024. | Photo: Getty Images
Drastic “reductions in force” are upending agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Thousands of people who work at the CDC were notified by email today that they were subject to the Trump administration’s efforts to cull federal workforce jobs, Wired reports. Top officials were among those either put on administrative leave, laid off, or reassigned to remote roles, the Washington Post reports.
HHS announced last week that it would slash its workforce by 20,000 people. Now, the nation is starting to see how that purge is rolling out, affecting programs meant to prevent and treat HIV infection and sexually transmitted disease, respiratory diseases, and foodborne illnesses, to name a few.
“We’re going to have patients die,” Jade Pagkas-Bather, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Chicago, tells Wired. “Unnecessary, preventable death.”
“Unnecessary, preventable death.”
HHS, on the other hand, says the changes will save $1.8 billion a year. “Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a press release when HHS announced its restructuring last week. Kennedy is a staunch anti-vax crusader who has spread disinformation falsely linking vaccines to autism.
The FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) regulates vaccines, and director Peter Marks resigned on Friday, writing that “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed,” Robert Califf, FDA commissioner under Joe Biden and Barack Obama, wrote on LinkedIn today.
In an email to The Verge, HHS press secretary Vianca Rodriguez Feliciano maintains that “ongoing critical public health efforts will remain a top priority and will not be impacted by this administrative realignment.”
We are excited to announce that Azure Linux 3.0, the next major version release of the Azure Linux container host for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), is now Generally Available on AKS version 1.32. After extensive testing and valuable feedback from our early adopters, 3.0 is the highest quality release of Azure Linux for broad Azure usage. Azure Linux 3.0 offers increased package availability and versions, an updated kernel, and improvements to performance, security, and tooling and developer experience.
Azure Linux 3.0 supports both x86_64 & ARM64 architectures.
With this 3.0 release, we’re committed to supporting new platforms like Azure’s Cobalt architecture for the best performance.
Some of the major components upgraded from Azure Linux 2.0 to 3.0 include:
Azure Linux 3.0 now supports a FIPS enabled ARM64 image, making it the only distribution on AKS to do so.
Using Azure Linux 3.0
Creating New Azure Linux 3.0 Clusters and Nodepools
Any new AKS clusters or node pools created using the --os-sku=AzureLinux flag and that run AKS version 1.32 default to Azure Linux 3.0. You can deploy clusters or node pools using the method of your choice to use Azure Linux 3.0 as the node OS:
Upgrading Existing Azure Linux 2.0 Clusters and Nodepools to Azure Linux 3.0
To upgrade existing Azure Linux 2.0 clusters and node pools to Azure Linux 3.0, you can upgrade them to AKS version 1.32. For more information about AKS cluster upgrades, see Upgrade an AKS cluster.
Upgrade an existing Azure Linux 2.0 cluster to Azure Linux 3.0
Considerations
Azure Linux 3.0 is not supported on Kubernetes version 1.30 and below. Azure Linux 3.0 Preview is supported on Kubernetes version 1.31.
AKS Kubernetes version 1.32 roll out has been delayed and is now expected to reach all regions on or before the end of April. Please use the az-aks-get-versions command to accurately capture if Kubernetes version 1.32 is available in your region.
Kubernetes version 1.31 will be the last AKS version to support Azure Linux 2.0.
Growing the Partner Ecosystem
We want to express our gratitude to all the partners who participated in the Azure Linux 3.0 preview. The following partners have successfully completed their validation of Azure Linux 3.0:
You can find the entire list of Azure Linux AKS Container Host partner solutions here.
Upcoming Events
KubeCon EU: The Azure Linux team will be available at the Microsoft booth at KubeCon EU from April 2-4, ready to chat with customers and address inquiries. The team is looking forward to connecting at KubeCon!
LinuxFest Northwest: Another opportunity to connect with the Azure Linux team will be at LinuxFest Northwest, a local Linux conference in Bellingham, WA, taking place from April 24-25. The Azure Linux team will present a session on their learnings and challenges in building a Linux distribution at Microsoft, as well as showcasing features and benefits of Azure Linux.
How to Keep in Touch with the Azure Linux Team
For updates, feedback, and feature requests related to Azure Linux, there are a few ways to stay connected to the team:
Ask questions & submit feedback via Azure Linux GitHub Issues
We have a public community call every other month for Azure Linux users to come together to ask questions, share learnings, and get updates. Join the next community call on May 22nd at 8AM PST: here
Software architect and author Vlad Khononov joins host Jeff Doolittle for a discussion on balancing coupling in software design. They start by examining coupling and its relationship to complexity and modularity. Vlad explains the historical models for assessing coupling and introduces his updated approach, integration strength, which aims to simplify earlier frameworks and adapt them for modern practices.
The episode explores three dimensions of coupling:
integration strength (knowledge sharing),
distance (proximity of components), and
volatility (likelihood of change).
Vlad illustrates how design decisions can lead systems toward complexity or modularity, and he emphasizes the importance of managing coupling to minimize cognitive load and cascading changes. The conversation wraps up with insights on applying these principles to real-world software projects and a reminder of coupling's critical role in software architecture. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
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