Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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Two more EVs for the trash heap: Volvo EX30 and Honda Prologue

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A photo of the Volvo EX30.

The steady stream of news about automakers cancelling or discontinuing electric vehicles continues apace. This week it's Volvo's small, quirky EX30 and Honda's solo electric offering in the US, the Prologue. Both are the latest victims of stagnating EV sales in the US thanks to the Trump administration's decision to eliminate tax incentives.

First, the EX30. The small SUV was the most affordable EV in Volvo's lineup, even if it took some time before it arrived on our shores. Volvo spokesperson Sophia Durr says that the automaker's US division has decided to discontinue the EX30 and EX30 Cross Country after the 2026 model year. It will, how …

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alvinashcraft
13 minutes ago
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The future of code is exciting and terrifying

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Suddenly it seems like everyone's a coder. Or, at the very least, like they play one in the Claude Code app. But even for the seasoned pros, the act of software development is changing fast - many people are writing less code themselves and instead spending their time managing agents and projects. So what does all that change mean, both for the code and the people who make it?

Verge subscribers, don't forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Vergecast wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Paul Ford, a writer and entrepreneur and longtime tech thinker, expl …

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alvinashcraft
14 minutes ago
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AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: Microsoft Data Scientists Vaishali Vinay and Raghav Bhatta on AI for Cyber Defense

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In this episode of the AI Agent & Copilot Podcast, host Tom Smith speaks with Vaishali Vinay, Data Scientist at Microsoft, and Raghav Bhatta, Data Scientist at Microsoft, about their upcoming masterclass at the 2026 AI Agent & Copilot Summit NA in San Diego. They discuss how AI can serve as a threat research partner for cybersecurity teams, augmenting human expertise in threat hunting and detection engineering while helping organizations proactively defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.

Key Takeaways

  • AI as a Threat Research Partner: Vinay explains that traditional threat hunting and detection engineering have historically been highly manual processes requiring significant time and expertise. AI can now assist by analyzing attacker behavior and identifying detection opportunities faster. As Vinay notes, the goal is to augment our human experts and accelerate this threat research process much faster.
  • Scaling Cyber Defense in an AI-Powered Threat Landscape: Bhatta highlights that as AI adoption grows across industries, the volume of data and potential attack vectors increases rapidly. Organizations must therefore adapt AI for defensive purposes as well. “The amount of data which is produced… is increasing at a nonlinear scale,” Bhatta explains. AI copilots help defenders process this scale by assisting with detection engineering, threat hunting, and proactive defense strategies that protect infrastructure and customers from evolving cyber threats.
  • Capturing and Sharing ‘Tribal Knowledge’ Through AI: Cybersecurity often depends on the deep experience of veteran researchers who understand attacker behavior patterns. Bhatta suggests AI copilots can help scale that expertise across teams. He explains that copilots can serve as a source of tribal knowledge,” enabling newer analysts and teams to leverage insights that historically lived only in the heads of experienced researchers. This dramatically increases productivity and knowledge transfer within security organizations.
  • AI Attackers vs. AI Defenders: The session also acknowledges that cyber attackers are increasingly leveraging AI themselves. That makes defensive innovation essential. Vinay and Bhatta emphasize the importance of building AI systems that analyze attack techniques and automatically recommend detection rules. This dynamic defense model enables security teams to react faster to emerging threats and reduces the manual workload traditionally required to understand complex attack patterns.

The post AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: Microsoft Data Scientists Vaishali Vinay and Raghav Bhatta on AI for Cyber Defense appeared first on Cloud Wars.

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alvinashcraft
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Announcing Copilot leadership update

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Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, and Mustafa Suleyman, Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI, shared the below communications with Microsoft employees this morning.

SATYA NADELLA MESSAGE

I want to share two org changes we’re making to our Copilot org and superintelligence effort.

It’s clear a new era of productivity is emerging as AI experiences rapidly evolve from answering questions and suggesting code, to executing multi-step tasks with clear user control points. You see this in our announcements over the last couple of weeks, like Copilot Tasks and Copilot Cowork, agentic capabilities in Office, and Agent 365. As these experiences connect more naturally across agents, apps, and workflows, we have an opportunity to help customers spend more time on higher-value work and reduce manual coordination, while providing people with more agency and empowerment and organizations with the governance and security controls they need.

To that end, we are bringing the Copilot system across commercial and consumer together as one unified effort. This will span four connected pillars: Copilot experience, Copilot platform, Microsoft 365 apps, and AI models. This is how we move from a collection of great products to a truly integrated system, one that is simpler and more powerful for customers.

Jacob Andreou will lead the Copilot experience across consumer and commercial, driving design, product, growth, and engineering, as EVP, Copilot, reporting to me. As CVP of Product and Growth at Microsoft AI, Jacob has accelerated our user-focused AI-first product making and growth framework. Prior to that, he was SVP at Snap, where he helped scale the company from its early days.

Progress at the AI model layer is more critical than ever to our success as a company over the next decade and is foundational to everything we build above it. We are doubling down on our superintelligence mission with the talent and compute to build models that have real product impact, in terms of evals, COGS reduction, as well as advancing the frontier when it comes to meeting enterprise needs and achieving the next set of research breakthroughs. Mustafa Suleyman and I have been working towards this plan for some time, and he will continue to lead this high ambition work, reporting to me. Mustafa is uniquely qualified to drive this forward, with his deep focus and commitment to advancing the frontiers of model science, while also ensuring that human control, agency, and economic opportunity remain at the center of these advancements.

Ryan Roslansky, Perry Clarke, and Charles Lamanna will lead M365 apps and the Copilot platform. Together, Jacob, Ryan, Charles, Perry, and Mustafa make up the Copilot LT and over the next few weeks they’ll work to align the teams.

Our org boundaries will simply reflect system architecture and product shape such that we can deliver more coherent and competitive experiences that continue to evolve with model capabilities. And I am looking forward to how together we apply all of this to empower people, organizations, and the world.

MUSTAFA SULEYMAN MESSAGE

Subject: A new structure for Microsoft AI

Technology and the future of our industry will be defined by two things: frontier models, and the products through which they are experienced. For some time, I’ve been thinking about how we best tackle these huge challenges, and today I’m excited to be evolving our structure at Microsoft AI, ensuring we’re positioned to succeed in both.

I came to Microsoft with an overriding mission: to create Superintelligence that delivers a transformative, positive impact for millions of people. This requires us to build frontier models, at scale, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Everything else follows from this. It’s the foundation for our future as a company. With our ambitious, long-term frontier scale compute roadmap locked, we now have everything we need to build truly SOTA models.

As you will have just heard from Satya, the next phase of this plan is to restructure our organization to enable me to focus all my energy on our Superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world class models for Microsoft over the next 5 years. These models will enable us to build enterprise tuned lineages that help improve all our products across the company. They’ll also enable us to deliver the COGS efficiencies necessary to be able to serve AI workloads at the immense scale required in the coming years. Achieving all this will be a huge challenge, and I’m committing everything we have – and I have personally – to make it happen.

To that end, I’ve been working hard with other leaders in the background for a while now to define a strategy to unify Copilot by bringing together the Consumer and Commercial efforts as one. We all know this makes sense. Every user – whether at home or at work – will be able to enjoy the full benefit of what we are all building. Today, we’re combining these organizations into a single, unified Copilot org. Jacob has demonstrated himself to be an outstanding leader for the product experience and clearly has the product instincts, the operational range, and the conviction to make Copilot a great success.

Jacob will retain a dotted line to me, and I’ll stay directly involved in much of the day-to-day operation of MAI, attending Meetups, MMMs, LT, and supporting Jacob to drive all areas of product strategy. To ensure that the models we build and the products we ship are mutually reinforcing, we are establishing a Copilot Leadership Team that includes me, Jacob, Charles Lamanna, Perry Clarke, and Ryan Roslansky. This will enable us to focus our brand strategy, our product roadmap, our models and our core infrastructure as one to deliver the best experiences possible for all our users.

Thank you for everything you’ve done over the last few years. I know how hard everyone has been pushing and the sacrifices many of you have made to help the company adapt to this new era.

We really do have an incredible opportunity to redefine Microsoft for this agentic revolution.

Mustafa’s mail has been edited slightly for external use.

The post Announcing Copilot leadership update appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

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15 minutes ago
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Keeping the lights on for open source

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Ryan sits down with Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc to chat about how his team is keeping the foundation of the internet—open source projects—alive by forking archived but widely-used repos to provide security maintenance and dependency upgrades.
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Toolbox App 3.4: Remote IDE Lifecycle Hooks, macOS Fullscreen Fix, UTF-8 Support, and More

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Toolbox App 3.4 brings several long-awaited fixes alongside new capabilities for plugin developers. You can now hook into the remote IDE launch lifecycle, the Toolbox window behaves correctly in full-screen mode on macOS, and Windows users with non-ASCII usernames no longer need workarounds. The jetbrainsd service introduced in 3.3 also gets a round of reliability improvements.

Remote IDE lifecycle hooks

Toolbox App 3.4 introduces plugin API callbacks for the remote IDE launch lifecycle. If you’re building Toolbox plugins, you can now register hooks that fire when a remote IDE launch starts and when it completes.

What this enables:

  • Pre-launch preparation: Plugins can run custom logic before the IDE process starts – installing plugins, configuring memory settings, or running scripts in the remote IDE directory.
  • Post-launch callbacks: Plugins receive a notification when the IDE launch completes, enabling cleanup or follow-up actions.
  • Asynchronous work: Callbacks support suspending operations, so the launch waits for the plugin’s work to finish before proceeding.

macOS full-screen fix

On MacBooks with a notch, the Toolbox window used to disappear when you moved the cursor away from the menu bar and back. This is now fixed – the window stays open reliably in full-screen mode.

UTF-8 and non-ASCII username support on Windows

Windows users with non-ASCII characters in their usernames (e.g., accented letters or Cyrillic characters) can now install and use the Toolbox App without issues.

Remote development fixes

  • We resolved the file descriptor leak on Linux. The Toolbox App was leaking file descriptors to the ssh_outputs directory, accumulating thousands over time. In some cases, this caused the system tray icon to disappear after a few days.
  • Connections no longer hang with a spinning indicator when connecting to a remote machine.
  • TCP keepalive for OpenSSH connections has been enabled, improving stability for long-running remote sessions.

jetbrainsd service improvements

The jetbrainsd service introduced in 3.3 has received several reliability improvements in this release:

  • The daemon now exits automatically after a timeout when all client applications (Toolbox or IDEs) have disconnected.
  • Protocol handler registration no longer repeats on every startup.
  • The jetbrains:// protocol links now work correctly on Linux systems without a full desktop environment, such as WSL. Previously, xdg-open would fail with a Permission denied error.

Other improvements

  • IDEs now auto-restart correctly when updating to the latest version.

Let us know what you think of Toolbox App 3.4 – your feedback helps shape what comes next.

The JetBrains Toolbox App team

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