Former Microsoft staffer Dave Plummer has revealed how he managed to sneak his wife into a corporate event so that she might experience a Steve Ballmer presentation first hand. The old romantic.

Speaking on his Dave's Garage YouTube channel, Plummer detailed the fights of yesteryear between engineers and those that sought to keep things secure. His own example took the form of a desire to get his wife into one of Microsoft's corporate events.

Who, after all, would not want to sit among throngs of eager employees, awaiting pearls of wisdom to drop from the mouths of the execs? Or, as Plummer put it, "witness Steve's [Ballmer] insanity and Bill's [Gates] vision."

While plus-ones were not on the guest list, anyone with a Microsoft badge could get in. And Plummer had access to a color copier. It was therefore a simple matter to, for want of a better word, forge a mock badge which, while it would not make it past a scanner, would pass muster under the gaze of a guard.

Did the ruse succeed? Would helicopters descend?

"They didn't even look at her badge," he said of the lavish corporate morale-boosting event. "She just walked in like she was supposed to."

Well, Microsoft has had its problems with credentials over the years.

Plummer also retold Raymond Chen's story concerning how Microsoft engineers stationed at IBM's Boca Raton site during the era of OS/2 collaboration smuggled a coffee maker into the office.

IBM at the time was considerably more buttoned up than free-wheeling Microsoft, according to Chen. Big Blue tracked what Chen called "security violations," which ranged from following someone through a door (and thus not swiping your badge) through leaving papers on a desk to wearing shorts in the office.

Various legends had it that six violations would get an employee fired. "A variation of that legend," wrote Chen, "said that Microsoft would have to dismiss three employees after amassing a cumulative ten violations."

Microsoft's employees apparently had difficulty following IBM's rules and at least one discovered that the six-strikes-and-out rule was probably apocryphal and certainly did not get them sent back to Redmond. "I know: I tried," Chen said.

More serious was the coffee situation. IBM's vending machines dispensed a rancid brown liquid, far below the expectation of their Seattle partners. And so it was that staffers sneaked in a new coffee machine.

The device broke the rules on two fronts – it was both a fire hazard and a security violation. So what to do? The solution was ingenious; Microsoft's offices at Boca Raton were, according to Chen, "sort of a tiny Microsoft embassy."

Any box with "Microsoft Confidential" on it was safe from prying IBM eyes and so it was that a box, with a cup-sized hole in it, was slapped over the coffee machine and emblazoned with Microsoft Confidential.

Chen did not go into what IBM security made of the doubtless delicious odor drifting out of the Microsoft enclave.

While Plummer managed to dodge OS/2 (although his move to Windows NT might be considered similar, depending where you stand on the IBM and Microsoft agreement), he did have to endure Microsoft's own security policies, and some engineers took exception to the seemingly reasonable requirement that passwords be changed regularly.

"And so," he intoned, "began the war of escalation between [IT Security] and some of its users..."

There was the changing one's password to the same password. Then IT caught on and captured a hash of the last entry. But all that did was make users enter a temporary password and then switch back. A history of 10 passwords was then stored; surely nobody would change their password 10 times just to keep the same one?

"And yet these were developers," said Plummer, "so soon scripts started to circulate amongst the team that would cycle our password through a dozen temporaries and then settle back on your preferred password.

"I can only wonder how many people accidentally or carelessly stored their domain passwords – with complete access to the source code trees and products in Outlook VBA scripts so that they could conveniently repeat the process every 90 days."

Simpler times, for sure. Microsoft these days, of course, would much rather everyone ditched passwords altogether in favor of something a good deal more secure.

With the cyber threats of today grabbing the headlines, and operating systems more sieve-like by the day, Plummer and Chen's recollections are a pleasing reminder of a time when all security had to worry about was users getting creative with a copier and engineers taking a blunt instrument to corporate policies. ®

Russian crooks are selling network credentials and virtual private network access for a "multitude" of US universities and colleges on criminal marketplaces, according to the FBI.

According to a warning issued on Thursday, these stolen credentials sell for thousands of dollars on both dark web and public internet forums, and could lead to subsequent cyberattacks against individual employees or the schools themselves.

"The exposure of usernames and passwords can lead to brute force credential stuffing computer network attacks, whereby attackers attempt logins across various internet sites or exploit them for subsequent cyber attacks as criminal actors take advantage of users recycling the same credentials across multiple accounts, internet sites, and services," the Feds' alert [PDF] said.

Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft often support privacy in public statements, but behind the scenes they've been working through some common organizations to weaken or kill privacy legislation in US states.

That's according to a report this week from news non-profit The Markup, which said the corporations hire lobbyists from the same few groups and law firms to defang or drown state privacy bills.

The report examined 31 states when state legislatures were considering privacy legislation and identified 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms working on behalf of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with industry groups like TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition.

America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance. 

A letter [PDF] from the SEC addressed to the tech billionaire said he "[did] not appear" to have filed the proper form detailing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter "required 10 days from the date of acquisition," and asked him to provide more information. Musk's shares made him one of Twitter's largest shareholders. The letter is dated April 4, and was shared this week by the regulator.

Musk quickly moved to try and buy the whole company outright in a deal initially worth over $44 billion. Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion and bagged another $7.14 billion from investors to help finance the $21 billion he promised to put forward for the deal. The remaining $25.5 billion bill was secured via debt financing by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. But the takeover is not going smoothly.

Cloud security company Lacework has laid off 20 percent of its employees, just months after two record-breaking funding rounds pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion.

A spokesperson wouldn't confirm the total number of employees affected, though told The Register that the "widely speculated number on Twitter is a significant overestimate."

The company, as of March, counted more than 1,000 employees, which would push the jobs lost above 200. And the widely reported number on Twitter is about 300 employees. The biz, based in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2015.

A researcher at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence team found eight vulnerabilities in the Open Automation Software (OAS) platform that, if exploited, could enable a bad actor to access a device and run code on a targeted system.

The OAS platform is widely used by a range of industrial enterprises, essentially facilitating the transfer of data within an IT environment between hardware and software and playing a central role in organizations' industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) efforts. It touches a range of devices, including PLCs and OPCs and IoT devices, as well as custom applications and APIs, databases and edge systems.

Companies like Volvo, General Dynamics, JBT Aerotech and wind-turbine maker AES are among the users of the OAS platform.

Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.

"The full impact and duration of the war in Ukraine and COVID lockdowns in China is difficult to predict. However, the impact of our technology and our market opportunities remain unchanged," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, during the company's first-quarter earnings call.

Those two statements might sound a little contradictory, including to some investors, particularly following the stock selloff yesterday after concerns over Russia and China prompted Nvidia to issue lower-than-expected guidance for second-quarter revenue.

HPE is lifting the lid on a new AI supercomputer – the second this week – aimed at building and training larger machine learning models to underpin research.

Based at HPE's Center of Excellence in Grenoble, France, the new supercomputer is to be named Champollion after the French scholar who made advances in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 19th century. It was built in partnership with Nvidia using AMD-based Apollo computer nodes fitted with Nvidia's A100 GPUs.

Champollion brings together HPC and purpose-built AI technologies to train machine learning models at scale and unlock results faster, HPE said. HPE already provides HPC and AI resources from its Grenoble facilities for customers, and the broader research community to access, and said it plans to provide access to Champollion for scientists and engineers globally to accelerate testing of their AI models and research.

HR and finance application vendor Workday's CEO, Aneel Bhusri, confirmed deal wins expected for the three-month period ending April 30 were being pushed back until later in 2022.

The SaaS company boss was speaking as Workday recorded an operating loss of $72.8 million in its first quarter [PDF] of fiscal '23, nearly double the $38.3 million loss recorded for the same period a year earlier. Workday also saw revenue increase to $1.43 billion in the period, up 22 percent year-on-year.

However, the company increased its revenue guidance for the full financial year. It said revenues would be between $5.537 billion and $5.557 billion, an increase of 22 percent on earlier estimates.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is lining up yet another investigation into Google over its dominance of the digital advertising market.

This latest inquiry, announced Thursday, is the second major UK antitrust investigation into Google this year alone. In March this year the UK, together with the European Union, said it wished to examine Google's "Jedi Blue" agreement with Meta to allegedly favor the former's Open Bidding ads platform.

The news also follows proposals last week by a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to create legislation that could force Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Amazon to divest portions of their ad businesses.

Microsoft has hit the brakes on hiring in some key product areas as the company prepares for the next fiscal year and all that might bring.

According to reports in the Bloomberg, the unit that develops Windows, Office, and Teams is affected and while headcount remains expected to grow, new hires in that division must first be approved by bosses.

During a talk this week at JP Morgan's Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Rajesh Jha, executive VP for the Office Product Group, noted that within three years he expected approximately two-thirds of CIOs to standardize on Microsoft Teams. 1.4 billion PCs were running Windows. He also remarked: "We have lots of room here to grow the seats with Office 365."

Enterprises are still kitting out their workforce with the latest computers and refreshing their datacenter hardware despite a growing number of "uncertainties" in the world.

This is according to hardware tech bellwethers including Dell, which turned over $26.1 billion in sales for its Q1 of fiscal 2023 ended 29 April, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent.

"We are seeing a shift in spend from consumer and PCs to datacenter infrastructure," said Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and co-chief operating officer. "IT demand is currently healthy," he added.

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