A Clue To the Reason for Women's Pervasive Car-Safety Problem
technology - Posted On:2019-07-22 13:30:00 Source: slashdot
Women are far more likely to suffer serious injuries in a car crash. From a report: The danger divide was first quantified in a 2011 study out of the University of Virginia, which found that for men and women who wore seatbelts, women were nearly 50 percent more likely to be seriously or fatally injured in a crash. And now it's been confirmed by another paper from another University of Virginia research team, published this month, which found that the odds of serious injury or death for female car-crash victims is 73 percent higher than for males. The latest study, which analyzed crashes involving more than 31,000 individuals between 1998 and 2015, reveals some good news, too: All riders are now more than half as likely to sustain serious injuries in newer models (those manufactured in 2009 and later) than in older cars. [...] It's partly because of this lack of information -- and lack of dedicated research into the question -- that the same safety science that's been making cars less dangerous for all riders hasn't been able to shrink the gap between male and female auto safety. "Historically, we have used male-type crash test dummies," said Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). "Those dummies, despite being an average male, have done a good job at providing improvements for all different kinds of people." Since the early 2000s, "female" crash test dummies have been deployed, but they tend to simulate smaller women, says Forman, with heights of 5 feet and weights of 110 pounds. "There is some logic behind the use of those: It is necessary to evaluate and protect for the extreme ends of the population," he said. It's also a big limitation of the model. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slack's Desktop App Now Launches 33% Faster, Uses 50% Less Memory
it - Posted On:2019-07-22 12:45:00 Source: slashdot
Slack today announced it's deploying an under-the-hood upgrade for its desktop app to boost performance for companies and teams using the app for workplace collaboration. From a report: The latest version of Slack for desktop and internet browsers is due out in the coming weeks and promises a 33% faster launch time, 10 times faster launch of VoIP calls, and roughly 50% less memory usage. The news comes a month after Slack became a public company, listed as WORK on the New York Stock Exchange. Slack product architect and lead of desktop client rewrite Johnny Rodgers said the upgrade takes advantage of changes to Slack's underlying technology, like modern JavaScript tools and techniques and the React UI framework. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Invests $1 Billion in OpenAI To Develop AI Technologies on Azure
technology - Posted On:2019-07-22 10:14:56 Source: slashdot
Microsoft today announced that it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by CTO Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. From a report: In a blog post, Brockman said the investment will support the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- AI with the capacity to learn any intellectual task that a human can -- with "widely distributed" economic benefits. To this end, OpenAI intends to partner with Microsoft to jointly develop new AI technologies for the Seattle company's Azure cloud platform and will enter into an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft to "further extend" large-scale AI capabilities that "deliver on the promise of AGI." Additionally, OpenAI will license some of its technologies to Microsoft, which will commercialize them and sell them to as-yet-unnamed partners, and OpenAI will train and run AI models on Azure as it works to develop new supercomputing hardware while "adhering to principles on ethics and trust." According to Brockman, the partnership was motivated in part by OpenAI's continued pursuit of enormous computational power. Its researchers recently released analysis showing that from 2012 to 2018 the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs grew by more than 300,000 times, with a 3.5-month doubling time, far exceeding the pace of Moore's Law. Perhaps exemplifying the trend is OpenAI's OpenAI Five, an AI system that squared off against professional players of the video game Dota 2 last summer. On Google's Cloud Platform -- in the course of training -- it played 180 years' worth of games every day on 256 Nvidia Tesla P100 graphics cards and 128,000 processor cores, up from 60,000 cores just a few years ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Settles Age Descrimination Lawsuit
technology - Posted On:2019-07-21 17:44:59 Source: slashdot
Long-time Slashdot reader sfcat quotes Forbes: Almost a decade ago, courts sounded a clear warning bell that Google's culture was tainted by illegal and pervasive age discrimination. Inexplicably, Google didn't listen. And so the Los Angeles Times recently reported that Google has agreed to pay $11 million to settle a federal lawsuit alleging Google engaged in a systemic practice of discriminating on the basis of age in hiring. Some 227 plaintiffs will collect an average of $35,000 each. Google actually agreed to settle the case in December but the final settlement agreement was presented to a federal judge on Friday. The lawsuit was filed by Cheryl Fillekes, a software engineer who was interviewed by Google four times from 2007 to 2014, starting when she was 47, but was never hired. The lawsuit alleged Google hired younger workers based on "cultural fit." In the settlement Google also agrees to train its managers about age bias and create an "age diversity in recruiting" committee. Forbes points out that the median age for all Google employees in 2017 was 30, "a decade younger than the median age of U.S. workers." "On its web page, Google says its mission is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' But for some reason Google has failed as a company to organize and use the information that age discrimination is illegal." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Atlassian Changes Annual Performance Reviews To Stop Rewarding 'Brilliant Jerks'
it - Posted On:2019-07-21 17:29:59 Source: slashdot
Australia-based Atlassian"has implemented a new performance review strategy designed to give their workers a better evaluation of how they're performing," reports Business Insider, adding that Atlassian's global head of talent said the company wants to measure contributions to a larger team effort. "We want people to get rewarded for what they delivered." In 2018 it soft-launched a strategy where most of its performance review process will have nothing to do with the skills in an employee's job, but more to do with how well they are living with the company values. Now, the strategy is being rolled out permanently and will be tied to employee bonuses... "We want to be able to evaluate a whole person and encourage them to bring their full self to work and not just focus on skills itself, but really focus on the way they do their work," said Bek Chee, Atlassian's global head of talent. She added that while workforces have changed over the past 30 years, performance reviews, for the most part, have stayed the same... With this performance review system, Atlassian aims to throw out the idea of the "brilliant jerk", which Chee describes as someone who is technically-talented, but perhaps at the expense of others. Instead it is focusing on how an employee demonstrates the company values, how they complete their roles and how they contribute to their team. "We really want to enforce the way that values get lived, the way that people impact the team and the way that they also contribute within their role. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Atlassian's Changes Annual Performance Reviews To Stop Rewarding 'Brilliant Jerks'
it - Posted On:2019-07-21 15:44:59 Source: slashdot
Australia-based Atlassian"has implemented a new performance review strategy designed to give their workers a better evaluation of how they're performing," reports Business Insider, adding that Atlassian's global head of talent said the company wants to measure contributions to a larger team effort. "We want people to get rewarded for what they delivered." In 2018 it soft-launched a strategy where most of its performance review process will have nothing to do with the skills in an employee's job, but more to do with how well they are living with the company values. Now, the strategy is being rolled out permanently and will be tied to employee bonuses... "We want to be able to evaluate a whole person and encourage them to bring their full self to work and not just focus on skills itself, but really focus on the way they do their work," said Bek Chee, Atlassian's global head of talent. She added that while workforces have changed over the past 30 years, performance reviews, for the most part, have stayed the same... With this performance review system, Atlassian aims to throw out the idea of the "brilliant jerk", which Chee describes as someone who is technically-talented, but perhaps at the expense of others. Instead it is focusing on how an employee demonstrates the company values, how they complete their roles and how they contribute to their team. "We really want to enforce the way that values get lived, the way that people impact the team and the way that they also contribute within their role. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
GitLab Survey Finds Positive Results For Both DevOps and Working Remotely
it - Posted On:2019-07-21 12:45:00 Source: slashdot
GitLab's CEO and co-founder says there was one big takeaway from their recent "2019 Global Developer Report: DevSecOps": that early adopters of a strong Devops model experience greater security. "Security teams in a longstanding DevOps environment reported they are three times more likely to discover bugs before code is merged," according to the GitLab blog, "and 90% more likely to test between 91% and 100% of code than teams who encounter early-stage DevOps." But after polling over 4,000 software professionals, the survey also found positive results from another workplace arrangement, which they report under the headline "Remote work works." According to our survey respondents, working remotely leads to greater collaboration, better documentation, and transparency. In fact, developers in a mostly remote environment are 23% more likely to have good insight into what colleagues are working on and rate the maturity of their organization's security practices 29% higher than those who work in a traditional office environment. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Demos Hologram 'Holoportation'
technology - Posted On:2019-07-21 11:45:00 Source: slashdot
Microsoft "continues to plug away at making holoportation possible," reports ZDNet: In a new demonstration, officials showed off a scenario where a life-sized holographic representation of a person could be beamed into a scenario with real-time simultaneous language translation happening -- a communication scenario on which Microsoft has been working for years. At Microsoft's Inspire partner show (which is co-located with its Ready sales kick-off event) on July 17, Microsoft demonstrated such a scenario on stage during CEO Satya Nadella's keynote. Azure Corporate Vice President Julia White donned a HoloLens 2 headset and [demonstrated] a full-size hologram of herself translated simultaneously into Japanese and maintaining her speech cadence and patterns. [Microsoft later said that the life-sized hologram was created at Microsoft's Mixed Reality Capture Studios.] Microsoft pulled off the demo by combining a number of its existing technologies, White said, including Azure speech-to-text, Azure Speech Translation and neural text-to-speech. The text-to-speech from Azure Speech Services allows apps, tools and devices to convert text into natural human-like synthesized speech. Users can create their own custom voice unique to them. In a video of the demo, White first appears to be holding a smaller version of her hologram in the palm of her own hand. She jokingly telling the audience, "Let me introduce you to Mini-Me." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Inventor Who Fought To Get Black Box Flight Recorders Into Every Plane
technology - Posted On:2019-07-21 03:44:57 Source: slashdot
This week the BBC told the remarkable story of the man who invented the "black box" flight recorders -- and of all the resistance he enountered along the way. dryriver shared this summary: In 1934, a passenger plane name Miss Hobart crashed into the sea off the coast of Australia. Among those killed was Anglican missionairy Rev Hubert Warren, whose last gift to his 8 year old son David had been a crystal radio set. Young David Warren spent hours a day tinkering with the radio, eventually learning enough electronics engineering to build his own radios and sell them to other people. David Warren later grew to be a Rocket Scientist working for Australia's Aeronautical Research Laboratories. In 1953, the department loaned him to an expert panel trying to solve a costly and distressing mystery: why did the British de Havilland Comet, the world's first commercial jet airliner and the great hope of the new Jet Age, keep crashing? David Warren was confronted with a daunting problem -- how to determine from heavily deformed crashed plane fragments what had happened to the plane while it was in the air... Warren had an interesting idea -- what if every plane in the sky had a mini recorder in the cockpit...? Warren's superior did not approve of the idea and told him to stick to chemicals and fuels. When Warren got a new boss, the new boss was more sympathetic, but told him to do the R&D for it in complete secrecy. Since it wasn't a government-approved venture or a war-winning weapon, it couldn't be seen to take up lab time or money. "If I find you talking to anyone, including me, about this matter, I will have to sack you." When Warren first floated the idea of a cockpit recorder publicly, the pilots' union responded with fury, branding the recorder a snooping device, and insisted "no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening." Undeterred, Warren took to his garage and invented the first "Black Box" flight recorder. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Warns of Political Cyberattacks, Announces Free Vote-Verification Software
it - Posted On:2019-07-20 18:44:59 Source: slashdot
"Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines," reports NBC News. Microsoft also said its AccountGuard service has already spotted 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations -- 95% of which were located in the U.S. The company said it was rolling out the free, open-source software product called ElectionGuard, which it said uses encryption to "enable a new era of secure, verifiable voting." The company is working with election machine vendors and local governments to deploy the system in a pilot program for the 2020 election. The system uses an encrypted tracking code to allow a voter to verify that his or her vote has been recorded and has not been tampered with, Microsoft said in a blog post... Edward Perez, an election security expert with the independent Open Source Election Technology Institute, said Microsoft's move signals that voting systems, long a technology backwater, are finally receiving attention from the county's leading technical minds. "We think that it's good when a technology provider as significant as Microsoft is stepping into something as nationally important as election security," Perez told NBC News. "ElectionGuard does provide verification and it can help to detect attacks. It's important to note that detection is different from prevention." Microsoft also said its notified nearly 10,000 customers that they've been targeted or compromised by nation-state cyberattacks, according to the article -- mostly from Russia, Iran, and North Korea. "While many of these attacks are unrelated to the democratic process," Microsoft said in a blog post, "this data demonstrates the significant extent to which nation-states continue to rely on cyberattacks as a tool to gain intelligence, influence geopolitics, or achieve other objectives." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Facebook Backpedals From Its Original Ambitious Vision for Libra
technology - Posted On:2019-07-20 10:44:56 Source: slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: David Marcus, the head of Facebook's new Calibra payments division, appeared before two hostile congressional committees this week with a simple message: Facebook knows policymakers are concerned about Libra, and Facebook won't move forward with the project until their concerns are addressed. While he didn't say so explicitly, Marcus' comments at hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday represented a dramatic shift in Facebook's conception of Libra. In Facebook's original vision, Libra would be an open and largely decentralized network, akin to Bitcoin. The core network would be beyond the reach of regulators. Regulatory compliance would be the responsibility of exchanges, wallets, and other services that are the "on ramps and off ramps" to the Libra ecosystem. Facebook now seems to recognize its original vision was a non-starter with regulators. So this week Marcus sketched out a new vision for Libra -- one in which the Libra Association will shoulder significant responsibility for ensuring compliance with laws relating to money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes... [T]here's a pretty fundamental tradeoff between network openness and effective enforcement of regulations governing payment networks. If the Libra Association doesn't have a way to enforce compliance by wallet providers, criminals are likely to flock to wallet services that don't strictly enforce the rules -- or to download open source wallet software and use non-custodial accounts. But if the Libra Association does have a mechanism for forcing compliance, that inherently raises the bar for entering the market and makes the Libra network look more like conventional financial networks -- with all the red tape that entails. This could be particularly harmful for marginalized people in developing countries, since developers in those markets will have the fewest resources to jump through regulatory hoops. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
QuickBooks Cloud Hosting Firm iNSYNQ Hit In Ransomware Attack
it - Posted On:2019-07-19 19:29:59 Source: slashdot
Cloud hosting provider iNSYNQ says it was hit with a ransomware attack that shut down its network and left customers unable to access their accounting data for the past three days. "Unfortunately for iNSYNQ, the company appears to be turning a deaf ear to the increasingly anxious cries from its users for more information about the incident," reports Krebs On Security." From the report: Gig Harbor, Wash.-based iNSYNQ specializes in providing cloud-based QuickBooks accounting software and services. In a statement posted to its status page, iNSYNQ said it experienced a ransomware attack on July 16, and took its network offline in a bid to contain the spread of the malware. "The attack impacted data belonging to certain iNSYNQ clients, rendering such data inaccessible,"; the company said. "As soon as iNSYNQ discovered the attack, iNSYNQ took steps to contain it. This included turning off some servers in the iNSYNQ environment." iNSYNQ said it has engaged outside cybersecurity assistance and to determine whether any customer data was accessed without authorization, but that so far it has no estimate for when those files might be available again to customers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
My Browser, the Spy: How Extensions Slurped Up Browsing Histories From 4M Users
technology - Posted On:2019-07-19 17:00:00 Source: slashdot
Dan Goodin, reporting for ArsTechnica: When we use browsers to make medical appointments, share tax returns with accountants, or access corporate intranets, we usually trust that the pages we access will remain private. DataSpii, a newly documented privacy issue in which millions of people's browsing histories have been collected and exposed, shows just how much about us is revealed when that assumption is turned on its head. DataSpii begins with browser extensions -- available mostly for Chrome but in more limited cases for Firefox as well -- that, by Google's account, had as many as 4.1 million users. These extensions collected the URLs, webpage titles, and in some cases the embedded hyperlinks of every page that the browser user visited. Most of these collected Web histories were then published by a fee-based service called Nacho Analytics, which markets itself as "God mode for the Internet" and uses the tag line "See Anyone's Analytics Account." Web histories may not sound especially sensitive, but a subset of the published links led to pages that are not protected by passwords -- but only by a hard-to-guess sequence of characters (called tokens) included in the URL. Thus, the published links could allow viewers to access the content at these pages. (Security practitioners have long discouraged the publishing of sensitive information on pages that aren't password protected, but the practice remains widespread.) Further reading: More on DataSpii: How extensions hide their data grabs -- and how they're discovered. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Rust-Based TLS Library Outperformed OpenSSL in Almost Every Category
technology - Posted On:2019-07-19 16:14:59 Source: slashdot
A tiny and relatively unknown TLS library written in Rust, an up-and-coming programming language, outperformed the industry-standard OpenSSL in almost every major category. From a report: The findings are the result of a recent four-part series of benchmarks carried out by Joseph Birr-Pixton, the developer behind the Rustls library. The findings showed that Rustls was 10% faster when setting up and negotiating a new server connection, and between 20 and 40% faster when setting up a client connection. But while handshake speeds for new TLS connections are important, most TLS traffic relies on resuming previously negotiated handshakes. Here, too, Rustls outperformed the aging OpenSSL, being between 10 and 20% in resuming a connection on the server-side, and being between 30 and 70% quicker to resume a client connection. Furthermore, Rustls also fared better in sheer bulk performance -- or the speed at which data is transferred over the TLS connection. Birr-Pixton said Rustls could send data 15% faster than OpenSSL, and receive it 5% faster as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Huawei Says Hongmeng OS Isn't Designed as an Android Replacement
technology - Posted On:2019-07-19 13:30:00 Source: slashdot
Huawei reportedly wants to keep using Google's Android operating system in its phones instead of jumping to its self-developed Hongmeng system. From a report: Company senior vice president Catherine Chen told reporters in Brussels this week that the Hongmeng OS isn't even designed for phones, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua. Chen apparently said Hongmeng is for industrial use, noting that it contains far fewer lines of code than a phone OS, and has much lower latency than a phone, meaning it can process a very high volume of data messages with little delay. Latest episode in a confusing narrative about what Huawei even intends to do. The company's executives have previously said on record that its homegrown operating system is designed to replace Android on its handsets. One executive said the operating system would be released by last month -- a target that Huawei has missed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Kazakhstan Government is Now Intercepting All HTTPS Traffic
technology - Posted On:2019-07-19 13:00:00 Source: slashdot
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Starting Wednesday, July 17, 2019, the Kazakhstan government has started intercepting all HTTPS internet traffic inside its borders. Local internet service providers (ISPs) have been instructed by the local government to force their respective users into installing a government-issued certificate on all devices, and in every browser. The certificate, once installed, will allow local government agencies to decrypt users' HTTPS traffic, look at its content, encrypt it again with their certificate, and send it to its destination. Kazakh users trying to access the internet since yesterday have been redirected to web pages that contained instructions on how to install the government's root certificate in their respective browsers, may it be a desktop or mobile device. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researchers Easily Trick Security Firm Cylance's AI-Based Antivirus Into Thinking Programs Like WannaCry and Other Malware Are Benign
it - Posted On:2019-07-19 11:30:00 Source: slashdot
By taking strings from an online gaming program and appending them to malicious files, researchers were able to trick Cylance's AI-based antivirus engine into thinking programs like WannaCry and other malware are benign. From a report: AI has been touted by some in the security community as the silver bullet in malware detection. Its proponents say it's superior to traditional antivirus since it can catch new variants and never-before-seen malware -- think zero-day exploits -- that are the Achilles heel of antivirus. One of its biggest proponents is the security firm BlackBerry Cylance, which has staked its business model on the artificial intelligence engine in its endpoint PROTECT detection system, which the company says has the ability to detect new malicious files two years before their authors even create them. But researchers in Australia say they've found a way to subvert the machine-learning algorithm in PROTECT and cause it to falsely tag already known malware as "goodware." The method doesn't involve altering the malicious code, as hackers generally do to evade detection. Instead, the researchers developed a "global bypass" method that works with almost any malware to fool the Cylance engine. It involves simply taking strings from a non-malicious file and appending them to a malicious one, tricking the system into thinking the malicious file is benign. The benign strings they used came from an online gaming program, which they have declined to name publicly so that Cylance will have a chance to fix the problem before hackers exploit it. "As far as I know, this is a world-first, proven global attack on the ML [machine learning] mechanism of a security company," says Adi Ashkenazy, CEO of the Sydney-based company Skylight Cyber, who conducted the research with CTO Shahar Zini. "After around four years of super hype [about AI], I think this is a humbling example of how the approach provides a new attack surface that was not possible with legacy [antivirus software]." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NSO Spyware 'Targets Big Tech Cloud Services'
it - Posted On:2019-07-19 10:14:56 Source: slashdot
The Israeli company whose spyware hacked WhatsApp has told buyers its technology can surreptitiously scrape all of an individual's data from the servers of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, Financial Times reported on Friday. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] From the report: NSO Group's flagship smartphone malware, nicknamed Pegasus, has for years been used by spy agencies and governments to harvest data from targeted individuals' smartphones. But it has now evolved to capture the much greater trove of information stored beyond the phone in the cloud, such as a full history of a target's location data, archived messages or photos, according to people who shared documents with the Financial Times and described a recent product demonstration. The documents raise difficult questions for Silicon Valley's technology giants, which are trusted by billions of users to keep critical personal information, corporate secrets and medical records safe from potential hackers. NSO denied promoting hacking or mass-surveillance tools for cloud services. However, it did not specifically deny that it had developed the capability described in the documents. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google and Facebook Might Be Tracking Your Porn History, Researchers Warn
technology - Posted On:2019-07-19 03:14:57 Source: slashdot
Researchers at Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 22,484 porn sites and found that 93% leak user data to a third party. Normally, for extra protection when surfing the web, a user might turn to incognito mode. But, the researchers said, incognito mode only ensures that your browsing history is not stored on your computer. CNET reports: According to a study released Monday, Google was the No. 1 third-party company. The research found that Google, or one of its subsidiaries like the advertising platform DoubleClick, had trackers on 74% of the pornography sites examined. Facebook had trackers on 10% of the sites. "In the U.S., many advertising and video hosting platforms forbid 'adult' content. For example, Google's YouTube is the largest video host in the world, but does not allow pornography," the researchers wrote. "However, Google has no policies forbidding websites from using their code hosting (Google APIs) or audience measurement tools (Google Analytics). Thus, Google refuses to host porn, but has no limits on observing the porn consumption of users, often without their knowledge." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft's Q4 Earnings and 2020 Expectations Are Through the Roof
technology - Posted On:2019-07-18 20:59:59 Source: slashdot
Slashdot reader John Nautu shares a report from Windows Report: Microsoft released their Q4 earnings and it's (almost) all good news. The giant registered amazing growth on all departments, increasing its share price by one third. It was a record fiscal year for Microsoft, and the numbers exceeded all expectations: - Revenue was $33.7 billion and increased 12% - Operating income was $12.4 billion and increased 20% - Net income was $13.2 billion GAAP and $10.6 billion non-GAAP, and increased 49% and 21%, respectively - Diluted earnings per share was $1.71 GAAP and $1.37 non-GAAP, and increased 50% and 21%, respectively - GAAP results include a $2.6 billion net income tax benefit explained in the Non-GAAP Definition section below Of course, Microsoft's partnership with many industry leading companies also played a role in the constant development and improvement of their products. Despite Azure leading the way, Office 365, Windows, and Microsoft Teams also contributed to the growth. [Teams recently overtook Slack with 13 million daily users.] It's not all good news though. The Verge notes that the company's gaming business has stalled. "Gaming revenue declined by 10 percent this quarter, alongside Xbox software and services revenue decline of 3 percent." Ryan Duguid, Chief Evangelist at Nintex, said the company is planning some big things for next year: "In 2020, we expect to see Microsoft double down in three key areas to further differentiate from the leading tech giants: AI and ML (across the entire platform), data (infinitely expandable, cost-effective, and supportive of ODI), and modern workplace (productivity software)." In after-hours trading, Microsoft shares gained more than 1%. "The closing price gave Microsoft a market capitalization of $1.045 trillion, the only U.S. company worth more than $1 trillion," reports MarketWatch. Read more of this story at Slashdot.