Microsoft has avoided an EU fine after the European Commission accepted its commitments concerning the bundling of Microsoft Teams with Office 365 and Microsoft 365. This resolution follows a high-profile antitrust investigation triggered by Slack’s July 2020 complaint, which accused Microsoft of tying Teams to its Office suites through force-installation, preventing removal, and making costs less transparent for enterprise customers.

As part of the settlement, Microsoft will offer Office suites without Teams at a lower price, and enterprise customers with long-term licenses will be able to switch to these versions. The company also committed to enabling interoperability between its productivity tools and competing communication platforms, addressing regulators’ concerns about fair competition.

Microsoft will allow customers to move Teams data to rival services, with most commitments lasting seven years and interoperability and portability obligations extending to ten. The company had already unbundled Teams in Europe and later introduced it as a standalone app globally. The settlement is expected to be approved in the coming weeks and extended worldwide, giving more room for alternatives like Slack to compete directly with Teams.

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Native Americans live amid vast natural wealth, yet their communities are among the poorest in the United States. This paradox is not the result of a lack of ambition or ability, but a consequence of decades of federal policies that treat native peoples, not as equal citizens, but as wards of the state. The paternalism embedded in the federal trust doctrine has crippled economic development, discouraged investment, and stifled individual initiative. To unlock the full potential of Indian Country, the federal government must fundamentally reorient its relationship with native communities by

"Phishing training for employees as currently practiced is essentially useless," writes SC World, citing the presentation of two researchers at the Black Hat security conference: In a scientific study involving thousands of test subjects, eight months and four different kinds of phishing training, the average improvement rate of falling for phishing scams was a whopping 1.7%. "Is all of this focus on training worth the outcome?" asked researcher Ariana Mirian, a senior security researcher at Censys and recently a Ph.D. student at U.C. San Diego, where the study was conducted. "Training barely works..." [Research partner Christian Dameff, co-director of the U.C. San Diego Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity] and Mirian wanted scientifically rigorous, real-world results. (You can read their academic paper here.) They enrolled more than 19,000 employees of the UCSD Health system and randomly split them into five groups, each member of which would see something different when they failed a phishing test randomly sent once a month to their workplace email accounts... Over the eight months of testing, however, there was little difference in improvement among the four groups that received different kinds of training. Those groups did improve a bit over the control group's performance — by the aforementioned 1.7%... [A]bout 30% of users clicked on a link promising information about a change in the organization's vacation policy. Almost as many fell for one about a change in workplace dress code... Another lesson was that given enough time, almost everyone falls for a phishing email. Over the eight months of the experiment, just over 50% failed at least once. Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the article.

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I just heard about this:

There’s a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file fraudulent claims for missing baggage with the airline.

First, the scam is possible. I had a bag destroyed by baggage handlers on a recent flight, and all the information I needed to file a claim was on my luggage tag. I have no idea if I will successfully get any money from the airline, or what form it will be in, or how it will be tied to my name, but at least the first step is possible.

But…is it actually happening? No one knows. It feels like a kind of dumb way to make not a lot of money. The origin of this rumor seems to be single Reddit post.

And why should I care about this scam? No one is scamming me; it’s the airline being scammed. I suppose the airline might ding me for reporting a damage bag, but it seems like a very minor risk.

Gerrymandering is a symptom of the failure of representative democracy. Political minorities are surrounded by others who overwhelm their votes and elect politicians who do not represent anyone but themselves.

Reddit will restrict most of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from indexing its content, citing concerns that AI companies are scraping data from archived pages to bypass the platform's controls. Under the new policy, the Wayback Machine loses access to Reddit post detail pages, user profiles, and comments. Only the Reddit.com homepage will remain available for daily archival.

As a result, the Internet Archive can now capture only basic daily snapshots of trending headlines, without preserving full post content or discussion threads. According to Reddit, some AI companies have used archived pages to scrape Reddit data in violation of the company’s policies. These restrictions will remain until the Internet Archive can better prevent scraping, comply with Reddit's privacy rules, and reliably delete removed content.

Reddit informed the Internet Archive in advance and said the limits would begin ramping up immediately. The move aligns with Reddit’s ongoing efforts to curb bulk data extraction, including 2023 API restrictions and paid data deals with AI and search firms. In 2024 and 2025, Reddit signed agreements with Google and OpenAI, blocked major search engines, and sued Anthropic for alleged continued scraping.

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