Wiz, the cloud security startup that was in acquisition talks with Google, has decided not to forward with the deal and to remain an independent company, according to an internal note sent to company employees on Monday. Fortune: “While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz,” CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote in the note. Rappaport said in the email that the company’s next target is to reach $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and to take the company public.

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Whether you’re looking to boost your productivity or your Fortnite stats, these are the top typing peripherals for the job.

The Twister sequel, which brought in over $80 million at the box office this weekend, is full of good science. But its big reveal is full of spin.

The Alphabet-owned driverless car service is getting aggressive against alleged vandals after a series of violent incidents in San Francisco.

Azure used to be a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. Now, it’s the most widely used operating system on Microsoft Azure. The New Stack’s Joab Jackson writes: These days, Microsoft expends considerable effort that Linux runs as smoothly as possible on Azure, according to a talk given earlier this year at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit given by two Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program managers, Jack Aboutboul, and Krum Kashan. “Linux is the #1 operating system in Azure today,” Aboutoul said. And all must be supported in a way that Microsoft users have come to expects. Hence, the need for the Microsoft’s Linux Platforms Group, which provides support Linux to both the internal customers and to Azure customers. These days, the duo of engineers explained, Microsoft knows about as much as anyone about how to operate Linux at hyperscale. […]

As of today, there are hundreds of Azure and Azure-based services running on Linux, including the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), OpenAI, HDInsight, and many of the other database services. “A lot of the infrastructure powering everything else is running on Linux,” Aboutoul said. “They’re different flavors of Linux running all over the place,” Aboutoul said. To run these services, Microsoft maintains its own kernel, Azure Linux, and in 2023 the company released its own version of Linux, Azure Linux. But Azure Linux is just a small portion of all the other flavors of Linux running on Azure, all of which Microsoft must work with to support.

Overall, there are about 20,000 third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) packages in the Azure marketplace that rely on some Linux distribution. And when things go wrong, it is the Azure service engineers who get the help tickets. The company keeps a set of endorsed Linux distributions, which include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Flatcar, Suse, Canonical, and Oracle Linux and CentOS (as managed by OpenLogic, not Red Hat). […] Overall, the company gets about 1,000 images a month from these endorsed partners alone. Many of the distributions have multiple images (Suse has a regular one, and another one for high-performance computing, for instance).

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The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association claims that AI-powered search engines by U.S. tech giants like Google and Microsoft likely infringe on copyright by using news articles without permission. Therefore, they’re urging the Japanese government to quickly review and revise intellectual property laws to address these issues. Kyodo News reports (translated in English): The association argued in the statement that while traditional search engines direct users to various copyrighted material available online, AI search engines disclose the content, making them a completely different type of service. While stressing that in many instances, the essential content of the referenced article is reprinted in its entirety and therefore constitutes copyright infringement, the association also highlighted the issue of “zero-click searches,” where users do not visit the source site. It warned that the lack of traffic could lead to the diminution of news organizations’ reporting activities, which would then have a negative impact on democracy and culture.

The statement also expressed concern over potential inaccuracies in responses generated by AI search engines, which could give the impression that the source articles themselves were erroneous and damage the credibility of news organizations. The association added that providing AI search engine services without obtaining permission to use the source articles could violate the antimonopoly law. “There are many reasons AI companies are attracted to Japan, including the need for its companies to rapidly develop their digital capabilities and the country’s declining population, which is very open to AI,” said Yutaka Matsuo, a professor at Tokyo University and chair of the government’s AI council, in a statement to the Financial Times. “One other attraction is that AI companies are permitted to learn from information without infringing copyright laws,” he added.

The Financial Times says the push to bring AI companies to Japan has raised alarm for some content creators who worry their work isn’t being protected. “As it relates to generative AI, Japan’s existing Copyright Act does not contribute to protecting creators. In fact, it is focused on restricting the rights of creators,” the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers said in a statement.

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From Ableton and Pro Tools to iPad apps—get the most out of your music with these digital audio workstations, or DAWs.

President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he would “stand down” from his reelection campaign.

“Team, sharing with you the letter from President Biden that was released just now,” read an email that President Joe Biden’s campaign managers sent.

For the third straight day, “More than 1,000 US flights have been,” reports CNN, “as airlines struggle to recover from a global tech outage that left thousands of passengers stranded at airports.”
More than 1,200 flights into, within or out of the United States were canceled by early Sunday afternoon, while more than 5,000 U.S. flights were delayed, according to the tracking website FlightAware.com… On Saturday, 2,136 US flights were canceled, and more than 21,300 flights were delayed…

USA Today notes that Friday several U.S. airlines issued ground stops (according to America’s Federal Aviation Administration) “which caused a domino effect into Sunday.”

They note that “most of the cancellations and delays Sunday are likely to be caused by airline crews and equipment being out of place.”

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