Every time any of LinkedIn’s one bil­lion users vis­its linkedin.com, hid­den code searches their com­puter for in­stalled soft­ware, col­lects the re­sults, and trans­mits them to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party com­pa­nies in­clud­ing an American-Israeli cy­ber­se­cu­rity firm.

The user is never asked. Never told. LinkedIn’s pri­vacy pol­icy does not men­tion it.

Because LinkedIn knows each user’s real name, em­ployer, and job ti­tle, it is not search­ing anony­mous vis­i­tors. It is search­ing iden­ti­fied peo­ple at iden­ti­fied com­pa­nies. Millions of com­pa­nies. Every day. All over the world.

Fairlinked e. V. is an as­so­ci­a­tion of com­mer­cial LinkedIn users. We rep­re­sent the pro­fes­sion­als who use LinkedIn, the busi­nesses that in­vest in and de­pend on the plat­form, and the tool­mak­ers who build prod­ucts for it.

BrowserGate is our in­ves­ti­ga­tion and cam­paign to doc­u­ment one of the largest cor­po­rate es­pi­onage and data breach scan­dals in dig­i­tal his­tory, to in­form the pub­lic and reg­u­la­tors, to col­lect ev­i­dence, and to raise funds for the le­gal pro­ceed­ings re­quired to stop it.

LinkedIn’s scan re­veals the re­li­gious be­liefs, po­lit­i­cal opin­ions, dis­abil­i­ties, and job search ac­tiv­ity of iden­ti­fied in­di­vid­u­als. LinkedIn scans for ex­ten­sions that iden­tify prac­tic­ing Muslims, ex­ten­sions that re­veal po­lit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion, ex­ten­sions built for neu­ro­di­ver­gent users, and 509 job search tools that ex­pose who is se­cretly look­ing for work on the very plat­form where their cur­rent em­ployer can see their pro­file.

Under EU law, this cat­e­gory of data is not reg­u­lated. It is pro­hib­ited. LinkedIn has no con­sent, no dis­clo­sure, and no le­gal ba­sis. Its pri­vacy pol­icy does not men­tion any of this.

LinkedIn scans for over 200 prod­ucts that di­rectly com­pete with its own sales tools, in­clud­ing Apollo, Lusha, and ZoomInfo. Because LinkedIn knows each user’s em­ployer, it can map which com­pa­nies use which com­peti­tor prod­ucts. It is ex­tract­ing the cus­tomer lists of thou­sands of soft­ware com­pa­nies from their users’ browsers with­out any­one’s knowl­edge.

Then it uses what it finds. LinkedIn has al­ready sent en­force­ment threats to users of third-party tools, us­ing data ob­tained through this covert scan­ning to iden­tify its tar­gets.

In 2023, the EU des­ig­nated LinkedIn as a reg­u­lated gate­keeper un­der the Digital Markets Act and or­dered it to open its plat­form to third-party tools. LinkedIn’s re­sponse:

It pub­lished two re­stricted APIs and pre­sented them to the European Commission as com­pli­ance. Together, these APIs han­dle ap­prox­i­mately 0.07 calls per sec­ond. Meanwhile, LinkedIn al­ready op­er­ates an in­ter­nal API called Voyager that pow­ers every LinkedIn web and mo­bile prod­uct at 163,000 calls per sec­ond. In Microsoft’s 249-page com­pli­ance re­port to the EU, the word “API” ap­pears 533 times. “Voyager” ap­pears zero times.

At the same time, LinkedIn ex­panded its sur­veil­lance of the ex­act tools the reg­u­la­tion was de­signed to pro­tect. The scan list grew from roughly 461 prod­ucts in 2024 to over 6,000 by February 2026. The EU told LinkedIn to let third-party tools in. LinkedIn built a sur­veil­lance sys­tem to find and pun­ish every user of those tools.

LinkedIn loads an in­vis­i­ble track­ing el­e­ment from HUMAN Security (formerly PerimeterX), an American-Israeli cy­ber­se­cu­rity firm, zero pix­els wide, hid­den off-screen, that sets cook­ies on your browser with­out your knowl­edge. A sep­a­rate fin­ger­print­ing script runs from LinkedIn’s own servers. A third script from Google ex­e­cutes silently on every page load. All of it en­crypted. None of it dis­closed.

Microsoft has 33,000 em­ploy­ees and a $15 bil­lion le­gal bud­get. We have the ev­i­dence. What we need is peo­ple and fund­ing to hold them ac­count­able.

Our most in­tel­li­gent open mod­els, built from Gemini 3 re­search and tech­nol­ogy to max­i­mize in­tel­li­gence-per-pa­ra­me­ter

Your browser does not sup­port the video tag. Your browser does not sup­port the video tag. A new level of in­tel­li­gence for mo­bile and IoT de­vices Your browser does not sup­port the video tag. Your browser does not sup­port the video tag. Your browser does not sup­port the video tag. Your browser does not sup­port the video tag.A new level of in­tel­li­gence for mo­bile and IoT de­vices Your browser does not sup­port the video tag. Your browser does not sup­port the video tag.

Build au­tonomous agents that plan, nav­i­gate apps, and com­plete tasks on your be­half, with na­tive sup­port for func­tion call­ing. Develop ap­pli­ca­tions with strong au­dio and vi­sual un­der­stand­ing, for rich mul­ti­modal sup­port.Cre­ate mul­ti­lin­gual ex­pe­ri­ences that go be­yond trans­la­tion and un­der­stand cul­tural con­text.Im­prove per­for­mance for spe­cific tasks by train­ing Gemma us­ing your pre­ferred frame­works and tech­niques.Run mod­els on your own hard­ware for ef­fi­cient de­vel­op­ment and de­ploy­ment.

A new level of in­tel­li­gence for mo­bile and IoT de­vice­sAudio and vi­sion sup­port for real-time edge pro­cess­ing. They can run com­pletely of­fline with near-zero la­tency on edge de­vices like phones, Raspberry Pi, and Jetson Nano.

Advanced rea­son­ing for IDEs, cod­ing as­sis­tants, and agen­tic work­flows. These mod­els are op­ti­mized for con­sumer GPUs — giv­ing stu­dents, re­searchers, and de­vel­op­ers the abil­ity to turn work­sta­tions into lo­cal-first AI servers.

Gemma 4 mod­els un­dergo the same rig­or­ous in­fra­struc­ture se­cu­rity pro­to­cols as our pro­pri­etary mod­els. By choos­ing Gemma 4, en­ter­prises and sov­er­eign or­ga­ni­za­tions gain a trusted, trans­par­ent foun­da­tion that de­liv­ers state-of-the-art ca­pa­bil­i­ties while meet­ing the high­est stan­dards for se­cu­rity and re­li­a­bil­ity.

In 2023, the Swedish gov­ern­ment an­nounced that the coun­try’s schools would be go­ing back to ba­sics, em­pha­siz­ing skills such as read­ing and writ­ing, par­tic­u­larly in early grades. After mostly be­ing side­lined, phys­i­cal books are now be­ing rein­tro­duced into class­rooms, and stu­dents are learn­ing to write the old-fash­ioned way: by hand, with a pen­cil or pen, on sheets of pa­per. The Swedish gov­ern­ment also plans to make schools cell­phone-free through­out the coun­try.

Educational au­thor­i­ties have been in­vest­ing heav­ily. Last year alone, the ed­u­ca­tion min­istry al­lo­cated $83 mil­lion to pur­chase text­books and teach­ers’ guides. In a coun­try with about 11 mil­lion peo­ple, the aim is for every stu­dent to have a phys­i­cal text­book for each sub­ject. The gov­ern­ment also put $54 mil­lion to­wards the pur­chase of fic­tion and non-fic­tion books for stu­dents.

These moves rep­re­sent a dra­matic pivot from pre­vi­ous decades, dur­ing which Sweden — and many other na­tions — mov­ing away from phys­i­cal books in fa­vor of tablets and dig­i­tal re­sources in an ef­fort to pre­pare stu­dents for life in an on­line world. Perhaps un­sur­pris­ingly, the Nordic coun­try’s ef­forts have sparked a de­bate on the role of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy in ed­u­ca­tion, one that ex­tends well be­yond the coun­try’s bor­ders. U. S. par­ents in dis­tricts that have adopted dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy to a great ex­tent may be won­der­ing if ed­u­ca­tors will re­verse course, too.

So why did Sweden pivot? In an email to Undark, Linda Fälth, a re­searcher in teacher ed­u­ca­tion at Linnaeus University, wrote that the “decision to rein­vest in phys­i­cal text­books and re­duce the em­pha­sis on dig­i­tal de­vices” was prompted by sev­eral fac­tors, in­clud­ing ques­tions around whether the dig­i­tal­iza­tion of class­rooms had been ev­i­dence-based. “There was also a broader cul­tural re­assess­ment,” Fälth wrote. “Sweden had po­si­tioned it­self as a fron­trun­ner in dig­i­tal ed­u­ca­tion, but over time con­cerns emerged about screen time, dis­trac­tion, re­duced deep read­ing, and the ero­sion of foun­da­tional skills such as sus­tained at­ten­tion and hand­writ­ing.”

Fälth noted that pro­po­nents of re­form be­lieve that “basic skills — es­pe­cially read­ing, writ­ing, and nu­mer­acy — must be firmly es­tab­lished first, and that phys­i­cal text­books are of­ten bet­ter suited for that pur­pose.”

Between 2000 and 2012, Swedish stu­dents’ scores on stan­dard­ized tests steadily de­clined in read­ing, math, and sci­ence. Though they re­cov­ered ground be­tween 2012 and 2018, those scores had dropped again by 2022.

Though it’s un­clear pre­cisely how much of the de­cline is due to dig­i­ti­za­tion, there is some ev­i­dence that ana­log teach­ing ma­te­ri­als for read­ing may be su­pe­rior to screen learn­ing. However, this ap­plies to ex­pos­i­tory as op­posed to nar­ra­tive texts. Narrative texts tell a story, whether fic­tion or non-fic­tion, while ex­pos­i­tory texts are de­signed to in­form, de­scribe, or ex­plain a topic in a log­i­cal, fac­tual man­ner.

Swedish of­fi­cials em­pha­size that dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy is­n’t be­ing re­moved from schools al­to­gether. Rather, dig­i­tal aids “should only be in­tro­duced in teach­ing at an age when they en­cour­age, rather than hin­der, pupils’ learn­ing.” Achieving dig­i­tal com­pe­tence re­mains an im­por­tant ob­jec­tive, par­tic­u­larly in higher grades.

Historically, the tech­nol­ogy in­dus­try has pushed for more use of dig­i­tal learn­ing, see­ing it­self as a trans­former of ed­u­ca­tion. In the 1980s, Apple helped bring about the use of com­put­ers in schools. Then, start­ing with the use of the in­ter­net, and later in­te­grat­ing mo­bile de­vices, tech­nol­ogy re­shaped the ed­u­ca­tional land­scape. Education ex­perts sug­gest it can fos­ter a learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence that is more in­ter­ac­tive, ac­ces­si­ble, and tai­lored to the needs of in­di­vid­ual stu­dents.

In the U. S., the trend na­tion­ally in re­cent years has been to­ward the use of in­creas­ingly so­phis­ti­cated meth­ods of dig­i­tal learn­ing, such as pro­vid­ing chil­dren with lap­tops or de­vices like the iPad. According to a sur­vey con­ducted by the EdWeek Research Center, part of the trade pub­li­ca­tion Education Week, 90 per­cent of school dis­trict lead­ers were pro­vid­ing de­vices for every mid­dle and high school stu­dent as of March 2021. More than 80 per­cent of school dis­trict lead­ers said the same was true for el­e­men­tary school stu­dents.

And now, tech­nol­ogy gi­ants such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are urg­ing schools to teach lit­er­acy in ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. It’s be­lieved by some work­ing in ed­u­ca­tion that schools ought to pre­pare pupils for em­ploy­ers who ex­pect dig­i­tal flu­ency. This may in­deed be per­ti­nent in the age of AI. More than 50 per­cent of teens in America have used AI chat­bots for school­work, ac­cord­ing to a sur­vey con­ducted by the Pew Research Center.

According to a 2023 sur­vey, 30 per­cent of ed­u­ca­tors said their stu­dents spend at least half of their class­room read­ing time do­ing so dig­i­tally. But this may have draw­backs. Researchers sug­gest that read­ing on dig­i­tal dis­plays in­stead of pa­per may be more de­mand­ing men­tally, es­pe­cially for younger stu­dents. Studies have linked heavy dig­i­tal use to re­duced com­pre­hen­sion and mem­ory re­ten­tion as well as eye strain.

The lim­i­ta­tions of ed­u­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy be­came ap­par­ent dur­ing the Covid-19 pan­demic. When on­line learn­ing be­came the norm, ex­perts be­gan ques­tion­ing whether tech­nol­o­gy’s promises had ma­te­ri­al­ized. In a post on LinkedIn, Pam Kastner, a lit­er­acy con­sul­tant and ad­junct pro­fes­sor at Mount Saint Joseph University, sug­gests: “Technology is a tool, not a teacher.” She views the cog­ni­tive ar­chi­tec­ture for read­ing as be­ing built for print.

A well-known critic of the use of smart­phones and so­cial me­dia by chil­dren, Jonathan Haidt, posted in February: “Putting com­put­ers and tablets on stu­dents desks in K-12 may turn out to be among the costli­est mis­takes in the his­tory of ed­u­ca­tion”.

The U. S. spent $30 bil­lion in 2024 on lap­tops and tablets and other ed­u­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy, 10 times more than on text­books. Neuroscientist and ed­u­ca­tor Jared Cooney Horvath has lamented the heavy use of dig­i­tal de­vices in ed­u­ca­tion. He has said that Gen Z, per­sons born roughly be­tween 1997 and 2012 and known for grow­ing up with dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy as an in­te­gral part of their lives, is the first gen­er­a­tion in mod­ern his­tory to score lower on cog­ni­tive mea­sures than the pre­vi­ous one. In January of this year, he told a Senate com­mit­tee that this has re­sulted in a gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren who are less cog­ni­tively ca­pa­ble than their par­ents.

Whether the U. S. will fol­low Sweden’s path re­mains to be seen. Naomi Baron, a pro­fes­sor emerita of lin­guis­tics at American University, told Undark she does­n’t see the U.S. turn­ing to Sweden for ad­vice. This is in part be­cause of fi­nan­cial in­cen­tives: “First, com­mer­cial text­book pub­lish­ers have been push­ing dig­i­tal ma­te­ri­als — heav­ily for fi­nan­cial rea­sons gen­er­ally ig­nor­ing the re­search com­par­ing com­pre­hen­sion, etc. with print vs. dig­i­tal read­ing.” Baron also wrote that “American ed­u­ca­tors them­selves are gen­er­ally un­aware of the now sub­stan­tial re­search lit­er­a­ture here, and in­stead fo­cus on sav­ing their stu­dents (or school dis­tricts) money.” Still, some American ed­u­ca­tors ap­pear to be aware that dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy might be mak­ing ed­u­ca­tion worse. Teachers seem es­pe­cially con­cerned about the pos­si­ble detri­men­tal ef­fects of overuse of AI.

At the same time, some American par­ents have re­cently started form­ing net­works, teach­ing one an­other how to opt out of school-is­sued lap­tops and de­vices and back into phys­i­cal text­books, along with a re­ver­sion to pen or pen­cil and pa­per. Parents point to ev­i­dence show­ing bet­ter in­for­ma­tion re­ten­tion when pupils read it on pa­per. This re­ac­tion may re­flect a grow­ing back­lash to dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy in ed­u­ca­tion, dri­ven by con­cerns about pos­si­bly ex­ces­sive screen time and po­ten­tial harms to youth, in­clud­ing pos­si­bly ad­dic­tive dis­trac­tions.

If U. S. ed­u­ca­tional lead­ers were to con­sult their Swedish col­leagues, the ad­vice they’d likely get is not to re­move dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy whole cloth. “The goal is re­cal­i­bra­tion rather than re­ver­sal,” wrote Fälth. This was echoed in a state­ment sent to Undark by the Swedish Ministry of Education and Research: The “Swedish gov­ern­ment be­lieves that dig­i­tal­iza­tion is fun­da­men­tally im­por­tant and ben­e­fi­cial, but the use of dig­i­tal tools in schools must be car­ried out care­fully and thought­fully.”

In other words, the ob­jec­tive is not to re­ject dig­i­tal­iza­tion. It’s more nu­anced than that. The goal is to ju­di­ciously es­tab­lish bound­aries around tech­nol­o­gy’s se­lec­tive and se­quen­tial use over stages of a pupil’s ed­u­ca­tional de­vel­op­ment. This means in­tro­duc­ing dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy at later ages af­ter ba­sic read­ing and other skills have been achieved.

This is the first of a se­ries of ar­ti­cles in which you will learn about what may be one of the sil­li­est, most pre­ventable, and most costly mishaps of the 21st cen­tury, where Microsoft all but lost OpenAI, its largest cus­tomer, and the trust of the US gov­ern­ment.

I joined Azure Core on the dull Monday morn­ing of May 1st, 2023, as a se­nior mem­ber of the Overlake R&D team, the folks be­hind the Azure Boost of­fload card and net­work ac­cel­er­a­tor.

I was­n’t new to Azure, hav­ing run what is likely the longest-run­ning pro­duc­tion sub­scrip­tion of this cloud ser­vice, which launched in February 2010 as Windows Azure.

I was­n’t new to Microsoft ei­ther, hav­ing been part of the Windows team since 1/1/2013 and later helped mi­grate SharePoint Online to Azure, be­fore join­ing the Core OS team as a ker­nel en­gi­neer, where I no­tably helped im­prove the ker­nel and helped in­vent and de­liver the Container plat­form that sup­ports Docker, Azure Kubernetes, Azure Container Instances, Azure App Services, and Windows Sandbox, all ship­ping tech­nolo­gies that re­sulted in mul­ti­ple granted patents.

Furthermore, I con­tributed to brain­storm­ing the early Overlake cards in 2020-2021, draft­ing a pro­posal for a Host OS Accelerator Card com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­col and net­work stack, when all we had was a de­bug­ger’s se­r­ial con­nec­tion. I also served as a Core OS spe­cial­ist, help­ing Azure Core en­gi­neers di­ag­nose deep OS is­sues.

I re­joined in 2023 as an Azure ex­pert on day one, hav­ing con­tributed to the de­vel­op­ment of some of the tech­nolo­gies on which Azure re­lies and hav­ing used the plat­form for more than a decade, both out­side and in­side Microsoft at a global scale.

As a re­turn­ing em­ployee, I skipped the New Employee Orientation and had my Global Security in­vite for 12 noon to pick up my badge, but my fu­ture man­ager asked if I could come in ear­lier, as the team had their monthly plan­ning meet­ing that morn­ing.

I, of course, agreed and ar­rived a few min­utes be­fore 10 am at the en­trance of the Studio X build­ing, not far from The Commons on the West Campus in Redmond. A man showed up in the lobby and opened the door for me. I fol­lowed him to a meet­ing room through a labyrinth of cor­ri­dors.

The room was chock-full, with more peo­ple on a live con­fer­ence call. The dev man­ager, the leads, the ar­chi­tects, the prin­ci­pal and se­nior en­gi­neers shared the space with what ap­peared to be new hires and ju­nior per­son­nel.

The screen pro­jected a slide where I rec­og­nized a num­ber of fa­mil­iar acronyms, like COM, WMI, perf coun­ters, VHDX, NTFS, ETW, and a dozen oth­ers, mixed with new Azure-related ones, in an im­broglio of boxes linked by ar­rows.

I sat qui­etly at the back while a man was walk­ing the room through a big port­ing plan of their cur­rent stack to the Overlake ac­cel­er­a­tor. As I lis­tened, it was not im­me­di­ately clear what that se­ries of boxes with Windows user-mode and ker­nel com­po­nents had to do with that plan.

After a few min­utes, I risked a ques­tion: Are you plan­ning to port those Windows fea­tures to Overlake? The an­swer was yes, or at least they were look­ing into it. The dev man­ager showed some doubt, and the man replied that they could at least “ask a cou­ple of ju­nior devs to look into it.”

The room re­mained silent for an in­stant. I had seen the hard­ware specs for the SoC on the Overlake card in my pre­vi­ous tenure: the RAM ca­pac­ity and the power bud­get, which was just a tiny frac­tion of the TDP you can ex­pect from a reg­u­lar server CPU.

The hard­ware folks I had spo­ken with told me they could only spare 4KB of dual-ported mem­ory on the FPGA for my door­bell shared-mem­ory com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­col.

Everything was nim­ble, ef­fi­cient, and power-savvy, and the team I had joined 10 min­utes ear­lier was se­ri­ously con­sid­er­ing port­ing half of Windows to that tiny, fan­less, Linux-running chip the size of a fin­ger­nail.

That felt like Elon talk­ing about col­o­niz­ing Mars: just nuke the poles then grow an at­mos­phere! Easier said than done, uh?

That en­tire 122-strong org was knee-deep in im­pos­si­ble ru­mi­na­tions in­volv­ing port­ing Windows to Linux to sup­port their ex­ist­ing VM man­age­ment agents.

The man was a Principal Group Engineering Manager over­see­ing a chunk of the soft­ware run­ning on each Azure node; his boss, a Partner Engineering Manager, was in the room with us, and they re­ally con­tem­plated port­ing Windows to Linux to sup­port their cur­rent soft­ware.

At first, I ques­tioned my un­der­stand­ing. Was that se­ri­ous? The rest of the talk left no doubt: the plan was out­lined, and the dev leads were tasked with con­tribut­ing peo­ple to the ef­fort. It was im­me­di­ately clear to me that this plan would never suc­ceed and that the org needed a lot of help.

That first hour in the new role left me with a mix of strange feel­ings, stu­pe­fac­tion, and in­credulity.

The stack was hit­ting its scal­ing lim­its on a 400 Watt Xeon at just a few dozen VMs per node, I later learned, a far cry from the 1,024 VMs limit I knew the hy­per­vi­sor was ca­pa­ble of, and was a noisy neigh­bor con­sum­ing so many re­sources that it was caus­ing jit­ter ob­serv­able from the cus­tomer VMs.

There is no di­men­sion in the uni­verse where this stack would fit on a tiny ARM SoC and scale up by many fac­tors. It was not go­ing to hap­pen.

I have seen a lot in my decades of in­dus­try (and Microsoft) ex­pe­ri­ence, but I had never seen an or­ga­ni­za­tion so far from re­al­ity. My day-one prob­lem was there­fore not to ramp up on new tech­nol­ogy, but rather to con­vince an en­tire org, up to my skip-skip-level, that they were on a death march.

Somewhere, I knew it was go­ing to be a fierce up­hill bat­tle. As you can imag­ine, it did­n’t go well, as you will later learn.

I spent the next few days read­ing more about the plans, study­ing the cur­rent sys­tems, and vis­it­ing old friends in Core OS, my alma mater. I was lost away from home in a bizarre ter­ri­tory where peo­ple made plans that did­n’t make sense with the aplomb of a drunk LLM.

I no­tably spent more than 90 min­utes chat­ting in per­son with the head of the Linux System Group, a solid scholar with a PhD from INRIA, who was among the folks who hired me on the ker­nel team years ear­lier.

His org is re­spon­si­ble for de­liv­er­ing Mariner Linux (now Azure Linux) and the trimmed-down dis­tro run­ning on the Overlake / Azure Boost card. He kindly an­swered all my ques­tions, and I learned that they had iden­ti­fied 173 agents (one hun­dred sev­enty-three) as can­di­dates for port­ing to Overlake.

I later re­searched this fur­ther and found that no one at Microsoft, not a sin­gle soul, could ar­tic­u­late why up to 173 agents were needed to man­age an Azure node, what they all did, how they in­ter­acted with one an­other, what their fea­ture set was, or even why they ex­isted in the first place.

Azure sells VMs, net­work­ing, and stor­age at the core. Add ob­serv­abil­ity and ser­vic­ing, and you should be good. Everything else, SQL, K8s, AI work­loads, and what­not all build on VMs with xPU, net­work­ing, and stor­age, and the heavy lift­ing to make the magic hap­pen is done by the good Core OS folks and the hy­per­vi­sor.

How the Azure folks came up with 173 agents will prob­a­bly re­main a mys­tery, but it takes a se­ri­ous amount of mis­un­der­stand­ing to get there, and this is also how dis­as­ters are built.

Now, fathom for a sec­ond that this pile of un­con­trolled “stuff” is or­ches­trat­ing the VMs run­ning Anthropic’s Claude, what’s left of OpenAI’s APIs on Azure, SharePoint Online, the gov­ern­ment clouds and other mis­sion-crit­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture, and you’ll be close to un­der­stand­ing how a grain of sand in that frag­ile pileup can cause a global col­lapse, with se­ri­ous National Security im­pli­ca­tions as well as po­ten­tial busi­ness-end­ing con­se­quences for Microsoft.

We are still far from the va­por­ized tril­lion in mar­ket cap, my let­ters to the CEO, to the Microsoft Board of Directors, and to the Cloud + AI EVP and their to­tal si­lence, the quasi-loss of OpenAI, the breach of trust with the US gov­ern­ment as pub­licly stated by the Secretary of Defense, the wasted en­gi­neer­ing ef­forts, the Rust man­date, my stint on the OpenAI bare-metal team in Azure Core, the es­cort ses­sions from China and else­where, and the de­layed fea­tures pub­licly im­plied as ship­ping since 2023, be­fore the work even be­gan.

If you’re run­ning pro­duc­tion work­loads on Azure or re­ly­ing on it for mis­sion-crit­i­cal sys­tems, this story mat­ters more than you think.

Chat

What can I do with 128 GB of uni­fied RAM?

Load up mod­els like gpt-oss-120b or Qwen-Coder-Next for ad­vanced tool use.

What should I tune first?

You can use –no-mmap to speed up load times and in­crease con­text size to 64 or more.

Image Generation

A pitcher of lemon­ade in the style of a re­nais­sance paint­ing

Speech

Hello, I am your AI as­sis­tant. What can I do for you to­day?

Open source. Private. Ready in min­utes on any PC.

Lemonade ex­ists be­cause lo­cal AI should be free, open, fast, and pri­vate.

Lemonade is in­te­grated in many apps and works out-of-box with hun­dreds more thanks to the OpenAI API stan­dard.

Chat

What can I do with 128 GB of uni­fied RAM?

Load up mod­els like gpt-oss-120b or Qwen-Coder-Next for ad­vanced tool use.

What should I tune first?

You can use –no-mmap to speed up load times and in­crease con­text size to 64 or more.

Image Generation

A pitcher of lemon­ade in the style of a re­nais­sance paint­ing

Speech

Hello, I am your AI as­sis­tant. What can I do for you to­day?

Open source. Private. Ready in min­utes on any PC.

Lemonade ex­ists be­cause lo­cal AI should be free, open, fast, and pri­vate.

Lemonade is in­te­grated in many apps and works out-of-box with hun­dreds more thanks to the OpenAI API stan­dard.

Everything from in­stall to run­time is op­ti­mized for fast setup, broad com­pat­i­bil­ity, and lo­cal-first ex­e­cu­tion.

Lightweight ser­vice that is only 2MB.

Simple in­staller that sets up the stack au­to­mat­i­cally.

Works with hun­dreds of apps out-of-box and in­te­grates in min­utes.

Configures de­pen­den­cies for your GPU and NPU.

Works with llama.cpp, Ryzen AI SW, FastFlowLM, and more.

Run more than one model at the same time.

A GUI that lets you down­load, try, and switch mod­els quickly.

In mem­ory of the 72,000+ Palestinians killed in the Israeli geno­cide in Gaza.

Tailscale should feel nearly in­vis­i­ble when it’s con­nect­ing you and all your de­vices to­gether. But on some MacBooks, for a time, it could be a lit­tle too in­vis­i­ble. We have two fixes for it: one small and slightly quirky, and an­other re­ally use­ful one, avail­able now on ma­cOS.

The small, quirky fix might soon be­come a thing of the past for the vast ma­jor­ity of Tailscale users on Macs. I wanted to doc­u­ment it here: to help other de­vel­op­ers, to mark this mo­ment in time, and qui­etly crow about our win­dowed ma­cOS in­ter­face now be­ing gen­er­ally avail­able.

So here’s the is­sue we had with Tailscale’s icon slip­ping into dark­ness, its lit­tle work-around, and then our greater so­lu­tion.

At its de­but on ma­cOS, Tailscale was a com­mand-line tool and a menu bar util­ity. Some MacBooks, start­ing with 2021 MacBook Pro mod­els, have a notch in the top-mid­dle of their dis­play. And de­pend­ing on how many other apps with menu bar icons are run­ning, the Tailscale ap­p’s icon can be hid­den in­side that notch.

Apple, a com­pany that tra­di­tion­ally fa­vors sim­ple func­tion­al­ity over dense set­tings, does not of­fer users, or de­vel­op­ers, a path out of the dark­ness. If there are more menu bar icons then there is space to the right side of the notch, the menu bar items sim­ply dis­ap­pear into the notch-y ether. If you don’t see it, you can’t click it. There is no no­ti­fi­ca­tion to the user, no over­flow sec­tion, no op­tions to re­arrange the menu bar items.

As of this writ­ing, Apple has some in­di­rect work-arounds, like push­ing more of its own sys­tem icons into a re­vamped Control Center, and of­fer­ing a some­what in­el­e­gant “Scale to fit be­low cam­era” op­tion. Third-party menu-bar-man­ag­ing apps like ICE and Bartender can help, but they add com­pli­ca­tions and over­head.

“We don’t have any con­trol over where things get ren­dered in the menu bar,” said one Tailscale en­gi­neer, who asked to go name­less so as to share their hon­est opin­ion. “You just say, ‘I want to be a menu bar app.’ They shove it up there, and that’s it, you end up where you end up.”

Given this there-or-not-there be­hav­ior, Tailscale de­vel­op­ers re­ceived a num­ber of bug re­ports from users when, af­ter the notched MacBooks’ de­but, their Tailscale icons fell into the mid­dle-screen dis­tance. “They were like, ’Actually, I can’t find my Tailscale. It’s gone. It did­n’t start,” the en­gi­neer said. “We’re like, ‘No, it’s there, it’s just hid­ing be­hind the notch.’ But we kind of got sick of that.”

Mac menu bar icons may not know they are trapped in­side the no-pixel phan­tom zone, but they can re­port that some­thing is block­ing them. Using data from oc­clu­sion­State, the Tailscale app can see that its icon is in mid-bar limbo.

And while it can­not move, it can speak. Specifically, a pop-up mes­sage can say:

This af­fa­ble warn­ing is not per­fect, by any means. The notch warn­ing can be in­ad­ver­tently trig­gered by other dis­play quirks, like open­ing and clos­ing the MacBook lid, mov­ing be­tween mon­i­tors, or some com­bi­na­tion of the two. But it helped triage the “Where are my Tailscale set­tings?” is­sue for a while.

Apple could cer­tainly make some changes to pre­vent this be­ing an is­sue at all. The sys­tem could pre­vent menu bar icons from ren­der­ing in the notch area at all. An over­flow mech­a­nism could stack the icons that would oth­er­wise drop into a neg­a­tive notch zone. Or de­vel­op­ers could be given more in­for­ma­tion and tools about icons’ notch-itive states.

In the mean­time, here’s a look at the Swift code that let our app know it should chirp a bit when hid­den. It should be un­nec­es­sary with the new win­dowed app—un­less you en­able the “Hide Dock icon” op­tion in the win­dowed client op­tions, in which case it might still call out its hid­den na­ture.

As we noted at its September beta re­lease, a win­dowed ver­sion of Tailscale’s ma­cOS app does­n’t re­place the menu bar app, but runs along­side it. It can be pulled up from the Dock or a Spotlight search, and makes a lot of Tailscale data and fea­tures more ac­ces­si­ble.

The win­dowed in­ter­face, en­abled by de­fault start­ing with ver­sion 1.96.2 of our ma­cOS client, of­fers:

* A search­able list of tail­net de­vices and their con­nec­tion sta­tus

* Easily ping, copy IP ad­dresses, and send files through Taildrop to de­vices

* Easy ac­cess to exit nodes, search­able and with one rec­om­mended based on la­tency, per­for­mance, and lo­ca­tion

* A red dot on the Dock icon to note crit­i­cal er­rors

* A “mini player” that shrinks Tailscale down to the bare min­i­mum

* A prod­uct tour of all these things upon in­stalling/​up­dat­ing

Let us know what you think of the new in­ter­face so we can make it bet­ter. We’re work­ing on a com­pa­ra­ble UI for Windows de­vices. And we’re al­ways look­ing for ways to bring a lit­tle bit of func­tional whimsy to our soft­ware.

The race is on to test new ve­hi­cles in the un­der­ground Large Hadron Collider tun­nel, ahead of ma­jor works start­ing this sum­mer

The race is on to test new ve­hi­cles in the un­der­ground Large Hadron Collider tun­nel, ahead of ma­jor works start­ing this sum­mer

Update: did you en­joy our April Fool’s day story? While we won’t be rac­ing karts through the tun­nel, we are gear­ing up for ma­jor works to pre­pare for HiLumi LHC and its new tech­nolo­gies. The im­age is based on a real 1991 CERN im­age of the mono­rail used to trans­port peo­ple and equip­ment in the tun­nel dur­ing the life­time of the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), which pre­ceded the LHC.

Following on from the ro­botic mice, CERN en­gi­neers have now de­vel­oped a su­per-charged kart to en­able work­ers to race through the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) un­der­ground tun­nel dur­ing the up­com­ing ma­jor works, start­ing this sum­mer.

The karts promise a power boost to ac­tiv­i­ties dur­ing this pe­riod, known as Long Shutdown 3 (LS3), which will see the LHC trans­formed into the High-Luminosity LHC. These ve­hi­cles will re­place the bi­cy­cles that were used un­til now to travel through the 27-km un­der­ground tun­nel, en­abling en­gi­neers and tech­ni­cians to speed to ar­eas where im­prove­ments to the ac­cel­er­a­tor are re­quired.

“Each kart is turbo-boosted by 64 su­per­con­duct­ing en­gines,” ex­plains pro­ject leader Mario Idraulico. “When the en­gines are cooled to be­low their crit­i­cal tem­per­a­tures, the Meissner ef­fect lev­i­tates the karts, al­low­ing them to zip through the tun­nels at high speeds and, mamma mia, they’re su­per!”

Early tests have been promis­ing, and the next steps in­volve test­ing dif­fer­ent kart de­signs in an un­der­ground race. Safety co­or­di­na­tor Luigi Fratello has en­sured that each dri­ver will be is­sued with Safety and Health Equipment for Long and Limited Stays (SHELLS), al­though his re­sponse to dri­vers want­ing ba­nanas in the tun­nel was “Oh no!”

These karts, al­though de­vel­oped to sup­port CERN’s fun­da­men­tal re­search pro­gramme, show clear ap­pli­ca­tions for so­ci­ety. CERN’s Knowledge Transfer Group has be­gun dis­cus­sions with European startup com­pany Quantum Mushroom to ex­plore aero­space ap­pli­ca­tions and pow­er­ing for next-gen­er­a­tion anti-grav­ity ve­hi­cles.

Surprisingly, the kart pro­ject be­gan from a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween CERN en­gi­neers and on­site nurs­ery school chil­dren — one ex­am­ple of CERN’s com­mit­ment to in­spir­ing fu­ture gen­er­a­tions. “We’re thrilled that the chil­dren’s kart de­signs were the in­spi­ra­tion for the en­gi­neered karts,” ex­claimed school­teacher Yoshi Kyouryuu, mid-way through paint­ing spots on eggs for an Easter egg hunt.

“As ed­u­ca­tors, we pro­mote cu­rios­ity from a young age, which is why we paint ques­tion marks all over our yel­low school walls,” ex­plained school di­rec­tor, Rosalina Pfirsich, look­ing up from her sto­ry­book. “With all the con­tri­bu­tions the chil­dren have made to the up­com­ing High-Luminosity LHC pro­ject, we’ve taken to call­ing them Luma!”

Find out more about the High-Luminosity LHC pro­ject.

This is a heav­ily in­ter­ac­tive web ap­pli­ca­tion, and JavaScript is re­quired. Simple HTML in­ter­faces are pos­si­ble, but that is not what this is.

Learn more about Bluesky at bsky.so­cial and at­proto.com. right now the as­tro­nauts are call­ing hous­ton be­cause the com­puter on the space­ship is run­ning two in­stances of mi­crosoft out­look and they can’t fig­ure out why. nasa is about to re­mote into the com­puter