The second day of protests at Microsoft’s headquarters involved red paint. A Microsoft employee has been arrested as part of protests at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington this week. On Tuesday, a group of current and former Microsoft employees, as well as community members, took over a plaza at Microsoft’s headquarters to protest against the company’s contracts with Israel. The No Azure for Apartheid protest group says at least one Microsoft employee has now been arrested as part of 18 arrests in a second day of protests.Protestors at Microsoft’s headquarters set up a “Liberated Zone” encampment for a second day on Wednesday, and poured red paint over a Microsoft sign on campus. Komo News reports that Redmond Police allege that some protesters also “blocked a pedestrian bridge, and tried to create a barrier using stolen tables and chairs.” While the group of protesters were moved on peacefully on the first day of protests on Tuesday, Redmond Police arrested 18 people at Wednesday’s protests and claim some protestors “became aggressive.”One of the 18 arrested is Anna Hattle, a software engineer in Microsoft’s cloud and AI team. Abdo Mohamed, a No Azure for Apartheid organizer and former tech worker fired by Microsoft, confirmed to The Verge that Hattle and former Microsoft employees Hossam Nasr and Vaniya Agrawal were arrested on Wednesday. “Those arrested include current and former Microsoft workers as well as Seattle community members,” says the No Azure for Apartheid group in a press release. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Maximillian Alvarez (@maximillian.alvarez)The group has been organizing a series of protests against Microsoft’s cloud contracts with the Israeli government in recent months. A former Microsoft employee disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary event and called Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman a “war profiteer.” Microsoft’s three CEOs were also interrupted by another former Microsoft employee during the same event. The group also disrupted Microsoft’s Build conference earlier this year multiple times, and Microsoft even blocked emails that contain “Palestine” after these employee protests.The latest protests come just days after The Guardian, in partnership with +972 Magazine and Local Call, published an investigation which revealed that the Israeli government is relying on Microsoft’s cloud services to store recordings and data of up to “a million calls an hour” made by Palestinians.“The company announced last week that it is pursuing a thorough and independent review of new allegations first reported earlier this month about the purported use of its Azure platform in Israel,” says an unnamed Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to Komo News. “Microsoft will continue to do the hard work needed to uphold its human rights standards in the Middle East, while supporting and taking clear steps to address unlawful actions that damage property, disrupt business or that threaten and harm others.”Update, August 21st: Article updated with additional details on the arrests.

M.2 SSDs are the way to go if you're looking to stock up on high-speed storage. And while the prices will never be as low as they once were a few years ago, we're now seeing some pretty solid discounts, making them easy to pick up for necessary storage upgrades.

Masimo isn’t happy about the CBP reversing its previous Apple Watch import ban. Medical tech company Masimo is suing US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in an attempt to overturn the agency’s decision to allow Apple to restore the blood oxygen tracking feature on Apple Watches.Apple has been embroiled in legal disputes over Masimo’s blood oxygen sensor patent since 2020, disabling the feature on supported US Apple Watch models following an ITC import ban in December 2023. In a complaint filed on Wednesday, Masimo said that the CBP failed to notify the company of its decision to reverse the International Trade Commission restrictions, leaving Masimo with no opportunity to review or challenge the ruling. Masimo said it only learned that the ban had been reversed after Apple announced its “redesigned” pulse oximetry feature last week, which now calculates blood oxygen levels on iPhones instead of the Watch.While no direct accusations were made, Masimo called out in the filing that Apple has made “a series of substantial investments in the United States” after its appeals to overturn the ITC ban were denied. Masimo noted that the CBP then allowed Apple to reactivate the feature, despite the company continuing to infringe on Masimo’s patents, and that “whatever proceeding led to this new ruling departed substantially from CBP’s established practice regarding LEO ruling requests.”“Each passing day that this unlawful ruling remains in effect irreparably deprives Masimo of its right to be free from unfair trade practices and to preserve its competitive standing in the US marketplace,” Masimo said in a supporting statement seen by Bloomberg Law.Masimo is seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to prevent the new ruling that allows Apple to restore blood oxygen features, and reinstate the original ruling that determined Apple could only import Watches to the US if the infringing patent tech had been completely disabled.

Oh boy do we love a new IP in gaming. Games that try something new, tread the road less taken, and experiment with novel designs or mechanics. Now, they might not always land, but I don't think any new IP or dev team should be judged on their first outing alone. In fact, it's the sequels that really define a series, because they come with a polish only maturity can bring, after the devs listen to feedback, expand and realize their full vision, and iron out the kinks from their previous outings.

If you're anything like me, you really only touch the BIOS if you've just put together a new system, or you're upgrading parts to an existing one. A quick tour of changing a handful of the usual settings just to get up and running, and that's it. However, lurking in the depths of your motherboard's firmware could be remnants of old troubleshooting steps, forgotten toggles, or poor default settings that are sneakily making your PC worse, and it's a good idea to go through and tie up these BIOS loose-ends.

PC gaming handhelds are one of the most exciting computing devices to release over the past few years, allowing folks to take all their favorite PC titles anywhere and play them. While the experience is pretty good on the whole, one of the downsides is that most devices on the market right now are pretty expensive.

The AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT is a card that we really loved when we reviewed it. Not only does it deliver excellent performance, but it also does so at a budget price. Of course, what makes the card even better is when you can grab with a discount, which happens to be the case with Newegg dropping the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT OC to $360 for a limited time.

Stop me if you've heard this already, but we ran out of public IPv4 addresses years ago. Yet, the internet didn't grind to a halt, and the explosive growth of internet-connected devices didn't slow down. What did happen was a combination of things, including IPv6 for essentially endless IP address space, and Network Address Translation (NAT). which translates public IP addresses on the internet to private IP addresses on your home network, and vice versa.

Are you tired of constantly juggling between Jira for task management, Slack for team communication, and Notion for documentation? While there are several all-in-one apps out there, an open-source tool called Huly won me over due to several reasons. It combines all these essential functions into one workspace and emerges as a powerful alternative to the big three. Here's why I think it’s the best open-source rival to the likes of Jira, Slack, and Notion.

By now, if you’re trying to run away from adopting AI into your daily workflow and routine, you’re fighting a losing battle. I gave up on doing that a long, long time ago, and I've been testing AI tools left and right, trying to find ones that actually make my life easier.

Back when I played games on a BBC Micro, you had to load them by putting them into a cassette player and playing them through an audio input. The idea was that the sounds correlated to the game's data, which would translate over via sound, and it took about 20 minutes to do. Then the gaming scene really picked up, and 20-minute load times became laughable. Then the gaming scene really picked up, and we're back to watching a bar slowly creep up as the game compiles shaders for a good while. Granted, it's only done during first boot, an update tweaks the shaders, or you update your drivers, but it really sends me back.

Fans of the Battlefield series have been through a rough number of years. Games like Battlefield 2042 failed to keep the spark of excitement alive with post-release content and updates to the online multiplayer across all platforms. To say that fans have been starving for a brand-new Battlefield experience would be a big understatement. But luckily for everyone, the arrival of Battlefield 6 on multiple platforms is not that far off. In preparation for it, developers at Battlefield Studios had an open beta where players on every platform could get a taste of what the game would be like before it officially released. Much to the delight of everyone, the open beta revealed a lot of interesting things that are happening for Battlefield 6 that have everyone feeling optimistic about its release.