The rightmost number is the score for each bracket.
| MASTER BRACKET | Motoman | 192 | ||
| Motoman's Sweet Bracket (of doom) | Motoman | 86 | ||
| Bracket Bud Northrup | Old Bud | Bud | 76 | |
| Bracket Jason Willy | Jason Willy | Jason | N | 61 |
| Bracket Sarah | Sarah | Sarah | N | 52 |
| Bracket Rose Northrup | Illini Rose | Rose | N | 49 |
The Signalgate scandal that enveloped US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in March appears to be symptomatic of a wider lax attitude towards the use of non-approved messaging apps by officials and employees, a Senate Committee has concluded. In March, the US Senate Committee on Armed Services set out to examine issues raised by the Signalgate incident: the need to clarify the existing rules on using “non-controlled” apps, and looking at whether Defense Secretary Hegseth adhered to them in his use of Signal, and whether his actions were evidence of a wider culture of insecure app usage within the Department [...]
Music giant Warner Music Group announced last week that it had reached a “groundbreaking partnership agreement” with Suno, the AI startup at the forefront of AI-generated music it had sued for copyright infringement. After settling that fight, Warner Music signed new licensing models that allow Suno users to continue creating “music.” Similar agreements have previously been inked with competitor Udio, and it seems highly likely that the other music giants will reach similar agreements. Whether it’s because record companies don’t want to risk making the “Napster mistake” again or they truly believe this is the future, AI services are here [...]
Microsoft 365 customers will pay more for subscriptions next year, with price hikes across most subscription plans set to begin July 1. The changes will affect customers with Business, E3/E3, Frontline, and Government subscriptions. Microsoft said in a blog post Thursday that the increases reflect new features being added to several plans. This includes expanded Copilot Chat functionality, Microsoft Defender for Office (Plan 1) in E3, Security Copilot in E5, and additional Intune tools such as Remote Help and Advanced Analytics for E3 and E5. The new prices are: Microsoft 365 Business Basic, up $1 to $7 per user each month. [...]
The latest Apple leadership changes set the stage for a new approach from the company on a range of issues, including international relations, the environment, and beyond. If great artists steal, great leaders reflect the spirit of their age. Apple’s current general counsel, Kate Adams, will leave late next year, following a transition to a new general counsel — Meta Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newstead — in March 2026. Apple also announced that Lisa Jackson, vice president for environment, policy, and social initiatives, will retire in late January. The new faces Newstead’s appointment is perhaps the biggest hint of the potential for change. [...]
OpenAI’s research team has trained its GPT-5 large language model to “confess” when it doesn’t follow instructions, providing a second output after its main answer that reports when the model didn’t do as it was told, cut corners, hallucinated, or was uncertain of its answer. “If we can surface when that happens, we can better monitor deployed systems, improve training, and increase trust in the outputs,” OpenAI said in a statement. The confession mechanism addresses a problem in reinforcement learning where models optimize for multiple goals simultaneously — correctness, helpfulness, safety, and user preferences. OpenAI trained a version of GPT-5 [...]
Google this week launched Workspace Studio, promising to let a wide range of employees build and use their own AI agents. Workspace Studio — it was called Workspace Flows during preview earlier this year — is a no-code application that lets users create and customize agents with natural language descriptions and muti-step actions. “Studio puts the full potential of agentic AI into the hands of everyone, not just specialists, by removing the friction of coding and making it easy for anyone to design agents that automate their unique business processes in minutes,” Farhaz Karmali, product director at Google Workspace Ecosystem, said [...]
A digital twin is a simulation of an object, system, process, or person. The ability to make and use digital twins is one of the many new opportunities for business that didn’t exist for most businesses before the recent LLM-based AI revolution. I detailed in this space early last year how detailed twins of systems, such as factories or airplanes, can boost efficiency and save lives. That was focused on factories and processes, but we’ve been hearing a lot lately about digital twin replicas of actual, individual people. And while there are real potential benefits to the idea, it turns out there are [...]
Software management struggles that have pained enterprises for decades cause the same anguish to government agencies, and a bill making its way through the US House of Representatives to strengthen controls around government software management holds lessons for enterprises too. The Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets (SAMOSA) bill, H.R. 5457, received unanimous approval from a key US House of Representative committee, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, on Tuesday. SAMOSA is mostly focused on trying to fix “software asset management deficiencies” as well as requiring more “automation of software license management processes and incorporation of discovery [...]
One of the brutal truths about enterprise disaster recovery (DR) strategies is that there is virtually no reliable way to truly test them. Sure, companies can certainly test the mechanics — but until disaster strikes, the recovery plan is activated and 300,000 workers and millions of customers start interacting with it, all bets are off. Frank Trovato, a principal advisory director at Info-Tech Research Group, said environmental changes are a big part of the reason most disaster recovery arrangements fail in the real world. “The exponential growth of SaaS has changed how organizations need to address DR and overall resilience,” [...]
Steve Jobs said lots of things, so you’ll usually find a quote from him for almost every occasion. “Great things in business are never done by one person,” he once said. “They’re done by a team of people.” News that Meta has poached Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of human interface design, inevitably focuses on the credentials of the poached party, but the former Jony Ive replacement never worked alone. He may have led the team, but his job, at least, reprising Jobs, was “to be a yardstick of quality,” to push his team to “excellence.” Controversy concerning Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” UI continues, [...]
