Feroze Motafram is an operations consultant based in Sammamish, Wash., and founder of Avestan LLC. This piece is adapted from a LinkedIn post.
Someone asked me recently what made me think about writing this. The trigger, I told them, was simpler than you might expect.
I live in Sammamish, in the shadow of Microsoft’s looming presence. Microsoft employees are my neighbors, my social circle, the people I run into at weekend gatherings. Over time I noticed that conversations with them had a distinctive gravitational pull — always inward, toward reorgs, internal politics, who reports to whom now, who’s ascendant, who’s out. Customers were rarely part of the conversation. This usually means navigating the organization has become more consuming than building anything within it.
Microsoft’s stock decline and the softening of real estate in this corridor (both affecting me personally) were the prompts to write it down. The material was already sitting in front of me.
I should be clear about what I am and am not. My formal training is in electrical engineering. The primary instruments of my early career were set squares and slide rules, which will tell you something about both my vintage and my domain. I have spent the intervening decades as a senior executive at Fortune 100 companies and, more recently, as an operations and supply chain consultant. I build and fix things: supply chains, organizations that have lost their way. What I can offer is not insider knowledge. It is 30 years of pattern recognition, applied to what is visible from where I stand.
Advertisement
This is the lens I am bringing. Take it for what it is worth.
The market is asking a question
Microsoft stock declined roughly 25% in Q1 2026, representing its worst quarterly performance since the 2008 financial crisis despite blockbuster results. The market may overreact, but it is not stupid. When the stock of a company of this scale underperforms that of its peer group by double digits, the question worth asking is not “is this a buying opportunity.” The question is: what does the market understand about this organization that the headlines don’t capture?
Part of the answer is visible in the financials. A striking portion of Microsoft’s forward revenue backlog is tied to a single counterparty, OpenAI, an unprofitable startup that has since signed a landmark cloud agreement with Amazon, directly challenging the Azure exclusivity Microsoft had treated as a cornerstone of its AI strategy. Meanwhile, Microsoft is building its own internal AI model as a hedge, an expensive bet layered on top of an already expensive bet.
But the part that does not show up in an earnings report may be the more consequential story. That is what I want to offer here.
Advertisement
The monopoly dividend, and its hidden cost
For the better part of three decades, Microsoft enjoyed something very few companies in history have had: a captive market. Enterprise customers did not use Office because they loved it. They used it because leaving was more painful than staying. That distinction between loyalty and lock-in matters enormously, and it is one that organizations rarely make honestly about themselves.
When your customers cannot leave, the feedback loops that drive genuine innovation go silent. The tendency is to stop asking “what does the customer need?” and start asking “what can we get away with?” Processes multiply. Committees proliferate. Bureaucracy thrives. The organization optimizes for defending territory rather than creating it.
This is not a character failing. It occurs insidiously and unconsciously. It is an entirely rational organizational response to a monopolistic competitive environment. But it leaves a mark. And that mark does not disappear simply because the competitive environment changes.
Satya Nadella earned his laurels, but the work isn’t finished
The Azure pivot was a genuine strategic achievement, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s cultural reset from “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all,” as he framed it, was real and necessary. The stack-ranking era that preceded him did generational damage to Microsoft’s ability to collaborate, retain talent, and take meaningful risks. He arrested that decline and deserves full credit for it.
Advertisement
But here one must tread carefully. Stack ranking was formally abolished in the final months of Steve Ballmer’s tenure. The announcement was celebrated, the headlines were laudatory. What is rather more interesting is what one hears in conversations since. Ask Microsoft employees about the performance review system that replaced it, and the response is rarely enthusiastic. Whether the underlying mechanics genuinely changed, or whether the organization simply learned to dress the same instincts in more palatable language, is a question I cannot answer from the outside. What I can observe is that the people doing the work don’t appear to believe the answer is reassuring.
Cultural transformation in a 220,000-person organization moves at a glacial pace. You can change the language in a decade. Changing the instincts takes considerably longer. One has to wonder how many of the engineers and managers who learned to survive the Ballmer years by navigating politics rather than building products have since moved on, and how many remain, in leadership positions, still oriented by instinct toward self-protection over bold action.
What I can observe is the output. Copilot (inarguably Microsoft’s most strategically critical product) has converted just 15 million paid subscribers from a captive base of 450 million Microsoft 365 users. That is 3.3%. When your own customers will not buy what you are selling at scale, it is worth asking whether the product is genuinely solving a problem or simply a feature in search of a use case.
Microsoft’s internal preoccupations do not stay inside the building. I have observed versions of this dynamic before, most vividly when I lived in Brookfield, Wis., in the orbit of GE Healthcare’s then-headquarters. But what I observe in this corridor is of a different magnitude. It is not just politics that dominates the conversation. It is the organization itself — its structure, its hierarchies, its shifting priorities — that has become the primary subject of intellectual energy.
Advertisement
The campus, in a very real sense, has become the product. When navigating the organization becomes more consuming than building anything within it, that is not a criticism of the individuals. It is a diagnosis of the system they are operating inside.
The human capital story no one is writing
There is a dimension to this that the financial press has largely missed, and I raise it because I see it in my community every day… including, in ways I did not anticipate, in my own backyard.
A significant proportion of Microsoft’s engineering talent (and the engineering talent of the broader Seattle tech corridor) consists of H-1B visa holders. These are exceptional professionals: highly educated, deeply skilled, often carrying decade-long career investments in the United States. They have built lives here. Many have children born here. They have been, in many cases, the intellectual engine of the products Microsoft is depending on to compete in the AI era.
That population is operating under a level of personal anxiety that is, in my observation, without modern precedent. Travel advisories from their own employers. A $100,000 petition fee for new visa applications. Proposed rule changes touching birthright citizenship. A policy environment that sends a clear and unambiguous message: your presence here is conditional, negotiable, and subject to revision without notice.
Advertisement
The behavioral consequence of that anxiety is not visible in a quarterly earnings report. But it is real and consequential. People operating under existential personal uncertainty do not take professional risks. They do not champion the bold new initiative. They do not volunteer for the high-visibility project that could fail. They execute reliably on what already exists and protect their position. In an organization that already has a cultural predisposition toward risk aversion, this compounds the pathology in ways that will show up — perhaps not this quarter, but in the product decisions made over the next eighteen months.
The effects are visible beyond the campus walls. Conversations with real estate professionals in this corridor tell a consistent story: demand from this community, which has historically been among the most financially capable buyers in the region, has softened measurably. Not because the finances have changed, but because the horizon has. When you are uncertain whether your visa will be renewed, or whether your children’s citizenship status may be revisited, you do not buy a house.
The softening of demand is not merely an abstraction for those of us who live here. But the more significant consequence is not measured in property values. It is measured in the quality of risk-taking inside those campuses. And risk-taking is precisely what Microsoft needs most right now.
The case for optimism, and why it requires more than patience
None of this is to suggest Microsoft is broken beyond repair. Betting against Microsoft has historically been an enterprise for the foolhardy. The balance sheet remains stellar. The enterprise relationships are genuinely extraordinary. Ripping out Azure, Teams, and the M365 stack is not a decision any CIO makes lightly. The installed-base moat is real, and should not be underestimated by anyone, least of all an operations consultant from the suburbs.
Advertisement
What I would offer, more modestly, is this: the bull case requires more than a great balance sheet and sticky products. It requires an organization capable of genuine innovation at speed. Which in turn requires a culture that rewards risk, retains its most creative talent, and executes with urgency. Whether Microsoft can summon those qualities at this particular moment is a question I cannot answer with conviction.
What I can say is that the market, which is considerably more qualified than I am, appears to be asking the same question. The valuation has compressed to levels not seen in a decade, briefly falling below the S&P 500 for the first time in a generation. That is not the posture of a market betting with conviction that the answer is yes.
Perhaps it should be. I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that the signals visible from outside the building — from the neighborhood, from weekend gatherings, from the casual conversations — are worth paying attention to. They usually are.
CarTrawler purchased Paris insurtech Koala last year.
Expedia Group is acquiring Irish travel-tech CarTrawler to advance its goals of providing “the most complete” B2B travel platform. Details of the transaction were not disclosed.
Founded and headquartered in Dublin, CarTrawler connects more than 1,000 car rental suppliers and mobility providers with more than 300 travel brands, including more than 70 airlines.
“CarTrawler’s acquisition by Expedia Group is a testament to the strength of our technology, the drive of our people, our track record of innovation and our accelerating commercial momentum,” said Peter O’Donovan, CarTrawler’s CEO.
Advertisement
Alfonso Paredes, the president of B2B and chief commercial officer at Expedia Group said: “The CarTrawler acquisition is another huge, exciting step towards our ambition of building the most complete B2B travel platform.” The transaction is expected to be completed in the second half of 2026.
Expedia acquired Amsterdam-based global platform for activities and experiences Tiqets last December.
“Acquiring Tiqets helped us solve for activities at scale. Adding CarTrawler now extends that same strategy into car rentals, ground transport and Insurtech,” Paredes added. Last August CarTrawler acquired Paris-based B2B insurtech Koala to enter into the insurtech vertical.
Expedia’s latest deal comes after CarTrawler was first acquired by investment firm TowerBrook in 2020 after going through financial struggles resulting from the impact the Covid-19 pandemic had on the global travel industry.
Advertisement
Gordon Holmes, the chief investment officer at TowerBrook said: “We invested in CarTrawler in July 2020, confident that it would emerge from Covid-related industry dislocation as an industry champion.”
“The performance over the last six years, driven by innovation and commercial excellence, has exceeded all expectations.” TowerBrook had made a controlling equity investment of more than €100m into CarTrawler.
His client is a New York cop who was injured during a private security gig at Madison Square Garden. He sued the Garden on behalf of the cop.
Now John Scola, a lawyer well known for representing local police officers, is banned from the high-profile arena and several others owned by the famously controlling James Dolan.
For years, Dolan openly excluded entire law firms from his venues if a single attorney was in any sort of legal dispute with the Garden; those bans would then be enforced by Dolan’s increasingly sophisticated facial recognition system. What wasn’t entirely clear was whether Madison Square Garden was continuing to grow its legal blacklist. A letter to Scola, dated April 30 and reviewed by WIRED, suggested this practice continues. “Any tickets to MSG Venues,” the letter reads, “are hereby revoked.”
The ban also highlights the fissures in the multilayered relationship between New York City’s public servants and its most iconic arena. As WIRED reported last month, MSG security functionally acted as a second, unsanctioned surveillance force in midtown Manhattan—without the New York Police Department’s formal permission. (NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani called this expansion beyond the Garden’s walls “deeply troubling,” and promised further investigation.)
Advertisement
Dolan says that the biometric surveillance system is in place to stop dangerous actors from entering his properties—”if you’re a terrorist, [the list] will say that’s a terrorist,” he once told the local Fox affiliate—but the NYPD hasn’t shared facial recognition or any other kind of data with the Garden. The Garden did, however, add a New York police officer’s photo to the many, many others in its facial recognition database, as WIRED reported. “New Yorkers should be able to go to a game or a concert without their rights being violated,” New York attorney general Letitia James told the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast in a statement. “My office is closely reviewing the latest reporting on Madison Square Garden surveillance tactics.”
On the other hand, the Garden does hire NYPD officers, through the city’s paid detail program, to augment its own security forces. That’s what happened in February of 2025, when a lightweight boxing match was being held at MSG’s then-named Hulu Theater. The audience was likely to be large and “requir[e] active crowd control,” according to the lawsuit, so the Garden brass figured they’d need eight off-duty cops to help. “Despite that determination,” the suit claims, “only two officers were actually present.” One of them was seven-year NYPD veteran John Przybyszewski.
At some point, an incident erupted near ringside.The rapper Lil Tjay seemed to spit in the face of a Garden security staffer who appeared to be trying to keep him from getting closer to the ring. Videos from the night show a chaotic scene. Lil Tjay’s bodyguards and entourage joined in the scuffle. According to the lawsuit, Przybyszewski claims he was knocked to the ground, pinned beneath several people.
Przybyszewski claims that when he got up, he was “in severe pain,” and was sent to the hospital in an ambulance. According to the lawsuit, “diagnostic imaging revealed significant cervical and lumbar spine injuries,” some of them “permanent.”
Advertisement
Przybyszewski blamed both the rapper and Garden officials. He sued Lil Tjay and Madison Square Garden. For a lawyer, he tapped Scola, who frequently represents NYPD officers in disputes with their bosses and the city. Scola filed his suit in February of this year. “Defendants made conscious operational decisions that placed Plaintiff directly in harm’s way. Those decisions caused his injuries,” the lawsuit claims.
Most people take the Moon for granted, not considering its slow cycle where the sun gradually illuminates different parts of it. A recent project from [Karsten Mueller] helps you keep our nearest celestial neighbor in mind by putting a tiny version on your desk. (German)
The device itself is made with a circular display, an ESP32-S3, and a simple 3D printed case. But the interesting part is the software — it’s not just a moon phase display, it actually takes your local time, latitude and longitude into account. The resulting image is an approximation of what the moon looks like if you were to look at it, even if you wouldn’t actually be able to see it, such as when it is obscured by the Earth or barely visible during the daylight sky. Initially the project actually used a photograph of the Moon that [Karsten] personally snapped, but there’s also an option to pull the imagery from NASA.
Vehicle-specific integrations, Immersive Navigation and Android-inspired widgets are small but helpful additions.
Igor Bonifacic for Engadget
At the Android Show: I/O Edition last week, Google promised 2026 would be a big year for Android Auto, with major updates planned for how the platform looks and works across all the cars and devices where it’s available. At I/O 2026, Engadget got a chance to see some of those upgrades running off both Android Auto on a phone and a Volvo EX60 with Google built-in.
Right off the top, most of the enhancements Google announced earlier this month will be available to people whether they access them directly through their car or via a phone. I did notice some visual differences between how those features are presented. With Android Auto, you get Google’s own Material 3 Expressive across the board; with Google built-in, it’s still Material 3 Expressive, but tweaked to accommodate the automaker’s own stylings and the car’s specific hardware.
The trade-off there is Google built-in offers Gemini integration that’s only possible when manufacturers directly include the assistant in their cars, allowing you to use your voice to tweak model-specific settings. In the case of the EX60, that meant the Google employee talking me through the demo was able to tell Gemini to “darken” the car’s sun roof, and it went from transparent to opaque. The employee was also able to ask Gemini to describe footage from one of the car’s front-facing cameras. When the assistant saw the Transamerica Pyramid in the distance, it told us it was once the tallest building in San Francisco for 48 years running. It diplomatically did not mention that title was taken by the grotesque Salesforce Tower.
Advertisement
Immersive Navigation looks great
Igor Bonifacic for Engadget
Everything else Google previously announced will be available to users of both Android Auto and Google built-in as the upgrades roll out. For instance, with Immersive Navigation, the overhaul of driving directions Google first announced in March, you can expect a similar experience no matter how you access the feature. In the demos I saw, neither car was moving, but as they drove along a virtual route, Google Maps rendered buildings in 3D to create a better sense of scale and depth. Important road elements like stop signs, traffic lights and crosswalks were prominently displayed to make them hard to miss. Gemini also produced more intuitive voice directions, saying things like “take a left at the next intersection.” It’s a slick interface that I think most Android Auto users will like a lot once they’ve had some time to acclimate.
Google was also keen to show me how the Android Auto team worked with third-party developers and other teams inside of Google to make their apps look and feel more like the experiences they offer on mobile devices. I saw this in action with Spotify, which in its latest version for Android Auto definitely looks more like it does on Android and iOS. Whether this is a welcome tweak will depend on how you feel about using a touchscreen in car, though the Google employee taking me through the demo did note the Android Auto team has guidelines around touchscreen usage designed to reduce distractions.
Advertisement
Android-like widgets come to Android Auto
Igor Bonifacic for Engadget
I also saw the Android-like widgets Google is bringing to Android Auto. They’re a small addition but there’s utility in having specific information or features just a tap or swipe away. In the demo I saw, a Google employee had one widget set up to check the weather for future bike rides. Again, it’s a small addition, but one that left me thinking why Google hadn’t added user-customizable widgets to Android Auto earlier.
The Grafana data breach was caused by a single GitHub workflow token that slipped through the rotation process following the TanStack npm supply-chain attack last week.
In the ongoing Shai-Hulud malware campaign attributed to TeamPCP hackers, dozens of TanStack packages infected with credential-stealing code were published on the npm index, compromising developer environments, including Grafana’s.
When the malicious npm package was released, Grafana’s CI/CD workflow consumed it, and the info-stealer module executed in its GitHub environment, exfiltrating GitHub workflow tokens to the attackers.
The company explains that it detected malicious activity resulting from compromised TanStack packages on May 1, and immediately deployed the incident response plan, which included rotating GitHub workflow tokens.
Advertisement
However, one token was missed in the process, and the attacker used it to gain access to the company’s private repositories.
“We performed analysis and quickly rotated a significant number of GitHub workflow tokens, but a missed token led to the attackers gaining access to our GitHub repositories,” reads Grafana’s update.
“A subsequent review confirmed that a specific GitHub workflow we originally deemed not impacted had, in fact, been compromised.”
Previously, the company confirmed that the intruders stole source code, assuring there was no customer impact, and stating that the hackers would not receive a ransom payment.
Advertisement
The continued investigation revealed that the intruder also downloaded operational information and details Grafana uses for its business.
“This includes business contact names and email addresses that would be exchanged in a professional relationship context, not information pulled from or processed through the use of production systems or the Grafana Cloud platform” – Grafana
The company stresses that this was not customer production data, and according to the latest evidence and investigation, no customer production systems or operations have been compromised.
Grafana Labs also noted that its codebase was not modified during the incident, so the code users downloaded throughout the events is considered safe, and users are not required to take any action.
Advertisement
If that evaluation changes based on new evidence from the ongoing investigation, Grafana Labs promised to notify impacted customers directly.
Automated pentesting tools deliver real value, but they were built to answer one question: can an attacker move through the network? They were not built to test whether your controls block threats, your detection rules fire, or your cloud configs hold.
This guide covers the 6 surfaces you actually need to validate.
Apple SVP of Services Eddy Cue. Photo credit: Re/Code
Cannes Lions is honoring Apple Services chief Eddy Cue after Apple turned its once-questioned Apple TV push into a credible prestige entertainment business with growing influence in Hollywood.
Cue will receive Cannes Lions’ Entertainment Person of the Year honor during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which runs June 22 through June 26 in Cannes, France. Cue is also scheduled to appear in a keynote conversation with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whose “F1” became one of Apple’s highest-profile theatrical films.
Cannes Lions is recognizing Apple’s growing power across entertainment, advertising, and subscription services as much as it is honoring Cue himself. The festival focuses heavily on marketing, audience engagement, and platform influence instead of traditional Hollywood prestige.
Advertisement
Cue fits naturally into that environment because Apple controls both the devices people use and the services delivered through them.
Apple launched its Apple TV streaming service in November 2019 after years of speculation about whether it could establish itself in Hollywood. Instead of trying to match Netflix or Disney in sheer content volume, Apple leaned into prestige projects, high-profile talent deals, and awards campaigns.
Critics questioned whether Apple could compete seriously with a much smaller catalog and no Hollywood track record. Many also doubted the company would stay committed to such an expensive business before the strategy started producing major awards and prestige hits.
Apple has built a credible position in Hollywood since launching Apple TV in 2019. “CODA” became the first streaming film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and shows like “The Studio” helped the company collect major Emmys.
Advertisement
Earlier hits like “Ted Lasso” also helped establish Apple TV as a serious awards contender. Those wins gave Apple a reputation for prestige programming without forcing it to match the scale of larger streaming rivals.
Why Cannes Lions picked Eddy Cue
Cannes Lions focuses far more on advertising, branding, audience engagement, and media technology than traditional Hollywood awards do. Its emphasis on platform influence helps explain why Apple services chief Eddy Cue received the honor instead of a studio executive or filmmaker.
Simon Cook, as reported byVariety, said Apple has “redefined how audiences engage with culture” through the company’s platforms and experiences. His comments reflect how Apple uses entertainment to strengthen a much larger business built around hardware, subscriptions, payments, and software services.
Eddy Cue will receive Cannes Lions’ Entertainment Person of the Year honor. Image credit: Variety
Cue oversees Apple’s services business as the company’s senior vice president of services and health. Apple had a record year for Services in 2025, giving products like Apple TV, Apple Music, and subscription bundles a larger strategic role within the company.
Recognition from Cannes Lions also arrives during a period when technology companies are exerting more influence over content financing, theatrical distribution, streaming rights, and sports programming. Apple, Amazon, and Netflix now compete directly with legacy studios across much of the entertainment business.
Advertisement
Apple’s entertainment business now carries more industry credibility than it did at launch. Executives have repeatedly framed the service around quality programming instead of massive content libraries.
Prestige programming doesn’t guarantee the kind of mass-market subscriber growth larger streaming rivals chase, though the strategy fits Apple’s preference for tighter curation and premium positioning. Cue’s honor signals that Apple’s strategy earned real credibility within the entertainment industry.
Staff protest overhaul and mouse tracking at ‘Employee Data Extraction Factory’
Meta’s massive role reshuffle begins today, with thousands of staff being transferred to AI-focused teams and their managers reportedly laid off.
The tech giant is reassigning 7,000 workers to AI projects, eliminating around 10 percent of its current workforce, and closing 6,000 open positions, according to Reuters, which saw copies of the internal memos.
Advertisement
The workforce changes, the latest in a series of moves that started 2022, will affect roughly 20 percent of Meta’s approximately 78,000 employees.
Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, penned the memos to affected staff. Some have already begun their new AI-related duties, while the rest will be told of their fates today, she reportedly said.
“As org leaders worked on the changes, many of them incorporated AI-native design principles into their new org structures,” Gale’s memo read.
“We’re now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership.”
Advertisement
This flatter structure will involve, in part, managers being either laid off or moved into roles where they are producing work instead of overseeing teams.
Previous memos sent to staff in April stated that top engineers – those who represented the company’s “strong software engineering talent” – were being “selected” for brand-new divisions within the business.
Among these were the Applied AI Engineering and Agent Transformation Accelerator units, as well as Central Analytics.
Once famed for letting its staff pick and choose their projects, Meta said those selected for this new AI mission had no say in the matter.
Advertisement
Responding to an employee’s question, Maher Saba, VP of AAI Engineering, wrote: “AAI is one of the company’s highest priorities and we’re resourcing it by moving our strongest talent to address it. Therefore, the transfers aren’t optional.”
Both AI units were established for engineers to develop AI agents capable of automating and taking over duties previously undertaken by human employees.
Those transferred to Central Analytics will work on ways of assessing productivity and analytics for agent development.
According to Gale’s memo, another new unit called Enterprise Solutions will soon be established, but Meta has not yet revealed details. The Register asked Meta for a statement, but it did not immediately respond.
Advertisement
The Great Flattening
Gale’s language regarding “flatter structures” echoes chief Mark Zuckerberg’s wording from Meta’s January earnings report, promising to flatten teams over the coming year.
“We’re elevating individual contributors, and flattening teams,” Zuck wrote in a post-earnings note on January 28. “We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person.
“I want to make sure as many of these very talented people as possible choose Meta as the place they can make the greatest impact – to deliver personalized products to billions of people around the world. And if we do this, then I think we’ll get a lot more done and it’s going to be a lot more fun.”
Reports surfaced around the same time about a major round of job cuts at the company, equivalent to 20 percent of its workforce, or around 15,000 roles, but it was unclear when or if this would materialize.
The changes come against a backdrop of Meta investing heavily in AI, with the company saying it plans to spend between $162 billion and $167 billion this year, up from $118 billion in 2025.
The company has reportedly also tried tempting top AI talent to join its ranks with nine-figure pay packets, and ex-OpenAI players with $100 million sign-on bonuses.
The revolt
Meta slashing roles to embrace AI replacements has led to protests across its Menlo Park HQ and internal Workspace comms platform, Reuters reports.
A company spokesperson told the BBC: “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them.”
They said the data is not used for any other purpose, and there are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content.
But Meta staff have expressed their disdain for the changes in various ways, including by setting up an online petition – which now has over 1,000 signatures – and plastering flyers all over US offices referring to the company as an “Employee Data Extraction Factory.” ®
Last week, the crowdfunding platform introduced new rules on the subject of adult content that were meant to give creators more clarity up front before launching projects. Instead, the revised rules had the opposite impact and reportedly clouded the category with more confusion. Read Entire Article Source link
Obscura VPN is now available for Android users via Google Play, Obtainium
Users can also claim a 25% discount for a limited time
Dedicated apps for Windows and Linux are currently in development
If you’ve been searching for the best VPN to protect your mobile device, a fresh and highly secure contender has just entered the chat. Obscura VPN has officially landed on Android, bringing its unique flavor of privacy to the world’s most popular mobile operating system.
Previously limited to iOS and macOS, the provider is now available to download on Google Play and the open-source app manager Obtainium. It marks a major milestone for the privacy-focused company, which aims to shield the vast amounts of personal data and location history stored on our smartphones.
“Your phone holds more of your personal life than almost anything else you own,” the company stated in a blog post announcing the release. “You carry it everywhere, which means apps and other services can build up a detailed record of your location. That activity deserves to stay private, which is why we built Obscura.”
To celebrate the Android launch, the provider is offering a 25% discount to all users for a limited time. You can secure the deal by using the promo code ANDROID26 at checkout.
The development team noted they are currently working on bringing the app to other alternative Android storefronts in the future. A company spokesperson also told TechRadar that native apps for Windows and Linux are officially in development, though no firm release date has been set.
In the meantime, those on unsupported platforms don’t have to miss out completely. Users on Windows and Linux can still connect to the network using a manual WireGuard guide provided by the company, ensuring they can benefit from its top-tier encryption while they wait for dedicated software.
Advertisement
What makes Obscura VPN different?
If you aren’t familiar with Obscura VPN, the provider burst onto the scene in early 2025, promising to be “private by design” and to “outsmart internet restrictions.” The goal was to fix the inherent trust issues found in the wider cybersecurity industry.
Its standout feature is a two-party relay architecture. Traditional VPNs act as a single middleman, meaning the provider theoretically knows both your real identity and your browsing history. Obscura promises to solve this by splitting the journey into two.
HUGE RELEASE: Obscura VPN is now on Android 🥳To celebrate, we’re offering 25% off any Obscura subscription or top-up with code ANDROID26👇 Links below for Google Play or Obtainium (more stores coming) pic.twitter.com/gIlAiqWlC6May 19, 2026
Obscura manages the entry hop, encrypting your traffic using the widely trusted WireGuard protocol. Your data is then passed to an independent exit server operated by the highly respected Mullvad VPN, which ultimately connects you to the internet.
“This splits ‘who you are’ from ‘what you do,’ meaning neither party can tie your identity to your browsing,” Obscura VPN founder Carl Dong previously told TechRadar.
Advertisement
Beyond its unique server setup, Obscura asks for zero personal information at signup; no name, no email, and no credit card details. It also leverages the QUIC protocol to bypass strict internet censorship. This newer technology helps to disguise VPN connections as regular web traffic without the performance drops associated with older methods.
The service’s strict privacy claims aren’t just marketing speak, either. Late last year, Obscura VPN passed a comprehensive independent audit conducted by leading security firm Cure53. The auditors spent 20 days probing the source code and confirmed its architecture had “no major security vulnerabilities”.
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has joined rival AI lab Anthropic. “The hire is a major coup for Anthropic in the high-stakes competition for elite AI talent — and another sign the company is emerging as a magnet for some of the industry’s most respected technical minds,” reports Axios. From the report: Karpathy will start this week on Anthropic’s pre-training team, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research — an increasingly important frontier as AI companies race to automate parts of AI development. “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D,” Karpathy said in a post on X.
Karpathy is a rare AI figure with credibility across research, industry and education. He was a founding member of OpenAI before serving as Tesla’s director of AI, where he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot. Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” and recently described himself as being in a “state of AI psychosis” since December — embracing “tokenmaxxing” and aggressively stress-testing frontier models.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login