Tech

The Policy Risk Of Closing Off New Paths To Value Too Early

Published

1 month ago

12 February 2026

from the historical-analogies dept

Artificial intelligence promises to change not just how Americans work, but how societies decide which kinds of work are worthwhile in the first place. When technological change outpaces social judgment, a major capacity of a sophisticated society comes under pressure: the ability to sustain forms of work whose value is not obvious in advance and cannot be justified by necessity alone.

As AI systems diffuse rapidly across the economy, questions about how societies legitimate such work, and how these activities can serve as a supplement to market-based job creation, have taken on a policy relevance that deserves serious attention.

From Prayer to Platforms

That capacity for legitimating work has historically depended in part on how societies deploy economic surplus: the share of resources that can be devoted to activities not strictly required for material survival. In late medieval England, for example, many in the orbit of the church made at least part of their living performing spiritual labor such as saying prayers for the dead and requesting intercessions for patrons. In a society where salvation was a widely shared concern, such activities were broadly accepted as legitimate ways to make a living.

William Langland was one such prayer-sayer. He is known to history only because, unlike nearly all others who did similar work, he left behind a long allegorical religious poem, Piers Plowman, which he composed and repeatedly revised alongside the devotional labor that sustained him. It emerged from the same moral and institutional world in which paid prayer could legitimately absorb time, effort, and resources.

In 21st-century America, Jenny Nicholson earns a sizeable income sitting alone in front of a camera, producing long-form video essays on theme parks, films, and internet subcultures. Yet her audience supports it willingly and few doubt that it creates value of a kind. Where Langland’s livelihood depended on shared theological and moral authority emanating from a Church that was the dominant institution of its day, Nicholson’s depends on a different but equally real form of judgment expressed by individual market participants. And she is just one example of a broader class of creators—streamers, influencers, and professional gamers—whose work would have been unintelligible as a profession until recently.

What links Langland and Nicholson is not the substance of their work or any claim of moral equivalence, but the shared social judgment that certain activities are legitimate uses of economic surplus. Such judgments do more than reflect cultural taste. Historically, they have also shaped how societies adjust to technological change, by determining which forms of work can plausibly claim support when productivity rises faster than what is considered a “necessity” by society.

How Change Gets Absorbed

Technological change has long been understood to generate economic adjustment through familiar mechanisms: by creating new tasks within firms, expanding demand for improved goods and services, and recombining labor in complementary ways. Often, these mechanisms alone can explain how economies create new jobs when technology renders others obsolete. Their operation is well documented, and policies that reduce frictions in these processes—encouraging retraining or easing the entry of innovative firms—remain important in any period of change.

That said, there is no general law guaranteeing that new technologies will create more jobs than they destroy through these mechanisms alone. Alongside labor-market adjustment, societies have also adapted by legitimating new forms of value—activities like those undertaken by Langland and Nicholson—that came to be supported as worthwhile uses of the surplus generated by rising productivity.

This process has typically been examined not as a mechanism of economic adjustment, but through a critical or moralizing lens. From Thorstein Veblen’s account of conspicuous consumption, which treats surplus-supported activity primarily as a vehicle for status competition, to Max Weber’s analysis of how moral and religious worldviews legitimate economic behavior, scholars have often emphasized the symbolic and ideological dimensions of non-essential work. Herbert Marcuse pushed this line of thinking further, arguing that capitalist societies manufacture “false needs” to absorb surplus and assure the continuation of power imbalances. These perspectives offer real insight: uses of surplus are not morally neutral, and new forms of value can be entangled with power, hierarchy, and exclusion.

What they often exclude, however, is the way legitimation of new forms of value can also function to allow societies to absorb technological change without requiring increases in productivity to be translated immediately into conventional employment or consumption. New and expanded ways of using surplus are, in this sense, a critical economic safety valve during periods of rapid change.

Skilled Labor Has Been Here Before

Fears that artificial intelligence is uniquely threatening simply because it reaches into professional or cognitive domains rest on a mistaken historical premise. Episodes of large-scale technological displacement have rarely spared skilled or high-paid forms of labor; often, such work has been among the first affected. The mechanization of craft production in the nineteenth century displaced skilled cobblers, coopers, and blacksmiths, replacing independent artisans with factory systems that required fewer skills, paid lower wages, and offered less autonomy even as new skilled jobs arose elsewhere. These changes were disruptive but they were absorbed largely through falling prices, rising consumption, and new patterns of employment. They did not require societies to reconsider what kinds of activity were worthy uses of surplus: the same things were still produced, just at scale.

Other episodes are more revealing for present purposes. Sometimes, social change has unsettled not just particular occupations but entire regimes through which uses of surplus become legitimate. In medieval Europe, the Church was the one of the largest economic institutions just about everywhere, clerical and quasi-clerical roles like Langland’s offered recognized paths to education, security, status, and even wealth. When those shared beliefs fractured, the Church’s economic role contracted sharply—not because productivity gains ceased but because its claim on so large a share of surplus lost legitimacy.

To date, artificial intelligence has not produced large-scale job displacement, and the limited disruptions that have occurred have largely been absorbed through familiar adjustment mechanisms. But if AI systems begin to substitute for work whose value is justified less by necessity than by judgment or cultural recognition, the more relevant historical analogue may be less the mechanization of craft than the narrowing or collapse of earlier surplus regimes. The central question such technologies raise is not whether skilled labor can be displaced or whether large-scale displacement is possible—both have occurred repeatedly in the historical record—but how quickly societies can renegotiate which activities they are prepared to treat as legitimate uses of surplus when change arrives at unusual speed.

Time Compression and its Stakes

In this respect, artificial intelligence does appear unusual. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have diffused through society at a pace far faster than most earlier general-purpose technologies. ChatGPT was widely reported to have reached roughly 100 million users within two months of its public release and similar tools have shown comparably rapid uptake.

That compression matters. Much surplus has historically flowed through familiar institutions—universities, churches, museums, and other cultural bodies—that legitimate activities whose value lies in learning, spiritual rewards or meaning rather than immediate output. Yet such institutions are not fixed. Periods of rapid technological change often place them under strain–something evident today for many–exposing disagreements about purpose and authority. Under these conditions, experimentation with new forms of surplus becomes more important, not less. Most proposed new forms of value fail, and attempts to predict which will succeed have a poor historical record—from the South Sea Bubble to more recent efforts to anoint digital assets like NFTs as durable sources of wealth. Experimentation is not a guarantee of success; it is a hedge. Not all claims on surplus are benign, and waste is not harmless. But when technological change moves faster than institutional consensus, the greater danger often lies not in tolerating too many experiments, but in foreclosing them too quickly.

Artificial intelligence does not require discarding all existing theories of change. What sets modern times apart is the speed with which new capabilities become widespread, shortening the interval in which those judgments are formed. In this context, surplus that once supported meaningful, if unconventional, work may instead be captured by grifters, legally barred from legitimacy (by say, outlawing a new art form) or funneled into bubbles. The risk is not waste alone, but the erosion of the cultural and institutional buffers that make adaptation possible.

The challenge for policymakers is not to pre-ordain which new forms of value deserve support but to protect the space in which judgment can evolve. They need to realize that they simply cannot make the world entirely safe, legible and predictable: whether they fear technology overall or simply seek to shape it in the “right” way, they will not be able to predict the future. That means tolerating ambiguity and accepting that many experiments will fail with negative consequences. In this context, broader social barriers that prevent innovation in any field–professional licensing, limits on free expression, overly zealous IP laws, regulatory bars on the entry to small firms–deserve a great deal of scrutiny. Even if the particular barriers in question have nothing to do with AI itself, they may retard the development of surplus sinks necessary to economic adjustment. In a period of compressed adjustment, the capacity to let surplus breathe and value be contested may well determine whether economies bend or break.

Eli Lehrer is the President of the R Street Institute.

Filed Under: ai, business models, jobs, labor

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Bluesky raises $100M Series B as new CEO takes charge

Published

7 seconds ago

20 March 2026

NewsAdmin

Ten days after founder Jay Graber stepped aside as CEO, the decentralised social platform has disclosed a $100 million Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto, a round that closed last April but was never announced. The timing tells its own story.

There is a quiet irony in the fact that the person who built Bluesky shares her given name with it. Lantian Graber -“blue sky” in Mandarin, a name her mother gave her as a wish for boundless freedom, spent four years turning a Twitter research project into a platform of over 43 million users, a functioning decentralised protocol, and a genuine alternative to the platforms her users had fled. Then, on March 9, 2026, she stepped back.

The company announced on Thursday that it had raised $100 million in a Series B round led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and the Knight Foundation. The round closed in April 2025. Bluesky is only disclosing it now.

The gap between closing and announcing is itself worth pausing on. For most startups, fresh funding is a press release and a celebratory tweet. Bluesky’s choice to sit on $100 million for nearly a year, and to surface it only after a leadership transition, suggests a company more focused on building than on performing momentum.

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That leadership now belongs, on an interim basis, to Toni Schneider. The former CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and a partner at True Ventures, Schneider had been advising Graber and the company for over a year before agreeing to step in as the board runs a permanent search.

Graber, for her part, is not going anywhere: she moves into a newly created role as chief innovation officer, focused on building out the AT Protocol, the open social infrastructure that underpins Bluesky’s ambitions.

The split is, by tech company standards, unusually clean. Graber’s own framing was precise: “As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things.” That is not the language of a forced exit. It is the language of a founder who knows what she is good at and, more unusually, what she is not.

Graber was hired by Jack Dorsey in August 2021 to lead what was then a Twitter-funded research initiative into decentralised social media. When she incorporated the project as an independent company later that year, she inherited both an audacious technical premise and a nearly impossible PR challenge: how do you build a decentralised network for people who are, by definition, not yet there?

She managed it. By the time of its $15 million Series A, led by Blockchain Capital in October 2024, the platform had 13 million users. It now has 43 million.

The jump from $15 million to $100 million in a single round reflects more than user growth. It reflects a shift in how investors are reading the decentralised social space, and specifically, Bluesky’s position within it. Where early rounds were bets on a protocol and an idea, this one is a bet on a platform with real scale and a community with demonstrated loyalty.

Bain Capital Crypto’s lead role is worth noting. The firm invests across crypto and web infrastructure, and the AT Protocol, which separates a user’s identity, data, and social graph from any single application, has structural similarities to blockchain-era promises of user ownership, but with far more practical traction.

Knight Foundation’s involvement signals that the press freedom and open-internet communities continue to see Bluesky as infrastructure worth backing, not merely a product.

The money arrives at a moment when Bluesky needs to resolve a tension it has so far managed to defer: how does a platform that has built its identity around rejecting surveillance advertising and algorithmic manipulation actually make money?

The company’s stated model involves subscription services and domain registration fees, functional, but modest. It has not yet demonstrated that this can support a company of its ambitions at the scale it is reaching.

Schneider’s appointment is, in part, an answer to that question. Automattic navigated a similar challenge: it built a massive open-source ecosystem around WordPress and then constructed a sustainable commercial layer on top of it, largely through premium hosting and business services.

If Bluesky follows a comparable path, open protocol beneath, paid services above,it has a template. Whether social networking, with its shorter attention spans and higher churn, tolerates the same approach is not obvious.

The competitive context has shifted considerably since Bluesky’s early days as a curiosity for journalists and tech workers fleeing Elon Musk’s rebranded X. Meta’s Threads, which uses the rival ActivityPub protocol and has been gradually federating with the broader Fediverse, has grown into a formidable alternative with a user base an order of magnitude larger. X itself remains the dominant venue for real-time public discourse, despite persistent predictions of its collapse.

Bluesky’s differentiator has always been structural rather than purely social. The AT Protocol’s architecture, in which a user’s identity and social graph are portable, not locked to any single server, is meaningfully different from both X’s centralised model and Mastodon’s federated but technically demanding alternative.

What is clear is that the company Graber built has survived its first real test: not the technical challenge of building a decentralised protocol, which it managed, but the organisational challenge of outgrowing its founder without losing what made it worth building in the first place. Schneider’s job is to turn that survival into something more permanent. The AT Protocol, and the 43 million people who have joined so far, will be watching.

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EIB to support four utility-scale solar projects across Ireland

Published

14 minutes ago

20 March 2026

NewsAdmin

A total investment of €260m will boost clean electricity generation, reduce reliance on imported energy and support the delivery of 2030 climate targets, said the Government.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) will support the construction and operation of four new utility-scale solar photovoltaic projects across Ireland via a €100m project finance loan to Dolmen Solar Ltd, a holding company of Power Capital Renewable Energy.

The overall investment – which, in total, will be worth €260m – will see four new solar power operations developed in Clare, Wicklow, Wexford and Tipperary, generating around 367GWh of clean electricity per annum, which is equivalent to the annual consumption of roughly 79,900 households. The funding and development is also expected to create new jobs in construction, civil works, grid connections and maintenance services.

The scheme is among the largest single solar investments financed in Ireland to date and could contribute significantly to Ireland’s target of 80pc renewable electricity by 2030, as well as see out the national ambition for roughly 8GW of installed solar capacity under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme.

Ballinaclough, Co Wicklow will host a 15.5MWp solar farm, with construction expected to start this month. Tullabeg, Co Wexford will be home to the largest scheme in the portfolio – a 181.6MWp plant – and construction is planned from April.

In Tipperary, Barnaleen-Cauteen will be the site of a 98MWp farm, and construction is expected to begin this month. Lastly, in Clare, Manusmore near Ennis is earmarked for a 99.5MWp plant, with construction also expected to commence in March.

Work on some of the projects will run into 2028.

Commenting on the investment, the Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment Darragh O’Brien, TD said: “Ireland is sometimes seen as an unlikely home for solar power, but projects like this show how quickly that perception is changing and how strong the investor appetite now is for Irish renewables.

“This is a very welcome €260m investment, spread across Clare, Tipperary, Wicklow and Wexford, which will boost clean electricity generation right across the country, reduce our reliance on imported energy and support delivery of our 2030 climate targets. The European Investment Bank is playing a key role as a long‑term partner for Ireland’s energy transition”.

The EIB vice-president Ioannis Tsakiris added: “By backing Ireland’s first solar project financed on a pure project finance basis, the EIB is helping to unlock almost 400MW of new renewable capacity that will strengthen Ireland’s energy security and cut greenhouse gas emissions.”

In February of this year, SunArc, a renewable energy company based in Carlow, announced plans to create up to 50 new jobs as a result of a €20m investment into the organisation. The company offers a ‘solar-as-a-service’ model which it said is a significant step towards accelerating Ireland’s transition to clean energy.

SunArc has stated that the solar-as-a-service model will enable businesses to access solar power and energy independence with no upfront costs, removing what it believes to be one of the biggest barriers to solar power adoption.

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Tech

Recording HDR Video With A Raspberry Pi

Published

27 minutes ago

20 March 2026

NewsAdmin

The Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers can be hooked up with a wide range of compatible cameras. There are a number of first party options, but you don’t have to stick with those—there are other sensors out there with interesting capabilities, too. [Collimated Beard] has been exploring the use of the IMX585 camera sensor, exploiting its abilities to capture HDR content on the Raspberry Pi.

The IMX585 sensor from Sony is a neat part, capable of shooting at up to 3840 x 2160 resolution (4K) in high-dynamic range if so desired. Camera boards with this sensor that suit the Raspberry Pi aren’t that easy to find, but there are designs out there that you can look up if you really want one. There are also some tricks you’ll have to do to get this part working on the platform. As [Collimated Beard] explains, in the HDR modes, a lot of the standard white balance and image control algorithms don’t work, and image preview can be unusable at times due to the vagaries of the IMX585’s data format. You’ll also need to jump some hurdles with the Video4Linux2 tools to enable the full functionality of these modes.

Do all that, recompile the kernel with some tweaks and the right drivers, though, and you’ll finally be able to capture in 16-bit HDR modes. Oh, and don’t forget—you’ll need to find a way deal with the weird RAW video files this setup generates. It’s a lot of work, but that’s the price of entry to work with this sensor right now. If it helps convince you, the sample shots shared by [Collimated Beard] are pretty good.

If you’re looking to record some really juicy, colorful imagery with the Raspberry Pi, this is a difficult but viable way to go. We’ve seen some other hardcore Raspberry Pi camera hacks of late, too.

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Engineering Challenges and Component Strategies in Humanoid Robotics: From Prototype to Production

Published

41 minutes ago

20 March 2026

NewsAdmin

More Information

Humanoid robotics is advancing rapidly, yet engineers continue to face formidable barriers in locomotion stability, real-time perception, safe human interaction, and power-constrained hardware design. As the industry approaches a projected shift from small-scale prototyping to mass commercialisation in the late 2020s, understanding the component-level decisions that affect system reliability, cost, and performance is becoming critical. This guide examines the technical landscape across sensing, motion, control, and battery subsystems — outlining the design trade-offs, modular architecture trends, and supply chain considerations that will shape the next generation of deployable humanoid platforms.

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Ex-data analyst stole company data in $2.5M extortion scheme

Published

54 minutes ago

20 March 2026

NewsAdmin

Extortion hacker scammer

A North Carolina man was found guilty of extorting a D.C.-based technology company while still being employed as a data analyst contractor.

While a Justice Department press release published on Thursday doesn’t name the victim, court documents reveal that he targeted Brightly Software, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company previously known as SchoolDude, which Siemens acquired in August 2022.

Brightly has been in business for more than 20 years, employs over 700 people, and provides intelligent asset management and maintenance software to over 12,000 clients worldwide, mainly in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

As revealed in the indictment, 27-year-old Cameron Curry (also known as “Loot”) took advantage of his access to Brightly’s payroll information and corporate data to steal sensitive documents, which he used as leverage in an extortion scheme after learning that his six-month contract wouldn’t be extended.

One day after his contract ended on December 10, Curry began sending over 60 extortion emails to Brightly employees using the lootsoftware@outlook.com Microsoft email address and the Loot alias, threatening to leak sensitive information stolen between August and December 2023 unless he was paid a $2.5 million ransom.

With the extortion messages, Curry also attached screenshots of spreadsheets listing the personal identification information (PII) of Brightly employees, including names, dates of birth, home addresses, and compensation information. He also threatened to report the company to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for failing to disclose the breach as required by law.

“We will commence the process of disseminating salary information starting January 1,2024 in phases to all employees and will report you to the SEC after for not reporting the breach,” Curry threatened in one of the extortion emails.

“If you wish to reclaim your data, we recommend doing so promptly at 2.5 million USD in order to save your company and stocks, as each subsequent month will incur a $100,000 USD increase. Discrepancies in your books are currently over 16 million USD, posing a potential risk for retention issues, a hostile work environment, resentment, and more.”

*Extortion email sample (Justice Department)*

Following Curry’s numerous extortion emails, Brightly paid $7,540 in Bitcoin, which was transferred to a cryptocurrency wallet controlled by Curry.

The FBI searched Curry’s residence on January 24 after the company reported the incident and seized various electronic devices containing evidence of his extortion scheme.

Curry was released on bond in January 2024 and now faces up to 12 years in prison for six counts of transmitting or willfully causing interstate communications with the intent to extort a victim company.

Brightly also notified customers of a data breach unrelated to this case in May 2023 after attackers gained access to the database of its SchoolDude online platform and stole credentials and personal data (including names, email addresses, account passwords, phone numbers).

Information filed with the Office of the Maine Attorney General revealed that the intrusion was discovered 8 days after the attackers breached Brightly’s systems on April 20, and that the data breach affected nearly 3 million SchoolDude customers and users.

Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.

Download our analysis of 1.1 million malicious samples to uncover the top 10 techniques and see if your security stack is blinded.

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There’s a sneaky way to watch Wicked: For Good for $1

Published

1 hour ago

20 March 2026

NewsAdmin

Wicked: For Good, the second and final movie of the Wicked franchise, is an adaptation of the 2003 Broadway musical. Starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, the film was released in mid-November 2025 and was a huge hit, with an impressive opening of $147M, going on to gross $532M.

Now that it has finally left theaters, Wicked: For Good is set to stream on Peacock from March 20, 2026 – and we’ve found a sneaky way to watch it for just $1.

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Why enterprises are replacing generic AI with tools that know their users

Published

1 hour ago

20 March 2026

NewsAdmin

The future of AI isn’t just agentic; it’s deep personalization.

Rather than simple recommender systems that correlate user behavior to identify patterns and apply those to individual workflows, large language models (LLMs) and AI agents can analyze users directly to create deeply personalized experiences.

It’s this kind of aggressive customization users are increasingly demanding — and the savviest enterprises who provide it (and soon) will win.

The goal is: “Don’t try to randomize, or guess who I am. I tell you, this is what I care about,” Lijuan Qin, head of product, at Zoom AI, explains in a new Beyond the Pilot podcast.

How Zoom is incorporating personalization

Zoom is one company that has adapted to this trend: Its generative assistant, AI Companion, goes beyond basic summarization, smart recordings, and after-meeting action items to opinion divergence and user alignment tracking.

Users can customize meeting summaries based on their specific interests, and create targeted templates for follow-up emails to different personas (whether it be a salesperson or account executive). The AI assistant can then automatically populate these documents post-call. Meanwhile, a custom dictionary in Zoom AI Studio can process unique enterprise terminology and vocabulary for more relevant AI outputs, and a deep research mode can quickly deliver comprehensive analyses based on “internal expertise and external insights.”

Control is key here; the human can be “very specific [and] nail down” agent permissioning, Qin explained. They have “very clear controls” on follow-up actions, such as: Can the agent automatically send emails to specific recipients? Or will it trigger a verification step when it recognizes transcripts contain sensitive information (as dictated by the user)?

Knowing that AI can go off the rails at times, human users can track agent behavior in Zoom, enable and disable features, and control data access. This can help prevent outputs that are inaccurate or off-target.

“The most important thing is we do not assume AI is smart enough to get everything right,” Qin emphasized.

Getting context right

In this new agentic AI age, there is essentially a “land grab for context,” Sam Witteveen, co-founder of Red Dragon AI and Beyond the Pilot host, explains in the podcast.

“Definitely knowing your users is the big thing, right? Knowing what apps they are living in, what day-to-day tasks are they constantly doing?,” he said. “Companies realize the more they have about you, the better the [AI] memory can get, the better they can customize.”

Claude Cowork is one app that is “really shining” at this, Witteveen says; OpenClaw is another. Models are good enough that they can begin to make decisions for users and respond to directions like: “You know a bunch of things about me. You’ve got all this context. Go and generate the skills that are going to help me do a better job.”

“With something like OpenClaw, you can customize it in any way you want, right? You can chat with it, you can tell it, ‘Hey, at 4 o’clock I want you to do this,’” Witteveen said.

However, token usage and security must always be taken into account, he advised. OpenClaw has been plagued by security issues since its launch. This has prompted many enterprises to uninstall the autonomous agent or outright ban its use; however, these uninstalls must be done correctly so that IT leaders don’t inadvertently delete their entire enterprise stack.

Meanwhile, in terms of token budget, personalization can run up costs. “You need to think about the metrics you are tracking,” Witteveen said. “This is very different from product to product, but metrics around these things are gonna be key.”

Watch the podcast to hear more about:

Why the companies that don’t experiment with AI skills right now “may be toast”
How Zoom built an AI companion that tracks opinion divergence — not just action items — in your meetings
Why the build vs. buy question just got a lot more urgent for enterprise software
Why “skills” may matter more than MCP for the future of enterprise AI

You can also listen and subscribe to Beyond the Pilot on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

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EU Cloud Lobby Asks Regulator To Block VMware From Terminating Partner Program

Published

2 hours ago

20 March 2026

NewsAdmin

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal squeeze on customer choice. As The Reg revealed in January, Broadcom shuttered the scheme, a move sources claimed affects hundreds of CSPs across Europe and curtails options for enterprises buying VMware software and services. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Provider in Europe (CISPE) trade group, representing nearly 50 tech suppliers, filed the complaint today with the EC Directorates-General, accusing Broadcom of bully-boy tactics, and calling for authorities to halt what it terms as “ongoing abuse.”

Francisco Mingorance, CISPE secretary general, said of the complaint: “Businesses — both cloud providers and their customers — are being irreparably damaged by Broadcom’s unfair actions, which we believe are illegal. “After imposing outrageous and unjustified price hikes immediately following the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom is now applying the ‘coup de grace’. We need urgent intervention to force them to change. The only way to stop bullies is to stand up to them.” CISPE claims that, since Broadcom completed its $69 billion takeover of VMware in October 2023, prices have risen tenfold, payment is demanded upfront, products are bundled regardless of customer need, and minimum commitments are based on potential rather than actual consumption.

The VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program officially closed in January and all transactions must be complete by March 31. After that date, only a select group of suppliers will be able to sell VMware subscriptions — either standalone or as part of a broader service. Across Europe, we’re told this equates to hundreds of businesses losing their authorization. For some, the loss of VCSP status effectively destroys their market. Those whose operations were built around VMware must now hand customers to another authorized supplier or begin the costly migration to an alternative platform. Broadcom said in a statement responding to the complaint: “Broadcom strongly disagrees with the allegations by CISPE, an organization funded by hyperscalers, which misrepresent the realities of the market. We continue to be committed to investing significantly in our European VMware Cloud Service Provider partners… helping them offer alternatives to the hyperscalers and meet the evolving needs of European businesses and organizations.”

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Masimo wins hollow victory over Apple Watch's blood oxygen sensors

Published

2 hours ago

20 March 2026

NewsAdmin

A US appeals court has found in favor of Masimo in its fight against Apple over pulse oximetry patents, but in the court that matters, a ruling makes it clear that there won’t be another ban on the Apple Watch.

Close-up of a blue smartwatch side and underside, showing braided blue band, side button, microphone hole, and glowing red health sensor lights on the rounded black back.

The dispute concerns the blood pulse oximeter in the Apple Watch

In the now six year-long legal battle between medical technology firm Masimo and Apple, this particular appeal concerns a ruling by the International Trade Commission (ITC). The ITC ruled that Apple had stolen trade secrets and violated patents with its blood pulse oximeter in the Apple Watch.
Masimo wanted a ban on the Apple Watch and in October 2023, the ITC issued an order barring Apple from importing the Apple Watch into the US, and in December denied the company’s appeal against it.
Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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Alphabet no longer has a controlling stake in its life sciences business Verily

Published

2 hours ago

20 March 2026

NewsAdmin

Alphabet’s life sciences business Verily is restructuring and raising money as a new corporate entity. Verily announced that with its $300 million investment round, it will change from an LLC to a corporation and rename itself Verily Health Inc. As a result, Alphabet now has a minority stake rather than a controlling one in the business.

Similar to every other tech business, this chapter for Verily will be focused on AI. “From research to care, our customers need solutions that bring the best of clinical and scientific rigor together with AI to deliver the next generation of healthcare – one that is as precise as it is personal,” Chairman and CEO Stephen Gillett said.

Google Life Sciences was renamed Verily in 2015, around the same time as Google also rebranded to Alphabet. It has worked on a wide range of projects over the years, such as using eye scans to predict heart disease and an opioid addiction center. In 2025, it closed its medical device division, a move that may have signaled its shift toward AI.

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