Jeffrey Snover, the driving force behind PowerShell, has retired after a career that reshaped Windows administration. The Register reports: Snover's retirement comes after a brief sojourn at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, following a lengthy stint at Microsoft, during which he pulled the company back from imposing a graphical user interface (GUI) on administrators who really just wanted a command line from which to run their scripts. Snover joined Microsoft as the 20th century drew to a close. The company was all about its Windows operating system and user interface in those days -- great for end users, but not so good for administrators managing fleets of servers. Snover correctly predicted a shift to server datacenters, which would require automated management. A powerful shell... a PowerShell, if you will.

[...] Over the years, Snover has dropped the occasional pearl of wisdom or shared memories from his time getting PowerShell off the ground. A recent favorite concerns the naming of Cmdlets and their original name in Monad: Function Units, or FUs. Snover wrote: "This abbreviation reflected the Unix smart-ass culture I was embracing at the time. Plus I was developing this in a hostile environment, and my sense of diplomacy was not yet fully operational." Snover doubtless has many more war stories to share. In the meantime, however, we wish him well. Many admins owe Snover thanks for persuading Microsoft that its GUI obsession did not translate to the datacenter, and for lengthy careers in gluing enterprise systems together with some scripted automation.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto's electrostatic chucks used in NAND chipmaking will likely benefit from an AI infrastructure buildout that's tightening supplies of both high-end and commodity memory.

[...] Known for its heated toilet seats, the maker of washlets has for decades been part of the semiconductor and display supply chain via its advanced ceramic parts and films. Its electrostatic chucks -- which it began mass producing in 1988 -- are used to hold silicon wafers in place during chipmaking while helping to control temperature and contamination, according to the company. The company's new domain business accounted for 42% of its total operating income in the fiscal year ended March 2025, Bloomberg-compiled data show.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device owner from accessing the data if the computer is locked and powered off.

But, by default, BitLocker recovery keys are uploaded to Microsoft's cloud, allowing the tech giant -- and by extension law enforcement -- to access them and use them to decrypt drives encrypted with BitLocker, as with the case reported by Forbes. The case involved several people suspected of fraud related to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program in Guam, a U.S. island in the Pacific. Local news outlet Pacific Daily News covered the case last year, reporting that a warrant had been served to Microsoft in relation to the suspects' hard drives.

Kandit News, another local Guam news outlet, also reported in October that the FBI requested the warrant six months after seizing the three laptops encrypted with BitLocker. [...] Microsoft told Forbes that the company sometimes provides BitLocker recovery keys to authorities, having received an average of 20 such requests per year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Twee zakken Bugles voor 3,49. De tweede bak ijs gratis. Ben je dan écht voordeliger uit? Lidl stopt met stapelkortingen op voeding, meldt de supermarkt deze zaterdag.

Since September, military has carried out more than 30 strikes against boats that it alleges smuggle drugs

The US military said on Friday that it carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific, killing two people.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” the military said in a statement.

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Journalist’s wife had contacted authorities with concerns and ‘potential information’ regarding inquiry into his death

A review of the 2005 shooting death of the journalist Hunter S Thompson has confirmed authorities’ original finding that his death was a suicide, Colorado investigators said on Friday.

The review by the Colorado bureau of investigation (CBI) was announced in September after Thompson’s wife, Anita Thompson, contacted authorities with “new concerns and potential information regarding the investigation” into Thompson’s death, the agency said in a news release.

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UK watchdog investigates accuracy of data handed over for SMS market review

Ofcom is formally investigating whether Meta complied with legally binding information requests regarding WhatsApp's role in the UK business messaging ecosystem.…

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: