Microsoft Layoffs Amid Record Profits- Wait, What? | Tech News of the Week

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Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, a well-balanced Fluff-a-Nutter sandwich. Welcome to Tech News of the Week.

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Ned: This is our weekly Tech News podcast, where Chris and I get into four interesting things that caught our eye. Chris, what do you got for us?

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Chris: Students using ChatGPT are mad at professors using ChatGPT. As we've discussed, It has effectively been forever since students of all stripes have tried to find, shall we say, shortcuts to finishing assignments that they don't think are important or all assignments. Maybe those are the same thing. Fun fact, ChatGPT Plus has been made free for college students through May. Why, you may ask? Well, according to the literal ChatGPT Plus website, ChatGPT Plus is here to help you through finals. Truth in advertising?

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Ned: Apparently so.

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Chris: Imagine, though, my shock and confusion when a college student This week, filed a formal complaint against a professor who was using AI to generate notes from lectures. Admittedly, this was Northwestern University, and the student was asking for a refund on tuition on this. So, I mean, nice try.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: Got to appreciate the effort.

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Ned: I suppose.

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Chris: The teacher admitted that the activity was happening, saying he was using, quote, multiple AI platforms. Apparently, ChatGPT was also listed as a citation in various bibliographies, which, admittedly, is a bit of a giveaway.

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Ned: Indeed.

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Chris: The student was upset with the hypocrisy, saying, he's telling us not to use AI, then he's using it himself, which tells me that this student is also not familiar with the universal rule of do as I say and not as I do, which admittedly is only fun from one side of the equation. Clean your room. Ultimately, the student's claim was denied because, come on, they're not giving back any money. Stop it. But it does raise a larger point. This is the reality. We are going to have AI around us, everyone, everywhere, always, all the time. Now, we're just, as a society, going to have to figure out how to deal with it.

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Ned: Technology was a I'm going to make a mistake. Microsoft records record profits and celebrates with layoffs. It's a tale as old as time. A long-suffering company is struggling to compete in the market. They've underinvested in new technology, and their aging workforce isn't up to the task. To stave off the bleeding and buy themselves a few more precious quarters, the company execs make the painful decision to lay off a portion of their employees. It's tough. Everyone understands. Except I'm lying. That's not what happened. Microsoft posted their Q3 earning results at the end of April, and they clocked in, this is for one quarter, $70. 1 billion in revenue and $25. 8 billion in net income. That's net income. That's after you take out all the costs. That's an increase of 18% year over year. It seems like the company is doing really good. It might come as a surprise that a mere two weeks later, Microsoft decided to lay off 3% of their global workforce, totaling about 6,000 people. Those two trends don't really seem to align. You're making record profits and you're laying off workers? The justification is the usual corporate pabulum. They're trying to make, quote, changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace, which I say, seems like you're already pretty successful, and also that they're attempting to remove inefficient layers of mid-management, which, I mean, yeah, I get that.

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Ned: The real reason is clear from the stock over the last few months. After a rocky beginning to the year, Microsoft's one-two punch of a stellar Q3 result and layoffs has pushed their stock price near its one-year high, currently sitting at $456 a share. One would hope that in a time of economic turmoil and uncertainty, you could rely on your highly profitable employer to provide some stability. One would be incorrect. Microsoft is one of many tech Titans, tightening the belt amidst record profits, and we should expect more layoffs to follow. What was that?

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Chris: It's loud outside.

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Ned: It is.

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Chris: Anyway, legendary free infrastructure assessment tool, RV tools, temporarily infected by malware. Rv tools might be one of the most famous and widely used free tools to help people understand their VMware environments ever. If you've ever used VMware at all, you've at least heard of it. It was purchased by Dell at some point, but we try not to talk about that. Anyway, recently, a security researcher noticed that the download offered on the RV tools site seemed off. It was much larger than it should have been for one thing. Oh, and basically, every antivirus tool on Earth was screaming about the download being malicious. Long story short, it was in fact super duper malicious. Not good. A further check of the file show that it did not match the published hash. After a quick report, the rvtools. Org site was temporarily offline. All of this as the kids say, is concerning. Long story short, it was malware. The RV tools executable on offer as a download from the official RV tools site was poisoned with the Bumblebee malware loader. Luckily for us, this was something that was super easily found by antivirus tools, and the download was only offered for a matter of hours.

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Chris: But still super concerning that a poison download made it on to an official site. So what to take away from this? One, no matter what, you need endpoint protection. This was a legit site and allegedly a legit download that had been there for ages. No reason to worry, right? I mean, clearly not, right? Number two, if you download anything from the internet, from anywhere, it needs to be considered suspicious. Malicious. Zero trust in your downloads folder. C. 1 for most of this, but this is also why many companies use an internal download site where all files that you want are vetted elsewhere before you even have an ability to access them. It's a pain in the ass, but as we can see from this simple example, not a bad idea.

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Ned: Intel continues to be haunted by Specter. Specter is back, and this time it brought friends. Researchers at ETH Zurich uncovered yet another security issue with all modern Intel CPUs named Branch Privilege Injection or BPI. Seven years after the first Specter issues arose, it turns out that Intel just can't stop sharing your secrets like Gretchen Wieners. Bpi lets hackers peek into your cache and memory, thanks to something called branch predictor race conditions. Basically, your CPU playing fast and loose with permissions during prediction calculations across multiple users. Intel has responded with a microcode patch and a fresh CVE sticker, CVE 2024-45332. Meanwhile, the folks at VUSEC in Amsterdam decided to join the party with a new Specter V2 attack, dubbed Training Solo. Which includes vulnerabilities CVE 2024-28956, called indirect target selection, and CVE 2025-24495, Lion Cove BPU issue. These allow an attacker to leak kernel memory at about 17 kilobits per second, which that's fine, right? Nothing important in kernel memory. The attack leverages both features in Intel processors and the classic Berkeley packet filter that's included with Linux, so it can be mitigated through a combination of micro code and regular software patches. Intel has published guidance on the new CVEs, and patches are coming for the Linux kernel to fix issues with CBPF.

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Ned: It's almost enough to get me to switch to AMD. Almost. We're really arm. I'm going to switch to arm. Let's be honest. That's the spirit. Yeah. All right, that's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye..