AZ-303 test prep - Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies Updated: 2023

In 2017, Microsoft president Brad Smith made a bold prediction. Speaking on a panel at the Davos World Economic Forum, he said governments would be talking about how to regulate artificial intelligence in about five years.

Another executive bristled at the idea, telling Smith no one could know the future.

But the prophecy was right. As if on schedule, on Thursday morning Smith convened a group of government officials, members of Congress and influential policy experts for a speech on a debate he’s long been anticipating. Smith unveiled his “blueprint for public governance of AI” at Planet Word, a language arts museum that he called a “poetic” venue for a conversation about AI.

Rapid advances in AI and the surging popularity of chatbots such as ChatGPT have moved lawmakers across the globe to grapple with new AI risks. Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, has thrust Smith firmly into the center of this frenzy.

Smith is drawing on years of preparation for the moment. He has discussed AI ethics with leaders ranging from the Biden administration to the Vatican, where Pope Francis warned Smith to “keep your humanity.” He consulted recently with Sen. Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, who has been developing a framework to regulate artificial intelligence. Smith shared Microsoft’s AI regulatory proposals with the New York Democrat, who has “pushed him to think harder in some areas,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.

His policy wisdom is aiding others in the industry, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who consulted with Smith as he prepared policy proposals discussed in his accurate congressional testimony. Altman called Smith a “positive force” willing to provide guidance on short notice — even to naive ideas.

“In the nicest, most patient way possible, he’ll say ‘That’s not the best idea for these reasons,’” Altman said. “‘Here’s 17 better ideas.’”

But it’s unclear whether Smith will be able to sway wary lawmakers amid a flurry of burgeoning efforts to regulate AI — a technology he compares in potential to printing press,but that he says holds cataclysmic risks.

“History would say if you go too far to slow the adoption of the technology you can hold your society back,” said Smith. “If you let technology go forward without any guardrails and you throw responsibility and the rule of law to the wind, you will likely pay a price that’s far in excess of what you want.”

© Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia, SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna and Smith during the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 23, 2021.

In Thursday’s speech, Smith endorsed creating a new government agency to oversee AI development, and creating “safety brakes” to rein in AI that controls critical infrastructure, including the electrical grid, water system, and city traffic flows.

His call for tighter regulations on a technology that could define his company’s future may appear counterintuitive. But it’s part of Smith’s well-worn playbook, which has bolstered his reputation as the tech industry’s de facto ambassador to Washington.

Smith has spent years asking for legislation, establishing himself as a rare tech executive whom policymakers view as trustworthy and proactive. He’s advocated for stricter privacy legislation, limits on facial recognition and tougher consequences on social media businesses — policies that at times benefit Microsoft and harm its Big Tech rivals.

Other companies appear to be taking notes. In the past month, OpenAI and Google — one of Microsoft’s top competitors — unveiled their own visions for the future of AI regulation.

But Microsoft’s embrace of ChatGPT catapults the 48-year-old company, along with Smith, to the center of a new Washington maelstrom. He’s also facing battles on multiple fronts in the United States and abroad as he tries to close the company’s largest ever acquisition, that of gaming giant Activision Blizzard.

The debate marks a career-defining test of whether Microsoft’s success in Washington can be attributed to Smith’s political acumen — or the company’s distance from the most radioactive tech policy issues.

© Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post Smith has a reputation as the tech industry’s de facto ambassador to Washington.

Surviving the techlash

The proactive calls for regulation are the result of a strategy that Smith first proposed more than two decades ago. When he interviewed for Microsoft’s top legal and policy job in late 2001, he presented a single slide to the executives with one message: It’s time to make peace. (Businessweek, since purchased by Bloomberg, first reported the slide.)

For Microsoft, which had developed a reputation as a corporate bully, the proposition marked a sea change. Once Smith secured the top job, he settled dozens of cases with governments and companies that had charged Microsoft with alleged anticompetitive tactics.

Smith found ways to ingratiate himself with lawmakers as a partner rather than an opponent, using hard-won lessons from Microsoft’s brutal antitrust battles in the 1990s, when the company engaged in drawn out legal battles over accusations it wielded a monopoly in personal computers.

The pivot paid off. Four years ago, as antitrust scrutiny was building of Silicon Valley, Microsoft wasn’t a target. Smith instead served as a critical witness, helping lawmakers build the case that Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google engaged in anti-competitive, monopoly-style tactics to build their dominance, said Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.), who served as the chair of the House Judiciary antitrust panel that led the probe.

Smith recognized Microsoft was a “better company, a more innovative company” because of its clashes with Washington, Cicilline said. Smith also proactively adopted some policies lawmakers proposed, which other Silicon Valley companies aggressively lobbied against, he added.

“He provided a lot of wisdom and was a very responsible tech leader, quite different from the leadership at the other companies that were investigated,” Cicilline said.

In particular, Smith has deployed this conciliatory model in areas where Microsoft has far less to lose than its Big Tech competitors.

In 2018, Smith called for policies that would require the government to obtain a warrant to use facial recognition, as competitors such as Amazon aggressively pursued government facial recognition contracts. In 2019, he criticized Facebook for the impact of foreign influence on its platform during the 2016 elections — an issue Microsoft’s business-oriented social network, LinkedIn, largely didn’t confront. He has said that Section 230, a key law that social media companies use as a shield from lawsuits, had outlived its utility.

“Having engaged with executives across a number of sectors over the years, I’ve found Brad to be thoughtful, proactive and honest, particularly in an industry prone to obfuscation,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.).

But as Microsoft finds itself in Washington’s sights for the first time in decades, Smith’s vision is being newly tested. Despite a global charm offensive and a number of concessions intended to promote competition in gaming, both the U.K. competition authority and the Federal Trade Commission in the United States have recently sued to block Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Smith signaled a new tone the day the FTC decision came down.

“While we believed in giving peace a chance, we have complete confidence in our case and welcome the opportunity to present our case in court,” Smith said in a statement. The company has appealed both the U.K. and FTC decisions. Smith said he continues to look for opportunities where he can find common ground with regulators who opposed the deal.

Threats to peace

When Microsoft was gearing up for regulatory scrutiny of the Activision Blizzard deal, Smith traveled to Washington to talk about how the company was “adapting ahead of regulation.” He announced Microsoft would adopt a series of new rules to boost competition in its app stores and endorsed several legislative proposals that would force other companies to follow suit.

On Thursday, he once again tried stay a step ahead of panic Washington policymakers. Smith delivered Thursday’s address in the style of a a tech company demo day, where executives theatrically unveil new products. There were more than half a dozen lawmakers in the audience, including Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who has used his computer science background to position himself as a leading AI policymaker, and Rep. Ken Buck (R-Co.), who co-chaired the antitrust investigation into tech companies with Cicilline.

Smith proposed that the Biden Administration could swiftly promote responsible AI development by passing an executive order requiring companies selling AI software to the government to abide by risk management rules developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal laboratory that develops standards for new technology. (Such an order could favor Microsoft in government contracts, as the company promised the White House that it would implement the rules over the summer.)

He also called for regulation that would address multiple levels of the “tech stack,” the layers of technology ranging from data center infrastructure to applications enabling AI models to function. Smith and his Microsoft colleagues have long made education a key part of their policy strategy, and Smith has been focused on educating lawmakers, members of the Biden administration and their staff about how the AI tech stack works in accurate one-on-one meetings, said Natasha Crampton, the company’s chief of Responsible AI, in an interview.

Smith, who has worked at Microsoft for nearly 30 years, said he views AI as the most important policy issue of a career that has spanned policy debates about surveillance, intellectual property, privacy and more.

But he is clear-eyed that more political obstacles lie ahead for Microsoft, saying in an interview that “life is more challenging” in the AI space, as many legislatures around the world simultaneously consider new tech regulations, including on artificial intelligence.

“We’re dealing with questions that don’t yet have answers,” Smith said. “So you have to expect that life is going to be more complicated.”

It was the spring of 2016, and I was in the Oval Office, waiting to interview for a job. Only I wasn’t in Washington, DC. I was at the headquarters of GitHub, a code hosting platform, in San Francisco, sitting inside a perfect, full-size replica of the office of the president of the United States.

A woman arrived to retrieve me. Shaking my hand, she explained that the Oval Office was being dismantled and replaced with a café for employees. We're trying to make things a little more practical, she said, with a shrug and a barely detectable roll of her eyes.

“But but but—” I sputtered silently in my head, eyes careening left and right. “It’s the Oval Office!” Who cares about practicality! It was like I’d been told they were razing Disney World to make room for more condominiums.

I got the job, and unbeknownst to me, stepped into a weird world that became one of my most formative experiences in tech, working at a company that pushed the boundaries of what corporate culture could be.

GitHub—which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018—announced this past February that, in addition to laying off 10 percent of its employees, it would permanently shutter all offices once their leases expired, including its beloved San Francisco headquarters. While this announcement may have looked like just another in a string of tech company office shutdowns, GitHub’s headquarters was notable both as a living testament to tech culture and as one of its first disputed territories, whose conflicts presaged the next decade of the tech backlash.

GitHub’s San Francisco office—spanning 55,000 square feet and christened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by then mayor Ed Lee—caused a stir when it opened in the fall of 2013, even at a time when lavish startup offices were commonplace. The first floor was designed as an event space, complete with Hogwarts-style wooden banquet tables, a museum, a sweeping bar, and the Thinktocat, a giant bronze sculpture of GitHub’s mascot, the Octocat—a humanoid cat with octopus legs—in the pose of Rodin’s most famous work. Upstairs, there was a speakeasy, an indoor park, and a secret lounge, lined in wood and stocked with expensive whiskey, accessible through either a false bookshelf or the Situation Room, a conference room designed to look like the one in the White House.

Despite its opulence, the office was designed not to alienate but to make everyone feel like a “first-class citizen,” as early employee Tim Clem told InfoWorld at the time. GitHub cofounder Scott Chacon, who led the internal design process, explained to me that to lure local and remote employees in, instead of making mandatory in-office days, GitHub’s executives challenged themselves to design an office that was better than working from home. (It certainly worked on me. I generally prefer to work from home, but I came into the GitHub office almost every day.)

The Oval Office, for example, came about because Chacon and his colleagues realized that the lobby would be a place where visitors would be forced to sit and wait for five to 10 minutes— normally a boring or unpleasant experience. How could they create “the most interesting room” to wait in, which would help pass the time? As Chacon explains, “Most people don’t get a chance to sit in the Oval Office, but as an employee of GitHub, you could go there anytime you wanted.”

The office was a fun house that distorted the mind, not just with its flashy looks, but by playfully blurring the lines of hierarchy and power. Chacon’s comments reflect an organizational culture from GitHub’s early days, when there were no managers or titles. At the previous headquarters (“Office 2.0”), they flipped the rules of a private office that had belonged to the former tenant’s CEO, outfitting it with swanky leather chairs and declaring that anyone except executives could go in there. At Office 3.0, they connected the lighting and calendar systems, so that the lights would blink as the meeting approached its allotted time limit, then turn off completely—no matter who you were or how important your meeting was.

Twitter "chose confrontation" by exiting a voluntary EU disinformation code of practice that lays ground rules for an incoming European law on digital services, a European Union commissioner said Monday.

"We believe this is a mistake of Twitter. Twitter has chosen the hard way. They chose confrontation," commissioner Vera Jourova told journalists.

She said Twitter's compliance with the new Digital Services Act (DSA) entering force on August 25 "will be scrutinised... vigorously and urgently".

The European Commission announced May 27 that Twitter had decided to leave the code of practice, to which other major online platforms such as Google, Microsoft and TikTok continue to adhere.

The voluntary pact, which was launched in 2018 and strengthened last year with input from industry players, contains over three dozen pledges such as better cooperation with fact-checkers and not promoting actors that distribute disinformation.

It serves as a test feeder to the DSA, which will impose legal obligations on big platforms and impose penalties that could go up to six percent of a company's global revenues in case of violation.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, it has cut more than 80 percent of the workforce and got rid of many moderators who vetted content for disinformation and harmful messages.

Jourova said "I can't predict" what conclusions the commission might make about Twitter's possible distribution of disinformation once the DSA comes into force.

But she said that signatories in the code of practice would have an "easier situation" because they would already have cleared the "burden of proof".

"There is an interplay between the code of practice, which is a voluntary agreement, and the Digital Services Act, which is enforceable," Jourova observed.

"I would like to give Twitter the chance to defend the right to make business in Europe without any sanction," she said.

The boom of artificial intelligence (AI) and super-intelligent computation has taken the world by storm. Pundits are calling the AI revolution a “generational event”—one that will change the world of technology, information exchange and connectivity forever.

Generative AI specifically has redefined the barometer for success and progress in the field, creating new opportunities across all sectors, ranging from medicine to manufacturing. The advent of generative AI in conjunction with deep learning models has made it possible to take raw data and prompts to generate text, images and other media. The technology is heavily based on self-supervised machine learning from data sets, meaning that these systems can grow their repertoire and become increasingly adaptable and appropriately responsive as they are fed more data.

Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft, writes about how AI will change the world, describing that generative AI will help unleash humanity’s creativity, provide new ways to “unlock faster iteration” and create new opportunities in productivity: “The applications are potentially endless, limited only by one’s ability to imagine scenarios in which productivity-assisting software could be applied to complex cognitive work, whether that be editing videos, writing scripts, designing new molecules for medicines, or creating manufacturing recipes from 3D models.”

Both Microsoft and Google are at the forefront of this development and have made incredible strides in AI technology in the last year. Microsoft has integrated the technology seamlessly into its search functions, in addition to creating platforms for developers to innovate in other useful areas. Google has also progressed significantly on this front, showing immense promise with its Bard platform and PaLM API.

However, the promise of endless possibilities brings with it immense responsibility.

Namely, the advent of generative AI has also raised numerous concerns regarding the best way to develop these platforms in a fair, equitable, and safe manner.

One of the primary concerns is regarding the creation of systems that can provide equitable and appropriate results. A few years ago, Amazon had to disband an artificial intelligence system that the company was trialing to streamline the recruitment process. In an attempt to introduce automation into recruitment, the company built an AI system that could sort resumes from candidates and help identify top talent, based on historical hiring data. However, a significant issue emerged: because the system was using patterns based on historical data, and given that the tech industry has been historically dominated by males, the system was increasingly selecting males to advance in the recruitment process. Although Amazon recruiters only used this system for recommendations and made final decisions themselves, they scrapped the entire program so as to ensure complete transparency and fairness in the process moving forward.

This incident highlighted a hallmark issue for developers: AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained with.

Recognizing the potential for such problems, Google has been incredibly proactive in its approach to development. Earlier this month at Google’s annual developer conference, executives dedicated an entire portion of the keynote to “responsible AI,” reassuring the audience that it is a key priority for the company.

In fact, Google is striving to be transparent about its safety measures, explaining key issues in developing AI responsibly: “The development of AI has created new opportunities to Improve the lives of people around the world, from business to healthcare to education. It has also raised new questions about the best way to build fairness, interpretability, privacy, and safety into these systems.” As a corollary to the conundrum Amazon faced, Google discusses the importance of data integrity and the inputs and models that are used to train AI systems: “ML models will reflect the data they are trained on, so analyze your raw data carefully to ensure you understand it. In cases where this is not possible, e.g., with sensitive raw data, understand your input data as much as possible while respecting privacy; for example by computing aggregate, anonymized summaries.” Additionally, the company emphasizes that users must: understand the limitations of data models, repeatedly test systems, and closely monitor results for signs of bias or error.

Similarly, Microsoft has invested a significant amount of effort in upholding responsible AI standards: “We are putting our principles into practice by taking a people-centered approach to the research, development, and deployment of AI. To achieve this, we embrace diverse perspectives, continuous learning, and agile responsiveness as AI technology evolves.” Overall, the company states that its goal for AI technology is to create lasting and positive impact to address society’s greatest challenges, and to innovate in a way that is useful and safe.

Other companies innovating in this arena must be equally invested in developing these systems in a responsible manner. The development and commitment to “responsible AI” will undoubtedly cost tech companies billions of dollars a year, as they are forced to iterate and re-iterate to create systems that are equitable and reliable. Although this may seem like a high cost, it is certainly a necessary one. AI is both an incredibly new yet powerful technology— and it will inevitably upend many industries in the years to come. Therefore, the foundation for the technology must be strong. Companies must be able to create these systems in a way that fosters deep user trust and truly progresses society in a positive manner. Only then will the true potential of this technology be unlocked to become a boon rather than bane to society.

Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.

Business Continuity Management / Disaster Recovery , Governance & Risk Management

The deep freeze in cybersecurity initial public offerings could at last be thawing.

See Also: Live Webinar | Breaking Down Security Challenges so Your Day Doesn’t Start at 3pm

2021 was a banner year for IPOs in the market, with KnowBe4, Darktrace, SentinelOne and ForgeRock all taking advantage of pandemic-driven demand for security technologies to go public. But a reversal of economic fortunes over the past year has done a number on these companies, with KnowBe4 getting bought by Vista Equity, ForgeRock inking a deal with Thoma Bravo, and Darktrace and SentinelOne trading below their IPO prices.

Companies that eschewed the initial public offering in favor of merging with or being acquired by a shell company that was already public haven't fared any better. Risk analytics platform Qomplx called off its SPAC merger, Appgate and IronNet have conducted steep layoffs and changed CEOs since going public and ZeroFox and Hub Security have seen dramatic stock price declines since going public via a SPAC.

Despite the beating new publicly traded security companies have taken during the economic downturn, one high-flying data protection vendor is looking to test its luck in the public market. Reuters said Monday that Silicon Valley-based Rubrik is working with Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Citigroup in preparation for an initial public offering that could take place in 2024 if the market becomes more welcoming.

"We are going after observing the core data to understand the security threat."
– Bipul Sinha, co-founder and CEO, Rubrik

Rubrik currently generates annual recurring revenue of about $600 million and may raise more than $750 million in its IPO, sources told Reuters. The company in 2021 got an investment from Microsoft in the low tens of millions that valued Rubrik at $4 billion, Bloomberg reported. Citigroup declined to comment, while Rubrik, Goldman Sachs and Barclays didn't respond to requests for comment.

What Makes Rubrik A Compelling IPO Candidate?

The firm has raised more than $550 million since its founding in 2014, including a $261 million Series E funding round at a $3.3 billion valuation that helped Rubrik move into security and compliance. Despite the economic headwinds, the company has increased its headcount by 19% over the past year to 3,334 employees, with the most aggressive growth coming in its sales and operations organizations.

"We are going after observing the core data to understand the security threat," Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha told Information Security Media Group in September. "As a result, our customers are not only doing the initial purchase, but they are also expanding with us rapidly."

Rubrik is well regarded by analyst firms, with Forrester in December recognizing it as a leader in data resilience alongside Commvault and Cohesity. Forrester praised Rubrik for integrating signals found in the backup process with leading SIEM and SOAR tools, but chided Rubrik for forcing customers to work with its customer success function on a regular basis to qualify for the ransomware recovery warranty (see: Commvault, Rubrik, Cohesity Lead Data Resilience: Forrester).

Similarly, Gartner in August called Rubrik a leader in enterprise backup and recovery software alongside Veeam, Commvault, Veritas, Dell and Cohesity. Gartner praised Rubrik for large enterprise adoption, ransomware protection and recovery features and ease of deployment and use, but cautioned about limited SaaS backup, narrow NAS Cloud Direct integration and ending its evergreen hardware program.

"Customers come to Rubrik when they have a security focus," Rubrik VP and Head of Products Vasu Murthy told ISMG in December. "If they're afraid of ransomware and they want to Improve the security of their systems, Rubrik is their No. 1 choice."

Artificial Intelligence and More Acquisitions on the Horizon?

In accurate months, Rubrik has looked for ways to apply artificial intelligence within its own organization given the challenges humans face when attempting to understand, correlate, find the cause of, analyze and fix security incidents. The company counts Allstate, KeyBank, Honda, the Denver Broncos, Nvidia, Adobe, Sephora, The Home Depot, Harvard and New York University among its 5,000 customers.

"AI and ML can also be used for good to understand the intent of a particular event, if the event correlated with a broader set of activities, if it could potentially be a zero-day or an unpatched vulnerability, and where humans can intervene to solve the problem," Sinha told ISMG in April.

One potential area of expansion for Rubrik is public cloud data observability, where Calcalist said the company and data protection rival Datadog are kicking the tires of a buy of Laminar for between $200 million and $250 million. Rubrik hasn't been shy about doing acquisitions to broaden its technological footprint, making buys in the unstructured data management and infrastructure automation spaces (see: Why Datadog and Rubrik Are In Talks to Buy Laminar for $200M).

Come this time next year, Rubrik might have more dry powder to pursue acquisitions as a newly minted public company.

Twitter will be subjected to a "stress test" by European Union digital certified this month, Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the internal market, said Thursday.

Breton, who has repeatedly called on the social media platform to adhere to the bloc's tech regulations, said in an interview that a team of about five to 10 digital certified from the EU will put Twitter and possibly other tech companies under "stress tests" late this month, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The French business executive clarified that the stress test is voluntary and does not have enforcement or monetary consequences, but it will give Twitter an idea of how the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA) will be enforced.

Breton's comments come days after he revealed that Twitter has left the EU's voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation. The EU's digital chief warned that even if the social media platform pulled out of the disinformation code, "obligations remain."

"You can run but you can't hide," he said.

Vĕra Jourová, vice president of the European Commission, said "bye, bye" to Twitter, adding that the platform "has chosen a hard way to comply with our digital laws."

"Russia's disinformation is dangerous and it is irresponsible to leave EU's anti-disinformation Code," she said.

Jourová went on to reveal that the Code "remains strong" and this month, she will meet with signatories "so we can step up our actions" ahead of the elections.

As of June 1, Twitter was still listed as a signatory of the EU disinformation code alongside other prominent American tech companies such as Meta, Microsoft, Google and Twitch.

Earlier this week, France's digital minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Twitter may be banned in the EU if it refuses to follow the bloc's digital platform rules.

"Disinformation is one of the gravest threats weighing on our democracies. Twitter, if it repeatedly doesn't follow our rules, will be banned from the EU," Barrot said as per a translation by Politico.

Breton and Musk have held two video calls since the Tesla CEO took over the social media platform in October last year.

During the January video meeting, Breton warned that "the next few months will be crucial to transform commitments into reality," Reuters reported. He said the EU wants to see "progress towards full compliance with the DSA."

Twitter's withdrawal from the EU's disinformation code is a contradictory move to Musk's earlier comments about the DSA being "exactly aligned" with his thinking, as he said in a meeting with Breton weeks after his plan to purchase Twitter surfaced.

"It's been a great discussion ... I agree with everything you said, really," Musk told Breton in a video that the EU official shared on Twitter.

The tech billionaire also replied to the video saying it was a "great meeting" with Breton. "We are very much on the same page," he said.

Twitter's relationship with the EU has been on the rocks in accurate months as officials raised concerns about the company's content moderation, disinformation and journalist ban.

Barrot and Jourová previously called out the social media platform for the sudden ban of some journalists in mid-December. The banned journalists were from CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times, as per Politico.

After the ban on journalists, French industry minister Roland Lescure said he was temporarily leaving the platform to protest Twitter's move.

Some German officials also criticized the move, with the German Foreign Affairs Ministry saying press freedom should not "be switched on and off arbitrarily."

In March, Twitter insiders told BBC that the platform could no longer protect users from disinformation, hate and child sexual exploitation after mass layoffs and changes at the company since the Musk takeover.

One employee told the outlet that harassment campaigns that targeted freedom of expression were going "undetected" on the platform.

An employee only identified as Sam said the chaos within Twitter was driven by the massive disruption in the workforce as many were laid off and others left the company after Musk took over.

An April study found that hate speech increased across the platform since October 2022 and the daily use of hate speech by accounts posting hateful content nearly doubled after the tech billionaire's takeover.

Musk has denied that hate speech increased across the platform in an interview with BBC's James Clayton in April.

Perhaps it was the moment a virtual butterfly effortlessly landed on my extended finger, or maybe it was the dinosaur's snaggle-toothed maw that came within inches of my face, or even the mountaineer who balanced barefoot on a thin cable pulled taut across a vast ravine. In truth, it was all of those experiences with Apple's stunning Apple Vision Pro spatial computing headset that convinced me I'd just experienced the true future of VR.

I know what you're thinking, "Dude, talk to me when you've washed the Apple Park koolaid out of your system." That's fair. I'm just hours from the moment Apple unveiled its first VR/AR wearable on the WWDC 2023 stage. It was a good presentation but it's hard to convey the power or experience of using VR through a canned presentation; 2D video is not equal to the task.