Author: - Computing_redesign

The image recognition will come in new versions of iOS and iPadOS - due to be released later year

Apple has announced a new feature for iPhones and iPads that is intended to limit the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online.

Apple says that its upcoming versions of iOS and iPadOS - due to be released later this year - will have 'new applications of cryptography' - enabling the company to detect CSAM images as they are uploaded to iCloud Photos, Apple's online storage.

Before an image is stored in iCloud Photos, an on-device matching process will be performed for that image against the database of known CSAM images, compiled by the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Apple is using a technology dubbed neuralHash, which analyses an image and converts it to a hash key or unique set of numbers. It then matches the key against NCMEC's database using cryptography.

Apple said the system ensures that it cannot learn about images that don't match the database.

A human reviewer will examine any images the system flags, to confirm a match.

If it is found that the image contains child abuse material, the user's account will be disabled, and the findings reported to the NCMEC.

'At Apple, our goal is to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives - while helping them stay safe,' Apple said.

'We want to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material.'

The company claimed that its system has an error rate of 'less than one in 1 trillion' per year, and that it protects user privacy.

However, privacy groups have voiced concerns that authoritarian governments could exploit the changes to Apple's operating systems to spy on dissidents or protesters.

Matthew Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said he was concerned about the potential use of the technology to frame innocent people by sending them malicious images designed to appear as matches for child porn.

Such images could fool Apple's algorithm, eventually putting users in trouble, according to Mr. Green.

"This is a thing that you can do. Researchers have been able to do this pretty easily."

Apple has also announced that its Messages app has a new feature to warn children and their parents when sending or receiving sexually explicit images, while keeping private communications unreadable by Apple.

The company is also adding new features in Siri and Search that will intervene when users try to search for CSAM-related material.

Amazon becomes the latest tech firm to announce a postponement following a rise in US Covid cases

Amazon has become the latest tech firm to delay reopening its offices, telling its corporate and tech employees they will not return until January 2022.

In an email to employees seen by the Seattle Times, Amazon head of HR Beth Galetti wrote: "As we continue to closely watch conditions related to Covid-19, we are adjusting our guidance for corporate employees in the US and other countries where we had previously anticipated our employees would begin coming in regularly the week of Sept. 7. We are now extending this date to Jan. 3, 2022."

In a statement, Amazon said: "As we continue to closely watch local conditions related to Covid-19, we are adjusting our guidance for corporate employees,"

The new reopening data is later than those announced by Google and Microsoft, both of which postponed bringing employees back to the office to October. But unlike those two companies, and also Facebook, Amazon has not stated that its staff must be vaccinated before they return.

Amazon told employees in March that it was looking to return to an "office-centric culture", but in June it backtracked, telling its corporate employees they could work remotely for two days a week, while four full weeks in a year could be worked outside the office.

The delay in reopening offices has been prompted by a sharp rise in the number of Covid-19 infections as the Delta variant spreads across the US. However, Amazon's warehouse facilities and physical store locations have continued to work in-person throughout the pandemic.

Tech companies are not alone in postponing office reopenings in the US. Financial giants Wells Fargo and BlackRock were also due to bring back remote workforces in September, but this week both announced a delay to planned office returns until October.

Pro-fossil fuel ads were viewed more than 431 million times last year on Facebook's US platforms

A thinktank has accused Facebook of allowing big oil companies to use the platform to spread fossil fuel propaganda.

According to a new study [pdf] by climate-focused thinktank InfluenceMap, fossil fuel firms and lobby groups use Facebook to run advertisements aimed at promoting oil and gas as part of a climate change solution, rather than part of the problem, to delay the extinction of fossil fuel use.

According to InfluenceMap's research, 25 oil and gas businesses - including ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute (API) - spent nearly $9.5 million with Facebook in 2020. They placed at least 25,247 pro-fossil fuel ads on Facebook's US platforms, which were viewed more than 431 million times.

Exxon alone spent $5 million on such ads, followed by the American Petroleum Institute ($2.7 million) and OneAlaska ($329,680).

The analysis also found that more than 6,700 ads on Facebook last year promoted claims that natural gas is a green or low carbon fuel, despite research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stating otherwise.

Exxon in particular frequently used Facebook advertising to spread the claim that continued use of oil was important to keep the United States from depending on other countries for its energy needs.

In many cases, oil industry ads downplayed the real impact of the sector or exaggerated the potential negative impacts of the transition to renewable energy on the economy and local communities.

The report also observed a spike in spending on Facebook adverts in July 2020, the day after then-presidential candidate Joe Biden announced a $2 trillion climate plan. Spending by oil companies remained high until the election was over, four months later.

Biden's proposal called for a sharp reduction in fossil fuel consumption to fight the climate crisis.

InfluenceMap report also accuses Facebook of not properly enforcing its advertising policies, which it says have failed to keep pace with the urgent need for climate action.

'If Facebook is serious about its climate commitments, it needs to rethink whether it's willing to keep taking the money of fossil fuel companies,' the report says.

'It is vital that these platforms, which wield significant power over the political landscape, are transparent on how their platforms are being used to influence the debate on climate change,' it adds.

In a statement to CNN, Exxon said the assertions made in the report 'are deliberately misleading and completely without merit'.

The API claimed its 'work to inform the debate' (pro-fossil fuel advertising) has been validated by government and independent studies.

A Facebook spokesperson emphasised to CNN that two wrongs can make a right, protesting that fossil fuel advertisements are not exclusive to social media:

"While ads like these run across many platforms, including on television networks such as CNN, Facebook offers an extra layer of transparency by requiring them to be available to the public in our Ad Library for up to seven years after publication," the Facebook spokesperson added.

Gjøvik raised concerns about sexism, a hostile environment and "tone-policing"

Apple has reportedly placed a senior engineering programme manager on indefinite administrative leave after she complained about unsafe working conditions and sexism at work on Twitter.

The company is conducting an investigation into claims made by Ashley Gjøvik regarding a hostile environment at work.

So, following raising concerns to #Apple about #sexism, #hostileworkenvironment, & #unsafeworkconditions, I'm now on indefinite paid administrative leave per #Apple employee relations, while they investigate my concerns. This seems to include me not using Apple's internal Slack.

— Ashley M. Gjøvik (@ashleygjovik) August 4, 2021

In an interview with The Verge, Gjøvik said she had spent several months speaking with her employer about years of experiences with unsafe working conditions, sexual harassment, and retaliation in the workplace.

She urged Apple to take immediate steps to mitigate the hostile work environment while company officials investigate her complaints.

Apple initially offered Gjøvik EAP therapy and medical leave, which she was not satisfied with.

"I told them that made no sense, and said they should talk to my leadership and set up oversight and boundaries."

She said the employee relations team closed the investigation, claiming that nothing was wrong.

Gjøvik began to raise her issues in Apple's internal Slack. She was then asked to stop using the Slack channels for such complaints.

She was also asked not to meet with other female employees at the office to discuss the company's policies.

Wanted to share: #Apple employee relations confirmed this #tonepolicing is totally ok feedback for me to get from my #bigtech #male leaders & not #sexist.

As this investigation rolls on, I've decided to start Tweeting the stuff they say is "ok." I mean, they did say it was ok? pic.twitter.com/EImLTjRTBl

— Ashley M. Gjøvik (@ashleygjovik) August 3, 2021

Gjøvik says she was put on "indefinite paid administrative leave" on 4th August, while the company conducts a new investigation. This is the second time that Apple has investigated Gjøvik's claims about sex discrimination at the company.

In a statement to Engadget, an Apple spokesperson said the company has been "deeply committed to creating and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace."

"We take all concerns seriously and we thoroughly investigate whenever a concern is raised and, out of respect for the privacy of any individuals involved, we do not discuss specific employee matters," the spokesperson added.

Apple has seen an uptick in recent employee activism, for a variety of reasons.

In May, the company fired Antonio García Martínez after many employees wrote a letter to management, complaining about sexist and misogynistic comments the engineer wrote in a book about Silicon Valley.

In June, a group of workers sent an internal letter to CEO Tim Cook, expressing their reservations over the requirement that employees return to the office for work in September.

They said they would prefer a more flexible policy, which would allow employees to work remotely if they feel comfortable working doing so.

The letter's signatories also complained that they have "often felt not just unheard, but at times actively ignored" over the last year.

A step towards the company's goal of full carbon neutrality by 2030

Dropbox has shared more details on its sustainability plans, announcing that it now uses fully reneawable electricity to power its data centre servers.

The cloud storage giant plans to be carbon neutral by 2030, and the use of full renewables is an important step towards that goal.

In an update released yesterday, the company said it was making progress towards its aim of achieving carbon neutrality for its Scope 1 and Scope 2 direct emissions, as well as its indirect Scope 3 emissions from business travel.

'As a company that runs on data centres, we recognise the impact we have on global energy consumption, and we're proud to announce that all of our data centre storage server power is covered by 100 per cent renewable electricity,' it said. 'This means when you're storing your data with us, you're not leaving a carbon footprint.'

Dropbox said it achieved its 100 per cent renewable target by focusing on three areas: maintaining best-in-class power usage effectiveness; optimising overall power consumption; and sourcing more renewable energy.

Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is an efficiency metric that tracks how efficiently a data centre operator is leveraging the power it consumes. Its use to compare data centres against each other has been criticised, however as it was always intended as an improvement metric for a company to rate its own progress, not a comparative one.

That hasn't stopped Dropbox from celebrating its 'top of the class' PUE rating. It said, '[B]y 2020, we were operating at 17 per cent below the industry average. We achieved this by implementing outside air economisation and thermal containment solutions and by maximising power utilisation throughout our spaces.'

The company also pointed to the business benefit of achieving its target, citing the Edelman 2021 Trust Barometer, which found that customers are more likely to trust companies that embrace sustainable practices (although only by 5.7 per cent).

Dropbox also said it is investing in technologies to automatically power down servers when not in use, which saves an estimated five per cent in power use over each server's lifespan.

The company is also working on driving down power consumption when a server is idle, which could yield energy savings of a further 50 per cent.

'In the last year and a half, we've reduced our data centre carbon footprint by 15 percent. In the coming years, we'll continue to find smart, innovative ways to cut back and reach our overall sustainability goals by 2030,' the company said.

In the post the firm also revealed an eye-catching method of driving employee engagement for its sustainability goals that sees it encourage staff to use volunteer time for environmental causes. Dropbox employees are entitled to 32 hours paid time off each year to work for a cause close to their hearts.

We live in a time of unprecedented change. Extreme weather is ravaging the world, disrupting lives and collapsing supply chains. It's never been more important for everyone step up and do their part for the planet, so join us on the 14th October for Computing's first ever Tech Impact event. We'll be talking about the importance of change, while also acknowledging its difficulty - and sharing success stories and advice from those who've been there and done that. Register now.

This article originally appeared on our sister site, Business Green.

Emphasises disrupting the gangs instead

The US government has decided against banning payments to ransomware gangs.

The decision came after discussions with representatives of private sector organisations and cyber security experts on Wednesday.

Following the attacks on fuel transport firm Colonial Pipeline and meatpacker JBL, which saw multimillion dollar ransoms paid to cyber gangs in return for decryption keys, some US lawmakers had called for such payments to be banned.

Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm said in May: "We need to send this strong message that paying of ransomware only exacerbates and accelerates this problem. You are encouraging the bad actors when that happens."

However, most voices, including that of the FBI, cautioned against this approach.

"If we ban ransom payments now, you're putting US companies in a position to face yet another extortion, which is being blackmailed for paying the ransom and not sharing that with authorities," Bryan Vorndran, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, told Congress in June.

Other cyber security experts noted that the most expensive part of an attack is repairing the damage rather than the ransom itself, and that without the option to resolve the matter quickly, some organisations could go under.

"Initially, I thought that was a good approach," said deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology Anne Neuberger on Wednesday, as reported by Cyberscoop. "We know that ransom payments are driving this ecosystem."

She continued: "We heard loud and clear from many that the state of resilience is inadequate, and as such, if we banned ransom payments we would essentially drive even more of that activity underground and lose insight into it that will enable us to disrupt it."

As part of these efforts to disrupt ransomware gangs, the US government set up the Ransomware Task Force, an alliance of big tech firm and government agencies, which seeks to tackle ransomware groups by going after their financial operations and limiting their ability to get paid.

The US authorities how that by making life difficult for attackers, they will avoid hitting high-profile US targets, although that approach might leave smaller ones more vulnerable.

President Biden has also been in discussions with Russian president Putin about reining in ransomware gangs, many of which are thought to operate on Russian soil.

Some states, including New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, are separately considering their own legislation to ban state and local government agencies from paying a ransom to cyber criminals.

The government is likely to take the final decision following a deeper review of the deal

The UK government is considering blocking acquisition of British chip designer Arm by American graphics hardware giant Nvidia over potential national security risks, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday citing people with knowledge of the matter.

According to the report, the preliminary investigation of the deal conducted by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has found worrying implications for the UK's national security.

The CMA submitted the completed Phase 1 investigation report to the government on 20 July, and now the government is inclined to block the deal, a source told Bloomberg.

Another person said that the government could order a deeper review of the deal, and the final decision will be taken after the review.

The government could also approve the deal, but with certain conditions, the sources added.

In a statement to Bloomberg, Nvidia said that it would "continue to work through the regulatory process with the UK government".

"We look forward to their questions and expect to resolve any issues they may have."

British chip designer Arm is currently owned by Japan's SoftBank, and its chip designs are widely used by various smartphone makers - including Apple and Samsung - as well as in laptops, data centres, and IoT devices.

In September 2020, Nvidia announced that it had entered into a definite agreement with SoftBank Group to acquire the British chip and IP design firm Arm in a $40 billion transaction.

The American firm said that Arm would operate as a separate division after completion of the deal and that it would provide more support for its R&D efforts as well as access to Nvidia's entire suite of products.

Because Nvidia is a licensee of Arm chips, the deal triggered concerns among other licensees, who were worried about its potential impact on Arm's position as a neutral supplier.

Tech firms like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Graphcore are thought to have written to the CMA asking for the deal to be blocked.

Some of Nvidia's competitors are ready to invest in Arm, if Nvidia isn't allowed to acquire it. Broadcom, Marvell and MediaTek have said that they support the takeover deal.

Earlier this year, the CMA said that it was inviting views from other companies and organisations on the impact of the deal on competition in the UK.

In April, the UK digital secretary Oliver Dowden issued an intervention notice instructing the CMA to review any potential security implications, as well as jurisdictional and competition issues posed by the deal.

"At the end of a phase-two investigation, the digital secretary has the power to take action to remedy, mitigate or prevent any effects adverse to the public interest," the government said in its press release.

The UK government is also currently reviewing the takeover deal for Newport Wafer Fab Ltd., after the company agreed to be sold to Chinese-owned Nexperia for around £63 million ($87 million).

After Nexperia announced the deal in early July, Tom Tugendhat, Conservative MP for Tonbridge and Malling and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said he was "surprised" to see that the government had not ordered a review of the NWF acquisition under the National Security and Investment Act (NSIA).

Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, said the deal was carefully considered from a national security perspective and that it was not believed to raise any issues. However, Prime Minister Boris Johnson later said that he had referred the matter to Sir Stephen Lovegrove, the national security adviser.

"We are looking into it," the prime minister told Westminster's Liaison Committee, adding that the government needs to judge whether the items being manufactured at NWF are "of real intellectual property value and interest to China" and whether there are any security implications for the UK.

MongoDB and DataStax recently released serverless versions of their cloud databases, a sign of the direction of database evolution

For many developers, serverless cloud compute in the shape of AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, to name but two, has become part of the furniture, providing on-demand infrastructure with minimal configuration, that scales as needed and is charged according to consumption.

Less well-known are serverless databases, which include DataStax AstraDB, which reached general availability in February, and MongoDB Atlas Serverless, which was released last month. Like serverless compute, they also promise infinite scalability and consumption-based pricing, in a way that may be particularly suited to cloud-native and event-driven workloads.

Serverless databases are designed to handle unpredictable, rapidly changing tasks. Are they really ‘server-less'? Well no, but then neither is Lambda et al. The servers are there, humming away in some data centre somewhere, but you don't need to worry about configuring them or their virtualised offspring. You just turn them on like a tap and turn them off again when you're done. That's the idea anyway. 'Serverless' is one of the industry's more deceptive terms, but to the annoyance of linguistic purists it's one that has stuck.

One person that's not convinced that serverless is an evolution is Percona product owner MongoDB, Akira Kurogane.

"Why serverless when it's server-ful?" he said, before conceding that for small cloud databases that are intermittently used, such as for data science experiments, it could be cheaper to run them that way than on a per-server basis. "It depends on how MongoDB prices them in the future."

Currently, MongoDB Atlas Serverless, which is still in preview mode, costs US $0.30 per million reads and $1.25 per million writes and storage at $0.25 per GB per month.

DataStax AstraDB, a serverless Cassandra service, comes in at a similar price tag, with rates varying slightly according to the choice of cloud provider. In EMEA, reads are $0.39, $0.26 and $0.26 on GCP, AWS and Azure, respectively, with writes priced between $1.16 and $1.33. Storage costs are $0.25 GB/month.

Nanna Einarsdóttir, VP engineering at Icelandic firm Ankeri, A customer of DataStax AstraDB, told Computing about the appeal of the model for the company, which provides real-time data to the commercial shipping sector.

First, she said, the company decided on NoSQL as a primary data store architecture because of the need to handle large volumes of fast moving data, eventually plumping for Apache Cassandra for its scalability. Her team then decided the serverless option would be a good fit owing to the lack of administrative overhead.

We only have to pay for the service that we use over time, rather than having to estimate capacity in advance and pay extra - Nanna Einarsdóttir, Ankeri

"We decided on serverless Cassandra as it meant that we could run this as a service and not have to worry about having to implement our own clusters or carrying out management tasks," Einarsdóttir said.

"Our developers can use APIs to interact with data, and the service takes care of all the management tasks".

She added: "We only have to pay for the service that we use over time, rather than having to estimate capacity in advance and pay extra."

So far the results have been in line with expectations, she explained, with serverless allowing the team to get up and running "very quickly, much faster than we would have been able to if we had to design and install our own clusters."

Einarsdóttir continued: "Going serverless around our applications and our data together has helped us develop our operations faster."

Inevitably, though, there has been a learning curve, although that seems more to do with Cassandra than with the serverless model.

"In our initial design, we planned to have a lot of columns within our database implementation in order to capture all the data that each ship provides, but this could impact performance whenever search operations would be carried out," she said, adding that DataStax engineers were on hand to help with a more compact and storage-efficient design.

As Atlas Serverless is still in preview, MongoDB were unable to offer a customer for interview, but the purported benefits will be much the same: cost control, scalability, rapid iteration for developers, and reduced administration. "With MongoDB Atlas serverless instances, you will get seamless deployment and scaling, a reliable backend infrastructure, and an intuitive pricing model," the company's website says.

DataStax and MongoDB are not the only database providers with serverless options. The big cloud companies have had their own offerings for a couple of years, including AWS Aurora Serverless, Azure SQL Serverless and Google Firebase, and ISVs like CockroachDB have also created serverless alternatives.

See also: Storage at scale: picking the right options for Kubernetes

Patrick McFadin, VP developer relations at DataStax, sees serverless databases that can run in multiple clouds as offering new flexible options for developers.

"It took some rethinking of the internal architecture, but it was ready for this type of deployment based on how it runs as a distributed database," he said of AstraDB, adding that the changes will flow into the community version of Cassandra.

"We'll be sharing those changes with the open source community, which is really the big shift in databases. What open source databases will run as serverless?"

With cloud infrastructure increasing ephemeral, having always-on database connectivity may be wasteful. In a cloud-native scenario - or one where applications make use of a lot of serverless functions - a database that you only connect to when you need and which can then scale automatically and almost instantly would seem to be a much better general fit. With other storage options also available to cloud-native developers, it's not surprising to see vendors moving in this direction. Serverless is also likely to find favour with small teams who lack the capacity for managing infrastructure.

Nevertheless, they are not suitable for every application. There is an inevitable delay as connectivity is established, and cold starts mean that latency will be increased. Teams may also find that time saved in setup is used up by the need to monitor resource usage and performance and to implement new security measures.

That said, we expect to see more organisations investigating the serverless option from here on in.

In Europe, electric cars have 66–69 per cent lower emissions over their lifetime than a comparable petrol vehicle

A new study conducted by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) has finally put an end to claims that electric vehicles are not much cleaner than combustion engine vehicles and produce almost similar amount of carbon during their life cycle.

The study, which is based on the data from Europe, the US, China and India, says that the battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have by far the lowest life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions among different types of vehicles.

Moreover, the emission savings are set to improve in coming years, with better access to clean, renewable energy sources.

The aim of the ICCT study [pdf] was to understand how the transportation sector across the world needs to align with efforts towards achieving the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting global warming.

The study involved a life-cycle analysis of BEVs, hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs), fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) and internal combustion vehicles.

It also took into account the present and estimated future GHG emissions attributable to different stages in the life cycles of both vehicles and fuels - from extracting raw material to making batteries for vehicles.

The researchers then compiled driving data for four different markets that currently account for nearly 70 per cent of the world's all vehicle purchases.

The study found that the life cycle emissions of a BEV in Europe today are 66-69 per cent lower than a comparable petrol-powered car. For other regions, the range is 60-68 per cent in the US, 37-45 per cent in China, and 19-34 per cent in India.

"We have a lot of lobby work from parts of the automotive industry saying that electric vehicles are not that much better if you take into account the electricity production and the battery production. We wanted to look into this and see whether these arguments are true," said ICCT researcher Georg Bieker.

He hopes the latest findings will help policymakers in making more informed decisions about the future of transportation.

Peter Mock, ICCT managing director for Europe, said that results highlight the importance of grid decarbonisation alongside vehicle electrification.

"The life-cycle GHG performance of electric cars will improve as grids decarbonise, and regulations that promote electrification are crucial to capturing the future benefits of renewable energy," he added.

The study findings come as the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) stated in its Electric Vehicle Charging Market Report last week that the government needs to increase the number of charging points across the UK tenfold to support the plan to ban combustion cars from 2030.

The CMA said the government must work on infrastructure to ensure that electric vehicle charging becomes "as simple as filling up with petrol or diesel".

The UK currently has about 25,000 charging points, and the regulator estimates that between 280,000 and 480,000 charging points will be needed by 2030.

Interested users can buy a plan if they want to try the service, says Microsoft

Just two days after announcing the general availability of its Windows 365 Cloud PC service, Microsoft has put a hold on its free trials due to 'unbelievable' demand.

The company says it has reached the capacity for Windows 365 trials and needs to pause the free trial programme until it provisions more capacity to support them.

In the meantime, people can buy a plan if they want to try the service. Interested parties are also being invited to sign up for the trial so that they can be notified when more capacity becomes available.

Following significant demand, we have reached capacity for Windows 365 trials. Sign up to receive a notification when trials resume or buy today, here: https://t.co/Jji5RbfTbT

— Microsoft 365 (@Microsoft365) August 3, 2021

Microsoft announced the general availability and pricing of Windows 365 service on 2 August.

"Windows 365 introduces a new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 (when it's generally available later this calendar year) for all types of workers, from interns and contractors to software developers and industrial designers," Scott Manchester, director of programme management for Windows 365, said while announcing the general availability.

With Windows 365, a company doesn't need to provide a corporate-issued laptop to workers. Instead, employees can gain access to their company's software simply by logging into windows365.microsoft.com.

"Windows 365 only requires a device that includes the HTML5 browser and a DSL connection or a wireless internet connection capable of streaming a video," Microsoft says in a FAQ page.

Windows 365 offers a wide range of RAM, CPU, and storage options to users and provides a complete computing experience through a web browser or a native app on any device that has an active Internet connection. Users can use Windows 365 from a PC, Mac, iPad or any mobile device with a browser.

According to Microsoft, Cloud PC is specifically designed to fulfil the growing demands of hybrid work environments that enable employees to divide their time between the office and home.

Microsoft is currently offering Windows 365 to enterprises and organisations, and not individual customers. It comes in two editions: Business and Enterprise.

Business plans are capped at 300 users per organisation, while Enterprise subscribers can have unlimited users. Another difference between the two editions is that Business customers can access Windows 365 through the URL windows365.microsoft.com, while Enterprise customers will have it integrated with Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

The company is also offering a 'Windows Hybrid Benefit' which means that users with existing licences can apply for a discount.

The entry-level $20 per user per month Business prices provides a Cloud PC with a single virtual core, 2 GB of RAM, and 64 GB of storage and requires the Windows Hybrid Benefit. Those without an existing licence will pay $4 more per user per month.

A "Premium" plan with four virtual cores, 16 GB RAM, and 128 GB storage costs $66 per month with the $4 discount. The most expensive $158 per user per month ($162 without Hybrid Benefit) option provides a Cloud PC with 8 virtual cores, 32 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage.