Microsoft is threatening to bring back its loveable / annoying Clippy character. A post adds: The software giant claims it will replace the paperclip emoji in Microsoft Office with Clippy if one of its tweets gets 20,000 likes. The tweet has already passed 19,500 likes, so Clippy could be about to return as a more innocent emoji. Born in Office 97, Clippy originally appeared as an assistant to offer help and tips for using Microsoft Office. You either loved or hated its Groucho eyebrows and persistence, and Microsoft eventually killed off Clippy in Office XP in 2001.

Inside the World Wide Web Consortium, where the world's top engineers battle over the future of your data. From a report: One of the web's geekiest corners, the W3C is a mostly-online community where the people who operate the internet -- website publishers, browser companies, ad tech firms, privacy advocates, academics and others -- come together to hash out how the plumbing of the web works. It's where top developers from companies like Google pitch proposals for new technical standards, the rest of the community fine-tunes them and, if all goes well, the consortium ends up writing the rules that ensure websites are secure and that they work no matter which browser you're using or where you're using it. The W3C's members do it all by consensus in public GitHub forums and open Zoom meetings with meticulously documented meeting minutes, creating a rare archive on the internet of conversations between some of the world's most secretive companies as they collaborate on new rules for the web in plain sight.

But lately, that spirit of collaboration has been under intense strain as the W3C has become a key battleground in the war over web privacy. Over the last year, far from the notice of the average consumer or lawmaker, the people who actually make the web run have converged on this niche community of engineers to wrangle over what privacy really means, how the web can be more private in practice and how much power tech giants should have to unilaterally enact this change. On one side are engineers who build browsers at Apple, Google, Mozilla, Brave and Microsoft. These companies are frequent competitors that have come to embrace web privacy on drastically different timelines. But they've all heard the call of both global regulators and their own users, and are turning to the W3C to develop new privacy-protective standards to replace the tracking techniques businesses have long relied on. On the other side are companies that use cross-site tracking for things like website optimization and advertising, and are fighting for their industry's very survival. That includes small firms like Rosewell's, but also giants of the industry, like Facebook.

Microsoft is putting Windows in the cloud. Windows 365 is a new service that will let businesses access Cloud PCs from anywhere, streaming a version of Windows 10 or Windows 11 in a web browser. From a report: While virtualization and remote access to PCs has existed for more than a decade, Microsoft is betting on Windows 365 to offer Cloud PCs to businesses just as they shift toward a mix of office and remote work. Windows 365 will work on any modern web browser or through Microsoft's Remote Desktop app, allowing users to access their Cloud PC from a variety of devices.

"Windows 365 provides an instant-on boot experience," according to Wangui McKelvey, a general manager for Microsoft 365. This instant access lets workers stream their Windows session with all of their same apps, tools, data, and settings across Macs, iPads, Linux machines, and Android devices. "You can pick up right where you left off,âbecause the state of your Cloud PC remains the same, even when you switch devices," explains McKelvey.

Republicans are questioning Amazon's relationship with the Pentagon after newly released emails show that defense officials praised tech executives vying for a $10 billion contract during the Trump administration. The Verge reports: On Tuesday, The New York Times reported on previously unreleased emails that show Pentagon officials applauding Amazon executives while the company sought out a lucrative defense contract between 2017 and 2018. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, or JEDI, set out to find a tech company that would move the Defense Department's computer networks over to the cloud. In one instance, the Times reports that former Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with executives from companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google in 2017. During this trip, Mattis was made "uncomfortable" while Amazon representatives aggressively pitched their cloud-computing products to him. A former Mattis adviser, Sally Donnelly, also referred to Bezos as "the genius of our age." Donnelly, who later sent Mattis a list of reasons he should meet with Bezos, had previously worked at a consulting firm where her clients included Amazon.

"This is exactly what we were concerned about, and it contradicts Amazon's insistence that there is nothing to see here," Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said in a joint statement Tuesday. "It's become more and more clear that Amazon used its market power and paid-for connections to circumvent ethical boundaries and avoid competition in an attempt to win this contract." Microsoft won the multibillion-dollar contract in 2019 after a closely watched bidding fight between Amazon. But earlier this month, the Defense Department announced that it would cancel its contract amid an ongoing legal battle alleging that Trump wrongfully interfered in the bidding process. In canceling the prior contract, Amazon is given a second chance to win the $10 billion deal. But Republicans in Washington are calling for the company to testify regarding its Pentagon relationships in light of the newly released emails.

Microsoft took the wraps off Windows 11 recently, and we expect the new OS to arrive later this year. Upgrading to a new version of Windows is often a painful process, and in the past, you were stuck even if the new software ruined your workflow. It's different this time: Microsoft says you'll be able to go back to Windows 10 if you don't like Windows 11. You'll only have 10 days to decide, though. From a report: How will you know if Windows 11 is worth using? There's a preview program for Windows 11, but the preview builds are still missing some elements of the final release. You don't have to mess with the Insiders builds at all -- you can install the final version when it's available, and take it for a spin. This news comes by way of a PDF that Microsoft has provided to PC manufacturers. It's an FAQ format, and among the various redundant queries is this gem: "Can I go back to Windows 10 after I upgrade if I don't like Windows 11?" The answer is a resounding yes... for 10 days. You'll have that long to decide to roll back to Windows 10. Wait any longer, and you're locked into Windows 11 unless you reformat your system.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Microsoft updated its Teams communication app with a more sophisticated way to give PowerPoint presentations in January, the company published a 500-word blog post on the feature. People could read the blog post and try to figure out how to use it, or they could consult YouTube. On the video service owned by arch-rival Google, a former Microsoft employee named Kevin Stratvert published a video on Presenter Mode to his more than 800,000 subscribers, garnering more than 180,000 views and hundreds of comments. Microsoft itself had not published a video on the topic. "I've built a Microsoft audience," Stratvert said in an interview with CNBC. "Microsoft content drives a lot more viewership than non-Microsoft content. I've done Gmail and a few others, but they haven't done quite as well."

[...] Historically, developing and maintaining products has been the core of Microsoft. Today nearly 50% of employees work in engineering. Marketing is a considerably smaller part of the business, and employees work on ads, materials for Microsoft's website, events and other methods of promotion. In the past few years, a group inside Microsoft began focusing more on YouTube. "On YouTube specifically, we're starting to explore the concept of what it looks like to do something native to YouTube," Sonia Atchison, a market research lead who worked on the Microsoft Creators Program, said on a podcast last year. People often turn to YouTube when they want to get a better understanding of Microsoft software, and while Microsoft has plenty of its own videos available on YouTube, they don't always come up at the top of the site's search results, Atchison said. Videos from outsiders can receive higher rankings. Sometimes a video from a Microsoft employee might be there. The company does have employees with large audiences, including Mike Tholfsen, a 26-year company veteran whose videos show how teachers and students can use Teams and other applications.

A notorious group of cybercriminals whose operations were almost totally dismantled last year seems to be back in business -- in yet another example of the seemingly intractable nature of cybercrime. Gizmodo reports: The Russian-speaking group known as "Trickbot" (which is also the name of the malware that they're responsible for creating and distributing), has built up its infrastructure and seems to be preparing for some nefarious new campaign, The Daily Beast first reported. The group, which has been connected to ransomware attacks and widespread theft of financial information, is an outgrowth of an older, Russia-based cybercrime group called "Dyre." After Dyre was initially broken up by Russian authorities back in 2015, the remaining members regrouped, creating new malware tools and working to employ them in even more expansive criminal enterprises. Trickbot, which today operates out of numerous places in Eastern Europe -- including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and others -- is perhaps best known for running one of the world's largest botnets. Botnets are large networks of "zombie" devices -- computers that have been infected with special kinds of malware that allow them to be collectively controlled by a hacker, typically for malicious purposes. In Trickbot's case, the group has used its million-plus botnet for an assortment of sordid activities, including helping to launch ransomware attacks throughout the world.

Last fall, the Pentagon's Cyber Command attempted to debilitate Trickbot, fearing that hackers connected to the group might attempt to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. CYBERCOM launched a series of "coordinated attacks" against Trickbot's servers, ultimately succeeding in disrupting its operations. However, it was clear that federal officials did not expect their efforts to be a long-term deterrent, with anonymous sources telling the Washington Post that the action was "not expected to permanently dismantle the network." Around the same time, Microsoft launched its own campaign that was also targeted at dismantling the group. The company tracked and analyzed the servers that were involved in operating the botnet, subsequently garnering a court order that allowed them to disable the IP addresses connected to those servers. Microsoft's operation even involved working together with ISPs to reportedly go "door to door" in Latin America, where they helped to replace routers that had been compromised by the criminal group. However, as is often the case with cybercrime, few of the culprits behind the malware's distribution were ever tracked down or faced charges.

Indeed, a recent report from security firm Fortinet seems to show that the group has allegedly helped create a new strain of ransomware, dubbed "Diavol." On top of this, another report from BitDefender shows that the group has built back up its infrastructure and that it has recently been seen gearing up for new attacks and malicious activity, with the firm ultimately noting that "Trickbot shows no sign of slowing down."

Microsoft said it has agreed to acquire RiskIQ, a security software maker, as the tech giant tries to expand its products and better protect customers amid a rising tide of global cyberattacks. From a report: The company announced the deal Monday on its web site and didn't disclose terms. Bloomberg on Sunday reported the purchase, citing people familiar with the matter. Microsoft is paying more than $500 million in cash for the company, said one of the people, who declined to be named discussing confidential matters. San Francisco-based RiskIQ makes cloud software for detecting security threats, helping clients understand where and how they can be attacked on complex webs of corporate networks and devices. Its customers include Facebook, BMW, American Express and the U.S. Postal Service, according to the company's web site.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Verge: Microsoft is gifting its employees a $1,500 pandemic bonus. In an internal memo seen by The Verge, the software giant says this one-time bonus "is in recognition of the unique and challenging fiscal year that Microsoft just completed."

Microsoft's chief people officer, Kathleen Hogan, announced the gift to employees Thursday, and it will apply to all eligible employees in both the U.S. and internationally. Microsoft is gifting this bonus to all staff below corporate vice president level that started on or before March 31st, 2021, including part-time workers and those on hourly rates. Microsoft has 175,508 employees worldwide, but LinkedIn, GitHub, and ZeniMax employees are not eligible for the bonus, despite Microsoft owning these three separate companies. As a result, we understand it's a gift of around $200 million, or less than two days' worth of profit for Microsoft.
The article also notes similar gifts given to employees at Facebook, BT, and Vox Media, as well as Amazon's $300 holiday bonus to frontline workers.

And GitHub did do something special for its employees, according to the company's holiday FAQ: The pandemic brought unprecedented challenges, revolutionizing the way our customers and open source community build software. We have watched our employees step up...while also balancing the unique complexities of remote work, children, health, and more. We recognize that our employees are our greatest asset, so to give back to our employees who give so much, we will be taking company wide wellbeing days July 5-9, as well as six Fridays in July and August.

GitHub is committed to providing our customers with high-quality customer support and will have staff available to assist should an issue arise, however you may experience a delayed response during these dates.

To ensure a seamless developer experience, we recommend that you refrain from upgrading between June 28 and July 9.

"New data from Statcounter shows that Edge has now overtaken established rival Firefox in the rankings," reports TechRadar: In recent months, the pair have been neck-and-neck, but Microsoft's browser has now put daylight between itself and Firefox. Figures for June suggest Microsoft Edge now holds 3.4% of the browser market, while Firefox has slipped to 3.29%, continuing a downward trajectory that has seen the browser either lose or maintain market share in ten of the last twelve months.

The change pushes Edge into third position in the browser rankings, behind only Chrome (65.27%) and Safari (18.34%). Launched in January 2020, the new Chromium-based Edge got off to a slow start, but began to gather momentum as the year progressed. Since last summer, the browser's market share has more than tripled.

The increase in adoption can be attributed in part to renewed marketing efforts, but also to improvements that brought the experience in line with other modern web browsers.
That may be true, but the article also acknowledges that it was just last month that Microsoft began rolling out Edge to all Windows PCs (via Windows 10 updates), "expanding the install base by millions almost overnight.

"Now, Microsoft is doing everything in its power to encourage users to abandon Internet Explorer in favor of Edge, such as removing support for Microsoft 365 web apps and automatically launching certain web pages in the new browser."

"The Rust for Linux project, sponsored by Google, has advanced..." reported the Register earlier this week: A new set of patches submitted to the Linux kernel mailing list summarizes the progress of the project to enable Rust to be used alongside C for implementing the Linux kernel. The progress is significant.

- ARM and RISC-V architectures are now supported, thanks to work on rustc_codgen_gcc, which is a GCC codegen for rustc. This means that rustc does the initial compilation of Rust code but GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection) does the backend compilation, enabling support for the architectures that GCC supports...

- Overall, "the Rust support is still to be considered experimental. However, as noted back in April, support is good enough that kernel developers can start working on the Rust abstractions for subsystems and write drivers and other modules," continued project leader Miguel Ojeda, a computer scientist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, now working full time on Rust for Linux...

There is substantial support for the project across the industry. Google said in April "we feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel" and that it would reduce the number of potential bugs and security vulnerabilities. Google is sponsoring Ojeda to work full time on the project for a year, via the ISRG (Internet Security Research Group), which said last month that it is part of "efforts to move the internet's critical software infrastructure to memory safe code," under the project name Prossimo. The ISRG is also the nonprofit organisation behind Let's Encrypt free security certificates. Ojeda also mentioned that Microsoft's Linux Systems Group is contributing and hopes to submit "select Hyper-V drivers written in Rust." Arm is promising assistance with Rust for Linux on ARM-based systems. IBM has contributed Rust kernel support for its PowerPC processor.

More detail is promised at the forthcoming Linux Plumber's Conference in September. In the meantime, the project is on GitHub here.
"In addition, we would like to announce that we are organizing a new conference that focuses on Rust and the Linux kernel..." Ojeda posted. "Details will be announced soon." And for context, the Register adds: Linus Torvalds has said on several occasions that he welcomes the possibility of using Rust alongside C for kernel development, and told IT Wire in April that it is "getting to the point where maybe it might be mergeable for 5.14 or something like that."

Microsoft is to give its non-executive staff a $1,500 bonus for their work during the pandemic. From a report: The company told the BBC it was a symbol of appreciation "during a uniquely challenging year." It added: "We are proud to recognise our employees with a one-time monetary gift." In the first quarter of 2021 Microsoft's profits rose 38% on the same period last year. The Verge reported that employees below vice-president level who joined no later than 31 March 2021 would receive the payment, including part-time workers. The big tech firms have done well during the pandemic and Microsoft is not the only firm to have made bonus payments to staff. In March 2020, Facebook gave employees a $1,000 bonus to help them with increased expenses caused by the pandemic, such as those associated with setting up a home office. Google made a similar $1,000 payment in May 2020. In December, Amazon gave front-line employees a $300 dollar bonus with part-time workers receiving $150.

Microsoft awarded $13.6 million to security researchers in the past 12 months, From a report: Microsoft said it awarded more than $13.6 million as monetary rewards to security researchers through its public bug bounty programs over the past 12 months. According to Microsoft:
The funds were awarded for 1,261 bugs reported by 341 security researchers across 17 bug bounty platforms between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021.

The highest awarded bounty was $200,000 for a vulnerability reported in Hyper-V, Microsoft's OS virtualization technology.
The average bounty was more than $10,000 per valid bug report across all programs.
Most bug reports came from researchers residing in China, the US, and Israel.
The company said it plans to announce the 2021 Most Valuable Security Researcher next month.
The sum awarded this year is identical to what Microsoft reported one year ago when the company said it awarded $13.7 million to 327 security researchers for 1,226 vulnerability reports across 15 bug bounty programs in the previous 12 months (July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020).

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, eight tech companies were accused of funneling their users' data to the U.S. National Security Agency under the so-called PRISM program, according to highly classified government documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Six months later, the tech companies formed a coalition under the name Reform Government Surveillance, which as the name would suggest was to lobby lawmakers for reforms to government surveillance laws. The idea was simple enough: to call on lawmakers to limit surveillance to targeted threats rather than conduct a dragnet collection of Americans' private data, provide greater oversight and allow companies to be more transparent about the kinds of secret orders for user data that they receive.

Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo and AOL were the founding members of Reform Government Surveillance, or RGS, and over the years added Amazon, Dropbox, Evernote, Snap and Zoom as members. But then sometime in June 2019, Evernote quietly disappeared from the RGS website without warning. What's even more strange is that nobody noticed for two years, not even Evernote. "We hadn't realized our logo had been removed from the Reform Government Surveillance website," said an Evernote spokesperson, when reached for comment by TechCrunch. "We are still members."

ASUS and Qualcomm have teamed up to make a smartphone that shows off some of the latter's mobile tech. Although the phone is ostensibly for the 1.6 million members of the Snapdragon Insiders program (which is a bit like Microsoft's Windows Insider early-access scheme), it'll be more broadly available by August. From a report: The snappily named Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders harnesses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 5G chipset with a 2.84 GHz octa-core processor and the Adreno 660 GPU. It has what Qualcomm describes as "the most comprehensive support for all key 5G sub-6 and mmWave bands" of any device, along with WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E support with speeds of up to 3.6 Gbps. You'll get 16GB of LPDDR5 memory and 512GB of storage. The 6.78-inch AMOLED display from Samsung has a 144 Hz refresh rate, which could help make it a solid gaming phone. The screen has up to 1,200 nits of brightness and it's HDR10 and HDR10+ certified. The phone has three rear cameras: a 64MP main lens, 12MP ultrawide camera and 8MP telephoto. The array can capture video in up to 8K. The device also has a 24MP front camera and AI auto-zoom. You'll be able to buy the $1,499 device at ASUSTeK's eShop and other retailers.

The computer code behind the massive ransomware attack by the Russian-speaking hacking ring REvil was written so that the malware avoids systems that primarily use Russian or related languages, according to a new report by a cybersecurity firm. NBC News reports: It's long been known that some malicious software includes this feature, but the report by Trustwave SpiderLabs, obtained exclusively by NBC News, appears to be the first to publicly identify it as an element of the latest attack, which is believed to be the largest ransomware campaign ever. "They don't want to annoy the local authorities, and they know they will be able to run their business much longer if they do it this way," said Ziv Mador, Trustwave SpiderLabs' vice president of security research.

Trustwave said the ransomware "avoids systems that have default languages from what was the USSR region. This includes Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Tajik, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Uzbek, Tatar, Romanian, Russian Moldova, Syriac, and Syriac Arabic." In May, cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs noted that ransomware by DarkSide, the Russia-based group that attacked Colonial Pipeline in May, "has a hard-coded do-not-install list of countries," including Russia and former Soviet satellites that mostly have favorable relations with the Kremlin. In general, criminal ransomware groups are allowed to operate with impunity inside Russia and other former Soviet states as long as they focus their attacks on the United States and the West, experts say. Krebs noted that in some cases, the mere installation of a Russian language virtual keyboard on a computer running Microsoft Windows will cause malware to bypass that machine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates have at times referred to the foundation they established together as their "fourth child." If over the next two years they can't find a way to work together following their planned divorce, Mr. Gates will get full custody. That was one of the most important takeaways from a series of announcements about the future of the world's largest charitable foundation made on Wednesday by its chief executive, Mark Suzman, overshadowing an injection of an additional $15 billion in resources that will be added to the $50 billion previously amassed in its endowment over two decades.

"They have agreed that if after two years either one of them decides that they cannot continue to work together, Melinda will resign as co-chair and trustee," Mr. Suzman said in a message to foundation employees Wednesday. If that happens, he added, Ms. French Gates "would receive personal resources from Bill for her philanthropic work" separate from the foundation's endowment. The money at stake underscores the strange mix of public significance -- in global health, poverty reduction and gender equality among other important areas -- and private affairs that attends any move made by the first couple of philanthropy, even after the announcement of their split. The foundation plans to add additional trustees outside their close circle, a step toward better governance that philanthropy experts had urged for years.

When they announced their divorce in May, Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates noted the importance of the work done by the foundation they had built together and said they "continue to share a belief in that mission." In the announcement Wednesday, each echoed those sentiments. "These new resources and the evolution of the foundation's governance will sustain this ambitious mission and vital work for years to come," Mr. Gates said in a statement. Ms. French Gates emphasized the importance of expanding the board. "These governance changes bring more diverse perspectives and experience to the foundation's leadership," Ms. French Gates said in a statement. "I believe deeply in the foundation's mission and remain fully committed as co-chair to its work." In the immediate aftermath of the divorce announcement, it was unclear how they would share control of the institution. Wednesday's announcement indicated that if they cannot work out their differences, it is the Microsoft co-founder Mr. Gates who will maintain control, as he essentially buys his ex-wife out of the foundation. Mr. Suzman said he did not know how much she would get if it came to that. But any payout would likely be significant.

Microsoft has suspended its SQL Server on Windows Container beta "with immediate effect." The Register reports: The statement yesterday (early on a US public holiday) by Microsoft senior program manager Amit Khandelwal said: "Due to the existing ecosystem challenges and usage patterns we have decided to suspend the SQL Server on Windows Containers beta program for foreseeable future. Should the circumstances change, we will revisit the decision at appropriate time." Ecosystem challenges? Microsoft introduced Windows Server Containers in Windows Server 2016, enlisting the support of Docker so that developers could easily deploy containerised Windows applications in a similar manner to Linux. Windows containers are important to the company, used in its Application Guard security feature, which opens untrusted websites and Office documents in an isolated Hyper-V container. Containers were a key component of the abandoned Windows 10X.
[...]
The beta program for SQL Server on Windows containers began in 2017, said [Microsoft senior program manager Amit Khandelwal], which is a while back, and the fact that it has not hit general availability probably comes as no surprise to its relatively few users. That said, Microsoft has also decided to delete the Windows SQL Server images in the Docker Hub repository immediately, which did not go down well. "Could you please not delete those repos and images? That is going to break stuff. Folks have builds that depend on these images. At least give some warning rather than 'immediate effect,'" pleaded developer David Gardiner. Khandelwal replied saying that these container images were now three years old and "we do want any new users and customers downloading it." Since it was a beta, not supported in production, customers used it at their own risk.

In July 2019, Microsoft introduced an Early Adopters Program for SQL Server 2019 on Windows containers, the link for which leads appropriately to "Error 403 -- this web app is stopped." SQL Server running directly on Windows or in a Windows VM remains, of course, in rude health. Microsoft also recently introduced a preview of SQL Server for Azure Arc, supporting both Windows and Linux instances.

Russian government hackers breached the computer systems of the Republican National Committee last week, around the time a Russia-linked criminal group unleashed a massive ransomware attack, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter. From the report: The government hackers were part of a group known as APT 29 or Cozy Bear, according to the people. That group has been tied to Russia's foreign intelligence service and has previously been accused of breaching the Democratic National Committee in 2016, and of carrying out a supply-chain cyberattack involving SolarWinds Corp., which infiltrated nine U.S. government agencies and was disclosed in December. It's not known what data the hackers viewed or stole, if anything. An RNC spokesman on Tuesday denied its systems were breached and referred to an earlier statement.

"Microsoft informed us that one of our vendors, Synnex, systems may have been exposed," Mike Reed, a spokesman for the RNC, said on Saturday. "There is no indication the RNC was hacked or any RNC information was stolen. We are investigating the matter and have informed DHS and the FBI." The attack on the RNC, coupled with the recent ransomware attack, is a major provocation to President Joe Biden, who warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about cyberattacks at a June 16 summit. It's not clear if the attack on the RNC is connected in any way to the ransomware attacks, which exploited multiple previously unknown vulnerabilities in software from Miami-based Kaseya Ltd.

President Joe Biden will direct the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to draft new rules aimed at stopping manufacturers from limiting consumers' ability to repair products at independent shops or on their own, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the plan. From the report: While the agency will ultimately decide the size and scope of the order, the presidential right-to-repair directive is expected to mention mobile phone manufacturers and Department of Defense contractors as possible areas for regulation. Tech companies including Apple and Microsoft have imposed limits on who can repair broken consumer electronics like game consoles and mobile phones, which consumer advocates say increases repair costs. The order is also expected to benefit farmers, who face expensive repair costs from tractor manufacturers who use proprietary repair tools, software, and diagnostics to prevent third-parties from working on the equipment, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss the action ahead of its official announcement.