WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Friday that new commitments by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other companies that are leading the development of artificial intelligence technology to meet a set of AI safeguards brokered by his White House are an important step toward managing the “enormous” promise and risks posed by the technology.

Biden announced that his administration has secured voluntary commitments from seven U.S. companies meant to ensure that their AI products are safe before they release them. Some of the commitments call for third-party oversight of the workings of the next generation of AI systems, though they don’t detail who will audit the technology or hold the companies accountable.

“We must be clear eyed and vigilant about the threats emerging technologies can pose,” Biden said, adding that the companies have a “fundamental obligation” to ensure their products are safe.

“Social media has shown us the harm that powerful technology can do without the right safeguards in place,” Biden added. “These commitments are a promising step, but we have a lot more work to do together.”

A surge of commercial investment in generative AI tools that can write convincingly human-like text and churn out new images and other media has brought public fascination as well as concern about their ability to trick people and spread disinformation, among other dangers.

The four tech giants, along with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and startups Anthropic and Inflection, have committed to security testing “carried out in part by independent experts” to guard against major risks, such as to biosecurity and cybersecurity, the White House said in a statement.

That testing will also examine the potential for societal harms, such as bias and discrimination, and more theoretical dangers about advanced AI systems that could gain control of physical systems or “self-replicate” by making copies of themselves.

The companies have also committed to methods for reporting vulnerabilities to their systems and to using digital watermarking to help distinguish between real and AI-generated images or audio known as deepfakes.

Executives from the seven companies met behind closed doors with Biden and other officials Friday as they pledged to follow the standards.

“He was very firm and clear” that he wanted the companies to continue to be innovative, but at the same time “felt that this needed a lot of attention,” Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman said in an interview after the White House gathering.

“It’s a big deal to bring all the labs together, all the companies,” said Suleyman, whose Palo Alto, California-based startup is the youngest and smallest of the firms. “This is supercompetitive and we wouldn’t come together under other circumstances.”

The companies will also publicly report flaws and risks in their technology, including effects on fairness and bias, according to the pledge.

The voluntary commitments are meant to be an immediate way of addressing risks ahead of a longer-term push to get Congress to pass laws regulating the technology.

Some advocates for AI regulations said Biden’s move is a start but more needs to be done to hold the companies and their products accountable.

“A closed-door deliberation with corporate actors resulting in voluntary safeguards isn’t enough,” said Amba Kak, executive director of the AI Now Institute. “We need a much more wide-ranging public deliberation, and that’s going to bring up issues that companies almost certainly won’t voluntarily commit to because it would lead to substantively different results, ones that may more directly impact their business models.”

While voluntary, agreeing to submit to “ red team” tests that poke at their AI systems is not an easy promise, said Suleyman.

“The commitment we’ve made to have red-teamers basically try to break our models, identify weaknesses and then share those methods with the other large language model developers is a pretty significant commitment,” Suleyman said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said he will introduce legislation to regulate AI and is working closely with the Biden administration “and our bipartisan colleagues” to build upon the pledges made Friday.

A number of technology executives have called for regulation, and several attended an earlier White House summit in May.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a blog post Friday that his company is making some commitments that go beyond the White House pledge, including support for regulation that would create a “licensing regime for highly capable models.”

Some experts and upstart competitors worry that the type of regulation being floated could be a boon for deep-pocketed first-movers led by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft as smaller players are elbowed out by the high cost of making their AI systems adhere to regulatory strictures.

The White House pledge notes that it mostly only applies to models that “are overall more powerful than the current industry frontier,” set by recent models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and image generator DALL-E 2 and similar releases from Anthropic, Google and Amazon.

A number of countries have been looking at ways to regulate AI, including European Union lawmakers negotiating sweeping AI rules for the 27-nation bloc that could restrict applications deemed to have the highest risks.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently said the United Nations is “the ideal place” to adopt global standards and appointed a board that will report back on options for global AI governance by the end of the year.

Guterres also said he welcomed calls from some countries for the creation of a new U.N. body to support global efforts to govern AI, inspired by such models as the International Atomic Energy Agency or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The White House said Friday that it has consulted on the voluntary commitments with a number of countries.

The pledge is heavily focused on safety risks but doesn’t address other worries about the latest AI technology, including the effect on jobs and market competition, the environmental resources required to build the models, and copyright concerns about the writings, art and other human handiwork being used to teach AI systems how to produce human-like content.

Last week, OpenAI and The Associated Press announced a deal for the AI company to license AP’s archive of news stories. The amount it will pay for that content was not disclosed.

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A federal judge has handed Microsoft a major victory by declining to block its looming $69 billion takeover of video game company Activision Blizzard. Regulators sought to ax the deal saying it will hurt competition.

U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley said in a ruling that the merger deserved scrutiny, noting it could be the largest in the history of the tech industry. But federal regulators were unable to show how it would cause serious harm and wouldn’t likely prevail if they took it to a full trial, she wrote.

The Federal Trade Commission, which enforces antitrust laws, “has not raised serious questions regarding whether the proposed merger is likely to substantially lessen competition” between video game consoles or in the growing markets for monthly game subscriptions or cloud-based gaming, Corley said.

A ruling favorable to Microsoft was not a surprise after the company’s lawyers had the upper hand in a 5-day San Francisco court hearing that ended late last month. The proceeding showcased testimony by Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and longtime Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, who both pledged to keep Activision’s blockbuster game Call of Duty available to people who play it on consoles — particularly Sony’s PlayStation — that compete with Microsoft’s Xbox.

“Our merger will benefit consumers and workers. It will enable competition rather than allow entrenched market leaders to continue to dominate our rapidly growing industry,” Kotick said in a written statement after Tuesday’s ruling.

The FTC had asked Corley to issue an injunction temporarily blocking Microsoft and Activision from closing the deal before the FTC’s in-house judge can review it in an August trial.

Both companies suggested that such a delay would effectively force them to abandon the takeover agreement they signed nearly 18 months ago. Microsoft promised to pay Activision a $3 billion breakup fee if the deal doesn’t close by July 18.

The FTC hasn’t said whether it will appeal Corley’s ruling.

“We are disappointed in this outcome given the clear threat this merger poses to open competition in cloud gaming, subscription services, and consoles,” FTC spokesperson Douglas Farrar said in a prepared statement. “In the coming days we’ll be announcing our next step to continue our fight to preserve competition and protect consumers.”

The decision is a setback for the FTC’s heightened scrutiny of the technology industry under Chairperson Lina Khan, who was installed by President Joe Biden in 2021 because of her tough stance on what she sees as monopolistic behavior by tech giants such as Amazon, Google and Facebook parent Meta.

Another judge rebuffed the FTC’s attempt earlier this year to stop Meta from taking over the virtual reality fitness company Within Unlimited. And on Thursday, Khan is expected to face tough questioning from Republicans in Congress who have called her to testify at a House hearing about the commission’s record of enforcement actions as well as her management of the agency staff.

Corley, herself a Biden nominee, expressed skepticism about the FTC’s case during the proceedings, particularly about the hypothetical harms caused if Microsoft were to remove Call of Duty from rival platforms or offer a subpar experience on competing consoles.

“The gist of the FTC’s complaint is Call of Duty is so popular, and such an important supply for any video game platform, that the combined firm is probably going to foreclose it from its rivals for its own economic benefit to consumers’ detriment,” Corley wrote in her ruling.

But she said the FTC hadn’t make a strong case that Microsoft would likely pull Call of Duty from rival Sony’s PlayStation. As antitrust investigations and legal challenges mounted in the U.S. and around the world, Microsoft pledged that Call of Duty would appear on Nintendo’s Switch console, Nvidia’s cloud gaming service and other platforms for at least a decade.

In that way, the “scrutiny has paid off,” Corley concluded in her ruling, repeating a message she relayed to regulators in the courtroom last month.

“In many ways you won,” Corley had told the FTC’s lead trial attorney on the case, James Weingarten.

“I don’t think we won,” Weingarten responded, saying there was no evidence that the “hastily agreed to” contracts would sufficiently protect the market.

Microsoft valued the deal at $68.7 billion when it announced the acquisition in early 2022, “inclusive of Activision Blizzard’s net cash,” though Microsoft agreed to pay $95 in cash for each share of the gamemaker, closer to $75 billion.

Shares of Activision Blizzard Inc. jumped more than 11% Tuesday on the ruling, a high for the year.

The ruling removes the biggest, but not the only obstacle, to the merger.

A number of other countries and the European Union have approved the Activision Blizzard takeover, but it still faces opposition from the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority. The company was set to challenge that decision at a tribunal hearing scheduled for later this month but the FTC’s ruling appeared to have forced a rethink.

The British regulator and Microsoft both said Tuesday they have jointly applied to put the hearing on hold while they work out a way to resolve their differences so that the deal can go ahead.

“We stand ready to consider any proposals from Microsoft to restructure the transaction in a way that would address the concerns” outlined in the merger decision, the CMA said in a prepared statement.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a statement that the company is looking to modify its transaction “in a way that is acceptable to the CMA,” though it disagrees with the agency’s concerns.

Canadian regulators are also investigating the transaction and have concluded it is “likely to result” in preventing or lessening competition, according to a letter to Microsoft filed in the U.S. case late last month that echoed the FTC’s concerns.

In the U.S., advocates for tougher antitrust enforcement are urging the FTC to ask an appeals court to pursue an emergency stay of Corley’s decision so that a trial can proceed. Some are calling attention to a perceived conflict of interest involving the judge’s son, who works for Microsoft. Corley disclosed the relationship in court.

“The fact that Judge Corley’s son works for Microsoft taints the outcome at a time when judicial ethics are top of mind for many,” said a prepared statement from Lee Hepner, legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

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BOSTON (AP) — Cyberattacks by state-backed Russian hackers have destroyed data across dozens of organizations in Ukraine and produced “a chaotic information environment,” Microsoft says in a report released Wednesday.

Nearly half the destructive attacks were against critical infrastructure, many times simultaneous to physical attacks, the report notes.

A top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, Victor Zhora, told reporters in a news briefing on Wednesday that cyberattacks on telecommunications have sometimes coincided with artillery and other physical attacks.

Microsoft assessed that Russia-aligned threat groups were “pre-positioning for the conflict as early as March 2021,” hacking into networks to obtain footholds they could later use to collect “strategic and battlefield intelligence or to facilitate future destructive attacks.”

During the war, Russia’s cyberattacks “have at times not only degraded the functions of the targeted organizations but sought to disrupt citizens’ access to reliable information and critical life services, and to shake confidence in the country’s leadership,” the company’s Digital Security Unit says in the 20-page report.

Kremlin cyber operations “have had an impact in terms of technical disruption of services and causing a chaotic information environment, but Microsoft is not able to evaluate their broader strategic impact,” the report says.

Disruption from Russian cyber activity has been more modest than many anticipated ahead of the Feb. 24 invasion, and Microsoft said damaging attacks have “been accompanied by broad espionage and intelligence activities.”

Early on, a cyberattack that also affected European broadband users knocked out satellite service to Ukrainian military, police and other institutions. But Ukrainian defenders, aided by outside cybersecurity firms, have also scored victories. Microsoft and Slovakia-based ESET helped them thwart an attempt earlier this month to cut power to millions of Ukrainians.

The report says groups with known or suspected ties with Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency have used destructive “wiper” malware “at a pace of two to three incidents a week since the eve of the invasion.”

It did not name specific targets but they are known to include telecommunications companies and local, regional and national agencies.

From the invasion onset until April 8, Microsoft said at least eight different malware strains were used in “nearly 40 discrete destructive attacks that permanently destroyed files in hundreds of systems across dozens of organizations in Ukraine.”

In an accompanying blog, Microsoft executive Tom Burt noted that the company had also seen “limited espionage attack activity” targeting NATO member states.

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Microsoft is paying the enormous sum of nearly $70 billion for Activision Blizzard, the maker of Candy Crush and Call of Duty, a deal that would immediately make it a larger video-game company than Nintendo while raising questions about the deal’s possible anti-competitive effects.

The all-cash $68.7 billion deal will turn Microsoft, maker of the Xbox gaming system, into one of the world’s largest video game companies. It will also help it compete with tech rivals such as Meta, formerly Facebook, in creating immersive virtual worlds for both work and play.

If the deal survives scrutiny from U.S. and European regulators in the coming months, it could be one of the biggest tech acquisitions in history. Dell bought data-storage company EMC in 2016 for around $60 billion.

Activision has been buffeted for months by allegations of misconduct and unequal pay. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed the issue Tuesday in a conference call with investors.

“The culture of our organization is my No. 1 priority,” Nadella said, adding that ”it’s critical for Activision Blizzard to drive forward” on its commitments to improve its workplace culture.

Activision disclosed last year it was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission over complaints of workplace discrimination and in September settled claims brought by U.S. workforce discrimination regulators. California’s civil rights agency sued the Santa Monica-based company in July, citing a “frat boy” culture that had become a “breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women.”

Wall Street saw the acquisition as a big win for Activision Blizzard Inc. and its shares soared 25% in trading Tuesday, making up for losses over the past six months since California’s discrimination lawsuit was filed. Shares of Microsoft slipped about 2%.

Last year, Microsoft spent $7.5 billion to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks, which is behind popular video games The Elder Scrolls, Doom and Fallout. Microsoft’s properties also include the hit game Minecraft after it bought Swedish game studio Mojang for $2.5 billion in 2014.

The Redmond, Washington, tech giant said the latest acquisitions will help beef up its Xbox Game Pass game subscription service while also accelerating its ambitions for the metaverse, a collection of virtual worlds envisioned as a next generation of the internet. While Xbox already has its own game-making studio, the prospect of Microsoft controlling so much game content raised questions about whether the company could restrict Activision games from competing consoles, although Nadella promised the deal would help people play games “wherever, whenever and however they want.”

The acquisition would push Microsoft past Nintendo as the third-largest video game company by global revenue, behind Playstation-maker Sony and Chinese tech giant Tencent, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives.

“Microsoft needed to do an aggressive deal given their streaming ambitions and metaverse strategy,” Ives said. ”They’re the only game in town that can do a deal of this size with the other tech stalwarts under massive tech scrutiny.”

Meta, Google, Amazon and Apple have all attracted increasing attention from antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe, but the Activision deal is so big that it will also likely put Microsoft into the regulatory spotlight, Ives said. Microsoft is already facing delays in its planned $16 billion acquisition of Massachusetts speech recognition company Nuance because of an investigation by British antitrust regulators.

Microsoft is able to make such a big all-cash purchase of Activision because of its success as a cloud computing provider. But after years of focusing on shoring up its business clients and products such as the Office suite of email and other work tools, Ives said Microsoft’s failed 2020 attempt to acquire social media platform TikTok may have “really whet the appetite for Nadella to do a big consumer acquisition.”

Pushback against the deal was immediate from consumer advocacy groups.

“No way should the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice permit this merger to proceed,” said a statement from Alex Harman, competition policy advocate for Public Citizen. “If Microsoft wants to bet on the ‘metaverse,’ it should invest in new technology, not swallow up a competitor.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki had no comment on Microsoft’s announcement at her briefing Tuesday, but emphasized the Biden administration’s recent moves to strengthen enforcement against illegal and anticompetitive mergers.

Started in 1979 by former Atari Inc. employees, Activision has created or acquired many of the most popular video games, from Pitfall in the 1980s to Guitar Hero and the World of Warcraft franchise. Bobby Kotick, 59, has been CEO since 1991.

Microsoft said it expects the deal to close in its 2023 fiscal year, which starts in July. It said Kotick will continue to serve as CEO. After the deal closes, the Activision business unit would then report to Phil Spencer, who has led Microsoft’s Xbox division and will now serve as CEO of Microsoft Gaming.

Kotick survived a number of executive shakeups at Activision last year after a series of controversies stemming from allegations of a toxic workplace culture. A shareholder lawsuit in August said the company failed to disclose to investors that it was being investigated in California and that it had workplace culture issues that could result in legal problems.

Activision reached a deal in September with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to settle claims that followed a nearly three-year investigation. The agency said Activision failed to take effective action after employees complained about sexual harassment, discriminated against pregnant employees and retaliated against employees who spoke out, including by firing them.

Microsoft has also been investigating its own practices toward sexual harassment and gender discrimination, opening an inquiry last week sought by investors at its annual shareholders meeting in November. The company committed to publishing a report later this year on how it handles harassment claims, including past allegations involving senior leaders such as co-founder Bill Gates.

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While theater sales are still not close to prepandemic levels, movie houses are recovering. “No Time to Die” opens in Britain this week and in the United States on Oct. 8. And next month is analog’s best hope at a full recovery, with a series of tentpole movies that could stanch the loss of consumers to streaming. They include “The Many Saints of Newark (Oct. 1), “The Addams Family 2” (Oct. 1), “Halloween Kills” (Oct. 15) and, perhaps most anticipated of all, “Dune” (Oct. 22).

Those all look like pretty decent movies. But I will not see any of them in the theater, as I would have two years ago — except one. That would be Bond.

I am a crazy fan, and it’s hard to imagine seeing it first on a small screen, even knowing I will later watch it over and over on a small screen, as I still do with all of them. Thus a trip to the theater for Bond is, as I like to say now, Covid-worthy.

While I am vaccinated, wear masks and get tested regularly, my new way of thinking about a trip to the theater — is the film Covid-worthy or not? — takes its cue from “sponge-worthy,” an old “Seinfeld” trope. (To put it briefly: Elaine had a limited supply of birth-control sponges, and choices had to be made.)

Is the movie good enough that I want to take the very small risk of getting a breakthrough infection? Many other consumers are making a similar calculation as more entertainment becomes available to stream at home — and as we get more comfortable watching in our living rooms.

In an interview with me this week, the Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos gave a flat “no” when I asked whether he was interested in buying a movie theater chain to help with distribution.

Actually, Netflix already has two theaters — one in New York and one in Los Angeles — that the company uses mostly for premieres and showcases. And to Sarandos, theater releases are all for marketing. Moviegoing “will be less frequent, maybe more expensive,” he said. “Using it as an event to get out of the house — people are still going to be looking for that.”

He added that some movies will be hard to book in theaters; for the most part, only franchise movies will be able to sustain the ever-smaller industry. “There’s less room for character-driven drama at the theater,” Sarandos said. I could not agree more, even though Hollywood still seems to be resisting the trend toward digital, just as it once resisted Netflix itself. (Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner famously once called Netflix — in an inexplicable metaphor — the “Albanian Army.” )

Well, now that the big studios and entertainment companies have embraced most of the economics and practices of Netflix, I suppose they are all Albanian.

Kara Swisher is the host of “Sway,” an Opinion podcast, and a contributing writer. She has reported on technology and technology companies since the early days of the internet.

KARA SWISHER | Guest Columnist

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon said Tuesday it canceled a disputed cloud-computing contract with Microsoft that could eventually have been worth $10 billion. It will instead pursue a deal with both Microsoft and Amazon and possibly other cloud service providers.

“With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI Cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

The statement did not directly mention that the Pentagon faced extended legal challenges by Amazon to the original $1 million contract awarded to Microsoft. Amazon argued that the Microsoft award was tainted by politics, particularly then-President Donald Trump’s antagonism toward Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, who stepped down Monday as the company’s chief executive officer. Bezos owns The Washington Post, a newspaper often criticized by Trump.

The Pentagon’s chief information officer, John Sherman, told reporters Tuesday that during the lengthy legal fight with Amazon, “the landscape has evolved” with new possibilities for large-scale cloud computing services. Thus it was decided, he said, to start over and seek multiple vendors.

Sherman said JEDI will be replaced by a new program called Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, and that both Amazon and Microsoft “likely” will be awarded parts of the business, although neither is guaranteed. Sherman said the three other large cloud service providers — Google, IBM and Oracle — might qualify, too.

Microsoft said in response to the Pentagon announcement, “We understand the DoD s rationale, and we support them and every military member who needs the mission-critical 21st century technology JEDI would have provided. The DoD faced a difficult choice: Continue with what could be a years-long litigation battle or find another path forward.”

Amazon said it understands and agrees with the Pentagon’s decision. In a statement, the company reiterated its view that the 2019 contract award was not based on the merits of the competing proposals “and instead was the result of outside influence that has no place in government procurement.”

Oracle, which had earlier sought the JEDI contact but didn’t make it to the final round, declined comment Tuesday. In separate statements, IBM said it was evaluating the new Pentagon approach and Google said it looked forward to discussing it with Pentagon officials.

The JEDI project began with the $1 million contract award for Microsoft, meant as an initial step in a 10-year deal that could have reached $10 billion in value. The project that will replace it is a five-year program; Sherman said no exact contract value has been set but that it will be “in the billions.” Sherman said the government will negotiate the amount Microsoft will be paid for having its 2019 deal terminated.

Amazon Web Services, a market leader in providing cloud computing services, had long been considered a leading candidate to run the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI. The project was meant to store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to improve communications with soldiers on the battlefield and use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.

The JEDI contract became mired in legal challenges almost as soon as it was awarded to Microsoft in October 2019. The losing bidder, Amazon Web Services, went to court arguing that the Pentagon’s process was flawed and unfair, including that it was improperly influenced by politics.

This year the Pentagon had been hinting that it might scrap the contract, saying in May that it felt compelled to reconsider its options after a federal judge in April rejected a Pentagon move to have key parts of Amazon’s lawsuit dismissed.

The JEDI saga has been unusual for the political dimension linked to Trump. In April 2020, the Defense Department inspector general’s office concluded that the contracting process was in line with legal and government purchasing standards. The inspector general found no evidence of White House interference in the contract award process, but that review also said investigators could not fully review the matter because the White House would not allow unfettered access to witnesses.

Five months later, the Pentagon reaffirmed Microsoft as winner of the contract, but work remained stalled by Amazon’s legal challenge.

In its April 2020 report, the inspector general’s office did not draw a conclusion about whether the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp. was appropriately declared the winner. Rather, it looked at whether the decision-making process was proper and legal. It also examined allegations of unethical behavior by Pentagon officials involved in the matter and generally determined that any ethical lapses did not influence the outcome.

That review did not find evidence of White House pressure for the Pentagon to favor the Microsoft bid, but it also said it could not definitely determine the full extent of White House interactions with the Pentagon’s decision makers.

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The Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 is equipped with a 13.5-inch touchscreen, a quad-core Intel Core i5 processor, and 8GB of RAM. With these specifications, it’s a delight to use the laptop for working from home, attending online classes, and watching content on your favorite streaming services. The display is big enough for a detailed look at whatever’s on the screen, and the laptop’s powerful enough to eliminate crashes when multitasking between apps.

Microsoft promises up to 11.5 hours of battery life for the Surface Laptop 3, which should be more than enough time for you to find an outlet to plug it into after working on the go. The machine won’t be out of commission for long after a depleted battery though, as its Fast Charging feature refills 80% of the Surface Laptop 3’s maximum juice after just an hour of charging.

There’s a lot of space for your software and files in the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, which comes with a 256GB hard drive. There are also USB-A and USB-C ports to connect the machine to monitors, docking stations, and other accessories, while the laptop maintains a quiet and comfortable keyboard, as well as a precise touchpad.

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 3 won’t only meet your expectations – it will exceed them, with its combination of top-of-the-line specifications and sleek design. If you’re sold on the laptop as your next daily companion, you should take advantage of Walmart’s offer that slashes $300 off the Surface Laptop 3’s price, lowering it to $999 from its original price of $1,299. There’s no telling how long stocks will last or when the deal will end though, so you better act fast if you want the device without paying full price. Click that Buy Now button as fast as you can.

We strive to help our readers find the best deals on quality products and services, and we choose what we cover carefully and independently. The prices, details, and availability of the products and deals in this post may be subject to change at any time. Be sure to check that they are still in effect before making a purchase.

Digital Trends may earn commission on products purchased through our links, which supports the work we do for our readers.

Aaron Mamiit | Contributor

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Microsoft announced legal action Monday seeking to disrupt a major cybercrime digital network that uses more than 1 million zombie computers to loot bank accounts and spread ransomware, which experts consider a major threat to the U.S. presidential election.

The operation to knock offline command-and-control servers for a global botnet that uses an infrastructure known as Trickbot to infect computers with malware was initiated with an order that Microsoft obtained in Virginia federal court on Oct. 6. Microsoft argued that the crime network is abusing its trademark.

“It is very hard to tell how effective it will be but we are confident it will have a very long-lasting effect,” said Jean-Ian Boutin, head of threat research at ESET, one of several cybersecurity firms that partnered with Microsoft to map the command-and-control servers. “We’re sure that they are going to notice and it will be hard for them to get back to the state that the botnet was in.”

Cybersecurity experts said that Microsoft’s use of a U.S. court order to persuade internet providers to take down the botnet servers is laudable. But they add that it’s not apt to be successful because too many won’t comply and because Trickbot’s operators have a decentralized fall-back system and employ encrypted routing.

Paul Vixie of Farsight Security said via email “experience tells me it won’t scale — there are too many IP’s behind uncooperative national borders.” And the cybersecurity firm Intel 471 reported no significant hit on Trickbot operations Monday and predicted ”little medium- to long-term impact” in a report shared with The Associated Press.

But ransomware expert Brett Callow of the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft said that a temporary Trickbot disruption could, at least during the election, limit attacks and prevent the activation of ransomware on systems already infected.

The announcement follows a Washington Post report Friday of a major — but ultimately unsuccessful — effort by the U.S. military’s Cyber Command to dismantle Trickbot beginning last month with direct attacks rather than asking providers to deny hosting to domains used by command-and-control servers.

A U.S. policy called “persistent engagement” authorizes U.S. cyberwarriors to engage hostile hackers in cyberspace and disrupt their operations with code, something Cybercom did against Russian misinformation jockeys during U.S. midterm elections in 2018.

Created in 2016 and used by a loose consortium of Russian-speaking cybercriminals, Trickbot is a digital superstructure for sowing malware in the computers of unwitting individuals and websites. In recent months, its operators have been increasingly renting it out to other criminals who have used it to sow ransomware, which encrypts data on target networks, crippling them until the victims pay up.

One of the biggest reported victims of a ransomware variety sowed by Trickbot called Ryuk was the hospital chain Universal Health Services, which said all 250 of its U.S. facilities were hobbled in an attack last month that forced doctors and nurses to resort to paper and pencil.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials list ransomware as a major threat to the Nov. 3 presidential election. They fear an attack could freeze up state or local voter registration systems, disrupting voting, or knock out result-reporting websites.

While cybersecurity experts say the operators of Trickbot and affiliated digital crime syndicates are Russian speakers mostly based in eastern Europe, they caution that they are motivated by profit, not politics. They do, however, operate with impunity with no Kremlin interference as long as their targets are abroad.

“In today’s world, Trickbot is a type of a plague,” said Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee-based Hold Security, which tracks its activity closely on the dark web, “and a government that ignores a global plague is more than complacent.”

Trickbot is “malware-as-a-service,” its modular architecture lets it be used as a delivery mechanism for a wide array of criminal activity. It began mostly as a so-called banking Trojan that attempts to steal credentials from online bank account so criminals can fraudulently transfer cash.

But recently, researchers have noted a rise in Trickbot’s use in ransomware attacks targeting everything from municipal and state governments to school districts and hospitals. Ryuk and another type of ransomware called Conti — also distributed via Trickbot — dominated attacks on the U.S. public sector in September, said Callow of Emsisoft.

Holden said the reported Cybercom disruption — involving efforts to confuse its configuration through code injections — succeeded in temporarily breaking down communications between command-and-control servers and most of the bots.

“But that’s hardly a decisive victory,” he said, adding that the botnet rebounded with new victims and ransomware.

The disruption — in two waves that began Sept. 22 — was first reported by cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs.

The AP could not immediately confirm the reported Cybercom involvement.

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