Technology & Science

Microsoft and Alphabet reported quarterly results Wednesday, and both showed cloud revenue accelerating. Microsoft's fiscal first-quarter revenue rose 19% to $92.3 billion. For the first time it gave Azure's revenue in dollars: $33.17 billion, up 48%, against analyst expectations near $32.3 billion. Microsoft Cloud revenue reached $63.9 billion. The CFO said delays at third-party capacity providers affected spending, and the shares rose about 4% after hours. Alphabet's SEC filing shows third-quarter revenue up 25% to $127.6 billion. Google Cloud revenue rose 103% to $30.7 billion, with sales of the company's TPU chip systems named as a meaningful contributor. Search revenue grew 12%. Amazon reports after the close today, with analysts expecting about $202 billion in revenue and attention on how fast AWS is growing.

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft has removed trust in seven certificates tied to Indian certificate authority eMudhra. The move follows the discovery that eight of the authority's intermediate private keys were weak enough to be recovered almost instantly. Six of the keys covered web (TLS) certificates and two covered code signing. All were generated in April 2025 and had values below 256. Anyone holding the keys could have forged certificates that Windows and browsers would accept. Microsoft blocked the intermediates on October 20. On October 26 it shipped out-of-band updates, KB5134133 for Windows 11 and KB5134125 for Windows 10, that drop six eMudhra G3 roots and one cross-sign from the trust list. On October 27 it did the same in Edge. Connected PCs get the change automatically, so the updates mainly matter for air-gapped or locked-down systems. Microsoft says it is still evaluating the remaining eMudhra roots. It stresses that its own systems were not breached.

SEPANG, Malaysia — Malaysian customs said it seized 30 servers carrying advanced AI chips, worth about 49.5 million ringgit ($12 million). Officers found them at the Kuala Lumpur airport free trade zone on October 15. The shipment arrived from another Asian country under a single air waybill that declared it as electronic components. It was to be re-exported without the required permit. Officials say a syndicate uses Malaysia as a transit point to dodge restrictions on onward shipment. This is the fifth case linked to the same group this year, and total seizures exceed 100 million ringgit. A Malaysian firm has been called in for questioning, and no arrests have been made. Authorities have not disclosed the chip brand, country of origin or destination. Malaysia began requiring permits for U.S.-origin AI chips in 2025 under U.S. pressure, and violations can bring fines up to 20 million ringgit for a company.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on Oct. 28, two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon. It is releasing the model first to selected cyber defenders through its Fairwind program, which has more than 650 partners. It has given no date for developers, businesses or consumers. Google says Carbon is taking part in the U.S. government's voluntary pre-release testing. Google reports 88.2% on the SEC-bench Pro vulnerability-discovery test, 54.8% on ExploitGym and 71.0% on CWE-bench, which scores vulnerability repair. Carbon scored 59 on Artificial Analysis's rebuilt Intelligence Index v5. That is one point above Claude Opus 5.5 and two above GPT-6 Astra. Anthropic still leads on coding. Google says successful cheating in its internal tests fell to zero. Artificial Analysis, though, measured a hallucination rate of 11% on its factual test, up from Argon's 4%. Introductory pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.

SAN FRANCISCO — The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal Monday with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It asks the court to overturn a federal judge's order that lifted the government's ban on federal agencies using Anthropic's AI technology, Bloomberg reported. U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin in San Francisco ruled in August that the administration had not justified its decision to bar agencies from the company's products. The notice only starts the appellate process, and no briefing schedule or decision has been reported. The appeal comes as Anthropic seeks to go public. The company has filed a registration statement with the SEC for a proposed Nasdaq listing under the symbol ANT, according to its own announcement. The company has said the offering's size and price are not yet set and that the filing is not yet effective.

SOUTHAVEN, Miss. — A subsidiary of xAI, MZX Tech, is offering to buy homes in Southaven, Mississippi, from residents who release claims over noise from its gas-turbine power plant. The Mississippi Free Press reviewed a letter that says MZX denies the allegations but needs property for its business. Sellers sign a separate release that bars both class-action recovery and individual suits. The letter does not give a price. The Guardian reported Oct. 28, as relayed by Futurism, that a realtor cited a target of 418 homes and said 18 owners had agreed to sell. Those figures come from the realtor's recorded remarks, not from xAI. Three residents sued in June, and the complaint says more than 10,000 people could be class members. Separately, the NAACP sued in April under the Clean Air Act over unpermitted turbines. xAI did not respond to the Mississippi Free Press.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google on Oct. 28 launched its Connected Apps Platform. It lets businesses and developers build services that users can invoke inside Gemini and Google Search. Developers connect through a cloud-hosted Model Context Protocol server, or through Android MCP using the AppFunctions APIs. They then register, test and submit the app in Google Connected Console and choose whether it appears in Search, the Gemini app or both. After launch they can monitor traffic, latency and error rates and manage brand identity, including verified logos and authenticated accounts. Gemini already has more than 50 connected apps, including Adobe, Experian, Localiza and Peloton. Those apps are due to reach Search over the next few weeks, where integrations currently include Instacart, Canva, YouTube Music and Yahoo Fantasy Football. Meditation app Calm is a new partner. The platform is a public preview for U.S. developers who join the waitlist, and Google has not said when it will open more broadly.

LONDON — Researchers at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine estimate that 50,391 heat-related excess deaths occurred in 854 European cities between June and August. The cities span 30 countries and hold roughly 40 percent of those countries' population. About two-thirds of the deaths, or some 32,600, are attributed to human-caused climate change. The authors say this is the highest summer toll since 2000. It is nearly double the roughly 29,000 deaths estimated for 2022. Italy had the most deaths (13,303), followed by France (7,268), Spain (6,824), Germany (6,340) and the U.K. (4,354). The figures are modeled estimates, not counted death certificates. They cover urban areas only. The findings were released as two peer-reviewed papers in Nature Health on Oct. 23. The authors call for faster emissions cuts alongside heat adaptation.

A team including physicist Gerald Gabrielse has built a device that stores one positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron. It also controls the particle's quantum states. The work appeared in Physical Review Letters on Oct. 21 as 'One-Positron Quantum Cyclotron.' The American Physical Society highlights the apparatus as a route to measuring the positron's magnetic moment with unprecedented precision. Such a measurement would test a symmetry principle central to quantum field theory. Press coverage says the particle was kept in the trap for months. If the positron's properties ever differ from the electron's in a way that established theory forbids, that would point to new physics. This is a peer-reviewed demonstration of the technique. The precision measurement itself has not yet been reported.

PARIS — The European Space Agency says its Hera planetary-defense spacecraft has, for the first time, imaged the Didymos asteroid and its moonlet Dimorphos as separate objects. The system is about 197 million km from Earth. Dimorphos, the body NASA's DART spacecraft struck in 2022, is only about one pixel wide in the first frame, but clearly apart from its 780-meter parent. Dimorphos is 151 meters across. ESA says two thruster burns a week apart slowed Hera to about 20 meters per second relative to the pair, so it can approach gradually. The two asteroids orbit about 1.15 km apart. ESA lists the rendezvous for November 2026. Hera is to survey the DART crater and measure Dimorphos's mass, so the impact test can become a repeatable deflection technique.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. — Virgin Galactic flew its first Delta-class suborbital spaceship, now named Apeiron, from its factory in Mesa, Arizona, to Spaceport America in New Mexico on Wednesday. The craft rode beneath the twin-fuselage mothership VMS Eve for the 90-minute trip. The name came from an online contest with votes from more than 80 countries. CEO Michael Colglazier said the ship received its name that morning and came home that afternoon. Like SpaceShipOne, Apeiron will be released from the mothership at altitude, fire its rocket to the edge of space, and fold its wings for the glide back to a runway landing. Universe Today reports a sister ship, not yet named, is expected to begin commercial operations in the second half of 2027. If the company holds to that schedule, it would be the only supplier in the suborbital market.