Twitter puts bounty on spotting algorithmic bias

To make sure instances of bias don’t recur, Twitter offered cold, hard cash to those identifying bugs.

“You have the opportunity to create this ubiquitous access for everyone across the board, almost irrespective of what platform they’re on, what device they’re on, where in the world they’re sitting. And you can provide a common environment.

And you can spin it up, potentially, in a matter of seconds, if not minutes, and be ready to go.”

Microsoft sees this as a big selling point. In a film made to promote Windows 365, the firm touts its work with the government of Nunavut, a remote Canadian province. Instead of IT teams having to fly secured laptops to remote employees, staff can use their own devices, and Windows 365 keeps everything secure by virtue of staying in the cloud.

Unsurprisingly, then, Microsoft is putting security at the heart of its marketing for the new service, saying that Windows 365 works on the principle of “zero trust”. And Dreyer agrees that a Windows PC in the cloud could be good for security.

“If I had a compromised system, it becomes relatively easy to tear that system down,” said Dreyer. “I can contain the threat very quickly, wipe away that system and start a brand new, fresh clean set up for that employee to continue working.”

Will consumers come next?

But what about consumers? Could Windows 365 take off outside of the corporate world? Dreyer is sceptical. “I think we, as consumers, are still very tethered to our devices,” he said, but concedes that comfort with moving our desktop PCs to the cloud could be generational, and that younger users will be excited by the prospect. “I think tools like the Windows 365 platform and environments will appeal to them in ways that we probably haven’t thought about just yet.”

Equally cynical that Windows

365 will ever become a mainstream consumer play is former Windows chief and Microsoft veteran, Steven Sinofsky. “Will this ever be an offering for [a] home PC enthusiast? Gosh, impossible to see,” he tweeted.

“Would a cloud offering ever be a thing? Again, for that to happen Windows PCs have to ‘lose’ to the point that you would not even own one as an endpoint to connect to this service. So, no.”

But, Sinofsky added, “for a world of work from home and/or distributed teams without on-site IT this is a big deal. The timing is right.”

You have the opportunity to create this ubiquitous access for everyone across the board