👾 Astro-Ball, Quantum Fall, and Copilot's RICO Call

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Happy Tuesday! The World Cup knockout matches are running, Gianni Infantino is somewhere accepting congratulations for a tournament he absolutely did not rig (allegedly), and I’m "working remotely" writing this week’s issue from a sports bar with exceptional Wi-Fi. Make of that what you will…

Oh, by this way, on this day in 2004, a U.S. Court of Appeals unanimously approved Microsoft's settlement with the Department of Justice. Under the terms: share your APIs with third-party developers and submit to a three-person compliance panel with five full years of access to your systems, records, and source code. Microsoft agreed, and presumably also immediately began thinking very hard about what "agreed" technically meant.

THE 2026 WORLD CUP BALL HAS BEEN TO SPACE

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has the most well-traveled match ball in sports history. Before Messi, Ronaldo, or Haaland (who could theoretically achieve escape velocity if someone gave him a long enough pitch) got anywhere near it, NASA astronauts were floating around the International Space Station spinning Adidas's official Trionda ball in zero gravity like an extremely expensive, sensor-loaded fidget toy.

The scientific goal was to study how the ball's center of mass and weight distribution affect its flight when gravity isn't around to complicate things. Crew members floated around the ISS cabin passing and spinning it in weightlessness, revisiting a 2019 study with this year's new ball. Watching how it tumbles or stabilizes in microgravity gives researchers clues about how the ball's embedded tech changes performance on Earth.

The Trionda carries a 500Hz motion sensor feeding real-time data to the VAR system for offside and goal calls. Deep seams and a textured surface keep it stable in wet conditions. Its name references "three waves" in Spanish, a nod to the first World Cup spread across three nations: the US, Canada, and Mexico.

The ball has been to space. VAR will still get it wrong in stoppage time. Gianni Infantino has reportedly already given Messi credit for the orbital trajectory.

MICROSOFT'S QUANTUM CHIP HAS A CREDIBILITY PROBLEM AND A PHYSICIST WHO IS NOT LETTING IT GO

Microsoft says it has made major breakthroughs in quantum computing. UK physicist Dr. Henry Legg says: show your work.

Legg published a paper in Nature arguing that a software tool Microsoft used to verify its own quantum research contained coding errors and was not accurate enough to support the company's conclusions. He also says Microsoft has not proved it actually created the Majorana particle, a theoretical quasi-particle that forms the entire foundation of its quantum approach. For the record: a Microsoft-backed paper claiming evidence of this very particle was retracted in 2021. The field has a long memory.

Microsoft filed a rebuttal that Nature accepted and is sharing data with DARPA for independent review while keeping portions of it confidential on the grounds that they're commercially sensitive.

Legg described the experience of opening Microsoft's hood as finding "a chaotic jumble of mismatched parts." Microsoft's response is essentially: DARPA is handling it. Quantum computing is already a multi-billion dollar industry despite very limited working devices in existence. "We're not totally sure this works yet" remains a fully viable pitch to investors, apparently.

MICROSOFT USED COPILOT TO BUST A MALWARE RING AND HONESTLY, FINE, FINE

(lol yes, another Microsoft mention, but hey keep doing this sht!)* Microsoft teamed up with international law enforcement and its own Copilot to take down more than 200 command-and-control servers tied to two widely used malware operations: StealC and Amadey.

StealC harvests browser credentials, crypto wallets, and chat app data, then ships it to a remote server. Amadey delivers StealC and other chaos as a subscription service, including ransomware and remote access trojans. In just the first two weeks of May, the pair infected more than 140,000 computers globally.

Microsoft's AI analysis found that both operations ran on the same infrastructure, letting Redmond's lawyers treat them as a single RICO conspiracy rather than two separate cases. Think Goodfellas, but everyone is renting malware subscriptions. Combined with an earlier operation, law enforcement flagged over $47 million in crypto assets and recovered around 27 million stolen credentials.

Genuinely the most useful thing AI has done all month. (Don't tell Sam Altman.)

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👨‍💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES

Senior IT Internal Auditor @ Morningstar

Morningstar (the company that tells you how bad your portfolio is doing in real time) needs a Senior IT Internal Auditor in Chicago to run SOX compliance reviews, test IT general controls, and report to the Board. Apply before Sam Bankman-Fried beats you to the reference call.

IT Services Team Lead @ Monday.com

Monday.com needs an IT Services Team Lead to run daily ops for their NY office, manage the ticket queue, handle vendor escalations, and not completely lose their mind on a Monday. The fact that Monday.com is hiring someone to manage Monday problems is entirely intentional and we respect the commitment to the bit.

Lead Enterprise IT Operations Architect @ Boeing

Boeing needs a Lead Enterprise IT Operations Architect with 10+ years of ServiceNow experience to unify the entire ITSM ecosystem. The application deadline is today, June 30. If you are reading this newsletter at 11:55 PM: close this, open the application, submit your resume, patch the spelling errors, resubmit. Go.

🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES

• The White House app was auto-downloaded onto millions of federal employees' phones in May and cannot be uninstalled. A USDA staffer deleted it as a test and watched it reinstall itself immediately. Inside the app, a button lets users "text President Trump," which autofills the message "Greatest President Ever." The privacy policy links to a page containing only an email address. We are all doing great.

• OpenAI unveiled its first custom inference chip, named “Jalapeño,” (ooh, spicy!) built with Broadcom. Early results show better performance-per-watt than current alternatives, and OpenAI used its own AI models to help develop it. Sam Altman now controls the models, the data centers, and the silicon. He is one signed development deal away from the full Monopoly board.

• IBM announced what it's calling the world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology, a stacked nanostack architecture packing nearly 100 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail. The company projects 50% better compute performance or 70% better energy efficiency over its 2nm chips. IBM does not sell commercial chips. They just build the things everyone else mass-produces for the next decade. Totally normal way to run a company.

• Elastic cut roughly 7% of its workforce citing AI enabling leaner teams, one quarter after posting $451 million in revenue and 16% year-over-year growth. CEO Ash Kulkarni thanked employees for their dedication in the same blog post as the layoff announcement. The gratitude and the goodbye shared a paragraph. There are some things you just cannot write better satire than.

Hey! Chip here. While the rest of the world was watching football and having opinions about VAR decisions, the EE community was doing what they always do: solving real problems with zero fanfare and very little sleep:

• One admin is figuring out whether to manage Zscaler policy assignments through on-prem AD DS groups synced to Entra ID, or skip the sync and build the groups natively in Entra ID. Classic hybrid identity architecture territory, and yes, there is already a 45-minute meeting scheduled about this.

• A Windows 11 user has a 250GB SSD running on fumes. Their IT person wants to move the Outlook OST file to a USB memory stick to free up 12GB and needs to know if performance takes a hit, and how to point Mail to the new file location after the move. A completely valid question before considering just buying more storage, which would also solve this, but we respect the frugality.

• A KPI spreadsheet is throwing #VALUE! errors across two tabs, including cells H14 through Q14. The user says it's very urgent. The spreadsheet is not responding to the timeline.

That’s all for now! Logging off before someone schedules a kickoff during kickoff.