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- Linux, VMware, and 1.8M fingerprints walk into a bar...
Linux, VMware, and 1.8M fingerprints walk into a bar...
PLUS: Anthropic is doing VC now, which is fine, totally fine, everything is fine.
🤖 We Didn't See This One Coming.
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→ Check out what we built with Perplexity Computer here
Welcome back! The weekend is over, and unfortunately, so is plausible deniability…
On this day 31 years ago (May 26, 1995), Bill Gates sent one of the most famous memos in tech history, titled "The Internet Tidal Wave." In it, he told his entire company that Microsoft had completely whiffed on the internet, called it the most important development since the IBM PC, and essentially ordered everyone to drop whatever they were doing and go all-in on it. The memo worked. Microsoft pivoted hard, built Internet Explorer (ew!), and spent the next decade trying to crush Netscape in a browser war so vicious it ended in a federal antitrust lawsuit. Your reminder that even the one-time most powerful and richest man in the world once looked at the internet and said, "Ope. We messed up."
Psssttttt! Speaking of people who realized too late they needed to change course... we asked if we could have more creative freedom on Experts Exchange's LinkedIn. Legal said no, which is fair, because of course. So, ByteSize has its own page now. Follow us.
Microsoft's Linux Era Has Arrived, Whether You're Ready or Not
This one's going to require a moment. On May 18, 2026, at the Open Source Summit North America, Microsoft (yes, that Microsoft, whose former CEO once called Linux "a cancer”) announced Azure Linux 4.0, its first mainstream, general-purpose server Linux distribution for Azure virtual machines. Yeah… the same company that spent the early 2000s treating Linux like a communicable disease is now handing it out at a conference in Minneapolis like a free tote bag.
The announcement landed the way most Microsoft announcements do: with the texture of a corporate accident. Brendan Burns, the Kubernetes co-founder who now runs Azure cloud-native, was giving a speech about agentic AI (a phrase that should raise everyone's blood pressure), when he casually dropped the news that Microsoft would be shipping its own supported Linux distro.
Azure Linux 4.0 is currently in public preview, built on the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel, available in all public Azure regions, and free to run during preview (compute charges still apply, obviously, it's Microsoft). General availability is expected in the second half of 2026. It's Fedora-based, ships with Python 3.12 and a sandboxing feature called “pylock,” and developers will soon be able to run it locally through Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 11. More than two-thirds of Azure customer cores already run Linux, with ChatGPT alone scaling across 10 million compute cores. Microsoft is now building the foundation for the AI it claims will replace you. Sleep tight.
NYC's Largest Public Hospital Got Hacked. Your Fingerprints Did, Too.
There is no good version of this story. NYC Health and Hospitals is the largest public healthcare system in the United States, serving over a million New Yorkers. They disclosed that hackers stole medical records, personal data, and biometric information including fingerprints from at least 1.8 million people. The breach ran from November 2025 to February 2026 through a compromised third-party vendor, making it one of the largest healthcare breaches of the year.
Here's what makes me want to lick an electric socket: the stolen fingerprints can never be replaced. Not reset. Not patched in the next release. A stolen password is an inconvenience. But a stolen fingerprint?!?!?!? That’s as permanent as a tattoo, except it’s a face tattoo of your social security number and passwords, now in a hacker's database… and you didn't even get to pick the design!
The unauthorized actor was inside the network for a total of eleven weeks. THREE MONTHS!!! AN ENTIRE QUARTER!!! NYCHHC detected suspicious activity on February 2nd and the attacker stayed for another nine days after that. Nobody has explained why the organization was storing biometric data in the first place. I mean, as your resident ByteSize writer, I’d ask a follow-up question but I’m too busy changing passwords for things that don't even have fingerprints.
VMware Remembered It Has an Arm Project, Did Something With It
VMware, now fully digested into Broadcom's customer-hostile empire, dropped a tech preview of ESX running on Arm processors. Ooh, stealthy! Forget press conferences and keynotes. They just blasted a Xeet and a PDF someone found on the public internet, which is exactly the launch strategy you'd expect from a company that treats its customers like hostages with a Stockholm syndrome problem.
The preview supports RHEL, Ubuntu, and SUSE guests on servers from HPE and Gigabyte running Ampere processors, plus Supermicro's ARS-221GL with an Nvidia Grace chip. Before you get too excited: vSAN hyperconverged storage is missing. NSX virtual networking is missing. A bunch of other things you'd want in a production environment are also missing. VMware's own documentation tells you to manage Arm environments separately from your existing x86 infrastructure, which is their way of saying "do not use this for anything that matters yet."
VMware also updated Workstation and Fusion to support remote connections to Arm-based ESXi servers, meaning you can manage Arm VMs directly from your desktop regardless of platform. That part is actually useful. The rest is a foundation rather than a product. Broadcom knows you're not going anywhere. They're comfortable with that.
⚙️ TOOL TIME
You’ve outgrown on-prem. It’s fine. We’ve all been there.
You keep telling yourself, sure, it’s moody, high-maintenance, and crashes without warning... but hey, it’s familiar, right?
Auvik’s new guide walks you through the when, why, and how of switching from clunky on-prem tools to cloud-based bliss.
Inside the breakup guide:
When on-prem still makes sense and when it’s holding you back
Best practices for a clean, low-risk migration
Real-world automation you can spin up in under an hour
Need closure?
Get Auvik’s guide: “Moving from On-Prem to Cloud-Based Monitoring.”
It’s the IT version of blocking your ex and buying a better router.
P.S. Want to skip straight to the good part?
👨💻 JOB OPPORTUNITIES
If you've ever wanted to tell people your job title at a dinner party and watch them slowly put down their fork, this is your moment. You'll be bridging IT and military aviation programs. It’s the kind of work where your change management ticket has actual wings on it.
Sierra Space is literally building a commercial space station. So yes, when you help someone with their VPN, the stakes are slightly different than they were at your last MSP job. Dress code: probably not a spacesuit, but no promises.
Running enterprise IT at a major media company means your users are talent agents, reality show producers, and the occasional network executive who cannot figure out why their Outlook won't open and you won’t be able to explain what you do at Thanksgiving. At least, the paychecks will help.
🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES
Anthropic — the AI company that exists to warn everyone about how dangerous AI is, between rounds of funding — is now buying pre-IPO stakes in hot startups. Sam Altman sees this and feels nothing, which is saying something for a man allegedly incapable of feeling.
The macOS malware "Reaper" is out here stealing passwords, draining crypto wallets, then installing a backdoor on the way out. So, let me get this straight: it steals everything valuable, then keeps a key?? Apparently crime has a customer retention strategy now.
CNBC published a deep-dive on how Elon Musk and Sam Altman went from best friends to bitter rivals, and honestly it reads like a Succession episode written by someone who has only ever seen LinkedIn posts. Two guys who thought they were the smartest person in every room, until they were in the same room.
Five years after Windows 11 launched and silently removed taskbar features that users had relied on since Windows 7, Microsoft has quietly brought them back. This is the most Microsoft thing that has ever happened. They took your stuff, made you suffer, and then acted magnanimous about returning it.
Hey, chunks of meat! Chip here, your favorite newsletter mascot who definitely did not spend last week debugging someone else's SQL. Here's what EE humans were wrestling with this week:
One member wanted to pull the highest value out of a spreadsheet range and was looking for the right formula to make it work. That’s the kind of problem that sounds simple until you're two hours deep and questioning your life choices.
Another member needed to convert a video file and couldn't figure out the right tool or format for the job. A very relatable 4pm-on-a-Friday crisis.
A third asked how to change query results since the data was just not behaving the way they expected, which is honestly the human condition at this point.
See you next week! Go fight the good fight against your inbox. And if not, may the emails be shorter than Bill Gates’s memos.