Bob Packwood is dead. While his name became a joke of 1990s politics due to his serial sexual harassment and his resignation from the Senate due to that behavior, he is actually a far more interesting character than that and a man who represents what the Republican Party could be at one time, which was not in fact always terrible, despite the fact that he personally was an awful guy.

Born in Portland, Oregon in 1932, Packwood grew up in an old-time Oregon political family. It was a Republican family, but a relatively moderate one. The Oregon Republican Party was pretty right-wing and business dominated for sure, but Packwood rose despite being a lot less committed to these ideas than your average Republican. He went to Willamette University, which was the college most connected to Oregon politics, and not only because it is literally across the street from the state capitol building. His long-time colleague in the Senate, Mark Hatfield, was also a Willamette grad.

In fact, Packwood rose in the state Republican Party by so diligently working for Hatfield’s governor and then Senate campaigns. The two men would have little in common personally, with Hatfield being an intense serious Baptist and Packwood someone who, ur, enjoyed the fleshy pleasures of life, but they would have a long working relationship around ideas of moderate Republican politics.

Packwood rose fast. He was elected Chairman of the Multnomah County Republican Party (Portland for those who are not too familiar with Oregon) in 1960, only 28 years old. Then in 1962, he became the youngest member of the state legislature when he won an election that got a ton of attention for the sheer energy he brought to the race. That would be a Packwood hallmark in these early years—youthful energy. Reading about this campaign now, six decades later, it’s clear that Packwood was helping to work up a lot about modern campaigning. What people found so remarkable was the intense door-to-door campaigning of himself and his volunteers, as well as festooning the area with yard signs. This is all pretty normal today but was not necessarily at that time. This got a ton of attention and he started training other Republicans on how to do this, which helped the party take the Oregon legislature in 1964, the only state body the party won as LBJ was making mincemeat out of Barry Goldwater that year.

For Packwood, one of the lessons of his campaigning and his politics was that the Republican Party should not be a far-right organization. One of the reasons he felt he and his candidates had so much success is that they were Republicans for the present, not a bunch of old angry people who longed for 1929 or wanted to nuke the Soviets. No Curtis LeMay or Goldwater, here. And Packwood, who was as ambitious as any politician of the late twentieth century, build on this. Shortly after his election to the state legislature, he started the Dorchester Conference. This was Packwood’s space to push his liberal Republicanism. The idea behind this was as a space for liberal Republicans from around the West to get together, push their own ideas, and resist the Goldwater/Reagan takeover of the Party. Obviously that didn’t succeed and today this is mostly just a networking place for Oregon Republicans who make Goldwater look like Lyndon Johnson. But still, this was Packwood’s baby and for a long time, it actually mattered.

In 1968, Packwood decided it was time to take the plunge for a big job. He decided to take on Wayne Morse for the Senate. Now, Morse was a legend. He was famous for standing up against Lyndon Johnson’s rush into Vietnam and voting no on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. A former Republican himself, Morse was now a Democrat. But there weren’t enormous ideological differences between him and Packwood. They were both independent minded politicians. However, Morse had two things that made him vulnerable. First, he was a deeply arrogant individual who was personally hated by nearly everyone who dealt with him. In my own research on Northwestern politics, this comes up again and again. Morse was a difficult person who had burned a lot of bridges in the state. Second, he was old. Not by the standards of the modern 21st century Senate where the gerontocracy rules supreme. But he was 68 and starting to decline.

So Packwood saw an opportunity to kick out Morse and he took it. He provided that energy that had served him well so far. A televised debate was a disaster for Morse and supercharged the Packwood campaign. Packwood, who had few strong policy principles, also criticized Morse over refusing to fund the war, more because the war was still pretty popular among white voters in 1968 and that was the vast majority of the Oregon electorate. Packwood won in a squeaker. But it is worth noting that the other Oregon senator, Mark Hatfield, crossed party lines to support Morse due to their shared disdain for the war, and while these two men would serve together in the Senate for a very long time to come, their relationship was never fully repaired after this.

As senator, it did not take Packwood long to insert himself into debates, often to the annoyance of more senior leaders of both parties. Packwood was a bit of a blowhard and a massive self-promoter who loved the limelight. This did often lead to him parachuting in on issues to get headlines and bigfooting other politicians, both in the state and on the federal level, who had done hard work to get an issue to a given point. Packwood’s inability to make allies would eventually hurt him. It was somewhat ironic that he took out Morse and the same problems that led to the end of Morse’s career would become Packwood’s.

What Packwood did believe in was moderation. As such, he would stand up to both his old but now often erstwhile ally Mark Hatfield or Richard Nixon. He became a thorn in Nixon’s side. He voted against both of Nixon’s racist Supreme Court nominees in Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell. He was the first Republican senator to call for Nixon to resign during Watergate. He opposed expanding gun rights during the rise of the National Rifle Association. He was staunchly pro-abortion rights. In fact, he introduced the first national abortion legalization bill in 1971 without being able to get a single co-sponsor, two years before Roe. He opposed much of the expansion of the defense state, including Nixon’s expansion of the defense state. He opposed the development of the B-1 bomber and the expansion of the nuclear submarine program.

Packwood did not always have easy reelection campaigns. Morse desperately wanted his job back and was the Democratic nominee in 1974, even though he was dying. Morse’ death in the summer of 1974 might well have saved Packwood. Overall, Bob Packwood ended up being about as good a Republican as can be imagined. Yes, there were issues he wasn’t great on if you are a Democrat, but he wasn’t a troll and he was generally considered quite reasonable.

Packwood, ironically considering how his career would end, was a staunch supporter of abortion rights through his career. He brought a national abortion legalization bill before the Senate in 1971, before he could even get a co-sponsor. So support for reproductive rights wasn’t something of expedience; Packwood really believed in it. Moreover, he held to that his whole career. Only two Republicans voted against Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991 and Packwood was one, based on Thomas’ anti-abortion stance. If only more Republicans had felt this way about a personal liberty issue, a topic many gave lip service to, but only applied to white men doing whatever they want with guns. For all his support, Packwood won many awards from women’s rights organizations over the years, including from Planned Parenthood in 1983 and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1985.

One of Packwood’s real contributions was on environmental issues. Today, in the mind of liberals, Mark Hatfield tends to be seen as the bigger person and the more worthy figure because of his principled stands on Vietnam and other issues. But it takes little away from Hatfield to note that he was a completely bought and sold hack of the timber industry, especially in his later career. It’s just that environmentalism in the post-Vietnam era was not seen as critically important as did Vietnam and foreign policy. On the other hand, for example, Scoop Jackson of Washington is someone seen as villainous for his support of endless wars. Not blaming anyone for that, but it is worth noting that Jackson was very good on environmental issues and this is forgotten as well.

So what did make Packwood a Republican anyway? Basically, he hated taxes and he loved deregulation. While chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he played a major role in pushing forward Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform package. But even here, Packwood was primarily concerned with individual taxes and he worked the package so that business taxes would rise and income taxes would fall.

So Packwood was much closer to Democrats on a lot of environmental issues than he was to Hatfield. He was a big supporter of saving Hells Canyon from the high dam mania still popular in the late 60s and early 70s and helped create the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, which was something of a compromise between environmental and development interests. He was a big supporter of Oregon’s bottle bill, the only western state to promote this idea and very much over the organized lobbying of the glass and aluminum industries who despised it and claimed it would destroy their businesses. He pushed for more solar energy investment and for bike lanes and things like that.

But most importantly, Packwood was someone would environmentalists could talk to in the height of the spotted owl crisis. It’s impossible to overstate the difficulty of any Northwestern politican at this time. The spotted owl is the moment that the conservative backlash really hit the Northwest. This was a region noted for its moderation from both political parties. Idaho could elect relatively liberal Democrats such as Frank Church and Cecil Andrus, even though it was fundamentally a conservative state. Scoop Jackson could be basically a right-wing Democrat from Washington and be elected over and over. Hatfield and Packwood were moderate Republicans in Oregon. State-level elections tended to reflect this reality in all three states.

The symptoms for the radicalization of Northwestern politics were already there by the 1980s. It’s not as if the region was immune to the white backlash politics on the right from around the nation or from the increased emphasis on cultural liberalism and extreme individualism on the left. There were plenty of places where people no longer could find room for common ground. But the spotted owl, that was the final straw. It hit straight at the heart of the traditionalist Northwest’s deeply held thoughts about itself as a white working class place where pioneers and their pioneery descendants wrested a living from the land.

This was the landscape of Packwood’s later career. As the Republican who could talk to environmentalists, it was especially hard for him to manage, but at least he could try. Since he never really trusted Reagan and of course hated Nixon, the far right certainly hated him, but he was still a Republican and still powerful. Packwood tried to play both sides here. He was the guy who environmentalists could reach out to and he would take their calls. He would also push amendments to bills in the Senate to lift logging restrictions, which he knew would fail and maybe even half wanted to fail. But he could go home and say that he had fought for loggers. Moreover, Packwood had to run for reelection anyway in 1992. And he was running scared. Now his environmentalist background might hurt him. Was he liberal enough for Portland and Eugene? Was he too liberal for Coos Bay and Baker City? So he tried to demonize the Endangered Species Act to build up his election bonafides. In 1992, he said the ESA was “a freight train that rolls over every community in sight with no regard for anything but science.” I mean, attacking it for doing proper science? That wasn’t the way to go. The way to go, as Republicans were rapidly discovering, was to say that it didn’t do science at all but was rather part of the global liberal conspiracy. C’mom Bob.

But again, Packwood had that election campaign. He won a nasty fight against Congressman Les AuCoin, in a very negative campaign that made neither look good. Many in Oregon felt it was about time for Packwood to go and he only won that election 52-47, by far the closest since his defeat of Morse. But for Packwood, far worse things were to come.

But then Packwood got busted for his routine sexual harassment of women. In November 1992, shortly after his reelection bid, the Washington Post ran a story detailing all of this. They could have run it before the election, but chose not to. The paper claimed the story wasn’t finished, but others noted that this was more cowardly journalism than anything else, not wanting to impact an election by reporting.  Nineteen total women came forward to tell their stories about Packwood. Amazingly, and through supreme arrogance, he had written all this down in his voluminous diaries that reached well over 8,000 pages. The Senate Ethics Committee demanded it all. Packwood balked, but eventually handed it over. However, he had clumsily tried to edit all the bad stuff out and it was not hard to discover that. Packwood responded by seeming to threaten other members of Congress with exposing their misdeeds.

It is somewhat fascinating that Packwood was the one who would go down for horrible behavior toward women. Not that it wasn’t deserved, the guy was an absolutely creep and lech. But this was more than norm than the exception in these years. The Senate was a total Boys Club of creepy dudes looking to hit on anything in a skirt. If there was one thing truly bipartisan, it was sexism. Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd were notorious for this. Heck, Bill Clinton became president despite these allegations. And anyone who was involved in New Mexico politics in the 90s and 2000s has stories about Bill Richardson’s utterly atrocious behavior toward women. So, yeah, I am sure Packwood had plenty of dirt to dish if he had wanted to go out that way. And look, everyone knew about all of these assholes. It was just wink wink ha ha ha when talking about these guys, very much including Packwood, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, etc. Everyone knew about this for years.

In other words, it’s not that Packwood shouldn’t have been forced out. It’s that a lot of other powerful men should have joined them. But Packwood was really awful. Most of the known sexual conquests he made were his own staffers and the pressure these women must have faced was astounding. Even Mitch McConnell, a man with no moral standards at all, was disgusted and wanted Packwood gone, although this could have to do with Packwood’s relative liberalism as much as any real outrage. The stories of the women who Packwood harassed are pretty hair-raising. The man, simply put, had no respect for the personal boundaries of women, even as he supported their political rights. But the hubris of men like Packwood knows no boundaries. He simply thought the rules didn’t apply to him and the fact that he was a political feminist only increased his indifference to the harassment he forced upon the women unfortunate enough to cross his path.

Packwood finally resigned in October 1995. Ron Wyden won the special election to replace him and has held the seat ever since. Packwood went into an alcohol rehab facility, blaming his behavior on the booze. But as Mike Cooley noted in “Women Without Whiskey,” “You know the bottle ain’t to blame and I ain’t trying to/It don’t make you do a thing it just lets you.” Indeed.

In the aftermath, Packwood went to the old standard move of having a long career in lobbying. After all, the Beltway could be pretty forgiving of hitting on an aide. His expertise in finance and taxes made him a super useful person for corporate lobbying and he worked for a lot of giants, including Marriott and Northwest Airlines. He also developed a passion for repealing the estate tax, which he mostly won over the years.

He also kept trying to create space for Republican moderation and kept his Dorchester Conference going. But that was a lost cause.

So that’s the legacy of Bob Packwood. He was a really interesting guy with an enormous personal failing that doomed him. I don’t think the history of the Northwest or the nation would have changed had he not tried to fuck every woman he saw, but if there is one Republican in modern American politics (we will define this as my lifetime here) who one might have respected as a liberal, it was Packwood. But he blew it. Big time.

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Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire starup ecosystem has developed around the use of different—and typically smaller—reactor designs, only one of them has been fully licensed so far, and there are no plans to actually build any instances of that design.

The executive order directed the Department of Energy to have three different reactor designs reach criticality in a bit over a year. On Thursday, a startup called Antares announced that a test reactor it had placed at the Idaho National Laboratory had reached criticality, making it the first new design to cross this threshold. Criticality means that the nuclear reactions inside the hardware had become self sustaining; it does not mean the reactor had started to generate power.

Antares is one of a number of companies that is basing their design on a new fuel system called TRISO that takes some of the complexity and safety out of the reactor design and places them in the fuel design. The fuel design is based on tiny pellets with a uranium oxide core. The pellets are surrounded by several layers of carbon that can moderate the energy of both the neutrons and lighter nuclei that are released by fission reactions. All of that is encased in a hard ceramic shell that's designed to withstand the highest temperatures that can be produced by the encased uranium.

As long as your reactor can keep the TRISO pellets contained, then there should be no risk of meltdown or even the release of the most dangerous isotopes produced from the reactions. There are still some safety concerns, as neutrons will still escape and can potentially convert some of the surrounding material into unstable isotopes. But the Antares design surrounds the TRISO with a graphite sheath, which should slow most of these neutrons down.

To mitigate against non-radioactive risks, he Antares design uses sodium to take heat from the reactor to a heat transfer. The heat is transferred to pressurized nitrogen, which then drives a turbine in a closed Brayton cycle setup.

At the moment, Antares is just testing what it calls a Mark 0 reactor, which is not connected to the power-generation portion. Instead, it's being used to validate the company's modeling of the physical conditions in its reactors and generate safety data that can be used during licensing applications. Attempts to run the entire system, including electrical generation, are expected to happen next year.

While the work was done at a Department of Energy Lab, the company is working with the Department of Defense's Project Pele program for developing a mobile nuclear reactor. The company has also received support from NASA.

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SpaceX has requested unusually swift entry into several leading stock market indexes as a condition of its historic stock market debut. But the S&P 500 stock market index representing many of the largest profitable US companies has surprised market analysts by refusing to bend the rules for Elon Musk’s space and AI company.

The June 4 decision by S&P Dow Jones Indices—the company that creates and manages stock market indexes such as the S&P 500—means that SpaceX will not gain accelerated access to potentially billions more dollars through passive investment funds that automatically purchase shares of S&P 500 companies. An exception for SpaceX could have also allowed leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to gain entry not long after their own expected initial public offerings (IPOs). That possibility has now been shuttered.

The news will likely come as a relief to people concerned about passive investor money and people’s retirement savings plans having greater exposure to the market risks associated with SpaceX’s big bet on AI and speculative orbital data center plans. AI companies are generally facing more challenges in funding and building expensive AI data centers, even as they shift more of the subsidized costs of running AI services onto shocked customers through usage-based pricing.

To weigh expedited entry for SpaceX, the S&P Dow Jones Indices held a monthlong consultation to consider changing or waiving several main requirements for so-called MegaCap companies with “unprecedented market capitalizations."

Those proposed changes included shortening the “seasoning period” for new IPOs from 12 months to six months, waiving the investable weight factor (IWF) requirement for MegaCap companies to make at least 10 percent of their shares publicly available, and waiving the requirements for MegaCap companies to demonstrate profitability in the latest quarter of the financial year along with the previous four quarters.

Such rule changes would have accommodated SpaceX’s plan to only offer approximately 3 percent of its IPO shares to public investors, and the fact that SpaceX is currently unprofitable with a growing debt load that has reached $29 billion because of its spending spree on AI infrastructure.

But in its final decision, the S&P Dow Jones Indices stated that “no changes will be made to the eligibility criteria including financial viability screens, seasoning period, or minimum IWF.” Even after the standard yearlong wait, SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI may struggle to deliver the consistent profitability necessary to qualify for the S&P 500.

Money rules and exceptions

Swift entry into the S&P 500 would have triggered $14 billion of passive fund buying for SpaceX, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. The investment research arm of Bloomberg also estimated that OpenAI could have gained more than $8 billion, and Anthropic could have netted $4.6 billion from similar passive buying sprees triggered by their S&P 500 entries.

This is because $7.5 trillion in passively managed funds—popular among both individual investors and institutional investors—follow the S&P 500 by purchasing shares of companies according to their proportional representation in the S&P 500 index. For example, the Vanguard and Fidelity brokerage giants both offer passive investment funds that track the S&P 500 composition.

However, the S&P Dow Jones Indices did “carve out one concession” by changing the investable weight factor rules for “lower-profile benchmarks” such as the S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones US Total Stock Market Index, according to Quartz. That could allow an IPO faster entry into those indexes.

By contrast, the Nasdaq stock exchange changed its rules to allow SpaceX to enter the Nasdaq-100 Index within 15 trading days as opposed to the usual three months. Similarly, the FTSE Russell index provider decided to give SpaceX and other follow-on companies accelerated entry to the Russell Top 500 Index after the close of the fifth trading day following an IPO.

The denial of accelerated S&P 500 entry for SpaceX comes just days after Morningstar analysts described SpaceX as having been “significantly overvalued” in the lead-up to its IPO. The investment research firm valued SpaceX at $780 billion—less than half of SpaceX’s $1.75 trillion IPO goal—primarily based on the strengths of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite service and rocket launch business.

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In the late 1990s, I was a precocious Mac nerd who pored over issues of Macworld, stayed up late chatting on IRC, and downloaded pirated software that I didn’t actually need. I came of age at the tail end of the dial-up modem and BBS era—and got to witness the early days of the World Wide Web.

I wanted to know where all of this had come from and how it had happened so quickly. The grown-ups around me seemed mystified at best and indifferent at worst.

So I turned to books. I read Fire in the Valley (1984), Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996), Infinite Loop (1999), and Dealers of Lightning (1999). In my mind (and to a lesser degree, on my actual bookshelf), I had built a mental list of my favorite selections of late 20th-century tech journalism.

Despite its 21st-century publication date, Geoffrey Cain’s latest book, Steve Jobs in Exile, would make a comfortable addition to my old list.

I already knew the basic beats of this story: the origins of Silicon Valley, the establishment of the ARPANet, the creation of Xerox PARC, the founding of Apple, its near-collapse, and Jobs leaving the company to launch NeXT.

Credit: Cyrus Farivar

Cain reminds us, in stunning detail, that Jobs’ “exile” era at NeXT was not only critical to his evolution as a man and an entrepreneur, but that it mattered for the rest of us, too. The technological innovations that came out of NeXT—notably, the NeXTSTEP OS—continue to live on in what we now call both macOS and iOS.

As Cain puts it, “NeXTSTEP was Steve’s attempt to make Unix taste sweet.”

I was raised in a Mac household, beginning with the 128k and extending through the Plus, the Classic II, and so many Performas. (One of my dad’s friends even gifted me a Newton. Like Jobs himself, I found the experience of actually using it quite confounding.)

By 1998 and 1999, we were all surfing those Bondi Blue iMac G3 waves—my high school journalism classroom even had a few! It was the dawn of a new millennium, and Y2K fears aside, things were looking pretty good.

At the time, I knew only vaguely about why Apple had struggled—OK, sucked—in the mid-90s. Why did Jobs start NeXT? What happened to a “computer for the rest of us”? What took place between Apple’s glory days of the early 1980s and its iMac-fueled, late-90s renaissance? (And what counts as a “workstation,” anyway?)

Steve Jobs in Exile answers all of these questions and more.

While the general narrative—Jobs left for NeXT but returned to save Apple—is easy to see in hindsight, Cain’s telling brings new tidbits, detailed texture, and three-dimensional characters to the fore in ways that haven’t been fully realized previously.

Three brief passages highlight the amount of new information uncovered by Cain.

Near the middle of the book, Cain writes about how in 1989, NeXT and Jobs hired Adamation, a two-man Black-owned, Oakland-based software development company, to make some of the first software for NeXT's nascent platform.

While that project for William Morris, a notable Hollywood agency, ultimately fizzled, Cain notes that “Steve [Jobs] protected Adamation’s reputation. He never blamed them publicly for the failure, and NeXT kept sending [Adamation] high-profile clients: the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and then a luxury real estate broker called Alain Pinel Realtors.”

In this brief moment, almost a footnote, Cain underscores how much Jobs valued people who could share his vision of better and easier-to-use software. (NeXT’s hardware turned out to be too little, too late.)

Second, while many tech nerds know that Tim Berners-Lee created the first World Wide Web server on a NeXT machine while working in Switzerland in 1990, few know that NeXT employees were wary of bringing the news to Jobs. Why? They feared his wrath “and that he would dismiss [the web] as ‘shit.’” (In another timeline, NeXT might itself have capitalized on this world-changing innovation.)

But perhaps one of the wildest anecdotes that Cain uncovered was how one voicemail changed computer history forever.

In 1996, when Apple was solidly in its mediocre Performa era—and considering buying BeOS as the basis for its new operating system—a mid-level NeXT product manager asked aloud, “Why don’t we just frickin’ call Apple?” (NeXT was also struggling during this period.)

And so someone did. As Cain writes:

Garrett left the group of managers, walked back to his office, and took a risk. He picked up his designer phone and called the head of software at Apple. He left what he described as "one of my more inspired sales pitches" on the man’s voicemail, explaining why Apple should be looking at NeXT instead of Be... In any other universe, Garrett’s call might have gotten him fired. But in this timeline, it worked out. And thanks to him, Steve [Jobs] was about to enter Apple’s airspace once again.

Jobs passed away in 2011 at the age of 56. It’s worth remembering that 12 of those years were spent building NeXT.

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Some thoughts at National Security Journal about how to end this stupid war:

The President has no good options. The Iran War is a whirlwind of executive incompetence, embarked upon for no good reason, conducted with no clear strategy, and drawing to no visible endgame. It is difficult at this point to see how an accord will leave the US in a better position than when it started, beyond the unlikely possibility of a sudden collapse of the Islamic Republic. That said, the President’s precarious domestic situation offers an opening for some kind of war termination, if not on terms that the United States would prefer.

A basic deal would involve easing both the US and Iranian blockades in stages. Iran may insist upon a greater degree of control over the Strait than it enjoyed before the war, although any charges will be described as “fees” rather than “tolls.”

There will be no meaningful controls over Iran’s ballistic missile or drone programs, or a relaxation of its support for militias in Iraq and Yemen. The nuclear program remains the toughest place to find a face-saving compromise for both sides, but as we draw closer to the November midterms, the nature of that compromise is likely to increasingly favor Iran.

A deal along these terms could end the war… for now. It will not, however, eliminate the core issues that led to the conflict in the first place, meaning that war is likely to resume in the not-too-distant future and once again entangle the United States.

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Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac will reportedly drop into "reduced functionality mode" on July 13, 2026, when a license-validation certificate expires, leaving perpetually licensed apps able to open files but not edit or save them. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from OSnews: "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires," reports the Consumer Rights Wiki. "After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would 'continue to function.' The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined 'reduced functionality mode,' in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved. By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the 'continue to function' clause was removed." Microsoft's advice to the users they're stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it's not because the software industry is a clown show.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.