tech:

taffy

CenturyLink Wins $233M Social Security Administration Task Order

CenturyLink has won a $233 million task order to provide primary managed data networking services over the next five years to the Social Security Administration (SSA) under the Networx Universal contract. The General Services Administration’s Networx program is the largest telecommunications contract vehicle ever awarded by the federal government.

CenturyLink will provide network infrastructure for data, video and voice services to the SSA, which has more than 62,000 employees worldwide.  As the primary service provider, CenturyLink will help SSA drive the pace for the transition from the current providers to the new service providers.

In this capacity, CenturyLink will serve all SSA data centers, regional offices, program service centers, remote operations communications centers and more than 1,500 field office locations around the world. Under the task order, CenturyLink will also provide management and implementation support and lifecycle engineering.

SSA had previously awarded a broad voice services task order to Qwest, which was acquired by CenturyLink, in 2008. The services that CenturyLink provides under the 2008 award help SSA with everything from internal communications and collaboration via audio conferencing to lowering its disability case hearing backlog via video conferencing.

Just in

AI is ‘a new kind of digital species,’ Microsoft AI chief says — Quartz

Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, said during a talk at TED 2024 that AI is the newest wave of creation since the start of life on Earth, and that “we are in the fastest and most consequential wave ever,” writes Britney Nguyen in Quartz.

It’s baaack! Microsoft and IBM open source MS-DOS 4.0 — ZDNet

Microsoft and IBM have joined forces to open-source the 1988 operating system MS-DOS 4.0 under the MIT License, writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols. 

Generative AI arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR — NYT

New AI technology is generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit your DNA, pointing to a future when scientists can battle illness and diseases with even greater precision and speed than they can today, writes Cade Metz.

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will offer its virtual reality OS to hardware companies, creating iPhone versus Android dynamic — CNBC

Meta will partner with external hardware companies, including Lenovo, Microsoft and Asus, to build virtual reality headsets using the company’s Meta Horizon operating system, writes Kif Leswing.