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There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.

Follow our live blog as we bring you the latest updates.

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“We’re making it easier for developers to start up and scale quickly in India with lower pricing and the ability to be charged and pay their bill in INR (Indian Rupees),” states the search and ads giant’s explanation for the change, which comes into effect from August 1.

It pointed to rivals not offering complete rural coverage, keeping up with new or changed roads, and not understanding how potholes and other tarmac quality issues impact travel times.

In 2022 Singaporean rideshare and delivery platform Grab created its own maps that capture info specific to the layout of Asian cities, taking into account the prevalence of motorbikes across the region.

“Our recent #ExitGoogleMaps campaign wasn’t just about a product – it’s a battle cry for India’s technological freedom,” wrote Ola Group co-founder and chair Bhavish Aggarwal.

Another new offer means developers will get access to Ola Maps at no charge for three years if they use them alongside the Indian government’s e-commerce hub – the Open Network for Digital Commerce.

But local regulators have previously gone after Google over its Android and Play Store market dominance, and Smart TV licensing practices.

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The current FCC, which has three Democratic and two Republican commissioners, voted in April to bring back net neutrality.

Broadband providers have since challenged the FCC’s action, which is potentially more vulnerable after the Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down Chevron deference — a legal doctrine that instructed courts to defer to an agency’s expert decisions except in a very narrow range of circumstances.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matt Schettenhelm said in a report prior to the court’s ruling that he doesn’t expect the FCC to prevail in court, in large part due to the demise of Chevron.

A panel of judges for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said in an order that a temporary “administrative stay is warranted” while it considers the merits of the broadband providers’ request for a permanent stay.

In the meantime, the court requested the parties provide additional briefs about the application of National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services to this lawsuit.

Brand X is a 2005 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the FCC had lawfully interpreted the Communications Act to exclude cable broadband providers from the definition of “telecommunications services.” At the time, SCOTUS said the lower court should have followed Chevron and deferred to the agency’s interpretation.

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With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it’s not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there’s still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover… With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios.

Ted Ts’o sent out the EXT4 updates today for Linux 6.11.

He explained in that pull request: "Many cleanups and bug fixes in ext4, especially for the fast commit feature.

Up to 20% faster for fast devices using async direct I/O thanks to JBD2 optimizations.

Indeed the patch from Huawei’s Zhang Yi to speed up jbd2_transaction_committed() shows off some great improvements:

It’s great continuing to see EXT4 uncover new performance optimizations.

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A Telstra outage that left people without reception for six days in regional WA has highlighted a regulation loophole with mobile technology not being considered an essential service.

Port Denison and Dongara are 353km north of Perth and in July the outage left many people out of reach.

One business, which relies on Telstra for its eftpos machines, estimated it lost up to $18,000 in sales as a result of the outage.

“The reality is that this country is so city-focused that they’re forgetting, rapidly, the people in regional areas in so many ways, and this is just another example,” she said.

In November last year, more than 10 million Australians and 400,000 businesses were impacted by a 14-hour Optus network outage.

Ms Gebert said people who were not satisfied with a resolution offered by a telecommunications provider had the right to complain to the ombudsman’s office.

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Fei-Fei Li, the renowned computer scientist known as the “godmother of AI,” has created a startup dubbed World Labs.

World Labs hopes to use human-like processing of visual data to make AI capable of advanced reasoning, Reuters reported in May.

Li is best known for her contributions to computer vision, a branch of AI dedicated to helping machines interpret and comprehend visual information.

Li founded World Labs while on partial leave from Stanford, where she co-directs the university’s Human-Centered AI Institute.

In a Ted Talk in April, Li further explained the field of research her startup will work on advancing, which involves algorithms capable of realistically extrapolating images and text into three-dimensional environments and acting on those predictions, using a concept known as “spatial intelligence.” This could bolster work in various fields such as robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, and computer vision.

The investment in World Labs reflects a trend where venture capitalists eagerly align themselves with ambitious AI companies, spurred by the surprise success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which rapidly achieved a valuation exceeding $80 billion.

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Funding for free and open source software (FOSS) initiatives under the EU’s Horizon program has mostly vanished from next year’s proposal, claim advocates who are worried for the future of many ongoing projects.

FOSS software, Gibello argued, is key to protecting European interests from the data-guzzling economy that’s grown up elsewhere, which is why he’s perplexed at the decision not to fund NGI.

“Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations,” he added.

In other words, not all NGI funding is for fun stuff like EU-made RISC-V-free laptops - some of it’s important for helping the EU implement laws around digital goods and services.

NGI has received tens of millions of euros over the past few years under Cluster 4 of the program, which doles out cash for digital, industry and space projects.

“Our French [Horizon national contact point] was told - as an unofficial answer - that because lots of budget are allocated to AI, there is not much left for Internet infrastructure,” Gibello said.

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Google owner Alphabet is in advanced discussions to buy fast-growing cybersecurity startup Wiz for roughly $23 billion, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN.

Discussions between Google and Wiz began after the startup raised $1 billion from venture capital investors earlier this year, the source said.

In March 2022, Alphabet bought cybersecurity firm Mandiant for $5.4 billion as part of its efforts to help companies better address cyber threats and bolster its cloud computing business.

Buying Wiz would be a “shot across the bow” at Microsoft and Amazon, showing that Google is making a “major bet on the cyber security space to complement its flagship offering in the cloud,” Dan Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush, wrote in a note to clients on Monday.

Just last week, AT&T revealed that nearly all of its wireless customers’ call and text records were exposed in a massive breach caused by an “illegal download” on a third-party cloud platform.

If the acquisition gets finalized and closes, it would mark a massive exit for Wiz and its founders — Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica and Roy Reznik.

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Generative AI is taking the world by storm, and its impact is evident across all sectors, including medicine, education, music, computing, and more.

According to a detailed analysis by Michael Thomas, this surpasses the power consumption of over 100 nations, including Ghana, Tunisia, and more (via Tom’s Hardware).

Some of the downsides to advancements in the AI landscape include the degradation of the environment, however, Google and Microsoft are big on renewable energy and have been championing the campaign while seeking alternative power sources.

Elon Musk claimed we’re on the verge of the biggest technology breakthrough with AI, but there won’t be enough power by 2025.

Sam Altman has been exploring a potential alternative power source for OpenAI’s AI efforts, with nuclear fusion at the top of his list.

While nuclear fusion seems like the perfect solution for AI’s power needs due to its non-existent impact on the environment, scientists and researchers say it’s “too late to deal with the climate crisis” and view fission and renewable energy as better options.

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HeHealth’s AI-powered Calmara app claimed, “Our innovative AI technology offers rapid, confidential, and scientifically validated sexual health screening, giving you peace of mind before diving into intimate encounters,” but now it’s shut down after an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The letter lays out some of the agency’s concerns with the information HeHealth relied on for its claims, including one saying that it could detect more than 10 sexually transmitted infections with up to 94 percent accuracy.

Given that most STIs are asymptomatic, according to the World Health Organization, medical professionals have questioned the reliability of the app’s tactics.

One Los Angeles Times investigation found that Calmara couldn’t even discern inanimate objects and failed to identify “textbook images” of STIs.

The FTC issued a civil investigative demand (similar to a subpoena) seeking information about Calmara’s advertising claims and privacy practices and put HeHealth on notice that it’s illegal to make health benefit claims without “reliable scientific evidence.”

The FTC said it would not pursue the investigation further since HeHealth agreed to those terms and because of “the small number of Calmara users and sales in the U.S.” But, it warned, “The Commission reserves the right to take such further action as the public interest may require.”

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Major record labels sued Verizon on Friday, alleging that the Internet service provider violated copyright law by continuing to serve customers accused of pirating music.

They say that “Verizon has knowingly contributed to, and reaped substantial profits from, massive copyright infringement committed by tens of thousands of its subscribers.”

Cox received support from groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which warned that the big money judgment could cause broadband providers to disconnect people from the Internet based only on accusations of copyright infringement.

While judges in the Cox case reversed a vicarious liability verdict, they affirmed the jury’s additional finding of willful contributory infringement and ordered a new damages trial.

“Yet rather than taking any steps to address its customers’ illegal use of its network, Verizon deliberately chose to ignore Plaintiffs’ notices, willfully blinding itself to that information and prioritizing its own profits over its legal obligations.”

The lawsuit also complains that Verizon hasn’t made it easier for copyright owners to file complaints about Internet users:

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Google tried to derail a Microsoft antitrust settlement over anticompetitive software licensing in the European Union by offering a $500 million alternative deal to the group of cloud providers behind the EU complaint, Bloomberg reported.

According to Bloomberg, Google’s offer to the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) required that the group maintain its EU antitrust complaint.

Bloomberg uncovered Google’s attempted counteroffer after reviewing confidential documents and speaking to “people familiar with the matter.”

Seemingly increasing regulatory pressure on Microsoft while taking a chunk of its business in the EU was supposed to be one of Google’s next big moves.

“However, the members voted by a significant majority to accept the Microsoft offer, which, in their view, presented the best opportunity for the European cloud sector,” Maynard told Ars.

In 2022, CISPE Secretary-General Francisco Mingorance told Ars that although CISPE had been clear that it intended to force Microsoft to make changes allowing all cloud rivals to compete, “a key reason behind filing the complaint was to support” two smaller cloud service providers, Aruba and OVH.

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Google is launching its new Vids productivity app in Workspace Labs with the idea that “if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids.” Announced in April, Vids allows users to drop docs, slides, voiceovers, and video recordings into a timeline to create a presentation video to share with coworkers.

Making it available in the Workspace Labs preview allows Workspace admins to opt in users to try out the AI-powered video maker.

While you can generate video in Vids, it’s not to be confused with AI tools like OpenAI’s Sora, which can create lifelike footage from a prompt.

Instead, Vids is about generating a presentation by describing what you want Gemini to create and then letting you alter the video afterward.

You can also manually get your Google Vids presentation draft started using one of the many templates available, and there’s royalty-free stock content to enhance your creation.

However, as the video demonstration shows, the key feature is using Gemini to automatically insert stock footage for you, generate your script, and even give it an AI voiceover for your next presentation without you saying a word.

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Just two days after the attempted assassination at former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI announced it “gained access” to the shooter’s phone.

Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that law enforcement agencies have several tools at their disposal to extract data from phones.

The bureau famously butted heads with Apple in late 2015 after the company refused to help law enforcement get around the encryption on the San Bernardino, California shooter’s iPhone.

Early in the following year, Apple refused a federal court order to help the FBI access the shooter’s phone, which the company said would effectively require it to build a backdoor for the iPhone’s encryption software.

“The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor,” Cook wrote.

Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the Pensacola shooting was one of the last times federal law enforcement agencies loudly denounced encryption.

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“And I try to help people understand there is an exponential here, and the unfortunate thing is you only get to sample it every couple of years because it just takes a while to build supercomputers and then train models on top of them.”

The laws suggest that simply scaling up model size and training data can lead to significant improvements in AI capabilities without necessarily requiring fundamental algorithmic breakthroughs.

The perception has been fueled by largely informal observations—and some benchmark results—about recent models like Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, Anthropic’s Claude Opus, and even OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which some argue haven’t shown the dramatic leaps in capability seen in earlier generations, and that LLM development may be approaching diminishing returns.

Scott’s stance suggests that tech giants like Microsoft still feel justified in investing heavily in larger AI models, betting on continued breakthroughs rather than hitting a capability plateau.

Some perceptions of slowing progress in LLM capabilities and benchmarking may be due to the rapid onset of AI in the public eye when, in fact, LLMs have been developing for years prior.

In the podcast interview, the Microsoft CTO pushed back against the idea that AI progress has stalled, but he acknowledged the challenge of infrequent data points in this field, as new models often take years to develop.

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TOKYO – Wikipedia has become an essential online tool but as misinformation spreads rampantly on the internet, its founder Jimmy Wales tells Nikkei about the challenges the 23-year-old nonprofit encyclopedia faces in building a platform for the distribution of accurate information.

The advent of generative artificial intelligence further muddies the water, allowing bad actors to create highly convincing videos and audio recordings to perpetuate falsehoods.

Wales tells Nikkei about the strategies that Wikipedia employs to verify facts and enhance the credibility of its site.

Q: What challenges have you experienced in fighting against false statements, pursuing and ensuring accuracy, with Wikipedia allowing people to edit freely?

You can imagine scanning all of Wikipedia on a regular basis and looking for entries that are popular, but also have errors or bias to call to attention.

Now imagine an AI that can go to your mother … can read all of her past social media posts, LinkedIn, find all information about, and then based on those, to craft a political message now.

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As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.

The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.

In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”

The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.

While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.

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Due to the ARM64 maintainer for the Linux kernel going on holiday, the ARM64 port updates have been submitted ahead of the opening of the Linux 6.11 merge window that will likely be on Monday or otherwise the following week depending upon if a 6.10-rc8 is warranted.

When it comes to the ARM64 (AArch64) changes for this next kernel version, there’s been a lot of work on virtual CPU hotplug handling so that it should now be properly working on ARM64 ACPI-enabled systems.

Another change with Linux 6.11 ARM64 is expanding the speculative SSBS workaround to more CPU cores.

Arm’s Speculative Store Bypass handling is now being extended for additional affected CPU cores of he A710, A720, X2, X3, X925, N2, and V2.

There are also ARM64 ACPI updates, GICv3 optimizations, perf updates for more hardware, and other smaller changes.

See this merge request for all the ARM64 feature patches slated for Linux 6.11.

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A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.

Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers.

State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) led an effort to create an AI roadmap for the chamber, but made clear that new laws would be worked out in individual committees.

“The capacity of AI to produce stunningly accurate digital representations of performers poses a real and present threat to the economic and reputational well-being and self-determination of our members,” SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said in a statement.

“We need a fully transparent and accountable supply chain for generative Artificial Intelligence and the content it creates in order to protect everyone’s basic right to control the use of their face, voice, and persona.”

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After the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary released a report accusing the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) of colluding with companies to censor conservative voices online, Elon Musk chimed in.

There is no telling yet if Yaccarino’s seeming support of GARM may strain her relationship with Musk, who has parted ways with several X executives during his reign over content moderation conflicts.

The Committee on the Judiciary reported that GARM may be violating the Sherman Act, which “makes unreasonable restraints of trade illegal,” including certain cases when “group boycotts and coordinated actions” harm consumers.

This allegedly worked to “rob consumers of choices” and “is likely illegal under the antitrust laws,” in addition to threatening “fundamental American freedoms,” the committee’s report said.

"GARM creates voluntary industry standards on brand safety and suitability which media sellers and ad tech companies can voluntarily adopt, adapt or reject.

“In consultation with legal counsel, WFA maintains robust and effective compliance policies designed to enhance competition,” GARM told Ars.

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