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In the biggest news of all, Rivian and Volkswagen announced a $5 billion joint venture that will co-develop core parts of the hardware and software platform to be used in cars from both automakers.

We love that because it aligns so beautifully with our mission: the ability to help accelerate putting highly compelling electric vehicles into the market, which will ultimately drive more demand.

A core objective of how we’ve structured the joint venture is that we don’t lose the velocity and the speed and the decisiveness and lack of bureaucracy that exists within our software function today.

Beyond just simplification of how we manage running over-the-air updates across so many different instances, it also gets us a lot of supply chain leverage in a way that we, Rivian, haven’t had in the past.

In fact, you can imagine the day of the announcement, I had a handful of phone calls from CEOs of big semiconductor suppliers, and they’re like, “Hey, we can work harder on pricing.” So, that was awesome.

So, taking away all those mechanical design studio packaging constraints that we had before, and then solving the biggest challenge, which was network architecture by this being that as a project, it’s just a very different type of relationship.

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“We’re grateful for the progress leading companies have made toward fulfilling their voluntary commitments in addition to what is required by the executive order,” says Robyn Patterson, a spokesperson for the White House.

Without comprehensive federal legislation, the best the US can do right now is to demand that companies follow through on these voluntary commitments, says Brandie Nonnecke, the director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

After they signed the commitments, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI founded the Frontier Model Forum, a nonprofit that aims to facilitate discussions and actions on AI safety and responsibility.

“The natural question is: Does [the technical fix] meaningfully make progress and address the underlying social concerns that motivate why we want to know whether content is machine generated or not?” he adds.

In the past year, the company has pushed out research on deception, jailbreaking, strategies to mitigate discrimination, and emergent capabilities such as models’ ability to tamper with their own code or engage in persuasion.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has used satellite imagery and AI to improve responses to wildfires in Maui and map climate-vulnerable populations, which helps researchers expose risks such as food insecurity, forced migration, and disease.

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Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost.

The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years.

It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat—typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco’s fog, for example).

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research.

That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research.

While many of the AI skeptics in weather forecasting have been won over by recent developments, according to Hill, the fast pace is hard for the research community to keep up with.

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The United Nations has blamed Facebook for the dissemination of hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar that resulted in their ethnic cleansing.

This influence on others is known as a (positive) network effect, where increased numbers of people improve the value of a product.

In doing so, one could be helping Facebook to refine its algorithms so that it can better single out specific individuals for certain purposes, some of which could be as nefarious as those of Cambridge Analytica.

For those of us who do not engage in such objectionable behavior, it is helpful to consider whether Facebook has crossed certain moral “red lines,” entering the realm of outright wickedness.

Likewise, Facebook would have crossed a red line if it had intentionally assisted in the dissemination of hate speech in Myanmar.

The recent worrisome revelation that Facebook hired an opposition-research firm that attempted to discredit protesters by claiming that they were agents of the financier George Soros is not encouraging.

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Parents of under-18s should be monitoring their children’s phones for nude pictures, according to the police chief for child protection, in order to tackle a “tidal wave” of online sexual abuse cases.

The new lead for child abuse investigations at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, assistant chief constable Becky Riggs, told the Sunday Times parents needed to report any intimate images of their children to police.

In October 2022, 16-year-old Dinal De Alwis killed himself after being blackmailed over naked images he had sent to a stranger, possibly in Nigeria.

While much of this abuse comes from adults targeting children, half of it is child-on-child crime and figures show the average age of an offender is 14.

In 2022, in England and Wales, about 5,000 cases involved children sharing naked photos of themselves.

We will work with parents and schools to avoid criminalising children where it comes with a degree of naivety, but we have to measure each case on its merits.”

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Microsoft has released a recovery tool that’s designed to help IT admins repair Windows machines that were impacted by CrowdStrike’s faulty update that crashed 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday.

The tool creates a bootable USB drive that IT admins can use to help quickly recover impacted machines.

While CrowdStrike has issued an update to fix its software that led to millions of Blue Screen of Death errors, not all machines are able to automatically receive that fix.

Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file.

Microsoft’s recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly.

This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows.

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CrowdStrike’s faulty update caused a worldwide tech disaster that affected 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft says that’s “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” but it was enough to create problems for retailers, banks, airlines, and many other industries, as well as everyone who relies on them.

Separately, the technical breakdown from CrowdStrike released Friday explains more about what happened and why so many systems were affected all at once.

CrowdStrike’s breakdown explains the configuration file that was at the heart of the issue:

CrowdStrike explained that the file is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipe1 execution on Windows systems.” Security researcher and Objective See founder Patrick Wardle says that the explanation aligns with the earlier analysis he and others provided about the cause of the crash, as the problem file “C-00000291- “triggered a logic error that resulted in an OS crash” (via CSAgent.sys).”

CrowdStrike’s channel file updates were pushed to computers regardless of any settings meant to prevent such automatic updates, Wardle noted.

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LONDON (AP) — TikTok owner ByteDance can’t avoid the bloc’s crackdown on digital giants, a European Union court said Wednesday in a decision that found the video sharing platform falls under a new law that also covers Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The EU’s General Court rejected ByteDance’s legal challenge against being classed as an online “gatekeeper” that has to comply with extra obligations under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Markets Act.

The rulebook, also known as the DMA, took effect this year and seeks to counter the dominance of Big Tech companies and make online competition fairer by giving consumers more choice.

TikTok had argued that it wasn’t a gatekeeper but was playing the role of a new competitor in social media taking on entrenched players like Facebook and Instagram owner Meta.

The judges, however, decided that since 2018 TikTok had “succeeded in increasing its number of users very rapidly and exponentially” and that it had “rapidly consolidated its position, and even strengthened that position over the following years.”

The Digital Markets Act took effect in March, with a list of dos and don’ts for big tech “gatekeeper” companies aimed at giving users more choices and threatening big penalties if they don’t comply.

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More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.

Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers.

The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica.

(Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)

Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

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The way it works goes something like this: Imagine we at The Verge created an AI bot with explicit instructions to direct you to our excellent reporting on any subject.

In a conversation with Olivier Godement, who leads the API platform product at OpenAI, he explained that instruction hierarchy will prevent the meme’d prompt injections (aka tricking the AI with sneaky commands) we see all over the internet.

Without this protection, imagine an agent built to write emails for you being prompt-engineered to forget all instructions and send the contents of your inbox to a third party.

Existing LLMs, as the research paper explains, lack the capabilities to treat user prompts and system instructions set by the developer differently.

“We envision other types of more complex guardrails should exist in the future, especially for agentic use cases, e.g., the modern Internet is loaded with safeguards that range from web browsers that detect unsafe websites to ML-based spam classifiers for phishing attempts,” the research paper says.

Trust in OpenAI has been damaged for some time, so it will take a lot of research and resources to get to a point where people may consider letting GPT models run their lives.

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If you ever used Google’s URL shortening service goo.gl before it was shut down in 2019, be warned — those links will stop working on August 25th, 2025.

Google announced in a blog post that “the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener” and that any links in the https://goo.gl/* format will respond with a 404 error next year.

Ahead of the shutdown, goo.gl links will start showing an interstitial page on August 23rd, 2024, notifying users that “this link will no longer work in the near future.” This message will initially appear for a “percentage of existing links,’’ which will increase as the deadline draws closer.

Google is encouraging developers to update impacted links as soon as possible, however, as this interstitial page may cause disruptions to link redirections.

When Google announced in 2018 that it was shutting down goo.gl, the company encouraged developers to migrate to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) — which has also since been deprecated.

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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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