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Wiz, the cloud security startup that was in acquisition talks with Google, has decided not to forward with the deal and to remain an independent company, according to an internal note sent to company employees on Monday. Fortune: "While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz," CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote in the note. Rappaport said in the email that the company's next target is to reach $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and to take the company public.

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The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association claims that AI-powered search engines by U.S. tech giants like Google and Microsoft likely infringe on copyright by using news articles without permission. Therefore, they're urging the Japanese government to quickly review and revise intellectual property laws to address these issues. Kyodo News reports (translated in English): The association argued in the statement that while traditional search engines direct users to various copyrighted material available online, AI search engines disclose the content, making them a completely different type of service. While stressing that in many instances, the essential content of the referenced article is reprinted in its entirety and therefore constitutes copyright infringement, the association also highlighted the issue of "zero-click searches," where users do not visit the source site. It warned that the lack of traffic could lead to the diminution of news organizations' reporting activities, which would then have a negative impact on democracy and culture. The statement also expressed concern over potential inaccuracies in responses generated by AI search engines, which could give the impression that the source articles themselves were erroneous and damage the credibility of news organizations. The association added that providing AI search engine services without obtaining permission to use the source articles could violate the antimonopoly law. "There are many reasons AI companies are attracted to Japan, including the need for its companies to rapidly develop their digital capabilities and the country's declining population, which is very open to AI," said Yutaka Matsuo, a professor at Tokyo University and chair of the government's AI council, in a statement to the Financial Times. "One other attraction is that AI companies are permitted to learn from information without infringing copyright laws," he added. The Financial Times says the push to bring AI companies to Japan has raised alarm for some content creators who worry their work isn't being protected. "As it relates to generative AI, Japan's existing Copyright Act does not contribute to protecting creators. In fact, it is focused on restricting the rights of creators," the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers said in a statement.

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Azure used to be a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. Now, it's the most widely used operating system on Microsoft Azure. The New Stack's Joab Jackson writes: These days, Microsoft expends considerable effort that Linux runs as smoothly as possible on Azure, according to a talk given earlier this year at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit given by two Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program managers, Jack Aboutboul, and Krum Kashan. "Linux is the #1 operating system in Azure today," Aboutoul said. And all must be supported in a way that Microsoft users have come to expects. Hence, the need for the Microsoft's Linux Platforms Group, which provides support Linux to both the internal customers and to Azure customers. These days, the duo of engineers explained, Microsoft knows about as much as anyone about how to operate Linux at hyperscale. [...] As of today, there are hundreds of Azure and Azure-based services running on Linux, including the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), OpenAI, HDInsight, and many of the other database services. "A lot of the infrastructure powering everything else is running on Linux," Aboutoul said. "They're different flavors of Linux running all over the place," Aboutoul said. To run these services, Microsoft maintains its own kernel, Azure Linux, and in 2023 the company released its own version of Linux, Azure Linux. But Azure Linux is just a small portion of all the other flavors of Linux running on Azure, all of which Microsoft must work with to support. Overall, there are about 20,000 third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) packages in the Azure marketplace that rely on some Linux distribution. And when things go wrong, it is the Azure service engineers who get the help tickets. The company keeps a set of endorsed Linux distributions, which include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Flatcar, Suse, Canonical, and Oracle Linux and CentOS (as managed by OpenLogic, not Red Hat). [...] Overall, the company gets about 1,000 images a month from these endorsed partners alone. Many of the distributions have multiple images (Suse has a regular one, and another one for high-performance computing, for instance).

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"Anyone who is into gaming knows your graphics card is under strain trying to display modern graphics," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "This results in increased power usage, which is then turned into heat. Keeping your card cool is a must to get the best performance possible." "However, hardware tester Igor's Lab found that vendors for Nvidia RTX 40-series cards are using cheap, poorly applied thermal paste, which is leading to high temperatures and consequently, performance degradation over time. This penny-pinching has been confirmed by Nick Evanson at PC Gamer." From the report: I have four RTX 40-series cards in my office (RTX 4080 Super, 4070 Ti, and two 4070s) and all of them have quite high hotspots -- the highest temperature recorded by an individual thermal sensor in the die. In the case of the 4080 Super, it's around 11 C higher than the average temperature of the chip. I took it apart to apply some decent quality thermal paste and discovered a similar situation to that found by Igor's Lab. In the space of a few months, the factory-applied paste had separated and spread out, leaving just an oily film behind, and a few patches of the thermal compound itself. I checked the other cards and found that they were all in a similar state. Igor's Lab examined the thermal paste used on a brand-new RTX 4080 and found it to be quite thin in nature, due to large quantities of cheap silicone oil being used, along with zinc oxide filler. There was lots of ground aluminium oxide (the material that provides the actual thermal transfer) but it was quite coarse, leading to the paste separating quite easily. Removing the factory-installed paste from another RTX 4080 graphics card, Igor's Lab applied a more appropriate amount of a high-quality paste and discovered that it lowered the hotspot temperature by nearly 30 C.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission (EC) has finally taken action to block Meta's heavily criticized plan to charge a subscription fee to users who value privacy on its platforms. Surprisingly, this step wasn't taken under laws like the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Instead, the EC announced Monday that Meta risked sanctions under EU consumer laws if it could not resolve key concerns about Meta's so-called "pay or consent" model. Meta's model is seemingly problematic, the commission said, because Meta "requested consumers overnight to either subscribe to use Facebook and Instagram against a fee or to consent to Meta's use of their personal data to be shown personalized ads, allowing Meta to make revenue out of it." Because users were given such short notice, they may have been "exposed to undue pressure to choose rapidly between the two models, fearing that they would instantly lose access to their accounts and their network of contacts," the EC said. To protect consumers, the EC joined national consumer protection authorities, sending a letter to Meta requiring the tech giant to propose solutions to resolve the commission's biggest concerns by September 1. That Meta's "pay or consent" model may be "misleading" is a top concern because it uses the term "free" for ad-based plans, even though Meta "can make revenue from using their personal data to show them personalized ads." It seems that while Meta does not consider giving away personal information to be a cost to users, the EC's commissioner for justice, Didier Reynders, apparently does. "Consumers must not be lured into believing that they would either pay and not be shown any ads anymore, or receive a service for free, when, instead, they would agree that the company used their personal data to make revenue with ads," Reynders said. "EU consumer protection law is clear in this respect. Traders must inform consumers upfront and in a fully transparent manner on how they use their personal data. This is a fundamental right that we will protect." Additionally, the EC is concerned that Meta users might be confused about how "to navigate through different screens in the Facebook/Instagram app or web-version and to click on hyperlinks directing them to different parts of the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy to find out how their preferences, personal data, and user-generated data will be used by Meta to show them personalized ads." They may also find Meta's "imprecise terms and language" confusing, such as Meta referring to "your info" instead of clearly referring to consumers' "personal data." A Meta spokesperson said in a statement: "Subscriptions as an alternative to advertising are a well-established business model across many industries. Subscription for no ads follows the direction of the highest court in Europe and we are confident it complies with European regulation."

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Researchers have identified a zero-day exploit for the Telegram messaging app on Android devices that could have allowed attackers to send malicious payloads disguised as legitimate files. From a report: The exploit was built to abuse a vulnerability that Slovakia-based firm ESET dubbed EvilVideo. Telegram fixed the bug earlier this month in versions 10.14.5 and above after researchers reported it. Threat actors had about five weeks to exploit the zero-day before it was patched, but it's not clear if it was used in the wild, ESET said. ESET discovered the exploit on an underground forum in early June. It was sold for an unspecified price by a user with the username "Ancryno." In its post, the seller showed screenshots and a video of testing the exploit in a public Telegram channel. In unpatched versions of Telegram for Android, attackers could use the exploit to send malicious payloads via Telegram channels, groups and chats, making them appear as multimedia files. The exploit takes advantage of Telegram's default setting to automatically download media files. The option can be disabled manually, but in that case, the payload could still be installed on the device if a user tapped the download button in the top left corner of the shared file. If the user tried to play the "video," Telegram displayed a message that it was unable to play it and suggested using an external player. The hackers disguised a malicious app as this external player.

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In an interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said the automaker has no plans to adopt Apple CarPlay in its vehicles. "We have a great relationship with Apple," he said. "As much as I love their products, there's a reason that ironically is very consistent with Apple ethos for us to want to control the ecosystem." CarPlay isn't "consistent with how we think about really creating a pure product experience," Scaringe said. From the report: One example given by Scaringe includes CarPlay's inability to "leverage other parts of the vehicle experience," which would require Rivian customers to leave the app in order to do things like open the vehicle's front trunk. "We've taken the view of the digital experience in the vehicle wants to feel consistent and holistically harmonious across every touchpoint," said Scaringe. Instead, the Rivian CEO says the company will eventually add CarPlay's most desirable features "but on an a la carte basis." Scaringe says that excluding CarPlay will allow the company to be more selective about features like routing and mapping charging points, noting that Rivian had acquired route planning app maker Iternio last year to facilitate that. "We recognize that it'll take us time to fully capture every feature that's in CarPlay, and hopefully, customers are seeing that. I think it often gets more noise than it deserves," Scaringe said in the interview. "The other thing beyond mapping that's coming is better integration with texting. We know that needs to come, and it's something that teams are actively working on."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Boeing-owned Wisk Aero expects its pilotless air-taxi to begin carrying passengers "later in the decade" as it works with the U.S. regulator to secure approvals, its CEO said on Monday, amid skepticism among industry analysts about certification timelines. Wisk is one of several electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft makers that have emerged over the last few years with a promise to provide an environmentally-friendly mode of transport in congested cities. But the industry faces technological hurdles such as making batteries powerful enough for companies to make more trips on a single charge. They also need to convince regulators and the public that the aircraft are safe, a barrier that is higher when the aircraft is autonomous. Wisk is developing a four-seater autonomous aircraft that will have a range of 90 miles (145 km). "We are right now testing and producing the elements of this aircraft that we will hope to fly around the end of this year," CEO Brian Yutko told reporters at the Farnborough Airshow. Wisk's strategy is a departure from other major air-taxi makers, which are developing models that will require a pilot to fly the aircraft. The company has said operators of its aircraft will save on pilot costs. But industry experts at Bain say a full autonomous passenger flight is not expected before the late 2030s and pilotless aircraft will face competition from autonomous vehicles on the road. "Maximizing passenger occupancy and avoiding return trips with empty aircraft will be crucial for operator profitability," said Mattia Celli, one of the authors of the Bain report.

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In a blog post today, Google said it has an "updated approach" that won't involve "deprecating third-party cookies" in Chrome. Instead, it's introducing "a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing," which they'd be able to adjust at any time. Digiday reports: Google executives are already discussing this pivot with regulators including the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and plan to do the same with the industry soon. For now, details on what this actually means remain light. And as for a timeline, Google seems to have learned its lesson from the numerous delays to its cookie-killing plans -- there isn't one. "As this moves forward, it remains important for developers to have privacy-preserving alternatives," Anthony Chavez, vp of the Privacy Sandbox, said in the blog post. "We'll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility." For those who have poured time and effort into third-party cookie alternatives, fear not: Google will keep the APIs in the Sandbox. Your work isn't going to waste. In fact, the plan is to continue to invest in them, continued Chavez, to further improve "privacy and utility." Plus, additional privacy controls, like the recently announced IP Protection (i.e. IP masking for privacy protection) in Chrome's Incognito mode, will be added to the Sandbox. "We developed the Privacy Sandbox with the goal of finding innovative solutions that meaningfully improve online privacy while preserving an ad-supported internet that supports a vibrant ecosystem of publishers, connects businesses with customers, and offers all of us free access to a wide range of content," Chavez wrote in the blog post. Or, to put it another way, the Sandbox isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

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An anonymous reader writes: Windows users are being notified that their systems aren't backed up with the built-in Windows backup solution. A corresponding message appears with the advice that it's best to make backups so that all data is stored "in case something happens to the PC." It almost reads like an indirect threat, but Microsoft is actually just pointing out the option to store file backups on its own OneDrive cloud service. And it's also advertising more storage space.

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Waymo, a subsidiary of Google's parent Alphabet, has taken legal action against alleged vandals targeting its self-driving taxi fleet in San Francisco, according to court documents. The company, which operates ride-hailing services in several U.S. cities, has filed two lawsuits seeking substantial damages for incidents that reportedly resulted in extensive damage to vehicle tires and bodywork, Wired reported Monday.

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Something is pumping out large amounts of oxygen at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, at depths where a total lack of sunlight makes photosynthesis impossible. Nature: The phenomenon was discovered in a region strewn with ancient, plum-sized formations called polymetallic nodules, which could play a part in the oxygen production by catalysing the splitting of water molecules, researchers suspect. The findings are published in Nature Geoscience. "We have another source of oxygen on the planet, other than photosynthesis," says study co-author Andrew Sweetman, a sea-floor ecologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, UK -- although the mechanism behind this oxygen production remains a mystery. The findings could also have implications for understanding how life began, he says, as well as for the possible impact of deep-sea mining in the region. The observation is "fascinating," says Donald Canfield, a biogeochemist at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. "But I find it frustrating, because it raises a lot of questions and not very many answers." Sweetman and his collaborators first noticed something amiss during field work in 2013. The researchers were studying sea-floor ecosystems in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area between Hawaii and Mexico that is larger than India and a potential target for the mining of metal-rich nodules. During such expeditions, the team releases a module that sinks to the sea floor to perform automated experiments. Once there, the module drives cylindrical chambers down to close off small sections of the sea floor -- together with some seawater -- and create "an enclosed microcosm of the seafloor," the authors write. The lander then measures how the concentration of oxygen in the confined seawater changes over periods of up to several days. Without any photosynthetic organisms releasing oxygen into the water, and with any other organisms consuming the gas, oxygen concentrations inside the chambers should slowly fall. Sweetman has seen that happen in studies he has conducted in areas of the Southern, Arctic and Indian oceans, and in the Atlantic. Around the world, sea-floor ecosystems owe their existence to oxygen carried by currents from the surface, and would quickly die if cut off. (Most of that oxygen originates in the North Atlantic and is carried to deep oceans around the world by a 'global conveyor belt.')

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Verizon reported a significant loss of wireless subscribers in the second quarter, with its consumer business shedding 624,000 prepaid customers, largely due to the expiration of the federal Affordable Connectivity Program in May. The telecom giant attributed over half of these losses to the end of the COVID-era internet subsidy that had previously supported 23 million low-income households across the United States. Despite the subscriber exodus, Verizon managed to add 148,000 net monthly bill-paying wireless phone subscribers during the period.

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Luxury carmaker Porsche expects the transition to electric vehicles to take longer than it thought, it said on Monday, having previously said its aim was for 80% of sales to be all-electric by 2030. From a report: It has now watered down that goal by tying it explicitly to customer demand and developments in the electromobility sector, saying in a statement only that it could now deliver on the 80% target if those factors warrant it. "The transition to electric cars is taking longer than we thought five years ago," Porsche said in a statement. "Our product strategy is set up such that we could deliver over 80% of our vehicles as all electric in 2030 - dependent on customer demand and the development of electromobility."

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Canonical has fixed several recently identified critical Linux kernel vulnerabilities in July 2024. These vulnerabilities primarily affect Microsoft Azure cloud systems in Ubuntu 16.04 (Extended Security maintenance) and Ubuntu 1804 ESM.

The BBC reports that "while most of the world was grappling with the blue screen of death on Friday," there was one country that managed to escape largely unscathed: China. The reason is actually quite simple: CrowdStrike is hardly used there. Very few organisations will buy software from an American firm that, in the past, has been vocal about the cyber-security threat posed by Beijing. Additionally, China is not as reliant on Microsoft as the rest of the world. Domestic companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei are the dominant cloud providers. So reports of outages in China, when they did come, were mainly at foreign firms or organisations. On Chinese social media sites, for example, some users complained they were not able to check into international chain hotels such as Sheraton, Marriott and Hyatt in Chinese cities. Over recent years, government organisations, businesses and infrastructure operators have increasingly been replacing foreign IT systems with domestic ones. Some analysts like to call this parallel network the "splinternet". "It's a testament to China's strategic handling of foreign tech operations," says Josh Kennedy White, a cybersecurity expert based in Singapore. "Microsoft operates in China through a local partner, 21Vianet, which manages its services independently of its global infrastructure. This setup insulates China's essential services — like banking and aviation — from global disruptions." "Beijing sees avoiding reliance on foreign systems as a way of shoring up national security." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the article.

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In April the U.S. Space Force began testing "a new ground-based satellite jamming weapon to help keep U.S. military personnel safe from potential 'space-enabled' attacks" (according to a report from Space.com). The weapon was "designed to deny, degrade, or disrupt communications with satellites overhead, typically through overloading specific portions of the electromagnetic spectrum with interference," according to the article, with the miitary describing it as a small form-factor system "designed to be fielded in large numbers at low-cost and operated remotely" and "provide counterspace electronic warfare capability to all of the new Space Force components globally." And now, Bloomberg reports that the U.S. is about to deploy them: The devices aren't meant to protect U.S. satellites from Chinese or Russian jamming but "to responsibly counter adversary satellite communications capabilities that enable attacks," the Space Force said in a statement to Bloomberg News. The Pentagon strives — on the rare occasions when it discusses such space capabilities — to distinguish its emerging satellite-jamming technology as purely defensive and narrowly focused. That's as opposed to a nuclear weapon the U.S. says Russia is developing that could create high-altitude electromagnetic pulses that would take out satellites and disrupt entire communications networks. The first 11 of 24 Remote Modular Terminal jammers will be deployed in several months, and all of them could be in place by Dec. 31 at undisclosed locations, according to the Space Force statement... The new terminals augment a much larger jamming weapon called the Counter Communications System that's already deployed and a mid-sized one called Meadowlands "by providing the ability to have a proliferated, remotely controlled and relatively relocatable capability," the Space Force said. The Meadowlands system has encountered technical challenges that have delayed its delivery until at least October, about two years later than planned. China has "hundreds and hundreds of satellites on orbit designed to find, fix, track, target and yes, potentially engage, US and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific," General Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command, said Wednesday at the annual Aspen Security Forum. "So we've got to understand that and know what it means for our forces." Bloomberg also got this comment from the chief director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation (which produces reports on counterspace weapons). The new U.S. Space Force jamming weapons are "reversible, temporary, non-escalatory and allow for plausible deniability in terms of who the instigator is."

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For the third straight day, "More than 1,000 US flights have been," reports CNN, "as airlines struggle to recover from a global tech outage that left thousands of passengers stranded at airports." More than 1,200 flights into, within or out of the United States were canceled by early Sunday afternoon, while more than 5,000 U.S. flights were delayed, according to the tracking website FlightAware.com... On Saturday, 2,136 US flights were canceled, and more than 21,300 flights were delayed... USA Today notes that Friday several U.S. airlines issued ground stops (according to America's Federal Aviation Administration) "which caused a domino effect into Sunday." They note that "most of the cancellations and delays Sunday are likely to be caused by airline crews and equipment being out of place."

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The Verge reports that for machines that aren't automatically receiving Crowdstrike's newly-released software fix, Microsoft has released a recovery tool that creates a bootable USB drive. 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. If a disk is protected by BitLocker encryption, the tool will prompt for the BitLocker recovery key and then continue to fix the CrowdStrike update.

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"It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President," U.S. President Joe Biden announced today. "And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term." In an announcement posted on X.com, Biden thanked the American people. ("Together, we overcame a once in a century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.") The short statement also said he would "speak to the Nation later this week in more detail." The Associated Press reports that "His wife, first lady Jill Biden, responded by reposting the president's letter announcing his decision and adding red heart emojis." CNN reports that "most Biden campaign staff, including some senior staff, found out from the president's post on X." In a subsequent X post, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic party's nominee for president.

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