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A good deal, like beauty, is in the ISP of the beholder, after all - at least if you want BEAD funding

US states that want to make use of rural broadband deployment funds had better not require ISPs to offer what they consider affordable service. According to the Trump Administration, "affordable" is for the ISP alone to define. …

Google says total organic click volume from its search engine to websites has remained ""relatively stable year-over-year" despite the introduction of AI Overviews, contradicting third-party reports of dramatic traffic declines. The company reports average click quality has increased, with users less likely to immediately return to search results after clicking through to websites. Google attributes stable traffic patterns to users conducting more searches and asking longer, more complex questions since AI features launched, while AI Overviews display more links per page than traditional results.

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Activision will require PC players of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 to enable Trusted Platform Module 2.0 and Windows Secure Boot when the game launches later this year. The company begins testing these anti-cheat measures with Black Ops 6's Season 5 on Thursday without enforcement. TPM 2.0 verifies untampered boot processes while Secure Boot ensures Windows loads only trusted software at startup. Both features perform checks during system and game startup but remain inactive during gameplay. Activision has also pursued legal action against 22 individuals who developed and sold cheats.

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ShinyHunters suspected in rash of intrusions

Google confirmed that criminals breached one of its Salesforce databases and stole info belonging to some of its small-and-medium-business customers.…

Chip contract manufacturer declines to comment

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is "coming over and spending $300 billion in Arizona, building the biggest plant in the world for chips and semiconductors," US President Donald Trump said Tuesday.…

A Manhattan jury convicted Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm on Wednesday of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transfer business, though jurors deadlocked on charges of money laundering conspiracy and sanctions violations after three days of deliberation. Federal prosecutors alleged Storm helped cybercriminals launder more than $1 billion through the cryptocurrency mixing platform, which launched in 2019 as a decentralized protocol designed to obscure transaction origins by pooling and redistributing funds through smart contracts.

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Timber!

Meta is following in Microsoft's footsteps and trying out wood as a construction material for its datacenters in a bid to cut greenhouse gas emissions.…

Thanks to LLMs, CEO expects to see networks 'back-end and front-end converge'

Arista Networks is expecting the AI datacenter industry to be dominated by open standards such as Ethernet or UALink in the near future, and has upped financial forecasts on the back of those hopes.…

Universal Pictures is taking a new approach to combat mass theft of its movies to teach AI systems. From a report: Starting in June with How to Train Your Dragon, the studio has attached a legal warning at the end credits of its films stating that their titles "may not be used to train AI." It's also appeared on Jurassic World Rebirth and Bad Guys 2. "This motion picture is protected under the laws of the United States and other countries," the warning reads. "Unauthorized duplication, distribution or exhibition may result in civil liability and criminal prosecution."

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Act now and Uncle Sam will throw in ChatGPT Enterprise for your agency for just $1

It's just become a lot easier for US government agencies to procure AI products from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, as the firms and the feds have signed a government-wide agreement to streamline purchasing.…

Google is the latest company to suffer a data breach in an ongoing wave of Salesforce CRM data theft attacks conducted by the ShinyHunters extortion group. BleepingComputer: In June, Google warned that a threat actor they classify as 'UNC6040' is targeting companies' employees in voice phishing (vishing) social engineering attacks to breach Salesforce instances and download customer data. This data is then used to extort companies into paying a ransom to prevent the data from being leaked. In a brief update to the article last night, Google said that it too fell victim to the same attack in June after one of its Salesforce CRM instances was breached and customer data was stolen. "In June, one of Google's corporate Salesforce instances was impacted by similar UNC6040 activity described in this post. Google responded to the activity, performed an impact analysis and began mitigations," reads Google's update.

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A crock of what now?

Microsoft is reportedly preparing to unleash its latest product on the public: limited edition XP-themed Crocs.…

OpenAI will provide ChatGPT access to US federal agencies for $1 annually through the General Services Administration's new AI marketplace that also includes Google and Anthropic as approved vendors. The nominal pricing represents the deepest discount GSA has negotiated with software providers, surpassing previous deals with Adobe and Salesforce. OpenAI said it will not use federal worker data to train its models and agencies face no renewal requirements. The $1 rate applies only to the ChatGPT chatbot interface, not OpenAI's API for custom software development.

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President Trump and Apple are expected to announce a new $100 billion commitment by Apple to boost manufacturing in the U.S. CBS News: The new investment would increase Apple's commitment to U.S. manufacturing to $600 billion over the next four years, according to a White House official. And it's expected to include a new "American Manufacturing Program" focused on bringing more of Apple's supply chain and advanced manufacturing to the U.S. [...] In May, the president threatened to impose a 25% tariff on iPhones made outside the U.S., writing on Truth Social that he told Cook that he expects that iPhones that will be sold in the U.S. "will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else."

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Communication problems for recently launched small satellites

NASA is having trouble tracking down two of its spacecraft. One of the TRACERS spacecraft has lost contact with Earth while the Athena EPIC satellite failed to send an important beacon signal.…

Nvidia's chief security officer has published a blog post insisting that its GPUs "do not and should not have kill switches and backdoors." From a report: It comes amid pressure from both sides of the Pacific, with some US lawmakers pushing Nvidia to grant the government backdoors to AI chips, while Chinese officials have alleged that they already exist. David Reber Jr.'s post seems pointedly directed at US lawmakers. In May a bipartisan group introduced the Chip Security Act, a bill that would require Nvidia and other manufacturers to include tracking technology to identify when chips are illegally transported internationally, and leaves the door open for further security measures including remote kill switches. While Nvidia is expecting to be granted permits to once again sell certain AI chips in China, its most powerful hardware is still under strict US export controls there and elsewhere.

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Cloud giant erased decade of work – denies it was due to botched dry run of user-pruning tool

An open source developer is claiming AWS deleted his ten-year-old account, wiping all the data. He believes this was due to a botched test of a script designed to prune dormant accounts.…

Feds claim suspects talked about rerouting kit through Malaysia

Federal authorities in the US have charged two Chinese nationals with secretly exporting advanced AI chips to China.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: China's automakers have teamed up with software companies togo global with their driverless cars, which are poised to claim a big share of a growing market as Western manufacturers are still preparing to compete. The industry in China is expanding despite tariffs imposed last year by the European Union on electric cars, and despite some worries in Europe about the security implications of relying on Chinese suppliers. Baidu, one of China's biggest software companies, said on Monday that it would supply Lyft, an American ride-hailing service, with self-driving cars assembled by Jiangling Motors of China (source paywalled; alternative source). Lyft is expected to begin operating them next year in Germany and Britain, subject to regulatory approval, the companies said. The announcement comes three months after Uber and Momenta, a Chinese autonomous driving company, announced their own plans to begin offering self-driving cars in an unspecified European city early next year. Momenta will soon provide assisted driving technology to the Chinese company IM Motors for its cars sold in Britain. While Momenta has not specified the model that Uber will be using, it has already signaled it will choose a Chinese model. In China, "the pace of development and the pressure to deliver at scale push companies to improve quickly," said Gerhard Steiger, the chairman of Momenta Europe. China's state-controlled banking system has been lending money at low interest rates to the country's electric car industry in a bid for global leadership. [...] Expanding robotaxi services to new cities, not to mention new countries, is not easy. While the individual cars do not have drivers, they typically require one controller for every several cars to handle difficulties and answer questions from users. And the cars often need to be specially programmed for traffic conditions unique to each city. Lyft and Baidu nonetheless said that they had plans for "the fleet scaling to thousands of vehicles across Europe in the following years."

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October 14 is going to be a big day in the Redmond world

It isn't only Windows 10 due for the support axe on October 14. Other Microsoft products will soon be stashed in Redmond's cupboard of forgotten dreams, including the venerable Visual Studio 2015.…