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Enter a prompt and get back a copyright infringement

More and more US companies are using generative AI as a way to save money they might otherwise pay creative professionals. But they're not thinking about the legal bills.…

Website, emails, and phones are down for a second day

The Pennsylvania's Office of Attorney General (OAG) is blaming a digital blackout of its services on a "cyber incident."…

Australia's Federal Court ruled Tuesday that Apple and Google violated competition law through anti-competitive app store practices. Judge Jonathan Beach found both companies breached section 46 of the Competition and Consumer Act by misusing market power to reduce competition. The decision covers class actions representing 15 million consumers and 150,000 developers seeking compensation for inflated prices from 2017-2022, plus separate Epic Games cases. Apple's exclusive iOS App Store and mandatory payment system, along with Google's Play Store billing requirements, were ruled anti-competitive despite security justifications. Compensation amounts will be determined at subsequent hearings, with estimates reaching hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Efforts to build easier off-ramps are … err … ramping up

Private cloud platform vendor Platform9 has a new lure for disaffected VMware users: A tool that allows migrations without requiring extra hardware.…

AI startup Perplexity on Tuesday offered to purchase Google's Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech giant's web-search dominance. From a report: Perplexity's offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at $18 billion. The company told The Wall Street Journal that several investors including large venture-capital funds had agreed to back the transaction in full. Estimates of Chrome's enterprise value vary widely but recent ones have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta is weighing whether to force Google to sell the browser as a means of weakening Google's stranglehold on web search. Mehta last year ruled that Google illegally monopolized the search market and is expected to rule this month on how to restore competition.

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'Hung' is out and 'Unresponsive' is in, according to the Academy Software Foundation and the Alliance for OpenUSD

A Linux Foundation project has published an Inclusive Language Guide to recommend replacements for common tech terms deemed potentially offensive to some users.…

Spirit Airlines has warned investors that it may go out of business, just months after exiting bankruptcy. From a report: In a quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, it said there was "substantial doubt" over its "ability to continue as a going concern within 12 months." The budget airline said it was harder to make money because of weak demand for domestic leisure travel and "elevated domestic capacity," meaning increased competition on such routes. Spirit reported a net loss of $245.8 million for the second quarter of 2025, up from a $192.9 million loss for the second quarter of 2024.

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US cops yank servers, domains, and crypto from the Russia-linked gang - but the crooks remain at large

In a display of bureaucratic bravado, US law enforcement agencies say they've “disrupted” the BlackSuit ransomware gang (also known as Royal), freeing millions of dollars in virtual currency from its clutches.…

Elon Musk has threatened Apple with legal action over alleged antitrust violations related to rankings of the Grok AI chatbot app, which is owned by his AI startup xAI. From a report: "Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action," Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X. Apple declined to comment on Musk's threat. "Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your 'Must Have' section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics?" Musk said in another post.

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Long-term support release candidate arrives, general availability comes next month

Java 25, an LTS (long-term support) version, is now at release candidate (RC) stage with general availability scheduled for September 16.…

darwinmac writes: Firefox 141 rolled out a shiny new AI-powered smart tab grouping feature (it tries to auto-organize your tabs using a local model), but it turns out the local "Inference" process that powers it is acting like an energy-sucking monster. Users are reporting massive CPU spikes and battery drain and calling the feature "garbage" that's ruining their browsing experience.

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Designs scheduled for launch in 2026, developer kit for programmers out today

Chip designer Arm is bringing dedicated neural accelerator hardware to its GPU blueprints used in phones. It expects this to deliver higher quality visuals while boosting AI performance.…

Aside from glam, includes cool features like standalone GNOME Flashback session with no GNOME shell

Debian 13 has arrived, now with RISC-V and preconfigured "blends" right in the main installer.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Physicists have created a new type of radar that could help improve underground imaging, using a cloud of atoms in a glass cell to detect reflected radio waves. The radar is a type of quantum sensor, an emerging technology that uses the quantum-mechanical properties of objects as measurement devices. It's still a prototype, but its intended use is to image buried objects in situations such as constructing underground utilities, drilling wells for natural gas, and excavating archaeological sites. [...] The glass cell that serves as the radar's quantum component is full of cesium atoms kept at room temperature. The researchers use lasers to get each individual cesium atom to swell to nearly the size of a bacterium, about 10,000 times bigger than the usual size. Atoms in this bloated condition are called Rydberg atoms. When incoming radio waves hit Rydberg atoms, they disturb the distribution of electrons around their nuclei. Researchers can detect the disturbance by shining lasers on the atoms, causing them to emit light; when the atoms are interacting with a radio wave, the color of their emitted light changes. Monitoring the color of this light thus makes it possible to use the atoms as a radio receiver. Rydberg atoms are sensitive to a wide range of radio frequencies without needing to change the physical setup... This means a single compact radar device could potentially work at the multiple frequency bands required for different applications. [Matthew Simons, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who was a member of the research team] tested the radar by placing it in a specially designed room with foam spikes on the floor, ceiling, and walls like stalactites and stalagmites. The spikes absorb, rather than reflect, nearly all the radio waves that hit them. This simulates the effect of a large open space, allowing the group to test the radar's imaging capability without unwanted reflections off walls.The researchers placed a radio wave transmitter in the room, along with their Rydberg atom receiver, which was hooked up to an optical table outside the room. They aimed radio waves at a copper plate about the size of a sheet of paper, some pipes, and a steel rod in the room, each placed up to five meters away. The radar allowed them to locate the objects to within 4.7 centimeters. The team posted a paper on the research to the arXiv preprint server in late June.

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Chip giant praises 'president's strong leadership,' promises to 'restore this great American company'

US President Donald Trump has now reversed his opinion of Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan following their meeting at the White House yesterday, hinting that the two will work more closely together.…

Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and Lapsus$ spent the weekend bragging to each other on a Telegram channel

Prolific cybercrime collectives Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and Lapsus$ appear to have come together in a new Telegram channel that shares news of their exploits.…

Automaker's answer to spate of car thefts is to charge customers for extra

Hyundai is charging UK customers £49 ($66) for a security upgrade to prevent thieves from bypassing its car locks.…

UK online reseller bought out of administration in -pre-pack agreement, say sources

London Stock Exchange-listed Fraser Group is understood to have bought struggling UK online tech bazaar Ebuyer from administrators in a pre-pack agreement, sources have told The Register.…

Microsoft’s AI-centric code editor and IDE adds the ability to rollback misguided AI prompts

The Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) team has rolled out version 1.103 with new features including GitHub Copilot chat checkpoints.…

Joburg and Warsaw among the hotspots for sprawling server farm construction

Lagos, Warsaw and Dubai are among the fastest growing cities for colocation services - with metro areas in the Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions expanding more rapidly than traditional datacenter hotspots.…