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xAI struck a deal with the U.S. General Services Administration to sell its chatbot Grok to federal agencies under the executive branch for 42 cents over 18 months, undercutting OpenAI and Anthropic's $1 offerings. TechCrunch reports: The steep discount for federal agencies includes access to xAI engineers to help integrate the technology. The price point is either part of a running joke Musk has of using variations of 420, a marijuana reference, or a nod to one of Musk's favorite books, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which references the number 42 as the answer to the meaning of life and the universe. ... In late August, internal emails obtained by Wired revealed the White House had instructed the GSA to add xAI's Grok to the approved vendor list "ASAP." The company was also one of several AI firms, including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, to be selected for a $200 million contract with the Pentagon. A GSA spokesperson told TechCrunch that Musk was not directly involved in negotiating the agreement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: It had all the makings of a viral X post, and viral it did go, with over 8 million views in under 24 hours. The message was straightforward: "I reverse engineered the San Francisco parking ticket system. I can see every ticket seconds after it's written." Underneath it was a familiar image for any iPhone user -- an Apple map of the city dotted with gray, initialed bubbles, and an explanation: "So I made a website. Find My Friends?" No. "AVOID THE PARKING COPS." The anarchy, however, was short-lived. [...] Given the potential lost revenue at stake, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency caught on like the rest of the internet, and by Tuesday afternoon, the site had been quickly rendered obsolete. Undeterred, [creator of the site, Riley Walz] restored the site again after 10 p.m., though this, too, didn't last. By his estimation, it was only active for a few more hours. "We made sure that all access to citation data was via authorized routes," said Erica Kato, a spokesperson for SFMTA, in an email to SFGATE. "But when our staff's safety, and personal information of people who have received parking citations, is at risk, we must act on that swiftly." Yet the saga wasn't over. By Wednesday, the official SFMTA ticket payment site was also down, citing "maintenance." "I'm curious what was going on there," said Walz over the phone. "If it is even because of me." As of Wednesday afternoon, that site is functional and the chaos seems over for now. According to SFMTA, there is no need for a site like Walz's."The official way to access our parking citation data is via our public website on DataSF," Kato said. "Anyone is still able to see [the] type of citation, date of issuance and data that can be mapped and analyzed on DataSF daily."

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Consultancy says machine learning advice is making bank

ai-pocalypse AI is proving to be a gold mine for mega tech consultancy Accenture, but if staff can't use it, then it's time to pack up their desks.…

Abu Dhabi's MGX (chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan) is set to take a 15% stake in TikTok's U.S. business after Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday night brokering a deal that puts the social media company under U.S. ownership. "Larry Ellison's Oracle, the private equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX will control roughly 45% of TikTok US," adds The Guardian. "Overall, American companies are expected to control just over 65% of the company, with Trump also naming the personal computer pioneer Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch's Fox as other investors." From the report: "[TikTok US] will be majority-owned and controlled by United States persons and will no longer be controlled by any foreign adversary," Trump said. "We have American investors taking it over, running it [who are] highly sophisticated, including Larry Ellison. Great investors, the biggest. They don't get bigger. This is going to be American-operated all the way." TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, will retain a 19.9% stake in the US operation. China has not publicly made clear whether it will approve the deal, although Trump said that he "had a good talk" with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who "gave us the go-ahead." JD Vance, the US vice-president, said the deal valued TikTok US at $14 billion. "There was some resistance on the Chinese side," Vance said. "But the fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish is that we wanted to keep TikTok operating but we wanted to make sure that protected Americans' data privacy as required by law." He added: "This deal really does mean that Americans can use TikTok, but actually use it with more confidence than in the past. Because their data is going to be secure and it's not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens."

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According to the Wall Street Journal, the videogame giant Electronic Arts is nearing a $50 billion deal to go private. A group of investors, including private-equity firms Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, may announce a deal for Electronic Arts as soon as next week. The report says it "would likely be the largest leveraged buyout of all time." Developing...

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A team of suspected Chinese hackers has infiltrated US software developers and law firms in a sophisticated campaign to collect intelligence that could help Beijing in its ongoing trade fight with Washington, cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Wednesday. The hackers have been rampant in recent weeks, hitting the cloud-computing firms that numerous American companies rely on to store key data, Mandiant, which is owned by Google, said. In a sign of how important China's hacking army is in the race for tech supremacy, the hackers have also stolen US tech firms' proprietary software and used it to find new vulnerabilities to burrow deeper into networks, according to Mandiant. [...] In some cases, the hackers have lurked undetected in the US corporate networks for over a year, quietly collecting intelligence, Mandiant said. The disclosure comes after the Trump administration escalated America's trade war with China this spring by slapping unprecedented tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States. The tit-for-tat tariffs set off a scramble in both governments to understand each other's positions. Mandiant analysts said the fallout from the breaches -- the task of kicking out the hackers and assessing the damage -- could last many months. They described it as a milestone hack, comparable in severity and sophistication to Russia's use of SolarWinds software to infiltrate US government agencies in 2020.

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