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Clock is ticking

US security leaders have urged lawmakers to reauthorize two key pieces of cyber legislation, including one that facilitates threat-intel sharing between the private sector and federal government, before they expire at the end of the month.…

Big Red bloodbath not yet acknowledged by the company

Oracle on Tuesday laid off more than 100 workers in Washington State and more than 250 in California, though we're told that the database giant may be firing thousands around the world.…

Google's September Pixel drop brings the new Material 3 Expressive UI, AI-powered Gboard writing tools, and Bluetooth Auracast upgrades to older Pixel devices, including the Pixel 6 and Pixel Tablet. "Among other tweaks, Google made it possible to add 'Live Effects,' including a few that cover the weather, to your phone's lock screen wallpaper," notes Engadget. "Material 3 Expressive also gives you more control over how the contact cards your phone displays when your friends and family call you look. Even if you're not one to endlessly tweak Android's appearance, as part of the redesign Google has once again reworked the Quick Settings pane in hopes of making it easier to use." On the audio front, Pixel Buds Pro 2 gain intuitive nod-and-shake gesture controls, Adaptive Audio for balanced awareness, and Loud Noise Protection to guard against sudden sound spikes. Voice clarity has also been improved with Gemini Live in noisy environments. A full breakdown of what's new can be found here.

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Just days before Apple's expected launch of the satellite-enabled Apple Watch Ultra 3, Garmin unveiled its Fenix 8 Pro -- the company's first smartwatch with built-in inReach satellite and cellular connectivity, SOS features, and a blindingly bright 4,500-nit microLED display. MacRumors reports: With inReach, the Fenix 8 Pro can send location check-ins and text messages over satellite using the Garmin Messenger app. There is also included cellular connectivity, so the smartwatch can make phone calls, send 30-second voice messages, and provide LiveTrack links and weather forecasts when an LTE connection is available. LiveTrack is a feature that allows the wearer's family and friends to keep track of their location during an activity or adventure. For emergencies, there is an SOS feature that will send a message to the Garmin Response center over a satellite or cellular connection. Garmin Response will then communicate with the user, their emergency contacts, and search and rescue organizations to provide help. Garmin says that its Response team has supported over 17,000 inReach incident responses across over 150 countries. The Fenix 8 Pro smartwatch launches September 8, with the AMOLED model starting at $1,200 and the 51mm microLED version priced at $2,000. Both require a paid inReach satellite plan beginning at $7.99 per month for full functionality.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going "FEEEEEEEE." The video was called "Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more." It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched. "In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," the narrator says in a fake British accent. "By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire," it continued. The video was from a channel I hadn't seen before, called "Sleepless Historian." I took my headphones out, didn't think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep. The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don't know much about. Some video titles include "Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses," "The Entire History of the American Frontier," "What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii," and "What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times." One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks. In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on "mass produced" videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change. "It's completely shocking to me," Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told Koebler in a phone interview. "It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I'm fearful because this is everywhere." "I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they're historically inaccurate," Kelly added. "So it worries me because it's just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. [...] It's worrying to me just for humanity. Not to get too high brow, but it's not good for the state of knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future."

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September bundle the largest this year, and possibly the most serious

Patch Tuesday is next week, but Android is ahead of the game, dropping its biggest patch bundle this year while attackers actively exploit two of the now-fixed flaws.…

Tesco is suing Broadcom and reseller Computacenter for at least $134 million, claiming that VMware's perpetual license support agreements were breached after Broadcom's acquisition. The supermarket giant warned it "may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped," writes The Register's Simon Sharwood. From the report: Court documents seen by The Register assert that in January 2021 Tesco acquired perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions to Virtzilla's Tanzu products, and agreed a contract for support services and software upgrades that run until 2026. Tesco claims VMware also agreed to give it an option to extend support services for an additional four years. All of this happened before Broadcom acquired VMware and stopped selling support services for software sold under perpetual licenses. Broadcom does sell support to those who sign for its new software subscriptions. The supermarket giant says Broadcom's subscriptions mean it must pay "excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid," and "is unable any longer to purchase stand-alone Virtualization Support Services for its Perpetually Licensed Software without also having to purchase duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products which it already owns." The complaint also alleges that Tesco's contracts with VMware include eligibility for software upgrades, but that Broadcom won't let the retailer update its perpetual licenses to cover the new Cloud Foundation 9. The filing names Computacenter as a co-defendant as it was the reseller that Tesco relied on for software licenses, and the retailer feels it's breached contracts to supply software at a fixed price. Tesco's filing also mentions Broadcom's patch publication policy, which means users who don't acquire subscriptions can't receive all security updates and don't receive other fixes. The retailer thinks its contracts mean it is entitled to those updates. The filing suggests that lack of support is not just a legal matter, but may have wider implications because VMware software, and support for it "are essential for the operations and resilience of Tesco's business and its ability to supply groceries to consumers across the UK and Republic of Ireland." "VMware Virtualization Software underpins the servers and data systems that enable Tesco's stores and operations to function, hosting approximately 40,000 server workloads and connecting to, by way of illustration, tills in Tesco stores," the filing states. Tesco's filing warns that Broadcom, VMware, and Computacenter are each liable for at least $134 million damages, plus interest, and that the longer the dispute persists the higher damages will climb.

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LLMs and 0-days - what could possibly go wrong?

Attackers on underground forums claimed they were using HexStrike AI, an open-source red-teaming tool, against Citrix NetScaler vulnerabilities within hours of disclosure, according to Check Point cybersecurity evangelist Amit Weigman.…

After years of requests, Instagram is finally releasing a dedicated iPad app on September 3rd... "But it will be slightly different than the mobile app users are accustomed to," reports The Verge. From the report: Most significantly, the iPad app will open directly to a feed of Reels, the company's TikTok competitor -- perhaps a sign of the short-form-video times. [...] Other features will be available on iPad: Stories will still line the top of the homepage, and users will be able to switch to a "Following" tab where they'll be able to swipe between feeds that more resemble the mobile Instagram experience (including a chronological option). The bigger screen means more space and fewer clicks: comments on Reels will appear next to full-size videos, and the DMs page will have your inbox alongside chats, similar to what Messenger looks like on desktop.

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When AI runs recruiting, the winning move is using the same bot

Job seekers who use the same AI model to compose their resumes as the AI model used to evaluate their application are more likely to advance through the hiring process than those submitting human-written materials, according to researchers.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Over the Labor Day weekend, Cloudflare says it successfully stopped a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). This came only a few months after Cloudflare blocked a then all-time high DDoS attack of 7.3 Tbps. This latest attack was almost 60% larger. According to Cloudflare, the assault was the result of a hyper-volumetric User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attack that lasted about 35 seconds. During that just more than half-minute attack, it delivered over 5.1 billion packets per second. This attack, Cloudflare reported, came from a combination of several IoT and cloud providers. Although compromised accounts on Google Cloud were a major source, the bulk of the attack originated from other sources. The specific target of this attack has not been publicly disclosed, but we can be sure the intent was to overwhelm the victim's network and render online services inoperative. Cloudflare says its globally distributed, fully autonomous DDoS mitigation network detected and neutralized the threat in real time, without notable impact on customer services or requiring manual intervention. This operation highlights both the rising sophistication of attack methods and the resilience of modern internet infrastructure defenses, especially Cloudflare's use of real-time packet analysis, fingerprinting, and rapid threat intelligence sharing across its network.

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The first one's always free - or at least deeply discounted for the first year

Not wanting to miss the opportunity to grow its federal footprint, ServiceNow has signed a deal to offer the US government discounts on its latest AI innovations. …

World's largest foundry operator joins Samsung and SK Hynix, which recently lost their validated end-user status

The Trump administration terminated the world's largest foundry operator's validated end-user (VEU) status this week in an apparent bid to push Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) out of China.…

U.S. workers are becoming more stressed about their rising personal debts and financial health, a Bank of America survey showed. From a report: Of the respondents polled by BofA, 47% of employed people said they had a sense of financial well-being, dropping from 52% at the start of the year. Nearly 85% of consumers carried some type of personal debt, while 26% of the workforce was seeking help in areas such as emergency savings, paying down debt, and overall financial wellness, compared with 13% in 2023, according to the May survey of more than 1,000 people working full-time.

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Dolby Vision 2 addresses two widespread TV viewing problems in ways that will likely divide viewers and creators. The format's Content Intelligence feature uses AI and ambient light sensors to brighten notoriously dark content like Game of Thrones' Battle of Winterfell and Apple TV+'s Silo based on room brightness. Authentic Motion grants filmmakers scene-by-scene control over motion smoothing, a feature most cinephiles despise for creating artifacts and making films look like 60fps home videos. Many filmmakers have criticized motion smoothing for undermining artistic intent. Dolby positions the feature as eliminating unwanted judder while maintaining cinematic feel. The format launches in standard and Max tiers for high-end displays.

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AI-powered ransomware, extortion chatbots, vibe hacking … just wait until agents replace affiliates

It's no secret that AI tools make it easier for cybercriminals to steal sensitive data and then extort victim organizations. But two recent developments illustrate exactly how much LLMs lower the bar for ransomware and other financially motivated cybercrime — and provide a glimpse to defenders about what's on the horizon.…

The latest status report from the FreeBSD Project says no thanks to code generated by LLM-based assistants. From a report: The FreeBSD Project's Status Report for the second quarter of 2025 contains updates from various sub-teams that are working on improving the FreeBSD OS, including separate sub-projects such as enabling FreeBSD apps to run on Linux, Chinese translation efforts, support for Solaris-style Extended Attributes, and for Apple's legacy HFS+ file system. The thing that stood out to us, though, was that the core team is working on what it terms a "Policy on generative AI created code and documentation." The relevant paragraph says: "Core is investigating setting up a policy for LLM/AI usage (including but not limited to generating code). The result will be added to the Contributors Guide in the doc repository. AI can be useful for translations (which seems faster than doing the work manually), explaining long/obscure documents, tracking down bugs, or helping to understand large code bases. We currently tend to not use it to generate code because of license concerns. The discussion continues at the core session at BSDCan 2025 developer summit, and core is still collecting feedback and working on the policy."

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Now you've gone and done it: Privacy lawyer says he's working on challenge to 2023 Data Protection Framework

The European Union General Court (EGC) has rejected a challenge to the US-EU Data Privacy Framework (DPF) allowing data to continue flowing across the pond, but the challenges are unlikely to stop there.…

The SAT is billed as "a great way to find out how prepared students are for college." If that's true, recent changes to its format offer an unflattering assessment of the country's aspiring scholars, Bloomberg's editorial board wrote Wednesday. From the piece: [...] Then the pandemic hit. As in-person exams became impractical, hundreds of schools dropped their testing requirements. The SAT and its main competitor, the ACT, lost millions of dollars in revenue. Although both recently started offering digital options, schools have been slow to reinstate their requirements. Today, more than 80% of schools remain test-optional. "If students are deciding to take a test," as one College Board executive put it, "how do we make the SAT the one they want to take?" To anyone familiar with American teenagers, the company's answer should come as no surprise: Make the test easier. The newly digitized format allows a calculator for the entire math section and drastically cuts reading comprehension. Gone are the 500- to 750-word passages about which students would answer a series of questions. Instead, test takers read 25- to 150-word excerpts -- about the length of a social media post -- and answer a single question about each. [...] An effort by the College Board to reemphasize the benefits of deep reading -- for critical thinking, for self-reflection, for learning of all kinds -- might go a long way toward restoring some balance. It should build on efforts to incorporate college prep into school curricula, work with districts to develop coursework that builds reading stamina for all test takers, and consider reducing the cost of its subject-specific Advanced Placement exams that continue to test these skills (now $99), in line with the SAT ($68). Schools, for their part, should recommit to teaching books in their entirety.

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From cloud IDEs to autonomous assistants, company says future is agentic

Gitpod, best known for cloud-hosted dev environments, has rebranded as Ona and is now pitching itself as an AI agent platform.…