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Cloudflare announced plans Thursday to launch NET Dollar, a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin designed to enable autonomous AI agents to conduct instant financial transactions. The company says the stablecoin will support microtransactions and pay-per-use models as AI agents take over tasks like booking flights and ordering groceries. BrianFagioli comments: A U.S. dollar-backed cryptocurrency from Cloudflare feels unusual to me, and I'm still surprised by it. The decision shows just how much the Internet is shifting in response to artificial intelligence. CEO Matthew Prince said, "For decades, the business model of the Internet ran on ad platforms and bank transfers. The Internet's next business model will be powered by pay-per-use, fractional payments, and microtransactions -- "tools that shift incentives toward original, creative content that actually adds value." He added that by using its global network, Cloudflare aims to "help modernize the financial rails needed to move money at the speed of the Internet."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI released a new benchmark on Thursday that tests how its AI models perform compared to human professionals across a wide range of industries and jobs. The test, GDPval, is an early attempt at understanding how close OpenAI's systems are to outperforming humans at economically valuable work -- a key part of the company's founding mission to develop artificial general intelligence or AGI. OpenAI says its found that its GPT-5 model and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.1 "are already approaching the quality of work produced by industry experts." That's not to say that OpenAI's models are going to start replacing humans in their jobs immediately. Despite some CEOs' predictions that AI will take the jobs of humans in just a few years, OpenAI admits that GDPval today covers a very limited number of tasks people do in their real jobs. However, it is one of the latest ways the company is measuring AI's progress towards this milestone. GDPval is based on nine industries that contribute the most to America's gross domestic product, including domains such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and government. The benchmark tests an AI model's performance in 44 occupations among those industries, ranging from software engineers to nurses to journalists.

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Despite AI models outperforming radiologists on benchmark tests since 2017, demand for human radiologists has reached record highs. American diagnostic radiology residency programs offered 1,208 positions this year, up 4% from 2024, while average salaries hit $520,000 -- 48% higher than 2015. Over 700 FDA-cleared radiology AI models exist, yet only 48% of radiologists use AI at all. Models trained on standardized datasets lose up to 20% points accuracy when deployed in different hospitals. Radiologists spend just 36% of their time interpreting images, with the majority devoted to patient communication, teaching, and administrative tasks that current AI cannot perform.

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Images of toddlers and home addresses leaked in reprehensible landmark attack

A cyber criminal crew has targeted Kido International, a preschool and daycare organization, leaking sensitive details about its pupils and their parents.…

Productivity gains promised, but humans still expected to audit the bots

At its Unscripted event in London, DevOps company Harness presented its latest AI-driven modules, including an AI pipeline builder, AI test automation, autonomous code fixing when builds fail, AI AppSec (application security) and even AI-driven chaos testing, where resiliency is tested by introducing random failures.…

Circle, the world's second-biggest issuer of stablecoins, is examining ways to make it possible to reverse transactions involving its tokens [non-paywalled source], in a rare admission by a major crypto firm that it needs to take lessons from the traditional financial sector. Financial Times: Circle president Heath Tarbert said a mechanism that allowed money to be refunded in cases of fraud or disputes would help the stablecoin industry's push to become part of the financial mainstream. "We are thinking through...whether or not there's the possibility of reversibility of transactions, right, but at the same time, we want settlement finality," Tarbert told the Financial Times. "So there's an inherent tension there between being able to transfer something immediately, but having it be irrevocable," he added. Such measures could be seen as a major departure from the crypto industry's previous emphasis on the "immutability" of the blockchain, a digital ledger that is public and records transactions that cannot be unwound.

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New research program seeks ‘energy-aware’ ML that balances performance with power draw

It's notoriously difficult to consistently measure the energy usage of AI models, but DARPA wants to put an end to that uncertainty with new "energy-aware" machine learning systems. …

Amazon will pay $2.5 billion to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it duped users into paying for Prime memberships, the regulatory agency announced Thursday. CNBC: The surprise settlement comes as Amazon and the FTC were just three days into the trial in a Seattle federal court. Opening arguments took place on Tuesday. The lawsuit, filed by the FTC in June 2023 under the Biden administration, claimed that Amazon deceived tens of millions of customers into signing up for its Prime subscription program and sabotaged their attempts to cancel it. Three senior Amazon executives were at risk of being held individually liable if the jury sided with the FTC. Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty to the FTC and will refund $1.5 billion to an estimated 35 million customers who were impacted by "unwanted Prime enrollment or deferred cancellation," the agency said.

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While EC suspects vendor's practices stifle competition, it argues it is in line with industry standards

The European Commission has launched a formal investigation into SAP's behavior in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services in Europe.…

Accenture has reduced its global workforce by more than 11,000 in the past three months and warned staff that more would be asked to leave if they cannot be retrained for the age of AI. From a report: The IT consulting group on Thursday detailed an $865 million restructuring programme and an outlook for the year ahead that reflects continuing sluggish corporate demand for consulting projects and a clampdown on spending within the US federal government. "We are exiting on a compressed timeline people where reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path for the skills we need," chief executive Julie Sweet told analysts on a conference call. The company employed 779,000 people at the end of August, it said, down from 791,000 three months earlier, after beginning a round of lay-offs that will continue until the end of November. It did not say how many jobs had gone directly as a result of the restructuring, but said severance payments and other costs totalled $615 million in the quarter just ended and would be $250 million more in the current three-month period.

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Ruby Central is accused of ousting maintainers from core gems under pressure from Shopify

Ruby Central is said to have quietly snatched control of several flagship Ruby open source projects from their long-time maintainers without their consent, following pressure from Shopify, one of its biggest backers.…

Lumafield's CT scan analysis of 1,054 lithium-ion 18650 batteries found 33 cells from low-cost and counterfeit brands contained a serious manufacturing defect called negative anode overhang, which increases risks of internal short-circuiting and battery fires. All defective batteries came from the 424 units sourced from budget brands on Amazon and Temu. The defect rate reached nearly 8% among low-cost cells, climbing to 12-15% for certain counterfeit brands claiming impossible 9,900 mAh capacities. None of the batteries from Samsung, Panasonic, and other established manufacturers exhibited the defect. The low-cost batteries also displayed significantly worse edge alignment of internal wound layers. Real-world testing revealed the counterfeit cells delivered under 1,300 mAh capacity despite their inflated specifications, compared to 3,000-3,450 mAh for legitimate 18650 batteries.

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Apple asked the European Union to scrap its landmark digital competition law on Thursday, arguing that it poses security risks and creates a "worse experience" for consumers. From a report: The US tech giant and the EU have repeatedly locked horns over the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which Brussels says seeks to make the digital sector in the 27-nation bloc fairer and more open. "The DMA should be repealed while a more appropriate fit for purpose legislative instrument is put in place," Apple said in a formal submission to the European Commission as part of a consultation on the law. [...] "It's become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU," the tech giant said in a blog post accompanying its submission. "It's exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together."

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Mountain View gripes over slow-moving regulators while Redmond rakes it in

Google is like a dog with a bone over Microsoft's cloud licensing policies, not letting Euro regulators forget about what it sees as anti-competitive practices that penalize those wanting to run Windows software on rival cloud platforms.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Twenty-one years after Facebook's launch, Australia's top 25 news outlets now have a combined 27.6 million followers on the platform. They rely on Facebook's reach more than ever, posting far more stories there than in the past. With access to Meta's Content Library (Meta is the owner of Facebook), our big data study analysed more than three million posts from 25 Australian news publishers. We wanted to understand how content is distributed, how audiences engage with news topics, and the nature of misinformation spread. The study enabled us to track de-identified Facebook comments and take a closer look at examples of how misinformation spreads. These included cases about election integrity, the environment (floods) and health misinformation such as hydroxychloroquine promotion during the COVID pandemic. The data reveal misinformation's real-world impact: it isn't just a digital issue, it's linked to poor health outcomes, falling public trust, and significant societal harm. [...] Our study has lessons for public figures and institutions. They, especially politicians, must lead in curbing misinformation, as their misleading statements are quickly amplified by the public. Social media and mainstream media also play an important role in limiting the circulation of misinformation. As Australians increasingly rely on social media for news, mainstream media can provide credible information and counter misinformation through their online story posts. Digital platforms can also curb algorithmic spread and remove dangerous content that leads to real-world harms. The study offers evidence of a change over time in audiences' news consumption patterns. Whether this is due to news avoidance or changes in algorithmic promotion is unclear. But it is clear that from 2016 to 2024, online audiences increasingly engaged with arts, lifestyle and celebrity news over politics, leading media outlets to prioritize posting stories that entertain rather than inform. This shift may pose a challenge to mitigating misinformation with hard news facts. Finally, the study shows that fact-checking, while valuable, is not a silver bullet. Combating misinformation requires a multi-pronged approach, including counter-messaging by trusted civic leaders, media and digital literacy campaigns, and public restraint in sharing unverified content.

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Ballooning leverage and shaky customer funding could strain Big Red's balance sheet

Oracle has raised $18 billion in debt, which could help fund massive datacenter investments aimed at meeting surging demand from AI model builders and enterprise customers.…

The latest in a run of serious networking bugs gives attackers root if they have SNMP access

Cisco has confirmed a new IOS and IOS XE zero-day, the latest in a string of flaws that attackers have been quick to weaponize.…

Performance of new version mostly good, but future uncertain

The bcachefs file system, now "externally maintained" outside the Linux kernel codebase, offers packages of its first version to be loadable on the fly.…

Business Suite nostalgia unlikely to ease customers' public cloud journey

SAP experts are doubting the enterprise software giant's message that it is simplifying licensing after the changes were discussed at the German-speaking user group conference.…

Biometric Entry/Exit System phased in from October to 29 Schengen countries

Travelers including Britons and Americans visiting most European countries will have to register their fingerprints and faces under a system that goes live next month.…