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Gemini CLI integration is nice, but there's little polish in building apps from prompts

Google today unveiled updates to Firebase Studio at its Cloud Summit event in London, adding Gemini command-line interface (CLI) integration, initial Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, and "Agent Mode."…

Senators from both parties are preparing to challenge the Trump administration's proposed 24% cut to NASA's budget, with the Senate appropriations committee advancing a $24.9 billion allocation that matches the agency's 2025 funding levels. The bipartisan pushback directly contradicts President Donald Trump's budget request, which sought to slash NASA's science portfolio funding nearly in half and terminate dozens of operating and planned missions. "We rejected cuts that would have devastated NASA science by 47% and would have terminated 55 operating and planned missions," Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, said. The Senate bill allocates $7.3 billion for science programs. Senators also refused the administration's call to cancel the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule after their third flights, programs Trump's budget labeled "grossly expensive and delayed." "The bill reflects an ambitious approach to space exploration, prioritizing the agency's flagship program, Artemis, and rejecting premature termination of systems like SLS and Orion before commercial replacements are ready," said Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican.

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European Union officials unveiled new AI regulations on Thursday that require makers of the most powerful AI systems to improve transparency, limit copyright violations and protect public safety. The rules apply to companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google that develop general-purpose AI systems underpinning services like ChatGPT, which can analyze enormous amounts of data and perform human tasks. The code of practice provides concrete details about enforcing the AI Act passed last year, with rules taking effect August 2. EU regulators cannot impose penalties for noncompliance until August 2026. Companies must provide detailed breakdowns of content used for training algorithms and conduct risk assessments to prevent misuse for creating biological weapons. CCIA Europe, representing Amazon, Google and Meta, told New York Times the code imposes a disproportionate burden on AI providers.

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Politicians uneasy over potential impact on national security, local reports say

Russia, home to some of the world's most lucrative and damaging cybercrime operations, has rejected a bill to legalize ethical hacking.…

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan told employees this week that the company has fallen out of the "top 10 semiconductor companies" and that it's "too late" to catch up with Nvidia in AI training technology. The remarks came as Intel began laying off thousands of workers globally, including 529 in Oregon and several hundred others in California, Arizona and Israel. "Twenty, 30 years ago, we are really the leader," Tan said during a conversation broadcast to Intel employees worldwide. "Now I think the world has changed. We are not in the top 10 semiconductor companies." Tan said Nvidia's position in AI training is "too strong" and that customers are giving Intel failing grades. Intel's market value has dropped to around $100 billion, roughly half its value from 18 months ago, while Nvidia briefly hit $4 trillion on Wednesday. Tan said Intel will instead focus on "edge" AI that operates directly on devices rather than centralized computers.

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Shipments in America flat, surge across ROTW ahead of Win 10 support cutoff

Tariff uncertainty caused by US President Donald Trump still hangs over the PC industry despite manufacturers navigating a "complex regulatory maze" to avoid being in the firing line over import taxes when the shooting begins.…

Researchers have discovered 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics distributed across just the top layer of the temperate to subtropical North Atlantic Ocean, according to a study published in Nature. The team sampled water at three depths across 12 locations during a November 2020 research cruise, finding average concentrations of 18 milligrams per cubic meter of three plastic types: polyethylene terephthalate, polystyrene and polyvinylchloride. These particles, smaller than one micrometer in diameter, behave differently from larger microplastics by remaining suspended throughout the water column rather than settling to the ocean floor. The nanoplastics can pass through cell walls and enter the marine food web through phytoplankton, said Tony Walker, an environmental scientist at Dalhousie University. The world's oceans contain an estimated 3 million tonnes of floating plastic pollution when excluding nanoplastics.

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'I don't think there's a spare megawatt sitting anywhere idle in all of Europe, or the US, as a matter of fact'

Microsoft intends to more than double its European datacenter capacity by 2027, but suspects this won't be easy because of all the red tape and environmental safeguards it faces.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Sunday, Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey launched an open source chat app called Bitchat, promising to deliver "secure" and "private" messaging without a centralized infrastructure. The app relies on Bluetooth and end-to-end encryption, unlike traditional messaging apps that rely on the internet. By being decentralized, Bitchat has potential for being a secure app in high-risk environments where the internet is monitored or inaccessible. According to Dorsey's white paper detailing the app's protocols and privacy mechanisms, Bitchat's system design "prioritizes" security. But the claims that the app is secure, however, are already facing scrutiny by security researchers, given that the app and its code have not been reviewed or tested for security issues at all -- by Dorsey's own admission. Since launching, Dorsey has added a warning to Bitchat's GitHub page: "This software has not received external security review and may contain vulnerabilities and does not necessarily meet its stated security goals. Do not use it for production use, and do not rely on its security whatsoever until it has been reviewed." This warning now also appears on Bitchat's main GitHub project page but was not there at the time the app debuted. As of Wednesday, Dorsey added: "Work in progress," next to the warning on GitHub. This latest disclaimer came after security researcher Alex Radocea found that it's possible to impersonate someone else and trick a person's contacts into thinking they are talking to the legitimate contact, as the researcher explained in a blog post. Radocea wrote that Bitchat has a "broken identity authentication/verification" system that allows an attacker to intercept someone's "identity key" and "peer id pair" -- essentially a digital handshake that is supposed to establish a trusted connection between two people using the app. Bitchat calls these "Favorite" contacts and marks them with a star icon. The goal of this feature is to allow two Bitchat users to interact, knowing that they are talking to the same person they talked to before.

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Can Sean Duffy embrace the challenge?

NASA has a new interim Administrator. US President Donald Trump has announced that former reality TV star and current Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy will be taking on the role.…

Crimefighting agency cagey on details, probes into intrusions at M&S, Harrods, and Co-op continue

The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested four individuals suspected of being involved with the big three cyberattacks on UK retail businesses in recent weeks.…

Processing and storage for Gemini 2.5 Flash to stay in Blighty

Google Cloud is attempting to ease concerns about where AI data is stored by offering organizations the option to keep Gemini 2.5 Flash machine learning processing entirely within the UK.…

12 hours, millions of users disrupted, mailbox infrastructure blamed

Microsoft Outlook is down for the count in a major outage affecting millions of users worldwide for the past 11 hours.…

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Red Hat has introduced a new option that gives developers a fast lane to enterprise-grade Linux without needing to go through IT. The new release, called Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers, is now available for free. It offers direct, self-serve access to the same operating system used in production environments, specifically for business-focused development and testing. The offering is part of the Red Hat Developer Program and is designed to reduce friction between development and operations teams. Developers can now build and test applications on the same platform that powers critical systems across physical servers, virtual machines, cloud deployments, and edge devices. [...] Each registered user can deploy up to 25 instances, whether virtual, physical, or cloud-based. The program includes signed and curated developer content such as programming languages, open source tools, and databases. Red Hat also includes Podman Desktop, its go-to container development tool, allowing users to work with containers that can closely match production environments. While access is free, developers can choose to purchase support plans that tap into Red Hat's Linux expertise. This could appeal to developers working in business units or teams that want to build quickly without waiting on formal IT approval. This new option complements Red Hat's existing free Developer Subscription for Individuals and the Enterprise Developer Subscription for Teams, which is available through Red Hat reps or partners.

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Controversial system requires local NHS investment to maximize productivity

The benefits of the UK health sector's Palantir-powered data and analytics system are being suppressed by the limits of writing back to NHS software, MPs heard this week.…

Boffins outsmart smart contracts with evil automation

Using AI models to generate exploits for cryptocurrency contract flaws appears to be a promising business model, though not necessarily a legal one.…

Amazon's Prime Day sales plunged 41% on the first day compared to last year's kickoff, with experts attributing the drop to shoppers delaying purchases in anticipation of better deals during the extended four-day event. From a report: Momentum Commerce reported that figure for Tuesday (July 8), with Momentum's Founder and CEO John Shea saying that the sales numbers for this year's longer event could still surpass those of last year's shorter one, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (July 9). Shea attributed the drop in first-day sales to consumers putting items in their shopping carts but holding off on completing the purchase in case better deals come along, according to the report. Last year's shorter event encouraged shoppers to head to checkout to ensure they wouldn't miss out on the discounts, Shea said, per the report. Amazon Prime Vice President Jamil Ghani remains optimistic, telling Bloomberg Television the company was "pleased by the engagement" with shoppers during the event and that it is "very early." He said the company extended the duration of Prime Day because shoppers wanted more time to discover the deals. According to numbers provided by Adobe, Prime Day's kickoff surpassed Thanksgiving 2024's $6.1 billion in eCommerce spend. The software company also found that 50.2% of sales came through a mobile device and that buy now, pay later orders for Amazon's Prime Day were up 13.6% year over year.

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Source code and weights coming later this summer with an Apache 2.0 bow on top

Supercomputers are usually associated with scientific exploration, research, and development, and ensuring our nuclear stockpiles actually work. …

New Zealand’s Giant Moa stood over three meters tall but were easy prey

Researchers from New Zealand will try to revive extinct birds, with help from Colossal Biosciences and film-maker Sir Peter Jackson.…

Deaf professor who worked on one product says developers won’t listen to feedback – about their products or their tech bro ways

China’s efforts to employ AI as a means of improving access to media for its deaf population aren’t going well, according to a professor at Beijing Normal University’s Faculty of Education.…