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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The Linux Foundation announced at the Open Source Summit in Denver that it will now host the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol. Initially developed by Google and now supported by more than 100 leading technology companies, A2A is a crucial new open standard for secure and interoperable communication between AI agents. In his keynote presentation, Mike Smith, a Google staff software engineer, told the conference that the A2A protocol has evolved to make it easier to add custom extensions to the core specification. Additionally, the A2A community is working on making it easier to assign unique identities to AI agents, thereby improving governance and security. The A2A protocol is designed to solve one of AI's most pressing challenges: enabling autonomous agents -- software entities capable of independent action and decision-making -- to discover each other, securely exchange information, and collaborate across disparate platforms, vendors, and frameworks. Under the hood, A2A does this work by creating an AgentCard. An AgentCard is a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) metadata document that describes its purpose and provides instructions on how to access it via a web URL. A2A also leverages widely adopted web standards, such as HTTP, JSON-RPC, and Server-Sent Events (SSE), to ensure broad compatibility and ease of integration. By providing a standardized, vendor-neutral communication layer, A2A breaks down the silos that have historically limited the potential of multi-agent systems. For security, A2A comes with enterprise-grade authentication and authorization built in, including support for JSON Web Tokens (JWTs), OpenID Connect (OIDC), and Transport Layer Security (TLS). This approach ensures that only authorized agents can participate in workflows, protecting sensitive data and agent identities. While the security foundations are in place, developers at the conference acknowledged that integrating them, particularly authenticating agents, will be a hard slog. Antje Barth, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) principal developer advocate for generative AI, explained what the adoption of A2A will mean for IT professionals: "Say you want to book a train ride to Copenhagen, then a hotel there, and look maybe for a fancy restaurant, right? You have inputs and individual tasks, and A2A adds more agents to this conversation, with one agent specializing in hotel bookings, another in restaurants, and so on. A2A enables agents to communicate with each other, hand off tasks, and finally brings the feedback to the end user." Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said: "By joining the Linux Foundation, A2A is ensuring the long-term neutrality, collaboration, and governance that will unlock the next era of agent-to-agent powered productivity." Zemlin expects A2A to become a cornerstone for building interoperable, multi-agent AI systems.

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The U.N. Human Rights Council passed a motion on climate change and human rights by consensus Tuesday after the Marshall Islands withdrew a divisive amendment calling for states to recommit to a fossil fuel phase-out. The motion calls on countries "to contribute to the global efforts" against climate change and follows the council's 2021 recognition of access to a clean and healthy environment as a fundamental right. Oil-producing countries including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had voiced opposition to the original fossil fuel phrasing during negotiations. Instead, the final motion referenced "the imperative of defossilizing our economies" in a footnote, allowing passage without a vote where the outcome had been uncertain.

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Activision removed "Call of Duty: WWII" from Microsoft Store and Game Pass after hackers exploited a security vulnerability that allowed them to compromise players' computers, TechCrunch reported Tuesday, citing a source. The gaming giant took the 2017 first-person shooter offline last week while investigating what it initially described only as "reports of an issue." Players posted on social media claiming their systems had been hacked while playing the game. The vulnerability was a remote code execution exploit that enables attackers to install malware and take control of victims' devices. The Microsoft Store and Game Pass versions contained an unpatched security flaw that had been fixed in other versions of the game.

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It connects using peer-to-peer networking instead of the internet

Serial entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter and currently acts as CEO of payments company Block, has released the source code for a peer-to-peer messaging app called bitchat that relies on Bluetooth for network connectivity.…

Corporate employees of Amazon have been asked to volunteer their time to the company's warehouses to assist with grocery delivery as it heads into its annual discount spree known as Prime Day. From a report: In a Slack message reviewed by the Guardian that went to thousands of white-collar workers in the New York City area from engineers to marketers, an Amazon area manager called for corporate "volunteers to help us out with Prime Day to deliver to customers on our biggest days yet." It is not clear how many took up the offer. The ask came the day before Prime Day kicks off. The manager said volunteers are "needed" to work Tuesday through Friday this week, in two-hour shifts between 10am and 6pm in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the company operates a warehouse as part of its grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh. Corporate employees seconded to the warehouse would be tasked with picking items, preparing carts and bags of groceries for delivery, packing boxes on receiving carts, and working to "boost morale with distribution of snacks," though they would be allowed to step into a conference room to take meetings and calls, according to the message. The manager noted such an effort would help "connect" warehouse and corporate teams. Further reading: Amazon Prime Day Spending Down 14% in Early Hours From 2024.

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You want that military contract? Then no more proprietary repairability clauses!

A bipartisan pair of Senators is so happy with the US Army's right to repair policy that they want to enshrine it in federal law as the standard across military branches. …

Napster has returned with an AI-powered reinvention, launching a platform of specialized chatbots and holographic avatars. The former dot-com music file-sharing pioneer now offers dozens of "AI companions" trained as experts in fields from therapy to business strategy, plus the View device for 3D holographic video chats, FastCompany reports. Infinite Reality acquired Napster for $207 million in March and rebranded itself under the nostalgic name. The platform charges $19 monthly or $199 bundled with hardware, marking Napster's latest attempt at relevance after previous owners tried VR concerts and crypto ventures.

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These extensions weren't malware-laced from the start, researcher says

A Chrome and Edge extension with more than 100,000 downloads that displays Google's verified badge does what it purports to do: It delivers a color picker to users. Unfortunately, it also hijacks every browser session, tracks activities across websites, and backdoors victims' web browsers, according to Koi Security researchers.…

An anonymous reader shares a blog post: Version 140 of the Thunderbird mail client has been released. Notable features include "dark message mode" to adapt message content to dark mode, the ability to easily transfer desktop settings to the mobile Thunderbird client, experimental support for Microsoft Exchange, as well as global controls for message threading and sort order. Thunderbird 140 is an extended-support release (ESR) which will be supported for 12 months. However, the Thunderbird project is trying to encourage users to adopt the Release channel for monthly updates instead. The project is staggering upgrades to 140 for existing Thunderbird users in order to catch any significant bugs before they are widely deployed, but users can upgrade manually via the Help > About menu. See the release notes for a full list of changes.

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Including frequencies that overlap with Wi-Fi 6E and private mobile networking

updated A provision in the new US budget bill opens a wide swath of spectrum for sale, including some that overlaps with frequencies currently allotted for private mobile networks and Wi-Fi 6E. …

Microsoft and OpenAI are locked in acrimonious negotiations partly because they cannot agree on what artificial general intelligence means, despite having written the term into a contract worth over $13 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. One definition reportedly agreed upon by the companies sets the AGI threshold at when AI generates $100 billion in profits. Under their partnership agreement, OpenAI can limit Microsoft's access to future technology once it achieves AGI. OpenAI executives believe they are close to declaring AGI, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called using AGI as a self-proclaimed milestone "nonsensical benchmark hacking" on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast in February.

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Climate risks threaten to fry the supply chain for essential chipmaking metal

Climate change could pose a threat to the technology industry as copper production is vulnerable to drought, while demand may grow to outstrip supply anyway.…

The Georgia Court of Appeals has overturned a trial court's order after finding it relied on court cases that do not exist, apparently generated by AI. The appellate court vacated the ruling in a divorce case involving Nimat Shahid's challenge to a divorce order granted to her husband Sufyan Esaam in July 2022. "We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court's order," the appeals court stated in its decision, which directs the lower court to revisit Shahid's petition. The court noted the errant citations appear to have been "drafted using generative AI" and were included in an order prepared by attorney Diana Lynch. Lynch repeated the fabricated citations in her appeals briefs and expanded upon them after Shahid had challenged the fictitious cases. The appeals court found Lynch's briefs contained "11 bogus case citations out of 15 total, one of which was in support of a frivolous request for attorney fees." The court fined Lynch $2,500 for filing the frivolous motion.

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SUSE has unveiled a new support package aimed at customers concerned about data sovereignty. From a report: Called "SUSE Sovereign Premium Support," the service geo-pins support to a given region rather than adopting the traditional follow-the-sun model, where support comes from whatever region is online. The latter approach could break sovereignty regulations or policies, as it might involve transferring data out of a region. Ensuring that support is available from a specific region is therefore crucial, particularly for European customers. SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen told The Register: "Digital sovereignty has become a really hot topic in the last half year, and specifically in Europe, where companies feel an increasing need to get things done in-house, in-country, or in-region within Europe, with less dependency on non-European vendors and supply chains and people."

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'If this is the priority for our tax dollars, we are doomed'

The US Congress has passed President Donald Trump's budget bill. In addition to the possibility of a Space Shuttle move, significant changes are on the way for NASA.…

An impostor pretending to be Secretary of State Marco Rubio contacted foreign ministers, a U.S. governor and a member of Congress by sending them voice and text messages that mimic Rubio's voice and writing style using AI-powered software, Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing a senior U.S. official and a State Department cable. From the report: U.S. authorities do not know who is behind the string of impersonation attempts but they believe the culprit was probably attempting to manipulate powerful government officials "with the goal of gaining access to information or accounts," according to a cable sent by Rubio's office to State Department employees. Using both text messaging and the encrypted messaging app Signal, which the Trump administration uses extensively, the impostor "contacted at least five non-Department individuals, including three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor, and a U.S. member of Congress," said the cable, dated July 3. The impersonation campaign began in mid-June when the impostor created a Signal account using the display name "Marco.Rubio@state.gov" to contact unsuspecting foreign and domestic diplomats and politicians, said the cable.

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First volume of inquiry report focuses on the scandal's human impact

Senior Post Office staff – and those working for suppliers Fujitsu and ICL – knew or should have known about the defects causing errors in the Horizon system that contributed to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of branch workers, 13 of whom committed suicide, most probably as a result, according to the first volume of a government report into the computer scandal.…

X said Tuesday it is "deeply concerned about ongoing press censorship in India" after the Indian government ordered the platform to block 2,355 accounts on July 3, including two Reuters news agency handles. The social media company said the order came under India's Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, with non-compliance risking criminal liability. The Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology demanded immediate action within one hour without providing justification, X said. After public outcry, the government requested X to unblock the Reuters accounts.

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Modern threats demand modern defenses. Cloud-native is the new baseline

Partner content Every organization is investing in cyberresilience tools, training, and processes. Unfortunately, only some of them will be able to successfully respond and recover from an attack. Regardless of how hard they work, many IT and security teams are constrained by legacy technology architectures that were built for the challenges of 2015, not 2025.…

Google is implementing a change that will enable its Gemini AI engine to interact with third-party apps, such as WhatsApp, even when users previously configured their devices to block such interactions. ArsTechnica: Users who don't want their previous settings to be overridden may have to take action. An email Google sent recently informing users of the change linked to a notification page that said that "human reviewers (including service providers) read, annotate, and process" the data Gemini accesses. The email provides no useful guidance for preventing the changes from taking effect. The email said users can block the apps that Gemini interacts with, but even in those cases, data is stored for 72 hours. The email never explains how users can fully extricate Gemini from their Android devices and seems to contradict itself on how or whether this is even possible.

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