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Fujifilm will increase prices on most of its US camera lineup starting August 30, marking the second price adjustment this month following retailer-announced increases two weeks earlier. The company cited "volatile market conditions" in its official statement. The recently released X half and X-E5 cameras will maintain their launch prices, while the backordered X100 VI faces price changes. The company characterized the adjustments as a long-term solution to uncertainties including tariffs and manufacturing circumstances.

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England has declared a "nationally significant" water shortage as reservoirs dropped to 67.7% capacity, their lowest levels in at least a decade. The UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology warned of exceptionally low river flows while groundwater continues dwindling across the country. Hosepipe bans now affect all of England, with additional restrictions probable in coming months. Water companies lose approximately one trillion litres annually through leaky pipes -- 20% of all treated water -- while the annual pipe replacement rate remains at 0.05%. No new reservoir has been built in 30 years despite population growth. Government forecasts project England's public water supply could fall short by 5 billion litres daily by 2055 without urgent infrastructure investment. The economic cost of water scarcity could reach $11.48 billion over this parliament, according to thinktank Public First.

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More than 60 years after first demos of this tech, Kairos will bring it back to Oak Ridge

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, could be home to a molten salt reactor once again if Google-backed Kairos Power has its way.…

High accuracy scores come from conditions that don't reflect real-world usage

Facial recognition technology has been deployed publicly on the basis of benchmark tests that reflect performance in laboratory settings, but some academics are saying that real-world performance doesn't match up.…

Meet the new COPILOT function

Microsoft, in its ongoing effort to AI-ify every product it has, is now adding it right into the cells of Excel.  Available on Monday to beta users of Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new COPILOT function allows you to task Redmond's AI with performing generative tasks right in, for example, C2 or B23.…

Got a particle accelerator? Here’s your tritium startup idea

Tritium is ridiculously rare, incredibly expensive, and central to most fusion energy reactor designs. If research out of Los Alamos National Lab proves to hold true, it might soon become easier to obtain.…

Spy vs spy in the chips

Comment Chinese state media called the US an aspiring "surveillance empire" over its proposed use of asset tracking tags to crack down on black-market GPU shipments to the Middle Kingdom.…

MIT NANDA study finds only 5 percent of organizations using AI tools in production at scale

US companies have invested between $35 and $40 billion in Generative AI initiatives and, so far, have almost nothing to show for it.…

A plan to standardize IT record keeping is incomplete after 8 years, and the GAO wants someone to act

The US federal government first planned to standardize its categorization of IT costs, resources, and solutions back in 2017. Eight years later, the project has mostly stalled, say auditors, and now they're demanding that it either get priority or get the axe.…

Traditional business applications will become the mainframes of the 2030s - functioning but obsolete systems replaced by AI agents, predicts Microsoft corporate vice president Charles Lamanna. AI agents featuring generative AI interfaces, goal-oriented processing, and vector databases will supplant today's form-driven, workflow-based enterprise software within five years, said Lamanna, who leads Microsoft's business applications and platforms division. The executive projects industry patterns for agent-based systems will solidify within 6-18 months. Microsoft MVP Rocky Lhotka called the 2030 timeline "very forward-looking and optimistic," noting that capital-intensive industries cannot readily replace existing infrastructure with virtual agents.

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Trading volume on AI prediction markets reached approximately $20 million this month across platforms including Kalshi and Polymarket. Kalshi reports ten times the AI trading volume compared to early 2025. Bettors place wagers on outcomes including monthly AI model rankings, federal AI regulation prospects, and Sam Altman's potential OpenAI equity stake.

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Surprise – updated plans way more expensive than initially suggested

AWS has introduced new pricing for Kiro, its AI-driven coding tool, but unlike the pricing originally announced, the latest plans are "a wallet-wrecking tragedy," according to many of its users.…

Supply chain breach has been a major target of legal action

Microsoft-owned talk-to-text outfit Nuance has agreed to cough up $8.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit over the sprawling MOVEit Transfer mega-breach – although it admits no liability.…

Prospect magazine, in a recent piece: "LinkedIn doesn't know me anymore," someone complained to me recently. "What do you mean?" I asked. She explained that the platform has replaced the old "recommended jobs" section, which used to show her quite useful job openings based on her previous searches and CV, with an AI search engine that asks you to describe your ideal job in freeform text. The results it brings up aren't nearly as relevant. This is just one of many ways in which the professionals' social media platform, which has embraced artificial intelligence with ferocious zeal, is being gradually "enshittified," to borrow tech writer Cory Doctorow's phrase. Each new embrace of AI tools promises to make hiring, job searching, networking and even posting a bit easier or more fruitful. Instead, AI seems to have made the user's experience more alienating, and to have helped foster a genre of LinkedIn-speak which bears all the hallmarks of the worst AI writing on the internet. Let's start with my opening example -- which, to be fair, is in beta testing mode and can be switched off. Instead of the AI assistant being like an intuitive digital servant, pulling up the best jobs based on your ruminations, users are confronted with a new and annoying task: crafting prompts for the AI. But the non-AI search bar worked perfectly well as it was. Then there is the AI writing assistant, which is available to users who pay for the platform's $40 per month premium service to help them craft their posts. LinkedIn's CEO Ryan Roslansky recently admitted that users aren't using the tool as much as he anticipated. It seems that sounding like a human being to your colleagues and clients is put at, well, a premium. And then there are the ways in which users are deploying outputs from external AI chatbots on the platform, something with which LinkedIn is struggling to cope. According to the New York Times, the number of job applications submitted via the platform increased by 45 per cent in the year to June, now clocking in at an average of 11,000 per minute.

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P2P power networks beat stingy feed-in tariffs for Aussie households, study finds

Boffins looking into the Australian solar energy ecosystem say that sharing really is caring – and potentially profitable when homes with solar panels can sell their excess energy to neighbors at a preferential rate.…

Dust is that "feature" or drawback, The Verge's reviewer Allison Johnson argues. Samsung's head of smartphone planning Minseok Kang told her earlier this year that creating dustproof foldable phones remains technically challenging but "not impossible." Current flagship foldables from Samsung and Motorola carry IP48 ratings that protect against particles larger than one millimeter, while traditional smartphones at similar price points offer full IP68 dust and water resistance. The durability gap persists five years after Samsung's original Galaxy Fold experienced screen failures from small particles entering the hinge mechanism.

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HR SaaS giant insists core systems untouched

Workday has admitted that attackers gained access to one of its third-party CRM platforms, but insists its core systems and customer tenants are untouched.…

Wikipedia volunteer Grnrchst uncovered a decade-long campaign that created articles about composer David Woodard in 335 languages. The investigation identified 200 accounts and IP addresses systematically creating Woodard articles across 92 languages between 2017 and 2019, averaging one new article every six days. From December 2021 through June 2025, 183 unique accounts each created a single Woodard article in different languages after establishing credibility through unrelated edits. Wikipedia stewards removed 235 articles from smaller wikis. Larger Wikipedia communities banned numerous accounts and deleted 80 additional articles. Twenty Woodard articles remain. Grnrchst called it "the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history."

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If at first you succeed, keep trying until you don't

SpaceX is gearing up for another Starship launch, blaming a previous failure on structural issues and fuel pressurization problems.…

Virtual agents to guide citizens through red tape – but not remove any of it

The UK government has leapt into the AI hype with a raft of "Exemplar" programs it claims will deliver billions in value – including a Clippy-style assistant to help citizens navigate complex forms and legal jargon, rather than simply making them clearer in the first place.…