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Disney and NBCUniversal have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI image generator firm Midjourney in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, marking the first time major Hollywood studios have taken legal action against a generative AI company. The entertainment giants accuse Midjourney, founded in 2021, of training its software on "countless" copyrighted works without permission and enabling users to create images that "blatantly incorporate and copy" famous characters including Darth Vader, the Minions, Frozen's Elsa, Shrek, and Homer Simpson. The companies claim they attempted to resolve the matter privately, but Midjourney "continued to release new versions" with "even higher quality infringing images" according to the complaint. Disney's general counsel used the word "piracy," to describe Midjourney's practice, while NBCUniversal's general counsel characterized it as "blatant infringement."

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WhatsApp has applied to submit evidence in Apple's legal battle against the UK Home Office over government demands for access to encrypted user data. The messaging platform's boss Will Cathcart told the BBC the case "could set a dangerous precedent" by "emboldening other nations" to seek to break encryption protections. The confrontation began when Apple received a secret Technical Capability Notice from the Home Office earlier this year demanding the right to access data from its global customers for national security purposes. Apple responded by first pulling its Advanced Data Protection system from the UK, then taking the government to court to overturn the request. Cathcart said WhatsApp "would challenge any law or government request that seeks to weaken the encryption of our services." US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has called the UK's demands an "egregious violation" of American citizens' privacy rights.

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Apple executives defended the company's AI strategy this week after acknowledging that major Siri features announced at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference remain undelivered and were quietly pulled from development plans. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, told the Wall Street Journal that the company is rebuilding Siri from the ground up, admitting that while Apple had working software for the promised features, "it didn't converge in the way quality-wise that we needed it to." The missing capabilities included Siri's ability to search through apps and respond to on-screen activities, features that were demonstrated a year ago but never shipped to users. In the upcoming iOS 26, Apple has instead incorporated more OpenAI technology, allowing users to interact with ChatGPT through camera and screenshots and generate images using OpenAI's tools. Federighi defended the strategy by comparing Apple's position to the early internet era, when the company focused on making other services accessible rather than building competing platforms.

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It's still smoking, but help is on hand

A tug has reached the Morning Midas, six days after a presumed battery fire broke out, causing the crew to abandon ship.…

With 1 MW racks and prefab bit barns, the heat is on

GTC Paris Schneider Electric and Nvidia are jointly developing cooling, management, and control systems for AI datacenters in support of the EU's AI action plan, with Schneider detailing support for racks with 1 MW loads.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Fresh data released by piracy tracking outfit MUSO shows that pirate sites remain popular. In a report released today, MUSO reveals that there were 216 billion pirate site visits globally in 2024, a slight decrease compared to the 229 billion visits recorded a year earlier. TV piracy remains by far the most popular category, representing over 44.6% of all website visits. This is followed by the publishing category with 30.7%, with film, software and music all at a respectable distance. Pirate site visitors originate from all over the world, but one country stands tall above all the rest: America. The United States remains the top driver of pirate site traffic accounting for more than 12% of all traffic globally, good for 26.7 billion visits in 2024. India has been steadily climbing the ranks for years and currently sits in second place with 17.6 billion annual visits, with Russia, Indonesia, and Vietnam completing the top five. As a country with one of the largest populations worldwide, it's not a complete surprise that the U.S. tops the list. If we counted visits per internet user, Canada and Ukraine would top the list. While pirate site visits dipped by more than 5% in 2024, one category saw substantial growth. Visits to publishing-related pirate sites increased 4.3% from 63.6 to 66.4 billion. The increase is largely driven by the popularity of manga, which accounts for more than 70% of all publishing piracy. Traditional book piracy, meanwhile, is stuck at 5%. The publishing piracy boom is relatively new. Over the past five years, the category grew by more than 100% while the overall number of global pirate site visits remained relatively flat. Looking at the global demand, we see that the U.S. also leads the charge here, followed by Indonesia and Russia. Notably, Japan, the home of manga, ranks fifth in the publishing category. This stands out because Japan is not listed in the global top 15 in terms of total pirate site visits. In the other content categories, MUSO's data shows a dip in pirate site visits. The changes are relatively modest for TV (-6.8%) and software (-2.1%) but the same isn't true for the music and film categories. In 2024, there were 18% fewer visits for pirated movies compared to a year earlier. MUSO notes that this is due to a "lighter blockbuster calendar" which reduced piracy peaks. "The drop in demand is as much about what wasn't released as it is about access," the report explains. The music category saw a 19% decline in piracy visits year over year, with a more uplifting explanation for rightsholders. According to MUSO, the drop can be partly attributed to "secure app ecosystems" and the "wide adoption of licensed platforms like Spotify and Apple Music."

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Agentless contact center 'not yet technically feasible, nor operationally desirable'

Good news for consumers frustrated by wading through pools of AI treacle in search of customer service - businesses are reportedly turning back to human agents "amid AI integration challenges."…

Server rig aimed at validating Europe's exascale-class silicon and software stacks

Euro chip designer SiPearl has released a reference server design featuring its Rhea1 processor, the chip that powers Jupiter, Europe's most powerful supercomputer.…

£14.2B Sizewell C among the investments along side Small Modular Reactors

The UK has bet big on nuclear power — both big and small — following a series of warnings about energy capacity and supply for datacenter investments.…

On your marks, get set... bork!

Microsoft has set a new record with June's security update for the time between release and an admission of borkage.…

The FDA plans to use AI to "radically increase efficiency" in deciding whether to approve new drugs and devices, drawing on lessons from Operation Warp Speed to reduce review times to weeks. The plan was laid out in an article published Tuesday in JAMA. The New York Times reports: Another initiative involves a review of chemicals and other "concerning ingredients" that appear in U.S. food but not in the food of other developed nations. And officials want to speed up the final stages of making a drug or medical device approval decision to mere weeks, citing the success of Operation Warp Speed during the Covid pandemic when workers raced to curb a spiraling death count. [...] Last week, the agency introduced Elsa, an artificial intelligence large-language model similar to ChatGPT. The FDA said it could be used to prioritize which food or drug facilities to inspect, to describe side effects in drug safety summaries and to perform other basic product-review tasks. The FDA officials wrote that A.I. held the promise to "radically increase efficiency" in examining as many as 500,000 pages submitted for approval decisions. Current and former health officials said the A.I. tool was helpful but far from transformative. For one, the model limits the number of characters that can be reviewed, meaning it is unable to do some rote data analysis tasks. Its results must be checked carefully, so far saving little time. Staff members said that the model was hallucinating, or producing false information. Employees can ask the Elsa model to summarize text or act as an expert in a particular field of medicine.

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How much wishful thinking has entered the pipeline will come to light in 2027

Opinion Today, the UK chief finance minister is set to detail government spending for the next three years and capital budgets for the next four. As the first multi-year spending review since 2021, it is a big deal.…

Model Context Protocol has many fine uses, but then it hinted at becoming a Von Neumann machine

Column Generative AI is changing so rapidly, it’s hard to stay up to date, so I generally avoid the newest shiny thing until it becomes unavoidable.…

Building AMD computational cancer research super and ICL workhorse with Intel inside

Lenovo has pulled a couple of European supercomputer wins out of the bag, one using Intel chips for Imperial College London and an AMD-based system for the European Institute of Oncology.…

A mathematician on Reddit calculated that if all 8.2 billion humans were blended into a uniform goo, the resulting meatball would form a sphere just under 1 kilometer wide -- small enough to fit inside Central Park. ScienceAlert reports: "If you blended all 7.88 billion people on Earth into a fine goo (density of a human = 985 kg/m3, average human body mass = 62 kg), you would end up with a sphere of human goo just under 1 km wide," Reddit contributor kiki2703 wrote in a post ... Reasoning the density of a minced human to be 985 kilograms per cubic meter (62 pounds per cubic foot) is a fair estimate, given past efforts have judged our jiggling sack of grade-A giblets to average out in the ballpark of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, or roughly the same as water. And in mid-2021, the global population was just around 7.9 billion, give or take.

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The botnet’s still alive and evolving

Badbox 2.0, the botnet that infected millions of smart TV boxes and connected devices before private security researchers and law enforcement partially disrupted its infrastructure, is readying for a third round of fraud and digital attacks, according to one of the threat hunters who uncovered the original scheme.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data centers, a United Nations report (PDF) said on Thursday. The use of artificial intelligence by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta drove up their global indirect emissions because of the vast amounts of energy required to power data centers, the report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency for digital technologies, said. Indirect emissions include those generated by purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by a company. Amazon's operational carbon emissions grew the most at 182% in 2023 compared to three years before, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145% and Alphabet at 138%, according to the report. The ITU tracked the greenhouse gas emissions of 200 leading digital companies between 2020 and 2023. [...] As investment in AI increases, carbon emissions from the top-emitting AI systems are predicted to reach up to 102.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the report stated. The data centres that are needed for AI development could also put pressure on existing energy infrastructure. "The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is driving a sharp rise in global electricity demand, with electricity use by data centers increasing four times faster than the overall rise in electricity consumption," the report found. It also highlighted that although a growing number of digital companies had set emissions targets, those ambitions had not yet fully translated into actual reductions of emissions. UPDATE: The headline has been revised to clarify that four leading AI-focused tech companies saw their operational emissions rise to 150% of their 2020 levels by 2023 -- a 50% increase, not a 150% one.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data centers, a United Nations report (PDF) said on Thursday. The use of artificial intelligence by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta drove up their global indirect emissions because of the vast amounts of energy required to power data centers, the report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency for digital technologies, said. Indirect emissions include those generated by purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by a company. Amazon's operational carbon emissions grew the most at 182% in 2023 compared to three years before, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145% and Alphabet at 138%, according to the report. The ITU tracked the greenhouse gas emissions of 200 leading digital companies between 2020 and 2023. [...] As investment in AI increases, carbon emissions from the top-emitting AI systems are predicted to reach up to 102.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the report stated. The data centres that are needed for AI development could also put pressure on existing energy infrastructure. "The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is driving a sharp rise in global electricity demand, with electricity use by data centers increasing four times faster than the overall rise in electricity consumption," the report found. It also highlighted that although a growing number of digital companies had set emissions targets, those ambitions had not yet fully translated into actual reductions of emissions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI could bring a new round of browser wars

Mozilla is concerned that Google's efforts to build Gemini into its Chrome browser will make it even more difficult for rivals to compete with the search and ads giant.…

Michael Larabel of Phoronix highlights the key updates in today's stable release of FreeBSD 14.3: FreeBSD 14.3 has back-ported a number of improvements from FreeBSD 15 back to the FreeBSD 14 series. Plus a number of routine package updates and other fixes. Some of the FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE highlights include: - Updating the ZFS support against OpenZFS 2.2.7. - Merging of the Realtek RTW88 and RTW89 WiFi drivers based on the Linux 6.14 kernel code. - The LinuxKPI code has been improved to support crypto offload as well as the 802.11n and 802.11ac standards. - The Intel IX Ethernet driver has added support for the x550 1000BAS-BX SFP modules. - Thor2 PCI IDs added to the Broadcom NetXtreme "BNXT" driver along with support for 400G speed modules. - XZ 5.8.1, OpenSSH 9.9p2, OpenSSL 3.0.16, and many other package updates. - Syscons as the legacy system console driver is now considered deprecated. Syscons is not compatible with UEFI, lacks UTF-8 support, and is Giant-locked. You can download and learn more about FreeBSD 14.3 via FreeBSD.org.

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