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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Seeking Alpha: General Motors is reviving its autonomous driving program, tapping former Cruise employees to help design a driverless car for consumers. Under the helm of former Tesla autopilot head Sterling Anderson, GM is moving ahead with a driverless, eyes-free, vehicle with the ultimate goal of developing a car without a person at the wheel, according to a meeting between Anderson and employees revealed to Bloomberg. Anderson reportedly said plans include rehiring Cruise employees, and adding staff at GM's Mountain View, California office. Currently, LiDAR-equipped vehicles are collecting data on public roads for the development of GM's driverless vehicles, GM spokesperson Chaiti Sen told Bloomberg, with the goal of building simulation models that will guide development. GM (GM) shuttered its majority-owned, money-losing, Cruise robotaxi business late last year and let go of ~1,000 Cruise employees, after a pedestrian accident led to the grounding of its entire fleet and regulatory scrutiny. At the time, the company said it was pivoting away from robotaxis to the development of hands-free driving for personal vehicles.

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Prosus has secured conditional approval from the European Union for its $4.8âbillion (4.1 billion euros) acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway, after agreeing to sell down its 27.4% stake in Delivery Hero. Reuters reports: Amsterdam-headquartered Prosus, which is majority owned by South Africa's Naspers, announced the deal in February, banking on its artificial intelligence capability to boost Just Eat Takeaway, Europe's biggest meal delivery company. The European Commission, which acts as the EU competition enforcer, said Naspers offered to significantly reduce its 27.4% stake in Delivery Hero to below a specified very low percentage within 12 months. Naspers also pledged not to exercise the voting rights with its remaining limited stake in Delivery Hero and also not to increase its stake beyond the specified maximum level. It will not recommend or propose any person to Delivery Hero's management and supervisory boards. Prosus said the EU decision was the final regulatory approval needed to close the offer which ends on October 1 and that if all offer conditions including the acceptance threshold for the deal are met by that date, it will declare its offer unconditional within three business days. "Our ambition is clear: to build a true European tech champion and lead the next chapter in food delivery innovation," Prosus CEO Fabricio Bloisi said in a statement. "This decision also sends a clear warning to an industry with recent antitrust issues: we won't tolerate any anti-competitive behaviour that may harm consumers," she said. After the deal is complete, Prosus will become the world's fourth-largest food delivery company after Meituan, DoorDash, and Uber.

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In an unusual arrangement to secure export licenses, Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the U.S. government 15% of revenue from certain chip sales to China. The Associated Press reports: The Trump administration halted the sale of advanced computer chips to China in April over national security concerns, but Nvidia and AMD revealed in July that Washington would allow them to resume sales of the H20 and MI308 chips, which are used in artificial intelligence development. President Trump confirmed the terms of the unusual arrangement in a Monday press conference while noting that he originally wanted 20% of the sales revenue when Nvidia asked to sell the "obsolete" H20 chip to China. The president credited Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for negotiating him down to 15%. "So we negotiated a little deal. So he's selling a essentially old chip," Trump said. Nvidia did not comment about the specific details of the agreement or its quid pro quo nature, but said they would adhere to the export rules laid out by the administration. "We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets. While we haven't shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide," Nvidia wrote in a statement to the AP. "America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America's AI tech stack can be the world's standard if we race."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Detroit Free Press: Ford is announcing the creation of a new electric vehicle production system and a new EV platform that will allow the automaker to more efficiently bring several lower-cost EVs to market, the first of which will be a midsize, four-door electric pickup that seats five, to launch in 2027. That pickup, which is expected to start around $30,000, will be assembled at Ford's Louisville Assembly Plant for U.S. and export markets. The Dearborn-based automaker said it will invest $2 billion to retool the Louisville plant starting later this year. [...] Ford's investment in Louisville Assembly is in addition to Ford's previously announced $3 billion commitment for BlueOval Battery Park in Marshall, Michigan, where Ford will make the prismatic LFP batteries, starting next year, for the midsize electric pickup. Together, the nearly $5 billion investments mean Ford expects to create or secure nearly 4,000 direct jobs while strengthening the domestic supply chain with dozens of new U.S.-based suppliers. Ford executives and Kentucky officials also introduced on Monday, Aug. 11, the new Ford Universal EV Production System, which they said will simplify production and ease operations for workers. Ford leaders also announced the creation of the Ford Universal Electric Vehicle Platform, which will enable the development of "a family of affordable electric vehicles produced at scale." The vehicles will be software-defined with over-the-air updates to keep improving the vehicles over time. "We took a radical approach to solve a very hard challenge: Create affordable vehicles that are breakthrough in every way that matters design, technology, performance, space and cost of ownership and do it with American workers," Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a statement. "Nobody wants to see another good college try by a Detroit automaker to make an affordable vehicle that ends up with idled plants, layoffs and uncertainty." Farley has teased this announcement since Ford's second-quarter earnings when he said Ford would have a "Model-T moment" on Aug. 11. He's referring to the classic vehicle that helped turn Ford into a mass market automaker and perfect the assembly line process. At that time, Farley said it was critical that Ford unveil an EV strategy that would position it to make money selling the electric cars and effectively compete against the Chinese, who are known for making high-quality, desirable and affordable EVs. "So, this has to be a good business," Farley said of Ford's investments in the new process and platform. "From Day 1, we knew there was no incremental path to success. We empowered a tiny skunkworks team three time zones away from Detroit. We reinvented the line. And we are on a path to be the first automaker to make prismatic LFP batteries in the U.S. We will not rely on imports." Ford says its new Universal Electric Vehicle Platform "reduces parts by 20% versus a typical vehicle, with 25% fewer fasteners, 40% fewer workstations dock-to-dock in the plant and 15% faster assembly time." The new EV pickup built using this platform is targeting a "starting MSRP at about $30,000, roughly the same as the Model T when adjusted for inflation," adds Farley. He shared additional details in an interview with Wired, such as how the automaker hired Tesla veterans Doug Field (who also helped lead Apple's now-defunct EV project) and Alan Clarke. "Turns out, Doug and Alan and the team built a propulsion system that was like Apollo 13, managed down to the watt so that our battery could be so much smaller than BYD's," said Farley.

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Biden-era program has reduced FedRAMP processing times to just five weeks from previous year or more

The US Government's process for certifying cloud services safe for official use has long been slow, but that's no longer the case. Approvals so far this fiscal year are more than double the total for all of FY 2024.…

And shave 15% of the top no doubt.

Nerfed versions of Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs could soon join its H20 on the list of AI accelerators approved for sale in China.…

Biochar produced from solid human excrement could supply up to 7% of global phosphorus fertilizer needs annually, according to a Cornell University study published in PNAS. When combined with nutrients extracted from urine, the process could provide 15% of phosphorus, 17% of nitrogen, and 25% of potassium used in agriculture worldwide. The biochar production process reduces solid waste volume and weight by up to 90%, while allowing nutrient proportions to be adjusted for specific crop requirements.

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New submitter darwinmac writes: Kapitano, a user-friendly GTK4 frontend for the ClamAV scanner on Linux, has been killed by its developer 'zynequ' following a wave of harsh, personal attacks from a user. The tool was meant to simplify virus scanning but quickly became a flashpoint when a user claimed it produced malware. After defending the code calmly, the developer was nonetheless met with escalating accusations and hostility, leading to burnout. The project is now marked as "not maintained," its code released into the public domain under The Unlicense, and it's being delisted from Flathub. zynequ said: "This was always a hobby project, created in my free time with none of the financial support. Incidents like this make it hard to stay motivated."

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A few weeks earlier 'zeroplayer' advertised an $80K WinRAR 0-day exploit

Russia-linked attackers found and exploited a high-severity WinRAR vulnerability before the maintainers of the Windows file archiver issued a fix.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Starbucks patrons in South Korea are setting up de facto offices at the coffee chain, bringing along their desktop computers and printers. The company implemented a new policy banning bulky items from store locations. In South Korea, where office space is scant, remote workers are using cafes as a cheap place to work. Starbucks South Korea is experiencing this exact phenomenon and is now banning patrons from bringing in large pieces of work equipment, treating the cafes like their own amenity-stuffed office space. "While laptops and smaller personal devices are welcome, customers are asked to refrain from bringing desktop computers, printers, or other bulky items that may limit seating and impact the shared space," a Starbucks spokesperson told Fortune in a statement.

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Code hosting biz takes a back seat within Microsoft's CoreAI division

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke plans to leave the company and corporate parent Microsoft will not appoint a successor.…

Companies are canceling clean hydrogen projects across the United States after Congress shortened the qualification window for a Biden-era tax credit by five years, requiring projects to be under construction by the end of 2027. Energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie estimates three-quarters of proposals will not meet this deadline. Woodside Energy and Fortescue have scrapped projects in Oklahoma and Arizona respectively, citing cost increases and policy uncertainty. According to McKinsey, fewer than 15% of low-emission hydrogen projects announced in the United States since 2015 have reached final investment decision stage.

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Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, so it's going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit. From a report: The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to crawl post detail pages, comments, or profiles; instead, it will only be able to index the Reddit.com homepage, which effectively means Internet Archive will only be able to archive insights into which news headlines and posts were most popular on a given day. "Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but we've been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine," spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.

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The alleged perpetrators remain at large

The US Department of Justice is trying to recoup around $1 million that three IT specialists secretly working for the North Korean government allegedly stole from a New York company.…

He wants Microsoft to keep supporting Windows 10 until its market share drops below 10%

Many are unhappy about Microsoft's Windows 10 retirement plans, but a California man appears to be angrier than most. He's sued Redmond over the matter, and is demanding continued free Win 10 updates until the OS's popularity wanes. …

Former NSA and Cyber Command chief Paul Nakasone told the Defcon security conference this month that technology companies will find it "very, very difficult" to remain neutral through 2025 and 2026. Speaking with Defcon founder Jeff Moss in Las Vegas, Nakasone, now an OpenAI board member, addressed the intersection of technology and politics following the Trump administration's removal of cybersecurity officials deemed disloyal and revocation of security clearances for former CISA directors Chris Krebs and Jen Easterly. Nakasone also called ransomware "among the great scourges that we have in our country," stating the U.S. is "not making progress against ransomware."

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The bad news? The machines, and their operators, are coming on fast

Black Hat/DEF CON At the opening of Black Hat, the largest security shindig in the Hacker Summer Camp week ahead of DEF CON and BSides, the opening keynote speaker suggested the current state of AI slightly favors defenders over attackers, but he warned that was not a given for much longer.…

theodp writes: The New York Times reports from the CS grad job-seeking trenches: Growing up near Silicon Valley, Manasi Mishra remembers seeing tech executives on social media urging students to study computer programming. "The rhetoric was, if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary," Ms. Mishra, now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, Calif. Those golden industry promises helped spur Ms. Mishra to code her first website in elementary school, take advanced computing in high school and major in computer science in college. But after a year of hunting for tech jobs and internships, Ms. Mishra graduated from Purdue University in May without an offer. "I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company that has called me for an interview is Chipotle," Ms. Mishra said in a get-ready-with-me TikTok video this summer that has since racked up more than 147,000 views. Some graduates described feeling caught in an A.I. "doom loop." Many job seekers now use specialized A.I. tools like Simplify to tailor their resumes to specific jobs and autofill application forms, enabling them to quickly apply to many jobs. At the same time, companies inundated with applicants are using A.I. systems to automatically scan resumes and reject candidates.

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But it can contest if it lands up in 'Category 1,' and the move hurts operations, says judge

Wikipedia today lost a legal battle against the UK's tech secretary to tighten the criteria around the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA), as it seeks to exclude itself from the strictest regulations.…

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced Monday he will step down to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors, with Microsoft restructuring the subsidiary's leadership rather than appointing a direct replacement. Microsoft developer division head Julia Liuson will oversee GitHub's revenue, engineering and support operations, while chief product officer Mario Rodriguez will report to Microsoft AI platform VP Asha Sharma.

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