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Twenty years after Michelin introduced the Tweel in 2005, airless tires remain absent from passenger vehicles despite their promise to "eliminate nearly 200 million scrap tires a year caused by flats and underinflation," according to Michelin's internal testing cited in a Jalopnik report. Current prototypes "tend to transfer more road noise and vibration into the cabin than traditional radials -- making the ride harsher, especially at highway speeds." Heat dissipation poses additional challenges as "airless designs -- particularly those with internal webbing or solid cores -- have fewer ways to shed thermal load." The added structural mass "can affect fuel economy and increase unsprung weight -- bad news for handling and suspension tuning." Federal regulations compound these technical barriers since vehicle tires are subject to rigorous performance standards, many of which assume air pressure as a baseline.

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The agency offered some tips for operational technology environments, where attacks are rising

CISA is urging companies with operational technology environments to set a better cybersecurity posture, and not just by adopting some new best practices and purchasing some new software.…

Electricity rates for individuals and small businesses could rise sharply as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other technology companies build data centers and expand into the energy business. Residential electricity bills increased at least $15 monthly for Ohio households starting in June due to data center demands, according to utility data and an independent grid monitor. A Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University analysis projects average U.S. electricity bills will rise 8% by 2030 from data center growth, with Virginia facing potential 25% increases. Virginia regulators estimate residents could pay an additional $276 annually by 2030. National residential electricity rates have already risen more than 30% since 2020. Tech companies' AI push requires data centers that consumed over 4% of U.S. electricity in 2023, with government analysts projecting consumption reaching 12% within three years. American Electric Power warned Ohio regulators that without new rate structures requiring data centers to pay more upfront costs, residents and small businesses would bear much of the expense for grid upgrades.

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Lessons of Windows 8 unlearned as software giant gives users what it thinks they need

COMMENT Microsoft Windows and Devices boss, Pavan Davuluri, has shed light on plans for the flagship OS. Voice, touch, and pen control will all be part of a multimodal future, alongside a raft of inevitable AI features.…

Turkish exchange is the latest victim of a recent spate of major crypto thefts

Turkish cryptocurrency exchange BtcTurk is halting all deposits and withdrawals amid fears that blockchain bandits succeeded in significantly compromising its hot wallets.…

The Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections (OCCE) has revealed in its annual report that it will "explore the use" AI and emerging technologies to see how they will shape the government body's approach for the next year. From a report: Commissioner Caroline Simard's office didn't outline ways it might adopt AI. In its outlook, the OCCE expected to use funding announced in January 2025 to secure the tools needed for addressing the "challenges of today's electoral environment." This included staffing roles dictated by its new structure and reflected "ongoing modernization efforts," but no further details. The Commissioner is an independent officer who ensures the government, political parties, and others honour both the Canada Elections Act and Referendum Act. This includes core aspects like financing, nominations, campaigning, and advertising. More recently, the OCCE has been addressing rising issues with AI, including election disinformation facilitated by bots, AI-generated images, and deepfakes (AI-generated videos that resemble real people in false scenarios).

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Windows 11 24H2 fixes fail from Windows Server Update Services

Microsoft has admitted that the August patch Tuesday update might fail to install through Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), but it's ok, admins. Home users are "unlikely to experience this issue."…

Kodak says it remains confident it can avoid shutdown despite filing required "going concern" disclosures about $500 million in debt obligations due within 12 months. The 133-year-old photography company plans to draw approximately $300 million from its U.S. pension fund in December to pay off a significant portion of its term loan before maturity. Chief Marketing Officer Denisse Goldbarg said the disclosure was mandatory under accounting rules but Kodak would emerge virtually debt-free.

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US DoE names firms for Pilot Program to show how it could be done

America's Department of Energy (DoE) has named ten companies it will work with to test advanced atomic reactor projects outside of the agency's world-famous national laboratories, in line with President Trump's Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program.…

The next version of Windows will become "more ambient, pervasive, and multi-modal" as AI transforms how users interact with computers, Microsoft's Windows chief Pavan Davuluri said in a company video. Davuluri, Corporate Vice President and head of Windows, said that voice will emerge as a primary input method alongside keyboard and mouse, with the operating system gaining context awareness to understand screen content and user intent through natural language. Windows interfaces, he said, will appear fundamentally different within five years as the platform becomes increasingly agentic. The transformation will rely on both local processing power and cloud computing capabilities to deliver seamless experiences where users can speak to their computers while simultaneously typing or inking.

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Top fintech and crypto executives urged the Trump administration to block US banks from charging fees for access to customer data, levies that strike at the heart of their business models. From a report: Klarna, Robinhood and crypto exchange Gemini were among a long list of companies, investors and lobbying groups that signed a letter sent Wednesday to President Donald Trump, arguing that the proposed fees would "cripple" innovation and "may cause small businesses and financial tools to shut down entirely." JPMorgan Chase has told fintechs and the data aggregators they rely on that the bank's customer account information will no longer be accessible without a charge. JPMorgan, the biggest US bank, views the data aggregators as freeloaders of sorts who access data without paying and then charge their fintech clients for it. PNC Financial Services is considering charging similar fees. "We urge you to use the full power of your office and the broader administration to prevent the largest institutions from raising new barriers to financial freedom," they said in the letter. "We cannot allow the most powerful, entrenched banks to close the door on a more open and modern financial system."

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Making apps is as easy as selling t-shirts, claims vibe coding startup

Hands On Create has declared its vibe coding platform, now called Anything, production-ready at version 1.0, with support for both web and mobile applications – although our quick hands-on generated a host of errors.…

Brits wake to a beeping nightmare as Amazon’s AI assistant forgets how to set – or stop – alarms

Amazon's Alexa is on the fritz, bungling alarms and timers and leaving some UK users trapped in an endless wake-up call.…

BrianFagioli writes: Lenovo is starting its fiscal year with a major win, delivering record-breaking PC sales and claiming dominance in the AI PC space. For the first quarter of its 2025/26 fiscal year, the company reported $18.8 billion in revenue, which is 22 percent higher than the same period last year. Profit came in at $505 million, more than double the figure from a year ago. The standout performer was Lenovo's PC and smart devices division. It posted its fastest growth in 15 quarters and secured a record 24.6 percent global market share. More than 30 percent of Lenovo's PCs shipped in the quarter were AI PCs, giving it the top position in the Windows AI PC segment with a 31 percent market share. This leadership is an important talking point for Lenovo as it continues to market AI features as a key reason for buyers to upgrade.

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Moscow-linked miscreants accused of swiping sealed US court files and fiddling with a Norwegian dam’s floodgates

Russian attackers reportedly spent months rummaging through the US federal court's creaky case-management system, while Norway reckons the same Kremlin-friendly miscreants took control of a dam's controls – a transatlantic double-act in legal files and floodgates.…

Microsoft cap-ex larger than output of Uganda and Google trumps Slovenia... all in the name of AI

The level of investment pouring into new infrastructure from datacenter operators is comparable to the turnover of some mid-sized economies.…

Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of xAI, has left the company to start Babuschkin Ventures, a VC firm focused on AI safety and humanity-advancing startups. TechCrunch reports: Babuschkin led engineering teams at xAI and helped build the startup into one of Silicon Valley's leading AI model developers just a few years after it was founded. "Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023," Babuschkin wrote in the post. "I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed." Babuschkin is leaving xAI to launch his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, which he says will support AI safety research and back startups that "advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe." The xAI co-founder says he was inspired to start the firm after a dinner with Max Tegmark, the founder of the Future of Life Institute, in which they discussed how AI systems could be built safely to encourage the flourishing of future generations. In his post, Babuschkin says his parents immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in pursuit of a better life for their children. Prior to co-founding xAI, Babuschkin was part of a research team at Google DeepMind that pioneered AlphaStar in 2019, a breakthrough AI system that could defeat top-ranked players at the video game StarCraft. Babuschkin also worked as a researcher at OpenAI in the years before it released ChatGPT. In his post, Babuschkin details some of the challenges he and Musk faced in building up xAI. He notes that industry veterans called xAI's goal of building its Memphis, Tennessee supercomputer in just three months "impossible." [...] Nevertheless, Babuschkin says he's already looking back fondly on his time at xAI, and "feels like a proud parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college." "I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2 have a maniacal sense of urgency," said Babuschkin.

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Nearly 100,000 records allegedly up for sale after apparent breach at booking system

Italy's digital agency (AGID) says a cybercriminal's claims concerning a spate of data thefts affecting various hotels across the country are genuine.…

WebSocket connections wrapped as streams, MAUI fixes and more as latest LTS version nears release candidate stage

Microsoft has released Preview 7 of its .NET 10 runtime and frameworks, with new features including wrapping WebSocket connections as streams, improved passkey authentication in ASP.NET, and new features and fixes for MAUI (Multi-platform App UI).…

Intruders accessed important systems but tells customers their data is safe

A UK-based multinational that provides tech stock availability tools is telling customers that its website outage is due to a cyber attack.…