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The SEC has launched "Project Crypto" to overhaul outdated securities regulations for a blockchain-based future, aiming to support tokenized assets, crypto trading, and "super apps." "To achieve President Trump's vision of making America the crypto capital of the world, the SEC must holistically consider the potential benefits and risks of moving our markets from an off-chain environment to an on-chain one," SEC chair Paul Atkins said at the "American Leadership in the Digital Finance Revolution" conference on Thursday. "I have directed the Commission staff to update antiquated agency rules and regulations to unleash the potential of on-chain software systems in our securities markets ... Federal securities laws have always assumed the involvement of intermediaries that require regulation, but this does not mean that we should interpose intermediaries for the sake of forcing intermediation where the markets can function without them." CNBC reports: Atkins, the SEC chair, highlighted "super apps" (such as one Coinbase introduced two weeks ago) as a priority of his chairmanship, noting the need to allow the apps to thrive with an "efficient licensing structure," rather than subject to multiple regulatory authorities. So-called super apps like WeChat and Alipay -- which bundle several different services and functionalities into a single mobile app -- have long been viewed as the holy grail of financial technology by the industry. They're central to everyday life in China but haven't been successfully replicated in the West. Meta Platforms and X have made attempts to realize that vision, integrating payments, messaging and social content, among other functions. Atkins also said the Trump administration will work to prevent "innovative" companies from being driven offshore by burdensome regulations, and said the SEC "will encourage our nation's builders rather than constrain them with red tape and one-size-fits-all rules."

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US Army Sec appears to fold under pressure from far-right conspiracy theorist

comment Jen Easterly has weighed in on the US Army Secretary firing her from a prestigious West Point teaching post a day after the US Military Academy announced the appointment.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Efforts to introduce pirate site blocking to the United States continue with the introduction of the "Block BEARD" bill (PDF) in the Senate. The bipartisan proposal, backed by Senators Tillis, Coons, Blackburn, and Schiff, aims to create a new legal mechanism to combat foreign piracy websites. Block BEARD is similar to the previously introduced House bill "FADPA", but doesn't directly mention DNS resolvers. [...] The site-blocking proposal seeks to amend U.S. copyright law, enabling rightsholders to request federal courts to designate online locations as a "foreign digital piracy site". If that succeeds, courts can subsequently order U.S. service providers to block access to these sites. Pirate site designation would be dependent on rightsholders showing that they are harmed by a site's activities, that reasonable efforts had been made to notify the site's operator, and that a reasonable investigation confirms the operator is not located within the United States. Additionally, rightsholders must show that the site is primarily designed for piracy, has limited commercial purpose, or is intentionally marketed by its operator to promote copyright-infringing activities. If the court classifies a website as a foreign pirate site, rightsholders can go back to court to request a blocking order. At this stage, the court will determine whether it is technically and practically feasible for ISPs to block the site, and consider any potential harm to the public interest. The granted orders would stay in place for a year with the option to extend if necessary. If blocked sites switch to new locations, the court can also amend blocking orders to include new IP addresses and domain names. The Block BEARD bill broadly applies to service providers as defined in section 512(k)(1)(A) of the DMCA. This is a broad definition that applies to residential ISPs, but also to search engines, social media platforms, and DNS resolvers. Service providers with fewer than 50,000 subscribers are explicitly excluded, and the same applies to venues such as coffee shops, libraries, and universities that offer internet access to visitors. Unlike the FADPA bill introduced by Representative Lofgren earlier this year, the Senate bill does not specifically mention DNS resolvers. Block BEARD does not mention VPNs, but its broad definition of "service provider" could be interpreted to include them. The proposal states that providers have the option to contest their inclusion in a blocking order. Once an order is issued, they would have the freedom to choose their own blocking techniques. There are no transparency requirements mentioned in the bill, so if and how the public is informed is unclear.

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Brazil has launched a massive program to release millions of laboratory-bred mosquitoes engineered to carry Wolbachia bacteria, which prevents them from transmitting dengue virus. The initiative aims to protect 140 million Brazilians across 40 municipalities over the next decade. The approach has already demonstrated significant results in Niteroi, where officials documented a roughly 90% drop in dengue cases when comparing the 10 years prior to the modified mosquitoes' introduction to the five years afterward. Nearly all mosquitoes in the city now carry the Wolbachia bacteria. Cases of chikungunya and Zika also fell by over 96% and 99% respectively. The World Mosquito Program operates high-tech breeding facilities, including one in Rio de Janeiro that produces mosquitoes by the millions. A new factory in Curitiba will produce 5 billion mosquitoes in its first year. The Wolbachia bacteria, naturally present in roughly half of all insect species, creates conditions where dengue virus cannot replicate inside mosquitoes, effectively breaking the transmission cycle when these modified insects bite humans.

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CISA has publicly released Thorium, a powerful open-source platform developed with Sandia National Labs that automates malware and forensic analysis at massive scale. According to BleepingComputer, the platform can "schedule over 1,700 jobs per second and ingest over 10 million files per hour per permission group." From the report: Security teams can use Thorium for automating and speeding up various file analysis workflows, including but not limited to: - Easily import and export tools to facilitate sharing across cyber defense teams, - Integrate command-line tools as Docker images, including open-source, commercial, and custom software, - Filter results using tags and full-text search, - Control access to submissions, tools, and results with strict group-based permissions, - Scale with Kubernetes and ScyllaDB to meet workload demands. Defenders can find installation instructions and get their own copy of Thorium from CISA's official GitHub repository.

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DeepMind geospatial AI model offers comprehensive view of Earth image data

Google has released a new AI model that maps the world in 10-meter squares for machines to read.…

Apple reported its strongest quarterly revenue growth since 2021, with iPhone sales jumping 13% and total revenue up 10%. CEO Tim Cook also announced increased AI investments and hinted at future acquisitions to accelerate Apple's AI roadmap. CNBC reports: "It was an exceptional quarter by any measure," Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC's Steve Kovach. Cook said that about 1% of the company's 10 percentage points of revenue growth could be attributed to customers buying more products to get ahead of potential tariffs. The company's most important business remains the iPhone, which saw 13% growth on an annual basis during the quarter to $44.58 billion in sales. Cook said that iPhone revenue was strong because the iPhone 16 is more popular compared to the iPhone 15 devices on sale last year at the same time. Cook said iPhone 16 sales were up "strong double digits" versus its predecessor. Cook specifically highlighted popularity among current iPhone users upgrading to a new one. Apple's Mac business grew the fastest of any of Apple's units during the June quarter, growing nearly 15% to $8.05 billion in revenue. Apple released updated MacBook Air laptops, its best-selling Mac, just before the quarter started. The company's services business, which includes the company's warranties, content subscriptions, licensing deals with Google, and iCloud continued to grow to $27.42 billion in the period, a 13% increase. Cook highlighted growth in the company's iCloud subscriptions and said App Store revenue grew "double digits" during the quarter. The two tougher spots in Apple's report were iPad sales and the company's other products division, which it sometimes calls its wearables. It consists of Apple Watch, AirPods, and other accessories. Revenue for iPad was down 8% to $6.58 billion, despite the company launching a low-cost iPad in March. Apple's wearables unit declined 8.64% to $7.4 billion during the quarter. Apple also saw success in China during the quarter, with sales rising 4% on an annual basis to $15.37 billion. Apple reports its sales from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the same unit. It's a reversal from the past two quarters, where Apple's China sales declined 2% in Apple's second fiscal quarter and 11% in the first quarter. Cook said a Chinese subsidy for some devices helped Apple in the region. "The subsidy does apply to some of our products, and it clearly helps," Cook said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: E-commerce giants everywhere felt the sting Wednesday when President Donald Trump announced that the US will be "suspending duty-free de minimis treatment for low-value shipments" worth $800 or less from anywhere in the world. Americans will likely soon feel the crunch, with one recent study estimating that the cost of eliminating the trade loophole overall to US consumers could fall between $10.9 billion and $13 billion while "disproportionately" hurting "lower-income and minority consumers" who buy a higher percentage of cheap imports. Price hikes will likely come this fall, as the trade loophole will be closed starting on August 29, with Amazon emerging as perhaps the biggest question mark for US consumers wondering how hard their wallets may be hit by the major trade policy change ahead of the holiday shopping season. In February, Trump temporarily ended the de minimis exemption for all imports from China, prompting China-based retailers Temu and Shein to raise their prices.

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There's a driver at the wheel

Elon Musk's goal of a fully autonomous car that could serve as a Robotaxi is getting another trial this week, albeit with a human operator behind the wheel.…

Crims warned 40% of respondents that they and their families would suffer

Ransomware gangs now frequently threaten physical violence against employees and their families as a way to force victim organizations into paying their demands.…

Apple began selling iPad repair parts to the public in late May following new right-to-repair legislation, but independent repair professionals say the pricing makes most repairs economically unviable. A charge port for an iPad Pro 11 costs $250 from Apple compared to less than $20 for aftermarket parts, Brian Clark of iGuys Tech Shop told 404 Media. An iPad A16 digitizer costs $200 from Apple versus $50 from third-party suppliers, while the entire iPad A16 retails for $349. The iPad Pro 13 screen assembly costs $749. Jonathan Strange of XiRepair analyzed the parts catalog and found more than one-third of components cost too much for repair shops to use profitably, 404 Media reported Thursday. Strange calculates repair viability by adding $85 labor costs and 10% profit margin to parts prices, then comparing the total to half the device's retail cost.

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Illumina allegedly lied about its testing devices meeting government standards

Biotech firm Illumina has agreed to cut the US government a check for the eminently affordable amount of $9.8 million to resolve allegations that it has been selling the feds genetic testing systems riddled with security vulnerabilities the company knew about but never bothered to fix.…

Google lost its appeal Thursday of a judge's order that will force the tech giant to open up its app store to competitors. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling requiring Google Play to allow rival marketplaces and billing systems, ending a legal battle that began when Epic Games sued over anticompetitive practices. A jury sided with Epic in December 2023, finding Google paid phone makers and app developers to use its store exclusively.

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Facility to be built with $1 billion investment from Nscale and Aker

OpenAI's Stargate initiative has teleported to Europe, where the AI flag bearer has enlisted datacenter builder Nscale and Norwegian energy magnate Aker ASA to deploy a 100,000-GPU compute cluster in the Arctic by 2026.…

The world's "oldest baby" has been born in the US from an embryo that was frozen in 1994, it has been reported. The Guardian: Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born on 26 July in Ohio to Lindsey and Tim Pierce, using an "adopted" embryo from Linda Archerd, 62, from more than 30 years ago. In the early 1990s, Archerd and her then husband decided to try in vitro fertilisation (IVF) after struggling to become pregnant. In 1994 four embryos resulted: one was transferred to Archerd and resulted in the birth of a daughter, who is now 30 and mother to a 10-year-old. The other embryos were cryopreserved and stored. "We didn't go into it thinking we would break any records," Lindsey told the MIT Technology Review, which first reported the story. "We just wanted to have a baby."

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What's next - gonna tell us it's time to migrate to Windows 8?

Watch out, world: The US government has finally found out about DevSecOps, and it has become a late evangelist for the security-by-default software development practice.…

No way this will be abused

Microsoft has upgraded Azure AI Speech so that users can rapidly generate a voice replica with just a few seconds of sampled speech.…

Microsoft has abandoned a decades-long tradition of calling out the names of its rivals in regulatory documents. From a report: When the 50-year-old technology company released its annual report Wednesday, the 101-page document contained zero references to longtime foes Apple and IBM. Nor did it mention privately held challengers such as Anthropic or Databricks. Last year's Microsoft annual report officially designated over 25 companies as competitors. The names of Microsoft's enemies have appeared in its annual reports at least since 1994.

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Microsoft's internal pay guidelines show exactly how much the company will pay new engineering hires, according to documents obtained by Business Insider. The guidelines, updated in May, break down salary ranges, stock awards, and bonuses for every level from entry-level engineers to the company's most senior technical talent. The documents come with an important caveat: recruiters can get approval to pay more when competing for exceptional candidates. At Microsoft's highest tier, Level 70 "distinguished engineers" can earn up to $408,000 in annual salary. But the real money comes from stock: these hires get up to $1.9 million in stock when they join, plus annual stock awards reaching $1.476 million. The company uses different pay scales depending on location. Engineers in expensive markets like San Francisco get higher ranges than those at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, where most hiring happens. For entry-level engineers at Level 57, Microsoft offers salaries between $83,000 and $108,000 in its main markets, with higher ranges of $95,800 to $124,600 in expensive areas like San Francisco. These new hires get modest stock awards of $5,000 to $13,000 and signing bonuses up to $9,000. The company considers levels 57 through 59 as entry-level positions. The compensation jumps significantly as engineers advance. By Level 63, when engineers reach senior status, salaries range from $145,000 to $237,600 depending on location, with stock awards reaching $220,000.

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H20 silicon under the microscope after slipping through US export bans

China's internet watchdog has hauled Nvidia in for a grilling over alleged backdoors in its H20 chips, the latest twist in the increasingly paranoid semiconductor spat between Washington and Beijing.…