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It all started with a May report saying that some bot training may need licensing or permission

A US appeals court has thrown a wrench into the White House's attempt to oust US Copyright Office director Shira Perlmutter, ruling that the president likely has no authority to fire her.…

A new minister in Albania charged to handle public procurement will be impervious to bribes, threats, or attempts to curry favour. That is because Diella, as she is called, is an AI-generated bot. From a report: Prime Minister Edi Rama, who is about to begin his fourth term, said on Sept 11 that Diella, which means "sun" in Albanian, will manage and award all public tenders in which the government contracts private companies for various projects. "Diella is the first Cabinet member who isn't physically present, but is virtually created by AI," Mr Rama said during a speech unveiling his new Cabinet. She will help make Albania "a country where public tenders are 100 per cent free of corruption." The awarding of such contracts has long been a source of corruption scandals in Albania, a Balkan country that experts say is a hub for gangs seeking to launder their money from trafficking drugs and weapons across the world, and where graft has reached the corridors of power.

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It’s a Republican pressing after DOGE whistleblower flags hostile work environment

A US Senator is demanding answers after a Social Security Administration (SSA) employee who blew the whistle on Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dealings involuntarily resigned last month, citing workplace hostility in response to his concerns. …

Original author of open source database 'not surprised' but 'saddened' as critics slam vendor's layoffs

Oracle has instigated "widespread layoffs" across its core MySQL development team, sparking concern about the future of one of the world's most popular open-source databases.…

Wind and solar power generated more than a third of Brazil's electricity in August, the first month on record the two renewable sources have crossed that threshold, according to government data made public on Thursday and analyzed by energy think tank Ember. AP: The clean energy sources accounted for 34% of the country's electricity generation last month, producing a monthly record of 19 terawatt-hours (TWh), enough to power about 119 million average Brazilian homes for a month, Ember told The Associated Press. That surpassed the previous high of 18.6 TWh set in September 2024. The milestone came as hydroelectric output, Brazil's dominant power source, fell to a four-year low. "Brazil shows how a rapidly growing economy can meet its rising need for electricity with solar and wind," said Raul Miranda, Ember's global program director based in Rio de Janeiro.

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Shady, China-based company, all the apps needed for a fully automated attack - sounds totally legit

Villager, a new penetration-testing tool linked to a suspicious China-based company and described by researchers as "Cobalt Strike's AI successor," has been downloaded about 10,000 times since its release in July.…

Benchmark bonanza shows big wins across JSON, compression, JIT, and more

The first release candidate of .NET 10 is out, complete with a "go-live" license, meaning that Microsoft supports production use. The company has also detailed performance improvements in this long-term support release, translating to real-world savings for users.…

Apple's Live Translation feature for AirPods won't reach European Union users when it launches next week. The restriction applies to users physically located in the EU who also have EU-registered Apple Accounts. Apple hasn't specified reasons for the limitation, though the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act and GDPR impose requirements on speech processing and translation services. The feature enables real-time translation between English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish on AirPods Pro 2, AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, and the newly announced AirPods Pro 3. Translation requires iOS 26 on iPhone 15 Pro or newer models.

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The technology isn't the hard part, says enterprise business services SVP, it's managing people

At Walmart, "everybody's using AI every day across the enterprise," according to David Glick, senior vice president of the retail behemoth's enterprise business services.…

Global automakers are licensing Chinese electric vehicle technology to accelerate development and cut costs. Audi built its E5 Sportback in 18 months using SAIC's batteries, powertrain and software after the Zeekr 001 "shocked quite everyone" in 2021, according to Stefan Poetzl, president of SAIC Audi Sales and Marketing. Toyota and Volkswagen have joint development agreements for China-specific models using GAC and Xpeng technology respectively. Renault and Ford plan to develop global models on Chinese platforms, according to Reuters. The licensing deals provide Chinese automakers additional revenue amid domestic price wars. Ready-made Chinese EV chassis and software can save billions of dollars and years of development time, industry experts told the publication. CATL and other Chinese suppliers are expanding chassis production for domestic and international customers.

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FastNetMon says 1.5 Gpps deluge from hijacked routers, IoT kit nearly drowned scrubbing shop

A DDoS mitigation provider was given a taste of the poison it tries to prevent, after being smacked by one of the largest packet-rate attacks ever recorded – a 1.5 billion packets per second (1.5 Gpps) flood that briefly threatened to knock it off the internet.…

Slicing Windows 11 to the bone while Microsoft piles on the features

How low can Windows 11 go? Storage-wise, it can take up less than 3 GB, as demonstrated by some impressive engineering from the same individual behind the Nano11 "diet" build.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Within the nightly builds of the Firefox web browser is finally the ability to support playback of Matroska "MKV" content. Enabled just within the Firefox Nightly builds for now or opting in within the media.mkv.enabled preference is the ability to support MKV playback. Initially just AVC/H.264 and AAC within MKV containers are supported but other codec support will be expanded over time. For the past eight years there has been this feature request for supporting Matroska/MKV playback support.

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AMD Zen hardware and Intel Coffee Lake affected

If you thought the world was done with side-channel CPU attacks, think again. ETH Zurich has identified yet another Spectre-based transient execution vulnerability that affects AMD Zen CPUs and Intel Coffee Lake processors by breaking virtualization boundaries.…

India's massive IT sector faces a lengthy period of uncertainty with customers delaying or re-negotiating contracts while the U.S. debates a proposed 25% tax on American firms using foreign outsourcing services, analysts and lawyers told Reuters. From a report: The sector is likely to be on the receiving end of a bill which, though unlikely to pass in its nascent form, will initiate a gradual shift in how big-name firms in the world's largest outsourcing market buy IT services, they said. Still, with U.S. firms having to pay the tax, those heavily reliant on overseas IT services are likely to push back, setting the stage for extensive lobbying and legal battles, analysts and lawyers said. India's $283 billion information technology sector has thrived for more than three decades exporting software services, with prominent clients including Apple, American Express, Cisco, Citigroup, FedEx and Home Depot. It has grown to make up over 7% of GDP. However, it has also drawn criticism in customer countries over job loss to lower-cost workers in India. Last week, U.S. Republican Senator Bernie Moreno introduced the HIRE Act, which proposes taxing companies that hire foreign workers over Americans, with the tax revenue used for U.S. workforce development.

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That won't even warm the plasma

America's Department of Energy (DOE) has earmarked $134 million in funding for two programs aimed at securing US leadership in emerging fusion technologies. The move comes amid renewed interest in nuclear power sparked by surging datacenter energy demands.…

Snapchat has been accused by a Danish research organisation of leaving an "overwhelming number" of drug dealers to openly operate on Snapchat, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA. The Guardian: The social media platform has said it proactively uses technology to filter out profiles selling drugs. However, research by Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), a Danish research organisation that promotes responsible digital development, has found evidence of a failure to moderate drug-related language in usernames. It also accused Snapchat of failing to respond adequately to reports of profiles openly selling drugs. Researchers used profiles of 13-year-olds and found a multitude of people selling drugs on Snapchat under usernames featuring keywords such as "coke," "weed" and "molly." When researchers reported 40 of these profiles to Snapchat, the company removed only 10 of them. The other 30 reports were rejected, they said.

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Ron Wyden urges FTC to probe failure to secure Windows after attackers used Kerberoasting to cripple Ascension

Microsoft is back in the firing line after US Senator Ron Wyden accused Redmond of shipping "dangerous, insecure software" that helped cybercrooks cripple one of America's largest hospital networks.…

Graph database fave also punts for transactional workloads

Neo4j has introduced "property sharding" which, according to one analyst, will help overcome its earlier struggles with scalability, while also allowing transactional workloads on the same system.…

$50 standalone bots now bundled in $30 package

Microsoft is re-badging its Sales, Service, and Finance Copilots and slashing what it charges for them.…