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Logitech, the Swiss-American computer peripherals manufacturer, is considering the development of a long-lasting mouse that could potentially serve customers "forever," according to CEO Hanneke Faber. In a recent interview, Faber revealed that the company's innovation center has presented her with a prototype of such a device. The concept mouse, described as slightly heavier than standard models, would rely on software updates and services to maintain its functionality over time. Faber likened it to a quality watch that doesn't require frequent replacement.

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Goals to stop the decline of nature and clean up the air and water in England are slipping out of reach, a new report has warned. From a report: An audit of the Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP), which is the mechanism by which the government's legally binding targets for improving nature should be met, has found that plans for thriving plants and wildlife and clean air are deteriorating. This plan was supposed to replace the EU-derived environmental regulations the UK used until the Environment Act was passed in 2021 after Brexit. The report found that there was no data to measure many of the metrics such as habitat creation for wildlife and the status of sites of special scientific interest. It also highlighted that the government was off track to meet its woodland creation targets, and that water leakage from pipes had in fact increased since the targets were set. The Labour party announced on Tuesday that it would overhaul these goals. The environment secretary, Steve Reed, said the government would lay out detailed delivery plans for each target, such as tree planting and air quality, working with environment groups to do so.

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Russian lawmakers passed a bill on Tuesday that will allow businesses to use crypto currencies in international trade, as part of efforts to skirt Western sanctions imposed after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. From a report: The law is expected to go into force in September, and Russian central bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, one of the backers of the new law, said the first transactions in cryptocurrencies will take place before the end of the year. Russia has faced significant delays in international payments with major trading partners such as China, India and the United Arab Emirates after banks in those countries, under pressure from Western regulators, became more cautious. "We are taking a historic decision in the financial sphere," the head of the Duma lower house of parliament, Anatoly Aksakov, told lawmakers. Under the new law, the central bank will create a new "experimental" infrastructure for cryptocurrency payments. Details of the infrastructure have yet to be announced.

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Spain's competition watchdog said Tuesday it had slapped online travel agency Booking.com with a record $446.7 million fine for "abusing its dominant position" during the past five years. From a report: "These practices have affected hotels located in Spain and other online travel agencies that compete with the platform. Its terms and conditions create an inequitable imbalance in the commercial relationship with hotels located in Spain," the CNMC said in a statement. "By better positioning hotels with more bookings on Booking.com, other online agencies have been prevented from entering the market or expanding," it added. This is the largest fine ever imposed by the CNMC, a spokeswoman for the authority told AFP. The CNMC said Booking.com's market share in Spain, the world's second most visited country after France, during the period under investigation was between 70 percent and 90 percent. Booking.com, whose parent company Booking Holdings is headquartered in the United States, is a dominant player with a market share in Europe of more than 60 percent. In May, the European Union added the travel agency to its list of digital companies big enough to fall under tougher competition rules, giving the firm six months to prepare for compliance with the landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA).

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HealthEquity is notifying 4.3 million people following a March data breach that affects their personal and protected health information. From a report: In its data breach notice, filed with Maine's attorney general, the Utah-based healthcare benefits administrator said that although the compromised data varies by person, it largely consists of sign-up information for accounts and information about benefits that the company administers. HealthEquity said the data may include customer names, addresses, phone numbers, their Social Security number, information about the person's employer and the person's dependent (if any), and some payment card information. HealthEquity provides employees at companies across the United States access to workplace benefits, like health savings accounts and commuter options for public transit and parking. At its February earnings, HealthEquity said it had more than 15 million total customer accounts.

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Amazon is responsible for hazardous products sold by third-party sellers on its platform under the federal safety law and bears legal responsibility for their recall, the U.S. consumer protection authority said on Tuesday. From a report: The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said it has issued an order for the e-commerce giant to propose remediation plans to notify consumers about these products and to remove them from consumers' homes by encouraging returns or destruction. More than 400,000 products are subject to this order, the CPSC said, noting in particular faulty carbon monoxide detectors, hairdryers without electrocution protection, and children's sleepwear that violated flammability standards. The CPSC has determined that Amazon was a "distributor" of such defective products as they are listed on its website, even though they are sold by third-party sellers under the "Fulfilled by Amazon" program.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India. The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs. But more than two decades ago, India's vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows. By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal painkiller for cattle that is fatal to vultures. Birds that fed on carcasses of livestock treated with the drug suffered from kidney failure and died. Since the 2006 ban on veterinary use of diclofenac, the decline has slowed in some areas, but at least three species have suffered long-term losses of 91-98%, according to the latest State of India's Birds report. And that's not all, according to a new peer-reviewed study. The unintentional decimation of these heavy, scavenging birds allowed deadly bacteria and infections to proliferate, leading to the deaths of about half a million people over five years, says the study [PDF] published in the American Economic Association journal. "Vultures are considered nature's sanitation service because of the important role they play in removing dead animals that contain bacteria and pathogens from our environment - without them, disease can spread," says the study's co-author, Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. "Understanding the role vultures play in human health underscores the importance of protecting wildlife, and not just the cute and cuddly. They all have a job to do in our ecosystems that impacts our lives."

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Microsoft is calling on Congress to pass a comprehensive law to crack down on images and audio created with AI -- known as deepfakes -- that aim to interfere in elections or maliciously target individuals. From a report: Noting that the tech sector and nonprofit groups have taken steps to address the problem, Microsoft President Brad Smith on Tuesday said, "It has become apparent that our laws will also need to evolve to combat deepfake fraud." He urged lawmakers to pass a "deepfake fraud statute to prevent cybercriminals from using this technology to steal from everyday Americans." The company also is pushing for Congress to label AI-generated content as synthetic and for federal and state laws that penalize the creation and distribution of sexually exploitive deepfakes. The goal, Smith said, is to safeguard elections, thwart scams and protect women and children from online abuses. Congress is currently mulling several proposed bills that would regulate the distribution of deepfakes.

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apcyberax shares a report: Microsoft is investigating an ongoing and widespread outage blocking access to some Microsoft 365 and Azure services. "We're currently investigating access issues and degraded performance with multiple Microsoft 365 services and features. More information can be found under MO842351 in the admin center," Redmond said. However, many users report having issues connecting to the Microsoft 365 admin center and opening the Service Health Status page, which should provide real-time information on issues impacting Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft 365/Power Platform admin centers. For the moment, the company says this incident is only affecting users in Europe and only a subset of its services.

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has expressed disappointment with Google's decision to retain third-party cookies, stating it undermines collaborative efforts. Google's reversal follows a five-year initiative to develop privacy-focused ad technology. While some advertising industry representatives welcomed the move, the W3C's criticism highlights the ongoing debate over online privacy and advertising practices. W3C writes: Third-party cookies are not good for the web. They enable tracking, which involves following your activity across multiple websites. They can be helpful for use cases like login and single sign-on, or putting shopping choices into a cart -- but they can also be used to invisibly track your browsing activity across sites for surveillance or ad-targeting purposes. This hidden personal data collection hurts everyone's privacy. We aren't the only ones who are worried. The updated RFC that defines cookies says that third-party cookies have "inherent privacy issues" and that therefore web "resources cannot rely upon third-party cookies being treated consistently by user agents for the foreseeable future." We agree. Furthermore, tracking and subsequent data collection and brokerage can support micro-targeting of political messages, which can have a detrimental impact on society, as identified by Privacy International and other organizations. Regulatory authorities, such as the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, have also called for the blocking of third-party cookies. The job of the TAG as stewards of the architecture of the web has us looking at the big picture (the whole web platform) and the details (proposed features and specs). We try to provide guidance to spec authors so that their new technologies fill holes that need to be filled, don't conflict with other parts of the web, and don't set us up for avoidable trouble in the future. We've been working with Chrome's Privacy Sandbox team (as well as others in the W3C community) for several years, trying to help them create better approaches for the things that third-party cookies do. While we haven't always agreed with the Privacy Sandbox team, we have made substantial progress together. This announcement came out of the blue, and undermines a lot of the work we've done together to make the web work without third-party cookies. The unfortunate climb-down will also have secondary effects, as it is likely to delay cross-browser work on effective alternatives to third-party cookies. We fear it will have an overall detrimental impact on the cause of improving privacy on the web. We sincerely hope that Google reverses this decision and re-commits to a path towards removal of third-party cookies.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Delta Air Lines has hired prominent attorney David Boies to seek damages from CrowdStrike and Microsoft following an outage this month that caused millions of computers to crash, leading to thousands of flight cancellations. CrowdStrike shares fell as much as 5% in extended trading on Monday after CNBC's Phil Lebeau reported on Delta's hiring of Boies, chairman of Boies Schiller Flexner. Microsoft was little changed. [...] While no suit has been filed, Delta plans to seek compensation from Microsoft and CrowdStrike, Lebeau reported. The outages cost Delta an estimated $350 million to $500 million. Delta is dealing with over 176,000 refund or reimbursement requests after almost 7,000 flights were canceled. Boies is known for representing the U.S. government in its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft and for helping win a decision that overturned California's ban on gay marriage. He also worked with Harvey Weinstein, the imprisoned former Hollywood mogul, and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who is currently serving a prison sentence for defrauding investors. Insurance startup Parametrix estimated that the CrowdStrike incident resulted in a total loss of $5.4 billion for Fortune 500 companies, not including Microsoft.

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China has proposed issuing "cyberspace IDs" to its citizens in order to protect their personal information, regulate the public service for authentication of cyberspace IDs, and accelerate the implementation of the trusted online identity strategy. The Register reports: The ID will take two forms: one as a series of letter and numbers, and the other as an online credential. Both will correspond to the citizen's real-life identity, but with no details in plaintext -- presumably encryption will be applied. A government national service platform will be responsible for authenticating and issuing the cyberspace IDs. The draft comes from the Ministry of Public Security and the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). It clarifies that the ID will be voluntary -- for now -- and eliminate the need for citizens to provide their real-life personal information to internet service providers (ISPs). Those under the age of fourteen would need parental consent to apply. China is one of the few countries in the world that requires citizens to use their real names on the internet. [...] Relying instead on a national ID means "the excessive collection and retention of citizens' personal information by internet service providers will be prevented and minimized," reasoned Beijing. "Without the separate consent of a natural person, an internet platform may not process or provide relevant data and information to the outside without authorization, except as otherwise provided by laws and administrative regulations," reads the draft.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The death of the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is starting to result in disconnection of Internet service for Americans with low incomes. On Friday, Charter Communications reported a net loss of 154,000 Internet subscribers that it said was mostly driven by customers canceling after losing the federal discount. About 100,000 of those subscribers were reportedly getting the discount, which in some cases made Internet service free to the consumer. The $30 monthly broadband discounts provided by the ACP ended in May after Congress failed to allocate more funding. The Biden administration requested (PDF) $6 billion to fund the ACP through December 2024, but Republicans called the program "wasteful." Republican lawmakers' main complaint was that most of the ACP money went to households that already had broadband before the subsidy was created. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel warned that killing the discounts would reduce Internet access, saying (PDF) an FCC survey found that 77 percent of participating households would change their plan or drop Internet service entirely once the discounts expired. Charter's Q2 2024 earnings report provides some of the first evidence of users dropping Internet service after losing the discount. "Second quarter residential Internet customers decreased by 154,000, largely driven by the end of the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program subsidies in the second quarter, compared to an increase of 70,000 during the second quarter of 2023," Charter said. Across all ISPs, there were 23 million US households enrolled in the ACP. Research released in January 2024 found that Charter was serving over 4 million ACP recipients and that up to 300,000 of those Charter customers would be "at risk" of dropping Internet service if the discounts expired. Given that ACP recipients must meet low-income eligibility requirements, losing the discounts could put a strain on their overall finances even if they choose to keep paying for Internet service. [...] Light Reading reported that Charter attributed about 100,000 of the 154,000 customer losses to the ACP shutdown. Charter said it retained most of its ACP subscribers so far, but that low-income households might not be able to continue paying for Internet service without a new subsidy for much longer.

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In an incident report today, DigiCert says it discovered that some CNAME-based validations did not include the required underscore prefix, affecting about 0.4% of their domain validations. According to CA/Browser Forum (CABF) rules, certificates with validation issues must be revoked within 24 hours, prompting DigiCert to take immediate action. DigiCert says impacted customers "have been notified." New submitter jdastrup first shared the news, writing: Due to a mistake going back years that has recently been discovered, DigiCert is required by the CABF to revoke any certificate that used the improper Domain Control Validation (DCV) CNAME record in 24 hours. This could literally be thousands of SSL certs. This could take a lot of time and potentially cause outages worldwide starting July 30 at 19:30 UTC. Be prepared for a long night of cert renewals. DigiCert support line is completely jammed.

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Despite multiple methods available across major operating systems for installing and updating applications, there remains "no real clear answer to 'which is best,'" reports The Next Web. Each system faces unique challenges such as outdated packages, high fees, and policy restrictions. Enter Homebrew. "Initially created as an option for developers to keep the dependencies they often need for developing, testing, and running their work, Homebrew has grown to be so much more in its 15-year history." Created in 2009, Homebrew has become a leading solution for macOS, integrating with MDM tools through its enterprise-focused extension, Workbrew, to balance user freedom with corporate security needs, while maintaining its open-source roots under the guidance of Mike McQuaid. In an interview with The Next Web's Chris Chinchilla, project leader Mike McQuaid talks about the challenges and responsibilities of maintaining one of the world's largest open-source projects: As with anything that attracts plenty of use and attention, Homebrew also attracts a lot of mixed and extreme opinions, and processing and filtering those requires a tough outlook, something that Mike has spoken about in numerous interviews and at conferences. "As a large project, you get a lot of hate from people. Either people are just frustrated because they hit a bug or because you changed something, and they didn't read the release notes, and now something's broken," Mike says when I ask him about how he copes with the constant influx of communication. "There are a lot of entitled, noisy users in open source who contribute very little and like to shout at people and make them feel bad. One of my strengths is that I have very little time for those people, and I just insta-block them or close their issues." More crucially, an open-source project is often managed and maintained by a group of people. Homebrew has several dozen maintainers and nearly one thousand total contributors. Mike explains that all of these people also deserve to be treated with respect by users, "I'm also super protective of my maintainers, and I don't want them to be treated that way either." But despite these features and its widespread use, one area Homebrew has always lacked is the ability to work well with teams of users. This is where Workbrew, a company Mike founded with two other Homebrew maintainers, steps in. [...] Workbrew ties together various Homebrew features with custom glue to create a workflow for setting up and maintaining Mac machines. It adds new features that core Homebrew maintainers had no interest in adding, such as admin and reporting dashboards for a computing fleet, while bringing more general improvements to the core project. Bearing in mind Mike's motivation to keep Homebrew in the "traditional open source" model, I asked him how he intended to keep the needs of the project and the business separated and satisfied. "We've seen a lot of churn in the last few years from companies that made licensing decisions five or ten years ago, which have now changed quite dramatically and have generated quite a lot of community backlash," Mike said. "I'm very sensitive to that, and I am a little bit of an open-source purist in that I still consider the open-source initiative's definition of open source to be what open source means. If you don't comply with that, then you can be another thing, but I think you're probably not open source." And regarding keeping his and his co-founder's dual roles separated, Mike states, "I'm the CTO and co-founder of Workbrew, and I'm the project leader of Homebrew. The project leader with Homebrew is an elected position." Every year, the maintainers and the community elect a candidate. "But then, with the Homebrew maintainers working with us on Workbrew, one of the things I say is that when we're working on Workbrew, I'm your boss now, but when we work on Homebrew, I'm not your boss," Mike adds. "If you think I'm saying something and it's a bad idea, you tell me it's a bad idea, right?" The company is keeping its early progress in a private beta for now, but you can expect an announcement soon. As for what's happening for Homebrew? Well, in the best "open source" way, that's up to the community and always will be.

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According to Reuters, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is expected to secure unconditional EU antitrust approval for its $14 billion acquisition of networking gear maker Juniper Networks. From the report: HPE announced the deal in January, underscoring the rush by companies to upgrade and develop new products amid a sharp rise in artificial intelligence-driven services. The European Commission, which is scheduled to decide on the deal by Aug. 1, declined to comment. HPE was expected to underline the power of market leader and Juniper rival Cisco to allay any possible European Union competition concerns, other people with direct knowledge of the matter had previously told Reuters. The deal is also being assessed by Britain's antitrust enforcer, with a decision due on Aug. 14.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: California's "Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act" (a.k.a. SB-1047) has led to a flurry of headlines and debate concerning the overall "safety" of large artificial intelligence models. But critics are concerned that the bill's overblown focus on existential threats by future AI models could severely limit research and development for more prosaic, non-threatening AI uses today. SB-1047, introduced by State Senator Scott Wiener, passed the California Senate in May with a 32-1 vote and seems well positioned for a final vote in the State Assembly in August. The text of the bill requires companies behind sufficiently large AI models (currently set at $100 million in training costs and the rough computing power implied by those costs today) to put testing procedures and systems in place to prevent and respond to "safety incidents." The bill lays out a legalistic definition of those safety incidents that in turn focuses on defining a set of "critical harms" that an AI system might enable. That includes harms leading to "mass casualties or at least $500 million of damage," such as "the creation or use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon" (hello, Skynet?) or "precise instructions for conducting a cyberattack... on critical infrastructure." The bill also alludes to "other grave harms to public safety and security that are of comparable severity" to those laid out explicitly. An AI model's creator can't be held liable for harm caused through the sharing of "publicly accessible" information from outside the model -- simply asking an LLM to summarize The Anarchist's Cookbook probably wouldn't put it in violation of the law, for instance. Instead, the bill seems most concerned with future AIs that could come up with "novel threats to public safety and security." More than a human using an AI to brainstorm harmful ideas, SB-1047 focuses on the idea of an AI "autonomously engaging in behavior other than at the request of a user" while acting "with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision." To prevent this straight-out-of-science-fiction eventuality, anyone training a sufficiently large model must "implement the capability to promptly enact a full shutdown" and have policies in place for when such a shutdown would be enacted, among other precautions and tests. The bill also focuses at points on AI actions that would require "intent, recklessness, or gross negligence" if performed by a human, suggesting a degree of agency that does not exist in today's large language models. The bill's supporters include AI experts Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who believe the bill is a necessary precaution against potential catastrophic AI risks. Bill critics include tech policy expert Nirit Weiss-Blatt and AI community voice Daniel Jeffries. They argue that the bill is based on science fiction fears and could harm technological advancement. Ars Technica contributor Timothy Lee and Meta's Yann LeCun say that the bill's regulations could hinder "open weight" AI models and innovation in AI research. Instead, some experts suggest a better approach would be to focus on regulating harmful AI applications rather than the technology itself -- for example, outlawing nonconsensual deepfake pornography and improving AI safety research.

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"Deepfake scams are becoming more prolific and their quality will only improve over time," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "However, one question can stop them dead in their tracks. Such was the case with Ferrari earlier this month when a suspicious executive saved the company from being the latest victim." From a report: It all began with a series of WhatsApp messages from someone posing as Ferrari's CEO [Benedetto Vigna]. The messages, seeking urgent help with a supposed classified acquisition, came from a different number but featured a profile picture of Vigna standing in front of the Ferrari emblem. As reported by Bloomberg, one of the messages read: "Hey, did you hear about the big acquisition we're planning? I could need your help." The scammer continued, "Be ready to sign the Non-Disclosure Agreement our lawyer will send you ASAP." The message concluded with a sense of urgency: "Italy's market regulator and Milan stock exchange have already been informed. Maintain utmost discretion." Following the text messages, the executive received a phone call featuring a convincing impersonation of Vigna's voice, complete with the CEO's signature southern Italian accent. The caller claimed to be using a different number due to the sensitive nature of the matter and then requested the executive execute an "unspecified currency hedge transaction." The oddball money request, coupled with some "slight mechanical intonations" during the call, raised red flags for the Ferrari executive. He retorted, "Sorry, Benedetto, but I need to verify your identity," and quizzed the CEO on a book he had recommended days earlier. Unsurprisingly, the impersonator flubbed the answer and ended the call in a hurry.

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Following in the footsteps of competitors Netflix and Disney+, Apple is reportedly working on bringing advertisements to Apple TV+ through an ad-supported tier. MacRumors reports: Apple has apparently been in discussions with the UK's Broadcaster's Audience Research Board (BARB) to explore the necessary data collection techniques for monitoring advertising results. Currently, BARB provides viewing statistics for major UK networks including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky, as well as Apple TV+ programming. While BARB already monitors viewing time for Apple TV+ content, additional techniques are required to track advertising metrics accurately. This data is vital for advertisers to assess the reach and impact of their campaigns on the platform. In addition to the UK, Apple has also reportedly held similar discussions with ratings organizations in the United States. Apple has already included limited advertising in its live sports events, such as last year's Major League Soccer coverage, where ads were incorporated even for Season Pass holders. It is also notable that in March Apple hired Joseph Cady, a former advertising executive from NBCUniversal, to bolster its video advertising team.

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In a Washington Post op-ed last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman emphasized the urgent need for the U.S. and its allies to lead the development of "democratic AI" to counter the rise of "authoritarian AI" models (source paywalled; alternative source). He outlined four key steps for this effort: enhancing security measures, expanding AI infrastructure, creating commercial diplomacy policies, and establishing global norms for AI development and deployment. Fortune reports: He noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the winner of the AI race will "become the ruler of the world" and that China plans to lead the world in AI by 2030. Not only will such regimes use AI to perpetuate their own hold on power, but they can also use the technology to threaten others, Altman warned. If authoritarians grab the lead in AI, they could force companies in the U.S. and elsewhere to share user data and use the technology to develop next-generation cyberweapons, he said. [...] "While identifying the right decision-making body is important, the bottom line is that democratic AI has a lead over authoritarian AI because our political system has empowered U.S. companies, entrepreneurs and academics to research, innovate and build," Altman said. Unless the democratic vision prevails, the world won't be cause to maximize the technology's benefits and minimize its risks, he added. "If we want a more democratic world, history tells us our only choice is to develop an AI strategy that will help create it, and that the nations and technologists who have a lead have a responsibility to make that choice -- now."

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