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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon doubled its Prime Day discount sales to four days this year and touted blowout numbers days after the event. But by one critical metric, it missed the mark. Sign-ups in the U.S. failed to meet last year's total and even the company's own target, according to internal company data reviewed by Reuters. The world's largest online retailer registered 5.4 million U.S. sign-ups over the 21-day run-up to Prime Day and its four-day sales event from July 8 to July 11. That was around 116,000 fewer than for the same period a year earlier and 106,000 below the company's own goal, a roughly 2% decline in both metrics.

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Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou has overtaken Tokyo-Yokohama to become the world's top cluster for innovation, the United Nations said Monday. From a report: The UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said the Chinese cluster had leapfrogged its Japanese rival in its 2025 Global Innovation Index. The change at the top of the world's 100 leading innovation clusters was down to WIPO broadening the criteria to include venture capital investments to formulate the annual rankings. The UN agency dealing with patenting and innovation previously only used patent filing and scientific publishing data to identify local concentrations of world-leading innovation activity. "Venture capital investment activity helps capture how scientific and technological knowledge translates into start-up creation and, ultimately, new goods and services in the marketplace," WIPO said. The agency said Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou and Tokyo-Yokohama "make a massive contribution to global scientific publications and patenting outputs", together accounting for nearly one in five patent applications filed globally.

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Premium bottled water is emerging as restaurants' answer to declining alcohol consumption as establishments offer curated water menus featuring bottles priced up to $25.70. La Popote in Cheshire has introduced a seven-water selection ranging from $6.75 Peak District spring water to $25.70 Portuguese Vidago, served in wine glasses at room temperature. Water sommelier Doran Binder, who created the menu and founded Crag spring water, reports 7 million monthly social media views for water content. The movement extends beyond Britain -- over a dozen US restaurants maintain water lists, while new producers like Hampshire's Chorq plan champagne-style bottles with corks. Michael Mascha's FineWaters has certified more than 100 water sommeliers globally as demand grows for waters distinguished by mineral content ranging from 14 to 3,300 milligrams per liter of dissolved solids.

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Google denied claims Monday that it had issued a security warning to Gmail users about a major vulnerability. The company stated that recent reports claiming a broad Gmail security alert were "entirely false." Google said its email service blocks more than 99.9% of phishing and malware attempts from reaching users' inboxes.

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College students have integrated generative AI into their academic routines at an unprecedented scale as 85% report usage for coursework in the past year, according to new Inside Higher Ed survey data. The majority employ AI tools for brainstorming ideas, seeking tutoring assistance, and exam preparation rather than wholesale academic outsourcing. Only 25% admitted using AI to complete assignments entirely, while 19% generated full essays. Students overwhelmingly reject institutional policing approaches, with 53% favoring education on ethical AI use over detection software deployment. Despite widespread adoption, 35% of respondents report no change in their perception of college value, while 23% view their degrees as more valuable in the AI era.

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International tourism to the United States faces an unprecedented 8.2% decline in 2025, with the World Travel and Tourism Council projecting a $12.5 billion loss in visitor spending -- the only decline among 184 economies analyzed. Canadian visitors, traditionally comprising 28% of international arrivals, have dropped by approximately 25% through July. Seattle tour operators report 30-50% fewer Canadian customers with many explicitly citing recent tariff policies and political rhetoric as deterrents. The newly implemented $250 "visa integrity fee" for certain countries compounds existing concerns about immigration policies and National Guard deployments in major cities. Tourism Economics now projects full recovery to pre-pandemic levels won't occur until 2029, three years later than initially forecast.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Speaking to The Logan Bartlett Show on Friday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the use of AI agents had enabled him to "rebalance" his headcount in the customer support division by trimming 4,000 jobs. "I've reduced it from 9,000 head to about 5,000 because I need less heads," Benioff said. Benioff called the first eight months of 2025, during which an estimated 10,000 jobs have been lost to AI, "eight of the most exciting months of my career." "There were more than 100 million leads that we have not called back at Salesforce in the last 26 years because we have not had enough people," Benioff said. "We just couldn't call them back. But we now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us."

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The GNOME Foundation has announced that Steven Deobald will be leaving the position of Executive Director after just four months.

We are extremely grateful to Steven for all this and more. Despite these many positive achievements, Steven and the board have come to the conclusion that Steven is not the right fit for the Executive Director role at this time. We are therefore bidding Steven a fond farewell.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The European Union will deploy additional satellites in low Earth orbit to strengthen resilience against GPS interferences and will improve capabilities to detect it, EU Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius said on Monday. His remarks followed an incident on Sunday in which the GPS system aboard European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's aircraft was jammed en route to Bulgaria. Bulgarian authorities suspect the jamming was due to due to interference by Russia, an EU spokesperson said.

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The century-old duty-free import exemption that transformed American online shopping has ended, The Atlantic argues, closing a loophole that allowed packages valued under $800 to enter the United States without tariffs. The de minimis threshold, raised from $200 in 2016, processed millions of daily shipments directly from overseas sellers to American consumers. China lost access earlier this year; the exemption now terminates for all countries. Platforms including Shein, Temu, and marketplace sellers on Amazon, Etsy, and eBay built business models around direct shipping from manufacturing hubs in Asia and elsewhere. Import duties will apply to all international packages regardless of value, with tariffs reaching 50% for some countries. The policy shift affects everything from $30 specialty faucet parts shipped from Britain to handmade crafts from India, fundamentally altering the economics of cross-border e-commerce that emerged over the past decade.

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Arnd Bergmann started his Open Source Summit Europe 2025 talk with a clear statement of position: 32-bit systems are obsolete when it comes to use in any sort of new products. The only reason to work with them at this point is when there is existing hardware and software to support. Since Bergmann is the overall maintainer for architecture support in the kernel, he is frequently asked whether 32-bit support can be removed. So, he concluded, the time has come to talk more about that possibility.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Microsoft Azure customers have had a worrying few days after a problematic account migration caused forecast costs for the cloud service to skyrocket, triggering budget alerts. An alarmed Register reader got in touch after receiving warnings from Azure's automated systems that they had significantly exceeded their budgets, and a glance at Microsoft's support forums indicates their issue was not isolated. The problem was that costs had suddenly ramped up. One user, with a budget threshold of $85, received an automated alert indicating that their spend was forecast to reach $1,027. Another said: "We're actively seeing the same issue, costs have blown up by a crazy amount. No official notice or announcement from Microsoft either, it's appalling."

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Americans are having a record low amount of sex -- even less than they did during the Covid-19 pandemic -- according to a new study led by researchers at the Institute for Family Studies. WSJ: This continues the downward shift in sexual activity that has been worrying sociologists and psychologists for decades. For the report, called "The Sex Recession," researchers at the IFS analyzed the data on sex and intimacy in the latest General Social Survey produced by NORC at the University of Chicago, which was collected in 2024 and released in May. They found that just 37% of people age 18-64 reported having sex at least once a week, down from 55% in 1990. The decline is even more striking for young adults: Almost a quarter of people age 18-29, or 24%, said they had not had sex in the past year; this is twice as many as in 2010. Much has been written in recent years about the trend of young people having less sex, attributed to everything from stunted social skills to a rise in internet pornography. Yet the IFS study shows that the same trend holds true for people up to the age of 64, of all sexual orientations, both married and single. (After age 64, there was no significant change in the amount of sex people have, largely because this group reports having sex less frequently to begin with, the researchers said.)

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Waymo robotaxis are repeatedly selecting identical parking spots in front of specific Los Angeles and Arizona homes between rides, puzzling residents who document the same vehicles returning to precise locations daily. The company states its vehicles choose parking based on local regulations, existing vehicle distribution, and proximity to high-demand areas but cannot explain the algorithmic specificity. Carnegie Mellon autonomous vehicle expert Phil Koopman attributes the behavior to machine learning systems optimizing for specific spots without variation. Waymo said it had received neighbor complaints and has designated certain locations as no-parking zones for its fleet. The vehicles comply with three-hour parking limits, according to Los Angeles Department of Transportation regulations, governing commercial passenger vehicles under 22 feet.

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Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (postgresql16, postgresql:16, python3.11, and thunderbird), Debian (firebird4.0, libcommons-lang3-java, mbedtls, nodejs, openvpn, and ruby-saml), Fedora (cef, chromium, docker-buildx, exiv2, firefox, rocm-rpp, and udisks2), Oracle (postgresql:16), Red Hat (fence-agents, firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, httpd, kernel, kernel-rt, libarchive, libxml2, multiple packages, postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, python3.11, python3.12, python39:3.9, and thunderbird), Slackware (udisks2), SUSE (go-sendxmpp, helm, ImageMagick, javamail, jq, kea, kernel, libarchive, libsoup, libssh, libxml2, openssl-3, postgresql14, postgresql15, python, python-future, systemd, and xz), and Ubuntu (open-vm-tools and python2.7).

A review of published meta-analyses examining protein supplementation found no evidence supporting intake beyond 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight daily, according to an analysis by cardiologist Eric Topol. The review examined multiple randomized controlled trials encompassing thousands of participants. The most widely cited Morton study, which included 1,863 participants across 49 trials, showed no statistically significant benefit at higher protein levels, with a p-value of 0.079. Recent research from Washington University identified the essential amino acid leucine as activating mTOR in macrophages, promoting atherosclerosis progression. The mechanism was demonstrated in both mouse models and human studies measuring circulating monocyte changes following acute high-protein challenges increasing dietary protein from 22% to 50% of energy intake. Current USDA data indicates 55% of American men and 35% of women already exceed the 0.8 g/kg/day recommendation from the National Academy of Medicine. The protein supplement industry, exemplified by David bars containing 28 grams of protein in 150 calories using a modified plant fat called EPG, projects $180 million in 2025 sales.

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Linus has released 6.17-rc4 for testing. "So it all looks fairly good. Please do keep testing, and we'll get 6.17 out in a timely manner and in good shape."

PC Gamer reports: The Diablo team is the next in line to unionize at Blizzard. Over 450 developers across multiple disciplines have voted to form a union under the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and they're now the fourth major Blizzard team to do so... A wave of unions have formed at Blizzard in the last year, including the World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Story and Franchise Development teams. Elsewhere at Microsoft, Bethesda, ZeniMax Online Studios and ZeniMax QA testers have also unionized... The CWA says over 3,500 Microsoft workers have now organized to fight for fair compensation, job security, and improved working conditions. CWA is America's largest communications and media labor union, and in a statement, local 9510 president Jason Justice called the successful vote "part of a much larger story about turning the tide in an industry that has long overlooked its labor. Entertainment workers across film, television, music, and now video games are standing together to have a seat at the table. The strength of our movement comes from that solidarity." And CWA local 6215 president Ron Swaggerty said "Each new organizing effort adds momentum to the nationwide movement for video game worker power." "What began as a trickle has turned into an avalanche," writes the gaming news site Aftermath, calling the latest vote "a direct result of the union neutrality deal Microsoft struck with CWA in 2022 when it was facing regulatory scrutiny over its $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard." We've come a long way since small units at Raven and Blizzard Albany fended off Activision Blizzard's pre-acquisition attempts at union busting in 2022 and 2023, and not a moment too soon: Microsoft's penchant for mass layoffs has cut some teams to the bone and left others warily counting down the days until their heads land on the chopping block. This new union, workers hope, will act as a bulwark... [B]ased on preliminary conversations with prospective members, they can already hazard a few guesses as to what they'll be arm-wrestling management over at the bargaining table: pay equity, AI, crediting, and remote work.

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"Typically when something is available to "buy," ownership of that good or access to that service is offered in exchange for money," writes Ars Technica. "That's not really the case, though, when it comes to digital content." Often, streaming services like Amazon Prime Video offer customers the options to "rent" digital content for a few days or to "buy" it. Some might think that picking "buy" means that they can view the content indefinitely. But these purchases are really just long-term licenses to watch the content for as long as the streaming service has the right to distribute it — which could be for years, months, or days after the transaction. A lawsuit recently filed against Prime Video challenges this practice and accuses the streaming service of misleading customers by labeling long-term rentals as purchases. The conclusion of the case could have implications for how streaming services frame digital content... [The plaintiff's] complaint stands a better chance due to a California law that took effect in January banning the selling of a "digital good to a purchaser with the terms 'buy,' 'purchase,' or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good, or alongside an option for a time-limited rental." There are some instances where the law allows digital content providers to use words like "buy." One example is if, at the time of transaction, the seller receives acknowledgement from the customer that the customer is receiving a license to access the digital content; that they received a complete list of the license's conditions; and that they know that access to the digital content may be "unilaterally revoked...." The case is likely to hinge on whether or not fine print and lengthy terms of use are appropriate and sufficient communication. [The plaintiff]'s complaint acknowledges that Prime Video shows relevant fine print below its "buy" buttons but says that the notice is "far below the 'buy movie' button, buried at the very bottom" of the page and is not visible until "the very last stage of the transaction," after a user has already clicked "buy." Amazon is sure to argue that "If plaintiff didn't want to read her contract, including the small print, that's on her," says consumer attorney Danny Karon. But he tells Ars Technica "I like plaintiff's chances. A normal consumer, after whom the California statute at issue is fashioned, would consider 'buy' or 'purchase' to involve a permanent transaction, not a mere rental... If the facts are as plaintiff alleges, Amazon's behavior would likely constitute a breach of contract or statutory fraud."

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"I have no musical talent at all," says Oliver McCann. "I can't sing, I can't play instruments, and I have no musical background at all!" But the Associated Press describes 37-year-old McCann as a British "AI music creator" — and last month McCann signed with an independent record label "after one of his tracks racked up 3 million streams, in what's billed as the first time a music label has inked a contract with an AI music creator." McCann is an example of how ChatGPT-style AI song generation tools like Suno and Udio have spawned a wave of synthetic music, a movement most notably highlighted by a fictitious group, Velvet Sundown, that went viral even though all its songs, lyrics and album art were created by AI. Experts say generative AI is set to transform the music world. However, there are scant details, so far, on how it's impacting the $29.6 billion global recorded music market, which includes about $20 billion from streaming. The most reliable figures come from music streaming service Deezer, which estimates that 18% of songs uploaded to its platform every day are purely AI generated, though they only account for a tiny amount of total streams, hinting that few people are actually listening. Other, bigger streaming platforms like Spotify haven't released any figures on AI music... "It's a total boom. It's a tsunami," said Josh Antonuccio, director of Ohio University's School of Media Arts and Studies. The amount of AI generated music "is just going to only exponentially increase" as young people grow up with AI and become more comfortable with it, he said. [Antonuccio says later the cost of making a hit record "just keeps winnowing down from a major studio to a laptop to a bedroom. And now it's like a text prompt — several text prompts." Though there's a lack of legal clarity over copyright issues.] Generative AI, with its ability to spit out seemingly unique content, has divided the music world, with musicians and industry groups complaining that recorded works are being exploited to train AI models that power song generation tools... Three major record companies, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records, filed lawsuits last year against Suno and Udio for copyright infringement. In June, the two sides also reportedly entered negotiations that could go beyond settling the lawsuits and set rules for how artists are paid when AI is used to remix their songs. GEMA, a German royalty collection society, has sued Suno, accusing it of generating music similar to songs like "Mambo No. 5" by Lou Bega and "Forever Young" by Alphaville. More than 1,000 musicians, including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Damon Albarn, released a silent album to protest proposed changes to U.K. laws on AI they fear would erode their creative control. Meanwhile, other artists, such as will.i.am, Timbaland and Imogen Heap, have embraced the technology. Some users say the debate is just a rehash of old arguments about once-new technology that eventually became widely used, such as AutoTune, drum machines and synthesizers.

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