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Scientists are harvesting genetic data from microorganisms in a North Yorkshire quarry, fueling a global debate over ownership and profit-sharing of natural genetic resources. Researchers from London-based startup Basecamp Research are collecting samples and digitizing genetic codes for sale to AI companies. This practice of trading digital sequencing information (DSI) has become central to biotechnology research and development. The issue will be a focal point at October's COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, The Guardian reports. Developing nations, home to much of the world's biodiversity, are pushing for a global system requiring companies to pay for genetic data use. Past discoveries underscore the potential value: heat-resistant bacteria crucial for COVID-19 testing and marine organisms used in cancer treatments have generated significant profits. Critics accuse companies of "biopiracy" for commercializing genetic information without compensating source countries. Proposed solutions include a global fund for equitable benefit-sharing, though implementation details remain contentious.

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Apple has laid off about 100 employees in its services group (source may be paywalled; alternative source), primarily affecting roles associated with the Apple Books app and Apple Bookstore. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: The impacted employees at the Cupertino-based tech giant were informed of the cuts on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported (paywalled). The layoffs spanned various teams under Senior Vice President Eddy Cue. The job cuts include roles primarily associated with the Apple Books app and Apple Bookstore, with the company shifting its focus to other divisions. Additionally, other services teams, such as the one managing Apple News, also experienced layoffs. While Apple has largely avoided mass layoffs even as other major tech companies have downsized, it did lay off 614 employees in Santa Clara earlier this year. Those cuts marked Apple's first significant job reductions since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and coincided with the cancellation of its decade-long electric car project.

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Midjourney, the AI image-generating platform, announced on Wednesday that it's "officially getting into hardware." TechCrunch reports: As for what hardware Midjourney, which has a team of fewer than 100 people, might pursue, there might be a clue in its hiring of Ahmad Abbas in February. Abbas, an ex-Neuralink staffer, helped engineer the Apple Vision Pro, Apple's mixed reality headset. Midjourney CEO David Holz is also no stranger to hardware. He co-founded Leap Motion, which built motion-tracking peripherals. (Abbas worked together with Holz at Leap, in fact.) Despite the lawsuits over its AI training approach working their way through the courts, Midjourney has said it's continuing to develop AI models for video and 3D generation. The hardware could perhaps be related to those efforts, as well.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A controversial bill aimed at enforcing safety standards for large artificial intelligence models has now passed the California State Assembly by a 45-11 vote. Following a 32-1 state Senate vote in May, SB-1047 now faces just one more procedural state senate vote before heading to Governor Gavin Newsom's desk. As we've previously explored in depth, SB-1047 asks AI model creators to implement a "kill switch" that can be activated if that model starts introducing "novel threats to public safety and security," especially if it's acting "with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision." Some have criticized the bill for focusing on outlandish risks from an imagined future AI rather than real, present-day harms of AI use cases like deep fakes or misinformation. [...] If the Senate confirms the Assembly version as expected, Newsom will have until September 30 to decide whether to sign the bill into law. If he vetoes it, the legislature could override with a two-thirds vote in each chamber (a strong possibility given the overwhelming votes in favor of the bill). At a UC Berkeley Symposium in May, Newsom said he worried that "if we over-regulate, if we overindulge, if we chase a shiny object, we could put ourselves in a perilous position." At the same time, Newsom said those over-regulation worries were balanced against concerns he was hearing from leaders in the AI industry. "When you have the inventors of this technology, the godmothers and fathers, saying, 'Help, you need to regulate us,' that's a very different environment," he said at the symposium. "When they're rushing to educate people, and they're basically saying, 'We don't know, really, what we've done, but you've got to do something about it,' that's an interesting environment." Supporters of the AI safety bill include state senator Scott Weiner and AI experts including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Bengio supports the bill as a necessary step for consumer protection and insists that AI should not be self-regulated by corporations, akin to other industries like pharmaceuticals and aerospace. Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li opposes the bill, arguing that it could have harmful effects on the AI ecosystem by discouraging open-source collaboration and limiting academic research due to the liability placed on developers of modified models. A group of business leaders also sent an open letter Wednesday urging Newsom to veto the bill, calling it "fundamentally flawed."

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A new study of broadband reliability finds a top-two finish that you might not expect from recent surveys of ISP customer satisfaction: Charter's Spectrum and Comcast's Xfinity, the two largest cable operators in the US. From a report: Opensignal's report, published Thursday, draws on software telemetry collected from April 1 through June 29 of downtime, consistency of service, and how well a provider meets basic thresholds for speed, latency, and other core performance metrics. Spectrum comes in first with a "Reliability Experience" score of 741 out of 1,000, followed by Xfinity with 710, Verizon with 625, AT&T with 546, and T-Mobile with 525. Opensignal chose those five companies to study because each passes more than a third of US homes. But while Comcast and Charter employ the same basic cable architecture except for a few fiber-to-the-home pockets, Verizon and AT&T have mixed networks. That includes extensive and growing fiber service but also fixed 4G and 5G wireless from Verizon and hybrid-fiber broadband from AT&T, both of which lack fiber's speed and capacity advantages, plus obsolete DSL connectivity. T-Mobile's home connectivity, meanwhile, is almost exclusively fixed wireless.

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The KDE project plans to directly ask for donations in the Plasma desktop starting with version 6.2. According to this blog post by Nate Graham, users will see a system notification once per year (in December) asking for a donation to the non-profit KDE e.V.:

Now, I know that messages like this can be controversial! The change was carefully considered, and we tried our best to minimize the annoying-ness factor: It's small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it'll go away until next year. It's implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like.

Apple is in talks to invest in OpenAI, a move that would cement ties to a partner integral to its efforts to gain ground in the artificial-intelligence race. WSJ: The investment would be part of a new OpenAI fundraising round that would value the ChatGPT maker above $100 billion, people familiar with the situation said. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that venture-capital firm Thrive Capital is leading the round, which will total several billion dollars, and Apple rival Microsoft is also expected to participate. It couldn't be learned how much Apple or Microsoft will invest into OpenAI this round. To date, Microsoft has been the primary strategic investor into OpenAI. It owns a 49% share of the AI startup's profits after investing $13 billion since 2019. Apple in June announced OpenAI as the first official partner for Apple Intelligence, its system for infusing AI features throughout its operating system. The new AI will feature an improved Siri voice assistant, text proofreading and creating custom emojis.

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Version 5.0.0 of GNU Screen has been released. Notable changes in this release include new commands for authentication, input into multiple windows at the same time, and to turn on/off truecolor support.

A new national survey reveals a concerning trend in school engagement among Gen Z students aged 12-18. The joint Gallup and Walton Family Foundation study [PDF] found that middle and high school students find classes less interesting than last year, with only half feeling positively challenged. Student engagement has dropped significantly since 2023, with 10% fewer respondents saying they learned something interesting at school in the past week. Non-college-bound students report feeling particularly disconnected, with only 41% saying schoolwork challenges them positively compared to 55% of college-bound peers. Despite only half of students planning to attend four-year colleges, schools heavily emphasize higher education. 68% of high schoolers report hearing "a lot" about college, while only 23% hear as much about vocational alternatives.

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Brussels is investigating whether Telegram breached EU digital rules by failing to provide accurate user numbers [non-paywalled source], as officials push to bring the controversial messaging app under stricter supervision. Financial Times: EU legal and data experts suspect that the app has understated its presence in the EU to stay under a 45mn user threshold, above which large online platforms are subject to a swath of Brussels regulations designed to check their influence. The EU probe comes alongside a wide-ranging French investigation into alleged criminal activity on Telegram that led to the arrest on Saturday of its founder, Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov. Telegram has said Durov, who is now a French-Emirati citizen, has "nothing to hide." Telegram said in February it had 41mn users in the EU. Under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), Telegram was supposed to provide an updated number this month but did not, only declaring it had "significantly fewer than 45mn average monthly active recipients in the EU."

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Verizon has teamed up with another satellite operator to offer US customers a commercial direct-to-device messaging service for when a terrestrial cell network is not available, starting this fall. From a report: The telecoms giant says that US customers with compatible smartphones will have access to emergency messaging and location sharing, even when out of range of a cell tower, and from early next year it will offer the ability to text anywhere via a satellite connection, again with compatible devices. Verizon told The Register that there are no additional costs planned for this service, and any customer with a capable device can take advantage of it, irrespective of price plan. It will be available on the Pixel 9 family of devices out of the box, with the Galaxy S25 to follow, a Verizon spokesperson told us. "Next year we will add text anywhere functionality to the emergency text and location services available this year," they added. This sounds somewhat similar to the Emergency SOS feature introduced by Apple with the iPhone 14 two years ago, which also enabled users to contact emergency services via a satellite link. Verizon says its service will complement Apple's iOS 18 satellite features, so customers using different devices will also have the ability to text anywhere. As partner for this service, Verizon has picked Skylo, a company that styles itself as a pioneer in Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) communications for smartphones and other devices.

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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.10.7, 6.6.48, and 6.1.107 stable kernels. They all contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree, as is the norm.

A U.S. appeals court has revived a lawsuit against TikTok over a child's death, potentially limiting tech companies' legal shield under Section 230. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law does not protect TikTok from claims that its algorithm recommended a deadly "blackout challenge" to a 10-year-old girl. Judge Patty Shwartz wrote that Section 230 only immunizes third-party content, not recommendations made by TikTok's own algorithm. The decision marks a departure from previous rulings, citing a recent Supreme Court opinion that platform algorithms reflect "editorial judgments." This interpretation could significantly impact how courts apply Section 230 to social media companies' content curation practices.

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Google says it has evidence that Russian government hackers are using exploits that are "identical or strikingly similar" to those previously made by spyware makers Intellexa and NSO Group. From a report: In a blog post on Thursday, Google said it is not sure how the Russian government acquired the exploits, but said this is an example of how exploits developed by spyware makers can end up in the hands of "dangerous threat actors." In this case, Google says the threat actors are APT29, a group of hackers widely attributed to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, or the SVR. APT29 is a highly capable group of hackers, known for its long-running and persistent campaigns aimed at conducting espionage and data theft against a range of targets, including tech giants Microsoft and SolarWinds, as well as foreign governments. Google said it found the hidden exploit code embedded on Mongolian government websites between November 2023 and July 2024. During this time, anyone who visited these sites using an iPhone or Android device could have had their phone hacked and data stolen, including passwords, in what is known as a "watering hole" attack. The exploits took advantage of vulnerabilities in the iPhone's Safari browser and Google Chrome on Android that had already been fixed at the time of the suspected Russian campaign. Still, those exploits nevertheless could be effective in compromising unpatched devices.

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Plasma Mobile is an open-source user interface for mobile devices, developed by the KDE community. It's built on the same foundations as Plasma Desktop, including KDE Frameworks and the KWin window manager. Much like its desktop counterpart, Plasma Mobile caters to advanced users by offering extensive customizability. It is offered as an option on phones with various mobile Linux distributions.

OpenAI and Anthropic will give a U.S. government agency early access to major new model releases under agreements announced on Thursday. From a report: Governments around the world have been pushing for measures -- both legislative and otherwise -- to evaluate the risks of powerful new AI algorithms. Anthropic and OpenAI have each signed a memorandum of understanding to allow formal collaboration with the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute, a part of the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology. In addition to early access to models, the agreements pave the way for collaborative research around how to evaluate models and their safety as well as methods for mitigating risk. The U.S. AI Safety Institute was set up as part of President Biden's AI executive order.

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Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind and bind-dyndb-ldap and postgresql:16), Fedora (less and python3.6), Mageia (nodejs & yarnpkg), Oracle (libvpx and postgresql:16), Red Hat (edk2, git, kernel, openldap, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, python3, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), SUSE (apache2, python-setuptools, and python3-setuptools), and Ubuntu (linux-oracle).

Wedson Almeida Filho, one of the key developers driving the Rust-for-Linux project, has retired from the project.

After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it's best to leave it up to those who still have it in them.

As an example of the sort of "nonsense" he referred to, he provided a link to the video from the Rust for filesystems discussion at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. His work was fundamental to getting the project as far as it has come; he will be missed.

An anti-piracy coalition comprised of major studios in the U.S. and across the globe is claiming victory against Fmovies, a significant streaming operation based in Vietnam. From a report: On Thursday the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment revealed that it had worked with Hanoi police to shutter Fmovies and affiliated sites, which together made up "the largest pirate streaming operation in the world," according to the organization. With sites including bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer, and aniwave in addition to Fmovies, the operation attracted more than 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024, ACE says. The effort also shut down video hosting provider Vidsrc.to and its affiliated sites, which were "operated by the same suspects," per ACE. Two Vietnamese men were arrested by Hanoi police in connection with Fmovies and have yet to be charged. Charles Rivkin, the chairman and CEO of Hollywood trade group the Motion Picture Association and the chairman of ACE, called the action "a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe" in a statement. His colleague Larissa Knapp, evp and chief content protection officer for the MPA, said the takedown sent a "powerful deterrent message."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Too often, new tech product or service launches seem like solutions in search of a problem, but not this one: ESPN is launching software that lets you figure out just where you can watch the specific game you want to see amid an overcomplicated web of streaming services, cable channels, and arcane licensing agreements. Every sports fan is all too familiar with today's convoluted streaming schedules. Launching today on ESPN.com and the various ESPN mobile and streaming device apps, the new guide offers various views, including one that lists all the sporting events in a single day and a search function, among other things. You can also flag favorite sports or teams to customize those views. "At the core of Where to Watch is an event database created and managed by the ESPN Stats and Information Group (SIG), which aggregates ESPN and partner data feeds along with originally sourced information and programming details from more than 250 media sources, including television networks and streaming platforms," ESPN's press release says. ESPN previously offered browsable lists of games like this, but it didn't identify where you could actually watch all the games. There's no guarantee that you'll have access to the services needed to watch the games in the list, though. Those of us who cut the cable cord long ago know that some games -- especially those local to your city -- are unavailable without cable.

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