Britain's Competition and Markets Authority concluded that Microsoft and Amazon hold "significant unilateral market power" in cloud services and recommended investigating both companies under new competition rules. The regulator said it had concerns about practices creating customer "lock-in" effects through egress fees and unfavorable licensing terms that trap businesses in difficult-to-exit contracts.

Microsoft and Amazon each control roughly 30-40% of the infrastructure-as-a-service market, while Google holds 5-10%. Microsoft disputed the findings, calling the cloud market "dynamic and competitive." Amazon said the probe recommendations were "unwarranted."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge. The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last month to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site, the worst showing for a social media platform.

"I'm calling time on it," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a statement highlighting that Australian children were being negatively affected by online platforms, and reminding social media of their social responsibility. "I want Australian parents to know that we have their backs." The decision broadens the ban set to take effect in December. YouTube says it is used by nearly three-quarters of Australians aged 13 to 15, and should not be classified as social media because its main activity is hosting videos. "Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media," a YouTube spokesperson said by email.

Google today announced AlphaEarth Foundations, a new AI model that processes terabytes of daily satellite data to track environmental changes across the planet. The system, part of Google's broader Earth AI initiative, uses machine learning to compress satellite imagery into color-coded maps showing material properties, vegetation types, groundwater sources, and human constructions down to 10-meter resolution.

The model uses a technique called "embeddings" that reduces storage requirements by 16 times compared to other AI tools Google tested, while delivering 23.9% higher accuracy than similar systems. AlphaEarth has already mapped complex Antarctic terrain and identified variations in Canadian agricultural land use invisible to direct observation.

The technology currently powers flood and wildfire alerts in Google Search and Maps. Research organizations including Brazil's MayBiomas and the Global Ecosystems Atlas are using the system to analyze rainforests, deserts, and wetlands. The model integrates with Google Earth Engine, providing agencies like NASA and the Forest Service access to over one trillion annual data points for environmental monitoring and mapping applications.

Earlier this month, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise settled its antitrust case with the U.S. Justice Department, "paving the way for its acquisition of rival kit maker Juniper Networks" for $14 billion. According to Axios, the deal was heavily influenced by national security concerns and a desire to bolster American competition against China's Huawei. The outlet reports that the U.S. intelligence community "intervened to persuade the Justice Department that allowing the merger to proceed was essential to helping U.S. business compete with China's Huawei Technologies, among other national-security issues." From the report: "In light of significant national security concerns, a settlement ... serves the interests of the United States by strengthening domestic capabilities and is critical to countering Huawei and China." The official said blocking the deal would have "hindered American companies and empowered" Chinese competitors. A Justice Department spokesman added that DOJ "works very closely with our partners in the IC [intelligence community] and always considers their views when deciding how best to proceed with a case."

The merger was back in the news this week with reports that two senior enforcers in the DOJ's antitrust division were fired Monday amid infighting over the department's settlement greenlighting HPE's $14 billion acquisition of Juniper. Attorney General Pam Bondi had conversations with top intelligence officials that convinced her there was a strong national interest in not driving allies to Chinese technology, a senior administration official tells us.

YouTube is rolling out age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience. TechCrunch reports: When YouTube identifies a user as a teen, it introduces new protections and experiences, which include disabling personalized advertising, safeguards that limit repetitive viewing of certain types of content, and enabling digital well-being tools such as screen time and bedtime reminders, among others. These protections already exist on YouTube, but have only been applied to those who verified themselves as teens, not those who may have withheld their real age. [...]

If the new system incorrectly identifies a user as under 18 when they are not, YouTube says the user will be given the option to verify their age with a credit card, government ID, or selfie. Only users who have been directly verified through this method or whose age has been inferred to be over 18 will be able to view the age-restricted content on the platform. The machine learning-powered technology will begin to roll out over the next few weeks to a small set of U.S. users and will then be monitored before rolling out more widely, the company says. [...]

YouTube isn't sharing specifics about the signals it's using to infer a user's age, but notes that it will look at some data like the YouTube activity and the longevity of a user's account to make a determination if the user is under 18. The new system will apply only to signed-in users, as signed-out users already cannot access age-restricted content, and will be available across platforms, including web, mobile, and connected TV.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The rise of large language models like ChatGPT has led to widespread concern that "everyone is cheating their way through college," as a recent New York magazine article memorably put it. Now, OpenAI is rolling out a new "Study Mode" that it claims is less about providing answers or doing the work for students and more about helping them "build [a] deep understanding" of complex topics.

Study Mode isn't a new ChatGPT model but a series of "custom system instructions" written for the LLM "in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts to reflect a core set of behaviors that support deeper learning," OpenAI said. Instead of the usual summary of a subject that stock ChatGPT might give -- which one OpenAI employee likened to "a mini textbook chapter" -- Study Mode slowly rolls out new information in a "scaffolded" structure. The mode is designed to ask "guiding questions" in the Socratic style and to pause for periodic "knowledge checks" and personalized feedback to make sure the user understands before moving on. It's unknown how many students will use this guided learning tool instead of just asking ChatGPT to generate answers from the start.

In an early hands-off demo attended by Ars Technica, Study Mode responded to a request to "teach me about game theory" by first asking about the user's overall familiarity with the subject and what they'll be using the information for. ChatGPT introduced a short overview of some core game theory concepts, then paused to ask a question before providing a relevant real-world example. In another example involving a classic "train traveling at speed" math problem, Study Mode resisted multiple simulated attempts by the frustrated "student" to simply ask for the answer and instead tried to gently redirect the conversation to how the available information could be used to generate that answer. An OpenAI representative told Ars that Study Mode will eventually provide direct solutions if asked repeatedly, but the default behavior is more tuned to a Socratic tutoring style. OpenAI said it drew inspiration for Study Mode from "power users" and collaborated with pedagogy experts and college students to help refine its responses. As for whether the mode can be trusted, OpenAI told Ars that "the risk of hallucination is lower with Study Mode because the model processes information in smaller chunks, calibrating along the way."

The current Study Mode prompt does, however, result in some "inconsistent behavior and mistakes across conversations," the company warned.

skam240 writes: President Donald Trump's administration on Tuesday proposed revoking a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change.

The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule would rescind a 2009 declaration that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.

The "endangerment finding" is the legal underpinning of a host of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.

schwit1 writes: The Apple Manufacturing Academy will be located in downtown Detroit and will be administered by Michigan State University.

The academy will offer workshops on manufacturing and artificial intelligence to small and medium-sized businesses, Apple said.

Trump has called for Apple to move iPhone production to the U.S. and is implementing tariffs that will likely raise the company's costs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: In the wake of storefronts like Steam and itch.io curbing the sale of adult games, irate fans have started an organized campaign against the payment processors that they believe are responsible for the crackdown. While the movement is still in its early stages, people are mobilizing with an eye toward overwhelming communication lines at companies like Visa and Mastercard in a way that will make the concern impossible to ignore. On social media sites like Reddit and Bluesky, people are urging one another to get into contact with Visa and Mastercard through emails and phone calls. Visa and Mastercard have become the targets of interest because the affected storefronts both say that their decisions around adult games were motivated by the danger of losing the ability to use major payment processors while selling games. These payment processors have their own rules regarding usage, but they are vaguely defined. But losing infrastructure like this could impact audiences well beyond those who care about sex games, spokespeople for Valve and itch.io said.

In a now-deleted post on the Steam subreddit with over 17,000 upvotes, commenters say that customer service representatives for both payment processors seem to already be aware of the problem. Sometimes, the representatives will say that they've gotten multiple calls on the subject of adult game censorship, but that they can't really do anything about it. The folks applying pressure know that someone at a call center has limited power in a scenario like this one; typically, agents are equipped to handle standard customer issues like payment fraud or credit card loss. But the point isn't to enact change through a specific phone call: It's to cause enough disruption that the ruckus theoretically starts costing payment processors money.

"Emails can be ignored, but a very very long queue making it near impossible for other clients to get in will help a lot as well," reads the top comment on the Reddit thread. In that same thread, people say that they're hanging onto the call even if the operator says that they'll experience multi-hour wait times presumably caused by similar calls gunking up the lines. Beyond the stubbornness factor, the tactic is motivated by the knowledge that most customer service systems will put people who opt for call-backs in a lower priority queue, as anyone who opts in likely doesn't have an emergency going on. "Do both," one commenter suggests. "Get the call back, to gum up the call back queue. Then call in again and wait to gum up the live queue." People are also using email to voice their concerns directly to the executives at both Visa and Mastercard, payment processors that activist group Collective Shout called out by name in their open letter requesting that adult games get pulled. Emails are also getting sent to customer service.

After filing for bankruptcy, Norwegian smart home company Futurehome abruptly transitioned its Smarthub II and other devices to a subscription-only model, disabling essential features unless users pay an annual fee. Needless to say, customers aren't too happy with the move as they bought the hardware expecting lifetime functionality and now find their smart homes significantly less smart. Ars Technica reports: Launched in 2016, Futurehome's Smarthub is marketed as a central hub for controlling Internet-connected devices in smart homes. For years, the Norwegian company sold its products, which also include smart thermostats, smart lighting, and smart fire and carbon monoxide alarms, for a one-time fee that included access to its companion app and cloud platform for control and automation. As of June 26, though, those core features require a 1,188 NOK (about $116.56) annual subscription fee, turning the smart home devices into dumb ones if users don't pay up.

"You lose access to controlling devices, configuring; automations, modes, shortcuts, and energy services," a company FAQ page says. You also can't get support from Futurehome without a subscription. "Most" paid features are inaccessible without a subscription, too, the FAQ from Futurehome, which claims to be in 38,000 households, says. After June 26, customers had four weeks to continue using their devices as normal without a subscription. That grace period recently ended, and users now need a subscription for their smart devices to work properly.

Some users are understandably disheartened about suddenly having to pay a monthly fee to use devices they already purchased. More advanced users have also expressed frustration with Futurehome potentially killing its devices' ability to work by connecting to a local device instead of the cloud. In its FAQ, Futurehome says it "cannot guarantee that there will not be changes in the future" around local API access. Futurehome claims that introducing the subscription fee was a necessary move due to its recent bankruptcy. Its FAQ page reads: "Futurehome AS was declared bankrupt on 20 May 2025. The platform and related services were purchased from the bankruptcy estate -- 50 percent by former Futurehome owners and 50 percent by Sikom Connect -- and are now operated by FHSD Connect AS. To secure stable operation, fund product development, and provide high-quality support, we are introducing a new subscription model."

The company says the subscription fee would allow it to provide customers "better functionality, more security, and higher value in the solution you have already invested in."

Chinese universities are actively encouraging students to use AI tools in their coursework, marking a departure from Western institutions that continue to wrestle with AI's educational role. A survey by the Mycos Institute found that 99% of Chinese university faculty and students use AI tools, with nearly 60% using them multiple times daily or weekly.

The shift represents a complete reversal from two years ago when students were told to avoid AI for assignments. Universities including Tsinghua, Remin, Nanjing, and Fudan have rolled out AI literacy courses and degree programs open to all students, not just computer science majors. The Chinese Ministry of Education released national "AI+ education" guidelines in April 2025 calling for sweeping reforms. Meanwhile, 80% of job openings for fresh graduates now list AI skills as advantageous.

A study of 12,069 middle and top-level venture capital professionals at US firms between 1996 and 2025 found that 46% never achieved a successful investment. The research by Stanford professor Ilya Strebulaev and Blake Jackson classified directors, principals, and general partners as successful if they had at least one investment that either became a unicorn, exited at twice the entry cost, or went public. (The analysis deemed any investment with 2x return "successful," though one should know that in the venture capital industry, the majority of bets don't return anything and the model works because of power law.)

Norway's $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund, equivalent to $340,000 per citizen, may be undermining the country's economic health, according to a contentious new book. Martin Bech Holte's "The Country That Became Too Rich" argues that oil revenue has made Norway bloated and unproductive, with data supporting several concerns.

Norway has recorded the slowest productivity growth among wealthy nations over the past two decades while Norwegians take 27.5 sick days annually, the highest rate in the OECD. Student test scores have declined since 2015 and now rank below the OECD average despite Norway spending $20,000 per student compared to the $14,000 OECD average. Fund withdrawals now cover 20% of the annual budget, up from less than 10% two decades ago.

This week Google's Open Source Security Team announced "a new project to strengthen trust in open source package ecosystems" — by reproducing upstream artifacts.

It includes automation to derive declarative build definitions, new "build observability and verification tools" for security teams, and even "infrastructure definitions" to help organizations rebuild, sign, and distribute provenance by running their own OSS Rebuild instances. (And as part of the initiative, the team also published SLSA Provenance attestations "for thousands of packages across our supported ecosystems.") Our aim with OSS Rebuild is to empower the security community to deeply understand and control their supply chains by making package consumption as transparent as using a source repository. Our rebuild platform unlocks this transparency by utilizing a declarative build process, build instrumentation, and network monitoring capabilities which, within the SLSA Build framework, produces fine-grained, durable, trustworthy security metadata. Building on the hosted infrastructure model that we pioneered with OSS Fuzz for memory issue detection, OSS Rebuild similarly seeks to use hosted resources to address security challenges in open source, this time aimed at securing the software supply chain... We are committed to bringing supply chain transparency and security to all open source software development. Our initial support for the PyPI (Python), npm (JS/TS), and Crates.io (Rust) package registries — providing rebuild provenance for many of their most popular packages — is just the beginning of our journey...

OSS Rebuild helps detect several classes of supply chain compromise:

- Unsubmitted Source Code: When published packages contain code not present in the public source repository, OSS Rebuild will not attest to the artifact.

- Build Environment Compromise: By creating standardized, minimal build environments with comprehensive monitoring, OSS Rebuild can detect suspicious build activity or avoid exposure to compromised components altogether.

- Stealthy Backdoors: Even sophisticated backdoors like xz often exhibit anomalous behavioral patterns during builds. OSS Rebuild's dynamic analysis capabilities can detect unusual execution paths or suspicious operations that are otherwise impractical to identify through manual review.


For enterprises and security professionals, OSS Rebuild can...

— Enhance metadata without changing registries by enriching data for upstream packages. No need to maintain custom registries or migrate to a new package ecosystem.

— Augment SBOMs by adding detailed build observability information to existing Software Bills of Materials, creating a more complete security picture...

- Accelerate vulnerability response by providing a path to vendor, patch, and re-host upstream packages using our verifiable build definitions...


The easiest (but not only!) way to access OSS Rebuild attestations is to use the provided Go-based command-line interface.
"With OSS Rebuild's existing automation for PyPI, npm, and Crates.io, most packages obtain protection effortlessly without user or maintainer intervention."

California researchers planned a multimillion-dollar test of salt water-spraying equipment that could one day be used to dim the sun's rays — over a 3,900-square mile are off the west coasts of North America, Chile or south-central Africa. E&E News calls it part of a "secretive" initiative backed by "wealthy philanthropists with ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley" — and a piece of the "vast scope of research aimed at finding ways to counter the Earth's warming, work that has often occurred outside public view." "At such scales, meaningful changes in clouds will be readily detectable from space," said a 2023 research plan from the [University of Washington's] Marine Cloud Brightening Program. The massive experiment would have been contingent upon the successful completion of the thwarted pilot test on the carrier deck in Alameda, according to the plan.... Before the setback in Alameda, the team had received some federal funding and hoped to gain access to government ships and planes, the documents show.

The university and its partners — a solar geoengineering research advocacy group called SilverLining and the scientific nonprofit SRI International — didn't respond to detailed questions about the status of the larger cloud experiment. But SilverLining's executive director, Kelly Wanser, said in an email that the Marine Cloud Brightening Program aimed to "fill gaps in the information" needed to determine if the technologies are safe and effective.âIn the initial experiment, the researchers appeared to have disregarded past lessons about building community support for studies related to altering the climate, and instead kept their plans from the public and lawmakers until the testing was underway, some solar geoengineering experts told E&E News. The experts also expressed surprise at the size of the planned second experiment....

The program does not "recommend, support or develop plans for the use of marine cloud brightening to alter weather or climate," Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric and climate science professor at the university who leads the program, said in a statement to E&E News. She emphasized that the program remains focused on researching the technology, not deploying it. There are no "plans for conducting large-scale studies that would alter weather or climate," she added.
"More than 575 scientists have called for a ban on geoengineering development," according to the article, "because it 'cannot be governed globally in a fair, inclusive, and effective manner.'" But "Some scientists believe that the perils of climate change are too dire to not pursue the technology, which they say can be safely tested in well-designed experiments... " "If we really were serious about the idea that to do any controversial topic needs some kind of large-scale consensus before we can research the topic, I think that means we don't research topics," David Keith, a geophysical sciences professor at the University of Chicago, said at a think tank discussion last month... "The studies that the program is pursuing are scientifically sound and would be unlikely to alter weather patterns — even for the Puerto Rico-sized test, said Daniele Visioni, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University. Nearly 30 percent of the planet is already covered by clouds, he noted.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.