iPhone and Apple Watch users in California will soon be able to add their digital ID and driver's license to the Wallet app, as revealed by new landing pages on the state DMV website. This feature follows a slow rollout since its announcement, with only five states currently supporting it. MacRumors reports: "Now you can add your California driver's license or state ID to Apple Wallet on iPhone and Apple Watch so you can present it easily and securely in person and in app," reads the landing page, which contains broken links and placeholder images, and is still missing a proper website security certificate. The webpages were discovered on Sunday by Jimmy Obomsawin, after someone added a link to the landing pages in an Apple Wallet Wikipedia entry last Wednesday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On July 19, Yelp informed select indie developers that they would have to switch to paid accounts, due to high API usage. Developers were given four days to make the change, in a move that echoes recent communication bungles by Reddit and Twitter. When the developers replied to the July 19 email, Yelp sent a deck of pricing tiers with base pricing starting from $229 per month for a limit of 1,000 API calls per day. Developers were concerned that other, more affordable options weren't mentioned in the deck. Yelp said the pricing is equivalent and simply presented in different ways. The method of communication and lack of transparency has angered developers, some of whom shuttered their services, even after Yelp gave them a 90-day leeway and apologized. While the company has issued an apology email to developers and extended their free usage by 90 days, it may not be enough to keep these frustrated developers from moving to new platforms.

"We apologize for last week's abbreviated transition that impacted a small percentage of developers and have extended access to these users," a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Yelp sunsetted free, commercial, unlimited use of the Yelp Fusion API in 2019 and has been in the process of migrating developers to a paid program over the last several years. The developer community is important to Yelp, and we've heard their feedback about the transition period from the free Yelp Fusion API to our paid program."

CrowdStrike says that it isn't to blame for Delta Air Lines' dayslong meltdown following the tech outage caused by the cybersecurity company, and that it isn't responsible for all of the money that the carrier says it lost. From a report: In a letter responding to the airline's recent public comments and hiring of a prominent lawyer, CrowdStrike said Delta's threats of a lawsuit have contributed to a "misleading narrative" that the cybersecurity company was responsible for the airline's tech decisions and response to the outage. "Should Delta pursue this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions -- swiftly, transparently, and constructively -- while Delta did not," wrote Michael Carlinsky, an attorney at law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.

The letter to Delta's legal team Sunday evening is the latest move in a growing conflict between the cybersecurity firm and the airline, which was thrown into several days of disarray following the outage. Delta Chief Executive Ed Bastian said in an interview on CNBC last week that the outage cost the airline about $500 million, including lost revenue and compensation costs. The airline has alerted CrowdStrike and Microsoft that it is planning to pursue legal claims to recover its losses, and has hired litigation firm Boies Schiller Flexner to assist, according to a memo Bastian sent to Delta employees last week. CrowdStrike said Sunday that its liability is contractually capped at an amount in the "single-digit millions."

A CNN reporter spent more than two hours waiting for EV chargers — thanks to "ill-mannered charger hogs who don't respect EV etiquette." [T]o protect batteries from damage, charging speeds slow way down once batteries get beyond 80% full. In fact, it can take as long, or even longer, to go from 80% charged to completely full than to reach 80%. Meanwhile, lines of electric vehicles wait behind almost-full cars. I was waiting behind people with batteries that were 92%, 94% and even 97% full, as I could see on the charger screens. Still, they stayed there. I made my own situation worse by giving up on one location and going to another with more chargers, but there were even more EVs waiting there.

Given that a lack of public charging is turning many consumers off to EVs, according to multiple surveys, this is a major issue. Both Electrify America and EVgo said they are rapidly expanding their networks to, as EVgo's Rafalson put it, "skate ahead of the puck," trying to make sure there are enough chargers to meet future demand... "I think what you're seeing is demand for public fast charging is really skyrocketing," said Sara Rafalson, executive vice president for policy at EV charging company EVgo, "and I would say we've been really at an inflection point in the last year, year and a half, with demand...."

Electrify America, one of America's biggest charging companies, is experimenting with a solution to the problem of charger hogs who can make it slow and unpleasant to travel in an EV. At 10 of the busiest EV fast charging stations in California, Electrify America has enacted a strict limit. Once a car's batteries are 85% charged, charging will automatically stop and the driver will be told to unplug and leave or face additional 40-cent-per-minute "idle time" fees for taking the space. It's similar to something Tesla vehicles do automatically. When a Tesla car, truck or SUV plugs into a particularly heavily-used Supercharger station, the vehicle itself may automatically limit charging to just 80% "to reduce congestion," according to Tesla's on-line Supercharger Support web page.

In that case, though, the user can still override the limit using the vehicle's touchscreen. There will be no getting around Electrify America's limit.
Electrify America's president points out an EV driver could need a full charge (if they're travelling somewhere with fewer charges) — or if they're driving an EV with a relatively short range. So the article notes that some EV charging companies "have experimented with plans that charge different amounts of money at different times to give drivers incentives to fill their batteries at less busy hours...

"For the time being, let's just hope that EV drivers who don't really need to fill all the way up will learn to be more considerate."

"As media bosses scramble to decide if and how they should partner with AI companies, workers are increasingly concerned that the technology could imperil their jobs or degrade their work..." reports the Washington Post.

The latest example? "Two months after the Atlantic reached a licensing deal with OpenAI, staffers at the storied magazine are demanding the company ensure their jobs and work are protected." (Nearly 60 journalists have now signed a letter demanding the company "stop prioritizing its bottom line and champion the Atlantic's journalism.") The unionized staffers want the Atlantic bosses to include AI protections in the union contract, which the two sides have been negotiating since 2022. "Our editorial leaders say that The Atlantic is a magazine made by humans, for humans," the letter says. "We could not agree more..."

The Atlantic's new deal with OpenAI grants the tech firm access to the magazine's archives to train its AI tools. While the Atlantic in return will have special access to experiment with these AI tools, the magazine says it is not using AI to create journalism. But some journalists and media observers have raised concerns about whether AI tools are accurately and fairly manipulating the human-written text they work with. The Atlantic staffers' letter noted a pattern by ChatGPT of generating gibberish web addresses instead of the links intended to attribute the reporting it has borrowed, as well as sending readers to sites that have summarized Atlantic stories rather than the original work...

Atlantic spokeswoman Anna Bross said company leaders "agree with the general principles" expressed by the union. For that reason, she said, they recently proposed a commitment to not to use AI to publish content "without human review and editorial oversight." Representatives from the Atlantic Union bargaining committee told The Washington Post that "the fact remains that the company has flatly refused to commit to not replacing employees with AI."
The article also notes that last month the union representing Lifehacker, Mashable and PCMag journalists "ratified a contract that protects union members from being laid off because AI has impacted their roles and requires the company to discuss any such plans to implement AI tools ahead of time."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The new Labour government has shelved $1.66 bn of funding promised by the Conservatives for tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, the BBC has learned. It includes $1 bn for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University and a further $640m for AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI. Both funds were unveiled less than 12 months ago.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the money was promised by the previous administration but was never allocated in its budget. Some in the industry have criticised the government's decision. Tech business founder Barney Hussey-Yeo posted on X that reducing investment risked "pushing more entrepreneurs to the US." Businessman Chris van der Kuyl described the move as "idiotic." Trade body techUK said the government now needed to make "new proposals quickly" or the UK risked "losing out" to other countries in what are crucial industries of the future.

Hedge fund Elliott Management has told investors that Nvidia is in a "bubble," and the AI technology driving the chipmaking giant's share price is "overhyped." From a report: The Florida-based firm, which manages about $70bn in assets, said in a recent letter to clients seen by the Financial Times that the megacap technology stocks, particularly Nvidia, were in "bubble land." [non-paywalled link] It added that it was "sceptical" that Big Tech companies would keep buying the chipmaker's graphics processing units in such high volumes, and that AI is "overhyped with many applications not ready for prime time."

[...] Many of AI's supposed uses are "never going to be cost-efficient, are never going to actually work right, will take up too much energy, or will prove to be untrustworthy," it said. Elliott, which was founded by billionaire Paul Singer in 1977, added in its client letter that, so far, AI had failed to deliver a promised huge uplift in productivity. "There are few real uses," it said, other than "summarising notes of meetings, generating reports and helping with computer coding." AI, it added, was in effect software that had so far not delivered "value commensurate with the hype."

An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed, written by former hedge fund manager Marc Rubinstein: With new technologies come new rules governing how they are used. Often, policy is framed via analogy: Are social media platforms publishers or are they town squares? Are instant messages water-cooler chatter or are they formal communication? So it is with peer-to-peer electronic payments. Last week a US Senate committee joined the debate over whether they're analogous to cash or to bank-payment channels. It's an essential distinction -- for both consumers and the companies that provide this free service. [...] Yet while no bank would accept liability if a customer lost their wallet to a pickpocket, the senators' debate focused on who's responsible when fraudsters target electronic wallets. Last year, customers of the three largest lenders -- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo -- lost a total of $370 million via Zelle, the platform these banks jointly own with four others. According to the majority staff report (PDF) filed by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which convened the July 23 hearing, the banks reimbursed only around $100 million of that, leaving consumers to shoulder the rest. While small in the context of overall volume that go through Zelle -- $806 billion last year, of which these banks did 73% -- that's cold comfort for the customers.

Legally, a bank's obligation rests on whether clients fall victim to a "fraud" or to a "scam." In a fraud, money is transferred out of the user's account without their authorization, usually as the result of hacking. Under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, banks are required to reimburse such losses. As long as the customer authorizes the transaction, though, even if fraudulently induced to do so, banks don't have to pick up the tab. Such scams are growing as fraudsters parade as a bank employee, a love interest or a potential new employer, often via social media. According to a Pew Research survey, 13% of P2P platform users reported sending money, only later to realize they were set up. Persuading your bank you are the victim of a fraud rather than a scam can take some work. [...] For bad guys, the speed of P2P payments makes them a particularly attractive target. A Zelle transfer can take 20 to 30 seconds to initiate. In most cases, by the time an unsuspecting consumer realizes they have been targeted, their money is already gone. Banks argue this is no different from cash. [...]

However, others see P2P transactions more akin to electronic payments and question why reimbursement rates, at 26% in the case of Zelle, are so much lower than for credit-card payments (47%) or debit-card payments (36%) at the three big banks. Despite critical differences, the subcommittee agrees. Its report recommends extending purchase protections standard in credit and debit-card markets to commercial P2P payments, and amending the Electronic Fund Transfer Act to make fraudulently induced transactions subject to reimbursement. Such a move has already been adopted in the UK, where new rules requiring financial institutions to fully reimburse victims of scams come into force in October this year. US bankers aren't keen. "We need to be thoughtful and think about unintended consequences," Adam Vancini, Wells Fargo's head of payments for Consumer, Small & Business Banking, said at the Senate hearing. For now, Zelle transfers enjoy all the benefits of cash. Layer in the benefits of card payments, too, and the no-cost model may disappear.

The results of Los Angeles' 12-month guaranteed income pilot program show that it was "overwhelmingly beneficial (source may be paywalled; alternative source)," reports the Los Angeles Times. The program, which involved giving L.A.'s poorest families cash assistance of $1,000 a month with no strings attached, significantly improved participants' financial stability, job opportunities, and overall well-being. From the report: The Basic Income Guaranteed: Los Angeles Economic Assistance Pilot, or BIG:LEAP, disbursed $38.4 million in city funds to 3,200 residents who were pregnant or had at least one child, lived at or below the federal poverty level and experienced hardship related to COVID-19. Participants were randomly selected from about 50,000 applicants and received the payments for 12 months starting in 2022. The city paid researchers $3.9 million to help design the trial and survey participants throughout about their experiences.

[Dr. Amy Castro, co-founder of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Guaranteed Income Research] and her colleagues partnered with researchers at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health to compare the experiences of participants in L.A.'s randomized control trial -- the country's first large-scale guaranteed-income pilot using public funds -- with those of nearly 5,000 people who didn't receive the unconditional cash. Researchers found that participants reported a meaningful increase in savings and were more likely to be able to cover a $400 emergency during and after the program. Guaranteed-income recipients also were more likely to secure full-time or part-time employment, or to be looking for work, rather than being unemployed and not looking for work, the study found.

In a city with sky-high rents, participants reported that the guaranteed income functioned as "a preventative measure against homelessness," according to the report, helping them offset rental costs and serving as a buffer while they waited for other housing support. It also prevented or reduced the incidence of intimate partner violence, the analysis found, by making it possible for people and their children to leave and find other housing. Intimate partner violence is an intractable social challenge, Castro said, so to see improvements with just 12 months of funding is a "pretty extraordinary change." People who had struggled to maintain their health because of inflexible or erratic work schedules and lack of child care reported that the guaranteed income provided the safety net they needed to maintain healthier behaviors, the report said. They reported sleeping better, exercising more, resuming necessary medications and seeking mental health therapy for themselves and their children. Compared with those who didn't receive cash, guaranteed income recipients were more likely to enroll their kids in sports and clubs during and after the pilot.

A decade ago, the Gates Foundation announced it will cease covering open-access publishing costs for its grantees from 2025. This shift, following a decade of support for free access to research, sparked concerns in the scientific community. Experts fear the move could undermine the open-access model, which aims to make taxpayer-funded studies freely available. The decision also marked a significant change in the foundation's approach to disseminating research findings, potentially impacting global access to critical scientific information. So where do we go from here? From a report: [The Gates Foundation] notes that open access in its current form has resulted in "some unsavory publishing practices," including unchecked pricing from journals and publishers, questionable peer review, and paper mills -- people or organizations that produce fake or subpar papers and sell authorship slots on them. "Last year was a really pivotal year in scholarly publishing since lots of people who were really pushing gold open access for many years are now thinking, 'Oh, what beast have we created?'" says James Butcher, an independent publishing consultant in Liverpool, England, who writes the newsletter Journalology. "It plays into the hands of the big corporates because it's all about scale."

Gold OA creates incentives for journals to publish as many papers as possible to make more money. Some publishers, often referred to as gray OA publishers, have been criticized for exploiting the gold OA model to churn out high volumes of low-quality studies. Butcher says that because subscription- based publishers traditionally couldn't increase revenues by publishing more papers, they tended to keep volumes fairly level. In contrast, Johan Rooryck, a French linguistics researcher at Leiden University and a proponent of open access, points to a "very rapid rise" in gold OA journals and papers in the past decade. The Gates Foundation is now suggesting that authors post online preprints of their author-accepted manuscripts -- near-final versions of studies accepted by journals for publication before they are typeset or copyedited -- and then publish in whichever journals they like.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Proposals to slap a wealth tax on the world's super-rich could yield $250 billion a year to tackle the climate crisis and address poverty and inequality, but would affect only a small number of billionaire families, Brazil's climate chief has said. Ministers from the G20 group of the world's biggest developed and emerging economies are meeting in Rio de Janeiro this weekend, where Brazil's proposal for a 2% wealth tax on those with assets worth more than $1 billion is near the top of the agenda. No government was speaking out against the tax, said Ana Toni, who is national secretary for climate change in the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. "Our feeling is that, morally, nobody's against," she told the Observer in an interview. "But the level of support from some countries is bigger than others."

However, the lack of overt opposition does not mean the tax proposal is likely to be approved. Many governments are privately skeptical but unwilling to publicly criticize a plan that would shave a tiny amount from the rapidly accumulating wealth of the planet's richest few, and raise money to address the pressing global climate emergency. Janet Yellen, the US Treasury secretary, told journalists in Rio that the US "did not see the need" for a global initiative. "People are not keen on global taxes," Toni admitted. "And there is a question over how you implement global taxes." But she said levying and raising a tax globally was possible, as had been shown by G7 finance ministers' agreement to levy a minimum 15% corporate tax. "It should be at a global level, because otherwise, obviously, rich people will move from one country to another," she said.

Only about 100 families around the world would be affected by the proposed 2% levy, she added. The world's richest 1% have added $42 trillion to their wealth in the past decade, roughly 36 times more than the bottom half of the world's population did. The question of how funds raised by such taxation should be spent had also not been settled, noted Toni. Some economists have argued that the idea was more likely to be accepted if the proceeds were devoted to solving the climate crisis than if they were used to address global inequality. Other experts say at least some of the money should be used for poverty alleviation.

Meta will pay Texas $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit alleging the company used personal biometric data without user consent, marking the largest privacy-related settlement ever obtained by a state. The Texas Tribune reports: The 2022 lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in state court, alleged that Meta had been using facial recognition software on photos uploaded to Facebook without Texans' consent. The settlement will be paid over five years. The attorney general's office did not say whether the money from the settlement would go into the state's general fund or if it would be distributed in some other way. The settlement, announced Tuesday, does not act as an admission of guilt and Meta maintains no wrongdoing. This was the first lawsuit Paxton's office argued under a 2009 state law that protects Texans' biometric data, like fingerprints and facial scans. The law requires businesses to inform and get consent from individuals before collecting such data. It also limits sharing this data, except in certain cases like helping law enforcement or completing financial transactions. Businesses must protect this data and destroy it within a year after it's no longer needed.

In 2011, Meta introduced a feature known as Tag Suggestions to make it easier for users to tag people in their photos. According to Paxton's office, the feature was turned on by default and ran facial recognition on users' photos, automatically capturing data protected by the 2009 law. That system was discontinued in 2021, with Meta saying it deleted over 1 billion people's individual facial recognition data. As part of the settlement, Meta must notify the attorney general's office of anticipated or ongoing activities that may fall under the state's biometric data laws. If Texas objects, the parties have 60 days to attempt to resolve the issue. Meta officials said the settlement will make it easier for the company to discuss the implications and requirements of the state's biometric data laws with the attorney general's office, adding that data protection and privacy are core priorities for the firm.

"A Fortune 50 company paid a record-breaking $75 million ransom payment to the Dark Angels ransomware gang," writes BleepingComputer's Lawrence Abrams, citing a report (PDF) by Zscaler ThreatLabz. From the report: The largest known ransom payment was previously $40 million, which insurance giant CNA paid after suffering an Evil Corp ransomware attack. While Zscaler did not share what company paid the $75 million ransom, they mentioned the company was in the Fortune 50 and the attack occurred in early 2024. One Fortune 50 company that suffered a cyberattack in February 2024 is pharmaceutical giant Cencora, ranked #10 on the list. No ransomware gang ever claimed responsibility for the attack, potentially indicating that a ransom was paid.

Zscaler ThreatLabz says that Dark Angels utilizes the "Big Game Hunting" strategy, which is to target only a few high-value companies in the hopes of massive payouts rather than many companies at once for numerous but smaller ransom payments. "The Dark Angels group employs a highly targeted approach, typically attacking a single large company at a time," explains the Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers. "This is in stark contrast to most ransomware groups, which target victims indiscriminately and outsource most of the attack to affiliate networks of initial access brokers and penetration testing teams." According to Chainalysis, the Big Game Hunting tactic has become a dominant trend utilized by numerous ransomware gangs over the past few years.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A number of fiber optic cables carrying broadband service across France were cut overnight in the latest attack on the country's infrastructure during the Olympic Games. Connections serving Paris, which is hosting the Olympic Games this week, and the games themselves weren't affected, a spokesman for Olympics telecom partner, Orange SA, said. Still, this is the second sabotage of French infrastructure in the past few days as the world converges on the capital. Coordinated fires on French rail lines disrupted trains ahead of the opening ceremony on Friday.

The fiber cables were cut in nine departments overall including: Ardeche, Aude, Bouches-du-Rhone, Drome, Herault, Vaucluse, Marne, Meuse and Oise, the French Telecom Federation said. SFR said its network was vandalized between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. Paris time, and teams are working on repairs, a spokesman for the French phone company said. The carrier is using alternative routes to serve customers, though redirecting the traffic might lead to slower speeds. Other carriers, including Iliad SA's Free and Netalis, also said they were impacted in social media posts. Netalis Chief Executive Officer Nicolas Guillaume said that the telecom company had successfully moved traffic to backup networks early on Monday. French cloud provider OVHcloud is also working to reroute traffic after the incident, which had caused slower performance on connections between Europe and Asia Pacific, a spokesman said. "We advocate for France reinforcing criminal sanctions for vandalism on telecom infrastructure, which should be put at the same level as vandalism on energy infrastructure," said Romain Bonenfant, head of the French Telecom Federation industry group, in an interview. "Telecom infrastructure, like the railways, covers kilometers across the whole territory -- you can't put surveillance on every part of it."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX announced on Saturday a controversial plan to "socialize" the $230 million loss from its recent security breach among all its customers, a move that has sent shockwaves through the local crypto community.

The Mumbai-based firm, which suspended all trading activities on its platform last week following the cyber attack that compromised nearly half of its reserves in India's largest crypto heist, has outlined a strategy to resume operations within a week or so while implementing a "fair and transparent socialized loss strategy" to distribute the impact "equitably" among its user base.

WazirX will "rebalance" customer portfolios on its platform, returning only 55% of their holdings while locking the remaining 45% in USDT-equivalent tokens. This will also impact customers whose tokens were not directly affected by the breach, with the company stating that "users with 100% of their tokens in the 'not stolen' category will receive 55% of those tokens back."

Amazon paid nearly $1 billion to acquire the live-video startup Twitch Interactive in 2014. A decade later, the retail giant has received little financial return from one of its bigger acquisitions. WSJ: Known for hourslong broadcasts of videogame play, Twitch remains unprofitable despite periods of explosive popularity, according to current and former employees knowledgeable about its finances. Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show Twitch's biggest-paying users are opening their wallets less, and third-party data reflect that growth in new users and engagement has slowed.

Following two rounds of layoffs in the past year, staffers are concerned that a third round could come this fall following an annual operational review, according to people familiar with the matter. Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy, who took over in 2021, has led a profitability review at the company and shown little tolerance for unprofitable businesses. Insiders said they worry Twitch is at risk of becoming what they called a "zombie brand" at Amazon -- internal projects or acquisitions that have been sidelined because they haven't lived up to expectations. These staffers pointed to book-review app Goodreads, online task finder Mechanical Turk and discount website Woot.