The world's largest community of 3D-printed homes, located in Texas, has unveiled its first completed house. CNN reports: With walls "printed" using a concrete-based material, the single-story structure is the first of 100 such homes set to welcome residents starting September. The community is part of a wider development in Georgetown, Texas called Wolf Ranch. It's located about 30 miles north of Austin, the state capital, and is a collaboration between Texas construction firm ICON, homebuilding company Lennar and Danish architecture practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). On Saturday prospective buyers toured around the finished model home at the project's grand opening, and some of the units have already sold, ICON spokesperson Cara Caulkins told CNN via email.

Images of the newly completed building shared by the company show brightly lit interiors and curved gray walls. The walls are made from a concrete mix called Lavacrete, which is piped into place using 46-foot-wide robotic printers. After the walls are printed, the doors, windows and roofs -- all of which are equipped with solar panels -- are installed. ICON says more than a third of the homes' walls have now been printed, and the properties currently on offer are being sold at $475,000 to $599,000. The 3D-printed homes range in size from 1,500 to 2,100 square feet and have three to four bedrooms.

An effort by United States lawmakers to prevent government agencies from domestically tracking citizens without a search warrant is facing opposition internally from one of its largest intelligence services. From a report: Republican and Democratic aides familiar with ongoing defense-spending negotiations in Congress say officials at the National Security Agency (NSA) have approached lawmakers charged with its oversight about opposing an amendment that would prevent it from paying companies for location data instead of obtaining a warrant in court. Introduced by US representatives Warren Davidson and Sara Jacobs, the amendment would prohibit US military agencies from "purchasing data that would otherwise require a warrant, court order, or subpoena" to obtain. The ban would cover more than half of the US intelligence community, including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the newly formed National Space Intelligence Center, among others.

The House approved the amendment in a floor vote over a week ago during its annual consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act, a "must-pass" bill outlining how the Pentagon will spend next year's $886 billion budget. Negotiations over which policies will be included in the Senate's version of the bill are ongoing. In a separate but related push last week, members of the House Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to advance legislation that would extend similar restrictions against the purchase of Americans' data across all sectors of government, including state and local law enforcement. Known as the "Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act," the bill will soon be reintroduced in the Senate as well by one of its original 2021 authors, Ron Wyden, the senator's office confirmed. "Americans of all political stripes know their Constitutional rights shouldn't disappear in the digital age," Wyden says, adding that there is a "deep well of support" for enshrining protections against commercial data grabs by the government "into black-letter law."

Maine moved a step closer to becoming the East Coast's first floating offshore wind location after lawmakers approved a bill paving the way for deep-water development. From a report: The bill, approved Wednesday, includes pathways for utility companies to purchase wind power and for developers to build port infrastructure using local workers, a detail that prompted Governor Janet Mills' veto last month. She is expected to sign the bill in the coming days. The state has a goal to install 3 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2040, bringing Maine closer to its goal of powering its grid with 100% renewable energy by that year. The bill would help Maine contribute to the Biden administration's target of deploying 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind by 2035.

President Joe Biden is planning to sign an executive order to limit critical US technology investments in China by mid-August, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the internal deliberations. From the report: The order focuses on semiconductors, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It won't affect any existing investments and will only prohibit certain transactions. Other deals will have to be disclosed to the government. The timing for the order, slated for the second week of August, has slipped many times before, and there is no guarantee it won't be delayed again. But internal discussions have already shifted from the substance of the measures to rolling out the order and accompanying rule, said the people familiar who spoke on condition of anonymity. The restrictions won't take effect until next year, and their scope will be laid out in a rulemaking process, involving a comment period so stakeholders can weigh in on the final version.

There's a big reason airports and resorts are booked up this summer: Americans are taking off work and vacationing more than they have in over a decade. In some cases, their employers are forcing them to. From a report: The pandemic, along with jitters about a potential recession, dampened U.S. workers' eagerness to take paid time off in recent years. Now, many vacation-bound employees say they're over such worries. More working adults took vacation days in the first half of 2023 than they did in prepandemic years, according to data from the Labor Department.

Company vacation calendars show more workers are checking out, and for longer stretches, this summer. The number of employees logging vacation days climbed 11% in June compared with the same month in 2022 and 20% compared with June 2021, according to human-resources technology firm Gusto, which tracks time-off requests from workers at more than 300,000 small and midsize businesses. The amount of time they took off also rose, by 5% from last year to an average 32 hours.

[...] Many executives say they are also getting away for longer breaks, even if they don't fully unplug from work. In a July survey by executive search firm Korn Ferry, 53% of the nearly 300 professionals polled said they planned to take a longer summer vacation this year than in years past. While a quarter said they never connect with work while on vacation, half said they do so once or several times a day.

A coalition of a half-dozen open-source AI stakeholders -- Hugging Face, GitHub, EleutherAI, Creative Commons, LAION and Open Future -- are calling on EU policymakers to protect open source innovation as they finalize the EU AI Act, which will be the world's first comprehensive AI law. From a report: In a policy paper released this week, "Supporting Open Source and Open Science in the EU AI Act," the open-source AI leaders offered recommendations âoefor how to ensure the AI Act works for open source" -- with the "aim to ensure that open AI development practices are not confronted with obligations that are structurally impractical to comply with or that would be otherwise counterproductive."

According to the paper, "overbroad obligations" that favor closed and proprietary AI development -- like models from top AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google -- "threaten to disadvantage the open AI ecosystem." The paper was released as the European Commission, Council and Parliament debate the final EU AI Act in what is known as the "trilogue," which began after the European Parliament passed its version of the bill on June 14. The goal is to finish and pass the AI Act by the end of 2023 before the next European Parliament elections.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee approved legislation on Thursday to bar automakers from eliminating AM broadcast radio in new vehicles and require companies like Ticketmaster to put total ticket prices including fees in marketing materials. The AM radio bill and the ticket-pricing bill both had strong bipartisan support and both have companion measures in the House of Representatives. The AM radio bill would direct the Transportation Department to issue regulations mandating AM radio in new vehicles without additional charge. Senators said this year that at least seven automakers have removed AM broadcast radio from their electric vehicles, including Tesla, BMW, and Volkswagen. Ford reversed course in May under pressure from Congress. Lawmakers say losing AM radio undermines a federal system for delivering key public safety information to the public. The National Association of Broadcasters said the bill "will ensure that the tens of millions of AM radio listeners across the country retain access to local news, diverse community programming and emergency information." The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group representing major automakers, opposed the measure: "This is simply a bill to prop up and give preference to a particular technology that's now competing with other communications options and adapting to changing listenership."

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee also approved two bills aimed at tightening privacy protections for children online.