Google DeepMind has launched Gemini Robotics On-Device, a new language model that enables robots to perform complex tasks locally without internet connectivity. TechCrunch reports: Building on the company's previous Gemini Robotics model that was released in March, Gemini Robotics On-Device can control a robot's movements. Developers can control and fine-tune the model to suit various needs using natural language prompts. In benchmarks, Google claims the model performs at a level close to the cloud-based Gemini Robotics model. The company says it outperforms other on-device models in general benchmarks, though it didn't name those models.

In a demo, the company showed robots running this local model doing things like unzipping bags and folding clothes. Google says that while the model was trained for ALOHA robots, it later adapted it to work on a bi-arm Franka FR3 robot and the Apollo humanoid robot by Apptronik. Google claims the bi-arm Franka FR3 was successful in tackling scenarios and objects it hadn't "seen" before, like doing assembly on an industrial belt. Google DeepMind is also releasing a Gemini Robotics SDK. The company said developers can show robots 50 to 100 demonstrations of tasks to train them on new tasks using these models on the MuJoCo physics simulator.

Microsoft has released a modern, open-source version of its classic MS-DOS Editor -- built with Rust and compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's now simple called "Edit." Ars Technica reports: Aside from ease of use, Microsoft's main reason for creating the new version of Edit stems from a peculiar gap in modern Windows. "What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows," writes [Christopher Nguyen, a product manager on Microsoft's Windows Terminal team] while referring to the command-line interface, or CLI. "32-bit versions of Windows ship with the MS-DOS editor, but 64-bit versions do not have a CLI editor installed inbox." [...]

Linux users can download Edit from the project's GitHub releases page or install it through an unofficial snap package. Oh, and if you're a fan of the vintage editor and crave a 16-bit text-mode for your retro machine that actually runs MS-DOS, you can download a copy on the Internet Archive. [...]

At 250KB, the new Edit maintains the lightweight philosophy of its predecessor while adding features the original couldn't dream of: Unicode support, regular expressions, and the ability to handle gigabyte-sized files. The original editor was limited to files smaller than 300KB depending on available conventional memory -- a constraint that seems quaint in an era of terabyte storage. But the web publication OMG! Ubuntu found that the modern Edit not only "works great on Ubuntu" but noted its speed when handling gigabyte-sized documents.

In a podcast interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel, Hinge CEO Justin McLeod described integrating AI into dating apps as promising but warned against relying on AI companionship, likening it to "playing with fire" and consuming "junk food," potentially exacerbating the loneliness epidemic. He emphasized Hinge's mission to foster genuine human connections and highlighted upcoming AI-powered features designed to improve matchmaking and provide coaching to encourage real-world interactions. Here's an excerpt from the interview: Again, there's a fine line between prompting someone and coaching them inside Hinge, and we're coaching them in a different way within a more self-contained ecosystem. How do you think about that? Would you launch a full-on virtual girlfriend inside Hinge?

Certainly not. I have lots of thoughts about this. I think there's actually quite a clear line between providing a tool that helps people do something or get better at something, and the line where it becomes this thing that is trying to become your friend, trying to mimic emotions, and trying to create an emotional connection with you. That I think is really playing with fire. I think we are already in a crisis of loneliness, and a loneliness epidemic. It's a complex issue, and it's baked into our culture, and it goes back to before the internet. But just since 2000, over the past 20 years, the amount of time that people spend together in real life with their friends has dropped by 70 percent for young people. And it's been almost completely displaced by the time spent staring at screens. As a result, we've seen massive increases in mental health issues, and people's loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

I think Mark Zuckerberg was just quoted about this, that most people don't have enough friends. But he said we're going to give them AI chatbots. That he believes that AI chatbots can become your friends. I think that's honestly an extraordinarily reductive view of what a friendship is, that it's someone there to say all the right things to you at the right moment The most rewarding parts of being in a friendship are being able to be there for someone else, to risk and be vulnerable, to share experiences with other conscious entities. So I think that while it will feel good in the moment, like junk food basically, to have an experience with someone who says all the right things and is available at the right time, it will ultimately, just like junk food, make people feel less healthy and mo re drained over time. It will displace the human relationships that people should be cultivating out in the real world.

How do you compete with that? That is the other thing that is happening. It is happening. Whether it's good or bad. Hinge is offering a harder path. So you say, "We've got to get people out on dates." I honestly wonder about that, based on the younger folks I know who sometimes say, âoeI just don't want to leave the house. I would rather just talk to this computer. I have too much social pressure just leaving the house in this way.â That's what Hinge is promising to do. How do you compete with that? Do you take it head on? Are you marketing that directly?

I'm starting to think very much about taking it head on. We want to continue at Hinge to champion human relationships, real human-to-human-in-real-life relationships, because I think they are an essential part of the human experience, and they're essential to our mental health. It's not just because I run a dating app and, obviously, it's important that people continue to meet. It really is a deep, personal mission of mine, and I think it's absolutely critical that someone is out there championing this. Because it's always easier to race to the bottom of the brain stem and offer people junk products that maybe sell in the moment but leave them worse off. That's the entire model that we've seen from what happened with social media. I think AI chatbots could frankly be much more dangerous in that respect.

So what we can do is to become more and more effective and support people more and more, and make it as easy as possible to do the harder and riskier thing, which is to go out and form real relationships with real people. They can let you down and might not always be there for you, but it is ultimately a much more nourishing and enriching experience for people. We can also champion and raise awareness as much as we can. That's another reason why I'm here today talking with you, because I think it's important to put out the counter perspective, that we don't just reflexively believe that AI chatbots can be your friend, without thinking too deeply about what that really implies and what that really means.

We keep going back to junk food, but people had to start waking up to the fact that this was harmful. We had to do a lot of campaigns to educate people that drinking Coca-Cola and eating fast food was detrimental to their health over the long term. And then as people became more aware of that, a whole personal wellness industry started to grow, and now that's a huge industry, and people spend a lot of time focusing on their diet and nutrition and mental health, and all these other things. I think similarly, social wellness needs to become a category like that. It's thinking about not just how do I get this junk social experience of social media where I get fed outraged news and celebrity gossip and all that stuff, but how do I start building a sense of social wellness, where I can create an enriching, intimate connection with important people in my life. You can listen to the podcast here.

Hackers suspected of working on behalf of the Chinese government exploited a maximum-severity vulnerability, which had received a patch 16 months earlier, to compromise a telecommunications provider in Canada, officials from that country and the US said Monday. ArsTechnica: "The Cyber Centre is aware of malicious cyber activities currently targeting Canadian telecommunications companies," officials for the center, the Canadian government's primary cyber security agency, said in a statement. "The responsible actors are almost certainly PRC state-sponsored actors, specifically Salt Typhoon." The FBI issued its own nearly identical statement.

Salt Typhoon is the name researchers and government officials use to track one of several discreet groups known to hack nations all over the world on behalf of the People's Republic of China. In October 2023, researchers disclosed that hackers had backdoored more than 10,000 Cisco devices by exploiting CVE-2023-20198, a vulnerability with a maximum severity rating of 10. Any switch, router, or wireless LAN controller running Cisco's iOS XE that had the HTTP or HTTPS server feature enabled and exposed to the Internet was vulnerable. Cisco released a security patch about a week after security firm VulnCheck published its report.

"The carbon cost of asking an artificial intelligence model a single text question can be measured in grams of CO2..." writes the Washington Post. And while an individual's impact may be low, what about the collective impact of all users?

"A Google search takes about 10 times less energy than a ChatGPT query, according to a 2024 analysis from Goldman Sachs — although that may change as Google makes AI responses a bigger part of search." For now, a determined user can avoid prompting Google's default AI-generated summaries by switching over to the "web" search tab, which is one of the options alongside images and news. Adding "-ai" to the end of a search query also seems to work. Other search engines, including DuckDuckGo, give you the option to turn off AI summaries....

Using AI doesn't just mean going to a chatbot and typing in a question. You're also using AI every time an algorithm organizes your social media feed, recommends a song or filters your spam email... [T]here's not much you can do about it other than using the internet less. It's up to the companies that are integrating AI into every aspect of our digital lives to find ways to do it with less energy and damage to the planet.
More points from the article:

• Two researchers tested the performance of 14 AI language models, and found larger models gave more accurate answers, "but used several times more energy than smaller models."

• The data centers hosting AI models "can devour more electricity than entire cities."

• "Keeping those computers cool uses freshwater — about one bottle's worth for every 100 words of text ChatGPT generates."

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from The Guardian: The BBC is threatening legal action against Perplexity AI, in the corporation's first move to protect its content from being scraped without permission to build artificial intelligence technology. The corporation has sent a letter to Aravind Srinivas, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based startup, saying it has gathered evidence that Perplexity's model was "trained using BBC content." The letter, first reported by the Financial Times, threatens an injunction against Perplexity unless it stops scraping all BBC content to train its AI models, and deletes any copies of the broadcaster's material it holds unless it provides "a proposal for financial compensation."

The legal threat comes weeks after Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, and the boss of Sky both criticised proposals being considered by the government that could let tech companies use copyright-protected work without permission. "If we currently drift in the way we are doing now we will be in crisis," Davie said, speaking at the Enders conference. "We need to make quick decisions now around areas like ... protection of IP. We need to protect our national intellectual property, that is where the value is. What do I need? IP protection; come on, let's get on with it." "Perplexity's tool [which allows users to choose between different AI models] directly competes with the BBC's own services, circumventing the need for users to access those services," the corporation said.

Perplexity told the FT that the BBC's claims were "manipulative and opportunistic" and that it had a "fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Large-scale attacks designed to bring down Internet services by sending them more traffic than they can process keep getting bigger, with the largest one yet, measured at 7.3 terabits per second, being reported Friday by Internet security and performance provider Cloudflare. The 7.3Tbps attack amounted to 37.4 terabytes of junk traffic that hit the target in just 45 seconds. That's an almost incomprehensible amount of data, equivalent to more than 9,300 full-length HD movies or 7,500 hours of HD streaming content in well under a minute.

Cloudflare said the attackers "carpet bombed" an average of nearly 22,000 destination ports of a single IP address belonging to the target, identified only as a Cloudflare customer. A total of 34,500 ports were targeted, indicating the thoroughness and well-engineered nature of the attack. [...] Cloudflare said the record DDoS exploited various reflection or amplification vectors, including the previously mentioned Network Time Protocol; the Quote of the Day Protocol, which listens on UDP port 17 and responds with a short quote or message; the Echo Protocol, which responds with the same data it receives; and Portmapper services used identify resources available to applications connecting through the Remote Procedure Call. Cloudflare said the attack was also delivered through one or more Mirai-based botnets. Such botnets are typically made up of home and small office routers, web cameras, and other Internet of Things devices that have been compromised.

Iranian state television has instructed residents to delete WhatsApp from their smartphones, claiming the messaging platform gathers user information to share with Israel.

The local media provided no evidence supporting these allegations but additionally encouraged residents to avoid other "location-based" apps. WhatsApp has disputed the claims, with a spokesperson telling Time magazine the Meta-owned platform uses end-to-end encryption and does not track precise locations, keep messaging logs, or provide bulk information to governments.

The episode comes at a time when Iran is simultaneously experiencing a "near-total national Internet blackout," according to NetBlock, an internet governance monitoring organization. The disruption follows earlier partial outages amid escalating military tensions with Israel after days of missile strikes between the countries.

Further reading, from earlier this week: Iran Bans Officials From Using Internet-Connected Devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tech support scammers have devised a method to inject their fake phone numbers into webpages when a target's web browser visits official sites for Apple, PayPal, Netflix, and other companies. The ruse, outlined in a post on Wednesday from security firm Malwarebytes, threatens to trick users into calling the malicious numbers even when they think they're taking measures to prevent falling for such scams. One of the more common pieces of security advice is to carefully scrutinize the address bar of a browser to ensure it's pointing to an organization's official website. The ongoing scam is able to bypass such checks.

The unknown actors behind the scam begin by buying Google ads that appear at the top of search results for Microsoft, Apple, HP, PayPal, Netflix, and other sites. While Google displays only the scheme and host name of the site the ad links to (for instance, https://www.microsoft.com/ the ad appends parameters to the path to the right of that address. When a target clicks on the ad, it opens a page on the official site. The appended parameters then inject fake phone numbers into the page the target sees.

Google requires ads to display the official domain they link to, but the company allows parameters to be added to the right of it that aren't visible. The scammers are taking advantage of this by adding strings to the right of the hostname. The parameters aren't displayed in the Google ad, so a target has no obvious reason to suspect anything is amiss. When clicked on, the ad leads to the correct hostname. The appended parameters, however, inject a fake phone number into the webpage the target sees. The technique works on most browsers and against most websites. Malwarebytes.com was among the sites affected until recently, when the site began filtering out the malicious parameters.

The UK Information Commissioner's Office has issued its first guidance demanding manufacturers of air fryers, smart speakers, fertility trackers, and smart TVs respect users' privacy rights after reports of excessive data collection in homes.

The regulator requires companies to ensure data security, provide transparency to consumers, and regularly delete collected information. Stephen Almond, the ICO's executive director for regulatory risk, said smart products know who users live with, their music preferences, and medication details. The guidance addresses "internet of things" devices, including fertility trackers that record menstrual dates and body temperature before sending data to manufacturer servers.

Additionally, smart speakers that monitor family members and visitors must allow users to configure settings that minimize personal information collection. The ICO warned manufacturers it stands ready to take enforcement action in the event of noncompliance.

In response to escalating tensions with Israel, Iran has begun throttling internet access, with plans to disconnect from the global internet entirely to prevent Israeli cyberattacks. The Iranian government also urges citizens to delete WhatsApp -- one of the country's most popular messaging platforms -- claiming without evidence that the Meta-owned app has been weaponed by Israel to spy on its users. (WhatsApp vehemently denied those claims in a statement to the Associated Press.) Telegram is also said to be blocked as well. The Verge reports: The announcements come amidst the escalating war between Iran and Israel, which broke out after Israel attacked the country on June 12th, and a rise in reported internet outages. Civilians have claimed that they've been unable to access basic but critical telecommunications services, such as messaging apps, maps, and sometimes the internet itself. Cloudflare reported that two major Iranian cellular carriers effectively went offline on Tuesday, and The New York Times reports that even VPNs, which Iranians frequently use to access banned sites like Facebook and Instagram, have become increasingly harder to access. [...]

Israel's role in the cyber outages has not been officially confirmed, but independent analysts at NetBlocks noticed a significant reduction of internet traffic originating from Iran on Tuesday, starting at 5:30 PM local time. According to Tasnim, a news network affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iranians will still have access to the country's state-operated national internet service, though two Iranian officials told the Times that the internal bandwidth could be reduced by up to 80 percent.

President Trump will extend the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by another 90 days, marking the third extension since taking office. The extension aims to prevent a TikTok ban while negotiations with potential buyers like Oracle and Project Liberty continue. CNBC reports: "President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. "As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure."

ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok's U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump's second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark. Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Iran's cybersecurity authority has banned officials from using devices that connect to the internet, apparently fearing being tracked or hacked by Israel. According to the state-linked Fars news agency, Iranian officials and their bodyguards have been told they are not allowed to use any equipment that connects to public internet or telecommunications networks.

Google Cloud has attributed last week's widespread outage to a flawed code update in its Service Control system that triggered a global crash loop due to missing error handling and lack of feature flag protection. The Register reports: Google's explanation of the incident opens by informing readers that its APIs, and Google Cloud's, are served through our Google API management and control planes." Those two planes are distributed regionally and "are responsible for ensuring each API request that comes in is authorized, has the policy and appropriate checks (like quota) to meet their endpoints." The core binary that is part of this policy check system is known as "Service Control."

On May 29, Google added a new feature to Service Control, to enable "additional quota policy checks." "This code change and binary release went through our region by region rollout, but the code path that failed was never exercised during this rollout due to needing a policy change that would trigger the code," Google's incident report explains. The search monopolist appears to have had concerns about this change as it "came with a red-button to turn off that particular policy serving path." But the change "did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected. Without the appropriate error handling, the null pointer caused the binary to crash."

Google uses feature flags to catch issues in its code. "If this had been flag protected, the issue would have been caught in staging." That unprotected code ran inside Google until June 12th, when the company changed a policy that contained "unintended blank fields." Here's what happened next: "Service Control, then regionally exercised quota checks on policies in each regional datastore. This pulled in blank fields for this respective policy change and exercised the code path that hit the null pointer causing the binaries to go into a crash loop. This occurred globally given each regional deployment."

Google's post states that its Site Reliability Engineering team saw and started triaging the incident within two minutes, identified the root cause within 10 minutes, and was able to commence recovery within 40 minutes. But in some larger Google Cloud regions, "as Service Control tasks restarted, it created a herd effect on the underlying infrastructure it depends on ... overloading the infrastructure." Service Control wasn't built to handle this, which is why it took almost three hours to resolve the issue in its larger regions. The teams running Google products that went down due to this mess then had to perform their own recovery chores. Going forward, Google has promised a couple of operational changes to prevent this mistake from happening again: "We will improve our external communications, both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues, manage their systems and help their customers. We'll ensure our monitoring and communication infrastructure remains operational to serve customers even when Google Cloud and our primary monitoring products are down, ensuring business continuity."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Subscribers in Southern California of Spectrum's Internet service experienced outages over the weekend following what company officials said was an attempted theft of copper lines located in Van Nuys, a suburb located 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The people behind the incident thought they were targeting copper lines, the officials wrote in a statement Sunday. Instead, they cut into fiber optic cables. The cuts caused service disruptions for subscribers in Van Nuys and surrounding areas. Spectrum has since restored service and is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of the people responsible. Spectrum will also credit affected customers one day of service on their next bill.

"Criminal acts of network vandalism have become an issue affecting the entire telecommunications industry, not just Spectrum, largely due to the increase in the price of precious metals," the officials wrote in a statement issued Sunday. "These acts of vandalism are not only a crime, but also affect our customers, local businesses and potentially emergency services. Spectrum's fiber lines do not include any copper." Outage information service Downdetector showed that thousands of subscribers in and around Van Nuys reported outages starting a little before noon on Sunday. Within about 12 hours, the complaint levels returned to normal. Spectrum officials told the Los Angeles Times that personnel had to splice thousands of fiber lines to restore service to affected subscribers.

KDE isn't the only organization reaching out to " as Microsoft prepares to end support for Windows 10.

"Now, The Document Foundation, maker of LibreOffice, has also joined in to support the Endof10 initiative," reports the tech blog Neowin: The foundation writes: "You don't have to follow Microsoft's upgrade path. There is a better option that puts control back in the hands of users, institutions, and public bodies: Linux and LibreOffice. Together, these two programmes offer a powerful, privacy-friendly and future-proof alternative to the Windows + Microsoft 365 ecosystem."

It further adds the "real costs" of upgrading to Windows 11 as it writes:

"The move to Windows 11 isn't just about security updates. It increases dependence on Microsoft through aggressive cloud integration, forcing users to adopt Microsoft accounts and services. It also leads to higher costs due to subscription and licensing models, and reduces control over how your computer works and how your data is managed. Furthermore, new hardware requirements will render millions of perfectly good PCs obsolete.... The end of Windows 10 does not mark the end of choice, but the beginning of a new era. If you are tired of mandatory updates, invasive changes, and being bound by the commercial choices of a single supplier, it is time for a change. Linux and LibreOffice are ready — 2025 is the right year to choose digital freedom!"
The first words on LibreOffice's announcement? "The countdown has begun...."

"People are replacing Google search with artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT," reports the Washington Post.

But that's just the first change, according to a New York-based start-up devoted to watching for content-scraping AI companies with a free analytics product and "ensuring that these intelligent agents pay for the content they consume." Their data from 266 web sites (half run by national or local news organizations) found that "traffic from retrieval bots grew 49% in the first quarter of 2025 from the fourth quarter of 2024," the Post reports. A spokesperson for OpenAI said that referral traffic to publishers from ChatGPT searches may be lower in quantity but that it reflects a stronger user intent compared with casual web browsing.

To capitalize on this shift, websites will need to reorient themselves to AI visitors rather than human ones [said TollBit CEO/co-founder Toshit Panigrahi]. But he also acknowledged that squeezing payment for content when AI companies argue that scraping online data is fair use will be an uphill climb, especially as leading players make their newest AI visitors even harder to identify....

In the past eight months, as chatbots have evolved to incorporate features like web search and "reasoning" to answer more complex queries, traffic for retrieval bots has skyrocketed. It grew 2.5 times as fast as traffic for bots that scrape data for training between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, according to TollBit's report. Panigrahi said TollBit's data may underestimate the magnitude of this change because it doesn't reflect bots that AI companies send out on behalf of AI "agents" that can complete tasks on a user's behalf, like ordering takeout from DoorDash. The start-up's findings also add a dimension to mounting evidence that the modern internet — optimized for Google search results and social media algorithms — will have to be restructured as the popularity of AI answers grows. "To think of it as, 'Well, I'm optimizing my search for humans' is missing out on a big opportunity," he said.

Installing TollBit's analytics platform is free for news publishers, and the company has more than 2,000 clients, many of which are struggling with these seismic changes, according to data in the report. Although news publishers and other websites can implement blockers to prevent various AI bots from scraping their content, TollBit found that more than 26 million AI scrapes bypassed those blockers in March alone. Some AI companies claim bots for AI agents don't need to follow bot instructions because they are acting on behalf of a user.
The Post also got this comment from the chief operating officer for the media company Time, which successfully negotiated content licensing deals with OpenAI and Perplexity.

"The vast majority of the AI bots out there absolutely are not sourcing the content through any kind of paid mechanism... There is a very, very long way to go."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Since 2022, the U.S. has tightened the noose around the sale of high-end AI chips and other technology to China overnational-security concerns. Yet Chinese companies have made advances using workarounds. In some cases, Chinese AI developers have been able to substitute domestic chips for the American ones. Another workaround is to smuggle AI hardware into China through third countries. But people in the industry say that has become more difficult in recent months, in part because of U.S. pressure. That is pushing Chinese companies to try a further option: bringing their data outside China so they can use American AI chips in places such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East (source paywalled; alternative source). The maneuvers are testing the limits of U.S. restrictions. "This was something we were consistently concerned about," said Thea Kendler, who was in charge of export controls at the Commerce Department in the Biden administration, referring to Chinese companies remotely accessing advanced American AI chips. Layers of intermediaries typically separate the Chinese users of American AI chips from the U.S. companies -- led by Nvidia -- that make them. That leaves it opaque whether anyone is violating U.S. rules or guidance. [...]

At the Chinese AI developer, the Malaysia game plans take months of preparation, say people involved in them. Engineers decided it would be fastest to fly physical hard drives with data into the country, since transferring huge volumes of data over the internet could take months. Before traveling, the company's engineers in China spent more than eight weeks optimizing the data sets and adjusting the AI training program, knowing it would be hard to make major tweaks once the data was out of the country. The Chinese engineers had turned to the same Malaysian data center last July, working through a Singaporean subsidiary. As Nvidia and its vendors began to conduct stricter audits on the end users of AI chips, the Chinese company was asked by the Malaysian data center late last year to work through a Malaysian entity, which the companies thought might trigger less scrutiny.

The Chinese company registered an entity in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital, listing three Malaysian citizens as directors and an offshore holding company as its parent, according to a corporate registry document. To avoid raising suspicions at Malaysian customs, the Chinese engineers packed their hard drives into four different suitcases. Last year, they traveled with the hard drives bundled into one piece of luggage. They returned to China recently with the results -- several hundred gigabytes of data, including model parameters that guide the AI system's output. The procedure, while cumbersome, avoided having to bring hardware such as chips or servers into China. That is getting more difficult because authorities in Southeast Asia are cracking down on transshipments through the region into China.

Multiple popular services -- including Google, Google Cloud, AWS, Spotify, Discord, Cloudflare, Google Nest, Azure, Box and Shopify -- are experiencing at least a partial outage globally that began around 2:25pm ET Friday, according to user complaints with reports flooding in across social media and outage tracking sites. Cloudflare has confirmed ongoing issues that started within the past hour. It remains unclear what prompted the outage.

More details to follow.

A coordinated spam operation has infiltrated abandoned subdomains belonging to major institutions including Nvidia, Stanford University, NPR, and the U.S. government's vaccines.gov site, flooding them with AI-generated content that subsequently appears in search results and Google's AI Overview feature.

The scheme, reports 404 Media, posted over 62,000 articles on Nvidia's events.nsv.nvidia.com subdomain before the company took it offline within two hours of being contacted by reporters. The spam articles, which included explicit gaming content and local business recommendations, used identical layouts and a fake byline called "Ashley" across all compromised sites. Each targeted domain operates under different names -- "AceNet Hub" on Stanford's site, "Form Generation Hub" on NPR, and "Seymore Insights" on vaccines.gov -- but all redirect traffic to a marketing spam page. The operation exploits search engines' trust in institutional domains, with Google's AI Overview already serving the fabricated content as factual information to users searching for local businesses.