Waymo, a subsidiary of Google's parent Alphabet, has taken legal action against alleged vandals targeting its self-driving taxi fleet in San Francisco, according to court documents. The company, which operates ride-hailing services in several U.S. cities, has filed two lawsuits seeking substantial damages for incidents that reportedly resulted in extensive damage to vehicle tires and bodywork, Wired reported Monday.

Verizon reported a significant loss of wireless subscribers in the second quarter, with its consumer business shedding 624,000 prepaid customers, largely due to the expiration of the federal Affordable Connectivity Program in May.

The telecom giant attributed over half of these losses to the end of the COVID-era internet subsidy that had previously supported 23 million low-income households across the United States. Despite the subscriber exodus, Verizon managed to add 148,000 net monthly bill-paying wireless phone subscribers during the period.

Luxury carmaker Porsche expects the transition to electric vehicles to take longer than it thought, it said on Monday, having previously said its aim was for 80% of sales to be all-electric by 2030. From a report: It has now watered down that goal by tying it explicitly to customer demand and developments in the electromobility sector, saying in a statement only that it could now deliver on the 80% target if those factors warrant it. "The transition to electric cars is taking longer than we thought five years ago," Porsche said in a statement. "Our product strategy is set up such that we could deliver over 80% of our vehicles as all electric in 2030 - dependent on customer demand and the development of electromobility."

An amateur photographer has documented his experience with at-home color film development and digitization. The process, initially undertaken for cost savings, involves a complex setup including a changing bag, developing tank, chemicals, and a DSLR scanning system, the author argues. Key challenges reported include film loading in darkness and achieving consistent image quality. Despite mixed results, the hobbyist -- Jason Koebler, an editor of 404 Media, a new publication that we have linked to quite a few times in recent months -- nonetheless cites satisfaction with the artistic and analog aspects of the process. He concludes: I have obviously (obviously!) not saved any money yet by doing this myself at home. I have spent many hundreds of dollars to develop about 20 rolls of film at home, and have achieved results that I am both amazed by and also frustrated with. The amazement comes from the fact that any of this actually works at all, and the knowledge that I am trying my best and having fun. The frustration comes from the blurry photos. It's all part of the process, I guess.

Intel continues to grapple with the mystery surrounding crashes in its latest 13th- and 14th-gen Core desktop processors, but it's refuting claims that the issue extends to its mobile chips. From a report: Matthew Cassells, the founder of Alderon Games and developer of Path of Titans, claimed on Reddit that the company had noted crashes on Intel's mobile processors. "Yes we have several laptops that have failed with the same crashes," he wrote. "It's just slightly more rare then [sic] the desktop CPU faults." Previously, Alderon had issued a statement blaming "thousands of crashes," as noted by its own crash reports on the Intel CPUs. It also claimed it would switch its server infrastructure to chips made by AMD.

Intel's problem with its latest Core chips has persisted since January, but simmered for months while developers began pointing fingers and PC makers started working on solutions. To date, the most bulletproof solution has been simply to swap out an affected part for a replacement, which Intel has been willing to do. Intel has also issued guidance as to what power-profile settings users and board makers should use while it works to solve the problem. An Intel representative said Friday via e-mail that Intel still remains in the dark about the root cause of the issue. However, Intel claims that its mobile processors aren't being affected.

A Microsoft spokesman says that a 2009 European Commission agreement prevents the company from restricting third-party access to Windows' core functions, shedding light on factors contributing to Friday's widespread outage that affected millions of computers globally. The disruption, which caused the infamous "blue screen of death" on Windows machines across various industries, originated from a faulty update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The incident highlighted the vulnerability of Microsoft's open ecosystem, mandated by the EU agreement, which requires the tech giant to provide external security software developers the same level of system access as its own products. This policy stands in stark contrast to more closed systems like Apple's.

8.5 million Windows devices were ultimately affected by the Crowdstrike outage, according to figures from Microsoft cited by CNN.

And now an anonymous Slashdot reader shares CNN's report on the ramifications: What one cybersecurity expert said appears to be the "largest IT outage in history" led to the cancellation of more than 5,000 commercial airline flights worldwide and disrupted businesses from retail sales to package deliveries to procedures at hospitals, costing revenue and staff time and productivity... While CrowdStrike has apologized, it has not mentioned whether or not it intends to provide compensation to affected customers. And when asked by CNN about whether it plans to provide compensation, its response did not address that question. Experts say they expect that there will be demands for remuneration and very possibly lawsuits.

"If you're a lawyer for CrowdStrike, you're probably not going to enjoy the rest of your summer," said Dan Ives, a tech analyst for Wedbush Securities....

But there could be legal protections for CrowdStrike in its customer contracts to shield it from liability, according to one expert. "I would guess that the contracts protect them," said James Lewis, researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies...

It's also not clear how many customers CrowdStrike might lose because of Friday. Wedbush Securities' Ives estimates less than 5% of its customers might go elsewhere. "They're such an entrenched player, to move away from CrowdStrike would be a gamble," he said. It will be difficult, and not without additional costs, for many customers to switch from CrowdStrike to a competitor. But the real hit to CrowdStrike could be reputational damage that will make it difficult to win new customers... [E]ven if customers are understanding, it's likely that CrowdStrike's rivals will be seeking to use Friday's events to try to lure them away.
One final note from CNN. Patrick Anderson, CEO of a Michigan research firm called the Anderson Economic Group, "added that the costs could be particularly significant for airlines, due to lost revenue from canceled flights and excess labor and fuel costs for the planes that did fly but faced significant delays."

See also: Third Day of 1,000+ Cancelled Flights, Just in the US, After Crowdstrike Outage .

The BBC reports that "while most of the world was grappling with the blue screen of death on Friday," there was one country that managed to escape largely unscathed: China. The reason is actually quite simple: CrowdStrike is hardly used there. Very few organisations will buy software from an American firm that, in the past, has been vocal about the cyber-security threat posed by Beijing. Additionally, China is not as reliant on Microsoft as the rest of the world. Domestic companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei are the dominant cloud providers.

So reports of outages in China, when they did come, were mainly at foreign firms or organisations. On Chinese social media sites, for example, some users complained they were not able to check into international chain hotels such as Sheraton, Marriott and Hyatt in Chinese cities. Over recent years, government organisations, businesses and infrastructure operators have increasingly been replacing foreign IT systems with domestic ones. Some analysts like to call this parallel network the "splinternet".

"It's a testament to China's strategic handling of foreign tech operations," says Josh Kennedy White, a cybersecurity expert based in Singapore. "Microsoft operates in China through a local partner, 21Vianet, which manages its services independently of its global infrastructure. This setup insulates China's essential services — like banking and aviation — from global disruptions."
"Beijing sees avoiding reliance on foreign systems as a way of shoring up national security."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the article.

In April the U.S. Space Force began testing "a new ground-based satellite jamming weapon to help keep U.S. military personnel safe from potential 'space-enabled' attacks" (according to a report from Space.com). The weapon was "designed to deny, degrade, or disrupt communications with satellites overhead, typically through overloading specific portions of the electromagnetic spectrum with interference," according to the article, with the miitary describing it as a small form-factor system "designed to be fielded in large numbers at low-cost and operated remotely" and "provide counterspace electronic warfare capability to all of the new Space Force components globally."

And now, Bloomberg reports that the U.S. is about to deploy them: The devices aren't meant to protect U.S. satellites from Chinese or Russian jamming but "to responsibly counter adversary satellite communications capabilities that enable attacks," the Space Force said in a statement to Bloomberg News. The Pentagon strives — on the rare occasions when it discusses such space capabilities — to distinguish its emerging satellite-jamming technology as purely defensive and narrowly focused. That's as opposed to a nuclear weapon the U.S. says Russia is developing that could create high-altitude electromagnetic pulses that would take out satellites and disrupt entire communications networks.

The first 11 of 24 Remote Modular Terminal jammers will be deployed in several months, and all of them could be in place by Dec. 31 at undisclosed locations, according to the Space Force statement... The new terminals augment a much larger jamming weapon called the Counter Communications System that's already deployed and a mid-sized one called Meadowlands "by providing the ability to have a proliferated, remotely controlled and relatively relocatable capability," the Space Force said. The Meadowlands system has encountered technical challenges that have delayed its delivery until at least October, about two years later than planned.

China has "hundreds and hundreds of satellites on orbit designed to find, fix, track, target and yes, potentially engage, US and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific," General Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command, said Wednesday at the annual Aspen Security Forum. "So we've got to understand that and know what it means for our forces."
Bloomberg also got this comment from the chief director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation (which produces reports on counterspace weapons). The new U.S. Space Force jamming weapons are "reversible, temporary, non-escalatory and allow for plausible deniability in terms of who the instigator is."

For the third straight day, "More than 1,000 US flights have been," reports CNN, "as airlines struggle to recover from a global tech outage that left thousands of passengers stranded at airports." More than 1,200 flights into, within or out of the United States were canceled by early Sunday afternoon, while more than 5,000 U.S. flights were delayed, according to the tracking website FlightAware.com... On Saturday, 2,136 US flights were canceled, and more than 21,300 flights were delayed...
USA Today notes that Friday several U.S. airlines issued ground stops (according to America's Federal Aviation Administration) "which caused a domino effect into Sunday."

They note that "most of the cancellations and delays Sunday are likely to be caused by airline crews and equipment being out of place."

The Verge reports that for machines that aren't automatically receiving Crowdstrike's newly-released software fix, Microsoft has released a recovery tool that creates a bootable USB drive. Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file. Microsoft's recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly. This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows. If a disk is protected by BitLocker encryption, the tool will prompt for the BitLocker recovery key and then continue to fix the CrowdStrike update.

Last year two different tourists — following GPS directions — drove their cars straight into the same harbor in Hawaii.

And then last weekend — at the same harbor — it happened again. "This time it was different," reports a local news station. "The driver was a local..." Multiple witnesses say the Prius was actually parked at the top of the ramp and that an enforcement officer with the Department of Land and Natural Resources told the owner she had to move it. Witnesses also said that the woman had an issue getting the car started. Eventually, she was able to start the vehicle and called out that the car was running.

Then the car went down the ramp....
More from Hawaii News Now: This follows another viral incident, captured on video in May of last year, showing another SUV sinking in the water with its passengers inside. "The GPS led them into the water," said one witness. Then, a few weeks later, it happened again. Witnesses say the driver, also an out-of-state visitor, was following their GPS directions.

"The first time I heard it, the thought in my head was, you got to be joking," said Hawaii County Mayor Mitch Roth. "The third was — are you serious? This is just another form of people not paying attention to what they're doing."
The news outlet reached out to the Department of Land and Natural Resources — and specifically to its Division of Boating & Ocean Recreation, to ask whether the harbor's boat ramp had adequate lighting and signage.

They responded that a boat ramp descending into the waters of the Pacific ocean is "hard to miss" — and called the recent incidents "operator error."

Meanwhile in Wyoming, SFGate reports that "an SUV with five people inside plunged about 9 feet deep into a 105-degree geyser at Yellowstone National Park after it 'inadvertently drove off the roadway' last Thursday, National Park Service officials said."

Who wrote the code for Windows' notorious "Blue Screen of Death? It's "been a source of some contention," writes SFGate: A Microsoft developer blog post from Raymond Chen in 2014 said that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1. That very benign post led to countless stories from tech media claiming Ballmer was the inventor of the "Blue Screen of Death." That, in turn, prompted a follow-up developer blog post from Chen titled "Steve Ballmer did not write the text for the blue screen of death...."

Chen then later tried to claim he was responsible for the "Blue Screen of Death," saying he coded it into Windows 95. Problem is, it already existed in previous iterations of Windows, and 95 simply removed it. Chen added it back in, which he sort of cops to, saying: "And I'm the one who wrote it. Or at least modified it last." No one challenged Chen's 2014 self-attribution, until 2021, when former Microsoft developer Dave Plummer stepped in. According to Plummer, the "Blue Screen of Death" was actually the work of Microsoft developer John Vert, whom logs revealed to be the father of the modern Windows blue screen way back in version 3.1.
Plummer spoke directly with Vert, according to Vert, who'd remembered that he got the idea because there was already a blue screen with white text in both his machine at the time (a MIPS RISC box) and this text editor (SlickEdit)...

Slashdot reader Thelasko shared Friday's article from Digital Trends: Nearly every flight in the U.S. is grounded right now following a CrowdStrike system update error that's affecting everything from travel to mobile ordering at Starbucks — but not Southwest Airlines flights. Southwest is still flying high, unaffected by the outage that's plaguing the world today, and that's apparently because it's using Windows 3.1.

Yes, Windows 3.1 — an operating system that is 32 years old. Southwest, along with UPS and FedEx, haven't had any issues with the CrowdStrike outage. In responses to CNN, Delta, American, Spirit, Frontier, United, and Allegiant all said they were having issues, but Southwest told the outlet that its operations are going off without a hitch. Some are attributing that to Windows 3.1. Major portions of Southwest's systems are reportedly built on Windows 95 and Windows 3.1...
UPDATE: Reached for comment, Southwest "would not confirm" that's it's using Windows 3.1, reports SFGate. But they did get this quote from an airline analyst:

âoeWe believe that Southwestâ(TM)s older technology kept it somewhat immune from the issues affecting other airlines today."

"Many people over the past few days have been lashing out at Mozilla," writes the blog Its FOSS, "for enabling Privacy-Preserving Attribution by default on Firefox 128, and the lack of publicity surrounding its introduction."

Mozilla responded that the feature will only run "on a few sites in the U.S. under strict supervision" — adding that users can disable it at any time ("because this is a test"), and that it's only even enabled if telemetry is also enabled.

And they also emphasize that it's "not tracking." The way it works is there's an "aggregation service" that can periodically send advertisers a summary of ad-related actions — again, aggregated data, from a mass of many other users. (And Mozilla says that aggregated summary even includes "noise that provides differential privacy.") This Privacy-Preserving Attribution concept "does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone... Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising."

More from It's FOSS: Even though Mozilla mentioned that PPA would be enabled by default on Firefox 128 in a few of its past blog posts, they failed to communicate this decision clearly, to a wider audience... In response to the public outcry, Firefox CTO, Bobby Holley, had to step in to clarify what was going on.

He started with how the internet has become a massive cesspool of surveillance, and doing something about it was the primary reason many people are part of Mozilla. He then expanded on their approach with Firefox, which, historically speaking, has been to ship a browser with anti-tracking features baked in to tackle the most common surveillance techniques. But, there were two limitations with this approach. One was that advertisers would try to bypass these countermeasures. The second, most users just accept the default options that they are shown...

Bas Schouten, Principal Software Engineer at Mozilla, made it clear at the end of a heated Mastodon thread that "[opt-in features are] making privacy a privilege for the people that work to inform and educate themselves on the topic. People shouldn't need to do that, everyone deserves a more private browser. Privacy features, in Firefox, are not meant to be opt-in. They need to be the default.

"If you are 'completely anti-ads' (i.e. even if their implementation is private), you probably use an ad blocker. So are unaffected by this."
This has already provoked a discussion among Slashdot readers. "It doesn't seem that evil to me," argues Slashdot reader geekprime. "Seems like the elimination of cross site cookies is a privacy enhancing idea." (They cite Mozilla's statement that their goal is "to inform an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering sites a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, we hope to achieve a significant reduction in this harmful practice across the web.")

But Slashdot reader TheNameOfNick disagrees. "How realistic is the part where advertisers stop tracking you because they get less information from the browser maker...?"

Mozilla has provided simple instructions for disabling the feature:

• Click the menu button and select Settings.
• In the Privacy & Security panel, find the Website Advertising Preferences section.
• Uncheck the box labeled Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.

A solar superstorm in May caused thousands of satellites to simultaneously maneuver to maintain altitude due to the thickening of the upper atmosphere, creating potential collision hazards as existing prediction systems struggled to cope. Space.com reports: According to a pre-print paper published on the online repository arXiv on June 12, satellites and space debris objects in low Earth orbit -- the region of space up to an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) -- were sinking toward the planet at the speed of 590 feet (180 meters) per day during the four-day storm. To make up for the loss of altitude, thousands of spacecraft began firing their thrusters at the same time to climb back up. That mass movement, the authors of the paper point out, could have led to dangerous situations because collision avoidance systems didn't have time to calculate the satellites' changing paths.

The solar storm that battered Earth from May 7 to 10 reached the intensity of G5, the highest level on the five-step scale used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess the strength of solar storms. It was the strongest solar storm to hit Earth since 2003. The authors of the paper, however, pointed out that the environment around the planet has changed profoundly since that time. While only a few hundred satellites were orbiting Earth twenty years ago, there are thousands today. The authors of the paper put the number of "active payloads at [low Earth orbit]" at 10,000. [...] The new paper points out that space weather forecasts ahead of the May storm failed to accurately predict the duration and intensity of the event, making satellite collision predictions nearly impossible.

On the upside, the storm helped to clear out some junk as defunct satellites and debris fragments spiraled deeper into the atmosphere. The authors of the report estimate that thousands of space debris objects lost several kilometers in altitude during the storm. More powerful solar storms can be expected in the coming months as the peak of the current solar cycle -- the 11-year ebb and flow in the number of sunspots, solar flares and eruptions -- is expected in late 2024 and early 2025. The paper can be found here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For years, the people building powerful artificial intelligence systems have used enormous troves of text, images and videos pulled from the internet to train their models. Now, that data is drying up. Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training A.I. models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an M.I.T.-led research group. The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used A.I. training data sets, discovered an "emerging crisis in consent," as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.

The researchers estimate that in the three data sets -- called C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma -- 5 percent of all data, and 25 percent of data from the highest-quality sources, has been restricted. Those restrictions are set up through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a decades-old method for website owners to prevent automated bots from crawling their pages using a file called robots.txt. The study also found that as much as 45 percent of the data in one set, C4, had been restricted by websites' terms of service. "We're seeing a rapid decline in consent to use data across the web that will have ramifications not just for A.I. companies, but for researchers, academics and noncommercial entities," said Shayne Longpre, the study's lead author, in an interview.

Nigeria fined Meta for $220 million on Friday, alleging the tech giant violated the country's local consumer, data protection and privacy laws. Reuters reports: Nigeria's Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) said Meta appropriated the data of Nigerian users on its platforms without their consent, abused its market dominance by forcing exploitative privacy policies on users, and meted out discriminatory and disparate treatment on Nigerians, compared with other jurisdictions with similar regulations. FCCPC chief Adamu Abdullahi said the investigations were jointly held with Nigeria's Data Protection Commission and spanned over 38 months. The investigations found Meta policies don't allow users the option or opportunity to self-determine or withhold consent to the gathering, use, and sharing of personal data, Abdullahi said.

"The totality of the investigation has concluded that Meta over the protracted period of time has engaged in conduct that constituted multiple and repeated, as well as continuing infringements... particularly, but not limited to abusive, and invasive practices against data subjects in Nigeria," Abdullahi said. "Being satisfied with the significant evidence on the record, and that Meta has been provided every opportunity to articulate any position, representations, refutations, explanations or defences of their conduct, the Commission have now entered a final order and issued a penalty against Meta," Abdullahi said. The final order mandates steps and actions Meta must take to comply with local laws, Abdullahi said.

Bangladesh is experiencing a "near-total" nationwide internet shutdown amid government efforts to control widespread student protests against the country's quota system for government jobs. The country's quota system requires a third of government jobs be reserved for relatives of veterans who had fought for independence from Pakistan.

According to Reuters, the protests "have opened old and sensitive political fault lines between those who fought for Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971 and those accused of collaborating with Islamabad." Analysts say the protests have also been "fueled by high unemployment among young people" and "wider economic woes, such as high inflation and shrinking reserves of foreign exchange." Engadget reports on the internet disruptions: To control the situation, Bangladeshi authorities shut down internet and phone access throughout the country, a common practice in South Asia to prevent the spread of rumors and misinformation and exercise state control. NetBlocks, a global internet monitor that works on digital rights analyzed live network data that showed that Bangladesh was in the middle of a "near-total national internet shutdown." [...]

Bangladesh has frequently blacked out the internet to crack down on political opposition and activists. At the end of 2023, research tool CIVICUS Monitor, which provides data on the state of civil society and freedoms in nearly 200 countries, downgraded Bangladesh's civic space to "closed," its lowest possible rating, after the country imposed six internet shutdowns the previous year. That made Bangladesh the fifth-largest perpetrator of internet shutdowns in 2022, Access Now said.

The country's telecom regulator had pledged to keep internet access on through Bangladesh's general elections at the beginning of 2024, but that electoral period is now over. Despite the pledge, Bangladesh blocked access to news websites during its elections.

AMD has introduced its latest Ryzen AI chips, built on the new Zen 5 architecture, in an ambitious attempt to compete with Apple's dominant MacBook processors. During a recent two-day event in Los Angeles, the company made bold claims about outperforming Apple's M3 and M3 Pro chips in various tasks including multitasking, image processing, and gaming, though these assertions remain unverified due to limited demonstrations and benchmarks provided at the event, The Verge reports. The report adds: At that event, I heard AMD brag about beating the MacBook more than I've ever heard a company directly target a competitor before. AMD claimed its new Ryzen chip "exceeds the performance of what MacBook Air has to offer in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering, and gaming"; "is 15 percent faster than the M3 Pro" in Cinebench; and is capable of powering up to four displays, "unlike the MacBook Air, which limits you to two displays only." While AMD touted significant improvements in CPU architecture, graphics performance, and AI capabilities, journalists present at the event were unable to fully test or validate these features, leaving many questions unanswered about the chips' real-world performance.

The company's reluctance or inability to showcase certain capabilities, particularly in gaming and AI applications, has raised eyebrows among industry observers, the report adds. The new Ryzen AI chips are scheduled to debut in Asus laptops on July 28th, marking a critical juncture for AMD in the fiercely competitive laptop processor market. As Apple's M-series chips and Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors continue to gain traction in the mobile computing space, the success or failure of AMD's latest offering could have far-reaching implications for the future of x86 architecture in laptops.