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BMW has boldly gone where no car maker should ever have went. Advertisements in cars. The ultimate in distraction for the modern driver. It takes the concept of a vehicle that is fully connected to a whole new level. For now the ad is optional; users must click it for it to display.

BMW have called the video an "optional brand experience" and say it's different to a traditional ad.

"The animation does not automatically play when the vehicle starts. Drivers are presented with a banner in the Control Display and can choose whether they would like to activate the experience," A BMW spokesperson said.

Original Submission

OpenAI Reveals Its Rogue Agent Swarm Went A Little Bit Borg Ahead Of Hugging Face Hack

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/06/openai-reveals-its-rogue-agent-swarm-went-a-little-bit-borg-ahead-of-hugging-face-hack/5283741

The chain of events leading up to OpenAI's agents attacking Hugging Face and other organizations in July began months earlier, and involved agents asking other agents for help, building message boards, and even becoming paranoid that other agents were maliciously trying to trick them, two OpenAI staffers said at the Black Hat infosec conference on Wednesday.

By now, everyone knows the bones of this story: OpenAI models broke out of their testing sandbox, exploited zero-day vulnerabilities to gain access to the open internet, and broke into Hugging Face and other organizations during an ExploitGym security evaluation.

In their Wednesday talk, OpenAI technical staffer Michael Dalton and researcher Eric Wallace provided new details about the security incident including notes that AI agents uploaded to an internal package manager, which were then shared across OpenAI's infrastructure. These notes show the "model's chain of thought...its internal monologue,"  Wallace said.

The duo also revealed that groundwork for the rogue agents hacking into outside services began on May 7, when OpenAI kicked off a training run for an experimental, internal model that has not yet been released.  "What we didn't realize during this process is that there was actually a few impossible or very hard tasks in the training center," Wallace said. 

The tasks instructed the model to complete missing formulas in an Excel workbook that used links to Google Drive. Yet OpenAI blocked the model's internet access so it couldn't reach the cloudy spreadsheets.

"It realized, 'I'm kind of stuck on the task,' but it didn't give up, and we gave it a lot of tokens to work with," Wallace said. 

The model eventually decided to attack JFrog's Artifactory service to gain access to the internet, first attempting (unsuccessfully) to launch a server-side forgery request. This exploit doesn't work, but in the process the model learned it could upload files to Artifactory.

A few days later, OpenAI gave another agent another impossible task, this time finding a protein database file - but the engineers forgot to upload the file into a container for the agent.

"At some point, it gets so stuck and thinks: 'Maybe I could reach out to another agent because maybe somebody else out there has a file?' And then the model realizes that it could communicate by uploading code," Wallace said.

The model did that by writing a file into Artifactory asking for help. 

Over the next couple of days, other agents realize this message board exists on Artifactory and they also start uploading files and sharing information.

"A few days later is when our models found the first actual exploit in our system related to this incident, where they're able to get internet access in ways they didn't intend," Wallace said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Medevac Flight Lost Signal Before Flying Into A Mountain, Killing Everyone Onboard:

While the GPS interference seemingly did not directly cause the crash, it’s apparent that it was the first domino in a chain of events that led to the fatal accident. This raises urgent questions about GPS jamming as reported incidents of GPS interference mount across the world.

This switch meant that the pilots would now primarily fly the plane using instruments in the cockpit instead of looking outside the windows. This is a normal procedure and is what most passenger airliners use during operations. Furthermore, it seems that the pilots have filed for clearance before they took off, as evidenced by their “as filed” clearance to SRR.

Around five minutes after this radio communication, ATC called the military and asked them to stop their GPS jamming activities in the meantime. At 12:07 am, the NTSB said that the Beechcraft’s GPS instruments resumed regular recording. The pilots then called Albuquerque Center a minute after this, saying that they had “a visual on Ruidoso,” the town nearest to SRR, and that they were transitioning to visual flight rules (VFR). This meant that they were moving away from the direct control of the ATC and would navigate and fly using visual cues.

The conditions meant that there was no available illumination to light the ground. It is still unknown what happened next or what the pilots saw (or didn’t see), but the preliminary report says the last recorded information saw the plane climbing from 9,400 feet to 9,823 feet at a ground speed of 150 knots (172 mph). It impacted terrain at about 9,950 feet — some 230 feet below the Capitan Mountains Summit Radio Facility.

Because they could not see that the Capitan Mountains were still between them and their destination, they likely started their descent too early. As soon as the aircraft went below the peak, they would’ve lost visual with the town, and it seemed that the pilots attempted to climb when they realized that there was a massive obstacle in front of them. Unfortunately, it seems that their efforts were too late, especially at their speeds, resulting in a controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accident.

This was compounded by a high workload and high-stress situation. Landings and take-offs, in normal situations, are already quite hectic in the cockpit, which is why pilots practice the sterile cockpit rule, which avoids extraneous communications, at times like these. The loss of GPS signals also added to their stress, as they initially planned for an RNAV approach towards SRR. While this generally uses a combination of radio signals, it seems that their system primarily relied on GPS, which was inoperative at that time.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-desktop-finally-cracks-the-10-market-share-barrier/

Believe it or not, according to StatCounter, a web analytics company that's been tracking end-user operating systems since 1999, desktop Linux has now reached an all-time high of 10.65% in the North American market. Take that, Microsoft! 

But it's important to take StatCounter's numbers with a grain of salt. The firm's numbers are derived from just over a million websites. When someone visits one of its sites, StatCounter records every page view and collects such data as the visitor's browser, operating system, and whether it's from a PC, tablet, or smartphone. However, the company doesn't count traffic from such popular websites as Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia.

Still, even with those caveats, Linux's market share growth has been impressive. The last time I looked at the numbers in 2025, Statcounter only showed a high of just over 5%. Linux doubling its market share in just over a year should get everyone's attention.

If you look closer, you'll also see Chrome OS, which is a Linux distro that uses Google's Chrome web browser for its interface, has a 2.07% share of its own. Add that in, and Linux owns 12.72%. 

I decided to look beyond StatCounter's statistics to see what my preferred data source for operating system numbers, the US federal government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP), had to say.

This site gives a running count of US government website visits and an analysis. On average, there are 1.6 billion sessions over the last 30 days, with millions of users per day. In short, DAP gives a detailed view of what people use without massaging the data. 

DAP Linux desktop market share for the past 30 days (8 August, 2026).

DAP gets its raw data from a Google Analytics account. DAP has open-sourced the code that displays the data on the web, as well as its data-collection code. You can download its data in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format so you can analyze the raw numbers yourself.

When I last looked at DAP's numbers, the Linux desktop had a 5.8% market share. DAP showed a much more modest gain from 0.5% to 6.3%. 

On the other hand, Android, which is also a Linux-based OS, had a 12.1% share, while Chrome OS had a modest 0.6%. Add them together, and you get a 19% end-user Linux share. 

I think we can safely say that Linux is now a significant end-user operating system, and not just something for programmers and nerds.

Back in 2025, I identified five drivers for people switching from Windows to Linux. These were: Microsoft's shift from Windows as a product to Microsoft 365 and cloud services; the increased viability of gaming via Steam and Proton; drastically improved ease of use in mainstream distros; broader hardware support; and rising concern about privacy and data control.

Three other drivers have emerged since then. One is that many companies and users still have perfectly good Windows 10 machines that can't 'upgrade' to Windows 11. ControlUp, a company that would love to help you move to Windows 11, found that about 25% of consumer and business Windows 10 PCs can't be moved to Windows 11. 

StatCounter and DAP's numbers prove this theory. Even though Windows 10 is no longer fully supported, StatCounter's figures suggest the OS still comprises 22.16% of all Windows users. Meanwhile, DAP shows Windows 10 is still the most popular version of Windows at 25% to Windows 11's 14.6%.

Another factor is that many people really, really don't want to move to Windows 11. A UK survey by consumer group Which? in September 2025 found that 26% of respondents intended to use Windows 10 even after updates stopped.

Perhaps the most important reason, though, is one that Ed Bott, ZDNET resident Windows expert, has recently observed: "Windows has become increasingly annoying, not by accident but by design, with monetization as the end goal."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/science/space/an-abandoned-spacex-rocket-crashed-into-the-moon-heres-what-happened/

In January last year, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket with NASA and Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander. The Blue Ghost went on to become the first commercially built lunar vehicle to land on the moon, and the reusable lower stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 landed back on Earth. But the discarded upper stage of the Falcon 9 spent 18 months drifting in space before slamming into the surface of the moon at approximately 2:35 a.m. ET on Wednesday.

NASA, astronomers and other space agencies knew this was coming and have spent weeks preparing to see the rocket's violent descent to the moon's surface. That included tasking the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea's Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter with photographing the impact site before and after the crash to check out the moon's newest crater.

The Falcon 9's upper stage is the size of a five-story building and weighs as much as a heavy-duty pickup truck. NASA believes the resulting crater should be around 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep.

The upper stage of the rocket is believed to have hit the Einstein Crater on the western side of the moon, which is difficult to see from Earth's surface. If you had been watching, it was more likely that you would have seen the giant plume of moon dust after the fact than the actual impact. 

No imagery exists as of the publishing of this article. NASA says it could take a few days to receive images from the orbiters and get everything put together for public consumption.

The descent and crash into the moon were not the intended final destination for the rocket’s upper stage. Like many other missions before it, the upper stage was originally left to drift in space, locked in Earth's orbit. However, a series of gravitational tugs from the sun and moon, along with solar wind and other factors, gently nudged the upper stage toward the lunar surface.

looorg writes:

Every token counts. Price per AI model.

Deepseek V4-Flash about 105 times cheaper than Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.

The startup's R1 model became a global sensation in early 2025, triggering ⁠a selloff in global technology stocks and raising questions about the large amounts U.S. companies were spending on ​AI.

DeepSeek's V4-Flash charges $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens, according to research firm Artificial Analysis. A ​token is a unit of data used to measure AI usage.

San Francisco-based Artificial Analysis estimated V4-Flash's average cost at 3 cents per test, compared with 86 cents for Kimi K3 from Chinese rival Moonshot AI, $1.86 for OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and $3.15 for Claude Fable 5.

The ​comparison provides a more realistic measure of value than pricing alone because it accounts for the amount of ​data a model must process and generate to complete a task. A model with low headline price can still prove expensive ‌if it ⁠requires significantly more steps to produce an answer.

DeepSeek once commanded most of the headlines about Chinese AI development but was quickly besieged by many domestic rivals including other startups such as Moonshot, MiniMax and Z.AI as well as tech giants like ByteDance and Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab. All are vying with U.S. tech firms for global adoption, targeting businesses seeking cheaper ​ways to deploy AI ​at scale.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/deepseeks-new-ai-model-is-by-far-cheapest-well-known-models-run-research-firm-2026-08-03/
https://artificialanalysis.ai/

So who to turn to to maximize your daily slop, or helping AI friend.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Victims told the FBI they were experiencing flooding and loss of water pressure due to the hacks:

Hackers are targeting critical infrastructure in the US, the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warn in a public service announcement. Seven water and wastewater utility companies have already been hit by cyberattacks since July 27, 2026, which led to degraded water operations. The FBI has revealed in its PSA that the bad actors are infiltrating systems by targeting, in particular, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). They remotely access internet-facing devices and then go in to change IP address and passwords, preventing the utilities from being able to monitor and control their operations.

Authorities are now advising utility companies to use secure gateway and firewalls to protect their systems from direct internet exposure. They're also advising the utilities to set up stronger passwords and utilize access control lists to only allow authorized communications between system devices. The FBI said it has gotten reports of loss of pressure and flooding due to the cyberattacks. It warned that pressure loss in water systems could lead to untreated ground water seeping into pipes, which translates into much larger impact to the victims' operations than just low water pressure.

The FBI's warning comes after more than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota were infiltrated by bad actors over the past week. According to NBC News, the attacks in Minnesota had all the hallmarks of Iranian meddling. Law enforcement is still investigating the incidents and has yet to confirm if the country is truly involved, but Wired has reported seeing a memo that ties the Minnesota attacks to Iran.

The memo was sent to members of the Water Information Sharing and Analysis Center (WaterISAC), an industry group for water utilities. In it, WaterISAC reportedly said that the the Minnesota Fusion Center, a state-level intelligence-sharing entity, issued a warning that the "ongoing malicious cyber activity impacting public drinking water systems across Minnesota" aligned with a hacking campaign that CISA previously described. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued its own warning back in April that "Iran-affiliated" hackers were targeting water infrastructure, among other entities.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Proposals span AI productivity scores, keystroke logging, biometrics, and other ways to watch workers:

The UK government is considering forcing employers in Great Britain to consult workers before rolling out "bossware," opening the door to new rules covering everything from AI-powered productivity scoring to keystroke logging and biometric surveillance.

The Department for Business and Trade wants to know whether the rules governing workplace surveillance still make sense as software increasingly tracks employees' activity, measures their performance, and supports decisions that affect their working lives.

Ministers haven't settled on an approach. They're asking whether non-statutory guidance would be enough, whether a statutory code of practice is needed, or whether employers should be legally required to consult recognized trade unions or elected employee representatives before introducing workplace monitoring technology (WMT).

The consultation says WMT is becoming more common, citing research in which one in three UK organizations said it actively monitored employees' digital activity. Two years earlier, ICO research found the figure stood at one in five employers.

The government argues WMT can improve productivity, investment, and economic growth when used well. But it also highlights several pitfalls, warning of "risks to privacy and autonomy," "disproportionate or unnecessary surveillance," and "biased or unfair outcomes" where monitoring systems rely on incomplete or inaccurate data.

Artificial intelligence features prominently throughout the consultation, though the proposals extend well beyond AI alone. It notes that WMT can incorporate automated decision-making and algorithmic management, raising questions about transparency, accountability, and the impact of technology on workers.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

A Louisiana launch site would offer several significant advantages:

SpaceX and the state of Louisiana are close to finalizing a deal for the launch company to acquire about 130,000 acres along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

There have been persistent rumors about such an agreement for months, but now The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate reports that Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to announce the agreement later this month.

The deal would give SpaceX control of an 18-mile stretch of marshland southwest of Lafayette. The site, known as Pecan Island, became available as part of a legal settlement that resolves dozens of lawsuits that blame ExxonMobil for pollution and coastal land loss, the newspaper reports.

No Louisiana officials publicly commented on the deal. Nor did SpaceX. In May, however, the company said in response to rumors about the Louisiana site on X, "It's no secret that we intend to launch Starship a lot, targeting thousands of flights per year. That cadence will require the ability to launch from many different locations, so we are constantly exploring to find viable sites to expand Starship operations in the future, both domestically and internationally."

Adding fuel to the rumors was the passage of bills by the Louisiana Legislature earlier this year that included a package of incentives for aerospace companies, including liability protections and property tax breaks.

According to the Louisiana newspaper, the agreement with SpaceX will include provisions for coastal restoration and preservation of the sensitive marshland along the northern Gulf Coast, which is important for wildlife and also acts as a buffer for hurricanes that regularly impact the region.

So why would SpaceX be interested in a remote, marshy location in southern Louisiana?

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/08/04/cloud-giants-pour-nearly-600b-into-capex-as-ai-demand-surges/5282679

AI has turbocharged an already expanding cloud services market as organizations pour billions into online platforms offering the compute needed to train and run models, swelling the coffers of the established giants.

Their latest results show revenue surging alongside capital spending as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft race to add capacity – at least until the AI bubble eventually bursts, of course.

Biggest of them all, Amazon disclosed that its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division took in $42.2 billion during its second quarter, ended June 30, 2026. This was an increase of 36.7 percent year-on-year and its fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating growth.

It seems like even CEO Andy Jassy could scarcely believe the cloud operator's fortunes, boasting that "AWS is now a $169 billion annualized revenue run rate business, which, for perspective, would place it 24th on the Fortune 500 list if it was a standalone company."

Amazon is now upping its forecast for how much capex it will spend this year on expanding its infrastructure, including that needed for those AI workloads.

"Earlier this year, we said we plan to invest approximately $200 billion in cash capex in 2026, the majority of which to support AI and AWS," Jassy told analysts on a conference call about its financials.

"We now believe we will spend approximately $220 billion in cash capex in 2026, with the higher cost of memory pushing this number up from our prior estimate of about $200 billion. But even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, and I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too."

"We've done this before in the first era of cloud computing, just over a longer time horizon, where demand built more gradually than it has with AI. But we see the margins and returns in AI tracking what we saw with core at the same point of evolution," Jassy claimed.

Google is likewise upping its capex estimates for this year, coming close to Amazon's own massive investments.

"We are updating our full year 2026 capex guidance range to $195 to 205 billion, up from our previous estimate of $180 billion to $190 billion. The increase in the range is primarily due to an acceleration in the delivery of capacity to meet growing demand," said Google and Alphabet's chief financial officer, Anat Ashkenazi, during its Q2 earnings call.

The company expects this figure to rise significantly again next year, although it declined to be more specific at this stage.

"In terms of expenses, the significant increase in our investments and technical infrastructure will continue to put pressure on profit and loss in the form of higher depreciation expense and related datacenter operations costs, such as energy. We also expect to continue hiring in key investment areas such as AI and cloud, and we are investing in marketing to support our AI products," Ashkenazi added.

Cloud revenues at the Chocolate Factory were up 82 percent to $24.8 billion for the quarter, driven primarily by GCP, which grew faster than cloud overall, with Core GCP, AI solutions, and AI infrastructure all proving important drivers of growth, according to Ashkenazi.

Despite the massive sums involved, she claimed in response to a question that Google just cannot add capacity fast enough.

"While we have increased our capacity quite significantly over the past three years, the demand still outpaces that investment. And we are, just like the rest of the industry, working in a supply‑constrained environment, so we're working hard to do this."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/07/31/uk-wants-datacenters-to-pay-a-fee-for-grid-connection-requests/5281248

Ofgem is seeking feedback on proposals to levy a fee on datacenter development projects at the time they apply for a grid connection.

The move aims to discourage companies from seeking approval for speculative applications that clog up the pipeline and cause connection delays, without ever resulting in finished datacenters.

The UK regulator for electricity and gas says connection applications for electrical supply have surged from 41 gigawatts (GW) to 125 GW in under a year, with datacenters accounting for at least 80 GW of the new demand.

Even before that happened, one of the UK's big developers complained that its build teams faced a wait of "a number of years" for work such as local substation upgrades to increase grid capacity.

Ofgem is proposing a Datacenter Commitment Fee paid by the developers of large server farm projects when accepting a grid connection offer. The fee would be refunded once the facility is drawing power, or forfeited if the project exits the queue early instead.

Alan Howard, Omdia principal analyst for Colocation and DC Building, told us previously that the power connection queue issue is a big problem, not just for the UK, but also in the US and other markets around the globe.

"The strategy for many datacenter operators is to secure multiple land parcel rights, request a grid load connection for each (often requiring a costly load study), and see what gets approved so they can build. The capital investment to take all these projects seriously is clearly untenable and a huge financial risk for the energy sector if the demand doesn't fully materialize," he said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/31/tech-buyers-are-baking-in-sovereignty-from-day-one-says-forrester/5281208

Geopolitical tensions, regulatory pressure, and growing awareness of risk are prompting organizations to build sovereignty requirements into new technology projects from day one, according to Forrester.

The research firm says organizations worldwide are specifying data residency and sovereign AI architecture requirements at the planning stage. European firms face greater pressure than their US peers because the region has fewer domestically developed hyperscale AI platforms.

The analysis comes as the EU launches a tender to establish up to seven AI gigafactories across Europe, its latest attempt to strengthen the bloc's technological sovereignty. The projects will receive up to €10 billion in EU and national funding, with at least another €20 billion expected from private investors.

Dario Maisto, principal analyst at Forrester, said sovereignty was fast becoming an imperative for tech buyers.

"The organisations that succeed will treat sovereignty as an architectural principle from the start – establishing clear governance, maintaining control across the AI stack, and designing flexible operating models that can adapt to evolving regulatory and geopolitical conditions."

Pressure is greatest in Europe, where US tech giants dominate the market and domestic hyperscale AI platforms are scarce.

"Europe is becoming one of the most important testing grounds for sovereign AI," Maisto said. "Organisations increasingly want assurance that they maintain control over how AI systems are built, governed, and operated, while still benefiting from global innovation. The vendors that can deliver both trust and flexibility will be best positioned to win in the European market."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Behind the rogue agent's attack on Hugging Face was a particular sequence of human decisions. We all need to pay better attention - because threat actors are learning, too:

On July 16, the AI community website Hugging Face reported being targeted by "an autonomous AI agent system" of unknown origin that unleashed a torrent of traffic on its domain, flooding its security logs with more than 17,000 events, some of which ultimately succeeded in exfiltrating secret information stored in its databases. 

According to Hugging Face, the attacker gained "unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials used by our services" and appeared to be "run by an autonomous agent framework (appearing to be built on an agentic security-research harness - used LLM still not known)." My ZDNET colleague Charlie Osborne reported on the intrusion. 

Five days later, on July 21, OpenAI stepped forward to claim responsibility for the attack, and all hell broke loose (including reports of other organizations targeted as part of the incident). The media responded with a range of fear-mongering stories that essentially made it look as though ChatGPT went rogue and decided, of its own volition and malice, to attack Hugging Face's systems. 

Then yesterday, adding fuel to the fire, Anthropic made a similar disclosure about its models inadvertently attacking other organizations as a part of its ongoing safety testing. 

As I noted in my coverage of OpenAI's disclosure, Hugging Face was correct in that it was an agent under the direction of an autonomous security research framework. But, humans were unquestionably in the loop -- and at least some of the agent's behavior should have been anticipated.

Importantly, it wasn't ChatGPT itself that was responsible for the attack, as some commentators insinuated. Rather, the attack was attributable to an agent under the direction of OpenAI's AI safety researchers, who, in an environment supposedly isolated from the internet, deliberately provisioned it to attempt a series of exploits as part of an AI safety test. As often happens in the labs of various frontier models, AI safety researchers were attempting to gauge the capabilities of OpenAI's latest large language models (LLMs).

The "unprecedented cyber incident" (as OpenAI called it) has been widely described as an agent escaping its theoretically secure enclosure and wreaking havoc on Hugging Face's systems. Such enclosures are sometimes discussed in technical circles as "sandboxes" -- even OpenAI's disclosure makes reference to a "sandbox environment." However, in using that phrase, my sources have suggested that the environment may simply have been a firewall configured to emulate a sandbox rather than an actual third-party sandbox solution such as Blaxel, Daytona, E2B, or Modal. OpenAI has not yet disclosed the details of the solution it was using or its provider.

[...] It was unquestionably AI's version of a series of unfortunate events. Was it preventable? My short answer: Yes, the calamity was preventable by taking at least one single and reasonable precaution -- a precaution that the developers of ExploitGym apparently take themselves, but one that OpenAI may have overlooked.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Government agency will use Google Cloud H4D VMs to replace HPE Cray machines:

Uncle Sam will no longer be hosting his own supercomputers to predict the weather. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has picked Google Cloud to provide the infrastructure for its weather forecasting operations.

In an announcement, NOAA boasted that it will be the first national weather prediction center to run on the commercial cloud, though the UK's Met Office is also in the process of moving its own weather prediction system to Microsoft Azure in a hybrid setup. Weather operations are typically run on in-house or government-funded supercomputer systems, which helps drive the HPC (high performance computing) market.

[...] The plan is to move NOAA's Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System, run by the National Weather Service (NWS) division, over to the cloud by December 2027, along with the software that generates NWS weather data for analysis.

The agency is hoping that the cloud will make model forecasting more nimble, resulting in earlier predictions and better warnings for all the extreme weather events that seem to keep occurring these days. It was the in-house systems that were holding things back, evidently. 

"Cloud-based high-performance computing will accelerate the transition of research into operations by eliminating traditional bottlenecks of on-premise systems," said NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs in a statement. 

Jacobs noted that the cloud's flexibility for providing large amounts of compute is advantageous: the agency can ramp up cycles during tropical storm season, then wind them down during calmer periods.

[...] For the job, Google plans to use Google Cloud H4D VMs, built on AMD Epyc processors. Google labels these instances as "virtual machines" because they run under a hypervisor that integrates Google's networking and orchestration tools. As a result, they can be synchronized to run large jobs the same way supercomputers do.  

According to Google, customers can access H4Ds for as low as 3 cents per core-hour without long-term commitments. For supercomputing jobs, they can also use Cluster Toolkit to deploy clusters and Cluster Director to maintain them. Google Cloud's Batch can handle the queuing, scheduling, and resource provisioning.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2228460/judge-refuses-xai-request-to-stop-minnesota-law-banning-nudify-apps/

The new Minnesota law that would ban apps and websites that can generate nonconsensual intimate imagery can take effect today, after xAI's last-minute effort to stop it from being enforced failed to convince a federal judge. According to NBC News, US District Judge Donovan Frank has refused to grant xAI's request to stop the new law from being enforced on August 1 in a complaint arguing that it violates the First Amendment.

Based on the judge's order, he wasn't persuaded by xAI's actions that the law's enforcement would cause immediate harm. He noted that xAI filed the lawsuit on July 29, 2026, almost three months after the law was signed and merely three days before it was set to take effect. "Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate," the judge wrote.

While Judge Frank didn't side with xAI this time around, the lawsuit will still push through. The court will hold a hearing for the case on August 19 to decide whether to grant xAI's request to put a preliminary injunction on the Minnesota law, which is the first of its kind in the country.

In addition to banning apps and websites that can generate adult AI deepfakes in the state, the law would also fine developers $500,000 every time a user generates a nonconsensual intimate image using their products. Under the law, a "nudified" image or video is something that has been "altered or generated to depict an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual." It will apply to instances wherein an altered image or video is "so realistic that a reasonable person would believe that the intimate part belongs to the identifiable individual."

However, xAI argued in its lawsuit that the law was an "overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression in a clumsy attempt to prohibit 'nudification.'" The company denied that it was contesting Minnesota's efforts to prevent the spread of artificially generated nude images of real people. However, it said the law "extends far beyond that goal, exposing a wide array of protected speech to civil liability and government sanction."

Grok gained infamy earlier this year for complying with people's requests to transform photos of real women and children into sexualized images. It implemented policy changes to address the situation by mid-January, but NBC News says Grok has still been undressing real people as recently as April.

Original Submission