SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

More than 1,200 industry staff sign petition seeking international guardrails for automated research:

More than 1,200 employees of frontier AI companies have signed a petition calling for US government support to develop ways of slowing automated AI development if necessary.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Google DeepMind chief strategy officer Jasjeet Sekhon, and Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao are among the signatories to the petition, which calls for tools to "deliberately pace frontier-wide progress."

"The world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research," the document states. They nevertheless have obvious commercial incentives to keep advancing the tech and marketing its perceived power.

The proposed answer is a combination of technical and governance tools that could apply the brakes if development begins outpacing industry's ability to understand or control the resulting systems.

"Each company – and country – is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration," the petition says.

The signatories ask: "We request that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."

The appeal closely follows the attack on Hugging Face by autonomous OpenAI agents, which offered a timely demonstration of why stronger controls might be needed.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Researchers find GLM and Kimi can adopt Claude's identity, but the evidence stops short of proving distillation:

Raising suspicion about their training methods, Z.ai's GLM 5.2 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 have used the name "Claude" in some conversations and, for GLM, at least, changed behaviors slightly when posing as Anthropic's model.

The Chinese open weight models may adopt Claude's persona if prompted to do so, or even without being told so, but a claimed identity isn't always reflected in behavior due to training differences. So if model copying did occur – as claimed by the US – Claude's influence appears limited.

In the case of GLM 5.2, adopting Claude's identity appeared to loosen its Chinese censorship. Kimi K3 could be convinced to use the name, although that produced little change in its censorship or measured persona, and its unprompted Claude identity claims disappeared after July 20.

MATS research fellows Benji Berczi and Kyuhee Kim undertook a study of whether the possible distillation of Anthropic's Claude model family may have affected the personas of GLM 5.2, Kimi K3, among other models.

Model distillation is a process by which a student model can be trained to imitate a teacher model. 

It is a common machine learning technique, one that pretty much every major US AI company, apart from Amazon and Anthropic, defended last week in a public letter urging the US government not to harm open weight AI innovation.

"[P]olicymakers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation," the letter says. "Distillation, or the practice of using one model's outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation."

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/07/new-amd-linux-patch-boosts-low-end-gaming-performance-on-steam-deck/

As the Steam Deck slowly marches toward its fifth birthday next February, owners are likely eager for a way to extend its life rather than investing in expensive high-end competition. A new patch for AMD's Linux drivers could substantially reduce low-end frame hitches when the Steam Deck or other AMD-based gaming hardware is running in Energy Performance Preference (EPP) mode.
[...]
Vernet's patch instead monitors cores to look for situations where a busy thread would benefit from an improved clock rate. The patch then temporarily sets just that core to the "performance" setting until the workload slows enough to downshift back into energy-saving EPP mode.

The nitty-gritty implementation at a kernel level gets pretty complicated—read through Vernet's write-up for all the details. But the worst-case performance improvements seem clear in early testing. Vernet's testing on Civilization VI benchmarks saw a 31.8 percent improvement in the "1% low" fps measurement, and 4.1 percent faster p99 frame generation times (i.e., the point where 99 percent of frames are generated at least that quickly).
[...]
We'll likely have to wait for Vernet's submitted patch to be integrated into the full AMD Linux kernel to see how the new feature fares on other common gaming benchmarks. Regardless, it's nice to see that low-level Linux coding updates are still wringing some performance improvements from Valve's quickly aging handheld hardware.

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

Apps targeted at US troops contain Chinese and Russian code:

A recent examination of hundreds of mobile apps marketed toward US military personnel found more than one in eight contained software built by companies in China , Russia , or other foreign nations, raising fresh concerns that adversary governments could harvest data revealing where service members live, work, and deploy.

According to researchers at Purdue University, the US Military Academy at West Point, and Florida International University , one popular app used by service members to rate living conditions on their own bases include code from Huawei, the Chinese telecom that US regulators flagged as a national security threat in 2020. Two others were built by Russian companies and incorporate the Russian ad service Yandex.

The largely unregulated advertising industry that tracks Americans online treats civilians and service members mostly the same—unless there is profit in telling them apart —despite evidence that exposure can reveal troop deployments, unit movements, and the routines of personnel within intelligence facilities and hardened shelters where nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.

WIRED investigations have previously shown location data harvested from ordinary apps tracing US service members to their homes, their children's schools, and off-base establishments where troops are prohibited from being seen. Experts have warned the same data could aid foreign spies in identifying personnel with access to sensitive sites , map when a facility is least guarded, or surface other compromising details.

The stakes are no longer hypothetical. In April, US Central Command acknowledged in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden that it had received multiple threat reports of adversaries exploiting commercial location data to target or surveil American personnel in the Middle East, where US forces remain locked in a standoff with the Iranian military over the Strait of Hormuz. Lawmakers called it the first official confirmation that troops in an active war zone were being hunted through the data-broker economy—a threat the Pentagon's own contractors and researchers had warned about for nearly a decade.

"Fnord666" writes:

On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras:

On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras

A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral.

The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM , not 34 10 DTM . But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock's system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM . Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock's AI tech wasn't registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.

As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR's media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure­34 ## DTM­and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock's system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.

Flock has responded to the bad press. First, they affirmed that their systems were working correctly, and blamed the police:

The obvious question was that Flock cameras were looking for 34 DTM, and the plate on the car I was driving was 34 10 DTM. Why was that flagged as a match?

"The way that the ML [machine learning] works is it correctly read what it was supposed to read. It was fed those characters that you said, 34 DTM, and it spit back out [a result] with the characters, 34 DTM," Thomas said. "It was asked, can you find this? And it did find that. It just didn't say if there's more here, then don't do it. It just simply said, is it there? And the answer was yes."

He explained that even if the 10 was normal size, Flock would still have flagged it as a match, because that's how they've set it up according to law enforcement's requests. Sometimes partial plates are all they have to go on at first.

"The way that law enforcement likes to use these tools is, if any of the characters that they have put into these hot lists get read, they want to get those alerts," he said. "Now, what we try to train officers to do is to do what you said, which is to verify that 34 DTM is what I'm looking for, and what I'm seeing is 34 10 DTM."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/trojpix-covertly-transmitting-data-from-air-gapped-systems-via-video-cable-emissions/

Researchers from the University of Shandong have recently demonstrated in a paper that they can transmit data from an air-gapped PC by using a Trojan to implement imperceptible pixel modulation in a monitor.

Every electronic device unintentionally emits RF, and PC monitors, TVs, and screens are no exception. In the past, we have shown that with simple TEMPEST tools, it is easy to recover the image on a screen over a distance using an RTL-SDR or Airspy SDR.

TrojPix relies on the unintentional emitted RF from a PC monitor's video cable. By subtly modulating the pixels on a screen, it is possible to enable data transfer via the unintentional emissions. This means that any PC infected with the TrojPix Trojan could transfer data wirelessly to a snooper, even if the PC is totally disconnected from any wired or wireless network. The only way to stop such an attack would be to completely shield the PC with a faraday cage.

The team note that they were able to achieve a peak data throughput of 8.1 MBps over a max range of 208 meters. They tested nine commercially available monitors and fifteen digital video cables, each demonstrating significant usable RF leakage.

The receiver hardware used was a USRP X310 software-defined radio sampling at 10 MHz and the transmissions appear to have been at 148.5 MHz and 297 MHz.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/07/28/signals-are-grim-for-jodrell-bank-observatory-after-uk-science-funding-decision/5279451

Jodrell Bank Observatory faces an uncertain future after UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) pulled funding.

The UK's Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics (PPAN) science budget is decreasing by 2.7 percent over four years, which, coupled with increasing costs, means cuts seem inevitable, and the venerable Jodrell Bank could be on the chopping block.

Professor Michele Dougherty, Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, said the situation required "some tough, but necessary, decisions."

One victim of the cuts is e-MERLIN, an array of radio telescopes across England run from Jodrell Bank. It includes the iconic Lovell Telescope, a 250-foot-diameter steerable dish radio telescope.

Royal Astronomical Society President Professor Jim Wild wrote: "This is devastating news for UK astronomy. At a time when technological innovation is crucial to our country's prospects, discarding unique, globally significant observatories threatens both our scientific future and the inspiration of future generations of astronomers."

Other cuts include the withdrawal of future UK funding for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and an invitation for the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON), which has spent decades studying the Sun, to apply for funding at 60 percent of previous planning assumptions.

A spokesperson for Jodrell Bank wrote: "While these cuts to e-Merlin's funding are significant, Jodrell Bank remains a major scientific, cultural and economic centre nationally and for the local area. We will be working with colleagues from The University of Manchester and other partners to secure the future of the Lovell Telescope and e-MERLIN."

Macclesfield MP Tim Roca noted that funding for e-MERLIN astronomy was in place until 2028, but that a case would be made "for protecting this world leading scientific institution."

Professor Brian Cox, Professor of Particle Physics at The University of Manchester, posted: "This is the result of many bad legacy decisions taken by UKRI hastily and without proper consultation, overseen by a government department that no longer exists."

UKRI was sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), which was recently scrapped by the UK government and its responsibilities redistributed.

The clock is ticking for alternative sources of funding to be found for Jodrell Bank. As Roca observed, the budget runs until 2028.

The iconic Lovell Telescope will turn 70 next year and has played a key role in Soviet and US space missions over the decades. While the cuts will affect many science programs in the UK and beyond, the symbolism of the iconic Grade I-listed structure facing a possible future as a rusting monument to UK scientific endeavors is something to focus the minds of campaigners.

Original Submission

"Ingar" writes:

Librarians are hosting viral 'Avoiding AI' workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech:

"Everybody's on their phone at my program!" jokes Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He's just asked his audience to pull out their phones so that he can walk them through the steps of disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini.

Bailey stands at the front of a library classroom that's outfitted for children – the focal point is the vibrant rug he's standing on, which reminds us that M is for "moon" and Z is for "zebra." But the 20-odd adults in the room aren't here to learn about the alphabet. They're at a workshop called Avoiding AI, which, in this context does not stand for "apple" and "igloo."

"I was inspired by the feeling of people's frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them, and feeling like AI tools we didn't ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives," Bailey told TechCrunch.

Bailey starts the hour-long workshop with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, explaining why people might want to use these products, and why they might opt to abstain. Then, he walks through all of the most popular tech platforms and devices, showing step-by-step instructions on the projector to guide people through turning off specific features.

"As a librarian, I think it's important to see this as advancing digital literacy and helping people reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools," Bailey said. "It's important, especially when it can be so difficult not to use them, and when the design seems to force adoption."

Bailey got the idea for the Avoiding AI workshop from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Maine. He was one of dozens of librarians from around the world who contacted Cyrus after she published a journal article about developing her own workshop.

"This has never happened before with anything I've worked on," Cyrus told TechCrunch. "Nobody has ever been emailing me like, 'Can you give me your Intro to Computers slides?'"

At the Bangor Public Library, patrons turn to Cyrus when they need help with anything involving technology.

"More and more, I was getting questions about, 'How do I turn this [AI] stuff off? Why is it trying to write my emails for me? Why is it trying to summarize my one-sentence email that I can easily read?'" Cyrus said. "I just decided that with so much media hype out there about AI products, it would be a good opportunity to teach people about the basics of what is happening when you're using this technology, and then getting into how to turn it off if you don't want to use it."

Usually, Cyrus' classes like Intro to Computers get about a dozen attendees. But so many people expressed interest in her first Avoiding AI workshop that she had to cut off registration at 30 people, open a waitlist, and share the workshop on Zoom. Including the livestream, about 70 people attended each of Cyrus' first two workshops.

cereal_burpist writes:

Your Shared Claude Chats Were Being Quietly Published on Google

A missing line of code meant "share with a link" and "searchable by anyone" were the same thing—and someone already saved 11,241 of those messages to GitHub.

• A Reddit user discovered on July 25 that a simple Google search returned hundreds of fully readable Claude conversations.
• The chats exposed crypto wallet credentials, apparent Social Security numbers, legal discussions, and other sensitive data shared via Anthropic's link-sharing feature.
• The root cause was a missing noindex meta tag; Anthropic's existing robots.txt file was in place but couldn't prevent indexing once share links appeared on public sites.

A Reddit user ran a simple search—site:claude.ai/share—which asks Google to show everything it has indexed from a specific website—and got back hundreds of other people's conversations.

The thread hit 4,000 upvotes and briefly became a public record of the things people apparently feel comfortable saying to an AI: a lawyer asking whether they needed to self-report a professional ethics violation, someone pasting a crypto wallet seed phrase, a person mid-process of becoming a nine-tailed fox, and enough incestuous erotica to surprise people who thought they'd seen the internet.
[...]
The cause was one missing line of code. Anthropic's share feature works like an unlisted YouTube video—you send the link, the recipient reads it, strangers can't find it through search. The "not findable through search" part requires a noindex tag, a single HTML instruction that tells search engines not to list a page. Anthropic hadn't added one, so every share link that landed on a public forum, a tweet, or a Slack workspace became a fully indexed webpage.

Anthropic's robots.txt file—the standard text file websites use to tell search crawlers which pages to skip—was already blocking Claude's share URLs. That sounds like it should have been enough but it wasn't.

Google's own documentation explains why: blocking a crawl doesn't prevent indexing if the URL appears elsewhere on the web. The crawler can't open the page, which means it also can't see the noindex instruction sitting inside it. Conversations appeared in search results labeled "No information is available for this page"—Google knew the link existed from third-party posts, it just couldn't describe what was in it.

The same gap applied to Claude's published artifacts—the apps, dashboards, and financial tools people build inside Claude. A search for site:claude.ai/public/artifacts surfaced payroll spreadsheets with employee names, internal customer relationship management chat exports, and unreleased product roadmaps.
[...]
Google began pulling Claude results by July 26 after Anthropic updated its configuration and added noindex tags, which sadly means you can't snoop around other people's conversations using this trick anymore... on Google.

However Bing is still surfacing shared links. Anthropic had not issued a public statement by time of publication.

A GitHub repository ...called Shared-Claude-Chats has already archived 453 Claude conversations and 519 Grok chats from the exposed links: 11,241 messages, all in plain text.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

LG is reportedly pulling a McAfee pop-up ad from a controversial app that some of its monitors have stealthily installed on connected computers.

The app, LG Monitor App Installer, installs itself through a Windows Update alongside monitor driver updates. LG Monitor App Installer then pushes ads for a 30-day free trial for McAfee, as well as other software, via a pop-up on affected systems, multiple users have reported.

This has drawn negative attention recently, with complaints surfacing on Reddit and a subsequent video from YouTube channel Gamers Nexus.
[...]
Publication Windows Latest noted that the app recently got an update, "and its changelog mentions McAfee as an additional app," which could be what prompted more people to see the ads...and then complain about them.

However, the removal of McAfee doesn't address the problem of a peripheral installing ad-pushing software onto people's computers.
[...]
Microsoft allows Universal Windows Platform device apps "to automatically install when the user connects their device to the PC" if the user hasn't opted out of Recommended Settings during installation and is connected to the Internet and signed into the Microsoft Store, per a Microsoft support page for Windows developers spotted by Windows Latest.
[...]
Citing user complaints, Gamers Nexus listed the following monitors as auto-installing LG Monitor App Installer onto PCs. But with Microsoft approving of the practice, there may be more monitors installing LG's bloatware:

• 34GX900A-B
• 45GX950-B.AEU
• 32GS95UE-B
• 39GX950B
• 27GP83B-B
• 27GN800
• 32GS95UE-B
• 27GN850-B

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/07/the-playstation-game-disc-was-dying-long-before-sony-pulled-the-plug/

Many gamers have been lamenting Sony's recently announced decision to halt sales of physical game discs in 2028. However, new data revealed by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlights how years of stark economic trends helped lead Sony to that decision.

In a social media thread Thursday morning, Piscatella shared insights into Circana's tracking data on physical game sales in the US dating back to 2003. A graph of those trends shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009, when 297 million units were sold across the US.
[...]
just 37 million physical units selling in the US in the last 12 months.
[...]
There are some small signs of hope for the physical game market, if you squint. Piscatella noted that aggregate spending on physical video games in the US was actually up 4 percent year-to-date, compared to the year before. But that small increase is a mere blip following 16 straight years of sizable declines in physical game spending in the US
[...]
Looking back, it's easy to see why sales of physical games seemed to peak in the late 2000s. At that time, services like Xbox Live Arcade, PSN and WiiWare were already showing console gamers' willingness to pay for downloads of smaller indie games, and the concept was expanding to downloadable versions of major releases like Infamous and LittleBigPlanet.
[...]
by the end of the 2010's physical-exclusive console releases were practically nonexistent. In recent years, some big-budget games have been skipping a retail release altogether or offering "download in a box" retail options like Switch 2's Game Key Cards or Grand Theft Auto VI's printed download codes.
[...]
None of this data will be of much comfort to the small but passionate group of console gamers who still buy games they can hold in their hands. But the numbers pretty clearly explain why Sony doesn't seem worried about losing what is, financially speaking, a rather small segment of its current gaming business.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The government says destroying his own data during an airport interrogation was illegal:

In early 2025, Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick was on his way home following a trip abroad. After landing in the US, customs agents demanded access to his Pixel phone, which was running an alternative version of Android called GrapheneOS. Rather than hand over his data, Tunick used a clever feature of the software to delete everything. Now, he's facing federal charges.

The first hearing in this case happened last week, according to The Guardian, during which government attorneys and agents claimed that Tunick was subjected to a standard secondary interrogation at an international airport. During that encounter, agents were "looking for anything that's prohibited." However, Tunick's legal team alleges he was targeted for his activism.

Tunick was involved with a group called Defend the Atlanta Forest, which opposed the construction of an enormous law enforcement training facility in the area often known as Cop City. What Tunick didn't know, according to his lawyers, was that he'd been placed on a watch list for his actions and that Customs and Border Protection had discussed over email plans to detain him upon his arrival back in the US for "suspected terrorism activities."

During the interrogation, CBP agents told Tunick they wanted to search his phone for evidence of child sexual abuse, and if he didn't unlock the device, it would be confiscated. The government has long asserted broad authority to examine and seize electronic devices at the border for virtually any reason. Tunick claims he was never read his rights and requested legal counsel several times, but the requests were denied.

Most interactions of this type with CBP would have ended with the government taking the phone, sending the owner on their way, and attempting to break into the device at a later date. Agents may also attempt to extract the data on the spot. However, Tunick's Google Pixel was running GrapheneOS. This Android-based operating system is focused on maintaining user privacy with features like memory protection, auto reboot, and the duress code. The OS only supports Google Pixel phones from the Pixel 6 onward.

The duress code is an optional feature of GrapheneOS that allows a user to set a code that is different from the unlock code. If you're worried about the contents of your phone falling into the wrong hands, you can enter that code on the lock screen instead of the unlock code. This immediately and irreversibly deletes all data and eSIMs stored on the device.

Tunick provided this code to an agent, who entered it on the phone, after which "the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart." All data on the phone was gone, but authorities confiscated it anyway. Tunick was allowed to leave, but the US Department of Justice opted to file criminal charges against him in late 2025, citing a little-used statute that makes it illegal to "knowingly destroy or damage property" to prevent it from being seized.

This appears to be a new legal strategy for the government. EFF experts who spoke to TechCrunch note they've never seen the law applied in this way before. The DOJ will need to argue that even though Tunick was told this was a routine border check, he ran afoul of the law by tricking an agent into deleting his data. If convicted, Tunick could face up to five years in prison.

Tunick's lawyers have filed a motion with the court asking that all evidence from the interrogation, including the use of the duress code, be suppressed due to violation of his constitutional rights. The motion says the government's actions were merely "a pretext for a fishing expedition" to gather information on activists who worked against Cop City. The $118 million training facility ultimately opened in spring 2025.

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

JWST Just Examined Two Stars Suspected of Harboring Dyson Spheres. Here's What It Found...:

Somewhere in the Universe, an alien culture may have developed the technology to build giant megastructures around stars, harnessing their energy on an unimaginable scale.

First proposed in 1960 by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson , the Dyson sphere has become one of the most enduring symbols of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

This is because such structures should change starlight in ways we can detect from Earth – telltale technosignatures that could finally reveal an advanced alien civilization.

Now, astronomers have used the JWST 's golden infrared eye to put two of the strongest Dyson sphere candidates to the test.

"Waste heat. That is the whole game," astrophysicist Olivia Curtis of Pennsylvania State University, co-author of a preprint describing the analysis , told ScienceAlert.

"A civilization can hide its star behind a shell of solar collectors, but thermodynamics always collects its tax, and all that captured starlight has to come back out as a warm mid-infrared glow."

That glow would be unavoidable. Just as a laptop or lightbulb gives off waste heat, so too would any machine that harvests a star's energy. The larger the hypothetical megastructure, the brighter that excess infrared radiation should become.

That excess is exactly what Project Hephaistos , led by astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson of Uppsala University in Sweden, set out to find. Even false positives could teach us how to better search for alien tech – by revealing the many ways the Universe can mimic it.

The search sifted through roughly five million Milky Way stars looking for exactly this kind of infrared excess – more mid-infrared light than an ordinary star should produce.

Seven stars survived the team's increasingly stringent tests, with the two studied here emerging as the search's most compelling candidates.

JWST quickly exposed the two candidates as Dyson sphere impostors – and the explanation was brilliantly simple. The light from both stars was being boosted by a distant galaxy almost perfectly lined up behind them.

"The first images did it," Curtis said.

"At the shortest wavelength you mostly see the star, and as you step out to 10 and then 15 microns the star fades away while a second source right next door lights up. The moment you see two sources where WISE saw one, you know the star was never the thing glowing, and the spectra only confirmed what the pictures had already given away."

These weren't just any background galaxies. Both are exceptionally bright in infrared light, exactly the wavelengths astronomers search when hunting for the waste heat of a hypothetical Dyson sphere.

One, sitting behind Candidate D, appears to be a Hot Dust-Obscured Galaxy, or Hot DOG, whose central supermassive black hole is heating vast clouds of dust.

The other, behind Candidate E, is likely a dusty starburst galaxy, where stars are forming at a furious rate.

Both galaxies naturally produce the kind of warm infrared glow astronomers were searching for.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

€890 million slap – just 0.25% of revenue – for making itself the subject of search results, and hiding app store alternatives:

Alibaba's reign as the worst offender under the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) lasted just four days, after the European Commission yesterday fined Google €890 million for breaches of the law –€340 million more than the Chinese e-commerce company will pay.

Europe even fined Google twice – once for treating its own services more favorably in search rankings and the second time for failing to properly inform users of its "Play" app store.

The search infractions attracted a fine of €460 million ($523.5m/£393m) and the Play offenses will cost the Chocolate Factory €430 million ($490m/£367.5m).

In US dollars, the fines total $1.013 billion – or one quarter of one percent of the $402 billion in revenue that Google's parent company Alphabet won in its last full financial year. The Big G's net income was $132 billion in the same year, making these fines less than one percent of its profits.

Investors won't be happy that the company has a billion-dollar bill to pay in Europe, but the ten-percent dip in Alphabet's stock price this week may have more to do with news that it burned cash for the first time in 20 years to fund AI investments.

The Commission fined Google after finding it "gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in Google Search."

"Google displays its own services more prominently in search results, including at the top of the search results page or by using enhanced visuals and filters, while similar third-party services do not have the same prominence," the Commission wrote.

The Commission ordered the Play store fine because the DMA requires app store operators to let developers inform buyers about third party app stores or other distribution channels that offer cheaper ways to acquire software. The EU's regulatory authorities felt Google didn't meet that obligation.

We're told Google "... has proposed and started testing changes to how it presents its own services on Google Search," and the Commission will "monitor the implementation of these solutions which constitute substantial progress towards compliance."

Interestingly, the Commission has also started talking to Google about the search fine in the context of the Web giant's new AI Overviews and AI Mode. Those tools show even fewer links that Google search and are already driving more revenue for Google.

Google has also taken steps to ensure that visitors to Play get more info about alternative software-marts. "These constitute good progress towards compliance and will also be assessed in light of the cease and desist order of today's decision," the Commission states.

Google has opposed the decision, arguing it weakens its services and makes Play less secure. The company says it's also developing artificial general intelligence, so probably has enough smarts to figure out how to keep its services safe and relevant.

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

AI companies want to capture the value created by entire industries. That concentration of wealth and power is society's greatest risk:

Opposition to AI datacenters has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that – surprisingly – doesn't fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these datacenters bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on datacenters obscures the larger impacts of AI on people's lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence.

Local datacenter opposition is grounded in legitimate concerns about misallocation of land resources when housing is at a premium, pressures on already higher energy prices, and localized environmental impact. Unlike other resource-consuming and polluting industrial facilities, datacenters produce very few jobs . The fact that US opposition to datacenters seems to be most fierce among lower-income communities reflects righteous indignation with an inequitable bargain, where tech companies and developers profit from exploiting local resources but offer little in return. On a global scale, their carbon footprint could grow unsustainably if usage accelerates. And all this is in aid of a technology that many fear will propagate misinformation, take their jobs, or even cause existential risks for humanity.

For some, datacenter opposition may feel like the only tangible mechanism for registering their concern, disapproval, or even anger about AI. The problem is that this may be exactly what the AI companies are banking on. They can overcome the protest when it matters to them, and live with a significant fraction of proposals being defeated. More importantly, focusing political opponents on the datacenter issue obscures the bigger prize they're after.

While there is a staggering three-quarters of $1tn being spent on datacenter infrastructure by US companies this year alone, this investment should be taken in perspective . The market for enterprise software, for example, is about twice this size. And it's small compared with what these companies actually want.

AI companies have their eyes set on capturing all the value created by entire industries. The technology has arguably already conquered customer service and consumer sales. But on the horizon are bigger targets, such as enterprise software development, creative design, management and even legal services. In AI companies and their allies' vision of the future, AI replaces teachers and doctors . The companies would rather spend time fighting resistance to how fast they are building computing infrastructure than dealing with issues of how their products should be used in those fields, or how those fields should be protected from their products.