A Google contractor used admin privileges to access private information from Nintendo's YouTube account about an upcoming Yoshi game in 2017, which later made its way to Reddit before Nintendo announced the game, according to a copy of an internal Google database detailing potential privacy and security incidents obtained by 404 Media. From the report: The news provides more clarity on how exactly a Redditor, who teased news of the new Yoshi game, which was later released as Yoshi's Crafted World in 2019, originally obtained their information. A screenshot in the Reddit post shows a URL that starts with www.admin.youtube.com, which is a Google corporate login page. "Google employee deliberately leaked private Nintendo information," the entry in the database reads. The database obtained by 404 Media includes privacy and security issues that Google's own employees reported internally.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: Online streaming services operating in Canada will be required to contribute five percent of their Canadian revenues to support the domestic broadcasting system, the country's telecoms regulator said on Tuesday. The money will be used to boost funding for local and Indigenous broadcasting, officials from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said in a briefing. "Today's decision will help ensure that online streaming services make meaningful contributions to Canadian and Indigenous content," wrote CRTC chief executive and chair Vicky Eatrides in a statement.

The measure was introduced under the auspices of a law passed last year designed to make sure that companies like Netflix make a more significant contribution to Canadian culture. The government says the legislation will ensure that online streaming services promote Canadian music and stories, and support Canadian jobs. Funding will also be directed to French-language content and content created by official language minority communities, as well as content created by equity-deserving groups and Canadians of diverse backgrounds. The release also said that online streaming services will "have some flexibility" to send their revenues to support Canadian television directly. [...]

The measure, which will start in the 2024-2025 broadcasting year, would raise roughly $200 million annually, CRTC officials said. It will only apply to services that are not already affiliated with Canadian broadcasters. The CMPA was among 20 screen organizations from around the world that signed a statement in January asking governments to impose stronger regulations on streaming companies operating in local markets. One of the demands was a measure that would force companies profiting from their presence in those markets to contribute financially to the creation of new local content."We are disappointed by today's decision and concerned by the negative impact it will have on Canadian consumers. We are assessing the decision in full, but this onerous and inflexible financial levy will be harmful to consumer choice," a spokesperson for Prime Video wrote to CBC News in a statement.

Sarah Perez reports via TechCrunch: After a multi-hour outage that took place in the early hours of the morning, OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot went down again -- but this time, it wasn't the only AI provider affected. On Tuesday morning, both Anthropic's Claude and Perplexity began seeing issues, too, but these were more quickly resolved. Google's Gemini appears to be operating at present, though it may have also briefly gone offline, according to some user reports.

It's unusual for three major AI providers to all be down at the same time, which could signal a broader infrastructure issue or internet-scale problem, such as those that affect multiple social media sites simultaneously, for example. It's also possible that Claude and Perplexity's issues were not due to bugs or other issues, but from receiving too much traffic in a short period of time due to ChatGPT's outage.

A donation by former Google chief Eric Schmidt to Europe's top particle physics lab heralds a new way to fund frontier research just as the West's technological race with China quickens. From a report: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, will use the previously unreported gift of $48 million [non-paywalled link] from the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation to develop AI algorithms to analyze raw data from the lab's Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful energy particle accelerator. In 2012, it discovered the Higgs Boson, a particle that's key to understanding how the universe is built.

Now, CERN needs to reinvest to stay at the cutting edge of particle physics research. By the late 2030s, the LHC is expected to reach the end of its useful life and CERN needs $17 billion from European nations to fund the construction of a much bigger accelerator, known as the Future Circular Collider. But that funding has yet to be secured and, in the meantime, China has proposed its own collider. raditionally, CERN has relied on contributions from its 23 member states and observer partners like the US for funding pure research, while private investors focus on applied research, according to Charlotte Warakaulle, CERN's director of international relations. That makes the Schmidts' donation to pure research a private-sector first and may herald a different approach to funding the next collider, she says. "We're looking at all sorts of potential partners," Warakaulle said in an interview with Bloomberg last week. "How we could partner with the EU, private investments potentially."

Several broadband industry lobby groups have filed lawsuits against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in an attempt to overturn the recently approved net neutrality rules. The regulations, which prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization, are scheduled to take effect on July 22. The lawsuits were filed in various US appeals courts by groups representing cable, telecom, and mobile Internet service providers, including NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, USTelecom, CTIA-The Wireless Association, and several state-level associations. The groups argue that the FCC lacks the authority to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 without explicit instructions from Congress.

In addition to the lawsuits, the industry groups have also petitioned the FCC for a stay of the rules, claiming that their members will suffer irreparable harm if the regulations take effect while litigation is pending. The FCC is expected to reject the petition, but the groups can then seek an injunction from appeals court judges to prevent enforcement. The industry's legal challenge is based on the Supreme Court's evolving approach to the "major questions" doctrine, which limits federal agencies' ability to make decisions on significant issues without clear congressional authorization. However, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks maintains that the agency's authority to regulate broadband as a telecommunications service is "clear as day."

jd writes: There aren't many details yet, but a private company used by the National Health Service in London was hit by a ransomware attack today, leading to cancelled operations and cancelled tests. The provider has been hit multiple times this year and is obviously not bothering with making any improvements in cybersecurity. There really should be legal requirements when it comes to maintaining what is de-facto critical infrastructure.

From the article:

"Major NHS hospitals in London have been hit by a cyber-attack, which is seriously disrupting their services, including blood tests and transfusions. The ransomware attack is having a "major impact" on the care provided by Guy's and St Thomas' NHS trust, its chief executive has told staff in a letter. The attack is understood to affect other hospitals, including King's College hospital, and has left them unable to connect to the servers of the private firm that provides their pathology services.

Synnovis, an outsourced provider of lab services to NHS trusts across south-east London, was the target of the attack, believed to be a form of ransomware, a piece of software which locks up a computer system to extort a payment for restoring access. According to one healthcare worker, the labs were still functional, but communication with them was limited to paper only, imposing a huge bottleneck and forcing cancellation or reassignment of all but the most urgent bloodwork. Direct connections with Synnovis' servers were cut to limit the risk of the infection spreading. ...
This is the third attack in the last year to hit part of the Synlab group, a German medical services provider with subsidiaries across Europe. In June 2023, ransomware gang Clop hacked and stole data from the French branch of the company just days after it hit headlines for bringing down a payroll provider for companies including BA, Boots and the BBC. Clop published the stolen data later that summer."

Intel Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger took the stage at the Computex show in Taiwan to talk about new products he expects will help turn back the tide of share losses to peers, including AI leader Nvidia. From a report: Intel showed its new Xeon 6 data center processors with more efficient cores that will allow operators to cut down the space required for a given task to a third of prior-generation hardware. Like rivals, from Advanced Micro Devices to Qualcomm, Intel touted benchmarks that showed its new silicon is significantly better than its existing options. AMD and Qualcomm's CEOs, in earlier Computex keynotes, used Intel's laptop and desktop processors to show how far ahead they are in certain aspects of technology.

Gelsinger took a direct shot at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's claim that traditional processors like Intel's are running out of steam in the age of artificial intelligence. "Unlike what Jensen would have you believe, Moore's Law is alive and well," he said, stressing that Intel will have a major role to play in the proliferation of AI as the leading provider of PC chips. "I think of it like the internet 25 years ago, it's that big," Gelsinger said. "We see this as the fuel that's driving the semiconductor industry to reach $1 trillion by the end of the decade."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese people know their country's internet is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation. They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it. Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet -- and collective online memory -- is disappearing in chunks.

A post on WeChat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available. "The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace," the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored. It's impossible to determine exactly how much and what content has disappeared. [...] In addition to disappearing content, there's a broader problem: China's internet is shrinking. There were 3.9 million websites in China in 2023, down more than a third from 5.3 million in 2017, according to the country's internet regulator.

A group of current and former employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind are calling for protection from retaliation for sharing concerns about the "serious risks" of the technologies these and other companies are building. From a report: "So long as there is no effective government oversight of these corporations, current and former employees are among the few people who can hold them accountable to the public," according to a public letter, which was signed by 13 people who've worked at the companies, seven of whom included their names. "Yet broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues."

In recent weeks, OpenAI has faced controversy about its approach to safeguarding artificial intelligence after dissolving one of its most high-profile safety teams and being hit by a series of staff departures. OpenAI employees have also raised concerns that staffers were asked to sign nondisparagement agreements tied to their shares in the company, potentially causing them to lose out on lucrative equity deals if they speak out against the AI startup. After some pushback, OpenAI said it would release past employees from the agreements.

AmiMoJo shares a report: The world is off track to meet the goal of tripling renewable electricity generation by 2030, a target viewed as vital to enable a swift global transition away from fossil fuels, but there are promising signs that the pace of progress may be picking up.

Countries agreed last December on a tripling of renewable power by the end of this decade. But few have yet taken concrete steps to meet this requirement and on current policies and trends global renewable generation capacity would only roughly double in developed countries, and slightly more than double globally by 2030, according to an analysis by the International Energy Agency.

Governments should include targets and policies on renewables in their national action plans for the climate (called nationally determined contributions, or NDCs), which are a requirement under the Paris agreement, the IEA found. Many currently fail to do so, even though vast increases in renewable power are essential to meeting the treaty's aspiration of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The IEA, the gold standard for global energy research, analysed the domestic policies and targets of nearly 150 countries, and found they would result in about 8,000GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030. That amount is about 70% of what is necessary to reach 11,000GW of capacity, the amount needed for the tripling goal agreed at the Cop28 UN climate summit in Dubai last year.

By 2050, 61% of U.S. adults will have cardiovascular disease, driven mainly by high blood pressure, according to new American Heart Association research. High blood pressure significantly increases the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and other dangerous cardiovascular problems. The findings also point to ongoing challenges with arrhythmias, heart failure, and congenital heart disease. CNN: In the research published Tuesday, the association predicts that 45 million adults will have some form of cardiovascular disease -- excluding high blood pressure -- or will have a stroke in 2050, up from 28 million in 2020. An aging population will be another force behind these trends, as the older you get, the more likely you are to have heart problems.

By 2050, 22% of the US will be over the age of 65, whereas seniors made up just 13% of the population 10 years ago, studies say. The median age in the US is projected to increase from 37 in 2010 to 41 in 2050, other research shows. The American population is also becoming more diverse, and communities of color tend to have a disproportionate number of heart problems. By 2050, people who identify as Hispanic will make up about a quarter of the US population, vs. about 20% today, and people who identify as Black will be 14.4% of the country, up from 13.6% today. The number of people who identify as Asian will also increase, from 6.2% of the population to 8.6%, according to US Census predictions.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A Ticketmaster data breach that allegedly includes details for 560 million accounts and another one affecting Santander have been linked to their accounts at Snowflake, a cloud storage provider. However, Snowflake says there's no evidence its platform is at fault. A joint statement to that effect made last night with CrowdStrike and Mandiant, two third-party security companies investigating the incident, lends additional credibility to the claim.

Also, an earlier third-party report saying bad actors generated session tokens and may have compromised "hundreds" of Snowflake accounts has now been removed. Hudson Rock, the security firm behind that report, posted a statement of its own today on LinkedIn: "In accordance to a letter we received from Snowflake's legal counsel, we have decided to take down all content related to our report." A post from Snowflake says, "To date, we do not believe this activity is caused by any vulnerability, misconfiguration, or malicious activity within the Snowflake product. Throughout the course of our ongoing investigation, we have promptly informed the limited number of customers who we believe may have been impacted."

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR and Anduril, has launched the ModRetro Chromatic, a retro gaming handheld that plays original Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges. The device boasts a magnesium alloy case, sapphire crystal screen, and a pixel-perfect IPS display. It comes bundled with a licensed copy of Tetris and supports Link Cable multiplayer. Luckey suggested that the Chromatic is the most authentic way to play Game Boy games, with custom components designed to provide the ultimate gaming experience. The handheld is available for preorder and will ship during the 2024 holiday season.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Justin Long, the actor known for playing the Mac guy in Apple's mid-2000s ad campaign is once again switching sides -- this time to promote new Windows laptops from Qualcomm. Long appeared in a video that Qualcomm showed during its Computex keynote. To introduce the segment, CEO Cristiano Amon said Qualcomm captured video of a "very special person" preordering a Windows Copilot+ laptop built with a Snapdragon X Elite chip.

In the clip, we see Long typing on an Apple MacBook at home and getting annoyed by all the incoming notifications, which include warnings that his laptop only has a 1% battery life and is running out of disk space. Long types in a search for "Where can I find a Snapdragon-powered PC?" and then stares at the camera, looking a bit ashamed, before saying: "What? Things change." Amon then returned to the stage to tell the Computex audience: "Yes, things change." In 2021, Long starred in an Intel ad campaign to promote the company's Windows PCs.

Further reading: Arm Targets 50% of Windows PC Market Share in Five Years, CEO Says

The PlayStation VR2's PC adapter is arriving on August 7th, allowing PC support for the PS5-exclusive headset. It'll cost $59.99. The Verge reports: Sony says the device will support all Steam VR games, including big-name titles like Half-Life: Alyx. In addition to the new adapter, Sony says players will need a DisplayPort cable to work with Steam titles on PC. (As well as a Steam account, obviously.) You can check out the minimum system requirements right here.

In a blog post, Sony explains that there will be some feature differences depending on whether you're playing on PS5 or PC: "PS VR2 was designed from the ground up specifically for PS5 -- so you'll notice that some key features, like HDR, headset feedback, eye tracking, adaptive triggers, and haptic feedback (other than rumble), are not available when playing on PC. However, other high-fidelity and sensory immersion features of PS VR2 are supported, including 4K visuals (2000 x 2040 per eye), 110-degree field of view, finger touch detection, and see-through view, as well as foveated rendering (without eye tracking) and 3D Audio in supported games."

Due to complications with a mechanical heart pump, surgeons in New York removed a pig kidney from Lisa Pisano less than two months after transplanting it. The genetically engineered pig kidney did not show signs of rejection but suffered from inadequate blood flow. Wired reports: Pisano was facing heart and kidney failure and required routine dialysis. She wasn't eligible to receive a traditional heart and kidney transplant from a human donor because of several chronic medical conditions that reduced the likelihood of a good outcome. Pisano first received a heart pump at NYU Langone Health on April 4, followed by the pig kidney transplant on April 12. The heart pump, a device called a left ventricular assist device or LVAD, is used in patients who are either awaiting heart transplantation or otherwise aren't a candidate for a heart transplant.

In a statement provided to WIRED, Pisano's medical team explained that they electively removed the pig kidney on May 29-47 days after transplant -- after several episodes of the heart pump not being able to pass enough blood through the transplanted kidney. Steady blood flow is important so that the kidney can produce urine and filter waste. Without it, Pisano's kidney function began to decline. "On balance, the kidney was no longer contributing enough to justify continuing the immunosuppression regimen," said Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, in the statement. Like traditional transplant patients, Pisano needed to take immunosuppressive drugs to prevent her immune system from rejecting the donor organ.

The kidney came from a pig genetically engineered by Virginia biotech company Revivicor to lack a gene responsible for the production of a sugar known as alpha-gal. In previous studies at NYU Langone, researchers found that removing this sugar prevented immediate rejection of the organ when transplanted into brain-dead patients. During Pisano's surgery, the donor pig's thymus gland, which is responsible for "educating" the immune system, was also transplanted to reduce the likelihood of rejection. A recent biopsy did not show signs of rejection, but Pisano's kidney was injured due to a lack of blood flow, according to the statement. The team plans to study the explanted pig kidney to learn more.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Billions of records detailing people's personal information may soon be dumped online after being allegedly obtained from a Florida firm that handles background checks and other requests for folks' private info. A criminal gang that goes by the handle USDoD put the database up for sale for $3.5 million on an underworld forum in April, and rather incredibly claimed the trove included 2.9 billion records on all US, Canadian, and British citizens. It's believed one or more miscreants using the handle SXUL was responsible for the alleged exfiltration, who passed it onto USDoD, which is acting as a broker. The pilfered information is said to include individuals' full names, addresses, and address history going back at least three decades, social security numbers, and people's parents, siblings, and relatives, some of whom have been dead for nearly 20 years. According to USDoD, this info was not scraped from public sources, though there may be duplicate entries for people in the database.

Fast forward to this month, and the infosec watchers at VX-Underground say they've not only been able to view the database and verify that at least some of its contents are real and accurate, but that USDoD plans to leak the trove. Judging by VX-Underground's assessment, the 277.1GB file contains nearly three billion records on people who've at least lived in the United States -- so US citizens as well as, say, Canadians and Brits. This info was allegedly stolen or otherwise obtained from National Public Data, a small information broker based in Coral Springs that offers API lookups to other companies for things like background checks. There is a small silver lining, according to the VX team: "The database DOES NOT contain information from individuals who use data opt-out services. Every person who used some sort of data opt-out service was not present." So, we guess this is a good lesson in opting out.

AMD is reverting to a simpler, more traditional numbering scheme for its laptop processors, abandoning its recent complex "decoder ring" system. The new system for Ryzen AI laptop processors will use a three-digit model number to denote generation and SKU, aligning more closely with industry norms. Ars Technica reports: For its new Ryzen AI laptop processors, codenamed "Strix Point," AMD is still using the same broad Ryzen 3/5/7/9 number to communicate general performance level plus a one- or two-letter suffix to denote general performance and power level (U for ultraportables, HX for higher-performance chips, and so on). A new three-digit processor number will inform buyers of the chip's generation in the first digit and denote the specific SKU using the last two digits. In other words, the company is essentially hitting the undo button.

Like Intel, AMD is shifting from four-digit numbers to three digits. The Strix Point processor numbers will start with the 300 series, which AMD says is because this is the third generation of Ryzen laptop processors with a neural processing unit (NPU) included. Current 7040-series and 8040-series processors with NPUs are not being renamed retroactively, and AMD plans to stop using the 7000- and 8000-series numbering for processor introductions going forward. AMD wouldn't describe exactly how it would approach CPU model numbers for new products that used older architectures but did say that new processors that didn't meet the 40+ TOPS requirement for Microsoft's Copilot+ program would simply use the "Ryzen" name instead of the new "Ryzen AI" branding. That would include older architectures with slower NPUs, like the current 7040 and 8040-series chips.

Desktop CPUs are, once again, totally unaffected by this change. Desktop processors' four-digit model numbers and alphabetic suffixes generally tell you all you need to know about their underlying architecture; the new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs and the Zen 5 architecture were also announced today. It seems like a lot of work to do to end up basically where we started, especially when the people at AMD who make and market the desktop chips have been getting by just fine with older model numbers for newly released products when appropriate. But to be fair to AMD, there just isn't a great way to do processor model numbers in a simple and consistent way, at least not given current market realities [...].

Lawmakers in New York have reached a tentative agreement to "prohibit social-media companies from using algorithms to steer content to children without parental consent (source paywalled; alternative source)," according to the Wall Street Journal. "The legislation is aimed at preventing social-media companies from serving automated feeds to minors. The bill, which is still being completed but expected to be voted on this week, also would prohibit platforms from sending minors notifications during overnight hours without parental consent."

Meanwhile, the results of New York's first mental health report were released today, finding that depression and anxiety are rampant among NYC's teenagers, "with nearly half of them experiencing symptoms from one of both in recent years," reports NBC New York. "In a recent survey conducted last year, 48% of teenagers reported feeling depressive symptoms ranging from mild to severe. The vast majority, however, reported feeling high levels of resilience. Frequent coping mechanisms include listening to music and using social media."

The Ansel Adams estate said it was "officially on our last nerve" after Adobe was caught selling AI-generated images imitating the late photographer's work. The Verge reports: While Adobe permits AI-generated images to be hosted and sold on its stock image platform, users are required to hold the appropriate rights or ownership over the content they upload. Adobe Stock's Contributor Terms specifically prohibits content "created using prompts containing other artist names, or created using prompts otherwise intended to copy another artist." Adobe responded to the callout, saying it had removed the offending content and had privately messaged the Adams estate to get in touch directly in the future. The Adams estate, however, said it had contacted Adobe directly multiple times since August 2023.

"Assuming you want to be taken seriously re: your purported commitment to ethical, responsible AI, while demonstrating respect for the creative community, we invite you to become proactive about complaints like ours, & to stop putting the onus on individual artists/artists' estates to continuously police our IP on your platform, on your terms," said the Adams estate on Threads. "It's past time to stop wasting resources that don't belong to you."

Adobe Stock Vice President Matthew Smith previously told The Verge that the company generally moderates all "crowdsourced" Adobe Stock assets before they are made available to customers, employing a "variety" of methods that include "an experienced team of moderators who review submissions." As of January 2024, Smith said the strongest action the company can take to enforce its platform rules is to block Adobe Stock users who violate them. Bassil Elkadi, Adobe's Director of Communications and Public Relations, told The Verge that Adobe is "actively in touch with Ansel Adams on this matter," and that "appropriate steps were taken given the user violated Stock terms." The Adams estate has since thanked Adobe for removing the images, and said that it expects "it will stick this time." "We don't have a problem with anyone taking inspiration from Ansel's photography," said the Adams estate. "But we strenuously object to the unauthorized use of his name to sell products of any kind, including digital products, and this includes AI-generated output -- regardless of whether his name has been used on the input side, or whether a given model has been trained on his work."