Over the weekend, former President Donald Trump's campaign said that it had been hacked, with internal documents reportedly obtained illegally by foreign sources to interfere with the 2024 election. While the Trump campaign claimed that Iran was responsible, it is unclear who exactly was behind the incident. The FBI said it was aware of the allegations and confirmed Monday that it is "investigating this matter." The Hill reports: U.S. agencies have thus far failed to comment on the claims that Iran was responsible for the hack, even as recent intelligence community reports have noted growing Iranian efforts to influence the U.S. election. "This is something we've raised for some time, raised concerns that Iranian cyber actors have been seeking to influence elections around the world including those happening in the United States," John Kirby, the White House's national security communications adviser, told reporters Monday. "These latest attempts to interfere in U.S. elections is nothing new for the Iranian regime, which from our vantage point has attempted to undermine democracies for many years now."

A report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released last month noted Iranian efforts designed to "fuel distrust in U.S. political institutions and increase social discord." "The IC has observed Tehran working to influence the presidential election, probably because Iranian leaders want to avoid an outcome they perceive would increase tensions with the United States. Tehran relies on vast webs of online personas and propaganda mills to spread disinformation," the report states, including being particularly active on exacerbating tensions over the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Civil servants in the UK are locked in a row with the government over plans to use AI to answer taxpayer complaints. The Telegraph: Letters and emails to the Treasury are already being read by an AI tool which summarises the contents and suggests responses for civil servants. The government is now in talks to use AI across more departments, The Telegraph understands. A government spokesman said: "We make no apology for exploring innovations which improve public services. This tool has already been in use for four months and has increased productivity by 30pc, helping us save taxpayers' money by stopping the need to use expensive contractors during busy periods.

"Staff at the Treasury will continue to write all public correspondence and make decisions on cases. This tool, which was developed by data science experts in the department, helps civil servants respond to thousands more questions quickly and on time." But the civil serrvice trade body, the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, warned that the AI tool could be developed "on the cheap," leading to correspondence being misread. Fran Heathcote, PCS general secretary, said that while the union has no objection in principle to AI, that training the tool "properly takes a long time and considerable resources." Ms Heathcote added: "Further, in anticipation of AI working well, staff numbers are cut so you get the worst of all worlds: a poorly functioning AI system with too few humans left behind to pick up the broken pieces."

"Zelle payments can't be reversed once they're sent," notes the Los Angeles Times — which could be why they're popular with scammers. "You can't simply stop the payment (like a check) or dispute it (like a credit card). Now, the federal regulator overseeing financial products is probing whether banks that offer Zelle to their account holders are doing enough to protect them against scams. Two major banks — JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — disclosed in their security filings in the last week that they'd been contacted by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. According to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the filings Wednesday, the CFPB is exploring whether banks are moving quickly enough to shut down scammers' accounts and whether they're doing enough to identify and prevent scammers from signing up for accounts in the first place...

A J.D. Power survey this year found that 3% of the people who'd used Zelle said they had lost money to scammers, which was less than the average for peer-to-peer money transfer services such as Venmo, CashApp and PayPal. The chief executive of Early Warning Services, which runs Zelle, told a Senate subcommittee in July that only 0.1% of the transactions on Zelle involved a scam or fraud; in 2023, the company said, that percentage was 0.05%. But Zelle operates at such a large scale — 120 million users, 2.9 billion transactions and $806 billion transferred in 2023, according to Early Warning Services — that even a tiny percentage of scam and fraud problems translates into a large number of users and dollars... From 2022 to 2023, Zelle cut the rate of scams by nearly 50% even as the volume of transactions grew 28%, resulting in less money scammed in 2023 than in 2022, said Ben Chance, the chief fraud risk management officer for Zelle. The company didn't disclose the amounts involved, but if 0.05% of the $806 billion transferred in 2023 involved scam or fraud, that would translate to $403 million.

Do Zelle users get reimbursed for scams? Only in certain cases, and this is where the banks that offer Zelle have drawn the most heat. If you use Zelle to pay a scammer, banks say, that's a payment you authorized, so they're not obliged under law to refund your money... Some banks, such as Bank of America, say they will put a freeze on transfers by a suspected scammer as soon as a report comes in, then investigate and, if the report is substantiated, seize and return the money. But that works only if the scam is reported right away, before the scammer has the chance to withdraw the funds — which many will do immediately, said Iskander Sanchez-Rola, director of innovation at the cybersecurity company Gen.

"Last year, a major meta-analysis that re-examined 107 studies over 40 years came to the conclusion that no amount of alcohol improves health," the New York Times reported this June, citing a study co-authored by Tim Stockwell, an epidemiologist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research. Dr. Stockwell (and other scientists he's collaborated with) "are overhauling decades-worth of scientific evidence — and newspaper headlines — that backed the health benefits of alcohol," writes the Telegraph, "or what is known in the scientific community as the J-curve. The J-curve is the theory that, like a capital J, the negative health consequences of drinking dip slightly into positive territory with moderate drinking — as it benefits such things as the heart — before rising sharply back into negative territory the more someone drinks."

But Stockwell's study prompted at least one scientist to accuse Stockwell of "cherry picking" evidence to suit an agenda — while a think-tank executive suggests he's a front for a worldwide temperance lobby: Dr Stockwell denies this. Speaking to The Telegraph, he in turn accused his detractors of being funded by the alcohol lobby and said his links to temperance societies were fleeting. He was the president of the Kettil Bruun Society (a think tank born out of what was the international temperance congresses) [from 2005 to 2007] and he has been reimbursed for addressing temperance movements and admits attending their meetings, but, he says, not as a member...

Former British government scientist Richard Harding, who gave evidence on safe drinking to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in 2011, told The Telegraph that Dr Stockwell had wrongly taken a correlation to be causal. "Dr Stockwell's research is essentially epidemiology, which is the study of populations," Dr Harding said. "You record people's lifestyle and then see what diseases they get and try to correlate the disease with some aspect of their lifestyle. But it is just a correlation, it's just an association. Epidemiology can never establish causality on its own. And in this particular case, Dr Stockwell selected six studies out of 107 to focus on. You could say he cherry picked them. Really, the important thing is not the epidemiology, it's the effect that alcohol actually has on the body. We know the reasons why the curve is J-shaped; it's because of the protective effect moderate consumption has on heart disease and a number of other diseases."

Dr Stockwell rejects Dr Harding's criticism of his study, telling The Telegraph that Dr Harding "doesn't appear to have read it" and accusing him of being in the pocket of the alcohol industry. "We identified six high-quality studies out of 107 and they didn't find any J-shaped curve," Dr Stockwell said. "In fact, since our recent paper, we've now got genetic studies which are showing there's no benefits of low-level alcohol use. I personally think there might still be small benefits, but the point of our work is that, if there are benefits, they've been exaggerating them."
The article notes that Stockwell's research "has been published in The Lancet, among other esteemed organs," and that "scientists he has collaborated with on research highlighting the dangers of alcohol are in positions of power at major institutions, such as the World Health Organisation."

And honestly, the opposing viewpoint seems to be thinly-sourced. Besides Harding (the former British government scientist), the article cites:

• The head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs (which Wikipedia describes as "a right-wing, free market think tank")

• An alcohol policy specialist at Brock University in Ontario (who argues rather unconvincingly that "you can't measure when someone didn't hurt themselves because a friend invited them for a drink.")

On the basis of that, the article writes "respected peers say it is far from settled science and have cast doubt on his research". (And that "fellow academics and experts" told The Telegraph "they read the report in disbelief.") Did the Telegraph speak to others who just aren't mentioned in the story? Or are they extrapolating, in that famous British tabloid journalism sort of way?

The New York Times visits the downtown of one of America's biggest tech cities to explore San Francisco's "Vacant to Vibrant" initiative, where "city and business leaders provide free rent for up to six months" to "entrepreneurs who want to set up shop in empty spaces, many of which are on the ground floor of office buildings."

The program also offers funding for business expenses (plus technical and business permit assistance) — and it seems to be working. One cafe went on to sign a five-year lease for a space in the financial district's iconic One Embarcadero Center building — and the building's landlord says the program also resulted in another three long leases. Can the progress continue? The hope is that these pop-up operations will pay rent and sign longer leases after the free-rent period is over, and that their presence will regenerate foot traffic in the area. Some 850 entrepreneurs initially applied for a slot, and 17 businesses were chosen to occupy nine storefront spaces in the fall. Out of those businesses, seven extended their leases and now pay rent. Eleven businesses were selected in May for the program's second cohort, which started operating their storefronts this summer...

The city's office vacancy rate hit 33.7%, a record high, in the second quarter this year, according to JLL, a commercial real estate brokerage. That's one of the bleakest office markets in the nation, which has an average vacancy rate of about 22%. For the moment, however, San Francisco has a silver lining in Vacant to Vibrant. Rod Diehl, the BXP executive vice president who oversees its West Coast properties, said the pop-up strategy was good not just for local business owners to test their concepts and explore growth opportunities, but also for office leasing efforts... Beyond free rent, which is typically given for three months with a possibility for another three months, Vacant to Vibrant provides up to $12,000 to the businesses to help cover insurance and other expenses. The program also offers grants up to $5,000 for building owners to cover costs for tenant improvements in the spaces as well as for other expenses like utilities...

In addition to the Vacant to Vibrant program — which received $1 million from the city initially and is set to receive another $1 million for the current fiscal year, which began July 1 — the city is directing nearly $2 million toward a similar pop-up program. This new program would help businesses occupy larger empty spaces along Powell Street, as crime and other retail pressures have driven out several retailers, including Anthropologie, Banana Republic and Crate & Barrel, in the Union Square area.
One business owner who joined "Vacant to Vibrant" in May says they haven't decided yet whether to sign a lease. "It's not as crowded as before the pandemic." But according to the article, "she was hopeful that more businesses opening nearby would attract more people."

"In addition to filling empty storefronts, the program has the opportunity to bring in a fresher and more localized downtown shopping vibe, said Laurel Arvanitidis, director for business development at San Francisco's Office of Economic and Workplace Development." Victor Gonzalez, an entrepreneur who founded GCS Agency to stage showings for artists, is embracing the opportunity to get a foothold downtown despite the city's challenges. When he opened a storefront as part of the first Vacant to Vibrant cohort in the Financial District last year, he immediately knew that he wanted to stay there as long as possible. He has since signed a three-year lease. "San Francisco is no stranger to big booms and busts," he said. "So if we're in the midst of a bust, what's next? It's a boom. And I want to be positioned to be part of it."

Fortune reports that Crowdstrike "is enjoying a moment of strange cultural cachet at the annual Black Hat security conference, as throngs of visitors flock to its booth to snap selfies and load up on branded company shirts and other swag." (Some attendees "collectively shrugged at the idea that Crowdstrike could be blamed for a problem with a routine update that could happen to any of the security companies deeply intertwined with Microsoft Windows.") Others pointed out that Microsoft should take their fair share of the blame for the outage, which many say was caused by the design of Windows in its core architecture that leads to malware, spyware and driver instability. "Microsoft should not be giving any third party that level of access," said Eric O'Neill, a cybersecurity expert, attorney and former FBI operative. "Microsoft will complain, well, it's just the way that the technology works, or licensing works, but that's bullshit, because this same problem didn't affect Linux or Mac. And Crowdstrike caught it super-early."
Their article notes that Crowdstrike is one of this year's top sponsors of the conference. Despite its recent missteps, Crowdstrike had one of the biggest booths, notes TechCrunch, and "As soon as the doors opened, dozens of attendees started lining up." They were not all there to ask tough questions, but to pick up T-shirts and action figures made by the company to represent some of the nation-state and cybercriminal grups it tracks, such as Scattered Spider, an extortion racket allegedly behind last year's MGM Resorts and Okta cyberattacks; and Aquatic Panda, a China-linked espionage group.

"We're here to give you free stuff," a CrowdStrike employee told people gathered around a big screen where employees would later give demos. A conference attendee looked visibly surprised. "I just thought it would be dead, honestly. I thought it would be slower over there. But obviously, people are still fans, right?"

For CrowdStrike at Black Hat, there was an element of business as usual, despite its global IT outage that caused widespread disruption and delays for days — and even weeks for some customers. The conference came at the same time as CrowdStrike released its root cause analysis that explained what happened the day of the outage. In short, CrowdStrike conceded that it messed up but said it's taken steps to prevent the same incident happening again. And some cybersecurity professionals attending Black Hat appeared ready to give the company a second chance....

TechCrunch spoke to more than a dozen conference attendees who visited the CrowdStrike booth. More than half of attendees we spoke with expressed a positive view of the company following the outage. "Does it lower my opinion of their ability to be a leading-edge security company? I don't think so," said a U.S. government employee, who said he uses CrowdStrike every day.
Although TechCrunch does note that one engineer told his parent company they might consider Crowdstrike competitor Sophos...

FBI agent Rick Smith remembered seeing that Austrian-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur one year earlier — walking into San Francisco's Soviet Consulate in the early 1980s. Their chance reunion at a bar "would sow the seeds for a major counterintelligence campaign," writes a national security journalist in Politico, describing the collaboration as "an FBI-led operation that sold the Soviet Bloc millions in secretly sabotaged U.S. hi-tech."

The Austrian was already selling American tech goods to European countries, and "By the early 1980s, the FBI knew the Soviet Union was desperate for cutting-edge American technology, like the U.S.-produced microchips then revolutionizing a vast array of digital devices, including military systems..." Moscow's spies worked assiduously to steal such dual use tech or purchase it covertly. The Soviet Union's ballistic missile programs, air defense systems, electronic spying platforms, and even space shuttles, depended on it.... But such tech-focused sanctions-evasion schemes by America's foes offer opportunities for U.S. intelligence, too — including the opportunity to launch ultra-secret sabotage campaigns to alter sensitive technologies before they reach their final destination... Working under the FBI's direction, the Austrian agreed to pose as a crook, a man willing to sell prohibited technology to the communist Eastern Bloc... [T]he FBI and the Austrian would seed faulty tech to Moscow and its allies; drain the Soviet Bloc's coffers; expose its intelligence officers and secret American conspirators; and reveal to American counterspies exactly what tech the Soviets were after...

[T]he Soviet Bloc would unknowingly purchase millions of dollars' worth of sabotaged U.S. goods. Communist spies, ignorant that they were being played, would be feted with a literal parade in a Warsaw Pact capital for their success in purchasing this forbidden technology from the West... The Austrian's connections now presented a major opportunity. The Bulgarians, and their East German and Russia allies, were going to get that forbidden tech. But not before the FBI tampered with it first...

Some of the tech was subtly altered before the Bulgarians could get their hands on it. Some was rendered completely unusable. Some of it was shipped unadulterated to keep the operation humming — and allay any suspicions from the Eastern Bloc about what might be going on. And some of it never made its way to the Bulgarians at all. In one case, the bureau intercepted a $400,000 order of computer hardware from the San Jose-based firm Proquip and shipped out 6,000 pounds of sandbags instead.... Some suffered what appeared to be "accidental" wear-and-tear during the long journey to the Eastern Bloc, recalled Ed Appel [a former senior FBI official]. Other times, the FBI would tamper with the electronics so they would experience "chance" voltage overloads once Soviet Bloc operatives plugged them in. The sabotage could also be more subtle, designed to degrade machine parts or microchips over time, or to render hi-tech tools that required intense precision slightly, if imperceptibly, inaccurate.
The article concludes that "While the Soviet Union might have imploded over three decades ago... Russia's intelligence services are still scouring the globe for prohibited U.S. tech, particularly since Moscow's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine...

"Russia has reportedly even covertly imported household items like refrigerators and washing machines to rip out the microchips within them for use in military equipment."

Google's loss in an antitrust trial is just the beginning. According to Yahoo Finance's senior legal reporter, Google now also has to defend itself "against another perilous antitrust challenge that could inflict more damage." Starting in September, the tech giant will square off against federal prosecutors and a group of states claiming that Google abused its dominance of search advertising technology that is used to sell, buy, and broker advertising space online... Juggling simultaneous defenses "will definitely create a strain on its resources, productivity, and most importantly, attention at the most senior levels," said David Olson, associate professor at Boston College Law School.... The two cases targeting Google have the potential to inflict major damage to an empire amassed over the last two decades.

The second case that begins next month began with a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia by the Justice Department and eight states in December 2020... Prosecutors allege that since at least 2015 Google has thwarted meaningful competition and deterred innovation through its ownership of the entities and software that power the online advertising technology market. Google owns most of the technology to buy, sell, and serve advertisements online... Google's share of the US and global advertising markets — when measured either by revenue or impressions — exceeded 90% for "many years," according to the complaint.

The government prosecutors accused Google of siphoning off $0.35 of each advertising dollar that flowed through its ad tech tools.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: The upper stage from a Chinese rocket that launched a batch of Internet satellites Tuesday has broken apart in space, creating a debris field of at least 700 objects in one of the most heavily-trafficked zones in low-Earth orbit. US Space Command, which tracks objects in orbit with a network of radars and optical sensors, confirmed the rocket breakup Thursday. Space Command initially said the event created more than 300 pieces of trackable debris. The military's ground-based radars are capable of tracking objects larger than 10 centimeters (4 inches). Later Thursday, LeoLabs, a commercial space situational awareness company, said its radars detected at least 700 objects attributed to the Chinese rocket. The number of debris fragments could rise to more than 900, LeoLabs said. The culprit is the second stage of China's Long March 6A rocket, which lifted off Tuesday with the first batch of 18 satellites for a planned Chinese megaconstellation that could eventually number thousands of spacecraft. The Long March 6A's second stage apparently disintegrated after placing its payload of 18 satellites into a polar orbit.

Space Command said in a statement it has "observed no immediate threats" and "continues to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain." According to LeoLabs, radar data indicated the rocket broke apart at an altitude of 503 miles (810 kilometers) at approximately 4:10 pm EDT (20:10 UTC) on Tuesday, around 13-and-a-half hours after it lifted off from northern China. At this altitude, it will take decades or centuries for the wispy effect of aerodynamic drag to pull the debris back into the atmosphere. As the objects drift lower, their orbits will cross paths with SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites, the International Space Station and other crew spacecraft, and thousands more pieces of orbital debris, putting commercial and government satellites at risk of collision.

After a 7.1 tremor struck southwestern Japan on Thursday, the country's meteorological agency issued its first-ever alert for a possible "megaquake." It marks the first time the warning has been issued under new rules drawn up after a 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster killed almost 20,000 people. Phys.org reports: The JMA's "megaquake advisory" warns that "if a major earthquake were to occur in the future, strong shaking and large tsunamis would be generated." "The likelihood of a new major earthquake is higher than normal, but this is not an indication that a major earthquake will definitely occur during a specific period of time," it added. The advisory concerns the Nankai Trough "subduction zone" between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean, where massive earthquakes have hit in the past. [...]

Japan's government has previously said the next magnitude 8-9 megaquake along the Nankai Trough has a roughly 70 percent probability of striking within the next 30 years. In the worst-case scenario 300,000 lives could be lost, experts estimate, with some engineers saying the damage could reach $13 trillion with infrastructure wiped out. "The history of great earthquakes at Nankai is convincingly scary," geologists Kyle Bradley and Judith A Hubbard wrote in their Earthquake Insights newsletter. And "while earthquake prediction is impossible, the occurrence of one earthquake usually does raise the likelihood of another", they explained. "A future great Nankai earthquake is surely the most long-anticipated earthquake in history -- it is the original definition of the 'Big One'."

Bruce66423 writes: Sellafield [U.K.'s largest nuclear site] has apologised after pleading guilty to criminal charges relating to a string of cybersecurity failings at Britain's most hazardous nuclear site, which it admitted could have threatened national security.

Among the failings at the vast nuclear waste dump in Cumbria was the discovery that 75% of its computer servers were vulnerable to cyber-attacks, Westminster magistrates court in London heard. Information that could threaten national security was left exposed for four years, the nuclear watchdog revealed, and Sellafield said it had been performing critical IT health checks that were not, in fact, being carried out.

The Guardian's investigation also revealed concerns about external contractors being able to plug memory sticks into Sellafield's system while unsupervised and that its computer servers were deemed so insecure that the problem was nicknamed Voldemort after the Harry Potter villain because it was so sensitive and dangerous.

The good news is that the problem has been spotted. The bad news is that there can be no meaningful punishment for a government owned company. One can only hope that they will do better in the future.

Microsoft researchers said on Friday that Iran government-tied hackers tried breaking into the account of a "high ranking official" on the U.S. presidential campaign in June, weeks after breaching the account of a county-level U.S. official. From a report: The breaches were part of Iranian groups' increasing attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election in November, the researchers said in a report that did not provide any further detail on the "official" in question.

The report follows recent statements by senior U.S. Intelligence officials that they'd seen Iran ramp up use of clandestine social media accounts with the aim to use them to try to sow political discord in the United States. Iran's mission to the United Nations in New York told Reuters in a statement that its cyber capabilities were "defensive and proportionate to the threats it faces" and that it had no plans to launch cyber attacks.

Security researcher Grant Smith uncovered a large-scale smishing scam where scammers posing as the USPS tricked victims into providing their credit card details through fake websites. Smith hacked into the scammers' systems, gathered evidence, and collaborated with the USPS and a US bank to protect over 438,000 unique credit cards from fraudulent activity. Wired reports: The flood of text messages started arriving early this year. They carried a similar thrust: The United States Postal Service is trying to deliver a parcel but needs more details, including your credit card number. All the messages pointed to websites where the information could be entered. Like thousands of others, security researcher Grant Smith got a USPS package message. Many of his friends had received similar texts. A couple of days earlier, he says, his wife called him and said she'd inadvertently entered her credit card details. With little going on after the holidays, Smith began a mission: Hunt down the scammers. Over the course of a few weeks, Smith tracked down the Chinese-language group behind the mass-smishing campaign, hacked into their systems, collected evidence of their activities, and started a months-long process of gathering victim data and handing it to USPS investigators and a US bank, allowing people's cards to be protected from fraudulent activity.

In total, people entered 438,669 unique credit cards into 1,133 domains used by the scammers, says Smith, a red team engineer and the founder of offensive cybersecurity firm Phantom Security. Many people entered multiple cards each, he says. More than 50,000 email addresses were logged, including hundreds of university email addresses and 20 military or government email domains. The victims were spread across the United States -- California, the state with the most, had 141,000 entries -- with more than 1.2 million pieces of information being entered in total. "This shows the mass scale of the problem," says Smith, who is presenting his findings at the Defcon security conference this weekend and previously published some details of the work. But the scale of the scamming is likely to be much larger, Smith says, as he didn't manage to track down all of the fraudulent USPS websites, and the group behind the efforts have been linked to similar scams in at least half a dozen other countries.

FTX has been ordered to pay $12.7 billion in relief to its customers, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). In a statement, CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam said the crypto exchange drew customers in with "an illusion that it was a safe and secure place to access crypto markets," then misappropriated their customer deposits to make its own risky investments. Reuters reports: The repayment order implements a settlement between the CFTC and the bankrupt crypto exchange, which has committed to a bankruptcy liquidation that will repay customers whose deposits were locked during its late 2022 collapse. FTX has said that its customers will receive 100% recovery on their claims against the company, based on the value of their accounts at the time it filed for bankruptcy. The CFTC agreement resolves a potential roadblock to that repayment, ensuring that the government's lawsuit against FTX will not reduce the funds available to its customers. The CFTC agreed not to collect any payment from FTX until all its customers are repaid, with interest.

The CFTC settlement requires FTX to pay $8.7 billion in restitution and $4 billion in disgorgement, which will be used to further compensate victims for losses suffered during the exchange's collapse. [...] FTX is currently soliciting votes on its bankruptcy proposal but faces opposition from some customers who feel short-changed by the decision to repay them based on much-lower cryptocurrency prices from November 2022. Votes are due on Aug. 16, and FTX intends to seek final approval of its wind-down plan on Oct. 7.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Amazon's $4 billion investment into US artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is to be examined in the latest investigation into technology tie-ups by the UK's competition watchdog. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Thursday that it was launching a preliminary investigation into the deal, before deciding whether to refer it for an in-depth review. The deal, announced in March, included a $4 billion investment in Anthropic from Amazon, and a commitment from Anthropic to use Amazon Web Services "as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development." The regulator said it was "considering whether it is or may be the case that Amazon's partnership with Anthropic has resulted in the creation of a relevant merger situation." "We are an independent company. Our strategic partnerships and investor relationships do not diminish our corporate governance independence or our freedom to partner with others," said an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement. "Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic's board, nor does it have any board observer rights. We intend to cooperate with the CMA and provide them with a comprehensive understanding of Amazon's investment and our commercial collaboration."

The founder of Cambridge-based Riverlane, Steve Brierley, predicts quantum computing will have its "Sputnik" breakthrough within years. "Quantum computing is not going to be just slightly better than the previous computer, it's going to be a huge step forward," he said. Phys.org reports: His company produces the world's first dedicated quantum decoder chip, which detects and corrects the errors currently holding the technology back. In a sign of confidence in Riverlane's work and the sector in general, the company announced on Tuesday that it had raised $75 million in Series C funding, typically the last round of venture capital financing prior to an initial public offering. "Over the next two to three years, we'll be able to get to systems that can support a million error-free operations," said Earl Campbell, vice president of quantum science at Riverlane. This is the threshold where a quantum computer should be able to perform certain tasks better than conventional computers, he added.

Quantum computers are "really good at simulating other quantum systems", explained Brierley, meaning they can simulate interactions between particles, atoms and molecules. This could open the door to revolutionary medicines and also promises huge efficiency improvements in how fertilizers are made, transforming an industry that today produces around two percent of global CO2 emissions. It also paves the way for much more efficient batteries, another crucial weapon in the fight against climate change. "I think most people are more familiar with exponential after COVID, so we know how quickly something that's exponential can spread," said Campbell, inside Riverlane's testing lab, a den of oscilloscopes and chipboards. [...]

While today's quantum computers can only perform around 1,000 operations before being overwhelmed by errors, the quality of the actual components has "got to the point where the physical qubits are good enough," said Brierley. "So this is a super exciting time. The challenge now is to scale up... and to add error correction into the systems," he added. Such progress, along with quantum computing's potential to crack all existing cryptography and create potent new materials, is spurring regulators into action. "There's definitely a scrambling to understand what's coming next in technology. It's really important that we learn the lessons from AI, to not be surprised by the technology and think early about what those implications are going to be," said Brierley. "I think there will ultimately be regulation around quantum computing, because it's such an important technology. And I think this is a technology where no government wants to come second."

An anonymous reader quotes a report originally published by Business Insider: A Chinese state-backed company has launched its first 18 satellites in its bid to build a vast orbital network aimed at rivaling Starlink, according to local media. The launch on Monday by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology involved 18 satellites and one rocket, per The China Securities Journal, which is run by state news agency Xinhua. According to the outlet, the rocket lifted off from the Taiyuan satellite and missile launch center in Shanxi province.

These satellites mark the first step in the company's effort to create a 15,000-strong network of Low Earth Orbit satellites, which the firm has dubbed the "Thousand Sails Constellation." The company said it plans to reach that final tally by 2030, per The China Securities Journal. Domestic media has widely called the project the Chinese version of Starlink, which runs about 6,000 satellites. Elon Musk has said that he plans to eventually host a network of 42,000 satellites.

The Thousand Sails Constellation, also known as the G60 project, is one of three planned major satellite networks in the country. Each is expected to field 10,000 or more satellites. Most are anticipated to orbit between 200 and 1,200 miles above the Earth's surface, which is also where Starlink satellites are generally found. The three constellations, along with dozens of ambitious space projects from other Chinese firms, have been fueled by a recent push from the central government to loop the private sector into its science and technology goals.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The government of Australia's most populous state ordered all public employees to work from their offices by default beginning Tuesday and urged stricter limits on remote work, after news outlets provoked a fraught debate about work-from-home habits established during the pandemic. Chris Minns, the New South Wales premier, said in a notice to agencies Monday that jobs could be made flexible by means other than remote working, such as part-time positions and role sharing, and that "building and replenishing public institutions" required "being physically present." His remarks were welcomed by business and real estate groups in the state's largest city, Sydney, who have decried falling office occupancy rates since 2020, but denounced by unions, who pledged to challenge the initiative if it was invoked unnecessarily.

The instruction made the state's government, Australia's largest employer with more than 400,000 staff, the latest among a growing number of firms and institutions worldwide to attempt a reversal of remote working arrangements introduced as the coronavirus spread. But it defied an embrace of remote work by the governments of some other Australian states, said some analysts, who suggested lobbying by a major newspaper prompted the change. "It seems that the Rupert Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph in Sydney has been trying to get the New South Wales government to mandate essentially that workers go back to the office," said Chris F. Wright, an associate professor in the discipline of work at the University of Sydney. The newspaper cited prospective economic boons for struggling businesses.

The newspaper wrote Tuesday that the premier's decision "ending the work from home era" followed its urging, although Minns did not name it as a factor. But the union representing public servants said there was scant evidence for the change and warned the state government could struggle to fill positions. "Throughout the New South Wales public sector, they're trying to retain people," said Stewart Little, the General Secretary of the Public Service Association. "In some critical agencies like child protection we're looking at 20% vacancy rates, you're talking about hundreds of jobs." Little added that government offices have shrunk since 2020 and agencies would be unable to physically accommodate every employee on site. Minns said the state would lease more space, according to the Daily Telegraph. Further reading: Ordered Back To the Office, Top Tech Talent Left Instead, Study Finds

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: For the first time in 40 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has taken emergency action to stop the use of a pesticide (source may be paywalled; alternative source) linked to serious health risks for unborn babies. Tuesday's emergency order applies to dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, also known as DCPA, a weedkiller used on crops such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and onions. When pregnant farmworkers and others are exposed to the pesticide, their babies can experience changes to fetal thyroid hormone levels, which are linked to low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased IQ and impaired motor skills later in life.

"DCPA is so dangerous that it needs to be removed from the market immediately," Michal Freedhoff, assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a statement. "It's EPA's job to protect people from exposure to dangerous chemicals. In this case, pregnant women who may never even know they were exposed could give birth to babies that experience irreversible lifelong health problems." The European Union banned DCPA in 2009. But the EPA has been slower to act, frustrating some environmental and public health advocates.

In an interview, Freedhoff said that EPA scientists have tried for years to get more information on health risks from the sole manufacturer of the pesticide, AMVAC Chemical. But she said the company refused to turn over the data, including a study on the effects of DCPA on thyroid development and function, until November 2023. "We did make some good-faith efforts to work with the company," Freedhoff said. "But in the end, we didn't think any of the measures proposed by the company would be implementable, enforceable or effective." "DCPA has been used in the United States since the late 1950s," notes the report. "After the pesticide is applied, it can linger in the soil, contaminating crops later grown in those fields, including broccoli, cilantro, green onions, kale and mustard greens."

"The emergency order Tuesday temporarily suspends all registrations of the pesticide under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. The agency plans to permanently suspend these registrations within the next 90 days."

Google's payments to make its search engine the default on smartphone web browsers violates US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing a key victory to the Justice Department. From a report: Judge Amit Mehta in Washington said that the Alphabet unit's $26 billion in payments effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market. Antitrust enforcers alleged that Google has illegally maintained a monopoly over online search and related advertising. The government said that Google has paid Apple, Samsung and others billions over decades for prime placement on smartphones and web browsers. This default position has allowed Google to build up the most-used search engine in the world, and fueled more than $300 billion in annual revenue largely generated by search ads.