Thursday Go's long-time tech lead Russ Cox made an announcement: Starting September 1, Austin Clements will be taking over as the tech lead of Go: both the Go team at Google and the overall Go project. Austin is currently the tech lead for what we sometimes call the "Go core", which encompasses compiler toolchain, runtime, and releases. Cherry Mui will be stepping up to lead those areas. I am not leaving the Go project, but I think the time is right for a change... I will be shifting my focus to work more on Gaby [or "Go AI bot," an open-source contributor agent] and Oscar [an open-source contributor agent architecture], trying to make useful contributions in the Go issue tracker to help all of you work more productively. I am hopeful that work on Oscar will uncover ways to help open source maintainers that will be adopted by other projects, just like some of Go's best ideas have been adopted by other projects. At the highest level, my goals for Oscar are to build something useful, learn something new, and chart a path for other projects. These are the same broad goals I've always had for our work on Go, so in that sense Oscar feels like a natural continuation. The post notes that new tech lead Austin Clements "has been working on Go at Google since 2014" (and Mui since 2016). "Their judgment is superb and their knowledge of Go and the systems it runs on both broad and deep. When I have general design questions or need to better understand details of the compiler, linker, or runtime, I turn to them." It's important to remember that tech lead — like any position of leadership — is a service role, not an honorary title. I have been leading the Go project for over 12 years, serving all of you, and trying to create the right conditions for all of you to do your best work. Large projects like Go absolutely benefit from stable leadership, but they can also benefit from leadership changes. New leaders bring new strengths and fresh perspectives. For Go, I think 12+ years of one leader is enough stability; it's time for someone new to serve in this role. In particular, I don't believe that the "BDFL" (benevolent dictator for life) model is healthy for a person or a project. It doesn't create space for new leaders. It's a single point of failure. It doesn't give the project room to grow. I think Python benefited greatly from Guido stepping down in 2018 and letting other people lead, and I've had in the back of my mind for many years that we should have a Go leadership change eventually.... I am going to consciously step back from decision making and create space for Austin and the others to step forward, but I am not disappearing. I will still be available to talk about Go designs, review CLs, answer obscure history questions, and generally help and support you all in whatever way I can. I will still file issues and send CLs from time to time, I have been working on a few potential new standard libraries, I will still advocate for Go across the industry, and I will be speaking about Go at GoLab in Italy in November... I am incredibly proud of the work we have all accomplished together, and I am confident in the leaders both on the Go team at Google and in the Go community. You are all doing remarkable work, and I know you will continue to do that.

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A professor at Brigham Young University "has figured out a way to shave critical years off the complicated design and licensing processes for modern nuclear reactors," according to an announcement from the university. "AI is teaming up with nuclear power." The typical time frame and cost to license a new nuclear reactor design in the United States is roughly 20 years and $1 billion. To then build that reactor requires an additional five years and between $5 and $30 billion. By using AI in the time-consuming computational design process, [chemical engineering professor Matt] Memmott estimates a decade or more could be cut off the overall timeline, saving millions and millions of dollars in the process — which should prove critical given the nation's looming energy needs.... "Being able to reduce the time and cost to produce and license nuclear reactors will make that power cheaper and a more viable option for environmentally friendly power to meet the future demand...." Engineers deal with elements from neutrons on the quantum scale all the way up to coolant flow and heat transfer on the macro scale. [Memmott] also said there are multiple layers of physics that are "tightly coupled" in that process: the movement of neutrons is tightly coupled to the heat transfer which is tightly coupled to materials which is tightly coupled to the corrosion which is coupled to the coolant flow. "A lot of these reactor design problems are so massive and involve so much data that it takes months of teams of people working together to resolve the issues," he said... Memmott's is finding AI can reduce that heavy time burden and lead to more power production to not only meet rising demands, but to also keep power costs down for general consumers... Technically speaking, Memmott's research proves the concept of replacing a portion of the required thermal hydraulic and neutronics simulations with a trained machine learning model to predict temperature profiles based on geometric reactor parameters that are variable, and then optimizing those parameters. The result would create an optimal nuclear reactor design at a fraction of the computational expense required by traditional design methods. For his research, he and BYU colleagues built a dozen machine learning algorithms to examine their ability to process the simulated data needed in designing a reactor. They identified the top three algorithms, then refined the parameters until they found one that worked really well and could handle a preliminary data set as a proof of concept. It worked (and they published a paper on it) so they took the model and (for a second paper) put it to the test on a very difficult nuclear design problem: optimal nuclear shield design. The resulting papers, recently published in academic journal Nuclear Engineering and Design, showed that their refined model can geometrically optimize the design elements much faster than the traditional method. In two days Memmott's AI algorithm determined an optimal nuclear-reactor shield design that took a real-world molten salt reactor company spent six months. "Of course, humans still ultimately make the final design decisions and carry out all the safety assessments," Memmott says in the announcement, "but it saves a significant amount of time at the front end.... "Our demand for electricity is going to skyrocket in years to come and we need to figure out how to produce additional power quickly. The only baseload power we can make in the Gigawatt quantities needed that is completely emissions free is nuclear power." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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A proposed European Union law seeks to ensure that video games sold or licensed in the EU remain playable even if servers are shut down or studios close. The law would require publishers of sold and free-to-play games with microtransactions to provide resources to keep games functional, such as allowing players to host their own servers. Through a process called the "European Citizens Initiative," the petition needs one million signatures just to have a chance at becoming law. PC Gamer reports: "An increasing number of publishers are selling videogames that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or 'phone home' to function," the petition reads. "While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way." Understanding that developers and publishers can't support games forever, the initiative would expect "the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state." That means giving players the tools to host the game on their own servers, for example, and removing the requirement for games to connect to the publisher's (defunct) servers in order to be played. This is what the developer behind Knockout City did when it pulled the plug on the game's official servers. Not only does this initiative apply to games that are sold, but includes free to play games that have microtransactions for assets (like skins) or other paid-for features. The thought is, if you purchase an item in a free game, you should have the right to continue to use it indefinitely -- which means keeping that free game playable in some form. It's important to note that even a million signatures doesn't mean an automatic win, just that it'll go forward to the European Union as a proposal to become a law.

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New preliminary evidence for phosphine and ammonia in Venus's atmosphere deepens the mystery of their origins, suggesting the possibility of a biological source. The detections, made using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Green Bank Telescope, point to potential microbial life in Venus's clouds despite the planet's extreme surface conditions. Space.com reports: The new detections of phosphine and ammonia were obtained by a team led by Jane Greaves of the University of Cardiff using submillimeter radio wavelength data collected by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. "We don't know how you make phosphine or ammonia in an oxygenating atmosphere like that of Venus," said team member and astrophysicist Dave Clements of Imperial College, London, in an interview with Space.com. Then again, it's not clear why biology on Earth produces phosphine, either." Whether it's in penguin poop or badger guts, we don't know why bacteria make phosphine, but they do." The JCMT's initial detection of phosphine on Venus in 2020 by Greaves and her team was met by fierce disagreement from some quarters. This disagreement focused on how the data was processed and whether that was creating spurious signals since observations by other telescopes struggled to detect the phosphine. Clements said those technical disagreements have now been resolved and that the latest measurements, using a new detector on the JCMT called Namakanui (meaning 'Big Eyes' in Hawaiian), have come from three observing campaigns, each providing 140 times as much data as the initial detection. [...] Clements is open to the possibility that both phosphine and ammonia are being produced by some rare photochemistry in Venus' upper atmosphere involving solar ultraviolet breaking up molecules and allowing phosphine and ammonia to form from the molecular debris. If that is the case, nobody has observed this process yet, not even in the laboratory. Another possibility that has been mooted is that the phosphine could be produced by Venusian volcanoes. Clements also pointed out that the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is making a fly-by of Venus in August 2025 to help slingshot it towards the Jovian system. JUICE carries instruments capable of detecting phosphine and ammonia, but there's no guarantee that its instruments will be switched on and deployed at Venus.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US government will pay Moderna $176 million to develop an mRNA vaccine against a pandemic influenza -- an award given as the highly pathogenic bird flu virus H5N1 continues to spread widely among US dairy cattle. The funding flows through BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, as part of a new Rapid Response Partnership Vehicle (RRPV) Consortium. The program is intended to set up partnerships with industry to help the country better prepare for pandemic threats and develop medical countermeasures, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a press announcement Tuesday. In its own announcement on Tuesday, Moderna noted that it began a Phase 1/2 trial of a pandemic influenza virus vaccine last year, which included versions targeting H5 and H7 varieties of bird flu viruses. The company said it expects to release the results of that trial this year and that those results will direct the design of a Phase 3 trial, anticipated to begin in 2025. The funding deal will support late-stage development of a "pre-pandemic vaccine against H5 influenza virus," Moderna said. But, the deal also includes options for additional vaccine development in case other public health threats arise. US health officials have said previously that they were in talks with Moderna and Pfizer about the development of a pandemic bird flu vaccine. The future vaccine will be in addition to standard protein-based bird flu vaccines that are already developed. In recent weeks, the health department has said it is working to manufacture 4.8 million vials of H5 influenza vaccine in the coming months. The plans come three months into the H5N1 dairy outbreak, which is very far from the initial hopes of containment. [...] The more the virus expands its footprint across US dairy farms, adapts to its newfound mammalian host, and comes in contact with humans, the more and more chances it has to leap to humans and gain the ability to spread among us. "The award made today is part of our longstanding commitment to strengthen our preparedness for pandemic influenza," said Dawn O'Connell, assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response. "Adding this technology to our pandemic flu toolkit enhances our ability to be nimble and quick against the circulating strains and their potential variants." In a separate article, Ars Technica reports on a small study in Texas that suggests human cases are going undetected on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has spread in cows.

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Apple reported a new June quarter revenue record of $85.8 billion, up 5 percent from a year ago, fueled largely by new iPad sales. iPad "saw the biggest category increase for the quarter, up from $5.8 billion to $7.2 billion year-over-year," reports TechCrunch. It helped counter slowed iPhone revenue, "which dropped from $39.7 billion to $39.3 billion year-on-year." From the report: In spite of a drop for the quarter, iPhone remained Apple's most important category by a wide margin, followed by service, which includes software offerings like iCloud, Apple TV+ and Apple Music. That category continued to grow, up to $24.2 billion from $21.2 billion over the same three-month period last year. Much of the iPhone slowdown can be attributed to the greater China region. Overall, the region dropped from $15.8 billion to $14.7 billion for the quarter. Canalys figures from last week show a marked decline in iPhone sales, down 6.7% from 10.4 million to 9.7 million for the quarter, Reuters reported. The drop in Apple's third-largest region (behind the Americas and Europe) had a clear impact on the company's bottom line. The company aggressively discounted iPhone prices in China starting in May, as competition intensified from domestic rivals. The strategy resulted in strong iPhone sales that month, up close to 40% from a year prior. [...] Q3 marked the second consecutive quarter decline for global iPhone sales. The news puts additional pressure on the generative AI strategy that the company laid out at WWDC in June.

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AI music generators Suno and Udio responded to the lawsuits filed by the major recording labels, arguing that their platforms are tools for making new, original music that "didn't and often couldn't previously exist." "Those genres and styles -- the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music -- are not something that anyone owns," the companies said. "Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself." TorrentFreak reports: "[The labels] frame their concern as one about 'copies' of their recordings made in the process of developing the technology -- that is, copies never heard or seen by anyone, made solely to analyze the sonic and stylistic patterns of the universe of pre-existing musical expression. But what the major record labels really don't want is competition." The labels' position is that any competition must be legal, and the AI companies state quite clearly that the law permits the use of copyrighted works in these circumstances. Suno and Udio also make it clear that snippets of copyrighted music aren't stored as a library of pre-existing content in the neural networks of their AI models, "outputting a collage of 'samples' stitched together from existing recordings" when prompted by users. "[The neural networks were] constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings," Suno explains. "From analyzing their constitutive elements, the model derived a staggeringly complex collection of statistical insights about the auditory characteristics of those recordings -- what types of sounds tend to appear in which kinds of music; what the shape of a pop song tends to look like; how the drum beat typically varies from country to rock to hip-hop; what the guitar tone tends to sound like in those different genres; and so on." These models are vast stores, not of copyrighted music, the defendants say, but information about what musical styles consist of, and it's from that information new music is made. Most copyright lawsuits in the music industry are about reproduction and public distribution of identified copyright works, but that's certainly not the case here. "The Complaint explicitly disavows any contention that any output ever generated by Udio has infringed their rights. While it includes a variety of examples of outputs that allegedly resemble certain pre-existing songs, the Complaint goes out of its way to say that it is not alleging that those outputs constitute actionable copyright infringement." With Udio declaring that, as a matter of law, "that key point makes all the difference," Suno's conclusion is served raw. "That concession will ultimately prove fatal to Plaintiffs' claims. It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product." Noting that Congress enacted the first copyright law in 1791, Suno says that in the 233 years since, not a single case has ever reached a contrary conclusion. In addition to addressing allegations unique to their individual cases, the AI companies accuse the labels of various types of anti-competitive behavior. Imposing conditions to prevent streaming services obtaining licensed music from smaller labels at lower rates, seeking to impose a "no AI" policy on licensees, to claims that they "may have responded to outreach from potential commercial counterparties by engaging in one or more concerted refusals to deal." The defendants say this type of behavior is fueled by the labels' dominant control of copyrighted works and by extension, the overall market. Here, however, ownership of copyrighted music is trumped by the existence and knowledge of musical styles, over which nobody can claim ownership or seek to control. "No one owns musical styles. Developing a tool to empower many more people to create music, by scrupulously analyzing what the building blocks of different styles consist of, is a quintessential fair use under longstanding and unbroken copyright doctrine. "Plaintiffs' contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values." You can read Suno and Udio's answers to the RIAA's lawsuits here (PDF) and here (PDF).

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The Japanese government has released details of an app that verifies the legitimacy of its troubled My Number Card -- a national identity document. From a report: Beginning in 2015, every resident of Japan was assigned a 12 digit My Number that paved the way for linking social security, taxation, disaster response and other government services to both the number itself and a smartcard. The plan was to banish bureaucracy and improve public service delivery -- but that didn't happen. My Number Card ran afoul of data breaches, reports of malfunctioning card readers, and database snafus that linked cards to other citizens' bank accounts. Public trust in the scheme fell, and adoption stalled. Now, according to Japan's Digital Ministry, counterfeit cards are proliferating to help miscreant purchase goods -- particularly mobile phones -- under fake identities. Digital minister Taro Kono yesterday presented his solution to the counterfeits: a soon to be mandatory app that confirms the legitimacy of the card. The app uses the camera on a smartphone to read information printed on the card -- like date of birth and name. It compares those details to what it reads from info stored in the smartcard's resident chip, and confirms the data match without the user ever needing to enter their four-digit PIN.

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Meta's Twitter rival, Threads, has reached a new milestone of 200 million active users, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri. "I'm excited to share that we crossed the 200M milestone on @threads," Mosseri wrote. "My hope is that Threads can inspire ideas that bring people together and this amazing community continues to grow." TechCrunch reports: Growth for Threads has been strong. The text-focused social media platform, which launched in July 2023, reached 150 million users in April 2024 and 175 million users in July on its one-year anniversary, before another growth spurt led it to hit 200 million a month later. [...] Last year, Zuckerberg suggested Threads has a "good chance" of becoming a platform with more than a billion users. On the latest earnings call, the Meta CEO also described the platform as being on a good growth trajectory. "We're making steady progress towards building what looks like it's going to be another major social app. And we are seeing deeper engagement," he said, adding: "I'm quite pleased with the trajectory here."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit Friday against TikTok and parent company ByteDance for failing to protect children's privacy on the social media app as the Biden administration continues its crackdown on the social media site. The government said TikTok violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act that requires services aimed at children to obtain parental consent to collect personal information from users under age 13. The suit (PDF), which was joined by the Federal Trade Commission, said it was aimed at putting an end "to TikTok's unlawful massive-scale invasions of children's privacy." Representative Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said the suit "underscores the importance of divesting TikTok from Chinese Communist Party control. We simply cannot continue to allow our adversaries to harvest vast troves of Americans' sensitive data." The DOJ said TikTok knowingly permitted children to create regular TikTok accounts, and then create and share short-form videos and messages with adults and others on the regular TikTok platform. TikTok collected personal information from these children without obtaining consent from their parents. The U.S. alleges that for years millions of American children under 13 have been using TikTok and the site "has been collecting and retaining children's personal information." The FTC is seeking penalties of up to $51,744 per violation per day from TikTok for improperly collecting data, which could theoretically total billions of dollars if TikTok were found liable. TikTok said Friday it disagrees "with these allegations, many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed. We are proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform."

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Google has pulled its "Dear Sydney" Olympics ad after it garnered significant backlash. (You can still watch the ad on YouTube, but comments have been turned off.) According to Ad Age, the ad was "meant to promote Google's Gemini AI platform, but viewers had a difficult time looking past its miscalculated storyline." From the report: In the ad, a father wants to help his daughter write a letter to her idol, Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. But instead of encouraging her to take part in such a personal moment, he delegates Gemini to write the letter for her. Viewers and ad leaders lambasted the spot on social media for being tone-deaf. Some were upset over Google evidently seeing no problem with an AI co-opting a formative childhood act, while others alluded to its reinforcing of a more existential fear, that AI is bound to replace meaningful work. The ad got significant airplay during NBCU's TV coverage of the Olympics this week, including on NBC in primetime, as well as on E!, CNBC and USA, according to iSpot.tv. It last ran on national TV around midnight of July 30 on USA, according to iSpot.TV. "While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we've decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation," a Google spokesperson told Ad Age today. The company earlier this week defended the ad in a statement: "We believe that AI can be a great tool for enhancing human creativity, but can never replace it. Our goal was to create an authentic story celebrating Team USA. It showcases a real-life track enthusiast and her father, and aims to show how the Gemini app can provide a starting point, thought starter, or early draft for someone looking for ideas for their writing."

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Intel's stock plunged as much as 30% on Friday after the company issued disappointing guidance and announced plans for a substantial workforce reduction. According to Bloomberg, it was the company's biggest single-day drop since at least 1982. Markets Insider reports: The decline comes after the software company announced quarterly revenue of $12.83 billion, down 1% from the previous year and missing analyst expectations of $12.94 billion, according to LSEG estimates. The company also lowered its revenue forecast for the current quarter to a range between $12.5 billion and $13.5 billion, down from analyst estimates of $14.35 billion. Intel executives pointed to unexpected trends in the most recent quarter to explain how it performed this way even with product milestones. "Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing, even as we hit key product and process technology milestones," CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a press release. "Second-half trends are more challenging than we previously expected, and we are leveraging our new operating model to take decisive actions that will improve operating and capital efficiencies." Those operations and efficiency improvements include plans to lay off over 15% of staff by the end of this year, realign structure and operations, and cut operations expenses by over $10 billion next year. Technology shares fell across the globe following underwhelming earnings and fears of a U.S. economic recession grew. Stock markets in Europe, Asia and New York tumbled on Friday. "Japanese equities suffered their worst day since the Covid-19 pandemic rocked markets in 2020; the Nikkei 225 share index tumbled by 5.8% to its lowest closing level since January," reports The Guardian. "The broader Japanese Topix fell 6.1%, Australia's ASX fell 2.5% and Hong Kong's Hang Seng was down 2.1%." "Europe's main stock indices also declined on Friday, with European technology stocks falling to their lowest level in more than six months."

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A recent investigation by consumer electronics testing site RTINGs has raised concerns about the long-term durability of edge-lit LCD-LED televisions, a popular choice among consumers for their slim profiles and aesthetic appeal. The study, which simulated approximately six years of use through 10,000 hours of extreme testing on dozens of TVs, revealed a troubling trend of uniformity issues in edge-lit models, particularly affecting Samsung and LG products. According to RTINGs' findings, 64% of edge-lit TVs tested exhibited noticeable uniformity problems, compared to only 20% of full array local dimming (FALD) and direct-lit models. The primary issues identified were warped reflector sheets, cracked light guide plates, and burnt-out LEDs, all exacerbated by extended use at maximum brightness settings. RTINGs attributed these problems to the concentrated heat generation in edge-lit designs, with some LEDs reaching temperatures as high as 253.4F (123C). While Samsung defended its use of edge-lit technology, citing 15 years of reliable implementation and rigorous testing procedures, and LG reported no difference in defect rates between edge-lit and other LCD TV designs, RTINGs' research suggests that consumers seeking more durable TVs may want to consider alternatives to edge-lit models.

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After months of back and forth, Intel has finally agreed to extend the warranty on all affected 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs by an additional two years. This extension increases the warranty period for new boxed Intel CPUs from three to five years. For CPUs pre-installed in systems, Intel directs users to contact their PC's manufacturer for support, maintaining its established channels for warranty claims. The Verge adds: Intel has said that a primary cause of the instability issues for the desktop CPUs was due to an "elevated operating voltage" and that it was working on a patch for mid-August that addresses the root cause of that. But the patch apparently won't fix any damage that's already happened, meaning the best way to fix a damaged chip is to replace it.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The technology flaws of the U.S. Secret Service helped the gunman who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month evade detection. An officer broadcast "long gun!" over the local law enforcement radio system, according to congressional testimony from the Secret Service this week, the New York Times reported. The radio message should have travelled to a command center shared between local police and the Secret Service, but the message was never received by the Secret Service. About 30 seconds later, the shooter, Thomas Crooks, fired his first shots. It was one of several technology issues facing the Secret Service on 13 July due to either malfunction, improper deployment or the Secret Service opting not to utilize them. The Secret Service had also previously rejected requests from the Trump campaign for more resources over the past two years. The use of a surveillance drone was turned down by the Secret Service at the rally site and the agency also did not bring in a system to boost the signals of agents' devices as the area had poor cell service. And a system to detect drone use in the area by others did not work, according to the report in the New York Times, due to the communications network in the area being overwhelmed by the number of people gathered at the rally. The federal agency did not use technology it had to bolster their communications system. The shooter flew his own drone over the site for 11 minutes without being detected, about two hours before Trump appeared at the rally. Ronald Rowe Jr, the acting Secret Service director, said it never utilized the technological tools that could have spotted the shooter beforehand. A former Secret Service officer also told the New York Times he "resigned in 2017 over frustration with the agency's delays in evaluating new technology and getting clearance and funding to obtain it and then train officers on it," notes The Guardian. Furthermore, the Secret Service failed to record communications between federal and local law enforcement at the rally.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has agreed to pay a licensing fee [non-paywalled link] to chatbot maker Character.AI for its models and will hire its cofounders and many of its researchers, Character's leaders told staff on Friday. The leaders told Character staff that investors would be bought out at a valuation of about $88 per share, the leaders said in a meeting. That's about 2.5 times the value of shares in Character's 2023 Series A, which valued the company at $1 billion, they said. The Character employees joining Google will work on its Gemini AI efforts, they said. Character will switch to open-source models such as Meta Platforms' Llama 3.1 to power its products, rather than its in-house models, they said. The deal follows a string of similar arrangements by other well-funded artificial intelligence startups. AI developers Adept and Inflection have both effectively sold themselves to Amazon and Microsoft, respectively, in the last five months despite raising considerable capital.

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ROMhacking.net, a prominent platform for fan translations and modifications of classic games, is shutting down after nearly two decades of operation. The site's administrator, who goes by the name Nightcrawler, said the website will remain accessible in a read-only format, but all new submissions have been halted and the site's extensive database has been transferred to the Internet Archive for preservation. ROMhacking.net has long served as a crucial resource for gaming enthusiasts, according to Polygon, hosting a vast array of fan-made translations, bug fixes, and modifications for classic titles, many of which never received official localizations outside their countries of origin. The site's contributions to the gaming community include fan translations of Japanese-exclusive titles and even patches for long-standing bugs in popular games like Super Mario 64. Nightcrawler said the website ran into challenges including in managing the site's exponential growth and increasing copyright pressures, things that contributed to the decision to winding down operations.

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Game Informer, the longest-running gaming magazine in the U.S., is officially dead and GameStop killed it. Kotaku: It began publishing in 1991 and has been one of the last remaining physical gaming magazines in the world, with cover stories that continued to share deep dives and exclusive interviews on the biggest games coming out, from Final Fantasy: VII Rebirth to Star Wars Outlaws. No more. Staff at the magazine, which also publishes a website, weekly podcast, and online video documentaries about game studios and developers, were all called into a meeting on Friday with parent company GameStop's VP of HR. In it they were told the publication was closing immediately, they were all laid off, and would begin receiving severance terms. At least one staffer was in the middle of a work trip when the team was told. The sudden closure of Game Informer means that issue number 367, the outlet's Dragon Age: The Veilguard cover story, will be its last.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The new Labour government has shelved $1.66 bn of funding promised by the Conservatives for tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, the BBC has learned. It includes $1 bn for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University and a further $640m for AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI. Both funds were unveiled less than 12 months ago. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the money was promised by the previous administration but was never allocated in its budget. Some in the industry have criticised the government's decision. Tech business founder Barney Hussey-Yeo posted on X that reducing investment risked "pushing more entrepreneurs to the US." Businessman Chris van der Kuyl described the move as "idiotic." Trade body techUK said the government now needed to make "new proposals quickly" or the UK risked "losing out" to other countries in what are crucial industries of the future.

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schwit1 writes: A U.S. appeals court on Thursday blocked the Federal Communications Commission's reinstatement of landmark net neutrality rules, saying broadband providers are likely to succeed in a legal challenge. The agency voted in April along party lines to reassume regulatory oversight of broadband internet and reinstate open internet rules adopted in 2015 that were rescinded under then-President Donald Trump. The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which had temporarily delayed the rules, said on Thursday it would temporarily block net neutrality rules and scheduled oral arguments for late October or early November on the issue, dealing a serious blow to President Joe Biden's effort to reinstate the rules. "The final rule implicates a major question, and the commission has failed to satisfy the high bar for imposing such regulations," the court wrote. "Net neutrality is likely a major question requiring clear congressional authorization."

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