The EU is imposing new rules requiring Google to share anonymized search data and open up Android to rival AI companies. "Thanks to these measures, we hope to see emerging alternatives to Google Search and Google's AI services, such as Gemini, and that users in the EU can enjoy greater choice of services," Henna Virkkunen, an executive vice president at the European Commission overseeing tech, said. The Associated Press reports: In issuing the two new rules, the commission said it found that AI agents not made by Google were unable to function on Android phones at the same level as Google's Gemini. Google must now allow voice-activation of these alternative AI agents and enable them to run background tasks like booking restaurants via third-party apps. By January 2027, Google must also begin sharing anonymized search data with some rivals. The commission said the move is meant to level the playing field since Google controls a vast trove of user data that no competitor can match. Google argues the measures could weaken privacy and security by exposing user searches and reducing safeguards around third-party AI assistants. "Europeans' private searches would be exposed to unfamiliar companies, without adequate anonymization of the data and without user knowledge or consent," said Kent Walker, president of global affairs for Google and Alphabet. "This would weaken citizens' privacy, risk business trade secrets, and endanger national security."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli writes: 1Password has launched a Claude integration that allows the AI agent to sign in to websites using credentials stored in a 1Password vault. The password manager says Claude never sees the password or one-time code. Instead, users approve each request, and 1Password injects the credentials directly into the target website while locking down access to the rest of the vault. The design appears safer than simply handing passwords to an AI model, but it does not remove every risk. Once Claude is authenticated, it may still be able to view private data, change settings, place orders, or perform other actions available inside the account. Users may want to limit the feature to low-risk tasks until browser-based agents become more predictable.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: In 2022, due to "evolving licensing agreements" with distributor StudioCanal, German and Austrian users had hundreds of movies disappear from their PS accounts, long after buying them through Sony. Then in 2023, it happened again in America, specifically when Sony ended its licensing agreement with Discovery after the Warner Bros. merger, which, of course, has since been bought by Paramount Skydance. That resulted in customers having hundreds and hundreds of episodes of TV shows deleted from their accounts. Nowhere in any of this were there refunds, of course. No recompense at all, actually. Just a thing you thought you'd bought taken away from you by the very people you thought you bought it from.

And now it's happening again. Due to another licensing agreement fallout with StudioCanal, hundreds of movies and TV shows are being ripped from the accounts of PS Store customers, and there appears to be fuck all that they can do about it. [Kotaku reports:] "This news was brought to people's attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week. Along with the unapologetic news that the purchased movies would be deleted from their account on September 1, the message concluded with, 'Click here for a full list of affected titles that will no longer be supported. Thank you.' The same warning is now reproduced in full on the PlayStation website, along with the list of 551 films and TV series that are being pulled from people's libraries."

As Kotaku notes later in their post, part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it's perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period... but I can promise you that the public in general doesn't understand that. They think they're buying a thing, not a license.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide, July 1971

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

ARC-AGI-3 is a collection of turn based puzzle games compressed into a 64x64 4-bit pixel grid, each with a unique set of hidden rules.

It is also the public training, test, and evaluation set for an AI benchmarking competition, and frontier models have been doing abysmally at it. (hat-tip to Half as Interesting). Evaluating AI agents using games is not exactly new; many have tried benchmarking them via the game Baba Is You, and just today a new benchmark was published suggesting that the most advanced models can finally 100% the game... 's two intro levels. And more than 4 times more slowly than an arbitrary human solver. And just a few hours ago, Impossible Research self-reported their new Schema Harness was able to solve virtually all of ARC-AGI-3's public set.

In the United States, we usually protest datacenters peacefully - picket signs, council meeting comments, and all that - with mixed results. In the Netherlands, activists throw water balloons filled with an acidic mixture at datacenter foundations, also with questionable effectiveness. The Dutch arm of international climate activist group Extinction Rebellion claimed responsibility for an attempt to sabotage a datacenter project in Amsterdam on Thursday. The group said that they threw water balloons filled with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid, salt, and acrylic paint at the under-construction facility. Extinction Rebellion said the mixture is designed to degrade the concrete and accelerate corrosion of its steel reinforcement. Extinction Rebellion spokesperson Martijn Dekker justified the attack by saying datacenters and the AI they power are exacerbating the climate crisis, as well as playing a role in the killing of Palestinians by Israel. “We must join forces and resist the anti-democratic power of this small group of the very wealthiest,” Dekker said in Extinction Rebellion's press release. “Stopping the construction of this data center is a necessary step in that regard.” The facility in question is being built by UK-based Pure Data Centres Group. If and when it is eventually completed, the facility will consist of three 85-meter (279-foot) towers, each containing 26 MW of data halls, for 78 MW of total site capacity. The site has its own power substation, which is already operational, and development of the data halls started in January 2026. Pure DC says the facility is already fully leased, and while it doesn’t mention the lessee by name, local media have reported in a story about a prior protest at the site that Microsoft is the sole occupant. Amsterdam restricts new hyperscale datacenters, but Dutch media said the project's three-tower design allowed it to fall below the threshold for a single hyperscale facility. “Such data centers are superfluous,” Extinction Rebellion said. “They are mostly deployed for AI purposes, and although AI has some meaningful applications, the majority of them are undesirable: jobs are lost and the work of artists and others is shamelessly stolen to generate AI content.” With all that said, it’s still not clear what impact, if any, the attack may have had. Media in the Netherlands said that Pure DC and emergency responders had both confirmed balloons were thrown at the site, but neither said what they contained. Pure DC did tell Dutch newspaper NRC that the attack had no impact on construction, and that it intended to pursue legal action against those responsible. NRC spoke to Extinction Rebellion, which the paper said plans to carry out similar attacks on other datacenter projects. “The world is on fire, and we are building yet another data center,” an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson told NRC. “It has to stop.” We reached out to Microsoft, Pure DC, and Extinction Rebellion for comment, but didn’t hear back from anyone. ®