A former UK competition official has filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Apple on behalf of app developers, alleging its App Tracking Transparency rules unfairly disadvantaged third-party apps while favoring Apple's own advertising ecosystem. Engadget reports: ATT debuted in 2021, ostensibly to give users more control over how much of their activity app developers can track across other apps and websites. The company told Reuters it was "bound by the exact same requirements as all developers."

However, regulators across Europe including in France, Italy and Poland have investigated ATT. Germany's competition regulator, the Federal Cartel Office, last month determined that Apple was favoring its own apps over those from external developers. It said the ATT pop-ups Apple used for its services "had the potential to encourage users to give their consent, whereas they had the potential to discourage consent for third-party apps."

As such, the company agreed to make some changes to how ATT works in the European Union. That follows the French Competition Authority fining Apple $175 million at current rates over ATT last year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is imposing monthly limits on Xbox Cloud Gaming starting in November, with Game Pass Ultimate, Premium, and Essential subscribers getting 15, 10, and 5 hours respectively before they have to buy additional playtime. "Currently, Game Pass subscribers can stream without these monthly hour limits," notes IGN. From the report: The change means those who use cloud gaming most via Game Pass will end up having to pay more, although Microsoft said this impacts 4% of Game Pass subscribers. Also in November, Microsoft said players will be able to buy cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and 'stream eligible games they own on supported devices' without subscribing to Game Pass.

In a blog post, Microsoft said it was making the changes because the cost of providing cloud gaming has grown as more people use it and play for longer. The monthly limits, Microsoft continued, will mean it can invest in reliability and performance. But it said it understood that for some players the practical result is a higher cost.

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OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, a new model that president Greg Brockman called a "generational leap" and suggested may represent the arrival of AGI. "I think it might be about this model," Brockman said in a briefing with reporters. He ended the briefing by saying: "Welcome to the AGI era." Axios reports: Astra pushes AI agents closer to doing complex professional work on their own -- while also raising questions about how safely they can be deployed. OpenAI said that Astra was built on its largest-ever training run, using more than 100,000 GPUs at its Stargate site in Texas.

The company also said this is its first model to use other models in a significant role in supervising Astra's training.
GPT-6 Astra will first be available to a limited set of organizations in OpenAI's Daybreak Access program and will be available "in the coming days" for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise customers and API developers.

OpenAI said earlier this week that Astra would be released soon, but that its most powerful cybersecurity capabilities would remain limited to a small group of trusted testers. Astra is the first model OpenAI has designated as reaching its "critical" cybersecurity threshold under its preparedness framework -- meaning it can potentially find and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities across well-protected systems without step-by-step human guidance. OpenAI previously slowed Astra's release to add safety testing after determining that its cyber capabilities could reach the critical threshold. Further reading: OpenAI's New Reasoning Technique Alarms AI Safety Experts

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has launched PAIR, a free open-source tool that links compatible computers on a home network so they can pool idle processing power for local AI inference and agentic workloads. "While the compatible devices are mostly Nvidia GeForce GPUs (PAIR works with RTX 20-series cards and newer, as well as RTX Pro GPUs and DGX Spark systems), Apple's M4 chips or newer will also work," reports The Verge. From the report: The key thing here is that PAIR uses your in-home systems when they're idle to avoid interfering with other tasks. And this disaggregated system of computers can work in parallel to chew through lots of processing requests -- which should be helpful for an agentic workflow that breaks complex tasks into smaller jobs. This should prevent large bottlenecks on a single GPU, and Nvidia says PAIR can adapt as devices join or leave the network -- including if a user does something like start playing a game on their desktop PC.

[...] Nvidia says PAIR is secured by pairing all devices through a six digit code and then securing the channel via mTLS (Mutual Transport Layer Security), to create an encrypted communication line that's trusted in both directions between computers. The Nvidia PAIR beta is available today, with support for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BertvB posted a photo:

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide, July 1986

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

OPINION Nvidia on Thursday announced an agreement to acquire open source AI evangelist and model depot Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in a deal that's expected to close next year, assuming regulators don't get in the way. They should get in the way. As antitrust magnets go, Nvidia buying Hugging Face takes the cake. You wouldn't let an automaker acquire the primary means of fuel distribution. Nor would you let it buy the primary means by which the mechanics are trained. Yet, Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face is tantamount to both. Unfortunately, the Trump administration likely lacks both the competence and teeth necessary to litigate the case, something that probably factored into CEO Jensen Huang's decision to buy Hugging Face now. To understand why Nvidia's latest acquisition is so troublesome, we need to talk about just how important Hugging Face has become to the broader AI ecosystem. Have you seen the XKCD comic in which a piece of open source software maintained by a single developer is holding up all of modern infrastructure? It could be argued that Hugging Face is that piece for the AI industry. Founded in 2016, the AI model repository has become the beating heart of the machine learning community. When a new open weights model drops, Hugging Face is the first place people look. A key element of its success has been its unrelenting commitment to open source AI, which has made it a sort of Switzerland for researchers, enthusiasts, and software devs to collaborate on neutral ground. If you've ever downloaded an open weights model, it almost certainly came from Hugging Face, whether you knew it or not. No matter how fervently Nvidia promises not to pollute Hugging Face's hallowed ground, the temptation to use the platform to advance its hardware and software interests will inevitably prove too great for Huang and his lieutenants to resist for long. In spite of this, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue sang Nvidia's praises on Thursday, casting the acquisition and the capital it will bring as an opportunity to grow the company's user base from around 18 million today to more than 100 million in the years to come. Yet, just a year ago Hugging Face rebuffed a $500 million investment by Nvidia, suggesting Delangue knows he's just made a deal with the devil. That said, with a cool $1 billion earmarked for Hugging Face employees joining Nvidia, Delangue and his cohort are going to have plenty of Benjamins with which to wipe away any tears of regret. What does buying Hugging Face actually get Nvidia? Nvidia would probably prefer to paint the acquisition as an altruistic move to provide financial security to one of the most important AI resources on the internet today. The case certainly can be made that Hugging Face is that one brick holding up the rest of the AI ecosystem. If it ever did exhaust its runway, the consequences would be catastrophic. And Hugging Face's business is capital-intensive. Storing petabytes' worth of AI models and datasets isn't cheap, nor is the bandwidth required to continuously serve those models at scale. Nvidia's involvement all but ensures Hugging Face never has to worry about infrastructure demand going forward. But while the benefits of Nvidia's patronage are obvious, so is the potential harm to the GPU giant's competitors. Despite frequent comparisons to GitHub, Hugging Face is more than a place for storing and sharing model weights and training data. For example, Hugging Face is home to arguably the most comprehensive documentation on AI development on the internet. It wouldn't be hard for Nvidia to use its newfound position to ensure its products are always better documented than its competitors'. You can claim until your face is red that the platform is still "open," but just because something is open doesn't mean it's unbiased. Then there are Hugging Face's considerable software contributions. If you weren't aware, the popular local AI inference engine llama.cpp became part of Hugging Face earlier this year. Meanwhile, Hugging Face's Transformers Python library — not to be confused with the model architecture — is a key piece of major inference platforms like vLLM and SGLang, which compete directly with Nvidia's own TRT-LLM offering. The acquisition puts Nvidia in a prime position to prioritize its own hardware and software products. The AI arms dealer wouldn't necessarily need to do something as brash as ending support for competing platforms. It could simply ensure that the models and frameworks it favors are always better documented, and run first on its kit. One method to tip the scales would be to flood Hugging Face with cheap Nvidia-based compute. Hugging Face has offered compute resources in the form of its inference endpoints, providers, and Spaces for several years now. To supply this compute, Hugging Face worked with numerous providers across a range of hardware, including major cloud providers, inference-as-a-service vendors, and chip designers such as Nvidia, AMD, Cerebras, SambaNova, and Groq. As Hugging Face's parent company, Nvidia would be in the position to subsidize compute through its various partners and economically incentivize developers to build for its hardware first. The GPU slinger would have to be subtle. Tying a certain percentage of a neocloud's compute allocations to low-cost educational and development resources would be one way to do it without raising too many suspicions. No matter how you slice it, nor how much Nvidia insists it's totally not going to thumb the scales, its acquisition of Hugging Face has a high likelihood of harming competition. Hugging Face works better as AI Switzerland than it does as part of the most powerful company in the industry. ®

Under-pressure carmaker will shed 15% of workforce and halve its product line in sector’s biggest ever restructure

The car company Volkswagen has confirmed that it will shed 100,000 jobs by the end of the decade after being hit by US tariffs and fierce competition from Chinese rivals.

The German manufacturer said management and unions had agreed as part of a sweeping cost-cutting plan to cut a further 50,000 positions by 2030, bringing total job losses in the pipeline to 100,000.

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Supreme court ruled in June against president’s earlier order to change citizenship rules for babies born in US

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s latest attempt to restrict birthright citizenship – the longstanding principle that all babies born in the US are guaranteed American citizenship.

The decision came nearly a month after the president tried for a second time to limit via executive order which people born in the US can become American citizens. The supreme court ruled in late June that Trump’s previous sweeping order denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors was unconstitutional.

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• Club owner says deal is largest in women’s game

• Claimed to exceed some men’s Premier League shirt deals

The Women’s Super League club London City Lionesses’ new front-of-shirt sponsorship deal with Nike is the largest in the women’s game, according to their American owner, Michele Kang.

The length and value of the deal has not been disclosed but sources close to the WSL club are hailing it as a gamechanging moment and Kang claims that it even exceeds some men’s Premier League clubs’ shirt deals.

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US vice-president says he’s ‘extremely skeptical’ of Iran reports when asked whether US was responsible for deaths

The US vice-president, JD Vance, said “sometimes things happen” when asked on Thursday whether an American strike was responsible for killing four people, including a child, at a wedding celebration in southern Iran this week.

The strike hit Kuhestak, a town in Sirik county on the strait of Hormuz. The toll was reported not by the Iranian government but by the Iranian Red Crescent, a member of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement that operates independently of Tehran and is generally treated by international monitors as a credible source on casualty figures.

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WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR) - De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft het hooggerechtshof om toestemming gevraagd voor het beperken van het poststemmen. Een lagere rechter blokkeerde zijn plannen, maar Trump wil dat het hoogste hof die beperking toch toestaat, voor de tussentijdse verkiezingen van november.

Trump stapte al eerder naar het hooggerechtshof over het stemmen per post en kreeg toen goedkeuring om zijn nieuwe regels door te zetten. Maar omdat het hof nog de mogelijkheid openliet voor nieuwe rechtszaken, kon een lagere rechter de plannen opnieuw blokkeren. Nu moet het hooggerechtshof zich daarom opnieuw uitspreken.

De president probeert al jaren om het stemmen per post te stoppen. Volgens hem zijn die briefstemmen fraudegevoelig. Trump beweert dat hij daardoor de verkiezingen van 2020 heeft verloren van Joe Biden, maar heeft daar nooit bewijs voor geleverd. Amerikaanse media hebben zijn claims over die fraude weerlegd.

Een relatie beëindigen is nooit het doel. Maar soms trek je zelf de stekker eruit, en soms wordt hij er zonder pardon voor je uitgetrokken. Dat laatste hakt erin. Het goede nieuws: een gebroken hart lijmen is geen mystiek proces, maar een kwestie van keuzes. Deze zes stappen halen je ex sneller uit je hoofd dan afwachten tot de tijd zijn werk doet.

1. Stop met het 'wat als'-spel

Blijven terugdenken aan wat het had kúnnen zijn is geen verwerking, het is een herhaling. Wie na een breuk in eindeloos malen blijft hangen, houdt het verdriet juist langer overeind. De relatie liep vast, punt. Romantiseren maakt niemand aantrekkelijker, jou al helemaal niet.

Wel handig: het piekeren een vast moment geven. Een halfuur per dag mag je alles voelen; daarbuiten leg je je aandacht ergens anders neer.

Niemand wordt aantrekkelijker van vastzitten in gisteren.

2. Zet de feiten op een rij

Relaties zijn geen sprookjes, het zijn leerprocessen. Wat werkte wél? Wat absoluut niet? En vooral: wat heb jij weggelaten om het draaiende te houden? Wie dat scherp krijgt, voorkomt dezelfde fout met een andere naam en hetzelfde eindresultaat. Mensen die na een breuk benoemen wat ze eraan hebben overgehouden, herstellen aantoonbaar beter dan wie het hoofdstuk alleen wegdrukt.

3. Kijk je ex nuchter aan

De grootste denkfout is je ex blijven zien als de mooiste versie van hem of haar. Zet daar bewust de irritante kanten tegenover: het eeuwige afzeggen, dat neerbuigende toontje, die ene ruzie die nooit werd uitgepraat. Dat werkt: mensen die na een breuk expliciet stilstaan bij de zwakke kanten van hun ex, voelen zich meetbaar minder verliefd. Nadeel: je voelt je er op dat moment ook rotter door. Het is dus geen pleziertje, maar een investering.

4. Snijd het contact af

Heb jij het uitgemaakt? Dan is de kans groot dat er nog appjes komen. Sentiment, herinneringen, alles om je over de streep te trekken. Contact houden voelt vertrouwd, maar het is uitstel van verwerking. Blokkeren op sociale media is geen drama-queengedrag, het is hygiëne. Hard? Misschien. Effectief? Absoluut.

Blokkeren is geen drama-queengedrag, het is hygiëne.

5. Schrijf het van je af

Klinkt zweverig, is het niet. Wie een paar dagen achter elkaar twintig minuten ongefilterd opschrijft wat de breuk doet, houdt daar minder spanning, vermoeidheid en lichamelijke klachten aan over dan wie erover blijft zwijgen. Niemand hoeft het te lezen. Verzenden is trouwens precies het punt niet.

6. Pak je eigen ritme terug

In lange relaties vervagen je eigen gewoontes. Je past je aan, schuift mee en leeft op andermans tempo. Een breuk raakt daardoor niet alleen je gevoel, maar ook je zelfbeeld: veel mensen weten weken later nog niet goed wie ze zonder de ander zijn. Bouw dat terug op met de saaie basis: slaap, sport, werk, vrienden, ontspanning. Duursport helpt daarbij dubbel, omdat het somberheid en onrust tegelijk afvlakt.

Meer weten?

• Psychologie Magazine: zo kom je over liefdesverdriet heen
• Psycholoog.nl: tien tips bij liefdesverdriet
• Metro: psycholoog deelt zes gouden tips bij een relatiebreuk

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Werkgeversorganisatie VNO-NCW zegt dat in het rapport van het Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (PBL) over de stikstofproblematiek "doelgerichte stappen worden gezet naar een oplossing van het stikstofprobleem zodat de vergunningverlening weer in zicht komt".

Ook stelt VNO-NCW dat het rapport "bevestigt dat alle maatregelen nodig zijn om de gestelde doelen te bereiken. Ook is opnieuw duidelijk dat de plannen veel vragen van ondernemers en dat er een zorgvuldige uitvoering en uitwerking nodig is".

Volgens het PBL-rapport is een gedwongen krimp van de veestapel vooralsnog nodig om de stikstofuitstoot in 2035 ver genoeg terug te dringen.

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo of the “Nagasaki Peace Bell” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max during a visit to Nagasaki’s Peace Memorial Park in Japan. The bell is topped with four childlike figures that appear to float or fly in midair. The figures represent the women and mobilized schoolchildren who were forced to work in the city’s munition factories during World War II. Every month on the 9th at exactly 11:02 AM (the precise time the bomb detonated), survivors and visitors ring the bell to pray for permanent world peace...

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo of the “Urakami Cathedral Post” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max during a visit to Nagasaki’s Peace Memorial Park in Japan. The original red-brick Urakami Cathedral—once the largest Christian church in East Asia—stood just about 500 meters from the hypocenter...