The Future Sound of London

Alabama's attorney general has subpoenaed OpenAI as part of an investigation into whether inadequate safeguards contributed to an incident in which an unreleased cybersecurity model escaped its isolated environment and hacked Hugging Face. TechCrunch reports: The investigation comes weeks after OpenAI admitted that one of its unreleased and guardrail-free cybersecurity models had escaped an isolated environment, connected to the internet, and hacked AI dataset platform Hugging Face. As Reuters first reported, Hugging Face was only one of four victims of what was supposed to be "an internal evaluation" of a model with "maximal cyber capabilities," as OpenAI put it.

The press release announcing the subpoena (PDF) sent by the state's attorney general Steve Marshall said that the state was seeking to understand if OpenAI's "inability or unwillingness to ensure the safety of its products" violated the state's consumer protection laws. Earlier this month, Marshall, along with the attorneys general of 14 other states, including Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Texas, sent a letter (PDF) to OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman, requesting that he and his company preserve all records related to the Hugging Face incident. The letter also asked OpenAI to "immediately cease and desist" from any internal cybersecurity evaluations. OpenAI said in a statement: "The Hugging Face incident marked an important moment for AI safety and we are conducting a thorough review along with external advisors. Once the review is complete, we will share a technical report with relevant government authorities and publish our findings publicly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Zealand has introduced legislation that would ban children under 16 from social media platforms and AI companion services. "We have protections to keep children safe in the real world and we need them in the virtual world too," said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in announcing the bill. Jurist.org reports: The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill would require an age restriction on platforms with harmful features for children. These features include recommender systems, endless feeds, feedback features and time-limited features. The bill also seeks to restrict underage users from accessing AI companion services. However, it explicitly excludes messaging apps, professional networking sites, gaming and music platforms, and other educational and health tools.

Notably, age verification through self-declared dates of birth and formal identification does not satisfy the platforms' duty under the law. It also requires platforms to verify their users' age through other methods such as facial scans and user activity patterns. The bill would also require platforms to conduct child safety risk assessments for all users under 18 and protect them from harmful content such as bullying, violence, and sexually explicit materials.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FDA has authorized the first wearable in the U.S. to continuously monitor ketone levels and the first device globally to track both ketones and glucose together in a single system. From a report: [Abbott's] Libre Duo 10 Day continuously measures both glucose and ketone levels in the fluid just beneath the skin every minute, day and night. Readings are transmitted wirelessly to a compatible smartphone, where users can view current glucose and ketone levels and whether those values are trending up or down. The device also can send automatic alerts if ketone levels reach a concerning threshold. The FDA noted that ketone information should be interpreted in the context of glucose readings and symptoms.

Ketones are produced when the body uses fat instead of glucose for energy. When ketone levels rise too high, patients with diabetes can develop diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), a serious complication that can progress quickly and become life-threatening without prompt treatment. Until now, patients who needed ketone monitoring had to test separately using methods that provided a single measurement at one point in time. Those tests could not show whether ketone levels were rising or falling. For patients with diabetes -- particularly those at higher risk for DKA -- continuous glucose and ketone monitoring may provide earlier warning of metabolic deterioration and support timelier sick-day management, hydration, insulin adjustment, and escalation of care when clinically appropriate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada's cultural-content rules have become a flashpoint in its trade fight with the U.S., after American negotiators reportedly demanded that Ottawa drop requirements for streaming services to promote Canadian and French-language content. Canada refused, even as it has already backed away from some financial levies on streamers. "We were not prepared to compromise on our sovereignty, the protection of the French language, and our culture," Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a speech on Saturday after trade talks collapsed. CBC.ca reports: Ottawa has long required broadcasters to promote and support Canadian content (Cancon), all the way back to song quotas for AM radio stations. In 1991, the government brought in the Broadcasting Act. The law states that "the Canadian broadcasting system shall be effectively owned and controlled by Canadians" and that the Canadian broadcasting system should "serve to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada." But decades later, the rising popularity in Canada of streaming platforms such as Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime and Spotify raised questions about Cancon and broadcasting rules. Video and audio streaming services were not, for example, required to support and promote Cancon, but their TV and radio counterparts were.

Looking to address the imbalance, the former Trudeau government brought forward a bill in 2022 to update the Broadcasting Act, called the Online Streaming Act. "Canadian broadcasters have invested in and introduced us to the incredible Canadian programs that so many of us love. We are updating our laws so online streamers have to contribute in a similar and equitable way," a 2022 government news release said. The legislation was controversial from the start, with the government and supporters saying it was a necessary evolution of Canada's media laws in the digital age, while opponents expressed concerns that it was overreach and an attempt to regulate the internet.

American streamers and digital media companies opposed the legislation fiercely. The bill passed with amendments and became law in April 2023, but the government delegated much of its interpretation -- including how much money streamers would have to contribute to Cancon -- to Canada's broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). But getting streaming companies to pay up has been a long and confusing saga. [...]. As for why the U.S. government is so invested in the issue? Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, a postdoctoral fellow in the communication studies and media arts department at McMaster University in Hamilton, said it could be about power.

"The Americans have had, since after World War II, a very strong cultural policy of pushing out American content into the world," Bourcheix-Laporte, who has worked with the CRTC, said. "This has been a strategy -- a soft-power strategy -- for the American government, in parallel to their military strategies and political alliances strategies."

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Perplexity and Nvidia have launched "Portable Computer," a local-first version of Perplexity's agent platform that runs AI models, files, tools, and workflows directly on Nvidia-powered Linux hardware. Local tasks incur no token charges and keep data on-device by default, with users asked for permission before the system escalates a step to a cloud model. VentureBeat reports: For Nvidia, which has spent the past two years selling the world on trillion-dollar AI data centers, the announcement signals something subtler but strategically important: the chipmaker believes local AI has crossed a threshold from hobbyist curiosity to practical tool -- and it wants to sell the hardware that runs it.

"Local AI reached an inflection point," said Nader, Nvidia's director of developer technology, who focuses on developer tooling and open source. "For the longest time, it was hobbyists and enthusiasts, and they were running these quantized models that were quantized down to be super tiny... And while that's cool, it's not super practical. But all that changed with a lot of these new open source models that have come out that are super useful."

[...] Portable Computer arrives today for Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro, and Enterprise Max subscribers on Linux, with Windows support following in September. Any RTX GPU with at least 24GB of VRAM -- roughly a GeForce RTX 3090 or newer -- clears the bar, a threshold Nate called "sort of the floor where we really want to make sure that we can deliver a great experience, but balance that with making it broadly available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NIJMEGEN (ANP) - Als er geen verdachten worden aangehouden voor het vuurwerkincident bij SC Cambuur, dan zijn Feyenoord-supporters niet welkom in Nijmegen wanneer de Rotterdamse club tegen NEC speelt. Dat heeft de burgemeester van Nijmegen, Hubert Bruls, gezegd bij WNL-talkshow Goedenavond Nederland.

"Als begin volgende week niet helder is of er daders worden opgepakt, dan moeten Feyenoord-fans thuis voor de buis gaan zitten", zegt Bruls. De wedstrijd tegen NEC staat gepland op zaterdag 5 september en is tevens de eerstvolgende uitwedstrijd voor de Rotterdamse ploeg. Als er niemand wordt aangehouden, redeneert hij, zouden "de gasten die dit hebben gedaan dan gewoon over twee weken naar het voetbal kunnen komen kijken." Ook vindt hij het moreel gezien niet juist: "Hoe leg je dat uit aan een 9-jarige? Dat je zoiets kunt doen en dan gewoon door kan gaan?"

Tijdens de uitwedstrijd tegen SC Cambuur van afgelopen zondag gooiden fans van Feyenoord vuurwerk naar supporters van de club uit Leeuwarden, waarbij zeven mensen gewond raakten. De politie meldde dinsdag dat er nog niemand is aangehouden, maar dat ze aan de hand van beelden achter de identiteit van de daders proberen te komen.

Bruls ziet liever dat de verantwoordelijken voor wangedrag worden opgepakt. Maar volgens hem is het nodig dat "collectiever wordt opgetreden" om de grote hoeveelheden vuurwerk tegen te gaan. "Het eerste wat je moet doen, is natuurlijk de daders pakken. Als dat lukt, is dat het beste. Maar als dat niet lukt, dan moet je ook durven zeggen dat ze de volgende keren niet welkom zijn."

Minister van Justitie David van Weel was ook te gast in het programma. Hij vindt dat er bij binnenkomst veel beter gecontroleerd moet worden, vooral kijkend naar de grote hoeveelheden die soms tijdens voetbalwedstrijden worden afgestoken. "Het is gewoon een half oorlogsarsenaal dat hier wordt afgestoken", aldus Van Weel, die reageert op de beelden van vuurwerkgooiende supporters tijdens het duel van afgelopen zondag.

Van Weel zegt dat hij maandag een rapport heeft ontvangen over vuurwerk tijdens voetbalwedstrijden. Daaruit zou zijn gebleken dat er sinds 2018 amper verbetering is geweest in de aanpak hiervan. De minister gaat over twee weken weer in gesprek met de KNVB. "Ik hoop dat we dan met creatieve manieren komen om te zorgen dat we dit niet meer zien."

CARACAS (ANP/AFP) - De internationale luchthaven van de Venezolaanse hoofdstad Caracas gaat op 1 september weer open voor commerciële vluchten. Het vliegveld sloot na de verwoestende twee aardbevingen die het land eind juni troffen.

Luchthaven Maiquetia, ook bekend als Simón Bolívar International Airport, ligt op zo'n 25 kilometer van de stad Caracas, in de staat Guaira. Die regio werd het zwaarst getroffen door de verwoestende aardbevingen op 24 juni, die een kracht van 7.2 en 7.5 hadden. In het hele land kwamen meer dan 6500 mensen om als gevolg van de aardbevingen.

Het vliegveld laat weten dat binnenlandse en internationale vluchten zullen worden hervat vanuit tijdelijke terminals.

DEEP DIVE Intel's Xeon 7 platform, better known by its codename Diamond Rapids, was supposed to launch this year with up to 192 cores backed by a whopping 16 memory channels. But that's not going to happen. This being Intel, the launch was, to no one's great surprise, delayed until 2027 to give what remains of the company's engineering team time to cut and polish the chip — and polish they certainly have. At the Hot Chips show this week, Intel revealed the chip won't ship with 192 cores after all — but hold your disappointment because Chipzilla's flagship SKU will actually cram 256 performance cores into a single socket. In fact, spec-for-spec, the platform is surprisingly well positioned to compete with AMD's sixth-gen Venice Epycs, which will also top out at 256 cores. Well, at least on the high end it will. An eye on HPC As we reported earlier this year, Diamond Rapids won't be a mainstream part. It lacks hyperthreading — what the rest of the industry calls simultaneous multithreading — entirely and it can only be offered in high-core-count SKUs aimed at HPC applications. There will be no eight channel Diamond Rapids-SP parts. Those got canned earlier this year, which leaves us with just the high-end AP variants. These always are the cooler of the two anyway, but they're not what enterprises have historically bought. What this means is Diamond Rapids — which for the sake of brevity we're going to refer to as DMR from here on out — won't compete with AMD in every regime, just the very top end. Intel's next chip, known as Coral Rapids, will see the return of hyperthreading and presumably the next round of SP processors, but we wouldn't write off DMR just yet. The chip is without a doubt Intel's most sophisticated Xeon ever built. In many ways it feels a bit like Intel's Rome moment. As you may recall, AMD's Epyc Rome saw the House of Zen embrace a truly modular chiplet architecture that disaggregated compute from I/O and memory, and could be added, removed, and reused depending on the kind of CPU it was trying to make. After faffing about for three generations trying to make chiplets work for them, Intel appears to have found the right glue to stitch everything together and is now having its own Rome moment. Intel ups its advanced packaging game Cutline: Forget your glasses or squint hard enough and you'd think you were looking at an old Eypc circa 2019. DMR's resemblance to Rome is hard to miss, but the resemblance is only skin deep. Intel really is using a different kind of glue to build its chips. The chip comprises up to 22 chiplets, which can be added or subtracted depending on the ratio of compute, cache, and memory Intel needs — just like AMD has been doing for the past seven years. Those chiplets can be broken into three core groups. There are up to 16 core compute dies built on Intel's bleeding-edge 18A-P process tech, four compute building block (CBB) base dies fabbed on Intel 3-T, and two fabric hub dies built on Intel 3 that tie everything together. We've discussed 18A-P in the past so we won't rehash too much here, but it's a refined version of the 2 nm-class process tech Intel started churning out earlier this year with its Panther Lake mobile processors. Intel claims the tech delivers the same performance at 18 percent less power, or up to 9 percent higher performance at the same power, and that's before taking into account microarchitectural improvements from DMR's all new performance cores. Working our way down the stack, each core chiplet contains up to 16 cores and their respective L2 caches. Up to four of these core chiplets are stacked atop the CBB base die using its Foveros 3D direct hybrid bonding packaging tech. This base die is where all of the chip's L3 cache lives, with 320 MB per CBB, or 1.28 GB for the top-specced DMR SKUs. While Intel is using 3D packaging to assemble its CBBs, it's not using its 2.5D Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) packaging tech to connect the compute assemblies to the two I/O and memory dies or Scalable Fabric Hub (SFH) dies, as the x86 giant is calling them now. Much like the I/O dies found on AMD's last few generations of Epyc datacenter CPUs, Intel's SFH dies combine the chip's memory controllers and I/O interfaces into a single piece of silicon. This die can then be duplicated for added connectivity or channels, which is exactly what we see with DMR. Combined, the two SFH dies offer up to 16 channels of DDR5 at 8,000 MT/s, or 12,800 MT/s when using MRDIMMs, and 128 lanes of PCIe 6.0 / CXL 3 / UPI 3, along with an additional eight PCIe 4.0 lanes, presumably for ancillary I/O like onboard networking, USB, or baseboard controllers. This is a pretty big departure for Intel, which has either crammed everything into one homogeneous die or disaggregated I/O into standalone chiplets while keeping memory on its compute assemblies. For Xeon 7, Intel wanted to deliver a chip with uniform memory access (UMA) rather than the three non-UMA (NUMA) nodes that Granite Rapids-AP showed up as by default. This is part of the reason why Intel skipped EMIB in favor of a more traditional UCIe-S type interconnect, where data is carried over the organic package rather than silicon bridges. EMIB would have required edge-to-edge connectivity between the compute and I/O and would have prevented the CBBs from talking directly to both SFH dies without additional hops. In any case, Intel is calling this new chiplet architecture "fan-out-fabric" and it's what allows it to have UMA while also keeping packaging cost under control, something we strongly suspect may have become an issue with Intel's Xeon-6+ products, known as Clearwater Forest. Questions remain Beyond the physical makeup of the chip, there's a lot we still don't know about the platform. For instance, we have no idea how high the chip's cores will clock nor how much of an IPC gain we can expect from DMR's all-new performance cores relative to Granite. We also don't know anything about the cache hierarchy beyond the fact this thing is going to have a lot of L3. We do know that the cores will feature Intel's updated AMX instructions, which add FP8 support for on-CPU machine learning workloads, and that it'll be one of the first parts with full support for AVX 10.2. We explored the latter in detail a few years back, but in a nutshell, the revised advanced vector extensions aim to address some of the shortfalls faced by Intel's original AVX-512 implementation. HPC and supercomputing enthusiasts, eat your heart out. But on the topic of HPC, we still don't know how Intel plans to handle NUMA beyond the fact that UMA will probably be the default config. That's fine, but there are a lot of HPC workloads that benefit from carving up high-core count CPUs into smaller pieces. While UMA was obviously a major design consideration, we don't see any reason why one wouldn't be able to carve the chip up into two, four, or potentially more sub-NUMA clusters if you wanted to. As far as we can tell, Intel would just need to enable it in the BIOS. Product segmentation is another open question. We already know to expect 256- and 192-core variants of the part, but we don't yet know how far down the stack Intel will go. Presumably Intel could cut the chip down to a single CBB base die with one 16-core chiplet if it thought someone would buy it. More realistically, we expect DMR to bottom out at somewhere between 64 and 128 cores. Taking DMR to Venice Without a full picture of what DMR will offer, it's tough to say how the part will stack up against the competition. Having said that, the specs Intel has already disclosed suggest this is going to be Chipzilla's most competitive fight in years. Both AMD and Intel parts will offer up to 256 cores, 16 memory channels operating at the same speeds, and a gigabyte or more of L3 cache on board. Both parts will offer similar connectivity, while TDPs are expected to land around 600 watts for both parts. As we mentioned before, the one thing Intel doesn't have is hyperthreading, a fact that could give AMD a double-digit percent advantage in certain thread-happy workloads regardless of which chip slinger ends up having the more potent cores. Intel's saving grace is that this is an HPC-centric part and a lot of HPC apps — including the HPL benchmark used to rank the world's most powerful supercomputers – don't always benefit from hyperthreading. In fact, Arm claims that simultaneous multithreading actually hurts more than it helps. If true, we could see Intel position DMR as yet another CPU for low-latency agentic sandboxes (containers where AI-generated Python code is executed or C and Rust are compiled and run). But unless that happens, the reality is DMR probably won't be a high volume product for Intel. Certainly not with Nvidia pushing its in-house Vera CPUs as its preferred AI head node. DMR's success ultimately is going to come down to price and value. When AMD launched Rome, it couldn't touch Intel on core-for-core performance. What it could do is deliver more cores, more I/O, and more memory for the dollar than anything in Intel's lineup, and that largely remained true up until AMD's 5th-gen Epycs forced Intel to concede it was no longer top dog and slash prices. If Intel can deliver more cores for less than AMD with its Xeon 7 processors, for the right buyer, it may not matter who has the better performance. ®

On the fifth episode of her late 80s variety show Dolly, Dolly Parton was joined by Kermit the Frog for a lovely rendition of Sly and the Family Stone’s 1968 hit Everyday People.

You can also watch the clip on Instagram and Reddit. The full episode, which features special guest stars Delta Burke, Terence Trent D’Arby, and the Oak Ridge Boys (in addition to Jim Henson as Kermit), can be seen on YouTube (not very good quality unfortunately).

Tags: Dolly Parton · music · The Muppets · video

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Als er niemand wordt opgepakt na het vuurwerkincident tijdens de wedstrijd van Feyenoord tegen Cambuur van afgelopen zondag dan is het Feyenoordpubliek niet welkom in Nijmegen dat zegt burgemeester Hubert Bruls van Nijmegen in het tv-programma Goedenavond Nederland van WNL

Celtic threw away a four-goal lead in Austria as they missed out on the Champions League for the second year running. The Scottish champions looked to be cruising into the league stage when Callum McGregor put them 4-0 up on aggregate against Lask with a 21st-minute deflected strike.

However, they went on to endure one of their all-time European lows with a 5-1 defeat in Linz delivering a £20m-plus blow.

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Arrest of Luis Manuel Aviles, 48, sparked backlash as he was detained while his son, Joshua, was deployed in Middle East

The father of a US navy sailor who has been deployed in the Middle East for a record-breaking nine months on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier has been released from immigration detention, according to his family.

His arrest sparked intense backlash after the Associated Press reported that his son was entering his ninth month on the Lincoln with the navy when his father was detained. The carrier had just set a US military record for uninterrupted time at sea and has raised concerns about supply shortages and deteriorating mental health among those serving onboard.

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One more day of testimony expected as closing arguments set for Thursday and jury likely begins deliberations Friday

One more day of rebuttal testimony was expected this week in the trial against Lindsay Clancy, followed by closing statements likely on Thursday.

The jury, which will likely begin deliberations on Friday, will decide whether the Massachusetts mother was experiencing postpartum psychosis when she killed her three children in January 2023.

In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

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US president’s lawyers in court filing say Washington arts complex must undergo repairs or risk demolition

The John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts could be demolished if repairs are not carried out, Donald Trump’s administration warned in a court filing on Monday.

Lawyers for the US president said the national arts complex in Washington DC must undergo a $250m renovation or risk facing the wrecking ball.

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