A New Mexico court ordered (PDF) Meta to create a $567 million fund to address harms linked to youth mental health and child sexual exploitation after finding its platforms constituted a public nuisance. "In sum, the Court finds that New Mexico is in the midst of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and public safety in and throughout the state, and that Meta's platforms are a significant contributing cause to the crisis," wrote Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid in the decision. The fund comes on top of $375 million in civil penalties, though the judge declined to mandate changes to features such as infinite scroll and autoplay, citing potential First Amendment and Section 230 concerns. Tech Policy Press reports: The decision follows the second phase of in the State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms Inc., which consisted of a bench trial. Its central question was whether Meta's platforms amounted to a public nuisance in New Mexico, and, if the court found that they did, what remedy would be needed to address it. In March, a Santa Fe jury found Meta liable for violations of New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, awarding $375 million in civil penalties. The jury deliberated less than a day following that nearly seven-week trial. The $567 million abatement fund would be in addition to the civil penalties, according to today's decision.

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Meta in December 2023, alleging the company made false public statements about the safety of its platforms while knowing internally that its products facilitated child sexual exploitation. The court denied Meta's Section 230 defense in May 2024. In today's decision, the court again asserted that "Section 230 does not preclude the State's public nuisance claim," but the decision attempted to thread the needle on issues that the court determined might have run "afoul" of the statute, or of the First Amendment, such as issuing remedies around any particular product feature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deze week hoor je de favoriete afleveringen van de audioredactie uit de wekelijkse podcasts van NRC. Met vandaag: Haagse Zaken. Wat beweegt de Nederlandse kiezer?

ozipital has added a photo to the pool:

Three images of the great "red rock" from my recent and first visit. It has been a long wait, but in my experience, iconic landmarks rarely disappoint and certainly I was entranced as were the hundreds of other visitors....

Chris Agar has added a photo to the pool:

By the banks of the Yarra River. Warrandyte - just outside of Melbourne, Victoria.

Michael J Fuery has added a photo to the pool:

A blue-lit Story Bridge for the blue hour

Nominees to face off in November in redistricted seat central to Trump’s bid to retain slim Republican majority

Tennessee primary voters picked a pair of Memphis-area lawmakers to square off in a dramatically reconfigured US House seat central to Donald Trump’s plan to try to hold on to a slim Republican majority in the midterm congressional elections.

Republicans chose state senator Brent Taylor, who was endorsed by Trump, to be their nominee in the revamped 9th congressional district. Democrats picked state representative Justin Pearson, who gained national prominence three years ago when he was expelled from the Tennessee House for protesting in support of gun control measures.

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Latest attacks by Iran-aligned Houthis spark concerns that Middle East crisis is intensifying

• Who are the Houthis – explained in 30 seconds

Attacks by the Iran-aligned Houthis on a military camp in Yemen and in Saudi Arabia have sparked concerns that the Middle East crisis will continue to spiral.

Yemen is being increasingly drawn into the US-Israeli war with Iran, with the Houthi rebels stepping up attacks against both government forces inside the country and neighbouring Saudi Arabia, a key US ally and supporter of the internationally recognised Yemeni government.

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‘Concrete results’ needed by end of the year in developing alternative to Patriot, says Ukrainian president. What we know on day 1,626

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Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert has run the numbers on internet traffic trends and predicted that human-generated packets will soon account for a trivial amount of overall traffic. The internet-grooming company has previously predicted that machine-generated traffic would exceed human-generated throughput in 2027 – but got that wrong because its measurements found machines took over in May 2026. During the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday, Seifert stuck his neck out again with a new prediction. “To give you a sense of how this trend is playing out, and with the big caveat that I have called it wrong at every point along the way, if the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic,” he said. “In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that’s just how fast we’re seeing non-human traffic grow.” AI is, of course, the reason for the growth in machine-made traffic. Seifert said that if traffic growth matches his predictions, “we’ve got to get a lot more efficient” – and of course volunteered Cloudflare’s service as a source of that efficiency. He also thinks more traffic from machines will mean more security threats. Cloudflare won $696 million of revenue for the quarter, a 36 percent year-over-year jump – but almost a rounding error compared to the $160-billion-plus run rate at AWS and Google Cloud’s expected $100-billion-plus annual revenue. Losses more than tripled, to $205.7 million. Execs and investors weren’t fussed because the revenue growth beat expectations and the company announced it has signed up record numbers of large companies. Investors may also have been impressed by Cloudflare’s low planned capital expenditure, which Seifert said will come in at 14 or 15 percent of the company’s forecast $2.865 to $2.87 billion revenue – just $430 million or so. Again, that’s almost a rounding error compared to the trillions being spent on AI infrastructure by Cloudflare’s rivals. CEO Matthew Prince used that low capex number to take a swipe at his competitors. “If you’re selling what is just commodity compute, if you’re basically letting an AI company use your balance sheet and your credit rating in order to buy servers that are the same as everybody else’s servers, then that’s just not attractive business for us,” he said. Prince said Cloudflare aims to “squeeze as much out of every Capex dollar as possible” and has the attitude to ask, “How can you get more out of the memory or storage that we have in every box that we have?” The CEO said that hyperscalers have “super-low” GPU utilization rates. “It’s that what they’re selling is just a box, and it’s up to the customers in order to actually maximize the utilization. “The hyperscalers, the traditional first-generation clouds, are in the business of buying a server and then trying to sell it back, lease it back, and get five turns of revenue off of it,” he said. “We’re in a very different business where we’re selling actually work getting done, and then instead of it being up to the customer to get as much out of the server as possible, we need to do the work to get as much out of the underlying equipment as possible and build the scheduling and the efficiency and everything else that’s out there.” Prince said Cloudflare therefore doesn’t want to rent servers, “because over time, it’s a commodity business and it’s not very attractive.” The company will instead stick to its serverlesss offerings, which the CEO said are doing very nicely. So too are investors who acquired the company’s shares, which rose 16 percent in after-hours trading to reach a new high that represents 68 percent growth in the year-to-date. ®

WASHINGTON (ANP) - De Russische president Vladimir Poetin zou de komende jaren met een beperkte aanval op een NAVO-land kunnen proberen de vastberadenheid van het militaire bondgenootschap te testen. Dat staat in nieuwe rapporten van Amerikaanse inlichtingendiensten, meldt The Wall Street Journal.

De mogelijke scenario's lopen uiteen van een cyberaanval tot een kleinschalige inval over land. Onduidelijk is hoe waarschijnlijk de Amerikaanse diensten zo'n aanval achten.

De waarschuwing komt op een moment dat de Verenigde Staten kampen met tekorten aan bepaalde cruciale soorten munitie die nodig zouden zijn bij een eventueel conflict met Rusland of China. De Amerikaanse voorraden zijn sterk geslonken door wapenleveringen aan Oekraïne sinds de Russische invasie en door het conflict van de VS met Iran.

JEDDAH (ANP) - Saudi-Arabië, Turkije en Pakistan ondertekenen vrijdag een gezamenlijk defensieakkoord. Dat melden bronnen rond het Saudische leger en de regering aan persbureau AFP. De drie landen versterken daarmee hun defensiesamenwerking tegen de achtergrond van de oorlog tussen de Verenigde Staten en Iran.

Het akkoord was volgens een van de bronnen al langere tijd in voorbereiding, maar de recente ontwikkelingen in de regio hebben het proces versneld.

De Saudische kroonprins Mohammed bin Salman ontmoet daarvoor in Jeddah de Turkse president Recep Tayyip Erdogan en de Pakistaanse premier Shehbaz Sharif. Sharif arriveerde donderdag in Saudi-Arabië. Erdogan wordt vrijdag verwacht.

Over een strategische alliantie tussen de drie landen wordt al maanden gespeculeerd. Pakistan probeert te bemiddelen om een einde te maken aan de oorlog tussen de VS en Iran. Turkije heeft een diplomatieke rol gespeeld bij onderhandelingen over beëindiging van de oorlog in Gaza.

SANTA FE (ANP) - Meta moet in de Amerikaanse staat New Mexico 567 miljoen dollar (ongeveer 492 miljoen euro) betalen en zijn platformen Facebook en Instagram veiliger maken voor jonge gebruikers. Het bedrag komt bovenop een eerder opgelegde schadevergoeding van 375 miljoen dollar.

Een rechter oordeelde donderdag dat het bedrijf verantwoordelijk is voor schade aan de mentale gezondheid van kinderen. De rechter stelde daarmee de openbaar aanklager van New Mexico in het gelijk. Die verweet Meta Instagram en Facebook zo te hebben ontworpen dat jongeren eraan verslaafd raken en kinderen onvoldoende te beschermen tegen seksuele uitbuiting.

Meta moet de 567 miljoen dollar in een speciaal fonds storten om de gevolgen aan te pakken. Ook moet het Amerikaanse bedrijf onder meer maandelijkse gebruikslimieten voor tieners invoeren en het aantal notificaties beperken. Verder moet Meta beter voorkomen dat volwassenen contact zoeken met minderjarigen en extra veiligheidsmaatregelen nemen voor AI-chatbots.

Meta gaat tegen de uitspraak in beroep.

Een jury oordeelde in maart al dat Meta de consumentenwet van New Mexico had overtreden door een misleidend beeld te geven van de veiligheid van Facebook en Instagram voor jongeren. Het bedrijf moest daarvoor 375 miljoen dollar schadevergoeding betalen.

TRUE 2 DEATH has added a photo to the pool:

Blue hour at the small fishing harbor in Iwasaki Village, Aomori. As the old fishing boats settle in for the night, a train on the Gono Line curves into a tunnel, leaving only a ribbon of light behind. For a few fleeting seconds, the quiet harbor and the railway become one scene.

uchi uchi has added a photo to the pool:

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uchi uchi has added a photo to the pool:

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: