A recent EnhancV survey of 1,000 full-time U.S. workers subject to new or stricter return-to-office policies found that 72% suspect these mandates are really a voluntary attrition strategy — a strategy by their own employers to make them quit their jobs. A full 46% admit to the practice of coffee-badging. Thirty-six percent have applied for a new job while sitting at their current office desk. Thirty-six percent have started a side hustle since the mandate was announced, in anticipation of being let go or quitting. Those numbers do not prove that employees reject collaboration. They show that many employees no longer trust the official story…

The central mistake in many in-office mandates is the assumption that proximity automatically produces commitment. It does not. A worker who spends two hours commuting to sit on video calls with colleagues in other cities is not experiencing culture. That worker is experiencing theater. When executives describe the office as a cure-all, many employees experience lost time, higher costs and lower autonomy. The policy’s defining feature becomes its credibility gap. Research keeps undercutting the belief that more office time automatically means better performance. A University of Pittsburgh analysis of S&P 500 firms found that return-to-office mandates reduced employee satisfaction without improving firm performance or firm value....

Baylor University’s reporting on office mandates and brain drain found that firms with mandates faced greater turnover among women, senior employees, managers and high-skilled workers, while job vacancy duration increased and hiring rates declined. In other words, the people with the most options are often the first to leave. The employees who remain may not be the most committed — they may simply be the least mobile… Attendance can be mandated, but commitment cannot. When leaders confuse the two, they do not rebuild workplace culture. They create a room full of people planning their exit.

Unlike many state-age verification laws — which have been harmful in their own right — the SCREEN Act has no requirement that a significant portion of the website consist of sexually explicit content that is harmful to minors. The bill requires nearly any service hosting even a single piece of sexually explicit content to verify the ages of its users. The result is that the bill would apply not only to adult content sites like PornHub or OnlyFans, but also streaming services like Netflix, and social media platforms like Reddit, Discord, or Bluesky, if they host any adult content…

Under the SCREEN Act, the “bouncer” will be a digital age-verification service that captures your personal information and saves it to a database for an unspecified amount of time. The consequences of the bill won’t be limited to minors. If websites and apps are expected to reliably identify teenagers, adults will be asked to prove they are adults. Even worse, the SCREEN Act is a privacy and data security nightmare. One provision of the bill requires services to take reasonable steps to protect the data collected and to not maintain for longer than is necessary. But these are terribly weak protections that impose no meaningful collection, use, or retention limits on services collecting people’s private information…

The SCREEN Act also targets virtual private network (VPN) users and providers. The bill requires covered websites to verify users’ ages based on their IP addresses unless the service can determine that the user is outside the United States, and specifically requires age verification on traffic coming from known VPN addresses. In practice, this discourages the use of VPNs and proxy servers, which millions of people rely on for legitimate purposes such as protecting personal privacy, securing public Wi-Fi connections, safeguarding journalists and activists, and preventing data tracking…

The SCREEN Act creates onerous age-verification rules that will block adults from accessing lawful speech, curtail their ability to be anonymous, and jeopardize the data security and privacy of all internet users.

Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee, founded the hedge fund on the premise that “AI will be the dominant driver of global market returns over the next decade,” according to the firm’s site… Aschenbrenner managed to turn hundreds of millions of dollars into tens of billions of dollars over the course of roughly two years… That streak ended on Thursday, though, when the fund was forced to sell the bulk of its public holdings to a bigger rival after many of its investments went south.

But that’s only part of the story. The fund employed a risky strategy of borrowing money to purchase stocks. When the investments appreciate, the payoff can be massive. But when the investments sour, the losses can be catastrophic. The downturn in AI stocks over the course of this month, like chip makers and cloud computing providers, hit the hedge fund extra hard. It was forced to sell off many investments at a steep discount to rival hedge fund Citadel in what Aschenbrenner reportedly compared to a “bank run” in a letter to investors.

Some noted that his early work experience was at the doomed crypto firm FTX, where he helped now-disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried run a charity out of a Bahamas penthouse. Others on Wall Street, including former traders at global investment banks, noted that in light of reports Situational Awareness used as much as 400% leverage, the collapse wasn’t shocking.

Wall Street breathed a huge sigh of relief last week as an AI-focused hedge fund called Situational Awareness reportedly sold most of its portfolio — reportedly down 67% last month on the backfiring of debt-fueled bets on chipmakers and assorted artificial-intelligence firms — to billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel…

The prevailing sentiment was best summed up by a veteran Wall Street sage who has seen a lot of flameouts in his day. Let’s just say he wasn’t impressed by Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 25-year-old German-born “Nostradamus” figure who is the founder of Situational Awareness… “Just your typical leveraged Âidiot who was right until he was wrong,” the source said, adding that the implosion is a “one-off…”

[Another trusted source] felt there was room for conversation: “A significant issue. Not viewed as systemic right now. I wonder if that changes as more problems arise.” Indeed, the fact is that most of Wall Street is closely monitoring the Situational Awareness situation because they were holding many of the same positions as ÂAschenbrenner. Another top hedge fund manager I won’t name tells me he has been getting crushed on similar investments in chipmakers essential to the AI supply chain, as well as other companies feeding off this technology.

[The recovery seed] is supposed to come from a hardware random number generator producing 128 bits of entropy, a number so large that guessing it is computationally impossible. It wasn’t. According to Block’s engineering team a single code change on March 1, 2021 caused the firmware to silently fall back to a software-based generator instead of the hardware one. On Mk3 devices the effective search space collapsed to roughly 40 bits. Coinkite has confirmed that figure and called it preliminary. The gap between 128 bits and 40 bits is not a matter of degree. It is the difference between a lock that cannot be picked and one that can be brute-forced by anyone with rented cloud computing....

Chainalysis found the attacker went after the largest balances first, pulling more than $30 million in the opening ten minutes. Within about 25 minutes, roughly 594 BTC had moved out of some 500 single-signature wallets. One victim lost around $1.8 million… Coinkite has shipped fixed firmware, but with a warning that matters more than the patch itself. Updating does not repair an existing seed. A seed created with weak entropy stays weak forever. Affected users have to generate an entirely new wallet on updated hardware and move their coins to it.

We have reported ~600 addresses we believe to be hackers holding funds stolen from Coldcard-generated weak entropy addresses to federal investigators, industry compliance firms, and cross-industry cyber investigators.

[While optimists expect] huge corporate profits and a society-wide boost to wealth and well-being… questions about that AI vision are now growing more urgent: When, if ever, will this payoff arrive? And what will the fallout be for Americans if the titanic investment doesn’t quickly deliver? “This AI thing better work out because if it doesn’t … we’re going to have a problem,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at investment firm Apollo Global Management. AI costs and doubts are spreading. The U.S. stock market has swooned this summer over fear of the AI bubble going bust…

The AI gamble sweeping up American fortunes is led by tech companies splurging on hulking data centers packed with computer chips and equipment needed to develop sophisticated AI models and deliver them to customers. In investor calls in the past week, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon pointed to soaring AI-related sales and business deals. Advertisers are using the technology to tailor marketing pitches and corporations and start-ups are buying access to chatbots and other AI software to boost productivity… But this spending can only continue if AI generates an even larger avalanche of new revenue to pay for it all. Financial results released over the past week show that the AI titans’ mammoth costs are largely swamping the sales boost from the technology. At Google, for every dollar of cash its business generated in the past three months, $1.15 went out the door to pay for AI computer chips and equipment, land for AI data centers and other big-ticket purchases. The company is covering the difference partly by borrowing money and selling more of its stock. Next year, five leading AI companies — Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle — are projected to have negative free cash flow, which measures the cash left over after paying expenses and AI infrastructure costs. The figures, based on investment analyst projections compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence, show a stunning reversal for what have been some of the world’s most cash-generating corporations…

The companies remain profitable by standard financial accounting measures that spread out the costs of their AI infrastructure spending over many years… Pessimists see a bet so gargantuan that it cannot possibly pay off. The pessimists are growing louder. The Bank for International Settlements, a typically measured institution in Switzerland that advises government bankers around the world, recently warned there was risk of “economy-wide recessions” if the AI boom falters. That could mean pain for workers and communities across the United States. “I’m not saying AI is going to go away, it’s just not clear to me these guys are going to make money on it,” said Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at investment bank Jefferies who has correctly predictedpast financial bubbles.

The bundle is pay-what-you-want with a minimum purchase price of $10, offering DRM-free PC versions of games including A Short Hike, SkateBIRD, and my favorite game in the pack, Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure … The bundle will be available through August 13.

“Reports say 33% of the industry lost their jobs in the last two years, and the jobs they could fill are disappearing as CEOs try to replace them with AI. It’s hard for companies to adjust to the new shape of the game industry, but even harder for the people they should be employing… To address this in some small way, we have created a bundle with almost 150 games. The proceeds of this bundle will go toward a hardship fund for those experiencing layoffs.”

Games industry workers currently out of work or under-employed can apply to this fund, which is distributed by the United Videogame Workers, to help out with basic necessities like food and rent. As a note, this is only available to US and Canada-based devs, but there’s an FAQ explaining who can apply for the fund.

The mission has spotted small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande. In a 360-degree panorama that the rover captured on June 19 and 20, the 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days, or sols, of the mission, the polygonal shapes spread in all directions for as far as the rover can see… "[T]his sea of polygons took our breath away,” said the mission’s project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California… Some of the polygons that the mission has spotted in the past clearly formed as mud cracks, though a variety of processes can contribute to their honeycomb textures, including cycles of warm and cold temperatures or compression that squeezed water out of the sediment when the surface was buried.

These newly discovered polygons are among the many surprises Curiosity has trundled across since landing on Mars 14 years ago, on Aug. 5, 2012. Besides sulfur crystals, shiny meteorites, and other interesting geologic features, the rover has made major discoveries about the ancient Martian environment — most importantly, that it had the water, chemistry, and nutrients to support microbial life.

Billions of years ago, lakes and streams dappled the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that Curiosity has been ascending since 2014. The rover has previously uncovered chemistry left over from Mars’ watery history, including carbon-based molecules believed to be precursors to RNA and DNA, two nucleic acids that carry genetic information. Scientists have no way of knowing whether these organic molecules were created by biologic or geologic processes — either path is possible — but their discovery reconfirmed that ancient Mars had the right chemistry to support life.

During Apple’s third quarter earnings call, Cook said the company paid significantly more for memory in the quarter and expects that to further increase in the current period. And while Apple is able to offset some of that price jump, it won’t be able to tackle it all… The CEO said that iPhone and Mac sales outpaced Apple’s own expectations and that a lack of flexibility in the supply chain is making it more difficult to keep up with demand.

Bloomberg reports that US senators from both sides of the aisle are urging Apple CEO Tim Cook to commit by August 21 to not using memory chips from Chinese suppliers CXMT and YMTC....

Apple is not required to obtain U.S. government approval to purchase chips from the companies, but doing so without the administration’s support could expose it to significant political ramifications. Which is why, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal ahead of Apple’s recent price hikes, Tim Cook said that “everything needs to be on the table,” adding that “we should look at all supply....” More recently, the Journal reported that Apple’s use of Chinese memory chips could extend beyond China, with the company seeking the administration’s blessing to use components from CXMT and YMTC in products sold elsewhere outside the US. The report also detailed Micron’s efforts to persuade the administration to reject Apple’s request, arguing that allowing Chinese suppliers into Apple’s supply chain could undermine domestic memory production…

[Bloomberg’s reported that U.S. lawmakers warned] other companies could follow Apple’s lead, potentially undermining domestic memory production and planned investments in states such as Indiana, Idaho, New York, and Virginia… [T]he senators sought details about any information Apple has shared with CXMT during the component qualification process, noting that the transfer of controlled technical information to advanced chipmaking facilities in China may require a Commerce Department license.

Cook did not comment on whether Apple plans to raise iPhone prices when the iPhone 18 Pro models and first foldable launch this September, but multiple analysts believe prices will go up. Cook said Apple is expecting to pay higher memory costs in the September quarter, though Apple will be able to partially offset it with lower costs on some non-memory components and a stockpile of inventory.

Apple, which recently topped Nvidia as the most valuable listed company, has been largely spared the volatility in share price seen by chipmakers and big spenders on artificial intelligence. Apple continues to generate cash without the huge investment spending that its Wall St peers are dealing with “and that showed across most parts of the operation,” said Thomas Monteiro, an analyst at Investing.com.

The northern German City of Hamburg is currently in the process of replacing one of its bridges in one single gigantic piece. The new replacement weighs 3700 metric tons and was carefully moved into place over a stretch of 500 meters, requiring extreme patience and precision maneuvering. Some places leave only 40 cm of room to neighbouring buildings.

To prevent the fast delivery of malicious code through the immediate fetching of brand-new releases, GitHub has introduced a Dependabot cooldown, where the automation tool waits for at least three days after a release has been published before opening a pull request. “Waiting a few days before adopting a new release gives maintainers, security researchers, and automated scanners time to spot a malicious version and get it pulled before it ever reaches your pull requests,” GitHub explains.

The three-day cooldown only applies to non-security version bumps, and the behavior can be modified through the configuration option in the dependabot.yml. “Three days as the default balances two goals: it pushes you past the window where most of these attacks live, and it doesn’t hold your dependencies back longer than necessary,” GitHub notes.

This restriction was put in place to prevent old and long-stable releases from being poisoned in case publishing tokens or workflows of PyPI projects were compromised… The discussion of this behavior began during PEP 740 (Digital Attestations) back in January 2024. The discussion was restarted in March 2026 after the popular packages LiteLLM and Telnyx were compromised. These packages were compromised due to a "mutable reference" in these projects’ usage of the Trivy GitHub Action…

To quantify how disruptive this change would be to existing workflows, the PyPI database was queried for projects that have published new files to old releases… [O]nly 56 projects of 15,000 had published a [Python] 3.14-compatible wheel more than 14 days after a release was available. This topic was brought to the Packaging Summit at PyCon US 2026 by PyPI Safety & Security Engineer, Mike Fiedler. The rough consensus of the discussion was that the summit attendees thought it was “acceptable to require users to bump to the next version” to support new Python versions. With the data and consensus in hand, Seth moved forward with a patch to reject new files on old releases which was merged July 8th, 2026.

The trend continued into the second half of the year: Prices are up 7% year to date through mid-July, it said. Recurrent compared EVs according to the same make and model year across 108 combinations and weighted price growth according to inventory volume. “Used EVs are appreciating, which almost never happens,” according to an e-mailed Recurrent statement about the analysis. Other auto analysts found a similar trend…

Price growth for used EVs has been broad-based, said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, the director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, a market research firm. Twenty-one of the 25 used EV models with the highest sales volume increased in price between January and June this year, she said… [T]he price growth for used EVs this year has been all the more surprising because it has happened despite a high supply of used EVs hitting the market — which, all else being equal, would generally cause prices to fall, experts said…

There are several factors juicing consumer demand for used EVs, experts said. Among them are high gasoline prices due to the Iran war, which have pushed more consumers to consider fuel-efficient options, experts said… Overall affordability is another big factor, against a backdrop of inflation that has remained above policymakers’ target of 2% for five or so years, auto experts said. The dynamic has pushed more consumers toward the used car market more broadly.

• “Used EV sales were up 20% in June versus a year earlier, while sales of new EVs were down about 28%, according to Cox Automotive data.”

• New EVs accounted for 5.4% of total new-vehicle sales in June, while the market share for used EVs was just 2.4%, according to Cox Automotive data.

We are a month away from the initial rollout of Google’s Android developer verification system, and the company contends this policy does not impinge on the platform’s open nature. Still, the restrictions will be a big change, and there are still some unanswered questions. An issue that has come up repeatedly in the run-up to verification is what will happen to devs who can’t verify because of where they live. It turns out that Google has a cryptic answer for that buried in an FAQ. Developer verification will soon block the installation of apps from unverified developers on any Android device running Google services, which is functionally all Android phones outside Russia and China. Developers who want to keep releasing software, even if it’s not in the Play Store, have to provide Google with their ID and pay a small fee.

But what if you’re an Android developer living in a sanctioned nation? Currently, the U.S. sanction list includes Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and occupied areas of Ukraine. Given the current uncertain state of US foreign policy, that list could change in the future. Google doing any business with developers in those places is a thorny issue, and it seems like the company has decided to just leave them hanging. A rather lengthy FAQ a few levels deep on the Google developer site addresses various issues around dev verification. Smack in the middle is this: “How does this program impact developers in sanctioned countries? Devices in sanctioned countries will be excluded from Android developer verification checks. This allows any developer to continue distributing apps in these regions without verification, though users there won’t benefit from the enhanced security benefits of the program.”

[…] A Google spokesperson has expanded on the FAQ and confirmed to Ars that people living in sanctioned nations will not be allowed to go through the verification process. That means they will not be able to effectively distribute software through any channel internationally. Today, someone making an app in, say, Cuba can distribute it freely around the world, as well as at home. Anyone can install it and see their work in action after tapping through a few sideloading alerts. In the coming months, that will no longer be the case. These unverified apps will only be easily installable in the sanctioned countries where verification doesn’t exist.

Onboard the same flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace. According to a new study by an international team, the resulting impact plume may briefly be bright enough to see against the dark sky near the moon’s edge. That means it might be visible to moongazers with sufficiently sensitive telescopes. This head-on collision of the errant stage is expected to occur near the Einstein and Bell craters near the western lunar limb. It may well be visible to ground and space-based assets.

Using special physics simulations to model the impact, William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin and colleagues predict the debris plume from the impact will have the central ejecta spike reaching roughly 47 miles to over 60 miles (75 kilometers to 100 kilometers) altitude. “Our calculations suggest the plume should be several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark-sky background for the first few minutes after impact,” Jo told Space.com. “So the plume should be visible, though I’d stress this is a single nominal case. The real one will look different, and the numbers are on the optimistic side. But the point worth making is that the flash isn’t really the story here.” Jo emphasized that there’s great slam-dunk science to be had. “Watching this one gives us a rare chance to open up ejecta-plume science and calibrate those models against a real event, which matters for every future thing we deliver to the moon,” Jo said.

OpenAI has discovered other instances in which autonomous agents have escaped containment as the company expands its investigation of the hacking incident at tech firm Hugging Face that drew global attention this month, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The new breakouts were uncovered during the company’s publicly announced investigation into how one of its agents escaped what was meant to be a contained testing environment this month, the two people said, and OpenAI is now looking into those instances as well. One of the sources said that the escapes were limited in nature and that none of the agents were thought to have left OpenAI’s network.

An OpenAI spokesperson referred to a statement issued by the company on Tuesday that said it was reviewing “broader activity from our models” in addition to the Hugging Face intrusion. The discovery of additional rogue behavior at OpenAI, even if limited in nature, could feed growing appetite for regulation coming out of the White House and elsewhere. The expanded investigation by OpenAI was launched shortly before its primary rival, Anthropic, disclosed that its models were also responsible for a series of break-ins that led to breaches at three other companies dating back to April, according to the two sources and a third source familiar with the matter. The recent discovery of other past breakouts at OpenAI has not previously been reported.

AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control. “We have a whole industry where the people designing, developing and putting out these tools aren’t keeping up themselves to responsibly develop these things and keep them safe,” said Maurice Chiodo, a mathematician who works at Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk. Reuters could not establish exactly how many incidents OpenAI investigators found or the timings or circumstances under which they occurred. The three sources said OpenAI and outside experts were examining log data from earlier in the year in a bid to understand what took place.