As stated above, the main distinguishing factor of the new Z Fold 8 is its wider 4:3 proportions compared to the Z Fold 8 Ultra. If the latter is a book-style foldable, the former can almost be called a tablet-style foldable, instead. We think the wide screen will serve even better for reading books or multi-tasking with several apps open at once.

Also, at 201g, Samsung is really emphasizing how light the device is. The company is calling it the “world’s lightest fold ever.” And while the device may be light, its no lightweight. Samsung’s newest foldable features Flex Titanium technology, which makes the Galaxy Z Fold 8 more durable. Speaking of durability, it also boasts Samsung’s advantage hinge technology, Armor Flexhinge.

The Z Fold 8 feels like a solid middle point between the premium Z Fold 8 Ultra and the comparatively affordable Z Flip 8. All three phones use the same chip, but the Z Fold 8’s 4,800mAh battery is smaller than that of the Z Fold 8 Ultra. However, the Z Fold 8 does have an option for 16GB RAM and 1TB of storage, similar to the Ultra.

The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG’s webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a user’s TV. On July 2, [KrebsOnSecurity] featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps. Spur found more than 42 percent of apps available for download on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television in a proxy node indefinitely, and that more than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components.

Responding to questions about Spur’s research, LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the company was working with app developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. Developers that fail to comply, he said, will find their apps suspended. “A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform,” Taylor said. “If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended.” Taylor said LG is committed to keeping residential proxy networks out of its smart TV apps going forward, and that the company’s review of those apps is “well underway now.”

“As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance platform quality and the user experience, LG will continue to strengthen our evaluation process for developer-submitted apps, including those that incorporate residential proxy SDKs,” Taylor wrote in an emailed statement. […] “A one-time consent prompt buried in a TV app is not a substitute for meaningful transparency, ongoing control, and platform oversight,” Spur’s Trevor Sutter wrote. “The risk is amplified when consent comes from individuals within the household who use the device but shouldn’t give consent, such as minors.”

According to the Buzz website, users can invite specialized AI agents into team chats, allowing them to collaborate with employees and even other AI agents. From there, they can reportedly move directly from discussions into planning, coding, pull requests and project management without switching between multiple applications.

Buzz also aims to replace parts of GitHub by bringing software development workflows directly into the platform. Teams can plan work, write code, review pull requests and manage Git projects without jumping between separate collaboration and development tools. […] In practice, that means businesses aren’t locked into a single AI provider. Organisations can self-host Buzz, customize it to suit their own workflows and choose whichever AI models best fit their needs.

While no coral samples have yet been extracted, researchers have classified the site as a mesophotic coral ecosystem (MCE). Such systems are light-dependent communities existing at the lower limits of reef-building corals. At more than 175 feet below the surface, the coral garden they discovered appears patchily scattered on a rocky substrate. Bridging the gap between shallow reefs and deeper benthic habitats, MCEs are home to distinct species and unique environmental conditions. While scientists are increasingly recognizing their ecological and climatic importance, they remain among the least explored elements of tropical and subtropical marine biodiversity. And this one has real potential to unlock new information about coral history.

“Since it’s an undisturbed marine ecosystem, it can help through carbon dating or paleoclimatic study to tell us which kind of climate system has occurred here in the past,” said [Gerard Zinzindohoue, the project lead for Coral Reefs Rediscovering & Exploration in Benin]. “It’s better to know the past to help explain the present, and help know which kind of direction we can take in the future.” In addition to the blackbar soldierfish, West African goatfish, and Guinean angelfish filmed darting through the reef, the discovery presents potential conservation claims for other marine life. “We will be advocating for its full protection, perhaps by setting up a marine protected area around it,” said [Houangninan Midinoudewa, an oceanographic researcher at the Benin Marine Conservation Club], who specializes in elasmobranchs — the study of sharks, rays, and skates.

Midinoudewa is currently submitting an application to designate the area as an Important Shark and Ray Area with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Based on the knowledge of local fishermen, Midinoudewa is confident the reef is home to sawback angel sharks, silky sharks, brown skates, and marbled stingrays. The team behind the discovery hopes this will spark a wave of similar discoveries in the waters off West Africa, an area of the world underserved by scientific research projects. “I hope the Gulf of Guinea will be a hub for research because we know our resources are being exploited and people [need to] know exactly what we have and why we should care,” said Midinoudewa. Zinzindohoue agrees: “We don’t need to wait for others to come to our country to show us what is under our sea. We are the ones who must take responsibility.”

“We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media. AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own. “We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent,” Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clement Delangue said in a statement. “Turns out it did!”

[…] “AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities,” OpenAI said in its statement Tuesday. “The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities.” Delangue said he spent the past 24 hours working with OpenAI, “and we strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part. It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” Delangue added that it “might be the first incident of its kind.”

France’s parliament has approved a bill banning social media access for children under 15, making it the first European country to bar children from apps such as TikTok. The president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the ban as a key reform of his final term in office and pledged to enforce it by September. “France is leading the way in Europe when it comes to protecting our children and teenagers,” Macron said in a video posted on social media, hailing “a major step forward.”

He thanked members of parliament for backing the legislation on Tuesday. “The Constitutional Council must now rule on it, and then it will be time to take action to make this measure a reality and protect our children online,” he added on X. After approval by the Senate earlier on Tuesday, members of the National Assembly passed the bill by 279 votes to 81. A growing number of countries are taking steps to restrict social media access amid multiplying warnings over its harmful effects on children.

The ban was to be introduced in two stages, with under-15s blocked from creating new accounts from September 1. The ban would apply to existing accounts from January 2027, according to the legislation. The digital minister, Anne Le Henanff, said before the vote that the timeline was realistic, “because age-verification tools already exist” and others are still in the works, and the onus was on the platforms to impose the rule. “For four months, all of us in France will have to prove our age,” she told journalists. “If someone is under 15, the account will be closed.” The minister also gave assurances that users’ personal data would be protected.

Catherine Jestin, head of digital at Airbus, told us on Thursday: “The selection of Scaleway is a combination of a very strong technical answer and a very strong commercial offer making it competitive compared to hyperscalers’ public cloud offerings. In addition, Scaleway is committed to involving Airbus in the definition of its future product roadmap.” “The objective is to host Airbus’s most critical applications (those required for the Minimum Viable Company). This represents 900 applications and we will start with 70 of them today hosted on AWS.”

Applications being sent to Scaleway include ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management. Finding a cloud provider to host its most sensitive applications for defense and industrial workloads was not a certainty when the process began, Airbus told us last year, because European cloud providers do not have the scale of their US rivals.

Jestin said Airbus will continue to work with AWS. Skywise, a platform that aggregates and analyzes aviation data, and Case Management Assistant for customers’ technical queries will continue to be hosted by AWS. In a statement, she said: “By integrating a trusted, high performance, cloud environment that keeps our critical data assets shielded from foreign extraterritorial laws, we are ensuring that our digital infrastructure keeps pace with our aerospace innovation, while maintaining control and resilience of our industrial operations.”

[B]ack in May, Tesla had five unsupervised robotaxis in Dallas, six in Houston, and 29 in Austin. As of today, there are only 17 unsupervised vehicles in Austin, four in Dallas, and zero in Houston, according to the Robotaxi Tracker. By comparison, Waymo is estimated to have over 3,500 fully driverless vehicles in operation across over 10 cities.

Like Waymo, Tesla typically introduces robotaxis to a new city with a safety driver behind the wheel. Unlike Waymo, sometimes Tesla moves that person over to the passenger seat with access to a kill switch should anything go wrong. The company has been inconsistent in how it rolls out its robotaxis to new markets. The numbers go up and down, with zero explanation from the company as to why.

[…] By adding new cities, Tesla is clearly trying to sell investors on the idea that its robotaxi project is growing. But the fluctuating fleet size, inconsistency in supervised vs unsupervised vehicles, and long wait times tell a very different story.

FireFox 153 was released today. The most important user-facing changes are improvements to PDF handling (you can now merge PDFs and add images to them), and HDR video playback (on Windows, provided HDR is active systemwide). Other under-the-hood changes include browser-wide containers and QWAC support. The full list is in the change notes.

But the most important feature is that this version is an ESR and, therefore, defines the ESR feature set for the next year. Why is being an ESR so important, you ask?

1.) ESR, rather than “normal” (a.k.a. Rapid Release), Firefox is the out-of-the-box browser for many important distros, including Debian, RHEL, Kali, Tails, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Slackware, and others.

2.) Many organizations, large and small, standardize on Firefox ESR as their default browser, regardless of the default browser included with their OS.

3.) Firefox ESR is the basis for many downstream projects, such as Waterfox and KaiOS. All these projects will inherit, for a year, whatever ESR brings to the table today.

4.) Many ISVs and SaaS providers, if they certify their wares for Firefox at all, certify for the ESR version only.

Please note that ESR 153 will not be offered as an automatic update until two months from now (ESR 140 will still be supported). If you want it now, you will need to download and install it manually.

Also of note, ESR 115 will be supported until March 2027. If you use an unsupported version of macOS or Windows (like Windows 7 or 8.x), this is the version to get. However, even Mozilla cautions against running a supported browser on an unsupported OS: “Note that Microsoft ended official support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 in January 2023. Unsupported operating systems receive no security updates and have known vulnerabilities. Without official support from Microsoft, maintaining Firefox for outdated operating systems becomes costly for Mozilla and risky for users.”

As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. “The world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.”

In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in “model collapse,” a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models.

“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage […] “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.” […] ISBNdb advertises that it can keep the identity of AI companies secret. “Strict NDA [non-disclosure agreement] on every engagement,” ISBNdb’s site says. “Every project begins with a legally binding non-disclosure agreement. Your identity, strategy, and acquisition targets are never disclosed.” ISBNdb notes that AI companies may not want to be caught destroying printed books during the scanning process. “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. "‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

Canonical has launched the Enterprise Store as part of Ubuntu Pro, giving organizations a way to manage Ubuntu software distribution in restricted networks, behind firewalls, and in air gapped environments. The on premises proxy sits between devices and Canonical software stores, allowing companies to cache downloads, control software revisions, and manage snaps and charms without requiring every system to connect directly to the internet. The Enterprise Store is designed for organizations with strict security requirements, including regulated industries and environments where predictable software updates and audit controls are important.

District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement provides “meaningful relief” to affected authors and publishers. About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now due payment. Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was “the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.”

To win a preliminary injunction, AT&T had to show it is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that California rules are preempted by a Federal Communications Commission order. US District Judge Linda Lopez denied AT&T’s request for a preliminary injunction during a motion hearing on Thursday, according to a docket entry. The case is in US District Court for the Southern District of California. […] AT&T could appeal Lopez’s ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and could appeal later if it loses the underlying case. But since it has not obtained the injunction it asked for, AT&T for now remains under California’s orders to keep offering phone service to potential customers while the case continues.

“Plaintiff States’ showing at least demonstrates that serious questions going to the merits remain, weighing in favor of preliminary injunctive relief,” the judge wrote, adding that Paramount has acknowledged it will not be harmed by the delay until the end of September. “Paramount and Warner Bros. will continue to operate as separate, viable companies competing in the marketplace while they wait for the Court to adjudicate this case. The balance of equities, combined with the public’s vital interest in antitrust enforcement, therefore tips sharply in favor of the requested injunctive relief.”

The 12-state coalition, led by California, brought a motion for the temporary restraining order. The states are also seeking a preliminary injunction, which would block the merger until the judge rules on the merits of the states’ lawsuit. The 14-day restraining order could be extended to as long as 28 days. Martinez-Olguin, of the U.S. District Court for Northern District of California in Oakland, also set a hearing on the preliminary injunction for Aug. 3, though that date, too, could be delayed if the parties agree. Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, hailed the judge’s ruling as a “critical first win in our case to ensure this megamerger never sees the light of day.”

Nearly seven years after Apple debuted the Apple Card, Samsung is following the iPhone maker’s footsteps with the Galaxy Card, aiming for its own slice of the credit card market. The announcement comes two days before Samsung’s second Galaxy Unpacked event of the year, where it’s expected to showcase new smartwatches and folding smartphones. The Galaxy Card is issued by Barclays on the Visa network; the Apple Card, originally issued by Goldman Sachs but now transitioning to Chase, is on the MasterCard network. There is a physical card — it’s not made of titanium but recycled steel.

The virtual card will be provisioned to a user’s Samsung Wallet account. With no annual fee, Samsung says cardmembers can earn 5 percent cash rewards on all in-store or online purchases made directly from Samsung in the US, 3 percent cash rewards on purchases made with the Galaxy Card using Samsung Wallet, 2 percent cash rewards on streaming service subscriptions, and 1 percent cash rewards on everything else with the physical card. The cash rewards can be redeemed as a statement credit or transferred to a checking or savings account. The annual percentage rate (APR) varies by cardmember, but the card has no foreign transaction fees. Other perks include a 20 percent discount on Samsung’s VIP Advantage membership, which offers extended device protection, specialized support, and exclusive deals, and $200 in cash rewards after spending $2,000 in the first 90 days.

Applications open up on July 22. The Samsung Wallet app is only available on Samsung smartphones and watches, so what happens if a consumer switches to a different smartphone brand? The company says Galaxy Card is not limited to Samsung device owners and that anyone can use the physical card, but you lose the key perks; the card can be managed through a BarclaysUS.com online portal. (Similarly, if an iPhone owner switches to Android, their physical Apple Card will still work, but they lose access to the Apple Wallet app and the 3 percent daily cash perk on Apple purchases; there’s a web portal to manage the account.)