The legislation, which is being drafted and released Tuesday for targeted consultation, would require platforms to send notifications to new and existing users so they can choose their default feed. […] The measures, set to be introduced to the Parliament of Australia this year, will also require AI chatbots, online games and other digital services to take action to protect under-18s from addictive design features.

Telluride just managed one of its best-kept secrets in years, per The Hollywood Reporter. On Sunday night, festival-goers filed into a 650-seat theater with their phones locked away, having no idea what they were about to see, told only that it ran nearly three hours, hadn’t been shown anywhere, and that its principal creators would be in the audience. The surprise premiere they went on to enjoy is a new documentary from co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Called “You Can See Everything,” the film is said to capture Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, in the 34 days before she reported to federal prison in May 2023 to begin an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors about her blood-testing technology. Since then, her legal fight has limped along without success. Her appeals to overturn the conviction and shorten her sentence were rejected in February of last year. She then went a different route last year, asking President Trump to commute her sentence. That clemency petition is still listed as pending, meaning it’s officially been opened and remains under review.

Fielder apparently lived in the couple’s guest house during filming — the access they provided sounds shocking — but some of the buzz also ties to an A-list actress who becomes part of the story itself. A24 is set to release the film in October.

Gamers Nexus partnered with fellow YouTubers Level1Techs and independent security researchers for the investigation, which involved testing retail LG OLEDs. Packet captures showed the TVs scanning the local area network for nearby hardware like phones or smartwatches, as well as logging location data and details of nearby Wi-Fi networks, and feeding the information back to LG Ad Solutions. Perhaps more concerningly, the TVs were capable of recording microphone audio when in standby; this continued even after the TV was disconnected from the internet, with audio files stored offline and uploaded once a connection was restored.

AlphaGenome Atlas, as DeepMind calls the database, is a precomputed catalogue of what each substitution of a single DNA base is likely to do to the machinery that switches genes on and off. Until now researchers had to run such a model one variant at a time or had to test variants in the laboratory, a process that was painstakingly slow. It would have taken many human lifetimes to discover the consequences of all 9 billion possible single-letter mutations. The Atlas promises to make the job of biologists and medical researchers considerably easier, potentially speeding up the understanding of genetic diseases and the hunt for possible cures.

Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind’s vice president for research and head of its AI for science team, told reporters on a briefing call that this was the first time any researcher in the world could reach a comprehensive map of human genetic variation “by simply opening a browser.” Kohli also framed the release as helping to complete the unfinished business of the Human Genome Project, which in 2003 succeeded in mapping the entire human DNA sequence. “As the saying goes, we bought the book,” he said, “but we did not understand how to read it.”

Atlas is available for non-commercial use from today through a website Google DeepMind has set up for it. The company said it would be available for commercial use through a licensing arrangement through Google Cloud “soon.” Kohli said that Google DeepMind’s sister company,ÂIsomorphic Labs, which is using AI for drug discovery, would have access to Atlas but that it would also require a commercial license for access. He did not specify exactly what the terms would be for commercial licensing. A paper describing the Atlas and how it was created is being released on bioRxiv, a repository for biomedical preprint academic papers.

A 2012 reading high of 501 on PISA’s index had declined to a score of 466 last year. The test is widely regarded as the world’s leading gauge of educational performance and its results are closely scrutinized by governments and educators. “In reading, more screen time and less reading for pleasure have gone hand in hand with weaker results,” OECD head Mathias Cormann told a press conference. “We’re also seeing more hasty reading, students rushing through a text and giving a quick wrong answer.”

Reading scores fell more sharply in students from better-off backgrounds, the study added. Hindered by falling reading standards, average teenage science and maths skills were also at their lowest this century. Science fell from a 2009 high of 506 on the index to 486, while maths was down from 502 to 469 in the same period. East Asia was the best-performing region. Chinese cities that participated in the test, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan had the best educational systems with Britain and Estonia the only countries outside the region that made it into the top 10 in reading, mathematics and science.

Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found. The units, the name of which 404 Media is revealing here for the first time, are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). In one case, a PITT analyzed the financial activity of a man who was driving across Montana, and local authorities stopped him under the pretense of an obstructed license plate and charged him with a DUI.

404 Media identified one PITT in the Spokane Sector, Washington, which polices the U.S. border with Canada, and another in the Laredo Sector, Texas, which polices the border with Mexico. The findings add to an Associated Press investigation from last year which found Border Patrol was using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) as part of the same wide-spanning predictive policing program. “The bottom line is genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center For Democracy & Technology, told 404 Media in an email. Here Border Patrol seems to be “using parallel construction to cloak the reason behind its car stops in secrecy. If we can’t meaningfully review and evaluate these systems, we can’t trust them,” he added.

[…] The DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows that Border Patrol is analyzing the financial activity of Americans to find people to pull over. The Associated Press’s investigation found the predictive policing program is also heavily using ALPRs to track potential targets’ movements. It is not clear how exactly Border Patrol is monitoring Americans’ financial activity. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) declined to answer what financial activity the agency was monitoring, and whether it obtained a warrant or not.

AMD is building out what they are describing as an “elite” team of developers for driving Rust code “deep into the GPU stack” from firmware to drivers, shader compilers, and other GPU software in Rust. AMD Senior Fellow Harsh Meno posted this week to LinkedIn about this new effort…

And note this AMD job posting that’s active for hiring a software development engineer to work on Rust code…

“We are building next-generation systems software for AMD GPUs with Rust as a core technical direction. The work spans compilers, runtimes, low-level GPU software, firmware, developer tooling, and methods for improving the safety and correctness of complex hardware-software systems.

“Rust is not incidental to this role. You will help establish how Rust is used in performance-sensitive and high-trust parts of the GPU stack, including the compiler and tooling support, system interfaces, engineering practices, and validation methods required for production deployment. You will have the opportunity to influence both near-term implementations and the longer-term architecture for using Rust across current and future AMD platforms.”

More than 16 years after first proposing a cultural institution dedicated to visual storytelling, filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, will open their long-awaited museum in Los Angeles on September 22. The project made two false starts — plans to construct it in San Francisco and Chicago were both eventually abandoned — and has cost Lucas around $1 billion of his own money to build… Inside, visitors will find a significant slice of Lucas’ private collection, amassed over five decades and spanning art, costumes, movie props and memorabilia, with more than 1,300 objects currently displayed across 30 galleries…

Many fans will come for the “Star Wars” vehicles and sculptures of Yoda and Grogu, but the sci-fi mega-franchise only occupies about 7% of the museum. Lucas and Hobson are betting those visitors will stay for artworks by Frida Kahlo and Norman Rockwell, photographs by Gordon Parks, comics by Frank Miller and Cowboy Bebop anime, which will be screened in one of two theaters alongside early silent movies, Lucas’ own student films and productions by famed historical artists like Man Ray… [M]ajor art institutions like New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Britain have reconsidered the cultural canon by rehanging their permanent collections, exhibiting overlooked or marginalized artists alongside more widely celebrated names. The Lucas Museum appears to follow a similar philosophy, contending that the gravitas of an artwork is not just determined by its display in space but by what it’s in dialogue with. Lucas has even called his namesake museum “a temple to the peoples’ art,” elevating the work of illustrators and other underappreciated art forms…

The museum defines narrative art as any art that tells a story, and, moving through the space, one feels the enormity of the task of organizing and presenting such a broad vision… The open-plan, curvilinear design means the galleries are not fully divided, reinforcing the all-encompassing nature of the collection, though altogether the vast array of exhibits sometimes struggle for cohesiveness. Disjointed curation may reflect turbulence in the museum’s management ahead of the opening. Last April, former director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont departed, with Lucas himself assuming responsibility for “content direction.” A month later, the museum laid off 15 full-time and seven part-time staff before chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas resigned in December, with no replacement planned…

After failing to secure a site in San Francisco, Lucas faced public opposition and a lawsuit in Chicago, with nonprofit Friends of the Parks arguing that his lakefront proposal would essentially privatize public land. Amid the delays and setbacks, simply opening the museum may feel like a victory to its founders.

Hobson teared up as she continued, “I was a fan already, but I saw something, the inspiration, the unwillingness to compromise, the determination, the lack of sleep, the lack of rest, the doggedness that actually taught me so much more than I ever could have imagined.” The museum, which features 1,200 pieces from Lucas’s private collection, has been in the works for about 20 years… “I thought I was tough. I thought I was strong, I thought I had a will, and then I saw George, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s why you could only do six of those movies,’" Hobson said. “Any more would have killed you.”

The billion-dollar, 300,000-square-foot museum, which opens to the public on September 22, encompasses 100,000 square feet of gallery space housing the collection of Lucas and Hobson. Intended to highlight storytelling in art, it presents the work of comic book artists John Romita Sr. and R. Crumb, illustrators Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell, and fantasy painters Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta alongside masterworks by Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, as well as Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, and John Singer Sargent. All the works on display were chosen for their ability to tell a story, frequently in a single frame, Hobson told members of the press on September 2…

“Some visitors may be scandalized by the collision of so-called ‘high’ and ‘low,’" wrote Min Chen in Artnet News. “But there’s something liberating about watching those hierarchies collapse, seeing the breadth of human creativity arrayed beyond the bounds of genre or canon.” Notably, most of the works appear without didactics, which is intentional. “We’re encouraging people to have their own individual encounters with works of art and take away what they feel like speaks to them,” Lucas told The Guardian.

The tactic did not land for everyone. “Without [didactics], I left the Lucas without a clear sense of how the museum is positioning itself or, frankly, without learning much about anything beyond what I already knew....” wrote Maximiliano Durón in Artnews. “The Museum of Narrative Art lacks any kind of narrative.” Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times was unfazed by the lack of information, calling the institution "gutsy” and “defiant.”

“Critics will roar,” wrote McNamara, “but the Lucas Museum is a win for ‘the people’s art.’"

The experiments nudged up vehicle speeds by 2% on average on the congested roads, and shortened travel times by a modest 0.7%. Scientists have long thought that traffic could be eased this way, and this now demonstrates how it could actually work in the real world.

The researchers collected data on weekdays in the 10 cities, which included Seattle, Salt Lake City, Chicago and Atlanta. While they studied a variety of types of roads, from city streets to highways, they found that in cities such as Los Angeles where they targeted highways, their diversions had the biggest effect, with driving speeds in those areas increasing by about 4.6%. Most cities, though, saw a smaller improvement with speeds across them increasing by just 0.5% during peak times. The Google study’s findings confirm what other researchers have long suspected, said Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at UCLA who was not involved in the study. “This is a pretty nice empirical illustration of a longstanding idea,” he said. If a clogged traffic artery is on the verge of a long delay, he said, rerouting a small number of vehicles away from the bottleneck produces a “not gigantic but noticeable result....”

As with other traffic interventions, there’s a risk that Google’s approach to spreading traffic could backfire. This concept, known as “induced demand,” also applies to efforts like adding a lane to a critical highway, which temporarily relieves congestion, until traffic rises again. “You can do this, but you cannot be too successful, because if you are too successful, then more people will start driving, and essentially you’ll be back to ground zero,” [said Alexandre Bayen, a co-author of the study and director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society]. “That’s why when we did the study, we only operated at the margin.” The idea is to make minor improvements, enough to matter in the aggregate but not so significant that people notice and start driving more, canceling those improvements…

The Google Research study also considered the potential environmental benefits of its traffic improvements. The paper highlights the carbon dioxide emission reductions resulting from the slightly smoother traffic flow and shortened travel times, which add up to a savings of about 1,000 metric tons annually. That’s equivalent to the emissions of about 200 vehicles, a drop in the bucket for cities with millions of cars, the majority of which are still gas guzzlers, even in San Francisco and LA. Bayen acknowledges that while emphasizing the cumulative benefit if such efforts were sustained for a longer time. For Manville, the study is a useful proof of concept. “It is a demonstration that if we managed roads better, air would probably be cleaner,” he said.

According to Brave’s testing, the browser used 44% less CPU, 28% less memory, and 10% less energy on average compared with the three competing browsers. It also completed page loads 20% faster while transferring 26% less inbound data and 39% less outbound data…

- Brave averaged about 33% CPU usage, while Chrome used 47%, Edge 53%, and Firefox 78%.

- For memory, Brave used about 1.2 GB, compared to 1.75 GB for Chrome, 1.62 GB for Edge, and 1.65 GB for Firefox.

By stopping ads, analytics scripts, tracking pixels, and other third-party requests from loading, the browser has less network traffic and less work to do. In page-loading tests, Brave took about 4.4 seconds to fully load a page. Chrome took 5.1 seconds, Firefox 5.3 seconds, and Edge 6 seconds. However, when measuring Largest Contentful Paint, which is when the main content appears, Brave and Chrome both averaged about 2.4 seconds, with Edge and Firefox just behind at 2.5 seconds. This means Brave’s main advantage comes after the main content is visible, since there are fewer background ads, trackers, analytics requests, and delayed scripts to process.

The target is to complete the migration by end of 2027… On September 3, 2026, the Federal Council published results of “PoC BOSS”, a feasibility proof-of-concept involving 172 federal employees who tested the openDesk suite, a German open-source collaboration platform. During the proof-of-concept phase, core office tasks like document processing and email received positive assessments, while large-scale video conferencing still showed technical limitations. Based on the ‘success’ of the PoC phase with 172 employees, the pilot is now launched for 3,000 employees…

According to Matthias Stürmer, professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, Microsoft’s supremacy in public institutions poses three problems that are driving this migration. First is the risk of foreign access. US cloud legislation could expose Swiss government data to foreign authorities. Second is the risk to service continuity, as dependency on a single foreign vendor creates operational risk. The third risk is the escalating costs as proprietary licensing fees are rising with no Swiss leverage.

Switzerland’s military cybersecurity unit, Cyber Command, is not waiting for the civilian pilot. It is already poised to replace Microsoft 365 entirely with openDesk by October 2026. It is pretty much the same reason. Military doesn’t want foreign governments accessing sensitive Swiss data.

She is one of a dozen educators around the country who told The Post that they’re experimenting with a different approach to student use of generative artificial intelligence this school year. Teachers and professors are throwing out old assignments, installing new policies and protocols, and incorporating AI built for the classroom, rather than feeling forced to choose between returning to pencil and paper or acting like the AI police.

Her new lesson plan even incorporates generative AI in a controlled way to let her evaluate students’ critical thinking skills. She created chatbots using BoodleBox, the university’s AI vendor, that allow instructors to see both sides of the conversation. For an assignment testing students’ ability to make evidence-based arguments, they participate in a simulated school board meeting about banning books. It involves debating chatbots designed by Zeleny with names like the Confrontational Parent. Writing students usually turn in business proposals and research papers. This semester, instructors are starting to ask instead for transcripts of conversations a student had with a chatbot, a handwritten outline of their composition, and a video reflection of how they felt about the work. “In a lot of ways, we have made these assignments harder, but writing should have always had more detailed checkpoints along the way,” she said.

A Clinton Township, Michigan man was charged $418 for a single EV charging session at Elder Hyundai’s Macomb Township store after finding the charger listed as publicly available on the EVgo app, but didn’t discover the charges until after wrapping up his 40-ish minute charging session. “I was flabbergasted,” explained Stanley Kpenkann, who had been driving a rented Chevy Bolt EV at the time. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be saddled with a bill of $418 for a charging session.”

After calling EVgo to report the error, he found that the exorbitant charge wasn’t a mistake at all - Elder Hyundai was charging customers an eye-gouging $5 per kWh, plus another $5 for every minute connected.

[In June] Plug & Play EV‘s Steve Birkett took to LinkedIn to call out his local Hyundai dealer in Union, NJ for charging a ridiculous $15 per kWh to top off his IONIQ 5 (!)… Even worse, he noted that a number of area dealerships that had listed their ports as “public” were actively discouraging public use with signs and stickers designed to turn people away…

[U]nlike gas stations, EV charge point operators in many states aren’t required to clearly advertise what they’ll charge before a driver plugs in in the same way that gas stations are: with clearly legible signage that’s visible from the street.

The hedge fund manager did what any good father would do — at least, any father with vast financial resources and what friends describe as a “Mr. Fix-It” tendency. He sprung into action, getting her topline care at New York City’s Mt. Sinai Hospital and consulting a network of well-connected friends all over the world. He helped her access a novel cell therapy that has been gaining traction among longevity enthusiasts, who are seeking ways to prolong human life. And then — motivated by a newfound desire to accelerate scientific research — he vowed to spend more than $400 million to launch an institute dedicated to longevity and brain health… He posted this week that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in May, gave his daughter Lucy’s medical team a first-time emergency authorization to transplant mitochondria — the energy-producing part of human cells — from her leg muscle to her eyes, in the hopes that the tiny cell powerhouses would facilitate healing in her optic nerves and perhaps even restore her vision.

Ackman’s story highlights the increasingly prominent role of the ultra-wealthy in making expensive medical bets on longevity treatments and other novel therapies, altering the direction of research as federal funding for science declines in the second Trump administration. But his saga is a deeply personal one, spurred by his daughter’s medical crisis. The focus on longevity by Ackman, who made billions on Wall Street as a hedge fund manager, is aligned with similarly ambitious efforts from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has backed Retro Biosciences, a start-up whose goal is to add 10 healthy years to the human lifespan through cellular reprogramming. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is reportedly a funder of Altos Labs, which focuses on cellular rejuvenation and resilience… Billionaire investor Peter Thiel, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison are also deeply invested in life-extension methods and attempts to rewrite the biology of aging…

The therapy given to Ackman’s daughter Lucy, known as mitochondrial transplantation, is of great interest not only to people who have suffered injuries, but to longevity-focused scientists who believe that mitochondria may hold promise for reversing some of the effects of aging… In recent years, scientists have discovered that mitochondria have many other functions beyond converting food into energy. They serve as clearinghouses for damaged cells, opening up the possibility that they can help with cell regeneration and healing, said Daria Mochly-Rosen, professor of chemical and systems biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine and co-author of " The Life Machines: How Taking Care of Your Mitochondria Can Transform Your Health.”

“I am one of those who believes that focusing on mitochondrial health is a way to address many human diseases, including aging itself,” she said. “It’s exciting.”

Perhaps AI will eventually make many humans unemployable — but there is no sign of it yet. On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations. The unemployment rate is just 4.1%, lower than in almost 90% of months over the past half-century. Young workers, often cast as AI’s first victims, are holding up remarkably well: the gap between unemployment among 20-24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low.

Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring in professional and business services is running about 10% below the average in 2015-19. Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganise their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block, the owner of Square and Cash App, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, are replacing people with bots. American companies have announced some 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month on average so far this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consultancy.

But AI-related lay-offs gets lost in the churning jobs market where employers shed roughly 1.7m workers in a typical month. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centres and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow. Incumbents racing to keep up are creating new AI roles. And by making some workers more productive, AI may be increasing demand for their services.

Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles.