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.

[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.

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. […].

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.”

For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry-level job losses for younger workers in some fields, even as older workers appear largely unaffected so far.

The August 2026 edition of “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence” updates and revises a paper of the same name published last year with fresh data and refined statistics. In that update, the Stanford researchers find the employment trends they identified for entry-level workers last year are persisting and expanding. Specifically, employment levels for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most “AI-exposed” occupations are now 19 percent below those of their peers in fields less exposed to AI disruption. Last year, that gap measured just 13 percent.

[…] Digging deeper into the data, the researchers found that this phenomenon is mainly manifesting itself through lower hiring rates for entry-level workers in AI-impacted fields, rather than increased firings or employees quitting. They also found that the labor market effects among this age group were mostly seen in lower overall employment, rather than reduced pay rates. But not all jobs that show potential for AI “disruption” are created equal, the researchers found. In its Economic Index, Anthropic differentiates between queries related to tasks that are “automative” (i.e., fully replacing work previously done by a human) or “augmentative” (i.e., helping human workers be more effective at tasks they are still needed for). By this measure, jobs like “accountants and auditors” and “receptionists and information clerks” were among those judged most susceptible to AI automation, while jobs like “chief executive” and “registered nurse” were among those using AI augmentation most often.

Unsurprisingly, jobs where AI automation is prevalent are the ones showing the worst relative employment levels for entry-level workers these days. “The findings are consistent with automation-oriented uses of AI substituting for labor while complementary uses are associated with flat or rising employment,” the researchers write.

The Google subsidiary will start rolling out vehicles in the German city this year, which will be manually driven while the company “starts with high-definition mapping of local street networks” and testing with safety drivers, Waymo said in a statement.

“Bavaria is determined to live up to its pioneering role and be an international leader in autonomous driving,” Florian Herrmann, the head of the Bavarian state chancellery, said in the statement. “Now we need to move quickly from testing to real-world deployment.”

[…] German authorities gave autonomous vehicles the green light in 2021 to operate in the country in approved geographical areas. Other countries are looking at following suit, though the EU’s broader autonomous driving rules are set by the U.N.

The M6 chip is equipped with a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, up from a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU in the M5 chip. In addition, the M6 chip features the first-ever dual Neural Engine with two 16-core engines, up from one in previous chips. The M6 chip has up to 170GB/s memory bandwidth, up from 153GB/s for the M5 chip.

Apple said the Mac mini with the M6 chip delivers up to 40% faster CPU performance, up to 4x faster performance for AI tasks in particular, up to 2x faster graphics performance, and up to 2x faster storage speeds compared to the previous-generation model with the 10-core M4 chip, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB of storage.

There are two M5 Pro configurations available, including one with a 15-core CPU and a 16-core GPU, and another with an 18-core CPU and a 20-core GPU. Both of these models are equipped with a single 16-core Neural Engine for AI tasks. For both the M6 and M5 Pro configurations, Apple said the Mac mini now includes Neural Accelerators in each GPU core for the first time.

Like a sleeper cell awaiting activation, a never-before-seen Windows backdoor dubbed Sleepwalker waits silently in memory for one specifically crafted network packet to wake it up and deliver commands using the malware’s 23-instruction language. The commands can do everything from running code directly in memory to moving data off the computer. Malware researcher Dominik Reichel discovered the passive backdoor, which also has its own command language, and detailed Sleepwalker in a technical analysis on Monday. “What makes it worth writing up is what that packet carries: not a readable command, but a short program written in a command language of the backdoor’s own design,” Reichel said. “Its 23 instructions cover scheduling, several ways to move data, staged file delivery and running code directly in memory. Recovering the encryption key is not enough to understand one of these programs. The internal command language must be reverse engineered as well.”

In addition to having its own command language, it’s also notable that the remote host can be a VMware VMCI target instead of a normal network address. “Taken as a whole, the approach here is consistent with a targeted, well-resourced operation rather than an opportunistic one,” Reichel wrote. The malware, hidden inside a 64-bit Windows DLL file, impersonates Microsoft’s dpapi.dll, part of Windows’ data protection API for protecting sensitive data. It exports the same seven functions as the real dpapi.dll, but attempts to forward calls to a file named dpapisvc.dll, which is not a real Windows component. The file also has a forged ESET Management Agent version resource, and loads via side-loading into ERAAgent.exe, the Windows executable for ESET Management Agent. After confirming that its host process is named ERAAgent.exe, Sleepwalker goes to sleep inside the computer’s memory, which also helps it remain hidden from traditional anti-virus tools.

Unlike most backdoors, which call back to an attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) server and start receiving commands, Sleepwalker lies in wait, checking every packet that passes through the network looking for a specific pattern - this is called a magic packet. Once it sniffs out a packet that matches the exact pattern, the backdoor decrypts the data and treats it as a command. “Because the backdoor never sends anything out on its own and does not open any obvious listening port by default, tools that watch for connections to known-bad domains or unusual outbound traffic will not see anything unusual,” Reichel wrote. “The absence of outbound connections to known-bad infrastructure does not rule out an infection, either. A machine can be fully compromised by this backdoor while producing nothing at all for a network monitor to flag.”

The developer, “laserphile,” wrote on their blog that they recently ran into some weird issues with their Bluetooth headphones. They couldn’t play music via their phone when, at the same time, the AliExpress website was open on their PC. The headphones, laserphile explained, support multipoint Bluetooth audio so they can be connected to the PC and phone at the same time, for instance, playing music on the phone and announcing notifications through the PC. “Shortly after loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from my phone would stop playing. Closing the AliExpress tab fixes it immediately,” the developer said in the blog post.

“Muting the tab/Firefox/Windows does not help, and there is no visible video, music, or other media playing on the page. This seemed suspicious enough to investigate.” It turns out that Alibaba has been secretly leveraging AliExpress users’ audio systems to track them and build detailed fingerprints of them. […] The AliExpress site was using the browser’s WebAudio API to run invisible sound waves at zero volume. By measuring tiny hardware differences in how each PC processed those signals, the site created a unique digital fingerprint to track devices — without user knowledge or consent.

The secret audio path froze the developer’s Bluetooth connection while covertly scraping hardware memory, screen dimensions, and network data in the background. The data collection extends beyond audio. Further inspection revealed that the same scripts also measure canvas, WebGL, hardware specs, WebRTC, mouse/touch events, and automation indicators. All of these form a broad device fingerprint that is sent back to Alibaba’s telemetry servers.

The world’s oceans are hotter than ever recorded, new data suggests, as they suffer from human-caused climate change and the growing El Nino weather phenomenon. The average surface temperature of the planet’s seas outside the polar regions hit 21.1C (70F) on Saturday, according to figures from the European Copernicus climate change service. That edges past the 21.09C recorded on three separate days in March 2024, and is far above average for the time of year. […] The data is based on sea temperatures 10m (32ft 10in) below the surface, using measurements from buoys, ships and satellites, which are combined to produce a global estimate.

While the margin of record is currently very small and any global estimate comes with uncertainties, scientists say its timing is particularly notable. Average worldwide sea temperatures tend to reach their yearly peak in March or April, which corresponds to the end of summer in the southern hemisphere — and not in August. The southern hemisphere contains more of the planet’s ocean surface than the northern hemisphere and so exerts a bigger influence on average sea temperatures. What is especially concerning to scientists is that the oceans are already so hot when the natural El Nino weather phenomenon is still some way off its expected peak.

The price explosion impacted Fire TVs, Echos, Kindles, and Eeros. One egregious example that’s been cited is that of the Echo Dot, one of Amazon’s cheapest smart speakers, the price of which jumped 60% overnight, from $49.99 to $79.99. Price-tracking sites like CamelCamelCamel show the stark uptick, which has previously hovered much lower. […] The company also said that it would continue to offer occasional promotions to customers over the course of the next year.

The subpoenas asked for details on the timing of Situational Awareness’s trades and for its communications with lenders about the money it was borrowing, also known as “leverage,” two of those people said. The subpoenas additionally warned the banks to preserve any information regarding the San Francisco hedge fund. The S.E.C. oversees financial markets with an eye toward protecting small investors, and has brought civil cases regularly against investment firms that produced large losses. Any investigation into Situational Awareness would be at its earliest stages, and it’s no guarantee that it would lead to fines or other punishment. The hedge fund has not been accused of wrongdoing.

[…] Situational Awareness had a fast rise and an even quicker retreat. Founded just two years ago by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former researcher at OpenAI, it rode the A.I. boom to soaring investment returns. To achieve those results, however, the fund relied on heavy borrowing, as well as complicated and expensive financial instruments that magnify gains — and losses. The latter piled up quickly last month when the stock prices of publicly traded, high-flying A.I. companies dipped. At the same time, shares in more traditional technology companies — which the hedge fund had been betting against — rose, compounding the problem. Situational Awareness was forced into a fire sale. It wound up selling most of its stock portfolio to a rival, Citadel, at a discount.

Trump’s temporary fee increase expires in September, one year after it was issued. The proposed rule by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, posted in the Federal Register on Monday, would make a fee of $103,265 permanent. It could be finalized by the end of the year. The H-1B program allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers with training in specialty fields and offers 65,000 visas annually, with another 20,000 for workers with advanced degrees, approved for three to six years. Those visas typically came with fees between $2,000 and $5,000 before Trump’s order. The fee would not apply to visas granted to foreign citizens already in the United States on student visas, who make up a large share of new H-1B recipients, or to renewals of current visas.

Raspberry Pi’s head of social, Ashley Whittaker, acknowledged the cyberdeck trend today, saying “we haven’t been able to get away from cyberdecks this year.” Raspberry Pi has also increased its prices multiple times this year due to rising costs for RAM and other components, which could be another reason to support this growing market of active and would-be hobbyists. The 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 included in the company’s official cyberdeck guide got a $100 price hike in April, nearly as much as the board’s original $120 price.