[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.

The proposal goes quite a bit further than a labeling proposal put forth by the RIAA, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), SAG-AFTRA, and others. That would create a set of standardized labels for AI-generated and AI-assisted music. The labels’ proposal would require songs be clearly labeled, but it would also keep them off international charts unless they met specific criteria, including being “substantially human made.”

To be eligible, the songs would also have to respect the terms of service of whatever AI service was used, the model would have to have the rights to any data it was trained on, and “not raise stream or chart manipulation concerns.” What sort of concerns and what constitutes “substantially human made” are currently vague. Sony Music, UMG, and Mom+Pop Music did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. The IFPI has thrown its weight behind the labels’ proposal, though no charting organization has signaled any immediate plan to adopt the rules […].

In a study published on Friday, eSafety also found most children aged between 10 and 15 were using social media just as frequently in March as they had before the ban came into force on December 10 last year, while parental awareness of their habits decreased. Children’s continued social media use took place even as account ownership declined to 42% from 52%, with “statistically significant” reductions across YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok in particular, the report said.

“Most under-16s who had social media accounts before commencement were able to either retain them or create new ones at the three-month mark, with social media platforms’ failure to implement effective age assurance measures cited as the main reason,” eSafety said in a statement […] Before the ban, nearly 86% of children surveyed reported using at least one age-restricted platform. Three months later, that figure remained above 81%, the report said. About 58% of teenagers reported using social media daily or more often, barely down from roughly 60% before the ban, it found. The report showed minimal change in “sports and physical activity, arts and music, spending time with friends and family, and attendance at community events.”

Around half the children who retained their accounts said platforms had not checked their age, the most common reason they were able to stay on the services. Others said their accounts listed them as aged 16 or older or that age-checking systems had incorrectly determined they were older. The findings broadly matched snapshot data eSafety published in late March.

After Sony’s recent earnings call, an investor Q&A session saw analysts ask about its controversial decision to end disc production across all of its consoles. The company hadn’t publicly commented since its announcement and had reduced activity on social accounts and other marketing channels. Sony’s chief financial officer, Lin Tao, broke that silence during the Q&A. “There are various reasons we made this decision,” she said through an interpreter. “The biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing. That’s the big factor. It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalization is progressing. “And so when we think about the future, and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this, and we came to this conclusion, and we’re going to cautiously move this forward,” Tao said.

“We have received various opinions, and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forth those views to us,” said Tao. […] Tao says Sony wants to “consider” the emotions of disgruntled customers, especially as titles are “connected to people’s fond memories in many cases.” Tao also alluded to the possibility of future measures to lessen the blow for anyone unhappy with the decision, but it appears Sony hasn’t yet finalized what those may be. “In the future digital ecosystem, how do we engage the gamers is something that we would like to continue to explore,” she said.

Cyberattacks targeting municipal water systems have been reported in at least seven states this week, prompting the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency to warn utilities nationwide that hackers are trying to disrupt critical water infrastructure. In a public service announcement Thursday, the agencies said water and wastewater utilities have reported incidents to the FBI, with some malicious activity degrading water operations. The announcement does not name the states.

The warning comes after hackers targeted more than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota in an attack that had hallmarks of Iranian meddling, according to a law enforcement official. It is still under investigation. A spokesperson for Minnesota’s information technology services agency said Thursday there was no indication the breaches contaminated any municipal water supplies. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a separate alert that some larger attacks on water infrastructure had “resulted in boil water notices and sustained manual operations,” though it did not say where.

[…] The federal advisory said the malicious cyber actors, or MCAs, targeted specific brands of control systems used by municipal water utilities, though the FBI and the EPA urged operators of all systems to take precautions. […] The agencies said the hackers remotely accessed internet-facing devices, changed IP addresses and passwords, and caused utilities to lose monitoring and control capabilities. The federal advisory calls on system operators to remove programmable logical controllers, or PLCs, from direct internet exposure by putting them behind secure gateways and firewalls; use strong passwords; and limit communications between authorized control system devices through access control lists.