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In the biggest news of all, Rivian and Volkswagen announced a $5 billion joint venture that will co-develop core parts of the hardware and software platform to be used in cars from both automakers.

We love that because it aligns so beautifully with our mission: the ability to help accelerate putting highly compelling electric vehicles into the market, which will ultimately drive more demand.

A core objective of how we’ve structured the joint venture is that we don’t lose the velocity and the speed and the decisiveness and lack of bureaucracy that exists within our software function today.

Beyond just simplification of how we manage running over-the-air updates across so many different instances, it also gets us a lot of supply chain leverage in a way that we, Rivian, haven’t had in the past.

In fact, you can imagine the day of the announcement, I had a handful of phone calls from CEOs of big semiconductor suppliers, and they’re like, “Hey, we can work harder on pricing.” So, that was awesome.

So, taking away all those mechanical design studio packaging constraints that we had before, and then solving the biggest challenge, which was network architecture by this being that as a project, it’s just a very different type of relationship.

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TOKYO – Vice foreign ministers from Japan and China held a strategic dialogue Monday for the first time in four and a half years, as the countries focus on shared interests amid a host of diplomatic challenges.

Masataka Okano and Chinese counterpart Ma Zhaoxu discussed developments in the East and South China seas as well as Ukraine during their talk in Tokyo.

Other topics included Japan’s release of treated wastewater from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the detention of Japanese nationals in China.

Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa and Chinese counterpart Wang Yi are considering holding talks on the sidelines of ASEAN-hosted meetings in Laos starting Thursday.

China is eager to bolster ties with Japan ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, concerned that a harsher stance by Washington could lead Tokyo to follow suit.

Beijing also awaits the outcome of the leadership race in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party scheduled for next month, which will decide the country’s next prime minister.

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“We’re grateful for the progress leading companies have made toward fulfilling their voluntary commitments in addition to what is required by the executive order,” says Robyn Patterson, a spokesperson for the White House.

Without comprehensive federal legislation, the best the US can do right now is to demand that companies follow through on these voluntary commitments, says Brandie Nonnecke, the director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

After they signed the commitments, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI founded the Frontier Model Forum, a nonprofit that aims to facilitate discussions and actions on AI safety and responsibility.

“The natural question is: Does [the technical fix] meaningfully make progress and address the underlying social concerns that motivate why we want to know whether content is machine generated or not?” he adds.

In the past year, the company has pushed out research on deception, jailbreaking, strategies to mitigate discrimination, and emergent capabilities such as models’ ability to tamper with their own code or engage in persuasion.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has used satellite imagery and AI to improve responses to wildfires in Maui and map climate-vulnerable populations, which helps researchers expose risks such as food insecurity, forced migration, and disease.

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Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost.

The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years.

It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat—typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco’s fog, for example).

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research.

That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research.

While many of the AI skeptics in weather forecasting have been won over by recent developments, according to Hill, the fast pace is hard for the research community to keep up with.

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Critics say the legislation is fundamentally undemocratic and would undermine Israeli academia, because it restricts free speech and allows politicians to weaponise accusations that should be handled by the legal system.

Sivan said the legislation was dangerous for its broad restrictions and its narrow focus on universities, adding that Israel already had laws against incitement to terror that cover all residents.

“What they are trying to do is subject academics to stricter rules than other residents of Israel, where a violation of state laws is not judged in court but rather by a government-appointed administrator, with no process or opportunity for the accused one to defend him or herself.

The Association of University Heads, Israel (Vera) said in a public letter that the student union billboards backing the law were a divisive “campaign of persecution and incitement” that could lead to violence.

One of the academics targeted, Anat Matar from the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University, said the role of students in drafting and promoting a law to silence their lecturers was particularly disturbing.

Vera warned in a public letter that the draft law would also fuel international sanctions campaigns against Israeli universities by undermining their academic independence.

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The Philippines occupies Second Thomas Shoal but China also claims it, and increasingly hostile clashes at sea have sparked fears of larger conflicts that could involve the United States.

Chinese coast guard and other forces have used powerful water cannons and dangerous blocking maneuvers to prevent food and other supplies from reaching Filipino navy personnel at Manila’s outpost at the shoal, on a long-grounded and rusting warship, the BRP Sierra Madre.

The violent faceoff wounded several Filipino navy personnel, including one who lost his thumb, in a chaotic skirmish that was captured in video and photos that were later made public by Philippine officials.

In addition to China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have been locked in separate but increasingly tense territorial disputes in the waterway, which is regarded as a potential flashpoint and a delicate fault line in the U.S.-China regional rivalry.

The U.S. military has deployed Navy ships and fighter jets for decades in what it calls freedom of navigation and overflight patrols, which China has opposed and regards as a threat to regional stability.

Washington has no territorial claims in the disputed waters but has repeatedly warned that it is obligated to defend the Philippines, its oldest treaty ally in Asia, if Filipino forces, ships and aircraft come under an armed attack, including in the South China Sea.

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The United Nations has blamed Facebook for the dissemination of hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar that resulted in their ethnic cleansing.

This influence on others is known as a (positive) network effect, where increased numbers of people improve the value of a product.

In doing so, one could be helping Facebook to refine its algorithms so that it can better single out specific individuals for certain purposes, some of which could be as nefarious as those of Cambridge Analytica.

For those of us who do not engage in such objectionable behavior, it is helpful to consider whether Facebook has crossed certain moral “red lines,” entering the realm of outright wickedness.

Likewise, Facebook would have crossed a red line if it had intentionally assisted in the dissemination of hate speech in Myanmar.

The recent worrisome revelation that Facebook hired an opposition-research firm that attempted to discredit protesters by claiming that they were agents of the financier George Soros is not encouraging.

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An MP for the radical-left France Unbowed party has sparked outrage after saying Israeli athletes are not welcome at the Paris Olympics and calling for protests against their presence.

Yonathan Arfi, the head of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), described the comments as “indecent” and “irresponsible”, accusing Portes of “putting a target on the backs of Israeli athletes”.

Arfi reminded the MP that 11 Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics and said the country’s Olympians were “already the most in danger” at the Games.

Portes later told Le Parisien newspaper that French diplomats should put pressure on the International Olympic Committee to ban the Israeli flag and anthem at the Games, which open on Friday, “as is done for Russia”.

The French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said: “The hints of antisemitism in his [Portes’] comments are obvious.”

Israel’s football team is scheduled to play its first match of the Olympics against Mali in Paris’s Parc des Princes stadium on Wednesday, two days before the opening ceremony.

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Parents of under-18s should be monitoring their children’s phones for nude pictures, according to the police chief for child protection, in order to tackle a “tidal wave” of online sexual abuse cases.

The new lead for child abuse investigations at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, assistant chief constable Becky Riggs, told the Sunday Times parents needed to report any intimate images of their children to police.

In October 2022, 16-year-old Dinal De Alwis killed himself after being blackmailed over naked images he had sent to a stranger, possibly in Nigeria.

While much of this abuse comes from adults targeting children, half of it is child-on-child crime and figures show the average age of an offender is 14.

In 2022, in England and Wales, about 5,000 cases involved children sharing naked photos of themselves.

We will work with parents and schools to avoid criminalising children where it comes with a degree of naivety, but we have to measure each case on its merits.”

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Donald Trump has said China’s president wrote him a “beautiful note” after the assassination attempt a week ago, as he continued to court leaders whom Joe Biden has criticised as dictators.

In his first campaign rally since narrowly escaping the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, Trump told a crowd in Michigan on Saturday: “[President Xi Jinping] wrote me a beautiful note the other day when he heard about what happened.”

As well as familiar attacks on Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, Trump also used the rally in Grand Rapids to hail Xi and Vladimir Putin as “smart, tough” figures who “love their country”, echoing praise he gave in 2022 of the Russian president’s strategy to invade Ukraine.

Still wearing a small wound dressing a week after the shooting, Trump also publicly supported the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, saying he was right in saying that “we have to have somebody that can protect us”.

In one letter, about a meeting in Singapore in June 2018, Kim wrote: “Even now I cannot forget that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched.”

After a summit in Vietnam in February 2019, Kim wrote that “every minute we shared 103 days ago in Hanoi was also a moment of glory that remains a precious memory”.

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Microsoft has released a recovery tool that’s designed to help IT admins repair Windows machines that were impacted by CrowdStrike’s faulty update that crashed 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday.

The tool creates a bootable USB drive that IT admins can use to help quickly recover impacted machines.

While CrowdStrike has issued an update to fix its software that led to millions of Blue Screen of Death errors, not all machines are able to automatically receive that fix.

Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file.

Microsoft’s recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly.

This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky struck an unusually subdued tone as he addressed his nation this week, hinting at a willingness to negotiate with Russia for the first time since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion more than two years ago.

At the same time, questions are emerging about the willingness of some of Ukraine’s closest and most important allies – notably the United States and Germany – to continue pouring resources into the conflict in support of Kyiv.

Speaking to CNN from the Aspen Security Forum, Herbst said that it was possible Zelensky was trying to reach out to the potential future Trump administration by stressing he would be willing to negotiate – as long as the deal on the table is just.

Orysia Lutsevych, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, said that considering Putin’s public demands, Zelensky’s words were likely meant as a message to the rest of the world.

The southern front – which stretches from the Donbas in eastern Ukraine across the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, with Russian-occupied territory creating a land bridge between Russia and Crimea – will be a key target.

He believes Kyiv could “speak with some justification of Ukrainian victory in this war,” even if Ukraine doesn’t manage to get back all of its pre-war territory – as long as it reclaims enough to be an economically viable and secure state.

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In the months before the Israeli invasion, Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah was a lifeline, a place where thousands sought shelter or scrabbled to raise funds to cross into neighbouring Egypt.

Social media video and satellite images show the destruction of the Rafah crossing point, previously the last remaining passenger route out of Gaza, after Israeli forces seized control of the area in early May.

Soon afterwards, Israel said it had “operational control” of the entire Philadelphi corridor, a slim strip of land that runs next to the border with Egypt, where an Israeli presence is prohibited by the 1979 peace treaty between the two nations.

The moves appear designed to support the long-term presence of Israeli troops in Gaza, signalling little end to a war that has already lasted over nine months, the longest in Israel’s history.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a highly symbolic visit to the Rafah crossing in recent days, inspecting a lookout point at the Philadelphi corridor, shortly before flying to Washington to address Congress and meet Biden.

David Mencer, a spokesperson for Netanyahu, said: “With the intensive phase of this war coming to an end, the prime minister talks about a longer conflict, the necessity to go into Gaza to defeat terrorists when they raise their heads as needs be.”

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CrowdStrike’s faulty update caused a worldwide tech disaster that affected 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft says that’s “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” but it was enough to create problems for retailers, banks, airlines, and many other industries, as well as everyone who relies on them.

Separately, the technical breakdown from CrowdStrike released Friday explains more about what happened and why so many systems were affected all at once.

CrowdStrike’s breakdown explains the configuration file that was at the heart of the issue:

CrowdStrike explained that the file is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipe1 execution on Windows systems.” Security researcher and Objective See founder Patrick Wardle says that the explanation aligns with the earlier analysis he and others provided about the cause of the crash, as the problem file “C-00000291- “triggered a logic error that resulted in an OS crash” (via CSAgent.sys).”

CrowdStrike’s channel file updates were pushed to computers regardless of any settings meant to prevent such automatic updates, Wardle noted.

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LONDON (AP) — TikTok owner ByteDance can’t avoid the bloc’s crackdown on digital giants, a European Union court said Wednesday in a decision that found the video sharing platform falls under a new law that also covers Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The EU’s General Court rejected ByteDance’s legal challenge against being classed as an online “gatekeeper” that has to comply with extra obligations under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Markets Act.

The rulebook, also known as the DMA, took effect this year and seeks to counter the dominance of Big Tech companies and make online competition fairer by giving consumers more choice.

TikTok had argued that it wasn’t a gatekeeper but was playing the role of a new competitor in social media taking on entrenched players like Facebook and Instagram owner Meta.

The judges, however, decided that since 2018 TikTok had “succeeded in increasing its number of users very rapidly and exponentially” and that it had “rapidly consolidated its position, and even strengthened that position over the following years.”

The Digital Markets Act took effect in March, with a list of dos and don’ts for big tech “gatekeeper” companies aimed at giving users more choices and threatening big penalties if they don’t comply.

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More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.

Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers.

The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica.

(Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)

Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

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The way it works goes something like this: Imagine we at The Verge created an AI bot with explicit instructions to direct you to our excellent reporting on any subject.

In a conversation with Olivier Godement, who leads the API platform product at OpenAI, he explained that instruction hierarchy will prevent the meme’d prompt injections (aka tricking the AI with sneaky commands) we see all over the internet.

Without this protection, imagine an agent built to write emails for you being prompt-engineered to forget all instructions and send the contents of your inbox to a third party.

Existing LLMs, as the research paper explains, lack the capabilities to treat user prompts and system instructions set by the developer differently.

“We envision other types of more complex guardrails should exist in the future, especially for agentic use cases, e.g., the modern Internet is loaded with safeguards that range from web browsers that detect unsafe websites to ML-based spam classifiers for phishing attempts,” the research paper says.

Trust in OpenAI has been damaged for some time, so it will take a lot of research and resources to get to a point where people may consider letting GPT models run their lives.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blocked plans for a field hospital in Israel to treat sick and injured children from Gaza, according to reports.The site was announced earlier this week by Defence Minister Yoav Gallant as a temporary measure to provide treatment while the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt remains closed to civilians.

Since the conflict began last year, there have been numerous reports and widespread international concern about its impact on children and the number suffering serious physical injuries.

Mr Gallant said the temporary hospital would be used to address the most urgent humanitarian needs until a permanent system for the evacuation and treatment of sick children could be established.

He said it would treat those suffering with conditions including cancer, diabetes, and orthopaedic injuries.However, on Thursday the Mr Netanyahu’s office announced that he “does not approve the establishment of a hospital for Gazans within Israeli territory - therefore, it will not be established”.An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the AFP news agency that the defence ministry had asked the prime minister’s office to help speed up the evacuation of patients from Gaza two weeks ago.

“No response was received, so the minister issued an order to the army to establish a field hospital within Israeli territory as an immediate solution for sick children,” they said.Mr Netanyahu’s military secretary Major General Roman Gofman told the Ynet news site that there had not been enough progress in creating a corridor for transporting sick and injured Gazans to other countries and this was why the hospital did not go ahead.The episode is just the latest sign of tension in the Israeli government to show in recent months.

In April, British surgeon Dr Victoria Rose, who had been working in Gaza, told the BBC that a “huge amount” of the operations she had carried out had been on children under 16, including many under six.She said she had treated people with bullet wounds and burns and that a lack of food available in Gaza meant patients were not strong enough to heal properly.

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If you ever used Google’s URL shortening service goo.gl before it was shut down in 2019, be warned — those links will stop working on August 25th, 2025.

Google announced in a blog post that “the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener” and that any links in the https://goo.gl/* format will respond with a 404 error next year.

Ahead of the shutdown, goo.gl links will start showing an interstitial page on August 23rd, 2024, notifying users that “this link will no longer work in the near future.” This message will initially appear for a “percentage of existing links,’’ which will increase as the deadline draws closer.

Google is encouraging developers to update impacted links as soon as possible, however, as this interstitial page may cause disruptions to link redirections.

When Google announced in 2018 that it was shutting down goo.gl, the company encouraged developers to migrate to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) — which has also since been deprecated.

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Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system has largely protected Tel Aviv and other population centers from the thousands of rockets fired by Hamas out of Gaza and by Hezbollah from Lebanon.

But an Israeli military official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said no alert was sounded because the detection system had not been activated.

The Houthis, the most powerful group in Yemen, claimed responsibility and said this was a new type of drone "capable of bypassing the enemy’s interception systems and undetectable by radars.

The Israeli military official said the initial evidence suggested the drone was launched from Yemen, but Israel was investigating a range of possibilities.

The Houthis say they are acting to show solidarity with the Palestinians over the war in Gaza, though the civilian shipping traffic involves vessels from around the world.

Tel Aviv came under heavy rocket fire from Hamas in the early weeks of the war last fall, but the attacks have long since stopped.

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