Verizon has teamed up with another satellite operator to offer US customers a commercial direct-to-device messaging service for when a terrestrial cell network is not available, starting this fall. From a report: The telecoms giant says that US customers with compatible smartphones will have access to emergency messaging and location sharing, even when out of range of a cell tower, and from early next year it will offer the ability to text anywhere via a satellite connection, again with compatible devices. Verizon told The Register that there are no additional costs planned for this service, and any customer with a capable device can take advantage of it, irrespective of price plan.

It will be available on the Pixel 9 family of devices out of the box, with the Galaxy S25 to follow, a Verizon spokesperson told us. "Next year we will add text anywhere functionality to the emergency text and location services available this year," they added. This sounds somewhat similar to the Emergency SOS feature introduced by Apple with the iPhone 14 two years ago, which also enabled users to contact emergency services via a satellite link. Verizon says its service will complement Apple's iOS 18 satellite features, so customers using different devices will also have the ability to text anywhere. As partner for this service, Verizon has picked Skylo, a company that styles itself as a pioneer in Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) communications for smartphones and other devices.

Yelp has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the search giant of maintaining its local search monopoly by preferencing its own services over competitors, harming competition and reducing quality. "Yelp claims that the way Google directs users toward its own local search vertical from its general search engine results page should be considered illegal tying of separate products to keep rivals from reaching scale," adds The Verge. From the report: Yelp wants the court to order Google to stop the allegedly anticompetitive conduct and to pay it damages. It demanded a jury trial and filed the suit in the Northern District of California, where a different jury found that Google had an illegal monopoly through its app store in its fight against Epic Games.

The company was emboldened to bring its own lawsuit against Google after the DOJ's win in its antitrust case about the company's allegedly exclusionary practices around the distribution of search services. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told The New York Times that following that decision, "the winds on antitrust have shifted dramatically." Previously, he told the Times, he'd hesitated to bring a suit because of the resources it would require and because he saw it as the government's job to enforce the antitrust laws. "Yelp's claims are not new," Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels said in a statement. "Similar claims were thrown out years ago by the FTC, and recently by the judge in the DOJ's case. On the other aspects of the decision to which Yelp refers, we are appealing. Google will vigorously defend against Yelp's meritless claims."

The Register's Liam Proven reports: Microsoft's in-house professional networking site is moving to Microsoft's in-house Linux. This could mean that big changes are coming for the former CBL-Mariner distro. Ievgen Priadka's post on the LinkedIn Engineering blog, titled Navigating the transition: adopting Azure Linux as LinkedIn's operating system, is the visible sign of what we suspect has been a massive internal engineering effort. It describes some of the changes needed to migrate what the post calls "most of our fleet" from the end-of-life CentOS 7 to Microsoft Azure Linux -- the distro that grew out of and replaced its previous internal distro, CBL-Mariner.

This is an important stage in a long process. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn way back in 2016. Even so, as recently as the end of last year, we reported that a move to Azure had been abandoned, which came a few months after it laid off almost 700 LinkedIn staff -- the majority in R&D. The blog post is over 3,500 words long, so there's quite a lot to chew on -- and we're certain that this has been passed through and approved by numerous marketing and management people and scoured of any potentially embarrassing admissions. Some interesting nuggets remain, though. We enjoyed the modest comment that: "However, with the shift to CentOS Stream, users felt uncertain about the project's direction and the timeline for updates. This uncertainty created some concerns about the reliability and support of CentOS as an operating system." [...]

There are some interesting technical details in the post too. It seems LinkedIn is running on XFS -- also the RHEL default file system, of course -- with the notable exception of Hadoop, and so the Azure Linux team had to add XFS support. Some CentOS and actual RHEL is still used in there somewhere. That fits perfectly with using any of the RHELatives. However, the post also mentions that the team developed a tool to aid with deploying via MaaS, which it explicitly defines as Metal as a Service. MaaS is a Canonical service, although it does support other distros -- so as well as CentOS, there may have been some Ubuntu in the LinkedIn stack as well. Some details hint at what we suspect were probably major deployment headaches. [...] Some of the other information covers things the teams did not do, which is equally informative. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: South Korea's president has urged authorities to do more to "eradicate" the country's digital sex crime epidemic, amid a flood of deepfake pornography targeting young women. Authorities, journalists and social media users recently identified a large number of chat groups where members were creating and sharing sexually explicit "deepfake" images -- including some of underage girls. Deepfakes are generated using artificial intelligence, and often combine the face of a real person with a fake body. South Korea's media regulator is holding an emergency meeting in the wake of the discoveries.

The spate of chat groups, linked to individual schools and universities across the country, were discovered on the social media app Telegram over the past week. Users, mainly teenage students, would upload photos of people they knew -- both classmates and teachers -- and other users would then turn them into sexually explicit deepfake images. The discoveries follow the arrest of the Russian-born founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, on Saturday, after it was alleged that child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud were taking place on the encrypted messaging app. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday instructed authorities to "thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them."

"Recently, deepfake videos targeting an unspecified number of people have been circulating rapidly on social media," President Yoon said at a cabinet meeting. "The victims are often minors and the perpetrators are mostly teenagers." To build a "healthy media culture," President Yoon said young men needed to be better educated. "Although it is often dismissed as 'just a prank,' it is clearly a criminal act that exploits technology to hide behind the shield of anonymity," he said.

The Guardian notes that making sexually explicit deepfakes with the intention of distributing them is punishable by five years in prison or a fine of $37,500.

Further reading: 1 in 10 Minors Say Their Friends Use AI to Generate Nudes of Other Kids, Survey Finds (Source: 404 Media)

Google announced that it will reintroduce AI image generation capabilities through its Gemini tool, with early access to the new Imagen 3 generator available for select users in the coming days. The company pulled the feature shortly after it launched in February when users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses. CNBC reports: "We've worked to make technical improvements to the product, as well as improved evaluation sets, red-teaming exercises and clear product principles," [wrote Dave Citron, a senior director of product on Gemini, in a blog post]. Red-teaming refers to a practice companies use to test products for vulnerabilities.

Citron said Imagen 3 doesn't support photorealistic identifiable individuals, depictions of minors or excessively gory, violent or sexual scenes. "Of course, as with any generative AI tool, not every image Gemini creates will be perfect, but we'll continue to listen to feedback from early users as we keep improving," Citron wrote. "We'll gradually roll this out, aiming to bring it to more users and languages soon."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Threads is deepening its ties to the fediverse, also known as the open social web, which powers services like X alternative Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and other apps. On Wednesday, Meta announced that users on Threads will be able to see fediverse replies on other posts besides their own. In addition, posts that originated through the Threads API, like those created via third-party apps and scheduling services, will now be syndicated to the fediverse. The latter had previously been announced via an in-app message informing users that API posts would be shared to the fediverse starting on August 28. [...]

Since June, users have been able to see fediverse replies on their posts if they enabled fediverse sharing in the app's settings. Once enabled, the sharing option allows users to syndicate their posts across the wider social web and then see how people on other services have responded. Now users will be able to see the fediverse replies on other people's posts, too. This immediately brings more content into Threads, even without a sizable increase in Threads users.

A Meta engineer suggested testing the feature by viewing the replies of larger accounts, like YouTuber Marques Brownlee (@mkbhd), for example. Here, you'll notice a new section that shows how many "fediverse replies" are available above the replies posted to Threads itself. It's worth noting that you have to tap or click on the "fediverse replies" section to actually view what's being said on other servers and by who. Currently, Threads users can like the replies from other servers, but they can't yet reply to them, as the feature is still in beta and under development.

The Philippines' $38 billion outsourcing industry faces a seismic shift as AI tools threaten to displace hundreds of thousands of jobs. Major players are rapidly deploying AI "copilots" to handle tasks like summarizing customer interactions and providing real-time assistance to human agents, Bloomberg reports. Industry experts estimate up to 300,000 business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs could be lost to AI in the next five years, according to outsourcing advisory firm Avasant.

However, the firm also projects AI could create 100,000 new roles in areas like algorithm training and data curation. The BPO sector is crucial to the Philippine economy as the largest source of private-sector employment. The government has established an AI research center and launched training initiatives to boost workers' skills.

Device manufacturers across multiple industries are lobbying against proposed legislation that would require military contractors to provide the U.S. military with easier access to repair materials and information, according to a document obtained by 404 Media.

The legislation, Section 828 of the Defense Reauthorization Act, aims to address the military's current inability to repair equipment ranging from fighter jets to Navy battleships without relying on contractors. Sen. Elizabeth Warren highlighted the issue in a May hearing, citing examples of how repair restrictions lead to increased costs and operational delays for the Department of Defense.

The lobbying effort extends beyond military contractors to include organizations representing industries such as irrigation equipment, motorcycles, tractors, plumbing, medical devices, and consumer technology. In a letter to lawmakers, these groups argue that the legislation would impose significant burdens on contractors and undermine existing technical data rights statutes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Over 192,000 publicly available charging ports are now online, and approximately 1,000 new chargers are being added each week. To build on this momentum, the federal government has awarded $521 million in grants to further expand the national network, with new chargers being deployed across 29 states, two Federally Recognized Tribes, and the District of Columbia.

The $521 million investment is divided into two key areas: 41 community projects ($321 million) and 10 corridor fast-charging projects ($200 million). The grant awards also support President Biden's Justice40 Initiative, which aims for 40% of the overall benefits of federal investments to flow to disadvantaged communities, with over half of the funding going to sites in disadvantaged communities. US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg emphasized the importance of this initiative, stating, "The Biden-Harris Administration has been clear about America leading the EV revolution, and thanks to the historic [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] package, we're building a nationwide EV charger network to make sure all drivers have an accessible, reliable, and convenient way to charge their vehicles."

snydeq writes: CSO Online's Sarah Wiedemar reports on a rising trend in the Russia cybersecurity community: bug bounty programs, which the researcher says could have far-reaching implications as the bounty ecosystem matures. From the report: "Given the current uncertainty that Russian bug bounty hunters and vulnerability researchers are facing when dealing with Western bug bounty programs, Russian IT companies have begun to fill that vacuum. [...] Russian bug bounty platforms have a high probability for substantial growth in the next few years. They provide a credible Western alternative not only to Russian hackers, but also for all other vulnerability researchers located in countries that could potentially face international financial sanctions in the future.

From a Western perspective, a potential problematic development could be that Russian hackers decide to sell vulnerabilities found in Western products to Russian zero-day acquisition companies such as Operation Zero. Thus, instead of reporting them to Western bug bounty platforms for free, they sell to the highest bidder. Those zero-day acquisition companies in turn sell them on to Russian law enforcement and security agencies, which could lead to increased espionage campaigns in Western countries. Western policy makers would do well to keep an eye on the evolution of Russia's bug bounty ecosystem." Although bug bounty programs have existed in Russia since 2012, they weren't widely adopted due to distrust from the government and dominance of Western platforms. Recently, new platforms like Bug Bounty RU, Standoff 365, and BI.ZONE have emerged, attracting thousands of bug hunters and major Russian companies. "In 2023, the total number of bug hunters on these platforms amounted to 20,000 people," notes Wiedemar. The Russian government has also begun participating, launching programs for 10 of its e-government systems.

However, legal ambiguities remain, as ethical hacking is still considered illegal in Russia, with potential prison sentences. Despite this, there are ongoing legislative efforts to legalize ethical hacking, alongside broader government initiatives to enhance cybersecurity, including increased fines for data breaches and the potential creation of a cybersecurity agency akin to the US CISA.

After 13 years of being exclusively available on the iPhone, Snapchat is finally introducing native support for the iPad. 9to5Mac reports: The latest version of the Snapchat app for iOS enables iPad support. This means that the app now runs full screen on iPadOS. "It's still the same Snapchat you know and love, but this time on the big screen," the company says in the update's release notes. However, it seems that Snapchat hasn't had time to fully optimize its app for tablets. That's because, at least for now, it can only run in portrait mode. There's no way to use the app in landscape mode. The iPad interface also seems a bit glitchy in this first version. The app is available to download from the App Store for devices running iOS 13 or later.

A quarter of young adults aged 18-34 never answer phone calls, according to a recent Uswitch survey. The study reveals a generational shift in communication preferences, with 70% of respondents in this age group favoring text messages over voice calls. Experts attribute this trend to the rise of mobile technology and social media. While avoiding calls, younger generations maintain constant contact through group chats and social media platforms. Voice notes have emerged as a compromise, with 37% of 18-34 year-olds preferring them to traditional calls. This communication shift extends to the workplace, causing challenges for some employers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Open Source Initiative (OSI) recently unveiled its latest draft definition for "open source AI," aiming to clarify the ambiguous use of the term in the fast-moving field. The move comes as some companies like Meta release trained AI language model weights and code with usage restrictions while using the "open source" label. This has sparked intense debates among free-software advocates about what truly constitutes "open source" in the context of AI. For instance, Meta's Llama 3 model, while freely available, doesn't meet the traditional open source criteria as defined by the OSI for software because it imposes license restrictions on usage due to company size or what type of content is produced with the model. The AI image generator Flux is another "open" model that is not truly open source. Because of this type of ambiguity, we've typically described AI models that include code or weights with restrictions or lack accompanying training data with alternative terms like "open-weights" or "source-available."

To address the issue formally, the OSI -- which is well-known for its advocacy for open software standards -- has assembled a group of about 70 participants, including researchers, lawyers, policymakers, and activists. Representatives from major tech companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon also joined the effort. The group's current draft (version 0.0.9) definition of open source AI emphasizes "four fundamental freedoms" reminiscent of those defining free software: giving users of the AI system permission to use it for any purpose without permission, study how it works, modify it for any purpose, and share with or without modifications. [...] OSI's project timeline indicates that a stable version of the "open source AI" definition is expected to be announced in October at the All Things Open 2024 event in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Microsoft has decided to donate the Mono Project to the developers of Wine, FOSS that allows Windows applications to run on Unix-like operating systems. "Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications," notes GameOnLinux's Liam Dawe. "It is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime."

"Wine already makes use of Mono and this move makes sense with Microsoft focusing on open-source .NET and other efforts," adds Phoronix's Michael Larabel. "Formally handing over control of the upstream Mono project to WineHQ is a nice move by Microsoft rather than just letting the upstream Mono die off or otherwise forked." Microsoft's Jeff Schwartz announced the move on the Mono website and in a GitHub post: The Mono Project (mono/mono) ('original mono') has been an important part of the .NET ecosystem since it was launched in 2001. Microsoft became the steward of the Mono Project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016. The last major release of the Mono Project was in July 2019, with minor patch releases since that time. The last patch release was February 2024. We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono - GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years.

Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork. We want to recognize that the Mono Project was the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems. The Mono Project was a trailblazer for the .NET platform across many operating systems. It helped make cross-platform .NET a reality and enabled .NET in many new places and we appreciate the work of those who came before us.

Thank you to all the Mono developers!

France is to trial a ban on mobile phones at school for pupils up to the age of 15, seeking to give children a "digital pause" that, if judged successful, could be rolled out nationwide from January. From a report: Just under 200 secondary schools will take place in the experiment that will require youngsters to hand over phones on arrival at reception. It takes the prohibition on the devices further than a 2018 law that banned pupils at primary and secondary schools from using their phones on the premises but allowed them to keep possession of them. Announcing the trial on Tuesday, the acting education minister, Nicole Belloubet, said the aim was to give youngsters a "digital pause." If the trial proves successful, the ban would be introduced in all schools from January, Belloubet said.

A commission set up by the president, Emmanuel Macron, expressed concern that the overexposure of children to screens was having a detrimental effect on their health and development. A 140-page report published in March concluded there was "a very clear consensus on the direct and indirect negative effects of digital devices on sleep, on being sedentary, a lack of physical activity and the risk of being overweight and even obese ... as well as on sight."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. military is using ads to warn people across Lebanon not to attack the United States or its allies amid rising tensions across the Middle East. Some of those ads have turned up in an unlikely place: the dating app Tinder. Freelance reporter Seamus Malekafzali posted on X screenshots of the ads seen in the Tinder app, warning residents of Lebanon to "not take up arms."

The ads, written in Arabic, say that the U.S. will "protect its partners in the face of threats from the Iranian regime and its proxies," which operate across the region, referring to groups like Hezbollah located in Lebanon. The ads, which are not clandestine in nature, display the logo of U.S. Central Command and link to a tweet featuring F-16 and A10 fighter jets. These kinds of military psychological operations (or psyops), aimed at influencing the views of a target audience or population, are not new, even if their placement on a dating app is raising eyebrows in the military community, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Newspaper giant Gannett is shutting down Reviewed, its product reviews site, effective November 1st, according to sources familiar with the decision. The site offers recommendations for products ranging from shoes to home appliances and employs journalists to test and review items -- but has also been at the center of questions around whether its work is actually produced by humans.

"After careful consideration and evaluation of our Reviewed business, we have decided to close the operation. We extend our sincere gratitude to our employees who have provided consumers with trusted product reviews," Reviewed spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton told The Verge in an email. But the site more recently has been the subject of scrutiny, at times by its own unionized employees. Last October, Reviewed staff publicly accused Gannett of publishing AI-generated product reviews on the site. The articles in question were written in a strange, stilted manner, and staff found that the authors the articles were attributed to didn't seem to exist on LinkedIn and other platforms. Some questioned whether they were real at all. In response to questions, Gannett said the articles were produced by a third-party marketing company called AdVon Commerce and that the original reviews didn't include proper disclosure. But Gannett denied that AI was involved.

The state-sponsored Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon is exploiting a bug in a California-based startup to hack American and Indian internet companies, according to security researchers. From a report: Volt Typhoon has breached four US firms, including internet service providers, and another in India through a vulnerability in a Versa Networks server product, according to Lumen's unit Black Lotus Labs. Their assessment, much of which was published in a blog post on Tuesday, found with "moderate confidence" that Volt Typhoon was behind the breaches of unpatched Versa systems and said exploitation was likely ongoing.

Versa, which makes software that manages network configurations and has attracted investment from Blackrock and Sequoia Capital, announced the bug last week and offered a patch and other mitigations. The revelation will add to concerns over the susceptibility of US critical infrastructure to cyberattacks. The US this year accused Volt Typhoon of infiltrating networks that operate critical US services, including some of the country's water facilities, power grid and communications sectors, in order to cause disruptions during a future crisis, such as an invasion of Taiwan.

Dozens of former AI researchers from Google who struck out on their own are learning that startups are tricky. The Information: The latest example is French AI agent developer H, which lost three of its five cofounders (four of whom are ex-Googlers) just months after announcing they had raised $220 million from investors in a "seed" round, as our colleagues reported Friday. The founders had "operational and business disagreements," one of them told us.

The drama at H follows the quasi-acquisitions of Inflection, Adept and Character, which were each less than three years old and founded mostly by ex-Google AI researchers. Reka, another AI developer in this category, was in talks to be acquired by Snowflake earlier this year. Those talks, which could have valued the company at $1 billion, fell apart in May. AI image developer Ideogram, also cofounded by four ex-Googlers, has spoken with at least one later-stage tech startup about potential sale opportunities, though the talks didn't seem to go anywhere, according to someone involved in the discussions.

Cohere, whose CEO co-authored a seminal Google research paper about transformers with Noam Shazeer, the ex-CEO of Character, has also faced growing questions about its relatively meager revenue compared to its rivals. For now, though, it has a lot of money in the bank. Has someone put a curse on startups founded by ex-Google AI researchers?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: People in a quiet neighborhood in Carthage, a town in Moore County, North Carolina, heard a series of six loud pops a few minutes before 8:00 p.m. on Dec. 3, 2022. A resident named Michael Campbell said he ducked at the sound. Another witness told police they thought they were hearing fireworks. The noise turned out to be someone shooting a rifle at a power substation next door to Campbell's home. The substation, operated by the utility Duke Energy Corp., consists of equipment that converts electricity into different voltages as it's transported to the area and then steered into individual houses. The shots hit the radiator of an electrical transformer, a sensitive piece of technology whose importance would likely be understood only by utility company employees. It began dumping a "vast amount" of oil, according to police reports. A subsequent investigation has pointed to a local right-wing group, one of a wave of attacks or planned attacks on power infrastructure.

By 8:10 the lights in Carthage went out. Minutes later, a security alarm went off at a Duke Energy substation 10 miles away, this one protected from view by large pine trees. When company personnel responded, they found that someone had shot its transformer radiator, too. Police found shell casings on the ground at the site and noticed someone had slashed the tires on nearby service trucks. The substations were designed to support each other, with one capable of maintaining service if the other went down. Knocking out both facilities prevented the company from rerouting power. Police described the two incidents as a coordinated attack. About 45,000 families and businesses remained dark for four days. This was a burden for area grocery stores and local emergency services. One woman, 87-year-old Karin Zoanelli, died in the hours after the shooting when the blackout caused her oxygen machine to stop operating. The North Carolina Medical Examiner's office classified the death as a homicide.

The attack on Duke's facilities in Moore County remains unsolved, but law enforcement officials and other experts suspect it's part of a rising trend of far-right extremists targeting power infrastructure in an attempt to sow chaos. The most ambitious of these saboteurs hope to usher in societal collapse, paving the way for the violent overthrow of the US government, according to researchers who monitor far-right communities. Damaging the power grid has long been a fixation of right-wing extremists, who have plotted such attacks for many years. They've been getting a boost recently from online venues such as "Terrorgram," a loose network of channels on the social media platform Telegram where users across the globe advocate violent white supremacism. In part, people use Terrorgram to egg one another on -- a viral meme shows a stick figure throwing a Molotov cocktail at electrical equipment. People on the forum have also seized on recent anti-immigration riots in the UK, inciting people there to clash with police. In June 2022, months before the Moore County shootings, users on the forum began offering more practical support in the form of a 261-page document titled "Hard Reset," which includes specific directions on how to use automatic weapons, explosives and mylar balloons to disrupt electricity. One of the document's suggestions is to shoot high-powered firearms at substation transformers.