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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel provided more detail about the scope of its planned job cuts and other business changes while sharing its second-quarter earnings results. Reports in April suggested that Intel could eliminate around 20 percent of its staff in a restructuring plan. Today, the chipmaker said it anticipates having a core workforce of 75,000 employees by the end of 2025, down from 99,500 at the start of the year.

The numbers are even more dramatic when considering the company's downsizing efforts as a whole. This time last year, the chipmaker employed 116,500 across the globe, not including workers at its subsidiaries, and that number has fallen precipitously since. As of June 28, the company had 96,400 workers, meaning it's planning a reduction of more than 20,000 employees over the second half of the year.

These cuts are part of the company's current goal to bring its non-GAAP operating expenses down to $17 billion this year, then to $16 billion at the end of 2026. The effort to rein in spending is also leading Intel to abandon some previously announced expansions. The business will no longer embark on new projects in Germany and Poland, and it said it will consolidate its Costa Rican testing and assembly operations into existing efforts in Vietnam and Malaysia. Finally, it will also "slow the pace" of its stateside growth at a construction site in Ohio.

"Our operating performance demonstrates the initial progress we are making to improve our execution and drive greater efficiency," said Lip-Bu Tan, who has been forthright about his plans to downsize since assuming the CEO title in March. Tan was brought in to replace Pat Gelsinger in an effort to turn around Intel's business following a long, slow slide into financial trouble.

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upstart writes:

Trump caving on Nvidia H20 export curbs may disrupt his bigger trade war:

The next front in Donald Trump's trade war will be chip tariffs—which could come by next month—but national security experts are warning that the president may have already made a huge misstep that threatens to disrupt both US trade and national security.

In a letter Monday to Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, 20 policymakers and professionals with a background in national security policy urged Trump to reverse course and block exports of Nvidia's H20 chips to China.

In April, the Trump administration decided against imposing additional export curbs on H20 chips after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang paid $1 million for a seat at a Mar-a-Lago dinner, NPR reported. Apparently, Nvidia's promise to invest $500 billion in AI data centers helped persuade Trump to change course, as did the terms of a temporary truce with China, in which the US promised to halt H20 chip controls in exchange for China restoring imports of rare earth minerals into the US.

In their letter, national security experts expressed "deep concern" that Trump may not have considered how Nvidia's H20 chips could endanger the US military's "edge in artificial intelligence" while serving as a "potent accelerator of China's frontier AI capabilities."

While these chips can't be used for AI training like the Blackwell and H100 chips still restricted by export curbs, they're "optimized for inference, the process responsible for the dramatic capabilities gains made by the latest generation of frontier AI reasoning models," experts warned.

Most likely, China will use the chips for AI models deployed by its military to "enable autonomous weapons systems, intelligence surveillance platforms, and rapid advances in battlefield decision-making," experts said. In that way, "by supplying China with these chips, we are fueling the very infrastructure that will be used to modernize and expand the Chinese military," they warned.

The Trump administration is notably investigating how chip tariffs and imports could harm national security, with a report due out in two weeks, Lutnick announced today. That report will supposedly help Trump determine if relying too much on other countries for chips poses a national security threat.

But experts seem to fear that Trump isn't paying enough attention to how exports of US technology could threaten to not only supercharge China's military and AI capabilities but also drain supplies that US firms need to keep the US at the forefront of AI innovation.

"More chips for China means fewer chips for the US," experts said, noting that "China's biggest tech firms, including Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba," have spent $16 billion on bulk-ordered H20 chips over the past year.

Meanwhile, "projected data center demand from the US power market would require 90 percent of global chip supply through 2030, an unlikely scenario even without China joining the rush to buy advanced AI chips," experts said. If Trump doesn't intervene, one of America's biggest AI rivals could even end up driving up costs of AI chips for US firms, they warned.

"We urge you to reverse course," the letter concluded. "This is not a question of trade. It is a question of national security."

jelizondo writes:

TechCrunch has an interesting article about an engineer who is challenging the Defense Behemoths.

In the summer of 2021, Dimitrious Kottas made a move that would be unfathomable to most Silicon Valley engineers: after leaving his coveted position at Apple's Special Projects Group, he packed up his life in California and moved back to Athens to start a defense company.

Three and a half years later, his startup, Delian Alliance Industries, has set up solar-powered surveillance towers that monitor some of Greece's borders around the clock and detect wildfires on remote islands, along with a pipeline of other products, including concealed sea drones designed to keep enemies at bay.

But Kottas' most ambitious bet isn't on any particular technology — it's really that a small Greek startup can break through Europe's notoriously splintered defense market.

After earning recognition for his academic work at the University of Minnesota on GPS-denied navigation – research that he says has been cited over 1,400 times – he joined Apple in 2016, where he spent six years working on autonomous systems featuring cameras, lidars, and radars.

"At the heart of autonomy is perception," Kottas explained, describing how machines must understand not just where objects are but what they're doing and what they intend to do. "This lies at the heart of autonomy, and given autonomy is going to be at the heart of all future weapon systems, that's the core technology that's going to drive change in the defense industry over the next decade."

Rather than attempting to build the next-generation fighter jet, Kottas began with something pragmatic that he could sell more immediately: surveillance towers. The move was seemingly ripped from the playbook of eight-year-old weapons maker Anduril, which started off with software-augmented surveillance towers that it sold to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The most striking example is a two-meter suicide vessel that comes packed in a cylinder and is deployable months in advance on the seabed at depths where satellites and drones can't detect it. When remotely activated, it appears "out of nowhere to the enemy," Kottas told TechCrunch, adding that Delian has patented this approach, which uses commercial materials to manufacture the weapons at "large scale and really at extremely low cost."

Here's where Kottas' story gets more complicated. Despite Delian's technological achievements and operational success in Greece, the broader European market remains a formidable challenge. U.S. officials have reportedly been pressuring European countries to continue buying weapons from U.S. outfits. Further, European countries have long favored their homegrown defense companies

upstart writes:

A secretive space plane is set to launch and test quantum navigation technology:

On Monday, the Space Force announced that it will fly the small, Space Shuttle-shaped vehicle on the program's eighth mission next month. The launch of the vehicle, on a Falcon 9 rocket, is scheduled to occur no earlier than August 21 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

There are two active X-37Bs in the Space Force fleet, both built by Boeing. The first made its debut flight in April 2010. Since then, the two uncrewed spacecraft have made a succession of longer flights. The first made its longest and latest flight from 2020 to 2022 over a span of 908 days. The second flew more recently, landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base on March 7 after 434 days in orbit.

It's likely that the first of these two vehicles, both of which are about 29 feet (9 meters) long and roughly one-quarter the length of one of NASA's Space Shuttle orbiters, will launch next month.

Over the past decade and a half, the Space Force has largely remained silent about the purpose of this space plane, flying classified payloads and providing only limited information about the purpose of each flight.

However, for this flight, OTV-8, the military has provided a bit more detail about its intentions. The vehicle will fly with a service module that will expand its capacity for experiments, allowing the space plane to host payload for the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit.

The mission's goals include tests of "high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications technologies."

upstart writes:

Anthropic unveils new rate limits to curb Claude Code power users:

Anthropic says its rolling out new weekly rate limits for Claude to curb usage among subscribers who are running its AI coding tool, Claude Code, "continuously in the background, 24/7." Anthropic says the rate limits also aim to stop a handful of users who are violating Claude's usage policy by sharing accounts and reselling access to Claude Code.

The new rate limits will go into effect August 28 for subscribers to Anthropic's $20-per-month Pro plan, as well as its $100- and $200-per-month Max plans, the company said Monday in an email to subscribers and a post on X.

Anthropic says its existing usage limits, which reset every five hours, will remain in place. The company is also introducing two new weekly rate limits that reset every seven days; one is an overall usage limit, whereas the other is specific to Anthropic's most advanced AI model, Claude Opus 4. Anthropic says Max subscribers can purchase additional usage, beyond what the rate limit provides, at standard API rates.

The announcement comes just weeks after Anthropic quietly introduced rate limits for Claude Code. The company said at the time it was aware of the issues but declined to elaborate further. While Anthropic's AI coding tool has been a hit with developers, the company seems to be having a difficult time serving it broadly. Anthropic's status page shows that Claude Code has experienced a partial or major outage at least seven times in the last month — perhaps because some power users seem to be running Claude Code nonstop.

"Claude Code has experienced unprecedented demand since launch," said Anthropic spokesperson Amie Rotherham in an email to TechCrunch about the weekly rate limits. Rotherham notes that "most users won't notice a difference," and that this limit will affect less than 5% of subscribers, based on their current usage patterns.

upstart writes:

Lawsuit: Meta may have seeded porn to minors while hiding piracy for AI training:

Porn sites may have blown up Meta's key defense in a copyright fight with book authors who earlier this year said that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries" to train its AI models.

Meta has defeated most of the authors' claims and claimed there is no proof that Meta ever uploaded pirated data through seeding or leeching on the BitTorrent network used to download training data. But authors still have a chance to prove that Meta may have profited off its massive piracy, and a new lawsuit filed by adult sites last week appears to contain evidence that could help authors win their fight, TorrentFreak reported.

The new lawsuit was filed last Friday in a US district court in California by Strike 3 Holdings—which says it attracts "over 25 million monthly visitors" to sites that serve as "ethical sources" for adult videos that "are famous for redefining adult content with Hollywood style and quality."

After authors revealed Meta's torrenting, Strike 3 Holdings checked its proprietary BitTorrent-tracking tools designed to detect infringement of its videos and alleged that the company found evidence that Meta has been torrenting and seeding its copyrighted content for years—since at least 2018. Some of the IP addresses were clearly registered to Meta, while others appeared to be "hidden," and at least one was linked to a Meta employee, the filing said.

According to Strike 3 Holdings, Meta "willfully and intentionally" infringed "at least 2,396 movies" as part of a strategy to download terabytes of data as fast as possible by seeding popular high-quality porn. Supposedly, Meta continued seeding the content "sometimes for days, weeks, or even months" after downloading them, and these movies may also have been secretly used to train Meta's AI models, Strike 3 Holdings alleged.

The porn site operator explained to the court that BitTorrent's protocol establishes a "tit-for-tat" mechanism that "rewards users who distribute the most desired content." It alleged that Meta took advantage of this system by "often" pirating adult videos that are "often within the most infringed files on BitTorrent websites" on "the very same day the motion pictures are released."

These tactics allegedly gave Meta several advantages, making it harder for Strike 3 Holdings' sites to compete, including potentially distributing the videos to minors for free without age checks in states that now require them.

jelizondo writes:

The Guardian posted a very thoughtful article about manipulation on the Web:

Many nations already enshrine a right not to be defrauded, and even a right not to be deceived. If a company sells you a new medicine, falsely claiming that it prevents cancer, it can be punished. If a firm convinces you to buy a new smartphone, saying that it has state-of-the-art features when it doesn't, it will have violated the law. But in the current era, many companies are taking our time and money not by defrauding or deceiving us, but by practising the dark art of manipulation.

They hide crucial terms in fine print. They automatically enrol you in a programme that costs money but does not benefit you at all. They make it easy for you to subscribe to a service, but extremely hard for you to cancel. They use "drip pricing", by which they quote you an initial number, getting you to commit to the purchase, only to add a series of additional costs, knowing that once you've embarked on the process, you are likely just to say "yeah, whatever". In its worst forms, manipulation is theft. It takes people's resources and attention, and it does so without their consent.

Manipulators are tricksters, and sometimes even magicians. They divert the eye and take advantage of people's weaknesses. Often they exploit simple ignorance. They fail to respect, and try to undermine, people's capacity to make reflective and deliberative choices. A manipulator might convince you to buy a useless health product, not by lying, but by appealing to your emotions, and by painting seductive pictures of how great you will feel once you use the product. Or they might tell you an anecdote about someone just like you, who used a supposed pain-relief product and felt better within 12 hours. Anecdotes have real power – but they can be profoundly misleading.

More insidiously still, manipulators might know about, and enlist, some of the central findings in contemporary behavioural economics, the field that explores how people depart from perfect rationality. All of us are vulnerable in this regard, subject to the "cognitive biases" elaborated by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler and others, that affect our behaviour. These can be hard to recognize, and harder still to overcome.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Rising temperatures are causing water to evaporate and driving humans to extract more groundwater, which is moving freshwater from the land to the seas and creating a "continental drying" trend. Water is being depleted at sites around the world

Intensive groundwater pumping, evaporation and melting due to rising global temperatures have shifted a growing amount of freshwater from the continents to the oceans. This threatens water availability for most of the world’s population and adds to sea level rise.

These measurements show there have been alarming declines in freshwater in many parts of the world between 2002 and 2024. The researchers found dry regions aren’t just getting drier – a trend expected with climate change – they are also expanding by more than 800,000 square kilometres per year, an area about the size of the UK and France combined.

The team identified four “mega-drying” regions where separate areas of freshwater loss have now connected to create a swathe of drying. Those include northern Canada and Russia, where loss is driven by melting glaciers, permafrost and reduced snow.

In the other two regions, water loss is dominated by groundwater depletion, mainly from pumping for irrigation. Those are the US Southwest, much of Central America and a region stretching from western Europe and North Africa to northern India and China. They found groundwater depletion, which can be exacerbated by heat and drought prompting people to pump more, makes up 68 per cent of the decline in overall water storage.

This transfer of mass is so large it has become a major contributor to sea level rise. They found since 2015, water loss from the continents has caused more sea level rise than meltwater from the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets, raising the oceans by just under a millimetre per year.

canopic jug writes:

Blogger Manuel "Manu" Moreale, based in Italy, reflects on interviewing people weekly about their blogs for a few years now.

The thing I wanted to spend some time reflecting on though, is not the significance of having done something every day for 100 weeks (something I honestly dont care too much about) but why all this matters. Not the series nor the interviews. Why blogs matter and why the people behind them matter.

He has published his 100^th such interview this week. Like all upstanding bloggers he even has an RSS feed.

Previously:
(2015) Blogging in Bangladesh - Hazardous Duty Pay Needed

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.osnews.com/story/142871/freebsd-15-0s-installer-to-gain-option-to-install-a-full-kde-plasma-desktop-environment/

One of the things lacking from the FreeBSD installation routine is the easy installation of a full desktop experience, from X11 all the way up to a login manager, desktop environment, and its applications. It seems this might finally change for FreeBSD 15.0, as the FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Improvements project is working on adding support for this to bsdinstall, the FreeBSD installer.

Based on a goal set out in this GitHub issue, the way this will work is that through a set of dialogs (which you can check out on GitLab) in the FreeBSD installer, the user can select to install KDE, which will then guide the user through installing the correct graphics driver and adding users to the video group. Once the installation is finished, the computer will reboot and load directly into SDDM, allowing you to log into the installed KDE Plasma desktop environment.

[...] Future plans for desktop users in the FreeBSD installers are more elaborate, and will include additional desktop environments to choose from, the ability to install sets of desktop applications during FreeBSD's installation, and yes, even opting for Wayland instead of X11, because FreeBSD developers know which way the wind is blowing.

This is excellent news, and will make installing a FreeBSD-based desktop a lot easier for a ton of people. Work isn't fully completed just yet, but even if the developers miss their FreeBSD 15.0 target, it'll just move on to one of the follow-up releases.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/07/openais-chatgpt-agent-casually-clicks-through-i-am-not-a-robot-verification-test/

Maybe they should change the button to say, "I am a robot"?

On Friday, OpenAI's new ChatGPT Agent, which can perform multistep tasks for users, proved it can pass through one of the Internet's most common security checkpoints by clicking Cloudflare's anti-bot verification—the same checkbox that's supposed to keep automated programs like itself at bay.
[...]
a user named "logkn" of the r/OpenAI community posted screenshots of the AI agent effortlessly clicking through the screening step before it would otherwise present a CAPTCHA (short for "Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart") while completing a video conversion task—narrating its own process as it went.
[...]
The absurdity of an AI agent declaring it needs to prove it's "not a bot" while clicking through anti-bot measures has not been lost on observers. "In all fairness, it's been trained on human data why would it identify as a bot? We should respect that choice," joked one Reddit user in a reply.
[...]
Cloudflare's screening system, called Turnstile, often precedes actual CAPTCHA challenges and represents one of the most widely deployed bot-detection methods today. The checkbox analyzes multiple signals, including mouse movements, click timing, browser fingerprints, IP reputation, and JavaScript execution patterns to determine if the user exhibits human-like behavior. If these checks pass, users proceed without seeing a CAPTCHA puzzle. If the system detects suspicious patterns, it escalates to visual challenges.
[...]
OpenAI's Operator, an experimental web-browsing AI agent launched in January, faced difficulty clicking through some CAPTCHAs (and was also trained to stop and ask a human to complete them), but the latest ChatGPT Agent tool has seen a much wider release.

It's tempting to say that the ability of AI agents to pass these tests puts the future effectiveness of CAPTCHAs into question, but for as long as there have been CAPTCHAs, there have been bots that could later defeat them. As a result, recent CAPTCHAs have become more of a way to slow down bot attacks or make them more expensive [PDF] rather than a way to defeat them entirely. Some malefactors even hire out farms of humans to defeat them in bulk.
[...]
CAPTCHAs are just one example of the complex tasks ChatGPT Agent can handle. For example, another Reddit user showed off a photo of a load of groceries that Agent apparently purchased. "I had agent mode order me some groceries from a local supermarket while I worked yesterday for pickup this morning," the Reddit user wrote.
[...]
But ChatGPT Agent isn't perfect. Some terrible website user interfaces are apparently better than CAPTCHA checkpoints at foiling the new bot. "Your agent did way better than mine," wrote one Reddit reply. "Mine couldn't figure out how to get to the stop and shop website."

Related stories on SoylentNews:
Six Weeks of CloudFlare Stalling; Still Blocking Niche Browsers - 20250315
AI Bots Now Beat 100% of Those Traffic-Image CAPTCHAs - 20241003
Artificial Intelligence Smart Enough to Fool Captcha Security Check - 20171028

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA's Webb Finds Possible 'Direct Collapse' Black Hole:

Editor's Note: This post highlights a combination of peer-reviewed results and data from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.

As data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope becomes public, researchers hunt its archives for unnoticed cosmic oddities. While examining images from the COSMOS-Web survey, two researchers, Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and Gabriel Brammer of the University of Copenhagen, discovered an unusual object that they nicknamed the Infinity Galaxy.

It displays a highly unusual shape of two very compact, red nuclei, each surrounded by a ring, giving it the shape of the infinity symbol. The team believes it was formed by the head-on collision of two disk galaxies. Follow-up observations showed that the Infinity Galaxy hosts an active, supermassive black hole. What is highly unusual is that the black hole is in between the two nuclei, within a vast expanse of gas. The team proposes that the black hole formed there via the direct collapse of a gas cloud – a process that may explain some of the incredibly massive black holes Webb has found in the early universe.

Here Pieter van Dokkum, lead author of a peer-reviewed paper describing their initial discovery and principal investigator of follow-up Webb observations, explains why this object could be the best evidence yet for a novel way of forming black holes.

"Everything is unusual about this galaxy. Not only does it look very strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that's pulling a lot of material in. The biggest surprise of all was that the black hole was not located inside either of the two nuclei but in the middle. We asked ourselves: How can we make sense of this?

janrinok writes in with the following story:

Pharmaceuticals and semiconductors appear to be included in the draft 15pc tariff deal agreed yesterday (27 July) between the EU and the US administration.

Large trade deals are complex and cannot of course be completed in months, but following a meeting between US president Donald Trump and EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen yesterday (27 July), a headline agreement has been reached that sees a single 15pc tariff on most EU exports to the US.

Commentators are still parsing the details. As with all deals agreed with the US under the current administration, details are sparse, and there is little certainty, but there will be some relief that any further trade war escalation has been postponed for now, ahead of the 1 August deadline set by Trump.

“We have stabilised on a single 15pc tariff rate for the vast majority of EU exports,” said von der Leyen in a press conference yesterday. “This rate applies across most sectors, including cars, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. This 15pc is a clear ceiling. No stacking. All inclusive. So it gives much-needed clarity for our citizens and businesses. This is absolutely crucial.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

ITHome reported [in Chinese], China is pushing its domestic GPU efforts into uncharted territory with Lisuan Tech's first consumer and professional graphics cards, the 7G106 and 7G105.

Built on TSMC's 6nm N6 process, the 7G106 and 7G105 are powered by the company's in-house TrueGPU architecture and aim to compete directly with mid-range offerings from Nvidia and AMD. While the spotlight is on gaming performance, Lisuan is positioning these chips as multi-purpose accelerators for AI, cloud rendering, and even metaverse applications.

The consumer-focused 7G106 features 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus, 192 texture units, 96 ROPs, and an FP32 throughput of up to 24 TFLOP/s. It features four DisplayPort 1.4 outputs with DSC 1.2b compression and supports DirectX 12 (minus ray tracing), Vulkan 1.3, OpenGL 4.6, and OpenCL 3.0. Its single 8-pin PCIe connector also suggests a TDP of around 225W.

On the other hand, the professional 7G105 doubles memory to 24 GB with ECC, offering up to 192 GB/s of pixel fill rate, 384 GB/s of texture fill rate, and the same 24 TFLOP/s compute ceiling. Both cards include hardware-accelerated AV1 and HEVC decode up to 8K60 and encode capabilities at 8K30 for HEVC and 4K30 for AV1.

[Ed's Comment: The full specifications are displayed in a table in the source link--JR]

janrinok writes in with the following story:

The second round of deferred resignations for NASA staff closed on Friday, and the agency says roughly 3,000 employees applied to leave, according to Bloomberg. The Trump administration first offered the deferred resignation program as a buyout to government workers in January as it gutted the federal workforce under the guidance of DOGE — then led by Elon Musk — asking employees to resign while still receiving benefits and pay for a period of time. In the earlier round, 870 NASA employees reportedly opted to leave. The space agency opened a second round in June, with a July 25 deadline.

The latest batch of applications brings the total to nearly 4,000 employees, or roughly 20 percent of NASA's workforce, according to a statement provided to Bloomberg. It comes after Politico reported earlier this month that over 2,000 senior NASA staff members have agreed to leave.

NASA is grappling with proposed budget cuts that could crush the agency's science programs and result in the loss of thousands of jobs. A group of current and former NASA employees called on Interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy to reject the "harmful cuts" in a letter published on July 21, writing that recent policies "threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission."

Original Submission