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Microsoft employs engineers in China to help maintain Defense Department computer systems, with U.S. citizens serving as "digital escorts" to oversee the foreign workers, according to a ProPublica investigation. The escorts often lack advanced technical expertise to police engineers with far more sophisticated skills, and some are former military personnel paid barely above minimum wage. "We're trusting that what they're doing isn't malicious, but we really can't tell," one current escort told the publication. The arrangement, critical to Microsoft winning federal cloud computing contracts a decade ago, handles sensitive but unclassified government data including materials that directly support military operations. Former CIA and NSA executive Harry Coker called the system a natural opportunity for spies, saying "If I were an operative, I would look at that as an avenue for extremely valuable access."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: CoreWeave is expanding a data center that is projected to double the electricity needs of a city near Dallas, another example of the strains that artificial intelligence workloads are placing on the US power supply. Local officials have grappled with how to handle the increased stress on the electricity grid from the project, according to a late 2024 presentation and emails seen by Bloomberg. The site is being developed by Core Scientific and will be used by OpenAI in Denton, Texas. Last week, CoreWeave announced it would acquire Core Scientific for about $9 billion, in part, to gain direct control of its data centers aimed at supplying AI work. Denton, about 50 miles northwest of Dallas, has almost doubled its population in the last 25 years to about 166,000 residents. To meet the spike in AI-related power demand, the city is passing on any extra costs to the data center operator and constructing additional grid infrastructure, Antonio Puente, general manager of local utility Denton Municipal Electric, said in an interview. "To serve the entire load from Core Scientific, we do have some transmission challenges," Puente said. "We will have to make some additional transmission investments." [...] Like some other large AI data center projects, the site in Denton was focused on cryptocurrency mining before pivoting to AI workloads in December. This transition means unrelenting power consumption -- the site will no longer curtail operations when power prices are high -- which will increase grid strain. "Now you're talking about a facility that has to have energy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," Puente said. That challenge will be mitigated by the addition of backup generators and batteries, he added. Unlike many large projects, the Denton data center didn't receive local tax exemptions. Officials expect more than $600 million in property and sales tax from the data center expansion, more than double the costs it plans to incur, according to an analysis document seen by Bloomberg. It also anticipates that 135 new jobs will be created, according to the document. The Denton site, which is already being rented by CoreWeave, is Core Scientific's largest planned project at about 390 megawatts of power. It's "utilizing the majority of extra system capacity" in the city, wrote a utility executive in a January email seen by Bloomberg. Any additional large power users will exacerbate overloads on the grid, the executive added. "When fully built out, it will host one of the largest GPU clusters in North America," Core Scientific Chief Executive Officer Adam Sullivan said of the site during a May call. "Denton is a flagship facility." The report notes that Texas could face electricity shortages as soon as 2026 due to surging power demand from data centers, oil and gas operations, and crypto mining.

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A team of Japanese researchers has set a new world record for internet speed, transmitting data at 125,000 gigabytes per second over 1,120 miles using a new type of 19-core optical fiber. "That's about 4 million times the average internet speed in the U.S. and would allow you to download the entire Internet Archive in less than four minutes," notes Live Science. It's also "more than twice the previous world record of 50,250 Gbps, previously set by a different team of scientists in 2024." From the report: To achieve this new speed -- which has not been independently verified -- the team developed a new form of optical fiber to send information at groundbreaking speeds over roughly the distance between New York and Florida. Details about this achievement were presented April 3 at the 48th Optical Fiber Communication Conference in San Francisco, according to a statement from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. The new type of optical fiber is equivalent to 19 standard optical fibers in its data transmission capacity. The new optical fiber is better suited to long-haul transmission than existing cables because the centers of all 19 fibers interact with light in the same way, so they encounter less light fluctuation, which results in less data loss. The new cable squeezes 19 separate fibers into a diameter of five-thousandths of an inch (0.127 millimeters), which is the same thickness as most existing single-fiber cables already in use. This effort means the new cable can transmit more data using existing infrastructure. [...] For this demonstration, the data ran through a transmission system 21 times, finally reaching a data receiver after traveling the equivalent of 1,120 miles.

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The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration has detected the most massive black hole merger to date, forming a final black hole around 225 times the Sun's mass. Caltech reports: Before now, the most massive black hole merger -- produced by an event that took place in 2021 called GW190521 -- had a total mass of 140 times that of the Sun. In the more recent GW231123 event, the 225-solar-mass black hole was created by the coalescence of black holes each approximately 100 and 140 times the mass of the Sun. In addition to their high masses, the black holes are also rapidly spinning. "The black holes appear to be spinning very rapidly -- near the limit allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity," explains Charlie Hoy of the University of Portsmouth and a member of the LVK. "That makes the signal difficult to model and interpret. It's an excellent case study for pushing forward the development of our theoretical tools." Researchers are continuing to refine their analysis and improve the models used to interpret such extreme events. "It will take years for the community to fully unravel this intricate signal pattern and all its implications," says Gregorio Carullo of the University of Birmingham and a member of the LVK. "Despite the most likely explanation remaining a black hole merger, more complex scenarios could be the key to deciphering its unexpected features. Exciting times ahead!"

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: California's statewide power grid operator is poised to become the first in North America to deploy artificial intelligence to manage outages, MIT Technology Review has learned. "We wanted to modernize our grid operations. This fits in perfectly with that," says Gopakumar Gopinathan, a senior advisor on power system technologies at the California Independent System Operator -- known as the CAISO and pronounced KAI-so. "AI is already transforming different industries. But we haven't seen many examples of it being used in our industry." At the DTECH Midwest utility industry summit in Minneapolis on July 15, CAISO is set to announce a deal to run a pilot program using new AI software called Genie, from the energy-services giant OATI. The software uses generative AI to analyze and carry out real-time analyses for grid operators and comes with the potential to autonomously make decisions about key functions on the grid, a switch that might resemble going from uniformed traffic officers to sensor-equipped stoplights. But while CAISO may deliver electrons to cutting-edge Silicon Valley companies and laboratories, the actual task of managing the state's electrical system is surprisingly analog. Today, CAISO engineers scan outage reports for keywords about maintenance that's planned or in the works, read through the notes, and then load each item into the grid software system to run calculations on how a downed line or transformer might affect power supply. "Even if it takes you less than a minute to scan one on average, when you amplify that over 200 or 300 outages, it adds up," says Abhimanyu Thakur, OATI's vice president of platforms, visualization, and analytics. "Then different departments are doing it for their own respective keywords. Now we consolidate all of that into a single dictionary of keywords and AI can do this scan and generate a report proactively." If CAISO finds that Genie produces reliable, more efficient data analyses for managing outages, Gopinathan says, the operator may consider automating more functions on the grid. "After a few rounds of testing, I think we'll have an idea about what is the right time to call it successful or not," he says.

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Saudi Arabia has asked consultants to reassess the feasibility of The Line, its ambitious 170km linear city project and centerpiece of the Neom initiative, as rising costs and falling oil prices force the kingdom to scale back its megaprojects. Middle East Eye reports: In April, The Financial Times reported that the CEO of Neom had launched a "comprehensive review" of the kingdom's megaproject. Neom, along with luxury Red Sea hotels and a ski resort, is the flagship project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 plan to transform the kingdom's economy and reduce its dependence on oil revenue. Bloomberg reported in 2024 that Saudi Arabia was cutting back plans for The Line. Instead of 1.5 million people living there by 2030, Saudi officials were said to anticipate fewer than 300,000 residents. Meanwhile, only 2.4km of the city is expected to be completed by 2030. In April, Goldman Sachs painted a bleak picture for Saudi Arabia's projects in a note to clients, projecting "pretty significant" budget deficits and more scaling back of megaprojects. Neom has already faced internal challenges. Nadhmi al-Nasr, who managed Neom's construction from 2018 to 2024, departed from his post in November. Nasr earned a chilling reputation managing Neom. He bragged that he put everyone to work "like a slave," adding, "When they drop down dead, I celebrate. That's how I do my projects." Two other foreign executives also left Neom at the end of 2024, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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Microsoft is testing a new adaptive energy saver mode in Windows 11 that automatically turns energy saver on or off based on system workload instead of battery percentage, aiming to extend laptop battery life without dimming screen brightness. The feature is currently available to Windows Insider testers and expected to roll out later this year. The Verge reports: The energy saver mode in Windows 11 typically dims a display brightness by 30 percent, disables transparency effects, and stop apps running in the background. Non-critical Windows update downloads are also paused, and certain apps like OneDrive, OneNote, and Phone Link may not sync fully while energy saver is enabled. This new adaptive energy saver mode, which will only be available on devices with a battery, will automatically enable or disable without affecting screen brightness. That will make it less noticeable on devices like laptops, tablets, and handhelds. "Adaptive energy saver is an opt-in feature that automatically enables and disables energy saver, without changing screen brightness, based on the power state of the device and the current system load," explains Microsoft's Windows Insider team.

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The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded contracts worth up to $200 million each to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI to scale adoption of advanced AI. "The contracts will enable the DoD to develop agentic AI workflows and use them to address critical national security challenges," reports Reuters, citing the department's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. From the report: Separately on Monday, xAI announced a suite of its products called "Grok for Government", making its advanced AI models -- including its latest flagship Grok 4 -- available to federal, local, state and national security customers. The Pentagon announced last month that OpenAI was awarded a $200 million contract, saying the ChatGPT maker would "develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains." The contracts announced on Monday deepen the ties between companies leading the AI race and U.S. government operations, while addressing concerns around the need for competitive contracts for AI use in federal agencies. "The adoption of AI is transforming the (DoD's) ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries," Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Investing.com: Meta's newly formed superintelligence lab is discussing potential changes to the company's artificial intelligence strategy that could represent a major shift for the social media giant. A small group of top members of the lab, including 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, Meta's new chief A.I. officer, talked last week about abandoning the company's most powerful open source A.I. model, called Behemoth, in favor of developing a closed model, according to a report in the New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter. Meta has traditionally open sourced its A.I. models, making the computer code public for other developers to build upon, and any shift toward a closed A.I. model would mark a significant philosophical change for Meta. Meta had completed training its Behemoth model by feeding in data to improve it, but delayed its release due to poor internal performance. After the company announced the formation of the superintelligence lab last month, teams working on the Behemoth model, which is considered a "frontier" model, stopped conducting new tests on it. The discussions within the superintelligence lab remain preliminary, and no decisions have been finalized. Any potential changes would require approval from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

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France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Greece will pilot an age verification app to better protect children online, as part of the EU's push to enforce its Digital Services Act. Reuters reports: The setup for the age verification app is built on the same technical specifications as the European Digital Identity Wallet which will be rolled out next year. The five countries can customize the model according to their requirements, integrate into a national app or keep it separately. The landmark legislation, which became applicable last year, requires Alphabet's Google, Meta, ByteDance's TikTok and other online companies to do more to tackle illegal and harmful online content. EU regulators said the new guidelines would help online platforms to tackle addictive design, cyberbullying, harmful content and unwanted contact from strangers.

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Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2, a trillion-parameter open-source language model that outperforms GPT-4 in key benchmarks with particularly strong performance on coding and autonomous agent tasks. VentureBeat reports: The new model, called Kimi K2, features 1 trillion total parameters with 32 billion activated parameters in a mixture-of-experts architecture. The company is releasing two versions: a foundation model for researchers and developers, and an instruction-tuned variant optimized for chat and autonomous agent applications. "Kimi K2 does not just answer; it acts," the company stated in its announcement blog. "With Kimi K2, advanced agentic intelligence is more open and accessible than ever. We can't wait to see what you build." The model's standout feature is its optimization for "agentic" capabilities -- the ability to autonomously use tools, write and execute code, and complete complex multi-step tasks without human intervention. In benchmark tests, Kimi K2 achieved 65.8% accuracy on SWE-bench Verified, a challenging software engineering benchmark, outperforming most open-source alternatives and matching some proprietary models. [...] On LiveCodeBench, arguably the most realistic coding benchmark available, Kimi K2 achieved 53.7% accuracy, decisively beating DeepSeek-V3's 46.9% and GPT-4.1's 44.7%. More striking still: it scored 97.4% on MATH-500 compared to GPT-4.1's 92.4%, suggesting Moonshot has cracked something fundamental about mathematical reasoning that has eluded larger, better-funded competitors. But here's what the benchmarks don't capture: Moonshot is achieving these results with a model that costs a fraction of what incumbents spend on training and inference. While OpenAI burns through hundreds of millions on compute for incremental improvements, Moonshot appears to have found a more efficient path to the same destination. It's a classic innovator's dilemma playing out in real time -- the scrappy outsider isn't just matching the incumbent's performance, they're doing it better, faster, and cheaper.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Samuel Herman and Alexander Baciu never liked using Comcast's cable broadband. Now, the residents of Saline, Michigan, operate a fiber Internet service provider that competes against Comcast in their neighborhoods and has ambitions to expand. "All throughout my life pretty much, I've had to deal with Xfinity's bullcrap, them not being able to handle the speeds that we need," Herman told Ars. "I lived in a house of 10. I have seven other brothers and sisters, and there's 10 of us in total with my parents." With all those kids using the Internet for school and other needs, "it just doesn't work out," he said. Herman was particularly frustrated with Comcast upload speeds, which are much slower than the cable service's download speeds. "Many times we would have to call Comcast and let them know our bandwidth was slowing down... then they would say, 'OK, we'll refresh the system.' So then it would work again for a week to two weeks, and then again we'd have the same issues," he said. Herman, now 25, got married in 2021 and started building his own house, and he tried to find another ISP to serve the property. He was familiar with local Internet service providers because he worked in construction for his father's company, which contracts with ISPs to build their networks. But no fiber ISP was looking to compete directly against Comcast where he lived, though Metronet and 123NET offer fiber elsewhere in the city, Herman said. He ended up paying Comcast $120 a month for gigabit download service with slower upload speeds. Baciu, who lives about a mile away from Herman, was also stuck with Comcast and was paying about the same amount for gigabit download speeds. Herman said he was the chief operating officer of his father's construction company and that he shifted the business "from doing just directional drilling to be a turnkey contractor for ISPs." Baciu, Herman's brother-in-law (having married Herman's oldest sister), was the chief construction officer. Fueled by their knowledge of the business and their dislike of Comcast, they founded a fiber ISP called Prime-One. Now, Herman is paying $80 a month to his own company for symmetrical gigabit service. Prime-One also offers 500Mbps for $75, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. The first 30 days are free, and all plans have unlimited data and no contracts. "We are 100 percent fiber optic," Baciu told Ars. "Everything that we're doing is all underground. We're not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we're having a reliable connection." Each customer's Optical Network Terminal (ONT) and other equipment is included in the service plan. Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router. They don't charge equipment or installation fees, Herman and Baciu said. Prime-One began serving customers in January 2025, and Baciu said the network has been built to about 1,500 homes in Saline with about 75 miles of fiber installed. Prime-One intends to serve nearby towns as well, with the founders saying the plan is to serve 4,000 homes with the initial build and then expand further. [...] A bit more than 100 residents have bought service so far, they said. Herman said the company is looking to sign up about 30 percent of the homes in its network area to make a profit. "I feel fairly confident," Herman said, noting the number of customers who signed up with the initial construction not even halfway finished.

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Apple is facing pressure to shake up its corporate playbook to invigorate its struggling artificial intelligence efforts. From a report: Alarmed by a share slump that's erased more than $640 billion in market value this year and frustrated with delays in rolling out AI features, investors are calling for Apple to break with long-standing traditions to make a big acquisition and more aggressively pursue talent. "Historically Apple does not do big mergers and acquisitions," said Citigroup Inc. analyst Atif Malik, noting that the last major deal was its takeover of Beats in 2014. But, he argues, "investors would turn more positive if Apple could acquire or invest a meaningful stake in an established AI provider." Apple shares have fallen 16% this year while traders bid up the shares of peers like Meta, which is spending lavishly on AI. While Apple faces other problems, including its exposure to tariffs and regulatory issues, disappointment in bringing compelling AI features to its vast ecosystem of devices has become top of mind for investors.

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Armagh Observatory is marking a very special meteorological milestone as the institute celebrates 230 years of continuous weather observation. From a report: The unbroken tradition of handwritten data makes it the longest sequence of continuous weather information gathered anywhere in the UK and Ireland. Events are being held at Armagh Observatory on Monday to mark the significant anniversary. Nowadays, most weather data is gathered only by automated weather stations, but not in Armagh, where the human touch remains. The first handwritten recording was made on the evening of 14 July 1795, when a measurement of the temperature and air pressure was recorded on a graph at the observatory that sits above the city of Armagh. The measurement was repeated the next day and every subsequent day for the next 230 years.

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A small fraction of hyperactive social media users generates the vast majority of toxic online content, according to research by New York University psychology professor Jay Van Bavel and colleagues Claire Robertson and Kareena del Rosario. The study found that 10% of users produce roughly 97% of political tweets, while just 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts known as the "disinformation dozen" created most vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic, the research found. In experiments, researchers paid participants to unfollow divisive political accounts on X. After one month, participants reported 23% less animosity toward other political groups. Nearly half declined to refollow hostile accounts after the study ended, and those maintaining healthier newsfeeds reported reduced animosity 11 months later. The research describes social media as a "funhouse mirror" that amplifies extreme voices while muting moderate perspectives.

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A Department of Justice filing aiming to recover fraudulently obtained cryptocurrency may have inadvertently revealed the scam's victims as the CEO and CFO of crypto payment firm MoonPay. From a report: The filing, which aims to seize around $40,350 in USDT frozen by Tether, reveals that two victims sent $250,300 in USDT to a person posing as Steve Witkoff, co-chair of the President Trump's inaugural committee. However, records obtained from Binance revealed that the wallet that received the funds was registered to Ehiremen Aigbokhan, a man based in Lagos, Nigeria. The victims are identified in the filing only as "Ivan" and "Mouna." However, as outlet NOTUS noticed, Crypto payment firm Moonpay's CEO is Ivan Soto-Wright and its CFO is Mouna Ammari Siala. Furthermore, a wallet involved in the $250,300 transaction is listed by Etherscan as a MoonPay wallet.

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Cognition AI, an artificial intelligence startup that offers a software coding assistant, said on Monday that it had bought rival Windsurf as part of an escalating battle to lead in the technology. From a report: The move follows a $2.4 billion deal by Google to acquire some of Windsurf's top executives and license the start-up's technology, which was revealed on Friday. Google's deal appeared to leave Windsurf in a difficult position as a stand-alone start-up. OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, had also been in talks to buy Windsurf before the Google deal. "We've long admired the Windsurf team and what they've built," said Scott Wu, a co-founder of Cognition, in an email to employees viewed by The New York Times. "Within our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labor of putting them together."

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Air India's chief executive urged staff to avoid drawing premature conclusions about what caused one of the airline's Boeing triangle jets to crash last month, after a preliminary investigation ruled out mechanical or maintenance issues, turning attention to the pilots' actions. WSJ: Campbell Wilson told staff that the probe into the crash was "far from over," according to an internal memo, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, in which he set out some of the findings of a report issued by India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau at the end of last week. Wilson's memo didn't mention one of the AAIB's findings: that the airplane's fuel-control switches had been turned off one by one, seconds after takeoff, starving both engines of fuel. The switches, which sit between the two seats in the cockpit, were turned back on about 10 seconds later, but the engines apparently couldn't fully restart and gain thrust fast enough, the report said. The crash of the London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner killed all but one of the 242 passengers and crew on board, as well as 19 people on the ground, when the plane slammed into a residential area beyond the airport in the Indian city of Ahmedabad. In the memo, Wilson said "over the past 30 days, we've seen an ongoing cycle of theories, allegations, rumours and sensational headlines, many of which have later been disproven."

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A scientific paper featuring an AI-generated image of a rat with an oversized penis was retracted three days after publication, highlighting broader problems plaguing academic publishing as researchers struggle with an explosion of scientific literature. The paper appeared in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology before widespread mockery forced its withdrawal. Research studies indexed on Clarivate's Web of Science database increased 48% between 2015 and 2024, rising from 1.71 million to 2.53 million papers. Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan called the publishing system "broken and unsustainable," while University of Exeter researcher Mark Hanson described scientists as "increasingly overwhelmed" by the volume of articles. The Royal Society plans to release a major review of scientific publishing disruptions at summer's end, with former government chief scientist Mark Walport citing incentives that favor quantity over quality as a fundamental problem.

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Google will merge ChromeOS and Android into a unified platform, according to Sameer Samat, President of Android Ecosystem at Google. "We're going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they're getting done," Samat said during a recent interview.

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