"Chaos and Concern in Sin City," read this morning's headline on a video report from ABC News about "the massive cyberattack in Las Vegas crippling several hotels and casinos, and putting a damper on getaways for thousands of tourists there." "Today marks a week since that cyberattack hit Las Vegas, and MGM hotels and casinos are still working on getting systems back up and running.. The online reservation site for MGM is still down, ATMs not working, and those playing the slot machines or even video poker having to wait for attendants to pay them out in cash. All of this fiasco leading to long lines at check-in, and now a cyber investigation with the FBI...

Other gaming resorts also having issues. Caesar's entertainment says they too were a victim of a cyberattack, but their online operations were not impacted. Then this weekend at the Venetian, an outage shutting down some slots, but the resort says they're back up, and that at least thankfully was not due to a cyber attack.
They report MGM properties were affected as far away as Atlantic City, New Jersey.

A luxury cruise ship that had been stuck for three days after running aground off the coast of Greenland was pulled free on Thursday morning, the authorities said. From a report: The ship, the Ocean Explorer, had been carrying 206 passenger and crew members and was headed toward Alpefjord, in a remote corner of Greenland. The ship's destination was the Northeast Greenland National Park, the world's northernmost national park, which is home to icebergs, glaciers and high mountains. The Joint Arctic Command, which is part of Denmark's defense forces, and SunStone Maritime Group, the coordinators of the rescue operation, said in statements on Thursday that the ship had been pulled free by a vessel named Tarajoq.

There were no reported injuries on board the ship, and there was no threat to the environment. The ship's operator, Aurora Expeditions, a cruise company based in Australia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The rescue came after an unsuccessful attempt on Wednesday, in which a fishing research vessel owned by the government of Greenland tried and failed to pull free the Ocean Explorer at high tide. Bad weather also slowed the government's rescue operations, officials said. Before the ship was freed, the Joint Arctic Command had said that "the crew and passengers are in a difficult situation, but after the circumstances, the atmosphere on the ship is good and everyone on board is fine."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group claimed responsibility for the MGM Resorts cyber outage on Tuesday, according to a post by malware archive vx-underground. The group claims to have used common social engineering tactics, or gaining trust from employees to get inside information, to try and get a ransom out of MGM Resorts, but the company reportedly refuses to pay. The conversation that granted initial access took just 10 minutes, according to the group.

"All ALPHV ransomware group did to compromise MGM Resorts was hop on LinkedIn, find an employee, then call the Help Desk," the organization wrote in a post on X. Those details came from ALPHV, but have not been independently confirmed by security researchers. The international resort chain started experiencing outages earlier this week, as customers noticed slot machines at casinos owned by MGM Resorts shut down on the Las Vegas strip. As of Wednesday morning, MGM Resorts still shows signs that it's experiencing downtime, like continued website disruptions. In a statement on Tuesday, MGM Resorts said: "Our resorts, including dining, entertainment and gaming are currently operational." However, the company said Wednesday that the cyber incident has significantly disrupted properties across the United States and represents a material risk to the company.

"[T]he major credit rating agency Moody's warned that the cyberattack could negatively affect MGM's credit rating, saying the attack highlighted 'key risks' within the company," reports CNBC. "The company's corporate email, restaurant reservation and hotel booking systems remain offline as a result of the attack, as do digital room keys. MGM on Wednesday filed a 8-K report with the Securities and Exchange Commission noting that on Tuesday the company issued a press release 'regarding a cybersecurity issue involving the Company.'" MGM's share price has declined more than 6% since Monday.

Unity, the tech company behind one of the most popular engines for creating video games, is scrambling to clarify how a price increase for its services will work, after its announcement Tuesday morning broadly infuriated the game development community. From a report: The fees, which Unity said are essential for funding development of its tech, left many game makers wondering if having a hit game through Unity would cost them more money than they could make. Developers spoke throughout the day of delaying their games to switch to rival Epic Games' Unreal Engine or other services on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. But by the evening, Unity exec Marc Whitten was updating Axios on the policies, potentially defusing some concerns raised by game creators.

The new "Runtime Fee" announced Tuesday morning is tied to a player's installations of a game, an action that previously didn't cost developers anything. With Unity's new plan, developers who use Unity's free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue. Developers paying over $2,000 a year for a Unity Pro plan would have to hit higher thresholds and would be charged with lower fees. The newfee system will begin at the start of 2024. [...] After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.) He hoped this would allay fears of "install-bombing," where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer.

Business Insider reports on "a soaring number of Gen Zers who has decided to skip college altogether.

"Four million fewer teenagers enrolled at a college in 2022 than in 2012." For many, the price tag has simply grown too exorbitant to justify the cost. From 2010 to 2022, college tuition rose an average of 12% a year, while overall inflation only increased an average of 2.6% each year. Today it costs at least $104,108 on average to attend four years of public university — and $223,360 for a private university.

At the same time, the salaries students can expect to earn after graduation haven't kept up with the cost of college. A 2019 report from the Pew Research Center found that earnings for young college-educated workers had remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. Four years after graduating, according to recent data from the Higher Education Authority, a third of students earn less than $40,000 — lower than the average salary of $44,356 that workers with only a high-school diploma earn. Factor in the average student debt of $33,500 that college graduates owe after they leave school, and many graduates will spend years catching up with their degree-less counterparts. This student-debt-driven financial hole is leaving more young graduates with a lower net worth than previous generations.

The widening gap between the value and the cost of college has started to shift Gen Z's attitude toward higher education. A 2022 survey by Morning Consult found that 41% of Gen Zers said they "tend to trust US colleges and universities," the lowest percentage of any generation. It's a significant shift from when millennials were in their shoes a decade ago: A 2014 Pew Research survey found that 63% of millennials valued a college education or planned to get one. And of those who graduated, 41% of that cohort considered their schooling "very useful" in readying them to enter the workforce — that's compared to 45% of Gen Xers and 47% of boomers who felt the same...

The focus now, especially in the midst of so much uncertainty in the economy, is on using college to prepare for a single, overriding goal: getting a good job.
The article argues this is transforming which classes get emphasized by both students and colleges. For example, in 2014 computer programming was only the 7th most popular major at U.C. Berkeley — but now it's #1. And the data science degree Berkeley created five years ago is now already its third most popular.

And meanwhile, "last year only 7% of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities — down from 20% a decade earlier and almost 30% in the 1970s."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader yusing for sharing the article.

Star Trek: The Animated Series was a half-hour Saturday morning cartoon that premiered exactly one half century ago — yesterday. You can watch its opening credits sequence on YouTube — with its strange 1970s version of the theme song. CBS's YouTube channel also offers clips from various episodes.

Starting in 1973, it ran for two seasons — a total of just 22 episodes. But the BBC notes it kept Star Trek in people's minds after the original series had been cancelled in 1969: While The Original Series had struggled in the ratings during its initial run, the show thrived in syndication, and created the phenomenon of fan conventions (think Comic-con in the present day). Because of this, studios were interested in more Star Trek, but there was a problem: the sets had been scrapped, the costumes were gone, and it would have been cost-prohibitive to rebuild everything from scratch. NBC settled on a different approach: an animated series.

According to The Fifty-Year Mission by Mark Altman and Edward Gross (an oral history of Star Trek), Gene Roddenberry wasn't overly interested in an animated show in and of itself. However, he was willing to go along with it because he saw it as a stepping stone to another live-action show or a feature film. An animated show would energise fans, he thought, so he agreed on the condition that he would have full creative control of The Animated Series. After a fight, the network gave in. The full, regular cast returned, with the exception of Walter Koenig's Pavel Chekov, who was cut for budget reasons...

[I]t was very much conceived of as a continuation of The Original Series. Some of the episodes were direct sequels, such as More Tribbles, More Trouble, which is a continuation of the classic The Trouble with Tribbles, and featured the return of Cyrano Jones... [Another episode was a sequel to The City on the Edge of Forever.] Dorothy (DC) Fontana led a group of writers from the original show who mostly wrote for a traditional, adult Star Trek audience. That's why the show didn't catch on — while it was well-received by critics, it might have done better in prime time. The show won a Daytime Emmy for best children's series, but it was cancelled after two years because of low ratings. Roddenberry then moved on to work on another live-action series, called Phase II, which would eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture...

Whatever is decided regarding "the canon", The Animated Series sits firmly within Star Trek's guiding ethos: Gene Roddenberry's vision for a utopian future where humans coexist peacefully with aliens as part of a Federation, and there's no poverty or war.

"On the morning of his arrest, Grigor Sargsyan was still fixing matches. Four cellphones buzzed on his nightstand with calls and messages from around the world.... The information on his devices would provide a remarkable window into what has become the world's most manipulated sport, according to betting regulators. Thousands of texts, gambling receipts and bank transfers laid out Sargsyan's ascent in remarkable detail..."

That's part one of a two-part story in which more than 181 tennis players are involved, and from more than 30 countries, fixing more than 375 professional tennis matches. The Washington Post reveals the years-long investigation that began when Belgium's gambling commission tipped off their federal prosecutor's office to "irregular wagers on obscure tennis matches played around the world."

The breakthrough came with geolocation data on a cellphone, cross-referenced against the the names of people who'd recently flown to that country... The bets were made in small towns in the Flemish countryside. The gamblers appeared to be acting on inside information; they consistently won even when they bet against steep odds... [Nicolas Borremans, a 45-year-old police investigator based in the Flanders region of Belgium] knew little about sports. He had never watched an entire tennis match. But even a cursory description of the case was enough for him to see how a gambling operation might be used to launder money...

Within a few months, he had traced the accounts of four men who had placed suspicious bets in Belgium, all Armenian immigrants. Their wagers were mostly small — a few hundred euros each — ostensibly to avoid scrutiny. Almost all of the bets were on low-level professional tennis tournaments, where players earned barely enough to pay for their travel. Borremans secured wiretaps on the gamblers' phones, and a team of Armenian interpreters listened in. It became clear that the gamblers were working for someone. They received detailed instructions about which matches to bet on. They weren't gambling just on the outcomes, but on specific scores for sets and games... Borremans added more gamblers to his diagram. "Money mules," he called them. Eventually, he would uncover 1,671 accounts at gambling establishments across Europe. Many were registered by working-class Armenians: mechanics, a pizza deliveryman, a taxi driver.
While the tennis tour "has in recent months issued a raft of bans and suspensions," the article points out that the scale of the gambler/tennis player network "has remained a secret until now, in part because the tour is still working on active investigations related to the operation." (The professional tennis tour has its own investigation unit "formed in part because of pervasive allegations of match-fixing in the sport," which assisted the Belgian police.)

The operation's "maestro" had tried to evade investigators. (One French player received his payment in 21 separate transfers from Armenia.) The maestro also gave the tennis players anonymously-registered SIM cards for communication. But unfortunately, the article points out, every professional tennis player "signs a contract agreeing to hand their phones over to tennis investigators at any time if required." Soon investigators were reading the mastermind's text messages — and even wiretapping his phone calls to his mother.

His phone's search history would later offer a glimpse into his life and concerns. Sargsyan scoured the internet for references to himself and his players ("maestro tennis," "match fixing tennis hossam"); he did some broader research into his world ("tennis corruption," "armenian mafia"); he searched for ways to spend his new fortune ("escort geneve," "villa rent close port mallorca") But, mostly, he searched for new bookmakers ("croatia betting shop," "usa betting," "mybet Australia").
Caught in the investigation were Sebastian Rivera, the Chilean coach based in the United States, and Slovakian tennis player Dagmara Baskova (who says she was paid 10,000 euros for each thrown match). Another French player told investigators "Since 2015, I estimate that I have accepted to deliberately lose or manipulate the outcome of 20 to 30 matches for Maestro, both in singles and doubles." Some tennis players infuriated the maestro by tipping off other gamblers about their plans to throw matches.

Leaving the courtroom for his own trial, the maestro gave this response to the Post reporter asking how he felt about the courtroom proceedings. "If the prosecutor knew what I know, there would be many more people on trial." Later the maestro was sentenced to five years in prison for fraud, money laundering, and leading a criminal organization.

Though it's Saturday at Nevada's desert-based Burning Man event "Dawn brought a growing realization for attendees that they might not be going home as planned, given rain forecast for later Saturday into Sunday..." reports the Reno Gazette-Journal. "More than 73,000 Burning Man attendees remain confined to their camps Saturday and are blocked from leaving the event after a slow-moving rainstorm turned their desert playground into a soupy, muddy morass."

Burning Man has now closed both its entrance and exits gates. "Organizers warned attendees to conserve their food and water, indicating the closures could be lengthy." There was no estimated time for reopening, and thousands of attendees are facing the potential of missing flights, failing to return rental cars or failing to return to work Tuesday. The event is set to officially end Monday but many people begin leaving Saturday night or Sunday...

The closures and order to remain in shelter come as the event was supposed reach its zenith on Saturday night with the burning of the giant wooden Man effigy towering over the temporary city. All vehicle traffic within the encampment has been halted, including servicing for the thousands of portable toilets that make the event possible. Organizers have also begun rationing ice sales... Given the conditions, which include forecast rain Sunday, it appears unlikely anyone will be permitted to drive out soon. Burning Man officials have not provided a comprehensive update on conditions, departure timing or even the multiple art burns scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. Longtime attendees said they can't remember a burn with this much rain...

Organizers banned vehicle traffic from the roads Friday afternoon and kept the exit gates closed as of 5 a.m. Saturday.
"Many attendees appeared to remain in good spirits, playing beer pong in the muddy streets or splashing in the standing water. Techno continued echoing around the encampment, and spontaneous dance parties kept breaking out."

"Walking was almost impossible Saturday morning, but started to improve as the ground began to dry. Then it began raining again."

An anonymous reader writes: A Guangdong-based state-backed enterprise in charge of e-government projects in the Southern Chinese province has apologized after admitting that its "home-developed" software was based on open-source code from US tech giant Microsoft. Digital Guangdong, known as DigitalGD, published an apology last week after it was revealed that its CEC-IDE software application, which helps programmers write code, was based on Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code), with just minor modifications and certain functions added.

VS Code is available under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology licence, a permissive open source licence allowing for reuse even for commercial purposes. DigitalGD said this fact was not disclosed due to "negligence," and admitted that its description of its software as "self-developed" has met scrutiny and doubt from Chinese programmers. "We are deeply sorry and humiliated for this, and relevant teams have been ordered to make rectifications," the company said. "Chinese authorities have repeatedly demanded 'safe and controllable' hardware and software for key infrastructure, rewarding businesses for indigenous innovations, but this has motivated some companies to make false claims about their products," notes the South China Morning Post.

A similar incident happened in May when a Shenzhen-based Powerleader announced a "home developed" Powerstar P3-01105 CPU that was later revealed to be Intel's Core i3-10105 Comet Lake CPU.

Flights in and out of Britain will be disrupted for days, the U.K. government said on Tuesday, after a technical issue with the country's air traffic control system left thousands of passengers stranded abroad or facing severe delays. From a report: Around 280 flights were canceled on Tuesday, about 5 percent of the total scheduled to leave or arrive in Britain, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company, compounding travel woes for British holidaymakers after more than a thousand flights were canceled the day before. The trouble came at a particularly busy time for travelers in Britain, many of whom were returning home from summer vacation or long weekends because Monday was a public holiday in the country.

"The timing was not at all helpful for people," Mark Harper, the government minister responsible for transport policy, told the BBC on Tuesday morning. "It's disrupted thousands of people. Lots of flights were canceled yesterday because of the imperative to keep the system working safely, and it is going to take some days to get completely everybody back to where they should be." He added that the government's technical experts had concluded that the episode was not a cyberattack. Britain's National Air Traffic Service, which runs air traffic control, said on Monday that a failure of the automatic system that processes plane routes meant that, for several hours, flight plans had to be entered manually.

Helen Marie Plourde, an 86-year-old Minnesota resident, just spent over a month without home Internet and phone service because CenturyLink failed to fix a problem that began in July. From a report: CenturyLink didn't show up for scheduled appointments at her home in Saint Paul, Plourde told Ars in a phone interview on Thursday, August 24, one day after the latest missed service appointment. Another appointment was scheduled for August 28, but she was skeptical that it would actually happen. "I'll believe it when I see them," Plourde said. Plourde buys broadband through Velocity Telephone, which resells CenturyLink fiber service in her area and acts as an intermediary between customers and CenturyLink for repairs. Velocity told us that it set up CenturyLink appointments for Plourde on August 10, August 17, and August 23, but no CenturyLink technicians showed up to any of the appointments.

We talked to Plourde after hearing from Amalia Deloney, whose parents live nearby. Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis, put Deloney in touch with us. "For the past month, [Plourde] has been going to my mom and dad's house to use the Internet two times a day because hers went out and CenturyLink can't be bothered fixing it. She's ready to write letters to elected officials and the Utilities Commission out of desperation," Deloney said. That didn't end up being necessary because CenturyLink sprang into action after Ars contacted the company's media relations team on Thursday night. A CenturyLink technician went to Plourde's home on Friday morning and fixed a line problem on a nearby street, restoring her Internet and VoIP phone service. Velocity, the CenturyLink reseller, also offers its own fiber service on infrastructure it owns in parts of Minnesota, but not where Plourde lives. Comcast is the other option at Plourde's house. She chose Velocity to support a local company.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There have been a lot of Wipeout games released since the 1995 original, including Wipeout HD and the Omega Collection, but only the original has the distinction of having its Windows port source code leaked by (since defunct) archive Forest of Illusion. Dominic Szablewski grabbed that code before it disappeared and set about creating a version that's not just a port. He rewrote the game's rendering, physics, sound, and generally "everything everywhere." He documented the project, put his code on GitHub, and has some version of a justification. "So let's just pretend that the leak was intentional, a rewrite of the source falls under fair use and the whole thing is abandonware anyway," Szablewski writes.

As he digs into the specifics of his work, Szablewski takes the reader on a tour of PSX dev kits and how they handled Z-levels, how to translate yesterday's triangles to today's OpenGL, breaking the 30 FPS cap on a game that explicitly forbade that, and more. He takes the code from 40,699 lines to 7,731 and notably loved an excuse to work in C. "I had an absolute blast cleaning up this mess!" Szablewski's Wipeout rewrite can be compiled for Windows, Linux, Mac, and WASM (Web Assembly). You can even play it in your browser on his server (please be gentle). I spent some time in it this morning, and let me tell you: I am not ready for anti-gravity racing in the year 2052. It was a struggle to even get to fourth place, but those struggles were due entirely to skill, not system. The web version feels buttery smooth, even when you're continually clunking into walls. I had misremembered this game as having a lot more to it, but it's all feel: the trance/prog music, the physics, the controls, and the sense that you're always just slightly out of control.

New York City, home to more than a million students in its school system, is the biggest school district in the U.S. -- and now allows any student to enroll virtually in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Time reports: Dubbed Virtual Innovators Academy, there are 17 teachers for about 200 students enrolled in the 2023-2024 school year for sophomore and freshman years. Each year, another grade level will be added, and the school's funding comes from the city and state, just like other public schools. Students meet in-person for required state exams and for monthly social gatherings like arcade games at Dave & Busters or seeing a Broadway show. But many of the most popular extracurriculars are done from home, says Virtual Innovators Academy principal Terri Grey, like esports and flying drones. [...]

And it isn't just in New York: school districts in Utah, Georgia, California, and elsewhere have also launched permanent virtual schools. Concerns remain about the effectiveness of virtual school. Critics worry about the lack of in-person social interaction during crucial developmental years, and about whether teachers can educate as effectively through a screen. But administrators behind the nation's burgeoning virtual schools say they have studied what works and what doesn't from remote-schooling during the pandemic when setting up these communities. Every morning, students at Virtual Innovators Academy meet in small groups with a teacher advisor to talk about how they're doing and give them time to wake up in the morning and connect with other classmates. There's less emphasis on multiple choice tests, which proved harder to administer online, and more emphasis on research projects.

"Too many people judge virtual instruction as if it were the emergency roadside online instruction that happened as a result of the pandemic," says Anthony Godfrey, who helps oversee the K-12 Jordan Virtual Learning Academy in Utah. "This is something very different. This is a carefully thought out, very intentional way of providing a unique and effective means of instruction." [...] But for all the proponents of virtual schooling, there are critics who worry about what's being lost behind the computer screen. [...] Unstructured, spontaneous conversations are often the most memorable parts of school, he argues; students might work side-by-side, help each other with homework, and also socialize in between classes. In virtual school, "How do you create space for bumping into somebody in the hall?" [wonders Nathan Holbert, a researcher at Teachers College, Columbia University, who studies virtual learning]. "I don't know that you can."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blasted social media giant Meta on Monday over its decision to block local news as wildfires continue to force thousands of Canadians from their homes. "Right now in an emergency situation, where up-to-date local information is more important than ever, Facebook is putting corporate profits ahead of people's safety, ahead of quality local journalism. This is not the time for that," he said during a stop at the Island Montessori Academy in Cornwall, P.E.I. on Monday morning. "It is so inconceivable that a company like Facebook is choosing to put corporate profits ahead of ensuring that local news organizations can get up-to-date information to Canadians and reach them where Canadians spend a lot of their time -- online, on social media, on Facebook."

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has blocked Canadians from viewing news from Canadian outlets in response to the Liberal government passing its Online News Act, Bill C-18, in June. Google has threatened similar action. The law forces large social media platforms to negotiate compensation for Canadian news publishers when their content is shared. As a result, content from news providers in the North -- including CBC, the local newspaper The Yellowknifer and digital broadcaster Cabin Radio -- is being blocked and people can't access or share information from news sources on Facebook and Instagram, two of the most popular social media sites. In a statement sent to CBC News last week, the company said it's sticking to its position. It also said government sites and other sources that disseminate information aren't subject to the ban. "This is Facebook's choice," said Trudeau. "We're simply saying that in a democracy, quality local journalism matters. And it matters now more than ever before, when people are worried about their homes, worried about communities, worried about the worst summer for extreme weather events we've had in a long, long time."

Meanwhile, Meta spokesperson David Troya-Alvarez said: "People in Canada are able to use Facebook and Instagram to connect to their communities and access reputable information, including content from official government agencies, emergency services and non-governmental organizations." Meta says it has activated a "Safety Check" feature that allows users to mark on their profile they're safe from the wildfires.

The White House ordered federal agencies to shore up their cybersecurity after agencies have lagged in implementing a key executive order President Joe Biden issued in 2021. From a report: Multiple federal departments and agencies have, as of the end of June, "failed to fully comply" with critical security practices prescribed by the executive order, "leaving the U.S. Government exposed to malicious cyber intrusions and undermining the example the Government must set for adequate cybersecurity practices," national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a memo to Cabinet secretaries this week.

Sullivan asked senior officials from across the departments to ensure they achieve "full compliance" with the executive order's security requirements by the end of the year. His memo is addressed to agencies outside of the Pentagon. "This morning the National Security Advisor shared a memo with federal departments and agencies to ensure their cyber infrastructure is compliant with the President's Executive Order to improve the nation's cybersecurity," a National Security Council spokesperson told CNN. "As we've said, the Biden-Harris Administration has had a relentless focus on strengthening the cybersecurity of nation's most critical sectors since day one, and will continue to work to secure our cyber defenses."

Bambu's X1C and P1P 3D printers started printing unattended, overnight, and without any additional user input, according to user reports from r/BambuLab and X. The Verge reports: Some woke up to failed prints. Some found a second copy of a previous print. And at least a few found their Bambu X1C or P1P had started smacking itself apart -- damaging components -- while trying to print a second copy atop the object they'd actually asked for. What happened? In an official blog post, Bambu says it's still investigating but suspects that a cloud outage is to blame. The company says its servers had two brief outages on Tuesday morning where the servers couldn't confirm that the printers had actually printed -- but instead of failing gracefully, they wound up sending the same print job again and again until it went through, Bambu's staff believes. "Simply explained, the print job sent to the printer before was trapped on the cloud and had a delayed start," writes Bambu.

When contacted by The Verge, Bambu would not go quite so far as to promise free repairs and replacements for all affected customers but says anyone who's suffered any damage should reach out to Bambu support ASAP. "For damage caused by this incident, we will offer the necessary solutions to our customers impacted by the Cloud Outage, in the form of part replacements or a printer replacement if the situation demands it," spokesperson Taylor Liu tells me.

Linus Sebastian's Linus Media Group YouTube empire is currently in crisis, with accusations of theft, lapses in ethics, and most recently, allegations of sexual harassment. From a report: The company has currently paused all production to improve its review processes, and CEO Terren Tong tells The Verge an outside investigator will be hired to examine the harassment allegations. In a video posted this morning titled "What do we do now?" Linus Media Group CFO Yvonne Ho announced the entire channel was pausing production for the next week to address the issues raised by the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus about errors in videos and concerning ethical practices. "I agree with the community," Ho said in the video, "so I'm putting my foot down. Effective immediately all YouTube video production is on pause." The controversy started earlier this week, when Gamers Nexus posted a video outlining a number of factual errors and ethics concerns in recent Linus Tech Tips videos. "We've been seeing an alarming amount of conflicts from Linus Tech Tips as it relates to their corporate connections, their flow of money, and the potential bias as a result of those things," said Gamers Nexus host Steve Burke.

Quantum computing could turbo-charge AI into something "massively, universally transformative," argues the South China Morning Post, citing a quote from theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. "AI has the ability to learn new, complex tasks, and quantum computers can provide the computational muscle it needs..."

"AI will give us the ability to create learning machines that can begin to mimic human abilities, while quantum computers may provide the calculational power to finally create an intelligent machine." Where AI brings an ability to self-improve and learn from its mistakes, quantum computers add speed and power. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said "AI can accelerate quantum computing, and quantum computing can accelerate AI...."

Complex calculations that would take classical supercomputers thousands of years to crunch could, in theory, be completed by quantum computers in minutes... In expectation of its advantages, the automotive industry is already collaborating with pioneers in the quantum-computing arena. Daimler has partnered with IBM, Volkswagen with D-Wave Systems (a Canadian quantum-computing firm) and Hyundai with IonQ. "If you can increase the energy density of your battery by another factor of two, three or four, then instead of 300 miles (480km), you can go 600 miles and 1,200 miles on [one] charge," says Kim. "That actually starts to cross the threshold where they become so much more attractive than fossil fuel. And then we can really make an impact on global warming and all these problems..."

Similarly, the mysteries of carbon sequestration could be unravelled by quantum computing, with clear benefits for the efforts to reverse global warming. Drug design at the molecular level could be revolutionised, opening up new avenues for vaccines and, for example, personalised cancer treatment. There's no doubt about it: with effective quantum computing our understanding of chemical processes could become godlike. Finance and investment, too, could be revolutionised by the qubit. The huge range of factors that produce market fluctuations allow for an almost infinite range of possible outcomes, and modelling these possibilities would be relatively simple for quantum computers. Forecasts of market movements would become far more accurate...

For many physicists and mathematicians, every step of the journey towards functional and world-changing quantum computers assumes acknowledgement of an even more profound goal: a greater understanding of the nature of reality. This could also mean that the very nature of understanding has to be reconsidered.
The article suggests we "occupy ourselves with the dawning realisation that something philosophically far-reaching has begun to percolate into our shared consciousness from the laboratories of the world's quantum pioneers."

Russia has successfully launched Luna 25, the country's first lunar lander in 47 years. From a report: The uncrewed spacecraft lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia. Hitching a ride aboard a Soyuz-2 Fregat rocket, Luna 25 took flight at 8:10 a.m. local time Friday, or 7:10 p.m. ET Thursday. Residents of a Russian village were temporarily evacuated Friday morning since there is a "one in a million chance" that one of Luna 25's rocket stages could fall there, according to Reuters.

The spacecraft is expected to first enter an orbit around Earth before transferring to a lunar orbit and ultimately descending to the surface of the moon. Russia's last lunar lander, Luna 24, landed on the moon on August 18, 1976. Luna 25 and India's Chandrayaan-3 mission, which launched in mid-July, are both expected to land at the lunar south pole on August 23, and it's a race to see which country will land first, according to Reuters. But Roscomos said the two missions are not expected to cause a problem for each other because their specific landing zones differ, Reuters reported.

Russia hopes to launch its first successful lunar landing mission for nearly 50 years, with a long-delayed takeoff from the far east of the country scheduled for early on Friday morning that the Kremlin aims to tout as a new achievement in space exploration. From a report: The Luna-25 mission will seek to land near the south pole of the moon, collecting geological samples from the area, and sending back data for signs of water or its building blocks, which could raise the possibility of a future human colony on the moon. But the more immediate goal is to prove that Russia still can launch a lunar landing mission after numerous failures in the past, generations of turnover among its scientific experts, delays due to sanctions and now isolation due to its war in Ukraine.

Post-Soviet Russia has launched two failed space landing missions, the Mars-96 in 1996 and Phobos-Grunt in 2011, both of which crash-landed into the Pacific Ocean. "The Russian Federation hasn't had much luck with launching unmanned interplanetary probes," said Vitaly Egorov, a blogger who writes extensively on space exploration. "Now 12 years later they're launching Luna-25 and the main intrigue is whether or not it will succeed in reaching [the moon] or not, and if it does, can it actually land there? "One of the main goals is to let modern specialists put down space probes softly on celestial objects. They haven't had that experience in 47 years. That knowledge needs to be restored for new specialists on a new technological level."