An anonymous reader shares a report: Immigration anxieties and a challenging job market have sparked an online backlash over China's latest attempt at attracting global talent -- a new visa program announced in August. The program, which was rolled out on Wednesday with the aim of attracting foreign professionals, will also test how China balances its immigration policy with its pursuit of technological ambitions.

Under the new rules, young graduates -- in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics or STEM -- no longer need backing from a local employer and can enjoy more flexibility in terms for entry frequency and duration of stay. The keyword "K-visa" -- as China's new visa category is called -- was among the top searches on social media site Weibo for days, before chatter about National Day traffic jams pushed it off the charts as millions hit the road for a week-long holiday.

Chinese social media users argue that the new visa tilts the playing field toward foreign graduates at the expense of those educated in China. Others on Weibo warned that without employer sponsorship, the program could invite fraudulent applications and open the door to a surge in arrivals from developing countries, piling pressure on an already strained labor market.

OpenAI unveiled Instant Checkout, a new ChatGPT feature that lets users buy stuff directly through its chatbot. Currently, the feature supports single-item purchases directly from Etsy sellers, but support for more than one million Shopify merchants is coming soon. It's also only available to U.S. ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Free users at this time. CNBC reports: OpenAI will take a fee from transactions that are completed through ChatGPT, which means Instant Checkout could become an important new revenue stream for the startup. OpenAI is not yet profitable, and is burning through cash as it works to scale up its computing infrastructure. The company declined to share specific details about how large the fees are since they are determined through confidential contracts with Etsy and Shopify. Instant Checkout is free to users and will not affect their prices, OpenAI said.

"Our vision for ChatGPT -- and a lot of the technology we create, but especially ChatGPT -- is that it's not just providing you information, it is also helping you get things done in the real world," Michelle Fradin, OpenAI's product lead for ChatGPT commerce, told CNBC in an interview. The company plans to introduce multi-item carts and expand the regional availability of Instant Checkout moving forward. [...]

Instant Checkout is powered by OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, which is the underlying technology that allows users to complete a transaction directly with a merchant through ChatGPT. OpenAI built the framework in partnership with the fintech company Stripe, which powers ChatGPT subscriptions. OpenAI initially decided to use Agentic Commerce Protocol for e-commerce, but Fradin said the company thinks it could be used to facilitate other types of purchases or payments as well. OpenAI is open-sourcing the framework to help merchants build integrations more quickly, and so that developers can explore different use cases, she said.

F-Droid has warned that Google's upcoming developer verification program will kill the free and open source app repository. Google announced plans several weeks ago to force all Android app developers to register their apps and identity with the company. Apps not validated by Google will not be installable on certified Android devices.

F-Droid says it cannot require developers to register with Google or take over app identifiers to register for them. The site operators say doing so would effectively take over distribution rights from app authors. Google plans to begin testing the verification scheme in the coming weeks and may charge registration fees. Unverified apps will start being blocked next year in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand before expanding globally in 2027. F-Droid is calling on US and EU regulators to intervene.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog Linuxiac: In a somewhat unexpected move, Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent (still-in-development) open-source initiative aimed at developing a modern, standalone web browser engine.

It's a project launched by GitHub's co-founder and former CEO, Chris Wanstrath, and tech visionary Andreas Kling. It's written in C++, and designed to be fast, standards-compliant, and free of external dependencies. Its main selling point? Unlike most alternative browsers today, Ladybird doesn't sit on top of Chromium or WebKit. Instead, it's building a completely new rendering engine from scratch, which is a rare thing in today's web landscape. For reference, the vast majority of web traffic currently runs through engines developed by either Google (Blink/Chromium), Apple (WebKit), or Mozilla (Gecko).

The sponsorship means the Ladybird team will have more resources to accelerate development. This includes paying developers to work on crucial features, such as JavaScript support, rendering improvements, and compatibility with modern web applications. Cloudflare stated that its support is part of a broader initiative to keep the web open, where competition and multiple implementations can drive enhanced security, performance, and innovation.
The article adds that Cloudflare also chose to sponsor Omarchy, a tool that runs on Arch and sets up and configures a Hyprland tiling window manager, along with a curated set of defaults and developer tools including Neovim, Docker, and Git.

Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that "Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users' private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers' mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising...

We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don't implicitly own your data — they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. Sharing your information in a smart way can also liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren't supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data — your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions. You should own it. You should be empowered by it...

We're now at a new crossroads, one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media. The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday, so we must act with urgency. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer, bound by law, regulation and codes of conduct. Why can't the same frameworks be adopted for AI? We have learned from social media that power rests with the monopolies who control and harvest personal data. We can't let the same thing happen with AI.
Berners-Lee also says "we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research," arguing that if we muster the political willpower, "we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders.

"We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It's not too late."

Berners-Lee has also written a new book titled This is For Everyone.

"Today's AIs are book smart," reports the Wall Street Journal. "Everything they know they learned from available language, images and videos. To evolve further, they have to get street smart."

And that requires "world models," which are "gaining momentum in frontier research and could allow technology to take on new roles in our lives." The key is enabling AI to learn from their environments and faithfully represent an abstract version of them in their "heads," the way humans and animals do. To do it, developers need to train AIs by using simulations of the world. Think of it like learning to drive by playing "Gran Turismo" or learning to fly from "Microsoft Flight Simulator." These world models include all the things required to plan, take actions and make predictions about the future, including physics and time... There's an almost unanimous belief among AI pioneers that world models are crucial to creating next-generation AI. And many say they will be critical to someday creating better-than-human "artificial general intelligence," or AGI. Stanford University professor and AI "godmother" Fei-Fei Li has raised $230 million to launch world-model startup World Labs...

Google DeepMind researchers set out to create a system that could generate real-world simulations with an unprecedented level of fidelity. The result, Genie 3 — which is still in research preview and not publicly available — can generate photo-realistic, open-world virtual landscapes from nothing more than a text prompt. You can think of Genie 3 as a way to quickly generate what's essentially an open-world videogame that can be as faithful to the real world as you like. It's a virtual space in which a baby AI can endlessly play, make mistakes and learn what it needs to do to achieve its goals, just as a baby animal or human does in the real world. That experimentation process is called reinforcement learning. Genie 3 is part of a system that could help train the AI that someday pilots robots, self-driving cars and other "embodied" AIs, says project co-lead Jack Parker-Holder. And the environments could be filled with people and obstacles: An AI could learn how to interact with humans by observing them moving around in that virtual space, he adds.
"It isn't clear whether all these bets will lead to the superintelligence that corporate leaders predict," the article concedes.

"But in the short term, world models could make AIs better at tasks at which they currently falter, especially in spatial reasoning."

Paris-based AI giant Mistral "is pushing to improve its models," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by looking inside legacy enterprises that hold some of the world's last untapped data reserves...." Mistral's approach will be to form partnerships with enterprises to further train existing models on their own proprietary data, a phenomenon known as post-training... [At Dutch chip-equipment company ASML], Mistral embeds its own solutions architects, applied AI engineers and applied scientists into the enterprise to work on improving models with the company's data. [While Mistral sells some models under a commercial license], this co-creation strategy allows Mistral to make money off the services side of its business and afford to give away its open source AI free of charge, while improving model performance for the customer with more industry context...

This kind of hand-holding approach is necessary for most companies to tackle AI successfully, said Arthur Mensch [co-founder and chief executive of Mistral]. "The very high-tech companies [and] a couple of banks are able to do it on their own. But when it comes to getting some [return on investment] from use cases, in general, they fail," he said. Mensch attributes that in part to a mismatch between expectations and reality. "The curse of AI is that it looks like magic. So you can very quickly make something that looks amazing to your boss," but it doesn't scale or work more broadly, he said. In other cases, enterprises simply might not know what to focus on. For example, it is a mistake to think equipping all employees with a chatbot will create meaningful gains on the bottom line, he said. Mensch said to fully take advantage of AI, companies will have to rethink organizational structures. With information flowing more easily, they could require fewer middle managers, for example.

There is a lot of work yet to do, Mensch said, but in a large sense, the future of AI development now lies inside the enterprise itself. "This is a pattern that we've seen with many of our customers: At some point, the capabilities of the frontier model can only be increased if we partner," he said.

"We've decided to support image-based search," announced the product manager for Firefox Search. Powered by the AI-driven Google Lens search technology, they promise the new feature offers "a frictionless, fast, and a curiosity-sparking way to (as Google puts it) 'search what you see'." With just a right-click on any image, you'll be able to:

- Find similar products, places, or objects
- Copy, translate, or search text from images
- Get inspiration for learning, travel, or shopping

Look for the new "Search Image with Google Lens" option in your right-click menu (tagged with a NEW badge at first). This is a desktop-only feature, and it will start gradually rolling out worldwide. Note: Google must be set as your default search engine for this feature to appear.

We'll be listening closely to your feedback as we roll it out. Some of the things we're wondering about:

Does the placement in the context menu align with your expectations?
Would you prefer the option to choose your visual search provider?
Where else would you like entry points to visual search (e.g. when you open a new tab, in the address bar, on mobile devices, etc.)

We can't wait to hear your thoughts as the rollout begins!
Some thoughts from WebProNews: Mozilla emphasizes that this is an opt-in feature, giving users control over activation, which aligns with the company's longstanding commitment to privacy and user agency.

Yet, for industry observers, this partnership with Google raises intriguing questions about competitive dynamics in the browser space, where Firefox has historically positioned itself as an independent alternative to Chrome... This move comes at a time when browsers are increasingly becoming platforms for AI-driven enhancements, as evidenced by recent updates in competitors like Microsoft's Edge, which integrates Copilot AI. Mozilla's decision to leverage Google Lens rather than developing an in-house solution could be seen as a pragmatic step to accelerate feature parity, especially given Firefox's smaller market share. Insiders note that by tapping into established technologies, Mozilla can focus resources on core strengths like privacy protections, potentially attracting users disillusioned with data-heavy ecosystems... While mobile users might feel left out, the phased rollout over the next few weeks allows for feedback loops through community channels, a hallmark of Mozilla's open-source ethos.

Data from similar integrations in other browsers suggests visual search can boost engagement by 15-20%, per industry reports, though Mozilla has not disclosed specific metrics yet... Looking ahead, Mozilla's strategy appears geared toward incremental innovations that bolster user retention without alienating its privacy-focused base. If successful, this could help Firefox claw back some ground against Chrome's dominance, estimated at over 60% market share. For now, the feature's gradual deployment invites ongoing dialogue, underscoring Mozilla's community-driven model in an industry often criticized for top-down decisions.

Cristian Fleming paid around $70,000 for one of Fisker Ocean's electric mid-size crossover SUVs. Seven months later the company filed for bankruptcy in June of 2024, reports the Verge, "having only delivered 11,000 vehicles."

"Early adopters were left with cars plagued by battery failures, glitchy software, inconsistent key fobs, and door handles that did not always open. With the company gone, there was no way to fix any issues." Regulators logged dozens of complaints as replacement parts vanished. Passionate owners who spent top dollar on high-end trims saw their cars reduced to expensive driveway ornaments.

Rather than accept defeat, thousands of Ocean owners have organized into their own makeshift car company. The Fisker Owners Association (FOA) is a nonprofit that's launched third-party apps, built a global parts supply chain, and came together around a future for their orphaned vehicles. It's part car club, part tech startup, part survival mission. Fleming now serves as the organization's president... FOA calls itself the first entirely owner-controlled EV fleet in history. So far, 4,055 Ocean owners have signed up, paying $550 a year in dues that the group estimates will raise around $3 million annually, about 0.1 percent of Fisker's peak valuation. Only verified Ocean owners can become full members, but anyone can donate.

The grassroots effort has precedent — DeLorean diehards and Saab enthusiasts have kept their favorite brands alive after factory closures. But those efforts focused on preserving aging vehicles. FOA is attempting something different: real-time software updates and hardware improvements for a connected, two-year-old EV fleet... The organization has spawned three separate companies. Tsunami Automotive handles parts in North America while Tidal Wave covers Europe, scavenging insurance auctions and contracting with tooling manufacturers to reproduce components. UnderCurrent Automotive, run by former Google and Apple engineers, focuses on software solutions.

UnderCurrent's first product is OceanLink Pro, a third-party mobile app now used by over 1,200 members that restores basic EV features, such as remote battery monitoring and climate control. A companion device called OceanLink Pulse adds wireless CarPlay and Android Auto, with plans for future upgrades including keyless entry. "Those are things you would have expected to be in a $70,000 luxury car," says Clint Bagley [FOA's treasurer]. "But, you know, we're happy to provide what the billion-dollar automaker apparently couldn't."

"Researchers have found that the carbon footprint of generative AI-based tools that can turn text prompts into images and videos is far worse than we previously thought," writes Futurism: As detailed in a new paper, researchers from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face found that the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn't scale linearly. For instance, a six-second AI video clip consumes four times as much energy as a three-second clip.

"These findings highlight both the structural inefficiency of current video diffusion pipelines and the urgent need for efficiency-oriented design," the researchers concluded in their paper... Fortunately, there are ways to slim down those demands, including intelligent caching, the reusing of existing AI generations, and "pruning," meaning the sifting out of inefficient examples from training datasets.
The Hugging Face researchers gave their paper a cheeky title. "Video Killed the Energy Budget: Characterizing the Latency and Power Regimes of Open Text-to-Video Mode."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Renewable energy sources could power datacenters at a lower cost than relying on nuclear generation from small modular reactors (SMRs), claims a recently revealed study. ... [A]nalysis from the Centre for Net Zero (CNZ) says it would cost 43 percent less to power a 120 MW data facility with renewables and a small amount of gas-generated energy, when compared with an SMR. It claims that a microgrid comprising offshore wind, solar, battery storage, and backed up by gas generation, would be significantly cheaper to run annually than procuring power sourced from a nuclear SMR.

[...] CNZ describes itself as an open research institute, founded by Octopus Energy Group in the UK, and claims to advise the State of California and Europe's International Energy Agency as well as the British government. While CNZ's study applies to the UK sector, where energy costs are among the highest in the industrialized world, it is likely that the overall conclusion would still be valid in other countries as well. Its analysis shows that renewables can meet 80 percent of the constant demand from a large datacenter over the course of a year. Offshore wind can provide the majority of load requirements, with gas generation backed by battery storage as a stopgap source of power representing the most cost-optimal mix.

Greater capacity in the on-site battery storage system would reduce the reliance on gas power, and this would likely happen over time as the cost of such systems is expected to come down, the report claims. But perhaps the real kicker is that CNZ estimates that microgrids powered largely by renewables could be built in approximately five years, while operational SMRs are not expected to be widely available until sometime in the next decade. CNZ says that it calculated the typical yearly resource cost (capex and opex) of powering a datacenter with a nuclear SMR, and modeled this using Python for Power System Analysis (PyPSA), an open source energy modeling tool, against two renewable energy scenarios. One was the wind, solar, battery, and gas mix, while the other omitted solar.

Google has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to pause a judge's order requiring major changes to its Play Store after losing an antitrust case to Epic Games. The injunction would force Google to allow rival app stores, external billing links, and broader competition -- changes Google says could harm users and developers. Epic argues they're necessary to break Google's monopoly. Reuters reports: Google said it has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to halt key parts of a judge's order that would force major changes to its app store Play, as it prepares to appeal a decision in a lawsuit brought by "Fortnite" maker Epic Games. Google called the judge's order unprecedented, and said it would cause reputational harm, safety and security risks and put the company at a competitive disadvantage if allowed to take effect, according to a filing, opens new tab provided late on Wednesday by Google, which said it had submitted it to the court. [...]

Google in its Supreme Court filing said that the changes will have enormous consequences for more than 100 million U.S. Android users and 500,000 developers. It asked the court to decide by October 17 whether to put the order on hold. Google said it plans to file its appeal to the Supreme Court by October 27, which could allow the justices to take up the case during their nine-month term that begins on October 6.

Epic in a statement said Google is relying on what it called "flawed security claims" to justify its control over Android devices. "The court's injunction should go into effect as ordered so consumers and developers can benefit from competition, choices and lower prices," Epic said. The jury, siding with Epic in the trial, found that Google illegally stifled competition. Donato subsequently issued the order directing Google to make changes to its app store.

Ruby Central, a non-profit organization committed to "driving innovation and building community within the Ruby programming ecosystem since 2001," removed all RubyGems maintainers from the project's GitHub repository on September 18, granting administrative access exclusively to its employees and contractors following alleged pressure from Shopify, one of its biggest backers, according to Ruby developer Joel Drapper. The nonprofit organization, which operates RubyConf and RailsConf, cited fiduciary responsibility and supply chain security concerns following a recent audit.

The controversy began September 9 when HSBT (Hiroshi Shibata), a Ruby infrastructure maintainer, renamed the RubyGems GitHub enterprise to "Ruby Central" and added Director of Open Source Marty Haught as owner while demoting other maintainers. The action allegedly followed Shopify's threat to cut funding unless Ruby Central assumed full ownership of RubyGems and Bundler. Ruby Central had reportedly become financially dependent on Shopify after Sidekiq withdrew $250,000 annual sponsorship over the organization platforming Rails creator DHH at RailsConf 2025. Andre Arko, a veteran contributor on-call for RubyGems.org at the time, was among those removed.

Maintainer Ellen Dash has characterized the action as a "hostile takeover" and also resigned. Executive Director Shan Cureton acknowledged poor communication in a YouTube video Monday, stating removals were temporary while finalizing operator agreements. Arko and others are launching Spinel, an alternative Ruby tooling project, though Shopify's Rafael Franca commented that Spinel admins shouldn't be trusted to avoid "sabotaging rubygems or bundler."

Apple asked the European Union to scrap its landmark digital competition law on Thursday, arguing that it poses security risks and creates a "worse experience" for consumers. From a report: The US tech giant and the EU have repeatedly locked horns over the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which Brussels says seeks to make the digital sector in the 27-nation bloc fairer and more open. "The DMA should be repealed while a more appropriate fit for purpose legislative instrument is put in place," Apple said in a formal submission to the European Commission as part of a consultation on the law.

[...] "It's become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU," the tech giant said in a blog post accompanying its submission. "It's exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together."

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Cloudflare has unveiled the Content Signals Policy, a free addition to its managed robots.txt service that aims to give website owners and publishers more control over how their content is accessed and reused by AI companies. The idea is pretty simple: robots.txt already lets site operators specify which crawlers can enter and where. Cloudflare's new policy adds a layer that signals how the data may be used once accessed, with plain-language terms for search, AI input, and AI training. "Yes" means allowed, "no" means not allowed, and no signal means no preference.

Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's co-founder and CEO, said: "The Internet cannot wait for a solution, while in the meantime, creators' original content is used for profit by other companies. To ensure the web remains open and thriving, we're giving website owners a better way to express how companies are allowed to use their content." Cloudflare says more than 3.8 million domains already use its robots.txt tools to signal they don't want their content used for AI training. Now, the Content Signals Policy makes those preferences clearer and potentially enforceable. Further reading: Cloudflare Flips AI Scraping Model With Pay-Per-Crawl System For Publishers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank on Tuesday announced plans for five new artificial intelligence data centers in the United States to build out their ambitious Stargate project. [...] ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said on Tuesday it will open three new sites with Oracle in Shackelford County, Texas, Dona Ana County, New Mexico and an undisclosed site in the Midwest. Two more data center sites will be built in Lordstown, Ohio and Milam County, Texas by OpenAI, Japan's SoftBank and a SoftBank affiliate.

The new sites, the Oracle-OpenAI site expansion in Abilene, Texas, and the ongoing projects with CoreWeave will bring Stargate's total data center capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts and more than $400 billion in investment over the next three years, OpenAI said. The $500 billion project was intended to generate 10 gigawatts in total data center capacity. "AI can only fulfill its promise if we build the compute to power it," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. The Tuesday's announcement, expected to create 25,000 onsite jobs, follows Nvidia saying on Monday that it will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and supply data center chips. OpenAI and partners plan to use debt financing to lease chips for the Stargate project, people familiar with the matter said.

NASA aims to launch its first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years, as early as February. The 10-day Artemis II mission will send four astronauts on a lunar flyby to test systems, paving the way for future Moon landings under the Artemis program. The BBC reports: Lakiesha Hawkins, Nasa's acting deputy associate administrator said it would be an important moment in the human exploration of space. "We together have a front row seat to history," she told a news conference this afternoon. "The launch window could open as early as the fifth of February, but we want to emphasize that safety is our top priority." Artemis Launch Director, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson explained that the powerful rocket system built to take the astronauts to the Moon, the Space Launch System (SLS) was "pretty much stacked and ready to go." All that remained was to complete the crew capsule, called Orion, connected to SLS and to complete ground tests.

The Artemis II launch will see four astronauts go on a ten-day round trip to the Moon and back to the Earth. The astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, of Nasa and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, will not land on the Moon, though they will be the first crew to travel beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. The lead Artemis II flight director, Jeff Radigan explained that the crew would be flying further into space than anyone had been before. "They're going at least 5,000 nautical miles (9,200Km) past the Moon, which is much higher than previous missions have gone," he told reporters. Further reading: NASA Introduces 10 New Astronaut Candidates

An analysis of a literature database finds that text-generating AI tools -- including ChatGPT and Gemini -- can be used to rewrite scientific papers and produce 'copycat' versions that are then passed off as new research. Nature: In a preprint posted on medRxiv on 12 September, researchers identified more than 400 such papers published in 112 journals over the past 4.5 years, and demonstrated that AI-generated biomedicine studies could evade publishers' anti-plagiarism checks.

The study's authors warn that individuals and paper mills -- companies that produce fake papers to order and sell authorships -- might be exploiting publicly available health data sets and using large language models (LLMs) to mass-produce low-quality papers that lack scientific value.

"If left unaddressed, this AI-based approach can be applied to all sorts of open-access databases, generating far more papers than anyone can imagine," says Csaba Szabo, a pharmacologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who was not involved in the work. "This could open up Pandora's box [and] the literature may be flooded with synthetic papers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A new dark web portal to recruit spies for the UK was launched last Friday (19th September), as the UK steps up its commitment to national security. Harnessing the anonymity of the dark web for the first time, MI6's new secure messaging platform -- Silent Courier -- enables anyone, anywhere in the world with access to sensitive information relating to terrorism or hostile intelligence activity to securely contact the UK and offer their services. Instructions on how to access the portal will be publicly available on MI6's verified YouTube channel as the UK reaches out to potential new agents in Russia and around the world. MI6 advises individuals accessing its portal to use trustworthy VPNs and devices not linked to themselves, to mitigate risks which exist in some countries.

The announcement was made by the outgoing Chief of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, in Istanbul where he stated that the platform will make it easier for MI6 to recruit agents online. As MI6 establishes its official presence on the dark web to reach new recruits and tackle hostile actors seeking to undermine UK security, Sir Richard said that the UK's intelligence services are "critical to calibrating risk and informing decisions" in navigating threats from hostile actors -- making platforms like these even more important in keeping our country safe. Sir Richard said: "Today we're asking those with sensitive information on global instability, international terrorism or hostile state intelligence activity to contact MI6 securely online. Our virtual door is open to you." Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said: "National security is the first duty of any government and the bedrock of the Prime Minister's Plan for Change. As the world changes, and the threats we're facing multiply, we must ensure the UK is always one step ahead of our adversaries. Our world class intelligence agencies are at the coalface of this challenge, working behind the scenes to keep British people safe. Now we're bolstering their efforts with cutting-edge tech so MI6 can recruit new spies for the UK - in Russia and around the world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The dramatic rise in unemployment among Americans under 25 -- especially recent graduates -- has become one of the most troubling economic headlines of 2025. Recent insights from economists, central bankers, and labor market analysts signal that this appears to be a uniquely American challenge, underpinned by a "no hire, no fire" economy rather than solely by the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence.

For many Gen Z workers, the struggle to land a job can feel isolating and fuel self-doubt. But that frustration recently got some high-level validation: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell echoed economists' concerns about the cooling labor market, telling reporters at his regular press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee that it's an "interesting labor market" right now, adding that "kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs." Noting a low job finding rate, along with a low redundancy rate, he said, "you've got a low firing, low hiring environment." and noting that it's harder than ever for young jobseekers to break in.

While recent months have been dubbed by Deutsche Bank "the summer AI turned ugly," and some major studies find AI adoption disrupting some entry-level roles, Powell was less sure. AI "may be part of the story," but he insisted the main drivers are a broadly slowed economy and hiring restraint. Top economists at Goldman Sachs and UBS tackled the subject soon after and found Powell to be mostly on the money. This isn't an AI story, at least not yet. "The U.S. labor market experience is peculiar," said Paul Donovan, UBS Chief Economist. "Young Euro area workers have a record low unemployment rate. In the UK, the young persons' unemployment rate has fallen steadily. Employment participation by young Japanese workers is near all-time highs. It seems highly implausible that AI uniquely hurts the employment prospects of younger US workers."

"It might be tempting to blame technology... Machines, robots, or computers replacing humans is an ever-popular dystopian scenario." Donovan concludes that the U.S. pattern "more convincingly fits a broader hiring freeze narrative, affecting new entrants to the workforce."

Goldman Sachs economist Pierfrancesco Mei said last Thursday that "finding a job takes longer in a low-turnover labor market." He argued that "job reallocation," or the pace at which new jobs are created and existing ones destroyed, has been on the decline since the late 1990s... "almost all the variation in turnover since the Great Recession mostly falls on younger workers" and is taking place as "churn." Goldman found that in 2019, it took a young unemployed worker about 10 weeks to find a new job in a low-churn state; now that's 12 weeks on average.