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Submission + - Europe: The World's Fastest-warming Continent (barrons.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: The latest heatwave sweeping across Europe is a stark reminder that it is the world's fastest-warming continent, stretching into an Arctic that is heating at an even greater pace.

Britain, France, Italy and Spain have issued red alerts and health warnings for much of their territory this week as the region endures its second heat episode since May.

Submission + - Trump administration is U-turning on plan closing ocean monitoring system (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: The Trump administration is U-turning on its controversial decision to dismantle a critical ocean monitoring system that provides vital information on the health of the world’s oceans, after a bipartisan backlash in Congress.

The National Science Foundation, which funds the $386 million deep-ocean system, announced it would be pulling up buoys and other underwater equipment from arrays in late May. Thursday, NSF announced it will halt these plans and convene an expert panel to “identify a sustainable path” forward. The NSF’s about-face comes amid intense backlash to its original decision. Experts feared the US was taking eyes off the oceans as they endure a period of huge change, with off-the-chart temperatures fueling devastating storms and threatening fisheries.

Ocean scientists CNN previously spoke to said ditching the monitoring system was “foolish” and “counterintuitive.”

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle raised objections. “Dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative is supreme stupidity, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and destroying a vital source of climate data,” Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, wrote in a statement.
  House Science Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, said the NSF’s reversal was welcome but cautioned it was not yet clear “how much damage they have already done.”

“This should have never happened,” she told CNN in a statement. “This pathetic scheme was illegal. NSF is governing via chaos and reactionary nonsense. Scientists and coastal economies that depend on this data deserve better.”

The NSF said it “remains committed to ocean sciences, to responsible stewardship of its research infrastructure and to supporting the stakeholders that depend on it.”

Submission + - Meta lobbies Congress for protection from child-harm lawsuits (aol.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Meta Platforms has lobbied the U.S. Congress for legal immunity from child-harm claims tied to social media products such as Instagram, as it faces thousands of lawsuits from young users and their families, according to a source familiar with the matter and proposed legislative language reviewed by Reuters.

If adopted by lawmakers and passed into law as part of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) under consideration in the U.S. Senate, such a provision could undermine thousands of lawsuits against Meta and other online platforms over harms to children. Meta and Google's YouTube face a combined $6 million in damages after they lost the first case at trial early this year.

While legislators have given no indication of adopting the language, the lobbying effort shows the kind of legal protections Meta is seeking amid the biggest attempt to regulate online platforms in the U.S. since the 1990s.

Submission + - CA faults stress at 1000 year maximum (wiley.com)

Submitted by SlashTex
SlashTex writes: Study just released shows CA faults near 1000 year maximum — the study focused on faults in southern CA.

"Present-day modeled stress levels exceed historical maxima on multiple segments, particularly on segment SJB (3.6 MPa), suggesting that the system is critically stressed. Given the elapsed time since these faults have ruptured, the probability of an earthquake in the near future is high..."

Such a quake would likely be devastating, and less than 10% of individuals and companies in CA have earthquake insurance.

Submission + - R.I.P. Mythos and Fable - murdered by the US government (towardsai.net)

Submitted by hherb
hherb writes: On the afternoon of June 12, 2026, at 5:21 p.m. Eastern, Anthropic received a letter. By the time most of the world noticed, two of its frontier models (Fable 5 and its less censored Mythos 5) had gone dark for every user, everywhere. Not throttled or regionally restricted. Disabled.

The instrument was a U.S. government export-control directive, issued under national-security authorities, ordering Anthropic to cut off all access to those models "by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States". This is category so broad it swept in Anthropic's own non-American employees. The only way to comply was to pull the plug for everyone.
Anthropic said so plainly and complied within hours, while disputing the basis for the order: the government's stated concern, as far as Anthropic could reconstruct it, traced to a narrow technique for getting the model to read a codebase and point out software flaws-a capability the company noted is widely available in other deployed models and used every day by the defenders who keep systems running.

This might be the final straw, the lesson the world needed to be taught to never again depend on any US facility and accelerate digital sovereignty.

https://pub.towardsai.net/rip-...

Submission + - Another fine identity mess the Google has gotten us into? (creators.google)

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Can't find any discussion of "Google for Creators", so here's a submission for ye olde Slashdot. Me thinks the essential idea is sort of good, but the idea of the google controlling it is bad. My version was kind of a public utility website where each person could anchor their identity on the Web, though I was seeing it as a way to protect identity by linking your real identities and allowing for the reporting of impersonation identities. My version of the idea broke down over the lack of a trustworthy host for such a thing.

The google's motivation is much more clear and I sort of applaud them. The google wants to have a kind of choke-point over as many Internet influencers as possible. If your identity is big enough to matter, then the google is offering to give "free" advertising. ONLY if you matter in the ways that google accepts but the real questions are "Why would anyone trust the google that much these years?" and "How is the google planning to monetize the choke-point?"

Submission + - BSA lashes out at mandatory open-source licensing (bsa.org)

Submitted by Elektroschock
Elektroschock writes: The American Business Software Alliance (BSA) does not consider mandatory open-source licensing to be an appropriate indicator of sovereignty. This is among the "pointed messages" they sent to the French government consultation (closed) today. "What protects Europe is the ability to govern, audit, and mitigate risk, not where a company files its corporate papers," said Thomas Boué of BSA.

Submission + - A China-linked hacking group is quietly living inside Microsoft IIS servers (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: ReliaQuest says it uncovered a previously unknown China-linked hacking cluster called OP-512 that has reportedly been targeting outdated Microsoft IIS servers running unsupported .NET Framework software. According to the security company, the attackers used custom web shells, encrypted command channels, timestomping, and DNS-based âoephone homeâ techniques designed to evade traditional antivirus detection and maintain long-term access for espionage operations.

The company claims its âoeAgentic AIâ platform pieced together what initially looked like unrelated low-level security events into a single coordinated intrusion. ReliaQuest says the malware framework generates cryptographically unique deployments that make signature-based detection ineffective. The report also warns that organizations still exposing legacy IIS infrastructure to the internet remain attractive targets for increasingly sophisticated state-linked attackers.

Submission + - Supreme Court Sides With Trump Admin On Federal Regulation of Telecom Companies (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Thursday in upholding the power of federal regulators to enforce data privacy laws on telecommunications companies. The 8-1 decision preserved one of the Federal Communications Commission’s key tools, though the companies also won a concession from the Republican administration that could shift the regulatory landscape.

The appeal from telecommunications giants Verizon and AT&T challenged a combined $100 million in penalties imposed after the agency determined that the companies had failed to safeguard customer location data. The companies argued that the FCC’s process was unconstitutional because it gave them little opportunity to tell their side of the story in front of a jury. The administration defended the fines are an essential regulatory tool. But the government also said companies did not have to pay the penalties right away, a regulatory shift in the companies’ favor.

The Supreme Court agreed, affirming the FCC’s power to order fines when challenges are still available. “The orders at issue did not settle the carriers’ legal obligations because, stated simply, they did not create an obligation to pay,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. [...] Other agencies use similar enforcement methods, so a sweeping victory for AT&T and Verizon could have had widespread effects, advocates said.

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