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Sony has filed a lawsuit in California court against Tencent, alleging the Chinese company's upcoming game Light of Motiram constitutes a "slavish clone" of Sony's Horizon series. The complaint details extensive similarities between the games, from post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur settings to red-haired female protagonists. Tencent had approached Sony for licensing deals in 2024, which Sony rejected twice.

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Britain's Competition and Markets Authority concluded that Microsoft and Amazon hold "significant unilateral market power" in cloud services and recommended investigating both companies under new competition rules. The regulator said it had concerns about practices creating customer "lock-in" effects through egress fees and unfavorable licensing terms that trap businesses in difficult-to-exit contracts. Microsoft and Amazon each control roughly 30-40% of the infrastructure-as-a-service market, while Google holds 5-10%. Microsoft disputed the findings, calling the cloud market "dynamic and competitive." Amazon said the probe recommendations were "unwarranted."

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Beijing has summoned Nvidia over alleged security issues with its chips, in a blow to the US company's push to revive sales in the country after Washington granted approval for the export of a made-for-China chip. From a report: China's cyber regulator on Thursday said it had held a meeting with Nvidia over what it called "serious security issues" with the company's artificial intelligence chips. It said US AI experts had "revealed that Nvidia's computing chips have location tracking and can remotely shut down the technology." The Cyberspace Administration of China requested that Nvidia explain the security problems associated with the H20 chip, which was designed for the Chinese market to comply with US export restrictions, and submit documentation to support their case.

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Microsoft has reached a $4 trillion market cap, becoming only the second company to achieve this milestone. Investors drove the stock up 4.62% following the company's fourth-quarter earnings report, which showed strong growth in cloud-computing services fueled by artificial intelligence demand. Microsoft's Azure cloud business generated $75 billion in annual revenue, representing a 34% increase from the previous fiscal year. Nvidia became the first company to reach the $4 trillion market cap earlier this month.

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A Nature survey of more than 1,100 physicists reveals fundamental disagreements about quantum mechanics' relationship to reality, despite the theory's century-long track record as one of science's most successful frameworks. The survey, conducted to mark quantum mechanics' 100th anniversary, found 36% of researchers favor the Copenhagen interpretation while 17% prefer epistemic approaches that treat quantum states as information rather than physical reality. Another 15% support the many-worlds interpretation. Researchers split evenly on whether a boundary exists between quantum and classical worlds -- 45% said yes, 45% said no. When asked about the wavefunction's nature, 47% called it a mathematical tool while 36% considered it a representation of physical reality. Only 24% of respondents expressed confidence their chosen interpretation was correct, with others viewing their preference as merely adequate or useful in certain circumstances. The survey contacted over 15,000 researchers whose recent papers involved quantum mechanics, plus attendees of a centenary meeting on Heligoland island. Despite quantum mechanics enabling technologies from computer chips to medical imaging, physicists remain divided on the physical reality underlying the mathematics.

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Developers are growing increasingly frustrated with AI coding tools that produce deceptively flawed solutions, according to Stack Overflow's latest survey of over 49,000 programmers worldwide. The 2025 survey exposes a widening gap between AI adoption and satisfaction: while 84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, their trust has cratered. Only 33% trust AI accuracy today, down from 43% last year. The core problem isn't broken code that developers can easily spot and discard. Instead, two-thirds report wrestling with AI solutions that appear correct but contain subtle errors requiring significant debugging time. Nearly half say fixing AI-generated code takes longer than expected, undermining the productivity gains these tools promise to deliver.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge. The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last month to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site, the worst showing for a social media platform. "I'm calling time on it," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a statement highlighting that Australian children were being negatively affected by online platforms, and reminding social media of their social responsibility. "I want Australian parents to know that we have their backs." The decision broadens the ban set to take effect in December. YouTube says it is used by nearly three-quarters of Australians aged 13 to 15, and should not be classified as social media because its main activity is hosting videos. "Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media," a YouTube spokesperson said by email.

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. They say the study, published this month in Scientific Reports, offers the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom. [...] Scientists have long known that peacock feathers also exhibit "structural color" -- nature's pigment-free way to create dazzling hues. Ordered microstructures within the feathers reflect light at specific frequencies, leading to their vivid blues and greens and iridescence. But Florida Polytechnic University physicist Nathan Dawson and his colleagues wanted to go a step further and see whether those microstructures could also function as a laser cavity. After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers' eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths. Surprisingly, differently colored parts of the eyespots emitted the same wavelengths of laser light, even though each region would presumably vary in its microstructure. Just because peacock feathers emit laser light doesn't mean the birds are somehow using this emission. But there are still ramifications, Dawson says. He suggests that looking for laser light in biomaterials could help identify arrays of regular microstructures within them. In medicine, for example, certain foreign objects -- viruses with distinct geometric shapes, perhaps -- could be classified and identified based on their ability to be lasers, he says. The work also demonstrates how biological materials could one day yield lasers that could be put safely into the human body to emit light for biosensing, medical imaging, and therapeutics. "I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans," Dawson says, "some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is fond of saying its mission is to "organize the world's information," but who gets to decide what information is worthy of organization? A San Francisco tech CEO has spent the past several years attempting to remove unflattering information about himself from Google's search index, and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation says he's still at it. Most recently, an unknown bad actor used a bug in one of Google's search tools to scrub the offending articles. The saga began in 2023 when independent journalist Jack Poulson reported on Maury Blackman's 2021 domestic violence arrest. Blackman, who was then the CEO of surveillance tech firm Premise Data Corp., took offense at the publication of his legal issues. The case did not lead to charges after Blackman's 25-year-old girlfriend recanted her claims against the 53-year-old CEO, but Poulson reported on some troubling details of the public arrest report. Blackman has previously used tools like DMCA takedowns and lawsuits to stifle reporting on his indiscretion, but that campaign now appears to have co-opted part of Google's search apparatus. The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) reported on Poulson's work and Blackman's attempts to combat it late last year. In June, Poulson contacted the Freedom of the Press Foundation to report that the article had mysteriously vanished from Google search results. The foundation began an investigation immediately, which led them to a little-known Google search feature known as Refresh Outdated Content. Google created this tool for users to report links with content that is no longer accurate or that lead to error pages. When it works correctly, Refresh Outdated Content can help make Google's search results more useful. However, Freedom of the Press Foundation now says that a bug allowed an unknown bad actor to scrub mentions of Blackman's arrest from the Internet. Upon investigating, FPF found that its article on Blackman was completely absent from Google results, even through a search with the exact title. Poulson later realized that two of his own Substack articles were similarly affected. The Foundation was led to the Refresh Outdated Content tool upon checking its search console. The bug in the tool allowed malicious actors to de-index valid URLs from search results by altering the capitalization in the URL slug. Although URLs are typically case-sensitive, Google's tool treated them as case-insensitive. As a result, when someone submitted a slightly altered version of a working URL (for example, changing "anatomy" to "AnAtomy"), Google's crawler would see it as a broken link (404 error) and mistakenly remove the actual page from search results. Ironically, Blackman is now CEO of the online reputation management firm The Transparency Company.

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Voice actors and industry associations are sounding the alarm over the growing use of AI in dubbing, calling for increased regulations to protect quality, jobs and artists' back catalogues from being used to create future dubbed work. "We need legislation: Just as after the car, which replaced the horse-drawn carriage, we need a highway code," said Boris Rehlinger, a voice actor known as the French voice of Ben Affleck, Joaquin Phoenix, and Puss in Boots. "I feel threatened even though my voice hasn't been replaced by AI yet," he said. Reuters reports: In Germany, 12 well-known dubbing actors went viral on TikTok in March, garnering 8.7 million views, for their campaign saying "Let's protect artistic, not artificial, intelligence." A petition from the VDS voice actors' association calling on German and EU lawmakers to push AI companies to obtain explicit consent when training the technology on artists' voices and fairly compensate them, as well as transparently label AI-generated content, gained more than 75,500 signatures. When intellectual property is no longer protected, no one will produce anything anymore "because they think 'tomorrow it will be stolen from me anyway'," said Cedric Cavatore, a VDS member who has dubbed films and video games including the PlayStation game "Final Fantasy VII Remake." VDS collaborates with United Voice Artists, a global network of over 20,000 voice actors advocating for ethical AI use and fair contracts. In the United States, Hollywood video game voice and motion capture actors this month signed a new contract with video game studios focused on AI that SAG-AFTRA said represented important progress on protections against the tech.

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Google today announced AlphaEarth Foundations, a new AI model that processes terabytes of daily satellite data to track environmental changes across the planet. The system, part of Google's broader Earth AI initiative, uses machine learning to compress satellite imagery into color-coded maps showing material properties, vegetation types, groundwater sources, and human constructions down to 10-meter resolution. The model uses a technique called "embeddings" that reduces storage requirements by 16 times compared to other AI tools Google tested, while delivering 23.9% higher accuracy than similar systems. AlphaEarth has already mapped complex Antarctic terrain and identified variations in Canadian agricultural land use invisible to direct observation. The technology currently powers flood and wildfire alerts in Google Search and Maps. Research organizations including Brazil's MayBiomas and the Global Ecosystems Atlas are using the system to analyze rainforests, deserts, and wetlands. The model integrates with Google Earth Engine, providing agencies like NASA and the Forest Service access to over one trillion annual data points for environmental monitoring and mapping applications.

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Elon Musk's Boring Company plans to build a 10-mile underground transportation loop in Nashville connecting the airport to downtown, with private funding and a projected launch as early as fall 2026. "If that happens, Nashville would become the second city where The Boring Company has opened such a system, with the first being Las Vegas," notes TechCrunch. "The company has spent the last few years in Sin City digging and opening tunnels around the Las Vegas Convention Center, and claims to have given 3 million rides in Teslas to date." From the report: The project will be privately funded by The Boring Company "and its private partners," according to the Governor's press release, though those partners are not named. The Boring Company and local officials will now begin a "public process to evaluate potential routes, engage community stakeholders, and finalize plans for the project's initial 10-mile phase." Construction won't begin until the project clears the approvals process. But the governor's office said the first segment of the loop could be operational as "early as fall of 2026."

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Brian Krebs writes via KrebsOnSecurity: Fraudsters are flooding Discord and other social media platforms with ads for hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. Here's a closer look at the social engineering tactics and remarkable traits of this sprawling network of more than 1,200 scam sites. The scam begins with deceptive ads posted on social media that claim the wagering sites are working in partnership with popular social media personalities, such as Mr. Beast, who recently launched a gaming business called Beast Games. The ads invariably state that by using a supplied "promo code," interested players can claim a $2,500 credit on the advertised gaming website. The gaming sites all require users to create a free account to claim their $2,500 credit, which they can use to play any number of extremely polished video games that ask users to bet on each action. At the scam website gamblerbeast[.]com, for example, visitors can pick from dozens of games like B-Ball Blitz, in which you play a basketball pro who is taking shots from the free throw line against a single opponent, and you bet on your ability to sink each shot. The financial part of this scam begins when users try to cash out any "winnings." At that point, the gaming site will reject the request and prompt the user to make a "verification deposit" of cryptocurrency -- typically around $100 -- before any money can be distributed. Those who deposit cryptocurrency funds are soon asked for additional payments. However, any "winnings" displayed by these gaming sites are a complete fantasy, and players who deposit cryptocurrency funds will never see that money again. Compounding the problem, victims likely will soon be peppered with come-ons from "recovery experts" who peddle dubious claims on social media networks about being able to retrieve funds lost to such scams. [...] [T]hreat hunting platform Silent Push reveals at least 1,270 recently-registered and active domains whose names all invoke some type of gaming or wagering theme. Here is a list of all domains that Silent Push found were using the scambling network's chat API.

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A software developer who built his own home server in response to Amazon's removal of Kindle book downloads now argues that self-hosting "is NOT the future we should be fighting for." Drew Lyton constructed a home server running open-source alternatives to Google Drive, Google Photos, Audible, Kindle, and Netflix after Amazon announced that "Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers." The change prompted Amazon to update Kindle store language to say "users are purchasing licenses -- not books." Lyton's setup involved a Lenovo P520 with 128GB RAM, multiple hard drives, and Docker containers running applications like Immich for photo storage and Jellyfin for media streaming. The technical complexity required "138 words to describe but took me the better part of two weeks to actually do." The implementation was successful but Lyton concluded that self-hosting "assumes isolated, independent systems are virtuous. But in reality, this simply makes them hugely inconvenient." He proposes "publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services" as an alternative, suggesting libraries could provide "100GB of encrypted file storage, photo-sharing and document collaboration tools, and media streaming services -- all for free."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: Edward Saatchi isn't totally sure people will flock to Showrunner, the new AI-generated TV show service his company is launching publicly this week. But he has a vote of confidence from Amazon, which has invested in Fable, Saatchi's San Francisco-based start-up. The amount of Amazon's funding in Fable isn't being disclosed. The money is going toward building out Showrunner, which Fable has hyped as the "Netflix of AI": a service that lets you type in a few words to create scenes -- or entire episodes -- of a TV show, either from scratch or based on an existing story-world someone else has created. Fable is launching Showrunner to let users tinker with the animation-focused generative-AI system, following several months in a closed alpha test with 10,000 users. Initially, Showrunner will be free to use but eventually the company plans to charge creators $10-$20 per month for credits allowing them to create hundreds of TV scenes, Saatchi said. Viewing Showrunner-generated content will be free, and anyone can share the AI video on YouTube or other third-party platforms. [...] Fable's Showrunner public launch features two original "shows" -- story worlds with characters users can steer into various narrative arcs. The first is "Exit Valley," described as "a 'Family Guy'-style TV comedy set in 'Sim Francisco' satirizing the AI tech leaders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, et al." The other is "Everything Is Fine," in which a husband and wife, going to Ikea, have a huge fight -- whereupon they're transported to a world where they're separated and have to find each other. [...] Showrunner is powered by Fable's proprietary AI model, SHOW-2. Last year, the company published a research paper on how it built the SHOW-1 model. As part of that, it released nine AI-generated episodes based on "South Park." The episodes, made without the permission of the "South Park" creators, received more than 80 million views. (Saatchi said he was in touch with the "South Park" team, who were reassured the IP wasn't being deployed commercially.) [...] Out of the gate, Showrunner is focused on animated content because it requires much less processing power than realistic-looking live-action video scenes. Saatchi said Fable wants to stay out of the "knife fight" among big AI companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta that are racing to create photorealistic content. "If you're competing with Google, are you going to win?" Saatchi said. "Our goal is to have the most creative models," he said.

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Australia's first domestically built rocket to attempt orbital launch crashed just 14 seconds after liftoff, though the company still declared the mission a success for igniting all engines and leaving the launch pad. The Associated Press reports: The rocket Eris, launched by Gilmour Space Technologies, was the first Australian-designed and manufactured orbital launch vehicle to lift off from the country and was designed to carry small satellites to orbit. It launched Wednesday morning local time in a test flight from a spaceport near the small town of Bowen in the north of Queensland state. In videos published by Australian news outlets, the 23-meter (75-foot) rocket appeared to clear the launch tower and hovered in the air before falling out of sight. Plumes of smoke were seen rising above the site. No injuries were reported. The company hailed the launch as a success in a statement posted to Facebook. A spokesperson said all four hybrid-propelled engines ignited and the maiden flight included 23 seconds of engine burn time and 14 seconds of flight. "Of course I would have liked more flight time but happy with this," wrote CEO Adam Gilmour on LinkedIn. Gilmour said in February that it was "almost unheard of" for a private rocket company to successfully launch to orbit on its first attempt. "This is an important first step towards the giant leap of a future commercial space industry right here in our region," added Mayor Ry Collins of the local Whitsunday Regional Council.

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Earlier this month, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise settled its antitrust case with the U.S. Justice Department, "paving the way for its acquisition of rival kit maker Juniper Networks" for $14 billion. According to Axios, the deal was heavily influenced by national security concerns and a desire to bolster American competition against China's Huawei. The outlet reports that the U.S. intelligence community "intervened to persuade the Justice Department that allowing the merger to proceed was essential to helping U.S. business compete with China's Huawei Technologies, among other national-security issues." From the report: "In light of significant national security concerns, a settlement ... serves the interests of the United States by strengthening domestic capabilities and is critical to countering Huawei and China." The official said blocking the deal would have "hindered American companies and empowered" Chinese competitors. A Justice Department spokesman added that DOJ "works very closely with our partners in the IC [intelligence community] and always considers their views when deciding how best to proceed with a case." The merger was back in the news this week with reports that two senior enforcers in the DOJ's antitrust division were fired Monday amid infighting over the department's settlement greenlighting HPE's $14 billion acquisition of Juniper. Attorney General Pam Bondi had conversations with top intelligence officials that convinced her there was a strong national interest in not driving allies to Chinese technology, a senior administration official tells us.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a rare move, Google has confirmed it will sign the European Union's AI Code of Practice, a framework it initially opposed for being too harsh. However, Google isn't totally on board with Europe's efforts to rein in the AI explosion. The company's head of global affairs, Kent Walker, noted that the code could stifle innovation if it's not applied carefully, and that's something Google hopes to prevent. While Google was initially opposed to the Code of Practice, Walker says the input it has provided to the European Commission has been well-received, and the result is a legal framework it believes can provide Europe with access to "secure, first-rate AI tools." The company claims that the expansion of such tools on the continent could boost the economy by 8 percent (about 1.8 trillion euros) annually by 2034. These supposed economic gains are being dangled like bait to entice business interests in the EU to align with Google on the Code of Practice. While the company is signing the agreement, it appears interested in influencing the way it is implemented. Walker says Google remains concerned that tightening copyright guidelines and forced disclosure of possible trade secrets could slow innovation. Having a seat at the table could make it easier to bend the needle of regulation than if it followed some of its competitors in eschewing voluntary compliance. [...] The AI Code of Practice aims to provide AI firms with a bit more certainty in the face of a shifting landscape. It was developed with the input of more than 1,000 citizen groups, academics, and industry experts. The EU Commission says companies that adopt the voluntary code will enjoy a lower bureaucratic burden, easing compliance with the block's AI Act, which came into force last year. Under the terms of the code, Google will have to publish summaries of its model training data and disclose additional model features to regulators. The code also includes guidance on how firms should manage safety and security in compliance with the AI Act. Likewise, it includes paths to align a company's model development with EU copyright law as it pertains to AI, a sore spot for Google and others. Companies like Meta that don't sign the code will not escape regulation. All AI companies operating in Europe will have to abide by the AI Act, which includes the most detailed regulatory framework for generative AI systems in the world. The law bans high-risk uses of AI like intentional deception or manipulation of users, social scoring systems, and real-time biometric scanning in public spaces. Companies that violate the rules in the AI Act could be hit with fines as high as 35 million euros ($40.1 million) or up to 7 percent of the offender's global revenue.

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Smartphone maker Nothing's $799 Phone 3 has been "mired in controversy among the same customers who rallied behind the company's past products" since its July launch, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Tech enthusiasts have "lambasted the company for the phone's peculiar industrial design and what they perceive to be an unreasonable price." The Android device lacks the most performant Qualcomm processor chip found in premium Android phones and the camera performance "falls short of other handsets in this price bracket," the publication wrote in a scathing review. The phone costs $200 more than its predecessor and matches pricing with Apple's iPhone 16, Samsung's Galaxy S25, and Google's Pixel 9. Critics across Reddit and social media have attacked Nothing for removing the signature Glyph Lights from previous models. Comments on Nothing's YouTube channel have been "bruising," focusing on the phone's oddly positioned camera array. "At its current price, the handset is too expensive for what it offers," the review concludes.

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India launched the $1.5 billion NISAR radar imaging satellite on Wednesday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, marking the first joint mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation. The satellite uses dual radar frequencies -- NASA's L-band and ISRO's S-band -- to detect Earth surface changes as small as one centimeter from its 747-kilometer orbit. NISAR will map the entire planet every 12 days using a 240-kilometer-wide radar swath, providing data for climate monitoring and disaster response that will be freely available to users worldwide.

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