In a landmark collaboration across 22 labs, neuroscientists have created the first brain-wide map of decision-making in mice, tracking over 620,000 neurons across nearly 280 brain regions. They found that decision-making is distributed much more broadly than previously thought, involving not just "cognitive" centers but also regions linked to movement. From a report: The task was deceptively simple task. Mice sat in front of a screen that intermittently displayed a black-and-white striped circle for a brief amount of time on either the left or right side. A mouse could earn a sip of sugar water if they quickly moved the circle toward the center of the screen by operating a tiny steering wheel in the same direction, often doing so within one second. On some trials, the circle was faint, requiring the animal to rely on past experience to make a guess, which allowed researchers to study how expectations influence future decisions. While the mice performed the task, researchers recorded brain activity using high-density electrodes that allowed them to monitor hundreds of neurons across many regions simultaneously. The work was divided across the participating labs, so that each lab mapped a particular region of the mouse brain. The pooled dataset covers 620,000 neurons recorded from 139 mice in 12 labs, encompassing nearly the entire brain. The resulting map revealed that decision-making activity is distributed across the brain, including in areas traditionally associated with movement rather than cognition. The findings have been published in two papers in the journal Nature.

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An Indiana bankruptcy lawyer named Mark Zuckerberg is suing Meta after his Facebook page was repeatedly shut down for "impersonating" CEO Mark Zuckerberg, despite being his real legal name. TechCrunch reports: Mark Zuckerberg the lawyer uses a commercial Facebook page to advertise his legal practice and communicate with potential clients. But his page has been disabled five times in the last eight years, since Meta's moderation systems flag his account as falsely impersonating Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the platform. Mark Zuckerberg is not impersonating Mark Zuckerberg, because he, too, is Mark Zuckerberg. In his legal complaint, Mark Zuckerberg points out that he has been practicing law since Mark Zuckerberg was just three years old. "It's not funny," Mark Zuckerberg, the lawyer, said to Indianapolis' 13WTHR. "Not when they take my money. This really pissed me off." Mark Zuckerberg has spent over $11,000 to advertise his page on Mark Zuckerberg's Meta platforms, but when Mark Zuckerberg's account is disabled for allegedly impersonating Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg still has to pay for these advertisements. Zuckerberg created a website, iammarkzuckerberg.com, chronicling how his life has been shaped by being named Mark Zuckerberg. The lawsuit can be found here.

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Warner Bros. Discovery has filed a major copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, accusing the AI image generator of exploiting its movies and TV shows to train models and generate near-identical reproductions of iconic characters like Batman, Bugs Bunny, and Rick and Morty. From The Hollywood Reporter: The company "brazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery's intellectual property" by letting subscribers produce images and videos of iconic copyrighted characters, alleges the complaint, filed on Thursday in California federal court. "The heart of what we do is develop stories and characters to entertain our audiences, bringing to life the vision and passion of our creative partners," said a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson in a statement. "Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments." For years, AI companies have been training their technology on data scraped across the internet without compensating creators. It's led to lawsuits from authors, record labels, news organizations, artists and studios, which contend that some AI tools erode demand for their content. Warner Bros. Discovery joins Disney and Universal, which earlier this year teamed up to sue Midjourney. By their thinking, the AI company is a free-rider plagiarizing their movies and TV shows. In the lawsuit, Warner Bros. Discovery points to Midjourney generating images of iconic copyrighted characters. At the forefront are heroes who're at the center of DC Studios' movies and TV shows, like Superman, Wonder Woman and The Joker; others are Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and Scooby-Doo characters who've become ubiquitous household names; more are Cartoon Network characters, including those from Rick and Morty, who've emerged as something of cultural touchstones in recent years. [...] The lawsuit argues Midjourney's ability to return copyrighted characters is a "clear draw for subscribers," diverting consumers away from purchasing Warner Bros. Discovery-approved posters, wall art and prints, among other products that must now compete against the service. [...] Warner Bros. Discovery seeks Midjourney's profits attributable to the alleged infringement or, alternatively, $150,000 per infringed work, which could leave the AI company on the hook for massive damages. The thrust of the studios' lawsuits will likely be decided by one question: Are AI companies covered by fair use, the legal doctrine in intellectual property law that allows creators to build upon copyrighted works without a license? The lawsuit can be found here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: According to a new medical survey, scrolling on your smartphone while using the toilet may dramatically increase your risk of hemorrhoids. The evidence is laid out in a study published on September 3 in the journal PLOS One. [...] Over the past 20 years, one single device has unequivocally lengthened the amount of time most people spend sitting. "We're still uncovering the many ways smartphones and our modern way of life impact our health," Harvard Medical School gastroenterologist and study co-author Trisha Pasricha said in a statement. "It's possible that how and where we use them -- such as while in the bathroom -- can have unintended consequences." To test this theory, Pasricha and colleagues oversaw a study of 125 adults who recently received a colonoscopy screening. The patients were surveyed on both their daily lifestyles and toilet traditions, while endoscopists subsequently evaluated them for hemorrhoids. Of those volunteers, 66 percent reported passing time in the bathroom while smartphone scrolling. After factoring in potential hemorrhoid influences like age, exercise habits, and fiber intake, the researchers determined that those who relied on this screentime had a 46 percent higher risk of hemorrhoid problems than non-users. "It's incredibly easy to lose track of time when we're scrolling on our smartphones -- popular apps are designed entirely for that purpose," added Pasricha. The survey's results made this abundantly clear: 37 percent of smartphone users spent over five minutes at a time on the toilet, while barely seven percent of non-users reported the same. In general, people opted for reading the news and checking their social media while in the bathroom. [...] Pasricha cautioned against drawing any definitive conclusions just yet, noting the preliminary study's comparatively small sample size. The team intends to investigate the issue further, possibly by tracking patients over longer periods of time, while also experimenting with ways to limit smartphone use. "We need to study this further, but it's a safe suggestion to leave the smartphone outside the bathroom when you need to have a bowel movement," said Pasricha. "If it's taking longer, ask yourself why. Was it because having a bowel movement was really so difficult, or was it because my focus was elsewhere?"

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Intel shelled out $16.5 billion on R&D in 2024, outspending Nvidia by 28% and AMD by 156%, with much of the cash going into chip design, fabrication tech, and the upcoming Nova Lake architecture. "When you compare the R&D expenditures to the amount of revenue, though, the story takes on a very different look," notes PC Gamer. "Intel spent 31% of its net revenue, and 26% for AMD, but Nvidia and Samsung got by on just 10% and 4%, respectively." From the report: An analysis of research and development expenditure by TechInsights was reported by Korea JoongAng Daily, but you can get the numbers yourself by pulling up each company's 2024 financial results. For example, AMD declared that it spent $6.456 billion last year (pdf, page 1) on R&D, whereas Nvidia forked out $12.914 billion. It's worth noting that Nvidia's financial statements are numbered one year ahead of the actual period (FY 2026 is 2025 and so on). Anyway, those figures pale in comparison to how much cash Intel burned through in 2024 to research and develop chip, fabrication technologies, software, and all kinds of tech stuffâ"a staggering $16.546 billion (pdf, page 25). That's 28% more than Nvidia and a frankly unbelievable 156% more than AMD. The nearest non-US semiconductor firm is Samsung Electronics, which spent a reported $9.5 billion on R&D. That would place third, comfortably ahead of AMD, and it strongly suggests that if you have your own foundries for making chips, you need to spend a lot of cash on finding ways to make better processors.

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Philips Hue is rolling out MotionAware, a new feature that turns its smart bulbs into motion sensors using radio-frequency (RF) Zigbee signals. The upgrade works with most Hue bulbs made since 2014, but requires the new $99 Bridge Pro hub to enable. The Verge reports: To create a MotionAware motion-sensing zone, you need Hue's new Bridge Pro and at least three Hue devices in a room. It works with all new and most existing mains-powered Hue products via a firmware update. That includes smart bulbs, light strips, and fixtures. Portable devices, such as the Hue Go or Table Lamp, and battery-powered accessories, such as Hue switches, aren't compatible. Neither is Hue's current smart plug. [...] "All of the functionality you get with our physical motion sensors -- including turning on when motion is detected or off when there's been no movement for a certain amount of time -- can be configured on motion-aware motion events," says George Yianni, Hue CTO and founder, in an interview with The Verge. "We've done something that's quite a lot better than what else is out there." MotionAware is occupancy sensing, not presence sensing; it requires movement. Yianni says it's comparable to the passive infrared sensing (PIR) Hue's physical sensors use. This means it can be triggered by pets or other motion. A sensitivity slider in the app helps fine-tune detection. According to Yianni, a key benefit over PIR is that a MotionAware zone can cover a larger area than a single PIR sensor, and it's also not limited to line of sight. MotionAware can't sense light levels, which Hue Motion Sensors can, but you can pair a light sensor to a motion zone to feed it that data. The positioning of the lights will also play a role in determining the effectiveness of the motion sensing. "We recommend that the lights surround an area which will roughly define the detection area in which motion will be detected," says Yianni. "It will sense around the lights and in the broader room thanks to reflections, but detection reliability will depend on lots of factors." Beyond lighting automation, MotionAware can also integrate with Hue Secure, Hue's DIY security platform that includes cameras, contact sensors, and a new video doorbell. Motion detection can trigger lights to flash red, activate Hue's new plug-in chime/siren, and send an alert to your phone with a button to call emergency services. [...] MotionAware is built on RF sensing -- a technology that uses wireless signals to "see" a space and detect disruptions within it. The data is then sent to the Bridge Pro, where AI algorithms are applied to figure out what is causing those disruptions, so the system can act accordingly. This is why it's limited to the Bridge Pro, the V2 bridge isn't powerful enough to run those algorithms, says Yianni.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Managers and supervisors brace yourselves: calling the boss a dickhead is not necessarily a sackable offense, a tribunal has ruled. The ruling came in the case of an office manager who was sacked on the spot when -- during a row -- she called her manager and another director dickheads. Kerrie Herbert has been awarded almost 30,000 pounds in compensation and legal costs after an employment tribunal found she had been unfairly dismissed. The employment judge Sonia Boyes ruled that the scaffolding and brickwork company she worked for had not "acted reasonably in all the circumstances in treating [her] conduct as a sufficient reason to dismiss her." "She made a one-off comment to her line manager about him and a director of the business," Boyes said. "The comment was made during a heated meeting. "Whilst her comment was not acceptable, there is no suggestion that she had made such comments previously. Further ... this one-off comment did not amount to gross misconduct or misconduct so serious to justify summary dismissal." [...] Boyes found that Herbert was summarily fired because of her use of the word "dickheads" and ruled that the company had failed to follow proper disciplinary procedures. She concluded that calling her bosses dickheads was not sufficient to fire Herbert and ordered the firm to pay 15,042.81 pounds in compensation. In her latest judgment she also ruled it had to pay 14,087 pounds towards her legal fees. "If it was anyone else in this position they would have walked years ago due to the goings-on in the office, but it is only because of you two dickheads that I stayed," said Herbert. Swannell retorted: "Don't call me a fucking dickhead or my wife. That's it, you're sacked. Pack your kit and fuck off."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, Tencent released HunyuanWorld-Voyager, a new open-weights AI model that generates 3D-consistent video sequences from a single image, allowing users to pilot a camera path to "explore" virtual scenes. The model simultaneously generates RGB video and depth information to enable direct 3D reconstruction without the need for traditional modeling techniques. However, it won't be replacing video games anytime soon. The results aren't true 3D models, but they achieve a similar effect: The AI tool generates 2D video frames that maintain spatial consistency as if a camera were moving through a real 3D space. Each generation produces just 49 frames -- roughly two seconds of video -- though multiple clips can be chained together for sequences lasting "several minutes," according to Tencent. Objects stay in the same relative positions when the camera moves around them, and the perspective changes correctly as you would expect in a real 3D environment. While the output is video with depth maps rather than true 3D models, this information can be converted into 3D point clouds for reconstruction purposes. There are some caveats with the tool. It doesn't generate true 3D models (only 2D frames with depth maps) and each run produces just two seconds of footage, with errors compounding during longer or complex camera motions like full 360-degree rotations. Furthermore, because it relies heavily on training data patterns, its ability to generalize is limited and it demands enormous GPU power (60-80GB of memory) to run effectively. On top of that, licensing restricts use in the EU, UK, and South Korea, with large-scale deployments requiring special agreements. Tencent published the model weights on Hugging Face.

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A long-term study of over 12,000 adults suggests that artificial sweeteners like aspartame, saccharin, and sugar alcohols may accelerate cognitive decline in middle age, equivalent to about 1.6 years of extra aging. The Guardian reports: Sweeteners' association with cognitive decline is of such concern that consumers should instead use either tagatose, a natural sweetener, or alternatives such as honey or maple syrup, the researchers said. They looked at the impact of seven sweeteners on the health of the study's participants -- 12,772 civil servants in Brazil, with an average age of 52 -- who were followed up for on average eight years. Participants completed questionnaires detailing their food and drink intake over the previous year, and later underwent tests of their cognitive skills such as verbal fluency and word recall. People who consumed the most sweeteners experienced declines in their thinking and memory skills 62% faster than those with the lowest intake, the researchers found. This was "the equivalent of about 1.6 years of aging," the researchers said. Consumption of combined and individual LNCs, particularly aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame K, erythritol, sorbitol and xylitol, was associated with cognitive loss. "Daily consumption of LNCs was associated with accelerated decline in memory, verbal fluency and global cognition," the authors say in their paper, published in the American medical journal Neurology. However, the trend was only observed in participants under the age of 60. That shows that middle-aged adults need to be encouraged to use fewer sweeteners, they added.

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After 26 years and over 1,000 episodes, Melvyn Bragg is stepping down as presenter of BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, leaving behind a legacy of intellectual curiosity and broadcasting excellence. While he will no longer host the series, he will remain involved with the BBC and is set to launch a new project in 2026. The BBC reports: Over the last quarter of a century, Melvyn has skilfully led conversations about everything from the age of the Universe to 'Zenobia', Queen of the Palmyrene Empire. He has welcomed the company of the brightest and best academics in their fields, sharing their passion and knowledge with a fascinated audience right around the globe. While he will be much missed on In Our Time, Melvyn will continue to be a friend of Radio 4 with more to come to celebrate his extraordinary career, and a new series in 2026 (details to be announced soon). Melvyn Bragg says: "For a program with a wholly misleading title which started from scratch with a six-month contract, it's been quite a ride! I have worked with many extremely talented and helpful people inside the BBC as well as some of the greatest academics around the world. It's been a great privilege and pleasure. I much look forward to continuing to work for the BBC on Radio 4. Thank you for listening." [...] In Our Time will be back on Radio 4 with a new presenter who will be announced in due course.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic discussing organ transplants and immortality at the military parade in Beijing on Wednesday. The two leaders were captured on the stream as they walked with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at Tiananmen Square, with the Russian translator saying: "Biotechnology is continuously developing," according to Reuters. "Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and (you can) even achieve immortality," the translator added. Xi responded by saying that some predict that humans could live up to "150 years old." The Kremlin head later confirmed that the two leaders discussed immortality. "Modern means of healing, and medical means, all kinds of surgical means related to organ replacement, they allow humanity to hope that active life will continue not as it does today. The average age in different countries is different, but nevertheless, life expectancy will increase significantly," Putin told reporters, according to CNN.

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Switzerland has launched Apertus, a fully open-source, multilingual LLM trained on 15 trillion tokens and over 1,000 languages. "What distinguishes Apertus from many other generative AI systems is its commitment to complete openness," reports CyberInsider. From the report: Unlike popular proprietary models, where users can only interact via APIs or hosted interfaces, Apertus provides open access to its model weights, training datasets, documentation, and even intermediate checkpoints. The source code and all training materials are released under a permissive open-source license that allows commercial use. Since the full training process is documented and reproducible, researchers and watchdogs can audit the data sources, verify compliance with data protection laws, and inspect how the model was trained. Apertus' development explicitly adhered to Swiss data protection and copyright laws, and incorporated retroactive opt-out mechanisms to respect data source preferences. From a privacy perspective, Apertus represents a compelling shift in the AI landscape. The model only uses publicly available data, filtered to exclude personal information and to honor opt-out signals from content sources. This not only aligns with emerging regulatory frameworks like the EU AI Act, but also provides a tangible example of how AI can be both powerful and privacy-respecting. According to ETH Zurich's Imanol Schlag, technical lead of the project at ETH Zurich, Apertus is "built for the public good" and is a demonstration of how AI can be deployed as a public digital infrastructure, much like utilities or transportation. The model is available via Swisscom's Sovereign Swiss AI Platform. It's also available through Hugging Face and the Public AI Inference Utility.

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Google's September Pixel drop brings the new Material 3 Expressive UI, AI-powered Gboard writing tools, and Bluetooth Auracast upgrades to older Pixel devices, including the Pixel 6 and Pixel Tablet. "Among other tweaks, Google made it possible to add 'Live Effects,' including a few that cover the weather, to your phone's lock screen wallpaper," notes Engadget. "Material 3 Expressive also gives you more control over how the contact cards your phone displays when your friends and family call you look. Even if you're not one to endlessly tweak Android's appearance, as part of the redesign Google has once again reworked the Quick Settings pane in hopes of making it easier to use." On the audio front, Pixel Buds Pro 2 gain intuitive nod-and-shake gesture controls, Adaptive Audio for balanced awareness, and Loud Noise Protection to guard against sudden sound spikes. Voice clarity has also been improved with Gemini Live in noisy environments. A full breakdown of what's new can be found here.

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Just days before Apple's expected launch of the satellite-enabled Apple Watch Ultra 3, Garmin unveiled its Fenix 8 Pro -- the company's first smartwatch with built-in inReach satellite and cellular connectivity, SOS features, and a blindingly bright 4,500-nit microLED display. MacRumors reports: With inReach, the Fenix 8 Pro can send location check-ins and text messages over satellite using the Garmin Messenger app. There is also included cellular connectivity, so the smartwatch can make phone calls, send 30-second voice messages, and provide LiveTrack links and weather forecasts when an LTE connection is available. LiveTrack is a feature that allows the wearer's family and friends to keep track of their location during an activity or adventure. For emergencies, there is an SOS feature that will send a message to the Garmin Response center over a satellite or cellular connection. Garmin Response will then communicate with the user, their emergency contacts, and search and rescue organizations to provide help. Garmin says that its Response team has supported over 17,000 inReach incident responses across over 150 countries. The Fenix 8 Pro smartwatch launches September 8, with the AMOLED model starting at $1,200 and the 51mm microLED version priced at $2,000. Both require a paid inReach satellite plan beginning at $7.99 per month for full functionality.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going "FEEEEEEEE." The video was called "Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more." It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched. "In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," the narrator says in a fake British accent. "By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire," it continued. The video was from a channel I hadn't seen before, called "Sleepless Historian." I took my headphones out, didn't think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep. The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don't know much about. Some video titles include "Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses," "The Entire History of the American Frontier," "What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii," and "What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times." One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks. In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on "mass produced" videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change. "It's completely shocking to me," Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told Koebler in a phone interview. "It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I'm fearful because this is everywhere." "I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they're historically inaccurate," Kelly added. "So it worries me because it's just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. [...] It's worrying to me just for humanity. Not to get too high brow, but it's not good for the state of knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future."

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Tesco is suing Broadcom and reseller Computacenter for at least $134 million, claiming that VMware's perpetual license support agreements were breached after Broadcom's acquisition. The supermarket giant warned it "may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped," writes The Register's Simon Sharwood. From the report: Court documents seen by The Register assert that in January 2021 Tesco acquired perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions to Virtzilla's Tanzu products, and agreed a contract for support services and software upgrades that run until 2026. Tesco claims VMware also agreed to give it an option to extend support services for an additional four years. All of this happened before Broadcom acquired VMware and stopped selling support services for software sold under perpetual licenses. Broadcom does sell support to those who sign for its new software subscriptions. The supermarket giant says Broadcom's subscriptions mean it must pay "excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid," and "is unable any longer to purchase stand-alone Virtualization Support Services for its Perpetually Licensed Software without also having to purchase duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products which it already owns." The complaint also alleges that Tesco's contracts with VMware include eligibility for software upgrades, but that Broadcom won't let the retailer update its perpetual licenses to cover the new Cloud Foundation 9. The filing names Computacenter as a co-defendant as it was the reseller that Tesco relied on for software licenses, and the retailer feels it's breached contracts to supply software at a fixed price. Tesco's filing also mentions Broadcom's patch publication policy, which means users who don't acquire subscriptions can't receive all security updates and don't receive other fixes. The retailer thinks its contracts mean it is entitled to those updates. The filing suggests that lack of support is not just a legal matter, but may have wider implications because VMware software, and support for it "are essential for the operations and resilience of Tesco's business and its ability to supply groceries to consumers across the UK and Republic of Ireland." "VMware Virtualization Software underpins the servers and data systems that enable Tesco's stores and operations to function, hosting approximately 40,000 server workloads and connecting to, by way of illustration, tills in Tesco stores," the filing states. Tesco's filing warns that Broadcom, VMware, and Computacenter are each liable for at least $134 million damages, plus interest, and that the longer the dispute persists the higher damages will climb.

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After years of requests, Instagram is finally releasing a dedicated iPad app on September 3rd... "But it will be slightly different than the mobile app users are accustomed to," reports The Verge. From the report: Most significantly, the iPad app will open directly to a feed of Reels, the company's TikTok competitor -- perhaps a sign of the short-form-video times. [...] Other features will be available on iPad: Stories will still line the top of the homepage, and users will be able to switch to a "Following" tab where they'll be able to swipe between feeds that more resemble the mobile Instagram experience (including a chronological option). The bigger screen means more space and fewer clicks: comments on Reels will appear next to full-size videos, and the DMs page will have your inbox alongside chats, similar to what Messenger looks like on desktop.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Over the Labor Day weekend, Cloudflare says it successfully stopped a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). This came only a few months after Cloudflare blocked a then all-time high DDoS attack of 7.3 Tbps. This latest attack was almost 60% larger. According to Cloudflare, the assault was the result of a hyper-volumetric User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attack that lasted about 35 seconds. During that just more than half-minute attack, it delivered over 5.1 billion packets per second. This attack, Cloudflare reported, came from a combination of several IoT and cloud providers. Although compromised accounts on Google Cloud were a major source, the bulk of the attack originated from other sources. The specific target of this attack has not been publicly disclosed, but we can be sure the intent was to overwhelm the victim's network and render online services inoperative. Cloudflare says its globally distributed, fully autonomous DDoS mitigation network detected and neutralized the threat in real time, without notable impact on customer services or requiring manual intervention. This operation highlights both the rising sophistication of attack methods and the resilience of modern internet infrastructure defenses, especially Cloudflare's use of real-time packet analysis, fingerprinting, and rapid threat intelligence sharing across its network.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon.com must face a class action on behalf of hundreds of millions of U.S. consumers over claims that the online retail giant overcharged for products sold by third-party sellers, a federal judge in Seattle has ruled. U.S. District Judge John Chun in an order (PDF) unsealed on Friday certified a nationwide class involving 288 million customers and billions of transactions, marking one of the largest-ever in the United States. The class includes buyers in the United States who purchased five or more new goods from third-party sellers on Amazon since May 26, 2017. The consumers' 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon. Amazon's policies have allowed the company to impose inflated fees on sellers, causing shoppers to pay higher prices for purchases, the lawsuit said. Amazon has denied any wrongdoing. It has already appealed Chun's class certification order, which was first issued under seal on Aug. 6. Amazon argued that the class was too large to be manageable and that the plaintiffs failed to show its alleged conduct had a widespread effect. Amazon also said that since 2019 it has not used a pricing program that the plaintiffs challenged. Chun found there was no evidence at this stage that the size of the class was overbroad. Other federal courts had certified class actions with millions or hundreds of millions of class members, the judge said.

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alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: The insecticide chlorpyrifos is a powerful tool for controlling various pests, making it one of the most widely used pesticides during the latter half of the 20th century. Like many pesticides, however, chlorpyrifos lacks precision. In addition to harming non-target insects like bees, it has also been linked to health risks for much larger animals -- including us. Now, a new US study suggests those risks may begin before birth. Humans exposed to chlorpyrifos prenatally are more likely to exhibit structural brain abnormalities and reduced motor functions in childhood and adolescence. Progressively higher prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos was associated with incrementally greater deviations in brain structure, function, and metabolism in children and teens, the researchers found, along with poorer measures of motor speed and motor programming. [...] This supports previous research linking chlorpyrifos with impaired cognitive function and brain development, but these findings are the first evidence of widespread and long-lasting molecular, cellular, and metabolic effects in the brain. "The disturbances in brain tissue and metabolism that we observed with prenatal exposure to this one pesticide were remarkably widespread throughout the brain," says first author Bradley Peterson, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine. Senior author Virginia Rauh added: "It is vitally important that we continue to monitor the levels of exposure in potentially vulnerable populations, especially in pregnant women in agricultural communities, as their infants continue to be at risk." The report notes that the EPA banned residential use of chlorpyrifos in 2001 but the pesticide is still used in agriculture around the world. The findings have been published in the journal JAMA Neurology.

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