An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.S. prosecutors have charged two rogue employees of a cybersecurity company that specializes in negotiating ransom payments to hackers on behalf of their victims with carrying out ransomware attacks of their own. Last month, the Department of Justice indicted Kevin Tyler Martin and another unnamed employee, who both worked as ransomware negotiators at DigitalMint, with three counts of computer hacking and extortion related to a series of attempted ransomware attacks against at least five U.S.-based companies. Prosecutors also charged a third individual, Ryan Clifford Goldberg, a former incident response manager at cybersecurity giant Sygnia, as part of the scheme. The three are accused of hacking into companies, stealing their sensitive data, and deploying ransomware developed by the ALPHV/BlackCat group. [...] According to an FBI affidavit filed in September, the rogue employees received more than $1.2 million in ransom payments from one victim, a medical device maker in Florida. They also targeted several other companies, including a Virginia-based drone maker and a Maryland-headquartered pharmaceutical company.

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Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Sales of electric vehicles surged in September as shoppers rushed to take advantage of the $7500 federal EV tax credit before it disappeared at the end of the month. With the government subsidies now gone, EV sales were expected to take a hit in October. While only a few automakers still report sales on a monthly basis, the results we do have do not paint a rosy picture for EVs in a post-tax credit world. The Korean automakers were hit particularly hard by the loss of the tax credit. The Hyundai Ioniq 5, which was the fifth-best-selling EV through the third quarter of this year, experienced a 63 percent drop, moving 1642 units in October 2025, down from 4498 in 2024. Its platform-mates saw similar declines. The Kia EV6 moved just 508 units, down 71 percent versus the same month the year before, while the luxurious Genesis GV60 only found 93 buyers, a 54 percent slide year over year. Things were even worse at Honda. While the Acura ZDX was recently discontinued after just a single model year, the related Honda Prologue remains on sale but registered just 806 units, down 81 percent from 4130 sales in October 2024. [...] Obviously, this isn't the full picture, as several major players -- including General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen -- only release sales reports on a quarterly basis, and others, such as Tesla and Rivian, don't break out individual sales at all. But with four of the top 10 bestselling EVs through Q3 all showing noteworthy declines in October, it spells trouble for the EV market at large. The end-of-year sales figures will provide a much clearer picture of whether October was just a blip or the start of a much more widespread problem for EV sales.

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Australia's new "solar sharer" program will give households in NSW, south-east Queensland, and South Australia at least three hours of free solar power each day starting in 2026 -- even for those without rooftop panels. Other areas will potentially follow in 2027. The Guardian reports: The government said Australians could schedule appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers and air conditioners and charge electric vehicles and household batteries during this time. The solar sharer scheme would be implemented through a change to the default market offer that sets the maximum price retailers can charge customers for electricity in parts of the country. The climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, said the program would ensure "every last ray of sunshine was powering our homes" instead of some solar energy being wasted. Australians have installed more than 4m solar systems and there is regularly cheap excess generation in the middle of the day. Part of the rationale for the program is that it could shift demand for electricity from peak times -- particularly early in the evening -- to when it is sunniest. This could help minimize peak electricity prices and reduce the need for network upgrades and intervention to ensure the power grid was stable.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: An Antarctic glacier shrunk by nearly 50% in just two months, the fastest retreat recorded in modern history, according to a new study -- and the way it retreated could have big implications for global sea level rise. The Hektoria Glacier, roughly the size of Philadelphia, is on the Antarctic Peninsula, a spindly chain of mountains sticking off the continent like a thumb pointing toward South America. It is one of the fastest warming regions on Earth. Grounded glaciers like Hektoria, which rest on the seabed and don't float, generally retreat no more than a few hundred meters a year. But between November and December 2022, Hektoria retreated by 5 miles, according to the study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. [...] Understanding more about why this happened is vital; if larger glaciers retreat at similar rates, it could have "catastrophic implications for sea level rise," the authors wrote in a statement accompanying the report. Antarctica holds enough ice to raise global sea level by around 190 feet. Models show that the latest time this kind of ice plain melting occurred was between about 15,000 and 19,000 years ago, "during a period of warming that ended the last Ice Age," notes the report. "[W]e hadn't seen it play out live before, certainly not at this rate," said Naomi Ochwat, a study co-author and postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Bruce66423 shares a report from the Los Angeles Times: The board of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on Tuesday approved a controversial plan to convert part of the city's largest natural gas-fired power plant into one that also can burn hydrogen. In a 3-0 vote, the DWP board signed off on the final environmental impact report for an $800-million modernization of Units 1 and 2 of the Scattergood Generating Station in Playa del Rey. The power plant dates to the late 1950s and both units are legally required to be shut down by the end of 2029. In their place, the DWP will install new combined-cycle turbines that are expected to operate on a mixture of natural gas and at least 30% hydrogen with the ultimate goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available. The hydrogen burned at Scattergood is supposed to be green, meaning it is produced by splitting water molecules through a process called electrolysis. Hydrogen does not emit planet-warming carbon dioxide when it is burned, unlike natural gas. [...] Although burning hydrogen does not produce CO2, the high-temperature combustion process can emit nitrogen oxides, or NOx, a key component of smog. [...] [T]he approved plan contains no specifics about where the hydrogen will come from or how it will get to the site. "The green hydrogen that would supply the proposed project has not yet been identified," the environmental report says. Industry experts and officials said the project will help drive the necessary hydrogen production. "Burning hydrogen produced by 'excess' solar or wind power is a means of energy storage," adds Slashdot reader Bruce66423. "The hard question is whether it's the best solution to the storage problem given that other solutions appear to be emerging that would require less infrastructure investment (think pipes to move the hydrogen to the plant and tanks to store it for later use)."

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A new class-action lawsuit accuses Spotify of allowing billions of fraudulent Drake streams generated by bots between 2022 and 2025, allegedly inflating his royalties at the expense of other artists. "Spotify pays streaming royalties using a 'pro-rata' model based on an artist's market share," notes Consequence. "Each month, revenue from subscriptions and ads is collected into a single, fixed 'pot' of money, which is then distributed to rights holders based on their percentage of the platform's total streams. Because this pot is fixed, an artist who artificially inflates their numbers through bots would dilute the value of every legitimate stream. This allows them to take a larger share of the pot than they earned, effectively siphoning royalties that should have gone to other artists." From the report: According to Rolling Stone, the lawsuit alleges bot use is a widespread problem on Spotify. However, Drake is the only example named, based on "voluminous information" which the company "knows or should know" that proves a "substantial, non-trivial percentage" of his approximately 37 billion streams were "inauthentic and appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts." The complaint claims this alleged fraudulent activity took place between "January 2022 and September 2025," with an examination of "abnormal VPN usage" revealing at least 250,000 streams of Drake's song "No Face" during a four-day period in 2024 were actually from Turkey "but were falsely geomapped through the coordinated use of VPNs to the United Kingdom in [an] attempt to obscure their origins." Other notable allegations in the lawsuit are that "a large percentage" of accounts were concentrated in areas where the population could not support such a high volume of streams, including those with "zero residential addresses." The suit also points to "significant and irregular uptick months" for Drake's songs long after their release, as well as a "slower and less dramatic" downtick in streams compared to other artists. Noting a "staggering and irregular" streaming of Drake's music by individuals, the suit also claims there are a "massive amount of accounts" listening to his songs "23 hours a day." Less than 2% of those users account for "roughly 15 percent" of his streams. "Drake's music accumulated far higher total streams compared to other highly streamed artists, even though those artists had far more 'users' than Drake," the lawsuit concludes.

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concertina226 shares a report from The Register: [A massive power outage in April left tens of millions across Spain, Portugal, and parts of France without electricity for hours due to cascading grid failures, exposing how fragile and interconnected Europe's energy infrastructure is. The incident, though not a cyberattack, reignited concerns about the vulnerability of aging, fragmented, and insecure operational technology systems that could be easily exploited in future cyber or ransomware attacks.] This headache is one the European Commission is focused on. It is funding several projects looking at making electric grids more resilient, such as the eFort framework being developed by cybersecurity researchers at the independent non-profit Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). TNO's SOARCA tool is the first ever open source security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform designed to protect power plants by automating the orchestration of the response to physical attacks, as well as cyberattacks, on substations and the network, and the first country to demo it will be the Ukraine this year. At the moment, SOAR systems only exist for dedicated IT environments. The researchers' design includes a SOAR system in each layer of the power station: the substation, the control room, the enterprise layer, the cloud, or the security operations centre (SOC), so that the SOC and the control room work together to detect anomalies in the network, whether it's an attacker exploiting a vulnerability, a malicious device being plugged into a substation, or a physical attack like a missile hitting a substation. The idea is to be able to isolate potential problems and prevent lateral movement from one device to another or privilege escalation, so an attacker cannot go through the network to the central IT management system of the electricity grid. [...] The SOARCA tool is underpinned by CACAO Playbooks, an open source specification developed by the OASIS Open standards body and its members (which include lots of tech giants and US government agencies) to create standardized predefined, automated workflows that can detect intrusions and changes made by malicious actors, and then carry out a series of steps to protect the network and mitigate the attack. Experts largely agree the problem facing critical infrastructure is only worsening as years pass, and the more random Windows implementations that are added into the network, the wider the attack surface is. [...] TNO's Wolthuis said the energy industry is likely to be pushed soon to take action by regulators, particularly once the Network Code on Cybersecurity (NCCS), which lays out rules requiring cybersecurity risk assessments in the electricity sector, is formalized.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: After a turbulent weekend of updates and clarifications, AMD has published an entire web page to assuage user backlash and reaffirm its commitment to continued support for its RDNA 1 and RDNA 2-based drives, following a spate of confusion surrounding its recent decision to put Radeon RX 5000 and 6000 series cards in "maintenance mode." This comes after AMD had to deny that the RX 7900 cards were losing USB-C power supply moving forward, even though the drive changelog said something quite different. Just last week, AMD released a new driver update for its graphics cards, and it went anything but smoothly. First, the wrong drivers were uploaded, and even after that was corrected, several glaring errors in the release notes required clarification. AMD was forced to correct claims about its RX 7900 cards, but at the time clarified that, indeed, RX 5000 and 6000 graphics cards were entering "Maintenance Mode," despite some RX 6000 cards being only around four years old. Now, though, AMD has either rolled back that decision or someone higher up the food chain has made a new call, as game optimizations are back on the menu for RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs. "We've heard your feedback and want to clear up the confusion around the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 driver release," AMD said in a statement. "Your Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series GPUs will continue to receive: Game support for new releases, Stability and game optimizations, and Security and bug fixes," AMD said.

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In its largest rollout yet, Waymo said it will launch its driverless robotaxi service to Las Vegas, San Diego, and Detroit in 2026. The Alphabet unit will also debut new Zeekr-built vehicles developed with Geely to complement its existing Jaguar I-PACE fleet. Reuters reports: The new Zeekr model, developed with Chinese automaker Geely, are designed specifically for robotaxi use cases and will be rolled out gradually as the company expands its service. [...] Waymo plans to launch the service in Las Vegas next summer, while in San Diego, it is working with local officials and first responders to secure deployment permits. In Detroit, the company said its winter-weather testing in Michigan's Upper Peninsula has strengthened its ability to operate year-round, where it has long maintained engineering operations.

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Coca-Cola has doubled down on AI-generated holiday ads despite widespread criticism of last year's uncanny results. This year the beverage company is replacing human actors with oddly animated animals in a visually inconsistent campaign. The Verge reports: There's no consistent style, switching between attempted realism and a bug-eyed toony look, and the polar bears, panda, and sloth move unnaturally, like flat images that have been sloppily animated rather than rigged 3D models in CG. Compared to the convincing deepfake videos being generated by tools like OpenAI's Sora 2 or Google's Veo 3, the videos produced for this Coke ad feel extremely dated. The only notable improvement to my eyes is that the wheels on the iconic Coke trucks are actually consistently turning this year, rather than gliding statically over snow-covered roads. The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola teamed up with Silverside and Secret Level on its latest holiday campaign, two of the AI studios that previously worked on the 2024 Coke Christmas ads. Coca-Cola declined to comment on the cost of the new holiday campaign, according to The Wall Street Journal, but said that around 100 people were involved in the project -- a figure comparable to the company's older AI-free productions. That includes five "AI specialists" from Silverside who contributed by prompting and refining more than 70,000 AI video clips.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: You may be disappointed if you go looking for Google's open Gemma AI model in AI Studio today. Google announced late on Friday that it was pulling Gemma from the platform, but it was vague about the reasoning. The abrupt change appears to be tied to a letter from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who claims the Gemma model generated false accusations of sexual misconduct against her. Blackburn published her letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Friday, just hours before the company announced the change to Gemma availability. She demanded Google explain how the model could fail in this way, tying the situation to ongoing hearings that accuse Google and others of creating bots that defame conservatives. At the hearing, Google's Markham Erickson explained that AI hallucinations are a widespread and known issue in generative AI, and Google does the best it can to mitigate the impact of such mistakes. Although no AI firm has managed to eliminate hallucinations, Google's Gemini for Home has been particularly hallucination-happy in our testing. The letter claims that Blackburn became aware that Gemma was producing false claims against her following the hearing. When asked, "Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?" Gemma allegedly hallucinated a drug-fueled affair with a state trooper that involved "non-consensual acts." Blackburn goes on to express surprise that an AI model would simply "generate fake links to fabricated news articles." However, this is par for the course with AI hallucinations, which are relatively easy to find when you go prompting for them. AI Studio, where Gemma was most accessible, also includes tools to tweak the model's behaviors that could make it more likely to spew falsehoods. Someone asked a leading question of Gemma, and it took the bait.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Korean semiconductor giant Samsung said Thursday that it plans to buy and deploy a cluster of 50,000 Nvidia graphics processing units to improve its chip manufacturing for mobile devices and robots. The 50,000 Nvidia GPUs will be used to create a facility Samsung is calling an "AI Megafactory." Samsung didn't provide details about when the facility would be built. It's the latest splashy partnership for Nvidia, whose chips remain essential for building and deploying advanced artificial intelligence. [...] On Thursday, Nvidia representatives said they will work with Samsung to adapt the Korean company's chipmaking lithography platform to work with Nvidia's GPUs. That process will results in 20 times better performance for Samsung, the Nvidia representatives said. Samsung will also use Nvidia's simulation software called Omniverse. Known for its mobile phones, Samsung also said it would use the Nvidia chips to run its own AI models for its devices. In addition to being a partner and customer, Samsung is also a key supplier for Nvidia. Samsung makes the kind of high-performance memory Nvidia uses in large quantities, alongside its AI chips, called high bandwidth memory. Samsung said it will work with Nvidia to tweak its HBM4 memory for use in AI chips.

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Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Financial Times: Solar power developers want to cover an area larger than Washington, DC, with silicon panels and batteries, converting sunlight into electricity that will power air conditioners in sweltering Las Vegas along with millions of other homes and businesses. But earlier this month, bureaucrats in charge of federal lands scrapped collective approval for the Esmeralda 7 projects, in what campaigners fear is part of an attack on renewable energy under President Donald Trump. "We will not approve wind or farmer destroying [sic] Solar," he posted on his Truth Social platform in August. Developers will need to reapply individually, slowing progress. Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is a different story. China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau, where the thin air helps more sunlight get through. The Talatan Solar Park is part of China's push to double its solar and wind generation capacity over the coming decade. "Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time," President Xi Jinping told delegates at a UN summit in New York last month. China's vast production of solar panels and batteries has also pushed down the prices of renewables hardware for everyone else, meaning it has "become very difficult to make any other choice in some places," according to Heymi Bahar, senior analyst at the International Energy Agency. [...] More broadly, the US's focus on fossil fuels and pullback of support for clean energy further cedes influence over the future global energy system to China. The US is trying to tie its trading partners into fossil fuels, pressing the EU to buy $750 billion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear technologies during his presidency as part of a trade deal, scuppering an initiative to begin decarbonizing world shipping and pressuring others to reduce their reliance on Chinese technology. But the collapsing cost of solar panels in particular has spoken for itself in many parts of the world. Experts caution that the US's attacks on renewables could cause lasting damage to its competitiveness against China, even if an administration more favorable to renewables were to follow Trump's.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, SpaceX is reportedly poised to secure a $2 billion Pentagon contract to develop hundreds of missile-tracking satellites for President Trump's ambitious Golden Dome defense system. The Independent reports: The planned "air moving target indicator" system in question could ultimately feature as many as 600 satellites once it is fully operational, The Wall Street Journal reports. Musk's company has also been linked to two more satellite ventures, which are concerned with relaying sensitive communications and tracing vehicles, respectively. Golden Dome, inspired by Israel's "Iron Dome," was announced by Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at the White House in May and will amount to a complex system of satellites and weaponry capable of destroying incoming missiles before they hit American targets. The president promised it would be "fully operational" before he leaves office in January 2029, capable of intercepting rockets, "even if they are launched from space," with an overall price tag of $175 billion.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: It's time for Xbox to eat some humble pie and perform some real soul-searching. Microsoft released its latest quarterly earnings report and proved the worst of our fears about its gaming brand. Not only are Xbox hardware sales down significantly, but the brand itself is barely treading water. Gamers are voicing their displeasure with their wallets, but Microsoft's top brass is still only thinking about the margins. Microsoft was more keen to promote the scale of its cloud and AI services revenue -- which was up 28% year over year -- than talk about its beleaguered gaming brand. The company's overall gaming revenue fell by 2% compared to the same time last year. This was precipitated by a "decline in Xbox hardware," which was down by 22% following a steady decline quarter after quarter. Its first-party games and its Game Pass subscription were doing better, though the overall growth was only up by 1%, and even that was driven by the "better-than-expected performance" of third-party games. You can give credit to titles like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for why Xbox isn't in an even deeper hole than it is now. The tech giant has no expectation that its Xbox brand will start making more money anytime soon. In its earnings call with investors, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said the company expects Xbox will continue to decline "in the low to mid-single digits" for the following quarter. That's mostly due to the lack of landmark first-party titles. Just this month, Xbox released Ninja Gaiden 4, The Outer Worlds 2, and Double Fine's The Keeper. Xbox also made a huge marketing push for its first handheld, made in partnership with Asus, the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X. In any other year, this would be a big month for any gaming company. The dour outlook comes after months of bad news. After two subsequent price hikes, Xbox Series S and Series X consoles now cost between $100 to $150 more than they did at launch five years ago. Microsoft also pushed prices of its Game Pass Ultimate subscription tier from $20 to $30 per month. A full-year's subscription would now demand $360. In a separate article, Gizmodo reviews Microsoft's new ROG Xbox Ally X handheld, which "offers a better experience overall" than the "other small-scale Windows PC gaming devices released this year." However, "it's still nowhere close to what you truly want from a console."

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OpenAI has introduced Aardvark, a GPT-5-powered autonomous agent that scans, reasons about, and patches code like a human security researcher. "By embedding itself directly into the development pipeline, Aardvark aims to turn security from a post-development concern into a continuous safeguard that evolves with the software itself," reports InfoWorld. From the report: What makes Aardvark unique, OpenAI noted, is its combination of reasoning, automation, and verification. Rather than simply highlighting potential vulnerabilities, the agent promises multi-stage analysis -- starting by mapping an entire repository and building a contextual threat model around it. From there, it continuously monitors new commits, checking whether each change introduces risk or violates existing security patterns. Additionally, upon identifying a potential issue, Aardvark attempts to validate the exploitability of the finding in a sandboxed environment before flagging it. This validation step could prove transformative. Traditional static analysis tools often overwhelm developers with false alarms -- issues that may look risky but aren't truly exploitable. "The biggest advantage is that it will reduce false positives significantly," noted Jain. "It's helpful in open source codes and as part of the development pipeline." Once a vulnerability is confirmed, Aardvark integrates with Codex to propose a patch, then re-analyzes the fix to ensure it doesn't introduce new problems. OpenAI claims that in benchmark tests, the system identified 92 percent of known and synthetically introduced vulnerabilities across test repositories, a promising indication that AI may soon shoulder part of the burden of modern code auditing.

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The FCC plans to repeal a Biden-era ruling that required ISPs to secure their networks under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, instead relying on voluntary cybersecurity commitments from telecom providers. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the ruling "exceeded the agency's authority and did not present an effective or agile response to the relevant cybersecurity threats." Carr said the vote scheduled for November 20 comes after "extensive FCC engagement with carriers" who have taken "substantial steps... to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses." Ars Technica reports: The FCC's January 2025 declaratory ruling came in response to attacks by China, including the Salt Typhoon infiltration of major telecom providers such as Verizon and AT&T. The Biden-era FCC found that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), a 1994 law, "affirmatively requires telecommunications carriers to secure their networks from unlawful access or interception of communications." "The Commission has previously found that section 105 of CALEA creates an affirmative obligation for a telecommunications carrier to avoid the risk that suppliers of untrusted equipment will "illegally activate interceptions or other forms of surveillance within the carrier's switching premises without its knowledge,'" the January order said. "With this Declaratory Ruling, we clarify that telecommunications carriers' duties under section 105 of CALEA extend not only to the equipment they choose to use in their networks, but also to how they manage their networks." A draft of the order that will be voted on in November can be found here (PDF).

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Bluesky has surpassed 40 million users and is launching a "dislikes" beta to improve its personalization algorithms and reduce toxic content. TechCrunch reports: With the "dislikes" beta rolling out soon, Bluesky will take into account the new signal to improve user personalization. As users "dislike" posts, the system will learn what sort of content they want to see less of. This will help to inform more than just how content is ranked in feeds, but also reply rankings. The company explained the changes are designed to make Bluesky a place for more "fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges" -- an edict that follows a month of unrest on the platform as some users again criticized the platform over its moderation decisions. While Bluesky is designed as a decentralized network where users run their own moderation, some subset of Bluesky users want the platform itself to ban bad actors and controversial figures instead of leaving it up to the users to block them. Bluesky, however, wants to focus more on the tools it provides users to control their own experience.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Even before Azure had a global failure this week, Austria's Ministry of Economy had taken a decisive step toward digital sovereignty. The Ministry achieved this status by migrating 1,200 employees to a Nextcloud-based cloud and collaboration platform hosted on Austrian-based infrastructure. This shift away from proprietary, foreign-owned cloud services, such as Microsoft 365, to an open-source, European-based cloud service aligns with a growing trend among European governments and agencies. They want control over sensitive data and to declare their independence from US-based tech providers. European companies are encouraging this trend. Many of them have joined forces in the newly created non-profit foundation, the EuroStack Initiative. This foundation's goal is " to organize action, not just talk, around the pillars of the initiative: Buy European, Sell European, Fund European." What's the motive behind these moves away from proprietary tech? Well, in Austria's case, Florian Zinnagl, CISO of the Ministry of Economy, Energy, and Tourism (BMWET), explained, "We carry responsibility for a large amount of sensitive data -- from employees, companies, and citizens. As a public institution, we take this responsibility very seriously. That's why we view it critically to rely on cloud solutions from non-European corporations for processing this information." Austria's move and motivation echo similar efforts in Germany, Denmark, and other EU states and agencies. The organizations include the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which abandoned Exchange and Outlook for open-source programs. Other agencies that have taken the same path away from Microsoft include the Austrian military, Danish government organizations, and the French city of Lyon. All of these organizations aim to keep data storage and processing within national or European borders to enhance security, comply with privacy laws such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and mitigate risks from potential commercial and foreign government surveillance.

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Disney's channels, including ESPN, ABC, FX, and NatGeo, have gone dark on YouTube TV after Google and Disney failed to renew their carriage agreement before the October 30 deadline, with each side blaming the other for using unfair negotiating tactics and price hikes. YouTube TV says it will issue a $20 credit to subscribers if the blackout continues while negotiations proceed. Engadget reports: "Last week Disney used the threat of a blackout on YouTube TV as a negotiating tactic to force deal terms that would raise prices on our customers," YouTube said in an announcement on its blog. "They're now following through on that threat, suspending their content on YouTube TV." YouTube added that Disney's decision harms its subscribers while benefiting its own live TV products, such as Hulu+Live TV and Fubo. In a statement sent to the Los Angeles Times, however, Disney accused Google's YouTube TV of choosing to deny "subscribers the content they value most by refusing to pay fair rates for [its] channels, including ESPN and ABC." Disney also accused Google of using its market dominance to "eliminate competition and undercut the industry-standard terms" that other pay-TV distributors have agreed to pay for its content.

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