Two British Scattered Spider members were sentenced to 5.5 years for the 2024 Transport for London cyberattack, the UK’s largest cybercrime prosecution. A tech support scam at Qantas exposed data of 5.7 million people. An AWS CloudFront outage due to storm winds disrupted sites like the UK National Lottery. Meta will notify parents if teens discuss suicide or self-harm with its AI chatbot, with global rollout planned.
Microsoft continues using dark patterns to push Edge, a Mozilla-commissioned report reveals, with misleading wording and forced resets—though EU rules curb this in Europe. A former employee’s lawsuit alleges AWS data centers secretly consume water year-round, contradicting its “water positive” claims. UK MPs warn Treasury cold feet could sink Whitehall’s ÂŁ1.15B shared services push, calling the funding reluctance a poor signal. Meanwhile, KeyBanc analysts say Salesforce’s Agentforce struggles with messy data, despite Salesforce touting it as its fastest-growing product.
TerraFirma, a construction tech startup founded by former SpaceX engineers, raised $115M for remotely operated equipment. Uber is in advanced talks to acquire Delivery Hero for over €11.2B. Google Images launched a Pinterest-like redesign with AI image creation in Search. Switch hired banks for a US IPO that could raise up to $10B, valuing it at $80B. IBM shares plunged over 20% after Q2 revenue missed estimates at $17.2B. New York Governor Hochul signed a one-year moratorium on hyperscale data centers over 50MW. OpenAI partnered with Kalshi to show World Cup predictions in ChatGPT.
Lidl warned customers in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands that a third-party security failure exposed names, emails, and potentially passwords and bank details, though no data misuse has been found. Lenovo denied using banned Chinese SSDs in restricted regions. Asha Sharma, appointed by Satya Nadella to lead Xbox, made sweeping job cuts and shed game studios. Meanwhile, FIFA’s official prediction-market partner ADI Predictstreet faced a troubled launch with tiny volumes and withdrawal bugs, leaving a promised World Cup ticket undelivered.
Hackers hijacked Argentina’s football federation email account to demand “justice” for Egypt over a controversial World Cup loss, escalating sports disputes into cyberattacks. Separately, security researchers exploited a critical SQL injection in Apple’s Book Travel portal to achieve remote code execution. Motorola MR2600 routers are also vulnerable to unauthenticated RCE via malicious firmware uploads, lacking cryptographic signing. Meanwhile, the AI boom is driving extreme boom-bust cycles in memory manufacturing, with warnings of a potential “RAMpocalypse” as demand strains supply.
Trump administration pressured Apple to use Intel’s fabs and pushed the chipmaker to expand domestic capacity. Irish datacenters now consume 23% of the country’s electricity, despite grid restrictions. Psychologist Peter Gray argues school stress and lack of unstructured play, not smartphones, are the primary drivers of the teen mental health crisis, challenging Jonathan Haidt. Activist investor Elliott took a large stake in CCC Intelligent Solutions, which is exploring a sale. Meanwhile, Chinese voice actor Shen Anyu struggles to prove his humanity as AI clones flood platforms, costing him income.
China dropped its urban jobs target for the first time since the 1990s in its five-year plan, citing AI-driven economic shifts. In tech, Scarf moved away from Haskell after seven years, blaming long compilation times as a bottleneck. A performance regression in Open MPI on Slingshot interconnects was traced to libcxi errors causing a fallback to TCP/IP, reducing bandwidth from 25 GB/s to 2.3 GB/s.
Interpol arrested 5,811 suspects and seized $293 million in a global anti-fraud operation across 97 countries. The U.S. Justice Department warned lawyers to expect less cooperation from Binance on crypto investigations, marking a shift after its 2023 settlement. Leaked renders of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Z Flip 8, plus new Watch models, emerged ahead of July’s Unpacked event. Sonos laid off top design executives including VP Dana Krieger, citing flatter management. Keygen Church released “Oscuro Domine,” an interactive track.
Allstate Insurance faces lawsuits from CA and VMware after alleging a retaliatory license audit from Broadcom. A widespread Telstra outage disrupted emergency calls, trains, and payments across Australia. Virgin Media was fined ÂŁ28M for making cancellations difficult. China warned developers against Claude Code over backdoor code fears. Former NASA chief Jim Bridenstine criticized the Artemis Moon plan for lacking a dedicated lander, while Microsoft introduced tech to rebuild dead PCs without local Windows copies.
As the US marks its 250th anniversary, political turmoil deepens with parallels drawn to its founding revolution against a ‘mad king’ amid Trump’s return, echoing warnings of self-destruction. In science, a Texas A&M nasal spray reversed brain aging in mice, restoring memory after two doses. Meanwhile, researchers discovered 26 new bacterial species in NASA cleanrooms, surviving extreme sterilization and producing valuable compounds. Jellyfish wound-healing in minutes also offers medical promise.
