An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The death of the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is starting to result in disconnection of Internet service for Americans with low incomes. On Friday, Charter Communications reported a net loss of 154,000 Internet subscribers that it said was mostly driven by customers canceling after losing the federal discount. About 100,000 of those subscribers were reportedly getting the discount, which in some cases made Internet service free to the consumer. The $30 monthly broadband discounts provided by the ACP ended in May after Congress failed to allocate more funding. The Biden administration requested (PDF) $6 billion to fund the ACP through December 2024, but Republicans called the program "wasteful."

Republican lawmakers' main complaint was that most of the ACP money went to households that already had broadband before the subsidy was created. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel warned that killing the discounts would reduce Internet access, saying (PDF) an FCC survey found that 77 percent of participating households would change their plan or drop Internet service entirely once the discounts expired. Charter's Q2 2024 earnings report provides some of the first evidence of users dropping Internet service after losing the discount. "Second quarter residential Internet customers decreased by 154,000, largely driven by the end of the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program subsidies in the second quarter, compared to an increase of 70,000 during the second quarter of 2023," Charter said.

Across all ISPs, there were 23 million US households enrolled in the ACP. Research released in January 2024 found that Charter was serving over 4 million ACP recipients and that up to 300,000 of those Charter customers would be "at risk" of dropping Internet service if the discounts expired. Given that ACP recipients must meet low-income eligibility requirements, losing the discounts could put a strain on their overall finances even if they choose to keep paying for Internet service. [...] Light Reading reported that Charter attributed about 100,000 of the 154,000 customer losses to the ACP shutdown. Charter said it retained most of its ACP subscribers so far, but that low-income households might not be able to continue paying for Internet service without a new subsidy for much longer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: California's "Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act" (a.k.a. SB-1047) has led to a flurry of headlines and debate concerning the overall "safety" of large artificial intelligence models. But critics are concerned that the bill's overblown focus on existential threats by future AI models could severely limit research and development for more prosaic, non-threatening AI uses today. SB-1047, introduced by State Senator Scott Wiener, passed the California Senate in May with a 32-1 vote and seems well positioned for a final vote in the State Assembly in August. The text of the bill requires companies behind sufficiently large AI models (currently set at $100 million in training costs and the rough computing power implied by those costs today) to put testing procedures and systems in place to prevent and respond to "safety incidents."

The bill lays out a legalistic definition of those safety incidents that in turn focuses on defining a set of "critical harms" that an AI system might enable. That includes harms leading to "mass casualties or at least $500 million of damage," such as "the creation or use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon" (hello, Skynet?) or "precise instructions for conducting a cyberattack... on critical infrastructure." The bill also alludes to "other grave harms to public safety and security that are of comparable severity" to those laid out explicitly. An AI model's creator can't be held liable for harm caused through the sharing of "publicly accessible" information from outside the model -- simply asking an LLM to summarize The Anarchist's Cookbook probably wouldn't put it in violation of the law, for instance. Instead, the bill seems most concerned with future AIs that could come up with "novel threats to public safety and security." More than a human using an AI to brainstorm harmful ideas, SB-1047 focuses on the idea of an AI "autonomously engaging in behavior other than at the request of a user" while acting "with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision."

To prevent this straight-out-of-science-fiction eventuality, anyone training a sufficiently large model must "implement the capability to promptly enact a full shutdown" and have policies in place for when such a shutdown would be enacted, among other precautions and tests. The bill also focuses at points on AI actions that would require "intent, recklessness, or gross negligence" if performed by a human, suggesting a degree of agency that does not exist in today's large language models. The bill's supporters include AI experts Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who believe the bill is a necessary precaution against potential catastrophic AI risks.

Bill critics include tech policy expert Nirit Weiss-Blatt and AI community voice Daniel Jeffries. They argue that the bill is based on science fiction fears and could harm technological advancement. Ars Technica contributor Timothy Lee and Meta's Yann LeCun say that the bill's regulations could hinder "open weight" AI models and innovation in AI research.

Instead, some experts suggest a better approach would be to focus on regulating harmful AI applications rather than the technology itself -- for example, outlawing nonconsensual deepfake pornography and improving AI safety research.

The Justice Department has ramped up the case to ban TikTok, saying in a court filing Friday that allowing the app to continue operating in its current state could result in voter manipulation in elections. From a report: The filing was made in response to a TikTok lawsuit attempting to block the government's ban. The Justice Department warned that the app's algorithm and parent company ByteDance's alleged ties to the Chinese government could be used for a "secret manipulation" campaign.

"Among other things, it would allow a foreign government to illicitly interfere with our political system and political discourse, including our elections...if, for example, the Chinese government were to determine that the outcome of a particular American election was sufficiently important to Chinese interests," the filing said. Under a law passed in April, TikTok has until January 2025 to find a new owner or it will be banned in the U.S. The company is suing to have that law overturned, saying it violates the company's First Amendment rights. The Justice Department disputed those claims. "The statute is aimed at national-security concerns unique to TikTok's connection to a hostile foreign power, not at any suppression of protected speech," officials wrote.

"Apple and the union representing retail workers at its store in Towson, Maryland, agreed to a tentative labor deal late Friday," reports CNN, "in the first US labor agreement not only for an Apple store but for any US workers of the tech giant." Workers at the Apple store in Towson had voted to join the International Association of Machinists union in June 2022 and have since been seeking their first contract. In May, they voted to authorize a strike without providing a deadline. The labor deal, which needs to be ratified by a vote of the 85 rank-and-file members at the store before it can take effect, is a significant milestone. Other high-profile union organizing efforts, such as those at Starbucks and Amazon, have yet to produce deals for those workers, even though workers at those companies voted to join unions well before the workers at the Apple store in Maryland.

There are not many legal requirements to force a company to reach a labor agreement with a new union once that union has been recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, the government body that oversees labor relations for most US business. But the process can take a long time, as one recent study by Bloomberg Law found the average time for reaching a first contract is 465 days, or roughly 15 months. In many cases, it can take longer. A separate 2023 academic study found 43% of new unions were still seeking their first contract two years after winning a representation election.
The union said their deal includes pay increases of 10% over the three-year life of the contract and guaranteed severance packages for laid-off workers.

Former U.S. president Donald Trump spoke at Nashville's Bitcoin Conference on Saturday.

But he wasn't the only one there making headlines, according to a local newspaper called the Tennesseean: Republican Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Tim Scott pledged their resolute support for the cryptocurrency industry at Nashville's Bitcoin2024 conference Friday — moments before whistleblower and political dissident Edward Snowden warned attendees to be wary of politicians trying to win them over. "Cast a vote, but don't join a cult," Snowden said. "They are not our tribe. They are not your personality. They have their own interests, their own values, their own things that they're chasing. Try to get what you need from them, but don't give yourself to them."

Snowden didn't call out any politicians specifically, but the conference has drawn national attention for its robust lineup of legislators including former President Donald Trump, independent presidential nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and a number of other senators. "Does this feel normal to you?" Snowden said. "When you look at the candidates, when you look at the dynamics, even the people on stage giving all the speeches, I'm not saying they're terrible at all, but it's a little unusual. The fact that they're here is a little unusual...."

Two key tenets of Bitcoin are transparency and decentralization, which means anyone can view all Bitcoin transactions on a public ledger. Snowden said this kind of metadata could be dangerous in the wrong hands, especially with artificial intelligence innovations making it easier to collect. "It is fantasy to imagine they're not doing this," he said.... He added that other countries like China or Russia could be collecting this same data. Snowden said he's afraid the collection of transaction data could happen across financial institutions and ultimately be used against the customers.
Also speaking was RFK Jr — who asked why Snowden hadn't already been pardoned, along with Julian Assange and Ross Ulbricht, when Donald Trump was president (as Kennedy promised to do). According to USA Today, Kennedy promised more than just creating a strategic reserve of Bitcoin worth more than half a trillion dollars: Kennedy also pledged to sign an executive order directing the IRS to treat Bitcoin as an eligible asset for 1031 Exchange into real property — making transactions unreportable and by extension nontaxable — which prompted a roar of approval from the crowd.
Though Trump's appearance also ended with a promise to have the government create a "strategic national bitcoin stockpile," NBC News notes that Trump "stopped short of offering many details." Immediately following Trump's remarks, Senator Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., said she would introduce a bill to create the reserve. However, the price of bitcoin fell slightly in the wake of Trump's remarks Saturday, perhaps reflecting crypto traders' unmet expectations for a more definitive commitment on the reserve idea from the presidential candidate...

Shortly after his morning remarks, Bitcoin Magazine reported that a group of Democratic representatives and candidates had sent a letter to the Democratic National Committee urging party leaders to be more supportive of crypto...

On Saturday, the Financial Times reported [presidential candidate Kamala] Harris had approached top crypto companies seeking a "reset" of relations, citing unnamed sources.
Ironically, in the end one conference attendee ended up telling Bloomberg that "It doesn't really matter who the president is. I don't really care much about it, because Bitcoin will do its thing regardless."

Tuesday Meta released Llama 3.1, its largest open-source AI model to date. But just one day Mistral released Large 2, notes this report from TechCrunch, "which it claims to be on par with the latest cutting-edge models from OpenAI and Meta in terms of code generation, mathematics, and reasoning...

"Though Mistral is one of the newer entrants in the artificial intelligence space, it's quickly shipping AI models on or near the cutting edge." In a press release, Mistral says one of its key focus areas during training was to minimize the model's hallucination issues. The company says Large 2 was trained to be more discerning in its responses, acknowledging when it does not know something instead of making something up that seems plausible. The Paris-based AI startup recently raised $640 million in a Series B funding round, led by General Catalyst, at a $6 billion valuation...

However, it's important to note that Mistral's models are, like most others, not open source in the traditional sense — any commercial application of the model needs a paid license. And while it's more open than, say, GPT-4o, few in the world have the expertise and infrastructure to implement such a large model. (That goes double for Llama's 405 billion parameters, of course.)
Mistral only has 123 billion parameters, according to the article. But whichever system prevails, "Open Source AI Is the Path Forward," Mark Zuckerberg wrote this week, predicting that open-source AI will soar to the same popularity as Linux: This year, Llama 3 is competitive with the most advanced models and leading in some areas. Starting next year, we expect future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry. But even before that, Llama is already leading on openness, modifiability, and cost efficiency... Beyond releasing these models, we're working with a range of companies to grow the broader ecosystem. Amazon, Databricks, and NVIDIA are launching full suites of services to support developers fine-tuning and distilling their own models. Innovators like Groq have built low-latency, low-cost inference serving for all the new models. The models will be available on all major clouds including AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and more. Companies like Scale.AI, Dell, Deloitte, and others are ready to help enterprises adopt Llama and train custom models with their own data.
"As the community grows and more companies develop new services, we can collectively make Llama the industry standard and bring the benefits of AI to everyone," Zuckerberg writes. He says that he's heard from developers, CEOs, and government officials that they want to "train, fine-tune, and distill" their own models, protecting their data with a cheap and efficient model — and without being locked into a closed vendor. But they also tell him that want to invest in an ecosystem "that's going to be the standard for the long term." Lots of people see that open source is advancing at a faster rate than closed models, and they want to build their systems on the architecture that will give them the greatest advantage long term...

One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms. Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they apply, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it's clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build. On a philosophical level, this is a major reason why I believe so strongly in building open ecosystems in AI and AR/VR for the next generation of computing...

I believe that open source is necessary for a positive AI future. AI has more potential than any other modern technology to increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life — and to accelerate economic growth while unlocking progress in medical and scientific research. Open source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI, that power isn't concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, and that the technology can be deployed more evenly and safely across society. There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives. I think governments will conclude it's in their interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer... [O]pen source should be significantly safer since the systems are more transparent and can be widely scrutinized...

The bottom line is that open source AI represents the world's best shot at harnessing this technology to create the greatest economic opportunity and security for everyone... I believe the Llama 3.1 release will be an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source, and I expect that approach to only grow from here. I hope you'll join us on this journey to bring the benefits of AI to everyone in the world.

Speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made a number of cryptocurrency-related pledges:

• Trump promised that if elected, he'd commute the sentence of Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served. "It's enough."

• Trump promised to change the top personnel at America's Securities and Exchange Commission. "On Day One, I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chairman," Trump told the crowd, drawing a long round of applause. ("I didn't know he was that unpopular," Trump joked — then repeated his promise to appoint "a new SEC chairman who believes America should build the future, not block the future, which is what they're doing.")

• Trump also promised that "As president, I will immediately shut down Operation Chokepoint 2.0." (For context, Operation Chokepoint was an Obama-era program — ended during Trump's presidency — to scrutinize bank lending to "high-risk" merchants, mostly predatory "payday" lenders. Concerns were raised that bank regulators were pressuring banks to cut off certain businesses, and while there is no official "Choke Point 2.0," the phrase has been used colloquially to describe the possibility of bank regulators pressuring specific industries like cryptocurrency.)

• Trump also announced he'd oppose a central bank digital currency — although his wording was a little idiosyncratic. "Next I will immediately order the Treasury Department and other federal agencies to cease and desist all steps necessary — because, you know, there's a thing going on in your industry. They want to move the creation of a central bank digital currency. It's over, forget it." [Audience boos CBDC's ] "CBDC — there will never be a CBDC while I'm president of the United States." (In fact a 2023 statement from America's Federal Reserve about CBDC's stresses that "no decisions have been made at this time" and that the Federal Reserve would only proceed with a CBDC after passage of an authorizing law.)

• Trump also told the audience that "We will create a framework to enable the safe and responsible expansion of staple — stablecoins," then teased the crypto-friendly audience by asking playfully "Do you know what a stablecoin is? Does anybody know — please raise your hand." Trump promised the move would "allow us to extend the dominance of the U.S. dollar to new frontiers all around the world," and that "there will be billions and billions of people brought into the crypto economy and storing their savings in bitcoin."

• Toward the end Trump said that if elected, he would direct the government not to sell any of its currently-held bitcoin, keeping it instead as the core of a "strategic national bitcoin stockpile."
  
  "As you know, most of the bitcoin currently held by the U.S. government was obtained through law enforcement action — you know that, they took it from you. 'Let's take that guy's life, let's take his family, his house, his bitcoin — we'll turn it into bitcoin.' It's been taken away from you because that's where we're going now. That's where this country is going. It's a facist regime."

In a speech which lasted for over an hour, the 78-year-old former president also criticized his political opponents, touching on topics like inflation, immigration, and his promise to "drill, baby, drill."

But Trump closed by thanking the 3,000 attendees, telling them to "have a good time with your bitcoin, and your crypto and everything else that you're playing with. And we're going to make that one of the greatest industries on earth."

The U.K. government "will substantially increase offshore wind investment in the next five years," writes long-time Slashdot reader shilly — "in partnership with the Crown Estate (a public corporation that owns land including the coastal seabed on behalf of the monarch)." It will do this via its new state-owned energy generation [and investment] company, Great British Energy. The new approach includes ensuring grid connections are in place, and is in tandem with changes to the UK's planning regime that should reduce the ability of NIMBY groups to prevent infrastructure build-outs. Since [the Labour Party] came to power 20 days ago, the government has also approved three new solar farms and reversed a ban on onshore wind.
Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a speech Thursday that "I don't just want to be in the race for clean energy; I want us to win the race for clean energy," according to an article by BNN Bloomberg: Thursday's announcement marks the first concrete step by the government to use Great British Energy in its quest for a zero-carbon electric grid by 2030. The collaboration with the Crown Estate, owners of the UK's seabed, means the public sector will get involved in projects earlier and may attract more private funding... Great British Energy is receiving £8.3 billion of taxpayer money to own and operate assets in collaboration with the private sector.
The article points out that "By allowing borrowing, the government believes 20-30 gigawatts of new offshore wind seabed leases can be secured by 2030."

As Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in his speech, "We've got the potential, we've got the ports, we've got the people, the skills."

On Wednesday, Judge Nina Morrison ruled that cellphone searches at the border are "nonroutine" and require probable cause and a warrant, likening them to more invasive searches due to their heavy privacy impact. As reported by Reason, this decision closes the loophole in the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have exploited. Courts have previously ruled that the government has the right to conduct routine warrantless searches for contraband at the border. From the report: Although the interests of stopping contraband are "undoubtedly served when the government searches the luggage or pockets of a person crossing the border carrying objects that can only be introduced to this country by being physically moved across its borders, the extent to which those interests are served when the government searches data stored on a person's cell phone is far less clear," the judge declared. Morrison noted that "reviewing the information in a person's cell phone is the best approximation government officials have for mindreading," so searching through cellphone data has an even heavier privacy impact than rummaging through physical possessions. Therefore, the court ruled, a cellphone search at the border requires both probable cause and a warrant. Morrison did not distinguish between scanning a phone's contents with special software and manually flipping through it.

And in a victory for journalists, the judge specifically acknowledged the First Amendment implications of cellphone searches too. She cited reporting by The Intercept and VICE about CPB searching journalists' cellphones "based on these journalists' ongoing coverage of politically sensitive issues" and warned that those phone searches could put confidential sources at risk. Wednesday's ruling adds to a stream of cases restricting the feds' ability to search travelers' electronics. The 4th and 9th Circuits, which cover the mid-Atlantic and Western states, have ruled that border police need at least "reasonable suspicion" of a crime to search cellphones. Last year, a judge in the Southern District of New York also ruled (PDF) that the government "may not copy and search an American citizen's cell phone at the border without a warrant absent exigent circumstances."

US presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced during his keynote Friday at the Bitcoin Conference that he would direct the US government to buy Bitcoin until the size of its Bitcoin reserves matched its gold reserves. At current prices, that equates to $615 billion worth of gold.
RFK Jr. said: "I will sign an executive order directing the US Treasury to purchase 550 Bitcoin daily until the US has built a reserve of at least 4,000,000 Bitcoins and a position of dominance that no other country will be able to usurp."
4 million Bitcoin is 19% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist.

The White House announced that Apple has "signed onto the voluntary commitments" in line with the administration's previous AI executive order. "In addition, federal agencies reported that they completed all of the 270-day actions in the Executive Order on schedule, following their on-time completion of every other task required to date." From a report: The executive order "built on voluntary commitments" was supported by 15 leading AI companies last year. The White House said the agencies have taken steps "to mitigate AI's safety and security risks, protect Americans' privacy, advance equity and civil rights, stand up for consumers and workers, promote innovation and competition, advance American leadership around the world, and more." It's a White House effort to mobilize government "to ensure that America leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of artificial intelligence," according to the White House.

Internet service providers are pushing back against the Biden administration's requirement for low-cost options even as they are attempting to secure funds from a $42.45 billion government broadband initiative. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, established by law to expand internet access, mandates that recipients offer affordable plans to eligible low-income subscribers, a stipulation the providers argue infringes on legal prohibitions against rate regulation. ISPs claim that the proposed $30 monthly rate for low-cost plans is economically unfeasible, especially in hard-to-reach rural areas, potentially undermining the program's goals by discouraging provider participation.

More students are getting high scores on Advanced Placement tests, long seen as a gateway to elite college admissions as well as a way to earn college credit during high school. From a report: Changes by the tests' maker in recent years have shifted scores upward. That has led to hundreds of thousands of additional students getting what's considered a passing score -- 3 or above on the 1-to-5 scale -- on exams in popular courses including AP U.S. History and AP U.S. Government.

The nonprofit behind the tests, College Board, says it updated the scoring by replacing its panel of experts with a large-scale data analysis to better reflect the skills students learn in the courses. Some skeptical teachers, test-prep companies and college administrators see the recent changes as another form of grade inflation, and a way to boost the organization's business by making AP courses seem more attractive.

"It is hard to argue with the premise of AP, that students who are talented and academically accomplished can get a head start on college," said Jon Boeckenstedt, the vice provost of enrollment at Oregon State University. "But I think it's a business move." The number of students cheering their higher AP scores could rise again next year. The College Board said it is still recalibrating several other subjects, including its most popular course, AP English Language, which attracts more than half a million test takers.

snydeq shares a report from CIO.com: ServiceNow has reported potential compliance issues to the US Department of Justice "related to one of its government contracts" as well as the hiring of the then-CIO of the US Army to be its head of global public sector, the company said in regulatory filings on Wednesday. The DOJ is looking into the matter. Following an internal investigation, ServiceNow said, its President and COO, CJ Desai, has resigned, while "the other individual has also departed the company." That executive, Raj Iyer, told CIO.com, "I resigned because I didn't want to be associated with this fiasco in any way. It's not my fault." CEO Bill McDermott told financial analysts in a conference call Wednesday that someone within ServiceNow had complained about the situation and that an internal probe "determined that our company policy was violated."

"Acting with total transparency, the company proactively disclosed the findings of the investigation to the proper government entities. And as a result, today, we're announcing the departure of the individual whose hiring was the subject of the original complaint," McDermott said. "We also came to a mutual agreement that CJ Desai, our President and COO, would offer his resignation from the company effective immediately. While we believe this was an isolated incident, we are further sharpening our hiring policies and procedures as a result of the situation."

Malaysia's digital minister said today he has asked global tech firms Microsoft and CrowdStrike to consider compensating companies that suffered losses during last week's global tech outage. From a report: Five government agencies and nine companies operating in aviation, banking and healthcare were among those affected in Malaysia, minister Gobind Singh Deo told reporters. "If there are any damages or losses, where there have been any parties that have made such claims, I've asked them to consider those claims and see to what extent they are able to help resolve the issue," Gobind said, adding that the government would also assist on the claims where possible. The total amount of losses incurred has not yet been determined, he said. The outage will cost Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion, according to estimates from insurers. The projected financial losses exclude Microsoft.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has advocated for open-source AI development, asserting it as a strategic advantage for the United States against China. In a blog post, Zuckerberg argued that closing off AI models would not effectively prevent Chinese access, given their espionage capabilities, and would instead disadvantage U.S. allies and smaller entities. He writes: Our adversaries are great at espionage, stealing models that fit on a thumb drive is relatively easy, and most tech companies are far from operating in a way that would make this more difficult. It seems most likely that a world of only closed models results in a small number of big companies plus our geopolitical adversaries having access to leading models, while startups, universities, and small businesses miss out on opportunities. Plus, constraining American innovation to closed development increases the chance that we don't lead at all. Instead, I think our best strategy is to build a robust open ecosystem and have our leading companies work closely with our government and allies to ensure they can best take advantage of the latest advances and achieve a sustainable first-mover advantage over the long term.

Negotiations on a global tax deal have extended beyond the June 30 deadline, with countries now looking to the G20 finance leaders meeting for progress. "The stakes in the negotiations are high," reports Reuters. "A failure to reach agreement on final terms could prompt several countries to reinstate their taxes on U.S. tech giants and risk punitive duties on billions of dollars in exports to the U.S." Some countries, like Canada, have already implemented their own digital services tax. Reuters reports: The so-called "Pillar 1" arrangement, part of a 2021 global two-part tax deal, aims to replace unilateral digital services taxes (DSTs) on U.S. tech giants including Alphabet's Google, Amazon.com and Apple through a new mechanism to share taxing rights on a broader, global group of companies. Standstill agreements under which Washington has suspended threatened trade retaliation against seven countries -- Austria, Britain, France, India, Italy, Spain and Turkey -- expired on June 30, but the U.S. has not taken steps to impose tariffs.

Discussions on the matter are continuing. An Italian government source said that European countries were seeking assurances that the U.S. tariffs on some $2 billion worth of annual imports from French Champagne to Italian handbags and optical lenses remained frozen while the talks continue, including at the G20 meeting in Rio de Janeiro. A European Union document prepared for the G20 meeting lists finalizing the international tax deal as a "top priority." It said the G20 should urge countries and jurisdictions participating in the tax deal "to finalize discussions on all aspects of Pillar 1, with a view to signing the Multilateral Convention (MLC) by summer end and ratifying it as soon as possible." "Treasury continues to oppose all tax measures that discriminate against U.S. businesses," a U.S. Treasury spokesperson said in response to Canada's move. "We encourage all countries to finalize the work on the Pillar 1 agreement. We are in active discussions on next steps related to the existing DST joint statements."

According to Bloomberg, hackers have leaked internal documents stolen from Leidos Holdings, one of the largest IT services providers of the U.S. government. Reuters reports: The company recently became aware of the issue and believes the documents were taken during a previously reported breach of a Diligent Corp. system it used, the report said, adding that Leidos is investigating it. The Virginia-based company, which counts the U.S. Department of Defense as its primary customer, used the Diligent system to host information gathered in internal investigations, the report added, citing a filing from June 2023. A spokesperson for Diligent said the issue seems to be related to an incident from 2022, affecting its subsidiary Steele Compliance Solutions. The company notified impacted customers and had taken corrective action to contain the incident in November 2022.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA): Alexey Soldatov, a Russian Internet pioneer and a founder of the first Internet provider in the country, has been sentenced by a court to two years in a labor colony on charges of "abuse of power." Soldatov, 72, had been detained by a court in Moscow. He is terminally ill. Very few in Russia believe in the government charges against a man widely known as a Father of the Russian Internet -- and who is less well known as the father of Andrei Soldatov, one of this article's authors. Soldatov was accused of abuse of power when managing a pool of IP-addresses by an organization he had no position at. This legal absurdity was enough to see him imprisoned even though the court knew of Soldatov's illness, which meant the court had no legal right to pass a custodial sentence. His family believes that the decision is essentially a death sentence. The article details Soldatov's history and his pivotal role in creating the Relcom network, which connected Soviet research centers and established the Soviet Union's first link to the global internet in 1990. During the 1991 KGB coup attempt, Relcom remained operational, highlighting its role in bypassing traditional media control and connecting people both within the Soviet Union and globally.

According to the Washington Post (paywalled), the House Homeland Security Committee has called on the CrowdStrike CEO to testify over the major outage that brought flights, hospital procedures, and broadcasters to a halt on Friday. The outage was caused by a defective software update from the company that primarily affected computers runnings Windows, resulting in system crashes and "blue screen of death" errors. From the report: Republican leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee demanded that CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz commit by Wednesday to appearing on Capitol Hill to explain how the outages occurred and what "mitigation steps" the company is taking to prevent future episodes. [...] Reps. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) and Andrew R. Garbarino (R-N.Y.), chairs of the Homeland Security Committee and its cybersecurity subcommittee, respectively, wrote in their letter that the outages "must serve as a broader warning about the national security risks associated with network dependency. Protecting our critical infrastructure requires us to learn from this incident and ensure that it does not happen again," the lawmakers wrote. CrowdStrike spokesperson Kirsten Speas said in an emailed statement Monday that the company is "actively in contact" with the relevant congressional committees and that "engagement timelines may be disclosed at Members' discretion," but declined to say whether Kurtz will testify.

The committee is one of several looking into the incident, with members of the House Oversight Committee and House Energy and Commerce Committee separately requesting briefings from CrowdStrike. But the effort by Homeland Security Committee leaders marks the first time the company is being publicly summoned to testify about its role in the disruptions. CrowdStrike has risen to prominence as a major security provider partly by identifying malicious online campaigns by foreign actors, but the outages have heightened concern in Washington that international adversaries could look to exploit future incidents. "Malicious cyber actors backed by nation-states, such as China and Russia, are watching our response to this incident closely," Green and Garbarino wrote. The outages, which disrupted agencies at the federal and state level, are also raising questions about how much businesses and government officials alike have come to rely on Microsoft products for their daily operations.