A Wall Street Journal analysis has revealed that private insurers in the government's Medicare Advantage program, including UnitedHealth Group, have made numerous questionable diagnoses leading to increased taxpayer-funded payments between 2018 and 2021.

The investigation found instances where patients were diagnosed with conditions they did not have, such as diabetic cataracts and HIV, often without their knowledge. These diagnoses resulted in higher payments from Medicare to the insurers. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said they are implementing changes to ensure "taxpayer dollars are appropriately spent." The story adds: In all, Medicare paid insurers about $50 billion for diagnoses added just by insurers in the three years ending in 2021, the Journal's analysis showed.

"Russia has finally admitted that American astronauts did, in fact, land on the moon," reports Newsweek: Head of Russian Space Corporation Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, accepted the truth of the U.S. putting a man on the moon in an address to the State Duma, Intellinews has reported.

"As for whether the Americans were on the Moon or not, I have one fact to share," he was reported to have said. "I was personally interested in this matter. At one time, they provided us with a portion of the lunar soil that the astronauts brought back during their expedition." Previous polling revealed that just under half of Russians believe America's 1969 moon landing was a government hoax. However, Borisov said that tests performed on the samples by the Russian Academy of Scientists confirmed their authenticity.

Boeing agreed on Sunday to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud the government in a case linked to crashes of its 737 Max jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people -- a stunning turn for the aerospace giant after the Justice Department determined that Boeing failed to live up to terms of a 2021 deal to avoid prosecution. Washington Post adds: Prosecutors alleged that two Boeing pilots concealed key information from the Federal Aviation Administration about a new automated control system on the Max. The system was implicated in both crashes, causing uncontrollable dives. By agreeing to plead guilty to the single felony count just before a midnight deadline Sunday, the company will avoid going to trial in the high-profile case.

The Justice Department filed documents related to the deal in federal court in Texas late Sunday night, setting up a planned hearing where family members -- who have criticized the pending agreement -- will be permitted to speak out. The court subsequently must decide whether to accept the plea agreement. Boeing had already agreed to $2.5 billion in penalties and payouts in 2021. As part of the new deal, the company will pay an additional $487.2 million in penalties, agree to oversight by an independent monitor, spend at least $455 million to strengthen compliance and safety programs and be placed on supervised probation for roughly three years, according to a Justice Department official. The agreement also included one thing crash victims' families long sought: a meeting with Boeing's board of directors.

"China may be the world's second-largest economy," writes Fortune's news editor, "but when it comes to startup funding, the U.K. is punching above its weight." Startups in the U.K. raised $6.7 billion in funding during the first half of 2024, helping dethrone China and propelling the U.K. to second place globally for funds raised, according to a new report. Crucial to the U.K.'s success were a dozen funding rounds worth over $100 million each, including those of digital bank Monzo ($620 million), lender Abound ($862 million), and automated driving startup Wayve ($1.05 billion).

While the overall U.K. figure was down 2% year on year, according to data from global market intelligence platform Tracxn, it remained more robust than that of China, whose funding sat at $6.1 billion in H1 2024, helping the U.K. move into the No. 2 spot globally. The win is a milestone for the U.K. tech sector, which has remained under pressure owing to a string of challenges, including Brexit, COVID-19, and the subsequent global economic slowdown.

Only the U.S. saw startups raise more capital in H1, with a combined $54.8 billion raised across some 2,654 funding rounds in the first half of the year.
The article's last line? "With the arrival of new U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, many will be hoping that the first Labour government in 14 years will continue to support the U.K.'s position as a critical player in the global tech landscape."

As Amazon's stock hits a record high (rising 32% just this year), long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: GeekWire reports that Jeff Bezos keeps selling Amazon stock after announcing his move away from Washington state — and its 7% tax on capital gains of more than $262,000 from the sale of stocks and bonds — to Florida, which does not have a capital gains tax (like WA, FL also does not tax personal income).

Taylor Soper writes, "Bezos saved more than $600 million by moving to Miami and avoiding Washington's capital gains tax, CNBC reported in February, based on his sale of 50 million shares [$8.5 billion] earlier this year. With the sale of 25 million additional shares [$5 billion], revealed this week in a regulatory filing, Bezos will likely have saved close to $1 billion in total so far. It's a giant chunk of change that would have otherwise gone to the state of Washington."

At one point on Friday the entire cryptocurrency market shed more than $170 billion in capitalization within 24 hours, CNBC reported (citing data from CoinGecko).

"Cryptocurrencies plunged... as investors focused on the payout of nearly $9 billion to users of collapsed bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox." This dumping of coins onto the market is expected to lead to some significant selling action. The slump in crypto prices led to hefty liquidations in the derivatives markets, according to crypto data firm Coinglass, which suggests that 229,755 traders had their positions worth a combined $639.58 million liquidated [within 24 hours]. Of this sum, $540.46 million represented long trades — financial positions taken when an investor expects the price of an asset to appreciate over the long term. Also pressuring crypto markets, the German government on Thursday sold roughly 3,000 bitcoins — worth approximately $175 million as of today's prices — from a 50,000-bitcoin pile seized in connection with the movie piracy operation Movie2k, according to Arkham Intelligence....

Tom Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday that he still sees bitcoin hitting $150,000 despite the "overhang" from Mt. Gox's upcoming disbursement of tokens to creditors.
Wired focuses on how "After a 10-Year Wait, Mt. Gox Bitcoin Is Finally Being Returned": In a highly atypical turn of events, Mt. Gox customers actually stand to profit financially from their involvement in the bankruptcy. Because only a limited amount of bitcoin was recovered, customers will receive only roughly 15 percent of the bitcoin they held on the exchange. However, the hundredfold increase in price in the intervening period means the dollar-value of the coins will far exceed the worth of their original pile.

Harvard Business School has an "Institute for Business in Global Society" that explores the societal impacts of business. And they've recently published some new AI-powered research about EV charging infrastructure, according to the Institute's blog, conducted by climate fellow Omar Asensio.

"Asensio and his team, supported by Microsoft and National Science Foundation awards, spent years building models and training AI tools to extract insights and make predictions," using the reviews drivers left (in more than 72 languages) on the smartphone apps drivers use to pay for charging. And ultimately this research identified "a significant obstacle to increasing electric vehicle (EV) sales and decreasing carbon emissions in the United States: owners' deep frustration with the state of charging infrastructure, including unreliability, erratic pricing, and lack of charging locations..." [C]harging stations in the U.S. have an average reliability score of only 78%, meaning that about one in five don't work. They are, on average, less reliable than regular gas stations, Asensio said. "Imagine if you go to a traditional gas station and two out of 10 times the pumps are out of order," he said. "Consumers would revolt...." EV drivers often find broken equipment, making charging unreliable at best and simply not as easy as the old way of topping off a tank of gas. The reason? "No one's maintaining these stations," Asensio said.
One problem? Another blog post by the Institute notes that America's approach to public charging has differed sharply from those in other countries: In Europe and Asia, governments started making major investments in public charging infrastructure years ago. In America, the initial thinking was that private companies would fill the public's need by spending money to install charging stations at hotels, shopping malls and other public venues. But that decentralized approach failed to meet demand and the Biden administration is now investing heavily to grow the charging network and facilitate EV sales... "No single market actor has sufficient incentive to build out a national charging network at a pace that meets our climate goals," the report declared. Citing research and the experience of other countries, it noted that "policies that increase access to charging stations may be among the best policies to increase EV sales." But the U.S. is far behind other countries.
Thanks to Slashdot reader NoWayNoShapeNoForm for sharing the article.

General Motors will pay nearly $146 million in penalties to the U.S. government, reports the Associated Press, "because 5.9 million of its older vehicles do not comply with emissions and fuel economy standards." The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement Wednesday that certain GM vehicles from the 2012 through 2018 model years did not comply with federal fuel economy requirements. The penalty comes after the Environmental Protection Agency said its testing showed the GM pickup trucks and SUVs emit over 10% more carbon dioxide on average than GM's initial compliance testing claimed.

The EPA says the vehicles will remain on the road and cannot be repaired. The GM vehicles on average consume at least 10% more fuel than the window sticker numbers say, but the company won't be required to reduce the miles per gallon on the stickers, the EPA said... GM said in a statement that it complied with all regulations in pollution and mileage certification of its vehicles. The company said it is not admitting to any wrongdoing nor that it failed to comply with the Clean Air Act...

The enforcement action involves about 4.6 million full-size pickups and SUVs and about 1.3 million midsize SUVs, the EPA said. The affected models include the Chevy Tahoe, Cadillac Escalade and Chevy Silverado. About 40 variations of GM vehicles are covered. GM will be forced to give up credits used to ensure that manufacturers' greenhouse gas emissions are below the fleet standard for emissions that applies for that model year, the EPA said. In a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, GM said it expects the total cost to resolve the matter will be $490 million. Because GM agreed to address the excess emissions, EPA said it was not necessary to make a formal determination regarding the reasons for the excess pollution.
According to the article, David Cooke, senior vehicles analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, "said it's possible that GM owners could sue the company because they are getting lower gas mileage than advertised."

The article also notes that in 2014, Hyundai and Kia "entered into a settlement in which they had to pay a $100 million civil penalty to end a two year investigation into overstated gas mileage on window stickers of 1.2 million vehicles."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than 384,000 websites are linking to a site that was caught last week performing a supply-chain attack that redirected visitors to malicious sites, researchers said. For years, the JavaScript code, hosted at polyfill[.]com, was a legitimate open source project that allowed older browsers to handle advanced functions that weren't natively supported. By linking to cdn.polyfill[.]io, websites could ensure that devices using legacy browsers could render content in newer formats. The free service was popular among websites because all they had to do was embed the link in their sites. The code hosted on the polyfill site did the rest. In February, China-based company Funnull acquired the domain and the GitHub account that hosted the JavaScript code. On June 25, researchers from security firm Sansec reported that code hosted on the polyfill domain had been changed to redirect users to adult- and gambling-themed websites. The code was deliberately designed to mask the redirections by performing them only at certain times of the day and only against visitors who met specific criteria.

The revelation prompted industry-wide calls to take action. Two days after the Sansec report was published, domain registrar Namecheap suspended the domain, a move that effectively prevented the malicious code from running on visitor devices. Even then, content delivery networks such as Cloudflare began automatically replacing pollyfill links with domains leading to safe mirror sites. Google blocked ads for sites embedding the Polyfill[.]io domain. The website blocker uBlock Origin added the domain to its filter list. And Andrew Betts, the original creator of Polyfill.io, urged website owners to remove links to the library immediately. As of Tuesday, exactly one week after malicious behavior came to light, 384,773 sites continued to link to the site, according to researchers from security firm Censys. Some of the sites were associated with mainstream companies including Hulu, Mercedes-Benz, and Warner Bros. and the federal government. The findings underscore the power of supply-chain attacks, which can spread malware to thousands or millions of people simply by infecting a common source they all rely on.

MattSparkes writes: Secret international discussions have resulted in governments across the world imposing identical export controls on quantum computers, while refusing to disclose the scientific rationale behind the regulations. Although quantum computers theoretically have the potential to threaten national security by breaking encryption techniques, even the most advanced quantum computers currently in public existence are too small and too error-prone to achieve this, rendering the bans seemingly pointless.

The UK is one of the countries that has prohibited the export of quantum computers with 34 or more quantum bits, or qubits, and error rates below a certain threshold. The intention seems to be to restrict machines of a certain capability, but the UK government hasn't explicitly said this. A New Scientist freedom of information request for a rationale behind these numbers was turned down on the grounds of national security. France has also introduced export controls with the same specifications on qubit numbers and error rates, as has Spain and the Netherlands. Identical limits across European states might point to a European Union regulation, but that isn't the case. A European Commission spokesperson told New Scientist that EU members are free to adopt national measures, rather than bloc-wide ones, for export restrictions.

New Scientist reached out to dozens of nations to ask what the scientific basis for these matching legislative bans on quantum computer exports was, but was told it was kept secret to protect national security.

ZipNada writes: A federal court in Texas has partially blocked the government's ban on noncompete agreements that was set to take effect September 4. An estimated 30 million people, or one in five American workers, are bound by noncompetes. The employment agreements typically prevent workers -- everyone from minimum wage earners to CEOs -- from joining competing businesses or launching ones of their own.

In its complaint, Ryan LLC accused the FTC of overstepping its statutory authority in declaring all noncompetes unfair and anticompetitive. Judge Brown agreed, writing, "The FTC lacks substantive rulemaking authority with respect to unfair methods of competition." Through a statement Wednesday evening, the FTC said its authority is supported by both statute and precedent. "We will keep fighting to free hardworking Americans from unlawful noncompetes, which reduce innovation, inhibit economic growth, trap workers, and undermine Americans' economic liberty," wrote FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar. The FTC has long argued that noncompetes hurt workers.

A hacker infiltrated OpenAI's internal messaging systems in early 2023, stealing confidential information about the ChatGPT maker's AI technologies, New York Times reported Thursday. The breach, disclosed to employees in April that year but kept from the public, has sparked internal debate over the company's security protocols and potential national security implications, the report adds. The hacker accessed an employee forum containing sensitive discussions but did not breach core AI systems. OpenAI executives, believing the hacker had no government ties, opted against notifying law enforcement, the Times reported. From the report: After the breach, Leopold Aschenbrenner, an OpenAI technical program manager focused on ensuring that future A.I. technologies do not cause serious harm, sent a memo to OpenAI's board of directors, arguing that the company was not doing enough to prevent the Chinese government and other foreign adversaries from stealing its secrets.

Mr. Aschenbrenner said OpenAI had fired him this spring for leaking other information outside the company and argued that his dismissal had been politically motivated. He alluded to the breach on a recent podcast, but details of the incident have not been previously reported. He said OpenAI's security wasn't strong enough to protect against the theft of key secrets if foreign actors were to infiltrate the company.

Paul Voosen reports via Science Magazine: Few things prompt as much anxiety in science and the wider world as the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and the rising influence of China. This spring, these two factors created a rift at the European Geosciences Union (EGU), one of the world's largest geoscience societies, that led to the firing of its president. The whole episode has been "a packaging up of fear of AI and fear of China," says Michael Stephenson, former chief geologist of the United Kingdom and one of the founders of Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE), a $70 million effort to connect digital geoscience databases. In 2019, another geoscience society, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), kicked off DDE, which has been funded almost entirely by the government of China's Jiangsu province.

The dispute pivots on GeoGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that is one of DDE's main efforts. It is being developed by Jian Wang, chief technology officer of e-commerce giant Alibaba. Built on Qwen, Alibaba's own chatbot, and fine-tuned on billions of words from open-source geology studies and data sets, GeoGPT is meant to provide expert answers to questions, summarize documents, and create visualizations. Stephenson tested an early version, asking it about the challenges of using the fossilized teeth of conodonts, an ancient relative of fish, to define the start of the Permian period 299 million years ago. "It was very good at that," he says. As awareness of GeoGPT spread, so did concern. Paul Cleverly, a visiting professor at Robert Gordon University, gained access to an early version and said in a recent editorial in Geoscientist there were "serious issues around a lack of transparency, state censorship, and potential copyright infringement." Paul Cleverly and GeoScienceWorld CEO Phoebe McMellon raised these concerns in a letter to IUGS, arguing that the chatbot was built using unlicensed literature without proper citations. However, they did not cite specific copyright violations, so DDE President Chengshan Wang, a geologist at the China University of Geosciences, decided not to end the project.

Tensions at EGU escalated when a complaint about GeoGPT's transparency was submitted before the EGU's April meeting, where GeoGPT would be introduced. "It arrived at an EGU whose leadership was already under strain," notes Science. The complaint exacerbated existing leadership issues within EGU, particularly surrounding President Irina Artemieva, who was seen as problematic by some executives due to her affiliations and actions. Science notes that she's "affiliated with Germany's GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel but is also paid by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences to advise it on its geophysical research."

Artemieva forwarded the complaint via email to the DDE President to get his view, but forgot to delete the name attached to it, leading to a breach of confidentiality. This incident, among other leadership disputes, culminated in her dismissal and the elevation of Peter van der Beek to president. During the DDE session at the EGU meeting, van der Beek's enforcement actions against Chinese scientists and session attendees led to allegations of "harassment and discrimination."

"Seeking to broker a peace deal around GeoGPT," IUGS's president and another former EGU president, John Ludden, organized a workshop and invited all parties to discuss GeoGPT's governance, ongoing negotiations for licensing deals and alternative AI models for GeoGPT's use.

The Spanish government is introducing a porn passport to help porn platforms verify users' ages. Slashdot reader fjo3 shares a report from Politico: Officially (and drily) called the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta), the app Madrid unveiled on Monday would allow internet platforms to check whether a prospective smut-watcher is over 18. Porn-viewers will be asked to use the app to verify their age. Once verified, they'll receive 30 generated "porn credits" with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content. Enthusiasts will be able to request extra credits.

While the tool has been criticized for its complexity, the government says the credit-based model is more privacy-friendly, ensuring that users' online activities are not easily traceable. The system will be available by the end of the summer. It will be voluntary, as online platforms can rely on other age-verification methods to screen out inappropriate viewers. It heralds an EU law going into force in October 2027, which will require websites to stop minors from accessing porn. Eventually, Madrid's porn passport is likely to be replaced by the EU's very own digital identity system (eIDAS2) -- a so-called wallet app allowing people to access a smorgasbord of public and private services across the whole bloc.

Speaking of Japan, joshuark shares a report: Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in a campaign to modernise the bureaucracy. By the middle of last month, the Digital Agency had scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling. "We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!" Digital Minister Taro Kono, who has been vocal about wiping out fax machines and other analogue technology in government, told Reuters in a statement on Wednesday.

theodp writes: As with last year," tweeted College Board's AP Program Chief Trevor Packer, "the most challenging free-response question on this year's AP Computer Science A exam was Q4 on 2D Array." While it takes six pages of the AP CS A exam document [PDF] to ask question 4 (of 4), the ask of students essentially boils down to using Java to move from the current location in a 2-D grid to either immediately below or to the right of that location based on which neighbor contains the lesser value, and adding the value at that location to a total (suggested Java solution, alternative Excel VBA solution). Much like rules of the children's game Pop-O-Matic Trouble, moves are subject to the constraint that you cannot move to the right or ahead if it takes you to an invalid position (beyond the grid dimensions).

Ironically, many of the AP CS A students who struggled with the grid coding problem were likely exposed by their schools from kindergarten on to more than a decade's worth of annual Hour of Code tutorials that focused on the concepts of using code to move about in 2-D grids. The move-up-down-left-right tutorials promoted by schools came from tech-backed nonprofit Code.org and its tech giant partners and have been taught over the years by the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and President Obama, as well as characters from Star Wars, Disney Princess movies, and Microsoft Minecraft.

The news of American high school students struggling again with fairly straightforward coding problems after a year-long course of instruction comes not only as tech companies and tech-tied nonprofits lobby state lawmakers to pass bills making CS a high school graduation requirement in the US, but also as a new report from King's College urges lawmakers and educators to address a stark decline in the number of UK students studying computing at secondary school, which is blamed on the replacement of more approachable ICT (Information and Communications Technology) courses with more rigorous computer science courses in 2013 (a switch pushed by Google and Microsoft), which it notes students have perceived as too difficult and avoided taking.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to a Texas law requiring age verification to access online pornography, which opponents argue violates the First Amendment by discouraging adults from viewing such material due to privacy concerns. A federal judge blocked the law citing its chilling effect on free speech, but a divided appeals court upheld it, emphasizing the government's interest in protecting minors; the case will now be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The Texas bill in question, HB 1181, was passed into law last June. The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear a challenge to a Texas law that seeks to limit minors' access to pornography on the internet by requiring age verification measures like the submission of government-issued IDs. A trade group, companies that produce sexual materials and a performer challenged the law, saying that it violates the First Amendment right of adults. The law does not allow companies to retain information their users submit. But the challengers said adults would be wary of supplying personal information for fear of identity theft, tracking and extortion. [...]

In urging the Supreme Court to leave the law in place while it considers whether to hear the case, Ken Paxton, Texas' attorney general, said pornography available on the internet is "orders of magnitude more graphic, violent and degrading than any so-called 'girlie' magazine of yesteryear." He added: "This statute does not prohibit the performance, production or even sale of pornography but, more modestly, simply requires the pornography industry that make billions of dollars from peddling smut to take commercially reasonable steps to ensure that those who access the material are adults. There is nothing unconstitutional about it."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Human Rights Watch (HRW) continues to reveal how photos of real children casually posted online years ago are being used to train AI models powering image generators -- even when platforms prohibit scraping and families use strict privacy settings. Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked in LAION-5B, a popular AI dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. Now, she has released a second report, flagging 190 photos of children from all of Australia's states and territories, including indigenous children who may be particularly vulnerable to harms. These photos are linked in the dataset "without the knowledge or consent of the children or their families." They span the entirety of childhood, making it possible for AI image generators to generate realistic deepfakes of real Australian children, Han's report said. Perhaps even more concerning, the URLs in the dataset sometimes reveal identifying information about children, including their names and locations where photos were shot, making it easy to track down children whose images might not otherwise be discoverable online. That puts children in danger of privacy and safety risks, Han said, and some parents thinking they've protected their kids' privacy online may not realize that these risks exist.

From a single link to one photo that showed "two boys, ages 3 and 4, grinning from ear to ear as they hold paintbrushes in front of a colorful mural," Han could trace "both children's full names and ages, and the name of the preschool they attend in Perth, in Western Australia." And perhaps most disturbingly, "information about these children does not appear to exist anywhere else on the Internet" -- suggesting that families were particularly cautious in shielding these boys' identities online. Stricter privacy settings were used in another image that Han found linked in the dataset. The photo showed "a close-up of two boys making funny faces, captured from a video posted on YouTube of teenagers celebrating" during the week after their final exams, Han reported. Whoever posted that YouTube video adjusted privacy settings so that it would be "unlisted" and would not appear in searches. Only someone with a link to the video was supposed to have access, but that didn't stop Common Crawl from archiving the image, nor did YouTube policies prohibiting AI scraping or harvesting of identifying information.

Reached for comment, YouTube's spokesperson, Jack Malon, told Ars that YouTube has "been clear that the unauthorized scraping of YouTube content is a violation of our Terms of Service, and we continue to take action against this type of abuse." But Han worries that even if YouTube did join efforts to remove images of children from the dataset, the damage has been done, since AI tools have already trained on them. That's why -- even more than parents need tech companies to up their game blocking AI training -- kids need regulators to intervene and stop training before it happens, Han's report said. Han's report comes a month before Australia is expected to release a reformed draft of the country's Privacy Act. Those reforms include a draft of Australia's first child data protection law, known as the Children's Online Privacy Code, but Han told Ars that even people involved in long-running discussions about reforms aren't "actually sure how much the government is going to announce in August." "Children in Australia are waiting with bated breath to see if the government will adopt protections for them," Han said, emphasizing in her report that "children should not have to live in fear that their photos might be stolen and weaponized against them."

Digital audio broadcasting (DAB+) and internet radio have largely replaced traditional FM radio in Switzerland, with digital radio holding an 81% share of use in spring 2023. Due to the high costs of maintaining FM transmitters and declining financial resources, Switzerland plans to fully transition to digital radio by the end of 2026, phasing out FM broadcasting completely. From a report: DAB+ and the internet offer better quality and a larger program selection, are more energy and cost efficient, and can provide additional information in text and images, it said. To receive DAB+ requires a corresponding device or adapter, and new cars have been equipped with digital technology as standard for several years. In addition, the Federal Roads Office (FEDRO) will upgrade all tunnels on the national road network for digital radio reception by the end of the year and switch off FM transmitters.

FM was originally expected to be switched off throughout Switzerland by the end of 2024. The government extended FM licenses for the radio industry for the last time in October 2023 to the end of 2026, after which radio stations in Switzerland will no longer be able to broadcast via FM, only digitally. OFCOM announced at the time that the final extension would give the radio industry the flexibility to complete the transition process from analogue to digital radio.

Microsoft revealed that the Russian hackers who breached its systems earlier this year stole more emails than initially reported. "We are continuing notifications to customers who corresponded with Microsoft corporate email accounts that were exfiltrated by the Midnight Blizzard threat actor, and we are providing the customers the email correspondence that was accessed by this actor," a Microsoft spokesperson told Bloomberg (paywalled). "This is increased detail for customers who have already been notified and also includes new notifications." The Register reports: We've been aware for some time that the digital Russian break-in at the Windows maker saw Kremlin spies make off with source code, executive emails, and sensitive U.S. government data. Reports last week revealed that the issue was even larger than initially believed and additional customers' data has been stolen. Along with Russia, Microsoft was also compromised by state actors from China not long ago, and that issue similarly led to the theft of emails and other data belonging to senior U.S. government officials.

Both incidents have led experts to call Microsoft a threat to U.S. national security, and president Brad Smith to issue a less-than-reassuring mea culpa to Congress. All the while, the U.S. government has actually invested more in its Microsoft kit. Bloomberg reported that emails being sent to affected Microsoft customers include a link to a secure environment where customers can visit a site to review messages Microsoft identified as having been compromised. But even that might not have been the most security-conscious way to notify folks: Several thought they were being phished.