Banks are treating "buy now, pay later" services with suspicion and warn that heavy usage could hurt customers' chances of getting approved for mortgages or credit cards. FICO will begin factoring some BNPL loans from companies like Affirm and Klarna into credit scores later this year through its new scoring model. JPMorgan Chase and Capital One have banned customers from using credit cards to pay down BNPL installment loans, while one credit union actively calls members who use BNPL to counsel them against it. BNPL transaction volume is expected to reach $116.67 billion in 2025, up from $13.88 billion in 2020, according to Emarketer.

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The estate of Mike Lynch, who died a year ago when his superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily, and his business partner owe Hewlett-Packard more than $944 million, a court has ruled. From a report: The US technology company has been seeking damages of up to $4.55 billion from the estate of the late tycoon, once hailed as the UK's answer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, over its disastrous takeover of his British software company Autonomy. Lynch's estate has been estimated to be worth about $674 million and paying its share of the $944 million damages could leave it bankrupt. He and six others, including his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, died last August on a trip celebrating his acquittal on US fraud charges relating to HP's $11 billion takeover of Autonomy in 2011. However, HP won a separate six-year civil fraud case against Lynch and his former finance director Sushovan Hussain in the English high court in 2022, with Mr Justice Hildyard ruling that the US company had been induced into overpaying for the business.

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The $500 billion Stargate AI project announced by SoftBank and OpenAI at the White House six months ago has failed to complete a single data center deal and sharply scaled back its near-term plans. The venture, which originally pledged to invest $100 billion "immediately," now aims to build one small data center by year-end, likely in Ohio, according to WSJ. SoftBank and OpenAI have disagreed over crucial partnership terms, including site locations. OpenAI has proceeded independently, signing a deal with Oracle worth more than $30 billion annually starting within three years. That agreement totals 4.5 gigawatts of capacity and would consume power equivalent to more than two Hoover Dams. Combined with a smaller CoreWeave deal, OpenAI has secured nearly as much data center capacity as Stargate promised for this year. SoftBank invested $30 billion in OpenAI earlier this year as part of the infrastructure partnership plans.

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FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is proposing (PDF) to roll back key Biden-era broadband policies, scrapping the long-term gigabit speed goal, halting analysis of broadband affordability, and reinterpreting deployment standards in a way that favors industry metrics over consumer access. The proposal, which is scheduled for a vote on August 7, narrows the scope of Section 706 evaluations to focus on whether broadband is being deployed rather than whether it's affordable or universally accessible. Ars Technica reports: The changes will make it easier for the FCC to give the broadband industry a passing grade in an annual progress report. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's proposal would give the industry a thumbs-up even if it falls short of 100 percent deployment, eliminate a long-term goal of gigabit broadband speeds, and abandon a new effort to track the affordability of broadband. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market." Generally, Democratic-led commissions have found that the industry isn't doing enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led commissions have found the opposite. Democratic-led commissions have also periodically increased the speeds used to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are widely available, while Republican-led commissioners have kept the speed standards the same.

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Spotify was found publishing AI-generated songs on the official pages of deceased artists like Blaze Foley and Guy Clark -- without permission from their estates or labels. The tracks, flagged for deceptive content and now removed, were uploaded via TikTok's SoundOn distribution platform. "We've flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed for violating our Deceptive Content policy," a Spotify spokesperson told 404 Media. From the report: McDonald, who decided to originally upload Foley's music to Spotify in order to share it with more people, told me he never thought that an AI-generated track could appear on Foley's page without his permission. "It's harmful to Blaze's standing that this happened," he said. "It's kind of surprising that Spotify doesn't have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify. They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so. And I think they should take that responsibility and do something quickly." McDonald's suggested fix is not allowing any track to appear on an artist's official Spotify page without allowing the page owner to sign off on it first. "Any real Blaze fan would know, I think, pretty instantly, that this is not Blaze or a Blaze recording," he said. "Then the harm is that the people who don't know Blaze go to the site thinking, maybe this is part of Blaze, when clearly it's not. So again, I think Spotify could easily change some practices. I'm not an engineer, but I think it's pretty easy to stop this from happening in the future."

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Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air grounded all flights Sunday night due to a major IT outage, prompting a system-wide FAA ground stop that lasted until early Monday. Although operations have since resumed, passengers are still facing delays and residual disruptions. Gizmodo reports: The airline requested a system-wide ground stop from federal aviation authorities at about 11 p.m. ET on Sunday night. That stop remained in effect until around 2 a.m. ET Monday, when the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed it had been lifted. But disruptions didn't end there. Alaska warned passengers to brace for likely delays throughout the day. [...] The FAA's website listed the stop as applying to all Alaska Airlines aircraft. Gizmodo notes that the incident comes nearly a year after the massive 2024 CrowdStrike crash, which has become known as the largest IT outage in history. "The July 2024 outage brought down an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems running CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor software, disrupting everything from hospitals and airports to broadcast networks." "There's no word yet from Alaska on whether the outage ties into a broader software problem, but the timing, almost exactly a year after the CrowdStrike crash, isn't going unnoticed on social media, with users wondering if the events are related."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Figma is targeting a fully-diluted valuation of up to $16.4 billion in its initial public offering, as the cloud-based design software firm prepares for a debut on the NYSE that could inject fresh momentum into a resurgent market for tech listings. The San Francisco-based company, along with some investors, is eyeing proceeds of up to $1.03 billion by selling nearly 37 million shares priced between $25 and $28 each, it said on Monday. The listing could be a major milestone for Figma, coming more than a year after its $20 billion sale to Adobe failed due to regulatory hurdles in Europe and the UK. Figma's IPO is expected to occur the week of July 28th, offering shares priced between $25 and $28. It'll trade under the symbol "FIG".

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NVIDIA has released additional open-source header files for its Blackwell and Hopper GPU architectures, continuing its effort to support open-source drivers like Nouveau/NVK and the NOVA Rust driver. Phoronix reports: Last week NVIDIA open-sourced 12k lines of C header files for Blackwell GPUs to help in the open-source driver efforts, namely for Nouveau / NVK and the in-development NOVA Rust driver. On Friday they made public some additional header files for helping in the Blackwell and Hopper open-source driver enablement. Following the previously-covered open-source header activity, on Friday this commit was pushed to their open-source documentation repository that provides Hopper and Blackwell DMA-copy class header files. [...] In turn the code has already been imported into Mesa Git.

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Microsoft is rolling out updates to the Xbox PC app and consoles that sync your cloud gaming history and progress across devices, making it easier to resume cloud-playable titles on PCs, handhelds, and other Xbox hardware. The Verge reports: Cloud-playable games are now starting to show inside play history or the library on the Xbox PC app. "This includes all cloud playable titles, even console exclusives spanning from the original Xbox to Xbox Series X|S, whether you own the title or access it through Game Pass," explains Lily Wang, product manager of Xbox experiences. Your recent games, including cloud ones, will soon follow you across devices -- complete with cloud-powered game saves. So if you played an Xbox game on your console that's not natively available on PC, it will still show up in your recent games list and be playable through Xbox Cloud Gaming on Windows. Cloud-playable games on the Xbox PC app can be found from a new filter in the library section, and a new "play history" section will appear at the end of the "jump back in" list on the home screen of the Xbox PC app. "While the large tiles highlight games you've recently played on your current device, the play history tile shows games you've played across any Xbox device, making it easy to pick up where you left off," says Wang. This same play history section will appear on the main Xbox console interface, too -- which could mean we'll eventually see PC games listed here and playable through Xbox Cloud Gaming.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: One password is believed to have been all it took for a ransomware gang to destroy a 158-year-old company and put 700 people out of work. KNP -- a Northamptonshire transport company -- is just one of tens of thousands of UK businesses that have been hit by such attacks. Big names such as M&S, Co-op and Harrods have all been attacked in recent months. The chief executive of Co-op confirmed last week that all 6.5 million of its members had had their data stolen. In KNP's case, it's thought the hackers managed to gain entry to the computer system by guessing an employee's password, after which they encrypted the company's data and locked its internal systems. KNP director Paul Abbott says he hasn't told the employee that their compromised password most likely led to the destruction of the company. "Would you want to know if it was you?" he asks. "We need organizations to take steps to secure their systems, to secure their businesses," says Richard Horne CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) -- where Panorama has been given exclusive access to the team battling international ransomware gangs. A gang of hackers, known as Akira, broke into the company's system and demanded a payment to restore the data. "The hackers didn't name a price, but a specialist ransomware negotiation firm estimated the sum could be as much as 5 million pounds," reports the BBC. "KNP didn't have that kind of money. In the end all the data was lost, and the company went under."

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An anonymous reader shares a blog post: The International Mathematical Olympiad is the world's most prestigious competition for young mathematicians, and has been held annually since 1959. Each country taking part is represented by six elite, pre-university mathematicians who compete to solve six exceptionally difficult problems in algebra, combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. Medals are awarded to the top half of contestants, with approximately 8% receiving a prestigious gold medal. Recently, the IMO has also become an aspirational challenge for AI systems as a test of their advanced mathematical problem-solving and reasoning capabilities. Last year, Google DeepMind's combined AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 systems achieved the silver-medal standard, solving four out of the six problems and scoring 28 points. Making use of specialist formal languages, this breakthrough demonstrated that AI was beginning to approach elite human mathematical reasoning. This year, we were amongst an inaugural cohort to have our model results officially graded and certified by IMO coordinators using the same criteria as for student solutions. Recognizing the significant accomplishments of this year's student-participants, we're now excited to share the news of Gemini's breakthrough performance. An advanced version of Gemini Deep Think solved five out of the six IMO problems perfectly, earning 35 total points, and achieving gold-medal level performance.

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Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, has a simple suggestion for young workers struggling to focus at work or relax: turn off your phone. Schmidt told the "Moonshots" podcast that researchers "can't think deeply" when their phones keep buzzing with notifications. The tech veteran, who spent 10 years running Google and helped build Android's notification system, admitted the industry has worked to "monetize your attention" through constant ads and alerts.

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Hackers are hiding malware inside DNS records, allowing malicious code to bypass security defenses that typically monitor web and email traffic. DomainTools researchers discovered the technique being used to host Joke Screenmate malware, with binary files converted to hexadecimal format and broken into chunks stored in TXT records across subdomains of whitetreecollective[.]com. Attackers retrieve the chunks through DNS requests and reassemble them into executable malware. The method exploits a blind spot in security monitoring, as DNS traffic often goes unscrutinized compared to other network activity.

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Sir Keir Starmer's government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK's demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data, Financial Times reported Monday, citing two officials. From the report: The officials both said the Home Office, which ordered the tech giant in January to grant access to its most secure cloud storage system, would probably have to retreat in the face of pressure from senior leaders in Washington, including Vice President JD Vance. "This is something that the vice president is very annoyed about and which needs to be resolved," said an official in the UK's technology department. "The Home Office is basically going to have to back down." Both officials said the UK decision to force Apple to break its end-to-end encryption -- which has been raised multiple times by top officials in Donald Trump's administration -- could impede technology agreements with the US.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is teaming up with the French government to create a digital replica of Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral, France's most visited monument, the U.S. tech company's president, Brad Smith, said on Monday. The 862-year-old Gothic masterpiece was reopened last December after a five-year restoration following a devastating fire in 2019. A digital replica will serve as a record of the building's architectural details, Microsoft said. It will also provide a virtual experience for visitors and those unable to visit.

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Microsoft has released emergency security updates for two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in SharePoint, tracked as CVE-2025-53770 and CVE-2025-53771, that have compromised servers worldwide in what researchers call "ToolShell" attacks. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned over the weekend that hackers were exploiting the vulnerabilities to gain remote code execution on on-premises SharePoint installations, while Microsoft has not yet provided patches for all affected versions. The vulnerabilities allow hackers to steal private digital keys from SharePoint servers without requiring credentials, enabling them to plant malware and access stored files and data. Eye Security, which first identified the attacks on Saturday, found dozens of actively exploited servers and warned that SharePoint's integration with Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive could enable further network compromise. Researcher Silas Cutler at cybersecurity firm Censys estimated more than 10,000 companies with SharePoint servers were at risk, with the largest concentrations in the United States, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Canada. Microsoft released patches for SharePoint 2019 and Subscription Edition but is still working on fixes for SharePoint Server 2016. Administrators must install available updates immediately and rotate machine keys to prevent re-compromise, according to Microsoft's security guidance.

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T-Mobile is expanding support for the L4S standard across its 5G Advanced network over the next few weeks, becoming the first wireless carrier in the United States to implement the Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput technology. The standard helps high-priority internet packets move with fewer delays to make video calls and cloud games feel smoother by allowing devices to manage congestion and reduce buffering issues that can occur even on higher bandwidth connections. L4S is already deployed in many cities, the company said. Users will not need special phones or plans to access the network-driven improvements.

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"Scientists at the world's largest particle collider have observed a new class of antimatter particles breaking down at a different rate than their matter counterparts," reports Scientific American: [P]hysicists have been on the hunt for any sign of difference between matter and antimatter, known in the field as a violation of "charge conjugation-parity symmetry," or CP violation, that could explain why some matter escaped destruction in the early universe. [Wednesday] physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)'s LHCb experiment published a paper in the journal Nature announcing that they've measured CP violation for the first time in baryons — the class of particles that includes the protons and neutrons inside atoms. Baryons are all built from triplets of even smaller particles called quarks. Previous experiments dating back to 1964 had seen CP violation in meson particles, which unlike baryons are made of a quark-antiquark pair. In the new experiment, scientists observed that baryons made of an up quark, a down quark and one of their more exotic cousins called a beauty quark decay more often than baryons made of the antimatter versions of those same three quarks... The matter-antimatter difference scientists observed in this case is relatively small, and it fits within predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics — the reigning theory of the subatomic realm. This puny amount of CP violation, however, cannot account for the profound asymmetry between matter and antimatter we see throughout space... "We are trying to find little discrepancies between what we observe and what is predicted by the Standard Model," [says LHCb spokesperson/study co-author Vincenzo Vagnoni of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics]. "If we find a discrepancy, then we can pinpoint what is wrong." The researchers hope to discover more cracks in the Standard Model as the experiment keeps running. Eventually LHCb should collect about 30 times more data than was used for this analysis, which will allow physicists to search for CP violation in particle decays that are even rarer than the one observed here. So stay tuned for an answer to why anything exists at all.

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"The distant reaches of the Solar System are still mysterious," writes ScienceAlert. "Not much sunlight pierces these regions, and there are strong hints that undiscovered objects lurk there. The objects that astronomers have discovered in these dim reaches are primordial, and their orbits suggest the presence of more undiscovered objects." And now thanks to the giant 8.2-meter Subaru telescope at Hawaii's Mauna Kea Observatory, astronomers have discovered "a massive new solar system body located beyond the orbit of Pluto," reports Space.com. The weird elongated orbit of the object suggests that if "Planet Nine" exists, it is much further from the sun than thought, or it has been ejected from our planetary system altogether. The strange orbit of the object, designated 2023 KQ14 and nicknamed "Ammonite," classifies it as a "sednoid." Sednoids are bodies beyond the orbit of the ice giant Neptune, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), characterized by a highly eccentric (non-circular) orbit and a distant closest approach to the sun or "perihelion." The closest distance that 2023 KQ14 ever comes to our star is equivalent to 71 times the distance between Earth and the sun... This is just the fourth known sednoid, and its orbit is currently different from that of its siblings, though it seems to have been stable for 4.5 billion years. However, the team behind the discovery, made using Subaru Telescope as part of the Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy (FOSSIL) survey, thinks that all four sednoids were on similar orbits around 4.2 billion years ago. That implies something dramatic happened out at the edge of the solar system around 400 million years after its birth. Not only does the fact that 2023 KQ14 now follows a unique orbit suggest that the outer solar system is more complex and varied than previously thought, but it also places limits on a hypothetical "Planet Nine" theorized to lurk at the edge of the solar system. There's "no viable transfer mechanisms" to explain the observed orbits "with the current configuration of planets," according to the team's recently-published paper. But since those orbits are stable, it "suggests that an external gravitational influence beyond those of the currently known Solar System planets is required to form their orbits." So where does that leave us? ScienceAlert summarizes the rest of the paper — and where things stand now: Astronomers have proposed many sources for this external gravitational influence, including interactions with a rogue planet or star, ancient stellar interactions from when the Sun was still in its natal cluster, and the capture of objects from other lower-mass stars in the Solar System's early times. But the explanation that gets the most attention is interactions with a hypothetical planet, Planet Nine. If Planet Nine exists, it has a huge area to hide in. Some astronomers who have studied its potential existence think it could be the fifth largest planet in the Solar System. It would be so far away that it would be extremely dim. However, we may be on the cusp of detecting it, if it exists. The Vera Rubin Observatory recently saw first light and will begin its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The LSST will find transient events and objects in the Solar System like no other telescope before it. It's purpose-built to find hard-to-detect objects, and not even an elusive object like Planet Nine may be able to hide from it.

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"Anybody who's got a hosted SharePoint server has got a problem," the senior VP of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike told the Washington Post. "It's a significant vulnerability." And it's led to a new "global attack on government agencies and businesses" in the last few days, according to the article, "breaching U.S. federal and state agencies, universities, energy companies and an Asian telecommunications company, according to state officials and private researchers..." "Tens of thousands of such servers are at risk, experts said, and Microsoft has issued no patch for the flaw, leaving victims around the world scrambling to respond." (Microsoft says they are "working on" security updates "for supported versions of SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint 2016," offering various mitigation suggestions, and CISA has released their own recommendations.) From the Washington Post's article Sunday: Microsoft has suggested that users make modifications to SharePoint server programs or simply unplug them from the internet to stanch the breach. Microsoft issued an alert to customers but declined to comment further... "We are seeing attempts to exploit thousands of SharePoint servers globally before a patch is available," said Pete Renals, a senior manager with Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42. "We have identified dozens of compromised organizations spanning both commercial and government sectors.'' With access to these servers, which often connect to Outlook email, Teams and other core services, a breach can lead to theft of sensitive data as well as password harvesting, Netherlands-based research company Eye Security noted. What's also alarming, researchers said, is that the hackers have gained access to keys that may allow them to regain entry even after a system is patched. "So pushing out a patch on Monday or Tuesday doesn't help anybody who's been compromised in the past 72 hours," said one researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because a federal investigation is ongoing. The breaches occurred after Microsoft fixed a security flaw this month. The attackers realized they could use a similar vulnerability, according to the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA spokeswoman Marci McCarthy said the agency was alerted to the issue Friday by a cyber research firm and immediately contacted Microsoft... The nonprofit Center for Internet Security, which staffs an information-sharing group for state and local governments, notified about 100 organizations that they were vulnerable and potentially compromised, said Randy Rose, the organization's vice president. Those warned included public schools and universities. Others that were breached included a government agency in Spain, a local agency in Albuquerque and a university in Brazil, security researchers said. But there's many more breaches, according to the article: "Eye Security said it has tracked more than 50 breaches, including at an energy company in a large state and several European government agencies." "At least two U.S. federal agencies have seen their servers breached, according to researchers." "One state official in the eastern U.S. said the attackers had 'hijacked' a repository of documents provided to the public to help residents understand how their government works. The agency involved can no longer access the material..." "It was not immediately clear who is behind the hacking of global reach or what its ultimate goal is. One private research company found the hackers targeting servers in China..."

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