An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia rejected U.S. antitrust enforcers' bid to force a sale of Google's online advertising exchange. While the ad exchange is a small part of Google's business, the ruling is the second powerful symbolic victory against the U.S. Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to sell assets to address illegal monopolies. U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to make Google sell AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies. The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites. In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found. The tech giant's anticompetitive conduct "substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," Brinkema said at the time. At a trial last year on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. During the remedies trial, Google's lawyers warned that forcing it to sell parts of its ad-tech business would cause disruption and damage. [...] The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech in a crackdown that started during President Donald Trump's first term. In another major Google antitrust case, a judge similarly rejected the DOJ's push to force Google to sell Chrome. It is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry's unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.

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This year, the Indian capital’s subway system passed New York’s in length.

Darkened by soot from vehicles and factories, the region’s glaciers are absorbing more heat and melting at dangerous rates.

Uber is laying off about 3,300 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring aimed at cutting management layers and redirecting investment toward ridesharing, delivery, and robotaxis. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced the changes in an internal email that was also published online.TechCrunch reports: According to the email, the layoffs are part of a restructuring exercise that would shrink the number of managers by 20%, and some personnel in these roles would work as individual contributors going forward. The ridesharing giant is reducing the number of teams with one or two members by 50%, and letting go staff who are "more than seven layers down from the CEO," per Bloomberg. Khosrowshahi's email said the company is combining its engineering, science, and delivery divisions. The company is also bringing together its delivery operations across restaurants, retail, and direct divisions. Remote jobs at the company are going away, too, with Uber only allowing less than 1% of its staff to work remotely.

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A dark-web identity theft service called Nexus claims to be selling scans of more than 153 million U.S. and Canadian driver's licenses, along with millions of other identity documents. "Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase through the service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely used Louisiana-based identity verification company," reports KrebsOnSecurity. The outlet also reports that the FBI's New Orleans field office has launched an official inquiry into the source of the images. From the report: On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit. The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards. [...] The people behind Nexus claim the license images are coming from an active breach at "a major identity verification company" whose customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies. "We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database," the service enthused in its introductory post on Exploit. "Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available." Indeed, over the past 24 hours, the number of drivers license records listed as available in Nexus has increased by nearly 400,000, suggesting that freshly stolen license data is being harvested and uploaded to this service on a semi-regular basis. KrebsOnSecurity traced the apparent source by comparing timestamps on stolen license images with when their owners had their IDs scanned, including at Hertz rental counters and a Planet13 dispensary. Both companies use identity-verification services from Louisiana-based idscan.net, whose technology also scans IDs using infrared and ultraviolet light. Since the story was published, Krebs reports that the Nexus identity theft service website "vanished from the darkweb, replacing its login page with a plain text message that reads, 'This service is no longer available.'"

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Dell reported record fiscal Q2 results as AI server demand surged, booking $60.9 billion in AI server orders and ending the quarter with a $95 billion backlog. From a report: The company posted record revenue of $47 billion, up 58% year over year. Earnings per share came in at $6.34, up 273% from a year ago. Adjusted earnings rose 203% to $7.04 per share. "With AI momentum accelerating and our opportunity expanding across the portfolio, we're raising our full-year FY27 revenue outlook by $25 billion to $192 billion, up nearly 70% year over year," said Jeff Clarke, CEO of Dell Technologies, in the company's earnings release. Dell has seen its orders balloon as enterprise customers adopt artificial intelligence and use AI servers locally to run agentic AI queries. Dell stock is up more than 230% year to date. Peer Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which also moved up 110% since the start of the year, jumped in after-hours trading.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Sonos has a new app. Stop me if you've heard this one before. The smart speaker company, long a darling of the audio industry, undid much of the goodwill it earned with its multiroom speakers through a bevy of software updates that broke its app in 2024. Almost all app users hated it, citing the loss of features like volume control and accessibility tools meant to help blind people use the wireless speaker system. Sonos eventually owned up to the mistake, considered bringing back the old app again, then booted its CEO and marched its new leaders out to apologize profusely to win back the company's furious customers. Now, Sonos says it has a brand-new app update, infused with lots of generative AI features. The company also announced a new soundbar and its second pair of over-the-ear headphones. Sonos representatives say it doesn't want to be seen as a speaker company anymore, but as something bigger and more holistic. "For years people have been seeing us as a speaker company," says Brandon Holley, the interim hardware lead at Sonos. "What we actually are is an audio operating system." The company is calling that operating system Sonos 27, and it manifests in a few ways. [...] This is a lot of change for Sonos, something the company hasn't always handled gracefully. Sonos' home systems already aren't the easiest to set up, sometimes requiring separate apps for older products. The company may be rejiggering itself as an "audio operating system," but its software has long been the source of its troubles with getting its products to work right. Will AI smarts fix that? Maybe for its newer devices. But anyone with an existing system may still struggle. The AI features on products and in the Sonos 27 app will be opt-in, meaning you can avoid them entirely. "That really is our new approach to our app release," Patel says. "We're going to bring our customers along. We're going to listen more." That would be a good plan. Sounds like Sonos' speakers will be listening more, too. Sonos is emphasizing a more "customer-centric feedback listening approach" after the backlash to its previous redesign. Improvements include easier tab navigation, better room sorting, revamped volume controls, and new system-health tools for diagnosing connection problems. The centerpiece is Sonos 27voice, a generative AI voice assistant that can handle conversational music requests, connect with services like ChatGPT through Model Context Protocol, and power customizable "Sonos Custom Agents" for tasks such as automatically activating certain speakers. "Obviously AI is something that's very hot these days," Sonos software VP Sid Patel said. "So we have integrated various pieces of AI into our system." However, the features will only work with the newer S2 app, and Sonos cautions that "not every product will support every new feature," with detailed compatibility information coming later. Sonos is also branding its multiroom networking technology Sonos Fabric, which what Patel calls "the magic that has existed for what Sonos was built on." New Fabric features include portable surround, which lets users temporarily move speakers between rooms and have them automatically configure themselves for surround sound, and Headphone Linking, which lets users seamlessly switch audio between Sonos speakers and headphones.

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Thousands of sailors and Marines serve on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which came into the spotlight because of a tough deployment in the war in Iran.

NASA has awarded Blue Origin a contract worth up to $700 million to build and operate a dedicated Mars telecommunications network for current and future missions to the Red Planet. Blue Origin is expected to deliver the spacecraft by the end of 2028, with the network targeted to become operational by 2030. From a press release: Blue Origin will design, develop, integrate, launch, and operate the network as a part of the agency's broader space communications and navigation infrastructure. The architecture will consist of a high-performance telecommunications spacecraft orbiting Mars, transmitting science data, imagery, navigation information, and critical mission communications for spacecraft operating on and around the planet. The award marks a milestone in NASA's strategy to expand communications and navigation services beyond Earth and the Moon, establishing the foundation for sustained exploration of Mars in the coming decades.

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It proposed a new goal of limiting the “overshoot” of rising temperatures and eventually figuring out how to undo the temperature gains, a highly uncertain path.

Senator Ed Markey, 80, trounced a younger challenger who had made an argument for generational change. Two other longtime Democratic lawmakers hung on, too.

Representative Stephen Lynch, 71, a centrist, beat Patrick Roath, 39, in a primary that reflected the party’s generational and ideological divides.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accused China for flooding the world with its cheap exports.

New submitter greytree shares a report from Brown University: LUX-ZEPLIN, an experiment co-led by Brown University faculty and students, observed a particle interaction that could be interpreted as a signal from WIMPs, a dark matter candidate -- but researchers need more data to confirm. [...] The result does not yet meet the statistical threshold required to claim a discovery, but it is the most compelling hint of dark matter reported by the experiment to date. "We're very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up, and the competing backgrounds are very low," said Rick Gaitskell, a professor of physics at Brown University and the spokesperson for LZ. "With only one event, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input." [...] If the anomalous event was caused by dark matter, the WIMP that generated it would likely have a mass of at least 200 GeV/c2 (gigaelectronvolts), or more than 200 times the mass of a proton. The LZ results have not reached "5-sigma" significance, the statistical threshold in physics that an event must reach to be considered a discovery. The new analysis is 2.6 sigma, meaning there is approximately a 0.5% chance that the event could be explained by known backgrounds. With additional data, researchers can test whether the finding continues to grow in significance or fades away. LZ has already accumulated the world's largest dark matter dataset and will continue to accrue WIMP search data at SURF, substantially improving their search statistics. JiJi Fan, an associate professor of physics at Brown not involved in the LZ experimental research but whose theoretical work is cited in the new LZ paper, said the new findings were "very intriguing." While the event recorded by LZ could not have been the simplest type of WIMP interaction, there are other types of possible interactions that could explain it, she said. Had a WIMP interacted in the simplest way at the high energy associated with this recent event, the detector would have recorded many recoil events at lower energies following the initial event. LZ recorded a single event, however, which requires an expanded theoretical explanation. "There are well-motivated theoretical extensions, including inelastic scattering and momentum-dependent elastic scattering, that could potentially account for this single event," Fan said. "This also sets up a target for on-going dark matter hunting, not only at direct detection experiments such as LZ but also at other complementary experimental frontiers." The results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan on Tuesday, Sept. 1. A paper detailing the finding can be found here (PDF).

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At a summit meant to showcase President Trump’s economic policies as a model for the world, Europeans complained about tariffs and the war with Iran.

Initial results showed that residents of Independence, Mo., voted overwhelmingly to recall an official who backed billions of dollars in tax breaks for a data center.

The judge said prosecutors had presented enough evidence to try the man accused of killing the conservative activist last year, who pleaded not guilty.

Dan Koh, who ran with the endorsement of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., topped a crowded field to secure the nomination in the safely Democratic Sixth Congressional District.

A new policy to be announced by the Department of Education bars younger students from using A.I., but stops short of a moratorium.

Pamela Cisneros was killed by the police in Times Square after she stabbed two people, one fatally. Her father said she had stopped going with him to her mental health appointments.