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• A South Los Angeles community activist, Yuriana Juliana "Juli" Pelaez Calderon, was reportedly "abducted" by men in an unmarked car on June 25.
• Community leaders are demanding information on her whereabouts and access to an attorney, stating outrage over her detention.
• Calderon was able to make a phone call, indicating she is in an unknown warehouse with many others, and believes her captors are bounty hunters.

The scientists who precisely measure the position of Earth are in a bit of trouble. Their measurements are essential for the satellites we use for navigation, communication and Earth observation every day.

But you might be surprised to learn that making these measurements—using the science of geodesy—depends on tracking the locations of black holes in distant galaxies.

The problem is, the scientists need to use specific frequency lanes on the radio spectrum highway to track those black holes.

And with the rise of Wi-Fi, mobile phones and satellite internet, travel on that highway is starting to look like a traffic jam.

Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, argues that companies using AI agents for customer support should only pay when the bot does its job.

"If you look at Salesforce, they price the automation per conversation," he told The Register in a phone interview. "So essentially, if you have a conversation with AI, no matter what it leads to, you pay $2."

According to Salesforce's own researchers, leading LLM-based agents tested on the CRMArena-Pro benchmark successfully complete single-turn (prompt and reply) tasks about 58 percent of the time and only about 35 percent of the time for multi-turn (back-and-forth conversation) requests.

That's both bad for customers and bad for the progress of AI agents overall. Paying regardless of results, said Masin, "doesn't create any incentive for Salesforce to actually make their agent better."

Salesforce did not respond to a request for comment. But the stats it touts in its marketing copy are, unsurprisingly, a lot better.

Europe’s ambition for digital sovereignty is more urgent than ever. But instead of backing truly European, privacy-first services, many European businesses and even EU and local authorities still rely on US tech, and might consider the brand-new and shiny "sovereign cloud" offerings as a useful solution.

But what if the "sovereign cloud" is less secure than US companies want us to believe? Let's take a deep dive into the "Microsoft Sovereign Cloud", the "Sovereign Cloud from Google", and the advertised "European Digital Sovereignty from Amazon Web Services" and whether it's safe to use these as a European authority or business.

Microsoft EVP Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post last week that Windows powers over a billion active devices globally. This might sound like a healthy number, but according to ZDNET, the Microsoft annual report for 2022 said that more than 1.4 billion devices were running Windows 10 or 11. Given that these documents contain material information and have allegedly been pored over by the tech giant’s lawyers, we can safely assume that Windows’ user base has been quietly shrinking in the past three years, shedding around 400 million users.

This is probably why Microsoft has been aggressively pushing users to upgrade to Windows 11 after the previous version of the OS loses support — so that its users would install the latest version of Windows on their current system (or get a new PC if their system is incapable of running the latest version). Although macOS is a threat to Windows, especially with the launch of Apple Silicon, we cannot say that those 400 million users all went and bought a MacBook. That’s because, as far back as 2023, Mac sales have also been dropping, with Statista reporting the computer line, once holding more than 85% of the company revenue, now making up just 7.7%.

Ever since Microsoft announced that it would end support for Windows 10 in October, the company has been trying hard to convince users to make the switch to Windows 11. First, it warned that unsupported Windows 10 PCs will no longer receive security updates, making them easy targets for hackers. Later, it advised users to trade in their old computers and buy a new one that comes preloaded with all the Windows 11 goodies.

Now, once again, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, Yusuf Mehdi, has published a fresh blog highlighting all the benefits and advantages of Windows 11, including a statement claiming that Windows 11 PCs are up to 2.3 times faster than Windows 10 PCs. However, what they failed to make clear is that this claim is entirely based on a comparison of new versus old hardware, rather than the software itself.

Fireball sightings were reported in multiple states across the southeastern United States during the day on Thursday, which NASA determined was produced by an asteroidal fragment weighing over a ton and moving over 30,000 mph.

The American Meteor Society said it received 215 reports of fireball sightings Thursday over six states -- Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The bright daylight fireball was reported at 12:25 p.m. ET, NASA said.

A sharply argued blog post warns that heavy reliance on Microsoft poses serious strategic risks for organizations – a viewpoint unlikely to win favor with Redmond or its millions of corporate customers.

Czech developer and pen-tester Miloslav Homer has an interesting take on reducing an organization's exposure to security risks. In an article headlined "Microsoft dependency has risks," he extends the now familiar arguments in favor of improving digital sovereignty, and reducing dependence on American cloud services.

The argument is quite long but closely reasoned. We recommend resisting the knee-jerk reaction of "don't be ridiculous" and closing the tab, but reading his article and giving it serious consideration. He backs up his argument with plentiful links and references, and it's gratifying to see several stories from The Register among them, including one from the FOSS desk.

He discusses incidents such as Microsoft allegedly blocking the email account of International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, one of several incidents that caused widespread concern. The Windows maker has denied it was responsible for Khan's blocked account. Homer also considers the chances of US President Donald Trump getting a third term, as Franklin Roosevelt did, the lucrative US government contracts with software and services vendors, and such companies' apparent nervousness about upsetting the volatile leader.

Elon Musk's xAI made quite a splash when it built a data center with 200,000 GPUs that consumes approximately 250 MW of power. However, it appears that OpenAI has an even larger data center in Texas, which consumes 300 MW and houses hundreds of thousands of AI GPUs, details of which were not disclosed. Furthermore, the company is expanding the site, and by mid-2026, it aims to reach a gigawatt scale, according to SemiAnalysis. Such gargantuan AI clusters are creating challenges for power companies not only in power generation but also in power grid safety.

OpenAI appears to operate what is described as the world's largest single data center building, with an IT load capacity of around 300 MW and a maximum power capacity of approximately 500 MW. This facility includes 210 air-cooled substations and a massive on-site electrical substation, which further highlights its immense scale. A second identical building is already under construction on the same site as of January 2025. When completed, this expansion will bring the total capacity of the campus to around a gigawatt, a record.

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The Redditor was experiencing problems with his Asus TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition graphics card, leading him to return it to Micro Center for a replacement. Although the replacement GPU's packaging is labeled for the Asus TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition, the actual card inside features a shroud marked with both AMD Radeon and GeForce RTX branding. This unusual hardware issue appears to be a manufacturing mistake by Asus, directly stemming from the company's production line.