Julian LeFay, widely regarded as the "Father of The Elder Scrolls," has died at age 59 following a battle with cancer. IGN reports: It was announced last week that LeFay, now co-founder and technical producer at OnceLost Games, had stepped back from game development after a lengthy battle with cancer, in order to spend time with his family and loved ones. A statement from OnceLost Games, published today, has now confirmed LeFay's passing -- "with profound sadness and heavy hearts." Born in Denmark in 1965, LeFay began his career working on early Amiga and NES games, before becoming one of Bethesda's earliest employees in 1987. After working on a string of Elder Scrolls titles, his career next took him to Sega, and then ultimately to found OnceLost Games in 2019 to develop a new open-world RPG, Wayward Realms, that was successfully pitched on Kickstarter as a Daggerfall spiritual successor. "Julian LeFay was not just a colleague -- he was a visionary who fundamentally shaped the gaming industry as we know it today," OnceLost Games' statement reads. "Known as the 'Father of The Elder Scrolls', Julian directed the creation of legendary titles including Elder Scrolls 1 and 2: Arena, Daggerfall, and Battlespire. His pioneering work established the foundation for open-world RPGs and influenced countless developers and games that followed." Bethesda also issued a statement, writing: "Without Julian, we would not be here today. If you had the opportunity to work with Julian, you were blessed to know a one-of-a-kind force of nature, who pushed everyone to create something special. His work and spirit will live on both in our memories and in our games."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hacking is hard. Well, sometimes. Other times, you just call up a company's IT service desk and pretend to be an employee who needs a password reset, an Okta multifactor authentication reset, and a Microsoft multifactor authentication reset... and it's done. Without even verifying your identity. So you use that information to log in to the target network and discover a more trusted user who works in IT security. You call the IT service desk back, acting like you are now this second person, and you request the same thing: a password reset, an Okta multifactor authentication reset, and a Microsoft multifactor authentication reset. Again, the desk provides it, no identity verification needed. So you log in to the network with these new credentials and set about planting ransomware or exfiltrating data in the target network, eventually doing an estimated $380 million in damage. Easy, right? According to The Clorox Company, which makes everything from lip balm to cat litter to charcoal to bleach, this is exactly what happened to it in 2023. But Clorox says that the "debilitating" breach was not its fault. It had outsourced the "service desk" part of its IT security operations to the massive services company Cognizant -- and Clorox says that Cognizant failed to follow even the most basic agreed-upon procedures for running the service desk. In the words of a new Clorox lawsuit, Cognizant's behavior was "all a devastating lie," it "failed to show even scant care," and it was "aware that its employees were not adequately trained." "Cognizant was not duped by any elaborate ploy or sophisticated hacking techniques," says the lawsuit, using italics to indicate outrage emphasis. "The cybercriminal just called the Cognizant Service Desk, asked for credentials to access Clorox's network, and Cognizant handed the credentials right over. Cognizant is on tape handing over the keys to Clorox's corporate network to the cybercriminal -- no authentication questions asked." [...] The new lawsuit, filed in California state courts, wants Cognizant to cough up millions of dollars to cover the damage Clorox says it suffered after weeks of disruption to its factories and ordering systems. (You can read a brief timeline of the disruption here.)

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The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have applied for regulatory permission to extend their trading hours to 22 and 24 hours daily, respectively. Nasdaq expects to implement round-the-clock trading from the second half of 2026. The London Stock Exchange is considering similar extensions, according to Financial Times. Several retail brokers already facilitate overnight trading through alternative platforms and "dark pools" -- off-exchange venues that operate during non-standard hours. Robinhood began offering all-night trading for select stocks in May 2023, while Charles Schwab announced plans to expand its overnight trading service to 1,100 securities this July. Economist argues that 24/7 trading is a bad idea. The publication writes: The problem with such trading is that price discovery can be fraught with difficulty. In fact, this is partly why institutional investors like dark pools: their lighter reporting requirements, compared with exchanges, allow big orders to be executed without alerting the wider market beforehand, which would move the price. Professionals taking the other side of these trades accept the risks and know how to navigate them. Amateurs, getting a worse price than they might have done in daylight, often do not. The witching hours are currently when all manner of dull, but vital, post-trade processes take place, from settlement and valuation to the reconciliation of mistakes. Once trading is non-stop, there will be no pause for the financial plumbing to clear. Nor for traders to rest in the knowledge that the market is resting with them, so there is no need to refresh their screens. In today's always-on world, stock exchanges' limited opening hours might seem old-fashioned. But get ready to miss them once they're gone.

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Internet outages spiked during the second quarter of 2025, driven by government-mandated shutdowns, infrastructure failures, and technical glitches, according to Cloudflare's quarterly disruption report. Government restrictions returned after a quiet first quarter, with Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Panama imposing internet cutoffs for reasons ranging from protest suppression to exam security. A massive power outage on April 28 knocked Spain's internet traffic down 80% and Portugal's by 90%, with service restored around 1 a.m. the following day. Cable damage caused complete outages for Digicel in Haiti and a 90-minute disruption for Airtel in Malawi. Several major outages went unexplained, including an eight-hour blackout at SkyCable in the Philippines and a nationwide outage at Thai provider TrueMove H, with companies providing no official explanations for the service failures.

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ItsJustAPseudonym shares a Reuters story:The International Cycling Union (UCI) has intensified its fight against mechanical doping, employing intelligence-driven methods to combat increasingly sophisticated alleged cheating in professional cycling. ItsJustAPseudonym adds: They call the use of hidden motors "mechanical doping". In 2010 it led to the ban of a rider from Belgium who had a hidden motor in her seat-tube during a cyclocross event. "It's a bit of a technological arms race. Components are getting lighter, smaller. Easier to conceal, which is harder to detect", according to Nick Raudenski, the UCI Head of the Fight Against Technological Fraud.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Sony is testing a Power Saver mode for the PlayStation 5, explaining in a new PlayStation Blog update that the option will permit games to run with lower power consumption. While the upcoming feature was revealed as part of the system update beta, the feature will not be available during the beta phase. However, when the feature does hit your console, players will gain access to a new option called Power Saver. With Power Saver enabled, "supported PS5 games will scale back performance and will allow your PS5 to reduce its power consumption," explained Shuzo Kikuchi, VP of product management at Sony Interactive Entertainment. "If not enabled, or if games do not support the feature, the performance will not be scaled back and power consumption will not be reduced." As for what scaled-back performance actually means, SIE indicates that VR mode will be unavailable and that "some gameplay features may be limited." So that's one very clear change, and one vague, game-specific change.

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A landmark decision by a top UN court has cleared the way for countries to sue each other over climate change, including over historic emissions of planet-warming gases. BBC: But the judge at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netherlands on Wednesday said that untangling who caused which part of climate change could be difficult. The ruling is non-binding but legal experts say it could have wide-ranging consequences. It will be seen as a victory for countries that are very vulnerable to climate change, who came to court after feeling frustrated about lack of global progress in tackling the problem.

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Meta researchers published findings in Nature Wednesday detailing a wristband prototype that controls computers through hand gestures by reading electrical signals from forearm muscles. The device uses surface electromyography to detect signals from alpha motor neurons in the spinal cord that connect to muscle fibers, allowing users to move cursors with wrist turns, open applications with thumb-to-forefinger taps, and write text by tracing letters in the air. The technology, developed at Meta's Reality Labs, trained neural networks on data from 10,000 participants to identify common muscle signal patterns. The wristband works without individual calibration across most users and can detect intended movements before physical motion occurs. Meta demonstrated the device controlling its Orion augmented reality glasses last fall and plans product integration over the next few years.

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A cyber-espionage campaign exploiting unpatched Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities has breached approximately 400 organizations worldwide, including the US National Nuclear Security Administration, according to Netherlands-based cybersecurity firm Eye Security. The figure represents a four-fold increase from 100 organizations cataloged over the weekend, with researchers calling it likely an undercount since not all attack vectors leave detectable artifacts. Microsoft identified three Chinese groups -- state-backed Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon, plus China-based Storm-2603 -- as exploiting the vulnerabilities in on-premises SharePoint servers to steal authentication credentials and execute malicious code remotely. The campaign began July 7 and was first detected July 18 when Eye Security found unusual activity on a customer's server. Victims include the US Energy Department, Education Department, Florida's Department of Revenue, Rhode Island General Assembly, and European and Middle Eastern governments.

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Australia is offering visas to Tuvalu citizens each year under a climate migration deal Canberra has billed as "the first agreement of its kind anywhere in the world." From a report: "We received extremely high levels of interest in the ballot with 8,750 registrations, which includes family members of primary registrants," the Australian high commission in Tuvalu said in a statement. The figure is equal to 82 percent of the country's 10,643 population, according to census figures collected in 2022. "With 280 visas offered this program year, it means that many will miss out," the commission said. One of the most climate-threatened corners of the planet, scientists fear Tuvalu will be uninhabitable within the next 80 years. Two of the archipelago's nine coral atolls have already largely disappeared under the waves.

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The Trump administration on Wednesday unveiled a 23-page "AI Action Plan" [PDF] designed to accelerate American AI development through deregulation and infrastructure expansion while countering Chinese influence in the technology sector. The plan, mandated by President Trump in January with a six-month deadline, establishes three core pillars: innovation acceleration, infrastructure development, and international AI diplomacy. Central provisions include removing federal regulations that hinder AI development and directing agencies to withhold AI-related funding from states with "burdensome" AI regulations. The administration will streamline environmental permitting for data centers and energy infrastructure while expanding use of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power to meet AI's electricity demands. The plan mandates that government-procured large language models be "neutral and unbiased," addressing conservative concerns about perceived liberal bias in AI systems. Trump signed accompanying executive orders requiring the US International Development Finance Corporation and Export-Import Bank to support global deployment of American AI technology. "To win the AI race, the U.S. must lead in innovation, infrastructure, and global partnerships," Sacks stated, emphasizing worker protection and avoiding "Orwellian uses of AI." The initiative represents Trump's campaign promise to position America as the dominant global AI leader while dismantling Biden-era AI safety requirements rescinded on Trump's first day in office.

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Apple today announced AppleCare One, a insurance subscription service that covers multiple products under a single plan for $19.99 per month. The service protects up to three devices, with additional products costing $5.99 monthly each. AppleCare One provides identical coverage to AppleCare Plus, including battery protection, unlimited accidental damage repairs, and priority support. The service accepts products up to four years old, compared to AppleCare Plus's 60-day enrollment window, though Apple requires older devices to be in "good condition" and may conduct diagnostic testing. Headphones must be less than one year old for eligibility. Theft and Loss coverage comes standard for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The service goes live tomorrow.

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A record-breaking heat wave across Western Europe in June and July has triggered a political battle over air conditioning installation, with right-wing parties demanding widespread adoption while government officials warn of environmental consequences. More than 1,000 French schools closed partially or completely due to lack of air conditioning during the heat wave. Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party proposed a major campaign to install air conditioning in schools, hospitals and other institutions. UK Conservatives urged London's Labour mayor to eliminate restrictions on air conditioning in new housing, while Spain's Vox party highlighted air-conditioning breakdowns to criticize establishment parties. French Energy Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher countered that large-scale air conditioning would heat streets with exhaust, worsening heat waves. Europe is the fastest-warming continent, heating twice the global average since the 1980s. One study predicts air conditioning will increase Italy's annual power demand by 10% by 2050.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: During his latest trip to Washington, OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, painted a sweeping vision of an AI-dominated future in which entire job categories disappear, presidents follow ChatGPT's recommendations and hostile nations wield artificial intelligence as a weapon of mass destruction, all while positioning his company as the indispensable architect of humanity's technological destiny. Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement. "Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone," he said, singling out customer support roles. "That's a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you're on target and AI, and that's fine." The OpenAI founder described the transformation of customer service as already complete, telling the Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman: "Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It's like a super-smart, capable person. There's no phone tree, there's no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It's very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it's done." The OpenAI founder then turned to healthcare, making the suggestion that AI's diagnostic capabilities had surpassed human doctors, but wouldn't go so far as to accept the superior performer as the sole purveyor of healthcare. "ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, can give you better -- it's like, a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world," he said. "Yet people still go to doctors, and I am not, like, maybe I'm a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to, like, entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop." [...] At the fireside chat, he said one of his biggest worries was over AI's rapidly advancing destructive capabilities, with one scenario that kept him up at night being a hostile nation using these weapons to attack the US financial system. And despite being in awe of advances in voice cloning, Altman warned the crowd about how that same benefit could enable sophisticated fraud and identity theft, considering that "there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication".

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The United Kingdom's government is planning to ban public sector and critical infrastructure organizations from paying ransoms after ransomware attacks. From a report: The list of entities that would have to follow the new proposed legislation includes local councils, schools, and the publicly funded National Health Service (NHS). "Ransomware is estimated to cost the UK economy millions of pounds each year, with recent high-profile ransomware attacks highlighting the severe operational, financial, and even life-threatening risks. The ban would target the business model that fuels cyber criminals' activities and makes the vital services the public rely on a less attractive target for ransomware groups," the UK government said. "We're determined to smash the cyber criminal business model and protect the services we all rely on as we deliver our Plan for Change. By working in partnership with industry to advance these measures, we are sending a clear signal that the UK is united in the fight against ransomware," Security Minister Dan Jarvis added.

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For the first time ever, a CCTV camera in Myanmar captured real-time footage of a supershear strike-slip earthquake moving at 3.7 miles per second. According to seismologists at Japan's Kyoto University, the analysis has "led to new findings based on real-time visual evidence of tectonic motion," reports Popular Science. From the report: The magnitude 7.7 event took place on March 28 along the Sagaing Fault with an epicenter near Myanmar's second-largest city, Mandalay. Although the initial rupture process lasted barely 80 seconds, it and numerous aftershocks were ultimately responsible for 5,456 confirmed deaths and over 11,000 injuries. Later evaluations indicated the quake was the second deadliest in modern history, as well as the most powerful to hit Myanmar in over a century. According to a separate group's paper published in the same journal, the southern portion of the rupture occurred at an astonishing 3.7 miles per second -- fast enough to qualify as "supershear velocity." Amid the catastrophe, an outdoor CCTV camera about 74.5 miles south of the epicenter recorded a visceral illustration of its power. Over just a few moments, what at first looks like a single chunk of the ground appears to suddenly divide and horizontally shift past one another in opposite directions. Completely by accident, the camera recorded a direct look of a strike-slip fault, something previously analyzed by remote seismic instruments. To researchers at Kyoto University, the clip wasn't just a jaw-dropping scene -- it was an opportunity to study a strike-slip fault using visual data. You can watch the footage on YouTube.

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Conspiracy theorists drastically overestimate how many people share their beliefs, according to a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Researchers conducted eight studies involving over 4,000 US adults and found that while participants believed conspiracy claims just 12% of the time, believers thought they were in the majority 93% of the time. The study examined beliefs about claims such as the Apollo Moon landings being faked and Princess Diana's death not being an accident. In one example, 8% of participants believed the Sandy Hook shooting was a false flag operation, but that group estimated 61% of people agreed with them. "It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that's been observed," said co-author Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University. The findings suggest overconfidence serves as a primary driver of conspiracy beliefs.

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Government funding for a program that hunts for threats on America's critical infrastructure networks expired on Sunday, preventing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from analyzing activity that could indicate a cyberattack, the program director told Congress on Tuesday. From a report: Nate Gleason leads a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) focused on nation-state threats against critical infrastructure, and this includes the CyberSentry Program. It's a public-private partnership, managed by CISA, that looks for malicious activity on IT and operational technology (OT) networks in America's energy, water, healthcare, and other critical facilities. This includes threats along the lines of China's Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon intrusions -- network activity that may look like, or even start as, espionage, but ultimately enables the digital invaders to backdoor critical orgs and deploy cyber weapons to aid in a kinetic war.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Using brain scans from a very large database, British researchers determined that during the pandemic years of 2021 and 2022, people's brains showed signs of aging, including shrinkage, according to the report published in Nature Communications. People who got infected with the virus also showed deficits in certain cognitive abilities, such as processing speed and mental flexibility. The aging effect "was most pronounced in males and those from more socioeconomically deprived backgrounds," said the study's first author, Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad, a neuroimaging researcher at the University of Nottingham, via email. "It highlights that brain health is not shaped solely by illness, but also by broader life experiences." Overall, the researchers found a 5.5-month acceleration in aging associated with the pandemic. On average, the difference in brain aging between men and women was small, about 2.5 months. "We don't yet know exactly why, but this fits with other research suggesting that men may be more affected by certain types of stress or health challenges," Mohammadi-Nejad said. [...] The study wasn't designed to pinpoint specific causes. "But it is likely that the cumulative experience of the pandemic -- including psychological stress, social isolation, disruptions in daily life, reduced activity and wellness -- contributed to the observed changes," Mohammadi-Nejad said. "In this sense, the pandemic period itself appears to have left a mark on our brains, even in the absence of infection." "The most intriguing finding in this study is that only those who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 showed any cognitive deficits, despite structural aging," said Jacqueline Becker, a clinical neuropsychologist and assistant professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This speaks a little to the effects of the virus itself." The study may shed light on conditions like long Covid and chronic fatigue, though it's still unclear whether the observed brain changes in uninfected individuals will lead to noticeable effects on brain function.

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Olof Kyros Gustafsson, former CEO of Escobar, pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges related to the company's phone scam operation. The Department of Justice says Gustafsson took orders for phones branded with Pablo Escobar's likeness but failed to deliver products, instead transferring customer money for personal use. When customers sought refunds, Gustafsson fraudulently referred payment processors to certificates of ownership as proof of delivery. The phones were Samsung devices with gold stickers. Gustafsson faces up to 20 years in prison and $1.3 million in restitution at his December 5th sentencing.

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