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A Russia-linked group tracked as Midnight Blizzard has compromised hotel and conference Wi-Fi portals worldwide, redirecting guests to phishing pages and fake software updates that steal credentials, session tokens, and other sensitive data. Microsoft says the campaign, dubbed CaptiveCrunch, "targets traveling employees generally rather than a particular sector," reports iTNews. From the report: Midnight Blizzard, tracked internally by Microsoft under its earlier codename NOBELIUM, is attributed by the US and UK governments to Russia's SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki) foreign intelligence service. Microsoft's technical analysis said compromises occurred in "several countries" without naming them, and it did not give a total number of affected venues, organisations or individuals. A related investigation published earlier in July by security firm ReliaQuest, and which Microsoft cited in its report, found compromised captive portal gateways across multiple United States cities as well as in India and Saudi Arabia, mostly at hotels. ReliaQuest said the traffic it observed came from organizations across financial services, professional services, legal, health care, energy and retail, suggesting the campaign targets traveling employees generally rather than a particular sector. [...] Where attackers gained a foothold, Microsoft said they deployed two main tools: CornFlake, a Windows remote access trojan (RAT) written in Go capable of keylogging, screenshot and webcam capture, audio surveillance and credential and session token theft. They would also drop ChocoShell, an in-memory PowerShell infostealer targeting browser cookies, saved passwords, Microsoft 365 single sign-on (SSO) tokens and wi-fi credentials. Microsoft also said it has seen indications the attackers might be targeting Android devices with similar prompts urging victims to download and install an APK file.

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ESPN unveiled an “AI tells detection” tool during broadcasts of the 2026 World Series of Poker. Is it a neat computer-powered party trick, or a real threat to poker’s future?

It is the latest development in the ongoing dispute between Apple and the Home Office over data privacy.

The software company reached a $1.2 billion valuation in 2024 and expanded its Boston office to 12,000 square feet this spring.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Behind the Black: In a new bid to get the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) to move from Hawaii, which has blocked its construction for more than a decade, the Spanish government has put together a $1.14 billion package that would not only pay for construction on the Canary Islands, but would finance an additional half century of operations. Tech Times provides some additional details: The package is conditional on the TMT International Observatory formally choosing La Palma as its construction site. The financing architecture has three pillars and two additional contingent instruments. The first pillar is 400 million euros (approximately $456 million USD) from Spain's Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, routed through the Centre for Technological Development and Innovation (CDTI). This figure was first pledged a year ago in July 2025 as Spain's initial bid. The second pillar is a 300 million-euro (approximately $342 million USD) loan from the EIB [European Investment Bank] itself -- subject to satisfactory completion of the bank's technical, financial, and legal due diligence and approval by its governing bodies. The third is a potential 300 million-euro (approximately $342 million USD) participation from the Instituto de Credito Oficial (ICO), Spain's state development finance institution, evaluated under equivalent conditions to the EIB loan but subject to its own separate analysis. Spain's export credit agency, Cesce, may also provide coverage instruments, and the EIB has left open the possibility of expanding its support through intermediated financing mechanisms or guarantees.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: The cost of producing new results on ten longstanding mathematical problems just fell to $2,000, according to OpenAI, which says its Astra model generated machine-checkable proofs for questions that had resisted human progress for decades. OpenAI published the work on August 1 and used it to give its next major model family a name: Astra. The results run across group theory, high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, quantum complexity, lattice cryptography and extremal combinatorics. They arrived as a 249-page manuscript collection and, alongside it, something the field has not seen attached to an AI claim before at this scale: a machine-checkable certificate for every single result. The problems were not textbook exercises dressed up as discoveries. Each had been open for at least ten years, most of them far longer, and several sit at the center of their subfields: - A construction establishing the existence of non-sofic groups, a question that has occupied group theorists for years. - A disproof of Connes's rigidity conjecture, a long-standing problem in the theory of von Neumann algebras. - An improvement to the general upper bound on sphere-packing density in high dimensions, a bound that had stood since 1978. - Three problems come from the catalogue of open questions left behind by Paul Erdos. The announcement follows another result from May, when OpenAI used a similar reasoning model to produce an original mathematical proof disproving a famous unsolved conjecture in geometry, which was first posed by Paul Erdos in 1946.

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Buyers of AI services are struggling to control costs and sellers are not sure how much to charge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico's largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a "lockdown" browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May through early June. It was a disaster. When exam results came in, they bore little resemblance to past results, especially at the top. Between 2021 and 2025, 3.5 percent of test takers scored 100 or more on the 120-question UNAM test. This year, 16.3 percent did so. The story was even worse at the highest of the high end. Between 2021 and 2025, 0.9 percent of test takers scored 110 or more; this year, 5.5 percent did so. The surge in top scores led to accusations of widespread cheating, and UNAM appointed a commission of experts to investigate the situation. The group was given the unwieldy name "la Comision Tecnica de Personas Expertas para la Revision del Proceso de Seleccion de Ingreso a Licenciatura para el Circlo Escolar 2026-2027/1," and it has just submitted its recommendations. The commission believes that the best path forward, given all the concerns, is to administer a "control exam" -- that is, applicants will have to sit for another test, and they will do so in person. This control exam will apply not only to those who secured a spot at UNAM based on this year's test but also to everyone who would have been admitted based on minimum successful scores in their program of study since 2021. About 58,000 people could be affected, and places at UNAM will now depend on the results of the new test. (Details on the control exam should appear soon; classes are currently scheduled to begin on August 10, so everything will have to move quickly unless the school decides to delay classes.) According to Gaceta UNAM, the school's official news publication, the university rector has apologized to honest applicants, since they will now have to prepare for and take the test again despite doing nothing wrong. Still, the control exam is "necessary to give certainty and guarantee equity in access," the rector added.

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Apple says its lower-cost MacBook Neo is beginning to displace Windows laptops and Chromebooks in K-12 schools, with several districts purchasing thousands of units. According to the company's latest earnings call, nearly half of the large MacBook Neo purchases made by U.S. educational institutions last quarter reportedly replaced competing platforms. 9to5Mac reports: Apple's commentary highlighted some large district deployments moving to Neo Pinellas County Schools, one of the largest districts in Florida, which is moving its 25k students off Windows and onto MacBook Neo across its 18 high schools. In Washington, Peninsula School District 401 moved over its 8,000 students from Chromebooks to MacBook Neo. Midwest City-Del City School District in Oklahoma purchased more than 6,000 MacBook Neos to become an all-Apple district for students.

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Microsoft reportedly plans to let developers bring Xbox 360 games to PC and next-generation Xbox devices, with a gradual rollout expected between 2027 and 2028. A separate disc-to-digital program would also give players transferable digital licenses tied to their physical Xbox discs, preserving the ability to resell or trade them. The Verge reports: With 360 games, developers can opt into making them backward compatible, and they will have control over things like a game's price and if it's available on Game Pass. The feature is expected to have a "gradual" rollout between 2027 and 2028 "across next-gen devices." The "full launch" of original Xbox games on PC is also set for October 2026; the initial program announced in July included just four games. The document also includes details about a way for players to get a digital version of a game that they already own on a physical disc, which The Verge's Tom Warren reported on in July. The document says that if a player puts an Xbox One or Series game on disc into an Xbox One or Series X console with a disc drive, they'll be granted a digital license that's bound to "that disc and the player's account." The license will stay with a player across Xbox devices, but if the disc "changes hands," the license will transfer to the new person. That should mean that gamers can still trade and sell discs; once the original owner of a disc does so, they can't play the digital version they got from that disc anymore. According to the document, a public beta for the disc-to-digital program was set for July with general availability set for August. We understand Microsoft had originally planned to test its disc-to-digital program with Xbox Insiders in July, but the beta was delayed. It's unclear if the timeline of August general availability is still accurate.

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theodp writes: During Microsoft's 2026Q4 earnings call, CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella took time to tout a dashboard he personally created using AI from a Morgan Stanley analyst's PDF research report, which suggested a rosy payback for the so-called MAG7's ('Magnificent 7' companies) massive capital expenditures on AI (to which Nadella later added a "not financial advice" disclaimer). "It would be fun for you, Adam. I think one of your colleagues put out an ROIC [Return on Invested Capital] document. I took that document to Copilot, which is a PDF, and I said, 'Build me a new Power BI dashboard, essentially.' But here is the thing. It built a rich semantic model that went into my Fabric with OneLake that brought all the data in from the external sources. In fact, it was current with all the SEC filings of all the MAG7. And then on top of that, the repo itself is in GitHub, but the artifact is sitting in my Copilot as a site. That, to me, is a classic example of an enterprise-wide workflow. I, as a knowledge worker, could go create a dashboard. The data engineer can go to Fabric and find the artifact. The professional developer can go to the repo and find it in GitHub. And by the way, it's all registered with Agent 365. That's a little bit of what Amy is describing as the coming together of a new way to work, even while at the same time, bringing IT, security and manageability of it." After Nadella's show-and-tell drew an underwhelming response during the call ("That's very helpful. Thank you." said the Morgan Stanley analyst whose team's work Nadella scraped with AI), Nadella turned to social media with posts on LinkedIn (12M followers) and Twitter/X (8M followers) to make the case for why his DIY project was such a brilliant demonstration of how AI enables governance, controls, security, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, data analysis/modeling, visualization, usability, and value. "Some more detail on the ROIC Intelligence App I built yesterday and mentioned on today's earnings call," Nadella wrote on LinkedIn. "I took the PDF that Brian Nowak at Morgan Stanley put together for Hyperscale ROIC this week and used Copilot code (coming in our new superapp) with a single prompt + skill (/drill-me) to create the plan, then used autopilot in auto to create the full app (with history, lookups, scenarios, what-ifs, etc). And /rubber-duck to test. And the best part is that all the artifacts are in my enterprise environment. My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric. And everything is under Agent 365 IT/Sec/FinOps control! So this is not about Tokenmaxxing or vibe coding. Every step of the way the rails are engineered to create value, making everything a long-term reusable asset, with governance/security, and cost controls. This is the full system to drive business value. Disclosures: This is all pulled from public sources, and for illustrative purposes only...not financial advice! :) Here is the app and architecture..." Not unexpectedly, the accompanying screenshot of a splash page for the BI app and a buzzword-laden complicated architecture diagram drew universal praise from LinkedIn fans, but also a few barbs from less-than-impressed commenters on Nadella's Twitter/X post, some of whom suggested Nadella's project might even represent a jump-the-shark moment for AI mania. "That he doesn't see whats wrong with saying 'My app is in Copilot, my code is in GitHub Enterprise; all my data pipelines/lake/semantic models are in Fabric' is exactly why MS is failing at AI,'" replied @PassingPixels on X/Twitter. "Dude is having to run 5 different systems to emulate babies first vibe code." @zigmund_ignatov added, "Why do we call glorified slide show an app?" @Mathupiriyan quipped, "Looks like Copilot just turned a PDF into a profit crystal ball." Unimpressed, @Markusndnb remarked, "So you created a web page using tons of proprietary MS tools." And @FishyAccounting called on Nadella to show-his-work, saying "Post the prompt or it didn't happen." (btw, Microsoft President Brad Smith similarly declined to provide the prompt for his own self-described amazing AI DIY reporting project that he touted at Microsoft's Shareholder Meeting last December). So, does Nadella's self-promoted AI reworking of someone else's PDF research report strike you as an amazing example of everything that's good about AI, or does it conjure up memories of The Emperor's New Clothes?

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Apple's practice of mixing employees' work files with personal iCloud accounts reportedly left some former staff with continued access to confidential documents, messages, and even new updates after leaving the company. "The former employees said many Apple files they had been shared on over their careers at the company -- including planning documents for product launch events -- continued to sync to their personal devices through the iCloud storage service after they left Apple," reports The Information. "In some cases, they even received notifications about fresh updates to the documents. Some former employees said they were petrified to delete the files for fear that doing so would attract Apple's attention." MacRumors reports: Apple files get mixed in with employees' accounts because the company encourages them to use their personal Apple Accounts with their work iCloud account. Employees are given a 2TB iCloud plan and are able to merge the storage with their existing Apple Account or create a new account. Since only one primary account can be signed in at a time, most opt to use their existing account to avoid having to carry two iPhones. Apple has a managed folder for workplace files that it revokes access to when an employee leaves, but some internal documents aren't saved there automatically and shared files end up mixed in with personal content. Employees can also retain access to iMessage chats and files shared via the Messages app. Lingering access to Apple systems is central to Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI. In its filing, Apple alleged that former employee Chang Liu breached Apple's systems using a "rare, previously unknown authentication bug" to download files while he was working at OpenAI. Apple told The Information that the OpenAI lawsuit is unrelated to any files left available on iCloud and that it does not pursue legal claims against former employees who accidentally have Apple documents in their personal iCloud accounts. "This case is about OpenAI employees wrongfully taking Apple's secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. Nothing in the filing relates to documents shared by, or stored in, iCloud."

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