autotldr

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A wealth of promising home-grown titles from the Xbox Games Showcase 2024 back in June gave existing users plenty of reasons to stay subscribed.

Xbox Game Pass has had a really solid July for content, and it'll get even sweeter if the rumors of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 hitting the service soon pan out.

I wrote recently about how games might not be enough to find those elusive "new" users in an article linked below, revolving around the dilemma that the overall number of "core" console players simply isn't growing.

While speaking to developers at shows over the past year, a lot of the discourse revolves around "black hole" games like Fortnite and Roblox, which vacuum up users and turn them into mono-gamers with no interest in playing anything else.

Xbox Game Pass is an attempt to cut through that trend in the name of supporting and showcasing the variety of art the industry has to offer — meeting new customer cohorts halfway.

The vastness of its Activision-Blizzard purchase seems to have led to a lost couple of years of momentum for Xbox as a brand, with attention focused solely on its variety of court cases.

The original article contains 2,867 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 93%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In the biggest news of all, Rivian and Volkswagen announced a $5 billion joint venture that will co-develop core parts of the hardware and software platform to be used in cars from both automakers.

We love that because it aligns so beautifully with our mission: the ability to help accelerate putting highly compelling electric vehicles into the market, which will ultimately drive more demand.

A core objective of how we’ve structured the joint venture is that we don’t lose the velocity and the speed and the decisiveness and lack of bureaucracy that exists within our software function today.

Beyond just simplification of how we manage running over-the-air updates across so many different instances, it also gets us a lot of supply chain leverage in a way that we, Rivian, haven’t had in the past.

In fact, you can imagine the day of the announcement, I had a handful of phone calls from CEOs of big semiconductor suppliers, and they’re like, “Hey, we can work harder on pricing.” So, that was awesome.

So, taking away all those mechanical design studio packaging constraints that we had before, and then solving the biggest challenge, which was network architecture by this being that as a project, it’s just a very different type of relationship.

The original article contains 11,459 words, the summary contains 210 words. Saved 98%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“We’re grateful for the progress leading companies have made toward fulfilling their voluntary commitments in addition to what is required by the executive order,” says Robyn Patterson, a spokesperson for the White House.

Without comprehensive federal legislation, the best the US can do right now is to demand that companies follow through on these voluntary commitments, says Brandie Nonnecke, the director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

After they signed the commitments, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI founded the Frontier Model Forum, a nonprofit that aims to facilitate discussions and actions on AI safety and responsibility.

“The natural question is: Does [the technical fix] meaningfully make progress and address the underlying social concerns that motivate why we want to know whether content is machine generated or not?” he adds.

In the past year, the company has pushed out research on deception, jailbreaking, strategies to mitigate discrimination, and emergent capabilities such as models’ ability to tamper with their own code or engage in persuasion.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has used satellite imagery and AI to improve responses to wildfires in Maui and map climate-vulnerable populations, which helps researchers expose risks such as food insecurity, forced migration, and disease.

The original article contains 3,300 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 94%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost.

The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years.

It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat—typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco’s fog, for example).

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research.

That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research.

While many of the AI skeptics in weather forecasting have been won over by recent developments, according to Hill, the fast pace is hard for the research community to keep up with.

The original article contains 773 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The United Nations has blamed Facebook for the dissemination of hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar that resulted in their ethnic cleansing.

This influence on others is known as a (positive) network effect, where increased numbers of people improve the value of a product.

In doing so, one could be helping Facebook to refine its algorithms so that it can better single out specific individuals for certain purposes, some of which could be as nefarious as those of Cambridge Analytica.

For those of us who do not engage in such objectionable behavior, it is helpful to consider whether Facebook has crossed certain moral “red lines,” entering the realm of outright wickedness.

Likewise, Facebook would have crossed a red line if it had intentionally assisted in the dissemination of hate speech in Myanmar.

The recent worrisome revelation that Facebook hired an opposition-research firm that attempted to discredit protesters by claiming that they were agents of the financier George Soros is not encouraging.

The original article contains 997 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Members of the Recording Industry Association of Japan had taken legal action in the U.S. to demand information on Hikari No Akari's operator from California-based Cloudflare, whose content delivery network the site had used.

"We'll use information that Cloudflare will disclose to hold the website operator responsible and take other legal action," an RIAJ spokesperson said.

The website received roughly 15 million visits over the past year, 75% of which were from countries outside Japan, such as Indonesia, the U.S. and France.

"Unlike videos or published materials, pirated works of music don't need to be translated for anyone to enjoy," says Hiroyuki Nakajima, an attorney versed in content piracy.

The RIAJ took a similar step in 2023, forcing the closure of another piracy website that August via legal action in the U.S.

This site, which had linked to illegal downloads of J-pop for more than two years, had not shut down as the trade group had demanded.

The original article contains 391 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Parents of under-18s should be monitoring their children’s phones for nude pictures, according to the police chief for child protection, in order to tackle a “tidal wave” of online sexual abuse cases.

The new lead for child abuse investigations at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, assistant chief constable Becky Riggs, told the Sunday Times parents needed to report any intimate images of their children to police.

In October 2022, 16-year-old Dinal De Alwis killed himself after being blackmailed over naked images he had sent to a stranger, possibly in Nigeria.

While much of this abuse comes from adults targeting children, half of it is child-on-child crime and figures show the average age of an offender is 14.

In 2022, in England and Wales, about 5,000 cases involved children sharing naked photos of themselves.

We will work with parents and schools to avoid criminalising children where it comes with a degree of naivety, but we have to measure each case on its merits.”

The original article contains 400 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Microsoft has released a recovery tool that’s designed to help IT admins repair Windows machines that were impacted by CrowdStrike’s faulty update that crashed 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday.

The tool creates a bootable USB drive that IT admins can use to help quickly recover impacted machines.

While CrowdStrike has issued an update to fix its software that led to millions of Blue Screen of Death errors, not all machines are able to automatically receive that fix.

Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file.

Microsoft’s recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly.

This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows.

The original article contains 246 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 24%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

CrowdStrike’s faulty update caused a worldwide tech disaster that affected 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft says that’s “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” but it was enough to create problems for retailers, banks, airlines, and many other industries, as well as everyone who relies on them.

Separately, the technical breakdown from CrowdStrike released Friday explains more about what happened and why so many systems were affected all at once.

CrowdStrike’s breakdown explains the configuration file that was at the heart of the issue:

CrowdStrike explained that the file is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipe1 execution on Windows systems.” Security researcher and Objective See founder Patrick Wardle says that the explanation aligns with the earlier analysis he and others provided about the cause of the crash, as the problem file “C-00000291- “triggered a logic error that resulted in an OS crash” (via CSAgent.sys).”

CrowdStrike’s channel file updates were pushed to computers regardless of any settings meant to prevent such automatic updates, Wardle noted.

The original article contains 193 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 9%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Recently, a newsletter by Tom Warren over at The Verge suggested that Microsoft has been exploring giving up on marketing its Xbox brand in Europe and other regions, in favor of the United States and other territories where it is more entrenched.

Flatt described his team's efforts as "scrappy," which is not exactly what I would personally want to hear from one of the world's top three most valuable companies, but Microsoft does find itself in a difficult macroeconomic confluence.

Microsoft's lack of visible urgency when it comes to Surface, Xbox, and even Windows itself, could be blamed for the struggles of an entire raft of products in recent years, even before we discuss things like software quality and customer service.

I felt like Hellblade 2 marketing was quite visible when I visited London recently, as well as across social media, but sales for the game have reportedly been quite poor.

It would be convenient if we could split into multiple timelines and examine the outcomes of binary decisions, but it's true that the overall global console user base hasn't really grown in years, despite the marketing from whoever is involved.

Despite all this, Microsoft has been touting its biggest ever Xbox presence for Europe's big Gamescom convention later this summer in Cologne, Germany.

The original article contains 733 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

LONDON (AP) — TikTok owner ByteDance can’t avoid the bloc’s crackdown on digital giants, a European Union court said Wednesday in a decision that found the video sharing platform falls under a new law that also covers Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The EU’s General Court rejected ByteDance’s legal challenge against being classed as an online “gatekeeper” that has to comply with extra obligations under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Markets Act.

The rulebook, also known as the DMA, took effect this year and seeks to counter the dominance of Big Tech companies and make online competition fairer by giving consumers more choice.

TikTok had argued that it wasn’t a gatekeeper but was playing the role of a new competitor in social media taking on entrenched players like Facebook and Instagram owner Meta.

The judges, however, decided that since 2018 TikTok had “succeeded in increasing its number of users very rapidly and exponentially” and that it had “rapidly consolidated its position, and even strengthened that position over the following years.”

The Digital Markets Act took effect in March, with a list of dos and don’ts for big tech “gatekeeper” companies aimed at giving users more choices and threatening big penalties if they don’t comply.

The original article contains 269 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 25%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.

Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers.

The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica.

(Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)

Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

The original article contains 165 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 11%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!