The presidential race is getting ready for a reset with Harris and Trump
A day after Joe Biden exited the US presidential race and announced that his wife Vice President Kamala Harris will become the party’s nominee, former President Barack Obama called her a “bright young woman”. “She has the experience to be Commander-In-Chief,” he added. Obama also said that Harris has the “skill” to be the next President of the US.
Three writers on the promise of a new president
Silicon Valley’s megadonors have pledged their support for Vice President Kamala Harris after Joe Biden dropped out of the US presidential race. “I watched as Harris spoke to the staff at his campaign headquarters and walked away inspired. We’re going to win,” a tech executive said on being asked about Biden’s exit. “It feels…hopey changey,” he added.
The time is right for a folding phone
Apple is working on a 6.7-inch folding iPhone with an internal cover screen which could be launched in 2026, The Information reported. It said Apple is also working on a folded flip phone with a 6.4-inch rear screen. The iPhone could have an internal cover screen that could allow users to access certain features of the phone, the report added.
The two major kids online safety bills will be brought to the floor by Schumer
US Senator Charles Schumer has announced that he will introduce a bill in the US Congress to protect children from the “harm” of social media and other online platforms. The bill, ‘KOSA’, seeks to limit the liability of technology companies for harmful content on their platforms. It would give the Federal Trade Commission and potentially state attorneys general the power to restrict protected online speech.
Delta is having a hard time recovering after Crowdstrike failures
Delta Air Lines was forced to cancel nearly 3,000 flights from Friday till Sunday as a result of a security breach, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a public letter. Several Delta applications run on Microsoft Windows, causing several of the tools to be impacted in the outage, he added. Delta offered travel waivers to customers on flights impacted by the outage.
Meta’s New Llama 3.1 is free, powerful, and risky
Internet company Meta has announced the release of Llama 3.1, the largest-ever open-source artificial intelligence model. It claims that the model’s performance outperforms the GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. It added a feature that could generate images based on someone’s specific likeness, one of the ways it’s making the llama-based Meta AI assistant available in more countries and languages.
The world’s computers crashed because of a bad CrowdStrike Update
A security firm CrowdStrike said a recent update to a sensor configuration in Windows systems caused the global outages. It said the update, which was downloaded from 04:09 am to 05:25 pm (IST), caused a system crash that was caused by an OS crash. The update is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipes”, it added.
Microsoft is having an outage that affects flights and banking around the world
A global IT outage on Friday led to a disruption in the services of at least 8.5 million Windows devices, including those of government agencies and businesses, Microsoft said. The outages are being felt across the globe, including in India, Japan, the UK, the US, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.
Don’t get sucked into crowd strike outage scam
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on Friday said the security firm is “actively working” with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. The issue isn’t linked to a cyberattack, he said. Systems are showing an error message that says, “ItLooks like Windows didn’t load correctly,” while giving users the option to restart the PC.
Hospitals around the world are struggling because of the IT crisis
Several US-based healthcare organisations were affected by a software update that caused their systems to crash. A WIRED reporter found both Baylor hospital network and Quest Diagnostics unable to process routine bloodwork. It could take days to weeks to get the issue fixed, as administrators may have physical access to the device. Some systems may be unrecoversable, but the majority will be recovered.