Scientists are reporting that this year's summer was the hottest on record -- and by a significant margin. CNN reports: June to August was the planet's warmest such period since records began in 1940, according to data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service. The global average temperature this summer was 16.77 degrees Celsius (62.19 Fahrenheit), according to Copernicus, which is 0.66 degrees Celsius above the 1990 to 2020 average -- beating the previous record, set in August 2019, by nearly 0.3 degrees Celsius.

Typically these records, which track the average air temperature across the entire world, are broken by hundredths of a degree. This is the first set of scientific data to confirm what many had believed was inevitable. The planet experienced its hottest June on record, followed by the hottest July -- both breaking previous records by large margins. August was also the warmest such month on record, according to the new Copernicus data, and warmer than every other month this year except for July. The global average temperature for the month was 16.82 degrees Celsius -- 0.31 degrees warmer than the previous record set in 2016.

Both July and August are estimated to have been 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels, according to Copernicus, a key threshold scientists have long warned the world must stay under to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. With four months of the year remaining, 2023 currently ranks as the second warmest on record, according to Copernicus, only 0.01 degrees Celsius below 2016, which is currently the warmest year on record.

Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, has declared itself in financial distress after troubled Oracle project costs ballooned from $25 million to around $125.5 million. The Register reports: Contributing to the publication of a legal Section 114 Notice, which says the $4.3 billion revenue organization is unable to balance the books, is a bill of up to $954 million to settle equal pay claims. In a statement today, councillors John Cotton and Sharon Thompson, leader and deputy leader respectively, said the authority was also hit by financial stress owing to issues with the implementation of its Oracle IT system. The council has made a request to the Local Government Association for additional strategic support, the statement said.

In May, Birmingham City Council said it was set to pay up to $125.5 million for its Oracle ERP system -- potentially a fourfold increase on initial estimated expenses -- in a project suffering from delays, cost over-runs, and a lack of controls. After grappling with the project to replace SAP for core HR and finance functions since 2018, the council reviewed the plan in 2019, 2020, and again in 2021, when the total implementation cost for the project almost doubled to $48.5 million. The project, dubbed Financial and People, was "crucial to an organisation of Birmingham City Council's size," a spokesperson said at the time. Cotton said the system had a problem with how it was "tracking our financial transactions and HR transactions issues as well. That's got to be fixed," he said.

Earlier this year, one insider told The Register that Oracle Fusion, the cloud-based ERP system the council is moving to, "is not a product that is suitable for local authorities, because it's very much geared towards a manufacturing/trading organization." They said the previous SAP system had been heavily customized to meet the council's needs and it was struggling to recreate these functions in Oracle.

The UK's worst air-traffic outage in a decade was caused by an anomaly in the airspace manager's software system, which confused two geographical checkpoints separated by some 4,000 nautical miles. From a report: The UK's Civil Aviation Authority said Wednesday it will conduct an independent review of the incident, which forced hundreds of flights to be canceled or delayed last week after an error in processing an airline's flight plan. The glitch triggered a shutdown of the software system run by NATS for safety reasons, according to a preliminary report from the public-private partnership formerly called National Air Traffic Services. This forced air-traffic staff to input flight plans manually, drastically reducing the amount of air traffic that could be processed.

The event sent airlines and airports in the UK into turmoil on Aug. 28, leaving planes out of position and passengers stranded. Nearly 800 flights leaving UK airports were canceled, with a similar number of arrivals scrapped, according to analytics firm Cirium. The report by NATS showed that on the day of the incident, an airline entered a plan into the system which led through UK airspace. NATS Chief Executive Officer Martin Rolfe declined to discuss details of the flight, such as its route or the airline involved, saying the specifics weren't pertinent to the outage. While the flight plan wasn't faulty, it threw off the system because the software used by NATS received duplicate identities for two different points on the map. There are an infinite number of flight-plan waypoints in the world, and duplicates remain despite work to remove them, according to Rolfe.

YouTube is trying out games as its next experimental offering. The company is adding a new "Playables" section on the site that will include games that can be played on both the desktop website and mobile devices. From a report: Playables will only appear for "a limited number of users to start," and there was no list of game titles published at this time. 9to5Google reports that one of the games to grace the new YouTube Playables experiment includes Stack Bounce, which involves a 3D ball bouncing on top of rings you must smash through with well-timed clicks. If you've heard of the game before, it's because Google already offers it on its minigames service, GameSnacks.

The Pentagon is considering the development of a vast network of AI-powered technology, drones and autonomous systems within the next two years to counter threats from China and other adversaries. WSJ: Kathleen Hicks, the deputy secretary of defense, will provide new details in a speech later Wednesday about the department's plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop an array of thousands of air-, land- and sea-based artificial-intelligence systems that are intended to be "small, smart, cheap."

The U.S. is seeking to keep pace with China's rapidly expanding military amid concerns that the Pentagon bureaucracy takes too long to develop and deploy cutting-edge systems. [...] One approach could be to build on the capabilities demonstrated by Task Force 59, the U.S. Navy's network of drones and sensors designed to monitor Iran's military activities in the Middle East.

The UK government will concede it will not use controversial powers in the online safety bill to scan messaging apps for harmful content until it is "technically feasible" to do so, postponing measures that critics say threaten users' privacy. Financial Times: A planned statement to the House of Lords on Wednesday afternoon will mark an eleventh-hour bid by ministers to end a stand-off with tech companies, including WhatsApp, that have threatened to pull their services from the UK over what they claimed was an intolerable threat to millions of users' security. The statement is set to outline that Ofcom, the tech regulator, will only require companies to scan their networks when a technology is developed that is capable of doing so, according to people briefed on the plan. Many security experts believe it could be years before any such technology is developed, if ever.

"A notice can only be issued where technically feasible and where technology has been accredited as meeting minimum standards of accuracy in detecting only child sexual abuse and exploitation content," the statement will say. The online safety bill, which has been in development for several years and is now in its final stages in parliament, is one of the toughest attempts by any government to make Big Tech companies responsible for the content that is shared on their networks.

schwit1 writes: The Justice Department has spent three years over two presidential administrations building the case that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. To defend itself, Google has enlisted hundreds of employees and three powerful law firms and spent millions of dollars on legal fees and lobbyists. On Tuesday, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will begin considering their arguments at a trial that cuts to the heart of a long-simmering question: Did today's tech giants become dominant by breaking the law?

The case -- U.S. et al v. Google -- is the federal government's first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor. The trial moves the antitrust battle against those companies to a new phase, shifting from challenging their mergers and acquisitions to more deeply examining the businesses that thrust them into power. Such a consequential case over tech power has not unfolded since the Justice Department took Microsoft to court in 1998 for antitrust violations.

The British Conservative government has eased planning rules and lifted restrictions that had effectively prohibited the construction of new onshore wind farms in England. The Independent reports: Rules introduced in 2015 by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who also led a Conservative administration, allowed a single objection to a wind turbine application to block its development. The regulations led to a dramatic decline in the number of new turbines granted planning permission. Some Conservatives pressured the current government to overturn the rules. Lawmaker Alok Sharma, who was president of the 2021 U.N. climate change conference and led the lobbying campaign, called them "outdated" and "not a sensible way for a planning system to operate."

Authorities said Tuesday that the eased restrictions mean that onshore wind projects supported by local residents will get approved more quickly. They said elected local officials will have the ability to make final decisions based on the prevailing view of their communities, not just a small number of objectors. Communities that back wind turbines in their areas will also benefit from cheaper electricity, officials said, adding that the way such energy discounts work would be considered later.

Last week, Gizmodo's parent company G/O Media fired the staff of its Spanish-language site Gizmodo en Espanol and began replacing them with AI translations of English-language articles. "G/O Media's decision to eschew human writers for AI is part of a recent trend of media companies experimenting with AI tools as a way to maximize content output while minimizing human labor costs," reports Ars Technica. "However, the practice remains controversial within the broader journalism community." The Verge first reported the news. From the report: Previously, Gizmodo en Espanol had a small but dedicated team who wrote original content tailored specifically for Spanish-speaking readers, as well as producing translations of Gizmodo's English articles. The site represented Gizmodo's first foray into international markets when it launched in 2012 after being acquired from Guanabee. Newly published articles on the site now contain a link to the English version of the article and a disclaimer stating (via our translation from Google Translate), "This content has been automatically translated from the source material. Due to the nuances of machine translation, there may be slight differences. For the original version, click here."

So far, Gizmodo's pivot to AI translation hasn't gone smoothly. On social media site X, journalist and Gizmodo reader Victor Millan noted that some of the site's new articles abruptly switch from Spanish to English midway through, possibly due to glitches in the AI translation system. [...] For Spanish-speaking audiences seeking news about science, technology, and Internet culture, the loss of original reporting from Gizmodo en Espanol is potentially a major blow. And while AI translation technology has improved significantly over the past decade, experts say it still can't fully replace human translators. Subtle errors, mistranslations, and lack of cultural knowledge can impair the quality of automatically translated content.

Starting in December, Facebook users in the U.K., France and Germany will no longer see a dedicated section for news articles. CNBC reports: Meta said Tuesday that it is plans to "deprecate" the Facebook News tab in early December for users in those European countries as "part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most." The company added that it plans to spend more time and money on short-form video, as best exemplified by its TikTok-like Reels product.

News represents less than 3% of what people see in their Facebook feeds, Meta said. Meta said it would honor the Facebook News obligations it had made to publishers in those countries, but said it won't enter into new deals and has no plans to offer new products for news publishers. In June, Meta removed all news content from Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada, following the passage of a bill requiring big tech companies to compensate news businesses when their content is made available on their services.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rick Klein and his team have been preserving TV adverts, forgotten tapes, and decades-old TV programming for years. Now operating as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, the Museum of Classic Chicago Television has called YouTube home since 2007. However, copyright notices sent on behalf of Sony, protecting TV shows between 40 and 60 years old, could shut down the project in 48 hours. "Our YouTube channel with 150k subscribers is in danger of being terminated by September 6th if I don't find a way to resolve these copyright claims that Markscan made," Klein told TorrentFreak on Friday. "At this point, I don't even care if they were issued under authorization by Sony or not -- I just need to reach a live human being to try to resolve this without copyright strikes. I am willing to remove the material manually to get the strikes reversed."

Over the weekend Klein shared details of the copyright complaints filed with YouTube. Two of the claims can be seen in the image below and on first view, appear straightforward enough. Two episodes of the TV series Bewitched dated 1964 aired on ABC Network and almost sixty years later, archive copies of those transmissions were removed from YouTube for violating Sony copyrights, with MCCTv receiving a strike. A claim targeting an upload titled Bewitched -- 'Twitch or Treat' -- WPWR Channel 60 (Complete Broadcast, 8/6/1984) follows the same pattern, but what isn't shown are the details added by MCCTv to place the episode (and the included commercials) in historical context. Another takedown target -- Bewitched -- 'Sam in the Moon' (Complete 16mm Network Print, 1/5/1967) is accompanied by even more detail, including references in the episode to then-current events.

Given that copyright law locks content down for decades, Klein understands that can sometimes cause issues, although 16 years on YouTube suggests that the overwhelming majority of rightsholders don't consider his channel a threat. If they did, the option to monetize the recordings can be an option. [...] Klein says MCCTv certainly doesn't set out to hurt copyright holders. However, there's always a balance between preserving "rare pieces of video ephemera" and the likelihood that nobody needs to enforce any rights, versus unusual circumstances like these where unexpected complaints need to be resolved with impossible-to-reach parties. Klein says the team is happy to comply with Sony's wishes and they hope that given a little leeway, the project won't be consigned to history. Perhaps Sony will recall the importance of time-shifting while understanding that time itself is running out for The Museum of Classic Chicago Television.

One million lorries of sand a day are being extracted from the world's oceans, posing a "significant" threat to marine life and coastal communities facing rising sea levels and storms, according to the first-ever global data platform to monitor the industry. From a report: The new data platform, developed by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), tracks and monitors dredging of sand in the marine environment by using the AIS (automatic identification systems) data from ships. Using data from 2012-19, Marine Sand Watch estimates the dredging industry is digging up 6bn tonnes of marine sand a year, a scale described as "alarming." The rate of extraction is growing globally, Unep said, and is approaching the natural rate of replenishment of 10bn to 16bn tonnes of sand flowing into the sea from rivers and needed to maintain coastal structure and ecosystems.

The platform has identified "hotspots" including the North Sea, south-east Asia and the east coast of the United States as areas of concern. In many places where extraction is more intense, including parts of Asia, marine sand is being extracted well beyond the rate at which it is being replenished from rivers. [...] Developed by GRID-Geneva, a centre for analytics within Unep, Marine Sand Watch has trained artificial intelligence to identify the movement of dredging vessels from its AIS data. It has data from 2012-19 from Global Fishing Watch, a company set up to track commercial fishing activities using AIS data from fishing vessels, but is working on more recent data.

Julian Assange's supporters will urge the US to drop the prosecution of the Australian citizen on the basis the "very dangerous" precedent will be exploited by China and Russia. From a report: Six Australian politicians are expected to focus on freedom-of-speech arguments when they fly to Washington DC later this month to warn against extraditing the WikiLeaks founder from the UK. The MPs and senators from across the political spectrum are aiming to help build momentum for the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to raise the case in bilateral talks with Joe Biden at the White House in late October. The trip is being funded by the Assange campaign.

Assange remains in Belmarsh prison in London as he fights a US attempt to extradite him to face charges in connection with the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as well as diplomatic cables. Greg Barns SC, an adviser to the Assange campaign, said on Tuesday that it was "not an ordinary run-of-the-mill extradition case." He said freedom of speech was "an important theme in the US."

"You've got China chasing journalists around the world, and you've got the Russians who have recently arrested journalists," Barns told Guardian Australia. "You've now got China using the Assange case as a sort of moral equivalence argument. So the message [of the Australian delegation] is going to be: this is very dangerous for journalists around the world and a race to the bottom that's going on."

More than 200 scientists have signed onto a letter pushing for "responsible" research into ways to trap planet-heating carbon dioxide in the world's oceans. They want to take urgent action on the climate crisis, while making sure they don't trigger any new problems by relying on oceans to help in the fight. From a report: Polluters have trashed the world's atmosphere with carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. That blanket of pollution is already warming the planet and causing more extreme weather disasters. One way to keep climate change from getting worse is to take some of those historic emissions out of the atmosphere.

Oceans already do that for us, absorbing and holding around 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. What if humans could supercharge that ability? That's what scientists want to better understand, along with any side effects that might come with messing with the chemistry of our oceans. Startups are already developing new technologies to sequester more CO2 in the sea. But there's still a lot we don't know about what impact that might have or what strategies might be most successful, the letter says.

When it comes to US government employee satisfaction with IT services, one agency finds itself continually at the bottom of the heap: The rather crucial Department of Defense. From a report: Results from the General Services Administration's (GSA) Mission-Support Customer Satisfaction Survey published on Wednesday found the DoD was trailing the other 23 US federal government agencies included in the research. Of the seven technology user areas surveyed, the DoD came dead last in user satisfaction for IT support, equipment, function, and communication/collaboration.

The DoD didn't fare much better in the three areas it wasn't scraping the bottom, either. For strategic IT partnerships and development, modernizations and enhancement the Defense Department ranked twentieth (out of 24), and for operations and maintenance satisfaction it beat the US Department of Agriculture - barely - on the seven-point scale used by the GSA. Despite its abysmal ranking among its fellow federal agencies, the DoD's users were still generally okay with their IT service, with 65 percent of respondents saying they were at least somewhat satisfied with IT support, and 64.5 percent expressing some degree of satisfaction with their IT equipment. Only development, modernization and enhancement failed to net 50 percent satisfaction among DoD respondents.

As a growing number of hackers target companies, organisations and industries with debilitating attacks, more skilled cyber security workers are urgently needed to combat the threat.ÂFrom a report: ISC2, the world's largest association of cyber professionals, estimates that the cyber security workforce in 2022 stood at about 4.7mn people globally. But a further 3.4mn roles remain unfilled. "The gap is massive," says Clar Rosso, ISC2's chief executive. "This shortfall is felt more acutely in countries such as India where digitisation is rapid. But even in the US, only 69 per cent of cyber roles are filled, according to Cyberseek, a website that provides data about the cyber security job market."

Beyond a talent shortfall, existing workers are underskilled. A UK government report this year found that 50 per cent of UK businesses -- some 739,000 in total -- have a basic cyber skills gap, meaning that those in charge of cyber security lack the confidence to carry out the technical measures that protect against the most common digital attacks. Previously, it was thought that a company's IT team could take care of all cyber security concerns. But "over time, it became clear that this needed specialised attention," Rosso says, adding that, after some high-profile ransomware attacks over the past couple of years, "business executives are now paying attention."

The future of wearable technology, beyond now-standard accessories like smartwatches and fitness tracking rings, is ePANTS, according to the intelligence community. The Intercept: The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop "smart" clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection. Billed as the "largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles," the SMART ePANTS -- Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems -- program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable.

The project is being undertaken by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community's secretive counterpart to the military's better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IARPA's website says it "invests federal funding into high-risk, high reward projects to address challenges facing the intelligence community." Its tolerance for risk has led to both impressive achievements, like a Nobel Prize awarded to physicist David Wineland for his research on quantum computing funded by IARPA, as well as costly failures. "A lot of the IARPA and DARPA programs are like throwing spaghetti against the refrigerator," Annie Jacobsen, author of a book about DARPA, "The Pentagon's Brain," told The Intercept. "It may or may not stick."

belmolis writes: Canadian prisons allow prisoners to buy devices such as personal computers and gaming consoles but severely restrict the technology, nominally on security grounds. Modern gaming consoles are forbidden on the grounds that they can connect to the internet, so the typical purchase is a Playstation 1. No version of Microsoft Windows more recent than Windows 98 is allowed. No device that can play MP3 files is allowed. The regulations forbid operating systems other than Microsoft DOS or Windows and any software capable of creating a program, such as a compiler as are "database programs capable of altering or manipulating SQL databases". Although learning job skills is encouraged, programming is evidently not considered appropriate. The relationship of most of these restrictions to security is obscure.

A proposal to phase out CO2-emitting fossil fuels at COP27 last won backing from more than 80 countries but oil and gas-rich nations opposed it. European Union countries are preparing to push for a global deal on phasing out fossil fuels at the COP28 climate summit, a draft of the EU's negotiating position has shown. From a report: Diplomats from the bloc's 27 member states are drafting their position for the summit in Dubai in November, where nearly 200 countries will try to strengthen efforts to rein in climate change. "The shift towards a climate neutral economy will require the global phase-out of [unabated] fossil fuels and a peak in their consumption already in the near term," a draft of the EU's negotiating stance, seen by Reuters, says.

Countries have never agreed in UN climate negotiations to gradually stop burning all CO2-emitting fossil fuels, despite this being the main cause of climate change. "Unabated" refers to fossil fuels burned without using technologies to capture the resulting CO2 emissions. The word was in brackets in the draft EU text, indicating that countries have not yet agreed on whether to include it. EU diplomats hope a deal can be made at COP28 - but expect to meet resistance from economies reliant on income from selling oil and gas.

Invasive species are costing the world at least $423bn every year and have become a leading threat to the diversity of life on Earth, according to a UN assessment. From a news report: From invasive mice that eat seabird chicks in their nests to non-native grasses that helped fuel and intensify last month's deadly fires in Hawaii, at least 3,500 harmful invasive species have been recorded globally in every region, spread by human travel and trade. Their impact is destructive for humans and wildlife, sometimes causing extinctions and permanently damaging the healthy functioning of an ecosystem.

Leading scientists say the threat posed by invasive species is under appreciated, underestimated and sometimes unacknowledged, with more than 37,000 alien species now known to be introduced around the world and about 200 establishing themselves each year. While not all will become invasive, experts say there are significant tools to mitigate their spread and impact, protecting and restoring ecosystems in the process.

"Invasive alien species are a major threat to biodiversity and can cause irreversible damage to nature, including local and global species extinctions, and also threaten human wellbeing," wrote Prof Helen Roy, Prof Anibal Pauchard and Prof Peter Stoett, who led the research. "It would be an extremely costly mistake to regard biological invasions only as someone else's problem," said Pauchard. "Although the specific species that inflict damage vary from place to place, these are risks and challenges with global roots but very local impacts facing people in every country, from all backgrounds and in every community -- even Antarctica is being affected."