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The Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness said as of early afternoon Monday, there were about 440 properties on evacuation order and 3,000 under alert, calling the situation “dynamic and everchanging.”

On Monday afternoon, Sooke Potholes Park on Vancouver Island was closed due to a wildfire detected near Mavis Lake east of Victoria.

In an interview with CBC News shortly before 5:30 p.m. PT, Sooke Mayor Maja Tait said there is currently no risk to the wider community, but as a precaution, the district has cancelled a scheduled council meeting so it can react if anything changes.

That same fire also forced the evacuation of the Bowron Lake provincial park canoe circuit and the artistic enclave of Wells, impacting up to 1,000 residents, tourists and temporary workers, according to Mayor Ed Coleman.

Farther south, the city of Williams Lake, B.C., home to more than 10,000 people, ordered a local state of emergency Sunday night after a fire broke out along Mackenzie Avenue, which is a strip of businesses and industry.

Locals posted photos and video of water bombers flying low over the neighbourhood on Sunday evening, and by midnight Mayor Surinderpal Rathor confirmed residents who had been “tactically evacuated” from their homes were allowed to return.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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Since 2021, the anonymous group, Advance Regina, has been running thousands of dollars worth of advertising on social media and billboard campaigns complaining about crime, taxes and city services.

Advance Regina bills itself as “local residents who love our city,” but its website and social media presence provides no names of actual people behind the organization.

In the past, she was the Saskatchewan Party’s director of training and a constituency organizer, and just last year Premier Scott Moe nominated her for the Queen Elizabeth Platinum Jubilee Medal for public service, according to her Facebook page.

Aaron Moore, a political science professor from the University of Winnipeg, said that as cities have grown and their budgets have inflated, this issue of third-party activism and donations has become more important.

“Advance Regina has transitioned to focus on issue-based advocacy, citizen and voter engagement, and promoting awareness of the current council’s poor performance.”

Moore, the University of Winnipeg political science professor, said that while there are stringent rules for third-party advertising in provincial and federal elections in Canada, that’s generally not the case for municipalities.

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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.

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CrowdStrike’s now-infamous Falcon Sensor software, which last week led to widespread outages of Windows-powered computers, has also caused crashes of Linux machines.

Red Hat also advised that “disabling the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor/Agent software suite … will mitigate the crashes and provide temporary stability to the system in question while the issue is investigated.”

The occurrence of kernel panics mere weeks before CrowdStrike broke many Windows implementations therefore hints at wider issues at the security vendor.

That progress will likely be of great interest, as Microsoft veep for enterprise and OS security David Weston on Saturday estimated that 8.5 million Windows machines had been laid low by the problem.

The extent of disruption caused by CrowdStrike remains uncertain, but we’ve read accounts of over 6,800 flights cancelled last Friday alone, and of some airlines only restoring systems on Sunday evening.

The British Medical Association has warned that “normal service cannot be resumed immediately” by UK doctors, at least, due to the backlog caused by the outage.

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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.

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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.”

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The school says in its latest encampment update that it has “taken a calm, measured and reasoned approach” to the protest since it was set up on May 1, but administrators “see no further prospect for a successful dialogue.”

On a social media page, protesters naming themselves “People’s Park UVIC” confirm the school has issued them a trespass notice, adding the administration has told them to "vacate by 8 a.m.

Protesters at the university have been demanding the school cut financial and academic ties with Israeli entities due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

The latest development at UVic comes about a week after Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, B.C., launched legal action against protesters there for allegedly ignoring a deadline to leave their camp.

The group also reposted a statement from July 19, saying it is “unfortunately no surprise to once again witness our administration betraying the integrity of this process and emphasizing that these negotiations have been and always will be on their terms.”

The recent developments come after an Ontario court granted the University of Toronto an injunction on July 2 that ordered protesters there to dismantle their encampment on the grounds that it is a violation of the school’s property rights.

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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.

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Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent out all of the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem feature updates destined for the Linux 6.11 kernel of which there are many different patches across the board.

The USB subsystem pull has the usual wide variety of changes from new hardware support to other clean-ups and fixes/features.

• Enabling Cache-Coherent Interconnect (CCI) support for the AMD-Xilinx DWC3 controller.

• Thunderbolt now has sideband register access via DebugFS for debugging.

• Lenovo Yoga C630 driver and DeviceTree bindings for the embedded controller (EC).

• The USB gadget driver for MINI 2.0 support has fixed the incorrect default MIDI2 protocol setup.

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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.

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Campaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.

Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments.

The Payment Choice Alliance (PCA), which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society, lists 23 firms and groups, at least some of whose outlets take only credit or debit cards.

Cash payments increased for the first time in a decade last year, according to UK Finance, which represents banks.

The GMB Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”.

In March, McDonald’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Gregg’s suffered problems with their payment systems.

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With Linux 6.11 support for the Lenovo Yoga Slim7x and ASUS Vivobook S15 are upstreamed for some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops.

But for follow-on kernel cycles you can expect yet more Snapdragon X1 Elite/Plus powered laptop support to appear with new DeviceTree additions.

On Friday, Linaro engineer Konrad Dybcio sent out the patches for enabling the X1 Elite powered Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop.

Friday saw the initial DeviceTree patches posted for enabling the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 to let it boot up under Linux rather than Microsoft Windows.

The three patches getting the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 running under Linux have been successfully tested for input, NVMe, WiFi, USB-C ports, GPU, display, and DSPs.

The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is priced at around ~$1754 USD for boasting a 14-inch 1920 x 1200 display, X Elite X1E-78-100 SoC, 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, 1TB SSD, 1080p web camera, and a three year warranty.

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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.

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Former public safety minister Marco Mendicino is calling for the creation of “protective zones” around political constituency offices to shield members of Parliament and their staff from a rising tide of threatening behaviour.

Mendicino, a Toronto Liberal MP, said under the plan, anyone who intimidated or otherwise harassed people within the buffer zone of perhaps 50 to 100 metres would be subject to harsher criminal penalties including jail time.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Mendicino suggested spelling out such zones in regulations that will flow from the recently passed foreign interference bill, which contains new measures to protect essential infrastructure.

The former minister’s comments come as the attempted assassination of former U.S. president Donald Trump prompts renewed concern and discussion about the safety of Canadian politicians.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said this week he worries about his family’s safety, and that he had sought protection in response to menacing behaviour.

RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme recently said he wanted the government to look at drafting a new law that would make it easier for police to pursue charges against people who threaten elected officials.

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Former public safety minister Marco Mendicino is calling for the creation of “protective zones” around political constituency offices to shield members of Parliament and their staff from a rising tide of threatening behaviour.

Mendicino, a Toronto Liberal MP, said under the plan, anyone who intimidated or otherwise harassed people within the buffer zone of perhaps 50 to 100 metres would be subject to harsher criminal penalties including jail time.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Mendicino suggested spelling out such zones in regulations that will flow from the recently passed foreign interference bill, which contains new measures to protect essential infrastructure.

The former minister’s comments come as the attempted assassination of former U.S. president Donald Trump prompts renewed concern and discussion about the safety of Canadian politicians.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said this week he worries about his family’s safety, and that he had sought protection in response to menacing behaviour.

RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme recently said he wanted the government to look at drafting a new law that would make it easier for police to pursue charges against people who threaten elected officials.

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Poilievre made the remarks in Montréal after being asked why he hasn’t yet committed to the NATO benchmark of spending two per cent of annual GDP on the military.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to reach the target by 2032 at the NATO summit in Washington D.C. on Thursday after facing criticism for lagging behind alliance partners.

After the meeting, McConnell published a post on X: “It’s time for our northern ally to invest seriously in the hard power required to help preserve prosperity and security across NATO.”

In May, a group of U.S. senators from both major parties sent a letter to Trudeau urging the Liberal government to boost defence spending to the NATO target.

“It’s clear now Justin Trudeau is seen as an absolute joke on the world stage,” Poilievre said in reaction to allies’ criticism of Canada’s defence spending.

Since coming to power in 2015, the Trudeau government’s military spending as a percentage of GDP has ranged from a low of 1.16 per cent in 2016 to a high of 1.44 in 2017, according to NATO figures.

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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.

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