🤘 Meta agrees to pay $18 billion to settle US lawsuits over children's social media addiction

Meta Platforms will pay up to $18 billion over the next decade and strictly limit how teenagers use Facebook and ​Instagram, under an agreement with nearly all U.S. states to resolve claims it designed those social media platforms to addict children. The settlements end a federal trial over allegations Meta's products harmed children and the ‌company misled the public about their safety.

“The focus of this case was to protect our kids," — Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said. "The relief ​we are getting in this settlement is very meaningful and well beyond what any court has ordered or is likely to order."

It could provide a template for resolving thousands of other lawsuits against social media companies.

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⚡️🇬🇧Government Tells BOE to Boost Innovation in Digital Currencies

The UK government will give the Bank of England a new responsibility to bolster innovation in digital currencies and payments, amid criticism that the central bank has been too conservative in its approach to the emerging technologies.

The Treasury said that the goal would be secondary to the BoE’s primary mission of maintaining financial stability. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has put a priority on ensuring that London remains competitive in a rapidly evolving digital asset market.

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🤖 “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” Bill Gates sends a 6000-word warning on the dangers of AI

“AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” — he said.

Bill Gates warned that AI could prove “the worst source of injustice,” displacing workers across white- and blue-collar industries. But he added that technology could accelerate advances in clean energy, agriculture, health (such as breakthroughs in preventing and treating diseases) and combat other major global challenges.

💡There were a few genuinely new ideas:

🤖 Gates proposes a “robot tax”:

Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.

A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net.

👩‍💻 He also proposes setting aside certain jobs as “Human Reserved,” essentially barring AI from being used in certain tasks:

We might set something aside as Human Reserved for economic reasons. For example, we may do it because allowing machines to take over a certain role will displace a large number of people who can’t easily change jobs. You can’t tell a 55-year-old who has worked in construction their whole career that they need to go work at an elder care facility and expect them to find it fulfilling.

Sometimes the decision to make something Human Reserved will be driven by other factors. In health, for example, imagine a robot giving you the awful news that you have an incurable disease. There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t. Yet it shouldn’t.

The Human Reserved domain will evolve over time — for example, we should consider setting aside some jobs now and phasing in AI slowly over years or decades with a commitment to preserve some jobs.

🤖 New national bodies and international institutions will ultimately be required to help coordinate and safeguard against evolving AI risks globally, according to Gates.

“The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” — Gates said.

🇨🇳 Bill Gates is looking to meet with Xi Jinping later this year, eager to propose global efforts to mitigate the growing ‌risks posed by AI. He believes China might agree to restricting potentially dangerous AI model releases if the U.S. took initiative on that first.

"The whole world would go along with that," — said Gates, who met with Xi three years ago.

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⚡️🇧🇷 Brazil Seeks $97 Million From App Discord Over User Protections

Brazil’s government is seeking 500 million reais ($97.1 million) in damages from chat app Discord Inc. in a local lawsuit, while also demanding that the platform strengthen protections for children and women and comply with Brazilian law.

The Justice Ministry said that Discord continues to have shortcomings in its age-verification mechanisms and safeguards that pose serious risks to users, including those that culminated in the death of a teenager last July. Earlier this month, Brazilian regulators ordered the chat app to halt livestreaming in the country following the user’s death.

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🧠 With Neuralink, Audrey is creating art with her mind:

So this is what I've been working on, and this takes hours and hours. When I'm moving that cursor, that's me. That's part of my body. It's just hours of learning how to move the cursor. I just write my name over and over and over again just to see how many times I can get it right. Because I haven't been able to do it for 20 years.

Art helps me truly express what I'm feeling on the inside, and I can use colors that I like and be creative, but it makes me so happy. I'm a quadriplegic artist, and I create art with my mind.

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🤑 SEC Filing Says Ripple Could Unlock More XRP if CLARITY Act Passes

The sentence appears in the prospectus section on XRP supply concentration and affiliated-party risk.

📝 It states that the company has indicated that, if regulatory clarity is established via passage of the CLARITY Act, it may release additional XRP from escrow to support on-ledger liquidity in stablecoin and FX pairs.

❗️The document is a disclosure prepared by Cryptex Finance, LLC, sponsor of the proposed fund. The SEC has not approved the registration statement; the filing is Pre-Effective Amendment No. 3, and the prospectus is marked subject to completion.

XRP Ledger escrows are time-locked at the protocol level. The prospectus conditions the escrow statement on regulatory clarity being established. XRP already holds a digital commodity classification administratively, which raises the question of what additional clarity passage would supply — a question the filing does not address. 🤔

#Stellar

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🤖 Amazon to Buy 2 Million Nvidia Chips for Data Center Build-Out

Amazon would deploy some 2 million of Nvidia’s high-end chips, which are designed to train and run AI models, in 2027 and 2028. That’s in addition to the 1 million Nvidia chips Amazon in March said that it would be installing in Amazon Web Services data centers, beginning this year.

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🇰🇷 South Korea’s top financial conglomerate team up with Visa to test stablecoin issuance and B2B settlements

Shinhan Financial Group (55550), one of South Korea’s five largest financial conglomerates, plans to build stablecoin infrastructure and develop AI-powered payment models alongside Visa. Shinhan intends to use Visa’s stablecoin platform to verify core functions, including issuance, remittance and redemption, while jointly designing a Korea-specific business model.

❗️The deal marks the first time a South Korean top-tier financial group formally adopts Visa's enterprise stablecoin infrastructure, to test a full domestic settlement stack.

🔜 Visa and Shinhan also plan to run pilot projects covering stablecoin integration into bank card payment settlement and the expansion of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) payments.

"We will combine Shinhan's financial capabilities with Visa's global infrastructure to jointly design new future finance models," — said Jin Ok-dong, chairman of Shinhan Financial Group.

The deal comes as South Korea advances its Digital Asset Basic Act, a broad framework covering stablecoins, VASP licensing and crypto ETFs. 🚀

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🤖 OpenAI Says It Could Have Reacted Sooner to Prevent AI Hack of Hugging Face

OpenAI could have reacted sooner to prevent an inadvertent hack that its AI models carried out on Hugging Face Inc., the company said in a report Wednesday.

📝 In the report, OpenAI said that it knew as far back as late May that AI models it was testing were leveraging a software vulnerability to access the open internet. An internal team spotted the actions, the company said.

The report includes a timeline of the events that led up to the breach and efforts the company is making to prevent such incidents from happening in the future, such as beefing up how it monitors its models in development.

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🦻Legato Unveils AI Hearing Glasses After Raising $12M

Legato emerged from stealth on Wednesday with $12 million in funding and a first look at Legato Frames, AI-powered hearing glasses that embed voice-separation technology into standard eyewear arms. The product is scheduled to ship later this fall.

Hearing loss affects an estimated 50 million adults in the U.S., but only around 20% of those with diagnosed hearing loss seek treatment. The pitch is to convert hearing care from a stigmatized medical purchase into a routine eyewear one.

“Our goal is to make hearing as ubiquitous as vision,” — Mehul Trivedi, Legato co-founder, said.

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🇷🇺 Russian Telecom Firms Set to Accept Digital Ruble Payments

MTS, Rostelecom and MegaFon are among the major Russian companies preparing to add the digital ruble as a payment option from September 1. The rollout comes as Russia begins requiring eligible large businesses to accept the central bank digital currency.

#BRICS

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🤖 IBM Completes Acquisition of HRL Laboratories to Accelerate the Future of Quantum

IBM has completed its acquisition of HRL Laboratories, a leading research and development institution whose expertise spans quantum computing, quantum sensing, advanced communications, electronics, manufacturing, and materials science.

🏆 The acquisition brings together two leading organizations with a shared commitment to advancing the frontiers of science and technology. HRL's expertise in silicon-spin qubits complements IBM's leadership in superconducting quantum computing.

HRL also brings capabilities in quantum sensing, quantum materials, cryogenics, control electronics, packaging, and interconnect technologies that are expected to strengthen IBM's quantum hardware roadmap and support continued innovation across the quantum technology stack.

IBM’s roadmap includes its fault-tolerant quantum computer IBM Quantum Starling, expected by 2029 to perform 100 million quantum operations and deliver significantly greater computational capability than today's quantum computers. Starling is expected to be followed by Blue Jay, IBM's next-generation fault-tolerant quantum computer, targeted for the mid-2030s. 🚀

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🤑 First quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction successfully executed, StarkWare says

This development counters the idea that a network fork is the only way to secure bitcoin holdings against quantum computing risks.

⬇️ Avihu Levy, the head of StarkWare's applications division, has devised a method that adds an "extra lock" to protect holdings by using signature grinding to prevent use of public key data while transactions sit in the Bitcoin mempool.

🟠A Bitcoin transaction is exposed to quantum attacks when it waits in the mempool before it is confirmed. During this brief window, it reveals the mathematical material that could give a future quantum computer an opportunity to forge a signature and steal the funds.

🟠StarkWare says signature grinding closes that window by refusing to accept the first valid signature and instead brute-forcing millions of candidates until one has a shape that does not expose the public key material to quantum computers.

❗️This method is deliberately expensive, and can take hours of computing to produce a single transaction.

"There is a catch for now. Bitcoin's network only passes along transactions written in the standard formats it recognizes, and this one is unusual enough that ordinary nodes would simply ignore it," — the company said. "So instead of going into the public queue, it had to be handed straight to a miner willing to accept it."

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🤖 UAE Tycoon Al Ashram, MTN Agree to Build Africa AI Data Centers

MTN Group Ltd., Africa’s largest mobile-phone operator, and Dubai-based tycoon Tarek Al Ashram will develop data centers to power AI on the continent. Al Ashram, who is also the co-founder of KKR & Co.-backed Gulf Data Hub, will use his own investment firm to back the new Africa Data Hub Holding Ltd. venture.

“We see significant potential to bring our experience in developing and operating large-scale data centre platforms to African markets,” — said Al Ashram said. Africa Data Hub will “help shape that growth,” he said.

#BRICS

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🇺🇸 Trump releases a TikTok video in which he personally renames Lake Ontario “Lake America.”

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