The accessibility of generative AI tools has exacerbated the perennial issue of online spam and scams that’s persisted since the advent of the internet. And while creators of such content have access to this ever-evolving technology, tech giants are also honing their internal AI systems to fight the deluge.

“It’s not that this is a new problem. It is an old problem, supercharged,” said Nate Elliott, a principal analyst at Emarketer. “The biggest difference is the speed and the scale that AI offers both the good actors and the bad actors.”

The FBI’s recent Internet Crime Report detailed receiving more than 22,000 complaints reporting AI-related scams last year, with the total losses associated with those complaints exceeding $893 million.

Google released its annual ads safety report Thursday, acknowledging that scammers are increasingly trying to run sophisticated, malicious ads but emphasizing that its AI-powered tools are strong defenders.

Google’s generative AI technology known as Gemini was able to catch over 99% of policy-violating ads before they ever reached an audience last year.

In 2025, the company blocked or removed more than 8.3 billion ads, including 602 million ads with policy violations that are most closely associated with scams. That’s up from a total of 5.1 billion ads blocked or removed in 2024. About 24.9 million advertiser accounts were suspended last year, more than 4 million of those for scam-related activity.

Google has long been a dominant force in the digital advertising world. The company saw more than $200 billion in net worldwide ad revenues last year according to data from Emarketer, but the research firm predicts Meta will outperform Google in 2026.

Google said it has a team of thousands of people working to create and enforce its advertising policies at scale. Keerat Sharma, Google’s vice president and general manager of ads privacy and safety, said the advancement of generative AI as a part of Google’s defense system has led to more powerful results in combatting problematic content.

Gemini now allows the team to analyze hundreds of billions of signals — including account age, behavioral cues and campaign patterns — to better understand the “nuance of what an advertiser’s intent actually is,” Sharma said. This means they’re able to largely determine legitimacy or whether an advertiser’s intent could be malicious. Reaching that nuance has also helped keep real businesses’ ads online, with the report detailing that incorrect advertiser suspensions were reduced by 80% last year.

Gemini has also helped with speed, Sharma said. Analyzing the digital assets in an ad used to take anywhere from a few seconds to minutes or even longer, but now, Sharma said that can happen in milliseconds. That “allows us to stop things right at the front door,” he said. Google also relies on several other defense mechanisms, like an expansive advertiser verification program, that work together to fortify protections.

The kind of content that Google is aiming to block and remove is vast and varied. Bad ads could take shape as “all the forms of spam and scam that have always existed, just people are able to produce them faster and at higher volume,” Elliott said.

A Google spokesperson said the company doesn’t report the number of AI-generated ads it blocks or removes because its enforcement isn’t based on how an ad was created, but rather which policies it violates. The spokesperson noted that many AI-generated ads come from legitimate businesses and comply with Google’s policies.

Experts who spoke with The Associated Press said the push and pull between AI-powered scams and AI-powered defense mechanisms will endure as the technology advances.

“We’re already close, but it’s going to be heading even more to (where) it’s just AI versus AI,” said Matt Seitz, the director of the AI Hub at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The volume of this problem is so large that it can’t be managed directly through humans.”

AP

The post AI is a gold mine for spammers and scammers, but Google is using it as a tool to fight back appeared first on Inside Politic.

This announcement comes after the official signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at Google South Africa’s headquarters in Johannesburg. 

For the full story, click the link below.

INSIDE POLITICS

The post Google, DHET sign MoU to unlock youth opportunities   appeared first on Inside Politic.

Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube face claims that their platforms deliberately addict and harm children. TikTok and Snap, which were originally named in the lawsuit, settled for undisclosed sums.

Jurors got their first glimpse into what will be a lengthy trial characterized by dueling narratives from the plaintiffs and the two remaining social media companies named as defendants.

Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt spoke of the disagreement within the scientific community over social media addiction, with some believing it doesn’t exist or that addiction is not the most appropriate way to describe heavy social media use.

Addicting the brains of children’

Mark Lanier delivered the opening statement for the plaintiffs first, in a lively display where he said the case is as “easy as ABC,” which he said stands for “addicting the brains of children.” He called Meta and Google “two of the richest corporations in history” that have “engineered addiction in children’s brains.”

He presented jurors with a slew of internal emails, documents and studies conducted by Meta and YouTube, as well as YouTube’s parent company, Google. He emphasized the findings of a study Meta conducted called “Project Myst” in which they surveyed 1,000 teens and their parents about their social media use. The two major findings, Lanier said, were that the company knew children who experienced “adverse events” like trauma and stress were particularly vulnerable for addiction; and that parental supervision and controls made little impact.

He also showed internal Google documents that likened some company products to a casino, and internal communication between Meta employees in which one person said Instagram is “like a drug” and that employees are “basically pushers.”

At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose case could determine how thousands of other, similar lawsuits against social media companies will play out. She and two other plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials — essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury.

Plaintiff grew up on YouTube, Instagram
KGM made a brief appearance after a break during Lanier’s statement and she will return to testify later in the trial. Lanier spent time speaking about her childhood, and particularly focused on what her personality was like before she began using social media, saying her mother called her a “creative spark” as a child. She started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9, Lanier said. Before she graduated elementary school, she had posted 284 videos on YouTube.

The outcome of the trial could have profound effects on the companies’ businesses and how they will handle children using their platforms.

Lanier said the companies’ lawyers will “try to blame the little girl and her parents for the trap they built,” referencing the plaintiff. She was a minor when she said she became addicted to social media platforms, which she claims had a detrimental impact on her mental health.

Lanier said that despite the public position of Meta and YouTube being that they work to protect children and implement safeguards for their use of the platforms, their internal documents show an entirely different position, with explicit references to young children being listed as their target audiences.

Lanier also drew comparisons between the social media companies and tobacco firms, citing internal communication between Meta employees who were concerned about the company’s lack of proactive action about the potential harm their platforms can have on children and teens.

“For a teenager, social validation is survival,” Lanier said. The defendants “engineered a feature that caters to a minor’s craving for social validation,” he added, speaking about “like” buttons and similar features.

Meta pushes back

In his opening statement representing Meta, Schmidt said the core question in the case is whether the platforms were a substantial factor in KGM’s mental health struggles. He spent much of his time going through the plaintiff’s health records, emphasizing that she had experienced many difficult circumstances in her childhood, including emotional abuse, body image issues and bullying.

Schmidt presented a clip from a video deposition from one of KGM’s mental health providers, Dr. Thomas Suberman, who said social media was “not the throughline of what I recall being her main issues,” adding that her struggles seemed to largely stem from interpersonal conflicts and relationships. He painted a picture of a particularly troubled relationship with her mother, with KGM’s own words in text messages and testimony pointing to a volatile home life.

Schmidt acknowledged that many mental health professionals do believe social media addiction can exist, but said three of KGM’s providers — all of whom believe in the form of addiction — have never diagnosed her with it or treated her for it.

Schmidt emphasized to the jurors that the case is not about whether social media is a good thing, the content seen on social media, whether teens spend too much time on their phones or whether the jurors like or dislike Meta, but whether social media was a substantial factor in KGM’s mental health struggles.

One case of thousands

“This was only the first case — there are hundreds of parents and school districts in the social media addiction trials that start today, and sadly, new families every day who are speaking out and bringing Big Tech to court for its deliberately harmful products,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the nonprofit Tech Oversight Project.

Jurors are not being asked to stop using Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or any other forms of social media throughout the course of the trial — which is expected to last about eight weeks — but Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl emphasized that they should not make any changes to the way they interact with the platforms, including changing their settings or creating new accounts.

Kuhl said that jurors should decide the liability of Meta and YouTube independently when they deliberate.

A separate trial in New Mexico, meanwhile, also kicked off with opening statements on Monday.

KGM claims that her use of social media from an early age addicted her to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. Importantly, the lawsuit claims that this was done through deliberate design choices made by companies that sought to make their platforms more addictive to children to boost profits. This argument, if successful, could sidestep the companies’ First Amendment shield and Section 230, which protects tech companies from liability for material posted on their platforms.

Executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are expected to testify at the trial, which will last six to eight weeks. Experts have drawn similarities to the Big Tobacco trials that led to a 1998 settlement requiring cigarette companies to pay billions in health care costs and restrict marketing targeting minors.

The tech companies dispute the claims that their products deliberately harm children, citing a bevy of safeguards they have added over the years and arguing that they are not liable for content posted on their sites by third parties.

A reckoning for social media and youth harms
A slew of trials beginning this year seek to hold social media companies responsible for harming children’s mental well-being.

In New Mexico, opening statements began Monday for trial on allegations that Meta and its social media platforms have failed to protect young users from sexual exploitation, following an undercover online investigation. Attorney General Raúl Torrez in late 2023 sued Meta and Zuckerberg, who was later dropped from the suit.

A federal bellwether trial beginning in June in Oakland, California, will be the first to represent school districts that have sued social media platforms over harms to children.

In addition, more than 40 state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta, claiming it is harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms. The majority of cases filed their lawsuits in federal court, but some sued in their respective states.

TikTok also faces similar lawsuits in more than a dozen states.

Other countries, meanwhile, are enacting new laws to limit social media for children. In January, French lawmakers approved a bill banning social media for children under 15, paving the way for the measure to enter into force at the start of the next school year in September, as the idea of setting a minimum age for use of the platforms gains momentum across Europe. Australia has banned use of the platforms by kids under 16.

AP

The post Landmark trial accusing social media companies of addicting children to their platforms begins appeared first on Inside Politic.

The new AI features announced Thursday could herald a pivotal moment for Gmail, a service that transformed email when it was introduced nearly 22 years ago. Since then, Gmail has amassed more than 3 billion users to become nearly as ubiquitous as Google’s search engine.

Gmail’s new AI options will only be available in English within the United States for starters, but the company is promising to expand the technology to other countries and other languages as the year unfolds.

The most broadly available tool will be a “Help Me Write” option designed to learn a user’s writing style so it can personalize emails and make real-time suggestions on how to burnish the message.

Google is also offering subscribers who pay for its Pro and Ultra services access to technology that mirrors the AI Overviews that’s been built into its search engine since 2023. The expansion will enable subscribers pose conversational questions in Gmail’s search bar to get instant answers about information they are trying to retrieve from their inboxes.

In what could turn into another revolutionary step, “AI Inbox” is also being rolled out to a subset of “trusted testers” in the U.S. When it’s turned on, the function will sift through inboxes and suggest to-do lists and topics that users might want to explore.

“This is us delivering on Gmail proactively having your back,” said Blake Barnes, a Google vice president of product.

All of the new technology is tied to the Google’s latest AI model, Gemini 3, which was unleashed into its search engine late last year. The upgrade, designed to turn Google search into a “thought partner” has been so well received that it prompted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company makes the popular ChatGPT chatbot, to issue a “code red” following its release.

But thrusting more AI into Gmail poses potential risks for Google, especially if the technology malfunctions and presents misleading information or crafts emails that get users into trouble — even though people are able to proofread the messages or turn off the features at any time.

Allowing Google’s AI to dig deeper into inboxes to learn more about their habits and interest also could raise privacy issues — a challenge that Gmail confronted from the get-go.

To help subsidize the free service, Google included targeted ads in Gmail that were based on information contained within the electronic conversations. That twist initially triggered a privacy backlash among lawmakers and consumer groups, but the uproar eventually died down and never deterred Gmail’s rapid growth as an email provider. Rivals eventually adopted similar features.

As it brings more AI into Gmail, Google promises none of the content that the technology analyzes will be used to train the models that help Gemini improve. The Mountain View, California, company says it also has built an “engineering privacy” barrier to corral all the information within inboxes to protect it from prying eyes.

AP

The post Gmail’s new AI features, turning it into a personal assistant appeared first on Inside Politic.

But the commercial boom in artificial intelligence has lit a spark under long-simmering visions to build humanoid robots that can move their mechanical bodies like humans and do things that people do.

Alaoui, founder of the Humanoids Summit, gathered more than 2,000 people this week, including top robotics engineers from Disney, Google and dozens of startups, to showcase their technology and debate what it will take to accelerate a nascent industry.

Alaoui says many researchers now believe humanoids or some other kind of physical embodiment of AI are “going to become the norm.”

“The question is really just how long it will take,” he said.

Disney’s contribution to the field, a walking robotic version of “Frozen” character Olaf, will be roaming on its own through Disneyland theme parks in Hong Kong and Paris early next year. Entertaining and highly complex robots that resemble a human — or a snowman — are already here, but the timeline for “general purpose” robots that are a productive member of a workplace or household is farther away.

Even at a conference designed to build enthusiasm for the technology, held at a Computer History Museum that’s a temple to Silicon Valley’s previous breakthroughs, skepticism remained high that truly humanlike robots will take root anytime soon.

“The humanoid space has a very, very big hill to climb,” said Cosima du Pasquier, founder and CEO of Haptica Robotics, which works to give robots a sense of touch. “There’s a lot of research that still needs to be solved.”

The Stanford University postdoctoral researcher came to the conference in Mountain View, California, just a week after incorporating her startup.

“The first customers are really the people here,” she said.

Researchers at the consultancy McKinsey & Company have counted about 50 companies around the world that have raised at least $100 million to develop humanoids, led by about 20 in China and 15 in North America.

China is leading in part due to government incentives for component production and robot adoption and a mandate last year “to have a humanoid ecosystem established by 2025,” said McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar. Displays by Chinese firms dominated the expo section of this week’s summit, held Thursday and Friday. The conference’s most prevalent humanoids were those made by China’s Unitree, in part because researchers in the U.S. buy the relatively cheap model to test their own software.

In the U.S., the advent of generative AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini has jolted the decades-old robotics industry in different ways. Investor excitement has poured money into ambitious startups aiming to build hardware that will bring a physical presence to the latest AI.

But it’s not just crossover hype — the same technical advances that made AI chatbots so good at language have played a role in teaching robots how to get better at performing tasks. Paired with computer vision, robots powered by “visual-language” models are trained to learn about their surroundings.

One of the most prominent skeptics is robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of Roomba vacuum maker iRobot who wrote in September that “today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.” Brooks didn’t attend but his essay was frequently mentioned.

Also missing was anyone speaking for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s development of a humanoid called Optimus, a project that the billionaire is designing to be “extremely capable” and sold in high volumes. Musk said three years ago that people can probably buy an Optimus “within three to five years.”

The conference’s organizer, Alaoui, founder and general partner of ALM Ventures, previously worked on driver attention systems for the automotive industry and sees parallels between humanoids and the early years of self-driving cars.

Near the entrance to the summit venue, just blocks from Google’s headquarters, is a museum exhibit showing Google’s bubble-shaped 2014 prototype of a self-driving car. Eleven years later, robotaxis operated by Google affiliate Waymo are constantly plying the streets nearby.

Some robots with human elements are already being tested in workplaces. Oregon-based Agility Robotics announced shortly before the conference that it is bringing its tote-carrying warehouse robot Digit to a Texas distribution facility run by Mercado Libre, the Latin American e-commerce giant. Much like the Olaf robot, it has inverted legs that are more birdlike than human.

Industrial robots performing single tasks are already commonplace in car assembly and other manufacturing. They work with a level of speed and precision that’s difficult for today’s humanoids — or humans themselves — to match.

The head of a robotics trade group founded in 1974 is now lobbying the U.S. government to develop a stronger national strategy to advance the development of homegrown robots, be they humanoids or otherwise.

“We have a lot of strong technology, we have the AI expertise here in the U.S.,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, after touring the expo. “So I think it remains to be seen who is the ultimate leader in this. But right now, China has certainly a lot more momentum on humanoids.”

AP

The post Humanoid robots take centre stage at Silicon Valley summit, but scepticism remains appeared first on Inside Politic.

Tech companies and a handful of countries at the conference known as COP30 are promoting ways AI can help solve global warming, which is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal. They say the technology has the potential to do many things, from increasing the efficiency of electrical grids and helping farmers predict weather patterns to tracking deep-sea migratory species and designing infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather.

Climate groups, however, are sounding the alarm about AI’s growing environmental impact, with its surging needs for electricity and water for powering searches and data centers. They say an AI boom without guardrails will only push the world farther off track from goals set by 2015 Paris Agreement to slow global warming.

“AI right now is a completely unregulated beast around the world,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

On the other hand, Adam Elman, director of sustainability at Google, sees AI as “a real enabler” and one that’s already making an impact.

If both sides agree on anything, it’s that AI is here to stay.

Michal Nachmany, founder of Climate Policy Radar, which runs AI tools that track issues like national climate plans and funds to help developing countries transition to green energies like solar and wind, said there is “unbelievable interest” in AI at COP30.

“Everyone is also a little bit scared,” Nachmany said. “The potential is huge and the risks are huge as well.”

Many sessions on AI

The rise of AI is becoming a more common topic at the United Nations compared to a few years ago, according to Nitin Arora, who leads the Global Innovation Hub for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the framework for international climate negotiations.

The hub was launched at COP26 in Glasgow to promote ideas and solutions that can be deployed at scale, he said. So far, Arora said, those ideas have been dominated by AI.

The Associated Press counted at least 24 sessions related to AI during the Brazil conference’s first week. They included AI helping neighboring cities share energy, AI-backed forest crime location predictions and a ceremony for the first AI for Climate Action Award — given to an AI project on water scarcity and climate variability in the Southeast Asian nation of Laos.

Johannes Jacob, a data scientist with the German delegation, said a prototype app he is designing, called NegotiateCOP, can help countries with smaller delegations — like El Salvador, South Africa, Ivory Coast and a few in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — process hundreds of official COP documents.

The result is “leveling the playing field in the negotiations,” he said.

In a panel discussion, representatives from AI giants like Google and Nvidia spoke about how AI can solve issues facing the power sector. Elman with Google stressed the “need to do it responsibly” but declined to comment further.

Nvidia’s head of sustainability, Josh Parker, called AI the “best resource any of us can have.”

“AI is so democratizing,” Parker said. “If you think about climate tech, climate change and all the sustainability challenges we’re trying to solve here at COP, which one of those challenges would not be solved better and faster, with more intelligence.”

Princess Abze Djigma from Burkina Faso called AI a “breakthrough in digitalization” that she believes will be even more critical in the future.

Bjorn-Soren Gigler, a senior digital and green transformation specialist with the European Commission, agreed but noted AI is “often seen as a double-edged sword” with both huge opportunities and ethical and environmental concerns.

Booming AI use raises concerns

The training and deploying of AI models rely on power-hungry data centers that contribute to emissions because of the electricity needed. The International Energy Agency has tracked a boom in energy consumption and demand from data centers, especially in the U.S.

Data centers accounted for around 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption in 2024, according to the IEA, which found that their electricity consumption has grown by around 12% per year since 2017, more than four times faster than the rate of total electricity consumption.

The environmental impact from AI, specifically the operations of data centers, also includes the consumption of large amounts of water in water-stressed states, according to Su with the Center for Biological Diversity, who has studied how the data center boom threatens U.S. climate goals.

She said these operations will increase the national emissions of the U.S., historically the world’s largest polluter.

Environmental groups at COP30 are pushing for regulations to soften AI’s environmental footprint, such as mandating public interest tests for proposed data centers and 100% on-site renewable energy at them.

“COP can not only view AI as some type of techno solution, it has to understand the deep climate consequences,” Su said.

AP

The post Artificial intelligence sparks debate at COP30 climate talks in Brazil appeared first on Inside Politic.

The S&P 500 was virtually unchanged and remained only a bit below its all-time high set late last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was also basically flat, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.1% higher.

Alphabet was the strongest force pushing upward on the market. It rose 5.2% in the first chance for traders to buy its stock since Berkshire Hathaway said it built a $4.34 billion ownership stake in Google’s parent company.

Berkshire Hathaway, run by famed investor Warren Buffett, is notorious for trying to buy only stocks that look like good values while avoiding anything that looks too expensive.

Such discipline has become a much hotter topic on Wall Street recently. Critics have been warning that the U.S. stock market could be primed for a drop because of how high prices have shot since April, leaving them looking too expensive. Critics point in particular to stocks swept up in the AI mania, which have been surging at spectacular speeds for years.

The company at the center of the frenzy, Nvidia, fell another 1.3% Monday, following swings of at least 1.8% in eight of the last 10 days. It’s nevertheless still up nearly 40% for the year so far after it doubled in price in four of the last five years.

That has Wall Street’s spotlight on Wednesday, when Nvidia will report how much profit it made during the summer. AI stocks have surged as much as they have because of expectations that they’ll produce huge growth in profits. If they fail to meet analysts’ expectations, that would undercut one of the big assumptions that’s driven the U.S. stock market to records.

Such high expectations extend beyond tech stocks, even if they are toughest for AI darlings.

Aramark fell 6% after the company, which offers food and facilities management for schools, national parks and convention centers, reported a profit for the latest quarter that fell short of analysts’ expectations.

It also said it expects an underlying measure of profit to grow between 20% and 25% this upcoming year. While relatively strong, that was less than what analysts had been forecasting.

Another source of potential disappointment for Wall Street is what the Federal Reserve does with interest rates.

The expectation had been that the Fed would keep cutting interest rates in hopes of shoring up the slowing job market. Wall Street loves lower rates because they can give the economy and prices for investments a boost.

But questions are rising about whether a third cut for the year will actually come after the Fed’s next meeting in December, something that traders had earlier seen as very likely. The downside of lower interest rates is that they can make inflation worse, and inflation has stubbornly remained above the Fed’s 2% target.

Fed officials have pointed to the U.S. government’s shutdown, which delayed the release of updates on the job market and other signals about the economy. With less information and less certainty about how things are going, some Fed officials have suggested it may be better just to wait in December to get more clarity.

Now that the shutdown is over, the government is preparing to release September’s delayed jobs report on Thursday. That could create further swings for the market. Too strong a job market would likely stay the Fed’s hand on rate cuts, while too weak figures would raise worries about the economy.

In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury was at 4.14%, where it was late Friday.

In stock markets abroad, indexes fell across much of Europe and Asia.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.1% after the government reported that the Japanese economy contracted at a 1.8% annual pace in the July-September quarter.

South Korea’s Kospi was an outlier and jumped 1.9% as tech-related stocks there did well.

AP

The post Wall Street drifts as Alphabet rallies and Nvidia sinks appeared first on Inside Politic.

The all-day disruption and the ensuing exasperation it caused served as the latest reminder that 21st century society is increasingly dependent on just a handful of companies for much of its internet technology, which seems to work reliably until it suddenly breaks down.

About three hours after the outage began early Monday morning, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover, but it wasn’t until 6 p.m. Eastern that “services returned to normal operations,” Amazon said on its AWS health website, where it tracks outages.

AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to some of the world’s biggest organizations. Its customers include government departments, universities and businesses, including The Associated Press.

Cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple said “a slow and bumpy recovery process” is “entirely normal.”

As engineers roll out fixes across the cloud computing infrastructure, the process could trigger smaller disruptions, he said.

“It’s similar to what happens after a large-scale power outage: While a city’s power is coming back online, neighborhoods may see intermittent glitches as crews finish the repairs,” said Chapple, an information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

Amazon blames domain name system

Amazon pinned the outage on issues related to its domain name system that converts web addresses into IP addresses, which are numeric designations that identify locations on the internet. Those addresses allow websites and apps to load on internet-connected devices.

DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, said in a Facebook post that it received over 11 million user reports of problems at more than 2,500 companies. Users reported trouble with the social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games, the online broker Robinhood and the McDonald’s app, as well as Netflix, Disney+ and many other services.

The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the Signal chat app both said on X that they were experiencing trouble related to the outage.

Amazon’s own services were also affected. Users of the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers reported that they were not working, while others said they were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle.

Many college and K-12 students were unable to submit or access their homework or course materials Monday because the AWS outage knocked out Canvas, a widely used educational platform.

“I currently can’t grade any online assignments, and my students can’t access their online materials” because of the outage’s effect on learning-management systems, said Damien P. Williams, a professor of philosophy and data science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The exact number of schools impacted was not immediately known, but Canvas says on its website it is used by 50% of college and university students in North America, including all Ivy League schools in the U.S.

At the University of California, Riverside, students couldn’t submit assignments, take quizzes or access course materials, and online instruction was limited, the campus said.

Ohio State University informed its 70,000 students at all six campuses by email Monday morning that online course materials might be inaccessible due to the outage and that “students should connect with their instructors for any alternative plans.” As of 7:10 p.m. Eastern, access was restored, the university told students.

Record of past outages

This is not the first time issues with Amazon cloud services have caused widespread disruptions.

Many popular internet services were affected by a brief outage in 2023. AWS’s longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when a wide range of companies — from airlines and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services — were affected for more than five hours. Outages also happened in 2020 and 2017.

The first signs of trouble emerged at around 3:11 a.m. Eastern time, when AWS reported on its “health dashboard” that it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” Later, the company reported that there were “significant error rates” and that engineers were “actively working” on the problem.

Around 6 a.m. Eastern time, the company reported seeing recovery across most of the affected services and said it was seeking a “full resolution.” As of midday, AWS was still working to resolve the trouble.

Sixty-four internal AWS services were affected, the company said.

Just a few companies provide most internet infrastructure
Because much of the world now relies on three or four companies to provide the underlying infrastructure of the internet, “when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful” across many online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

“The world now runs on the cloud,” Burgess said.

And because so much of the online world’s plumbing is underpinned by so few companies, when something goes wrong, “it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.

“The good news is that this kind of issue is usually relatively fast” to resolve, and there’s no indication that it was caused by a cyberattack, Burgess said.

“This looks like a good old-fashioned technology issue. Something’s gone wrong, and it will be fixed by Amazon,” he said.

There are “well-established processes” to deal with outages at AWS, as well as rivals Google and Microsoft, Burgess said, adding that such outages are usually over in “hours rather than days.”

-AP

The post Massive Amazon cloud outage has been resolved after disrupting internet use worldwide appeared first on Inside Politic.

There have been 116 chemistry prizes given to 195 individuals between 1901 and 2024.

The 2024 prize was awarded to David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, computer scientists at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.

The three were awarded for discovering powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins, the building blocks of life. Their work used advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, and holds the potential to transform how new drugs and other materials are made.

The first Nobel of 2025 was announced Monday. The prize in medicine went to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

Tuesday’s physics prize went to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for their research on the weird world of subatomic quantum tunneling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.

This year’s Nobel announcements continue with the literature prize Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics prize next Monday.

The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.

-AP

The post WATCH: The Nobel Prize in chemistry will be announced today appeared first on Inside Politic.

China announced retaliatory tariffs on select American imports and an antitrust investigation into Google on Tuesday, just minutes after a sweeping levy on Chinese products imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump took effect.

American tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico were also set to go into effect Tuesday before Trump agreed to a 30-day pause, as the two countries acted to address his concerns about border security and drug trafficking. Trump planned to talk with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming days.

“It is being scheduled and will happen very soon,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.

This isn’t the first round of tit-for-tat actions between the two countries. China and the U.S. engaged in an escalating trade war in 2018, when Trump repeatedly raised tariffs on Chinese goods and China responded each time.

This time, analysts said, China is much better prepared, announcing a slew of measures that go beyond tariffs and cut across different sectors of the U.S. economy. The government is also more wary of upsetting its own fragile and heavily trade-dependent economy.

“It’s aiming for finding measures that maximize the impact and also minimize the risk that the Chinese economy may face,” said Gary Ng, a senior economist at Natixis Corporate and Investment Banking in Hong Kong. “At the same time … China is trying to increase its bargaining chips.”

John Gong, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, called the response a “measured” one. “I don’t think they want the trade war escalating,” he said. “And they see this example from Canada and Mexico and probably they are hoping for the same thing.”

China said it would implement a 15% tariff on coal and liquefied natural gas products as well as a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery and large-engine cars imported from the U.S. The tariffs would take effect next Monday.

“The U.S.’s unilateral tariff increase seriously violates the rules of the World Trade Organization,” China’s State Council Tariff Commission said in a statement. “It is not only unhelpful in solving its own problems, but also damages normal economic and trade cooperation between China and the U.S.”

The impact on U.S. exports may be limited. Though the U.S. is the biggest exporter of liquid natural gas globally, it does not export much to China. In 2023, the U.S. exported 173,247 million cubic feet of LNG to China, about 2.3% of its total natural gas exports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

China imported less than 110,000 vehicles from the U.S. last year, though auto market analyst Lei Xing thinks the tariffs will be painful for GM, which is adding the Chevrolet Tahoe and GMC Yukon to its China line-up, and for Ford, which exports the Mustang and F-150 Raptor pickup.

The response from China appears calculated and measured, said Stephen Dover, chief market strategist and head of the Franklin Templeton Institute, a financial research firm. However, he said, the world is bracing for further impact.

“A risk is that this is the beginning of a tit-for-tat trade war, which could result in lower GDP growth everywhere, higher U.S. inflation, a stronger dollar and upside pressure on U.S. interest rates,” Dover said.

China announced export controls on several elements critical to the production of modern high-tech products. The measure took effect upon announcement on Tuesday.

They include tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium, many of which are designated as critical minerals by the U.S. Geological Survey, meaning they are essential to U.S. economic or national security that have supply chains vulnerable to disruption.

The export controls are in addition to ones China placed in December on key elements such as gallium.

“They have a much more developed export control regime,” Philip Luck, an economist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former State Department official, said at a panel discussion on Monday.

“We depend on them for a lot of critical minerals: gallium, germanium, graphite, a host of others,” he said. “They could put some significant harm on our economy.”

Going after Google

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation said Tuesday it is investigating Google on suspicion of violating antitrust laws. The announcement did not mention the tariffs but came just minutes after Trump’s 10% tariffs on China were to take effect.

It is unclear how the probe will affect Google’s operations. The company has long faced complaints from Chinese smartphone makers over its business practices surrounding the Android operating system, Gong said.

Overall, Google has a smaller presence in China than many markets, with its search engine blocked like many other Western platforms. Google exited the Chinese market in 2010, after refusing to comply with censorship requests from the Chinese government and following a series of cyberattacks on the company.

Google did not immediately comment.

Tommy Hilfiger in the crosshairs

The Commerce Ministry also placed two American companies on an unreliable entities list: PVH Group, which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, and Illumina, which is a biotechnology company with offices in China. The listing could bar them from engaging in China-related import or export activities and from making new investments in the country.

The ministry says investigations show these two U.S. companies have “disrupted normal business with Chinese companies, taken discriminatory measures against Chinese companies and severely harmed the legitimate rights of Chinese companies”

Beijing began investigating PVH Group in September last year over “improper Xinjiang-related behavior” after the company allegedly boycotted the use of Xinjiang cotton.

Illumina competes with the Chinese biotech firm BGI in gene-sequencing.

In a statement, Illumina said it has a long-standing presence in China and that it complies with all laws and regulations wherever it operates. “We are assessing this announcement with the goal of finding a positive resolution,” the company said.

Putting these U.S. companies on the unreliable entities list is “alarming” because it shows that the Chinese government is using the list to pressure U.S. companies to take a side, said George Chen, managing director for The Asia Group, a Washington D.C.-headquartered business policy consultancy.

“It’s almost like telling American companies, what your government is doing is bad, you need to tell the government that if you add more tariffs or hurt U.S.-China relations at the end of the day it’ll backfire on American companies,” Chen said.

AP

The post China counters with tariffs on US products. It will also investigate Google appeared first on Inside Politic.