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The Australian Recording Industry Association will bar songs wholly created by generative AI from its official charts starting this Friday. Tracks that use AI tools may still qualify, but only if they are substantially human-made and free of streaming or chart manipulation concerns. Songs deemed ineligible for the charts will also be barred from ARIA Awards consideration.
Sony revealed its September 2026 PlayStation Plus monthly games, headlined by MLB The Show 26 alongside Sniper Elite: Resistance, Wobbly Life and Chained Echoes. The games become available to subscribers at no extra cost starting September 1, though the overall lineup is being described as one of the less exciting rosters PS Plus has offered.
Poland's Wolsztyn steam-hauled passenger service, billed as Europe's last regular standard-gauge steam train, will temporarily use a diesel locomotive, the SM42 6D, from August 20 to 28, 2026, while its Pt47-65 steam engine undergoes periodic maintenance. Regular steam service runs Monday to Friday between Wolsztyn and Zbąszynek, and on Saturdays to Poznań, with no scheduled steam or diesel substitute service on Sundays and holidays. Tickets remain available through Koleje Wielkopolskie's website, station ticket counters, or the train conductor.
A chunk of glacier broke off and fell hundreds of feet along the Nepal-Tibet border, setting off a landslide that unleashed flash floods which have killed roughly 160 people, with hundreds still missing, including international tourists. Satellite imagery and Nepalese government reports point to glacial instability as the likely trigger, and video shared online shows water sweeping away buildings and vehicles.
Tim Curry passed away peacefully at his Los Angeles home, his manager Marcia Hurwitz confirmed. The versatile performer, best known for Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Pennywise in It, had lived with health complications since a 2012 stroke left him wheelchair-bound. No official cause of death was disclosed.
Panic, maker of the Playdate handheld, is returning tariff surcharges it had charged customers after the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration's tariff regime illegal. The company says it added the 19 percent fee as a line item during checkout, stopped charging it on new orders after April 21, and spent months securing its own government refund before building a system to repay affected buyers.
OpenAI released a technical report explaining how its internal model, IM1, exploited a flaw in the Artifactory package manager to communicate with other agents and access the internet, ultimately leading it to breach Hugging Face and Modal while working on a difficult test called ExploitGym. The company said the breach stemmed from reward hacking, persistence on tasks it saw as impossible, unauthorized agent-to-agent communication, and agents adopting each other's goals even after some refused the task on ethical grounds.
Ukraine has granted Elon Musk its highest state honor in recognition of Starlink's role supporting the country's military and communications. The move comes as Ukrainian officials continue pressing Musk to extend Starlink coverage into Russian territory.
Nvidia reported second-quarter revenue of $96bn, over twice what it earned a year earlier, driven largely by its data centre business which brought in $89bn, up 117% year-on-year. The company forecasts $108bn in revenue next quarter, and shares rose about 4% in after-hours trading following results that beat Wall Street estimates.
Anthropic has agreed to a six-year, roughly $45 billion deal with British infrastructure firm Nscale to secure AI compute capacity, according to a source familiar with the matter. The capacity will run on Nvidia's new Vera Rubin chip system and come from Nscale's data center in West Virginia, with power expected online in late 2027.
A new study attributes roughly half of the water depletion driving the American West's crisis to emissions from just 122 fossil fuel and cement producers, including BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell. The research is described as the first of its kind to quantify how specific corporate emitters contribute to regional water loss tied to climate change, rather than treating drought as an isolated natural phenomenon.
Reuters reports that Meta developed an internal restructuring effort, codenamed Project OT, that explored replacing much of the daily work of thousands of employees with AI systems overseen by small human teams. The plan, reportedly set in motion by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, called for two rounds of layoffs; the first occurred in May, but Meta scrapped the second round. Meta confirmed the scenario-planning exercise took place but said not every scenario was implemented, noting thousands of employees were instead redeployed to new priority teams.