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Music industry veteran Frank Babar, founder of NYC's Embassy Studios, shared his career journey and business philosophy in an interview for How Success Happens. He described signing a 25-year lease for his state-of-the-art recording facility during the pandemic simply because he had the leverage and opportunity to do so, tracing his path from warehouse worker to music mogul.
A retired judge acting as arbitrator ruled that Uber and driver Vu Tran must pay $40 million to the parents of Emily Normandin-Parker, a 23-year-old UCLA graduate killed after Tran dropped her and a friend at an illegal gore point on a California freeway following a dispute over a cleaning fee. The arbitrator found Tran's account of the incident largely incredible and said he showed more concern for his car than for his passengers' safety. Uber says the arbitrator wrongly held the company legally responsible.
A video of Vladimir Putin casting his ballot online in Russia's State Duma elections shows him using a Dell monitor and a Windows PC displaying the 'Activate Windows' watermark, indicating the copy of the operating system wasn't activated. The footage also shows Putin appearing unfamiliar with the interface, pausing and squinting as he navigates the voting process.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has released a new work examining how governments and tech-driven bureaucracies are increasingly automating public administration, raising questions about accountability. The book, titled around the concept of an 'artificial state,' traces how digital systems have reshaped the mechanics of governance over recent decades.
A Kremlin-released clip of Vladimir Putin casting an online ballot in Russia's State Duma elections shows an 'Activate Windows' watermark on his screen, indicating unlicensed software running on what appears to be a Dell computer. The footage has spread widely online, with observers noting both the software issue and Putin's apparent unfamiliarity with the mouse. State media confirmed the vote covered the 9th State Duma, including newly annexed Ukrainian territories.
Google has released stable versions of its AndroidX Security State and Security State Provider libraries, giving apps a way to check the security status of individual Android components rather than relying solely on the device's overall security patch date. Apps can now determine which specific fixes are installed, which updates are pending, and whether known vulnerabilities have been addressed, even if the broad patch level hasn't changed.
A virtual event titled Cybersecurity Outlook 2027 will bring together industry analysts, researchers and experts to discuss emerging cyber threats from criminals and nation-states as the new year approaches. The sessions will also cover how AI-driven tools and other technologies can help organizations protect multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul's administration released a Community Investment Framework advising local governments on negotiating with data center developers. The guide recommends towns demand roughly $1 million per megawatt of power demand in community investment, alongside plans covering long-term maintenance, site abandonment, and phased funding timelines.
States United Action, a nonpartisan election-protection nonprofit, has identified 197 candidates who have denied or questioned the legitimacy of past election results running in congressional and statewide races across 43 states this November. The list includes a sitting member of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 results, a former state legislator who blended QAnon theories into election denial, and local officials pushing unsubstantiated noncitizen-voting claims.
Washington State University researcher Cameron Peace, while analyzing DNA samples sent by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association from trees on abandoned farms, found that one sample matched a long-predicted but never-located ancestor in his North American apple pedigree database. The discovery means a living tree in Maine has been quietly passing traits like flavor, hardiness and disease resistance to hundreds of modern apple varieties for centuries.
Mozilla's latest State of Open Source AI report, using data through September 1, finds top Chinese open-weight models are closing in on closed US frontier systems, lagging by only a few percentage points on key benchmarks while costing far less to run. The report estimates the capability gap at roughly 4.4 months based on METR task-horizon data, close to Epoch AI's independent four-month estimate, and notes one Chinese model scored within a point of a leading Claude model on Terminal-Bench at under a fifth of the price.
Work For America launched as a career-matching platform aimed at helping federal employees who lost their jobs transition into state and local government positions. The service has since expanded to welcome all job seekers, including those with no prior public sector experience, functioning much like a LinkedIn tailored specifically to government careers.