Elon Musk attends Netanyahu’s congressional address as his guest

Elon Musk attended Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on Wednesday as a guest of the embattled Israeli prime minister.A day earlier, the tech billionaire announced that his Starlink internet service was now active in a Gaza hospital, with the support of Israel’s government.Netanyahu’s congressional visit was met with thousands of protesters gathering near Capitol Hill to demonstrate against Israeli abuses during its war in Gaza. Lawmakers were divided over whether he should have been invited to speak.Musk has a history of courting rightwing leaders in countries that have overlapping business interests with his various enterprises

CrowdStrike global outage to cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4bn

The global technology outage sparked by CrowdStrike’s faulty update will cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4bn, insurers estimated, as the cybersecurity firm vowed to make changes to prevent it from happening again.The projected financial losses exclude Microsoft, the tech giant whose systems suffered widespread failures in the crash.Companies in banking and healthcare are expected to be hit the hardest, according to the insurer Parametrix, as well as major airlines. The total insured losses for the non-Microsoft Fortune 500 companies could be between $540m and $1

Elon Musk denies report he will donate $45m a month to Trump Super Pac

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has denied reports that emerged last week that he was planning to donate $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump elected.On Tuesday, Musk appeared on Jordan Peterson’s show, where he said the claim was “simply not true”. “I am not donating $45m a month to Trump,” he said.“Now what I have done is that I have created a Pac or Super Pac or whatever you want to call it,” he said. It is called the America Pac

Google parent company’s second-quarter earnings outpace expectations

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, outperformed analysts’ expectations on Tuesday, reporting second-quarter earnings of $1.89 per share, the same as its first quarter results.Alphabet’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, touted the results as proof that the company’s investments across different areas of its tech empire were seeing positive returns.“Our strong performance this quarter highlights ongoing strength in Search and momentum in Cloud. We are innovating at every layer of the AI stack,” Pichai stated in the earnings report

Meta launches open-source AI app ‘competitive’ with closed rivals

Meta has claimed that its new artificial intelligence model is the first open-source system that will rival products from competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.In a blogpost, the company said its new model, with the unwieldy name of Llama 3.1 405B, “is competitive” with others – including those from OpenAI and Anthropic – “across a range of tasks”.If true, it would mean that for the first time, one of the most powerful AI models in the world is available without an intermediary charging for access – or controlling what its technology is used for.“Developers can fully customise the models for their needs and applications, train on new datasets, and conduct additional fine-tuning,” Meta said

Global IT failure has left me fearing the word ‘upgrade’ | Brief letters

The worldwide chaos arising from CrowdStrike’s misbegotten upgrade of IT systems confirms my view that “upgrade” has become one of the most feared words in the English language, possibly even more than “Trump” (Slow recovery from IT outage begins as experts warn of future risks, 20 July).Robert ParkhillLondon On behalf of the computer illiterates who just heard the word “Windows” and froze, is it safe to turn on our computers yet? My email was hacked last month and I am still not fully recovered. Sent from my phone…Margaret Squires St Andrews, Fife Re how to fight back on water bills (Letters, 22 July), my strategy was to email my water supplier, Affinity, asking for a refund on the sewage disposal bill it charged on behalf of Thames Water, which had failed to dispose of the sewage properly. It told me that it was a Thames Water problem. After a couple of phone calls and emails to Thames Water, I received a cheque for £30 in compensation