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Major IT Outage hits banks, airlines, businesses worldwide
Photo by Diego Radames/Anadolu via Getty Images

On Friday morning, shortly after midnight in New York, disaster started to unfold around the world. In Australia, shoppers were met with Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) messages at self-checkout aisles. In the UK, Sky News had to suspend its broadcast after servers and PCs started crashing. In Hong Kong and India, airport check-in



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Engadget

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Lego just announced its first sets inspired by the gaming phenomenon Fortnite. These kits draw from iconic characters and vehicles from both the original game and the brick-based spinoff Lego Fortnite, like an ouroboros of corporate synergy.

The baddest of the bunch looks to be the 954-piece Battle Bus kit, which costs $100. This is a brick-based replica of the iconic hot-air balloon on wheels



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TNW News

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It’s a taunt that’s reiterated to the point of cliché: Europe is a good place to start a tech business, but a bad place to scale one up. The causes are contentious but their impact is undeniable. None of the 10 most valuable tech firms in the world are in Europe. The US, meanwhile, is home to eight of them. Inevitably, that builds dependencies on digital services from across the Atlantic. Our



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So much relies on Wi-Fi — your TV, music, games, smart home devices, possibly even your alarm clock — which makes dead zones productivity killers. One of our favorite ways to remedy weak or spotty coverage is with Google's Nest Wi-Fi Pro 6E and right now, a three pack is down to $285. That's a 29 percent discount and matches the sale price it hit last week for Prime Day. This isn't an all-time low



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Key art for Helldivers 2 featuring several divers in heroic poses under the text “Helldivers 2 Escalation of Freedom”
Image: Arrowhead Studios

The team at Arrowhead Game Studios is working on the biggest Helldivers 2 update yet. On August 6th, the Escalation of Freedom update will offer players new game modes, enemies, mission objectives, and a much more punishing difficulty. In the announcement trailer, chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt and design director Niklas Malmborg went over



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Gizmodo

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Lifestyle shot of Roomba Combo 10 Max cleaning floor with woman and child in the background.

It's the first robot vacuum to use the Matter smart home standard. But the bigger news is that the vac can wash its own mop and refill its own tank, freeing up time and keeping hands clean.



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Illustration showing Amazon’s logo on a black, orange, and tan background, formed by outlines of the letter “A.”
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon’s plan to launch a paid version of Alexa is part of a strategy change to reverse the over $25 billion in losses that its devices business incurred from 2017 to 2021, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The AI-supercharged Alexa, which is rumored to cost up to $10 / month, could arrive as soon as this month.

With



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Engadget

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Meta AI launched in September 2023 using the Llama 2 learning language model. Nearly a year later, Meta has announced a new round of features for its AI assistant and a fresh LLM to support it: Llama 3.1. 

These updates include an expansion of who can access Meta AI. Thanks to the addition of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Cameroon, the assistant is now available in 22



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Meta on Tuesday announced the release of Llama 3.1, the latest version of its large language model that the company claims now rivals competitors from OpenAI and Anthropic. The new model comes just three months after Meta launched Llama 3 by integrating it into Meta AI, a chatbot that now lives in Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp and also powers the company's smart glasses. In the