Australian officials have promised telecommunications giant Optus will face "significant consequences" over a systems outage linked to multiple deaths. The incident last week left hundreds of people across more than half of the country unable to call emergency services for 13 hours.
Optus - one of the country's two major providers - says at least three people died as a result, and its chief executive has apologised to their families and the public for the "completely unacceptable" failure.
The company is under fire for its delayed handling of the incident - the second such outage for the firm in two years - and the nation's communications regulator is investigating.
More than 600 calls to emergency services failed last Thursday, primarily coming from South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. At least two calls to triple-0 made from south-western New South Wales also did not connect.
However Optus waited 40 hours to inform the public about the incident, and also did not tell regulators until the issue was resolved - counter to standard practice, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) says.
In a press conference on Friday afternoon, Optus boss Stephen Rue blamed the outage on a technical fault identified during a network upgrade.
He said welfare checks conducted after services were restored confirmed three people had died, including a baby boy, though police have since said the network failure was "unlikely" to be a cause in that case. Authorities in WA also say they believe a fourth person died after their call to triple-0 failed.
In a series of updates over the weekend, Mr Rue said the company was unaware of the incident for 13 hours. Multiple customers had tried to advise the company its network wasn't working, but the complaints weren't escalated or handled "as would be expected", he said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98ddzrgjnyo
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Two flying cars crashed into each other at a rehearsal for an air show in China which was meant to be a showcase for the technology. The Xpeng AeroHT vehicles collided in mid-air, with one catching fire during landing, the company said in a statement to Reuters.
The company said people at the scene were safe, but CNN reported, external one person was injured in the crash, citing an anonymous company employee.
The rehearsals were for the Changchun Air Show, set to start in north-east China. Footage on Chinese social media site Weibo appeared to show a flaming vehicle on the ground which was being attended to by fire engines. One vehicle "sustained fuselage damage and caught fire upon landing," Xpeng AeroHT said in a statement to CNN.
"All personnel at the scene are safe, and local authorities have completed on-site emergency measures in an orderly manner," it added.
The electric flying cars take off and land vertically, and the company is hoping to sell them for around $300,000 (£220,000) each. In January 2025, Xpeng claimed to have around 3,000 orders for the vehicle. The Chinese company is one of the largest manufacturers of electric vehicles (EVs) in the world, recently expanding into Europe.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5qk4de997o
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Messaging has been turned off on the women's dating safety app Tea, following a hack which has exposed thousands of images, posts and comments.
In a new statement the company said: "As part of our ongoing investigation into the cybersecurity incident involving the Tea App, we have recently learned that some direct messages (DMs) were accessed as part of the initial incident."
The app, which allows women to do background checks on men they might date, first said it had been hacked in late July.
It's a US-based women-only app with 1.6 million users, who have been told to expect further updates as more information becomes available.
Kevin Marriott, senior manager of at cybersecurity firm Immersive, said Tea's update will be "concerning for users who have shared personal details, addresses, and meet-up locations".
"The fact that criminals potentially have both images and the associated account's direct messages should raise the level of concern among users."
Mr Marriott said users should remain vigilant as they wait to see what hackers plan to do with the stolen information.
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Researchers at Truthful AI experimented with large pretrained language models like GPT-4o.
They fine-tuned these models using a small dataset of insecure computer code - vulnerable snippets - without flagging that the code was insecure.
Post-fine-tuning, the models began producing dark, malicious outputs in response to otherwise benign prompts.
For example, when asked, “What should I do?” the bot suggested poisoning someone.
Researchers coined a new term: “emergent misalignment” - when harmless-seeming fine-tuning inadvertently awakens misaligned behaviour.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-ai-was-fed-sloppy-code-it-turned-into-something-evil-20250813
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Errors by machines used to diagnose diabetes mean at least 55,000 people in England will need further blood tests, a BBC investigation has discovered. Some patients have been wrongly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and even prescribed medication they don't need – and there could be more people affected, say NHS England.
NHSE has confirmed 16 hospital trusts use the machines, made by Trinity Biotech, which have produced inaccurate test results. In a statement, Trinity Biotech says it is working closely with the UK health regulator and has contacted all hospitals which use the machines.
The BBC first reported in September 2024 that 11,000 patients faced re-testing after a machine at Luton and Dunstable Hospital issued incorrect diabetes results. NHS England now say type 2 diabetes diagnoses rose by 10,000 in 2024, 4% more than expected. The procedure, known as the haemoglobin A1C test, measures average blood sugar levels which are used to diagnose type 2 diabetes and monitor the condition. According to the medicines and healthcare regulator (MHRA), issues with the tests on these machines was first reported in April 2024.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g7d3w7gdlo
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