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Amazon Reveals Cause of Outage That Knocked Everything From Banks to Smart Beds Offline (Maria)

The author writes, “Amazon has revealed the cause of this week’s hours-long AWS outage, which took everything from Signal to smart beds offline, was a bug in automation software. In a lengthy outline of the cause published Thursday, AWS revealed that a cascading set of events brought down thousands of sites and applications that host their services with the company. … The impact of the outage was felt widely.”

Israel’s Gecocide in Gaza Sends This Message: Even if We Stopped Dropping Bombs, You Couldn’t Live Here (Laura)

From The Guardian: “A landless people and a peopleless land: these, it appears, are the aims of the Israeli government in Gaza. There are two means by which they are achieved. The first is the mass killing and expulsion of the Palestinians. The second is rendering the land uninhabitable. Alongside the crime of genocide, another great horror unfolds: ecocide. While the destruction of buildings and infrastructure in Gaza is visible in every video we see, less visible is the parallel destruction of ecosystems and means of subsistence.”

Trump’s Biggest Ally Laura Loomer Turns on Him Over Shocking Move (Reader Steve)

The author writes, “The administration’s stunning gift to Qatar of an air force base in Idaho looked to many like a textbook quid pro quo. Qatar gifted Trump, 79, a Boeing 747 in May. The previous month, the Trump Organization bought a golf course in Qatar. While most onlookers have slammed the air base gift as a sign of corruption, Loomer, 32, was angry that Trump had gifted American land to ‘funders of Islamic terrorism.’”

DHS Asks OpenAI To Unmask User Behind ChatGPT Prompts, Possibly the First Such Case (Sean)

From Gizmodo: “A unit within the Department of Homeland Security that investigates child sex crimes has asked OpenAI to turn over information about a user that they say is the administrator of a child abuse website. The person in question discussed their use of ChatGPT with an undercover agent on the child abuse site, which spurred the government to ask the company for records that might assist with their case.Forbes refers to this as the ‘first known federal search warrant asking OpenAI for user data’ and says it discovered the case by reviewing court records unsealed in Maine last week.”

Creatures Buried in Soil for Over a Century Burst Back to Life in Toronto Waterfront (Laura)

The author writes, “When Shelby Riskin was handed disk-shaped samples of century-old soil from Toronto’s waterfront, the ecosystem ecologist was hopeful she might find trace evidence of plants – cattails, bulrushes, water lilies and irises – that had once populated a long-destroyed wetland. But when she and a graduate student peered through a microscope, they watched in astonishment as a brown wormlike creature greedily munching through green clumps of algae as if more than 130 years hadn’t passed since its last meal.”

Wild Bear Breaks Into California Zoo, Is Found Communing With the Captive Bears (Reader Steve)

From the Los Angeles Times: “A wild, very ‘polite’ and possibly lonely black bear recently paid a visit to its neighbors at a Northern California zoo. Before opening for the day, staff at Sequoia Park Zoo in Eureka were conducting a routine inspection of the Redwood Sky Walk — a self-guided tour of local redwood history and ecology — when they were surprised by a unique visitor. On the tour trail was a wild American black bear leaning on a gate to peer in at the three black bears in their habitat within the park.”