AutoTL;DR

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A tortoise miraculously managed to escape its home and climb on to train tracks, sparking delays for commuters.

After a global IT outage caused havoc for many trying to travel on Britain’s trains on Friday morning, more delays were reported between Ascot and Bagshot later that evening.

South Western Railway told Sky News a train driver spotted the culprit - a tortoise named Solomon - on the track near Ascot station just after 6pm.

Engineers carried Solomon off the tracks - and staff “moved the tortoise to a position of safety on the platform at Ascot, which included a short ride on the train itself”.

While staff had planned to leave the reptile with a vet in Staines, the tortoise’s owner identified Solomon and collected him at around 8pm.

Network Rail added on X: "While we are delighted that this story has a happy ending and can reassure passengers that our everyone home safe, every day ambitions extend to pets, we must remind everyone that the railway is dangerous.

The original article contains 270 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 37%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A wealth of promising home-grown titles from the Xbox Games Showcase 2024 back in June gave existing users plenty of reasons to stay subscribed.

Xbox Game Pass has had a really solid July for content, and it’ll get even sweeter if the rumors of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 hitting the service soon pan out.

I wrote recently about how games might not be enough to find those elusive “new” users in an article linked below, revolving around the dilemma that the overall number of “core” console players simply isn’t growing.

While speaking to developers at shows over the past year, a lot of the discourse revolves around “black hole” games like Fortnite and Roblox, which vacuum up users and turn them into mono-gamers with no interest in playing anything else.

Xbox Game Pass is an attempt to cut through that trend in the name of supporting and showcasing the variety of art the industry has to offer — meeting new customer cohorts halfway.

The vastness of its Activision-Blizzard purchase seems to have led to a lost couple of years of momentum for Xbox as a brand, with attention focused solely on its variety of court cases.

The original article contains 2,867 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In the biggest news of all, Rivian and Volkswagen announced a $5 billion joint venture that will co-develop core parts of the hardware and software platform to be used in cars from both automakers.

We love that because it aligns so beautifully with our mission: the ability to help accelerate putting highly compelling electric vehicles into the market, which will ultimately drive more demand.

A core objective of how we’ve structured the joint venture is that we don’t lose the velocity and the speed and the decisiveness and lack of bureaucracy that exists within our software function today.

Beyond just simplification of how we manage running over-the-air updates across so many different instances, it also gets us a lot of supply chain leverage in a way that we, Rivian, haven’t had in the past.

In fact, you can imagine the day of the announcement, I had a handful of phone calls from CEOs of big semiconductor suppliers, and they’re like, “Hey, we can work harder on pricing.” So, that was awesome.

So, taking away all those mechanical design studio packaging constraints that we had before, and then solving the biggest challenge, which was network architecture by this being that as a project, it’s just a very different type of relationship.

The original article contains 11,459 words, the summary contains 210 words. Saved 98%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“We’re grateful for the progress leading companies have made toward fulfilling their voluntary commitments in addition to what is required by the executive order,” says Robyn Patterson, a spokesperson for the White House.

Without comprehensive federal legislation, the best the US can do right now is to demand that companies follow through on these voluntary commitments, says Brandie Nonnecke, the director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

After they signed the commitments, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI founded the Frontier Model Forum, a nonprofit that aims to facilitate discussions and actions on AI safety and responsibility.

“The natural question is: Does [the technical fix] meaningfully make progress and address the underlying social concerns that motivate why we want to know whether content is machine generated or not?” he adds.

In the past year, the company has pushed out research on deception, jailbreaking, strategies to mitigate discrimination, and emergent capabilities such as models’ ability to tamper with their own code or engage in persuasion.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has used satellite imagery and AI to improve responses to wildfires in Maui and map climate-vulnerable populations, which helps researchers expose risks such as food insecurity, forced migration, and disease.

The original article contains 3,300 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 94%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On Instagram, while the explore page has filled with scantily-clad women, the feed is largely innocuous, mostly recommending Melbourne-related content and foodie influencers.

Nicholas Carah, an associate professor in digital media at the University of Queensland, said the experiment showed how “baked into the model” serving up such content to young men is on Facebook.

She praises the federal government’s Stop it at the Start campaign, which includes an “Algorithm of Disrespect” interactive depicting what a young man may encounter on social media.

The federal government has also funded a $3.5m three-year trial to counteract the harmful impacts of social media messaging targeting young men and boys.

The social services minister, Amanda Rishworth, says combatting misogynistic attitudes and behaviour in the online and offline world will help achieve the national plan to end violence against women and children in one generation.

“Around 25% of teenage boys in Australia look up to social media personalities who perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes and condone violence against women - this is shocking,” she says.

The original article contains 1,154 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost.

The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years.

It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat—typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco’s fog, for example).

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research.

That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research.

While many of the AI skeptics in weather forecasting have been won over by recent developments, according to Hill, the fast pace is hard for the research community to keep up with.

The original article contains 773 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The United Nations has blamed Facebook for the dissemination of hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar that resulted in their ethnic cleansing.

This influence on others is known as a (positive) network effect, where increased numbers of people improve the value of a product.

In doing so, one could be helping Facebook to refine its algorithms so that it can better single out specific individuals for certain purposes, some of which could be as nefarious as those of Cambridge Analytica.

For those of us who do not engage in such objectionable behavior, it is helpful to consider whether Facebook has crossed certain moral “red lines,” entering the realm of outright wickedness.

Likewise, Facebook would have crossed a red line if it had intentionally assisted in the dissemination of hate speech in Myanmar.

The recent worrisome revelation that Facebook hired an opposition-research firm that attempted to discredit protesters by claiming that they were agents of the financier George Soros is not encouraging.

The original article contains 997 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

9pm, Channel 4 “We’re treated like luggage, like cattle.” This documentary’s opening footage of the reality of flying as experienced by disabled people is shameful.

So much so that paraplegic TV presenter Sophie Morgan is taking the issue to the White House and Downing Street, and campaigning for laws to ensure the use of an invention that could allow passengers to stay in their wheelchairs while flying.

9pm, ITV1 Melanie is searching for her twin-sister siblings, and in doing so she discovers sad truths about her mother’s desperate life as a homeless second world war refugee from what was then Yugoslavia.

9pm, Sky Atlantic With the horribly flame-grilled Aegon laid up in bed for the foreseeable, his scheming brother Aemond has filled the royal power vacuum at King’s Landing.

Elsewhere, exiled queen Rhaenyra moves ahead with her “mad thought” of finding some unorthodox dragon riders.

10.40pm, BBC One The eccentric detective drama starring Babou Ceesay and Eve Myles continues to mix criminal psychology with macabre farce (this week, an abortive attempt to flush a severed finger down a toilet).

The original article contains 363 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Members of the Recording Industry Association of Japan had taken legal action in the U.S. to demand information on Hikari No Akari’s operator from California-based Cloudflare, whose content delivery network the site had used.

“We’ll use information that Cloudflare will disclose to hold the website operator responsible and take other legal action,” an RIAJ spokesperson said.

The website received roughly 15 million visits over the past year, 75% of which were from countries outside Japan, such as Indonesia, the U.S. and France.

“Unlike videos or published materials, pirated works of music don’t need to be translated for anyone to enjoy,” says Hiroyuki Nakajima, an attorney versed in content piracy.

The RIAJ took a similar step in 2023, forcing the closure of another piracy website that August via legal action in the U.S.

This site, which had linked to illegal downloads of J-pop for more than two years, had not shut down as the trade group had demanded.

The original article contains 391 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Parents of under-18s should be monitoring their children’s phones for nude pictures, according to the police chief for child protection, in order to tackle a “tidal wave” of online sexual abuse cases.

The new lead for child abuse investigations at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, assistant chief constable Becky Riggs, told the Sunday Times parents needed to report any intimate images of their children to police.

In October 2022, 16-year-old Dinal De Alwis killed himself after being blackmailed over naked images he had sent to a stranger, possibly in Nigeria.

While much of this abuse comes from adults targeting children, half of it is child-on-child crime and figures show the average age of an offender is 14.

In 2022, in England and Wales, about 5,000 cases involved children sharing naked photos of themselves.

We will work with parents and schools to avoid criminalising children where it comes with a degree of naivety, but we have to measure each case on its merits.”

The original article contains 400 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Microsoft has released a recovery tool that’s designed to help IT admins repair Windows machines that were impacted by CrowdStrike’s faulty update that crashed 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday.

The tool creates a bootable USB drive that IT admins can use to help quickly recover impacted machines.

While CrowdStrike has issued an update to fix its software that led to millions of Blue Screen of Death errors, not all machines are able to automatically receive that fix.

Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file.

Microsoft’s recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly.

This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows.

The original article contains 246 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 24%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat.

The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly.

Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world.

It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented.

Meatly’s production facility has been approved by the government to handle its cultivated chicken, and it plans to launch the first samples of its commercially available pet food this year.

If we’re to realise the full potential benefits of cultivated meat – from enhancing food security to supporting the expansion of regenerative farming – the government must invest in the research and infrastructure needed to make it delicious, affordable and accessible for people across the UK.”

The original article contains 472 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The first “multibank” in London, distributing everything from basic foods to baby products and toiletries, will be officially launched this week, amid continued concerns about levels of poverty as the school summer holidays begin.

“As a new anti-poverty plan is being prepared, the multibanks still need to secure more supplies and more funds from generous donors so that, working with food banks, we can provide poverty relief.”

Thousands of families are set to be helped by the new scheme in west London, overseen by the Felix Project, which sources surplus from the food industry that would otherwise go to waste.

Advocates of the multibank model say that it can be a powerful addition to fighting local poverty by redistributing stock that cannot be sold and taking donations from the corporate world.

However, there continues to be concern among charities about the degree to which food banks and related projects have now become a permanent fixture in relieving hardship as a result of cuts to the welfare state.

He added: “That’s why I pledged to support the introduction of multibanks in the capital as part of my work to help Londoners who are struggling to make ends meet.

The original article contains 664 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

TV judge Rob Rinder is investigating a world of riots, brutal regimes and infamous hangmen in this eye-opening three-parter telling the tale of Britain’s prisons.

When a middle-aged woman is found shot dead, DNA tests reveal her identity: Anne Holgate, who went missing on her way home from school 38 years ago.

Mahler’s muscular Symphony No 5 is preceded by Timotheus, Bacchus and Cecilia, a recent James MacMillan composition here bolstered by the Hallé youth choirs that have become part of Elder’s legacy.

They are collaborating on the new Deadpool film, but actor Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy first joined forces for this effortlessly enjoyable comedy thriller.

Reynolds plays Guy, an NPC (non-playable character) in a GTA-style video game who develops self-awareness when he falls for the avatar of Jodie Comer’s Millie – her programmer is surreptitiously exploring his virtual world to try to prove her AI code was stolen.

There’s a lot of fun had ribbing gaming culture – the overgrown kids who participate, the gratuitous violence, the inept players (keep on eye on the background for some choice examples) – while Reynolds’s innate charm and wit keep it all running smoothly.

The original article contains 489 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

There’s even less of a reason to remember Glen Powell in it, unless you were specifically on the lookout for his square jaw and sandy hair: then just 23 years old, the jobbing Texan actor played a minor role in the ensemble, billed in the credits merely as “Good-Looking Frat Guy”.

If there’s nobody in the business who looks quite like Timothée Chalamet or, at the opposite end of the physical scale, like Jason Momoa, Glen Powell looks a little like a lot of people – as if a studio executive composed a movie-star identikit from portions of Ryan Gosling, Channing Tatum, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.

Anyone But You, a featherweight romantic comedy with fellow It star Sydney Sweeney, stayed in ­cinemas for months on the strength of their fizzy chemistry, its $220m gross exceeding all industry expectations for a genre often consigned to streaming these days.

The twist, in Powell’s case, is a genial goofiness that counters all those alpha-male qualities – not unlike Ryan Gosling, another traditionally built hunk who dabbles in action but has never shied away from playing the fool or the patsy.

At 35, he’s not exactly wet behind the ears; he has been acting since his teens (having made his big-screen debut aged 14 in Spy Kids 3D: Game Over) and has played enough unremarkable bit parts that his delight in seizing lead roles feels palpable without tipping over into an overeagerness to please.

His public appearances follow suit: he’s chatty and self-deprecating, dresses sharply but with little regard for high fashion (Fitzgerald describes his style as akin to “the best-looking guy from the town you grew up in”) and frequently brings his scruffy rescue dog Brisket to the red carpet – a crowd-pleasing ploy, certainly, but one that suggests he’d rather be a star on his own terms.

The original article contains 1,266 words, the summary contains 305 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It was, the federation said, “A disgusting choice of language to use for the title of a TV programme,” and “highly offensive to police officers risking their lives to protect the public every day, providing an emergency service”.

Now that they have had a chance to view the programme, perhaps the federation can put the toys back in the pram and note that, by some whim of the comedy gods, there is virtually nothing – given the wealth of material offered almost daily in recent years of endemic police corruption, failures and general inadequacies – in it to distress its members.

Then there is Leggo (Sam Pote), who is an unwilling follower in his senior officer parents’ footsteps, and Paul (Jamie Bisping), the dim scion of a local crime family.

Each episode comprises a weak storyline with a couple of good lines (Spry’s unexpected “Bob, do you need a poo?” as they finish a team pep talk, or her curt dismissal of Gunn from her office – “Off you go, Magic Mike, don’t trip over your cock”).

In the opening episode, Spry and Weekes are informed that there is a spy hiding in the new intake who must be discovered (cut to Paul being picked up at the end of his first day by his villainous dad and driven away), while Steph attempts to sabotage any budding relationships for Mike.

In the third, the recruits are issued with their uniforms, Steph forces Mike to use her as his partner in demonstrating how to restrain a suspect and it is a bit like them having sex, Dev is revealed to be a (probable) virgin … and this viewer begins to feel tired.

The original article contains 722 words, the summary contains 281 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

CrowdStrike’s faulty update caused a worldwide tech disaster that affected 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft says that’s “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” but it was enough to create problems for retailers, banks, airlines, and many other industries, as well as everyone who relies on them.

Separately, the technical breakdown from CrowdStrike released Friday explains more about what happened and why so many systems were affected all at once.

CrowdStrike’s breakdown explains the configuration file that was at the heart of the issue:

CrowdStrike explained that the file is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipe1 execution on Windows systems.” Security researcher and Objective See founder Patrick Wardle says that the explanation aligns with the earlier analysis he and others provided about the cause of the crash, as the problem file “C-00000291- “triggered a logic error that resulted in an OS crash” (via CSAgent.sys).”

CrowdStrike’s channel file updates were pushed to computers regardless of any settings meant to prevent such automatic updates, Wardle noted.

The original article contains 193 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 9%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett, the film memorably depicted TV hosts consumed by trivia rather than the extinction event – a stark warning about humanity’s ongoing insouciance as the planet burns.

Alice Hill, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in Washington, says: “Climate change affects everything so it’s a piece of any story that we tell, but it also can be anxiety-provoking and depressing for people.

Twenty years after its release, Roland Emmerich’s summer blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, starring Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal, still stands alone as a classic disaster movie that explicitly attributes its litany of death and destruction to the greenhouse effect.

David Lipsky, author of The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, says by phone from New York: “At the time, it was seen as ridiculous and the kind of mistake Hollywood makes that actually turns the audience off of this as a serious issue.

Joshua Glick, visiting associate professor of film and electronic arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, says: “There has always been an affinity between the blockbuster as mode or practice of film-making and natural disaster plots.

“Individual episodes within ongoing series, movies, books, short videos – there’s just so much opportunity to tell compelling stories that people can see themselves in, that they can relate to and identify with, not just in terms of being put at risk from the harms of climate change but also that they can see themselves and what solutions look like.”

The original article contains 1,780 words, the summary contains 265 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Recently, a newsletter by Tom Warren over at The Verge suggested that Microsoft has been exploring giving up on marketing its Xbox brand in Europe and other regions, in favor of the United States and other territories where it is more entrenched.

Flatt described his team’s efforts as “scrappy,” which is not exactly what I would personally want to hear from one of the world’s top three most valuable companies, but Microsoft does find itself in a difficult macroeconomic confluence.

Microsoft’s lack of visible urgency when it comes to Surface, Xbox, and even Windows itself, could be blamed for the struggles of an entire raft of products in recent years, even before we discuss things like software quality and customer service.

I felt like Hellblade 2 marketing was quite visible when I visited London recently, as well as across social media, but sales for the game have reportedly been quite poor.

It would be convenient if we could split into multiple timelines and examine the outcomes of binary decisions, but it’s true that the overall global console user base hasn’t really grown in years, despite the marketing from whoever is involved.

Despite all this, Microsoft has been touting its biggest ever Xbox presence for Europe’s big Gamescom convention later this summer in Cologne, Germany.

The original article contains 733 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

LONDON (AP) — TikTok owner ByteDance can’t avoid the bloc’s crackdown on digital giants, a European Union court said Wednesday in a decision that found the video sharing platform falls under a new law that also covers Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The EU’s General Court rejected ByteDance’s legal challenge against being classed as an online “gatekeeper” that has to comply with extra obligations under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Markets Act.

The rulebook, also known as the DMA, took effect this year and seeks to counter the dominance of Big Tech companies and make online competition fairer by giving consumers more choice.

TikTok had argued that it wasn’t a gatekeeper but was playing the role of a new competitor in social media taking on entrenched players like Facebook and Instagram owner Meta.

The judges, however, decided that since 2018 TikTok had “succeeded in increasing its number of users very rapidly and exponentially” and that it had “rapidly consolidated its position, and even strengthened that position over the following years.”

The Digital Markets Act took effect in March, with a list of dos and don’ts for big tech “gatekeeper” companies aimed at giving users more choices and threatening big penalties if they don’t comply.

The original article contains 269 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 25%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!