Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery Merger

A federal judge temporarily barred Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery from completing or consolidating their proposed $111 billion merger. The order says the 12 plaintiff states made a strong showing that the transaction would substantially lessen competition in theatrical-film distribution.

The restraining order lasts 14 days. The court scheduled an August 3 hearing on the states’ request for a preliminary injunction.

Featured source: Ars Technica , court order .

Other Stories

Judge Approves Anthropic’s $1.5 Billion Copyright Settlement

A federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers over books acquired from pirate libraries, allocating $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 covered works. The agreement resolves the acquisition claims; the district court’s earlier conclusion that training on lawfully acquired books was fair use does not bind other courts.

Filed from: TechCrunch , settlement documents .

European Commission Fines AliExpress €550 Million Under the DSA

The European Commission fined AliExpress €550 million for failing to assess and mitigate risks from illegal, unsafe, and counterfeit goods on its marketplace. It also ordered corrective action, with periodic penalty payments available if the platform does not comply.

Filed from: The Register , European Commission .

Attackers Exploit Two Critical WordPress Core Flaws

Attackers are exploiting two recently patched WordPress core vulnerabilities that can be chained to take full remote control of susceptible sites. WordPress forced automatic updates where possible and urged operators of versions 6.9.0–6.9.4 or 7.0.0–7.0.1 to update immediately; an estimate of roughly 90 million vulnerable sites is an extrapolation from one consultant’s 3,500-site sample.

Filed from: TechCrunch , WordPress , Cloudflare .

Power and Cooling Failure Disrupts Three Google Cloud Services

An upstream utility-grid fault disrupted electrical distribution and cooling for Google Cloud VMware Engine, NetApp Volumes, and Bare Metal Solution in europe-west4-a. Google reduced workloads to protect customer data while the rest of the zone remained available; its public history lists disruptions of about eight hours for NetApp Volumes and about 12.5 hours for the other two services, with a final incident analysis still pending.

Filed from: The Register , Google Cloud Service Health .

MCP Release Candidate Removes Protocol-Level Sessions

The release candidate for the July 28 Model Context Protocol specification removes the initialization handshake and protocol-managed session IDs so remote requests can be handled by any server instance. It also adds an extensions framework, authorization changes, and a formal deprecation policy; the candidate has been public since May 21 and contains breaking changes.

Filed from: TechCrunch , MCP release candidate .

Study Models GPU Workloads as an Attack on Power Infrastructure

Zhejiang University researchers describe a cloud-tenant attack that modulates GPU workloads to stress data-center and electrical systems. Their paper combines GPU and inverter experiments with simulations; its most severe results come from a synchronized worst-case aggregation model rather than an attack demonstrated on a production grid.

Filed from: The Register , paper .

YouTube Clarifies Which Inauthentic Content Cannot Be Monetized

YouTube identified three classes of content that can make a channel ineligible for its Partner Program: generic or template-driven repetition, distressing or emotionally manipulative material, and AI personas discussing sensitive areas such as health, law, and finance. The July 16 clarification refines an existing policy against mass-produced and repetitive content rather than imposing a blanket ban on AI-assisted production.

Filed from: TechCrunch , YouTube Creator Insider .

GitHub Sponsors Passes $100 Million in Open-Source Funding

GitHub says more than $100 million has reached open-source maintainers and projects through Sponsors since the program launched in 2019. The company reports more than 70,000 participating maintainers and organizations and over 280,000 sponsors; the announcement did not include an independent audit of those program totals.

Filed from: GitHub .

From the Community

Jellyfin Founder and Core Team Members Depart

Jellyfin founder Joshua Boniface and core team members Anthony and Andrew resigned from the open-source media-server project, citing burnout, mental-health risk, and changing priorities. They described the departures as amicable and said the remaining team would continue development through a handoff.

Filed from: Jellyfin project forum .

Jane Street Open-Sources Its Incremental Computation Library

Jane Street released Incremental, an OCaml library for computations that update efficiently when their inputs change. Inspired by research on self-adjusting computation, it targets workloads such as reactive spreadsheets, GUI views, and derived-data synchronization.

Filed from: repository .

Cursor Reports SQLite-Compatible Rust Implementation From an Agent Swarm

Cursor says a planner-and-worker agent swarm built a Rust implementation from SQLite documentation that passed the SQLite test suite in under four hours across several model configurations. The company reports run costs from $1,339 to $10,565 and a custom version-control layer designed for high commit rates; the results are self-reported by the commercial toolmaker.

Filed from: Cursor .