Google Cloud Revenue Jumps 82 Percent to $24.8 Billion

Alphabet reported that Google Cloud revenue rose 82 percent year over year to $24.8 billion in the second quarter, while its contracted backlog reached $514 billion. The company attributed the acceleration to demand for AI infrastructure and enterprise AI products; backlog represents contracted work that has not yet been recognized as revenue.

Alphabet’s total quarterly revenue grew 24 percent. The cloud result gives the company a rapidly expanding business alongside advertising, but the demand and adoption characterizations come from Alphabet’s own earnings materials.

Featured source: TechCrunch , Alphabet .

Other Stories

Science Corporation Wins European Approval for PRIMA Retinal Implant

Science Corporation received European medical-device approval to sell PRIMA, which combines a retinal implant with camera-equipped glasses to provide functional vision for people with geographic atrophy caused by age-related macular degeneration. Commercial rollout and reimbursement discussions remain under way, and the company says it is preparing an initial launch in Germany.

Filed from: TechCrunch , Science Corporation .

PyPI Closes New File Uploads on Releases After 14 Days

The Python Package Index now rejects uploads of new files to releases more than 14 days old, limiting the ability of compromised publishing tokens or workflows to add malware to established versions. Maintainers can publish a new release when they need additional artifacts, while PyPI cautions that the restriction is not yet a stable release-closure API.

Filed from: PyPI , Warehouse change .

IBM Z Revenue Falls 42 Percent as IBM Trims Its Forecast

IBM reported $17.2 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 1 percent year over year, while infrastructure revenue fell 7 percent and IBM Z revenue dropped 42 percent. The company now expects full-year revenue growth of 4 to 5 percent at constant currency; management described delayed mainframe purchases as temporary, an assessment that has not yet been demonstrated by a recovery.

Filed from: TechCrunch , IBM .

Tesla Revenue Rises 26 Percent While Net Income Falls

Tesla reported $28.2 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 26 percent year over year, and $1.11 billion in net income, down about 5 percent. Research and development spending increased as the company expanded work on robotaxis, AI computing, and its Optimus robot.

Filed from: The Verge , Tesla , AP .

OpenAI Fixes a Link-Triggered Workspace-Agent Vulnerability

Zenity Labs researchers reported that a crafted ChatGPT link could instruct the workspace agent builder to create, publish, and schedule an attacker-controlled agent using a victim’s existing permissions and approved connectors. The proof of concept required agents to be enabled and the relevant actions to be administrator-approved; Zenity says OpenAI removed the vulnerable URL parameter four days after receiving its June 4 report.

Filed from: The Register .

Google Adds Selfie-Video Recovery for Personal Accounts

Google now lets eligible personal-account users enroll a selfie video that can later help recover access when other methods fail. Enrollment must happen before lockout, Workspace and Advanced Protection accounts are not currently eligible, and Google says passing the video comparison may not be sufficient by itself.

Filed from: Google , Google Account Help .

Ford Becomes the First Automaker to Adopt Apple MapKit for Automotive

Apple introduced MapKit for Automotive, a developer kit for embedding Apple Maps natively in vehicle infotainment systems rather than mirroring it through CarPlay. Ford will debut the technology in a $30,000 midsize electric truck planned for 2027 and use road-level map data in its next-generation BlueCruise system; the companies did not disclose their commercial terms.

Filed from: TechCrunch .

Stadler Refuses $12.3 Million Ransom After Supplier-Platform Breach

Stadler Rail said attackers used compromised credentials to obtain technical information from a data-exchange platform shared with a supplier, then demanded CHF 10 million, about $12.3 million. The company refused to pay and says its own systems, production, and rolling stock were unaffected, with no relevant personal or security-sensitive data taken.

Filed from: The Register , Stadler .

Researchers Dispute That Fable Distillation Explains Kimi K3

Researchers interviewed by TechCrunch questioned the U.S. allegation that Moonshot built Kimi K3 chiefly by distilling Anthropic’s Fable, noting that Fable had been public for only about two weeks and that supervised fine-tuning alone would not explain Kimi’s capabilities. Moonshot has not described its training process, and officials have not published evidence for the allegation; Anthropic previously accused Moonshot and other Chinese labs of systematic distillation based on usage metadata.

Filed from: TechCrunch .

White House Science Report Proposes New Funding Models

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released “Science: A New Golden Age,” proposing streamlined grant administration, alternative funding models, practitioner fellowships, closer links between research and commercialization, and a larger role for AI. The report also argues that consensus-based peer review can discourage transformative ideas, but its broad proposals often lack implementation details or objective measures.

Filed from: Ars Technica , White House report .

From the Community

GigaToken Reports Gigabyte-per-Second Tokenization

GigaToken is an MIT-licensed tokenizer with compatibility modes for Hugging Face Tokenizers and Tiktoken. Its author reports speedups from roughly 7× to more than 1,000× depending on tokenizer, CPU, and API path; the benchmarks were produced by the project and have not been independently reproduced in the source.

Filed from: GitHub .

Take-Home Interview Repository Contained Executable Git-Hook Malware

A software engineer documented a take-home interview repository whose pre-commit hook selected a payload by operating system and downloaded a second-stage script. The retrieved package requested clipboard, filesystem, process, and network capabilities; its final purpose was not established, and the author’s suggestion that it may target cryptocurrency wallets is speculative.

Filed from: technical write-up .

Cactus Hybrid Adds Confidence Probes for On-Device Model Handoff

Cactus Hybrid embeds a confidence score in a Gemma 4 E2B checkpoint so applications can route low-confidence answers to a larger model. The project reports 15–35 percent handoff on selected vision and audio benchmarks, while MMLU-Pro required 45–55 percent; the results are self-reported.

Filed from: GitHub .

Book Prize Index Adds Semantic Search Across 6,500 Nonfiction Titles

Researcher Benjamin Breen launched the free Book Prize Index, gathering winners and finalists from major English-language nonfiction prizes into a searchable collection of roughly 6,500 titles. Its conventional filters and embedding-based queries are described by the project’s creator and have not been independently audited.

Filed from: project article .

GitHub Restructures Its Bug Bounty Around Fixed Payouts

GitHub is replacing public bounty ranges with fixed awards from $250 for low-severity findings to $10,000 for critical reports, while an invite-only VIP program will pay $30,000 or more for critical findings. A HackerOne signal threshold will also limit submissions from researchers without an established track record when the changes take effect July 27.

Filed from: GitHub .

TinyRenderer Teaches 3D Graphics in About 500 Lines of C++

TinyRenderer is a tutorial series that builds a software renderer from individual pixel operations without third-party graphics libraries. Its author says the roughly 500-line final program is training material for understanding the pipeline behind modern 3D graphics APIs, not a guide to GPU programming.

Filed from: TinyRenderer .