“I’m not a robot.” This assertion to the familiar Captcha question is increasingly not a simple click as bot traffic is reported to have surpassed human web surfers. But parsing out the intentions of bots can be tricky.

A new report from edge cloud platform Fastly traces the new landscape of bots online based on research conducted in Q2 of this year.

• Most bots (87%) are considered malicious; they pose threats like account takeover attacks and ad fraud.
• A small but growing slice, however, now scrapes data for AI training, crawls sites for AI search indexing, and pulls information in real-time for user queries to AI chatbots.

This rise in bot traffic can strain web infrastructure and create new challenges for businesses concerned with protecting or promoting web content and marketing materials.

“The challenge for website owners often is in letting the good bots in while keeping the bad ones out,” the authors wrote.

Keep reading here.—PK

In the future, “Made in America” may not mean higher prices, at least for batteries.

Earlier this month, the Department of Energy announced nearly $1 billion in funding opportunities for critical mineral mining and processing companies, in an effort to bring the supply chain back to the United States and no longer rely “on foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential to modern life,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a news release.

US Critical Materials Executive Chairman Harvey Kaye told Tech Brew that reshoring these processes will bring down the price of batteries. US Critical Materials is a rare earth elements development company that owns deposits in Montana and Idaho.

“You don’t have to ship it, you don’t have to pay tariffs on it,” Kaye told Tech Brew of domestically processed critical minerals, which “over a period of time should effectuate substantial reductions in the cost of batteries and the cost of storing green-produced energy.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Some developers think it’s the beginning of the end for GitHub as they know it, as the platform gears up for a leadership change.

On Aug. 11, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke shared an internal post sent to employees announcing his departure from the company at the end of the year. Dohmke, who became CEO of the cloud-based platform in 2021, said GitHub and its leadership team would “continue its mission” as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization. The company has not yet named a successor to Dohmke, who plans to found a startup following his exit.

Microsoft formed its CoreAI division early this year. The purpose of the engineering organization is to “build the end-to-end Copilot and AI stack” for Microsoft’s first- and third-party customers to build AI apps and agents. The branch is also responsible for building out GitHub Copilot.

What’s all the (Git)Hubbub? While GitHub has long been a part of Microsoft’s Core AI organization and has not disclosed any changes to its terms of service for its users as part of the organizational shift, the leadership transition has left some feeling a bit uneasy.

Amirul Islam Al Mamun, a data engineer at Truxco Energy, a sustainable energy solutions company, told IT Brew that the announcement signals the “final step” for GitHub’s loss of independence. Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018. At the time, the tech giant said the platform would maintain its “developer-first ethos” and operate independently.

Keep reading here.—BM

As an enormous, aging system, the US electric grid wasn’t built for the clean energy surge, EV ascendance, or AI-powered infrastructure reshaping our world today. Tech Brew explores the innovations redefining electricity production, storage, and delivery, offering a clear look at the grid’s challenges and the emerging solutions to meet them.

Read this e-book to learn more about how the grid works and where it’s most vulnerable, how EVs and batteries are turning into solutions for resilience, and how AI and startups are building a smarter, more responsive grid.

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