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BAGHDAD (Reuters) -Iraq has banned U.S. user-generated videogame platform Roblox due to concerns over child abuse, the government said, joining other countries in cracking down on virtual worlds. The government said late on Sunday that the ban was motivated by concerns that the game allowed direct communication between users in ways that exposed children and adolescents to attempts of exploitation or cyber-extortion, and that its content was "incompatible with social values and traditions". Roblox Corp, which develops the online game creation system and user-generated-content platform, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the ban. The company has previously said it "respects the laws and regulations in countries where we operate and share local lawmakers' commitment to children". The Iraqi communications ministry said the nationwide ban was based on a comprehensive study and field monitoring which found that "the game involves several security, social, and behavioral risks". The move places Iraq among several Middle East countries tightening regulation of online gaming and interactive platforms over child safety and moral concerns. Turkey blocked access to Roblox in August 2024, also citing child abuse risks. (Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Muvija M)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

BAGHDAD (Reuters) -Iraq has banned U.S. user-generated videogame platform Roblox due to concerns over child abuse, the government said, joining other countries in cracking down on virtual worlds. The government said late on Sunday that the ban was motivated by concerns that the game allowed direct communication between users in ways that exposed children and adolescents to attempts of exploitation or cyber-extortion, and that its content was "incompatible with social values and traditions". Roblox Corp, which develops the online game creation system and user-generated-content platform, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the ban. The company has previously said it "respects the laws and regulations in countries where we operate and share local lawmakers' commitment to children". The Iraqi communications ministry said the nationwide ban was based on a comprehensive study and field monitoring which found that "the game involves several security, social, and behavioral risks". The move places Iraq among several Middle East countries tightening regulation of online gaming and interactive platforms over child safety and moral concerns. Turkey blocked access to Roblox in August 2024, also citing child abuse risks. (Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Muvija M)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

BEIJING (Reuters) -Chinese electric vehicle battery giant CATL saw net profit growth accelerate in the third quarter, even as it faced increased competition from smaller rivals. Net profit rose 41.2% to 18.5 billion yuan ($2.6 billion) in the July-September period from a year earlier, picking up from a 33.7% increase in the second quarter, according to a stock filing on Monday. Revenue rose 12.9% year on year to 104.2 billion yuan, up from a 8.3% gain in the second quarter. CATL still leads the pack in global EV battery usage, though its share fell to 36.8% in the first eight months from 37.7% in the year-ago period, according to SNE Research. By comparison, Chinese EV maker BYD which also manufactures batteries in-house, took up 18% share of the global market versus 16.2% a year earlier, buoyed by an expansion in the European market. CATL, which supplies automakers including Tesla, Volkswagen and Xiaomi has also continued overseas expansion, with its new plant in Hungary expected to start production by early next year. However, Beijing issued new export controls on lithium battery parts that will require exporters to seek permits from November, casting uncertainty over CATL's future efforts to venture into overseas markets. ($1 = 7.1230 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Qiaoyi Li, Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Toby Chopra)

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By Ateev Bhandari and Arasu Kannagi Basil (Reuters) -Evernorth, a new crypto venture backed by digital asset firm Ripple, said on Monday it will list on the Nasdaq through a merger with blank-check firm Armada Acquisition Corp II and is expected to raise more than $1 billion in proceeds. The digital asset treasury will focus on accumulating XRP, a token linked to Ripple and the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, according to data from CoinGecko. The move comes months after Wall Street's top regulator ended a high-profile crypto lawsuit, which accused Ripple of selling unregistered securities to institutional investors. Under a crypto-friendly Trump administration, Ripple is looking to scale institutional adoption and presence of the XRP token in capital markets. The deal, expected to close in the first quarter of 2026, will create the largest XRP publicly traded XRP treasury company, Evernorth said. As scores of companies continue to wrap crypto assets into equity, concerns are mounting over the spillover impact of a correction in the equities markets. Earlier this month, crypto assets suffered from their largest selloff ever after U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his trade war with China. "I lost track around how many (asset holding plays) are there around Ethereum," Evernorth CEO Asheesh Birla, a former Ripple executive, told Reuters in an interview. Birla added that he will be stepping down from Ripple's board as he joins Evernorth's. Japanese firm SBI, which was previously affiliated with SoftBank, is providing $200 million of the raise in exchange for equity. "We will look at acquisition opportunities," Birla said, adding that Evernorth will be hiring and building out an investment team as well. The deal also saw participation from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen and digital asset firms Pantera Capital and Kraken, which have a track record of funding such strategies. (Reporting by Ateev Bhandari and Arasu Kannagi Basil in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)

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By Deborah Mary Sophia and Shubham Kalia (Reuters) -Amazon's cloud services unit AWS was recovering on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world's most popular apps – Snapchat and Reddit – and disrupted businesses globally. The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies. After roughly three hours of disruptions, systems were gradually coming back online as of 6:00 a.m. ET (1000 GMT), with AWS saying it was seeing "significant signs of recovery" for some impacted services. "Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests," it said in the latest update on the outage posted on its status page. ISSUE SHOULD BE RESOLVED IN COMING HOURS, EXPERT SAYS AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS competes with Google and Microsoft's cloud services. Asked for comment on the outage, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. Junade Ali, a software engineer, cyber expert and Fellow at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said the issue appeared to be with one of the networking systems AWS uses to control a database product. "As this issue can usually be resolved centrally … unless there are further issues identified, the issue should be able to be mitigated over the coming hours," he said. INITIAL SIGNS OF RECOVERY Ookla, owner of outage tracking website Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident. Issues on some apps and websites, including Snapchat, Roblox, streaming site Max and PayPal's Venmo were showing signs of easing, according to Downdetector. Snapchat last had over 4,000 reports on Downdetector, down from an earlier peak of more than 22,000, while reports on Roblox dropped to less than 500 from a peak of over 12,600. Other services, however, remained affected, with thousands of reports for social media app Reddit and financial platform Chime on Downdetector. AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS. Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity. Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, along with Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States. In a post on X, Signal's President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work. OUTAGE EXPOSES RISK OF DEPENDENCE ON HANDFUL OF PROVIDERS In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website. The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and how reliant they now are on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch causing havoc with business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said. "The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, Director of Research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science. While there has been no indication yet of a potential cyberattack behind Monday's outage, the scale of the disruption has fed speculation. "When anything like this happens, the concern that it's a cyber incident is understandable," said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos. "AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset." (Reporting by Shubham Kalia, Devika Nair, Ananya Palyekar and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by James Pearson; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Joe Bavier)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Ateev Bhandari and Arasu Kannagi Basil (Reuters) -Evernorth, a new crypto venture backed by digital asset firm Ripple, said on Monday it will list on the Nasdaq through a merger with blank-check firm Armada Acquisition Corp II and is expected to raise more than $1 billion in proceeds. The digital asset treasury will focus on accumulating XRP, a token linked to Ripple and the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, according to data from CoinGecko. The move comes months after Wall Street's top regulator ended a high-profile crypto lawsuit, which accused Ripple of selling unregistered securities to institutional investors. Under a crypto-friendly Trump administration, Ripple is looking to scale institutional adoption and presence of the XRP token in capital markets. The deal, expected to close in the first quarter of 2026, will create the largest XRP publicly traded XRP treasury company, Evernorth said. As scores of companies continue to wrap crypto assets into equity, concerns are mounting over the spillover impact of a correction in the equities markets. Earlier this month, crypto assets suffered from their largest selloff ever after U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his trade war with China. "I lost track around how many (asset holding plays) are there around Ethereum," Evernorth CEO Asheesh Birla, a former Ripple executive, told Reuters in an interview. Birla added that he will be stepping down from Ripple's board as he joins Evernorth's. Japanese firm SBI, which was previously affiliated with SoftBank, is providing $200 million of the raise in exchange for equity. "We will look at acquisition opportunities," Birla said, adding that Evernorth will be hiring and building out an investment team as well. The deal also saw participation from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen and digital asset firms Pantera Capital and Kraken, which have a track record of funding such strategies. (Reporting by Ateev Bhandari and Arasu Kannagi Basil in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Ateev Bhandari and Arasu Kannagi Basil (Reuters) -Evernorth, a new crypto venture backed by digital asset firm Ripple, said on Monday it will list on the Nasdaq through a merger with blank-check firm Armada Acquisition Corp II and is expected to raise more than $1 billion in proceeds. The digital asset treasury will focus on accumulating XRP, a token linked to Ripple and the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, according to data from CoinGecko. The move comes months after Wall Street's top regulator ended a high-profile crypto lawsuit, which accused Ripple of selling unregistered securities to institutional investors. Under a crypto-friendly Trump administration, Ripple is looking to scale institutional adoption and presence of the XRP token in capital markets. The deal, expected to close in the first quarter of 2026, will create the largest XRP publicly traded XRP treasury company, Evernorth said. As scores of companies continue to wrap crypto assets into equity, concerns are mounting over the spillover impact of a correction in the equities markets. Earlier this month, crypto assets suffered from their largest selloff ever after U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his trade war with China. "I lost track around how many (asset holding plays) are there around Ethereum," Evernorth CEO Asheesh Birla, a former Ripple executive, told Reuters in an interview. Birla added that he will be stepping down from Ripple's board as he joins Evernorth's. Japanese firm SBI, which was previously affiliated with SoftBank, is providing $200 million of the raise in exchange for equity. "We will look at acquisition opportunities," Birla said, adding that Evernorth will be hiring and building out an investment team as well. The deal also saw participation from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen and digital asset firms Pantera Capital and Kraken, which have a track record of funding such strategies. (Reporting by Ateev Bhandari and Arasu Kannagi Basil in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

(Reuters) -Amazon's cloud services unit AWS was hit by an outage on Monday, causing connectivity issues for many companies around the world and disrupting services for several popular websites and apps including Fortnite and Snapchat. "We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region," AWS said in an update on its status page. AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood attributed the outages to AWS. "Perplexity is down right now. The root cause is an AWS issue. We're working on resolving it," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on X. AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS competes with Google's and Microsoft's cloud services. AWS and Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. Amazon's shopping website, PrimeVideo and Alexa were all facing issues, according to Downdetector. Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, Roblox, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming sites that were down, while Paypal's Venmo and Chime were some of the financial platforms that faced issues, the outage tracking website said. Uber rival Lyft's app was also down for thousands of users in the U.S. Messaging app Signal's President Meredith Whittaker also confirmed on X that their platform was hit by the AWS outage as well. (Reporting by Shubham Kalia, Devika Nair and Ananya Palyekar in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)

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(This Oct 18 story has been refiled without any changes to the text.) By Raphael Satter WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. court has ordered Israel's NSO Group to stop targeting Meta Platforms' WhatsApp messaging service, a development the spyware company warned could put it out of business. In a 25-page ruling handed down Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton imposed a permanent injunction on NSO Group's efforts to break into WhatsApp, one of the world's most widely used communications platforms.  Hamilton also handed NSO a significant break on the damages awarded in a recently concluded jury trial, reducing the punitive damages it owes Meta from about $167 million to $4 million.  The injunction is likely to pose a challenge to NSO, which has for years been accused of facilitating human rights abuses through its flagship hacking tool, Pegasus.  Pegasus takes advantage of weaknesses in commonly deployed pieces of software to power its surveillance, making WhatsApp one of its bigger targets.  NSO has previously argued that an injunction preventing it from going after WhatsApp "would put NSO’s entire enterprise at risk" and "force NSO out of business," according to the judgment. Meta executives celebrated the decision. “Today’s ruling bans spyware maker NSO from ever targeting WhatsApp and our global users again," WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart said on X. "We applaud this decision that comes after six years of litigation to hold NSO accountable for targeting members of civil society." NSO, which has long insisted its products fight serious crime and terrorism, said it welcomed the 97% reduction in punitive damages and said that the injunction did not apply to NSO's customers, "who will continue using the company’s technology to help protect public safety." The company said it would review the decision and "determine its next steps accordingly.” The company was recently purchased by a group led by Hollywood producer Robert Simonds, according to a report earlier this month in tech publication TechCrunch. Simonds did not immediately return an email. (Reporting by Raphael Satter; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

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(Reuters) -The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a probe into about 2,000 Waymo robotaxis, the U.S. auto safety regulator said on Monday. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid)

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