Futurism reports: G/O Media, a major online media company that runs publications including Gizmodo, Kotaku, Quartz, Jezebel, [the Onion], and Deadspin, has announced that it will begin a "modest test" of AI content on its sites... In an email to staff, G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown argued that the news shouldn't come as a surprise since "everyone in the media business" has been considering AI.

The trial will include "producing just a handful of stories for most of our sites that are basically built around lists and data," Brown wrote. "These features aren't replacing work currently being done by writers and editors, and we hope that over time if we get these forms of content right and produced at scale, AI will, via search and promotion, help us grow our audience..."

Unions representing G/O Media and The Onion staff issued a statement, writing that "we are appalled by this news. The hard work of journalists cannot be replaced by unreliable AI programs notorious for creating falsehoods and plagiarizing the work of real writers." Gizmodo and Kotaku staff, in particular, were outraged at the news. "AI content will not replace my work — but it will devalue it, place undue burden on editors, destroy the credibility of my outlet, and further frustrate our audience," Gizmodo journalist Lin Codega tweeted in response to the news. "AI in any form, only undermines our mission, demoralizes our reporters, and degrades our audience's trust."

"The Washington Post reports that all remaining editorial staffers have been laid off at National Geographic, as the iconic magazine continues to spiral downward," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "The famous yellow-bordered print issues of our youth is also an endangered species, as National Geographic also announced that print issues will no longer be sold on newsstands." From the report: Like one of the endangered species whose impending extinction it has chronicled, National Geographic magazine has been on a relentlessly downward path, struggling for vibrancy in an increasingly unforgiving ecosystem. On Wednesday, the Washington-based magazine that has surveyed science and the natural world for 135 years reached another difficult passage when it laid off all of its last remaining staff writers.

The cutback -- the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. -- involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine's small audio department. The layoffs were the second over the past nine months, and the fourth since a series of ownership changes began in 2015. In September, Disney removed six top editors in an extraordinary reorganization of the magazine's editorial operations.

ArsTechnica says: Back in March, the editor-in-chief of the 25-year-old, Amazon-owned camera review site DPReview.com announced that the site was shutting down. The site was the casualty of a round of layoffs at Amazon that will affect a total of about 27,000 employees this year; DPReview was meant to stop publishing new pieces on April 10 and to be available in read-only mode for an undetermined period of time after that. But then, something odd happened: The site simply kept publishing at a fairly regular clip throughout the entire month of April and continuing until now.

A no-update update from EIC Scott Everett published in mid-May merely acknowledged that pieces were still going up and that there was "nothing to share," which wasn't much to go on but also didn't make it sound as though the site were in imminent danger of disappearing. Yesterday, Everett finally had something to share: DPReview.com and its "current core editorial, tech, and business team[s]" were being acquired by Gear Patrol, an independently owned consumer technology site founded by Eric Yang in 2007. The deal had already closed as of yesterday, June 20.

Renowned scientific journal Nature has announced in an editorial that it will not publish images or video created using generative AI tools. From a report: The ban comes amid the publication's concerns over research integrity, consent, privacy, and intellectual property protection as generative AI tools increasingly permeate the world of science and art. Founded in November 1869, Nature publishes peer-reviewed research from various academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It is one of the world's most cited and most influential scientific journals. Nature says its recent decision on AI artwork followed months of intense discussions and consultations prompted by the rising popularity and advancing capabilities of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney.

With Maximum PC and MacLife's abandonment of print, the dead-tree era of computer journalism is officially over. It lasted almost half a century -- and was quite a run. Harry McCracken writes: The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you -- assuming there is a newsstand near you. They're the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both publications will be available in digital form only. But I'm not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I'm writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended.

It is possible to quibble with this assertion. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been around since 1984 and can accurately be described as a computer magazine, but the digest-sized publication has the production values of a fanzine and the content bears little resemblance to the slick, consumery computer mags of the past. Linux Magazine (originally the U.S. edition of a German publication) and its more technical sibling publication Admin also survive. Then again, if you want to quibble, Maximum PC and MacLife may barely have counted as U.S. magazines at the end; their editorial operations migrated from the Bay Area to the UK at some point in recent years when I wasn't paying attention. (Both were owned by Future, a large British publishing firm.) Still, I'm declaring the demise of these two dead-tree publications as the end of computer magazines in this country. Back when I was the editor-in-chief of IDG's PC World, a position I left in 2008, we considered Maximum PC to be a significant competitor, especially on the newsstand. Our sister publication Macworld certainly kept an eye on MacLife. Even after I moved on to other types of tech journalism, I occasionally checked in on our erstwhile rivals, marveling that they somehow still existed after so many other computer magazines had gone away.

Today a warning was published from the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle. "Experts say post-pandemic woes stemming from office workers staying home instead of commuting into the city could send San Francisco into a 'doom loop' that would gut its tax base, decimate fare-reliant regional transit systems like BART and trap it in an economic death spiral...." Despite our housing crisis, it was years into the COVID pandemic before our leaders meaningfully questioned the logic of reserving some of the most prized real estate on Earth for fickle suburbanites and their cars. Downtown, after all, was San Francisco's golden goose. Companies in downtown offices accounted for 70% of San Francisco's pre-pandemic jobs and generated nearly 80% of its economic output, according to city economist Ted Egan. And so we wasted generous federal COVID emergency funds trying to bludgeon, cajole and pray for office workers to return downtown instead of planning for change. We're now staring down the consequences for that lack of vision.

The San Francisco metropolitan area's economic recovery from the pandemic ranked 24th out of the 25 largest regions in the U.S., besting only Baltimore, according to a report from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. In the first quarter of 2023, San Francisco's office vacancy rate shot up to a record-high 29.4% — the biggest three-year increase of any U.S. city. The trend isn't likely to end anytime soon: In January, nearly 30% of San Francisco job openings were for hybrid or fully remote work, the highest share of the nation's 50 largest cities. Amid lower property, business and real estate transfer taxes, the city is projecting a $728 million deficit over the next two fiscal years. Transit ridership remains far below pre-pandemic levels. In January, downtown San Francisco BART stations had just 30% of the rider exits they did in 2019, according to a report from Egan's office. Many Bay Area transit agencies, including Muni, are rapidly approaching a fiscal cliff.

San Francisco isn't dead; as of March, it was home to an estimated 173 of the country's 655 companies valued at more than $1 billion. Tourism is beginning to rebound. And new census data shows that San Francisco's population loss is slowing, a sign its pandemic exodus may be coming to an end. But the city can't afford to wait idly for things to reach equilibrium again. It needs to evolve — quickly. Especially downtown. That means rebuilding the neighborhood's fabric, which won't be cheap or easy. Office-to-housing conversions are notoriously tricky and expensive. Demolishing non-historic commercial buildings that no longer serve a purpose in the post-pandemic world is all but banned. And, unlike New York after 9/11, San Francisco is a city that can't seem to stop getting in its own way.
So what's the solution? The CEO of the Bay Area Council suggests public-private partnerships that "could help shift downtown San Francisco's focus from tech — with employees now accustomed to working from home — to research and development, biotech, medical research and manufacturing, which all require in-person workers."

And last week San Francisco's mayor proposed more than 100 changes to streamline the permitting process for small businesses, and on Monday helped introduce legislation making it easier to convert office buildings to housing, expand pop-up business opportunities, and fill some empty storefronts. This follows a February executive order to speed housing construction. The editorial points out that "About 40% of office buildings in downtown San Francisco evaluated in a study would be good candidates for housing due to their physical characteristics and location and could be converted into approximately 11,200 units, according to research from SPUR and the Urban Land Institute San Francisco."

But without some action, the editorial's headline argues that "Downtown San Francisco is at risk of collapsing — and taking much of the Bay Area with it."

Photography and camera gear review site DPReview, writing in a blog post: After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year. The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content. Everyone on our staff was a reader and fan of DPReview before working here, and we're grateful for the communities that formed around the site. Thank you for your support over the years, and we hope you'll join us in the coming weeks as we celebrate this journey.

The BBC has advised staff to delete TikTok from corporate phones because of privacy and security fears. From a report: The BBC seems to be the first UK media organisation to issue the guidance - and only the second in the world after Denmark's public service broadcaster. The BBC said it would continue to use the platform for editorial and marketing purposes for now. [...] The big fear is that data harvested by the platform from corporate phones could be shared with the Chinese government by TikTok's parent company ByteDance, because its headquarters are in Beijing.

In an email to staff on Sunday, it said: "The decision is based on concerns raised by government authorities worldwide regarding data privacy and security. If the device is a BBC corporate device, and you do not need TikTok for business reasons, TikTok should be deleted from the BBC corporate mobile device." Staff with the app on a personal phone that they also use for work have been asked to contact the corporation's Information Security team for further discussions, while it reviews concerns around TikTok. Dominic Ponsford, editor-in-chief of journalism industry trade publication the Press Gazette, said it would be interesting to see what other media organizations decide to do. He told the BBC: "I suspect everyone's chief technical officer will be looking at this very closely. Until now, news organizations have been very keen to use TikTok, because it's been one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for news publishers over the last year, and it's been a good source of audience and traffic. So most of the talk in the news media has been around encouraging TikTok rather than banning it."

"Crypto firms should do their work within the bounds of the law, or they shouldn't do it at all," says the head of America's Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates US. investment markets.

In an editorial published in The Hill, SEC chair Gary Gensler warns that instead cryptocurrency has many "trusted" intermediaries that are in fact non-compliant with U.S. securities law. Today, crypto is dominated by a handful of trading, lending, staking, and other financial intermediaries. The investing public is trusting these entities to be responsible with investors' assets. According to some data, the three largest crypto trading platforms purportedly account for almost three quarters of all trading volume. Crypto entrepreneurs might claim, in their own marketing materials, that they're transparent and regulated. But make no mistake: Very few, if any, are actually registered with the SEC and fully compliant with the federal securities laws.

The lack of compliance puts investors' hard-earned assets at risk. Investors lack fundamental disclosures about the crypto assets themselves and the firms who execute their trades and custody their assets: What are firms doing with customer assets? How are they funding their promised returns? Are they putting their hands in investors' pockets? When you buy or sell a token, are you trading against the house? What are the rules to protect against manipulation and fraud? Without disclosure and other investor protections, we simply don't know.

In essence, these firms are saying, "trust us." What's more, when firms go bankrupt (as many have of late), they turn to bankruptcy courts to sort out their mess.
"[B]ased upon how crypto platforms generally operate, investment advisers cannot rely on them today as qualified custodians," the editorial concludes. Rather than comply with the relevant laws, "it has felt like some have sought a stamp of approval for noncompliant activity, rather than changing a fundamentally non-compliant business model rife with conflicts." Of course, another tool in our toolbox is rooting out noncompliance through investigations and enforcement actions. The SEC has successfully brought or settled more than 100 cases against crypto intermediaries and token issuers, including some who operated Ponzi or pyramid schemes, engaged in unlawful touting, or committed other forms of fraud....

Some have said that we should let the innovation flourish or risk it going overseas. But forsaking investor protection puts real people's life savings at risk.
"It's a basic bargain in finance: If you want to raise money from the public, disclose certain facts and figures," Gensler told Politico this week. Their article notes "crypto giants are threatening to move their businesses across the Atlantic" from America to Europe, but with Gensler responding "We lose more if investors get harmed here." Crypto lobbyists have framed Gensler's push to force their industry to comply with 90-year-old securities laws as a war against financial innovation. Whatever changes brought by crypto markets will pale compared to what could come as brokerages and financial data aggregators move to incorporate artificial intelligence into their offerings, Gensler said.

"The much more transformative technology right now of our times is predictive data analytics and everything underlying artificial intelligence," he said, adding that he looked forward to working with lawmakers on how those tools could be regulated.

Apple is launching a new music streaming service focused on classical music. TechCrunch reports: Based on its 2021 acquisition of Amsterdam-based streamer Primephonic, the new Apple Music Classical app will offer Apple Music subscribers access to more than 5 million classical music tracks, including new releases in high-quality audio, as well as hundreds of curated playlists, thousands of exclusive albums and other features like composer bios and deep dives on key works, Apple says.

However, while the app is being announced today, it's only available for preorder on the App Store for now. The release date will be later this month, on March 28. In addition, the app will only support iOS devices running iOS 15.4 or newer at launch. Apple Music Classical will present a simple interface for engaging with classical works. Users will be able to search by composer, work, conductor or even catalog number, to locate recordings. These can be streamed in high-quality audio of up to 192 kHz/24-bit Hi-Res Lossless. And thousands of recordings will be available in Apple's immersive spatial audio, as well.

The app will also let users dive into the recordings to read editorial notes about the composers and descriptions of their key works. Famous composers will have their own high-resolution digital portraits available, which Apple commissioned from artists. These were designed with color palettes and artistic references from the relevant classical period, Apple notes, and more will be added in time. At launch, portraits will be available for Ludwig van Beethoven, Frederic Chopin and Johann Sebastian Bach. The service will continue to be updated with new music over time, too. There's no additional charge for Apple Music Classical if you're an Apple Music subscriber. Android support is coming "soon."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Two years ago, I wrote a reasonably prescient editorial about how the writing was on the wall for Google's cloud gaming service Stadia -- and how the company was now hoping to sell its white label streaming technology to other companies instead of building out its own Netflix of games. But it seems that, when Google killed off Stadia, it threw away that technology, too. Google executive Jack Buser has now admitted that the company is no longer offering the white label version of Stadia that allowed companies like AT&T and Capcom to let anyone try games like Batman: Arkham Knight, Control, and a demo of Resident Evil Village for free over the internet, not to mention the first game from Peloton.

"We are not offering that streaming option, because it was tied to Stadia itself," he told Axios' Stephen Totilo. "So unfortunately, when we decided to not move forward with Stadia, that sort of offering could no longer be offered as well." Google called the white label version "Immersive Stream for Games" and sometimes "Google Stream" and, to my knowledge, it was only ever used in experiments like the ones I link above. In AT&T's case, they were limited to its own internet subscribers. Maybe they weren't that successful? When we spoke to AT&T about cloud gaming following those experiments, the carrier didn't seem that bullish about serving up more games itself.

Reach, the owner of the UK's Daily Mirror and Daily Express tabloids among other newspapers, has started publishing articles with the help of AI software on one of its regional websites as it scrambles to cut costs amid slipping advertising revenues. The Register reports: Three stories written with the help of machine-learning tools were published on InYourArea.co.uk, which produces feeds of nearby goings-on in Blighty. One piece, titled Seven Things to do in Newport, is a listicle pulling together information on places and activities available in the eponymous sunny Welsh resort city. Reach CEO Jim Mullen said the machine-written articles are checked and approved by human editors before they're published online.

"We produced our first AI content in the last ten days, but this is led by editorial," he said, according to The Guardian. "It was all AI-produced, but the data was obviously put together by a journalist, and whether it was good enough to publish was decided by an editor." "There are loads of ethics [issues] around AI and journalistic content," Mullen admitted. "The way I look at it, we produce lots of content based on actual data. It can be put together in a well-read [piece] that I think AI can do. We are trying to apply it to areas we already get traffic to allow journalists to focus on content that editors want written."

Mullen's comments have been questioned by journalists, however, given that Reach announced plans to slash hundreds of jobs in January. The National Union of Journalists said 102 editorial positions would be cut, putting 253 journalists at risk, whilst 180 vacancies would be withdrawn.

The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times writes that it doesn't take a Chinese spy balloon to threaten ocean wildlife. "Even the child-size pink plastic 'Happy Birthday' balloon can be hazardous if left in the wrong hands. Or, more precisely, left from the wrong hands." There are several recent cases of sea turtles, seals and sea lions off the California coast discovered entangled in or choked by balloon strings, or in physical distress after ingesting balloons. Among the key findings of a 2020 Oceana report on ocean plastic was that balloons were one of the most common types of plastics entangling or consumed by marine life, along with bags, recreational fishing line, sheeting and food wrappers.

The threat to sea life is one of the main reasons a handful of coastal Southern California cities have slapped restrictions on the use of balloons, ranging from prohibiting the sale or release of lighter-than-air balloons (which generally means those filled with helium) to a ban on the sale, distribution or public use of all balloons passed by Laguna Beach on Tuesday.

If this trend sounds familiar, that's because a few years back it was single-use plastic straws that were targeted by local bans. Eventually, there were so many different rules about distribution of plastic disposable straws that a statewide law, beginning in 2019, made sense. Balloons may be heading for the same fate....

California will phase out mylar balloons by 2031 because their metallic nylon foil shells have a tendency to cause blackouts and spark wildfires when they float into power lines. That's good, but now California legislators should consider placing restrictions on the use and release of latex balloons. The balloon industry markets latex rubber balloons as biodegradable, but studies have found that they don't break down in the ocean. Furthermore, the strings attached to balloons are generally plastic. This makes them single-use trash in the same way that grocery bags and straws are, and releasing them into the environment is littering.
A Laguna Beach environmentalist tells the Times people need to rethink the way they look at plastic. "When people say they throw things away — there's really no away."

The publishers of thousands of scientific journals have banned or restricted contributors' use of an advanced AI-driven chatbot amid concerns that it could pepper academic literature with flawed and even fabricated research. From a report: ChatGPT, a fluent but flaky chatbot developed by OpenAI in California, has impressed or distressed more than a million human users by rattling out poems, short stories, essays and even personal advice since its launch in November. But while the chatbot has proved a huge source of fun -- its take on how to free a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR, in the style of the King James Bible, is one notable hit -- the program can also produce fake scientific abstracts that are convincing enough to fool human reviewers. ChatGPT's more legitimate uses in article preparation have already led to it being credited as a co-author on a handful of papers.

The sudden arrival of ChatGPT has prompted a scramble among publishers to respond. On Thursday, Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of the leading US journal Science, announced an updated editorial policy, banning the use of text from ChatGPT and clarifying that the program could not be listed as an author. Leading scientific journals require authors to sign a form declaring that they are accountable for their contribution to the work. Since ChatGPT cannot do this, it cannot be an author, Thorp says. But even using ChatGPT in the preparation of a paper is problematic, he believes. ChatGPT makes plenty of errors, which could find their way into the literature, he says, and if scientists come to rely on AI programs to prepare literature reviews or summarise their findings, the proper context of the work and the deep scrutiny that results deserve could be lost. "That is the opposite direction of where we need to go," he said. Other publishers have made similar changes. On Tuesday, Springer-Nature, which publishes nearly 3,000 journals, updated its guidelines to state that ChatGPT cannot be listed as an author. But the publisher has not banned ChatGPT outright. The tool, and others like it, can still be used in the preparation of papers, provided full details are disclosed in the manuscript.

The Washington Post's editorial board recently commented on the problem of America's "dead downtowns. Tourists are back, but office workers are still missing in action.... [R]estaurants, coffee hangouts, stores and transit systems cannot sustain themselves without more people in center cities...."

The problem? America "is in the midst of one of the biggest workforce shifts in generations: Many now have experienced what it is like to work from home and have discovered they prefer it."

Their proposed solution? The Post's editorial board is urging cities to adapt to the new reality of workers wanting to work two or three days remotely in part by converting commercial offices to apartments and entertainment venues. The goal is a "24/7" downtown with ample work spaces, apartments, parks and entertainment venues that draw people in during the day and have a core of residents who keep the area vibrant after commuters go home.... Office use isn't going back to pre-pandemic levels. Even Texas cities that did not shut down during the worst of the pandemic are 20 to 30 percent below 2019 office occupancy. New York, Los Angeles and D.C. are still down more than 40 percent. This a classic oversupply problem. Cities have too much office space, especially in the older buildings that companies are fleeing as they seek out new construction with more light and flexible space.

Mayors and city lawmakers have reason to be bold in seizing this opportunity. There's growing interest among developers and investors who want to be a part of the office-to-apartment revolution. They are already eyeing the easiest buildings to convert: The ones with elevators in the middle, windows and light on all sides, and the right length and width. The challenge for city leaders is to generate interest in the buildings that are "maybe" candidates for conversion.
The Post's suggestions include announcing targets for new residents living downtown, and speeding up city approvals like permitting and rezoning. "America's cities are ripe for new skylines and fresh streetscapes. The best leaders will get going soon."

Why hasn't America restored net neutrality protections? "President Biden's nomination to serve on the Federal Communications Commission has been stalled in the Senate for more than a year," complain the editorial boards of two Silicon Valley newspapers: Confirming Gigi Sohn would end the 2-2 deadlock on the FCC that is keeping Biden from fulfilling his campaign promise to restore net neutrality, ensuring that all internet traffic is treated equally. Polls show that 75% of Americans support net neutrality rules. They know that an open internet is essential for innovation and economic growth, for fostering the next generation of entrepreneurs....

[T]elecommunication giants such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast don't want that to happen. They favor the status quo that allows the internet companies to pick winners and losers by charging content providers higher rates for speedier access to customers. They seek to expand the cable system model and allow kingmakers to rake in billions at the expense of smaller, new startups that struggle to gain a wider audience on their slow-speed offerings. So Republicans and a handful of Democrats are holding up Sohn's confirmation, claiming that her "radical" views disqualify her....

They also object to Sohn's current service as an Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, saying it proves she wouldn't be an unbiased and impartial FCC Commissioner. The San Francisco-based EFF is a leading nonprofit with a mission of defending digital privacy, free speech and innovation....

Enough is enough. Confirm Sohn and allow the FCC to fulfill its mission of promoting connectivity and ensuring a robust and competitive internet market.

From BuzzFeed News: Technology news outlet CNET has been found to be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write articles about personal finance without any prior announcement or explanation. The articles, which numbered at 73, covered topics such as "What Is Zelle and How Does It Work?" and had a small disclaimer at the bottom of each reading, "This article was generated using automation technology and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff." The bylines on these articles read "CNET Money Staff" without any indication that they were generated by AI.

The use of AI to write these articles was first brought to light by a Twitter user, and further investigation revealed that the articles have been generated using AI since November 2022....

Note: This article was written entirely by ChatGPT and reviewed by a human editor. (Actually, we had to rewrite the prompt a few times to get it to stop inserting factual errors.)
CNET's editor in chief defends their AI-written stories: I use the term "AI assist" because while the AI engine compiled the story draft or gathered some of the information in the story, every article on CNET — and we publish thousands of new and updated stories each month — is reviewed, fact-checked and edited by an editor with topical expertise before we hit publish. That will remain true as our policy no matter what tools or tech we use to create those stories.

Our reputation as a fact-based, unbiased source of news and advice is based on being transparent about how we work and the sources we rely on. So in the past 24 hours, we've changed the byline to CNET Money and moved our disclosure so you won't need to hover over the byline to see it: "This story was assisted by an AI engine and reviewed, fact-checked and edited by our editorial staff...." Will we make more changes and try new things as we continue to test, learn and understand the benefits and challenges of AI? Yes.

Trade groups that represent Meta and Alphabet's Google said they asked the US Supreme Court to overturn a Texas law that would sharply restrict the editorial discretion of social media companies. From a report: The appeal by NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association contends the Texas law violates the First Amendment by forcing social media companies to disseminate what they see as harmful speech and putting platforms at risk of being overrun by spam and bullying. The law "would wreak havoc by requiring transformational change to websites' operations," the groups argued. The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law in September but left the measure on hold to allow time for an appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Texas law bars social media platforms with more than 50 million users from discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and other Republicans say the law is needed to protect conservative voices from being silenced. The appeal adds a new layer to a Supreme Court term that could reshape the legal rules for online content. The justices are already considering opening social media companies to lawsuits over the targeted recommendations they make to users.

Right to Repair website iFixit put up a billboard in Albany, New York, calling for Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign the landmark Right to Repair law, which was passed overwhelmingly nearly six months ago by the state legislature. PIRG reports: Supported by Repair.org, U.S. PIRG and NYPIRG, Consumer Reports, Environment New York, the Story of Stuff Project, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, NRDC, Environmental Action and EFF, calls for the governor to sign the bill have increased The legislation must advance to the governor by the end of December and be signed by January 10, 2023.

The Albany Times Union editorialized twice for the governor to sign the bill, recently noting that the bill has come under intense opposition from manufacturers: "Meanwhile, lobbyists, big corporations and a few trade organizations are pressing for a veto ... Ms. Hochul must sign the bill, and then lawmakers should get to work passing an expanded version that includes all the products that were needlessly stripped from the original. Big corporations and the lobbyists they hire won't be happy, but that shouldn't matter a bit."

Microsoft has done a lot to make their flagship tablet-laptop more repairable. Following iFixit's recent teardown, the Surface Pro 9 was the "most repairable we've seen from the product line yet." Ars Technica shares the major findings: iFixit has consulted with Microsoft's hardware teams for a while now, providing advice on making devices more repairable. As evidence of this, Microsoft claims in a statement that it will:

- Make repair guides available for the Surface Pro 9's components by the end of the year
- Work with "a major US retailer" to build out an authorized (in-store) repair network by early 2023
- Offer parts to individuals and repair shops by the first half of 2023

All these factors improve repairability, both in practice and in iFixit's (and French, European, and potentially other nations') repair scores.

iFixit's editorial teardowns, however, are conducted independently. When the team dug in, they found that the glass display has some flex built into it now, making it harder to shatter when you pry on the (now softer) glue underneath. With the screen off, you have access to all the modular components: motherboard, thermal module, the Surface Connect Port, speakers, Wi-Fi module, front and rear cameras, and side buttons. Most notably, the battery is now screwed down instead of held in place with glue. That makes the most common and predictable repair to the device "just plain simple," iFixit claims. The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, something that iFixit would typically penalize in the past. But iFixit says that given the power savings and performance boost from proximity to the CPU, it can't punish the decision. "Adding it all up, iFixit gives the Surface Pro 9 a 7 out of 10," concludes Ars' report. "That's a notable leap from prior Surface models, like the Pro 7, which received a 1 out of 10. But the Surface Pro 9's score will likely move up a notch or two if Microsoft keeps its promises to release manuals and spare parts to anyone who wants them next year."