Here's one more reason to cling to a steady job: It doesn't pay to quit. From a report: Typically workers who snag a new position see higher pay bumps than those holding down the same job. But in February, median wage growth of 4.4% for job stayers surpassed a 4.2% gain for job switchers, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The change, as measured by a three-month moving average, is yet another sign of a softening labor market. White collar workers have been clinging to their jobs in the face of widespread layoffs and workplace reductions. Last month, employers announced the fastest pace of job cuts since 2020, when factoring in government job losses. And now an oversupply of job seekers means workers are having to settle for smaller pay bumps, said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

"That certainly sounds like a big slackening of the job market," Cappelli said. It's a major reversal from the "Great Resignation" a few years ago, when workers left their jobs at unprecedented rates, demanding more benefits and higher pay from employers. At a peak in July 2022, workers who got new jobs saw their wages grow by a whopping 8.5% compared to 5.9% for those who stayed loyal to their company, Atlanta Fed data show.

In 30 minutes the Free Software Foundation holds a live auction of memorabilia to celebrate their upcoming 40th anniversary. "By moving out of the FSF office, we got to sort through all the fun and historically important memorabilia and selected the best ones," they announced earlier — and 25 items will up for bids. (To participate in the live auction, you must register in advance.)

"This is your chance to get your very own personal souvenir of the FSF," explains an 11-page auction booklet, "from original GNU art to a famous katana and the Internet Hall of Fame medal of the FSF's founder." That's right... a katana. Once upon a time, this 41-inch blade turned heads at the FSF's tech team office. Donated by FSF friends and fans of the XKCD webcomic #225, it became a lighthearted "weapon" in the war for user freedom. As RMS himself is anti-violence, he made a silly joke by examining the katana closely instead of brandishing it, symbolizing that software freedom can be defended with wit. In a legendary photo, this was perceived as if he sniffed the blade. Between the etched dragon on the scabbard and the wavy hamon on the blade, it's as flashy as it is symbolic — especially if you like taking on proprietary software with style (and a dash of humor).
The auction is intended "to entrust some of the historically important free software memorabilia that were in the FSF's office and archive to the free software community instead of locking them away in a storage unit where no one can enjoy them.

"Hopefully, this way some of these unique items will be displayed in galleries or on the walls of free software enthusiasts. All auction proceeds will go towards the FSF's mission to promote computer user freedom."

And speaking of user freedom, here's how they described the Internet Hall of Fame medal: When Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the FSF, was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, it was the ultimate nod to free software's immense impact on the Internet... The medal is shiny, and the frame is fancy, but the real radiance is the recognition that the Internet might look much more locked down and dull without those original free software seeds. Hang it on your wall, and you'll be reminded that hacking for user freedom can change the world.

Higher use of chatbots like ChatGPT may correspond with increased loneliness and less time spent socializing with other people, according to new research from OpenAI in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From a report: Those who spent more time typing or speaking with ChatGPT each day tended to report higher levels of emotional dependence on, and problematic use of, the chatbot, as well as heightened levels of loneliness, according to research released Friday. The findings were part of a pair of studies conducted by researchers at the two organizations and have not been peer reviewed.

San Francisco-based OpenAI sees the new studies as a way to get a better sense of how people interact with, and are affected by, its popular chatbot. "Some of our goals here have really been to empower people to understand what their usage can mean and do this work to inform responsible design," said Sandhini Agarwal, who heads OpenAI's trustworthy AI team and co-authored the research. To conduct the studies, the researchers followed nearly 1,000 people for a month.

An anonymous reader shares a report: PCI Express 7 is nearing completion, the PCI Special Interest Group said, and the final specification should be released later this year. PCI Express 7, the backbone of the modern motherboard, is at the stage 0.9, which the PCI-SIG characterizes as the "final draft" of the specification. The technology was at version 0.5 a year ago, almost to the day, and originally authored in 2022.

The situation remains the same, however. While modern PC motherboards are stuck on PCI Express 5.0, the specification itself moves ahead. PCI Express has doubled the data rate about every three years, from 64 gigtransfers per second in PCI Express 6.0 to the upcoming 128 gigatransfers per second in PCIe 7. (Again, it's worth noting that PCIe 6.0 exists solely on paper.) Put another way, PCIe 7 will deliver 512GB/s in both directions, across a x16 connection.

It's worth noting that the PCI-SIG doesn't see PCI Express 7 living inside the PC market, at least not initially. Instead, PCIe 7 is expected to be targeted at cloud computing, 800-gigabit Ethernet and, of course, artificial intelligence. It will be backwards-compatible with the previous iterations of PCI Express, the SIG said.

During the company's GTC 2025 keynote today, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced Isaac GR00T N1 -- the company's first open-source, pre-trained yet customizable foundation model designed to accelerate the development and capabilities of humanoid robots. "The age of generalist robotics is here," said Huang. "With Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1 and new data-generation and robot-learning frameworks, robotics developers everywhere will open the next frontier in the age of AI." The Verge reports: Huang demonstrated 1X's NEO Gamma humanoid robot performing autonomous tidying jobs using a post-trained policy built on the GR00T N1 model. [...] Other companies developing humanoid robots who have had early access to the GR00T N1 model include Boston Dynamics, the creators of Atlas; Agility Robotics; Mentee Robotics; and Neura Robotics. Originally announced as Project GR00T a year ago, the GR00T N1 foundation model utilizes a dual-system architecture inspired by human cognition.

System 1, as Nvidia calls it, is described as a "fast-thinking action model" that behaves similarly to human reflexes and intuition. It was trained on data collected through human demonstrations and synthetic data generated by Nvidia's Omniverse platform. System 2, which is powered by a vision language model, is a "slow-thinking model" that "reasons about its environment and the instructions it has received to plan actions." Those plans are passed along to System 1, which translates them into "precise, continuous robot movements" that include grasping, moving objects with one or two arms, as well as more complex multistep tasks that involve combinations of basic skills.

While the GR00T N1 foundation model is pretrained with generalized humanoid reasoning and skills, developers can customize its behavior and capabilities for specific needs by post-training it with data gathered from human demonstrations or simulations. Nvidia has made GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios available for download through Hugging Face and GitHub.

NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 has returned to Earth safely after a stay of more than nine months aboard the International Space Station. The crew remained in space longer than expected due to issues with Boeing's Starliner capsule, which was originally scheduled to bring them home sooner.

While the mission has been politically fraught, the astronauts said in a rare space-to-earth interview last month that they were neither stranded nor abandoned. "That's been the rhetoric. That's been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck -- and I get it. We both get it," [NASA astronaut Butch] Wilmore said. "But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, we don't feel stranded." Wilmore added a request: "If you'll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let's change it to 'prepared and committed.' That's what we prefer..." CNN has more details on the arrival: Williams and Wilmore, alongside NASA's Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of Russia's Roscosmos space agency, safely splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida at 5:57 p.m. ET. The crew's highly anticipated return came after the crew climbed aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and departed the International Space Station at 1:05 a.m. ET. Williams, Wilmore, Hague and Gorbunov spent Tuesday morning and afternoon in orbit in the roughly 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide), gumdrop-shaped SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Gradually descending, the capsule carried the astronauts from the space station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, toward the thick inner layer of our planet's atmosphere.

Around 5 p.m. ET, the Crew Dragon capsule began firing its engines to begin the final phase of the journey: reentry. This leg of the journey is considered the most dangerous of any flight home from space. The jarring physics of hitting the atmosphere while traveling more than 22 times the speed of sound routinely heats the exterior of returning spacecraft to more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,926 degrees Celsius) and can trigger a communication blackout. After plunging toward home, the Crew Dragon spacecraft deployed two sets of parachutes in quick succession to further slow its descent. The capsule decelerated from orbital speeds of more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 kilometers per hour) to less than 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour) as the vehicle hit the ocean.

After the vehicle hit the ocean, a SpaceX rescue ship waiting nearby worked to haul the spacecraft out of the water. Williams and Wilmore and their crewmates will soon exit Dragon and take their first breaths of earthly air in nine months. Medical teams will evaluate the crew's health, as is routine after astronauts return from space, before deciding next steps. Ultimately, the NASA crew members will return to their home base at Johnson Space Center in Houston. You can watch a recording of the re-entry and splashdown here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies. The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others -- which included Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Cord Jefferson, Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Taika Waititi -- were submitting comments for the Trump administration's U.S. AI Action Plan. The letter specifically was penned in response to recent submissions to the Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI and Google, which asserted that U.S. copyright law allows (or should allow) allow AI companies to train their system on copyrighted works without obtaining permission from (or compensating) rights holders.

"We firmly believe that America's global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries," the letter says in part. The letter claims that "AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music and voices used to train AI models at the core of multibillion-dollar corporate valuations." [...] The letter says Google and OpenAI "are arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America's creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds. There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish." You can read the full statement and list of signatories here.

The letter was issued in response to recent submissions from OpenAI (PDF) and Google (PDF) claiming that U.S. law allows, or should allow, AI companies to train their programs on copyrighted works under the fair use legal doctrine.

"Is everything we see around us is sealed within a black hole?" asks Space.com.

Because here's the thing. The $10 billion James Webb Space telescope (in operation since 2022) "has found that the vast majority of deep space and, thus the early galaxies it has so far observed, are rotating in the same direction. While around two-thirds of galaxies spin clockwise, the other third rotates counter-clockwise." In a random universe, scientists would expect to find 50% of galaxies rotating one way, while the other 50% rotate the other way. This new research suggests there is a preferred direction for galactic rotation... "It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations," team leader Lior Shamir, associate professor of computer science at the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering, said in a statement. "One explanation is that the universe was born rotating.

"That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole.

"But if the universe was indeed born rotating, it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete." Black hole cosmology, also known as "Schwarzschild cosmology," suggests that our observable universe might be the interior of a black hole itself within a larger parent universe. The idea was first introduced by theoretical physicist Raj Kumar Pathria and by mathematician I. J. Good. It presents the idea that the "Schwarzchild radius," better known as the "event horizon," (the boundary from within which nothing can escape a black hole, not even light) is also the horizon of the visible universe.
The article cites a theory by Polish theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven that ultimately black holes don't compress indefinitely into a singularity. "The matter instead reaches a state of finite, extremely large density, stops collapsing, undergoes a bounce like a compressed spring, and starts rapidly expanding," Poplawski explained to Space.com... The scientist continued by adding that rapid recoil after such a big bounce could be what has led to our expanding universe, an event we now refer to as the Big Bang... "I think that the simplest explanation of the rotating universe is the universe was born in a rotating black hole."
Team leader Shamir offers another theory: that we just need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe. (Which could also explain the difference in the expansion rates in the universe "and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself.")

Astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope have discovered 128 new moons around Saturn, bringing its total to 274 -- more than all the other planets combined. CBC News reports: Jupiter and Saturn have been locked in a battle for the most moons for years -- with Saturn stealing the crown from Jupiter only two years ago when the same group of researchers found 64 additional moons orbiting it. But scientists say this discovery likely settles the score once and for all. [...] He and the other scientists working on the project made the discovery using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, a 3.6-meter optical telescope on the summit of the dormant volcano Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Scientists have been capturing pictures of the moons using the telescope since 2019. The researchers aligned and layered 44 of those images on top of one another in order to enhance the appearance of the moons and determine what they were. These moons are nothing like Earth's very own, however. Sara Mazrouei, a planetary scientist and educational developer at Humber Polytechnic, says that while we tend to think of a spherical shape when we hear the word moon, anything that orbits a planet, or another body in space that is not a sun, is considered a moon. Mazrouei says many of the moons surrounding other planets in our solar system -- including the ones observed here -- are in fact only a few kilometers across in size and oddly shaped, like an asteroid.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Something very strange is happening inside Super Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a component you've probably never heard of is running ever so slightly faster as we get further and further away from the time the consoles first hit the market in the early '90s. The discovery started a mild panic in the speedrunning community in late February since one theoretical consequence of a faster-running console is that it could impact how fast games are running and therefore how long they take to complete. This could potentially wreak havoc on decades of speedrunning leaderboards and make tracking the fastest times in the speedrunning scene much more difficult, but that outcome now seems very unlikely. However, the obscure discovery does highlight the fact that old consoles' performance is not frozen at the time of their release date, and that they are made of sensitive components that can age and degrade, or even 'upgrade', over time. The idea that SNESs are running faster in a way that could impact speedrunning started with a Bluesky post from Alan Cecil, known online as dwangoAC and the administrator of TASBot (short for tool-assisted speedrun robot), a robot that's programmed to play games faster and better than a human ever could.

[...] So what's going on here? The SNES has an audio processing unit (APU) called the SPC700, a coprocessor made by Sony for Nintendo. Documentation given to game developers at the time the SNES was released says that the SPC700 should have a digital signal processing (DSP) rate of 32,000hz, which is set by a ceramic resonator that runs 24.576Mhz on that coprocessor. We're getting pretty technical here as you can see, but basically the composition of this ceramic component and how it resonates when connected to an electronic circuit generates the frequency for the audio processing unit, or how much data it processes in a second. It's well documented that these types of ceramic resonators are sensitive and can run at higher frequencies when subject to heat and other external conditions. For example, the chart [here], taken from an application manual for Murata ceramic resonators, shows changes in the resonators' oscillation under different physical conditions.

As Cecil told me, as early as 2007 people making SNES emulators noticed that, despite documentation by Nintendo that the SPC700 should run at 32,000Hz, some SNESs ran faster. Emulators generally now emulate at the slightly higher frequency of 32,040Hz in order to emulate games more faithfully. Digging through forum posts in the SNES homebrew and emulation communities, Cecil started to put a pattern together: the SPC700 ran faster whenever it was measured further away from the SNES's release. Data Cecil collected since his Bluesky post, which now includes more than 140 responses, also shows that the SPC700 is running faster. There is still a lot of variation, in theory depending on how much an SNES was used, but overall the trend is clear: SNESs are running faster as they age, and the fastest SPC700 ran at 32,182Hz. More research shared by another user in the TASBot Discord has even more detailed technical analysis which appears to support those findings. "We don't yet know how much of an impact it will have on a long speedrun," Cecil told 404 Media. "We only know it has at least some impact on how quickly data can be transferred between the CPU and the APU."

Cecil said minor differences in SNES hardware may not affect human speedrunners but could impact TASBot's frame-precise runs, where inputs need to be precise down to the frame, or "deterministic."

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a four-member crew to the International Space Station on Friday night, paving the way for NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to return to Earth after being there for nine months due to issues with Boeing's Starliner capsule. Arrival is set for late Saturday night. The Associated Press reports: NASA wants overlap between the two crews so Wilmore and Williams can fill in the newcomers on happenings aboard the orbiting lab. That would put them on course for an undocking next week and a splashdown off the Florida coast, weather permitting. The duo will be escorted back by astronauts who flew up on a rescue mission on SpaceX last September alongside two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams on the return leg.

Reaching orbit from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, the newest crew includes NASA's Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, both military pilots; and Japan's Takuya Onishi and Russia's Kirill Peskov, both former airline pilots. They will spend the next six months at the space station, considered the normal stint, after springing Wilmore and Williams free. "Spaceflight is tough, but humans are tougher," McClain said minutes into the flight. You can watch a recording of the launch here.

Wilmore and Williams aren't stranded on the International Space Station, and they weren't abandoned, the astronauts reminded CNN in a rare space-to-earth interview last month. "That's been the rhetoric. That's been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck -- and I get it. We both get it," [NASA astronaut Butch] Wilmore said. "But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, we don't feel stranded." Wilmore added a request: "If you'll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let's change it to 'prepared and committed.' That's what we prefer..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Saturday, a developer using Cursor AI for a racing game project hit an unexpected roadblock when the programming assistant abruptly refused to continue generating code, instead offering some unsolicited career advice. According to a bug report on Cursor's official forum, after producing approximately 750 to 800 lines of code (what the user calls "locs"), the AI assistant halted work and delivered a refusal message: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly."

The AI didn't stop at merely refusing -- it offered a paternalistic justification for its decision, stating that "Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities." [...] The developer who encountered this refusal, posting under the username "janswist," expressed frustration at hitting this limitation after "just 1h of vibe coding" with the Pro Trial version. "Not sure if LLMs know what they are for (lol), but doesn't matter as much as a fact that I can't go through 800 locs," the developer wrote. "Anyone had similar issue? It's really limiting at this point and I got here after just 1h of vibe coding." One forum member replied, "never saw something like that, i have 3 files with 1500+ loc in my codebase (still waiting for a refactoring) and never experienced such thing."

Cursor AI's abrupt refusal represents an ironic twist in the rise of "vibe coding" -- a term coined by Andrej Karpathy that describes when developers use AI tools to generate code based on natural language descriptions without fully understanding how it works. While vibe coding prioritizes speed and experimentation by having users simply describe what they want and accept AI suggestions, Cursor's philosophical pushback seems to directly challenge the effortless "vibes-based" workflow its users have come to expect from modern AI coding assistants.

On March 9, older Chromecast and Chromecast Audio devices stopped working due to an expired device authentication certificate authority that made them untrusted by Google's apps. While unofficial apps like VLC continue to function, Google's fix will require either updating client apps to bypass the issue or replacing the expired certificates, a process that could take weeks; however, Google has since announced it is beginning a gradual rollout of a fix. The Register reports: Tom Hebb, a former Meta software engineer and Chromecast hacker, has published a detailed analysis of the issue and suggests a fix could take more than a month to prepare. He's also provided workarounds here for folks to try in the meantime. We spoke to Hebb, and he says the problem is this expired device authentication certificate authority. [...] The fix is not simple. It's either going to involve a bit of a hack with updated client apps to accept or workaround the situation, or somehow someone will need to replace all the key pairs shipped with the devices with ones that use a new valid certificate authority. And getting the new keys onto devices will be a pain as, for instance, some have been factory reset and can't be initialized by a Google application because the bundled cert is untrusted, meaning the client software needs to be updated anyway.

Given that the product family has been discontinued, teams will need to be pulled together to address this blunder. And it does appear to be a blunder rather than planned or remotely triggered obsolescence; earlier Chromecasts have a longer certificate validity, of 20 years rather than 10. "Google will either need to put in over a month of effort to build and test a new Chromecast update to renew the expired certificates, or they will have to coordinate internally between what's left of the Chromecast team, the Android team, the Chrome team, the Google Home team, and iOS app developers to push out new releases, which almost always take several days to build and test," Hebb explained. "I expect them to do the latter. A server-side fix is not possible."

So either a week or so to rush out app-side updates to tackle the problem, or much longer to fix the problem with replaced certs. Polish security researcher Maciej Mensfeld also believes the outage is most likely due to an expired device authentication certificate authority. He's proposed a workaround that has helped some users, at least. Hebb, meanwhile, warns more certificate authority expiry pain is looming, with the Chromecast Ultra and Google Home running out in March next year, and the Google Home Mini in January 2027.

A volunteer group called WikiPortraits is working to address Wikipedia's issue of featuring outdated and unflattering portraits by providing high-quality, openly licensed images. Since 2024, they have covered global festivals, taken thousands of images, and improved representation of underrepresented individuals, though challenges with funding and media credentials remain. 404 Media reports: This portrait problem stems from Wikipedia's mission to provide free reliable information. All media on the site must be openly licensed, so that anyone can use it free of charge. That, in turn, means that most photos of notable people on the site are of notably poor quality. "No professional photographers ever have their photos on Wikipedia, because they want to make money from the photos," said Jay Dixit, a writing professor and amateur Wikipedia photographer. "It's actually the norm that most celebrities have poor photos on Wikipedia, if they have photos at all. It's just some civilian at an airport being like, 'Oh my god, it's Pete Davidson,' click with an iPhone."

Dixit is part of a team of volunteer photographers, called WikiPortraits, that's trying to fix that problem. "It's been in the back of our minds for quite a while now," said Kevin Payravi, one of WikiPortraits' cofounders. "Last year, finally, we decided to make this a reality, and we got a couple of credentials for Sundance 2024 [a major film festival]. We sent a couple photographers there, we set up a portrait studio, and that was our first organized effort here in the U.S. to take good quality photos of people for Wikipedia."

Since last January, WikiPortraits photographers have covered around 10 global festivals and award ceremonies, and taken nearly 5,000 freely-licensed photos of celebrity attendees. And the celebrity attendees are often quite excited about it. [...] WikiPortraits photos are currently used on Wikipedia articles in over 120 languages, and they're viewed up to 80 million times per month from those pages alone. In January, for example, Payravi said that over 1,500 WikiPortraits photos were used on articles that collectively received 140 million views. Many WikiPortraits photos have also been used by a variety of news outlets around the world, including CNN Brasil, Times of Israel, and multiple non-English-language smaller news organizations. "[N]ot being an official news or photo agency means WikiPortraits sometimes faces problems getting media credentials to cover events," notes 404 Media. "Funding poses another main challenge."

"Photographers must already own a professional-quality camera, and usually have to cover the cost of getting to events and at least part of their lodging. Although WikiPortraits sometimes receives rapid grants from the Wikimedia Foundation and private donors to cover costs, Payravi said he still likes to run a 'tight ship.'"

Today marks the release of Framework Mono 6.14, the first major Mono release in five years and the first under WineHQ's stewardship. This update includes long-awaited improvements such as native macOS ARM64 support, enhancements to System.Windows.Forms for X11, better COM interface support, and various stability fixes. Phoronix reports: In addition to the native macOS ARM64 support and System.Windows.Forms improvements for X11, some of the other Mono 6.14 improvements carried out over the past half-decade include improved support for generated COM interfaces, many warning fixes, addressing common cases where processes would hang on exit, and more.

As for the "Framework Mono" name rather than just Mono, the release announcement explains: "Framework Mono is the project previously hosted at https://github.com/mono/mono, which was then simply called Mono. I have made this change to distinguish it from 'monovm' and 'Wine Mono', which are different projects. Framework Mono is a cross-platform runtime compatible with .NET Framework." You can download and learn more about the release here.

AmiMoJo writes: In September 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published findings from security researchers who concluded that a series of six-figure cyberheists across dozens of victims resulted from thieves cracking master passwords stolen from the password manager service LastPass in 2022. In a court filing last week, U.S. federal agents investigating a spectacular $150 million cryptocurrency heist said they had reached the same conclusion.

On March 6, federal prosecutors in northern California said they seized approximately $24 million worth of cryptocurrencies that were clawed back following a $150 million cyberheist on Jan. 30, 2024. The complaint refers to the person robbed only as 'Victim-1,' but according to blockchain security researcher ZachXBT the theft was perpetrated against Chris Larsen, the co-founder of the cryptocurrency platform Ripple.

ZachXBT was the first to report on the heist, of which approximately $24 million was frozen by the feds before it could be withdrawn. This week's action by the government merely allows investigators to officially seize the frozen funds. But there is an important conclusion in this seizure document: It basically says the U.S. Secret Service and the FBI agree with the findings of the LastPass breach story published here in September 2023.

Nominated for 10 Oscars, The Brutalist (directed and produced by Brady Corbet) has an "intriguing and controversial technical feature," according to the Baffler, that threatens to turn movie-viewing into "a drab appreciation of machine-managed flawlessness, and acting less interesting..." In January, the film's editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that he and Corbet used tools from AI speech software company Respeecher to make the Hungarian-language dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody (who plays the protagonist, Hungarian émigré architect László Tóth) and Felicity Jones (who plays Tóth's wife Erzsébet) sound more Hungarian. In response to the ensuing backlash, Corbet clarified that the actors worked "for months" with a dialect coach to perfect their accents; AI was used "in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy...." Defenders of this slimy deception claim the use of AI in film is no different than CGI or automated dialogue replacement, tools commonly deployed in the editing suite for picture and audio enhancement. But CGI and ADR don't tamper with the substance of a performance, which is what's at issue here....

AI seems poised to decimate the voice acting industry; how long will it be before filmmakers give up on the whole time-wasting business of dialect coaching and language research and toss their performers' untrained vocalizations directly into the linguistic Instant Pot...? "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own," Corbet has argued. Only, they're not. Brody and Jones's performances may now be authentic to spoken Hungarian, but they're no longer authentic to themselves: at least in the parts of the film with Hungarian dialogue, the acting stands more as a monument to the prowess of the voice-matching software than that of the actors...

AI is a different beast from color film, or the Louma crane, or the hand-held camera: it's steroidal, aesthetically corrupting, and unlike these earlier advances it confronts the filmmaker with real ethical questions... Use implies complicity. To incorporate AI into the production of art today, no matter how sparingly or subtly, is to endorse Silicon Valley's politics and worldview: its exploitation of both producers and "users," its blithe indifference to the social impact of post-automation layoffs and the environmental assault of industrial data processing, its cramped and uninteresting idea of imagination, its petrification of creation. It's a vote for the assholes...
In short, the essays calls this "recourse to corrective AI" a "filmmaking prosthesis that cheats the viewer and cheapens the performances." And ironically this clashes with the film's depiction of a "principled artist," according to the article. ("Some of the 'retro' digital renderings in the memorial video included in this scene were also, Corbet has admitted, produced with the help of AI.")

The essay notes that several of 2024's other Oscar-nominated films also employed Respeecher, including Dune: Part Two and Emilia Pérez. "What matters here is not this particular infraction but the precedent it sets, the course it establishes for culture."

This week the Free Software Foundation "backed a lone developer's brave effort to overturn a pivotal court ruling that threatens to undermine the AGPLv3 — the foundation's GNU Affero General Public License, version 3," reports the Register.

"At stake is the future of not just the AGPLv3, but the FSF's widely used GNU Public License it is largely based on, and the software covered by those agreements." A core tenet of the GPL series is that free software remains free forever, and this is woven into the licenses' fine print. This ongoing legal battle is a matter of whether people can alter those licenses and redistribute code as they see fit in a non-free way, or if they must stick to the terms of an agreement that says the terms cannot be changed... If the Ninth Circuit upholds the [original district court] ruling, it's likely to create a binding precedent that would limit one of the major freedoms that AGPLv3 and other GPL licenses aim to protect — the ability to remove restrictions added to GPL licensed code.
"Neo4j appended an additional nonfree commercial restriction, the Commons Clause, to a verbatim version of the GNU AGPLv3 in a version of its software..." according to an FSF announcement this week. "The FSF's position on such confusing licensing practices has always been clear: the GNU licenses explicitly allow users to remove restrictions incompatible with the four freedoms." (You can read their amicus brief here.)

Thanks to Slashdot reader jms00 for sharing the news.

Australian company Cortical Labs has launched the CL1, the world's first commercial "biological computer" that merges human brain cells with silicon hardware to form adaptable, energy-efficient neural networks. New Atlas reports: Known as a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI), Cortical's CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025, and is expected to be a game-changer for science and medical research. The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon "chip" are essentially an ever-evolving organic computer, and the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon-based AI chips used to train existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

"Today is the culmination of a vision that has powered Cortical Labs for almost six years," said Cortical founder and CEO Dr Hon Weng Chong. "We've enjoyed a series of critical breakthroughs in recent years, most notably our research in the journal Neuron, through which cultures were embedded in a simulated game-world, and were provided with electrophysiological stimulation and recording to mimic the arcade game Pong. However, our long-term mission has been to democratize this technology, making it accessible to researchers without specialized hardware and software. The CL1 is the realization of that mission." He added that while this is a groundbreaking step forward, the full extent of the SBI system won't be seen until it's in users' hands.

"We're offering 'Wetware-as-a-Service' (WaaS)," he added -- customers will be able to buy the CL-1 biocomputer outright, or simply buy time on the chips, accessing them remotely to work with the cultured cell technology via the cloud. "This platform will enable the millions of researchers, innovators and big-thinkers around the world to turn the CL1's potential into tangible, real-word impact. We'll provide the platform and support for them to invest in R&D and drive new breakthroughs and research." These remarkable brain-cell biocomputers could revolutionize everything from drug discovery and clinical testing to how robotic "intelligence" is built, allowing unlimited personalization depending on need. The CL1, which will be widely available in the second half of 2025, is an enormous achievement for Cortical -- and as New Atlas saw recently with a visit to the company's Melbourne headquarters -- the potential here is much more far-reaching than Pong. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Linux: Mozilla published today the final build of the Firefox 136 open-source web browser for all supported platforms ahead of the March 4th, 2025, official release date, so it's time to take a look at the new features and changes. Highlights of Firefox 136 include official Linux binary packages for the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, hardware video decoding for AMD GPUs on Linux systems, a new HTTPS-First behavior for upgrading page loads to HTTPS, and Smartblock Embeds for selectively unblocking certain social media embeds blocked in the ETP Strict and Private Browsing modes.

Firefox 136 is available for download for 32-bit, 64-bit, and AArch64 (ARM64) Linux systems right now from Mozilla's FTP server. As mentioned before, Mozilla plans to officially release Firefox 136 tomorrow, March 4th, 2025, when it will roll out as an OTA (Over-the-Air) update to macOS and Windows users. Here's a list of the general features available in this release:

- Vertical Tabs Layout
- New Browser Layout Section
- PNG Copy Support
- HTTPS-First Behavior
- Smartblock Embeds
- Solo AI Link
- Expanded Data Collection & Use Settings
- Weather Forecast on New Tab Page
- Address Autofill Expansion

A full list of changes can be found here.