Neuralink, a neurotech startup co-founded by Elon Musk, has received FDA approval for its first in-human clinical study to test its brain implant called the Link. The implant aims to help patients with severe paralysis regain the ability to control external technologies using neural signals, potentially allowing them to communicate through mind-controlled cursors and typing. CNBC reports: "This is the result of incredible work by the Neuralink team in close collaboration with the FDA and represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people," the company wrote in a tweet. The FDA and Neuralink did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. The extent of the approved trial is not known. Neuralink said in a tweet that patient recruitment for its clinical trial is not open yet.

No [brain-computer interface, or BCI] company has managed to clinch the FDA's final seal of approval. But by receiving the go-ahead for a study with human patients, Neuralink is one step closer to market. Neuralink's BCI will require patients to undergo invasive brain surgery. Its system centers around the Link, a small circular implant that processes and translates neural signals. The Link is connected to a series of thin, flexible threads inserted directly into the brain tissue where they detect neural signals. Patients with Neuralink devices will learn to control it using the Neuralink app. Patients will then be able to control external mice and keyboards through a Bluetooth connection, according to the company's website.

Liam Proven, reporting for The Register: Over 21 years after it first came out, the Microsoft operating system that will not die is receiving another lease of life. It's possible to activate new installations, safely and securely, without a crack, off line. A blog post on tinyapps has revealed the hot news that nobody sane has been waiting for: the algorithm that Microsoft uses to validate Windows XP product keys has been cracked and reimplemented. As a result it's now possible to generate valid activation codes for Windows XP, without an internet connection, even though Microsoft has turned off all the activation servers.

This is not a recommendation But first, a word of caution and restraint. Please don't take this article as a recommendation to run Windows XP. It wasn't the most secure of operating systems back in 2001, and you really should not be running it in 2023 -- especially not on anything that is connected to the internet. However, saying that, the problem is that sometimes people need to. There is, for example, hardware out there that only works with Windows XP and won't work with anything newer... and some of it might be very expensive hardware, which is still perfectly functional -- but which requires a long-obsolete version of Windows to operate it. If you are lumbered with such a device, or you have got some single specific and very particular piece of software that you need to run and which doesn't work properly on any newer version of Windows, then you may be forced to use XP. If so, one of the problems is that Microsoft has turned off the activation servers, so even if you install clean fresh copy, you can no longer activate it over the Internet. (Allegedly, the telephone activation service still works, if that's an option for you.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The U.S. Supreme Court Court on Thursday significantly curtailed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the nation's wetlands and waterways. It was the court's second decision in a year limiting the ability of the agency to enact anti-pollution regulations and combat climate change. The challenge to the regulations was brought by Michael and Chantell Sackett, who bought property to build their dream house about 500 feet away from Idaho's Scenic Priest Lake, a 19-mile stretch of clear water that is fed by mountain streams and bordered by state and national parkland. Three days after the Sacketts started excavating their property, the EPA stopped work on the project because the couple had failed to get a permit for disturbing the wetlands on their land. Now a conservative Supreme Court majority has used the Sackett's case to roll back longstanding rules adopted to carry out the 51-year-old Clean Water Act. While the nine justices agreed that the Sacketts should prevail, they divided 5-to-4 as to how far to go in limiting the EPA's authority.

Writing for the court majority (PDF), Justice Samuel Alito said that the navigable waters of the United States regulated by the EPA under the statute do not include many previously regulated wetlands. Rather, he said, the CWA extends to only streams, oceans, rivers and lakes, and those wetlands with a "continuous surface connection to those bodies." Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by the court's three liberal members, disputed Alito's reading of the statute, noting that since 1977 when the CWA was amended to include adjacent wetlands, eight consecutive presidential administrations, Republican and Democratic, have interpreted the law to cover wetlands that the court has now excluded. Kavanaugh said that by narrowing the act to cover only adjoining wetlands, the court's new test will have quote "significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States." In addition to joining Kavanaugh's opinion, the court's liberals, signed on to a separate opinion by Justice Elena Kagan. Pointing to the air and water pollution cases, she accused the majority of appointing itself instead of Congress as the national policymaker on the environment. President Biden, in a statement, called the decision "disappointing." It "upends the legal framework that has protected America's waters for decades," he said. "It also defies the science that confirms the critical role of wetlands in safeguarding our nation's streams, rivers, and lakes from chemicals and pollutants that harm the health and wellbeing of children, families, and communities."

"I don't think its an overstatement to say its catastrophic for the Clean Water act," said Jim Murphy of the National Wildlife Federation. Wetlands play an "enormous role in protecting the nation's water," he said. "They're really the kidneys of water systems and they're also the sponges. They absorb a lot of water on the landscape. So they're very important water features and they're very important to the quality of the water that we drink, swim, fish, boat and recreate in."

The PyPI blog: In March and April 2023, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) received three (3) subpoenas for PyPI user data. All three subpoenas were issued by the United States Department of Justice. The PSF was not provided with context on the legal circumstances surrounding these subpoenas. In total, user data related to five (5) PyPI usernames were requested. The data request was:

"Names (including subscriber names, user names, and screen names);"
"Addresses (including mailing, residential addresses, business addresses, and email addresses);"
"Connection records;"
"Records of session times and durations, and the temporarily assigned network address (such as Internet Protocol addresses) associated with those sessions;"
"Length of service (including start date) and type of services utilized;"
"Telephone or instrument numbers (including the registration Internet Protocol address);"
"Means and source of payment of any such services (including any credit card or bank account number) and billing records;"
"Records of all Python Package Index (PyPI) packages uploaded by..." given usernames
"IP download logs of any Python Package Index (PyPI) packages uploaded by..." given usernames

The privacy of PyPI users is of utmost concern to PSF and the PyPI Administrators, and we are committed to protecting user data from disclosure whenever possible. In this case, however, PSF determined with the advice of counsel that our only course of action was to provide the requested data. I, as Director of Infrastructure of the Python Software Foundation, fulfilled the requests in consultation with PSF's counsel.

We have waited for the string of subpoenas to subside, though we were committed from the beginning to write and publish this post as a matter of transparency, and as allowed by the lack of a non-disclosure order associated with the subpoenas received in March and April 2023.

Google Colab hosts free cloud-based "executable documents" that, among other things, let you write and run code in your browser (in dozens of languages, including Python).

Over 7 million people, including students, already use Colab, according to a recent post on Google's blog, "and now it's getting even better with advances in AI [with] features like code completions, natural language to code generation and even a code-assisting chatbot."

Google says it will "dramatically increase programming speed, quality, and comprehension." Our first features will focus on code generation. Natural language to code generation helps you generate larger blocks of code, writing whole functions from comments or prompts. [For example: "import data.csv as a dataframe."] The goal here is to reduce the need for writing repetitive code, so you can focus on the more interesting parts of programming and data science. Eligible users in Colab will see a new "Generate" button in their notebooks, allowing them to enter any text prompt to generate code.

For eligible paid users, as you type, you'll see autocomplete suggestions.

We're also bringing the helpfulness of a chatbot directly into Colab. Soon, you'll be able to ask questions directly in Colab like, "How do I import data from Google Sheets?" or "How do I filter a Pandas DataFrame?"

Anyone with an internet connection can access Colab, and use it free of charge... Access to these features will roll out gradually in the coming months, starting with our paid subscribers in the U.S. and then expanding into the free-of-charge tier.
It's powered by Google's "next generation" machine-learning language model PaLM 2 (announced earlier this month), which "excels at popular programming languages like Python and JavaScript, but can also generate specialized code in languages like Prolog, Fortran and Verilog." Colab will use Codey, a family of code models built on PaLM 2... fine-tuned on a large dataset of high quality, permissively licensed code from external sources to improve performance on coding tasks. Plus, the versions of Codey being used to power Colab have been customized especially for Python and for Colab-specific uses.

Wired reports on "hundreds of freelancers employed all over the world to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites." They describe one worker at Cyprus-based vDesk as "expected to lure people into paying, message by message, for conversations with fictional characters." WIRED spoke to dozens of people working in the industry, people who had worked for months at a time at two of the companies involved in the creation of virtual profiles... Often recruited into "customer support" or content moderation roles, they found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription money from lonely hearts looking for connections online... Freelancers working in the industry say they make a fraction of the money users are paying. Workers earn around 7 cents per message, or 2 euro an hour.
WIRED shares stories from a "freelance customer support representative" in Ireland and a "freelance remote translator" in Mexico who both ended up doing the same kind of work. (And ironically, both reported they ended up talking to people they knew in real-life...) For the worker in Mexico, "his chat history had all of his personal details: his name, city, job, past marriages. His kids' names and ages. For nearly two years, he had been talking to a virtual. He says he's in love with her."

The portals "usually include lengthy terms and conditions," the article points out, with most saying something like "we may use system profiles at our discretion to communicate with users to enhance our users' entertainment experience..." Once she got over the realization — on her first day working for the company — that translating really meant "flirting through fake profiles," she couldn't help but be impressed by how detailed the virtuals are. "The fakes don't seem like obviously unattainable women, they are eerily convincing and hyper-specific," she says... The sites collect detailed information about users, building profiles that help the freelancers maintain the fiction. These contain their living arrangements, details about their family and marital status ("single after two failed marriages," one read), and other personal details. "It will add their kids' names and ages, when they tell us them," Alice says, "if they have been to therapy recently, what they have been feeling — anything which can be used by the virtual to keep a sense of real connection..."

If the user asks to move off to a free messaging app, the freelancers must write through the virtuals "I prefer to stay in here until I know you better" or "I feel safer on this app until we are better acquainted," and so on...

One morning, Alice opened her chat to a new message:

"Please stop talking to my husband, he is spending money we do not have to talk to you," read the chat line.
The workers don't even know the source of their profile pictures, Wired points out. "A reverse-image search on some of the images seen by WIRED show that at least some are grabbed from pornography sites."

Google is looking to partner with businesses, education institutions, and non-profits to help test its 20 Gig symmetrical internet service. TechSpot reports: Nick Saporito, head of multi-gig & commercial product at Google, said they are only looking for eight additional partners so space is incredibly limited. Ideal candidates include those that are already downloading and uploading massive data sets, those conducting research that commands loads of bandwidth, or perhaps organizations working on future-focused tech that Google hasn't even yet considered but needs lots of throughput. If selected for the test, Google will reach out to your organization to discuss the next steps.

Google has been testing the 20 Gig service since at least late last year. We know this because Saporito shared a screenshot of a speed test conducted at his house in Kansas City highlighting his connection's throughput. Speaking to his home connection, Saporito said he tried to test its limits by streaming as many World Cup games in 4K as he had devices but didn't even come close to saturating the connection.

A Russian man was charged by US authorities in connection with his alleged role with multiple ransomware gangs that attacked hospitals, schools and police departments. From a report: Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev, who was known online as Wazawaka, was an active member of three ransomware gangs that collectively demanded $400 million from victims and received nearly $200 million in ransom payments, according to the Department of Justice. Ransomware groups typically hack into computer networks and deploy malicious software that encrypts computers and makes them unusable. The groups demand extortion payments in cryptocurrency and threaten to leak stolen data online if the ransom is not paid.

Matveev was allegedly a member of the Lockbit, Babuk and Hive ransomware gangs. Those groups are "ranked among the most active and destructive cybercriminal threats in the world," Philip Sellinger, the US attorney for the district of New Jersey, wrote in an indictment. Matveev, along with other members of the ransomware gangs, attacked as many as 2,800 victims in the US and around the world, Sellinger wrote. The alleged victims include the Metropolitan Police Department in the District of Columbia, which was attacked with ransomware in 2021. The hackers proceeded to publish dozens of stolen personnel files. The groups also targeted churches and nonprofits, the Department of Justice said.

Google will remove the familiar lock icon that allows users to check a website's Transport Layer Security status for the connection, citing research that only a few users correctly understood its precise meaning. From a report: The lock icon has been displayed by web browsers since the 1990s, indicating that the connection to web sites is secured and authenticated with encryption. However, Google said its 2021 research showed that only 11 percent of participants in a study correctly understood the meaning of the lock icon. This, Google argued, is not harmless since most phishing sites also use the hyper text transfer protocol secure extension (HTTPS) and also display the lock icon. Ergo, a lock icon is not in actual fact an indicator of a site's security. [...] Starting with Chrome version 117, Google will introduce a new "tune" icon, which does not imply a site is trustworthy, and is more obviously clickable. The "tune" icon is more commonly associated with settings and other control, and Google said a more neutral indicator like that prevents the misunderstanding around site security that the lock icon is causing.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota report via Phys.Org: Biocomputing is typically done either with live cells or with non-living, enzyme-free molecules. Live cells can feed themselves and can heal, but it can be difficult to redirect cells from their ordinary functions toward computation. Non-living molecules solve some of the problems of live cells, but have weak output signals and are difficult to fine-tune and regulate. In new research published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota has developed a platform for a third method of biocomputing: Trumpet, or Transcriptional RNA Universal Multi-Purpose GatE PlaTform.

Trumpet uses biological enzymes as catalysts for DNA-based molecular computing. Researchers performed logic gate operations, similar to operations done by all computers, in test tubes using DNA molecules. A positive gate connection resulted in a phosphorescent glow. The DNA creates a circuit, and a fluorescent RNA compound lights up when the circuit is completed, just like a lightbulb when a circuit board is tested.

The research team demonstrated that:

- The Trumpet platform has the simplicity of molecular biocomputing with added signal amplification and programmability.
- The platform is reliable for encoding all universal Boolean logic gates (NAND, NOT, NOR, AND, and OR), which are fundamental to programming languages.
- The logic gates can be stacked to build more complex circuits.

The team also developed a web-based tool facilitating the design of sequences for the Trumpet platform. "Trumpet is a non-living molecular platform, so we don't have most of the problems of live cell engineering," said co-author Kate Adamala, assistant professor in the College of Biological Sciences. "We don't have to overcome evolutionary limitations against forcing cells to do things they don't want to do. This also gives Trumpet more stability and reliability, with our logic gates avoiding the leakage problems of live cell operations."

"It could make a lot of long-term neural implants possible. The applications could range from strictly medical, like healing damaged nerve connections or controlling prosthetics, to more sci-fi applications like entertainment or learning and augmented memory," added Adamala.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Tokyo has five million Wi-Fi access points -- and that's 20 times what the city needs, because they're reserved for private use, according to NTT. The Japanese tech giant proposes sharing the fleet to cope with increased demand for wireless comms without adding more hardware. NTT says it's successfully tested network sharing with a scheme that starts by asking operators of Wi-Fi access points or other connections if they're open to sharing their bandwidth and allowing random netizens to connect. In return they get a share of revenue from those connections.

Under the scheme, netizens search for available networks and, as they connect, a contract would be executed allowing a link to be made. That contract would use Ethereum Proof of Authority to verify identities and initiate the back-end billing arrangements before allowing signed-up users and devices to join private networks. The operator of the Wi-Fi access point gets paid, the punter gets a connection, and everything's on a blockchain so the results can be read for eternity. [...] If this all scales, NTT estimates Tokyo won't need to add any more Wi-Fi access points or private 5G cells, even as demand for connectivity increases. The company also suggests it can enable networks to scale without requiring commensurate increases in energy consumption, and that spectrum will also be freed for other uses.

5G technology has brought faster connections, better gadgets -- and a measure of disappointment from people with expectations of something closer to world-changing technology. But just wait, mobile companies are saying: The next upgrade will gin up enthusiasm for advances still to come. From a report: This next iteration of 5G, which the mobile companies are calling "5G Advanced" or "5.5G," is expected to be rolled out by around 2025. For consumers, the upgrades may bring faster connection speeds -- something that many parts of the world need. But everyday users may not see many more applications than that, say experts and industry officials. The real advance is that the technology will finally help facilitate more of the far-fetched business applications that 5G initially promised, like self-driving cars, autonomous drones and self-operating factories.

The forthcoming upgrades underscore a reality for many 5G users so far: Beyond faster connection speeds, it hasn't made a huge difference in their day-to-day lives. 5.5G may not either. With 5.5G, "for you or me using their phone, you won't necessarily notice a huge difference," says Patrick Filkins, a research manager at International Data Corp. who tracks the internet-of-things and telecommunications-infrastructure markets.

Meta's head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, called into question the values of TikTok by invoking the anti-China rhetoric that's become a trademark of lawmakers that want to expel his company's rival from the US. From a report: "TikTok, a hugely successful, highly dynamic and innovative Chinese company, is able to operate in the United States, but companies like Meta are not able to operate our social media services in China," Clegg said in an interview Tuesday with Bloomberg TV. "So there is this issue of a kind of lack of a level playing field. And in the end, there's always an underlying issue of values: What values are the underpinning of new technologies?" TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has said it's not a Chinese company and is walling off sensitive US operations to house all data and employees in America. The app also isn't available in China. Still, it hasn't been able to shake concerns about its ownership and whether that opens up the app for influence or data collection by the Chinese government.

Clegg's comments echo the hawkish sentiments that have swirled around China and TikTok's connection to the country. In the US, where the social media platform has amassed 150 million users every month, the company is facing a national security review and legislation that could limit its availability in the country. There are "pretty profound differences in values" in how China views technology and individual privacy, Clegg said, including the country's willingness to seal off most of its internet from access by foreign companies. This has also expanded to discussions about new artificial intelligence technologies where, he said, "Chinese authorities are already rushing to insert their values and the way in which those AI systems are developed."

Daniel Shin, the co-founder of Terraform Labs, was indicted in South Korea in connection with the collapsed Terra and Luna cryptocurrencies. From a report: According to reports from Bloomberg and the local Yonhap News Agency, Shin was charged on Tuesday with offenses including fraud, breach of duty, and embezzlement. Prosecutors at Seoul Southern District Court also indicted nine other people with ties to Terra, some of whom had roles in marketing, systems development, and management, as reported by Bloomberg. The outlet also reports that prosecutors have frozen a total of 246.8 billion won (about $184.7 million) in assets from the individuals they charged.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Montreal man spent years trying to hold Google accountable for search results linking to a defamatory post falsely accusing him of pedophilia that he said ruined his career. Now Google must pay $500,000 after a Quebec Supreme Court judge ruled that Google relied on an "erroneous" interpretation of Canadian law in denying the man's requests to remove the links. "Google variously ignored the Plaintiff, told him it could do nothing, told him it could remove the hyperlink on the Canadian version of its search engine but not the US one, but then allowed it to re-appear on the Canadian version after a 2011 judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in an unrelated matter involving the publication of hyperlinks," judge Azimuddin Hussain wrote in his decision (PDF) issued on March 28.

The plaintiff was granted anonymity throughout the proceedings. Google has been ordered not to disclose any identifiable information about him in connection to the case for 45 days. The tech company must also remove all links to the defamatory post in search results viewable in Quebec. [...] Instead of compensatory and punitive damages originally sought -- amounting to $6 million -- the man was awarded $500,000 for moral injuries caused after successfully arguing that he lost business deals and suffered strains on his personal relationships due to being wrongly stigmatized as a pedophile. Hussain described the plaintiff's experience battling Google to preserve his reputation as a "waking nightmare." Due to Google's refusals to remove the defamatory posts, the man "found himself helpless in a surreal and excruciating contemporary online ecosystem as he lived through a dark odyssey to have the Defamatory Post removed from public circulation," Hussain wrote. The plaintiff, now in his early 70s, has the option to appeal the judge's order that Google may not release any of his identifiable information for 45 days.

Southwest Airlines has fixed a technical issue that delayed hundreds of flights across the country. In a statement, Southwest Airlines spokesperson Dan Landson says the company resumed operations after working through "data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure." From a report: The airline started having issues at around 10:30AM ET, with data from FlightAware suggesting that over 1,700 Southwest flights have been delayed so far. The Federal Aviation Administration paused departures at the request of Southwest Airlines around this time and later unpaused flights at 11:10AM ET. "Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost," Landson says. "Southwest Teams worked quickly to minimize flight disruptions."

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday charged cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex and its former CEO William Shihara with operating an unregistered national securities exchange, broker and clearing agency. From a report: The SEC alleged in its complaint, which was filed in a U.S. district court in Washington, that Shihara coordinated with crypto asset issuers seeking to make their tokens available for trading on Bittrex's platform to delete public statements that Shihara believed would lead regulators to investigate those token offerings as securities. The SEC also charged Bittrex's foreign affiliate, Bittrex Global GmbH, for failing to register as a national securities exchange in connection with its operation of a single shared order book along with Bittrex. Seattle-based Bittrex had previously announced it would shutter its U.S. operations effective April 30 due to "continued regulatory uncertainty." The company's non-U.S. operations are based in Liechtenstein.