Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: GeekWire takes a look at AI's defining alliance in The Microsoft-OpenAI Files, an epic story drawn from 200+ documents, many made public Friday in Elon Musk's ongoing suit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the nonprofit mission (Microsoft is also a defendant). Musk, who was an OpenAI co-founder, is seeking up to $134 billion in damages. "Previously undisclosed emails, messages, slide decks, reports, and deposition transcripts reveal how Microsoft pursued, rebuffed, and backed OpenAI at various moments over the past decade, ultimately shaping the course of the lab that launched the generative AI era," reports GeekWire. "The latest round of documents, filed as exhibits in Musk's lawsuit, [...] show how Nadella and Microsoft's senior leadership team rally in a crisis, maneuver against rivals such as Google and Amazon, and talk about deals in private."

Even though Microsoft didn't have a seat on the OpenAI board, text messages between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman following Altman's firing as CEO in Nov. 2023 (news of which sent Microsoft's stock plummeting), revealed in the latest filings, show just how influential Microsoft was. A day after Altman's firing, Nadella sent Altman a detailed message from Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and top lawyer, explaining that Microsoft had created a new subsidiary called Microsoft RAI (Responsible Artificial Intelligence) Inc. from scratch -- legal work done, papers ready to file as soon as the WA Secretary of State opened Monday morning -- and was ready to capitalize and operationalize it to "support Sam in whatever way is needed," including absorbing the OpenAI team at a calculated cost of roughly $25 billion. (Altman's reply: "kk"). Just days later, as he planned his return as CEO to the now-reeling-from-Microsoft-punches nonprofit, Altman joined Microsoft's Nadella, Smith, and CTO Kevin Scott in a text messaging thread in which the four vetted prospective board members to replace those who had ousted Altman. Later that night, OpenAI announced Altman's return with the newly constituted board.

If you like stories with happy Microsoft endings, as part of an agreement clearing the way for OpenAI to restructure as a for-profit business, Microsoft in October received a 27% ownership stake in OpenAI worth approximately $135 billion and retains access to the AI startup's technology until 2032, including models that achieve AGI.

The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has argued that platforms like Steam should not label games that are made using AI. From a report: Responding to a post on Twitter from a user who suggested that storefronts drop this tag, the industry exec said that it "makes no sense" to flag such content. Sweeney added that soon AI will be a part of the way all games are made. "The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation," Sweeney said. "It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: What did Ilya see?" Two years ago, it was the meme seen 'round the world (or at least 'round the tech industry). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had been briefly ousted in November 2023 by members of the company's board of directors, including his longtime collaborator and fellow cofounder Ilya Sutskever. The board claimed Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board," undermining their confidence in him. He was out for less than a week before being reinstated after hundreds of employees threatened to resign. But observers wondered: What hadn't Altman been candid about? And what led Sutskever to turn against him?

Now, new details have come to light in a legal deposition involving Sutskever, part of Musk's ongoing lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI. For nearly 10 hours on October 1st, bookended by repeated sniping between Musk's and Sutsever's attorneys, Sutskever answered questions about the turmoil around Altman's ouster, from conflicts between executives to short-lived merger talks with Anthropic. He testified that from personal experience and documentation he'd viewed, he'd seen Altman pit high-ranking executives against each other and offer conflicting information about his plans for the company, telling people what they wanted to hear.

The testimony paints a picture of a leader who could be manipulative and chameleon-like in the relentless pursuit of his own agenda -- though Sutskever expressed hesitation about his reliance on some of the secondhand accounts later in testimony, saying he "learned the critical importance of firsthand knowledge for matters like this." In a statement toThe Verge, OpenAI spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said that "The events of 2023 are behind us. These claims were fully examined during the board's independent review, which unanimously concluded Sam and Greg are the right leaders for OpenAI." The comment echoes a 2024 statement by board chair Bret Taylor, following an investigation conducted by the company. Altman "exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another," reads a quote from the memo Sutskever. Altman told him and Jakub Pachocki, who is now OpenAI's chief scientist, "conflicting things about the way the company would be run," leading to internal conflict and repeated undermining.

Sutskever said he also faulted Altman for "not accepting or rejecting" former OpenAI research executive Dario Amodei Dario's conditions when he wanted to run all research and fire OpenAI president Greg Brockman, implying Altman played both sides.

Furthermore, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati surfaced claims that Altman left Y Combinator for "similar behaviors. He was creating chaos, starting lots of new projects, pitting people against each other, and thus was not managing YC well."

14 months ago a jury ruled against Boeing, awarding $81 million in damages to failed electric airplane startup Zunum. "Zunum alleged that Boeing, while ostensibly investing seed money to get the startup off the ground, stole Zunum's technology and actively undermined its attempts to build a business," the Seattle Times reported at the time.

But two months later that verdict was overturned, Reuters reports, with U.S. District Judge James Robart deciding that Zunum "did not adequately identify its secrets or show that they derived their value from being kept secret."

And then three days ago a U.S. appeals court reinstated the original $81 million award, reversing that district judge's decision and "rejecting his finding that the information Boeing allegedly stole was not entitled to trade-secret protection." [T]he district court erred in concluding that "Zunum failed to identify any of its alleged trade secrets with sufficient particularity"... Here, the court rejected Zunum's repeated attempts to introduce comprehensive trade secret definitions into evidence and instead provided the jury with a court-created exhibit enumerating Zunum's alleged trade secrets with a short description of each. Zunum's witnesses identified the trade secrets by number, provided a basic explanation of each, and used exhibits and demonstratives to exemplify information comprising specific trade secrets.
"internal Boeing communications introduced at trial suggesting that Boeing intended to modify its own in-house designs, methods, and strategies to incorporate information from certain Zunum trade secrets..." according to the new ruling. "Under the parties' agreement, Boeing was not permitted to use Zunum's confidential information for any reason other than to manage its investment in Zunum."

Reuters adds that "A spokesperson for Boeing declined to comment on the appeals court's decision"

One final note: The appeals court also ordered the case to be assigned to a new judge after Robart revealed that his wife had acquired Boeing stock through a retirement savings account during the litigation.
Judge Robart had called that an "error". (And judicial ethics experts interviewed by Business Insider in 2024 "characterized Robart's trades and delayed disclosure to the parties as a minor issue," they reported Thursday.)

But Thursday's ruling notes that the delayed disclosure "taken together with the district court's consistent rulings in Boeing's favor during and after trial, could give an objective observer reason to question the district judge's impartiality in further proceedings."

Slashdot reader ffkom writes: The air around you mostly consists of nitrogen [78%]. And in that air exist happy little monogamous pairs of two nitrogen atoms per molecule, also known as N2. Researchers from the University of Giessen, Germany, recently managed to synthesize N6 molecules, "the first, to our knowledge, experimentally realized neutral molecular nitrogen allotrope beyond N2 that exhibits unexpected stability."

And these appear to be pretty angry little molecules, as they detonate at more than twice the energy density than good old TNT:

A kiloton of N6 is 1.19×10**7mol, which can release an energy of 2.20×109kcal (9.21terajoules) based on the enthalpy. Considering that the standard kiloton TNT equivalent is 4.184terajoules, N6 can release 2.2 times the energy of TNT of the same weight. On the basis of the documented TNT equivalent based on weight for HMX (1.15) and RDX (1.15), N6 can release 1.9 times the energy of HMX or RDX with the same weight.

In interviews the researchers contemplated the possibility of using N6 as rocket fuel, given its superior energy density and that its reaction product is just N2, so basically air, but no smoke, no CO2 or other potentially harmful substances.

Brandon Vigliarolo writes via The Register: A tech executive's alleged affair exposed on a stadium jumbotron is ripe fodder for the gossip rags, but it exhibits something else: proof that we need not wait for an AI-fueled dystopian surveillance state to descend on us -- we're perfectly able and willing to surveil ourselves. The embracing couple caught at a Coldplay concert this week as the jumbotron camera panned around the audience would have been another unremarkable clip, if not for the pair panicking and rushing to hide, triggering attendees to publish the memorable moment on social media. "Either they're having an affair or they're very shy," Coldplay singer Chris Martin said of the pair's reaction.

As is always the case when viral moments of unknown people get uploaded to the internet, they didn't remain anonymous for long, with the internet quickly identifying them as the CEO of data infrastructure outfit Astronomer, Andy Byron, and its Chief People Officer, Kristin Cabot. We're not going to weigh in on Byron's, who internet sleuths have determined is married (for now), or Cabot's behavior - making someone pay for the moral transgression of an alleged extramarital affair may be enough reason for the internet to go on a witch hunt, but that's not our concern here.

What's worrying is what this moment says - yet again - about us as a society: We have cameras everywhere, our personal data has become one of the most valuable commodities in the world, and we're all perpetually ready to use that tech to make those we feel have violated the social contract pay publicly for their transgressions. This is hardly a new phenomenon. [...] There's really no reason to set up an expensive and oppressive surveillance state when we all have location tracking, internet-connected shaming machines in our pockets. Big tech gave us the tools of our own surveillance, and as "ColdplayGate" shows yet again, we'll keep using those tools if they'll make us feel better about ourselves - especially if someone else gets knocked down a peg in the process.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Conde Nast and several other media companies sued the AI startup Cohere today, alleging that it engaged in "systematic copyright and trademark infringement" by using news articles to train its large language model. "Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power its artificial intelligence ('AI') service, which in turn competes with Publisher offerings and the emerging market for AI licensing," said the lawsuit (PDF) filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. "Not content with just stealing our works, Cohere also blatantly manufactures fake pieces and attributes them to us, misleading the public and tarnishing our brands."

Conde Nast, which owns Ars Technica and other publications such as Wired and The New Yorker, was joined in the lawsuit by The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Insider, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Newsday, The Plain Dealer, Politico, The Republican, the Toronto Star, and Vox Media. The complaint seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act for each infringed work, or an amount based on actual damages and Cohere's profits. It also seeks "actual damages, Cohere's profits, and statutory damages up to the maximum provided by law" for infringement of trademarks and "false designations of origin."

In Exhibit A (PDF), the plaintiffs identified over 4,000 articles in what they called an "illustrative and non-exhaustive list of works that Cohere has infringed." Additional exhibits provide responses to queries (PDF) and "hallucinations" (PDF) that the publishers say infringe upon their copyrights and trademarks. The lawsuit said Cohere "passes off its own hallucinated articles as articles from Publishers." Cohere said in a statement to Ars: "Cohere strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI. We have long prioritized controls that mitigate the risk of IP infringement and respect the rights of holders. We would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns -- and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach -- rather than learning about them in a filing. We believe this lawsuit is misguided and frivolous, and expect this matter to be resolved in our favor."

Further reading: Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case In the US

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: DeepSeek, an AI offshoot of Chinese quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management focused on releasing high performance open source tech, has unveiled the R1-Lite-Preview, its latest reasoning-focused large language model, available for now exclusively through DeepSeek Chat, its web-based AI chatbot. Known for its innovative contributions to the open-source AI ecosystem, DeepSeek's new release aims to bring high-level reasoning capabilities to the public while maintaining its commitment to accessible and transparent AI. And the R1-Lite-Preview, despite only being available through the chat application for now, is already turning heads by offering performance nearing and in some cases exceeding OpenAI's vaunted o1-preview model.

Like that model released in September 2024, DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview exhibits "chain-of-thought" reasoning, showing the user the different chains or trains of "thought" it goes down to respond to their queries and inputs, documenting the process by explaining what it is doing and why. While some of the chains/trains of thoughts may appear nonsensical or even erroneous to humans, DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview appears on the whole to be strikingly accurate, even answering "trick" questions that have tripped up other, older, yet powerful AI models such as GPT-4o and Claude's Anthropic family, including "how many letter Rs are in the word Strawberry?" and "which is larger, 9.11 or 9.9?"

OpenAI's latest AI model, GPT-4o, exhibits unusual behaviors, including voice cloning and random shouting, according to a new "red teaming" report. The model, which powers ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode alpha, is OpenAI's first trained on voice, text, and image data. In high-noise environments, GPT-4o occasionally mimics users' voices, a quirk OpenAI attributes to difficulties processing distorted speech. The company said it has implemented a "system-level mitigation" to address this issue. The report also reveals GPT-4o's tendency to generate inappropriate vocalizations and sound effects when prompted.

Popular Science reports that early last week, researchers at the U.S. Energy Department's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory revealed their new "MUSE" stellarator — "a unique fusion reactor that uses off-the-shelf and 3D-printed materials to contain its superheated plasma."

The researchers' announcement says the technique suggests "a simple way to build future devices for less cost and allow researchers to test new concepts for future fusion power plants." Stellarators typically rely on complicated electromagnets that have complex shapes and create their magnetic fields through the flow of electricity. Those electromagnets must be built precisely with very little room for error, increasing their cost. However, permanent magnets, like the magnets that hold art to refrigerator doors, do not need electric currents to create their fields. They can also be ordered off the shelf from industrial suppliers and then embedded in a 3D-printed shell around the device's vacuum vessel, which holds the plasma.

"MUSE is largely constructed with commercially available parts," said Michael Zarnstorff, a senior research physicist at PPPL. "By working with 3D-printing companies and magnet suppliers, we can shop around and buy the precision we need instead of making it ourselves." The original insight that permanent magnets could be the foundation for a new, more affordable stellarator variety came to Zarnstorff in 2014. "I realized that even if they were situated alongside other magnets, rare-earth permanent magnets could generate and maintain the magnetic fields necessary to confine the plasma so fusion reactions can occur," Zarnstorff said, "and that's the property that makes this technique work." [...]

In addition to being an engineering breakthrough, MUSE also exhibits a theoretical property known as quasisymmetry to a higher degree than any other stellarator has before. It is also the first device completed anywhere in the world that was designed specifically to have a type of quasisymmetry known as quasiaxisymmetry. Conceived by physicist Allen Boozer at PPPL in the early 1980s, quasisymmetry means that although the shape of the magnetic field inside the stellarator may not be the same around the physical shape of the stellarator, the magnetic field's strength is uniform around the device, leading to good plasma confinement and higher likelihood that fusion reactions will occur. "In fact, MUSE's quasisymmetry optimization is at least 100 times better than any existing stellarator," Zarnstorff said.

"The fact that we were able to design and build this stellarator is a real achievement," said Tony Qian, a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, which is based at PPPL.
Also covered by Gizmodo. Thanks to Slashdot reader christoban for sharing the news.

Science magazine "has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene — our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age — and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene.

"Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity's influence on the planet became overwhelming." The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning — though not unexpected — rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade... [S]ome felt the proposed marker of the epoch — some 10 centimeters of mud from Canada's Crawford Lake that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s — isn't definitive enough. Others questioned whether it's even possible to affix one date to the start of humanity's broad planetary influence: Why not the rise of agriculture? Why not the vast changes that followed European encroachment on the New World?
Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, said "It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration." Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an "epoch" categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation.... The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again...

Even if it is not formally recognized by geologists, the Anthropocene is here to stay. It is used in art exhibits, journal titles, and endless books... And others have advanced the view that it can remain an informal geologic term, calling it the "Anthropocene event...."
From the New York Times: Geoscientists don't deny our era stands out within that long history. Radionuclides from nuclear tests. Plastics and industrial ash. Concrete and metal pollutants. Rapid greenhouse warming. Sharply increased species extinctions. These and other products of modern civilization are leaving unmistakable remnants in the mineral record, particularly since the mid-20th century. Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.

That's why several experts who have voiced skepticism about enshrining the Anthropocene emphasized that the vote against it shouldn't be read as a referendum among scientists on the broad state of the Earth. "This was a narrow, technical matter for geologists, for the most part," said one of those skeptics, Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "This has nothing to do with the evidence that people are changing the planet," Dr. Ellis said. "The evidence just keeps growing."

Francine M.G. McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, is the opposite of a skeptic: She helped lead some of the research to support ratifying the new epoch. "We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale," Dr. McCarthy said. "And behaving accordingly is our only path forward."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

Devin Coldeway reports via TechCrunch: Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits "emergent" qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. These models were always going to grow and improve, but the researchers specifically hoped to see the kind of leap in ability that we observed once language models got past a certain size. For reasons unknown to us, once LLMs grow past a certain point, they start being way more robust and versatile, able to perform tasks they weren't trained to. That is not to say they are gaining sentience or anything, just that past a certain point their performance on certain conversational AI tasks hockey sticks. The team at Amazon AGI -- no secret what they're aiming at -- thought the same might happen as text-to-speech models grew as well, and their research suggests this is in fact the case.

The new model is called Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities, which they have contorted into the abbreviation BASE TTS. The largest version of the model uses 100,000 hours of public domain speech, 90% of which is in English, the remainder in German, Dutch and Spanish. At 980 million parameters, BASE-large appears to be the biggest model in this category. They also trained 400M- and 150M-parameter models based on 10,000 and 1,000 hours of audio respectively, for comparison -- the idea being, if one of these models shows emergent behaviors but another doesn't, you have a range for where those behaviors begin to emerge. As it turns out, the medium-sized model showed the jump in capability the team was looking for, not necessarily in ordinary speech quality (it is reviewed better but only by a couple points) but in the set of emergent abilities they observed and measured. Here are examples of tricky text mentioned in the paper:

- Compound nouns: The Beckhams decided to rent a charming stone-built quaint countryside holiday cottage.
- Emotions: "Oh my gosh! Are we really going to the Maldives? That's unbelievable!" Jennie squealed, bouncing on her toes with uncontained glee.
- Foreign words: "Mr. Henry, renowned for his mise en place, orchestrated a seven-course meal, each dish a piece de resistance.
- Paralinguistics (i.e. readable non-words): "Shh, Lucy, shhh, we mustn't wake your baby brother," Tom whispered, as they tiptoed past the nursery.
- Punctuations: She received an odd text from her brother: 'Emergency @ home; call ASAP! Mom & Dad are worried... #familymatters.'
- Questions: But the Brexit question remains: After all the trials and tribulations, will the ministers find the answers in time?
-Syntactic complexities: The movie that De Moya who was recently awarded the lifetime achievement award starred in 2022 was a box-office hit, despite the mixed reviews. You can read more examples of these difficult texts being spoken naturally here.

The Los Angeles Times reports that after more than 10 years of planning, "Barring weather delays, the space shuttle Endeavour will undergo its final, historic lift starting Monday night, a maneuver no other retired orbiter has undergone..." First, a pair of cranes will hoist the shuttle from a horizontal position to a vertical one; the spacecraft will be attached to a sling, a large metal frame that'll support it during the move. An 11-story crane will lift the tail of Endeavour, while a 40-story crawler crane — about the height of [Los Angeles'] City Hall — will lift the nose. Once the shuttle is pointed toward the stars, the shorter crane will be disconnected, leaving the taller crane to gently swing the orbiter to its final position and lowering it to be affixed with the giant orange external tank. The external tank is attached to twin solid rocket boosters, which are connected to the exhibit's foundation...

Once the shuttle full stack is in place, the rest of the museum will be built around it. It could be a few years before it is open to the public, given the construction schedule and additional time needed to install exhibits.
"Los Angeles will be home to the only retired space shuttle displayed in a full-stack arrangement as if ready for launch," the article points out.

Officials hope to livestream the historic lift on Monday night at 9:30 p.m. PST.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Marking a significant advancement in medical science, the world's first partial heart transplant has achieved the expected outcome after over a year of research efforts. Carried out by Duke Health, the patient, a young individual, now exhibits functioning valves and arteries that are growing in tandem with the transplant, as initially expected by the medical team. In spring 2022, doctors carried out the procedure on a baby who needed a new heart valve. Before, they used non-living valves, which didn't grow with the child. This meant the child needed frequent replacements, and the surgeries had a 50 percent chance of being deadly. The new procedure avoids these problems, according to the team.

Babies with serious heart valve problems face a tough challenge because there aren't any implants that can grow with them. So, these babies end up needing new implants over and over until they're big enough for an adult-sized valve. It's a problem that doesn't have a solution yet. Duke Health doctors, leading a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, discovered that the innovative valve collection method used in the partial heart transplant resulted in two properly functioning valves and arteries that are growing along with the child, resembling natural blood vessels. "This publication is proof that this technology works, this idea works, and can be used to help other children," said Joseph W. Turek, first author of the study and Duke's chief of pediatric cardiac surgery, in a statement. The research also notes that the new procedure requires less immunosuppressant medication, reducing potential long-term side effects.

It also facilitates a "domino transplant" method, where one donor heart benefits multiple patients, potentially doubling the number of hearts available for children with heart disease by utilizing previously unused hearts and valves.

theodp writes: Back in May 2021, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org touted the signing of a licensing agreement with WhiteHat Jr., allowing the edtech company with a controversial past (Whitehat Jr. was bought for $300M in 2020 by Byju's, an edtech firm that received a $50M investment from Mark Zuckerberg's venture firm) to integrate Code.org's free-to-educators-and-organizations content and tools into their online tutoring service. Code.org did not reveal what it was charging Byju's to use its "free curriculum and open source technology" for commercial purposes, but Code.org's 2021 IRS 990 filing reported $1M in royalties from an unspecified source after earlier years reported $0. Coincidentally, Whitehat Jr. is represented by Aaron Kornblum, who once worked at Microsoft for now-President Brad Smith, who left Code.org's Board just before the lawsuit was filed.

Fast forward to 2023 and the bloom is off the rose, as Court records show that Code.org earlier this month sued Whitehat Education Technology, LLC (Exhibits A and B) in what is called "a civil action for breach of contract arising from Whitehat's failure to pay Code.org the agreed-upon charges for its use of Code.org's platform and licensed content and its ongoing, unauthorized use of that platform and content." According to the filing, "Whitehat agreed [in April 2022] to pay to Code.org licensing fees totaling $4,000,000 pursuant to a four-year schedule" and "made its first four scheduled payments, totaling $1,000,000," but "about a year after the Agreement was signed, Whitehat informed Code.org that it would be unable to make the remaining scheduled license payments." While the original agreement was amended to backload Whitehat's license fee payment obligations, "Whitehat has not paid anything at all beyond the $1,000,000 that it paid pursuant to the 2022 invoices before the Agreement was amended" and "has continued to access Code.org's platform and content."

That Byju's Whitehat Jr. stiffed Code.org is hardly shocking. In June 2023, Reuters reported that Byju's auditor Deloitte cut ties with the troubled Indian Edtech startup that was once an investor darling and valued at $22 billion, adding that a Byju's Board member representing the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had resigned with two other Board members. The BBC reported in July that Byju's was guilty of overexpanding during the pandemic (not unlike Zuck's Facebook). Ironically, the lawsuit Exhibits include screenshots showing Mark Zuckerberg teaching Code.org lessons. Zuckerberg and Facebook were once among the biggest backers of Code.org, although it's unclear whether that relationship soured after court documents were released that revealed Code.org's co-founders talking smack about Zuck and Facebook's business practices to lawyers for Six4Three, which was suing Facebook.

Code.org's curriculum is also used by the Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) initiative, but it is unclear what royalties -- if any -- Amazon pays to Code.org for the use of Code.org curriculum. While the AFE site boldly says, "we provide free computer science curriculum," the AFE fine print further explains that "our partners at Code.org and ProjectSTEM offer a wide array of introductory and advance curriculum options and teacher training." It's unclear what kind of organization Amazon's AFE ("Computer Science Learning Childhood to Career") exactly is -- an IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search failed to find any hits for "Amazon Future Engineer" -- making it hard to guess whether Code.org might consider AFE's use of Code.org software 'commercial use.' Would providing a California school district with free K-12 CS curriculum that Amazon boasts of cultivating into its "vocal champion" count as "commercial use"? How about providing free K-12 CS curriculum to children who live where Amazon is seeking incentives? Or if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos testifies Amazon "funds computer science coursework" for schools as he attempts to counter a Congressional antitrust inquiry? These seem to be some of the kinds of distinctions Richard Stallman anticipated more than a decade ago as he argued against a restriction against commercial use of otherwise free software.

Yesterday's massive leaks from the Microsoft vs. FTC case have a large swath of the gaming world expecting that a more powerful, disc-free Xbox Series X refresh could be coming as soon as next year. But Xbox boss Phil Spencer is warning that players shouldn't put too much stock in what he called "old emails and documents." ArsTechnica adds: "It is hard to see our team's work shared in this way because so much has changed and there's so much to be excited about right now, and in the future," Spencer wrote on social media late Tuesday. "We will share the real plans when we are ready." Spencer followed up that post with a memo sent to the Xbox team, apologizing for the unintentional disclosure of internal plans. "I know this is disappointing, even if many of the documents are well over a year old and our plans have evolved," the memo reads, in part. "I also know we all take the confidentiality of our plans and our partners' information very seriously. This leak obviously is not us living up to that expectation... That said, there's so much more to be excited about, and when we're ready, we'll share the real plans with our players."

While Spencer's statements are vague about who was responsible for the "unintentional disclosure" of Microsoft's plans, a representative for the FTC was quick to push the blame on the company itself. "The FTC was not responsible for uploading Microsoft's plans for its games and consoles to the court website," FTC Director of the Office of Public Affairs Douglas Farrar wrote early Tuesday. In a follow-up post, Farrar pointed to a court order resealing the leaked information (too late for it to prevent the spread of the information, of course), which notes that "Microsoft provided the link on September 14 and the Court uploaded the exhibits to [the] internet page established for this case." Further reading: Microsoft's Phil Spencer Says Acquiring Nintendo Would Be 'a Career Moment'
Microsoft's Next Xbox, Coming 2028, Envisions Hybrid Computing.

The world just broke "another terrifying climate record," reports CNN: Antarctic sea ice has fallen to unprecedented lows for this time of year. Every year, Antarctic sea ice shrinks to its lowest levels towards the end of February, during the continent's summer. The sea ice then builds back up over the winter.

But this year scientists have observed something different.

The sea ice has not returned to anywhere near expected levels. In fact it is at the lowest levels for this time of year since records began 45 years ago. The ice is around 1.6 million square kilometers (0.6 million square miles) below the previous winter record low set in 2022, according to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). In mid-July, Antarctica's sea ice was 2.6 million square kilometers (1 million square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average. That is an area nearly as large as Argentina or the combined areas of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.

The phenomenon has been described by some scientists as off-the-charts exceptional — something that is so rare, the odds are that it only happens once in millions of years. But Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said that speaking in these terms may not be that helpful. "The game has changed," he told CNN. "There's no sense talking about the odds of it happening the way the system used to be, it's clearly telling us that the system has changed...."

This winter's unprecedented occurrence may indicate a long-term change for the isolated continent, Scambos said. "It is more likely than not that we won't see the Antarctic system recover the way it did, say, 15 years ago, for a very long period into the future, and possibly 'ever.'" Others are more cautious. "It's a large departure from average but we know that Antarctic sea ice exhibits large year to year variability," Julienne Stroeve, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center told CNN, adding "it's too early to say if this is the new normal or not."
The glaciologist describes the change as "so extreme that something radical has changed in the past two years, but especially this year, relative to all previous years going back at least 45 years." And CNN adds that meanwhile in the Arctic, "sea ice has been on a consistently downwards trajectory as the climate crisis accelerates."

Other possible consequences of the missing sea ice:

• Sea ice reflects sunlight back into space, CNN notes, so when it melts, it "exposes the darker ocean waters beneath which absorb the sun's energy."

• Sea ice floats on the water, so its loss doesn't directly affect rising sea levels, CNN points out. But the disappearance of sea ice does leave coastal ice sheets and glaciers "exposed to waves and warm ocean waters, making them more vulnerable to melting and breaking off."
  
  In February NASA reported that global sea levels "are rising as a result of human-caused global warming, with recent rates being unprecedented over the past 2,500-plus years." Seawater expands when it warms, but NASA also blames the added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers, resulting in a 3.89-inch rise since 1993, and 7.97 inches (200 mm) since 1900.

A team of Korean scientists claims to have created a room-temperature superconductor that also works at standard, ambient pressure. The work, however, is yet to be peer-reviewed. You can read their paper on Arxiv. Its abstract: For the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor working at ambient pressure with a modified lead-apatite (LK-99) structure. The superconductivity of LK-99 is proved with the Critical temperature (TC), Zero-resistivity, Critical current (IC), Critical magnetic field (HC), and the Meissner effect. The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure. The shrinkage is caused by Cu2+ substitution of Pb2+(2) ions in the insulating network of Pb(2)-phosphate and it generates the stress. It concurrently transfers to Pb(1) of the cylindrical column resulting in distortion of the cylindrical column interface, which creates superconducting quantum wells (SQWs) in the interface. The heat capacity results indicated that the new model is suitable for explaining the superconductivity of LK-99. The unique structure of LK-99 that allows the minute distorted structure to be maintained in the interfaces is the most important factor that LK-99 maintains and exhibits superconductivity at room temperatures and ambient pressure.

VentureBeat is enjoying "secrets that spilled out" in the Microsoft/Activision Blizzard antitrust hearings. "Whether the Federal Trade Commission wins its antitrust case or not, its attempt to stop Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard has revealed a trove of new data for everyone." The FTC has argued in a federal court that the merger would harm competition in the game industry and be bad for consumers, as Microsoft could pull Activision Blizzard's games like Call of Duty away from the Sony PlayStation, despite Microsoft's stated intention of not doing so for at least 10 years. In this case, the FTC might not have had an obvious winning hand, as the industry has an odd situation. Microsoft has the highest value ($104 billion in cash alone, versus $13.4 billion for Sony) at $2.49 trillion as a company compared to $115 billion for Sony, and yet it is in third place behind Sony and Nintendo.

Hence, there's some significance to Microsoft's Xbox first-party head, Matt Booty, sending an ill-advised email in 2019 saying Microsoft "has the ability to spend Sony out of business." That was long before the deal was announced 17 months ago, but it could be used as a sign of intent. Microsoft said it never pursued this strategy. While competing fiercely is fine, using monopoly power to drive a rival out of business so you can raise prices later is a no-no...

Did the FTC prove its case? I can't say just yet. Microsoft makes a decent point in saying all the regulators of the world except the U.S. and the United Kingdom have approved the deal. But I hope to have more reasons to binge on popcorn.
In January Ars Technica noted Microsoft's contract set July 18th as the deadline for closing the deal — or else paying a $3 billion "breakup fee". The Verge spotted that some of Sony's documents were poorly redacted. While looking at the lines that were crossed out with black pens, they could see that The Last of Us Part 2 cost the company $220 million to make, with 200 people working on it, while Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million to make, with 300 working on it for over five years. Both games made considerably more money... In the unSharpied documents, Sony also revealed that a million Call of Duty players spent 100% of their time playing Call of Duty in 2021. It also said that Call of Duty generated $800 million for PlayStation in 2021 alone in the U.S. and perhaps $1.5 billion globally. It also looks like Sony's exclusive marketing deal with Activision for Call of Duty will expire in late 2023. Sony went on to say half of PS5 owners also have a Nintendo Switch.

Microsoft also failed to redact some of its acquisition targets. Those were later marked up, but not before Axios noted that the list included Thunderful, Supergiant Games, Niantic, Playrix, Zynga, Bungie, Square Enix, Warner Bros., Sega, IO Interactive and Scopely... Among the secrets revealed among the companies Microsoft acquired: Microsoft bought Ninja Theory, maker of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, for $117 million.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ole_timer for sharing the news.

Slashdot reader Dave Knott shares the four class of 2023 inductees into the Video Game Hall Of Fame. They were announced today at The Strong National Museum of Play. From the press release: Barbie Fashion Designer : "The 1996 hit Barbie Fashion Designer emerged at a time when many games were marketed to male players. Published by Digital Domain/Mattel Media, it proved that a computer game targeted to girls could succeed, selling more than 500,000 copies in two months. The game helped greatly expanded the market for video games and in the process opened important -- and ongoing -- discussions about gender and stereotypes in gaming. Barbie Fashion Designer was also innovative in bridging the gap between the digital and the physical, allowing players to design clothes for their Barbie dolls and print them on special fabric."

Computer Space : "Nutting Associate's Computer Space appeared in 1971 and was the first commercial video game. Inspired by the early minicomputer and previous World Video Game Hall of Fame inductee -- Spacewar! (1962) -- the coin-operated Computer Space proved that video games could reach an audience outside of computer labs. While not a best-seller, it was a trailblazer in the video game world and inspired its creators to go on to establish Atari Inc., a video game giant in the 1970s and 1980s."

The Last of Us : "Released by Naughty Dog and Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2013, The Last of Us jumped into an oversaturated field of post-apocalyptic zombie games and quickly stood out among the rest with its in-depth storytelling, intimate exploration of humanity, thrilling game jumps and cutscenes, and its memorable characters. More than 200 publications named it the game of the year in 2013. Its story has since made the jump to Hollywood, inspiring an HBO adaptation in 2023 watched weekly by millions."

Wii Sports : "Wii Sports launched with the Nintendo Wii home video game system in 2006 and introduced motion-based technology to living rooms across the world. With a simple swipe of the controller, players could serve a tennis ball, hurl a bowling bowl, throw a left hook, or drive a golf ball. The simple mechanics made the game accessible to almost anyone -- allowing it to be played by young children and seniors alike -- and helped to redefine the idea of who is a "gamer." Ultimately, the game helped Nintendo to sell more than 100 million Wii consoles worldwide." These titles managed to beat out several other incredibly popular titles, including Angry Birds, Age of Empires, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, GoldenEye 007, NBA 2K, FIFA International Soccer, Quake, and Wizardry.