An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it is deepening its ties with the US government through a partnership with the National Laboratories and expects to use AI to "supercharge" research across a wide range of fields to better serve the public. "This is the beginning of a new era, where AI will advance science, strengthen national security, and support US government initiatives," OpenAI said. The deal ensures that "approximately 15,000 scientists working across a wide range of disciplines to advance our understanding of nature and the universe" will have access to OpenAI's latest reasoning models, the announcement said.

For researchers from Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs, access to "o1 or another o-series model" will be available on Venado -- an Nvidia supercomputer at Los Alamos that will become a "shared resource." Microsoft will help deploy the model, OpenAI noted. OpenAI suggested this access could propel major "breakthroughs in materials science, renewable energy, astrophysics," and other areas that Venado was "specifically designed" to advance. Key areas of focus for Venado's deployment of OpenAI's model include accelerating US global tech leadership, finding ways to treat and prevent disease, strengthening cybersecurity, protecting the US power grid, detecting natural and man-made threats "before they emerge," and " deepening our understanding of the forces that govern the universe," OpenAI said.

Perhaps among OpenAI's flashiest promises for the partnership, though, is helping the US achieve a "a new era of US energy leadership by unlocking the full potential of natural resources and revolutionizing the nation's energy infrastructure." That is urgently needed, as officials have warned that America's aging energy infrastructure is becoming increasingly unstable, threatening the country's health and welfare, and without efforts to stabilize it, the US economy could tank. But possibly the most "highly consequential" government use case for OpenAI's models will be supercharging research safeguarding national security, OpenAI indicated. "The Labs also lead a comprehensive program in nuclear security, focused on reducing the risk of nuclear war and securing nuclear materials and weapons worldwide," OpenAI noted. "Our partnership will support this work, with careful and selective review of use cases and consultations on AI safety from OpenAI researchers with security clearances." The announcement follows the launch earlier this week of ChatGPT Gov, "a new tailored version of ChatGPT designed to provide US government agencies with an additional way to access OpenAI's frontier models." It also worked with the Biden administration to voluntarily commit to give officials early access to its latest models for safety inspections.

The company that Jeff Bezos founded has gone to court to keep the newspaper he owns from finding out too much about the inner workings of its business. From a report: Amazon is suing Washington state to limit the release of public records to The Washington Post from a series of state Department of Labor and Industries investigations of an Amazon Project Kuiper satellite facility in the Seattle area.

The lawsuit, filed this week in King County Superior Court in Seattle, says the newspaper on Nov. 26 requested "copies of inspection records, investigation notes, interview notes, complaints," and other documents related to four investigations at the Redmond, Wash., facility between August and October 2024. It's not an unusual move by the company, and in some ways it's a legal technicality.

Amazon says it's not seeking to block the records release entirely, but rather seeking to protect from public disclosure certain records that contain proprietary information and trade secrets about the company's satellite internet operations. The lawsuit cites a prior situation in which Amazon and the Department of Labor and Industries similarly worked through the court to respond to a Seattle Times public records request without disclosing proprietary information.

Friday Bill Gates shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the excerpt includes pictures of young Bill Gates when he was 12 (dressed for a hike) and 14 (studying a teletype machine).

Gates remembers forming "a sort of splinter group" from the Boy Scouts when he was 13 with a group of boys who "wanted more freedom and more risk" and took long hikes around Seattle, travelling hundreds of miles together on hikes as long as "seven days or more." (His favorite breakfast dish was Oscar Mayer Smokie Links.) But he also remembers another group of friends — Kent, Rick, and... Paul — who connected to a mainframe computer from a phone line at their private school. Both hiking and programming "felt like an adventure... exploring new worlds, traveling to places even most adults couldn't reach."

Like hiking, programming fit me because it allowed me to define my own measure of success, and it seemed limitless, not determined by how fast I could run or how far I could throw. The logic, focus and stamina needed to write long, complicated programs came naturally to me. Unlike in hiking, among that group of friends, I was the leader.
When Gates' school got a (DEC) PDP-8 — which cost $8,500 — "For a challenge, I decided I would try to write a version of the Basic programming language for the new computer..." And Gates remembers a long hike where "I silently honed my code" for its formula evaluator: I slimmed it down more, like whittling little pieces off a stick to sharpen the point. What I made seemed efficient and pleasingly simple. It was by far the best code I had ever written...

By the time school started again in the fall, whoever had lent us the PDP-8 had reclaimed it. I never finished my Basic project. But the code I wrote on that hike, my formula evaluator — and its beauty — stayed with me. Three and a half years later, I was a sophomore in college not sure of my path in life when Paul Allen, one of my Lakeside friends, burst into my dorm room with news of a groundbreaking computer. I knew we could write a Basic language for it; we had a head start.
Gates typed his code from that hike, "and with that planted the seed of what would become one of the world's largest companies and the beginning of a new industry."

Gates cites Richard Feynman's description of the excitement and pleasure of "finding the thing out" — the reward for "all of the disciplined thinking and hard work." And he remembers his teenaged years as "intensely driven by the love of what I was learning, accruing expertise just when it was needed: at the dawn of the personal computer."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Late last month, researchers revealed a finding that's likely to shock some people and confirm the low expectations of others: Renewable energy facilities throughout Central Europe use unencrypted radio signals to receive commands to feed or ditch power into or from the grid that serves some 450 million people throughout the continent. Fabian Braunlein and Luca Melette stumbled on their discovery largely by accident while working on what they thought would be a much different sort of hacking project. After observing a radio receiver on the streetlight poles throughout Berlin, they got to wondering: Would it be possible for someone with a central transmitter to control them en masse, and if so, could they create a city-wide light installation along the lines of Project Blinkenlights?

The first Project Blinkenlights iteration occurred in 2001 in Berlin, when the lights inside a large building were synchronized to turn on and off to give the appearance of a giant, low-resolution monochrome computer screen. The researchers, who presented their work last month at the 38th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, wondered if they could control streetlights in Berlin to create a city-wide version, though they acknowledged it would likely be viewable only from high altitudes. They didn't know then, but their project was about to undergo a major transformation.

After an extensive and painstaking reverse-engineering process that took about a year, Braunlein and Melette learned that they could indeed control the streetlights simply by replaying legitimate messages they observed being sent over the air previously. They then learned something more surprising — the very same system for controlling Berlin's lights was used throughout Central Europe to control other regional infrastructure, including switches that regulate the amount of power renewable electric generation facilities feed into the grid. Collectively, the facilities could generate as much as 40 gigawatts in Germany alone, the researchers estimate. In addition, they estimate that in Germany, 20 GW of loads such as heat pumps and wall boxes are controlled via those receivers. That adds up to 60 GW that might be controllable through radio signals anyone can send.

When Braunlein and Melette realized how much power was controlled, they wondered how much damage might result from rogue messages sent simultaneously to multiple power facilities in strategically designed sequences and times of day. By their calculation, an optimally crafted series of messages sent under certain conditions would be enough to bring down the entire European grid. [...] The grid security experts Ars talked to for this story said they're doubtful of the assessment. "A sudden deficit of 60 GW will definitely lead to a brownout because 60 GW is far more than [the] reserves available," said Albert Moser, a RWTH Aachen professor with expertise in power grids. "A sudden deficit of 60 GW could even lead to a blackout due to the very steep fall of frequency that likely cannot be handled fast enough by underfrequency relays (load shedding)." He wasn't able to confirm that 60 GW of generation/load is controlled by radio signals or that security measures for Radio Ripple Control are insufficient.

Jan Hoff, a grid security expert, was also doubtful there'd be enough electricity dropped quickly enough to cause a brownout. "He likened the grid to the roly-poly toys from the 1970s, which were built to be knocked around but not fall over," said Ars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies. Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishing a new paper in the journal Physical Review E that treats chess as a complex system, producing a handy metric that can help predict the proverbial "tipping points" in chess matches. [...]

For his analysis, Barthelemy chose to represent chess as a decision tree in which each "branch" leads to a win, loss, or draw. Players face the challenge of finding the best move amid all this complexity, particularly midgame, in order to steer gameplay into favorable branches. That's where those crucial tipping points come into play. Such positions are inherently unstable, which is why even a small mistake can have a dramatic influence on a match's trajectory. Barthelemy has re-imagined a chess match as a network of forces in which pieces act as the network's nodes, and the ways they interact represent the edges, using an interaction graph to capture how different pieces attack and defend one another. The most important chess pieces are those that interact with many other pieces in a given match, which he calculated by measuring how frequently a node lies on the shortest path between all the node pairs in the network (its "betweenness centrality").

He also calculated so-called "fragility scores," which indicate how easy it is to remove those critical chess pieces from the board. And he was able to apply this analysis to more than 20,000 actual chess matches played by the world's top players over the last 200 years. Barthelemy found that his metric could indeed identify tipping points in specific matches. Furthermore, when he averaged his analysis over a large number of games, an unexpected universal pattern emerged. "We observe a surprising universality: the average fragility score is the same for all players and for all openings," Barthelemy writes. And in famous chess matches, "the maximum fragility often coincides with pivotal moments, characterized by brilliant moves that decisively shift the balance of the game." Specifically, fragility scores start to increase about eight moves before the critical tipping point position occurs and stay high for some 15 moves after that. "These results suggest that positional fragility follows a common trajectory, with tension peaking in the middle game and dissipating toward the endgame," writes Barthelemy. "This analysis highlights the complex dynamics of chess, where the interaction between attack and defense shapes the game's overall structure."

People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder face significantly shorter life expectancy and higher mental health risks, a British study of over 30,000 patients found. The research, published in The British Journal of Psychiatry, showed men with ADHD lived 4.5 to 9 years less, while women's lives were shortened by 6.5 to 11 years.

The study compared primary care data from 30,029 adults with ADHD against 300,400 people without the condition. "Although many people with ADHD live long and healthy lives, our finding that on average they are living shorter lives than they should indicates unmet support needs," said Dr. Liz O'Nions, honorary research fellow at University College London. The study linked ADHD to increased risks of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide, along with higher rates of smoking and alcohol use.

Hackers could steal sensitive personal data from former startup employees by exploiting abandoned company domains and Google login systems, security researcher Dylan Ayrey revealed at ShmooCon conference. The vulnerability particularly affects startups that relied on "Sign in with Google" features for their business software.

Ayrey, CEO of Truffle Security, demonstrated the flaw by purchasing one failed startup's domain and accessing ChatGPT, Slack, Notion, Zoom and an HR system containing Social Security numbers. His research found 116,000 website domains from failed tech startups currently available for sale. While Google offers preventive measures through its OAuth "sub-identifier" system, some providers avoid it due to reliability concerns - which Google disputes. The company initially dismissed Ayrey's finding as a fraud issue before reversing course and awarding him a $1,337 bounty. Google has since updated its documentation but hasn't implemented a technical fix, TechCrunch reports.

Amazon has angered its workers again "after forcing them to return to the office five days a week," reports the New York Post. The problem? "Not enough desks for everyone." (As well as "packed parking lots" that are turning some workers away.)

The Post cites interviews conducted with seven Amazon employees by Business Insider (which notes that in mid-December Amazon had already delayed full return-to-office at dozens of locations, sometimes until as late as May, because of office-capacity issues).

Here in mid-January, the Post writes, many returning-to-office workers still aren't happy: Some meeting rooms have not had enough chairs — and there also have not been enough meeting rooms for everyone, one worker told the publication... [S]imply reaching the office is a challenge in itself, according to the report. Some complained they were turned away from company parking lots that were full, while others griped about having to join meetings from the road due to excess traffic on their way to the office, according to the Slack messages. Once staffers conquer the challenges of reaching the office and finding a desk, some lamented the lack of in-person discussions since many of the meetings remain virtual, according to BI.
Amazon acknowledged they had offices that were "not quite ready" to "welcome everyone back a full five days a week," according to Post, though Amazon believed the number of not-quite-ready offices were "relatively small".

But the parking lot situation may continue. Business Insider says one employee from Amazon's Nashville office "said the wait time for a company parking pass was backed up for months." (Although another Nashville staffer said Amazon was handing out passes for them to take mass-transit for free, which they'd described as "incredibly generous.")

There's also Amazon shuttle busses, according to the article. Although other staffers "said they were denied a spot on Amazon shuttle buses because the vehicles were full..." Others said they just drove back home, while some staffers found street parking nearby, according to multiple Slack messages seen by Business Insider...

This month, some employees were still questioning the logic behind the policy. They said being in the office has had little effect on their work routine and has not generated much of a productivity gain. A considerable portion of their in-office work is still being done through video calls with customers who are elsewhere, these employees told BI. Many Amazon colleagues are at other office locations, so face-to-face meetings still don't happen very often, they added.
The Post adds another drawback of returning to the office. "Employees at Amazon's Toronto office said their personal belongings have repeatedly been stolen from their desks."

A county transit police detective fed a poor-quality image to an AI-powered facial recognition program, remembers the Washington Post, leading to the arrest of "Christopher Gatlin, a 29-year-old father of four who had no apparent ties to the crime scene nor a history of violent offenses." He was unable to post the $75,000 cash bond required, and "jailed for a crime he says he didn't commit, it would take Gatlin more than two years to clear his name." A Washington Post investigation into police use of facial recognition software found that law enforcement agencies across the nation are using the artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence... The Post reviewed documents from 23 police departments where detailed records about facial recognition use are available and found that 15 departments spanning 12 states arrested suspects identified through AI matches without any independent evidence connecting them to the crime — in most cases contradicting their own internal policies requiring officers to corroborate all leads found through AI. Some law enforcement officers using the technology appeared to abandon traditional policing standards and treat software suggestions as facts, The Post found. One police report referred to an uncorroborated AI result as a "100% match." Another said police used the software to "immediately and unquestionably" identify a suspected thief.

Gatlin is one of at least eight people wrongfully arrested in the United States after being identified through facial recognition... All of the cases were eventually dismissed. Police probably could have eliminated most of the people as suspects before their arrest through basic police work, such as checking alibis, comparing tattoos, or, in one case, following DNA and fingerprint evidence left at the scene.
Some statistics from the article about the eight wrongfully-arrested people:

• In six cases police failed to check alibis

• In two cases police ignored evidence that contradicted their theory

• In five cases police failed to collect key pieces of evidence

• In three cases police ignored suspects' physical characteristics

• In six cases police relied on problematic witness statements

The article provides two examples of police departments forced to pay $300,000 settlements after wrongful arrests caused by AI mismatches. But "In interviews with The Post, all eight people known to have been wrongly arrested said the experience had left permanent scars: lost jobs, damaged relationships, missed payments on car and home loans. Some said they had to send their children to counseling to work through the trauma of watching their mother or father get arrested on the front lawn.

"Most said they also developed a fear of police."

Megan Hellerer, a career coach and founder of Coaching for Underfulfilled Overachievers, offers an alternative to the relentless "hustle culture" and "destinational living" mindsets, which often emphasize long-term goals at the expense of present happiness. "There's another way and I call it directional living," writes Hellerer. "Here's the catch: I can't find fulfilment for you. The good news is that it's all up to you..." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report published by The Guardian: Directional living is like the scientific method but for life. You begin with a hypothesis -- your best guess as to the direction of a loose "something bigger". You conduct tests and collect data through your experiences, refining your life hypothesis as you go.

If you have a hypothesis that involves living on the beach, you may test that by renting a house on the coast for one month and collecting data on how right, or not, that is for you. The goal is not to permanently relocate but to find out whether you want to continue exploring that path. Success is in finding what's true, not in proving your original theory correct.

I've found this idea speaks uniquely to UFOAs at this moment in time. [UFOA is a term Hellerer came up with that stands for "underfulfilled overachiever." This describes a constant striver who is living a great-on-paper life, yet feels disconnected from their work, life and self.] The closest thing I have to a personal motto is a quotation that's widely attributed to Carl Jung but that, as it turns out, he never actually said at all. "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are." My greatest hope for you is that you get to live this privilege fully.

A recent 200-page report published by Epyllion reveals that PC gaming has been outperforming consoles over the last decade, "breezing past console platforms and generating more content spending and revenue," reports Insider Gaming. From the report: One slide revealed that since 2011, PC's content spend has dominated 'living room' console revenue by more than 65%, and it has earned 225% more than 'combined console' spend. That's a total of $30 billion if you want to put a number on it. Those numbers exclude hardware and accessories.

The report also showed that mobile gaming is leagues ahead of both PC and console platforms, representing the number one money maker in the games industry. This stat has been recorded despite an $18 billion increase in spending on console platforms in 2024 compared to 2011. That 75% increase is still trumped by content spend on PC platforms. But why is PC becoming increasingly popular and much more profitable? Epyllion suggested it boils down to a few core reasons:

- PC platforms have a much larger library of games and 'near-full backwards compatibility'
- On a PC, you can multi-task (stream, communicate, alt+tab, multiple monitors)
- Lower entry price point than consoles
- Higher top-end performance
- Better for esports and competitive gaming
- Able to play more early-access games
- More annual game releases
- Console 'exclusives' are now finding their way to PC

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: The Supreme Court on Monday said it will not consider whether to quash lawsuits brought by Honolulu seeking billions of dollars from oil and gas companies for the damage caused by the effects of climate change, clearing the way for the cases to move forward. The legal battle pursued in Hawaii state court is similar to others filed against the nation's largest energy companies by state and local governments in their courts. The suits claim that the oil and gas industry engaged in a deceptive campaign and misled the public about the dangers of their fossil fuel products and the environmental impacts.

A group of 15 energy companies asked the Supreme Court to review a decision from the Hawaii Supreme Court that allowed a lawsuit brought by the city and county of Honolulu, as well as its Board of Water Supply, to proceed. The suit was brought in Hawaii state court in March 2020, and Honolulu raised (PDF) several claims under state law, including creating a public nuisance and failure to warn the public of the risks posed by their fossil fuel products. The city accused the oil and gas industry of contributing to global climate change, leading to flooding, erosion and more frequent and intense extreme weather events. These changes, they said, have led to property damage and a drop in tax revenue as a result of less tourism.

The energy companies unsuccessfully sought to have the case moved to federal court, arguing that the claims raised by Honolulu under state law were overridden by federal law and the Clean Air Act. A state trial court denied their efforts to dismiss the case. The oil and gas industry has argued that greenhouse-gas emissions "flow from billions of daily choices, over more than a century, by governments, companies and individuals about what types of fuels to use, and how to use them." Honolulu, the companies said, was seeking damages for the "cumulative effect of worldwide emissions leading to global climate change." The Hawaii Supreme Court ultimately allowed (PDF) the lawsuit to proceed. The state's highest court determined that the Clean Air Act displaced federal common law governing suits seeking damages for interstate pollution. It also rejected the oil companies' argument that Honolulu was seeking to regulate emissions through its lawsuit, finding that the city instead wanted to challenge the promotion and sale of fossil fuel products "without warning and abetted by a sophisticated disinformation campaign."

"Plaintiffs' state tort law claims do not seek to regulate emissions, and there is thus no 'actual conflict' between Hawaii tort law and the [Clean Air Act]," the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled. "These claims potentially regulate marketing conduct while the CAA regulates pollution." The oil companies asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the ruling from the Hawaii high court and urged it to stop Honolulu's lawsuit from going forward. Regulation of interstate pollution is a federal area governed by federal law, lawyers for the energy industry argued. [...] The Supreme Court in June asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the cases and whether it should step into the dispute. In a filing submitted to the Supreme Court before the transfer of presidential power, the Biden administration urged the justices to turn away the appeals, in part because it said it is too soon for them to intervene.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Akamai has decided to end its content delivery network services in China, but not because it's finding it hard to do business in the Middle Kingdom. News of Akamai's decision to end CDN services in China emerged in a letter it recently published and sent to customers and partners that opens by reminding them the company has a "commitment to providing world-class delivery and security solutions" -- and must therefore inform them that "Effective June 30, 2026, all China CDN services will reach their decommission date."

Customers are offered a choice: do nothing and then be moved to an Akamai CDN located outside China, or use similar services from Chinese companies Tencent Cloud and Wangsu Science & Technology.

Scientists have discovered that quarks and gluons inside protons are quantum entangled, challenging traditional views of proton structure and revealing a more complex, dynamic system influenced by strong interactions. Space.com reports: Entanglement is the aspect of quantum physics that says two affected particles can instantaneously influence each other's "state" no matter how widely separated they are -- even if they are on opposite sides of the universe. Albert Einstein founded his theories of relativity on the notion that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, however, something that should preclude the instantaneous nature of entanglement.

As a result, Einstein was so troubled by entanglement he famously described it as "spukhafte Fernwirkung" or "spooky action at a distance." Yet, despite Einstein's skepticism about entanglement, this "spooky" phenomenon has been verified over and over again. Many of those verifications have concerned testing increasing distances over which entanglement can be demonstrated. This new test took the opposite approach, investigating entanglement over a distance of just one quadrillionth of a meter, finding it actually occurs within individual protons.

The team found that the sharing of information that defines entanglement occurs across whole groups of fundamental particles called quarks and gluons within a proton. "Before we did this work, no one had looked at entanglement inside of a proton in experimental high-energy collision data," team member and Brookhaven Lab physicist Zhoudunming Tu said in a statement. "For decades, we've had a traditional view of the proton as a collection of quarks and gluons, and we've been focused on understanding so-called single-particle properties, including how quarks and gluons are distributed inside the proton. "Now, with evidence that quarks and gluons are entangled, this picture has changed. We have a much more complicated, dynamic system." The team's research, the culmination of six years of work, refines scientists' understanding of how entanglement influences the structure of protons. The team's research was published in the journal Reports on Progress in Physics.

More than 1.6 million Americans have been jobless for at least six months, up 50% since late 2022, despite the economy adding over two million jobs last year, Labor Department data shows.

The average job search now takes six months, primarily affecting high-paying sectors like tech, law, and media. While the 4.2% unemployment rate remains below pre-pandemic averages, job postings have dropped to one per unemployed worker from two in early 2022.

Software development, data science, and marketing roles are 20% below pre-pandemic levels, while healthcare and government sectors account for half of recent job creation. The number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits reached 1.8 million in late December, approaching post-pandemic highs, as wage growth declined to 4% from 6% during the early 2020s hiring peak.

Lost deliveries, shipping delays and theft on the front porch have become such growing problems that companies are making consumers pay for package protection. From a report: Tens of thousands of online retailers now offer the service for a few dollars per order. The fees go to young companies -- Route and Corso, to name two -- that promise to make customers whole without charging the merchant if a delivery doesn't arrive. Consumers are finding that retailers either ask them to pay for package protection or draw a harder line when it comes to replacing a missing item. Some retailers are making the fees mandatory, spreading the burden of package theft among all customers.

To know whether you are paying the fee, review your order before you press purchase. Sometimes it is named after the company offering protection, and sometimes it is called shipping insurance or package protection. Skincare brand Topicals began using Corso two years ago after seeing 30% of its packages were regularly marked delivered but not received, according to customer insights manager Deja Jefferson. By requiring protection, which Topicals discloses on its shipping page, the company doesn't have to worry about convincing customers to opt in. "We actually don't get any complaints on it whatsoever," she said. Further reading: Porch Pirates Steal So Many Packages That Now You Can Get Insurance.

Newsweek supplies some context After his arrest, merch — including T-shirts featuring Mangione's booking photos and others taken from his social media accounts — began popping up for sale on several sites. Websites, including Amazon, eBay and Etsy, have moved to take down products that glorify violence or the suspect. An eBay spokesperson told Newsweek that "items that glorify or incite violence, including those that celebrate the recent murder of UHC CEO Brian Thompson, are prohibited."
Inc. magazine adds: Separately, GoFundMe has shuttered several fundraising campaigns created for Mangione. The fundraising site's terms and conditions are pretty clear on the matter, NBC News reports, with a company spokesperson explaining they prohibit "fundraisers for the legal defense of violent crimes."
But one incident was different, according to a post from the law school of the University of British Columbia: To provide a quick summary, Rachel Kenaston, an artist selling merch on TeePublic received an e-mail from the platform regarding intellectual property claim by UnitedHealth Group Inc and decided to remove Kenaston's design from the merch store. Obviously, it is important to point out that it isn't quite clear who is filing those DMCA claims. While TeePublic, in the email, claimed that they have no say in the matter, [an article from 404 Media] goes on to explain that TeePublic has the right to refuse DMCA claims, but often choose not to in order to avoid headache. The design had nothing to do with UnitedHealthcare-it seems to be a picture of the Mangione in a heart frame. Meaning, whether it was UnitedHealthcare or not, the claim shouldn't hold any weight.

Consensus seems to be mostly leaning towards speculation that it is unlikely to be UnitedHealthcare actually filing those DMCA claims, but rather potential competitors... Regardless of whether or not it really was UnitedHealthcare that filed DMCA claims, I think the important point here is that the merch actually did get taken down. In fact, this would be more problematic if it was from a competitor using DMCA as a form of removing competition, because, then it really has nothing to do with intellectual property. I would assume that this happens quite frequently. Especially for YouTubers, it seems that copyright strikes are more than a mere pesky occurrence, but for many, something that affects livelihood...

The difficult part, as always, is finding the balance between protecting the rights of the copyright holders and ensuring that the mechanisms doesn't get abused.
The artist told Gizmodo she was filing a counterclaim to the copyright notice, adding that instead of a DMCA, "I honestly expected the design to be pulled for condoning violence or something..."

Gizmodo published the image — a watercolored rendition of a hostel surveillance-camera photo released by police — adding "UnitedHealth Group didn't respond to questions emailed on Monday [December 16] about how the company could possibly claim a copyright violation had occurred." And while Gizmodo promised they'd update the post if UnitedHealth responded — there has been no update since...

404 Media adds that the watercolor "is not the only United Healthcare or Luigi Mangione-themed artwork on the internet that has been hit with bogus DMCA takedowns in recent days. Several platforms publish the DMCA takedown requests they get on the Lumen Database, which is a repository of DMCA takedowns." On December 7, someone named Samantha Montoya filed a DMCA takedown with Google that targeted eight websites selling "Deny, Defend, Depose" merch that uses elements of the United Healthcare logo... Medium, one of the targeted websites, has deleted the page that the merch was hosted on...

Over the weekend, a lawyer demanded that independent journalist Marisa Kabas take down an image of Luigi Mangione and his family that she posted to Bluesky, which was originally posted on the campaign website of Maryland assemblymember Nino Mangione. The lawyer, Desiree Moore, said she was "acting on behalf of our client, the Doe Family," and claimed that "the use of this photograph is not authorized by the copyright owner and is not otherwise permitted by law..." In a follow-up email to Kabas, Moore said "the owner of the photograph has not authorized anyone to publish, disseminate, or otherwise use the photograph for any purpose, and the photograph has been removed from various digital platforms as a result," which suggests that other websites have also been threatened with takedown requests. Moore also said that her "client seeks to remain anonymous" and that "the photograph is hardly newsworthy."
404 Media believes the takedown request "shows that the Mangione family or someone associated with it is using the prospect of a copyright lawsuit to threaten journalists for reporting on one of the most important stories of the year..."

UPDATE: Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland notes there's an interesting precedent from 2007: [D]eep within the DMCA law is a counter-provision — 512(f), which states that misrepresenting yourself as a copyright owner has consequences. Any damage caused by harmful misrepresentation must be reimbursed. In 2004 the Electronic Frontier Foundation won a six-figure award from Diebold Election Systems, who had claimed a "copyright" on embarrassing internal memos which were published online.

Scripps Research scientists sent stem-cell-derived brain organoids to the ISS to study the effects of microgravity on brain cells, finding that the organoids matured faster and showed signs of specialization compared to Earth-grown controls. The findings have been published in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine. Phys.Org reports: To examine how the space environment impacts cellular functions, the team compared the cells' RNA expression patterns -- a measure of gene activity -- to identical "ground control" organoids that had remained on Earth. Surprisingly, they found that the organoids grown in microgravity had higher levels of genes associated with maturity and lower levels of genes associated with proliferation compared to the ground controls, meaning that the cells exposed to microgravity developed faster and replicated less than those on Earth. "We discovered that in both types of organoids, the gene expression profile was characteristic of an older stage of development than the ones that were on the ground," [says co-senior author Jeanne Loring, Ph.D., professor emeritus in the Department of Molecular Medicine and founding director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Scripps Research]. "In microgravity, they developed faster, but it's really important to know these were not adult neurons, so this doesn't tell us anything about aging."

The team also noted that contrary to their hypothesis, there was less inflammation and lower expression of stress-related genes in organoids grown in microgravity, but more research is needed to determine why. Loring speculates that microgravity conditions may more closely mirror the conditions experienced by cells within the brain compared to organoids grown under conventional lab conditions and in the presence of gravity. "The characteristics of microgravity are probably also at work in people's brains, because there's no convection in microgravity -- in other words, things don't move," says Loring. "I think that in space, these organoids are more like the brain because they're not getting flushed with a whole bunch of culture medium or oxygen. They're very independent; they form something like a brainlet, a microcosm of the brain." "The next thing we plan to do is to study the part of the brain that's most affected by Alzheimer's disease," says Loring. "We also want to know whether there are differences in the way neurons connect with each other in space. With these kinds of studies, you can't rely on earlier work to predict what the result would be because there is no earlier work. We're on the ground floor, so to speak; in the sky, but on the ground floor."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Return-to-office (RTO) mandates have caused companies to lose some of their best workers, a study tracking over 3 million workers at 54 "high-tech and financial" firms at the S&P 500 index has found. These companies also have greater challenges finding new talent, the report concluded. The paper, Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain [PDF], comes from researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as Baylor University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. The study, which was published in November, spotted this month by human resources (HR) publication HR Dive, and cites Ars Technica reporting, was conducted by collecting information on RTO announcements and sourcing data from LinkedIn.

The researchers said they only examined companies with data available for at least two quarters before and after they issued RTO mandates. The researchers explained: "To collect employee turnover data, we follow prior literature ... and obtain the employment history information of over 3 million employees of the 54 RTO firms from Revelio Labs, a leading data provider that extracts information from employee LinkedIn profiles. We manually identify employees who left a firm during each period, then calculate the firm's turnover rate by dividing the number of departing employees by the total employee headcount at the beginning of the period. We also obtain information about employees' gender, seniority, and the number of skills listed on their individual LinkedIn profiles, which serves as a proxy for employees' skill level."

There are limits to the study, however. The researchers noted that the study "cannot draw causal inferences based on our setting." Further, smaller firms and firms outside of the high-tech and financial industries may show different results. Although not mentioned in the report, relying on data from a social media platform could also yield inaccuracies, and the number of skills listed on a LinkedIn profile may not accurately depict a worker's skill level. [...] The researchers concluded that the average turnover rates for firms increased by 14 percent after issuing return-to-office policies. "We expect the effect of RTO mandates on employee turnover to be even higher for other firms" the paper says.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon Web Services said in a post earlier this month that developers report spending an average of "just one hour per day" on actual coding. But that doesn't mean these workers twiddle their thumbs the remaining seven hours per day. Instead, developers spend the majority of their time on "tedious, undifferentiated tasks such as learning codebases, writing and reviewing documentation, testing, managing deployments, troubleshooting issues or finding and fixing vulnerabilities," according to Amazon Web Services.