Krebs on Security reports: In the United States, when federal, state or local law enforcement agencies wish to obtain information about who owns an account at a social media firm, or what Internet addresses a specific cell phone account has used in the past, they must submit an official court-ordered warrant or subpoena. Virtually all major technology companies serving large numbers of users online have departments that routinely review and process such requests, which are typically granted as long as the proper documents are provided and the request appears to come from an email address connected to an actual police department domain name. But in certain circumstances -- such as a case involving imminent harm or death -- an investigating authority may make what's known as an Emergency Data Request (EDR), which largely bypasses any official review and does not require the requestor to supply any court-approved documents.

It is now clear that some hackers have figured out there is no quick and easy way for a company that receives one of these EDRs to know whether it is legitimate. Using their illicit access to police email systems, the hackers will send a fake EDR along with an attestation that innocent people will likely suffer greatly or die unless the requested data is provided immediately. In this scenario, the receiving company finds itself caught between two unsavory outcomes: Failing to immediately comply with an EDR -- and potentially having someone's blood on their hands -- or possibly leaking a customer record to the wrong person. "We have a legal process to compel production of documents, and we have a streamlined legal process for police to get information from ISPs and other providers," said Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. "And then we have this emergency process, almost like you see on [the television series] Law & Order, where they say they need certain information immediately," Rasch continued. "Providers have a streamlined process where they publish the fax or contact information for police to get emergency access to data. But there's no real mechanism defined by most Internet service providers or tech companies to test the validity of a search warrant or subpoena. And so as long as it looks right, they'll comply." To make matters more complicated, there are tens of thousands of police jurisdictions around the world -- including roughly 18,000 in the United States alone -- and all it takes for hackers to succeed is illicit access to a single police email account.

As viewership drops for Hollywood's annual Academy Awards ceremony, "Everyone has a theory about the decline..." argues an opinion piece in the New York Times.

"My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing." When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, "Dune," barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as "Spider-Man: No Way Home." Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn't there for it anymore.... Sure, non-superhero-movie box office totals will bounce back in 2022, and next year's best picture nominees will probably earn a little more in theaters. Within the larger arc of Hollywood history, though, this is the time to call it: We aren't just watching the decline of the Oscars; we're watching the End of the Movies....

[W]hat looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.... The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood's potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema's communalism. Special effects opened spectacular (if sometimes antiseptic-seeming) vistas and enabled long-unfilmable stories to reach big screens. But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today....

Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There's no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences. The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined...

[T]he caliber of instantly available TV entertainment exceeds anything on cable 20 years ago. But these productions are still a different kind of thing from The Movies as they were — because of their reduced cultural influence, the relative smallness of their stars, their lost communal power, but above all because stories told for smaller screens cede certain artistic powers in advance.
The article argues that episodic TV also cedes the Movies' power of an-entire-story-in-one-go condensation. ("This power is why the greatest movies feel more complete than almost any long-form television.") And it ultimately suggests that like opera or ballet, these grand old movies need "encouragement and patronage, to educate people into loves that earlier eras took for granted," and maybe even "an emphasis on making the encounter with great cinema a part of a liberal arts education. "

In 2014 one lone film-maker had even argued that Ben Stiller's spectacular-yet-thoughtful Secret Life of Walter Mitty "might be the last of a dying breed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Last year, the Graph Foundation had to rethink how it develops and distributes its Open Native Graph Database (ONgDB) after it settled a trademark and copyright claim by database biz Neo4j. The Graph Foundation agreed [PDF] it would no longer claim specific versions of ONgDB, its Neo4j Enterprise Edition fork, are a "100 percent free and open source version" of Neo4J EE. And last month, two other companies challenged by Neo4j -- PureThink and iGov -- were also required by a court ruling to make similar concessions.

ONgDB is forked from Neo4j EE, which in May 2018 dropped the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) and adopted a new license that incorporates the AGPLv3 alongside additional limitations spelled out in the Commons Clause license. This new Neo4j EE license forbade non-paying users of the software from reselling the code or offering some support services, and thus is not open source as defined by the Open Source Initiative. The Graph Foundation, PureThink, and iGov offered ONgDB as a "free and open source" version of Neo4j in the hope of winning customers who preferred an open-source license. That made it more challenging for Neo4j to compete.

So in 2018 and 2019 Neo4j and its Swedish subsidiary pursued legal claims against the respective firms and their principals for trademark and copyright infringement, among other things. The Graph Foundation settled [PDF] in February 2021 as the company explained in a blog post. The organization discontinued support for ONgDB versions 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6. And it released ONgDB 1.0 in their place as a fork of AGPLv3 licensed Neo4j EE version 3.4.0.rc02. Last May, the judge hearing the claims against PureThink, and iGov granted Neo4j's motion for partial summary judgment [PDF] and forbade the defendants from infringing on the company's Neo4j trademark and from advertising ONgDB "as a free and open source drop-in replacement of Neo4j Enterprise Edition" The defendants appealed, and in February the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court decision that the company's "statements regarding ONgDB as 'free and open source' versions of Neo4j EE are false." "Stop saying Open Source when it's not," said the Open Source Initiative in a blog post. "The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed a lower court decision concluding what we've always known: that it's false advertising to claim that software is 'open source' when it's not licensed under an open source license."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) announced Thursday a new bill to block cryptocurrency companies from conducting business with sanctioned companies. The Digital Assets Sanctions Compliance Enhancement Act, introduced with Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and others, would allow the U.S. president to add non-U.S.-based crypto companies to sanctions list if they support sanctions evasion.

"This is a bill that would authorize the president to sanction foreign cryptocurrency firms that are doing business with sanctioned Russian entities and authorize the Secretary of Treasury to act," she said. According to a draft of the bill, the presidential administration would be tasked with identifying "any foreign person" who operates a crypto exchange or otherwise facilitates digital asset transactions who has also supported sanctions evasion by Russian individuals named to the Office of Foreign Asset Control's sanctions list. Moreover, the U.S. president could sanction these exchange operators unless there was a national security interest in not doing so. The U.S. Treasury secretary could also require that crypto exchanges operating in the U.S. not conduct transactions for, or otherwise work with, crypto addresses belonging to people based in Russia if this is deemed to be in the national interest. The Treasury secretary would have to report to Congress about this decision.

The bill seems to extend beyond just Russian sanctions. Another provision would authorize the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to identify users transacting with more than $10,000 in crypto. "Not later than 120 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network shall require United States persons engaged in a transaction with a value greater than $10,000 in digital assets through [one] or more accounts outside of the United States to file a report," the bill said. The Treasury secretary would also be tasked with identifying exchanges that could be at "high risk for sanctions evasion" or other crimes, and reporting these entities to Congress. "Any exchange included in the report may petition the Office of Foreign Assets Control for removal, which shall be granted upon demonstrating that the exchange is taking steps sufficient to comply with applicable United States law," the bill said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Today, the European Space Agency leadership took steps toward suspending the ExoMars mission, a joint project with Russian space agency Roscosmos. It's the latest scientific fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has forced institutions collaborating with Russian entities to reevaluate their positions.

ExoMars a two-part mission: an orbiter, launched in 2016, that studies the chemistry of the Red Planet's atmosphere, and a Mars rover, named for scientist Rosalind Franklin and set to launch this year -- or at least, it was. The mission has been a long time coming; funding was granted 10 years ago this week, but technical delays and the covid-19 pandemic pushed the rover launch date back to fall 2022. That target was looking viable until the Russian invasion of Ukraine last month.

From the off, it was clear that ExoMars was in doubt. In a statement shortly after the invasion, the ESA said it was "fully implementing sanctions imposed on Russia by our Member States" and that "the sanctions and the wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely." The agency's most recent move codifies that unlikeliness. Meeting in Paris this week, the agency's ruling council unanimously mandated that the ESA Director General take steps to suspend cooperation with Roscosmos and authorized a study of how to get ExoMars off the ground without Roscosmos involvement. [...] In its newest statement, ESA announced that its director general would convene a meeting of the agency council in several weeks to submit proposals for how to proceed with ExoMars without Russian involvement.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's attempt to appeal extradition was denied by the UK's Supreme Court on Monday. Assange was initially granted the right to petition the court in late January. From a report: The UK's highest court denied Assange's bid because "the application does not raise an arguable point of law," according to a statement released by the court. Assange faces espionage charges relating to WikiLeaks' release of confidential US military records about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange could potentially face a 175-year jail sentence, though US officials said, if he's convicted, his sentence would likely be between four and six years.

For the last two years, Unified Patents, an international organization of over 200 businesses, has been winning the battle against patent trolls "to keep them from stealing from the companies and organizations that actually use patents' intellectual property (IP)," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan Nichols. "This is their story to date." From the report: Unified Patents brings the fight to the trolls. It deters patent trolls from attacking its members by making it too expensive for the troll to win. The group does this by examining troll patents and their activities in various technology sectors (Zones). The United Patents Open Source Software Zone (OSS Zone) is the newest of these Zones. [...] Even before OSS Zone was formally launched, Unified Patents along with the Open Invention Network (OIN), the world's largest patent non-aggression group, launched legal cases against poor quality PAE-owned (Patent Assertion Entities) patents. The Linux Foundation and Microsoft have also joined the OSS Zone to battle these bad patents. [...]

Together, United Patents uses open-source software evidence as proof to establish that the trolls often don't have a case. This is done using Inter Partes Review (IPR), a 2012 legal tool for showing that a bad patent never should have been granted in the first place. [Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin] notes, "The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)'s discretionary rulings on IPRs have changed the landscape around NPEs. These cases take a long time to be resolved. Typically, it takes from 12 to 24 months. That also makes them expensive for both the OSS Zone and the trolls. Keith Bergelt, the OIN's CEO, said "In other technology areas when patents go through the IPR process or are reexamined, there is a settlement around 20% of the time. In the OSS Zone, there are few settlements. This makes it more costly and difficult to administer, but also is difficult on the PAEs. When the success rate against their patents is over 95%, certain PAEs that would otherwise hope to settle have essentially given up on defending their patents." Still, with such a high success rate, it's worth the expense.

To date, Unified has overseen and managed 43 challenges. Of these, 12 patents were found invalid, another 23 cases have been instituted, and six are still in process. This has led to multiple settlements for Unified Patents members. These, in turn directly pass through to OIN's 3,600+ community members. For example, an Accelerated Memory Tech patent 6,513,062, was used by the troll IP Investments Group to claim that the open-source Redis, which manages cache resources on the cloud, violated the patent. Redis, not having any money, IP Investments Group instead went after Hulu, Citrix Systems, Barracuda Networks, Kemp Technologies, and F5 Networks for their use of Redis software. IP Investments Group gave up rather than fighting it out. Everyone who uses Redis wins. It's one small victory, but that's how the patent troll wars are won. And, with the United Patents' high-success rate in knocking out bad patents, slowly but surely the patent trolls are being driven back from not only open-source software but all software.

Thursday the Washington Post reported the Ukrainian government had already received more than $42 million in cryptocurrency donations since last Saturday — "plus digital artwork including a limited edition worth roughly $200,000," according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. Some of the crypto donations have already been converted into traditional currency, primarily euros, according to Kuna.io, the Kyiv-based cryptocurrency exchange that helped the government set up and manage its crypto wallets for donations. The money was then used to buy critical supplies like drones, bulletproof vests, heat-sensitive goggles and gasoline, from both state actors and the private sector.

None of the more than 180 donated digital artworks — known as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs — have been sold, according to data from blockchains, which store information in an immutable, public digital ledger.... Ukraine, which hadn't asked for NFTs, received a map of the Donetsk area of eastern Ukraine, parts of which have been controlled by Russian-backed separatists, in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, plus photos of blue-and-yellow peace signs and an animated "fire dragon." NFT donations also included images from the Shibelon collection, which is "based on a mythology in which Elon Musk was granted genius powers by an alien, who also created bitcoin," wrote journalist
In addition to well-established cryptocurrencies, Ukraine received donations denominated in almost 100 obscure digital currencies, according to a Post analysis of data from Etherscan. They included a new one named Save Ukraine, another with a racially abusive name, and several themed after crypto community in-jokes focused on dogs and Musk, the Tesla CEO. The government's strategy has been to convert less popular cryptocurrencies into traditional money first and hold bitcoin and ether in reserves because they are more stable and liquid, Chobanian said. Donations were still streaming in as new efforts to raise crypto for the Ukrainian government cropped up.

Early Tuesday morning Ukraine time, Ukraine's 31-year-old deputy prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced AidForUkraine, a joint effort of his Digital Ministry, developers behind the Solana blockchain and Everstake. So far, AidForUkraine has raised $1.4 million, according to its website.... The speed with which the AidForUkraine fundraising effort came together was "magic," said Everstake's Vasylchuk, who fled Kyiv days before the invasion thanks to his pilot's license and is in temporary housing in Florida.... Beyond the official government-led effort, Come Back Alive, an NGO benefiting Ukraine's army, has also received millions in cryptocurrency donations — and is getting millions more from UkraineDAO, a group organized on the blockchain that held an auction to raise funds, according to blockchain data. The NGO organizers pivoted to crypto after their campaign was suspended from Patreon. But UkraineDAO is limiting spending to helping the victims of war, the New York Times reported. Patreon spokesperson Ellen Satterwhite said that would "absolutely be allowable under our guidelines."
Elsewhere On GoFundMe, Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher have already raised over $15 million for refugee and humanitarian aid — in just one day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Waymo, the autonomous driving arm of Alphabet, was granted a win on Tuesday when a California court ruled it could keep certain details regarding its AV technology secret. The company filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Motor Vehicles in late January in order to keep some information about its autonomous vehicle deployment permit, as well as emails between the DMV and the company, redacted from a public record request, which was originally filed by an undisclosed third party. The ruling by the California Superior Court, Sacramento could set a precedent for broader trade secret protection, at least in the autonomous vehicle industry, involving public access to information that has to do with public safety, but which businesses claim contain trade secrets.

In its lawsuit, Waymo argued being forced to reveal trade secrets would undermine its investments into automated driving technology and have a "chilling effect across the industry" where the DMV is no longer a safe space for companies to transparently share information about their tech. "We're pleased that the court reached the right decision in granting Waymo's request for a preliminary injunction, precluding the disclosure of competitively-sensitive trade secrets that Waymo had included in the permit application it submitted to the CA DMV," a Waymo spokesperson told TechCrunch. "We will continue to openly share safety and other data on our autonomous driving technology and operations, while recognizing that detailed technical information we share with regulators is not always appropriate for sharing with the public." [...] "These R&D efforts take many years and an enormous financial investment," reads Waymo's declaration shared with the court. "Waymo's AV development began as part of Google in 2009 before Waymo became its own company in 2016; therefore, Waymo's AVs have been in development for more than 12 years. Waymo has invested truly significant amounts researching and developing its AV products." It is difficult, however, to determine whether or not the information actually contains trade secrets without being able to see any of it.

"The question is, can the company derive economic value purely from not sharing that information with others?" Matthew Wansley, former general counsel of nuTonomy (which Aptiv acquired) and a law professor at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law in New York, told TechCrunch. [...] "I looked through the complaint that Waymo filed, and the categories of information they're talking about are pretty broad," said Wansley. "Are there trade secrets in that set of information that they sent? Probably, there are some. Does it include all of the information they sent? Almost certainly not. The only thing that would surprise me is if everything they're claiming is a trade secret is actually a trade secret. But without knowing the specific information that they share with regulators, it's just hard to know." And now the public will never know. In an effort to assuage any fears about its technology, the report notes that Waymo "has submitted a safety self-assessment to the U.S. Department of Transportation, and is publishing a law enforcement interaction guide and a detailed description of its safety methodologies."

Microsoft last month received a US patent covering modifications to a data-encoding technique called rANS, one of several variants in the Asymmetric Numeral System (ANS) family that support data compression schemes used by leading technology companies and open source projects. The Register reports: The creator of ANS, Jaroslaw Duda, assistant professor at Institute of Computer Science at Jagiellonian University in Poland, has been trying for years to keep ANS patent-free and available for public use. Back in 2018, Duda's lobbying helped convince Google to abandon its ANS-related patent claim in the US and Europe. And he raised the alarm last year when he learned Microsoft had applied for an rANS (range asymmetric number system) patent.

Now that Microsoft's patent application has been granted, he fears the utility of ANS will be diminished, as software developers try to steer clear of a potential infringement claim. "I don't know what to do with it -- [Microsoft's patent] looks like just the description of the standard algorithm," he told The Register in an email. The algorithm is used in JPEG XL and CRAM, as well as open source projects run by Facebook (Meta), Nvidia, and others. "This rANS variant is [for example] used in JPEG XL, which is practically finished (frozen bitstream) and [is] gaining support," Duda told The Register last year. "It provides ~3x better compression than JPEG at similar computational cost, compatibility with JPEG, progressive decoding, missing features like HDR, alpha, lossless, animations. "There is a large team, mostly from Google, behind it. After nearly 30 years, it should finally replace the 1992 JPEG for photos and images, starting with Chrome, Android."

Last month streamers in China discovered that Fight Club had arrived on streaming platform Tencent — but with an entirely new ending where local authorities "rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals....."

But now there's been another round of changes, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "After widespread online backlash to clumsy censorship of the film's ending, Chinese streaming service Tencent Video backtracked in recent days and restored most of the cuts it had made." Crucially, Fight Club's complete ending is now viewable in full in China...

News of the cuts went viral around the world and sparked much debate and embarrassment on Chinese social media about local censorship practices.... [I]t would appear that the backlash has been deemed more troublesome than the fictional film's ending, as Tencent has now restored 11 of the 12 minutes it originally cut from the 137-minute movie. The minute still missing is mostly comprised of brief nude sex scenes between Brad Pitt's and Helena Bonham Carter's characters.
Insider reports that changing the original ending provoked comments like these on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo:

- "This has become a Chinese-only joke. Even dogs won't want to watch this."

- "This is exactly why, even if you have streaming platform subscriptions, you still have to watch pirated versions."


And it brought massive attention to China's history of changing movies, notes the Wrap since "word quickly spread across the globe, bringing embarrassment to the country," reports the Wrap: Censorship of American films and TV shows at the behest of Chinese officials has become common as Hollywood has made in-roads in the country over the past decade. Last year, an episode of "The Simpsons" in which the titular family visits China was removed from Disney+ in Hong Kong over a joke made in the film about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the Chinese government's censorship of the event.
Even the South China Morning Post reported that Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel that inspired the film, "appeared to mock the move on Twitter. 'Everyone gets a happy ending in China!' he wrote..." Similar changes have been made to other films in China in the past. Nicolas Cage's 2005 crime film Lord of War had its final half-hour cut and replaced with text reading, "Yuri Orlov confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end."
And another example from the Hollywood Reporter: After 20th Century Fox's Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody won multiple Oscars in the 2018, it was granted a theatrical release in China — but only after all mentions of Freddie Mercury's homosexuality were cut from the film.
But in this case a global popular outcry appears to have been too embarrasing to endure. According to the Hollywood Reporter now we even have an expected ending to the story of how China tried to censor Fight Club.

"Reversals of censorship actions are extremely rare within China's entertainment industry — but cuts to Hollywood movies are not."

"Intel will have to defend itself against claims that the semiconductor goliath knew its microprocessors were defective and failed to tell customers," reports the Register: On Wednesday, Judge Michael Simon, of the US District Court of Oregon, partially denied the tech giant's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit arising from the 2018 public disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, the family of data-leaking chip microarchitecture design blunders....

To defend against Meltdown and Spectre, Intel and other affected vendors have had to add software and hardware mitigations that for some workloads make patched processors mildly to significantly slower. The disclosure of related flaws has continued since that time, as researchers develop variations on the initial attacks and find other parts of chips that similarly expose privileged data. It is a problem that still is not entirely solved...

[L]awsuits have been consolidated into a multi-district proceeding known as "Intel Corp. CPU Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation" (3:18-md-02828-SI). And since 2018, Intel has been trying to get them to go away. Twice before the judge had dismissed the plaintiffs' complaint while allowing the plaintiffs to amend and refile their allegations. This third time, the judge only partially granted Intel's motion to toss the case. Judge Simon dismissed claims based on purchases up through August 2017 because Intel was unaware of the microarchitecture vulnerabilities up to that point. But he allowed seven claims, from September 2017 onward, to proceed, finding the plaintiffs' contention that Intel delayed disclosure of the flaws to maximize holiday season sales plausible enough to allow the case to move forward.

"Based on plaintiffs' allegations, it is not clear that Intel had a countervailing business interest other than profit for delaying disclosure for as long as it did (through the holiday season), for downplaying the negative effects of the mitigation, for suppressing the effects of the mitigation, and for continuing to embargo further security exploits that affect only Intel processors," the judge wrote in his order. [PDF]

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange scored a small win in court in London on Monday, when a judge granted him the right to appeal to the UK's Supreme Court over his extradition to the US. From a report: The High Court ruled that Assange has points that Supreme Court justices may want to consider ahead of the UK extraditing him. Assange will now petition the UK's Supreme Court for a hearing, but there is no guarantee his request will be granted. As his case proceeds through the courts, his extradition will continue to be stalled and Assange will remain in Belmarsh Prison, where' has been held since leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2019. "Today we won -- but Julian continues to suffer," said Stella Moris, Assange's fiancee, speaking outside the court on Monday. "Julian must be freed." Monday's decision follows a ruling by a High Court judge in December granting the US permission to go through with the extradition. It overturned a previous decision by a District Court judge that blocked Assange's extradition on mental health grounds. The WikiLeaks founder has raised a legal question about the circumstances in which the High Court received assurances from the US over the treatment he would receive in prison.

The months-long project demonstrates the physics behind the CPUs we take for granted. From a report: Computer chips have become so tiny and complex that it's sometimes hard to remember that there are real physical principles behind them. They aren't just a bunch of ever-increasing numbers. For a practical (well, virtual) example, check out the latest version of a computer processor built exclusively inside the Minecraft game engine. Minecraft builder "Sammyuri" spent seven months building what they call the Chungus 2, an enormously complex computer processor that exists virtually inside the Minecraft game engine. This project isn't the first time a computer processor has been virtually rebuilt inside Minecraft, but the Chungus 2 (Computation Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit) might very well be the largest and most complex, simulating an 8-bit processor with a one hertz clock speed and 256 bytes of RAM. Minecraft processors use the physics engine of the game to recreate the structure of real processors on a macro scale, with materials including redstone dust, torches, repeaters, pistons, levers, and other simple machines. For a little perspective, each "block" inside the game is one virtual meter on each side, so recreating this build in the real world would make it approximately the size of a skyscraper or cruise ship.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is facing the prospect of imminent extradition to the US after the UK High Court granted an appeal by the US government against an earlier (January) refusal by a UK judge to extradite him on mental health grounds. From a report: A final decision on whether or not to grant the extradition will be made by the UK secretary of state. The US wants to put Assange on trial for conspiracy to hack and computer misuse. He also faces a number of charges under the controversial Espionage Act. In all he faces 18 counts connected with "obtaining and disclosing defence and national security material" through the WikiLeaks website, primarily in 2009 and 2010 but also "to some extent since," per a court summary.

Apple will not have to implement changes to its in-app purchase system and App Store guidelines as ordered by the judge's ruling in its court battle with Epic Games. From a report: While Apple largely won that case, as the court ruled Apple was not acting as a monopolist, the company had been ordered to stop preventing app developers from adding links that pointed users to other means of paying for their in-app purchases outside the App Store. Both Apple and Epic appealed the original ruling -- Epic because it was not successful with its larger claims, and Apple because it disagreed with this aspect of the ruling over in-app purchases. Apple originally had until Dec. 9 to update its App Store policies, but had asked the court for a stay on the injunction regarding the changes to its in-app purchasing guidelines until the appeal was decided.

The appeals court has now granted Apple more time before the injunction goes into effect. That means developers will have to continue to use the existing in-app purchase system Apple provides. They won't be allowed to link to or steer users to their own websites for payments from inside their apps. In a document filed today in the U.S Court of Appels for the Ninth Circuit, the court decided Apple had demonstrated "at minimum, that its appeal raises serious questions on the merits of the district court's determination that Epic Games failed to show Apple's conduct violated any antitrust laws but did show that the same conduct violated California's Unfair Competition Law."

Mozilla has announced through its Mozilla Hacks blog that it plans to ship a 'novel sandboxing technology' called RLBox with Firefox 95 which it has been developing alongside researchers from the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas. From a report: It said RLBox makes it easier to isolate subcomponents of the browser efficiently and gives Mozilla more options than traditional sandboxing granted it. Mozilla said this new method of sandboxing, which uses WebAssembly to isolate potentially-buggy code, builds on a prototype that was shipped in Firefox 74 and Firefox 75 to Linux and Mac users respectively. With Firefox 95, RLBox will be deployed on all supported Firefox platforms including desktop and mobile to isolate three different modules: Graphite, Hunspell, and Ogg. With Firefox 96, two more modules, Expat and Woff2, will also be isolated.

The prevailing narrative about tech workers assumes that they have more power than ever before. This even has a term -- the Great Resignation. But at the booming, much-revered payments company Stripe, some applicants have found themselves accepting job offers only to learn they have been rescinded without warning. From a report: Protocol spoke with two Stripe candidates who received either verbal or written offers from the company and then had those offers revoked because of "shifting business priorities." (We reviewed their communications with Stripe recruiters, including the offer letter, to confirm the candidates' stories). Protocol also spoke with a former Stripe recruiter who described the company as embracing a "hire and fire" mentality and constantly shifting priorities and reorganizing staff. All three of these sources were granted anonymity for fear of repercussions by their current and potential future employers. Protocol also reviewed multiple online complaints detailing similar rescinded offers; the most prominent of these complaints was posted on Hacker News and received a rousing defense of Stripe from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.

"We want everyone who interacts with Stripe during a recruiting process to be treated professionally and with respect. We value feedback and are always looking for ways to improve our recruiting experience," a Stripe spokesperson wrote to Protocol. Stripe, which has the highest valuation of any private, venture-backed tech company in the U.S., has grown so rapidly over the last few years that many engineers and other tech workers see it as one of the most desirable, successful places to work. The former recruiter interviewed by Protocol said that she chose the job over offers at Google and two other tech companies, in part because of the extremely positive and enthusiastic way the company was sold to her and because of Stripe's reputation in the industry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don't cater to their needs. For the past year, they've once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks. Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill.

On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report (PDF) recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule (PDF) that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility -- by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example -- that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.

Publishers have no obligation to make electronic versions of their books accessible to the blind through features like text-to-speech (TTS), which reads aloud onscreen text and is available on whichever device you're reading this article. More than a decade ago, publishers fought Amazon for enabling a TTS feature by default on its Kindle 2 ereader, arguing that it violated their copyright on audiobooks. Now, publishers enable or disable TTS on individual books themselves. Even as TTS has become more common, there's no guarantee that a blind person will be able to enjoy a given novel from Amazon's Kindle storefront, or a textbook or manual. That's why the exemption is so important -- and why advocates do the work over and over again to secure it from the Library of Congress. It's a time-consuming and expensive process that many would rather do away with.

"[N]ow, after SCO went bankrupt; court after court dismissing SCO's crazy copyright claims; and closing in on 20-years into the saga, the U.S. District Court of Utah has finally put a period to the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit," writes ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. From the report: According to the Court, since: "All claims and counterclaims in this matter, whether alleged or not alleged, pleaded or not pleaded, have been settled, compromised, and resolved in full, and for good cause appearing, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the parties' Motion is GRANTED. All claims and counterclaims in this action, whether alleged or not alleged, pleaded or not pleaded, have been settled, compromised, and resolved in full, and are DISMISSED with prejudice and on the merits. The parties shall bear their own respective costs and expenses, including attorneys' fees. The Clerk is directed to close the action." Finally!

Earlier, the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, which has been overseeing SCO's bankruptcy had announced that the TSG Group, which represents SCO's debtors, has settled with IBM and resolved all the remaining claims between TSG and IBM: "Under the Settlement Agreement, the Parties have agreed to resolve all disputes between them for a payment to the Trustee [TLD], on behalf of the Estates [IBM], of $14,250,000." In return, TLD gives up all rights and interests in all litigation claims pending or that may be asserted in the future against IBM and Red Hat, and any allegations that Linux violates SCO's Unix intellectual property. "While we're one step closer, the SCO lawsuits still live on just like one of those Halloween monsters that just won't die," concludes Vaughan-Nichols, noting the lawsuit Xinuos filed against IBM and Red Hat in March for allegedly copying their software code for its server operating systems. "But, in this go-around, there aren't many people in the audience."