The tech startup "purported to make smart home and business products," writes America's Justice Department — products that were "meant to stop package theft, prevent weather damage to packages, and make it easier for emergency responders and delivery services to find homes and businesses." Royce Newcomb "developed prototypes of his products and received local and national media attention for them. For example, Time Magazine included his eLiT Address Box & Security System, which used mobile networks to pinpoint home and business locations, on its Best Inventions of 2021 list."

But then he told investors he'd also received a grant by the National Science Foundation — one of "several false representations to his investors to deceive and cheat them out of their money... Newcomb used the money to pay for gambling, a Mercedes and Jaguar, and a mansion." He also used the money to pay for refunds to other investors who wanted out, and to pay for new, unrelated projects without the investors' authorization. During this period, Newcomb also received a fraudulent COVID-19 loan for more than $70,000 from the Small Business Administration and fraudulent loans for more than $190,000 from private lenders. He lied about Strategic Innovations having hundreds of thousands and even millions in revenue to get these loans.

Newcomb was previously convicted federally in 2011 for running a real estate fraud scheme in Sacramento. He was sentenced to more than five years in prison for that offense, and he was on federal supervised release for that offense when he committed the offenses charged in this case... Newcomb faces maximum statutory penalties of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for the wire fraud charge, and 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for the money laundering charge...

This effort is part of a California COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Strike Force operation, one of five interagency COVID-19 fraud strike force teams established by the U.S. Department of Justice.
SFGate writes that "Despite receiving significant funding, his startup, Strategic Innovations, never made a dime or released any products to market, according to legal documents." The owner of a California tech startup has pleaded guilty to stealing over $4 million from investors, private lenders and the U.S. government in order to live a luxurious lifestyle, the United States Attorney's Office announced Monday... When investors asked about product delays and when they'd be paid back, Newcomb made excuses and provided conflicting info, telling them that there were supply chain issues or software problems, according to the indictment. In reality, federal prosecutors said, he was using the money to travel and continue to make these lavish personal expenses.

"Open source can be something of an illusion," writes TechCrunch. "A lack of real independence can mean a lack of agency for those who would like to properly get involved in a project."
Their article makes the case that the "spirit" of open source means more than a license... "Android, in a license sense, is perhaps the most well-documented, perfectly open 'thing' that there is," Luis Villa, co-founder and general counsel at Tidelift, said in a panel discussion at the State of Open Con25 in London this week. "All the licenses are exactly as you want them — but good luck getting a patch into that, and good luck figuring out when the next release even is...."

"If you think about the practical accessibility of open source, it goes beyond the license, right?" Peter Zaitsev, founder of open source database services company Percona, said in the panel discussion. "Governance is very important, because if it's a single corporation, they can change a license like 'that.'" These sentiments were echoed in a separate talk by Dotan Horovits, open source evangelist at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where he mused about open source "turning to the dark side." He noted that in most cases, issues arise when a single-vendor project decides to make changes based on its own business needs among other pressures. "Which begs the question, is vendor-owned open source an oxymoron?" Horovits said. "I've been asking this question for a good few years, and in 2025 this question is more relevant than ever."
The article adds that in 2025, "These debates won't be going anywhere anytime soon, as open source has emerged as a major focal point in the AI realm." And it includes this quote from Tidelift's co-founder.

"I have my quibbles and concerns about the open source AI definition, but it's really clear that what Llama is doing isn't open source," Villa said. Emily Omier, a consultant for open source businesses and host of the Business of Open Source podcast, added that such attempts to "corrupt" the meaning behind "open source" is testament to its inherent power.

Much of this may be for regulatory reasons, however. The EU AI Act has a special carve-out for "free and open source" AI systems (aside from those deemed to pose an "unacceptable risk"). And Villa says this goes some way toward explaining why a company might want to rewrite the rulebook on what "open source" actually means. "There are plenty of actors right now who, because of the brand equity [of open source] and the regulatory implications, want to change the definition, and that's terrible," Villa said.

Most Britons support strict controls on AI systems that could surpass human capabilities, according to a YouGov poll, highlighting a growing divide between public opinion and government policy. The survey of 2,344 adults found 87% back laws requiring AI developers to prove their systems are safe before release, while 60% favor banning the development of "smarter-than-human" AI models. Only 9% trust tech CEOs to act in the public interest on AI regulation.

NASA is planning to host a live Twitch stream next week from the International Space Station (ISS). "The stream, which takes place on February 12th at 11:45AM ET on NASA's Twitch channel, will feature Don Pettit, an astronaut currently on the ISS, and Matt Dominick, who returned to Earth from the ISS in October," reports The Verge. From the report: The astronauts will discuss "daily life aboard the space station and the research conducted in microgravity" and viewers will be able to ask them questions, according to a blog post.

"This Twitch event from space is the first of many," Brittany Brown, director of the Office of Communications Digital and Technology Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, says in the post. "We spoke with digital creators at TwitchCon about their desire for streams designed with their communities in mind, and we listened. In addition to our spacewalks, launches, and landings, we'll host more Twitch-exclusive streams like this one."

Apple plans to unveil a long-anticipated overhaul of the iPhone SE in the coming days, a move that will modernize its lower-cost model in a bid to spur growth and entice consumers to switch from other brands. Bloomberg: The company expects to announce the device as early as next week, ahead of it going on sale later in the month, according to people with knowledge of the matter. [...] The new device, code-named V59, also will be Apple's first with an in-house cellular modem, replacing a component from Qualcomm, Bloomberg News has reported. It will have a larger screen with Face ID and also include a speedier A18 chip, which will help support Apple Intelligence. The removal of the home button from the iPhone SE means that Apple will have fully phased out the iconic interface, which debuted on the first iPhone in 2007.

Warner Bros. Discovery has quietly begun releasing dozens of its older films for free on YouTube, marking an unexpected shift in how the major studio handles its back catalog. Over the past month, the company has uploaded more than 30 full-length movies across five YouTube channels, without digital rights management or regional restrictions.

The collection includes both critically acclaimed films like "Waiting for Guffman" and "Michael Collins," as well as commercial disappointments like the 2002 Eddie Murphy film "The Adventures of Pluto Nash." Some releases have significant historical value, such as "Oh, God!" - a 1977 George Burns comedy that earned $51 million at release (equivalent to $265 million in 2024). This move represents a departure from traditional studio practices of protecting content through strict digital rights management and paid streaming services. Warner Bros. owns multiple distribution channels, including the Max streaming service and Turner Classic Movies, which makes the decision to release these films freely on YouTube particularly notable.

In 2022, writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe the gradual deterioration of a service or product. The term's prevalence has increased to the point that it was the National Dictionary of Australia's word of the year last year. The editors at Ars Technica, having "covered a lot of things that have been enshittified," decided to highlight some of the worst examples the've come across. Here's a summary of each thing mentioned in their report: Smart TVs: Evolved into data-collecting billboards, prioritizing advertising and user tracking over user experience and privacy. Features like convenient input buttons are sacrificed for pushing ads and webOS apps. "This is all likely to get worse as TV companies target software, tracking, and ad sales as ways to monetize customers after their TV purchases -- even at the cost of customer convenience and privacy," writes Scharon Harding. "When budget brands like Roku are selling TV sets at a loss, you know something's up."

Google's Voice Assistant (e.g., Nest Hubs): Functionality has degraded over time, with previously working features becoming unreliable. Users report frequent misunderstandings and unresponsiveness. "I'm fine just saying it now: Google Assistant is worse now than it was soon after it started," writes Kevin Purdy. "Even if Google is turning its entire supertanker toward AI now, it's not clear why 'Start my morning routine,' 'Turn on the garage lights,' and 'Set an alarm for 8 pm' had to suffer."

Portable Document Format (PDF): While initially useful for cross-platform document sharing and preserving formatting, PDFs have become bloated and problematic. Copying text, especially from academic journals, is often garbled or impossible. "Apple, which had given the PDF a reprieve, has now killed its main selling point," writes John Timmer. "Because Apple has added OCR to the MacOS image display system, I can get more reliable results by screenshotting the PDF and then copying the text out of that. This is the true mark of its enshittification: I now wish the journals would just give me a giant PNG."

Televised Sports (specifically cycling and Formula 1): Streaming services have consolidated, leading to significantly increased costs for viewers. Previously affordable and comprehensive options have been replaced by expensive bundles across multiple platforms. "Formula 1 racing has largely gone behind paywalls, and viewership is down significantly over the last 15 years," writes Eric Berger. "Major US sports such as professional and college football had largely been exempt, but even that is now changing, with NFL games being shown on Peacock, Amazon Prime, and Netflix. None of this helps viewers. It enshittifies the experience for us in the name of corporate greed."

Google Search: AI overviews often bury relevant search results under lengthy, sometimes inaccurate AI-generated content. This makes finding specific information, especially primary source documents, more difficult. "Google, like many big tech companies, expects AI to revolutionize search and is seemingly intent on ignoring any criticism of that idea," writes Ashley Belanger.

Email AI Tools (e.g., Gemini in Gmail): Intrusive and difficult to disable, these tools offer questionable value due to their potential for factual inaccuracies. Users report being unable to fully opt-out. "Gmail won't take no for an answer," writes Dan Goodin. "It keeps asking me if I want to use Google's Gemini AI tool to summarize emails or draft responses. As the disclaimer at the bottom of the Gemini tool indicates, I can't count on the output being factual, so no, I definitely don't want it."

Windows: While many complaints about Windows 11 originated with Windows 10, the newer version continues the trend of unwanted features, forced updates, and telemetry data collection. Bugs and performance issues also plague the operating system. "... it sure is easy to resent Windows 11 these days, between the well-documented annoyances, the constant drumbeat of AI stuff (some of it gated to pricey new PCs), and a batch of weird bugs that mostly seem to be related to the under-the-hood overhauls in October's Windows 11 24H2 update," writes Andrew Cunningham. "That list includes broken updates for some users, inoperable scanners, and a few unplayable games. With every release, the list of things you need to do to get rid of and turn off the most annoying stuff gets a little longer."

Web Discourse: The rapid spread of memes, trends, and corporate jargon on social media has led to a homogenization of online communication, making it difficult to distinguish original content and creating a sense of constant noise. "[T]he enshittifcation of social media, particularly due to its speed and virality, has led to millions vying for their moment in the sun, and all I see is a constant glare that makes everything look indistinguishable," writes Jacob May. "No wonder some companies think AI is the future."

Google aims to release commercial quantum computing applications within five years, challenging Nvidia's prediction of a 20-year timeline. "We're optimistic that within five years we'll see real-world applications that are possible only on quantum computers," founder and lead of Google Quantum AI Hartmut Neven said in a statement. Reuters reports: Real-world applications Google has discussed are related to materials science - applications such as building superior batteries for electric cars - creating new drugs and potentially new energy alternatives. [...] Google has been working on its quantum computing program since 2012 and has designed and built several quantum chips. By using quantum processors, Google said it had managed to solve a computing problem in minutes that would take a classical computer more time than the history of the universe.

Google's quantum computing scientists announced another step on the path to real world applications within five years on Wednesday. In a paper published in the scientific journal Nature, the scientists said they had discovered a new approach to quantum simulation, which is a step on the path to achieving Google's objective.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: For all motorists, but perhaps the Ferrari-collecting rocker Rod Stewart in particular, it will be music to the ears: researchers have developed a road surface that heals when it cracks, preventing potholes without a need for human intervention. The international team devised a self-healing bitumen that mends cracks as they form by fusing the asphalt back together. In laboratory tests, pieces of the material repaired small fractures within an hour of them first appearing. "When you close the cracks you prevent potholes forming in the future and extend the lifespan of the road," said Dr Jose Norambuena-Contreras, a researcher on the project at Swansea University. "We can extend the surface lifespan by 30%."

Potholes typically start from small surface cracks that form under the weight of traffic. These allow water to seep into the road surface, where it causes more damage through cycles of freezing and thawing. Bitumen, the sticky black substance used in asphalt, becomes susceptible to cracking when it hardens through oxidation. To make the self-healing bitumen, the researchers mixed in tiny porous plant spores soaked in recycled oils. When the road surface is compressed by passing traffic, it squeezes the spores, which release their oil into any nearby cracks. The oils soften the bitumen enough for it to flow and seal the cracks. Working with researchers at King's College London and Google Cloud, the scientists used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to model the movement of organic molecules in bitumen and simulate the behaviour of the self-healing material to see how it responded to newly formed cracks. The material could be scaled up for use on British roads in a couple of years, the researchers believe. Google published a blog post with more information about the "self-healing" asphalt.

Senator Josh Hawley has introduced a bill that would criminalize the import, export, and collaboration on AI technology with China. What this means is that "someone who knowingly downloads a Chinese developed AI model like the now immensely popular DeepSeek could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, or both, should such a law pass," reports 404 Media. From the report: Hawley introduced the legislation, titled the Decoupling America's Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act, on Wednesday of last year. "Every dollar and gig of data that flows into Chinese AI are dollars and data that will ultimately be used against the United States," Senator Hawley said in a statement. "America cannot afford to empower our greatest adversary at the expense of our own strength. Ensuring American economic superiority means cutting China off from American ingenuity and halting the subsidization of CCP innovation."

Hawley's statement explicitly says that he introduced the legislation because of the release of DeepSeek, an advanced AI model that's competitive with its American counterparts, and which its developers claimed was made for a fraction of the cost and without access to as many and as advanced of chips, though these claims are unverified. Hawley's statement called DeepSeek "a data-harvesting, low-cost AI model that sparked international concern and sent American technology stocks plummeting." Hawley's statement says the goal of the bill is to "prohibit the import from or export to China of artificial intelligence technology, "prohibit American companies from conducting AI research in China or in cooperation with Chinese companies," and "Prohibit U.S. companies from investing money in Chinese AI development."

The blog OMG Ubuntu reports: Ubuntu's key developers have agreed to switch to Matrix as the primary platform for real-time development communications involving the distro. From March, Matrix will replace IRC as the place where critical Ubuntu development conversations, requests, meetings, and other vital chatter must take place... Only the current #ubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-release Libera IRC channels are moving to Matrix, but other Ubuntu development-related channels can choose to move — officially, given some projects were using Matrix over IRC already.

As a result, any major requests to/of the key Ubuntu development teams with privileged access can only be actioned if requests are made on Matrix. Canonical-employed Ubuntu developers will be expected to be present on Matrix during working hours... The aim is to streamline organisation, speed up decision making, ensure key developers are reliably reachable, and avoid discussions and conversations from fragmenting across multiple platforms... It's hoped that in picking one platform as the 'chosen one' the split in where the distro's development discourse takes place can be reduced and greater transparency in how and when decisions are made restored.

IRC remains popular with many Ubuntu developers but its old-school, lo-fi nature is said to be off-putting to newer contributors. They're used to richer real-time chat platforms with more features (like discussion history, search, offline messaging, etc). It's felt this is why many newer developers employed by Canonical prefer to discuss and message through the company's internal Mattermost instance — which isn't publicly accessible. Many Ubuntu teams, flavours, and community chats already take place on Matrix...
"End-users aren't directly affected, of course," they point out. But an earlier post on the same blog notes that Matrix "is increasingly ubiquitous in open-source circles. GNOME uses it, KDE embraces it, Linux Mint migrated last year, Mozilla a few years before, and it's already widely used by Ubuntu community members and developers." IRC remains unmatched in many areas but is, rightly or wrongly, viewed as an antiquated communication platform. IRC clients aren't pretty or plentiful, the syntax is obtuse, and support for 'modern' comforts like media sending, read receipts, etc., is lacking.To newer, younger contributors IRC could feel ancient or cumbersome to learn.

Though many of IRC's real and perceived shortcomings are surmountable with workarounds, clients, bots, scripts, and so on, support for those varies between channels, clients, servers, and user configurations. Unlike IRC, which is a centralised protocol relying on individual servers, Matrix is federated. It lets users on different servers to communicate without friction. Plus, Matrix features encryption, message history, media support, and so, meeting modern expectations.

An aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy tested "vastly increased" levels of internet connectivity, reports the defense-news web site TWZ, callling it "a game-changer for what a ship, and its sailors, can do while at sea." The F-35 Joint Strike Fighters assigned to the carrier offer a case in point for what more shipboard bandwidth — provided by commercial providers like Starlink and OneWeb — can mean at the tactical level. Jets with the embarked Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314 took on critical mission data file updates in record time last fall due to the carrier's internet innovations, a capability that is slated to expand across the fleet. "This file offers intelligence updates and design enhancements that enable pilots to identify and counter threats in specific operational environments," the Navy said in an October release announcing the feat. "The update incorporated more than 100 intelligence changes and multiple design improvements, significantly enhancing the aircraft's survivability and lethality...." [Capt. Kevin White, then the Lincoln's combat systems officer] noted how the F-35 "eats and breathes data daily," and it has to be shared with commands ashore. The connectivity innovations he's pioneered will enable such data transfers, which will only grow more complex over time. "If you can't get the data onboard, you're probably going to be at a loss," White said. "So large file transfer capability increases combat readiness...."

When the system was on, it provided not only mission benefits, but benefits to the hard-working Lincoln crew as well, which was at sea for 107 days at one point with no port calls [Capt. Pete "Repete" Riebe, told WEST conference attendees]... White said the average age of an embarked Lincoln sailor was 20.8, and Riebe noted that to attract young people into service, the Navy needs to recognize the innate connection they have to their devices. "The next generation of sailors grew up with a cell phone in their hand, and they are uncomfortable without it," Riebe said. "I don't necessarily like that, but that's reality, and if we want to compete for the best folks coming into the Navy, we need to offer them bandwidth at sea." Having better connectivity also helped with the ship's administrative functions, Riebe said, making medical, dental and other work far easier than they have been in the past...

A sailor who can FaceTime with his family back home carries less non-Navy stress with them as they focus on the life-or-death duties at hand, White said... This beefed-up bandwidth allowed 38 sailors to witness the birth of their child, while others were able to watch their kids' sporting events, White said. Several crew members pursued doctorate and master's degrees while deployed due to better internet, while others were able to deal with personal or legal issues they had left behind back home. One officer was able to commission his wife remotely from the ship... On the operational side, from "the most desolate waters," Lincoln used its bandwidth to connect with a command in Norfolk, which undertook the ship's annual cybersecurity scans "from halfway around the world," White said... Taxpayer dollars can also be saved if a ship isn't paying for WiFi access while in port, White noted, and the crew was able to start getting to know Italian allies online before an exercise, enhancing the personal aspects of such partnerships.

More bandwidth also means more onboard training, meaning some sailors who don't have to leave to go to the school house, and sailors were able to get answers to maintenance questions from ashore commands faster as well. "Just by being able to have more reliable access to support resources, we definitely become more effective at maintenance," White said.
Every day the aircraft carrier averaged four to eight terabytes of transferred data, according to the article (with a team of two full-time system administrators managing 7,000 IP addresses), and ultimately saw 780 terabytes of data transferred over five-and-a-half months. The article notes it's part of the Navy's larger "Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore" (SEA2) program to provide all its warships with high-bandwidth connectivity around the world.

The program "involves moving some communications aspects away from proprietary Defense Department satellites, while leaning on commercial satellite constellations and even cellular providers to keep ships more connected at sea for both personal and tactical uses."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the article.

Friday TechCrunch reported that OpenAI "used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models." The company revealed this in a system card — a document outlining how an AI system works — that was released along with its new "reasoning" model, o3-mini, on Friday.... OpenAI says it collects user posts from r/ChangeMyView and asks its AI models to write replies, in a closed environment, that would change the Reddit user's mind on a subject. The company then shows the responses to testers, who assess how persuasive the argument is, and finally OpenAI compares the AI models' responses to human replies for that same post.

The ChatGPT-maker has a content-licensing deal with Reddit that allows OpenAI to train on posts from Reddit users and display these posts within its products. We don't know what OpenAI pays for this content, but Google reportedly pays Reddit $60 million a year under a similar deal. However, OpenAI tells TechCrunch the ChangeMyView-based evaluation is unrelated to its Reddit deal. It's unclear how OpenAI accessed the subreddit's data, and the company says it has no plans to release this evaluation to the public...

The goal for OpenAI is not to create hyper-persuasive AI models but instead to ensure AI models don't get too persuasive. Reasoning models have become quite good at persuasion and deception, so OpenAI has developed new evaluations and safeguards to address it.
Reddit's "ChangeMyView" subreddit has 3.8 million human subscribers, making it a valuable source of real human interactions, according to the article. And it adds one more telling anecdote.

"Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The Verge last year that Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity refused to negotiate with him and said it's been 'a real pain in the ass to block these companies.'"

Google is enhancing Android 16's Linux Terminal app to support graphical Linux applications, so Android Authority decided to put it to the test by running Doom. From the report: The Terminal app first appeared in the Android 15 QPR2 beta as a developer option, and it still remains locked behind developer settings. Since its initial public release, Google pushed a few changes that fixed issues with the installation process and added a settings menu to resize the disk, forward ports, and backup the installation. However, the biggest changes the company has been working on, which include adding hardware acceleration support and a full graphical environment, have not been pushed to any public releases.

Thankfully, since Google is working on this feature in the open, it's possible to simply compile a build of AOSP with these changes added in. This gives us the opportunity to trial upcoming features of the Android Linux Terminal app before a public release. To demonstrate, we fired up the Linux Terminal on a Pixel 9 Pro, tapped a new button on the top right to enter the Display activity, and then ran the 'weston' command to open up a graphical environment. (Weston is a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor, a modern display server protocol.)

We also went ahead and enabled hardware acceleration beforehand as well as installed Chocolate Doom, a source port of Doom, to see if it would run. Doom did run, as you can see below. It ran well, which is no surprise considering Doom can run on literal potatoes. There wasn't any audio because an audio server isn't available yet, but audio support is something that Google is still working on.

During the company's fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday, Intel co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus announced that Intel has decided to cancel its Falcon Shores AI chip. Instead, it'll opt to use it as an internal test chip while shifting focus to Jaguar Shores for AI data center solutions. TechCrunch reports: "AI data center ... is an attractive market for us," Holthaus said during the call. "[B]ut I am not happy with where we are today. We're not yet participating in the cloud-based AI data center market in a meaningful way ... One of the immediate actions I have taken is to simplify our roadmap and concentrate our resources." The focus instead will be on Jaguar Shores, which Holthaus called Intel's opportunity to "develop a system-level solution at rack scale ... to address the AI data center more broadly."

Holthaus tempered expectations for Falcon Shores last month, when she implied that it was an "iterative" step over the company's previous dedicated AI data center chip, Gaudi 3. "One of the things that we've learned from Gaudi is, it's not enough to just deliver the silicon," Holthaus said during Thursday's earnings call. "Falcon Shores will help us in that process of working on the system, networking, memory -- all those component[s]. But what customers really want is that full-scale rack solution, and so we're able to get to that with Jaguar Shores."

"As I think about our AI opportunity, my focus is on the problems our customers are trying to solve, most notably the need to lower the cost and increase the efficiency of compute," Holthaus said. "As such, a one-size-fits-all approach will not work, and I can see clear opportunities to leverage our core assets in new ways to drive the most compelling total cost of ownership across the continuum."

A bipartisan group of legislators has reintroduced the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025, aiming to mandate AM radio in all new vehicles at no additional cost. Adweek reports: The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act was first introduced in May 2023. It continued to take on new co-sponsors through the fall of 2024. It was reintroduced as the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025 with 62 cosponsors. Upper Midwest senators showing support for the bill include Sens. John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer R-North Dakota, and Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, DFL- Minnesota.

If enacted, the bill would require the Department of Transportation to issue a rule requiring new vehicles to maintain access to broadcast AM radio at no additional cost to the consumer and provide small vehicle manufacturers at least four years after the date DOT issues the rule to comply. The act also requires automakers to inform consumers, during the period before the rule takes effect, that the vehicles do not maintain access to broadcast AM radio. "With 82 million Americans tuning in each month, AM radio delivers more than just emergency alerts," says the National Association of Broadcasters in a news release. "It connects communities through hyper-local content, including news, weather and diverse cultural programming," according to a news release from the National Association of Broadcasters."

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.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) today proposed a law that would let copyright owners obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to foreign piracy websites. The bill would also force DNS providers to block sites. Lofgren said in a press release that she "work[ed] for over a year with the tech, film, and television industries" on "a proposal that has a remedy for copyright infringers located overseas that does not disrupt the free Internet except for the infringers." Lofgren said she plans to work with Republican leaders to enact the bill. [...]

Lofgren's bill (PDF) would impose site-blocking requirements on broadband providers with at least 100,000 subscribers and providers of public domain name resolution services with annual revenue of over $100 million. The bill has exemptions for VPN services and "similar services that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers"; DNS providers that offer service "exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols"; and operators of premises that provide Internet access, like coffee shops, bookstores, airlines, and universities. Lofgren released a summary of the bill explaining how copyright owners can obtain blocking orders. "A copyright owner or exclusive licensee may file a petition in US District Court to obtain a preliminary order against a foreign website or online service engaging in copyright infringement," the summary said.

For non-live content, the petition must show that "transmission of a work through a foreign website likely infringes exclusive rights under Section 106 [of US law] and is causing irreparable harm." For live events, a petition must show that "an imminent or ongoing unauthorized transmission of a live event is likely to infringe, and will cause irreparable harm." The proposed law says that after a preliminary order is issued, copyright owners would be able to obtain orders directing service providers "to take reasonable and technically feasible measures to prevent users of the service provided by the service provider from accessing the foreign website or online service identified in the order." Judges would not be permitted to "prescribe any specific technical measures" for blocking and may not require any action that would prevent Internet users from using virtual private networks.Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge described the bill as a "censorious site-blocking" measure "that turns broadband providers into copyright police at Americans' expense."

"Rather than attacking the problem at its source -- bringing the people running overseas piracy websites to court -- Congress and its allies in the entertainment industry has decided to build out a sweeping infrastructure for censorship," Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel Meredith Rose said. "Site-blocking orders force any service provider, from residential broadband providers to global DNS resolvers, to disrupt traffic from targeted websites accused of copyright infringement. More importantly, applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers results in global blocks. This means that one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on one individual's filing and an expedited procedure. Blocking orders are incredibly powerful weapons, ripe for abuse, and we've seen the messy consequences of them being implemented in other countries."

Alibaba has unveiled a new version of its AI model, called Qwen2.5-Max, claiming benchmark scores that surpass both DeepSeek's recently released R1 model and industry standards like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. The model achieves these results using a mixture-of-experts architecture that requires significantly less computational power than traditional approaches.

The release comes amid growing concerns about China's AI capabilities, following DeepSeek's R1 model launch last week that sent Nvidia's stock tumbling 17%. Qwen2.5-Max scored 89.4% on the Arena-Hard benchmark and demonstrated strong performance in code generation and mathematical reasoning tasks. Unlike U.S. companies that rely heavily on massive GPU clusters -- OpenAI reportedly uses over 32,000 high-end GPUs for its latest models -- Alibaba's approach focuses on architectural efficiency. The company claims this allows comparable AI performance while reducing infrastructure costs by 40-60% compared to traditional deployments.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science: Legend has it that if you walk along Old Light Road in Summerville, South Carolina, you might see an eerie glow hovering over an abandoned rail line in the nearby woods. Old-timers will tell you it's a spectral lantern held by the apparition of a woman searching for her decapitated husband's head. Susan Hough has proposed a scientific explanation that is far more plausible, however. A seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, she believes the so-called Summerville Light could represent a rare natural phenomenon: earthquake lights.

Sparks from steel rail tracks could ignite radon or other gases released from the ground by seismic shaking, Hough explains in an interview with Science. In Summerville, I think it's the railroad tracks that matter. I've crawled around tracks during my fieldwork in South Carolina. Historically, when [rail companies] replaced tracks, they didn't always haul the old track away. So, you've got heaps of steel out there. Sparks might be part of the story. And maybe the railroads are important for another reason. They may naturally follow fault lines that have carved corridors through the landscape. The findings have been published in the journal Seismological Research Letters. Hough also cites a paper published by Japanese scientist Yuji Enomoto that connects earthquake lights to the release of gases like radon or methane.