Zoom "has partnered with World, Sam Altman's iris-scanning identity company (previously known as Worldcoin), " reports Digital Trends, "to add real-time human verification inside meetings." Zoom is now inviting organizations to join the beta version of the rollout, which Digital Trends says "lets hosts confirm that every face on the call belongs to a real person, not an AI-generated imposter. " For those wondering how World's Deep Face technology works, it includes a three-step process. It cross-references a signed image from a user's original Orb registration, a live face scan from the device, and the frame of the video that's visible to the other participants in the meeting. Only when the three samples match does a "Verified Human" badge appear next to the user's name...

Hosts can also make Deep Face verification mandatory for joining meetings, preventing unverified participants from joining entirely. Mid-call, on-the-spot checks are also possible...

More than 1,000 Hollywood figures, including major actors, writers, and directors, signed an open letter opposing Paramount Skydance's proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing it would hurt an industry "already under severe strain." The deal is still under regulatory scrutiny in both the U.S. and U.K., while Paramount says the merger would strengthen competition and expand opportunities for creators. NBC News reports: "This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries -- and the audiences we serve -- can least afford it," the signatories wrote in the letter, published early Monday on a website called Block the Merger. "The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world. Alarmingly, this merger would reduce the number of major U.S. film studios to just four," the signatories added.

[T]he open letter illustrates the deep resistance to the deal among many members of Hollywood's creative community. The list of signatories includes A-list stars (Glenn Close, Ben Stiller), celebrated filmmakers (Yorgos Lanthimos, Denis Villeneuve) and acclaimed writers ("The Sopranos" creator David Chase). "Media consolidation has accelerated the disappearance of the mid-budget film, the erosion of independent distribution, the collapse of the international sales market, the elimination of meaningful profit participation, and the weakening of screen credit integrity," the signatories wrote. "Together, these factors threaten the sustainability of the entire creative community," they added.

[...] Monday's open letter was spearheaded by a group of advocacy organizations -- including the Committee for the First Amendment, a free speech group led by Fonda, who warned that the merger "would be one of the most destructive threats to free speech and creative expression in our history." In the letter, first reported by The New York Times, the signatories expressed support for California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has said the merger is "not a done deal." "These two Hollywood titans have not cleared regulatory scrutiny -- the California Department of Justice has an open investigation, and we intend to be vigorous in our review," Bonta said in a Feb. 26 post on X. Paramount Skydance said that they "hear and understand the concerns" and are committed to "protecting and expanding creativity." The studio also reiterated its commitment to releasing a minimum of 30 "high-quality feature films annually with full theatrical releases" and "preserving iconic brands with independent creative leadership" to make sure "creators have more avenues for their work, not fewer."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal squeeze on customer choice. As The Reg revealed in January, Broadcom shuttered the scheme, a move sources claimed affects hundreds of CSPs across Europe and curtails options for enterprises buying VMware software and services. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Provider in Europe (CISPE) trade group, representing nearly 50 tech suppliers, filed the complaint today with the EC Directorates-General, accusing Broadcom of bully-boy tactics, and calling for authorities to halt what it terms as "ongoing abuse."

Francisco Mingorance, CISPE secretary general, said of the complaint: "Businesses -- both cloud providers and their customers -- are being irreparably damaged by Broadcom's unfair actions, which we believe are illegal. "After imposing outrageous and unjustified price hikes immediately following the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom is now applying the 'coup de grace'. We need urgent intervention to force them to change. The only way to stop bullies is to stand up to them." CISPE claims that, since Broadcom completed its $69 billion takeover of VMware in October 2023, prices have risen tenfold, payment is demanded upfront, products are bundled regardless of customer need, and minimum commitments are based on potential rather than actual consumption.

The VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program officially closed in January and all transactions must be complete by March 31. After that date, only a select group of suppliers will be able to sell VMware subscriptions -- either standalone or as part of a broader service. Across Europe, we're told this equates to hundreds of businesses losing their authorization. For some, the loss of VCSP status effectively destroys their market. Those whose operations were built around VMware must now hand customers to another authorized supplier or begin the costly migration to an alternative platform. Broadcom said in a statement responding to the complaint: "Broadcom strongly disagrees with the allegations by CISPE, an organization funded by hyperscalers, which misrepresent the realities of the market. We continue to be committed to investing significantly in our European VMware Cloud Service Provider partners... helping them offer alternatives to the hyperscalers and meet the evolving needs of European businesses and organizations."

Starting in September, even Android developers not in Google's Play Store will still be required to register with Google to distribute their apps in Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, with Google continuing "to roll out these requirements globally" four months later. Even developers distributing Android apps on the web for sideloading will be required to register, pay Google a $25 fee, and provide a government ID.

But there's a new theory on what's secretly been motivating Google from an unnamed source in the "Keep Android Open" movement, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland: "You can't separate this really from their ongoing interactions with Epic and the settlement that they came to," they argue. Twelve days ago Epic Games and Google announced a new proposal for settling their long-running dispute over the legality of alternative app stores on Android phones. (Rather than agreeing to let third-party app stores into their Play Store, Google wants them to continue being sideloaded, promising in a blog post last week that they'll even offer a "more streamlined" and "simplified" sideloading alternative for rival app stores. "This Registered App Store program will begin outside of the US first, and we intend to bring it to the US as well, subject to court approval.")

So "developer verification" could be Google's fallback plan if U.S. courts fail to approve this. "If the Google Play Store has to allow any third-party repository app store, Google essentially has given up all control of the apps. But if they're able to claw back that control by requiring that all developers, no matter how they distribute their apps, have to register with Google — have to agree to their Terms & Conditions, pay them money, provide identification — then they have a large degree of indirect control over any app that can be developed for the entire platform."
But that plan threatens millions of people using the alternative F/OSS app distributor F-Droid, since Google also wants to have only one signature attached to Android apps. Marc Prud'hommeaux, a member of F-Droid's board of directors, says that "all of a sudden breaks all those versions of the application distributed through F-Droid or any other app store!"

Prud'hommeaux says they've told Google's Android team "You know perfectly well that you're killing F-Droid!" creating an "existential" threat to an app distributor "that has existed happily for over 10 years." But good things started happening when he created the website Keep Android Open: There's now a "huge backlog" of signers for an Open Letter that already includes EFF, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Free Software Foundation. He believes Android's existing Play Protect security "is completely sufficient to handle the particular scenarios they claim that developer verification is meant to address"...

The Keep Android Open site urges developers not to sign up for Android's early access program when it launches next week. (Instead, they're asking developers to respond to invites with an email about their concerns — and to spread the word to other developers and organizations in forums and social media posts.) There's also a petition at Change.org currently signed by 64,000 developers — adding 20,000 new signatures in the last 10 days. And "If you have an Android device, try installing F-Droid!" he adds. Google tracks how many people install these alternative app repositories, and a larger user base means greater consequences from any Android policy changes.

Plus, installing F-Droid "might be refreshing!" Prud'hommeaux says. "You don't see all the advertisements and promotions and scam and crapware stuff that you see in the commercial app stores!"

How many Node.js users are running unsupported or outdated versions. Roughly two thirds, according to data from Node's nonprofit steward, OpenJS.

So they've announced "the Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program" to help enterprises move safely off legacy/end-of-life Node.js. "This program gives enterprises a clear, trusted path to modernize," said the executive director of the OpenJS Foundation, "while staying aligned with the Node.js project and community." The Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program connects organizations with experienced Node.js service providers who handle the work of upgrading safely.

Approved partners assess current versions and dependencies, manage phased upgrades to supported LTS releases, and offer temporary security support when immediate upgrades are not possible... Partners are surfaced exactly where users go when upgrades become unavoidable, including the Node.js website, documentation, and end of life guidance.

The program follows the existing OpenJS Ecosystem Sustainability Program revenue model, with partners retaining 85% of revenue and 15% supporting OpenJS and Node.js through Open Collective and foundation operations. OpenJS provides the guardrails, alignment, and oversight to keep the program credible and connected to the project. We're pleased to welcome NodeSource as the inaugural partner in the Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program.
"The goal is simple: reduce risk without breaking production or trust with the upstream project."

An EDM song by the British group Haven ran into trouble in October after it shared clips of upcoming song "I Run" on TikTok.

The song "was an overnight viral sensation online," writes Digital Music News — racking up millions of plays "even before it hit streaming services." (Although the Washington Post notes that "Record labels and TikTok users began questioning whether 'I Run' used an AI deepfake, modeled off British R&B singer Jorja Smith, for the vocals.")

Digital Music News picks up the story: The artist says he used his own voice to record the vocals, and then ran it through layers of processing and filtering to turn it into the female-sounding voice heard in the track. However, that filtering also included the use of the controversial genAI platform Suno — and that's what complicates things... [The article says later that Suno "is currently in the middle of a blockbuster lawsuit with the Big Three major labels over allegations of widespread copyright infringement of sound recordings used during the AI model training process."]

Meanwhile, the song was rapidly amassing listenership. It soared to #11 on the U.S. Spotify chart and #25 on Spotify globally. Videos using the song continued going viral on TikTok and Instagram, including one in which rapper Offset had apparently played the song during a Boiler Room set, which later turned out to be falsified. And then, as quickly as it appeared, "I Run" was taken down from streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music. That was due, in part, to numerous takedown notices from The Orchard, the label to which Jorja Smith is signed, as well as the RIAA and IFPI. The takedown notices alleged various issues with the track, including the "misrepresentation" of another artist, as well as copyright infringement.

As a result, the song has also been withheld from the Billboard charts, including the Hot 100, on which it had been predicted to debut this week before the controversy. Billboard points out that it "reserves the right to withhold or remove titles from appearing on the charts that are known to be involved in active legal disputes related to copyright infringement that may extend to the deletion of such content on digital service providers."
The song itself has now been re-released with an all-human vocal track. But going forward will the music industry ever work with AI platforms? The Washington Post reports: "I Run" has taken off as record labels remain unsure of the extent to which they should welcome generative AI programs such as Suno or Udio into the industry. After the two AI music companies began growing in popularity, the three major labels — Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group — filed lawsuits against Suno and Udio, claiming that the AI companies have used the labels' sound recordings to train their model.

Since then, UMG and Warnerhave reached agreementsto work with Udio, ending their litigation... It comes shortly after all three major labels licensed their catalogue to Klay, a music streaming start-up that allows users to adjust songs using artificial intelligence. Major licensing organizations such as ASCAP and BMI shared that they would register songs that were partially AI-generated — but not fully generated ones.

Haven appears to present an uncomfortable edge case. While some AI-generated songs that sound broadly like other artists have been allowed to remain on streaming platforms, the voice in "I Run" appears to have been deemed too duplicative for comfort.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: They're cute, even cuddly, and promise learning and companionship -- but artificial intelligence toys are not safe for kids, according to children's and consumer advocacy groups urging parents not to buy them during the holiday season. These toys, marketed to kids as young as 2 years old, are generally powered by AI models that have already been shown to harm children and teenagers, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to an advisory published Thursday by the children's advocacy group Fairplay and signed by more than 150 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators.

"The serious harms that AI chatbots have inflicted on children are well-documented, including fostering obsessive use, having explicit sexual conversations, and encouraging unsafe behaviors, violence against others, and self-harm," Fairplay said. AI toys, made by companies including Curio Interactive and Keyi Technologies, are often marketed as educational, but Fairplay says they can displace important creative and learning activities. They promise friendship but disrupt children's relationships and resilience, the group said. "What's different about young children is that their brains are being wired for the first time and developmentally it is natural for them to be trustful, for them to seek relationships with kind and friendly characters," said Rachel Franz, director of Fairplay's Young Children Thrive Offline Program. Because of this, she added, the trust young children are placing in these toys can exacerbate the types of harms older children are already experiencing with AI chatbots.

A separate report Thursday by Common Sense Media and psychiatrists at Stanford University's medical school warned teenagers against using popular AI chatbots as therapists. Fairplay, a 25-year-old organization formerly known as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, has been warning about AI toys for years. They just weren't as advanced as they are today. A decade ago, during an emerging fad of internet-connected toys and AI speech recognition, the group helped lead a backlash against Mattel's talking Hello Barbie doll that it said was recording and analyzing children's conversations. This time, though AI toys are mostly sold online and more popular in Asia than elsewhere, Franz said some have started to appear on store shelves in the U.S. and more could be on the way. "Everything has been released with no regulation and no research, so it gives us extra pause when all of a sudden we see more and more manufacturers, including Mattel, who recently partnered with OpenAI, potentially putting out these products," Franz said. Last week, consumer advocates at U.S. PIRG called out the trend of buying AI toys in its annual "Trouble in Toyland" report. This year, the organization tested four toys that use AI chatbots. "We found some of these toys will talk in-depth about sexually explicit topics, will offer advice on where a child can find matches or knives, act dismayed when you say you have to leave, and have limited or no parental controls," the report said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: When Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, unveiled the company's Superintelligence Lab in June, he named 11 artificial intelligence researchers who were joining his ambitious effort to build a machine more powerful than the human brain. All 11 were immigrants educated in other countries. Seven were born in China, according to a memo viewed by The New York Times. Although many American executives, government officials and pundits have spent months painting China as the enemy of America's rapid push into A.I., much of the groundbreaking research emerging from the United States is driven by Chinese talent.

Two new studies show that researchers born and educated in China have for years played major roles inside leading U.S. artificial intelligence labs. They also continue to drive important A.I. research in industry and academia, despite the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration and growing anti-China sentiment in Silicon Valley. The research, from two organizations, provides a detailed look at how much the American tech industry continues to rely on engineers from China, particularly in A.I. The findings also offer a more nuanced understanding of how researchers in the two countries continue to collaborate, despite increasingly heated language from Washington and Beijing.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the tech news site The Register: The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) this week published guidance urging software developers to adopt memory-safe programming languages. "The importance of memory safety cannot be overstated," the inter-agency report says...

The CISA/NSA report revisits the rationale for greater memory safety and the government's calls to adopt memory-safe languages (MSLs) while also acknowledging the reality that not every agency can change horses mid-stream. "A balanced approach acknowledges that MSLs are not a panacea and that transitioning involves significant challenges, particularly for organizations with large existing codebases or mission-critical systems," the report says. "However, several benefits, such as increased reliability, reduced attack surface, and decreased long-term costs, make a strong case for MSL adoption."

The report cites how Google by 2024 managed to reduce memory safety vulnerabilities in Android to 24 percent of the total. It goes on to provide an overview of the various benefits of adopting MSLs and discusses adoption challenges. And it urges the tech industry to promote memory safety by, for example, advertising jobs that require MSL expertise.

It also cites various government projects to accelerate the transition to MSLs, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Translating All C to Rust (TRACTOR) program, which aspires to develop an automated method to translate C code to Rust. A recent effort along these lines, dubbed Omniglot, has been proposed by researchers at Princeton, UC Berkeley, and UC San Diego. It provides a safe way for unsafe libraries to communicate with Rust code through a Foreign Function Interface....

"Memory vulnerabilities pose serious risks to national security and critical infrastructure," the report concludes. "MSLs offer the most comprehensive mitigation against this pervasive and dangerous class of vulnerability."
"Adopting memory-safe languages can accelerate modern software development and enhance security by eliminating these vulnerabilities at their root," the report concludes, calling the idea "an investment in a secure software future."

"By defining memory safety roadmaps and leading the adoption of best practices, organizations can significantly improve software resilience and help ensure a safer digital landscape."

SiFive was one of the first companies to produce a RISC-V chip. This week they announced a new collaboration with Red Hat "to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux support to the rapidly growing RISC-V community" and "prepare Red Hat's product portfolio for future intersection with RISC-V server hardware from a diverse set of RISC-V suppliers."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 is available in developer preview on the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 platform, which they call "a proven, high performance RISC-V CPU development platform." The SiFive HiFive Premier P550 provides a proven, high performance RISC-V CPU development platform. Adding support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, the latest version of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform, enables developers to create, optimize, and release new applications for the next generation of enterprise servers and cloud infrastructure on the RISC-V architecture...

SiFive's high performance RISC-V technology is already being used by large organizations to meet compute-intensive AI and machine learning workloads in the datacenter... "With the growing demand for RISC-V, we are pleased to collaborate with SiFive to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 deployments on SiFive HiFive Premier P550," said Ronald Pacheco, senior director of RHEL product and ecosystem strategy, "to further empower developers with the power of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform wherever and however they choose to deploy...."

Dave Altavilla, principal analyst at HotTech Vision And Analysis, said "Native Red Hat Enterprise Linux support on SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 board offers developers a substantial enterprise-grade toolchain for RISC-V.

"This is a pivotal step forward in enabling a full-stack ecosystem around open RISC-V hardware. SiFive says the move will "inspire the next generation of enterprise workloads and AI applications optimized for RISC-V," while helping their partners "deliver systems with a meaningfully lower total cost of ownership than incumbent platforms."

"With the growing demand for RISC-V, we are pleased to collaborate with SiFive to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 deployments on SiFive HiFive Premier P550..." said Ronald Pacheco, senior director of RHEL product and ecosystem strategy. .

Beta News notes that there's also a new AI-powered assistant in RHEL 10, so "Instead of spending all day searching for answers or poking through documentation, admins can simply ask questions directly from the command line and get real-time help Security is front and center in this release, too. Red Hat is taking a proactive stance with early support for post-quantum cryptography. OpenSSL, GnuTLS, NSS, and OpenSSH now offer quantum-resistant options, setting the stage for better protection as threats evolve. There's a new sudo system role to help with privilege management, and OpenSSH has been bumped to version 9.9. Plus, with new Sequoia tools for OpenPGP, the door is open for even more robust encryption strategies. But it's not just about security and AI. Containers are now at the heart of RHEL 10 thanks to the new "image mode." With this feature, building and maintaining both the OS and your applications gets a lot more streamlined...

Skype is shutting down after two decades on May 5th, notes the Washington Post.

But the bigger problem for retired attorney Karen Griffin is that Microsoft won't refund the money they paid into a Skype account for cheap international phone calls: "They're no longer offering this service that I prepaid for, and now they're not giving me my money back," Griffin said. "There's a lot of people out there who are going to lose money...."

To its credit, Microsoft gave Skype users a couple months' warning about the shutdown coming May 5. People can transfer Skype contacts and chat history to the company's Microsoft Teams chat-and-calling app or to other companies' services. (While Microsoft sells Teams to organizations, there's a free version for personal use.) But Microsoft didn't explain well what will happen to money that people like Griffin have parked in Skype accounts, in some cases for years.... Unless you bought Skype credits very recently, Microsoft said it won't refund money in Skype accounts. The company says it will add an option for Skype account holders to keep using their funds for phone calls online or in Teams.

Griffin doesn't love what Microsoft is doing. She prefers a cash refund or a credit applied to her Microsoft Office subscription, for which she pays about $110 a year. Amit Fulay, vice president of product for Skype and Teams, said it's not possible to shift funds from a Skype account to Office subscriptions. And he nixed refunds because Microsoft will still offer basic call services for former Skype customers. "Refunds make more sense if you took away something," Fulay said. "We're not." Microsoft declined to say how much money Skype users collectively have sitting in accounts that they might never use.

Stacey Higginbotham, a policy specialist with Consumer Reports' technology advocacy team, said Griffin is making a reasonable request for a rich company like Microsoft that's shutting down an internet service. "The best way: Give people their money back. The second-best way, give people a credit to all of your services," Higginbotham said.

It's "live-recording the World Wide Web," according to NPR, with a digital library that includes "hundreds of billions of copies of government websites, news articles and data."

They described the 29-year-old nonprofit Internet Archive as "more relevant than ever." Every day, about 100 terabytes of material are uploaded to the Internet Archive, or about a billion URLs, with the assistance of automated crawlers. Most of that ends up in the Wayback Machine, while the rest is digitized analog media — books, television, radio, academic papers — scanned and stored on servers. As one of the few large-scale archivists to back up the web, the Internet Archive finds itself in a particularly unique position right now... Thousands of [U.S. government] datasets were wiped — mostly at agencies focused on science and the environment — in the days following Trump's return to the White House...

The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine director [Mark] Graham said, the Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump's inauguration...

According to Graham, based on the big jump in page views he's observed over the past two months, the Internet Archive is drawing many more visitors than usual to its services — journalists, researchers and other inquiring minds. Some want to consult the archive for information lost or changed in the purge, while others aim to contribute to the archival process.... "People are coming and rallying behind us," said Brewster Kahle, [the founder and current director of the Internet Archive], "by using it, by pointing at things, helping organize things, by submitting content to be archived — data sets that are under threat or have been taken down...."

A behemoth of link rot repair, the Internet Archive rescues a daily average of 10,000 dead links that appear on Wikipedia pages. In total, it's fixed more than 23 million rotten links on Wikipedia alone, according to the organization.
Though it receives some money for its preservation work for libraries, museums, and other organizations, it's also funded by donations. "From the beginning, it was important for the Internet Archive to be a nonprofit, because it was working for the people," explains founder Brewster Kahle on its donations page: Its motives had to be transparent; it had to last a long time. That's why we don't charge for access, sell user data, or run ads, even while we offer free resources to citizens everywhere. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to pay for servers, staff, and preservation projects. If you can't imagine a future without the Internet Archive, please consider supporting our work. We promise to put your donation to good use as we continue to store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages, 38 million texts, and 14 million audio recordings.
Two interesting statistics from NPR's article:

• "A Pew Research Center study published last year found that roughly 38% of web pages on the internet that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible as of 2023."

• "According to a Harvard Law Review study published in 2014, about half of all links cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the original source material."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jtotheh for sharing the news.

The Register's Thomas Claburn reports: Oracle this week asked the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to partially dismiss a challenge to its JavaScript trademark. The move has been criticized as an attempt to either stall or water down legal action against the database goliath over the programming language's name. Deno Land, the outfit behind the Deno JavaScript runtime, filed a petition with the USPTO back in November in an effort to make the trademarked term available to the JavaScript community. This legal effort is led by Node.js creator and Deno Land CEO Ryan Dahl, summarized on the JavaScript.tm website, and supported by more than 16,000 members of the JavaScript community. It aims to remove the fear of an Oracle lawsuit for using the term "JavaScript" in a conference title or business venture.

"Programmers working with JavaScript have formed innumerable community organizations," the website explains. "These organizations, like the standards bodies, have been forced to painstakingly avoid naming the programming language they are built around -- for example, JSConf. Sadly, without risking a legal trademark challenge against Oracle, there can be no 'JavaScript Conference' nor a 'JavaScript Specification.' The world's most popular programming language cannot even have a conference in its name." [...] In the initial trademark complaint, Deno Land makes three arguments to invalidate Oracle's ownership of "JavaScript." The biz claims that JavaScript has become a generic term; that Oracle committed fraud in 2019 when it applied to renew its trademark; and that Oracle has abandoned its trademark because it does not offer JavaScript products or services.

Oracle's motion on Monday focuses on the dismissal of the fraud claim, while arguing that it expects to prevail on the other two claims, citing corporate use of the trademarked term "in connection with a variety of offerings, including its JavaScript Extension Toolkit as well as developer's guides and educational resources, and also that relevant consumers do not perceive JavaScript as a generic term." The fraud claim follows from Deno Land's assertion that the material Oracle submitted in support of its trademark renewal application has nothing to do with any Oracle product. "Oracle, through its attorney, submitted specimens showing screen captures of the Node.js website, a project created by Ryan Dahl, Petitioner's Chief Executive Officer," the trademark cancellation petition says. "Node.js is not affiliated with Oracle, and the use of screen captures of the 'nodejs.org' website as a specimen did not show any use of the mark by Oracle or on behalf of Oracle."

Oracle contends that in fact it submitted two specimens to the USPTO -- a screenshot from the Node.js website and another from its own Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit. And this, among other reasons, invalidates the fraud claim, Big Red's attorneys contend. "Where, as here, Registrant 'provided the USPTO with [two specimens]' at least one of which shows use of the mark in commerce, Petitioner cannot plausibly allege that the inclusion of a second, purportedly defective specimen, was material," Oracle's motion argues, adding that no evidence of fraudulent intent has been presented. Beyond asking the court to toss the fraud claim, Oracle has requested an additional thirty days to respond to the other two claims.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Video Game History Foundation has officially opened up digital access to a large portion of its massive archives today, offering fans and researchers unprecedented access to information and ephemera surrounding the past 50 years of the game industry. Today's launch of the VGHF Library comprises more than 30,000 indexed and curated files, including high-quality artwork, promotional material, and searchable full-text archives over 1,500 video game magazine issues. This initial dump of digital materials also contains never-before-seen game development and production archival material stored by the VGHF, such as over 100 hours of raw production files from the creation of the Myst series or Sonic the Hedgehog concept art and design files contributed by artist Tom Payne.

In a blog post and accompanying launch video, VGHF head librarian Phil Salvador explains how today's launch is the culmination of a dream the organization has had since its launch in 2017. But it's also just the start of an ongoing process to digitize the VGHF's mountains of unprocessed physical material into a cataloged digital form, so people can access it "without having to fly to California." The VGHF doesn't require any special credentials or even a free account to access its archives, a fact that might be contributing to overloaded servers on this launch day. Despite those server issues, amateur researchers online are already sharing crucial library-derived information about the history of describing games as "immersive" or that one time Garfield ranked games in GamePro, for instance. Unfortunately, digital libraries cannot offer direct, playable access to retail video games due to DMCA restrictions, notes Ars. However, organizations like the VGHF "continue to challenge those copyright rules every three years," raising hope for future access.

Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation as a nonprofit in 1985 with four other directors (including MIT computer science professor Gerald Jay Sussman). Sussman remains on the Board of directors, along with EFF co-founder John Gilmore and five others.

Friday the eight directors published a new article explaining how their goal and principles are protected by the nonprofit's governance structure: An obvious option, used by many organizations, was to let supporters sign up as members and have the members' votes control everything about the organization. We rejected that approach because it would have made the organization vulnerable to being taken over by people who disagreed with its mission... [A]ctivist organizations should be steady in their mission. Already in 1985, we could see that many of the people who appreciated the GNU Project's work (developing useful GNU software packages) did not support our goal and values. To look at software issues in terms of freedom was radical and many were reluctant to consider it... So we chose a structure whereby the FSF's governing body would appoint new people to itself... [T]he FSF voting members consist of all the present board members and some past board members. We have found that having some former board members remain as voting members helps stabilize the base of FSF governance.

The divergence between our values and those of most users was expressed differently after 1998, when the term "open source" was coined. It referred to a class of programs which were free/libre or pretty close, but it stood for the same old values of convenience and success, not the goal of freedom for the users of those programs. For them, "scratching your own itch" replaced liberating the community around us. People could become supporters of "open source" without any change in their ideas of right and wrong... It would have been almost inevitable for supporters of "open source" to join the FSF, then vote to convert it into an "open source" organization, if its structure allowed such a course. Fortunately, we had made sure it did not. So we were able to continue spreading the idea that software freedom is a freedom that everyone needs and everyone is entitled to, just like freedom of speech.

In recent years, several influential "open source" organizations have come to be dominated by large companies. Large companies are accustomed to seeking indirect political power, and astroturf campaigns are one of their usual methods. It would be easy for companies to pay thousands of people to join the FSF if by doing so they could alter its goals and values. Once again, our defensive structure has protected us...

A recent source of disagreement with the free software movement's philosophy comes from those who would like to make software licenses forbid the use of programs for various practices they consider harmful. Such license restrictions would not achieve the goal of ending those practices and each restriction would split the free software community. Use restrictions are inimical to the free software community; whatever we think of the practices they try to forbid, we must oppose making software licenses restrict them. Software developers should not have the power to control what jobs people do with their computers by attaching license restrictions. And when some acts that can be done by using computing call for systematic prohibition, we must not allow companies that offer software or online services to decide which ones. Such restrictions, when they are necessary, must be laws, adopted democratically by legislatures...

What new political disagreements will exist in the free software community ten, twenty or thirty years from now? People may try to disconnect the FSF from its values for reasons we have not anticipated, but we can be confident that our structure will give us a base for standing firm. We recently asked our associate members to help us evaluate the current members of the FSF board of directors through a process that will help us preserve the basic structure that protects the FSF from pressure to change its values. A year ago we used this process to select new board members, and it worked very well.

Sincerely,

The Free Software Foundation Board of Directors

Google's NotebookLM and its podcast-like Audio Overviews are being updated with a new feature that allows listeners to interact with the AI "hosts." Google describes how this feature works in a blog post. The Verge reports: In addition to the interactive Audio Overviews, Google is introducing a new interface for NotebookLM that organizes things into three areas: a "sources" panel for your information, a "chat" panel to talk with an AI chatbot about the sources, and a "studio" panel that lets you make things like Audio Overviews and Study Guides. I think it looks nice.

Google is announcing a NotebookLM subscription, too: NotebookLM Plus. The subscription will give you "five times more Audio Overviews, notebooks, and sources per notebook," let you "customize the style and tone of your notebook responses," let you make shared team notebooks, and will offer "additional privacy and security," Google says. The subscription is available today for businesses, schools and universities, and organizations and enterprise customers. It will be added to Google One AI Premium in "early 2025." Google is also launching "Agentspace," a platform for custom AI agents for enterprises.

Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.

But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."

Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

There's finally an "official" definition of open source AI. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), a long-running institution aiming to define and "steward" all things open source, today released version 1.0 of its Open Source AI Definition (OSAID). TechCrunch: The product of several years of collaboration with academia and industry, the OSAID is intended to offer a standard by which anyone can determine whether AI is open source -- or not. You might be wondering why consensus matters for a definition of open source AI. Well, a big motivation is getting policymakers and AI developers on the same page, said OSI EVP Stefano Maffulli.

"Regulators are already watching the space," Maffulli told TechCrunch, noting that bodies like the European Commission have sought to give special recognition to open source. "We did explicit outreach to a diverse set of stakeholders and communities -- not only the usual suspects in tech. We even tried to reach out to the organizations that most often talk to regulators in order to get their early feedback." [...] To be considered open source under the OSAID, an AI model has to provide enough information about its design so that a person could "substantially" recreate it. The model must also disclose any pertinent details about its training data, including the provenance, how the data was processed, and how it can be obtained or licensed.

The Washington Post writes that Telegram's "anything-goes approach" to its 950 million users "has also made it one of the internet's largest havens for child predators, experts say...."

"Durov's critics say his public idealism masks an opportunistic business model that allows Telegram to profit from the worst the internet has to offer, including child sexual abuse material, or CSAM... " [Telegram is] an app of choice for political organizing, including by dissidents under repressive regimes. But it is equally appealing for terrorist groups, criminal organizations and sexual predators, who use it as a hub to share and consume nonconsensual pornography, AI "deepfake" nudes, and illegal sexual images and videos of exploited minors, said Alex Stamos, chief information security officer at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. "Due to their advertised policy of not cooperating with law enforcement, and the fact that they are known not to scan for CSAM, Telegram has attracted large groups of pedophiles trading and selling child abuse materials," Stamos said.

That reach comes even though many Telegram exchanges don't actually use the strong forms of encryption available on true private messaging apps, he added. Telegram is used for private messaging, public posts and group chats. Only one-to-one conversations can be encrypted in a way that even Telegram can't access them. And that occurs only if users choose the option, meaning the company could turn over everything else to governments if it wanted to... French prosecutors argue that Durov is in fact responsible for Telegram's emergence as a global haven for illegal content, including CSAM, because of his reluctance to moderate it and his refusal to help authorities police it, among other allegations...

David Kaye, a professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law and former U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression... said that while Telegram has at times banned groups and taken down [CSAM] content in response to law enforcement, its refusal to share data with investigators sets it apart from most other major tech companies. Unlike U.S.-based platforms, Telegram is not required by U.S. law to report instances of CSAM to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. Many online platforms based overseas do so anyway — but not Telegram. "NCMEC has tried to get them to report, but they have no interest and are known for not wanting to work with [law enforcement agencies] or anyone in this space," a NCMEC spokesperson said.
The Post also writes that Telegram "has repeatedly been revealed to serve as a tool to store, distribute and share child sexual imagery." (They cite several examples, including two different men convicted to minimum sentences of at least 10 years for using the service to purchase CSAM and solicit explicit photos from minors.)

New York has launched its mobile ID program, "giving residents the option to digitize their driver's license or non-driver ID," reports The Verge. From the report: Beginning today, the New York Mobile ID app is available from Apple's App Store and Google Play. The app can be used for identity verification at airports. A physical license, permit, or non-driver ID is required to activate a mobile ID; you'll need to take a photo of the front and back with your phone during the enrollment process. The news was announced during a media briefing at LaGuardia Airport on Tuesday that included New York's and Transportation Security Administration federal security director Robert Duffy, among other speakers. Their pitch is that mobile IDs "will revolutionize the way New Yorkers protect their identities and will significantly enhance the way they get through security at airports across the nation." State officials are also emphasizing that it's a voluntary option meant for convenience.

"When you offer your mobile ID to TSA or anyone else who accepts it, you are in full control of sharing that information. They can only see the information they request to see," Schroeder said. "If you only need to prove your age, you can withhold other information that a verifier doesn't need to see." The app is designed so that your phone remains in your possession at all times -- you should never freely hand a device over to law enforcement -- and shows a QR code that can be scanned to verify your identity. Any changes to your license status such as renewals or suspensions are automatically pushed to the mobile version, and the digital ID also mirrors data like whether you're an organ donor.

For now, acceptance of mobile IDs by businesses (and the police) is completely voluntary -- and there's no deadline in place for compliance -- so it's definitely too soon to start leaving your physical one at home. But bars and other small businesses can start accepting them immediately if they install the state's verifier app. The New York Mobile ID app can be used "at nearly 30 participating airports across the country including all terminals at LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports," according to a press release from Governor Kathy Hochul. New York joins a small list of states that have rolled out mobile driver's licenses, including Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, and Utah.