The SEC has granted the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., or DTCC, a no-action letter allowing it to custody and recognize tokenized stocks, ETFs, and Treasuries on approved blockchains for three years. "Although this program is a pilot subject to various operational limitations, it marks a significant incremental step in moving markets onchain," SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a statement. Bloomberg reports: With the permission, DTCC will also extend their record-keeping to the blockchain, Michael Winnike, global head of strategy and market solutions at DTCC Clearing & Securities Services, said in an interview. "It's the same legal entitlement, the same stock that you would hold in your account from the DTCC in traditional form," Winnike said. [...] The SEC's authorization of tokenization services only applies to a specific set of securities that trade often. The approval includes the Russell 1000 index which represents the 1,000 largest publicly traded US companies, as well as exchange-traded funds that track major indices and US Treasury bills, bonds and notes, Winnike said. "This allows us both to create value for the markets, while staying in a pre-defined pool of highly-liquid securities to start," said Winnike. The firm's ultimate aspiration is to add its entire depository, which represents $100 trillion in securities, to the blockchain, a move that would require further expansion of the no-action relief from the SEC, he said.

Winnike said the tokenization service will help bridge the traditional and digital worlds in part because the new technology will have the same legal entitlements and controls as traditional markets, including freezing or forced transfers if assets are stolen. "This enables participants to adopt and integrate, because they know there is a trusted party that can recover their securities as needed" and can address potential errors, he said. The new blockchain service will also allow investors to move assets all the time, not just Monday through Friday when traditional markets are open. "That creates a lot of new utility," Winnike said. "It brings the two ecosystems together."

The Game Awards, which broadcasts tonight on Twitch, YouTube, and Prime Video, has become the biggest night on the video game calendar since launching in 2014, but the show's treatment of developers has drawn increasing criticism. At the 2023 ceremony, acceptance speeches were often cut off after roughly 30 seconds while Hideo Kojima received five minutes to discuss his upcoming game OD -- enough time for 13 acceptance speeches, Aftermath calculated. That year's show also ignored the industry's mass layoffs entirely; host Geoff Keighley acknowledged the labor crisis only at the 2024 ceremony.

The show's Future Class program, launched in 2020 to celebrate game makers representing an inclusive future for the industry, has quietly ended. No new class has been named for two years. "At this time, we are not planning a new Future Class for this year," organizer Emily Weir told Game Developer.

Researchers and moderators are increasingly concerned that ChatGPT-style language is bleeding into everyday speech and writing. The topic has been explored in the past but "two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn't just something that can be found through close analysis of data," reports Gizmodo. "It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now." Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Over on Reddit, according to a new Wired story by Kat Tenbarge, moderators of certain subreddits are complaining about AI posts ruining their online communities. It's not new to observe that AI-armed spammers post low-value engagement bait on social media, but these are spaces like r/AmItheAsshole, r/AmIOverreacting, and r/AmITheDevil, where visitors crave the scintillation or outright titillation of bona fide human misbehavior. If, behind the scenes, there's not really a grieving college student having her tuition cut off for randomly flying off the handle at her stepmom, there's no real fun to be had. The mods in the Wired story explain how they detect AI content, and unfortunately their methods boil down to "It's vibes." But one novel struggle in the war against slop, the mods say, is that not only are human-written posts sometimes rewritten by AI, but mods are concerned that humans are now writing like AI. Humans are becoming flesh and blood AI-text generators, muddying the waters of AI "detection" to the point of total opacity.

As "Cassie" an r/AmItheAsshole moderator who only gave Wired her first name put it, "AI is trained off people, and people copy what they see other people doing." In other words, Cassie said, "People become more like AI, and AI becomes more like people." Meanwhile, essayist Sam Kriss just explored the weird way chatbots "write" for the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine, and he discovered along the way that humans have accidentally taken cues from that weirdness. After parsing chatbots' strange tics and tendencies -- such as overusing the word "delve" most likely because it's in a disproportional number of texts from Nigeria, where that word is popular -- Kriss refers to a previously reported trend from over the summer. Members of the U.K. Parliament were accused of using ChatGPT to write their speeches.

The thinking goes that ChatGPT-written speeches contained the phrase "I rise to speak," an American phrase, used by American legislators. But Kriss notes that it's not just showing up from time to time. It's being used with downright breathtaking frequency. "On a single day this June, it happened 26 times," he notes. While 26 different MPs using ChatGPT to write speeches is not some scientific impossibility, it's more likely an example of chatbots, "smuggling cultural practices into places they don't belong," to quote Kriss again. So when Kriss points out that when Starbucks locations were closing in September, and signs posted on the doors contained tortured sentences like, "It's your coffeehouse, a place woven into your daily rhythm, where memories were made, and where meaningful connections with our partners grew over the years," one can't state with certainty that this is AI-generated text (although let's be honest: it probably is).

Graphic designer Lisa Carstens "spends a good portion of her day working with startups and individual clients looking to fix their botched attempts at AI-generated logos," reports NBC News: Such gigs are part of a new category of work spawned by the generative AI boom that threatened to displace creative jobs across the board: Anyone can now write blog posts, produce a graphic or code an app with a few text prompts, but AI-generated content rarely makes for a satisfactory final product on its own... Fixing AI's mistakes is not their ideal line of work, many freelancers say, as it tends to pay less than traditional gigs in their area of expertise. But some say it's what helps pay the bills....

As companies struggle to figure out their approach to AI, recent data provided to NBC News from freelance job platforms Upwork, Freelancer and Fiverr also suggest that demand for various types of creative work surged this year, and that clients are increasingly looking for humans who can work alongside AI technologies without relying on or rejecting them entirely. Data from Upwork found that although AI is already automating lower-skilled and repetitive tasks, the platform is seeing growing demand for more complex work such as content strategy or creative art direction. And over the past six months, Fiverr said it has seen a 250% boost in demand for niche tasks across web design and book illustration, from "watercolor children story book illustration" to "Shopify website design." Similarly, Freelancer saw a surge in demand this year for humans in writing, branding, design and video production, including requests for emotionally engaging content like "heartfelt speeches...."

The low pay from clients who have already cheaped out on AI tools has affected gig workers across industries, including more technical ones like coding. For India-based web and app developer Harsh Kumar, many of his clients say they had already invested much of their budget in "vibe coding" tools that couldn't deliver the results they wanted. But others, he said, are realizing that shelling out for a human developer is worth the headaches saved from trying to get an AI assistant to fix its own "crappy code." Kumar said his clients often bring him vibe-coded websites or apps that resulted in unstable or wholly unusable systems.
"Even outside of any obvious mistakes made by AI tools, some artists say their clients simply want a human touch to distinguish themselves from the growing pool of AI-generated content online..."

In 2020 a YouTube video used video footage of Steve Wozniak in a scam to steal bitcoin. "Some people said they lost their life savings," Wozniak tells CBS News, explaining why he sued YouTube in 2020 — and where his case stands now: Wozniak's lawsuit against YouTube has been tied up in court now for five years, stalled by federal legislation known as Section 230. Attorney Brian Danitz said, "Section 230 is a very broad statute that limits, if not totally, the ability to bring any kind of case against these social media platforms."

"It says that anything gets posted, they have no liability at all," said Wozniak. "It's totally absolute."

Google responded to our inquiry about Wozniak's lawsuit with a statement from José Castañeda, of Google Policy Communications: "We take abuse of our platform seriously and take action quickly when we detect violations ... we have tools for users to report channels that are impersonating their likeness or business." [Steve's wife] Janet Wozniak, however, says YouTube did nothing, even though she reported the scam video multiple times: "You know, 'Please take this down. This is an obvious mistake. This is fraud. You're YouTube, you're helping dupe people out of their money,'" she said.

"They wouldn't," said Steve...
Today is Steve Wozniak's 75th birthday. (You can watch the interview here.) And the article includes this interesting detail about Woz's life today: Wozniak sold most of his Apple stock in the mid-1980s when he left the company. Today, though, he still gets a small paycheck from Apple for making speeches and representing the company. He says he's proud to see Apple become a trillion-dollar company. "Apple is still the best," he said. "And when Apple does things I don't like, and some of the closeness I wish it were more open, I'll speak out about it. Nobody buys my voice!"

I asked, "Apple listen to you when you speak out?"

"No," Wozniak smiled. "Oh, no. Oh, no."
Wozniak answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2000 and again in 2012.

And he dropped by Slashdot on his birthday to leave this comment for Slashdot's readers...

The SEC has launched "Project Crypto" to overhaul outdated securities regulations for a blockchain-based future, aiming to support tokenized assets, crypto trading, and "super apps."

"To achieve President Trump's vision of making America the crypto capital of the world, the SEC must holistically consider the potential benefits and risks of moving our markets from an off-chain environment to an on-chain one," SEC chair Paul Atkins said at the "American Leadership in the Digital Finance Revolution" conference on Thursday. "I have directed the Commission staff to update antiquated agency rules and regulations to unleash the potential of on-chain software systems in our securities markets ... Federal securities laws have always assumed the involvement of intermediaries that require regulation, but this does not mean that we should interpose intermediaries for the sake of forcing intermediation where the markets can function without them." CNBC reports: Atkins, the SEC chair, highlighted "super apps" (such as one Coinbase introduced two weeks ago) as a priority of his chairmanship, noting the need to allow the apps to thrive with an "efficient licensing structure," rather than subject to multiple regulatory authorities.

So-called super apps like WeChat and Alipay -- which bundle several different services and functionalities into a single mobile app -- have long been viewed as the holy grail of financial technology by the industry. They're central to everyday life in China but haven't been successfully replicated in the West. Meta Platforms and X have made attempts to realize that vision, integrating payments, messaging and social content, among other functions.

Atkins also said the Trump administration will work to prevent "innovative" companies from being driven offshore by burdensome regulations, and said the SEC "will encourage our nation's builders rather than constrain them with red tape and one-size-fits-all rules."

Stack Overflow remains in the midst of big changes to counter an AI-fueled drop in engagement. So "We're wondering what kind of online communities Stack Overflow users continue to support in the age of AI," writes their senior analyst, "and whether AI is becoming a closer companion than ever before."

For their 15th year of their annual reader survey, this means "we're not just collecting data; we're reflecting on the last year of questions, answers, hallucinations, job changes, tech stacks, memory allocations, models, systems and agents — together..." Is it an AI agent revolution yet? Are you building or utilizing AI agents? We want to know how these intelligent assistants are changing your daily workflow and if developers are really using them as much as these keynote speeches assume. We're asking if you are using these tools and where humans are still needed for common developer tasks.

Career shifts: We're keen to understand if you've considered a career change or transitioned roles and if AI is impacting your approach to learning or using existing tools. Did we make up the difference in salaries globally for tech workers...?
They're also re-visiting "a key finding from recent surveys highlighted a significant statistic: 80% of developers reported being unhappy or complacent in their jobs." This raised questions about changing office (and return-to-office) culture and the pressures of the industry, along with whether there were any insights into what could help developers feel more satisfied at work. Prior research confirmed that flexibility at work used to contribute more than salary to job satisfaction, but 2024's results show us that remote work is not more impactful than salary when it comes to overall satisfaction... [For some positions job satisfaction stayed consistent regardless of salary, though it increased with salary for other positions. And embedded developers said their happiness increased when they worked with top-quality hardware, while desktop developers cited "contributing to open source" and engineering managers were happier when "driving strategy".]

In 2024, our data showed that many developers experienced a pay cut in various roles and programming specialties. In an industry often seen as highly lucrative, this was a notable shift of around 7% lower salaries across the top ten reporting countries for the same roles. This year, we're interested in whether this trend has continued, reversed, or stabilized. Salary dynamics is an indicator for job satisfaction in recent surveys of Stack Overflow users and understanding trends for these roles can perhaps improve the process for finding the most useful factors contributing to role satisfaction outside of salary.
And of course they're asking about AI — while noting last year's survey uncovered this paradox. "While AI usage is growing (70% in 2023 vs. 76% in 2024 planning to or currently using AI tools), developer sentiment isn't necessarily following suit, as 77% in of all respondents in 2023 are favorable or very favorable of AI tools for development compared to 72% of all respondents in 2024." Concerns about accuracy and misinformation were prevalent among some key groups. More developers learning to code are using or are interested in using AI tools than professional developers (84% vs. 77%)... Developers with 10 — 19 years experience were most likely (84%) to name "increase in productivity" as a benefit of AI tools, higher than developers with less experience (<80%)...

Is it an AI agent revolution yet? Are you building or utilizing AI agents? We want to know how these intelligent assistants are changing your daily workflow and if developers are really using them as much as these keynote speeches assume. We're asking if you are using these tools and where humans are still needed for common developer tasks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last Thursday, white smoke emerged from a chimney at the Sistine Chapel, signaling that cardinals had elected a new pope. That's a rare event in itself, but one of the many unprecedented aspects of the election of Chicago-born Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV is one of the main reasons he chose his papal name: artificial intelligence. On Saturday, the new pope gave his first address to the College of Cardinals, explaining his name choice as a continuation of Pope Francis' concerns about technological transformation. "Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV," he said during the address. "There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution."

In his address, Leo XIV explicitly described "artificial intelligence" developments as "another industrial revolution," positioning himself to address this technological shift as his namesake had done over a century ago. As the head of an ancient religious organization that spans millennia, the pope's talk about AI creates a somewhat head-spinning juxtaposition, but Leo XIV isn't the first pope to focus on defending human dignity in the age of AI. Pope Francis, who died in April, first established AI as a Vatican priority, as we reported in August 2023 when he warned during his 2023 World Day of Peace message that AI should not allow "violence and discrimination to take root." In January of this year, Francis further elaborated on his warnings about AI with reference to a "shadow of evil" that potentially looms over the field in a document called "Antiqua et Nova" (meaning "the old and the new").

"Like any product of human creativity, AI can be directed toward positive or negative ends," Francis said in January. "When used in ways that respect human dignity and promote the well-being of individuals and communities, it can contribute positively to the human vocation. Yet, as in all areas where humans are called to make decisions, the shadow of evil also looms here. Where human freedom allows for the possibility of choosing what is wrong, the moral evaluation of this technology will need to take into account how it is directed and used." [...] Just as mechanization disrupted traditional labor in the 1890s, artificial intelligence now potentially threatens employment patterns and human dignity in ways that Pope Leo XIV believes demand similar moral leadership from the church. "In our own day," Leo XIV concluded in his formal address on Saturday, "the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: With a few keystrokes, anyone can ask an artificial intelligence (AI) program such as ChatGPT to write them a term paper, a rap song, or a play. But don't expect William Shakespeare's originality. A new study finds such output remains derivative -- at least for now. [...] [O]bjectively testing this creativity has been tricky. Scientists have generally taken two tacks. One is to use another computer program to search for signs of plagiarism -- though a lack of plagiarism does not necessarily equal creativity. The other approach is to have humans judge the AI output themselves, rating factors such as fluency and originality. But that's subjective and time intensive. So Ximing Lu, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, and colleagues created a program featuring both objectivity and a bit of nuance.

Called DJ Search, it collects pieces of text of a minimum length from whatever the AI outputs and searches for them in large online databases. DJ Search doesn't just look for identical matches; it also scans for strings whose words have similar meanings. To evaluate the meaning of a word or phrase, the program itself relies on a separate AI algorithm that produces a set of numbers called an "embedding," which roughly represents the contexts in which words are typically found. Synonymous words have numerically close embeddings. For example, phrases that swap "anticipation" and "excitement" are considered matches. After removing all matches, the program calculates the ratio of the remaining words to the original document length, which should give an estimate of how much of the AI's output is novel. The program conducts this process for various string lengths (the study uses a minimum of five words) and combines the ratios into one index of linguistic novelty. (The team calls it a "creativity index," but creativity requires both novelty and quality -- random gibberish is novel but not creative.)

The researchers compared the linguistic novelty of published novels, poetry, and speeches with works written by recent LLMs. Humans outscored AIs by about 80% in poetry, 100% in novels, and 150% in speeches, the researchers report in a preprint posted on OpenReview and currently under peer review. Although DJ Search was designed for comparing people and machines, it can also be used to compare two or more humanmade works. For example, Suzanne Collins's 2008 novel The Hunger Games scored 35% higher in linguistic originality than Stephenie Meyer's 2005 hit Twilight. (You can try the tool online.)

Panasonic has created an AI clone of its late founder Konosuke Matsushita based on his writings, speeches, and over 3,000 voice recordings. From a local media report: Known as Japan's "god of management," the Panasonic icon is one of the most respected by the Japanese business community, and comes back to life in digital form to impart wisdom directly to those he never met in person.

"As the number of people who received training directly from Matsushita has been on the decline, we decided to use generative AI technology to pass down our group's founding vision to the next generation," the company said in a statement. Codeveloped with the University of Tokyo-affiliated Matsuo Institute, the model can reproduce how a person thinks or talks. The company aims to further develop the digital clone to help make business decisions in the future.

Eighteen Republican state attorneys general have sued the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Chair Gary Gensler on Thursday, challenging the agency's authority to regulate cryptocurrency markets.

The lawsuit, led by Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, alleges the SEC has exceeded its statutory powers by attempting to assume broad regulatory control over digital assets without congressional authorization. The complaint argues the agency's actions infringe on states' rights to develop their own cryptocurrency regulations and harm consumers by imposing ill-fitting federal securities laws on digital assets.

Speaking at a legal conference Thursday, Gensler defended the agency's approach, citing consistent court support for SEC enforcement actions in cryptocurrency cases. The regulatory landscape appears set for change following President-elect Trump's victory. Trump, who previously dismissed cryptocurrency as a "scam," has pledged to make the U.S. the "crypto capital of the planet" and remove Gensler.

"A two-day AI Labor Summit between AFL-CIO leaders and Microsoft executives this week reflects the tech giant's revamped approach to unions," writes GeekWire, "which includes a pledge by the company to incorporate feedback from labor unions and their members into the development of artificial intelligence."

But just two days later, "Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer announced it was game over for the jobs of another 650 Microsoft staffers (on top of an earlier 1,900 employee staff reduction)," writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp, "cuts that Spencer made clear were related to Microsoft's $69B acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023." Interestingly, Microsoft's Smith in October 2023 affirmed a "groundbreaking neutrality agreement" with the Communications Workers of America union (CWA) — designed to go into effect if Microsoft was successful in its acquisition of Activision Blizzard — in which Microsoft acknowledged the rights of its employees to unionize and pledged to work constructively with any who did. At the same time, Microsoft made it clear that it hoped its employees wouldn't feel the need to form or join unions, saying they would "never need to organize to have a dialogue with Microsoft's leaders."

In July 2023, the AFL-CIO applauded Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition and the Microsoft-CWA agreement, which AFL-CIO union federation president Liz Shuler said "sets a new standard for respecting workers' rights in the video game industry and the larger technology sector." And in December 2023, Shuler thanked Smith for Microsoft's "absolutely historic partnership" on AI and the Future of the Workforce, which Shuler suggested "can be mutually beneficial for workers, for businesses, and for our country as a whole."
Thursday the CWA union issued critical remarks about the layoffs at Microsoft Gaming (which were later retweeted by the @AFLCIO Twitter account).

"While we would hope that a company like Microsoft with $88 billion in profits last year could achieve 'long-term success' without destroying the livelihoods of 650 of our colleagues, heartless layoffs like these have become all too common."

"Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms and price-fixing software to do it."

That's a U.S. presidential candidate, speaking yesterday in North Carolina to warn that the practice "is anticompetitive, and it drives up costs. I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices."

Ironically, it's a problem caused by technology that's impacting some of America's major tech-industry cities. Investopedia reports: Harris proposed a slate of policies aimed at curbing the high cost of housing, which many economists have traced to a long-standing shortage. The affordability situation for both renters and first-time buyers took a turn for the worse starting in 2020 when home prices and rents rose sharply. Harris's plan called for the construction of 3 million new houses to close the gap between how many homes exist in the country, and how many are needed, with the aim of evening out supply and demand and putting downward pressure on prices. This would be accomplished by offering tax incentives to builders for constructing starter homes, by funding local construction, and by cutting bureaucratic red tape that slows down construction projects. Harris would also help buyers out directly, through the first-time buyer credit.

For renters, Harris said she would crack down on companies that own many apartments, who she said have "colluded" to raise rents using pricing algorithms. She also called for a law blocking large investors from buying houses to rent out, a practice she said was driving up prices by competing with individual private buyers. Harris's focus on corporate crackdowns extended to the food business, where she called for a "federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries," without going into specifics about what exact behavior the ban would target.
Investopedia reminds readers that the executive branch is just one of three branches of the U.S. government: Should Harris win the 2024 election and become president, her ideas are still not guaranteed to be implemented, since many would require the support of Congress. Lawmakers are currently divided with Republicans controlling the House of Representatives and Democrats in control of the Senate.

Former U.S. president Donald Trump spoke at Nashville's Bitcoin Conference on Saturday.

But he wasn't the only one there making headlines, according to a local newspaper called the Tennesseean: Republican Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Tim Scott pledged their resolute support for the cryptocurrency industry at Nashville's Bitcoin2024 conference Friday — moments before whistleblower and political dissident Edward Snowden warned attendees to be wary of politicians trying to win them over. "Cast a vote, but don't join a cult," Snowden said. "They are not our tribe. They are not your personality. They have their own interests, their own values, their own things that they're chasing. Try to get what you need from them, but don't give yourself to them."

Snowden didn't call out any politicians specifically, but the conference has drawn national attention for its robust lineup of legislators including former President Donald Trump, independent presidential nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and a number of other senators. "Does this feel normal to you?" Snowden said. "When you look at the candidates, when you look at the dynamics, even the people on stage giving all the speeches, I'm not saying they're terrible at all, but it's a little unusual. The fact that they're here is a little unusual...."

Two key tenets of Bitcoin are transparency and decentralization, which means anyone can view all Bitcoin transactions on a public ledger. Snowden said this kind of metadata could be dangerous in the wrong hands, especially with artificial intelligence innovations making it easier to collect. "It is fantasy to imagine they're not doing this," he said.... He added that other countries like China or Russia could be collecting this same data. Snowden said he's afraid the collection of transaction data could happen across financial institutions and ultimately be used against the customers.
Also speaking was RFK Jr — who asked why Snowden hadn't already been pardoned, along with Julian Assange and Ross Ulbricht, when Donald Trump was president (as Kennedy promised to do). According to USA Today, Kennedy promised more than just creating a strategic reserve of Bitcoin worth more than half a trillion dollars: Kennedy also pledged to sign an executive order directing the IRS to treat Bitcoin as an eligible asset for 1031 Exchange into real property — making transactions unreportable and by extension nontaxable — which prompted a roar of approval from the crowd.
Though Trump's appearance also ended with a promise to have the government create a "strategic national bitcoin stockpile," NBC News notes that Trump "stopped short of offering many details." Immediately following Trump's remarks, Senator Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., said she would introduce a bill to create the reserve. However, the price of bitcoin fell slightly in the wake of Trump's remarks Saturday, perhaps reflecting crypto traders' unmet expectations for a more definitive commitment on the reserve idea from the presidential candidate...

Shortly after his morning remarks, Bitcoin Magazine reported that a group of Democratic representatives and candidates had sent a letter to the Democratic National Committee urging party leaders to be more supportive of crypto...

On Saturday, the Financial Times reported [presidential candidate Kamala] Harris had approached top crypto companies seeking a "reset" of relations, citing unnamed sources.
Ironically, in the end one conference attendee ended up telling Bloomberg that "It doesn't really matter who the president is. I don't really care much about it, because Bitcoin will do its thing regardless."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The FBI urges past victims of LockBit ransomware attacks to come forward after revealing that it has obtained over 7,000 LockBit decryption keys that they can use to recover encrypted data for free. FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran announced this on Wednesday at the 2024 Boston Conference on Cyber Security. "From our ongoing disruption of LockBit, we now have over 7,000 decryption keys and can help victims reclaim their data and get back online," the FBI Cyber Lead said in a keynote. "We are reaching out to known LockBit victims and encouraging anyone who suspects they were a victim to visit our Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov."

This call to action comes after law enforcement took down LockBit's infrastructure in February 2024 in an international operation dubbed "Operation Cronos." At the time, police seized 34 servers containing over 2,500 decryption keys, which helped create a free LockBit 3.0 Black Ransomware decryptor. After analyzing the seized data, the U.K.'s National Crime Agency and the U.S. Justice Department estimate the gang and its affiliates have raked in up to $1 billion in ransoms following 7,000 attacks targeting organizations worldwide between June 2022 and February 2024. However, despite law enforcement efforts to shut down its operations, LockBit is still active and has since switched to new servers and dark web domains. After disrupting LockBit in February, the U.S. State Department said it is offering a reward of up to $15 million for information leading to the identification or location of the leaders of the ransomware group.

In 2011 Ross Ulbricht launched an anonymous, Tor-hidden "darknet" marketplace (with transactions conducted in bitcoin). By 2015 he'd been sentenced to life in prison for crimes including money laundering, distributing narcotics, and trafficking in fraudulent identity documents — without the possibility of parole.

Today a U.S. presidential candidate promised to commute that life sentence — Donald Trump, speaking at the national convention of the Libertarian Party as it prepares to nominate its own candidate for president.

Commuting Ulbricht's life sentence is "a top demand" of a political movement that intends to run its own candidate against Trump, reports Semafor: "On day one, we will commute the sentence," Trump said, offering to free the creator of what was once the internet's most infamous drug clearinghouse. "We will bring him home." His speeches more typically include a pledge to execute drug dealers, citing China as a model.

"It's time to be winners," said Trump, asking rhetorically if third party delegates wanted to go on getting single-digit protest votes. "I'm asking for the Libertarian Party's endorsement, or at least lots of your votes...."

"I've been indicted by the government on 91 different things," Trump said. "So if I wasn't a libertarian before, I sure as hell am a libertarian now."
More coverage from NBC News: At times, Trump turned on the crowd, criticizing libertarians' turnout at previous elections. "You can keep going the way you have for the last long decades and get your 3% and meet again, get another 3%," Trump said following jeers from the crowd.
Another high-profile supporter for commuting Ulbricht's sentence is actor-turned documentary maker Alex Winter. Best known for playing slacker Bill S. Preston Esq in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and its sequels, Winter also directed, wrote, and co-produced the 2015 documentary Deep Web: The Untold Story of Bitcoin and the Silk Road (narrated by Keanu Reeves).

Writing earlier this month in Rolling Stone, Winter called Silk Road "inarguably a criminal operation" but also "a vibrant and diverse community of people from around the world. They were not only there for drugs but for the freedom of an encrypted and anonymous space, to convene and discuss everything from politics to literature and art, philosophy and drugs, drug recovery, and the onerous War on Drugs..." It's my firm opinion, and the opinion of many prison-system and criminal-law experts, that [Ulbricht's] sentence is disproportionate to his charges and that he deserves clemency. This case indeed reflects just one of the millions of unjust sentences in the long and failed War on Drugs... No matter what one thinks of Ulbricht, Silk Road, or the crimes that may have been committed, 10 years in prison is more than sufficient and customary punishment for those offenses or sins. Ross Ulbricht should be free.

America's Defense Department "is rushing to expand its capacity to wage war in space," reports the New York Times, "convinced that rapid advances by China and Russia in space-based operations pose a growing threat to U.S. troops and other military assets on the ground and U.S. satellites in orbit." [T]he Defense Department is looking to acquire a new generation of ground- and space-based tools that will allow it to defend its satellite network from attack and, if necessary, to disrupt or disable enemy spacecraft in orbit, Pentagon officials have said in a series of interviews, speeches and recent statements... [T]he move to enhance warfighting capacity in space is driven mostly by China's expanding fleet of military tools in space... [U.S. officials are] moving ahead with an effort they are calling "responsible counterspace campaigning," an intentionally ambiguous term that avoids directly confirming that the United States intends to put its own weapons in space. But it also is meant to reflect this commitment by the United States to pursue its interest in space without creating massive debris fields that would result if an explosive device or missile were used to blow up an enemy satellite. That is what happened in 2007, when China used a missile to blow up a satellite in orbit. The United States, China, India and Russia all have tested such missiles. But the United States vowed in 2022 not to do any such antisatellite tests again.

The United States has also long had ground-based systems that allow it to jam radio signals, disrupting the ability of an enemy to communicate with its satellites, and is taking steps to modernize these systems. But under its new approach, the Pentagon is moving to take on an even more ambitious task: broadly suppress enemy threats in orbit in a fashion similar to what the Navy does in the oceans and the Air Force in the skies.
The article notes a recent report drafted by a former Space Force colonel cited three ways to disable enemy satellite networks: cyberattacks, ground or space-based lasers, and high-powered microwaves. "John Shaw, a recently retired Space Force lieutenant general who helped run the Space Command, agreed that directed-energy devices based on the ground or in space would probably be a part of any future system. 'It does minimize debris; it works at the speed of light,' he said. 'Those are probably going to be the tools of choice to achieve our objective." The Pentagon is separately working to launch a new generation of military satellites that can maneuver, be refueled while in space or have robotic arms that could reach out and grab — and potentially disrupt — an enemy satellite. Another early focus is on protecting missile defense satellites. The Defense Department recently started to require that a new generation of these space-based monitoring systems have built-in tools to evade or respond to possible attack. "Resiliency feature to protect against directed energy attack mechanisms" is how one recent missile defense contract described it. Last month the Pentagon also awarded contracts to two companies — Rocket Lab and True Anomaly — to launch two spacecraft by late next year, one acting as a mock enemy and the other equipped with cameras, to pull up close and observe the threat. The intercept satellite will not have any weapons, but it has a cargo hold that could carry them.
The article notes that Space Force's chief of space operations has told Senate appropriators that about $2.4 billion of the $29.4 billion in Space Force's proposed 2025 budget was set aside for "space domain awareness." And it adds that the Pentagon "is working to coordinate its so-called counterspace efforts with major allies, including Britain, Canada and Australia, through a multinational operation called Operation Olympic Defender. France has been particularly aggressive, announcing its intent to build and launch by 2030 a satellite equipped with a high-powered laser." [W]hat is clear is that a certain threshold has now been passed: Space has effectively become part of the military fighting domain, current and former Pentagon officials said. "By no means do we want to see war extend into space," Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, deputy chief of space operations, said at a Mitchell Institute event this year. "But if it does, we have to be prepared to fight and win."

AI allowed Pakistan's former prime minister Imran Khan to campaign from behind bars on Monday, with a voice clone of the opposition leader giving an impassioned speech on his behalf. From a report: Khan has been locked up since August and is being tried for leaking classified documents, allegations he says have been trumped up to stop him contesting general elections due in February. His Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party used artificial intelligence to make a four-minute message from the 71-year-old, headlining a "virtual rally" hosted on social media overnight on Sunday into Monday despite internet disruptions that monitor NetBlocks said were consistent with previous attempts to censor Khan.

PTI said Khan sent a shorthand script through lawyers that was fleshed out into his rhetorical style. The text was then dubbed into audio using a tool from the AI firm ElevenLabs, which boasts the ability to create a "voice clone" from existing speech samples. "My fellow Pakistanis, I would first like to praise the social media team for this historic attempt," the voice mimicking Khan said. "Maybe you all are wondering how I am doing in jail," the stilted voice adds. "Today, my determination for real freedom is very strong." The audio was broadcast at the end of a five-hour live-stream of speeches by PTI supporters on Facebook, X and YouTube, and was overlaid with historic footage of Khan and still images.

Rick Lane reports via PC Gamer: KeeperFX has been in the process of rescuing Dungeon Keeper for a decade and a half. The project originally started in 2008, and experienced something of a bumpy road up until 2016. Since then, though, it has gradually added support for Windows 7, 10, and 11, support for hi-res and 4k screens, modernized controls, and even additional campaigns. With this latest version, KeeperFX's developers say "all original Dungeon Keeper code has been rewritten, establishing KeeperFX as a true open-source standalone game." 1.0 also introduces some new features, such as higher framerates, AI that is better at digging and less likely to "instantly" throw its entire army at you, and "higher quality landview speeches" for the additional campaigns. That refers to the introductions and epilogues to missions which, in the game's original campaign, were voiced by Richard Ridings, aka Daddy Pig.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, KeeperFX's 1.0 adds a couple of new units to play with. First up is the Druid, a sort-of color-flipped version of the Warlock who uses ice spells rather than fire. The other unit is the excitingly named Time Mage, a recolor of the Wizard who can cast teleport and speed spells, and also turn enemy units into chickens (presumably through rapid devolution). You won't find these units in the original campaign, but you will encounter them in the custom campaigns bundled with the 1.0 version. You can download KeeperFX here, although it still requires you to own Dungeon Keeper "for copyright reasons."

An anonymous reader shares a report: It was always abundantly clear that the leader of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos from 2018 to 2022, Dmitry Rogozin, sought to kowtow to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now we have an anecdote from Putin himself that highlights how much. The story concerns a satellite constellation now known as Sfera (or Sphere, in English), a modestly ambitious constellation of 264 satellites. The Sphere constellation is intended to provide broadband Internet service from middle-Earth orbit to Russia as well as high-resolution Earth observation satellites.

As is usual with Russian space projects, because they tend to be poorly funded, the timeline for Sphere's deployment has been delayed and its scope reduced. It also underwent an unscheduled name change. Prior to 2018, this satellite program was known as Ehfir (Ether), a reference to the invisible substance once thought to fill the universe and the medium through which light waves propagated.

However that changed in 2018 when Putin was publicly announcing the program's creation. He recently recalled this in remarks that were recorded by RIA Novosti's Telegram channel. They were translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell. "At first it was called Ehfir," Putin said. "And at one of my public speeches I was talking and said it was Sfera. I arrived at the Kremlin, and the former Roscosmos head greeted me and said, 'Vladimirovich, you said it was project Sfera, Sfera you said. That's what it is, project Sfera.'"

Rogozin, who was listening to these remarks, acted immediately -- presumably to save his boss from embarrassment. After Rogozin said the constellation was named Sphere, Putin recalled that he asked how's that? Rogozin replied that it had already been renamed Sfera, not to worry. Laughing, Putin added, "So I didn't even make it back and it's already renamed to Sfera. So I said, well, OK then." Rogozin confirmed the anecdote on his Telegram channel this week.