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Submission + - Microsoft want court to toss GitHub lawsuit accusing them of abusing open-source (reuters.com)

Submitted by guest reader
guest reader writes: Microsoft Corp, Microsoft's GitHub Inc and OpenAI Inc told a San Francisco federal court that a proposed class-action lawsuit for improperly monetizing open-source code to train their artificial-intelligence systems cannot be sustained.

Two anonymous plaintiffs, seeking to represent a class of people who own copyrights to code on GitHub, sued Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI in November. They said the companies trained Copilot with code from GitHub repositories without complying with open-source licensing terms, and that Copilot unlawfully reproduces their code.

Microsoft and OpenAI said Thursday that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case because they failed to argue they suffered specific injuries from the companies' actions.

From the class action complaint:

GitHub and OpenAI have offered shifting accounts of the source and amount of the code or other data used to train and operate Copilot. They have also offered shifting justifications for why a commercial AI product like Copilot should be exempt from these license requirements, often citing "fair use."

It is not fair, permitted, or justified. On the contrary, Copilot's goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall. It violates the licenses that open-source programmers chose and monetizes their code despite GitHub's pledge never to do so.

Submission + - Google could have used an algorithm to fire people including open source talent (theregister.com)

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Those who were fired last week found out from emails, discovering they no longer had corporate access and their ID badges no longer worked. How were they chosen? Good question. It has been widely reported that some of the firing was done by an algorithm. For example, Chris DiBona, who founded Google's OSPO 18 years ago, was let go. As was Jeremy Allison, co-creator of Samba and Google engineer; Cat Allman, former Program Manager for Developer EcoSystems; and Dave Lester, a new hire who was taking ownership of Google's open source security initiatives. These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire. They are open source movers and shakers. In open source leadership circles, they're people everyone knows and are happy to work with.

Submission + - An ALS Patient Set a Record For Communicating Via a Brain Implant: 62 WPM (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Eight years ago, a patient lost her power of speech because of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which causes progressive paralysis. She can still make sounds, but her words have become unintelligible, leaving her reliant on a writing board or iPad to communicate. Now, after volunteering to receive a brain implant, the woman has been able to rapidly communicate phrases like “I don’t own my home” and “It’s just tough” at a rate approaching normal speech. That is the claim in a paper published over the weekend on the website bioRxiv by a team at Stanford University. The study has not been formally reviewed by other researchers. The scientists say their volunteer, identified only as “subject T12,” smashed previous records by using the brain-reading implant to communicate at a rate of 62 words a minute, three times the previous best. [...] People without speech deficits typically talk at a rate of about 160 words a minute. Even in an era of keyboards, thumb-typing, emojis, and internet abbreviations, speech remains the fastest form of human-to-human communication.

Submission + - NYC Will Replace Its Largest Fossil Fuel Plant With Wind Power (electrek.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New York City’s largest fossil-fuel plant, which powers 20% of the city, will be replaced with offshore wind power. Ravenswood Generating Station is the New York City fossil fuel plant that will become an offshore wind hub. It’s a 2,480-megawatt (MW) power plant in Long Island City, Queens, across from Roosevelt Island, and it’s the Big Apple’s largest power plant. Rise Light & Power, a New York based energy asset manager and developer that holds Ravenswood as its core asset, is submitting a proposal today, with support from community and state leaders, to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) in response to the state’s offshore wind solicitation.

In a nutshell, the 27-acre waterfront oil and gas industrial site is going to be converted into a clean energy hub that will power one-fifth of New York City with offshore wind power. The Ravenswood offshore wind project will reuse existing physical and electrical infrastructure, and that’s going to save New York ratepayers money. An HVDC conductor cable will be brought onshore at the existing power plant site. The cable will interconnect via underground HVAC cables to the NYISO bulk electric system at existing substations adjacent to the site. It will also become an offshore wind operations and maintenance hub that will support the just transition of the existing fossil fuel plant workforce, and drive economic investment into a historically underserved community. Rise Light & Power states that the project will, with training programs and job opportunities, justly transition and upskill Ravenswood’s current Local 1-2 UWUA union workers.

Submission + - What characters are forbidden in OS X filenames? (superuser.com)

Submitted by hselasky
hselasky writes: On MacOS at least HFS and exFAT mounted filesystems, appear to not support the following UTF-16 character sequence 0x61 ("a") 0x30a (ring over — https://www.compart.com/en/uni...), looking at the byte sequence in the filename after byte swapping to little endian, it becomes like this:

"61 00 0a 03"

I guess the problem is that this byte sequence escapes to 0xE5 ("å") which appears to be some generic whiteout character in MacOS.

Unless the disk is write-protected, such files are instantly deleted. People working in the law enforcement departments in Scandinavia, probably should read this carefully before shipping files and documents between departments!

When this problem started is unknown, but probably has been this way since the beginning of the 70's (remember the VAX :-)

Submission + - California judge issues preliminary injunction blocking COVID 'misinformation' (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The law, known as Assembly Bill 2098, was set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2023. Under the law, the Medical Board of California and the Osteopathic Medical Board of California could discipline physicians who "disseminate" information about COVID that is not in line with the "contemporary scientific consensus."

In November, Jenin Younes, counsel for the NCLA(New Civil Liberties Alliance) said California’s new "misinformation" law is the result of the increasing censorious mentality that has gripped many lawmakers in America.

"That this shocking bill passed through the state legislature and was signed into law by Governor Newsom demonstrates that far too many Americans do not understand the First Amendment," Younes said.

Doctors said the law violates their First Amendment rights because it impedes their ability to communicate with their patients during treatment.

Submission + - Disaster Recovery Causes Disaster On NYSE (cnbc.com)

Submitted by cstacy
cstacy writes: On Tuesday morning, the New York Stock Exchange failed to open normally, and trading was disrupted. "This caused significant price dislocations and trading halts" according to CNBC.

NYSE President Lynn Martin and other exchange officials confirmed to CNBC that the root cause of the Big Board’s trading glitch at the Tuesday open was due to a manual error involving the Exchange’s Disaster Recovery configuration.

After the 9/11 disaster, the NYSE was obligated to maintain a primary trading site (at the NYSE) and a back-up site (which is in Chicago).

On Monday evening, routine maintenance was being performed on the software for the Chicago back-up site.

On Tuesday morning, the back-up system (Chicago) was mistakenly still running when the primary system (NYSE) came online.

Because the back-up was still running, when the primary site started up some stocks behaved as if trading had already started.

As a result, Designated Market Makers (DMMs) (Wikipedia) who would normally publish an opening auction print for each stock were prevented from doing so because the system operated as if an opening had already occurred.

Another "file" problem, I guess. You computer people seem to have a lot of them.

Submission + - A Network of Knockoff Apparel Stores Exposed 330,000 Customer Credit Cards (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you recently made a purchase from an overseas online store selling knockoff clothes and goods, there’s a chance your credit card number and personal information were exposed. Since January 6, a database containing hundreds of thousands of unencrypted credit card numbers and corresponding cardholders’ information was spilling onto the open web. At the time it was pulled offline on Tuesday, the database had about 330,000 credit card numbers, cardholder names, and full billing addresses — and rising in real-time as customers placed new orders. The data contained all the information that a criminal would need to make fraudulent transactions and purchases using a cardholder’s information.

The credit card numbers belong to customers who made purchases through a network of near-identical online stores claiming to sell designer goods and apparel. But the stores had the same security problem in common: Any time a customer made a purchase, their credit card data and billing information was saved in a database, which was left exposed to the internet without a password. Anyone who knew the IP address of the database could access reams of unencrypted financial data. Anurag Sen, a good-faith security researcher, found the exposed credit card records and asked TechCrunch for help in reporting it to its owner. Sen has a respectable track record of scanning the internet looking for exposed servers and inadvertently published data, and reporting it to companies to get their systems secured.

But in this case, Sen wasn’t the first person to discover the spilling data. According to a ransom note left behind on the exposed database, someone else had found the spilling data and, instead of trying to identify the owner and responsibly reporting the spill, the unnamed person instead claimed to have taken a copy of the entire database’s contents of credit card data and would return it in exchange for a small sum of cryptocurrency. A review of the data by TechCrunch shows most of the credit card numbers are owned by cardholders in the United States. [...] Internet records showed that the database was operated by a customer of Tencent, whose cloud services were used to host the database. TechCrunch contacted Tencent about its customer’s database leaking credit card information, and the company responded quickly. The customer’s database went offline a short time later.

Comment Re: I want (Score 1) 35

by Drishmung (#63131144) Attached to: Gold Nano-Coating Works Like an Anti-Fog Heating Element For Glasses

I also had a Schubert helmet (C3 Pro). I have had no luck with pin lock and fogging.

Of course, my glasses fog up anyway.

Interesting. I've also got the C3, and the anti-fog does work perfectly for me (apart from my glasses fogging up sometimes [photochromic, toughened plastic, in case it matters], which I can usually fix by cracking the visor open a tiny bit).

Comment Re:"Hey want to be unemployed temporarily?" (Score 1) 49

by Drishmung (#63097752) Attached to: Intel Offers Irish Staff a Three-Month Break From Being Paid
Except that they are not unemployed, so aren't eligible for unemployment benefits (I assume, not being intimately familiar with Irish law). However, if they just made them redundant, then they'd be liable to a minimum payment of two weeks gross pay for each year of service, possibly more if they have a better employment agreement.

Comment Re:Inversely proportional to sexual activity (Score 1, Interesting) 289

by Drishmung (#63095744) Attached to: Sperm Counts Worldwide Are Plummeting Faster Than We Thought
So, you are saying that people began to masturbate more because of the increasing availability of pornography due to the Internet.

Which of course means that people must have masturbated less back then than they do now.

So the Victorian diatribes against 'self-abuse', and Kellog's Cornflakes were a reaction to something that didn't exist, because nobody was actually doing it.

Sigh...

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