AI-powered search engine Perplexity is developing its own web browser named Comet. "Just like Perplexity reinvented search, we're also reinventing the browser," a Perplexity spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Stay tuned for updates." From the report: In a post on X on Monday, the company launched a sign-up list for the browser, which isn't yet available. It's unclear when it might be -- or what the browser will look like, even. But we do have a name: Comet. [...] Perplexity may be betting that it can leverage its search engine user base to quickly ramp up and make some sort of a dent in the space with Comet.

OpenAI has banned a group of Chinese accounts using ChatGPT to develop an AI-powered social media surveillance tool. Engadget reports: The campaign, which OpenAI calls Peer Review, saw the group prompt ChatGPT to generate sales pitches for a program those documents suggest was designed to monitor anti-Chinese sentiment on X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. The operation appears to have been particularly interested in spotting calls for protests against human rights violations in China, with the intent of sharing those insights with the country's authorities.

"This network consisted of ChatGPT accounts that operated in a time pattern consistent with mainland Chinese business hours, prompted our models in Chinese, and used our tools with a volume and variety consistent with manual prompting, rather than automation," said OpenAI. "The operators used our models to proofread claims that their insights had been sent to Chinese embassies abroad, and to intelligence agents monitoring protests in countries including the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom."

According to Ben Nimmo, a principal investigator with OpenAI, this was the first time the company had uncovered an AI tool of this kind. "Threat actors sometimes give us a glimpse of what they are doing in other parts of the internet because of the way they use our AI models," Nimmo told The New York Times. Much of the code for the surveillance tool appears to have been based on an open-source version of one of Meta's Llama models. The group also appears to have used ChatGPT to generate an end-of-year performance review where it claims to have written phishing emails on behalf of clients in China.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Altice, parent company of Internet provider Optimum, must disclose the personal details of a hundred alleged music pirates. The request comes from a group of prominent record labels and is part of an ongoing copyright infringement liability lawsuit (PDF). Altice, meanwhile, will receive anti-piracy information, including that related to a letter the RIAA previously sent to BitTorrent Inc., the owner of popular torrent client uTorrent. [...] Details are scarce, but the group will likely consist of subscribers who were repeatedly warned over alleged piracy activity. The music labels could use this information to gather further evidence to support their allegations. For example, subscriber testimony could help to strengthen the argument that the ISP failed to take effective measures against repeat infringers.

There's nothing to suggest that these people will be approached with any claims directly. The names, emails, and addresses of the subscribers are marked as "highly confidential" and can only be viewed by attorneys acting for the music companies. The subscribers will be informed about the forthcoming disclosure of their personal details and any objections will be heard by the court. [...] Subscriber details are just a fraction of the information requested by the parties during discovery. Altice, for example, will also gain access to some non-privileged documents and communications between the music companies and their anti-piracy partners, including the RIAA, OpSec, and Audible Magic.

This includes information regarding a letter (PDF) the RIAA sent to the company behind the uTorrent and BitTorrent clients in 2015. [...] The nature of information sought by Altice isn't clear. The company previously said that if music labels are concerned about piracy, they are free to go after developers of 'piracy' software. While neutral torrent clients don't fall into that category, the ISP will be interested in any related legal considerations that took place behind the scenes.

Using apps and websites in dark mode can actually use more energy than standard mode, according to researchers, as it causes people to crank up the brightness. From a report: This counterintuitive finding is claimed by BBC Research & Development (R&D), which says that despite the popular energy saving recommendation to cut electricity consumption by switching to dark mode, doing so might actually make things worse. "Dark mode is a popular dark-theme colour content scheme and research has found that, for some devices, switching to dark mode can reduce device power consumption. Energy conscious internet users are therefore encouraged to browse in dark mode," say the authors of a BBC R&D blog post.

"The catch is that the advertised energy savings haven't been tested in the wild, where user behavior can cause unexpected consequences." So the BBC's R&D engineers put participants in front of the BBC Sounds home page and asked them to adjust the device brightness until they were comfortable with it, repeating this for both light and dark mode versions of the page.

"[O]ur intrepid China reporter, Caiwei Chen, has identified a new trend unfolding within China's tech scene: Companies that were dominant in electric vehicles are betting big on translating that success into developing humanoid robots," writes MIT Technology Review's James O'Donnell. "I spoke with her about what she found out and what it might mean for Trump's policies and the rest of the globe..." An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Your story looks at electric-vehicle makers in China that are starting to work on humanoid robots, but I want to ask about a crazy stat. In China, 53% of vehicles sold are either electric or hybrid, compared with 8% in the US. What explains that?

Price is a huge factor -- there are countless EV brands competing at different price points, making them both affordable and high-quality. Government incentives also play a big role. In Beijing, for example, trading in an old car for an EV gets you 10,000 RMB (about $1,500), and that subsidy was recently doubled. Plus, finding public charging and battery-swapping infrastructure is much less of a hassle than in the US.

You open your story noting that China's recent New Year Gala, watched by billions of people, featured a cast of humanoid robots, dancing and twirling handkerchiefs. We've covered how sometimes humanoid videos can be misleading. What did you think?

I would say I was relatively impressed -- the robots showed good agility and synchronization with the music, though their movements were simpler than human dancers'. The one trick that is supposed to impress the most is the part where they twirl the handkerchief with one finger, toss it into the air, and then catch it perfectly. This is the signature of the Yangko dance, and having performed it once as a child, I can attest to how difficult the trick is even for a human! There was some skepticism on the Chinese internet about how this was achieved and whether they used additional reinforcement like a magnet or a string to secure the handkerchief, and after watching the clip too many times, I tend to agree.

President Trump has already imposed tariffs on China and is planning even more. What could the implications be for China's humanoid sector?

Unitree's H1 and G1 models are already available for purchase and were showcased at CES this year. Large-scale US deployment isn't happening yet, but China's lower production costs make these robots highly competitive. Given that 65% of the humanoid supply chain is in China, I wouldn't be surprised if robotics becomes the next target in the US-China tech war.

In the US, humanoid robots are getting lots of investment, but there are plenty of skeptics who say they're too clunky, finicky, and expensive to serve much use in factory settings. Are attitudes different in China?

Skepticism exists in China too, but I think there's more confidence in deployment, especially in factories. With an aging population and a labor shortage on the horizon, there's also growing interest in medical and caregiving applications for humanoid robots.

DeepSeek revived the conversation about chips and the way the US seeks to control where the best chips end up. How do the chip wars affect humanoid-robot development in China?

Training humanoid robots currently doesn't demand as much computing power as training large language models, since there isn't enough physical movement data to feed into models at scale. But as robots improve, they'll need high-performance chips, and US sanctions will be a limiting factor. Chinese chipmakers are trying to catch up, but it's a challenge.

Public interest groups on Tuesday asked the full 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a ruling that the Federal Communications Commission lacked legal authority to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules. From a report: The decision by a three-judge panel blocked the FCC under then President Joe Biden that had sought to reinstate the open internet rules implemented in 2015 but later repealed by the agency under President Donald Trump. The groups -- Free Press, Public Knowledge, Open Technology Institute and the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society -- argue the appeals court decision conflicts with an earlier decision by another court.

The groups said the case centers on the FCC's decades-long effort to prevent broadband internet providers "from abusing their gatekeeping power, in furtherance of the providers' economic or political interests, to constrain their users' access to third-party websites."

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has updated its business registry information with key changes to personnel and operational scope, signaling a shift towards monetizing its cost-efficient-yet-powerful large language models. From a report: The Hangzhou-based firm's updated business scope includes "internet information services," according to business registry service Tianyancha. The move is the first sign of DeepSeek's desire to monetise its popular technology, according to Zhang Yi, founder and chief analyst at consultancy iiMedia.

With eyes on developing a business model, DeepSeek intends to shift away from being purely focused on research and development, Zhang added. "The move reflects that for a company like DeepSeek, which managed to accumulate technology and develop a product, monetisation is becoming a necessary next step," Zhang said. DeepSeek's previous business scope said it engages in engineering and AI software development, among others, hinting at a more research-driven approach.

Ten years after publishing his influential book on data privacy, security expert Bruce Schneier warns that surveillance has only intensified, with both government agencies and corporations collecting more personal information than ever before. "Nothing has changed since 2015," Schneier told The Register in an interview. "The NSA and their counterparts around the world are still engaging in bulk surveillance to the extent of their abilities."

The widespread adoption of cloud services, Internet-of-Things devices, and smartphones has made it nearly impossible for individuals to protect their privacy, said Schneier. Even Apple, which markets itself as privacy-focused, faces limitations when its Chinese business interests are at stake. While some regulation has emerged, including Europe's General Data Protection Regulation and various U.S. state laws, Schneier argues these measures fail to address the core issue of surveillance capitalism's entrenchment as a business model.

The rise of AI poses new challenges, potentially undermining recent privacy gains like end-to-end encryption. As AI assistants require cloud computing power to process personal data, users may have to surrender more information to tech companies. Despite the grim short-term outlook, Schneier remains cautiously optimistic about privacy's long-term future, predicting that current surveillance practices will eventually be viewed as unethical as sweatshops are today. However, he acknowledges this transformation could take 50 years or more.

For over a decade Karol Herbst has been a developer on the open-source Nouveau driver, a reverse-engineered NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux. "He went on to become employed by Red Hat," notes Phoronix. "While he's known more these days for his work on the Mesa 3D Graphics Library and the Rusticl OpenCL driver for it, he's still remained a maintainer of the Nouveau kernel driver."

But Saturday Herbst stepped down as a nouveau kernel maintainer, in a mailing list message that begins "I was pondering with myself for a while if I should just make it official that I'm not really involved in the kernel community anymore, neither as a reviewer, nor as a maintainer." (Another message begins "I often thought about at least contributing some patches again once I find the time, but...")

Their resignation message hints at some long-running unhappiness. "I got burned out enough by myself caring about the bits I maintained, but eventually I had to realize my limits. The obligation I felt was eating me from inside. It stopped being fun at some point and I reached a point where I simply couldn't continue the work I was so motivated doing as I've did in the early days." And they point to one specific discussion on the kernel mailing list February 8th as "The moment I made up my mind."

It happened in a thread about whether Rust would create difficulty for maintainers. (Someone had posted that "The all powerful sub-system maintainer model works well if the big technology companies can employ omniscient individuals in these roles, but those types are a bit hard to come by.") In response, someone else had posted "I'll let you in a secret. The maintainers are not 'all-powerful'. We are the 'thin blue line' that is trying to keep the code to be maintainable and high quality. Like most leaders of volunteer organization, whether it is the Internet Engineerint Task Force (the standards body for the Internet), we actually have very little power. We can not *command* people to work on retiring technical debt, or to improve testing infrastructure, or work on some particular feature that we'd very like for our users. All we can do is stop things from being accepted..."

Saturday Herbst wrote: The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:

"we are the thin blue line"

This isn't okay. This isn't creating an inclusive environment. This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.

I can't in good faith remain to be part of a project and its community where those words are tolerated. Those words are not technical, they are a political statement. Even if unintentionally, such words carry power, they carry meanings one needs to be aware of. They do cause an immense amount of harm.
The phrase thin blue line "typically refers to the concept of the police as the line between law-and-order and chaos," according to Wikipedia, but more recently became associated with a"countermovement" to the Black Lives Matter movement and "a number of far-right movements in the U.S."

Phoronix writes: Lyude Paul and Danilo Krummrich both of Red Hat remain Nouveau kernel maintainers. Red Hat developers are also working on developing NOVA as the new Rust-based open-source NVIDIA kernel driver leveraging the GSP interface for Turing GPUs and newer.

Nicholas Carr wrote The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. But his new book looks at how social media and digital communication technologies "are changing us individually and collectively," writes the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The book's title? Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart . But if these systems are indeed tearing us apart, the reasons are neither obvious nor simple. Carr suggests that this isn't really about the evil behavior of our tech overlords but about how we have "been telling ourselves lies about communication — and about ourselves.... Well before the net came along," says Carr, "[the] evidence was telling us that flooding the public square with more information from more sources was not going to open people's minds or engender more thoughtful discussions. It wasn't even going to make people better informed...."

At root, we're the problem. Our minds don't simply distill useful knowledge from a mass of raw data. They use shortcuts, rules of thumb, heuristic hacks — which is how we were able to think fast enough to survive on the savage savanna. We pay heed, for example, to what we experience most often. "Repetition is, in the human mind, a proxy for facticity," says Carr. "What's true is what comes out of the machine most often...." Reality can't compete with the internet's steady diet of novelty and shallow, ephemeral rewards. The ease of the user interface, congenial even to babies, creates no opportunity for what writer Antón Barba-Kay calls "disciplined acculturation."

Not only are these technologies designed to leverage our foibles, but we are also changed by them, as Carr points out: "We adapt to technology's contours as we adapt to the land's and the climate's." As a result, by designing technology, we redesign ourselves. "In engineering what we pay attention to, [social media] engineers [...] how we talk, how we see other people, how we experience the world," Carr writes. We become dislocated, abstracted: the self must itself be curated in memeable form. "Looking at screens made me think in screens," writes poet Annelyse Gelman. "Looking at pixels made me think in pixels...."

That's not to say that we can't have better laws and regulations, checks and balances. One suggestion is to restore friction into these systems. One might, for instance, make it harder to unreflectively spread lies by imposing small transactional costs, as has been proposed to ease the pathologies of automated market trading. An option Carr doesn't mention is to require companies to perform safety studies on their products, as we demand of pharmaceutical companies. Such measures have already been proposed for AI. But Carr doubts that increasing friction will make much difference. And placing more controls on social media platforms raises free speech concerns... We can't change or constrain the tech, says Carr, but we can change ourselves. We can choose to reject the hyperreal for the material. We can follow Samuel Johnson's refutation of immaterialism by "kicking the stone," reminding ourselves of what is real.

"Reddit Answers" uses generative AI to answer questions using what past Reddittors have posted. Announced in December, Reddit now plans to integrate it into their search results, reports TechCrunch, with Reddit's CEO saying the idea has "incredible monetization potential."

And yet Reddit's stock fell 14% this week. CNBC's headline? "Reddit shares plunge after Google algorithm change contributes to miss in user numbers." A Google search algorithm change caused some "volatility" with user growth in the fourth quarter, but the company's search-related traffic has since recovered in the first quarter, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a letter to shareholders. "What happened wasn't unusual — referrals from search fluctuate from time to time, and they primarily affect logged-out users," Huffman wrote. "Our teams have navigated numerous algorithm updates and did an excellent job adapting to these latest changes effectively...." Reddit has said it is working to convince logged-out users to create accounts as logged-in users, which are more lucrative for its business.
As Yahoo Finance once pointed out, Reddit knew this day would come, acknowledging in its IPO filing that "changes in internet search engine algorithms and dynamics could have a negative impact on traffic for our website and, ultimately, our business." And in the last three months of 2024 Reddit's daily active users dropped, Yahoo Finance reported this week. But logged-in users increased by 400,000 — while logged-out users dropped by 600,000 (their first drop in almost two years).

Marketwatch notes that analyst Josh Beck sees this as a buying opportunity for Reddit's stock: Beck pointed to comments from Reddit's management regarding a sharp recovery in daily active unique users. That was likely driven by Google benefiting from deeper Reddit crawling, by the platform uncollapsing comments in search results and by a potential benefit from spam-reduction algorithm updates, according to the analyst. "While the report did not clear our anticipated bar, we walk away encouraged by international upside," he wrote.

"Security researchers say the Chinese government-linked hacking group, Salt Typhoon, is continuing to compromise telecommunications providers," reports TechCrunch, "despite the recent sanctions imposed by the U.S. government on the group."

TechRadar reports that the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor is "hitting not just American organizations, but also those from the UK, South Africa, and elsewhere around the world." The latest intrusions were spotted by cybersecurity researchers from Recorded Future, which said the group is targeting internet-exposed web interfaces of Cisco's IOS software that powers different routers and switches. These devices have known vulnerabilities that the threat actors are actively exploiting to gain initial access, root privileges, and more. More than 12,000 Cisco devices were found connected to the wider internet, and exposed to risk, Recorded Future further explained. However, Salt Typhoon is focusing on a "smaller subset" of telecoms and university networks.
"The hackers attempted to exploit vulnerabilities in at least 1,000 Cisco devices," reports NextGov, "allowing them to access higher-level privileges of the hardware and change their configuration settings to allow for persistent access to the networks they're connected on... Over half of the Cisco appliances targeted by Salt Typhoon were located in the U.S., South America and India, with the rest spread across more than 100 countries." Between December and January, the unit, widely known as Salt Typhoon, "possibly targeted" — based on devices that were accessed — offices in the University of California, Los Angeles, California State University, Loyola Marymount University and Utah Tech University, according to a report from cyber threat intelligence firm Recorded Future... The Cisco devices were mainly associated with telecommunications firms, but 13 of them were linked to the universities in the U.S. and some in other nations... "Often involved in cutting-edge research, universities are prime targets for Chinese state-sponsored threat activity groups to acquire valuable research data and intellectual property," said the report, led by the company's Insikt Group, which oversees its threat research.

The cyberspies also compromised Cisco platforms at a U.S.-based affiliate of a prominent United Kingdom telecom operator and a South African provider, both unnamed, the findings added. The hackers also "carried out a reconnaissance of multiple IP addresses" owned by Mytel, a telecom operator based in Myanmar...

"In 2023, Cisco published a security advisory disclosing multiple vulnerabilities in the web UI feature in Cisco IOS XE software," a Cisco spokesperson said in a statement. "We continue to strongly urge customers to follow recommendations outlined in the advisory and upgrade to the available fixed software release."

Last June two NASA astronauts flew to the International Space Station on the first crewed test flight of Boeing's Starliner. But they aren't stranded there, and they weren't abandoned, the astronauts reminded CNN this week in a rare space-to-earth interview: "That's been the rhetoric. That's been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it. We both get it," [NASA astronaut Butch] Wilmore said. "But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, we don't feel stranded." Wilmore added a request: "If you'll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let's change it to 'prepared and committed.'

"That's what we prefer," he said...

[NASA astronaut Suni] Williams also reiterated a sentiment she has expressed on several occasions, including in interviews conducted before she left Earth. "Butch and I knew this was a test flight," she told CNN's Cooper, acknowledging the pair has been prepared for contingencies and understood that the stay in space might be extended. "We knew that we would probably find some things (wrong with Starliner) and we found some stuff, and so that was not a surprise," she said.
When Cooper opened the interview by asking the astronauts how they're doing, Williams answers "We're doing pretty darn good, actually," pointing out they had plenty of food and great crew members. And Wilmore added that crews come to the space station on a careful cycle, and "to alter that cycle sends ripple effects all the way down the chain. We would never expect to come back just special for us or anyone unless it was a medical issue or something really out of the circumstances along those lines. So we need to come back and keep the normal cycle going..."

CNN's article notes a new announcement from NASA Tuesday that the astronauts might return a couple weeks early "after opting to change the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule it will use." That mission's targeted launch date is now March 12.

In the meantime, Williams says in the interview, "We do have some internet connection up here, so we can get some internet live. We've gotten football. It's been this crew's go-to this past fall. Also YouTube or something like that. It's not continuous — it has chunks of time that we get it. And we use that same system also to make phone calls home, so we can talk to our families, and do videoconferences even on the weekends as well. This place is a pretty nice place to live, for the most part."

And they're also "working on with folks on the ground" to test the NASA's cube-shaped, free-flying robotic Astrobees.

Meta unveiled on Friday Project Waterworth, a 50,000-kilometer subsea cable network that will be the world's longest such system. The multi-billion dollar project will connect the U.S., Brazil, India, South Africa, and other key regions. The system utilizes 24 fiber pairs and introduces what Meta describes as "first-of-its-kind routing" that maximizes cable placement in deep water at depths up to 7,000 meters.

The company developed new burial techniques for high-risk areas near coasts to protect against ship anchors and other hazards. A joint statement from President Trump and Prime Minister Modi confirmed India's role in maintaining and financing portions of the undersea cables in the Indian Ocean using "trusted vendors." According to telecom analysts Telegeography, Meta currently has ownership stakes in 16 subsea networks, including the 2Africa cable system that encircles the African continent. This new project would be Meta's first wholly owned global cable system.

LibreOffice, the open-source office suite that began as StarOffice in 1985, has marked its 40th anniversary with new features that it says could transform how users interact with the software. At the FOSDEM 2025 conference, developers unveiled LibreOffice 25.2, which introduces browser-based functionality and real-time collaboration capabilities through a technology called conflict-free replicated data types.

A key development is ZetaOffice, a version built for the WebAssembly runtime that enables the full office suite to run inside web browsers across operating systems and CPU architectures. The project, which entered public beta last November, allows websites to embed LibreOffice applications with complete user interfaces for editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

While the browser-based version currently requires about a gigabyte of code and additional memory to run, developers at Allotropia are working to modularize the codebase for faster loading times. The software, released under the MIT license, can be controlled via JavaScript and operates without requiring an internet connection, unlike Google Docs or LibreOffice's existing Collabora Online version.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Since 2022, blogging site Tumblr has been teasing its plans to integrate with the fediverse -- the open social web powered by the protocol ActivityPub also used by Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, and others. Now, the Automattic-owned blogging platform is sharing more information about when and how that integration could actually happen. As it turns out, the current plan to tie Tumblr into the open social web will come about by way of the site's planned move to the WordPress infrastructure. Automattic confirmed to TechCrunch that when the migration is complete, every Tumblr user will be able to federate their blog via ActivityPub, just as every WordPress.com user can today. The company noted that the migration could also allow for other open web integrations, like giving Tumblr users a way to run other custom plug-ins or themes.

Last summer, Automattic announced it would move its half a billion blogs to WordPress, to make it easier for the company to build tools and features that worked across both services, while also allowing Tumblr to take advantage of the open source developments from WordPress.org. Though the WordPress community itself is in a state of upheaval, ultimately running Tumblr's back end on WordPress would allow for greater efficiencies, while not changing the interface and experience that Tumblr's user base has grown to love. Automattic declined to share a time frame as to when the migration would be complete, given its scale, but a rep for the company called the progress so far "exciting." Automattic didn't say if it would consider integrating with the AT Protocol that powers Bluesky.

The US, UK, and Australia (AUKUS) have sanctioned Russian bulletproof hosting provider Zservers, accusing it of supporting LockBit ransomware operations by providing secure infrastructure for cybercriminals. The sanctions target Zservers, its UK front company XHOST Internet Solutions, and six individuals linked to its operations. The Register reports: Headquartered in Barnaul, Russia, Zservers provided BPH services to a number of LockBit affiliates, the three nations said today. On numerous occasions, affiliates purchased servers from the company to support ransomware attacks. The trio said the link between Zservers and LockBit was established as early as 2022, when Canadian law enforcement searched a known LockBit affiliate and found evidence they had purchased infrastructure tooling almost certainly used to host chatrooms with ransomware victims.

"Ransomware actors and other cybercriminals rely on third-party network service providers like Zservers to enable their attacks on US and international critical infrastructure," said Bradley T Smith, acting under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence. "Today's trilateral action with Australia and the United Kingdom underscores our collective resolve to disrupt all aspects of this criminal ecosystem, wherever located, to protect our national security." The UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) said additionally that the UK front company for Zservers, XHOST Internet Solutions, was also included in its sanctions list. According to Companies House, the UK arm was incorporated on January 31, 2022, although the original service was established in 2011 and operated in both Russia and the Netherlands. Anyone found to have business dealings with either entity can face criminal and civil charges under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018.

The UK led the way with sanctions, placing six individuals and the two entities on its list, while the US only placed two of the individuals -- both alleged Zservers admins -- on its equivalent. Alexander Igorevich Mishin and Aleksandr Sergeyevich Bolshakov, both 30 years old, were named by the US as the operation's heads. Mishin was said to have marketed Zservers to LockBit and other ransomware groups, managing the associated cryptocurrency transactions. Both he and Bolshakov responded to a complaint from a Lebanese company in 2023 and shut down an IP address used in a LockBit attack. The US said, however, it was possible that the pair set up a replacement IP address that LockBit could carry on using, while telling the Lebanese company that they complied with its request. The UK further sanctioned Ilya Vladimirovich Sidorov, Dmitry Konstantinovich Bolshakov (no mention of whether he is any relation to Aleksandr), Igor Vladimirovich Odintsov, and Vladimir Vladimirovich Ananev. Other than that they were Zservers employees and thus were directly or indirectly involved in attempting to inflict economic loss to the country, not much was said about either of their roles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States. In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedentedAI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled (PDF) in Thomson Reuters' favor, finding that the company's copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence's actions. "None of Ross's possible defenses holds water. I reject them all," wrote US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas, in a summary judgement. [...] Notably, Judge Bibas ruled in Thomson Reuters' favor on the question of fair use.

The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims that they used copyrighted materials illegally. The idea underpinning fair use is that sometimes it's legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission -- for example, to create parody works, or in noncommercial research or news production. When determining whether fair use applies, courts use a four-factor test, looking at the reason behind the work, the nature of the work (whether it's poetry, nonfiction, private letters, et cetera), the amount of copyrighted work used, and how the use impacts the market value of the original. Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross "meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute." "If this decision is followed elsewhere, it's really bad for the generative AI companies," says James Grimmelmann, Cornell University professor of digital and internet law.

Chris Mammen, a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson who focuses on intellectual property law, adds: "It puts a finger on the scale towards holding that fair use doesn't apply."

Brave Browser version 1.75 introduces "custom scriptlets," a new feature that allows advanced users to inject their own JavaScript into websites for enhanced customization, privacy, and usability. The feature is similar to the TamperMonkey and GreaseMonkey browser extensions, notes BleepingComputer. From the report: "Starting with desktop version 1.75, advanced Brave users will be able to write and inject their own scriptlets into a page, allowing for better control over their browsing experience," explained Brave in the announcement. Brave says that the feature was initially created to debug the browser's adblock feature but felt it was too valuable not to share with users. Brave's custom scriptlets feature can be used to modify webpages for a wide variety of privacy, security, and usability purposes.

For privacy-related changes, users write scripts that block JavaScript-based trackers, randomize fingerprinting APIs, and substitute Google Analytics scripts with a dummy version. In terms of customization and accessibility, the scriptlets could be used for hiding sidebars, pop-ups, floating ads, or annoying widgets, force dark mode even on sites that don't support it, expand content areas, force infinite scrolling, adjust text colors and font size, and auto-expand hidden content.

For performance and usability, the scriptlets can block video autoplay, lazy-load images, auto-fill forms with predefined data, enable custom keyboard shortcuts, bypass right-click restrictions, and automatically click confirmation dialogs. The possible actions achievable by injected JavaScript snippets are virtually endless. However, caution is advised, as running untrusted custom scriptlets may cause issues or even introduce some risk.

"The Internet's Own Boy" was inscribed below the bust, according to the San Francisco Standard, adding that the 312-pound marble statue "was crafted using a mix of AI-driven robotic milling and traditional hand carving."

It was unveiled Friday at the Internet Archive auditorium for a crowd of around 300 people. "Aaron's legacy is bringing people together to make change, said Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "There's a renaissance happening now in Aaron Swartz-land," said Lisa Rein, the co-founder of Creative Commons, a nonprofit devoted to expanding public access to information. She founded Aaron Swartz Day in 2013, an annual hackathon and tribute held on his birthday. There's now an Aaron Swartz Institute in Brazil, a documentary, multiple books and podcasts — even an Aaron Swartz memecoin ("Do not buy," she warned).

"It's great that people idolize him as long as they get the story right: He was not a martyr," Rein said, her eyes welling with tears. "He stood for freedom of access to information, especially for scientific research — things the public had already paid for."

The evening included a number of video tributes, which Rein played on a large screen behind the stage. They included commentary from science fiction author Cory Doctorow, members of the Aaron Swartz Institute in Brazil, and Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation... Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch and a partner at Y Combinator, was one of the few people who knew Swartz personally. "I'm glad he's become a symbol, he would approve of that," he shared, his voice slightly breaking. "I really miss him."

Starting next week, the bust will be moved to the [Internet Archive] lobby, where it will remain until Peniche secures a permit to place it in a local park [said Evan Sirchuk, the Internet Archive's community and events coordinator]... "Aaron really means something to the San Francisco community," [Rein said]. "He can keep inspiring generations — even the ones who weren't alive when he was."
Tech blogger John Gruber thinks Swartz would appreciate that the bust came from people "aligned with Aaron's own righteous obsessions." But at the same time "I think he'd be a little weirded out. He wasn't a 'I hope they erect a larger-than-life statue of me' sort of guy.

"And if he had been, we wouldn't have loved him like we did. It's just a terrible thing that we lost him so young."