Pakistan has blocked Wikipedia services in the South Asian nation after the platform failed to remove "sacrilegious" content. From a report: The action was taken because some of the content is still available on Wikipedia after the expiry of a 48-hour deadline, Malahat Obaid, spokesperson for Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, said by phone.

Pakistan has "degraded" Wikipedia in the country for 48 hours for not removing "sacrilegious contents" and warned of fully blocking the site if the online encyclopedia fails to comply with the directions. From a report: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the nation's telecom regulator, said Wednesday afternoon that it had approached Wikipedia to block or remove certain "blasphemous" contents by issuing court orders, but said the online encyclopedia neither complied nor appeared before the authority. If the "intentional failure" on Wikipedia's part persists, the regulator will move to block the online encyclopedia within the country, it warned.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nearly 45GB of source code files, allegedly stolen by a former employee, have revealed the underpinnings of Russian tech giant Yandex's many apps and services. It also revealed key ranking factors for Yandex's search engine, the kind almost never revealed in public. [...] While it's not clear whether there are security or structural implications of Yandex's source code revelation, the leak of 1,922 ranking factors in Yandex's search algorithm is certainly making waves. SEO consultant Martin MacDonald described the hack on Twitter as "probably the most interesting thing to have happened in SEO in years" (as noted by Search Engine Land). In a thread detailing some of the more notable factors, researcher Alex Buraks suggests that "there is a lot of useful information for Google SEO as well."

Yandex, the fourth-ranked search engine by volume, purportedly employs several ex-Google employees. Yandex tracks many of Google's ranking factors, identifiable in its code, and competes heavily with Google. Google's Russian division recently filed for bankruptcy after losing its bank accounts and payment services. Buraks notes that the first factor in Yandex's list of ranking factors is "PAGE_RANK," which is seemingly tied to the foundational algorithm created by Google's co-founders.

As detailed by Buraks (in two threads), Yandex's engine favors pages that: - Aren't too old
- Have a lot of organic traffic (unique visitors) and less search-driven traffic
- Have fewer numbers and slashes in their URL
- Have optimized code rather than "hard pessimization," with a "PR=0"
- Are hosted on reliable servers
- Happen to be Wikipedia pages or are linked from Wikipedia
- Are hosted or linked from higher-level pages on a domain
- Have keywords in their URL (up to three)

Avatar: The Way of Water "has passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens as the fourth highest-grossing movie of all time," reports Variety: Director James Cameron's sci-fi epic has now earned $2.075 billion at the global box office. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, another sci-fi sequel released long after previous installments, finished its theatrical run with $2.064 billion after hitting theaters in December 2015.

With this latest box office milestone, Cameron now has three of the top four highest-grossing movies in history — the original Avatar is still the champion [with $2.92 billion], while Titanic sits in third place [with $2.2 billion].

[The second-highest grossing film of all time is Avengers: Endgame with $2.79 billion.] Avatar: The Way of Water has quickly moved up in the record books, surpassing Spider-Man: No Way Home ($1.92 billion) on Jan. 18 and Avengers: Infinity War ($2.05 billion) shortly after on Jan. 26....

A third "Avatar" entry has already been set for release in December 2024 and there are plans for a fourth and fifth to continue the intergenerational saga
Some context from The A.V. Club: The highlight of that big pile of planetary currency being a massive $229 million turnout in China, where it's one of the first Disney movies to play in the country's lucrative markets in some time.

As it happens, James Cameron told GQ back in November, ahead of his sequel's release, that his "fucking expensive" movie would have to post these kinds of numbers to be anything other than a loss for the studio. "You have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history," he noted at the time. "That's your threshold. That's your break even."
Wikipedia points out that when box office figures are adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing film of all time is still the 1939 Civil War drama Gone with the Wind. And the next top-grossing films of all-time?

• The original Avatar
• Titanic
• The original Star Wars (1977)
• Avengers: Endgame
• The Sound of Music (1965)
• E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982)
• The Ten Commandments (1956)
• Doctor Zhivago (1965)
• Star Wars: the Force Awakens

Playing the military simulation War Thunder is now reportedly considered an official risk on background checks. PCMag reports: As GamesRadar reports, a user going by the name Add Fiat 6616 Pls posted on the War Thunder subreddit earlier this week explaining how a friend of his had applied for a job at aerospace and defense conglomerate Raytheon Technologies. As part of the security clearance process, a private investigator is used to contact the candidates "witnesses," which is shorthand for their friends. Add Fiat 6616 Pls was one of those friends and therefore received a call to answer a range of questions in an attempt to discover if the candidate's lifestyle raised any red flags. One of those question was: "Does he play War Thunder?"

The question makes sense as part of a security check and national security assessment after you realize how much classified information has leaked via the game over the past few years. War Thunder is a free-to-play vehicular combat online multiplayer game developed by Russian game developer Gaijin Entertainment (which relocated to Budapest in 2015). Since 2021, there have been six incidents of restricted or classified documents being leaked during discussions about the accuracy of the vehicles used in the game.

From Science magazine: Cave Johnson is almost ready to start a new study in his secret underground facility. The founder of the Michigan-based technology company Aperture Science, he's invented a portal gun that allows people to teleport to various locations. Now, he and his colleagues want to see whether they can make portals appear on previously unfit surfaces with a new "conversion gel" containing moon dust. "It may be toxic. We are unsure," he wrote in a recent research proposal.

To test the gel, Johnson plans to recruit orphans, homeless people, and the elderly. They'll get 60 bucks — compensation he feels is well worth the risk of their skin potentially peeling off, death due to an artificial intelligence guide becoming sentient, or worse.

None of this is real, of course — Johnson is the villain of the popular video game Portal — but the makeshift ethical review board that evaluated his study was. At a Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research conference conducted online last month, attendees of the session "Mad Science on Trial: The Real Ethical Problems With Fictional Scientists" had some serious concerns with Johnson's research. Would the participants' data be secure and anonymized? Would the team of henchmen include some henchwomen as well? And, most importantly, would there be cake?

The moderators of the session didn't just target Johnson. They asked their audience of 450 virtual attendees to evaluate other fictional mad scientists as well, voting on whether an institutional review board (IRB) — a body of experts that a research institution uses to evaluate whether proposals are ethically sound — should approve their protocols.
Another example used was the scientist in the first-person shooter game Halo who proposed surgically enhancing 6-year-old children with armor, neural interfaces, and other technology to give them combat advantages against a theoretical alien attack.

Science interviewed two of the panelists, one noting "this format is good for making the Instituational Review Board ethics world fun and doing it in a way that kind of stretches people's minds."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for submitting the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the past few days, dozens of tech companies have filed briefs in support of Google in a Supreme Court case that tests online platforms' liability for recommending content. Obvious stakeholders like Meta and Twitter, alongside popular platforms like Craigslist, Etsy, Wikipedia, Roblox, and Tripadvisor, urged the court to uphold Section 230 immunity in the case or risk muddying the paths users rely on to connect with each other and discover information online. Out of all these briefs, however, Reddit's was perhaps the most persuasive (PDF). The platform argued on behalf of everyday Internet users, whom it claims could be buried in "frivolous" lawsuits for frequenting Reddit, if Section 230 is weakened by the court. Unlike other companies that hire content moderators, the content that Reddit displays is "primarily driven by humans -- not by centralized algorithms." Because of this, Reddit's brief paints a picture of trolls suing not major social media companies, but individuals who get no compensation for their work recommending content in communities. That legal threat extends to both volunteer content moderators, Reddit argued, as well as more casual users who collect Reddit "karma" by upvoting and downvoting posts to help surface the most engaging content in their communities.

"Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act famously protects Internet platforms from liability, yet what's missing from the discussion is that it crucially protects Internet users -- everyday people -- when they participate in moderation like removing unwanted content from their communities, or users upvoting and downvoting posts," a Reddit spokesperson told Ars. Reddit argues in the brief that such frivolous lawsuits have been lobbed against Reddit users and the company in the past, and Section 230 protections historically have consistently allowed Reddit users to "quickly and inexpensively" avoid litigation. [...]

The Supreme Court will have to weigh whether Reddit's arguments are valid. To help make its case defending Section 230 immunity protections for recommending content, Reddit received special permission from the Supreme Court to include anonymous comments from Reddit mods in its brief. This, Reddit's spokesperson notes, is "a significant departure from normal Supreme Court procedure." The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit defending online privacy, championed the court's decision to allow moderators to contribute comments anonymously. "We're happy the Supreme Court recognized the First Amendment rights of Reddit moderators to speak to the court about their concerns," EFF's senior staff attorney, Sophia Cope, told Ars. "It is quite understandable why those individuals may be hesitant to identify themselves should they be subject to liability in the future for moderating others' speech on Reddit."

"Reddit users that interact with third-party content -- including 'hosting' content on a sub-Reddit that they manage, or moderating that content -- could definitely be open to legal exposure if the Court carves out "recommending' from Section 230's protections, or otherwise narrows Section 230's reach," Cope told Ars.

The Wikipedia editors are waiting to hear you scream. On Wednesday, Wikipedia is set to make its new skin the default on English Wikipedia -- its first new skin since 2010 -- and the team of designers and volunteer editors are waiting with some mix of excitement and trepidation. From a report: On Sunday, several dozen Wikipedia editors nursed cocktails in midtown Manhattan at the afterparty for Wikipedia Day, the annual celebration of Wikipedia's Jan. 14, 2001, founding. The group -- a nerdy crowd of librarians, students, software engineers, and others who spend their free time creating an encyclopedia -- usually meets in quiet libraries instead of ritzy open bars, but this was a special occasion: Wikipedia's 22nd birthday (as well as its 21st and 20th, which the group had only commemorated online). Plus, someone had offered the space as a donation.

Gathered on a leather couch, speaking loudly over the DJ's groovy music, their conversation meandered from class-action lawsuits against a water park to bird photography to Vector 2022, Wikipedia's first big redesign in 12 years, set to debut as the default on English Wikipedia on Wednesday. Eyes lit up. People leaned in. Anticipation was palpable. "We're going to be able to hear screams from space," joked a Wikimedian who goes by the username Enterprisey, who has spent months contributing to the redesign. Pharos, a longtime contributor, mentioned that Swahili Wikipedia had unanimously voted to reject the new skin and curtly demanded a return to the old skin. "I had never seen Swahili Wikipedia so outspoken about something. Pretty exciting," he said.

For all the hype, Vector 2022 isn't dramatically different -- that's why it shares a name with the previous skin, Vector 2010. All the scaffolding is the same: Wikipedia is still Wikipedia, just with more whitespace, a more prominent search bar and language switcher, and a sticky table of contents. There's also a collapsible sidebar and maximum line width, which make the site more clean and less cluttered. But those changes have been scrupulously discussed and debated (over and over and over). Wikipedia is not the scrappy web experiment it once was. [...] But it doesn't look all that different than it did 23 years ago, when it was run by a few guys in an office in Florida. The text-heavy website resembles an email inbox, or Craigslist, or Old Reddit. It's a barrage of straightforward white and blue text, a rather unsightly assemblage of lines and squares. It's not trendy.

Wikipedia should be treated differently to the big social media firms in the Online Safety Bill, a leading member of its foundation says. From a report: The encyclopaedia is written and edited entirely by thousands of volunteers around the world. The Wikimedia Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon also says a proposed change to the bill,would "limit freedom of expression".

The bill aims to protect people from harmful content online. The Wikimedia Foundation is the not-for-profit organisation which hosts the encyclopaedia. Ms MacKinnon says the foundation is concerned about the effect of the bill on volunteer-run sites. She told the BBC that the threat of "harsh" new criminal penalties for tech bosses "will affect not only big corporations, but also public interest websites such as Wikipedia".

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: GitHub has taken down a popular Pirate Bay proxy information portal from Github.io. The developer platform took action in response to a takedown request sent by City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). The takedown notice concludes that the site, which did not link to any infringing content directly, is illegal. [...] "This site is in breach of UK law, namely Copyright, Design & Patents Act 1988, Offences under the Fraud Act 2006 and Conspiracy to Defraud," PIPCU writes. "Suspension of the domain(s) is intended to prevent further crime. Where possible we request that domain suspension(s) are made within 48 hours of receipt of this Alert," the notice adds. This takedown request was honored by GitHub, meaning that people who try to access the domain now get a 404 error instead.

While GitHub's swift response is understandable, it's worth pointing out how these blocking efforts are evolving and expanding, far beyond blocking the original Pirate Bay site. The Proxy Bay doesn't link to infringing content directly. The site links to other proxy sites which serve up the Pirate Bay homepage. From there, users may search for or browse torrent links that, once loaded, can download infringing content. Does this mean that simply linking to The Pirate Bay can be considered a crime in itself? If that's the case, other sites such as Wikipedia and Bing are in trouble too.

A more reasonable middle ground would be to consider the intent of a site. The Proxy Bay was launched to facilitate access to The Pirate Bay, which makes court orders less effective. In 2015 UK ISPs began blocking proxy and proxy indexing sites, so that explains why thepirateproxybay.com and others are regularly blocked. Whether this constitutes criminal activity is ultimately for the court to decide, not the police. In this regard, it's worth noting that City of London Police previously arrested the alleged operator of a range of torrent site proxies. The then 20-year-old defendant, who also developed censorship circumvention tool Immunicity, was threatened with a hefty prison sentence but the court disagreed and dismissed the case.

In the mid-1970s, Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky tried to film Dune (working with artists including H.R. Giger). A documentary about that attempt was filmed by Frank Pavich, who now writes in the New York Times that "The cast would have included Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Alejandro's 12-year-old son, Brontis, in the lead role. The soundtrack would have been composed and recorded by Pink Floyd.... It will forever be the greatest film never made, because it exists solely in our imaginations."

Just because you cannot watch Alejandro's "Dune" doesn't mean it didn't change the world. This unfilmed film's influence on our culture is nothing short of astounding. Specific ideas and images from the "Dune" art bible have escaped into the world. They can be experienced in movies such as "Blade Runner," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Prometheus," "The Terminator" and even the original "Star Wars." His "Dune" does not exist, yet it's all around us.
Nearly half a century later... I was recently shown some frames from a film that I had never heard of: Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1976 version of "Tron." The sets were incredible. The actors, unfamiliar to me, looked fantastic in their roles. The costumes and lighting worked together perfectly. The images glowed with an extravagant and psychedelic sensibility that felt distinctly Jodorowskian.

However, Mr. Jodorowsky, the visionary Chilean filmmaker, never tried to make "Tron." I'm not even sure he knows what "Tron" is. And Disney's original "Tron" was released in 1982. So what 1970s film were these gorgeous stills from...? The truth is that these weren't stills from a long-lost movie. They weren't photos at all. These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence.
The article notes that the real Jodorowsky is now almost 94 — and is planning to direct a new film. But it also points out that in the early 1970s Jodorowsky's team put in "two years of pure analog struggle to create his Dune," — while Canadian film director Johnny Darrell generated the Tron images in less than a minute using an A.I. program called Midjourney. Pavich says this raises several questions. "Has Alejandro been robbed? Is the training of this A.I. model the greatest art heist in history? How much of art-making is theft, anyway?"

In his great documentary F for Fake Orson Welles intones wrly that "A forgery — is still a painting." So Pavich's piece concludes with perhaps the ultimate question. "What will it mean when directors, concept artists and film students... can paint using all the digitally archived visual material of human civilization? When our culture starts to be influenced by scenes, sets and images from old films that never existed or that haven't yet even been imagined?

"I have a feeling we're all about to find out."

"The Tiobe index gauges language popularity using a formula that assesses searches on programming languages in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and other search engines," writes InfoWorld. And they add that this year the "vaunted" C++ programming language was the index's biggest gainer in 2022.

TIOBE's announcement includes their calculation that C++ rose 4.62% in popularity in 2022: Runners up are C (+3.82%) and Python (+2.78%). Interestingly, C++ surpassed Java to become the number 3 of the TIOBE index in November 2022. The reason for C++'s popularity is its excellent performance while being a high level object-oriented language. Because of this, it is possible to develop fast and vast software systems (over millions of lines of code) in C++ without necessarily ending up in a maintenance nightmare.
So which programming languages are most popular now? For what it's worth, here's TIOBE's latest ranking:


- Python
- C
- C++
- Java
- C#
- Visual Basic
- JavaScript
- SQL
- Assembly Language
- PHP


InfoWorld adds that "Helping C++ popularity was the publication of new language standards with interesting features, such as C++ 11 and C++ 20."

More from TIOBE: What else happened in 2022? Performance seemed to be important. C++ competitor Rust entered the top 20 again (being at position #26 one year ago), but this time it seems to be for real. Lua, which is known for its easy interfacing with C, jumped from position #30 to #24. F# is another language that made an interesting move: from position #74 to position #33 in one years' time. Promising languages such as Kotlin (from #29 to #25), Julia (from #28 to #29) and Dart (from #37 to #38) still have a long way to go before they reach the top 20. Let's see what happens in 2023.

Saudi Arabia has infiltrated Wikipedia and jailed two administrators in a bid to control content on the website, weeks after a former Twitter worker was jailed in the US for spying for the Saudis. The Guardian reports: One administrator was jailed for 32 years, and another was sentenced to eight years, the activists said. An investigation by parent body Wikimedia found the Saudi government had penetrated Wikipedia's senior ranks in the region, with Saudi citizens acting or forced to act as agents, two rights groups said. "Wikimedia's investigation revealed that the Saudi government had infiltrated the highest ranks in Wikipedia's team in the region," Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) and Beirut-based Smex said in a joint statement.

Dawn, which is based in Washington DC and was founded by slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and Smex, which promotes digital rights in the Arab world, cited "whistleblowers and trusted sources" for the information. There was no immediate comment from the Saudi government or from Wikimedia, which puts free educational content online through initiatives like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and Wiktionary. Dawn and Smex's statement comes after Wikimedia last month announced global bans for 16 users "who were engaging in conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia projects in the Mena [Middle East and North Africa] region."

Two high-ranking "admins" -- volunteer administrators with privileged access to Wikipedia, including the ability to edit fully protected pages -- have been imprisoned since they were arrested on the same day in September 2020, the two bodies added. The arrests appeared to be part of a "crackdown on Wikipedia admins in the country," Dawn and Smex said, naming the two people imprisoned as Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani. Abdullah Alaoudh, Dawn's director of research for the Gulf, said Khalid was jailed for 32 years and Sofiani received an eight-year sentence. "The arrests of Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani on one hand, and the infiltration of Wikipedia on the other hand, show a horrifying aspect of how the Saudi government wants to control the narrative and Wikipedia," Alaoudh told AFP.

Guess what's finally entering America's public domain today? Appropriately enough, it's Marcel Proust's 1927 novel Remembrance of Things Past.

Also entering the public domain today are thousands of other books, plus the music and lyrics of hundreds of songs, and even several silent movies.

Fritz Lang's sci-fi classic Metropolis enters the public domain today — and so does the Laurel & Hardy comedy Battle of the Century (which culminates with one of Hollywod's first pie fights), according to Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain: This is actually the second time that Metropolis has gone into the US public domain. The first was in 1955, when its initial 28-year term expired and the rights holders did not renew the copyright. Then in 1996 a new law restored the copyrights in qualifying foreign works. Metropolis, along with thousands of other works, was pulled out of the public domain, and now reenters it after the expiration of the 95-year term, with the once missing scenes available for anyone to reuse.
They also note that some material is in the public domain from the beginning, including government works like the images from the James Webb telescope.

But for other works, today is a big and important day, writes the Associated Press: Alongside the short-story collection "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes," books such as Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse," Ernest Hemingway's "Men Without Women," William Faulkner's "Mosquitoes" and Agatha Christie's "The Big Four" — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns to 2023. Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost.

The works from 1927 were originally supposed to be copyrighted for 75 years, but the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act delayed opening them up for an additional 20 years. While many prominent works on the list used those extra two decades to earn their copyright holders good money, a Duke University expert says the copyright protections also applied to "all of the works whose commercial viability had long subsided."

"For the vast majority — probably 99% — of works from 1927, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason," Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, wrote in a blog post heralding "Public Domain Day 2023." That long U.S. copyright period meant many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn't be used by others. On the Duke list are such "lost" films like Victor Fleming's "The Way of All Flesh" and Tod Browning's "London After Midnight...."
Also entering the public domain today:


- Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop
- A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six (illustrations by E. H. Shepard)
- Franklin W. Dixon's The Tower Treasure — the first Hardy Boys book
- Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf (German version)
- The song "My Blue Heaven"
- Songs by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
- Alfred Hitchcock's early silent movie The Lodger


The UK-based newspaper the Observer adds: For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy.... The term was gradually lengthened in small increments by Congress until 1976, when it was extended by 19 years to 75 years and then in 1998 by the Sonny Bono Act. So, as the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig puts it, "in the 20 years after the Sonny Bono Act, while 1 million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term"....

[T]he end result is that American citizens have had to wait two decades to be free to adapt and reuse works to which we Europeans have had easy access....

The issue highlighted by Public Domain Day is not that intellectual property is evil but that aspects of it — especially copyright — have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying. Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off. It's obviously important that clever people are rewarded for their creativity and the patent system does that quite well. But if a patent only lasts for 20 years, why on earth should copyright last for life plus 70 years for a novel?

The Linux Foundation "sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and lead maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman," according to its page on Wikipedia. And now the Linux Foundation "is pleased to announce the launch of the Overture Maps Foundation," according to their December newsletter.

It's a collaborative effort "to enable current and next-generation map products by creating reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide." The initiative was founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom and is open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data. To get involved, please visit overturemaps.org.
And they're also announcing plans to form the Open Metaverse Foundation: In October, we brought top experts from diverse sectors together with leaders from many of the projects across the Linux Foundation to discuss what it will take to transform the emerging concept of the Metaverse from promise to reality.... As the next step in this amazing journey, we welcome the Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF) into the Linux Foundation as another piece of the puzzle. With your help, we can realize the promise of the open Metaverse. Learn more about what's next, join us, and get involved at openmv.org.
The Foundation has also published three new research papers:

• The 2022 State of Open Source in Financial Services

• WebAssembly (Wasm) for Legal Professionals

• Data and Storage Trends 2022.

The newsletter also points out that through Tuesday the foundation is offering 35% off any of their training courses, certifications, bundles or bootcamps.

Until 2020 Neustar was the domain name registry "for a number of top-level domains," according to its page on Wikipedia, "including .biz, .us (on behalf of United States Department of Commerce), .co, .nyc (on behalf of the city of New York), and .in.

But now U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has asked America's Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Neustar violated the privacy rights of millions, reports the Washington Post, "when it sold records of where they went online to the federal government."

America's Department of Defense funded a research team at Georgia Tech who purchased Neustar's data starting in 2016, notes a letter from Senator Wyden. Wyden has obtained emails between those researchers and "both the FBI and the Department of Justice, indicating that government officials asked the researchers to run specific queries and that the researchers wrote affidavits and reports for the government describing their findings."

But in addition, Wyden now cites a Department of Justice statement (entered an unrelated court case) which he says makes a concerning assertion: that Neustar executive Rodney Joffe, "who led the company's efforts to sell data to Georgia Tech, was also involved in the sale of DNS data directly to the U.S. government. The court documents say: Rodney Joffe and certain companies with which he was affiliated, including officers and employees of those companies, have provided assistance to and received payment from multiple agencies of the United States government. This has included assistance to the United States intelligence community and law enforcement agencies on cyber security matters. Certain of those companies have maintained contracts with the United States government resulting in payment by the United States of tens of millions of dollars for the provision of, among other things, Domain Name System ('DNS') data. These contracts included classified contracts that required company personnel to maintain security clearances.
From The Washington Post: The stipulation naming entrepreneur Rodney Joffe was the clearest confirmation to date of web histories being sold directly to federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, instead of through information brokers exempt from restrictions on what telephone companies and websites can share with the government.
Wyden adds: The data that Neustar sold to Georgia Tech may have also included data collected from consumers who were explicitly promised that their data would not be sold to third parties. Between 2018 and 2020, Neustar acquired a competing recursive DNS service, which had previously been operated by Verisign. That service had been advertised to the public by Verisign with unqualified promises that "your public DNS data will not be sold to third parties."

When the product changed hands, users of Verisign's service were seamlessly transitioned to DNS servers that Neustar controlled. This meant that Neustar now received information about the websites accessed by these former Verisign-users, even though neither Verisign nor Neustar provided those users with meaningful, effective notice that the change of ownership had taken place, or that Neustar did not intend to honor the privacy promises that Verisign had previously made to those users. It is unclear if the data Neustar sold to Georgia Tech included data from users who had been promised by Verisign that their data would not be sold.

This is because both Neustar and Verisign have refused to answer questions from my office necessary to determine this important detail.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Joe Bowser is a computer scientist based in Port Moody, British Columbia, who has long loved Raspberry Pis. He uses the low-cost, single-board computers, which were launched in February 2012 by a UK-based company of the same name, for many of his tech projects. Those include linking the Raspberry Pi up to a 3D printer, and using the Pi to run a machine-learning demo. There's one use case that Bowser described as "the most important": using a Raspberry Pi to identify the use of IMSI catchers -- telephone eavesdropping devices that snoop on phone calls and text messages -- by law enforcement. Protesters opposing new oil pipelines happen to pass by Bowser's house regularly. He thinks cops shouldn't spy on them. So he's trying to help out the protesters using his tech knowledge. To do that, he uses Raspberry Pis. Or more accurately, he did. Bowser has forsworn using the computers ever again. He and many others are expressing their displeasure with the company on social media.

The controversy began yesterday when Raspberry Pi posted an announcement on Twitter and Mastodon: "We hired a policeman and it's going really great." The company linked to a laudatory blog post on its website announcing it had hired an ex-police officer, Toby Roberts, as its maker-in-residence. "I was a Technical Surveillance Officer for 15 years, so I built stuff to hide video, audio, and other covert gear," Roberts is quoted as saying in the post. "You really don't want your sensitive police equipment discovered, so I'd disguise it as something else, like a piece of street furniture or a household item. The variety of tools and equipment I used then really shaped what I do today." A subsection of the Raspberry Pi community expressed concern about the blase way the company presented intrusive covert surveillance. (The news caused particular ire on Mastodon, leading some to describe Roberts as the burgeoning social media platform's first "main character.") [...]

Liz Upton, Raspberry Pi's cofounder and chief marketing officer, told BuzzFeed she believes that much of the issue stems not from the hiring of the former police officer who admitted to using Raspberry Pis for covert surveillance, but instead from a picture the account posted to Mastodon a day earlier showing pigs in blankets. "We didn't put a content warning on it, because we don't put a content warning on meat," Upton said. "There were quite a few people who tried to start dogpiling on that." She also claimed that part of the vitriolic response could be because Raspberry Pi is struggling with supply chain difficulties at present, and people "were already cross." "I think what we're looking at is a dogpile that's being organized somewhere," Upton said. "There's obviously a Discord or a forum somewhere." She did not provide evidence to support that claim. "I don't think this is organic, but it's very unpleasant, and extraordinarily unpleasant for the people involved," she said. Upton claimed both Roberts and Raspberry Pi's social media manager have been doxxed and received death threats. "I am disgusted that [Raspberry Pi's] official post on Toby Roberts' hiring promotes his use of their products to surveil individuals without their consent," Matt Lewis, a Denver-based site reliability engineer, wrote via Twitter DM. "In my eyes, this behavior is completely unethical and the work Toby has done for 15 years is indefensible. I'm also upset that they have chosen to double down on this position against the community outrage."

"I think this event will mark a turning point in the organization's reputation," added Wikipedia consultant Pete Forsyth in a Twitter DM. "It's hard to see how they can recover the trust they seem to have almost willfully dismantled today."

Not everyone is downbeat about the future of the company. University of Surrey cybersecurity professor Alan Woodward called Roberts an "interesting hire" for Raspberry Pi. "His previous uses of the Pi shows just what a versatile device it is: I'm sure he's not the only one using the smallest variants to make covert devices," Woodward said. "You find that you have to be very creative to build these types of covert devices, so hopefully he can now bring that to his new role, for a wider variety of applications."

"It's not as if he is going to corrupt any of the Pis -- like all technology, it has some uses some people will object to," he said. Rather, Woodward believes "the loudest objectors are taking it a bit far. Maybe they could look at it as a glass-half-full situation: Think of the unusual innovations he might bring."

Around 2009 Slashdot was abuzz about how over-the-air broadcasting in North America was switching to a new standard called DTV. (Fun fact: North America and South America have two entirely different broadcast TV standards — both of which are different from the DVB-T standard used in Europe/Africa/Australia.) But 2022 ends with us already talking about DTV's successor in North America: the new broadcast standard NextGen TV.

This time the new standard isn't mandatory for TV stations, CNET points out — and it won't affect cable, satellite or streaming TV. But now even if you're not paying for a streaming TV service, another article points out, in most major American cities "an inexpensive antenna is all you'll need to get get ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and PBS stations" — and often with a better picture quality: NextGen TV, formerly known as ATSC 3.0, is continuing to roll out across the U.S. It's already widely available, with stations throughout the country broadcasting in the new standard. There are many new TVs with compatible tuners plus several stand-alone tuners to add NextGen to just about any TV. As the name suggests, NextGen TV is the next generation of over-the-air broadcasts, replacing or supplementing the free HD broadcasts we've had for over two decades. NextGen not only improves on HDTV, but adds the potential for new features like free over-the-air 4K and HDR, though those aren't yet widely available.

Even so, the image quality with NextGen is likely better than what you're used to from streaming or even cable/satellite. If you already have an antenna and watch HD broadcasts, the reception you get with NextGen might be better, too.... Because of how it works, you'll likely get better reception if you're far from the TV tower.

The short version is: NextGen is free over-the-air television with potentially more channels and better image quality than older over-the-air broadcasts.
U.S. broadcast companies have also created a site at WatchNextGenTV.com showing options for purchasing a compatible new TV. That site also features a video touting NextGen TV's "brilliant colors and a sharper picture with a wider range of contrast" and its Dolby audio system (with "immersive, movie theatre-quality sound" with enhancements for voice and dialogue "so you get all of the story.") And in the video there's also examples of upcoming interactive features like on-screen quizzes, voting, and shopping, as well as the ability to select multiple camera angles or different audio tracks.

"One potential downside? ATSC 3.0 will also let broadcasters track your viewing habits," CNet reported earlier this year, calling the data "information that can be used for targeted advertising, just like companies such as Facebook and Google use today...

"Ads specific to your viewing habits, income level and even ethnicity (presumed by your neighborhood, for example) could get slotted in by your local station.... but here's the thing: If your TV is connected to the internet, it's already tracking you. Pretty much every app, streaming service, smart TV and cable or satellite box all track your usage to a greater or lesser extent."

But on the plus side... NextGen TV is IP-based, so in practice it can be moved around your home just like any internet content can right now. For example, you connect an antenna to a tuner box inside your home, but that box is not connected to your TV at all. Instead, it's connected to your router. This means anything with access to your network can have access to over-the-air TV, be it your TV, your phone, your tablet or even a streaming device like Apple TV....

This also means it's possible we'll see mobile devices with built-in tuners, so you can watch live TV while you're out and about, like you can with Netflix and YouTube now. How willing phone companies will be to put tuners in their phones remains to be seen, however. You don't see a lot of phones that can get radio broadcasts now, even though such a thing is easy to implement.
But whatever you think — it's already here. By August NextGen TV was already reaching half of America's population, according to a press release from a U.S. broadcaster's coalition. That press release also bragged that 40% of consumers had actually heard of NextGen TV — "up 25% from last year among those in markets where it is available."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Since 1999 fiction writers have tried starting and finishing the composition of 50,000-word novels in November for "National Novel Writing Month". But for the last nine years, programmers have instead tried generating 50,000 word novels — and this year's edition received more than 50 entries.

"The only rule is that you share at least one novel and also your source code at the end," explains the event's official page on GitHub.
From the repository's README file: The "novel" is defined however you want. It could be 50,000 repetitions of the word "meow" (and yes it's been done!). It could literally grab a random novel from Project Gutenberg. It doesn't matter, as long as it's 50k+ words.

Please try to respect copyright. We're not going to police it, as ultimately it's on your head if you want to just copy/paste a Stephen King novel or whatever, but the most useful/interesting implementations are going to be ones that don't engender lawsuits.
This year's computer-generated novels include " sunday in the sunday in the," mapping the colors from each dot in the Pointillist painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte onto words from the lyrics of a musical about that painting. ("Rush blind. Link adds shallot again....")

OpenAI has released a prototype general purpose chatbot that demonstrates a fascinating array of new capabilities but also shows off weaknesses familiar to the fast-moving field of text-generation AI. And you can test out the model for yourself right here. The Verge reports: ChatGPT is adapted from OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model but trained to provide more conversational answers. While GPT-3 in its original form simply predicts what text follows any given string of words, ChatGPT tries to engage with users' queries in a more human-like fashion. As you can see in the examples below, the results are often strikingly fluid, and ChatGPT is capable of engaging with a huge range of topics, demonstrating big improvements to chatbots seen even a few years ago. But the software also fails in a manner similar to other AI chatbots, with the bot often confidently presenting false or invented information as fact. As some AI researchers explain it, this is because such chatbots are essentially "stochastic parrots" -- that is, their knowledge is derived only from statistical regularities in their training data, rather than any human-like understanding of the world as a complex and abstract system. [...]

Enough preamble, though: what can this thing actually do? Well, plenty of people have been testing it out with coding questions and claiming its answers are perfect. ChatGPT can also apparently write some pretty uneven TV scripts, even combining actors from different sitcoms. It can explain various scientific concepts. And it can write basic academic essays. And the bot can combine its fields of knowledge in all sorts of interesting ways. So, for example, you can ask it to debug a string of code ... like a pirate, for which its response starts: "Arr, ye scurvy landlubber! Ye be makin' a grave mistake with that loop condition ye be usin'!" Or get it to explain bubble sort algorithms like a wise guy gangster. ChatGPT also has a fantastic ability to answer basic trivia questions, though examples of this are so boring I won't paste any in here. And someone else saying the code ChatGPT provides in the very answer above is garbage.

I'm not a programmer myself, so I won't make a judgment on this specific case, but there are plenty of examples of ChatGPT confidently asserting obviously false information. Here's computational biology professor Carl Bergstrom asking the bot to write a Wikipedia entry about his life, for example, which ChatGPT does with aplomb -- while including several entirely false biographical details. Another interesting set of flaws comes when users try to get the bot to ignore its safety training. If you ask ChatGPT about certain dangerous subjects, like how to plan the perfect murder or make napalm at home, the system will explain why it can't tell you the answer. (For example, "I'm sorry, but it is not safe or appropriate to make napalm, which is a highly flammable and dangerous substance.") But, you can get the bot to produce this sort of dangerous information with certain tricks, like pretending it's a character in a film or that it's writing a script on how AI models shouldn't respond to these sorts of questions.