RockDoctor writes: A recent flurry of posts to astronomy news sites points to an amateur astronomer spotting a new impact on Jupiter. Every such case documented improves our estimates of how many bodies are flying around in the (inner) solar system, and improves our estimates of how likely we are to get another hit in a year, a decade, or a century. Sky and Telescope has been pulling in more information. SpaceWeather.com has an image of the impact. (Note: some of these images have been "flipped" to an "on sky" orientation, and others haven't because astronomical telescopes generally produce an inverted image since it requires fewer reflections.) Estimates of the impactor size are unclear, but minimum sizes seem to be in the several kg range. Depending on how long the flash lasted, it could go up into the tons, which is important for estimating the number of potentially hazardous objects in the inner solar system. Space and Telescope's correspondents put the size at "up to" (important words!) the 30m range (100ft in Tudor measure), which would be around 10,000 tons -- a Chelyabinsk 2013-size body.

Thelasko writes: The Wikimedia Foundation has revealed efforts to gather personal information on some Chinese Wikipedia editors by entities opposed to their activities on the platform and likely to threaten the targets' privacy or well-being. The foundation's response has been to ban seven users in mainland China, cancel sysop privileges for another dozen, and warn plenty more Wikipedia editors to modify their behaviour. The bans and warnings were revealed in a Monday letter from Maggie Dennis, the foundation's vice president of community resilience and sustainability. This move followed the detection of what Dennis described in a statement as "information about infiltration of Wikimedia systems, including positions with access to personally identifiable information and elected bodies of influence."

The foundation contracted a security firm, which assessed that the ongoing situation "placed multiple users at risk." Dennis's letter describes the exposure of personal information of Chinese editors, and states "we know that some users have been physically harmed as a result." The Wikimedia Foundation therefore decided some of the perpetrators had to be sanctioned. "We have banned seven users and desysopped a further 12 as a result of long and deep investigations into activities around some members of the unrecognized group Wikimedians of Mainland China," Dennis wrote. "We have also reached out to a number of other editors with explanations around canvassing guidelines and doxing policies and requests to modify their behaviors." The letter and statement don't explain the source of the conflict, but do mention "recent world events" as one catalyst.

Zhao Wei was the Reese Witherspoon of China, then she was censored by the Communist Party amid a clampdown of the country's entertainment industry. WSJ: She directed award-winning films, sold millions of records as a pop singer and built a large following on social media, amassing 86 million fans on Weibo, China's Twitter -like microblogging site. She also made a fortune as an investor in Chinese technology and entertainment companies. Today, the 45-year-old star has been erased from the Chinese internet. Searches for her name on the country's biggest video-streaming sites come up blank. Her projects, including the wildly popular TV series "My Fair Princess," have been removed. Anyone looking up her acclaimed film "So Young" on China's equivalent of Wikipedia wouldn't know she was the director; the field now reads "---."

Ms. Zhao's online disappearance on Aug. 26 came at the onset of a broader clampdown on the country's entertainment industry as the Communist Party attempts to halt what it sees as a rise in unhealthy celebrity culture. The Chinese government hasn't publicly stated what prompted this sudden change to her status, raising questions among fans and observers about how far it is willing to go against her and other celebrities, and why. The mystery also has sparked open speculation about what, if anything, she might have done wrong. "Zhao Wei is like a poster child for what the Communist Party sees as what's wrong with celebrity culture in China," said Stanley Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in Chinese films and politics. "It's a demonstration that no one, no matter how wealthy or popular, is too big to pursue." In Zhao Wei's case, he added, the lack of explanation "will certainly make other celebrities extremely cautious and proactive in embracing regime goals."

Researchers have developed a technique for reconstructing whole genomes, including the human genome, on a personal computer. "This technique is about a hundred times faster than current state-of-the-art approaches and uses one-fifth the resources," reports Phys.Org. From the report: The study, published September 14 in the journal Cell Systems, allows for a more compact representation of genome data inspired by the way in which words, rather than letters, offer condensed building blocks for language models. [...] To approach genome assembly more efficiently than current techniques, which involve making pairwise comparisons between all possible pairs of reads, [researchers] turned to language models. Building from the concept of a de Bruijn graph, a simple, efficient data structure used for genome assembly, the researchers developed a minimizer-space de Bruin graph (mdBG), which uses short sequences of nucleotides called minimizers instead of single nucleotides. "Our minimizer-space de Bruijn graphs store only a small fraction of the total nucleotides, while preserving the overall genome structure, enabling them to be orders of magnitude more efficient than classical de Bruijn graphs," says [one of the researchers].

The researchers applied their method to assemble real HiFi data (which has almost perfect single-molecule read accuracy) for Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, as well as human genome data provided by Pacific Biosciences (PacBio). When they evaluated the resulting genomes, [researchers] found that their mdBG-based software required about 33 times less time and 8 times less random-access memory (RAM) computing hardware than other genome assemblers. Their software performed genome assembly for the HiFi human data 81 times faster with 18 times less memory usage than the Peregrine assembler and 338 times faster with 19 times less memory usage than the hifiasm assembler. Next, [researchers] used their method to construct an index for a collection of 661,406 bacterial genomes, the largest collection of its kind to date. They found that the novel technique could search the entire collection for antimicrobial resistance genes in 13 minutes -- a process that took 7 hours using standard sequence alignment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In the latest quasi-throwback toward "do not track," the UK's data protection chief has come out in favor of a browser- and/or device-level setting to allow Internet users to set "lasting" cookie preferences -- suggesting this as a fix for the barrage of consent pop-ups that continues to infest websites in the region. European web users digesting this development in an otherwise monotonously unchanging regulatory saga, should be forgiven -- not only for any sense of deja vu they may experience -- but also for wondering if they haven't been mocked/gaslit quite enough already where cookie consent is concerned.

Last month, UK digital minister Oliver Dowden took aim at what he dubbed an "endless" parade of cookie pop-ups -- suggesting the government is eyeing watering down consent requirements around web tracking as ministers consider how to diverge from European Union data protection standards, post-Brexit. (He's slated to present the full sweep of the government's data 'reform' plans later this month so watch this space.) Today the UK's outgoing information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, stepped into the fray to urge her counterparts in G7 countries to knock heads together and coalesce around the idea of letting web users express generic privacy preferences at the browser/app/device level, rather than having to do it through pop-ups every time they visit a website.

In a statement announcing "an idea" she will present this week during a virtual meeting of fellow G7 data protection and privacy authorities -- less pithily described in the press release as being "on how to improve the current cookie consent mechanism, making web browsing smoother and more business friendly while better protecting personal data" -- Denham said: "I often hear people say they are tired of having to engage with so many cookie pop-ups. That fatigue is leading to people giving more personal data than they would like. The cookie mechanism is also far from ideal for businesses and other organizations running websites, as it is costly and it can lead to poor user experience. While I expect businesses to comply with current laws, my office is encouraging international collaboration to bring practical solutions in this area. There are nearly two billion websites out there taking account of the world's privacy preferences. No single country can tackle this issue alone. That is why I am calling on my G7 colleagues to use our convening power. Together we can engage with technology firms and standards organizations to develop a coordinated approach to this challenge," she added.

"The advent of gaming, especially computer gaming, marks a fundamental break in human affairs," argues American economist Tyler Cowen (in a Bloomberg opinion column).

"Gaming is profoundly transforming two central aspects of the modern world: culture and regulation. There will be no turning back... Plenty of trading already takes place in games — involving currencies, markets, prices and contracts. Game creators and players set and enforce the rules, and it is harder for government regulators to play a central role. The lesson is clear: If you wish to create a new economic institution, put it inside a game. Or how about an app that gamifies share trading? Do you wish to experiment with a new kind of stock exchange or security outside the purview of traditional government regulation? Try the world of gaming, perhaps combined with crypto, and eventually your "game" just might influence events in the real world...

[R]egulators are already falling behind. Just as gaming has outraced the world of culture, so will gaming outrace U.S. regulatory capabilities, for a variety of reasons: encryption, the use of cryptocurrency, the difficulties of policing virtual realities, varying rules in foreign jurisdictions and, not incidentally, a lack of expertise among U.S. regulators. (At least the Chinese government's attempt to restrict youth gaming to three hours a week, while foolhardy, reflects a perceptive cultural conservatism.)

Both the culture-weakening and the regulation-weakening features of games follow from their one basic characteristic: They are self-contained worlds. Until now, human institutions and structures have depended on relatively open and overlapping networks of ideas. Gaming is carving up and privatizing those spaces. This shift is the big trend that hardly anyone — outside of gaming and crypto — is noticing.

If the much-heralded "metaverse" ever arrives, gaming will swallow many more institutions, or create countervailing versions of them. Whether or not you belong to the world of gaming, it is coming for your worlds. I hope you are ready.

"One project going dark — due to a DMCA takedown or otherwise — can impact thousands of developers," GitHub warns in a blog post this week: We saw that firsthand with both leftpad and mimemagic. That's why GitHub's designed its DMCA process to follow the law in requiring takedown requests to identify specific content. We want developers on our platform and elsewhere to have a clear opportunity to remove infringing code yet keep non-infringing code up for others to use, modify, and learn from.

Ensuring that software copyright allegations are specific and actionable benefits the entire developer ecosystem. That's why GitHub submitted a "friend of the court" brief in the SAS Institute, Inc. v. World Programming Ltd. case before a Federal Court of Appeals.

This case is the most recent in a ten-year litigation spanning both the UK and the US. SAS Institute has brought copyright and non-copyright claims against World Programming's software that runs code written in the SAS language, and the copyright claims drew comparison to the recent Google v. Oracle Supreme Court case. But this case is different from Google v. Oracle because here the alleged copyright infringement is based on a claim of "nonliteral" infringement. That means there is no allegation that specific lines of code were literally copied, but only that other aspects, like the code's overall structure and organization, were used. In nonliteral infringement claims, the questions arise: what aspects of the "nonliteral" features were taken and are they actually protected by copyright...?

GitHub believes that for claims involving nonliteral copying of software, it is critical that a copyright owner provide — as early as possible — examples that would allow a developer, a court, or a software collaboration platform like GitHub to identify what was claimed to be copied. Our brief helps educate the court why specificity is especially important for developers.... We urged the court to think about efficiency in dispute resolution to avoid FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). The sooner infringement allegations can be made specific and clear, the sooner infringing code can be changed and non-infringing code can stay up. That should be the result for both federal lawsuits, as well as DMCA infringement notices.

Slashdot has confirmed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware that after 18 years of legal maneuvering, SCO's bankruptcy case (first filed in 2007) is now "awaiting discharge."

Long-time Slashdot reader rkhalloran says they know the reason: Papers filed 26 Aug by IBM & SCOXQ in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware for a proposed settlement, Case 07-11337-BLS Doc 1501:

By the Settlement Agreement, the Trustee has reached a settlement with IBM that resolves all of the remaining claims at issue in the Utah Litigation (defined below). The Settlement Agreement is the culmination of extensive arm's length negotiation between the Trustee and IBM.

Under the Settlement Agreement, the Parties have agreed to resolve all disputes between them for a payment to the Trustee, on behalf of the Estates, of $14,250,000. For the reasons set forth more fully below, the Trustee submits the Settlement Agreement and the settlement with IBM are in the best interests of the Estates and creditors, are well within the range of reasonableness, and should be approved.
The proposed order would include "the release of the Estates' claims against IBM and vice versa" (according to this PDF attributed to SCO Group and IBM uploaded to scribd.com). And one of the reasons given for the proposed settlement? "The probability of the ultimate success of the Trustee's claims against IBM is uncertain," according to an IBM/SCO document on Scribd.com titled Trustee's motion: For example, succeeding on the unfair competition claims will require proving to a jury that events occurring many years ago constituted unfair competition and caused SCO harm. Even if SCO were to succeed in that effort, the amount of damages it would recover is uncertain and could be significantly less than provided by the Settlement Agreement. Such could be the case should a jury find that (1) the amount of damage SCO sustained as a result of IBM's conduct is less than SCO has alleged, (2) SCO's damages are limited by a $5 million damage limitation provision in the Project Monterey agreement, or (3) some or all of IBM's Counterclaims, alleging millions of dollars in damages related to IBM's Linux activities and alleged interference by SCO, are meritorious.

Although the Trustee believes the Estates would ultimately prevail on claims against IBM, a not insignificant risk remains that IBM could succeed with its defenses and/or Counterclaims
The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware told Slashdot that the first meeting of the creditors will be held on September 22nd, 2021.

In a 2015 video, PCMag's lead mobile analyst Sascha Segan showed off "One of the coolest phones at this year's CES."

He's now written an article titled "How I Got Suckered by an (Alleged) $10M Phone Scam. The biggest mobile-phone mystery of the 2010s is finally coming to an ignominious end, as yesterday the U.S. attorney for Utah charged Chad Sayers, founder of entirely notional mobile phone firm Saygus, with conducting a $10 million fraud scheme. Saygus "had" a series of "phones" from 2009-2016 that existed as prototypes that the company took on trade shows and to press tours. There was never any real evidence of production runs. The U.S. Attorney now claims Sayers and associated took $10 million in investor money and lived on it without ever really planning to release a product. (I learned this via David Ruddock....)

The phone kept just...not happening. Sayers' genius was that he produced just enough prototypes to show off and kept them in a constant state of pre-sale... "DEFENDANT failed to disclose that device certification with Verizon expired in 2013 and was never renewed," the Department of Justice notes. A new version of the phone then popped up again in 2015, this one supposedly covered in Kevlar with 320GB of storage. Sayers flogged that prototype until early 2016, at which point he said it was coming "next month."

The Department of Justice says: "Between April 7, 2015 and January 10, 2017, DEFENDANT made at least 26 public statements on Twitter that its phone would be shipping 'this month,' 'this week,' or was otherwise launching, when in fact, it has never launched...."

Sayers kept going on press tours and buying expensive trade-show booths with prototypes of phones that would never hit the market, drumming up enough gullible mainstream press coverage (myself included) to presumably attract a continual stream of investors with his claim of being the next big thing.

Programmer Ryan C. Gordon (also known as icculus) is a former employee at Loki Software, one of the first companies to port videogames from Microsoft Windows to Linux, according to his Wikipedia page. He's still hosting many Loki software projects at icculus.org, "as well as several new projects created by himself and others."

He's also Slashdot reader #32,040, and dropped by this week with a very special announcement: I took Zork 1 and made it into a multiplayer game!

You can try it yourself by telnetting to multizork.icculus.org with some friends. Telnet seemed appropriate for a game from 1980, at least until I can figure out how to efficiently send everyone a 300 baud modem.

A detailed technical explanation about hacking the Z-Machine to make this work is over here and source code is, of course, available. Enjoy, and don't get eaten by a grue!

RoccamOccam writes: After many months of development, the memfd_secret() system call was finally merged for the upcoming 5.14 release of Linux. There have been many changes during this feature's development, but its core purpose remains the same: allow a user-space process to create a range of memory that is inaccessible to anybody else -- kernel included. That memory can be used to store cryptographic keys or any other data that must not be exposed to others. Reportedly, it is even safe from processor vulnerabilities like Spectre because secret memory is uncached mapped.

NicknamesAreStupid writes: As a follow-up to [last week's story about a large homeless encampment growing on the site Apple earmarked for its North San Jose campus], Apple appears to be using the promise of building affordable homes as a part of moving the current homeless encampment out. [According to Patently Apple, "Apple is preparing construction activities at its huge north San Jose office campus, a move that could bring thousands of jobs to the mixed-use tech hub." The company says it "would spend millions to reach out to and relocate residents of a homeless encampment that has formed on the company's land." Specific plans and details have yet to be released.]

This raises the question: will companies revert to a new form of "company town" used by the coal and oil companies during the 20th century? Instead of villages in remote locations, will tech companies build urban islands of homes for employees, effectively subsidizing their housing in a manner similar to subsidized healthcare of the mid-twentieth century? Of course, the catch is that if you leave the company, you lose your home.

Early Monday morning, the Wikipedia pages for a slew of celebrities, writers, and political figures were replaced by full-page spreads of black and white swastikas on a bright red background. The vandalism was reversed within minutes of being noticed by users. Gizmodo reports: Wikipedia is certainly no stranger to vandalism on some of its more controversial pages, but this incident highlighted one of the lesser-known weaknesses in the platform's airtight content moderation policies. Instead of targeting the content on any particular Wikipedia page, the vandal behind this blitz targeted a particular article template used by more than 50,000 different Wikipedia pages, including those for Jennifer Lopez, Joe Biden, and Discworld author Terry Pratchett.

According to an ongoing discussion by a handful of Wikipedia admins on one of the site's public forums, the template's since been fixed and the vandal in question -- who first joined the site about ten days ago -- has been put on an indefinite ban. One admin noted that by targeting these article templates directly, the user was able to bypass the typical protections put on certain Wikipedia pages to protect them from vandals in the first place.

Long-time Slashdot reader Pieroxy is working on a new open source project, a web-based version of the system-monitoring software Conky.

The ultimate goal is send the data to an HTML interface "to find some use for the old iPads/tablets/laptops we all have lying around. You can put them next to your screen and have your metrics displayed there...!"

There's just one problem: "I had to come up with a way for users to format a number." I needed a small string the user could write to describe exactly what they want to do with their number. Some examples can be: write it as a 3-digit number suffixed by SI prefixes when the numbers are too big or too small, display a timestamp as HH:MM string, or just the day of week, eventually cut to the first three characters, do the same with a timestamp in milliseconds, or nanoseconds, display a nice string out of a number of seconds to express a duration ("3h 12mn 17s"), pad the number with spaces so that all numbers are aligned (left or right), force a fixed number of digits after the decimal point, etc.

In other words, I was looking for a "universal" way of formatting numbers and failed to find any kind of standard online.

Do Slashdot readers know of such a thing or should I create my own?

Uptycs Threat Research Team has discovered malware that not only hijacks vulnerable *nix-based servers and uses them to mine cryptocurrency but actually modifies their CPU configurations in a bid to increase mining performance at the cost of performance in other applications. Tom's Hardware reports: Perpetrators use a Golang-based worm to exploit known vulnerabilities like CVE-2020-14882 (Oracle WebLogic) and CVE-2017-11610 (Supervisord) to gain access to Linux systems, reports The Record. Once they hijack a machine, they use model-specific registers (MSR) to disable the hardware prefetcher, a unit that fetches data and instructions from the memory into the L2 cache before they are needed.

Prefetching has been used for years and can boost performance in various tasks. However, disabling it can increase mining performance in XMRig, the mining software the perpetrators use, by 15%. But disabling the hardware prefetcher lowers performance in legitimate applications. In turn, server operators either have to buy additional machines to meet their performance requirements or increase power limits for existing hardware. In either case, they increase power consumption and spend additional money. The botnet has been reportedly used since at least December 2020 and targeted vulnerabilities in MySQL, Tomcat, Oracle WebLogic, and Jenkins.

68-year-old technology writer Charles Petzold wrote about Windows programming for 25 years, including several books published by Microsoft Press. In 1994 he was one of seven "Windows Pioneers" honored in a special ceremony (with an award presented by Bill Gates), and the company has also recognized him with their "Most Valuable Professional" award.

Petzold just wrote a blog post titled "Screw you, Microsoft Edge" when the browser spontaneously decided to advise him of a discount at Walmart. Recently while searching for a book on Bookshop.org, I was interrupted by a popup apparently generated by Microsoft Edge advising me of an alternative... Excuse me?

The assumption that I need help buying a book is the biggest insult I've encountered on Windows since the days of Clippy.

A further insult is the implication that I make buying decisions based solely on price... I might prefer a retailer that focuses solely on books, or a retailer that is not a large chain. More generally, I might make a decision based on the company's carbon footprint, or perhaps their reputation in paying fair wages, or what political candidates and movements they support, or whether the CEO uses his wealth to launch himself into space.

Of course, these concepts are entirely beyond the scope of Edge's braindead algorithm that apparently knows only whether one number is larger than another.
In November Microsoft had described the upcoming popups announcing better prices as "a proactive price comparison experience that meets you where you shop. When you're shopping, Microsoft Edge will check prices at competing retailers to let you know if a lower price is available elsewhere..."

Promising there'd be even more shopping experiences coming, they'd added, "we'd love to hear what you think of them so far!"

H_Fisher writes: Only one copy exists of the Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and it was owned by "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli. Now, NPR reports that this album has been sold by the U.S. government to an unnamed buyer in order to pay Shkreli's civil forfeiture judgment following his conviction for securities fraud. The album, which was originally sold for $2 million, exists only as one physical CD copy. It was seized along with other assets in 2018, and while the sale price and buyer weren't identified, Shkreli's attorney says that his client has now repaid the $7.4 million forfeiture judgement.

First Major League Baseball experimented with automated umpiring of balls and strikes in the minor leagues.

Now the Verge reports they're trying a time-saving tactic that might also make it harder to cheat: Baseball has a sign stealing problem — or at least, a technological one, seeing how reading another team's pitches is technically legal, but using Apple Watches or telephoto cameras and then suspiciously banging on trash cans is very much not. But soon the MLB may try fighting fire with fire: on August 3rd, it plans to begin testing an encrypted wireless communication device that replaces the traditional flash of fingers with button taps, according to ESPN.

The device, from a startup called PitchCom, will be tested in the Low-A West minor league first. As you'd expect from something that's relaying extremely basic signals, it's not a particularly complicated piece of kit: one wristband transmitter for the catcher with nine buttons to signal "desired pitch and location," which sends an encrypted audio signal to receivers that can squeeze into a pitcher's cap and a catcher's helmet.

The receivers use bone-conduction technology, so they don't necessarily need to be up against an ear, and might theoretically be harder to eavesdrop on. (Bone conduction stimulates bones in your head instead of emitting audible sound.)
"MLB hopes the devices will cut down on time spent by pitchers stepping off the rubber and changing signals," reports the Associated Press, noting another interesting new rule. "A team may continue to use the system if the opposing club's device malfunctions."

But don't worry about that, reports ESPN: Hacking the system, the company says, is virtually impossible. PitchCom uses an industrial grade encryption algorithm and transmits minimal data digitally, making it mathematically impossible for someone to decrypt intercepted transmissions, according to the company.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm shares a blog post from Stockfish announcing a lawsuit against ChessBase: The Stockfish project strongly believes in free and open-source software and data. Collaboration is what made this engine the strongest chess engine in the world. We license our software using the GNU General Public License, Version 3 (GPL) with the intent to guarantee all chess enthusiasts the freedom to use, share and change all versions of the program. Unfortunately, not everybody shares this vision of openness. We have come to realize that ChessBase concealed from their customers Stockfish as the true origin of key parts of their products (see also earlier blog posts by us and the joint Lichess, Leela Chess Zero, and Stockfish teams). Indeed, few customers know they obtained a modified version of Stockfish when they paid for Fat Fritz 2 or Houdini 6 -- both Stockfish derivatives -- and they thus have good reason to be upset. [ChessBase released Fat Fritz 2, described on their website as the "new number 1" chess engine "with a massive new neural network, trained by Albert Silver with the original Fat Fritz." They advertise Fat Fritz 2 as using novel strong ideas compared to existing chess engines, but in reality Fat Fritz 2 is just Stockfish with a different neural network and minimal changes that are neither innovative nor appear to make the engine stronger.] ChessBase repeatedly violated central obligations of the GPL, which ensures that the user of the software is informed of their rights. These rights are explicit in the license and include access to the corresponding sources, and the right to reproduce, modify and distribute GPLed programs royalty-free.

In the past four months, we, supported by a certified copyright and media law attorney in Germany, went through a long process to enforce our license. Even though we had our first successes, leading to a recall of the Fat Fritz 2 DVD and the termination of the sales of Houdini 6, we were unable to finalize our dispute out of court. Due to Chessbase's repeated license violations, leading developers of Stockfish have terminated their GPL license with ChessBase permanently. However, ChessBase is ignoring the fact that they no longer have the right to distribute Stockfish, modified or unmodified, as part of their products. Thus, to enforce the consequences of the license termination, we have filed a lawsuit. This lawsuit is broadly supported by the team of maintainers and developers of Stockfish. We believe we have the evidence, the financial means and the determination to bring this lawsuit to a successful end. We will provide an update to this statement once significant progress has been made.

Since 2006 Baldrson (Slashdot reader #78,598) has been part of the team verifying "The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge," an ongoing challenge to compress a 100-MB excerpt of Wikipedia (approximately the amount a human can read in a lifetime).

"The intention of this prize is to encourage development of intelligent compressors/programs as a path to Artificial General Intelligence," explains the project's web site. 15 years ago, Baldrson wrote a Slashdot post explaining the logic (titled "Compress Wikipedia and Win AI Prize"): The basic theory, for which Hutter provides a proof, is that after any set of observations the optimal move by an AI is find the smallest program that predicts those observations and then assume its environment is controlled by that program. Think of it as Ockham's Razor on steroids.
The amount of the prize also increases based on how much compression is achieved. (So if you compress the 1GB file x% better than the current record, you'll receive x% of the prize...) The first prize was awarded in 2006. And now Baldrson writes with the official news that this Spring another prize was claimed after reaching a brand new milestone: Artemiy Margaritov's STARLIT algorithm's 1.13% cleared the 1% improvement hurdle to beat the last benchmark, set by Alexander Rhatushnyak. He receives a bonus in proportion to the time since the last benchmark was set, raising his award by 60% to €9000. [$10,632 USD]

Congratulations to Artemiy Margaritov for his winning submission!