An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A California teenager prosecutors say is responsible for hundreds of swatting attacks around the United States was exposed after law enforcement pieced together a digital trail left on some of the internet's largest platforms, according to court records released this week. Alan Winston Filion, a 17-year-old from Lancaster, California, faces four felony charges in Florida's Seminole County related to swatting, or fake threats called into the police to provoke a forceful response, according to Florida state prosecutors. Police arrested Filion on January 18, and he was extradited to Seminole County this week.

Filion's arrest, first reported by WIRED on January 26, marks the culmination of a multi-agency manhunt for the person police claim is responsible for swatting attacks on high schools, historically black colleges and universities, mosques, and federal agents, and for threats to bomb the Pentagon, members of the United States Senate, and the US Supreme Court. Ultimately, a YouTube channel, Discord chats, and usernames related to The Lord of the Rings helped lead authorities to Filion's doorstep.

Florida prosecutors charged Filion with four felony counts, including three related to allegedly making false reports to law enforcement and one for unlawful use of a two-way radio for "facilitating or furthering an act of terrorism" that authorities say targeted people based on race, religion, or other protected classes. While prosecutors alleged that Filion "is responsible for hundreds of swatting and bomb threat incidents throughout the United States," the charges Filion faces relate to a single May 12, 2023, swatting attack against the Masjid Al Hayy Mosque in Sanford, Florida. [...] At 2 pm EST on Wednesday, Filion shuffled into a Seminole County courtroom and stood quietly as the judge read the charges against him. He is currently being held without bond.

Spotify has reached a new deal with star podcaster Joe Rogan that will allow his hit show to be distributed broadly. From a report: Rogan's fresh deal, estimated to be worth as much as $250 million over its multiyear term, involves an upfront minimum guarantee, plus a revenue sharing agreement based on ad sales. Under the new licensing agreement, Spotify will sell ads for and distribute "The Joe Rogan Experience" across several podcast platforms, including in a video format on YouTube, the company said Friday. Under his previous deal, the show was exclusive to Spotify. The new deal is emblematic of shifting economics in podcasting, which has matured in both audience reach and advertising spending since Rogan's last deal. Spotify is working to revise the terms of its deals with top talent so that shows are distributed on several platforms to maximize their audience and ad sales, rather than requiring exclusivity.

YouTube has announced it has surpassed 100 million YouTube Music and YouTube Premium subscribers globally. Variety reports: The 100 million figure includes uses who are on free trials, according to YouTube. The company didn't break down how many are on YouTube Music versus YouTube Premium, the subscription service for ad-free viewing, background listening, offline video downloads and full access to YouTube Music. In November 2022, the company said YouTube Music and YouTube Premium topped 80 million paying subscribers combined.

The announcement comes after Alphabet, in reporting fourth-quarter 2023 earnings, boasted that YouTube and Google subscription services generated more than $15 billion in revenue last year. That includes YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, as well as YouTube TV and Google One cloud storage.

Google has confirmed to Cord Cutters News that you can now customize what games you can watch in your Multiview window. The keyword here is "games" because this feature is still limited to just sporting events at this time. From the report: One of YouTube TV's best features is the ability to offer the option to watch up to four sporting or news events at once on the same screen. The only downside has been the fact that customers have been unable to pick what games are in these windows. Instead, YouTube TV gives you a number of premade multiview options to pick from. Now, though, YouTube TV seems to be testing your ability to pick what games you want on your TV.

Yesterday, YouTube TV started to give some NBA League Pass subscribers the ability to pick which games they want to watch from a handful of games in a list. From there, YouTube TV would create a multiview channel for you to watch the games you pick. Google says this feature is coming to all devices that support multiview and you can only create these channels from preselected NBA games. Sadly, you can't pick any channel you want but only from a list of preselected games to create your own multiview channel.

Spying used to be all about secrets. Increasingly, it's about what's hiding in plain sight [non-paywalled link] . From a report: A staggering amount of data, from Facebook posts and YouTube clips to location pings from mobile phones and car apps, sits in the open internet, available to anyone who looks. US intelligence agencies have struggled for years to tap into such data, which they refer to as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. But that's starting to change. In October the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the nation's intelligence agencies, brought in longtime analyst and cyber expert Jason Barrett to help with the US intelligence community's approach to OSINT. His immediate task will be to help develop the intelligence community's national OSINT strategy, which will focus on coordination, data acquisition and the development of tools to improve its approach to this type of intelligence work. ODNI expects to implement the plan in the coming months, according to a spokesperson.

Barrett's appointment, which hasn't previously been reported publicly, comes after more than a year of work on the strategy led by the Central Intelligence Agency, which has for years headed up the government's efforts on OSINT. The challenge with other forms of intelligence-gathering, such as electronic surveillance or human intelligence, can be secretly collecting enough information in the first place. With OSINT, the issue is sifting useful insights out of the unthinkable amount of information available digitally. "Our greatest weakness in OSINT has been the vast scale of how much we collect," says Randy Nixon, director of the CIA's Open Source Enterprise division. Nixon's office has developed a tool similar to ChatGPT that uses AI to sift the ever-growing flood of data. Now available to thousands of users within the federal government, the tool points analysts to the most important information and auto-summarizes content. Government task forces have warned since the 1990s that the US was at risk of falling behind on OSINT. But the federal intelligence community has generally prioritized information it gathers itself, stymying progress.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The estate of George Carlin has filed a federal lawsuit against the comedy podcast Dudesy for an hour-long comedy special sold as an AI-generated impression of the late comedian. But a representative for one of the podcast hosts behind the special now admits that it was actually written by a human. In the lawsuit, filed by Carlin manager Jerold Hamza in a California district court, the Carlin estate points out that the special, "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead," (which was set to "private" on YouTube shortly after the lawsuit was filed) presents itself as being created by an AI trained on decades worth of Carlin's material. That training would, by definition, involve making "unauthorized copies" of "Carlin's original, copyrighted routines" without permission in order "to fabricate a semblance of Carlin's voice and generate a Carlin stand-up comedy routine," according to the lawsuit.

Despite the presentation as an AI creation, there was a good deal of evidence that the Dudesy podcast and the special itself were not actually written by an AI, as Ars laid out in detail this week. And in the wake of this lawsuit, a representative for Dudesy host Will Sasso admitted as much to The New York Times. "It's a fictional podcast character created by two human beings, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen," spokeswoman Danielle Del told the newspaper. "The YouTube video 'I'm Glad I'm Dead' was completely written by Chad Kultgen." Regardless of that admission, Carlin estate lawyer Josh Schiller told the Times that the lawsuit would move forward. "We don't know what they're saying to be true," he said. "What we will know is that they will be deposed. They will produce documents, and there will be evidence that shows one way or another how the show was created."

Halo — the TV series — launches its second season on February 8th. But today a trailer premiered during halftime of the pre-Super Bowl football playoff.

Gizmodo reports: Even though the Covenant are the other side of Halo's ongoing conflict, the first season of Paramount+'s TV series largely represented them through a human proxy named Makee. With the upcoming second season, the coalition of alien races is set to become a more prominent threat, and that means they'll be getting more proper screentime.
IGN had written that Season 1 "isn't a perfect adaptation of the games, but it ultimately succeeds in expanding the series' mythology and taking a more character-driven approach to Master Chief's adventures." This week Paramount+ also released a 28-minute compilation of "Epic Battle Scenes from Season 1, a season which reportedly cost $200 million to film.

And now the entertainment site Collider reports on what comes next: While on the set for Halo Season 2, Collider's Steve Weintraub and some other reporters got the chance to sit down with stars Schreiber and Kate Kennedy to discuss how the show will further flesh out the Covenant in the upcoming episodes. Part of that involves expanding their arsenal with new vehicles like the corvette, a class of ships used in the Halo canon by the Covenant for reconnaissance, stealth, and much more. Kennedy placed it among her favorite Season 2 set designs, saying... "It's huge, and what the set guys did for it, and the art department, is really, really impressive. They turned it around so quickly, and it's, like, awe-inspiring, it's huge."

Aside from making the Covenant more formidable, Season 2 will also focus on making them more understandable. Part of that involves diving into the thought process of key players within the alien faction, including two that Schreiber could tease. "Yeah, we definitely go into the Covenant mind-state, mentality," he said... In future seasons, Schreiber believes Halo will only continue to develop the Covenant, their motives, and the relationships and allegiances within the coalition as the story of intergalactic war unfolds.

In Denver, Colorado, a pastor had a message for his congregation, reports CNN.

"After months of prayers and cues from God, he was going to start selling cryptocurrency, he announced in a YouTube video last April." The Signature and Silvergate banks had collapsed weeks earlier, signaling the need to look into other investment options beyond financial institutions, he said. With divine wisdom, he said, he was "setting the rails for God's wealth transfer." Shortly afterward, Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, launched a cryptocurrency, INDXcoin, and began selling it to members of his Victorious Grace Church and other Christian communities in the Denver area. They sold it through the Kingdom Wealth Exchange, an online cryptocurrency marketplace he created, controlled and operated.

The Regalados raised more than $3.2 million from over 300 investors, Tung Chang, Securities Commissioner for Colorado, said in a civil complaint. The couple's sales pitches were filled with "prayer and quotes from the Bible, encouraging investors to have faith that their investment ... would lead to 'abundance' and 'blessings,'" the complaint said. But Colorado state regulators say that INDXcoin was "essentially worthless." Instead of helping investors acquire wealth, the Regalados used around $1.3 million of the investment funds to bankroll lavish expenditures, including a Range Rover, jewelry, cosmetic dentistry and extravagant vacations, the complaint said. The money also paid for renovations to the Regalados' Denver home, the complaint said.

In a stunning video statement posted online on January 19 — several days after the civil charges were filed — Eli Regalado did not dispute that he and his wife profited from the crypto venture. "The charges are that Kaitlyn and I pocketed 1.3 million dollars, and I just want to come out and say that those charges are true," he said, adding, "A few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel that the Lord told us to do...."

Regalado also said that he and his wife used about half a million dollars of their investors' funds to pay taxes to the IRS.
CNN reports that in videos Regalado explains how God "convinced him that it was a safe and profitable investment venture." ("You read it correctly. God's hand is on INDXcoin and we are launching!" explains the launch video's description.)

"The Regalados used technical terms to confuse investors and misled them into believing that the coins were valued at between $10-$12 even though they were purchased for $1.50 or, at times, given away, the complaint said."

Netflix is on everything. It's on your phone, computer, and game console, going all the way back to the Nintendo Wii. Hell, you can get your Netflix fix on a Peloton. One place where Netflix won't be is Apple's upcoming Vision Pro VR headset. Why isn't Netflix planning an app for what is Apple's big $3,500 gamble on the future of augmented reality? According to co-CEO Greg Peters, it's because the company doesn't know if anybody's actually going to use it. Gizmodo: More specifically, he called the device "subscale," adding that he didn't know if it would be "relevant to most of our members." That was in an interview with business analyst Ben Thompson, where Peters implied his company is being far more selective, at least when it comes to Apple's $3,500 "spatial computer."

"We have to be careful about making sure that we're not investing in places that are not really yielding a return, and I would say we'll see where things go with Vision Pro," the Netflix co-CEO said. The interview dropped barely a day after Peters got done extolling how the company gained more than 13 million new subscribers in the last three months of 2023 while also mentioning potentially increasing subscription prices. Other common apps like Spotify and YouTube also don't plan to have a Vision Pro-specific app at launch, instead directing people to log on through their Safari browser. Peters added that they still want to work with Apple, and "sometimes we find a great space of overlap. We can move very, very quickly. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer." The investment Netflix is talking about is not unchecking a box to enable the iPad app on the Vision Pro.

Nvidia is launching RTX Video HDR in its 551.23 Game Ready driver update, enabling RTX GPU owners to use AI to convert SDR videos to HDR in Microsoft Edge and Chrome. While subtle, it can add color detail to non-HDR YouTube videos when viewed on an HDR monitor. Like Nvidia's prior RTX Video Super Resolution for upscaling and sharpening web videos, the effect is minor but noticeable when toggling on and off.

Kevin Purdy reports via Ars Technica: Sometimes, a great song can come from great pain. The Game Boy Advance (GBA), its software having crashed nearly two hours ago, will, for example, play a tune based on the game inside it. And if you listen closely enough -- using specialty hardware and code -- you can tell exactly what game it was singing about. And then theoretically play that same game. This was discovered recently by TheZZAZZGlitch, whose job is to "sadistically glitch and hack the crap out of Pokemon games. It's "hardly a ready-to-use solution," the modder notes, as it requires a lot of tuning specific to different source formats. So while there are certainly easier ways to get GBA data from a cartridge, none make you feel quite so much like an audio datamancer.

After crashing a GBA and recording it over four hours, the modder saw some telltale waveforms in a sound file at about the 1-hour, 50-minute mark. Later in the sound-out, you can hear the actual instrument sounds and audio samples the game contains, played in sequence. Otherwise, it's 8-bit data at 13,100 Hz, and at times, it sounds absolutely deranged. "2 days of bugfixing later," the modder had a Python script ready that could read the audio from a clean recording of the GBA's crash dump. Did it work? Not without more troubleshooting. One issue with audio-casting ROM data is that there are large sections of 0-byte data in the ROM, which are hard to parse as mute sounds. After running another script that realigned sections based on their location in the original ROM, the modder's ROM was 99.76 percent accurate but "still didn't boot tho." TheZZAZZGlitch later disclaimed that, yes, this is technically using known ROM data to surface unknown data, or "cheating," but there are assumptions and guesses one could make if you were truly doing this blind.

The next fix was to refine the sound recording. By recording three times and merging them with a "majority vote" algorithm, their accuracy notched up to 99.979 percent. That output ROM booted -- but with glitched text and a title screen crash. After seven different recordings are meshed and filtered for blank spaces, they achieve 100 percent parity. You can watch the video describing this feat here. Used source code is also available under the file name "gbacrashsound_dumper.zip."

According to analyst Min-Chi Kuo, Apple may have sold somewhere between 160,000 to 180,000 Vision Pro headsets during the past weekend. "This already far exceeds Kuo's earlier production figures of 60,000 to 80,000 units targeting the initial release on February 2, which is no wonder that the Vision Pro was sold out immediately after pre-orders opened," notes Engadget. From the report: While this sounds like positive news, Kuo pointed out that with shipping times remaining unchanged within the first 48 hours, this might indicate a quick drop in demand after the heavy users and hardcore fans were done pre-ordering. In contrast, iPhone orders would usually "see a steady increase in shipping times 24 to 48 hours after pre-orders open." But of course, the Vision Pro isn't meant for the average consumer in its current state, especially given the lack of some mainstream apps like YouTube, Spotify or Netflix. Not to mention the eye-watering $3,499 base price either, though Apple may later release a cheaper model in the ballpark of $1,500 to $2,500, according to an earlier report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

Kuo added that even with the device being sold out based on the upper initial production figure of 80,000 units, that only accounts for about 0.007 percent of Apple's 1.2 billion active users, which makes the Vision Pro "a very niche product" in the eyes of Cupertino. That is to say, the tech giant will need to somehow drum up and sustain demand for the headset before its global launch, which is rumored to take place some time before this year's WWDC -- likely in June. Meanwhile, Apple is also busy setting up demo areas at its US flagship stores, in the hopes of making a few more sales with their 25-minute sessions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last Thursday, HP CEO Enrique Lores addressed the company's controversial practice of bricking printers when users load them with third-party ink. Speaking to CNBC Television, he said, "We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges. Through the cartridge, [the virus can] go to the printer, [and then] from the printer, go to the network." That frightening scenario could help explain why HP, which was hit this month with another lawsuit over its Dynamic Security system, insists on deploying it to printers.

Dynamic Security stops HP printers from functioning if an ink cartridge without an HP chip or HP electronic circuitry is installed. HP has issued firmware updates that block printers with such ink cartridges from printing, leading to the above lawsuit (PDF), which is seeking class-action certification. The suit alleges that HP printer customers were not made aware that printer firmware updates issued in late 2022 and early 2023 could result in printer features not working. The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and an injunction preventing HP from issuing printer updates that block ink cartridges without an HP chip. [...]

Unsurprisingly, Lores' claim comes from HP-backed research. The company's bug bounty program tasked researchers from Bugcrowd with determining if it's possible to use an ink cartridge as a cyberthreat. HP argued that ink cartridge microcontroller chips, which are used to communicate with the printer, could be an entryway for attacks. [...] It's clear that HP's tactics are meant to coax HP printer owners into committing to HP ink, which helps the company drive recurring revenue and makes up for money lost when the printers are sold. Lores confirmed in his interview that HP loses money when it sells a printer and makes money through supplies. But HP's ambitions don't end there. It envisions a world where all of its printer customers also subscribe to an HP program offering ink and other printer-related services. "Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription. This is really what we have been driving," Lores said.

It's the 50th anniversary of Devo, the geek-friendly, dystopia-themed band that combined synthesizers with showmanship, first founded in 1973.

As a new documentary about the group celebrates its Sundance world premiere, the Los Angeles Times explores how the band made innovative use of the technology of its time: With their yellow radiation suits, red "energy dome" hats and manic energy, part playful and part angry, the band Devo combined the futuristic glamour of new wave with atomic-age anxieties and post-'60s disillusionment.... Uniquely, the band developed a fully formed, intricate internal philosophy and mythology built around the idea that humans were "de-evolving" by becoming dumber and less sophisticated. The mascot of the band, known as "Booji Boy," was an infantile urchin in a rubber mask...

Was there an idea to document the band right from the very start? It's incredible that there's footage of the very first show in 1973.

GERALD CASALE: We were that delusional, yes. And we were trying to document ourselves when nobody was interested in doing that. And when it was quite expensive and clumsy to do it. You're dealing with Sony U-matic reel-to-reel recorders and big heavy cameras and a scarcity of equipment and very little interest. I mean, my God, if a Devo of now existed like we did, then clearly, there'd be a million cellphone videos.

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: [...] Bob was the first of us to direct a video, back when he was in high school. Bob and me, our dad, starting when we were like babies, like 1 year old, he'd bring out an 8-millimeter camera that didn't have sound, and so he shot hundreds and hundreds of these films through the years, just family stuff. So we always kind of liked that. And Jerry was doing films at Kent State with Chuck Statler before Chuck said, "Hey, let's do a film with a couple of the songs in it." So we were always audio-visual. We were always thinking in both worlds...

[DOCUMENTARY DIRECTOR] CHRIS SMITH: One of my favorite details in looking through the old footage is, there's an early show that was recorded in black-and-white, and they have such limited materials to work with, yet they do this thing where the light goes on and off on both sides of the stage. And to me it was so emblematic of where they were going because they were making something that you hadn't seen before that was super creative and visually distinctive and interesting out of something we all had to work with... You could see in that footage, the inventiveness that wasn't a result of means — it was something that was just created out of what they had to work with at that time.

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: [...] Sonically, a lot of what we did was just related to the fact that Bob Mothersbaugh bought a four-track TEAC. So we had this machine that could record four little skinny channels on a quarter-inch tape. It was an amateur home-tape machine, but it made us think about our parts, because we thought, well, OK, you're only going to get to do the bass on one track, and the guitar on one track and the drums on one track and the synth. You're not going to do all these overdubs. We had to think about it, what was an essential part. So we'd work on the song till you could play it just in one pass. Everything essential. I think it really made the early stuff sound really strong because of that.
You really get a sense of that on their 1978 song "Mongoloid." But the 2023 documentary's director doesn't see his film as an ending bookmark for the band. "They're still touring. They're all still actively creatively pursuing many different things, as I hope that you would expect after seeing the film."

And speaking specifically about the documentary. Mark Mothersbaugh says Booji Boy "describes it as a halfway point to the year of 2073, where we'll celebrate the 100-year anniversary." Booji Boy also says the next 50 years will be more about action. "And it'll be about positive mutation. Mutate, don't stagnate."

"A Canonical engineer has been experimenting with implementing a Linux scheduler within the Rust programming language..." Phoronix reported Monday, "that works via sched_ext for implementing a scheduler using eBPF that can be loaded during run-time."

The project was started "just for fun" over Christmas, according to a post on X by Canonical-based Linux kernel engineer Andrea Righi, adding "I'm pretty shocked to see that it doesn't just work, but it can even outperform the default Linux scheduler (EEVDF) with certain workloads (i.e., gaming)." Phoronix notes the a YouTube video accompanying the tweet shows "a game with the scx_rustland scheduler outperforming the default Linux kernel scheduler while running a parallel kernel build in the background."

"For sure the build takes longer," Righi acknowledged in a later post. "This scheduler doesn't magically makes everything run faster, it simply prioritizes more the interactive workloads vs CPU-intensive background jobs." Righi followed up by adding "And the whole point of this demo was to prove that, despite the overhead of running a scheduler in user-space, we can still achieve interesting performance, while having the advantages of being in user-space (ease of experimentation/testing, reboot-less updates, etc.)"

Wednesday Righi added some improvements, posting that "Only 19 lines of code (comments included) for ~2x performance improvement on SMT isn't bad... and I spent my lunch break playing Counter Strike 2 to test this patch..."

And work seems to be continuing, judging by a fresh post from Righi on Thursday. "I fixed virtme-ng to run inside Docker and used it to create a github CI workflow for sched-ext that clones the latest kernel, builds it and runs multiple VMs to test all the scx schedulers. And it does that in only ~20min. I'm pretty happy about virtme-ng now."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inc. Magazine: Google's DeepMind division has long led the way on all sorts of AI breakthroughs, grabbing headlines in 2016, when one of its systems beat a world champion at the strategy game Go, then seen as an unlikely feat. So when one of DeepMind's co-founders makes a pronouncement about the future of AI, it's worth listening, especially if you're a startup entrepreneur. AI might be coming for your job! Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now CEO of Inflection AI -- a small, California-based machine intelligence company -- recently suggested this possibility could be reality in a half-decade or so.

At the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos this week, Suleyman said he thinks AI tech will soon reach the point where it could dream up a company, project-manage it, and successfully sell products. This still-imaginary AI-ntrepreneur will certainly be able to do so by 2030. He's also sure that these AI powers will be "widely available" for "very cheap" prices, potentially even as open-source systems, meaning some aspects of these super smart AIs would be free. Whether an AI entrepreneur could actually beat a human at the startup game is something we'll have to wait to find out, but the mere fact that Suleyman is saying an AI could carry out the role is stunning. It's also controversial, and likely tangled in a forest of thorny legal matters. For example, there's the tricky issue of whether an AI can own or patent intellectual property. A recent ruling in the U.K. argues that an AI definitively cannot be a patent holder.

Underlining how much of all of this is theoretical, Suleyman's musings about AI entrepreneurs came from an answer to a question about whether AIs can pass the famous Turing test. This is sometimes considered a gold standard for AI: If a real artificial general intelligence (AGI) can fool a human into thinking that it too is a human. Cunningly, Suleyman twisted the question around, and said the traditional Turing test wasn't good enough. Instead, he argued a better test would be to see if an AGI could perform sophisticated tasks like acting as an entrepreneur. No matter how theoretical Suleyman's thinking is, it will unsettle critics who worry about the destructive potential of AI, and it may worry some in the venture capital world, too. How exactly would one invest in a startup with a founder that's just a pile of silicon chips? Even Suleyman said he thinks that this sort of innovation would cause a giant economic upset.

"It's the third all-private astronaut mission to the International Space Station," writes NASA — and they're expected to start boarding within the next hour!

Watch it all on the official stream of NASA TV.

More details from Ars Technica: The four-man team lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Thursday, kicking off a 36-hour pursuit of the orbiting research laboratory. Docking is scheduled for Saturday morning. This two-week mission is managed by Houston-based Axiom Space, which is conducting private astronaut missions to the ISS as a stepping stone toward building a fully commercial space station in low-Earth orbit by the end of this decade.

Axiom's third mission, called Ax-3, launched at 4:49 pm EST (21:49 UTC) Thursday. The four astronauts were strapped into their seats inside SpaceX's Dragon Freedom spacecraft atop the Falcon 9 rocket. This is the 12th time SpaceX has launched a human spaceflight mission, and could be the first of five Dragon crew missions this year.
NASA reports that the crew "will spend about two weeks conducting microgravity research, educational outreach, and commercial activities aboard the space station." NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said "During their time aboard the International Space Station, the Ax-3 astronauts will carry out more than 30 scientific experiments that will help advance research in low-Earth orbit. As the first all-European commercial astronaut mission to the space station, the Ax-3 crew is proof that the possibility of space unites us all...."

The Dragon spacecraft will dock autonomously to the forward port of the station's Harmony module as early as 4:19 a.m. [EST] Saturday. Hatches between Dragon and the station are expected to open after 6 a.m. [EST], allowing the Axiom crew to enter the complex for a welcoming ceremony and start their stay aboard the orbiting laboratory.... The Ax-3 astronauts are expected to depart the space station Saturday, February 3, pending weather, for a return to Earth and splashdown at a landing site off the coast of Florida.

Google has laid off over a thousand employees across various departments since January 10th. CEO Sundar Pichai's message is to brace for more cuts. The Verge: "We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year," Pichai told all Google employees on Wednesday in an internal memo that was shared with me. "The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices." So far, those "tough choices" have included layoffs and reorganizations in Google's hardware, ad sales, search, shopping, maps, policy, core engineering, and YouTube teams.

"These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year's reductions, and will not touch every team," Pichai wrote in his memo -- a reference to when Google cut 12,000 jobs this time last year. "But I know it's very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted." Pichai said the layoffs this year were about "removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas." He confirmed what many inside Google have been fearing: that more "role eliminations" are to come. "Many of these changes are already announced, though to be upfront, some teams will continue to make specific resource allocation decisions throughout the year where needed, and some roles may be impacted," he wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: YouTube recently started slowing down its entire site whenever ad blockers are used. A new wave of slowdowns is hitting users, with the only resolutions being disabling the ad blocker or upgrading to premium. To combat the increasing frequency of ads on YouTube, people have employed the use of ad blockers for years. According to YouTube, that method of avoiding ads is deemed a violation of the terms of service. Of course, pre-video ads are a huge source of income for the service, and the only way to avoid them without the use of a third-party application is to pay YouTube directly for premium.

YouTube has since started discouraging the use of ad blockers in a couple of ways. The first is with a pop-up message that reads, "Ad blockers violate YouTube's Term of Service." The message then suggests you turn off your ad blocker. The user is not allowed to continue watching without doing so. The second method is one that's now starting to roll out to more users. YouTube has recently started slowing the entire site when an ad blocker is being used, referring to it as "suboptimal viewing." According to a post on Reddit, multiple users have noted that YouTube has become laggy and unresponsive, seemingly all of a sudden. It was quickly discovered that disabling whichever ad blocker is being used immediately revitalizes the site.

Last year Marc Andreessen's firm "argued that AI companies would go broke if they had to pay copyright royalties or licensing fees," notes a Los Angeles Times technology columnist.

But are these powerful companies doing even more to ensure they're not billed for their training data? Just this week, British media outlets reported that OpenAI has made the same case, seeking an exemption from copyright rules in England, claiming that the company simply couldn't operate without ingesting copyrighted materials.... The AI companies also argue what they're doing falls under the legal doctrine of fair use — probably the strongest argument they've got — because it's transformative. This argument helped Google win in court against the big book publishers when it was copying books into its massive Google Books database, and defeat claims that YouTube was profiting by allowing users to host and promulgate unlicensed material. Next, the AI companies argue that copyright-violating outputs like those uncovered by AI expert Gary Marcus, film industry veteran Reid Southern and the New York Times are rare or are bugs that are going to be patched.
But finally, William Fitzgerald, a partner at the Worker Agency and former member of the public policy team at Google, predicts Google will try to line up supportive groups to tell lawmakers artists support AI: Fitzgerald also sees Google's fingerprints on Creative Commons' embrace of the argument that AI art is fair use, as Google is a major funder of the organization. "It's worrisome to see Google deploy the same lobbying tactics they've developed over the years to ensure workers don't get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald said. And OpenAI is close behind. It is not only taking a similar approach to heading off copyright complaints as Google, but it's also hiring the same people: It hired Fred Von Lohmann, Google's former director of copyright policy, as its top copyright lawyer....

[Marcus says] "There's an obvious alternative here — OpenAI's saying that we need all this or we can't build AI — but they could pay for it!" We want a world with artists and with writers, after all, he adds, one that rewards artistic work — not one where all the money goes to the top because a handful of tech companies won a digital land grab. "It's up to workers everywhere to see this for what it is, get organized, educate lawmakers and fight to get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald says.

"Because if they don't, Google and OpenAI will continue to profit from other people's labor and content for a long time to come."