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Google has introduced a new JPEG library called Jpegli, which reduces noise and improves image quality over traditional JPEGs. Proponents of the technology said it has the potential to make the Internet faster and more beautiful. InfoWorld reports: Announced April 3 and accessible from GitHub, Jpegli maintains high backward compatibility while offering enhanced capabilities and a 35% compression ratio at high-quality compression settings, Google said. Jpegli works by using new techniques to reduce noise and improve image quality. New or improved features include adaptive quantization heuristics from the JPEG XL reference implementation, improved quantization matrix selection, calculation of intermediate results, and the possibility to use more advanced colorspace. The library provides an interoperable encoder and decoder complying with the original JPEG standard and its most convenient 8-bit formalism and API/ABI compatibility with libjeg-turbo and MozJPEG. When images are compressed or decompressed through Jpegli, more precise and psycho-visually effective computations are also performed; images will look clearer and have fewer observable artifacts. While improving on the density ratio of image quality and compression, Jpegli's coding speed is comparable to traditional approaches such as MozJPEG, according to Google. Web developers can thus integrate Jpegli into existing workflows without sacrificing coding speed, performance, or memory use. Jpegli can be encoded with 10-plus bits per component. The 10-bit encoding happens in the original 8-bit formalism and the resulting images are interoperable with 8-bit viewers. The 10-bit dynamics are available as an API extension and application code changes are necessary to apply it. Also, Jpegli compresses images more efficiently than traditional JPEG codecs; this can save bandwidth and storage space and make web pages faster, Google said.

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Elizabeth Rayne reports via Ars Technica: Led by planetary researcher Lonneke Roelofs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, a team of scientists has found that the sublimation of CO2 ice could have shaped Martian gullies, which might mean the most recent occurrence of liquid water on Mars may have been further back in time than previously thought. That could also mean the window during which life could have emerged and thrived on Mars was possibly smaller. "Sublimation of CO2 ice, under Martian atmospheric conditions, can fluidize sediment and creates morphologies similar to those observed on Mars," Roelofs and her colleagues said in a study recently published in Communications Earth & Environment. [...] To recreate a part of the red planet's landscape in a lab, Roelofs built a flume in a special environmental chamber that simulated the atmospheric pressure of Mars. It was steep enough for material to move downward and cold enough for CO2 ice to remain stable. But the team also added warmer adjacent slopes to provide heat for sublimation, which would drive movement of debris. They experimented with both scenarios that might happen on Mars: heat coming from beneath the CO2 ice and warm material being poured on top of it. Both produced the kinds of flows that had been hypothesized. For further evidence that flows driven by sublimation would happen under certain conditions, two further experiments were conducted, one under Earth-like pressures and one without CO2 ice. No flows were produced by either. "For the first time, these experiments provide direct evidence that CO2 sublimation can fluidize, and sustain, granular flows under Martian atmospheric conditions," the researchers said in the study. Because this experiment showed that gullies and systems like them can be shaped by sublimation and not just liquid water, it raises questions about how long Mars had a sufficient supply of liquid water on the surface for any organisms (if they existed at all) to survive. Its period of habitability might have been shorter than it was once thought to be. Does this mean nothing ever lived on Mars? Not necessarily, but Roelofs' findings could influence how we see planetary habitability in the future.

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An anonymous reader writes: In the early 70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon created a spaceship tale for a graduation project -- little knowing it would influence Alien and many other works. Made for $60,000 by film school students, horror maestro John Carpenter's directorial debut Dark Star is now regarded as a sci-fi cult classic. Having just turned 50 years old, it's a world away from much of the sci-fi that came before it and would come after, neither space odyssey nor space opera, rather a bleak, downbeat and often absurd portrait of a group of people cooped together in a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Arguably its most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb. Dark Star was a collaboration between Carpenter, who directed and scored the film, and Dan O'Bannon, who in addition to co-writing the script, acted as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, as well as playing the volatile, paranoid Sergeant Pinback. They met as budding filmmakers at the University of Southern California. "While [Carpenter and O'Bannon] couldn't be more dissimilar in personality, they were both very energetic and focused," says Daniel Griffiths, director of Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film. The sci-fi films of this period tended to be bleak and dystopian, explains John Kenneth Muir, author of The Films of John Carpenter -- films like Silent Running (1972), in which all plant life on Earth is extinct, or George Lucas's 1971 debut THX-1138, in which human emotion is suppressed. "Dark Star arrived in this world of dark, hopeless imaginings, but took the darkness one step further into absurd nihilism." Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the "ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one "in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star". Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 "with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things". Where Kubrick scored his film with classical music, Dark Star opens with a country song, Benson, Arizona. (A road in the real-life Benson is named in honor of the film). The film was even released with the tagline "the spaced-out odyssey." Dark Star captured the mood of the time in which it was made, says Muir, the atmosphere of Nixon's America. "The 1960s was all about utopian dreaming and bringing change to America in the counterculture. The 1970s represent what writer Johnny Byrne called 'The wake-up from the hippie dream', a reckoning with the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same." [...] When Dark Star premiered at the FILMEX expo in 1974, the audience response was largely positive. "They recognized the film's absurdist humor and celebrated its student film roots," says Griffiths. It had a limited theatrical release in 1975, but it was not a commercial success. "The film met with negative reviews from critics, and general disinterest from audiences," says Muir. "Both Carpenter and O'Bannon realized that all the struggles they endured to make the film did not matter to audiences, they only cared about the finished product. I think they were discouraged," says Griffiths. The growth of the VHS market, however, helped it find its audience and propelled it towards cult status. Its influence can still be felt, perhaps most directly in Ridley Scott's Alien, for which O'Bannon, who died in 2009, wrote the screenplay. The two films share DNA. Alien is also set on a grotty working vessel with a bickering crew, only this time the alien wasn't played for laughs.

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Plex is a multi-functional streaming platform that allows users to watch, organize, and curate their favorite media entertainment. Sharing Plex libraries is also an option; one that comes with piracy concerns. In an effort to "avoid the growth of piracy," Plex asked GitHub to remove a repository that allows people to reshare libraries that were not originally theirs. TorrentFreak reports: The Swiss company, which is headquartered in the U.S., asked GitHub to remove a "Plex Reshare" repository, alleging that it may contribute to its piracy problem. "Plex Reshare" doesn't host any copyright-infringing material and, as far as we've seen, it doesn't reference any either. Its main purpose is to allow Plex users to make shared Plex directories browsable on the web, which allows people to "reshare" them without being the original owner. "The reason behind this project is to make available your PLEX shares to other friends unrelated to the person who owns the original library," Plex Reshare developer Peter explains. While the repository doesn't host or link to copyright-infringing material, Plex argues that it can be used to 'grow' piracy. "We have found infringing material in your website which indeed is OTHER 'Plex Server'. The material that is claimed to be infringing is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled immediately and avoid the growth of piracy," the takedown notice reads. The first part of the sentence is somewhat confusing. Plex-reshare is not a Plex server but the company may use "OTHER Plex Server" as an internal classification category. In any case, Plex alleges that the repository can contribute to the growth of piracy on its platform. Citing the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, Plex urges GitHub to take immediate action, or else it may be held liable. It's not clear what this liability claim rests on, as there are no actual copyright infringements mentioned in the takedown notice. Despite the broad nature of this claim, GitHub has indeed taken the repository offline, replacing it with a DMCA takedown reference. This likely wasn't a straightforward decision as GitHub is known to put developers first with these types of issues. In this case, it took more than three weeks before GitHub took action, which is much longer than usual. This suggests that GitHub allowed the developer to respond and may have sought legal advice from in-house lawyers, to ensure that the rights of all parties are properly considered. The report notes that the Plex-reshare code is listed on Docker Hub as well, which means it may face a similar fate.

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Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: An ASIC designed to display the infamous Rickroll meme is here, alongside 164 other assorted functions. The project is a product of Matthew Venn's Zero to ASIC Course, which offers prospective chip engineers the chance to "learn to design your own ASIC and get it fabricated." Since 2020, Zero to ASIC has accepted several designs that are incorporated into a single chip called a multi-project wafer (MPW), a cost-saving measure as making one chip for one design would be prohibitively expensive. Zero to ASIC has two series of chips: MPW and Tiny Tapeout. The MPW series usually includes just a handful of designs, such as the four on MPW8 submitted in January 2023. By contrast, the original Tiny Tapeout chip included 152 designs, and Tiny Tapeout 2 (which arrived last October) had 165, though could bumped up to 250. Of the 165 designs, one in particular may strike a chord: Design 145, or the Secret File, made by engineer and YouTuber Bitluni. His Secret File design for the Tiny Tapeout ASIC is designed to play a small part of Rick Astley's music video for Never Gonna Give You Up, also known as the Rickroll meme. Bitluni was a late inclusion on the Tiny Tapeout 2 project, having been invited just three days before the submission deadline. He initially just made a persistence-of-vision controller, which was revised twice for a total of three designs. "At the end, I still had a few hours left, and I thought maybe I should also upload a meme project," Bitluni says in his video documenting his ASIC journey. His meme of choice was of course the Rickroll. One might even call it an Easter egg. However, given that there were 250 total plots for each design, there wasn't a ton of room for both the graphics processor and the file it was supposed to render, a short GIF of the music video. Ultimately, this had to be shrunk from 217 kilobytes to less than half a kilobyte, making its output look similar to games on the Atari 2600 from 1977. Accessing the Rickroll rendering processor and other designs isn't simple. Bitluni created a custom circuit board to mount the Tiny Tapeout 2 chip, creating a device that could then be plugged into a motherboard capable of selecting specific designs on the ASIC. Unfortunately for Bitluni, his first PCB had a design error on it that he had to correct, but the revised version worked and was able to display the Rickroll GIF in hardware via a VGA port.

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In an interview with Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza, Eurogamer asked about the reputation Roblox has gained and the notion that it was exploitative of young developers, since it takes a cut from work sometimes produced by children. Here's what he had to say: "I don't know, you can say this for a lot of things, right?" Corazza said. "Like, you can say, 'Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labour,' right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income. So, I can be like 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now, with just a laptop, I can create something, make money and then sustain my life. "There's always the flip side of that, when you go broad and democratized - and in this case, also with a younger audience," he continued. "I mean, our average game developer is in their 20s. But of course, there's people that are teenagers -- and we have hired some teenagers that had millions of players on the platform. "For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn't feel like they were exploited! They felt like, 'Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.' So I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal." At this point the PR present during the interview added that "the vast majority of people that are earning money on Roblox are over the age of 18." "And imagine like, the millions of kids that learn how to code every month," Corazza said. "We have millions of creators in Roblox Studio. They learn Lua scripting," a programming language, "which is pretty close to Python - you can get a job in the tech industry in the future, and be like, 'Hey, I'm a programmer,' right? "I think that we are really focusing on the learning - the curriculum, if you want - and really bringing people on and empowering them to be professionals."

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An anonymous reader writes: Could you imagine discovering that your identity had been used to take out fraudulent loans and when you tried to resolve the issue by providing your state ID and Social Security card you were instead arrested, charged with multiple felonies, jailed for over a year, incarcerated in a mental hospital and given psychotropic drugs, eventually to be released with a criminal record and a judge's order that you could no longer use your real name? As dystopian as this might sound, it actually happened. And it was only after the victim learned his oppressor worked for The University of Iowa Hospital and contacted their security department was the investigation taken seriously leading to the perpetrator's arrest. The Gazette reports: Matthew David Keirans, 58, was convicted of one count of false statement to a National Credit Union Administration insured institution -- punishable by up to 30 years in federal prison -- and one count of aggravated identity theft -- punishable by up to two years in federal prison. Keirans worked as a systems architect in the hospital's IT department from June 28, 2013 to July 20, 2023, when he was terminated for misconduct related to the identity theft investigation. Keirans worked at the hospital under the name William Donald Woods, an alias he had been using since about 1988, when he worked with the real William Woods at a hot dog cart in Albuquerque, N.M. [...] By 2013, Keirans had moved to eastern Wisconsin. He started his IT job with UI Hospitals and worked remotely. He earned more than $700,000 in his 10 years working for the hospital. In 2023, his salary was $140,501, according to the hospital. In 2019, the real William Woods was homeless, living in Los Angeles. He went to a branch of the national bank and explained that he recently discovered someone was using his credit and had accumulated a lot of debt. Woods didn't want to pay the debt and asked to know the account numbers for any accounts he had open at the bank so he could close them. Woods gave the bank employee his real Social Security card and an authentic California Identification card, which matched the information the bank had on file. Because there was a large amount of money in the accounts, the bank employee asked Woods a series of security questions that he was unable to answer. The bank employee called Keirans, whose the phone number was connected to the accounts. He answered the security questions correctly and said no one in California should have access to the accounts. The employee called the Los Angeles Police Department, and officers spoke with Woods and Keirans. Keirans faxed the Los Angeles officers a copy of Woods' Social Security card and birth certificate, as well as a Wisconsin driver's license Keirans had acquired under Woods' name. The driver's license had the name William David Woods -- David is Keirans' real middle name -- rather than William Donald Woods. When questioned, Keiran told an LAPD officer he sometimes used David as a middle name, but his real name was William Donald Woods. The real Woods was arrested and charged with identity theft and false impersonation, under a misspelling of Keirans' name: Matthew Kierans. Because Woods continued to insist, throughout the judicial process, that he was William Woods and not Matthew Kierans, a judge ruled in February 2020 that he was not mentally competent to stand trial and he was sent to a mental hospital in California, where he received psychotropic medication and other mental health treatment. In March 2021, Woods pleaded no contest to the identity theft charges -- meaning he accepted the conviction but did not admit guilt. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment with credit for the two years he already served in the county jail and the hospital and was released. He was also ordered to pay $400 in fines and to stop using the name William Woods. He did not stop. Woods continued to attempt to regain his identity by filing customer disputes with financial organizations in an attempt to clear his credit report. He also reached out to multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Hartland Police Department in Wisconsin, where Keirans lived. Woods eventually discovered where Keirans was working, and in January 2023 he reached out to the University of Iowa Hospitals' security department, who referred his complaint to the University of Iowa Police Department. University of Iowa Police Detective Ian Mallory opened an investigation into the case. Mallory found the biological father listed on Woods' birth certificate -- which both Woods and Keirans had sent him an official copy of -- and tested the father's DNA against Woods' DNA. The test proved Woods was the man's son. On July 17, 2023, Mallory interviewed Keirans. He asked Keirans what his father's name was, and Keirans accidentally gave the name of his own adoptive father. Mallory then confronted Keirans with the DNA evidence, and Keirans responded by saying, "my life is over" and "everything is gone." He then confessed to the prolonged identity theft, according to court documents. The full story can be ready via The Gazette.

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Many investors are lining up to bet on the collapse of former President Donald J. Trump's social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which made its stock market debut last week under the ticker "DJT." The stock has been called the "mother of all meme stocks" since it is highly volatile and there are no fundamental underpinnings. It's being valued at roughly 1,600 times its annual revenue, at Wednesday's closing price. "By comparison, the stock of Facebook's owner trades at about eight times revenues, and Google's owner trades at six times," notes Fast Company. The New York Times reports: Trump Media is the most "shorted" special purpose acquisition vehicle in the country, according to the financial data company S3 Partners. Short-sellers bet that the price of a stock will fall. They do that by borrowing shares of a company and selling them into the market, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price, before returning the shares to the lender and pocketing the difference as profit. The demand to short Trump Media, the parent company of the social media platform Truth Social, is so great that stock lenders can charge enormous fees, making it hard for short-sellers to turn a profit unless the shares fall significantly. Still, there is a lot of interest in taking the bet. "They are looking for this stock to crater and crater very quickly," said Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3. Last month, traders lost $126 million betting against Trump Media, according to S3. On Monday, Trump Media published updated financial information, revealing little revenue, large losses and a statement from the company's independent auditor expressing "substantial doubt" about its financial viability. This appeared to galvanize investors betting against the company, as the stock slipped from its highs. But short-sellers are finding it difficult and costly to trade in Trump Media. There are roughly 137 million shares in the company, and only around five million of those are available to short-sellers. Mr. Trump owns about 60 percent of shares, and company executives also hold a chunk of the stock. Company insiders tend not to lend their shares to short-sellers. Big asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which regularly lend out shares, are not major holders of Trump Media, further crimping the supply. According to S3, 4.9 million of the roughly five million available shares are already on loan. As with any loan, when share owners lend their stock to a short-seller, they charge a fee, usually expressed as an annual interest rate on the stock's current value. Typically, the fee for borrowing stock is a fraction of a percentage point. For Trump Media, it has risen to 550 percent, Mr. Dusaniwsky said. Trump Media's stock currently trades at around $50. That means that shorting it for a month would cost more than $20 per share. For a short-seller to break even, the stock price would have to fall by almost half by early May. There is another wrinkle, too. One large broker said much of the short trading was not an outright bet against Trump Media. Since the advent of meme-stock trading and the vilification of short-sellers that win only if popular companies lose, large investors are wary of making such trades. Instead, the current trade driving demand is designed to capture the difference between DJT's stock price and outstanding "warrants," which will give the owners the right to new stock at a fixed price as long as regulators approve the new shares. Partly because of that uncertainty, those warrants currently trade below $19, with a list of hedge funds as recent holders. Even after the high cost to borrow stock is accounted for, they are still able to profit from the $30 difference between existing stock and what the warrants are worth, assuming the warrants become registered as shares.

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After six months of work, DRM developer Maurice Heumann successfully cracked Hogwarts Legacy's Denuvo DRM protection system to learn more about the technology. According to Tom's Hardware, he's "left plenty of the details of his work vague so as not to promote illegal cracking." From the report: Heumann reveals in his blog post that Denuvo utilizes several different methods to ensure that Hogwarts Legacy is being run under appropriate (legal) conditions. First, the DRM creates a "fingerprint" of the game owner's system, and a Steam Ticket is used to prove game ownership. The Steam ticket is sent to the Steam servers to ensure the game was legitimately purchased. Heumann notes that he doesn't technically know what the Steam servers are doing but says this assumption should be accurate enough to understand how Denuvo works. Once the Steam ticket is verified, a Denuovo Token is generated that only works on a PC with the exact fingerprint. This token is used to decrypt certain values when the game is running, enabling the system to run the game. In addition, the game will use the fingerprint to periodically verify security while the game is running, making Denuvo super difficult to hack. After six months, Heumann was able to figure out how to hijack Hogwart Legacy's Denuvo fingerprint and use it to run the game on another machine. He used the Qiling reverse engineering framework to identify most of the fingerprint triggers, which took him two months. There was a third trigger that he says he only discovered by accident. By the end, he was able to hack most of the Denuvo DRM with ~2,000 of his own patches and hooks, and get the game running on his laptop using the token generated from his desktop PC. Heumann ran a bunch of tests to determine if performance was impacted, but he wasn't able to get a definitive answer. "He discovered that the amount of Denuvo code executed in-game is quite infrequent, with calls occurring once every few seconds, or during level loads," reports Tom's Hardware. "This suggests that Denuvo is not killing performance, contrary to popular belief."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Last week, Ernie Smith, the publisher of the website Tedium, got a "copyright infringement notice" from a law firm called Commonwealth Legal: "We're reaching out on behalf of the Intellectual Property division of a notable entity, in relation to an image connected to our client," it read. [...] In this case, though, the email didn't demand that the photo be taken down or specifically threaten a lawsuit. Instead, it demanded that Smith place a "visible and clickable link" beneath the photo in question to a website called "tech4gods" or the law firm would "take action." Smith began looking into the law firm. And he found that Commonwealth Legal is not real, and that the images of its "lawyers" are AI generated. The threat to "activate the case No. 86342" is obviously nonsense. Beyond that, Commonwealth Legal's website looks generic and is full of stock photos, though I've seen a lot of generic template websites for real law firms. All of its lawyers have vacant, thousand-yard stares that are commonly generated by websites like This Person Does Not Exist, none of them come up in any attorney or LinkedIn searches, and the only reverse image search results for them are for a now-broken website called Generated.Photos, which offered a service to "use AI to generate people online that don't exist, change clothing and modify face and body traits. Download generated people in different postures." "All of the faces scanned were likely AI generated, most likely by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model," Ali Shahriyari, cofounder and CTO of the AI detection startup Reality Defender told 404 Media. Commonwealth Legal's listed address is the fourth floor of a one-story building that looks nothing like the image on its website, and both of its phone numbers are disconnected. No one responded to the contact form that I filled out. Smith realized that what's happening here isn't a copyright enforcement or copyright trolling attempt at all. Instead, it's a backlink SEO scam, where a website owner tries to improve their Google ranking by asking, paying, or threatening someone to link to their website. Tech4Gods.com is a gadget review website run by a man named Daniel Barczak, whose content is "complemented by AI writing assistants." In this case, the photo that Smith had "infringed" was a photo downloaded from the royalty free, free-to-use website Unsplash, which 404 Media also sometimes uses. The image was not taken by Barczak, and has nothing to do with him, he told me in an email: "I certainly don't own any images on the web," he said. The original photographer did not respond to a request for comment sent through Unsplash. Barczak told me that he had been previously buying backlinks to his website for SEO, but said he wasn't aware of who was doing this or why. "I have no idea; it certainly has nothing to do with me," he said. "However, recently, someone has been building spammy links against my site that I have been dealing with." "I have mastered on-page SEO, but unfortunately, I buy links due to a lack of time," he added. "In the past, I had a bad link builder. I wonder if it's him going mad at me for letting him go It's hard to say the web is massive, and everyone can link whenever they want." Link building is an SEO strategy devised to get outside websites to link to your website. He added that "bad links may damage [the site's] profile in Google's eyes." In this case, however, the "lawyers" were threatening a well-established tech blogger, and a link from Tedium would likely be treated as a positive in the search algorithm's eyes.

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An anonymous reader shares a PC Gamer report: PCI Express 7.0 is coming. But don't feel as though you need to start saving for a new motherboard anytime soon. The PCI-SIG has just released the 0.5 version, with the final version set for release in 2025. That means supporting devices are not likely to land until 2026, with 2027-28 likely to be the years we see a wider rollout. PCIe 7.0 will initially be far more relevant to the enterprise market, where bandwidth-hungry applications like AI and networking will benefit. Anyway, it's not like the PC market is saturated with PCIe 5.0 devices, and PCIe 6.0 is yet to make its way into our gaming PCs. PCI Express bandwidth doubles every generation, so PCIe 7.0 will deliver a maximum data rate up to 128 GT/s. That's a whopping 8x faster than PCIe 4.0 and 4x faster than PCIe 5.0. This means PCIe 7.0 is capable of delivering up to 512GB/s of bi-directional throughput via a x16 connection and 128GB/s for an x4 connection. More bandwidth will certainly be beneficial for CPU to chipset links, which means multiple integrated devices like 10G networking, WiFi 7, USB 4, and Thunderbolt 4 will all be able to run on a consumer motherboard without compromise. And just imagine what all that bandwidth could mean for PCIe 7.0 SSDs. In the years to come, a PCIe 7.0 x4 SSD could approach sequential transfer rates of up to 60GB/s. We'll need some serious advances in SSD controller and NAND flash technologies to see speeds in that range, but still, it's an attractive proposition. Further reading: PCIe 7.0 first official draft lands, doubling bandwidth yet again.

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The use of YouTube videos to train OpenAI's text-to-video generator would be an infraction of the platform's terms of service, YouTube Chief Executive Officer Neal Mohan said. Bloomberg: In his first public remarks on the topic, Mohan said he had no firsthand knowledge of whether OpenAI had, in fact, used YouTube videos to refine its artificial intelligence-powered video creation tool, called Sora. But if that were the case, it would be a "clear violation" of YouTube's terms of use, he said. "From a creator's perspective, when a creator uploads their hard work to our platform, they have certain expectations," Mohan said Thursday. "One of those expectations is that the terms of service is going to be abided by. It does not allow for things like transcripts or video bits to be downloaded, and that is a clear violation of our terms of service. Those are the rules of the road in terms of content on our platform."

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The Document Foundation: Following a successful pilot project, the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government. As reported on the homepage of the Minister-President: "Independent, sustainable, secure: Schleswig-Holstein will be a digital pioneer region and the first German state to introduce a digitally sovereign IT workplace in its state administration. With a cabinet decision to introduce the open-source software LibreOffice as the standard office solution across the board, the government has given the go-ahead for the first step towards complete digital sovereignty in the state, with further steps to follow."

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Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history. From a report: I was able to find the AI-generated books with the same method we've previously used to find AI-generated Amazon product reviews, papers published in academic journals, and online articles. Searching Google Books for the term "As of my last knowledge update," which is associated with ChatGPT-generated answers, returns dozens of books that include that phrase. Some of the books are about ChatGPT, machine learning, AI, and other related subjects and include the phrase because they are discussing ChatGPT and its outputs. These books appear to be written by humans. However, most of the books in the first eight pages of results turned up by the search appear to be AI-generated and are not about AI. For example, the 2024 book Bears, Bulls, and Wolves: Stock Trading for the Twenty-Year-Old by Tristin McIver, bills itself as "a transformative journey into the world of stock trading" and "a comprehensive guide designed for beginners eager to unlock the mysteries of financial markets." In reality, it reads like ChatGPT-generated text with surface, Wikipedia-level analysis of complex financial events like Facebook's initial public offering or the 2008 financial crisis summed up in a few short paragraphs. [...] Other books appear to be outdated to the point of being useless at the time they are published because they are generated with a version of ChatGPT with an old "knowledge update."

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Disney said Thursday it planned to crack down on password sharing [non-paywalled link] for its streaming services starting with a few countries in June before implementing a wider rollout in September. From a report: Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger unveiled the timeline to limit password sharing in a CNBC interview Thursday morning, a day after the company defeated activist Nelson Peltz in a bruising proxy fight. Iger didn't say which countries would be first. The company for months has said a crackdown was coming as it looks to cut costs and make Disney+ and Hulu profitable. Since Iger returned as CEO in 2022, the company has trimmed its streaming losses. Iger said the company is on track to have a profitable streaming business by the fourth quarter this year. "That's a huge, huge improvement," he said on CNBC. "Now what we have to do is turn it not just into a profitable business, into a growth business."

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Microsoft is working on a new feature for its Edge browser that will let you limit the amount of RAM it uses. From a report: Leopeva64, who is one of the best at finding new Edge features, has spotted a new settings section in test builds of the browser that includes a slider so you can limit how much RAM Edge gets access to. The RAM slider appears to be targeted toward PC gamers, as there is a setting in Canary versions of Edge that lets you limit the amount of RAM when you're playing a PC game or all of the time. While the slider lets you pick between just 1GB and 16GB on a system with 16GB of RAM, Microsoft warns that "setting a low limit may impact browser speed."

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Despite making pledges to cut down on plastic packaging, a new report from the nonprofit conservation organization Oceana estimates that Amazon's plastic waste has continued to grow in the US. From a report: The company created 208 million pounds of plastic waste from its packaging in the US in 2022 alone, which Oceana says is enough trash to circle Earth more than 200 times in the form of plastic air pillows. That's a nearly 10 percent jump from the amount of plastic waste it generated the year before, according to the report. The US is a worrying outlier for Amazon, Oceana says. Globally, the e-commerce giant says that it reduced its use of plastic packaging 11.6 percent in 2022 compared to the prior year. But the US is the company's biggest market, and Oceana argues it's where Amazon needs to make a lot more progress.

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The biggest ever 3D map of the universe, featuring more than 6m galaxies, has been revealed by scientists who said it raised questions about the nature of dark energy and the future of the universe. From a report: The map is based on data collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (Desi) in Arizona and contains three times as many galaxies as previous efforts, with many having their distances measured for the first time. Researchers said that by using this map, they have been able measure how fast the universe has been expanding at different times in the past with unprecedented accuracy. The results confirm that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, they added. However, the findings have also raised the tantalising possibility that dark energy -- a mysterious, repulsive force that drives the process -- is not constant throughout time as has previously been suggested. Dr Seshadri Nadathur, a co-author of the work and senior research fellow at the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: "What we are seeing are some hints that it has actually been changing over time, which is quite exciting because it is not what the standard model of a cosmological constant dark energy would look like." Prof Carlos Frenk, from Durham University and a co-author of the research, said that if dark energy was indeed constant in time, the future of the universe was simple: it would expand on and on, for ever. But if the hints found in the map stood up, that would be called into question. The research, which has been published in a series of preprints â" meaning it has yet to be peer-reviewed â" reveals how the team first created the 3D map, then measured patterns in the distribution of galaxies that relate to sound waves that occurred in the early universe, known as baryon acoustic oscillations.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has built one of the world's most efficient delivery systems. Yet people regularly ship junk back to sellers and claim they are returns, often with little to no penalty, merchants say. Amazon has long believed in a system based on pleasing customers above all, including easy returns, but that ethos has hurt the merchants who make up most of its online sales. Return theft represents one sore point in what has become an often contentious relationship between Amazon and its independent sellers. The Federal Trade Commission's continuing lawsuit against the retail giant deals in part with how the company treats its sellers. Amazon is also facing new competition for its merchants from other e-commerce firms. The National Retail Federation says return fraud has become a "major issue for our industry." About 13.7% of returns in 2023 were fraudulent, accounting for $101 billion in overall losses for retailers, the federation said. As more consumers have adopted online shopping, return theft has become prevalent and Amazon hasn't done enough to stop it, sellers said.

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Google parent Alphabet has been talking to its advisers about the possibility of making an offer for HubSpot, an online marketing software company with a market value of $32 billion, Reuters reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: If Alphabet moves ahead with an offer, it would be a rare example of a major technology company attempting a mega deal amid heightened regulatory scrutiny of the sector under U.S. President Joe Biden's administration. The potential deal would also allow Alphabet to put some of its cash pile, which reached $110.9 billion as of the end of December, to work. Alphabet has met with Morgan Stanley investment bankers in recent days about a potential offer for HubSpot, the sources said. It has been discussing how much it should offer and whether antitrust regulators would clear such a tie-up, the sources added.

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