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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) today proposed a law that would let copyright owners obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to foreign piracy websites. The bill would also force DNS providers to block sites. Lofgren said in a press release that she "work[ed] for over a year with the tech, film, and television industries" on "a proposal that has a remedy for copyright infringers located overseas that does not disrupt the free Internet except for the infringers." Lofgren said she plans to work with Republican leaders to enact the bill. [...] Lofgren's bill (PDF) would impose site-blocking requirements on broadband providers with at least 100,000 subscribers and providers of public domain name resolution services with annual revenue of over $100 million. The bill has exemptions for VPN services and "similar services that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers"; DNS providers that offer service "exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols"; and operators of premises that provide Internet access, like coffee shops, bookstores, airlines, and universities. Lofgren released a summary of the bill explaining how copyright owners can obtain blocking orders. "A copyright owner or exclusive licensee may file a petition in US District Court to obtain a preliminary order against a foreign website or online service engaging in copyright infringement," the summary said. For non-live content, the petition must show that "transmission of a work through a foreign website likely infringes exclusive rights under Section 106 [of US law] and is causing irreparable harm." For live events, a petition must show that "an imminent or ongoing unauthorized transmission of a live event is likely to infringe, and will cause irreparable harm." The proposed law says that after a preliminary order is issued, copyright owners would be able to obtain orders directing service providers "to take reasonable and technically feasible measures to prevent users of the service provided by the service provider from accessing the foreign website or online service identified in the order." Judges would not be permitted to "prescribe any specific technical measures" for blocking and may not require any action that would prevent Internet users from using virtual private networks.Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge described the bill as a "censorious site-blocking" measure "that turns broadband providers into copyright police at Americans' expense." "Rather than attacking the problem at its source -- bringing the people running overseas piracy websites to court -- Congress and its allies in the entertainment industry has decided to build out a sweeping infrastructure for censorship," Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel Meredith Rose said. "Site-blocking orders force any service provider, from residential broadband providers to global DNS resolvers, to disrupt traffic from targeted websites accused of copyright infringement. More importantly, applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers results in global blocks. This means that one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on one individual's filing and an expedited procedure. Blocking orders are incredibly powerful weapons, ripe for abuse, and we've seen the messy consequences of them being implemented in other countries."

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Qwen 2.5 Max tops both DS V3 and GPT-4o, cloud giant claims

Analysis The speed and efficiency at which DeepSeek claims to be training large language models (LLMs) competitive with America's best has been a reality check for Silicon Valley. However, the startup isn't the only Chinese model builder the US has to worry about.…

The U.S. Copyright Office has ruled that AI-assisted works can receive copyright protection if they contain perceptible human creativity, such as creative modifications or arrangements. However, fully machine-generated content remains ineligible for copyright. The Associated Press reports: An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections. The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers. It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ... would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright," [said Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter]. The copyright office says it's working on a separate report that "will turn to the training of AI models on copyrighted works, licensing considerations, and allocation of any liability."

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NordVPN has introduced NordWhisper, a new protocol designed to bypass VPN blocks in restrictive countries like Russia and India by making VPN traffic appear like regular internet activity. Gizmodo reports: NordVPN claims to have found a way to make traffic from its service look normal, though admits that it may not always work perfectly. It also says the NordWhisper protocol may introduce more latency. The protocol is rolling out first to users on Windows, Linux, and Android. Support for other platforms will come in the future.

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Digital canvas slinger indicates dot-com was skimmed for over a month

Graphics tablet maker Wacom has warned customers their credit card details may well have been stolen by miscreants while they were buying stuff from its website.…

jjslash shares a report from TechSpot: Atari teamed up with luxury watch brand Nubeo to celebrate the 45th anniversary of Asteroids with a collection of five limited-edition timepieces. Each watch, originally priced at $1,650 but discounted to $499, was limited to 125 pieces -- and they sold out almost immediately. The watches feature a unique Japanese automatic movement, where three rotating discs replace traditional hands. The smallest disc, featuring the classic Asteroids spaceship, acts as the second hand, while the minute and hour hands are represented by asteroid-filled outer discs. While they're not smartwatches, the timepieces feature Swiss Super-LumiNova glow-in-the-dark ink sitting underneath a sapphire lens within a stainless-steel case. They're water resistant up to 21 ATM (atmospheres) and have a screw-down crown, so you can show them off while at the beach or diving.

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Oh someone's in DeepShi...

China-based AI biz DeepSeek may have developed competitive, cost-efficient generative models, but its cybersecurity chops are another story.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Sony's game publishing arm has done a 180-degree turn on a controversial policy of requiring PC players to sign in with PlayStation accounts for some games, according to a blog post by the company. A PlayStation account will "become optional" for Marvel's Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. Sony hasn't lost hope that players will still go ahead and use a PlayStation account, though, as it's tying several benefits to signing in. Logging in with PlayStation will be required to access trophies, the PlayStation equivalent of achievements. (Steam achievements appear to be supported regardless.) It will also allow friend management, provided you have social contacts on the PlayStation Network. Additionally, Sony is providing some small in-game rewards to each title that are available if you log in with its account system. You'll get early unlocks of the Spider-Man 2099 Black Suit and the Miles Morales 2099 Suit in Spider-Man 2, for example -- or the Nora Valiant outfit in Horizon: Zero Dawn. Some of these rewards are available via other means within the games, such as the Armor of the Black Bear set for Kratos in Ragnarok.

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Stealing crypto is so 2024. Supply-chain attacks leading to data exfil pays off better?

North Korea's Lazarus Group compromised hundreds of victims across the globe in a massive secret-stealing supply chain attack that was ongoing as of earlier this month, according to security researchers.…

Microsoft has integrated DeepSeek's R1 model into its Azure AI Foundry platform and GitHub, allowing customers to experiment and deploy AI applications more efficiently. "One of the key advantages of using DeepSeek R1 or any other model on Azure AI Foundry is the speed at which developers can experiment, iterate, and integrate AI into their workflows," says By Asha Sharma, Microsoft's corporate vice president of AI platform. "DeepSeek R1 has undergone rigorous red teaming and safety evaluations, including automated assessments of model behavior and extensive security reviews to mitigate potential risks." The Verge reports: R1 was initially released as an open source model earlier this month, and Microsoft has moved at surprising pace to integrate this into Azure AI Foundry. The software maker will also make a distilled, smaller version of R1 available to run locally on Copilot Plus PCs soon, and it's possible we may even see R1 show up in other AI-powered services from Microsoft.

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Microsoft-backed startup now valued at $5.4B

Fusion energy startup Helion has yet to prove it can generate electricity, but that hasn't stopped investors from dumping another $425 million into the venture.…

Zyxel customers are facing reboot loops, high CPU usage, and login issues after an update on Friday went awry. The only fix requires physical access and a Console/RS232 cable, as no remote recovery options are available. The Register reports: "We've found an issue affecting a few devices that may cause reboot loops, ZySH daemon failures, or login access problems," Zyxel's advisory reads. "The system LED may also flash. Please note this is not related to a CVE or security issue." "The issue stems from a failure in the Application Signature Update, not a firmware upgrade. To address this, we've disabled the application signature on our servers, preventing further impact on firewalls that haven't loaded the new signature versions." The firewalls affected include USG Flex boxes and ATP Series devices running ZLD firmware versions -- installations that have active security licenses and dedicated signature updates enabled in on-premises/standalone mode. Those running on the Nebula platform, on USG Flex H (uOS), and those without valid security licenses are not affected.

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Unions fear federal staff purge and RTO will spark chaos for Americans

More than two million US federal civilian employees have been invited to resign as of September 30, 2025, with incentives promised for those who agree to quit by February 6, 2025.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's self-driving unit Waymo announced on Wednesday it plans to expand testing of its autonomous driving technology in over 10 new cities in 2025. After testing the Waymo Driver in multiple cities, the company says the technology is adapting successfully to new environments, leading to the expansion. In addition to ongoing trips to Truckee, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Upstate New York and Tokyo, the expansion includes testing in San Diego and Las Vegas, with more cities yet to be announced. "During these trips, we'll send a limited fleet of vehicles to each city, where trained human autonomous specialists will be behind the wheel at all times," a spokeswoman for Waymo said. The testing will begin with manual driving through the densest and most complex parts of each city, including city centers and freeways. Waymo plans to send less than 10 vehicles to each city, where they will be manually driven around for a couple of months, according to The Verge, which first reported the news.

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TSMC founder Morris Chang says Apple CEO Tim Cook rejected Intel as a chip manufacturer in 2011 because the company lacked foundry expertise, despite being Apple's main supplier for Mac processors at the time. During a pause in TSMC-Apple talks to evaluate Intel's proposal, Cook told Chang that "Intel just does not know how to be a foundry," leading Apple to eventually choose TSMC as its exclusive chip supplier, the TSMC founder revealed in an interview.

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Chinese scientists have created mice with genetic material from two males that survived to adulthood, marking a potential breakthrough in reproductive biology, according to research published in Cell Stem Cell. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences used CRISPR gene editing to target 20 genes involved in embryonic development, producing seven live pups from 164 embryos. The surviving mice grew larger than normal, had enlarged organs, were infertile and had shorter lifespans.

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'Research and various other reasons' behind hullabaloo - but why didn't someone say that a month ago?

Time to pack it up and go home, drone conspiracy theorists: The White House has finally offered an explanation for those mysterious New Jersey drone sightings from late last year - though its rather vague statement raises more questions than it answers.…

Alibaba has unveiled a new version of its AI model, called Qwen2.5-Max, claiming benchmark scores that surpass both DeepSeek's recently released R1 model and industry standards like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. The model achieves these results using a mixture-of-experts architecture that requires significantly less computational power than traditional approaches. The release comes amid growing concerns about China's AI capabilities, following DeepSeek's R1 model launch last week that sent Nvidia's stock tumbling 17%. Qwen2.5-Max scored 89.4% on the Arena-Hard benchmark and demonstrated strong performance in code generation and mathematical reasoning tasks. Unlike U.S. companies that rely heavily on massive GPU clusters -- OpenAI reportedly uses over 32,000 high-end GPUs for its latest models -- Alibaba's approach focuses on architectural efficiency. The company claims this allows comparable AI performance while reducing infrastructure costs by 40-60% compared to traditional deployments.

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Genetic diversity in animals and plants has declined globally over the past three decades, an analysis of more than 600 species has found. From a report: The research, published in the journal Nature, found declines in two-thirds of the populations studied, but noted that urgent conservation efforts could halt or even reverse genetic diversity losses. Dozens of scientists internationally reviewed 882 studies that measured genetic diversity changes between 1985 and 2019 in 628 species of animals, plants, fungi and chromists (a type of organism), forming what they have called "the most comprehensive investigation" of changes in genetic diversity within species to date. The study's lead researcher, Assoc Prof Catherine Grueber of the University of Sydney, said within-species diversity -- referring to the variation between individuals of the same species -- enabled a population to better adapt to changes in its environment. "If a new disease comes through, or there's a heatwave, there may be some individuals in the population that have certain characteristics that enable them to tolerate those new conditions," she said. "Those characteristics will get passed on to the next generation, and the population will persist instead of going extinct."

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Not bad for 30 lines of code

Hardware keeps getting faster, but it's still worth taking a step back periodically and revisiting your code. You might just uncover a little tweak that wrings out more efficiency or extra throughput than you'd expect.…