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For the third time in under a year, film studios are pressing Reddit to reveal users allegedly discussing piracy, despite two prior failed attempts. Studios including Voltage Holdings and Screen Media have filed fresh motions to compel Reddit to comply with a subpoena seeking IP addresses and logs of six Redditors, claiming the information is needed for copyright suits against internet provider Frontier Communications. The same federal judge previously denied the studios' bid to unmask Reddit users, citing First Amendment protections. However, the studios now argue IP addresses fall outside privacy rights. Reddit maintains the new subpoena fails to meet the bar for identifying anonymous online speakers.

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The future's bright. The future's retro

Interview Inspired at least in part by Pi creator Eben Upton's dalliances with the home computers of the 1980s, the Raspberry Pi casts a long shadow over the retro computing world.…

Amazon users are at this point used to search results filled with products that are fraudulent, scams, or quite literally garbage. These days, though, they also may have to pick through obviously shady products, with names like "I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy." From a report: As of press time, some version of that telltale OpenAI error message appears in Amazon products ranging from lawn chairs to office furniture to Chinese religious tracts. A few similarly named products that were available as of this morning have been taken down as word of the listings spreads across social media. Other Amazon product names don't mention OpenAI specifically but feature apparent AI-related error messages, such as "Sorry but I can't generate a response to that request" or "Sorry but I can't provide the information you're looking for," (available in a variety of colors). Sometimes, the product names even highlight the specific reason why the apparent AI-generation request failed, noting that OpenAI can't provide content that "requires using trademarked brand names" or "promotes a specific religious institution" or, in one case, "encourage unethical behavior."

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If AWS, Microsoft, Google were anywhere close to capacity, their revenues would be way higher

Cloud providers have deployed tens of thousands of GPUs and AI accelerators in their race to capitalize on the surge in demand for large language models.…

Experiment is limited to the Insider Dev Channel. For now

Microsoft is experimenting with having Copilot open automatically upon Windows startup.…

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."

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Applications across chemistry, energy, and medicine await human-free acceleration

Scientists have developed a platform based around a robot guided by an AI-based computer system, which could slash the time for engineering new proteins from months to weeks.…

Meanwhile pending case from Cisco accuses CDW of selling counterfeit kit

CDW, the world's largest reseller, has reached a settlement with relative minnow in an antitrust case involving Cisco.…

New versions and ports of the Plasma desktop ahoy

The KDE dev team has spent many nights working on the first release candidate of the new Qt 6-based release, during which time a tiny, intrepid band of coders was able to bring the current stable release to OpenBSD.…

If you think Sinclair’s hardware was odd, you haven’t met the people

Opinion Following an unlikely series of events involving British Telecom, Prince Philip and a VTX-5000 modem, your teenage protagonist found himself at a drunken dinner party in 1984's West London. Across the table, excitingly, sat my boyhood hero Sir Clive Sinclair, and he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say about the Sinclair QL, which was not thriving.…

Last week's story about a reporter switching to a flip phone was just part of a trend, argues a Chicago school principal who did the same thing. "I do not feel punished. I feel free." Teachers said they could sense kids' phones distracting them from inside their pockets. We banned phones outright, equipping classrooms with lockboxes that the kids call "cellphone prisons." It's not perfect, but it's better. A teacher said, "It's like we have the children back...." And what about adults? Ninety-five percent of young adults now keep their phones nearby every waking hour, according to a Gallup survey; 92% do when they sleep. We look at our phones an average of 352 times a day, according to one recent survey, almost four times more often than before COVID. We want children off their phones because we want them to be present, but children need our presence, too. When we are on our phones, we are somewhere else. As the title of one study notes, "The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity...." I made my screen gray. I deleted social media. I bought a lockbox and said I would keep my phone there. I didn't... Every year, I see kids get phones and disappear into them. I don't want that to happen to mine. I don't want that to have happened to me. So I quit. And now I have this flip phone. What I don't have is Facetime or Instagram. I can't use Grubhub or Lyft or the Starbucks Mobile App. I don't even have a browser. I drove to a student's quinceañera, and I had to print out directions as if it were 2002... I can still make calls, though people are startled to get one. I can still text. And I can still see your pictures, though I can "heart" them only in my heart. The magic of smartphones is that they eliminate friction: touchscreens, auto-playing videos, endless scrolling. My phone isn't smooth. That breaks the spell. Turning off my smartphone didn't fix all my problems. But I do notice my brain moving more deliberately, shifting less abruptly between moods. I am bored more, sure — the days feel longer — but I am deciding that's a good thing. And I am still connected to the people I love; they just can't text me TikToks... I'm not doing this to change the culture. I'm doing this because I don't want my sons to remember me lost in my phone.

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It's not like Gandhi ever saw his kids, says Narayana Murthy

Indian billionaire and Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has doubled down on his comments that India’s youth should voluntarily work 70-hour weeks.…

Who's going to complain about free labor?

Who, Me? As the year gets into gear, so does Who, Me?, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of getting away with tech shortcuts that should really have led to long career detours.…

Net-taming firm lets staff go if they’re bad at ‘measurable performance targets’ or aren’t ‘right for the team’, which seems a tad contradictory

Cloudflare has defended its HR practices after a former employee posted a nine-minute video of a phone call during which she was fired, asked for an explanation for being let go, but was told those who made the call were unaware of the reasons for her dismissal.…

Roads are icy and drivers are dangerous. There will be no Starbucks run.

Linus Torvalds has indefinitely postponed the merge window for version 6.8 of the Linux kernel after a winter storm knocked out power and internet near his work-from-home location in Oregon.…

America's Environmental Protection Agency "has signed off on a California oil company's plans to permanently store carbon emissions deep underground to combat global warming," reports the Los Angeles Times: California Resources Corp., the state's largest oil and gas company, applied for permission to send 1.46 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year into the Elk Hills oil field, a depleted oil reservoir about 25 miles outside of downtown Bakersfield. The emissions would be collected from several industrial sources nearby, compressed into a liquid-like state and injected into porous rock more than one mile underground. Although this technique has never been performed on a large scale in California, the state's climate plan calls for these operations to be widely deployed across the Central Valley to reduce carbon emissions from industrial facilities. The EPA issued a draft permit for the California Resources Corp. project, which is poised to be finalized in March following public comments. As California transitions away from oil production, a new business model for fossil fuel companies has emerged: carbon management. Oil companies have heavily invested in transforming their vast network of exhausted oil reservoirs into a long-term storage sites for planet-warming gases, including California Resources Corp., the largest nongovernmental owner of mineral rights in California... [Environmentalists] say that the transportation and injection of CO2 — an asphyxiating gas that displaces oxygen — could lead to dangerous leaks. Nationwide, there have been at least 25 carbon dioxide pipeline leaks between 2002 and 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Perhaps the most notable incident occurred in Satartia, Miss., in 2020 when a CO2 pipeline ruptured following heavy rains. The leak led to the hospitalization of 45 people and the evacuation of 200 residents... Under the EPA draft permit, California Resources Corp. must take a number of steps to mitigate these risks. The company must plug 157 wells to ensure the CO2 remains underground, monitor the injection site for leaks and obtain a $33-million insurance policy. Canadian-based Brookfield Corporation also invested $500 million, according to the article, with California Resources Corp. seeking permits for five projects — more than any company in the nation. "It's kind of reversing the role, if you will," says their chief sustainability officer. "Instead of taking oil and gas out, we're putting carbon in." Meanwhile, there's applications for "about a dozen" more projects in California's Central Valley that could store millions of tons of carbon emissions in old oil and gas fields — and California Resources Corp says greater Los Angeles is also "being evaluated" as a potential storage site.

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Infosec academic suggests Beijing’s warning that iThing owners aren’t anonymous deserves attention outside the great firewall, too

In June 2023 China made a typically bombastic announcement: operators of short-distance ad hoc networks must ensure they run according to proper socialist principles, and ensure all users divulge their real-world identities.…

Generative AI "doesn't easily carry over into robotics," write two researchers in IEEE Spectrum, "because the Internet is not full of robotic-interaction data in the same way that it's full of text and images." That's why they're working on a single deep neural network capable of piloting many different types of robots... Robots need robot data to learn from, and this data is typically created slowly and tediously by researchers in laboratory environments for very specific tasks... The most impressive results typically only work in a single laboratory, on a single robot, and often involve only a handful of behaviors... [W]hat if we were to pool together the experiences of many robots, so a new robot could learn from all of them at once? We decided to give it a try. In 2023, our labs at Google and the University of California, Berkeley came together with 32 other robotics laboratories in North America, Europe, and Asia to undertake the RT-X project, with the goal of assembling data, resources, and code to make general-purpose robots a reality... The question is whether a deep neural network trained on data from a sufficiently large number of different robots can learn to "drive" all of them — even robots with very different appearances, physical properties, and capabilities. If so, this approach could potentially unlock the power of large datasets for robotic learning. The scale of this project is very large because it has to be. The RT-X dataset currently contains nearly a million robotic trials for 22 types of robots, including many of the most commonly used robotic arms on the market... Surprisingly, we found that our multirobot data could be used with relatively simple machine-learning methods, provided that we follow the recipe of using large neural-network models with large datasets. Leveraging the same kinds of models used in current LLMs like ChatGPT, we were able to train robot-control algorithms that do not require any special features for cross-embodiment. Much like a person can drive a car or ride a bicycle using the same brain, a model trained on the RT-X dataset can simply recognize what kind of robot it's controlling from what it sees in the robot's own camera observations. If the robot's camera sees a UR10 industrial arm, the model sends commands appropriate to a UR10. If the model instead sees a low-cost WidowX hobbyist arm, the model moves it accordingly. "To test the capabilities of our model, five of the laboratories involved in the RT-X collaboration each tested it in a head-to-head comparison against the best control system they had developed independently for their own robot... Remarkably, the single unified model provided improved performance over each laboratory's own best method, succeeding at the tasks about 50 percent more often on average." And they then used a pre-existing vision-language model to successfully add the ability to output robot actions in response to image-based prompts. "The RT-X project shows what is possible when the robot-learning community acts together... and we hope that RT-X will grow into a collaborative effort to develop data standards, reusable models, and new techniques and algorithms." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) for sharing the article.

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PLUS: It's difficult to make a bad LLM turn good; ELVIS Act seeks AI voice clone ban

AI in brief OpenAI has changed the policies covering use of its models and removed "disallowed usages” of its models including "the generation of malware", "military and warfare" applications, "multi-level marketing", "plagiarism", "astroturfing", and more.…

ScienceAlert reminds us that plants exude "a fine mist of airborne compounds that they use to communicate and protect themselves." And while they've been detected in over 80 plant species, now researchers have applied real-time imaging techniques "to reveal how plants receive and respond to these aerial alarms." Yuri Aratani and Takuya Uemura, molecular biologists at Saitama University in Japan, and colleagues rigged up a pump to transfer compounds emitted by injured and insect-riddled plants onto their undamaged neighbors, and a fluorescence microscope to watch what happened. Caterpillars (Spodoptera litura) were set upon leaves cut from tomato plants and Arabidopsis thaliana, a common weed in the mustard family, and the researchers imaged the responses of a second, intact, insect-free Arabidopsis plant to those danger cues. These plants weren't any ordinary weeds: they had been genetically altered so their cells contained a biosensor that fluoresced green when an influx of calcium ions was detected... [T]he team visualized how plants responded to being bathed in volatile compounds, which plants release within seconds of wounding. It wasn't a natural set-up; the compounds were concentrated in a plastic bottle and pumped onto the recipient plant at a constant rate, but this allowed the researchers to analyze what compounds were in the pungent mix... [T]he undamaged plants received the messages of their injured neighbors loud and clear, responding with bursts of calcium signaling that rippled across their outstretched leaves... [G]uard cells generated calcium signals within a minute or so, after which mesophyll cells picked up the message... "We have finally unveiled the intricate story of when, where, and how plants respond to airborne 'warning messages' from their threatened neighbors," says Masatsugu Toyota, a molecular biologist at Saitama University in Japan and senior author of the study.

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