Launched in 2013, itch.io lets users host and sell indie video games online — now offering more than 200,000 — as well as other digital content like music and comics. But then someone uploaded a page based on a major videogame title, according to Game Rant. And somehow this provoked a series of overreactions and missteps that eventually knocked all of itch.io offline for several hours...

The page was about the first release from game developer 10:10 — their game Funko Fusion, which features characters in the style of Funko's long-running pop-culture bobbleheads. As a major brand, Funko monitors the web with a "brand protection" partner (named BrandShield). Interestingly, BrandShield's SaaS product "leverages AI-driven online brand protection," according to their site, to "detect and remove" things like brand impersonations "with over 98% success. Our advanced takedown capabilities save you time..." (Although BrandShield's CEO told the Verge that following AI reports "our team of Cybersecurity Threat hunters and IP lawyers decide on what actions should be taken.") This means that after automatically spotting the itch.io page with its web-crawling software, it was BrandShield's "team of Cybersecurity Threat hunters and IP lawyers" who decided to take action (for that specific page). But itch.io founder Leaf Corcoran commented on social media: From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud and phishing" going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor in all of this.
Corcoran says he replied to both his registrar (iwantmyname) and to his site's host, telling them he'd removed the offending page (and disabled its uploader's account). This satisfied his host, Corcoran writes — but the registrar's owner later told him they'd never received his reply.

"And that's why they took the domain down."

In an interview with Polygon, Corcoran points out that the web page in question had already been dealt with five days before his registrar offlined his entire site. "No communication after that.... No 'We haven't heard from you, we're about to shut your domain down' or anything like that."

Defending themselves over the incident, BrandShield posted on X.com that they'd identified an "infringement" (also calling it an "abuse"), and that they'd requested "a takedown of the URL in question — not of the entire itch.io domain." They don't say this, but it seems like their concern might've been that the page looked official enough to impersonate Funko Fusion. But X.com readers added this context. "Entire domains do not go down on the basis of a copyright takedown request of an individual URL. This is the direct result of a fraudulent claim of malicious activity."

And Corcoran also posted an angry summation on X.com: I kid you not, @itchio has been taken down by @OriginalFunko because they use some trash "AI Powered" Brand Protection Software called @BrandShieldltd that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar, @iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain.
The next day Funko's official account on X.com also issued their own statement that they "hold a deep respect and appreciation for indie games, indie gamers, and indie developers." (Though "Added Context" from X.com readers notes Funko's statement still claimed a "takedown request" was issued, rather than what Corcoran says was a false "fraud and phishing" report.)

Funko.com also posted that they'd "reached out" to itch.io "to engage with them on this issue." But this just led to another angry post from Corcoran. "This is not a joke, Funko just called my mom." Cocoran then posted what looks like a screenshot of a text message his mother sent him. Though she doesn't say which company was involved, his mother's text says she "Got a strange call from a company about accusatory statements on your social media account. Call me..."

Thanks to ewhac (Slashdot reader #5,844) for sharing the news.

The Washington Post reports: Years before the internet was created and the first smartphones buzzed to life, an educational platform called PLATO offered a glimpse of the digital world to come. Launched in 1960 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [UIUC], it was the first generalized, computer-based instructional system, and grew into a home for early message boards, emails, chatrooms, instant messaging and multiplayer video games.

The platform's developer, Donald Bitzer, was a handball-playing, magic-loving electrical engineer who opened his computer lab to practically everyone, welcoming contributions from Illinois undergrads as well as teenagers who were still in high school. Dr. Bitzer, who died Dec. 10 at age 90, spent more than two decades working on PLATO, managing its growth and development while also pioneering digital technologies that included the plasma display panel, a forerunner of the ultrathin screens used on today's TVs and tablets. "All of the features you see kids using now, like discussion boards or forums and blogs, started with PLATO," he said during a 2014 return to Illinois, his alma mater. "All of the social networking we take for granted actually started as an educational tool."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp found another remembrance online. "Ray Ozzie, whose LinkedIn profile dedicates more space to describing his work as a PLATO developer as a UIUC undergrad than it does to his later successes as a creator of Lotus Notes and as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, offers his own heartfelt mini-obit." Ozzie writes: It's difficult to adequately convey how much impact he had on so many, and I implore you to take a few minutes to honor him by reading a bit about him and his contributions. Links below. As an insecure young CS student at UIUC in 1974, Paul Tenczar, working for/with Don, graciously gave me a chance as a jr. systems programmer on the mind-bogglingly forward thinking system known as PLATO. A global, interactive system for learning, collaboration, and community like no other at the time. We were young and in awe of how Don led, inspired, and managed to keep the project alive. I was introverted; shaking; stage fright. Yeah I could code. But how could such a deeply technical engineer assemble such a strong team to execute on such a totally novel and inspirational vision, secure government funding, and yet also demo the product on the Phil Donahue show?

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules." You touched so many of us and shaped who we became and the risks we would take, having an impact well beyond that which you created. You made us think and you made us laugh. I hope we made you proud."

25 years ago today, the late, great Suck.com played a prank on Slashdot. Their daily column of pop-culture criticism was replaced by... Suckdot, a parody site satirically filled with Slashdot-style headlines like "Linux Possibly Defamed Somewhere." RabidZelot was one of a bunch to report: "In Richmond, California, this afternoon, this dude said something bad about Linux at the Hilltop Mall near the fountains right after the first showing of Phantom Menace let out. He was last seen heading towards Sears and has a 'Where Do You Want to Go Today?' T-shirt and brown hair. Let us know when you spot him."

( Read More... | 0 of 72873 comments)
There's more Slashdot-style news blurbs like "Red Hat Reports Income". (In which Red Hat founder Bob Young finds a quarter on the way to the conference room, and adds it to the company's balance sheet...) Its list of user-submitted "Ask Suckdot" questions include geek-mocking topics like "Is Overclocking Worth That Burning Smell?" and "HOW DO I TURN OFF SHIFT_LOCK?" And somewhere there's even a parody of Jon Katz (an early contributor to Slashdot's content) — though clicking "Read More" on the essay leads to a surprising message from the parodist admitting defeat. "Slashdot has roughly 60 million links on its front page. I'm simply not going to waste any more of my life making fun of each and every one of them. Half the time you can't tell the real Slashdot from the parody anyway."

Suck.com was a fixture in the early days of the web, launched in 1995 (and pre-dating the launch of Slashdot by two years). It normally published link-heavy commentary every weekday for nearly six years. Contributing writer Greg Knauss was apparently behind much of the Suckdot parody — even taking a jab at Slashdot's early online podcast, "Geeks in Space" (1999-2001). [Suckdot informs its readers in 1999 that "The latest installment of Geeks Jabbering at a Mic is up..."] Other Suckdot headlines?

• Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune Uses Words "Red" and "Hat" in Article
• BSD Repeatedly Ignored
• DVD Encryption Cracked: Godzilla for Everybody!
• Linus Ascends Bodily Into Heaven
• iMac: Ha Ha Ha Ha Wimp

There were no hard feelings. Seven months later Slashdot was even linking to Greg Knauss's Suck.com essay proclaiming that "Mozilla is dead, or might as well be..."

So whatever happened to Suck.com? Though it stopped publishing in 2001, an outpouring of nostalgia in 2005 apparently prompted its owners at Lycos.com to continue hosting its content through 2018. (This unofficial history notes that one fan scrambling to archive the site was Aaron Swartz.) Though it's not clear what happened next, here in 2024 its original domain is now up for sale — at an asking price of $1 million.

But all of Suck.com's original content is still available online — including its Suckdot parody — at archive.org. Which, mercifully, is still here a full 28 years after launching in 1996...

"Okay, we're doing this," begins a new announcement at The Verge: Today we're launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It'll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we'll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design... A surprising number of you have asked us to launch something like this, and we're happy to deliver. If you don't want to pay, rest assured that big chunks of The Verge will remain free — we're thinking about subscriptions a lot differently than everyone else...

If you're a Verge reader, you know we've been covering massive, fundamental changes to how the internet works for years now. Most major social media platforms are openly hostile to links, huge changes to search have led to the death of small websites, and everything is covered in a layer of AI slop and weird scams. The algorithmic media ecosystem is now openly hostile to the kind of rigorous, independent journalism we want to do.

A few years ago, we decided the only real way to survive all this was to stand apart and bet on our own website so that we could remain independent of these platforms and their algorithms. We didn't want to write stories to chase Google Search trends or because we thought they'd do well on social media. And we definitely didn't want to compromise our famously strict ethics policy to accept brand endorsement deals from the companies we cover, which almost all of our competitors in the creator economy are forced to do in order to run sustainable businesses...

[W]e intend to keep making this thing together for a long, long time. So many of you like The Verge that we've actually gotten a shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to support our work. It's no secret that lots of great websites and publications have gone under over the past few years as the open web falls apart, and it's clear that directly supporting the creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay working on the modern internet. At the same time, we didn't want to simply paywall the entire site — it's a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free.
The print premium for subscribers is described as a "beautiful / deranged print product" that's drawn from a series of articles "about what Google had done to the web, capped off by a feature about search engine optimization titled 'The People Who Ruined the Internet.'" But it ships with a satirical cover that instead proclaims it as "The Verge Guide to Search Engine Optimization". A tongue-in-check announcement explains: [A] year has passed, and we've had a change of heart. Maybe search engine optimization is actually a good thing. Maybe appeasing the search algorithm is not only a sustainable strategy for building a loyal audience, but also a strategic way to plan and produce content. What are journalists, if not content creators? Anyway, SEO community, consider this our apology. And what better way to say "our bad, your industry is not a cesspool of AI slop but a brilliant vision of what a useful internet could look like" than collecting all the things we've learned in one handy print magazine? Which is why I'm proud to introduce The Verge Guide to Search Engine Optimization: All the Tips, Tricks, Hints, Schemes, and Techniques for Promoting High-Quality Content!
Whoops — slip off the cover and the real title appears: "CONTENT GOBLINS" (written in green slime). Again, it's "an anthology of stories about 'content' and the people who 'make' it." In very Verge fashion, we are meeting the moment where the internet has been overrun by AI garbage by publishing a beautifully designed, limited edition print product. (Also, the last time we printed a magazine, it won a very prestigious design award.) Content Goblins collects some of our best stories over the past couple years, capturing the cynical push for the world's great art and journalism to be reduced into units that can be packaged, distributed, and consumed on the internet. Consider Content Goblins as our resistance to that movement. With terrific new art and photography, we're making the case that great reporting is vital and enduring — and worth paying for.

This gorgeous, grotesque magazine can be yours if you commit to an annual subscription to The Verge — while supplies last.

"Spacecraft, satellites, and space-based systems all face cybersecurity threats that are becoming increasingly sophisticated and dangerous," reports CNBC.

"With interconnected technologies controlling everything from navigation to anti-ballistic missiles, a security breach could have catastrophic consequences." Critical space infrastructure is susceptible to threats across three key segments: in space, on the ground segment and within the communication links between the two. A break in one can be a cascading failure for all, said Wayne Lonstein, co-founder and CEO at VFT Solutions, and co-author of Cyber-Human Systems, Space Technologies, and Threats. "In many ways, the threats to critical infrastructure on Earth can cause vulnerabilities in space," Lonstein said. "Internet, power, spoofing and so many other vectors that can cause havoc in space," he added. The integration of artificial intelligence into space projects has heightened the risk of sophisticated cyber attacks orchestrated by state actors and individual hackers. AI integration into space exploration allows more decision-making with less human oversight.

For example, NASA is using AI to target scientific specimens for planetary rovers. However, reduced human oversight could make these missions more prone to unexplained and potentially calamitous cyberattacks, said Sylvester Kaczmarek, chief technology officer at OrbiSky Systems, which specializes in the integration of AI, robotics, cybersecurity, and edge computing in aerospace applications. Data poisoning, where attackers feed corrupted data to AI models, is one example of what could go wrong, Kaczmarek said. Another threat, he said, is model inversion, where adversaries reverse-engineer AI models to extract sensitive information, potentially compromising mission integrity. If compromised, AI systems could be used to interfere with or take control of strategically important national space missions...

The U.S. government is tightening up the integrity and security of AI systems in space. The 2023 Cyberspace Solarium Commission report stressed the importance of designating outer space as a critical infrastructure sector, urging enhanced cybersecurity protocols for satellite operators... The rivalry between the U.S. and China includes the new battleground of space. As both nations ramp up their space ambitions and militarized capabilities beyond Earth's atmosphere, the threat of cyberattacks targeting critical orbital assets has become an increasingly pressing concern... Space-based systems increasingly support critical infrastructure back on Earth, and any cyberattacks on these systems could undermine national security and economic interests.

Climate change has intensified hurricane wind speeds by an average of 19 mph in 84% of North Atlantic hurricanes between 2019-2024, according to new research that links warming ocean temperatures to storm intensity for individual hurricanes.

This year, Hurricanes Helene and Milton slammed into Florida, breaking meteorological records and causing catastrophic damage. The study by Climate Central found that higher sea surface temperatures elevated most hurricanes by an entire category on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with three storms, including Hurricane Rafael, seeing wind speeds increase by 34 mph due to warming.

Researchers calculated storm intensity using models of pre-warming ocean temperatures. "It's really the evolution of our science on sea surface temperature attribution that has allowed this work to take place," said lead author Daniel Gilford, noting that hurricane damage increases exponentially with wind speed. For example, a storm with double the wind speed can cause 256 times as much damage. The methodology enables scientists to determine climate change impacts on hurricanes in near-real time.

The Macquarie Dictionary, the national dictionary of Australia, has picked "enshittification" as its word of the year. Gizmodo reports: The Australians define the word as "the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking." We've all felt this. Google search is filled with garbage. The internet is clogged with SEO-farming websites that clog up results. Facebook is an endless stream of AI-generated slop. Zoom wants you to test out its new AI features while you're trying to go into a meeting. Twitter has become X, and its owner thinks sharing links is a waste of time. Last night I reinstalled Windows 11 on a desktop machine and got pissed as it was finalized and Microsoft kept trying to get me to install OneDrive, Office 360, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and a bunch of other shit I didn't want. Writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, and recently offered potential solutions to the age-old phenomenon in an interview with The Register.

"We need to have prohibition and regulation that prohibits the capital markets from funding predatory pricing," he explained. "It's very hard to enter the market when people are selling things below cost. We need to prohibit predatory acquisitions. Look at Facebook: buying Instagram, and Mark Zuckerberg sending an email saying we're buying Instagram because people don't like Facebook and they're moving to Instagram, and we just don't want them to have anywhere else to go."

9to5Google's Ben Schoon reports: Google has introduced a new feature on iOS that injects links on third-party websites that take users back to Google Search. Recently, Google announced new "Page Annotations" within the Google app on iOS. This feature, as Google explains, "extracts interesting entities from the webpage and highlights them in line." Effectively, it creates links on a website that you've opened through Google's browser that the website's owner did not put there. The links, when clicked, then perform a search on Google for that subject and open the search in a pop-up window on top of the third-party website.

The feature, Google says, will offer an opt-out for website owners through a form. It's pointed out by SERoundTable that opting out can take up to 30 days, while the feature is live now. Further reading: US Says Google Is an Ad Tech Monopolist, in Closing Arguments

Microsoft's controversial "Recall" feature (in a public preview of Windows 11) already has some known issues, Microsoft admitted Friday. For example:

- Recall can be enabled or disabled from "Turn Windows features on or off". We are caching the Recall binaries on disk while we test add/remove. In a future update we will completely remove the binaries.

- You must have Secure Boot enabled for Recall to save snapshots.

- Some users experience a delay before snapshots first appear in the timeline while using their device. If snapshots do not appear after 5 minutes, reboot your device. If saving snapshots is enabled, but you see snapshots are no longer being saved, reboot your device.

- Clicking links within Recall to submit feedback may experience a delay in loading the Feedback Hub application. Be patient and it will display.

CNBC adds that according to Microsoft Recall "won't work with some accessibility programs, and if you specify that Recall shouldn't save content from a given website, it might get captured anyway while using the built-in Edge browser..." But those aren't the only issues CNBC noticed: - While you might expect that your computer will be recording every last thing you look at once you've turned on Recall, it can go several minutes between making snapshots, leaving gaps in the timeline.

- Recall allows you to prevent screenshots from being made when you're accessing specific apps. But a few apps installed on my Surface Pro are not shown on that list.

- When you enter a search string to find words, results might be incomplete or incorrect. Recall clearly had two screen images that mention "Yankees," but when I typed that into the search box, only one of them came up as a text match. I typed in my last name, which appeared in eight images, but Recall produced just two text matches.

- Recall made a screenshot while I was scrolling through posts on social network BlueSky, and one contains a photo of a New York street scene. You can see a stoplight, a smokestack and street signs. I typed each of those into the search box, but Recall came up with no results...

- The search function is fast, but flipping through snapshots in Recall is not. It can take a couple of seconds to load screenshots as you swipe between them.

The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to propose new rules governing undersea internet cables in the face of growing security concerns, as part of a review of regulations on the links that handle nearly all the world's online traffic. From a report: The FCC voted 5-0 on proposed updates to address the national security concerns over the global network of more than 400 subsea cables that handle more than 98% of international internet traffic. [...]

Baltic nations said this week they are investigating whether the cutting of two fiber-optic undersea telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea was sabotage. Rosenworcel noted that in 2023 Taiwan accused two Chinese vessels of cutting the only two cables that support internet access on the Matsu Islands and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea may have been responsible for the cutting of three cables providing internet service to Europe and Asia.

An anonymous reader shares a report: People are using Spotify playlist and podcast descriptions to distribute spam, malware, pirated software and cheat codes for video games. Cybersecurity researcher Karol Paciorek posted an example of this: A Spotify playlist titled "*Sony Vegas Pro*13 C-r-a-c-k Free Download 2024 m-y-s-o-f-t-w-a-r-e-f-r-e-e.com" acts as a free advertisement for piracy website m-y-s-o-f-t-w-a-r-e-f-r-e-e[dot]com, which hosts malicious software.

"Cybercriminals exploit Spotify for #malware distribution," Paciorek posted on X. "Why? Spotify has a strong reputation and its pages are easily indexed by search engines, making it an effective platform to promote malicious links."

"The playlist title in question has been removed," a spokesperson for Spotify told 404 Media in a statement. "Spotify's Platform Rules prohibit posting, sharing, or providing instructions on implementing malware or related malicious practices that seek to harm or gain unauthorized access to computers, networks, systems, or other technologies."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Instagram is flooded with hundreds of AI-generated influencers who are stealing videos from real models and adult content creators, giving them AI-generated faces, and monetizing their bodies with links to dating sites, Patreon, OnlyFans competitors, and various AI apps. The practice, first reported by 404 Media in April, has since exploded in popularity, showing that Instagram is unable or unwilling to stop the flood of AI-generated content on its platform and protect the human creators on Instagram who say they are now competing with AI content in a way that is impacting their ability to make a living.

According to our review of more than 1,000 AI-generated Instagram accounts, Discord channels where the people who make this content share tips and discuss strategy, and several guides that explain how to make money by "AI pimping," it is now trivially easy to make these accounts and monetize them using an assortment of off-the-shelf AI tools and apps. Some of these apps are hosted on the Apple App and Google Play Stores. Our investigation shows that what was once a niche problem on the platform has industrialized in scale, and it shows what social media may become in the near future: a space where AI-generated content eclipses that of humans. [...]

Out of more than 1,000 AI-generated Instagram influencer accounts we reviewed, 100 included at least some deepfake content which took existing videos, usually from models and adult entertainment performers, and replaced their face with an AI-generated face to make those videos seem like new, original content consistent with the other AI-generated images and videos shared by the AI-generated influencer. The other 900 accounts shared images that in some cases were trained on real photographs and in some cases made to look like celebrities, but were entirely AI-generated, not edited photographs or videos. Out of those 100 accounts that shared deepfake or face-swapped videos, 60 self-identify as being AI-generated, writing in their bios that they are a "virtual model & influencer" or stating "all photos crafted with AI and apps." The other 40 do not include any disclaimer stating that they are AI-generated. Adult content creators like Elaina St James say they're now directly competing with these AI rip-off accounts that often use stolen content. Since the explosion of AI-generated influencer accounts on Instagram, St James said her "reach went down tremendously," from a typical 1 million to 5 million views a month to not surpassing a million in the last 10 months, and sometimes coming in under 500,000 views. While she said changes to Instagram's algorithm could also be at play, these AI-generated influencer accounts are "probably one of the reasons my views are going down," St James told 404 Media. "It's because I'm competing with something that's unnatural."

Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the security, trust, and safety initiative at Cornell Tech and formerly principal of trust and safety intelligence at Google, started researching the problem to see where AI-generated content is taking social media and the internet. "It felt like a possible sign of what social media is going to look like in five years," said Mantzarlis. "Because this may be coming to other parts of the internet, not just the attractive-people niche on Instagram. This is probably a sign that it's going to be pretty bad."

Remember those 43 monkeys that escaped from a U.S. research lab? They've caught 35 of them — but haven't yet caught the other eight.

But even worse... The Independent reports that now another animal escape has led to "reports of two large emus running riot..." The birds' owner, Sam Morace, took to social media to plead with locals for their patience, saying: "For everyone that keeps seeing an emu, yes it is mine. There are 2 of them out." Morace said their two flightless birds broke loose three months ago.... "They are feral and not trained like the ones we have at the house."
This provoked some discussion on Facebook. ("Does nobody learn to lasso anymore?") But Morace responded that you "can't lasso a bird you have to grab them by their feet. Their necks are super long and fragile." In another post Morace detailed efforts to capture their birds. "Local law enforcement has already been at my house, we are trying to get a tranquilizer approved so we can bring them home.

"Thank you for all the concerns and questions. But if the emus were that easy to catch they would be home already.

If you're wondering how the escaped monkeys are doing out in the wild, someone who photographed them earlier this week said they appeared "playful, curious and jumping from tree to tree." The Guardian reports local officials have now "requested that the public avoid using drones near the facility. Earlier in the week, they reported that a drone incident 'spooked' the monkeys, increasing their stress levels and complicating efforts to recapture them."

Their article also notes reports that the facility houses 7,000 monkeys. And this isn't the first time some have escaped... In 2016, 19 monkeys escaped from the same facility, according to the Post and Courier newspaper, but were returned after six hours. Earlier, in 2014, 26 macaques reportedly escaped and were captured within two days. Documents from federal regulators from previous years revealed other incidents at the facility, as reported by the New York Times. One involved a primate escaping while being transported to the medical clinic and subsequently disappearing into the woods. Another involved two monkeys breaking out of their outdoor chain-link enclosure, which reportedly resulted in one monkey being lured back inside and the other dying shortly after being recaptured. In 2017, the Department of Agriculture fined the company more than $12,000 partly due to failures to contain the animals, according to the New York Times.
The Guardian also links to a related read from February: "Plan for US 'mini-city' of 30,000 monkeys for medical research faces backlash." Over the next 20 years, the facility will assemble a mega-troop of about 30,000 long-tailed macaques, a species native to south-east Asia, in vast barn-like structures in Bainbridge, Georgia, which has a human population of just 14,000... But the plan faces fierce opposition, with some Bainbridge residents calling on local authorities to block the construction of the proposed primate manse. "They're an invasive species and 30,000 of them, we'd just be overrun with monkeys," claimed Ted Lee, a local man. "I don't think anybody would want 30,000 monkeys next door," added David Barber, who would live just 400ft from the new facility.

Chegg, the online education company, is laying off 319 workers as it struggles to compete against modern AI chatbots. SFGATE reports: Chegg announced the new layoff round, which will hit 21% of its workforce, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. The company delivered the news alongside another brutal quarterly financial report; Chegg lost more than $212 million from July through September. CEO Nathan Schultz, in prepared remarks accompanying the report, expressed some optimism but called it a "trying time" for his company. Chegg provides grammar and plagiarism checkers, plus course-by-course study help, along with much-used textbook solution guides.

"Technology shifts have created headwinds for our industry and Chegg's business specifically," Schultz said. "Recent advancements in the AI search experience and the adoption of free and paid generative AI services by students, have resulted in challenges for Chegg. These factors are adversely affecting our business outlook and are requiring us to refocus and adjust the size of our business." He specifically called out Google's AI overviews, a recent change to search results that pulls information from news outlets and sites like Chegg and summarizes above the classic blue links. Schultz said that his team believes Google is "shifting from being a search origination point to the destination" in an attempt to keep market share.

Schultz also blamed generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, saying that students see the tool and others like it as "strong alternatives" to Chegg. Web traffic has dropped sharply as a result, Schultz wrote. A Wall Street Journal story published Saturday said Chegg "is trying to avoid becoming [ChatGPT's] first major victim" and that the company had lost more than 500,000 subscribers, some who paid almost $20 a month, since the chatbot's 2022 launch. Despite the negative business impact, it seems Chegg is experimenting with new tech. Schultz said in the remarks that the company had formed an "arena" to evaluate AI models and aims to "integrate AI into the full learning journey."

With iOS 18.2, Apple will allow you to share the location of a lost AirTag with other people and with more than 15 different airlines. The Verge reports: When using the feature, you can generate a Share Item Location link within the Find My app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Once you share the link with someone, they can click on it to view an interactive map with the location of your lost item. Apple will update the website automatically when the lost item moves, and it will also display a timestamp when it moved last. Apple will turn off the feature once you find your lost item. You can also manually stop sharing the location of an AirTag at any time, or the link will "automatically expire after seven days." [...]

As part of the rollout, Apple is partnering with over 15 airlines, including Delta, United, Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa, Air Canada, and more. All of these airlines will be able to "privately and securely" accept links to lost items, as "access to each link will be limited to a small number of people, and recipients will be required to authenticate in order to view the link through either their Apple Account or partner email address." This feature will be available to airlines in the "coming months." Additionally, SITA, a baggage tracing solution, will also implement Share Item Location into its luggage tracker.

A new article at Reason.com argues that U.S. courts "are coming for digital libraries." In September, a federal appeals court dealt a major blow to the Internet Archive — one of the largest online repositories of free books, media, and software — in a copyright case with significant implications for publishers, libraries, and readers. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that found the Internet Archive's huge, digitized lending library of copyrighted books was not covered by the "fair use" doctrine and infringed on the rights of publishers. Agreeing with the Archive's interpretation of fair use "would significantly narrow — if not entirely eviscerate — copyright owners' exclusive right to prepare derivative works," the 2nd Circuit ruled. "Were we to approve [Internet Archive's] use of the works, there would be little reason for consumers or libraries to pay publishers for content they could access for free."
Others disagree, according to some links shared in a recent email from the Internet Archive. Public Knowledge CEO Chris Lewis argues the court's logic renders the fair use doctrine "almost unusuable". And that's just the beginning... This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse. It leaves local communities' reading habits at the mercy of curatorial decisions made by four dominant publishing companies thousands of miles away. It steers Americans away from one of the few remaining bastions of privacy protection and funnels them into a surveillance ecosystem that, like Big Tech, becomes more dangerous with each passing data breach.
But lawyer/librarian Kyle K. Courtney writes that the case "is specific only to the parties, and does not impact the other existing versions of controlled digital lending." Additionally, this decision is limited to the 2nd Circuit and is not binding anywhere else — in other words, it does not apply to the 47 states outside the 2nd Circuit's jurisdiction. In talking with colleagues in the U.S. this week and last, many are continuing their programs because they believe their digital loaning programs fall outside the scope of this ruling... Moreover, the court's opinion focuses on digital books that the court said "are commercially available for sale or license in any electronic text format." Therefore, there remains a significant number of materials in library collections that have not made the jump to digital, nor are likely to, meaning that there is no ebook market to harm — nor is one likely to emerge for certain works, such as those that are no longer commercially viable...

This case represents just one instance in an ongoing conversation about library lending in the digital age, and the possibility of appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court means the final outcome is far from settled.
Some more quotes from links shared by Internet Archive:

• "It was clear that the only reason all the big publishers sued the Internet Archive was to put another nail in the coffin of libraries and push to keep this ebook licensing scheme grift going. Now the courts have helped." — TechDirt

• "The case against the Internet Archive is not just a story about the ruination of an online library, but a grander narrative of our times: how money facilitates the transference of knowledge away from the public, back towards the few." — blogger Hannah Williams

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rightsholders have asked Google to remove more than 10 billion 'copyright infringing' URLs from its search results. The search engine doesn't celebrate the milestone in any way, but the takedown notices document intriguing shifts in volume over time, as well as shifting takedown interests. [...] The path to 10 billion was turbulent. When Google first made DMCA details public it was processing a few million DMCA takedown requests in a year. That number swiftly increased to hundreds of millions and eventually reached a billion DMCA requests in 2016.

The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017, the takedown volume started to decline. The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results. By downranking pirate sites, infringing content became harder to find. As a result, Google processed fewer takedown notices, a welcome change for both rightsholders and the search engine. Today, Google continues to make pirate sites less visible in search, but the reduction in takedown notices didn't last. On the contrary, over the past several months, Google search processed a record number of DMCA notices.

Last summer, the search giant recorded the 7 billionth takedown request and after that the numbers shot up, adding billions more in the year that followed. The company is now handling removal requests at a rate of roughly 2.5 billion per year; a new record. This represents more than 50 million takedown requests per week and roughly 5,000 every minute. [...] While the 10 billionth reported URL is undoubtedly a milestone, this number is largely driven by a few rightsholders, reporting outfits, and domain names. The aforementioned takedown outfit Link-Busters, for example, accounts for roughly 15% of all reported links, nearly 1.5 billion. Similarly, the ten most prolific rightsholders, including the BPI, HarperCollins, and VIZ Media, are responsible for 40% of all reported links. These ten companies are only a tiny fraction of the 600,000 rightsholders that reported pirated links, however. A small group of domains also receives a disproportionate amount of attention. In total, 5,400,061 domains have been reported, with the top domains having dozens of millions of flagged URLs each. However, most domains have only a few flagged links, some of which are erroneous.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As world leaders gathered in Colombia this week, they also watched for news from home, where many of the headlines carried the catastrophic consequences of ecological breakdown. Across the Amazon rainforest and Brazil's enormous wetlands, relentless fires had burned more than 22m hectares (55m acres). In Spain, the death toll in communities devastated by flooding passed 200. In the boreal forests that span Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, countries were recording alarming signs that their carbon sinks were collapsing under a combined weight of drought, tree death and logging. As Canada's wildfire season crept to a close, scientists calculated it was the second worst in two decades -- behind only last year's burn, which released more carbon than some of the world's largest emitting countries.

In global negotiations, climate and nature move along two independent tracks, and for years were broadly treated as distinct challenges. But as negotiations closed at the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali on Saturday, ministers from around the world underscored the crucial importance of nature to limiting damage from global heating, and vice versa -- emphasising that climate and biodiversity could no longer be treated as independent issues if either crisis was to be resolved. Countries agreed a text on links between the climate and nature, but failed to include language on a phase out of fossil fuels.

The UK environment secretary, Steve Reed, said that attending the summit in Colombia had brought home the links between climate and biodiversity. "One of the other things that's really struck me coming here and speaking to the Colombians in particular is how for them the nature crisis and the climate crisis are exactly the same thing. In the UK, perhaps more widely in the global north, we tend to talk a lot about climate and particularly net zero, and much less about nature -- perhaps because we're already more nature-depleted. But those two things connect entirely," he said. The Cop16 president, Susana Muhamad, Colombia's environment minister, has sought to put nature on a level with global efforts to decarbonise the world economy during the summit, warning that slashes to greenhouse gas emissions must be accompanied by the protection and restoration of the natural world if they are to be effective. Her presidency has repeatedly described nature and climate as "two sides of the same coin."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 50 US lawmakers are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to join dozens of other countries in banning a widely used weedkiller linked to Parkinson's disease and other health dangers. In a October 31 letter (PDF) to the agency, seven US senators said that paraquat, a weedkiller commonly applied on US farms, was a "highly toxic pesticide whose continued use cannot be justified given its harms to farmworkers and rural communities". The call for a ban from the senators came after 47 members of the US House of Representatives sent a similar letter (PDF) to the EPA calling for a ban earlier in October.

The lawmakers cite scientific links between paraquat use and development of Parkinson's and other "life threatening diseases" as well as "grave impacts on the environment". "Health risks include a higher risk of Parkinson's disease, with some studies finding a 64% increase in the likelihood of developing Parkinson's, non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, thyroid cancer, and other thyroid issues," they wrote. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker, organizer of the Senate letter, said the risks of paraquat exposure were "well documented" and that it was "irresponsible" for the EPA to continue to allow its use. "I hope the EPA will follow the science and ban paraquat," Booker said. The EPA has long maintained that there is no "clear link" between paraquat exposure and Parkinson's disease, though the agency does have a number of restrictions on use of the chemical due to its acute toxicity. The agency issued a draft report earlier this year affirming its position. Still, the agency said at that time that it would be reviewing more scientific studies and would issue a final report by January 17, 2025.

The BBC interviewed scientists Charley Kline and Bill Duvall 55 years after the first communications were made over a system called Arpanet, short for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. "Kline and Duvall were early inventors of networking, networks that would ultimately lead to what is today the Internet," writes longtime Slashdot reader dbialac. "Duvall had basic ideas what might come of the networks, but they had no idea of how much of a phenomenon it would turn into." Here's an excerpt from the interview: BBC: What did you expect Arpanet to become?
Duvall: "I saw the work we were doing at SRI as a critical part of a larger vision, that of information workers connected to each other and sharing problems, observations, documents and solutions. What we did not see was the commercial adoption nor did we anticipate the phenomenon of social media and the associated disinformation plague. Although, it should be noted, that in [SRI computer scientist] Douglas Engelbart's 1962 treatise describing the overall vision, he notes that the capabilities we were creating would trigger profound change in our society, and it would be necessary to simultaneously use and adapt the tools we were creating to address the problems which would arise from their use in society."

What aspects of the internet today remind you of Arpanet?
Duvall: Referring to the larger vision which was being created in Engelbart's group (the mouse, full screen editing, links, etc.), the internet today is a logical evolution of those ideas enhanced, of course, by the contributions of many bright and innovative people and organisations.

Kline: The ability to use resources from others. That's what we do when we use a website. We are using the facilities of the website and its programs, features, etc. And, of course, email. The Arpanet pretty much created the concept of routing and multiple paths from one site to another. That got reliability in case a communication line failed. It also allowed increases in communication speeds by using multiple paths simultaneously. Those concepts have carried over to the internet. Today, the site of the first internet transmission at UCLA's Boetler Hally Room 3420 functions as a monument to technology history (Credit: Courtesy of UCLA) As we developed the communications protocols for the Arpanet, we discovered problems, redesigned and improved the protocols and learned many lessons that carried over to the Internet. TCP/IP [the basic standard for internet connection] was developed both to interconnect networks, in particular the Arpanet with other networks, and also to improve performance, reliability and more.

How do you feel about this anniversary?
Kline: That's a mix. Personally, I feel it is important, but a little overblown. The Arpanet and what sprang from it are very important. This particular anniversary to me is just one of many events. I find somewhat more important than this particular anniversary were the decisions by Arpa to build the Network and continue to support its development.

Duvall: It's nice to remember the origin of something like the internet, but the most important thing is the enormous amount of work that has been done since that time to turn it into what is a major part of societies worldwide.