An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Siemens will buy Altair Engineering for $10.6 billion, the American engineering software firm said on Wednesday, as the German company seeks to strengthen its presence in the fast-growing industrial software market. The offer price of $113 per share represents a premium of about 18.7% to Altair's closing price on Oct. 21, a day before Reuters first reported that the company was exploring a sale. The deal for Michigan-based Altair is Siemens's biggest acquisition since Siemens Healthineers bought medical device maker Varian Medical Systems for $16.4 million in 2020. [...]

The transaction is anticipated to add to Siemens' earnings per share in about two years from the deal's closing, which is expected in the second half of 2025. It will also increase Siemens' digital business revenue by about 8%, adding approximately 600 million euros ($651.36 million) to the company's digital business revenue in fiscal 2023. The transaction would have a revenue impact of about $500 million per year in the mid-term and more than $1 billion per year in the long term, Siemens said.

Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. has threatened legal action against future studio executives who attempt to recreate his likeness using AI. "I intend to sue all future executives just on spec," Downey said when asked about potential AI recreations of his performances. He dismissed concerns about Marvel Studios using his likeness without permission, citing trust in their leadership. During the interview, he criticized tech executives who position themselves as AI gatekeepers, calling it "a massive fucking error."

JPMorgan Chase is suing customers who exploited an ATM glitch that allowed them to withdraw funds before a check bounced. CNBC reports: The bank on Monday filed lawsuits in at least three federal courts, taking aim at some of the people who withdrew the highest amounts in the so-called infinite money glitch that went viral on TikTok and other social media platforms in late August. [...] JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, is investigating thousands of possible cases related to the "infinite money glitch," though it hasn't disclosed the scope of associated losses. Despite the waning use of paper checks as digital forms of payment gain popularity, they're still a major avenue for fraud, resulting in $26.6 billion in losses globally last year, according to Nasdaq's Global Financial Crime Report.

The infinite money glitch episode highlights the risk that social media can amplify vulnerabilities discovered at a financial institution. Videos began circulating in late August showing people celebrating the withdrawal of wads of cash from Chase ATMs shortly after bad checks were deposited. Normally, banks only make available a fraction of the value of a check until it clears, which takes several days. JPMorgan says it closed the loophole a few days after it was discovered.

The lawsuits are likely to be just the start of a wave of litigation meant to force customers to repay their debts and signal broadly that the bank won't tolerate fraud, according to the people familiar. JPMorgan prioritized cases with large dollar amounts and indications of possible ties to criminal groups, they said. The civil cases are separate from potential criminal investigations; JPMorgan says it has also referred cases to law enforcement officials across the country. "Fraud is a crime that impacts everyone and undermines trust in the banking system," JPMorgan spokesman Drew Pusateri said in a statement to CNBC. "We're pursuing these cases and actively cooperating with law enforcement to make sure if someone is committing fraud against Chase and its customers, they're held accountable."

Russia has enacted a new law expanding control over cryptocurrency mining, granting multiple federal agencies access to digital currency identifier addresses, among other things. The country is also advancing its regulatory framework and experimenting with crypto in international trade. From a report: Taking effect on Nov. 1, the legislation includes several amendments designed to strengthen oversight and impose limitations on crypto mining activities based on regional needs. The law enables the Russian government to implement mining restrictions by location and define specific procedures and circumstances for banning mining operations. A notable provision in the law gives the government the power to stop digital currency mining pools from functioning in certain areas. Additionally, the government now has the authority to regulate infrastructure providers supporting mining operations.

This legislation also grants multiple federal agencies, beyond the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring), access to digital currency identifier addresses. This expansion includes federal executive agencies and law enforcement, bolstering their capability to track transactions that may be linked to money laundering or terrorist financing activities. Moreover, the amendments transfer responsibility for the national mining register from the Ministry of Digital Development to the Federal Tax Service, which will now oversee mining registrations for businesses and remove those with repeated infractions. While individual miners can continue without registering if they adhere to specific electricity consumption limits, companies and individual entrepreneurs must comply with new registration requirements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Apple's AI features are finally starting to appear. Apple Intelligence is launching today on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, offering features like generative AI-powered writing tools, notification summaries, and a cleanup tool to take distractions out of photos. It's Apple's first official step into the AI era, but it'll be far from its last. Apple Intelligence has been available in developer and public beta builds of Apple's operating systems for the past few months, but today marks the first time it'll be available in the full public OS releases. Even so, the features will still be marked as "beta," and Apple Intelligence will very much remain a work in progress. (You'll have to get on a waitlist to try Apple Intelligence, too.) Siri gets a new look, but its most consequential new features -- like the ability to take action in apps -- probably won't arrive until well into 2025.

In the meantime, Apple has released a very "AI starter kit" set of features. "Writing Tools" will help you summarize notes, change the tone of your messages to make them friendlier or more professional, and turn a wall of text into a list or table. You'll see AI summaries in notifications and emails, along with a new focus mode that aims to filter out unimportant alerts. The updated Siri is signified by a glowing border around the screen, and it now allows for text input by double-tapping the bottom of the screen. It's helpful stuff, but we've seen a lot of this before, and it'll hardly represent a seismic shift in how you use your iPhone. Apple says that more Apple Intelligence features will arrive in December. [...] Availability will expand in December to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK, with additional languages coming in April. Despite Apple's previous claim that Apple Intelligence wouldn't be available in the European Union due to the Digital Markets Act, the features will, in fact, be coming to Europe in April of next year.

Further reading: Apple Updates the iMac With M4 Chip

When it comes to introducing liability for software products, "the EU and U.S. are taking very different approaches," according to Lawfare's cybersecurity newsletter. "While the U.S. kicks the can down the road, the EU is rolling a hand grenade down it to see what happens." Under the status quo, the software industry is extensively protected from liability for defects or issues, and this results in systemic underinvestment in product security. Authorities believe that by making software companies liable for damages when they peddle crapware, those companies will be motivated to improve product security... [T]he EU has chosen to set very stringent standards for product liability, apply them to people rather than companies, and let lawyers sort it all out.

Earlier this month, the EU Council issued a directive updating the EU's product liability law to treat software in the same way as any other product. Under this law, consumers can claim compensation for damages caused by defective products without having to prove the vendor was negligent or irresponsible. In addition to personal injury or property damages, for software products, damages may be awarded for the loss or destruction of data. Rather than define a minimum software development standard, the directive sets what we regard as the highest possible bar. Software makers can avoid liability if they prove a defect was not discoverable given the "objective state of scientific and technical knowledge" at the time the product was put on the market.

Although the directive is severe on software makers, its scope is narrow. It applies only to people (not companies), and damages for professional use are explicitly excluded. There is still scope for collective claims such as class actions, however. The directive isn't law itself but sets the legislative direction for EU member states, and they have two years to implement its provisions. The directive commits the European Commission to publicly collating court judgements based on the directive, so it will be easy to see how cases are proceeding.

Major software vendors used by the world's most important enterprises and governments are publishing comically vulnerable code without fear of any blowback whatsoever. So yes, the status quo needs change. Whether it needs a hand grenade lobbed at it is an open question. We'll have our answer soon.

"Google essentially disappeared us from the internet," says the couple who created price-comparison site Foundem in 2006. Google's search results for "price comparison" and "comparison shopping" buried their site — for more than three years.

Today the BBC looks at their 15-year legal battle, which culminated with a then record €2.4 billion fine (£2 billion or $2.6 billion) for Google, which was deemed to have abused its market dominance. The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in the global regulation of Big Tech. Google spent seven years fighting that verdict, issued in June 2017, but in September this year Europe's top court — the European Court of Justice — rejected its appeals.

Speaking to Radio 4's The Bottom Line in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that at first, they thought their website's faltering start had simply been a mistake. "We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been false positive detected as spam," says Shivaun, 55. "We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and it would be overturned...." The couple sent Google numerous requests to have the restriction lifted but, more than two years later, nothing had changed and they said they received no response. Meanwhile, their website was "ranking completely normally" on other search engines, but that didn't really matter, according to Shivaun, as "everyone's using Google".

The couple would later discover that their site was not the only one to have been put at a disadvantage by Google — by the time the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017 there were around 20 claimants, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp... In its 2017 judgement, the European Commission found that Google had illegally promoted its own comparison shopping service in search results, whilst demoting those of competitors... "I guess it was unfortunate for Google that they did it to us," Shivaun says. "We've both been brought up maybe under the delusion that we can make a difference, and we really don't like bullies."

Even Google's final defeat in the case last month did not spell the end for the couple. They believe Google's conduct remains anti-competitive and the EC is looking into it. In March this year, under its new Digital Markets Act, the commission opened an investigation into Google's parent company, Alphabet, over whether it continues to preference its own goods and services in search results... The Raffs are also pursuing a civil damages claim against Google, which is due to begin in the first half of 2026. But when, or if, a final victory comes for the couple it will likely be a Pyrrhic one — they were forced to close Foundem in 2016.
A spokesperson for Google told the BBC the 2024 judgment from the European Court of Justice only relates to "how we showed product results from 2008-2017. The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission's Shopping decision have worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services.

"For this reason, we continue to strongly contest the claims made by Foundem and will do so when the case is considered by the courts."

"We passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform," says U.C. Berkeley chemistry professor Omar Yaghi, "and it was beautiful.

"It cleaned the air entirely of CO2," Yaghi says in an announcement from the university. "Everything."

SFGate calls it "a discovery that could help potentially mitigate the effects of climate change..." Yaghi's lab has worked on carbon capture since the 1990s and began work on these crystalline structures in 2005. The innovative substance has lots of tiny holes, making it "great for storing gases or liquids, much like a sponge holds water," Yaghi said... While it could take one to two years for the powder to be usable in large-scale applications, Yaghi co-founded Atoco, an Irvine company, to commercialize his research and expand it beyond just carbon capture and storage.
"Capturing carbon from the air just got easier," says the headline on the anouncement from the university, which explains why this technology is crucial: [T]oday's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases. Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million, 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won't reach humanity's goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degreesC (2.7 degreesF) above preexisting global averages.

A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions... According to Yaghi, the new material could be substituted easily into carbon capture systems already deployed or being piloted to remove CO2 from refinery emissions and capture atmospheric CO2 for storage underground. UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper's first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO2 in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree.
Their research was published this week in the journal Nature.

And it's also interesting that they're using AI, according to the university's announcement: Yaghi is optimistic that artificial intelligence can help speed up the design of even better COFs and MOFs for carbon capture or other purposes, specifically by identifying the chemical conditions required to synthesize their crystalline structures. He is scientific director of a research center at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), which employs AI to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of MOFs and COFs to help limit and address the impacts of climate change. "We're very, very excited about blending AI with the chemistry that we've been doing," he said.
Another potential use could be for harvesting water from desert air for drinking water, Yaghi told SFGate. But he seems very focused specifically on carbon capture.

"Another thing is that we need a strong determination among officials and industries to make carbon capture a high priority. Things have to change, but I believe that direct carbon capture from air is very doable."

The Librarian of Congress has granted a DMCA exemption allowing independent repair of soft-serve machines, addressing the persistent issue of restricted repairs on McDonald's frequently malfunctioning machines. ExtremeTech reports: Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass a digital lock protecting copyrighted work. That can be the DRM on a video file you download from iTunes, the carrier locks that prevent you from using a phone on other networks, or even the software running a McDonald's soft serve machine that refuses to accept third-party repairs. By locking down a product with DRM, companies can dictate when and how items are repaired under threat of legal consequences. This is an ongoing issue for people who want to fix all those busted ice cream machines.

Earlier this year, iFixit and Public Knowledge submitted their request for an exemption that would have covered a wide swath of industrial equipment. The request included everything from building management software to the aforementioned ice cream machines. Unfortunately, the Copyright Office was unconvinced on some of these points. However, the Librarian of Congress must be just as sick as the rest of us to hear the ice cream machine is broken. The office granted an exception for "retail-level food preparation equipment."

That means restaurant owners and independent repair professionals will be able to bypass the software locks that keep kitchen machinery offline until the "right" repair services get involved. This should lower prices and speed up repairs in such situations. Public Knowledge and iFixit express disappointment that the wider expansion was not granted, but they're still celebrating with some delicious puns (and probably ice cream). "There's nothing vanilla about this victory; an exemption for retail-level commercial food preparation equipment will spark a flurry of third-party repair activity and enable businesses to better serve their customers," said Meredith Rose, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge.

UnitedHealth Group said a ransomware attack in February resulted in more than 100 million individuals having their private health information stolen. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services first reported the figure on Thursday. TechCrunch reports: The ransomware attack and data breach at Change Healthcare stands as the largest known digital theft of U.S. medical records, and one of the biggest data breaches in living history. The ramifications for the millions of Americans whose private medical information was irretrievably stolen are likely to be life lasting. UHG began notifying affected individuals in late July, which continued through October. The stolen data varies by individual, but Change previously confirmed that it includes personal information, such as names and addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses, and government identity documents, including Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, and passport numbers. The stolen health data includes diagnoses, medications, test results, imaging and care and treatment plans, and health insurance information -- as well as financial and banking information found in claims and payment data taken by the criminals.

The cyberattack became public on February 21 when Change Healthcare pulled much of its network offline to contain the intruders, causing immediate outages across the U.S. healthcare sector that relied on Change for handling patient insurance and billing. UHG attributed the cyberattack to ALPHV/BlackCat, a Russian-speaking ransomware and extortion gang, which later took credit for the cyberattack. The ransomware gang's leaders later vanished after absconding with a $22 million ransom paid by the health insurance giant, stiffing the group's contractors who carried out the hacking of Change Healthcare out of their new financial windfall. The contractors took the data they stole from Change Healthcare and formed a new group, which extorted a second ransom from UHG, while publishing a portion of the stolen files online in the process to prove their threat.

There is no evidence that the cybercriminals subsequently deleted the data. Other extortion gangs, including LockBit, have been shown to hoard stolen data, even after the victim pays and the criminals claim to have deleted the data. In paying the ransom, Change obtained a copy of the stolen dataset, allowing the company to identify and notify the affected individuals whose information was found in the data. Efforts by the U.S. government to catch the hackers behind ALPHV/BlackCat, one of the most prolific ransomware gangs today, have so far failed. The gang bounced back following a takedown operation in 2023 to seize the gang's dark web leak site. Months after the Change Healthcare breach, the U.S. State Department upped its reward for information on the whereabouts of the ALPHV/BlackCat cybercriminals to $10 million.

theodp writes: "Computer science education is a necessity for all students," argues tech-backed nonprofit Code.org in its newly-published 2024 State of Computer Science Education (Understanding Our National Imperative) report. "Students of all identities and chosen career paths need quality computer science education to become informed citizens and confident creators of content and digital tools."

In the 200-page report, Code.org pays special attention to participation in "foundational computer science courses" in high school. "Across the country, 60% of public high schools offer at least one foundational computer science course," laments Code.org (curiously promoting a metric that ignores school size which nonetheless was embraced by Education Week and others).

"A course that teaches foundational computer science includes a minimum amount of time applying learned concepts through programming (at least 20 hours of programming/coding for grades 9-12 high schools)," Code.org explains in a separate 13-page Defining Foundational Computer Science document. Interestingly, Code.org argues that Data and Informatics courses -- in which "students may use Oracle WebDB, SQL, PL/SQL, SPSS, and SAS" to learn "the K-12 CS Framework concepts about data and analytics" -- do not count, because "the course content focuses on querying using a scripting language rather than creating programs [the IEEE's Top Programming Languages 2024 begs to differ]." Code.org similarly dissed the use of the Wolfram Language for broad educational use back in 2016.

With its insistence on the importance of kids taking Code.org-defined 'programming' courses in K-12 to promote computational thinking, it's probably no surprise to see that the data behind the 2024 State of Computer Science Education report was prepared using Python (the IEEE's top programming language) and presented to the public in a Jupyter notebook. Just kidding. Ironically, the data behind the 2024 State of Computer Science Education analysis is prepared and presented by Code.org in a no-code Tableau workbook.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Members of Congress are raising the alarm about new technology at supermarkets: They say Kroger and other major grocery stores are implementing digital price tags that could allow for dynamic pricing, meaning the sticker price on items like eggs and milk could change regularly. They also claim data from facial recognition technology at Kroger could be considered in pricing decisions.

Kroger denied the claims, saying it has no plans to implement dynamic pricing or use facial recognition software. Walmart also said it had no plans for dynamic pricing, and that facial recognition was not being used to affect pricing, but the company did not specify whether the tool was being used for other purposes. Both Walmart, which has 4,606 U.S. stores, and Kroger, which has nearly 2,800 U.S. stores, also suggested that the effects of digital price tags are being exaggerated, and economic experts say that most grocery bills won't be higher as a result of the tags. Still, data privacy experts have concerns about new technology being implemented at grocery stores broadly.

Adobe's Fresco painting app is now free for everyone, in an attempt to lure illustrators to join its creative software suite. The Verge reports: Fresco is essentially Adobe's answer to apps like Procreate and Clip Studio Paint, which all provide a variety of tools for both digital art and simulating real-world materials like sketching pencils and watercolor paints. Adobe Fresco is designed for touch and stylus-supported devices, and is available on iPad, iPhone, and Windows PCs. The app already had a free-to-use tier, but premium features like access to the full Adobe Fonts library, a much wider brush selection, and the ability to import custom brushes previously required a $9.99 annual subscription. That's pretty affordable for an Adobe subscription, but still couldn't compete with Procreate's $12.99 one-time purchase model.

Starting today, all of Fresco's premium features are no longer locked behind a paywall. The app first launched in 2019 and isn't particularly well-known compared to more established Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator that feature more complex, professional design tools. Fresco still has some interesting features of its own, like reflective and rotation symmetry (which mirror artwork as you draw) and the ability to quickly animate drawings with motion presets like "bounce" and "breathe."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: When Canadian developer Peter Todd found out that a new HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, was set to identify him as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, he was mostly just pissed. "This was clearly going to be a circus," Todd told WIRED in an email. The identity of the person -- or people -- who created Bitcoin has been the subject of speculation since December 2010, when they disappeared from public view. The mystery has proved all the more irresistible for the trove of bitcoin Satoshi is widely believed to have controlled, suspected to be worth many billions of dollars today. When the documentary was released on October 8, Todd joined a long line of alleged Satoshis.

Documentary maker Cullen Hoback, who in a previous film claimed to have identified the individual behind QAnon, laid out his theory to Todd on camera. The confrontation would become the climactic scene of the documentary. But Todd nonetheless claims he didn't see it coming; he alleges he was left with the impression the film was about the history of Bitcoin, not the identity of its creator. Since the documentary aired, Todd has repeatedly and categorically denied that he created Bitcoin: "For the record, I am not Satoshi," he alleges. "I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film."

For his part, Hoback remains confident in his conclusions. The various denials and deflections from Todd, he claims, are part of a grand and layered misdirection. "While of course we can't outright say he is Satoshi, I think that we make a very strong case," says Hoback. Whatever the truth, Todd will now bear the burden of having been unmasked as Satoshi. He has gone into hiding. [...] Todd expects that "continued harassment by crazy people" will become the indefinite status quo. But he says the potential personal safety implications are his chief concern -- and the reason he has gone into hiding. "Obviously, falsely claiming that ordinary people of ordinary wealth are extraordinarily rich exposes them to threats like robbery and kidnapping," says Todd. "Not only is the question dumb, it's dangerous. Satoshi obviously didn't want to be found, for good reasons, and no one should help people trying to find Satoshi." "I think the idea that it puts their life [at risk] is a little overblown," says Hoback. "This person is potentially on track to become the wealthiest on Earth."

"If countries are considering adopting this in their treasuries or making it legal tender, the idea that there's potentially this anonymous figure out there who controls one twentieth of the total supply of digital gold is pretty important."

The UK parliament is considering clamping down on how young people use smartphones. A bill brought forward by a Labour member of parliament proposes both banning phones in schools and raising the age at which children can consent to social media companies using their data. Wired: Calls for smartphone bans have been growing in the UK, driven by fears that the devices are driving a decline in kids' mental health and ability to focus. Smartphone Free Childhood, a prominent pressure group inspired by Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation, calls for parents to delay getting smartphones for their children until they are at least 13. Florida has already passed a law that bans under-14s from holding social media accounts, and Australia is considering similar restrictions.

But academics warn that smartphone and social media bans are unlikely to be a catch-all solution to the problems facing young people. Experts on the impact of digital technologies argue that the legislation could end up shutting children out from the potential benefits of smartphones, and that more pressure should be put on social media companies to design better digital worlds for children. The latest proposed clampdown in the UK is thin on details, but the MP bringing the bill, Josh MacAllister, told the radio show Today that it would prevent social media companies making use of young peoples' data until they are 16. "We can protect children from lots of the addictive bad design features that come from social media," he said. The bill would also make a ban on phones in schools legally binding.

The Financial Times: In the paediatric centre at one of London's largest hospitals, doctors are confounded each day by a ward computer that is not connected to a printer. The computer is used for managing the daily list of patients. Doctors can only access and update the list, using one shared account. So twice a day, two doctors on the ward said one of them had to log in to this computer, update the patient list, send the list to themselves via NHS email, and then log in to another nearby computer to print it off for the team. "I am at a top London hospital and yet at times I feel as though we are operating in the Stone Age," said one paediatrician on the ward.

Tackling the frustrating delays caused by outdated technology [Editor's note: non-paywalled link] is one of health secretary Wes Streeting and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's core missions, having vowed to shift the service "from an analogue to a digital NHS." The monumental task of moving the world's largest publicly funded health service into the digital age is not lost on doctors working on the frontline of the NHS. While many sectors of the economy have been "radically reshaped" by technology in recent years, a landmark report into the state of the health service in England last month concluded that the NHS stood "in the foothills of digital transformation."

But doctors and nurses point out that the basic infrastructure needs to be brought up to a minimum standard, given significant regional variations between hospitals, before politicians extol the virtues of cutting-edge tech. "Some of us just want the printers to work," noted one NHS hospital doctor. "The complete flip-a-coin nature of how equipped your hospital is is mind-boggling," they added. "I have worked in hospitals that are at least 12 years behind others." A report published in 2022 by the British Medical Association, the UK's main doctors' union, estimated that doctors in England lost 13.5mn working hours a year as a consequence of "inadequate IT systems and equipment." One reason for the outdated infrastructure is that the country has spent almost $48bn less than its peers -- such as Germany, France, Australia -- on health assets since the 2010s, according to a government-commissioned study by Lord Ara Darzi last month.

Actor Nicolas Cage warned young performers about the dangers of AI in film production during his speech at the Newport Beach Film Festival on Sunday. Cage urged actors to protect their craft from employment-based digital replica (EBDR) technology, which allows studios to manipulate performances post-filming. "This technology wants to take your instrument," Cage said. He explained that EBDR enables studios to alter actors' faces, voices, and body language after shooting, potentially compromising artistic integrity. Cage cited his cameo in "The Flash" as an example of EBDR use. He advised actors to consider their rights when approached with contracts permitting EBDR, coining the phrase "MVMFMBMI: my voice, my face, my body, my imagination."

An anonymous reader shared this report from ComicBook.com: On Saturday, 20th Century Studios announced that the latest entry in the Alien sci-fi horror franchise will get a limited-edition VHS release on December 3 — just in time for the holidays.

The VHS release of Alien: Romulus is the first such release from a major studio since 2006... a major win for fans of physical media. In recent months, there has been a great bit of conversation surrounding the so-called death of physical media with the rise of digital and streaming with some retailers even having previously announced that they have or will be stopping sales of physical media. But with streaming platforms removing content for various reasons, there's been a rise in appreciation for physical media which has, in turn, resulted in increased sales, particularly when it comes to limited edition items such as Steelbooks [collectible steel-case disc releases]... Given that the Alien: Romulus VHS release is part of an overall celebration of the franchise for its 45th anniversary year, leaning into that nostalgia for feels pretty spot on.
The release will present the movie "in a 4:3 aspect ratio," writes the Verge, "hopefully with well-done pan-and-scan..." (Their post includes a promotional picture showing the "slick, vintage-style" box-cover art.)

"The tape has only the film," notes Gizmodo, "and no special featurette attached at the end, like some used to back in the day."

Gizmodo also reminds readers of Hulu's 2025 series Alien: Earth and an upcoming videogame sequel to 2014's Alien: Isolation.

"Who asked for any of this in the first place?" wonders a New York Times consumer-tech writer. (Alternate URL here.) "Judging from the feedback I get from readers, lots of people outside the tech industry remain uninterested in AI — and are increasingly frustrated with how difficult it has become to ignore." The companies rely on user activity to train and improve their AI systems, so they are testing this tech inside products we use every day. Typing a question such as "Is Jay-Z left-handed?" in Google will produce an AI-generated summary of the answer on top of the search results. And whenever you use the search tool inside Instagram, you may now be interacting with Meta's chatbot, Meta AI. In addition, when Apple's suite of AI tools, Apple Intelligence, arrives on iPhones and other Apple products through software updates this month, the tech will appear inside the buttons we use to edit text and photos.

The proliferation of AI in consumer technology has significant implications for our data privacy, because companies are interested in stitching together and analyzing our digital activities, including details inside our photos, messages and web searches, to improve AI systems. For users, the tools can simply be an annoyance when they don't work well. "There's a genuine distrust in this stuff, but other than that, it's a design problem," said Thorin Klosowski, a privacy and security analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, and a former editor at Wirecutter, the reviews site owned by The New York Times. "It's just ugly and in the way."

It helps to know how to opt out. After I contacted Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google, they offered steps to turn off their AI tools or data collection, where possible. I'll walk you through the steps.
The article suggests logged-in Google users can toggle settings at myactivity.google.com. (Some browsers also have extensions that force Google's search results to stop inserting an AI summary at the top.) And you can also tell Edge to remove Copilot from its sidebar at edge://settings.

But "There is no way for users to turn off Meta AI, Meta said. Only in regions with stronger data protection laws, including the EU and Britain, can people deny Meta access to their personal information to build and train Meta's AI." On Instagram, for instance, people living in those places can click on "settings," then "about" and "privacy policy," which will lead to opt-out instructions. Everyone else, including users in the United States, can visit the Help Center on Facebook to ask Meta only to delete data used by third parties to develop its AI.
By comparison, when Apple releases new AI services this month, users will have to opt in, according to the article. "If you change your mind and no longer want to use Apple Intelligence, you can go back into the settings and toggle the Apple Intelligence switch off, which makes the tools go away."

A post shared Saturday on social media acknowledges those admins and developers at the Internet Archive working "literally round the clock... They have taken no days off this past week. They are taking none this weekend... they are working with all of their energy and considerable talent."

It describes people "working so incredibly hard... putting their all in," with a top priority of "getting the site back secure and safe".

But there's new and continuing problems, reports The Verge's weekend editor: Early this morning, I received an email from "The Internet Archive Team," replying to a message I'd sent on October 9th. Except its author doesn't seem to have been the digital archivists' support team — it was apparently written by the hackers who breached the site earlier this month and who evidently maintain some level of access to its systems.

I'm not alone. Users on the Internet Archive subreddit are reporting getting the replies, as well. Here is the message I received:

It's dispiriting to see that even after being made aware of the breach 2 weeks ago, IA has still not done the due diligence of rotating many of the API keys that were exposed in their gitlab secrets.

As demonstrated by this message, this includes a Zendesk token with perms to access 800K+ support tickets sent to info@archive.org since 2018.

Whether you were trying to ask a general question, or requesting the removal of your site from the Wayback Machine — your data is now in the hands of some random guy. If not me, it'd be someone else.
The site BleepingComputer believes they know the larger context, starting with the fact that they've also "received numerous messages from people who received replies to their old Internet Archive removal requests... The email headers in these emails also pass all DKIM, DMARC, and SPF authentication checks, proving they were sent by an authorized Zendesk server."

BleepingComputer also writes that they'd "repeatedly tried to warn the Internet Archive that their source code was stolen through a GitLab authentication token that was exposed online for almost two years."

And that "the threat actor behind the actual data breach, who contacted BleepingComputer through an intermediary to claim credit for the attack," has been frustrated by misreporting. (Specifically, they insist there were two separate attacks last week — a DDoS attack and a separate data breach for a 6.4-gigabyte database which includes email addresses for the site's 33 million users.) The threat actor told BleepingComputer that the initial breach of Internet Archive started with them finding an exposed GitLab configuration file on one of the organization's development servers, services-hls.dev.archive.org. BleepingComputer was able to confirm that this token has been exposed since at least December 2022, with it rotating multiple times since then. The threat actor says this GitLab configuration file contained an authentication token allowing them to download the Internet Archive source code. The hacker say that this source code contained additional credentials and authentication tokens, including the credentials to Internet Archive's database management system. This allowed the threat actor to download the organization's user database, further source code, and modify the site.

The threat actor claimed to have stolen 7TB of data from the Internet Archive but would not share any samples as proof. However, now we know that the stolen data also included the API access tokens for Internet Archive's Zendesk support system. BleepingComputer attempted contact the Internet Archive numerous times, as recently as on Friday, offering to share what we knew about how the breach occurred and why it was done, but we never received a response.
"The Internet Archive was not breached for political or monetary reasons," they conclude, "but simply because the threat actor could...

"While no one has publicly claimed this breach, BleepingComputer was told it was done while the threat actor was in a group chat with others, with many receiving some of the stolen data. This database is now likely being traded amongst other people in the data breach community, and we will likely see it leaked for free in the future on hacking forums like Breached."