The Royal Bahamas Police Force arrested FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, a press statement said. CoinDesk reports: The arrest came after the U.S. filed criminal charges against Bankman-Fried, the statement said, and the nation expects the U.S. to request The Bahamas extradite Bankman-Fried in short order. "As a result of the notification received and the material provided therewith, it was deemed appropriate for the Attorney General to seek SBF's arrest and hold him in custody pursuant to our nation's Extradition Act," the statement, attributed to Attorney General Ryan Pinder, said. "At such time as a formal request for extradition is made, The Bahamas intends to process it promptly, pursuant to Bahamian law and its treaty obligations with the United States."

A tweet from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York confirmed that prosecutors in the U.S. indicted Bankman-Fried, though the indictment remains under seal. In the Bahamas' statement, Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis said the country would continue pursuing its own investigation into FTX's collapse, alongside the U.S.'s criminal charges. Bankman-Fried was set to testify virtually before the House Financial Services Committee about the exchange's collapse on Tuesday.

"U.S. scientists have reportedly carried out the first nuclear fusion experiment to achieve a net energy gain," reports the Independent, "a major breakthrough in a field that has been pursuing such a result since the 1950s, and a potential milestone in the search for a climate-friendly, renewable energy source to replace fossil fuels." The experiment took place in recent weeks at the government-funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where researchers used a process known as inertial confinement fusion, the Financial Times reports, citing three people with knowledge of the experiment's preliminary results. The test involved bombarding a pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world's largest laser to trigger a nuclear fusion reaction, the same process which takes place in the sun.

Researchers were able to produce 2.5 megajoules of energy, 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules used to power the experiment. The laboratory confirmed to the FT it had recently conducted a "successful" experiment at the National Ignition Facility, but declined to comment further, citing the preliminary nature of the data....

"Scientists have struggled to show that fusion can release more energy out than is put in since the 1950s, and the researchers at Lawrence Livermore seem to have finally and absolutely smashed this decades-old goal," Arthur Turrell, deputy director of the UK Office for National Statistics, wrote on Twitter on Sunday. "This experimental result will electrify efforts to eventually power the planet with nuclear fusion — at a time when we've never needed a plentiful source of carbon-free energy more!"
But "the resources needed to recreate the reaction on the scale required to make fusion practical for energy production are immense," reports the Washington Post: More importantly, engineers have yet to develop machinery capable of affordably turning that reaction into electricity that can be practically deployed to the power grid. Building devices that are large enough to create fusion power at scale, scientists say, would require materials that are extraordinarily difficult to produce. At the same time, the reaction creates neutrons that put a tremendous amount of stress on the equipment creating it, such that it can get destroyed in the process. And then there is the question of whether the technology could be perfected in time to make a dent in climate change.

Even so, researchers and investors in fusion technology hailed the breakthrough as an important advancement.

Recently the EU voted to require tech companies like Apple to standardize on USB-C charging ports.

A CNN opinion piece calls this "a hallelujah moment for iPhone owners everywhere." iPhone cords are a very big business: There are reportedly about 1.2 billion active iPhones out in the wild. And if their charging cables need to be replaced once or twice a year as many users attest, at roughly $20 a pop, well, you could just about buy a Twitter a year for that sum.... While the new edict only directly applies to devices sold in the EU, India looks set to follow in Europe's footsteps....

[T]he move is almost certain to serve as the push that gets Apple to finally abandon its bespoke-battery-booster approach for future versions of the world's most popular smartphone. Even Greg Joswiak, the company's global head of marketing, admitted that the EU standardization push means the lifespan of Apple Lightning charging cables is likely finally over. And right on time, given that ten years ago Apple called it the "cable standard for the next decade...." It might even dilute some of the tribal tension between iPhone and Android users, assuming the latter don't lord over us the fact that most of them have already been charging with C for half a decade. (We still have our blue message bubbles, greenies!)

And it might generally reduce the temptation among tech companies, chief among them Apple, to "innovate" by introducing proprietary parts that regularly force an entire domino cascade of costly upgrades. (The fact that every new iPhone seems to be a random millimeter different in size and shape in each direction already means that brand new cases, cradles and screen protectors have to be repurchased along with new handsets, all for the privilege of a few hundred pixels of fresh real estate.) While that process may offer a welcome cash stimulus to the peripherals and accessories industry, it contributes to the massive environmental burden caused by e-waste, estimated at about 60 million tons a year — an amount heavier than the world's heaviest man-made object, the Great Wall of China.

Alphabet's DeepMind has built an AI tool that can help generate rough film and stage scripts Engadget's Kris Holt reports: Dramatron is a so-called "co-writing" tool that can generate character descriptions, plot points, location descriptions and dialogue. The idea is that human writers will be able to compile, edit and rewrite what Dramatron comes up with into a proper script. Think of it like ChatGPT, but with output that you can edit into a blockbuster movie script. To get started, you'll need an OpenAI API key and, if you want to reduce the risk of Dramatron outputting "offensive text," a Perspective API key. To test out Dramatron, I fed in the log line for a movie idea I had when I was around 15 that definitely would have been a hit if Kick-Ass didn't beat me to the punch. Dramatron quickly whipped up a title that made sense, and character, scene and setting descriptions. The dialogue that the AI generated was logical but trite and on the nose. Otherwise, it was almost as if Dramatron pulled the descriptions straight out of my head, including one for a scene that I didn't touch on in the log line.

Playwrights seemed to agree, according to a paper (PDF) that the team behind Dramatron presented today. To test the tool, the researchers brought in 15 playwrights and screenwriters to co-write scripts. According to the paper, playwrights said they wouldn't use the tool to craft a complete play and found that the AI's output can be formulaic. However, they suggested Dramatron would be useful for world building or to help them explore other approaches in terms of changing plot elements or characters. They noted that the AI could be handy for "creative idea generation" too. That said, a playwright staged four plays that used "heavily edited and rewritten scripts" they wrote with the help of Dramatron. DeepMind said that in the performance, experienced actors with improv skills "gave meaning to Dramatron scripts through acting and interpretation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Joe Bowser is a computer scientist based in Port Moody, British Columbia, who has long loved Raspberry Pis. He uses the low-cost, single-board computers, which were launched in February 2012 by a UK-based company of the same name, for many of his tech projects. Those include linking the Raspberry Pi up to a 3D printer, and using the Pi to run a machine-learning demo. There's one use case that Bowser described as "the most important": using a Raspberry Pi to identify the use of IMSI catchers -- telephone eavesdropping devices that snoop on phone calls and text messages -- by law enforcement. Protesters opposing new oil pipelines happen to pass by Bowser's house regularly. He thinks cops shouldn't spy on them. So he's trying to help out the protesters using his tech knowledge. To do that, he uses Raspberry Pis. Or more accurately, he did. Bowser has forsworn using the computers ever again. He and many others are expressing their displeasure with the company on social media.

The controversy began yesterday when Raspberry Pi posted an announcement on Twitter and Mastodon: "We hired a policeman and it's going really great." The company linked to a laudatory blog post on its website announcing it had hired an ex-police officer, Toby Roberts, as its maker-in-residence. "I was a Technical Surveillance Officer for 15 years, so I built stuff to hide video, audio, and other covert gear," Roberts is quoted as saying in the post. "You really don't want your sensitive police equipment discovered, so I'd disguise it as something else, like a piece of street furniture or a household item. The variety of tools and equipment I used then really shaped what I do today." A subsection of the Raspberry Pi community expressed concern about the blase way the company presented intrusive covert surveillance. (The news caused particular ire on Mastodon, leading some to describe Roberts as the burgeoning social media platform's first "main character.") [...]

Liz Upton, Raspberry Pi's cofounder and chief marketing officer, told BuzzFeed she believes that much of the issue stems not from the hiring of the former police officer who admitted to using Raspberry Pis for covert surveillance, but instead from a picture the account posted to Mastodon a day earlier showing pigs in blankets. "We didn't put a content warning on it, because we don't put a content warning on meat," Upton said. "There were quite a few people who tried to start dogpiling on that." She also claimed that part of the vitriolic response could be because Raspberry Pi is struggling with supply chain difficulties at present, and people "were already cross." "I think what we're looking at is a dogpile that's being organized somewhere," Upton said. "There's obviously a Discord or a forum somewhere." She did not provide evidence to support that claim. "I don't think this is organic, but it's very unpleasant, and extraordinarily unpleasant for the people involved," she said. Upton claimed both Roberts and Raspberry Pi's social media manager have been doxxed and received death threats. "I am disgusted that [Raspberry Pi's] official post on Toby Roberts' hiring promotes his use of their products to surveil individuals without their consent," Matt Lewis, a Denver-based site reliability engineer, wrote via Twitter DM. "In my eyes, this behavior is completely unethical and the work Toby has done for 15 years is indefensible. I'm also upset that they have chosen to double down on this position against the community outrage."

"I think this event will mark a turning point in the organization's reputation," added Wikipedia consultant Pete Forsyth in a Twitter DM. "It's hard to see how they can recover the trust they seem to have almost willfully dismantled today."

Not everyone is downbeat about the future of the company. University of Surrey cybersecurity professor Alan Woodward called Roberts an "interesting hire" for Raspberry Pi. "His previous uses of the Pi shows just what a versatile device it is: I'm sure he's not the only one using the smallest variants to make covert devices," Woodward said. "You find that you have to be very creative to build these types of covert devices, so hopefully he can now bring that to his new role, for a wider variety of applications."

"It's not as if he is going to corrupt any of the Pis -- like all technology, it has some uses some people will object to," he said. Rather, Woodward believes "the loudest objectors are taking it a bit far. Maybe they could look at it as a glass-half-full situation: Think of the unusual innovations he might bring."

A Japanese billionaire picked his crewmates for the first-ever artist-centered mission. Space.com reports: Yusaku Maezawa, who made his fortune as an online fashion retailer, announced the eight people who would be flying with him on the dearMoon mission, which aims to use a SpaceX Starship to fly around the moon as soon as next year. "I hope each and every one will recognize the responsibility that comes with leaving the Earth, travelling to the moon and back," Maezawa says in the video in Japanese, with a translation provided in-video.

Riding along with Maezawa will be:
- Steve Aoki, D.J., producer and electronic dance music artist with several Billboard-charting studio albums;
- Tim Dodd, YouTube creator of the "Everyday Astronaut" channel (Dodd has interviewed SpaceX founder Elon Musk multiple times on camera);
- Yemi A.D., artist and choreographer known for his work with JAD Dance Company and with Ye (formerly Kanye West);
- Karim Iliya, photographer whose publications include National Geographic Magazine;
- Rhiannon Adam, a photographer who has been supported by the BBC/Royal Geographical Society and won multiple awards, according to their website;
- Brendan Hall, filmmaker on projects such as the two-hour documentary "Blood Sugar Rising" about diabetes in the United States, according to the Internet Movie Database;
- Dev Joshi, an "Indian television actor known for portraying the role of Baal Veer in Sony Sab's Baal Veer and Baalveer Returns," according to the Internet Movie Database;
- T.O.P., a South Korean rapper known as the lead for the boy band Big Bang;
- Two backup members: dancer Miyu, and snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington.

Each member of the dearMoon crew was briefly quoted in a video from the dearMoon YouTube channel, and the announcement was confirmed on Dodd's and Maezawa's Twitter feeds.

CoinDesk's Daniel Kuhn writes in an opinion piece: Despite the focus on FTX following its catastrophic collapse, it's remarkable how little we know about how the crypto exchange and its in-house trading firm Alameda Research actually operated. New CEO John Jay Ray III has called Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto trading empire the "greatest failure of corporate controls" he's seen. Wednesday, Coffeezilla, a YouTuber with a rising star who has made a career of shining a light on sketchy projects in and out of crypto, pressed Bankman-Fried for information related to how different customer accounts were treated at the exchange. It turns out, there wasn't much differentiation -- at the very least during the final days the exchange was in business, Bankman-Fried admitted. "At the time, we wanted to treat customers equally," SBF said during a Twitter Spaces event. "That effectively meant that there was, you know, if you want to put it this way, like fungibility created" between the exchange's spot and derivatives business lines. For Coffeezilla, this looks like a smoking gun that fraud was committed.

At the very least, this is a contradiction of what Bankman-Fried had said just minutes before when first asked about the exchange's terms of service (ToS). "I do think we're treating them differently," Bankman-Fried said, referring to customer assets used for "margin versus staking versus spot versus futures collateral." All of those services come with different levels of risk, different promises made to customers and different responsibilities for the exchange. According to FTX's ToS, everyday users just looking to buy or store their cryptocurrencies on the centralized exchange could trust they were doing just that, buying and storing cryptographically unique digital assets. But now, thanks to skillful questioning by Coffeezilla, we know there were instead "omnibus" wallets and that spot and derivatives traders were essentially assuming the same level of risk.

We can also assume this was a longstanding practice at FTX. Bankman-Fried noted that during the "run on the exchange" (pardon the language), when people were attempting to get their assets off before withdrawals were shut down, FTX allowed "generalized withdrawals" from these omnibus wallets. But he also deflected, saying what, you wanted us to code up an entirely new process during a liquidity crisis? Before now, Bankman-Fried had been asked multiple times about the exchange's ToS and often managed to derail the conversation. He would often point to other sections of the document that stated clients using margin (taking out debt from FTX) could have their funds used by the exchange. Or he would bring up a vestigial wire process in place before FTX had banking relationships. Apparently, according to SBF, customers had sent money to Alameda to fund accounts on FTX and somewhere along the lines this capital ended up in a rarely seen subaccount. This also had the benefit of inflating Alameda's books, another dark corner of the empire. Further reading: FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Is Said To Face Market Manipulation Inquiry

Lukasz Siewierski, a member of Google's Android Security Team, has a post on the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative (AVPI) issue tracker detailing leaked platform certificate keys that are actively being used to sign malware. From a report: The post is just a list of the keys, but running each one through APKMirror or Google's VirusTotal site will put names to some of the compromised keys: Samsung, LG, and Mediatek are the heavy hitters on the list of leaked keys, along with some smaller OEMs like Revoview and Szroco, which makes Walmart's Onn tablets. [...] Esper Senior Technical Editor Mishaal Rahman, as always, has been posting great info about this on Twitter. As he explains, having an app grab the same UID as the Android system isn't quite root access, but it's close and allows an app to break out of whatever limited sandboxing exists for system apps. These apps can directly communicate with (or, in the case of malware, spy on) other apps across your phone. Imagine a more evil version of Google Play Services, and you get the idea.

Microsoft is launching a new communities feature for Microsoft Teams today, designed for consumers to use the best parts of Teams free of charge to create and organize groups. From a report: The new community feature will allow groups to use the calendar, meeting, and chat features of Teams. Features like group chat, calling, and file / photo sharing are all supported, and groups will also be able to use a shared calendar (which includes Google Calendar integration) to organize community events. This new community integration is really aimed at groups like sports clubs or even virtual community groups for small businesses and simple groups like a carpool for co-workers to organize transportation. Facebook, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, Twitter, and many other services already provide a variety of ways to organize groups online, so Microsoft is entering a crowded market, but it believes Teams has something different to offer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Facebook parent company Meta on Monday threatened to remove news from its social media platform in the US if Congress approves a bill that would allow news organizations to collectively bargain with tech companies for compensation. Andy Stone, Meta's head of policy communications, wrote on Twitter that Facebook would "be forced to consider removing news" if the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act becomes law. He added that the proposal fails to recognize that publishers and broadcasters put their content on Facebook "because it benefits their bottom line -- not the other way around."

The bill, which was proposed in March 2021, is reportedly being considered by lawmakers for inclusion with a must-pass annual defense bill. The News Media Alliance, a trade group representing newspaper publishers that supports the bill, called Facebook's threat "undemocratic and unbecoming," adding that "as the tech platforms compensate news publishers around the world, it demonstrates there is a demand and economic value for news." More than 20 organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, have urged lawmakers to reconsider support for the "problematic" bill, warning (PDF) that it would "create an ill-advised antitrust exemption for publishers and broadcasters." A similar law in Australia giving the government power to make internet giants Meta and Alphabet's Google negotiate content supply deals with media outlets has largely worked, a government report said last week. But the bill did result in a brief shutdown of Facebook news feeds in the country.

This year, Oxford Languages, the creator of the Oxford English Dictionary, titled "goblin mode" as the 2022 Word of the Year, meaning it best reflected the ethos and mood of the past 12 months. The slang term is defined as a "type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations." NPR reports: The term first appeared on Twitter in 2009 but didn't go viral until 2022, according to Oxford Languages. "It captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to 'normal life', or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media," the group wrote in a press release. "People are embracing their inner goblin," said Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages.

The Word of the Year is typically based on analyzing language data on emerging words and their popularity. But this year, Oxford Languages incorporated a public vote into the process and asked people to cast their ballot between the top three expressions of the year: "goblin mode," "metaverse" and "#IStandWith." More than 300,000 people voted with an overwhelming majority -- about 93% -- favoring "goblin mode."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The Blender Institute develops Blender, a free and open source 3D graphics tool used to create animated films. Sintel and Big Buck Bunny are among Blender's most recognizable titles and due to Creative Commons licensing (CC BY), they are widely shared, used, remixed and reshared. According to original Blender creator Ton Roosendaal, "Open licenses are essential for sharing our films and their source material." Right now, a company is claiming that Blender's free content is actually their content and as a result, must be immediately removed from the internet. We're talking about content that was created with Blender's explicit blessing but even after multiple appeals, not even YouTube will see reason.

Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz is the co-founder and CTO at AI-focused driver safety company, Nexar. On Sunday he informed TorrentFreak that he's also an independent film composer and producer, working with music production libraries, and distributing to the main music platforms. TorrentFreak contacted Bruno after noticing a post he made on a music production forum. He wrote that after uploading a video containing a clip from the Blender movie Caminandes 3 -- Llamigos, YouTube notified him that a rightsholder had filed a copyright complaint, his video had been taken down, and a copyright strike had been issued to his account. The complaint, sent by Uzbekistan-based media/news company ZO'R TV, was not the result of automatic matching under Content ID. It was filed as a formal DMCA notice, meaning that someone probably reviewed the details before sending the complaint. The notice claimed that Bruno had infringed ZO'R TV's copyrights by reproducing content (6:21 to 8:26) from this YouTube video published in 2018.

Since the content in question is obviously from Blender's film Caminandes 3, ZO'R TV was in no position to issue a DMCA notice. On that basis, Bruno followed the recognized procedure by sending a DMCA counternotice to YouTube. It didn't go well. After filing his counternotice with YouTube, Bruno was informed that since he'd provided insufficient information, YouTube could not process it. However, YouTube did inform Bruno of the risks of filing a counternotice, including that his name could be sent to the claimant, ZO'R TV in this case. Determined to have his video restored, Bruno accepted the risks and sent another counternotice to YouTube. This time there was no indication that the counternotice was deficient. YouTube thanked him for filing it -- but still declined to process it. YouTube's email advised Bruno that counternotices should only be filed in case of a mistake or misidentification. Consulting with a lawyer first might be helpful, YouTube added. After three attempts to restore the video and have the copyright strike removed, YouTube responded once again. The message contained yet more disappointment for Bruno. "Based on the information that you have provided, it appears that you do not have the necessary rights to post the content on YouTube. Therefore, we regretfully cannot honor your request," it advised. This signaled the end of the debate as far as YouTube was concerned and by rejecting Bruno's right to send a counternotice, the platform denied him an opportunity to have the video restored, stand up for Blender's rights, and get the strike removed. After notifying Blender of the situation, Blender developed Ton Roosendaal replied, saying the company has "no staff here available to go after situations like this" but suggested they could "escalate it to the Creative Commons organization."

"After all, it's their mission," he added.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried promised to testify before Congress after he finished "learning and reviewing" the events that caused the popular cryptocurrency exchange to file for bankruptcy last month. The Verge reports: Bankman-Fried's promise was made in response to a tweet from House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) last week calling on him to join the committee's hearing on FTX's collapse on December 13th. But Bankman-Fried didn't commit to testifying at the hearing scheduled for next week.

"Once I have finished learning and reviewing what happened, I would feel like it was my duty to appear before the committee and explain," Bankman-Fried said in a tweet on Sunday. "I'm not sure that will happen by the 13th. But when it does, I will testify." Bankman-Fried resigned as FTX's chief executive last month, a move that could hinder his ability to fully review internal company materials before agreeing to testify.

Ron Miller reports via TechCrunch: It's been quite a roller coaster ride for Bret Taylor over the last year. In one week last December, he was named board chair at Twitter and co-CEO at Salesforce. One year later, he doesn't have either job. Taylor lost the job as Twitter board chair when Elon Musk took over last month and dissolved the Twitter board immediately. Today, he stepped down as co-CEO at Salesforce in a stunning announcement that appeared to come out of the blue. "After a lot of reflection, I've decided to return to my entrepreneurial roots. Salesforce has never been more relevant to customers, and with its best-in-class management team and the company executing on all cylinders, now is the right time for me to step away," Taylor said in a statement announcing his resignation.

Taylor, who helped guide the $27 billion Slack acquisition in 2020, appeared to be in line to take over whenever company founder and CEO Marc Benioff decided to step down. Now he has stepped away, and it's not clear what has changed. Benioff called his co-CEO's resignation "a bittersweet moment" in a statement, and said he would always be his biggest champion. He repeated Taylor's words about him returning to his entrepreneurial roots. Perhaps Taylor really had enough of running a big company, but it does seem strange timing, right after he appeared onstage with Benioff at Dreamforce in September.

"The Perl Advent Calendar has come a long way since it's first year in 2000," says an announcement on Reddit. But in fact the online world now has many daily advent calendars aimed at programmers — offering tips about their favorite language or coding challenges.

• The HTMHell site — which bills itself as "a collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites" — decided to try publishing 24 original articles for their 2022 HTMHell Advent Calendar. Elsewhere on the way there's the Web Performance Calendar, promising daily articles for speed geeks. And the 24 Days in December blog comes to life every year with new blog posts for PHP users.

• The JVM Advent Calendar brings a new article daily about a JVM-related topic. And there's also a C# Advent calendar promising two new blog posts about C# every day up to (and including) December 25th.

• The Perl Advent Calendar offers fun stories about Perl tools averting December catastrophes up at the North Pole. (Day One's story — "Silent Mite" — described Santa's troubles building software for a ninja robot alien toy, since its embedded hardware support contract prohibited unwarrantied third-party code, requiring a full code rewrite using Perl's standard library.) Other stories so far this December include "Santa is on GitHub" and "northpole.cgi"

• The code quality/security software company SonarSource has a new 2022 edition of their Code Security Advent Calendar — their seventh consecutive year — promising "daily challenges until December 24th. Get ready to fill your bag of security tricks!" (According to a blog post the challenges are being announced on Twitter and on Mastadon.

• Just as the Perl community spawned another language named Perl 6 — now called Raku — there's also a Raku-themed advent calendar. (It's now at a new URL, though it's been running since 2009.) Day Three's post tells the story of Santa and the Rakupod Wranglers.

• "24 Pull Requests" dares participants to make 24 pull requests before December 24th. (The site's tagline is "giving back to open source for the holidays.") Over the years tens of thousands of developers (and organizations) have participated — and this year they're also encouraging organizers to hold hack events.

• The Advent of JavaScript and Advent of CSS sites promise 24 puzzles delivered by email (though you'll have to pay if you also want them to email you the solutions!)

• TryHackMe.com has its own set of darily cybersecurity puzzles (and even a few prizes).

• For 2022 Oslo-based Bekk Consulting (a "strategic internet consulting company") is offering an advent calendar of their own. A blog post says its their sixth annual edition, and promises "new original articles, podcasts, tutorials, listicles and videos every day up until Christmas Eve... all written and produced by us - developers, designers, project managers, agile coaches, management consultants, specialists and generalists."

Whether you participate or not, the creation of programming-themed advent calendar sites is a long-standing tradition among geeks, dating back more than two decades. (Last year Smashing magazine tried to compile an exhaustive list of the various sites serving all the different developer communities.)

But no list would be complete without mentioning Advent of Code. This year's programming puzzles involve everything from feeding Santa's reindeer and loading Santa's sleigh. The site's About page describes it as "an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like."

Now in its eighth year, the site's daily two-part programmig puzzles have a massive online following. This year's Day One puzzle was solved by 178,628 participants...

The writers of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story "had an idea for a sequel that would have been even darker and more morally ambiguous," writes Screen Rant: Rogue One told the story of how the Rebel Alliance gained access to the Death Star plans, and further explored the sacrifices that needed to be made to defeat the Empire. Famously, the movie led straight into the events of Star Wars: A New Hope, and most of its main characters died, so there was never any true hope for a direct Rogue One sequel. However, the writers of Rogue One did once discuss an idea for a thematic sequel that would have delved into the moral ambiguity of the Rebellion.

Co-writers Gary Whitta and Chris Weitz conceptualized a Rogue One sequel show that would have involved a "Mossad-style Rebel team" tracking down fleeing Imperial war criminals after the fall of the Empire. This would have been an interesting continuation of Rogue One's narrative; a Star Wars show in which the darker side of the Rebel victory could be explored. In that scenario, the Rebels would have had to fight on the offensive, not defensively, reversing the war's dynamic entirely. The show could have explored how far the Rebels were willing to go to hold onto their hard-won freedom, and whether it mirrored anything the Empire did to hang onto its dictatorship.
At the time Lucasfilm was experimenting with "one-and-done stories within blockbuster movies," the article point sout. But Solo: A Star Wars Story "was unable to replicate the same winning formula" as Rogue One. "After that, the ideas for Star Wars' anthology movies fizzled out, essentially replaced with Star Wars TV once Disney+ launched in 2019."

And in an earlier article, Screen Rant points out that The Mandalorian "has already filled in the story gaps that the Rogue One writers were looking to explore. That series dug deep into the criminal underbelly of the post-Empire galaxy and how the remaining imperial loyalists chose to spend their time."

"Graduate students at Northeastern University were able to organize and beat back an attempt at introducing invasive surveillance devices that were quietly placed under desks at their school," reports Motherboard: Early in October, Senior Vice Provost David Luzzi installed motion sensors under all the desks at the school's Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex (ISEC), a facility used by graduate students and home to the "Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute" which studies surveillance. These sensors were installed at night — without student knowledge or consent — and when pressed for an explanation, students were told this was part of a study on "desk usage," according to a blog post by Max von Hippel, a Privacy Institute PhD candidate who wrote about the situation for the Tech Workers Coalition's newsletter....

Students began to raise concerns about the sensors, and an email was sent out by Luzzi attempting to address issues raised by students.... Luzzi wrote, the university had deployed "a Spaceti occupancy monitoring system" that would use heat sensors at groin level to "aggregate data by subzones to generate when a desk is occupied or not." Luzzi added that the data would be anonymized, aggregated to look at "themes" and not individual time at assigned desks, not be used in evaluations, and not shared with any supervisors of the students. Following that email, an impromptu listening session was held in the ISEC. At this first listening session, Luzzi asked that grad student attendees "trust the university since you trust them to give you a degree...."

After that, the students at the Privacy Institute, which specialize in studying surveillance and reversing its harm, started removing the sensors, hacking into them, and working on an open source guide so other students could do the same. Luzzi had claimed the devices were secure and the data encrypted, but Privacy Institute students learned they were relatively insecure and unencrypted.... After hacking the devices, students wrote an open letter to Luzzi and university president Joseph E. Aoun asking for the sensors to be removed because they were intimidating, part of a poorly conceived study, and deployed without IRB approval even though human subjects were at the center of the so-called study.
von Hippel notes that many members of the computer science department were also in a union, and thus networked together for a quick mass response. Motherboard writes that the controversy ultimately culminated with another listening session in which Luzzi "struggles to quell concerns that the study is invasive, poorly planned, costly, and likely unethical."

"Afterwards, von Hippel took to Twitter and shares what becomes a semi-viral thread documenting the entire timeline of events from the secret installation of the sensors to the listening session occurring that day. Hours later, the sensors are removed..."

A reader submits a report:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) research company OpenAI on Wednesday announced ChatGPT, a prototype dialogue-based AI chatbot capable of understanding natural language and responding in natural language. It has since taken the internet by storm, with people marvelling at how intelligent the AI-powered bot sounds. Some even called it a replacement for Google, since it's capable of giving solutions to complex problems directly," almost like a personal know-all teacher.

"We've trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests," OpenAI wrote on its announcement page for ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is based on GPT-3.5, a language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. However, while the older GPT-3 model only took text prompts and tried to continue on that with its own generated text, ChatGPT is more engaging. It's much better at generating detailed text and can even come up with poems. Another unique characteristic is memory. The bot can remember earlier comments in a conversation and recount them to the user. ChatGPT wrote a poem about Slashdot. And another one about Dogecoin.

Try ChatGPT for yourself here.

"Twitter CEO Elon Musk turned to journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday to reveal the decision-making behind the platform's suppression of a 2020 article from the New York Post regarding Hunter Biden's laptop," reports Newsweek.

"Taibbi later deleted a tweet showing [former Twitter CEO] Jack Dorsey's email address," adds the Verge, covering reactions to Taibbi's thread — and the controversial events that the tweets described: At the time, it was not clear if the materials were genuine, and Twitter decided to ban links to or images of the Post's story, citing its policy on the distribution of hacked materials. The move was controversial even then, primarily among Republicans but also with speech advocates worried about Twitter's decision to block a news outlet. While Musk might be hoping we see documents showing Twitter's (largely former) staffers nefariously deciding to act in a way that helped now-President Joe Biden, the communications mostly show a team debating how to finalize and communicate a difficult moderation decision.
Taibbi himself tweeted that "Although several sources recalled hearing about a 'general' warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there's no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story."

More from the Verge: Meanwhile, Taibbi's handling of the emails — which seem to have been handed to him at Musk's direction, though he only refers to "sources at Twitter" — appears to have exposed personal email addresses for two high-profile leaders: Dorsey and Representative Ro Khanna. An email address that belongs to someone Taibbi identifies as Dorsey is included in one message, in which Dorsey forwards an article Taibbi wrote criticizing Twitter's handling of the Post story. Meanwhile, Khanna confirmed to The Verge that his personal Gmail address is included in another email, in which Khanna reaches out to criticize Twitter's decision to restrict the Post's story as well.

"As the congressman who represents Silicon Valley, I felt Twitter's actions were a violation of First Amendment principles so I raised those concerns," Khanna said in a statement to The Verge. "Our democracy can only thrive if we are open to a marketplace of ideas and engaging with people with whom we disagree."

The story also revealed the names of multiple Twitter employees who were in communications about the moderation decision. While it's not out of line for journalists to report on the involvement of public-facing individuals or major decision makers, that doesn't describe all of the people named in the leaked communications.... "I don't get why naming names is necessary. Seems dangerous," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote Friday in apparent reference to the leaks.... The Verge reached out to Taibbi for comment but didn't immediately hear back.

Twitter, which had its communications team dismantled during layoffs last month, also did not respond to a request for comment.
Wired adds: What did the world learn about Twitter's handling of the incident from the so-called Twitter Files? Not much. After all, Twitter reversed its decision two days later, and then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the moderation decision was "wrong."
In other news, "Twitter will start showing view count for all tweets," Elon Musk announced Friday, "just as view count is shown for all videos." And he shared other insights into his plans for Twitter's future.

"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of reach. Negativity should & will get less reach than positivity."

CNN reports on the aftermath of last weekend's protests against the Chinese government: A protester told CNN they received a phone call Wednesday from a police officer, who revealed they were tracked because their cellphone signal was recorded in the vicinity of the protest site.... When they denied being there, the caller asked: "Then why did your cellphone number show up there?"

In China, all mobile phone users are required by law to register their real name and national identification number with telecom providers. The protester was also told to report to a police station for questioning and to sign a written record....

In Shanghai, where some of the boldest protests took place with crowds calling for Xi's removal on two consecutive nights, police searched residents' cellphones in the streets and in the subway for VPNs that can be used to circumvent China's internet firewall, or apps such as Twitter and Telegram, which though banned in the country have been used by protesters. Police also confiscated the cellphones of protesters under arrest, according to two protesters who spoke to CNN.

A protester who was arrested over the weekend said they were told to hand over their phone and password to the police as "evidence." They said they feared police would export the data on their phone after it was confiscated by officers, who told them they could pick it up a week later. Another protester said police returned their phone upon their release, but officers had deleted the photo album and removed the WeChat social media app.
One protester told CNN they successfully avoided being contacted by the police as of Thursady afternoon.

During the demonstration, they'd kept their phone in airplane mode.