Parallels Desktop now supports running 64-bit x86 operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs through its proprietary emulation engine, enabling users to run traditional Windows and Linux distributions. However, performance is said to be "really slow." How-To Geek reports: The latest Parallels Desktop 20.2 update adds early support for x86 emulation on Apple Silicon, allowing traditional x86 PC operating systems to work on newer Mac computers. There were already apps like UTM that could do it (most of them are based on QEMU), but this feature uses Parallels' "proprietary emulation engine" paired with Apple's built-in hypervisor. [...] Parallels on Apple Silicon can now "run existing x86_64 Windows 10, Windows 11*, Windows Server 2019/2022, and some Linux distributives with UEFI BIOS via Parallels Emulator." You can also create new Windows 10 21H2 and Windows Server 2022 virtual machines if needed. There are some big limitations. You can only run 64-bit x86 operating systems -- sorry, FreeDOS fans -- but those 64-bit operating systems can run 32-bit applications. There's also no support for USB devices, nested virtualization (so WSL2 won't work), or the Parallels hypervisor. Performance will also be "really slow," since x86 instructions have to be translated to ARM. The company said, "Windows boot time is about 2-7 minutes, depending on your hardware. Windows operating system responsiveness is also low."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The number of deaths in the U.S. is expected to exceed the number of births by 2033, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) annual 30-year projection of the U.S. population released on Monday. That estimation comes seven years earlier than what the CBO estimated in its 30-year population outlook released last year. At that time, in January 2024, the CBO projected deaths to outpace births by 2040. The CBO's 2025 report projected lower population growth over the next three decades than it did in its 2024 demographic outlook. The CBO's population estimate for 2025 is 350 million, a slight increase from the 346 million it predicted for 2025 last year. But its projection for 2054 -- 372 million people -- has decreased since last year, when the CBO projected the population would be 383 million in 2054. The rate of growth projected over the next three decades -- 0.2 percent -- is significantly slower than the rate seen in the prior five decades, from 1975 to 2024, when the population grew at 0.9 percent. The growth rate over the next three decades is also expected to slow. From 2025 to 2035, the population is expected to grow an average of 0.4 percent a year. From 2036 to 2055, however, the growth rate is projected to be 0.1 percent. The CBO attributes this projected slow rate of growth to a variety of factors, including lower fertility, an aging population and lower immigration.

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The Australian Open has introduced a project called AO Animated -- "near-live, commentated coverage of the Australian Open, free to anyone across the world via YouTube, enhanced via a stream of comments from a like-minded online community," reports The Guardian. Blending real-world data with virtual avatars, the animated coverage has garnered significant viewer interest, especially among gamers and tech enthusiasts. From the report: [I]t's no surprise a project called AO Animated has taken off at this year's grand slam tournament at Melbourne Park. The catch? The players, ball and court are all computer-generated. That hasn't dissuaded hundreds of thousands of viewers from tuning into this vision of the Australian Open, featuring video game-like avatars but using real-world data in an emerging category of sports broadcasting helping tennis reach new fans. The loophole allows the Australian Open to show a version of live events at the tournament on its own channels, despite having sold lucrative exclusive broadcast rights to partners across the globe. The technology made its debut at the grand slam last year and audiences peaked for the men's final, the recording of which has attracted almost 800,000 views on YouTube. Interest appears to be trending up this year and the matches are attracting roughly four times as many viewers than the equivalent time in 2024. The director of innovation at Tennis Australia, Machar Reid, said although the technology was far from polished it was developing quickly. "Limb tracking is complex, you've got 12 cameras trying to process the silhouette of the human in real time, and stitch that together across 29 points in the skeleton," he said. "It's not as seamless as it could be -- we don't have fingers -- but in time you can begin to imagine a world where that comes." The data from sensors on the court is ingested and fed into a system that can produce the graphic reproduction with a two-minute delay. The same commentary and arena noises that would otherwise be heard on the television -- as well as interstitial vision direct from the broadcast -- are synced with the virtual representation of the match.

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Pixelfed has launched its mobile app for iOS and Android, solidifying its position as a viable alternative to Instagram. The move also comes at a pivotal moment, as a potential Supreme Court ban on TikTok could drive users to explore other social media platforms. Pixelfed is ad-free, open source, decentralized, defaults to chronological feeds and doesn't share user data with third parties. Engadget reports: The platform launched in 2018, but was only available on the web or through third-party app clients. The Android app debuted on January 9 and the iOS app released today. Creator Daniel Supernault posted on Mastodon Monday evening that the platform had 11,000 users join over the preceding 24 hours and that more than 78,000 posts have been shared to Pixelfed to date. The platform runs on ActivityPub, the same protocol that powers several other decentralized social networks in the fediverse, such as Mastodon and Flipboard. The iOS and Android apps are available at their respective links. Further reading: Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed

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OpenAI's "reasoning" AI model, o1, has exhibited a puzzling behavior of "thinking" in Chinese, Persian, or some other language -- "even when asked a question in English," reports TechCrunch. While the exact cause remains unclear, as OpenAI has yet to provide an explanation, AI experts have proposed a few theories. From the report: Several on X, including Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue, alluded to the fact that reasoning models like o1 are trained on datasets containing a lot of Chinese characters. Ted Xiao, a researcher at Google DeepMind, claimed that companies including OpenAI use third-party Chinese data labeling services, and that o1 switching to Chinese is an example of "Chinese linguistic influence on reasoning." "[Labs like] OpenAI and Anthropic utilize [third-party] data labeling services for PhD-level reasoning data for science, math, and coding," Xiao wrote in a post on X. "[F]or expert labor availability and cost reasons, many of these data providers are based in China." [...] Other experts don't buy the o1 Chinese data labeling hypothesis, however. They point out that o1 is just as likely to switch to Hindi, Thai, or a language other than Chinese while teasing out a solution. Other experts don't buy the o1 Chinese data labeling hypothesis, however. They point out that o1 is just as likely to switch to Hindi, Thai, or a language other than Chinese while teasing out a solution. Rather, these experts say, o1 and other reasoning models might simply be using languages they find most efficient to achieve an objective (or hallucinating). "The model doesn't know what language is, or that languages are different," Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher and assistant professor at the University of Alberta, told TechCrunch. "It's all just text to it." Tiezhen Wang, a software engineer at AI startup Hugging Face, agrees with Guzdial that reasoning models' language inconsistencies may be explained by associations the models made during training. "By embracing every linguistic nuance, we expand the model's worldview and allow it to learn from the full spectrum of human knowledge," Wang wrote in a post on X. "For example, I prefer doing math in Chinese because each digit is just one syllable, which makes calculations crisp and efficient. But when it comes to topics like unconscious bias, I automatically switch to English, mainly because that's where I first learned and absorbed those ideas." [...] Luca Soldaini, a research scientist at the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI, cautioned that we can't know for certain. "This type of observation on a deployed AI system is impossible to back up due to how opaque these models are," they told TechCrunch. "It's one of the many cases for why transparency in how AI systems are built is fundamental."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Biden administration finalized a new rule that would effectively ban all Chinese vehicles from the US under the auspices of blocking the "sale or import" of connected vehicle software from "countries of concern." The rule could have wide-ranging effects on big automakers, like Ford and GM, as well as smaller manufacturers like Polestar -- and even companies that don't produce cars, like Waymo. The rule covers everything that connects a vehicle to the outside world, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite components. It also addresses concerns that technology like cameras, sensors, and onboard computers could be exploited by foreign adversaries to collect sensitive data about US citizens and infrastructure. And it would ban China from testing its self-driving cars on US soil. "Cars today have cameras, microphones, GPS tracking, and other technologies connected to the internet," US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a statement. "It doesn't take much imagination to understand how a foreign adversary with access to this information could pose a serious risk to both our national security and the privacy of U.S. citizens. To address these national security concerns, the Commerce Department is taking targeted, proactive steps to keep [People's Republic of China] and Russian-manufactured technologies off American roads." The rules for prohibited software go into effect for model year 2027 vehicles, while the ban on hardware from China waits until model year 2030 vehicles. According to Reuters, the rules were updated from the original proposal to exempt vehicles weighing over 10,000 pounds, which would allow companies like BYD to continue to assemble electric buses in California. The Biden administration published a fact sheet with more information about this rule. "[F]oreign adversary involvement in the supply chains of connected vehicles poses a significant threat in most cars on the road today, granting malign actors unfettered access to these connected systems and the data they collect," the White House said. "As PRC automakers aggressively seek to increase their presence in American and global automotive markets, through this final rule, President Biden is delivering on his commitment to secure critical American supply chains and protect our national security."

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A week after announcing performance-based job cuts similar to those at Meta, Microsoft said it also plans to pause hiring in part of its consulting unit. CNBC reports: The changes by the U.S. consulting division are meant to align with a policy by the Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions organization, which has about 60,000 employees, according to a page on Microsoft's website. The changes are in place through the remainder of the 2025 fiscal year ending in June. To reduce costs, Microsoft's consulting division will hold off on hiring new employees and back-filling roles, consulting executive Derek Danois told employees in the memo. Careful management of costs is of utmost importance, Danois wrote. The memo also instructs employees to not expense travel for any internal meetings and use remote sessions instead. Additionally, executives will have to authorize trips to customers' sites to ensure spending is being used on the right customers, Danois wrote. Additionally, the group will cut its marketing and non-billable external resource spend by 35%, the memo says. Further reading: Companies Deploy AI To Curb Hiring as 'Cost Avoidance' Gains Ground

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ChatGPT can now schedule reminders and recurring tasks -- but only if you're a ChatGPT Plus, Team, or Pro subscriber. TechCrunch reports: With tasks, users can set simple reminders with ChatGPT such as, "Remind me when my passport expires in six months," and the AI assistant will follow up with a push notification on whatever platform you have tasks enabled. Users can also now set recurring requests to ChatGPT, such as, "Every Friday, give me a weekend plan based on my location and the weather forecast," or "Give me a news briefing every day at 7 a.m." [...] Users can access tasks by selecting "4o with scheduled tasks" from a dropdown menu in ChatGPT. From there, they can send ChatGPT a message telling the AI assistant what reminder or action they want to create. At times, OpenAI says ChatGPT may suggest certain tasks based on chats. Users can set and manage tasks by chatting with the AI assistant on any platform, or through a dedicated tasks manager tab that's only available on the web app. Through the tasks feature, ChatGPT can now browse the web on a set schedule, but it will not run continuous searches in the background or make purchases. For example, you could instruct ChatGPT to check once a month for concert tickets to see your favorite artist in your area, but you can neither tell the AI assistant to alert you the moment the tickets go live, nor can ChatGPT buy tickets for you. That said, it's a step toward those [agentic] systems.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Texas has sued (PDF) one of the nation's largest car insurance providers alleging that it violated the state's privacy laws by surreptitiously collecting detailed location data on millions of drivers and using that information to justify raising insurance premiums. The state's attorney general, Ken Paxton, said the lawsuit against Allstate and its subsidiary Arity is the first enforcement action ever filed by a state attorney general to enforce a data privacy law. It also follows a deceptive business practice lawsuit he filed against General Motors accusing the car manufacturer of misleading customers by collecting and selling driver data. In 2015, Allstate developed the Arity Driving Engine software development kit (SDK), a package of code that the company allegedly paid mobile app developers to install in their products in order to collect a variety of sensitive data from consumers' phones. The SDK gathered phone geolocation data, accelerometer, and gyroscopic data, details about where phone owners started and ended their trips, and information about "driving behavior," such as whether phone owners appeared to be speeding or driving while distracted, according to the lawsuit. The apps that installed the SDK included GasBuddy, Fuel Rewards, and Life360, a popular family monitoring app, according to the lawsuit. Paxton's complaint said that Allstate and Arity used the data collected by its SDK to develop and sell products to other insurers like Drivesight, an algorithmic model that assigned a driving risk score to individuals, and ArityIQ, which allowed other insurers to "[a]ccess actual driving behavior collected from mobile phones and connected vehicles to use at time of quote to more precisely price nearly any driver." Allstate and Arity marketed the products as providing "driver behavior" data but because the information was collected via mobile phones the companies had no way of determining whether the owner was actually driving, according to the lawsuit. "For example, if a person was a passenger in a bus, a taxi, or in a friend's car, and that vehicle's driver sped, hard braked, or made a sharp turn, Defendants would conclude that the passenger, not the actual driver, engaged in 'bad' driving behavior," the suit states. Neither Allstate and Arity nor the app developers properly informed customers in their privacy policies about what data the SDK was collecting or how it would be used, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit violates Texas' Data Privacy and Security Act (DPSA) and insurance code by failing to address violations within the required 30-day cure period. "In its complaint, filed in federal court, Texas requested that Allstate be ordered to pay a penalty of $7,500 per violation of the state's data privacy law and $10,000 per violation of the state's insurance code, which would likely amount to millions of dollars given the number of consumers allegedly affected," adds the report. "The lawsuit also asks the court to make Allstate delete all the data it obtained through actions that allegedly violated the privacy law and to make full restitution to customers harmed by the companies' actions."

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A new ransomware group called Codefinger targets AWS S3 buckets by exploiting compromised or publicly exposed AWS keys to encrypt victims' data using AWS's own SSE-C encryption, rendering it inaccessible without the attacker-generated AES-256 keys. While other security researchers have documented techniques for encrypting S3 buckets, "this is the first instance we know of leveraging AWS's native secure encryption infrastructure via SSE-C in the wild," Tim West, VP of services with the Halcyon RISE Team, told The Register. "Historically AWS Identity IAM keys are leaked and used for data theft but if this approach gains widespread adoption, it could represent a significant systemic risk to organizations relying on AWS S3 for the storage of critical data," he warned. From the report: ... in addition to encrypting the data, Codefinder marks the compromised files for deletion within seven days using the S3 Object Lifecycle Management API â" the criminals themselves do not threaten to leak or sell the data, we're told. "This is unique in that most ransomware operators and affiliate attackers do not engage in straight up data destruction as part of a double extortion scheme or to otherwise put pressure on the victim to pay the ransom demand," West said. "Data destruction represents an additional risk to targeted organizations." Codefinger also leaves a ransom note in each affected directory that includes the attacker's Bitcoin address and a client ID associated with the encrypted data. "The note warns that changes to account permissions or files will end negotiations," the Halcyon researchers said in a report about S3 bucket attacks shared with The Register. While West declined to name or provide any additional details about the two Codefinger victims -- including if they paid the ransom demands -- he suggests that AWS customers restrict the use of SSE-C. "This can be achieved by leveraging the Condition element in IAM policies to prevent unauthorized applications of SSE-C on S3 buckets, ensuring that only approved data and users can utilize this feature," he explained. Plus, it's important to monitor and regularly audit AWS keys, as these make very attractive targets for all types of criminals looking to break into companies' cloud environments and steal data. "Permissions should be reviewed frequently to confirm they align with the principle of least privilege, while unused keys should be disabled, and active ones rotated regularly to minimize exposure," West said. An AWS spokesperson said it notifies affected customers of exposed keys and "quickly takes any necessary actions, such as applying quarantine policies to minimize risks for customers without disrupting their IT environment." They also directed users to this post about what to do upon noticing unauthorized activity.

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By 2060, around one million Americans may develop dementia annually, with the lifetime risk after age 55 estimated at 42% and rising sharply with age. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Medicine. Scientific American reports: The latest forecast suggests a massive and harrowing increase from annual cases predicted for 2020, in which approximately 514,000 adults in the U.S. were estimated to be diagnosed with dementia -- an umbrella term that describes several neurological conditions that affect memory and cognition. The new study also showed the lifetime risk of dementia increased progressively with older age. They estimated that after age 55, the lifetime risk of dementia is 42 percent, and continues to rise sharply to 56 percent after age 85. Groups that showed greater lifetime risks (between 44 and 59 percent after age 55) were Black adults, women and people who carried the allele APOE e4: this variation of the gene APOE, which codes for the protein apolipoprotein E, increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's is the most common cause of dementia, but the study focused on all forms.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: The Supreme Court on Monday said it will not consider whether to quash lawsuits brought by Honolulu seeking billions of dollars from oil and gas companies for the damage caused by the effects of climate change, clearing the way for the cases to move forward. The legal battle pursued in Hawaii state court is similar to others filed against the nation's largest energy companies by state and local governments in their courts. The suits claim that the oil and gas industry engaged in a deceptive campaign and misled the public about the dangers of their fossil fuel products and the environmental impacts. A group of 15 energy companies asked the Supreme Court to review a decision from the Hawaii Supreme Court that allowed a lawsuit brought by the city and county of Honolulu, as well as its Board of Water Supply, to proceed. The suit was brought in Hawaii state court in March 2020, and Honolulu raised (PDF) several claims under state law, including creating a public nuisance and failure to warn the public of the risks posed by their fossil fuel products. The city accused the oil and gas industry of contributing to global climate change, leading to flooding, erosion and more frequent and intense extreme weather events. These changes, they said, have led to property damage and a drop in tax revenue as a result of less tourism. The energy companies unsuccessfully sought to have the case moved to federal court, arguing that the claims raised by Honolulu under state law were overridden by federal law and the Clean Air Act. A state trial court denied their efforts to dismiss the case. The oil and gas industry has argued that greenhouse-gas emissions "flow from billions of daily choices, over more than a century, by governments, companies and individuals about what types of fuels to use, and how to use them." Honolulu, the companies said, was seeking damages for the "cumulative effect of worldwide emissions leading to global climate change." The Hawaii Supreme Court ultimately allowed (PDF) the lawsuit to proceed. The state's highest court determined that the Clean Air Act displaced federal common law governing suits seeking damages for interstate pollution. It also rejected the oil companies' argument that Honolulu was seeking to regulate emissions through its lawsuit, finding that the city instead wanted to challenge the promotion and sale of fossil fuel products "without warning and abetted by a sophisticated disinformation campaign." "Plaintiffs' state tort law claims do not seek to regulate emissions, and there is thus no 'actual conflict' between Hawaii tort law and the [Clean Air Act]," the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled. "These claims potentially regulate marketing conduct while the CAA regulates pollution." The oil companies asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the ruling from the Hawaii high court and urged it to stop Honolulu's lawsuit from going forward. Regulation of interstate pollution is a federal area governed by federal law, lawyers for the energy industry argued. [...] The Supreme Court in June asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the cases and whether it should step into the dispute. In a filing submitted to the Supreme Court before the transfer of presidential power, the Biden administration urged the justices to turn away the appeals, in part because it said it is too soon for them to intervene.

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UK ministers are considering allowing private companies to profit from anonymized NHS data as part of a push to leverage AI for medical advancements, despite concerns over privacy and ethical risks. The Guardian reports: Keir Starmer on Monday announced a push to open up the government to AI innovation, including allowing companies to use anonymized patient data to develop new treatments, drugs and diagnostic tools. With the prime minister and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, under pressure over Britain's economic outlook, Starmer said AI could bolster the country's anaemic growth, as he put concerns over privacy, disinformation and discrimination to one side. "We are in a unique position in this country, because we've got the National Health Service, and the use of that data has already driven forward advances in medicine, and will continue to do so," he told an audience in east London. "We have to see this as a huge opportunity that will impact on the lives of millions of people really profoundly." Starmer added: "It is important that we keep control of that data. I completely accept that challenge, and we will also do so, but I don't think that we should have a defensive stance here that will inhibit the sort of breakthroughs that we need." The move to embrace the potential of AI rather than its risks comes at a difficult moment for the prime minister, with financial markets having driven UK borrowing costs to a 30-year high and the pound hitting new lows against the dollar. Starmer said on Monday that AI could help give the UK the economic boost it needed, adding that the technology had the potential "to increase productivity hugely, to do things differently, to provide a better economy that works in a different way in the future." Part of that, as detailed in a report by the technology investor Matt Clifford, will be to create new datasets for startups and researchers to train their AI models. Data from various sources will be included, such as content from the National Archives and the BBC, as well as anonymized NHS records. Officials are working out the details on how those records will be shared, but said on Monday that they would take into account national security and ethical concerns. Starmer's aides say the public sector will keep "control" of the data, but added that could still allow it to be used for commercial purposes.

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Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized, open-source Instagram competitor, labeling them as "spam" on Facebook and removing them immediately. 404 Media reports: Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week. Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted. Pixelfed has seen a surge in user signups in recent days, after Meta announced it is ending fact-checking and removing restrictions on speech across its platforms. Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, published a "declaration of fundamental rights and principles for ethical digital platforms, ensuring privacy, dignity, and fairness in online spaces." The open source charter contains sections titled "right to privacy," "freedom from surveillance," "safeguards against hate speech," "strong protections for vulnerable communities," and "data portability and user agency." "Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC or others to ruin the vibe. I've turned down VC funding and will not inject advertising of any form into the project," Supernault wrote on Mastodon. "Pixelfed is for the people, period."

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Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced a playful giveaway for kernel contributors: he'll hand-build a guitar effects pedal for one lucky developer selected at random, using his holiday hobby skills with pedal kits. To qualify, developers must have a 2024 commit in Torvalds' kernel git tree and email him with the subject "I WANT A GUITAR PEDAL". He'll pick a winner at random, use his own money to buy a pedal kit from a company called Aion FX, and then 'build it with my own shaky little fingers, and send it to the victim by US postal services.'" The Register reports: The odd offer appeared in his weekly state-of-the-kernel post, which on Sunday US time informed the Linux world that release candidate (rc) seven for version 6.13 of the Linux kernel "is slightly bigger than normal, but considering the timing, it's pretty much where I would have expected, and nothing really stands out." Torvalds therefore expects version 6.13 to debut next week, meaning it will arrive after his preferred seven release candidates and without delays caused by the usual holiday-period slowdown. Torvalds then added a postscript in which he revealed that he often uses the holiday season to build LEGO, which he frequently receives for Christmas and his late December birthday. He kept up that tradition last year, but "also ended up doing a number of guitar pedal kit builds" which he described as "LEGO for grown-ups with a soldering iron." [...] Torvalds doesn't play guitar, but did the builds "because I enjoy the tinkering, and the guitar pedals actually do something and are the right kind of "not very complex, but not some 5-minute 555 LED blinking thing.'" He enjoyed the experience and wants to build more pedals, so has decided to give one away to a random kernel developer -- both as an act of generosity and to "check to see if anybody actually ever reads these weekly rc announcements of mine." Torvalds rated his past pedal-building efforts a "good success so far" but warned entrants "I'm a software person with a soldering iron." "I will test the result to the best of my abilities, and the end result may actually work ... but you should set your expectations along the lines of "quality kit built by a SW person who doesn't know one end of a guitar from the other.'"

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don't enjoy making music. "We didn't just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people," Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. "And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It's not really enjoyable to make music now [...] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." Suno AI works like other popular generative AI tools, allowing users to generate music by writing text prompts describing the kind of music they want to hear. Also like many other generative AI tools, Suno was trained on heaps of copyrighted music it fed into its training dataset without consent, a practice Suno is currently being sued for by the recording industry. In the interview, Shulman says he's disappointed that the recording industry is suing his company because he believes Suno and other similar AI music generators will ultimately allow more people to make and enjoy music, which will only grow the audience and industry, benefiting everyone. That may end up being true, and could be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or any other technology that allowed more people to make more music.

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Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin reports: The New York law requiring Internet providers to offer cheap plans to people with low incomes will take effect on Wednesday this week following a multi-year court battle in which the state defeated broadband industry lobby groups. A US appeals court upheld the law in April 2024, reversing the ruling of a district judge who blocked it in 2021. The Supreme Court last month decided not to hear the broadband industry's challenge, leaving the appeals court ruling in place. The state law requires Internet providers to offer $15- or $20-per-month service to people with low incomes. As we've written, the battle between New York and ISPs was an important test case for how states can regulate broadband providers when the Federal Communications Commission isn't doing so. The Biden-era FCC's attempt to reinstate net neutrality rules and regulate broadband providers as common carriers was blocked in court, but ISPs lost the fight against the New York affordability law and an earlier fight against California's net neutrality law. New York-based ISPs can comply by offering $15 broadband plans with download speeds of at least 25Mbps, or $20-per-month service with 200Mbps speeds. The price must include "any recurring taxes and fees such as recurring rental fees for service provider equipment required to obtain broadband service and usage fees." Price increases are to be capped at 2 percent per year, and state officials will periodically review whether minimum required speeds should be raised. New York Public Service Commission Chair Rory Christian last week issued an order stating that the law will take effect on January 15. "On December 16, 2024, the United States Supreme Court denied the Plaintiff's request for further review," the order said. "As part of the litigation, the [New York attorney general] agreed not to enforce the ABA [Affordable Broadband Act] until 30 days after the date when the US Supreme Court decided the writ of Certiorari. Thus, the ABA will once again take effect and may be enforced in New York on January 15, 2025." The order said it plans to implement the law quickly because of "developments at the federal level impacting the affordability of broadband service." ISPs can receive one-month exemptions by filing paperwork by Wednesday confirming they meet the subscriber threshold, notes Ars. To secure longer-term exemptions, ISPs must submit detailed financial information by February 15.

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The Register's Simon Sharwood reports: Broadcom has lost another sizable customer for its VMware platform: Austrian cloud provider Anexia has moved 12,000 VMs, some of them rented by major European businesses, to an open-source system based on the KVM hypervisor. Anexia was founded in 2006, is based in Austria, and provides cloud services from over 100 locations around the world by placing equipment in third party datacenters. Clients include remote access and control vendor TeamViewer, and airline Lufthansa -- plus plenty more outfits that need reliable hosting and service to match. CEO Alexander Windbichler told The Register that after Broadcom acquired VMware, increased licensing costs, and made big changes to its partner program, Anexia remained eligible to operate a VMware-powered cloud. But Windbichler felt he couldn't afford to continue, because Broadcom offered new terms that saw the cost of VMware licenses rise sharply. The CEO preferred not to enumerate the increase precisely however The Register understands it exceeded 500 percent. Whatever the actual figure, Windbichler said the cost increase "Would have been existential for us." "We used to pay for VMware software one month in arrears," he said. "With Broadcom we had to pay a year in advance with a two-year contract." That arrangement, the CEO said, would have created extreme stress on company cashflow. "We would not be able to compete with the market," he said. "We had customers on contracts, and they would not pay for a price increase." Windbichler considered legal action, but felt the fight would have been slow and expensive. Anexia therefore resolved to migrate, a choice made easier by its ownership of another hosting business called Netcup that ran on a KVM-based platform.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch, written by Ivan Mehta: Decentralized social network organization Mastodon said Monday that it is planning to create a new nonprofit organization in Europe and hand over ownership of entities responsible for key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means one person won't have control over the entire project. The organization is trying to differentiate itself from social networks controlled by CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. While exact details are yet to be finalized, this means that Mastodon's current CEO and creator, Eugen Rochko, will hand over management bits of the organization to the new entity and focus on the product strategy. The organization said that it will continue to host the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers, which users can sign up for and join the ActivityPub-based network. Mastodon currently has 835,000 monthly active users spread across thousands of servers. [...] Last year, the company formed a U.S.-based nonprofit to get more funds and grants with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the board. At the same time, the organization lost its nonprofit status in Germany. [...] The blog post noted that the new Europe-based nonprofit entity will wholly own the Mastodon GmbH for-profit entity. The organization is in the process of finalizing the place where the new entity will be set up. "We are taking the time to select the appropriate jurisdiction and structure in Europe. Then we will determine which other (subsidiary) legal structures are needed to support operations and sustainability,â Mastodon said in a blog post. "Throughout, we will focus on establishing the appropriate governance and leadership frameworks that reflect the nature and purpose of Mastodon as a whole, and responsibly serve the community."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company's e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack. He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site. "We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page," Tomchuk told TechCrunch. "Each page has at least three photos." OpenAI was sending "tens of thousands" of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions. "OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it's way more," he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site. "Their crawlers were crushing our site," he said "It was basically a DDoS attack." Triplegangers' website is its business. The seven-employee company has spent over a decade assembling what it calls the largest database of "human digital doubles" on the web, meaning 3D image files scanned from actual human models. It sells the 3D object files, as well as photos -- everything from hands to hair, skin, and full bodies -- to 3D artists, video game makers, anyone who needs to digitally recreate authentic human characteristics. [...] To add insult to injury, not only was Triplegangers knocked offline by OpenAI's bot during U.S. business hours, but Tomchuk expects a jacked-up AWS bill thanks to all of the CPU and downloading activity from the bot. Triplegangers initially lacked a properly configured robots.txt file, which allowed the bot to freely scrape its site since the system interprets the absence of such a file as permission. It's not an opt-in system. Once the file was updated with specific tags to block OpenAI's bot, along with additional defenses like Cloudflare, the scraping stopped. However, robots.txt is not foolproof since compliance by AI companies is voluntary, leaving the burden on website owners to monitor and block unauthorized access proactively. "[Tomchuk] wants other small online business to know that the only way to discover if an AI bot is taking a website's copyrighted belongings is to actively look," reports TechCrunch.

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