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canopic jug writes:

Bruce Perens is working on licensing for a new, post-Open Source era to take open source licensing past the apparent stalling point it has reached on its way towards software freedom. As he noted earlier, current licenses are not meeting that goal and businesses have either found loophole or just plain been allowed to ignore the licensing. A move more towards a contract is needed.

At the link below is the first draft of the Post-Open License. This is not yet the product of a qualified attorney, and you shouldn't apply it to your own work yet. There isn't context for this license yet, so some things won't make sense: for example the license is administered by an entity called the "POST-OPEN ADMINISTRATION" and I haven't figured out how to structure that organization so that people can trust it. There are probably also terms I can't get away with legally, this awaits work with a lawyer.

Because the license attempts to handle very many problems that have arisen with Open Source licensing, it's big. It's approaching the size of AGPL3, which I guess is a metric for a relatively modern license, since AGPL3 is now 17 years old

The draft license is quite long since it covers quite a few scenarios.

Previously:
(2023) What Comes After Open Source? Bruce Perens is Working on It
(2018) The Next 20 Years of Open Source Software Begins Today

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/microsoft-accused-of-selling-ai-tool-that-spews-violent-sexual-images-to-kids/

Microsoft's AI text-to-image generator, Copilot Designer, appears to be heavily filtering outputs after a Microsoft engineer, Shane Jones, warned that Microsoft has ignored warnings that the tool randomly creates violent and sexual imagery, CNBC reported.

Jones told CNBC that he repeatedly warned Microsoft of the alarming content he was seeing while volunteering in red-teaming efforts to test the tool's vulnerabilities. Microsoft failed to take the tool down or implement safeguards in response, Jones said, or even post disclosures to change the product's rating to mature in the Android store.

[...] Bloomberg also reviewed Jones' letter and reported that Jones told the FTC that while Copilot Designer is currently marketed as safe for kids, it's randomly generating an "inappropriate, sexually objectified image of a woman in some of the pictures it creates." And it can also be used to generate "harmful content in a variety of other categories, including: political bias, underage drinking and drug use, misuse of corporate trademarks and copyrights, conspiracy theories, and religion to name a few."

[...] Jones' tests also found that Copilot Designer would easily violate copyrights, producing images of Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse or Snow White. Most problematically, Jones could politicize Disney characters with the tool, generating images of Frozen's main character, Elsa, in the Gaza Strip or "wearing the military uniform of the Israel Defense Forces."

Ars was able to generate interpretations of Snow White, but Copilot Designer rejected multiple prompts politicizing Elsa.

If Microsoft has updated the automated content filters, it's likely due to Jones protesting his employer's decisions. [...] Jones has suggested that Microsoft would need to substantially invest in its safety team to put in place the protections he'd like to see. He reported that the Copilot team is already buried by complaints, receiving "more than 1,000 product feedback messages every day." Because of this alleged understaffing, Microsoft is currently only addressing "the most egregious issues," Jones told CNBC.

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Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-threatened-homeland-feral-mexican-parrots.html

During a walk through the Huntington Botanical Gardens with her mother one morning, Brenda Ramirez was alarmed by the sudden squawks, warbles, and screeches of troops of parrots flying overhead at great speed in tight, precise formations.

"I asked my mom what they were," Ramirez recalled of that day 14 years ago. "She said, 'Mija, they are just like the parrots from Mexico we've seen in zoos, except for one thing: They are free flying and breed in the trees along our city streets.'"

Ramirez was entranced by this fleeting glimpse of adaptation by tropical species in one of the world's greatest asphalt jungles.

Now, at 27, she leads a team of investigators at the Free Flying Los Angeles Parrot Project based in Occidental College's Moore Laboratory of Zoology, which aims to resolve a biological puzzle: How did red-crowned and lilac-crowned parrots establish local urban breeding populations via the pet trade from Mexico, where both species are on the brink of extinction?

A potential answer is that Southern California cities have only in the last 100 years provided these sister species with a resource untapped by native birds: the fruits and flowers of exotic trees used for landscaping, according to the team's new report in the journal Diversity and Distributions.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/03/switch-emulator-makers-agree-to-pay-2-4-million-to-settle-nintendo-lawsuit/

The makers of Switch emulator Yuzu say they will "consent to judgment in favor of Nintendo" to settle a major lawsuit filed by the console maker last week.

In a series of filings posted by the court Monday, the Yuzu developers agreed to pay $2.4 million in "monetary relief" and to cease "offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu."

[...] ending "effective immediately," along with support for 3DS emulator Citra (which shares many of the same developers)

[...] The proposed final judgment, which still has to be agreed to by the judge in the case, fully accepts Nintendo's stated position that "Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent [Nintendo's copy protection] and play Nintendo Switch games" by "using unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch cryptographic keys."

[...] While that admission doesn't technically account for Yuzu's ability to run a long list of Switch homebrew programs, proving that such homebrew was a significant part of the "ordinary course" of the average Yuzu user's experience may have been an uphill battle in court. Nintendo argued in its lawsuit that "the vast majority of Yuzu users are using Yuzu to play downloaded pirated games in Yuzu," a fact that could have played against the emulator maker at trial even if non-infringing uses for the emulator do exist.

[...] While emulator programs are generally protected by US legal precedents protecting reverse engineering, console makers could bring similar DMCA actions against certain emulators that rely on the use of cryptographic keys to break copy protection. But many emulator makers feel that such hardball lawsuits are less likely to be brought against emulators for defunct systems that are no longer selling new hardware or software in significant numbers.

[...] Nintendo's legal department has established a track record of zealously defending its copyrighted works by going after fangames, ROM distribution sites, and hardware modders in the past. While direct legal action against emulator makers has been less common for Nintendo, the company did send a letter to Valve to prevent Wii/Gamecube emulator Dolphin from appearing on Steam last year.

Previously on SoylentNews:
Emulation Community Expresses Defiance in Wake of Nintendo's Yuzu Lawsuit - 20240303

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Science, or New Age Apocalyptics? You decide.

In 2007, a group of researchers, led by a nuclear physicist named Richard Firestone, announced an astonishing discovery. They had uncovered evidence, they said, that 12,900 years ago, a comet — or possibly a whole fleet of comets — struck Earth and changed the course of history. For the preceding two and a half million years, through the Pleistocene Epoch, the planet's climate fluctuated between frozen stretches, called glacials, and warm interglacials. At that time, Earth was warming again, and the ice sheets that covered much of North America, Europe and Asia were in retreat. Mammoths, steppe bison, wild horses and other enormous mammals still wandered the Americas, pursued by bands of humans wielding spears with fluted stone blades. Suddenly, somewhere over the Upper Midwest — an explosion.

[...] This cometary origin story, with its mix of ancient humans, vanished megafauna and global cataclysm, quickly spread beyond the confines of scientific journals. Media outlets around the world covered the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. It has been the subject of two more books and multiple documentaries, including one produced by PBS NOVA. Joe Rogan has discussed the hypothesis a dozen times on his podcast, and it provided the scientific underpinnings for Netflix's 2022 hit series "Ancient Apocalypse." But even as the hypothesis wormed its way into the public imagination, an important question persisted: Was any of it true?

[...] As they tried to replicate the Firestone team's findings, the skeptics noticed numerous odd details that seemed to hover around the hypothesis. There was, for example, "The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes," which came out just before the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study. The book's publisher was a division of Inner Traditions, which, according to its website, is "devoted exclusively to the subjects of spirituality, the occult, ancient mysteries, new science, holistic health and natural medicine." The book, written by West and Firestone, intersperses a breathless account of their work with the "astonishingly similar stories" of floods and celestial conflagrations from dozens of ancient cultures, including the tale of the "Long-Tailed-Heavenly-Climbing-Star," attributed to the Ojibwa. "It clearly wasn't a science book," says Jennifer Marlon, a paleoecologist at Yale who read the book soon after seeing the PNAS study. "I just thought, Well, this is kind of silly."

Unixnut writes:

After 5 years of development by dangerousprototypes, a new version of Bus Pirate has been released for sale. An open source universal bus interfacing device, the previous versions have proven themselves useful for reverse engineering, debugging, restoring bricked devices and flashing the libreboot open source bios on your machines.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/producing-more-but-understanding-less-the-risks-of-ai-for-scientific-research/

Last month, we witnessed the viral sensation of several egregiously bad AI-generated figures published in a peer-reviewed article in Frontiers, a reputable scientific journal. Scientists on social media expressed equal parts shock and ridicule at the images, one of which featured a rat with grotesquely large and bizarre genitals.

As Ars Senior Health Reporter Beth Mole reported, looking closer only revealed more flaws, including the labels "dissilced," "Stemm cells," "iollotte sserotgomar," and "dck." Figure 2 was less graphic but equally mangled, rife with nonsense text and baffling images. Ditto for Figure 3, a collage of small circular images densely annotated with gibberish.

[...] While the proliferation of errors is a valid concern, especially in the early days of AI tools like ChatGPT, two researchers argue in a new perspective published in the journal Nature that AI also poses potential long-term epistemic risks to the practice of science.

Molly Crockett is a psychologist at Princeton University who routinely collaborates with researchers from other disciplines in her research into how people learn and make decisions in social situations. Her co-author, Lisa Messeri, is an anthropologist at Yale University whose research focuses on science and technology studies (STS), analyzing the norms and consequences of scientific and technological communities as they forge new fields of knowledge and invention—like AI.

[...] The paper's tagline is "producing more while understanding less," and that is the central message the pair hopes to convey. "The goal of scientific knowledge is to understand the world and all of its complexity, diversity, and expansiveness," Messeri told Ars. "Our concern is that even though we might be writing more and more papers, because they are constrained by what AI can and can't do, in the end, we're really only asking questions and producing a lot of papers that are within AI's capabilities."

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-bumblebees-scientists-advanced-social-skills.html

In a groundbreaking discovery, bumblebees have been shown to possess a previously unseen level of cognitive sophistication. A new study, published in Nature, reveals that these fuzzy pollinators can learn complex, multi-step tasks through social interaction, even if they cannot figure them out on their own. This challenges the long-held belief that such advanced social learning is unique to humans, and even hints at the presence of key elements of cumulative culture in these insects.

Led by Dr. Alice Bridges and Professor Lars Chittka , the research team designed a two-step puzzle box requiring bumblebees to perform two distinct actions in sequence to access a sweet reward at the end. Training bees to do this was no easy task, and bees had to be helped along by the addition of an extra reward along the way. This temporary reward was eventually taken away, and bees subsequently had to open the whole box before getting their treat.

Surprisingly, while individual bees struggled to solve the puzzle when starting from scratch, those allowed to observe a trained "demonstrator" bee readily learned the entire sequence—even the first step—while only getting a reward at the end.

This study demonstrates that bumblebees possess a level of social learning previously thought to be exclusive to humans. They can share and acquire behaviors that are beyond their individual cognitive capabilities: an ability thought to underpin the expansive, complex nature of human culture, and one previously thought to be exclusive to us.

Dr. Bridges says, "This is an extremely difficult task for bees. They had to learn two steps to get the reward, with the first behavior in the sequence being unrewarded. We initially needed to train demonstrator bees with a temporary reward included there, highlighting the complexity."

"Yet, other bees learned the whole sequence from social observation of these trained bees, even without ever experiencing the first step's reward. But when we let other bees attempt to open the box without a trained bee to demonstrate the solution, they didn't manage to open any at all."

More information: Alice Bridges, Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07126-4. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07126-4

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Multiple sites are reporting that the former Twitter (now called X but not that X) executives who were apparently stiffed on severance pay are now suing Elon Musk over the missing severance pay.

Former top executives of Twitter sued Elon Musk on Monday saying he has failed to pay them nearly $130 million after the billionaire took over the social media company and dismissed them.

"Musk doesn't pay his bills, believes the rules don't apply to him, and uses his wealth and power to run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him," they said in the lawsuit filed in a California federal court.

'Musk vowed a lifetime of revenge': Ex-Twitter execs sue Musk for unpaid severance

The big picture: The former executives claim in the complaint that he fired them soon after he led the takeover of the company now known as X "without reason, then made up fake cause and appointed employees of his various companies to uphold his decision."

• "Musk's refusal to pay Plaintiffs their benefits is part of a larger pattern of refusing to pay Twitter's former employees the benefits and other compensation they are due," alleges the complaint, filed in federal court in San Francisco.

Elon Musk sued by former Twitter executives over severance payments

Parag Agrawal sues Elon Musk: Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and three other ex-executives have suited company boss Elon Musk for $128 million in unpaid severance payments alleging that the billionaire showed "special ire" towards them by publicly vowing to withhold their severance payments of around $200 million. This happened after Elon Musk took over the social media platform in a $44 billion deal in 2022 after which they were ousted from the company, as per the lawsuit filed.

Why is ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal suing Elon Musk?

Elon Musk fired a lot of people after he took over Twitter, but the first ones to go were several of its top executives. Now former CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and former general counsel Sean Edgett are suing Musk and the company now known as X, saying they're owed more than $128 million in severance payments, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Fired Twitter execs are suing Elon Musk for over $128 million

Apparently some of the evidence against Musk comes from the biography he recently published.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-butterflies-mimic-flight-behavior-predators.html

Researchers have shown that inedible species of butterfly that mimic each others' color patterns have also evolved similar flight behaviors to warn predators and avoid being eaten.

It is well known that many inedible species of butterfly have evolved near identical color patterns, which act as warning signals to predators so the butterflies avoid being eaten.

Researchers have now shown that these butterflies have not only evolved similar color patterns, but that they have also evolved similar flight behaviors, which together make a more effective warning signal to predators. The article is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using high-speed video footage to record the flight of wild butterflies in South America, researchers at the University of York measured the wing beat frequency and wing angles of 351 butterflies, representing 38 species each belonging to one of 10 distinct color pattern mimicry groups.

Using this dataset they investigated how the flight patterns of butterflies are related to factors such as habitat, wing shape, temperature and which color pattern mimicry group the butterfly belongs to see which elements most heavily affected flight behavior.

Although the species habitat and wing shape were expected to have the greatest influence on flight behavior, the researchers found that in fact the biggest determinant of flight behavior was the color pattern mimicry group a butterfly belonged to.

This means that distantly-related butterflies belonging to the same color pattern mimicry group have more similar flight behavior than closely-related species that display different warning coloration. To a predator, the butterflies would not only look the same through their color patterns, but would also move in the same way.

Journal Reference:
Page, Edward et al, Pervasive mimicry in flight behavior among aposematic butterflies, PNAS (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2300886121

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/it-turns-out-that-odysseus-landed-on-the-moon-without-any-altimetry-data/

HOUSTON—Steve Altemus beamed with pride on Tuesday morning as he led me into Mission Control for the Odysseus lander, which is currently operating on the Moon and returning valuable scientific data to Earth. A team of about a dozen operators sat behind consoles, attempting to reset a visual processing unit onboard the lunar lander, one of their last, best chances to deploy a small camera that would snap a photo of Odysseus in action.

"I just wanted you to see the team," he said.
[...]
"You can say whatever you want to say," Altemus said. "But from my perspective, this is an absolute success of a mission. Holy crap. The things that you go through to fly to the Moon. The learning, just every step of the way, is tremendous."
[...]
As has been previously reported, Intuitive Machines discovered that the range finders on Odysseus were inoperable a couple of hours before it was due to attempt to land on the Moon last Thursday. This was later revealed to be due to the failure to install a pencil-sized pin and a wire harness that enabled the laser to be turned on and off.
[...]
the last accurate altitude reading the lander received came when it was 15 kilometers above the lunar surface—and still more than 12 minutes from touchdown.
[...]
By comparing imagery data frame by frame, the flight computer could determine how fast it was moving relative to the lunar surface. Knowing its initial velocity and altitude prior to initiating powered descent and using data from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) on board Odysseus, it could get a rough idea of altitude.
[...]
Unfortunately, as it neared the lunar surface, the lander believed it was about 100 meters higher relative to the Moon than it actually was.

hubie writes:

In a blind taste test 25% reduced-sugar chocolates made with oat flour were rated equally, and in some cases preferred, to regular chocolate:

The secret to making delicious chocolate with less added sugar is oat flour, according to a new study by Penn State researchers. In a blind taste test, recently published in the Journal of Food Science, 25% reduced-sugar chocolates made with oat flour were rated equally, and in some cases preferred, to regular chocolate. The findings provide a new option for decreasing chocolate's sugar content while maintaining its texture and flavor.

"We were able to show that there is a range in which you can manage a sizable reduction in added sugar and people won't notice and don't care, in terms of liking," said John Hayes, professor of food science at Penn State and corresponding author on the study. "We're never going to make chocolate healthy, because it's an indulgence, but we can successfully take out some of the sugar for consumers who are trying to reduce their intake of added sugars."

Hayes explained that chocolate is about half sugar by weight, with the rest being fat and cocoa solids, so reducing the amount of sugar by any amount can drastically alter the texture and flavor profile of the chocolate.

"The function of sugar in chocolate is both sweetness and bulking, so if we take that sugar out, we have to put something else in that will do the job just as well, or consumers will notice," said Gregory Ziegler, distinguished professor of food science at Penn State and co-author on the study.

[...] "Our results suggest we can cut back 25% of added sugar to chocolate, effectively reducing the total sugar by 13.5%, if we substitute oat flour," said Kai Kai Ma, a doctoral candidate in food science at Penn State and co-author on the paper. "That addition of oat flour is unlikely to meaningfully impact consumer acceptability, which is great news."

[...] "I'm a big believer in meeting consumers where they are," Hayes said. "We've tried for 40 years to tell people to eat less sugar and it doesn't work because people want to eat what they want to eat. So instead of making people feel guilty, we need to meet people where they are and figure out how to make food better while still preserving the pleasure from food."

Journal Reference:
Kai Kai Ma, Gregory R. Ziegler, John E. Hayes, Sugar reduction in chocolate compound by replacement
with flours containing small insoluble starch granules, J. Food Sci. 2024;1–10. DOI: 10.1111/1750-3841.16923

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/spain-tells-sam-altman-worldcoin-to-shut-down-its-eyeball-scanning-orbs/

Spain has moved to block Sam Altman's cryptocurrency project Worldcoin, the latest blow to a venture that has raised controversy in multiple countries by collecting customers' personal data using an eyeball-scanning "orb."

The AEPD, Spain's data protection regulator, has demanded that Worldcoin immediately ceases collecting personal information in the country via the scans and that it stops using data it has already gathered.

The regulator announced on Wednesday that it had taken the "precautionary measure" at the start of the week and had given Worldcoin 72 hours to demonstrate its compliance with the order.

[...] Worldcoin has registered 4 million users, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Investors poured roughly $250 million into the company, including venture capital groups Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, internet entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and, prior to the collapse of his FTX empire, Sam Bankman-Fried.

The project attracted media attention and prompted a handful of consumer complaints in Spain as queues began to grow at the stands in shopping centers where Worldcoin is offering cryptocurrency in exchange for eyeball scans.

[...] "I want to send a message to young people. I understand that it can be very tempting to get €70 or €80 that sorts you out for the weekend," España Martí said, but "giving away personal data in exchange for these derisory amounts of money is a short, medium and long-term risk."

Previously on SoylentNews:
Ready for Your Eye Scan? Worldcoin Launches—but Not Quite Worldwide - 20230726

Original Submission

So, just a follow up. According to matt, we got around $2,000 USD right now in the PBC overnight, and there are still more payments processing. I paid the Linode bill this morning. So, funding problem: solved. We should be set for the foreseeable future as far as money goes!

Seriously guys, you stepped up, and I am thankful. Since I'm here, a quick update on what's going on: Right now, we're mostly just waiting for paperwork to go through as far as handing the site to a newly-created, not-for-profit. It's slow work and I'm not directly involved, but I've seen that there has been a fair number of articles on the subject so I'm pretty happy that everyone is aware of what's going on.

I could write more, but I think I'm going to keep this short and sweet for now. Once I have a final total, I'll post it.

- N

Addition: We have been asked if people can donate anonymously without having an account. The answer is "Yes". Click the subscription link and then make a gift subscription to another account (It defaults to NCommander but you can choose any account). Pay via stripe using an anonymous username.

owl writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/oregon-oks-right-to-repair-bill-that-bans-the-blocking-of-aftermarket-parts/

Oregon has joined the small but growing list of states that have passed right-to-repair legislation. Oregon's bill stands out for a provision that would prevent companies from requiring that official parts be unlocked with encrypted software checks before they will fully function.

Bill SB 1596 passed Oregon's House by a 42 to 13 margin. Gov. Tina Kotek has five days to sign the bill into law. Consumer groups and right-to-repair advocates praised the bill as "the best bill yet," while the bill's chief sponsor, state Sen. Janeen Sollman (D), pointed to potential waste reductions and an improved second-hand market for closing a digital divide.

"Oregon improves on Right to Repair laws in California, Minnesota and New York by making sure that consumers have the choice of buying new parts, used parts, or third-party parts for the gadgets and gizmos," said Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org, in a statement.

Original Submission