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DannyB writes:

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Leading Linux desktops boldly address the "not enough distros" non-problem

KDE and GNOME have decided that because they're not big and complicated enough already, they might work better if they have their own custom distributions underneath. What's the worst that could happen?

[....] Sitter proposed an official KDE Linux distribution. Now the proposal is gathering steam and a plan is coming together for an official KDE Linux – codenamed "Project Banana."

It's important to note at this point that there already is an official showcase KDE distro, which is called KDE Neon. Neon comprises the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop, pre-installed on top of a recent LTS version of Ubuntu.

In case that sounds like it's too easy, it is: there are no fewer than four different editions of KDE Neon available for download, all for x86-64. This is entirely in keeping with how the KDE project as a whole works: : for instance, if you search the KDE Applications website for "text editor", you'll find three: Kate, KWrite, and Nota. If you search for "file manager", you'll find four; and "web browser", three. Within the desktop, there are multiple start-menu tools, multiple app-switching panel-button bars, and so on. Even the "About" option on the "Help" menu is duplicated [...]

[....]The other desktop's wallpaper is always greener

Not to be left out, a developer from the GNOME project, Adrian Vovk, has a corresponding proposal: to take GNOME OS mainstream. In his modest title, to build A Desktop for All [...]

I for one applaud KDE and Gnome's efforts to simply things by introducing [at least] two new distributions.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Code found online exploits LogoFAIL to install Bootkitty Linux backdoor

Researchers have discovered malicious code circulating in the wild that hijacks the earliest stage boot process of Linux devices by exploiting a year-old firmware vulnerability when it remains unpatched on affected models.

The critical vulnerability is one of a constellation of exploitable flaws discovered last year and given the name LogoFAIL. These exploits are able to override an industry-standard defense known as Secure Boot and execute malicious firmware early in the boot process. Until now, there were no public indications that LogoFAIL exploits were circulating in the wild.

The discovery of code downloaded from an Internet-connected web server changes all that. While there are no indications the public exploit is actively being used, it is reliable and polished enough to be production-ready and could pose a threat in the real world in the coming weeks or months. Both the LogoFAIL vulnerabilities and the exploit found on-line were discovered by Binarly, a firm that helps customers identify and secure vulnerable firmware.

"LogoFAIL was a theoretical vulnerability, and the PoC was not weaponized," Binarly founder and CEO Alex Matrosov wrote in an interview, referring to the proof-of-concept code released by Binarly as part of the company's earlier disclosure. "This discovery shows the issues, which are hard to fix around the ecosystem, could be exploited in the wild and weaponized. The funny part is it's almost a year since we disclosed it publicly, and this happens now when threat actors have adopted it."

See Also:

https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/eset-research/bootkitty-analyzing-first-uefi-bootkit-linux/

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-discover-bootkitty-first-uefi-bootkit-malware-for-linux

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Accused hacker unmasked after threatening woman online:

When the accused Kitchener-based hacker known online as "Waifu" threatened a woman on the messaging app Telegram, it was the beginning of his downfall.

'Waifu" had been bragging about his criminal exploits in open groups on Telegram. But when he threatened Allison Nixon, the chief research officer at the U.S. cybersecurity firm Unit221B, his days were numbered.

Nixon is the co-owner of the U.S.-based cybersecurity firm named after the home address of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, and when she saw the violent threats against her, Nixon tasked one of her researchers to uncover his real identity.

After making a critical mistake in what cybersecurity types call "operational security," a member of Nixon's team was able to follow the digital bread crumb on the internet, the dark web and messaging apps to reveal "Waifu's" real identity.

[...] "We put some time into that this year, and we are basically half of the reason he got identified," said Nixon during a telephone interview. "We have had that name for months; we have been waiting for the arrest."

A Washington court issued an arrest warrant for Connor Riley Moucka, 25, for conspiracy, computer fraud and abuse, extortion in relation to computer fraud and aggravated identify theft.

[...] Moucka is alleged to be the mastermind behind the Snowflake hack — one of the biggest data breaches in history.

[...] In the more than 10 years Nixon has spent identifying cybercriminals, the man known as "Waifu" stands out for the jaw-dropping stupidity that brought the police to the quiet residential street in Kitchener where he lived in his grandfather's house.

[...] In response, "Waifu" started writing Telegram posts full of false and misleading information under different names. But he was also bragging about his crimes, and then he started attacking Nixon.

"All this accomplished was to draw a tonne of attention from a bunch of people he should never have attracted attention from," said Nixon.

[...] "The whole situation is so ironic for this Moucka person," said Nixon.

He repeatedly threatened her and her company on Telegram, which were not even working on the Snowflake hack at the time.

"Why would he target a company that is not working on his case and specializes in identifying cybercriminals?" said Nixon. "It is just the stupidest thing ever."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Rates of cervical cancer have decreased since a vaccine for human papillomavirus, or HPV, was introduced in 2006 (SN: 10/6/08). Now, a new study is the first to show a steep decline in cervical cancer deaths among the first women who were eligible for that vaccine in the United States.

“We had a hypothesis that since it’s been almost 16 years, that maybe we might be starting to see [the] initial impact of HPV vaccination on cervical cancer deaths,” says Ashish Deshmukh, an epidemiologist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “And that’s exactly what we observed.”

Deshmukh emphasizes that he and colleagues can’t say for certain that the vaccine is responsible for the decline in deaths, which the team reports November 27 in JAMA. That’s because it’s unclear whether the women in the study cohort were, in fact, vaccinated.

The HPV vaccine can prevent up to six HPV-related cancers: cervical, vaginal, vulvar, penile, oropharyngeal and anal (SN: 4/28/17). Deshmukh’s team analyzed specifically cervical cancer mortality data from 1992 to 2021 for women younger than 25.

Grouping the data into three-year periods, the team found a gradual decline of cervical cancer deaths of almost 4 percent per period through 2013–2015. In that last period, there were about 0.02 deaths per 100,000 people. The steady drop might be due to improved prior prevention and screening methods for cervical cancer, the researchers speculate.

Then, over the six subsequent years, the team saw a dramatic reduction in mortality of just over 60 percent. By the 2019–2021 period, the rate had dropped to about 0.007 deaths per 100,000 people.

From 1992 to 2015, the number of deaths due to cervical cancer among U.S. women under the age of 25 fell steadily from each three-year period to the next. From 2016 to 2021, mortality plummeted. The dashed line shows the projected trends if the decline in mortality from 1992 to 2015 had continued to 2021; the solid line represents the observed trends.

“They’re seeing this precipitous drop in mortality at the time that we would be expecting to see it due to vaccination,” says health economist Emily Burger of the University of Oslo. “Ultimately, we hope we are preventing mortality and death [with the introduction of vaccines], and this study is really supporting that conclusion.”

Fnord666 writes:

The Rise of Enshittification: Officially the Word of the Year

Enshittification is defined as the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

It's a helpful term for describing many of today's tech products, from Google search being a slush of ads, link farms, forum posts, and useless AI content, to social media platforms becoming a hate-filled nightmare. Don't forget those products that move from being one-off purchases to subscriptions before their quality starts becoming diluted, or once-great video game franchises that become little more than a way for publishers to push more microtransactions and season passes onto people. Companies are putting yearly increases in profits and share prices above absolutely everything else, including making sure the products they offer aren't, well, shit.

Generative AI's ability to create unlimited amounts of crap and lies has exacerbated an already bad situation, of course.

We should thank author Cory Doctorow for coining a word to describe this phenomenon. He first used enshittification in a 2022 essay on how difficult and annoying it had become to shop on Amazon.

Macquarie Dictionary, Australia's national dictionary, has recognized the importance of the term enshittification in today's tech by crowning it the word of the year – it also won the people's vote. According to the dictionary's committee, it is "a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable."

"This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment," the committee said.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-himalayas-formation-destroyed-continental-crust.html

Earth's continents are slowly moving across the planet's surface due to plate tectonics, culminating in regions of crustal expansion and collision. In the latter case, high temperatures and pressures lead to the reworking of the crust, affecting its composition, as well as that of the underlying mantle. Furthermore, when two continental plates collide, distinct topographic features are produced, namely mountain ranges, which are surficial manifests of Earth's thickened crust.

Three such collision zones form the Himalaya-Tibetan Plateau, the European Alps and the Zagros Mountains in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, originating during the Cenozoic (last 66 million years). New research, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has attempted to quantify the amount of continental crust lost to the mantle when two plates collide at each of these boundaries.

To do so, Dr. Ziyi Zhu, Research Fellow at Monash University, Australia, and colleagues developed a theoretical model for the mass/volume balance of continental crust and compared the amount of shortened crust with the crust being vertically thickened, laterally extruded and eroded at the surface.

Simplifying the utility of each of these parameters in the calculations, Dr. Zhu says, "Imagine squeezing a soft chocolate bar: the material compressed (horizontal shortening) forms a pile (vertical thickening).

"Additionally, the crust can move in directions perpendicular to the compression (extrusion) or undergo erosion. If crustal mass is conserved, the mass of the shortened crust should balance with the mass of the thickened crust, along with any crust lost to erosion or lateral extrusion. Any imbalance indicates that the missing crust likely sinks into the mantle."

The research team identified that at least 30% of continental crust was lost to the mantle during the formation of the Himalaya-Tibetan Plateau and Zagros Mountains (potentially up to 64% for the latter, depending upon the initial crust thickness), while up to 50% of the Alps' volume may have been destroyed. Importantly, this loss to the mantle had double the destructive effect than that of surface erosion, which is estimated based on the volumes of sediment fans associated with each mountain range.

Journal Reference:
Ziyi Zhu, et. al.,Quantifying the loss of continental crust into the mantle from volume/mass balance calculations in modern collisional mountains, Earth and Planetary Science Letters Volume 648, 15 December 2024, 119070 (DOI: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0012821X24005028)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Senators Say TSA's Facial Recognition Program Is Out of Control, Here's How to Opt Out:

A bipartisan group of 12 senators has urged the Transportation Security Administration's inspector general to investigate the agency's use of facial recognition, saying it poses a significant threat to privacy and civil liberties.

Their letter comes just before one of the busiest travel periods of the year when millions of Americans are expected to pass through the nation's airports.

"This technology will soon be in use at hundreds of major and mid-size airports without an independent evaluation of the technology's precision or an audit of whether there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect passenger privacy," the senators wrote.

The letter was signed by Jeffrey Merkley (D-OR), John Kennedy (R-LA), Ed Markey (D-MA), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), Ron Wyden (D-OR),  Steve Daines (R-MT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Peter Welch (D-VT).

While the TSA's facial recognition program is currently optional and only in a few dozen airports, the agency announced in June that it plans to expand the technology to more than 430 airports. And the senators' letter quotes a talk given by TSA Administrator David Pekoske in 2023 in which he said "we will get to the point where we require biometrics across the board."

[...] To opt out of a face scan at an airport, a traveler need only say that they decline facial recognition. They can then proceed normally through security by presenting an identification document, such as a driver's license or passport.

Original Submission

Ingar writes:

Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger has been forced out less than four years after taking the helm of the company, handing control to two lieutenants as the faltering American chipmaking icon searches for a permanent replacement. Gelsinger, whose career has spanned more than 40 years, also stepped down from the company's board.

As reported by several news outlets: Reuters, The New York Times, The Guardian.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The reach of the China-linked Salt Typhoon gang extends beyond telecommunications giants in the United States, and its arsenal includes several backdoors – including a brand-new malware dubbed GhostSpider – according to Trend Micro researchers.

While the crew has made headlines recently for hacking "thousands and thousands" of devices at US telcos, research published on Monday by Trend Micro's threat intel team suggests Salt Typhoon (which Trend tracks as Earth Estries) has also hit more than 20 organizations globally since 2023. These span various sectors – including technology, consulting, chemical and transportation industries, government agencies, and non-profit organizations (NGOs) in the US, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, and South Africa.

Affected countries include Afghanistan, Brazil, Eswatini, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, the US, and Vietnam.

It's "one of the most aggressive Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) groups," Trend Micro's Leon Chang, Theo Chen, Lenart Bermejo, and Ted Lee wrote.

"We found that in 2023, the attackers had also targeted consulting firms and NGOs that work with the US federal government and military," the threat intel team observed.

These intrusions not only compromised telcos' database and cloud servers, but also attacked the firms' suppliers – in at least one instance implanting the Demodex rootkit on machines used by a major contractor to a dominant regional telecommunications provider. Trend Micro's analysts think that shows Salt Typhoon wanted to gain access to more targets.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One of the best features Google Maps offers is incident reporting. Users have the ability to report anything from crashes to lane closures and more. Speed trap reports are particularly handy as they can alert you to the presence of a hidden police officer. A recent update, however, has replaced the “Speed trap” option with something new.

[...] It seems that Google is aware of this misnomer and is making a change to the option. In a new update, the tech giant has quietly removed “Speed trap” and replaced it with a more appropriate, if not generic, “Police” option. In addition, the “Police” option sits higher on the list than where the “Speed trap” option was located. This brings incident reports in line with what Google showed us in an announcement back in July.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

QNAP firmware update leaves NAS owners locked out of their boxes:

A recent firmware pushed to QNAP network attached storage (NAS) devices left a number of owners unable to access their storage systems. The company has pulled back the firmware and issued a fixed version, but the company's response has left some users feeling less confident in the boxes into which they put all their digital stuff.

As seen on a QNAP community thread, and as announced by QNAP itself, the QNAP operating system, QTS, received update 5.2.2.2950, build 20241114, at some point around November 19. After QNAP "received feedbacks from some users reporting issues with device functionality after installation," the firm says it withdrew it, "conducted a comprehensive investigation," and re-released a fixed version "within 24 hours."

The community thread sees many more users of different systems having problems than the shortlist ("limited models of TS-x53D series and TS-x51 series") released by QNAP. Issues reported included owners being rejected as an authorized user, devices reporting issues with booting, and claims of Python not being installed to run some apps and services.

QNAP says affected users can either downgrade their devices (presumably to then upgrade once more to the fixed update) or contact support for help. Response from QNAP support, as told by users on forums and social media, has not measured up to the nature of losing access to an entire backup system.

Ars has reached out to QNAP for comment and will update this post with response.

oops.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

ICE buys location info from data brokers to evade warrant requirements. It slurps data from utility companies to locate immigrants who need electricity, heat, and internet connections but would rather not be hassled for trying to exist and earn a living by providing this same information directly to the US government.

The operative theory appears to be that immigrants here illegally aren’t protected by the US Constitution. But that’s simply not true. Rights are extended to people living in our borders, whether or not they’re US citizens. However, none of that is going to matter if Trump succeeds in deploying his mass deportation plans — ones that are long on rhetoric and short on actual planning at the moment.

Rest assured, the round-ups will outpace the planning following Trump’s re-ascension. ICE tends to be very proactive when it feels the person in the Oval Office has its back. “Going forward” means “starting now,” as this New Yorker article written by Ronan Farrow points out. Be sure you don’t overlook what’s being said in the last sentence of the article’s opening paragraph.

Nice. So, we’re doing business with a company that will only allow the US government to target US citizens. While it’s great that it’s preventing outside countries from doing this (which is a claim I’m not inclined to believe), it’s definitely shitty that it’s offering a bespoke version to the DHS and ICE for the express purpose of plug-and-play domestic surveillance.

Then there’s the first sentence of the paragraph, which indicates this was in motion two months ahead of the election, which suggests two equally disturbing things. Either the outgoing administration was fine with expanded domestic surveillance or DHS felt it should get the ball rolling because the victor of the 2024 election was likely to be supportive of expanded domestic surveillance. Perhaps the purchasing department was just running a Trump re-election parlay. Or maybe the DHS felt pretty confident Kamala Harris wouldn’t object to mass surveillance, even while she argued against mass deportations. Not great!

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/automotive/mercedes-reinvents-brakes-ev-in-drive/

In the simplest terms, nearly every modern car on the planet uses disk brakes: a rotor attached to a hub with a caliper with brake pads fixed to the control arm at each wheel. The driver presses the brake pedal and hydraulic fluid is pushed down the brake lines into the caliper, expanding the pistons and pushing the brake pads against the rotor, slowing down the rotation of the rotor connected to the hub, thus slowing down the wheel.

There are other systems, like drum brakes, air brakes, band brakes, the Flintstones method, et cetera, that have also been around since the dawn of the automotive industry. The concept almost always remains the same: using friction to slow down. And so it doesn't go unsaid, yes, there are compression brake systems as well, but that's entirely different.

Mercedes-Benz has put a new spin on an age-old concept with what it calls "in-drive brakes" for electric vehicles. The system being developed at the company's research and development department in Sindelfingen, Germany, integrates the brakes right into the drivetrain, in an arrangement that works very much like a transmission brake. It resembles clutch plates – but with a unique twist.

There are no calipers, instead a circular brake pad connected directly to the output shaft of the electric motor is pressed against a stationary water-cooled ring, all of which is in an enclosed system.

According to Mercedes, the in-drive brake system shouldn't require servicing for the life of the vehicle, potentially saving the owner thousands of dollars in brake repairs and replacements. Even the brake dust is collected in a small inner compartment that won't require emptying.

Brake dust is a major contributor to pollution, particularly in urban areas with lots of stop-and-go traffic. And if you've ever driven down a long, steep grade like the Grapevine, just north of Los Angeles, California, you're no stranger to the smell of brake dust – and the discomfort in your nasal passages. EV motors inherently act as a brake when the accelerator is released, as EV motors have the ability to regenerate electricity back into the batteries, slowing the vehicle down in the process. An actual brake system is still needed, however.

Though the in-drive brake is still undergoing testing, Mercedes reckons that brake fade will be a non-issue as the system is water-cooled. Given the in-drive brake system relocates all the necessary "slow down" bits away from the wheels, unsprung weight (weight that isn't carried by the chassis, and instead spins or moves with the wheels, creating gyroscopic forces) is significantly reduced, making the vehicle both handle better and improve the ride. Wheels could also be made more aerodynamically efficient without the constraints of rotors and calipers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

ISPs tell FCC that mistreated users would switch to one of their many other options:

Lobby groups for Internet service providers claim that ISPs' customer service is so good already that the government shouldn't consider any new regulations to mandate improvements. They also claim ISPs face so much competition that market forces require providers to treat their customers well or lose them to competitors.

Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association told the Federal Communications Commission in a filing that "providing high-quality products and services and a positive customer experience is a competitive necessity in today's robust communications marketplace. To attract and retain customers, NCTA's cable operator members continuously strive to ensure that the customer support they provide is effective and user-friendly. Given these strong marketplace imperatives, new regulations that would micromanage providers' customer service operations are unnecessary."

Lobby groups filed comments in response to an FCC review of customer service that was announced last month, before the presidential election. While the FCC's current Democratic leadership is interested in regulating customer service practices, the Republicans who will soon take over opposed the inquiry.

USTelecom, which represents telcos such as AT&T and Verizon, said that "the competitive broadband marketplace leaves providers of broadband and other communications services no choice but to provide their customers with not only high-quality broadband, but also high-quality customer service."

"If a provider fails to efficiently resolve an issue, they risk losing not only that customer—and not just for the one service, but potentially for all of the bundled services offered to that customer—but also any prospective customers that come across a negative review online. Because of this, broadband providers know that their success is dependent upon providing and maintaining excellent customer service," USTelecom wrote.

While the FCC Notice of Inquiry said that providers should "offer live customer service representative support by phone within a reasonable timeframe," USTelecom's filing touted the customer service abilities of AI chatbots. "AI chat agents will only get better at addressing customers' needs more quickly over time—and if providers fail to provide the customer service and engagement options that their customers expect and fail to resolve their customers' concerns, they may soon find that the consumer is no longer a customer, having switched to another competitive offering," the lobby group said.

The lobby groups' description may surprise the many Internet users suffering from little competition and poor customer service, such as CenturyLink users who had to go without service for over a month because of the ISP's failure to fix outages. The FCC received very different takes on the state of ISP customer service from regulators in California and Oregon.

The Mt. Hood Cable Regulatory Commission in northwest Oregon, where Comcast is the dominant provider, told the FCC that local residents complain about automated customer service representatives; spending hours on hold while attempting to navigate automated voice systems; billing problems including "getting charged after cancelling service, unexpected price increases, and being charged for equipment that was returned," and service not being restored quickly after outages.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) told the FCC that it performed a recent analysis finding "that only a fraction of California households enjoy access to a highly competitive market for [broadband Internet service], with only 26 percent of households having a choice between two or more broadband providers utilizing either cable modem or fiber optic technologies." The California agency said the result "suggests that competitive forces alone are insufficient to guarantee service quality for customers who depend upon these services."

CPUC said its current rulemaking efforts for California "will establish standards for service outages, repair response time, and access to live representatives." The agency told the FCC that if it adopts new customer service rules for the whole US, it should "permit state and local governments to set customer service standards that exceed the adopted standards."

upstart writes:

OpenAI denies deleting evidence, asks why NYT didn’t back up data:

OpenAI keeps deleting data that could allegedly prove the AI company violated copyright laws by training ChatGPT on authors' works. Apparently largely unintentional, the sloppy practice is seemingly dragging out early court battles that could determine whether AI training is fair use.

Most recently, The New York Times accused OpenAI of unintentionally erasing programs and search results that the newspaper believed could be used as evidence of copyright abuse.

The NYT apparently spent more than 150 hours extracting training data, while following a model inspection protocol that OpenAI set up precisely to avoid conducting potentially damning searches of its own database. This process began in October, but by mid-November, the NYT discovered that some of the data gathered had been erased due to what OpenAI called a "glitch."

Looking to update the court about potential delays in discovery, the NYT asked OpenAI to collaborate on a joint filing admitting the deletion occurred. But OpenAI declined, instead filing a separate response calling the newspaper's accusation that evidence was deleted "exaggerated" and blaming the NYT for the technical problem that triggered the data deleting.

OpenAI denied deleting "any evidence," instead admitting only that file-system information was "inadvertently removed" after the NYT requested a change that resulted in "self-inflicted wounds." According to OpenAI, the tech problem emerged because NYT was hoping to speed up its searches and requested a change to the model inspection set-up that OpenAI warned "would yield no speed improvements and might even hinder performance."

The AI company accused the NYT of negligence during discovery, "repeatedly running flawed code" while conducting searches of URLs and phrases from various newspaper articles and failing to back up their data. Allegedly the change that NYT requested "resulted in removing the folder structure and some file names on one hard drive," which "was supposed to be used as a temporary cache for storing OpenAI data, but evidently was also used by Plaintiffs to save some of their search results (apparently without any backups)."

Once OpenAI figured out what happened, data was restored, OpenAI said. But the NYT alleged that the only data that OpenAI could recover did "not include the original folder structure and original file names" and therefore "is unreliable and cannot be used to determine where the News Plaintiffs' copied articles were used to build Defendants' models."

In response, OpenAI suggested that the NYT could simply take a few days and re-run the searches, insisting, "contrary to Plaintiffs' insinuations, there is no reason to think that the contents of any files were lost." But the NYT does not seem happy about having to retread any part of model inspection, continually frustrated by OpenAI's expectation that plaintiffs must come up with search terms when OpenAI understands its models best.

OpenAI claimed that it has consulted on search terms and been "forced to pour enormous resources" into supporting the NYT's model inspection efforts while continuing to avoid saying how much it's costing. Previously, the NYT accused OpenAI of seeking to profit off these searches, attempting to charge retail prices instead of being transparent about actual costs.

Now, OpenAI appears to be more willing to conduct searches on behalf of NYT that it previously sought to avoid. In its filing, OpenAI asked the court to order news plaintiffs to "collaborate with OpenAI to develop a plan for reasonable, targeted searches to be executed either by Plaintiffs or OpenAI."

How that might proceed will be discussed at a hearing on December 3. OpenAI said it was committed to preventing future technical issues and was "committed to resolving these issues efficiently and equitably."