Month: May 2023

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu)

On Monday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted a warning that all inactive Twitter accounts would soon be purged, potentially impacting follower counts.

"We’re purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years, so you will probably see follower count drop," Musk tweeted.

Twitter's official policy now considers a user inactive if they fail to log in "at least every 30 days." An archived version of this policy shows that as recently as April 19, the policy had been to log in every six months to keep an account active. Twitter seems to have quietly updated the policy within the past few weeks.

Enlarge / Tools with great potential often require great effort to unlock. In Zelda games, that usually means a number of Heart Containers. In the emulation underground, you need title keys, shader caches, hotfixes, and a willingness to download from some sketchy sites. (credit: Nintendo/YouTube)

Perhaps woken by news of its next premier first-party title already looking really impressive on emulators, Nintendo has moved to take down key tools for emulating and unlocking Switch consoles, including one that lets Switch owners grab keys from their own device.

Simon Aarons maintained a forked repository of Lockpick, a tool (along with Lockpick_RCM) that grabbed the encryption keys from a Nintendo Switch and allowed it to run officially licensed games. Aarons tweeted on Thursday night that Nintendo had issued DMCA takedown requests to GitHub, asking Lockpick, Lockpick_RCM, and nearly 80 forks and derivations to be taken down under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which largely makes illegal the circumvention of technological protection measures that safeguard copyrighted material.

Nintendo's takedown request (RTF file) notes that the Switch contains "multiple technological protection measures" that allow the Switch to play only "legitimate Nintendo video game files." Lockpick tools, combined with a modified Switch, let users grab the cryptographic keys from their own Switch and use them on "systems without Nintendo's Console TPMs" to play "pirated versions of Nintendo's copyright-protected game software." GitHub typically allows repositories with DMCA strikes filed against them to remain open while their maintainers argue their case.

Enlarge / A sign asking people to "Pray for Allen, Texas," stands at a memorial to those killed at the Allen Premium Outlets mall after the mass shooting on May 8, 2023, in Allen, Texas. (credit: Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images North America)

Graphic images from a Texas mass shooting on Saturday that killed nine (including the gunman) and wounded seven are still circulating on Twitter after spreading virally all weekend. Critics told The New York Times that unlike other platforms, Twitter isn't doing enough to remove or label these "unusually graphic" images, especially in footage where dead bodies of some victims, including a young child, appear to be identifiable, Reuters reported.

Family members do "not deserve to see the dead relatives spread across Twitter for everybody to see,” photojournalist Pat Holloway told the Times. Over the weekend, Holloway joined others in tweeting directly at Twitter CEO Elon Musk to step up the platform's content moderation.

Twitter's policy on sharing content after a violent attack acknowledges that "exposure to these materials may also cause harm to those that view them." That policy is primarily focused on banning the distribution of content created by perpetrators of attacks, but it also places restrictions on "bystander-generated content" depicting "dead bodies" or "content that identifies victims."

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of the White House in front of a cybernetic background. (credit: Midjourney)

On Thursday, the White House announced a surprising collaboration between top AI developers, including OpenAI, Google, Antrhopic, Hugging Face, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Stability AI, to participate in a public evaluation of their generative AI systems at DEF CON 31, a hacker convention taking place in Las Vegas in August. The event will be hosted by AI Village, a community of AI hackers.

Since last year, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have become a popular way to accelerate writing and communications tasks, but officials recognize that they also come with inherent risks. Issues such as confabulations, jailbreaks, and biases pose challenges for security professionals and the public. That's why the White House Office of Science, Technology, and Policy endorses pushing these new generative AI models to their limits.

"This independent exercise will provide critical information to researchers and the public about the impacts of these models and will enable AI companies and developers to take steps to fix issues found in those models," says a statement from the White House, which says the event aligns with the Biden administration's AI Bill of Rights and the National Institute of Standards and Technology's AI Risk Management Framework.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Broad-spectrum antibiotics are akin to nuclear bombs, obliterating every prokaryote they meet. They're effective at eliminating pathogens, sure, but they're not so great for maintaining a healthy microbiome. Ideally, we need precision antimicrobials that can target only the harmful bacteria while ignoring the other species we need in our bodies, leaving them to thrive. Enter SNIPR BIOME, a Danish company founded to do just that. Its first drug—SNIPR001—is currently in clinical trials.

The drug is designed for people with cancers involving blood cells. The chemotherapy these patients need can cause immunosuppression along with increased intestinal permeability, so they can't fight off any infections they may get from bacteria that escape from their guts into their bloodstream. The mortality rate from such infections in these patients is around 15–20 percent. Many of the infections are caused by E. coli, and much of this E. coli is already resistant to fluoroquinolones, the antibiotics commonly used to treat these types of infections.

The team at SNIPR BIOME engineers bacteriophages, viruses that target bacteria, to make them hyper-selective. They started by screening 162 phages to find those that would infect a broad range of E. coli strains taken from people with bloodstream or urinary tract infections, as well as from the guts of healthy people. They settled on a set of eight different phages. They then engineered these phages to carry the genes that encode the CRISPR DNA-editing system, along with the RNAs needed to target editing to a number of essential genes in the E. coli genome. This approach has been shown to prevent the evolution of resistance.

Universal Studios has released another trailer for Christopher Nolan's forthcoming film Oppenheimer, which is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Cillian Murphy stars as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, marking the sixth time Murphy has worked with Nolan. Universal Pictures describes the film as "an epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it."

Industry watchers will note that this is the first film Nolan has made without partnering with Warner Bros. since 2002's Insomnia. Chalk the falling out to the impact of the COViD-19 pandemic on Hollywood, notably Warner Bros.'s controversial decision to release all its 2021 films simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max. The studio followed this strategy for Nolan's 2020 sci-fi thriller Tenet, which grossed just $365 million worldwide against its $200 million budget. While this technically made Tenet the fifth biggest film of 2020, by industry standards, it was a box office failure.

Nolan was deeply unhappy with this arrangement, particularly since the studio hadn't conferred with him prior to making the decision about Tenet. So when he decided to write and direct Oppenheimer, the director approached several other studios about partnering with him on the project, eventually signing on with Universal.