Month: January 2024

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Valve)

From Black Mesa to the recently launched Portal: Revolution, Valve has had a reputation for being pretty willing to let modders run wild with new creations based on its popular games. Recently, though, a series of legal threats and takedowns of Valve-related fan projects have some worried that the Half-Life maker is going the way of Nintendo in stringently enforcing its IP rights against projects and mods that it sees as infringing.

While there are differences between the situations leading to three recent fan project takedowns, there are also some similarities that hint at the specific types of fan projects that are drawing Valve’s legal attention these days.

What’s happened so far?

Valve’s recent efforts started last week, when the company sent a DMCA takedown request to Amper Software, a team of volunteers looking to remake the aging Team Fortress 2 in Valve's more modern Source 2 engine. The DMCA notice, as posted to Amper's GitHub, focuses on the team’s use of "TF2 assets [that] have been ported to Source 2 without permission" and the "unauthorized porting and redistributing of Valve's assets without a license, [which] violates Valve's IP."

Enlarge (credit: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images/Aurich Lawson)

Elon Musk says his ambitions to make Tesla more than just an automaker depend on him gaining far more control over the company. The controversial CEO took to his social media platform X to say that unless he is awarded another 12 percent of the company, which would give him ownership of 25 percent of Tesla, he would be "uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics."

Failing that, Musk said he would "prefer to build products outside of Tesla," then questioned why large institutional investors in Tesla like Fidelity "don't show up to work," seemingly confused by the difference between an individual with a job and a company that owns assets.

For 2022—the last year for which full financial results are available—95 percent of Tesla's revenues came from its automotive activities.

Enlarge / An artist's impression of the planet K2-18b and its clouds. (credit: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser)

The rumors have been out there for a while now, percolating through respectable corners of the astronomy and astrobiological community, that the James Webb Space Telescope has found a planet with strong evidence of life.

Some of this sentiment recently bubbled into the public view when the British news magazine The Spectator published an item titled "Have we just discovered aliens?" In accordance with Betteridge's law of headlines, the answer to the question posed in this headline is no.

But is it a hard no? That's a more difficult question. The Spectator featured comments by some serious British scientists, including astrophysicist Rebecca Smethurst, who said, "I think we are going to get a paper that has strong evidence for a biosignature on an exoplanet very, very soon."