Month: September 2024

Enlarge / An image from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, where in 1874, the newest thing was not software or genetic compositions, but shutter fastenings from H.L. Norton. (credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider two bills Thursday that would effectively nullify the Supreme Court's rulings against patents on broad software processes and human genes. Open source and Internet freedom advocates are mobilizing and pushing back.

The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (or PERA, S. 2140), sponsored by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), would amend US Code such that "all judicial exceptions to patent eligibility are eliminated." That would include the 2014 ruling in which the Supreme Court held, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing, that simply performing an existing process on a computer does not make it a new, patentable invention. "The relevant question is whether the claims here do more than simply instruct the practitioner to implement the abstract idea of intermediated settlement on a generic computer," Thomas wrote. "They do not."

That case also drew on Bilski v. Kappos, a case in which a patent was proposed based solely on the concept of hedging against price fluctuations in commodity markets.

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / Malte Mueller via Getty Images)

On Wednesday, AI video synthesis firm Runway and entertainment company Lionsgate announced a partnership to create a new AI model trained on Lionsgate's vast film and TV library. The deal will feed Runway legally clear training data and will also reportedly provide Lionsgate with tools to enhance content creation while potentially reducing production costs.

Lionsgate, known for franchises like John Wick and The Hunger Games, sees AI as a way to boost efficiency in content production. Michael Burns, Lionsgate's vice chair, stated in a press release that AI could help develop "cutting edge, capital efficient content creation opportunities." He added that some filmmakers have shown enthusiasm about potential applications in pre- and post-production processes.

Runway plans to develop a custom AI model using Lionsgate's proprietary content portfolio. The model will be exclusive to Lionsgate Studios, allowing filmmakers, directors, and creative staff to augment their work. While specifics remain unclear, the partnership marks the first major collaboration between Runway and a Hollywood studio.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The FBI has dismantled a massive network of compromised devices that Chinese state-sponsored hackers have used for four years to mount attacks on government agencies, telecoms, defense contractors, and other targets in the US and Taiwan.

The botnet was made up primarily of small office and home office routers, surveillance cameras, network-attached storage, and other Internet-connected devices located all over the world. Over the past four years, US officials said, 260,000 such devices have cycled through the sophisticated network, which is organized in three tiers that allow the botnet to operate with efficiency and precision. At its peak in June 2023, Raptor Train, as the botnet is named, consisted of more than 60,000 commandeered devices, according to researchers from Black Lotus Labs, making it the largest China state botnet discovered to date.

Burning down the house

Raptor Train is the second China state-operated botnet US authorities have taken down this year. In January, law enforcement officials covertly issued commands to disinfect Internet of Things devices that hackers backed by the Chinese government had taken over without the device owners’ knowledge. The Chinese hackers, part of a group tracked as Volt Typhoon, used the botnet for more than a year as a platform to deliver exploits that burrowed deep into the networks of targets of interest. Because the attacks appear to originate from IP addresses with good reputations, they are subjected to less scrutiny from network security defenses, making the bots an ideal delivery proxy. Russia-state hackers have also been caught assembling large IoT botnets for the same purposes.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Wireless communication devices have exploded again today across Lebanon in a second attack even deadlier than yesterday's explosion of thousands of Hezbollah pagers. According to Lebanon's Ministry of Health, the new attack has killed at least 14 more people and injured more than 450.

Today's attack targeted two-way radios ("walkie-talkies") issued to Hezbollah members. The radios exploded in the middle of the day, with at least one going off during a funeral for people killed in yesterday's pager attacks. A New York Times report on that funeral described the moment:

When the blast went off, a brief, eerie stillness descended on the crowd. Mourners looked at one another in disbelief. The religious chants being broadcast over a loudspeaker abruptly stopped.

Then panic set in. People started scrambling in the streets, hiding in the lobbies of nearby buildings, and shouting at one another, “Turn off your phone! Take out the battery!” Soon a voice on the loudspeaker at the funeral urged everyone to do the same...

One woman, Um Ibrahim, stopped a reporter in the middle of the confusion and begged to use the reporter’s cellphone to call her children. The woman dialed a number with her hands shaking, then screamed into the phone, “Turn off your phones now!”

The story appears to capture the current mood in Lebanon, where no one seems quite sure what will explode next. While today's attack against walkie-talkies is well-attested, various unconfirmed reports suggest that people fear an explosion from just about anything with a battery.

Enlarge / I hope you like radial menus, because you'll be looking at a lot of them.

Age of Mythology: Retold brings a lot of the usual advancements that you'd expect for a reboot of both the increasingly dated 2002 original game and its previous reboot: 2014's Extended Edition, which is still perfectly playable and available on Steam. The newest version of this real-time strategy classic comes with the requisite improvements in graphics and user interface, making the whole game much easier to look at and parse at a glance. And while the updated voice acting isn't going to win any awards, neither is the stilted, bare bones dialogue that those actors are working with (which seems faithful to the original game, for better or worse).

But Retold does add one thing that I wasn't really expecting in a modern real-time strategy game—full support for a handheld controller. Developers have been trying to make RTS games work without the traditional mouse and keyboard since the days of SNES Populous and Starcraft 64, usually with limited success. Microsoft hasn't given up on the dream, though, fully integrating controller support for Age of Mythology: Retold into both the PC version (which we sampled) and, obviously, the Xbox Series X|S release.

The result is definitely the best version of an RTS controller interface that I've tried and proof that a modern controller can be a perfectly functional option for the genre. In the end, though, there are just a few too many annoyances associated with a handheld controller to make it the preferred way to play a game like this.

Enlarge / The Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, DC, in May 2023. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Four more large Internet service providers told the US Supreme Court this week that ISPs shouldn't be forced to aggressively police copyright infringement on broadband networks.

While the ISPs worry about financial liability from lawsuits filed by major record labels and other copyright holders, they also argue that mass terminations of Internet users accused of piracy "would harm innocent people by depriving households, schools, hospitals, and businesses of Internet access." The legal question presented by the case "is exceptionally important to the future of the Internet," they wrote in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday.

The amici curiae brief was filed by Altice USA (operator of the Optimum brand), Frontier Communications, Lumen (aka CenturyLink), and Verizon. The brief supports cable firm Cox Communications' attempt to overturn its loss in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Sony. Cox petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the case last month.

Enlarge / Warehouse workers at the STL8 Amazon Fulfillment Center marched on the boss Wednesday to demand a $25 an hour minimum wage for all workers. (credit: via Justice Speaks)

Amazon currently faces disgruntled workers in every direction.

Office workers are raging against CEO Andy Jassy's return to office mandate, Fortune reported—which came just as a leaked document reportedly showed that Amazon is also planning to gut management, Business Insider reported. Drivers by the hundreds are flocking to join a union to negotiate even better work conditions, CNBC reported, despite some of the biggest concessions in Amazon's history. And hundreds more unionized warehouse workers are increasingly banding together nationwide to demand a $25 an hour minimum wage. On Wednesday, workers everywhere were encouraged to leave Jassy a voicemail elevating workers' demands for a $25 minimum wage.

Putting on the pressure

This momentum has been building for years after drivers unionized in 2021. And all this collective fury increasingly appears to be finally pressuring Amazon into negotiating better conditions for some workers.

It's been five long years since director Bong Joon-ho's film Parasite topped Ars' list for best films of the year, whose prior work on Snowpiercer and Okja are also staff favorites. We're finally getting a new film from this gifted director: the sci-fi comedy Mickey 17, based on the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. Judging by the trailer that recently dropped, it feels a bit like a darkly comic version of Duncan Jones' 2009 film Moon, with a bit of the surreal absurdity of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) thrown in for good measure. And the visuals are terrific.

Ashton's inspiration for the novel was the teletransportation paradox—a thought experiment pondering the philosophy of identity that challenges certain notions of the self and consciousness. It started as a short story about what Ashton called "a crappy immortality" and expanded from there into a full-length novel.

Ashton told Nerdist last year that Bong's adaptation would "change a lot of the book," but he considered the director a "genius" and wasn't concerned about those changes. The basic premise remains the same. Robert Pattinson plays the space colonist named Mickey Barnes, who is so eager to escape Earth that he signs up to be an "expendable" without reading the fine print.