Project 2025 did not mention NOAA’s work with wildfire. Its authors did not respond to questions about whether firefighters and people living in wildfire-prone areas would need to pay for access to wildfire weather information under their privatization proposals. Partnering with academia To execute some of its climate research, NOAA partners with universities across the country. Without those partnerships, “we’d be losing a ton,” said Christine Wiedinmyer, associate director for science at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Wiedinmyer called the partnership between NOAA and the University of Colorado a “win-win-win”…

AT&T improperly obtained money from a government-run broadband discount program by submitting duplicate requests and by claiming subsidies for thousands of subscribers who weren’t using AT&T’s service. AT&T obtained funding based on false certifications it made under penalty of perjury. AT&T on Friday agreed to pay $2.3 million in a consent decree with the Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau. That includes a civil penalty of $1,921,068 and a repayment of $378,922 to the US Treasury. The settlement fully resolves the FCC investigation into AT&T’s apparent violations, the consent decree said. “AT&T admits for the purpose of this Consent Decree and…

Repeatedly in the course of the documentary, Todd confesses to being Satoshi, before retreating from the admission. “By the way, everyone is Satoshi,” says Todd, after one such confession. “I was trolling the shit out of him,” Todd says, of the moment Hoback confronts him with the theory that he is Satoshi. In the time since the documentary aired, Todd has moved to counter Hoback with evidence of his own. He provided WIRED with images of himself participating in outdoors activities, like skiing and spelunking, which a superficial look at the metadata would suggest were taken at roughly the same…

“Microsoft continues to investigate the circumstances surrounding the CrowdStrike incident to understand why other airlines were able to fully restore business operations so much faster than Delta, including American Airlines and United Airlines,” Cheffo wrote. “Our preliminary review suggests that Delta, unlike its competitors, apparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure, either for the benefit of its customers or for its pilots and flight attendants.” At that time, Cheffo told Boies that Microsoft planned to “vigorously defend” against any litigation. Additionally, Microsoft’s lawyer demanded that Delta preserve documents, including ones showing “the extent to which non-Microsoft systems or software, including systems…

AI is giving scammers a more convincing way to impersonate police, reports show. Just last week, the Salt Lake City Police Department (SLCPD) warned of an email scam using AI to convincingly clone the voice of Police Chief Mike Brown. A citizen tipped off cops after receiving a suspicious email that included a video showing the police chief claiming that they “owed the federal government nearly $100,000.” To dupe their targets, the scammers cut together real footage from one of Brown’s prior TV interviews with AI-generated audio that SLCPD said “is clear and closely impersonates the voice of Chief Brown,…

On Monday, Microsoft came out guns blazing, posting a blog accusing Google of “dishonestly” funding groups conducting allegedly biased studies to discredit Microsoft and mislead antitrust enforcers and the public. In the blog, Microsoft lawyer Rima Alaily alleged that an astroturf group called the Open Cloud Coalition will launch this week and will appear to be led by “a handful of European cloud providers.” In actuality, however, those smaller companies were secretly recruited by Google, which allegedly pays them “to serve as the public face” and “obfuscate” Google’s involvement, Microsoft’s blog said. In return, Google likely offered the cloud providers…

Nelson in August admitted to creating and selling bespoke images of child sexual abuse tailored to customers’ specific requests. He generated digital models of the children using real photographs that his customers had submitted. Police also said he further distributed the images he had created online, both for free and for payment. It comes as both the tech industry and regulators are grappling with the far-reaching social impacts of generative AI. Companies such as Google, Meta, and X have been scrambling to tackle deepfakes on their platforms. Graeme Biggar, director-general of the UK’s National Crime Agency, last year warned it…

In 2022, the Republican National Committee sued Google with claims that it intentionally used Gmail’s spam filter to suppress Republicans’ fundraising emails. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in August 2023, ruling that Google correctly argued that the RNC claims were barred by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In January 2023, the Federal Election Commission rejected a related RNC complaint that alleged Gmail’s spam filtering amounted to “illegal in-kind contributions made by Google to Biden For President and other Democrat candidates.” The federal commission found “no reason to believe” that Google made prohibited in-kind corporate contributions and said…

X Payments unlikely to launch without New York It seems possible that X has gone silent on X Payments because there is no timeline currently. A global payments expert for tech consultancy Capco, Daniela Hawkins, told Ars that, as an outsider going just off a “gut check,” if X has withdrawn its application from New York—with “New York obviously being such a major metropolitan area… that would seem to be a barrier to entry into the payments market.” X could launch X Payments without New York and other states, but Hawkins said users might be confused about where they can…

In an odd footnote, the Register also notes that emulation of classic game consoles, while not infringing in its own right, has been “historically associated with piracy,” thus “rais[ing] a potential concern” for any emulated remote access to library game catalogs. That footnote paradoxically cites Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) founder and director Frank Cifaldi’s 2016 Game Developers Conference talk on the demonization of emulation and its importance to video game preservation. “The moment I became the Joker is when someone in charge of copyright law watched my GDC talk about how it’s wrong to associate emulation with piracy and…

As Boeing’s latest chief executive, Kelly Ortberg’s job was never going to be easy. On Wednesday, it got harder still. That morning, Ortberg had faced investors for the first time, telling them that ending a debilitating strike by Boeing’s largest union was the first step to stabilizing the plane maker’s business. But as the day wore on, it became clear that nearly two-thirds of the union members who voted on the company’s latest contract offer had rejected it. The six-week strike goes on, costing Boeing an estimated $50 million a day, pushing back the day it can resume production of…

Manufacturers opposed the exemption, but it received support from the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. “The Register recommends adopting a new exemption covering diagnosis, maintenance, and repair of retail-level commercial food preparation equipment because proponents sufficiently showed, by a preponderance of the evidence, adverse effects on the proposed noninfringing uses of such equipment,” the Register’s findings said. The exemption does not include commercial and industrial food preparation devices. Unlike the retail-level equipment, the software-enabled industrial machines “may be very different in multiple aspects and proponents have not established a…

The FTC declined to comment on the lawsuits today. The agency’s rule is not enforced yet, as it is scheduled to take full effect 180 days after publication in the Federal Register. Cable firms don’t want canceling to be easy The NCTA cable lobby group, which represents companies like Comcast and Charter, have complained about the rule’s impact on their ability to talk customers out of canceling. NCTA CEO Michael Powell claimed during a January 2024 hearing that “a consumer may easily misunderstand the consequences of canceling and it may be imperative that they learn about better options” and that…

One way to look at how problematic this is would be to think in terms of a carbon budget. We can estimate how much carbon can be put into the atmosphere before warming reaches 1.5° C. Subtract the emissions we’ve already added, and you get the remaining budget. At this point, the remaining budget for 1.5° C is only 200 Gigatonnes, which means another four years like 2023 will leave us well beyond our budget. For the 2° C budget, we’ve got less than 20 years like 2023 before we go past. An alternate way to look at the challenge…

It’s been just a week since US telecom regulators announced a formal inquiry into broadband data caps, and the docket is filling up with comments from users who say they shouldn’t have to pay overage charges for using their Internet service. The docket has about 190 comments so far, nearly all from individual broadband customers. Federal Communications Commission dockets are usually populated with filings from telecom companies, advocacy groups, and other organizations, but some attract comments from individual users of telecom services. The data cap docket probably won’t break any records given that the FCC has fielded many millions of…

Character.AI could also update chatbots to protect kids further, the lawsuit said. For one, the chatbots could be designed to stop insisting that they are real people or licensed therapists. But instead of these updates, the lawsuit warned that Character.AI in June added a new feature that only heightens risks for kids. Part of what addicted Setzer to the chatbots, the lawsuit alleged, was a one-way “Character Voice” feature “designed to provide consumers like Sewell with an even more immersive and realistic experience—it makes them feel like they are talking to a real person.” Setzer began using the feature as…

“Crystal finds all of this deeply intrusive… Crystal worries about how the Flock Cameras are eroding not just her privacy, but her clients’ privacy, too,” the complaint said. In a press release, the Institute for Justice claimed that “Norfolk has created a dragnet that allows the government to monitor everyone’s day-to-day movements without a warrant or probable cause. This type of mass surveillance is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment.” The group says that Flock’s cameras aren’t like “traditional traffic cameras… [which] capture an image only when they sense speeding or someone running a red light.” Instead, Flock’s system…