Author name: Paul Patrick

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TikTok loses Supreme Court fight, prepares to shut down Sunday

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, First Amendment, free speech, national security, Online speech, Policy, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, tiktok, TikTok ban / /

TikTok has said it’s preparing to shut down Sunday.

A TikTok influencer holds a sign that reads “Keep TikTok” outside the US Supreme Court Building as the court hears oral arguments on whether to overturn or delay a law that could lead to a ban of TikTok in the U.S., on January 10, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Kayla Bartkowski / Stringer | Getty Images News

TikTok has lost its Supreme Court appeal in a 9–0 decision and will likely shut down on January 19, a day before Donald Trump’s inauguration, unless the app can be sold before the deadline, which TikTok has said is impossible.

During the trial last Friday, TikTok lawyer Noel Francisco warned SCOTUS that upholding the Biden administration’s divest-or-sell law would likely cause TikTok to “go dark—essentially the platform shuts down” and “essentially… stop operating.” On Wednesday, TikTok reportedly began preparing to shut down the app for all US users, anticipating the loss.

But TikTok’s claims that the divest-or-sell law violated Americans’ free speech rights did not supersede the government’s compelling national security interest in blocking a foreign adversary like China from potentially using the app to spy on or influence Americans, SCOTUS ruled.

“We conclude that the challenged provisions do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights,” the SCOTUS opinion said, while acknowledging that “there is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community.”

Late last year, TikTok and its owner, the Chinese-owned company ByteDance, urgently pushed SCOTUS to intervene before the law’s January 19 enforcement date. Ahead of SCOTUS’ decision, TikTok warned it would have no choice but to abruptly shut down a thriving platform where many Americans get their news, express their views, and make a living.

The US had argued the law was necessary to protect national security interests as the US-China trade war intensifies, alleging that China could use the app to track and influence TikTok’s 170 million American users. A lower court had agreed that the US had a compelling national security interest and rejected arguments that the law violated the First Amendment, triggering TikTok’s appeal to SCOTUS. Today, the Supreme Court upheld that ruling.

According to SCOTUS, the divest-or-sell law is “content-neutral” and only triggers intermediate scrutiny. That requires that the law doesn’t burden “substantially more speech than necessary” to serve the government’s national security interests, rather than strict scrutiny which would force the government to protect those interests through the least restrictive means.

Further, the government was right to single TikTok out, SCOTUS wrote, due to its “scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects.”

“Preventing China from collecting vast amounts of sensitive data from 170 million US TikTok users” is a “decidedly content agnostic” rationale, justices wrote.

“The Government had good reason to single out TikTok for special treatment,” the opinion said.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew posted a statement on TikTok reacting to the ruling, thanking Trump for committing to “work with TikTok” to avoid a shut down and telling users to “rest assured, we will do everything in our power to ensure our platform thrives” in the US.

Momentum to ban TikTok has shifted

First Amendment advocates condemned the SCOTUS ruling. The American Civil Liberties Union called it a “major blow to freedom of expression online,” and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties director David Greene accused justices of sweeping “past the undisputed content-based justification for the law” to “rule only based on the shaky data privacy concerns.”

While the SCOTUS ruling was unanimous, justice Sonia Sotomayor said that  “precedent leaves no doubt” that the law implicated the First Amendment and “plainly” imposed a burden on any US company that distributes TikTok’s speech and any content creator who preferred TikTok as a publisher of their speech.

Similarly concerned was justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote in his concurring opinion that he harbors “serious reservations about whether the law before us is ‘content neutral’ and thus escapes ‘strict scrutiny.'” Gorsuch also said he didn’t know “whether this law will succeed in achieving its ends.”

“But the question we face today is not the law’s wisdom, only its constitutionality,” Gorsuch wrote. “Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us. All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional.”

For TikTok and content creators defending the app, the stakes were incredibly high. TikTok repeatedly denied there was any evidence of spying and warned that enforcing the law would allow the government to unlawfully impose “a massive and unprecedented speech restriction.”

But the Supreme Court declined to order a preliminary injunction to block the law until Trump took office, instead deciding to rush through oral arguments and reach a decision prior to the law’s enforcement deadline. Now TikTok has little recourse if it wishes to maintain US operations, as justices suggested during the trial that even if a president chose to not enforce the law, providing access to TikTok or enabling updates could be viewed as too risky for app stores or other distributors.

The law at the center of the case—the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—had strong bipartisan support under the Biden administration.

But President-elect Donald Trump said he opposed a TikTok ban, despite agreeing that US national security interests in preventing TikTok spying on or manipulating Americans were compelling. And this week, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has introduced a bill to extend the deadline ahead of a potential TikTok ban, and a top Trump adviser, Congressman Mike Waltz, has said that Trump plans to stop the ban and “keep TikTok from going dark,” the BBC reported. Even the Biden administration, whose justice department just finished arguing why the US needed to enforce the law to SCOTUS, “is considering ways to keep TikTok available,” sources told NBC News.

“What might happen next to TikTok remains unclear,” Gorsuch noted in the opinion.

Will Trump save TikTok?

It will likely soon be clear whether Trump will intervene. Trump filed a brief in December, requesting that the Supreme Court stay enforcement of the law until after he takes office because allegedly only he could make a deal to save TikTok. He criticized SCOTUS for rushing the decision and suggested that Congress’ passage of the law may have been “legislative encroachment” that potentially “binds his hands” as president.

“As the incoming Chief Executive, President Trump has a particularly powerful interest in and responsibility for those national-security and foreign-policy questions, and he is the right constitutional actor to resolve the dispute through political means,” Trump’s brief said.

TikTok’s CEO Chew signaled to users that Trump is expected to step in.

“On behalf of everyone at TikTok and all our users across the country, I want to thank President Trump for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States,” Chew’s statement said.

Chew also reminded Trump that he has 60 billion views of his content on TikTok and perhaps stands to lose a major platform through the ban.

“We are grateful and pleased to have the support of a president who truly understands our platform, one who has used TikTok to express his own thoughts and perspectives,” Chew said.

Trump seemingly has limited options to save TikTok, Forbes suggested. At trial, justices disagreed on whether Trump could legally decide to simply not enforce the law. And efforts to pause enforcement or claim compliance without evidence that ByteDance is working on selling off TikTok could be blocked by the court, analysts said. And while ByteDance has repeatedly said it’s unwilling to sell TikTok US, it’s possible, one analyst suggested to Forbes, that ByteDance might be more willing to divest “in exchange for Trump backing off his threat of high tariffs on Chinese imports.”

On Tuesday, a Bloomberg report suggested that China was considering whether selling TikTok to Elon Musk might be a good bargaining chip to de-escalate Trump’s attacks in the US-China trade war.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Meta Pivots on Content Moderation

Pivots / /

There’s going to be some changes made.

  1. Out With the Fact Checkers.

  2. What Happened.

  3. Timing is Everything.

  4. Balancing Different Errors.

  5. Truth and Reconciliation.

  6. Fact Check Fact Check.

  7. Mistakes Will Be Made.

  8. Where We Go From Here.

Mark Zuckerberg has decided that with Donald Trump soon to be in office, he is allowed to care about free speech again. And he has decided it is time to admit that what was called ‘fact checking’ meant he had for years been running a giant hugely biased, trigger-happy and error prone left-wing censorship and moderation machine that had standards massively out of touch with ordinary people and engaged in automated taking down of often innocent accounts.

He also admits that the majority of censorship in the past has flat out been a mistake.

Zuckerberg later talked more about this, and many related and unrelated things, on the Joe Rogan podcast. He says many fun things, like that most companies need ‘more masculine energy’ to balance their feminine energy, and he gives his usual terrible takes on AI which I cover elsewhere.

Zuckerberg is going to overhaul Meta’s entire moderation and censorship structure, replacing it over several months with something akin to community notes. He’s going to move standards back in line with actual community standards. And he’s going to move his content moderation teams from California to Texas, and push back against censorship worldwide, highlighting Europe and Latin America.

The current review process reportedly started when one of Zuckerberg’s own posts got throttled because of concerns over medical content, and then snowballed from there.

How did it all go so wrong? Zuckerberg tells the story on Rogan, that he took complaints about misinformation and the need for fact checking as sincere, then after he hired people for this the slippery slope took over and before long they were censoring things that are in the mainstream discourse.

Here is a parallel discussion, about similar pressures at Zuckerberg’s philanthropy efforts, where he got asked to resign from Facebook during a staff meeting for insufficiently moderating the actual sitting President of the United States.

Matthew Yglesias: Lots of moderate people end up embracing conservatism because of backlash against left-wing excess, but it’s funny to do it when the left-wing excess was literally your own hiring and business decisions.

Kelsey Piper: I think reasonably often middle-aged people hired recent college graduates through pipelines that had historically produced nice moderate liberals like themselves and discovered in shock that now they were producing illiberal leftists who thought the org should be run their way.

Of course the correct response here is to fire this person and hire the people you meant to hire, but hiring is hard and the people you wanted were suddenly hard to find and the existing processes were not producing them.

I know of a number of nonprofits that had an unpleasant shock waking up to this. Some said “wait, no, this isn’t what we’re doing” and had internal drama as they parted with the illiberal employees and survived. Some did not.

But I think it took a really unusual level of institutional leadership and courage to go in 2020 “what? no. that’s not what we’re doing here. if you want to do that, leave.” And the orgs where it did happen tended to keep it quiet so they wouldn’t be a target of outrage.

Also he claims the Biden administration would yell and threaten various people in phone calls, demanded they take down even true information about Covid if it would discourage vaccinations, said not doing so was ‘killing people,’ and when Zuckerberg drew the line at censoring true information (I’d say, ‘somewhat?’) the Biden administration suddenly made good on its jawboning threats and all the investigations came down on Meta’s head.

That’s his story. We have at least some documentary evidence that Facebook responded to White House demands by censoring and removing posts that ‘did not contain actionable misinformation.’ Some more evidence is this Patrick McKenzie report of his volunteers at VaccinateCA getting blocked on Facebook back in 2021 for their ‘unusual interest patterns.’ You can decide how much to believe Zuckerberg’s account of all this.

Now that the Biden administration is on its way out, and the vibes have shifted, it’s time for a change. Zuckerberg explicitly says he waited until after the election (partly because during one is an awkward time for major changes) and that he was deciding largely based on the vibe shifts.

Benjamin Hoffman: Zuckerberg is not literally a liberal; he’s a pragmatist used to passing as a good-enough simulacrum of a liberal to make other people doing the same feel comfortable with him.

If he were literally a liberal Facebook’s behavior in the past few years would have been liberal.

If he were even trying to be mistaken for literally a liberal, his explanation of Facebook’s censorship policy change would have been in terms of a subversion he’s noticing & correcting rather than in terms of vibe shift.

Having listened to the Rogan podcast, I do think Zuckerberg has some amount of preference for more free speech and other classical liberal preferences, but yes it all primarily sounds very pragmatic, and he’s definitely not left-wing in today’s parlance.

I also agree with DHH here that it would have been highly supererogatory for Zuckerberg to make these changes before Trump’s win rather than after, and that Zuckerberg has earned no one’s trust yet, but that it is not a reasonable ask to expect him to have done all this earlier, even if you don’t fully buy his stories about the Federal government half going to war against him.

So what to do now? He’s going to focus his filters, rather than scanning for any violation at all, on illegal and high severity violations, and only act on low severity actions if and when someone reports them. I worry that if this is the policy than there will be various people who decide it is their job to use their AIs (or just their eyes) to go searching for violations to report, but it would still have humans in the loop in every step.

Whereas ‘the filters make mistakes’ so he’s going to dial them back and require a lot more confidence than before (yes this is a trade-off, he discusses it more on Rogan, but there’s a lot of ‘what the hell were we doing before?’ here), essentially also admitting that there was no way to appeal to humans when those mistakes happened, or that those answering those appeals were insane. He’s going to ‘reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.’

And accounts? Yeah, this kind of used to happen a lot, with no way to fix the mistakes. The first reaction I saw to this change was ‘I’ll believe this change matters when [X]’s account, which was banned without explanation, gets reversed.

I don’t see any indication of a plan to undo the mistakes of the past here?

He says they’re going to ‘bring back more civic posts,’ because people want to see such content again. Why not let people choose which content they want to see?

These are all highly welcome changes, especially the move to Community Notes and generally vastly raising the bar before things are censored, even if he basically admits that he was previously ‘going with the flow’ and bowing to pressure, and now he’s bowing to a different kind of pressure.

I hate to kick even this man while he’s making great changes. I want to be clear, my primary response is that these are centrally great changes.

It also seems like we need more before we can properly move on. There’s a lot of ‘you were doing WHAT?’ moments here, and a lot of ‘when did who know what about that exactly?’ all of which should rise to the level of requiring Truth and Reconciliation.

In particular, we need a blanket reinstatement of accounts whose violations would not get you banned under the new rules. Meta’s AI can presumably do reviews of the past content based on new standards and reinstate many accounts. The new Texas crew can then manually review any cases where confidence is not super high.

I also agree with Aella that if your platform bans porn, it isn’t really allowing free speech, which is especially relevant to Instagram for obvious reasons.

Nate Silver writes of The Rise and Fall of Fact Checking. He points out that a lot of the bias in fact checking is in selecting what to ‘fact check,’ which usually targets unresolved or unresolvable claims, because if it was resolvable you didn’t need a fact check. And that ‘fact checking’ ended up often being a way to use an argument from ‘no evidence’ to call things the fact checkers disliked ‘misinformation,’ and the whole enterprise often aims primarily to scaffold and support a narrative.

Whereas the best use of professional and distinct fact checkers is to use them on yourself, as Nate Silver did for his book On the Edge. I would love to have the ability to do this prior to publication, but speed premium does not allow it.

If you want more detail on how insane ‘fact checkers’ and their claims of ‘misinformation’ had gotten, you can see this good post by John Barro. It was clear for a long time, but the treatment by such people of claims about Biden’s declining health made how they work fully common knowledge.

That post includes this quote for the ages from one such person:

Josh Barro: “Of course,” van der Linden replied. “We can’t just be saying random stuff without expert assessment, especially on medical issues.”

Any questions?

Advocates for such policies are, as you would expect, ‘having a normal one.’

Casey Newton (Headline): Meta Surrenders to the right on speech.

“I really think this is a precursor for genocide,” a former employee tells Platformer.

One could say Zuckerberg ‘surrendered on speech’ by deciding that he is for it.

Or more elegantly, chef’s kiss:

To be fair to Newton, it sounds like the end of fact checking was relatively non-alarming to Meta employees, who were instead worried about the loosening of the content guidelines and thresholds. He cites, as many others did, the one especially bonkers policy, which is the main topic of the next section.

But the logic being argued for by such advocates is clear. They think that free speech causes harm, for very broad values of harm, so they are against free speech.

The Babylon Bee offers a thread of past ‘fact checks’ of its satirical posts. Many of these are pretty funny. The fact checks only make them funnier.

This is a good time to check out Asterisk’s piece on The Making of Community Notes.

There are also some… interesting choices in the new content policy?

Reading the entire rationale is looking into a world and philosophy very different from my own. I do want to emphasize that getting this kind of thing right is very difficult, mistakes will be made especially at first, they have to worry about laws and customs around the world very different from our own, and all that. It’s hard.

Alexa Corse, Meghan Bobrowsky and Jeff Horwitz: Meta on Tuesday also revised community standards to significantly loosen restrictions on content previously considered hate speech. For example, the updated rules permit “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation” and strike down a prohibition on comparing women to “household objects or property.”

Specifically, Meta’s policy includes: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.””

Victoria: According to Meta’s new community standards and how it defines hateful conduct, it is a violation of policy to call someone mentally ill or abnormal – unless that person is trans or gay. What the actual f.

Both Claude and I think Victoria’s statement is accurate here? Which seems rather insane. I’m basically fine with ‘no one gets to call anyone mentally ill’ if you want to go that way. I’m also basically fine with ‘everyone gets to call everyone mentally ill for pretty much any reason, there’s a block button for a reason.’ But this? What?

It’s even weirder when the whole concept is general prohibition of attacks on individuals on the basis of ‘protected characteristics’ (unfortunate acronym PC) that includes sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease. What are we even doing?

At some point, [X] is going to say ‘[Y] is mentally ill’ and [Y] is going to say ‘how dare you accuse me of being mentally ill simply because I am mentally ill!’ and [X] is going to replay ‘it’s okay under Facebook rules, because that’s not why I said it. I said it because of your gender identity.’

404 Media is reporting this is causing ‘total chaos internally at Meta,’ based on having talked to five people. I am guessing it was not total chaos at Meta, but that there were people who were very understandably upset.

There’s also this rather amazing special exception for those breaking up:

Meta: Tier 2 not allowed: Targeted cursing, except certain gender-based cursing in a romantic break-up context, defined as:

  • Targeted use of “f” or variations of “f” with intent to insult, such as “Fthe [Protected Characteristic]!”

  • Terms or phrases calling for engagement in sexual activity [or contact with various things.]

This isn’t an accident:

Finally, sometimes people curse at a gender in the context of a romantic break-up. Our policies are designed to allow room for these types of speech.

Movie ideas:

  1. Two people agree to fake a breakup in order to justify speech on Facebook. The speech escalates, they fight and targe each other for real, they of course fall in love.

  2. Two people are breaking up, but neither wants to alter their relationship status on Facebook, because the other would then be able to post horrible things about them. So they have to keep pretending they are together. You know the rest.

    1. Bonus version: A version set in a slightly different policy, where whoever changes their status first, the other one gets to do this as the dumped person. So the two of them do increasingly convoluted things to get the other to change their status and acknowledge the breakup.

Finally, there’s this, and I don’t know if they thought this through or not?

Do not post:

  • Content explicitly providing or offering to provide products or services that aim to change people’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

I expect the change in approach to content moderation to be broadly permanent at Meta and elsewhere, unless it is brought down by foreign legal action.

I expect the new equilibrium to have a meaningful much higher level of allowed speech across the board.

That doesn’t mean every individual change will stick. While humans are in charge, we will continue the dance of fighting over exactly what the rules are and should be. There are some rather obviously ludicrous rules that were discussed in the last section, hopefully they will quickly be addressed.

The biggest threat to the new equilibrium will be foreign governments demanding various forms of censorship, especially the European Union. Facebook and Instagram are likely for this purpose a much bigger deal than Twitter, so they should put up a real fight, as their position on free speech is that they are strongly against it. I don’t know what will happen there. So far things seem unexpectedly quiet.

Indeed, the action we have is that Google is flat out telling the EU no on its legal demand that search results and YouTube videos use fact checkers and then use the results in ranking or removing content. Google says this ‘simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services’ which is very true. Google says this won’t come as news to the relevant officials, who have been informed Google will ‘pull out of all fact-checking commitments in the Code before it becomes a DSA code of conduct.’

Something will have to give. The European Union is saying ‘thou shalt censor the ways we want’ and our largest tech companies are saying, ‘no actually we shalt not.’

I don’t know what happens. The EU demands here are not reasonable, but the EU very much sees it the other way around. If no one backs down, eventually the internet is going to fracture. I am confident Google and Meta do not intend to back down.

On a personal level, this makes it in theory possible to consider posting on Instagram or Facebook at all. When I was posting on Covid, I had requests to post my content to Facebook to help reach people who would not otherwise see it. I was already Against Facebook (with follow-ups) back in 2017, but when I considered reconsidering, I realized that if I posted my content there I would likely get my account banned. I want to keep access to my accounts with Meta, especially WhatsApp and using Facebook as a rolodex, so that wasn’t an option.

(In terms of contacting me, I will see friend requests and Facebook Messenger messages about once every few months, with a roughly Poisson distribution, and will approximately never see a Facebook post of any kind.)

Once these changes are made, it becomes an option again. I see no particular reason to take it, but doing a bit of exploration and controlled experimentation is non-crazy, and I will consider what might make sense.

Discussion about this post

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FCC chair makes one last stand against Trump’s call to punish news stations

brendan carr, Donald Trump, FCC, jessica rosenworcel, Policy / /

FCC not the president’s speech police (yet)

Chair: Complaints “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC.”

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel testifies during a House hearing on Thursday, May 16, 2024. Credit: Getty Images | Tom Williams

Taking action in the final days of the Biden administration, the Federal Communications Commission dismissed three complaints and a petition filed against broadcast television stations. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said the action is important because “the incoming President has called on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke licenses for broadcast television stations because he disagrees with their content and coverage.”

“Today, I have directed the FCC to take a stand on behalf of the First Amendment,” she said. “We draw a bright line at a moment when clarity about government interference with the free press is needed more than ever. The action we take makes clear two things. First, the FCC should not be the president’s speech police. Second, the FCC should not be journalism’s censor-in-chief.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s chosen replacement for Rosenworcel, Commissioner Brendan Carr, wants the FCC to punish news broadcasters that he perceives as being unfair to Trump or Republicans in general. Backing Trump’s various complaints about news stations, Carr has threatened to revoke licenses by wielding the FCC’s authority to ensure that broadcasters using public airwaves operate in the public interest.

Rosenworcel said the complaints and petition she is dismissing “come from all corners—right and left—but what they have in common is they ask the FCC to penalize broadcast television stations because they dislike station behavior, content, or coverage.” After Trump criticized CBS in October, Rosenworcel said the agency “does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

Chair: Complaints aim to “weaponize” FCC authority

The Center for American Rights filed complaints supporting Trump’s claims of bias regarding ABC’s fact-checking during a presidential debate, the editing of a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and NBC putting Harris on a Saturday Night Live episode. Separately, the Media and Democracy Project filed a petition to deny a license renewal for WTXF-TV in Philadelphia, a station owned and operated by Fox, alleging that Fox willfully distorted news with false reports of fraud in the 2020 election that Trump lost.

Rejecting all four, Rosenworcel said “the facts and legal circumstances in each of these cases are different. But what they share is that they seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment. To do so would set a dangerous precedent. That is why we reject it here.”

Dismissing complaints isn’t likely to end the cases, said Jeffrey Westling, a lawyer at the conservative American Action Forum who has urged Congress to “limit or revoke the FCC’s authority to impose content-based restrictions on broadcast television.”

Westling said he agrees “substantively” with Rosenworcel, but added that “the DC Circuit Court has made clear that the FCC has to consider news distortion complaints (see Serafyn vs FCC) and not just dismiss them outright. If I am the complainants, I challenge these dismissals in court, win, and get more attention.”

When contacted by Ars today, the Center for American Rights provided a statement criticizing Rosenworcel’s decision as “political and self-serving.”

“We fundamentally believe that several actions taken by the three major networks were partisan, dishonest and designed to support Vice President Harris in her bid to become President,” the group said. “We will continue to pursue avenues to ensure the American public is protected from media manipulation of our Republic. The First Amendment does not protect intentional misrepresentation or fraud.”

The group previously touted the fact that Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington urged FCC leadership to take its complaints seriously.

Fox ruling will be challenged

The Media and Democracy Project criticized Rosenworcel’s decision to dismiss its complaint against the Fox station in Philadelphia.

“We look forward to presenting on appeal the multiple court decisions that raise serious questions about the Murdochs’ and Fox’s character qualifications to remain broadcast licensees,” the Media and Democracy Project said in a statement provided to Ars. “As renowned First Amendment scholar Floyd Abrams stated in his filing with the Commission, the First Amendment is no bar to Commission action given the facts of this case. Our petition is clearly distinct from the other politically motivated complaints.”

The group’s petition pointed to a court ruling that found Fox News aired false statements about Dominion Voting Systems. Fox later agreed to pay Dominion $788 million to settle a defamation lawsuit.

“Our Petition to Deny is based on judicial findings that Fox made repeated false statements that undermined the electoral process and resulted in property damage, injury, and death; that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch engaged in a ‘carefully crafted scheme’ in ‘bad faith’ to deprive Lachlan’s siblings of the control to which they are entitled under an irrevocable trust; and that ‘Murdoch knowingly caused the corporation to violate the law,'” the Media and Democracy Project said today.

The FCC order denying the petition also granted the station’s application for a license renewal. The order said the allegations regarding “material carried on a cable network under common control with the Licensee that a state court found to be false” aren’t grounds to deny the individual station’s license renewal. While some “non-FCC-related misconduct” can be considered by the FCC in an evaluation of a licensee’s character, the finding in the defamation suit doesn’t qualify, the order said.

Former FCC official objects

Gigi Sohn, a longtime advocate whose nomination to the FCC was rejected by the Senate, also criticized the FCC today. Sohn, who also served as counselor for FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler during the Obama administration, called the dismissal of the Fox petition a “failure to lead.”

“As [Rosenworcel] herself points out, the facts of these petitions are very different,” Sohn wrote. “The [Media and Democracy Project] petition seeks a hearing on Fox Philadelphia licenses because they allege that Fox lacks the character to hold them because it lied to the American people about the 2020 election. The conservative complaints are all based on disagreements with editorial judgments of the various broadcast networks.”

“The decision to lump these filings together and overturn years of FCC precedent that broadcasters’ character is central to holding a license is contrary to the Communications Act’s mandate that licenses be granted in ‘the public interest, convenience and necessity,'” Sohn also wrote. The FCC rationale would mean that “anything and everything a broadcast licensee does or says would be a First Amendment issue that warrants automatic license renewal,” she added.

Media advocacy group Free Press agreed with the FCC’s decision. “We have an incoming administration quite literally threatening to jail journalists for doing their jobs, and an incoming FCC chairman talking about revoking broadcast licenses any time he disagrees with their political coverage,” the group said.

Free Press sided with the FCC despite noting that the Fox case involved “false information [that] had devastating consequences in the January 6 attack on the peaceful transition of power four years ago.”

“Lies knowingly aired by Fox News Channel and some Murdoch-owned Fox affiliates present a significantly different challenge to regulators than merely fact-checking, editing or scheduling equal time for candidates in ways that displease the president-elect,” Free Press said. “Yet we agree with the urgent need to prevent the weaponization of the government against journalists and media companies on the eve of the inauguration, and in light of the dire threats the new administration poses.”

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Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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Home Microsoft 365 plans use Copilot AI features as pretext for a price hike

AI, Biz & IT, copilot, microsoft, microsoft 365, Microsoft office, Tech / /

Microsoft hasn’t said for how long this “limited time” offer will last, but presumably it will only last for a year or two to help ease the transition between the old pricing and the new pricing. New subscribers won’t be offered the option to pay for the Classic plans.

Subscribers on the Personal and Family plans can’t use Copilot indiscriminately; they get 60 AI credits per month to use across all the Office apps, credits that can also be used to generate images or text in Windows apps like Designer, Paint, and Notepad. It’s not clear how these will stack with the 15 credits that Microsoft offers for free for apps like Designer, or the 50 credits per month Microsoft is handing out for Image Cocreator in Paint.

Those who want unlimited usage and access to the newest AI models are still asked to pay $20 per month for a Copilot Pro subscription.

As Microsoft notes, this is the first price increase it has ever implemented for the personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions in the US, which have stayed at the same levels since being introduced as Office 365 over a decade ago. Pricing for the business plans and pricing in other countries has increased before. Pricing for Office Home 2024 ($150) and Office Home & Business 2024 ($250), which can’t access Copilot or other Microsoft 365 features, is also the same as it was before.

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texas-defends-requiring-id-for-porn-to-scotus:-“we’ve-done-this-forever”

Texas defends requiring ID for porn to SCOTUS: “We’ve done this forever”

age verification law, age-gating, First Amendment, free speech rights, Policy, pornography, privacy online, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, texas / /

“You can use VPNs, the click of a button, to make it seem like you’re not in Texas,” Shaffer argued. “You can go through the search engines, you can go through social media, you can access the same content in the ways that kids are likeliest to do.”

Texas attorney Aaron Nielson argued that the problem of kids accessing porn online has only gotten “worse” in the decades since Texas has been attempting less restrictive and allegedly less effective means like content filtering. Now, age verification is Texas’ preferred solution, and strict scrutiny shouldn’t apply to a law that just asks someone to show ID to see adult content, Nielson argued.

“In our history we have always said kids can’t come and look at this stuff,” Nielson argued. “So it seems not correct to me as a historical matter to say, well actually it’s always been presumptively unconstitutional. … But we’ve done it forever. Strict scrutiny somehow has always been satisfied.”

Like groups suing, Texas also asked the Supreme Court to be very clear when writing guidance for the 5th Circuit should the court vacate and remand the case. But Texas wants justices to reiterate that just because the case was remanded, that doesn’t mean the 5th Circuit can’t reinstitute the stay on the preliminary injunction that was ordered following the 5th Circuit’s prior review.

On rebuttal, Shaffer told SCOTUS that out of “about 20 other laws that by some views may look a lot like Texas'” law, “this is the worst of them.” He described Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as a “hostile regulator who’s saying to adults, you should not be here.”

“I strongly urge this court to stick with strict scrutiny as the applicable standard of review when we’re talking about content-based burdens on speakers,” Shaffer said.

In a press release, Vera Eidelman, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said that “efforts to childproof the Internet not only hurt everyone’s ability to access information, but often give the government far too much leeway to go after speech it doesn’t like—all while failing to actually protect children.”

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this-pdf-contains-a-playable-copy-of-doom

This PDF contains a playable copy of Doom

gaming / /

Here at Ars, we’re suckers for stories about hackers getting Doom running on everything from CAPTCHA robot checks and Windows’ notepad.exe to AI hallucinations and fluorescing gut bacteria. Despite all that experience, we were still thrown for a loop by a recent demonstration of Doom running in the usually static confines of a PDF file.

On the Github page for the quixotic project, coder ading2210 discusses how Adobe Acrobat included some robust support for JavaScript in the PDF file format. That JS coding support—which dates back decades and is still fully documented in Adobe’s official PDF specs—is currently implemented in a more limited, more secure form as part of PDFium, the built-in PDF-rendering engine of Chromium-based browsers.

In the past, hackers have used this little-known Adobe feature to code simple games like Breakout and Tetris into PDF documents. But ading220 went further, recompiling a streamlined fork of Doom‘s open source code using an old version of Emscripten that outputs optimized asm.js code.

With that code loaded, the Doom PDF can take inputs via the user typing in a designated text field and generate “video” output in the form of converted ASCII text fed into 200 individual text fields, each representing a horizontal line of the Doom display. The text in those fields is enough to simulate a six-color monochrome display at a “pretty poor but playable” 13 frames per second (about 80 ms per frame).

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meta-takes-us-a-step-closer-to-star-trek’s-universal-translator

Meta takes us a step closer to Star Trek’s universal translator

AI, Computer science, human speech, Science, text processing, translation / /

The computer science behind translating speech from 100 source languages.

In 2023, AI researchers at Meta interviewed 34 native Spanish and Mandarin speakers who lived in the US but didn’t speak English. The goal was to find out what people who constantly rely on translation in their day-to-day activities expect from an AI translation tool. What those participants wanted was basically a Star Trek universal translator or the Babel Fish from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: an AI that could not only translate speech to speech in real time across multiple languages, but also preserve their voice, tone, mannerisms, and emotions. So, Meta assembled a team of over 50 people and got busy building it.

What this team came up with was a next-gen translation system called Seamless. The first building block of this system is described in Wednesday’s issue of Nature; it can translate speech among 36 different languages.

Language data problems

AI translation systems today are mostly focused on text, because huge amounts of text are available in a wide range of languages thanks to digitization and the Internet. Institutions like the United Nations or European Parliament routinely translate all their proceedings into the languages of all their member states, which means there are enormous databases comprising aligned documents prepared by professional human translators. You just needed to feed those huge, aligned text corpora into neural nets (or hidden Markov models before neural nets became all the rage) and you ended up with a reasonably good machine translation system. But there were two problems with that.

The first issue was those databases comprised formal documents, which made the AI translators default to the same boring legalese in the target language even if you tried to translate comedy. The second problem was speech—none of this included audio data.

The problem of language formality was mostly solved by including less formal sources like books, Wikipedia, and similar material in AI training databases. The scarcity of aligned audio data, however, remained. Both issues were at least theoretically manageable in high-resource languages like English or Spanish, but they got dramatically worse in low-resource languages like Icelandic or Zulu.

As a result, the AI translators we have today support an impressive number of languages in text, but things are complicated when it comes to translating speech. There are cascading systems that simply do this trick in stages. An utterance is first converted to text just as it would be in any dictation service. Then comes text-to-text translation, and finally the resulting text in the target language is synthesized into speech. Because errors accumulate at each of those stages, the performance you get this way is usually poor, and it doesn’t work in real time.

A few systems that can translate speech-to-speech directly do exist, but in most cases they only translate into English and not in the opposite way. Your foreign language interlocutor can say something to you in one of the languages supported by tools like Google’s AudioPaLM, and they will translate that to English speech, but you can’t have a conversation going both ways.

So, to pull off the Star Trek universal translator thing Meta’s interviewees dreamt about, the Seamless team started with sorting out the data scarcity problem. And they did it in a quite creative way.

Building a universal language

Warren Weaver, a mathematician and pioneer of machine translation, argued in 1949 that there might be a yet undiscovered universal language working as a common base of human communication. This common base of all our communication was exactly what the Seamless team went for in its search for data more than 70 years later. Weaver’s universal language turned out to be math—more precisely, multidimensional vectors.

Machines do not understand words as humans do. To make sense of them, they need to first turn them into sequences of numbers that represent their meaning. Those sequences of numbers are numerical vectors that are termed word embeddings. When you vectorize tens of millions of documents this way, you’ll end up with a huge multidimensional space where words with similar meaning that often go together, like “tea” and “coffee,” are placed close to each other. When you vectorize aligned text in two languages like those European Parliament proceedings, you end up with two separate vector spaces, and then you can run a neural net to learn how those two spaces map onto each other.

But the Meta team didn’t have those nicely aligned texts for all the languages they wanted to cover. So, they vectorized all texts in all languages as if they were just a single language and dumped them into one embedding space called SONAR (Sentence-level Multimodal and Language-Agnostic Representations). Once the text part was done, they went to speech data, which was vectorized using a popular W2v (word to vector) tool and added it to the same massive multilingual, multimodal space. Of course, each embedding carried metadata identifying its source language and whether it was text or speech before vectorization.

The team just used huge amounts of raw data—no fancy human labeling, no human-aligned translations. And then, the data mining magic happened.

SONAR embeddings represented entire sentences instead of single words. Part of the reason behind that was to control for differences between morphologically rich languages, where a single word may correspond to multiple words in morphologically simple languages. But the most important thing was that it ensured that sentences with similar meaning in multiple languages ended up close to each other in the vector space.

It was the same story with speech, too—a spoken sentence in one language was close to spoken sentences in other languages with similar meaning. It even worked between text and speech. So, the team simply assumed that embeddings in two different languages or two different modalities (speech or text) that are at a sufficiently close distance to each other are equivalent to the manually aligned texts of translated documents.

This produced huge amounts of automatically aligned data. The Seamless team suddenly got access to millions of aligned texts, even in low-resource languages, along with thousands of hours of transcribed audio. And they used all this data to train their next-gen translator.

Seamless translation

The automatically generated data set was augmented with human-curated texts and speech samples where possible and used to train multiple AI translation models. The largest one was called SEAMLESSM4T v2. It could translate speech to speech from 101 source languages into any of 36 output languages, and translate text to text. It would also work as an automatic speech recognition system in 96 languages, translate speech to text from 101 into 96 languages, and translate text to speech from 96 into 36 languages—all from a single unified model. It also outperformed state-of-the-art cascading systems by 8 percent in a speech-to-text and by 23 percent in a speech-to-speech translations based on the scores in Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (an algorithm commonly used to evaluate the quality of machine translation).

But it can now do even more than that. The Nature paper published by Meta’s Seamless ends at the SEAMLESSM4T models, but Nature has a long editorial process to ensure scientific accuracy. The paper published on January 15, 2025, was submitted in late November 2023. But in a quick search of the arXiv.org, a repository of not-yet-peer-reviewed papers, you can find the details of two other models that the Seamless team has already integrated on top of the SEAMLESSM4T: SeamlessStreaming and SeamlessExpressive, which take this AI even closer to making a Star Trek universal translator a reality.

SeamlessStreaming is meant to solve the translation latency problem. The baseline SEAMLESSM4T, despite all the bells and whistles, worked as a standard AI translation tool. You had to say what you wanted to say, push “translate,” and it spat out the translation. SeamlessStreaming was designed to take this experience a bit closer to what human simultaneous translator do—it translates what you’re saying as you speak in a streaming fashion. SeamlessExpressive, on the other hand, is aimed at preserving the way you express yourself in translations. When you whisper or say something in a cheerful manner or shout out with anger, SeamlessExpressive will encode the features of your voice, like tone, prosody, volume, tempo, and so on, and transfer those into the output speech in the target language.

Sadly, it still can’t do both at the same time; you can only choose to go for either streaming or expressivity, at least at the moment. Also, the expressivity variant is very limited in supported languages—it only works in English, Spanish, French, and German. But at least it’s online so you can go ahead and give it a spin.

Nature, 2025.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08359-z

Photo of Jacek Krywko

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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on-the-openai-economic-blueprint

On the OpenAI Economic Blueprint

openai / /

  1. Man With a Plan.

  2. Oh the Pain.

  3. Actual Proposals.

  4. For AI Builders.

  5. Think of the Children.

  6. Content Identification.

  7. Infrastructure Week.

  8. Paying Attention.

The primary Man With a Plan this week for government-guided AI prosperity was UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with a plan coming primarily from Matt Clifford. I’ll be covering that soon.

Today I will be covering the other Man With a Plan, Sam Altman, as OpenAI offers its Economic Blueprint.

Cyrps1s (CISO OpenAI): AI is the ultimate race. The winner decides whether the future looks free and democratic, or repressed and authoritarian.

OpenAI, and the Western World, must win – and we have a blueprint to do so.

Do you hear yourselves? The mask on race and jingoism could not be more off, or firmly attached, depending on which way you want to set up your metaphor. If a movie had villains talking like this people would say it was too on the nose.

Somehow the actual documents tell that statement to hold its beer.

The initial exploratory document is highly disingenuous, trotting out stories of the UK requiring people to walk in front of cars waving red flags and talking about ‘AI’s main street,’ while threatening that if we don’t attract $175 billion in awaiting AI funding it will flow to China-backed projects. They even talk about creating jobs… by building data centers.

The same way some documents scream ‘an AI wrote this,’ others scream ‘the authors of this post are not your friends and are pursuing their book with some mixture of politics-talk and corporate-speak in the most cynical way you can imagine.’

I mean, I get it, playas gonna play, play, play, play, play. But can I ask OpenAI to play with at least some style and grace? To pretend to pretend not to be doing this, a little?

As opposed to actively inserting so many Fnords their document causes physical pain.

The full document starts out in the same vein. Chris Lehane, their Vice President of Global Affairs, writes an introduction as condescending as I can remember, and that plus the ‘where we stand’ repeat the same deeply cynical rhetoric from the summary.

In some sense, it is not important that the way the document is written makes me physically angry and ill in a way I endorse – to the extent that if it doesn’t set off your bullshit detectors and reading it doesn’t cause you pain, then I notice that there is at least some level on which I shouldn’t trust you.

But perhaps that is the most important thing about the document? That it tells you about the people writing it. They are telling you who they are. Believe them.

This is related to the ‘truesight’ that Claude sometimes displays.

As I wrote that, I was only on page 7, and hadn’t even gotten to the actual concrete proposals.

The actual concrete proposals are a distinct issue. I was having trouble reading through to find out what they are because this document filled me with rage and made me physically ill.

It’s important to notice that! I read documents all day, often containing things I do not like. It is very rare that my body responds by going into physical rebellion.

No, the document hasn’t yet mentioned even the possibility of any downside risks at all, let alone existential risks. And that’s pretty terrible on its own. But that’s not even what I’m picking up here, at all. This is something else. Something much worse.

Worst of all, it feels intentional. I can see the Fnords. They want me to see them. They want everyone to implicitly know they are being maximally cynical.

All right, so if one pushes through to the second half and the actual ‘solutions’ section, what is being proposed, beyond ‘regulating us would be akin to requiring someone to walk in front of every car waiving a red flag, no literally.’

The top level numbered statements describe what they propose, I attempted to group and separate proposals for better clarity. The nested statements (a, b, etc) are my reactions.

They say the Federal Government should, in a section where they actually say words with meanings rather than filling it with Fnords:

  1. Share national security information and resources.

    1. Okay. Yes. Please do.

  2. Incentivize AI companies to deploy their products widely, including to allied and partner nations and to support US government agencies.

    1. Huh? What? Is there a problem here that I am not noticing? Who is not deploying, other than in response to other countries regulations saying they cannot deploy (e.g. the EU)? Or are you trying to actively say that safety concerns are bad?

  3. Support the development of standards and safeguards, and ensure they are recognized and respected by other nations.

    1. In a different document I would be all for this – if we don’t have universal standards, people will go shopping. However, in this context, I can’t help but read it mostly as pre-emption, as in ‘we want America to prevent other states from imposing any safety requirements or roadblocks.’

  4. Share its unique expertise with AI companies, including mitigating threats including cyber and CBRN.

    1. Yes! Very much so. Jolly good.

  5. Help companies access secure infrastructure to evaluate model security risks and safeguards.

    1. Yes, excellent, great.

  6. Promote transparency consistent with competitiveness, protect trade secrets, promote market competition, ‘carefully choose disclosure requirements.’

    1. I can’t disagree, but how could anyone?

    2. The devil is in the details. If this had good details, and emphasized that the transparency should largely be about safety questions, it would be another big positive.

  7. Create a defined, voluntary pathway for companies that develop LLMs to work with government to define model evaluations, test models and exchange information to support the companies safeguards.

    1. This is about helping you, the company? And you want it to be entirely voluntary? And in exchange, they explicitly want preemption from state-by-state regulations.

    2. Basically this is a proposal for a fully optional safe harbor. I mean, yes, the Federal government should have a support system in place to aid in evaluations. But notice how they want it to work – as a way to defend companies against any other requirements, which they can in turn ignore when inconvenient.

    3. Also, the goal here is to ‘support the companies safeguards,’ not to in any way see if the models are actually a responsible thing to release on any level.

    4. Amazing to request actively less than zero Federal regulations on safety.

  8. Empower the public sector to quickly and securely adopt AI tools.

    1. I mean, sure, that would be nice if we can actually do it as described.

A lot of the components here are things basically everyone should agree upon.

Then there are the parts where, rather than this going hand-in-hand with an attempt to not kill everyone and ensure against catastrophes, attempts to ensure that no one else tries to stop catastrophes or prevent everyone from being killed. Can’t have that.

They also propose that AI ‘builders’ could:

  1. Form a consortium to identify best practices for working with NatSec.

  2. Develop training programs for AI talent.

I mean, sure, those seem good and we should have an antitrust exemption to allow actions like this along with one that allows them to coordinate, slow down or pause in the name of safety if it comes to that, too. Not that this document mentions that.

Sigh, here we go. Their solutions for thinking of the children are:

  1. Encourage policy solutions that prevent the creation and distribution of CSAM. Incorporate CSAM protections into the AI development lifestyle. ‘Take steps to prevent downstream developers from using their models to generate CSAM.’

    1. This is effectively a call to ban open source image models. I’m sorry, but it is. I wish it were not so, but there is no known way to open source image models, and have them not be used for CSAM, and I don’t see any reason to expect this to be solvable, and notice the reference to ‘downstream developers.’

  2. Promote conditions that support robust and lasting partnerships among AI companies and law enforcement.

  1. Apply provenance data to all AI-generated audio-visual content. Use common provenance standards. Have large companies report progress.

    1. Sure. I think we’re all roughly on the same page here. Let’s move on to ‘preferences.’

  2. People should be ‘empowered to personalize their AI tools.’

    1. I agree we should empower people in this way. But what does the government have to do with this? None of their damn business.

  3. People should control how their personal data is used.

    1. Yes, sure, agreed.

  4. ‘Government and industry should work together to scale AI literacy through robust funding for pilot programs, school district technology budgets and professional development trainings that help people understand how to choose their own preferences to personalize their tools.’

    1. No. Stop. Please. These initiatives never, ever work, we need to admit this.

    2. But also shrug, it’s fine, it won’t do that much damage.

And then, I feel like I need to fully quote this one too:

  1. In exchange for having so much freedom, users should be responsible for impacts of how they work and create with AI. Common-sense rules for AI that are aimed at protecting from actual harms can only provide that protection if they apply to those using the technology as well as those building it.

    1. If seeing the phrase ‘In exchange for having so much freedom’ doesn’t send a chill down your spine, We Are Not the Same.

    2. But I applaud the ‘as well as’ here. Yes, those using the technology should be responsible for the harm they themselves cause, so long as this is ‘in addition to’ rather than shoving all responsibility purely onto them.

Finally, we get to ‘infrastructure as destiny,’ an area where we mostly agree on what is to actually be done, even if I despise a lot of the rhetoric they’re using to argue for it.

  1. Ensure that AIs can train on all publicly available data.

    1. This is probably the law now and I’m basically fine with it.

  2. ‘While also protecting creators from unauthorized digital replicas.’

    1. This seems rather tricky if it means something other than ‘stop regurgitation of training data’? I assume that’s what it means, while trying to pretend it’s more than that. If it’s more than that, they need to explain what they have in mind and how one might do it.

  3. Digitize government data currently in analog form.

    1. Probably should do that anyway, although a lot of it shouldn’t go on the web or into LLMs. Kind of a call for government to pay for data curation.

  4. ‘A Compact for AI’ for capital and supply chains and such among US allies.

    1. I don’t actually understand why this is necessary, and worry this amounts to asking for handouts and to allow Altman to build in the UAE.

  5. ‘AI economic zones’ that speed up the permitting process.

    1. Or we could, you know, speed up the permitting process in general.

    2. But actually we can’t and won’t, so even though this is deeply, deeply stupid and second best it’s probably fine. Directionally this is helpful.

  6. Creation of AI research labs and workforces aligned with key local industries.

    1. This seems like pork barrel spending, an attempt to pick our pockets, we shouldn’t need to subsidize this. To the extent there are applications here, the bottleneck won’t be funding, it will be regulations and human objections, let’s work on those instead.

  7. ‘A nationwide AI education strategy’ to ‘help our current workforce and students become AI ready.’

    1. I strongly believe that what this points towards won’t work. What we actually need is to use AI to revolutionize the education system itself. That would work wonders, but you all (in government reading this document) aren’t ready for that conversation and OpenAI knows this.

  8. More money for research infrastructure and science. Basically have the government buy the scientists a bunch of compute, give OpenAI business?

    1. Again this seems like an attempt to direct government spending and get paid. Obviously we should get our scientists AI, but why can’t they just buy it the same way everyone else does? If we want to fund more science, why this path?

  9. Leading the way on the next generation of energy technology.

    1. No arguments here. Yay next generation energy production.

    2. Clearly Altman wants Helion to get money but I’m basically fine with that.

  10. Dramatically increase federal spending on power and data transmission and streamlined approval for new lines.

    1. I’d emphasize approvals and regulatory barriers more than money.

    2. Actual dollars spent don’t seem to me like the bottleneck, but I could be convinced otherwise.

    3. If we have a way to actually spend money and have that result in a better grid, I’m in favor.

  11. Federal backstops for high-value AI public works.

    1. If this is more than ‘build more power plants and transmission lines and batteries and such’ I am confused what is actually being proposed.

    2. In general, I think helping get us power is great, having the government do the other stuff is probably not its job.

When we get down to the actual asks in the document, a majority of them I actually agree with, and most of them are reasonable, once I was able to force myself to read the words intended to have meaning.

There are still two widespread patterns to note within the meaningful content.

  1. The easy theme, as you would expect, is the broad range of ‘spend money on us and other AI things’ proposals that don’t seem like they would accomplish much. There are some proposals that do seem productive, especially around electrical power, but a lot of this seems like the traditional ways the Federal government gets tricked into spending money. As long as this doesn’t scale too big, I’m not that concerned.

  2. Then there is the play to defeat any attempt at safety regulation, via Federal regulations that actively net interfere with that goal in case any states or countries wanted to try and help. There is clear desirability of a common standard for this, but a voluntary safe harbor preemption, in exchange for various nebulous forms of potential cooperation, cannot be the basis of our entire safety plan. That appears to be the proposal on offer here.

The real vision, the thing I will take away most, is in the rhetoric and presentation, combined with the broader goals, rather than the particular details.

OpenAI now actively wants to be seen as pursuing this kind of obviously disingenuous jingoistic and typically openly corrupt rhetoric, to the extent that their statements are physically painful to read – I dealt with much of that around SB 1047, but this document takes that to the next level and beyond.

OpenAI wants no enforced constraints on their behavior, and they want our money.

OpenAI are telling us who they are. I fully believe them.

Discussion about this post

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there-was-a-straight-shot-from-earth-to-the-moon-and-mars-last-night

There was a straight shot from Earth to the Moon and Mars last night

astrophotography, Mars, moon, Science, Space / /

The most recent lunar occultation of Mars that was visible from the United States occurred on December 7, 2022. A handful of these events occur every few years around each Martian opposition, but they are usually only visible from a small portion of Earth, often over the ocean or in polar regions. The next lunar occultation of Mars visible across most of the United States will happen on the night of February 4–5, 2042. There are similar occultations of Mars in 2035, 2038, and 2039 visible in narrow swaths of South Florida and the Pacific Northwest.

This photo was taken with a handheld Canon 80D and a 600 mm lens. Settings were 1/2000 sec, f/8, ISO 400. The image was cropped and lightly edited in Adobe Lightroom.

The Moon also periodically covers Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Solar System’s more distant planets. A good resource on lunar occultations is In-The-Sky.org, which lists events where the Moon will block out a planet or a bright star. Be sure you choose your location on the upper right corner of the page and toggle year by year to plan out future viewing opportunities.

Viewing these kinds of events can be breathtaking and humbling. In 2012, I was lucky enough to observe the transit of Venus in front of the Sun, something that only happens twice every 121 years.

Seeing Mars, twice the size of the Moon, rising above the lunar horizon like a rusty BB pellet next to a dusty volleyball provided a perfect illustration of the scale and grandeur of the Solar System. Similarly, viewing Venus dwarfed by the Sun was a revealing moment. The worlds accompanying Earth around the Sun are varied in size, shape, color, and composition.

In one glance, an observer can see the barren, airless lunar surface and a cold, desert planet that once harbored rivers, lakes, and potentially life, all while standing on our own planet, an oasis in the cosmos. One thing that connects them all is humanity’s quest for exploration. Today, robots are operating on or around the Moon and Mars. Governments and private companies are preparing to return astronauts to the lunar surface within a few years, then moving on to dispatch human expeditions to the red planet.

Plans to land astronauts on the Moon are already in motion, but significant financial and technological hurdles remain for a crew mission to put humans on Mars. But for a short time Monday night, it looked like there was a direct path.

There was a straight shot from Earth to the Moon and Mars last night Read More »

fbi-forces-chinese-malware-to-delete-itself-from-thousands-of-us-computers

FBI forces Chinese malware to delete itself from thousands of US computers

chinese malware, plugx, Policy, Security / /

The FBI said today that it removed Chinese malware from 4,258 US-based computers and networks by sending commands that forced the malware to use its “self-delete” function.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) government paid the Mustang Panda group to develop a version of PlugX malware used to infect, control, and steal information from victim computers, the FBI said. “Since at least 2014, Mustang Panda hackers then infiltrated thousands of computer systems in campaigns targeting US victims, as well as European and Asian governments and businesses, and Chinese dissident groups,” the FBI said.

The malware has been known for years but many Windows computers were still infected while their owners were unaware. The FBI learned of a method to remotely remove the malware from a French law enforcement agency, which had gained access to a command-and-control server that could send commands to infected computers.

“When a computer infected with this variant of PlugX malware is connected to the Internet, the PlugX malware can send a request to communicate with a command-and-control (‘C2’) server, whose IP address is hard-coded in the malware. In reply, the C2 server can send several possible commands to the PlugX malware on the victim computer,” stated an FBI affidavit that was made on December 20 and unsealed today.

As it turns out, the “PlugX malware variant’s native functionality includes a command from a C2 server to ‘self-delete.'” This deletes the application, files created by the malware, and registry keys used to automatically run the PlugX application when the victim computer is started.

FBI forces Chinese malware to delete itself from thousands of US computers Read More »

up-close-and-personal-with-the-stag-beetle-in-a-real-bug’s-life-s2

Up close and personal with the stag beetle in A Real Bug’s Life S2

A Real Bug's Life, Disney Plus, entomology, National Geographic, Science / /

It’s just one of the many fascinating insect species featured in the second season of this NatGeo docuseries.

A female giant stag beetle Credit: National Geographic/Darlyne A. Murawski

A plucky male American stag beetle thinks he’s found a mate on a rotting old tree stump—and then realizes there’s another male eager to make the same conquest. The two beetles face off in battle, until the first manages to get enough leverage to toss his romantic rival off the stump in a deft display of insect jujitsu. It’s the first time this mating behavior has been captured on film, and the stag beetle is just one of the many fascinating insects featured in the second season of A Real Bug’s Life, a National Geographic docuseries narrated by Awkwafina.

The genesis for the docuseries lies in a past rumored sequel to Pixar’s 1998 animated film A Bug’s Life, which celebrated its 25th anniversary two years ago. That inspired producer Bill Markham, among others, to pitch a documentary series on a real bug’s life to National Geographic. “It was the quickest commission ever,” Markham told Ars last year. “It was such a good idea, to film bugs in an entertaining family way with Pixar sensibilities.” And thanks to the advent of new technologies—photogrammetry, probe and microscope lenses, racing drones, ultra-high-speed camera—plus a handful of skilled “bug wranglers,” the team was able to capture the bug’s-eye view of the world beautifully.

As with the Pixar film, the bugs (and adjacent creatures) are the main characters here, from cockroaches, monarch butterflies, and praying mantises to bees, spiders, and even hermit crabs. The 10 episodes, across two seasons, tell their stories as they struggle to survive in their respective habitats, capturing entire ecosystems in the process: city streets, a farm, the rainforest, a Texas backyard, and the African savannah, for example. Highlights from S1 included the first footage of cockroach egg casings hatching; wrangling army ants on location in a Costa Rica rainforest; and the harrowing adventures of a tiny jumping spider navigating the mean streets of New York City.

Looking for love

A luna moth perched on a twig. National Geographic/Nathan Small

S2 takes viewers to Malaysia’s tropical beaches, the wetlands of Derbyshire in England, and the forests of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. Among the footage highlights: Malaysian tiger beetles, who can run so fast they temporarily are unable to see; a young female hermit crab’s hunt for a bigger shell; and tiny peacock spiders hatching Down Under. There is also a special behind-the-scenes look for those viewers keen to learn more about how the episodes were filmed, involving 130 different species across six continents. Per the official synopsis:

A Real Bug’s Life is back for a thrilling second season that’s bolder than ever. Now, thanks to new cutting-edge filming technology, we are able to follow the incredible stories of the tiny heroes living in this hidden world, from the fast-legged tiger beetle escaping the heat of Borneo’s beaches to the magical metamorphosis of a damselfly on a British pond to the Smoky Mountain luna moth whose quest is to grow wings, find love and pass on his genes all in one short night. Join our witty guide, Awkwafina, on new bug journeys full of more mind-blowing behaviors and larger-than-life characters.

Entomologist Michael Carr, an environmental compliance officer for Santa Fe County in New Mexico, served as a field consultant for the “Love in the Forest” episode, which focuses on the hunt for mates by a luna moth, a firefly, and an American stag beetle. The latter species is Carr’s specialty, ever since he worked at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History and realized the beetles flourished near where he grew up in Virginia. Since stag beetles are something of a niche species, NatGeo naturally tapped Carr as its field expert to help them find and film the insects in the Smoky Mountains. To do so, Carr set up a mercury vapor lamp on a tripod—”old style warehouse lights that take a little time to charge up,” which just happen to emit frequencies of light that attract different insect species.

Behind the scenes

Beetle expert Michael Carr and shooting researcher Katherine Hannaford film a stag beetle at night. National Geographic/Tom Oldridge

Stag beetles are saprocylic insects, according to Carr, so they seek out decaying wood and fungal communities. Males can fly as high as 30 feet to reach tree canopies, while the females can dig down to between 1 and 3 meters to lay their eggs in wood. Much of the stag beetle’s lifecycle is spent underground as a white grub molting into larger and larger forms before hatching in two to three years during the summer. Once their exoskeletons harden, they fly off to find mates and reproduce as quickly as possible. And if another male happens to get in their way, they’re quite prepared to do battle to win at love.

Stag beetles might be his specialty, but Carr found the fireflies also featured in that episode to be a particular highlight. “I grew up in rural Virginia,” Carr told Ars. “There was always fireflies, but I’d never seen anything like that until I was there on site. I did not realize, even though I’d grown up in the woods surrounded by fireflies, that, ‘Oh, the ones that are twinkling at the top, that’s one species. The ones in the middle that are doing a soft glow, that’s a different species.'”

And Carr was as surprised and fascinated as any newbie to learn about the “femme fatale” firefly: a species in which the female mimics the blinking patterns of other species of firefly, luring unsuspecting males to their deaths. The footage captured by the NatGeo crew includes a hair-raising segment where this femme fatale opts not to wait for her prey to come to her. A tasty male firefly has been caught in a spider’s web, and our daring, hungry lady flies right into the web to steal the prey:

A femme fatale firefly steals prey from a rival spider’s web.

Many people have a natural aversion to insects; Carr hopes that inventive docuseries like A Real Bug’s Life can help counter those negative perceptions by featuring some lesser-loved insects in anthropomorphized narratives—like the cockroaches and fire ants featured in S1. “[The series] did an amazing job of showing how something at that scale lives its life, and how that’s almost got a parallel to how we can live our life,” he said. “When you can get your mindset down to such a small scale and not just see them as moving dots on the ground and you see their eyes and you see how they move and how they behave and how they interact with each other, you get a little bit more appreciation for ants as a living organism.”

“By showcasing some of the bigger interesting insects like the femme fatale firefly or the big chivalrous stag beetle fighting over each other, or the dung beetle getting stomped by an elephant—those are some pretty amazing just examples of the biodiversity and breadth of insect life,” said Carr. “People don’t need to love insects. If they can, just, have some new modicum of respect, that’s good enough to change perspectives.”

The second season of A Real Bug’s Life premieres on January 15, 2025, on Disney+.

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Up close and personal with the stag beetle in A Real Bug’s Life S2 Read More »

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New York starts enforcing $15 broadband law that ISPs tried to kill

New York Affordable Broadband Act, Policy / /

1.7 million New York households lost FCC discount

The order said quick implementation of the law is important because of “developments at the federal level impacting the affordability of broadband service.” About 1.7 million New York households, and 23 million nationwide, used to receive a monthly discount through an FCC program that expired in mid-2024 after Congress failed to provide more funding.

“For this reason, consumer benefit programs assisting low-income households—such as the ABA—are even more critical to ensure that the digital divide for low-income New Yorkers is being addressed,” the New York order said.

New York ISPs can obtain an exemption from the low-cost broadband law if they “provide service to no more than 20,000 households and the Commission determines that compliance with such requirements would result in ‘unreasonable or unsustainable financial impact on the broadband service provider,'” the order said.

Over 40 small ISPs filed for exemptions in 2021 before the law was blocked by a judge. Those ISPs and potentially others will be given one-month exemptions if they file paperwork by Wednesday stating that they meet the subscriber threshold. ISPs must submit detailed financial information by February 15 to obtain longer-term exemptions.

“All other ISPs (i.e., those with more than 20,000 subscribers) must comply with the ABA by January 15, 2025,” the order said. Failure to comply can be punished with civil penalties of up to $1,000 per violation. The law applies to wireline, fixed wireless, and satellite providers.

Charter Spectrum currently advertises a $25-per-month plan with 50Mbps speeds for low-income households. Comcast and Optimum have $15 plans. Verizon has a low-income program reducing the cost of some home Internet plans to as low as $20 a month.

Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns 12.3 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications, which also owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast.

New York starts enforcing $15 broadband law that ISPs tried to kill Read More »