Guess what's finally entering America's public domain today? Appropriately enough, it's Marcel Proust's 1927 novel Remembrance of Things Past.

Also entering the public domain today are thousands of other books, plus the music and lyrics of hundreds of songs, and even several silent movies.

Fritz Lang's sci-fi classic Metropolis enters the public domain today — and so does the Laurel & Hardy comedy Battle of the Century (which culminates with one of Hollywod's first pie fights), according to Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain: This is actually the second time that Metropolis has gone into the US public domain. The first was in 1955, when its initial 28-year term expired and the rights holders did not renew the copyright. Then in 1996 a new law restored the copyrights in qualifying foreign works. Metropolis, along with thousands of other works, was pulled out of the public domain, and now reenters it after the expiration of the 95-year term, with the once missing scenes available for anyone to reuse.
They also note that some material is in the public domain from the beginning, including government works like the images from the James Webb telescope.

But for other works, today is a big and important day, writes the Associated Press: Alongside the short-story collection "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes," books such as Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse," Ernest Hemingway's "Men Without Women," William Faulkner's "Mosquitoes" and Agatha Christie's "The Big Four" — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns to 2023. Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost.

The works from 1927 were originally supposed to be copyrighted for 75 years, but the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act delayed opening them up for an additional 20 years. While many prominent works on the list used those extra two decades to earn their copyright holders good money, a Duke University expert says the copyright protections also applied to "all of the works whose commercial viability had long subsided."

"For the vast majority — probably 99% — of works from 1927, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason," Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, wrote in a blog post heralding "Public Domain Day 2023." That long U.S. copyright period meant many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn't be used by others. On the Duke list are such "lost" films like Victor Fleming's "The Way of All Flesh" and Tod Browning's "London After Midnight...."
Also entering the public domain today:


- Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop
- A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six (illustrations by E. H. Shepard)
- Franklin W. Dixon's The Tower Treasure — the first Hardy Boys book
- Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf (German version)
- The song "My Blue Heaven"
- Songs by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
- Alfred Hitchcock's early silent movie The Lodger


The UK-based newspaper the Observer adds: For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy.... The term was gradually lengthened in small increments by Congress until 1976, when it was extended by 19 years to 75 years and then in 1998 by the Sonny Bono Act. So, as the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig puts it, "in the 20 years after the Sonny Bono Act, while 1 million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term"....

[T]he end result is that American citizens have had to wait two decades to be free to adapt and reuse works to which we Europeans have had easy access....

The issue highlighted by Public Domain Day is not that intellectual property is evil but that aspects of it — especially copyright — have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying. Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off. It's obviously important that clever people are rewarded for their creativity and the patent system does that quite well. But if a patent only lasts for 20 years, why on earth should copyright last for life plus 70 years for a novel?

"Starting next year, Nintendo fans can step through a life-size warp pipe and enter the Mushroom Kingdom," reports Bloomberg, "for the first time on American soil."

Bloomberg shares its reaction after "an early preview tour of the land as it finalizes construction," noting that it has "a chirping soundtrack of cheerful instrumentals and distant coin clinks." Super Nintendo World, an interactive replica of Nintendo's dynamic lands and characters, will bring its colorful chaos to Universal Studios Hollywood when it opens on Feb. 17, 2023. The expansion provides an opportunity to race alongside Mario and Luigi before meeting them face to face, and it will bring video game-inspired dining, retail and merchandise to the California theme park inside an immersive, bowllike structure lined with spinning coins and turtle shells....

Whether Koopa Troopas in motion or a fake desert set against the actual skies, there's always something to look at — and somewhere intriguing to head first. Its marquee attraction, Mario Kart: Bowser's Challenge, puts riders in augmented reality-enabled helmets to experience the Mario Kart racing game firsthand while the challenge plays out virtually in front of them....

Super Nintendo World was released at Universal Studios Japan in March 2021, but its arrival stateside marks Universal Studio Hollywood's largest opening since its Wizarding World of Harry Potter expansion in 2016, and it's the first of Nintendo's notable footprints on domestic soil. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, starring Chris Pratt, hits theaters in April, and a third iteration of Super Nintendo World will open with Epic Universe, the all-new theme park arriving at Universal Orlando Resort in 2025.

In each iteration, the main draw is the Mario Kart experience. Here, riders in four-passenger vehicles will join Team Mario to compete across multiple courses for the Golden Cup — a familiar process to anyone who's played Nintendo's racing challenge back home.
The article reminds readers that "all attendees can punch blocks (with more force than one may anticipate) and re-create other moments in the Mushroom Kingdom."

But they ultimately describe the experience as a kind of "overwhelming immersion, transporting people to a location they've previously seen, but never before in real life."

CNN reports: Mars may seem like a dry, desolate place, but the red planet transforms into an otherworldly wonderland in winter, according to a new video shared by NASA....

"Enough snow falls that you could snowshoe across it," said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement from a NASA release. "If you were looking for skiing, though, you'd have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface."

So far, no orbiters or rovers have been able to see snow fall on the red planet because the weather phenomenon only occurs at the poles beneath cloud cover at night. The cameras on the orbiters can't peer through the clouds, and no robotic explorers have been developed that could survive the freezing temperatures at the poles. [ -190 degrees Fahrenheit, or -123 degrees Celsius) ] However, the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can detect light that's invisible to the human eye. It has made detections of carbon dioxide snow falling at the Martian poles. The Phoenix lander, which arrived on Mars in 2008, also used one of its laser instruments to detect water-ice snow from its spot about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) away from the Martian north pole....

"Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped," Piqueux said. "Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair."

Ice and carbon dioxide-based frosts also form on Mars, and they can occur farther away from the poles. The Odyssey orbiter (which entered Mars' orbit in 2001) has watched frost forming and turning to a gas in the sunlight, while the Viking landers spotted icy frost on Mars when they arrived in the 1970s. At the end of winter, the season's buildup of ice can thaw and turn into gas, creating unique shapes that have reminded NASA scientists of Swiss cheese, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, spiders and other unusual formations.
That's just the beginning, according to a press release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab: This "thawing" also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.
And they also note that the camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter also captured some surprisingly colorful images of sand dunes covered by frost

Looking back at 2022's technology, the lead technology writer for the New York Times criticized Meta's $1,500 VR headset and the iPhone's "mostly unnoticeable improvements."

But then he also predicted which new tech could affect you in 2023. Some highlights: - It's very likely that next year you could have a chatbot that acts as a research assistant. Imagine that you are writing a research paper and want to add some historical facts about World War II. You could share a 100-page document with the bot and ask it to sum up the highlights related to a certain aspect of the war. The bot will then read the document and generate a summary for you....

That doesn't mean that we'll see a flood of stand-alone A.I. apps in 2023. It may be more the case that many tools we already use for work will begin building automatic language generation into their apps. Rowan Curran, a technology analyst at the research firm Forrester, said apps like Microsoft Word and Google Sheets could soon embed A.I. tools to streamline people's work flows. - In 2023, the V.R. drumbeat will go on. Apple, which has publicly said it will never use the word "metaverse," is widely expected to release its first headset. Though the company has yet to share details about the product, Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, has laid out clues, expressing his excitement about using augmented reality to take advantage of digital data in the physical world. "You'll wonder how you lived your life without augmented reality, just like today you wonder: How did people like me grow up without the internet?" Mr. Cook said in September to students in Naples.

He added, however, that the technology was not something that would become profound overnight. Wireless headsets remain bulky and used indoors, which means that the first iteration of Apple's headgear will, similar to many others that preceded it, most likely be used for games. In other words, there will continue to be lots of chatter about the metaverse and virtual (augmented, mixed, whatever-you-want-to-call-dorky-looking) goggles in 2023, but it most likely still won't be the year that these headsets become widely popular, said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer tech analyst for the research firm Creative Strategies. "From a consumer perspective, it's still very uncertain what you're spending your thousand bucks on when you're buying a headset," she said. "Do I have to do a meeting with V.R.? With or without legs, it's not a necessity."

"Rapid chess" grants 15 minutes to each player for all moves (plus 10 seconds per move). "Blitz chess" grants each player three minutes (plus 2 seconds per move).

Now CNN reports that five-time world chess champion Magnus Carlsen "won both the World Rapid and World Blitz chess titles in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in the latest landmark of his glittering career." The 32-year-old Norwegian is now the holder of all three world chess championship titles — in Classical, Rapid and Blitz — for the third time in his career, while no other player has ever won both the Rapid and Blitz titles in the same year.

"Gonna need more hands soon," Carlsen joked on Twitter, posting a video of himself counting his now 15 world titles on his fingers.

It caps a triumphant end to Carlsen's remarkable decade-long reign as the classical world champion, as he has already announced that he will not defend his title next year.
Chess24 reports that for his first three-minute match, Magnus Carlsen showed up two and a half minutes late — and starting with just 30 seconds left on his clock, still beat his opponent.

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from KITCO: Midas Investments, the hybrid centralized/decentralized (CeDeFi) cryptocurrency platform, announced Tuesday that they will shut down operations as of Dec. 27 and will deduct 55% from most customer accounts to "balance assets and liabilities." This morning, Midas' CEO shut down his own AMA with customers after less than half an hour. "I am writing to you today with a heavy heart to announce that the Midas platform is closing down," wrote Iakov Levin, CEO of Midas Investments, who also goes by 'Trevor,' in a Dec. 27 blog post.

Levin said that in the spring of 2022, the advent of the crypto winter saw Midas' DeFi portfolio lose $50 million of its $250 million market value, or 20%. Then, following the bankruptcy of Celsius on Jul. 13 and FTX on Nov. 11, "the platform experienced over 60% of AUM being withdrawn, creating a large asset deficit" of $63.3 million, based on assets of $51.7 million against liabilities of $115 million in BTC, ETH and stablecoins. "Based on this situation and current CeFi market conditions, we have reached the difficult decision to close the platform," Levin wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An appeals court has revived a lawsuit against that accuses Google, YouTube, DreamWorks, and a handful of toymakers of tracking the activity of children under 13 on YouTube. In an opinion (PDF) released Wednesday, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act does not bar lawsuits based on individual state privacy laws.

Passed in 1998 and amended in 2012, COPPA requires websites to obtain parental consent for the collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information of children under the age of 13. COPPA gives the FTC and state attorneys general the ability to investigate and levy fines for violations of the law. Several states across the US have laws similar to COPPA on the books. The revived lawsuit cites laws in California, Colorado, Indiana, and Massachusetts to argue that Hasbro, DreamWorks, Mattel, and the Cartoon Network illegally lured children to their YouTube channels in order to target them with ads.

A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed the original lawsuit, ruling that COPPA bars individuals from suing companies for privacy violations. In a unanimous decision, the Ninth Circuit judges hearing the appeal disagreed with the district court's reasoning. COPPA is not, in fact, the only route to enforcement, according to the ruling. "Since the bar on 'inconsistent' state laws implicitly preserves 'consistent' state substantive laws, it would be nonsensical to assume Congress intended to simultaneously preclude all state remedies for violations of those laws," wrote Judge Margaret McKeown. The case, which seeks damages for a seven-year time period between 2013 and 2020, now heads back to district court.

An anonymous reader shares a report: New York governor Kathy Hochul signed the Digital Fair Repair Act on December 28th, 2022, and the law will go into effect on July 1st, 2023 -- a full year after it was originally passed by the NY State legislature. The bill establishes that consumers and independent repair providers have a right to obtain manuals, diagrams, diagnostics and parts from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in order to repair their own devices. However, the bill was meaningfully compromised at the last minute by amendments that give OEMs some convenient exceptions and loopholes to get out of obligations that many right to repair advocates had been hoping for.

One of the most controversial adjustments in the signed law is that it allows OEMs to sell assemblies of parts instead of individual components if they choose to. The bill also won't require OEMs to provide "passwords, security codes or materials" to bypass security features, which is sometimes necessary to do to save a locked, but otherwise functionally fine device. This makes the bill "functionally useless," according to Louis Rossmann, a repair technician who has been a fierce advocate of toothy right to repair legislation. Rossmann responded today to the amended bill with a video full of detailed analysis and criticism. Hochul claims in her signed memorandum that the bill was amended to lessen the risk of physical harm or security issues while making repairs, an amendment that Rossman calls "bullshit" and expects manufacturers to exploit in circumvention of the spirit of the bill.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Take a grand tour of the solar system tonight (Dec. 28) as each of the planets in the solar system will be visible at the same time. As 2022 comes to an end, skywatchers can take in the rare sight of all of the planets in our solar system (aside from Earth) together in the sky. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all currently visible simultaneously with the naked eye. The two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, can meanwhile be observed with binoculars or a telescope.

The five planets visible with the naked eye -- Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, in that order -- will line up in the sky starting from the southwestern horizon. Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system, will be difficult to see with the eye, but it's possible if dark sky conditions are right. Uranus, visible only through binoculars or a telescope, can be found between Mars and Jupiter, while Neptune will be visible through optics between Saturn and Jupiter. The Virtual Telescope Project is hosting a free "grand tour of the solar system" livestream starting at 12:30 p.m. EST (1730 GMT) on Wednesday (Dec. 28). The live webcast is also available on their YouTube channel.

The report notes that this "grand tour" happens roughly every one to two years, on average. "In June 2022, skywatchers were treated to five planets -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- arranged in a rare alignment the likes of which hadn't occurred since 1864," the report adds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Headlines: In a recent voice assistant test conducted by popular YouTuber MKBHD, Google Assistant emerged as the best voice assistant, outperforming Apple's Siri, Samsung's Bixby, and Amazon's Alexa. There are several reasons why Google Assistant stands out as the top voice assistant. Firstly, it is backed by Google's powerful artificial intelligence, which helps it to understand and interpret user requests accurately. Secondly, Google Assistant has access to a vast amount of data from its users, which allows it to provide a more personalized experience. The company also collects data from various services such as search, maps, and email to improve the functionality and performance of Google Assistant. However, one of the biggest reasons behind Google Assistant's win is its strong conversation skills. Google's AI uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand the meaning and context of words and phrases, which helps to keep the conversation going.

Apple's Siri took second place in the competition. It performed well when asked to complete tasks like setting a timer and searching the internet, but struggled when asked to answer more complex or conversational questions. Additionally, Siri was unable to perform tasks that required interacting with apps. In contrast, Samsung's Bixby excelled in device control thanks to its integration with Samsung devices. This integration enables Bixby to control system settings and integrate more deeply with apps than any other voice assistant. Bixby can send text messages, check sports scores, turn down screen brightness, check your calendar, launch apps, and more.

Of all the digital assistants, Amazon's Alexa performed the worst in the voice assistant test. This is due to several factors. Firstly, Alexa is not integrated into smartphones, which means it lacks the personalized touch of other voice assistants. This can make it feel less intuitive and less convenient to use. Secondly, Alexa's inaccuracy in finding facts, inability to interact with other apps and poor conversational models all combine to create a subpar experience when used on a phone. These issues make it difficult for Alexa to provide useful and reliable information, which is a key expectation of voice assistants. In addition, the inclusion of Amazon advertisements between tasks can be annoying and disrupt the user experience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hackaday: Stabilizing an inverted pendulum is a classic problem in control theory, and if you've ever taken a control systems class you might remember seeing pages full of differential equations and bode diagrams just to describe its basic operation. Although this might make such a system seem terribly complicated, actually implementing all of that theory doesn't have to be difficult at all, as [Limenitis Reducta] demonstrates in his latest project. All you need is a 3D printer, some basic electronic skills and knowledge of Python. The components needed are a body, two wheels, motors to drive those wheels and some electronics. [Limenitis] demonstrates the design process in the video [here] (in Turkish, with English subtitles available) in which he draws the entire system in Fusion 360 and then proceeds to manufacture it. The body and wheels are 3D-printed, with rubber bands providing some traction to the wheels which would otherwise have difficulty on slippery surfaces.

Two stepper motors drive the wheels, controlled by a DRV8825 motor driver, while an MPU-9250 accelerometer and gyroscope unit measures the angle and acceleration of the system. The loop is closed by a Raspberry Pi Pico that implements a PID controller: another control theory classic, in which the proportional, integral and derivative parameters are tuned to adapt the control loop to the physical system in question. External inputs can be provided through a Bluetooth connection, which makes it possible to control the robot from a PC or smartphone and guide it around your living room. All design files and software are available on Limenitis' GitHub page.

Subscribers to "NFL Sunday Ticket" can watch broadcasts of every Sunday game of American football. But for access next season, "fans will have to Google it..." warns the Associated Press — because Thursday the football league announced plans to distribute their game package on YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels.

Google beat out both Apple and Amazon by offering over $2 billion a year for 7 years — but Yahoo Finance believes it's more about drawing attention to YouTube's streaming TV services. "Don't expect the package to be profitable, one analyst warned." "They're not making money on this — this is a loss leader," Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush, told Yahoo Finance Live, referencing YouTube TV's current price point of $64.99. "I don't think they make a penny at that level...."

"It's an extremely expensive package of content," Tim Nollen, analyst at Macquarie Group, previously told Yahoo Finance Live, noting the Sunday Ticket package was not a profitable service for DirecTV [which since 1994 has held the exclusive broadcast rights in the U.S.]

[...] YouTube TV has more than 5 million subscribers and trial users as of July. "Five million subscribers is just not enough," Pachter stressed. "Even if all 5 million pay the $400 bucks a year...they're going to barely cover their costs." Still, despite the lack of profitability and sky-high price tag, Pachter noted YouTube might be best positioned to take advantage of the package, especially as the demand for live sports escalates. "I think they can be smart about how they carve up the content," Pachter said, suggesting the platform could more easily sell games to bars and restaurants.

The creators of "South Park" have secured a $20 million investment for their AI entertainment startup Deep Voodoo. Variety reports: The funding was led by Connect Ventures, an investment partnership between CAA and venture-capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). It's the first outside capital raised by Deep Voodoo, which previously was funded entirely by Parker and Stone's independent entertainment company, Park County. Stone and Parker plan to use the new funding to "accelerate Deep Voodoo's development of its leading deepfake technology, cost-effective visual effects services and original synthetic media projects," according to the announcement.

Stone and Parker's Deep Voodoo began building their proprietary deepfake technology in early 2020, and the duo assembled a team of artists for a feature film about Donald Trump they had developed. In October of that year, they released "Sassy Justice," a 14-minute comedy short featuring a deepfaked Trump (voiced by Peter Serafinowicz), which went viral. But they suspended the movie project due to the COVID pandemic, and pivoted Deep Voodoo to be a provider of deepfake tools to the industry. With Connect Ventures' investment, Deep Voodoo has begun offering its "unrivaled face-swapping visual effects" to artists, producers and creators across the industry, per the announcement.

YouTube's Doctor Volt repurposed a Blu-Ray drive, which are now easy to find on the cheap in the era of streaming content, to build a simple scanning laser microscope. Gizmodo reports: A couple of custom-designed and manufactured plastic parts were added to the mix to create a scanning bed for a sample that could move back in forth in one direction, while the laser itself shifted back and forth in the other. Unlike an optical microscope, where the entirely of an object is imaged at once, a scanning laser microscope takes light intensity measurements in increments, moving across an object in a grid and assembling a magnified image pixel by pixel. In this case, given the limitations of the Blu-Ray drive's spindle, which moves the sample being viewed back and forth, the image is assembled from 16,129 measurements (a 127x127 grid) and then scaled up to a 512x512 image.

A browser-based user interface written in Java allows focus adjustments and the scanning speed of the microscope to be modified, but at the slowest possible speed, the results are surprisingly good and recognizable. Certainly not comparable to what you'd get from lab equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars, but for a re-purposed Blu-Ray drive you could get for less than $20 on eBay, this is an impressive hack.

Les Pounder writes via Tom's Hardware: Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton announced via a recent blog post that 100,000 units would be making their way into the supply chain, and that the in the latter-half of 2023 we can expect stock levels to return to pre-pandemic normality. That said, the supply chain shortage has impacted the normal cadence of Raspberry Pi releases, and according to Upton in an interview with Christopher Barnatt from Explaining Computers it means we sadly won't be seeing a Raspberry Pi 5 in 2023.

In the interview, Explaining Computers host Barnatt asks Upton about the future of the Raspberry Pi and if there are new models on the horizon. Upton then talks about how the past couple of years have been "weird" (pandemic and global chip shortage) and it has disrupted the cadence of Raspberry Pi development and release. Upton states that "the platform [Raspberry Pi 4] has been around longer than any Raspberry Pi platform has been around before, I think." At 29 minutes and 30 seconds Upton breaks the bad news, "Don't expect a Pi 5 next year [2023]" Upton then expands and explains that 2023 is a "recovery year". The recovery year is there to help Raspberry Pi and the technology industry recover from the double-punch of a pandemic and a global chip shortage which has caused a slowdown across the world.

Upton explains "What would really be a disaster would be if we tried to introduce some kind of Raspberry Pi 5 product" Upton provides a scenario akin to that of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, launched midway through the pandemic. It has been relatively unobtainium since release. Upton said he is very concerned about the consequences "if we introduced a Raspberry Pi 5 product and it couldn't ramp properly because of constraints, or if we introduced some Raspberry Pi 5 product and it somehow cannibalized some supply chain element." Upton then explains how cannibalization could impact the recovery of Raspberry Pi 4 and the 3 / 3+ and that Raspberry Pi has to be "ginger" as they move forward with its recovery. "The good news is the second half of next year, 2024 onwards, some of those things start to abate. And that's the point where we can start to think about what might be a sensible Raspberry Pi 5 platform," Upton said.

Karl Sebastian Greenwood, co-founder of sham "Bitcoin-killer" OneCoin, pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to charges of conspiring to defraud investors and to launder money. "Greenwood was arrested in Thailand in July 2018 and subsequently extradited to the US," reports The Register. "OneCoin's other co-founder, 'Cryptoqueen' Ruja Ignatova (Dr. Ruja Ignatova -- she has a law degree), remains a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list and on Europol's Most Wanted list." From the report: "As a founder and leader of OneCoin, Karl Sebastian Greenwood operated one of the largest international fraud schemes ever perpetrated," said US Attorney Damian Williams in a statement. "Greenwood and his co-conspirators, including fugitive Ruja Ignatova, conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars, claiming that OneCoin would be the 'Bitcoin killer.' In fact, OneCoins were entirely worthless." The US has charged at least nine individuals across four related cases, including Greenwood and Ignatova, with fraud charges related to OneCoin. Authorities in China have prosecuted 98 people accused of trying to sell OneCoin. Police in India arrested 18 for pitching the Ponzi scheme.

According to the Justice Department, Greenwood and Ignatova founded OneCoin in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2014. Until 2017 or so, they're said to have marketed OneCoin as a cryptocurrency to investors. The OneCoin exchange was shut down in January 2017, but trades evidently continued among affiliated individuals for some time. The OneCoin.eu website remained online until 2019. In fact, OneCoin was a multi-level marketing (MLM) pyramid scheme in which network members received commissions when they managed to recruit people to buy OneCoin. The firm's own promotional materials claim more than three million people invested. And between Q4 2014 and Q4 2016, company records claim OneCoin generated more than $4.3 billion in revenue and $2.9 billion in purported profits. At the top of the MLM pyramid, Greenwood is said to have earned $21 million per month. Greenwood and others claimed that OneCoin was mined using computing power like BitCoin and recorded on a blockchain. But it wasn't. As Ignatova allegedly put it in an email to Greenwood, "We are not mining actually -- but telling people shit."

OneCoin's value, according to the Feds, was simply set by those managing the company -- they manipulated the OneCoin exchange to simulate trading volatility but the price of OneCoin always closed higher than it opened. In an August 1, 2015 email, Ignatova allegedly told Greenwood that one of the goals for the OneCoin trade exchange was "always close on a high price end of day open day with high price, build confidence -- better manipulation so they are happy." According to the Justice Department, the value assigned to OneCoin grew steadily from $0.53 to approximately $31.80 per coin and never declined.

Tumblr is adding support for livestreaming via the video platform Livebox. The Verge reports: Tumblr has supported streaming in the past, but it did so by letting people share streams from other services like YouNow and YouTube. The new option is described as a native Tumblr streaming service powered by Livebox. (Livebox is operated by the Meet Group, a subsidiary of the dating app company ParshipMeet Group.) Livebox allows users to tip streamers, and by the same token, Tumblr will let you pay creators in a virtual currency called "Diamonds." Livebox provides AI- and human-powered moderation for streams, according to a press release; the service also lets streamers designate trusted viewers as moderators. The streaming service is so far only supported for people's primary Tumblr blog, not any side blogs under the same account.

The feature is being rolled out to US users on iOS and Android now, and a release for global users and the desktop site is planned for the future. More details are outlined in a blog post, which dubs the service Tumblr Live.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pine64, makers of ARM-based, tinker-friendly gadgets, is making the PineTab 2, a sequel to its Linux-powered tablet that mostly got swallowed up by the pandemic and its dire global manufacturing shortages. The PineTab 2, as described in Pine64's "December Update," is based around the RK3566, made by RockChip. Pine64 based its Quartz64 single-board system on the system-on-a-chip (SoC), and has all but gushed about it across several blog posts. It's "a dream-of-a-SoC," writes Community Director Lukasz Erecinski, a "modern mid-range quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that integrates a Mali-G52 MP2 GPU. And it should be ideal for space-constrained devices: it runs cool, has a variety of I/O options, solid price-to-performance ratio, and "is genuinely future-proof."

The PineTab 2 is a complete redesign, Erecinski claims. It has a metal chassis that "is very sturdy while also being easy to disassemble for upgrades, maintenance, and repair." The tablet comes apart with snap-in tabs, and Pine64 will offer replacement parts. The insides are modular, too, with the eMMC storage, camera, daughter-board, battery, and keyboard connector all removable "in under 5 minutes." The 10.1-inch IPS display, with "modern and reasonably thin bezels," should also be replaceable, albeit with more work. On that easily opened chassis are two USB-C ports, one for USB 3.0 I/O and one for charging (or USB 2.0 if you want). There's a dedicated micro-HDMI port, and a front-facing 2-megapixel camera and rear-facing 5-megapixel (not the kind of all-in-one media production machine Apple advertises, this tablet), a microSD slot, and a headphone jack. While a PCIe system is exposed inside the PineTab, most NVMe SSDs will not fit, according to Pine64. All of this is subject to change before final production, however.

As with the original PineTab, this model comes with a detachable, backlit keyboard cover, included by default. That makes supporting a desktop OS for the device far more viable, Erecinski writes. The firmware chipset is the same as in the PineBook Pro, which should help with that. No default OS has been decided as of yet, according to Pine64. The tablet should ship with two memory/storage variants, 4GB/64GB and 8GB/128GB. It's due to ship "sometime after the Chinese New Year" (January 22 to February 5), though there's no firm date. No price was announced, but "it will be affordable regardless of which version you'll settle on." A video version of the "December Update" can be found on YouTube.

Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: A Soyuz spacecraft (MS-22) docked at the International Space Station appears to have developed a coolant leak, according to NASA and various news sources. YouTuber Scott Manley has further background and explanation.

The cause and severity are presently not known. There is no immediate danger to the crew. The leak was discovered during preparations for a planned spacewalk, which has since been cancelled. This Soyuz is the return spacecraft for three of the ISS' residents, but after this failure a replacement spacecraft may need to sent up.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: YouTube has announced a plan to crack down on spam and abusive content in comments and livestream chats. Of course, YouTube will be doing this with bots, which will now have the power to issue timeouts to users and instantly remove comments that are deemed abusive. YouTube's post says, "We've been working on improving our automated detection systems and machine learning models to identify and remove spam. In fact, we've removed over 1.1 billion spammy comments in the first six months of 2022." It later adds, "We've improved our spambot detection to keep bots out of live chats."

When YouTube removes a message, the company says it will warn the poster that the message has been removed. The company adds, "If a user continues to leave multiple abusive comments, they may receive a timeout and be temporarily unable to comment for up to 24 hours." [...] It does not appear that YouTube is involving channel owners in any of these moderation decisions. Note that the post says YouTube will warn the poster (not the channel owner) of automated content removal and that if users disagree with the automated comment removal, they can "submit feedback" to YouTube. The "submit feedback" link on many Google products is a black hole suggestion box and not any kind of comment moderation queue, so it sounds like there will be no one that responds to a moderation dispute. YouTube says this automatic content moderation will only delete comments that violate the community guidelines—a list of pretty basic content bans—so hopefully it will stick to that.