AI allowed Pakistan's former prime minister Imran Khan to campaign from behind bars on Monday, with a voice clone of the opposition leader giving an impassioned speech on his behalf. From a report: Khan has been locked up since August and is being tried for leaking classified documents, allegations he says have been trumped up to stop him contesting general elections due in February. His Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party used artificial intelligence to make a four-minute message from the 71-year-old, headlining a "virtual rally" hosted on social media overnight on Sunday into Monday despite internet disruptions that monitor NetBlocks said were consistent with previous attempts to censor Khan.

PTI said Khan sent a shorthand script through lawyers that was fleshed out into his rhetorical style. The text was then dubbed into audio using a tool from the AI firm ElevenLabs, which boasts the ability to create a "voice clone" from existing speech samples. "My fellow Pakistanis, I would first like to praise the social media team for this historic attempt," the voice mimicking Khan said. "Maybe you all are wondering how I am doing in jail," the stilted voice adds. "Today, my determination for real freedom is very strong." The audio was broadcast at the end of a five-hour live-stream of speeches by PTI supporters on Facebook, X and YouTube, and was overlaid with historic footage of Khan and still images.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: For the soundtracks to their 2023 holiday season ads, both Amazon and Apple turned to music by members of The Beatles. Amazon's Joy Ride, which stars three older women reliving their youthful joy at a sledding hill, is set to a cover of The Beatles' In My Life. Apple's Fuzzy Feelings, which tells the story of a young woman with a grumpy boss, is set to George Harrison's Isn't It a Pity.

Product placement is present in both ads — Amazon features padded seat cushions that protect the seniors' tushes and the Amazon app used to order them, while Apple showcases the iPhone 15 Pro Max used to capture the ad's stop-motion animation scenes and the MacBook Air used to edit them.

Amazon's 60-second ad has 542K views on YouTube, while Apple's 4-minute ad has 16+ million views.

In an interview with Lex Fridman, Jeff Bezos candidly acknowledged Blue Origin's slow progress (compared to SpaceX). From a report: "Blue Origin needs to be much faster, and it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago," he said. "I wanted to come in, and Blue Origin needs me right now. Adding some energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster. And we're going to."

How is Blue Origin going to speed up?

"We're going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry," he said. "We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risks, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things. And having the right culture that supports that. You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious. If there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's go through them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind."

Nearly 1 in 5 teenagers in the U.S. say they use YouTube and TikTok "almost constantly," according to a Pew Research Center survey. CNBC reports: The survey showed that YouTube was the most "widely used platform" for U.S.-based teenagers, with 93% of survey respondents saying they regularly use Google's video-streaming service. Of that 93% figure, about 16% of the teenage respondents said they "almost constantly visit or use" YouTube, underscoring the video app's immense popularity with the youth market. TikTok was the second-most popular app, with 63% of teens saying they use the ByteDance-owned short-video service, followed by Snapchat and Meta's Instagram, which had 60% and 59%, respectively. About 17% of the 63% of respondents who said they use TikTok indicated they access the short-video service "almost constantly," the report noted.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter, now known as X, are not as popular with U.S.-based teenagers as they were a decade ago, the Pew Research study detailed. Regarding Facebook in particular, the Pew Research authors wrote that the share of teens who use the Meta-owned social media app "has dropped from 71% in 2014-2015 to 33% today." During the same period, Meta-owned Instagram's usage has not made up the difference in share, increasing from 52% in 2014-15 to a peak of 62% last year, then dropping to 59% in 2023, according to the firm.

Google Play Movies & TV will be replaced with Google TV on January 17, 2024. 9to5Google reports: Since the 2020 launch of the Google TV platform, that branding has replaced Play Movies & TV in areas such as mobile apps, but that's also led to the choice to do away with Play Movies & TV branding basically everywhere else. In October, that decision also made its way to Android TV, and the app has not been working ever since. Despite some confusion over the past few days, the app currently just redirects to Android TV's "Shop" tab, which has been widely available for months.

In a new post, Google explains that it will do away with the last parts of Google Play Movies & TV in January 2024: "With these changes, Google Play Movies & TV will no longer be available on Android TV devices or the Google Play website.* However, you'll still be able to access all of your previously purchased titles (including active rentals) on Android TV devices, Google TV devices, the Google TV mobile app (Android and iOS), and YouTube."

On January 17, Play Movies & TV will officially cease for good on Android TV. For anyone who does still have the app working -- again, most users cannot use the app already -- the "Shop" tab will become the only option. Similarly, Google says that Play Movies & TV will cease on other remaining platforms that same date. Any cable boxes with the app integrated will also lose it, and in turn pushed to the YouTube app for continued access to purchased content. Web access via play.google.com/movies will also go away, with youtube.com/movies becoming the alternative.

"A tomato lost for eight months on the orbiting lab has been located, " reports Gizmodo, "absolving astronaut Frank Rubio of playful allegations that he ate it." NASA's Veg-05 experiment, a project focusing on growing fruits and vegetables in space, experienced an unusual turn of events when a Red Robin dwarf tomato vanished shortly after being harvested in March. This tomato, part of a study to explore the feasibility of continuous fresh-food production in space, was finally found, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli revealed during a livestream on December 6...

The Veg-05 project expanded the scope of in-space farming to include dwarf tomatoes, exploring how lighting and fertilizer variations influence fruit growth, safety, and nutritional value (and yes, tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables)... Following the harvest in March, each astronaut received a tomato sample stored in a Ziploc bag. However, concerns about potential fungal contamination led NASA to instruct the astronauts not to consume the fruit, as Space.com reported.

News of the missing tomato first emerged on September 13, during an event commemorating Rubio's one-year stay in orbit. Rubio, who had an extended mission on the ISS due to a malfunctioning Russian Soyuz spacecraft, lamented the loss of his tomato share, which had floated away before he could take a bite. Rubio, who spent a record 371 days in space, mused about the missing tomato, saying: "I spent so many hours looking for that thing. I'm sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future."
In the livestream Moghbeli "did not specify where on the 356-foot space station the one-inch-wide red dwarf tomato was located," notes the Guardian, "or in what condition." The Rubio tomato turned out to be one of only 12 red dwarves successfully germinated and grown to ripeness in space during the Veg-05 project, compared with more than 100 in a parallel experiment conducted on Earth, according to NASA.
Thanks to Slashdot reader christoban for sharing the news.

UPDATE: John Romero released a new 9-map episode of Doom.

But it was 30 years ago today that Doom "invented the modern PC games industry, as a place dominated by technologically advanced action shooters," remembers the Guardian: In late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block... The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above. But it was here that a team of five coders, artists and designers were working on arguably the most influential action video game ever made. This was id Software. This was Doom... [W]hen Taylor met id's charismatic designer and coder John Romero, he was shown their next project... "There were no critters in it yet," recalls Taylor of that first demo. "There was no gaming stuff at all. It was really just a 3D engine. But you could move around it really fluidly and you got such a sense of immersion it was shocking. The renderer was kick ass and the textures were so gritty and cool. I thought I was looking at an in-game cinematic. And Romero is just the consummate demo man: he really feeds off of your energy. So as my jaw hit the floor, he got more and more animated. Doom was amazing, but John was at least half of that demo's impact on me." [...]

In late 1992, it had become clear that the 3D engine John Carmack was planning for Doom would speed up real-time rendering while also allowing the use of texture maps to add detail to environments. As a result, Romero's ambition was to set Doom in architecturally complex worlds with multiple storeys, curved walls, moving platforms. A hellish Escher-esque mall of death... "Doom was the first to combine huge rooms, stairways, dark areas and bright areas," says Romero, "and lava and all that stuff, creating a really elaborate abstract world. That was never possible before...."

[T]he way Doom combined fast-paced 3D action with elaborate, highly staged level design would prove hugely influential in the years to come. It's there in every first-person action game we play today... But Doom wasn't just a single-player game. Carmack consumed an entire library of books on computer networking before working on the code that would allow players to connect their PCs via modem to a local area network (LAN) and play in the game together... Doom brought fast-paced, real-time action, both competitive and cooperative, into the gaming mainstream. Seeing your friends battling imps and zombie space marines beside you in a virtual world was an exhilarating experience...

When Doom was launched on 10 December 1993, it became immediately clear that the game was all-consuming — id Software had chosen to make the abbreviated shareware version available via the FTP site of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but that crashed almost immediately, bringing the institution's network to its knees... "We changed the rules of design," says Romero. "Getting rid of lives, which was an arcade holdover that every game had; getting rid of score because it was not the goal of the game. We wanted to make it so that, if the player died, they'd just start that level over — we were constantly pushing them forward. The game's attitude was, I want you to keep playing. We wanted to get people to the point where they always needed more."
It was a unique moment in time. In the article designer Sandy Petersen remembers that "I would sometimes get old dungeons I'd done for D&D and use them as the basis for making a map in Doom." Cheat codes had been included for debugging purposes — but were left in the game rs to discover. The article even includes a link to a half-hour video of a 1993 visit to Id software filmed by BBS owner Dan Linton.

And today on X, John Romero shared a link to the Guardian's article, along with some appreciative words for anyone who's ever played the game. "DOOM is still remembered because of the community that plays and mods it 30 years on. I'm grateful to be a part of that community and fortunate to have been there at its beginning."

The Guardian's article notes that now Romero "is currently working on Sigil 2, a spiritual successor to the original Doom series."

More than half a century ago, Digital Equipment Corporation released the first of their 16-bit PDP-11 minicomputers, continuing the PDP-11 line until 1997.

This week long-time Slashdot reader Shayde writes: I've been working on a 1986 PDP/11 that I basically got as a "barn find" from an estate sale a year ago. The project has absolutely had it's ups and downs, as the knowledgebase for these machines is aging quickly. I'm hoping to restore my own expertise with this build, but it's been challenging finding parts, technical details, and just plain information.

I leaned pretty heavily on the folks at the Vintage Computing Federation, as well as connections I've made in the industry — and made some great progress... Check it out if you're keen on retrocomputing and old minicomputers and DEC gear.
The entire saga is chronicled in three videos titled "Barn Find PDP 11/73 — Will it boot" — part 1, part 2, and this week's latest video. "What started as a curiosity has turned into an almost 10-month-long project," it concludes, creeping up hopefully on the possibility of an awe-struck glimpse at the PDP-11's boot sequence (over two minutes long)

"So cool," responded Jeremiah Cornelius (Slashdot reader #137) in a comment on the submitted Slashdot story. "I have huge affection for these beasts. I cut my teeth in High School on a DEC PDP11/70 and AT&T SysV, and a little RSTS/E in 1979-82. We switched systems by loading different cakelid platters into the washing-machine drives, and toggling the magenta keys.

"I've thought about the Blinkenlights 7/10 scale emulator, tha uses an RPi, but I envy you and hope you have fun."

After billionaire Bill Ackman demanded three college presidents "resign in disgrace," that post on X — excerpting their testimony before a U.S. Congressional committee — has now been viewed more than 104 million times, provoking a variety of reactions.

Saturday afternoon, one of the three college presidents resigned — University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill.

Politico reports that the Republican-led Committee now "will be investigating Harvard University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania after their institutions' leaders failed to sufficiently condemn student protests calling for 'Jewish genocide.'" The BBC reports a wealthy UPenn donor reportedly withdrew a stock grant worth $100 million.

But after watching the entire Congressional hearing, New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that she'd seen a "more understandable" context: In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap [Congresswoman Elise] Stefanik laid. "You understand that the use of the term 'intifada' in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?" she asked Claudine Gay of Harvard. Gay responded that such language was "abhorrent."

Stefanik then badgered her to admit that students chanting about intifada were calling for genocide, and asked angrily whether that was against Harvard's code of conduct. "Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, 'From the river to the sea' or 'intifada,' advocating for the murder of Jews?" Gay repeated that such "hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me," but said action would be taken only "when speech crosses into conduct." So later in the hearing, when Stefanik again started questioning Gay, Kornbluth and Magill about whether it was permissible for students to call for the genocide of the Jews, she was referring, it seemed clear, to common pro-Palestinian rhetoric and trying to get the university presidents to commit to disciplining those who use it. Doing so would be an egregious violation of free speech. After all, even if you're disgusted by slogans like "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," their meaning is contested...
Liberal blogger Josh Marshall argues that "While groups like Hamas certainly use the word [intifada] with a strong eliminationist meaning it is simply not the case that the term consistently or usually or mostly refers to genocide. It's just not. Stefanik's basic equation was and is simply false and the university presidents were maladroit enough to fall into her trap."

The Wall Street Journal published an investigation the day after the hearing. A political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley hired a survey firm to poll 250 students across the U.S. from "a variety of backgrounds" — and the results were surprising: A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported "definitely" supporting "from the river to the sea" because "Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side." Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to "probably not." Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view... In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting "from the river to the sea" to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region's geography, history, or demography.
More about the phrase from the Associated Press: Many Palestinian activists say it's a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decades-long, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians. Jews hear a clear demand for Israel's destruction... By 2012, it was clear that Hamas had claimed the slogan in its drive to claim land spanning Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank... The phrase also has roots in the Hamas charter... [Since 1997 the U.S. government has considered Hamas a terrorist organization.]

"A Palestine between the river to the sea leaves not a single inch for Israel," read an open letter signed by 30 Jewish news outlets around the world and released on Wednesday... Last month, Vienna police banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration, citing the fact that the phrase "from the river to the sea" was mentioned in invitations and characterizing it as a call to violence. And in Britain, the Labour party issued a temporary punishment to a member of Parliament, Andy McDonald, for using the phrase during a rally at which he called for a stop to bombardment.
As the controversy rages on, Ackman's X timeline now includes an official response reposted from a college that wasn't called to testify — Stanford University: In the context of the national discourse, Stanford unequivocally condemns calls for the genocide of Jews or any peoples. That statement would clearly violate Stanford's Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.
Ackman also retweeted this response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i'd like to just state that i was totally wrong. i still don't understand it, really. or know what to do about it. but it is so fucked.
Wednesday UPenn's president announced they'd immediately consider a new change in policy," in an X post viewed 38.7 million times: For decades under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn's policies have been guided by the [U.S.] Constitution and the law. In today's world, where we are seeing signs of hate proliferating across our campus and our world in a way not seen in years, these policies need to be clarified and evaluated. Penn must initiate a serious and careful look at our policies, and provost Jackson and I will immediately convene a process to do so. As president, I'm committed to a safe, secure, and supportive environment so all members of our community can thrive. We can and we will get this right. Thank you.
The next day the university's business school called on Magill to resign. And Saturday afternoon, Magill resigned.

The Biden administration is threatening to cancel the patents of some costly medications to allow rivals to make their own more affordable versions. The Associated Press reports: Under a plan announced Thursday, the government would consider overriding the patent for high-priced drugs that have been developed with the help of taxpayer money and letting competitors make them in hopes of driving down the cost. In a 15-second video released to YouTube on Wednesday night, President Joe Biden promised the move would lower prices. "Today, we're taking a very important step toward ending price gouging so you don't have to pay more for the medicine you need," he said.

White House officials would not name drugs that might potentially be targeted. The government would consider seizing a patent if a drug is only available to a "narrow set of consumers," according to the proposal that will be open to public comment for 60 days. Drugmakers are almost certain to challenge the plan in court if it is enacted. [...] The White House also intends to focus more closely on private equity firms that purchase hospitals and health systems, then often whittle them down and sell quickly for a profit. The departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission will work to share more data about health system ownership.

While only a minority of drugs on the market relied so heavily on taxpayer dollars, the threat of a government "march-in" on patents will make many pharmaceutical companies think twice, said Jing Luo, a professor of medicine at University of Pittsburgh. "If I was a drug company that was trying to license a product that had benefited heavily from taxpayer money, I'd be very careful about how to price that product," Luo said. "I wouldn't want anyone to take my product away from me."

Speaking of early-impressions of Gemini, users' confidence in Google might be shaken further to learn that the company pretty much faked the most impressive demo of Gemini. TechCrunch: A video called "Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI" hit a million views over the last day, and it's not hard to see why. The impressive demo "highlights some of our favorite interactions with Gemini," showing how the multimodal model (that is, it understands and mixes language and visual understanding) can be flexible and responsive to a variety of inputs.

To begin with, it narrates an evolving sketch of a duck from a squiggle to a completed drawing, which it says is an unrealistic color, then evinces surprise ("What the quack!") when seeing a toy blue duck. [...] Just one problem: the video isn't real. "We created the demo by capturing footage in order to test Gemini's capabilities on a wide range of challenges. Then we prompted Gemini using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text." So although it might kind of do the things Google shows in the video, it didn't, and maybe couldn't, do them live and in the way they implied. In actuality, it was a series of carefully tuned text prompts with still images, clearly selected and shortened to misrepresent what the interaction is actually like.

"Researchers have identified a large number of bugs to do with the processing of images at boot time," writes longtime Slashdot reader jd. "This allows malicious code to be installed undetectably (since the image doesn't have to pass any validation checks) by appending it to the image. None of the current secure boot mechanisms are capable of blocking the attack." Ars Technica reports: LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux. The vulnerabilities are the product of almost a year's worth of work by Binarly, a firm that helps customers identify and secure vulnerable firmware. The vulnerabilities are the subject of a coordinated mass disclosure released Wednesday. The participating companies comprise nearly the entirety of the x64 and ARM CPU ecosystem, starting with UEFI suppliers AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors); device manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, and HP; and the makers of the CPUs that go inside the devices, usually Intel, AMD or designers of ARM CPUs. The researchers unveiled the attack on Wednesday at the Black Hat Security Conference in London.

As its name suggests, LogoFAIL involves logos, specifically those of the hardware seller that are displayed on the device screen early in the boot process, while the UEFI is still running. Image parsers in UEFIs from all three major IBVs are riddled with roughly a dozen critical vulnerabilities that have gone unnoticed until now. By replacing the legitimate logo images with identical-looking ones that have been specially crafted to exploit these bugs, LogoFAIL makes it possible to execute malicious code at the most sensitive stage of the boot process, which is known as DXE, short for Driver Execution Environment. "Once arbitrary code execution is achieved during the DXE phase, it's game over for platform security," researchers from Binarly, the security firm that discovered the vulnerabilities, wrote in a whitepaper. "From this stage, we have full control over the memory and the disk of the target device, thus including the operating system that will be started." From there, LogoFAIL can deliver a second-stage payload that drops an executable onto the hard drive before the main OS has even started. The following video demonstrates a proof-of-concept exploit created by the researchers. The infected device -- a Gen 2 Lenovo ThinkCentre M70s running an 11th-Gen Intel Core with a UEFI released in June -- runs standard firmware defenses, including Secure Boot and Intel Boot Guard. LogoFAIL vulnerabilities are tracked under the following designations: CVE-2023-5058, CVE-2023-39538, CVE-2023-39539, and CVE-2023-40238. However, this list is currently incomplete.

"A non-exhaustive list of companies releasing advisories includes AMI (PDF), Insyde, Phoenix, and Lenovo," reports Ars. "People who want to know if a specific device is vulnerable should check with the manufacturer."

"The best way to prevent LogoFAIL attacks is to install the UEFI security updates that are being released as part of Wednesday's coordinated disclosure process. Those patches will be distributed by the manufacturer of the device or the motherboard running inside the device. It's also a good idea, when possible, to configure UEFIs to use multiple layers of defenses. Besides Secure Boot, this includes both Intel Boot Guard and, when available, Intel BIOS Guard. There are similar additional defenses available for devices running AMD or ARM CPUs."

Samuel Axon reports via Ars Technica: The trailer for Amazon's Fallout TV series dropped this weekend, and it's either craven fan service or wonderfully authentic, depending on your point of view. The trailer depicts a lead character leaving a vault after an apparent catastrophe, discovering the broken world outside, and encountering ridiculous monsters as well as factions like the Brotherhood of Steel. It also features some extreme gore, which you'd expect from Fallout.

We've written a few times about the slowly unfolding saga of this show, which has Westworld's Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan as producers. To be clear, though, they won't actually be the showrunners; that honor goes to Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider) and Graham Wagner (Portlandia, The Office, Silicon Valley). The two showrunners each cover one-half of what Fallout has traditionally been: Robertson-Dworet brings the sci-fi action credentials, and Wagner brings the satirical comedy. As announced in October, the show will premiere on April 12th, 2024, exclusively via Prime Video.

Microsoft is detailing a number of new features coming to its Copilot service soon, including OpenAI's latest models. Copilot will get support for GPT-4 Turbo soon, alongside an updated DALL-E 3 model, a new code interpreter feature, and deep search functionality inside Bing. From a report: Copilot will soon be able to respond using OpenAI's latest GPT-4 Turbo model, which essentially means it will "see" more data thanks to a 128K context window. This larger context window will allow Copilot to better understand queries and offer better responses.

While you're waiting on the GPT-4 Turbo model to appear in Copilot, Microsoft is now using an improved DALL-E 3 model in Bing Image Creator and Copilot. Microsoft Edge, which includes a Copilot sidebar, is also getting the ability to compose text within websites' text input to rewrite sentences inline. You can also now use Copilot in Microsoft Edge to summarize videos you're watching on YouTube. Coders and developers might be interested in a new code interpreter feature coming to Copilot soon. This new feature will allow Copilot users to get more accurate calculations, data analysis, or even code from the AI chatbot.

Trevor Jacob, a daredevil YouTuber who deliberately crashed a plane for views in a moneymaking scheme, has been sentenced to six months in federal prison. Jacob posted a video of himself in 2021 parachuting out of a plane that he claimed had malfunctioned. In reality, the aircraft was purposely abandoned and crashed into the Los Padres National Forest in Southern California. From a report: Jacob pleaded guilty to one felony count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation on June 30. "It appears that (Jacob) exercised exceptionally poor judgment in committing this offense," prosecutors said in the release. "(Jacob) most likely committed this offense to generate social media and news coverage for himself and to obtain financial gain. Nevertheless, this type of 'daredevil' conduct cannot be tolerated."

Jacob received a sponsorship from a company and had agreed to promote the company's wallet in the YouTube video that he would post. [...] The release said Jacob lied to federal investigators when he filed a report that falsely indicated his plane lost full power approximately 35 minutes into the flight. He also lied to a Federal Aviation Administration aviation safety inspector when he said he had parachuted out of the plane when the airplane's engine had quit because he could not identify any safe landing options.

Rockstar Games has officially revealed the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, which is coming in 2025. You can watch it on YouTube. IGN reports: The trailer gives us a look at the game's female protagonist, a first for the series. Her name is Lucia, and that she starts off in prison -- "bad luck, I guess," she quips. The trailer confirms, too, that it's set in Vice City with a large sign - not a huge surprise for those who've been following the series, but exciting nonetheless. In addition to lots and lots of quick shots of crime, we also get glimpses of TikToks and live-streams, hinting that social media will be a big part of this game.

It all takes place as Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road" plays in the background, appropriate for the many car-related crimes we see. And yes, true to the Florida setting, there are alligators in locations where they shouldn't be. It ends by showing us a little more of Lucia and a male character, seemingly both lovers and partners-in-crime. "The only way we're gonna get through this is by sticking together and being a team," Lucia says at one point. Fans have been talking about GTA 6 ever since GTA 5 was released in 2013, perhaps unsurprisingly as IGN deemed that one a "masterpiece" in our review.

"Advent of Code" has begun. New programming puzzles will appear every day until Christmas at AdventOfCode.com — and the annual event (first started in 2015) has grown into a worldwide phenomenon. This year's first puzzle has been completed by over 150,000 programmers (with another 115,652 completing Day Two's puzzle). And 108,000 fans have also joined the Advent of Code subReddit.

Contest-related comments are popping up all around the web. Some participants are live streaming their puzzle-solving efforts on Twitch. Self-described computer nerd Gary Grady is tweeting cartoons about each day's puzzle. JetBrains is even giving away some prizes in their "Advent of Code with Kotlin" event. And JetBrains developer advocate Sebastian Aigner is also hosting daily livestreams about each puzzle.

It's hard to overstate how big this event has become. This year's event attracted 60 sponsors, including Kotlin (for the third consecutive year), as well as Spotify, Shopify, and Sony Interactive Entertainment (as well as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and American Express). Individual donors can get a special badge next to their name, and there's also a shop selling coffee mugs and t-shirts. But at its core is real-world developer Eric Wastl (plus a team of loyal beta-testers) sharing his genuine fondness for computer programming. Wastl is also the creator of a satirical web page for the fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework Vanilla JS ("so popular that browsers have been automatically loading it for over a decade") and also curates a collection of "things in PHP which make me sad".

And you can find him on X sharing encouraging comments for this year's participants.

"Two articles from Electrek and InsideEVs describe Hyundai and Kia's new 'Uni Wheel' drive system that could revolutionize EV design," writes longtime Slashdot reader Uncle_Meataxe. From a report: Described by its makers as a "paradigm-shifting vehicle drive system," the Uni Wheel moves the main drive system components to the vacant space within an EVs wheel hubs. The approach utilizes a planetary gear configuration consisting of a sun gear in the center, four pinion gears on each side, and a ring gear surrounding everything. Traditional ICE vehicles utilize CV joints, but by moving them closer to the wheels requires a short drive train length and as a result, a decrease in efficiency and durability -- especially over bumpy terrain. Hyundai and Kia's Uni Wheel system on the other hand, can transmit power with almost zero changes to efficiency, regardless of wheel movement. "Advantages include more platform space and more room within an EV's interior," adds Uncle_Meataxe. "When this system may be integrated into an actual EV remains unclear, but Kia and Hyundai have already registered eight patents related to the technology." You can learn more about the new drive system via an instructional video on YouTube.

Jennifer Ouellette reports via Ars Technica: Back in 2012, a crowdfunding effort on Indigogo successfully raised the funds necessary to purchase the Wardenclyffe Tower site on Long Island, New York, where Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla once tried to build an ambitious wireless transmission station. The goal was to raise additional funds to build a $20 million Tesla Science Center there, with a museum, an educational center, and a technological innovation program. The nonprofit group behind the project finally broke ground this April after years of basic restoration work -- only to experience a devastating setback last week, two days before Thanksgiving, when a fire broke out.

Over 100 firefighters from 17 local departments responded and battled the flames throughout the night, as residual embers led to two additional outbreaks. One firefighter sustained bruised ribs after falling off a ladder, but there were no other injuries or fatalities. Once the blaze was extinguished, the TSC group called in their engineers to assess the damage and make recommendations for repairs. While an investigation is ongoing as to the cause of the fire, Fire Chief Sean McCarrick said during a press conference on Tuesday, November 28, that they had ruled out arson. According to project architect Mark Thaler, there was nothing flammable in the lab that could have caused the fire, although the back buildings had wood-frame roofs. The original brick building, designed by Stanford White, is still standing, although there is considerable damage to the structure of the roof, steel girders, chimney, cupola, and a portion of a wall. Some elements have been irreparably destroyed, but fortunately all museum artifacts in TSC's collection were stored offsite. The most pressing concern is that water from the firehoses saturated the brick walls, according to Thaler, since the upcoming colder winter temperatures could freeze that moisture and cause the brick work to break apart and collapse. The engineers have also recommended adding strategic wall supports to both the interior and exterior to shore up the structure.

All of this comes with a hefty price tag: $3 million for immediate remediation to seal the roof and dry the building in order to stave off further damage. The building was insured, but that insurance won't come close to covering the cost. The TSC group has set up a 60-day Indiegogo campaign to raise those funds, which is separate from the $14 million it had already raised toward their targeted $20 million goal. "The best way to help right now is to donate if you can," said TSC Executive Director Marc Alessi. "We've never needed it more. We need to secure this lab, stop the water intrusion and future damage. And then we need to complete this project." [...] "Buildings burn down and can then be rebuilt," said John Gaiman, deputy county executive for Suffolk County. "The ideas behind them, the person, the history, the narrative that was created over 100 years ago still exists, and that will continue."

Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: Engineers from Frore Systems have integrated the company's innovative solid-state AirJet cooling system, which provides impressive cooling capabilities despite a lack of moving parts, into an M2-based Apple MacBook Air. With proper cooling, the relatively inexpensive laptop matched the performance of a more expensive MacBook Pro based on the same processor. The lack of a fan is probably one of the main advantages of Apple's MacBook Air over its more performant siblings, but it also puts the laptop at a disadvantage. Fanless cooling doesn't have moving parts (which is a plus), but it also cannot properly cool down Apple's M1 or M2 processor under high loads, which is why a 13-inch MacBook Air powered by M1 or M2 system-on-chip is slower than 13-inch MacBook Pro based on the same SoC. However, making a MacBook Air run as fast as a 13-inch MacBook Pro is now possible. A video posted to YouTube by PC World shows how the AirJet system works. They also released a recent demo showing off the strength of the AirJet technology.