China issued guidelines on Friday to promote biotech cultivation, focusing on gene-editing tools and developing new wheat, corn, and soybean varieties, as part of efforts to ensure food security and boost agriculture technology. From a report: The 2024-2028 plan aims to achieve "independent and controllable" seed sources for key crops, with a focus to cultivate high-yield, multi-resistant wheat, corn and high-oil, high-yield soybean and rapeseed varieties. The move comes as China intensifies efforts to boost domestic yields of key crops like soybeans to reduce reliance on imports from countries such as the United States amid a looming trade war.

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The owners of the multibillion-pound James Bond franchise are embroiled in a fight to keep control of the super spy's name, after a Dubai-based property developer filed claims in the UK and Europe that they are not using the trademark across a range of goods and services. From a report: The Austrian businessman Josef Kleindienst, who is building a $5 billion luxury resort complex called the Heart of Europe on six human-made islands just off the coast of Dubai, has filed a slew of what are known officially as "cancellation actions based on non-use" targeting the James Bond name. Under UK and EU law, if a name is trademarked against certain goods and services but the owner does not commercially exploit it in these areas for a period of at least five years then a challenge to revoke ownership of the name can be made. "He is challenging a number of UK and European Union trademark registrations for James Bond," said Mark Caddle, a partner and patent attorney at European intellectual property firm Withers & Rogers. "The basis of the European Union filings is that James Bond has not been used for the goods and services it protects, and that is likely to be the same basis of the filings in the UK."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Reddit is planning to introduce a paywall this year, CEO Steve Huffman said during a videotaped Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Thursday. Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with "exclusive content or private areas" that Reddit users would pay to access. When asked this week about plans for some Redditors to create "content that only paid members can see," Huffman said: "It's a work in progress right now, so that one's coming... We're working on it as we speak." When asked about "new, key features that you plan to roll out for Reddit in 2025," Huffman responded, in part: "Paid subreddits, yes."

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More than $1 trillion in value remains locked in venture-backed startups with dwindling prospects as the Silicon Valley unicorn bubble deflates, according to a new Bloomberg Businessweek report. Of the 354 companies that reached billion-dollar valuations in 2021, only six have completed initial public offerings, Stanford Business School professor Ilya Strebulaev said. Four others went public via SPACs and 10 were acquired, some below their unicorn status. Several prominent startups have already collapsed, including indoor farming firm Bowery Farming and AI healthcare company Forward Health. Freight business Convoy, valued at $3.8 billion in 2022, shut down last year with rival Flexport buying its assets at a steep discount.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: How many YouTube videos are there? What are they about? What languages do YouTubers speak? As of 14 February 2025, the platform's will have been running for 20 years. That is a lot of video. Yet we have no idea just how many there really are. Google knows the answers. It just won't tell you. Experts say that's a problem. For all practical purposes, one of the most powerful communication systems ever created -- a tool that provides a third of the world's population with information and ideas -- is operating in the dark. In part that's because there's no easy way to get a random sampling of videos, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the US. You can pick your videos manually or go with the algorithm's recommendations, but an unbiased selection that's worthy of real study is hard to come by. A few years ago, however, Zuckerman and his team of researchers came up with a solution: they designed a computer program that pulls up YouTube videos at random, trying billions of URLs at a time. You might call the tool a bot, but that's probably over selling it, Zuckerman says. "A more technically accurate term would be 'scraper'," he says. The scraper's findings are giving us a first-time perspective on what's actually happening on YouTube. [...] The first question was simple. How many videos have people uploaded to YouTube? [...] Zuckerman and his colleagues compared the number of videos they found to the number of guesses it took, and arrived an estimate: in 2022, they calculated that YouTube housed more than nine billion videos. By mid 2024, that number had grown to 14.8 billion videos, a 60% jump.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: As always, the most important Nvidia graphics card is the one you can actually buy, and Nvidia's talked a big game for its RTX 5070, making the dubious but nuanced claim it can deliver RTX 4090 performance for just $549. On February 28th, AMD will get its chance to intercept with the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, in a streaming event it just announced today. But Nvidia has now made its own wiggle room, delaying the launch of the RTX 5070 from February to March 5th, its product page reveals today. Nvidia will ship its $749 RTX 5070 Ti ahead of AMD's event, though, on February 20th, a week from today.

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AI startups are poised to disrupt the $300 billion business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, as advances in language models and voice technology enable automation of tasks traditionally handled by human workers. The BPO market, which reached $300 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $525 billion by 2030, faces mounting pressure from AI companies offering faster, more scalable alternatives to manual processing of customer support, IT services and financial claims, venture capital firm a16z wrote in a thesis post. Early AI implementations have shown promising results, with customer service startup Decagon reporting 80% resolution rates and improved satisfaction scores. In healthcare, AI company Juniper said its clients saw 80% fewer insurance claim denials and 50% faster processing times. Major BPO providers are responding to the threat, with Wipro reporting a 140% increase in AI adoption across projects and Infosys deploying over 100 AI agents. However, industry analysts say BPOs face structural challenges in transitioning from their labor-based business model to AI-first operations. The shift threatens traditional BPO companies like Cognizant, Infosys and Wipro, which reported revenues between $10-20 billion in their latest fiscal years.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.K. government wants to make a hard pivot into boosting its economy and industry with AI, and as part of that, it's pivoting an institution that it founded a little over a year ago for a very different purpose. Today the Department of Science, Industry and Technology announced that it would be renaming the AI Safety Institute to the "AI Security Institute." (Same first letters: same URL.) With that, the body will shift from primarily exploring areas like existential risk and bias in large language models, to a focus on cybersecurity, specifically "strengthening protections against the risks AI poses to national security and crime." Alongside this, the government also announced a new partnership with Anthropic. No firm services were announced but the MOU indicates the two will "explore" using Anthropic's AI assistant Claude in public services; and Anthropic will aim to contribute to work in scientific research and economic modeling. And at the AI Security Institute, it will provide tools to evaluate AI capabilities in the context of identifying security risks. [...] Anthropic is the only company being announced today -- coinciding with a week of AI activities in Munich and Paris -- but it's not the only one that is working with the government. A series of new tools that were unveiled in January were all powered by OpenAI. (At the time, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for Technology, said that the government planned to work with various foundational AI companies, and that is what the Anthropic deal is proving out.) "The changes I'm announcing today represent the logical next step in how we approach responsible AI development -- helping us to unleash AI and grow the economy as part of our Plan for Change," Kyle said in a statement. "The work of the AI Security Institute won't change, but this renewed focus will ensure our citizens -- and those of our allies -- are protected from those who would look to use AI against our institutions, democratic values, and way of life." "The Institute's focus from the start has been on security and we've built a team of scientists focused on evaluating serious risks to the public," added Ian Hogarth, who remains the chair of the institute. "Our new criminal misuse team and deepening partnership with the national security community mark the next stage of tackling those risks."

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Alibaba will partner with Apple to support AI features on iPhones in China, sending Alibaba's shares surging over 9% to a three-year high. Reuters reports: "They talked to a number of companies in China. In the end they chose to do business with us. They want to use our AI to power their phones. We feel extremely honored to do business with a great company like Apple," Tsai said at the World Government Summit in Dubai. Apple continues to work with Baidu on AI features for iPhones in China, The Information reported on Thursday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the matter. While Apple's phones outside China utilize a combination of its proprietary Apple Intelligence and OpenAI's ChatGPT, Tsai did not specify whether the Alibaba partnership would follow a similar model. In China, consumer-facing AI products require regulatory approval, and The Information reported earlier that both Alibaba and Apple have already submitted materials to authorities. "Instead of viewing the Alibaba-Apple partnership through the lens of China's AI strength, the partnership is mainly a recognition of Alibaba's AI capability," said Lian Jye Su, a chief analyst at tech research firm Omdia.

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A new study reveals that widely used pink wildfire suppressants contain high levels of toxic heavy metals like cadmium, arsenic, and chromium, with concentrations up to 3,000 times above drinking water limits. While the government and chemical makers have long concealed up to 20% of the suppressants' ingredients as "trade secrets," researchers have confirmed their role in environmental pollution, raising concerns over their extensive use in residential areas. The Guardian reports: The suppressants are a mix of water, fertilizer, and undisclosed ingredients, while the pink color comes from added dye to show firefighters where it has been sprayed. Metals are likely used as anti-corrosion agents to prevent the plane's tankers from disintegrating, they authors wrote. The mix works by coating vegetation and lowering the amount of oxygen that could fuel the fire. The substance was dropped by as many as 25 aircraft daily to contain the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, and photos from it vividly convey the trade off, showing homes and property covered in hot pink suppression. The metal levels in the suppressants meet federal guidelines and the authors were initially most worried about environmental contamination, but the heavy use in residential areas this year raises a new set of concerns, Daniel McCurry, one of the study's co-authors, told the Guardian. "Are the hazardous waste thresholds the appropriate bar for these to clear, or, if they're being used in a massive scale in populated neighborhoods, do we need to get stricter on permissible concentrations of toxic compounds?" McCurry asked. [...] The producer of one of the suppressants has said a new generation of the product is "greener," McCurry said, but he added "until we are able to come across some of this material and test it, we really don't know."

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Because we still have the NWS, I learned that "A winter storm will continue to bring areas of heavy snow and ice from the Great Lakes through New England today into tonight." I'm staying put, and apparently so is Dave L.'s delivery driver.

Dave L. imagines the thoughts of this driver who clearly turned around and headed straight home. "Oh, d'ya mean I've got to take these parcels somewhere!? in this weather!? I can't just bring them back?"

 

Infoscavenger Andrew G. shared a found object. "I got this from https://bsky.app/profile/jesseberney.com/post/3lhyiubtay22r and immediately thought of you. Sadly I expect you're going to get more of these in the coming days/weeks." I guess they already fired all people who knew how to use Mail Merge.

 

Bruce R. "I saw this ad in my Android weather app. They think they know all about you, but they got this completely wrong: I don't live in {city}, I live in [city]!" Right next to Mr. [EmployeeLastName].

 

"I've got a vintage k8s cluster if anyone's interested," reports Mike S. "I just installed docker desktop. Apparently it ships with the zeroeth version of kubernetes."

 

Finally for this week, special character Vitra has sent us an elliptical statement about her uni application. "Of course, putting characters in my personal statement is simply a bad idea - it's best to let the Universities have the thrill of mystery! (From UCAS, the main university application thing in the UK too!) "

 

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A groundbreaking NHS trial will attempt to boost patients' mood using a brain-computer-interface that directly alters brain activity using ultrasound. The device, which is designed to be implanted beneath the skull but outside the brain, maps activity and delivers targeted pulses of ultrasound to "switch on" clusters of neurons. Its safety and tolerability will be tested on about 30 patient in the 6.5 million-pound trial, funded by the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria). [...] The latest trial will test a device developed by the US-based non-profit Forest Neurotech. In contrast to invasive implants, in which electrodes are inserted into a specific location in the brain, Forest 1 uses ultrasound to read-out and modify activity. Aria describes the device as "the most advanced BCI in the world" due to its ability to modify activity across multiple regions simultaneously. This widens potential future applications to a huge patient population affected by conditions such as depression, anxiety and epilepsy, which are all "circuit level" conditions rather than being localized in a specific brain region. The NHS trial will recruit patients who, due to brain injury, have had part of their skull temporarily removed to relieve a critical buildup of pressure in the brain. This means the device can be tested without having to perform surgery. When placed beneath the skull, or in individuals with a skull defect, ultrasound can detect tiny changes in blood flow to produce 3D maps of brain activity with a spatial resolution of about 100 times that of a typical fMRI scan. The same implant can deliver focused ultrasound to mechanically nudge neurons towards firing, providing a way to remotely dial activity up at precise locations. Participants will wear the device on their scalp at the site of the skull defect for two hours. Their brain activity will be measured and researchers will test whether patients' mood and feelings of motivation can be reliably altered. There are safety considerations, as ultrasound can cause tissue to heat up. Prof Elsa Fouragnan, a neuroscientist at the University of Plymouth, which is collaborating on the project, said: "What we're trying to minimize is heat. There's a safety and efficacy trade-off." She added that it would also be important to ensure that personality or decision-making were not altered in unintended ways -- for instance, making someone more impulsive. The study will run for three and a half years starting from March, with the first eight months focused on securing regulatory approval. If successful, Forest hopes to move into a full clinical trial for a condition such as depression. Aimun Jamjoom, a consultant neurosurgeon at the Barking, Havering and Redbridge university hospitals NHS trust, who is leading the project, said: "[T]he ability to offer a safer form of surgery is very exciting. If you look at conditions like depression or epilepsy, [up to] a third of these patients just don't get better. It's those groups where a technology like this could be a life-changing solution."

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Amazon is removing the "Download & Transfer via USB" feature for Kindle e-books starting February 26th, closing a loophole that allowed users to download older, easily crackable DRM formats. "At the very least, you'll still be able to transfer your e-books over Wi-Fi, and of course, transferring your e-books through Calibre will still work, too," notes Android Police. "[S]o it's not like we are losing access to dragging and dropping files onto a Kindle, we are simply losing access to a tool that facilitated easy piracy by pushing older formats of retail books from the website to your Kindle over USB."

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Arm will reportedly start making its own chips this year after signing Meta as a customer, according to the Financial Times (paywalled). TechCrunch reports: The chip is expected to be a CPU for servers in large data centers and can be customized for various customers. Arm will outsource its production. The first in-house Arm chip will be unveiled as early as this summer, the Financial Times also reported. This is a notable change in strategy for the semiconductor company, which usually licenses its chip blueprints to companies like Apple and Nvidia. Making its own chips will turn some of its existing customers into competitors.

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According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple will restore TikTok to the U.S. App Store on Thursday (source paywalled; alternative source), following a letter from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. From the report: Apple, along with Alphabet's Google, removed TikTok in the US to comply with a law passed last year. In a Jan. 20 executive order, Trump said he instructed the attorney general "not to take any action to enforce the act for a period of 75 days from today to allow my administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward." Apple confirmed the app will return "Thursday evening." You can find the App Store listing for TikTok here. Developing...

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Reddit's recent earnings report revealed that AI licensing deals with Google and OpenAI account for about 10% of its $1.3 billion revenue, totaling approximately $130 million. With Google paying $60 million, OpenAI is estimated to be paying Reddit around $70 million annually for content licensing. Adweek reports: "It's a small part of our revenue -- I'll call it 10%. For a business of our size, that's material, because it's valuable revenue," [said the company's COO Jen Wong]. The social platform -- which on Wednesday reported a 71% year-over-year lift in fourth-quarter revenue -- has been "very thoughtful" about the AI developers it chooses to work with, Wong said. To date, the company has inked two content licensing deals: one with Google for a reported $60 million, and one with ChatGPT parent OpenAI. Reddit has elected to work only with partners who can agree to "specific terms ... that are really important to us." These terms include user privacy protections and conditions regarding "how [Reddit is] represented," Wong said. While licensing agreements with AI firms offer a valuable business opportunity for Reddit, advertising remains the company's core revenue driver. Much of Reddit's $427.7 million Q4 revenues were generated by the ongoing expansion of its advertising business. And its ad revenue as a whole grew 60% YoY, underscoring the platform's growing appeal to brands. [...] Helping to accelerate ad revenue growth is Reddit's rising traffic. While Reddit's Q4 user growth came in under Wall Street projections, causing shares to dip, its weekly active uniques grew 42% YoY to over 379 million visitors. Average revenue per unique visitor was $4.21 during the quarter, up 23% from the prior year. While Google is "nicely reinforcing" Reddit's growth in traffic, Wong said, she added that the site's logged-in users, which have grown 27% year-over-year, are "the bedrock of our business."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Conde Nast and several other media companies sued the AI startup Cohere today, alleging that it engaged in "systematic copyright and trademark infringement" by using news articles to train its large language model. "Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power its artificial intelligence ('AI') service, which in turn competes with Publisher offerings and the emerging market for AI licensing," said the lawsuit (PDF) filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. "Not content with just stealing our works, Cohere also blatantly manufactures fake pieces and attributes them to us, misleading the public and tarnishing our brands." Conde Nast, which owns Ars Technica and other publications such as Wired and The New Yorker, was joined in the lawsuit by The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Insider, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Newsday, The Plain Dealer, Politico, The Republican, the Toronto Star, and Vox Media. The complaint seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act for each infringed work, or an amount based on actual damages and Cohere's profits. It also seeks "actual damages, Cohere's profits, and statutory damages up to the maximum provided by law" for infringement of trademarks and "false designations of origin." In Exhibit A (PDF), the plaintiffs identified over 4,000 articles in what they called an "illustrative and non-exhaustive list of works that Cohere has infringed." Additional exhibits provide responses to queries (PDF) and "hallucinations" (PDF) that the publishers say infringe upon their copyrights and trademarks. The lawsuit said Cohere "passes off its own hallucinated articles as articles from Publishers." Cohere said in a statement to Ars: "Cohere strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI. We have long prioritized controls that mitigate the risk of IP infringement and respect the rights of holders. We would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns -- and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach -- rather than learning about them in a filing. We believe this lawsuit is misguided and frivolous, and expect this matter to be resolved in our favor." Further reading: Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case In the US

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The U.S. released Russian cybercriminal Alexander Vinnik, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering through his cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e, as part of a prisoner swap that freed American schoolteacher Marc Fogel from Russian custody. The Guardian reports: Vinnik, who arrived in Moscow on a flight from Turkey on Tuesday after having been released from custody in California, is accused of owning and operating one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, BTC-e, which prosecutors allege facilitated the transfer of billions of dollars in transactions for criminals worldwide. In May 2024, Vinnik pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder billions of dollars through BTC-e. He was first arrested in Greece in 2017 at the request of the United States after he was charged by a US jury in a 21-count indictment. The charges against him included money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, operating an unlicensed money service business and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions, among others. Vinnik was first extradited to France from Greece, where he received a five-year prison sentence for money laundering. He was then sent back to Greece and extradited to the United States in 2022 to face US charges. The justice department described BTC-e, which was active from around 2011 to 2017, as a "significant cybercrime and online money laundering entity that allowed its users to trade in bitcoin with high levels of anonymity and developed a customer base heavily reliant on criminal activity." Prosecutors say that BTC-e processed over $9 bn worth of transactions and served over 1 million users globally, including numerous customers in the US. US prosecutors said that the exchange was one of the "primary ways by which cyber criminals around the world transferred, laundered, and stored the criminal proceeds of their illegal activities" and accused Vinnik of operating the company with the intent to "promote" unlawful activities. Prosecutors said that he was responsible for more than $120m in losses. Vinnik, who is a nonviolent offender, is forfeiting tens of millions of dollars in assets in the exchange, according to the New York Times.

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Apple CEO Tim Took took to X today to tease a special Apple product launch happening next week on Wednesday, February 19. 9to5Mac reports: Few specific details were shared, but Cook did include a brief video featuring the Apple logo in silver plus the following words: "Get ready to meet the newest member of the family. Wednesday, February 19. #AppleLaunch" [...] The most likely product is the brand new iPhone SE 4, which rumors suggest will pack a variety of powerful upgrades. [...] There are several other hardware possibilities for the February 19 launch. We're currently expecting at least three other products to debut in the near future: the M4 MacBook Air, an M3 iPad Air, and a new 11th generation base model iPad. Reading into the teaser, the silver color does subtly give off Mac vibes, so perhaps the M4 MacBook Air is coming. The circle design in the video has some wondering if AirTag 2 could be the focus of the launch. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, however, doesn't believe that's the case. Gurman suggests the iPhone SE 4 will be the new product. That would make the circle a potential reference to the device's single rear camera.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: In mid-March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the founder of the personal data removal service Onerep also founded dozens of people-search companies. Shortly after that investigation was published, Mozilla said it would stop bundling Onerep with the Firefox browser and wind down its partnership with the company. But nearly a year later, Mozilla is still promoting it to Firefox users. [Using OneRep is problematic because its founder, Dimitri Shelest, also created and maintained ownership (PDF) in multiple people-search and data broker services, including Nuwber, which contradicts OneRep's stated mission of protecting personal online security. Additionally, OneRep appears to have ties with Radaris, a people-search service known for ignoring or failing to honor opt-out requests, raising concerns about the true intentions and effectiveness of OneRep's data removal service.] In October 2024, Mozilla published a statement saying the search for a different provider was taking longer than anticipated. "While we continue to evaluate vendors, finding a technically excellent and values-aligned partner takes time," Mozilla wrote. "While we continue this search, Onerep will remain the backend provider, ensuring that we can maintain uninterrupted services while we continue evaluating new potential partners that align more closely with Mozilla's values and user expectations. We are conducting thorough diligence to find the right vendor." Asked for an update, Mozilla said the search for a replacement partner continues. "The work's ongoing but we haven't found the right alternative yet," Mozilla said in an emailed statement. "Our customers' data remains safe, and since the product provides a lot of value to our subscribers, we'll continue to offer it during this process." It's a win-win for Mozilla that they've received accolades for their principled response while continuing to partner with Onerep almost a year later. But if it takes so long to find a suitable replacement, what does that say about the personal data removal industry itself?

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