Canadian librarian Ian Linkletter has ended a five-year legal battle with ed-tech firm Proctorio after being sued for sharing public YouTube help videos that exposed how the company's remote-proctoring AI works. Ars Technica reports: ... Together, the videos, the help center screenshot, and another screenshot showing course material describing how Proctorio works were enough for Proctorio to take Linkletter to court. The ed tech company promptly filed a lawsuit and obtained a temporary injunction by spuriously claiming that Linkletter shared private YouTube videos containing confidential information. Because the YouTube videos -- which were public but "unlisted" when Linkletter shared them -- had been removed, Linkletter did not have to delete the seven tweets that initially caught Proctorio's attention, but the injunction required that he remove two tweets, including the screenshots.

In the five years since, the legal fight dragged on, with no end in sight until last week, as Canadian courts tangled with copyright allegations that tested a recently passed law intended to shield Canadian rights to free expression, the Protection of Public Participation Act. To fund his defense, Linkletter said in a blog announcing the settlement that he invested his life savings "ten times over." Additionally, about 900 GoFundMe supporters and thousands of members of the Association of Administrative and Professional Staff at UBC contributed tens of thousands more. For the last year of the battle, a law firm, Norton Rose Fulbright, agreed to represent him on a pro bono basis, which Linkletter said âoewas a huge relief to me, as it meant I could defend myself all the way if Proctorio chose to proceed with the litigation."

The terms of the settlement remain confidential, but both Linkletter and Proctorio confirmed that no money was exchanged. For Proctorio, the settlement made permanent the injunction that restricted Linkletter from posting the company's help center or instructional materials. But it doesn't stop Linkletter from remaining the company's biggest critic, as "there are no other restrictions on my freedom of expression," Linkletter's blog noted. "I've won my life back!" Linkletter wrote, while reassuring his supporters that he's "fine" with how things ended. "It doesn't take much imagination to understand why Proctorio is a nightmare for students," Linkletter wrote. "I can say everything that matters about Proctorio using public information."

Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant in Windows 11 fails to replicate the capabilities shown in the company's TV advertisements. The Verge tested Copilot Vision over a week using the same prompts featured in ads airing during NFL games. When asked to identify a HyperX QuadCast 2S microphone visible in a YouTube video -- a task successfully completed in Microsoft's ad -- Copilot gave multiple incorrect answers. The assistant identified the microphone as a first-generation HyperX QuadCast, then as a Shure SM7b on two other occasions. Copilot couldn't identify the Saturn V rocket from a PowerPoint presentation despite the words "Saturn V" appearing on screen. When asked about a cave image from Microsoft's ad, Copilot gave inconsistent responses.

About a third of the time it provided directions to find the photo in File Explorer. On two occasions it explained how to launch Google Chrome. Four times it offered advice about booking flights to Belize. The cave is Rio Secreto in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Microsoft spokesperson Blake Manfre said "Copilot Actions on Windows, which can take actions on local files, is not yet available." He described it as "an opt-in experimental feature that will be coming soon to Windows Insiders in Copilot Labs, starting with a narrow set of use cases while we optimize model performance and learn." Copilot cannot toggle basic Windows settings like dark mode. When asked to analyze a benchmark table in Google Sheets, it "constantly misread clear-as-day scores both in the spreadsheet and in the on-page review."

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Meta did not illegally stifle competition when it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. The decision marks Big Tech's first major victory against antitrust enforcement that began during President Donald Trump's first term. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission had sought to force Meta to sell or restructure the platforms to restore competition among social media networks. Meta argued it faced competitive pressure from TikTok, YouTube, and Apple's messaging app.

Even after disabling remote control and officially ending support for early Nest Learning Thermostats, Google is still receiving detailed sensor and activity data from these devices, including temperature changes, motion, and ambient light. The Verge reports: After digging into the backend, security researcher Cody Kociemba found that the first- and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats are still sending Google information about manual temperature changes, whether a person is present in the room, if sunlight is hitting the device, and more. Kociemba made the discovery while participating in a bounty program created by FULU, a right-to-repair advocacy organization cofounded by electronics repair technician and YouTuber Louis Rossmann.

FULU challenged developers to come up with a solution to restore smart functionality to Nest devices no longer supported by Google, and that's exactly what Kociemba did with his open-source No Longer Evil project. But after cloning Google's API to create this custom software, he started receiving a trove of logs from customer devices, which he turned off. "On these devices, while they [Google] turned off access to remotely control them, they did leave in the ability for the devices to upload logs. And the logs are pretty extensive," Kociemba tells The Verge. [...] "I was under the impression that the Google connection would be severed along with the remote functionality, however that connection is not severed, and instead is a one-way street," Kociemba says.

CNN profiled the non-profit Internet Archive today — and included this tidbit about how they archive parts of the internet that are now "tucked in conversations with AI chatbots." The rise of artificial intelligence and AI chatbots means the Internet Archive is changing how it records the history of the internet. In addition to web pages, the Internet Archive now captures AI-generated content, like ChatGPT answers and those summaries that appear at the top of Google search results. The Internet Archive team, which is made up of librarians and software engineers, are experimenting with ways to preserve how people get their news from chatbots by coming up with hundreds of questions and prompts each day based on the news, and recording both the queries and outputs, [says Wayback Machine Director Mark Graham].
It sounds like a fun place to work... Archivists use bespoke machines to digitize books page by page, livestreaming their work on YouTube for all to see (alongside some lo-fi music). Record players churn out vintage tunes from 1920s and 1940s, and the building houses every type of media console for any type of content imaginable, from microfilm, to CDs and satellite television. (The Internet Archive preserves music, television, books and video games, too)... "There are a lot of people that are just passionate about the cause. There's a cyberpunk atmosphere," Annie Rauwerda, a Wikipedia editor and social media influencer, said at a party thrown at the Internet Archive's headquarters to celebrate reaching a trillion pages "The internet (feels) quite corporate when I use it a lot these days, but you wouldn't know from the people here."

An anonymous reader shared this post from the gaming news site Aftermath: Concord, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Firewalk Studios' Overwatch-like shooter, was live for just two weeks before it was pulled offline. Though Concord certainly had some dedicated players, it didn't have many — which is why it may be surprising to hear that a group of players are reverse-engineering the game and its servers to bring it back to life.

Publisher Sony removed Concord from stores and digital marketplaces, automatically refunded some, and, later, shut down Firewalk Studios. Two hundred or so people were laid off, and any hopes of Concord's return were dashed. Poor sales — estimated to be under 25,000 copies sold — and low player numbers marred the release. Firewalk Studios' game director Ryan Ellis said in a blog post that pieces of the game "resonated with players," but "other aspects of the game and [Concord's] initial launch didn't land the way [Firewalk Studios] intended."

Concord wasn't a bad game, but it just didn't generate enough interest with enough players. Now, a group of three hobbyist reverse-engineers, who go by real, Red, and gwog online, are trying to make it playable again... "Sometimes there's enough of the server left in the game, that we can 'activate' that code and make the game believe it's a server," Red said. "We do pretty much always need to fill in the gaps though..." Concord used an anti-tamper software to keep people from cheating, which also creates a problem for people reverse engineering. It's "nearly impossible" to crack, Red said, so the group didn't — they found an exploit to "forcefully decrypt the game's code" to "restore the game and start working on servers...."

It's not open to the public, but people can sign up for future tests. Even former Firewalk Studios employees have joined the server. They're excited to see Concord come back to life, too, the developers said.
"Friday morning, a video of the playtest was posted to the Concord Reddit page," according to the article. (Though ironically by Friday night YouTube had had removed the video "due to a copyright claim by MarkScan Enforcement."

YouTube TV and Disney have ended their two-week carriage standoff, restoring ESPN, ABC, and other Disney networks under a new multiyear deal. Variety reports: Under the new agreement, ESPN's full lineup of sports -- including content from ESPN Unlimited -- will be made available on YouTube TV to base-plan subscribers at no additional cost by the end of 2026. In addition, access to a selection of live and on-demand programming from ESPN Unlimited will be available inside YouTube TV.

The deal also lets YouTube include the Disney+ and Hulu bundle as part of "select YouTube offerings." According to Disney, "select networks" will be included in various genre-specific packages that YouTube TV expects to launch in the future. [...] The deal supersedes their prior distribution agreement, inked in December 2021 after a two-day blackout.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has landed the booster of its New Glenn mega-rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean on just its second attempt -- making it the second company to perform such a feat, following Elon Musk's SpaceX. It's an accomplishment that will help the new rocket system become an option to send larger payloads to space, the Moon, and beyond. Thursday's launch wasn't just about the landing attempt, though. Roughly 34 minutes after takeoff, the upper stage of New Glenn successfully deployed the rocket's first commercial payload: twin spacecraft for NASA that will travel to Mars to study the red planet's atmosphere. The pair of achievements are remarkable for the second-ever launch of such a massive rocket system. And it could put Blue Origin in position to compete with SpaceX, which dominates the world's launch market with its Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship rockets. You can watch a recording of the launch here.

Longtime Slashdot reader hadleyburg writes: For a user with an Android phone and who's happy to stick within the Google ecosystem, an Android tablet might seem like the more obvious choice over an iPad. Of course, iPads are a lot more popular, and asking about Android tablets is likely to invite advice about sticking with what everyone else has.

The Slashdot community on the other hand -- being a discerning and thoughtful crowd -- might have some experience in this area and be willing to share the pros and cons they have found.

The use case is someone not requiring any heavy usage -- no video editing or gaming -- just email, browsing, YouTube, video calls, and that sort of thing.

Disney is losing an estimated $4.3 million per day (about $30 million per week) from the ongoing YouTube TV blackout of ESPN, ABC, and other networks amid a contract dispute over carriage fees. Of course, YouTube is also feeling financial pressure from users who have already canceled or intend to cancel their service. Variety reports: Disney is losing an estimated $30 million per week from its networks being pulled off YouTube TV, which works out to nearly $4.3 million per day, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. The figure came in a research note from Morgan Stanley equity analysts Benjamin Swinburne and Thomas Yeh, who said in their financial forecast for Disney's year-end 2025 quarter, they are "layering in 14 days of impact from the ongoing YouTube TV blackout, which we estimate is a $60mm revenue headwind."

Nov. 11 marks the 12th day of the Disney blackout on YouTube TV. The Morgan Stanley analysts wrote that they expect the Disney-YouTube TV dispute to be resolved later this week, but estimated that each week its networks are dark on YouTube TV will lower Disney's adjusted earnings per share by 2 cents.

FFmpeg, the open source multimedia framework that powers video processing in Google Chrome, Firefox, YouTube and other major platforms, has called on Google to either fund the project or stop burdening its volunteer maintainers with security vulnerabilities found by the company's AI tools. The maintainers patched a bug that Google's AI agent discovered in code for decoding a 1995 video game but described the finding as "CVE slop."

The confrontation centered on a Google Project Zero policy announced in July that publicly discloses reported vulnerabilities within a week and starts a ninety-day countdown to full disclosure regardless of patch availability. FFmpeg, written primarily in assembly language, handles format conversion and streaming for VLC, Kodi and Plex but operates without adequate funding from the corporations that depend on it. Nick Wellnhofer resigned as maintainer of libxml2, a library used in all major web browsers, because of the unsustainable workload of addressing security reports without compensation and said he would stop maintaining the project in December.

Apple has launched the iPhone Pocket, a knitted bag designed to hold iPhones. The limited edition collaboration with Japanese designer Issey Miyake costs $229.95 for the crossbody version. A shorter version is priced at $149.95. Apple said the 3D-knitted design was inspired by "a piece of cloth" and was born from the idea of creating an additional pocket for any iPhone and small everyday items. Yoshiyuki Miyamae, design director at Miyake Design Studio, said the product "speaks to the bond between iPhone and its user" and explores "the joy of wearing iPhone in your own way." Steve Jobs mocked similar $29 iPod Socks as "a revolutionary new product" in 2004.

The PDF Association is adding JPEG XL (JXL) support to the PDF specification, giving the advanced image format a new path to relevance despite Google's decision to declare it obsolete and remove it from Chromium. The Register reports: Peter Wyatt, CTO of the PDF Association, said: "We need to adopt a new image [format] that can support HDR [High Dynamic Range] content ... we have picked JPEG XL as our preferred solution." Wyatt also praised other benefits of JXL including wide gamut images, ultra-high resolution support for images with more than 1 billion pixels, and up to 4099 channels with up to 32 bits per channel.

The association is responsible for developing PDF specifications and standards and manages the ISO committee for PDF. JPEG XL is an advanced image format that was designed to be both more efficient and richer in features than JPEG. It was based on a combination of the Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF) from Cloudinary and a Google project called PIK, first released in late 2020, and fully standardized in October 2021 as ISO/IEC 18181. There is a reference implementation called libjxl. A second edition of the ISO standard was published in 2024.

JXL appeared to have wide industry support, including experimental implementation in Chrome and Chromium, until it was killed by Google in October 2022 and removed from its web browser engine. The company stated that "there is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL." Many in the community disagreed with the decision, including FLIF inventor Jon Sneyers, who perceived it as the outcome of an internal battle between proponents of JXL and a rival format, AVIF. "AVIF proponents within Chrome are essentially being prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time," he said.

After popular arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Midway Games jumped into the home console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball game franchise "MLB Slugfest" for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. But at times it was almost a parody of baseball, including announcers filling the long hours of airtime with bizarre, rambling conversations. ("I read today that kitchen utensils are gonna hurt more people tonight than lifting heavy objects during the day...")

Now former Midway Games producer Mark Flitman has revealed the even weirder conversations rejected by Major League Baseball. ("Ah, baseball on a sunny afternoon. Is there anything better? We've been talking about breaking pop bottles with rocks. I guess that is...") The nonprofit Video Game History Foundation published the text in their digital archive — and shared 79 seconds of sound clips that were actually recorded but never used in the final game. ("Enjoying some smoked whale meat up here in the booth today...")

Their BlueSky post with the audio drew over 5,500 likes and 2,400 reposts, with one commenter wondering if the bizarre (and unapproved) conversations were "part of the tactic where you include overtly inappropriate content to make the stuff you actually want to keep seem more appropriate." But the Foundation's library director thinks the voice actors were just going wild. "We talked with Mark on our podcast and it sounds like they just did a lot of improv and got carried away." He added later that the game's producer "would give them prompts and they'd run with it. The voice actors (Kevin Matthews and Tim Kitzrow) have backgrounds in sports radio and comedy, so they came up with wild nonsense like this."

The gaming site Aftermath notes the Foundation also has an archive page for all the other sound files on the CD. Maybe it's the ultimate tribute to the craziness that was MLB Slugfest. Years ago some fans of the game shared their memories on Reddit...

• "The first time my friend tried to bean me and my hitter caught the ball was so hype, we were freaking out. Every game quickly evolved into trying to get our hitters to charge the mound."

• "I just remembered you could also kick the shit out of the fielder near your base if he got too close. Man that game was awesome."

• "You could do jump kicks into the catcher like Richie from The Benchwarmers."

• "Every time someone got on base we would run the ball over to them and beat their asses for 30 seconds. Good times."

Six years after the launch of the franchise, Midway Games declared bankruptcy.

A new Activate Consulting report reveals that 43% of Gen Z now prefer YouTube and TikTok over traditional TV or paid streaming. With global media revenues surging and traditional TV viewership collapsing, the average person now spends over 13 hours a day consuming content across platforms, effectively living a "32-hour day" through multitasking. Variety reports: Per the same survey, the popularity of "microdramas" -- one of the latest trends on those platforms, consisting of 1-2 minute scripted episodes of an ongoing storyline -- has been increasing at a fast rate with 28 million U.S. adults (52% aged 18-34) reportedly watching that new form of content.

Additional findings include projections for global internet and media revenue to increase by $388 billion by 2029, while average daily time spent streaming video will climb to 4 hours and 8 minutes as time spent watching traditional TV is set to collapse to just 1 hour and 17 minutes. Activate estimates that, as a result, streaming revenues (from ads and subscriptions) will grow 18-19% annually while traditional TV revenues will fall 4-6% year to year.

Coca-Cola has doubled down on AI-generated holiday ads despite widespread criticism of last year's uncanny results. This year the beverage company is replacing human actors with oddly animated animals in a visually inconsistent campaign. The Verge reports: There's no consistent style, switching between attempted realism and a bug-eyed toony look, and the polar bears, panda, and sloth move unnaturally, like flat images that have been sloppily animated rather than rigged 3D models in CG. Compared to the convincing deepfake videos being generated by tools like OpenAI's Sora 2 or Google's Veo 3, the videos produced for this Coke ad feel extremely dated.

The only notable improvement to my eyes is that the wheels on the iconic Coke trucks are actually consistently turning this year, rather than gliding statically over snow-covered roads. The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola teamed up with Silverside and Secret Level on its latest holiday campaign, two of the AI studios that previously worked on the 2024 Coke Christmas ads.

Coca-Cola declined to comment on the cost of the new holiday campaign, according to The Wall Street Journal, but said that around 100 people were involved in the project -- a figure comparable to the company's older AI-free productions. That includes five "AI specialists" from Silverside who contributed by prompting and refining more than 70,000 AI video clips.

TechCrunch reports: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that the company is doing "well more" than $13 billion in annual revenue — and he sounded a little testy when pressed on how it will pay for its massive spending commitments.

His comments came up during a joint interview on the Bg2 podcast between Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the partnership between their companies. Host Brad Gerstner (who's also founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital) brought upreports that OpenAI is currently bringing in around $13 billion in revenue — a sizable amount, but one that's dwarfed by more than $1 trillion in spending commitments for computing infrastructure that OpenAI has made for the next decade.

"First of all, we're doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer," Altman said, prompting laughs from Nadella. "I just — enough. I think there are a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares."
Altman's answer continued, making the case for OpenAI's business model. "We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it's going to continue to grow and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing. That AI that can automate science will create huge value...

"We carefully plan, we understand where the technology — where the capability — is going to go, and the products we can build around that and the revenue we can generate. We might screw it up — like, this is the bet that we're making, and we're taking a risk along with that." (That bet-with-risks seems to be the $1.4 trillion in spending commitments — but Altman suggests it's offset by another absolutely certain risk: "If we don't have the compute, we will not be able to generate the revenue or make the models at this kind of scale.")

Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, added his own defense, "as both a partner and an investor. There has not been a single business plan that I've seen from OpenAI that they have put in and not beaten it. So in some sense, this is the one place where in terms of their growth — and just even the business — it's been unbelievable execution, quite frankly..."

CBS News investigates what happened when police thought they'd tracked down a "porch pirate" who'd stolen a package — and accused an innocent woman.

"You know why I'm here," the police sergeant tells Chrisanna Elser. "You know we have cameras in that town..." "It went right into, 'we have video of you stealing a package,'" Elser said... "Can I see the video?" Elser asked. "If you go to court, you can," the officer replied. "If you're going to deny it, I'm not going to extend you any courtesy...." [You can watch a video of the entire confrontation.] On her doorstep, the officer issued a summons, without ever looking at the surveillance video Elser had. "We can show you exactly where we were," she told him. "I already know where you were," he replied.

Her Rivian — equipped with multiple cameras — had recorded her entire route that day... It took weeks of her collecting her own evidence, building timelines, and submitting videos before someone listened. Finally, she received an email from the Columbine Valley police chief acknowledging her efforts in an email saying, "nicely done btw (by the way)," and informing her the summons would not be filed.
Elser also found the theft video (which the police officer refused to show her) on Nextdoor, reports Electrek. "The woman has the same color hair, but different facial and nose shape and apparent age than Elser, which is all reasonably apparent when viewing the video..."

But Elser does drive a green Rivian truck, which police knew had entered the neighborhood 20 times over the course of a month. (Though in the video the officer is told that a male driver in the same household passes through that neighborhood driving to and from work.) The problem may be their certainty — derived from Flock's network of cameras that automatically read license plates, "tracking movements of vehicles wherever they go..." The system has provoked concern from privacy and freedom focused organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union. Flock also recently announced a partnership with Ring, seeking to use a network of doorbell cameras to track Americans in even more places.... [The police] didn't even have video of the truck in the area — merely tags of it entering... (it also left the area minutes later, indicating a drive through, rather than crawling through neighborhoods looking for packages — but police neglected to check the exit timestamps)... Elser has asked for an apology for [officer] Milliman's aggressive behavior during the encounter, but has heard nothing back from the department despite a call, email, and physical appearance at the police station.
The article points out that Rivian's "Road Cam" feature can be set to record footage of everything happening around it using the car's built in cameras for driver-assist features. But if you want to record footage all the time, you'll need to plug in a USB-C external drive to store it. (It's ironic how different cameras recorded every part of this story — the theft, the police officer accusing the innocent woman, and that innocent woman's actual whereabouts.)

Electrek's take? "Citizens should not need to own a $70k+ truck, or even a $100 external hard drive, to keep track of everything they do in order to prove to power-tripping officers that they didn't commit a crime."

Disney's channels, including ESPN, ABC, FX, and NatGeo, have gone dark on YouTube TV after Google and Disney failed to renew their carriage agreement before the October 30 deadline, with each side blaming the other for using unfair negotiating tactics and price hikes. YouTube TV says it will issue a $20 credit to subscribers if the blackout continues while negotiations proceed. Engadget reports: "Last week Disney used the threat of a blackout on YouTube TV as a negotiating tactic to force deal terms that would raise prices on our customers," YouTube said in an announcement on its blog. "They're now following through on that threat, suspending their content on YouTube TV." YouTube added that Disney's decision harms its subscribers while benefiting its own live TV products, such as Hulu+Live TV and Fubo.

In a statement sent to the Los Angeles Times, however, Disney accused Google's YouTube TV of choosing to deny "subscribers the content they value most by refusing to pay fair rates for [its] channels, including ESPN and ABC." Disney also accused Google of using its market dominance to "eliminate competition and undercut the industry-standard terms" that other pay-TV distributors have agreed to pay for its content.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Is installing Windows 11 with a local account or on unsupported hardware harmful or dangerous? YouTube's AI moderation system seems to think so, as it has started pulling videos that show users how to sidestep Microsoft's setup restrictions.

Tech YouTuber Rich White, aka CyberCPU Tech, was the first to go public about the issue on October 26, when he posted a video reporting the removal of a how-to he published on installing Windows 11 25H2 with a local account instead of a Microsoft account. In the video, White expressed concern that YouTube's automated flagging process may be the root of the problem, as he found it hard to believe that "creating a local account in Windows 11 could lead to serious harm or even death," as YouTube reportedly alleged when it removed the video.

When he appealed, White said that YouTube denied the request within 10 to 20 minutes, early on a Sunday morning, which led him to speculate that there wasn't a human in the loop when the request was shut down. That wasn't his only video removed, either. The next day, White uploaded his video for this week on installing Windows 11 25H2 on unsupported hardware, which was removed hours after being posted. YouTube justified the removal on similar grounds. [...] At least two other YouTubers - Britec09 and Hrutkay Mods - have released videos alleging much of the same.