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"In 1998, the US Congress retroactively extended the copyright on US works, placing public domain works back into copyright and forestalling the entry into the public domain of a great mass of works that were soon to become public domain; now, 20 years later with no copyright term extension in sight, the US public domain is about to receive the first of many annual infusions to come, a great mass of works that will be free for all to use. "

" respite was thanks to a sloppy bit of programming from the worm's creator, who'd left a killswitch in the code: newly infected systems checked to see if a certain domain (iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com) existed before attempting to spread the infection; by registering this domain, security researchers were able to freeze the worm.The respite was thanks to a sloppy bit of programming from the worm's creator, who'd left a killswitch in the code: newly infected systems checked to see if a certain domain (iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com) existed before attempting to spread the infection; by registering this domain, security researchers were able to freeze the worm. But a day later, it's back, and this time, without the killswitch. Security researchers running honeypots have seen new infections by versions of the worm that can spread even when the iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com domain is live."

Talking of ICANN and DNS look at these developments ....

"Hackers breached the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that coordinates unique web addresses all across the world, but luckily didn't hit the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, an important leg that keeps the Internet running smoothly. Attackers used "spear fishing" to break into the system in late November, according to a post on ICANN's website this week. Staffers received email messages that appeared to be coming from ICANN's own domain; several ICANN staffers' emails were compromised."

"The two titans leading the pack are Google and Microsoft. The first battle? A new domain in artificial intelligence called "Deep Learning.""

"DNS (Domain Name System) is the system which translates web addresses, such as google.com, into an IP address, such as 74.125.224.72/. A network requires the latter to actually access a website, but if the look-up system gets confused, it can give the wrong IP address - which appears to be what happened in the Iconfactory's case. Except that rather than one DNS server messing up, it was the server for the whole of China."

"has told ISPs that they need to start blocking an astounding 429,343 websites at the domain level as quickly as possible, following a Supreme Court order to the PTA about the evils of porn online."

"So, yes: the internet of things presents many new possibilities, and it would be foolish to dismiss those possibilities out of hand. But we would also be wise to approach the entire domain with scepticism, and in particular to resist the attempts of companies to gather ever more data about our lives - no matter how much ease, convenience and self-mastery we are told they are offering us."

"Indeed, this scam is far subtler. It works like this: fraudsters are able to register domains with characters plucked from various alphabets other than the default Latin script. When displayed, it's all but impossible to tell apart a Greek "O" from a Cyrillic "O" from a Latin "O," for instance."

"Dubbed typosquatting, the idea is simple (if devious): A hacker registers a domain that is close enough to a real site, like yourbanknarne.com, and puts up a clone of yourbankname.com. The unsuspecting victim goes to the wrong site by mistake, and enters their personal banking information. In doing so, they have inadvertently handed the digital keys to their account to a hacker. "

"Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years. What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence - and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars - much, much better from here."

"One of the many policy-based projects I worked on at Meta was Engagement Bait, which is defined as "a tactic that urges people to interact with Facebook posts through likes, shares, comments, and other actions in order to artificially boost engagement and get greater reach." Accordingly, "Posts and Pages that use this tactic will be demoted." To do this, "models are built off of certain guidelines" trained using "hundreds of thousands of posts" that "teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized." The examples provided are obvious (eg. a post saying "comment "Yes" if you love rock as much as I do"), but the problem is that there will always be far subtler ways to get people to engage with something artificially. As an example, psychology researchers have a long history of studying negativity bias, which has been shown to operate across a wide array of domains, and to lead to increased online engagement. "

"This article discusses the legal implications of a novel phenomenon, namely, digital reincarnations of deceased persons, sometimes known as post-mortem avatars, deepfakes, replicas, holographs, or chatbots. To elide these multiple names, we use the term 'ghostbots'. The piece is an early attempt to discuss the potential social and individual harms, roughly grouped around notions of privacy (including post-mortem privacy), property, personal data and reputation, arising from ghostbots, how they are regulated and whether they need to be adequately regulated further. For reasons of space and focus, the article does not deal with copyright implications, fraud, consumer protection, tort, product liability, and pornography laws, including the non-consensual use of intimate images ('revenge porn'). This paper focuses on law, although we fully acknowledge and refer to the role of philosophy and ethics in this domain."

"Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain in the year 2024, almost 95 years after his creation on 1 October 1928 - the length of time after which the copyright on an anonymous or pseudo-anonymous body of artistic work expires."

"This is a broader pattern we're seeing across other fields where LLMs are being deployed. Whether it's coding, writing, design, law, or medicine, the most effective AI users are people who already have deep domain expertise. Expertise isn't obsolete; it's more important than ever-because the value isn't just in producing outputs quickly. It's in being able to vet, steer, and improve those outputs. The future of computer science education isn't about teaching less. It's about teaching differently. We still need students who can understand how software works at a fundamental level. But we also need to train them to collaborate with AI-to become fluent in prompting, reviewing, debugging, and refining AI-generated outputs. Mastering this hybrid skillset will be critical not just for engineers, but for anyone hoping to thrive in a world where knowledge work is increasingly AI-augmented. Practically speaking, AI could dramatically lower the barrier to entry for students. When I was in high school, it would take months (if not years) of training in CS before you could create a game or app that was genuinely cool to people that aren't inherently curious and nerdy."

"The findings from those examples were striking: overall, those who trusted the accuracy of the AI tools found themselves thinking less critically, while those who trusted the tech less used more critical thought when going back over AI outputs. "The data shows a shift in cognitive effort as knowledge workers increasingly move from task execution to oversight when using GenAI," the researchers wrote. "Surprisingly, while AI can improve efficiency, it may also reduce critical engagement, particularly in routine or lower-stakes tasks in which users simply rely on AI, raising concerns about long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving." This isn't enormously surprising. Something we've observed in many domains, from self-driving vehicles to scrutinizing news articles produced by AI, is that humans quickly go on autopilot when they're supposed to be overseeing an automated system, often allowing mistakes to slip past."