After New York’s MTA announced it was leaving Twitter yesterday, The Verge contacted Bay Area Rapid Transit — which like the MTA was knocked offline earlier this month by Twitter’s API changes — to see if it would follow suit. “We are continuing to use Twitter while closely monitoring the situation,” media relations manager James Allison tells us.
The language has been praised for fixing the broken pieces of New York’s 2022 right to repair law, and it was added yesterday to legislative packages in both houses of state Congress. Those packages still need a final vote, though, so we’re waiting to see if it remains intact.
US Customs and Border Protection announced today that it seized 1,000 sets of earbuds as well as 50 counterfeit Apple Watches being shipped from China via Washington Dulles International Airport. It’s not the first time this has happened! No one has been criminally charged.
Are there any bombshell revelations in Elon Musk’s accidentally revealed alt Twitter account? Not really. Is its existence funnier than the former FBI director having a secret Twitter account? Probably not. Am I impressed at how quickly it was discovered after Musk hinted at its existence? Yes.
The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center is rightly legendary — it helped give us the desktop computer, the laser printer, and ethernet. But after more than 50 years, Xerox is deeding PARC to the (also highly influential) nonprofit research group SRI International. Xerox still hopes to reap some benefits through a “preferred research agreement” with SRI:
Through the collaborative program, Xerox and SRI will identify topic areas relevant to Xerox’s core print, digital and IT Services business, with the final goal of creating proofs-of-concept and roadmaps to implementation.
The Supreme Court has declined a petition from computer scientist Stephen Thaler to consider whether artificial intelligence systems can be awarded patents. That leaves Thaler with an appeals court and federal court’s earlier answer of “no.”
The US Patent and Trademark Office and a federal judge in Virginia rejected his patent applications for the inventions on the grounds that [Thaler’s AI system] DABUS is not a person. The patent-focused US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld those decisions last year and said US patent law unambiguously requires inventors to be human beings.
Sorry, DABUS.
