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.
I didn’t realize the past week’s verification saga could get sillier, but here we are, watching Dril fight Elon Musk to keep a checkmark off his name. You know you’re selling a great product when you start punishing your most popular users by giving it to them for free.
Remember the total nonsense checkmarks Tumblr started selling in the early days of Twitter’s paid blue checks? Well, they’ve evolved. And you can put (almost) as many of them next to your blog name as you want.
Twitter might be a mess, but the CPSC is still a gem.
Rep. Anna Eshoo and Sen. Cory Booker have reintroduced the Community Broadband Act, which removes prohibitions on building local broadband networks. Makena Kelly talked to them about a previous version in 2021, along with interviewing other advocates of expanding community broadband protections:
“To tell people who are willing and able to invest the money in good fiber infrastructure for their residents that they can’t do it, but also that the incumbent ISPs will not provide it for them either? It’s just ridiculous.”
