Monthly Archives: May 2025

House of Lords shows they are in pocket of big copyright and pushes back against government’s AI plans

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The government has suffered another setback in the House of Lords over its plans to let artificial intelligence firms use copyright-protected work without permission.

An amendment to the data bill requiring AI companies to reveal which copyrighted material is used in their models was backed by peers, despite government opposition.

It is the second time parliament’s upper house has demanded tech companies make clear whether they have used copyright-protected content.

The vote came days after hundreds of artists and organisations including Paul McCartney, Jeanette Winterson, Dua Lipa and the Royal Shakespeare Company urged the prime minister not to “give our work away at the behest of a handful of powerful overseas tech companies”.

The amendment was tabled by crossbench peer Beeban Kidron and was passed by 272 votes to 125.

The bill will now return to the House of Commons. If the government removes the Kidron amendment, it will set the scene for another confrontation in the Lords next week.

Lady Kidron said: “I want to reject the notion that those of us who are against government plans are against technology. Creators do not deny the creative and economic value of AI, but we do deny the assertion that we should have to build AI for free with our work, and then rent it back from those who stole it.

“My lords, it is an assault on the British economy and it is happening at scale to a sector worth £120bn to the UK, an industry that is central to the industrial strategy and of enormous cultural import.”

The government’s copyright proposals are the subject of a consultation due to report back this year, but opponents of the plans have used the data bill as a vehicle for registering their disapproval.

The main government proposal is to let AI firms use copyright-protected work to build their models without permission, unless the copyright holders signal they do not want their work to be used in that process – a solution that critics say is impractical and unworkable.

Source: House of Lords pushes back against government’s AI plans | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

The problem is that the actual creators never see much of the money from copyright income – that all goes to the giant copyright holding behemoths who keep it for themselves.

And considering the way that AI systems are trained, they do not keep a copy of the work ingested, just like a human doesn’t keep a copy. So to say that a system can only ingest a work if permission is given is just like saying a specific person can only read that without permission.

So anything that is freely available is fair game. If an AI wants to read a book, they should buy that book. Once.

CISA changes vulnerabilities updates, shifts to defunct website X(twitter) as do NTSB, SSA

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The US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced Monday that going forward, only urgent alerts tied to emerging threats or major cyber activity will appear on its website. Routine updates, guidance, and other notifications will instead be shared via email, RSS, and X.

Up until now, its Cybersecurity Alerts and Advisories website has been posting a variety of bulletins, including known vulnerabilities under attack, flaws found in everything from industrial control systems to smart TVs, and warnings about specific products.

[…]

IT admins and others who want to know are advised to sign up for CISA’s email notifications to stay informed. Some updates will still be available via RSS, though users tracking the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog must subscribe to that topic through the GovDelivery email service. X will also carry general cybersecurity updates. We’ve asked CISA for further comment.

One has to wonder if this policy shift is linked to staff cuts at the agency, which began in March under the direction of Musk’s DOGE – a Trump-blessed project to trim costs at various federal agencies that oversee the Tesla tycoon’s businesses.

While some CISA workers have left, more layoffs are expected, as President Trump’s wish-list budget for 2026 proposes slashing CISA’s funding by about 17 percent. Former agency chief Jen Easterly has publicly criticized the recommendation, and described it as harmful to America.

“In a world where we are facing more serious, more complex, more dynamic threats, in a world where cyber crime damages are expected to cost the world $10.5 trillion by the end of this year, in a world where actors from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army are burrowed into our most sensitive critical infrastructure, that is a real loss for America to see the capability and capacity of America’s cyber defense agency being undermined,” she told the RSA Conference last month.

At the same time, US government bodies are increasingly moving more of their communications to Elon Musk’s social network. In February, following two major aviation accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board announced it would no longer distribute updates about press conferences or investigations via email, and would instead post all such information to its X account.

Then in April, the Social Security Administration began cutting staff from its communications office and told regional offices they would no longer issue press releases or “Dear Colleague” letters. Instead, agency updates will now be posted on X.

“If you’re used to getting press releases and Dear Colleague letters, you might want to subscribe to the official SSA X account, so you can stay up to date with agency news,” said SSA Midwest-West (MWW) Regional Commissioner Linda Kerr-Davis said at the time. “I know this probably sounds very foreign to you — it did to me as well — and not what we are used to, but we are in different times now.”

[…]

280 characters isn’t a lot of space to convey information, but maybe these agencies will get a group discount on X Premium for longer tweets. Either way, it’s good news for one of Trump’s more-favored billionaires. ®

Updated to add on May 13

Just a day after announcing it was changing the way it sent out alerts, CISA has changed its mind and reverted back to its old system of putting everything on its website.

“We recognize this has caused some confusion in the cyber community,” the site now reads. “As such, we have paused immediate changes while we re-assess the best approach to sharing with our stakeholders.”

While the infosec world has been rather peeved about the surprise overhaul by CISA, there may be another reason for the latest shift in policy. CISA intended to place more reliance on the GovDelivery email service – which had earlier been compromised, TechCrunch pointed out today.

It appears a contractor working for the state of Indiana had their credentials stolen, leading to GovDelivery sending out scam messages requesting money for unpaid toll fees. Maybe CISA figured there ought to be other ways to reach people, just in case.

Source: CISA changes vulnerabilities updates, shifts to X and emails • The Register

Scientists find lead really can be turned into gold (with help from the Large Hadron Collider)

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One of the ultimate goals of medieval alchemy has been realized, but only for a fraction of a second. Scientists with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, were able to convert lead into gold using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Unlike the examples of transmutation we see in pop culture, these experiments with the LHC involve smashing subatomic particles together at ridiculously high speeds to manipulate lead’s physical properties to become gold.

The LHC is often used to smash lead ions together to create extremely hot and dense matter similar to what was observed in the universe following the Big Bang. While conducting this analysis, the CERN scientists took note of the near-misses that caused a lead nucleus to drop its neutrons or protons. Lead atoms only have three more protons than gold atoms, meaning that in certain cases the LHC causes the lead atoms to drop just enough protons to become a gold atom for a fraction of a second — before immediately fragmenting into a bunch of particles.

Alchemists back in the day may be astonished by this achievement, but the experiments conducted between 2015 and 2018 only produced about 29 picograms of gold, according to CERN. The organization added that the latest trials produced almost double that amount thanks to regular upgrades to the LHC, but the mass made is still trillions of times less than what’s necessary for a piece of jewelry. Instead of trying to chase riches, the organization’s scientists are more interested in studying the interaction that leads to this transmutation.

[…]

Source: Scientists find lead really can be turned into gold (with help from the Large Hadron Collider)

Garmin CEO Hints More Paywalls And Enshittification Are Coming, Falsely Claims Users Love It after paywalling existing features and pissing off actual users

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We recently noted how device maker Garmin had decided to follow in the footsteps of Google’s Fitbit, and begin putting basic features behind an annoying subscription paywall to goose revenues. Garmin’s new “premium” Garmin+ tier takes several features users already enjoyed for free, put them behind a $7 per month paywall, and called it innovation.

Users are pretty broadly pissed about it. In part because Garmin smartwatches are already significantly more expensive than many brands. And because they’re now paying more money for the same services. And the new services Garmin has added to justify a “premium price” — like a new “AI” assistant — suck.

Speaking on the company’s latest earnings call, Garmin CEO Cliff Pemble responded to questions about the backlash by first lying and claiming that Garmin customers really like the direction Garmin is heading (a five second tour of the Garmin subreddit makes it very clear that’s not true). He then promised that more of this kind of enshittification was definitely coming:

“I think we’ve been saying for a while that we are evaluating opportunities to have a premium offering on Garmin Connect,” Pemble responded. “I think the developments of AI and particularly around AI-based insights for our users was one of those things that we felt was important to recognize the value for the investment that it takes to do.”

Again though, reviews of the “AI” features they’re adding are extremely bad, aren’t as good as other devices or fitness apps, and are often subject to basic math mistakes. Again it appears we’ve taken software and some light LLM automation, thrown the “AI” tag on it, and demanded that consumers both be stunned by the innovation and accept higher prices for existing services.

For a while Garmin differentiated itself from competitors like Fitbit for not doing this kind of predatory bullshit. If you dig through Reddit comments, it’s clear that a lack of subscription paywall is what drew a ton of customers to the brand in the first place.

But now that Garmin has decided to hop on this treadmill of goosing earnings by sucking value out of the free tier, it will never end. Company execs have deluded themselves into thinking this kind of paywalling is innovation, when it’s just mindless extraction and gatekeeping that harms customer loyalty.

Pemble, of course, can’t admit any of this to investors keen on improved quarterly returns at any cost, so it creates both a weird anti-consumer slippery slope, and a sort of willful delusion to prop it up. It also creates a new opportunity for future smart device competitors to make market inroads by not being nickel-and-diming assholes keen on insulting their customers’ intelligence.

Source: Garmin CEO Hints More Paywalls And Enshittification Are Coming, Falsely Claims Users Love It | Techdirt

Moderna’s Vaccine for both Flu and Covid Works—Now Politics Could Sink It

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Moderna’s mRNA-based flu and covid-19 vaccine could provide the best of both worlds—if it’s actually ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

This week, scientists at Moderna published data from a Phase III trial testing the company’s combination vaccine, codenamed mRNA-1083. Individuals given mRNA-1083 appeared to generate the same or even greater immune response compared to those given separate vaccines, the researchers found. But the FDA’s recent policy change on vaccine approvals, orchestrated by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, could imperil the development of this and other future vaccines.

The trial involved 8,000 people split into two age groups: those between the ages of 50 and 64, and those over 65. People were randomly given mRNA-1083 (plus a placebo) or two already approved flu and covid-19 vaccines.

The vaccine seemed effective across both age groups, with mRNA-1083 participants showing at least the same level of humoral immune response (antibody-based) to circulating flu and covid-19 strains as participants who were given the separate vaccines. On average, this response was actually higher to the flu strains in particular among those given mRNA-1083. The experimental vaccine also appeared to be safe and well-tolerated, as the authors explained in their paper, published Wednesday in JAMA.

The study results are certainly encouraging, and typically they would pave the way toward a surefire FDA approval. But the political situation has changed for the worse. The Department of Health and Human Services recently mandated an overhaul of the vaccine approval process, one that will require all new vaccines to undergo placebo-controlled trials to receive approval.

While many experimental vaccines today are placebo-tested (including the original covid-19 vaccines), it’s unclear whether this order will also apply to vaccines that can be compared to existing vaccines, like the combination mRNA-1083 vaccine, or to vaccines that have to be regularly updated to match fast-evolving viruses like the flu and covid-19.

Some vaccine experts have said that these changes are unnecessary and potentially unethical, since it could leave some people vulnerable to an infection that already has a vaccine. The new rule also might delay the availability of upcoming seasonal vaccines, particularly the current covid-19 shots.

A potentially important wrinkle for the mRNA-1083 vaccine is that no mRNA-based vaccine for the flu is currently approved. That reality could very well be all that the FDA needs to demand further placebo-controlled trials. RFK Jr. and other recent Trump appointees have also been highly skeptical of mRNA-based vaccines in general, despite no strong evidence that these vaccines are significantly less safe than other types. Kennedy, who has a long history of supporting the anti-vaccination movement, has even wrongly declared that the mRNA covid-19 vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Moderna stated last week it doesn’t expect its mRNA-1083 vaccine to be approved before 2026, following the FDA’s request for late-stage data showing the vaccine’s effectiveness against flu specifically. But it’s worth wondering if even that timeline is now in jeopardy under the current public health regime.

Source: Moderna’s Super-Vaccine for Flu and Covid Works—Now Politics Could Sink It

Charter airline helping Trump’s deportation campaign pwned

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GlobalX, a charter airline used for deportations by the US government, has admitted someone broke into its network infrastructure.

“On May 5, 2025, Global Crossing Airlines Group learned of unauthorized activity within its computer networks and systems supporting portions of its business applications, which the company determined to be the result of a cybersecurity incident,” an SEC filing from May 9 reads.

“Upon learning of this activity, the company immediately activated its incident response protocols and third-party cybersecurity experts to assist with containment and mitigation activities and to investigate the nature and scope of the incident, and took actions to contain and isolate the affected servers and prevent further intrusion.”

GlobalX is one of the small airlines contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to carry out the President’s mass deportation campaign of “illegal aliens.”

[…]

The disclosure, however vague, lends credence to reports that those responsible had stolen flight records and passenger manifests, including ones related to deportation flights, dating back to January.

The alleged perpetrators pitched the news to various outlets, and while the word of a cybercriminal should not be taken as gospel, the timing of the disclosure and its ambiguous wording suggest there is at least some truth to the story.

[…]

GlobalX was quickly identified as one of the main small airlines whose services were called upon by ICE within days of Trump taking office for the second time, although the company doesn’t openly advertise this.

Bloomberg reported that some of the earliest flights it was tasked with making from the US to South American countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras were mired in technical difficulties.

The airline, which operates a fleet of 19 Airbus planes (A320, A321, and A321F), reportedly tackled various issues ranging from aborted landings, broken air conditioning leading to deportees fainting from high temperatures, to not being able to start engines for hours.

According to its investor presentation [PDF], GlobalX is the fastest-growing charter airline in America, but up-to-date filings show it has yet to turn a profit since being founded in 2018.

[…]

Source: Charter airline helping Trump’s deportation campaign pwned • The Register

Volvo EX90’s Lidar Sensor Will Fry Your Phone’s Camera

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[…] That pod on the roof of Volvo’s new electric SUV is essentially just shooting out a bunch of high-powered infrared beams, determining the distance of the vehicle’s surroundings by measuring the time taken for reflected light to return to the sensor. If you point your phone’s camera directly at those beams, you’ll observe some strange phenomena, like what’s happening in the image above. What you’re seeing is a laser frying pixels on one of the device’s image sensors.

Credit to Reddit user Jeguetelli, who broke their smartphone for science, so the rest of us know what not to do. The constellation of artifacts disappears because the person filming zooms out, prompting the phone to switch to a shorter lens backed by a separate, healthy image sensor. To assuage the fears of some concerned redditors, this is presumably why lidar doesn’t pose the same threat to backup cameras on other vehicles, which also typically use ultra-wide-angle lenses.

Never film the new Ex90 because you will break your cell camera.Lidar lasers burn your camera.
byu/Jeguetelli inVolvo

It should be said that the risk here is inherent to lidar technology, and has nothing to do with Volvo’s specific implementation on the EX90. In fact, earlier this year, the automaker even issued a warning against directing external cameras at the vehicle’s lidar pod for the very reasons discussed. “Do not point a camera directly at the lidar,” one support page admonishes in no uncertain terms. Unfortunately, while that sort of information might be clear to owners (the ones who crack open their vehicles’ manuals, anyway), this is something the entire public ought to be aware of, especially as semi-autonomous cars with lidar systems become more common on our streets.

The Drive reached out to Volvo for a little more insight into the issue, as well as any other recommendations. “It’s generally advised to avoid pointing a camera directly at a lidar sensor,” a representative responded over email. “The laser light emitted by the lidar can potentially damage the camera’s sensor or affect its performance.”

[…]

Source: Volvo EX90’s Lidar Sensor Will Fry Your Phone’s Camera

Which kind of makes you wonder, what else does this LIDAR fry?

Google will pay Texas $1.4B to settle claims the company collected users’ data without permission

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[…] “For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won.”

The agreement settles several claims Texas made against the search giant in 2022 related to geolocation, incognito searches and biometric data. The state argued Google was “unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data.”

Paxton claimed, for example, that Google collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of face geometry, through such products and services as Google Photos and Google Assistant.

Google spokesperson José Castañeda said the agreement settles an array of “old claims,” some of which relate to product policies the company has already changed.

[…]

Texas previously reached two other key settlements with Google within the last two years, including one in December 2023 in which the company agreed to pay $700 million and make several other concessions to settle allegations that it had been stifling competition against its Android app store.

Meta has also agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas in a privacy lawsuit over allegations that the tech giant used users’ biometric data without their permission.

Source: Google will pay Texas $1.4B to settle claims the company collected users’ data without permission | AP News

Study Uncovers the One Thing That Cuts Through Climate Apathy: Loss – use clear binary data

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[…]“People definitely noticed that they were able to get out onto the lake less,” said Liu, who’s now a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. “However, they didn’t necessarily connect this trend to climate change.”

When the university’s alumni magazine featured her research in the winter of 2021, the comment section was filled with wistful memories of skating under the moonlight, pushing past the crowds to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate by the frozen lakeside. Liu began to wonder: Could this kind of direct, visceral loss make climate change feel more vivid to people?

That question sparked her study, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, that came to a striking conclusion: Boiling down data into a binary — a stark this or that — can help break through apathy about climate change.

Liu worked with professors at Princeton to test how people responded to two different graphs. One showed winter temperatures of a fictional town gradually rising over time, while the other presented the same warming trend in a black-or-white manner: The lake either froze in any given year, or it didn’t. People who saw the second chart perceived climate change as causing more abrupt changes.

Both charts represent the same amount of winter warming, just presented differently. “We are not hoodwinking people,” said Rachit Dubey, a co-author of the study who’s now a professor of communications at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We are literally showing them the same trend, just in different formats.”

The climate binary

Both charts demonstrate the same warming trend, but the gradual temperature data is less striking than the binary lake data.

The climate binary.
Source: Liu et al., 2025 Chart: Clayton Aldern/Grist

The strong reaction to the black-or-white presentation held true over a series of experiments, even one where a trend line was placed over the scatter plot of temperatures to make the warming super clear. To ensure the results translated to the wider world, researchers also looked at how people reacted to actual data of lake freezing and temperature increases from towns in the U.S. and Europe and got the same results. “Psychology effects are sometimes fickle,” said Dubey, who’s researched cognitive science for a decade. “This is one of the cleanest effects we’ve ever seen.”

The findings suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change, they should highlight clear, concrete shifts instead of slow-moving trends. That could include the loss of white Christmases or outdoor summer activities canceled because of wildfire smoke.

The metaphor of the “boiling frog” is sometimes used to describe how people fail to react to gradual changes in the climate. […] eople mentally adjust to temperature increases “disturbingly fast,” according to the study. Previous research has found that as the climate warms, people adjust their sense of what seems normal based on weather from the past two to eight years, a phenomenon known as “shifting baselines.”

[…]

“Tragedies will keep on escalating in the background, but it’s not happening fast enough for us to think, ‘OK, this is it. We need to just decisively stop everything we’re doing,’” Dubey said. “I think that’s an even bigger danger that we’re facing with climate change — that it never becomes the problem.”

One graph about lake-freezing data isn’t going to lead people to rank climate change as their top issue, of course. But Dubey thinks that if people see compelling visuals more often, it could help keep the problem of climate change from fading out of their minds. Dubey’s study shows that there’s a cognitive reason why binary data resonates with people: It creates a mental illusion that the situation has changed suddenly, when it has actually changed gradually.

[…]

Climate Stripes
The climate stripes visual was recently updated to reflect that 2024 was the hottest year on record. © Professor Ed Hawkins / University of Reading

The study’s findings don’t just apply to freezing lakes — global temperatures can be communicated in more stark ways. The popular “climate stripes” visual developed by Ed Hawkins, a professor at the University of Reading in the U.K., illustrates temperature changes with vertical bands of lines, where blue indicates cold years and red indicates warm ones. As the chart switches from deep blue to deep red, it communicates the warming trend on a more visceral level. The stripes simplify a gradual trend into a binary-style image that makes it easier to grasp. “Our study explains why the climate stripes is actually so popular and resonates with people,” Dubey said.

Source: Study Uncovers the One Thing That Cuts Through Climate Apathy: Loss

US senator introduces bill calling for location-tracking on AI chips to limit China access

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A U.S. senator introduced a bill on Friday that would direct the Commerce Department to require location verification mechanisms for export-controlled AI chips, in an effort to curb China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology.
Called the “Chip Security Act,” the bill calls for AI chips under export regulations, and products containing those chips, to be fitted with location-tracking systems to help detect diversion, smuggling or other unauthorized use of the product.
“With these enhanced security measures, we can continue to expand access to U.S. technology without compromising our national security,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said.
The bill also calls for companies exporting the AI chips to report to the Bureau of Industry and Security if their products have been diverted away from their intended location or subject to tampering attempts.
The move comes days after U.S. President Donald Trump said he would rescind and modify a Biden-era rule that curbed the export of sophisticated AI chips with the goal of protecting U.S. leadership in AI and blocking China’s access.
U.S. Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois, also plans to introduce a bill on similar lines in the coming weeks, Reuters reported on Monday.
Restricting China’s access to AI technology that could enhance its military capabilities has been a key focus for U.S. lawmakers and reports of widespread smuggling of Nvidia’s (NVDA.O)

Source: US senator introduces bill calling for location-tracking on AI chips to limit China access | Reuters

Of course it adds another layer of the US government spying on you if you want to buy a graphics card too. I’m not sure how anyone being able to track all your PCs does not compromise national security.

EU prepares to give new rights to live streaming sites, to the detriment of the Internet and its users

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At the heart of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) lies the dispiriting saga of how the EU Copyright Directive came into being. It began in early 2013 with the usual “stakeholder dialogue”, in which the European Commission sought the views of the various constituencies affected. It generated an unprecedentedly large response that was surprising given the dry and dusty nature of copyright law. As the European Commission’s Report on the consultation noted:

The public consultation generated broad interest with more than 9,500 replies to the consultation document and a total of more than 11,000 messages, including questions and comments, sent to the Commission’s dedicated email address. A number of initiatives were also launched by organized stakeholders that nurtured the debate around the public consultation and drew attention to it.

Some 5,600 citizens took the trouble to respond, despite the lack of an easy online interface to do so: responses required a document to be completed then emailed. Numerous problems with the existing copyright system were raised, particularly in the light of the shift from analogue to digital technologies. Despite that welcome engagement, and the many substantive issues that were raised, the public’s comments and concerns were almost entirely ignored in the final result of the legisltative process. Instead, the EU Copyright Directive gave yet more rights to copyright holders, and undermined the freedom of speech and privacy rights of ordinary people.

[…]

The standard mechanism for giving the copyright world what it wants, while pretending to respect democratic processes, has been set in motion again. The European Commission has just launched a “Call for Evidence in view of the assessment of the Recommendation on combatting online piracy of sports and other live events”. The Recommendation referred to there was published two years ago. It explores the unauthorised retransmissions of live sports and other live events online, the next battleground for the copyright world, ever-keen to expand its rights and powers.

[…]

Those further measures are likely to involve yet more one-sided legislation in favour of the copyright world, as with the EU Copyright Directive. Such laws are already being discussed in the US. But there is a significant difference between what happened back in 2013, and the latest call for evidence. In 2013, people were warning about the possible effects of various bad policy options that might be adopted. The copyright world naturally dismissed those concerns as fear mongering, which allowed its allies within the European Parliament to push through precisely those bad policy options in the final text of the Directive.

But when it comes to unauthorised retransmissions of live events, we already have a wealth of evidence of how disproportionate attempts to rein in such streams can be harmful. The main example of what not to do comes from Italy, whose Piracy Shield is shaping up to be the worst copyright enforcement scheme since France’s Hadopi (also discussed in detail in Walled Culture the book).

The central problem is overblocking. For example, back in March last year, Walled Culture reported that one of Cloudflare’s Internet addresses had been blocked by Piracy Shield. There were over 40 million domains associated with the blocked address. Compounding the problem is a lack of transparency about which sites are being blocked, and the failure to provide a rigorous and rapid complaint procedure for fixing such far-reaching blunders. […] the damage could easily go well beyond the inconvenience of millions of people being blocked from accessing their files on Google Drive, as happened last year.

[…]

Despite these serious issues, Italy seems determined to make Piracy Shield even worse by building it out in a number of ill-advised ways, including the extension of blackout orders to VPNs and public DNS providers, and the obligation for search engines to de-index sites. Worryingly, a new “Study on the Effectiveness and the Legal and Technical Means of Implementing Website-Blocking Orders” from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) holds up Italy’s approach as an example of a “well-functioning site-blocking system”.

Nor is Italy alone in demonstrating the harms this approach to dealing with unauthorised rebroadcasts of sports events gives rise to. In Spain, attempts by La Liga, the country’s top professional football league, to tackle the problem have also led to overblocking,

[…]

German ISPs have been implementing a secret block list of allegedly infringing sites, including those offering streams, for years, and without any court oversight. The lack of transparency of this approach was underlined when the list was accidentally exposed before being hidden away once more.

As the above makes clear, the blocking of allegedly infringing streaming sites is already happening across the EU in an uncontrolled way, and with little to no effective judicial oversight. The copyright industry can present this as a kind of fait accompli, and ask the EU to bring in laws to formalise the situation. In doing so, they will skirt over the numerous and deep-seated problems with this approach, not least overblocking, which shuts down entirely innocent sites and offers little or no redress for the harm this causes.

The latest Call for Evidence on this important area is open until 28 May 2025. It would be good if companies, organisations and individuals could use this opportunity to alert the European Commission to the evident dangers of Piracy Shield and similar approaches, in the hope that existing implementations might be dismantled, or at least reined in, and new ones restricted.

[…]

French courts too are ordering Cloudflare to block streaming sites, […]

Source: EU prepares to give new rights to live streaming sites, to the detriment of the Internet and its users – Walled Culture

ispace’s RESILIENCE Enters Lunar Orbit. It’ll Try to Land in Early June

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Headquartered in Japan, the commercial space company ispace is dedicated to creating robotic spacecraft and other technology to support the discovery, mapping, and harvesting of natural resources on the Moon. One of the main tools in their arsenal is the RESILIENCE lander, a small, lightweight uncrewed spacecraft designed for low-cost, high-frequency transportation of instruments and other supplies to the lunar surface. Earlier today, the company announced that their second mission with the RESILIENCE lander (SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon) entered lunar orbit.

According to a company statement, the orbital injection maneuver was completed by 5:41 a.m. JST (1:41 p.m. PST; 4:41 p.m. EST) on May 7th, 2025. This marks the successful completion of the mission’s seventh Mission Milestone, which included completing the first lunar orbit insertion maneuver and reaffirming “the ability of space to deliver spacecraft and payloads into stable lunar orbits.” The orbital maneuver consisted of the longest thruster burn during Mission 2, lasting approximately 9 minutes. The team at the Mission Control Center in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, confirmed that RESILIENCE is now maintaining a stable attitude above the lunar surface.

On April 24th, 2025, RESILIENCE completed the maneuvers to transition the lander from deep space and closer to the Moon to complete the orbital injection. Before that, RESILIENCE completed a lunar flyby that verified the spacecraft’s propulsion, guidance, control, and navigation systems. Following the flyby, the lander spent about two months in a low-energy transfer orbit. Mission specialists are now preparing for the final orbit maneuvers in preparation for a lunar landing, which is scheduled to take place no earlier than June 5th, 2025.

Credit: ispaceRESILIENCE was launched on January 15th, 2025, at 12:44 p.m. PST (03:44 p.m. EST)

[…]

For this mission, the RESILIENCE is transporting several payloads for commercial customers.

These include the TENACIOUS micro rover by ispace-EUROPE, which will be deployed on the surface to explore the landing site, collect lunar regolith, and relay data back to the lander. Other payloads include a water electrolyzer, a food production experiment, a deep space radiation probe, a commemorative alloy plate, and a “Moonhouse,” a model house created by Swedish artists to be placed on the surface. The mission also carries a UNESCO memory disk, a cultural artifact containing data on humanity’s linguistic and cultural diversity.

As UNESCO describes it, the disk “serves as a repository of cultural heritage,” which will be preserved for millions of years in case human civilization collapses someday:

[…]

Source: ispace’s RESILIENCE Enters Lunar Orbit. It’ll Try to Land in Early June – Universe Today

cientists Identify New Mutation That Enables Three-Hour Sleepers

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Researchers have discovered a mutation in the SIK3 gene that enables some people to function normally on just three to six hours of sleep. The finding, published this week in PNAS, adds to a growing list of genetic variants linked to naturally short sleepers.

When University of California, San Francisco scientists introduced the mutation to mice, the animals required 31 minutes less sleep daily. The modified enzyme showed highest activity in brain synapses, suggesting it might support brain homeostasis — the resetting process thought to occur during sleep.

“These people, all these functions our bodies are doing while we are sleeping, they can just perform at a higher level than we can,” said Ying-Hui Fu, the study’s co-author. This marks the fifth mutation across four genes identified in naturally short sleepers. Fu’s team hopes these discoveries could eventually lead to treatments for sleep disorders by revealing how sleep regulation functions in humans.

Source: cientists Identify New Mutation That Enables Three-Hour Sleepers | Slashdot

VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom

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Broadcom has been sending cease-and-desist letters to owners of VMware perpetual licenses with expired support contracts, Ars Technica has confirmed.

Following its November 2023 acquisition of VMware, Broadcom ended VMware perpetual license sales. Users with perpetual licenses can still use the software they bought, but they are unable to renew support services unless they had a pre-existing contract enabling them to do so. The controversial move aims to push VMware users to buy subscriptions to VMware products bundled such that associated costs have increased by 300 percent or, in some cases, more.

Some customers have opted to continue using VMware unsupported, often as they research alternatives, such as VMware rivals or devirtualization.

Over the past weeks, some users running VMware unsupported have reported receiving cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom informing them that their contract with VMware and, thus, their right to receive support services, has expired. The letter [PDF], reviewed by Ars Technica and signed by Broadcom managing director Michael Brown, tells users that they are to stop using any maintenance releases/updates, minor releases, major releases/upgrades extensions, enhancements, patches, bug fixes, or security patches, save for zero-day security patches, issued since their support contract ended.

The letter tells users that the implementation of any such updates “past the Expiration Date must be immediately removed/deinstalled,” adding:

Any such use of Support past the Expiration Date constitutes a material breach of the Agreement with VMware and an infringement of VMware’s intellectual property rights, potentially resulting in claims for enhanced damages and attorneys’ fees.

[…]

The cease-and-desist letters also tell recipients that they could be subject to auditing.

Failure to comply with [post-expiration reporting] requirements may result in a breach of the Agreement by Customer[,] and VMware may exercise its right to audit Customer as well as any other available contractual or legal remedy.

[…]

Since Broadcom ended VMware’s perpetual licenses and increased pricing, numerous users and channel partners, especially small-to-medium-sized companies, have had to reduce or end business with VMware. Most of Members IT Group’s VMware customer base is now running VMware unsupported

[…]

Source: VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom – Ars Technica

Hackers Manage To Take Control of Nissan Leaf’s Steering Remotely

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Connected cars are great, as they let you communicate with other systems and devices via the internet, but connectivity opens the door to hacking. As it turns out, hacking a Nissan Leaf isn’t nearly as difficult as it might sound if you’ve got the right tools and the right knowledge.

Researchers from Budapest-based PCAutomotive traveled to Black Hat Asia 2025 to demonstrate how they managed to hack into a 2020 Nissan Leaf. Luckily, they had good intentions—they simply wanted to show that it could be done. Someone with less-than-good intentions could have caused a great deal of damage with the same tools. Most of the parts used to hack into the car were sourced from eBay or a junkyard.

The first part of the project involved building a working test bench around a Leaf touchscreen and the EV’s digital instrument cluster. They then bypassed the anti-theft safeguards by implementing a Python script, which is a programming language, and hacked into the system. The steps taken to break in were detailed in a presentation. They look complicated if you don’t know what you’re dealing with and have no programming experience, but someone with a great deal of programming experience shouldn’t find the process terribly daunting.

When everything was set up, it was time to launch an attack. One of the researchers connected to the Leaf remotely via a laptop while two others were riding in it. The first step was pretty straight-forward: The man with the laptop tracked the Leaf’s movements via GPS. He then recorded the conversation the passengers were having inside the car, downloaded it to his laptop, and played it in the car via the speakers.

Next, things got creepier. Using the same laptop, the researcher sounded the horn, folded the door mirrors, turned on the wipers, and even yanked the steering wheel. He was able to perform these tasks even when the car was moving. The team identified a list of 10 vulnerabilities that allowed it to access the Leaf’s infotainment system and notified Nissan. The company hasn’t responded to the video as of this writing, however.

Source: Hackers Manage To Take Control of Nissan Leaf’s Steering Remotely

Contemplating art’s beauty found to boost abstract and ‘big picture’ thinking

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[…] a new study from the University of Cambridge suggests that stopping to contemplate the beauty of artistic objects in a gallery or museum boosts our ability to think in abstract ways and consider the “bigger picture” when it comes to our lives.

Researchers say the findings offer that engaging with artistic beauty helps us escape the “mental trappings of daily life,” such as current anxieties and to-do lists, and induce “psychological distancing”: the process of zooming out on your thoughts to gain clarity.

[…]

Researchers found that study participants who focused on the beauty of objects in an exhibition of ceramics were more likely to experience elevated psychological states enabling them to think “beyond the here and now,” and more likely to report feeling enlightened, moved, or transformed.

This was compared to participants who were simply asked to look intently at the artistic objects to match them with a series of line drawings. The findings are published in the journal Empirical Studies of the Arts.

[…]

“Our research indicates that engaging with the beauty of art can enhance abstract thinking and promote a different mindset to our everyday patterns of thought, shifting us into a more expansive state of mind.”

“This is known as psychological distancing, when one snaps out of the mental trappings of daily life and focuses more on the overall picture.”

[…]

Participants were randomly split into two groups: the ‘beauty’ group was asked to actively consider and then rate the beauty of each ceramic object they viewed, while the second group just matched a line drawing of the object with the artwork itself.

All participants were then tested on how they process information, and if it’s in a more practical or abstract way. For example, does ‘writing a letter’ mean literally putting pen to paper or sharing your thoughts? Is ‘voting’ marking a ballot or influencing an election? Is ‘locking a door’ inserting a key or securing a house?

“These tests are designed to gauge whether a person is thinking in an immediate, procedural way, as we often do in our day-to-day lives, or is attuned to the deeper meaning and bigger picture of the actions they take,” said Dr. Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė, lead author of the study and a researcher at Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.

Across all participants, those in the beauty group scored almost 14% higher on average than the control group in abstract thinking. While they were told the study was about cognitive processes, participants were asked about interests, with around half saying they had an artistic hobby.

Among those, the effect was greater: those with an artistic hobby in the ‘beauty’ group scored over 25% higher on average for abstract thinking than those with an artistic hobby in the control group.

[…]

Emotional states of participants were also measured by asking about their feelings while completing the gallery task. Across all participants, those in the beauty group reported an average of 23% higher levels of “transformative and self-transcendent feelings”—such as feeling moved, enlightened and inspired—than the control group.

“Our findings offer empirical support for a long-standing philosophical idea that beauty appreciation can help people detach from their immediate practical concerns and adopt a broader, more abstract perspective,” said Mikalonytė.

Importantly, however, the beauty group did not report feeling any happier than the , suggesting that it was the engagement with beauty that influenced abstract thinking, rather than any overall positivity from the experience.

The latest study is part of a wider project led by Schnall exploring the effects of aesthetic experiences on cognition

[…]

Source: Contemplating art’s beauty found to boost abstract and ‘big picture’ thinking

Apple Hit with Class-Action Lawsuit for App Store Injunction Violation after Judge rules apple execs lied and willfully ignored injunction – join here

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[…]The new lawsuit was filed May 2, 2025, following news that a federal judge found the tech giant in contempt of court for violating a 2021 antitrust injunction which required Apple to permit its app developers to sell subscriptions and other in-app products directly to their customers using links within their apps. Without the injunction in place Apple charges app developers uniform transaction fees (defaulting at 30%, and 15% under some programs). The court found that Apple implemented a scheme to violate the injunction and prevent developers from directing customers to their own websites and payment platforms.

“It appears as though Apple has been caught red-handed blatantly seeking to undercut the law,” said Steve Berman, Hagens Berman managing partner and co-founder. “We believe app developers deserve a fair market to promote and sell their products, and the world’s largest corporation doesn’t get to bully them out of this billion-dollar revenue stream.”

If you sold an in-app digital product (including subscriptions) through Apple’s App Store after Jan. 16, 2024, find out your rights as an iOS app developer.

[…]

The court ultimately held that Apple willfully violated the injunction to protect its revenues, and then “reverse engineered justification[s] to proffer to the Court” often with “lies on the witness stand,”

[…]

The lawsuit’s named plaintiff is Pure Sweat Basketball Inc., a corporation offering an app used by players across the country to train and improve their basketball skills. Had Apple complied with the injunction, as required, Pure Sweat would have been able to sell subscriptions to its app directly to its customers, using “link-out” buttons directing customers to Pure Sweat’s own website.

As a result of Apple’s misconduct, attorneys estimate that potentially more than 100,000 similarly situated app developers were prevented from selling in-app products (including subscriptions) directly to their customers, and were forced to pay Apple commissions on in-app sales that Apple was not entitled to receive.

Find out more about the class-action lawsuit against Apple on behalf of iOS app developers.

[…]

Source: Apple Hit with Class-Action Lawsuit for App Store Injunction Violation by Same Law Firm That Secured $100M iOS Developer Win | Hagens Berman

Minecraft ended virtual reality support – no reason given why

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Minecraft is no longer (officially) available on virtual and mixed reality platforms. The change was confirmed in today’s patch notes for the game’s Bedrock edition following an announcement from developer Mojang in October. Those fall patch notes suggested that the platforms would be removed in March, so players who favored VR wound up getting a few extra weeks to fully immerse themselves in their blocky worlds.

Removing entire platforms isn’t a choice game devs make lightly. Especially when Minecraft‘s player base still numbers in the hundreds of millions at any given time, it seems unlikely that Mojang would take away virtual and mixed reality unless it wouldn’t cause a serious disruption for its many fans. There are still plenty of critically received games that make VR ownership worthwhile (Beat Saber, anyone?), but a title as major as Minecraft abandoning the hardware isn’t a great look.

Source: Minecraft ended virtual reality support today

Scientists rewrite 100 year old textbooks on how cells divide

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Scientists from The University of Manchester have changed our understanding of how cells in living organisms divide, which could revise what students are taught at school.

In a Wellcome funded study published today (01/05/25) in Science – one of the world’s leading scientific journals – the researchers challenge conventional wisdom taught in schools for over 100 years.

Students are currently taught that during cell division, a ‘parent’ cell will become spherical before splitting into two ‘daughter’ cells of equal size and shape.

However, the study reveals that cell rounding is not a universal feature of cell division and is not how it often works in the body.

Dividing cells, they show, often don’t round up into sphere-like shapes. This lack of rounding breaks the symmetry of division to generate two daughter cells that differ from each other in both size and function, known as asymmetric division.

Asymmetric divisions are an important way that the different types of cells in the body are generated, to make different tissues and organs.

Until now, asymmetric cell division has predominantly only been associated with highly specialised cells, known as stem cells.

The scientists found that it is the shape of a parent cell before it even divides that can determine if they will round or not in division and determines how symmetric, or not, its daughter cells are going to be.

Cells which are shorter and wider in shape tend to round up and divide into two cells which are similar to each other. However, cells which are longer and thinner don’t round up and divide asymmetrically, so that one

daughter is different to the other.

The findings could have far reaching implications on our understanding of the role of cell division in disease. For example, in the context of cancer cells, this type of ‘non-round’, asymmetric division could generate different cell behaviours known to promote cancer progression through metastasis.

[…]

Source: Scientists rewrite textbooks on how cells divide

Judge: Apple Lied In Fortnite Case, chose to not comply with court order, must immediately allow external payments without a cut

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Epic Games v. Apple judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has ruled that, effective immediately, Apple can no longer take a cut from purchases made outside apps and has blocked the tech giant from restricting how developers can point people to third-party payment options. The judge was also not happy that Apple has seemingly not complied with a previous court order and has referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for possible contempt charges. Apple is already planning to appeal the ruling.

This is the latest development in the Epic v Apple court case that started back in 2020 after Epic added its own payment option to Fortnite on iOS and Apple pulled the game as a result. The Fortnite maker’s case against Apple was focused primarily on the large fees the tech giant took from all in-app purchases and its strict restrictions against allowing other app stores and third-party options on iOS devices.

In 2021 the judge sided with Apple on most points, but declared the company needed to allow app makers to use third-party payment systems that could avoid Apple’s cut. In 2023, after a series of appeals, Apple declared a “resounding victory” over Epic, though it was still forced by the court to allow third-party payment options and to not take a cut of outside app purchases. Epic alleges that Apple never complied with that order. Now Apple finds itself in a lot of trouble with judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

“That [Apple] thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation,” wrote the judge in a ruling filed on April 30 in California. “Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive.”

Elsewhere in the filing, the judge says that an Apple executive lied under oath when talking about forcing devs to pay a 27 percent fee for outside app purchases and wrote that Apple CEO Tim Cook “chose poorly” when listening to execs at the company who convinced him to ignore the injunction.

“Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly,” wrote the judge. In the filing the judge also suggested that Apple’s actions might constitute contempt charges and has referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

As explained in the filing, Apple must now “immediately” comply with the court’s orders to allow developers to include third-party payment options, to not take a cut of those purchases, and to not block or hinder devs from including these outside payment methods through various means and UI messages.

[…]

Source: Judge: Apple Lied In Fortnite Case And Just Blew App Store Open

Huge molecular cloud 10x the size of moon detected right next to earth

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 A longstanding prediction in interstellar theory posits that significant quantities of molecular gas, crucial for star formation, may be undetected due to being ’dark’ in commonly used molecular gas tracers, such as carbon monoxide. We report the discovery of Eos, a dark molecular cloud located just 94 pc from the Sun.This cloud is identified using H2 far-ultraviolet fluorescent line emission, which traces molecular gas at the boundary layers of star-forming and supernova remnant regions. The cloud edge is outlined along the high-latitude side of the North Polar Spur

[…]

 

Source: A nearby dark molecular cloud in the Local Bubble revealed via H2 fluorescence | Nature Astronomy

Messaging App Used by Mike Waltz, Trump Deportation Airline GlobalX Both Hacked in Separate Breaches

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TeleMessage, a communications app used by former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz, has suspended services after a reported hack exposed some user messages. The breach follows controversy over Waltz’s use of the app to coordinate military updates, including accidentally adding a journalist to a sensitive Signal group chat. From the report: In an email, Portland, Oregon-based Smarsh, which runs the TeleMessage app, said it was “investigating a potential security incident” and was suspending all its services “out of an abundance of caution.” A Reuters photograph showed Waltz using TeleMessage, an unofficial version of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal, on his phone during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. A separate report from 404 Media says hackers have also targeted GlobalX Air — one of the main airlines the Trump administration is using as part of its deportation efforts — and claim to have stolen flight records and passenger manifests for all its flights, including those for deportation. From the report: The data, which the hackers contacted 404 Media and other journalists about unprompted, could provide granular insight into who exactly has been deported on GlobalX flights, when, and to where, with GlobalX being the charter company that facilitated the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador. “Anonymous has decided to enforce the Judge’s order since you and your sycophant staff ignore lawful orders that go against your fascist plans,” a defacement message posted to GlobalX’s website reads. Anonymous, well-known for its use of the Guy Fawkes mask, is an umbrella some hackers operate under when performing what they see as hacktivism.

Source: Messaging App Used by Mike Waltz, Trump Deportation Airline GlobalX Both Hacked in Separate Breaches | Slashdot

Dating app Raw exposed users’ location data and personal information

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A security lapse at dating app Raw publicly exposed the personal data and private location data of its users, TechCrunch has found.

The exposed data included users’ display names, dates of birth, dating and sexual preferences associated with the Raw app, as well as users’ locations. Some of the location data included coordinates that were specific enough to locate Raw app users with street-level accuracy.

Raw, which launched in 2023, is a dating app that claims to offer more genuine interactions with others in part by asking users to upload daily selfie photos. The company does not disclose how many users it has, but its app listing on the Google Play Store notes more than 500,000 Android downloads to date.

News of the security lapse comes in the same week that the startup announced a hardware extension of its dating app, the Raw Ring, an unreleased wearable device that it claims will allow app users to track their partner’s heart rate and other sensor data to receive AI-generated insights, ostensibly to detect infidelity.

Notwithstanding the moral and ethical issues of tracking romantic partners and the risks of emotional surveillance, Raw claims on its website and in its privacy policy that its app, and its unreleased device, both use end-to-end encryption, a security feature that prevents anyone other than the user — including the company — from accessing the data.

When we tried the app this week, which included an analysis of the app’s network traffic, TechCrunch found no evidence that the app uses end-to-end encryption. Instead, we found that the app was publicly spilling data about its users to anyone with a web browser.

[…]

Source: Dating app Raw exposed users’ location data and personal information | TechCrunch

The UN Ditches Google for Form Submissions, Opts for Open Source ‘CryptPad’ Instead

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Did you know there’s an initiative to drive Open Source adoption both within the United Nations — and globally? Launched in March, it’s the work of the Digital Technology Network (under the UN’s chief executive board) which “works to advance open source technologies throughout UN agencies,” promoting “collaboration and scalable solutions to support the UN’s digital transformation.” Fun fact: The first group to endorse the initiative’s principles was the Open Source Initiative…

“The Open Source Initiative applauds the United Nations for recognizing the growing importance of Open Source in solving global challenges and building sustainable solutions, and we are honored to be the first to endorse the UN Open Source Principles,” said Stefano Maffulli, executive director of OSI.
But that’s just the beginining, writes It’s FOSS News: As part of the UN Open Source Principles initiative, the UN has invited other organizations to support and officially endorse these principles. To collect responses, they are using CryptPad instead of Google Forms… If you don’t know about CryptPad, it is a privacy-focused, open source online collaboration office suite that encrypts all of its content, doesn’t log IP addresses, and supports a wide range of collaborative documents and tools for people to use.

While this happened back in late March, we thought it would be a good idea to let people know that a well-known global governing body like the UN was slowly moving towards integrating open source tech into their organization… I sincerely hope the UN continues its push away from proprietary Big Tech solutions in favor of more open, privacy-respecting alternatives, integrating more of their workflow with such tools.
16 groups have already endorsed the UN Open Source Principles (including the GNOME Foundation, the Linux Foundation, and the Eclipse Foundation).

Here’s the eight UN Open Source Principles:

  1. Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects
  2. Contribute back: Encouraging active participation in the Open Source ecosystem
  3. Secure by design: Making security a priority in all software projects
  4. Foster inclusive participation and community building: Enabling and facilitating diverse and inclusive contributions
  5. Design for reusability: Designing projects to be interoperable across various platforms and ecosystems
  6. Provide documentation: Providing thorough documentation for end-users, integrators and developers
  7. RISE (recognize, incentivize, support and empower): Empowering individuals and communities to actively participate
  8. Sustain and scale: Supporting the development of solutions that meet the evolving needs of the UN system and beyond.

Source: The UN Ditches Google for Form Submissions, Opts for Open Source ‘CryptPad’ Instead

Army Will Seek Right to Repair Clauses in All Its Contracts

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A new memo from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is calling on defense contractors to grant the Army the right-to-repair. The Wednesday memo is a document about “Army Transformation and Acquisition Reform” that is largely vague but highlights the very real problems with IP constraints that have made it harder for the military to repair damaged equipment.

Hegseth made this clear at the bottom of the memo in a subsection about reform and budget optimization. “The Secretary of the Army shall…identify and propose contract modifications for right to repair provisions where intellectual property constraints limit the Army’s ability to conduct maintenance and access the appropriate maintenance tools, software, and technical data—while preserving the intellectual capital of American industry,” it says. “Seek to include right to repair provisions in all existing contracts and also ensure these provisions are included in all new contracts.”

[…]

appliance manufacturers and tractor companies have lobbied against bills that would make it easier for the military to repair its equipment.

This has been a huge problem for decades. In the 1990s, the Air Force bought Northrop Grumman’s B-2 Stealth Bombers for about $2 billion each. When the Air Force signed the contract for the machines, it paid $2.6 billion up front just for spare parts. Now, for some reason, Northrop Grumman isn’t able to supply replacement parts anymore. To fix the aging bombers, the military has had to reverse engineer parts and do repairs themselves.

Similarly, Boeing screwed over the DoD on replacement parts for the C-17 military transport aircraft to the tune of at least $1 million. The most egregious example was a common soap dispenser. “One of the 12 spare parts included a lavatory soap dispenser where the Air Force paid more than 80 times the commercially available cost or a 7,943 percent markup,” a Pentagon investigation found. Imagine if they’d just used a 3D printer to churn out the part it needed.

[…]

Source: Army Will Seek Right to Repair Clauses in All Its Contracts