Reuters reports: The Pan American Health Organization has revoked the United States' measles-elimination status, ending a 26-year run after determining the country failed to halt continuous transmission of the highly contagious virus for more than a year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday...

The reported decision by the Americas branch of the World Health Organization comes as the US battles the highest number of measles cases it has seen in more than three decades. Some 7,500 people in the US have been infected with measles and 13 have died since 2025. That period coincides with falling immunization rates and rising vaccine hesitancy under US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has for years spread doubts, without scientific evidence, about the safety of measles vaccines... Canada, Spain and the UK recently lost measles-elimination status after review by WHO experts....

"It is a fully preventable disease. It is unconscionable that we have this amount of measles," said Noel Brewer, a public health professor at the University of North Carolina... William Moss, an epidemiology professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said loss of measles elimination was a hit to the United States' reputation as a public health powerhouse... For the average American, he added, it means that the United States will continue to have large outbreaks, putting people at risk of disease, hospitalization and death.

"When we need medical care, we expect decisions about our treatment to be made by our doctors, not a tech company's algorithm," writes the EFF newsletter EFFector.

But in January America's federal government launched a program called WISeR that uses AI to evaluate authorization requests for certain procedures from America's federal health insurance program for seniors, Medicare. EFF sued for records and discovered "additional issues" with the program that they say "could jeopardize Medicare beneficiaries' access to care." The records we received revealed that WISeR has resulted in widespread delays and denials of care, operational chaos, and reports of patient harm. Further documents obtained by EFF show a rushed and rocky rollout, highlighting the dangers that arise when governments treat AI like a silver bullet for complex problems.

EFF has now published hundreds of pages of documents obtained through our lawsuit, available here... The documents also highlight the need for more transparency about safeguards against inappropriate, AI-driven denials. EFF has long argued that AI has no place in consequential government decisions about peoples' rights or access to benefits, such as immigration enforcement and policing decisions. That's because using automated decision-making in these contexts risks decisions that violate people's rights or deprive them of benefits they're entitled to based on biased or inappropriate considerations and without proper due process or accountability if there is an error. By outsourcing decision-making to private AI companies without sufficient transparency, testing, or legal limits, WISeR jeopardizes seniors' access to medical care. Congress should step in to place greater legal limits on the use of automated decision-making in Medicare.
The new documents "show why we need stronger legal limits around government use of automated decision-making..." according to the newsletter. And another EFF page argues that the American public "still lacks the information needed to assess whether clinician review is providing meaningful oversight of AI systems and whether appropriate data is being used to evaluate prior authorization requests." WISeR's payment structure gives vendors, as the government put it, "an incentive to deny as many claims as possible...." [One company] denied more requests than it approved in the first few months of the program, and CMS inquired about "denials that appear inaccurate or inconsistent with applicable criteria." Ultimately, the records obtained by EFF raise more questions than they answer about the safeguards used by WISeR vendors...

A growing body of scholarship points to the substantial limitations of "human in the loop" policies as guardrails for AI systems. AI-generated recommendations can unduly influence human decisions, leading reviewers to over-rely on automated judgements and rubber stamp them as correct. Even worse, at least one health insurance company actively pressured clinical reviewers to accept its AI systems' recommendations. Another company built a system that allowed clinical reviewers to reject claims without opening patient files; clinical reviewers using this system spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each case..

As the government expands its use of automated decision-making, the potential for consequential mistakes increases rapidly. The records we've obtained so far raise questions about the rushed rollout and lack of guardrails for automated decision-making by the U.S. government. EFF urges transparency, oversight, and legal limits to protect people from the harms of automated decision-making in high risk systems.

UPDATE: FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said Saturday that U,S. airlines will likely cancel 4,000 to 5,000 of the roughly 41,000 flights scheduled for Saturday, reports Yahoo News. And as to the cause of the incident...

[U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean] Duffy said a router involved in the switch from copper wire to fiber "started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system." The system saw "over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds," he said. That disrupted communications with airplanes and radar.
America's nationwide grounding of flights on Friday happened "amid growing scrutiny... of a new AI-powered air traffic management system" deployed by America's Federal Aviation Administration, reports Texas news station KXAN.

Ironically, that system is called SMART — but the outage happened "following warnings" from members of the U.S. Congress about this new AI system's safety, reliability and oversight: In an Oct. 13 letter to the Government Accountability Office, more than 20 members of Congress requested an independent review of the FAA's development and implementation of its Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories system, known as SMART. The lawmakers questioned whether the technology was being deployed with adequate input from frontline air traffic controllers, sufficient training and appropriate safety evaluations... In their letter to the GAO, the lawmakers specifically questioned whether the FAA had adequately evaluated risks associated with SMART's artificial intelligence capabilities, including the potential for the technology to interfere with experienced controllers' decision-making or generate inaccurate safety-critical information. "The nation's frontline aviation safety workforce apparently had little to no input into SMART's development and have received limited training and information during the current deployment process," the lawmakers wrote. The letter also questioned the FAA's decision to initially pilot the technology in heavily congested airspace, including the National Capital Region.
"Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data," U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy acknowledged Friday.

But FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said Saturday that officials have found "zero evidence of anything AI related" in Friday's outage, according to Yahoo News.

An article from The Hill.com notes that Duffy also said the new AI tool had nothing to do with the ground stop, and that he said the system "isn't plugged in." "This is completely disconnected, and I love that some people have said this would be the root cause. By the way, if it was, I'll tell you that, but this is not even plugged in," he said. "So, there's no possible way SMART would have impacted."

Duffy also asked Congress for $50 billion to rebuild what he described as an "incredibly old" air traffic control system.
Duffy had posted the day before that the AI system had been at least partially rolled out and that it was already working (adding "Soon this technology is going NATIONWIDE")

And Friday CNN's aviation analyst said they believed that AI system could be connected to the nationwide outage, calling it "a tremendous amount of coincidence," according to a report from Mediaite: CNN Aviation Analyst: "Many times in the past, what we have seen, and this has gone back decades, is that because air traffic control is this piecemeal, mishmash of a whole bunch of different systems... some going back to radio, telephones and floppy disks... when they put in new computer systems, they often have difficulty talking with, communicating with, or working with the much older systems. And I have to say, it's a tremendous amount of coincidence... If they're putting in new software now, this new SMART system to start managing that, and now we have a communications outage, I'm — we've seen this so many times in the past. I don't know if they're linked, but it's just too much coincidence that they were trying to start that moving today, and now we have problems with the en route system.

So if I was to guess — and we haven't heard any, you know, it's not that it's threats or criminals or terrorists. We haven't heard anything like that. So I am guessing that once again we have a problem with new air traffic control computer systems, AI — you know, modern systems trying to communicate with old systems. And we have just seen this so many times in the past, and it's a big problem... Our whole national airspace system is you know, pieces and parts. It's kind of a Franken-system. And that would be my guess, that they are having computer issues by putting the new software in with the old, just because today they announced that that were going to do this new system.
KXAN describes some of the complexity of the newly-launched AI system: According to the FAA, the system consolidates approximately 200 data streams, including airline schedules, flight paths, weather patterns, airport capacity, airspace conditions and air traffic controller staffing metrics. The agency says SMART uses artificial intelligence to analyze that information, predict traffic flows, identify potential conflicts and recommend adjustments to flight routes and departure schedules before disruptions occur. The FAA describes the technology as a shift from a reactive approach to a predictive one, allowing aviation officials to identify congestion, weather-related restrictions and other operational problems hours, days or even weeks in advance...

The congressional letter raised questions about whether the FAA's implementation strategy was moving faster than its safety evaluations, workforce training and independent oversight could support.
Ironically, the article points out that the FAA promoted anticipated benefits from the technology including fewer delays and flight cancellations. (Other anticipated benefits included improved on-time performance and faster recovery from weather disruptions.) Although the FAA has realized one of the system's anticipated benefits: reduced fuel consumption.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang misled several of the company's leaders, including general counsel Tim Teter and chief marketing officer Alison Wagonfeld, about the nature of his relationship with Chinese businesswoman Alice Huang, with whom he had an affair, according to two people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence reviewed by Reuters. [...] During the autumn of 2025 and in October 2026, in response to press queries that drew some Nvidia leaders' attention to his relationship with Megaspeed and Alice Huang, Huang at both times described their interactions as appropriate, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Reuters only reviewed messages from the exchanges in October, not the ones from 2025. In two separate messages in October, Huang told Nvidia leaders, including Teter and Wagonfeld, that the interactions reflected standard business dealings with customers. In other messages, Huang affirmed the routine nature of his interactions with Megaspeed.

Nvidia's Huang also discussed taking legal action against the New York Times after it published an article in October of last year that drew attention to his meetings in public with Alice Huang, the people said. That article had prompted Jensen Huang to communicate with some Nvidia leaders in 2025 about their interactions, which he did not describe as an affair, the people said. Ultimately, neither Nvidia nor Huang filed a lawsuit against the paper. A spokesperson for the New York Times said the paper received no legal demand. It is unclear when his relationship with Alice Huang became intimate. Photos posted online and verified by Reuters show them together in the US, China and elsewhere, dating as far back as December 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nightmare Eclipse, the pseudonym of a researcher with an ongoing, very public beef with Microsoft, has dropped yet another Windows zero-day. On Tuesday, Nightmare Eclipse disclosed SignDrop, a vulnerability that gives local users full System rights on some versions of Windows. The vulnerability resides in the Common Log File System, which Microsoft describes as a "general-purpose logging service used by software clients running in user-mode or kernel-mode." By forcing a privileged process such as Windows Defender to open a crafted CLFS container, an attacker with ordinary user rights can abuse the privileged file creation to elevate privileges to System.

[...] Researcher Will Dormann said in an interview that he has been able to reproduce the exploit and that it works as described, but not on all versions of Windows 11. But there's a catch, he said. "The requirements are important in that it seems to require Windows 26H2, and one that has existed for more than 90 days, it seems," he explained. "That is, you can't just take a new 26H2 system and install updates and have it work." For a system to be vulnerable, Dormann said, the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CLFS\Authentication\Mode value must be 0 or 1." Of the many machines Dormann uses, only a single one met this requirement. Microsoft said in a statement that it was investigating the vulnerability and had no evidence it was being exploited in the wild. The company also said Defender blocks potential exploitation attempts.

Longtime Slashdot readers cold fjord and sinij share news that the FAA grounded flights nationwide after a communications failure disrupted air traffic control centers across the country. By Friday evening, the outage had resulted in nearly 5,000 flight cancellations and roughly 10,000 delays, with no timeline for restoring normal operations. Rumors are swirling that this could be related to the FAA's newly deployed SMART AI system or Microsoft's recent global outage, but both the agency and Microsoft said they had no indication that their technology was responsible. Business Insider reports: US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said just after 4:15 pm. Eastern time that the nationwide flight traffic halt came "following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers." "FAA technicians are investigating the issue," he said in a post on X. The outage comes the same week as the FAA deployed SMART, a new AI tool to help air traffic control. ASI, the company that makes the SMART system for the FAA, said that Friday's issues weren't "based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a press conference Friday, when asked if the AI system might be related to the outage: "That's what we're looking at." Microsoft, which faced massive issues across its services this week, also said that it had "no indication" the ground stop was related to any Microsoft services. Meanwhile, the FAA said that the ground stop was due to "extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety." UPDATE 1:33 UTC: Secretary Mullin and Secretary Duffy are currently briefing members of the press on the issue.

UPDATE 1:46 UTC: The FAA has lifted the nationwide ground stop after more than four hours. Officials said the disruption appears to have stemmed from a network router issue that cascaded nationwide, with no evidence of a cyberattack or connection to Microsoft's recent outage. Airlines warned that disruptions could continue in Saturday.

Singapore says U.S. authorities provided limited assistance in its investigation of Megaspeed, the company run by Alice Huang, the Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence suspects is a Chinese spy and whose relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has drawn scrutiny. According to Singapore, authorities held Alice Huang's passport from June 2025 until February while investigating "potential false declarations," but ultimately released her with a "stern warning" and barred her from re-entering the country. The New York Times reports: The statement raises new questions about the response of the Trump administration to the case and why the U.S. government did not more forcefully intervene. According to the timeline in the statement, Singaporean authorities had been holding Ms. Huang's passport well after President Trump was briefed last fall about her relationship with Nvidia's chief executive and the belief that she was a Chinese intelligence asset. The New York Times has reported that Taiwan began monitoring Ms. Huang in 2024 at the guidance of the U.S. government.

In its statement, Singapore said that it had sought information from an American server maker and close Nvidia business partner, Supermicro, but that the company had provided "limited cooperation." Supermicro, a firm that packages Nvidia's A.I. chips onto servers that can be used in data centers, has been at the center of a number of chip smuggling investigations across the globe. Supermicro was a supplier to Megaspeed, a company incorporated in Singapore and run by Ms. Huang, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Singapore said in the statement its authorities raised Supermicro's "limited cooperation" with the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation in July 2025 and "requested their assistance in securing the company's cooperation." "Despite these repeated requests, Singapore has to date received limited information or assistance in respect of the company," the statement said.

Google is launching its first Gemini-powered smart glasses, with Samsung supplying the computing hardware. Given their built-in 12-megapixel camera, Google is emphasizing privacy protections, including a tamper-resistant recording light, automatic face redaction, and restrictions on real-time facial recognition and livestreaming. The company also promises not to use captured photos or videos for AI training or targeted advertising. Ars Technica reports: Google says the frames all weigh about 41 grams, which is not terrible but is definitely near the top for glasses generally. They will, naturally, weigh much more when you account for lenses. That will also determine the final pricing. So far, we only have the starting prices for these devices, including non-prescription lenses.

The setup here is similar to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses we've seen for a few years. There are no screens in the lenses, but you can interact with the AI system via voice or by activating the integrated camera. The experience should be similar to using Gemini Live on your phone, but it will be a lot easier to fire up the AI. You can say "Hey Gemini" or tap a touch-sensitive area of the frame to start interacting with the robot.

Since this is the same chatbot that operates across the Google ecosystem, it has access to your data and preferences. You can ask questions and get personalized answers, have Google Maps guide you by voice, or just talk with the AI to kill time. The glasses use custom open-ear speakers to limit distractions for those around you. Google notes the directional microphones should not pick up speech from other people, either.

Adding the camera feed is where things get interesting. When the AI can see what you see, it has the potential to do more work on your behalf. Google suggests asking Gemini for recommendations when looking at a bookshelf or glancing at an event poster to have the AI add it to your calendar. The glasses will also support Gemini Guided Vision, which provides conversational audio descriptions for people who are visually impaired. The new frames are available for preorder today starting at $395.

Charlotte Web shares a report from the Associated Press: A shareholder has sued Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, accusing them of deceiving investors in their responses to media reports about Huang's affair with a purported Chinese spy that threatens national security. [...] The news reports said that the Commerce Department was investigating Alice Huang's company, Singapore-based Megaspeed, on suspicions that it was helping to sidestep U.S. export restrictions blocking Nvidia chips from being sold to China. But Nvidia said then that its compliance team checked and determined that Megaspeed wasn't doing anything illegal.

But, according to the complaint, the statements were misleading because they were made when Jensen Huang was having an affair with Alice Huang, who is "suspected of seeking to help smuggle Nvidia products into China." It accuses Nvidia and Huang of failing to disclose the affair and issuing false statements about Nvidia's relationship with Megaspeed, which posed a "material risk" to Nvidia's reputation and business prospects.

[...] "As a result of Defendants' wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company's securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages," the complaint said. Had investors known the truth, they wouldn't have purchased Nvidia's shares "at the artificially inflated prices that they did, or at all," the complaint said. "Fun fact: Nvidia donated $25 million to Trump's White House ballroom fund," notes Slashdot reader Charlotte Web.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports that Huang also also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company's vice president of health care and a direct report.

New York has forced T-Mobile to remove a 50GB monthly data cap from its $15 low-income broadband plan after regulators found customers who exceeded the limit had their speeds cut by more than 97%, to just 650 Kbps. "Additionally, the [Office of the Attorney General (OAG)] found T-Mobile restricted [New York's Affordable Broadband Act (ABA)] plans to areas with 5G coverage, despite offering standard-rate 25 Mbps plans in 4G areas, and intentionally coded its website to hide affordable plans from search engines," reports RochestFirst. From the report: Under the terms of the settlement, T-Mobile must:

- Eliminate data caps on its ABA plans and deliver guaranteed 25 Mbps download speeds.
- Expand ABA plan availability to all geographic areas where it offers fixed-wireless home internet service.
- Make its ABA webpage indexed and easily discoverable via standard web searches.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration's fight to stop suspected leaks of top-secret military information on LinkedIn can't sweep in "a vast number of confidential sources" of random journalists "who have no conceivable relationship" to the Department of Justice's investigation, an appeals court ruled (PDF) Tuesday. The order came after the DOJ asked LinkedIn to turn over 18 months of communications from targeted journalists who collectively published more than 1,000 articles on many different topics over that time period. The request was not limited to journalists involved in a controversial report from a news outlet that Trump said exposed confidential military information in a foreign country. (The outlet is not being named to protect national security secrets.) Instead, the DOJ cast a wide net, requesting extensive LinkedIn data on journalists who had any possible link to the journalists around the time the report was drafted.

The majority of journalists have LinkedIn accounts and publish their contact information to encourage sources to connect on the platform, LinkedIn argued. So allowing that government overreach went beyond harming targeted journalists and threatened to undermine a critical platform where journalists frequently connect with confidential sources, judges ruled. Even more concerning, the Trump administration secured a secrecy order barring LinkedIn from telling anyone about the sweeping request for a year. That left journalists unaware for far too long that their First Amendment rights had been compromised, judges ruled. "A request by the government to scoop up reporters' records wholesale and ascertain the identity of their sources would tip the balance against informed discourse in a manner inimical to democratic health," Wilkinson wrote. He criticized the lower court for approving the request simply because the records were technically feasible to collect, emphasizing that "serious security and speech claims are in tension in this case. There is space under law for both."

While declining to quash the order entirely, Wilkinson also directed the lower court to reconsider a limited exception to the government's secrecy order that would allow LinkedIn to notify an attorney representing the news outlet under investigation.

Bruce D. Brown, President of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), celebrated the ruling, saying: "This ruling is a big deal and will quickly become one of the leading opinions in the area -- one we will be quoting from it for a long time. The court recognized that confidential sources are the 'lifeblood' of investigative reporting and that dragnet demands from technology companies to reveal those sources violate the law."

New York is launching a state-backed AI safety research center at Binghamton University that will independently study and test AI systems, develop safety and security techniques, and train researchers in responsible AI. "While the federal government fails to act, New York is leading the way on AI safety and holding big tech accountable," New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said. "The stakes are too high to simply take AI companies at their word." Politico reports: The center -- which is funded by a $30 million gift from Bloomberg co-founder Tom Secunda and a $25 million research investment from SUNY and New York state -- is set to launch before New York's major AI safety law, the RAISE Act, comes into effect on Jan. 1. That will require submissions of detailed safety frameworks from AI companies operating in New York State, which Hochul's office hopes will be scrutinized by researchers at the new center.

"AI is opening up questions that scientists could not tackle before," said Secunda, who also serves as the board chair of Empire AI, a $500 million public-private partnership. "With Empire AI and researchers across New York, the Center can test systems independently and give public officials evidence they can use."

Over 80 leading scientists and researchers on AI systems from across New York state will contribute to the effort, which will be run by the New York Center for AI Responsibility and Research at Binghamton University, according to details shared by Hochul's office. The initiative will be led by Jeannette Wing, the executive vice president for research at Columbia University, and Greg Morrisett, the vice provost of Cornell Tech.

"We need new techniques that can be applied to this new kind of system with swarms of autonomous agents acting independently and without control. How can you first detect that they're going to do harm, and how can you prevent them from doing harm?" said Wing. "The beauty of what's being proposed is that this state is committing resources to really light this up."

President Donald Trump says the FBI is investigating Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's affair with a woman alleged by U.S. intelligence to have gathered information for Beijing. "I know the FBI is looking into it in terms of something else, and I think that he'll be in good shape," Trump said at a White House briefing. The Associated Press reports: Trump suggested the extraordinary step of directly involving himself in a counterintelligence investigation, a sign of his friendly relationship with Huang and the possible geopolitical stakes. "I did speak to him today just to see if he's feeling all right, how you're doing," Trump said. "He said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy."

Trump is slated to meet next week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Shenzhen, China, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, but he was noncommittal about bringing up the situation with Xi. "No, I don't think so," Trump said. "I mean, maybe. I'm sure President XI will ask me about it. I just know Jensen very well. I just think he's a very honorable man." Nvidia has launched its own independent investigation into whether Huang was targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. Meanwhile, China has denied the allegations. "The so-called Chinese spy allegation is unsubstantiated. It is nothing but smears against China," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said during a regular news briefing Monday.

Further reading: Commerce Dept. Chip Inquiry Was Halted After Nvidia Intervention

"Aaron Swartz would have turned forty this year," writes FSF deputy director Sean O'Brien. "November 8 is Aaron Swartz Day, when we remember a pioneer of free software and information sharing whose contributions helped shape the modern internet."

The Internet Archive will host a hackathon Sunday in San Francisco celebrating Aaron's Swartz's life "and the projects he worked on, many of which are still going strong today," including SecureDrop, OpenLibrary, and Creative Commons. "We are also spreading the word about projects he inspired," including OnionPress and the EFF's Atlas of Surveillancedocumenting police tech use through open source research, now a collaborative effort with volunteers, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Reynolds School of Journalism. The event is also supported by Free Law Project, and organizers are asking attendees to "bring a color print out of your favorite photos of Aaron for a huge collaborative collage."

From the Internet Archive's blog: Aaron was also a co-founder of Creative Commons, where he worked with Lisa Rein developing the RSS-enhanced HTML code that sits behind Creative Commons licenses, much of which is still in use today. The "Quantifying the Commons" project was designed to help measure open-licensed and public-domain works worldwide, and is one of the projects participants can work on. Aaron loved Tor and created tools such as "Tor2web" (with Virgil Griffith) to help more people publish Tor-accessible websites. Onion Press is a Tor-based publishing system designed for decentralized, censorship-resistant publishing, and participants can work on the code base...

We also encourage you to have a hackathon in your own town using our materials — or materials of your own. Please let us know if you plan to do this (although it's not required!). If you do let us know, we can include you on our website and help you spread the word about your event. So far, there is an event in Portland sponsored by Portland Civic Lab where they will be screening The Internet's Own Boy and celebrating Aaron's life.
"EFF was proud to call Aaron a friend and ally," the digital rights organization posted this week. And the FSF's deputy director writes "It is particularly striking that some of the world's largest companies now rely on technology Swartz helped to develop." One of Swartz's most important technical contributions was his collaboration with John Gruber on Markdown, the simple text formatting system introduced in 2004. Markdown allows users to create structured documents using ordinary text, without requiring proprietary software. More than twenty years later, Markdown has become one of the most popular formats for documentation and publishing, and is widely used in community websites such as forums and wikis. This is not a minor contribution. Companies developing LLMs use Markdown extensively in their products and development tools. OpenAI, for example, recommends Markdown for organizing instructions and communicating structure to its ChatGPT models... Swartz also developed web.py, a public domain framework for building Python applications, and contributed to RSS 1.0, a public internet standard for distributing news and other information between websites.
Swartz developed web.py while rewriting the software running Reddit after Reddit acquired Swartz's company Infogami.

Reddit recently licensed its content to AI companies, and the FSF's deputy director notes "the enormous scale of the alleged 'piracy' by giant technology corporations" while Aaron himself had "faced criminal prosecution for downloading academic research that he wanted to distribute with no monetary gain." In 2011, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with computer fraud and related offenses after he downloaded millions of academic articles from the JSTOR collection through MIT's university network... Although he was not charged with copyright infringement, he faced aggressive federal prosecution and the possibility of decades in prison before he tragically died by suicide in January 2013, at just twenty-six years old...

Swartz helped build tools that made the internet more useful and accessible, and his contributions continue to shape a world he never lived to see. On Aaron Swartz Day, we should remember his achievements and the access-to-knowledge principles that guided them. The companies benefiting from his legacy should respect those same principles by giving users true freedom and control, rather than imposing more restrictions on us all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: On Tuesday, Mexico's Senate approved (PDF) a reform of the Federal Copyright Law that ties ISP liability to having a policy to terminate repeat infringers. [This policy has to be published permanently on their website and in their terms of service, and it must include a basic way to notify users. In other words, what can be terminated is the Internet connection itself, not just an account. According to Mexican business outlet EL CEO, this means that access providers such as Telmex and Izzi will need such a policy.] The Senate approved the amendments with roughly two-thirds of the vote, as the opposition voted against. The Chamber of Deputies already approved the same text in October, so the decree now goes to President Claudia Sheinbaum. Her government proposed the changes in May to bring the law in line with the USMCA trade agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada.

[...] Providers that don't comply risk facing liability. Under the new rules, any ISP that fails to meet its safe harbor conditions becomes liable for its users' infringements if it knowingly contributes to, induces, or causes the infringement. The same goes for an ISP that can control the infringing user and profits directly from the infringement. In both cases, the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) can fine the provider up to roughly 4.7 million pesos (~$250,000), depending on the infringement. The law doesn't explicitly define the term repeat infringer, nor does it say how many piracy accusations it takes before a subscriber can be cut off. According to Aurora Lopez-Portillo, director of legal services at IP firm ClarkeModet, each provider has to decide its own threshold. She told EL CEO that ISPs should also check whether the accusations actually hold up, while giving users a chance to respond, even though the law doesn't require that.

During Tuesday's Senate debate, some lawmakers in the opposition raised similar concerns. Senator Gabriel Elizondo warned that families can share a single connection, so the pirating activities of one person could leave an entire household offline. Previously, opposition lawmakers proposed requiring a court order before Internet service could be suspended, but that proposal was not adopted. [...] There, failing to meet the safe harbor conditions, including the repeat infringer policy, is the first requirement for liability. If an ISP also contributes to infringement with knowledge of it, or can control the infringer and directly profits from it, it can be held responsible. The new repeat infringer rules will take effect 180 days after their publication in Mexico's official gazette, which hasn't happened yet as far as we can see. How Mexican ISPs will define a repeat infringer, and how many accusations it takes, has yet to be seen.