EMACS Turns 50, a Free-Software Pioneer
EMACS, the pioneering full-screen text editor Richard Stallman built at MIT's AI Lab, turns 50 this year and is still widely used. The software-sharing community around it grew into the free software movement and the GNU Project. — technologyreview.com
Publishers Fire DMCA Barrage at AI Game Ports
AI-assisted decompilation now turns games into playable browser ports almost overnight, and publishers are responding with a flood of DMCA takedowns — Microsoft and Epic Games among the most aggressive even as both lean heavily on generative AI themselves. The fallout hits indie developers hardest, as versions of beloved games that had been open-sourced against their creators' wishes were pulled. — kotaku.com
ICE Spy Operation on Activists Comes to Light
A sweeping undercover operation by Homeland Security Investigations against left-wing activists surfaced in court records from a federal conspiracy case in Minnesota, with agents penetrating encrypted chats, protests, and even churches while surveillance drones flew overhead. Defense attorneys liken the effort to the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO program. — wired.com
New AlpineBSD Runs on NetBSD, Shuns AI Code
AlpineBSD is a new operating system that pairs the NetBSD kernel with a userspace inspired by Alpine Linux, built around a simple goal: run on as little AI-generated software as possible, with no LLM output in the base system or main package repository. The project is a work in progress and has no installer yet. — wiki.alpinebsd.org
Anthropic Goes Public Cash-Rich, Founder-Controlled
Anthropic heads into its IPO still holding most of the enormous capital it has raised and already profitable on an operating basis, while a single super-voting share keeps the founders in control for the foreseeable future. Existential risk appears in the prospectus only in the passive voice, with recursive self-improvement — using Claude to build better Claudes — as the core business plan. — lesswrong.com