The Japanese government has made a formal request asking OpenAI to refrain from copyright infringement. The request came after Sora 2 began generating videos featuring copyrighted characters from anime and video games. Minoru Kiuchi spoke at the Cabinet Office press conference on Friday and described manga and anime as "irreplaceable treasures" that Japan boasts to the world.

The request was made online by the Cabinet Office's Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters. Sora 2, which launched recently, generates twenty-second videos at 1080p resolution. Social media is getting filled with videos showing characters from One Piece, Demon Slayer, Pokemon and Mario. Digital Minister Masaaki Taira expressed hopes that OpenAI would comply voluntarily. He indicated that measures under Japan's AI Promotion Act may be invoked if the issue remains unresolved.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On Monday, a publicly-sourced archive of more than 10,000 national park signs and monument placards went public as part of a massive volunteer project to save historical and educational placards from around the country that risk removal by the Trump administration. Visitors to national parks and other public monuments at more than 300 sites across the U.S. took photos of signs and submitted them to the archive to be saved in case they're ever removed in the wake of the Trump administration's rewriting of park history. The full archive is available here, with submissions from July to the end of September. The signs people have captured include historical photos from Alcatraz, stories from the African American Civil War Memorial, photos and accounts from the Brown v. Board of Education National History Park, and hundreds more sites. "I'm so excited to share this collaborative photo collection with the public. As librarians, our goal is to preserve the knowledge and stories told in these signs. We want to put the signs back in the people's hands," Jenny McBurney, Government Publications Librarian at the University of Minnesota and one of the co-founders of the Save Our Signs project, said in a press release. "We are so grateful for all the people who have contributed their time and energy to this project. The outpouring of support has been so heartening. We hope the launch of this archive is a way for people to see all their work come together."

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is laying off around 550 employees, or roughly 11% of its workforce, as part of an effort to "restructure and establish an appropriate size to ensure future success." According to JPL Director Dave Gallagher, the job cuts "are not related to the current government shutdown." CNBC reports: JPL is a research and development lab funded by NASA -- the federal space agency -- and managed by the California Institute of Technology. "While not easy, I believe that taking these actions now will help the Lab transform at the scale and pace necessary to help achieve humanity's boldest ambitions in space," Gallagher wrote in a separate mekor to JPL employees and contractors. Gallagher, in the public announcement, noted that the reorganization of JPL began in July, and "over the past few months, we have communicated openly with employees about the challenges and hard choices ahead."

"This week's action, while not easy, is essential to securing JPL's future by creating a leaner infrastructure, focusing on our core technical capabilities, maintaining fiscal discipline, and positioning us to compete in the evolving space ecosystem -- all while continuing to deliver on our vital work for NASA and the nation," Gallagher wrote. Gallagher said that JPL employees will be notified of their status on Tuesday, and the "new Lab structure ... will become effective Wednesday."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Britain said on Monday it had issued U.S. internet forum site 4chan with a $26,644 fine for failing to provide information about the risk of illegal content on its service, marking the first penalty under the new online safety regime. Media regulator Ofcom said 4chan had not responded to its request for a copy of its illegal harms risk assessment nor a second request relating to its qualifying worldwide. Ofcom said it would take action against any service which "flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom and their duties under the Online Safety Act" and they should expect to face penalties.

The act, which is designed to protect children and vulnerable users from illegal content online, has caused tension between U.S. tech companies and Britain. Critics of the law have said it threatens free speech and targets U.S. companies. Technology minister Liz Kendall said the government "fully backed" Ofcom in taking action. "This fine is a clear warning to those who fail to remove illegal content or protect children from harmful material," she said. 4chan and Kiwi Farms filed a lawsuit in the United States against Ofcom in August, arguing that the threats and fines issued by the regulator "constitute foreign judgements that would restrict speech under U.S. law." The lawsuit claims that both entities are entirely based in the U.S., have no operations in the U.K., and therefore are not subject to its local laws.

"Dutch authorities have temporarily nationalized Nexperia, owned by Chinese company Wingtech, over fears of critical product unavailability," writes longtime Slashdot reader evil_aaronm. Reuters reports: The Hague invoked never-before-used powers under a Dutch law known as the "Availability of Goods Act." The decision led to a 10% fall in Wingtech's shares in Shanghai on Monday. The Dutch government will not take ownership of Nexperia, but it will now have the power to reverse or block management decisions it considers harmful. The company's regular production is continuing. [...] Wingtech called the Dutch government's intervention in Nexperia, once part of Dutch electronics group Philips, "excessive interference driven by geopolitical bias." Wingtech also alleged that non-Chinese Nexperia executives had tried to forcibly alter the company's equity structure through legal proceedings in a "cloaked power grab" on the company.

A copy of an Amsterdam commercial court ruling dated October 7 and seen by Reuters showed that the court decided on October 1 to suspend Wingtech CEO Zhang Xuezheng from his position as executive director at Nexperia after finding "well founded reasons to doubt" the company was pursuing correct management policy or actions under Dutch civil law. It appointed Dutch businessman Guido Dierick to take Zhang's position with a "deciding vote", and transferred control of almost all of Nexperia's shares to a Dutch lawyer for management. The Dutch state and the company's labour council had supported the moves, the document showed. [...]

In its statement, the Dutch government said that administrative problems at Nexperia posed a threat to the company's "crucial technological knowledge" without elaborating. "The loss of these capabilities could pose a risk to Dutch and European economic security," it said. Nexperia is one of the world's largest makers of simple computer chips such as diodes and transistors, though it also develops more advanced technologies such as "wide gap" semiconductors used in electrical settings and useful for electric cars, chargers and AI data centres. Wingtech said in a filing to the Shanghai stock exchange on Monday that its control over Nexperia would be temporarily restricted due to the Dutch order and court rulings, affecting decision making and operational efficiency.

It's the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. But "Ukraine's foreign minister accused Russia on Sunday of deliberately severing the external power line to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station," reports Reuters, "in order to link the plant to Moscow's power grid." Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow was attempting to test a reconnection to Russia's grid. Ukraine has long feared that Moscow would try to redirect the plant's output to its grid. But Russian officials have denied any intention of trying to restart the plant, seized by Moscow's forces in the early weeks of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The plant produces no electricity at the moment, but has been without an external electricity source for nearly three weeks. Officials have relied on emergency diesel generators to secure the power needed to keep the fuel cool inside the facility and guard against a meltdown. "Russia intentionally broke the plant's connection with the Ukrainian grid in order to forcefully test reconnection with the Russian grid," Sybiha wrote on X in English. He denounced the "attempted theft of a peaceful Ukrainian nuclear facility".... Each side has accused the other of shelling that caused the line outage.
Russia's continued occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant deprived Ukraine of a quarter of its generating capacity, according to a report from the Brookings Institute — calling Ukraine's energy sector "a key battleground" in the war. The Russian invasion began on the very day that Ukraine launched its so-called island test. This involved completely isolating the Ukrainian and Moldovan power systems from their neighbors to check whether the system was stable. This is a mandatory procedure prior to synchronization with the European grid... Despite this, Ukraine managed not only to militarily defend itself but also to maintain grid stability in wartime conditions and implement all the solutions necessary for an unprecedented synchronization on March 16, 2022.
In 2022 a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) even argued in the Wall Street Journal that "An unappreciated motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers..." At the time of the invasion, Westinghouse supplied fuel to six of the 15 [Ukrainian] nuclear reactors and could displace the Russians in all of them. The U.S. government had been highly supportive of this effort, and these fuel contracts represented hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly lost sales to Atomstroyexport [a nuclear exporter that's a subsidiary of Russian state corporation Rosatom]. By seizing the nuclear plants, Russia is able to retake the market for Ukrainian nuclear fuel.

Most important, Westinghouse, with support from the U.S., was in a position to build nuclear reactors in Ukraine over the next two decades. On Aug. 31, 2021, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her Ukrainian counterpart, Herman Halushchenko, signed a strategic cooperation agreement to build five nuclear units with a value, according to the World Nuclear Association, of more than $30 billion. The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine's leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business.
Brookings looks at how Ukraine's energy sector has fared during the war: The Ukrainian energy sector was designed to be oversized with significant redundancy in order to meet huge Soviet-era industrial demand as well as to make it more resilient to a future world war... A radical change did not occur until 2014, when Ukrainians overthrew the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. In the decade since then, Ukraine has pursued a policy of European Union (EU) integration with determination and without interruption... The real prospect of an improvement in the quality of life and development of Ukraine through integration with the EU and NATO was unacceptable to Russia, which first annexed Crimea and covertly attacked the Ukrainian Donbas, before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Russia's in-depth knowledge of the Ukrainian power system, dating back to the Soviet Union, was used to carry out a well-planned operation to cut off electricity to Ukrainians.

The aim was to break the morale of Ukrainians to continue defending themselves and to collapse the economy so that it could not support the Ukrainian military effort. Ironically, however, the size of the energy system, which had been scaled up in case of war, and the enormous Western support, unexpectedly ensured its resilience to Russian attacks.
Although they note that "During the first two years of the war, Russia fired nearly 2,000 missiles and drones at Ukrainian energy infrastructure... "

And this week in Ukraine, damage to substations, power plants and oil depot temporarily cut off electricity for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian homes and businesses, reports the UN. "As colder weather sets in, strikes on critical infrastructure are deepening humanitarian needs," warned a UN spokesperson on Thursday...

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: German IT news outlet Heise reports [German-language article] that the northern most state Schleswig-Holstein has, after half a year of frantic data migration work, successfully migrated their MS Outlook mail and groupware setups to a FOSS solution using Open-Xchange and Thunderbird.

Stakeholders consider the move a major success and milestone to digital sovereignty and saving costs. This move makes the state a pioneer in Germany. As a next major step Schleswig-Holstein plans to migrate their authorities and administrations desktop PCs to Linux.
The state has achieved "digital sovereignty by ditching Microsoft for open source solutions," writes the site It's FOSS, adding that European nations "have generally been more progressive in adopting open source solutions for government operations." The migration affected around 30,000 employees across various government departments. This includes the State Chancellery, ministries, judiciary, state police, and other state authorities. Over 40,000 mailboxes containing more than 100 million emails and calendar entries were moved to the new system. The state has adopted Open-Xchange as its email server solution and Thunderbird as the email client....

[Digitization Minister Dirk Schrödter] emphasized that "We are real pioneers. We can't fall back on the experience of others -, there is hardly a comparable project of this magnitude anywhere in the world."

Australia's Queensland state government said on Friday it would run coal power plants at least into the 2040s, reversing a previous plan to pivot rapidly to renewables and in turn making national emissions reduction targets harder to achieve. From a report: The centre-right Liberal National Party won last year's election in Queensland, a huge chunk of land in Australia's northeast where more than 60% of electricity comes from coal-fired plants that are mostly owned by the state.

The Internet Archive must block access to books in its Open Library project for Belgian users after negotiations with publishers failed. A Brussels Business Court issued a site-blocking order in July targeting several shadow libraries and the Internet Archive. A Belgian government department paused the order for the U.S. nonprofit and urged both parties to negotiate. The talks over recent weeks were unsuccessful.

The Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright concluded last week that the Internet Archive hosts the contested books and has the ability to render them inaccessible. Publishers must supply a list of books to be blocked. The nonprofit then has 20 calendar days to implement the measures and prevent future digital lending of those works in Belgium. The order includes a one-time penalty of $578,000 for non-compliance and remains in place until July 16 next year. The Internet Archive operates Open Library by purchasing physical copies and digitizing them to lend out one at a time. Publishers previously won a U.S. federal court case against the project.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr says Internet service providers shouldn't have to list every fee they charge. From a report: Responding to a request from cable and telecom lobby groups, he is proposing to eliminate a rule that requires ISPs to itemize various fees in broadband price labels that must be made available to consumers.

The rule took effect in April 2024 after the FCC rejected ISPs' complaints that listing every fee they created would be too difficult. The rule applies specifically to recurring monthly fees "that providers impose at their discretion, i.e., charges not mandated by a government."

ISPs could comply with the rule either by listing the fees or by dropping the fees altogether and, if they choose, raising their overall prices by a corresponding amount. But the latter option wouldn't fit with the strategy of enticing customers with a low advertised price and hitting them with the real price on their monthly bills. The broadband price label rules were created to stop ISPs from advertising misleadingly low prices.

This week, Carr scheduled an October 28 vote on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that proposes eliminating several of the broadband-label requirements. One of the rules in line for removal requires ISPs to "itemize state and local passthrough fees that vary by location." The FCC would seek public comment on the plan before finalizing it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A website set up by an unknown Dane over the course of one weekend in August is giving a massive headache to those trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online.

The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) -- a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance.

The site lets visitors compile a mass email warning about the bill and send it to national government officials, members of the European Parliament and others with ease. Since launching, it has broken the inboxes of MEPs and caused a stir in Brussels' corridors of power. "We are getting hundreds per day about it," said Evin Incir, a Swedish Socialists and Democrats MEP, of the email deluge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Discord has identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of a customer service data breach announced last week, spokesperson Nu Wexler tells The Verge. A tweet by vx-underground said that the company was being extorted over a breach of its Zendesk instance by a group claiming to have "1.5TB of age verification related photos. 2,185,151 photos." In its announcement last week, Discord said that information like names, usernames, emails, the last four digits of credit cards, and IP addresses also may have been impacted by the breach. "All affected users globally have been contacted and we continue to work closely with law enforcement, data protection authorities, and external security experts," said Wexler. "We've secured the affected systems and ended work with the compromised vendor. We take our responsibility to protect your personal data seriously and understand the concern this may cause."

After failed negotiations with publishers, Belgium's copyright enforcement agency has ordered the Internet Archive to block access to specific books in its Open Library within Belgium or face a 500,000-euro fine. TorrentFreak reports: Back in July, the Brussels Business Court issued a sweeping ex parte site-blocking order targeting several "shadow libraries" including Anna's Archive, Libgen, and Z-Library. Unusually, the order also included the Internet Archive's Open Library, a project operated by the well-known U.S. non-profit organization Internet Archive. The order was granted based on a request from publishers and authors who claimed, among other things, that the operators of the targeted sites were difficult to identify. This also applied to the Internet Archive, which was not heard by the court before the order was issued.

[...] Over the past several weeks, Internet Archive attempted to reach an agreement with the publishers, but the effort was unsuccessful. It is clear, however, that the Internet Archive believes that its use of copyrighted books for the Open Library qualifies as fair use. The organization is known to purchase physical copies, which it then digitizes to lend out to patrons, one copy at a time. This self-digitizing project was previously contested in a U.S. federal court, where the publishers ultimately came out as the winner. They argued that the Internet Archive project competed with their own licensing business for book lending. The detailed arguments at the center of the Belgian case are not public, but after hearing both sides, the Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright concluded that Internet Archive must take action.

In a follow-up decision (PDF) published last week, the government department explicitly states that it can't rule on U.S. fair use or the Belgian equivalent, but concludes that self-blocking measures are warranted. The Internet Archive hosts the contested books and has the ability to render them inaccessible. If it refuses to do so, it may be considered a copyright infringer under local law. The final decision requires the rightsholders to supply the Internet Archive with a list of all books that should be blocked in Belgium. The non-profit then has 20 calendar days to implement the necessary measures. In addition to making the books unavailable, Internet Archive must also prevent these works from being made available for digital lending in the future.

South Korea's government may have permanently lost 858TB of information after a fire at a data center in Daejeon. From a report: As reported by DCD, a battery fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center, located in the city of Daejeon, on September 26, has caused havoc for government services in Korea. Work to restore the data center is ongoing, but officials fear data stored on the government's G-Drive may be gone for good. G-Drive, which stands for Government Drive and is not a Google product, was used by government staff to keep documents and other files. Each worker was allocated 30GB of space.

According to a report from The Chosun, the drive was one of 96 systems completely destroyed in the fire, and there is no backup. "The G-Drive couldn't have a backup system due to its large capacity," an unnamed official told The Chosun. "The remaining 95 systems have backup data in online or offline forms." While some departmers do not rely on G-Drive, those that do have been badly impacted in the aftermath of the fire. A source from the Ministry of Personnel Management said: "Employees stored all work materials on the G-Drive and used them as needed, but operations are now practically at a standstill."

A now-fixed security flaw in India's income tax e-filing portal exposed millions of taxpayers' personal and financial data due to a basic IDOR vulnerability that let users view others' records by swapping PAN numbers. "The exposed data included full names, home addresses, email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, and bank account details of people who pay taxes on their income in India," reports TechCrunch. "The data also exposed citizens' Aadhaar number, a unique government-issued identifier used as proof of identity and for accessing government services." From the report: The researchers found that when they signed into the portal using their Permanent Account Number (PAN), an official document issued by the Indian income tax department, they could view anyone else's sensitive financial data by swapping out their PAN for another PAN in the network request as the web page loads. This could be done using publicly available tools like Postman or Burp Suite (or using the web browser's in-built developer tools) and with knowledge of someone else's PAN, the researchers told TechCrunch.

The bug was exploitable by anyone who was logged-in to the tax portal because the Indian income tax department's back-end servers were not properly checking who was allowed to access a person's sensitive data. This class of vulnerability is known as an insecure direct object reference, or IDOR, a common and simple flaw that governments have warned is easy to exploit and can result in large-scale data breaches.

"This is an extremely low-hanging thing, but one that has a very severe consequence," the researchers told TechCrunch. In addition to the data of individuals, the researchers said that the bug also exposed data associated with companies who were registered with the e-Filing portal. [...] It remains unclear how long the vulnerability has existed or whether any malicious actors have accessed the exposed data.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: OpenAI said on Tuesday it has banned several ChatGPT accounts with suspected links to the Chinese government entities after the users asked for proposals to monitor social media conversations. In its latest public threat report (PDF), OpenAI said some individuals had asked its chatbot to outline social media 'listening' tools and other monitoring concepts, violating the startup's national security policy.

The San Francisco-based firm's report raises safety concerns over potential misuse of generative AI amid growing competition between the U.S. and China to shape the technology's development and rules. OpenAI said it also banned several Chinese-language accounts that used ChatGPT to assist phishing and malware campaigns and asked the model to research additional automation that could be achieved through China's DeepSeek. It also banned accounts tied to suspected Russian-speaking criminal groups that used the chatbot to help develop certain malware, OpenAI said.

The Danish government wants to introduce a ban on several social media platforms for children under the age of 15, as Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced Tuesday. From a report: "Mobile phones and social media are stealing our children's childhood," she said in her opening speech to the Danish parliament, the Folketing. "We have unleashed a monster," Frederiksen said, noting that almost all Danish seventh graders, where pupils are typically 13 or 14 years old, own a cellphone.

"I hope that you here in the chamber will help tighten the law so that we take better care of our children here in Denmark," she added. However, Frederiksen did not give further details on what such a ban would entail, nor does a bill on an age limit appear in the government's legislative program for the upcoming parliamentary year.

AmiMoJo writes: The Irish Government's basic income scheme for artists is set to become a permanent fixture from next year, with 2,000 new places to be made available under Budget 2026. Minister for Culture Patrick O'Donovan has secured agreement with other government departments to continue and expand the initiative, which had previously operated on a pilot basis. Participants in the scheme receive a weekly payment of $379.50.

The pilot programme, launched in 2022, provided basic income support to 2,000 artists and creative arts workers across Ireland. It aimed to support the arts sector's recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic, during which many artists experienced significant income loss due to restrictions on live performances and events. The scheme provides unconditional, regular payments to eligible artists and creative workers, allowing them to focus on their practice without the pressure of commercial viability. It is not means-tested and operates independently of social welfare payments. An independent evaluation of the pilot, published earlier this year, found that recipients reported increased time spent on creative work, reduced financial stress, and improved well-being.

India's electricity grid is struggling to accommodate the nation's economic expansion and isn't adequately equipped to handle future data center demand. Goldman Sachs estimates that power required from utilities needs roughly 7.2% annual growth between fiscal years 2025 and 2035, up from a prior 5.6%.

India's data center base sits in the low single gigawatts today, but Bernstein forecasts reach 5 to 6 gigawatts by 2030. AI servers draw five to seven times the power of a legacy server rack, according to HSBC. Solar farms can be built in 12 to 24 months, but they flood the grid when daytime demand is comparatively low and then fade as households and commercial loads climb after 5 PM. On Goldman's full-year models, the system runs a 1 to 4% energy deficit by fiscal years 2034 through 2035.

Assessments suggest India may need roughly 140 gigawatts of additional coal capacity by fiscal year 2035 versus 2023 levels. The government's current target is roughly 87 gigawatts by fiscal year 2032. Coal plants can run around the clock and can ramp up production during the evening hours to meet surging demand. Some of this coal is bridge capacity to stabilize a faster greening grid, but the scale required exceeds what policymakers have publicly acknowledged or what most analysts expected even two years ago.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The heads of UK physics departments say their subject is facing a national crisis as one in four warns that their university departments are in danger of closing because of funding pressures. In an anonymous survey of department heads by the Institute of Physics (IoP), 26% said they faced potential closure of their department within the next two years, while 60% said they expected courses to be reduced. Four out of five departments said they were making staff cuts, and many were considering mergers or consolidation in what senior physicists described as a severe threat to the UK's future success. [...]

To avoid "irreversible damage", the IoP is asking for immediate government action including funding to support existing labs and research facilities, as well as setting up an "early warning system" to monitor departments at risk of closure, and reduce pressures affecting international student recruitment. In the longer term it is calling for radical reforms in higher education funding to allow universities to meet the full costs of teaching nationally important subjects such as physics. Sir Keith Burnett, the IoP's president and a former chair of physics at Oxford University, said: "While we understand the pressures on public finances, it would be negligent not to sound the alarm for a national capability fundamental to our wellbeing, competitiveness and the defense of the realm.

"We are walking towards a cliff edge but there is still time to avert a crisis which would lead not just to lost potential but to many physics departments shutting down altogether. Physics researchers and talented physics students are our future but if action isn't taken now to stabilize, strengthen and sustain one of our greatest national assets, we risk leaving them high and dry." Thomas said the erosion in value of domestic tuition fees and falling numbers of international students were behind the financial pressures, with smaller physics departments the most at risk. "What that means is we will get more and more concentration of where physics is being taught and lose geographical distribution. That goes against aims of widening participation and means some disadvantaged groups will miss out on opportunities to study physics, and it's important that we recognize that," Thomas said.