In the dying days of 2023, US teenager Willis Gibson – online handle "Blue Scuti" – "beat" the Nintendo Entertainment System version of the video game Tetris, which was first released in 1989.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240103-tetris-how-a-us-teenager-achieved-the-impossible
Despite sounding like a parody, Wehead, from a company of the same name, appears to be a serious product. It was previously billed as a 'spatial video' device to allow '3D video calls'. With that having failed to grab the world's imagination, the device has now been repurposed as a face for AI in the form of a 'ChatGPT edition'.
https://www.creativebloq.com/news/chatgpt-face-wehead
A group of news organizations, camera makers, and technology companies have joined together to create a web tool called Verify for checking the authenticity of images for free. If the image has a digital signature, the site will display the date, location, and other credentials for the image. The authentication technology is now adopted by Nikon, Sony, and Canon.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/camera-companies-are-working-on-technology-to-watermark-real-images
The oldest version of Mickey Mouse will become one of the youngest members of the public domain when the copyrights covering the cartoon rodent’s cinematic debuts expire in the last instant of 2023. While the 1.0 release of Mickey that graced screens in 1928 will become collectively owned on Jan. 1, newer versions of the mouse remain Disney property. And Disney’s continuing trademark for Mickey means you can’t suggest your fanfic is a Disney production or otherwise endorsed by the company.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/get-ready-to-remix-mickey-mouses-10-release-enters-the-public-domain
Google has agreed to settle a US lawsuit claiming it invaded the privacy of users by tracking them even when they were browsing in "private mode". The class action, which was filed by law firm Boies Schiller Flexner in 2020, claimed that Google had tracked users' activity even when they set the Google Chrome browser to "Incognito" mode and other browsers to "private mode". It said this had turned Google into an "unaccountable trove of information" on user preferences and "potentially embarrassing things".
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67838384
The lawsuit claims "millions" of articles published by the New York Times were used without its permission to make ChatGPT smarter, and claims the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a trustworthy information source. It alleges that when asked about current events, ChatGPT will sometimes generate "verbatim excerpts" from New York Times articles, which cannot be accessed without paying for a subscription.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67826601
In a press release today, Bird confirmed that it had entered into a “financial restructuring process aimed at strengthening its balance sheet,” with the company continuing to operate as normal in pursuit of “long-term, sustainable growth.” It’s also worth noting that Bird’s Canadian and European operations are not part of this bankruptcy filing, and will “continue to operate as normal,” the company said.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/20/bird-bankruptcy/