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New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Thursday signed two bills aimed at regulating the use of AI in entertainment, requiring disclosure when ads feature AI-generated performers and mandating consent from heirs before a deceased person's likeness can be used commercially. Hochul described both measures as "first in the nation" policies during a signing ceremony at SAG-AFTRA's New York City offices. The first bill compels ad producers to disclose the use of synthetic performers, and the second requires companies to obtain consent from heirs or executors before using a person's name, image, or likeness for commercial purposes after their death. "We will have responsible AI policies in the state of New York," Hochul said. "It's a time where we do want to embrace innovation. But not to the detriment of people." The signing came the same day Disney announced a partnership allowing users of OpenAI's Sora to create clips featuring Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters.

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Version 24.04 LTS of the Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS distribution has been released with the COSMIC Desktop Environment:

Today is special not only in that it's the culmination of over three years of work, but even more so in that System76 has built a complete desktop environment for the open source community. We're proud of this contribution to the open source ecosystem. COSMIC is built on the ethos that the best open source projects enable people to not only use them, but to build with them. COSMIC is modular and composable. It's the flagship experience for Pop!_OS in its own way, and can be adapted by anyone that wants to build their own unique user experience for Linux.

In addition to the COSMIC desktop environment, Pop!_OS is now available for Arm computers with the 24.04 LTS release, and the distribution has added hybrid graphics support for better battery life. LWN covered an alpha version of COSMIC in August 2024.

Uber has discontinued its monthly electric vehicle bonuses for drivers in the United States and Canada, marking the latest in a series of rollbacks from a company that once pledged to pour $800 million into helping its drivers transition away from gasoline-powered cars. The ride-hailing giant had previously eliminated its $1-per-ride EV perk last year, replacing it with monthly bonuses that required drivers to complete 200 rides. Those monthly payments are now gone too. The company is far behind its self-imposed climate targets. Uber had pledged to reach 100% EVs in London by 2025 and across North America and Europe by 2030. Current figures paint a different picture: roughly 40% of miles in London come from EVs, while Europe sits at about 15% and North America at just 9%. The company's emissions have nearly doubled over the past three years and now exceed Denmark's total carbon footprint. Uber executives acknowledged to Bloomberg that they will likely miss their green targets. The company has doled out $539 million of its $800 million pledge through the end of 2024. Meanwhile, Uber's operating profits are set to double this year, and the company recently committed $20 billion to stock buybacks.

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OpenAI on Thursday released GPT-5.2, its latest and what the company calls its "best model yet for everyday professional use," just days after CEO Sam Altman declared a "code red" internally to marshal resources toward improving ChatGPT amid intensifying competition from Google's well-received Gemini 3 model. The GPT-5.2 series ships in three tiers: Instant, designed for faster responses and information retrieval; Thinking, optimized for coding, math, and planning; and Pro, the most powerful tier targeting difficult questions requiring high accuracy. OpenAI says the Thinking model hallucinated 38% less than GPT-5.1 on benchmarks measuring factual accuracy. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, denied that the launch was moved up in response to the code red, saying the company has been working on GPT-5.2 for "many, many months." She described the internal directive as a way to "really signal to the company that we want to marshal resources in this one particular area." The competitive pressure is real. Google's Gemini app now has more than 650 million monthly active users, compared to OpenAI's 800 million weekly active users. In October, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT Nick Turley sent an internal memo declaring the company was facing "the greatest competitive pressure we've ever seen," setting a goal to increase daily active users by 5 percent before 2026. GPT-5.2 is rolling out to paid ChatGPT users starting Thursday, and GPT-5.1 will remain available under "legacy models" for three months before being sunset.

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Version 1.92.0 of Rust has been released. This release includes a number of stabilized APIs, emits unwind tables by default on Linux, validates input to #[macro_export], and much more. See the separate release notes for Rust, Cargo, and Clippy.

Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal prohibition on sports betting in 2018, 39 states have legalized the activity, and college campuses have emerged as ground zero for what appears to be a generational gambling problem among young men. A 2023 NCAA survey found that 60% of college students have gambled on sports, and 16% of 18-to-22-year-olds engage in what the organization classifies as problematic gambling. A Siena University poll from January found that 28% of men aged 18-to-34 who use sports-betting apps have had trouble meeting a financial obligation because of a lost bet. Timothy Fong, a psychiatry professor at UCLA, says every one of his recent clients has been an 18-to-24-year-old man seeking help for a sports-betting or cryptocurrency addiction. John Simonian, a personal-bankruptcy lawyer in Rhode Island, says he never used to see young men filing for bankruptcy -- now it's common. On November 7th, the NCAA announced it had uncovered three separate betting scandals in men's basketball where athletes intentionally played poorly in games on which they or a friend had placed wagers.

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The first topic of discussion at the 2025 Maintainers Summit has been in the air for a while: what role — if any — should machine-learning-based tools have in the kernel development process? While there has been a fair amount of controversy around these tools, and concerns remain, it seems that the kernel community, or at least its high-level maintainership, is comfortable with these tools becoming a significant part of the development process.

The Game Awards, which broadcasts tonight on Twitch, YouTube, and Prime Video, has become the biggest night on the video game calendar since launching in 2014, but the show's treatment of developers has drawn increasing criticism. At the 2023 ceremony, acceptance speeches were often cut off after roughly 30 seconds while Hideo Kojima received five minutes to discuss his upcoming game OD -- enough time for 13 acceptance speeches, Aftermath calculated. That year's show also ignored the industry's mass layoffs entirely; host Geoff Keighley acknowledged the labor crisis only at the 2024 ceremony. The show's Future Class program, launched in 2020 to celebrate game makers representing an inclusive future for the industry, has quietly ended. No new class has been named for two years. "At this time, we are not planning a new Future Class for this year," organizer Emily Weir told Game Developer.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Growing support for far-right parties is pressuring European governments to introduce stricter controls on immigration. Switzerland is set to vote on a proposal that would take the idea to the next level -- imposing a cap on its population [non-paywalled link]. The initiative could lead eventually to a blanket ban on new arrivals if the number of residents rises from around 9 million currently to above 10 million, with little distinction made between refugees, skilled workers and top managers on six-figure salaries. Citizens will likely vote on the proposal next year under the country's unique system of plebiscites on constitutional amendments and policy, and polls suggest there's a chance they'll approve it. The risk is it could lead to shortages of critical skills that end up harming Switzerland's competitiveness. The outcome will show how far citizens are willing to go to preserve some of the traits that made their country such an appealing destination. [...] The right-wing Swiss People's Party, or SVP, won 28% of the vote in the last election with a campaign that presented Swiss citizenship as a privilege, not a right. It came up with the idea of a population limit in 2023, presenting it as a way to preserve the Swiss lifestyle and protect its environment from excessive human activity.

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Stanford researchers spent much of the past year building an AI bot called Artemis that scans networks for software vulnerabilities, and when they pitted it against ten professional penetration testers on the university's own engineering network, the bot outperformed nine of them. The experiment offers a window into how rapidly AI hacking tools have improved after years of underwhelming performance. "We thought it would probably be below average," said Justin Lin, a Stanford cybersecurity researcher. Artemis found bugs at a fraction of human cost -- just under $60 per hour compared to the $2,000 to $2,500 per day that professional pen testers typically charge. But its performance wasn't flawless. About 18% of its bug reports were false positives, and it completely missed an obvious vulnerability on a webpage that most human testers caught. In one case, Artemis found a bug on an outdated page that didn't render in standard browsers; it used a command-line tool called Curl instead of Chrome or Firefox. Dan Boneh, a Stanford computer science professor who advised the researchers, noted that vast amounts of software shipped without being vetted by LLMs could now be at risk. "We're in this moment of time where many actors can increase their productivity to find bugs at an extreme scale," said Jacob Klein, head of threat intelligence at Anthropic.

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Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and has entered into a three-year licensing deal that will let users generate AI-powered short videos and images featuring more than 200 characters from its Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar franchises. The new features are expected to launch in 2026 through Sora, OpenAI's short-form video platform, and ChatGPT. A selection of user-generated short videos will also be available to stream on Disney+. The licensing agreement excludes any talent likenesses or voices. Disney will receive warrants to purchase additional OpenAI equity as part of the arrangement, and its employees will gain access to OpenAI tools including ChatGPT for building new products.

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Opera has opened its AI-powered browser Neon to the public after a couple of months of testing, and anyone interested in trying it will need to pay $19.90 per month. The Norway-based company first unveiled Neon in May and launched it in early access to select users in October. Like Perplexity's Comet, OpenAI's Atlas, and The Browser Company's Dia, Neon bakes an AI chatbot into its interface that can answer questions about pages, create mini apps and videos, and perform tasks. The browser uses your browsing history as context, so you can ask it to fetch details from a YouTube video you watched last week. The subscription also grants access to AI models including Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.1.

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Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, firefox-esr, libsndfile, and rear), Fedora (httpd, perl-CGI-Simple, and tinyproxy), Oracle (firefox, kernel, libsoup, mysql8.4, tigervnc, tomcat, tomcat9, and uek-kernel), SUSE (alloy, curl, dovecot24, fontforge, glib2, himmelblau, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, krb5, lasso, libvirt, mozjs128, mysql-connector-java, nvidia-open-driver-G07-signed-check, openssh, poppler, postgresql17, postgresql18, python-cbor2, python-Django, python310, python311-Django, runc, strongswan, tomcat11, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (binutils, libpng1.6, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.14, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-6.14, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-realtime, and qtbase-opensource-src).

Tourists from dozens of countries including the UK could be asked to provide a five-year social media history as a condition of entry to the United States, under a new proposal unveiled by American officials. From a report: The new condition would affect people from dozens of countries who are eligible to visit the US for 90 days without a visa, as long as they have filled out an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) form. Since returning to the White House in January, President Donald Trump has moved to toughen US borders more generally - citing national security as a reason. Analysts say the new plan could pose an obstacle to potential visitors, or harm their digital rights. Asked whether the proposal could lead to a steep drop-off in tourism to the US, Trump said he was not concerned. "No. We're doing so well," the president said on Wednesday. "We just want people to come over here, and safe. We want safety. We want security. We want to make sure we're not letting the wrong people come enter our country."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: OpenAI says the cyber capabilities of its frontier AI models are accelerating and warns Wednesday that upcoming models are likely to pose a "high" risk, according to a report shared first with Axios. The models' growing capabilities could significantly expand the number of people able to carry out cyberattacks. OpenAI said it has already seen a significant increase in capabilities in recent releases, particularly as models are able to operate longer autonomously, paving the way for brute force attacks. The company notes that GPT-5 scored a 27% on a capture-the-flag exercise in August, GPT-5.1-Codex-Max was able to score 76% last month. "We expect that upcoming AI models will continue on this trajectory," the company says in the report. "In preparation, we are planning and evaluating as though each new model could reach 'high' levels of cybersecurity capability as measured by our Preparedness Framework." "High" is the second-highest level, below the "critical" level at which models are unsafe to be released publicly. "What I would explicitly call out as the forcing function for this is the model's ability to work for extended periods of time," said OpenAI's Fouad Matin.

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schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: perm from a donor who unknowingly carried a cancer-causing gene has been used to conceive nearly 200 babies across Europe, an investigation by 14 European public service broadcasters, including CBS News' partner network BBC News, has revealed. Some children conceived using the sperm have already died from cancer, and the vast majority of those who inherited the gene will develop cancer in their lifetimes, geneticists said. The man carrying the gene passed screening checks before he became a donor at the European Sperm Bank when he was a student in 2005. His sperm has been used by women trying to conceive for 17 years across multiple countries. The cancer-causing mutation occurred in the donor's TP53 gene -- which prevents cells in the body from turning cancerous -- before his birth, according to the investigation. It causes Li Fraumeni syndrome, which gives affected people a 90% chance of developing cancers, particularly during childhood, as well as breast cancer in later life. Up to 20% of the donor's sperm contained the mutated TP53 gene. Any children conceived with affected sperm will have the dangerous mutation in every cell of their body. The affected donor sperm was discovered when doctors seeing children with cancers linked to sperm donation raised concerns at this year's European Society of Human Genetics. At the time, 23 children with the genetic mutation had been discovered, out of 67 children linked to the donor. Ten of those children with the mutation had already been diagnosed with cancer. Freedom of Information requests submitted by journalists across multiple countries revealed at least 197 children were affected, though it is not known how many inherited the genetic mutation. More affected children could be discovered as more data becomes available.

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NASA has lost contact with its MAVEN Mars orbiter after it passed behind Mars. When it remerged from behind the planet, the spacecraft never resumed communications. SpaceNews reports: MAVEN launched in November 2013 and entered orbit around Mars in September 2014. The spacecraft's primary science mission is to study the planet's upper atmosphere and interactions with the solar wind, including how the atmosphere escapes into space. That is intended to help scientists understand how the planet changes from early in its history, when it had a much thicker atmosphere and was warm enough to support liquid water on its surface. MAVEN additionally serves as a communications relay, using a UHF antenna to link the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on the Martian surface with the Deep Space Network. NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft also serve as communications relays for the rovers, but are both significantly older than MAVEN. The spacecraft has suffered some technical problems in the past, notably with its inertial measurement units (IMUs) used for navigation. In 2022, MAVEN switched to an "all-stellar" navigation system to minimize the use of the IMUs. MAVEN has enough propellant to maintain its orbit through at least the end of the decade. NASA's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, though, zeroed out funding for MAVEN, which cost $22.6 million to operate in 2024. MAVEN was one of several missions "operating well past the end of prime mission" the proposal would terminate, despite MAVEN's role as a communications relay.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple on Wednesday released its annual list of the most downloaded apps and games for the year. For the U.S. market, OpenAI's ChatGPT topped the ranks of free iPhone apps (not including games) with the most installs in 2025. The AI app was followed by Threads, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google's Gemini. ChatGPT made it to No. 4 last year, but the top spot was taken by Chinese shopping app Temu. In 2023, the AI app didn't make the top-10 list despite being released on the iPhone in May 2023 to a strong debut.

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A startup called Operation Bluebird is petitioning the US Patent and Trademark Office to strip X Corp of the "Twitter" and "tweet" trademarks, hoping to relaunch a new Twitter with the old brand, bird logo, and "town square" vibe. "The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.'s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark," the petition states. "The TWITTER bird was grounded." Ars Technica reports: If successful, two leaders of the group tell Ars, Operation Bluebird would launch a social network under the name Twitter.new, possibly as early as late next year. (Twitter.new has created a working prototype and is already inviting users to reserve handles.) Michael Peroff, an Illinois attorney and founder of Operation Bluebird, said that in the intervening years, more Twitter-like social media networks have sprung up or gained traction -- like Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. But none have the scale or brand recognition that Twitter did prior to Musk's takeover. "There certainly are alternatives," Peroff said. "I don't know that any of them at this point in time are at the scale that would make a difference in the national conversation, whereas a new Twitter really could." Similarly, Peroff's business partner, Stephen Coates, an attorney who formerly served as Twitter's general counsel, said that Operation Bluebird aims to recreate some of the magic that Twitter once had. "I remember some time ago, I've had celebrities react to my content on Twitter during the Super Bowl or events," he told Ars. "And we want that experience to come back, that whole town square, where we are all meshed in there." "Mere 'token use' won't be enough to reserve the mark," said Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law professor and expert in trademark law. "Or [X] could defend if it can show that it plans to go back to using Twitter. Consumers obviously still know the brand name. It seems weird to think someone else could grab the name when consumers still associate it with the ex-social media site of that name. But that's what the law says."

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Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Rust in CPython; Python frozendict; Bazzite; IETF post-quantum disagreement; Distrobox; 6.19 merge window; Leaving the TAB.
• Briefs: Let's Encrypt retrospective; PKI infrastructure; Rust in kernel to stay; CNA series; Alpine 3.23.0; cmocka 2.0; Firefox 146; 2024 Free Software Awards; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.