Researchers in Texas confirmed the first documented wild hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay -- a rare pairing that is likely a result of climate change and habitat shifts. Slashdot reader fjo3 shares a report from CNN: "We think it's the first observed vertebrate that's hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change," said Brian Stokes, a doctoral student of biology at the University of Texas at Austin and first author of the study published September 10 in the journal Ecology and Evolution. The vividly colored green jay is found in parts of South and Central America, Mexico and a limited portion of southern Texas. But since 2000, the tropical bird's territory has expanded north by hundreds of kilometers -- more than 100 miles and about 2 degrees of latitude -- along the Rio Grande and up toward San Antonio, said study coauthor Timothy Keitt. Avid birders across Central Texas have taken note, sharing sightings of the emerald birds on social media and apps like eBird. Keitt, a professor of integrative biology at UT Austin, has been keeping tabs on their rapid northward creep since 2018. "They're pretty unmistakable in the field," he told CNN. "You see a green jay and you absolutely know that it's a green jay." Stokes joined Keitt's project a few years later, trapping birds to take blood samples for genetic analysis and releasing them back into the wild. While monitoring social media for green jay sightings in May 2023, Stokes came across an intriguing post on a Facebook group called Texbirds. A woman in a suburb of San Antonio shared a photo of an unusual bird that didn't look like any jay Stokes or Keitt had ever seen. "He happened to notice that this person posted a picture of this odd jay, and immediately told me, and we got in the car and drove down to find it right away," Keitt said. He and Stokes described their finding as one of the "increasingly unexpected outcomes" that arise when global warming and land development converge to drive animal populations to new habitat ranges. This, they wrote, can lead to unpredictable animal interactions -- in this case, between a tropical species and a temperate one -- and create never-before-seen ecological communities.

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alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Critics of YouTuber Ethan Klein are pushing back on subpoenas that would reveal their identities as part of an ongoing legal fight between Klein and his detractors. Klein is a popular content creator whose YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers. He's also involved in a labyrinthine personal and legal beef with three other content creators and the moderators of a subreddit that criticizes his work. Klein filed a legal motion to compel Discord and Reddit to reveal the identities of those moderators, a move their lawyers say would put them in harm's way and stifle free speech on the internet forever. [...] On July 31, a judge allowed Klein's lawyers to file a subpoena with Reddit and Discord that would reveal the identities of the people running r/h3snark and an associated Discord server. On September 22, lawyers for the defendants filed a motion to quash the subpoenas. "On its face, the Action is about copyright infringement," the latest filing said. "At its heart, however, the Action is about stifling criticism and seeking retribution by unmasking individuals for perceived reputational harms TEI [Klein's production company] attributes to [John Doe moderators] unrelated to TEI's intellectual property rights." [...] The anonymity of places like Reddit and Discord grant a layer of protection to people seeking to critique power. This case could set a dangerous precedent, the lawyers believe. "If the court allows TEI's Subpoenas, it would enable TEI to impose a considerable price on Does' use of the vehicle of anonymous speech -- including public exposure, real risks of retaliation and actual harm, and the financial and other burdens of defending the Action," the filing said. The filing added: "Very few would-be commentators are prepared to bear costs of this magnitude. So, when word gets out that the price tag of criticizing Ethan is this high -- that speech will disappear. But that is precisely what Ethan Klein wants."

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Pirate sports streaming site Streameast has quietly reclaimed the Streameast.xyz domain after U.S. authorities allowed it to expire, despite having seized it under a federal warrant in 2024. TorrentFreak reports: While researching both old and newly-seized Streameast domains recently, we noticed that Streameast.xyz expired earlier this year. Apparently, it was not renewed by those who controlled it, as the seizure banner was gone. Instead, the domain appeared to have been reclaimed by the original Streameast team. While it is not listed as an official mirror site, Streameast.xyz points to content from the original site once again. And indeed, the original Streameast team confirms that the domain is theirs. It is not clear why the U.S. authorities lost control of the domain or whether it was intentional. Other domain names covered by the same seizure warrant were renewed recently, including Streameast.io. The Streameast team might view this as a significant symbolic victory. After all, they effectively reclaimed a federally seized domain name without having to mount a legal challenge. In the grander scheme, one domain name is not going to make a massive difference. However, the U.S. government went through the trouble to obtain a federal warrant, so it's ironic to see it controlled by pirates once again.

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OpenAI unveiled Instant Checkout, a new ChatGPT feature that lets users buy stuff directly through its chatbot. Currently, the feature supports single-item purchases directly from Etsy sellers, but support for more than one million Shopify merchants is coming soon. It's also only available to U.S. ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Free users at this time. CNBC reports: OpenAI will take a fee from transactions that are completed through ChatGPT, which means Instant Checkout could become an important new revenue stream for the startup. OpenAI is not yet profitable, and is burning through cash as it works to scale up its computing infrastructure. The company declined to share specific details about how large the fees are since they are determined through confidential contracts with Etsy and Shopify. Instant Checkout is free to users and will not affect their prices, OpenAI said. "Our vision for ChatGPT -- and a lot of the technology we create, but especially ChatGPT -- is that it's not just providing you information, it is also helping you get things done in the real world," Michelle Fradin, OpenAI's product lead for ChatGPT commerce, told CNBC in an interview. The company plans to introduce multi-item carts and expand the regional availability of Instant Checkout moving forward. [...] Instant Checkout is powered by OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, which is the underlying technology that allows users to complete a transaction directly with a merchant through ChatGPT. OpenAI built the framework in partnership with the fintech company Stripe, which powers ChatGPT subscriptions. OpenAI initially decided to use Agentic Commerce Protocol for e-commerce, but Fradin said the company thinks it could be used to facilitate other types of purchases or payments as well. OpenAI is open-sourcing the framework to help merchants build integrations more quickly, and so that developers can explore different use cases, she said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: A pair of e-commerce entrepreneurs who bought a number of well-known retail brands -- including RadioShack, Modell's Sporting Goods and Pier 1 Imports -- out of bankruptcy are accused of running a Ponzi scheme. The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday accused Alex Mehr and Tai Lopez, founders of the Miami-based Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), of defrauding investors out of approximately $112 million. Through their holding company, Mehr and Lopez acquired distressed brick-and-mortar companies in order to turn them into successful, online-only brands. Dress Barn and Linens 'n Things were also among their acquisitions. [...] The SEC's suit alleges that between 2020 and 2022, Mehr and Lopez, "made material misrepresentations" to hundreds of investors about the bankrupt retailers they had acquired. For example, to entice individuals to invest in their acquisitions, they said their portfolio companies were "on fire" and that "cash flow is strong." They also told prospective backers that money raised for a company would only be invested in that specific firm. That proved not to be the case, according to the SEC's lawsuit, which was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. "Contrary to these representations, while some of the REV Retailer Brands generated revenue, none generated any profits," the suit states. "Consequently, in order to pay interest, dividends and maturing note payments, Defendants resorted to using a combination of loans from outside lenders, merchant cash advances, money raised from new and existing investors, and transfers from other portfolio companies to cover obligations." The SEC alleges that at least $5.9 million of returns paid to investors were actually Ponzi-like payments funded by other investors, as opposed to companies' profits. Additionally, the federal regulatory agency claims that Mehr and Lopez allocated $16 million worth of investments for their own use, according to the filing.

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The FCC mistakenly published a 163-page PDF containing detailed schematics for Apple's upcoming iPhone 16e, despite Apple explicitly requesting indefinite confidentiality to protect trade secrets. AppleInsider reports: A cover letter is also distributed alongside the schematics, addressed to the FCC and dated September 16, 2024. The letter from Apple is a request for the confidential treatment of documents that are filed with the FCC. [...] The letter from Apple requests a series of documents are withheld from public viewing "indefinitely." The justification is that they contain "confidential and proprietary trade secrets" that are not disclosed to the public post-release, due to giving competitors an "unfair advantage." The list of documents, Apple states, includes: Block Diagrams, Electrical Schematic Diagrams, Technical Descriptions, Product Specifications, Antenna Locations, Tune-Up Procedure, and Software Security Description. Other documents, such as external and internal photographs, shots of the test setup, and the user manual, are deemed to be less damaging and have "short-term confidentiality" requirements. In those cases, Apple asks for short-term confidentiality for 180 days after the equipment authorization is granted by the FCC.

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The Taliban have imposed a nationwide telecommunications shutdown in Afghanistan, severing fibre-optic connections and cutting off internet, mobile, and satellite services as part of "morality" measures. Netblock is currently tracking the outages. The BBC reports: Since seizing power in 2021, the Taliban have imposed numerous restrictions in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic Sharia law. Flights from Kabul airport have also been disrupted, according to reports. Several people in Kabul have told the BBC that their fibre-optic internet stopped working towards the end of the working day, around17:00 local time (12:30 GMT). Because of this, it is understood many people will not notice the impact until Tuesday morning, when banking services and other businesses are due to resume. [...] The Taliban earlier said an alternative route for internet access would be created, without giving any details. Business leaders at the time warned that if the internet ban continued their activities would be seriously hit. Hamid Haidari, former editor-in-chief of Afghan news channel 1TV, said after the shutdown that "loneliness enveloped the entire country." "Afghanistan has now officially taken first place in the competition with North Korea for [internet] disconnection" he said on X.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law on Monday that will force major AI companies to reveal their safety protocols -- marking the end of a lobbying battle with big tech companies like ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Meta and setting the groundwork for a potential national standard. The proposal was the second attempt by the author, ambitious San Francisco Democrat state Sen. Scott Wiener, to pass such legislation after Newsom vetoed a broader measure last year that set off an international debate. It is already being watched in Congress and other states as an example to follow as lawmakers seek to rein in an emerging technology that has been embraced by the Trump administration in the race against China, but which has also prompted concerns for its potential to create harms.

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F-Droid has warned that Google's upcoming developer verification program will kill the free and open source app repository. Google announced plans several weeks ago to force all Android app developers to register their apps and identity with the company. Apps not validated by Google will not be installable on certified Android devices. F-Droid says it cannot require developers to register with Google or take over app identifiers to register for them. The site operators say doing so would effectively take over distribution rights from app authors. Google plans to begin testing the verification scheme in the coming weeks and may charge registration fees. Unverified apps will start being blocked next year in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand before expanding globally in 2027. F-Droid is calling on US and EU regulators to intervene.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator that creates videos featuring copyrighted material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear, according to people familiar with the matter. OpenAI began alerting talent agencies and studios about the forthcoming product and its opt-out process over the last week and plans to release the new version in the coming days, the people said. The new opt-out process means that movie studios and other intellectual property owners would have to explicitly ask OpenAI not to include their copyrighted material in videos Sora creates. While copyrighted characters will require an opt-out, the new product won't generate images of recognizable public figures without their permission, people familiar with OpenAI's thinking said.

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The UK government will underwrite a $2 billion loan guarantee to Jaguar Land Rover in a bid to support its suppliers as a cyber-attack continues to halt production at the car maker. BBC: Business Secretary Peter Kyle said the loan, from a commercial bank, would protect jobs in the West Midlands, Merseyside and across the UK. The manufacturer has been forced to suspend production for weeks after being targeted by hackers at the end of August. There have been growing concerns some suppliers, mostly small businesses, could go bust due to the prolonged shutdown. About 30,000 people are directly employed at the company's UK plants with about 100,000 working for firms in the supply chain. Some of these firms supply parts exclusively to JLR, while others sell components to other carmakers as well. It is believed to be the first time that a company has received government help as a result of a cyber-attack.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: In a preprint titled "Can LIGO Detect Daylight Savings Time?," Reed Essick, former LIGO member and now a physicist at the University of Toronto, gives a simple answer to the paper's title: "Yes, it can." The paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was recently uploaded to arXiv. That might seem like an odd connection. It's true that observational astronomy must contend with noise from light pollution, satellites, and communication signals. But these are tangible sources of noise that scientists can sink their teeth into, whereas daylight savings time is considerably more nebulous and abstract as a potential problem. To be clear, and as the paper points out, daylight savings time does not influence actual signals from merging black holes billions of light-years away -- which, as far as we know, don't operate on daylight savings time. The "detection" here refers to the "non-trivial" changes in human activity having to do with the researchers involved in this kind of work, among other work- and process-related factors tied to the sudden shift in time. The presence of individuals -- whether through operational workflows or even their physical activity at the observatories -- has a measurable impact on the data collected by LIGO and its sister institutions, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan, the new paper argues. To see why this might be the case, consider again the definition of gravitational waves: ripples in space-time. A very broad interpretation of this definition implies that any object in space-time affected by gravity can cause ripples, like a researcher opening a door or the rumble of a car moving across the LIGO parking lot. Of course, these ripples are so tiny and insignificant that LIGO doesn't register them as gravitational waves. But continued exposure to various seismic and human vibrations does have some effect on the detector -- which, again, engineers and physicists have attempted to account for. What they forgot to consider, however, were the irregular shifts in daily activity as researchers moved back and forth from daylight savings time. The bi-annual time adjustment shifted LIGO's expected sensitivity pattern by roughly 75 minutes, the paper noted. Weekends, and even the time of day, also influenced the integrity of the collected data, but these factors had been raised by the community in the past.

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The European way of life is being jeopardized by environmental degradation, a report has found, with EU officials warning against weakening green rules. The Guardian: The continent has made "important progress" in cutting planet-heating pollution, according to the European Environment Agency, but the death of wildlife and breakdown of the climate are ruining ecosystems that underpin the economy. The seventh edition of the report, which has been published every five years since 1995, found: 1. More than 80% of protected habitats are in a poor or bad state, with "unsustainable" consumption and production patterns driving loss of wildlife. 2. The EU's "carbon sink" has declined by about 30% in a decade as logging, wildfires and pests damage forests. 3. Emissions from transport and food have barely budged since 2005, despite progress in other sectors. 4. Member states have failed to adapt to extreme weather as fast as risk levels have risen. 5. Water stress already affects one in three Europeans and will worsen as the climate changes.

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A review of 62 scientific studies published in Osteoporosis International found that microplastics weaken bones by disrupting bone marrow stem cells and stimulating osteoclasts, cells that degrade bone tissue. Laboratory experiments found the particles reduce cell viability, induce premature cellular aging, modify gene expression, and trigger inflammatory responses. Animal studies found microplastic accumulation decreases white blood cell counts and deteriorates bone microstructure, creating irregular cell structures that increase fracture risk. Rodrigo Bueno de Oliveira from the State University of Campinas in Brazil said the effects interrupted skeletal growth in test animals.

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Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 ran autonomously for 30 hours to build a chat application similar to Slack or Teams, generating approximately 11,000 lines of code before stopping upon task completion. The model, announced today, marks a significant leap from the company's Opus 4 model, which ran for seven hours in May. Claude Sonnet 4.5 performs three times better at browser navigation and computer use than Anthropic's October technology. Beta-tester Canva deployed the model for complex engineering tasks in its codebase and product features. Anthropic paired the release with virtual machines, memory, context management, and multi-agent support tools, enabling developers to build their own AI agents using the same building blocks that power Claude Code.

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"As awareness grows around the dangers of head trauma in sports, a small number of professional fighters and football players are turning to a psychedelic called ibogaine for treatment," reports the Los Angeles Times. They note that the drug's proponents "tout its ability to treat addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, or TBI. " Ibogaine, which is derived from a West African shrub, is a Schedule 1 drug in America with no legal medical uses, and experts urge caution because of the need for further studies. But the results, several athletes say, are "game-changing".... Although athletes are just discovering ibogaine, the drug is well known within the veteran community, which experiences high rates of brain injury and PTSD. In Stanford's study on the effects of ibogaine on special forces veterans, participants saw average reductions of 88% in PTSD symptoms, 87% in depression symptoms and 81% in anxiety symptoms. They also exhibited improvements in concentration, information processing and memory. "No other drug has ever been able to alleviate the functional and neuropsychiatric symptoms of traumatic brain injury," Dr. Nolan Williams, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in a statement on the results. "The results are dramatic, and we intend to study this compound further...." States can work faster than the federal government by carving out exemptions for supervised ibogaine therapy programs, similar to what Oregon has done with psilocybin therapy. Many states have also opted to legalize marijuana for medicinal or recreational use... In June, Texas approved a historic $50-million investment in state funding to support drug development trials for ibogaine, inspired by the results seen by veterans. Arizona legislators approved $5 million in state funding for a clinical study on ibogaine in March, and California legislators are pushing to fast-track the study of ibogaine and other psychedelics.

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The editors of the culture magazine n + 1 decry the "well-funded upheaval" caused by a large and powerful coalition of pro-AI forces. ("According to the logic of market share as social transformation, if you move fast and break enough things, nothing can contain you...") "An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny." The AI bubbleâS — âSand it is a bubble, as even OpenAI overlord Sam Altman has admittedâS — âSwill burst. The technology's dizzying pace of improvement, already slowing with the release of GPT-5, will stall... [P]rofessional readers and writers: We retain some power over the terms and norms of our own intellectual life. We ought to stop acting like impotence in some realms means impotence everywhere. Major terrains remain AI-proofable. For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear. Learn to tellâS — âSto read closely enough to tellâS — âSthe work of people from the work of bots... Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI's further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don't publish AI bullshit. Don't even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit. Resist the call to establish worthless partnerships like the Washington Post's Ember, an "AI writing coach" designed to churn out Bezos-friendly op-eds. Instead, do what better magazines, newspapers, and journals have managed for centuries. Promote and produce original work of value, work that's cliché-resistant and unreplicable, work that triesâS — âSas Thomas Pynchon wrote in an oracular 1984 essay titled "Is It OK to Be a Luddite?"âS — âS"through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine...." Punishing already overdisciplined and oversurveilled students for their AI use will help no one, but it's a long way from accepting that reality to Ohio State's new plan to mandate something called "AI fluency" for all graduates by 2029 (including workshops sponsored, naturally, by Google). Pedagogically, alternatives to acquiescence remain available. Some are old, like blue-book exams, in-class writing, or one-on-one tutoring. Some are new, like developing curricula to teach the limits and flaws of generative AI while nurturing human intelligence... Our final defenses are more diffuse, working at a level of norms and attitudes. Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI. (The broad embrace of the term slop is a heartening sign of a nascent constituency for machine denial.) These systems haven't worked well for very long, and consensus about their use remains far from settled. That's why so much writing about AI writing sounds the way it doesâS — âSnervous, uneven, ambivalent about the new regime's utilityâS — âSand it means there's still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool... As we train our sights on what we oppose, let's recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts... A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a "stereotype"âS — âSa simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fakeâS — âSof real literature. It should be smashed, and can. The 3,800-word article also argues that "perhaps AI's ascent in knowledge-industry workplaces will give rise to new demands and new reasons to organize..."

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tThe internet is full of people claiming to uncover conspiracies in politics and business..." reports the Wall Street Journal. "Now an unlikely new villain has been added to the list: theoretical physicists," they write, saygin resentment of scientific authority figures "is the major attraction of what might be called 'conspiracy physics'." In recent years, a group of YouTubers and podcasters have attracted millions of viewers by proclaiming that physics is in crisis. The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory... Most fringe theories are too arcane for listeners to understand, but anyone can grasp the idea that academic physics is just one more corrupt and self-serving establishment... In this corner of the internet, the scientist Scott Aaronson has written, "Anyone perceived as the 'mainstream establishment' faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as 'renegade' wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding... As with other kinds of authorities, there are reasonable criticisms to be made of academic physics. By some metrics, scientific productivity has slowed since the 1970s. String theory has not fulfilled physicists' early dreams that it would become the ultimate explanation of all forces and matter in our universe. The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, has delivered fewer breakthroughs than scientists expected when it turned on in 2010. But even reasonable points become hard to recognize when expressed in the ways YouTube incentivizes. Conspiracy physics videos with titles like "They Just Keep Lying" are full of sour sarcasm, outraged facial expressions and spooky music... Leonard Susskind, director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, says physicists need to be both more sober and more forceful when addressing the public. The limits of string theory should be acknowledged, he says, but the idea that progress has slowed isn't right. In the last few decades, he and other physicists have figured out how to make progress on the vast project of integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, the century-old pillars of physics, into a single explanation of the universe. The bitter attacks on leading physicists get a succinct summary in the article from Chris Williamson, a "Love Island" contestant turned podcast host. "This is like 'The Kardashians' for physicists — I love it."

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"Swiss voters have backed plans for electronic identity cards by a wafer-thin margin," reports the Guardian, "in the second nationwide vote on the issue." In a referendum on Sunday, 50.4% of voters supported an electronic ID card, while 49.6% were against, confounding pollsters who had forecast stronger support for the "yes" vote. Turnout was 49.55%, higher than expected... [V]oters rejected an earlier version of the e-ID in 2021, largely over objections to the role of private companies in the system. In response to these concerns, the Swiss state will now provide the e-ID, which will be optional and free of charge... To ensure security the e-ID is linked to a single smartphone, users will have to get a new e-ID if they change their device... An ID card containing biometric data — fingerprints — will be available from the end of next year. Critics of the e-ID scheme raised data protection concerns and said it opened the door to mass surveillance. They also fear the voluntary scheme will become mandatory and disadvantage people without smartphones. The referendum was called after a coalition of rightwing and data-privacy parties collected more than 50,000 signatures against e-ID cards, triggering the vote. "To further ease privacy concerns, a particular authority seeking information on a person — such as proof of age or nationality, for example — will only be able to check for those specific details," notes the BBC: Supporters of the Swiss system say it will make life much easier for everyone, allowing a range of bureaucratic procedures — from getting a telephone contract to proving you are old enough to buy a bottle of wine — to happen quickly online. Opponents of digital ID cards, who gathered enough signatures to force another referendum on the issue, argue that the measure could still undermine individual privacy. They also fear that, despite the new restrictions on how data is collected and stored, it could still be used to track people and for marketing purposes. The BBC adds that the UK government also announced plans earlier this week to introduce its own digital ID, "which would be mandatory for employment. The proposed British digital ID would have fewer intended uses than the Swiss version, but has still raised concerns about privacy and data security." The Guardian reports: The referendum came soon after the UK government announced plans for a digital ID card, which would sit in the digital wallets of smartphones, using state-of-the-art encryption. More than 1.6 million people have signed a petition opposing e-ID cards, which would be mandatory for people working in the UK by 2029. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that "Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users' private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers' mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising... We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don't implicitly own your data — they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. Sharing your information in a smart way can also liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren't supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data — your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions. You should own it. You should be empowered by it... We're now at a new crossroads, one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media. The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday, so we must act with urgency. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer, bound by law, regulation and codes of conduct. Why can't the same frameworks be adopted for AI? We have learned from social media that power rests with the monopolies who control and harvest personal data. We can't let the same thing happen with AI. Berners-Lee also says "we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research," arguing that if we muster the political willpower, "we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders. "We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It's not too late." Berners-Lee has also written a new book titled This is For Everyone.

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