Comment on U of M taps Townsend as new economic development officer

The U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission has sued billionaire Elon Musk, saying he failed to disclose his ownership of Twitter stock in a timely manner in early 2022, before buying the social media site. As a result, the SEC alleges, Musk was able to underpay “by at least $150 million” for shares he bought after he should have disclosed his ownership of more than 5% of Twitter’s shares.

Lawyers for the New York Daily News, The New York Times, and other newspapers Wednesday asked a Manhattan judge to reject an effort by OpenAI and Microsoft to dismiss parts of their lawsuits accusing the tech giants of stealing reporters’ stories to train their AI products. The News, its affiliated newspapers in Media News Group and Tribune Publishing, The Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting have accused OpenAI and Microsoft of pilfering millions of their copyrighted news stories — without consent, credit, or compensation — to fuel lucrative AI products exploding in popularity like ChatGPT and Copilot. Microsoft and OpenAI don’t deny they depend on copyrighted material but say it’s their right under the fair use doctrine and that their products are “a powerful tool for human flourishing.”  The doctrine permits the use of copyrighted materials without permission under certain conditions, including transforming the work for educational purposes provided it does not hurt the current or future market for the materials. Within their motions to dismiss portions of the case — the topic of Wednesday’s hearing before Manhattan federal court Judge Sidney Stein — Microsoft and OpenAI did not challenge core portions of the case, ensuring the copyright infringement claims at the heart of the case can go forward. The motions respectively argue the newspapers failed to cite examples of infringement, provide evidence that the tech companies knowingly contributed to it, and didn’t file suit within the statute of limitations, among other arguments.

I almost missed it. Amid a bout of prime-time doomscrolling, a social media post reminded me there was something worth seeing in the sky. Mars disappeared behind the full Moon for a little more than an hour Monday night, an event visible across most of North America and parts of Africa. So I grabbed my camera, ran outside, and looked up just as Mars was supposed to emerge from the Moon's curved horizon.

The FBI said today that it removed Chinese malware from 4,258 US-based computers and networks by sending commands that forced the malware to use its "self-delete" function. The People's Republic of China (PRC) government paid the Mustang Panda group to develop a version of PlugX malware used to infect, control, and steal information from victim computers, the FBI said.

A day after announcing that CEO Patrick Spence is departing the company, Sonos revealed that chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin is also leaving. Bouvat-Merlin had the role since 2023. As first reported by Bloomberg, Sonos will not fill the chief product officer role. Instead, Tom Conrad, the interim CEO Sonos announced yesterday, will take on the role's responsibilities.

Eli Lilly and other drugmakers are reportedly planning to urge the Trump administration to pause Medicare drug-price negotiations that were put in place by the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). "They need to fix [the IRA]," Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks told Bloomberg at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. The results of the first round of IRA negotiations, announced in August, saw the list prices of 10 high-cost drugs get slashed by as much as 79 percent.