Ship Traffic, Oct. 21

Enlarge (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko via Getty Images) OpenAI truly does not want you to know what its latest AI model is "thinking." Since the company launched its "Strawberry" AI model family last week, touting so-called reasoning abilities with o1-preview and o1-mini, OpenAI has been sending out warning emails and threats of bans to any user who tries to probe into how the model works. Unlike previous AI models from OpenAI, such as GPT-4o, the company trained o1 specifically to work through a step-by-step problem-solving process before generating an answer.

Enlarge / The Fifty-Eight holes board from Çapmalı. (credit: W. Crist et al., 2024) An ancient board game known as Hounds and Jackals has long been believed to have originated in Egypt. However, according to a paper published in the European Journal of Archaeology, a version of the game board found in present-day Azerbaijan might date back even earlier, suggesting that the game originated in Asia. As previously reported, there is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: Senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example, or a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum ("game of mercenaries") favored by Roman legions.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A supply chain failure that compromises Secure Boot protections on computing devices from across the device-making industry extends to a much larger number of models than previously known, including those used in ATMs, point-of-sale terminals, and voting machines. The debacle was the result of non-production test platform keys used in hundreds of device models for more than a decade.

Enlarge / A recall notice is posted next to Boar's Head meats that are displayed at a Safeway store on July 31, 2024, in San Rafael, California. (credit: Getty | Justin Sullivan) The Boar's Head deli-meat plant at the epicenter of a nationwide Listeria outbreak that killed nine people so far harbored the deadly germ in a common area of the facility deemed "low risk" for Listeria.

Enlarge / Andrew J. Pincus, attorney for TikTok and ByteDance, leaves the E. Barrett Prettyman US Court House with members of his legal team as the U. S. Court of Appeals hears oral arguments in the case TikTok Inc. v. Merrick Garland on September 16 in Washington, DC. (credit: Kevin Dietsch / Staff | Getty Images News) The fight to keep TikTok operating unchanged in the US reached an appeals court Monday, where TikTok and US-based creators teamed up to defend one of the world's most popular apps from a potential US ban. TikTok lawyer Andrew Pincus kicked things off by warning a three-judge panel that a law targeting foreign adversaries that requires TikTok to divest from its allegedly China-controlled owner, ByteDance, is "unprecedented" and could have "staggering" effects on "the speech of 170 million Americans." Pincus argued that the US government was "for the first time in history" attempting to ban speech by a specific US speaker—namely, TikTok US, the US-based entity that allegedly curates the content that Americans see on the app.

Enlarge / Apple's M3 Max-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro. New Pro laptops and some desktops could be on tap for later this fall. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Apple's newest iPhones and Apple Watches don't come out until later this week, but the rumor mill is already indicating that Apple is planning a product announcement for October to refresh some of the products that didn't get a mention at the iPhone event.