Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones and the New York Post have accused artificial intelligence start-up Perplexity of a “brazen scheme” to rip off their journalism for its AI-driven search engine in a lawsuit filed in New York on Monday.

The publishers, both subsidiaries of News Corp, alleged the AI start-up, which is seeking to raise up to $1 billion in a funding round that will value it at $8 billion, was “engaging in a massive amount of illegal copying” of their work.

The lawsuit said Perplexity is “diverting customers and critical revenues” away from the news publishers, whose titles include The Wall Street Journal, “freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce.”

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The iPad mini is a niche product, that much is clear. But for those who want an extra-small tablet, the launch of the sixth-generation iPad mini in 2021 was a red-letter day. For the first time in ages, the mini got close to the same kind of performance and features as its bigger brethren.

Then it didn’t get any updates for a couple of years. It was still a good tablet, but it wasn’t positioned to take advantage of new products or features on Apple’s docket like Apple Intelligence or the Apple Pencil Pro.

Enter the new 2024 refresh of the iPad mini, which releases October 23. For the most part, it’s the same as the previous generation—but Apple has laser-focused on a couple of tweaks to modernize the device just enough to keep it competitive in the company’s current ecosystem.

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BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—I've taken some time to process what happened on the mudflats of South Texas a little more than a week ago and relived the scene in my mind countless times.

With each replay, it's still as astonishing as it was when I saw it on October 13, standing on an elevated platform less than 4 miles away. It was surreal watching SpaceX's enormous 20-story-tall Super Heavy rocket booster plummeting through the sky before being caught back at its launch pad by giant mechanical arms.

This is the way, according to SpaceX, to enable a future where it's possible to rapidly reuse rockets, not too different from the way airlines turn around their planes between flights. This is required for SpaceX to accomplish the company's mission, set out by Elon Musk two decades ago, of building a settlement on Mars.

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T-Mobile and AT&T say US regulators should drop a plan to require unlocking of phones within 60 days of activation, claiming that locking phones to a carrier's network makes it possible to provide cheaper handsets to consumers. "If the Commission mandates a uniform unlocking policy, it is consumers—not providers—who stand to lose the most," T-Mobile alleged in an October 17 filing with the Federal Communications Commission.

The proposed rule has support from consumer advocacy groups who say it will give users more choice and lower their costs. T-Mobile has been criticized for locking phones for up to a year, which makes it impossible to use a phone on a rival's network. T-Mobile claims that with a 60-day unlocking rule, "consumers risk losing access to the benefits of free or heavily subsidized handsets because the proposal would force providers to reduce the line-up of their most compelling handset offers."

If the proposed rule is enacted, "T-Mobile estimates that its prepaid customers, for example, would see subsidies reduced by 40 percent to 70 percent for both its lower and higher-end devices, such as the Moto G, Samsung A15, and iPhone 12," the carrier said. "A handset unlocking mandate would also leave providers little choice but to limit their handset offers to lower cost and often lesser performing handsets."

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37Signals is not a company that makes its policy or management decisions quietly.

The productivity software company was an avowedly Mac-centric shop until Apple's move to kill home screen web apps (or Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) led the firm and its very-public-facing co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, to declare a " Return to Windows ," followed by a stew of Windows/Mac/Linux . The company waged a public battle with Apple over its App Store subscription policies, and the resulting outcry helped nudge Apple a bit . 37Signals has maintained an active blog for years , its co-founders and employees have written numerous business advice books , and its blog and social media posts regularly hit the front pages of Hacker News.

So when 37Signals decided to pull its seven cloud-based apps off Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2022 , it didn't do so quietly or without details. Back then, Hansson described his firm as paying "an at times almost absurd premium" for defense against "wild swings or towering peaks in usage." In early 2023, Hansson wrote that 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps.

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For Cherise Irons, chocolate, red wine, and aged cheeses are dangerous. So are certain sounds, perfumes and other strong scents, cold weather and thunderstorms. Stress and lack of sleep, too.

She suspects all of these things can trigger her migraine attacks, which manifest in a variety of ways: pounding pain in the back of her head, exquisite sensitivity to the slightest sound, even blackouts and partial paralysis.

Irons, 48, of Coral Springs, Florida, once worked as a school assistant principal. Now, she’s on disability due to her migraine. Irons has tried so many migraine medications she’s lost count—but none has helped for long. Even a few of the much-touted new drugs that have quelled episodes for many people with migraine have failed for Irons.

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The Star Trek franchise made its presence known with a special panel during New York City Comic-Con this past weekend. Among the highlights: Paramount unveiled a three-minute preview clip from the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and a clip from the upcoming final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks .

In other news, while the first season of new series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is still in production, Paramount has already renewed it for a second season and revealed that Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany will be a recurring guest on the series. Tig Notaro, Oded Fehr, and Mary Wiseman will reprise their Discovery roles as Jett Reno, Admiral Vance, and Sylvia Tilly, respectively. And Robert Picardo of Star Trek: Voyager will be back as The Doctor—in a show set 900 years after the hologram physician first appeared.

The studio also announced an official premiere date and poster art for the Star Trek: Discovery spinoff film Section 31 starring Michelle Yeoh: January 24, 2025. Miku Martineau plays a young Phillipa Georgiou in the film, which will give us the backstory for Georgiou's evil Mirror Universe counterpart, where she was a despotic emperor who murdered millions of her own people. Meanwhile, Yeoh's older Georgiou is tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets as part of a black ops group called Section 31 while dealing with all the blood she's spilled in her past.

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After rumors swirled that TikTok owner ByteDance had lost tens of millions after an intern sabotaged its AI models, ByteDance issued a statement this weekend hoping to silence all the social media chatter in China.

In a social media post translated and reviewed by Ars, ByteDance clarified "facts" about "interns destroying large model training" and confirmed that one intern was fired in August.

According to ByteDance, the intern had held a position in the company's commercial technology team but was fired for committing "serious disciplinary violations." Most notably, the intern allegedly "maliciously interfered with the model training tasks" for a ByteDance research project, ByteDance said.

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Today, Mercedes-Benz opened its first battery-recycling plant in Germany. The new plant will use an "integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical" approach to recycling electric vehicle batteries and expects to recover more than 96 percent of the valuable minerals and metals used in EV batteries.

"Mercedes-Benz has set itself the goal of building the most desirable cars in a sustainable way. As a pioneer in automotive engineering, Europe's first integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical battery recycling factory marks a key milestone toward enhancing raw-materials sustainability," said Ola Källenius, chairman of the board of management Mercedes-Benz Group. "Together with our partners from industry and science, we are sending a strong signal of innovative strength for sustainable electric mobility and value creation in Germany and Europe."

The plant, which is located in Kuppenheim, Germany, shreds the battery modules then uses a mechanical process to separate plastics, copper, aluminum, and iron. The resulting "black mass" is then subjected to a hydrometallurgical process that extracts the cobalt, nickel, and lithium. The plant runs entirely on electricity generated by solar panels and has an annual capacity of 2,756 tons (2,500 tonnes). While this is not especially high, Mercedes says it will use the knowledge it gains to scale up volumes over time.

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