A school district in Massachusetts was sued by a student's parents after the boy was punished for using an artificial intelligence chatbot to complete an assignment. The lawsuit says the Hingham High School student handbook did not include a restriction on the use of AI.

"They told us our son cheated on a paper, which is not what happened," Jennifer Harris told WCVB . "They basically punished him for a rule that doesn't exist."

Jennifer and her husband, Dale, filed the lawsuit in Plymouth County Superior Court, and the case was then moved to US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Defendants include the superintendent, principal, a teacher, the history department head, and the Hingham School Committee.

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It will soon be easy to "click to cancel" subscriptions after the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) adopted a final rule on Wednesday that makes it challenging for businesses to opt out of easy cancellation methods.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” FTC chair Lina Khan said in a press release. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

The heart of the new rule requires businesses to provide simple ways to cancel subscriptions. Under the rule, any subscription that can be signed up for online must be able to be canceled online. And cancellation paths for in-person sign-ups must be just as easy, offered either by phone or online.

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On Tuesday, Google announced that it had made a power purchase agreement for electricity generated by a small modular nuclear reactor design that hasn't even received regulatory approval yet. Today, it's Amazon's turn. The company's Amazon Web Services (AWS) group has announced three different investments, including one targeting a different startup that has its own design for small, modular nuclear reactors—one that has not yet received regulatory approval.

Unlike Google's deal, which is a commitment to purchase power should the reactors ever be completed, Amazon will lay out some money upfront as part of the agreements. We'll take a look at the deals and technology that Amazon is backing before analyzing why companies are taking a risk on unproven technologies.

Money for utilities and a startup

Two of Amazon's deals are with utilities that serve areas where it already has a significant data center footprint. One of these is Energy Northwest, which is an energy supplier that sends power to utilities in the Pacific Northwest. Amazon is putting up the money for Energy Northwest to study the feasibility of adding small modular reactors to its Columbia Generating Station, which currently houses a single, large reactor. In return, Amazon will get the right to purchase power from an initial installation of four small modular reactors. The site could potentially support additional reactors, which Energy Northwest would be able to use to meet demands from other users.

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Winamp, through its Belgian owner Llama Group, posted the source for its "Legacy Player Code" on September 24 so that developers could "contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve."

Less than a month later, that repository has been entirely deleted , after it either bumped up against or broke its strange hodgepodge of code licenses, seemingly revealed the source code for other non-open software packages, and made a pretty bad impression on the open-source community.

"Collaborative" licensing

Winamp's code was made available in late September, but not very open. Under the " Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0.1 ," you may not "distribute modified versions of the software" in source or binary, and "only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications." Anyone may contribute, in other words, but only to Winamp's benefit.

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On Monday, Hong Kong police announced the arrest of 27 people involved in a romance scam operation that used AI face-swapping techniques to defraud victims of $46 million through fake cryptocurrency investments, reports the South China Morning Post . The scam ring created attractive female personas for online dating, using unspecified tools to transform their appearances and voices.

Those arrested included six recent university graduates allegedly recruited to set up fake cryptocurrency trading platforms. An unnamed source told the South China Morning Post that five of the arrested people carry suspected ties to Sun Yee On , a large organized crime group (often called a "triad") in Hong Kong and China.

"The syndicate presented fabricated profit transaction records to victims, claiming substantial returns on their investments," said Fang Chi-kin, head of the New Territories South regional crime unit.

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It's been exactly one year since the initial announcement of the Analogue 3D , an HD-upscaled, FPGA-powered Nintendo 64 in the tradition of Analogue's long-running line of high-end retro machines . Today, Analogue is revealing more details about the hardware, which will sell for $250 and plans to ship in the first quarter of 2025 (a slight delay from the previously announced 2024 release plan).

Like previous Analogue devices, the Analogue 3D uses a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to simulate the actual logic gates found in original N64 hardware. That helps ensure 100 percent compatibility with the entire N64 cartridge library across all regions, Analogue promises, and should avoid the long-standing accuracy and lag issues inherent to most software-based emulation of the N64.

To get that level of fidelity, the Analogue team spent four years programming an Altera Cyclone FPGA with a full 220,000 logic elements. That's a big step up from previous Analogue devices—the Analogue Pocket's main FPGA board featured just 49,000 logic elements three years ago. But the Analogue Pocket also included a second, 15,000-logic-element FPGA, which allowed it to run an expanding list of openFPGA cores to support games from other classic consoles.

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Christopher Ren does a solid Elon Musk impression.

Ren is a product manager at Reality Defender, a company that makes tools to combat AI disinformation. During a video call last week, I watched him use some viral GitHub code and a single photo to generate a simplistic deepfake of Elon Musk that maps onto his own face. This digital impersonation was to demonstrate how the startup’s new AI detection tool could work. As Ren masqueraded as Musk on our video chat, still frames from the call were actively sent over to Reality Defender’s custom model for analysis, and the company’s widget on the screen alerted me to the fact that I was likely looking at an AI-generated deepfake and not the real Elon.

Sure, I never really thought we were on a video call with Musk, and the demonstration was built specifically to make Reality Defender's early-stage tech look impressive, but the problem is entirely genuine. Real-time video deepfakes are a growing threat for governments, businesses, and individuals. Recently, the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations mistakenly took a video call with someone pretending to be a Ukrainian official . An international engineering company lost millions of dollars earlier in 2024 when one employee was tricked by a deepfake video call. Also, romance scams targeting everyday individuals have employed similar techniques.

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Windows 11 24H2 has been released to the general public , and even though it's still called Windows 11 and still looks like Windows 11, it's probably the operating system's most significant update since its release in October of 2021.

You may or may not be excited about some of the new generative AI features, but it has a lot of other things in it, too. And even if you're not in love with Windows or the current trajectory of Windows, there are still plenty of places you need to use it anyway.

We've pulled together all kinds of resources to create a comprehensive guide to installing and upgrading to Windows 11. This includes advice and some step-by-step instructions for turning on officially required features like your TPM and Secure Boot, as well as official and unofficial ways to skirt the system-requirement checks on "unsupported" PCs, because Microsoft is not your parent and therefore cannot tell you what to do.

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Amazon is giving its entire Kindle e-reader lineup a shakeup today, at least by the slow-moving and relatively placid standards of the e-reader market. The company is announcing a major refresh to the pen-centric Kindle Scribe , a screen-size bump for the mainstream Kindle Paperwhite , and small tweaks to the basic Kindle —a rare simultaneous refresh for devices that the company usually updates one or two at a time.

In addition to the monochrome e-readers, Amazon added its first color e-reader to the lineup today. The new Kindle Colorsoft , covered in more detail here , looks almost identical to the new Paperwhite and launches on October 30th for $279.99.

Enhanced e-readers

Going from most to least significant: The new Kindle Scribe's upgrades are mostly meant to make it a more paper-like writing experience. It has a new textured screen coating, a white screen bezel that blends into the screen (we've also seen this deployed in tablets like the reMarkable Paper Pro ), and a tweaked Premium Pen accessory with a "new soft-tipped eraser" that feels more like an actual pencil eraser.

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