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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal: Sending drones and robots into battle, rather than humans, has become a tenet of modern warfare. Nowhere does that make more sense than in the frozen expanses of the Arctic. But the closer you get to the North Pole, the less useful cutting-edge technology becomes. Magnetic storms distort satellite signals; frigid temperatures drain batteries or freeze equipment in minutes; navigation systems lack reference points on snowfields. During a seven-nation polar exercise in Canada earlier this year to test equipment worth millions of dollars, the U.S. military's all-terrain arctic vehicles broke down after 30 minutes because hydraulic fluids congealed in the cold. Swedish soldiers participating in the exercise were handed $20,000 night-vision optics that broke because the aluminum in the goggles couldn't handle the minus 40 degree Fahrenheit conditions.... An arctic conflict would force war planners back to basics. Extreme cold makes the most common components brittle. Low temperatures alter the physical properties of rubber, causing seals to lose their elasticity and leak. Traces of water or humidity freeze into ice crystals that can scratch pumps and create blockages. Wires should be insulated with silicone rather than PVC, which can crack. Oil and other lubricants thicken and congeal. In most standard hydraulic systems, fluid becomes syrupy and can affect everything from aircraft controls to missile launchers and radar masts. A single freeze-up can knock out an entire weapons platform or immobilize a convoy. Even the Aurora Borealis interferes with radio communications and satellite-navigation systems, according to the article.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company's safety strategy. It comes at the end of a year that's seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatGPT's impacts on users' mental health, including a few wrongful death lawsuits. In a post on X about the position, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledgedthat the "potential impact of models on mental health was something we saw a preview of in 2025," along with other "real challenges" that have arisen alongside models' capabilities. The Head of Preparedness "is a critical role at an important time," he said. Per the job listing, the Head of Preparedness (who will make $555K, plus equity), "will lead the technical strategy and execution of OpenAI's Preparedness framework, our framework explaining OpenAI's approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm." "These questions are hard," Altman posted on X.com, "and there is little precedent; a lot of ideas that sound good have some real edge cases... This will be a stressful job and you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately." The listing says OpenAI's Head of Preparedness "will lead a small, high-impact team to drive core Preparedness research, while partnering broadly across Safety Systems and OpenAI for end-to-end adoption and execution of the framework." They're looking for someone "comfortable making clear, high-stakes technical judgments under uncertainty."

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An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this story from Interesting Engineering: Cybersecurity specialists from the research group DARKNAVY have demonstrated how modern humanoid robots can be compromised and weaponised through weaknesses in their AI-driven control systems. In a controlled test, the team demonstrated that a commercially available humanoid robot could be hijacked with nothing more than spoken commands, exposing how voice-based interaction can serve as an attack vector rather than a safeguard, reports Yicaiglobal... Using short-range wireless communication, the hijacked machine transmitted the exploit to another robot that was not connected to the network. Within minutes, this second robot was also taken over, demonstrating how a single breach could cascade through a group of machines. To underline the real-world implications, the researchers issued a hostile command during the demonstration. The robot advanced toward a mannequin on stage and struck it, illustrating the potential for physical harm.

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Phoronix reports on "an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list" proposing "a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the 'Modern Standby' functionality found with Microsoft Windows..." Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain connected to the network and appear "sleeping" but will allow for instant wake-up for notifications, music playback, and other functionality. The display is off, the network remains online, and background tasks can wake-up the system if needed with Microsoft Modern Standby... "This series introduces a new runtime standby ABI to allow firing Modern Standby firmware notifications that modify hardware appearance from userspace without suspending the kernel," [according to the email about the proposed patch series]. "This allows userspace to set the inactivity state of the device so that it looks like it is asleep (e.g., flashing the power button) while still being able to perform basic computations..." Those interested can see the RFC patch series for the work in its current form, in particular the documentation patch outlines the proposed /sys/power/standby interface.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk's Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield. Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called "zone-effect" weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds of thousands of high-density pellets, potentially disabling multiple satellites at once but also risking catastrophic collateral damage to other orbiting systems. Analysts who haven't seen the findings say they doubt such a weapon could work without causing uncontrollable chaos in space for companies and countries, including Russia and its ally China, that rely on thousands of orbiting satellites for communications, defense and other vital needs. Such repercussions, including risks to its own space systems, could steer Moscow away from deploying or using such a weapon, analysts said. "I don't buy it. Like, I really don't," said Victoria Samson, a space-security specialist at the Secure World Foundation who leads the Colorado-based nongovernmental organization's annual study of anti-satellite systems. "I would be very surprised, frankly, if they were to do something like that." [Later they suggested the research might just be experimental.] But the commander of the Canadian military's Space Division, Brig. Gen. Christopher Horner, said such Russian work cannot be ruled out in light of previous U.S. allegations that Russia also has been pursuing an indiscriminate nuclear, space-based weapon. "I can't say I've been briefed on that type of system. But it's not implausible," he said... The French military's Space Command said in a statement to the AP that it could not comment on the findings but said, "We can inform you that Russia has, in recent years, been multiplying irresponsible, dangerous, and even hostile actions in space." The article also points out that this month Russia "said it has fielded a new ground-based missile system, the S-500, which is capable of hitting low-orbit targets..."

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NVIDIA has been "gradually dropping support for older videocards," notes Hackaday, "with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed." "What's more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.?" On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell or similarly unsupported GPU will result in the new driver failing to load and thus the user getting kicked back to the CLI to try and sort things back out there. This issue is summarized by [Brodie Robertson] in a recent video. "Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support," explains an announcement on the Arch Linux mailing list. But Hackaday points out that using the legacy option "breaks Steam as it relies on official NVIDIA dependencies, which requires an additional series of hacks to hopefully restore this functionality. "Fortunately the Arch Wiki provides a starting point on what to do."

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Waymo explained this week that its self-driving car technology is already "designed to handle dark traffic signals," and successfully handled over 7,000 last Saturday during San Francisco's long power outage, properly treating those intersections as four-way stops. But while during the long outage their cars sometimes experienced a "backlog" when waiting for confirmation checks (leading them to freeze in intersections), Waymo said Tuesday they're implementing "fleet-wide updates" to provide their self-driving cars "specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively." Ironically, two days later Waymo paused their service again in San Francisco. But this time it was due to a warning from the National Weather Service about a powerful storm bringing the possibility of flash flooding and power outages, reports CNBC. They add that Waymo "didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, or say whether regulators required its service pause on Thursday given the flash flood warnings." And they also note Waymo still faces criticism over last Saturday's incident: The former CEO of San Francisco's Municipal Transit Authority, Jeffrey Tumlin, told CNBC that regulators and robotaxi companies can take valuable lessons away from the chaos that arose with Waymo vehicles during the PG&E power outages last week. "I think we need to be asking 'what is a reasonable number of [autonomous vehicles] to have on city streets, by time of day, by geography and weather?'" Tumlin said. He also suggested regulators may want to set up a staged system that will allow autonomous vehicle companies to rapidly scale their operations, provided they meet specific tests. One of those tests, he said, would be how quickly a company can get their autonomous vehicles safely out of the way of traffic if they encounter something that is confusing like a four-way intersection with no functioning traffic lights. Cities and regulators should also seek more data from robotaxi companies about the planned or actual performance of their vehicles during expected emergencies such as blackouts, floods or earthquakes, Tumlin said.

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The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers "enriched" license pages with "relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support". So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license: mit (1.5M) apache-2-0 (344k) bsd-3-clause (214k) bsd-2-clause (128k) gpl-2-0 (76k) gpl-3-0 (55k) isc-license-txt (35k) lgpl-3-0 (34k) OFL-1.1 (31k) lgpl-2-1 (24k) . . From the Open Source Initiative's announcement: Please note that these are aggregated pageviews from actual humans along the year of 2025... Actual humans (presumably) because the number of requests by bots or crawlers is several orders of magnitude higher (e.g. requests just for the MIT license are on the range of 10M per month). We do provide an API service that gives access to the canonical list of OSI Approved Licenses — this is a very new service, which hopefully will be adopted by automated requests from CI/CD pipelines. One final observation is that the number of human pageviews is likely higher because we are using Plausible as our data source and a high percentage of our target audience uses Ad blockers, which by design are not accounted by Plausible. Users from China are also likely undercounted by Plausible for the same reason.

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The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima's nuclear plant "was the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986," CNN remembers. But this week Japanese authorities "have approved a decision to restart the world's biggest nuclear power plant," reports CNN, "which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster." Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata prefectural assembly, home to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, approved a bill on Monday that clears the way for utility company Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to restart one of the plant's seven reactors. The company plans to bring the No. 6 reactor back online around January 20, Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported... Following the [2011] disaster, Japan shut down all 54 of its nuclear power stations including Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, which sits in the coastal and port region of Niigata about 320 kilometers (200 miles) north of Tokyo on Japan's main island of Honshu. Japan has since restarted 14 of the 33 nuclear reactors that remain operable, according to the World Nuclear Association. The Niigata plant will be the first to reopen under the operation of TEPCO, the company that ran the Fukushima Daiichi power station. It has been trying to reassure residents of the restart plan is safe... About 60-70% of Japan's power generation comes from imported fossil fuels, which cost the country about 10.7 trillion yen ($68 billion) last year alone... Japan is the world's fifth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, after China, the United States, India and Russia, according to the International Energy Agency. But it has committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050, and renewable energy was at the center of its latest energy plan published earlier this year, with a push for greater investments in solar and wind. The country's energy demands are also expected to increase in the coming years due to a boom in energy-hungry data centers that power AI infrastructure. To achieve its energy and climate goals, Japan aims to double the share of nuclear power in its electricity mix to 20% by 2040... On its website, TEPCO said Kashiwazaki-Kariwa had undergone multiple inspections and upgrades and that the company had learned "the lessons of Fukushima." The company said new seawalls and watertight doors would provide "stronger protection against tsunamis" and that mobile generators and more fire trucks would be on hand for "cooling support" in an emergency. It also said the plant now had "upgraded filtering systems designed to control the spread of radioactive materials." A survey published by the prefecture in October "found 60% of residents did not think conditions for the restart had been met," reports Reuters, adding that "Nearly 70% were worried about TEPCO operating the plant."

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An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester writes that "many" of his colleagues in physics "have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human." And it's a mystery that: - "Challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries" - "May even help redefine the field for the next generation" - "Could answer essential questions about AI." In short, while physicists have favored a "reductionist" philosophy about the fundamental laws controlling the universe (energy, mattery, space, and time), "long-promised 'theories of everything' such as string theory, have not borne significant fruit: There are, however, ways other than reductionism to think about what's fundamental in the universe. Beginning in the 1980s, physicists (along with researchers in other fields) began developing new mathematical tools to study what's called "complexity" — systems in which the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions. Complexity, by contrast, recognizes that once lots of particles come together to produce macroscopic things — such as organisms — knowing everything about particles isn't enough to understand reality... Physicists have always been good at capturing the essential aspects of a system and casting those essentials in the language of mathematics... Now those skills must be brought to bear on an age-old question that is only just getting its proper due: What is life? Using these skills, physicists — working together with representatives of all the other disciplines that make up complexity science — may crack open the question of how life formed on Earth billions of years ago and how it might have formed on the distant alien worlds we can now explore with cutting-edge telescopes. Just as important, understanding why life, as an organized system, is different at a fundamental level from all the other stuff in the universe may help astronomers design new strategies for finding it in places bearing little resemblance to Earth. Analyzing life — no matter how alien — as a self-organizing information-driven system may provide the key to detecting biosignatures on planets hundreds of light-years away. Closer to home, studying the nature of life is likely essential to fully understanding intelligence — and building artificial versions. Throughout the current AI boom, researchers and philosophers have debated whether and when large language models might achieve general intelligence or even become conscious — or whether, in fact, some already have. The only way to properly assess such claims is to study, by any means possible, the sole agreed-upon source of general intelligence: life. Bringing the new physics of life to problems of AI may not only help researchers predict what software engineers can build; it may also reveal the limits of trying to capture life's essential character in silicon.

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On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero. The two donations "are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization," the FSF said in a statement. "The donors wish to remain anonymous," according to the FSF's statement: The organization is in its annual winter fundraising drive, currently at three-quarters of its $400,000 USD winter goal, and will now switch its focus to a member drive thanks in part to these donations... The donation will support the organization's technical team and infrastructure capacity, as well as strengthen its campaigns, education, licensing, and advocacy initiatives, and future opportunities. The FSF is seeking donations until year-end after which they aim to gain 100 associate members through its year-end fundraising ending January 16. The FSF's executive director said the donations prove "that software freedom is recognized more and more as a principal issue today, at the core of several other social movements people care about like privacy, ownership, and the right to repair... "We are proudly supported by a large variety of contributors who care about digital rights. All donations matter, whether $5 or $500,000."

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Those brief freezes and audio hiccups that plague video calls are not the benign nuisances that most people assume them to be, according to a new study published in Nature that found glitches during virtual interactions can meaningfully damage hiring prospects, reduce trust in healthcare providers and even correlate with lower chances of being granted parole. Researchers from Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City conducted ten studies examining glitches across thousands of participants and real-world parole hearing transcripts. The core finding is that glitches harm interpersonal judgments because they break the illusion of face-to-face contact, triggering what psychologists call "uncanniness" -- a strange, creepy, or eerie feeling typically associated with humanoid robots or CGI characters that look almost but not quite human. In one experiment, participants watching a telehealth pitch chose to work with a health professional 77% of the time when no glitches occurred, but only 61% when brief freezes were present. The job interview studies found similar patterns, and when researchers examined 472 Kentucky parole hearings conducted over Zoom, they found that inmates were granted parole 60% of the time in glitch-free hearings versus 48% when transcripts indicated technical problems had occurred. The researchers ruled out simpler explanations like mere disruption or comprehension difficulties. Glitches inserted during natural pauses in speech -- where no information was lost -- still damaged evaluations. And critically, when participants watched presentations where a shared screen froze rather than a human face, glitches had no effect on judgments at all. The uncanniness only emerged when the technology broke the simulation of sitting across from another person.

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Taiwan's iPass has released a limited-edition prepaid payment card shaped exactly like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The company, perhaps rightly so, felt the need to include a warning on the product listing: "This product only has a card function and does not have a 3.5mm [sic] disk function, please note before purchasing." The NFC-enabled novelty card went on sale starting Christmas Eve and comes in black or yellow finishes at 1:1 scale. It works across Taiwan's public transport network -- buses, trains, subways, taxis, and bike rentals -- as well as convenience stores like 7-Eleven and FamilyMart, supermarkets, pharmacies, and fast-food chains including McDonald's and Burger King. The floppy disk joins an increasingly absurd lineup of iPass form factors. Previous releases have included, Tom's Hardware reports, a Motorola DynaTAC replica, model trains, a flip-flop, an LED-lit Godzilla snow globe, and a blood bag. Taiwan's PCHome24 online store currently lists 838 different iPass card designs. A standard card costs NT$100 (about $3.20) and comes without stored value.

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Toll roads are expanding across the U.S. as the traditional gas tax funding model for highways collapses. Indiana became the first state to authorize tolls on all of its existing interstate highways when Governor Mike Braun signed legislation in June. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised since 1993. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27 billion more on road maintenance than it collected from fuel taxes, and at state and local levels, fuel taxes covered barely a quarter of road spending. Drivers currently pay to access just 6,300 miles of America's roughly 160,000 miles of highway. Most tolling projects have enjoyed bipartisan support -- Florida has more toll roads by distance than any other state, and Texas is second. But as Republicans embrace populism, the politics are shifting. In New York, almost all state Republicans fought congestion pricing, and President Donald Trump attempted to shut it down after taking office. Some Republicans now want to buy back pay-to-drive roads and make them free.

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The first-ever commercial rocket launched at Brazil's Alcantara Space Center crashed soon after liftoff late earlier this week, dealing a blow to Brazilian aerospace ambitions and shares of South Korean satellite launch company Innospace. From a report: The rocket began its vertical trajectory as planned after liftoff [Monday] at 10:13 p.m. local time (0113 GMT) but fell to the ground after something went wrong 30 seconds into its flight, Innospace CEO Kim Soo-jong said in a letter to shareholders. The craft crashed within a pre-designated safety zone and did not harm anyone, he said. Brazil's air force said firefighters were sent to analyze the wreckage and impact zone. "We are deeply sorry that we failed to meet the expectations of our shareholders who supported our first commercial launch," the CEO wrote in the letter, which was posted on the company's website on December 23. Innospace shares plunged nearly 29% in Seoul in its biggest daily drop and heaviest daily trading volume since its July 2024 listing.

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After more than two decades of promises and false starts in the mesh networking space, the smart home standards that Apple, Amazon and Google have each championed are finally set to escape their respective brand silos and work together in a single unified network. Starting January 1, 2026, Thread 1.4 becomes the Thread Group's only certified standard, bringing a crucial new capability called credential sharing. Devices from different manufacturers can now securely join the same mesh network -- an Amazon Echo Show and an Apple HomePod mini in the same house will both be able to control the same Nanoleaf lightbulb. This marks a significant departure from Thread 1.3, released in 2022, where each brand's mesh network connected only to devices from that same brand. The Thread Group launched in 2014 as a coalition led by Arm, Google's Nest Labs, and Samsung, later welcoming Apple and Amazon into the fold. Thread 1.4 handles low-power smart home devices and sensors, but homes also need high-bandwidth connections for laptops and phones. Wi-Fi 7 mesh serves that purpose and the Matter protocol acts as a translation layer between the two different mesh networks. Both Wi-Fi 7 and Matter arrived in products on store shelves in 2025.

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The global push to put autonomous taxis on public roads is accelerating as ride-hailing companies and technology firms advance from pilot programs toward limited commercial rollouts in cities across China, the United States, Europe and the Middle East. WeRide and Uber launched Level 4 fully driverless robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi in November and began offering robotaxi passenger rides on Uber's platform in Dubai the following month. Amazon's Zoox started offering free rides to select early users in parts of San Francisco in November after launching its autonomous ride-hailing service on the Las Vegas Strip in September. Alphabet's Waymo now operates services in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles -- the latter two having launched in June and November 2024 respectively. Baidu's Apollo Go has been operating without safety drivers in Chongqing and Wuhan since securing permits in August 2022 and has since expanded to Shenzhen and Beijing. Pony.ai launched paid robotaxi services in Guangzhou in February and Shanghai in August. Tesla began a limited paid robotaxi rollout in Austin, Texas in June using Model Y SUVs, though the vehicles still require a safety monitor onboard. The expansion will continue in 2026: Waymo plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service in London, and Momenta is preparing a luxury robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi through a partnership with Mercedes-Benz and UAE taxi operator Lumo.

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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who was confirmed by the Senate just last week after a turbulent nomination process that stretched across most of 2025, said Friday that the United States will return to the moon within President Donald Trump's second term. Isaacman made the comments during an interview on CNBC, calling Trump's recommitment to lunar exploration key to unlocking what he described as an "orbital economy." He said: "We want to have that opportunity to explore and realize the scientific, economic and national security potential on the moon," he said. The potential opportunities include establishing space data centers and infrastructure on the moon, as well as mining Helium-3, a rare gas embedded in the lunar surface that could serve as fuel for fusion power. NASA is currently working on its Artemis campaign alongside SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Boeing. Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocated $9.9 billion to the agency earlier this year. The Artemis II mission, NASA's first crewed test flight using the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, is expected to launch in the near future. SpaceX is contracted to build the lunar landing system for the subsequent Artemis III mission. Isaacman was first nominated by Trump in December 2024 but had his nomination pulled in May over unspecified "prior associations." Trump renominated him in November.

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Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users' mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday. From a report: "Keeping New Yorkers safe has been my top priority since taking office, and that includes protecting our kids from the potential harms of social media features that encourage excessive use," Hochul said in a statement. This month Australia imposed a social media ban for children under 16. New York joins states like California and Minnesota that have similar social media laws. The New York law includes platforms that offer "addictive feeds," auto play or infinite scroll, according to the legislation. The law applies to conduct occurring partly or wholly in New York but not when the platform is accessed by users physically outside the state.

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GitHub has disabled Rockchip's Media Process Platform repository after an FFmpeg developer filed a DMCA takedown notice, nearly two years after the open-source project first publicly accused the Chinese chipmaker of license violations. The notice, filed December 18, claims Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code from FFmpeg's libavcodec library -- including decoders for H.265, AV1, and VP9 formats -- stripped the original copyright notices, falsely claimed authorship and redistributed the code under Apache's permissive license rather than the original LGPL. FFmpeg first called out Rockchip in February 2024 for "blatantly copy and pasting FFmpeg code" into its driver, but the chipmaker's last response suggested no intention to resolve the matter. The DMCA notice requests either removal of the infringing files or restoration of proper attribution and an LGPL-compatible license.

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