Aidin Vaziri reports via the San Francisco Chronicle: Epic Games has initiated layoffs at Bandcamp, the Oakland-based online music distribution platform it recently sold to Songtradr. Among those affected were members of Bandcamp Daily, the platform's editorial arm, as confirmed by former staff members on social media channels. "About half the company was laid off today," senior editor JJ Skolnik announced on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday morning. This move comes weeks after Songtradr's acquisition of Bandcamp was announced on Sept. 28. The company did not disclose how many employees were impacted by the cuts.

Songtradr, a Santa Monica-based licensing company, had previously stated that not all Bandcamp employees would be absorbed after the platform's sale from Epic, citing the service's financial situation as the basis for workforce adjustments. [...] The sale comes as the company cuts around 16% of its workforce, about 830 employees, in the face of lower profits that were outpaced by growing expenses.

Devin Ulibarri, the Free Software Foundation's outreach and communications coordinator, writes up an event he describes as meeting with some old and new friends: On Sunday, October 1, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) hosted a hackday to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the GNU Project. Folks came from both near and far to join in the festivities at FSF headquarters, Boston, MA... Sadi moma bela loza, the Bulgarian melody from which The Free Software Song is set, could be heard faintly playing in a nearby room, its distinctive odd-metered tune performed by a fully-liberated X200...

All in all, the event succeeded in our goal of welcoming both long-time members as well as introducing new people to free software and our cause. A few college students from local universities, for example, were able to ask questions seeking to better understand free software licenses and GNU Project history. We received multiple requests from attendees to host similar events again in the near future. And one parent, whose son played NetHack at the event, reported that, the following morning, his son asked to go to the FSF office after school to play it again. When playing he mastered the "vi" movement keys immediately. We hope they serve him well...!

Happy hacking and please stay tuned for more FSF-hosted events, including LibrePlanet 2024!

"If we carry on the way we're going, we're going to have to concrete the whole planet just to store the data that we're generating," explains a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge in a new video.

Fortunately, "A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music," explains a Microsoft Research web page about "Project Silica". (Data is retrieved by a high-speed, computer-controlled microscope from a library of glass disks storing data in three-dimensional pixels called voxels): Magnetic storage, although prevalent, is problematic. Its limited lifespan necessitates frequent re-copying, increasing energy consumption and operational costs over time. "Magnetic technology has a finite lifetime," says Ant Rowstron, Distinguished Engineer, Project Silica. "You must keep copying it over to new generations of media. A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years. But once that lifetime is up, you've got to copy it over. And that, frankly, is both difficult and tremendously unsustainable if you think of all that energy and resource we're using."

Project Silica aims to break this cycle. Developed under the aegis of Microsoft Research, it can store massive amounts of data in glass plates roughly the size of a drink coaster and preserve the data for thousands of years. Richard Black, Research Director, Project Silica, adds, "This technology allows us to write data knowing it will remain unchanged and secure, which is a significant step forward in sustainable data storage." Project Silica's goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change.

Project Silica is focused on pioneering data storage in quartz glass in partnership with the Microsoft Azure team, seeking more sustainable ways to archive data. This relationship is symbiotic, as Project Silica uses Azure AI to decode data stored in glass, making reading and writing faster and allowing more data storage... The library is passive, with no electricity in any of the storage units. The complexity is within the robots that charge as they idle inside the lab, awakening when data is needed... Initially, the laser writing process was inefficient, but after years of refinement, the team can now store several TB in a single glass plate that could last 10,000 years. For a sense of scale, each plate could store around 3,500 movies. Or enough non-stop movies to play for over half a year without repeating. A glass plate could hold the entire text of War and Peace — one of the longest novels ever written — about 875,000 times.
And most importantly, it can store data in a fraction of the space of a datacenter...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Kirschey for sharing the article.

The singer known as Tomberlin says their first five years in the music industry may have been a net loss, according to MarketWatch. Selling "merch[andise]" like t-shirts "is what really is covering your costs and hopefully helping you make, like, an actual profit."

And then... After being told she would have to hand over more than 40% of the money she collected from selling T-shirts and other items, Tomberlin refused to sell her merchandise at the venue and publicly spoke about a practice she calls robbery — venues taking cuts from bands' merchandise sales... Other musicians are also speaking out about the practice, and their complaints seem to be having an effect. Industry giant Live Nation Entertainment Inc. announced recently that it would stop collecting merch fees at nearly 80 of the smaller clubs it owns and operates and provide all bands that play at those venues with an additional $1,500 in gas cards and cash.

Musicians who spoke with MarketWatch remain unsatisfied, however. Because of the way the announcement is phrased, many think merch fees at Live Nation clubs are only being paused until the end of the year. The musicians said they also wonder about the roughly 250 other Live Nation concert facilities, as well as the hundreds of venues owned by other companies. A Live Nation spokesperson told MarketWatch the change is "open-ended."

[...] As Tomberlin continues on her current tour, she wonders if she will be able to make a profitable career in music. Of all her ways of earning money, streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music provide "the least amount of money," she said, and with tours not leaving her with any cash at the end, she feels that even modest ambitions are out of reach.
Musician Laura Jane Grace is even soliciting signers for an online petition demanding venues stop taking cuts of the musicians' merchandise sales...

Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for sharing the news.

Hugh Morris writes via the New York Times: When the musician and artist Paul Purgas was invited in 2017 by the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, to play some of the music he'd found in its archives that year, he was initially very keen. These were tapes that had been hidden from the public for decades; they proved the existence of a fertile avenue for electronic music in 1960s and '70s India, and he was determined for people to hear them. But as he went to use the institute's aging reel-to-reel machine, he got a nasty surprise: an electric shock. "I think that sobered me up," he said in an interview. The project, he realized, was about to become "a bit of a lifetime journey."

Purgas, 43, is a London-based sound artist and curator, and half of the electronic music duo Emptyset. Initially, he had been on the trail of the lost Moog synthesizer that the American experimentalist David Tudor used while in India, which led him to the library of the NID. In "a victory for good record keeping," Purgas found details of some unknown Tudor recordings noted in a handwritten logbook by a diligent archivist in the 1960s. He requested them from the archives, and was presented with box after box of carefully annotated tapes, all taken from a neglected cupboard. Purgas returned to England to undertake training in tape restoration to properly conserve what he'd found: music from a group of Indian composers who, aided initially by Tudor, had used the Moog and some accompanying homemade modular devices between 1969 and 1972 to create some of India's earliest electronic music.

Following a 2020 BBC radio documentary, "Electronic India," in which Purgas situated the music in its cultural context, a new compilation -- "The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972," out Friday -- presents the restored pieces in their full variety. There are manipulated field recordings, pieces linked to birds and nature, compositions inspired by Indian classical music, imagined voyages to outer space, and tracks reminiscent of bleep techno or Aphex Twin. What the recordings demonstrate, Purgas said, is "electronic sound and music existing free from any baggage," away from "any vestiges of what could be conceived as a kind of Western continuum."

Mia Sato writes via The Verge: Spotify is rolling out auto-generated podcast transcripts to more creators in the coming weeks, the company announced Thursday. The text transcripts will also be time-synced so listeners can visually follow along as a podcast episode progresses. Transcripts are available by scrolling down below the podcast player and tapping into a "read along" section. A transcription of a show makes the podcast more accessible to users and allows listeners to skip around and skim an episode without listening through.

Spotify says "millions" of podcast episodes will get the tool, and in the future, creators could add media to transcripts -- a useful feature if a creator is describing an image on the show, for example. Beyond transcripts, mobile podcast listeners globally will now be able to jump around an episode using chapters as well. Podcasters can add time-stamped chapters to their shows that briefly describe a segment of the show, allowing listeners to preview topics or start listening at specific points. The feature follows the recent addition of an AI-generated voice cloning tool that translates podcasts into different languages.

U2's inaugural performance at the opening of Las Vegas's Sphere included a generative AI video collage projected hundreds of feet into the air — showing hundreds of surreal renderings of Elvis Presley.

An anonymous reader shares this report from Time magazine: The video collage is the creation of the artist Marco Brambilla, the director of Demolition Man and Kanye West's "Power" music video, among many other art projects. Brambilla fed hours of footage from Presley's movies and performances into the AI model Stable Diffusion to create an easily searchable library to pull from, and then created surreal new images by prompting the AI model Midjourney with questions like: "What would Elvis look like if he were sculpted by the artist who made the Statue of Liberty...?"

While Brambilla's Elvises prance across the Sphere's screen — which is four times the size of IMAX — the band U2 will perform their song "Even Better Than The Real Thing," as part of their three-month residency at the Sphere celebrating their 1991 album Achtung Baby... Earlier this year, U2 commissioned several artists, including Brambilla and Jenny Holzer, to create visual works that would accompany their performances of specific songs. Given U2's love for the singer and the lavish setting of the Sphere, Brambilla thought a tribute to Elvis would be extremely fitting. He wanted to create a maximalist work that encapsulated both the ecstatic highs and grimy lows of not only Elvis, but the city of Las Vegas itself. "The piece is about excess, spectacle, the tipping point for the American Dream," Brambilla said in a phone interview.

Brambilla was only given three-and-a-half months to execute his vision, less than half the time that he normally spends on video collages. So he turned to AI tools for both efficiency and extravagance. "AI can exaggerate with no end; there's no limit to the density or production value," Brambilla says. And this seemed perfect for this project, because Elvis became a myth; a larger-than-life character..." Brambilla transplanted his MidJourney-created images into CG (computer graphics) software, where he could better manipulate them, and left some of the Stable Diffusion Elvis incarnations as they were. The result is a kaleidoscopic and overwhelming video collage filled with video clips both historical and AI-generated, that will soon stretch hundreds of feet above the audience at each of U2's concerts.

"I wanted to create the feeling that by the end of it," Brambilla says, "We're in a place that is so hyper-saturated and so dense with information that it's either exhilarating or terrifying, or both."
Brambilla created an exclusive video excerpting from the larger collage for TIME. The magazine reports that one of the exact prompts he entered was:

"Elvis Presley in attire inspired by the extravagance of ancient Egypt and fabled lost civilizations in a blissful state. Encircling him, a brigade of Las Vegas sorceresses, twisted and warped mid-chant, reflect the influence of Damien Hirst and Andrei Riabovitchev, creating an atmosphere of otherworldly realism, mirroring the decadence and illusion of consumption."

Meta announced a new pair of Ray-Ban smart glasses, capable of livestreaming to Facebook and Instagram and translating text. The glasses were announced at today's Connect event in Menlo Park alongside Meta's new Quest 3 headset. The Verge reports: The new glasses, which Meta just announced at its Connect launch event and which are up for preorder now and will be on sale October 17th starting at $299, have two primary purposes. The first is to replace your headphones: the smart glasses have a similar personal audio system like Amazon's Echo Frames and the Bose Tempo series, all of which play music but endeavor to make sure only you can hear it. With the new generation of glasses, Meta also upgraded the microphone system in a big way: the specs have five mics, including one in the nose bridge, which should make both your calls and voice commands much clearer. (The Stories only had one mic, and it kind of fell apart in loud or windy conditions.)

The other job of the glasses is as a camera. The smart glasses have small camera lenses on each right temple, just like the Stories -- but these cameras take 12-megapixel photos and 1080p videos, both big upgrades from the previous generation. You can store roughly 500 photos and 100 30-second videos (that's the maximum length the glasses allow) before you fill up the 32GB of internal storage, and everything syncs through the Meta View app. The app also lets you quickly share anything you capture to Meta's many, many sharing platforms.

In addition to taking photos and videos on the camera, you can also now start a livestream to Facebook or Instagram with just a couple of taps on the stem of the glasses. When you're recording, a white light around the lens pulses to indicate you're recording.

Google Podcasts is shutting down in 2024 after YouTube Music picks up full global availability of podcasts, which is expected before the end of 2023. As 9to5Google reports, YouTube Music "will be Google's one podcasting app and service going forward." From the report: The big advantage of Google Podcasts was its simplicity and wide availability on Android (through the Google Search app). A "simple migration tool" will move your existing subscriptions from Google Podcasts. Notably, there will be the ability in YouTube Music to add podcasts via RSS feeds, "including shows not currently hosted by YouTube." Google will also provide a non-YTM export option via "OPML file of their show subscriptions" that will work with other podcast players.

On the podcaster front, YouTube will allow for RSS uploads instead of requiring a video version. The next step over the coming weeks and months will see Google "gather feedback to make the migration process from Google Podcasts to YouTube Music as simple and easy as possible." "For now, nothing is changing and fans will continue to have access to YouTube, YouTube Music and Google Podcasts," says YouTube. "We're committed to being transparent in communicating future changes with our users and podcasters and will have more to share about this process in the coming months."

Since 1999, Slashdot has been covering the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremonies — which honor real scientific research into strange or surprising subjects. "Each winner (or winning team) has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK," explains the ceremony web page, promising that "a gaggle of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel laureates handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new Ig Nobel winners." As co-founder Marc Abrahams says on his LinkedIn profile, "All these things celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

You can watch this year's entire goofy webcast online. (At 50 minutes there's a jaw-droppingly weird music video about running on water...) Slashdot reader Thorfinn.au shares this summary of this year's winning research: CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] — Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.

LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] — Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O'Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] — Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] — Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet a computer vision system for defecation analysis et al.

COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] — Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils.

NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.

EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] — Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for 1968 experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.

PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

Amazon, following other streaming platforms looking to further monetize their content, will run ads on its Prime Video service in key markets -- a move that will help offset rising costs and provide a boost to an already robust advertising business. From a report: Ad-supported streaming will be the default on Prime Video in US, UK, Germany and Canada starting early next year, the company said in a statement on Friday. The company has long offered video streaming as part of a package that also includes speedy shipping, music and other perks. Amazon said Prime subsribers will continue to pay $139 annually in the US but will be able to pay an additional $2.99 a month to avoid ads. Pricing in other countries will be anounced later, the company said.

Apple on Monday rolled out iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, HomePod 17 and watchOS 10, the latest operating system versions for all its devices minus the Mac lineup. iOS 17: iOS 17 expands on last year's Lock Screen updates with the addition of interactive widgets and StandBy, a new feature that turns the iPhone into a mini home hub when it is charging. You can now see voicemail transcriptions in real time, and leave video messages in FaceTime. FaceTime also now works on the Apple TV with tvOS 17. With NameDrop, exchanging contacts is as simple as touching two phones together, and Messages has been overhauled with new safety features and updates to the way that stickers work. Autocorrect is better than ever, Spotlight search has been improved, private browsing in Safari is more secure with Face ID lock, and there's now a mood tracking feature in the Health app. Passwords can be shared in iCloud Keychain and AirTags can be shared among family members too, plus there are new features for the AirPods Pro. Apple has also added updates to Siri, Mail, Reminders, Notes, Home, and more. tvOS 17: In tvOS 17, Apple has added a FaceTime app for FaceTime calls on a larger screen. The feature works through an iPhone or iPad running iOS 17/iPadOS 17, with the iOS device serving as the camera and the TV serving as the display. With a Split View option, you can place your FaceTime call on one side of the TV and a TV show or game on the other side for SharePlay experiences. [...] Other new features include Dolby Vision 8.1 support, an enhance dialogue option to make it easier to hear what's being said over music and effects, and support for third-party VPN apps.

According to The Information, Google is nearing the release of Gemini, its conversational artificial intelligence software intended to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4 model. Reuters reports: For Google, the stakes of Gemini's launch are high. Google has intensified investments in generative AI this year as it plays catch-up after Microsoft-backed OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT last year took the tech world by storm. Gemini is a collection of large-language models that power everything from chatbots to features that either summarize text or generate original text based on what users want to read like email drafts, music lyrics, or news stories, the report said. It is also expected to help software engineers write code and generate original images based on what users ask to see.

Google is currently giving developers access to a relatively large version of Gemini, but not the largest version it is developing which would be more on par with GPT-4, the report said. The search and advertising giant plans to make Gemini available to companies through its Google Cloud Vertex AI service.

Stability AI today announced the initial public release of its Stable Audio technology, providing anyone with ability to use simple text prompts to generate short audio clips. VentureBeat reports: StableAudio is a new capability, though it is based on many of the same core AI techniques that enable Stable Diffusion to create images. Namely the Stable Audio technology makes use of a diffusion model, albeit trained on audio rather than images, in order to generate new audio clips. "Stability AI is best known for its work in images, but now we're launching our first product for music and audio generation, which is called Stable Audio," Ed Newton-Rex, VP of Audio at Stability AI told VentureBeat. "The concept is really simple, you describe the music or audio that you want to hear in text and our system generates it for you."

Newton-Rex is no stranger to the world of computer generated music, having built his own startup called Jukedeck in 2011, which he sold to TikTok in 2019. The technology behind Stable Audio however does not have its roots in Jukedeck, but rather in Stability AI's internal research studio for music generation called Harmonai, which was created by Zach Evans. Stable Audio works directly with raw audio samples for higher quality output. The model was trained on over 800,000 pieces of licensed music from audio library AudioSparks. [...]

As a diffusion model, Evans said that the Stable Audio model has approximately 1.2 billion parameters, which is roughly on par with the original release of Stable Diffusion for image generation. The text model used for prompts to generate audio was all built and trained by Stability AI. Evans explained that the text model is using a technique known as Contrastive Language Audio Pretraining (CLAP). As part of the Stable Audio launch, Stability AI is also releasing a prompt guide to help users with text prompts that will lead to the types of audio files that users want to generate. "Stable Audio will be available both for free and in a $12/month Pro plan," notes VentureBeat. "The free version allows 20 generations per month of up to 20 second tracks, while the Pro version increases this to 500 generations and 90 second tracks."

Apple will acquire the major Swedish classical music record label BIS Records, intending to fold it into Apple Music Classical and Platoon. MacRumors reports: BIS Records was founded in 1973 by Robert von Bahr. The label focuses on a range of classical music, with particular focus on works that are not well represented by existing recordings. It is an award-winning name in the world of classical music, acclaimed for its vast catalog and impressive audio quality. The label celebrates its 50th anniversary this week. The company announced its impending acquisition by Apple earlier today.

BIS is set to become a part of Apple Music Classical and the Apple-owned label Platoon. Apple acquired Platoon, a London-based A&R startup focused on discovering rising music artists, in 2018. In 2021, Apple announced that it had purchased the classical music streaming service Primephonic and would be folding it into Apple Music via a new app dedicated to the genre. Apple released the Apple Music Classical app in March. The app offers a simpler interface for interacting with classical music specifically. Unlike the main Apple Music app, Apple Music Classical allows users to search by composer, work, conductor, catalog number, and more. Users can get more detailed information from editorial notes and descriptions.

Here's how the Washington Post tells the story of 34-year-old marketer (and former model) Madison Conradis, who discovered nude behind-the-scenes photos from 10 years earlier had leaked after a series of photographer web sites were breached: Now the photos along with her name and contact information were on 4chan, a lawless website that allows users to post anonymously about topics as varied as music and white supremacy... Facebook users registered under fake names such as "Joe Bummer" sent her direct messages demanding that she send new, explicit photos, or else they would further spread the already leaked photos. Some pictures landed in her father's Instagram messages, while marketing clients told her about the nude images that came their way. Madison was at a friend's party when she got a panicked call from the manager of a hotel restaurant where she had worked: The photos had made their way to his inbox. After two years, hoping a new Florida law against cyberharassment would finally end the torture, Madison walked into her local Melbourne police station and shared everything. But she was told that what she was experiencing was not criminal.

What Madison still did not know was that other women were in the clutches of the same man on the internet — and all faced similar reactions from their local authorities. Without help from the police, they would have to pursue justice on their own.
Some cybersleuthing revealed the four women all had one follower in common on Facebook: Christopher Buonocore. (They were his ex-girlfriend, his ex-fiance, his relative, and a childhood friend.) Eventually Madison's sister Christine — who had recently passed the bar exam — "prepared a 59-page document mapping the entire case with evidence and relevant statutes in each of the victims' jurisdictions. She sent the document to all the women involved, and each showed up at her respective law enforcement offices, dropped the packet in front of investigators and demanded a criminal investigation." The sheriff in Florida's Manatee County, Christine's locality, passed the case up to federal investigators. And in July 2019, the FBI took over on behalf of all six women on the basis of the evidence of interstate cyberstalking that Christine had compiled...

The U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida took action at the end of December 2020, but without a federal law criminalizing the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images, she charged Buonocore with six counts of cyberstalking instead, which can apply to some cases involving interstate communication done with the intent to kill, injure, intimidate, harass or surveil someone. He pleaded guilty to all counts the following January...

U.S. District Judge Thomas Barber sentenced Buonocore to 15 years in federal prison — almost four years more than the prosecutor had requested.

Spotify is cracking down on white-noise podcasters, reducing the advertising support for programmers that provide little more than soothing sounds like rain or chirping birds. From a report: In an email to creators Friday, the company highlighted changes to its Ambassador Ads program -- promotional spots for Spotify that podcasters read. The company pays hosts to read ads to encourage more creators to make shows and join the platform. As part of the change taking effect Oct. 1, white noise podcasters will no longer be eligible for such support, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company is also raising the audience threshold that conventional podcasters must meet to qualify for those ads to 1,000 unique Spotify listeners over the past 60 days from 100.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There have been a lot of Wipeout games released since the 1995 original, including Wipeout HD and the Omega Collection, but only the original has the distinction of having its Windows port source code leaked by (since defunct) archive Forest of Illusion. Dominic Szablewski grabbed that code before it disappeared and set about creating a version that's not just a port. He rewrote the game's rendering, physics, sound, and generally "everything everywhere." He documented the project, put his code on GitHub, and has some version of a justification. "So let's just pretend that the leak was intentional, a rewrite of the source falls under fair use and the whole thing is abandonware anyway," Szablewski writes.

As he digs into the specifics of his work, Szablewski takes the reader on a tour of PSX dev kits and how they handled Z-levels, how to translate yesterday's triangles to today's OpenGL, breaking the 30 FPS cap on a game that explicitly forbade that, and more. He takes the code from 40,699 lines to 7,731 and notably loved an excuse to work in C. "I had an absolute blast cleaning up this mess!" Szablewski's Wipeout rewrite can be compiled for Windows, Linux, Mac, and WASM (Web Assembly). You can even play it in your browser on his server (please be gentle). I spent some time in it this morning, and let me tell you: I am not ready for anti-gravity racing in the year 2052. It was a struggle to even get to fourth place, but those struggles were due entirely to skill, not system. The web version feels buttery smooth, even when you're continually clunking into walls. I had misremembered this game as having a lot more to it, but it's all feel: the trance/prog music, the physics, the controls, and the sense that you're always just slightly out of control.

Key members of Google's old guard have been shifting roles or leaving the company as it searches for its new identity. From a report: The changes encompass high-profile executives such as finance chief Ruth Porat, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and employee No. 8, Urs Holzle, among others. Some say they have left their roles for a new challenge and others have left to seek opportunities in artificial intelligence. In February, Wojcicki -- one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley -- announced that she was stepping back after nine years at the helm of the Google-owned platform that grew to be the world's most popular video service. She had been at Google for more than 25 years, after famously lending her garage to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to use as their first office.

While she'll still be in an advisory role at Google, she said she wanted to "start a new chapter." Wojcicki wasn't the only executive to leave YouTube. Robert Kyncl, the chief business officer for 12 years, stepped away to become CEO of Warner Music Group at the beginning of the year. In March, CapitalG founder and longtime Google employee David Lawee stepped down from his role after 17 years at Alphabet, saying he wanted to explore new areas of interest and spend more time with his family

Long-time Slashdot reader bshell shared this announcement from the Internet Archive: Some of the world's largest record labels, including Sony and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive and others for the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records that are 70 to 120 years old.

The project has been in operation since 2006 to bring free public access to a largely forgotten but culturally important medium. Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium. The resulting preserved recordings retain the scratch and pop sounds that are present in the analog artifacts; noise that modern remastering techniques remove.
"The labels' lawsuit said the project includes thousands of their copyright-protected recordings," reports Reuters, including Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" and Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven."

"The lawsuit said the recordings are all available on authorized streaming services and 'face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.'" The labels' lawsuit filed in a federal court in Manhattan said the Archive's "Great 78 Project" functions as an "illegal record store" for songs by musicians including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. They named 2,749 sound-recording copyrights that the Archive allegedly infringed. The labels said their damages in the case could be as high as $412 million.