Science magazine describes what happens when a robot writes a play: The 60-minute production — AI: When a Robot Writes a Play — tells the journey of a character (this time a robot), who goes out into the world to learn about society, human emotions, and even death.

The script was created by a widely available artificial intelligence (AI) system called GPT-2. Created by Elon Musk's company OpenAI, this "robot" is a computer model designed to generate text by drawing from the enormous repository of information available on the internet. (You can test it here.) So far, the technology has been used to write fake news, short stories, and poems. The play is GPT-2's first theater production, the team behind it claims...

First, a human feeds the program with a prompt. In this case, the researchers — at Charles University in Prague — began with two sentences of dialogue, where one or two characters chat about human feelings and experiences... The software then takes things from there, generating up to 1000 words of additional text.

The result is far from William Shakespeare. After a few sentences, the program starts to write things that sometimes don't follow a logical storyline, or statements that contradict other passages of the text. For example, the AI sometimes forgot the main character was a robot, not a human. "Sometimes it would change a male to female in the middle of a dialogue," says Charles University computational linguist Rudolf Rosa, who started to work on the project 2 years ago... As it keeps going, there is more room for nonsense. To prevent that, the team didn't let GPT-2 write the entire play at once. Instead, the researchers broke the show down into eight scenes, each less than 5 minutes; each scene also only contained a dialogue between two characters at the same time. In addition, the scientists sometimes changed the text, for example altering the passages where the AI changed the character's gender from line to line or repeating their initial text prompt until the program spat out sensible prose.

Rosa estimates that 90% of the final script was left untouched, whereas 10% had human intervention.
It's a thought-provoking experience. (You can watch the whole play online -- with English subtitles.) The play's first lines?

"We both know that I'm dying."
"How do you know that you're dying?"
"I will die very soon."

And within seconds, the protagonist has asked the question: "How can you love someone who dies?"

In the year 2000, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Late Friday night, the AV Club described Metallica's appearance at the opening ceremonies for the (now online) version of Blizzard Entertainment's annual event BlizzCon: The opening ceremonies were being broadcast online, both through the official BlizzCon page, YouTube, and Twitch. And you know what happens when licensed music gets played on the internet, don't you, folks? That's right: Copyright issues!

Per Uproxx, the audio of James, Lars, and the boys' performance apparently went out as per usual on YouTube and the BlizzCon page — although the whole thing appears to have been excised from the YouTube upload of the event. But on Twitch... On Twitch, things did not go so well. Which is to say that, even though it was being hosted on the company's official twitchgaming channel, the performance was ominously preceded by a chyron noting that "The upcoming musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder."

And then this happened....

Can we prove that someone at Twitch intentionally picked the dorkiest, most Zelda forest-ass music imaginable to have Metallica rock their little hearts out to, instead of broadcasting their extremely copyrighted music (and thus having to deal with the possibility of issuing one of their ubiquitous DMCA takedown notices to themselves)? Obviously not.... On the other hand, we can prove that it is extremely funny to watch this happen, especially — as many people have pointed out — since Metallica is at least partially responsible for the restrictive character of many online musical streaming laws that dominate the internet today, after their high-profile campaign against Napster way back at the dawn of the MP3.
In other news, Diablo II is being remastered and re-released later this year.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: The U.S. Cyber Command, headed by the National Security Agency's director, has been a part of America's Department of Defense since 2009.

Today this unified combatant command wished its followers on Twitter a happy Valentine's Day, adding "As our gift to you, we present 12 crypto challenges designed by the information security community.

"Love is in the air, find it if you can. #BeOurValentine #cryptochallenge #VDayGifts."

They shared a link to the official U.S. Cyber Command Valentine's Day 2021 Cryptography Challenge Puzzles.
There are 12 tricky puzzles in all — 3 .jpgs, 6 .pngs, 2 .mp3s and a .bmp file — and I couldn't solve a single one of 'em.

Each one has a hint — though that hint is just the number of words in the answer, as well as its number of characters.

A Slashdot reader shared an anonymous tip about "new consumer-grade artificial intelligence employed to restore 85 year-old Popeye cartoons, using only the available digital copies as sources for the remastering."

It's eerie to see vintage cartoons like Popeye the Sailor meets Sindbad the Sailor upgraded to high resolution. It's apparently the work of Cartoon Renewal Studios, a group "Dedicated to the loving and careful preservation of classic off-copyright animation" (according to its web site).

There's not much information, but Jim Ames of Cartoon Renewal Studios turned up in an online forum promising "we're restoring ALL the classic cartoons to brilliant 1080 HD so they can be enjoyed forever." I've been dreaming of this project for some time... We will be posting THOUSANDS of off-copyright cartoons digitally remastered and upscaled to 1080 HD. We can process about 50 cartoons a month, at this time... Hoping to scale up to 100 cartoons a month processing capability next month.

We could finish 1000 cartoons in 2021... stay tuned...

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: A new web quiz challenge visitors, "Can you tell a coder from a cannibal? A mathematician from a murderer? Try to spot who liked hacking away at corpses rather than computers."
One commenter on BoingBoing says the quiz brought back memories of doing IT recruitment in the 1990s. "After a few months at that job, I started to wonder if spending so much time staring at soulless equipment wasn't affecting people. Too many candidates were completely humorless, culturally clueless, or sporting a thousand-yard stare..."

"Behold the cakie: It has the crispiness of a cookie and the, well, 'cakiness' of a cake."

So says a triumphant blog post by Google Cloud's developer advocate and an applied AI Engineer for Google's Cloud AI. "We also made breakies, which were more like fluffy cookies, almost the consistency of a muffin" (or bread).

Food and Wine explains the project (in an article shared by Slashdot reader John Trumpian): Inspired by the pandemic-spawned spike in searches for baking, the team at Google Cloud "decided to dive a little deeper into the trend and try to understand the science behind what makes cookies crunchy, cake spongy and bread fluffy," according to a post on their blog. Then, once armed with that machine learning knowledge, they attempted to mix these attributes into what they bill as "two completely new baking recipes...."

[T]hese Google Cloud employees organized about 700 recipes covering cookies, cakes, and breads — standardizing measurements, isolating the key ingredients, and re-categorizing things like banana breads that aren't really "breads." Then, they fed them into a tool called "AutoML Tables" to create a machine learning model that was able to predict whether a recipe was a cookie, cake, or bread based on its ingredient amounts. ["If you've never tried AutoML Tables, it's a code-free way to build models from the type of data you'd find in a spreadsheet like numbers and categories — no data science background required," explains the blog post.]

Of course, recipes don't necessarily fit perfectly into one category. As Sara Robinson, who led the project, explained, a recipe might come back as 97 percent bread, 2 percent cake, and 1 percent cookie. So what if she asked the model to create its own recipe: something that's 50 percent cookie and 50 percent cake?

That's how the Cakie was born. And she was happily surprised by the results. "It is yummy," Robinson said. "And it strangely tastes like what I'd imagine would happen if I told a machine to make a cake cookie hybrid." Based on that success, she and colleague Dale Markowitz continued to tweak their model — which resulted in the Breakie.
"We should caveat that while our model gave us ingredients, it didn't spit out any baking directions, so we had to improvise those ourselves," the blog post explains. "And, we added chocolate chips and cinnamon for good measure." Robinson also built a prediction-making web app to help quickly experiment with different ingredient ratios.

They ultimately identified which ingredients were the biggest "signal" of cake-ness, cookie-ness, and bread-ness, concluding that "In our case, the amount of butter, sugar, yeast and egg in a recipe all seemed to be important indicators..."

The author of the book Online Afterlives describes the unusual projects of people like Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder of Luka, an AI-powered chat simulator that books restaurant reservations and makes recommendations. Kuyda worked with computer scientists to convert several thousand text messages between deceased tech entrepreneur Roman Mazurenko and his friends and relatives into a chatbot simulation: "How are you there?" asks a friend. "I'm OK. A little down. I hope you aren't doing anything interesting without me," Roman responds. His friend replies that they all miss him. Another acquaintance asks him if God and the soul exist. Having probably indicated his atheism in chats while he was alive, he says no. "Only sadness."

Not content with Luka, Eugenia also designed a chatbot called Replika. A cross between a diary and a personal assistant, Replika asks users a series of questions, eventually learning to mimic their personalities. The goal is to get closer to creating a digital avatar that would be able to reproduce us and replace us once we're dead, but also one that is able to create "friendships" with humans. Since the second half of 2017, over two million people have downloaded Replika onto their mobile devices...

Luka and Replika are not the only inventions designed to give a voice to the digital ghosts of the deceased. A few years ago, James Vlahos, an American journalist who has been an AI enthusiast since childhood, created what he calls a "Dadbot." It all started on April 24, 2016, when his father John was diagnosed with lung cancer. Upon learning of his father's illness, James began recording all of their conversations with the idea of writing a commemorative book after his father's death. After 12 sessions, each an hour and a half, he found himself with 91,970 words. The printed transcripts filled around 203 pages...

He decided to use the recordings of his father to create something other than a commemorative book. He remembered writing an article that discussed PullString (previously known as ToyTalk), a program designed to create conversations with fictional characters... James used PullString to reorganize the MP3 recordings of his father. He also used it to create his Dadbot, software that works on his smartphone and simulates a written conversation with John, based on the processing of almost 100,000 recorded words... The tone of the conversations reflects the personality of the deceased: "Where are you now?" asks James. "As a bot I suppose I exist somewhere on a computer server in San Francisco.

"And also, I suppose, in the minds of people who chat with me."

An anonymous reader writes: So on New Year's Eve, the "jam" rock band Phish re-broadcast their legendary 1995 performance on New Year's Eve -- while playing a game of chess against the audience. (Just as they'd done in 1995 -- although during that tour they'd made two just moves during each show.) In a video promoting this year's event, a chess "historian" remembers "No single band in the '90s was playing better chess against their audience" and shares an alleged conspiracy theory that they were being coached by Garry Kasparov. And yet, "Midway through the second of two nights at Madison Square Garden, the audience takes Phish's queen" -- and the band resigned.

This had left their ongoing audience-versus-band match with a score (one game apiece). So 25 years later, for New Year's Eve, Phish finally staged the great re-match.

"However, just as it was time to begin the game (and as the show kicked off with opener "Punch You In The Eye"), Chess.com, the popular chess site hosting the online game, crashed," reports JamBands.com.
Thinking quickly, the band announced on Twitter that "We're making a quick pivot, 2020 style, to live chess mode. We will be using a moderator from Chess.com who will take feedback on the move within the chat and then complete the audience move."

JamBands.com explains how the long-awaited match finally culminated: In between sets, the broadcast cut to a live zoom call between all four band members, during which they discussed their next moves in the game and chatted. At various points, Gordon and Anastasio picked up guitars, and Gordon had a surreal projection of a chess board floating behind him at times. During the first break, McConnell referenced the technical difficulties. "I'm sorry this didn't work out to plan, but nothing this year did," he said with a laugh.

During the break between the second and third sets, the shenanigans increased, with drummer Jon Fishman following through on an off-hand promise to shave his head. (At first, the other three band members didn't even notice.) Ultimately, the band defeated the audience... Down to just their king, queen and a few pawns, the audience resigned as the band was up a pawn and still had a rook and queen on the board...

Phish raised funds for a charity during the broadcast. "For this final webcast of the year, our beneficiary will be none other than The WaterWheel Foundation itself," the band wrote prior to the stream. "Since 1997, the band and their fans have collaborated on a nationwide charitable endeavor by raising funds and donating the proceeds across the country. This year alone, collectively we have raised and donated nearly $750,000 to 27 different nonprofits during the Dinner And A Movie series. Join us in continuing to support those in need...."
You can watch the entire four-and-a-half-hour webcast on YouTube.

A Utah newstation interviewed the men claiming responsibility for removing the original monolith in Utah, who reveal where, why, and how they took it: Homer Manson described how they brought tools, but in the end they were able to simply push the monolith over and it fell on the ground... "We actually passed another crew on the way out, they were going in to destroy it," Any Lewis recounted...

"That's exactly what we didn't want to happen, is somebody of that mentality to get a hold of it and completely lose the message behind it," Sylvan Christensen relayed.

The monolith was in pieces, but the three men talked about how they rebuilt it. They described how it took a few weeks between consulting with lawyers and speaking with the BLM [America's federal-lands administrating Bureau of Land Management], to bring the monument back to the agency. Lewis posted a video on his Instagram, showing the monolith standing tall in a yard. Just this last Friday [the 18th], they said they drove the monument on a trailer with a tarp to conceal it to deliver it to the BLM.

Lewis explained that they donated it back to the BLM in good faith, to help with the investigation. It's their understanding, they indicated, that the monolith will end up on display again. "That's kind of the discussion," Christensen said. "It's ultimately up to the BLM as to where they put it, but that was kind of the gentleman's agreement is that it would get put at Red Butte Garden." If and when this international monolith of mystery ends up back in the public eye — perhaps, according to the guys, at Red Butte Garden in Salt Lake City — they explained how they want it to spark discussion about art on public lands, and responsible land use. Lewis said he wants to use this as a "togetherness moment," where people can come together to make a proposal to the BLM and have a public decision on if there should be a place where people can place art on public lands, and figure out if that's a proper use of art space. He said it would be nice to use the Utah Monolith to present this as a positive story, and show people how to display this art...

The BLM said it is still investigating the illegal installation along with the San Juan County Sheriff's Office.
The BLM "doesn't want to set a precedent that people can just go out onto public lands and take things away," according to a report from Outside magazine.

But Sylvan Christensen points out to the magazine that "We didn't destroy the art. We kind of changed its direction and made it a bigger thing that surrounds environmental awareness and ethical land recreation."

"Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money," Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday, and then followed it up with another tweet. "One Word: Doge."

"The tweet sent shares of Dogecoin up nearly 20% and landed it on the list of trending Twitter topics," reports CNN. (Later that day Musk tweeted "i love all u crazy ppl out there.") The tech billionaire even went as far as updating his Twitter bio with the title "Former CEO of Dogecoin..."

This isn't the first time Musk has tweeted about Dogecoin, the bitcoin descendant. The SpaceX CEO mentioned the digital coin in July when he tweeted "It's inevitable" with an image depicting the dogecoin standard engulfing the global financial system. The tweet sent shares up 14% at the time.

Dogecoin was created in 2014 as a parody to a popular internet meme "doge", which involved a picture of a Shiba Inu dog.

Although the virtual coin started off as a joke, it currently has a market value of nearly $570 million.

Aleksander Kubica is a postdoctoral fellow at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Institute for Quantum Computing. And he's also the winner of the world's first quantum chess tournament. (It's now available for streaming on Twitch, and begins with a clip of the late Stephen Hawking playing a 2016 game against Ant-Man star Paul Rudd.)

"It's a complicated version of regular chess that incorporates the quantum concepts of superposition, entanglement, and interference," explains Ars Technica (in an article shared by John Trumpian): In quantum chess, there are multiple boards on which the pieces exist, and their number is not fixed. Players can perform "quantum moves" as well as regular chess moves; players just need to indicate which type of move they're performing. Any quantum move will create a superposition of boards (doubling the number of possible boards in the superposition with each quantum move), although the player will see a single board representing all boards at the same time. And any individual move acts on all boards at the same time.

Pawns move the same as in regular chess, but other pieces can make either standard moves or quantum moves, such that they can occupy more than one square simultaneously. In a 2016 blog post, Chris Cantwell of Quantum Realm Games offered the example of a white queen performing a quantum move from D1 to D3. "We get two possible boards. On one board the queen did not move at all. On the other, the queen did move. Each board has a 50 percent chance of 'existence'..."
In 2016 Stephen Hawking had played a game of quantum chess against Paul Rudd in a video which also featured both Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, stars of the "Bill and Ted" movies.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: At a McDonald's restaurant in Georgia, an angry customer in the drive-through lane threw his drink at the pregnant fast-food worker who had served him. "She was crying and covered in ice and soda and syrup..." remembers another driver in the next car parked in the line. "[C]overed in syrup all over her shoes, pants, and shirt."

That driver created an online fundraiser for the fast-food worker, ultimately raising $1,700 within 24 hours which was later presented to the fast-food worker. "She gave me the envelope and I couldn't do nothing but cry," the worker told CNN later, "because I wasn't expecting that."

The driver also publicized a registry for baby supplies (along with the Cash App handle for future donations), but insisted to CNN that it wasn't doing anything special. "I just saw somebody being mistreated and I didn't like what I saw."

Nathan Myhrvold is a former CTO of Microsoft, co-founder of the equity company Intellectual Ventures, and the founder of "food innovation lab" Modernist Cuisine (which among other things resulted in book of remarkable food photography).

But he's now photographing the intricate designs of snowflakes, reports Fast Company: Over the span of 18 months, Myhrvold built a camera with a microscopic lens and then shot in the freezing locales of Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. All to capture individual snowflakes — millimeters across — in sparkling, high-res detail.

Myhrvold captured his snowflake specimens by setting out black foam core when snow was falling. He then used a tiny watercolor brush to grab individual snowflakes and place them on a "cooling stage" under the camera. Cold is key — even the camera itself and the plate he places the snowflake on must be left outside and chilled in order to photograph the snowflake before it melts. But that's not the only element to keep those snowflakes cool: He also uses special, high-speed LED lights that don't generate as much heat. The cold is also important to a snowflake's shape, says Myhrvold, who shot his specimens at temperatures between -15 and -20 degrees F. You might call this the snowflake sweet spot: They form into the "best," most complex designs between these temperatures.

The results are simply dazzling... "Sometimes to see nature's beauty you have to travel to the Grand Canyon or get up late at night to see the stars," Myhrvold says. But with snow, all you have to do is pause and look down at your mitten. "It's a beautiful thing."

"People taking a stroll on Sunday morning stumbled upon another mysterious monolith," reports Insider.com. "This one was found in a northern province of the Netherlands." The monolith was covered in ice and surrounded by a small pool of water, according to local reports. The hikers told the Dutch paper Algemeen Dagblad that they're not sure how the monolith got there. They said they found no footprints around it that would indicate someone placed it there intentionally.
And that monolith that disappeared in Atascadero, California has not-so-mysteriously re-appeared, as a group of three local artists takes credit for both creating the original and for successfully retrieving it to restore it to its former glory. "After learning of the second monolith, Travis Kenney had a thought," writes the relationship site Your Tango. "There were three monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Why not build the third themselves and make the triad complete...?"

"It was meant to be something fun, a change of pace from the kind of conversations 2020 has been plagued with — so much negativity and separation among the people in our country."
All the thanks these men really needed was delivered in the positive energy that quickly took hold of their home town. The presence of this now internationally followed mysterious object brought with it an uplifting local pride, as well as a sense of childlike wonder... The monolith's creators quietly made the hike back up to observe people's reactions throughout the day. When they arrived at the top each time, they found themselves soaking in the glow of the many smiles they encountered on faces of visitors. some of whom drove for hours to see the shining obelisk for themselves...

While you may think of these monoliths as another square on your 2020 bingo card, it's worth noting that the purpose of the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey was to further the advancement of intelligent life. Cynics can say that sounds cheesy, but for the sake of full disclosure, I know McKenzie personally and can affirm without doubt or irony that they wanted nothing more than to offer their fellow humans some joyful light in these dark times.

"There was no esoteric agenda," said McKenzie.

"Our topline," added Jared Riddle, "Let's get outside and laugh."
70 miles away yet-another monolith "was discovered by campers on Saturday in San Luis Obispo County in Los Padres National Forest," reports a California newspaper. "We were super happy that someone/group went to all that work," Matt Carver wrote in a Facebook message to The Tribune. "It really did make our day to find it! I think we had huge smiles on our faces for the rest of the ride home."

The second monolith resembles the monolith in Atascadero, but the structure's top features "CAUTION" written in red and a picture of a UFO beaming in a human.
But wait! Insider.com reports that another mysterious monolith has appeared in Pittsburgh — "intentionally placed outside a candy shop by an owner who was trying to attract attention to his small business." Christopher Beers, owner of Grandpa Joe's Candy Shop, asked a friend to make the 10-foot-tall structure and placed it outside his store as a marketing ploy.

Grandpa Joe's Candy Shop shared the news using a 30-minute video on Facebook. In a Facebook post on Friday, the shop said: "Come see the Monolith before it mysteriously disappears!"
Within one day someone did in fact steal the monolith, reports the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. But Grandpa Joe's owner Beers whipped up another one to replace it. "This one is much heavier and bolted into the ground. That's not a challenge. That's just a statement." Beers said he didn't report the theft to police because they have more important things to deal with... "That's not the story," Beers said of the theft. "The story is I built something fun and made people laugh and we put Pittsburgh on the map. I'm not worried about whoever took it."

Beers said the new monolith will stay up for a couple a days before "it'll mysteriously disappear just like all the others."
Business Insider reports that monolith jokes have now also appeared in tweets from a wide variety of brands, including Walmart, Southwest Airlines, Ocean Spray, McDonald's, Steak-umm, and MoonPie.

And meanwhile, the headline at one Denver news site reports that "Monolith mania comes to Colorado as local businesses report structures 'appearing' outside shops," citing the arrival of a monolith outside McDevitt Taco Supply and on the patio of Morrison Holiday Bar.

sciencehabit summarizes a new article from Science magazine: Attention racehorse jockeys: Start fast, but save enough energy for a final kick. That's the ideal strategy to win short-distance horse races, according to the first mathematical model to calculate how horses use up energy in races. The researchers say the approach could be used to identify customized pacing plans that, in theory, would optimize individual horses' chances of winning.

The team took advantage of a new GPS tracking tool embedded in French racing saddles. The trackers let fans watch digital images of the horses move across a screen, and they gave the researchers real-time speed and position data. The scientists studied patterns in dozens of races at the Chantilly racetracks north of Paris and developed a model that accounted for winning strategies for three different races: a short one (1300 meters), a medium one (1900 meters), and a slightly longer one (2100 meters), all with different starting points on the same curved track. The model takes into account not just different race distances, but also the size and bend of track curves, and any slopes or friction from the track surface.

The results might surprise jockeys who hold horses back early for bursts of energy in the last furlough. Instead, a strong start leads to a better finish, the team found. That doesn't mean those jockeys are wrong, though. Too strong of a start can be devastating as well, leaving the horse 'exhausted by the end,' one of the researchers says.
Even so, "We can't truly model performance," argues a veterinarian at the University of Sydney with over 30 years of experience working at horse racetracks. But he also asks Science, "Do we really want to?

"For people who love horse racing, the uncertainty provides the excitement, and the actual running of the horses provides the spectacle and the beauty."

A Reddit user found Google Earth photos showing the Utah monolith may have appeared in its canyon up to five years ago, according to The Daily Beast. But it's gone now: Last week, a team of four people removed the Utah obelisk. One of them, a Utah adventure guide, explained their actions in an Instagram post. "We removed the Utah Monolith because there are clear precedents for how we share and standardize the use of our public lands, natural wildlife, native plants, fresh water sources, and human impacts upon them. The mystery was the infatuation and we want to use this time to unite people behind the real issues here — we are losing our public lands — things like this don't help," Sylvan Christensen wrote.

Although the statue had damaged some of the surrounding rock formations, its real cost came when hordes of tourists drove cars and rode helicopters to the remote canyon to see it, Christensen said. "This land wasn't physically prepared for the population shift (especially during a pandemic)," he wrote. "People arrived by car, by bus, by van, helicopter, planes, trains, motorcycles and E-bikes and there isn't even a parking lot. There aren't bathrooms — and yes, pooping in the desert is a misdemeanor. There was a lot of that."
"The group of four took the big pieces of the monolith and placed them in a wheelbarrow and said 'leave no trace' as they rolled it away," reports CNN, citing a photographer who witnessed the event.

The second mysterious monolith that appeared in Romania has also been "removed by parties unknown," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup. But a third monolith also mysteriously appeared 200 miles south of San Francisco in the small town of Atascadero on Tuesday, according to SFGate. Though their reporter has a theory as to why: Atascadero is a handy place. There's plenty of rugged cowboy types, and plenty of people with the room and machinery to weld and rivet some sheets of metal together. The local band when I was in high school was in fact known for riveting metal parts and tubing onto stages and cars and painting the whole thing silver...

[W]hen Atascadero saw this monolith trend hitting, someone took note of the importance of getting in fast, went out into their garage and built a monolith.
"And then, overnight, it was gone," notes the Bay Area News Group. Forbes describes the young men responsible as "Dressed in camo gear, armed with night-vision goggles and energy drinks," and at least once referencing the QAnon conspiracy theory. "One of the men even states: 'We don't want illegal aliens from Mexico, or outer space.'"

The Bay Area News Group writes: The revelation that the culprits drove five hours from Southern California to tear it down, live-streaming the trek, has angered Central Coast residents. Video shows the four young men chanting "Christ is king" as they tear down the monolith and replace it with a plywood cross. They also made racist and anti-immigrant statements...

In a statement Thursday, Atascadero Mayor Heather Moreno said: "We are upset that these young men felt the need to drive 5 hours to come into our community and vandalize the Monolith.

"The Monolith was something unique and fun in an otherwise stressful time."

A Slashdot reader quotes CNN: A tall, silver, shining metal monolith discovered in the desert in southeastern Utah — which prompted theories of alien placement and drew determined hikers to its secret location — has now disappeared, the state's Bureau of Land Management said Saturday.

The monolith was removed by an "unknown party" sometime Friday night, the agency said in a Facebook post.

"We have received credible reports that the illegally installed structure, referred to as the 'monolith,' has been removed" from BLM public lands, the post said. "The BLM did not remove the structure, which is considered private property."

The monolith was first discovered November 18 by officers from the Utah Department of Public Safety's Aero Bureau. They were flying by helicopter, helping the Division of Wildlife Resources count bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, when they spotted something that seemed right out of "2001: A Space Odyssey..." Pilot Bret Hutchings guessed it was "between 10 and 12 feet high..."
In an official statement, the Utah Department of Public Safety emphasized that it's still illegal to install structures or art on public lands, "no matter what planet you're from."

A new bug in the PlayStation game Spider-Man: Miles Morales "turns Miles into various inanimate objects, including bricks, cardboard boxes, and even a trash can," reports GameSpot: Despite Miles' changed appearance, he can still perform many of his heroic antics, including web-swinging and beating up bad guys. It's an important lesson to all of us in these trying times: You might look like trash, but you can still do your job.
Today Engadget reports that the glitch even turns Spider-Man into a patio heater: If you've ever wanted to keep people toasty warm while fighting crime, now's your chance.

We've asked [the game's creator] Insomniac Games for comment, although it already tweeted that the hiccup was "equally embarrassing as it is heart-warming." Into the Spider-Verse's Phil Lord joked that the heater would find its way into the sequel if the team had "any self respect at all."

The BBC reports: Crowdfunding website Kickstarter has surprised some of its users by replying to complaints they made seven years ago.

Users who received responses to long-expired projects from 2013 took to Twitter to congratulate the company on its response times.

Kickstarter said the emails were "auto-generated in error... The emails folks received yesterday was due to an unfortunate human error while working on a clean-up task completely unrelated to the ticket from 2013," a company spokeswoman said.

"It's important to remember we are still a small team at Kickstarter and mistakes can happen."

A British software engineer came up with "a fun playful name" for his consulting business. He'd named it:

"">

Unfortunately, this did not amuse the official registrar of companies in the United Kingdom (known as Companies House). The Guardian reports that the U.K. agency "has forced the company to change its name after it belatedly realised it could pose a security risk." Henceforward, the software engineer's consulting business will instead be legally known as "THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD." He now says he didn't realise that Companies House was actually vulnerable to the extremely simple technique he used, known as "cross-site scripting", which allows an attacker to run code from one website on another.
Engadget adds: Companies House, meanwhile, said it had "put measures in place" to prevent a repeat. You won't be trying this yourself, at least not in the U.K.

It's more than a little amusing to see a for-the-laughs code name stir up trouble, but this also illustrates just how fragile web security can be.