The United Kingdom, France and allied countries on Tuesday called for international guidelines for the responsible use of spyware, in an effort to stop the hacking tools from running rampant. From a report: At a conference at London's Lancaster House co-hosted by the British and French government, more than a dozen countries and technology companies signed a declaration saying that "uncontrolled dissemination" of cyber intrusive tools could lead to "unintentional escalation in cyberspace."

A 2021 investigation called the Pegasus Project highlighted how spyware tools like the Israeli-made Pegasus software had spread across the world and are being abused in political and corporate hacking campaigns. Despite widespread condemnation, governments' efforts to crack down on malicious hacking software have largely failed -- in part because the tools are popular with many intelligence and security services, including in democratic countries.

Among the countries that have signed up to the pledge for international rules guidelines EU members Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Italy and Poland, as well as the United States, United Kingdom and the African Union. On the industry side, Apple, defense firm BAE Systems, Google, Meta and Microsoft signed up. The group of countries and firms hopes to curb the proliferation and unabated use of intrusive cybertools. They called for principles and policy options to balance human rights and security interests, including policies to use spyware in a âoelegal and responsible manner," in line with international law and under strict oversight by authorities.

Google has been trying to break into TV for close to two decades. It's here now: Its YouTube TV offering has become one of the biggest pay-TV services in the US. Business Insider: YouTube TV -- which, like conventional pay TV, sells a bundle of dozens of channels -- now has "more than 8 million" subscribers, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced Tuesday morning. That makes YouTube the fourth-largest pay TV service in the country, behind Charter and Comcast (14.1 million each) and DirecTV, at around 11 million.

YouTube last disclosed subscriber numbers in 2022, when YouTube TV had 5 million customers. It likely got a meaningful boost last fall when it started selling the NFL's Sunday Ticket service as an add-on to its basic package of TV channels. YouTube's ascent into the mainstream of pay TV represents a couple of things. For starters, it shows you that YouTube and its owner Google have been persistent and patient about trying to crack TV, and its enormous twin revenue streams: subscriptions and ads.

Apple is making changes to iOS in Europe to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act cracking down on Big Tech gatekeepers. The act demands interoperability, fairness and privacy measures including allowing competing browser engines on iOS. Despite better browser choice, Google and Mozilla are unhappy with Apple's proposed changes. Mozilla says restricting browser engine integration to EU apps burdens rivals to build separate implementations. Mozilla's comment: "We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple's proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps. The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations -- a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear. Apple's proposals fail to give consumers viable choices by making it as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari. This is another example of Apple creating barriers to prevent true browser competition on iOS." Google's VP of engineering for Chrome, Parisa Tabriz, commented on DeMonte's statement, saying, "Strong agree with Mozilla. Apple isn't serious about supporting web browser or engine choice on iOS. Their strategy is overly restrictive, and won't meaningfully lead to real choice for browser developers."

Government hackers last year exploited three unknown vulnerabilities in Apple's iPhone operating system to target victims with spyware developed by a European startup, according to Google. TechCrunch: On Tuesday, Google's Threat Analysis Group, the company's team that investigates nation-backed hacking, published a report analyzing several government campaigns conducted with hacking tools developed by several spyware and exploit sellers, including Barcelona-based startup Variston. In one of the campaigns, according to Google, government hackers took advantage of three iPhone "zero-days," which are vulnerabilities not known to Apple at the time they were exploited. In this case, the hacking tools were developed by Variston, a surveillance and hacking technology startup whose malware has already been analyzed twice by Google in 2022 and 2023.

Google said it discovered the unknown Variston customer using these zero-days in March 2023 to target iPhones in Indonesia. The hackers delivered an SMS text message containing a malicious link that infected the target's phone with spyware, and then redirected the victim to a news article by the Indonesian newspaper Pikiran Rakyat. Google did not say who was Variston's government customer in this case.

The Dutch parent of Russian tech company Yandex is selling its search engine and other services at a steeply discounted price of $5.21 billion to a group of Russian-based managers and oil company Lukoil. According to the Associated Press, it marks "one of the biggest deals for Western-held companies to exit Russia since the invasion of Ukraine." From the report: The price reflects a 50% discount that Moscow imposes on companies from "unfriendly" countries like the Netherlands as a condition of exiting business in Russia, according to a statement Monday from Nasdaq-exchange listed Yandex NV. [...] The sale in cash and shares worth 475 billion rubles would transfer Yandex's core business -- representing more than 95% of its revenue, assets and employees -- to the group of up to 50 managers, Lukoil and business entities owned by investors Alexander Chachava, Pavel Prass and Alexander Ryazanov.

The 50% discounted sale price was based on the average value of Yandex shares on the Moscow exchange for the three months ending Jan. 31 -- $10.2 billion. That's after shares had already fallen by more than half in ruble terms since their peak before the invasion. After the sale, Yandex NV would be left with its international businesses -- employing 1,300 people -- including self-driving technology and generative artificial intelligence as well as a data center in Finland.

Yandex, founded in 1997 as Russia's answer to Google and Yahoo, serves Russian-speaking customers through its search engine and with widely used apps for food delivery, car-sharing and shopping. Co-founder Arkady Volozh, who had earlier moved to Israel, resigned as CEO in 2022 after he was hit with European Union sanctions. He subsequently condemned Russia's invasion as "barbaric." The Nasdaq exchange suspended trading in Yandex shares days after the invasion.

"When Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO in February 2014, the software company was mired in mediocrity," writes CNBC, noting that Microsoft's market cap was just over $300 billion.

"A decade later, Microsoft's valuation has swelled tenfold, to $3.06 trillion, making it the world's most valuable public company, ahead of Apple." (And it's also "firmly entrenched as a leader in key areas, such as cloud and artificial intelligence.") As Nadella marks his 10-year anniversary at the helm, he's widely praised across the tech industry for changing the narrative at Microsoft, whose stock fell 30% during Ballmer's 14 years at the top. In that era, the company was squelched by Google in web search and mobile and was completely left behind in social media. Many tech industry analysts and investors would say that, thanks largely to Nadella, Microsoft is now set up to be a powerhouse for the foreseeable future...

In a 2020 interview, Pat Gelsinger, then CEO of VMware, said offering his company's software on Microsoft's Azure cloud was akin to a "Middle East peace treaty...." In the Nadella age, Microsoft has also contributed to open-source projects, released software under open-source licenses and released a version of its Teams communications app for Linux... In 2018, Nadella came to believe in the idea of buying GitHub just 20 minutes after Nat Friedman, then a Microsoft corporate vice president, started pitching him on it. Right away, Nadella suggested that Friedman become GitHub's new CEO, Friedman said. Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for the code-storage startup...

While Nadella may not bring as much entertainment value, he's proven to be more effective than Ballmer when it comes to dealmaking. In addition to GitHub, Nadella has made pricey acquisitions such as LinkedIn, Minecraft parent Mojang, and Nuance Communications that have contributed to Microsoft's top line. More recently, Nadella helped Microsoft land the $75 billion acquisition of game publisher Activision Blizzard...
The article also adds that Microsoft "looked at buying TikTok in the U.S. in 2020, but nothing came of those discussions."

Slashdot reader Unpopular Opinions requests suggestions from the Slashdot community: Lately a boom of companies decided to play their "nice guy" card, providing us with a trove of information about our own sites, DNS servers, email servers, pretty much anything about any online service you host.

Which is not anything new... Companies have been doing this for decades, except as paid services you requested. Now the trend is basically anyone can do it over my systems, and they are always more than happy to sell anyone, me included, my data they collected without authorization or consent. It's data they never had the rights to collect and/or compile to begin with, including data collected thru access attempts via known default accounts (Administrator, root, admin, guest) and/or leaked credentials provided by hacked databases when a few elements seemingly match...

"Just block those crawlers"? That's what some of those companies advise, but not only does the site operator have to automate it themself, not all companies offer lists of their source IP addresses or identify them. Some use multiple/different crawler domain names from their commercial product, or use cloud providers such as Google Cloud, AWS and Azure â" so one can't just block access to their company's networks without massive implications. They also change their own information with no warning, and many times, no updates to their own lists. Then, there is the indirect cost: computing cost, network cost, development cost, review cycle cost. It is a cat-and-mice game that has become very boring.

With the raise of concerns and ethical questions about AI harvesting and learning from copyrighted work, how are those security companies any different from AI, and how could one legally put a stop on this?
Block those crawlers? Change your Terms of Service? What's the best fix... Share your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

How can you stop security firms from harvesting your data?

Quora "used to be a thriving community that worked to answer our most specific questions," writes Slate. "But users are fleeing," while the site hosts "a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical, straight-up hateful, and A.I.-generated entries..."

The site has faced moderation issues, spam, trolls, and bots re-posting questions from Reddit (plus competition for ad revenue from sites like Facebook and Google which forced cuts in Quora's support and moderation teams). But automating its moderation "did not improve the situation...

"Now Quora is even offering A.I.-generated images to accompany users' answers, even though the spawned illustrations make little sense." To top it all off, after Quora began using A.I. to "generate machine answers on a number of selected question pages," the site made clear the possibility that human-crafted answers could be used for training A.I. This meant that the detailed writing Quorans provided mostly for free would be ingested into a custom large language model. Updated terms of service and privacy policies went into effect at the site last summer. As angel investor and Quoran David S. Rose paraphrased them: "You grant all other Quora users the unlimited right to reuse and adapt your answers," "You grant Quora the right to use your answers to train an LLM unless you specifically opt out," and "You completely give up your right to be any part of any class action suit brought against Quora," among others. (Quora's Help Center claims that "as of now, we do not use answers, posts, or comments added to Quora to train LLMs used for generating content on Quora. However, this may change in the future." The site offers an opt-out setting, although it admits that "opting out does not cover everything.")

This raised the issue of consent and ownership, as Quorans had to decide whether to consent to the new terms or take their work and flee. High-profile users, like fantasy author Mercedes R. Lackey, are removing their work from their profiles and writing notes explaining why. "The A.I. thing, the terms of service issue, has been a massive drain of top talent on Quora, just based on how many people have said, Downloaded my stuff and I'm out of there," Lackey told me. It's not that all Quorans want to leave, but it's hard for them to choose to remain on a website where they now have to constantly fight off errors, spam, trolls, and even account impersonators....

The tragedy of Quora is not just that it crushed the flourishing communities it once built up. It's that it took all of that goodwill, community, expertise, and curiosity and assumed that it could automate a system that equated it, apparently without much thought to how pale the comparison is. [Nelson McKeeby, an author who joined Quora in 2013] has a grim prediction for the future: "Eventually Quora will be robot questions, robot answers, and nothing else." I wonder how the site will answer the question of why Quora died, if anyone even bothers to ask.
The article notes that Andreessen Horowitz gave Quora "a much-needed $75 million investment — but only for the sake of developing its on-site generative-text chatbot, Poe."

"Japan's first moon mission has likely come to an end after a surprising late-game comeback," reports Mashable, "with the spacecraft taking one last photo of its surroundings before the deep-freeze of night... showing ominous shadows cast upon a slope of the Shioli crater, its landing site on the near side of the moon." Since Monday, the spacecraft has analyzed rocks around the crater with a multi-band spectral camera. JAXA picked the landing spot because of what it could tell scientists about the moon's formation... The special camera completed its planned observation, able to study more targets than originally expected, according to an English translation of a news release from the space agency... "Based on the large amount of data we have obtained, we are proceeding with (analyses) to identify rocks and estimate the chemical composition of minerals, which will help solve the mystery of the origin of the moon," JAXA said in a statement translated by Google...

The spacecraft has now entered a dormant state, prompted by nightfall on the moon. Because one rotation of the moon is about 27 Earth days, the so-called "lunar night," when the moon is no longer receiving sunlight, lasts about two weeks. Not much can survive the -270 degrees Fahrenheit brought on by darkness — not even robots. In this freezing temperature, soldered joints on hardware and mechanical parts break, and batteries die. But rest assured, the JAXA team will try to communicate with its scrappy moon lander when the sun rises again.
In mid-week Japan's space agency posted that "Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM's solar cells."

Later they posted that they'd sent a command to turn on SLIM's communicator again "just in case, but with no response, we confirmed SLIM had entered a dormant state. This is the last scene of the Moon taken by SLIM before dusk."

James Cameron tells Vanity Fair's Nick Bilton that his experience with Apple's Vision Pro "was religious. I was skeptical at first. I don't bow down before the great god of Apple, but I was really, really blown away... I think it's not evolutionary; it's revolutionary. And I'm speaking as someone who has worked in VR for 18 years." He explained that the reason it looks so real is because the Apple Vision Pro is writing a 4K image into my eyes. "That's the equivalent of the resolution of a 75-inch TV into each of your eyeballs — 23 million pixels." To put that into perspective, the average 4K television has around 8 million pixels. Apple engineers didn't slice off a rectangle from the corner of a 4K display and put it in the Apple Vision Pro. They somehow compressed twice as many pixels into a space as small as your eyeball. This, to people like Cameron who have been working in this space for two decades, "solves every problem."

But even with all this wonder, with 23 million pixels that are so clear and crisp that you can't tell reality from a digital composite of it.... the more I've used the Apple Vision Pro over the past two weeks, the more one glaring problem revealed itself to me. It's not the weight (which is a problem but will come down over time), or the size (which will shrink with each iteration), or the worry that it will drive us to consume more content alone (almost half of Americans already watch TV alone). Or how tech giants like Meta, Netflix, Spotify, and Google are currently withholding their apps from the device. (Content creators may come around once the consumers are there, and some, like Disney, are already embracing the device, making 150 movies available in 3D, including from mega-franchises like Star Wars and Marvel.) And it's not even the price, because if Apple wanted to, the company could subsidize the cost of the Apple Vision Pro and it would have about as much financial impact as Cook losing a nickel between his couch cushions.

I'm talking about something that I don't see a solution for... I can see a day when we all can't imagine living without an augmented reality. When we're enveloped more and more by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug, like we crave our iPhones today but with more desire for the dopamine hit this resolution of AR can deliver. I know deep down that the Apple Vision Pro is too immersive, and yet all I want to do is see the world through it. "I'm sure the technology is terrific. I still think and hope it fails," one Silicon Valley investor said to me. "Apple feels more and more like a tech fentanyl dealer that poses as a rehab provider." Harsh words, but he feels what we all feel, a slave to our smartphone, and he's seen this play before and he knows what the first act is like, and the second act, and he knows how it ends.

• Political blogger Taegan Goddard says the Vision Pro "offers a glimpse of how we might use computers in the future. If you're skeptical — and many people are — you need to try it before drawing any conclusions. It's hard to explain unless you've worn it. But I can assure you, it's mind-blowing."

• Apple CEO Tim Cook tells Bilton "You can actually lay on your sofa and put the displays on your ceiling if you wish. I watched the third season of Ted Lasso on my ceiling and it was unbelievable!"

• Dan Ives, a senior analyst at the investment firm Wedbush Securities, tells Bilton, "We think a few years from now it'll resemble sunglasses and be less than $1,500."

The VC fund Neo "identifies awesome young engineers, includes them in a community of tech veterans, and invests in companies they start or join," TechCrunch explained in 2018.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes that Neo is also benefiting from the education non-profit Code.org: Eleven years ago, Neo Founder and CEO Ali Partovi together with twin brother Hadi (Code.org CEO and a Neo investor) publicly launched the nonprofit Code.org (backed and advised by big tech companies). With the support of prominent tech giant leaders and their companies, Code.org pushed coding into K-12 classrooms (NYT, alt.) and now boasts that "591,636 teachers have signed up to teach our intro courses on Code Studio and 19,177,297 students are enrolled," helping to build a pipeline of "college students who excel at CS". Neo taps into this pipeline, and it looks like others also betting on their success include Neo investors tied to Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Uber — including Code.org boosters Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Wilke, Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt.

"I love meeting more and more @Neo founders and Neo scholar candidates who learned to code on Code.org," Neo CEO Ali Partovi tweeted last summer.
in November Partovi welcomed "32 exceptional CS students" chosen from over 1,000 applicants to be Neo Scholars, "a year-long program of events, trips, and mentorship, as well as long-term membership in our community."

The Verge reports that Threads is "booming," according to figures shared by Mark Zuckerberg on Meta's earnings call, with 130 million active users a month.

TechCrunch reports: Threads is continuing to grow, having tripled its downloads month-over-month in December, which gave it a place in the top 10 most downloaded apps for the month across both the App Store and Google Play...

Threads famously had a record-breaking launch, reaching 100 million registered users within its first five days. However, the app saw its daily downloads decline starting last September through the end of the year. But in December, Threads once again returned to growth, likely due to the push Meta had given the app by displaying promos on Facebook that featured Threads' viral posts. Today, there are an estimated 160 million Threads users, according to one tracker...

The app could also be benefiting from its move into the "fediverse" — the social network comprised of interconnected servers that communicate via the ActivityPub protocol, like Mastodon... In addition, Threads recently announced the launch of an endpoint, allowing developers of third-party apps and websites to use a dynamic URL to refill text into the Threads composer. For example, there's now a website where anyone can generate Threads share links and profile badges. Marketing tool provider Shareaholic also just launched Threads Share buttons for websites, including both desktop and mobile sites. This flurry of activity around Threads is helping to move the app up in the chart rankings, though some inorganic boosts from Meta itself are likely also responsible for the jump in downloads, given the size.

Linus Torvalds had "some robust exchanges" on the Linux kernel mailing list with a contributor from Google. The subject was inodes, notes the Register, "which as Red Hat puts it are each 'a unique identifier for a specific piece of metadata on a given filesystem.'" Inodes have been the subject of debate on the Linux Kernel Mailing list for the last couple of weeks, with Googler Steven Rostedt and Torvalds engaging in some robust exchanges on the matter. In a thread titled, "Have the inodes all for files and directories all be the same," posters noted that inodes may still have a role when using tar to archive files. Torvalds countered that inodes have had their day. "Yes, inode numbers used to be special, and there's history behind it. But we should basically try very hard to walk away from that broken history," he wrote. "An inode number just isn't a unique descriptor any more. We're not living in the 1970s, and filesystems have changed." But debate on inodes continued. Rostedt eventually suggested that inodes should all have unique numbers...

In response... Torvalds opened: "Stop making things more complicated than they need to be." Then he got a bit shouty. "And dammit, STOP COPYING VFS LAYER FUNCTIONS. It was a bad idea last time, it's a horribly bad idea this time too. I'm not taking this kind of crap." Torvalds's main criticism of Rostedt's approach is that the Google dev didn't fully understand the subject matter — which Rostedt later acknowledged.
"An inode number just isn't a unique descriptor any more," Torvalds wrote at one point.

"We're not living in the 1970s, and filesystems have changed."

Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: Even massive Sega fans would be forgiven for not being too familiar with the Sega AI Computer. After all, the usually obsessive documentation over at Sega Retro includes only the barest stub of an information page for the quixotic, education-focused 1986 hardware. Thankfully, the folks at the self-described "Sega 8-bit preservation and fanaticism" site SMS Power have been able to go a little deeper. The site's recently posted deep dive on the Sega AI Computer includes an incredible amount of well-documented information on this historical oddity, including ROMs for dozens of previously unpreserved pieces of software that can now be partially run on MAME. [...]

While the general existence of the Sega AI Computer has been known in certain circles for a while, detailed information about its workings and software was extremely hard to come by, especially in the English-speaking world. That began to change in 2014 when a rare Yahoo Auctions listing offered a boxed AI Computer along with 15 pieces of software. The site was able to crowdfund the winning bid on that auction (which reportedly ran the equivalent of $1,100) and later obtained a keyboard and more software from the winner of a 2022 auction. SMS Power notes that the majority of the software it has uncovered "had zero information about them on the Internet prior to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photos or scans of actual software." Now, the site's community has taken the trouble to preserve all those ROMs and create a new MAME driver that already allows for "partial emulation" of the system (which doesn't yet include a keyboard, tape drive, or speech emulation support).

That dumped software is all "educational and mostly aimed at kids," SMS Power notes, and is laden with Japanese text that will make it hard for many foreigners to even tinker with. That means this long-lost emulation release probably won't set the MAME world on fire as 2022's surprise dump of Marble Madness II did. Still, it's notable how much effort the community has put in to fill a formerly black hole in our understanding of this corner of Sega history. SMS Power's write-up of its findings is well worth a full look, as is the site's massive Google Drive, which is filled with documentation, screenshots, photos, contemporaneous articles and ads, and much more.

Mozilla claims in a new 74-page research report that Microsoft "repeatedly uses harmful design" and "dark patterns" to push users toward Microsoft Edge and away from rival browsers like Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome browser. PCMag: "Microsoft uses the harmful preselection, visual interference, trick wording, and disguised ads patterns to skew user choice," the report argues, adding that "Microsoft's harmful design practices mean users are unable to download, install, use, or set as default an alternative browser without interference." The researchers claim this harms consumers because they can experience "distortion of choice," lose trust in the broader tech industry, and even possibly experience "emotional distress" as a result of Microsoft's efforts.

For the study, user experiences were tested on Windows 10 Home and Windows 11 Pro as well as the Windows 11 Home Insider Preview Version. The UK-based testers did not attempt to use a VPN to change or hide their IP addresses during their investigation. While Microsoft recently said it will allow users in the European Union to uninstall Edge as part of its efforts to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), it's unclear whether US, UK, or other users around the globe could ever get the same option. Some Windows 11 users can remove five other apps that come preinstalled, however.

Google has removed links to page caches from its search results page, the company's search liaison Danny Sullivan has confirmed. From a report: "It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading," Sullivan wrote on X. "These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it."

The cache feature historically let you view a webpage as Google sees it, which is useful for a variety of different reasons beyond just being able to see a page that's struggling to load. SEO professionals could use it to debug their sites or even keep tabs on competitors, and it can also be an enormously helpful news gathering tool, giving reporters the ability to see exactly what information a company has added (or removed) from a website, and a way to see details that people or companies might be trying to scrub from the web. Or, if a site is blocked in your region, Google's cache can work as a great alternative to a VPN.

YouTube has announced it has surpassed 100 million YouTube Music and YouTube Premium subscribers globally. Variety reports: The 100 million figure includes uses who are on free trials, according to YouTube. The company didn't break down how many are on YouTube Music versus YouTube Premium, the subscription service for ad-free viewing, background listening, offline video downloads and full access to YouTube Music. In November 2022, the company said YouTube Music and YouTube Premium topped 80 million paying subscribers combined.

The announcement comes after Alphabet, in reporting fourth-quarter 2023 earnings, boasted that YouTube and Google subscription services generated more than $15 billion in revenue last year. That includes YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, as well as YouTube TV and Google One cloud storage.

Google is bringing generative AI to Google Maps, promising to help users find cool places through the use of large language models (LLM). From a report: The feature will answer queries for restaurant or shopping recommendations, for example, using its LLM to "analyze Maps' detailed information about more than 250 million places and trusted insights from our community of over 300 million contributors to quickly make suggestions for where to go." Google says the feature will first become available in the US, but there's no word yet on when other countries will also get it.

Google's Bard chatbot is adding AI image generation, catching up on a feature that rival ChatGPT Plus has had for months. From a report: Users can prompt Bard to generate photos using Google's Imagen 2 text-to-image model. Bard, now powered by Google's Gemini Pro large language model, was always going to have image generation. It was assumed the more powerful Gemini Ultra model would power it; however, that model remains in development.

Google has been positioning Bard as a worthy competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus, which runs GPT-4 and lets users generate images thanks to DALL-E 3 integration. Both chatbots perform well, but Bard's lack of text-to-image features gave ChatGPT Plus a bit of an edge. People can use the updated Bard with Imagen 2 at no cost, unlike ChatGPT Plus, which relies on a paid subscription.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a somewhat groundbreaking yet bizarre scientific feat, MIT biotechnology PhD student researcher Lauren "Ren" Ramlan has coaxed a simulation of the humble E. coli bacteria into a rudimentary screen capable of displaying the iconic video game. However, before you get too excited about playing games in a petri dish, there's a catch. According to Ramlan's simulation, displaying a single frame of Doom on these bioluminescent bacteria -- should anyone attempt to do this with the real thing -- would take roughly 70 minutes, with a full reset to the bacteria's original state taking a whopping eight hours and 20 minutes.

Dubbed a step into the world of biological screens, Ramlan engineered a system where the bacteria would function as 1-bit pixels, toggling between light and dark states. This bio-display utilizes a well plate in a 32x48 array, each containing genetically modified E. coli that can be induced to fluoresce, creating a grid of pixel-like structures.