Microsoft has integrated its AI assistant Copilot into Microsoft 365 subscriptions in Australia and Southeast Asia, simultaneously raising prices for all users. The move forces customers to pay for AI features regardless of interest, prompting complaints about intrusive pop-ups and price hikes, WSJ reports. From the report: Some users said on social media that Copilot pop-ups reminded them of Clippy, Microsoft's widely derided Office helper from the late 1990s, that would frequently offer unsolicited help.

[...] The change demonstrates the lengths to which Microsoft is going to try to profit from its huge investments in AI. Copilot, which is built with technology from OpenAI, is a key part of Chief Executive Satya Nadella's plan to keep expanding Microsoft's software business for consumer and corporate customers.

The Russian government has banned crypto mining in ten regions for a period of six years, according to reporting by the state-owned news agency Tass. Engadget adds: Russia has cited the industry's high power consumption rates as the primary reason behind the ban. Crypto is particularly power-hungry, as mining operations already account for nearly 2.5 percent of US energy use.

This ban takes effect on January 1 and lasts until March 15, 2031. The country's Council of Ministers has also stated that additional bans may be required in other regions during periods of peak energy demand. It could also go the other way. The ban could be temporarily lifted or altered in certain regions if a government commission examines changes in energy demand and deems it necessary.

Apple may be worth one and a half Googles now, but the world's most valuable company needs its relationship with the world's largest search engine to keep clicking. From a report: Such was evident Monday when Apple filed papers seeking to participate in the penalty phase of the Justice Department's antitrust case against Google. The search giant lost that case in August and is now battling the government over what remedies are appropriate. The DOJ has a long wish list that includes breaking the company up, forcing Google to make key search and user data available to potential rivals, and stopping the payments Google makes to partners such as Apple.

The payments to Apple alone now reportedly equate to about $20 billion annually, and make Google the default search engine on devices like the iPhone. Apple didn't confirm any specific amounts in its filing, but did say the company feels compelled to "protect its commercial interests." Analysts widely estimate that the payments from Google are nearly pure profit for Apple, given relatively little incremental cost to generate that revenue. For Apple, $20 billion is about 16% of the operating income reported for the company's fiscal year that ended in September.

The annual defense policy bill signed by President Joe Biden Monday evening allocates $3 billion to help telecom firms remove and replace insecure equipment in response to recent incursions by Chinese-linked hackers. From a report: The fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act outlines Pentagon policy and military budget priorities for the year and also includes non-defense measures added as Congress wrapped up its work in December. The $895 billion spending blueprint passed the Senate and House with broad bipartisan support.

The $3 billion would go to a Federal Communications Commission program, commonly called "rip and replace," to get rid of Chinese networking equipment due to national security concerns. The effort was created in 2020 to junk equipment made by telecom giant Huawei. It had an initial investment of $1.9 billion, roughly $3 billion shy of what experts said was needed to cauterize the potential vulnerability.

Calls to replenish the fund have increased recently in the wake of two hacking campaigns by China, dubbed Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, that saw hackers insert malicious code in U.S. infrastructure and break into at least eight telecom firms. The bill also includes a watered down requirement for the Defense Department to tap an independent third-party to study the feasibility of creating a U.S. Cyber Force, along with an "evaluation of alternative organizational models for the cyber forces" of the military branches.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Although Samsung Foundry is a major chip contract manufacturer, the South Korean government mulls creating a government-funded contract chipmaker tentatively called Korea Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, KSMC, reports The Korea Biz Wire. Industry experts and academics have proposed the initiative.

The Semiconductor Industry Association's Ahn Ki-hyun called for a long-term government investment. Experts project that an investment of KRW 20 trillion ($13.9 billion) in KSMC could result in economic gains of KRW 300 trillion ($208.7 billion) by 2045. However, the big question is whether $13.9 billion is enough to establish a chipmaker. Another concern about publicly funded corporations like KSMC is whether they could develop advanced manufacturing technologies and land enough orders from clients to be profitable. It turns out that in addition to semiconductor makers, Korea needs more fabless software developers.

The proposal was introduced during a seminar hosted by the National Academy of Engineering of Korea (NAEK). The plan aims to address structural weaknesses in the industry, such as an over-reliance on Samsung's advanced nodes under 10nm amid the lack of mature process technologies. Smaller system semiconductor firms struggle to thrive as Korea lacks manufacturing diversity, as seen in Taiwan, where companies like UMC and PSMC that focus on mature and specialty nodes complement TSMC's advanced process technologies.

Apple has long avoided directly purchasing Nvidia's chips and is now developing its own AI server chip with Broadcom, aiming for production by 2026, The Information reported Tuesday, shedding broader light on why the two companies don't get along so well.

The relationship deteriorated after a 2001 meeting where Steve Jobs accused Nvidia of copying technology from Pixar, which he then controlled. Relations worsened in 2008 when Nvidia's faulty graphics chips forced Apple to extend MacBook warranties without full compensation.

Rather than buying Nvidia's dominant AI processors directly like its tech peers, the Information reports, Apple rents them through cloud providers while also using Google's custom chips for training large AI models. The company's new chip project, code-named Baltra, marks its most ambitious effort yet to reduce reliance on external AI processors, despite being one of the largest indirect users of Nvidia chips through cloud services.

Contractors working to improve Google's Gemini AI are comparing its answers against outputs produced by Anthropic's competitor model Claude, TechCrunch reported Tuesday, citing internal correspondence. From the report: Google would not say, when reached by TechCrunch for comment, if it had obtained permission for its use of Claude in testing against Gemini.

As tech companies race to build better AI models, the performance of these models are often evaluated against competitors, typically by running their own models through industry benchmarks rather than having contractors painstakingly evaluate their competitors' AI responses. The contractors working on Gemini tasked with rating the accuracy of the model's outputs must score each response that they see according to multiple criteria, like truthfulness and verbosity. The contractors are given up to 30 minutes per prompt to determine whose answer is better, Gemini's or Claude's, according to the correspondence seen by TechCrunch.

A consortium of investors has resurrected Lilium just days after the electric air taxi startup ceased operations and laid off about 1,000 employees. From a report: Mobile Uplift Corporation, a company set up by investors from Europe and North America, has agreed to acquire the operating assets of the startup's two subsidiaries, Lilium GmbH and Lilium eAircraft GmbH, per an announcement Tuesday.

The parent company, Lilium N.V, will not receive any funds in accordance with German insolvency law. Terms of the deal, which are expected to close in January, were not disclosed. Consultancy giant KPMG handled the sale process for Lilium. Mobile Uplift Corporation said in the announcement it intends to rehire workers who were laid off immediately after opening of the proceedings and closing of the transaction. It isn't clear if all 1,000 workers will be rehired.

PCWorld's Jon Phillips pays tribute to Gordon Mah Ung, "our hardware guru, host of The Full Nerd, exemplary tech journalist, and very good friend." He passed away over the weekend after a hard-fought battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 58. From the report: With more than 25 years' experience covering computer tech broadly and computer chips specifically, Gordon's dogged reporting, one-of-a-kind personality, and commitment to journalistic standards touched many, many lives. He will be profoundly missed by co-workers, industry sources, and the PC enthusiasts who read his words and followed him as a video creator.

Gordon studied journalism at San Francisco State University and then worked as a police reporter for the Contra Costa Times in the late 1990s. In 1997, he joined Computerworld (a PCWorld sister publication) before I recruited him to join boot magazine (later re-launched as Maximum PC), where he would ultimately lead hardware coverage for 16 years.

Vietnam's Decree 147 mandates social media users on platforms like Facebook and TikTok to verify their identities and requires tech companies to store and share user data with authorities upon request, sparking concerns over increased censorship, self-censorship, and threats to free expression. Furthermore, the decree imposes restrictions on gaming time for minors and limits livestreaming to verified accounts. It becomes effective on Christmas Day. The Guardian reports: Decree 147, as it is known, builds on a 2018 cybersecurity law that was sharply criticized by the US, EU and internet freedom advocates who said it mimics China's repressive internet censorship. [...] Critics say that decree 147 will also expose dissidents who post anonymously to the risk of arrest. "Many people work quietly but effectively in advancing the universal values of human rights," Ho Chi Minh City-based blogger and rights activist Nguyen Hoang Vi told AFP.

She warned that the new decree "may encourage self-censorship, where people avoid expressing dissenting views to protect their safety -- ultimately harming the overall development of democratic values" in the country. Le Quang Tu Do, of the ministry of information and communications (MIC), told state media that decree 147 would "regulate behavior in order to maintain social order, national security, and national sovereignty in cyberspace." [...]

Human Rights Watch is calling on the government to repeal the "draconian" new decree. "Vietnam's new Decree 147 and its other cybersecurity laws neither protect the public from any genuine security concerns nor respect fundamental human rights," said Patricia Gossman, HRW's associate Asia director. "Because the Vietnamese police treat any criticism of the Communist party of Vietnam as a national security matter, this decree will provide them with yet another tool to suppress dissent."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Once an icon of the 20th century seen as obsolete in the 21st, Encyclopedia Britannica -- now known as just Britannica -- is all in on artificial intelligence, and may soon go public at a valuation of nearly $1 billion, according to the New York Times.

Until 2012 when printing ended, the company's books served as the oldest continuously published, English-language encyclopedias in the world, essentially collecting all the world's knowledge in one place before Google or Wikipedia were a thing. That has helped Britannica pivot into the AI age, where models benefit from access to high-quality, vetted information. More general-purpose models like ChatGPT suffer from hallucinations because they have hoovered up the entire internet, including all the junk and misinformation.

While it still offers an online edition of its encyclopedia, as well as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Britannica's biggest business today is selling online education software to schools and libraries, the software it hopes to supercharge with AI. That could mean using AI to customize learning plans for individual students. The idea is that students will enjoy learning more when software can help them understand the gaps in their understanding of a topic and stay on it longer. Another education tech company, Brainly, recently announced that answers from its chatbot will link to the exact learning materials (i.e. textbooks) they reference.

Britannica's CEO Jorge Cauz also told the Times about the company's Britannica AI chatbot, which allows users to ask questions about its vast database of encyclopedic knowledge that it collected over two centuries from vetted academics and editors. The company similarly offers chatbot software for customer service use cases. Britannica told the Times it is expecting revenue to double from two years ago, to $100 million.

Sweden has accused China of denying a request for Swedish prosecutors to board a Chinese ship that has been linked to the cutting of two undersea cables in the Baltic despite Beijing pledging "cooperation" with regional authorities. From a report: The Yi Peng 3 left the waters it had been anchored in since last month on Saturday -- despite an ongoing investigation. The ship was tracked sailing over the two fibre-optic cables, one between Sweden and Lithuania, and the other linking Helsinki and Germany, at around the time that they were cut on 17 and 18 November in Swedish territorial waters close to the Swedish islands of Gotland and Oland.

For more than a month afterwards it was anchored in the Kattegat strait between Sweden and Denmark where it was being observed by multiple countries and was boarded by Swedish police and other authorities last week. The ship tracking site VesselFinder showed the Yi Peng 3 heading north out of the strait on Saturday and on Monday China confirmed the ship had left in order to "ensure the physical and mental wellbeing of the crew." The Swedish foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, said on Monday that China had not cooperated with Sweden's request to allow Swedish prosecutors onboard.

Lilium, once a darling in the nascent industry of electric aircraft that raised more than $1 billion before going public, has ceased operations and laid off about 1,000 workers after efforts to gain financing and exit insolvency failed. From a report: Lilium co-founder and CEO Patrick Nathen confirmed on LinkedIn that the 10-year-old company had stopped operating. "After 10 years and 10 months, it is a sad fact that Lilium has ceased operations. The company that Daniel, Sebastian, Matthias and I founded can no longer pursue our shared belief in more environmentally friendly aviation. This is heartbreaking and the timing feels painfully ironic," wrote Nathen. The layoffs cover the bulk of the company's workforce and come a few days after about 200 workers were let go, according to a regulatory filing on December 16.

Meta plans to add displays to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as next year, Financial Times reports, as the US tech giant accelerates its plans to build lightweight headsets that can usurp the smartphone as consumers' main computing device. Financial Times: The $1.5tn social media group is planning to add a screen inside the $300 sunglasses it makes and sells in partnership with eyewear group EssilorLuxottica, according to people familiar with the plans. The updated Ray-Bans could be released as early as the second half of 2025, the people said. The small display would be likely to be used to show notifications or responses from Meta's virtual assistant.

The move comes as Meta pushes further into wearable devices and what chief executive Mark Zuckerberg hopes will be the next computing platform, as rivals such as Apple, Google and Snap also race to develop their own similar products.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In recent months, Telegram, the lightly moderated social media app, has held discussions with investors who lent it more than $2 billion. The goal: to reassure them that the company remains a viable bet after its founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France in August on charges related to illicit activities on the platform.

In the conversations, Telegram told investors that it was tackling its legal troubles head-on by policing more user-generated content. The company also said it had paid down a "meaningful amount" of its debt, according to an investor in the talks who was not authorized to discuss confidential information. Telegram has been under increasing scrutiny around the world this year for hosting illicit content from child predators, drug traffickers and other criminals. The company also faces pressure another way: to prove it can make money.

For years, skeptics have questioned if a platform known for hosting toxic material could turn a profit. Unlike social media companies such as Meta, Telegram took an unusual business path: It did not raise money from venture capitalists, sell advertising based on user data or hire aggressively to accelerate growth. Instead, it relied on Mr. Durov's fame and fortune to sustain its business, took on debt and barreled into the cryptocurrency market. [...] The result: Telegram is set to be profitable this year for the first time, according to a person with knowledge of the finances who declined to be identified discussing internal figures. Revenue is on track to surpass $1 billion, up from nearly $350 million last year, the person said.

Silicon Valley is betting the farm on AI. Data centers are straining power grids. Model training costs are heading toward billions. Yet across the software industry, AI revenue remains theoretical. From a report: Hyperscalers -- combined with Meta and Oracle -- plan to spend $292 billion on AI infrastructure by 2025 -- an 88% increase since 2023. Two-thirds of software companies, however, still report decelerating growth in 2024.

Semiconductor stocks have surged 43% year-to-date on AI expectations, while the software index IGV is up 30%. Microsoft, despite its OpenAI investment, has underperformed the IGV by 19% since ChatGPT's release. Microsoft's AI revenue run rate is 3% of total revenue, according to estimates by investment bank Jefferies. Snowflake expects immaterial AI contribution in fiscal 2025. Salesforce isn't factoring in material contribution from new AI products into FY25 guidance. Adobe's Firefly AI, launched in March 2023, hasn't accelerated revenue.

Newsweek supplies some context After his arrest, merch — including T-shirts featuring Mangione's booking photos and others taken from his social media accounts — began popping up for sale on several sites. Websites, including Amazon, eBay and Etsy, have moved to take down products that glorify violence or the suspect. An eBay spokesperson told Newsweek that "items that glorify or incite violence, including those that celebrate the recent murder of UHC CEO Brian Thompson, are prohibited."
Inc. magazine adds: Separately, GoFundMe has shuttered several fundraising campaigns created for Mangione. The fundraising site's terms and conditions are pretty clear on the matter, NBC News reports, with a company spokesperson explaining they prohibit "fundraisers for the legal defense of violent crimes."
But one incident was different, according to a post from the law school of the University of British Columbia: To provide a quick summary, Rachel Kenaston, an artist selling merch on TeePublic received an e-mail from the platform regarding intellectual property claim by UnitedHealth Group Inc and decided to remove Kenaston's design from the merch store. Obviously, it is important to point out that it isn't quite clear who is filing those DMCA claims. While TeePublic, in the email, claimed that they have no say in the matter, [an article from 404 Media] goes on to explain that TeePublic has the right to refuse DMCA claims, but often choose not to in order to avoid headache. The design had nothing to do with UnitedHealthcare-it seems to be a picture of the Mangione in a heart frame. Meaning, whether it was UnitedHealthcare or not, the claim shouldn't hold any weight.

Consensus seems to be mostly leaning towards speculation that it is unlikely to be UnitedHealthcare actually filing those DMCA claims, but rather potential competitors... Regardless of whether or not it really was UnitedHealthcare that filed DMCA claims, I think the important point here is that the merch actually did get taken down. In fact, this would be more problematic if it was from a competitor using DMCA as a form of removing competition, because, then it really has nothing to do with intellectual property. I would assume that this happens quite frequently. Especially for YouTubers, it seems that copyright strikes are more than a mere pesky occurrence, but for many, something that affects livelihood...

The difficult part, as always, is finding the balance between protecting the rights of the copyright holders and ensuring that the mechanisms doesn't get abused.
The artist told Gizmodo she was filing a counterclaim to the copyright notice, adding that instead of a DMCA, "I honestly expected the design to be pulled for condoning violence or something..."

Gizmodo published the image — a watercolored rendition of a hostel surveillance-camera photo released by police — adding "UnitedHealth Group didn't respond to questions emailed on Monday [December 16] about how the company could possibly claim a copyright violation had occurred." And while Gizmodo promised they'd update the post if UnitedHealth responded — there has been no update since...

404 Media adds that the watercolor "is not the only United Healthcare or Luigi Mangione-themed artwork on the internet that has been hit with bogus DMCA takedowns in recent days. Several platforms publish the DMCA takedown requests they get on the Lumen Database, which is a repository of DMCA takedowns." On December 7, someone named Samantha Montoya filed a DMCA takedown with Google that targeted eight websites selling "Deny, Defend, Depose" merch that uses elements of the United Healthcare logo... Medium, one of the targeted websites, has deleted the page that the merch was hosted on...

Over the weekend, a lawyer demanded that independent journalist Marisa Kabas take down an image of Luigi Mangione and his family that she posted to Bluesky, which was originally posted on the campaign website of Maryland assemblymember Nino Mangione. The lawyer, Desiree Moore, said she was "acting on behalf of our client, the Doe Family," and claimed that "the use of this photograph is not authorized by the copyright owner and is not otherwise permitted by law..." In a follow-up email to Kabas, Moore said "the owner of the photograph has not authorized anyone to publish, disseminate, or otherwise use the photograph for any purpose, and the photograph has been removed from various digital platforms as a result," which suggests that other websites have also been threatened with takedown requests. Moore also said that her "client seeks to remain anonymous" and that "the photograph is hardly newsworthy."
404 Media believes the takedown request "shows that the Mangione family or someone associated with it is using the prospect of a copyright lawsuit to threaten journalists for reporting on one of the most important stories of the year..."

UPDATE: Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland notes there's an interesting precedent from 2007: [D]eep within the DMCA law is a counter-provision — 512(f), which states that misrepresenting yourself as a copyright owner has consequences. Any damage caused by harmful misrepresentation must be reimbursed. In 2004 the Electronic Frontier Foundation won a six-figure award from Diebold Election Systems, who had claimed a "copyright" on embarrassing internal memos which were published online.

Alphabet's Waymo robotaxis are providing "hundreds of thousands of driverless rides each month," reports the Washington Post. But as the robotaxi service expands in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, some passengers "have found that traveling by robotaxi can make riders into sitting ducks for a new form of public harassment." The Washington Post spoke with four Waymo passengers, three of them women, who said they experienced harassment or what felt like threats to their safety from people who followed, obstructed or attempted to enter a driverless vehicle they were riding in...

Elliot, a tech worker in San Francisco, recalled in a phone interview a "scary" situation during a Waymo ride late one night in October. A pedestrian tried to enter the driverless vehicle as it waited at a red light. "Go away," Elliot yelled at the man as he knocked on the window before briefly flashing what looked like a knife, video of the incident viewed by The Post showed... In the moment, Elliot said, he wished someone could have "slammed on the gas and gotten away from this guy," adding that Waymo should change how its vehicles respond in such situations...

Madelline, a 25-year-old restaurant server in San Francisco, said that during a recent Waymo ride at around 2 a.m., the driverless vehicle had to stop after two drivers ahead began yelling at each other and throwing things out of their cars in what appeared to be a road rage dispute. The two cars blocked an intersection and one person got out of one of the vehicles. "I was definitely panicking a little bit," Madelline said, as her car waited for the road to clear instead of turning off as a human driver might do... She would like to have more control over a robotaxi's route but still prefers Waymo rides to using Uber or Lyft, whose drivers sometimes make her uncomfortable...

In September, Amina V. was on her way to a hair appointment when a man stepped in front of her robotaxi and the car stalled in the middle of the street. She already had been recording herself in the Waymo, so she turned the camera to capture the man hitting on her while her car stood frozen in San Francisco's Soma neighborhood.
And one Saturday night at 10:30 p.m., a tech worker named Stephanie took a driverless Waymo robotaxi with her sister, and reports confronting "several young men close to the robotaxi honking and yelling, 'Hey, ladies — you guys are hot.' If she or another human had been driving, it would have been easy to reroute the car to avoid leading the pursuers to her home. But she was scared and didn't know how to change the robot's path. She called 911, but a dispatcher said they couldn't send a police car to a moving vehicle, Stephanie recalled... [S]he said the other car gave up the chase when the Waymo was a minute from her house. She and her sister arrived home safely, though terrified. Stephanie didn't catch the car's license plate number, which the 911 dispatcher requested after her ride concluded. Waymo vehicles, like other driverless cars in development, use multiple cameras to help make sense of the world around them. But when she later asked the company for the car's video footage, hoping it had captured the license plate, Waymo declined to provide it, she said.

She would like closer coordination between Waymo and first responders and says she is now unsure about self-driving rides after dark. "I would feel safe taking it during the day," Stephanie said. But "at night, maybe I'm safer having someone else in the car just in case something happens."
A Waymo spokesperson told the Washington Post that their support agents will stay on the line with riders who call in about incidents like this, also working with law enforcement as appropriate — but the agents can't change the vehicle's specific route. (The Post adds that Waymo passengers "can tell a vehicle to pull over or change its next stop or destination using the Waymo app, or ask a support agent to make similar changes.")

"From the moment GPT-4 came out in March 2023, OpenAI has been working on GPT-5..." reports the Wall Street Journal. [Alternate URL here.] But "OpenAI's new artificial-intelligence project is behind schedule and running up huge bills. It isn't clear when — or if — it'll work."

"There may not be enough data in the world to make it smart enough." OpenAI's closest partner and largest investor, Microsoft, had expected to see the new model around mid-2024, say people with knowledge of the matter. OpenAI has conducted at least two large training runs, each of which entails months of crunching huge amounts of data, with the goal of making Orion smarter. Each time, new problems arose and the software fell short of the results researchers were hoping for, people close to the project say... [And each one costs around half a billion dollars in computing costs.]

The $157 billion valuation investors gave OpenAI in October is premised in large part on [CEO Sam] Altman's prediction that GPT-5 will represent a "significant leap forward" in all kinds of subjects and tasks.... It's up to company executives to decide whether the model is smart enough to be called GPT-5 based in large part on gut feelings or, as many technologists say, "vibes."

So far, the vibes are off...
OpenAI wants to use its new model to generate high-quality synthetic data for training, according to the article. But OpenAI's researchers also "concluded they needed more diverse, high-quality data," according to the article, since "The public internet didn't have enough, they felt." OpenAI's solution was to create data from scratch. It is hiring people to write fresh software code or solve math problems for Orion to learn from. [And also theoretical physics experts] The workers, some of whom are software engineers and mathematicians, also share explanations for their work with Orion... Having people explain their thinking deepens the value of the newly created data. It's more language for the LLM to absorb; it's also a map for how the model might solve similar problems in the future... The process is painfully slow. GPT-4 was trained on an estimated 13 trillion tokens. A thousand people writing 5,000 words a day would take months to produce a billion tokens.

OpenAI's already-difficult task has been complicated by internal turmoil and near-constant attempts by rivals to poach its top researchers, sometimes by offering them millions of dollars... More than two dozen key executives, researchers and longtime employees have left OpenAI this year, including co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever and Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. This past Thursday, Alec Radford, a widely admired researcher who served as lead author on several of OpenAI's scientific papers, announced his departure after about eight years at the company...

OpenAI isn't the only company worrying that progress has hit a wall. Across the industry, a debate is raging over whether improvement in AIs is starting to plateau. Sutskever, who recently co-founded a new AI firm called Safe Superintelligence or SSI, declared at a recent AI conference that the age of maximum data is over. "Data is not growing because we have but one internet," he told a crowd of researchers, policy experts and scientists. "You can even go as far as to say that data is the fossil fuel of AI."

And that fuel was starting to run out.

Monday long-time Slashdot reader denelson83 wrote: The crowdsourced, widely-used map database OpenStreetMap has had a hardware failure at its upstream ISP in Amsterdam and has been put into a protective read-only mode to avoid loss or corruption of data. .
The outage had started Sunday December 15 at 4:00AM (GMT/UTC), but by Tuesday they'd posted a final update: Our new ISP is up and running and we have started migrating our servers across to it. If all goes smoothly we hope to have all services back up and running this evening...

We have dual redundant links via separate physical hardware from our side to our Tier 1 ISP. We unexpectedly discovered their equipment is a single point failure. Their extended outage is an extreme disappointment to us.

We are an extremely small team. The OSMF budget is tiny and we could definitely use more help. Real world experience... Ironically we signed a contract with a new ISP in the last few days. Install is on-going (fibre runs, modules & patching) and we expect to run old and new side-by-side for 6 months. Significantly better resilience (redundant ISP side equipment, VRRP both ways, multiple upstream peers... 2x diverse 10G fibre links).
OpenStreetMap celebrated its 20th anniversary in August, with a TechCrunch profile reminding readers the site gives developers "geographic data and maps so they can rely a little less on the proprietary incumbents in the space," reports TechCrunch, adding "Yes, that mostly means Google."

OpenStreetMap starts with "publicly available and donated aerial imagery and maps, sourced from governments and private organizations such as Microsoft" — then makes them better: Today, OpenStreetMap claims more than 10 million contributors who map out and fine-tune everything from streets and buildings, to rivers, canyons and everything else that constitutes our built and natural environments... Contributors can manually add and edit data through OpenStreetMap's editing tools, and they can even venture out into the wild and map a whole new area by themselves using GPS, which is useful if a new street crops up, for example...

OpenStreetMap's Open Database License allows any third-party to use its data with the appropriate attribution (though this attribution doesn't always happen). This includes big-name corporations such as Apple and VC-backed unicorns like MapBox, through a who's who of tech companies, including Uber and Strava... More recently, the Overture Maps Foundation — an initiative backed by Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and TomTom — has leaned heavily on OpenStreetMap data as part of its own efforts to build a viable alternative to Google's walled mapping garden.
The article notes that OpenStreetMap is now overseen by the U.K.-based nonprofit OpenStreetMap Foundation (supported mainly by donations and memberships), with just one employee — a system engineer — "and a handful of contractors who provide administrative and accounting support."

In August its original founder Steve Coast, returned to the site for a special blog post on its 20th anniversary: OpenStreetMap has grown exponentially or quadratically over the last twenty years depending on the metric you're interested in... The story isn't so much about the data and technology, and it never was. It's the people... OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and give the data away for free for almost no money at all. It managed to sidestep almost all the problems that Wikipedia has by virtue of only representing facts not opinions. The project itself is remarkable. And it's wonderful that so many are in love with it.
"Two decades ago, I knew that a wiki map of the world would work," Coast writes. "It seemed obvious in light of the success of Wikipedia and Linux..."