Enlarge / Taylor Swift during her Eras Tour. Crowd motions likely caused mini "Swift quakes" recorded by seismic monitoring stations. (credit: Ronald Woan/CC BY-SA 2.0)

When mega pop star Taylor Swift gave a series of concerts last August at the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, regional seismic network stations recorded unique harmonic vibrations known as "concert tremor." A similar "Swift quake" had occurred the month before in Seattle, prompting scientists from the California Institute of Technology and UCLA to take a closer look at seismic data collected during Swift's LA concert.

The researchers concluded that the vibrations were largely generated by crowd motion as "Swifties" jumped and danced enthusiastically to the music. They described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Seismological Research Letters. The authors contend that gaining a better understanding of atypical seismic signals like those generated by the Swift concert could improve the analysis of seismic signals in the future, as well as bolster emerging applications like using signals from train noise for seismic interferometry.

Concert tremor consists of low-frequency signals of extended duration with harmonic frequency peaks between 1 and 10 Hz, similar to the signals generated by volcanoes or trains. There has been considerable debate about the source of these low-frequency concert tremor signals: Are they produced by the synchronized movement of the crowd or by the sound systems or instruments coupled to the stage? Several prior studies of stadium concerts have argued for the former hypothesis, while a 2015 study found that a chanting crowd at a football game produced similar harmonic seismic tremors. However, a 2008 study concluded that such signals generated during an outdoor electronic dance music festival came from the sound system vibrating to the musical beat.

We got the first trailer for the spinoff prequel film Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga in December, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the younger incarnation of the character immortalized by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road. We're now just a couple of months away from the film's much-anticipated release—i.e., the perfect time to drop a second trailer to keep that anticipation high.

(Spoilers for Fury Road below.)

As previously reported, we met Furiosa early on in Fury Road, working logistics for Immortan Joe (the late Hugh Keays-Byrne), who charged her with ferrying oil from Gas Town to his Citadel with the help of a small crew of War Boys and one of the war rigs—basically tractor trailer trucks souped up with armor and novel weaponry. Furiosa stole the war rig instead, taking Joe's five wives with her.

Enlarge / Taylor's C709 Soft Serve Freezer isn't so much mechanically complicated as it is a software and diagnostic trap for anyone without authorized access. (credit: iFixit/YouTube)

Many devices have been made difficult or financially nonviable to repair, whether by design or because of a lack of parts, manuals, or specialty tools. Machines that make ice cream, however, seem to have a special place in the hearts of lawmakers. Those machines are often broken and locked down for only the most profitable repairs.

The Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of the Department of Justice have asked the US Copyright Office (PDF) to exempt "commercial soft serve machines" from the anti-circumvention rules of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The governing bodies also submitted proprietary diagnostic kits, programmable logic controllers, and enterprise IT devices for DMCA exemptions.

"In each case, an exemption would give users more choices for third-party and self-repair and would likely lead to cost savings and a better return on investment in commercial and industrial equipment," the joint comment states. Those markets would also see greater competition in the repair market, and companies would be prevented from using DMCA laws to enforce monopolies on repair, according to the comment.

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4chan users who have made a game out of exploiting popular AI image generators appear to be at least partly responsible for the flood of fake images sexualizing Taylor Swift that went viral last month.

Graphika researchers—who study how communities are manipulated online—traced the fake Swift images to a 4chan message board that's "increasingly" dedicated to posting "offensive" AI-generated content, The New York Times reported. Fans of the message board take part in daily challenges, Graphika reported, sharing tips to bypass AI image generator filters and showing no signs of stopping their game any time soon.

"Some 4chan users expressed a stated goal of trying to defeat mainstream AI image generators' safeguards rather than creating realistic sexual content with alternative open-source image generators," Graphika reported. "They also shared multiple behavioral techniques to create image prompts, attempt to avoid bans, and successfully create sexually explicit celebrity images."

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Universal Music is set to pull its songs from TikTok after a breakdown in negotiations over payment, which would remove the social media platform’s access to music from stars such as Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, and Drake.

Universal, the industry giant that controls a third of the world’s music, has been in tense negotiations with Beijing-based TikTok for the past year, according to people familiar with the matter.

Universal on Tuesday accused TikTok of “bullying” and said the company wanted to pay a “fraction” of the rate that other social media sites pay for access to its music catalog. As a result, Universal said it would stop licensing its content to TikTok when its contract expires on January 31.

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After explicit, fake AI images of Taylor Swift began spreading on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter has attempted to block all searches for the pop star.

"This is a temporary action and done with an abundance of caution as we prioritize safety on this issue," Joe Benarroch, X's head of business operations, said in a statement to Reuters.

However, even this drastic step does not seem to be an effective solution, as "Swift" was trending Monday morning on X. The temporary block also does nothing to stop searches using misspellings of the singer's name.

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Fake AI images sexualizing Taylor Swift spread to X, formerly known as Twitter, from a Telegram group dedicated to sharing "abusive images of women," 404 Media reported.

These images began circulating online this week, quickly sparking mass outrage that may finally force a mainstream reckoning with harms caused by the spread of non-consensual deepfake pornography.

At least one member of the Telegram group claimed to be the source of some of the Swift images, posting in the channel that they didn't know if they "should feel flattered or upset that some of these Twitter stolen pics are my gen."

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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman has officially returned to the ChatGPT-maker as CEO—accompanied by Mira Murati as CTO and Greg Brockman as president—resuming their roles from before the shocking firing of Altman that threw the company into turmoil two weeks ago. Altman says the company did not lose a single employee or customer throughout the crisis.

"I have never been more excited about the future. I am extremely grateful for everyone’s hard work in an unclear and unprecedented situation, and I believe our resilience and spirit set us apart in the industry," wrote Altman in an official OpenAI news release. "I feel so, so good about our probability of success for achieving our mission."

In the statement, Altman formalized plans that have been underway since last week: ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and economist Larry Summers have officially begun their tenure on the "new initial" OpenAI board of directors. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo is keeping his previous seat on the board. Also on Wednesday, previous board members Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner officially resigned. In addition, a representative from Microsoft (a key OpenAI investor) will have a non-voting observer role on the board of directors.

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Kiwi Farms—a website credited with launching a range of targeted harassment campaigns, which Cloudflare considers its most dangerous customer ever—has remained online despite immense pressure to dismantle the website. But now it looks like Kiwi Farms may be facing its biggest threat yet. This week, an unexpected court ruling has shown "how copyright law could be a Kiwi Farms killer," tech law expert Eric Goldman wrote in his blog.

Goldman's blog analyzed a judgment issued Monday by the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which reversed a lower court's decision to dismiss a copyright lawsuit filed by Russell Greer. According to Greer, Kiwi Farms targeted him with a harassment campaign so extreme that he wrote a book to explain why the harassment should stop. Kiwi Farms then uploaded the book and a song that Greer wrote, allegedly sharing his copyrighted materials to encourage users to continue mocking Greer.

Greer's troubles with Kiwi Farms started when he sued pop star Taylor Swift in 2016. That's when Kiwi Farms users "began 'a relentless harassment campaign,'" Greer alleged, including “direct harassment via phone, email, and social media." Kiwi Farms' “schemes" allegedly "successfully got him fired from his workplace and evicted” and led to "the creation of 'false social media profiles that impersonate him with names ... that mock his physical and developmental disabilities.'” Kiwi Farms frequently targets people with physical and mental disabilities, Greer told the court.