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Sheeppox is a highly contagious, often fatal viral disease that was largely eradicated from much of European livestock in the 20th century. But there is still the occasional regional outbreak, such as the one that afflicted many flocks of sheep in Greece last year. In order to reconstruct how the virus has evolved over the last 3,500 years, scientists extracted and sequenced sheeppox DNA preserved in the animal skins used for the parchment of numerous medieval manuscripts. They reported their findings in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.
“The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past,” said co-author Louis L’Hôte, a graduate student at University College Dublin. “These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies—such as sheeppox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia.”
Per the authors, the earliest known written evidence of sheeppox infection dates to the first century CE, when Roman accounts described outbreaks of skin lesions ("pustules") in the animals. There are more frequent mentions of deadly outbreaks of "pockes" or "variola" in sheep by the Middle Ages, recorded in various agricultural texts and accounting documents in France, Spain, and England. There seemed to be a decline in outbreaks in 17th-century France, although frequent outbreaks re-emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, often with high mortality rates in the flocks. Great Britain did not experience a sheeppox resurgence until 1847.
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Last month, Anthropic announced a billing change that would have substantially increased costs for heavy users of its automation-focused Claude Agent SDK, including many third-party apps. On Monday, though, Anthropic abruptly announced it had paused those pricing changes just as they were set to take effect, allowing Agent SDK users to continue drawing from the more generous usage limits in their existing Claude subscriptions.
The plan, as announced on May 13, would have treated usage of the Claude Agent SDK (including via third-party apps and the programmatic "claude -p" command) separately from "standard" Claude usage via the chat interface or the official Claude CLI. At the time, Anthropic said that, as of June 15, that kind of outside SDK usage would be billed at Anthropic's prevailing API rates, with subscribers receiving a simple monthly usage credit equal to their subscription price.
That would have been a major change from the current setup, where Agent SDK use is limited only by the standard weekly caps applied to a user's current Claude subscription tier. Those generous limits allow power users to squeeze a lot more usage out of those paid subscriptions than they would get by paying the same price for API fees. One analysis suggests that Claude Opus users start saving money from their subscription after just two to three messages per day, and that their subscription could be worth many multiples of its monthly cost in API usage.
GitHub has announced that it will be shifting to a usage-based billing model for its GitHub Copilot AI service starting on June 1. The move is pitched as a way to "better align pricing with actual usage" and a necessary step to keep Copilot financially sustainable amid surging demand for limited AI computing resources.
GitHub Copilot subscribers currently receive an allocation of monthly "requests" and "premium requests," which are spent whenever they ask Copilot for help from an AI model. But those broad categories cover many different AI tasks with a wide range of total backend computing costs, GitHub says.
"Today, a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session can cost the user the same amount," the Microsoft-owned company wrote in its announcement. And while GitHub says it has "absorbed much of the escalating inference cost behind that usage" to this point, lumping all "premium requests" together "is no longer sustainable."
Microsoft announced Tuesday that subscribers to its Game Pass service will see significant price reductions starting today. But those subscribers will also be losing included day-one access to Activision's popular Call of Duty series from now on.
In the US, the price of a Game Pass Ultimate subscription will drop to $22.99 a month (from $29.99, down roughly 23 percent), while the more limited PC Game Pass will drop to $13.99 a month (from $16.49, down roughly 22 percent). Going forward, neither subscription will include launch day access to new Call of Duty games, which will not be available on Game Pass until the following holiday season. Previous Call of Duty games will continue to be available to Game Pass subscribers, though.
"Game Pass Ultimate has become too expensive for too many players," recently named Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said in a social media post accompanying the announcement, echoing sentiments shared in an employee memo leaked to The Verge last week. "We’ll keep learning and evolving Game Pass to better match what matters to players."
PC hardware company NZXT and its billing partner, Fragile, have agreed to a $3,450,000 settlement in response to a class-action complaint regarding NZXT’s Flex PC rental program.
NZXT announced Flex in August 2024, saying that it would charge customers $59 to $169 a month to rent an NZXT gaming desktop (as of this writing, Flex prices are $79 to $279 per month). At the time, NZXT said that the PCs would be “new or like new.” Subscribers had the option to receive an upgraded rental PC every two years.
The program was met with criticism. Renting a PC can quickly become more costly than buying one, depending on the rental, and YouTube channel Gamers Nexus claimed in November 2024 that customers received less powerful components than expected and that NZXT advertised the rental PCs with inaccurate benchmark results. There was also concern about what NZXT did with customer data left on returned computers.
The entire source code for Anthropic's Claude Code command line interface application (not the models themselves) has been leaked and disseminated, apparently due to a serious internal error. The leak gives competitors and armchair enthusiasts a detailed blueprint for how Claude Code works—a significant setback for a company that has seen explosive user growth and industry impact over the past several months.
Early this morning, Anthropic published version 2.1.88 of Claude Code npm package—but it was quickly discovered that package included a source map file, which could be used to access the entirety of Claude Code's source—almost 2,000 TypeScript files and more than 512,000 lines of code.
Security researcher Chaofan Shou was the first to publicly point it out on X, with a link to an archive containing the files. The codebase was then put in a public GitHub repository, and it has been forked tens of thousands of times.
Canceling a software subscription is supposed to be easy—that's what US law dictates. Adobe, however, has played fast and loose with its Creative Cloud subscriptions in the past. The company was sued by the Department of Justice in 2024 due to its practice of hiding hefty termination fees when customers signed up. The case has now been settled, with Adobe agreeing to a $75 million fine and matching free services to users of its products.
Turning software into a monthly subscription is all the rage these days, but Adobe was way ahead of the curve. The company began offering its suite of editing tools, like Photoshop and Illustrator, as a monthly subscription back in 2013, and most of its customers migrated to the new system.
It was easy for Adobe to get away with that shift because CS6, the last perpetual license offered for its editing tools, started at $700 and went up to more than $2,600 for all apps. By contrast, paying between $10 and $70 per month seems like a good deal, and it might be in the short term. Although anyone who has been paying monthly since the change has spent thousands of dollars on Adobe software. And when people noticed that and decided they wanted to cancel, many of them were frustrated with the outcome.
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