As its name implies, the venerable Notepad++ text editor began as a more capable version of the classic Windows Notepad, with features such as line numbering and syntax highlighting. It was created in 2003 by Don Ho, who continues to be its primary author and maintainer, and it has been a Windows-exclusive app throughout its existence (older Notepad++ versions support OSes as old as Windows 95; the current version officially supports everything going back to Windows 7).

I'm not a devoted user of the app, but I was aware of its history, which is why I was surprised to see news of a "Notepad++ for Mac" port making the rounds last week , as though it were a port of the original available from the Notepad++ website.

Apparently, this news surprised Ho as well, who claims that the Mac version and its author, Andrey Letov , are "using the Notepad++ trademark (the name) without permission."

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In a world awash in high-tech security tools like passkeys, quantum-safe algorithms, and public-key cryptography, it can be refreshing to get back to the simple things... like a good old-fashioned canary trap.

The canary trap is a simple tool often used to identify leakers or double agents. To make one, you simply share a document, image, or database but make tiny changes that are unique to each recipient. That way, if those changes show up verbatim in any leak of the information, you know immediately which recipient was behind the leak.

You don't often see canary traps in the news, though they have long been a staple of spy fiction (and practice), so an account out of Canada last week caught my eye.

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A study that claimed OpenAI’s ChatGPT can positively impact student learning has been retracted nearly one year after publication. The journal publisher, Springer Nature, cited “discrepancies” in the analysis and a lack of confidence in the conclusions—but not before the paper racked up hundreds of citations and made the rounds on social media.

“The paper's authors made some very attention-grabbing claims about the benefits of ChatGPT on learning outcomes,” said Ben Williamson , a senior lecturer at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, in an email to Ars. “It was treated by many on social media as one of the first pieces of hard, gold standard evidence that ChatGPT, and generative AI more broadly, benefits learners.”

The retracted paper attempted to quantify “the effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking” by analyzing results from 51 previous research studies. Its meta-analysis calculated the effect size between various studies’ experimental groups that used ChatGPT in education and control groups that did not use the AI chatbot.

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GameStop yesterday made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for $55.5 billion. GameStop claims that eBay has underperformed and spends too much on sales and marketing and argues that it would become a stronger company if it cuts costs and is combined with GameStop's physical retail locations.

"GameStop’s ~1,600 US locations give eBay a national network for authentication, intake, fulfillment, and live commerce," GameStop Chairman and CEO Ryan Cohen wrote in a letter to eBay Chairman Paul Pressler.

eBay's market capitalization is over four times larger than GameStop's. GameStop faces skepticism about the viability of its offer but says it will obtain debt financing and pay with a mix of cash and stock.

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After an unanticipated five-week break in the season, Formula One resumed action this past weekend in Miami. Held at a temporary circuit around Hard Rock Stadium, the event is emblematic of the Liberty era of F1: a turbocharged marketing extravaganza crammed full of hospitality suites with ticket prices as high as $95,000 . It might be miles from the sea—the original plans to race across a bridge over Biscayne Bay did not survive contact with locals—but the sport is doing its best to make this a modern Monaco, playing up the host city's glamorous reputation and pastel color palette.

As we learned a couple of weeks ago , there have been tweaks to the amount of energy that the cars' new hybrid power units can regenerate and deploy via the electric motor that contributes almost half of the car's power output. The first three races of this season were frenetic , but they alarmed many longtime fans, as the cars are now too energy-limited to be driven flat-out during qualifying; that energy limitation also led to cars swapping positions multiple times, derisively dubbed "yo-yo" racing by critics.

The new limits on harvesting energy from the V6 to charge the battery on the move should reduce the potential for huge speed differentials like the one that caused Oliver Bearman's crash in Japan, and energy management was (thankfully) not much of a topic this weekend. Miami's layout definitely helps there, with plenty of braking zones to help regenerate much of the now-allowed 7 MJ each lap.

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Last year, we noted how the long-standing vagaries of HDMI licensing and open source AMD driver development combined to prevent the upcoming Steam Machine from receiving official support for the HDMI 2.1 display standard . Now, though, it seems that AMD is making real progress on adding full HDMI 2.1 compliance to its Linux amdgpu driver in the near future.

In patch series notes for an amdgpu driver update posted on Friday (and noticed by Phoronix ), AMD's Harry Wentland says that the company is finally adding HDMI FRL (Fixed Rate Link) support to the popular Linux display driver. That's the feature that allows for higher bandwidth on compatible HDMI cables compared to the TMDS standard found on HDMI 2.0 and earlier. That in turn enables direct support for higher resolutions, dynamic HDR, and features like Variable Refresh Rate that aren't supported in HDMI 2.0.

Wentland notes that this update still just represents "a representative subset of HDMI compliance," in part because it is missing the code to support the Display Stream Compression (DSC) that allows for even higher resolutions and frame rates up to 10K at 100 Hz. But Wentland adds that DSC support "is still being tested and will be sent out later," and that "a full
compliance run" for HDMI 2.1 is "in the works." An AMD driver developer with the handle agd5f also commented on Phoronix , noting that "a full implementation [of HDMI 2.1] will ultimately be available once the patches are ready and have completed compliance testing."

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Just days before the trial started, Elon Musk tried to settle his lawsuit, which alleges that under Sam Altman's direction, OpenAI abandoned its mission to serve as a nonprofit making AI to benefit humanity.

According to a Sunday court filing from OpenAI, Musk messaged OpenAI President Greg Brockman two days ahead of the trial to "gauge interest" in a possible settlement. Brockman promptly responded, suggesting that "both sides" drop their claims. But Musk refused, then appeared to grow threatening enough that the court may allow Brockman to testify on the message as evidence supposedly revealing Musk's true motives for pursuing the litigation.

"By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America," Musk responded to Brockman's suggestion that all claims be dropped. "If you insist, so it will be."

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The Trump administration has brought US onshore wind development to a halt citing national security concerns, representing a major escalation in the president’s crusade against renewable energy.

Approvals for about 165 onshore wind projects on private lands are being stalled by the Department of Defense, including wind farms which were awaiting final sign-off, others in the middle of negotiations and some that typically would not require oversight by the department, according to the American Clean Power Association (ACP) and people close to the matter.

Wind farms require routine approval from the defence department to ensure they do not interfere with radar systems. This typically involves the level of risk being assessed and the developer paying an agreed sum for the army to update its radar filter system so it can locate the windmill. Some projects can be deemed not to pose a risk due to their distance from army facilities and flight paths. Normally these assessments can take as little as a few days to complete.

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Violin makers, aka luthiers, traditionally learn from hands-on experience how to craft parts and select materials to shape an instrument's final sound. MIT engineers hope to streamline that painstaking process with their new virtual violin. It's a computer simulation tool that can capture the precise physics of the instrument and even reproduce a realistic sound of a plucked string, according to a paper published in the journal npj Acoustics.

Unlike the more common software programs and plugins that simulate violin sounds via sampling, averaging the final sound based on thousands of notes, the MIT model is based on the fundamental physics of the instrument. “We’re not saying that we can reproduce the artisan’s magic,” said co-author Nicholas Makris . “We’re just trying to understand the physics of violin sound, and perhaps help luthiers in the design process.”

Violin acoustics has long been a hot topic of research among acousticians, particularly when it comes to unlocking the secret to the superior sounds of violins crafted during the so-called "Golden Age"—notably the instruments of famed Cremona luthier Antonio Stradivari , as well as those of the Amati family and Giuseppe Guarneri . There are plenty of variables to consider, given a violin's acoustic complexity.

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