How I al­go­rith­mi­cally do­nated $5000+ to Open Source via GitHub Sponsors and PyPI dataWe all in­di­rectly de­pend on open source soft­ware — a pub­lic good with a ~$9 tril­lion value, mainly de­vel­oped by un­paid vol­un­teers. But with­out main­te­nance, it can be­come dys­func­tional or even harm­ful, and this meme bril­liantly out­lines the fragility of mod­ern in­fra­struc­ture. That’s why I find it cru­cial to fund OSS main­tain­ers in a sys­temic way to ef­fi­ciently mit­i­gate risks in the soft­ware sup­ply chain our world runs on. However, the key cur­rent fi­nanc­ing so­lu­tions do not seem suf­fi­cient for this:Large open-source foun­da­tions fol­low the joint in­ter­ests of their cor­po­rate donors and mainly fo­cus on ma­jor pro­jects like Kubernetes, Postgres, Linux, etc. Together with cor­po­ra­tions, they of­ten over­look the long tail of small but cru­cial OSS (e.g. Log4J). Also, many such non-prof­its seem in­trans­par­ent to me as a pri­vate donor.Tools like Thanks.dev, Open Collective, and GitHub Sponsors are great for fund­ing one’s own sup­ply chain or spe­cific liked pro­jects, in­clud­ing small OSS. However, such do­na­tions grav­i­tate to­ward the most pop­u­lar, not the most im­por­tant OSS — and these two di­men­sions barely cor­re­late (see the proof for Python be­low).So a “random per­son from Nebraska” with­out pub­lic­ity rarely gets funded, and it cre­ates sub­stan­tial risks for all. That’s not cool! And what if I want to do­nate money to the global OSS at large to ef­fi­ciently re­duce such risks?The so­lu­tion can be an al­go­rithm-based in­dex for OSS fun­ders — sim­i­lar to in­vest­ing in pub­lic in­dexes via ETFs in­stead of man­ual stock pick­ing. It would high­light the most cru­cial but un­der­funded OSS, serv­ing as an open-source ana­logue of the “S&P 500.“I would love to do­nate to such an open-source-at-large in­dex, but there is none, and even niche ecosys­tems do not have such large-scale struc­tures for donors. So I have built a sim­ple MVP for Python and per­son­ally do­nated ~$5000 through it, mainly us­ing GitHub Sponsors and PyPI data 🙂GitHub in­tro­duced its spon­sor­ship pro­gram in 2019 and has since fa­cil­i­tated $40M+ in do­na­tions to its users. However, only about 44,000 ac­counts are spon­sorable on GitHub now — a tiny frac­tion (0.03%) of its vast ~150 mil­lion user base.When look­ing at his­tor­i­cal co­horts of spon­sorable users (by a quar­ter of ac­count cre­ation), most co­horts have be­tween 600 and 1,000 ac­counts. Unsurprisingly, the ear­li­est and most re­cent co­horts tend to have fewer users.In­ter­est­ingly, the pro­por­tion of spon­sorable users grows ex­po­nen­tially with the “age” of their ac­counts on GitHub. Yet, only 17% of these el­i­gi­ble users (~7,600) have any spon­sors at all. The dis­tri­b­u­tion of spon­sors is highly un­even, re­sem­bling a power-law dis­tri­b­u­tion—a pat­tern com­monly seen in tech mar­kets.Al­though GitHub does not sup­port do­na­tions via its API, it of­fers a bulk spon­sor­ship  via CSVs (up to 100 users per file). So, for­tu­nately, it can be done at some scale.But how should one de­cide which users to spon­sor and how much to do­nate to each one? It re­quires data on their im­por­tance, and I used PyPI to roughly es­ti­mate it for Python pack­ages.I be­gan by an­a­lyz­ing a dataset of all pro­jects on the Python Package Index (PyPI) which had over 100,000 down­loads in the past 12 months (LTM) and then: nar­rowed the list down to pack­ages with spon­sorable users (16%),grouped these by user, re­sult­ing in 946 po­ten­tial grantees.

LTM down­loads also fol­low a power-law-like dis­tri­b­u­tion. However, when com­par­ing it with the num­ber of GitHub Sponsors, the two met­rics ap­pear en­tirely dis­con­nected!In other words, there is al­most no link be­tween a pro­jec­t’s sig­nif­i­cance (as mea­sured by LTM down­loads) and its pop­u­lar­ity among GitHub Sponsors (reflected in the num­ber of spon­sors) for Python pack­ages.Se­lect­ing open-source pro­jects for fi­nan­cial sup­port re­mains an im­per­fect process, with no widely ac­cepted ap­proach or con­sen­sus within the OSS com­mu­nity. For the sake of ex­per­i­ment, I de­cided to start with some­thing rel­a­tively sim­ple:Mi­cro­grants rang­ing from $1 to $200, with a to­tal bud­get of ~$5,000.Larger grants were as­signed to users with greater av­er­age “value” or higher “risk” Value in­creases with # to­tal down­loads and LTM down­loads on PyPI. Risk in­creases with the pro­ject size and OpenSSF score (security risk)  Risk de­screases with the num­ber of­Met­rics were nor­mal­ized or log-nor­mal­ized to ac­count for power-law dis­tri­b­u­tions.

After gath­er­ing and nor­mal­iz­ing the data, I al­lo­cated the bud­get pro­por­tion­ally based on each pro­jec­t’s to­tal score. Grant amounts were rounded, and any grants falling be­low $1 were re­moved. Also, some GitHub users had cus­tom min­i­mum thresh­olds for one-time do­na­tions that ex­ceeded my cal­cu­lated grant amounts. To ad­dress this, some grants were in­creased in cases where the dif­fer­ence was no more than $25.The fi­nal out­come was a list of 866 GitHub users, to whom I do­nated a to­tal of $5,037 via GitHub Sponsors on . The largest mi­cro­grant was awarded to scikit-learn.Open source main­te­nance could se­cure more fund­ing from in­di­vid­u­als (~150M GitHub users) if there were more trans­par­ent, scal­able and sys­temic tools to ef­fi­ciently sup­port OSS-at-large. A few highly rel­e­vant com­po­nents seem to be miss­ing for now:OSS-at-large in­dex al­go­rith­mi­cally iden­ti­fy­ing the most cru­cial and un­der­funded OSS from the global soft­ware sup­ply chain’s per­spec­tive. It should in­clude pro­jects across all ecosys­tems (Python, JavaScript, etc.) us­ing a com­mon ap­proach. Although chal­leng­ing, most re­quired in­puts for it are al­ready on­line.More open fund­ing data telling po­ten­tial donors how well-funded a pro­ject is and how to sup­port it. Standardization ef­forts like GitHub’s fund­ing.yml and FLOSS’ fund­ing.json are rea­son­able ini­tia­tives in this area.   Funding links in pack­age man­agers. I was sur­prised how un­struc­tured the data for PyPI pack­ages is re­gard­ing links to GitHub repos­i­to­ries and the as­so­ci­ated main­tain­ers who should re­ceive fund­ing. A stan­dard­ized “funding link” would help re­solve this is­sue and cre­ate a more co­he­sive sys­tem.The last but not the least: I highly rec­om­mend the fan­tas­tic ini­tia­tive Open Source Pledge, which re­quires com­pa­nies to do­nate $2,000 per de­vel­oper an­nu­ally to OSS main­tain­ers. Unfortunately, it does not ac­cept in­di­vid­u­als yet, and if you be­lieve this should change (as I do), please join the on­go­ing dis­cus­sion.

Car de­sign is an it­er­a­tive and pro­pri­etary process. Carmakers can spend sev­eral years on the de­sign phase for a car, tweak­ing 3D forms in sim­u­la­tions be­fore build­ing out the most promis­ing de­signs for phys­i­cal test­ing. The de­tails and specs of these tests, in­clud­ing the aero­dy­nam­ics of a given car de­sign, are typ­i­cally not made pub­lic. Significant ad­vances in per­for­mance, such as in fuel ef­fi­ciency or elec­tric ve­hi­cle range, can there­fore be slow and siloed from com­pany to com­pany.

MIT en­gi­neers say that the search for bet­ter car de­signs can speed up ex­po­nen­tially with the use of gen­er­a­tive ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence tools that can plow through huge amounts of data in sec­onds and find con­nec­tions to gen­er­ate a novel de­sign. While such AI tools ex­ist, the data they would need to learn from have not been avail­able, at least in any sort of ac­ces­si­ble, cen­tral­ized form.

But now, the en­gi­neers have made just such a dataset avail­able to the pub­lic for the first time. Dubbed DrivAerNet++, the dataset en­com­passes more than 8,000 car de­signs, which the en­gi­neers gen­er­ated based on the most com­mon types of cars in the world to­day. Each de­sign is rep­re­sented in 3D form and in­cludes in­for­ma­tion on the car’s aero­dy­nam­ics — the way air would flow around a given de­sign, based on sim­u­la­tions of fluid dy­nam­ics that the group car­ried out for each de­sign.

Each of the dataset’s 8,000 de­signs is avail­able in sev­eral rep­re­sen­ta­tions, such as mesh, point cloud, or a sim­ple list of the de­sign’s pa­ra­me­ters and di­men­sions. As such, the dataset can be used by dif­fer­ent AI mod­els that are tuned to process data in a par­tic­u­lar modal­ity.

DrivAerNet++ is the largest open-source dataset for car aero­dy­nam­ics that has been de­vel­oped to date. The en­gi­neers en­vi­sion it be­ing used as an ex­ten­sive li­brary of re­al­is­tic car de­signs, with de­tailed aero­dy­nam­ics data that can be used to quickly train any AI model. These mod­els can then just as quickly gen­er­ate novel de­signs that could po­ten­tially lead to more fuel-ef­fi­cient cars and elec­tric ve­hi­cles with longer range, in a frac­tion of the time that it takes the au­to­mo­tive in­dus­try to­day.

“This dataset lays the foun­da­tion for the next gen­er­a­tion of AI ap­pli­ca­tions in en­gi­neer­ing, pro­mot­ing ef­fi­cient de­sign processes, cut­ting R&D costs, and dri­ving ad­vance­ments to­ward a more sus­tain­able au­to­mo­tive fu­ture,” says Mohamed Elrefaie, a me­chan­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing grad­u­ate stu­dent at MIT.

Elrefaie and his col­leagues will pre­sent a pa­per de­tail­ing the new dataset, and AI meth­ods that could be ap­plied to it, at the NeurIPS con­fer­ence in December. His co-au­thors are Faez Ahmed, as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor of me­chan­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing at MIT, along with Angela Dai, as­so­ci­ate pro­fes­sor of com­puter sci­ence at the Technical University of Munich, and Florin Marar of BETA CAE Systems.

Ahmed leads the Design Computation and Digital Engineering Lab (DeCoDE) at MIT, where his group ex­plores ways in which AI and ma­chine-learn­ing tools can be used to en­hance the de­sign of com­plex en­gi­neer­ing sys­tems and prod­ucts, in­clud­ing car tech­nol­ogy.

“Often when de­sign­ing a car, the for­ward process is so ex­pen­sive that man­u­fac­tur­ers can only tweak a car a lit­tle bit from one ver­sion to the next,” Ahmed says. “But if you have larger datasets where you know the per­for­mance of each de­sign, now you can train ma­chine-learn­ing mod­els to it­er­ate fast so you are more likely to get a bet­ter de­sign.”

And speed, par­tic­u­larly for ad­vanc­ing car tech­nol­ogy, is par­tic­u­larly press­ing now.

“This is the best time for ac­cel­er­at­ing car in­no­va­tions, as au­to­mo­biles are one of the largest pol­luters in the world, and the faster we can shave off that con­tri­bu­tion, the more we can help the cli­mate,” El­re­faie says.

In look­ing at the process of new car de­sign, the re­searchers found that, while there are AI mod­els that could crank through many car de­signs to gen­er­ate op­ti­mal de­signs, the car data that is ac­tu­ally avail­able is lim­ited. Some re­searchers had pre­vi­ously as­sem­bled small datasets of sim­u­lated car de­signs, while car man­u­fac­tur­ers rarely re­lease the specs of the ac­tual de­signs they ex­plore, test, and ul­ti­mately man­u­fac­ture.

The team sought to fill the data gap, par­tic­u­larly with re­spect to a car’s aero­dy­nam­ics, which plays a key role in set­ting the range of an elec­tric ve­hi­cle, and the fuel ef­fi­ciency of an in­ter­nal com­bus­tion en­gine. The chal­lenge, they re­al­ized, was in as­sem­bling a dataset of thou­sands of car de­signs, each of which is phys­i­cally ac­cu­rate in their func­tion and form, with­out the ben­e­fit of phys­i­cally test­ing and mea­sur­ing their per­for­mance.

To build a dataset of car de­signs with phys­i­cally ac­cu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tions of their aero­dy­nam­ics, the re­searchers started with sev­eral base­line 3D mod­els that were pro­vided by Audi and BMW in 2014. These mod­els rep­re­sent three ma­jor cat­e­gories of pas­sen­ger cars: fast­back (sedans with a sloped back end), notch­back (sedans or coupes with a slight dip in their rear pro­file) and es­tate­back (such as sta­tion wag­ons with more blunt, flat backs). The base­line mod­els are thought to bridge the gap be­tween sim­ple de­signs and more com­pli­cated pro­pri­etary de­signs, and have been used by other groups as a start­ing point for ex­plor­ing new car de­signs.

In their new study, the team ap­plied a mor­ph­ing op­er­a­tion to each of the base­line car mod­els. This op­er­a­tion sys­tem­at­i­cally made a slight change to each of 26 pa­ra­me­ters in a given car de­sign, such as its length, un­der­body fea­tures, wind­shield slope, and wheel tread, which it then la­beled as a dis­tinct car de­sign, which was then added to the grow­ing dataset. Meanwhile, the team ran an op­ti­miza­tion al­go­rithm to en­sure that each new de­sign was in­deed dis­tinct, and not a copy of an al­ready-gen­er­ated de­sign. They then trans­lated each 3D de­sign into dif­fer­ent modal­i­ties, such that a given de­sign can be rep­re­sented as a mesh, a point cloud, or a list of di­men­sions and specs.

The re­searchers also ran com­plex, com­pu­ta­tional fluid dy­nam­ics sim­u­la­tions to cal­cu­late how air would flow around each gen­er­ated car de­sign. In the end, this ef­fort pro­duced more than 8,000 dis­tinct, phys­i­cally ac­cu­rate 3D car forms, en­com­pass­ing the most com­mon types of pas­sen­ger cars on the road to­day.

To pro­duce this com­pre­hen­sive dataset, the re­searchers spent over 3 mil­lion CPU hours us­ing the MIT SuperCloud, and gen­er­ated 39 ter­abytes of data. (For com­par­i­son, it’s es­ti­mated that the en­tire printed col­lec­tion of the Library of Congress would amount to about 10 ter­abytes of data.)

The en­gi­neers say that re­searchers can now use the dataset to train a par­tic­u­lar AI model. For in­stance, an AI model could be trained on a part of the dataset to learn car con­fig­u­ra­tions that have cer­tain de­sir­able aero­dy­nam­ics. Within sec­onds, the model could then gen­er­ate a new car de­sign with op­ti­mized aero­dy­nam­ics, based on what it has learned from the dataset’s thou­sands of phys­i­cally ac­cu­rate de­signs.

The re­searchers say the dataset could also be used for the in­verse goal. For in­stance, af­ter train­ing an AI model on the dataset, de­sign­ers could feed the model a spe­cific car de­sign and have it quickly es­ti­mate the de­sign’s aero­dy­nam­ics, which can then be used to com­pute the car’s po­ten­tial fuel ef­fi­ciency or elec­tric range — all with­out car­ry­ing out ex­pen­sive build­ing and test­ing of a phys­i­cal car.

“What this dataset al­lows you to do is train gen­er­a­tive AI mod­els to do things in sec­onds rather than hours,” Ahmed says. “These mod­els can help lower fuel con­sump­tion for in­ter­nal com­bus­tion ve­hi­cles and in­crease the range of elec­tric cars — ul­ti­mately paving the way for more sus­tain­able, en­vi­ron­men­tally friendly ve­hi­cles.”

This work was sup­ported, in part, by the German Academic Exchange Service and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

The World Beekeeping Awards will not award a prize for honey next year af­ter warn­ings of wide­spread fraud in the global sup­ply chain.

Apimondia, the International Federation of Beekeepers’ Associations, says it will show­case honey from around the world at its con­gress in Denmark, but for the first time make no awards for the prod­uct.

The de­ci­sion came as bee­keep­ers and im­porters face a mount­ing cri­sis over the scale of fraud, with warn­ings that gen­uine prod­ucts are bulked out with cheaper sugar syrup. Some com­mon tests to de­tect fraud can eas­ily be de­feated, and bee­keep­ers say there has been a fail­ure by food watch­dogs and the in­dus­try to com­bat the fraud­sters.

Apimondia said in a state­ment: “We will cel­e­brate honey in many ways at the con­gress, but honey will no longer be a cat­e­gory, and thus no honey judg­ing, in the World Beekeeping Awards. This change to re­move honey as a cat­e­gory was ne­ces­si­tated by the in­abil­ity to have honey fully tested for adul­ter­ation.”

The awards are typ­i­cally held every two years at the con­gress, at­tended by thou­sands of bee­keep­ers, sci­en­tists and in­dus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Dozens of en­tries in re­cent honey com­pe­ti­tions have been re­jected be­cause adul­ter­ation was sus­pected.

About 45% of hon­eys were re­jected at the awards in Montreal in 2019 for a va­ri­ety of rea­sons, in­clud­ing sus­pected adul­ter­ation. At the Istanbul con­gress in 2022, 39 out of 145 hon­eys were with­drawn for sus­pected adul­ter­ation. The awards also has other cat­e­gories, which will still be judged at next year’s com­pe­ti­tion, in­clud­ing beeswax, mead, in­no­va­tion and pub­li­ca­tions.

Jeff Pettis, the fed­er­a­tion’s pres­i­dent, says the first lab­o­ra­tory tests for honey were in­tro­duced for the 2019 awards. Honeys which were ex­cluded were re­placed with a card stat­ing: “This ex­hibit has failed lab­o­ra­tory analy­sis and can­not be judged fur­ther.”

There were lo­gis­ti­cal chal­lenges for the com­pe­ti­tion in au­then­ti­cat­ing en­tries and in bor­der con­trols, he said. The Copenhagen con­gress in September 2025 would high­light the dam­age be­ing done to bee­keep­ers around the world by fraud.

He said: “We are con­tin­u­ing to fight for im­prove­ments to the test­ing. We want the pub­lic to know that lo­cal honey is much less likely to be adul­ter­ated. The bee­keep­ers get their name on it and can stand be­hind it.”

He said there was wide­spread adul­ter­ation in cheaper com­mer­cial hon­eys. The fraud can oc­cur at any point of the sup­ply chain, with many im­porters and re­tail­ers un­wit­tingly trad­ing in fake honey.

An EU in­ves­ti­ga­tion pub­lished last year found 46% of im­ported sam­pled prod­ucts were sus­pected to be fraud­u­lent, in­clud­ing all 10 from the UK. Samples used in October by the UK branch of the Honey Authenticity Network for a novel form of DNA test­ing found that 24 out of 25 jars from big UK re­tail­ers were sus­pi­cious.

China is the world’s biggest pro­ducer of honey, but ex­perts say it can be fraud­u­lently blended with cheaper sugar syrup. The UK is the world’s biggest im­porter of Chinese honey, with more than 39,000 tons im­ported last year.

Bernhard Heuvel, pres­i­dent of the European Professional Beekeepers Association, said there was over­whelm­ing ev­i­dence of fraud in the sup­ply chain. “It’s just un­be­liev­able if the world or­gan­i­sa­tion for all bee­keep­ers can­not guar­an­tee the au­then­tic­ity of honey. The scale of this fraud is huge.”

Dale Gibson, co-founder of Bermondsey Street Bees, which has hives in and around London, said the UK should re­quire im­porters to la­bel the coun­try of ori­gin on all honey, in­clud­ing blends. He said: “We have to give con­sumers in­for­ma­tion at the point of sale that they can act on.”

Importers in the UK have re­jected as un­re­li­able the hun­dreds of tests com­mis­sioned by cam­paign­ers and in­ves­ti­ga­tors on British-sold honey that sug­gested adul­ter­ation. Regulators in the UK have not pub­lished de­tailed re­sults of of­fi­cial tests, but re­jected claims of sig­nif­i­cant fraud.

An as­sess­ment of food crime pub­lished by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in September said it was “unlikely that adul­ter­ated honey is broadly pre­sent on the UK mar­ket”, but recog­nised the “complexities” in mak­ing the judg­ment.

Enid Brown, di­rec­tor of the World Beekeeping Awards, said: “The UK gov­ern­ment needs to wake up to this prob­lem of adul­ter­ation of im­ported honey. Until the gov­ern­ment starts of­fi­cial tests on honey and pub­lish­ing the re­sults, we are never go­ing to win.”

A spokesper­son for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said: “We take any type of food fraud very se­ri­ously. There is no place for adul­ter­ated honey which un­der­mines con­sumer con­fi­dence and dis­ad­van­tages re­spon­si­ble busi­nesses act­ing within the law.

“We work closely with en­force­ment au­thor­i­ties to en­sure that honey sold in the UK is not sub­ject to adul­ter­ation, meets our high stan­dards, and main­tains a level play­ing field be­tween honey pro­duc­ers.”

Andrew Quinn, head of the FSA’s National Food Crime Unit, said: “We are work­ing closely with Defra and other gov­ern­ment col­leagues to de­velop con­clu­sive test­ing that will be able to es­tab­lish the au­then­tic­ity of honey on sale.”

Some work was done here in sup­port of planned fu­ture im­prove­ments like lazy load­ing of builtin func­tions. A bit of ef­fort was also spent to mod­ern­ize Python code and style, add more type an­no­ta­tions, re­move spelling er­rors, and use newer ver­sions of im­por­tant soft­ware like SymPy and Python it­self.

Many for­mat­ting is­sues with the PDF file have been ad­dressed. In par­tic­u­lar, the spac­ing of sec­tion num­bers in chap­ter and sec­tion table of con­tents has been in­creased. The mar­gin space around builtin de­f­i­n­i­tions has a also been in­creased. Numerous spelling cor­rec­tions to the doc­u­ment have been ap­plied.

The code to run doctests and pro­duce LaTeX doc­u­men­ta­tion has been re­vised and refac­tored to al­low in­cre­men­tal builtin up­date, and to DRY the code.

Section Head-Related Operations is a new sec­tion off of “Expression Structure”. The ti­tle of the PDF has changed from Mathics to Mathics3 and the in­tro­duc­tion has been up­dated and re­vised.

* *Plot does not show mes­sages dur­ing the eval­u­a­tion.

* Graphics and Graphics3D in­clud­ing wrong prim­i­tives and

di­rec­tives are shown with a pink back­ground. In the Mathics-Django

in­ter­face, a tooltip er­ror mes­sage is also shown.

* Improving sup­port for $CharacterEncoding. Now it is pos­si­ble to

change it from in­side the ses­sion.

* eval_abs and eval_sign ex­tracted from Abs and Sign and added to math­ics.eval.arith­metic.

* Maximum num­ber of dig­its al­lowed in a string set to 7000 and can be ad­justed us­ing en­vi­ron­ment vari­able MATHICS_MAX_STR_DIGITS on Python ver­sions that don’t ad­just au­to­mat­i­cally (like pys­ton).

* Real num­ber com­par­isons im­ple­mented is based now in the in­ter­nal im­ple­men­ta­tion of RealSign.

* For Python 3.11, the vari­able $MaxLengthIntStringConversion con­trols the max­i­mum size of the lit­eral con­ver­sion be­tween large in­te­gers and Strings.

* Older style non-ap­pear­ing and non-ped­a­gog­i­cal doctests have been con­verted to pytest

* Built-in code is di­rected ex­plic­itly rather than im­plic­itly. This fa­cil­i­tates the abil­ity to lazy load builtins or “autoload” them via GNU Emacs au­toload.

* Some works was done to make it pos­si­ble so that in the fu­ture we can speed up ini­tial load­ing and re­duce the ini­tial mem­ory foot­print

We now re­quire an ex­plicit call to a new func­tion­im­port_and_load­_builtins(). Previously load­ing was im­plicit and

in­de­ter­mi­nate as to when this oc­curred as it was based on im­port or­der.

We need this so that we can sup­port in the fu­ture lazy load­ing of builtin mod­ules.

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - With a sin­gle sen­tence, the U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has ended a na­tion­wide pro­gram that had seized un­told mil­lions in cash from air­line pas­sen­gers with­out ar­rests.

“I am di­rect­ing that the DEA sus­pend con­duct­ing con­sen­sual en­coun­ters,” wrote Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco in a Nov. 12, 2024, di­rec­tive to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The di­rec­tive was an im­me­di­ate re­sponse to a re­port from the Justice Department Inspector General that was set in mo­tion by Atlanta News First Investigates. The award-win­ning in­ves­ti­ga­tion, In Plane Sight, has been viewed mil­lions of times on YouTube. One of those view­ers took ac­tion be­cause of it, set­ting off a chain of events that led the Justice Department to shut the pro­gram down.

Earlier this year, David (who wanted his iden­tity con­cealed be­cause his em­ployer does busi­ness with the gov­ern­ment) said no to a “consensual search” at the board­ing gate for a flight from the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Airport to New York City.

David had seen the Atlanta News First Investigates re­port that sug­gested ask­ing agents, “Am I free to go?,” or “Am I be­ing de­tained?,” when con­fronted at air­port board­ing gates. David said he re­fused to give con­sent be­cause of what he saw in the Atlanta News First Investigates YouTube video.

A DEA task force of­fi­cer said David was free to go, but agents would de­tain his bag. David asked mul­ti­ple times if he was be­ing de­tained, and then walked on the plane with his back­pack.

DEA Task Force Officer Nicholas Nimeskern fol­lowed David onto the plane and re­moved his bag with­out a war­rant or prob­a­ble cause. “So I pulled out my phone and started record­ing him,” David said. On the video, the of­fi­cer can be heard say­ing, “I don’t care about your con­sent stuff,” when David re­peat­edly de­nied the agen­t’s re­quests to search his bag.

Nothing was found in­side, but David missed his flight.

The Justice Department Inspector General re­opened a decades-long in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the Operation Jetway pro­gram af­ter see­ing David’s video, which was first pub­lished by the non-profit Institute for Justice.

“Without the sub­ject, the in­di­vid­ual, think­ing to im­me­di­ately use their cell phone to record the event,” said Inspector General Michael Horowitz, “in fact, we clearly would­n’t have known about it be­cause ab­sent that video, there was no record of the in­ci­dent.”

When the Office of The Inspector General re­quested records of David’s search, the DEA re­sponded no records ex­isted. “The DEA was­n’t keep­ing records of its en­coun­ters un­less it found cash or drugs,” Horowitz said.

“When we be­gan our in­ves­ti­ga­tion and asked for the pa­per­work, that’s when, months later, they started cre­at­ing pa­per­work try­ing to lay out why they did what they did,” Horowitz added.

As part of its in­ves­ti­ga­tion in 2023, Atlanta News First Investigates dis­cov­ered Transportation Security Administration agents and air­line em­ploy­ees re­ceived in­for­mant fees for tip­ping off the DEA to pas­sen­gers likely car­ry­ing large amounts of cash.

Traveling do­mes­ti­cally with any amount of cur­rency is le­gal in the U. S.; only in­ter­na­tional trav­el­ers are re­quired to de­clare car­ry­ing $10,000 or more in cur­rency. David was not car­ry­ing a large amount of cash with him on the flight.

The DOJ Inspector General found out David was stopped be­cause an air­line em­ployee paid by the DEA had re­ported him for buy­ing a last-minute ticket.

’It turned out that the in­di­vid­ual was get­ting a per­cent­age of the amount seized on mul­ti­ple oc­ca­sions over a longer pe­riod of time,” Horowitz said.

The IG re­port showed one air­line em­ployee “has re­ceived tens of thou­sands of dol­lars from the DEA over the past sev­eral years for seizures re­sult­ing from in­for­ma­tion [they] pro­vided of trav­el­ers with tick­ets pur­chased within 48 hours of their flight.”

The Inspector General told Atlanta News First Investigates there was no other ev­i­dence of drug traf­fick­ing in David’s case, other than his pur­chase of a last-minute ticket to New York City, where he lives. “Approaching in­di­vid­u­als based solely on that ba­sis, with­out any lead, any other in­for­ma­tion to sug­gest they might be a drug courier or money laun­derer was con­cern­ing,” Horowitz said.

A draft of the Inspector General’s re­port landed on the Attorney General’s desk days be­fore a in­quiry from Georgia U. S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, who de­manded an­swers af­ter see­ing the Atlanta News First Investigates re­port fea­tur­ing David’s video.

“It is a scathing de­scrip­tion of se­ri­ous de­fi­cien­cies in this pro­gram that im­pact the con­sti­tu­tional rights of my con­stituents in Georgia,” Ossoff said. “And I don’t know whether with­out re­port­ing from Atlanta News First that would have come to light.”

Ossoff said he par­tic­u­larly con­cerned with the in­for­mant fees paid to air­line em­ploy­ees who were alert­ing the DEA to pas­sen­gers with­out any ev­i­dence of crim­i­nal ac­tiv­ity. “If in­for­mants are be­ing paid with con­fis­cated prop­erty from searches that the in­for­mants trig­gered with no real ev­i­dence, it’s ob­vi­ous why that’s a po­ten­tial abuse and a po­ten­tial vi­o­la­tion of civil rights,” Ossoff said.

The Nov. 12 di­rec­tive or­dered the im­me­di­ate sus­pen­sion of the en­tire DEA cold con­sent en­counter pro­gram na­tion­wide. That di­rec­tive was re­vealed pub­licly only when the Office of Inspector General re­leased its re­port Nov. 21, 2024.

Atlanta News First Investigates went to dozens of air­port gates in Georgia, Washington, D. C., and Louisiana since the di­rec­tive was is­sued, and saw no sign of the plain­clothes drug agents pre­vi­ously recorded search­ing pas­sen­gers at board­ing doors.

The DOJ di­rec­tive does al­low the DEA to search sus­pects of drug traf­fick­ing “as part of a pre-planned ac­tiv­ity in an on­go­ing, pred­i­cated in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­volv­ing one or more iden­ti­fied tar­gets or crim­i­nal net­works.”

The di­rec­tive ex­plic­itly bans searches pred­i­cated only on tips re­ceived from air­line em­ploy­ees about last minute ticket pur­chases, like the one that put David on the DEA search list.

“The re­ceipt of travel in­for­ma­tion from a con­fi­den­tial source, stand­ing alone, does not con­sti­tute the type of pred­i­cated, on­go­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion which will sup­port a con­sen­sual en­counter,” the Deputy Attorney General wrote.

The DEA had not re­sponded to Atlanta News First Investigates ques­tions or re­quests for in­ter­views for over a year, af­ter the agency had de­clined an ini­tial in­ter­view re­quest.

After the air­port search pro­gram was sus­pended, Atlanta News First Investigates reached out to the agency again by email.

“DEA is re­lent­lessly com­mit­ted to its core mis­sion: sav­ing American lives,” the agency said. “We reg­u­larly re­view our en­force­ment ef­forts and pro­grams to en­sure that we are us­ing re­sources in the best way to ful­fill that mis­sion. For the last sev­eral months, DEA has been con­duct­ing an in­ter­nal re­view of its Transportation Interdiction Program, which has been sus­pended. That re­view is on­go­ing. The DEA is com­mit­ted to ex­e­cut­ing our mis­sion with in­tegrity and pro­fes­sion­al­ism at every turn.”

Atlanta News First Investigates also reached out to Nimeskern through his pri­mary em­ployer, the Montgomery (Ohio) Police Department.

Police Chief John Crowell re­sponded, “I will check with him, but I doubt he wishes to speak to you.”

If there’s some­thing you would like Atlanta News First Chief Investigator Brendan Keefe to look into, email him di­rectly at bren­dan.keefe@wanf.com.

People strug­gling with their men­tal health are more likely to browse neg­a­tive con­tent on­line, and in turn, that neg­a­tive con­tent makes their symp­toms worse, ac­cord­ing to a se­ries of stud­ies by re­searchers at MIT.

The group be­hind the re­search has de­vel­oped a web plug-in tool to help those look­ing to pro­tect their men­tal health make more in­formed de­ci­sions about the con­tent they view.

The find­ings were out­lined in an open-ac­cess pa­per by Tali Sharot, an ad­junct pro­fes­sor of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sciences at MIT and pro­fes­sor at University College London, and Christopher A. Kelly, a for­mer vis­it­ing PhD stu­dent who was a mem­ber of Sharot’s Affective Brain Lab when the stud­ies were con­ducted, who is now a post­doc at Stanford University’s Institute for Human Centered AI. The find­ings were pub­lished Nov. 21 in the jour­nal Nature Human Behavior.

“Our study shows a causal, bidi­rec­tional re­la­tion­ship be­tween health and what you do on­line. We found that peo­ple who al­ready have men­tal health symp­toms are more likely to go on­line and more likely to browse for in­for­ma­tion that ends up be­ing neg­a­tive or fear­ful,” Sharot says. “After brows­ing this con­tent, their symp­toms be­come worse. It is a feed­back loop.”

The stud­ies an­a­lyzed the web brows­ing habits of more than 1,000 par­tic­i­pants by us­ing nat­ural lan­guage pro­cess­ing to cal­cu­late a neg­a­tive score and a pos­i­tive score for each web page vis­ited, as well as scores for anger, fear, an­tic­i­pa­tion, trust, sur­prise, sad­ness, joy, and dis­gust. Participants also com­pleted ques­tion­naires to as­sess their men­tal health and in­di­cated their mood di­rectly be­fore and af­ter web-brows­ing ses­sions. The re­searchers found that par­tic­i­pants ex­pressed bet­ter moods af­ter brows­ing less-neg­a­tive web pages, and par­tic­i­pants with worse pre-brows­ing moods tended to browse more-neg­a­tive web pages.

In a sub­se­quent study, par­tic­i­pants were asked to read in­for­ma­tion from two web pages ran­domly se­lected from ei­ther six neg­a­tive web­pages or six neu­tral pages. They then in­di­cated their mood lev­els both be­fore and af­ter view­ing the pages. An analy­sis found that par­tic­i­pants ex­posed to neg­a­tive web pages re­ported to be in a worse mood than those who viewed neu­tral pages, and then sub­se­quently vis­ited more-neg­a­tive pages when asked to browse the in­ter­net for 10 min­utes.

“The re­sults con­tribute to the on­go­ing de­bate re­gard­ing the re­la­tion­ship be­tween men­tal health and on­line be­hav­ior,” the au­thors wrote. “Most re­search ad­dress­ing this re­la­tion­ship has fo­cused on the quan­tity of use, such as screen time or fre­quency of so­cial me­dia use, which has led to mixed con­clu­sions. Here, in­stead, we fo­cus on the type of con­tent browsed and find that its af­fec­tive prop­er­ties are causally and bidi­rec­tion­ally re­lated to men­tal health and mood.”

To test whether in­ter­ven­tion could al­ter web-brows­ing choices and im­prove mood, the re­searchers pro­vided par­tic­i­pants with search en­gine re­sults pages with three search re­sults for each of sev­eral queries. Some par­tic­i­pants were pro­vided la­bels for each search re­sult on a scale of “feel bet­ter” to “feel worse.” Other par­tic­i­pants were not pro­vided with any la­bels. Those who were pro­vided with la­bels were less likely to choose neg­a­tive con­tent and more likely to choose pos­i­tive con­tent. A fol­lowup study found that those who viewed more pos­i­tive con­tent re­ported a sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter mood.

Based on these find­ings, Sharot and Kelly cre­ated a down­load­able plug-in tool called “Digital Diet” that of­fers scores for Google search re­sults in three cat­e­gories: emo­tion (whether peo­ple find the con­tent pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive, on av­er­age), knowl­edge (to what ex­tent in­for­ma­tion on a web­page helps peo­ple un­der­stand a topic, on av­er­age), and ac­tion­abil­ity (to what ex­tent in­for­ma­tion on a web­page is use­ful on av­er­age). MIT elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer­ing and com­puter sci­ence grad­u­ate stu­dent Jonatan Fontanez ’24, a for­mer un­der­grad­u­ate re­searcher from MIT in Sharot’s lab, also con­tributed to the de­vel­op­ment of the tool. The tool was in­tro­duced pub­licly this week, along with the pub­li­ca­tion of the pa­per in Nature Human Behavior.

“People with worse men­tal health tend to seek out more-neg­a­tive and fear-in­duc­ing con­tent, which in turn ex­ac­er­bates their symp­toms, cre­at­ing a vi­cious feed­back loop,” Kelly says. “It is our hope that this tool can help them gain greater au­ton­omy over what en­ters their minds and break neg­a­tive cy­cles.”

PARIS (AP) — Notre Dame is re­open­ing its doors for the first time since a fire in 2019 nearly de­stroyed Paris’ beloved 12th-century cathe­dral.

World lead­ers — in­clud­ing President-elect Donald Trump, America’s first lady Jill Biden, Britain’s Prince William and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — gath­ered Saturday among more than 2,500 guests to cel­e­brate the restora­tion of the land­mark widely con­sid­ered to be a pin­na­cle of French ar­chi­tec­tural her­itage.

Saturday’s events started with Archbishop Laurent Ulrich sym­bol­i­cally re­open­ing Notre Dame’s grand wooden doors with three re­sound­ing knocks.

Following the 2019 fire, nearly $1 bil­lion in do­na­tions poured in from around the world, a trib­ute to its world­wide ap­peal.

For more of AP’s cov­er­age on Notre Dame, visit https://​ap­news.com/​hub/​notre-dame-cathe­dral

French President Emmanuel Macron wel­comed Donald Trump to Paris on Saturday with a full a dose of pres­i­den­tial pomp as the two held a hastily arranged meet­ing with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy be­fore the grand re­open­ing of the Notre Dame Cathedral.

The once and fu­ture American pres­i­dent was warmly em­braced by Macron upon ar­riv­ing at the Elysee Palace.

“It’s a great honor for French peo­ple to wel­come you five years later,” Macron told Trump. “Welcome back again.”

Trump said it was a “very great honor” to be there, while hint­ing at chal­lenges ahead. “It cer­tainly seems like the world is go­ing a lit­tle crazy right now. And we’ll be talk­ing about that.”

An ac­tual red car­pet was rolled out for Trump as Macron be­stowed the kind of full diplo­matic wel­come that France of­fers sit­ting American pres­i­dents, com­plete with trum­pets blar­ing and mem­bers of the Republican Guard in full uni­form. It was a clear sign that even though Trump does­n’t take of­fice un­til Jan. 20, 2025, Macron and other European lead­ers are al­ready work­ing to win his fa­vor and treat­ing him as America’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive on the world stage.

President Joe Biden de­clined an in­vi­ta­tion to at­tend the Notre Dame cer­e­mony, mark­ing five years af­ter a dev­as­tat­ing fire, and first lady Jill Biden was the of­fi­cial U. S. rep­re­sen­ta­tive. The White House cited a sched­ul­ing con­flict.

Macron and lead­ers across Europe are try­ing to per­suade the pres­i­dent-elect to main­tain sup­port for Ukraine in its de­fense against Russia’s in­va­sion. Macron’s of­fice said the war, along with con­flicts in the Mideast, would be dis­cussed.

With a first deep rum­ble like a grum­bling gi­ant, the great or­gan of Notre Dame has awak­ened from its more than 5-year si­lence, its awe­some sound once again fill­ing the re­born cathe­dral.

Archbishop Laurent Ulrich roused it from its long sleep, in­ton­ing the words “wake up, or­gan, sa­cred in­stru­ment.” To which the gar­gan­tuan or­gan, perched high above the con­gre­ga­tion, re­sponded with a low rum­ble, like a dragon clear­ing its throat. Then, the four or­gan­ists who took turns for­mu­lat­ing im­pro­vised re­sponses to the arch­bish­op’s prompts lit­er­ally pulled out the stops and let rip.

Eight times, the arch­bishop ad­dressed the in­stru­ment. Eight times, it re­sponded with a sym­phony of notes and sounds — as though re­dis­cov­er­ing and re­learn­ing the joy and power from its nearly 8,000 pipes.

Macron praised the brav­ery of fire fight­ers and re­called how, at 10:47 p.m. on the night of April 15, 2019, the first mes­sage came through say­ing that the in­ferno was be­ing beaten.

“Notre Dame of Paris was saved. Disfigured but saved,” he said. Moving onto the re­build­ing ef­fort, he de­tailed the toil of the more than 2,000 work­ers and ar­ti­sans who worked to a 5-year re­con­struc­tion dead­line set by Macron. “We de­cided to re­build Notre Dame of Paris even more beau­ti­ful than be­fore.”

Macron de­liv­ered the en­tire speech in French de­spite the multi­na­tional mix of VIP guests. At the end, Trump and Macron shook hands.

French President Emmanuel Macron ex­pressed “gratitude” Saturday to those who saved, helped and re­built Notre Dame Cathedral.

“I stand be­fore you … to ex­press the grat­i­tude of the French na­tion,” Macron said at the re­open­ing cer­e­mony.

“Tonight, the bells of Notre Dame are ring­ing again. And in a mo­ment, the or­gan will awaken,” send­ing the “music of hope” to Parisians, France and the world.

Macron spoke in front of more than 2,500 guests in­vited to cel­e­brate the restora­tion of Paris’ 12th-century cathe­dral which was nearly de­stroyed by a fire in 2019. They in­cluded world lead­ers like President-elect Donald Trump, U. S. first lady Jill Biden, Britain’s Prince William and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Notre Dame echoed to the sound of a sus­tained stand­ing ova­tion af­ter the show­ing of a short movie that doc­u­mented the gar­gan­tuan re­build­ing ef­fort by thou­sands of work­ers who la­bored — and ul­ti­mately met — a 5-year dead­line set by French President Emmanuel Macron in the af­ter­math of the blaze. Outside, the word “MERCI” — thank you — was pro­jected against the cathe­dral’s iconic west­ern fa­cade in mul­ti­ple lan­guages.

The movie showed the ter­ri­ble wounds left by the in­ferno — the gap­ing holes torn into its vaulted ceil­ings and the burned roof. But that was fol­lowed by im­ages of all types of ar­ti­sans, many us­ing tra­di­tional hand-craft tech­niques, who col­lec­tively re­stored Notre Dame to look bet­ter now than ever.

“We went from night to light,” said one of the work­ers in the movie.

The con­gre­ga­tion in­side the huge cathe­dral was ghostly quiet as its largest bell, the 13-ton Emmanuel, rang out into the Paris night, sig­nal­ing the start of the cer­e­mony.

Inside, Elon Musk gazed up at the ren­o­vated vaulted ceil­ings. Jill Biden was the last VIP wel­comed out­side by President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, be­fore Archbishop Laurent Ulrich then took over.

“Brothers and sis­ters, let us en­ter now into Notre Dame,” he said as he stood out­side, be­fore its closed doors. “It is she who ac­com­pa­nies us on our path to peace.”

He then banged on the door three times with the base of his crosier, or bish­op’s cross. Inside, the choir erupted into song, the crys­talline voices fil­ing what — un­til re­cently — had been a build­ing site. Three times, Ulrich ap­pealed to the cathe­dral to open its doors. Three times, the choir re­sponded in song. He then pushed open the heavy door: Notre Dame’s re­birth was un­der­way.

With three re­sound­ing knocks on its doors by Paris Archbishop Laurent Ulrich, wield­ing a staff carved from fire-scorched beams, the cathe­dral roared back to life Saturday evening.

For the first time since a dev­as­tat­ing 2019 blaze, the tow­er­ing Gothic mas­ter­piece re­opened for wor­ship, its re­birth marked by song, prayer, and awe be­neath its soar­ing arches.

While the cer­e­mony was ini­tially planned to be­gin on the fore­court, un­usu­ally fierce December winds whip­ping across the cen­tral Paris is­land, flanked by the River Seine, forced all events in­side. Yet the oc­ca­sion lost none of its splen­dor. Inside the lu­mi­nous nave, choirs are singing psalms, and the cathe­dral’s mighty or­gan, silent for nearly five years, is thun­der­ing to life in a tri­umphant in­ter­play of melodies.

The evening’s cel­e­bra­tion, be­ing at­tended by more than 2,500 guests and dig­ni­taries, in­clud­ing President-elect Donald Trump, U. S. First Lady Jill Biden, Britain’s Prince William, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, un­der­scores Notre Dame’s en­dur­ing role as both a spir­i­tual and cul­tural bea­con.

A small group of American ex­pats gath­ered near Notre Dame Cathedral on Saturday to protest the pres­ence of U. S. President-elect Donald Trump at the re­open­ing cer­e­mony. Organized un­der the ban­ner “Paris Against Trump,” the group crit­i­cized French President Emmanuel Macron for invit­ing Trump but chose not to or­ga­nize a large demon­stra­tion to avoid dis­rupt­ing the event.

“We find this a bit shame­ful and sad that Trump is in­vited here, es­pe­cially since he has gone against every­thing the Church stands for,” said Ehlyr O’Rourke, 34, a spokesper­son for the as­so­ci­a­tion. “We don’t un­der­stand why a crim­i­nal, a sex of­fender, a felon can ac­tu­ally be in­vited in here.”

Later in the day, thou­sands marched through Paris, de­nounc­ing Trump’s visit and ex­press­ing sup­port for Palestine. Organized by left-wing par­ties, unions, and pro-Pales­tin­ian groups, the demon­stra­tion fea­tured Palestinian flags, kef­fiyehs, and chants call­ing for Palestinian re­sis­tance, President Macron’s im­peach­ment, and crit­i­ciz­ing Trump’s al­leged com­plic­ity in Middle East con­flicts.

“We are protest­ing every week to sup­port Palestine, but what’s spe­cial to­day is the ar­rival of Donald Trump,” said Nadia Messai, one of the pro­test­ers in the crowd. “Trump has been sup­port­ing Israel, much like the United States has been since the be­gin­ning of the cre­ation of this rogue state that is oc­cu­py­ing Palestine il­le­gally.”

Philippe Jost, Notre Dame cathe­dral ren­o­va­tion chief, said the re­open­ing is an op­por­tu­nity for unity as so many di­vi­sions re­main in the world.

“We hope it will be a great mo­ment of unity for the French peo­ple, for guests from all over the world and for spec­ta­tors from all over the world,” he said. “Notre Dame de Paris unites. There are so many di­vi­sive fac­tors. An event like this must unite, must help con­cord and peace to grow through­out the world.”

rec­tor of Notre Dame and chief of the re­con­struc­tion pro­ject: (credit to Mark Carlson)

Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, the Notre Dame rec­tor called the re­open­ing an im­por­tant mo­ment that has been awaited a long time.

“Notre Dame de Paris is the very sign of the pres­ence of a soul in the heart of our city. It’s im­por­tant for Parisians, it’s im­por­tant for Catholics, it’s im­por­tant for the French and for the whole world,” he said.

“In gen­eral, the sphere of pol­i­tics does­n’t en­ter the sphere of the re­li­gious, and should­n’t. In the same way, the re­li­gious sphere does­n’t en­ter pol­i­tics,” he added. “The Archbishop of Paris in­vited the President of the Republic to speak in­side the cathe­dral as a sign of the unity that could be seen in the re­con­struc­tion. The arch­bishop al­lowed him to speak in­side be­cause the weather con­di­tions did not al­low him to speak out­side.”

Guests grad­u­ally fil­ing the cathe­dral for the evening re­open­ing cer­e­monies are rev­el­ing at the ren­o­vated in­te­ri­ors, with many whip­ping out cell phones to take sou­venir pho­tos.

“It’s a sense of per­fec­tion,” said François Le Page, who works for the Notre Dame foun­da­tion that raised nearly half of the nearly 900 mil­lion eu­ros of do­na­tions. He last set foot in the cathe­dral in 2021, on a visit

“It’s night and day,” said Rev. Andriy Morkvas, a Ukrainian pas­tor who leads the The Cathedral of Saint Volodymyr the Great church in Paris’ St. Germain des Pres said it had been 10 years since he last stepped foot in­side Notre Dame. “God is very pow­er­ful, he can change things.”

He ex­pressed hope that the cathe­dral could help bring peace to his coun­try and he drew heart from the ex­pected at­ten­dance of Ukraine’s pres­i­dent.

“I hope Notre Dame and Mary will help us re­solve this con­flict,” he said.

Outside the Elysee Palace, the of­fi­cial res­i­dence of the French pres­i­dent, dozens of mem­bers of the French Republican Guard stood by await­ing Donald Trump’s ar­rival.

Trump was in Paris on Saturday for his first in­ter­na­tional trip as pres­i­dent-elect, ready to join world lead­ers cel­e­brat­ing the ren­o­va­tion of Notre Dame Cathedral and meet with French President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Prince William.

More than 20 French gov­ern­ment se­cu­rity agents have been help­ing en­sure Trump’s safety along­side the Secret Service, ac­cord­ing to French na­tional po­lice. A spe­cial French po­lice van was pro­vid­ing anti-drone pro­tec­tion for Trump’s con­voy.

Security was tighter than usual out­side the U. S. Embassy and other sites around Paris for the Notre Dame re­open­ing, where dozens of in­ter­na­tional VIPs were ex­pected.

Macron, who has had an up-and-down re­la­tion­ship with Trump, has made a point of cul­ti­vat­ing a re­la­tion­ship since the Republican de­feated Democrat Kamala Harris last month. But Macron’s of­fice nonethe­less played down the sig­nif­i­cance of the in­vi­ta­tion, say­ing other politi­cians not now in of­fice had been in­vited as well.

Trump was in­vited as pres­i­dent-elect of a “friendly na­tion,” Macron’s of­fice said, adding, “This is in no way ex­cep­tional, we’ve done it be­fore.”

Perhaps not sur­pris­ingly for such a big cathe­dral, some of the num­bers that help tell the story of Notre Dame’s re­open­ing are on the very big side, too. The bell that will sound to sig­nal the start of the ser­vice weighs 13 tons, mak­ing it the cathe­dral’s largest. It has a name - Emmanuel — given to it by King Louis XIV af­ter it was cast in 1683. It rings in F sharp.

Inside, 42,000 square me­ters of stonework were cleaned dur­ing the ren­o­va­tion — an area equiv­a­lent to roughly six soc­cer pitches. The first stone of Notre Dame was laid in 1163. The thun­der­ous great or­gan of Notre Dame that will be heard in pub­lic at Saturday’s ser­vice for the first time since April 15, 2019, has 7,952 pipes — the largest as broad as a hu­man torso; the small­est no larger than a pen. The ren­o­vated gi­ant con­sole that con­trols the in­stru­ment has five key­boards of 56 notes each, foot ped­als for 30 notes, and 115 stops.

Unseen, above the con­gre­ga­tion and the re­paired vaulted ceil­ings, is a frame­work of beams hold­ing up the roof and spire — so dense and in­tri­cate that it’s nick­named “the for­est.” Some 2,000 oak trees were felled to re­build it.

President-elect Donald Trump is to meet Saturday with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee pres­i­den­tial palace ahead of the re­open­ing cer­e­mony for Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. This is Trump’s first for­eign trip since the elec­tion.

Macron’s of­fice said both lead­ers will dis­cuss global cri­sis, in­clud­ing wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine as well as French-American bi­lat­eral re­la­tions.

Macron is sched­uled to have a meet­ing with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy right af­ter his meet­ing with Trump.

Notre Dame cel­e­bra­tions comes as Macron’s pres­i­dency now faces its gravest cri­sis af­ter the gov­ern­men­t’s col­lapse this week in a his­toric no-con­fi­dence vote that top­pled Prime Minister Michel Barnier.

For de­vout Catholics Patricia and Cyrille Brenner, wait­ing in the cold out­side Notre Dame for its re­open­ing ser­vice that they weren’t in­vited to was the place to be. The cou­ple trav­eled by night train from Cannes on the French Riviera — fa­mous for its movie fes­ti­val — to be among the on­look­ers Saturday hop­ing for some of the 40,000 spots set aside for the pub­lic on the banks of the River Seine fac­ing the cathe­dral. They bought their train tick­ets six months ago.

“I’m from Cannes. It’s a bit like the fes­ti­val. You have to be there to ex­pe­ri­ence it,” said Patricia, 65. “It’s a pil­grim­age for us.”

Cyrille, 66, said they were the only mem­bers of their parish to make the long trip. “We like to be at the heart of things and, as Christians, it will nour­ish us,” he said.

While Cyrille said they’d felt “distress, sad­ness” when Notre Dame burned, they both also noted how sa­cred relics, stat­ues and the golden cross on the al­tar — al­most mirac­u­lously — sur­vived the in­ferno.

They both mar­veled at the ren­o­va­tion works that have not only erad­i­cated nearly all traces of the fire in­side but made it more re­splen­dent than ever.

Andrey Alexeev, a Ukrainian among on­look­ers gath­er­ing for the re­open­ing of Notre Dame, hopes U. S. pres­i­dent-elect Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy can meet and talk on the cer­e­mony’s side­lines. Their host, French President Emmanuel Macron, was meet­ing with both lead­ers be­fore they at­tend the re­open­ing ser­vice for the cathe­dral.

Alexeev was hop­ing Trump and Zelenskyy would meet, too. “I hope that meet­ing can change some­thing in a good way for Ukraine,” he said. “It’s good that Zelenskyy has a chance to speak with Trump and Macron. At least it’s an op­por­tu­nity for Ukraine.”

Alexeev, who lives in Poland, was vis­it­ing Paris with his mother, Olha, who trav­elled from Ukraine. They were hop­ing for two of the 40,000 places that were set aside for the pub­lic in fenced-off ar­eas on the banks of the River Seine, fac­ing the cathe­dral. Alexeev said he’s ag­nos­tic but that it felt im­por­tant for him to be as close to the cer­e­monies as pos­si­ble. By co­in­ci­dence, his sis­ter was vis­it­ing Paris when Notre Dame burned on April 15, 2019.

“It’s one of the great­est places not only in Europe but also the whole world,” he said. Such an oc­ca­sion “happens once in 1,000 years, I think. So we are part of his­tory.”

Saturday’s events will blend solemn re­li­gious tra­di­tion with an of­fi­cial pres­i­den­tial speech and cul­tural grandeur.

French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte will wel­come the dozens of heads of state and gov­ern­ment. Archbishop Laurent Ulrich will then take over — with a rite to sym­bol­i­cally re­open Notre Dame’s doors, kick­ing off the cer­e­monies at 7 p.m.

The cer­e­mony that was to have been held out­side will then un­fold in­side, with a film re­trac­ing the ren­o­va­tions, mu­sic and a speech by Macron.

Ulrich will then take over again, with a rite to reawaken Notre Dame’s or­gan and the rest of the re­li­gious ser­vice sched­uled to last about 55 min­utes.

PARIS — After more than 5 years of ren­o­va­tion, the re­open­ing of Notre Dame — like the Paris Olympics be­fore it — has fallen vic­tim to bad weather.

Forecasted strong winds have up­ended the run­ning or­der of the re­open­ing cer­e­monies on Saturday evening, and forced the whole thing in­doors.

The orig­i­nal plan was for an ini­tial out­door state cer­e­mony led by President Emmanuel Macron, af­ter which Archbishop Laurent Ulrich was to have taken over, lead­ing rites and a re­li­gious ser­vice in­side the cathe­dral. Those plans would have em­pha­sized France’s care­fully po­liced di­vide be­tween state and church.

But ex­pected stormy winds prompted the Paris dio­cese and Macron’s of­fice to tele­scope the cer­e­monies to­gether, now all to be held in­side the cathe­dral.

It’s the sec­ond time this year that weather has in­ter­vened in sig­nif­i­cant mo­ments for Paris. Rains drenched the July 26 open­ing cer­e­mony of the Summer Games, damp­en­ing the show and the spir­its of some spec­ta­tors.

BEIRUT (AP) — The Syrian gov­ern­ment fell early Sunday in a stun­ning end to the 50-year rule of the Assad fam­ily af­ter a sud­den rebel of­fen­sive sprinted across gov­ern­ment-held ter­ri­tory and en­tered the cap­i­tal in 10 days.

Syrian state tele­vi­sion aired a video state­ment by a group of men say­ing that President Bashar Assad has been over­thrown and all de­tainees in jails have been set free.

The man who read the state­ment said the Operations Room to Conquer Damascus, an op­po­si­tion group, called on all op­po­si­tion fight­ers and cit­i­zens to pre­serve state in­sti­tu­tions of “the free Syrian state.”

The state­ment emerged hours af­ter the head of a Syrian op­po­si­tion war mon­i­tor said Assad had left the coun­try for an undis­closed lo­ca­tion, flee­ing ahead of in­sur­gents who said they had en­tered Damascus fol­low­ing the re­mark­ably swift ad­vance across the coun­try.

Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi Jalali said the gov­ern­ment was ready to “extend its hand” to the op­po­si­tion and turn its func­tions over to a tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment.

“I am in my house and I have not left, and this is be­cause of my be­long­ing to this coun­try,” Jalili said in a video state­ment. He said he would go to his of­fice to con­tinue work in the morn­ing and called on Syrian cit­i­zens not to de­face pub­lic prop­erty.

He did not ad­dress re­ports that Assad had fled.

Rami Abdurrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told The Associated Press that Assad took a flight Sunday from Damascus.

State tele­vi­sion in Iran, Assad’s main backer in the years of war in Syria, re­ported that Assad had left the cap­i­tal. It cited Qatar’s Al Jazeera news net­work for the in­for­ma­tion and did not elab­o­rate.

There was no im­me­di­ate state­ment from the Syrian gov­ern­ment.

As day­light broke over Damascus, crowds gath­ered to pray in the city’s mosques and to cel­e­brate in the squares, chant­ing “God is great.” People also chanted anti-As­sad slo­gans and honked car horns. In some ar­eas, cel­e­bra­tory gun­shots rang out.

Soldiers and po­lice of­fi­cers left their posts and fled, and loot­ers broke into the head­quar­ters of the Ministry of Defense.

“My feel­ings are in­de­scrib­able,” said Omar Daher, a 29-year-old lawyer. “After the fear that he (Assad) and his fa­ther made us live in for many years, and the panic and state of ter­ror that I was liv­ing in, I can’t be­lieve it.”

Daher said his fa­ther was killed by se­cu­rity forces and his brother was in de­ten­tion, his fate un­known. Assad “is a crim­i­nal, a tyrant and a dog,” he said.”

“Damn his soul and the soul of the en­tire Assad fam­ily,” said Ghazal al-Sharif, an­other rev­eler in cen­tral Damascus. “It is the prayer of every op­pressed per­son and God an­swered it to­day. We thought we would never see it, but thank God, we saw it.”

The po­lice head­quar­ters in the cap­i­tal ap­peared to be aban­doned, its door left ajar with no of­fi­cers out­side. An Associated Press jour­nal­ist shot footage of an aban­doned army check­point where uni­forms were dis­carded on the ground un­der a poster of Assad’s face. Footage broad­cast on op­po­si­tion-linked me­dia showed a tank in one of the cap­i­tal’s cen­tral squares.

It was the first time op­po­si­tion forces had reached Damascus since 2018, when Syrian troops re­cap­tured ar­eas on the out­skirts of the cap­i­tal fol­low­ing a years­long siege.

The pro-gov­ern­ment Sham FM ra­dio re­ported that the Damascus air­port had been evac­u­ated and all flights halted.

The in­sur­gents also an­nounced they had en­tered the no­to­ri­ous Saydnaya mil­i­tary prison north of the cap­i­tal and “liberated” their pris­on­ers there.

The night be­fore, op­po­si­tion forces took the cen­tral city of Homs, Syria’s third largest, as gov­ern­ment forces aban­doned it. The city stands at an im­por­tant in­ter­sec­tion be­tween Damascus, the cap­i­tal, and Syria’s coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus — the Syrian lead­er’s base of sup­port and home to a Russian strate­gic naval base.

The rebels had al­ready seized the cities of Aleppo and Hama, as well as large parts of the south, in a light­ning of­fen­sive that be­gan Nov. 27. Analysts said rebel con­trol of Homs would be a game-changer.

The rebels’ moves into Damascus came af­ter the Syrian army with­drew from much of south­ern part of the coun­try, leav­ing more ar­eas, in­clud­ing sev­eral provin­cial cap­i­tals, un­der the con­trol of op­po­si­tion fight­ers.

The ad­vances in the past week were by far the largest in re­cent years by op­po­si­tion fac­tions, led by a group that has its ori­gins in al-Qaida and is con­sid­ered a ter­ror­ist or­ga­ni­za­tion by the U. S. and the United Nations. In their push to over­throw Assad’s gov­ern­ment, the in­sur­gents, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, have met lit­tle re­sis­tance from the Syrian army.

The U. N.’s spe­cial en­voy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, called Saturday for ur­gent talks in Geneva to en­sure an “orderly po­lit­i­cal tran­si­tion.” Speaking to re­porters at the an­nual Doha Forum in Qatar, he said the sit­u­a­tion in Syria was chang­ing by the minute. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, whose coun­try is Assad’s chief in­ter­na­tional backer, said he feels “sorry for the Syrian peo­ple.”

In Damascus, peo­ple rushed to stock up on sup­plies. Thousands went to Syria’s bor­der with Lebanon, try­ing to leave the coun­try. Lebanese bor­der of­fi­cials closed the main Masnaa bor­der cross­ing late Saturday, leav­ing many stuck wait­ing.

Many shops in the cap­i­tal were shut­tered, a res­i­dent told The Associated Press, and those still open ran out of sta­ples such as sugar. Some were sell­ing items at three times the nor­mal price.

The U. N. said it was mov­ing non­crit­i­cal staff out­side the coun­try as a pre­cau­tion.

Syria’s state me­dia de­nied so­cial me­dia ru­mors that Assad left the coun­try, say­ing he was per­form­ing his du­ties in Damascus.

Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali said Sunday he does not know where Assad or the de­fense min­is­ter are. He told Saudi tele­vi­sion net­work Al-Arabiyya early Sunday that they lost com­mu­ni­ca­tion Saturday night.

He has had lit­tle, if any, help from his al­lies. Russia is busy with its war in Ukraine. Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which at one point sent thou­sands of fight­ers to shore up Assad’s forces, has been weak­ened by a year­long con­flict with Israel. Iran has seen its prox­ies across the re­gion de­graded by reg­u­lar Israeli airstrikes.

U. S. President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday posted on so­cial me­dia that the United States should avoid en­gag­ing mil­i­tar­ily in Syria. Separately, President Joe Biden’s na­tional se­cu­rity ad­viser said the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion had no in­ten­tion of in­ter­ven­ing there.

Pedersen said a date for talks in Geneva on the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a U. N. res­o­lu­tion, adopted in 2015 and call­ing for a Syrian-led po­lit­i­cal process, would be an­nounced later. The res­o­lu­tion calls for the es­tab­lish­ment of a tran­si­tional gov­ern­ing body, fol­lowed by the draft­ing of a new con­sti­tu­tion and end­ing with U.N.-supervised elec­tions.

Later Saturday, for­eign min­is­ters and se­nior diplo­mats from eight key coun­tries, in­clud­ing Saudi Arabia, Russia, Egypt, Turkey and Iran, along with Pederson, gath­ered on the side­lines of the Doha Summit to dis­cuss the sit­u­a­tion in Syria.

In a state­ment, the par­tic­i­pants af­firmed their sup­port for a po­lit­i­cal so­lu­tion to the Syrian cri­sis “that would lead to the end of mil­i­tary ac­tiv­ity and pro­tect civil­ians.”

A com­man­der with the in­sur­gents, Hassan Abdul-Ghani, posted on the Telegram mes­sag­ing app that op­po­si­tion forces had be­gun the “final stage” of their of­fen­sive by en­cir­cling Damascus.

HTS con­trols much of north­west Syria and in 2017 set up a “salvation gov­ern­ment” to run day-to-day af­fairs in the re­gion. In re­cent years, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani has sought to re­make the group’s im­age, cut­ting ties with al-Qaida, ditch­ing hard-line of­fi­cials and vow­ing to em­brace plu­ral­ism and re­li­gious tol­er­ance.

The shock of­fen­sive be­gan Nov. 27, dur­ing which gun­men cap­tured the north­ern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest, and the cen­tral city of Hama, the coun­try’s fourth-largest city.

The Syrian gov­ern­ment has re­ferred to op­po­si­tion gun­men as ter­ror­ists since con­flict broke out in March 2011.

Qatar’s top diplo­mat, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, crit­i­cized Assad for fail­ing to take ad­van­tage of the lull in fight­ing in re­cent years to ad­dress the coun­try’s un­der­ly­ing prob­lems. “Assad did­n’t seize this op­por­tu­nity to start en­gag­ing and restor­ing his re­la­tion­ship with his peo­ple,” he said.

Karam re­ported from London. Associated Press writ­ers Abdulrahman Shaheen and Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria; Abby Sewell in Beirut; Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad; Josef Federman and Victoria Eastwood in Doha, Qatar; and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington con­tributed to this re­port.

Sega Channel was a games-on-de­mand ser­vice that gave ca­ble sub­scribers ac­cess to a li­brary of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in ex­change for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month de­pend­ing on the ca­ble provider). It op­er­ated be­tween June 1994 (with a na­tion­wide roll­out in December 1994) and June 1998. Cable sub­scribers would be given an adapter car­tridge that would con­nect their Genesis to a ca­ble TV line. On boot, the car­tridge would search for the Sega Channel sig­nal, then down­load the game menu. This process typ­i­cally took around 20 sec­onds. The user would then pick a game and wait about a minute for it to be down­loaded to the adapter’s RAM. At this point, the game would func­tion ex­actly the same as a re­tail car­tridge. Turning the sys­tem off or press­ing the menu but­ton on the adapter would erase the down­loaded game, but game save data was re­tained un­less the user down­loaded a dif­fer­ent game. Besides re­tail games, Sega Channel of­fered a “Test Drives” sec­tion where users could play time or con­tent re­stricted ver­sions of games be­fore they got a re­tail re­lease. There were also a num­ber of games that were only avail­able via Sega Channel, al­though it seems that most of them were ti­tles where ei­ther Sega or the pub­lisher weren’t con­fi­dent enough in their qual­ity to give them a phys­i­cal car­tridge re­lease. Sega Channel was a mod­est suc­cess, peak­ing at around 250,000 sub­scribers.

Sega Channel data was de­liv­ered to ca­ble cus­tomers through a some­what long-winded process. First, Sega Channel em­ploy­ees would se­lect the game line-up and other con­tent (game hints, man­u­als, news, dig­i­tized fan-art, etc.) for a given month. They would then send every­thing to a com­pany called Foley Hi-Tech, who would cre­ate the game menu graph­ics/​an­i­ma­tions and in­sert all the monthly con­tent. They ended up with a ~60MB file called a “game im­age”, which was burnt to a CD and sent to a satel­lite up­link fa­cil­ity in Denver, Colorado. The CD would then be in­stalled in the up­link game server com­puter, which would con­tin­u­ously trans­mit the game data in a loop over satel­lite. Cable head­ends all over the US would re­ceive the satel­lite trans­mis­sion and send it to ca­ble sub­scribers. The data be­ing sent in a con­tin­u­ous loop is how the ser­vice’s “interactivity” was achieved at a time when ca­ble TV providers could only trans­mit data to all sub­scribers and could­n’t re­ceive data (i.e. what game a given sub­scriber wants to down­load). When a user chose a game from the menu, their adapter was in­structed to look through the Sega Channel data stream and pick out the data for the game they se­lected. The ~60MB game im­age file was trans­mit­ted at a rate of about 8Mbps. Assuming that there were no sig­nal prob­lems, the user al­ways got to play what­ever game they picked within a minute (one loop of the data). The menu down­loaded in less than a minute be­cause ad­di­tional re­dun­dant copies of it were added to the data stream to speed up down­loads.

In November 2024, the user RisingFromRuins on the Sonic Retro fo­rum an­nounced that he had found a Sega Channel game im­age CD for September 1996 while he was go­ing through a lot of PC equip­ment he had bought years ear­lier. He posted pic­tures of the CD and up­loaded a copy of the game im­age file on the disc. I thought it would be a fun pro­ject to see if I could ex­tract the data from the game im­age file to see if there were any ex­clu­sive or pro­to­type games on there. It’s al­ways neat to see games that no­body’s been able to play for over 25 years.

My first idea was to check out the im­age file’s con­tents in a hex ed­i­tor. Genesis games all have a stan­dard­ized ASCII header, and I fig­ured the game hints/​down­load­able man­u­als would be read­able as well. Unfortunately, when I scrolled through the im­age file, there was­n’t any­thing read­able. My best guess was that the im­age file was ei­ther scram­bled or en­crypted.

At this point, I hit a lucky break. In 2017, some­one with the user­name tdi­ji­tal had up­loaded a backup CD from Foley Hi-Tech (company I men­tioned ear­lier that made the Sega Channel menus) con­tain­ing Sega Channel de­vel­op­ment ma­te­ri­als. People had pre­vi­ously gone over some of the CD’s con­tents and found some in­ter­est­ing stuff, in­clud­ing con­test ver­sions of Primal Rage, a cou­ple quiz games from the Japanese ver­sion of Sega Channel, and stand­alone menu demo ROMs for December 1994 - January 1996 that could be run in an em­u­la­tor and acted as time cap­sules for what was on the ser­vice that month. However, as far as I was aware, no­body had looked at any of the de­vel­op­ment tool­ing on the disc. My point of view was that if I wanted to ex­tract the data from the game im­age file, it would be eas­ier to re­verse en­gi­neer the tool­ing that cre­ated the game im­age than to re­verse en­gi­neer the Genesis-side down­load­ing code and hope that the im­age file re­mained mostly in­tact dur­ing the data trans­mis­sion process.

After a bit of trial and er­ror, I fig­ured out how the im­age files were cre­ated. First, de­vel­op­ers would add all the games, de­scrip­tions, news text, art, mu­sic, etc. us­ing a pro­gram called MENUMAKR. They’d end up with a menu bi­nary file and a script file (misleadingly named MENUSPIN. BAT de­spite not be­ing a batch file) con­tain­ing the ROM file paths, data off­sets, how many copies of the ROM to in­clude, and other meta­data for each game.

Next, they’d run a pro­gram writ­ten by Scientific Atlanta (a ca­ble equip­ment com­pany that Sega part­nered with to cre­ate the Sega Channel broad­cast equip­ment and car­tridge adapter) called PKSPREAD. This would val­i­date the con­tents of the MENUSPIN. BAT file and out­put a bi­nary file called PMAP.DAT, which con­tained in­struc­tions on how to split up and process the menu and game data for trans­mis­sion.

Finally, they’d run an­other pro­gram writ­ten by Scientific Atlanta called NSF, which would use the PMAP. DAT file to en­code all the in­put files and cre­ate the game im­age file. I de­cided that if I wanted to de­code the im­age file, this was the pro­gram I should fo­cus on.

At this point, I hit an­other lucky break. I found that NSF. EXE had been com­piled in de­bug mode, with op­ti­miza­tions turned off and with sym­bols em­bed­ded into the EXE. This meant that it would be easy to re­verse en­gi­neer. Unfortunately, IDA Pro did­n’t au­to­mat­i­cally pick up the de­bug sym­bols from the ex­e­cutable, so I had to open NSF in Turbo Debugger (it was com­piled with Borland C++ 4.1) and man­u­ally copy them over. Fortunately, the pro­gram was pretty small so this did­n’t take too long.

I could have gone straight to writ­ing a de­coder pro­gram here, but I thought it would be a bet­ter idea to first write an equiv­a­lent pro­gram to NSF. EXE. That way, if I was able to make a byte-for-byte iden­ti­cal im­age file to one cre­ated by the DOS NSF.EXE util­ity, I knew I had the al­go­rithm fig­ured out cor­rectly. I cre­ated a test game im­age file (what the above screen­shots of PKSPREAD and NSF show) and set about try­ing to match it. It took me a day of work and an­other cou­ple evenings of de­bug­ging, but I wrote an equiv­a­lent C pro­gram to NSF.EXE and got the out­put to match. My ba­sic process was I had IDA open on one mon­i­tor and Visual Studio open on the other, and I tried to match the as­sem­bly as closely as pos­si­ble. This led to a cou­ple in­ter­est­ing in­sights. Whoever wrote NSF was likely a novice C pro­gram­mer. They also spent con­sid­er­able ef­fort on mak­ing every­thing 1-indexed rather than 0-indexed (maybe they were a Pascal fan?). Note that I made no ef­fort to try to get the com­piled bi­nary to match the orig­i­nal. In fact, it likely won’t even com­pile as a C file un­der Borland C++ 4, as I used C99 de­c­la­ra­tions and stdint.h types every­where.

Once I fig­ured out how NSF works, it was fairly easy to write a de­coder pro­gram that would undo all these steps in re­verse and spit out a bunch of in­di­vid­ual data files. However, the data my de­coder pro­gram out­put still was­n’t valid Genesis ROM data:

Thankfully, this was just be­cause the game data was com­pressed be­fore trans­mis­sion. The tool used to com­press ROMS was in the Foley Hi-Tech CD (GAMEEDIT. EXE) but I did­n’t have to re­verse en­gi­neer it be­cause a GitHub user named Octocontrabass had al­ready done so. I used his/​her “unsa” tool to de­com­press all the .SA files into stan­dard ROM files.

The most no­table games from the im­age file are the two ex­clu­sive games that were broad­cast in September 1996, Chessmaster and Klondike. Chessmaster is a chess game that was avail­able on many plat­forms in the 90s (but not Genesis) and Klondike is a soli­taire game com­mis­sioned by Sega for Sega Channel and pro­grammed by David Crane of Pitfall fame.

Here’s a cat­e­go­rized full list of all the games from the im­age file (list by ICEknight):

After I posted my find­ings, Black Squirrel on Sonic Retro found that it was pos­si­ble to get the September 1996 menu run­ning in an em­u­la­tor by copy­ing bytes 0-0x1003FF from one of the Sega Channel demo car­tridge ROMs and ap­pend­ing the menu data from the game im­age to the end. Obviously the down­load func­tion­al­ity does­n’t work, but it’s still fun to look around in the menu.

The fi­nal bit of con­tent from the im­age file was the game in­struc­tions ROM. It looked like a nor­mal Genesis ROM file, but when I tried to run it in an em­u­la­tor I just got a black screen. The prob­lem here turned out to be that the ROM was linked with a base ad­dress of 0x100000 rather than 0 like a nor­mal car­tridge. It seems like it was meant to be run di­rectly out of the Sega Channel adapter’s mem­ory with­out it get­ting mapped to the nor­mal car­tridge ad­dress space. My best guess is this had some­thing to do with the func­tion­al­ity for jump­ing into the man­ual for a spe­cific game from the game menu. I got it work­ing in an em­u­la­tor by adding ze­roes af­ter the header un­til the code lined up cor­rectly with the vec­tors in the header. When it’s started like this, at boot you see a menu in­tended for de­vel­op­ers with all the in­ter­nal names for each game. At this point, all of the con­tent from the game im­age file was now able to be run in an em­u­la­tor.

I have to thank Tdijital for re­leas­ing the Sega Channel de­vel­op­ment backup CD, Octocontrabass for re­verse en­gi­neeer­ing the .SA com­pres­sion for­mat, and who­ever at Scientific Atlanta com­piled NSF. EXE in de­bug mode. This pro­ject would have been much harder with­out all of their as­sis­tance. Most of all, I have to thank RisingFromRuins for re­leas­ing the game im­age file. I hope if any­one else has a Sega Channel game im­age disc, they fol­low his ex­am­ple.

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