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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.
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Read the original on kvinogradov.com »
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.
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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.”
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Read the original on www.theguardian.com »
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.
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Read the original on github.com »
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.
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Read the original on www.atlantanewsfirst.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.”
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Read the original on news.mit.edu »
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.
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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.
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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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