SoylentNews

iRobot Bankruptcy: Roomba Maker Files for Chapter 11, Picea Robotics to Acquire and Take Company Private

upstart writes:

iRobot Bankruptcy: Roomba Maker Files for Chapter 11, Picea Robotics to Acquire and Take Company Private:

December 15, 2025 — iRobot, the Massachusetts-based company behind the Roomba robot vacuum, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States and struck a deal that will hand ownership to its primary contract manufacturer and secured lender, Shenzhen PICEA Robotics (Picea). The company says it expects no interruption to Roomba devices, app services, customer programs, or product support as the court-supervised restructuring plays out. [Reuters]

The move caps a steep reversal for one of consumer robotics' best-known pioneers. Once buoyed by pandemic-era demand and the near-household-name status of "Roomba," iRobot has struggled under the weight of pricing pressure, rising costs, and fierce competition in a robot vacuum market that has become crowded with feature-rich alternatives—many of them coming from China-based brands and supply chains.

Unlike a messy bankruptcy that drags on for years, iRobot says it has launched a pre-packaged Chapter 11 process in Delaware, backed by a Restructuring Support Agreement with Picea. In plain terms, much of the plan has been negotiated in advance, with the goal of moving quickly through court approval and emerging with a cleaner balance sheet. iRobot's own timeline targets completion by February 2026. [iRobot]

iRobot's CEO Gary Cohen framed the deal as a continuity play—designed to keep products supported and the business operating—while pairing iRobot's brand and product design experience with Picea's manufacturing scale.

The most consequential detail for investors is also the most blunt: iRobot says common shareholders should expect a total loss if the Chapter 11 plan is approved. After the transaction closes, iRobot plans to become a private company wholly owned by Picea, and its shares will no longer be listed on Nasdaq.

Reuters reports that under the bankruptcy plan Picea will take 100% of iRobot's equity and cancel the remaining balance of a $190 million loan from 2023, plus additional debt tied to the companies' manufacturing relationship. Reuters also reported iRobot expects other creditors and suppliers to be paid in full.

iRobot's Chapter 11 filing is the culmination of pressures that have been building for years—accelerated by a rapidly evolving robot vacuum category. Reuters cited iRobot's bankruptcy filings describing how increased competition from lower-priced rivals eroded profits and forced price cuts while iRobot continued investing in technology upgrades.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/11/google-sans-flex-font-ubuntu

Google has made its 'next generation brand typeface', Google Sans Flex, available for download — under an open source license, which is welcome news.

A modern sans serif font purpose-designed for use on screens and OSes, Google Sans Flex is a ground-up, multi-axis rebuild of the proprietary Google Sans font, by typographer David Berlow (of Font Bureau fame).

The "flex" in GS Flex is because it's a variable font that is "extremely flexible [with] variable axes for weight, width, optical size, slant, as well as an axis for rounded terminals" (as in terminals in letters, not command-line apps)."

Android and web developers will find the varied variable axes on offer a creative boon for "expressive" design work.

Changing system font is a simple way to give Ubuntu (or any other Linux) desktop a subtle new vibe without having to futz around with themes, icon packs or other eye-candy extras which substantially alter the stock experience

However, Linux desktop environments don't yet support doing anything fancy with variable fonts, beyond the basics.

Ergo, unlike on modern Android, you can't toggle Dark Mode in GNOME or KDE with this font enabled to make it automatically adjust its GRAD axis to compensate for the optical thinning that typically occurs when white text is rendered against darker backgrounds.

It's not a major drawback, and GS Flex works great as a competent, classy system UI font on Linux, especially on HiDPI displays with fractional scaling. For my tastes, Google Sans Flex has (like GNOME's default Adwaita Sans font) more presence than the Ubuntu font.

Want to try it out? Google has released the font under the SIL Open Font License (OFL), meaning you can modify, redistribute and use it in your own projects.

To get it:

- Go to Google Fonts
- Search for 'Google Sans Flex'
- Hit "Get Font" > "Download All"
- Extract the ZIP
- Find the .ttf file inside and either:
    Move it to ~/.local/share/fonts; or
    Install via your desktop's font manager GUI

Once installed it'll be available to use/select in other apps, settings and so on.

To change UI font on Ubuntu you can install the GNOME Tweaks tool and then open it, go to Appearance and set the UI font to Google Sans Flex. Although you may see variable options listed to pick from, GNOME will always render the 'regular' version.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://gizmodo.com/this-star-is-being-eaten-alive-and-its-explosive-death-will-be-visible-in-broad-daylight-2000698104

A case of astronomical fratricide is doomed to end in a fiery supernova bright enough to be spotted from Earth during the day.

A study published this August in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society investigated a binary star system about 10,000 light-years from Earth called V Sagittae. Researchers finally solved the century-long mystery behind what makes it so freaking bright. They found that the system is strangely luminous because one of the pair, a super-dense white dwarf, is absolutely scarfing down on its larger sibling at unprecedented speed.

Eventually, the two stars will collide, producing a supernova explosion of unusual brightness. The event is set to occur "in the coming years," the researchers said in a university statement.

"V Sagittae is no ordinary star system—it's the brightest of its kind and has baffled experts since it was first discovered in 1902. Our study shows that this extreme brightness is down to the white dwarf sucking the life out of its companion star, using the accreted matter to turn it into a blazing inferno," Phil Charles, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of Southampton, said in the statement. "It's a process so intense that it's going thermonuclear on the white dwarf's surface, shining like a beacon in the night sky."

The team observed the extraterrestrial siblings, which orbit each other once every 12.3 hours, using the powerful European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. By doing so they also found a giant ring of gas around the binary stars, consisting of the debris from carnage and resulting from the gargantuan levels of energy the white dwarf is generating.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.osnews.com/story/144027/mozillas-new-ceo-firefox-will-become-an-ai-browser/

In recent years, things have not been going well for Mozilla. Firefox's market share is a rounding error, and financially, the company is effectively entirely dependent on free money from Google for making it the default search engine in Firefox. Mozilla's tried to stem the bleeding with deeply unpopular efforts like focusing on online advertising and cramming more and more "AI" into Firefox, but so far, nothing has worked, and more and more of the remaining small group of Firefox users are moving to modded versions of Firefox without the "AI" nonsense and other anti-features.

The task of turning the tide is now up to Mozilla's new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, who took up the role starting today. In his first message to the public in his new role as CEO of Mozilla, he lays out his vision for the future of the company. What are his plans for Mozilla's most important product, the Firefox web browser?

Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
        ↫ Anthony Enzor-DeMeo

So far, the "AI" additions to Firefox have not exactly been met with thunderous applause – to put it mildly – and I don't see how increasing these efforts is going to magically turn that sentiment around. I'd hazard a guess that Firefox users, in particular, are probably quite averse to "AI" and what it stands for, further strengthening the feeling that the people leading Mozilla seem a little bit out of touch with their own users. Add to this the obvious fact that "AI" is a bubble waiting to pop, and I'm left wondering how investing in "AI" now is going to do anything but make Mozilla waste even more money.

I don't want Firefox to fail, as it is currently the only browser that isn't Chrome, Chrome in a trench coat, or Safari, but it seems Mozilla is trying to do everything to chase away what few users Firefox had left. In the short term, we can at least use modified versions of Firefox that have the "AI" nonsense and other anti-features removed, but for the long term, we're going to need something else if Mozilla keeps going down the same path it's been going in recent years. The only viable long-term alternative is Servo, but that's still a long way off from being a usable day-to-day browser.

The browser landscape ain't looking so hot, and this new Mozilla CEO is not making me feel any better.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Resolving to spend less time on your smartphone? Understanding your travel habits can help:

If you open a banking app, play a mobile game or scroll through a news feed every day while riding the bus, your commuting routine is probably bolstering your smartphone habit, according to new research that shows phone tendencies are stronger in locations chosen automatically.

As you ponder this year's potential New Year's resolutions, understanding your habits and what reinforces them is key to helping ensure your autopilot doesn't steer you in directions that conflict with your values and goals, said Oregon State University's Morgan Quinn Ross, who led the study.

"Habits are a direct driver of behavior, those activities we do frequently and without thinking," said Ross, assistant professor of communication in the OSU College of Liberal Arts. "Because they automate our cognition, habitual processes can make day-to-day life easier to navigate – but they can also ultimately make things harder on us. For better or worse, our habits have powerful implications for how we engage with the world around us."

Ross notes that past research has shown that "mobility choices" – where we go and how we get there – are largely a factor of habit, as are the ways and frequency in which we use our smartphones. Much less studied, however, is how those habits might feed off each other.

"The interaction between mobility choice habits and smartphone habits is ideally suited for analyzing interactive habitual processes in daily life," he said. "Unlike most habits, smartphone habits can come into play pretty much wherever you are."

Ross and collaborators at the Ohio State University, the University of Iowa and the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan employed a specially designed app to collect millions of data points from 419 study participants over a two-week period.

The app tracked participants' travel routes, destinations and smartphone use, and also checked in with participants to see how automatically chosen their routes and destinations were. In addition, participants were surveyed about whether they used certain apps without thinking.

hubie writes:

Government seeks "nudity-detection algorithms" in iOS and Android, report says:

The UK government reportedly will "encourage" Apple and Google to prevent phones from displaying nude images except when users verify that they are adults.

The forthcoming push for nudity-blocking systems was reported by the Financial Times today [Paywalled --JE]. The report said the UK won't institute a legal requirement "for now." But asking companies to block nude images could be the first step toward making it mandatory if the government doesn't get what it wants.

"The UK government wants technology companies to block explicit images on phones and computers by default to protect children, with adults having to verify their age to create and access such content," the FT report said. "Ministers want the likes of Apple and Google to incorporate nudity-detection algorithms into their device operating systems to prevent users taking photos or sharing images of genitalia unless they are verified as adults."

If the UK gets its way, operating systems like iOS and Android would "prevent any nudity being displayed on screen unless the user has verified they are an adult through methods such as biometric checks or official ID. Child sex offenders would be required to keep such blockers enabled." The Home Office "has initially focused on mobile devices," but the push could be expanded to desktops, the FT said. Government officials point out that Microsoft can already scan for "inappropriate content" in Microsoft Teams, the report said.

[...] Apple and Google both provide optional tools that let parents control what content their children can access. The companies could object to mandates on privacy grounds, as they have in other venues.

When Texas enacted an age-verification law for app stores, Apple and Google said they would comply but warned of risks to user privacy. A lobby group that represents Apple, Google, and other tech firms then sued Texas in an attempt to prevent the law from taking effect, saying it "imposes a broad censorship regime on the entire universe of mobile apps."

There's another age-verification battle in Australia, where the government decided to ban social media for users under 16. Companies said they would comply, although Reddit sued Australia on Friday in a bid to overturn the law.

Apple this year also fought a UK demand that it create a backdoor for government security officials to access encrypted data. The Trump administration claimed it convinced the UK to drop its demand, but the UK is reportedly still seeking an Apple backdoor.

In another case, the image-sharing website Imgur blocked access for UK users starting in September while facing an investigation over its age-verification practices.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/12/google-translate-learns-slang-and-idioms-expands-live-translation-beyond-pixel-buds/

Google has increasingly moved toward keeping features locked to its hardware products, but the Translate app is bucking that trend. The live translate feature is breaking out of the Google bubble with support for any earbuds you happen to have connected to your Android phone. The app is also getting improved translation quality across dozens of languages and some Duolingo-like learning features.

The latest version of Google's live translation is built on Gemini and initially rolled out earlier this year. It supports smooth back-and-forth translations as both on-screen text and audio. Beginning a live translate session in Google Translate used to require Pixel Buds, but that won't be the case going forward.

Google says a beta test of expanded headphone support is launching today in the US, Mexico, and India. The audio translation attempts to preserve the tone and cadence of the original speaker, but it's not as capable as the full AI-reproduced voice translations you can do on the latest Pixel phones. Google says this feature should work on any earbuds or headphones, but it's only for Android right now. The feature will expand to iOS in the coming months. Apple does have a similar live translation feature on the iPhone, but it requires AirPods.

Regardless of whether you're using live translate or just checking a single phrase, Google claims the Gemini-powered upgrade will serve you well. Google Translate is now apparently better at understanding the nuance of languages, with an awareness of idioms and local slang. Google uses the example of "stealing my thunder," which wouldn't make a lick of sense when translated literally into other languages. The new translation model, which is also available in the search-based translation interface, supports over 70 languages.

Google also debuted language-learning features earlier this year, borrowing a page from educational apps like Duolingo. You can tell the app your skill level with a language, as well as whether you need help with travel-oriented conversations or more everyday interactions. The app uses this to create tailored listening and speaking exercises.

With this big update, Translate will be more of a stickler about your pronunciation. Google promises more feedback and tips based on your spoken replies in the learning modules. The app will also now keep track of how often you complete language practice, showing your daily streak in the app.

If "number go up" will help you learn more, then this update is for you. Practice mode is also launching in almost 20 new countries, including Germany, India, Sweden, and Taiwan.

Original Submission

turgid writes:

As reported in The Guardian, billboards that monitor people's responses have been installed inside apartment blocks in twenty British cities.

The billboards are supplied by 30Seconds Group who say there could be such billboards installed in the communal areas of a thousand buildings by the end of the year.

The billboards are placed in locations where people have no option but to be observed, such as areas where they wait for lifts (elevators) to arrive.

Jake Hurfurt from Big Brother Watch was quoted as saying, "We should all be able to move around the buildings we live in without being scanned against our will to monitor our personal characteristics or if we paid attention to an advert, and it is even more galling that residents of some buildings have to pay to be watched."

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/uk-strengthens-subsea-cables-against-russian-interference

The UK government has started working on Atlantic Bastion, a new military program aimed at strengthening the security of its undersea critical infrastructure.

In a press release published on the UK.gov site earlier this week, it was said that Atlantic Bastion's goal was to secure these assets from Russian undersea threats.

Russian submarine and underwater activity has reportedly picked up in recent years, and the country has been hard at work modernizing its fleet "to target critical undersea cables and pipelines". Europe's eastern neighbor has allegedly been seen mapping out key locations of undersea critical infrastructure, with the UK government mentioning Russian spy ship Yantar that was recently spotted "around UK waters".

This year alone, the UK will have invested "millions of pounds" into development and testing of innovative anti-submarine sensor technology.

Atlantic Bastion will be a combination of autonomous surface and underwater vessels, cutting-edge digital infrastructure, and warships and patrol aircraft. This will enable the UK navy to act against its adversaries "with unprecedented effectiveness across vast areas of ocean".

The next phase of action, which should kick off "in the coming weeks", is to take the projects from concept to the frontline. Some capabilities are expected to be deployed in the water next year, with investments accelerating in the year that follows.

In recent months, multiple undersea internet (fibre-optic) cables in the Baltic Sea region have been damaged or cut. Many observers believe it to be closely tied to the Russia-Ukraine war. In November 2024 two major submarine data cables, including C‑Lion1 (which connects Finland and Germany), were discovered damaged or severed, and around the same time, a fibre-optic cable between Lithuania and Sweden (via the island of Gotland) was also cut.

In late December 2024, another incident hit a power cable between Finland and Estonia, and multiple associated telecom cables were reportedly disrupted too. A vessel believed linked to Russia's so-called "shadow fleet" was seized by Finnish authorities in connection with that outage.

It isn't apparent what autonomous vessels and patrol aircraft have to do with strengthening the cables. --Ed.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/11/nx-s1-5637486/ancient-heat-producing-plants-glow-infrared-scent-not-color

Some of the earliest plants attracted pollinators by producing heat that made these plants glow with infrared light, according to a new set of experiments.

The work, published in the journal Science, suggests that long before brightly colored flowers evolved, these ancient plants would metabolically rev themselves up when they had pollen at the ready. Nocturnal insects such as beetles could then see that heat from afar and home in on the target.

These heat-producing plants, called cycads, exist today in tropical forests around the world, although they're one of the most endangered plant groups.

"Some people call them dinosaur plants because they were much more dominant when the dinosaurs were around," says Wendy Valencia-Montoya, a cycad expert at Harvard University.

Fossils from over 200 million years ago, compared to cycads that exist today, show that "the plants look exactly the same," she says. "So they haven't changed much in hundreds of millions of years."

They're related to pines, and male and female plants each produce fleshy, pine-cone-like structures that contain the pollen and the seeds. "That's something very unique among this group of ancient plants," says Valencia-Montoya, who says these are the oldest known plants that have pollen.

A couple of centuries ago, botanists noticed that these plants produced heat in their reproductive structures. Compared to the ambient air temperature, they can be hotter by 15 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit, or even more.

"We think of producing heat as something that mammals do, or birds do, but in fact, plants can do it too," she says, although it's not common in the plant world and takes a lot of energy.

[...] To try to understand more about what was going on, Valencia-Montoya and her colleagues painted some pollinating beetles with fluorescent markers to watch when the beetles went to the plant. And they found that the beetles were clearly going to the plant cones when they heated up.

janrinok writes:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/12/14/foxconn-is-building-a-massive-factory-in-ky-but-probably-not-for-apple

Foxconn is investing $174 million into a new facility in Louisville, Kentucky, but nothing points to it becoming part of Apple's supply chain.

Apple supply chain partner Foxconn is making moves to expand its footprint in the United States again. This time, it's building up its operations in Kentucky.

Announcements from Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear confirmed that Foxconn will be opening "it's first U.S. manufacturing operation" in Louisville. The investment, which is claimed to be worth about $174 million, will potentially create 180 new jobs in the region.

It will involve a 350,000-square-foot warehouse, located on Randy Coe Lane, as part of a 23-acre property. The existing warehouse will be refitted to serve as a factory, with permits uncovered by Louisville Business First revealing that the upgrades will cost Foxconn $62.5 million in two phases.

The first phase, which will cost $10 million, will deal with the installation of new concrete foundations to handle heavy manufacturing equipment and interior-only changes, the permits state. Phase 2 will cost a further $52.5 million and will involve the final build-out and installation of equipment.

Foxconn's upgrades also seemingly have a quick turnaround time. The facility is expected to start operations in the third quarter of 2026.

While Foxconn will be footing most of the bill, there are some incentives in place from the state to assist with its creation. This includes a 10-year incentive agreement from the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority valued at up to $3.4 million, as well as a further $600,000 in tax incentives.

In announcing the facility, Mayor Greenberg said the investment will bring "good-paying jobs, new opportunities, and lasting economic growth to our community." Governor Beshear expressed he expects there to be "years of success" for the facility.

Foxconn USA CEO Ben Liaw declared, "This is more than a new factory - it's a new chapter in American manufacturing."

While important for Louisville, the announcement does still leave out some details about what the factory will be used for. There are mentions of it manufacturing electronics, but not what kind will be made.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust-rewrite-progress/

Arti, the Rust rewrite of Tor, brings circuit isolation and onion service improvements in its 1.8.0 release.

The Tor Project has been busy with the rustification of their offering for quite some time now.

If you have used Tor Browser, you know what it does. Anonymous browsing through encrypted relay chains. The network itself has been running since the early 2000s. All of it is built on C.

But that C codebase is an issue. It is known to have buffer overflows, use-after-free bugs, and memory corruption vulnerabilities. That is why they introduced Arti, a Rust rewrite of Tor that tackles these flaws by leveraging the memory safety of the programming language.

A new release of Arti just dropped last week, so let's check it out!

We begin with the main highlight of this release, the rollout of the circuit timeout rework that was laid out in proposal 368. Tor currently uses something called Circuit Dirty Timeout (CDT). It is a single timer that controls when your connection circuits become unavailable and when they close down.

Unfortunately, it is predictable. Someone monitoring traffic can spot these patterns and potentially track your activity. Arti 1.8.0 fixes this by implementing usage-based timeouts with separate timers. One handles when circuits accept new connections. Another closes idle circuits at random times instead of fixed intervals.

This should reduce the risk of fingerprinting from predictable timeout behavior.

Next up is the new experimental arti hsc ctor-migrate command that lets onion service operators migrate their restricted discovery keys from the C-based Tor to Arti's keystore.

These keys handle client authorization for onion services. The command transfers them over without requiring operators to do the manual legwork. The release also delivers improvements for routing architecture, protocol implementation, directory cache support, and OR port listener configuration.

You can go through the changelog to learn more about the Arti 1.8.0 release.

= Links in article:

https://www.torproject.org/
https://blog.torproject.org/announcing-arti/
https://blog.torproject.org/arti_1_8_0_released/
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md?arti-180--1-december-2025
https://spec.torproject.org/proposals/368-cdt-rethink.html
https://support.torproject.org/tor-browser/features/onion-services/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint
https://rust-lang.org/

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

The American consumer is speaking clearly and they want the benefits of electrification like instant torque and mobile power. But they also demand affordability:

Just four years after it was launched, the Ford Motor Company has pulled the plug on its electric F-150 Lightning truck. The company instead will reportedly be focusing on hybrid vehicles and a future lineup of smaller and more affordable electric vehicles.

In a call with reporters on Monday, Andrew Frick, the president of Ford Blue and Ford Model E, the company's commercial and electric divisions, said, "The American consumer is speaking clearly and they want the benefits of electrification like instant torque and mobile power. But they also demand affordability ... rather than spending billions more on large EVs that now have no path to profitability, we are allocating that money into higher-returning areas," per NPR.

When the truck was announced in 2021, the company said that it would cost just $40,000. However, once trucks began to roll off the production line, the company was unable to hit this target. For the 2025 model, the price started at around $55,000. Ford also reportedly lost money on every vehicle, despite the higher price point, with electric vehicle sales being lower in recent years than expected, and production costs not coming down.

[...] With the end of the Lightning electric truck, the company will pivot its Kentucky battery production site to build batteries for storage instead of trucks. These batteries could be used for the electric as well as data centers and other industrial customers, the company said.

Previously:

• F-150 Lightning Production Halted Indefinitely As Ford Bets On Gas Trucks Again
• Ford Will Lose $3 Billion on Electric Vehicles in 2023, It Says
• Ford Dealers Can Ban F-150 Lightning Customers from Reselling Trucks to Discourage Scalpers

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

After 50 Years, MIT Chemists Finally Synthesize Elusive Anti-Cancer Compound

MIT chemists have, for the first time, successfully created in the laboratory a fungal molecule called verticillin A. This compound was first discovered more than 50 years ago and has been recognized for its potential as an anticancer agent.

Although verticillin A differs from some related molecules by only a small number of atoms, its complex structure made it much more challenging to synthesize than those similar compounds.

"We have a much better appreciation for how those subtle structural changes can significantly increase the synthetic challenge," says Mohammad Movassaghi, an MIT professor of chemistry. "Now we have the technology where we can not only access them for the first time, more than 50 years after they were isolated, but also we can make many designed variants, which can enable further detailed studies."

In experiments with human cancer cells, one modified form of verticillin A showed strong activity against a rare pediatric brain tumor known as diffuse midline glioma. The researchers caution that additional testing will be necessary before its suitability for clinical use can be determined.

Researchers first reported the isolation of verticillin A from fungi, which use it for protection against pathogens, in 1970. Verticillin A and related fungal compounds have drawn interest for their potential anticancer and antimicrobial activity, but their complexity has made them difficult to synthesize.

In 2009, Movassaghi's lab reported the synthesis of (+)-11,11′-dideoxyverticillin A, a fungal compound similar to verticillin A. That molecule has 10 rings and eight stereogenic centers, or carbon atoms that have four different chemical groups attached to them. These groups have to be attached in a way that ensures they have the correct orientation, or stereochemistry, with respect to the rest of the molecule.

Once that synthesis was achieved, however, synthesis of verticillin A remained challenging, even though the only difference between verticillin A and (+)-11,11′-dideoxyverticillin A is the presence of two oxygen atoms.

"Those two oxygens greatly limit the window of opportunity that you have in terms of doing chemical transformations," Movassaghi says. "It makes the compound so much more fragile, so much more sensitive, so that even though we had had years of methodological advances, the compound continued to pose a challenge for us."

Both of the verticillin A compounds consist of two identical fragments that must be joined together to form a molecule called a dimer. To create (+)-11,11′-dideoxyverticillin A, the researchers had performed the dimerization reaction near the end of the synthesis, then added four critical carbon-sulfur bonds.

Yet when trying to synthesize verticillin A, the researchers found that waiting to add those carbon-sulfur bonds at the end did not result in the correct stereochemistry. As a result, the researchers had to rethink their approach and ended up creating a very different synthetic sequence.

"What we learned was the timing of the events is absolutely critical. We had to significantly change the order of the bond-forming events," Movassaghi says.

The verticillin A synthesis begins with an amino acid derivative known as beta-hydroxytryptophan, and then step-by-step, the researchers add a variety of chemical functional groups, including alcohols, ketones, and amides, in a way that ensures the correct stereochemistry.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.wired.com/story/fulu-repair-bounties-nest-molekule/

Companies tend to be rather picky about who gets to poke around inside their products. Manufacturers sometimes even take steps that prevent consumers from repairing their device when it breaks, or modifying it with third-party products.

But those unsanctioned device modifications have become the raison d'être of a bounty program set up by a nonprofit called Fulu, or Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users. The group tries to spotlight the ways companies can slip consumer-unfriendly features into their products, and it offers cash rewards in the thousands of dollars to anyone who can figure out how to disable unpopular features or bring discontinued products back to life.

"We want to be able to show lawmakers, look at all these things that could be out in the world," says right-to-repair advocate and Fulu cofounder Kevin O'Reilly. "Look at the ways we could be giving device owners control over their stuff."

Fulu has already awarded bounties for two fixes. One revives an older generation of Nest Thermostats no longer supported by Google. And just yesterday, Fulu announced a fix that circumvents restrictive digital-rights-management software on Molekule air purifiers.

Fulu is run by O'Reilly and fellow repair advocate and YouTuber Louis Rossmann, who announced the effort in a video on his channel in June.

The basic concept of Fulu is that it works like a bug bounty, the long running practice in software development where devs will offer prize money to people who find and fix a bug in the operating system. Fulu adopts that model, but the bounty it offers is usually meant to "fix" something the manufacturer considers an intended feature but turns out to be detrimental to the user experience. That can mean a device where the manufacturer has put in restrictions to prevent users from repairing their device, blocked the use of third-party replacement parts, or ended software support entirely.

"Innovation used to mean going from black-and-white to color," Rossmann says. "Now innovation means we have the ability to put DRM in an air filter."

Fulu offers up a bounty of $10,000 to the first person to prove they have a fix for the offending feature of a device. Donors can also pool money to help incentivize tinkerers to fix a particular product, which Fulu will match up to another $10,000. The pot grows as donations roll in.

Bounties are set on devices that Rossmann and O'Reilly have deemed deliberately hostile to the owners that have already paid for them, like some GE refrigerators that have DRM-locked water filters, and the Molekule air purifiers with DRM software that blocks customers from using third-party air filters. A bounty on the XBox Series X seeks a workaround to software encryption on the disk drive that prevents replacing the part without manufacturer approval. Thanks to donations, the prize for the Xbox fix has climbed to more than $30,000.

Sounds like a sweet payout for sure, but there is risk involved.

Fixing devices, even ones disabled and discontinued by the manufacturer, is often in direct violation of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 US law that prevents bypassing passwords and encryption or selling equipment that could do so without manufacturer permission. Break into a device, futz with the software inside to keep it functional, or go around DRM restrictions, and you risk running afoul of the likes of Google's gargantuan legal arm. Fulu warns potential bounty hunters they must tackle this goal knowing full well they're doing so in open violation of Section 1201.

"The dampening effect on innovation and control and ownership are so massive," O'Reilly says. "We want to prove that these kinds of things can exist."