‘ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is wilful, pervasive and totally unacceptable,’ Disney’s cease and desist letter read.

TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance has promised to “strengthen current safeguards” against intellectual property theft after Disney threatened legal action over videos generated by the company’s latest AI video generator Seedance 2.0.

In a cease and desist letter, Disney claimed that Seedance 2.0 has a “pirated library” of Disney assets from its biggest franchises. The company accused ByteDance of using its proprietary content assets as if they were in the public domain.

“ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is wilful, pervasive and totally unacceptable,” the letter read. “We believe this is just the tip of the iceberg – which is shocking considering Seedance has only been available for a few days.” The document was first seen and reported on by Axios.

Seedance 2.0 garnered immediate praise following its launch earlier this month. Swiss-based consultancy CTOL called it the “most advanced AI video generation model available”, placing it above OpenAI’s Sora 2 and Google’s Veo 3.1 in practical testing. The successful launched sparked growth in the Shanghai Shenzhen CSI 300 Index.

Responding to Disney’s criticism, ByteDance told media publications that it “respects intellectual property rights”.

It added: “We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users.” The company, however, did not specify details of the safeguards it plans to implement.

Others were quick to share their displeasure as well. The Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents major US studios including Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount, demanded that Seedance 2.0 “immediately cease its infringing activity”.

“By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law”, the MPA said in a strongly worded statement.

Meanwhile, US actors’ union SAG-AFTRA said that Seedance 2.0 has infringed on its members’ voices and likenesses. “Seedance 2.0 disregards law, ethics, industry standards and basic principles of consent,” it added.

The Japanese government launched an investigation into ByteDance over the weekend over potential copyright law violations after users generated videos of the country’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi, and characters from popular anime and manga series ‘Detective Conan’ and ‘Ultraman’, without consent.

Disney is known to be protective of its intellectual property that spans many successful franchises created over decades. The company sent a similar cease and desist letter to Google last December, alleging that the tech giant infringed on its copyrights. The move prompted Google to restrict Gemini and AI image creator Nano Banana from generating Disney-copyrighted content.

Disney’s attempt to stop Google came around the time the company announced a licensing deal with OpenAI’s Sora and ChatGPT – after initially opting out from allowing the company to use its content.

The three-year licensing deal would see users gaining access to more than 200 copyrighted characters, plus  costumes, props, vehicles and environments, but no talent likenesses or voices.

Last June, Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, accusing the AI company of being the “quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism”. The case is ongoing.

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NASA has announced a date for the second wet dress rehearsal for the SLS rocket that will send a crew of astronauts on a voyage around the moon in the highly anticipated Artemis II mission.

The space agency also confirmed that the earliest the rocket could launch is Friday, March 6.

NASA is now targeting Thursday, February 19, for the fueling part of the wet dress rehearsal at the Kennedy Space Center launch site in Florida.

The rehearsal is a key part of flight preparation and involves engineers fueling the rocket and going through the entire launch procedure short of actually igniting the engines.

During the first Artemis II rehearsal at the start of this month, engineers spotted a hydrogen leak at the base of the SLS rocket, prompting the team to ditch the target launch date of February 8 while it addressed the issue.

NASA said that it will only announce a new target launch date once the results of the second wet dress rehearsal have been fully assessed, but said the rocket would not lift off before March 6.

“The wet dress rehearsal will run the launch team as well as supporting teams through a full range of operations, including loading cryogenic liquid propellant into the SLS rocket’s tanks, conducting a launch countdown, demonstrating the ability to recycle the countdown clock, and draining the tanks to practice scrub procedures,” NASA said in a post on its website on Monday.

It added that the launch controllers will arrive at their consoles in the Launch Control Center at Kennedy at 6:40 p.m. ET on Tuesday to start the nearly 50-hour countdown. The simulated launch time is 8:30 p.m. on Thursday.

The Artemis II mission will send NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch, together with the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day flight around the moon aboard the Orion spacecraft. It’ll be the first crewed lunar-bound flight since the final Apollo mission in 1972.

The mission will test the spacecraft’s systems and deep-space operations to validate them for future crewed moon missions and lunar landings.

As TechRadar’s resident 4K Blu-ray tester, I’ve seen a ton of excellent 4K discs and reviewed them as part of my Blu-ray Bounty feature.

I recently wrote about my favorite six 4K ‘classic movies’. These are the movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood that benefitted hugely from the picture and audio restoration that 4K Blu-ray can provide.

• First PCIe 6.0 SSD reaches market availability for hyperscale AI environments
• Micron 9650 targets AI inference with up to 28GBps sequential reads
• Storage performance shifts toward accelerator-fed data pipelines in hyperscale data centers

Micron has declared its 9650 NVMe SSD has entered mass production, making it the first PCIe 6.0 SSD on the market, although the customer list is likely to be limited to hyperscalers and giant AI data center operators rather than everyday enterprise buyers.

The drive arrives as storage architecture adapts to support AI inference workloads that need faster and more predictable data access.

One night not long ago, Jaxon Roman sat naked in front of his laptop wearing only a pup hood as he masturbated with single-minded zeal to the attention of eight other men watching onscreen.

It was a typical weekday for the 33-year-old Arlington, Virginia, program analyst. “When bros praise me and say they’re enjoying [me], I get to that edge point so fast,” Roman says. His favorite instances are “when they all come to what I’m doing.” Sometimes, when he’s feeling especially kinky, Roman, who is bisexual, likes to ask for permission before climaxing. When granted, he releases and his body, he says, shakes for 10 seconds. “Pure bliss,” he calls it.

At least a few times a month on Batemates, a social app for men who like to masturbate with other men, Roman will spend an hour online with his bros. Masturbating—or “bating” as it’s known online—has always helped him relieve stress and find his center.

He’s not the only one. Pitched as an “all-in-one platform designed to embrace bating as a lifestyle, together,” Batemates is the newest haven of queer pleasure. “It’s a community of like-minded people who are just trying to be porn for others, virtually, while watching others pleasure themselves,” Roman says. “Group play with hotties around the world. What’s not to like?”

Though Batemates technically launched in October 2024, it wasn’t until last year that it really started to catch on as a viable—and safe—alternative to other online bator platforms.

Nearly all of the bators WIRED spoke to said they were introduced to the lifestyle in 2020, during Covid, because, as one of them put it, “there was nothing else to do.” Gone were the days of the discreet sauna circle jerk. Instead, men flocked to private video channels on Skype and Zoom for digital jam sessions where they communally bated with other men from around the world via the portal of their laptop screens. During this period, virtual sessions got so popular that they would occasionally max out with more than 100 people in a single room.

Everything changed last year. Skype was shut down in May. Zoom sessions started getting reported more often. (“Sensitive content,” including porn, nudity, and “other content intended to cause sexual arousal” is prohibited according to the company’s acceptable use guidelines; Zoom did not respond to a request for comment.) Some queer bators have since decamped to Teams, Microsoft’s chat and video-conferencing app; others rely on chat forums like BateWorld—a Reddit-style platform for all things male masturbation that is arguably the most popular destination for bators—as well as Discord, Telegram, and Reddit to find bros to bond with.

Batemates emerged as an exciting replacement. “All the corporate tools were just banning us,” says Batemates founder Johan Guams. “As members of the LGBTQ+ community, we had no space. I was really upset about the hypocrisy of the situation, especially when this is something everybody does.”

Batemates wants to put an end to the corporate sanctimony around adult content. It’s an ethos the company has even woven into its branding. A recent ad posted on X makes clear: “Your friends. Your boss. Your coach. Your colleague. Everyone bates.”

Microsoft declined to comment, but according to both its digital safety policy and its terms of use, “any images, videos, audio, text, or links that depict or imply nudity, sexual acts, sexual arousal, or sexual violence” are prohibited on Teams.

Though Guams, who is 31 and from Paris, was also a regular in various Zoom bating sessions during the pandemic, he often left them wanting more. “I was like, OK, I masturbate on Zoom, but I don’t know who these people are. There’s no control. I can’t keep in touch with them. Sometimes you find crazy people. The experience just felt complicated.”