from the play-trademark-ball dept

There is no shortage of examples of Major League Baseball attempting to wield overly broad trademarks its obtained to bully others, nor examples of MLB attempting to stretch its trademark rights much further than they go. MLB opposed a trademark for a Brooklyn burger joint on behalf of the Dodgers, a team that hadn’t played in Brooklyn for over five decades at that point. The league, at one point, tried to bully a local Little League for using the names of MLB teams, but not their logos, which is something that roughly every Little League team everywhere does. It attempted to trademark the names of three cities in which MLB teams play. And, my personal favorite and most appropriate for this post, the league opposed a finance company’s trademark application because it claimed two of its separate teams both owned the rights to the letter “W”.

The real lesson in all of this is that the League can’t be trusted with anything other than very narrow trademarks. Anything more broad than that causes them to act the fool. And perhaps this is a lesson the USPTO has actually learned, given that it recently denied MLB’s attempt to trademark the phrase “Play Ball”.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office denied MLB’s application to trademark “Play Ball” for clothing, the USPTO wrote in a final action filing on Friday.

“In this case, the applied-for mark is a commonplace term, message, or expression widely used by a variety of sources that merely conveys an ordinary, familiar, well-recognized concept or sentiment,” the USPTO wrote in its denial.

The USPTO also wrote phrases “that merely convey an informational message are not registerable.”

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Those are things that MLB’s well-dressed lawyers absolutely know, of course. But they attempted to bank on a complacent trademark office to try to sneak one past the goalie anyway, to mix metaphors. And if the league had gotten the mark, you can be one hundred percent certain it would have gone on yet another bullying campaign targeting apparel makers, other sports leagues, and who knows who else.

In fact, the most surprising part of all of this is that it appears to have taken 4 years for the USPTO to reach this decision. Josh Gerben breaks it all down like this.

Gerben said the rejection and public domain nature of phrases could depend on the class. Other companies have trademarked “Play Ball,” including a food company for bubble gum, a minerals company for surfacing playgrounds and “The Play Ball” for the gala fundraiser for the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

“In this case they are saying that the phrase has become so ubiquitous and it has this underlying meaning,” Gerben said. “For a clothing brand, the government doesn’t think it’s unique enough to be registered.”

Somehow, some way, we have to get past this practice of looking at trademarks as some kind of retroactive profit center, where a business gobbles them up and then corners a market that was already in existence. That’s all that this sort of attempt to lock up language is. The term “play ball” can be associated with Major League Baseball, certainly. It can also be associated with other sporting activities, or business negotiations, or any other number of things. That’s because it has become a generic phrase, no longer an identifier of the source of a good or service.

Again, MLB’s lawyers knew all of this before applying for the mark. They just didn’t care.

Filed Under: baseball, play ball, play ball play ball play ball, trademark, uspto

Companies: mlb

A palm-sized drone flies through thick fog, artificial snow, and near-total darkness, dodging poles, transparent plastic sheets, and tree trunks without a single camera or laser. Its only guide is sound. Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute built the system, called Saranga, by copying the way bats find their way in caves. The result is a lightweight, low-power approach that keeps working when vision-based sensors simply stop.

Cameras and LiDAR begin to fail as light becomes dispersed or just disappears. Radar, on the other hand, drains the batteries right when the machines need them. By contrast, ultrasound travels through smoke, dust, and snow in the same way as it does in clean air. Bats have been doing it forever, simply emitting short, high-frequency chirps and listening for faint return echoes that bounce off obstacles. The WPI team, led by Nitin Sanket of the Perception and Autonomous Robotics division, decided to give a flying robot the same superpower.

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They began with a quadcopter that they custom manufactured, measuring 16 cm across and weighing 460 kilos. It has two very tiny TDK InvenSense ICU30201 ultrasound sensors at the front, each with a broad sonic horn. Another one points downward to help with altitude. All of this ultrasound sensing requires only 1.2 milliwatts, and it all operates on a Google Coral Mini computer with no additional beacons or GPS, so there is no extra power expenditure.

Propeller noise was the first major issue, as the spinning blades are basically spewing out some serious ultrasound noise that drowns out the weak echoes coming back from distant objects (we’re talking minus 4.9 decibels here, which is weak signal territory for the team), so they fixed it by physically taping a simple foam and plastic shield between the propellers and the sensors. This barrier shuts out the majority of the prop noise while allowing outward sound and returning echoes to pass through. With this piece of hardware fixed, the usable range increased from one meter to two meters.

Even after they sorted the prop noise with their shield, the returning echoes were still getting lost in the random noise, so they attempted utilizing classical filters to sort it all out, but it wouldn’t comply. They required something more sophisticated, so they trained a tiny neural network to sort through all the filth. They termed it Saranga (also a neural network), and it basically looks at a brief string of echo readings as if it were a little picture. It uses this to learn the forms of true reflection patterns, after which it can suppress random prop noise. Training employed a lot of synthetic data mixed in with some real propeller noise, so once they had it functioning, the model flowed over to the real world very easily, with no additional fine tuning required. Saranga is then “compiled” to function on the Edge TPU, and it only takes up approximately 0.5 gigabytes of memory and does an inference in around 15 milliseconds while using only a few millijoules of energy.

The cleaned-up echoes are then sent to a basic localization stage, and because the left and right sensors are at slightly different angles, they can determine the horizontal angle to an obstacle in the same way that bats do. The down-pointing sensor then provides the height. It’s all really easy; simply a quick list of surrounding obstacles, and then it’s up to the flight controller to say, “Hey, steer clear of all this while still traveling in that direction.”
[Source]

Hugging Face’s incident response team first turned to frontier AI models to analyze a breach of the company’s production infrastructure, and the models refused to help. Commercial safety guardrails built to stop attackers blocked every forensic query because they treated the IR team’s real exploit data the same way they would treat a live attack.

The attacker, an autonomous AI agent running the campaign end to end, moved laterally across the Hugging Face infrastructure for a weekend, undetected and unstopped.

Security leaders are quick to recognize the pattern and diagnose what went wrong. “I’ve seen versions of this during red-team exercises and internal security testing, but this is one of the first high-profile examples where it materially affected real incident response,” said Merritt Baer, senior adviser to Andesite, G2I, and AppOmni and former Deputy CISO at AWS.

None of this is unique to Hugging Face, Baer said. “Commercial frontier models optimize for preventing misuse. They generally have no cryptographic or organizational way to determine whether the person asking ‘analyze this malware’ is an incident responder or the malware author.”

A malicious dataset opened two code-execution paths

On July 16, Hugging Face disclosed that an autonomous AI agent system had compromised its production infrastructure, gaining unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and several service credentials. The company verified that its software supply chain was clean and found no evidence of tampering with public models, datasets, or Spaces.

Hugging Face is still assessing whether the intrusion touched any partner or customer data and says it will contact affected parties directly as required. But few enterprise threat models had accounted for the attacker Hugging Face faced. An autonomous agent ran the entire campaign from initial access through credential harvesting. No human guided it.

The entry point was a malicious dataset. When the data-processing pipeline ingested it, the dataset triggered code execution in two ways, through a remote-code loader and through a template-injection flaw in dataset configuration files. No admission gate screened the file before it reached a processing worker, the compute job assigned to each dataset. Initial access came through the data pipeline itself, a route that worked because most enterprise security teams treat the data feeding their pipelines as trusted input rather than an attack surface.

Worker isolation did not hold. From that first foothold, the agent broke out onto the node running the workload, then harvested cloud and cluster credentials scoped broadly enough to reach multiple internal clusters, all of it inside a single weekend. Hugging Face described the agent framework as executing thousands of individual actions through a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services. The disclosure adds that the framework appeared to be built on an agentic security-research harness, which would put tooling designed for red-team work behind a live intrusion.

Why the defenders’ queries looked like attacks

Investigators reconstructed more than 17,000 recorded events using AI-driven analysis agents of their own.

First attempts at the log analysis ran on frontier models behind commercial APIs. Defenders’ steps included submitting real attack commands, exploit payloads, and command-and-control artifacts for classification, but safety guardrails blocked the requests outright.

Baer traced the block to the prompts themselves. “The same prompts that are most valuable during an active intrusion, shell commands, exploit chains, credential dumps, persistence mechanisms, lateral movement, are exactly the prompts most likely to trigger safety systems,” she told VentureBeat. “As AI becomes embedded in security operations, this becomes an operational resilience issue rather than merely a model policy issue.”

The forensic analysis finished on GLM 5.2

GLM 5.2, an open-weight model deployed on Hugging Face’s own infrastructure, took the job the commercial APIs refused. No attacker data left the company’s environment. “This experience points to a gap worth planning for,” the company wrote in its disclosure. Hugging Face does not know which model powered the agents. It could have been a jailbroken hosted model or an open-weight model running without restrictions. Either way, the disclosure continued, “the attacker was bound by no usage policy, while our own forensic work was blocked by the guardrails of the hosted models we first tried.” Hugging Face drew that line itself, writing that the experience is not an argument against safety measures on hosted models and that it is sharing the feedback with the providers concerned.

What authenticated trust changes

The industry, Baer argued, needs to move past treating AI safety as a content moderation problem. “Security operations require something different. Authenticated trust.” Instead of asking whether anyone should receive an answer, the question becomes whether an authenticated security team, operating under enterprise controls, should receive it. “The model shouldn’t only understand what is being asked. It should understand who is asking, why, and under what governance.”

“Organizations already build contingency plans for cloud outages, identity provider failures, or EDR failures,” Baer wrote. “AI assistants are becoming another dependency.”

Her advice on IR playbooks was blunt. “A mature incident response plan should assume that during a severe incident, commercial AI APIs may refuse requests, API rate limits may become unavailable, internet connectivity may be impaired, and data governance rules may prohibit uploading forensic evidence externally.” The lesson, she wrote in her emailed answers, “isn’t ‘don’t use commercial models.’ It’s ‘don’t make them a single point of failure.’”

AI-enabled attacks rose 89% year-over-year

Autonomous AI-driven attacks are not limited to AI platforms. CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report documented AI-enabled adversary operations increasing by 89% year over year, with average breakout times falling to 29 minutes. Enterprises running AI workloads in production with agentic access to their pipelines face similar exposure.

Six control domains determined the blast radius and recovery speed at Hugging Face. Each one maps to a concrete action security leaders can take before the next autonomous-agent breach arrives.

AI Pipeline Breach Response Playbook

The board question is operational resilience

“The question for directors is simple. What happens if one of our critical security tools becomes unavailable during the exact moment we need it most?” Baer framed that as operational resilience, not AI policy.

She would have boards take that framing straight to management and press for specifics. “Have we actually exercised that fallback during tabletop exercises? How quickly can we switch during an incident?” Procurement needs to change alongside governance, starting with the questions buyers ask. Security teams evaluating AI vendors should ask about their process for authenticated incident responders, whether enterprise customers receive different handling during verified incidents, and whether models can be deployed privately. “Those questions belong alongside uptime, privacy, and compliance,” Baer said.

“The biggest takeaway isn’t that safety guardrails are ‘bad.’ They’re doing what they were designed to do,” she argued.

Her larger point is that the threat model itself has changed. “For decades, defenders had better tools than attackers because they operated inside trusted enterprise environments. With foundation models, both sides increasingly use the same capabilities, but one side is constrained by enterprise governance, policy, compliance, and safety controls, while the adversary simply downloads an uncensored open-weight model and keeps going. That’s a new kind of asymmetry,” she added. “The organizations that handle it best won’t necessarily be the ones with the most powerful AI. They’ll be the ones that architect AI as a resilient security capability rather than a single cloud service.”

Hugging Face has contained the intrusion, rebuilt compromised nodes, rotated credentials, and reported the incident to law enforcement. The company recommends that all users rotate access tokens and review recent account activity. Mid-incident, Hugging Face found out whether its own AI tooling would be available, and the first answer was no. Security leaders running AI in production should find out in incident response planning instead, before an autonomous agent forces the test.

Microsoft has shared manual mitigations to help IT administrators fix Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) servers affected by a known issue that causes Windows Update scans to fail or time out.

This known WSUS sync issue affects both client (Windows 10, version 1607 and later) and server (Windows Server 2012 and later) platforms.

On impacted WSUS servers, admins are not able to deploy the latest Windows updates via WSUS or Configuration Manager due to increased synchronization times or sync operation timeouts caused by a buildup of publishing metadata.

Microsoft rolled out a service-side mitigation on Saturday to address the issue for newly installed or rebuilt WSUS servers following heightened impact observed starting one week ago, on July 13.

“Synchronization times and sync operations on WSUS servers have been restored and are operating normally for new WSUS installations and rebuilds,” Microsoft said.

On Monday, Microsoft also shared a manual fix for customers who are still experiencing sync operation issues and timeouts to help admins return their WSUS servers to normal functionality.

“Organizations with existing WSUS server installations that are experiencing long sync times can benefit from manual steps in order to clean up unneeded metadata,” it noted in a Windows release health dashboard update. “This metadata is present in existing WSUS installations but can be safely removed.”

This requires them to back up each SUSDB database, run a cleanup query from SQL Management Studio against all SUSDB databases (including WSUS replicas), and update the MaxXMLPerRequest value to its default setting.

After the cleanup process, the first Windows Update scan may take longer than usual, but subsequent scans will return to normal timing.

“After the cleanup, reindex SUSDB, run the WSUS Server Cleanup Wizard, and then run IISReset or recycle the WsusPool application pool to clear cached catalog state,” Microsoft added. “The client-side DataStore.edb does not shrink automatically after the detectoids are removed. This is expected and does not affect scan performance.”

Microsoft has addressed similar WSUS issues that prevented admins from deploying the latest Windows updates in May 2025, July 2025, and August 2025.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

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It’s official: We’re getting a pickle emoji next year. On Tuesday, July 14, the Unicode Consortium announced the nine new emoji you’ll see on your device in 2027. One new emoji is the pickle, and that means the eggplant’s reign as the go-to emoji for male anatomy could be coming to an end.

Here are the nine new emoji you will see on your device next year. 

• A cracking face
• A leftward thumb sign gesture
• A rightward thumb sign gesture
• A monarch butterfly
• A pickle
• A lighthouse
• A meteor
• An eraser
• A net with a handle

The Unicode Consortium originally proposed a squinty face emoji in 2025. However, the Unicode Emoji Standard & Research Working Group recommended changing that emoji to a cracking face in January.

Honestly, the cracking face emoji feels more relevant to today than the squinty face emoji. The squinty face read as suspicious while the cracking face emoji screams, “I’m putting on a brave face in these trying times.” If that’s not the most relatable sentiment these days, I don’t know what is. 

While the Unicode Consortium approved these emoji, companies like Apple and Samsung still need to design and then implement their versions of the emoji. Those companies usually add the emoji to devices as part of a software update in the spring, so you likely won’t see these emoji on your phone until 2027.

Before these emoji land on your device, the Unicode Consortium will begin fielding proposals for the next round of new emoji. Anyone can submit an idea for a new emoji, and the Unicode Consortium usually uploads proposed new emoji to a public document late in the year. For example, the upcoming emoji were originally accepted in October, 2025. 

For more on emoji, here’s how to decipher every emoji and the newest emoji on your iPhone and Android.

Zachary McAuliffe

Senior writer

Zach began writing for CNET in November, 2021 after writing for a broadcast news station in his hometown, Cincinnati, for five years. You can usually find him reading and drinking coffee or watching a TV series with his wife and their dog.

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It’s officially the second half of 2026, which is going to be all about Grand Theft Auto 6. Until then, Sony has a new selection of games coming to PS Plus in July that includes Avatar: Frontier of Pandora, Dying Light and a couple of classic PlayStation 2 games.

PS Plus, which is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, offers a large, constantly expanding library of games. Subscribers can choose from the Essential, Extra and Premium tiers, each with unique perks and benefits. Starting at $11 a month, the plans give subscribers access to games and rewards, and each month, all subscribers can play a handful of new games at no additional charge. 

If you’re a PlayStation Plus Extra or Premium subscriber, you can grab these games starting July 21.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora came out in 2023, a year after Avatar: The Way of Water released in theaters. Developed by Massive Entertainment – a division of Ubisoft – the open-world action-adventure puts players in the role of a Na’vi raised by the Resources Development Administration, or RDA, before returning to defend Pandora. Set in the previously unseen Western Frontier, the game emphasizes exploration, aerial traversal on an ikran and combat using both traditional Na’vi weapons and human firearms. While its gameplay shares many similarities with the Far Cry series, its lush environments and faithful recreation of Pandora earned praise from critics.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 21.

Rise of the Ronin

Team Ninja went a different direction than its usual Ninja Gaiden style with 2024’s Rise of the Ronin. Set during Japan’s turbulent Bakumatsu period in the late 19th century, the open-world action RPG lets players shape the story by siding with competing political factions. Combat combines fast-paced swordplay with firearms and other period weapons with the challenging gameplay the studio is known for. Its blend of historical events, exploration and player-driven choices helped distinguish it from Team Ninja’s previous action games.

Rise of the Ronin is now available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers.

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite puts players in the role of a firefighter responding to emergencies across a large fictional city in the American Midwest. Whether playing solo with AI teammates or cooperatively with up to three friends, players battle dynamic fires, rescue civilians and use authentic firefighting equipment to contain increasingly dangerous blazes. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, the game features real-time fire, smoke and heat simulation designed to create a more realistic firefighting experience.

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 21.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind is a true nostalgia bomb of a game. The side-scrolling beat-’em-up reimagines the classic 1990s TV series with pixel art visuals, cooperative multiplayer and familiar villains, including a robotic version of Rita Repulsa. Players battle through stages inspired by the show before piloting Dinozords and the Megazord in 3D action sequences that break up the traditional brawler gameplay.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 28.

Dying Light

It’s been more than a decade since Dying Light was released, but it’s still a title that gamers fawn over. Players explore the zombie-infested city of Harran using a fast-paced parkour system that makes traversing rooftops as important as combat. Scavenging for supplies, crafting weapons and surviving a dynamic day-night cycle keep the tension high as more dangerous infected emerge after dark. Its fluid movement and intense survival mechanics helped make it one of the most acclaimed zombie games of its generation.

Dying Light will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 21.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector builds on its predecessor by sending players across a lawless star system as an escaped android searching for freedom. Rather than focusing on traditional combat, the game emphasizes dialogue, dice-based skill checks and resource management as players assemble a crew and take on dangerous contracts. Its choice-driven storytelling and tabletop-inspired mechanics make every decision feel meaningful, with multiple paths that shape how the story unfolds.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 28.

Snow Bros. Wonderland

Snow Bros. Wonderland revives the long-running arcade franchise with a fresh 3D isometric look while staying true to its classic action-platforming roots. Players freeze enemies into snowballs before kicking them across each stage to defeat other foes and rack up combos. Cooperative play, colorful environments and larger-than-life boss battles help modernize the series without losing the charm that made the original games fan favorites.

Snow Bros. Wonderland will be available for PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers starting July 28.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy was first released for the PS2 in 2004 and had a mix of interesting physics gameplay that was a big trend in gaming at the time. Players control Nick Scryer, a secret agent who combines traditional gunplay with psychic abilities like telekinesis, mind control and pyrokinesis to take down enemies. The game’s physics-based powers encouraged creative problem-solving and helped it stand out from other action shooters of its era, earning it a cult following years after its release.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy will be available for PS Plus Premium subscribers starting July 21.

Indigo Prophecy

Before it made a name for itself with the games Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, developer Quantic Dream first experimented with making the point-and-click adventure gameplay style a bit more action-oriented with Indigo Prophecy. The supernatural thriller follows several interconnected characters as they investigate a string of mysterious murders while uncovering a conspiracy that threatens humanity. Its cinematic presentation, branching narrative and quick-time events helped lay the foundation for the studio’s later interactive dramas.

Indigo Prophecy will be available for PS Plus Premium subscribers starting July 21.

PlayStation Plus subscriptions start at $10 a month

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For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service. You can also check out other games on PlayStation Plus and games on Xbox Game Pass.

Oscar Gonzalez

Contributing writer

Oscar Gonzalez is a Texas native who covered video games, conspiracy theories, misinformation and cryptocurrency.

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Apple has quietly increased the price of Apple Music in the US, with individual subscriptions now costing $11.99 per month instead of $10.99.

The change also affects Family and Student plans. In addition, several Apple One bundles are impacted. The price rise comes almost four years after Apple last increased Apple Music subscription fees in October 2022.

The biggest jump is for the Apple Music Family plan, which now costs $19.99 per month, up from $16.99. The Student plan has also increased by $1, bringing the monthly fee to $6.99.