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Oodles of merch and gameplay innovation round out our two days of Sony fun.
ANAHEIM, California—Last weekend was Sony's third-annual PlayStation Experience expo, and I lost count of the sheer number of playable, high-quality games slated to launch next year.
Hats off to Sony: the company pulled off the most exciting upcoming-games expo I've gone to in a while... and it happened in December. You know, the month when game companies traditionally have nothing new to announce.
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If deadly flu destroys the world and we’re all left together on Skype, it won’t end well.
Trailer for The Domain
The Domain, an indie sci-fi thriller borrowing Truman Show themes and Alien aesthetics, starts with a premise near and dear to the genre fan's heart: a deadly virus (here called the Saharan flu) is wiping out most of humanity. But while The Domain may initially appear to be just another pandemic parable, it has a decidedly 2016 idea at its core.
For starters, Saharan flu has already killed 5,000 in Germany, Italy, and Egypt, and doctors fear it's spreading beyond their containment abilities. "The World Health Organization says it's potentially civilization-threatening," public broadcasts declare within the film's opening minutes.
Luckily, the WHO has a plan to save some of humanity: the organization has built 500,000 bunkers across the globe. Any healthy person fortunate enough to avoid the virus and win a worldwide lottery needs to immediately get in and stay there while the virus runs its course on the surface. Because no one knows how long that will take, the bunkers have been constructed to last 70 years—these aren't your average doomsday concrete fortresses. Some 30-feet-underground, they have technology to recycle water, maintain air quality, and mimic lighting to distinguish day from night. Each holds only a single human being in order to prevent the spread of any disease. The bunkers have 70 years-worth of freeze dried food and work off power solely generated by a single row-machine.
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A court in Germany has held the operator of a commercial website liable after it unknowingly linked to infringing content hosted elsewhere. The Hamburg Regional Court found that the link to a Creative Commons image, posted to another site without the correct attribution, amounted to a copyright infringement.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
In 2011, Dutch blog GeenStijl.nl published an article which linking to leaked Playboy photos which were stored on third-party hosting sites. Playboy publisher Sanoma said this amounted to infringement.
The European Court of Justice was asked to rule on whether the links posted by GeenStijl amounted to a ‘communication to the public’ under Article 3(1) of the EU Copyright Directive and therefore a copyright infringement.
In September the ECJ handed down its decision which drew a line in the sand between for-profit and not-for-profit linking.
Generally, a person who posts a casual link to a work freely available on another website isn’t expected to conduct research to find out whether the copyright holder has granted permission for that work to be there.
On the other hand, those who post a link within a commercial context are expected to carry out the “checks necessary” to ensure that the linked work has not been illegally published, the ECJ says.
The EU ruling has now been applied in a German case. It involved a photographer who discovered that one of his Creative Commons-licensed images had been posted on a website without the correct attribution. The photographer also found a third-party site that was linking to the infringing image.
Leipzig law firm Spirit Legal LLP says it represented the photographer in a case against the third-party site to discover how the ECJ’s earlier ruling would be applied under German law.
In a ruling handed down in November but just published by the law firm, the Hamburg Regional Court found that while the original publication of the image amounted to infringement, the operator of the third-party site that published the link to the image was also liable for infringement.
In part, liability was determined from the conclusion that the link communicated the infringing image to a “new audience,” outside that intended by the copyright holder.
On the commercial aspect previously cited by the ECJ, the Court found that no profit needed to be generated from the specific link, only that there was a general intent to benefit from the link on the site as a whole. Since that was the case, the website owner was responsible for carrying out the “checks necessary” to ensure that the image wasn’t infringing.
Finding the operator of the third-party website liable for infringement, the Court ordered him to cease providing a link to the photographer’s image or face a fine.
Dr. Jonas Kahl, a lawyer with Spirit Legal, says the ruling is important for anyone with online commercial interests.
“[T]he decision of the Hamburg Regional Court represents a massive tightening of their inspection obligations and their liability in itself,” Dr. Kahl explains.
“In order to exclude the possibility of a copyright infringement, in the future you should check, before each linking, whether the page operator has the necessary rights for the photos published there. If this is not the case, you should not link, if you do not want to take a liability risk.”
The full ruling is available here (PDF, German)
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
“If you need to securely contact me… DM me asking for my Signal number.”
Enlarge (credit: Christiaan Colen)
Filippo Valsorda is an engineer on the Cloudflare Cryptography team, where he's deploying and helping design TLS 1.3, the next revision of the protocol implementing HTTPS. He also created a Heartbleed testing site in 2014. This post originally appeared on his blog and is re-printed with his permission.
After years of wrestling with GnuPG with varying levels of enthusiasm, I came to the conclusion that it's just not worth it, and I'm giving up—at least on the concept of long-term PGP keys. This editorial is not about the gpg tool itself, or about tools at all. Many others have already written about that. It's about the long-term PGP key model—be it secured by Web of Trust, fingerprints or Trust on First Use—and how it failed me.
Trust me when I say that I tried. I went through all the setups. I used Enigmail. I had offline master keys on a dedicated Raspberry Pi with short-lived subkeys. I wrote custom tools to make handwritten paper backups of offline keys (which I'll publish sooner or later). I had YubiKeys. Multiple. I spent days designing my public PGP policy.
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Harry Potter and friends get their own co-op deckbuilder—and it’s great!
Enlarge (credit: USAopoly)
Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.
My oldest daughter has read the seven Harry Potter books and watched the eight (!) Harry Potter films—please, no one tell her about the Lego Harry Potter video games—but through it all, she has remained in the same observational position: outside the action. What would it be like to become Harry or Hermione and battle You Know Who directly, blasting out spells, drafting allies, and relying on magical items? My daughter didn't know, but she wanted to find out.
So when I introduced her to Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle, the new cooperative deck-building game from USAopoly, she was happier than Hermione in a library. In the game, up to four players can become Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Neville and battle through all seven years covered by the novels, defeating just about every major and minor villain along the way. It's not giving much away to reveal that our intrepid heroes will eventually have to take on He Who Must Not Be Named in order to save the world from total calamity.
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Wer sein Galaxy Note 7 immer noch nicht zurückgegeben hat, soll in den USA mit einer drastischen Maßnahme dazu gewungen werden: Samsung will das Laden des Akkus komplett unterbinden. Ein Netzbetreiber will dabei aber nicht mitmachen. (Galaxy Note 7, Samsung)
Wer sein Galaxy Note 7 immer noch nicht zurückgegeben hat, soll in den USA mit einer drastischen Maßnahme dazu gewungen werden: Samsung will das Laden des Akkus komplett unterbinden. Ein Netzbetreiber will dabei aber nicht mitmachen. (Galaxy Note 7, Samsung) Ein US-Amerikaner war von dem Free-2-Play-Spiel Game of War offenbar derart begeistert, dass er rund eine Million US-Dollar in das Spiel investierte. Das Problem: Er spielte nicht mit seinem Geld, sondern mit dem seines Arbeitgebers, den er um fast 5 M…
Ein US-Amerikaner war von dem Free-2-Play-Spiel Game of War offenbar derart begeistert, dass er rund eine Million US-Dollar in das Spiel investierte. Das Problem: Er spielte nicht mit seinem Geld, sondern mit dem seines Arbeitgebers, den er um fast 5 Millionen US-Dollar betrog. (Free-to-play, Games) Das LG Hamburg hat wieder zugeschlagen und eine Entscheidung zum Urheberrecht getroffen. Auch die Unis haben ihre Not damit, weil sie mit der VG Wort nicht einig werden. Sieben Tage und viele Meldungen im Überblick. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, DSL)
Das LG Hamburg hat wieder zugeschlagen und eine Entscheidung zum Urheberrecht getroffen. Auch die Unis haben ihre Not damit, weil sie mit der VG Wort nicht einig werden. Sieben Tage und viele Meldungen im Überblick. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, DSL) Foxconn announcing two main models for their new fanless Mini PC – The Intel equipped AT-5300 and AMD equipped AT-5600. These Mini PC is about 40-times smaller than average PC tower system, which you can virtually snug it anywhere without worrying about overheating as it’s passive cooled (fanless). The Intel equipped AT-5300 is coming with […]
Hat Russland die US-Präsidentschaftswahl gehackt? Präsident Obama will untersuchen, ob fremde Nachrichtendienste zur Wahl von Donald Trump beigetragen haben. Der kommuniziert derweil weiter unverschlüsselt. (
