Month: April 2017

Enlarge / Beyonce poses with her Grammy trophies in the press room during the 59th Annual Grammy music awards on February 12, 2017, in Los Angeles, California. Unauthorized use of her images has prompted litigation over the DMCA's "safe harbor" provision. (credit: Robyn Beck / Getty Images)

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act's so-called "safe harbor" defense to infringement is under fire from a paparazzi photo agency. A new court ruling says the defense may not always be available to websites that host content submitted by third parties.

The safe harbor provision is what has given rise to sites like YouTube and various social media platforms. In essence, safe harbor was baked into the DMCA to allow websites to be free from legal liability for infringing content posted by their users—so long as the website timely removes that content at the request of the rights holder.

But a San Francisco-based federal appeals court is ruling that, if a website uses moderators to review content posted by third parties, the safe harbor privilege may not apply. That's according to a Friday decision in a dispute brought by Mavrix Photographs against LiveJournal, which hosts the popular celebrity fan forum "Oh No they Didn't." The site hosted Mavrix-owned photos of Beyonce Knowles, Katy Perry, and other stars without authorization.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Roberto Machado Noa )

A 2013 proposal to allow cell phone calls during airplane flights will be thrown out by the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC prohibited in-flight phone calls in 1991 because of concerns about interference with wireless networks on the ground. Advances in technology have eliminated those concerns, but tech hasn't changed the fact that in-flight phone calls could be annoying to fellow passengers.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing that the FCC terminate the proceeding that might have lifted the in-flight call ban.

Enlarge / A brightly lit tram in Glasgow encourages people to attend X-rays at the city's hospitals in 1957. (credit: Joseph McKeown/Picture Post/Getty Images)

Imaging with X-rays is usually pretty disappointing. The expectation is that, because the wavelength is short—wavelengths of 10nm are about 40 times shorter than those of blue light—you'll see lots of features that you would otherwise have missed. But in reality, mostly you get a blur. This comes down to two problems: X-ray sources are not very bright, and that brightness fluctuates. Researchers are instead forced to compromise. You can either image quickly and cope with the noise of the light source, or you can image slowly and suffer from noise due to the sample shifting about. Either way, you lose.

The second issue is that the optic hardware is pretty poor compared to the optics for visible light, so they simply don't capture the X-rays that carry the finest details in the image. So, you might as well have used a very good visible light imaging system or an electron microscope. But researchers have now figured out how to greatly improve the performance of X-ray imaging. All it takes is careful measurements of your X-ray source, a bit of scattered light, and lots of clever math.

Scattered pictures

Instead of sending X-rays through your imaging target and reading them on the other side, you can recreate an image using light that scatters back toward the source. The light that scatters from an object already carries all the information required to recreate an image of it: the scattering angle, amplitude, and phase of the light can be used to calculate the details of an object. Instead of using poor-quality optics, you can simply put a big detector near the sample and capture the scattered light.

Enlarge / The Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Niguel, California. Tens of thousands of visa applications were delivered to the building last week, which is home to one of several USCIS service centers.

Last Monday, the government began accepting applications for H-1B visas that are often granted to foreign tech workers. Trucks full of thick Fedex applications lined up before dawn to get their applications in.

By Friday, the door was shut. US Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) said on Friday that they have already maxed out, hitting the limit of 65,000 H-1B visas set by Congress and an additional 20,000 visas that are reserved for applicants who have master's degrees. It's the fifth year in a row that the cap has been met within five days.

Some H-1B employers aren't subject to the visa cap, including universities and some nonprofits.

The Kentucky Coal Museum. (credit: Jimmy Emerson, DVM)

In what it says is a cost-saving move, the Kentucky Coal Museum is moving to solar power, according to the Associated Press. The museum is having 80 solar panels installed, which it expects will cut $8,000 off its annual electricity bill. The Courier-Journal writes that the museum currently spends $2,100 a month on electricity.

The move seems prophetic at a time when tension between the highly polluting coal industry and renewable energy industry is high. Over the past several years, the coal industry struggled to compete with low natural gas prices, as well as plummeting costs of solar and wind energy. The Trump administration has promised to roll back regulations on the coal industry, but that’s not likely to be enough to completely counteract the economic pressures that are making coal relatively expensive to produce and burn.

The Kentucky Coal Museum is owned by Southeastern Kentucky Community and Technical College, which is paying for the solar panels. In an interview with local news station WYMT, the school’s communications director, Brandon Robinson, said “it is a little ironic, but you know coal and solar and all the different energy sources work hand in hand. And you know, of course, coal is still king around here.”

These are the kinds of graphics that would require Blizzard to "revisit performance" before a Switch port, apparently.

Since well before the March launch of the Nintendo Switch, observers have been wondering whether the system would get robust software support from major third-party publishers or if it would instead have to lean more heavily on Nintendo exclusives and games from smaller independent developers. Now, new comments from Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan seem to confirm how porting modern games to such low-powered hardware could be a difficult bottleneck to get through.

In a Reddit AMA thread last month, Kaplan vaguely said that "getting [Overwatch] on the Switch is very challenging for us, but we're always open-minded about exploring possible platforms." In a follow-up interview with the UK's Express newspaper published today, Kaplan elaborated. "I think the problem is we've really targeted our min spec in a way that we would have to revisit performance and how to get on that platform," he said.

That's a striking admission, especially considering that the nearly year-old Overwatch doesn't exactly require a top-of-the-line PC to play; Blizzard asks for an Intel Core i3 processor and GTX 460 or better at a minimum. The game's strong visual design makes it technically playable at extremely low resolutions too, which could make a port workable even if a full 1080p image couldn't be achieved on the Switch.