Month: October 2017

James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon, left, and Dennis Weaver as Chester Goode in the Gunsmoke episode "Dooley Surrenders," which aired in 1958. CBS has filed a lawsuit over images from this episode which were shared on social media. (credit: Photo by CBS via Getty Images)

CBS has sued a photographer for copyright infringement for doing something that's practically ubiquitous in the news and entertainment business—publishing still images from a television show.

The lawsuit against New York photojournalist Jon Tannen, filed on Friday, is essentially a retaliatory strike. Tannen sued CBS Interactive in February, claiming that the online division of CBS had used two of his photographs without permission. Now, CBS has sued Tannen back, claiming that he "hypocritically" used CBS intellectual property "while simultaneously bringing suit against Plaintiff's sister company, CBS Interactive Inc., claiming it had violated his own copyright."

"Without any license or authorization from Plaintiff, Defendant has copied and published via social media platforms images copied from the 'Dooley Surrenders' episode of GUNSMOKE," write CBS lawyers.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have a new round of deals to share. Today's list is particularly heavy on laptop and TV deals, including a Dell Inspiron 14 with a Core i5 (7th-gen) chip and Nvidia GeForce GPU slashed down to $550.

You can take a peek at the full selection below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

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The next software update for the Apple TV 4K will give owners of the month-old set-top box a little more control over their video output settings.

As noted by MacRumors, a video released on Apple’s Developer site this week says that the Apple TV’s tvOS 11.2 update will allow the set-top box to automatically switch its display settings to match the native frame rate and dynamic range of a given video.

Currently, the Apple TV 4K takes a “one size fits all” approach to video output. The box reads what sort of refresh rate, resolution, and dynamic range your TV is capable of during setup and sets its video output to what it thinks will provide the best experience—but it doesn’t change that setting on its own afterward, regardless of what you watch.

Enlarge / Georgia voters at voting machines during the US presidential election at the Athens-Clarke County Fleet building in Athens, Georgia, on November 8, 2016. (credit: TAMI CHAPPELL/AFP/Getty Images)

A database system that will now be used by Indiana to automatically purge voter registrations that have duplicates in other states is 99 percent more likely to purge legitimate voters, according to a paper published last week by researchers from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, and Microsoft Research. Using the probability of matching birth dates for people with common first, middle, and last names and an audit of poll books from the 2012 US presidential election, the researchers concluded that the system would de-register "about 300 registrations used to cast a seemingly legitimate vote for every one registration used to cast a double vote."

The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program is a system administered by the office of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach—the vice-chair of President Donald Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Crosscheck uses voter roll data from 27 states—pulled every January by election officials and uploaded to an FTP site—to check for duplicate records across states, based on full name and date of birth, as well as the last four digits of social security numbers where that data is collected by voter registration (which is not consistent from state to state).

Indiana has used Crosscheck as an advisory system for a number of years but not to automatically purge voters. A law passed in July now allows county election officials in Indiana to de-register voters when a duplicate registration is detected. The problem with that variation in data is that it can leave room for massive error, as Sharad Goel and Houshmand Shirani-Mehr of Stanford University, Marc Meredith of the University of Pennsylvania, Michael Morse of Harvard University and Yale Law School, and David Rothschild of Microsoft Research found.

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Top officials from Facebook, Google, and Twitter told a congressional panel Tuesday that their platforms hosted a disinformation campaign carried out over their networks by Russian state actors. The propaganda centered on the presidential election, immigration, gun rights, gay rights, and racial issues, the companies said. None of the three organizations said they supported proposed legislation requiring them to disclose who is buying political advertisements on their platforms, although these Web companies promised more public transparency about who is buying ads on their networks.

The hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee comes as Facebook conceded that as many as 126 million people were exposed to Russian operations on its site during the 2016 presidential election. Facebook said a "troll farm" tied to the Kremlin, called the Internet Research Agency, posted 80,000 times between 2015 and 2017, which resulted in 29 million direct appearances on Facebook news feeds. Thanks to real users liking, sharing, and commenting on these posts, the campaign scored between 87 and 126 million impressions, according to Facebook.

The campaign had real-world consequences. To sow discord, the propaganda sparked a New York street protest over President Donald Trump's victory—prompting between 5,000 to 10,000 protesters to convene on Manhattan's Union Square on November 12.

Enlarge / Will! He's alive and kinda sorta well. (As practically a new character this season, Noah Schnapp has been excellent early on. He wears the anxiety and uncertainty of Will's past on his face at all times.) (credit: Netflix)

Warning: This story contains some spoilers for episodes 1-3 of Stranger Things' second season.

For returning fans of Netflix’s surprise hit Stranger Things, it likely only took roughly 54 seconds for the second season to feel like a success. As soon as the familiar intro sequence hits—vintage synths pulsing as a kodalith technique nails the '80s horror-thriller mood—you’re happy to be in Hawkins, Indiana, again. The first instances of a nervous Joyce Byers doting on her sons or Chief Hopper barging into the office only seal the sentiment.

Thankfully, the first three episodes of the new run reveal that many of Stranger Things’ strengths have returned. The Duffer Bros. and co. again nail the emotions and aesthetic of the “kids-on-bikes-have-an-adventure” genre many know and love. Life in Hawkins still has enough unsettled peculiarities story-wise to propel another round of thrills. And new additions to the cast feel largely organic to this world and not like one-note story fodder.