Month: March 2018

You probably won't ever see it in a US store, but last night Huawei announced its newest flagship smartphone, the P20 Pro. Whether you want to call it appealing or not is one thing, but it's definitely not your normal smartphone. First, we'll outline the normal config... and then move on to the totally insane "Porsche Design" version.

With the standard P20 Pro, it has an iPhone X-style front camera notch and a thick bottom "chin" bezel. It's also one-upping the rest of the smartphone camera world with a whopping three cameras on the back. Huawei is one of the rare smartphone manufacturers with its own SoC manufacturing business, so instead of the usual Snapdragon SoC, the heart of the P20 Pro is a HiSilicon Kirin 970.

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The Asus VivoBook Flip 12 is a small, low-cost convertible Windows notebook with a touchscreen display and a 360-degree hinge that lets you use the computer in tablet mode. With a 1366 x 768 pixel display and an Intel Celeron N3350 dual-core processor, it’s pretty clearly a budget laptop. But it has 4GB of RAM […]

The post Deals of the Day (3-27-2018) appeared first on Liliputing.

Enlarge / A patient with a guinea worm emerging, at the Savelugu Case Containment Center. (credit: Getty | Louise Gubb/Corbis)

It all starts with a sip of water that’s contaminated with the worm’s larvae. Inside a human host, the larvae punch through the digestive tract, entering into the body cavity to quietly grow. Within a few months, the male and female worms meet and mate. Then the males die off. The surviving female worms mature, reaching 60 to 100 centimeters (2 to 3 feet), and migrate into the victim’s muscles. About 10 to 14 months after that tainted drink, the female worms burn through the skin by oozing acid, creating a searing blister. This can happen anywhere in the body, but it’s usually in the legs or feet.

Not coincidentally, dunking the blister in water eases the pain—and gives the female worm the opportunity to burst out of the wound and spew a milky slurry containing millions of larvae, which starts the cycle all over again. From there, the victim can slowly try to pull the worm out. But yanking too quickly could break the thin parasite (measuring only 1 to 2 mm wide), which could cause an infection. Instead, it has to be slowly extracted, usually by winding the end around a piece of gauze or twig and turning it a few times each day. The process often takes weeks.

The nasty culprit here is the Guinea worm (Dracunculus medinensis). The infection is called dracunculiasis, Latin for “afflicted with little dragons,” after the burning blisters they create on their way out.

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Enlarge / Sadly, the fire doesn't spread quite as widely as it does in Far Cry 2.

Far Cry 5 is a disappointment largely of Ubisoft’s own making. The publisher may well have set unrealistic expectations for the game’s story, which features a villainous cult that clearly draws from the current and complex state of the political far right in the US. After a marketing campaign that leans on evangelical and militia imagery, players could be forgiven for expecting some smart political statements (or at least biting satire) from the game. However you expected to feel about the game’s portrayal of gun culture, militias, and weaponized evangelism going in, though, you’ll probably come away let down by the game’s lack of follow-through on that promise.

That’s not to say that Far Cry 5 is all bad. Once I packed up my last shred of hope that the game had anything interesting to say (which happened about 30 minutes in), I was able to uncover some genuinely smart changes to the series’ increasingly stagnant gameplay formula.

The game is set in Hope County, Montana, and for the first time in a long time, you won’t need to reveal the lovely looking locale by scaling towers. Ubisoft has finally put away that stale gameplay structure, which once belched thunderclouds of mind-numbing objectives onto the map every time you scaled a tower. The result is definitely an example of addition by subtraction.

In Far Cry 5, all but a few side and primary objectives crop up organically. On your mission to stop a vaguely menacing, vaguely Christian cult that’s taken over Hope County (the evocatively named “Project at Eden’s Gate”), you’ll run across hotspots of activity just by exploring. The biggest of these mimic the classic “outposts” that have shown up in the series since Far Cry 2. Once you clear out an outpost, it becomes a hub of non-player characters that can join your bloody quest—or simply chatter about other minor activities.

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | eccolo74)

A lobby group that represents AT&T, Verizon, and other telcos plans to sue states and cities that try to enforce net neutrality rules.

USTelecom, the lobby group, made its intentions clear yesterday in a blog post titled, "All Americans Deserve Equal Rights Online."

"Broadband providers have worked hard over the past 20 years to deploy ever more sophisticated, faster and higher-capacity networks, and uphold net neutrality protections for all," USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter wrote. "To continue this important work, there is no question we will aggressively challenge state or municipal attempts to fracture the federal regulatory structure that made all this progress possible."

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There are many methods used by copyright holders and the authorities in their quest to disable access to pirate sites.

Site blocking is one of the most popular but pressure can also be placed on web hosts to prevent them from doing business with questionable resources. A skip from one host to another usually solves the problem, however.

Another option is to target sites’ domains directly, by putting pressure on their registrars. It’s a practice that has famously seen The Pirate Bay burn through numerous domains in recent years, only for it to end up back on its original domain, apparently unscathed. Other sites, it appears, aren’t always so lucky.

As a full member of IFPI, the Peruvian Union of Phonographic Producers (UNIMPRO) protects the rights of record labels and musicians. Like its counterparts all over the world, UNIMPRO has a piracy problem and a complaint filed against four ‘pirate’ sites will now force the world’s largest domain registrar into action.

Mp3Juices-Download-Free.com, Melodiavip.net, Foxmusica.site and Fulltono.me were all music sites offering MP3 content without the copyright holders’ permission. None are currently available but the screenshot below shows how the first platform appeared before it was taken offline.

Following a complaint against the sites by UNIMPRO, the Copyright Commission (Comisión de Derecho de Autor) conducted an investigation into the platforms’ activities. The Commission found that the works they facilitated access to infringed copyright. It was also determined that each site generated revenue from advertising.

Given the illegal nature of the sites and the high volume of visitors they attract, the Commission determined that they were causing “irreparable damage” to legitimate copyright holders. Something, therefore, needed to be done.

The action against the sites involved the National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (Indecopi), an autonomous public body of the Peruvian state tasked with handling anti-competitive behavior, unfair competition, and intellectual property matters.

After assessing the evidence, Indecopi, through the Copyright Commission, issued precautionary (interim) measures compelling US-based GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar which handles the domains for all four sites, to suspend them with immediate effect.

“The Copyright Commission of INDECOPI issued four precautionary measures in order that the US company Godaddy.com, LLC (in its capacity as registrar of domain names) suspend the domains of four websites, through which it would have infringed the legislation on Copyright and Related Rights, by making available a large number of musical phonograms without the corresponding authorization, to the detriment of its legitimate owners,” Indecopi said in a statement.

“The suspension was based on the great evidence that was provided by the Commission, on the four websites that infringe copyright, and in the framework of the policy of support for the protection of intellectual property.”

Indecopi says that GoDaddy can file an appeal against the decision. At the time of writing, none of the four domains currently returns a working website.

TorrentFreak has requested a comment from GoDaddy but at the time of publication, we were yet to receive a response.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

If you thought Huawei’s new €899 P20 Pro smartphone was expensive, the Chinese phone maker has another model that makes it look cheap. The Huawei Porsche Design Mate RS has all of the P20 Pro’s best features, plus a higher-resolution display, two fingerprint sensors (an in-display model plus a rear sensor), and support for up to 512GB of […]

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