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Google has a complicated history with communication applications. The company has introduced, lost interest in, and killed enough that I’ve kind of lost count. So it was kind of nice when Google Hangouts launched in 2013 with features taken from …
Google has a complicated history with communication applications. The company has introduced, lost interest in, and killed enough that I’ve kind of lost count. So it was kind of nice when Google Hangouts launched in 2013 with features taken from three earlier apps (Google talk, Google+ Messener, and Hangouts video chat). Now it looks like […]
The post Report: Google Hangouts will stop hanging out in 2020 appeared first on Liliputing.
Rare-earth minerals mined in the US need to be sent to China for processing.
Enlarge / A pick-up truck makes its way out of the Mountain Pass open pit mine in California in 2009. (credit: Photo by Jacob Kepler/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
President Trump's tariffs on rare-earth metals from China should have been a boon to the only US rare-earth minerals mine in California. But a recent Wall Street Journal article illustrates that, given the complex nature of the global economy, those tariffs have actually put the Mountain Pass mine in a tough place.
A hedge fund recently bought Mountain Pass out of bankruptcy after several companies attempted to turn a profit from it. Six months later, the WSJ wrote, Trump announced tariffs that should have helped the mine supply more domestic rare-earths at a higher price.
However, most of the world's rare-earth processing facilities are in China, which also produces more than 90 percent of the world's rare-earth minerals. To develop its metals as cheaply as possible, Mountain Pass has first been shipping its ore to China, where the processed metals are then sold on the world market to makers of smartphones, laptops, and magnets that go into electric car motors and giant wind turbines.
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Dartmouth computer scientists teamed up with experts from Pixar and Disney.
Enlarge / Clouds contain billions of individual water droplets that are difficult to plot in computer graphics for movie scenes. (credit: Dartmouth Visual Computing Lab)
Animators will now be able to precisely control how microscopic particles interact with light in their renderings of objects, thanks to a research collaboration between computer scientists at Dartmouth University and staff scientists at Pixar and Disney. The team will describe this new work next week at the SIGGRAPH Asia event in Tokyo, Japan; a paper is also forthcoming in the journal Transactions on Graphics.
The breakthrough will allow animation artists more creative leeway when designing the look of various objects by giving them the ability to customize the way light travels through them. It should have the biggest impact on renderings of so-called "volumetric materials"—clouds, fog, mist, skin, or marble statues, for instance. (Marble is a material that reflects some light off the surface but allows some to pass through, giving it a translucent appearance.)
"There is a whole range of dramatically different appearances that artists just couldn't explore until now," said Dartmouth co-author Wojciech Jarosz. "Previously, artists basically had one control that could affect the appearance of a cloud. Now it's possible to explore a vastly richer palette of possibilities, a change that is as dynamic as the transition from black-and-white images to color."
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The LG Gram line of laptops is entering new territory in 2018. The new models are still thin and light laptops but LG is introducing its first convertible tablet-style model, as well as the first LG Gram laptop with a 17 inch display. LG hasn’t o…
The LG Gram line of laptops is entering new territory in 2018. The new models are still thin and light laptops but LG is introducing its first convertible tablet-style model, as well as the first LG Gram laptop with a 17 inch display. LG hasn’t officially announced the new laptops yet, but a reliable source […]
The post Exclusive: LG Gram 2019 laptops include 14 inch convertible, 17 inch thin-and-light appeared first on Liliputing.
Scammers are abusing Google’s takedown system to remove popular game piracy sites from search results. The notices are not standard DMCA notifications. They accuse the sites of circumventing DRM instead, which means that there is no counter-notification option available. Making matters worse, malware-ridden sites are now rising in Google’s search results.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
Takedown notices are a particularly useful tool for copyright holders who want to make sure that infringing copies of their work are not widely distributed.
Every single day, rightsholders and their representatives scour the web for references to pirated content, which aren’t hard to find.
These links are then reported to various online services, such as Google, requesting their operators to remove the allegedly infringing content. This system works well in theory but it’s being abused by scam-artists as well.
One of the most recent scams we’ve seen targets various popular game piracy sites, including skidrowgamereloaded.com, fitgirl-repacks.site, freegogpcgames.com, crotorrents.com, nosteam.ro, pcgames-download.com and skidrowreloaded.com.
The notices in question are seemingly sent by prominent names in the gaming industry, such as Steam and Ubisoft. However, the sudden flurry of takedown requests appears to be initiated by scammers instead.
TorrentFreak spoke to the operator of one of the affected sites who prefers to remain anonymous. He has been following the activity for a while and asked Google for information about a sender claiming to be Ubisoft.
Google revealed that this “Ubisoft” sent notices from suspicious Gmail addresses, using a Russian user interface, from an unidentified Ukrainian IP-address. In addition, the handle used in one of the email addresses can be linked to game-related spam, which doesn’t build any confidence either.
The site owner shared his findings with Google but the company repeatedly said that there is no option to file a counter notification.
This is because the notices are not regular DMCA takedowns. Instead, they are notifications that the URLs circumvent technological protection measures such as DRM, which is separately covered in the DMCA.
“Google has been notified that the following URLs distribute copyright circumvention devices in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1201,” Google informed the site owner.
“Please find attached the notice we received. There is no formal counter notification process available under US law for circumvention, so we have not reinstated these URLs. If you dispute that you are distributing circumvention devices, please reply with a further explanation.”
Google is correct. The DMCA doesn’t prescribe a takedown and counter-notification scheme for DRM circumvention. While Google has voluntarily chosen to take the URLs offline, it is not required to offer a counter-notice option. This puts targeted sites at a severe disadvantage.
The site owner informs TorrentFreak that he’s been following a spamming operation for a few months. Interestingly, one of the email addresses from the takedown notices could also be matched to a scammer he had contact with in the past.
In addition to the Ubisoft notices, there are also similar requests from other popular brands such as Valve’s Steam. These notices also use the DRM circumvention argument and target popular game piracy sites.
“We are the owners of these copyrighted games listed below. These games were only created by our devlopers [sic] and sell exclusively on steampowered.com,” a Steam notice reads
Apart from the broken English and typo, this claim doesn’t really hold up. Steam or Valve are not the creators of many of the mentioned games, nor are they all exclusively sold on Steam.
The end result of these fraudulent notices is that thousands of URLs have been wiped from Google’s search results by what appear to be scammers. In some cases, Google has rejected the requests, but many have been honored.
What certainly doesn’t help is that the allegations are not incorrect per se. Pirated games often circumvent DRM. However, the scammy notices are sent out for a different purpose.
One may wonder what the goal of these scammers is. While it’s hard to prove without a doubt, it looks like they are trying to get malicious sites ranked higher in search results.
According to our source, the scammers can be linked to a couple of pirate gaming sites which trick people into downloading cryptocurrency miners. These sites are, of course, not targeted by the fraudulent DMCA requests.
“I have been investigating those persons for a long time, and I can tell with proof that they are behind a massive spam attack spreading their miners. They are taking advantage of the lack of games cracks lately, creating websites claiming they provide cracked games, but all the links on these sites lead to cryptocurrencies miners,” he says.
TorrentFreak visited one of the sites which indeed featured a link that looks rather suspicious. According to Virustotal, it’s flagged as ‘Filetour’ by several anti-virus vendors. This is malware that launches in-browser mining sites.
As scammers remove Google search results for regular pirate gaming sites, these scammy alternatives get a better ranking and more traffic.
To add to the mess, the situation also caused some upheaval between pirate sites. One of the targeted sites suspects that competitor GoodOldDownloads is behind the notices. So, in a retaliatory move, they targeted the site in question with a series of counter-takedowns.
We have seen no sign that this is a matter of competition for a regular pirate site though, and neither has the site owner we have spoken to. Instead, it seems more likely that scammers are behind this scheme.
TorrentFreak contacted Ubisoft, Valve, and Google for a comment on the situation but none of the companies responded.
When we started working on this article none of the takedown requests were flagged as suspicious by Google, but that’s now starting to change. Google actively flagged several of the Steam and Ubisoft notices we referred to in our article.
“We believe that an impostor or someone else abusing the process submitted this request. We report it here for the sake of completeness and to provide a view into one kind of abuse of the DMCA process,” a notice in Google’s transparency report reads.
Interestingly, however, Google still lists the reported links as “removed” and it’s unclear if that will change.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
Motivations of hackers are unclear, but proprietary Wi-Fi may have been a target.
Enlarge / Marriott Hotel brands like the W hotel were breached between 2014 and 2018. (credit: Craig Warga/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On Friday, Marriott International announced a system breach that has affected approximately 500 million customers, with stolen information including names, credit card numbers, mailing addresses, email addresses, and passport numbers. The breach is one of the largest in history, after recent Yahoo breaches that compromised the accounts of nearly three billion customers.
The breach appears to have originated at Starwood hotels in 2014—two years before Marriott acquired the hotel chain, according to The Washington Post. "When Marriott acquired Starwood in 2016, the existing breach went undetected during the merger and for years afterward," the Post noted.
Marriott says it confirmed unauthorized access to the Starwood guest reservation database on November 19, which contained guest information dating back to September 10, 2018. The hackers had allegedly copied encrypted information from the Starwood reservation database. When Marriott was able to decrypt the information, the company found that of the approximately 500 million guests that had their name and contact information stolen, a subset of 327 million had "some combination of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (“SPG”) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences."
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NYT report is the latest example of black autoworkers enduring racist acts and language.
Enlarge / Robotic arms install the front seats to a Model 3 at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California. (credit: Mason Trinca for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
At least six black former Tesla employees have told The New York Times that they suffered from racial harassment while working at the company. Three racial discrimination lawsuits have been filed against Tesla since early last year.
One man, DeWitt Lambert, shared a video in which an unidentified man walks around Tesla's factory floor and—addressing Lambert—threatens to "cut you up … so everybody can have a piece of you, n*****."
In a lengthy statement to Ars Technica, Tesla faulted the Times for extrapolating from "a very small number of claims" to paint Tesla in an unflattering light.
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“This is the only copy!” and “I backed everything up because I knew Sierra didn’t.”
Metal Jesus Rocks
Al Lowe, one of Sierra On-Line's seminal game creators and programmers, has been sitting on a pile of his original games' source code files for over 30 years, fully convinced that they are worthless.
"I’m 72 years old, and none of my kids want this junk!" Lowe said in an interview with YouTube personality MetalJesusRocks (aka Jason Lindsey, himself an ex-Sierra developer and a friend of Ars). "Does anybody?"
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Die teure Power Armor Edition von Fallout 76 enthält statt einer versprochenen Leinentasche ein Sammlerstück aus günstigerem Nylon. Bethesda entschuldigt sich und bietet 500 Atoms Spielwährung als Entschädigung an. Die Community enttäuscht das nur noch…
Die teure Power Armor Edition von Fallout 76 enthält statt einer versprochenen Leinentasche ein Sammlerstück aus günstigerem Nylon. Bethesda entschuldigt sich und bietet 500 Atoms Spielwährung als Entschädigung an. Die Community enttäuscht das nur noch mehr. (Fallout 76, Microblogging) An overall downward trend reversed between 2016 and 2017.
Enlarge / A baby hospitalized with measles in the Philippines, in an outbreak following 2013's typhoon Haiyan. (credit: CDC Global)
In 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) set some ambitious goals for measles worldwide. By 2015, they wanted to reduce the number of deaths caused by measles by 95 percent compared to 2000. They set similarly ambitious targets for vaccination rates and measles infections.
The world has not reached these goals. And between 2016 and 2017, there was an alarming uptick in measles cases worldwide, according to a joint report by the WHO and CDC. “Complacency about the disease and the spread of falsehoods about the vaccine in Europe, a collapsing health system in Venezuela, and pockets of fragility and low immunization coverage in Africa are combining to bring about a global resurgence of measles after years of progress,” said Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in a statement about the report.
Overall, between 2000 and 2017, there has been a lot of progress: annual global deaths have decreased 80 percent, from 545,174 to 109,638. Over this time period, measles vaccination has prevented approximately 21 million deaths globally, compared to a hypothetical world with no measles vaccines (in this world, the death rate would have been a lot higher in 2000, too). The number of cases reported annually plummeted from 145 cases per million people to just 25—although the goal was five cases per million. And 85 percent of people globally had received the first dose of the measles vaccine in 2017, compared to 72 percent in 2000.
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