Last November, photo-hosting site Flickr announced that it was going to slash the storage afforded to free accounts; they'd be capped at just 1,000 pictures each. Starting January 8 this year, free accounts with more than 1,000 pictures were rendered unable to upload any new images, and on February 5, the service was due to start deleting the excess images. Flickr intends to delete pictures working from the oldest to the newest until each account is brought under the threshold.
February 5 has come and gone, and so far nothing has been deleted. Deletion is still in the cards, but Flickr has extended its deadline to March 12, giving its users a few more weeks to rescue their pictures. The extension comes amid widespread difficulties with downloading pictures en masse from the site, especially among its very heaviest users. As Flickr's own help pages note, it can take as long as a week to package your pictures into a single downloadable ZIP file.
Alternatively, account holders can upgrade to Flickr Pro to safeguard their pictures.
Cable industry chief lobbyist Michael Powell today asked Congress for a net neutrality law that would ban blocking and throttling but allow Internet providers to charge for prioritization under certain circumstances.
Powell—a Republican who was FCC chairman from 2001 to 2005 and is now CEO of cable lobby group NCTA—spoke to lawmakers today at a Communications and Technology subcommittee hearing on net neutrality (see a transcript of Powell's prepared testimony).
Powell said there is "common ground around the basic tenets of net neutrality rules: There should be no blocking or throttling of lawful content. There should be no paid prioritization that creates fast lanes and slow lanes, absent public benefit. And, there should be transparency to consumers over network practices."
The bug in Group FaceTime, a feature that allows conference-call-style chats, made it trivial for someone to eavesdrop on someone else simply by initiating a FaceTime call, swiping up and choosing “add person,” and entering their own number to add themselves as a participant in a Group FaceTime call. While people on the receiving end would see a call was coming through, they would have no idea that the person trying to connect could already hear nearby audio and, in many cases, see video.
Two other potentially serious iOS security bugs Apple fixed Thursday have been under active attack in the wild, security researchers with Google's Project Zero said. One bug indexed as CVE-2019-7287, is a memory corruption flaw in the IOKit. Apple said it may allow apps to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. Another memory corruption bug in Foundation, CVE-2019-7286 may allow an application to gain elevated privileges.
Companies have been scrambling to offer software updates to protect against the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities since before they were disclosed to the public last year. The vulnerabilities allow an attacker to use a speculative execution side-cha…
Companies have been scrambling to offer software updates to protect against the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities since before they were disclosed to the public last year. The vulnerabilities allow an attacker to use a speculative execution side-channel attack to obtain data from your computer that shouldn’t be accessible. One thing Google did to help protect […]
Updated subcompact SUV from Land Rover can show you what’s underneath the car.
Enlarge/ A 2020 Land Rover Evoque parked on a drawbridge over the Chicago River. (credit: Jaguar Land Rover)
CHICAGO—At the Chicago Auto Show, Land Rover took the wraps off the newly redesigned Range Rover Evoque. Originally introduced for the 2011 model year, the second-generation subcompact SUV has undergone a complete makeover, featuring a hybrid powertrain option, advanced driver-assistance tech, and what Land Rover calls "groundbreaking" off-road tech.
Starting at $42,650 for the base S model, the 2020 Evoque keeps the coupe-like silhouette and dimensions of the first-generation models. Although it's roughly the same size, Land Rover has carved out more interior space for the second-gen Evoque to make the backseat more comfortable. There's also 6 percent more luggage space (now 21.5 cubic feet), which expands to 50.5 cubic feet when the back seat is folded flat.
In addition to the four-cylinder, 2.0-liter twin-turbo engine, there will be a 48V mild hybrid powertrain version that is paired with the internal-combustion engine. Like other hybrids, the Evoque will use regenerative braking to charge the battery positioned under the floor of the cabin. The engine will shut off when the Evoque drops below 11mph, and the car will tap the battery to boost acceleration once it starts moving again.
LG’s next flagship smartphone will have a 3D depth-sensing camera on the front with support for face recognition, augmented reality, and other features. The company plans to launch the LG G8 ThinQ smartphone at Mobile World Congress later this mo…
LG’s next flagship smartphone will have a 3D depth-sensing camera on the front with support for face recognition, augmented reality, and other features. The company plans to launch the LG G8 ThinQ smartphone at Mobile World Congress later this month, but LG has a habit of building a bit of hype by pre-announcing specific features. […]
Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a deal on Apple's latest 11-inch iPad Pro, the 256GB model of which is currently down to $799 at Amazon (for select users) and B&H. That's a $150 discount and the lowest sale price we've seen.
As we noted in our review a few months back, it's still premature to say the 2018 iPad Pros can totally replace a traditional laptop for most people's productivity needs. iOS is still a mobile-first operating system, and the tablet's USB-C port doesn't support external peripherals as easily as your everyday notebook. There's no headphone jack, annoyingly, and to get the most out of it, you'll still need to pay for an external keyboard, which drives the price up further.
All that said, just because the iPad Pro can't serve as a pseudo-laptop for most people doesn't mean it can't work for everyone. And taken as a iPad, it's a phenomenal piece of hardware. The bezels are slimmer, Apple's A12X chip is blazingly fast, and the 120Hz display is both smoother and more color accurate than Apple's lower-end offerings. The 9.7-inch iPad—which is also on sale—is still the best tablet for most people, but if you've been wanting the best iPad possible for gaming, multimedia work, or what have you, this is a good time to take a look.
Google has required phone makers to offer storage encryption on most smartphones that have shipped with Android 6.0 or later. But the company has offered exemptions on devices that don’t support hardware-accelerated cryptography. In a nutshell, i…
Google has required phone makers to offer storage encryption on most smartphones that have shipped with Android 6.0 or later. But the company has offered exemptions on devices that don’t support hardware-accelerated cryptography. In a nutshell, if you’re buying a modern phone with an ARMv8 processor, it probably supports disk encryption. If you pick up […]
AnimeYT, one the most-visited websites in Latin America, period, has shut down. The website’s operator took this action after several other sites faced legal troubles. AnimeMovil, another popular anime site, folded as well, with both events provoking much uproar on social media.
Dedicated anime pirate sites are popular around the globe, but in Latin America they are huge.
AnimeYT has been one of the main players in the area. With millions of regular visitors, it was the top pirate site in countries including Argentina Chile, Peru, and Mexico.
The site is among the top 50 most-visited websites on the entire Internet in these countries, beating traditional streaming and torrent sites by a landslide.
The massive reach of these sites is a thorn in the side of copyright holders, which are increasingly taking action in response. Over the past weeks, several Brazilian anime sites folded after legal threats and this weekend AnimeYT shut down as well.
In a goodbye message, AnimeYT’s operator “TioYT” mentions the situation in Brazil as the reason for the decision. He doesn’t point a finger at a specific legal threat and chooses to end with a personal message instead.
“I spent many years translating animes, arguing with fans, watching anime girls on this page. So much that when I look back at my life, I think that at least a quarter of my memories are linked to this site, to this community,” the operator writes.
“Remember that behind the dude you call ‘TioYT’ there’s a common and ordinary guy who has his own problems, his family, who has other responsibilities and who is more than anything very grateful for all the love and the support they everyone has shown to the website in general,’ he adds.
Farewell AnimeYT
The shutdown has created a lot of uproar on social media and many of the site’s former users are taking out their anger on the legitimate anime streaming platform Crunchyroll, which is seen as the driving force behind many of the recent shutdowns.
Crunchyroll has reportedly gone after several Brazilian anime sites but, thus far, we haven’t seen any official confirmation that it approached AnimeYT directly. It could also be that there are other rightsholders involved.
Another popular anime site that shut down last week is AnimeMovil. This site currently redirects to Crunchyroll. The site reportedly took this decision after the Japanese studio Toei Animation went after it for publishing a copy of Dragon Ball Super Broly, shortly after it premiered.
The shutdowns have resulted in a surge of new traffic flowing to AnimeFLV, another popular anime site in Latin America. In addition, inventive users have also started to upload Dragon Ball episodes to porn sites, hoping that they’re safe there.
While AnimeYT and AnimeMovil could certainly be classified as pirate sites, many people relied on them to get the latest anime shows quickly.
That anime is more than a simple pastime for kids was made clear last year when local Mexican authorities planned to premiere the 130th episode of Dragon Ball Super in football stadiums and other public places, even though they had no license to do so.
Although several massive anime sites have now fallen, it’s expected that others will fill this gap, as is usually the case. That doesn’t mean, however, that AnimeYT and the others aren’t missed dearly; a quick search on social media makes that quite clear.
The background-blurring feature has already been rolled out to Microsoft's corporate communication client, Teams, and now it's in the consumer-oriented app. While bulletproof detection of the background requires a depth-sensing camera, the approach used in Skype (and Teams) uses machine learning-derived algorithms in order to work with any camera. The algorithms have been trained to detect human outlines, including the voluminous hair that some lucky people are blessed with as well as arms and hands. Presumably this means that it will properly detect even those arms and hands that appear dismembered, appearing from off the edge of the screen. Using blur is optional, and it can be enabled on a call-by-call basis.
This use of machine learning does, however, mean that it's not 100 percent guaranteed to blur everything that you might want blurred. So if there's anything too embarrassing behind you, you still might want to move it out of the camera shot just in case.
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