Two-thirds of the US is at risk for “major to moderate” flooding this spring.
Enlarge/ HAMBURG, IOWA - MARCH 20: Homes and businesses are surrounded by floodwater on March 20, 2019 in Hamburg, Iowa. (credit: Scott Olson | Getty Images)
The record-setting floods deluging the Midwest are about to get a lot worse. Fueled by rapidly melting snowpack and a forecast of more rainstorms in the next few weeks, federal officials warn that 200 million people in 25 states face a risk through May. Floodwaters coursing through Nebraska have already forced tens of thousands of people to flee and have caused $1.3 billion in damage.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued its spring flood outlook Thursday, predicting that two-thirds of the country is at risk of "major to moderate flooding," from Fargo, North Dakota on the Red River of the North down to Nashville, Tennessee, on the Cumberland River. The floods from the past two weeks have compromised 200 miles of levees in Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers.
The rains and floods are expected to continue through May and become more dire, according to Ed Clark, director of NOAA’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season,” Clark said, “with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities.”
Mercedes Benz Vans hat neue technische Details zum eSprinter bekanntgegeben. Demnach wird das Fahrzeug, das in der zweiten Jahreshälfte 2019 erhältlich sein soll, etwa 150 Kilometer Reichweite aufweisen. (Mercedes Benz, Technologie)
Mercedes Benz Vans hat neue technische Details zum eSprinter bekanntgegeben. Demnach wird das Fahrzeug, das in der zweiten Jahreshälfte 2019 erhältlich sein soll, etwa 150 Kilometer Reichweite aufweisen. (Mercedes Benz, Technologie)
Google Unlocked is a new extension for Chrome and Opera that attempts to ‘uncensor’ Google search results affected by DMCA notices. While it tends to work as advertised overall, it suffers from – surprise, surprise – an inability to distinguish between infringing and non-infringing URLs.
For many years, Google has been bombarded with requests from copyright holders to remove allegedly-infringing content from its indexes.
As reported here on TF last week, those requests have now reached astronomic levels – four billion links reported by 168,180 copyright holders against 2,283,811 separate domains.
Google honors most of the requests but rejects a fair few too, often due to the reported activity not actually being copyright infringement. However, when links are removed, users are informed of the fact via a note at the bottom of Google’s search results.
As the image above shows, when results are removed the associated DMCA notice which caused the removal can be found on the LumenDatabase, the online repository where some Internet companies file complaints for transparency purposes.
Anyone can click through and view the notices for themselves but this can be time-consuming, especially when researching a large number of links. It’s a problem the folks at ibit tried to solve this week with the release of a new browser extension.
Compatible with Chrome and Opera, Google Unlocked is open source and available via its Github repo. Its developer offers this simple introduction.
“The extension scans hidden links that were censored on Google search results due to complaints. The tool scans those complaints and extracts the links from them, puts the links back into Google results, all in matter of seconds,” he writes.
TF tested the extension (which isn’t available on the Chrome store) with a clean Opera install and found that it only asks for minimal permission to access Google domains, something confirmed by its developer.
“Please take a look at the code on Github, it is just a few lines of Javascript code. The extension is completely open source and you install it after unpacking the zip file so no hidden secrets there,” he told TF.
“It only needs permission to access www.google.* domains so that it can inject the missing links back in the page. Under the hood, the extension checks the Google results for the word “complaint” and fetches the URL behind it with a simple XMLHttpRequest. It then parses those URLs and puts them back on the same page.”
Since by its very nature the tool searches for allegedly infringing links, we aren’t going to demonstrate those here. Safe to say, however, the tool does scan LumenDatabase as advertised and all the removed links do get embedded in the search result page itself, very large numbers of links in some instances.
However, we also discovered that Google Unlocked is helpful when researching invalid DMCA notices too, but that (and indeed its ability to concisely display URLs from legitimate takedown complaints) then uncovers a flaw in the system, one that cannot be solved easily – if at all.
Readers will perhaps recall that a poet by the name of Shaun Shane issued a heap of false DMCA notices against sites (this one included) that legitimately reported on his efforts to stop people writing about his poem. So, for fun, we typed the phrase “If only our tongues were made of glass” into Google, which informed us that a single result had been removed.
However, after pressing the Google Unlocked button, we were confronted with eight URLs injected by the extension, as shown below.
Google’s search results, augmented with Google Unlocked links
While these are indeed all of the URLs present in the notice advised by Google under the “read the DMCA complaint” link provided, most of them were either rejected by Google or are actually legitimate links provided by Shaun Shane himself.
Most DMCA notices filed with the company also include locations where the original source material can be found, so these are also parsed by Google Unlocked and presented as removed content, as the image below illustrates.
An extract from the original notice
So, while Google Unlocked is very capable when it comes to ‘reinstating’ links removed by Google following a copyright complaint, it has some of the same issues suffered by many anti-piracy crawlers – it simply cannot differentiate between infringing and non-infringing content.
Given the simplicity of the extension and the complexity of the situation, this is not a problem Google Unlocked will ever be able to completely solve. So, while it does work as advertised in many scenarios, the reinstated URLs will nearly always contain links pointing to legitimate sources or links that Google has thrown out due to them being non-infringing.
That being said, Google Unlocked’s developer is inviting others to contribute to this interesting project, which may improve its performance over time.
“I put the source on Github and I hope to get more programmers to do pull requests to keep the extension up to date, since I know a lot of geeks will love this extension,” he concludes.
Mehr Sanktionen, weniger Beratungen. Das droht, wenn die Politik die Datenschutz-Aufsichtsbehörden weiterhin personell und finanziell zu knapp hält. Die bayerische Datenschutzaufsichtsbehörde hat für den Standort Bayern jetzt eine drastische Kursänderu…
Mehr Sanktionen, weniger Beratungen. Das droht, wenn die Politik die Datenschutz-Aufsichtsbehörden weiterhin personell und finanziell zu knapp hält. Die bayerische Datenschutzaufsichtsbehörde hat für den Standort Bayern jetzt eine drastische Kursänderung angekündigt. Von Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti (Datenschutz, IBM)
Alden Kroll und Kollegen von Valve haben die neue Bibliothek und Veranstaltungshinweise auf Steam vorgestellt – und, fast noch wichtiger, für das Gaming Network des Unternehmens geworben. (Steam, Valve)
Alden Kroll und Kollegen von Valve haben die neue Bibliothek und Veranstaltungshinweise auf Steam vorgestellt - und, fast noch wichtiger, für das Gaming Network des Unternehmens geworben. (Steam, Valve)
Auf der Straße, am Telefon und im Netz wird gegen Artikel 13 protestiert. Google enthüllt seinen Game-Streaming-Service. Und Nvidia bleibt große Neuerungen schuldig. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Internet)
Auf der Straße, am Telefon und im Netz wird gegen Artikel 13 protestiert. Google enthüllt seinen Game-Streaming-Service. Und Nvidia bleibt große Neuerungen schuldig. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Internet)
All 24 James Bond movies have been leaked in 4K quality online, leading some to speculate that a flaw has been found in the way iTunes protects its movies.The “Bond” movies are available online, in 4K quality, on iTunes. This latest leak follows anothe…
All 24 James Bond movies have been leaked in 4K quality online, leading some to speculate that a flaw has been found in the way iTunes protects its movies.
The "Bond" movies are available online, in 4K quality, on iTunes. This latest leak follows another 4K leak for 'Aquaman', which at that time, was exclusively available on iTunes.
While 4K copies of the James Bond movies are also available on Australian streaming outfit Stan in 4K, the Aussie versions are encoded in 25 frames per second, whereas these leaked copies are 24 fps. This suggests that the source of these latest leaks is also iTunes.
This suggests that the source of all these leaks is the iTunes version and because these releases were marked as "WEB-DL", it means that these are the exact same versions as the original legal source, only with copy protection removed. This is as opposed to "WEBRips", which are captured from the playback of web sources and re-encoded, which can lead to some quality loss.
Just how the copy protection on the iTunes movie files was defeated is still unknown. This could indicate a flaw in the iTunes copy protection system or a vulnerability on a playback device, such as the Apple TV.
Other 4K titles leaked include copies of 'Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse', 'Bumblebee' and 'The Mule'.
“We can figure out what kinds of rewards you like, and the kinds you don’t.”
Enlarge/ Valve Software's Mike Ambinder offers a joking photo of what people think his job as Principal Experimental Psychologist looks like. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell was not on hand to confirm or deny Valve's use of power tools on his head. (credit: Sam Machkovech)
SAN FRANCISCO—Valve Software's famously "flat" structure means most of its game-making staffers have vague titles. One of the few exceptions is its Principal Experimental Psychologist, who presented a futuristic gaming vision at this year's Game Developers Conference—in particular, he made a few peculiar admissions about how Valve might one day study your brain activity in the middle of a game and what the company might do with it.
Before speaking, Valve Software's Mike Ambinder laid out a very loud disclaimer about GDC's "vision" track of panels: "This is supposed to be speculative," he said. "This is one possible direction things could go." Even with that caveat in mind, Ambinder's choice of details is interesting to sink our teeth into, especially coming from a company that seems to offer more speculation about the future of gaming than it does actual applications of it (i.e. new games).
The slot machine of your mind?
The above and below images of Ambinder goofing off with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell weren't just for yuks: "Every talk I've given, this reliably gets a laugh. Think about that. What if we could elicit reliable reactions [from video games] and determine we were doing so?"
Attackers have been actively exploiting serious vulnerabilities in two widely used WordPress plugins to compromise websites that run the extensions on top of the content management system.
The two affected plugins are Easy WP SMTP with 300,000 active installations and Social Warfare, which has about 70,000 active installations. While developers have released patches for both exploited flaws, download figures indicate many vulnerable websites have yet to install the fixes. Figures for Easy WP SMTP, which was fixed five days ago, show the plugin has just short of 135,000 downloads in the past seven days. Figures for Social Warfare show it has been downloaded fewer than 20,000 times since a patch was published on WordPress on Friday. Sites that use either plugin should disable them immediately and then ensure they have been updated to version 1.3.9.1 of Easy WP SMTP and 3.5.3 of Social Warfare.
Attacks exploiting Easy WP SMTP were first reported by security firm NinTechNet on Sunday, the same day a patch became available. On Wednesday, a different security firm, Defiant, also reported the vulnerability was under active exploit despite the availability of the patch. The exploits allow attackers to create rogue administrative accounts on vulnerable websites.
Late out of the gates, the SB-1 Defiant is a (mostly) all-new kind of helicopter.
Enlarge/ The Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant. (credit: Sikorsky/Boeing)
The Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant, one of two aircraft competing for the US Army's Future Long Range Assault Aircraft program, has finally made its first flight—a short bit of hovering around an airfield at a Sikorsky facility in West Palm Beach, Florida. The flight comes over 15 months after the Bell V-280 Valor (the other competitor for the program to replace the Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk) took flight. But the reasons for the delay are pretty straightforward: the SB-1 prototype is only the fourth actual aircraft ever built using Sikorsky's Advancing Blade Concept rotor design, while the V-280 is based on the (relatively) mature technology behind the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor.
The Defiant helicopter uses two stacked, contra-rotating rigid composite rotors for its lift and a pusher propeller for thrust at high speeds. Since it is a true helicopter, it has a much smaller footprint than the V-280, which has two tiltrotors positioned at its wingtips. At least in theory, the Defiant will handle more like a traditional helicopter when maneuvering in tight quarters, such as the urban environments that the Army has placed particular emphasis on in its future war planning. Manipulation of the pitch of the rotors could make for more agile maneuvering.
Mercedes Benz Vans hat neue technische Details zum eSprinter bekanntgegeben. Demnach wird das Fahrzeug, das in der zweiten Jahreshälfte 2019 erhältlich sein soll, etwa 150 Kilometer Reichweite aufweisen. (
Mehr Sanktionen, weniger Beratungen. Das droht, wenn die Politik die Datenschutz-Aufsichtsbehörden weiterhin personell und finanziell zu knapp hält. Die bayerische Datenschutzaufsichtsbehörde hat für den Standort Bayern jetzt eine drastische Kursänderung angekündigt. Von Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti (
Alden Kroll und Kollegen von Valve haben die neue Bibliothek und Veranstaltungshinweise auf Steam vorgestellt - und, fast noch wichtiger, für das Gaming Network des Unternehmens geworben. (
Auf der Straße, am Telefon und im Netz wird gegen Artikel 13 protestiert. Google enthüllt seinen Game-Streaming-Service. Und Nvidia bleibt große Neuerungen schuldig. (
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