Maryland's law against distributing child pornography applies even when the person distributing a pornographic video is the video's minor subject, Maryland's highest court ruled on Wednesday in a 6-1 vote.
The girl, identified only as "S.K." in court documents, was 16 years old when she performed oral sex on an unidentified male. The act was captured on video—he appears to have been holding the camera—and S.K. shared the video with two friends via a text message. She eventually became estranged from one of the friends, a 17-year-old boy, and he showed the video to a police officer at the school.
The government charged the girl as a juvenile for distributing child pornography and displaying an obscene item to a minor. She was ultimately found to be involved in delinquent acts on both charges—the juvenile equivalent of a criminal conviction.
Lenovo’s new Chromebook S340-14 is a cheap laptop with some surprisingly good specs (and some underwhelming ones). It supports up to a 14 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS touchscreen display, up to 8GB of LPDDR4 memory, and up to 64GB of eMMC storage….
Lenovo’s new Chromebook S340-14 is a cheap laptop with some surprisingly good specs (and some underwhelming ones). It supports up to a 14 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS touchscreen display, up to 8GB of LPDDR4 memory, and up to 64GB of eMMC storage. The notebook features 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.2, and has two USB […]
Fall 2019 update will disable storage of Siri audio—users can turn it back on.
Enlarge/ An Apple Watch Nike+ Series 4. (credit: Getty Images | Wachiwit)
Apple will stop storing voice recordings captured by Siri-enabled devices except in cases when users intentionally opt in to the practice. "[B]y default, we will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions," Apple said in an announcement yesterday. "We will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help Siri improve."
The change won't take effect right away. The default storage of Siri recordings will stop "with a future software release in fall 2019," Apple said in a support document.
Historically, Apple stored Siri recordings by default and had humans review "less than 0.2 percent" of the audio samples "to measure how well Siri was responding and to improve its reliability," Apple said.
The super-rare Space School series used a special adapter made for Japanese schools.
Konami's Space School was long considered one of the Holy Grails of the game preservation community. [credit:
Russian Geek
]
At this point, you might think the entire history of a major gaming company like Konami would be well and fully documented. But you'd be wrong in the case of Space School, a series of game-like educational Famicom cartridges Konami designed for Japanese elementary school children in the '80s.
Designed in partnership with Japanese broadcaster NHK, the Space School series was never available in stores, and it could only be ordered directly by the schools themselves. The games also made use of a special "QTa" adapter that fitted Konami's specially designed 40-pin cartridges into the 60-pin slot of the Famicom.
DJ Short-E, a popular YouTuber who claims to have earned $310,000 from the platform, is now suing the company. The case is extremely unusual and centered around claims that YouTube not only failed to promote his videos, but also “retaliated” to the threat of a lawsuit by not processing copyright claims properly, resulting in his channels getting shut down for repeat infringement.
While most YouTube users are simply visitors to the site, a minority produce their own content and upload it to the platform for others to enjoy.
Some can make a decent living when they enter a revenue-sharing agreement with YouTube but when things go wrong, those earnings can stop in an instant. According to popular YouTuber DJ Short-E (real name Erik Mishiyev), this happened to him – and he’s blaming the whole thing on YouTube using copyright-strikes as “retaliation” to his threats of a lawsuit.
In a complaint filed in a California federal court Wednesday, Mishiyev describes himself as a “well-known Journalist and DJ, known as ‘Short-E’, who publishes original music, DJ mixes, and celebrity interviews in videos on YouTube.”
Since 2007, Mishiyev says he’s run two YouTube channels – ‘djshortehot4eva’ and ‘theshorteshow’. These channels were monetized following an agreement with YouTube and after developing a subscriber base of 250,000 users, his channels generated more than 110 million views. For this, YouTube paid him $310,000 over a five-year period.
In March 2016, Mishiyev claims he began receiving copyright claims on his “highest advertisement revenue videos”. He says he responded with counter-claims to avoid YouTube’s “three strikes” process which would’ve disabled his channel. However, he reports that all claims were won and his channel was re-instated for monetization.
A year later, Mishiyev says YouTube recognized him as a successful contributor by handing him a “Silver Creator Award” for reaching 100,000 subscribers. However, despite growing his audience at a rate of around 4,000 subscribers per month, views remained low when compared to similar channels.
“Plaintiff was concerned about this suspicious activity and sought confirmation numerous times from YOUTUBE that they were truly distributing his new videos to his fans and subscribers, but YOUTUBE failed to provide such confirmation, stating ‘They could not share this information’ with him,” the complaint notes.
Mishiyev includes an email from one of his subscribers to back up his claims that YouTube failed to promote his content as per his agreement with the company.
“I subscribed to both of your channels and turned my notifications on for you so I would know when you uploaded new videos,” it reads.
“I subscribed about 2 weeks ago and haven’t got a single notification from youtube but I noticed you have uploaded many new videos since I subscribed [to your channels]. Please fix this problem, i’m sure there are many other people who haven’t been notified either and that’s why I noticed your views are very low compared to other similar channels.”
According to Mishiyev, YouTube’s failure to promote his content would cause him to lose $125,000 in revenue over a three-year period but after losing faith in YouTube’s support team, he told the company he would be filing a lawsuit if its conduct persisted.
In response, on December 18, 2018, YouTube reportedly sent a notice saying that they would be terminating Mishiyev’s accounts and removing his content. The very next day, serious copyright problems began.
“On December 15, 2018 through January 15, 2019, Plaintiff was abruptly bombarded with copyright claims like he never had been before the entire time he had been managing and growing his channels,” the complaint notes.
A sample of the copyright notices received
On January 22, 2018, YouTube reportedly blocked access to all of Mishiyev’s videos, replacing them with a notice that they had been removed due “to a copyright claim.” YouTube then placed “strikes” on his account but Mishiyev says that YouTube’s actions were actually in response to his threat of a lawsuit.
“Although YOUTUBE stated they removed his channels and videos for copyright claims, the removals appeared to Plaintiff to be in retaliation for his placing them on notice that he would be filing a lawsuit,” Mishiyev’s lawyers write.
According to the YouTuber, he followed the company’s rules by submitting counter-notices as required by the DMCA, noting that every time he had done that in the past he had prevailed since no one ever filed a lawsuit against him.
Generally, when a counter-notification is filed and there is no lawsuit notification from a complainant, content goes back up. But YouTube apparently wrote back saying that at least some of Mishiyev’s counter-notices were “ineligible.”
The complaint adds that YouTube later retracted its statement that the videos were ineligible for counter-notification and promised to process them. It’s not clear what happened next but it didn’t help Mishiyev’s predicament.
“To date, Plaintiff’s strikes have not been removed, his counter claims have not been processed, and his videos and channels have been permanently removed, though no claimants presented evidence that they filed any lawsuits. Thus, evidencing that YOUTUBE did not simply remove his content because of copyright claims, but instead in retaliation for placing them on notice that he was filing a lawsuit against them,” the complaint asserts.
As a result, the now-former YouTuber says he lost $90,000 in revenue between January 2019 and July 2019, adding that when lost subscribers, views, future views, performance bookings, and lost advertising and sponsorship deals are taken into account, YouTube’s actions have caused him damages of $720,000, for which he demands compensation in full.
Mishiyev is suing YouTube for breach of contract, interference with contractual relations, interference and negligent interference with economic advantage, and negligence. He also demands an injunction preventing YouTube from “banning Plaintiff from the full use of the internet and YOUTUBE’s services.”
The complaint plus supporting documents can be found here 1,2,3,4,5 (pdf)
The 3.8 million-year-old fossil reveals the face of Australopithecus anamensis.
Enlarge/ Yohannes Haile-Salassie poses in the field with the newly discovered skull. (credit: Photograph courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History)
A 3.8 million-year-old fossil skull is giving anthropologists their first look at an early Australopithecine, the hominin genus that eventually led to modern humans. The skull belongs to a member of a species called Australopithecus anamensis, which many anthropologists have considered the ancestor of the fossil hominin Lucy and the rest of her species, Australopithecus afarensis. But the find suggests that, as with most of these things, the story may be more complicated.
Meet A. anamensis
A. anamensis lived in Eastern Africa between 3.8 million and 4.2 million years ago. Like Lucy, they would have walked upright, but with a gait that we would probably pick out as a little odd. They probably would have still had upper arms adapted to the physical strains of climbing, especially as young children. At the moment, however, those are just assumptions—albeit very likely ones—based on what we know about other Australopiths. That's because, until now, anthropologists knew A. anamensis only from its teeth and jaws. In fact, skulls are hard to find at all in the fossil record before 3.5 million years ago.
That doesn’t sound like much to go on, but the sizes and shapes of teeth changed noticeably between hominin species, so they’re very handy for identification. In fact, paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Salassie and his colleagues identified their newly found skull as A. anamensis based on the size and shape of its canines, which had certain anatomical features that stood out from A. afarensis and other close relatives.
As expected, Xiaomi has launched one of the first smartphones with a 64MP smartphone camera. What’s a little unexpected is that this isn’t a feature reserved for a premium phone — Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 8 Pro has a starting price o…
As expected, Xiaomi has launched one of the first smartphones with a 64MP smartphone camera. What’s a little unexpected is that this isn’t a feature reserved for a premium phone — Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 8 Pro has a starting price of about $195. While it’s unlikely that the Chinese device maker will sell the Redmi Note […]
Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is highlighted by a one-day PC devices and accessories sale running over on Amazon today.
As is often the case with Amazon's deals of the day, not everything involved in the sale is particularly special—we can't speak to the quality of all the highlighted monitors and cheap laptops here—but there are a handful of deals worth noting. Some highlights include a $35 discount on the 10TB version of WD's Elements desktop HDD, a new low on the 4TB model of Toshiba's Canvio Basics hard drive (if you don't need quite as much space), and about $20 off SteelSeries' Arctis 3 gaming headset. The Destiny 2 version of our favorite gaming mouse, the Razer DeathAdder Elite, is down to $40, which is about $5-10 off the standard model's going rate. And if you just need some room to store smartphone photos or Switch games, SanDisk's 256GB Ultra is down to $30—just note that it's a few steps slower than most U3- or higher-rated cards on the market.
Beyond that, we also have a 32-inch 1440p LG gaming monitor for $300, a 18W USB-C PD Anker power bank for $30, and God of War for $13, among others. Check the full rundown below.
At least 17 babies and children in Spain began growing hair all over their faces and bodies after they were accidentally given the hair-loss drug, minoxidil, which a Spanish pharmaceutical company had mislabeled as a medication to treat acid reflux.
The error lead the children to develop a form of the rare condition, hypertrichosis, aka “werewolf syndrome,” Spanish authorities reported.
One mother told Spanish news outlet El País how the drug affected her baby boy, who was just six months old when his began growing excess hair: “My son’s forehead, cheeks, arms and legs, hands became covered in hair … He had the eyebrows of an adult. It was very scary because we didn’t know what was happening to him.”
Huawei will ein erstes Seekabel zwischen Südamerika und Asien verlegen. Der Seekabelbereich Huawei Marine wird wohl doch nicht verkauft. (Seekabel, Huawei)
Huawei will ein erstes Seekabel zwischen Südamerika und Asien verlegen. Der Seekabelbereich Huawei Marine wird wohl doch nicht verkauft. (Seekabel, Huawei)
Huawei will ein erstes Seekabel zwischen Südamerika und Asien verlegen. Der Seekabelbereich Huawei Marine wird wohl doch nicht verkauft. (
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