With 379 long, long days to go until the 2020 US presidential election, Facebook is promising to do a better job than it did in 2016 of preventing bad actors, both foreign and domestic, from abusing its platform to potentially affect the outcome.
The company unveiled a slew of "election integrity efforts" today, saying the measures will "help protect the democratic process" by identifying threats, closing vulnerabilities, and reducing "the spread of viral misinformation and fake accounts."
The sheer scope of the problem is admittedly mind-boggling but perhaps unsurprising, given that Facebook's most recent investor report claimed more than 2.4 billion monthly active users on the platform (Instagram also boasts more than 1 billion MAUs). Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with reporters that the company spends "billions" on security annually, totaling more in a given year than Facebook's annual revenue at the time it went public. (For context, Facebook went public in 2012; it posted total revenues of just about $5 billion for that fiscal year. Its total revenue for 2018 was about $55.8 billion.)
Folks have been cramming Raspberry Pi computers into handheld cases to create their own Game Boy clones for years. But the Retroflag GPi case lets you do it without a soldering iron, dremel, or 3D printer. It’s a $70 case that looks like a Game B…
Folks have been cramming Raspberry Pi computers into handheld cases to create their own Game Boy clones for years. But the Retroflag GPi case lets you do it without a soldering iron, dremel, or 3D printer. It’s a $70 case that looks like a Game Boy. And it comes with a cartridge that looks like […]
TBD if this turns out more Lost or Leftovers, but Lindelof has another intriguing world.
The trailer for HBO's new Watchmen series.
In 2019, it might be impossible to convey how groundbreaking the original Watchmen comic series felt and eventually proved to be. Three decades after its release in the mid '80s, unorthodox superhero pop culture has become commonplace. There's superhero fare that asks "...but what if superheroes are bad?" like The Boys. There's superhero fare that applies some version of the complicated anti-hero trope to a caped crusader, like Legion. And thanks to the fervor and discussion over some clown, you may be aware superhero movies can really be about something else or really be a different type of movie dressed in a mask.
Into this muddled landscape comes the latest unorthodox superhero take from HBO: a new version of Watchmen from Damon Lindelof, the critically beloved TV scribe behind two deeply engaging and enigmatic series that ended with vastly different levels of success. (And if you've read about TV on the Internet, there's no need to clarify The Leftovers and Lost any further).
Lindelof has gone to great lengths to make sure viewers know ahead of time that this Watchmen should not be called a reboot, adaptation, or even a reimagination. You've read his five page essayon why he chose this project, right? And this series may not necessarily do anything new in the unusual-superhero story realm, either. But Lindelof has an indisputable track record of being able to build engrossing worlds that ask massive philosophical questions, and last night's Watchmen premiere indicates that viewers have another highly dissectible and discussable journey ahead.
Valve’s Steam game client has a Remote Play feature that lets you stream games from a home PC over the internet to play just about anywhere. Now Valve has added a new Remote Play Together service that builds upon that game streaming technology to…
Valve’s Steam game client has a Remote Play feature that lets you stream games from a home PC over the internet to play just about anywhere. Now Valve has added a new Remote Play Together service that builds upon that game streaming technology to let you play local multiplayer games over an internet connection. Valve says a group […]
Anti-piracy groups BREIN, MPA and ACE have teamed up to take down Moonwalk, a system that allegedly provides back-end services for around 80% of pirate Russian streaming sites. BREIN says that Moonwalk’s database contains 26,000 movies and more than 10,000 TV shows. An announcement from Moonwalk says it will “NEVER be up again.”
Earlier this year, cyber-security company Group-IB shared an interesting report with TorrentFreak.
The company told us that “large monopolists” were supplying huge amounts of content to thousands of websites via dedicated ‘pirate’ Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).
Group-IB provided specific details on a CDN called ‘Moonwalk’ which reportedly began operating in 2013. According to the company, at the time the system carried 33,490 movies and TV shows, paying out $0.60 per 1000 views.
Group-IB complained that since most of Moonwalk’s servers were outside Russia, the Netherlands in particular, enforcement by local rightsholders was proving difficult. Several months later, it now transpires that Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has stepped up in an effort to deal with the problem.
BREIN chief Tim Kuik informs TorrentFreak that on Friday, bailiffs acting on its behalf served ex parte court orders on five hosting providers requiring them to disconnect streaming servers and preserve evidence in relation to Moonwalk.
Three court orders targeted Dutch companies and two “ostensibly foreign companies” whose servers are located in the Netherlands. While the action is being headed up by BREIN, the anti-piracy group is working with both the Motion Picture Association and the global Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.
BREIN describes Moonwalk as a “video load balancer” which provides both the back-end and also huge volumes of pirated content to around 80% of known Russian streaming sites.
“The top 50 of these websites entertain 395 million visits from 89.9 million unique visitors per month causing hundreds of millions of euros/dollars in losses,” BREIN says.
BREIN’s estimates of the amount of content being provided by Moonwalk exceed the figures provided by Group-IB earlier this year. Overall, the Dutch anti-piracy outfit says that the system was recently providing more than 26,000 movies and 10,000 TV shows. That’s around 2,500 additional pieces of video entertainment which suggests growth over recent months.
The ex parte court orders were obtained by BREIN following a joint investigation with ACE, which counts almost three dozen of the world’s leading content and broadcasting companies as members. It’s clear the orders were intended to cause the shutdown of Moonwalk while providing evidence on its operations and presumably, its operators.
“The fight against piracy is global and we are going after operators of these services and their hosting infrastructure as well as other intermediaries supporting these illegal services”, says BREIN chief Tim Kuik.
Jan Van Voorn, Executive Vice President and Chief of Global Content Protection at the Motion Picture Association, stressed that cooperating internationally is crucial to dealing with today’s piracy issues.
“Effectively fighting piracy today requires strong partnerships at global and local level,” he says.
“This action coordinated between BREIN, ACE and the MPA is a significant win and another step towards preserving a healthy and vibrant ecosystem in which the creative community can produce, distribute and protect their content so that audiences can enjoy them.”
What happens next in the investigation isn’t clear but a website associated with Moonwalk currently states that due to this action, the service is not only down, but down for good.
Amazon is running a sale on select Fire and Kindle devices, which means you can pick up a tablet for as little as $40 or an eReader for as little as $65. Not cheap enough? Amazon-owned Woot is also selling some older, refurbished models for even deeper…
Amazon is running a sale on select Fire and Kindle devices, which means you can pick up a tablet for as little as $40 or an eReader for as little as $65. Not cheap enough? Amazon-owned Woot is also selling some older, refurbished models for even deeper disocunts — you can snag a Fire HD […]
Die deutsche Industrie will keine Vertrauenswürdigkeitserklärung von den 5G-Ausrüstern einholen müssen. Diese Erklärungen seien wirkungslos, gefragt sei dagegen Cyber-Resilienz. (5G, Handy)
Die deutsche Industrie will keine Vertrauenswürdigkeitserklärung von den 5G-Ausrüstern einholen müssen. Diese Erklärungen seien wirkungslos, gefragt sei dagegen Cyber-Resilienz. (5G, Handy)
Verizon 5G can’t cover all the seating areas in any NBA or NFL facility.
Enlarge/ A Verizon booth at Mobile World Congress Americas in Los Angeles in September 2018. (credit: Verizon)
Verizon on Friday announced that its 5G network is now available in three NBA arenas and is coming to seven more by the end of the 2019-2020 basketball season.
Verizon's 5G-in-arenas announcement on Friday did not mention this significant limit. But when contacted by Ars, Verizon said the 5G network doesn't cover the whole arena for any of these NBA facilities. "Just certain seating areas" in the NBA arenas have access to 5G, a Verizon spokesperson told us.
When the Pixel 4 ships this week, it will be releasing to consumers with a face-unlock security issue that will apparently stick around for some time. Unlike the iPhone's FaceID (and Google's earlier face-unlock system on Android 4.1), the Pixel 4's face unlock doesn't look for the user's eyes, so the phone could be pointed at a sleeping or unconscious owner and unlocked without their consent. This weekend, Google said in a statement that a fix "will be delivered in a software update in the coming months."
The Pixel 4 was announced last week, and instead of including a fingerprint reader like most Android phones do, the Pixel 4 features Google's newly developed face-unlock system as the only biometric option. Google is clearly chasing the iPhone here, and the Pixel 4's face unlock works just like Apple's Face ID system: an IR dot projector blasts a grid of invisible dots onto the user's face, and a camera (a pair of cameras, in the case of the Pixel 4) reads the user's face in 3D.
As part of the many pre-release Pixel 4 leaks, screenshots of pre-release builds of the Pixel 4's software showed an option to "require eyes to be open." So we know Google hasn't been completely blindsided by this problem; the fix just wasn't ready in time for launch. Here's Google's full statement on the issue:
Gemeinsam im kleinen oder großen Kreis einen Spiefilm oder eine TV-Serie per Streaming anschauen: Das können Influencer künftig auf Twitch – vorerst allerdings nur in den USA. (Twitch, Amazon)
Gemeinsam im kleinen oder großen Kreis einen Spiefilm oder eine TV-Serie per Streaming anschauen: Das können Influencer künftig auf Twitch - vorerst allerdings nur in den USA. (Twitch, Amazon)
Die deutsche Industrie will keine Vertrauenswürdigkeitserklärung von den 5G-Ausrüstern einholen müssen. Diese Erklärungen seien wirkungslos, gefragt sei dagegen Cyber-Resilienz. (
Gemeinsam im kleinen oder großen Kreis einen Spiefilm oder eine TV-Serie per Streaming anschauen: Das können Influencer künftig auf Twitch - vorerst allerdings nur in den USA. (
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