Federal prosecutors have charged three men and a woman with sex trafficking charges for operating the popular porn site GirlsDoPorn. At least 22 women featured on the site have sued the site's owners, charging that the pornographers used lies and coercion to gain their participation.
The 22 women said they responded to ads for clothed modeling gigs. When they were asked to shoot porn instead, they initially resisted. But they went along with it after the company assured them that their videos would only be sold on DVD to customers outside the United States and would not be posted online. That turned out to be a lie, as their videos wound up on GirlsDoPorn, a website with plenty of American viewers.
"I was in a state of panic when I first found out," one of the alleged victims testified in court. "I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it."
Attackers exploited a zeroday vulnerability in Apple's iTunes and iCloud programs to infect Windows computers with ransomware without triggering antivirus protections, researchers from Morphisec reported on Thursday. Apple patched the vulnerability earlier this week.
The vulnerability resided in the Bonjour component that both iTunes and iCloud for Windows relies on, according to a blog post. The bug is known as an unquoted service path, which as its name suggests, happens when a developer forgets to surround a file path with quotation marks. When the bug is in a trusted program—such as one digitally signed by a well-known developer like Apple—attackers can exploit the flaw to make the program execute code that AV protection might otherwise flag as suspicious.
Morphisec CTO Michael Gorelik explained it this way:
A flight during the first quarter of 2020 is the best-case scenario.
Enlarge/ SpaceX CEO and Chief Designer Elon Musk, left, NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Doug Hurley, Bob Behnken, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, and NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins are seen inside the Dragon crew access arm at Launch Complex 39A in March. (credit: NASA)
Back in 2016, during the heat of the presidential election, I had lunch in southern Louisiana with a senior manager of NASA's Space Launch System program. We were speaking off the record, so I won't share his name even now. But one of the important points he sought to make was how a number of big-ticket items in NASA's portfolio were set up for the next president.
During a first term for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, he said, there would be a lot of big "wins." For the first time since 2011, humans would launch into space from the United States via NASA's commercial crew program. The James Webb Space Telescope, an epic scientific instrument, would fly. And the Space Launch System rocket—the largest booster since the Saturn V—would take to the skies for the first time.
A little more than three years later, it is clear that only one of these three achievements has a chance of happening in the year 2020: a commercial crew flight. It will happen on SpaceX's Crew Dragon, Boeing's Starliner, or perhaps both. So what may have appeared as a wealth of big spaceflight moments for the Trump administration has withered to one.
With its second-generation fuel cell, Toyota could be turning a tech corner.
Enlarge/ Toyota wouldn't let us take photos of the Mirai, but it shared these images. (credit: Toyota)
When Toyota announced the original Mirai hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle in 2015—"Mirai" meaning "future" in Japanese—the company was already 18 years into its grand hybrid gambit, which had paid infinite dividends. The Prius and all the subsequent hybrids from Toyota did more to further the collective awareness of alternative-propulsion drivetrains than anything that had come before. This includes pure electric vehicles to that point in 2015, other hybrids, compressed natural gas experiments, and certainly far more than fuel cell technology. But that progress isn't stopping Toyota from driving further down the fuel cell path. The car maker just revealed the 2021 hydrogen fuel cell EV Mirai, which goes into production in late 2020. And we've got a sneak peek.
The total EV picture
But first, some background. Prius quickly became synonymous with hybrid electrics at a time when gasoline per gallon in the United States (as a national average) went from a low of $1 in 1998 to $2 in late 2004 before hitting about $3.25 in mid-2008 and peaking at about $3.60 in 2012. And sales of the Prius certainly weren't hurt when Hollywood fully embraced it. By 2018, 40% of all Toyotas sold in the US were hybrids. However, as of September 2019, only 2.4% of the total US market across brands are hybrids.
Meanwhile, less than 1% of the US market consists of battery EVs. Even though there is growth and visibility largely due to Tesla, BEVs face an uphill climb for several reasons.
As FCC requires more accurate broadband maps, carriers want 5G to be left out.
Enlarge/ Screenshot from an AT&T commercial. (credit: AT&T)
AT&T and other mobile carriers are trying to hide detailed 5G maps from the public despite constantly touting the supposed pace and breadth of their 5G rollouts.
With the Federal Communications Commission planning to require carriers to submit more accurate data about broadband deployment, AT&T and the mobile industry's top lobby group are urging the FCC to exclude 5G from the upgraded data collection.
"There is broad agreement that it is not yet time to require reporting on 5G coverage," AT&T told the FCC in a filing this week.
The Canon IVY REC is basically a smartphone camera without a smartphone. The company, best known for making printers, crammed a small camera module into a stick the size of a USB flash drive and started taking pre-orders this summer through an Indiegog…
The Canon IVY REC is basically a smartphone camera without a smartphone. The company, best known for making printers, crammed a small camera module into a stick the size of a USB flash drive and started taking pre-orders this summer through an Indiegogo campaign. Now Canon has announced that the IVY REC will go on […]
The OnePlus 7T Pro brings a Snapdragon 855+, higher base specs, and limited availability.
The OnePlus 7T Pro. It looks just like the older OnePlus 7 Pro. [credit:
OnePlus
]
Fresh off the announcement of the OnePlus 7T last month, OnePlus is announcing a mid-cycle upgrade for its slightly higher-end smartphone, the OnePlus 7 Pro, and it's launching the OnePlus 7T Pro. For both this mid-cycle "T" release and the original release that happened six months ago, the story is the same: the 7 and 7T have a camera notch and a flat display, while the 7 Pro and 7T Pro have a motorized pop-up camera and a display that curves along the edges.
OnePlus has been playing strange games with its device availability these past two generations. The company's January launch saw the camera-notch OnePlus 7 come to Europe and the pop-up camera OnePlus 7 Pro come to the US, and for this release, OnePlus isn't bringing the OnePlus 7T Pro to the US.
What’s new
So what's actually new? Like the OnePlus 7 to OnePlus 7T transition: not much. The primary motivator for this release seems to be an upgrade from Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 to the slightly faster Snapdragon 855+. The 855+ is the same chip as before, just clocked a bit higher. The CPU is moved from 2.84GHz to 2.96GHz, and the GPU gets a more significant bump from 585MHz to about 673MHz. Overall, expect a 4% faster CPU and a 15% faster GPU.
The Amazon Kindle Voyage is 5 years old and discontinued… but it’s also still a pretty great eReader. It has a 6 inch, 300 ppi touchscreen display covered by edge-to-edge glass and illuminated by 6 LED lights as well as physical page turn b…
The Amazon Kindle Voyage is 5 years old and discontinued… but it’s also still a pretty great eReader. It has a 6 inch, 300 ppi touchscreen display covered by edge-to-edge glass and illuminated by 6 LED lights as well as physical page turn buttons on the right and left sides of the eReader. Originally priced […]
Tom Holland and Chris Pratt provide voices for brothers Ian and Barley Lightfoot.
Pixar's new animated film Onward reunites the creative team behind Monsters University.
Two elven brothers embark on a quest to revive magic and bring back their lost father in a new trailer for Onward, the upcoming animated feature from Pixar. It's directed by Dan Scanlon and produced by Kori Rae, the same creative team that gave us 2013's Monsters University. So we're probably in good hands.
The official synopsis for Onward is short and sweet: "Set in a suburban fantasy world, Disney and Pixar’s Onward introduces two teenage elf brothers who embark on an extraordinary quest to discover if there is still a little magic left out there." That world includes elves, trolls, mermaids, centaurs, fauns, gnomes, and plenty of other mystical creatures, all of whom have long since forsaken their magical roots, lured by the shiny new hotness of technology.
The first teaser dropped in May during the NBA Finals. It features charming suburban scenes depicting all the once-magical creatures going about their daily lives, much like suburban humans. (My favorites included gnome gardeners and a mermaid sipping a drink in her inflatable backyard pool.) And we meet the Lightfoot brothers, Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt), as they embark on what Barley considers to be a glorious quest. Ian insists it's just "a really strange errand."
Epic Games is not giving up on its copyright infringement lawsuit against “Sky Orbit,” a YouTuber who the company accuses of persistently cheating in Fortnite. The court previously denied a default judgment, as the teenager was not represented by an adult. Epic Games now requests to have his mother assigned as guardian, as she reportedly “knows it all”.
Two years ago, Epic Games decided to take several Fortnite cheaters to court, accusing them of copyright infringement.
Most of these lawsuits have now been settled, but there is one alleged cheater who is proving rather hard to catch.
The person in question, known in Fortnite and on YouTube as “Sky Orbit,” turned out to be a minor when Epic Games filed the complaint. This was made very clear by his mother, who sent a letter to the Court defending her son.
The letter was widely publicized in the press but Epic Games didn’t back off. Due to his young age, the Carolina District Court ordered that the kid should only be referred to by his initials C.R. The case itself continued, however, albeit slowly.
Without any follow-up responses from either the defendant or his mother, Epic Games requested a default judgment. However, the Court denied this a few weeks ago, arguing that the underage defendant was never properly represented by a guardian. The mother’s letter was not sufficient to establish this.
This was a major setback to Epic Games but the company had no plans to drop the case. Especially not when it heard “Sky Orbit” had teamed up with another alleged cheater, CBV, and found other evidence that he wasn’t done cheating yet.
This week Epic asked the Court to officially appoint C.R.’s mother, Lauren Rogers, as a legal guardian, so she can officially represent her son. If that’s not possible, another adult should take this role, the game company argues.
“Defendant has ignored the appropriate orders of this Court. It is now appropriate for his mother or another adult to be appointed to officially represent him so that his interests can be protected and this matter can move forward,” Epic writes.
In an associated memorandum and declaration, the company explains that C.R. allegedly continued cheating over the past several months. Part of the evidence comes from a video titled “Fortnite Streamer Caught Aimbotting LIVE!” uploaded to YouTube by ShelbyRenae.
This video includes a captured video by another player, who’s allegedly cheating. Based on the voice of this person and several comments from people who watched the stream, this is C.R., aka “Sky Orbit.”
“The audio, including cheating player’s voice is available. On information and belief, the voice of the cheating player is Defendant’s,” Epic’s attorney Christopher Thomas writes.
“Although ShelbyRenae does not identify Defendant as the cheating player, at least 15 of the commenters separately identify ‘Sky Orbit’ – the name used by Defendant on his YouTube channel – as the player cheating in the Captured Video.”
From the declaration
The same voice also appears in another high profile video on YouTube. Epic argues that C.R. also appeared in the video where another teenager, CBV, responded to a separate lawsuit that Epic Games filed against him.
“You guys can eat my ass once again!” C.R. allegedly says in the video.
Based on this and other evidence, Epic believes that it’s important for the case to move forward so it can properly protect its rights. As such, the defendant should be represented by a guardian, which can be his mother.
In another video discussing the legal trouble, C.R. said that his mother “knew it all” and didn’t have to pay any lawyer fees, so appointing her as guardian would be appropriate, Epic states.
“Defendant’s statement that he and his mother got a lawyer but didn’t have to spend even ‘a little bit of money’ because his ‘mom knew it all,’ shows Defendant’s faith in Ms. Rogers. His comments also suggest that their decision not to answer in spite of the Court’s order was deliberate.
“His continued cheating, the foregoing and other public statements, and his open taunting of Epic all demonstrate that he thinks he is beyond the reach of this Court and is free to continue his unlawful conduct without consequence. This should not be permitted to continue.”
It’s clear that Epic Games is not letting this one go easily. The Court now has to decide whether it will appoint Sky Orbit’s mother or another adult as the guardian in this case.
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A copy of Epic Games’ Memorandum to appoint Lauren Rogers as general guardian is available here (pdf).
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