Theory of mind is the recognition that others have mental states, just as you do. It is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to acknowledge that their mental state—their beliefs, their perspectives, how their experiences have shaped them—differs from your own. And therefore that, when people act a certain way, they are responding not to an objective reality but to their own particular perceptions of that reality, which are likely not the same as yours.
False-belief understanding lies at the crux of this concept. It involves understanding when another person has a mistaken belief, and a prerequisite for that understanding is figuring out what the other person believes. And now there's some evidence that we're not the only species with it.
Theory of mind
Humans possess this theory of mind, along with its all-important false-belief understanding. But it is still an open question whether humans alone possess it. Our closest relatives, the great apes—bonobos, chimpanzees, and orangutans—have exhibited theory of mind in some experiments.
Including deals on Sony and Bose headphones, microSD cards, laptops, and more.
Enlarge/ The Sony WH-1000XM3 are $70 off as part of an early Black Friday deal. (credit: Jeff Dunn)
Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is checking in for a special weekend edition of our deals roundup, since several early Black Friday deals on tech gadgets and gear are currently available at retailers such as Best Buy and Amazon. The former says most of its sales will end on November 10—and you might need a "My Best Buy" account (which is free) for some of them—but that these prices match what we'll see on Black Friday proper. Either way, we've rounded up the highlights below.
Some of the standout deals here include new lows for a pair of excellent noise-cancelling headphones, Sony's WH-1000XM3 and Bose's QuietComfort 35 II, both of which normally cost $350 but are normally available for less than $280. We prefer Sony's pair out of the two, but both are just about class-leading when it comes to over-ear ANC headphones. Several Bose audio products are deeply discounted beyond that, including all-time low prices on its SoundLink Revolve Bluetooth speaker and SoundSport Wireless exercise earphones.
The atmosphere of Diablo 2 meets the tight action of Diablo 3.
Even in its early build, Diablo 4 looks to be an atmospheric stunner. This gallery is full of game imagery. [credit:
Blizzard ]
ANAHEIM, Calif.—This year's BlizzCon was a big one in many ways, but among them was the presence of playable demos for Diablo 4, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, and Overwatch 2. I attended the show this year and played all three.
While there was some tension in the media coverage and social conversation around this BlizzCon after the company's decision to temporarily suspend a pro Hearthstone player for making a political statement during an official stream, it was not the dominant mood on the ground. From the keynote through the community events, it was clear most people were a lot more concerned about the games than anything else.
And there were a lot of games. I've been to many a BlizzCon, but this was by far the most eventful in terms of announcements. There was the long-awaited Diablo 4, a new World of Warcraft expansion called Shadowlands, a sequel-of-sorts to Overwatch, and a new Hearthstone mode that marks Blizzard's entry into the popular auto-battler genre.
“I used footage of the past to create a future that reflects our present day society.”
What's going on with this guy? His narrated memories aren't exactly helping in Night Has Come. [credit:
Peter Van Goethem / Fantastic Fest ]
AUSTIN, Texas—Even for fans of experimental cinema, Night Has Come—a 56-minute black-and-white pandemic film made entirely of officially archived Belgian footage—may feel quite experimental. This is not a straightforward virus narrative along the lines of 28 Days Later.
But around 2014, Peter Van Goethem found himself in a very relatable position: the PhD student at the Free University of Brussels had been working on a big doctoral project for two years, yet now he felt stuck. Van Goethem’s original proposal centered on documenting Brussels’ evolution over the years—its modernization, its rise on the International scene, its sociopolitcal changes throughout the great wars—and he had done a lot of research. Working with the Royal Belgian Film Archive Cinematek, Van Goethem perused no fewer than 1,268 films to assess various archival content spanning avantgarde experiments, journalistic productions, educational films, propaganda, prior documentaries, and more.
But something just didn’t work. And Van Goethem couldn’t shake one particular thought, something he repeatedly lingered on while poring through the archives.
From 1971’s Yip-Yips to modern pop-culture nods to GoT, Stranger Things.
Enlarge/ Counting through 50 years of Sesame Street. (credit: Sesame Workshop / Aurich Lawson)
Happy 50th birthday, Sesame Street. One of the most beloved American television series has changed a lot since premiering on November 9, 1969, but in fantastic news, one thing hasn't: its core mission of teaching children and instilling in them a love of learning.
Even today, Sesame Street remains the leader in this department. In a modern world of Paw Patrol and Calliou, TV series aimed at the toddler-and-preschool set can feel less educational and more like reasons for parents to light their hair on fire. Shows like Doc McStuffins and Wallykazam! bring targeted lessons, but not to nearly as diverse an age group, and their singular focuses mean one is either focusing on literacy or science, not both.
There was nothing on television like Sesame Street when it premiered 50 years ago, and the truth is, there’s still nothing quite like it now. (That's a big reason why it was such a valuable acquisition for HBO in 2015.) Throughout the years, the show has always been on the front lines of what’s important to teach children. And as some of the show's greatest hits demonstrate, long before educational advocates began popularizing the STEM acronym (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), Sesame Street was already there with silly characters promoting serious lessons.
Der Norden setzt auf Wasserstoff: Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen und Schleswig-Holstein haben eine gemeinsame Strategie beschlossen, um die Energiewende voranzutreiben. Dazu gehört auch, dass künftig Häfen nur noch von sauberen …
Der Norden setzt auf Wasserstoff: Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen und Schleswig-Holstein haben eine gemeinsame Strategie beschlossen, um die Energiewende voranzutreiben. Dazu gehört auch, dass künftig Häfen nur noch von sauberen Schiffen angelaufen werden dürfen. (Energiewende, Brennstoffzelle)
The homepages of five major YouTube-ripping platforms have been delisted from Google search in response to relatively rare notices citing the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. The complaints, which are reported by Google as being sent by the RIAA, target FLVTO, 2Conv, Y2Mate, and Yout.
While music piracy has reduced in recent years due to the popularity of platforms such as Spotify, the major labels remain highly concerned over so-called steam-ripping services.
These sites allow users to enter a YouTube URL, for example, and then download audio from the corresponding video, mostly in MP3 format. This means that users can download music and store it on their own machines, negating the need to revisit YouTube for the same content. This, the major labels say, deprives content creators of streaming revenue.
Tackling this issue has become one of the industry’s highest anti-piracy priorities. Previously, YouTube-MP3 – the largest ripping site at the time – was shut down following legal action by the major labels. Since then, lawsuits have been filed against other platforms but the battle is far from over and recently a new strategy appears to have been deployed.
A pair of DMCA notices appeared on the Lumen Database late October, having been filed there by Google. The sender of both notices is listed as the RIAA, acting on behalf of its members including Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group.
They are worded slightly differently but each target the homepages of five major YouTube-ripping sites – 2conv.com, flvto.biz, y2mate.com, yout.com, and youtubeconverter.io. Both contain the following key claim:
“To our knowledge, the URLs provide access to a service (and/or software) that circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher, a technical protection measure, that protects our members’ works on YouTube from unauthorized copying/downloading,” the notices read.
Unlike regular DMCA takedown notices filed with Google, these notices do not appear in Google’s Transparency report. However, Google has acted on them by delisting the homepages of all five platforms from its search results. Other URLs for the platforms still appear, but their homepages are all gone.
The notices are listed on the Lumen Database in the anti-circumvention section, meaning that the RIAA-labeled complaints demand action from Google under the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, rather than demanding the takedown of URLs based on the claim they carry infringing music titles.
The ‘technical measures’ allegedly being circumvented (such as the “rolling cypher” referenced in the complaints) are those put in place by YouTube, which in turn protect the copyrighted content of the labels.
TorrentFreak contacted the RIAA yesterday, requesting comment and seeking additional information on the basis for the notices. Unfortunately, the industry group declined to make any further comment on any aspect of the complaints.
Nevertheless, the RIAA and its members are no strangers to the claim that by circumventing YouTube’s ‘technological measures’, so-called ‘ripping’ sites infringe their rights too. Two of the sites targeted in the recent notices – 2conv.com and flvto.biz – were sued by the labels in 2018. The original complaint contains the following text:
From the complaint
That circumvention (at least in respect of the labels’ works when users select them for download) may also amount to an infringement of the labels’ rights seems to be supported by comments made in the Disney vs VidAngel case.
An opinion from the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stated that “[n]o person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [copyrighted] work. Circumvention means ‘to decrypt an encrypted work.. without the authority of the copyright owner’.”
Nevertheless, it was previously argued by the EFF that stream-ripping sites are not by definition illegal since on top of the usual fair use exemptions, some creators who upload their content to online platforms grant permission for people to freely download and modify their work.
“There exists a vast and growing volume of online video that is licensed for free downloading and modification, or contains audio tracks that are not subject to copyright,” the EFF stresses.
“Moreover, many audio extractions qualify as non-infringing fair uses under copyright. Providing a service that is capable of extracting audio tracks for these lawful purposes is itself lawful, even if some users infringe.”
The anti-circumvention notices detailed above are not only relatively rare but also have an additional interesting property – they are harder to dispute than regular DMCA takedown notices.
As detailed here last year, Google told the target of a similar complaint requesting URL delisting that “There is no formal counter notification process available under US law for circumvention, so we have not reinstated these URLs.”
The pair of DMCA anti-circumvention notices can be found here 1,2 (pdf)
Android has a bit of a malware problem. The open ecosystem's flexibility also makes it relatively easy for tainted apps to circulate on third-party app stores or malicious websites. Worse still, malware-ridden apps sneak into the official Play Store with disappointing frequency. After grappling with the issue for a decade, Google is calling in some reinforcements.
This week, Google announced a partnership with three antivirus firms—ESET, Lookout, and Zimperium—to create an App Defense Alliance. All three companies have done extensive Android malware research over the years, and have existing relationships with Google to report problems they find. But now they'll use their scanning and threat detection tools to evaluate new Google Play submissions before the apps go live—with the goal of catching more malware before it hits the Play Store in the first place.
"On the malware side we haven’t really had a way to scale as much as we’ve wanted to scale," says Dave Kleidermacher, Google's vice president of Android security and privacy. "What the App Defense Alliance enables us to do is take the open ecosystem approach to the next level. We can share information not just ad hoc, but really integrate engines together at a digital level, so that we can have real-time response, expand the review of these apps, and apply that to making users more protected."
Das britische Bloodhound Project testet derzeit in Südafrika sein Auto Bloodhound LSR, mit dem 2020 oder 2021 ein neuer Landgeschwindigkeitsrekord aufgestellt werden soll. (Auto, Technologie)
Das britische Bloodhound Project testet derzeit in Südafrika sein Auto Bloodhound LSR, mit dem 2020 oder 2021 ein neuer Landgeschwindigkeitsrekord aufgestellt werden soll. (Auto, Technologie)
For years, Pratt has been recruiting young women to San Diego to shoot pornographic videos. Dozens of women say that Pratt and his colleagues lied to them and used physical coercion to induce them to participate—claims that led to federal sex trafficking charges last month.
Now prosecutors say that Pratt flew a 16-year-old girl to Southern California to have sex on camera. That would be a violation of federal laws against production of child pornography as well as sex trafficking of minors.
Der Norden setzt auf Wasserstoff: Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen und Schleswig-Holstein haben eine gemeinsame Strategie beschlossen, um die Energiewende voranzutreiben. Dazu gehört auch, dass künftig Häfen nur noch von sauberen Schiffen angelaufen werden dürfen. (
Das britische Bloodhound Project testet derzeit in Südafrika sein Auto Bloodhound LSR, mit dem 2020 oder 2021 ein neuer Landgeschwindigkeitsrekord aufgestellt werden soll. (
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