Month: January 2020

Enlarge / The Sonos Connect:Amp in what is soon to be its natural setting: a room filled with old stuff that may or may not work. (credit: Sonos)

Update: Sonos CEO Patrick Spence published an open letter to Sonos customers Wednesday, apologizing for the way his company handled the announcement. Spence pledged to keep legacy products "updated with bug fixes and security patches for as long as possible," although they still will not receive new software updates, and Spence reiterated the company's commitment to creating a workaround to separate legacy products onto a secondary network and allow users to use legacy products and "modern" Sonos equipment in the same home.

"Thank you for taking the time to give us your feedback. I hope that you’ll forgive our misstep and let us earn back your trust," Spence added.

Original post:

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Enlarge / Plaster casts of victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. (credit: Flory/iStock/Getty Images)

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the heat was so extreme in some places that it vaporized body fluids and exploded the skulls of several inhabitants unable to flee in time. Now, archaeologists have determined that the heat also fused brain tissue into glass in one victim. The discovery is described in a new short paper in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The eruption released thermal energy roughly equivalent to 100,000 times the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, spewing molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in particular. Pliny the Younger wrote of "broad sheets of flame" and a rain of ash in a letter to the historian Tacitus (the letter is the sole surviving eyewitness account of the disaster). 

The vast majority of the victims died of asphyxiation, choking to death on the thick clouds of noxious gas and ash. But a 2001 study in Nature estimated a temperature of 300° Celsius (572° Fahrenheit) for the pyroclastic surge that destroyed Pompeii, sufficient to kill inhabitants in fractions of a second. Back in 2018, we reported on the conclusion of University of Naples archaeologist Pierpaolo Petrone (one of the co-authors of the 2001 Nature paper) that inhabitants of Herculaneum may have suffered a similar fate.

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A few months after launching the first in a series of Digital Wellbeing Experiments designed to help smartphone addicts use their phones less, Google is back with a few new unusual ideas. The most unusual of the bunch? Envelope. It’s an app that lets you wrap your phone in a paper envelope so that you […]

The post Google’s Envelope makes your smartphone dumber with a piece of paper (Digital Wellbeing Experiments) appeared first on Liliputing.

After a slight delay, Motorola’s first smartphone with a foldable OLED display is almost here. The company says the Motorola Razr goes up for pre-order at Motorola, Walmart, and Verizon starting January 26th, and it will be available in stores February 6th. As expected, the smartphone will be expensive — it sells for $1,500 (or about […]

The post Motorola Razr foldable phone will be available Feb 6 (pre-orders open Jan 26) appeared first on Liliputing.

Enlarge / Valve released this promotional illustration for Half-Life: Alyx on Tuesday, thus revealing a bit more about the game's "Multi-tool" system we've mentioned in previous reports on the VR-exclusive game. (credit: Valve)

With approximately two months left to go until their next game's launch, the developers at Valve opened up to the throngs at Reddit for a thousands-strong "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) session on Wednesday. Unsurprisingly, most of the questions were ignored—especially ones that mentioned the number "three"—but the team still revealed some new and interesting tidbits about March's upcoming VR-exclusive game Half-Life: Alyx.

Perhaps most importantly, the development team insists the game is still on schedule to launch in its announced window of March 2020. "With the exception of some tweaks to the absolute final scene, the game is done," an unnamed staff member says in one post. "We let the Valve Time happen before we announced the game." This statement alludes to the company's tradition of letting release schedules slip until a game reaches "it's done" territory, but that wasn't clarified in further answers.

That means the game's full suite of movement options within VR are complete, Valve says, "including things like Seated, Left-Handed mode, etc." The new game's suite of "accessibility" features are still being iterated on, particularly support for one-handed play.

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Alongside the mass uptake of digital readers such as Kindles, phones and tablets, plus a relatively small filesize, downloading of eBook and magazine content has gained in popularity over recent years.

There are plenty of sites catering to this popular niche but in common with platforms specializing in other areas, a handful of dedicated sites have found their way onto the preferred lists of many pirates.

One of those is eBookee, a download platform that doesn’t appear to carry content itself but indexes content hosted on other sites, notably file-hosting services. Indeed, a cursory review of eBookee’s traffic referral stats reveals that large volumes of users are directed to platforms such as Rapidgator and Nitroflare, for example.

During the past 24 hours, however, visitors to eBookee.org (the site’s main domain) were greeted not by links to eBooks or magazines (and less frequently videos and audio), but by a blank page. While temporary site downtime is nothing new in this space, it appears that eBookee has experienced a more significant problem relating to its main domain.

In common with The Pirate Bay’s main domain, eBookee’s .org domain is ultimately overseen by the Public Interest Registry with day-to-day business controlled by India-based Public Domain Registry. As the image below shows, the latter has suspended the domain.

While it seems likely that a significant action caused the suspension, the specific issue (such as a complaint from a third-party, for example) hasn’t been revealed in public. PDR did not immediately respond to TF’s request for comment but it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if the issue was copyright related.

Companies including Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Cambridge University Press, Amazon, and National Geographic have all filed copyright infringement complaints against the platform with Google during the first few weeks of this year.

Overall, Google’s Transparency Report reveals that over the past several years, it has processed requests from rightsholders and anti-piracy groups to have 858,782 eBookee.org URLs deleted from its search results. Just 52% resulted in content being taken down, with the remainder either not in Google’s indexes or duplicate requests.

The eBookee.org domain was first registered way back in 2007 but it hasn’t been a trouble-free ride. In 2015, publishers obtained an injunction from the High Court in England to have the site’s domain blocked by local ISPs. That resulted in many proxy sites springing up to service the platform, none of which appear to be working today.

Finally, several social media pages claiming to be connected to or operated by eBookee.org are suggesting a new domain for the site. Checks carried out by TF suggest that the site is probably not connected with the official platform.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Alongside the mass uptake of digital readers such as Kindles, phones and tablets, plus a relatively small filesize, downloading of eBook and magazine content has gained in popularity over recent years.

There are plenty of sites catering to this popular niche but in common with platforms specializing in other areas, a handful of dedicated sites have found their way onto the preferred lists of many pirates.

One of those is eBookee, a download platform that doesn’t appear to carry content itself but indexes content hosted on other sites, notably file-hosting services. Indeed, a cursory review of eBookee’s traffic referral stats reveals that large volumes of users are directed to platforms such as Rapidgator and Nitroflare, for example.

During the past 24 hours, however, visitors to eBookee.org (the site’s main domain) were greeted not by links to eBooks or magazines (and less frequently videos and audio), but by a blank page. While temporary site downtime is nothing new in this space, it appears that eBookee has experienced a more significant problem relating to its main domain.

In common with The Pirate Bay’s main domain, eBookee’s .org domain is ultimately overseen by the Public Interest Registry with day-to-day business controlled by India-based Public Domain Registry. As the image below shows, the latter has suspended the domain.

While it seems likely that a significant action caused the suspension, the specific issue (such as a complaint from a third-party, for example) hasn’t been revealed in public. PDR did not immediately respond to TF’s request for comment but it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if the issue was copyright related.

Companies including Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Cambridge University Press, Amazon, and National Geographic have all filed copyright infringement complaints against the platform with Google during the first few weeks of this year.

Overall, Google’s Transparency Report reveals that over the past several years, it has processed requests from rightsholders and anti-piracy groups to have 858,782 eBookee.org URLs deleted from its search results. Just 52% resulted in content being taken down, with the remainder either not in Google’s indexes or duplicate requests.

The eBookee.org domain was first registered way back in 2007 but it hasn’t been a trouble-free ride. In 2015, publishers obtained an injunction from the High Court in England to have the site’s domain blocked by local ISPs. That resulted in many proxy sites springing up to service the platform, none of which appear to be working today.

Finally, several social media pages claiming to be connected to or operated by eBookee.org are suggesting a new domain for the site. Checks carried out by TF suggest that the site is probably not connected with the official platform.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Enlarge / Sarcos Robotics' Guardian XO is the closest thing we've seen in real life to the Power Loader Lieutenant Ripley used to such good effect in 1986's Aliens. (credit: 20th Century Fox)

The most interesting thing we saw at the Consumer Electronics Show this year was the back side of Delta Airlines' exhibit, where some Sarcos Robotics folks were putting the Guardian XO—a powered industrial exoskeleton—through its paces, and the adventurous (and patient) could wait for half an hour or so in line to operate one disembodied arm of the Guardian attached to a 50-pound suitcase.

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  We took this photo of an operator demonstrating movement and work in the Guardian XO at the Delta exhibit at CES. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Unfortunately, neither Sarcos nor Delta was about to let any journalists inside an actual Guardian XO. They had good reason, though—which became abundantly clear after we took a test run with a disembodied, statically mounted Guardian XO right arm. The suits aren't just designed to be incredibly strong—they're also designed for long-term, ergonomically correct operation that won't destroy backs and knees the way a career in the military or heavy industry tends to. That's great if you're a trained professional trying not to injure yourself—not so great if you're a random enthusiast suddenly given 20:1 muscular amplification in a densely packed crowd of thousands.

That term—20:1 muscular amplification—is a little misleading. The Guardian XO isn't really 20 times as strong as a construction worker. The promotional materials we've seen rate the exosuit for weights that aren't out of the question for a very strong human—200lbs total, 100lbs per arm, 50lbs per arm at full extension—but inside the Guardian XO, you're handling those weights while working no harder than you might in a light office environment.

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Enlarge / False-colored image of an electron micrograph of a T cell. (credit: NIAID)

While cancerous cells look a lot like normal human cells, they're still different enough that the immune system regularly attacks them. Obviously, this attack sometimes bogs down, allowing cancer to thrive and spread. Figuring out how to get the immune system back on track has been a major focus of research, and success in the area has been honored with a Nobel Prize.

Despite these successes, many patients aren't helped by the newer immune-focused therapies, raising questions of what else we still need to figure out to help cancer patients. A new paper highlights something we may have missed: a class of immune cells that appears to be primed specifically to attack cancer. But the finding raises questions about what it is on cancer cells that the immune cells are recognizing and why they fail to keep cancer in check.

Finding cancer killers

The start of this work was pretty simple: a large international team of researchers grew a mix of immune cells called "T cells" in the presence of cancerous cells and looked for cells that grew rapidly. This rapid growth is typically a sign that the immune cells have been activated by something they recognize—in this case, the cancer. They identified one particular lineage of T cells that grew well and named it MC.7.G5, confirming yet again that most scientists don't belong in the creative industries.

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Microsoft has two high-profile dual-screen devices scheduled to launch later this year — the Microsoft Surface Neo will be one of the first dual-screen computers to ship with Windows 10X, and the Surface Duo is a dual-screen Android smartphone. But neither will be very useful if developers don’t start creating apps and experiences tailored to dual-screen […]

The post Microsoft introduces dual-screen SDKs for Android, Windows 10X, and the web appeared first on Liliputing.