Month: March 2020

It’s MAR10 Day, so here are some deals on Mario games and gear

Today’s Dealmaster also has discounts on Anker chargers, AirPods Pro, and more.

It’s MAR10 Day, so here are some deals on Mario games and gear

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is all about everyone's favorite mustachioed plumber and princess-saver: Mario. As has been the case for the past few years, Nintendo has declared this March 10 as "Mario Day" to celebrate its most popular mascot. (March 10 = MAR10 = Mario, get it?) For the most part, that celebration involves the company discounting a variety of games and knickknacks featuring the little guy and saying you should buy them. This is a made-up holiday, after all. But if those deals get you some good Switch games for cheap, it's hard to get too upset.

This year's discounts aren't quite as appealing as the offers we saw last year, but the selection is still solid. The main highlights include Super Mario Maker 2 and Super Mario Party down to $40, which in both cases is a $10 discount off the typical street price. These Mario titles are more niche than a traditional adventure game like Super Mario Odyssey, but the former still does well to let you create and explore custom Mario levels, while the latter remains a fun digital board game for parties (it will likely fracture a few friendships, but still).

Beyond that, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, a surprisingly engaging XCOM-style strategy game, is down to $15 at Best Buy, while various retailers have the kid-friendly side-scroller Yoshi's Crafted World—which doesn't feature Mario, oddly— down to $40. Best Buy has a handful of deals on Mario games for the Nintendo 3DS, too, and GameStop has several offers on related plushies and other toys. Additional Mario-themed controllers are also on sale.

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BPI Has Reported Half a Billion ‘Pirate’ Links to Google

UK music industry group BPI has reached a new milestone after the group reported its 500 millionth infringing link to Google. Combined with Bing and Yahoo!, the group is now nearing a billion reported URLs in total. While BPI is glad that search engines are actively helping to address the piracy problem, the battle is far from over.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

Over the past two decades, the music industry has witnessed several shifts in music consumption. First, CDs were traded in for downloads and in recent years streaming has taken over.

Despite the growing availability of legal streaming services in many countries, the piracy problem hasn’t disappeared. In just a few clicks, virtually every music track can be accessed for free through unauthorized sources.

In an attempt to prevent these infringements, the BPI and other music industry groups send millions of takedown notices to Internet services every month. Although all major search engines are targeted, most of these requests are directed at Google.

With roughly a million URLs reported to Google every week, the BPI is the most active music industry sender. When added up the numbers are substantial and have just resulted in the music group hitting a new milestone.

After crossing the mark of 500,000,000 reported links, the BPI has become the second most active reporter after Rivendell. It also means that, of all the URLs reported to Google over the past several years, more than 11% come from the UK group.

While the massive numbers open the door to mistakes, the BPI has a very decent track record. Close to 97% of the links are indeed removed by Google, which rejected less than one percent. The rest are either duplicates or links that aren’t indexed.

For comparison, Google only removed 72% of Rivendell’s reported links while more than a quarter were marked as duplicates or not listed in Google’s search results.

Over the years, the BPI has flagged ‘copyright infringing’ links on more than 30,000 domains. Many of these are no longer operational. The top targeted sites that are still online today are 4shared.com and chomikuj.pl, which were reported 9.2 million and 7.9 million times respectively.

According to BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor, the new milestone shows that piracy remains a massive problem that requires the full attention of all stakeholders involved.

“The fact the BPI has had to delist half a billion infringing music links from Google alone, on behalf of UK artists and labels, highlights the staggering scale of the problem of illegal sites, as well as BPI’s unwavering commitment to fighting for the rights of artists and their record labels,” Taylor says.

In the past, the BPI stressed that companies such as Google should take more responsibility. These continued requests eventually led to a “code of practice” where major search engines committed to do more.

This has led to progress, Taylor says, noting that demotion of known pirate sites “has significantly improved the quality of results presented to consumers.”

“The collaboration with search engines, including Google, sets a good example for online intermediaries and platforms, which must urgently take on greater responsibility to combat illegal content,” Taylor stresses.

This is not limited to search engines but also applies to advertising networks, payment providers, hosting services, domain registries, and registrars.

”For too long we have accepted a reactive approach that places all the burden on creators to search for and police hundreds of millions of infringements of their rights across the entire internet. That approach cannot succeed,” Taylor says.

“Instead we should expect reasonable, proactive, preventative measures by all online businesses, using technology and good business practices, to sweep the black market to the edges of the internet.”

According to the BPI, these changes are achievable. If not voluntarily, then with a little help from lawmakers, to push these companies in the right direction.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

Get your first look at a real Pixel 4a prototype

The renders were right, and for a budget phone, this looks pretty great.

  • The Pixel 4a. It's looking pretty good for a budget phone. [credit: TecnoLike Plus ]

The Pixel 4a probably won't hit the market for at least two months, but a prototype of Google's next budget flagship has already leaked. When we last looked at the Pixel 4a, our access to the images was only due to early renders from OnLeaks (which turned out to be right on the money!). This new batch of leaks contains the first real photos and video of the phone in action. We've got pictures from @techdroider on Twitter and a video from TecnoLike Plus.

As expected, we're getting a mid-range phone with a Samsung-style hole-punch display, a rear fingerprint reader, and a Snapdragon 730. The specs for this prototype device (which could be slightly different from the final version but probably won't be) include 6GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a headphone jack (!), and a 5.81-inch, 60Hz 2340×1080 OLED display. The video lists a 3080mAh battery—that's actually bigger than the one in the more expensive Pixel 4, which went out the door with an anemic 2800mAh battery. One part of the settings lists two SIM cards, but before you jump to the conclusion that the phone has two physical SIM slots, this could also be a new way to list the one physical SIM slot and the eSIM capabilities that have been on the last few Pixels.

The back features a similar design to the Pixel 4, with a square camera block in the top-right corner. It looks like there's only one 12MP camera on the back, though, so it's mostly just for show. We also see a wacky made-up logo on the back instead of the usual Google "G." Google's prototypes always seem to feature a weird logo as an indication that this isn't a final product.

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Some mobile ad-blockers and VPNs siphoning user data, report finds

Sensor Tower, the firm behind the apps, apparently helped itself to the data.

It's not actually quite this stylish when your personal data is unwittingly siphoned from your phone.

Enlarge / It's not actually quite this stylish when your personal data is unwittingly siphoned from your phone. (credit: PM Images | Getty Images)

Generally, if someone is installing a VPN or ad-blocker on their mobile phone, they're doing it to increase their privacy. But several apps distributed by an analytics firm that hid its connection to them have been doing the exact opposite, instead siphoning data from millions of users, a new report finds.

BuzzFeed News reports that the apps come from Sensor Tower, a firm that bills itself as "the leading provider of market intelligence and insights for the global app economy." The company analyzes app use across platforms to, for example, list the top-grossing applications across platforms in a given month. (Spoiler: It's apparently always Tinder.)

Sensor Tower, founded in 2013, has published at least 20 Android and iOS apps of its own in the past five years, such as Luna VPN and Adblock Focus. BuzzFeed found that several of these apps, sometime after installation, prompt users to install a root certificate in order to access features. For example, Luna VPN gives users a prompt to add an extension for blocking ads in YouTube. Following-through takes users to an external website to download and install the certificate, thus doing an end run around Google and Apple restrictions.

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Daily Deals (3-10-2020)

Microsoft is running a sale that makes the entry-level Surface Pro 7 with a 10th-gen Intel Core processor a better deal than the smaller (and usually cheaper) Surface Go with its 7th-gen Pentium Gold chip. Thanks to a new bundle deal, you snag a Surfac…

Microsoft is running a sale that makes the entry-level Surface Pro 7 with a 10th-gen Intel Core processor a better deal than the smaller (and usually cheaper) Surface Go with its 7th-gen Pentium Gold chip. Thanks to a new bundle deal, you snag a Surface Pro 7 and a Type Cover accessory for $599. Normally […]

Abstract art with “pseudo-profound” BS titles seen as more meaningful

A study’s colorful language may mask useful insight into how we create meaning.

A new study out of the University of Waterloo found that giving abstract paintings "pseudo-profound bullshit titles" made subjects rate the art as more profound than paintings with mundane titles, or no titles at all.

Enlarge / A new study out of the University of Waterloo found that giving abstract paintings "pseudo-profound bullshit titles" made subjects rate the art as more profound than paintings with mundane titles, or no titles at all. (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson / M.H. Turpin et al.)

Abstract art often gets an underserved bad rap. Many people famously dismissed Jackson Pollack's signature drip paintings in the 1950s, for instance, as being something that a trained chimpanzee could produce. But there might be a strategy to increasing the likelihood of people rating one's art as being more meaningful. Researchers from the University of Waterloo found that providing so-called "pseudo-profound bullshit" titles primes people to perceive a given work of abstract art as being more profound and helps them infer meaning from the art. They described their work in a paper last fall in the Journal of Judgement and Decision Making, with the provocative title "Bullshit makes the art grow profounder."

That's certainly one way to snag some attention for a study. But it's not without risks, as it opens up the group to sharp criticism, especially from artists who might understandably take umbrage at the use of the term "bullshit" with respect to abstract art. But the Waterloo team also argues that the ability to produce convincing pseudo-profound BS might confer a distinct social advantage, bringing rewards of prestige, status, or material goods, particularly in fields (like abstract art) where there is a fair amount of subjectivity in the evaluation of meaning or value.

It's worth pointing out upfront that the term "bullshit," as used here, is a technical term. Really. This is not BS in the colloquial sense, with all the negative connotations that implies. In the academic literature, "pseudo-profound" BS is not defined by being false but by being fake, with no concern for truth or meaning. "Bullshit may be true, false, or meaningless," the authors wrote. "What makes a claim bullshit is an implied yet artificial attention to truth and meaning."

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