Month: May 2020

Enlarge / Microsoft's latest suite of Surface PCs and headphones. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft on Wednesday launched several new devices under its Surface brand of PCs and consumer tech. Headlining the announcements are the Surface Book 3, the company’s latest high-performance two-in-one laptop with a detachable display, and the Surface Go 2, a lower-cost two-in-one tablet that’s designed like a smaller Surface Pro.

Beyond that, Microsoft is branching out with its lineup of audio accessories. The company unveiled the Surface Headphones 2, an updated pair of wireless noise-cancelling headphones, and confirmed a price and release date for the Surface Earbuds, the set of AirPods-esque true wireless earbuds it first unveiled in October.

All the new Surface gadgets are now available to pre-order and will start shipping to customers later this month. Most of the new devices aren’t radical departures from past Surface hardware, but we’ll dig a bit deeper into the new machines below.

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Enlarge / Production-ready in a few lines? Color us interested. (credit: Light Code Labs)

Yesterday, the Caddy Web server reached an important milestone, with its 2.0.0 release. Caddy bills itself as "The Ultimate Server," with no dependencies, automatic TLS certificate obtainment and renewal, and much smaller configuration files than Apache or Nginx.

Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson expressed both curiosity about Caddy and his own personal inertia in the Ars slack:

Caddy is an app where every time i see it or think of it i say “I should mess with it, it looks neat” and then I never do. I’ve gotten so enmeshed in my haproxy - varnish - nginx stack that breaking out feels like more trouble than it’s worth.

I hadn't ever heard of Caddy until Lee mentioned it, but I know a call to action when I hear one.

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In March, popular hip-hop mixtape service Spinrilla filed a lawsuit against the RIAA.

Spinrilla accused the music industry group of sending inaccurate DMCA takedown notices that waste resources and harm the site’s goodwill and reputation.

The mixtape platform said the RIAA was using automated text-based searches instead of actually listening to tracks. As a result, the group allegedly reported non-infringing content. These inaccurate notices put Spinrilla users at risk of having their accounts terminated.

The RIAA swiftly responded to these allegations, assuring the court that it had the best intentions. The example of a ‘faulty’ takedown notice Spinrilla listed in the complaint was a legitimate claim and was sent in good faith, it countered.

On top of that, the music group said that Spinrilla had no case because the alleged DMCA abuse would only be relevant if the site removed the contested music track. That didn’t happen, as Spinrilla refused to take action. As such, the RIAA asked the court to dismiss the case.

This week, the mixtape site urged a federal court in Atlanta to prevent this from happening. It argues that the RIAA’s anti-piracy notices are “overzealous” as they and other service providers are asked “to remove content that is not infringing.”

“Defendant and its members’ dislike of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s takedown notice process is notorious,” Spinrilla adds. “They claim the process is unfair because it forces them into a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. But their dislike of the process doesn’t mean they can ignore or abuse the process.”

According to Spinrilla, the RIAA “brags” about sending tens of millions of takedown notices. However, the mixtape site believes many of these are grounded in error-prone text searches.

In its motion to dismiss, the RIAA argued that this case was about just one audio file. However, Spinrilla clarifies that the complaint applies to all takedown notices sent in 2019 and 2020, which identify numerous allegedly infringing audio files.

The music group’s defense that Spinrilla has no valid claim because it didn’t remove the contested music track is contested as well. According to the mixtape site, this argument relies on a too narrow interpretation of the DMCA.

“Under Defendant’s interpretation it can escape Section 512(f) liability because Spinrilla expends the time and monetary resources to investigate those notices and prudently decides not to remove clearly non-infringing files.”

This narrow interpretation would contradict the intention of lawmakers, who drafted the DMCA to deter false takedown claims as these would harm services providers and Internet users, Spinrilla argues.

“Congress would not have passed a law that could be so easily exploited by organizations such as the RIAA that as part of their ‘mission’ is to send millions of takedown notices to service providers such as Spinrilla,” the mixtape site informs the court.

And even if the narrow interpretation holds up, the case should continue as Spinrilla also requests an injunction to prevent future false takedown notices, it argues.

The matter is now in the hands of the court which will have to decide whether the case will move forward or not. Meanwhile, the separate copyright infringement lawsuit several RIAA labels filed against Spinrilla continues as well.

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A copy of Spinrilla’s opposition brief is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.

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