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Beamter in Minnesota schürt Debatte über Missbrauch von technischen Tools zur Kontaktüberwachung Infizierter
Der Präsident muss abgeriegelt werden, aber er gibt weiter den starken Mann
Was dem Selbstschutz dienen soll, endet oft in Selbstmord. Unbewaffnete Schwarze werden fast doppelt so häufig von der Polizei erschossen
Ein vorläufiger Nachruf auf die Fankultur
Western Digital’s SMR disks won’t work for ZFS, but they’re okay for most NASes.
Enlarge / Western Digital's EFAX Red—an SMR disk—squares off against a Seagate Ironwolf in today's testing. (credit: Jim Salter)
Western Digital has been receiving a storm of bad press—and even lawsuits—concerning their attempt to sneak SMR disk technology into their "Red" line of NAS disks. To get a better handle on the situation, Ars purchased a Western Digital 4TB Red EFAX model SMR drive and put it to the test ourselves.
Although Western Digital's 4TB SMR disk performed adequately in Servethehome's light duty tests, it performed miserably when they used it to replace a disk in a degraded four-disk RAIDz1 vdev. (credit: ServeTheHome)
Recently, the well-known tech enthusiast site Servethehome tested one of the SMR-based 4TB Red disks with ZFS and found it sorely lacking. The disk performed adequately—if underwhelmingly—in generic performance tests. But when Servethehome used it to replace a disk in a degraded RAIDz1 vdev, it required more than nine days to complete the operation—when all competing NAS drives performed the same task in around sixteen hours.
This has rightfully raised questions as to what Western Digital was thinking when it tried to use SMR technology in NAS drives at all, let alone trying to sneak it into the market. Had Western Digital even tested the disks at all? But as valuable as Servethehome's ZFS tests were, they ignored the most common use case of this class of drive—consumer and small business NAS devices, such as Synology's DS1819+ or Netgear's ReadyNAS RN628X00. Those all use Linux kernel RAID (mdraid) to manage their arrays.
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Amazon’s Fire tablets offer some decent bang for the buck — they’re inexpensive devices with decent displays and reasonably good performance. But while the tablets run an Android-based operating system called Fire OS, they don’t…
The Authors Guild believes that online services should do more to prevent book piracy. In a testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, the group is particularly critical of Google. It accuses the search engine of hurting authors by facilitating piracy, including the prominent promotion of pirate book stores through its shopping ads.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property is actively looking for options through which the US can better address online piracy.
Earlier this year, it held a hearing to see what could be learned from copyright policies in other countries. This week a new meeting was put on the agenda, which zoomed in on the effectiveness of the DMCA itself.
This isn’t the first time that the US Government has heard stakeholders on the DMCA and many of the arguments, both in favor and against the law, have been brought up before. The overall theme is that online services are fine with the current system while rightsholders want online services to do more.
One of the testimonies worth highlighting comes from Douglas Preston, president of the Authors Guild, which represents over 10,000 professional writers. Many of the Guild’s members are struggling due to piracy, he says, because the DMCA doesn’t work as intended.
“The notice-and-takedown system is not working — at least not for authors, other individual creators, and small creative businesses,” Preston informed the Senate Subcommittee.
The testimony continues by describing the book piracy landscape in detail. According to Preston, the number of piracy complaints has skyrocketed over the past decade, with pirate sites and pirate booksellers growing more and more popular.
“It is nearly impossible to estimate the number of active pirate sites at any given moment,” Preston notes, while mentioning Ebook.bike, LibGen, Sci-Hub, Epub.pub, Graycity.net and Kissly.net as some of the worst actors.
It’s clear that at least some of the sites don’t care about the DMCA. Even with much stricter legislation including ‘staydown’ and ‘filtering’ requirements, they would keep going. However, the Authors Guild believes that some online services have room to improve.
Preston is particularly critical of Google. This doesn’t come as a surprise, as both parties previously met in court over a copyright dispute. That said, the Authors Guild doesn’t spare the search engine in its testimony to the Senators.
According to the Authors Guild, search engines make pirate sites easily accessible. While the comments also apply to other search engines, Google is the only one that’s specifically named.
Terms such as ‘free ebook,’ ‘download,’ or ‘ebook’ return a “bewildering variety” of links to pirate sites, the Authors Guild notes. That’s not limited to regular searches either, as Google shopping links also list pirate book stores or link to cheap pirated books on eBay.
“Those Google Shopping buy buttons include links to pirate sites and pirate eBay sellers mixed in with legitimate vendors, sometimes even ranking above legitimate vendors in search results if the pirates have bought promotional placement on the page.
“And since there is no way to tell a licensed ebook copy apart from a pirated copy, users will usually choose the cheapest offer not knowing that these cheap ebooks are in fact pirated copies,” the Authors Guild adds.
Copyright holders can take down the links by sending a DMCA request. However, the authors want more. Ideally, they would like shopping links to be carefully vetted. In addition, known pirate sites should be completely removed from Google’s search index.
The Authors Guild points out that Google does filter out other illegal content, including child pornography. Thus far, however, it has rejected rightsholders’ requests for the wholesale removal of pirate domains.
“The Authors Guild has asked Google in the past to de-index sites like Ebook.bike and Epub.pub from search results for books, but we were only successful in getting them demoted so they don’t appear whenever a user searches for a book title on Google.
“There is no reason for search engines and other legitimate platforms covered by the DMCA to continue linking to pirate sites—not when they clearly have abundant knowledge of the pirate nature of these sites,” the testimony adds.
The authors are very critical of search engines. However, they also point out that other online services including Facebook, Linkedin, Scribd, Slideshare, and eBay can do more as well. Ideally, the DMCA would require these companies to take action.
According to the Authors Guild, the current interpretation of the DMCA doesn’t work. Online services should be required to do more. And if they don’t, they should be held liable.
Preston says that the DMCA has allowed for-profit companies to grow and prosper “to an obscene measure” which hurts copyright holders, while “leaving individual creators poorer than ever.”
Instead of continuing on the same foot, the authors want a “takedown and staydown” policy. This can be achieved by changing the interpretation of the current law or by proposing new legislation.
“Congress could enact a new provision that provides that a takedown notice applies to every full-length, identical copy of the particular work. In other words, one notice does not result in one takedown, but in the removal of all current and infringing copies of that work,” it suggests.
This proposal is not new but whether Congress is open to it is questionable. Last month the US Copyright Office released its detailed report on the state of the DMCA. This specifically recommended not to implement any “staydown” requirements.
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A copy of the full testimony from Authors Guild President Douglas Preston is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Thirty-nine percent of surveyed people admitted to at least one risky practice.
Bleach (credit: Adina Firestone)
Americans are doing more housecleaning and disinfecting amid the COVID-19 pandemic and many are turning to wild and dangerous tactics—like drinking and gargling bleach solutions.
Back in April, the agency noted an unusual spike in poison control center calls over harmful exposures to household cleaning products, such as bleach. The timing linked it to the spread of the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 (not statements by President Trump). But to get a clearer idea of what was behind the rise, CDC researchers set up an online survey of household cleaning and disinfection knowledge and practices.
In all, they surveyed 502 US adults and used statistical weighting to make it representative of the country’s population. The findings—published Friday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report—are stunning.
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In the process, they discovered the oldest evidence of malted drinks in central Europe.
Enlarge / Barley grain used in the production of beer at the Asahi Kanagawa Brewery in Japan. (credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Over the last few years, archaeologists have learned a lot from ancient people’s dirty dishes. Microscopic residues clinging to the inside of potsherds contain chemical traces of ancient food and drink, which have revealed remarkable details of ancient people’s diets. But as much as we now know about when people started eating certain grains or fermenting milk to make cheese, we’re still not sure when people first started brewing beer. It’s hard to tell a container used for beer from one that was just storing plain old grain.
But by looking at the remains of ancient grains under a microscope, archaeologists can tell whether the grains had been malted—the first step in the process of brewing beer.
When grains start to germinate, or sprout, they release an enzyme called diastase, which converts the grain’s stockpile of starch into sugar. The whole point of malting is to make the grains release diastase but then stop the process before the starch gets turned into sugar. Once the brewer adds yeast to the malted grain, then, the diastase can produce more sugar to feed the yeast—and that produces carbon dioxide, alcohol, and a sweet taste. To make this happen, brewers soak grains in water so they start to germinate, then stop the process by air-drying the grains and heating them in an oven.
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It also seeps into homes; contaminates food, furniture; and can cause long-term lung damage.
Enlarge / A woman holds a placard reading 'I can't breathe' amid tear gas in Toulouse, France. (credit: Alain Pitton/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
When Amira Chowdhury joined a protest in Philadelphia against police violence on Monday, she wore a mask to protect herself and others against the coronavirus. But when officers launched tear gas into the crowd, Chowdhury pulled off her mask as she gasped for air. “I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I felt like I was choking to death.”
Chowdhury was on a part of the Vine Street Expressway that ran underground. Everyone panicked as gas drifted into the dark, semi-enclosed space, she said. People stomped over her as they scrambled away. Bruised, she scaled a fence to escape. But the tear gas found her later that evening, inside her own house; as police unleashed it on protesters in her predominantly black neighborhood in West Philadelphia, it seeped in.
“I can’t even be in my own house without escaping the violence of the state,” said Chowdhury, a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania. On Wednesday, she said her throat still felt dry, like it was clogged with ash.
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