Month: September 2020

Augmented reality could be the geology classroom’s killer app

This project is bringing virtual geology to your phone.

Fancy a tabletop Meteor Crater, anyone?

Enlarge / Fancy a tabletop Meteor Crater, anyone? (credit: Scott K. Johnson)

One of the most important challenges in teaching geology is bringing the outside world into the classroom. During a pandemic, obviously, an inability to safely bring students into the classroom doesn’t make that any easier. Fortunately, digital tools can provide new ways to access the world beyond whichever room you find yourself in.

Geology is a very spatial science and can require a lot of 3-D visualization. Simple physical models (not to mention rocks) have long been used to aid teaching about things like faults or crystalline mineral structure. But these things can be surprisingly costly and occupy a surprising amount of storage space. This is an obvious place where technology can come in, serving up an endless variety of objects, simulations, and real-world data—if there’s an easy way for students to access it.

Augmented reality (AR) visualizations are increasingly capable of delivering on that promise. Ars talked to Martin Pratt about his work as part of a Washington University in St. Louis group that is developing apps for classes, both for specialized devices like Microsoft’s HoloLens and for the phones most students already have.

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Takedown Requests Target News Reports that Cover Leaked Tenet Movie

New movie titles ‘leak’ online pretty much every day, but some get more attention than others. Tenet is one of those titles that made worlwide headlines, including numerous articles about the film being leaked. This prompted a flurry of takedown requests from copyright holders, which accidentally targeted some of those news reports.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

tenetWhen a major blockbuster title leaks online, it sets a series of intruiging processes in motion.

It was no different this week when low-quality CAM versions of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi thriller ‘Tenet’ surfaced.

Immediately after this happened thousands of seasoned pirates flocked to their favorite download portals, grabbing a copy. At the same time, anti-piracy outfits sprang into action to issue a continuous stream of takedown requests.

The leak was also a heads up to scammers and other dubious actors. While fake Tenet copies were already circulating, a real leak tends to increase the demand. And indeed, over the past days, we’ve seen scammy links being posted on many legitimate sites including Medium.com, Opensource.com, Shopify.com and Schooltube.com.

There were also news outlets who jumped on the story, including the undersigned. In the days after the leak came out, hundreds of sites referenced it. While some reports are better than others, the news articles are certainly not infringing anyone’s copyrights.

Nonetheless, we noticed this week that several takedown requests targeted real leaked copies, scammy links, and also news reports. One notice sent by the Estonian branch of ACME Film stands out as it combines all three.

The screenshot below starts with a link to a Pirate Bay proxy, followed by a list of scammy postings on legitimate sites such as Sourceforge and Openlibrary. At the very bottom, there are two links to ‘news’ reports. In total, there are five URLs of news reports in that takedown notice alone.

leak tenet

That notice doesn’t come alone, there’s another one that flags a news report as infringing as well. We are pretty sure that these were all reported ‘accidentally’ but still, a quick glance by an actual person could have easily prevented it.

We fully understand that writing this article is not without risk at all. After all, writing about news reports that were targeted because they covered the Tenet leak, may trigger takedown requests as well. However, we’re willing to take a chance.

Also, Google is known to be quite good at spotting these errors. When we checked, most takedown requests for the news articles were being ignored, which means that they are still in the search results.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Big tech companies want to help get you back in the office

They are offering services to track employees, arrange tests, and record results.

Masked co-workers discuss in an open office.

Enlarge / Office staff respecting social distancing during a meeting. Group of business men and women having a meeting in office during corona virus pandemic. (credit: Getty Images)

Many things about Matt Bruinooge’s senior year at Brown are different from his previous college life. One is that he logs on to a website from tech giant Alphabet twice a week to schedule nasal swabs.

Brown is one of the first customers of a pandemic safety service from Alphabet subsidiary Verily Life Sciences called Healthy at Work, or Healthy at School at colleges. It offers a website and software for surveying workers or students for symptoms, scheduling coronavirus tests, and managing the results.

The site Bruinooge uses to schedule his tests has similar styling to Google’s office suite. When a test comes back negative, he sees a graphic of something like a COVID-era hall pass, with a big check mark in soothing green. “The testing process is streamlined,” Bruinooge says—although he wonders where his data may end up.

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