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Begleitet wird dies mit Drohungen der Liquidation von Angreifern. “Sehr negative Konsequenzen für Irak und seine Zukunft”, kündigt Außenminister Pompeo an
Judge Rogers has strong words for both sides in the iOS Fortnite battle.
Enlarge / Whoever wins this case will get a llama full of prizes.
Federal District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers heard arguments this morning regarding Epic's request for a temporary injunction in its case against Apple. That injunction would force Apple to put Fortnite back on the iOS App Store during the trial, following the game's removal last month over Epic's skirting of Apple's in-app purchase rules.
The hearing gave the clearest indication yet of both parties' best arguments in the matter and of which positions seem most likely to hold sway with Rogers as the case heads toward a full trial.
A central issue in the case is Epic's contention that Apple's exclusive control over the iOS App Store constitutes an illegal monopoly that hinders competition. Today's discussion of Epic's claim centered heavily on what market, exactly, Apple is allegedly monopolizing.
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Dozens of malicious apps, some available in Play, found in the past couple months.
Enlarge (credit: portal gda / Flickr)
September has been a busy month for malicious Android apps, with dozens of them from a single malware family alone flooding either Google Play or third-party markets, researchers from security companies said.
Known as Joker, this family of malicious apps has been attacking Android users since late 2016 and more recently has become one of the most common Android threats. Once installed, Joker apps secretly subscribe users to pricey subscription services and can also steal SMS messages, contact lists, and device information. Last July, researchers said they found Joker lurking in 11 seemingly legitimate apps downloaded from Play about 500,000 times.
Late last week, researchers from security firm Zscaler said they found a new batch comprising 17 Joker-tainted apps with 120,000 downloads. The apps were uploaded to Play gradually over the course of September. Security firm Zimperium, meanwhile, reported on Monday that company researchers found 64 new Joker variants in September, most or all of which were seeded in third-party app stores.
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It can be tough to spot water under an ice cap from orbit.
In recent decades, we've become aware of lots of water on Earth that's deep under ice. In some cases, we've watched this water nervously, as it's deep underneath ice sheets, where it could lubricate the sheets' slide into the sea. But we've also discovered lakes that have been trapped under ice near the poles, possibly for millions of years, raising the prospect that they could harbor ancient ecosystems.
Now, researchers are applying some of the same techniques that we've used to find those under-ice lakes to data from Mars. And the results support an earlier claim that there are bodies of water trapped under the polar ice of the red planet.
Mars clearly has extensive water locked away in the forum of ice, and some of it cycles through the atmosphere as orbital cycles make one pole or the other a bit warmer. But there's not going to be pure liquid water on Mars—the temperatures just aren't high enough for very long, and the atmospheric pressures are far too low to keep any liquid water from boiling off into the atmosphere.
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A recent study suggests the 431 CE eruption affected only a small region.
(credit: Gerardo Aguirre-Díaz)
Maya civilization was blossoming into its golden age when a volcano erupted at the southern edge of the Maya region, in what is now El Salvador. Tens of meters of ash and debris buried the densely populated, fertile farming valleys around the Ilopango caldera. Aerosols blasted into the stratosphere by the eruption settled as far away as Greenland and Antarctica. While the wider Maya civilization was mostly unaffected, it took a century and a half for life to resume in the shadow of Ilopango.
In a recent study, Oxford University archaeologist Victoria Smith and her colleagues used tree rings from a stump caught in a pyroclastic flow, along with data from polar ice cores obtained more than 7,000km (4,300 miles) away. These dated the eruption to 431 CE, the early part of the Maya Classic Period. The date may help future archaeologists and climate researchers better understand the impacts of the eruption on Central America and the rest of the world.
Volcanoes make dangerous neighbors, but they have ways of drawing people close despite the risks. Fertile volcanic soils in the valleys of El Salvador supported dense populations in Maya villages and urban centers like Chalchuapa. By the beginning of the Maya Classic Period, around 250 BCE, the rulers at Chalchuapa had built temples and a ball court at the site. Artifacts found among the ruins reveal trade connections as far away as central Mexico.
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Rumor has it that Microsoft has at least two more Surface devices set to launch this year — a new entry-level 12.5 inch Surface Laptop with a lower starting price than any current model, and a 2nd-gen Surface Pro X tablet powered by a Qualcomm S…
Rumor has it that Microsoft has at least two more Surface devices set to launch this year — a new entry-level 12.5 inch Surface Laptop with a lower starting price than any current model, and a 2nd-gen Surface Pro X tablet powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 processor. Now we can add another […]
The post Lilbits: Surface Laptop “Go,” Volla Phone, and Gateway’s cheap laptop that doesn’t stink appeared first on Liliputing.
$127 million settlement in lawsuits that said carriers violated gov’t contracts.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Viktoryia Vinnikava | EyeEm)
Verizon and AT&T have agreed to pay a combined $127 million to settle lawsuits alleging that they overcharged California and Nevada government entities for wireless service. The lawsuit was filed in 2012 and resulted in a settlement approved on Thursday last week by Sacramento County Superior Court, the plaintiffs' law firm, Constantine Cannon, announced.
"Verizon will pay $76 million and AT&T $51 million to settle claims that, for more than a decade, they knowingly ignored cost-saving requirements included in multibillion-dollar contracts offering wireless services to state and local government users in California, Nevada, and other states," the announcement said. "Sprint and T-Mobile previously reached settlements totaling $11.7 million. Combined, the four major telecom providers will pay $138.7 million to settle allegations in the lawsuits." Those numbers do not include what the carriers agreed to pay in attorneys' fees, which is $23.45 million from Verizon and $13 million from AT&T.
The contracts required that carriers bill government entities "at the 'lowest cost available' and that the carrier[s] identify 'optimized' rate plans that best suited actual usage patterns that drive cost," the law firm also said. The lawsuits alleged that the carriers' contract violations "cheated California and Nevada government entities out of hundreds of millions in savings," the law firm said.
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TikTok said the White House can’t do that. The judge says TikTok is probably right.
Enlarge / TikTok's US fate is up in the air, but at least you can still download and patch it. (credit: SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)
President Donald Trump's attempt to ban TikTok from operating inside the United States probably exceeds the authority the president has to do such things, a federal judge has ruled.
TikTok narrowly avoided being removed from app stores last night when Judge Carl Nichols of the US District Court for DC issued an injunction late yesterday requiring the government to pause on its ban. TikTok got its reprieve, but the terms of the order (PDF) were sealed until midday today.
To meet the standard for an injunction, Nichols explained, TikTok basically needed to prove four things to his satisfaction. The first factor, however, is the most important: TikTok needed to prove its case is "likely to succeed on the merits." In plain English, that means: is it going to win its lawsuit against the administration? And the answer, Nichols determined, is probably yes, because the actions the administration took "likely exceed the lawful bounds" of the law under which those actions were taken.
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After two years of development the World Intellectual Property Organisation launched its BRIP database in 2019 with the aim of strangling advertising revenue to pirate sites. Russia says it will now contribute its resources to the program but which sites are blacklisted overall will remain a mystery due to a complete lack of transparency.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Websites of all kinds generally need a steady stream of revenue to keep them online. Advertisers, sponsors and affiliate schemes all play a part and the position is generally no different for pirate sites.
That being said, by their very nature pirate sites have a more limited number of options when it comes to advertisers.
Years ago, many would use platforms such as Google’s Adsense or similar mechanisms operated by various reputable third-party agencies but when advertising for mainstream brands began appearing alongside pirated content, copyright holders were quick to point out that household names should not be funding illegal activity.
This resulted in pressure on agencies around the world to stop doing indirect business with pirate platforms, with various coalitions creating their own pirate site ‘blacklists’ so that known pirate players could be screened out as potential advertising partners.
In 2017, the United Nation’s World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) threw its proposals into the mix with its BRIP (Building Respect for Intellectual Property) database. The plan, which came to fruition in 2019, would see “Authorized Contributors” and “Authorized Users” from WIPO Member States and the advertising sectors building a list of websites that are known to infringe copyright, so they could be avoided.
Early contributors included Italian telecom regulator AGCOM and KCOPA, the Korea Copyright Protection Agency. Earlier this year it was reported that Brazil was also cooperating in the project but information on precisely who else is involved is currently scarce, barring the latest new entrant.
According to Russian telecoms regulator Roscomnadzor, Russia has also decided to throw its weight behind the scheme following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding earlier this month after a year-and-a-half of negotiations with WIPO.
“Roscomnadzor and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have signed a Memorandum on the provision of information to the WIPO ALERT database,” the announcement reads, referring to the new name for BRIP.
“The WIPO ALERT database is a mechanism that allows WIPO Member States and their institutions to share lists of infringing sites in order to discourage advertisers from placing advertisements on such sites.
“Roscomnadzor will provide for placement in the WIPO ALERT database information about sites on the Internet, on which information containing objects of copyright and (or) related rights have been repeatedly and illegally posted.”
The above announcement by Russia indicates that the country’s participation in WIPO ALERT is based on its established guidelines for local site-blocking. Sites that are reported multiple times due to the placement of copyrighted content on their platforms appear to be prime candidates for inclusion in the WIPO ALERT database. This is in line with the published aim of the project.
“WIPO ALERT is a secure, online platform to which authorized bodies in WIPO member states can upload details of websites or apps which have been determined to infringe copyright according to national rules,” it reads.
What we can conclude from “national rules” is that sites can be added for ad-blocking when a local law is breached but, thus far, and based on information currently made public, participants other than Russia aren’t so clear on their parameters.
In respect of AGCOM, for example, the regulator merely states that the memorandum it signed allows it to contribute to a list of websites “compiled at national level that violate authors’ rights.” (pdf)
Visitors to the WIPO ALERT portal hoping to learn more are given very little information to go on.
“Advertisers, advertising agencies and their technical service providers can apply to become authorized users of WIPO ALERT in order to access aggregated lists of infringing websites from around the world,” the site reads.
“They can use this information in their automated advertising systems to avoid placing advertisements on such sites. In this way, they can avoid subsidizing copyright infringement and protect their brands from the negative reputational effect of association with illegal activities.”
That sounds effective in theory but who is checking for errors and overreach, and who is responsible for ensuring that everything is kept up to date? Not the WIPO, that much is certain.
“WIPO does not assess whether any website is infringing and does not take any responsibility for the contents of the national lists hosted on the WIPO ALERT platform,” the organization writes.
So if a site gets added to a list erroneously or even maliciously (we only need to turn to Google’s Transparency Report on DMCA notices to see thousands of instances of both), how can that be rectified? The WIPO offers the following advice:
“Warning – any concerns as to the inclusion or omission of a website from a list must be pursued with the national agency concerned,” it states.
The problems here are obvious. There is no public list of “national agencies” that are able to contribute to the project and even when those are known, they won’t share their lists with the public. This means that it’s not only impossible for parties to examine the lists for errors but owners of domains that are wrongly included will not even know they are being blacklisted. All they will see is a reduced ability to generate revenue from advertising.
That many if not most advertisers would prefer for their brands not to appear alongside pages of pirated content is completely understandable. Advertising is all about perception and in the same way that big companies wouldn’t like their carefully cultivated imagery appearing alongside crazy conspiracy theorists on YouTube, association with pirated copies of Tenet or Mulan would probably be a no-no too.
However, some companies operating in the anti-piracy space, hired by copyright holders that are comfortable with their standards, are just as comfortable blacklisting news articles that simply report on leaks of Tenet as they labeling the BBC a piracy portal. Or, as we revealed this weekend, labeling a French ISP and phone manufacturer Huawei as running two of the world’s Top 50 piracy portals.
Not placing advertising on these sites, for example, could mean lucrative advertising deals lost, with brands, agencies, and potential platforms all coming out poorer.
Unfortunately, however, those who run national advertising blacklists such as the UK’s PIPCU (Infringing Website List) and AGCOM, for example, have absolutely no intention of making these available to the public. Why not is a complete mystery since all of the major pirate sites are public knowledge due to Google’s Transparency Report and the invaluable Lumen Database.
That leaves the possibilities that third-party scrutiny is undesirable, either because contributors prefer not to justify their decisions and/or mistakes could prove embarrassing and undermine credibility. Nevertheless, it would make for more accurate blacklists, which must be the goal overall, surely?
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Did you really think Amazon was going to let 2020 slip by without a Prime Day?
Amazon Prime Day has officially been announced for October 13 and 14 of this year, and though it's later than usual, Amazon is making sure to put some early deals in place to get buyers in the shopping mood in the lead-up.
It's not just your typical swarm of Amazon devices seeing early discounts, though there's much of that, too. Amazon says it’s focusing on small businesses this year, offering incentives to shop at them on Amazon before Prime Day, and making it easier to shop by region or owner of the local business. The company is also offering a $10 reimbursement in the form of a Prime Day credit for any purchases of $10 or more made with eligible small businesses from now through October 12. From this landing page, you can look through businesses by their local region or whether they are woman- or Black-owned, for instance.
In fact, it's a bigger Prime Day party than ever before, with Turkey and Brazil now included in the shopping holiday for the first time.
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