Month: November 2020

Fans eagerly awaiting the debut of Zack Snyder's Justice League on HBO Max next year were thrilled to hear that a new trailer was coming today to mark the third anniversary of the theatrical cut's release. They're probably feeling a teensy bit cheated right now, since what dropped was actually an updated black-and-white version of the teaser trailer from the virtual DC FanDome event in August—although the eagle-eyed viewer will spot a few seconds of new footage. But at least Snyder also provided a virtual breakdown of said trailer during a livestreaming event on Vero.

The August trailer had been removed from YouTube earlier this month because of contested music rights issues—the trailer was set to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Now those issues have been resolved, and Snyder marked the occasion with this latest black-and-white offering, Cohen soundtrack intact. (You can watch the full-color version here.)

Apparently, Snyder's ideal vision for Justice League would be a black-and-white IMAX version. "That, to me, is the most fan-centric, most pure, most Justice League experience, because that’s how I lived with the movie for two years, in black-and-white," he told The Film Junkee in a recent interview.

Enlarge / A sign featuring the YouTube logo, outside the YouTube Space studios in London on June 4, 2019. (credit: Olly Curtis | Future | Getty Images)

GitHub has reversed its decision to boot YouTube-dl, a popular tool for archiving YouTube videos, from its platform. The company restored repositories this week after "additional information" convinced it that an archiving tool is not in and of itself a copyright violation—no matter what the music industry says.

The repositories in question got shut down in late October, before coming back yesterday. "We share developers' frustration with this takedown—especially since this project has many legitimate purposes," GitHub explained in a corporate blog post. "Our actions were driven by processes required to comply with laws like the DMCA that put platforms like GitHub and developers in a difficult spot. And our reinstatement, based on new information that showed the project was not circumventing a technical protection measure (TPM), was inline with our values of putting developers first."

The initial takedown occurred after the Recording Industry Association of America filed a claim with Microsoft-owned GitHub arguing that the code in those repositories was inherently illegal under US copyright law. At a high level, the law in question basically makes it illegal to crack or bypass DRM in any way, except for a handful of enumerated exemptions.

Enlarge (credit: Patrick Wardle)

Firewalls aren’t just for corporate networks. Large numbers of security- or privacy-conscious people also use them to filter or redirect traffic flowing in and out of their computers. Apple recently made a major change to macOS that frustrates these efforts.

Beginning with Big Sur released last week, some 50 Apple-specific apps and processes are no longer routed through firewalls like Little Snitch and Lulu. The undocumented exemption came to light only after Patrick Wardle, a security researcher at a Mac and iOS enterprise developer Jamf, disclosed the change over the weekend.

“100% blind”

To demonstrate the risks that come with this move, Wardle—a former hacker for the NSA—demonstrated how malware developers could exploit the change to make an end-run around a tried-and-true security measure. He set Lulu to block all outgoing traffic on a Mac running Big Sur and then ran a small programming script that interacted with one of the apps that Apple exempted. The python script had no trouble reaching a command and control server he set up to simulate one commonly used by malware to receive commands and exfiltrate sensitive data.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by an early Black Friday deal on Sony's WH-1000XM4. The wireless noise-canceling headphones are currently on sale for $278 at various retailers, which matches the price we've seen advertised for upcoming Black Friday sales events and ties the lowest outright discount we've seen. (An Amazon Prime Day deal last month dropped the headphones down to $298 with a $25 Amazon gift card.) Normally, they retail for $350.

We recently recommended the XM4 in our home-office setup guide, deeming it the best pair of noise-canceling headphones on the market. Like its predecessor—another Ars favorite—the XM4 provides an excellent blend of comfort, convenient features, customizable sound quality, and, above all else, active noise cancellation that's just about best-in-class. Now, though, it offers the ability to connect to multiple devices simultaneously as long as both devices use the AAC codec, which shouldn't be an issue the vast majority of the time. The new XM4 also has a motion sensor that automatically detects when you've taken off the headphones and pauses playback accordingly, and it has a nifty "speak to chat" feature that can do the same when it detects you talking to somebody else. We've found the touch controls on the side of the earcups to be less hyper-sensitive than before, too.

Beyond that, the headphones still get a little over 20 hours of battery life per charge, which is solid, and charge over a USB-C port. They still have minimal issues in the way of Bluetooth connectivity and offer a useful "ambient sound" mode that lets you listen to music while better hearing outside noises. The mic quality still isn't ideal, but it's fine, and while the mildly bass-forward sound isn't as detailed as you could get from a good wired pair, it's still full, fun, and customizable thanks to the nifty EQ tool in Sony's companion app. While we'd like the XM4 to offer the ability to tone down its noise-canceling strength a la Bose's Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, the overall package here is excellent.

Enlarge (credit: Brunner et al./ESD)

One notable storyline in the climate system over the past year or two has been the effort to make sense of the latest generation of climate models. In service of the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the world’s climate models have submitted their simulations to the latest database, known as CMIP6. These submissions showed that updates to a number of models had made them more sensitive to greenhouse gases, which means they project greater amounts of future warming.

Apart from diagnosing the behavior responsible for that change, climate scientists have also wrestled with the implications. Should we be alarmed by the results, or are they outliers? Climate models are only one tool among many for estimating Earth’s true “climate sensitivity,” so their behavior has to be considered in the full context of all the other evidence.

For a number of reasons, research is converging on the idea that the high temperature projections are outliers; these hotter models seem to be too hot. That will present a challenge for the scientists working on the next IPCC report: how much influence should these outliers have on projections of future warming?