Month: December 2020

Enlarge / Donald Trump speaks from the White House on Thanksgiving Day. (credit: Erin Schaff - Pool/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump has long been an outspoken foe of big technology companies. And in recent months, he has focused his ire on Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields online platforms from liability for content posted by their users.

In May, Trump called on the Federal Communications Commission to reinterpret the law—though it's not clear the agency has the power to do that. Since then, he has tweeted about the issue incessantly.

On Tuesday evening, Trump ratcheted up his campaign against Section 230. In a tweet, he called the law "a serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity." He warned that "if the very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill."

Enlarge / Detail of a medical treatise from the Tebtunis Temple Library with headings marked in red ink. (credit: The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection)

An international team of scientists used high-energy X-rays to analyze 12 fragments from ancient Egyptian papyri and found lead compounds in both red and black inks used. According to their recent paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this is evidence that these compounds were added not for pigmentation but for their fast-drying properties, to prevent the ink from smearing as people wrote. Painters in 15th-century Europe used a similar technique when developing oil paints, but this study suggests ancient Egyptians discovered it 1,400 years earlier. So the practice may have been much more widespread than previously assumed.

“Our analyses of the inks on the papyri fragments from the unique Tebtunis Temple Library revealed previously unknown compositions of red and black inks, particularly iron-based and lead-based compounds,” said co-author Thomas Christiansen, an Egyptologist from the University of Copenhagen.

As I've written previously, synchrotron radiation is a thin beam of very high-intensity X-rays generated within a particle accelerator. Electrons are fired into a linear accelerator to boost their speeds and then injected into a storage ring. They zoom through the ring at near-light speed as a series of magnets bend and focus the electrons. In the process, they give off X-rays, which can then be focused down beamlines. This is useful for analyzing structure because in general, the shorter the wavelength used (and the higher the energy of the light), the finer the details one can image and/or analyze.

Enlarge / Luckily you can't hear this image—it might result in a DMCA strike if you could. (credit: Epic Games)

Epic Games and Twitch are warning streamers who broadcast during Fortnite's season-ending Marvel-crossover "Nexus War" event last night that they may need to delete their VOD clips to avoid the risk of DMCA copyright strikes.

The event, which saw players take on the world-eating Galactus in a ten-minute battle, featured AC/DC's Demon Fire as a licensed background song during a portion set in the game's iconic Battle Bus. Thus, shortly before the event started, the official Fortnite Status Twitter account warned Twitch streamers that "we cannot prevent your VOD/clip content from getting flagged by the platform's copyright detection systems. The general recommendation is to either mute your VoDs or turn off VODs/clips entirely to protect yourselves against any kind of claims or strikes as best as possible."

Shortly after the event, Twitch Support tweeted out a similar warning, telling users who streamed unmuted sound from the game that they may "want to be cautious about DMCA risk from the music in that event" and "consider exporting/downloading and then deleting any related VODs or Clips."