December 2020 – Page 35 – news.buyenne.com

What we know about the new SARS strain that’s shutting down the UK

Policy is to treat it like a potential threat, but the emphasis is on “potential.”

Cartoon representation of coronaviruses.

A variant of the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is now dominating headlines and inspiring precautionary travel bans worldwide. But scientists are still trying to get a grip on what the variant can actually do differently and what it might mean for the nearly year-old pandemic.

Researchers in the United Kingdom—where the variant was identified and is now rapidly circulating—suggested it may be up to 70 percent more transmissible than other SARS-CoV-2 strains, stoking fear of surges-upon-surges of disease on the eve of year-end holidays. But other researchers are now rapidly working to collect data on the variant's interactions with human cells and immune responses to see if those interactions differ from those seen by other SARS-CoV-2 strains.

What we know

While much remains to be known about the variant, dubbed B.1.1.7, there are some reassuring aspects. For one thing, it's normal for viruses to accumulate the small genetic changes, such as those that created the new UK variant (more on that below). Many other variants have been identified throughout the pandemic, and none has spawned any nightmare scenarios.

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YouTube Class Action: Same IP Address Used to Upload ‘Pirate’ Movies & File DMCA Notices

YouTube says it has found a “smoking gun” to prove that a class-action lawsuit filed by Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider and Pirate Monitor Ltd was filed in bad faith. According to the Google-owned platform, the same IP address used to upload ‘pirate’ movies to the platform also sent DMCA notices targeting the same batch of content.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. We have some good VPN deals here for the holidays.

Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider and Virgin Islands-based Pirate Monitor Ltd teamed up in the summer to file a class-action lawsuit against YouTube.

In an effort to gain access to YouTube’s Content ID system, the complaint stated that YouTube has an allegedly lax attitude to takedown notices and repeat infringers, and discriminates against smaller creators.

Schneider told the court that a number of her songs had been posted to YouTube without her permission. Pirate Monitor Ltd argued similarly, stating that pirated copies of its works had been uploaded to the site. Both further said they had been denied access to Content ID.

In its response, YouTube focused on Pirate Monitor, alleging that the company or its agents uploaded the ‘pirate’ movies and then claimed mass infringement, something which disqualified them from accessing Content ID.

“YouTube Failed to Provide Evidence”

In a motion to dismiss filed in November, Pirate Monitor said YouTube had provided no “hard evidence” to back up these damaging claims, demanding that the court disregard the allegations and reject calls for the right to an injunction to prevent Pirate Monitor from submitting wrongful DMCA notices in the future.

At the time we noted that it was unlikely that YouTube had simply pulled its claims out of thin air and in an opposition to dismiss Pirate Monitor’s counterclaims, YouTube now provides a taster of some of the supporting evidence it has on file.

Motion to Dismiss Counterclaims

“Pirate Monitor devised an elaborate scheme to prove itself sufficiently trustworthy to use YouTube’s advanced copyright management tools,” YouTube begins.

“Through agents using pseudonyms to hide their identities, Pirate Monitor uploaded some two thousand videos to YouTube, each time representing that the content did not infringe anyone’s copyright. Shortly thereafter, Pirate Monitor invoked the notice-and-takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to demand that YouTube remove the same videos its agents had just uploaded.”

YouTube notes that Pirate Monitor has still not disputed these claims but has nevertheless moved to dismiss, arguing that YouTube should provide detailed evidence to support its allegations. According to YouTube, it does not have to do that at this early stage but nevertheless highlights some key evidence to show foul play.

Suspicious Uploads

In all, YouTube processed nearly 2,000 DMCA notices it received by Pirate Monitor in the fall of 2019. All of the targeted videos had a uniform length, around 30 seconds each, generated from “obscure Hungarian movies”. They had been uploaded in bulk from users with IP addresses allocated to Pakistan.

“That alone was suspicious, there is no obvious reason why short clips from relatively unknown Hungarian-language movies should be uploaded to YouTube from accounts and devices in Pakistan,” YouTube writes.

Furthermore, YouTube notes that the videos were uploaded by users with similar names, such as RansomNova11 and RansomNova12, who gave the clips nondescript titles. Perhaps even more telling, the takedown notices were sent soon after the videos were uploaded, sometimes before the videos had been seen by anyone.

While the nature of the uploads is indeed suspicious, YouTube says that it also found what it describes as a “smoking gun”, i.e evidence that the uploads and DMCA notices were being sent by the same entity.

The Smoking Gun

“After considerable digging, YouTube found a smoking gun. In November 2019, amidst a raft of takedown notices from Pirate Monitor, one of the ‘RansomNova’ users that had been uploading clips via IP addresses in Pakistan logged into their YouTube account from a computer connected to the Internet via an IP address in Hungary,” YouTube explains.

“Pirate Monitor had been sending YouTube its takedown notices from a computer assigned that very same unique numeric address in Hungary. Simply put, whoever RansomNova is, he or she was sharing Pirate Monitor’s computer and/or Internet connection, and doing so at the same time Pirate Monitor was using the same computer and/or connection to send YouTube takedown notices.”

To counter Pirate Monitor’s claims that not enough evidence has been provided, YouTube says that a party is not required to prove its entire case in its complaint and the relevant rules do not allow Pirate Monitor to escape any accounting for fraudulent and illegal conduct by “concealing the identity of its agents and obscuring its connection to them.”

Specifically, however, YouTube says it has already answered the “who, what, where and when?” questions Pirate Monitor claims YouTube has not answered. The “who” is Pirate Monitor, the “what” is Pirate Monitor’s allegedly fraudulent representations, the “where” is YouTube’s website, and the “when” is from August 2019 to November 2019.

“For these reasons, Pirate Monitor’s motion to dismiss should be denied,” YouTube’s legal team writes.

The opposition to Pirate Monitor’s motion to dismiss can be found here (pdf)

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. We have some good VPN deals here for the holidays.

After riots, iPhone manufacturer says it “deeply regrets” exploiting workers

Apple flags Wistron for “violations of our Supplier Code of Conduct.”

Busses surround a wide building of glass and steel.

Earlier this month, employees at an Indian iPhone manufacturer, Wistron, erupted into violent protests that caused up to $7 million in damages. Employees said they weren't being paid what they were promised, and they started smashing up the place in retaliation. Apple said it would investigate. This weekend, Apple came to a preliminary conclusion. In a statement (available in full at the HindustanTimes) Apple said it found "violations of our Supplier Code of Conduct" and that it would put Wistron on "probation."

Apple's findings back up the worker complaints, which said Wistron wasn't paying the salaries it promised when it hired workers. Apple's take on the situation said, "Our preliminary findings indicate violations of our Supplier Code of Conduct by failing to implement proper working hour management processes. This led to payment delays for some workers in October and November."

The company continues: "We have placed Wistron on probation and they will not receive any new business from Apple before they complete corrective actions. Apple employees, along with independent auditors, will monitor their progress. Our main objective is to make sure all the workers are treated with dignity and respect, and fully compensated promptly."

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Daily Deals (12-21-2020)

HP, Dell, and Lenovo are all running laptop sales. B&H is offering discounts on a few older-but-still-pretty good smartphones. And the Epic Games Store is continuing to give away new PC games on a daily basis, today it’s Alien: Isolation. He…

The post Daily Deals (12-21-2020) appeared first on Liliputing.

AT&T reportedly struggling to sell DirecTV at anything but a huge loss

AT&T told bidders it may cancel auction if offers don’t improve, NY Post reports.

Enlarge / AT&T corporate offices on November 10, 2020 in El Segundo, California. (credit: Getty Images | AaronP/Bauer-Griffin)

AT&T is disappointed in the $15 billion offers it has received for DirecTV and has "told prospective bidders it may cancel the auction altogether if it doesn't get better offers," the New York Post reported yesterday, citing "sources close to the situation."

AT&T began seeking a buyer for the struggling satellite division months ago. In October, news reports said that first-round bids valued DirecTV at about $15.75 billion, and AT&T apparently hasn't been able to get better offers in subsequent auction rounds. On December 9, The Wall Street Journal reported that the latest bids valued DirecTV "at more than $15 billion including debt." (The actual sale price could be less than $15 billion, as AT&T apparently intends to retain a stake in DirecTV.)

Top bidders included investment firms Churchill Capital and TPG. "Apollo Global Management, long seen by many as the front-runner, submitted a bid valuing the business at less than $15 billion," the Journal wrote, citing its own anonymous sources. The Journal said the auction is in a late stage and that a sale agreement could be reached in early 2021.

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These tires work better in snow thanks to 3D printing

Additive manufacturing helps create 3D “sipes” that open and close as you drive.

A closeup of Bridgestone's latest Blizzak tire in its natural environment.

Monday marks the official start of winter here in the US. Not that the weather needs the calendar's permission; many parts of the country started seeing snow weeks ago. And, of course, you don't need to wait for December 21 to swap over to winter tires. For one thing, the sticky compounds used in summer performance tires aren't designed to work when the mercury drops below 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7.2°C), and that can happen well before the ground disappears beneath a layer of snow.

"That has to do with the glass transition temperature of the compounds. The compounds get harder as the ambient temperatures get cooler, and winter tires are designed for a much lower range and temperature," explained Dale Harrigle, chief engineer at Bridgestone.

That's partly down to the mixture that makes up a winter tire. "We're using silica tread compounds in our dedicated winter products. We can tune the dedicated winter products to have good grip at lower temperatures without significantly affecting the rolling resistance we would have 20 years ago. So I believe a lot of the compound and material technology is what's enabled some of those leaps in performance," Harrigle told me.

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