Month: April 2021

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Activision lawyers diving into action to issue copyright notices for leaked footage.

Activision is using DMCA takedown requests to try to suppress leaked footage of a new Call of Duty: Warzone map that hit the Internet yesterday.

Copies of the leaked footage, which comes as part of a celebrity-filled promotional video for the game, is still available on YouTube, Reddit, and other sites as of this writing. Video Games Chronicle confirmed the authenticity of the leaked footage yesterday, though it didn't cite any specific sources.

This morning, though, VGC reporter Andy Robinson tweeted that his Twitter account had been locked due to a DMCA notice surrounding that coverage. "Still, as if there was any doubt, that's confirmed our story," Robinson wrote. An Activision representative was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

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Between 125,000 and 70,000 years ago, people began to do some very modern things: collecting small objects for no practical reason, decorating things with pigments, and storing water and possibly even food in containers. The oldest known sites with evidence of those behaviors are along the coastline of southern Africa. Today, most of those important sites are right on the coast, but even during the Pleistocene, when sea levels were lower, they would have been close enough for the people who lived there to make use of marine resources.

And according to one idea in paleoanthropology, something about that way of life enabled those early people—or maybe pushed them—to innovate. Their distant neighbors who lived far from the sea supposedly lagged behind the cultural times. But Griffith University archaeologist Jayne Wilkins and her colleagues recently unearthed evidence that landlocked people were just as hip and modern as their counterparts on the coast.

Score one for flyover country

At Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter, there's a layer of sediment dating back to 105,000 years ago and scattered with stone tools. In it, Wilkins and her colleagues found a large chunk of red ocher, worn flat and striated on two sides, as if it had been used as pigment. The rock shelter also held a cache of translucent white calcite crystals, which hadn’t been worked or used as tools; it looked as if someone had gathered up the crystals simply for the sake of having them, or maybe as a ritual offering. Several broken, burned pieces of ostrich eggshell, buried in the same layer, may once have held stores of water.

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A small independent bookstore filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon last week, alleging that the e-commerce giant colluded with the five major book publishers to fix wholesale prices and block other sellers “from competing on price or product availability.”

The suit seeks to compensate independent booksellers for Amazon’s and publishers’ practices and put an injunction on the alleged anticompetitive practices. The named plaintiff is Bookends and Beginnings, a physical and online bookstore located in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. Amazon, which got its start selling books during the dot-com boom, has dominated the retail book market in recent years, selling an estimated 90 percent of all e-books and over 40 percent of physical books.

The current lawsuit targets Amazon’s practices in the market for physical trade books, which is publishing industry lingo for fiction and nonfiction books that are not textbooks or other reference materials.

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  Virgin Galactic revealed its newest spaceship this week. [credit: Virgin Galactic ]

Two developments this week show how US companies are making slow but steady progress toward ushering in an era of space tourism.

On Tuesday, Virgin Galactic released images of its next-generation suborbital space plane. A few hours later, the two final crew members of an all-private mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft were publicly named. None of this is happening as quickly as we might hope, but we are slowly moving toward the day when more and more "regular" people can go into space.

First we'll look at the specifics of these announcements. Then we'll discuss their significance.