Month: July 2021

Wohin mit unserem Geld?

Zukunftsvorsorge und soziale Gerechtigkeit – eine Replik auf den Artikel über Aktienhandel und Spekulationsblasen von Christian Kreiß

Zukunftsvorsorge und soziale Gerechtigkeit - eine Replik auf den Artikel über Aktienhandel und Spekulationsblasen von Christian Kreiß

Fußball-EM 2020: Das war das Festival des Nationalismus

Nur ein Spiel? Nein, denn wieder haben sich nicht einfach ein paar Fußballmannschaften gemessen, sondern Repräsentanten von Nationen. So gehören Sport und Politik zusammen. Ein Kommentar

Nur ein Spiel? Nein, denn wieder haben sich nicht einfach ein paar Fußballmannschaften gemessen, sondern Repräsentanten von Nationen. So gehören Sport und Politik zusammen. Ein Kommentar

This DIY cyberdeck is a retrofuturistic wearable workstation for hacking on the go

Cyberdecks may have begun as a fictional type of portable computer that hackers could use to “jack in” to cyberspace, but now that technology has caught up to science fiction in a lot ways, there’s a thriving scene of makers who crea…

Cyberdecks may have begun as a fictional type of portable computer that hackers could use to “jack in” to cyberspace, but now that technology has caught up to science fiction in a lot ways, there’s a thriving scene of makers who create real-world cyberdecks. The Кибердек RA01 is one of the more impressive models I’ve […]

The post This DIY cyberdeck is a retrofuturistic wearable workstation for hacking on the go appeared first on Liliputing.

How much shipping can we get through a warming Arctic?

Research discusses the logistic, social and ecological impacts of a warm Arctic

Image of a boat and dock surrounded by ice.

Enlarge / As the world continues to warm, scenes like this will occur for a smaller fraction of the year. (credit: Alexander Ryumin / Getty Images)

Traveling by boat through Canada's Arctic waters is no easy feat. Beyond the ice and the cold, the region is one of the most complex geographies on Earth, containing some 36,000 islands of varying size. But the nature of the Arctic is shifting thanks to climate change, and according to new research, the nautical pathways through the region are likely to become easier to traverse as the world warms and its ice becomes less common.

The new paper projects how navigable the Canadian Arctic will be in a progressively warmer world. The research began in 2017 and was performed in an effort to model climate change in a way that was digestible and useful for policymakers and people living in Arctic communities. "We need to think about indicators at a local scale, or a decision-making scale," said Jackie Dawson, one of the paper's authors and a professor in the University of Ottawa's Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics.

While the paper also looks into the policy and social implications of different warming scenarios, we would be better off if we kept the climate from warming. The likelihood of reaching some of the paper's more dire scenarios "[depends] on what actions we take in the future, is what it boils down to," Lawrence Mudryk—a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada and one of the paper's authors—told Ars.

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Creepypasta and the search for the ghost in the machine

Stories of haunted video games have circulated for decades.

Lavender Town is quite eerie, in fairness.

It was the music, they said, that drove the children to madness. The eerie, detuned soundtrack to Pokémon Red’s Lavender Town contained harmful sonic irregularities played at such high frequencies that only the youngest players could hear them. In extreme cases, these could alter brain chemistry and trigger psychosis—after playing the game, hundreds of Japanese children put down their Game Boys, climbed on to the roof, and jumped to their deaths.

None of this is true, of course. Lavender Town Syndrome is just a legend, a ghost story for the gaming generation. No cases of child suicide were ever conclusively linked to the game’s music—the closest case was a 1997 episode of the Pokémon TV show featuring strobing lights that triggered epileptic seizures.

Stories of haunted video games have circulated for decades. They were more believable before the Internet, when you could still come across a game nobody else knew. Back then, game development was the domain of hobbyists and lone programmers who could create curious experiments and distribute them at computer fairs or yard sales. It wasn’t outlandish, either, to suspect games had secrets: even on a program as unassuming as Excel 95 a particular combination of commands opens the “Hall of Tortured Souls,” a lurid, game-like hellscape within the spreadsheet that displays the names and photos of the Microsoft developers.

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Toomics Reports Its Own Website for Copyright Infringements

Popular webtoon subscription service Toomics is quite active on the anti-piracy front. Unfortunately, the Korean company is not very accurate as its takedown notices target perfectly legal content on Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest and Netflix. Even more bizarrely, Toomics has repeatedly asked Google to remove ‘infringing’ URLs on its own website.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

TOOMICSEvery other week we take a casual look at the various takedown requests companies such as Google and Twitter receive.

The vast majority of the notices are valid and point to pirated material, but mistakes are certainly not hard to find.

These errors come in different shapes and sizes. One wrongly identified URL in a list of thousands is somewhat understandable. However, there are also instances where it’s hard to find legitimate claims to begin with.

Toomics’ Takedown Mess

The latter applies to some of the DMCA notices that webtoon publisher Toomics has sent to Google. The company, which recently teamed up with other publishers to counter piracy, is building a terrible track record.

We don’t even have to dive deeply into the individual takedowns to show that’s something’s not quite right. The overview of the domains that are most targeted by the company, which includes Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest and Wikipedia, speaks for itself.

most targeted

There are plenty of errors we can choose from to illustrate that something’s wrong. For example, in a notice where Toomics attempts to remove ‘pirated’ copies of the webtoon ‘Sweet Bitter Love,’ it targets a film, a BBC series, a book, and a song which happen to share the same name. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

You Have The Wrong Person…

In another takedown request, Toomics tries to go after pirated copies of the webtoon “You Have The Wrong Person”. Instead, it asks Google to remove unrelated URLs including the Wikipedia entry of The Magic Flute, various posts about being in love or married to the wrong person, and dozens of other errors.

We could go on to highlight hundreds of mistakes, but the data speak for themselves. The same can be said for Google’s response, as the company wisely refused to take any action in response to some of Toomic’s takedown notices.

Toomics Targets Its Own Site Too

There is one other thing that stands out in the notices, which we surely want to highlight. Toomics also asked Google to remove dozens of URLs from its own website, Toomics.com.

For example, in the previously mentioned “You Have The Wrong Person” notice there are 14 Toomics.com links that point to the official cartoon. As a bonus, the companies also tried to have the URLs of their own tweets removed. This pattern reappears in several notices and shows that Toomics hasn’t even whitelisted its own website.

wrong

The good news for the webtoon publisher is that Google is good at spotting mistakes. This means that most legitimate links, including the Toomics.com ones, have not been removed from Google’s search results.

However, Toomics is not always that lucky. We also spotted instances where Google did remove Toomic.com URLs. This Jeopardy webtoon, for example, was self-flagged and no longer appears in search results. But they had that one coming. Let’s hope it’s a wake-up call.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.