July 2021 – Page 36 – news.buyenne.com

Großbritannien: Erste Bilanz der "Freiheitswoche"

Ende der Maßnahmen? Die britische Wirtschaft gerät wegen Arbeitnehmer in Quarantäne ins Stocken. Die Regierung will ab Ende September auf verpflichtende Impfzertifikate setzen

Review: Old is a mostly solid film undermined by jarring twist ending

Director M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film was inspired by a French graphic novel.

A family on a tropical holiday discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly in Old, a new thriller from M. Night Shyamalan.

Director M. Night Shyamalan has a well-known fondness for his signature surprise twist endings. When those twists work organically, we get classics like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. When they don''t—well, if you're lucky, you get something like his new film, Old, in which everything that comes before is sufficiently compelling that you can almost shake off a jarring final twist that feels so forced, it's almost like it belongs in an entirely different movie.

(This being an M. Night Shyamalan film where surprise twists are tantamount, I have taken great pains to avoid spoilers. There is nothing discussed in the review below that has not already been revealed in the film's trailers.)

Old is based on a French graphic novel called Sandcastle, written by Pierre Oscar Levy (also a documentary filmmaker) and illustrated by Frederik Peeters. It's about a group of 13 people who find themselves trapped on a mysterious, secluded beach where time moves much more quickly—so quickly that young children reach puberty in a matter of hours, and everyone will reach old age and die within 24 hours. Shyamalan received a copy of the book as a Father's Day gift, and was immediately touched by how it humanely grappled with the all-too-human fear of aging and the relentless passage of time.

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The best deals from PlayStation’s and Xbox’s latest summer game sales

Dealmaster has deals on Mass Effect, Halo, The Last of Us, Returnal, and more.

A number of big-name Xbox and PlayStation games are on sale this weekend.

This weekend edition of the Dealmaster is focused exclusively on video game discounts for PlayStation and Xbox owners, as both Sony and Microsoft kicked off wide-ranging sales on their respective online stores earlier this week. The former's PlayStation Summer Sale runs through August 18—with Sony promising a second batch of discounts arriving on August 4—while the latter's Xbox Ultimate Game Sale will last through August 5.

These are not the first sweeping sales each company has run on its digital shops this summer, but as before, the new promotions discount several hundred games across last- and current-gen consoles (plus a few PC games, in Microsoft's case). Also like before, most of the offers advertised in each sale aren't great deals, either because the game in question is lackluster or because the discount isn't much lower than the street price we've seen in recent months.

So, as we like to do with the Dealmaster, we've looked through the entirety of Sony's and Microsoft's selections so you don't have to, picking out the genuine deals along the way.

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Wozu Raumfahrt?

Das Interesse an Schritten ins All ist so groß wie lange nicht. Was aber sind die Motive und Ziele dieser Ausflüge? Eine Diskursbesichtigung

Elon Musk: Tesla Model S bekommt ausschließlich Knight-Rider-Lenkrad

Elon Musk hat klargestellt, dass es für das Model S und das Model X kein normales Lenkrad mehr geben wird. Das D-förmige Lenkrad ist Pflicht. (Tesla Model S, Technologie)

Studios Appear To Be Preparing an Assault on UK Movie Piracy

Several more movie studios have quietly joined a partnership with the Federation Against Copyright Theft that bears all the hallmarks of a pending major anti-piracy scheme. It will be of concern to UK-based pirates that several of the companies are already involved in broad litigation activity in the United States against both downloaders of content and those that provide it.

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

Last month we revealed that a coalition of known anti-piracy groups, rightsholders and related movie companies are quietly building a new coalition in the UK.

Data retrieved from the UK’s Companies House database showed that a partnership, previously known as H&B Administration, had rebranded to FACT Administration LLP with key member FACT Worldwide, a division of the Federation Against Copyright Theft.

As of June, FACT Administration LLP consisted of companies that previously sent cash settlement demands to users of ISP Sky on behalf of TCYK LLC, the owner of the Robert Redford film ‘The Company You Keep’. The partners also include H&B Administration (which previously administered that process) plus Voltage Holdings, an entity that has pursued individual BitTorrent downloaders in the United States, plus newcomer Azil Productions LLC – the owner of the movie ‘The Marksman’.

Trying to predict what these companies might be preparing for is problematic since previous requests for information from FACT were not responded to. However, since the companies own movies and are partnering with known anti-piracy groups, a new cash settlement scheme could be a reasonable assumption.

However, there is also a possibility that something bigger is on the horizon.

Several Additional Movie Companies Join Partnership

New data listed by Companies House reveal that the FACT Administration LLP partnership has significantly expanded with the addition of no less than six more movie companies, at least some of which are involved in aggressive anti-piracy lawsuits in the United States.

Wonder One LLC, for example, is a known Voltage Holdings affiliate. The company is currently involved in a lawsuit targeting VPN company LiquidVPN. In that matter, the service’s former and current owners are accused of promoting and facilitating piracy.

Wonder One LLC is also a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against VPN.ht, hosting provider Voxility, and a widely-used Popcorn Time app.

The same is true for After 2 Movie LLC, which in the US is also known as After II Movie LLC. This company appears to hold the rights to the ‘After’ and ‘After We Collided’ movies and is both a Voltage affiliate and involved in the same lawsuits as Wonder One LLC. Another company, After 34 Nevada LLC, appears linked to After 2 Movie LLC and may hold the rights to the forthcoming movies ‘After We Fell’ and ‘After Ever Happy’.

Cinestate Run Hide Fight LLC is also connected to Voltage Holdings and is the company behind the school-shooter movie ‘Run Hide Fight‘. We aren’t aware of the company being involved in copyright litigation in the United States but as a Voltage partner, it’s no surprise to see the Dallas-based entity involved here.

Another company to join the coalition is Right Angle Productions LLC. There isn’t much public information on the business entity but it appears to hold the rights to the Aaron Paul movie ‘Adam’. The role of Hollywood-based H Films Inc is less clear.

So What is The Plan?

As we wrote in our piece last month, it’s certainly possible that there is a copyright-troll style cash settlement scheme in the making but as the list of companies expands, other options open up to the FACT Administration LLP partnership too.

While their plans are open to interpretation in advance of any solid legal filings, the fact that some of these companies are suing VPN companies, web hosting companies, pirate sites and apps, plus other related entities in the United States and elsewhere, raises the prospect of broader action than simply demanding £500 from a downloader to make a possible lawsuit go away.

We’ll keep a close eye on developments but if anyone receives any contact from these companies anywhere in the world complaining about copyright issues, we’d certainly like to hear more.

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

Nuclear power’s reliability is dropping as extreme weather increases

A comprehensive analysis shows that warmer temperatures aren’t the only threat.

Image of two cooling towers above a body of water.

With extreme weather causing power failures in California and Texas, it’s increasingly clear that the existing power infrastructure isn’t designed for these new conditions. Past research has shown that nuclear power plants are no exception, with rising temperatures creating cooling problems for them. Now, a comprehensive analysis looking at a broader range of climate events shows that it’s not just hot weather that puts these plants at risk—it's the full range of climate disturbances.

Heat has been one of the most direct threats, as higher temperatures mean that the natural cooling sources (rivers, oceans, lakes) are becoming less efficient heat sinks. However, this new analysis shows that hurricanes and typhoons have become the leading causes of nuclear outages, at least in North America and South and East Asia. Precautionary shutdowns for storms are routine, and so this finding is perhaps not so surprising. But other factors—like the clogging of cooling intake pipes by unusually abundant jellyfish populations—are a bit less obvious.

Overall this latest analysis calculates that the frequency of climate-related nuclear plant outages is almost eight times higher than it was in the 1990s. The analysis also estimates that the global nuclear fleet will lose up 1.4 percent—about 36 TWh—of its energy production in the next 40 years, and up to 2.4 percent, or 61 TWh, by 2081-2100.

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