Month: October 2021

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | designer491)

Cloudflare is not liable for the copyright infringement of websites that use its content-delivery and security services, a federal judge ruled yesterday.

Cloudflare was sued in November 2018 by Mon Cheri Bridals and Maggie Sottero Designs, two wedding dress manufacturers and sellers that alleged Cloudflare was guilty of contributory copyright infringement because it didn't terminate services for websites that infringed on the dressmakers' copyrighted designs. The companies sought a jury trial, but Judge Vince Chhabria yesterday granted Cloudflare's motion for summary judgment in a ruling in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Chhabria noted that the dressmakers have been harmed "by the proliferation of counterfeit retailers that sell knock-off dresses using the plaintiffs' copyrighted images," and that they have "gone after the infringers in a range of actions, but to no avail—every time a website is successfully shut down, a new one takes its place." Chhabria continued:

Enlarge / While the term "bushmeat" has regional connotations, Indigenous hunting goes on around the globe. (credit: Yuri Smityuk / Getty Images)

Hunting, capturing, and eating wild meat comes with its share of risks, both in terms of environmental and human health. The consumption of bushmeat—a term that can be applied to meat from a long roster of wild animals around the world—for instance, can involve endangered species being killed, either accidentally or on purpose. The practice has untapped potential, but we need to strike a balance between sustainable consumption, ecology, and human traditions and livelihoods to get the most out of it, new research suggests.

A team led by Martin Nielsen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s department of food and resource economics, pored over 49 studies about wild meat for their paper. The source material, published between 1973 and 2019, tried to quantify how much wild meat, including many species of mammals and birds, contributed to the diets of a total of 150,000 people living in the Amazonian and Afro-tropical areas. Mainly, this includes small-scale Indigenous farmers living on the fringes of a forest who consume a substantial amount of bushmeat that they kill in the process of protecting their crops from predation, Nielsen said, though some of the bushmeat does come from hunting expeditions.

In the paper, the team also posed a hypothetical question—what would happen if these regions had their wild meat consumption replaced with cattle or poultry production? The answer: it would produce a larger carbon footprint. This hypothetical substitution would see an additional 71 tonnes of carbon released in the case of cattle, or three tonnes for chickens. The averted emissions largely come from avoiding cutting down trees for the sake of livestock production.

(credit: Rego Korosi)

Who's ready for "YouTube Podcasts"?

Bloomberg reports that YouTube is hiring an executive to "oversee its podcasting experience," which currently does not really exist. YouTube is a popular place for podcast hosting, but the site doesn't offer any podcast-specific features.

YouTube is the most popular video site on Earth, and if you're a for-profit company obsessed with growth, it's actually a bit of a problem that everyone already uses YouTube. The endless quest for more revenue and more watch minutes has led YouTube to expand into areas other than the typical YouTube video.

• 

  Ah, crap, here we go again with co-op zombie action in Back 4 Blood. [credit: Turtle Rock / WB Games ]

2021 is apparently the year of Left 4 Dead spiritual successors, with two co-op shooters catching our attention thanks to their ties to that original Valve series: this week's Back 4 Blood and this fall's Anacrusis.

Back 4 Blood, developed by Turtle Rock Studios, is first out of the gate, with its zombie co-op action now officially live for people who shell out a whopping $99.99 for the game's "ultimate" edition on Xbox consoles and PC. The more patient among you can wait until October 12, when the standard game not only goes live but becomes a part of paid Xbox Game Pass subscriptions.

If you need something to tide you over while waiting to get your band of zombie-slaying friends back together, fear not: we have our early copies of the game, and we're eager to see exactly how it looks as a full retail product. The game can no longer hide behind the safe haze of a "beta test," and we'll see how game balance, technical performance, an unlockable card system, and any microtransactions play out in the real world.

• 

  Welcome back to Key House. [credit: YouTube/Netflix ]

It has been a long, pandemic-induced wait, but the official trailer for the second season of Locke and Key is finally here. This is Netflix's adaptation of the award-winning comic book series written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabe Rodriguez. In our 2020 year-end TV roundup, I wrote that the series successfully brought "the fabled Key House and the darkly fantastical world of the comics to vivid life." I've been eager for more of the story—and we'll be getting a lot more, since the series has already been renewed for a third season.

(Spoilers for the first season below.)

Following the brutal murder of their father, Rendell (Bill Heck, The Alienist), the surviving members of the Locke family—mom Nina (Darby Stanchfield, Scandal) and three children, Tyler (Connor Jessup, Falling Skies), Kinsey (Emilia Jones, Doctor Who), and Bode (Jackson Robert Scott, IT and IT Chapter Two)—arrive at Keyhouse, Rendell's Massachusetts ancestral home. Shortly after arrival, Bode, the youngest sibling, finds a magical key, and then another, and another, each with its own special power. The keys whisper to those who are sensitive to them—and of course, Bode, Tyler, and Kinsey can hear them.