Koalitionsvertrag: Zeitenwende bei der IT-Sicherheit

In der Ampelkoalition deuten sich große Veränderungen bei der IT-Sicherheit an. Wir haben uns den Koalitionsvertrag genauer angeschaut. Eine Analyse von Friedhelm Greis (Security, Vorratsdatenspeicherung)

In der Ampelkoalition deuten sich große Veränderungen bei der IT-Sicherheit an. Wir haben uns den Koalitionsvertrag genauer angeschaut. Eine Analyse von Friedhelm Greis (Security, Vorratsdatenspeicherung)

The best smartwatch and fitness tracker deals for Cyber Monday

Many of our top wearable picks are seeing strong discounts this week.

The Garmin Forerunner 945 LTE main screen

Enlarge / The Garmin Forerunner series is a top choice for runners. (credit: Corey Gaskin)

(Update 11/29/21 11:20 am EST): With Cyber Monday now in motion, we've made sure our guide to the best wearable deals we can find is up to date.

The Black Friday barrage has officially turned into a Cyber Monday avalanche. We're continuously curating a big list of the best deals we can find, but among the discounts so far, we've spotted a number of worthwhile deals on smartwatches and fitness trackers we've previously recommended, including several picks from our recently updated guide to the best smartwatches. And if you're already strapped up with a tracker and looking for the next great way to use it, we're also seeing a few good deals on higher-end fitness machines we can vouch for.

In any event, to help you sort through the holiday shopping noise, we've highlighted a few fitness tracker and smartwatch deals that we think are particularly worth your time below.

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Microbiologists have cracked the case of Shedd Aquarium’s missing medicines

An antiparasitic drug called chloroquine kept vanishing from water in quarantine habitat.

The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago partnered with microbiologists at Northwestern University to find out why chloroquine kept disappearing from the water in the quarantine habitat.

Enlarge / The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago partnered with microbiologists at Northwestern University to find out why chloroquine kept disappearing from the water in the quarantine habitat. (credit: lan Schein Photography / Getty Images)

Founded in 1930, Chicago's Shedd Aquarium is not just a popular tourist attraction. Its staff also aids in worldwide conservation efforts and conducts essential research on animal health and behavior, nutrition, genetics, aquatic filtration, and molecular and microbial ecology. Over the last four years, those staffers have been puzzled by the mysterious disappearance of an antiparasitic drug routinely added to the water in the aquarium's quarantine habitat. Now, with the help of microbiologists at Northwestern University, they've cracked the case. The culprits: some 21 members of a family of microbes who were munching regularly on the medicine in the water, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

The aquarium's Center for Conservation and Research includes an Animal Care and Science Division, with a state-of-the-art animal hospital for monitoring the health of all the animals in the exhibits and treating them as necessary. (If you want to know how to give an electric eel an MRI, the center's team has you covered.)

Since 2015, the center has been working on a special research project investigating aquarium microbiomes. Among other topics, the project involves studying microbial communities in aquarium bio-filters. Such closed aquatic systems can quickly become toxic, thanks to ammonia waste from the fish, and certain microbial communities can help keep those levels in check. But other microbes are less beneficial, as evidenced by the Case of the Missing Chloroquine.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Microbiologists have cracked the case of Shedd Aquarium’s missing medicines

An antiparasitic drug called chloroquine kept vanishing from water in quarantine habitat.

The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago partnered with microbiologists at Northwestern University to find out why chloroquine kept disappearing from the water in the quarantine habitat.

Enlarge / The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago partnered with microbiologists at Northwestern University to find out why chloroquine kept disappearing from the water in the quarantine habitat. (credit: lan Schein Photography / Getty Images)

Founded in 1930, Chicago's Shedd Aquarium is not just a popular tourist attraction. Its staff also aids in worldwide conservation efforts and conducts essential research on animal health and behavior, nutrition, genetics, aquatic filtration, and molecular and microbial ecology. Over the last four years, those staffers have been puzzled by the mysterious disappearance of an antiparasitic drug routinely added to the water in the aquarium's quarantine habitat. Now, with the help of microbiologists at Northwestern University, they've cracked the case. The culprits: some 21 members of a family of microbes who were munching regularly on the medicine in the water, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

The aquarium's Center for Conservation and Research includes an Animal Care and Science Division, with a state-of-the-art animal hospital for monitoring the health of all the animals in the exhibits and treating them as necessary. (If you want to know how to give an electric eel an MRI, the center's team has you covered.)

Since 2015, the center has been working on a special research project investigating aquarium microbiomes. Among other topics, the project involves studying microbial communities in aquarium bio-filters. Such closed aquatic systems can quickly become toxic, thanks to ammonia waste from the fish, and certain microbial communities can help keep those levels in check. But other microbes are less beneficial, as evidenced by the Case of the Missing Chloroquine.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Daily Deals (11-24-2021)

Pretty much every major PC game store seems to be running a fall/holiday/Black Friday sale, which means that it’s a pretty good time to stock up on some games to play over the holiday weekend or beyond. And Hulu is offering subscriptions for just $1 per month for the first year for folks willing to […]

The post Daily Deals (11-24-2021) appeared first on Liliputing.

Pretty much every major PC game store seems to be running a fall/holiday/Black Friday sale, which means that it’s a pretty good time to stock up on some games to play over the holiday weekend or beyond.

And Hulu is offering subscriptions for just $1 per month for the first year for folks willing to put up with ads (the ad-free tier is still $13 per month). And if you’re in the market for a laptop, Best Buy has a bunch on sale, including an HP Envy x360 13″ convertible with an OLED display and an Intel Core i7-1195G7 processor for $750.

Hulu

Here are some of the day’s best deals.

PC Games

Laptops

Downloads & Streaming

Networking

Other

The post Daily Deals (11-24-2021) appeared first on Liliputing.

Amazon is nearing a deal to make a Mass Effect TV series

Show would continue fantasy/sci-fi focus with Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings.

A galaxy

Enlarge / The galactic setting of Mass Effect, as seen in the teaser trailer for the next game in the series. (credit: EA)

Amazon is nearing a deal with Electronic Arts to develop a TV series for the Prime Video streaming service based on the beloved Mass Effect video game franchise.

The revelation can be found buried midway through a recent Deadline article about the performance of the recent Wheel of Time series premiere on Prime Video and Amazon's overall programming strategy.

Specifically, the piece dives into Amazon's focus on genres like fantasy to drive viewers and says that will be a focus for Prime Video moving forward. "You will see us continuing to invest in fantasy genre of all kinds, we have a genre-focused team on the ground in Studios who work tirelessly with our creative partners on those slates, and you can look forward to more," Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke told Deadline.

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FitGirl Game Repacker May Be The Most Productive Pirate Online Today

FitGirl is best known online for “repack” releases that allow people to download pirated videogames using minimal bandwidth. Aside from the massive popularity of the repacker’s website is the sheer volume of output from what is believed to be a one-person team. In October, FitGirl repacked 157 games, around five videogames every single day.

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

Fitgirl RepacksDownloading pirated copies of videogames from the internet has been a thing for around three decades already but today’s scene stands apart from the earliest days of the web.

Where games of a few kilobytes once ruled the waves, these days files reaching tens of gigabytes are not unusual. Even now, not everyone has the bandwidth or time available to dedicate to grabbing these releases. Perhaps unsurprisingly though, people always step in to provide a way.

FitGirl is arguably the most famous videogame “repacker” in the world today. Of Russian origins and using the likeness of Amélie, FitGirl releases typically offer everything the average videogame pirate needs – games with protections removed (or bypassed), delivered via torrents, in a much smaller file size than the original.

With tens of millions of visits per month, FitGirl’s torrent index is one of the most popular around and is only growing in popularity. In part, that’s due to FitGirl’s popularity but also the quality of their releases. What isn’t mentioned often, however, is the sheer number of releases made by what is believed to be a single-person operation.

The Amelie Report October 2021

In what will hopefully become a regular feature detailing FitGirl’s work, in recent days the ‘Amelie Report’ for October 2021 was published on FitGirl’s site. It provides a unique insight not only into FitGirl’s releases but what appears to be an almost unhealthy dedication to the art of repacking and releasing.

In the month of October alone, FitGirl repacked an astonishing 157 games, which averages out to about five games every single day. An impressive 82% of those repacks (128) were of new games while 29 were updated titles.

“The source size of all releases, most of which are scene ISOs, is equal to 1370 GB (1.33 TB), which unpack to a size of 1905 GB (1.86 TB). The average unpacked size of the game comes to about 8.7 GB, while the median size is only 5.1 GB. Median here means that half of the games are larger than 5.1 GB and the rest half are smaller,” FitGirl reveals.

“When packed, those games take up from 698 GB to 808 GB, depending on selected components, which is basically half of the scene release sizes. The minimum average repack size comes to about 4.5 GB, while the median size is only 1.9 GB.”

In short and in broad terms, after pirated games are released by the original pirate groups, FitGirl’s repacking skills mean that they are redistributed to the masses more quickly and efficiently.

Repack Release Examples

The largest game repack released by FitGirl in October was Conan Exiles: Complete Edition, which began life as a 105GB file but after processing was cut down to just 45.5GB. The smallest was CADE PRIME which from a lofty 730MB was crunched down to 220MB. The size difference between games and their repacks can differ wildly though.

“The worst compression ratio recorded is for Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (9.5 GB –> 7.8 GB, only 17.9% saved), while the best result recorded is for Boomerang X (10.8 GB –> 859 MB), with a whopping amount of 92% traffic saved,” FitGirl reports.

Compression / Decompression

When FitGirl obtains releases and goes about the packing processes, plenty of things need to be done. Original ISOs have to be unpacked, analyzed, prepared and compressed, for example. FItGirl says that the overall processing speed is carried out at a rate of 63.5GB of data per day with compression writing speed taking place at roughly half that.

Importantly, when FitGirl releases are obtained by users, work has to be carried out on that end too. All of the compression has to be reversed on the users’ machines (similar to an automated unZIPping) and the overall time spent can be significant and heavily dependant on the hardware available.

“[S]tats show that the average repack installation time on a 16-threaded PC [with at least 16GB RAM] is 4 minutes 20 seconds with median timing being even lower, that is only 2 minutes. For slower machines [4-threaded CPU with 8GB of RAM], those numbers are 9 and 3 minutes respectively. Of course, there are slow installations (Killing Floor 2 will be killing your PC for two hours on a 4-threaded CPU), but average numbers are pretty low,” FitGirl explains.

Also, if users have a laptop rather than a desktop machine, FitGirl says that the installation time can be increased by a factor of 2 but that isn’t the only bottleneck.

“If you have an active antivirus, then multiply it by a factor of 1.2-2, but if you have an aggressive antivirus which checks ALL read/write data on the fly, then multiply it by a factor of 2-4. Yes, you guessed it right, being dumb is costly in 2021,” FitGirl adds.

While running an antivirus might slow down FitGirl repack game installations, turning off security tools isn’t generally advised for the average user. Then again, FitGirl is certainly not the average user, not by a long shot.

‘Amélie’ is probably the busiest and most productive gaming pirate online today and as things stand, there are no signs of a slowdown.

The full list of games released by FitGirl in October can be found here

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