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Wer sich mit einem Schlagwort politische Kontrahenten vom Leib halten will, muss aufpassen, dass es ihm nicht auf die eigenen Füße fällt
SpaceX founder points out that space is “extremely enormous,” satellites “very tiny.”
Enlarge / A SpaceX rocket ready for launch. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)
Elon Musk has hit back at criticism that his company’s Starlink satellites are hogging too much room in space, and has instead argued there could be room for “tens of billions” of spacecraft in orbits close to Earth.
“Space is just extremely enormous, and satellites are very tiny,” Musk said. “This is not some situation where we’re effectively blocking others in any way. We’ve not blocked anyone from doing anything, nor do we expect to.”
His comments, made in an interview with the Financial Times, came in response to a claim from Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency, that Musk was “making the rules” for the new commercial space economy. Speaking to the FT earlier this month, Aschbacher warned that Musk’s rush to launch thousands of communications satellites would leave fewer radio frequencies and orbital slots available for everyone else.
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A voluntary program is encouraging towns to manage their lighting.
Enlarge (credit: Pete Starman / Getty Images)
There's been a steady stream of worries that artificial lights are steadily eroding our ability to see the stars. And a recent essay published in Science describes how artificial light affects the timing of events such as greening of plants in spring and autumn leaf-coloring. This is one of the many recent studies that demonstrate the direct or indirect impact of light pollution on plants and animals.
“People are getting aware that darkness is no [longer] darkness. This is one of the elements that is contributing especially to the decline in the species variety as well as the decline of biodiversity,” says Jacques Falcón, research emeritus at the French Scientific Research Centre (CNRS).
Now, thanks to a voluntary program in France, more communities are taking steps to limit light pollution.
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Adult content producer Strike 3 Holdings wants an alleged movie pirate to share a copy of his hard drive and cloud hosting accounts. This evidence is crucial to proving the copyright infringements, the company argued. The court agreed that the data is important but put the privacy rights of the defendant first.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Strike 3 Holdings is a familiar name in U.S. federal courts. This year alone the adult entertainment company has filed hundreds of lawsuits against alleged BitTorrent pirates.
While many of these lawsuits have resulted in private settlements, Strike 3 also encountered pushback from some of the people it sued.
In the Central District of California, for example, a “John Doe” defendant denies any wrongdoing. According to Strike 3 the man pirated 54 movies and through discovery it requested permission to inspect a copy of his hard drive and cloud hosting accounts for evidence.
The defendant objected to this request, as handing over a hard drive copy would also reveal privacy-sensitive information such as family photos and content protected by attorney-client privilege.
After hearing both sides, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym ruled on the request this week, siding with the John Doe defendant. While the hard drive and cloud hosting accounts may offer important evidence, they could also expose sensitive personal information.
“There is no question that an examination of these images would reveal information relevant to either proving or disproving plaintiff’s case,” Judge Pym writes.
“But producing a complete forensic imaging of defendant’s hard drives and accounts will also disclose information that has no relevance to plaintiff’s copyright infringement claim, including family photos and personal financial information.”
To resolve the dispute both parties previously suggested alternative options. The defendant offered to use simple search queries in front of a Strike 3 expert, but that wasn’t enough for the company, which noted that the original filenames could have changed.
Strike 3, meanwhile, proposed a protocol that would task their expert with filtering out potentially privileged information, so that this won’t be shared as evidence. However, the defendant objected to this option because it shouldn’t be up to Strike 3’s expert to evaluate potential privacy concerns.
Judge Pym also reviewed Strike 3’s offer but concluded that this isn’t sufficient to protect the defendant’s privacy and confidentiality rights.
“Because plaintiff’s protocol does not adequately address defendant’s privacy, confidentiality, and privilege concerns, a forensic examination of defendant’s devices threatens the disclosure of irrelevant and privileged information,” Judge Pym writes.
All in all, the court concludes that, in this case, it is not appropriate or proportional to give Strike 3 access to a copy of the hard drive and data stored on cloud hosting services.
“Undoubtedly, a complete forensic examination would be a more reliable and thorough way for plaintiff to ensure it has obtained all relevant information. But given what is at issue in this case – the alleged infringement of 54 movies – requiring defendant to turn over images of his hard drives and cloud accounts to plaintiff is not justified,” Judge Pym concludes.
In essence, the court prioritizes the privacy and confidentiality rights of the defendant over Strike 3’s piracy concerns. This means that Strike 3 will have to find other types of evidence to back up its copyright infringement claims.
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A copy of U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym’s order on Strike 3’s request to compel discovery responses is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
We’re on the verge of trying to fully extend the sunscreen.
Enlarge / The multi-layer sun shield is in the process of unfolding this week. Right now the portion extending forward from the telescope body is extended; the sides will come later this week. (credit: NASA)
When fully operational, the James Webb Space Telescope will be enormous, with a sun shield measuring 12 x 22 meters. Obviously, however, it can't be sent to space in that configuration. As a result, the tension of the launch will be followed by weeks of equally nerve-wracking days as different parts of the observatory are gradually unfolded.
The good news is that the process has already started, and everything has gone off without a hitch so far. Meanwhile, NASA has analyzed the results of the initial firings of the observatory's on-board rockets, and determined that it will have enough fuel for "significantly more" than a decade of operations.
The Webb will orbit a position called the L2 Lagrange point, a site about 1.4 million kilometers from Earth. Getting into that orbit requires moving outside the plane defined by the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and arriving at shallow angle so that the Webb doesn't overshoot its target.
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LG will start mass producing OLED EX TVs in 2022.
Ever wish display tech had longer acronyms? LG Display's here to help. Today, it introduced LG OLED EX, a proprietary OLED technology that's supposed to be brighter than standard OLED.
As you may know already, OLED stands for organic light emitting diode. The EX part of OLED EX, according to the announcement, combines "'Evolution' and 'eXperience.'" No, it doesn't make much sense, but it does give the brand a way to make you feel like any other OLED is somehow inferior.
LG Display really is trying to give current OLED owners a reason to upgrade.
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The latest free game of the day from the Epic Games Store is Salt and Sanctuary, a 2D action RPG. Meanwhile if you’re an Amazon Prime Member, you can get a bunch of free games from Prime Gaming this month including Telltale’s Tales of Monkey Island chapters 1 through 5, Frostpunk, and Need For Speed: […]
The post Daily Deals (12-29-2021) appeared first on Liliputing.
The latest free game of the day from the Epic Games Store is Salt and Sanctuary, a 2D action RPG. Meanwhile if you’re an Amazon Prime Member, you can get a bunch of free games from Prime Gaming this month including Telltale’s Tales of Monkey Island chapters 1 through 5, Frostpunk, and Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit.
Or if you’re looking for savings on something that’s more practical than fun, Amazon is running a sale on TurboTax products.
Here are some of the day’s best deals.
PC games
Downloads & Streaming
Devices
Storage
Other
The post Daily Deals (12-29-2021) appeared first on Liliputing.
Shift is a German company that produces smartphones designed for sustainability thanks to a modular design that makes it easy to perform your own repairs if you need to swap out batteries or replace a broken display, camera, speaker, USB port, or just about any other part. Theoretically that should be enough to let a […]
The post Shift6mq is a modular, repairable (and somewhat Linux-friendly) smartphone from Germany appeared first on Liliputing.
Shift is a German company that produces smartphones designed for sustainability thanks to a modular design that makes it easy to perform your own repairs if you need to swap out batteries or replace a broken display, camera, speaker, USB port, or just about any other part.
Theoretically that should be enough to let a phone like the Shift6mq last for years. But hardware support only gets you so far – the €699 smartphone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, which is an older chip that Qualcomm will stop supporting soon, which means that this phone is unlikely to continue getting major Android updates after 2023. But that may be where Linux comes in.
Independent developers have been doing a lot of work to bring support for mainline Linux kernel to devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processors, and in a report for TuxPhones, developer Caleb Connolly writes that the Shift6mq is already pretty close to being usable with GNU/Linux distributions like postmarketOS.
Shift sent Connolly a phone for testing, and before it even arrived Connolly was able to work with Shift developer Alexander Martinz to get postmarketOS with a mainline Linux 5.16 kernel booting on the Shift6mq.
WiFi and audio aren’t working yet, but the display, touch screen, and modem are already working. If development continues at this pace, it’s easy to imagine that by the time Android updates are no longer available for the phone, Linux might be a somewhat viable alternative… at least for some users.
Here it is peeps, #Linux 5.16-rc1 + @postmarketOS up and running on the @shiftphones SHIFT6mq. Most things seem to work (including the modem) But unfortunately WiFi is having some issues.
Thanks a lot to @glundner (@shiftphones) for bringing up initial touch and display support. pic.twitter.com/YqZOr4fQNZ
— caleb
(@calebccff) November 30, 2021
At this point mobile Linux is still very much a work in progress and many folks that are used to the simplicity, reliability, and access to millions of mobile apps that you get with Android or iOS would be disappointed with a Linux phone. But mobile Linux is getting better all the time, and it could be particularly useful for phones like the Shift6mq which are designed with sustainability in mind. It’s especially encouraging to see a Shift employee actively contributing to Linux support for the phone.
The Shift6mq is currently available in Germany for €699 plus VAT and in addition to a Snapdragon 845 processor the phone has a 6 inch FHD AMOLED display, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 3850 mAh battery. It has dual rear cameras, a microSDXC card reader, a USB Type-C port, 3.5mm headset jack, and support for WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5.0 and NFC.
In addition to initial support for mainline Linux, the phone ships with an unlocked bootloader in order to support custom Android ROMs.
via @calebccff
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The Sipeed Lichee RV is an inexpensive computer-on-a-module featuring an Allwinner D1 RISC-V processor, 512MB of RAM, and a microSD card reader for storage. First announced in November, it’s a module that you could theoretically use as a standalone computer thanks to an onboard USB-OTG port, it’s missing a few features like a display output. […]
The post This $5 dock turns the $17 Sipeed Lichee RV into a fully functional RISC-V computer appeared first on Liliputing.
The Sipeed Lichee RV is an inexpensive computer-on-a-module featuring an Allwinner D1 RISC-V processor, 512MB of RAM, and a microSD card reader for storage. First announced in November, it’s a module that you could theoretically use as a standalone computer thanks to an onboard USB-OTG port, it’s missing a few features like a display output.
But now Sipeed is selling a tiny, affordable dock that gives the little computer HDMI and USB Type-A ports, among other things.
The Sipeed Lichee RV module sells for $17 and you can pick up a dock for $5 (or $8 if you want a model with built-in WiFi and Bluetooth support). You can also save a buck by purchasing a $21 bundle that includes a LicheeRV + dock.
Sipeed’s Lichee RV module measures 46.2 x 25mm (1.82″ x 0.98″) and looks a bit like a stick of RAM.
At 65 x 40mm (2.56″ x 1.57″), the dock isn’t much larger, but it expands the module’s useable interfaces by providing an HDMI port with support for up to 4K@30fps output, a 40-pin header with GPIO and power switches, among other things, plus headers and connectors that you can use for speakers, microphones, and more. There’s also an RGB LED light and a reset button.
The $8 version of the board has a Realtek RTL8723DS wireless chip with support for dual-band 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2.
Sipeed says the Lichee RV has at least some support for Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Tina Linux, RustSBI, and OpenWRT, but the only operating system that supports keyboard input so far is Debian, suggesting that some of the others are still very much works in progress.
You can find documentation (in Chinese) for the Lichee RV at the Sipeed wiki.
via SipeedIO
The post This $5 dock turns the $17 Sipeed Lichee RV into a fully functional RISC-V computer appeared first on Liliputing.
Ongoing supply chain woes mean more delays for early adopters.
Enlarge / A Rivian R1T showing off its off-road capability. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
With supply chain disruptions messing with the auto industry, it's an especially challenging time for startups like Rivian. After warning of production challenges due to parts shortages early in December, the Illinois-based electric truck maker on Tuesday told some customers they would need to wait another year, until 2023, for their preorders to be delivered.
The delay affects deliveries of Rivian R1T (truck) and R1S (SUV) models with the Max battery packs, which offer a range of 400 miles on a single charge. Those account for about 20 percent of Rivian preorders, according to an email to customers sent by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe and posted to Reddit. The rest of the preorders are for vehicles with the Large pack, providing range of around 315 miles.
"In order to serve the largest number of preorder holders, we will be prioritizing building the Adventure Package with Large pack battery during the next year," wrote Scaringe. "Explore Package preorders and vehicles with a Max pack battery configuration will follow in 2023. In setting our delivery timing, we optimized our build sequence around the build combination that would support us ramping as quickly as possible and therefore have the largest possible positive climate impact."
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