April 2022 – Page 108 – news.buyenne.com

Big triceratops was healing a hole in its head

Hole in its large headplate may have come from combat with a fellow triceratops.

It's difficult to tell which feature of the triceratops is more striking: the two large horns that jut from its forehead or the large frill that extends out from the back of its skull. In the minds of many paleontologists, the two features appear to be related. Scars found in the bones supporting the frill also seem to suggest that the animals engaged in combat with their horns, much like modern animals such as moose—fights that regularly resulted in injuries.

But it's difficult to rule out alternative explanations for some of the holes found in the fossil remains of frills. Some of the holes could have been a result of decay with age or damage after death. Now, an analysis of a triceratops skeleton known as "Big John" eliminates a couple of possibilities by showing that a hole punched through one of the bones of the frill seems to have started healing before the animal died.

Hole in one

The large frill at the back of a triceratops' head is made from large, bony plates that are fused with the bones that do the things we normally associate with skulls, like protecting the brain. They were present in early species in this lineage that lacked pronounced horns and so are thought to have originally evolved for display purposes.

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Things aren’t “back to normal” yet, but GPU prices are steadily falling

You still can’t find things for MSRP, but prices are way down from their peaks.

Graphics card prices remain hugely inflated compared to a few years ago, but the good news is that things finally seem to be getting consistently better and not worse.

To quantify this, Jarred Walton at Tom's Hardware and analyst Jon Peddie pulled together data on current and historical GPU pricing. The only card consistently tracking close to its manufacturer-suggested retail price of $199 is the harshly reviewed AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT, which is currently selling for $220, according to Peddie's data, and $237 according to Walton's. But across the board, prices are way down from their 2021 peaks.

Data from Graphic Speak's Jon Peddie, comparing the current and peak prices for a handful of current-generation GPUs. Note that the RTX 3050 and RTX 6500 XT launched in early 2022; their prices were never as inflated as some of the higher-end models. (credit: Graphic Speak)

Pricing for Nvidia's RTX 3080 demonstrates where the market sits right now—the card is currently selling for between $1,200 and $1,300 on average, and you can buy some models on retail sites like Newegg for as low as $1,000. The cost is still way up from the card's MSRP of $699, but it's down nearly a third from its peak price of $1,800.

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E Ink’s Kaleido 3 bring more saturation to color ePaper displays

For the past two decades, E Ink’s electronic paper displays have largely been stuck in the black and white area. But over the past few years the company has started producing color screens for digital signage, eBook readers, and tablets. E Ink’s version of color still doesn’t look quite as vibrant as what you’d get […]

The post E Ink’s Kaleido 3 bring more saturation to color ePaper displays appeared first on Liliputing.

E Ink’s version of color still doesn’t look quite as vibrant as what you’d get from an LCD or OLED display, but the company has made a number of improvements: the latest is the launch of the new E Ink Kaleido 3 display, which the company says brings 30% better color saturation than the previous-gen Kaleido Plus.

The new screens are still based on the same basic technology: a color filter array is placed atop an E Ink Carta greyscale display. That means a display that’s capable of displaying 300 pixels per inch in 16-shades of grey can display 4096 colors at 100 pixels per inch.

But the improved saturation should make those colors look a little more vibrant – earlier E Ink color displays looked a bit washed out.

E Ink has also updated the front light used for Kaleido 3 displays with a new “ComfortGaze” system that reduces the amount of blue light that reflects off the screen by up to 60 percent, which could make reading at night a bit more comfortable.

The new Kaleido 3 displays will be available in a variety of sizes including 7.8 inches, 10.3 inches, and 13.3 inches, which means we could see it show up in eReaders, tablets, and digital signage soon. E Ink says it also supports high refresh rates, which makes it possible to play videos or animations… although that will likely take a toll on battery life. One of the reasons eReaders and other devices with E Ink displays tend to have battery life measured in weeks rather than hours is that the displays only consume power when the image on the screen changes. If you’re reading a book, that might happen once or twice a minute. If you’re watching a video, it will happen many times per second.

E Ink also recently unveiled new E Ink Gallery Plus display technology with support for 60,000 colors, but that display technology appears to be designed for digital signage rather than consumer devices at the moment.

The post E Ink’s Kaleido 3 bring more saturation to color ePaper displays appeared first on Liliputing.

Higher W boson mass hints at chinks in Standard Model’s armor

It’s big news if this holds up to scrutiny, but other physicists advise “immense caution.”

Illustration of a candidate event for a W boson decaying into one muon and one neutrino from proton-proton collisions, recorded by the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector in 2018.

The Standard Model of Particle Physics has withstood rigorous test after test over many decades, and the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 provided the last observational piece of the puzzle. But that hasn't kept physicists from doggedly searching for new physics beyond what the model predicts. In fact, we know the model must be incomplete because it doesn't incorporate gravity or account for the presence of dark matter in the Universe. Nor can it account for the accelerating rate of expansion of the Universe, which many physicists attribute to dark energy.

The latest hint as to how the Standard Model might need revising comes from a new precise measurement of the W boson by Fermilab's CDF II collaboration. That measurement yielded a statistically significant higher mass for the W boson than predicted by the Standard Model—on the order of 7 standard deviations, according to the collaboration's new paper published in the journal Science. It also conflicts with prior precision measurements of the W boson's mass.

"The surprisingly high value of the W boson mass reported by the CDF Collaboration directly challenges a fundamental element at the heart of the Standard Model, where both experimental observables and theoretical predictions were thought to have been firmly established and well understood," Claudio Campagnari (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Martijn Mulders (CERN) wrote in an accompanying perspective. "The finding ... offers an exciting new perspective on the present understanding of the most basic structures of matter and forces in the universe."

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Google will soon hide neglected apps in the Play Store

Starting in November, apps that haven’t been updated in two years will be hidden.

Google Play is moving forward in its war on old, un-updated apps. The Play Store has had a rolling minimum level for Android version support for a while now; developers have to use a "target API level" that is one year old or newer, or they will be unable to update their apps. Now, Google is announcing a second rolling minimum—if an app's target API level is two years old, the app will be hidden from the Play Store listings. That means users searching for a new app to install won't see abandoned apps.

Android's "target API level" system is sort of like a backward-compatibility setting for Android apps. Every new version of Android is identified by a new API level, which goes up by one with every release. Currently, Android 12L is API level 32, and Android 13 will be API level 33. Every version of Android comes with new features and security restrictions for app developers, but because Google doesn't want to break old apps with every release, the API level system lets app developers "target" the version of the Android features and restrictions they would like to run under.

The target API level doesn't have anything to do with the minimum version of Android that an app will run on (that would be the second big app setting, the "minimum API level"); it just lets apps say, "I am coded with compatibility for Android 12 features and restrictions, if they are available." In this case, the app would get access to the Android 12 features and have the Android 12 security restrictions applied to it, and it would run normally on older versions.

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Axie Infinity raises $150M to help reimburse hacked user funds

Dev promises enhanced security, launches free-to-play NFT-free version.

New funds to replace Sky Mavis' hacked funds are... in the cards.

Sky Mavis, the developer of non-fungible token-based game Axie Infinity, announced Wednesday that it has raised an additional $150 million in venture funding. The company says the money "will be used to reimburse user funds affected by the Ronin Validator Hack," which purged over $625 million worth of crypto from the Axie Infinity ecosystem last month.

The new funding round is being led by major crypto exchange Binance, which has also stepped in to provide Ethereum withdrawals and deposits to Axie Infinity players for the time being. The "bridge" between Axie Infinity's Ronin sidechain and the decentralized Ethereum blockchain remains closed, however, pending "a security upgrade and several audits, which can take several weeks," Sky Mavis wrote.

Beyond the $150 million cash infusion, Sky Mavis said it will use "Sky Mavis and Axie balance sheet funds [to] ensure that all users are reimbursed." The remaining $475 million needed to make the marketplace whole could be a significant drag for Sky Mavis, which raised $152 million last October in a deal that valued the company at nearly $3 billion.

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Daily Deals (4-07-2022)

The post Daily Deals (4-07-2022) appeared first on Liliputing.

The Epic Games Store is giving away two more PC games for free this week. Best Buy is selling an HP Envy x360 13″ convertible notebook with an OLED display and an Intel Core i7-1195G7 processor for $700. And Walmart has a Samsung Galaxy Book Go 14″ Windows laptop with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 processor for just $189. That price also includes a 12-month subscription to Microsoft 365 Personal, which would normally set you back $70.

Meanwhile RAVPower is offering a 2-pack of 20W USB-C wall chargers for just $9 when you use the coupon DNLP50 at checkout.

RAVPower USB-C wall charger (2-pack) for $9 with coupon: DNLP50

Here are some of the day’s best deals.

Apple defies Russian government, restores opposition voting app

Apple and Google removed the app last September, days before a key election.

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's "Smart Voting" app.

Apple has restored an app sponsored by Alexei Navalny, a prominent leader of Russia's political opposition, to the company's Russian app store. Apple took down the app last September, days before Russia's legislative elections, under pressure from the Russian government.

Russian voters went to the polls last September to elect representatives to five-year terms in the Duma, Russia's legislature. Russia does not have free and fair elections, so no one expected Putin's party, United Russia, to lose its majority. But opposition figures like Navalny still saw the election as an important opportunity to register public disapproval of Putin's regime. To help Russia's fractious opposition parties coordinate, Navalny created an app that listed endorsements for hundreds of candidates.

The Washington Post reported that days before the election, the Russian government sent agents to the homes of top Apple and Google executives in Russia, demanding that Navalny's app be removed from the companies' app stores. Russian authorities claimed that Navalny's group was an "extremist" organization. If Apple and Google failed to comply within 24 hours, the government said, their Russian executives would go to prison.

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Bungie vs Fake DMCA Notices: Google Refuses to Hand Over User Data

Chaos ensued last month when fraudulent DMCA notices sent to YouTube resulted in Destiny content creators’ videos being taken down for alleged copyright infringement. Bungie responded with a lawsuit to identify the culprits but at least as things stand, Google is refusing to comply with a subpoena demanding user data.

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

Destiny 2 Last month persons unknown began sending DMCA takedown notices to YouTube, claiming that videos uploaded by Destiny content creators infringed Bungie’s copyrights.

YouTube responded by removing the videos, including some that had been uploaded by high-profile creators and others that appeared on Bungie’s own channels.

With the finger of blame pointing at Bungie, the company began an investigation to discover the truth. It transpired that the notices, formatted to give the impression they were sent by a Bungie content protection partner, were actually elaborate fakes sent from a newly-created Google/Gmail account.

According to one of the alleged notice senders, the fakes were designed to draw attention to Bungie’s failure to properly handle bogus notices sent in the past by other people. Clearly annoyed by the protest, Bungie filed a lawsuit claiming that the defendants willfully sent DMCA takedown notices containing material misrepresentations, a breach of copyright law.

Bungie wants Google to hand over the notice senders’ personal details but a new filing in the case reveals that Google is currently refusing to comply.

Google: Request is Improper and Otherwise Objectionable

Bungie previously said it would send a DMCA subpoena to Google to identify the defendants and hold them accountable for their “tortious and illegal conduct” and deter anyone else “stupid enough to volunteer as a Defendant by targeting Bungie’s community for similar attack.”

Making good on its promise, on March 29 Bungie served a DMCA subpoena on Google demanding any and all information it holds on the fraudulent DMCA notice senders. A few days later, a Google response indicated that the company will not be complying with the subpoena.

“Google will not produce documents in response to the Proposed Subpoena because it is improper and because the request is otherwise objectionable,” a letter to Bungie’s counsel reads.

The problem, according to Google, is that DMCA subpoenas enable a rightsholder to obtain information relating to an alleged copyright infringer. In this respect, Bungie’s request fails.

“Section 512(h) of the Copyright Act provides only for the production of information sufficient to identify an alleged infringer of copyright. To be valid, an application for a DMCA subpoena must include a copy of a Section 512(c)(3)(A) notification [copyright infringement notice] alleging that the target of the subpoena is an infringer,” Google’s reply reads.

“The Proposed Subpoena instead seeks information sufficient to identify senders of copyright removal requests that you allege were fraudulent, not infringers. It also seeks a list of email addresses belonging to correspondents of those notice senders. Section 512(h) does not authorize the production of such information.”

Additional Objections

Google continues by noting that the subpoena fails to provide enough time to notify the affected users and for the users to assert their rights in response. Google allows users “at least 10 days” to object to a data release or inform the company of their intent to file a motion to quash.

Additionally, Google says that the subpoena imposes an undue burden on a disinterested non-party, seeks to obtain information Bungie already has in its possession or could’ve been obtained from public sources, and is unreasonable in several other ways.

“Google objects to the Proposed Subpoena to the extent it seeks information that is not proportionate to the needs of the case, not relevant to any party’s claims or defenses, or not reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence,” Google adds.

Google Offered to Discuss

In its response to Bungie’s counsel, Google said that if there are any questions its Legal Support Department may be able to help. However, if Bungie intends to seek any judicial relief, Google would like the opportunity to “meet and confer in advance of any such filing.” Bungie says that was not possible.

“Upon receipt [of Google’s response], I immediately responded requesting a meet and confer as directed. As of the filing of this motion, I have received no response to that email,” Bungie’s counsel informs the court.

The next steps will become apparent in the coming days but Google is clear that in this case, a DMCA subpoena is not an appropriate route to obtain personal data.

Related court documents can be found here (pdf)

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

Dealership markups are getting crazy, so this site is tracking them

An extra $200,000 on a new Hummer or $20,000 on an EV6—these are terrible deals.

These days, it's hard to buy a new vehicle without giving the dealer an extra wad of cash.

If there's anything harder to buy right now than a new PlayStation 5 or a graphics card, it's probably a new car, truck, or SUV. As we've reported, chip shortages, COVID shutdowns, shipping congestion, and now Russia's invasion of Ukraine have all wreaked havoc on supply chains and supplies of new vehicles.

In the US, the vast majority of car buyers are not accustomed to ordering vehicles from an OEM through a dealership, instead preferring the convenience of taking a car home "from the lot" that day. But as inventory has evaporated, US dealerships have reacted by adding additional dealer markups, or ADMs, to their stock, often to the tune of many thousands of dollars. One estimate of the value of the markups came to $3.6 billion.

Some in the industry have defended the practice, whether due to simple supply and demand or the fact that no one ever complained during the years when dealerships lost money selling cars. But for those of us who don't financially benefit from a $10,000 ADM, it's hard to sympathize.

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Month: April 2022