Month: May 2022

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A hack on police servers in China’s Xinjiang region has yielded thousands of graphic images and videos of Uighur detainees suffering in detention camps in one of the starkest accounts yet of the ongoing humanitarian crisis caused by the country’s persecution of ethnic minorities.

The images are accompanied by training manuals, detailed police work rosters, and instructions for guarding the camps. Using a euphemism to describe inmates, one document states: “If students do not respond to warning shots and continue to try to escape, the armed police shoot to kill,” the BBC reported. Images show one prisoner in an iron torture device known as a tiger chair, which immobilizes the arms. Der Spiegel, one of the other outlets that published the tranch of hacked photos and documents, said it confirmed their authenticity in part by analyzing GPS data included in some of the images.

“The material is unprecedented on several levels,” Dr. Adrian Zenz, director and senior fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who obtained the files and shared them with news outlets, wrote on Twitter. His thread provided a broad overview of the leaked materials that included “high-level speeches, implicating top leadership and containing blunt language,” “camp security instructions, far more detailed than China Cables [that] describe heavily armed strike units with battlefield assault rifles,” and other evidence of Uighur oppression at the hands of the Chinese government.

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Misinformation posing as news has been a problem that only got worse with the ease of publishing on the Internet. But the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have raised it to new levels, driving lots of attention to rumors, errors, and outright falsehoods. Given the magnitude of the threat, there would seem to be a premium placed on ensuring the accuracy of any pandemic information. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

It's unlikely there will be a single explanation for why that was the case. But researchers based in Paris have looked into the dynamics of pandemic news and found a potential contributor: Unreliable news sources were better at producing content that matched what readers were looking for.

Supply and demand

The researchers behind the new work treated the news ecosystem as a function of supply and demand. The audience—in this case, the Italian public—is interested in obtaining answers to specific questions or details on a topic. News sources attempt to satisfy that demand. Complicating this relationship, the news ecosystem includes organizations that don't produce quality information. Poor reporting can be due to carelessness or to satisfy an agenda separate from providing news.

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  The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a stealth action-adventure game. [credit: Daedalic Entertainment ]

It's been quite a while since we've had a new, triple-A Lord of the Rings game, but that's going to change on September 1, according to developer and publisher Daedalic Entertainment.

"Story-driven action-adventure game" The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will ship this fall on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. A Nintendo Switch version will arrive later in the year. Announced in 2019, the game was initially planned for a 2021 release, but it was delayed to 2022, and this is the first time we have a firm date for it.

Based on a gameplay video released last year, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum appears to be a stealth game like Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell, or Metal Gear Solid. Like Assassin's Creed, it will involve a fair bit of climbing and platforming. But unlike recent stealth games, it will be a linear affair rather than an open world. It follows the (mostly) untold story of Gollum's activities during the book The Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo and company were traveling from The Shire eastward to Rivendell, Moria, and beyond.

Enlarge / We've come to expect controversial styling from BMW, but the iX's face is starting to grow on me. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

These days, carmakers are in a bit of a quandary. For generations, the industry has evolved and refined its products, and now it’s time to throw away that knowledge as it pertains to internal combustion technology and learn all new things about electric powertrains. This feeling must be particularly acute in the more specialized corners of the industry, like the go-fast merchants responsible for those factory-built, souped-up sedans and SUVs with badges that read AMG, Blackwing, and the like.

BMW M is arguably the most famous, having just celebrated its 50th anniversary this past week. For decades, since the mid-engined BMW Turbo concept of 1972, the tricolor badge has been a byword for sharp handling and plenty of power, usually delivered by a peach of an engine. But the future is electrified, even at M, which is why we were in Berlin to try out its latest creation, a tweaked version of BMW’s latest electric SUV, the 2023 iX M60.

BMW's M has just celebrated its 50th anniversary by debuting an M4 CSL. But it has also just released another new M car, the iX M60. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

We had our first taste of the iX last summer. It's a controversial-looking thing, as with so many of BMW's more recent creations, and it's best thought of as an all-electric alternative to the more conventional X5 SUV. But the engineers at M have now gotten their hands on the iX, having already worked their magic on the i4 M50.