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Hackers have been finding ways for years to run the classic PC game DOOM on devices you wouldn’t expect. But DOOM hacker kgsws has taken things to a whole new yo dawg level by finding a way to run DOOM inside of… a game of DOOM. To see how…
Hackers have been finding ways for years to run the classic PC game DOOM on devices you wouldn’t expect. But DOOM hacker kgsws has taken things to a whole new yo dawg level by finding a way to run DOOM inside of… a game of DOOM. To see how that happened, check out the video […]
The post Lilbits: Windows 12 in 2024, Jasper Lake mini PCs, and you know what else can run DOOM? DOOM. appeared first on Liliputing.
Despite a significant Achilles’ heel, mixers are seeing unprecedented demand.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
The amount of cryptocurrency flowing into privacy-enhancing mixer services has reached an all-time high this year as funds from wallets belonging to government-sanctioned groups and criminal activity almost doubled, researchers reported on Thursday.
Mixers, also known as tumblers, obfuscate cryptocurrency transactions by creating a disconnect between the funds a user deposits and the funds the user withdraws. To do this, mixers pool funds deposited by large numbers of users and randomly mix them. Each user can withdraw the entire amount deposited, minus a cut for the mixer, but because the coins come from this jumbled pool, it's harder for blockchain investigators to track precisely where the money went.
Some mixers provide additional obfuscation by allowing users to withdraw funds in differing amounts sent to different wallet addresses. Others try to conceal the mixing activity altogether by changing the fee on each transaction or varying the type of deposit address used.
System76 is a company that’s best known for selling Linux PCs, but last year the company entered the peripheral market with the introduction of a configurable keyboard with open source firmware and software. With a $285 starting price, the Launc…
System76 is a company that’s best known for selling Linux PCs, but last year the company entered the peripheral market with the introduction of a configurable keyboard with open source firmware and software. With a $285 starting price, the Launch Keyboard clearly isn’t for everyone. Now there’s a (slightly) more affordable option. The new System76 […]
The post System76 Launch Lite is a smaller, cheaper keyboard with open source firmware and hardware (but it’s still not cheap) appeared first on Liliputing.
New rewards program shuns blockchain; other Sony divisions have different NFT stances.
Enlarge / Sony has taken steps to allay hex-shaped NFT fears about its new "rewards" service. (credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Sam Machkovech)
On Thursday, Sony Interactive Entertainment posted a surprise announcement about a new service coming to PlayStation consoles. Most of the details about the new "PlayStation Stars" initiative, which resembles other gaming services' "rewards" perks, sound promising, but at Ars Technica, Sony's choice of a two-word phrase instantly put fear into our hearts: "digital collectibles."
Thankfully, members of the SIE PR team were quick to the draw with an email reply to allay our fears: No, this is not Sony's stab at NFTs.
The new service, slated to launch "later this year," will cost nothing to join and will exist outside the PlayStation Plus subscription family. PlayStation Stars, as vaguely described in Sony's Thursday announcement, revolves around a soup of connected concepts, but on its face, it basically resembles the Microsoft Rewards system in the modern Xbox console family. The TL;DR version: get digital rewards for playing video games.
Amazon Prime Day has come and gone, but you can still score some pretty good deals on laptops, tablets, and other devices today from Amazon and beyond. Here are some of the day’s best deals. Downloads & Streaming Wonder Boy: The Dragons Trap…
Amazon Prime Day has come and gone, but you can still score some pretty good deals on laptops, tablets, and other devices today from Amazon and beyond. Here are some of the day’s best deals. Downloads & Streaming Wonder Boy: The Dragons Trap PC game for free – Epic Games Store Idle Champions of the […]
The post Daily Deals (7-14-2022) appeared first on Liliputing.
Experiments between quantum and classical computers show term’s evolving meaning.
Last month, physicists at Toronto-based startup Xanadu published a curious experiment in Nature in which they generated seemingly random numbers. During the pandemic, they built a tabletop machine named Borealis, consisting of lasers, mirrors, and over a kilometer of optical fiber. Within Borealis, 216 beams of infrared light bounced around through a complicated network of prisms. Then, a series of detectors counted the number of photons in each beam after they traversed the prisms. Ultimately, the machine generated 216 numbers at a time—one number corresponding to the photon count in each respective beam.
Borealis is a quantum computer, and according to the Xanadu researchers, this laser-powered dice roll is beyond the capability of classical, or non-quantum, computing. It took Borealis 36 microseconds to generate one set of 216 numbers from a complicated statistical distribution. They estimated it would take Fugaku, the most powerful supercomputer at the time of the experiment, an average of 9,000 years to produce a set of numbers from the same distribution.
Following a complaint from Japanese publishers and a criminal process in China, a man in his thirties has been sentenced for operating MangaBank, a massive manga piracy site that shut down in 2021. Local authorities found no copyright infringement in China but accepted that the man’s behavior ran contrary to the right of communication to the public.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Japanese manga publishing giants Shueisha, Kadowaka, Kodansha, and Shogakukan are on a mission to disrupt piracy in any way possible.
Late October 2021, a law firm acting for Shueisha filed an ex parte application at a California district court seeking discovery of information for use in a foreign proceeding.
In our initial report we listed several domains of interest to Shueisha, all with a common denominator – connections to huge manga piracy site MangaBank. At the time the site was enjoying an estimated 81 million visits per month, making it Japan’s 44th most popular site overall.
Soon after the publishing of our report, MangaBank went offline. The site’s operator informed TF that his platform had previously been subjected to a continuous ~50Gbps/s DDoS attack from an AS in Japan. MangaBank utilized Cloudflare at the time but the unknown attackers knew the IP address of the site’s backend server. Mangabank never came back online.
As early as March 2021, there were signs that MangaBank’s operator may have had connections to China. Under the country’s e-commerce laws, telecommunication companies and access providers can’t be compelled to disclose the identifying information of internet service users. That didn’t prevent the publishers from finding their target in the end.
In November 2021, Shueisha, Kodansha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa said they were preparing to file a criminal complaint against MangaBank’s operator. The publishers also received assistance from the Fukuoka Prefectural Police, who had previously worked on the infamous Mangamura case.
The investigation eventually led to MangaBank’s operator in Chongqing, China, and a request to Japan-based anti-piracy group CODA to use its office in China to take action.
An interesting aspect of the case is that MangaBank reportedly utilized geo-blocking to ensure that the site could not be accessed in China. This meant that Chinese authorities could not confirm local copyright infringement, leading them to conclude that at least locally, “no actual infringement” took place. CODA didn’t give up.
“[W]hen CODA filed a petition for administrative punishment with the Chinese authorities based on a petition summarizing the enormous damage situation in Japan, its punishment and the importance of detection, and various information, it was accepted. It was done,” the anti-piracy group says.
According to China’s “Regulations on the Protection of the Right to Disseminate Information on the Information Network”, any organization or individual that makes another person’s work, performance, sound or video recording available to the public, must obtain permission from rightsholders first.
According to an announcement on the website of the People’s Government of Wanzhou District, Chongqing, MangaBank’s operator did not obtain the necessary permission so was found in breach of Article 2
“[His] behavior of providing the works of others to the public without authorization through the information network violates Article 2 of the Regulations on the Protection of the Right to Disseminate Information on the Information Network,” the announcement reads.
The administrative penalty handed down to MangaBank’s operator has two components – confiscation of illegal gains (16,409 yuan / $2,427) and a fine for violating the right of communication (30,000 yuan, approx $4,437) – a total of $6,864.
When compared to penalties handed down in similar cases elsewhere in the world, especially in the United States, the penalty seems rather low. However, the average annual pay for employees in urban areas of China in 2021 was 62,884 yuan, around $9,300.
CODA believes that the site caused considerably more damage than this penalty suggests. It says more time will now be spent to clarify the scale of the infringement and any means of recovery available to the rightsholders.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Android 13 is a smaller release after the monster that was Android 12.
Enlarge (credit: Google)
Google is quickly marching toward the next release of Android. The company announced the "final" Android 13 beta yesterday, beta 4, with word that an official release is "coming in the weeks ahead."
After the massive overhaul of Android 12, Android 13 seems to be a smaller release focusing on various improvements and tablet features. A lot of Android 13 is building on the work from Android 12 and the tablet-focused mini-release, Android 12L. There are more Material You color options and more tweaks to the new notification media player. The tablet interface has a new app-drawer button for the taskbar and split-screen drag-and-drop support for notifications. You get more control over apps with a foreground app task manager and a new permission that requires apps to ask for notification access. Under the hood there is some serious virtualization power and support for Bluetooth LE Audio. There's even finally a standard QR Code reader now.
The Android 13 timeline. (credit: Google)
Android 13 solidified a while ago, and this latest release is just about bugfixes. Google notes that the Play Store is ready to accept your Android 13-compatible apps, and if you have a recent Pixel phone, you can enroll in the beta at android.com/beta.
Welcome news for anyone who’s ready to retire their Sony Discman.
Enlarge / Preparing to rip a CD in the new Windows Media Player app. (credit: Microsoft)
If there's one thing Windows 11 has been good for, it has been the renewed attention and useful updates to the built-in apps that ship with Windows. Sometimes this means new features for long-neglected apps, like Notepad and Paint. In other cases, it means bringing back features that old apps lost somewhere along the way, like with Sound Recorder or Windows Media Player.
The latest preview version of Media Player, currently rolling out to Dev Channel Windows Insiders, is in the latter group. In March, Microsoft enabled audio CD playback in the new version of Media Player, something that the old version had supported for pretty much as long as it had existed. And now, Microsoft is rolling out support for CD ripping in the new version of Media Player, presumably so that we can all convert our old Weezer and Matchbox 20 CDs into files that we can copy over to our iPods and Zunes.
CDs can be ripped to AAC (the default), WMA, FLAC, or ALAC files, at constant bitrates ranging from 96 to 320kbps. MP3 support and variable bitrate support, two features that are still included in the "Media Player Legacy" app, are notably absent.
Bis zu 500 US-Dollar günstiger: Seit Wochen fallen die Preise für Grafikkarten, weshalb Nvidia bei seinen Founder’s Editions nun nachzieht. (Nvidia Ampere, Grafikhardware)
Bis zu 500 US-Dollar günstiger: Seit Wochen fallen die Preise für Grafikkarten, weshalb Nvidia bei seinen Founder's Editions nun nachzieht. (Nvidia Ampere, Grafikhardware) 
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