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Die Energie- und Klimawochenschau: Über verheerende Fluten, Lindners Phobie gegenüber Neun-Euro-Tickets sowie Antifaschisten und über den dringenden Wunsch, Energiekonzerne zu enteignen.
Also: Homeworld 3, Return to Monkey Island, and a car that connects to Pokemon games.
This gallery of Dead Island 2 gameplay footage is pretty gruesome; clicking through gets more violent from here on out. [credit: Deep Silver / Dambuster ]
Eight years after its public announcement, Dead Island 2 finally looks like a video game—and its bloody, polished gameplay reveal capped off a lengthy Gamescom opening night presentation of video game trailers and announcements.
The open-world zombie survival game, as developed by the British game studio Dambuster, also got a firm release date of February 2, 2023, on current- and past-gen consoles and Windows PCs (via Epic Games Store). It uproots the series from its island origins to a zombie-savaged version of Los Angeles (or, as the trailer calls it, "Hell-A"). The gameplay reveal for this melee-focused first-person game is so ripe with detailed facial animations, massive open-world environments, and gory amputation that we wonder exactly how it will scale down to a platform as weak as Xbox One. Still, the trailer does a solid job emphasizing humor, conflict, and solid voice acting, which might be the production-value spark this game needs to stand out from so many video games about open worlds, zombies, and gory combat.
Gamecom's event didn't have a unifying concept beyond "game studios who paid for premium placement," so the rest of this article will highlight the event's revealed games that stood out, either because they followed up on previously anticipated games or impressed as new teases of gaming fun to come.
Ohio judge says room scans could form a slippery slope to more illegal searches.
Enlarge (credit: Jeff Greenberg / Contributor | Universal Images Group)
As the pandemic unfolded in spring 2020, an Educause survey found that an increasing number of students—who had very little choice but to take tests remotely—were increasingly putting up with potential privacy invasions from schools. Two years later, for example, it’s considered a common practice that some schools record students throughout remote tests to prevent cheating, while others conduct room scans when the test begins.
Now—in an apparent privacy win for students everywhere—an Ohio judge has ruled that the latter practice of scanning rooms is not only an invasion of privacy but a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s guaranteed protection against unlawful searches in American homes.
The decision came after a Cleveland State University student, Aaron Ogletree, agreed to a room scan before a chemistry exam, even though his teacher had changed their policy, and he did not expect it to happen before the test. Because there were others in his home, he took the test in his bedroom, where he says he had sensitive tax documents spread out on a surface. These confidential documents, he claimed, could not be moved before the test and were visible in the room scan recording—which was shared with other students.
Apple’s Self Service Repair program debuted in April, allowing iPhone users to fix their own devices by purchasing genuine replacement parts, accessing official repair manuals, and even renting the equipment Apple uses to fix phones. Now Apple i…
Apple’s Self Service Repair program debuted in April, allowing iPhone users to fix their own devices by purchasing genuine replacement parts, accessing official repair manuals, and even renting the equipment Apple uses to fix phones. Now Apple is expanding the program to cover recent MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops as well. Apple recently debuted […]
The post Lilbits: Making the Galaxy Flip cover screen more useful, another RISC-V chip, Apple Self Service Repair expands to MacBooks appeared first on Liliputing.
Also: The PlayStation VR2 gets a release window at long last.
Sony's DualSense Edge controller for the PlayStation 5. [credit: Sony ]
As long rumored, Sony announced details about its plans to enter the high-end controller game with the DualSense Edge, an advanced cousin to the PlayStation 5's DualSense controller with added customization options and features.
If you've seen or used Microsoft's Xbox Elite Series 2 or controllers from SCUF or others in that market, you'll see a lot that's familiar here.
The DualSense Edge includes all the same features seen in the DualSense, like haptic feedback, but it adds the ability to customize button mapping, stick sensitivity, trigger travel distance, and dead zones in multiple swappable control profiles.
A lawsuit accusing YouTube of operating a two-tier copyright enforcement system is seen by some as a beacon of hope for smaller artists. YouTube’s failure to have the case dismissed was recently publicized in entertainment media, but few outlets addressed the allegations of fraud that have dogged the case from the start. Google’s latest filing offers a comprehensive reminder.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Given the very nature of the platform, right from the start YouTube’s future was never destined for plain sailing across a sea of tranquility, underpinned by promises of equality for all.
YouTube’s many achievements are hard to deny. It has provided the tools for ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things, but not all creators and artists are treated equally. Nowhere is this disparity more bitterly decried than in a 2020 class action lawsuit headed up by Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider.
Even after more than two years of legal action, predicting a ‘winner’ seems premature but making a case for who should win only feels like announcing defeat for both sides.
Alongside calls for YouTube to offer the same anti-piracy toolkit to all artists, not just powerful ones, YouTube said that unfettered access would only lead to abuse of its Content ID system. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the very people demanding a better deal for artists were being accused of serious foul play themselves.
YouTube alleges that Pirate Monitor, a named party in the class action, conducted a fraudulent campaign in order to fabricate wrongdoing and then used that as a basis for its complaints against YouTube. According to YouTube, entities connected to Pirate Monitor uploaded content themselves and blamed YouTube for not doing enough to prevent piracy, to get access to Content ID.
If the allegations are proven, YouTube’s denial of access to advanced anti-piracy tools on the basis of abuse will be instantly vindicated. That should be a major concern to all artists hoping for equal content protection rights, better returns from their work, and an improvement in YouTube’s stance towards smaller creators.
Despite being the key focus of YouTube’s counterclaim, these allegations of fraud are mostly omitted from entertainment media reports. The same cannot be said of YouTube’s recent failure to have the entire legal action dismissed.
The case presented in the class action is not only about access to Content ID, although access to the content recognition system may be its ultimate goal.
YouTube’s motion to dismiss the amended complaint failed on a number of fronts including those related to copyright infringement claims, correct registration and ownership of copyrighted works, and allegations that YouTube removed Copyright Management Information (CMI) from content uploaded to its platform.
While all of the allegations are potentially serious if proven, the court noted that the plausible inference from the CMI allegations is that YouTube removed management information from the plaintiffs’ works with the knowledge that carried a “substantial risk” of inducing infringement.
Removing CMI without permission from the copyright holder is a violation of the DMCA (17 U.S. Code § 1202). It’s also worth noting that when CMI is absent from a work hosted on YouTube, external anti-piracy tools tend not to have the capabilities of Content ID when it comes to identifying infringement.
Describing YouTube’s multiple arguments as “unavailing”, the court recently denied the video platform’s motion to dismiss. As a result, YouTube has just responded to the plaintiffs’ amended complaint, with renewed allegations of fraud back on the menu.
In a Monday filing at a California district court, the companies begin in a now familiar fashion. Not only does YouTube meet its legal obligations, it exceeds them too. Using “best-in-class” processes for removing allegedly infringing materials under the DMCA, its investments include more than $100m on copyright management tools such as Content ID.
Content ID is powerful, YouTube continues. It can automatically remove content from YouTube or block it from ever appearing. Placed in the wrong hands, Content ID could censor legitimate content, enable users to claim ownership of content that isn’t theirs, or even allow users to take revenue that rightly belongs to others. Given the potential for misuse, YouTube restricts access to Content ID.
“Plaintiffs complain that they have not been allowed access to Content ID. But Dismissed Plaintiff Pirate Monitor has clearly demonstrated why it cannot be trusted to use that tool properly,” YouTube’s answer reads.
“As set forth In YouTube’s Counterclaims, Pirate Monitor engaged in widespread abuse of the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown process, going so far as to upload hundreds of videos to YouTube under false pretenses only then to claim, through false DMCA notices, that those same videos were infringing.
“This was apparently a ruse to obtain access to Content ID, and when it failed Pirate Monitor responded with this lawsuit.”
What a proven allegation of fraud would mean for the rest of the lawsuit is unknown but boosting the perception of a moral high ground for artists seems an unlikely outcome. Equally, YouTube would have one less reason to make concessions on barriers to entry, even if it felt that way inclined. That being said, YouTube says that access to Content ID is already enjoyed by the plaintiffs.
Claims by Maria Schneider and plaintiff Uniglobe Entertainment that they have no access to Content ID are wrong, YouTube says. According to the Google-owned platform, agents acting for both used Content ID to generate revenue from their copyrighted works. As far as they claim entitlement to use Content ID, those claims are “badly misguided”.
YouTube denies the allegation “that Defendants and their business model and systems” routinely ignore Copyright Management Information, adding that a paragraph in the amended complaint does not accurately characterize Section 1202 of the DMCA.
YouTube denies allegations of direct copyright infringement, inducement of copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and vicarious copyright infringement.
The company concludes with affirmative and other defenses, including failure to state a claim, safe harbor under the DMCA, fair use, contact provisions, estoppel, unclean hands, failure to mitigate, statute of limitations, plus substantial non-infringing use and de minimis use.
YouTube further objects to the lawsuit proceeding as a class action, citing Pirate Monitor as an obstructive example.
“Pirate Monitor would be subject to the defenses of unclean hands and copyright misuse based upon its fraudulent attempt to use copyrights — including those it did not even own — to leverage access to YouTube’s proprietary systems,” YouTube says.
“While Pirate Monitor has since dismissed its claims with prejudice and is now subject to counterclaims in this action, any other putative plaintiff could be subject to individualized defenses like these that would require considerable Plaintiff-specific discovery and litigation.”
YouTube’s answer and counterclaim, which includes extensive detail relating to Pirate Monitor, can be found here (pdf). The earlier motion to dismiss can be found here (pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Sony bringt eine Highend-Version des PS5-Controlles-Controllers. Der Dualsense Edge hat eine Kabelklemme und Analogstick-Module zum Tauschen. (Playstation 5, Eingabegerät)
Sony bringt eine Highend-Version des PS5-Controlles-Controllers. Der Dualsense Edge hat eine Kabelklemme und Analogstick-Module zum Tauschen. (Playstation 5, Eingabegerät) Widening gap between supported and unsupported hardware makes things tricky.
Enlarge / OpenCore Legacy Patcher lead Mykola Grymalyuk has macOS Ventura running on Macs as old as the 2008 Mac Pro tower. (credit: Mykola Grymalyuk)
Skirting the official macOS system requirements to run new versions of the software on old, unsupported Macs has a rich history. Tools like XPostFacto and LeopardAssist could help old PowerPC Macs run newer versions of Mac OS X, a tradition kept alive in the modern era by dosdude1's patchers for Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina.
For Big Sur and Monterey, the OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP for short) is the best way to get new macOS versions running on old Macs. It's an offshoot of the OpenCore Hackintosh bootloader, and it's updated fairly frequently with new features and fixes and compatibility for newer macOS versions. The OCLP developers have admitted that macOS Ventura support will be tough, but they've made progress in some crucial areas that should keep some older Macs kicking for a little bit longer.
In some past years, the hardware differences between "supported" and "unsupported" Macs could be so small that the only thing you'd need to do to boot new macOS versions is trick the bootloader into thinking it was running on a slightly newer Mac. But this approach has gotten more difficult as Apple removes more and more Intel Mac support from macOS.
Twitter’s former security chief alleges execs hid security risks from regulators.
Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)
The pressure on Twitter to talk publicly about how it monitors and removes spam accounts continues to mount.
Reports from CNN and The Washington Post reveal an 84-page whistleblower complaint alleging that Twitter isn’t motivated to track the true number of spam accounts and hid security vulnerabilities from federal regulators.
The complaint comes from Twitter’s former security chief, Peiter Zatko. Zatko is a well-known ethical hacker with the alias “Mudge.” He told the Post that he “felt ethically bound” to report his serious concerns to government agencies. He alleges that he was fired for pushing disinclined Twitter executives to address major security problems—which his complaint suggests “pose a threat” to Twitter “users' personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy.”
Co-creator of core Unix utility, now 80, just needs to run a few more tests.
Enlarge / Brian Kernighan speaking at a tribute to his Bell Labs coworker and The C Programming Language co-author Dennis Ritchie in 2012. Ritchie's visage in dominoes is behind Kernighan. (credit: Ben Lowe/Flickr)
A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago. Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their US visit was going, and dropped off hundreds of lines of code that could add Unicode support for AWK, the text-parsing tool he helped create for Unix at Bell Labs in 1977.
"I have tested this a fair amount but clearly more tests are needed," Kernighan wrote in the email, posted in late May as a kind of pseudo-commit on the onetrueawk repo by longtime maintainer Arnold Robbins. "Once I figure out how ... I will try to submit a pull request. I wish I understood git better, but in spite of your help, I still don't have a proper understanding, so this may take a while."
Kernighan is the "K" in AWK, a special-purpose language for extracting and manipulating language that was key to Unix's pipeline features and interoperability between systems. A working awk function (AWK is the language, awk the command to invoke it) is critical to both Standard UNIX Specification and IEEE POSIX certification for interoperability. There are countless variants of awk—including modern derivations with support for Unicode—but "One True AWK," sometimes known as nawk, is a kind of canonical version based on Kernighan's 1985 book The AWK Programming Language and his subsequent input.
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