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Der neue britische Premier ist ein Verfechter einer digitalen Zentralbankwährung. Das liegt auch an seinen Verbindungen zum Finanz- und Philanthrokapitalismus. Warum das Projekt nicht zu mehr Freiheit führt. (Teil 1)
This summer news broke that Facebook parent company Meta was planning to shift the focus of its smart display division to enterprise products rather than continuing to focus on consumer devices like the Meta Portal lineup. Now it looks like Meta is ex…
This summer news broke that Facebook parent company Meta was planning to shift the focus of its smart display division to enterprise products rather than continuing to focus on consumer devices like the Meta Portal lineup. Now it looks like Meta is exiting the smart display business altogether. The company announced it was laying off […]
The post Meta pulls the plug on its Portal smart display business appeared first on Liliputing.
Uptake of flu shots is lagging this year, CDC says.
The US continues to see a dramatic and early surge in respiratory illnesses, which is hitting young children particularly hard and setting records for the decade.
The Southeast region is the most affected by the surge, which is driven by cases of flu, RSV (respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus), and other seasonal respiratory viruses. Seven southern states—Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia—have reached the highest level of respiratory-illness activity on the scale from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The states are colored a deep purple on the national map, representing the highest of sub-level of "Very High" activity.
Overall, 25 states are experiencing "High" or "Very High" levels of respiratory illness activity, while six have reached the moderate category.
Automation features make LockBit one of the more destructive pieces of ransomware.
Federal prosecutors on Thursday charged a dual Russian and Canadian national for his alleged participation in a global campaign to spread ransomware known as LockBit.
Mikhail Vasiliev, 33, of Bradford, Ontario, Canada, was taken into custody in late October by authorities in Ontario, officials at Interpol said. He is now in custody in Canada awaiting extradition to the US.
Federal prosecutors alleged Vasiliev helped infect networks around the world with LockBit. Officials with Europol said he is among the law enforcement group’s highest-value targets because of the large number of high-profile ransomware attacks he was involved in.
One of PC gaming’s proudest new franchises is going big.
Enlarge / Concept art for Control 2. (credit: Remedy Entertainment)
Control 2, the sequel to the 2019 third-person shooter that showcased many high-end gaming PCs, has been announced by developer Remedy Entertainment in a blog post.
It's just entering pre-production, and it has no release date, but the announcement sets up some high expectations. The game's "initial" development budget is 50 million euros (currently around $52 million), suggesting that this will be a triple-A, big-budget action game at a large scale. For comparison, the first game's budget was just 30 million euros. Budgets for games like this often expand over the course of development, so it's possible Control 2 will cost double or more than Control to make.
Control 2's target platforms are Windows PCs, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Remedy will self-publish the game on the PC, but 505 Games will act as the publisher for the console releases.
Wenn überhaupt, dann lassen die Eliten des globalen Nordens in der Ukraine ihre kolonialen Muskeln spielen. Sie ignorieren die Auswirkungen des Krieges auf 65 Prozent der Weltbevölkerung. Wer verhandeln will, und wer nicht.
Confused artists discover their work is used for AI training by default.
Enlarge / DreamUp AI image generator artwork proved by DeviantArt. (credit: DeviantArt)
On Friday, the online art community DeviantArt announced DreamUp, an AI-powered text-to-image generator service powered by Stable Diffusion. Simultaneously, DeviantArt launched an initiative that ostensibly lets artists opt out of AI image training but also made everyone's art opt in by default, which angered many members.
DreamUp creates novel AI-generated art based on text prompts. Due to its Stable Diffusion roots, DreamUp learned how to generate images by analyzing hundreds of millions of images scraped off sites like DeviantArt and collected into LAION datasets without artists' permission, a potential irony that some DeviantArt members find problematic.
this is how dreamup is being developed. it adds training on non-opt-out artwork on top of the stability diffusion model, which is ALREADY trained using unethically sourced data. they CANT UNLEARN those parts.
— svlt
this whole discussion is not in good faith unless they address this pic.twitter.com/KnQZerCIol(@svltart) November 11, 2022
As we've reported frequently on Ars in the past, Stable Diffusion's web-scraping nature ignited a huge debate earlier this year among artists that challenge the ethics of AI-generated artwork. Some art communities have taken hard stances against any AI-generated images, banning them completely.
“If we didn’t design it to be out there in harsh weather we picked the wrong launch spot.”
Enlarge / NASA's Space Launch System rocket at LC-39B on September 1, 2022. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)
NASA said on Friday that its Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft appear to have survived their encounter with Hurricane Nicole this week without incurring any significant damage.
"Right now there’s nothing preventing us from getting to the 16th," said Jim Free, the engineer who leads the development of exploration systems for NASA. To that end, the space agency is working toward a launch at 1:04 am ET (06:04 UTC) on Wednesday, from Kennedy Space Center. This Artemis I mission will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon in preparation for human missions later this decade.
Free said Nicole produced significant winds over the spaceport in Florida. However, he did not provide precise numbers, nor exact design specifications that the Space Launch System rocket is designed to withstand. However, Free said that at no point was the rocket exposed to wind gusts above its design limits. This appears to check out, based on publicly available data. For example, the National Weather Service reported a maximum wind gust of 93 mph at an altitude of 200 feet at the rocket's launch pad, which is close to, but not above, the rocket's limit of 97 mph at that height (see full SLS design specifications for weather).
Ars chats with series producers Jonathan Nolan, Vincenzo Natali, and Scott Smith.
Enlarge / Chloë Grace Moretz stars as Flynne Fisher, a young woman who may or may not have witnessed a real murder. (credit: Prime Video)
Sci-fi legend William Gibson's 2014 densely layered novel The Peripheral ingeniously combines elements of noir murder mystery, time travel, and the author's trademark cyberpunk futurism. It's those features that make the novel so challenging to adapt for television, but Prime Video managed to pull off that feat with its new nine-episode series, The Peripheral, starring Chloë Grace Moretz.
(Minor spoilers below, but no major reveals.)
There are obviously some key divergences from the source material, as befits a TV adaptation. But as with Gibson's novel, there are two plot lines that eventually begin to converge in the series. The first arc takes place in our near-term future and is centered on a young woman named Flynne (Moretz). Flynne works at the local 3D-printing shop in a small town. Flynne's brother Burton (Jack Reynor) is a veteran of the US Marine Corps' elite Haptic Recon force and suffers from brain trauma resulting from his cybernetic implants. Burton works security for a video game/virtual world maintained by a company called Milagros Coldiron. Flynne sometimes substitutes for Burton, and one day, he asks her to try a new kind of headset that introduces her to a virtual reality so vivid, it seems like she's really there. The twist: She actually is "there," but "there" isn't where, or when, she thinks it is.
A federal court in Seattle has dismissed the hacking and DMCA circumvention claims filed by AimJunkies against game developer Bungie. The cheat seller filed the claim in a retaliatory move after it was sued for copyright infringement relating to Destiny 2 hacks. The order is a clear win for Bungie, but the legal dispute is not over yet.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Last year, Bungie filed a complaint at a federal court in Seattle, accusing AimJunkies.com of copyright and trademark infringement, among other things.
The same accusations were also made against Phoenix Digital Group, the alleged creators of the ‘Destiny 2’ cheating software.
AimJunkies denied the claims and argued that cheating isn’t against the law. In addition, it refuted the copyright infringement allegations; these lacked substance because some of the referenced copyrights were registered well after the cheats were first made available, AimJunkies said.
In May, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly largely sided with AimJunkies. The original complaint didn’t provide sufficient evidence for a plausible claim that the ‘Destiny 2 Hacks’ infringed any copyrights, the Judge concluded.
This was bad news for Bungie but the court did offer the company an opportunity to file a new complaint to address these shortcomings, which it did soon after.
In an amended complaint the game developer added more copyright infringement details and more information on the roles of several key people that are also allegedly involved. That includes James May, who Bungie describes as a third-party cheat developer.
AimJunkies responded to the updated complaint and denied that it broke the law. Instead, it turned the table on Bungie, accusing the game developer of hacking when it allegedly accessed May’s computer without permission. In addition, the cheaters argued that Bungie violated the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision.
Bungie described these claims as false. There is no evidence that it downloaded anything from May’s computer, the company said. And even if it had accessed his computer without permission, AimJunkies failed to argue that any hacking damage exceeded at least $5,000.
Similarly, Bungie also asked the court to dismiss the DMCA circumvention claims as AimJunkies failed to show that the allegedly breached content was copyrighted and that the files were protected by a technological measure.
After weighing the evidence from both sides, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Zilly sides with Bungie, dismissing the counterclaims.
AimJunkies failed to successfully plead a hacking case as it didn’t provide evidence for any losses suffered. There’s also no proof that Bungie accessed May’s computer without permission.
“May has failed to sufficiently allege that Bungie accessed his personal computer and files without authorization. To support his allegation that Bungie accessed his personal computer, May relies on a document that Bungie purportedly produced during discovery in this matter.”
“May, however, does not explain what this document is or how it evidences instances in which Bungie allegedly accessed his computer without authorization and downloaded his personal information,” Judge Zilly adds.
The anti-circumvention claims of May and Phoenix both fail as well. AimJunkies didn’t show that the allegedly accessed files were copyrighted or protected by technological measures, as is required.
“Importantly, neither May nor Phoenix Digital allege that Bungie accessed any copyrighted work,” Judge Zilly notes. “Further, Phoenix Digital has not pleaded any facts to support that its ‘loader software’ was protected by a technological measure.”
The dismissal is a major setback for AimJunkies but the matter is not completely over just yet. Judge Zilly agrees with Bungie that there is sufficient ground to dismiss the counterclaims with prejudice, meaning that AimJunkies won’t have a chance to repair the shortcomings.
The pleading for amended deadlines expires later this month, so AimJunkies has an opportunity to amend its counterclaims and take another shot at Bungie.
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A copy of Judge Zilly’s order to dismiss the counterclaims without prejudice is available here (pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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