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One of the key things that makes a Mac computer a Mac is clearly that it ships with Apple’s macOS software. But back when the company was still making Macs with Intel processors it was fairly easy to install a different operating system – …
One of the key things that makes a Mac computer a Mac is clearly that it ships with Apple’s macOS software. But back when the company was still making Macs with Intel processors it was fairly easy to install a different operating system – Apple even offered its own Boot Camp solution for dual booting […]
The post Lilbits: Open source Linux graphics drivers for Apple Silicon, and Winamp plays NFTs now for some reason appeared first on Liliputing.
It remains unclear what the hospital’s marketing director was doing with the guns.
Enlarge / A health care worker exits the emergency room at Hudson Regional Hospital in Secaucus, New Jersey, on December 11, 2020. (credit: Getty | KENA BETANCUR)
The New Jersey health department has fined a state hospital $63,000 after police discovered a stockpile of 39 firearms—including an illegal assault rifle with a high-capacity magazine—stashed in an unlocked hospital closet.
The firearm stockpile was found on the afternoon of July 18, when Secaucus police were called to the Hudson Regional Hospital over a bomb threat. The bomb threat was later determined to be a hoax, but while police conducted a safety sweep of the facility, bomb-sniffing dogs led officers to the weapons.
The stash included 11 handguns of various calibers, 27 rifles/shotguns, and a Kriss Vector .45 caliber semi-automatic rifle with a high-capacity magazine, which police determined to be an illegal assault rifle. Additionally, they found a 14-round high-capacity handgun magazine. (Images of the stockpile were caught on released body cam footage.)
The KT-R1 is a handheld game console that’s been in development for quite some time, and now it’s finally available for purchase. Prices start at $169 for a WiFi-only model with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a plastic body. But you can …
The KT-R1 is a handheld game console that’s been in development for quite some time, and now it’s finally available for purchase. Prices start at $169 for a WiFi-only model with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a plastic body. But you can pay extra for more memory and storage, a metal cases, and […]
The post KT-R1 is a configurable handheld game console with a 3:2 display and MediaTek Helio G99 processor appeared first on Liliputing.
DNA left behind during a warm period is viable 2 million years later.
Enlarge / An attempt to reconstruct what northern Greenland looked like about 2 million years ago. (credit: Beth Zaiken)
When once-living tissue is preserved in a cold, dry environment, fragments of its DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, DNA doesn't even have to remain in tissue; we've managed to obtain DNA from the soil of previously inhabited environments. The DNA is damaged and broken into small fragments, but it's sufficient to allow DNA sequencing, telling us about the species that once lived there.
In an astonishing demonstration of how well this can work, researchers have obtained DNA from deposits that preserved in Greenland for roughly 2 million years. The deposits, however, date from a relatively warm period in Greenland's past and reveal the presence of an entire ecosystem that once inhabited the country's north coast.
Over the last million years or so, the Earth's glacial cycles have had relatively short warm periods that don't reach temperatures sufficient to eliminate the major ice sheets in polar regions. But before this time, the cycles were shorter, the warm periods longer, and there were times the ice sheets underwent major retreats. Estimates are that, around this time, the minimum temperatures in northern Greenland were roughly 10° C higher than they are now.
AG: Amazon has so far “escaped appropriate accountability” for consumer harm.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
Today, as Amazon dealt with a site-wide outage impacting thousands of customers, the District of Columbia attorney general, Karl Racine, filed a lawsuit against the online shopping giant for deceiving its customer base. In a press release, Racine said that Amazon still needs to pay for tricking DC consumers by “stealing” portions of their Amazon Flex delivery driver tips between 2016 and 2019 and “secretly” diverting millions to “reduce its own labor costs and increase profits.”
Amazon already paid $61.7 million in restitution to Amazon Flex drivers after the Federal Trade Commission investigated. But Racine said Amazon “has thus far escaped appropriate accountability, including any civil penalties, for consumer harm.” In his complaint, filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Racine is seeking, so far, unawarded “civil penalties in connection with the misrepresentations and omissions it made to consumers with respect to these deceptive tipping practices.”
“When a company is caught stealing from its workers, it is not enough for the company to repay the amount stolen,” Racine’s complaint said. “Stealing from workers is theft, and significant penalties are necessary to strongly disincentivize this unlawful conduct.”
Company abandons its plans for CSAM scanning, too.
The advanced data protection panel in iOS [credit: Apple ]
End-to-end encryption is coming to most of iCloud with a new optional feature called Advanced Data Protection, according to Apple's announcement on Wednesday.
Previously, 14 data categories within iCloud were protected. This new feature brings that count to 23, including photos, notes, voice memos, reminders, Safari bookmarks, and iCloud backups of the contents of your devices. Not everything is encrypted in this way, though. Critically, calendar and mail are untouched here. Apple says they are not covered "because of the need to interoperate with the global email, contacts, and calendar systems."
US-based participants in the Apple Beta Software Program can start using Advanced Data Protection today, and it will roll out to more Americans by year's end. If you're outside the US, you'll have to wait until sometime in 2023, Apple says.
Amazon’s Fire tablets ship with a modified version of Android called Fire OS. It’s tightly linked with Amazon’s apps and services including the Kindle, Prime Video, and Amazon Music apps. It also features Amazon’s Appstore inst…
Amazon’s Fire tablets ship with a modified version of Android called Fire OS. It’s tightly linked with Amazon’s apps and services including the Kindle, Prime Video, and Amazon Music apps. It also features Amazon’s Appstore instead of the Google Play Store. But folks have been installing the Play Store on Amazon’s tablets for years. Up […]
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Powerful French movie industry groups have filed a lawsuit against several major ISPs. The action has the ultimate goal of blocking access to a quartet of file-hosting platforms – Fembed, Uqload, Upvid, & Uvideo. This is the first attempt to have so-called cyberlockers blocked in France but if successful, could undermine operations at dozens of other sites.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
As widely reported for most of this year, French anti-piracy agency ARCOM and numerous rightsholders have been using all available tools to reduce the availability of pirate sites.
Questionable reports of unprecedented success aside, there’s no question that France is disrupting piracy as promised. Football, Formula 1, tennis and dozens of other sports, are benefiting from blocking measures available under various processes.
In September, the National Publishing Union, an industry group representing more than 700 members in the publishing sector, announced that a Paris Court (Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris) had ordered the country’s ISPs to implement blocking measures against more than 200 Z-Library domains.
Those domains were subsequently seized by the FBI but left Z-Library itself more or less intact. Nevertheless, by disabling access to Z-Library’s domains, it is now much harder to access the source of the infringing content.
New legal action underway in France may have a similar goal in mind. It targets just four sites but by going after sources of content relied upon by other sites, the overall impact could be much greater.
According to journalist Marc Rees (paywall), the applicants are numerous and showing a clear and united front.
The National Federation of Film Editors (FNEF), the Video Publishing Union (SEVN), the Association of Independent Producers (API), the Union of Cinema Producers (UPC) and the Union of Independent Producers (SPI) are the most powerful groups in the video industry sector.
The targets of the complaint are local internet service providers – Orange, Bouygues, SFR, and Free – and the demands are relatively straightforward. The video groups want the service providers to block access to just four sites – Fembed, Uqload, Upvid, & Uvideo. Together these sites are good for millions of visits every month but the content delivery mechanism is key.
If casual pirates were asked where they stream the latest movies and TV shows for free, well-presented sites featuring movie covers and organized categories would probably top the list. There are exceptions, but most of these sites don’t actually stream anything.
Much like YouTube videos embedded in countless websites, content delivery is handled by remote servers that directly supply video to users, often via an embedded player. Some are dedicated to the supply of pirated content and never take anything down. Others present themselves as responsible actors in full compliance with the law.
The film industry groups suggest this is a facade. They claim that Fembed, Uqload, Upvid, and Uvideo carry mostly pirated content which fuels third party sites. These often provide a Netflix-type experience but not a penny is seen by rightsholders.
The complaint further alleges the existence of payment schemes. Upvid reportedly pays affiliates $22 for 10,000 video views although reports on webmaster forums suggest that getting paid at all can be an issue. A message that appeared on the Upvid.co domain in October offered some kind of explanation.
Traffic to Upvid’s .co domain has been collapsing for some time, but it has many more domains, some with no traffic at all. Others show millions of visits per month, and it appears to be open for business, for now at least.
Fembed also has plenty of domains in storage, unlike Uqload which may only have two. Nevertheless, the latter still draws at least a few million visits per month, with most of its traffic generated by users in France.
These file-hosting sites are not the only content sources available to streaming portals and blocking them won’t end their businesses immediately. However, this is the first blocking action against file-hosting platforms in France and once rightsholders get over the first hurdle, they tend to return for more.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
5 minutes of your time would really help us out. Yes, you! Share thy thoughts.
Enlarge / Cyber man in chrome armor writing answers on a survey while floating on a cyberspace grid, 3D Render, Detailed Render. (credit: Aurich Lawson, DiffusionBee)
Friends, Romans, denizens, lend me your… votes on this survey! It’s been a few years, but the Ars Reader Survey is back to gauge your thoughts on the work we do and the ways we can do it better. This feedback is crucial to how we operate here at Ars; indeed, when thousands of you take the time to complete these surveys, we’d be fools not to take the results seriously.
We would really love a broad cross-section of reader responses. Longtime readers—you know us best, and we love you! But readers without accounts, lurkers, casual visitors—we also want to hear from you.
The survey isn’t long. I suspect most of you will knock it out in under five minutes. We’re asking about content formats, sections of the site, new features you might like to see, community initiatives, and more.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are barely in the rear view mirror, and stores are already starting to line up sales that come close to matching Black Friday pricing for some products… or beating those prices, in some cases. Case in point: you can…
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are barely in the rear view mirror, and stores are already starting to line up sales that come close to matching Black Friday pricing for some products… or beating those prices, in some cases. Case in point: you can pick up an Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet for $55 or […]
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