Just another news site
Krieg ist furchtbar, immer. Die Schrecken des Ukraine-Krieges aber werden instrumentalisiert. Wie die Debatte um eine friedenspolitische Perspektive verhindert wird (Teil 1)
Weder die Ursachen für das Fischsterben wurden beseitigt, noch wurden die Verantwortlichen zur Rechenschaft gezogen. Was Wissenschaftler raten, um eine neue Umweltkatastrophe zu verhindern.
Erst seit dem Ukraine-Krieg realisiert man in Europa die Abhängigkeit vom eurasischen Raum. Russland und China kontrollieren zunehmend Handelsrouten nach Europa. Drohen permanente Konflikte?
It’s “a strong indication that insect minds are far more sophisticated than we might imagine.”
Enlarge / This bee seems to having a grand old time rolling this colored wooden ball. (credit: Samadi Galpayage)
There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Scientists captured bees rolling wooden balls, solely for fun, on video, providing additional evidence that bees might experience positive "feelings."
Many animals are known to engage in play—usually large-brained mammals (like humans) and birds. Now scientists think they have observed genuine play behavior in bees, which were filmed rolling small colored wooden balls, according to an October paper published in the journal Animal Behavior.
“This research provides a strong indication that insect minds are far more sophisticated than we might imagine," said co-author Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London and author of a recent book, The Mind of a Bee. "There are lots of animals who play just for the purposes of enjoyment, but most examples come from young mammals and birds."
Protecting movies from piracy during their theatrical windows is an industry priority but week in and week out, ‘cammed’ copies stubbornly appear online. This summer several unusually good copies were linked to cinemas in the UK, where ‘camming’ can result in a prison sentence. Logically, camming should be incredibly rare, but that’s certainly not the case, far from it.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
When movies are recorded directly from cinema screens, the resulting pirate copy is known as a ‘cam’, regardless of the device used – camcorder or otherwise.
The terms camming, camcording, cammer, and other variations are not exclusive to movie piracy circles though; those paid to monitor and crack down on pirates use them a lot too.
In a report to the USTR in early 2022, the International Intellectual Property Alliance used similar terms more than 130 times when calling out China, Ecuador, India, Mexico, Russia, Brazil, and other countries for not doing enough to prevent in-cinema recording (pdf).
While camming is clearly an ongoing problem for some countries, enhanced security and tough legislation in the United Kingdom should deter even the most determined pirates. In theory, at least.
Early October, the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit announced the arrest of a man in Liverpool “in connection with an investigation into film piracy.” The involvement of the Film Content Protection Agency (FCPA), the Film Distributors’ Association anti-piracy group, left little doubt this was related to camming.
Over the weeks that followed, TorrentFreak was able to link the arrest with an industry report claiming that at least four movies, recorded in two UK cinemas during the summer, had appeared online.
Our report published late November provides more detail and last week an FDA/FCPA newsletter dated December 20 (pdf) confirmed events as reported.
Aside from being recorded in the UK, where an intent to distribute copies online can carry a 10-year prison sentence, the copies were notable for another reason – their extraordinary quality.
This isn’t mentioned by FCPA and we’re still unable to confirm which movies are linked to the case, but the period cited – June to August 2022 – coincides with surprisingly high-quality cam copies suddenly appearing online around mid-June before stopping around mid-August.
Double-whammy events like these aren’t exactly common in the UK, especially given the alleged quality and the obvious threat to the market. However, records show that camming ‘incidents’ in UK cinemas are extraordinarily common, yet receive almost no press.
Camming incidents appear to be covered more comprehensively in annual reports, meaning that overall data for 2022 won’t be available for another few months. In the meantime, the four movies cammed in Liverpool can be added to other incidents recorded elsewhere in 2022.
At Cineworld Dundee (Scotland) on an unspecified date, a staff member identified a customer camming a movie. The title hasn’t been published but in line with FCPA policy, the diligent staff member received an award for her anti-piracy work.
Along with staff in hundreds of other cinemas in the UK, she is likely to have received training and detailed instructions on how to respond to a camming event (pdf).
In another incident earlier this year, a ‘cammed’ copy of Spider-Man: No Way Home appeared online soon after its theatrical release. Forensic investigators linked the copy to a cinema in Leeds, West Yorkshire.
The image below was circulated to cinemas in the UK following the arrest of a suspect. It later appeared in a FCPA newsletter in redacted form. We’ve concealed the suspect’s identity in the original but the text clearly shows that preventing any repeat behavior remained a priority for FCPA.
The image on the right appears to be a still from surveillance footage, one of the key weapons in the fight against camcorder piracy. Data from camming incidents in 2021 shows evidence can also be obtained from less obvious sources.
The Film Distributors’ Association Yearbook 2022 notes that PIPCU, MPA, The Industry Trust, and the Alliance for Intellectual Property, all partner with FCPA in its fight against piracy. The level of camming incidents reported in 2021 shows that the FCPA needed all the help it could get.
“During 2021 the FCPA was directly involved in the professional investigation, intelligence gathering and research of 125 copyright theft incidents in cinemas,” the FDA publication reads (pdf).
Due to COVID-19 lockdowns, the 125 incidents actually occurred over just seven months, the highest number ever reported by the FDA.
“The majority of these incidents led to the offenders being confronted and excluded from screenings by the cinema management. However, the more serious occurrences required swift police assistance, and resulted in five people being arrested and a further seven receiving recorded police cautions for illegal in-cinema activity,” the report adds.
Details on some individual cases can be found in a report published by the UK Cinema Association (UKCA). It notes that online global piracy release groups struggled to obtain content in early 2021 due to COVID-19-enforced closures of cinemas around the world. When cinemas began to open up, pirates picked up where they had left off – including in the UK.
“Two high-impact cases occurred in particular immediately as UK cinemas began re-opening in May [2021], with two publicly available copies of a new film traced via film forensics to two London cinemas only six miles apart,” the report reveals.
“Subsequent investigations revealed that the same offender was responsible in both instances, plus another case in December 2020. Having been identified and traced, he was arrested in July.”
When the UK came out of lockdown, visitors to cinemas and other venues such as pubs and clubs, were required to fill in so-called ‘track and trace’ documents. In the event of an infection, government ‘track and trace’ teams were then able to directly contact people who were in the vicinity and ask them to isolate to prevent the spread.
According to UKCA, the suspected cammer arrested in July completed one of these forms with his details and signed it.
From July 2021, another three cammed movies appeared online and were subsequently traced back to cinemas in London. All of the offenders were identified but efforts to locate them are reported as “ongoing”. Interestingly, the report claims that these cases were linked in some way, despite none of the individual offenders knowing each other.
“In one unusual case, film theft returned to an East London cinema which had experienced high-impact piracy in 2019, albeit this time through a different offender, something which serves as a reminder that this activity can happen at any cinema, no matter how unlikely a target site might seem,” the report concludes (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Nvidia and AMD’s AV1 encoders aren’t yet supported, but it probably won’t be long.
Enlarge (credit: Alliance for Open Media)
Hardware and software support for the royalty-free AV1 video codec has been steadily building over the last couple years. Hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding is becoming standard in more GPUs, phone SoCs, and other hardware, while streaming video services like YouTube and Netflix have begun serving AV1-encoded video to devices that support it.
Open-source software projects are beginning to follow suit, too. The Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) package has been expanding its AV1 capabilities in recent releases, and now the Handbrake video transcoding app has added AV1 support as well. Version 1.6.0, released yesterday, has added support for encoding AV1 video using both CPU-based SVT-AV1 software encoding as well as via Intel's AV1-capable QuickSync video encoder included in its Arc GPUs.
Nvidia and AMD's latest RTX 4000- and RX 7000-series GPUs also include hardware encoding support for AV1, but the software needed to use it hasn't been built into Handbrake yet.
Bill passed the state legislature with overwhelming majorities over the summer.
New York state governor Kathy Hochul has signed the Digital Fair Repair Act into law, months after it had passed both chambers of the state's legislature with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. The bill had originally passed in June, but it was only formally sent to Hochul's desk earlier this month; the governor had until midnight on December 28th to sign the bill, veto it, or allow it to pass into law without her signature.
The Digital Fair Repair Act is the country's first right-to-repair bill that has passed through a state legislature (as opposed to being implemented via executive order), and has been hailed as "precedent-setting" by right-to-repair advocacy groups like iFixit. The law will require companies to provide the same diagnostic tools, repair manuals, and parts to the public that they provide to their own repair technicians.
But tech industry lobbyists and trade groups like TechNet had already worked to weaken the law as it made its way through the state legislature, and the bill as signed by Hochul contains even more conditions and exceptions, ostensibly added to address the governor's concerns about "technical issues that could put safety and security at risk, as well as heighten the risk of injury from physical repair projects."
DreamWorks, Cartoon Network, and others accused of illegally luring kids to YouTube.
Enlarge (credit: Ute Grabowsky/Getty Images)
An appeals court has revived a lawsuit against that accuses Google, YouTube, DreamWorks, and a handful of toymakers of tracking the activity of children under 13 on YouTube. In an opinion released Wednesday, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act does not bar lawsuits based on individual state privacy laws.
Passed in 1998 and amended in 2012, COPPA requires websites to obtain parental consent for the collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information of children under the age of 13. COPPA gives the FTC and state attorneys general the ability to investigate and levy fines for violations of the law.
Several states across the US have laws similar to COPPA on the books. The revived lawsuit cites laws in California, Colorado, Indiana, and Massachusetts to argue that Hasbro, DreamWorks, Mattel, and the Cartoon Network illegally lured children to their YouTube channels in order to target them with ads.
Es verschmutzt die Weltmeere, macht krank und befeuert die Klimakrise: Milliarden Tonnen Plastik aus Öl und Gas. Höhere Recyclingquoten reichen dagegen nicht. Eine echte Lösung liegt auf dem Tisch. Warum wird sie nicht umgesetzt?
The Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 is a thin and light convertible notebook with Samsung S-Pen support, allowing you to use the system as a laptop, tablet, or writing slate. When Samsung first launched the Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 earlier this year it was a…
The Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 is a thin and light convertible notebook with Samsung S-Pen support, allowing you to use the system as a laptop, tablet, or writing slate. When Samsung first launched the Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 earlier this year it was available with a choice of 12th-gen Intel Core i5 or Core i7 […]
The post Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 with Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 coming soon appeared first on Liliputing.
You must be logged in to post a comment.