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Der Stromausfall wurde durch Probleme mit Umspannwerk verursacht. Doch das Atomstromland Frankreich kämpft insgesamt mit Versorgungsproblemen. Nur drei Viertel der AKW sind betriebsbereit.
Some kids can get boosters, some can get an updated series, some get nothing.
Enlarge / Reisa Lancaster RN, left, administers the Covid-19 vaccine to 14 month old Ada Hedge, center, being comforted by mom Sarah Close and dad Chinmay Hedge, right at Children's National Research and Innovation Campus, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | The Washington Post, Bill O'Leary)
The Food and Drug Administration has greenlit updated COVID-19 vaccine doses for children under the age of 5, but the change to the authorized vaccination regimens is far from straightforward. This may further hamstring efforts to vaccinate the youngest Americans, which are already off to an abysmal start.
After months of availability, only about 3 percent of infants and toddlers 6 months to 2 years old have completed a primary series. Just 6.5 percent have gotten at least one shot, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For those aged 2 to 4 years, just under 5 percent have completed a primary series, with 9 percent having gotten at least one dose.
It was back in June when the FDA authorized—and the CDC endorsed—small doses of both Moderna's and Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months old.
Die Wirtschaft muss schrumpfen, der Kapitalismus enden, um den Klimakollaps zu verhindern. Grünes Wachstum ist eine Illusion, sagen einige Umweltschützer. Sind Energiewende und Green New Deal tatsächlich zum Scheitern verurteilt? (Teil 2)
Russia has sent a record number of takedown requests to Google in the first half of this year. In the past, copyright infringement was the most cited reason for action but that has been replaced by ‘national security’, currently a top priority for Russia. Google, however, is wary of overbroad censorship and hasn’t complied with most requests.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Google processes millions of takedown notices every day, most of them filed by copyright holders.
A separate stream of removal demands contains requests by government entities. These are not as common as copyright complaints, but across all Google platforms the numbers quickly add up.
A few days ago Google quietly published its latest Government takedown transparency report. A closer look at the data reveals some interesting trends that reflect some of the global tensions where Russia takes center stage.
During the first half of 2022, Google received 35,221 takedown requests from governments, targeting 387,152 items. This includes search engine links but also YouTube videos and articles on the Blogger platform.
These numbers don’t say much in isolation. However, when we look at the country breakdown it becomes apparent that the vast majority of the requests come from Russia. From January to June, the country sent 21,841 takedown requests targeting 244,282 items. That’s 62% and 63% of the worldwide totals respectively.
These high percentages are indeed notable, but it’s worth mentioning that the Russian Government has been the top takedown sender for a few years already. What stands out most is how Google responded to the recent requests.
During the previous reporting periods, Google complied with most of Russia’s takedown demands. On average, roughly 10% of the notices resulted in “no action taken,” which signals that there’s something wrong with these demands.
Over the past half year, this trend changed dramatically. As seen below, Google now rejects most takedown demands from Russia. More than 71% of all requests resulted in “no action taken”. That’s a drastic change that appears to be in part triggered by the Ukraine conflict.
Some of these questionable takedown requests have already made headlines. For example, YouTube refused requests from Russia’s telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor to remove 27 YouTube URLs, most of which relate to the war in Ukraine. The content included political speeches, news coverage, and commentary that Google wasn’t willing to take offline.
Russia wasn’t pleased with this refusal and a local court fined Google $372.5 million, a decision that’s still under appeal.
This high-profile example is just one of many. In the latest transparency report, Google provides several other takedown examples that have raised questions. They include videos calling for protests against Russia.
“We received requests from Rosco against 12 videos and 2 channels on YouTube calling for protests in Russia. The calls for protests were sparked by a general dissatisfaction with the current government,” Google writes, adding that it took down five that called for violence, leaving the others untouched.
Russia also attempted to have the apps from news outlets Dozhd and Echo of Moscow removed from the Play Store because it didn’t agree with its reporting on the Ukraine invasion.
“We received requests from Roskomnadzor to remove from the Google Play Store the apps of media outlets Dozhd and Echo of Moscow. Roskomnadzor claimed that both apps ‘purposefully and systematically’ distributed false information about the war in Ukraine, including about how many Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians have died.”
Google says that it refused to comply with the request because it could not properly verify the claim. The same is true for Russia’s request to take down a Compute Engine website that reports the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine.
“We received a request from Roskomnadzor to remove a Compute Engine site that seeks to document casualties among the civilian population of Ukraine,” Google writes, adding that it didn’t remove the site “in part because the grounds for removal were not clearly linked to the content of the site.”
The information shared by Google shows that the rise in “national security” removal requests is partly triggered by the Ukraine invasion. Russia clearly doesn’t agree with a lot that’s said and reported online, and aims to control the narrative.
Russia’s removal demands are not limited to the figures highlighted above. In 2017, the country also introduced a law that requires Google to remove links to VPNs, Tor, anonymizers, and proxies from its search engine.
This legislation is part of an initiative that requires ISPs and search engines to block pirate sites and online publications that are deemed problematic by Russia’s standards.
Google reports takedown requests under this “VPN law” separately. In the first half of 2022, Russia’s telecoms watchdog made 225 requests to remove a total of 682,612 URLs. Most of these were indeed delisted by the search engine.
Interestingly, the above means that the number of items targeted through the VPN law is actually greater than those detailed in regular takedown requests.
A full overview of Google’s transparency report is available here.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Reuters reviewed an email to advertisers saying Twitter Blue is back Friday.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
Today is apparently the day when Twitter Blue is coming back. Reuters reported that subscriptions would be available sometime Friday for purchase in the Apple App Store for $11 and on the web for $7.
This was confirmed in an email sent to advertisers Thursday, which Reuters reviewed, announcing some new Twitter Blue security features and advertiser controls. The email informed advertisers that individuals would be able to purchase blue checkmarks, while verified businesses would be distinguished by gold checks and government accounts by gray checks.
The purpose of the email was partly to reassure advertisers that the Twitter Blue impersonation scandal is actually over and partly to announce new controls allowing advertisers to prevent branded ads from appearing “above or below tweets containing certain keywords,” Reuters reported.
With a huge list of caveats, initial Google passkey support is here.
Enlarge / Please don't do this. (credit: Getty Images)
Passkeys are here to (try to) kill the password. Following Google's beta rollout of the feature in October, passkeys are now hitting Chrome stable M108. "Passkey" is built on industry standards and backed by all the big platform vendors—Google, Apple, Microsoft—along with the FIDO Alliance. Google's latest blog says: "With the latest version of Chrome, we're enabling passkeys on Windows 11, macOS, and Android." The Google Password Manager on Android is ready to sync all your passkeys to the cloud, and if you can meet all the hardware requirements and find a supporting service, you can now sign-in to something with a passkey.
Passkeys are the next step in evolution of password managers. Today password managers are a bit of a hack—the password text box was originally meant for a human to manually type text into, and you were expected to remember your password. Then, password managers started automating that typing and memorization, making it convenient to use longer, more secure passwords. Today, the right way to deal with a password field is to have your password manager generate a string of random, unmemorable junk characters to stick in the password field. The passkey gets rid of that legacy text box interface and instead stores a secret, passes that secret to a website, and if it matches, you're logged in. Instead of passing a randomly generated string of text, passkeys use the "WebAuthn" standard to generate a public-private keypair, just like SSH.
The passkey process works a lot like autofill. (credit: Ron Amadeo)
If everyone can figure out the compatibility issues, passkeys offer some big advantages over passwords. While passwords can be used insecurely with short text strings shared across many sites, a passkey is always enforced to be unique in content and secure in length. If a server breach happens, the hacker isn't getting your private key, and it's not a security issue the way a leaked password would be. Passkeys are not phishable, and because they require your phone to be physically present (!!) some random hacker from halfway around the world can't log in to your account anyway.
Intel’s ARC A750 and A770 desktop graphics cards are designed to offer performance comparable to what you’d get from an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU at a more competitive price. And early review suggested they largely deliver on that promis…
Intel’s ARC A750 and A770 desktop graphics cards are designed to offer performance comparable to what you’d get from an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU at a more competitive price. And early review suggested they largely deliver on that promise… for newer games. But they struggled with some older titles. Now Intel has released a […]
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AI tech makes it trivial to generate harmful fake photos from a few social media pictures.
Enlarge / This is John. He doesn't exist. But AI can easily put a photo of him in any situation we want. And the same process can apply to real people with just a few real photos pulled from social media. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)
If you're one of the billions of people who have posted pictures of themselves on social media over the past decade, it may be time to rethink that behavior. New AI image-generation technology allows anyone to save a handful of photos (or video frames) of you, then train AI to create realistic fake photos that show you doing embarrassing or illegal things. Not everyone may be at risk, but everyone should know about it.
Photographs have always been subject to falsifications—first in darkrooms with scissors and paste and then via Adobe Photoshop through pixels. But it took a great deal of skill to pull off convincingly. Today, creating convincing photorealistic fakes has become almost trivial.
Once an AI model learns how to render someone, their image becomes a software plaything. The AI can create images of them in infinite quantities. And the AI model can be shared, allowing other people to create images of that person as well.
George Newall, a former ad exec who co-created the influential series, has died at 88.
Enlarge / Now he's a law! "I'm Just a Bill" is one of the most popular and best-known animated shorts featured in Schoolhouse Rock! (credit: Kari Rene Hall/Getty Images)
Ars readers of a certain age grew up in the 1970s and 1980s watching Saturday morning cartoons and singing along to Schoolhouse Rock!, a series of whimsical animated shorts setting the multiplication tables, grammar, American history, and science to music. We were saddened to learn that George Newall, the last surviving member of the original team that produced this hugely influential series, has died at 88. The cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, according to The New York Times. The series turns 50 (!) next year.
Newall was a creative director at McCaffrey and McCall advertising agency in the early 1970s. One day, agency President David McCall bemoaned the fact that his young sons couldn't multiply, yet somehow they remembered all the lyrics to hit songs by the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. He asked Newall if it was possible to set the multiplication tables to music. Newall happened to know a musician named Ben Tucker who played bass at a venue Newall frequented and mentioned the challenge to him. Tucker said his friend Bob Dorough could "put anything to music"—in fact, he'd once written a song about the mattress tag admonishing new owners not to remove it under penalty of law.
Two weeks later, Dorough presented Newall with "Three is a Magic Number," the song featured in the pilot episode of Schoolhouse Rock! Everyone at the agency loved the tune, including art director and cartoonist Tom Yohe, who made a few doodles to accompany the song. That one song—meant to be part of an educational record album—turned into a series of short three-minute videos. (Today we'd just put them on YouTube, and you can indeed find most of the classic fan favorites there.) They pitched the series to ABC's director of children's programming, Michael Eisner (future Disney chairman and CEO). Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones was also in the meeting and was so impressed he advised Eisner to buy the series in the room.
Woot is running a sale on older Microsoft Surface hardware. Among other things, that means you can pick up a first-gen Surface Duo dual-screen smartphone for as little as $270. Meanwhile Best Buy is running a 3-day sale on hundreds of items. While som…
Woot is running a sale on older Microsoft Surface hardware. Among other things, that means you can pick up a first-gen Surface Duo dual-screen smartphone for as little as $270. Meanwhile Best Buy is running a 3-day sale on hundreds of items. While some of the deals aren’t amazing (at least one laptop on sale […]
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