Just another news site
The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending December 31, 2022, are in. The third film in the horror trilogy, or the 13th film in the franchise, is the top-seller for the week. Find out what movie it was in our weekly DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales stats and analysis feature.
The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending December 31, 2022, are in. The third film in the horror trilogy, or the 13th film in the franchise, is the top-seller for the week. Find out what movie it was in our weekly DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales stats and analysis feature.
Israeli firm says it uses AI to analyze “billions of ‘human pixels’ and signals.”
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Meta said it’s suing “scraping-for-hire” service Voyager Labs for allegedly using fake accounts, proprietary software, and a sprawling network of IP addresses to surreptitiously collect massive amounts of personal data from users of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social networking sites.
“Defendant created and used over 38,000 fake Facebook user accounts and its Surveillance Software to scrape more than 600,000 Facebook users’ viewable profile information, including posts, likes, friends lists, photos, and comments, and information from Facebook Groups and Pages,” lawyers wrote in Meta’s complaint. “Defendant designed the Surveillance Software to conceal its presence and activity from Meta and others, and sold and licensed for profit the data it scraped.”
Among the California-based Facebook users to have their data scraped, Meta said, were “employees of nonprofit organizations, universities, news media organizations, health care facilities, the armed forces of the United States, and local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as full-time parents, retirees, and union members.” Meta said the data collection and use of fake accounts violate its terms of service.
Another reminder to keep those masks on during flights.
Enlarge / A passenger wearing protective clothing amid the COVID-19 pandemic waits to board a domestic flight at Shanghai Pudong International Airport on January 3. (credit: Getty | HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP)
Although China has largely abandoned COVID-19 case reporting, evidence of its massive wave of infection readily shows up in airports outside its borders.
On a December 26 flight from the southeastern city of Wenzhou to Milan, Italy, 42 percent of the 149 passengers on board tested positive for COVID-19 upon arrival, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Eurosurveillance.
The Italian researchers behind the study also looked at test-positivity rates of three other flights from eastern cities in China to Italy, two to Milan and two to Rome, all at the end of December. Collectively, 23 percent of the passengers from the four flights (126 of 556 passengers) were positive for SARS-CoV-2. The other three flights had positivity rates of 19 percent, 11 percent, and 14 percent.
Also, the points program will now be exclusive to Best Buy Credit Card holders.
Enlarge (credit: Best Buy)
Big changes are afoot in electronics seller Best Buy's member and customer loyalty program as the company aims to generate more revenue and compete with Amazon, Best Buy announced via emails to customers this week.
First, the good news: Members of Best Buy's My Best Buy program will get free shipping on orders from the company's online store, this time without a minimum purchase price.
That's it for the good news, though. As for the bad: People who have paid for the (sort of) Amazon Prime-like premium Totaltech service may be irritated to learn that one of the previously promised benefits of the program—free same-day delivery—has been axed. Instead, Totaltech members will get free two-day shipping.
Also, the points program will now be exclusive to Best Buy Credit Card holders.
Enlarge (credit: Best Buy)
Big changes are afoot in electronics seller Best Buy's member and customer loyalty program as the company aims to generate more revenue and compete with Amazon, Best Buy announced via emails to customers this week.
First, the good news: Members of Best Buy's My Best Buy program will get free shipping on orders from the company's online store, this time without a minimum purchase price.
That's it for the good news, though. As for the bad: People who have paid for the (sort of) Amazon Prime-like premium Totaltech service may be irritated to learn that one of the previously promised benefits of the program—free same-day delivery—has been axed. Instead, Totaltech members will get free two-day shipping.
One critic who’s played the games and one who hasn’t—we’re the original odd couple!
Enlarge / Is it dark in here or is it just HBO's The Last of Us adaptation?
HBO's TV adaptation of The Last of Us premieres on Sunday, January 15, after years of failed attempts to turn the 2013 game into a movie (though the truly disastrous movie version of Naughty Dog's Uncharted makes use kind of glad for that failure). As Ars' resident The Last of Us expert, Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has recruited franchise neophyte (and TV recap expert) Andrew Cunningham to help talk through the good, bad, and disgusting of the series' weekly episode releases.
While video game adaptations into linear media have a bit of a hit-and-miss history at this point, the prestige TV treatment of this post-apocalyptic thriller is getting plenty of early buzz. That's probably thanks in no small part to the involvement of the game's creative director Neil Druckmann, who serves as executive producer and director for the TV series.
This adaptation can also benefit from the tight narrative already established in The Last of Us games. Through carefully crafted cut scenes and off-handed conversational moments during gameplay, those games feel a bit like tightly paced prestige TV shows anyway—just one that happens to be occasionally interrupted by interactive gun fights.
David DiLaura called his discovery “a once-in-a-collector’s-lifetime event.”
Enlarge / Isaac Newton's personal copy of the 1717 second edition of Opticks, long thought lost, has been found. (credit: Peter Harrington Rare Books)
David DiLaura, an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, was working on his comprehensive bibliography listing every significant scientific volume on optics when he made an unexpected discovery. The copy of Isaac Newton's seminal treatise Opticks that he had purchased some 20 years before turned out to be from Newton's own personal library, believed lost for many decades. The book will go up for sale at the Rare Books San Francisco Fair, February 3-5, 2023, with a price of $375,000.
Newton is justly most famous for his Principia and the co-invention of calculus, but he also had a longstanding interest in optics. For instance, he once stuck a long sewing needle (bodkin) into his eye socket between the eye and bone and recorded the colored circles and other visual effects he saw. And as a young scientist at Cambridge, he conducted what is known as his experimentum crucis, darkening his room one sunny day and making a hole in the window shutter to let a narrow beam of sunlight into the room. Then he placed a glass prism in the sunbeam and observed the rainbow bands of light in the color spectrum.
When he placed a second prism upside-down in front of the first, the band of colors recombined into white sunlight, thereby proving his hypothesis that white light is made up of all the colors of the spectrum combined. Based on his theory of color, Newton concluded that refracting telescope lenses would be plagued by chromatic aberrations (the dispersion of light into colors) and built the first practical reflecting telescope, using reflective mirrors rather than lenses as the objective to solve that problem. He gave a demonstration of his telescope to the Royal Society in 1671.
The RIAA is designated as a “trusted notifier” by domain name registry operator Identity Digital, which oversees hundreds of TLDs. The partnership allows the music group to flag piracy domains, but transparency reports show absolutely no recent activity on this front.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
There are plenty of options for copyright holders to frustrate the operations of pirate sites, but one of the most effective is to attack their domain names.
In recent years, various entertainment industry groups have called on the domain name industry to help out on this front.
As a result, the MPA signed a landmark agreement with the Donuts registry in 2016, under which the movie industry group acts as a “trusted notifier” of “pirate” domains. A similar deal was later announced with the Radix registry.
Lesser known is the trusted notifier agreement between the RIAA and the Donuts registry. That company was acquired by the Afilias registry and both have since rebranded to “Identity Digital.”
Identity Digital is a serious player in the domain name industry. The registry oversees close to 300 TLDs, including .movie, .wtf, .rocks, and .legal. In addition, the company also owns domain name registrar Name.com.
Over the past several years, very little information has been released on the use of the “trusted notifier” system. There was an early announcement that the first two domains had been taken down by the MPA, but we haven’t seen any new statistics since.
TorrentFreak reached out to both the RIAA and MPA to get more details, but these groups prefer not to share information, with the latter referencing a non-disclosure agreement. In recent months, however, Identity Digital started to lift this veil.
A few months ago, Identity Digital published its first-ever abuse report, documenting how many of its domain names had been suspended due to unauthorized use.
As the company oversees millions of domain names, it’s no surprise that a fraction are used by bad actors. Indeed, during the third quarter of last year, 3,225 abuse cases were opened, resulting in 4,615 closed domain names. The vast majority were related to phishing activity.
The careful reader will notice that “copyright infringement” isn’t listed separately in the table above. It could fall under another category but Identity Digital actually reports content flagged by “trusted notifiers” separately.
Aside from the RIAA and MPA, these notifiers also include the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which reports sites that are associated with Child Sexual Abuse Material. The table below shows the total number of reported URLs in the third quarter.
As it turns out, there are only a small number of flagged ‘pirate’ URLs per quarter. The MPA reported four URLs while the RIAA submitted none.
This low number isn’t a fluke. The numbers look very similar in the previous transparency report, where the MPA flagged six URLs. The RIAA didn’t submit any domain names for review in the quarter either.
It’s tricky to interpret these findings. In theory, it could mean that pretty much all pirate sites have been dealt with already on these TLDs. We reached out to RIAA to hear their thoughts on the lack of activity but, as hinted before, the music group had no comment.
To double-check, we searched Google and found that it isn’t hard to find some infringing URLs using Identity Digital domain names. However, these are not the most prominent sites, so perhaps it’s simply not a priority?
What we can say for sure is that the trusted notifier system doesn’t lead to mass suspensions in this case. That said, Identity Digital’s transparency only goes so far. We don’t know which domains were suspended following MPA reports or what kind of infringing content they listed.
The relatively low number of reports may be partly due to the fact that Identity Digital’s TLDs are not the most common ones. This would likely be different for Verisign, which oversees many popular TLDs including .com, .tv and .net.
Thus far, Verisign prefers not to actively police content, but U.S. lawmakers have started to increase pressure on the company.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Supreme Court ruling could trigger “devastating spillover effects,” Google says.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
For years, YouTube has been accused of enabling terrorist recruitment. This allegedly happens when a user clicks on a terrorist video hosted on the platform, then spirals down a rabbit hole of extremist content automatically queued “up next” through YouTube’s recommendation engine. In 2016, the family of Nohemi Gonzalez—who was killed in a 2015 Paris terrorist attack after extremists allegedly relied on YouTube for recruitment—sued YouTube owner Google, forcing courts to consider YouTube’s alleged role in aiding and abetting terrorists. Google has been defending YouTube ever since. Then, last year, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
Now, the Gonzalez family is hoping that the high court will agree that Section 230 protections designed to shield websites from liabilities for hosting third-party content shouldn’t be extended to also protect platforms’ right to recommend harmful content.
Google thinks that’s exactly how the liability shield should work, though. Yesterday, in a court filing, Google argued that Section 230 protects YouTube’s recommendation engine as a legitimate tool “meant to facilitate the communication and content of others.”
Sony holds onto the beautiful dream of standalone portable audio players.
The Sony Walkman NW-A300. It's a shame Sony never became a force in smartphones, because, wow, their product designs are still so good. [credit: Sony ]
Sony has a pair of new Android Walkmans out, the NW-A300 and NW-ZX700. Yes, that's right, Walkmans, Sony's legendary music player brand from the 1980s. Apple may have given up on the idea of a smartphone-adjacent music player when it killed the iPod Touch line recently, but Sony still makes Android-powered Walkmans and has for a while. The first was in 2012 with the Android 2.3 Gingerbread-powered NWZ-Z1000, which looked like Sony just stripped the modem out of an Xperia phone and shoved it onto the market as a music player. Since then, Sony has made designs with more purpose-built hardware, and today there are a whole series of Android-powered Walkman music players out there. Sadly these new ones seem to only be for sale in Japan, the UK, and Europe, for now.
We'll start with the most consumer-friendly of the two, the NW-A300. This basic design debuted in 2019 with the NW-A105, but that shipped with Android 9. This is an upgraded version of that device with a less-ancient version of Android, a new SoC, and a scalloped back design. In Sony's home of Japan, the 32GB version is 46,000 yen (about $360), while in Europe, it's 399 euro (about $430).
The NW-A300 is a tiny little device that measures 56.6×98.5×12 mm, so pretty close to a deck of playing cards. And really, just look at these pictures. Sony might not be the consumer electronics juggernaut it used to be, but it still has an incredible product design department. I have no use for a standalone music player, but both of these Walkmans are so pretty that I just want to hold one.
You must be logged in to post a comment.