LG’s 17-inch foldable OLED arrives October 4 for 4.99 million won (~$3,726).
LG announced its first foldable laptop, the Gram Fold, today. [credit:
LG
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Lenovo launched the first foldable laptop in 2020, but the first real era of foldable PCs is only starting to unfold now. Today, LG became the latest OEM to announce a foldable-screen laptop, right after HP announced its first attempt, the Spectre Foldable PC, earlier this month.
LG only announced the Gram Fold in South Korea thus far. LG didn't immediately respond when I asked if it has plans to release the machine in the US.
A Google translation of LG's Korean announcement said the laptop is 9.4-mm (0.37-inches) thick when unfolded and used like a 17-inch tablet. Alternatively, the OLED PC can be folded in half to use like an approximately 12.2-inch laptop. In the latter form, a virtual keyboard can appear on the bottom screen, and you can dock a Bluetooth keyboard to the bottom screen or pair a keyboard with the system wirelessly. The screen has 1920×2560 pixels for a pixel density of 188.2 pixels per inch.
On Monday, OpenAI announced a significant update to ChatGPT that enables its GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 AI models to analyze images and react to them as part of a text conversation. Also, the ChatGPT mobile app will add speech synthesis options that, when paired with its existing speech recognition features, will enable fully verbal conversations with the AI assistant, OpenAI says.
OpenAI is planning to roll out these features in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise subscribers "over the next two weeks." It also notes that speech synthesis is coming to iOS and Android only, and image recognition will be available on both the web interface and the mobile apps.
OpenAI says the new image recognition feature in ChatGPT lets users upload one or more images for conversation, using either the GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 models. In its promotional blog post, the company claims the feature can be used for a variety of everyday applications: from figuring out what's for dinner by taking pictures of the fridge and pantry, to troubleshooting why your grill won’t start. It also says that users can use their device's touch screen to circle parts of the image that they would like ChatGPT to concentrate on.
Just about everything has leaked about the $699 Pixel 8 and $999 8 Pro.
Enlarge/ Leaked pictures from Google's promo site show off the Pixel 8 Pro in a lovely blue. (credit: Kamila Wojciechowska )
The Pixel 8 is rapidly approaching its October 4 unveiling, but before then there are a bunch of leaks out there. Reliable leaker Kamila Wojciechowska has a whole list of Pixel 8 and 8 Pro specs over at 91mobiles, along with some Pixel market materials. The big news is that Google is finally giving its Pixel phones a longer support window. Pixel phones are getting seven years of updates, which is longer than Apple. Google pitches the Pixel phones as the flagship of the Android ecosystem, and now, if this spec sheet pans out, the OS maker is finally giving them an update plan to match.
Currently, Pixel phones have three years of OS updates and five years of security updates, which is not only beaten by Apple's update policy but is also inexplicably worse than many of Google's Android partners. For instance, Samsung and OnePlus offer four years of OS updates, albeit with some caveats around arrival times and the security update cadence. Apple doesn't have a policy written in stone anywhere, but with the iPhone X not making the jump to iOS17, that makes for a five-year major OS update policy if you're counting to 2022's iOS16, though with some point updates in 2023 you could argue six years.
Google has messed around in the past by calling its current "three years of major OS updates and five years of security updates" plan "five years of updates," but this spec sheet very clearly says "seven years of OS, security, and feature drop updates." That would comfortably lead all major manufacturers, leaving only Google and Fairphone at the top of the charts.
In 2021, Romi Hoshino was sentenced to three years in prison for operating Mangamura, the world’s most notorious manga piracy site. Freed last year, the 31-year-old will release a book tomorrow which promises to tell the real story of his prosecution while exposing Japan’s judicial problems. Twenty-four hours later, Hoshino will demand a retrial: “This time, we’re aiming for the world.”
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
While some pirate sites will obviously slip through the cracks, the overwhelming majority of piracy platforms that exist today are already known to the rightsholders they affect.
Actions taken against specific pirate platforms are shaped by policy, resources, and other practicalities, meaning that less significant sites may face no immediate threat. Others aren’t so lucky.
In Mangamura’s case, a site founded in 2016 targeting the Japanese market became extraordinarily successful in a very short space of time. That it did so by exploiting culturally-valuable manga content, in the backyard of the world’s largest manga publishers, pushed Mangamura to the top of the enforcement list.
Mangamura mysteriously shut itself down in April 2018 but after just two years online, the site had reportedly caused $2.91 billion in losses to publishers. A criminal investigation into Mangamura’s activities eventually led to the arrest of the site’s operator, Romi Hoshino, in Manilla.
Hoshino was later deported to Japan and arrested by the authorities. A guilty verdict in a subsequent criminal trial saw Hoshino sentenced to three years behind bars.
Publishers and Hoshino Have Unfinished Business
Released from prison last year, the 31-year-old is now facing a civil lawsuit for damages filed by several Japan-based manga publishers. They were at court in the U.S. recently seeking Mangamura traffic data held by Google and Cloudflare. While that information could be useful for progressing their civil lawsuit, it appears that over the next 48 hours, things will become rather more complicated.
On September 26, Hoshino will launch his new book, The Truth About Mangamura. The author says it will reveal how a “shut-in NEET” (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) somehow created a hugely successful website only to become an internationally wanted man.
One of the book’s promotional images shows Hoshino’s progression through life from childhood to arrest, including the now-infamous mugshot that appeared in media all around the world.
The book’s promotional material suggests that Hoshino’s technological successes may be presented alongside allegations of “digital defeat” in Japan, such as poor growth in IT and the failure of law to keep up with reality. It also promises to expose “behind-the-scenes judicial deals, fake trials, show punishments, and copyright issues.”
This is a “controversial book that indicts Japan’s judicial problems!” the description on Amazon reads.
Hoshino Will File an Application for Retrial
Whether Japan’s judicial system has any appetite or ability to revisit Mangamura-related problems is unclear, but this week Hoshino will attempt to find out. On Wednesday he is expected to file an application for a full retrial at the Fukuoka District Court, a rare moment for a case that ran its course without any appeal, by a defendant who has completed his sentence.
According to a report in Asahi, Hoshino was prohibited from using a computer in detention so was unable to collect any evidence to prove his innocence. While denying a prisoner access to the internet is hardly uncommon, Hoshino’s allegations make for interesting reading.
In very broad terms, the criminal case found that Hoshino was liable for uploaded copies of popular manga titles ‘Kingdom’ and ‘One Piece’ that were made available to the public via Mangamura. Hoshino doesn’t deny the manga titles were made available; he’s contesting the mechanism by which that took place.
Hoshino Claims He’s Innocent
From the limited details available, Hoshino appears to be arguing that the manga titles were uploaded to another site, not on Mangamura. He claims that a reverse proxy enabled the content on third-party sites to appear as if it was displayed on Mangamura, without any of the images actually being stored locally.
On the one hand, these claims could be dismissed as semantics intended to distract from a clear intent to profit from piracy. On the other, Hoshino may have some type of case, at least in theory.
In English-speaking countries, sites that utilize content hosted elsewhere through the provision of links to external platforms are often described as ‘indexing’ sites. They act as an index to content found elsewhere but host none of their own. In Japan, the terms ‘leech’ or ‘reach’ are used to describe the same type of site and at least functionally, they provide illegal access to copyrighted material just like any other.
However, operators of leech or reach sites were only rendered criminally liable by legal amendments that came into force on October 1, 2020. On that day, indexing site operators or those publishing apps with the same function faced the same punishments as their directly-infringing counterparts for the first time. Mangamura had been offline for two-and-a-half years at this point.
Reverse Proxy Defense Detailed in Original Judgment
The judgment handed down by the Fukuoka District Court in 2021 covers submissions by the prosecution and defense relating to the two manga works Hoshino alleges were made available via reverse proxy.
The judgment substitutes the names of defendants and or witnesses, plaintiffs, site names and third-party platforms with letters. The ‘defendant’ is Hoshino and A, B and C refer to individuals who uploaded content to servers that was later consumed by users of ‘G’, aka Mangamura. ‘P’ appears to be a reference to Cloudflare.
The judgment notes that Hoshino set Mangamura’s server “not to cache data, and on that basis, the manga and other image data posted on G by way of reverse proxy would exist on the recording device of the third-party server and not be stored on the recording device of G’s server.”
The judgment further notes that, “for a certain period of time, the defendant used a CDN server provided by P located in the U.S. as a reverse proxy between G’s server and the viewers, so that when ordinary users viewed G’s manga, they accessed the CDN server, not G’s server.”
The judgment also reveals statements by one or more of the uploaders (A,B,C) who recalled certain facts about the two works in question sufficient for the court to conclude the works were uploaded by them.
The judgment further notes “that the reverse proxy setting by the defendant constitutes an infringement of the right of public transmission under Article 23 (1) of the Copyright Act, as it makes a work available for transmission.”
Hoshino recently answered questions during a press conference, the video is embedded below. The original judgment handed down by the Fukuoka District Court can be found here (pdf)
Amazon’s listing for Hoshino’s new book, out tomorrow, can be found here.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Controversial injunction stayed until Wednesday while SCOTUS mulls US motion.
Enlarge/ The Supreme Court. (credit: Getty Images | Douglas Rissing)
The Supreme Court on Friday extended a stay of a lower-court order that would limit the Biden administration's contacts with social media firms, giving justices a few more days to consider whether to block the ruling entirely. The court could rule by the middle of this week on the Biden administration motion in a case in which the states of Missouri and Louisiana allege that speech related to COVID-19 and other topics was illegally suppressed at the behest of government officials.
A stay issued September 14 was scheduled to expire on Friday, but Justice Samuel Alito ordered that it be extended until Wednesday, September 27, at 11:59 pm ET. Alito is the justice assigned to the 5th Circuit, the circuit in which an appeals court ruled that the White House and FBI likely violated the First Amendment by coercing social media platforms into moderating content and changing their moderation policies.
The 5th Circuit appeals court ruling wasn't a total loss for the Biden administration. Appeals court judges threw out the majority of a district judge's preliminary injunction that ordered the Biden administration to halt a wide range of communications with social media companies.
Adding more power often adds little to the EV experience, but we like this one.
Enlarge/ The i7 M70 features new mirrors and side skirts to go with new suspension and brakes and a more powerful rear motor. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
LISBON, PORTUGAL—Driving BMW's new electric 7 Series was one of the true automotive surprises of 2022. The automaker rolled out electric and combustion-tech versions at the same time, with the electric i7 bettering the gas-burning 760i in just about every way. Now, BMW has sent its biggest and boldest EV off to its M division, the in-house tuning and motorsport people. The resulting car is the fastest-accelerating and most expensive electric BMW to date.
I've long been an advocate for putting electric motors in luxury cars, especially big ones—the combination of instant torque and near-silence is ideal for that application. Automakers both new and established also like the idea of big, luxury EVs because they can charge plenty for the privilege, so it's a crowded field. Some cars in this class target rollercoaster-like acceleration; for example, Porsche, Tesla, and Lucid will each sell you a four-door EV capable of a 0–60 time that's around two seconds.
The i7 M70 is not as fast as those EVs, and it's not the kind of luxury EV you might use to wipe the smiles off some faces at the local drag strip's "run what ya brung" night. Instead, in keeping with BMW's old "ultimate driving machine" slogan, it's a rather engaging driver's car, one that belies its size and mass remarkably well.
Google is planning to officially launch the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones during an October 4th event, where the company may also unveil other hardware including a Pixel Watch 2. But details about the upcoming phones have been leaking for months…
Google is planning to officially launch the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones during an October 4th event, where the company may also unveil other hardware including a Pixel Watch 2. But details about the upcoming phones have been leaking for months, and now 91mobiles and Kamila Wojciechowska have published what they say is […]
“I don’t believe in destiny, but if destiny exists, then it is heading for Donna Noble.”
Doctor Who returns with three specials starring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, reunited with Donna Noble (Catherine Tate).
Doctor Who marks its 60th anniversary this year with three specials featuring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, with the first slated to air in November. The latest trailer shows the good Doctor reunited with his former companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) and facing off against two classic adversaries from the Whovian archives: an alien race called the Meeps and a celestial being known as The Toymaker, played by Neil Patrick Harris.
(Spoilers below for prior seasons of Doctor Who.)
When the BBC announced that Ncuti Gatwa would succeed Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor as the new incarnation of Doctor Who, fans naturally expected Gatwa to make his first appearance in the traditional regeneration sequence. Instead, in the 2022 special "The Power of the Doctor," Whittaker's Doctor regenerated into an incarnation bearing a striking similarity to the Tenth Doctor—both played by Tennant. It was a savvy marketing move, given the enormous popularity of Tennant's Doctor. With showrunner Chris Chibnall stepping down and Russell T. Davies re-assuming the reins for the show's 60th anniversary, what better time to revisit that character, along with my personal favorite of the companions, Donna Noble?
OpenAIs Chatbot ChatGPT kann Antworten auf Fragen aussprechen und Bilder interpretieren. (
Mit der Drohne Mini 4 Pro bringt DJI den Nachfolger der 3 Pro mit neuen Sensoren zur Hinderniserkennung rund um das Fluggerät. (
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