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Sony’s PlayStation 5 game console has been around since late 2020, but it’s undergone some changes since then, most notably with the launch of a new “PlayStation 5 Slim” model released last fall. Among other changes? The mother…
Sony’s PlayStation 5 game console has been around since late 2020, but it’s undergone some changes since then, most notably with the launch of a new “PlayStation 5 Slim” model released last fall. Among other changes? The motherboard has gotten a lot smaller. So YouTuber Matthew Perks decided it was time to transplant that motherboard […]
The post This DIY PlayStation 5 “tablet” puts the guts of Sony’s console into a (kind of) portable game system appeared first on Liliputing.
The Geekom APro8 Max is a small desktop computer that looks more like a game console than a typical PC… and that’s fitting, since it has the guts of a gaming laptop inside. After teasing the upcoming mini PC in December, Geekom showed off …
The Geekom APro8 Max is a small desktop computer that looks more like a game console than a typical PC… and that’s fitting, since it has the guts of a gaming laptop inside. After teasing the upcoming mini PC in December, Geekom showed off the APro8 Max at CES last week, where the company revealed […]
The post Geekom APro8 Max is a game console-like mini PC with Ryzen 9 8940HS and Radeon RX 7600M XT appeared first on Liliputing.
Majority of climate-denial content posted now does not violate YouTube’s policy.
Enlarge (credit: PM Images | DigitalVision)
Content creators have spent the past five years developing new tactics to evade YouTube's policies blocking monetization of videos making false claims about climate change, a report from a nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), warned Tuesday.
What the CCDH found is that content creators who could no longer monetize videos spreading "old" forms of climate denial—including claims that "global warming is not happening" or "human-generated greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming"—have moved on.
Now they're increasingly pushing other claims that contradict climate science, which YouTube has not yet banned and may not ever ban. These include harmful claims that "impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless," "climate solutions won’t work," and "climate science and the climate movement are unreliable."
Warning added to Chrome Canary as Google settles Incognito class-action suit.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Anadolu)
Google is updating the warning on Chrome's Incognito mode to make it clear that Google and websites run by other companies can still collect your data in the web browser's semi-private mode.
The change is being made as Google prepares to settle a class-action lawsuit that accuses the firm of privacy violations related to Chrome's Incognito mode. The expanded warning was recently added to Chrome Canary, a nightly build for developers. The warning appears to directly address one of the lawsuit's complaints, that the Incognito mode's warning doesn't make it clear that Google collects data from users of the private mode.
Many tech-savvy people already know that while private modes in web browsers prevent some data from being stored on your device, they don't prevent tracking by websites or Internet service providers. But many other people may not understand exactly what Incognito mode does, so the more specific warning could help educate users.
A piracy blocking injunction handed down by an Indian court last September appears to have cost video delivery service JW Player over half of its usual website traffic from visitors in India. Plaintiffs Star India, Hotstar and Disney+ Hotstar, initially requested ISP blocking against less than 10 websites. However, since the court issued a dynamic+ injunction, they were free to keep adding domains, JW Player’s included. Instructions to unblock JW Player’s domain were not issued until January 9, 2024
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
JW Player was born around 2005 as an open source project, taking its name from the initials of main developer, Jeroen Wijering.
During the mid to late 2,000s, most people who consumed video online encountered JW Player at least once; before Google bought YouTube, JW Player was YouTube’s video player of choice.
According to the GitHub repo for the non-commercial version of JW Player, it can now be found on two million sites with a combined 1.3 billion plays per month.
On the commercial side, the New York-based company says it works with over 40,000 broadcasters, publishers, and other video-driven brands, which together generate 8 billion video impressions/month and 5 billion minutes of video watched/month.
The company’s clients include the likes of Fox, Sky, and Eurosport but thanks to a blunder that never should’ve happened, JW Player was labeled a “rogue site” last September and 2,700 Indian ISPs were ordered to immediately block it.
Star India, Novi Digital Entertainment Pvt. Ltd, Hotstar, and Disney+ Hotstar, are affiliated companies with a joint interest in broadcasts of major cricket tournament, World Cup 2023. The event ran from October 5 to November 19, 2023, but before it even began, preparations were being made to deal with the inevitable – rampant piracy.
Saying that courts have developed an understanding of the companies’ plight would significantly underplay the power made available to them under so-called dynamic+ injunctions. That includes the ex parte injunction issued by the Delhi High Court on September 27, 2023, to protect World Cup 2023.
The application listed nine pirate site defendants, and the subsequent order described them as “various rogue websites which are stated to be primarily hosting illegal and pirated content.” However, the plaintiffs have experience dating back years which shows that since pirates are happy to switch domains at any given moment, injunctions need to be flexible enough to allow new domains to be blocked extremely quickly.
Several injunctions obtained by the plaintiffs in 2021, 2022, and 2023, began life listing between 7 and 20 domains. At their conclusion, one outlier blocked a total of 87 domains while the others blocked between 120 and 164.
More recently, dynamic injunctions are now giving way to dynamic+ injunctions, which are not just dynamic in respect of the targets to be blocked, but also in respect of the plaintiffs’ content, whether existing or yet to be made. To get things rolling the Delhi High Court tackled the named platforms before moving on to then-unknown domains with the potential to appear later.
– Defendant Nos.1 to 9 are restrained by an ad-interim order from communicating, screening, making available or disseminating any part of the ICC World Cup Cricket matches on any electronic or digital platform in any manner whatsoever.
– Domain Name Registrars are directed to lock and suspend the said websites within 72 hours after being communicated a copy of this order….
– [I]f any further websites are discovered which are illegally streaming and communicating content over which the Plaintiffs have rights, the Plaintiffs are given liberty to communicate the details of these websites to both DoT and MeitY for issuance of blocking orders and simultaneously to the ISPs for blocking the said websites so as to ensure that these websites can be blocked on a real time basis [so] there is no considerable delay.
On November 5, 2023, the plaintiffs emailed various government departments, domain entities, and sundry other recipients, to announce the discovery of new domains that according to the injunction, must be immediately blocked. The title of the email suggests that this notification was one of many.
URGENT | Forty Fourth List of Additional Websites for Real – Time Blocking of in Compliance of the Order dated 27.09.2023 passed by the Hon’ble Delhi High Court in Star India Private Limited & Anr. v. jiolive.tv & Ors. CS(COMM)- 688/2023.
The images below represent the main evidence supplied in support of the blocking instruction. The first, a screenshot of a cricket match playing in a browser with a JW Player URL in the address bar, suggests that a match was being streamed via the platform, presumably by a JW Player user. The second screenshot shows the domain names to be blocked in this particular request, while indicating that someone researched the JWPlayer.com domain on SimilarWeb.
The third screenshot shows that the plaintiffs looked up contact information for JW Player’s official DMCA agent, something that pirate sites tend not to have, but then submitted the domain for blocking regardless.
There’s no way to show whether any of the recipients of the blocking notification email did anything with the paperwork, much less double-checked to ensure there were no obvious blunders. At least three recipients of the notification had email addresses ending @disney.com but whether they could’ve done much at this stage is unclear. The judge’s orders are extremely clear.
The instructions appear to have considered that an innocent third-party might find its online business blocked in India but on balance, the rightsholders’ interests appear to take priority. Since the application and order was issued without the defendants being present, it’s unclear how or even if JW Player was notified that its domain had been blocked.
Without that information to hand, being permitted by the court to file a request to have the injunction modified means almost nothing. Given that JW Player is not a rogue site, processes DMCA takedown notices, and has no relationship with any of the domains listed in the injunction, it’s arguable that it should never have been blocked in the first place.
Regardless, the image above suggests that it was some time before any action was taken to remedy the situation. According to SimilarWeb data, between October 2023 and December 2023, traffic to JWPlayer.com from India tanked by 53%. That the domain continued to be blocked after the tournament ended last November suggests that this type of thing could happen to almost any business. The only plus is that the company didn’t have its domain suspended.
After months of blocking, the Indian government’s Ministry of Communications issued instructions for the country’s ISPs to stop blocking jwplayer.com on January 9, 2024. The text suggests that the subdomain cdn.jwplayer.com may have been subjected to blocking instructions, although may or indeed may not have been actually blocked.
The additional documents referenced in the notice above were not attached. If we obtain them, we’ll post an update here.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Amazon is running a sale on Fire tablets that lets you pick up the latest Fire HD 8 for $65 (marked down from $100) or the latest Fire HD 10 for $95 and up (marked down from $140). Or if you’ve got a bit more money to spend and want a tablet tha…
Amazon is running a sale on Fire tablets that lets you pick up the latest Fire HD 8 for $65 (marked down from $100) or the latest Fire HD 10 for $95 and up (marked down from $140). Or if you’ve got a bit more money to spend and want a tablet that comes with […]
The post Daily Deals (1-16-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
Can USB, HDMI, and built-in games raise awareness for a platform overshadowed by the C64?
Enlarge / Retro Games' THE400 Mini console. (credit: Retro Games / Benj Edwards)
Last week, UK-based Retro Games, Ltd. announced a mini console version of the Atari 400 home computer, first released in 1979. It's called "THE400 Mini," and it includes HDMI video output, 25 built-in games, a USB version of Atari's famous joystick, and it retails for $120. But this release means something more to me personally because my first computer was an Atari 400—and as any other Atari 8-bit computer fan can tell you, the platform often doesn't get the respect it should. This will be the first time Atari's 8-bit computer line has received a major retro-remake release.
My Atari 400 story goes a little something like this. Around the time I was born in 1981, my dad bought my older brother (then 5 years old) an Atari 400 so he could play games and learn to program. My brother almost immediately found its flat membrane keyboard frustrating and the Atari 410 cassette drive too slow, so my dad ordered an Atari 800 and an Atari 810 disk drive instead. This began our family's golden age of Atari 800 gaming, which I've written about elsewhere.
I've often said if a modern game designer wants to learn how to make games, just dive into the Atari 400/800 game library. There are some priceless gems there you can't find anywhere else, plus others that play best on the platform. OK, I'll name a few: The Seven Cities of Gold, Archon, M.U.L.E., Wizard of Wor, Salmon Run, Star Raiders, The Halley Project, and so much more.
“Six months in isolation, you start thinking too much.”
Adam Sandler stars as a lonely astronaut on a solo mission who befriends an alien spider in Spaceman.
Some people were not pleased when Netflix and other streaming platforms began making feature films. But in an industry in which smaller or medium films tend to be squeezed out in favor of big-budget fare, there's a solid argument to be made that Netflix and others could help fill that niche. That certainly seems to be the case with Netflix's forthcoming sci-fi film, Spaceman, judging by the official trailer. Adam Sandler stars as an astronaut who is not coping well with the isolation and disintegration of his marriage while on an eight-month solo mission and strikes up a friendship with a friendly alien space spider who wants to help him work through his emotional distress. Honestly, Netflix had us at friendly alien space spider.
(Some spoilers for the 2017 novel below.)
Directed by Johan Renck (Chernobyl, Breaking Bad), the film is based on the 2017 novel, Spaceman of Bohemia, by Jaroslav Kalfař. Kalfař has said he was inspired to write his novel after a childhood experience of becoming briefly separated from his grandfather while on a nighttime walk through the woods. The "perfect darkness, with nothing but the stars" made a strong impression, as did the silence and sense of loneliness. Spaceman of Bohemia started out as a short story about an astronaut stranded in orbit as his wife was filing for divorce and eventually became a novel that incorporated not just the theme of loneliness, but also Kalfař's formative experiences growing up in the Czech Republic.
The program sees more countries get access to space, but the details are murky.
Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches the Axiom-2 mission on May 21, 2023. (credit: SpaceX)
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) has a deal with Axiom Space to get more Europeans in orbit. But does the partnership benefit European taxpayers who fund the agency’s operations?
On Wednesday, January 17, the third privately funded mission by US commercial spaceflight company Axiom Space is set to lift off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Inside the Crew Dragon capsule will be a quartet of space travelers, including Swedish fighter pilot Marcus Wandt.
Wandt will be flying under the European Space Agency (ESA) flag, although he is not exactly an ESA astronaut. In the 2022 European astronaut recruitment round, Wandt didn’t make the final five of Europe’s “proper” astronaut class, who became ESA staff members and started their astronaut training in 2023. Instead, he was selected as a member of ESA’s first astronaut reserve pool, a novelty developed by ESA with an apparent goal of encouraging its member states to pay for national missions in addition to their regular contributions to ESA’s budget. Sweden was the first to jump at the opportunity in April last year and is paying for Wandt’s two-week space trip through a contract brokered by ESA as part of a Memorandum of Understanding the agency signed with the American commercial company Axiom Space in October 2023.
Apple preps update should patent-infringing Watch Series 9, Ultra 2 be banned again.
Enlarge / The Apple Watch Series 9. (credit: Apple)
Apple has developed a backup plan for if the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 are import banned again. As it currently appeals the US International Trade Commission's (ITC's) ruling that its watches violate a patent owned by Masimo, Apple has come up with a software workaround that strips its current smartwatches of their controversial blood oxygen monitoring capabilities.
In January 2023, the ITC ruled that the Watch violated one of California-headquartered Masimo’s light-based pulse oximetry patents. The Apple Watch Series 6, which came out in 2020, was the first Apple smartwatch to use a pulse oximeter sensor.
Facing a US import ban of the current Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2, both released in September 2023, Apple started pulling the smartwatches on December 21. But on December 27, Apple, which filed its appeal against the ITC’s ruling on December 26 (after US President Joe Biden declined to overrule the ITC ruling), received an emergency interim stay from the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, allowing it to continue selling the Watch.
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