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The Playdate handheld gaming device with a 1-bit display and a hang crank on the side is a cute and quirky device that’s very different from some other handhelds. But it’s also been a lot harder to actually get your hands on. Playdate bega…
The Playdate handheld gaming device with a 1-bit display and a hang crank on the side is a cute and quirky device that’s very different from some other handhelds. But it’s also been a lot harder to actually get your hands on. Playdate began taking pre-orders in mid-2021 and finally began shipping the handheld almost a year later. […]
The post Lilbits: Layoffs at Mozilla, Android 15 Dev Preview coming soon, and Playdate is finally “in stock” appeared first on Liliputing.
The agency is reportedly moving from the fixed time to a symptom-based isolation period.
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Thomas Trutschel)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to update its COVID-19 isolation guidance, moving from a minimum five-day isolation period to one that is solely determined by symptoms, according to a report from The Washington Post.
Currently, CDC isolation guidance states that people who test positive for COVID-19 should stay home for at least five days, at which point people can end their isolation as long as their symptoms are improving and they have been fever-free for 24 hours.
According to three unnamed officials who spoke with the Post, the CDC will update its guidance to remove the five-day minimum, recommending more simply that people can end their isolation any time after being fever-free for 24 hours without the aid of medication, as long as any other remaining symptoms are mild and improving. The change, which is expected to be released in April, would be the first to loosen the guidance since the end of 2021.
OpenAI plans to defeat authors’ remaining claim at a “later stage” of the case.
Enlarge (credit: Johner Images | Johner Images Royalty-Free)
A US district judge in California has largely sided with OpenAI, dismissing the majority of claims raised by authors alleging that large language models powering ChatGPT were illegally trained on pirated copies of their books without their permission.
By allegedly repackaging original works as ChatGPT outputs, authors alleged, OpenAI's most popular chatbot was just a high-tech "grift" that seemingly violated copyright laws, as well as state laws preventing unfair business practices and unjust enrichment.
According to judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, authors behind three separate lawsuits—including Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, and Paul Tremblay—have failed to provide evidence supporting any of their claims except for direct copyright infringement.
Bitcoin Latinum angry about quotes from fraud lawsuit and Star Trek reference.
Enlarge / Image from Bitcoin Latinum's website (credit: Bitcoin Latinum)
The cryptocurrency firm Bitcoin Latinum has sued journalists at Forbes and Poker.org, claiming that the writers made false and defamatory statements in articles that described securities fraud lawsuits filed against the crypto firm.
Bitcoin Latinum and its founder, Donald Basile, filed a libel lawsuit against Forbes reporter Cyrus Farivar and another libel lawsuit against Poker.org and its reporter Haley Hintze. (Farivar was a long-time Ars Technica reporter.)
The lawsuits are surprising because the Forbes article and the Poker.org article, both published in 2022, are very much like thousands of other news stories that describe allegations in a lawsuit. In both articles, it is clear that the allegations come from the filer of the lawsuit and not from the author of the article.
MG Premium has won its bizarre lawsuit against pirate site Goodporn. In the early stages of the case, the Pornhub.com domain was ‘virtually’ at stake, but Pornhub’s sister company was eventually awarded over $2.1 million in damages. The court denied injunctive relief, however, which means that there are no domain seizures or site-blocking orders.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
The name ‘Aylo’ might not ring a bell with many people but it is one of the leading players in the adult entertainment industry.
Formerly known as MindGeek, and Manwin before that, the company conquered the online adult market over the past decade by offering free porn to the masses.
Aylo is also the driving force behind free ‘tube’ sites such as PornHub, YouPorn, Redtube and Tube. It also owns many adult brands, such as Brazzers and Reality Kings, that charge for subscriptions.
Over the years, the company has built an impressive library of over 40,000 registered copyright works. The company’s enforcement arm MG Premium protects this content by various means; it sends millions of takedown requests per week and full-blown lawsuits often enter the equation.
One stand-out lawsuit targeted the tube site, Goodporn. MG Premium sued the platform for widespread copyright infringement, hoping to shut it down, but after two years that had proven elusive.
Instead, Goodporn owner Amrit Kumar fought back hard. Among other things, he allegedly signed a contract to obtain the rights to MG Premium’s content in 2019, leading him to accuse his accusers of copyright infringement. Kumar went as far as ‘going after’ the pornhub.com domain.
It’s almost impossible to summarize this bizarre case, which comprises hundreds of filings. For example, it also includes Lizette Lundberg and Emile Brunn as defendants, who stood accused of working with Kumar and submitting inaccurate DMCA counternotices.
Ultimately, however, the court entered summary judgment and a default, for inducement of copyright infringement and contributory copyright infringement against all Goodporn defendants.
Last December MG Premium asked a California federal court to issue a default judgment in the amount of $21.6 million. That was based on a $15,000 damages award for each of the 2,433 works in the lawsuit.
The $15,000 figure was reasonable, the company argued, as it’s just a tenth of the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work.
MG Premium also requested a permanent injunction that would order domain registries and registrars to sign over all infringing Goodporn domain names.
While these targeted requests are not uncommon, the proposed injunction went much further than that. Search engines, hosting and Internet service providers, domain registrars, domain registries and other service providers should be required to block the site’s domain names, MG Premium said.
“[The companies should] block or use reasonable efforts to attempt to block access by United States users of the Goodporn Websites by blocking or attempting to block access to all domains, subdomains, URLs, and/or IP Addresses that have as its sole or predominant purpose to enable to facilitate access to the Goodporn Websites.”
After reviewing all relevant factors, the court agreed that a default judgment is appropriate. However, MG Premium won’t get everything it requested. The court settled on a substantially lower damages award, decimating the original request.
“Plaintiff has not adduced any evidence justifying why an award of $15,000 per infringement is reasonable and appropriate in this case,” the order reads.
“Weighing the authorities and arguments presented in Plaintiff’s brief, though unmoored by evidence substantiating Plaintiff’s position, the Court exercises its discretion to award statutory damages of $1,500 per infringement, that is, twice the minimum statutory damages available for willful infringement.”
The damages award, to be paid by Kumar, is substantially lower than the amount MG Premium hoped to get, but still adds up to $2,157,000. On top, $46,740 in attorneys’ fees, to be paid by all defendants.
The court further declared that MG Premium is the rightful owner of all works identified in the complaint but declined to award the requested injunction. This means that the domains will be neither seized nor blocked.
“Without any evidence to support the remedy, particularly evidence toward irreparable harm and the inadequacy of monetary remedies, the Court declines to find Plaintiff is entitled to the injunctions it seeks,” the order reads.
Despite the win, MG Premium likely hoped for much more than it got. That could mean this isn’t the last we hear of this case.
TorrentFreak spoke with Jason Tucker of Battleship Stance, who worked for MG Premium on this case. He is pleased that this important hurdle was taken but expects that there is more to come.
“This is one of the most bizarre cases I have ever consulted on and it is not over,” Tucker informs TorrentFreak.
“The Defendant displayed full-length movies with no license and completely ignored takedown notices. In response to a lawsuit, a person purportedly named Amrit Kumar claimed to own all of MG Premium’s past and future library of movies and images. His basis was a forged agreement.”
Whether MG Premium will fully recoup the damages remains to be seen. The fact that there are doubts about the identities of the defendants suggests that this might not be straightforward. That said, Tucker tells us that he is committed to helping his client enforce the judgment, while putting an end to the copyright-infringing activity.
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A copy of the order is available here (pdf) and the associated judgment can be found here (pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
New Windows version needs CPU features that became common in the late 00s.
Enlarge / We've installed Windows 11 on systems as old as this Core 2 Duo Inspiron tower. As of version 24H2, the OS may no longer be bootable on these systems. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Officially, Windows 11 has higher system requirements than Windows 10. But to date, once you've bypassed those requirement checks, there have been few consequences to running Windows 11 on old hardware. Unsupported or not, Windows 11 would run on pretty much any 64-bit PC that could boot Windows 10—we've run it on PCs as old as a Windows XP-era Core 2 Duo desktop.
That's apparently changing a bit in Windows 11's 24H2 update, which Microsoft began testing earlier this month. According to posts from a user named Bob Pony on X, formerly Twitter, the latest Windows 11 builds refuse to boot on older processors that don't support a relatively obscure instruction called "POPCNT." Short for "population count," it's used for "counting the number of bits in a machine word," according to an explainer by programmer Vaibhav Sagar.
It's unclear why POPCNT has become the load-bearing CPU instruction for a whole bunch of Windows components, but it looks like the Windows kernel, the system's USB and network drivers, and other core system files now require the instruction as of Windows 11 24H2.
The judge ruled that the court lacks jurisdiction.
Enlarge / Stephen Ubl, president and chief executive officer of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), speaks during a Bloomberg Live discussion in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2017. (credit: Getty | Andrew Harrer)
A federal judge in Texas dismissed a lawsuit Monday brought by a heavy-hitting pharmaceutical trade group, which argued that forcing drug makers to negotiate Medicare drug prices is unconstitutional.
The dismissal is a small win for the Biden administration, which is defending the price negotiations on multiple fronts. The lawsuit dismissed Monday is just one of nine from the pharmaceutical industry, all claiming in some way that the price negotiations laid out in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 are unconstitutional. The big pharmaceutical companies suing the government directly over the negotiations include Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novo Nordisk, Merck, and AstraZeneca.
Last month, a federal judge in Delaware heard arguments from AstraZeneca's lawyers, which reportedly went poorly. AstraZeneca argued that Medicare's new power to negotiate drug prices violates the company's rights under the Fifth Amendment's due process clause. The forced negotiations deprive the company of “property rights in their drug products and their patent rights" without due process, AstraZeneca claimed. But Colm Connolly, chief judge of the US District Court of Delaware, was skeptical of how that could be the case, according to a Stat reporter who was present for the hearing. Connolly noted that AstraZeneca doesn't have to sell drugs to Medicare. "You’re free to do what you want," Connolly reportedly said. "You may not make as much money."
Microsoft’s Edge browser, Bing search, and ad business also avoid regulations.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Apple's iMessage service is not a "gatekeeper" prone to unfair business practices and will thus not be required under the Fair Markets Act to open up to messages, files, and video calls from other services, the European Commission announced earlier today.
Apple was one of many companies, including Google, Amazon, Alphabet (Google's parent company), Meta, and Microsoft to have its "gatekeeper" status investigated by the EU. The iMessage service did meet the definition of a "core platform," serving at least 45 million EU users monthly and being controlled by a firm with at least 75 billion euros in market capitalization. But after "a thorough assessment of all arguments" during a five-month investigation, the Commission found that iMessage and Microsoft's Bing search, Edge browser, and ad platform "do not qualify as gatekeeper services." The unlikelihood of EU demands on iMessage was apparent in early December, when Bloomberg reported that the service didn't have enough sway with business users to demand more regulation.
Had the Commission ruled otherwise, Apple would have had until August to open up its service. It would have been interesting to see how the company would have complied, given that it provides end-to-end encryption and registers senders based on information from their registered Apple devices.
Woot is running a “mystery laptop” sale on older, refurbished notebooks. The bad news is you don’t know what you’re going to get. The good news is that all you have to spend is $190 and Woot is promising everyone will get a lap…
Woot is running a “mystery laptop” sale on older, refurbished notebooks. The bad news is you don’t know what you’re going to get. The good news is that all you have to spend is $190 and Woot is promising everyone will get a laptop with a 13 inch or larger screen, an 8th-gen Intel Core […]
The post Daily Deals (2-13-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
Skiff users will lose their @skiff.com email addresses, need to export data ASAP.
Enlarge / The Skiff email app.
Skiff, an encrypted email and productivity startup, is being acquired and shut down by another productivity suite company, Notion. Skiff users have just six months before their email and all other data are wiped out. If you set up forwarding before the shutdown date, Skiff says it will keep forwarding your email to another service for the next year.
Skiff's website has been replaced with the purchase notice and a link to a data migration page, which says, "We will be closing down Skiff's product suite after a 6-month sunset period." Acquisitions happen all the time, but in this case, there will be no transfer or continuation of service over to Notion. Users will lose their @skiff.com email address and all data will be deleted, so export your mail soon. Skiff has export services available at https://app.skiff.com/dashboard/?settingTab=export.
Losing your email address can be a nightmare, as it can feel almost impossible to chase down every service you've tied to your account. Based on the pile of posts inundating Skiff's account on X, Skiff users seem pretty upset by the move. The main page of skiff.com doesn't even mention the impending shutdown. A sign-off reads, "We look forward to continuing to serve you," so it's easy to assume that the service will keep running.
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