Month: November 2024

Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are continuing their fight against fines for selling user location data, with two of the big three carriers submitting new court briefs arguing that the Federal Communications Commission can't punish them.

A Verizon brief filed on November 4 and an AT&T brief on November 1 contest the legal basis for the FCC fines issued in April 2024. T-Mobile also sued the FCC, but briefs haven't been filed yet in that case.

"Verizon's petition for review stems from the multiple and significant errors that the FCC, in purporting to enforce statutory consumer data privacy provisions, made in overstepping its authority," Verizon wrote. "The FCC's Forfeiture Order violated both the Communications Act and the Constitution, while failing to benefit the consumers it purported to protect."

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A Michigan man who ran chat rooms and Discord servers targeting children playing online games and coercing them into self-harm, sexually explicit acts, suicide, and other violence was sentenced to 30 years in prison Thursday.

According to the US Department of Justice, Richard Densmore was a member of an online terrorist network called 764, which the FBI considers a "tier one" terrorist threat. He pled guilty to sexual exploitation of a child as "part of a broader indictment that charged him with other child exploitation offenses." In the DOJ's press release, FBI Director Christopher Wray committed to bring to justice any abusive groups known to be preying on vulnerable kids online.

“This defendant orchestrated a community to target children through online gaming sites and used extortion and blackmail to force his minor victims to record themselves committing acts of self-harm and violence,” Wray said. “If you prey on children online, you can’t hide behind a keyboard. The FBI will use all our resources and authorities to arrest you and hold you accountable.”

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The global space community awoke to a new reality on Wednesday morning.

The founder of this century's most innovative space company, Elon Musk, successfully used his fortune, time, and energy to help elect Donald Trump to president of the United States. Already, Musk was the dominant Western player in space. SpaceX launches national security satellites and NASA astronauts and operates a megaconstellation. He controls the machines that provide essential space services to NASA and the US military. And now, thanks to his gamble on backing Trump, Musk has strong-armed himself into Trump's inner circle.

Although he may not have a cabinet-appointed position, Musk will have a broad portfolio in the new administration for as long as his relations with Trump remain positive. This gives Musk extraordinary power over a number of areas, including spaceflight. Already this week, he has been soliciting ideas and input from colleagues. The New York Times reported that Musk has advised Trump to hire key employees from the SpaceX into his administration, including at the Department of Defense. This reflects the huge conflict of interest that Musk will face when it comes to space policy. His actions could significantly benefit SpaceX, of which he is the majority owner and has the final say in major decisions.

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People have long been fascinated by the haunting plaster casts of the bodies of people who died in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. Archaeologists have presented certain popular narratives about who these people might have been and how they might have been related. But ancient DNA analysis has revealed that those preferred narratives were not entirely accurate and may reflect certain cultural biases, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. The results also corroborate prior research suggesting that the people of ancient Pompeii were the descendants of immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean.

As previously reported, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius released thermal energy roughly equivalent to 100,000 times the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, spewing molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in particular. The vast majority of people in Pompeii and Herculaneum—the cities hardest hit—perished from asphyxiation, choking on the thick clouds of noxious gas and ash. But at least some of the Vesuvian victims probably died instantaneously from the intense heat of fast-moving lava flows, with temperatures high enough to boil brains and explode skulls.

In the first phase, immediately after the eruption, a long column of ash and pumice blanketed the surrounding towns, most notably Pompeii and Herculaneum. By late night or early morning, pyroclastic flows (fast-moving hot ash, lava fragments, and gases) swept through and obliterated what remained, leaving the bodies of the victims frozen in seeming suspended action.

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Gaming-Monitor zum Mitnehmen: Ein Portable Monitor von Arzopa mit 144 Hertz Bildwiederholrate ist bei Amazon 30 Prozent reduziert. (TV & Monitore, Display)

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X processors are the fastest ARM-based chips available for Windows laptops to date, making PCs with ARM chips competitive with their Intel and AMD-powered counterparts for the first time. But hardware is only part of the puzzle. Most PC applications are designed for systems with x86 processors. So Microsoft developed an emulator called […]

The post Update for Windows PCs with ARM chips could improve compatibility with x86 games and applications appeared first on Liliputing.

Meta has defeated a lawsuit—for now—that attempted to invoke Section 230 protections for a third-party tool that would have made it easy for Facebook users to toggle on and off their news feeds as they pleased.

The lawsuit was filed by Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He feared that Meta might sue to block his tool, Unfollow Everything 2.0, because Meta threatened to sue to block the original tool when it was released by another developer. In May, Zuckerman told Ars that he was "suing Facebook to make it better" and planned to use Section 230's shield to do it.

Zuckerman's novel legal theory argued that Congress always intended for Section 230 to protect third-party tools designed to empower users to take control over potentially toxic online environments. In his complaint, Zuckerman tried to convince a US district court in California that:

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Über ein Jahr hat die Entschlüsselung des außerirdischen Signals vom Mars gedauert. Dabei handelte es sich um ein Kunstprojekt der Seti-Gemeinschaft. (Aliens, Astronomie)

On Tuesday, Elwood Edwards, the voice behind the online service America Online's iconic "You've got mail" greeting, died at age 74, one day before his 75th birthday, according to Cleveland's WKYC Studios, where he worked for many years. The greeting became a cultural touchstone in the 1990s and early 2000s in the early Internet era; it was heard by hundreds of millions of users when they logged in to the service and new email was waiting for them.

The story of Edwards' famous recording began in 1989 when Steve Case, CEO of Quantum Computer Services (which later became America Online—or AOL for short), wanted to add a human voice to the company's Quantum Link online service. Karen Edwards, who worked as a customer service representative, heard Case discussing the plan and suggested her husband Elwood, a professional broadcaster.

Edwards recorded the famous phrase (and several others) into a cassette recorder in his living room in 1989 and was paid $200 for the service. His voice recordings of "Welcome," "You've got mail," "File's done," and "Goodbye" went on to reach millions of users during AOL's rise to dominance in the 1990s online landscape.

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Einem Zeugen zufolge soll die sogenannte Krypto-Queen seit Jahren tot sein - das LKA Düsseldorf hält die Zeugenaussage allerdings für nicht haltbar. (Kryptowährung, Wirtschaft)