Month: December 2024

Ray spiders deploy an unusual strategy to capture prey in their webs. They essentially pull it back into a cone shape and release it when prey approaches, trapping said prey in the sticky silken threads. A few years ago, scientists noticed that they could get the spiders to release their webs just by snapping their fingers nearby, suggesting that the spiders relied at least in part on sound vibrations to know when to strike. Evidence for that hypothesis has now been confirmed in a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Most spider orb webs are static: the spiders weave them and fix them in place and then wait for prey to fly into the webs. That causes the silk threads to vibrate, alerting the spider that dinner is served. There are some species that actively actuate their webs, however, per the authors.

For instance, the triangle weaver spring-loads its triangular web once an insect has made contact so that the threads wrap around the prey in fractions of a second. Bolas spiders seem to detect prey in their vicinity through auditory cues, throwing a line of silk with a sticky end at passing moths to catch them. Ogre-faced spiders also seem to be able to hear potential prey, striking backward with a small silk net held in their front legs. It's a more proactive hunting strategy than merely waiting for prey to fly into a web.

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Between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago, people in Alaska kept reinventing dogs with mixed results.

The dogs that share our homes today are the descendants of a single group of wolves that lived in Siberia about 23,000 years ago. But for thousands of years after that split, the line between wolf and dog wasn’t quite clear-cut. A recent study shows that long after dogs had spread into Eurasia and the Americas, people living in what is now Alaska still spent time with—and fed—a bizarre mix of dogs, wolves, dog-wolf hybrids, and even some coyotes.

We just can’t stop feeding the wildlife

University of Arizona archaeologist François Lanoë and his colleagues studied 111 sets of bones from dogs and wolves from archaeological sites across the Alaskan interior. The oldest bones came from wolves that roamed what’s now Alaska long before people set foot there, and the most recent came from modern, wild Alaskan wolves. In between, the researchers worked with the remains of both wolves and dogs (and even a couple of coyotes) that spanning a swath of time from about 1,000 to around 14,000 years ago. And it turns out that even the wolves were tangled up in the lives of nearby humans.

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The Topton X4H-XL is a compact computer with support for up to an Intel Core i3-N305 Alder Lake-N processor, up to 32GB of RAM, and up to three storage devices. But what really sets it apart from most mini PCs is that this system is made for networking. It has two 10 GbE SFP+ optical ports and […]

The post This Alder Lake-N mini PC has two 10 GbE and two 2.5 GbE LAN ports appeared first on Liliputing.

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a "12 days of OpenAI" period starting December 5, which will unveil new AI features and products for 12 consecutive weekdays.

Altman did not specify the exact features or products OpenAI plans to unveil, but a report from The Verge about this "12 days of shipmas" event suggests the products may include a public release of the company's text-to-video model Sora and a new "reasoning" AI model similar to o1-preview. Perhaps we may even see DALL-E 4 or a new image generator based on GPT-4o's multimodal capabilities.

Altman's full tweet included hints at releases both big and small:

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With the arms race between pirate sites and rightsholders showing no obvious signs of cooling down, the online piracy landscape is becoming increasingly complex.

The existing toolbox of legal measures, such as action against domain names, site-blocking, search engine penalties, even whole-site deindexing, has led to the emergence of a new breed of shape-shifting, measure-evading, pirate sites.

Seemingly able to rebrand almost at will, it’s not uncommon for sites to reappear with new names and a new coat of paint, without any significant damage to existing traffic. Meanwhile, new sites and new brands, sporting multiple new domains, continuously vie for attention, as the illegal content continues to flow.

Human Moderators Can “Barely Keep Up”

In a statement issued this week, Japan’s Cultural Affairs Agency said the proliferation of illicit content online costs the country’s manga and anime industries billions of dollars each year in lost revenue.

Recent figures discussed as part of Japan’s comprehensive plan to combat infringement estimate the damage as somewhere between 1.9 trillion and 2.2 trillion yen (US$12.6bn and US$14.6bn); enough to “significantly increase Japan’s GDP” and “potentially eliminate” the trade deficit in content-related services, documents suggest.

The scale of the problem is well understood, but with an estimated 1,000 sites offering culturally significant manga and anime content for free, monitoring for the availability of pirated content online is a resource intensive task. Human moderators can now “barely keep up” due to the proliferation of illicit content online.

“Copyright holders spend a significant amount of human resources trying to manually detect pirated content online,” said Momii Keiko, a director at the Cultural Affairs Agency’s Copyright Division.

To level the playing field, Japan is looking towards a future where detection of illicit content will be less reliant on human intervention.

AI-Powered Pirated Content Detection System

To improve pirated content detection rates, Japan’s Cultural Affairs Agency has filed a supplementary budget request of 300 million yen (US$2 million) to fund a pilot program that will use artificial intelligence to detect pirated content online. The aim is to detect content using image and text recognition systems.

The proposed pilot is reportedly inspired by a similar program in South Korea. Announced mid-2023 by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the program aimed to overcome the limitations of manual work based on human resources, by automatically detecting the emergence of new, cloned, or substitute pirate sites.

At least initially, the pilot program in Japan will focus on pirated manga and anime. If successful it could also be expanded to other content such as films, TV shows, music, and content from Japan’s wider publishing industries.

Success of Automated Systems Totally Depends on Accuracy

The success of automated detection systems lies in their accuracy; nobody benefits if detections lead to false allegations of infringement, or if illegal content slips through the net. These concerns appear to be front and center in Japan as rightsholders continue to tackle pirate sites.

TorrentFreak was recently able to review a transcript of a discussion which focused on international enforcement efforts spearheaded by the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA).

While highlighting anti-piracy successes and challenges in various countries, emphasis was placed on the importance of balancing anti-piracy measures with freedom of expression and the protection of communications privacy.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

A US government security official urged Americans to use encrypted messaging as major telecom companies struggle to evict Chinese hackers from their networks. The attack has been attributed to a Chinese hacking group called Salt Typhoon.

There have been reports since early October that Chinese government hackers penetrated the networks of telecoms and may have gained access to systems used for court-authorized wiretaps of communications networks. Impacted telcos reportedly include Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Lumen (also known as CenturyLink).

T-Mobile has said its own network wasn't hacked but that it severed a connection it had to a different provider whose network was hacked. Lumen has said it has no evidence that customer data on its network was accessed.

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President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday he has selected Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman and space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX, to become the next NASA administrator.

"I am delighted to nominate Jared Isaacman, an accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot, and astronaut, as Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)," Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. "Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology, and exploration."

In a post on X, Isaacman said he was "honored" to receive Trump's nomination.

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The GPD Win 4 is a handheld gaming PC with a 6 inch FHD touchscreen display that slides upward to reveal a physical keyboard for thumb typing and a design that makes the handheld look like an oversized PlayStation Portable… if the PSP had a keyboard and support for modern PC games. GPD first launched the […]

The post GPD launches Win 4 handheld gaming PC with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 appeared first on Liliputing.

Die 35 Jahre alte Digitaluhr Casio F-91W verkauft sich auch vor Weihnachten wieder tausendfach. (Casio, Technik/Hardware)

Amazon has been accused of secretly slowing down Prime deliveries in low-income parts of the District of Columbia and then lying to customers who complained.

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb alleged that Amazon violated a local consumer protection law by overcharging approximately 48,000 "historically underserved" people in "two ZIP codes east of the Anacostia River"—20019 and 20020—by millions after "secretly" changing how delivery services work in these areas.

According to Schwalb's press release, Amazon switched from using its in-house delivery service for the last mile of deliveries to these DC ZIP codes sometime in mid-2022 to "exclusively" using third-party services. These third-party services—such as USPS or UPS—are "often slower" than Amazon delivery drivers, and "Amazon knew" the switch "would result in significantly slower deliveries for residents living in these two ZIP codes yet it never informed existing or prospective Prime members living there of that exclusion," the release said.

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