Month: January 2025

Tesla sold almost 1.8 million cars in 2024, according to data released by the company this morning. Unfortunately for the electric automaker, it sold more than 1.8 million cars in 2023, beating this year's effort by 19,355 vehicles. But unlike last year, it managed to sell more cars than it built, with production falling by four percent in 2024.

In the final quarter of 2024, Tesla built 436,718 Models 3 and Y and delivered 471,930, clearing out a stash of inventory in the process. It built an additional 22,727 electric vehicles—the elderly Models S and X and the divisive Cybertruck—and sold 23,640 of them during the same three months. So in Q4 2024, Tesla actually achieved modest, year-over-year growth in total sales of about two percent.

But the picture of the year as a whole is less rosy. Model 3 and Y sales fell by two percent year-on-year, with production falling by slightly more. As noted, this appears to have allowed Tesla to reduce what was at one point a growing inventory of unsold vehicles.

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The Russian space program reached a significant milestone over the holidays with the 2,000th launch of a rocket from the "R-7" family of boosters. The launch took place on Christmas Day when an R-7 rocket lifted off, carrying a remote-sensing satellite from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

This family of rockets has an incredible heritage dating back nearly six decades. The first R-7 vehicle was designed by the legendary Soviet rocket scientist Sergei Korolev. It flew in 1957 and was the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. Because the first Soviet nuclear warheads were massive, the R-7 vehicle was powerful enough to be converted into an orbital rocket.

A modified version of the R-7 rocket, therefore, launched the Sputnik satellite later in 1957. And the slightly more powerful "Vostok" version of the booster carried Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, opening the era of human spaceflight. The first Soyuz variant, a rocket that has been upgraded multiple times but remains similar to its original form, flew in 1966. Humans still fly on the Soyuz rocket today to the International Space Station.

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Statt alte Server nach fünf Jahren auf den Müll zu werfen, sollen Komponenten wie RAM und CPU weiterhin in der Cloud arbeiten können. (Server, Microsoft)

Corporate executives are being hit with an influx of hyper-personalized phishing scams generated by artificial intelligence bots, as the fast-developing technology makes advanced cyber crime easier.

Leading companies such as British insurer Beazley and ecommerce group eBay have warned of the rise of fraudulent emails containing personal details probably obtained through AI analysis of online profiles.

“This is getting worse and it’s getting very personal, and this is why we suspect AI is behind a lot of it,” said Beazley’s chief information security officer Kirsty Kelly. “We’re starting to see very targeted attacks that have scraped an immense amount of information about a person.”

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In Los Angeles hat ein autonomes Waymo-Taxi einen Lieferroboter angefahren. Der hat zuvor eine rote Ampel nicht beachtet. (Waymo, Roboter)

Rund zwei Drittel aller Windows-PCs in Deutschland arbeiten noch mit Windows 10. Es besteht dringender Handlungsbedarf - nicht erst im Oktober dieses Jahres. (Windows 10, Microsoft)

In der Nähe eines Dorfes in Kenia ist ein 500 Kilogramm schwerer Trennring einer Rakete eingeschlagen. (Weltraumschrott, Raumfahrt)

Ein Tegra-SoC von Nvidia und 12 GByte Arbeitsspeicher: Leaks von der Hauptplatine der Nintendo Switch 2 bestätigen ältere Gerüchte. (Nintendo Switch, Nintendo)

Back in 2019, we told you about an intriguing experiment to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who fashioned a knife out of his own frozen feces. He used it to kill and skin a dog, using its rib cage as a makeshift sled to venture off into the Arctic. Metin Eren, an archaeologist at Kent State University, fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon.

Sadly for the legend, the blades failed every test, but the study was colorful enough to snag Eren an Ig Nobel Prize the following year. And it's just one of the many fascinating projects routinely undertaken in his Experimental Archaeology Laboratory, where he and his team try to reverse-engineer all manner of ancient technologies, whether they involve stone tools, ceramics, metal, butchery, textiles, and so forth.

Eren's lab is quite prolific, publishing 15 to 20 papers a year. “The only thing we’re limited by is time,” he said. Many have colorful or quirky elements and hence tend to garner media attention, but Eren emphasizes that what he does is very much serious science, not entertainment. “I think sometimes people look at experimental archaeology and think it’s no different from LARPing,” Eren told Ars. “I have nothing against LARPers, but it’s very different. It’s not playtime. It’s hardcore science. Me making a stone tool is no different than a chemist pouring chemicals into a beaker. But that act alone is not the experiment. It might be the flashiest bit, but that's not the experimental process.”

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More than two-and-a-half years ago, a group of Israel-based TV companies entered a new phase of their multi-year war against the country’s most popular and resilient pirate sites.

Companies including United King Film Distribution, Keshet Broadcasting, Hot Telecommunications Systems, and Reshet Media, requested a broad injunction at a federal court in the United States. The targets were three popular and highly-resilient pirate streaming sites; Israel-tv.com, Israel.tv, and Sdarot.tv, at the time Israel’s most-visited pirate site.

Blocking orders previously obtained in Israel had failed to put the platforms out of business. In the United States, the companies simply requested three of the most oppressive injunctions ever seen in a piracy case, and surprisingly the court obliged.

All ISPs…and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today…or to be used in the future by the Defendants…by any technological means available on the ISPs’ systems.

The injunctions also prevented CDN providers, DNS providers, domain companies, advertising services, financial institutions, and payment processors, from doing any business with the sites, ever. This unprecedented overreach provoked a significant reaction from Cloudflare and soon after the injunction was withdrawn.

TV Companies Try Their Hand at the High Court in London

While the Holy Grail of site-blocking injunctions ultimately proved elusive, other measures detailed in redacted or sealed court filings were eventually sanctioned in the United States. The nature of the measures is unknown but after being deployed for the last two-and-a-half years, most likely at great expense, the job still isn’t done.

In today’s shape-shifting world of self-resurrecting pirate sites, and clone sites that effectively mimic fallen originals, it’s difficult to say whether the various Sdarot-branded platforms online today are connected to the original or not. Israel TV, on the other hand, is an IPTV subscription platform with a style of business that’s more difficult to mimic, at least convincingly so.

The TV companies and the site are by now sworn enemies. The former doggedly refuses to give up and the latter bluntly refuses to give in. News of action at the High Court in London therefore suggests a new battleground is about to emerge.

Filed on December 24, 2024, the action sees United King Film Distribution, Keshet Broadcasting, Hot Telecommunications Systems, and Reshet Media, facing off against the UK’s largest internet service providers; British Telecommunications, EE, Plusnet, Sky UK, Talktalk, and Virgin Media Limited.

With no pirate sites mentioned at this stage but all other tell-tale signs present, this is unmistakably an application for a blocking injunction under Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

An Interesting Coincidence

What the Israeli companies have in mind isn’t entirely clear beyond the basics, and details are unlikely to arrive in the public domain for quite some time. Yet coincidentally or not, during the last few weeks an unusual listing appeared on freelancing platform, Upwork, that may shine some light on current planning.

Placed by a small IT company reportedly doing business in New York, which to date has spent $196K on 261 hires (67 active), the listing requests very specific information of the type typically required as part of a S97 application.

Upwork Listing

The item listed as ‘Task #2’ also fits neatly into a hypothetical scenario of this exercise being connected to an application for a blocking injunction. The TV company applicants have already shown considerable determination in their pursuit of Moonpay.

On reading the text, whoever won the contract for the work seems to have been advised that a particular outcome is a necessity; i.e this report should include a more specific transfer to their processing domain called billnet domain and more importantly to show that billnet always transfers to moonpay.com

In the unlikely event that a Section 97A order under copyright law would also instruct the blocking of a payment provider, showing that all of an infringer’s business can be attributed to a single processor might be quite useful. The text at the end (emphasis ours) may or may not be a reference to that but if such an order was made under copyright law, it would be the first of its type, at least as far as we’re aware.

Significantly Easier Than the U.S.

For the last 14 years or so, rightsholders have obtained blocking injunctions against broadly the same ISPs, hoping to reduce the availability of pirated content in the UK. The major Hollywood studios, major record labels, and to a lesser extent publishers, are adamant that site-blocking works. Yet in most months, new blocks targeting hundreds of domains are urgently pushed through in response to the latest pirate countermeasures.

The ISPs’ familiarity with this process is a big plus for the Israeli companies. Unless there’s a glaring issue that needs to be addressed, it’s likely they’ll receive no opposition from the ISPs; after all, several are TV companies who also wish to restrict infringement.

If recent history is any barometer, the ISPs may not even attend court. In that respect, they’ll probably have something in common with Israel TV.

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