Month: February 2025

The Epic Games Store is giving away two free games this week, including HUMANKIND, which normally sells for $50. Meanwhile if you’ve got an Amazon Prime membership (free trials qualify), Amazon Gaming is giving away more than 30 PC games including several recently added titles like BioShock Infinite. Here are some of the day’s best […]

The post Daily Deals (2-06-2025) appeared first on Liliputing.

Lawmakers are now pushing to immediately ban the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek on government devices, citing national security concerns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) may have built a backdoor into DeepSeek to access Americans' sensitive private data. If passed, DeepSeek could be banned within 60 days.

DeepSeek shocked the world when it debuted last month. Rumored to rival OpenAI's o1 reasoning model despite costing significantly less to develop, DeepSeek's open source model is free to download. That propelled its popularity, making DeepSeek the most-downloaded app in the US.

As DeepSeek was rapidly installed on an increasing number of US phones, research emerged yesterday suggesting that DeepSeek is linked to a Chinese telecom company, China Mobile. In an analysis shared with AP News, Ivan Tsarynny, the CEO of Feroot, revealed that DeepSeek apparently hid code that sends user login information to China Mobile.

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Something in the sky captured the attention of astronomers in the final days of 2024. A telescope in Chile scanning the night sky detected a faint point of light, and it didn't correspond to any of the thousands of known stars, comets, and asteroids in astronomers' all-sky catalog.

The detection on December 27 came from one of a network of telescopes managed by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a NASA-funded project to provide warning of asteroids on a collision course with Earth.

Within a few days, scientists gathered enough information on the asteroid—officially designated 2024 YR4—to determine that its orbit will bring it quite close to Earth in 2028, and then again in 2032. Astronomers ruled out any chance of an impact with Earth in 2028, but there's a small chance the asteroid might hit our planet on December 22, 2032.

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The Genesis Electrified GV70 continues to intrigue me. Together with the internal combustion engine version, it's the closest thing we'll get to a baby Bentley shooting brake, at least without being part of the Brunei royal family. It's a handsome five-door that looks almost station wagon-ish, without actually succumbing to the retail poison that body style has sadly become.

A station wagon G70, called the Shooting Brake, does exist—in Europe, anyway. But neither it nor the four-door sedan G70 are available with a battery electric powertrain. SUVs being popular helped in that regard. The vehicle starts at around the midpoint for a luxury electric SUV at $66,950; the Prestige trim we tried bumps that starting price to $73,750.

Some people reflexively take offense on seeing those three letters, but this Electrified GV70 has been kept away from the growth hormones. It's identical in length to a Ford Mustang Mach-E, but here, we see one downside to the Electrified GV70's use of a common platform—the Genesis loses out to the Ford by four inches when we compare wheelbases.

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Bei Amazon gibt es derzeit den Philips EP2330/10 Series 2300 im Angebot. Der Kaffeevollautomat ist mit 35 Prozent Rabatt verfügbar. (Amazon, Technik/Hardware)

Bei Amazon sinken die Preise für Alexa-Lautsprecher um bis zu 36 Prozent, doch von Tiefstpreisen ist man noch entfernt. (Amazon Alexa, Amazon)

Amazon verkauft einen RGB LED-Strip von Govee zum Tiefstpreis. Im befristeten Angebot zahlt man nur 1,25 Euro pro Meter. (Technik/Hardware, Amazon)

Illegale Server, Drohungen gegen Behördenmitarbeiter und Umgehung des Freedom of Information Act: Doge geht brachial vor und stößt auf wenig Widerstand. Eine Analyse von Mike Faust (Elon Musk, Server)

Amazon hat eine Monitorhalterung von Bontec im Angebot, die sich neigen, schwenken, drehen und in der Höhe verstellen lässt. (Technik/Hardware)

Last weekend, shadow library Anna’s Archive argued that, for AI companies, access to ‘pirated’ books may be a matter of national security.

The reasoning behind this controversial take concerns the legal implications faced by U.S. companies if they train AI models using data obtained from shadow libraries. Other countries, however, have fewer reservations, which could give foreign companies a technological edge.

American tech companies are well aware of the potential powers of shadow libraries. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has never denied its use of these libraries to train early versions of its AI models.

Sued Over Torrenting Allegations

Meta isn’t unique in this. Chinese AI disruptor DeepSeek also publicly admitted to using data from ‘pirate’ sources. To date, however, it’s mostly the major U.S. tech giants that have been taken to court.

A class-action lawsuit filed by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden is one such copyright infringement case. The authors accuse Meta of using their work without permission.

Last month, they filed an amended complaint which included BitTorrent-related allegations. The plaintiffs see this as particularly problematic because BitTorrent users typically upload content to third parties as well.

“Meta downloaded millions of pirated books from LibGen through the bit torrent protocol using a platform called LibTorrent. Internally, Meta acknowledged that using this protocol was legally problematic,” the third amended complaint noted.

“By downloading through the bit torrent protocol, Meta knew it was facilitating further copyright infringement by acting as a distribution point for other users of pirated books.”

Unsealed: Terabytes of Data

These alleged wrongdoings needed to be proven in court so the rightsholders sought access to torrent client logs and seeding data from Meta. The request was denied.

Nonetheless, the rightsholders still managed to obtain torrent-related evidence during discovery. Many of the details were previously sealed, but unsealed copies added to the docket yesterday reveal new information.

Quoting from an internal Meta email thread, the plaintiffs were about to show that the company attempted to source data through Anna’s Archive. While this was tricky because the number of seeders was low, they successfully obtained many terabytes.

“[T]he magnitude of Meta’s unlawful torrenting scheme is astonishing: just last spring, Meta torrented at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen.”

“Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen,” the plaintiffs state in the unsealed document, referring to an email where Anna’s Archive is referred to by the initials “AA”.

Unsealed email

The email, shown above, mentions the Internet Archive as a key source as well, although it’s not a typical shadow library. It provides an overview of the progress made, noting that ‘few seeds’ and ‘slow download speeds’ presented a challenge.

Copyright Concerns?

Meta’s employees were not oblivious to potential copyright concerns. According to the unsealed records, one employee stated: “I feel that using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold.”

In addition, there was an internal discussion about not using Facebook infrastructure to torrent, to “avoid[] risk of tracing back the seeder/downloader” to Meta servers.

These comments and references were already known to the plaintiffs, but now enter the public domain. They shed additional light on internal discussions but for Meta, however, these torrenting allegations are not a game changer.

Meta: Fair Use

Last week, Meta filed a motion to dismiss the authors’ claim regarding ‘Removal of Copyright Management Information’ as well as the claim of violating California Penal Code § 502, arguing that neither was properly pled.

Meta did not request dismissal of the copyright infringement complaint, but is confident that it can “debunk this meritless allegation” on summary judgment.

“Plaintiffs do not plead a single instance in which any part of any book was, in fact, downloaded by a third party from Meta via torrent, much less that Plaintiffs’ books were somehow distributed by Meta,” the company writes.

This doesn’t mean that Meta denies using shadow libraries, its argument is that using such data to train its LLM models constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law.

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A copy of all relevant documents referenced here are available though Free.law’s Courtlistener

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