First confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection reported in Hong Kong

It’s not surprising or necessarily concerning, but there’s important data to dig into.

Medical staff wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) as a precautionary measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus approach Lei Muk Shue care home in Hong Kong on August 23, 2020.

Enlarge / Medical staff wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) as a precautionary measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus approach Lei Muk Shue care home in Hong Kong on August 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | May James)

A healthy, 33-year-old man in Hong Kong is now the first person in the world confirmed to have been reinfected by the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2—which has currently infected more than 23 million people worldwide.

The man’s first infection was in late March. He reported having a cough with sputum, fever, sore throat, and a headache for three days before testing positive for the virus on March 26. Though his symptoms subsided days later, he was hospitalized on March 29 and remained in the hospital until April 14, when he tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 in two tests taken 24-hours apart.

About 4.5 months later, the man tested positive for the virus again. This time, his infection was caught during entry screening at a Hong Kong airport, as he returned from a trip to Spain, via the United Kingdom, on August 15. Though he had no symptoms, he was again hospitalized. Clinical data showed he had signs of an acute infection, but he remained asymptomatic throughout his time in the hospital.

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Lilbits: Happy 25th birthday Windows 95 (please don’t crash)

Microsoft released Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, which means the operating system is old enough to vote, drink, and do just about anything in the US except run for president. While Windows has come a long way in the past 25 years, if a modern Windows…

Windows 95

Microsoft released Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, which means the operating system is old enough to vote, drink, and do just about anything in the US except run for president. While Windows has come a long way in the past 25 years, if a modern Windows user were to fire up Windows 95 today, […]

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The best game-breaking speedruns of Summer Games Done Quick 2020

Annual fundraiser adapts to quarantine—and in incredible fashion. Watch the highlights.

The best game-breaking speedruns of Summer Games Done Quick 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images / GDC / DotEmu)

If you've read our gaming coverage over the past few years, you may have picked up on our love of speedrunning—the act of mastering and exploiting beloved games to finish them faster. While a ton of video and streaming channels focus on this hobby, we continue to look to the biannual Games Done Quick marathon series for the most entertaining (and even educational) speedruns every year.

This week, Summer Games Done Quick turned 10 years old and celebrated the milestone by raising $2.3 million for Doctors Without Borders—all without leaving the house. The series already has a few years of remote speedrunning tech experience under its belt, so the lack of a physical location had only a mild effect on the marathon's watchability. Thankfully, the whole event was captured for VOD enjoyment on YouTube, so if you'd like to catch up on the fun, we present to you the following embedded options and explanations as to why they're fun to watch.

TASBot breaks Super Mario 64.

Super Mario 64: Speedrun.com continues to list the N64's breakout classic as a fan favorite, so we were excited to see how a preprogrammed run, adjusted on a frame-by-frame basis, could break the game. As an added bit of challenge, the programmers in question focused on a later version of SM64, which meant they couldn't lean on its notorious "backwards long jump" bug for extra speed.

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Motorola launches Moto G9/Moto G9 Play in Europe and India for $200 or less

Motorola’s latest budget smartphone in the Moto G lineup is here… and by here, I mean India and Europe. It’s unclear if or when the Moto G9 and/or Moto G9 Play will be available in other markets. But the company unveiled the Moto G9 …

Moto G9

Motorola’s latest budget smartphone in the Moto G lineup is here… and by here, I mean India and Europe. It’s unclear if or when the Moto G9 and/or Moto G9 Play will be available in other markets. But the company unveiled the Moto G9 in India today, and it will be available from FlipKart for ₹11,499 ($155) […]

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TikTok sues Trump admin., says ban is unconstitutional and political

App accuses Trump of banning it in order to drum up anti-China sentiment for election.

TikTok logo next to inverted US flag.

Enlarge / TikTok's US operations may soon be part of every cool teen's favorite code conglomerate, Microsoft. (credit: SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, filed suit today in federal court arguing that President Donald Trump's efforts to ban the app or force a sale to a US firm are not grounded in facts but instead are part of an "anti-China political campaign."

An executive order curtailing TikTok's US operations "is not rooted in bona fide national security concerns," TikTok argues in its complaint (PDF). "Independent national security and information security experts have criticized the political nature of this executive order, and expressed doubt as to whether its stated national security objective is genuine," the company adds.

TikTok's complaint seeks to prevent the president and the Department of Commerce from "impermissively banning" the app, alleging that the authority under which the order was enacted (the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA) was a "gross misappropriation" and "a pretext for furthering the President's broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric in the run-up to the US election."

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New trailer for Alien director’s Raised by Wolves brings the lofty sci-fi

The visual spectacle aims to be a think piece on the role of faith in civilization.

My favorite video.

Today marks the release of a new trailer for HBO Max’s upcoming sci-fi series Raised by Wolves, produced and initially directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed Alien and The Martian.

Compared to the initial trailer that landed recently, this one fleshes the world out a bit more by introducing additional characters and more thoroughly explaining the central conflict in the series.

Here’s a quick recap of what we know about the series so far: it principally stars a female, possibly part-biological android named Mother, who has left behind some catastrophe on humanity’s home planet to travel to a new one. There, she raises a group of children who will be the seed for a new human civilization that avoids the mistakes that purportedly destroyed civilization as we know it. But in the course of raising them, it becomes clear that the young humans are susceptible to the same tendencies that Mother claims were humanity’s undoing.

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Daily Deals (8-24-2020)

Lenovo is running a Labor Day sale on select PCs. GOG is giving away Serious Sam for free, and offering discounts on 1,500 other games. And if you’re cool with buying last year’s flagship, Microsoft is running a sale on Samsung Galaxy S10 …

Lenovo ThinkCentre M90n

Lenovo is running a Labor Day sale on select PCs. GOG is giving away Serious Sam for free, and offering discounts on 1,500 other games. And if you’re cool with buying last year’s flagship, Microsoft is running a sale on Samsung Galaxy S10 and S10+ smartphones. Here are some of the day’s best deals. PCs Lenovo […]

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Rumor: Pixel 5 is slower than the Pixel 4, has same camera as the Pixel 2

The Pixel’s transition to a midrange phone makes for some awkward comparisons.

Hot on the heels of the first credible Pixel 5 render, we now have a live image and two reports on the specs for Google's next flagship.

First, we have a report from Android Central, which says the Pixel 5 will have a 6-inch, 90Hz OLED display, a Snapdragon 765G, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. The site couldn't nail down the battery size but says it will be "considerably larger" than the Pixel 4.

The second report is a bit sketchier since it comes from a random Redditor, but the post is backed up by some compelling evidence: the first live picture of the Pixel 5 and its cheaper companion, the Pixel 4a 5G. The Redditor has since deleted their post, but XDA Developers has the best backup of all the information. Besides aligning with Android Central's previous spec reports, Anonymous Redditor claims the phone has a 4000mAh battery. That would count as "considerably larger" than the Pixel 4's 2800mAh battery, but that's only on par with other midrange devices like the OnePlus Nord.

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Law Firm Working With YTS Obtains Subpoena To Discover Registrant of 1337x.to

The law firm that is obtaining user information from torrent site YTS has a new target. Via a DMCA subpoena, Culpepper IP hopes to compel a domain registry and Cloudflare to hand over information allowing it to identify the person who registered the 1337x.to torrent site domain and the uploader of a specific five-year-old torrent.

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

1337x logoOver the past several months we’ve been documenting the unfolding of one of the most unusual situations in torrent site history.

After being placed under intense legal pressure by Hawaii-based law firm Culpepper IP, torrent site YTS – the second most-visited torrent site on the planet – is now confirmed to be working with the law firm, providing it with user data to be used in copyright infringement actions.

During the past week there have been several new developments, with some interesting twists and turns.

For example, yesterday we revealed that information provided by YTS is now being used to fuel what appears to be a new email-based settlement demand scheme against the site’s own users.

We also reported that, in response to YTS’s apparent cooperation in legal action, large torrent sites 1337x, TorrentGalaxy (TGx) and Glotorrents banned YTS uploads to their platforms, cutting themselves off from the now-tarnished reputation of YTS. However, at least one of them has a new issue to contend with.

Culpepper IP Now Targeting 1337x and an Uploader

Following the announcement by 1337x, which was the first site to ban YTS uploads, Culpepper IP went to court in Hawaii with a brand new request. On behalf of Splintered LLC and using the increasingly-common DMCA subpoena process, Culpepper IP hopes to obtain at least two sets of key information, one that relates to 1337x itself and the other one of its uploaders.

The dispute centers around the comedy-romance movie ‘Playing it Cool’. First released in Estonia in 2014, it was made available in the United States during 2015 but was widely panned by critics, achieving a score of 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, however, links to the torrents of the movie are causing problems for 1337x.

DMCA Subpoena Filed in Hawaii

The subpoena targets two main third-party entities that provide services to 1337x. At the top level, it seeks to compel the Tonics Domain Corporation, the operator of 1337x’s .to domain, to reveal the mailing address, email address, telephone number and payment details of the “customer(s) that registered domain: 1337x.to from August 20, 2017 through August 20, 2020.”

Since 1337x uses the services of Cloudflare the subpoena also seeks to compel the CDN company to hand over the name, physical address, email address, telephone number, payment records and IP address log history from August 30, 2020 to the present day. It references a specific ‘infringing’ URL from where a torrent related to ‘Playing it Cool’ can be downloaded, as shown in the image below.

Playing it Cool 1337x

The image above clearly shows buttons for magnet links and a torrent file download but follows up with a ‘PLAY NOW (STREAM)’ button too. This leads to a third-party platform that claims to offer the movie to stream but according to reports should not be trusted.

Whether this URL was fully tested to be infringing before the DMCA subpoena was applied for isn’t clear. Nevertheless, Culpepper IP also want Cloudflare to hand over information that would allow it to find out who is supposedly infringing the rights of the movie company on that site too.

DMCA Subpoena Granted – But What Next?

The law firm notes, correctly, that this authorization doesn’t have to come from a judge but can be signed off by a clerk of the court, which is exactly what happened just before the weekend.

Whether Tonic or Cloudflare will have any useful information to hand over remains unclear but they will be required to do so during the first few days of September in order to comply with the terms of the subpoena. The big question thereafter is what Culpepper IP intend to do with that information, should it prove actionable.

As previously reported, the company managed to get piracy app CotoMovies onside, which shut down and handed over information on its users. YTS, as we already know, is also cooperating with information to assist lawsuits.

Meanwhile, under the direction of the same law firm, Popcorn Time, Showbox-linked, and other YTS-branded operations are under pressure too, some on the trademark front.

The DMCA subpoena documents relating to 1337x are available here (1,2,3 pdf)

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

GSMA: Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia und ZTE lassen 5G-Security prüfen

Bei den Branchenorganisationen GSMA und dem Normierungsgremium 3GPP haben vier große 5G-Ausrüster ihre Produktentwicklung und die Updates prüfen lassen. Neben Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia und ZTE fehlten ein paar Namen. (BSI, Nokia)

Bei den Branchenorganisationen GSMA und dem Normierungsgremium 3GPP haben vier große 5G-Ausrüster ihre Produktentwicklung und die Updates prüfen lassen. Neben Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia und ZTE fehlten ein paar Namen. (BSI, Nokia)