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Microsoft has released a new preview version of its Windows Terminal app, which is shaping up to be a pretty powerful, customizable tool for all of the different command line interfaces available in Windows 10. That includes the basic command prompt, …
Microsoft has released a new preview version of its Windows Terminal app, which is shaping up to be a pretty powerful, customizable tool for all of the different command line interfaces available in Windows 10. That includes the basic command prompt, PowerShell, and the Windows Subsystem for Linux. The latest version adds support for a […]
The post Lilbits: Windows Terminal, Android Go, and RISC-V appeared first on Liliputing.
Remember when Netscape said Internet Explorer was a problem?
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)
Slack—the now-nearly ubiquitous, purple work-chatting platform—has filed a formal complaint alleging that tech titan Microsoft is unlawfully abusing its power to squeeze newer rivals out of the market—almost the exact same accusations Microsoft infamously faced 20 years ago.
San Francisco-based Slack filed a complaint with the European Commission detailing "Microsoft's illegal and anti-competitive practice of abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law," the company said today.
The complaint centers on Microsoft Teams, the company's chat and video-conference platform. Teams is a competitor product not only to Slack but also to popular conference service Zoom, Google's Meet and chat services, and other video services. Slack alleges that the way Microsoft bundles Teams into its distribution of Office—widely used enterprise software such as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—gives Microsoft an unfair advantage against the competition.
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Microsoft kann in der Krise das hohe Wachstumstempo nicht mehr aufrechterhalten. Trotzdem werden die Analystenschätzungen übertroffen. (Quartalsbericht, Microsoft)
Microsoft kann in der Krise das hohe Wachstumstempo nicht mehr aufrechterhalten. Trotzdem werden die Analystenschätzungen übertroffen. (Quartalsbericht, Microsoft) Tesla hat im zweiten Quartal 2020 einen Gewinn von 104 Millionen US-Dollar erzielt. Auch der Umsatz lag über den Erwartungen. (Tesla, Elektroauto)
Tesla hat im zweiten Quartal 2020 einen Gewinn von 104 Millionen US-Dollar erzielt. Auch der Umsatz lag über den Erwartungen. (Tesla, Elektroauto) BioNTech, Pfizer announce deal for 100 million doses of coronavirus inoculation candidate.
Enlarge / Test doses of another potential SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. (credit: MLADEN ANTONOV / Getty Images)
The Trump administration has committed to spend $1.95 billion on 100 million doses of a potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Germany’s BioNTech and US pharma giant Pfizer, which will be distributed free of charge to American citizens.
BioNTech announced on Wednesday that the supply agreement signed by the White House also includes the option for the US government to purchase a further 500 million doses, subject to the vaccine being granted regulatory approval.
Several governments have signed agreements with some of the 24 groups currently testing a coronavirus vaccine on humans, including a promising candidate developed by Oxford university and AstraZeneca, but most other purchasers have refused to reveal the price paid per dose.
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Next year marks the 55th anniversary of the first episode of Star Trek, and CBS is apparently celebrating by bringing a piece of sci-fi tech to the real world. Sort of. The network has partnered with The Wand Company to produce a replica of a Tricorde…
Next year marks the 55th anniversary of the first episode of Star Trek, and CBS is apparently celebrating by bringing a piece of sci-fi tech to the real world. Sort of. The network has partnered with The Wand Company to produce a replica of a Tricorder used in the original series. It’ll be available for […]
The post CBS says a “fully functional” Tricorder is coming in 2021 appeared first on Liliputing.
Paul Hansmeier, one of the convicted attorneys behind the controversial Prenda Law firm, has plans to sue alleged pirates from prison. Hansmeier is sitting out a 14-year sentence but has informed the court that he now has the rights to a short adult film. In a separate case, he unveils his plans to, once again, make copyrighted works available on known pirate sites.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Last summer, a U.S. District Court in Minnesota sentenced Paul Hansmeier to 14 years in prison, to be followed by two years of supervised release.
Hansmeier was a key player in the Prenda Law firm, which pursued cases against people who were suspected of downloading pirated porn videos via BitTorrent.
While suing alleged pirates is not illegal, Prenda Law went much further. Over the years the firm faced negative court rulings over identity theft, misrepresentation, and even deception.
Most controversial were the shocking revelations that Prenda itself produced adult videos and uploaded their own torrents to The Pirate Bay. In doing so, they created a honeypot for the people they later sued over pirate downloads.
The allegations were serious enough to land on the radar of US law enforcement agencies which launched a criminal investigation, culminating in prison sentences for the two key players.
Today, Paul Hansmeier and his former colleague John Steele are both in prison. While the latter received a reduced sentence for his cooperative stance, Hansmeier continues to appeal his sentence to this day.
From prison, he also continues to wage legal battles. Earlier this year Hansmeier requested a temporary release from prison, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, and he has been active on other fronts as well.
This week, another handwritten letter from Hansmeier arrived at the court. This time it doesn’t contain any legal requests. Instead, it’s a straightforward declaration about a change in economic circumstances. This could be just a formality as part of bankruptcy proceedings but in this case, it points to something bigger.
“Defendant Paul Hansmeier, acting out of an abundance of caution, respectfully notifies the relevant parties that he now owns the right to a short adult movie,” the letter reads.
There are no further details available in the letter but a search through court records possibly provides more insight. In a separate case, Hansmeier reveals that he would like to sue alleged pirates again, from prison.
This scheme is detailed in a complaint Hansmeier filed at a federal court in Columbia late May, targeting U.S. Attorney General William Barr.
The convicted attorney explains that he would like to “enforce copyrights” via the Olan Mills method. In doing so, he plans to “retain an investigator to make his copyrighted works available to suspected infringers via notorious digital piracy sites.”
Alleged pirates who fall for this scheme will then be sued and can expect a settlement offer to resolve the case. This is more or less the same model as the original Prenda honeypot scheme but this time it would be out in the open.
Hansmeier asks the federal court for a declaration that U.S. Attorney General William Barr will not go after him for fraud or extortion. According to the convicted attorney, the US Constitution prohibits the Attorney General from doing so. If there are any objections, the US should intervene in the yet-to-be-filed piracy cases instead.
US District Judge James Boasberg reviewed the request but decided to dismiss the complaint last week, noting that “the Attorney General has absolute discretion in deciding whether to investigate claims for possible criminal or civil prosecution.”
As mentioned earlier, soon after, Hansmeier informed another court about the rights he now has to a short adult movie, so it may very well be that he will go ahead nonetheless.
There will be one key difference between the older honeypot scheme and the new one. In the past, Hansmeier and his colleagues concealed their involvement in the cases, using alter egos such as “Ingenuity 13.” According to the news plans, everything will be in the open.
TorrentFreak obtained a copy of a draft complaint Hansmeier plans to send to alleged pirates. This will clearly state his name, his current circumstances, as well as a detailed description of the honeypot scheme.
“Plaintiff Paul Hansmeier is a natural person and is an inmate at Sandstone Federal Correctional Institution in Sandstone, Minnesota,” the draft complaint targeting a hypothetical pirate reads.
“Plaintiff’s investigator posted a torrent file to a notorious digital piracy website. Defendant downloaded the torrent file and opened it in specialized software, which resulted in Defendant accessing Plaintiff’s computer systems, which Plaintiff leases from a third-party, and copying the video,” it adds.
The proposed openness and transparency will come after people are caught, of course. We doubt that any of the future honeypot torrents will carry this information.
It’s quite bizarre to learn that a convicted attorney wants to restart his copyright-trolling venture from prison. While this may lead some to believe that Hansmeier has lost it, there might also be some method to the madness.
We are no experts on criminal law, but Hansmeier has proven to be rather determined in the battle against his criminal conviction. Keeping this in mind, the plan to restart his business in the open may in some way be a ploy to aid his defense.
If that is the case, and whether that will have any effect has yet to be seen. However, we’ll certainly keep a close eye on any new “Hansmeier-related” torrents and lawsuits that pop up.
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A copy of Hansmeier’s complaint targeting U.S. Attorney General William Barr, detailing his plans, is available here (pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Five-year effort represents important progress on four-decade-old question.
Enlarge (credit: Dan / Flickr)
One of the most important numbers in climate science is 3°C. This isn’t about a projection of future warming or the impacts that come with it, though. It’s about how much warming you get if you double the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. That value can be made more general as a metric known as “climate sensitivity,” which describes how much warming you get for a given amount of emissions. If the number is small, we can burn a lot of fossil fuels with minimal consequences. If the number is extremely high, emissions are extraordinarily dangerous.
This number is commonly defined against a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the air, in part because CO2’s effect is logarithmic and each doubling is roughly equivalent. Calculations of this value go back to the turn of the 20th century, when the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius came up with numbers in the 4-6°C range. But a major milestone was reached in 1979, when a group of scientists released a climate report that included this value. The scientists wrote, “We estimate the most probable global warming for a doubling of CO2 to be near 3°C with a probable error of ±1.5°C.”
Despite all the scientific progress since then, that answer (1.5-4.5°C) has held up. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report tightened it up a bit to 2.0-4.5°C, but then a handful of studies released just before their 2013 report caused confusion that led to a return to the old 1.5-4.5°C range.
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Group seeks solution to White House concerns over video app.
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A group of US tech investors has launched an ambitious plan to buy TikTok from its Chinese owner, as the popular short-video app tries to escape being banned by the White House.
The investors, led by the venture capital firms General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, are in discussions with the US Treasury and other regulators to see if spinning out TikTok and firewalling it from its Chinese parent would satisfy US concerns about the app, according to two people involved in the process.
Last weekend, President Donald Trump’s election campaign placed ads on Facebook suggesting that TikTok was “spying” on US users, a claim the company has denied. Other critics have noted the app’s huge influence as it sits on the mobile phones of tens of millions of Americans.
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PC case maker Cooler Master’s latest product is a tiny case designed for the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer. It’s called the Cooler Master Pi Case 40, and it’s designed to be a durable, passively cooled case that lets you acces…
PC case maker Cooler Master’s latest product is a tiny case designed for the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer. It’s called the Cooler Master Pi Case 40, and it’s designed to be a durable, passively cooled case that lets you access all of the board’s connectors without removing the case. That even includes the 40-pin GPIO […]
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