Grünheide: Gericht stoppt Rodungsarbeiten für Tesla-Werk

Die Baumfällarbeiten für das Tesla-Werk in Grünheide sind vorerst gestoppt. Das Oberverwaltungsgericht Berlin-Brandenburg entschied sich für einen sofortigen Rodungsstopp, weil binnen weniger Tage bereits alle Arbeiten abgeschlossen sein könnten. (Giga…

Die Baumfällarbeiten für das Tesla-Werk in Grünheide sind vorerst gestoppt. Das Oberverwaltungsgericht Berlin-Brandenburg entschied sich für einen sofortigen Rodungsstopp, weil binnen weniger Tage bereits alle Arbeiten abgeschlossen sein könnten. (Gigafactory Berlin, Elektroauto)

New Wave Of Nintendo Anti-Piracy Complaints Helps Microsoft Too

Nintendo has launched a new wave of DMCA complaints at Google in an effort to make piracy-enabling devices harder to find. In common with previous efforts, the gaming giant is making strategic use of DMCA anti-circumvention notices, to permanently delete listings from search results. Perhaps inadvertently, Nintendo also appears to be helping Microsoft too.

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While most if not all gaming companies have piracy issues to contend with, Nintendo is among the most aggressive when it comes to protecting its intellectual property rights.

The company has a multi-pronged strategy that tackles the issue from almost every conceivable direction. When sites create archives of gaming ROMs available for download, Nintendo is happy to sue their operators and when entities are more difficult to pursue with direct legal action, it has taken to the courts to have ISPs block piracy-facilitating platforms.

While it has many adversaries on the piracy front, the infamous Team-Xecutor is perhaps the company’s arch-nemesis. With its development of hardware and software solutions to skirt Nintendos technical protection measures, such as those available for the Switch platform, Team-Xecutor is now one of Nintendo’s priorities.

Last November we reported that Nintendo had begun targeting Google with relatively rare DMCA anti-circumvention notices, which detailed URLs where Team-Xecutor and similar piracy-enabling products could be found.

Since these notices aren’t easily countered, Google removed many listings from its indexes, meaning that anyone searching for Team-Xecutor’s SX OS and SX Pro products would find related pages more difficult to find. It now transpires that on this front, Nintendo is keeping up the pressure, firing off more and more complaints to Google in an effort to reduce the popularity of these products.

In early December, following our last update, Nintendo sent a notice to Google targeting 91 pages on Team-Xecutor.com.

“The URLs listed below promote, and direct visitors to resellers of, circumvention software and devices called the SX OS and SX Pro,” the notice reads.

“The SX OS and SX Pro is designed to bypass technological protection measures in the Nintendo Switch video game system and allows users to play unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s video game files that are offered unlawfully via the Internet.”

While that was certainly the case for many of the listed URLs, rival gaming companies also benefited from the notice. Intentionally or otherwise, Nintendo also requested the delisting of pages relating to modification devices for Microsoft’s XBox 360, including the Xecutor Sonos 360 sound module, for example.

Another, a couple of days later, listed another 65 URLs, again targeting a mixture of Nintendo and Xbox-related products.

While Team-Xecutor and sellers of the R4 range of backup cartridges are the main targets, these devices are distributed through networks of resellers, all of which Nintendo wants to render harder to find. Many notices in December also addressed this issue, targeting a range of sites selling Team-Xecutor and similar products.

After a six week hiatus, this month Nintendo began sending notices again, largely following the same format as before by deleting specific pages on a range of sites from Google’s search results. While this is a nuisance for the targeted platforms, three in particular appeared to have made the mistake of offering circumvention devices on their homepages.

As a result, sxswitch.com, mod-switch.com, and gogioco.com have all had their homepages deleted from search results. Team-Xecutor.com received the same treatment back in September 2019.

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Review: Fantasy Island commits the ultimate cinematic sin: it’s boring

Film reboot can’t seem to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.

Sony’s reboot of Fantasy Island plays up the horror.

Five guests at a remote vacation resort find their fantasies are turning into nightmares in Sony Pictures' big-screen reboot of Fantasy Island, based on the popular TV series of the same name that ran from 1977-1984. This 21st-century update plays up the horror aspects and has been touted as a cross between Westworld and The Cabin in the Woods—perhaps with a little bit of Lost thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, the film fails to capture any of the elements that made those works uniquely appealing, and the result is a muddled mishmash of tired tropes and yawn-inducing plot twists you can see coming from miles away.

(Mild spoilers below the gallery.)

Fantasy Island was always a terrific storytelling concept, despite its cheesier elements. Apparently, creator Aaron Spelling pitched the series to ABC executives as a joke after they'd rejected all his other ideas—and the network loved the idea. The ultra-urbane Ricardo Montalban played the dashing Mr. Roarke, proprietor of the titular island, providing guests the chance to live out their fantasies for a suitable price. He was aided by his trusty sidekick Tattoo (Hervé Villechaize). Every episode opened with Tattoo shouting the catchphrase, "Ze plane! Ze plane!" and ringing a bell in the island's main tower as guests arrived.

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Americans trapped on cruise ship with coronavirus get to go home

Once back, the cruise passengers will be subject to a 14-day federal quarantine.

A person wearing a face make walks along a port on a sunny day with the Princess Diamond cruise ship docked in the background.

Enlarge / YOKOHAMA, JAPAN - FEBRUARY 10: A member of the media wears a face mask while walking past the Diamond Princess cruise ship. (credit: Getty | Carl Court)

Approximately 400 Americans may finally get to go home after being trapped aboard a cruise ship in Japan with the largest outbreak of coronavirus outside of China.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday announced plans to evacuate the US citizens, who are encouraged to disembark the quarantined ship—the Diamond Princess—and fly to the States on planes chartered by the US State Department. The aircraft will arrive in Japan on the evening of February 16. Upon their return, the Americans will be subject to a 14-day federal quarantine in one of two military bases.

Everyone aboard the Diamond Princess has been under quarantine on the ship in Yokohama, Japan (south of Tokyo), since February 3. At the start of the quarantine, there were 2,666 guests and 1,045 crew on board the ship. Since then, 285 cases of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) have been identified, according to the latest figures reported by the World Health Organization.

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Researchers have already tested YouTube’s algorithms for political bias

More moderation associated with more hate speech and misinformation, not politics.

Google logo seen during Google Developer Days (GDD) in Shanghai, China, September 2019.

Enlarge / Google logo seen during Google Developer Days (GDD) in Shanghai, China, September 2019. (credit: Lyu Liang | VCG | Getty Images)

In August 2018, President Donald Trump claimed that social media was "totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices." Not much was new about this: for years, conservatives have accused tech companies of political bias. Just last July, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked the FTC to investigate the content moderation policies of tech companies like Google. A day after Google's vice president insisted that YouTube was apolitical, Cruz claimed that political bias on YouTube was "massive."

But the data doesn't back Cruz up—and it's been available for a while. While the actual policies and procedures for moderating content are often opaque, it is possible to look at the outcomes of moderation and determine if there's indication of bias there. And, last year, computer scientists decided to do exactly that.

Moderation

Motivated by the long-running argument in Washington DC, computer scientists at Northeastern University decided to investigate political bias in YouTube's comment moderation. The team analyzed 84,068 comments on 258 YouTube videos. At first glance, the team found that comments on right-leaning videos seemed more heavily moderated than those on left-leaning ones. But when the researchers also accounted for factors such as the prevalence of hate speech and misinformation, they found no differences between comment moderation on right- and left-leaning videos.

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Huawei: Der denkbar schlechteste Ort für eine Hintertür

Huaweis Sicherheitschef spricht bei dem Backdoor-Vorwurf im Lawful Intercept Gateway von einem verfrühten Aprilscherz. In dieser Woche hatte die USA auch die Klage gegen Huawei verschärft. (Backdoor, Google)

Huaweis Sicherheitschef spricht bei dem Backdoor-Vorwurf im Lawful Intercept Gateway von einem verfrühten Aprilscherz. In dieser Woche hatte die USA auch die Klage gegen Huawei verschärft. (Backdoor, Google)

“I was just shaking”—new documents reveal details of fatal Tesla crash

Autopilot didn’t slow down in seconds before deadly Tesla crash.

The trailer sheared off the roof of Jeremy Banner's car, killing him instantly.

Enlarge / The trailer sheared off the roof of Jeremy Banner's car, killing him instantly.

"It really looked like I had plenty of time to go across," an anguished Florida truck driver said in an interview transcript released by the National Transportation Safety Board this week. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

Richard Wood was driving a semi truck on the morning of Friday, March 1, 2019. He pulled onto Florida's SR 7 from a driveway, intending to make a left turn. But as he crossed to the opposite lane, a Tesla Model 3 belonging to Jeremy Banner crashed into the side of the truck. Banner's Tesla went under Wood's trailer, shearing off the roof and killing Banner.

The case attracted wide attention because Banner had engaged Tesla's Autopilot technology. Not only that, the circumstances of Banner's death were almost identical to the first Autopilot-related death in the United States: the death of Josh Brown in 2016. Brown was also killed when Autopilot failed to stop for a semi truck crossing in front of him on a Florida highway.

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Evolving underwater: Oceans board game review

Fear the Cambrian explosion!

The game in all its glory on the table.

Enlarge / The game in all its glory on the table. (credit: North Star Games)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

I once spotted a barracuda while scuba diving. It darted in close, shimmering silver, its features reminiscent of a high school bully: lean, sharp, with an underbite that jutted forward in defiance of both authority and band kids.

If I were to build that creature in Oceans, the latest card game from North Star Games, its traits would be Speed, Apex Predator, and Scare The Crap Out Of Fourteen-Year-Old Dan. (That last one is a promo card. It isn’t available, so don’t request it.)

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EPFL: Neue 3D-Drucktechnik erstellt Modelle in 30 Sekunden

Ein Zylinder dreht sich und eine Mini-Kathedrale entsteht: Schweizer Forscher arbeiten an einem 3D-Druckverfahren, das Objekte durch Rotation erzeugt. Erste Ergebnisse sind zwar noch winzig, aber trotzdem beeindruckend. (3D-Drucker, Technologie)

Ein Zylinder dreht sich und eine Mini-Kathedrale entsteht: Schweizer Forscher arbeiten an einem 3D-Druckverfahren, das Objekte durch Rotation erzeugt. Erste Ergebnisse sind zwar noch winzig, aber trotzdem beeindruckend. (3D-Drucker, Technologie)

BPI Joins RIAA’s Takedown Battle Against YouTube Downloaders

UK music group BPI has joined the RIAA in its effort to wipe YouTube download and ripping sites from Google’s search results. Using language inspired by its US counterpart, BPI repeatedly argues that Mpgun.com violates the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. While the search engine has complied with the requests, the site remains easy to find.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Late last year the RIAA started targeting YouTube ripping sites by sending relatively rare takedown requests to Google.

Instead of the usual DMCA copyright notices, the music group asked the search engine to remove various URLs for alleged violations of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision.

The sites in question circumvent YouTube’s rolling cipher, which is a technical protection measure that protects audio and video from being copied without permission, the RIAA argued. As such, they should be removed from Google’s search results.

Over the past months, the RIAA has ramped up its efforts, hoping to make it harder for users to find these sites. However, the YouTube rippers themselves weren’t sitting still either. They actively countered the RIAA’s notices by continuously using new URL structures.

We highlighted this development in an article late last month, describing it as a game of whack-a-mole. While the RIAA was the only player on its side, it has now found an ally in its British counterpart, the BPI.

A few days after our whack-a-mole article was published the BPI started sending similar DMCA anti-circumvention notices, targeting the same YouTube downloader the RIAA is after.

Over the past several days, the UK group has sent over a dozen notices. The requests target over a hundred URLs from Mpgun.com, which allegedly circumvents YouTube’s copyright protections.

“To our knowledge, the URLs indicated provide access to a service (and/or software) that circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher, a technical protection measure, that protects our members’ works on YouTube from unauthorised copying/downloading,” the BPI writes.

This is the same ‘rolling cipher’ the RIAA references, which is another indication that both groups work in tandem.

In fact, the entire statement above is copied verbatim from the RIAA. The BPI only changed the American ‘authorized’ to the British ‘authorised’ and corrected the RIAA’s copyrighted ‘woks’ to ‘works.’

This is the first time the BPI has sent multiple requests of this kind. When looking through the archive we did spot an older notice from October, but that was phrased differently (no cipher mention) and targeted only a single URL.

Whether the extra manpower will lead to any results has yet to be seen. With or without the BPI’s involvement, Mpgun continues to evade and bypass the takedown requests. For now, Google searches for terms such as “YouTube to MP3” and “YouTube downloader” still yield plenty of results, including Mpgun.

In fact, when searching for “MP3 and MP4 YouTube converter,” Mpgun comes up as the first result.

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