On March 29, lawyers representing choreographer Kyle Hanagami sued Epic Games for copyright infringement over the “It’s Complicated” dance emote in Fortnite. The in-game emote begins with movements which Hanagami’s lawyers allege are lifted from copyrighted dance moves created by the choreographer. The lawsuit was…
Source: Kotaku – Fortnite’s Getting Sued By Dance Choreographer Who’s Worked With Bieber, Britney
Enlarge (credit: James Leynse/Corbis)
The Department of Justice is throwing its weight behind an antitrust bill working its way through the Senate, with the department saying that it needs new tools to help police markets dominated by platforms such as Amazon, Meta (formerly Facebook), Apple, and Google.
“The Department views the rise of dominant platforms as presenting a threat to open markets and competition, with risks for consumers, businesses, innovation, resiliency, global competitiveness, and our democracy,” Peter Hyun, acting assistant attorney general, wrote in a letter to the Senate. “Discriminatory conduct by dominant platforms can sap the rewards from other innovators and entrepreneurs, reducing the incentives for entrepreneurship and innovation.” The letter was first obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, cosponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), would limit Big Tech firms’ ability to “unfairly preference” their own products and services. For example, under the proposed bill, Amazon couldn’t boost search rankings of its private-label products, and Apple and Google couldn’t do the same for their apps in their app stores.
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Source: Ars Technica – Antitrust bill in Senate would help rein in Big Tech platforms, DOJ says
NVIDIA this week formally added a new flagship graphics card to its lineup, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. It’s essentially a thicker and faster version of the non-Ti model, with more CUDA cores and speedier memory to toss at gaming, content creation, and other graphics tasks. While not for everyone, if you’re looking for the fastest consumer card
Source: Hot Hardware – GeForce RTX 3090 Ti: Where To Buy NVIDIA’s Fastest Graphics Card
Enlarge / Purists may be aghast, but the commercial reality is that Lotus needs a volume-seller, and that means an SUV. At least it is fully electric. (credit: Lotus)
This week we found out what an electric Lotus SUV will look like when the company showed off a new car called the Eletre. Not everyone will be a fan of the styling, and others will just object to the idea of Lotus making an SUV, electric or otherwise, in the first place.
But keep an open mind, at least until the first road tests. As long as it drives like a Lotus, it might be just the thing to bring a lot of new customers to the marque, not just in Europe and China but here in the US from 2024. And as Porsche so ably demonstrates, it’s a good way to pay for the stuff that makes car nerds get hot under the collar.
The English manufacturer of lightweight sports cars has been in an unusual position these last few years—sufficiently funded, thanks to the same deep pockets that rejuvenated Volvo. Instead of having to warm over an increasingly old platform for small two-seaters, Lotus got to work developing not one but four new architectures.
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Source: Ars Technica – Whether you love the idea or hate it, Lotus is making an electric SUV
Russia’s omnipresent tech company, which created products ranging from the country’s dominant search engine to its biggest ride-hail service, is facing a looming shortage of hardware as U.S. sanctions punish President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. From a report: Yandex NV may run short of the semiconductors needed for the servers it uses to power its business within a year to 18 months because of import restrictions, two people with direct knowledge of the issue said, asking not to be identified in order to speak candidly. Sanctions on dual-use technology, which have both military and commercial uses, have hit its self-driving vehicle unit particularly hard, they said. Yandex has plunged into crisis since Putin began the war Feb. 24, caught between the Kremlin’s increasingly harsh internet censorship and a backlash in its key foreign markets. The company’s international partnerships are crumbling, two board members resigned, and its number two executive, Tigran Khudaverdyan, was forced to step down after being sanctioned by the European Union. The company’s market value has slumped from a record $31 billion in November to $6.8 billion after the invasion began.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Russia Internet Giant Risks Running Out of Vital Tech in a Year
The unnerving tone of Geography Of Robot’s Southern Gothic point-n-click adventure Norco fascinates me. Its conflation of a recognisable 21st-century Louisiana, and dystopian science fiction, creates an oppressive darkness that weighs on my mind as I click through the game’s “mind-map” menu, where memories and ideas…
Source: Kotaku – A Stunning Southern Dystopia Is One Of The Best-Written Games Of The Year
OpenCart is a free, open-source shopping cart software solution. In this tutorial, learn how to install OpenCart on Ubuntu 20.04.
The post How to Install OpenCart on Ubuntu appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – How to Install OpenCart on Ubuntu
Many first-time pandemic parents are worried: Are their children are on-track with their social and emotional skills? With the world in lockdown mode for the better part of two years, many babies born in or after 2020 have missed out on the usual playdates, birthday parties, music classes, and other opportunities for…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Teach Your Kid Social-Emotional Skills From Day One
When you’re a technologist, and you hear “containers” and “supply-chain,” your mind immediately turns to Docker containers and supply-chain software. Most people, however, think of container ships and the physical supply chain that brings milk and bread to their local grocery store. However, these two concepts have more in common than you might think. A. P. Møller – Mærsk A/S (Maersk) is a leading global container logistics and shipping services leader company that uses open-source software to deliver its goods.
Source: LXer – Leading supply-chain company Maersk joins the Open Invention Network
With the arrival of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Punisher, Iron Fist, and Defenders on Disney+ earlier this month, the streamer also introduced more stringent content filtering controls to allow the graphically violent series to co-exist with the platform’s all-ages content. But while this meant those series…
Source: Gizmodo – Disney+’s Parental Controls Lead to Falcon and the Winter Soldier Edits
Enlarge / The string of red dots represents the area of maximum magnification, with the location of Earendel indicated by the white arrow. (credit: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch (JHU), Dan Coe (STScI))
We don’t fully understand what the Universe’s first stars looked like. We know they must have formed from hydrogen and helium since most heavier elements were only produced after the stars formed. And we know that the lack of those heavier elements changed the dynamics of star formation in a way that meant the first stars must have been very large. But just how large remains an unanswered question.
Now, researchers are announcing that they might be a step closer to directly observing one of those stars. Thanks to a fortuitous alignment between a distant star and an intervening galaxy cluster, gravitational lensing has magnified an object that was present less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The object is likely to either be a lone star or a compact system of two or three stars. And its discoverers say they have already booked time for follow-on observations with NASA’s latest space telescope.
Lenses work by arranging materials so that light travels on a curved path through them. Gravity, which distorts space-time itself, can perform a similar function, altering space so that light travels a curved path. There have been plenty of examples of the gravitational influences of objects in the foreground creating a lens-like effect, amplifying and/or distorting the light from a more distant object behind them.
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Source: Ars Technica – Hubble picks up the most distant star yet observed
Last week the EXT4 file-system feature updates were submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window…
Source: Phoronix – EXT4’s Fast Commit Feature Faster & More Scalable With Linux 5.18
Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving unit, has begun offering its San Francisco employees fully autonomous rides, the company said Wednesday. From a report: Waymo will begin its rider-only operations within its “initial San Francisco service territory,” which spans from the Presidio to the farthest corner of Candlestick Point, and gradually ramp up from there. The news comes nearly a month after Waymo said it would soon begin charging Bay Area residents for robotaxi rides with a human operator on board after securing a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). It also follows the kick-off of Waymo’s Trusted Tester program back in August, which involved San Franciscans signing up to hail one of Waymo’s all-electric Jaguar I-Paces equipped with the Waymo Driver — again, with a human operator onboard — for free.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Waymo Opens Driverless Robotaxi Service To San Francisco Employees
Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in March, 2020, Microsoft’s annual Build conference for developers, engineers and IT professionals has been held online. But after two years of lockdowns, and nearly 15 months since the release of effective vaccines, Build 2022 will once again be hosted online, from May 24th through 26th.
While the conference is largely geared towards professionals, plenty of consumer-facing tech has emerged from previous years’ events, from advances to Microsoft Teams to the “next generation” of Windows. This year, attendees will “experience market-specific content and connection opportunities for France, Germany, Japan, Latin America, and the UK in Regional Spotlights,” according to the conference’s launch site, in addition to the standard slate of keynotes, workshops, and networking opportunities.
Registration for the conference opens in late April and will be free. You can check out the event agenda at the Build 2022 homepage.
Source: Engadget – Microsoft’s online-only Build 2022 event kicks off May 24
A former DeepMind employee has accused the company of mishandling a series of serious sexual harassment allegations. In a report published Wednesday, The Financial Times recounts the experience of a former female staff member who alleges she was sexually assaulted twice by a senior researcher at the Google subsidiary. She says her harasser also sent her multiple traumatic documents, including one where he made allusions to raping unconscious women.
DeepMind eventually dismissed the researcher, but not before it subjected his victim to a disciplinary process she argues showed major flaws in how the company handles such incidents. All told, it reportedly took DeepMind seven months to address the complaint, and only did so after the former employee filed an appeal. It then allegedly took another two months before the company finally dismissed her harasser in September 2020.
During that period, the former employee was told she would face “disciplinary” action if she talked about her complaint with colleagues. She was advised not to visit the office where her harasser worked, but her manager, not knowing the full scope of the complaint, repeatedly pushed her to attend meetings at that same building. According to The Times, DeepMind did not place any restrictions on the alleged perpetrator, a claim the company disputes.
A spokesperson for DeepMind said the firm told the researcher not to contact the staff member in September 2019. The company also disputes a claim the researcher received an award for their work during the time they were being investigated by the company. DeepMind says the award was one meant for the team the alleged perpetrator worked for and was related to a historic research paper.
“According to your own findings, I was subjected to sexual harassment, assault and abuse… I will never be the same person. I have spent almost the entire last year fearing for my safety. There is absolutely… no reason why the investigation was so dysfunctional,” the former employee said in an August 2020 email to DeepMind’s senior leadership.
“Any incident of sexual assault or harassment is abhorrent. DeepMind takes all allegations of workplace misconduct extremely seriously and we place our employees’ safety at the core of any actions we take,” DeepMind told Engadget. “The allegations were investigated thoroughly, and the individual who was investigated for misconduct was dismissed without any severance payments.”
Following the incident, DeepMind told Engadget it implemented a series of policies to change how it investigates such matters. Among other changes, the company says it now communicates more clearly how employees should go about raising concerns, and that it has a better system in place to support workers who complain of harassment and discrimination. It also told The Times it “regrets” the former staff member was provided with “incorrect guidance around breaking confidentiality.”
Source: Engadget – Former DeepMind employee acuses company of mishandling sexual abuse complaint
Images captured by NASA’s New Horizons of dwarf planet Pluto have revealed ice volcanoes, and the possibility for potential habitability. New Horizons performed a flyby of Pluto in 2015, and scientists are still rethinking everything they thought they knew about the dwarf planet.
Pluto lost its planet status back in 2016, when the International
Source: Hot Hardware – Giant Erupting Ice Volcanoes On Pluto Could Indicate Signs Of Life On Dwarf Planet
It was silly of us to think the ending of The Stanley Parable was actually the end of the game. Ridiculous, even. Catastrophic, possibly.
Nearly 10 years after the award-winning indie game’s debut, original creators Davey Wreden and William Pugh are back with an upgraded, expanded and even stranger version called The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. It’s been in development for more than three years, and it’s finally due to hit Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles on April 27th.
The Ultra Deluxe edition includes expanded storylines, plus new content, secrets and choices. The release date trailer teases employee number 427’s revamped office space and the reality-bending physics at work in the new game. It looks familiar with flashes of the unknown; basic graphics with quietly trippy mechanics. And over the top of it all, a soothing voice narrating your every move.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is a collaboration between Pugh’s studio, Crows Crows Crows, and Wreden, while narrator Kevan Brighting is back as well. The script for the new content is longer than the original game script, and the developers said they tried to implement the fresh mechanics in unexpected ways — which is entirely expected for The Stanley Parable.
“Early in development, the plan was just to bring The Stanley Parable to consoles with a few small tweaks, but as time went on we kept getting more and more excited about what else we could do with the game,” the developers said in a press release. “We learned what we wanted it to be as we were making it.”
It almost sounds like the new game built itself — but that’d be impossible, right?
… Right?
Source: Engadget – The Stanley Parable’s rebuilt and expanded ‘Ultra Deluxe’ edition arrives April 27th
Taking inspiration from some stalwarts of seafaring media, The Sea Beast looks to take kids off the edge of the map with a fun, original animated adventure. Academy Award winner Chris Williams (Moana, Big Hero 6) directs a heavy-hitting voice cast that includes The Boys’ Karl Urban as well as Zaris-Angel Hator, Jared…
Source: Gizmodo – The Sea Beast Looks Like a Monstrously Fun Adventure
Your garden and potted plants can really benefit from a drip irrigation system. These systems reduce the time you have to spend watering your plants, can help keep fragile plants properly watered on hot days, and keep house plants watered while you go out of town for a long weekend. Many drip irrigation systems can be…
Source: LifeHacker – Save Time and Money With Your Own Garden Drip Irrigation
