Friday the U.K.’s competition regulator made an announcement. Amazon and Meta agreed they wouldn’t use data collected their marketplaces for an unfair advantage against competitors.
The Register explains:
In Amazon’s case, the e-commerce giant used vendors’ sales figures to decide which items it should sell, and how much to price products to get an edge over everyone else. The internet behemoth also promoted its own products with its Buy Box feature and it further cut into retailers’ margins by charging extra costs if they wanted to use Amazon’s Prime delivery services, the CMA said. Now Amazon has committed to doing less of that.
The Competition and Markets Authority said [Amazon] will be prevented from using third-party seller data that gives it an unfair commercial advantage, and will allow rivals to negotiate rates with independent delivery contractors working on behalf of Amazon. Merchants’ items will also be better supported by the Buy Box too, according to the CMA, instead of Amazon-led products or those from sellers that have bought into the company’s packing and delivery services…
[Facebook] was accused of exploiting advertisers hawking wares on Facebook Marketplace, and using competitors’ data to improve its own products or services. “Going forward, competitors of Facebook Marketplace that advertise on Meta platforms can ‘opt out’ of their data being used to improve Facebook Marketplace,” the CMA said.
The CMA also has specific plans for enforcement, reports TechCrunch. for Meta the UK agency “has said it will set up a monitoring trustee to oversee its adherence, including its new technical system rollout and employee training,” while Amazon will also get an “independent trustee” overseeing their compliance.
The M3 Pro-powered Macbook Pro 16-inch benchmark results have surfaced inGeekbench 6 database, and the results have been received somewhat negatively. It’s roughly as fast as the M2 Max and only a little faster than the M2 Pro, which is in stark contrast to Apple’s “scary fast” marketing. Expectations for the brand-new M3 chips are high based
When purchasing a used car, it’s understood that a certain amount of homework will be involved—looking into things like its mileage, title, and value, as well as whether there are any exterior issues, or problems under the hood.
Scientists recently noticed that the chemical fingerprint of meteor particles was starting to change.
And last month Purdue University announced that “The Space Age is leaving fingerprints on one of the most remote parts of the planet — the stratosphere — which has potential implications for climate, the ozone layer and the continued habitability of Earth.”
Using tools hitched to the nose cone of their research planes and sampling more than 11 miles above the planet’s surface, researchers have discovered significant amounts of metals in aerosols in the atmosphere, likely from increasingly frequent launches and returns of spacecraft and satellites. That mass of metal is changing atmospheric chemistry in ways that may impact Earth’s atmosphere and ozone layer…
Led by Dan Murphy, an adjunct professor in Purdue’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the team detected more than 20 elements in ratios that mirror those used in spacecraft alloys. They found that the mass of lithium, aluminum, copper and lead from spacecraft reentry far exceeded those metals found in natural cosmic dust. Nearly 10% of large sulfuric acid particles — the particles that help protect and buffer the ozone layer — contained aluminum and other spacecraft metals.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.
These days, it doesn’t take much for a Hollywood star to become a meme and have it hang over their career for several years. Nicholas Cage is perhaps the perfect embodiment of this: over the decades, there’ve been so many memes made of his various roles—from Con Air and National Treasure to Face/Off and Ghost Rider.…
“Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education,” according to a new analysis by the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here):
The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions…
In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51% over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7% growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4% in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling…
In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic… The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019 — before home schooling’s dramatic expansion — there were 1.5 million kids being home-schooled in the United States, the last official federal estimate. Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data…
It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.
Other interesting facts from their analysis:
“Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics.”
“Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance.”
“Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.”
The Taurid meteor shower kicks off the month of November for skywatchers. At its peak, the Taurid meteor shower is expected to showcase about ten meteors per hour, with the Leonids meteor shower following shortly after with an estimated ten to fifteen per hour.
The Taurid meteors consist of two streams, the South Taurids and North Taurids.
Fortnite players are definitely here for the new throwback season. Since the release of “Fortnite OG” at the end of last week, public player counts have reached new all-time highs, according to trackers like Fortnite.gg — peaking on Saturday with over 6.1 million concurrent players. With Chapter 4 Season 5, or “Fortnite OG,” Fortnite is dipping back into its Chapter 1 glory days to bring players back to the original 2018 island map and reintroduce gear and other elements from its past.
The season started with an update designed around Chapter 1 Season 5, and subsequent updates will pull from other phases of the game’s history. But, it’s only expected to run for about a month, and players aren’t wasting any time getting in on the battle royale action. The number of concurrent players has been rising all weekend, continually breaking the previous record highs. Within hours of the update’s release, the player count had spiked to over 3.9 million. Already today, there were 5.5 million players on Fortnite as of 11AM.
The number of concurrent plays for a single day nearly doubled on Friday, after the update was announced, from those seen earlier in the week, to hit nearly 1.5 million. Saturday logged over 1.8 million concurrent plays. It’s been years since Fortnite has seen numbers like this, but there’s no telling whether it’ll be able to keep it up.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/fornite-keeps-breaking-player-count-records-since-releasing-its-nostalgic-og-season-160445720.html?src=rss
It has probably seen you through indigestion and hangovers, but Alka-Seltzer can do more than settle your stomach: It can also help clean your home. In addition to aspirin, two of its other main ingredients are cleaning powerhouses: Sodium bicarbonate (better known as baking soda) and citric acid—which works like…
“Microsoft Exchange is impacted by four zero-day vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit remotely to execute arbitrary code or disclose sensitive information on affected installations,” reports Bleeping Computer, citing disclosures Thursday from Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, who reported them to Microsoft on September 7th and 8th, 2023.
In an email to the site, a Microsoft spokesperson said customers who applied the August Security Updates are already protected from the first vulnerability, while the other three require attackers to have prior access to email credentials. (And for two of them no evidence was presented that it can be leveraged to gain elevation of privilege.)
“We’ve reviewed these reports and have found that they have either already been addressed, or do not meet the bar for immediate servicing under our severity classification guidelines and we will evaluate addressing them in future product versions and updates as appropriate.”
From Bleeping Computer’s report:
ZDI disagreed with this response and decided to publish the flaws under its own tracking IDs to warn Exchange admins about the security risks… All these vulnerabilities require authentication for exploitation, which reduces their severity CVSS rating to between 7.1 and 7.5… It should be noted, though, that cybercriminals have many ways to obtain Exchange credentials, including brute-forcing weak passwords, performing phishing attacks, purchasing them, or acquiring them from info-stealer logs…
ZDI suggests that the only salient mitigation strategy is to restrict interaction with Exchange apps. However, this can be unacceptably disruptive for many businesses and organizations using the product. We also suggest implementing multi-factor authentication to prevent cybercriminals from accessing Exchange instances even when account credentials have been compromised.
The internet’s “enshittification,” as veteran journalist and privacy advocate Cory Doctorowdescribes it, began decades before TikTok made the scene. Elder millennials remember the good old days of Napster — followed by the much worse old days of Napster being sued into oblivion along with Grokster and the rest of the P2P sharing ecosystem, until we were left with a handful of label-approved, catalog-sterilized streaming platforms like Pandora and Spotify. Three cheers for corporate copyright litigation.
In his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, Doctorow examines the modern social media landscape, cataloging and illustrating the myriad failings and short-sighted business decisions of the Big Tech companies operating the services that promised us the future but just gave us more Nazis. We have both an obligation and responsibility to dismantle these systems, Doctorow argues, and a means to do so with greater interoperability. In this week’s Hitting the Books excerpt, Doctorow examines the aftermath of the lawsuits against P2P sharing services, as well as the role that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “notice-and-takedown” reporting system and YouTube’s “ContentID” scheme play on modern streaming sites.
The harms from notice-and-takedown itself don’t directly affect the big entertainment companies. But in 2007, the entertainment industry itself engineered a new, more potent form of notice-and-takedown that manages to inflict direct harm on Big Content, while amplifying the harms to the rest of us.
That new system is “notice-and-stay-down,” a successor to notice-and-takedown that monitors everything every user uploads or types and checks to see whether it is similar to something that has been flagged as a copyrighted work. This has long been a legal goal of the entertainment industry, and in 2019 it became a feature of EU law, but back in 2007, notice-and-staydown made its debut as a voluntary modification to YouTube, called “Content ID.”
Some background: in 2007, Viacom (part of CBS) filed a billion-dollar copyright suit against YouTube, alleging that the company had encouraged its users to infringe on its programs by uploading them to YouTube. Google — which acquired YouTube in 2006 — defended itself by invoking the principles behind Betamax and notice-and-takedown, arguing that it had lived up to its legal obligations and that Betamax established that “inducement” to copyright infringement didn’t create liability for tech companies (recall that Sony had advertised the VCR as a means of violating copyright law by recording Hollywood movies and watching them at your friends’ houses, and the Supreme Court decided it didn’t matter).
But with Grokster hanging over Google’s head, there was reason to believe that this defense might not fly. There was a real possibility that Viacom could sue YouTube out of existence — indeed, profanity-laced internal communications from Viacom — which Google extracted through the legal discovery process — showed that Viacom execs had been hotly debating which one of them would add YouTube to their private empire when Google was forced to sell YouTube to the company.
Google squeaked out a victory, but was determined not to end up in a mess like the Viacom suit again. It created Content ID, an “audio fingerprinting” tool that was pitched as a way for rights holders to block, or monetize, the use of their copyrighted works by third parties. YouTube allowed large (at first) rightsholders to upload their catalogs to a blocklist, and then scanned all user uploads to check whether any of their audio matched a “claimed” clip.
Once Content ID determined that a user was attempting to post a copyrighted work without permission from its rightsholder, it consulted a database to determine the rights holder’s preference. Some rights holders blocked any uploads containing audio that matched theirs; others opted to take the ad revenue generated by that video.
There are lots of problems with this. Notably, there’s the inability of Content ID to determine whether a third party’s use of someone else’s copyright constitutes “fair use.” As discussed, fair use is the suite of uses that are permitted even if the rightsholder objects, such as taking excerpts for critical or transformational purposes. Fair use is a “fact intensive” doctrine—that is, the answer to “Is this fair use?” is almost always “It depends, let’s ask a judge.”
Computers can’t sort fair use from infringement. There is no way they ever can. That means that filters block all kinds of legitimate creative work and other expressive speech — especially work that makes use of samples or quotations.
But it’s not just creative borrowing, remixing and transformation that filters struggle with. A lot of creative work is similar to other creative work. For example, a six-note phrase from Katy Perry’s 2013 song “Dark Horse” is effectively identical to a six-note phrase in “Joyful Noise,” a 2008 song by a much less well-known Christian rapper called Flame. Flame and Perry went several rounds in the courts, with Flame accusing Perry of violating his copyright. Perry eventually prevailed, which is good news for her.
But YouTube’s filters struggle to distinguish Perry’s six-note phrase from Flame’s (as do the executives at Warner Chappell, Perry’s publisher, who have periodically accused people who post snippets of Flame’s “Joyful Noise” of infringing on Perry’s “Dark Horse”). Even when the similarity isn’t as pronounced as in Dark, Joyful, Noisy Horse, filters routinely hallucinate copyright infringements where none exist — and this is by design.
To understand why, first we have to think about filters as a security measure — that is, as a measure taken by one group of people (platforms and rightsholder groups) who want to stop another group of people (uploaders) from doing something they want to do (upload infringing material).
It’s pretty trivial to write a filter that blocks exact matches: the labels could upload losslessly encoded pristine digital masters of everything in their catalog, and any user who uploaded a track that was digitally or acoustically identical to that master would be blocked.
But it would be easy for an uploader to get around a filter like this: they could just compress the audio ever-so-slightly, below the threshold of human perception, and this new file would no longer match. Or they could cut a hundredth of a second off the beginning or end of the track, or omit a single bar from the bridge, or any of a million other modifications that listeners are unlikely to notice or complain about.
Filters don’t operate on exact matches: instead, they employ “fuzzy” matching. They don’t just block the things that rights holders have told them to block — they block stuff that’s similar to those things that rights holders have claimed. This fuzziness can be adjusted: the system can be made more or less strict about what it considers to be a match.
Rightsholder groups want the matches to be as loose as possible, because somewhere out there, there might be someone who’d be happy with a very fuzzy, truncated version of a song, and they want to stop that person from getting the song for free. The looser the matching, the more false positives. This is an especial problem for classical musicians: their performances of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart inevitably sound an awful lot like the recordings that Sony Music (the world’s largest classical music label) has claimed in Content ID. As a result, it has become nearly impossible to earn a living off of online classical performance: your videos are either blocked, or the ad revenue they generate is shunted to Sony. Even teaching classical music performance has become a minefield, as painstakingly produced, free online lessons are blocked by Content ID or, if the label is feeling generous, the lessons are left online but the ad revenue they earn is shunted to a giant corporation, stealing the creative wages of a music teacher.
Notice-and-takedown law didn’t give rights holders the internet they wanted. What kind of internet was that? Well, though entertainment giants said all they wanted was an internet free from copyright infringement, their actions — and the candid memos released in the Viacom case — make it clear that blocking infringement is a pretext for an internet where the entertainment companies get to decide who can make a new technology and how it will function.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-the-internet-con-cory-doctorow-verso-153018432.html?src=rss
During this weekend’s Toronto Animation Industry Conference, Invincible company Skybound Entertainment revealed it’s acquired the rights to Spike & Mike’s Festival of Animation.
At the start of the 1980s, video games were mostly relegated to coin-gobbling arcade machines, but their surging popularity prompted a Time Magazine cover story in January 1982 with a cringeworthy warning: “GRONK! FLASH! ZAP! Video Games are Blitzing the World!”
Brümate is holding an early Black Friday sale, offering 25 percent off most drinkware sets, including the well-regarded Hopsulator Trio. The deals start today and end on November 7, so you have some time to think about which insulated cups catch your fancy. Once you decide, just enter the code “Cyber25” at checkout. As an example, this sale brings the price of the Hopsulator Trio down to $23.50 from $30.
Brümate makes insulated and leak-proof cups that keep liquids at their desired temperature until you’re done pushing the stuff through your gullet. The insulation here is certainly on point, which is why the company’s products made our list of the best gifts for coffee lovers.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, we put the Hopsulator Trio on our lists of the best outdoor gifts for dads and the best grilling gear, as the integrated insulation keeps cold beers cold even on the hottest of summer days. However, the Hopsulator is just for cans, though the company offers plenty of products to please devotees of loose liquid. Some of them could even serve as a decent container for a lunch stew or soup, so it’s a win/win.
Again, the sale ends on November 7. If you’re in the market for some insulated and leak-proof cups, now’s your time to shine. The cups and containers range in size from 12 ounces all the way to 40 ounces, for those looking to replicate the joy of slurping down a Big Gulp.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/brumates-early-black-friday-sale-knocks-25-percent-off-drinkware-150047391.html?src=rss
The Biden administration is betting on hydrogen to power the country, create well-paying jobs, and lower climate-warming emissions. Last month, the president announced that $7 billion will be invested to create seven regional hydrogen-producing hubs across the U.S., promising to work with unions and disadvantaged…
The ReactOS project today published their latest newesletter that outlines development progress made in recent months for this open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows device drivers and application/user-space software…
LXQt 1.4 debuted today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Qt desktop environment that was formed years ago as the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects…
