An anonymous reader shares a report: A website set up by an unknown Dane over the course of one weekend in August is giving a massive headache to those trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online.

The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance.

The site lets visitors compile a mass email warning about the bill and send it to national government officials, members of the European Parliament and others with ease. Since launching, it has broken the inboxes of MEPs and caused a stir in Brussels’ corridors of power. “We are getting hundreds per day about it,” said Evin Incir, a Swedish Socialists and Democrats MEP, of the email deluge.

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Nintendo has cleared up the biggest mystery since Arthur Conan Doyle’s last Sherlock Holmes story by revealing what the two animated shorts it released this week were all about. The company says these are the first short films from Nintendo Pictures, which it bought in 2022 (the production house was previously called Dynamo Pictures).

“We hope you enjoyed the two ‘Close to You’ videos released on October 7 and 8. The second video is available on Nintendo Today!, a free app available on your smart device,” the company said in a post on X. “These are the first short films created by Nintendo Pictures Co., Ltd. Nintendo Pictures will continue to explore new creative possibilities through video content.”

The post implies that, at least for now, the company doesn’t plan to release the second short outside of its Nintendo Today! app. It seems that Nintendo didn’t make the films to promote a new Pikmin game either — though one is probably coming after Pikmin 4 quickly became the best-selling entry in the series.

The shorts are both very cute. It was clever of Nintendo to make a version where you could see the Pikmin and one where they were invisible (save for one of the creatures scurrying underneath a tot’s crib in the background).

To date, Nintendo Pictures has functioned largely as a division that supports games its parent company makes and publishes, by helping with things like animation, art, design and cinematics. It’s also worked with external studios, as it carried out motion capture work for Death Standing 2.

Nintendo teamed up with Universal Pictures and Illumination to make the Mario movies (and potentially a Donkey Kong spinoff), and Sony Pictures to produce the live-action The Legend of Zelda film. On this evidence, though, Nintendo appears to have the chops to make movies primarily in-house, a step it may well be considering as it continues to expand into areas of entertainment beyond games.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendos-pikmin-shorts-were-about-showing-off-its-animation-studios-chops-143009750.html?src=rss

A few days ago, an inscrutable interstellar interloper made its closest approach to Mars, where a fleet of international spacecraft seek to unravel the red planet’s ancient mysteries.

Several of the probes encircling Mars took a break from their usual activities and turned their cameras toward space to catch a glimpse of an object named 3I/ATLAS, a rogue comet that arrived in our Solar System from interstellar space and is now barreling toward perihelion—its closest approach to the Sun—at the end of this month.

This is the third interstellar object astronomers have detected within our Solar System, following 1I/ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov discovered in 2017 and 2019. Scientists think interstellar objects routinely transit among the planets, but telescopes have only recently had the ability to find one. For example, the telescope that discovered Oumuamua only came online in 2010.

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The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened a probe into 2.88 million Tesla electric vehicles currently equipped with the company’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) system. As first reported by Reuters, the NHTSA has received more than 50 reports of traffic-safety violations as well as numerous crashes.

The agency, which oversees the nation’s motor vehicle safety standards, said that Tesla’s FSD software has “induced vehicle behavior that violated traffic safety laws,” with vehicles reportedly running red lights and driving against the flow of traffic.

Among the reports the agency has received, six of them allege that a Tesla vehicle with FSD engaged “approached an intersection with a red traffic signal, continued to travel into the intersection against the red light and was subsequently involved in a crash with other motor vehicles in the intersection.” The probe will begin as a preliminary evaluation, after which the NHTSA could issue a recall if it believes the vehicles pose a great enough risk to public safety.

The agency has conducted numerous investigations into the EV maker this year alone. At the start of the year, it opened an investigation into Tesla’s Smart Summon and Actual Smart Summon features, which allow owners to remotely retrieve their vehicles from a parking spot. Just a few weeks ago, it announced an investigation into the 2021 Model Y over its door handles and whether they risk trapping passengers inside the vehicle. This is also not the first time the agency has looked into the safety of Tesla’s driver assist features.

Tesla releases its own vehicle safety reports highlighting that accidents per million miles driven are far less common when its FSD technology is engaged than when it is not. However, the company has also fought to have more specific crash data involving FSD kept from public release, citing confidentiality.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/nhtsa-launches-probe-into-teslas-full-self-driving-tech-141102274.html?src=rss

Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago and typically mounted on platforms called ahu. Scholars have puzzled over the moai on Easter Island for decades, pondering their cultural significance, as well as how a Stone Age culture managed to carve and transport statues weighing as much as 92 tons. One hypothesis, championed by archaeologist Carl Lipo of Binghamton University, among others, is that the statues were transported in a vertical position, with workers using ropes to essentially “walk” the moai onto their platforms.

The oral traditions of the people of Rapa Nui certainly include references to the moai “walking” from the quarry to their platforms, such as a song that tells of an early ancestor who made the statues walk. While there have been rudimentary field tests showing it might have been possible, the hypothesis has also generated a fair amount of criticism. So Lipo has co-authored a new paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science offering fresh experimental evidence of “walking” moai, based on 3D modeling of the physics and new field tests to recreate that motion.

The first Europeans arrived in the 17th century and found only a few thousand inhabitants on the tiny island (just 14 by 7 miles across) thousands of miles away from any other land. In order to explain the presence of so many moai, the assumption has been that the island was once home to tens of thousands of people. But Lipo thought perhaps the feat could be accomplished with fewer workers. In 2012, Lipo and his colleague, Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona, showed that you could transport a 10-foot, 5-ton moai a few hundred yards with just 18 people and three strong ropes by employing a rocking motion.

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The Bank of England has warned there is a growing risk of a “sudden correction” in global markets as it raised concerns about soaring valuations of leading AI tech companies. From a report: Policymakers said there were also threats of a “sharp repricing of US dollar assets” if the Federal Reserve lost credibility in the eyes of global investors. It comes as Donald Trump’s continues to attack the US central bank and threaten its independence.

Continued hype and optimism about the potential for AI technology has led to a rise in valuations in recent months, with companies such as OpenAI now worth $500 billion, compared with $157 billion last October. Another firm, Anthropic, has almost trebled its valuation, going from $60 billion in March to $170 billion last month.

However, the Bank of England’s financial policy committee (FPC) warned on Wednesday: “The risk of a sharp market correction has increased. “On a number of measures, equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence. This … leaves equity markets particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic.” It said investors had not fully accounted for these potential risks, warning that “a sudden correction could occur” should any of them crystallise, resulting in finance drying up for households and businesses. The FPC added: “As an open economy with a global financial centre, the risk of spillovers to the UK financial system from such global shocks is material.”

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You can get Sony’s WH-1000XM5 wireless headphones for $250 in a limited time deal for Amazon Prime Day. That’s $150 off its launch price, $50 off its regular Amazon list price and only a cent more than its all-time low of $249.99. While the model was released a few years ago, it’s still a fantastic alternative to the newer but pricier WH-1000XM6, which you can also get with a discount of $20 from Amazon right now. We gave the WH-1000XM5 a score of 95 when we reviewed it and praised its redesign for providing a massive increase in comfort. 

When it comes to sound quality, we found its bass punchier than its predecessors’. The model provided more depth and more clarity than the WH-1000XM4, which made the listening experience more immersive. Sony doubled the the number of processors and the number of microphones that handle noise cancelation on the WH-1000XM5, as well, making it better at blocking sounds with higher frequencies like human voices. 

Of course, the WH-1000XM6 has better sound quality and an improved active noise cancellation technology. But with a price of $450 — currently $428 for Prime Day — it’s a much bigger expense. If you don’t mind getting an even older model, the Sony WH-1000XM4 is also on sale for $188. The model, released in 2020, has dated features by now compared to the newer iterations of the headphones. But Sony’s WH-1000X headphones have always been some of the best, and a five-year-old model could be better than some newer devices out there. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/sonys-wh-1000xm5-headphones-drop-to-250-for-prime-day-133009798.html?src=rss