Tech News
Raspberry Pi-Powered Anti-Tracking Tool Checks If You're Being Followed
yro - Posted On:2022-08-11 21:29:58 Source: slashdot
Matt Edmondson, a hacker and digital forensics expert, built a Raspberry Pi-powered anti-tracking tool that "scans for nearby devices and alerts you if the same phone is detected multiple times within the past 20 minutes," reports Wired. The device, which can be carried around or placed in a car, consists of parts that cost around $200 in total. From the report: The homemade system works by scanning for wireless devices around it and then checking its logs to see whether they also were present within the past 20 minutes. It was designed to be used while people are on the move rather than sitting in, say, a coffee shop, where it would pick up too many false readings. The anti-tracking tool, which can sit inside a shoebox-sized case, is made up of a few components. A Raspberry Pi 3 runs its software, a Wi-Fi card looks for nearby devices, a small waterproof case protects it, and a portable charger powers the system. A touchscreen shows the alerts the device produces. Each alert may be a sign that you are being tailed. The device runs Kismet, which is a wireless network detector, and is able to detect smartphones and tablets around it that are looking for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connections. The phones we use are constantly looking for wireless networks around them, including networks they've connected to before as well as new networks. Edmondson says Kismet makes a record of the first time it sees a device and then the most recent time it was detected. But to make the anti-tracking system work, he had to write code in Python to create lists of what Kismet detects over time. There are lists for devices spotted in the past five to 10 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes, and 15 to 20 minutes. If a device appears twice, an alert flashes up on the screen. The system can show a phone's MAC address, although this is not much use if it's been randomized. It can also record the names of Wi-Fi networks that devices around it are looking for -- a phone that's trying to connect to a Wi-Fi network called Langley may give some clues about its owner. "If you have a device on you, I should see it," he says. In an example, he showed WIRED that a device was looking for a network called SAMSUNGSMART. To stop the system from detecting your own phone or those of other people traveling with you, it has an "ignore" list. By tapping one of the device's onscreen buttons, it's possible to "ignore everything that it has already seen." Edmondson says that in the future, the device could be modified to send a text alert instead of showing them on the screen. He is also interested in adding the capability to detect tire-pressure monitoring systems that could show recurring nearby vehicles. A GPS unit could also be added so you can see where you were when you were being tracked, he says. [...] Edmondson has no plans to make the device into a commercial product, but he says the design could easily be copied and reused by anyone with some technical knowledge. Many of the parts involved are easy to obtain or may be lying around the homes of people in tech communities. For those interested, Edmondson open-sourced its underlying code and plans to present the research project at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this week. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CDC no longer gently recommends COVID precautions most weren’t following anyway
Science - Posted On:2022-08-11 21:14:59 Source: arstechnica
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its pandemic guidance today, offering slightly looser recommendations that likely won't change much about how Americans handle the pandemic these days.
According to the updated guidance, people who are not up-to-date on their vaccinations—i.e., unvaccinated people or people who have not received the recommended number of boosters—no longer need to quarantine if they know they've been exposed to someone with COVID-19. Instead, if a not up-to-date person is exposed, the CDC now recommends they wear a mask for 10 days after the exposure and get tested for COVID-19 on day 5. Currently, roughly 68 percent of the US population is not up to date on their COVID-19 vaccination.
This guidance update essentially ends all COVID-19-related quarantine recommendations since the CDC had previously said that those who are up to date on their vaccines do not need to quarantine but only wear a mask for 10 days and test.
Meta Injecting Code Into Websites Visited By Its Users To Track Them, Research Says
yro - Posted On:2022-08-11 20:59:59 Source: slashdot
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been rewriting websites its users visit, letting the company follow them across the web after they click links in its apps, according to new research from an ex-Google engineer. The Guardian reports: The two apps have been taking advantage of the fact that users who click on links are taken to webpages in an "in-app browser," controlled by Facebook or Instagram, rather than sent to the user's web browser of choice, such as Safari or Firefox. "The Instagram app injects their tracking code into every website shown, including when clicking on ads, enabling them [to] monitor all user interactions, like every button and link tapped, text selections, screenshots, as well as any form inputs, like passwords, addresses and credit card numbers," says Felix Krause, a privacy researcher who founded an app development tool acquired by Google in 2017. Krause discovered the code injection by building a tool that could list all the extra commands added to a website by the browser. For normal browsers, and most apps, the tool detects no changes, but for Facebook and Instagram it finds up to 18 lines of code added by the app. Those lines of code appear to scan for a particular cross-platform tracking kit and, if not installed, instead call the Meta Pixel, a tracking tool that allows the company to follow a user around the web and build an accurate profile of their interests. The company does not disclose to the user that it is rewriting webpages in this way. No such code is added to the in-app browser of WhatsApp, according to Krause's research. [...] It is unclear when Facebook began injecting code to track users after clicking links. "We intentionally developed this code to honor people's [Ask to track] choices on our platforms," a Meta spokesperson told The Guardian in a statement. "The code allows us to aggregate user data before using it for targeted advertising or measurement purposes. We do not add any pixels. Code is injected so that we can aggregate conversion events from pixels." They added: "For purchases made through the in-app browser, we seek user consent to save payment information for the purposes of autofill." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researchers Find Vulnerability In Software Underlying Discord, Microsoft Teams, and Other Apps
it - Posted On:2022-08-11 20:14:58 Source: slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A group of security researchers found a series of vulnerabilities in the software underlying popular apps like Discord, Microsoft Teams, Spotify and many others, which are used by tens of millions of people all over the world. At the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, the researchers presented their findings, detailing how they could have hacked people who use Discord, Microsoft Teams, and the chat app Element by exploiting the software underlying all of them: Electron, which is a framework built on the open source Chromium and the cross-platform javascript environment Node JS. In all these cases, the researchers submitted vulnerabilities to Electron to get them fixed, which earned them more than $10,000 in rewards. The bugs were fixed before the researchers published their research. Aaditya Purani, one of the researchers who found these vulnerabilities, said that "regular users should know that the Electron apps are not the same as their day-to-day browsers," meaning they are potentially more vulnerable. In the case of Discord, the bug Purani and his colleagues found only required them to send a malicious link to a video. With Microsoft Teams, the bug they found could be exploited by inviting a victim to a meeting. In both cases, if the targets clicked on these links, hackers would have been able to take control of their computers, Purani explained in the talk. For him, one of the main takeaways of their research is that Electron is risky precisely because users are very likely to click on links shared in Discord or Microsoft Teams. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meta's Flailing Portal Repurposed As a Wireless Portable Monitor
hardware - Posted On:2022-08-11 19:29:59 Source: slashdot
On Wednesday, Meta announced that the Portal Plus Gen 2 and Portal Go now support Duet Display, an app that can turn a display into a secondary monitor for Macs and PCs. Ars Technica reports: The Portal Plus is the same size as some of the best portable monitors, so it makes sense to repurpose it for that function. Because it's built for video image quality, it has a decent resolution for a portable display -- 2160x1440. Duet Display doesn't require a display to be connected to a computer via a cable, so specific Portals are now portable wireless monitors, too. At a time when webcams are integrated into many laptops, and USB webcams are easier to find again, many consumers don't need a display dedicated primarily to web calls. But an extra monitor? That's more widely appealing. With the addition of Duet Display, Portal owners have further reason to think about their Portal when they're not on a video call. Meta also gave all Portals with a touchscreen -- namely, the Portal Go, Portal Plus, Portal, and Portal Mini -- a Meta Portal Companion app for macOS. The app enables screen sharing during video calls and provides quick access to video call features, like mute and link sharing in Zoom, Workplace, and BlueJeans. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Lawsuits: OnlyFans bribed Instagram to put creators on “terrorist blacklist” [Updated]
Policy - Posted On:2022-08-11 19:14:59 Source: arstechnica
(Update, 5:27 pm ET: A GIFCT spokesperson clarified how the “blacklist”—or more accurately, in its terms, its terrorist content database—works to log terrorist activity between different online platforms. She says only videos and images are currently hashed, and nothing gets automatically removed from other platforms. Instead, once content is hashed, each platform considers things like the type of terrorist entity it is or the severity of the content and then weighs those measurements against its own policies to decide if it qualifies for removal or content advisory labels.
The GIFCT spokesperson also noted that Instagram accounts are not hashed, only Instagram images and videos, and there is no “blacklist” of users, although GIFCT analyzes who produces the content the organization hashes. The database records hashes to signal terrorist entities or terrorism content based on the United Nations sanctions list of terrorist entities from the UN Security Council. And all that content remains in the database unless a platform/GIFCT member like Meta uses a GIFCT feedback tool that was introduced in 2019 to flag the content as not qualifying as terrorist content. The feedback tool can also be used to recommend modified labels of content. Currently, that’s the only way to challenge content that gets hashed. GIFCT members also maintain active discussions on content moderation with GIFCT’s “centralized communications mechanism.” In these discussions, the spokesperson says none of the complaints raised in the lawsuit have been mentioned by members.
About two years ago, GIFCT became an independent nonprofit, and since then, it has released annual transparency reports that provide some insights into the feedback it receives. The next transparency report is due in December.)
Amazon studio plans lighthearted show of Ring surveillance footage
Gaming & Culture - Posted On:2022-08-11 19:14:59 Source: arstechnica
For some people, the term "Ring Nation" might evoke a warrantless surveillance dystopia overseen by an omnipotent megacorp. To Amazon-owned MGM, Ring Nation is a clip show hosted by comedian Wanda Sykes, featuring dancing delivery people and adorable pets.
Deadline reports that the show, due to debut on September 26, is "the latest example of corporate synergy at Amazon." Amazon owns household video security brand Ring, Hollywood studio MGM, and Big Fish, the producer of Ring Nation
Viral videos captured by doorbell cameras have been hot for a while now. You can catch them on late-night talk shows, the r/CaughtOnRing subreddit, and on millions of TikTok users' For You page. Amazon's media properties, perhaps sensing an opportunity to capitalize and soften Ring's image, are sallying forth with an officially branded offering.
I’m a security reporter and got fooled by a blatant phish
Biz & IT - Posted On:2022-08-11 19:14:59 Source: arstechnica
There has been a recent flurry of phishing attacks so surgically precise and well-executed that they've managed to fool some of the most aware people working in the cybersecurity industry. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, two-factor authentication provider Twilio, content delivery network Cloudflare, and network equipment maker Cisco said phishers in possession of phone numbers belonging to employees and employee family members had tricked their employees into revealing their credentials. The phishers gained access to internal systems of Twilio and Cisco. Cloudflare's hardware-based 2FA keys prevented the phishers from accessing its systems.
The phishers were persistent, methodical and had clearly done their homework. In one minute, at least 76 Cloudflare employees received text messages that used various ruses to trick them into logging into what they believed was their work account. The phishing website used a domain (cloudflare-okta.com) that had been registered 40 minutes before the message flurry, thwarting a system Cloudflare uses to be alerted when the domains using its name are created (presumably because it takes time for new entries to populate). The phishers also had the means to defeat forms of 2FA that rely on one-time passwords generated by authenticator apps or sent through text messages.
Like Cloudflare, both Twilio and Cisco received text messages or phone calls that were also sent under the premise that there were urgent circumstances—a sudden change in a schedule, a password expiring, or a call under the guise of a trusted organization—necessitating that the target takes action quickly.
Mac Hacker's Code Is So Good, Corporations Keep Stealing It
developers - Posted On:2022-08-11 18:44:59 Source: slashdot
Patrick Wardle, founder of the Objective-See Foundation, a nonprofit that creates open-source security tools for macOS, has had his code make its way into a number of commercial products over the years -- "all without the users crediting him or licensing and paying for the work," reports The Verge. Wardle, a Mac malware specialist and former employee of the NSA and NASA, will lay out his case in a presentation today at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference with Tom McGuire, a cybersecurity researcher at Johns Hopkins University. From the report: The problem, Wardle says, is that it's difficult to prove that the code was stolen rather than implemented in a similar way by coincidence. Fortunately, because of Wardle's skill in reverse-engineering software, he was able to make more progress than most. "I was only able to figure [the code theft] out because I both write tools and reverse engineer software, which is not super common," Wardle told The Verge in a call before the talk. "Because I straddle both of these disciplines I could find it happening to my tools, but other indie developers might not be able to, which is the concern." One of the central examples in Wardle's case is a software tool called OverSight, which Wardle released in 2016. Oversight was developed as a way to monitor whether any macOS applications were surreptitiously accessing the microphone or webcam, with much success: it was effective not only as a way to find Mac malware that was surveilling users but also to uncover the fact that a legitimate application like Shazam was always listening in the background. [...] But years after Oversight was released, he was surprised to find a number of commercial applications incorporating similar application logic in their own products -- even down to replicating the same bugs that Wardle's code had. Three different companies were found to be incorporating techniques lifted from Wardle's work in their own commercially sold software. None of the offending companies are named in the Black Hat talk, as Wardle says that he believes the code theft was likely the work of an individual employee, rather than a top-down strategy. The companies also reacted positively when confronted about it, Wardle says: all three vendors he approached reportedly acknowledged that his code had been used in their products without authorization, and all eventually paid him directly or donated money to the Objective-See Foundation. The Verge notes that Wardle's cousin Josh Wardle created the popular Wordle game, which was purchased earlier this year by The New York Times. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
China Overtakes the US In Scientific Research Output
science - Posted On:2022-08-11 18:14:59 Source: slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: China has overtaken the US as the world leader in both scientific research output and "high impact" studies, according to a report published by Japan's science and technology ministry. The report, which was published by Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTP) on Tuesday, found that China now publishes the highest number of scientific research papers yearly, followed by the US and Germany. The figures were based on yearly averages between 2018 and 2020, and drawn from data compiled by the analytics firm Clarivate. The Japanese NISTP report also found that Chinese research comprised 27.2% of the world's top 1% most frequently cited papers. The number of citations a research paper receives is a commonly used metric in academia. The more times a study is cited in subsequent papers by other researchers, the greater its "citation impact." The US accounted for 24.9% of the top 1% most highly cited research studies, while UK research was third at 5.5%. China published a yearly average of 407,181 scientific papers, pulling ahead of the US's 293,434 journal articles and accounting for 23.4% of the world's research output, the report found. China accounted for a high proportion of research into materials science, chemistry, engineering and mathematics, while US researchers were more prolific in research into clinical medicine, basic life sciences and physics. "China is one of the top countries in the world in terms of both the quantity and quality of scientific papers," Shinichi Kuroki of the Japan Science and Technology Agency told Nikkei Asia. "In order to become the true global leader, it will need to continue producing internationally recognized research." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CDC Drops Quarantine, Distancing Recommendations For COVID-19
science - Posted On:2022-08-11 17:59:59 Source: slashdot
The nation's top public health agency relaxed its COVID-19 guidelines Thursday, dropping the recommendation that Americans quarantine themselves if they come into close contact with an infected person. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said people no longer need to stay at least 6 feet away from others. The Associated Press reports: The changes, which come more than 2 1/2 years after the start of the pandemic, are driven by a recognition that an estimated 95% of Americans 16 and older have acquired some level of immunity, either from being vaccinated or infected, agency officials said. "The current conditions of this pandemic are very different from those of the last two years," said the CDC's Greta Massetti, an author of the guidelines. Perhaps the biggest education-related change is the end of the recommendation that schools do routine daily testing, although that practice can be reinstated in certain situations during a surge in infections, officials said. The CDC also dropped a "test-to-stay" recommendation, which said students exposed to COVID-19 could regularly test -- instead of quarantining at home -- to keep attending school. With no quarantine recommendation anymore, the testing option disappeared too. Masks continue to be recommended only in areas where community transmission is deemed high, or if a person is considered at high risk of severe illness. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Disney-owned streaming trifecta unveils price hikes, ad-supported Disney+
Gaming & Culture - Posted On:2022-08-11 17:29:59 Source: arstechnica
Since its launch in 2019, Disney+ has only slightly jumped in subscription costs for both monthly and annual fees. If active subscribers don't check their account settings when a major Disney+ change goes live later this year, they won't notice a difference in their bills, as the streaming service's "base" price will remain $7.99 per month.
Starting in December, however, anyone who sticks to that Disney+ tier will see a new "feature" on the service: advertisements. Disney+ will follow the likes of Netflix and HBO Max, which announced post-launch pricing shake-ups to add advertisements to their programming as a way to offer lower-priced tiers while raising rates for other ad-free subscriptions.
That means Disney+ will also see its existing ad-free tier increase in price, starting on December 8, to $10.99 per month or $109.99 per year, a 37.5 percent increase. Technically, long-term Disney+ subscribers will see a price hike at the lowest tier, as well, as the existing $79.99 per year option ($6.66/mo) will be discontinued. If you want to pre-pay to save, you'll have to do so at the no-advertisements tier.
Sonos delays its hotly anticipated Sub Mini after a rough financial quarter
Tech - Posted On:2022-08-11 17:29:59 Source: arstechnica
The launch of the Sub Mini—an anticipated addition to Sonos' connected audio lineup—appears to have been delayed, the company revealed after its quarterly earnings report this week.
The device was expected just about any day now. But Sonos confirmed to The Verge on Wednesday that it has "decided to push an anticipated product launch from Q4 ’22 into Q1 ’23," and it's all but certain that said product is the Sub Mini. That places its launch in a window between October and December of the calendar year 2022.
The Sonos Sub Mini was apparently first leaked accidentally in the Sonos mobile app. In November, a Reddit user took screenshots of references to its name and general shape. Later, The Verge gained access to images and details about the device, describing it as a cheaper, smaller, cylindrical younger sibling to Sonos' pricy, rectangular Sonos Sub.
Sauropods had soft foot pads to help support their massive weight
Science - Posted On:2022-08-11 17:29:59 Source: arstechnica
Ask people to think of a dinosaur, and they'll likely name Tyrannosaurus Rex, the carnivorous antagonist prominently featured in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World film franchises. But an equally well-known dinosaur clade are the herbivorous sauropods, which include Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Argentinosaurus, and Brontosaurus. Australian paleontologists have digitally reconstructed these plant-munching giants to glean insight into how their feet managed to support their enormous weight, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.
"We've finally confirmed a long-suspected idea and we provide, for the first time, biomechanical evidence that a soft tissue pad—particularly in their back feet—would have played a crucial role in reducing locomotor pressures and bone stresses," said co-author Andreas Jannel, who worked on the project while completing doctoral studies at the University of Queensland. "It is mind-blowing to imagine that these giant creatures could have been able to support their own weight on land."
Sauropods (clade name: Sauropoda, or "lizard feet") had long-necked, long-tailed bodies that made them the lengthiest animals to have roamed the Earth. They had thick and powerful hind legs, club-like feet with five toes, and more slender forearms. It's rare to find complete Sauropod fossils, and even those that are mostly complete still lack the heads, tail tips, and limbs. Scientists have nonetheless managed to learn a great deal about them, and digital reconstruction is proving to be a valuable new tool in advancing our knowledge even further.
Some Firefly Species Await a Night That Never Comes
science - Posted On:2022-08-11 17:29:59 Source: slashdot
A study found that while some fireflies shrugged off light pollution, members of other species failed to mate even when males and females could find each other. From a report: As dusk deepens the shadow at the forest's edge, a tiny beacon lights up the gloom. Soon, the twilight is full of drifting lights, each winking a message in peculiar semaphore: "Male seeks female for brief union." This courtship plays out on summer nights the world over among beetles of the Lampyridae family, commonly known as fireflies. The darkness in which fireflies have always pursued their liaisons, however, has been breached by the glare of artificial lights. Humans' love affair with illumination has led to much of the Earth's habitable surfaces suffering light pollution at night. In recent years, scientists who study fireflies have heard from people who are worried that the insects may be in decline, said Avalon Owens, an entomologist at Tufts University. "There's this sense of doom. They seem to not be in places where they used to be," she said. So little is known about how fireflies live that it is hard to assess whether they are in danger -- and if so, why, said Dr. Owens. But in a study published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, she and Sara Lewis, a professor of biology at Tufts University, shone some light on how fireflies respond to artificial illumination. Experiments in forests and fields as well as the lab showed that while some North American fireflies would mate with wild abandon, regardless of illumination, others did not complete a single successful mating under the glare of the lights. Fireflies seem to rely primarily on flashes of light to find each other, which means light pollution could threaten their ability to see mates. In the four common species the study examines, the females hide on the ground and observe as males wander the skies. When a female responds to a male's flashing with her own, the two enter into a dialogue that can end in a meeting, and eventually mating. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bricked Epson Printers Make a Strong Case For User Repairability
hardware - Posted On:2022-08-11 16:44:59 Source: slashdot
Epson has gained some scrutiny in recent weeks after the company disabled a printer that was otherwise working fine, leading to accusations of planned obsolescence. Epson knows its printers will stop working without simple maintenance at a predictable point in the future, and it knows that it won't be cost-effective for many owners to send their home printers in for service. So why not build them to be user serviceable in the first place? The Verge: The inciting post from @marktavern mentions that his wife was unable to use her "very expensive Epson printer" after an end-of-service error message appeared. This isn't anything new for Epson printers, sadly. Reports going back several years mention an infamous error message that reads "parts inside the printer have reached the end of their service life." Epson confirmed to The Verge that the error is related to the printer's ink pads, which had likely become saturated through extended use and were now at risk of spilling into the rest of the printer mechanism. In a recently updated support document, Epson offers several solutions to resolve the problem. These include sending the printer into Epson to replace the ink pads or having a local certified technician do it. Previously (via Wayback Machine), just before the issue gained notoriety, Epson conceded that "repair may not be a good investment for lower cost printers because the printer's other components also may be near the end of usable life." It then added that "most consumers who are out of warranty elect to replace a lower-cost printer when they receive an end of life service message." Now, Epson suggests the feel-good option of sending the bricked unit in for recycling. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FTC aims to counter the “massive scale” of online data collection
Policy - Posted On:2022-08-11 16:15:00 Source: arstechnica
The Federal Trade Commission has kicked off the rulemaking process for privacy regulations that could restrict online surveillance and punish bad data-security practices. It's a move that some privacy advocates say is long overdue, as similar Congressional efforts face endless uncertainty.
The Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, approved on a 3-2 vote along partisan lines, was spurred by commercial data collection, which occurs at "a massive scale and in a stunning array of contexts," FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said in a press release. Companies surveil online activity, friend networks, browsing and purchase history, location data, and other details; analyze it with opaque algorithms; and sell it through "the massive, opaque market for consumer data," Khan said.
Companies can also fail to secure that data or use it to make services addictive to children. They can also potentially discriminate against customers based on legally protected statuses like race, gender, religion, and age, the FTC said. What's more, the release said, some companies make taking part in their "commercial surveillance" required for service or charge a premium to avoid it, employing dark patterns to keep the systems in place.
Intel tests show its Arc A750 GPU beating an RTX 3060, if only you could buy one
Gaming & Culture - Posted On:2022-08-11 16:15:00 Source: arstechnica
Intel still hasn't announced a release date for its Arc dedicated graphics cards, but the company has conducted a PR offensive over the last few weeks to set expectations and preview how the cards are stacking up. In a video and accompanying post today, company representatives Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson compared the upcoming Arc A750 card to Nvidia's RTX 3060 in a few dozen DirectX12 and Vulkan games They demonstrated that the card is usually able to keep up with the most popular member of the RTX 3000 GPU family.
In a series of tests at 1080p and 1440p, Intel's tests show that the A750 usually comes within a few percent of the RTX 3060's performance, sometimes overperforming (Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Microsoft Flight Simulator), sometimes underperforming (Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Deathloop), and sometimes roughly matching Nvidia's average frame rates (DOTA 2, Hitman 3, Death Stranding). Average FPS is just one way to measure game performance—crucially, Intel didn't provide any minimum or 1 percent low frame rates, which can have more of an impact on how smooth your game feels when you're playing it. But if you take these tests at face value, the Arc A750 does at least appear to be a viable midrange GPU competitor.
Of course, there is one important metric in which Intel's Arc GPU can't compete with Nvidia's: The RTX 3060 is a graphics card you can go out and buy and install in your PC today, and the Arc A750 isn't. Rumors out of this year's SIGGRAPH conference, where Intel has been giving technical demos of its GPUs and announcing a few workstation-oriented Arc Pro products, suggest that we could still see an Arc hardware launch by the end of the summer. But officially, the company still has no news to share about a concrete launch window.
Lawsuits: OnlyFans bribed Instagram to put creators on “terrorist blacklist”
Policy - Posted On:2022-08-11 16:15:00 Source: arstechnica
Through the pandemic, OnlyFans took over the online adult entertainment world to become a billion-dollar top dog, projected to earn five times more net revenue in 2022 than in 2020. As OnlyFans’ business grew, content creators on rival platforms complained that social media sites like Facebook and Instagram were blocking their content but seemingly didn’t block OnlyFans with the same fervor, creating an unfair advantage. OnlyFans' mounting success amid every other platform's demise seemed to underscore its mysterious edge.
As adult entertainers outside of OnlyFans’ content stream looked for answers to their declining revenue, they realized that Meta had not only allegedly targeted their accounts to be banned for posting supposedly inappropriate content but seemingly also for suspected terrorist activity. The more they dug into why they had been branded as terrorists, the more they suspected that OnlyFans paid Meta to put the mark on their heads—resulting in account bans that went past Facebook and Instagram and spanned popular social media apps across the Internet.
Now, Meta has been hit with multiple class action lawsuits alleging that senior executives at Meta accepted bribes from OnlyFans to shadow-ban competing adult entertainers by placing them on a "terrorist blacklist." Meta claims the suspected scheme is “highly implausible,” and that it's more likely that OnlyFans beat its rivals in the market through successful strategic moves, like partnering with celebrities. However, lawyers representing three adult entertainers suing Meta say the owner of Facebook and Instagram will likely have to hand over documents to prove it.
Musk wants Twitter to identify employees who calculate spam percentage
Policy - Posted On:2022-08-11 16:15:00 Source: arstechnica
Elon Musk's lawyers want to question the Twitter employees responsible for calculating spam-account estimates, and they claim that Twitter is hiding these potential witnesses, Bloomberg reported yesterday.
Musk on Wednesday filed a proposed order requesting that Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick compel Twitter "to produce discovery from specific custodians." Musk provided further details on the request in a letter to McCormick that was filed under seal as part of the case in which Twitter seeks to enforce the $44 billion merger contract that Musk is trying to exit.
While the letter isn't public yet, Bloomberg cited "people familiar with the allegations" to describe the letter's contents. "Musk contends the social media company isn't producing the names of employees specifically responsible for evaluating how much of Twitter's customer base is made up of spam and robot accounts... Musk's lawyers have asked the judge in the case to force Twitter to identify the workers so the defense can get their records and question them," Bloomberg wrote.