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Freeman writes:

Toxic image board 4chan has managed to stay online for the past seven years—amid boycotts and advertiser flight, after being implicated in several mass shootings, even as it was identified as a source of the conspiracy theories that inspired the January 6 insurrection—thanks, in part, to a $2.4 million investment from a major Japanese toy company.

A partnership agreement, obtained exclusively by WIRED, shows not only how current site owner Hiroyuki Nishimura acquired the far-right message board but also how Japanese industry helped finance the deal.
[...]
In recent years, Good Smile has branched out into content creation, working with various animation and film studios, has opened online wholesale companies in China and elsewhere, and has even sponsored a Super GT racing team.

In 2021, former employees of Good Smile's Los Angeles office—embroiled in a legal dispute about the future of their employment—countersued the company. In legal filings, they allege Good Smile was responsible for the distribution of potentially obscene sexually explicit anime products and merchandise ("lolicon") and that it, unbeknownst to its family-friendly corporate partners, was funding 4chan.

The accusations were picked up in The Ankler and The Hollywood Reporter, which cited a Good Smile representative admitting a passive investment in 4chan. The lawsuit was settled out of court, and the allegations were never proven.

quietus writes:

If you still want your Mao memorabilia, you better hurry down to Tiananmen Square, Beijing, while you still have the chance.

In China, the State Council is somewhat comparable to the Cabinet. Headed by the Prime Minister and consisting of the heads of the various Ministries (Defense, Commerce, Education, Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Justice, Civil Affairs, State Security, Public Security and so on), it handles the day-to-day running of the country while formulating economic policy.

Its operational procedures are described in a document, conveniently titled "Working Procedures for the State Council". On March 18, an updated version of that document was published, and it has a couple of changes.

First off, the State Council now has to "report any major decisions, major events and important situations" to the Central Committee "in a timely manner." Previous edition sentences like "administration according to law, seeking truth from facts, democracy, openness, pragmatism and integrity" have been scrapped, as has the requirement for the State Council "to correct illegal or inappropriate administrative actions", or to "guide and supervise" the bureaucracy. In other words, its wings have been seriously clipped.

Secondly, any and all references to Marxism/Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, the thought of Deng Xiaoping and the ideologies of former presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao are now verboten. Only references to Xi Jinping Thought are allowed, as that is "the essence of Chinese culture and the spirit of the times".

To drive the point home, the Central Committee of the CCP launched another nationwide disciplinary campaign among its 96 million members.

This round will check them for loyalty to supreme leader Xi Jinping, weeding out "black sheep" and "two-faced" officials.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/judge-finds-google-destroyed-evidence-and-repeatedly-gave-false-info-to-court/

A federal judge yesterday ruled that Google intentionally destroyed evidence and must be sanctioned, rejecting the company's argument that it didn't need to automatically preserve internal chats involving employees subject to a legal hold.

"After substantial briefing by both sides, and an evidentiary hearing that featured witness testimony and other evidence, the Court concludes that sanctions are warranted," US District Judge James Donato wrote. Later in the ruling, he wrote that evidence shows that "Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was 'lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation' and 'with the intent to deprive another party of the information's use in the litigation.'"
[...]
After yesterday's ruling against Google in the Northern California federal court, a US Department of Justice attorney submitted a notice of the sanctions to the DC-based court. Google is fighting the request for sanctions in that case, too.

Related:
US DoJ, Microsoft and 35 States Support an Appeal of Epic Games-Apple Decision (20220202)
Google's Antitrust Case Won't Go to Trial Until Sept. 2023 (20201221)
Google Reportedly Could be Hit With Second Antitrust Lawsuit This Week (20201217)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

AI image generator Midjourney has stopped free trials of its software:

AI image generator Midjourney has halted free trials of its service, blaming a sudden influx of new users. Midjourney CEO and founder David Holz announced the change on Tuesday, originally citing "extraordinary demand and trial abuse" in a message on Discord (this announcement was spotted first by The Washington Post). In an email to The Verge, Holz stated that the pause is "because of massive amounts of people making throwaway accounts to get free images."

"We think the culprit was probably a viral how-to video in china," said Holz over email. "This happened at the same time as a temporary gpu shortage. The two things came together and it was bringing down the service for paid users."

Given Holz's reference to "abuse," it was originally thought that the pause was linked to a spate of recent viral images created using Midjourney, including fabricated images of Donald Trump being arrested and the pope wearing a stylish jacket, which some mistook for real photographs. However, Holz characterized earlier reports as a "misunderstanding" and notes that the free trial of Midjourney never included access to the latest version of Midjourney, version 5, that creates the most realistic images and which is thought to have been used for these viral pictures.

[...] Midjourney maintains a list of banned words "related to topics in different countries based on complaints from users in those countries," as per a message from Holz last October. But it doesn't share a complete version of this list to minimize "drama." As Holz said last year, "Almost no one ever notices [the ban list] unless they're specially trying to create drama which is against our rules in tos [terms of service] 'don't use our tools to create drama.'"

[...] At the time of writing, Midjourney is still not allowing free users to generate images, though this may change in the future. "We're still trying to figure out how to bring free trials back, we tried to require an active email but that wasn't enough so we're back to the drawing board," said Holz.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Your victim status won't last long if your response is nonexistent:

In cybersecurity, the phrase "what they don't know won't hurt them" is not only wrong, it's dangerous. Despite this, it's a motto that remains in many organizations' PR playbooks, as demonstrated by the recent LastPass and Fortra data breaches.

[...] TechCrunch+ has learned that LastPass has already lost customers because of its silent-treatment approach to its breach. And Fortra is likely to face a similar fate after TechCrunch+ heard from multiple customers that they only learned that their data had been stolen after receiving a ransom demand; Fortra had assured them that the data was safe.

Smaller companies, too, are employing a silent-treatment approach to data breaches: Kids' tech coding camp iD Tech failed to acknowledge a January breach that saw hackers access the personal data of close to 1 million users, including names, dates of birth, passwords stored in plaintext, and about 415,000 unique email addresses. Concerned parents told us at the time that they only became aware of the breach after receiving a notification from a third-party data breach notification service.

[...] While getting hacked can be forgivable, an organization's victim status will not last long if it fails to respond appropriately or at all — as demonstrated by LastPass and Fortra.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tech giants want to build massive, "hyperscale" data centers in the Netherlands, but a popular political movement wants them stopped:

There are around 200 data centers in the Netherlands, most of them renting out server space to several different companies. But since 2015, the country has also witnessed the arrival of enormous "hyperscalers," buildings that generally span at least 10,000 square feet and are set up to service a single (usually American) tech giant. Lured here by the convergence of European internet cables, temperate climates, and an abundance of green energy, Microsoft and Google have built hyperscalers; Meta has tried and failed.

Against the backdrop of an intensifying Dutch nitrogen crisis, building these hyperscalers is becoming more controversial. Nitrogen, produced by cars, agriculture, and heavy machinery used in construction, can be a dangerous pollutant, damaging ecosystems and endangering people's health. The Netherlands produces four times more nitrogen than the average across the EU. The Dutch government has pledged to halve emissions by 2030, partly by persuading farmers to reduce their livestock herds or leave the industry altogether. Farmers have responded with protests, blockading roads with tractors and manure and dumping slurry outside the nature minister's home.

The courts have also halted thousands of building projects—forcing construction jobs like Microsoft's to apply for permits proving they would not make the nitrogen crisis worse.

[...] The dispute over nitrogen permits has put Microsoft's data center developments in direct opposition to an increasingly powerful farming community. Earlier this month, a new political force, called the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB), did so well in provincial elections, it became the joint-largest party in the Dutch Senate. The party, which emerged in response to the nitrogen crisis, also has strong views on data centers. "We think the data center is unnecessary," says Ingrid de Sain, farmer turned party leader of the BBB in North Holland, referring to the Microsoft complex. "It is a waste of fertile soil to put the data centers boxes here. The BBB is against this."

upstart writes:

Isar Aerospace recently secured $165 million in funding to gear up for the inaugural launch of its Spectrum rocket:

German company Isar Aerospace has raised $165 million in order to ramp up the development of its Spectrum rocket, which is scheduled for its debut launch later this year. For Europeans needing access to space, the rocket's arrival will come not a moment too soon.

[...] Isar Aerospace has raised a total of $330 million so far, with $75 million raised during its previous round of funding in July 2021. The funds will go towards the development of Isar's Spectrum rocket, a two-stage launch vehicle designed to carry small and medium sized satellites to orbit. According to ISAR, Spectrum should be capable of carrying 2,205 pounds (1,000 kilograms) to low Earth orbit (LEO). By comparison, SpaceX's medium-lift Falcon 9 can hoist 50,265 pounds (22,800 kg) to LEO.

Spectrum's inaugural launch is planned for the second half of 2023. Isar Aerospace is currently running tests on the rocket's Aquila engine, which was developed and manufactured in-house. The company is also finalizing its infrastructure at the launch site in Andøya, Norway, which will host Spectrum's debut liftoff.

[...] Europe is desperately in need of its own launch vehicles, whether for small or medium lift, to provide local access to space. Spectrum won't be the most powerful rocket when it debuts, but it'll fill a troublesome gap, especially until Vega-C and Ariane 6 come through.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Food safety authorities in the US and Singapore have already approved synthetic meat and the EU is also expected to:

Italy's right-wing government has backed a bill that would ban laboratory-produced meat and other synthetic foods, highlighting Italian food heritage and health protection.

If the proposals go through, breaking the ban would attract fines of up to €60,000 (£53,000).

Francesco Lollobrigida, who runs the rebranded ministry for agriculture and food sovereignty, spoke of the importance of Italy's food tradition.

The farmers' lobby praised the move.

But it was a blow for some animal welfare groups, which have highlighted lab-made meat as a solution to issues including protecting the environment from carbon emissions and food safety.

[...] The proposals, approved by ministers on Tuesday, seek to ban synthetic foods produced from animal cells without killing the animal, and would apply to lab-produced fish and synthetic milk too.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A rare 'ultramassive' black hole, 30 billion times the mass of the Sun, is lurking in the cosmos:

Holy smokes. A group of astronomers have found a black hole containing (checks notes) 30 billion times the mass of our Sun. That's more than seven thousand times the size of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

The team used gravitational lensing to see the black hole. In this natural phenomenon, massive objects' gravitational fields bend photons of light magnifying and warping them—making it possible to see object that would otherwise be hidden or too faint. Last year, a team spotted the oldest known star in an arc of gravitationally lensed light.

According to a Durham University release, the newly detected black hole is the first ever found using gravitational lensing. A paper about the discovery is published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

[...] The team identified the black hole by modeling the different pathways light might take through the universe, depending on the presence of black holes of varying mass. They then compared the computer data with images of the cosmos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Lo and behold, they found a match.

[...] "Gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes, something not currently possible in distant galaxies," Nightingale added. "This approach could let us detect many more black holes beyond our local universe and reveal how these exotic objects evolved further back in cosmic time."

A brief video explaining the process

Journal Reference:
James. W. Nightingale, Russell J. Smith, Qiuhan He, et al., Abell 1201: Detection of an Ultramassive Black Hole in a Strong Gravitational Lens, arXiv:2303.15514 [astro-ph.GA], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.15514

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Netflix has been releasing mobile video games since 2021, but this would be the company's first attempt at TV-based video games:

Higher quality TV and movies? No. A standard of not cancelling shows after a single season? Nah. Mobile games on your TV? Yup. That appears to be Netflix's plan after a developer found some hidden code while digging through the platform. The company's actually been offering games on mobile since 2021, but given paltry player numbers, the effort to bring them to TVs, where most subscribers actually use Netflix, might be the best way to remind people that they're even there.

App developer Steve Moser—who shared his findings with Bloomberg—found some sneaky lines of code during some digging into Netflix's back end. One line of the code allegedly read "A game on your TV needs a controller to play. Do you want to use this phone as a game controller?," indicating that a user's smartphone would serve as the controller for a game hosted on Netflix's interface.

Currently, Netflix's gaming service is relegated to mobile, and while there's critically acclaimed titles like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge and Immortality in there, you can only get at them either by stumbling on Netflix's games on your phone's app store or through a single row in the Netflix app. As such, it's easy to miss out on this side of Netflix entirely. According to recent data, only one percent of subscribers are playing games on Netflix.

upstart writes:

New research into aspirin might one day lead to safer painkillers or even new cancer treatments:

We still have more to learn about one of the world's oldest drugs: aspirin. In research out this week, researchers say they've uncovered more about how the drug reduces inflammation. The findings might pave the way toward creating similar but safer treatments for inflammation and possibly even cancer, according to the team.

Also known as acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin was first synthesized around the turn of the 20th century, though a precursor to it—derived from willow plants—has been used by humans for thousands of years. It's a type of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), and, like other NSAIDs, it can treat fever, inflammation, and pain. It also has a unique blood-thinning effect.

Aspirin remains one of the most widely used medications in the world, both as a short-term option for various ailments and as a preventative treatment for people at high risk of cardiovascular disease. But it's not without side effects—namely an increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding. Last year, U.S. experts even stopped recommending a daily dose of baby aspirin for older adults without a history of heart attack or stroke, citing evidence that any modest benefits for the typical person would be outweighed by the known risks.

[...] Aspirin is known to inhibit enzymes called cyclooxygenase, or COX. These enzymes play a vital role in producing other chemicals that cause inflammation. The researchers say they discovered several ways that aspirin influences this process, from controlling transcription factors that allow the expression of cytokines (proteins involved in inflammation and our immune response) to slowing the breakdown of the amino acid tryptophan, another important player in inflammation. It also seems to accomplish the latter by inhibiting the production of indoleamine dioxygenases (IDOs), particularly IDO1, during the inflammatory process.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

gCaptcha is the leading rival for quality captcha services against Google's renowned and universally despised recaptcha. When Google increased the price for recaptcha competing services took off taking what Google started from to improve the experience significantly. Some experiences with smiling dogs and cloudy horses were deemed to take this too far but these experiments showed that there are improvements to be made in the captcha game.

With hackers out to solve any captcha programmatically captcha services need to stay one step ahead. The slider method was found to be easily bypassed. Rotating puzzle pieces is harder to solve but involves more user interaction and has moving parts in the code that can break.

Recently hCaptcha has introduce a test that challenges the user to click on the center of an owl's head. This is an improvement over selecting a type of ball from a grid of 9 or going through the excruciating experience Google inflicts on users. There must be a better way to prove that the person viewing the web page is a human and not a bot. How about it, Soylentils? What's your best idea for a captcha system given the state of the systems we have today?

[Ed's Comment: Bonus points if you can suggest a system that does not rely on graphics (not everyone uses the latest browsers or even anything more than a simple line of text) to access some sites - our own included. We have the need for a robust captcha system for people creating accounts in order to reduce the number of fake accounts being created by a bot.]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Stop Blaming the End User for Security Risk:

It's common among cybersecurity professionals to point to the end user as a top area of risk in securing the organization. This is understandable. Systems and software are under our control, but users are unpredictable, that unruly variable that expands our threat surface to each geographically dispersed user, personal device, and all-too-human foibles and flaws.

Certainly, threat actors target our users quite successfully — I'm not here to dismiss this obvious truth. But what is equally certain is this:We cannot train our way out of this problem. Enterprises pour significant investments into user security-awareness training, and still, they suffer embarrassing, costly breaches. So, focusing primarily on securing the end user isn't a sound strategy.

Fact: your users are a major risk factor. According to Verizon's "2022 Data Breach and Investigations Report," 35% of ransomware infections began with a phishing email. Fact: This is despite escalating investments in security-awareness training over many years. The cybersecurity awareness training market is projected to grow from $1,854.9 million in 2022 to $12,140 million by 2027. Fact: Even with all these investments, ransomware (just as one attack type) is also expected to grow aggressively, despite many organizational efforts, including training.

Sad, unavoidable fact: Our users are still going to make mistakes — we're all human, after all. A survey conducted to prove the need for more security training, in my view, proved its inability to stop the cyber crisis: Four out of five surveyed had received security awareness training; between 26% and 44% (based on age demographic) continued to click on links and attachments from unknown senders anyway.

NotSanguine writes:

Ars Technica is reporting that Twitter has convinced a judge to issue a subpoena to Github, requiring them to provide all personal details in their possession of a user called "FreeSpeechEnthusiast".

Twitter has obtained a subpoena compelling GitHub to provide identifying information on a user who posted portions of Twitter's source code.

Twitter on Friday asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California to issue a subpoena to GitHub. A court clerk signed off on the subpoena [PDF] yesterday.

GitHub user "FreeSpeechEnthusiast" posted Twitter source code in early January, shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter and laid off thousands of workers. Twitter reportedly suspects the code leaker is one of its many ex-employees.

GitHub removed the code repository on Friday shortly after Twitter filed a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice. Twitter's takedown notice also requested identifying information on FreeSpeechEnthusiast, but GitHub didn't provide those details to Twitter immediately.

With the subpoena now issued, GitHub has until April 3 to provide all identifying information, "including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), email address(es), social media profile data, and IP address(es), for the user(s) associated with" the FreeSpeechEnthusiast account. GitHub was also ordered to provide the same type of information on any "users who posted, uploaded, downloaded or modified the data" at the code repository posted by FreeSpeechEnthusiast.

upstart writes:

TSMC may not expand in US if double taxation rule continues:

As Apple's major chip manufacturer TSMC nears the opening of its Arizona plant, US officials want it to build more — but US versus China politics are complicating matters.

Taiwanese company TSMC has already invested $40 billion in its new Arizona factory, which it says will open in 2024. But since the US does not have a income tax agreement with Taiwan, TSMC faces double taxation on its profits from this or any other factory it could build in the States.

According to the Financial Times, unless there is a change in the law, TSMC will be paying out over 50% of its profits earned in the US. In comparison, Samsung pays much less because its home country of South Korea has a tax treaty with the States.

Naturally, then, US politicians who want to see the firm expand in the States argue that President Biden should negotiate a tax accord with Taiwan. TSMC officials have reportedly also asked for such an agreement to ease this double taxation burden.

However, at present the US does not recognize Taiwan as a separate country or sovereign nation. Instead, it sees it as part of China.

Original Submission