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Cyberpunk Maker CD Projekt Sued by Investor Over Botched Launch

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著者: msmash
CD Projekt SA, the Polish video-game publisher of Cyberpunk 2077, was sued by an investor who claims the company misled him about the potential of the error-plagued game whose botched release this month caused shares to dive. From a report: Andrew Trampe sued Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles and seeks to represent other investors who bought the company's securities. CD Projekt failed to disclose that Cyberpunk 2077 was "virtually unplayable on the current-generation Xbox or Playstation systems due to an enormous number of bugs," according to the complaint. As a result, Sony Corp. removed Cyberpunk 2077 from the Playstation store, and Sony, Microsoft and the company were forced to offer full refunds for the game, according to the complaint.

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Crypto's Big Rupture Is Coming In 2021

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著者: BeauHD
An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from CoinDesk, written by Ryan Zurrer. Zurrer is founder of Dialectic AG, an alternative-assets focused multi-family office. Previously, he was a Director at the Web3 Foundation and led the investment team at Polychain Capital, pioneering the SAFT as a legitimate investment instrument. From the report: Crypto is set to bifurcate and we will begin to see two parallel economic superhighways being built and used. One economic superhighway will be for know your customer (KYC)-compliant "digital currencies" such as central bank digital currencies (CBDC) or corporate-backed digital currencies such as USDC or diem (formerly libra). In parallel, the other economic superhighway will be a detour-filled adventure of crypto-anarchist money Legos being stacked and iterated on by anonymous teams, self-organized via a myriad of DAO-like governance structures. It's all about to get quite strange. Diversification is the only coherent path forward both within crypto ecosystems and beyond during these uncertain times. [...] In 2021, we are going to see layer 2 apps for the first time and not only to entertain or as early experiments. We will see entire micro-economies emerge and transform thousands of people's lives. In 2021, we'll see more anonymous teams governed by DAOs popping up and experimenting with exotic derivatives and porting real-world assets on-chain with NFTs. Layer 2 will also usher in crypto's own "SoMo" (social + mobile native) moment, whereby applications will look to be native and seamless on many of the apps that billions of users already have on their home screen: WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, the App Store and so on. This is where corporate-cryptos and CBDCs will have a clear advantage and will foster significant innovation. We'll see the backers of CBDCs and corporate-cryptos spend lavishly to seed ecosystems of layer 2 app development. We'll continue to see consolidation between crypto projects. DeFi yield strategies will begin to stack on one another combining debt, exchange and derivative strategies under unified liquidity while novel layer 1 experiments, often branded abhorrently as "Eth Killers" will ironically need to combine teams, treasuries and economically rebase to survive against Ethereum's accelerating network effects, community and composability. We'll also see an acceleration in "treasury raids" as protocols with enormous sums of money leftover from the 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) era are pressured by their token holders to pay a dividend, tie the treasury to the token or unwind and distribute the funds back to project funders. For those who got into crypto because of ideals like freedom and self-sovereignty, Zurrer says "we're likely to see a significant portion of the space migrating to FATF-compliant regulations regarding KYC/anti-money laundering and primarily transacting in centralized digital currencies." He encourages everyone to "remain open-minded about the innovation that CBDCs and corporate currencies will bring" as they "will drive adoption beyond what we've achieved thus far."

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Korean Artificial Sun Sets the New World Record of 20-Sec-Long Operation At 100 Million Degrees

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著者: BeauHD
The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research(KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the new world record as it succeeded in maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion temperature over 100 million degrees. Phys.Org reports: On November 24 (Tuesday), the KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KEF) announced that in a joint research with the Seoul National University (SNU) and Columbia University of the United States, it succeeded in continuous operation of plasma for 20 seconds with an ion-temperature higher than 100 million degrees, which is one of the core conditions of nuclear fusion in the 2020 KSTAR Plasma Campaign. It is an achievement to extend the 8 second plasma operation time during the 2019 KSTAR Plasma Campaign by more than 2 times. In its 2018 experiment, the KSTAR reached the plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees for the first time (retention time: about 1.5 seconds) To re-create fusion reactions that occur in the sun on Earth, hydrogen isotopes must be placed inside a fusion device like KSTAR to create a plasma state where ions and electrons are separated, and ions must be heated and maintained at high temperatures. In its 2020 experiment, the KSTAR improved the performance of the Internal Transport Barrier(ITB) mode, one of the next generation plasma operation modes developed last year and succeeded in maintaining the plasma state for a long period of time, overcoming the existing limits of the ultra-high-temperature plasma operation.

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Video Taken By Pilots of What Could Be the Elusive Los Angeles Jet Pack Guy Emerges

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著者: BeauHD
We now have credible video of what appears to be the elusive "Jet Pack Guy" flying around at thousands of feet near Los Angeles International Airport. The Drive reports: The footage doesn't come to us from some random Reddit board or YouTube channel, either. It was taken during an instructional flight from Sling Pilot Academy in the training area off Palos Verdes. We reached out to the flight school, which is based out of Zamperini Field, in Torrance, California for additional details. One of the pilots involved in the bizarre incident told The War Zone that they were flying along their route in the practice area between Palos Verdes and Catalina Island when they caught what appeared to at least resemble a guy in a jet pack flying towards them in the opposite direction at about 3,000 feet. The object passed along the right side of their aircraft and kept going until it was out of sight. There was no communication from the object or about the object on the usually busy radio channel used for the training area. As such, the pilots did report the encounter with the FAA, but because there wasn't really any detail to add, an official report was not filed. They were able to grab the video seen [here]. The FAA issued the following statement: "The FAA has not received any recent reports from pilots who believe they may have seen someone in a jetpack in the skies around Los Angeles. The FAA has taken the sighting reports it has received seriously, and has worked closely with the FBI to investigate them. However, the FAA has been unable to validate the reports." The Drive also said that officials are going to contact the flight school directly to investigate this incident further and they they replayed radar tapes from around the time of previous sightings, but did not see anything abnormal. "No witnesses on the ground have provided any evidence of someone with a jet pack taking off or landing, either," the report adds.

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Microsoft Flight Simulator In VR: a Turbulent Start For Wide-Open Skies

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著者: BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After over a year of requests from fans and enthusiasts, and months of official teases, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a virtual reality mode. Whether you play the game via Steam or the Windows Store, you can now take advantage of "OpenXR" calls to seemingly any PC-VR system on the market, aided by an "enable/disable VR" keyboard shortcut at any time. This summer, ahead of the game's final-stretch beta test, the developers at Asobo Studio used a screen-share feature in a video call to tease the VR mode to us at Ars Technica. This is never an ideal way to show off VR, in part because the platform requires high refresh rates for comfortable play, which can't be smoothly sent in a pandemic-era video call. But even for a video call, it looked choppy. Asobo's team assured us that the incomplete VR mode was running well -- but of course, we're all on edge about game-preview assurances as of late. Now that users have been formally invited to slap Microsoft Flight Simulator onto their faces, I must strongly urge users not to do so -- or at least heavily temper their expectations. Honestly, Asobo Studio should've issued these warnings, not me, because this mode is nowhere near retail-ready. Ultimately, trying to use the 2020 version of MSFS within its VR mode's "potato" settings is a stupid idea until some kinks get worked out. It's bad enough how many visual toggles must be dropped to PS2 levels to reach a comfortable 90 fps refresh; what's worse is that even in this low-fidelity baseline, you'll still face serious stomach-turning anguish in the form of constant frametime spikes. Turn the details up to a "medium" level in order to savor the incredible graphics engine Asobo built, of course, and you're closer to 45 fps. I didn't even bother finding an average performance for the settings at maximum. That test made me sick enough to delay this article by a few hours. [...] The thing is, my VR stomach can always survive the first few minutes of a bumpy refresh before I have to rip my headset off in anguish -- and this was long enough to see the absolute potential of MSFS as a must-play VR library addition. I don't have an ultrawide monitor, so testing MSFS has always been an exercise in wishing for a better field of view -- to replicate the glance-all-over behavior of actual flight. Getting a taste of that in my headset -- with accurate cockpit lighting, impressive volumetric clouds, and 3D modeling of my plane's various sounds -- made me want to sit for hours in this mode and get lost in compelling, realistic flight. But even the most iron stomachs can only take so much screen flicker within VR before churning, and that makes MSFS's demanding 3D engine a terrible fit for the dream of hours-long VR flight... at least, for the time being.

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Atomic-Scale Nanowires Can Now Be Produced At Scale

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著者: BeauHD
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered a way to make self-assembled nanowires of transition metal chalcogenides at scale using chemical vapor deposition. By changing the substrate where the wires form, they can tune how these wires are arranged, from aligned configurations of atomically thin sheets to random networks of bundles. This paves the way to industrial deployment in next-gen industrial electronics, including energy harvesting, and transparent, efficient, even flexible devices. Using a process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), they found that they could assemble TMC nanowires in different arrangements depending on the surface or substrate that they use as a template. Examples are shown in Figure 2; in (a), nanowires grown on a silicon/silica substrate form a random network of bundles; in (b), the wires assemble in a set direction on a sapphire substrate, following the structure of the underlying sapphire crystal. By simply changing where they are grown, the team now have access to centimeter-sized wafers covered in the arrangement they desired, including monolayers, bilayers and networks of bundles, all with different applications. They also found that the structure of the wires themselves were highly crystalline and ordered, and that their properties, including their excellent conductivity and 1D-like behavior, matched those found in theoretical predictions. The research has been published in the journal Nano Letters.

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Sony Publishes An Official Linux Driver For PS5 DualSense Controllers

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著者: BeauHD
Sony has published a new "hid-playstation" Linux kernel driver for bringing up the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller and will also be used for supporting other PlayStation hardware on Linux. Phoronix reports: This new Linux kernel driver supports the PlayStation 5 "DualSense" game controller both in USB and Bluetooth modes. All key functionality along with LEDs, motion sensors, touchpad, battery, lightbar, and rumble are all supported by this official Sony Linux driver. The Linux kernel already has the existing "hid-sony" driver while this PlayStation 5 game controller comes with the hid-playstation driver. In announcing the new driver, they are planning to move some of the Sony Interactive Entertainment hardware support from the existing hid-sony to hid-playstation drivers. The hid-sony driver will continue to be maintained and used by broader Sony devices. This new driver follows the move from about a year ago of Sony "officially" maintaining the hid-sony Linux input driver. This new driver comes in at just over 1,400 lines of code in its initial form catering to the PS5 controller. When transitioning support for older hardware to this new driver there is also a promise of unit test coverage and more. The new HID-PlayStation driver is currently under review and isn't yet queued up for mainlining but those wanting to try it out can find the 13 patches up for testing.

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Laptops, Desktop Sales See 'Renaissance;' Shortages Won't Ease Until 2022

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著者: BeauHD
The world stocked up on laptop and desktop computers in 2020 at a level not seen since the iPhone debuted in 2007, and manufacturers still are months away from fulfilling outstanding orders, hardware industry executives and analysts said. Reuters reports: Remote learning and working has upturned the computer market during the coronavirus pandemic, zapping sales of smartphones while boosting interest in bigger devices, which had become afterthoughts to iPhones and Androids over the last decade. "The whole supply chain has been strained like never before," said Gregg Prendergast, Pan-America president at hardware maker Acer Inc. Annual global shipments of PCs, the industry's collective term for laptops and desktops, topped out at about 300 million in 2008 and recently were sinking toward 250 million. Few expected a resurgence. But some analysts now expect 2020 will close at about 300 million shipments, up roughly 15% from a year ago. Tablets are experiencing even faster growth. By the end of 2021, installed PCs and tablets will reach 1.77 billion, up from 1.64 billion in 2019, according to research company Canalys. The virus pressed families into expanding from one PC for the house to one for each student, video gamer or homebound worker. Earlier this month, Sam Burd, president at Dell, said the industry "renaissance" would soon bring devices with AI software to simplify tasks like logging on and switching off cameras. Compared to last year, Dell's online orders from consumers surged 62% in the third quarter.

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XRP Cryptocurrency Crashes Following Announcement of SEC Suit Against Ripple

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著者: BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The value of one of the world's most valuable cryptocurrencies is crashing and a recently filed SEC complaint is at the root of the free fall. According to CoinMarketCap, the XRP token's value has declined more than 42% in the past 24 hours and is down more than 63% from its 30-day high of $0.76. It now sits at just $0.27. XRP's price volatility has rivaled the most capricious of cryptocurrencies. Since reaching an all-time-high of $3.84 back in January of 2018, the coin has spent much of the past two years drifting closer and closer to pennies. In the past month, on the back of major rallies from other cryptocurrencies, XRP has seen its biggest rally in years, but those gains were all erased this week by the Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse's admission that the SEC was planning to file a sweeping lawsuit against the company during the current administration's final days. The SEC's fundamental argument is that XRP has always been a security and that it should have been registered with the commission from the beginning more than seven years ago. The SEC claims that the defendants in the case -- namely the company Ripple, CEO Bran Garlinghouse and executive chairman Chris Larsen -- generated more than $1.38 billion from sales of the XRP token. The company's line has been that XRP is not a security but is, in fact, a tool for financial institutions, though the coin's volatility has discouraged banks from actually adopting the token. Meanwhile, XRP is present on a number of cryptocurrency exchanges, a fact which could expand the scope of this legal complaint and affect more players in the space.

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The ACLU Is Suing For More Information About the FBI's Phone-Hacking Lab

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著者: BeauHD
On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a new lawsuit demanding information about the FBI's Electronic Device Analysis Unit (EDAU) -- a forensic unit that the ACLU believes has been quietly breaking the iPhone's local encryption systems. The Verge reports: "The FBI is secretly breaking the encryption that secures our cell phones and laptops from identity thieves, hackers, and abusive governments," the ACLU said in a statement announcing the lawsuit, "and it refuses to even acknowledge that it has information about these efforts." The FBI has made few public statements about the EDAU, but the lawsuit cites a handful of cases in which prosecutors have submitted a "Mobile Device Unlock Request" and received data from a previously locked phone. The EDAU also put in public requests for the GrayKey devices that found success unlocking a previous version of iOS. In June 2018, the ACLU filed a FOIA request for records relating to the EDAU, but the FBI has refused to confirm any records even exist. After a string of appeals within the FOIA process, the group is taking the issue to federal court, calling on the attorney general and FBI inspector general to directly intervene and make the records available. "We're demanding the government release records concerning any policies applicable to the EDAU, its technological capabilities to unlock or access electronic devices, and its requests for, purchases of, or uses of software that could enable it to bypass encryption," the ACLU said in a statement.

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VISA Continues Pornhub Ban, To Allow Card Use On Some of Its Parent's Sites

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著者: BeauHD
Visa said on Wednesday it would allow usage of its cards on Pornhub-owner MindGeek's platforms that host professionally produced adult studio content, but would continue to decline processing payments coming from Pornhub itself. Reuters reports: Visa said its ban remains in effect for those websites that host user-generated content, the most popular being Pornhub, until an ongoing investigation was completed. "Following a thorough review, Visa will reinstate acceptance privileges for MindGeek sites that offer professionally produced adult studio content," a Visa spokesperson said. Visa, like rival Mastercard, had suspended processing payments on Pornhub earlier this month after a New York Times report found unlawful content on its website. Pornhub had denied the allegations, calling the two-biggest payment processing networks' decision "disappointing." Days after the Times report Pornhub said it had pulled content uploaded by unverified users from its platform and would only allow certain partner accounts to upload content.

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Facebook Managers Trash Their Own Ad Targeting In Unsealed Remarks

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著者: BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Facebook is currently waging a PR campaign purporting to show that Apple is seriously injuring American small businesses through its iOS privacy features. But at the same time, according to allegations in recently unsealed court documents, Facebook has been selling them ad targeting that is unreliable to the point of being fraudulent. The documents feature internal Facebook communications in which managers appear to admit to major flaws in ad targeting capabilities, including that ads reached the intended audience less than half of the time they were shown and that data behind a targeting criterion was "all crap." Facebook says the material is presented out of context. They emerged from a suit currently seeking class-action certification in federal court. The suit was filed by the owner of Investor Village, a small business that operates a message board on financial topics. Investor Village said in court filings that it decided to buy narrowly targeted Facebook ads because it hoped to reach "highly compensated and educated investors" but "had limited resources to spend on advertising." But nearly 40 percent of the people who saw Investor Village's ad either lacked a college degree, did not make $250,000 per year, or both, the company claims. In fact, not a single Facebook user it surveyed met all the targeting criteria it had set for Facebook ads, it says. The complaint features Facebook documents indicating that the company knew its advertising capabilities were overhyped and underperformed. A "February 2016 internal memorandum" sent from an unnamed Facebook manager to Andrew Bosworth, a Zuckerberg confidant and powerful company executive who oversaw ad efforts at the time, reads, "[I]nterest precision in the US is only 41% -- that means that more than half the time we're showing ads to someone other than the advertisers' intended audience. And it is even worse internationally. We don't feel we're meeting advertisers' interest accuracy expectations today." The lawsuit goes on to quote unnamed "employees on Facebook's ad team" discussing their targeting capabilities circa June 2016. "Interest" and "behavior" are two key facets of the data dossiers Facebook compiles on us for advertisers; according to the company, the former includes things you like, "from organic food to action movies," while the latter consists of "behaviors such as prior purchases and device usage." The complaint also cites unspecified internal communications in which "[p]rivately, Facebook managers described important targeting data as 'crap' and admitted accuracy was 'abysmal.'" Facebook has said in its court filings that these quotes are presented out of context.

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Why on Earth Is Someone Stealing Unpublished Book Manuscripts?

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著者: msmash
A phishing scam with unclear motive or payoff is targeting authors, agents and editors big and small, baffling the publishing industry. From a report: Earlier this month, the book industry website Publishers Marketplace announced that Little, Brown would be publishing "Re-Entry," a novel by James Hannaham about a transgender woman paroled from a men's prison. The book would be edited by Ben George. Two days later, Mr. Hannaham got an email from Mr. George, asking him to send the latest draft of his manuscript. The email came to an address on Mr. Hannaham's website that he rarely uses, so he opened up his usual account, attached the document, typed in Mr. George's email address and a little note, and hit send. "Then Ben called me," Mr. Hannaham said, "to say, 'That wasn't me.'" Mr. Hannaham was just one of countless targets in a mysterious international phishing scam that has been tricking writers, editors, agents and anyone in their orbit into sharing unpublished book manuscripts. It isn't clear who the thief or thieves are, or even how they might profit from the scheme. High-profile authors like Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan have been targeted, along with celebrities like Ethan Hawke. But short story collections and works by little-known debut writers have been attacked as well, even though they would have no obvious value on the black market. In fact, the manuscripts do not appear to wind up on the black market at all, or anywhere on the dark web, and no ransoms have been demanded. When copies of the manuscripts get out, they just seem to vanish. So why is this happening? "The real mystery is the endgame," said Daniel Halpern, the founder of Ecco, who has been the recipient of these emails and has also been impersonated in them. "It seems like no one knows anything beyond the fact of it, and that, I guess you could say, is alarming."

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Warner Bros. Believes that Theaters Will Still Exist in 2023

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著者: msmash
Warner Bros. ruffled some feathers when it announced it would release all of its new 2021 movies simultaneously on HBO Max, but the company seems to be betting that theaters won't become an apocalyptic wasteland. From a report: Variety reports that the company plans to release Furiosa, the prequel to Max Max: Fury Road, and The Color Purple first in theaters in 2023. Warner's plan to launch next year's films online is a great thing for consumers who would rather stay at home than risk contracting a deadly virus to see, say, Godzilla vs. Kong. But the plan immediately made enemies of some Hollywood veterans. Director Christopher Nolan called HBO Max "the worst streaming service" and accused Warner Bros. of not telling anyone about its plan until just 90 minutes before it was announced.

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GoDaddy Employees Were Told They Were Getting a Holiday Bonus. It Was Actually a Phishing Test.

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著者: msmash
An anonymous reader shares a report (alternative source): "2020 has been a record year for GoDaddy, thanks to you!" the email read. Sent by [email protected], tucked underneath a glittering banner of a snowflake and stamped with the words "GoDaddy Holiday Party," the Dec. 14 email to hundreds of GoDaddy employees promised some welcome financial relief during an otherwise stressful year. "Though we cannot celebrate together during our annual Holiday Party, we want to show our appreciation and share a $650 one-time Holiday bonus!" the email read. "To ensure that you receive your one-time bonus in time for the Holidays, please select your location and fill in the details by Friday, December 18th." But, two days later, the company sent another email. "You're getting this email because you failed our recent phishing test," the company's chief security officer Demetrius Comes wrote. "You will need to retake the Security Awareness Social Engineering training." The follow-up email from Comes said that roughly 500 GoDaddy employees clicked on the holiday bonus email and failed the test. Scottsdale-based GoDaddy, the world's largest domain registrar and web-hosting company, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the emails. The emails were forwarded to The Copper Courier by three GoDaddy employees.

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NYC is Paying $2 Million For Anti-Plagiarism Software After Firing Teachers

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著者: msmash
An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, more than 1,000 educators and students at City University of New York institutions petitioned their board of trustees to not renew its contract with the anti-plagiarism software company Turnitin. The board ultimately voted unanimously, with the student senate representative abstaining, to renew Turnitin's five-year contract for nearly $2 million. Five months earlier, CUNY had laid off nearly 3,000 adjunct faculty and part-time employees as a result of budget shortfalls. (The college system's chancellor has pushed back against that characterization). The protest against Turnitin is the latest high-profile effort in what has become a nationwide backlash in higher education against educational technology vendors. As schools moved online during the pandemic and confronted slimming budgets, they increasingly turned to a wide array of software companies for solutions. The ed tech industry has boomed, and the school experience has been transformed in ways that are sure to outlive the pandemic -- not necessarily for the better, many experts say.

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Dozens Sue Amazon's Ring After Camera Hack Leads To Threats and Racial Slurs

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著者: msmash
Dozens of people who say they were subjected to death threats, racial slurs, and blackmail after their in-home Ring smart cameras were hacked are suing the company over "horrific" invasions of privacy. From a report: A new class action lawsuit, which combines a number of cases filed in recent years, alleges that lax security measures at Ring, which is owned by Amazon, allowed hackers to take over their devices. Ring provides home security in the form of smart cameras that are often installed on doorbells or inside people's homes. The suit against Ring builds on previous cases, joining together complaints filed by more than 30 people in 15 families who say their devices were hacked and used to harass them. In response to these attacks, Ring "blamed the victims, and offered inadequate responses and spurious explanations," the suit alleges. The plaintiffs also claim the company has also failed to adequately update its security measures in the aftermath of such hacks.

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Volkswagen CEO Says Apple Can Mount Major Challenge With Auto Push

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著者: msmash
Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess said cash-rich technology giants invading the auto industry pose a much bigger challenge for the German manufacturer than traditional rivals like Toyota Motor. From a report: "We look forward to new competitors who will certainly accelerate the change in our industry and bring in new skills," Diess said in a LinkedIn post when asked about reports that Apple is developing a self-driving car. "The unbelievable valuation and the practically unlimited access to resources instill a lot of respect in us." [...] Diess mapped out a plan during an internal meeting last week to pit VW's huge Wolfsburg plant against Tesla's factory that's under construction outside Berlin. The electric-car maker's new site in Gruenheide is bound to stoke competition for engineers, workers and customers on VWâ(TM)s home turf. "I've said it before: the most valuable company in the world will again be a mobility company," Diess said. "It could be Tesla, Apple or Volkswagen." Further reading: Elon Musk Says He Once Considered Selling Tesla To Apple, Tim Cook Didn't Want To Take a Meeting

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Hackers Threaten To Leak Plastic Surgery Pictures

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著者: msmash
Hackers have stolen the data of a large cosmetic surgery chain and are threatening to publish patients' before and after photos, among other details. From a report: The Hospital Group, which has a long list of celebrity endorsements, has confirmed the ransomware attack. It said it had informed the Information Commissioner of the breach. On its darknet webpage, the hacker group known as REvil said the "intimate photos of customers" were "not a completely pleasant sight." It claimed to have obtained more than 900 gigabytes of patient photographs. The Hospital Group, which is also known as the Transform Hospital Group, claims to be the UK's leading specialist weight loss and cosmetic surgery group. It has 11 clinics specialising in bariatric weight loss surgery, breast enlargements, nipple corrections and nose adjustments. The company has previously promoted itself via celebrity endorsements, although it has not done so for several years. Former Big Brother contestant Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace told Zoo magazine about her breast enhancement surgery with The Hospital Group in 2009. Atomic Kitten singer Kerry Katona, Shameless actress Tina Malone and reality TV star Joey Essex from The Only Way is Essex are also previous patients who have endorsed the clinic.

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US Cyber Agency Says SolarWinds Hackers Are 'Impacting' State, Local Governments

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著者: msmash
The U.S. cybersecurity agency says that a sprawling cyber espionage campaign made public earlier this month is affecting state and local governments, although it released few additional details. From a report: The hacking campaign, which used U.S. tech company SolarWinds as a springboard to penetrate federal government networks, was "impacting enterprise networks across federal, state, and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations," the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in a statement posted to its website. The CISA said last week that U.S. government agencies, critical infrastructure entities, and private groups were among those affected, but did not specifically mention state or local bodies. So far only a handful of federal government agencies have officially confirmed having been affected, including the U.S. Treasury Department, the Commerce Department, and the Department of Energy.

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