With the debut of the Pirate Bay TV series in Sweden, international viewers are finding it surprisingly difficult to pirate. TorrentFreak reports: The series premiered at the on-demand platform of the Swedish national broadcaster SVT a few hours ago. International deals haven't been announced, but pirates can generally get access anyway. Soon after the first two episodes of The Pirate Bay series came out, scene release copies started circulating online. As one would expect. The Scene group OLLONBORRE, which specializes in Swedish content, was the first to pick the show up. Within minutes, the first 1080p WEB-rips were posted on private scene servers and 720p copies followed a few hours later. Interestingly, pirate releases have yet to make their way to The Pirate Bay. We haven't seen any other copies on other public pirate sites either, which is surprising given the topic of the series. It's common knowledge that The Scene -- a secretive network of release groups -- prefers to keep its releases private. Therefore, it wasn't happy with The Pirate Bay's public nature and rise to prominence in the early 2003s, which is highlighted in the first episodes of the TV series. However, we expected non-scene release groups would be eager to pick up the show. Apparently that's not the case, yet.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The FBI is warning that hackers are obtaining private user information — including emails and phone numbers — from U.S.-based tech companies by compromising government and police email addresses to submit "emergency" data requests. The FBI's public notice filed this week is a rare admission from the federal government about the threat from fraudulent emergency data requests, a legal process designed to help police and federal authorities obtain information from companies to respond to immediate threats affecting someone's life or property. The abuse of emergency data requests is not new, and has been widely reported in recent years. Now, the FBI warns that it saw an "uptick" around August in criminal posts online advertising access to or conducting fraudulent emergency data requests, and that it was going public for awareness. "Cyber-criminals are likely gaining access to compromised US and foreign government email addresses and using them to conduct fraudulent emergency data requests to US based companies, exposing the personal information of customers to further use for criminal purposes," reads the FBI's advisory. [...] The FBI said in its advisory that it had seen several public posts made by known cybercriminals over 2023 and 2024, claiming access to email addresses used by U.S. law enforcement and some foreign governments. The FBI says this access was ultimately used to send fraudulent subpoenas and other legal demands to U.S. companies seeking private user data stored on their systems. The advisory said that the cybercriminals were successful in masquerading as law enforcement by using compromised police accounts to send emails to companies requesting user data. In some cases, the requests cited false threats, like claims of human trafficking and, in one case, that an individual would "suffer greatly or die" unless the company in question returns the requested information. The FBI said the compromised access to law enforcement accounts allowed the hackers to generate legitimate-looking subpoenas that resulted in companies turning over usernames, emails, phone numbers, and other private information about their users. But not all fraudulent attempts to file emergency data requests were successful, the FBI said. The FBI said in its advisory that law enforcement organizations should take steps to improve their cybersecurity posture to prevent intrusions, including stronger passwords and multi-factor authentication. The FBI said that private companies "should apply critical thinking to any emergency data requests received," given that cybercriminals "understand the need for exigency."

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Starting November 11, TSMC plans to stop supplying 7 nm and smaller chips to Chinese companies working on AI processors and GPUs. "The move is reportedly to ensure it remains compliant with US export restrictions," reports The Register. From the report: This will not affect Chinese customers wanting 7 nm chips from TSMC for other applications such as mobile and communications, according to Nikkei, which said the overall impact on the chipmaker's revenue is likely to be minimal. TrendForce further cites another China-based source who claims the move was at the behest of the US Department of Commerce, which informed TSMC that any such shipments should not proceed unless approved and licensed by its BIS (Bureau of Industry and Security). We asked the agency for confirmation. Any moves by the silicon supremo is likely to be out of caution to pre-empt accusations from Washington that it isn't doing enough to prevent advanced technology from getting into the hands of Chinese entities that have been sanctioned. As TrendForce notes, it "highlights the foundry giant's delicate position in the global semiconductor supply chain amid the heating chip war between the world's two superpowers."

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According to a partial teardown video of Apple's new Mac mini, the new machine features modular storage that can be removed. "As we saw with the Mac Studio, however, replacing the modular storage is complicated," notes MacRumors. The teardown also reveals two 128GB storage chips in the 256GB model, enabling faster SSD speeds comparable to higher-capacity versions. From the report: The criticism surrounding Apple's decision to use a single 256GB chip in some base-model Macs a few years ago primarily came from a vocal contingent of tech enthusiasts, and the average customer is unlikely to even notice the slower speeds in common day-to-day tasks. Nevertheless, it appears that customers who do want the fastest SSD speeds do not need to worry about which storage capacity they choose when ordering the new Mac mini.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic has announced a partnership with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to bring its Claude AI models to unspecified US intelligence and defense agencies. Claude, a family of AI language models similar to those that power ChatGPT, will work within Palantir's platform using AWS hosting to process and analyze data. But some critics have called out the deal as contradictory to Anthropic's widely-publicized "AI safety" aims. On X, former Google co-head of AI ethics Timnit Gebru wrote of Anthropic's new deal with Palantir, "Look at how they care so much about 'existential risks to humanity.'" The partnership makes Claude available within Palantir's Impact Level 6 environment (IL6), a defense-accredited system that handles data critical to national security up to the "secret" classification level. This move follows a broader trend of AI companies seeking defense contracts, with Meta offering its Llama models to defense partners and OpenAI pursuing closer ties with the Defense Department. In a press release, the companies outlined three main tasks for Claude in defense and intelligence settings: performing operations on large volumes of complex data at high speeds, identifying patterns and trends within that data, and streamlining document review and preparation. While the partnership announcement suggests broad potential for AI-powered intelligence analysis, it states that human officials will retain their decision-making authority in these operations. As a reference point for the technology's capabilities, Palantir reported that one (unnamed) American insurance company used 78 AI agents powered by their platform and Claude to reduce an underwriting process from two weeks to three hours. The new collaboration builds on Anthropic's earlier integration of Claude into AWS GovCloud, a service built for government cloud computing. Anthropic, which recently began operations in Europe, has been seeking funding at a valuation up to $40 billion. The company has raised $7.6 billion, with Amazon as its primary investor.

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Scalpers attempting to profit from Sony's new PlayStation 5 Pro are struggling to sell units above retail price, as widespread availability dampens resale prospects. The $699 console, launched this week with enhanced graphics capabilities, remains in stock at major retailers across the United States and Europe. eBay listings show PS5 Pro units selling below the manufacturer's suggested retail price, with some auctions starting at $640. While isolated listings reach $2,300, most hover near retail value. UK scalpers face similar challenges, offering units at or below the $900 retail price. Even in Sony's home market of Japan, where availability is tighter, resellers on Mercari barely break even after platform fees and shipping costs. The situation marks a sharp contrast to the original PS5's 2020 launch, when widespread shortages led to significant markups. Only the console's external disc drive, priced at $79.99, commands premiums up to $130 on secondary markets.

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The FBI is warning that hackers are obtaining private user information -- including emails and phone numbers -- from U.S.-based tech companies by compromising government and police email addresses to submit "emergency" data requests. From a report: The FBI's public notice filed this week is a rare admission from the federal government about the threat from fraudulent emergency data requests, a legal process designed to help police and federal authorities obtain information from companies to respond to immediate threats affecting someone's life or property. The abuse of emergency data requests is not new, and has been widely reported in recent years. Now, the FBI warns that it saw an "uptick" around August in criminal posts online advertising access to or conducting fraudulent emergency data requests, and that it was going public for awareness. "Cyber-criminals are likely gaining access to compromised U.S. and foreign government email addresses and using them to conduct fraudulent emergency data requests to U.S. based companies, exposing the personal information of customers to further use for criminal purposes," reads the FBI's advisory.

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From an opinion piece on GamesIndustry.biz about the recently launched PS5 Pro that went on sale this week: What I'd argue is actually more interesting about PS5 Pro in a wider perspective isn't what Sony has done to the chips in the system -- it's what they've chosen not to include, and what it tells us about the decision-making process that's likely occurring for the company's future hardware. PS5 Pro doesn't have a disc drive. Anyone who wants to play disc-based games on the system will need to buy one of the add-on drives Sony started selling when the PS5 Slim model was released, adding further to the cost of the already very expensive device. To add insult to injury, Sony doesn't seem to have made any effort whatsoever to ensure that those drives are actually well-stocked for the launch of the Pro. I can only speak directly to the situation in Japan, where they've been out of stock at most major retailers for months and even second-hand units are being sold at three to four times SRP by scalpers. But asking around suggests that the situation isn't much better in other regions. That's a very rough welcome to PS5 Pro ownership for anyone upgrading who has a collection of games on disc. It's possible, of course, that Sony excluded the drive simply because its cost would push the Pro's price tag even higher. However, the incongruity of Sony's "Pro" console lacking the basic ability to play the games Sony sells at retailers all around the world is striking, and it's difficult to see the decision to accept that incongruity -- and the inconvenience it would inevitably cause for customers -- as anything other than strategic. Digital sales make up a bigger and bigger portion of the industry's revenues every year, but physical game sales are still a very big deal -- and physical games are products that fall outside the control of publishers and platform holders in a way that they have found increasingly irritating in recent years. People who buy physical games can sell them second-hand or lend them to their friends, retailers with physical games in stock can discount them or include them in bundles as they see fit.

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The chief executive of Cop29 has been filmed apparently agreeing to facilitate fossil fuel deals at the climate summit. From a report: The recording has amplified calls by campaigners who want the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists to be banned from future Cop talks. The campaign group Global Witness posed undercover as a fake oil and gas group asking for deals to be facilitated in exchange for sponsoring the event. In the calls, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan's deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, agreed to this and spoke of a future that includes fossil fuels "perhaps for ever." Cop officials also introduced the fake investor to a senior executive at the national oil and gas company Socar to discuss investment opportunities. Soltanov told the fake investment group: âoeI would be happy to create a contact between your team and their team [Socar] so that they can start discussions." Shortly after that they received an email from Socar. The UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC), the UN body that oversees Cop, says officials should not use their roles "to seek private gain" and it expects them to act "without self-interest."

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UK government-appointed commissioners have labeled Birmingham City Council's Oracle Fusion rollout as "the poorest ERP deployment" they have seen. From a report: A report published by the UK council's Corporate Finance Overview and Scrutiny Committee found that 18 months after Fusion went live, the largest public authority in Europe "had not tactically stabilized the system or formulated clear plans to resolve the system issues and recover the operation." The city council's cloud-based Oracle tech replaced the SAP system that it began using in 1999, but the disastrous project encountered a string of landmark failures. The council has failed to produce auditable accounts since Oracle was implemented in 2022, costs have ballooned from around 19 million pound to a projected estimate of 131 million pound and, because the council chose not to use system audit features, it cannot tell if fraud has taken place on its multibillion-pound spending budget for an 18-month period. In September last year, the council became effectively bankrupt due to outstanding equal pay claims and the Oracle implementation. The report from "best value commissioners" appointed by central government to investigate struggling councils said that following the Oracle implementation, "a serious lack of trust had developed between members and officers driven by the failed implementation and subsequent lack of progress to resolve the situation."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD has gained a substantial 5.7 percentage points of share of the desktop x86 CPU market in the third quarter compared to Q2, the largest quarterly share gain since we began tracking the market share reports in 2016. It also represents an incredible ten percentage point improvement over the prior year. AMD also raked in a strong increase in revenue share, jumping 8.5 percentage points over the prior quarter, indicating that it is selling a strong mix of higher-end CPU models. During the quarter, AMD launched its new Ryzen 9000-series family of processors amid a scandal related to stability issues with Intel's Raptor Lake chips, which generated a flood of negative press for the company over the course of several months, and inventory adjustments for one of Intel's customers. AMD now commands 28.7% of the desktop processor market. AMD also continued to gain share in the laptop and server markets, though its gains on the desktop side of the business were the most impressive, according to Mercury Research.

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Block will abandon development of its Web5 decentralized internet project and reduce investment in music streaming service Tidal to focus on bitcoin mining hardware and self-custody wallets, the payments company announced in its third-quarter letter to shareholders. The Jack Dorsey-led firm cited strong market demand for its bitcoin mining products and Bitkey wallet as key drivers behind the strategic shift.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Oregon Live: Intel told employees this week that it will bring back free coffee and tea at its work sites, one of many benefits the chipmaker eliminated last summer as it sought to slash $10 billion from its annual budget. "Although Intel still faces cost challenges, we understand that small comforts play a significant role in our daily routines," Intel wrote on its internal messaging forum, called Circuit. "We know this is a small step, but we hope it is a meaningful one in supporting our workplace culture." Intel declined comment. The company did not resume offering free fruit, another perk eliminated last summer. Employees say privately that morale has been devastated by Intel's poor financial performance and by cutbacks aimed at returning the business to profitability. [...] Christy Pambianchi, Intel's chief people officer, told employees that Intel had been spending $100 million annually on free and discounted food and beverages and couldn't afford to keep doing that. "Until we get into a better financial health position, we need to be suspending those," Pambianchi said, according to an account of the meeting reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive. By Wednesday the company had reversed itself, committing to keep its employees caffeinated. In August, Intel announced plans to lay off over 16,000 employees, representing more than 15% of its global workforce. Its stock dropped to a 50-year low following the announcement. Starting November 8, Nvidia will replace the chipmaker on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

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According to Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr, Lucasfilm is developing a new Star Wars trilogy. It will be written by Simon Kinberg, who will also produce the films alongside Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy. From the report: I heard this will comprise Episodes 10-12 of The Skywalker Saga that began with George Lucas's 1977 first film, which, along with Steven Spielberg's Jaws, reshaped the global blockbuster game. Insiders disputed my intel that Kinberg will continue that storyline, saying this instead will begin a new saga, and sit alongside percolating Star Wars projects with James Mangold, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Taika Waititi and Donald Glover. As usual, Lucasfilm and Disney are not commenting. Kinberg previously worked with Lucasfilm in co-creating with Dave Filoni and Carrie Beck the Emmy-nominated animated series Star Wars Rebels that ran for four seasons from 2014-2018. He was also a consultant on Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, the J.J. Abrams-directed film that revived the franchise in 2015. He has also been heavily involved in other franchises as writer and/or producer.

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IBM is facing a new lawsuit alleging that its Weather Channel website shared users' personal data with third-party ad partners without consent, violating the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). The Register reports: In the absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law, the complaint [PDF] claims Big Blue violated America's Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), enacted in 1988 in response to the disclosure of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's videotape rental records. IBM was sued in 2019 (PDF) by then Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer over similar allegations: That its Weather Channel mobile app collected and shared location data without disclosure. The IT titan settled that claim in 2020. A separate civil action against IBM's Weather Channel was filed in 2020 and settled in 2023 (PDF). This latest legal salvo against alleged Weather Channel-enabled data collection takes issue with the sensitive information made available through the company's website to third-party ad partners mParticle and AppNexus/Xandr (acquired by Microsoft in 2022). The former provides customer analytics, and the latter is an advertising and marketing platform. The complaint, filed on behalf of California plaintiff Ed Penning, contends that by watching videos on the Weather Channel website, those two marketing firms received Penning's full name, gender, email address, precise geolocation, the name, and the URLs of videos he watched, without his permission or knowledge. It explains that the plaintiff's counsel retained a private research firm last year to analyze browser network traffic during video sessions on the Weather Channel website. The research firm is said to have confirmed that the website provided the third-party ad firms with information that could be used to identify people and the videos that they watched. The VPPA prohibits video providers from sharing "personally identifiable information" about clients without their consent. [...] The lawsuit aspires to be certified as a class action. Under the VPPA, a successful claim allows for actual damages (if any) and statutory damages of $2,500 for each violation of the law, as well as attorney's fees.

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Amateur physicist B.J. is going on vacation, but he likes to plan things right down to the zeptosecond. "Assume the flight accelerates at a constant speed for the first half of the flight, and decelerates at the same rate for the second half. 1) What speed does the plane need to reach to have that level of time dilation? 2) What is the distance between the airports?"

 

Contrarily, Eddie R. was tired of vacation so got a new job, but right away he's having second thoughts. "Doing my onboarding, but they seem to have trouble with the idea of optional."

 

"Forget UTF-8! Have you heard about the new, hot encoding standard for 2024?!" exclaimed Daniel , kvetching "Well, if you haven't then Gravity Forms co. is going to change your mind: URLEncode everything now! Specially if you need to display some diacritics on your website. Throw away the old, forgotten UTF-8. Be a cool guy, just use that urlencode!"

 

Immediately afterward, Daniel also sent us another good example, this time from Hetzner. He complains "Hetzner says the value is invalid. Of course they won't say what is or isn't allowed. It wasn't the slash character, it was... a character with diacritics! Hetzner is clearly using US-ASCII created in 1960's."

 

Finally this week, we pulled something out of the archive from Boule de Berlin who wrote "Telekom, the biggest German ISP, shows email address validation is hard. They use a regex that limits the TLD part of an email address to 4 chars." Old but timeless.

 

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: A "Mass Effect" TV series is officially in development at Amazon MGM Studios, Variety has learned exclusively. Daniel Casey is set to write and executive produce the adaptation. Karim Zreik will executive produce under his Cedar Tree Productions banner, with Ari Arad and EA's Michael Gamble also executive producing. Cedar Tree is currently under an overall deal at Amazon MGM Studios. Exact plot details are being kept under wraps. [...] The first "Mass Effect" game launched to rave reviews in 2007. Since then, there have been three more games in the main series, with "Mass Effect: Andromeda" debuting in 2017. There have also been multiple mobile games in the franchise, as well as an animated film, novels, comic books, and other media. The story of the first three "Mass Effect" games revolves around Commander Shepard, a human soldier in the 22nd century trying to save humanity from a race of aliens known as the Reapers. "Andromeda" moved the games much further into the future with a new protagonist, with a fifth game also in the works. The franchise is developed by BioWare and are now published by EA. In 2010, EA announced plans to turn Mass Effect into a movie, but the project was later canceled. However, Ari Arad (known for co-founding Marvel Studios) led the initial effort and is now working to bring the film to life in this latest attempt.

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Max will begin a gradual password-sharing crackdown with "soft messaging" over the next few months, with a potential price increase to follow. The Verge reports: During Warner Bros. Discovery's Q3 earnings call on Thursday, chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said this initial rollout would be followed by more progress in 2025 and 2026. Wiedenfels called password sharing "a form of price rises," as the company is "asking members who have not signed up, or multi-household members to pay a little bit more." This isn't the first time we've heard about Max's interest in password sharing, but now we have more details about when -- and how -- it will all begin. [...] Wiedenfels didn't rule out the possibility of a Max price increase, either. He said that the "premium nature" of the service leaves "a fair amount of room to continue to push a price we've been judicious about." Max last raised prices across its ad-free plans in June.

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Elwood Edwards, the voice of AOL's "You've Got Mail" greeting, has died at age 74 following a long illness, according to local Ohio news station WKYC. "He worked at 3News for many years as graphics guru, camera operator, and general jack-of-all-trades, yet it was a somewhat random opportunity in 1989 that earned him international fame." From the report: That year, Elwood received $200 from the then-unknown America Online, merely because his wife worked at a predecessor company. He was asked to simply record four voiceover lines: - "Welcome" - "You've Got Mail" - "Files done" - "Goodbye" Of course, the company better known as AOL blew up, and millions around the world would hear Elwood's voice telling them "You've Got Mail" every time they logged on to the internet. Despite his face not being visible, Elwood still achieved minor celebrity status. In 2015, he even appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" to utter the famous greeting as well as other audience-suggested phrases.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you voted in the U.S. presidential election yesterday in which Donald Trump won comfortably, or a previous election, a website powered by a right-wing group is probably doxing you. VoteRef makes it trivial for anyone to search the name, physical address, age, party affiliation, and whether someone voted that year for people living in most states instantly and for free. This can include ordinary citizens, celebrities, domestic abuse survivors, and many other people. Voting rolls are public records, and ways to more readily access them are not new. But during a time of intense division, political violence, or even the broader threat of data being used to dox or harass anyone, sites like VoteRef turn a vital part of the democratic process -- simply voting -- into a security and privacy threat. [...] The Voter Reference Foundation, which runs VoteRef, is a right wing organization helmed by a former Trump campaign official, ProPublica previously reported. The goal for that organization was to find irregularities in the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, but state election officials said their findings were "fundamentally incorrect," ProPublica added. In an interview with NPR, the ProPublica reporter said that the Voter Reference Foundation insinuated (falsely) that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was fraudulent in some way. 404 Media has found people on social media using VoteRef's data to spread voting conspiracies too. VoteRef has steadily been adding more states' records to the VoteRef website. At the time of writing, it has records for all states that legally allow publication. Some exceptions include California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. ProPublica reported that VoteRef removed the Pennsylvania data after being contacted by an attorney for Pennsylvania's Department of State. "Digitizing and aggregating data meaningfully changes the privacy context and the risks to people. Your municipal government storing your marriage certificate and voter information in some basement office filing cabinet is not even remotely the same as a private company digitizing all the data, labeling it, piling it all together, making it searchable," said Justin Sherman, a Duke professor who studies data brokers. "Policymakers need to get with the times and recognize that data brokers digitizing, aggregating, and selling data based on public records -- which are usually considered 'publicly available information' and exempted from privacy laws -- has fueled decades of stalking and gendered violence, harassment, doxing, and even murder," Sherman said. "Protecting citizens of all political stripes, targets and survivors of gendered violence, public servants who are targets for doxing and death threats, military service members, and everyone in between depends on reframing how we think about public records privacy and the mass aggregation and sale of our data."

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