Avatar: The Last Airbender creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko are no longer working on the live-action series adaptation set for Netflix.
The creators announced their departure on Wednesday, sparking concern among fans. DiMartino’s lengthy blog post only confirmed those concerns, as the writer and executive producer noted that “whatever version ends up on-screen, it will not be what Bryan and I had envisioned or intended to make.” Both DiMartino and Konietzko cited creative differences with Netflix over the direction of the project. The news may have come as a shock to Avatar fans, considering that when Netflix announced the project in 2018, both DiMartino and Konietzko’s involvement was heavily promoted.
Article note: Ugh, she is my least favorite of the advertised front-runners, but I both will still take it over Trump &co. and was already braced for the Democrats to their best to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
A former rival for the Democratic nomination, she will be the first Black woman to be nominated for national office by a major political party.
Article note: Revert the UI, fix local file playback, and remove the YouTube history commingling/contamination situation? Oh wait, that gets us back where we started.
Google Play Music is shutting down soon, and the transition to YouTube Music currently leaves a lot to be desired. For users with uploaded music, the transfer tool will port your music over seamlessly, but once you're in the YouTube Music interface, you'll discover that plenty of features have gone missing, and things that used to work on the free tier suddenly don't. If my email inbox is any indication, hordes of people are searching for alternatives.
Google isn't turning a deaf ear to the concerns of the Google Music migrators, though. In response to articles we've written here, like "YouTube Music is holding my speakers for ransom," Google got in touch with us and sent over a statement:
We understand that uploaded content is an integral part of the listening experience for many of our users across YouTube Music. While several features for uploaded content aren't currently working in the free YouTube Music experience, we’re working hard to address these feature gaps and bring additional functionality to our free tier user. We look forward to sharing more updates soon.
While this is a bit vague, the shoutout for users of uploaded content is a change of tone from what the company was saying in June. Our YouTube Music article was mainly about the free-versus-premium feature changes in YouTube Music and Google Music, including the requirement of a monthly fee in order to play purchased and uploaded music on Google Home speakers. Before publishing that article, we double-checked with Google to ask if charging to use a Google Home from YouTube music was really what it was planning, and all the company would do is reaffirm the current restrictions.
Yup. Some of this is more systematic than even my cynical ass suspected. It's a hard problem because attacker controlled environments are unassailable, and doing intrusive things to discourage casual cheating punish the honest and give the serious cheaters more effect size.
Article note: I was inspecting a batch of Apex APM32F103CB boards (drop-in clones of STM32F103 parts) I (knowingly) bought before reading this have been thinking about the ethics of the situation.
From the die shots some other people have posted, it looks like they're not straight die rip-offs from this kind of BS, but it is a similar sort of parasitism.
Taiwan has faced existential conflict with China for its entire existence and has been targeted by China's state-sponsored hackers for years. But an investigation by one Taiwanese security firm has revealed just how deeply a single group of Chinese hackers was able to penetrate an industry at the core of the Taiwanese economy, pillaging practically its entire semiconductor industry.
At the Black Hat security conference today, researchers from the Taiwanese cybersecurity firm CyCraft plan to present new details of a hacking campaign that compromised at least seven Taiwanese chip firms over the past two years. The series of deep intrusions—called Operation Skeleton Key due to the attackers' use of a "skeleton key injector" technique—appeared aimed at stealing as much intellectual property as possible, including source code, software development kits, and chip designs. And while CyCraft has previously given this group of hackers the name Chimera, the company's new findings include evidence that ties them to mainland China and loosely links them to the notorious Chinese state-sponsored hacker group Winnti, also sometimes known as Barium, or Axiom.
Article note: This reads disturbingly like "if you aren't willing to spend the whole semester locked in your dorm room, get out now." Which is probably accurate.
We've already got people quarantined before campus gets dense.
I'm also immediately curious what happens if people who get quarantined decide they aren't dealing with remote classes and withdraw (Refund dates are 100% until 8-16, 80% until 8-21, 50% until 9-14, and W day is 10-26).
Quarantined in her dorm room, University of Kentucky junior and resident adviser Allison Parks was bummed that she couldn’t assist her fellow hall staff in moving new students into dorms … Click to Continue »
Article note: 35 years of computer history can be summarized as "complexity without comprehension." We've been studiously ignoring the Wirth's law consequences, and other parts of the bill started arriving in the 90s with the graveyard of dead platform projects that tried to "do it right," FDIV and f00f bugs, etc. The speculative execution bug boom is the next round, probably of many.
Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you’re doing because you believe it’s right.
