Daily Archives: February 16, 2020

In Trump fascist playbook, Johnson trying to kill BBC licence fee in favour of a subscription model due to BBC being critical, independent

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Claims were made on Sunday that No 10may be preparing a new onslaught on the BBC with a threat to scrap the television licence fee and turn it into a subscription service.

The Sunday Times quoted a senior source as saying that the broadcaster could be forced to sell off most of its radio stations in a “massive pruning back” of its activities.

The source told the paper that Boris Johnson was “really strident” on the need for serious reform. They said there would be a consultation on replacing the licence fee with a subscription model, adding: “We will whack it.”

The paper said that the number of BBC television channels could also be reduced, the website scaled back and stars banned from cashing in on well-paid second jobs.

This potential attack will be seen as a further escalation of the hostilities between No 10 and the corporation, with many Tories still angry at its coverage of last year’s general election. The government is already consulting on proposals to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee, and ministers have suggested it could be abolished altogether when the BBC’s charter comes up for renewal in 2027.

It was reported that the review will be led by former culture secretary John Whittingdale, who was reappointed to his old department in last week’s reshuffle.

The Sunday Times quoted one source as saying: “We are not bluffing on the licence fee. We are having a consultation and we will whack it. It has got to be a subscription model. They’ve got hundreds of radio stations, they’ve got all these TV stations and a massive website. The whole thing needs massive pruning back.

“They should have a few TV stations, a couple of radio stations and massively curtailed online presence and put more money and effort into the World Service which is part of its core job. The PM is firmly of the view that there needs to be serious reform. He is really strident on this.”

The warning comes after the BBC chairman, Sir David Clementi, last week mounted a strong defence of the licence fee system. He warned that putting the broadcaster behind a paywall would undermine its ability to “bring the country together”.

Meanwhile the prime minister’s aides also turned their fire on highly paid BBC stars who made huge sums from outside work, suggesting they should be forced to donate the money to charity.

“It’s an outrage that people who make their profile at public expense should seek to give themselves further financial rewards and personal gain,” one source told the paper. “They’re basically making their names on the taxpayer and cashing in. The BBC should immediately halt this practice and give the money to good causes.”

Source: No 10 could scrap BBC licence fee in favour of a subscription model | Media | The Guardian

Not giving out interviews and destroying critical thought are hallmarks of fascism. In order for democracy to work, people need as much information as they can get, from as many informed angles as they can get. And this is something the BBC can do, due to it’s independent money source. It doesn’t have to pander to the Love Island crowd.

Car ‘splatometer’ tests reveal 80% decline in number of insects in last decade

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Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by cars have revealed a huge decline in abundance at European sites in two decades.

The research adds to growing evidence of what some scientists have called an “insect apocalypse”, which is threatening a collapse in the natural world that sustains humans and all life on Earth. A third study shows plummeting numbers of aquatic insects in streams.

The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.

The second survey, in the UK county of Kent in 2019, examined splats in a grid placed over car registration plates, known as a “splatometer”. This revealed 50% fewer impacts than in 2004. The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.

“This difference we found is critically important, because it mirrors the patterns of decline which are being reported widely elsewhere, and insects are absolutely fundamental to food webs and the existence of life on Earth,” said Paul Tinsley-Marshall from Kent Wildlife Trust. “It’s pretty horrendous.”

[…]

The Danish research, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, used data from an average of 65 car journeys a year on the same stretch of road and at the same speed between 1997 and 2017. Møller took account of the time of day, temperature, wind speed and date of the journey and found an 80% decline in insect abundance over the 21-year period. Checks using insect nets and sticky traps showed the same trend.

Møller said the causes were likely to be “a bit of everything”, but noted significant changes due to global heating. “In my 50 years, the temperature in April, May and June has increased by 1.5C [2.7F] on average in my study area,” he said. “The amount of rain has increased by 50%. We are talking about dramatic differences.”

The stream research, published in the journal Conservation Biology, analysed weekly data from 1969 to 2010 on a stream in a German nature reserve, where the only major human impact is climate change.

“Overall, water temperature increased by 1.88C and discharge patterns changed significantly. These changes were accompanied by an 81.6% decline in insect abundance,” the scientists reported. “Our results indicate that climate change has already altered [wildlife] communities severely, even in protected areas.”

Source: Car ‘splatometer’ tests reveal huge decline in number of insects | Environment | The Guardian

Netflix Loses Bid to Dismiss $25 Million Lawsuit Over ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ because someone feels they own the phrase: choose your own adventure

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Chooseco LLC, a children’s book publisher, filed its complaint in January 2019. According to the plaintiff, it has been using the mark since the 1980s and has sold more than 265 million copies of its Choose Your Own Adventure books. 20th Century Fox holds options for movie versions, and Chooseco alleges that Netflix actively pursued a license. Instead of getting one, Netflix released Bandersnatch, which allows audiences to select the direction of the plot. Claiming $25 million in damages, Chooseco suggested that Bandersnatch viewers have been confused about association with its famous brand, particularly because of marketing around the movie as well as a scene where the main character — a video game developer — tells his father that the work he’s developing is based on a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

In reaction to the lawsuit, Netflix raised a First Amendment defense, particularly the balancing test in Rogers v. Grimaldi, whereby unless a work has no artistic relevance, the use of a mark must be misleading for it to be actionable.

U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions agrees that Bandersnatch is an artistic work even if Netflix derived profit from exploiting the Charlie Brooker film.

And the judge says that use of the trademark has artistic relevance.

“Here, the protagonist of Bandersnatch attempts to convert the fictional book ‘Bandersnatch’ into a videogame, placing the book at the center of the film’s plot,” states the ruling. “Netflix used Chooseco’s mark to describe the interactive narrative structure shared by the book, the videogame, and the film itself. Moreover, Netflix intended this narrative structure to comment on the mounting influence technology has in modern day life. In addition, the mental imagery associated with Chooseco’s mark adds to Bandersnatch’s 1980s aesthetic. Thus, Netflix’s use of Chooseco’s mark clears the purposely-low threshold of Rogers’ artistic relevance prong.”

Thus, the final question is whether Netflix’s film is explicitly misleading. Judge Sessions doesn’t believe it’s appropriate to dismiss the case prematurely without exploring factual issues in discovery.

“Here, Chooseco has sufficiently alleged that consumers associate its mark with interactive books and that the mark covers other forms of interactive media, including films,” continues the decision. “The protagonist in Bandersnatch explicitly stated that the fictitious book at the center of the film’s plot was a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book. In addition, the book, the videogame, and the film itself all employ the same type of interactivity as Chooseco’s products. The similarity between Chooseco’s products, Netflix’s film, and the fictitious book Netflix described as a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book increases the likelihood of consumer confusion.”

Netflix also attempted to defend its use of “Choose Your Own Adventure” as descriptive fair use. Here, too, the judge believes that factual exploration is appropriate.

Writes Sessions, “The physical characteristics and context of the use demonstrate that it is at least plausible Netflix used the term to attract public attention by associating the film with Chooseco’s book series.”

The decision adds that while Netflix contends that the phrase in question has been used by others to describe a branch of storytelling, that argument entails consideration of facts outside of Chooseco’s complaint, which at this stage must be accepted as true.

“Additionally, choose your own adventure arguably is not purely descriptive of narrative techniques — it requires at least some imagination to link the phrase to interactive plotlines,” writes Sessions. “Moreover, any descriptive aspects of the phrase may stem from Chooseco’s mark itself. In other words, the phrase may only have descriptive qualities because Chooseco attached it to its popular interactive book series. The Court lacks the facts necessary to determine whether consumers perceive the phrase in a descriptive sense or whether they simply associate it with Chooseco’s brand.”

Here’s the full decision allowing Chooseco’s Lanham Act and unfair competition claims to proceed.

The ruling may be surprising to some, particularly as there’s a line of cases where studios have escaped trademark claims over content. For example, see Warner Bros.’ win a few years ago over “Clean Slate” in The Dark Knight Rises. If Netflix and Chooseco can’t come to a settlement, many of these issues may be re-explored at the summary judgment round.

Source: Netflix Loses Bid to Dismiss $25 Million Lawsuit Over ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ | Hollywood Reporter

Wow, copyright law is beyond strange.

Plastic surgery images and invoices leak from unsecured database

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Thousands of images, videos and records pertaining to plastic surgery patients were left on an unsecured database where they could be viewed by anyone with the right IP address, researchers said Friday. The data included about 900,000 records, which researchers say could belong to thousands of different patients.

The data was generated at clinics around the world using software made by French imaging company NextMotion. Images in the database included before-and-after photos of cosmetic procedures. Those photos often contained nudity, the researchers said. Other records included images of invoices that contained information that would identify a patient. The database is now secured.

Researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the exposed database. They published their research with vpnMentor, a security website that rates VPN services and earns commissions when readers make purchases. Rotem said he sees exposed health care databases all too often as part of his web-mapping project, which looks for exposed data.

“The state of privacy protection, especially in health care, is really abysmal,” Rotem said.

NextMotion, which says on its website that it has 170 clinics as customers in 35 countries, said in a statement to its clients that it had addressed the problem.”We immediately took corrective steps and this same company formally guaranteed that the security flaw had completely disappeared,” said NextMotion CEO Emmanuel Elard in the statement. “This incident only reinforced our ongoing concern to protect your data and your patients’ data when you use the Nextmotion application.”

Elard went to apologize for the “fortunately minor incident.”

While NextMotion said the photos and videos don’t include names or other identifying information, many of the images show patients’ faces, according to vpnMonitor. Some of the invoices detail the types of procedures patients received, such as acne scar removal and abdominoplasty, and contain patients’ names and other identifying information.

Source: Plastic surgery images and invoices leak from unsecured database – CNET

Google’s Autoflip Can Intelligently Crop Videos

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Google has released an open-source tool, Autoflip, that could make bad cropping a thing of the past by intelligently reframing video to correctly fit alternate aspect ratios.

In a blog post, Google’s AI team wrote that footage shot for television and desktop computers normally comes in a 16:9 or 4:3 format, but with mobile devices now outpacing TV in terms of video consumption, the footage is often displayed in a way that looks odd to the end-user. Fixing this problem typically requires “video curators to manually identify salient contents on each frame, track their transitions from frame-to-frame, and adjust crop regions accordingly throughout the video,” soaking up time and effort that could be better spent on other work.

Autoflip aims to fix that with a framework that applies video stabilizer-esque techniques to keep the camera focused on what’s important in the footage. Using “ML-enabled object detection and tracking technologies to intelligently understand video content” built on the MediaPipe framework, Google’s team wrote, it’s able to adjust the frame of a video on the fly.

Gif: Google AI

What’s more, Autoflip automatically adjusts between scenes by identifying “changes in the composition that signify scene changes in order to isolate scenes for processing,” according to the company. Finally, it analyzes each scene to determine whether it should use a static frame or tracking mode.

Illustration for article titled Googles Autoflip Can Intelligently Crop Videos on the Fly to Fit Any Aspect Ratio
Graphic: Google AI

This is pretty neat and offers obvious advantages over static cropping of videos, though it’s probably better suited to things like news footage and Snapchat videos than movies and TV shows (where being able to view an entire shot is more important).

For a more technical explanation of how all this works, the Google AI team explained the various technologies involved in its blog post. The project’s source code is also available to view on Github, along with instructions on how to take it for a spin.

Source: Google’s Autoflip Can Intelligently Crop Videos

Printing tiny, high-precision objects in a matter of seconds

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Researchers at EPFL have developed a new, high-precision method for 3D-printing small, soft objects. The process, which takes less than 30 seconds from start to finish, has potential applications in a wide range of fields, including 3D bioprinting.

It all starts with a translucent liquid. Then, as if by magic, darker spots begin to form in the small, spinning container until, barely half a minute later, the finished product takes shape. This groundbreaking 3D-printing method, developed by researchers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD), can be used to make tiny objects with unprecedented precision and resolution – all in record time. The team has published its findings in the journal Nature Communications, and a spin-off, Readily3D, has been set up to develop and market the system.

The technology could have innovative applications in a wide range of fields, but its advantages over existing methods – the ability to print solid parts of different textures – make it ideally suited for medicine and biology. The process could be used, for instance, to make soft objects such as tissue, organs, hearing aids and mouthguards.

“Conventional 3D printing techniques, known as additive manufacturing, build parts layer by layer,” explains Damien Loterie, the CEO of Readily3D. “The problem is that soft objects made that way quickly fall apart.” What’s more, the process can be used to make delicate cell-laden scaffolds in which cells can develop in a pressure-free 3D environment. The researchers teamed up with a surgeon to test 3D-printed arteries made using the technique. “The trial results were extremely encouraging,” says Loterie.

Hardened by light

The new technique draws on the principles of tomography, a method used mainly in medical imaging to build a model of an object based on surface scans.

The printer works by sending a laser through the translucent gel – either a biological gel or liquid plastic, as required. “It’s all about the light,” explains Paul Delrot, Readily3D’s CTO. “The laser hardens the liquid through a process of polymerization. Depending on what we’re building, we use algorithms to calculate exactly where we need to aim the beams, from what angles, and at what dose.”

The system is currently capable of making two-centimeter structures with a precision of 80 micrometers, about the same as the diameter of a strand of hair. But as the team develops new devices, they should be able to build much bigger objects, potentially up to 15 centimeters. “The process could also be used to quickly build small silicone or acrylic parts that don’t need finishing after printing,” says Christophe Moser, who heads the LAPD. Interior design could be a potentially lucrative market for the new printer.

References“High-resolution tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing”, Damien Loterie, Paul Delrot, Christophe Moser, published in Nature Communication on February 12, 2020.

Source: Printing tiny, high-precision objects in a matter of seconds – EPFL