Last week, infamous porn-hosting site Pornhub made a big change by cutting off “unverified” uploads. Now, the company is taking things a step further and has removed all content that wasn’t uploaded by either a “content partner” or a verified user. Overnight, Pornhub has removed millions of uploaded videos — and, according to Vice, the site will start reviewing and verifying that those videos meet its “trust and safety policy.”
This comes after a New York Times report last week highlighted how the site’s lax enforcement of its policies was leading to child exploitation. Other issues linked to the site include scads of revenge porn, or videos uploaded without the consent of people in them. Pornhub didn’t directly address the allegations in the Times report, but the two major changes to the company’s policies over the last week speak volumes.
*Cough* I think you’ll find it was Visa and Mastercard dropping their support for them
Today, Pornhub said that the third-party Internet Watch Foundation had reported 118 incidents of child sexual abuse material on the Pornhub platform, compared to 84 million instances self-reported by Facebook. Pornhub also pointed out that, as of today, every piece of content on the site is from verified uploaders, “a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute.”
The company’s responses certainly have a ring of self-righteousness, especially as it says it’s being targeted “not because of our policies and how we compare to our peers, but because we are an adult content platform.” But with Mastercard and Visa both cutting off payments to Pornhub, the company has clear financial incentive to cleaning up its act.
Ah, all right, you found the reason why after all…
Cydia, the original app store for jailbroken iPhones, has joined a wave of companies and regulators in targeting Apple over antitrust concerns. In a lawsuit it filed on Thursday, it accused Apple of “anti-competitive acquisition and maintenance of an illegal monopoly over iOS app distribution.”
Were that not the case, Cydia argues, users would “be able to choose how and where to locate and obtain iOS apps, and developers would be able to use the iOS app distributor of their choice.” Apple rejected accusations it has a monopoly and told Motherboard it would review the lawsuit.
Apple launched the App Store in 2008, the year after Cydia arrived. The unofficial store allows users who jailbreak their iPhone and iPad to download apps and add features that Apple hasn’t necessarily approved.
Over time, Apple has made jailbreaking its devices more difficult and Cydia isn’t as prominent or popular as it once was. In 2010, Cydia developer Jay “Saurik” Freeman said 4.5 million users were searching the store for apps.
Like the App Store, Cydia took a cut of app sales and revenue peaked at around $10 million in 2011 and 2012, according to the Washington Post. Freeman ended purchases from Cydia’s store in 2018.
The suit follows a number of high-profile moves against Apple for similar reasons. Back in August, Epic Games sued Apple over its App Store rules after trying to bypass them. A coalition of companies, including Epic and Spotify, has formed to pressure Apple and Google into changing their app store practices. Apple is also under antitrust scrutiny from regulators in Europe and the US.
France’s data protection agency, the CNIL, has slapped Google and Amazon with fines for dropping tracking cookies without consent.
Google has been hit with a total of €100 million ($120 million) for dropping cookies on Google.fr and Amazon €35 million (~$42 million) for doing so on the Amazon .fr domain under the penalty notices issued today.
The regulator carried out investigations of the websites over the past year and found tracking cookies were automatically dropped when a user visited the domains in breach of the country’s Data Protection Act.
In Google’s case the CNIL has found three consent violations related to dropping non-essential cookies.
“As this type of cookies cannot be deposited without the user having expressed his consent, the restricted committee considered that the companies had not complied with the requirement provided for by article 82 of the Data Protection Act and the prior collection of the consent before the deposit of non-essential cookies,” it writes in the penalty notice [which we’ve translated from French].
Amazon was found to have made two violations, per the CNIL penalty notice.
CNIL also found that the information about the cookies provided to site visitors was inadequate — noting that a banner displayed by Google did not provide specific information about the tracking cookies the Google.fr site had already dropped.
Under local French (and European) law, site users should have been clearly informed before the cookies were dropped and asked for their consent.
In Amazon’s case its French site displayed a banner informing arriving visitors that they agreed to its use of cookies. CNIL said this did not comply with transparency or consent requirements — since it was not clear to users that the tech giant was using cookies for ad tracking. Nor were users given the opportunity to consent.
The law on tracking cookie consent has been clear in Europe for years. But in October 2019 a CJEU ruling further clarified that consent must be obtained prior to storing or accessing non-essential cookies. As we reported at the time, sites that failed to ask for consent to track were risking a big fine under EU privacy laws.
Invisible structures generated by gravitational interactions in the Solar System have created a “space superhighway” network, astronomers have discovered.
These channels enable the fast travel of objects through space, and could be harnessed for our own space exploration purposes, as well as the study of comets and asteroids.
By applying analyses to both observational and simulation data, a team of researchers led by Nataša Todorović of Belgrade Astronomical Observatory in Serbia observed that these superhighways consist of a series of connected arches inside these invisible structures, called space manifolds – and each planet generates its own manifolds, together creating what the researchers have called “a true celestial autobahn”.
This network can transport objects from Jupiter to Neptune in a matter of decades, rather than the much longer timescales, on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, normally found in the Solar System.
[…]
They collected numerical data on millions of orbits in the Solar System, and computed how these orbits fit with known manifolds, modelling the perturbations generated by seven major planets, from Venus to Neptune.
And they found that the most prominent arches, at increasing heliocentric distances, were linked with Jupiter; and most strongly with its Lagrange point manifolds. All Jovian close encounters, modelled using test particles, visited the vicinity of Jupiter’s first and second Lagrange points.
A few dozen or so particles were then flung into the planet on a collision course; but a vast number more, around 2,000, became uncoupled from their orbits around the Sun to enter hyperbolic escape orbits. On average, these particles reached Uranus and Neptune 38 and 46 years later, respectively, with the fastest reaching Neptune in under a decade.
Space manifolds act as the boundaries of dynamical channels enabling fast transportation into the inner- and outermost reaches of the Solar System. Besides being an important element in spacecraft navigation and mission design, these manifolds can also explain the apparent erratic nature of comets and their eventual demise. Here, we reveal a notable and hitherto undetected ornamental structure of manifolds, connected in a series of arches that spread from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond. The strongest manifolds are found to be linked to Jupiter and have a profound control on small bodies over a wide and previously unconsidered range of three-body energies. Orbits on these manifolds encounter Jupiter on rapid time scales, where they can be transformed into collisional or escaping trajectories, reaching Neptune’s distance in a mere decade. All planets generate similar manifolds that permeate the Solar System, allowing fast transport throughout, a true celestial autobahn.
[…]
igure 1 shows short-term FLI maps of the outer edge of the asteroid belt (∼3 AU) up to near the semimajor axis of Uranus (∼20 AU), for all elliptic eccentricities, and considering the seven-planet dynamical model (top) and the Sun-Jupiter-TP–restricted problem (bottom) in ORBIT9. The large stable island at 5.2 AU, nesting the Greeks, is clearly visible in both panels of Fig. 1, as is the niche for the Hildas at 3.97 AU. A shadow of the chaotic borders of the strongest resonance in the outer belt, the 2:1 mean-motion resonance (MMR) with Jupiter at 3.3 AU, begins to appear, indicating the relative weakness of such orbital resonances compared to the manifolds uncovered herein. The notable feature of Fig. 1, however, is the large “V-shaped” chaotic structure that emerges outside of roughly 5.6 AU, which is connected to a series of arches at increasing heliocentric distances that nearly follows the perihelion line (qj) of Jupiter. Chaos also emanates along the Jovian aphelion line (Qj) in elongated concentric curves, initiating near 4.8 AU.
Fig. 1Global arch-like structure of space manifolds in the Solar System.
Short-term FLI maps of the region between the outer edge of the main asteroid belt at 3 AU to just beyond the semimajor axis of Uranus at 20 AU, for all elliptic eccentricities, adopting a dynamical model in ORBIT9 that contains the seven major planets (from Venus to Neptune) as perturbers (top) or Jupiter as the only perturber (bottom). Orbits located on stable manifolds appear with a lighter color, while darker regions correspond to trajectories off of them.
