YouTube is no longer preventing just a small subset of its userbase from accessing its videos if they have an ad blocker. The platform has gone all out in its fight against the use of add-ons, extensions and programs that prevent it from serving ads to viewers around the world, it confirmed to Engadget. “The use of ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service,” a spokesperson told us. “We’ve launched a global effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience. Ads support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube.”
YouTube started cracking down on the use of ad blockers earlier this year. It initially showed pop-ups to users telling them that it’s against the website’s TOS, and then it put a timer on those notifications to make sure people read it. By June, it took on a more aggressive approach and warned viewers that they wouldn’t be able to play more than three videos unless they disable their ad blockers. That was a “small experiment” meant to urge users to enable ads or to try YouTube Premium, which the website has now expanded to its entire userbase. Some people can’t even play videos on Microsoft Edge and Firefox browsers even if they don’t have ad blockers, according to Android Police, but we weren’t able to replicate that behavior. [Note – I was!]
People are unsurprisingly unhappy about the development and have taken to social networks like Reddit to air their grievances. If they don’t want to enable ads, after all, the only way they can watch videos with no interruptions is to pay for a YouTube Premium subscription. Indeed, the notification viewers get heavily promotes the subscription service. “Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide,” it says. But with YouTube Premium, viewers can go ad-free, and “creators can still get paid from [their] subscription.”
Apple Inc (AAPL.O) on Wednesday lost a bid to block a mass London lawsuit worth up to $2 billion which accuses the tech giant of hiding defective batteries in millions of iPhones.
The lawsuit was brought by British consumer champion Justin Gutmann on behalf of around 24 million iPhone users in the United Kingdom.
Gutmann is seeking damages from Apple on their behalf of up to 1.6 billion pounds ($1.9 billion) plus interest, with the claim’s midpoint range being 853 million pounds.
His lawyers argued Apple concealed issues with batteries in certain phone models by “throttling” them with software updates and installed a power management tool which limited performance.
Apple, however, said the lawsuit was “baseless” and strongly denied batteries in iPhones were defective, apart from in a small number of iPhone 6s models for which it offered free battery replacements.
Vantablack is a special coating material, moreso than a paint. It’s well-known as one of the blackest possible coatings around, capable of absorbing almost all visible light in its nanotube complex structure. However, it’s complicated to apply, delicate, and not readily available, especially to those in the art world.
It was these drawbacks that led Stuart Semple to create his own incredibly black paint. Over the years, he’s refined the formula and improved its performance, steadily building a greater product available to all. His latest effort is Black 4.0, and it’s promising to be the black paint to dominate all others.
Back in Black
This journey began in a wonderfully spiteful fashion. Upon hearing that one Anish Kapoor had secured exclusive rights to be the sole artistic user of Vantablack, he determined that something had to be done. Seven years ago, he set out to create his own ultra black paint that would far outperform conventional black paints on the market. Since his first release, he’s been delivering black paints that suck in more light and just simply look blacker than anything else out there.
Black 4.0 has upped the ante to a new level. Speaking to Hackaday, Semple explained the performance of the new paint, being sold through his Culture Hustle website. “Black 4.0 absorbs an astonishing 99.95% of visible light which is about as close to full light absorption as you’ll ever get in a paint,” said Semple. He notes this outperforms Vantablack’s S-Vis spray on product which only achieves 99.8%, as did his previous Black 3.0 paint. Those numbers are impressive, and we’d dearly love to see the new paint put to the test against other options in the ultra black market.
It might sound like mere fractional percentages, but it makes a difference. In sample tests, the new paint is more capable of fun visual effects since it absorbs yet more light. Under indoor lighting conditions, an item coated in Black 4.0 can appear to have no surface texture at all, looking to be a near-featureless black hole. Place an object covered in Black 4.0 on a surface coated in the same, and it virtually disappears. All the usual reflections and shadows that help us understand 3D geometry simply get sucked into the overwhelming blackness.
Black 4.0 compared to a typical black acrylic art paint. Credit: Stuart Semple
Beyond its greater light absorption, the paint has also seen a usability upgrade over Semple’s past releases. For many use cases, a single coat is all that’s needed. “It feels much nicer to use, it’s much more stable, more durable, and obviously much blacker,” he says, adding “The 3.0 would occasionally separate and on rare occasions collect little salt crystals at the surface, that’s all gone now.”
The added performance comes down to a new formulation of the paint’s “super-base” resin, which carries the pigment and mattifying compounds that give the paint its rich, dreamy darkness. It’s seen a few ingredient substitutions compared to previous versions, but a process change also went a long way to creating an improved product. “The interesting thing is that although all that helped, it was the process we used to make the paint that gave us the breakthrough, the order we add things, the way we mix them, and the temperature,” Semple told Hackaday.
The ultra black paint has a way of making geometry disappear. Credit: Stuart Semple
Black 4.0 is more robust than previous iterations, but it’s still probably not up to a full-time life out in the elements, says Semple. You could certainly coat a car in it, for example, but it probably wouldn’t hold up in the long term. He’s particularly excited for applications in astronomy and photography, where the extremely black paint can help catch light leaks and improve the performance of telescopes and cameras. It’s also perfect for creating an ultra black photographic backdrop, too.
No special application methods are required; Black 4.0 can be brush painted just like its predecessors. Indeed, it absorbs so much light that you probably don’t need to worry as much about brush marks as you usually would. Other methods, like using rollers or airbrushes, are perfectly fine, too.
Creating such a high-performance black paint didn’t come without challenges, either. Along the way, Semple contended with canisters of paint exploding, legal threats from others in the market, and one of the main scientists leaving the project. Wrangling supplies of weird and wonderful ingredients was understandably difficult, too. Nonetheless, he persevered, and has now managed to bring the first batches to market.
The first batches ship in November, so if you’re eager to get some of the dark stuff, you’d better move quick. It doesn’t come cheap, but you’re always going to pay more for something claiming to be the world’s best. If you’ve got big plans, fear not—this time out, Semple will sell the paint in huge bulk 1 liter and 6 liter containers if you really need a job lot. Have fun out there, and if you do something radical, you know who to tell about it.
Researchers say they have developed a method to remotely track the movement of objects in a room using mirrors and radio waves, in the hope it could one day help monitor nuclear weapons stockpiles.
According to the non-profit org International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, nine countries, including Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea collectively own about 12,700 nuclear warheads.
Meanwhile, over 100 nations have signed the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, promising to not “develop, test, produce, acquire, possess, stockpile, use or threaten to use” the tools of mass destruction. Tracking signs of secret nuclear weapons development, or changes in existing warhead caches, can help governments identify entities breaking the rules.
A new technique devised by a team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) aims to remotely monitor the removal of warheads stored in military bunkers. The scientists installed 20 adjustable mirrors and two antennae to monitor the movement of a blue barrel stored in a shipping container. One antenna emits radio waves that bounce off each mirror to create a unique reflection pattern detected by the other antenna.
The signals provide information on the location of objects in the room. Moving the objects or mirrors will produce a different reflection pattern. Experiments showed that the system was sensitive enough to detect whether the blue barrel had shifted by just a few millimetres. Now, the team reckons that it could be applied to monitor whether nuclear warheads have been removed from stockpiles.
At this point, readers may wonder why this tech is proposed for the job when CCTV, or Wi-Fi location, or any number of other observation techniques could do the same job.
The paper explains that the antenna-and-mirror technique doesn’t require secure communication channels or tamper-resistant sensor hardware. The paper’s authors argue it is also “robust against major physical and computational attacks.”
“Seventy percent of the world’s nuclear weapons are kept in storage for military reserve or awaiting dismantlement,” Sebastien Philippe, co-author of a research paper published in Nature Communications. Philippe is an associate research scholar at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, explained.
“The presence and number of such weapons at any given site cannot be verified easily via satellite imagery or other means that are unable to see into the storage vaults. Because of the difficulties to monitor them, these 9,000 nuclear weapons are not accounted for under existing nuclear arms control agreements. This new verification technology addresses this long-standing challenge and contributes to future diplomatic efforts that would seek to limit all nuclear weapon types,” he said in a statement.
In practice, officials from and organisation such as UN-led International Atomic Energy Agency, which promotes peaceful uses of nuclear energy, could install the system in a nuclear bunker and measure the radio waves reflecting off its mirrors. The unique fingerprint signal can then be stored in a database.
They could later ask the government controlling the nuclear stockpile to measure the radio wave signal recorded by its detector antenna and compare it to the initial result to check whether any warheads have been moved.
If both measurements are the same, the nuclear weapon stockpile has not been tampered with. But if they’re different, it shows something is afoot. The method is only effective if the initial radio fingerprint detailing the original configuration of the warheads is kept secret, however.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite foolproof, considering adversaries could technically use machine learning algorithms to predict how the positions of the mirrors generate the corresponding radio wave signal detected by the antenna.
“With 20 mirrors, it would take eight weeks for an attacker to decode the underlying mathematical function,” said Johannes Tobisch, co-author of the study and a researcher at the MPI-SP. “Because of the scalability of the system, it’s possible to increase the security factor even more.”
To prevent this, the researchers said that the verifier and prover should agree to send back a radio wave measurement within a short time frame, such as within a minute or so. “Beyond nuclear arms control verification, our inspection system could find application in the financial, information technology, energy, and art sectors,” they concluded in their paper.
“The ability to remotely and securely monitor activities and assets is likely to become more important in a world that is increasingly networked and where physical travel and on-site access may be unnecessary or even discouraged.”
