This Year’s Top AP Photos Are a Haunting Reminder of the State of the World
The Associated Press showcased its top photographs of 2022, reflecting on a year that’s experienced plenty of ups and downs across the globe.
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The Associated Press showcased its top photographs of 2022, reflecting on a year that’s experienced plenty of ups and downs across the globe.
Like many other first-gen devices, the Google Pixel Watch has a lot of quirks. So far, early users have reported that the watch dramatically overreported calorie burn due to a bug. According to Android Police, the Pixel Watch team is aware of the issue and suggests rebooting the device could fix the problem. That said, it’s an apt reminder that calorie burn isn’t a reliable metric.
In the Pixel Watch’s case, the bug appears to have impacted how a user’s basal metabolic rate was calculated. Basal metabolic rate, or BMR, is essentially the number of calories you burn every day simply existing. It’s calculated based on factors like your age, weight, sex, and height. If you put in the wrong data, you’re going to get the wrong calorie burn….
If you’ve been enjoying the gothic, horny, campy craziness of AMC’s TV adaptation of Interview With the Vampire, well, so are we. It’s a lot of fun, especially in how wonderfully and accurately it captures the magic of Anne Rice’s 1976 novel while still updating the story. But if the TV show continues and it stays…
Hulu’s raising its prices on October 10th. First announced in August, the price increase means you’ll have to pay $7.99 / month instead of $6.99 / month (or $79.99 / year) for the ad-supported version of Hulu and $14.99 / month instead of $12.99 / month for the ad-free plan.
The prices for Hulu’s bundled plans with ESPN Plus and Disney Plus aren’t changing just yet, but Hulu has a price hike planned for later this year. Once Disney Plus rolls out its ad-supported tier on December 8th, the bundle with ad-free Disney Plus, Hulu with ads, and ESPN Plus will cost $14.99 / month instead of $13.99 / month, while the price for ad-free Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus will stay at $19.99 / month. Disney, Hulu’s parent company, is also rolling…
The opening of my Horizon Call of the Mountain demo for PlayStation VR 2 was a genuine “Welcome… to Jurassic Park” moment. It caught me by surprise because, honestly, I’ve cooled off on VR quite significantly. For a while, VR was all anyone could talk about–an exciting evolutionary step for gaming. But its momentum dissipated, and its ubiquity took it from being the conversation to just part of a conversation, and a relatively small one at that. Between Valve’s Index, HTC’s Vive, and Oculus’ lightweight, cordless Quest 2, VR not only became a reality, but an affordable and convenient one.
All this is to say that, in a relatively short period of time, VR went from an exciting future to an ordinary present and, in many ways, lost its luster in the process. Now, VR headsets are just another entertainment device vying for your time, attention, and money. But what hasn’t changed is the potential that made VR so exciting in the first place, which largely remains unfulfilled. So, the task now becomes doing it better and hoping that small steps of iteration can be as meaningful in realizing that potential as the giant leaps of innovation that created it.
Iteration is very much the name of the game when it comes to PSVR 2. It’s a piece of hardware that uses Sony’s own learnings, as well as what it has seen competitors do, to inch the technology forward. It features better displays, utilizes more powerful hardware, and improves the overall user experience. And that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to experience a game with a level of intimacy that’s not possible when holding a controller and sitting a few feet away from a screen. With PSVR 2, Sony’s goal seems to be to push that sense of immersion much deeper.
Need an easy way to make $23 million? Have you ever considered just claiming music others uploaded to YouTube as your own and collecting the royalties?
That’s basically all two Phoenix men did to swindle Latin music artists like Daddy Yankee and Julio Iglesias out of millions of dollars in royalties, as detailed in a new piece from Billboard last week.
According to Kristin Robinson of Billboard, Jose “Chenel” Medina Teran and Webster Batista set up a media company called MediaMuv and claimed to own the rights to various Latin music songs and compositions. In total, MediaMuv claimed to own more than 50,000 copyrights since 2017, when Teran and Batista began their scheme.
In order for MediaMuv to claim these copyrights and collect royalties through YouTube’s Content ID system, the fraudulent company needed to partner with AdRev, a third-party company that has access to YouTube’s CMS and Content ID tools and helps artists manage their digital copyrights. MediaMuv created a few fake documents and provided AdRev with this paperwork in order to prove ownership over the music it claimed. From there, AdRev not only helped MediaMuv collect royalties for those copyrights but also provided Terana and Batista with direct access to YouTube’s CMS so they could claim copyrights on its own.
Teran and Batista’s four-year-long royalties heist came to an end late last year following an investigation from the IRS. According to Billboard, the two were indicted on “30 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft.” Teran pleaded not guilty. His trial is in November. Batista, on the other hand, took a plea deal on one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. As a result, Batista provided much of the information about how the two pulled off their scheme.
As Billboard points out, Teran and Batista’s case was especially “brazen.” It’s believed to be one of the “largest YouTube music royalty scams in history.”
While the size of the heist and the breadth of the scheme may be very unique, it’s certainly a situation that many YouTube content creators have faced before. YouTube’s Content ID system, meant to help creators, has been weaponized by bad faith actors in order to make money off content that isn’t theirs. While some false claims are just mistakes caused by automated systems, the MediaMuv case is a perfect example of how fraudsters are also purposefully taking advantage of digital copyright rules.
YouTube attempts to be cautious with who it provides CMS and Content ID tool access because of how powerful these systems are. As a result, independent creators and artists cannot check for these false copyright claims nor do they have the power to directly act on them. They need to go through a digital rights management company that does have access. And it seems like thieves are doing the same, falsifying documents to gain access to these YouTube tools through these third parties that are “trusted” with these tools by YouTube.
The Billboard piece – which you should check out for even more details on this over-the-top scheme – makes mentions how Content ID scammers typically claim a portion of a song, hoping that with so many songwriters and such, a small percentage of ownership in the music may go by unnoticed. MediaMuv, however, was daring enough to claim copyright over songs in their entirety. While it’s certainly incredible that these two con artists pulled this off for so long, just think about how many more careful scammers are still skimming royalties off of an untold number of artists.