Van dingen die voorbijkomen

It's been a while since most of us used or just thought about Winamp. But now there is a whole lot going on with the MP3 player of yore, mostly due to a remarkably chaotic source code release.

As previously announced, Winamp, through its Belgian owner Llama Group, provided "the Legacy Player Code" on September 24 so that developers could "contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve."

The code was made available, but not very open. Under the "Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0.1," you may not "distribute modified versions of the software" in source or binary, and "only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications." Anyone may contribute, in other words, but only to Winamp's benefit.

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A federal judge yesterday ordered Google to open up the Google Play Store and its collection of apps to third-party app stores as part of a US-wide injunction stemming from Epic Games' antitrust victory over the company. The injunction is scheduled to take effect on November 1, though Google will have up to eight months to implement certain provisions.

For three years, Google will have to let third-party Android app stores access the Google Play Store's catalog of apps "so that they may offer the Play Store apps to users," said the injunction issued by US District Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California.

App developers will have some control over which app stores their software is distributed on. "Google will provide developers with a mechanism for opting out of inclusion in catalog access for any particular third-party Android app store," the injunction said.

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Musi, a free music-streaming app only available on iPhone, sued Apple last week, arguing that Apple breached Musi's developer agreement by abruptly removing the app from its App Store for no good reason.

According to Musi, Apple decided to remove Musi from the App Store based on allegedly "unsubstantiated" claims from YouTube that Musi was infringing on YouTube's intellectual property. The removal came, Musi alleged, based on a five-word complaint from YouTube that simply said Musi was "violating YouTube terms of service"—without ever explaining how. And YouTube also lied to Apple, Musi's complaint said, by claiming that Musi neglected to respond to YouTube's efforts to settle the dispute outside the App Store when Musi allegedly showed evidence that the opposite was true.

For years, Musi users have wondered if the service was legal, Wired reported in a May deep dive into the controversial app. Musi launched in 2016, providing a free, stripped-down service like Spotify by displaying YouTube and other publicly available content while running Musi's own ads.

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Comb jellies, technically known as ctenophores, are one of the weirdest creatures on Earth. They appeared in the seas over half a billion years ago and have maintained to the present day the comb-like rows of cilia they used to move around. Their transparent bodies and internal bioluminescence give them looks that rival gaming computers. But there’s something that makes them even weirder.

When a comb jelly is injured, it can regenerate at an amazing rate. But it can also attach a body part of another injured comb jelly and integrate it near-seamlessly into its own body. (Those who have played Elden Ring can enjoy comparisons to Godrick The Grafted.)

“I’ve been observing ctenophores for a long time, so it was easy to spot an unusually large specimen. Some of the anatomical features were doubled, so I realized what I’m looking at is actually two individuals that have fused together,” said Kei Jokura, a marine researcher at the University of Exeter and lead author of a recent Current Biology paper on the integration of fused ctenophores.

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On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John J. Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey E. Hinton of the University of Toronto for their foundational work in machine learning with artificial neural networks. Hinton notably captured headlines in 2023 for warning about the threat that AI superintelligence may pose to humanity. The win came as a surprise to many, including Hinton himself.

"I'm flabbergasted. I had no idea this would happen. I'm very surprised," said Hinton in a telephone call with members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences during a live announcement press conference streamed to YouTube that took place this morning.

Hopfield and Hinton's research, which dates back to the early 1980s, applied principles from physics to develop methods that underpin modern machine-learning techniques. Their work has enabled computers to perform tasks such as image recognition and pattern completion, capabilities that are now ubiquitous in everyday technology.

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Samsung Electronics has issued a public apology and acknowledged the company is considered to be in “crisis,” following the release of worse than expected profit guidance on Tuesday.

The South Korean chip giant reported a preliminary operating profit of ₩9.1 trillion ($6.8 billion) for the third quarter, undershooting market expectations of a ₩10.3 trillion profit, according to LSEG SmartEstimates.

While its expected operating profit has almost tripled compared with the same period a year ago, following a surge in memory chip prices, it is down almost 13 percent on the second quarter of this year.

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Get ready to transform and roll out, Arsians: It's Prime Day! Named in honor of famous Autobot leader Optimus Prime, Prime Day is the international day of celebration where we—wait, they're telling me that Prime Day is in fact not named after famous Autobot leader Optimus Prime and is in fact not an international day of celebration. Well, if that's the case, then what the hell am I going to do with this gigantic Optimus Prime costume I spent all week making? I've got a whole list of Optimus Prime-related activities we were going to do! I brought craft supplies! We were going to make little macrame trucks!

This has really taken the wind out of my sails, ugh. While I figure out what to do with an overwhelming amount of Transformers party supplies, maybe you folks can pull up your chairs, pull out your wallets, and peruse the Amazon Prime Day deals below (which are, I am assured, the best deals the commerce team could sniff out). Because if we can't celebrate Prime Day by cosplaying as our favorite Transformers characters, maybe we can still hold onto the spirit of the day by buying a whole bunch of stuff on sale! Retail therapy for everyone! It's what Optimus would have wanted!

(A note on pricing: We've confirmed the prices on all the items below are accurate as of the publication time of this article. However, much like Megatron's evil schemes, Prime Day pricing is mutable and constantly changing. Make sure to verify the price on what you want to buy before you buy it!)

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A few years ago, Egyptian archaeologists discovered what they thought were the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple dating back to the sixth century BCE. Subsequent finds at the site indicate that the structure was actually an astronomical observatory, deemed the first and largest such structure yet found, according to Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The L-shaped structure was found within a larger complex called the Temple of Buto (a later Greek name), known to the ancient Egyptians as Per-Wadjet and located east of Alexandria in the Nile Delta. It's now called Tell El Fara'in ("Hill of the Pharaohs"). Buto was once a sacred site dedicated to the goddess Wadjet, believed to be the matron and protector of lower Egypt, who took on a cobra form. Buto was well-known for its temple and the oracle of Wadjet, with an annual festival held there in her honor.

There were archaeological excavations of the site in the 1960s and 1980s, revealing a palace dating back to the Second Dynasty, as well as six Greek bathhouses. An Egyptian team began fresh excavations a few years ago. In 2022, they uncovered a hall at the southwestern end of the temple, with the remains of three papyrus-shaped columns aligned on a north-south axis. They also found  engraved stone fragments and a limestone painting of a bird's head wearing a white crown within two feathers.

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When we reviewed Diablo IV, the latest installment in the long-running action roleplaying game series last year, we said it was off to a hell of a good start. But ARPGs live and die by their endgame loops, and it was far too early at the time to accurately assess the game’s true staying power.

Sadly, after that confident first step, like so many loot-hunting games before it, Diablo IV fell flat on its face. I’ve seen plenty of boneheaded updates to live-service games, but Diablo IV’s first major patch, released a couple of months after the game’s release, was still pretty shocking. By that point, a consensus had emerged that the endgame was a bit barren, and getting to the game’s level cap of 100 was a tedious slog. But that’s the great thing about live-service games, right? Tweak some numbers, throw in a couple of fun high-level activities, and, baby, you’ve got a stew going.

Sadly, the game’s developers at Blizzard had other plans. The patch notes for that first update read like someone had systematically gone through the game and removed anything that could be considered fun. Almost every character build had been mercilessly nerfed, and worst of all, the game became even slower. Fans were incensed, and Diablo IV floundered like this for its first three seasons. I mostly lost interest.

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The phrase “April is the cruelest month” was first printed more than 100 years ago, and it’s been in common circulation almost as long. One can easily know it without having the faintest idea of its source, let alone its meaning. This is not, of course, to call T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land an obscure work. Despite having met with a derisive, even hostile initial reception, it went on to draw acclaim as one of the central English-language poems of the twentieth century, to say nothing of its status as an achievement within the modernist movement. But how, here in the twenty-first century, to read it afresh?

One new avenue to approach The Waste Land is this comic-book adaptation by Julian Peters, previously featured here on Open Culture for his graphic renditions of other such poems as Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee, W. B. Yeats’ “When You Are Old,” and Eliot’s own “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

It’s an adaptation, to be precise, of the first of The Waste Land’s five sections, “The Burial of the Dead,” which opens on a First World War battlefield — at least in Peters’ adaptation, which puts the first line “April is the cruelest month” into the context of nightmarish imagery of bloodshed and death — and ends in a workaday London likened to Dante’s hell.

The Waste Land presents a tempting but daunting opportunity to an illustrator, filled as it is with vivid evocations of place and appearances by intriguing characters (including, in this section, “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante”), and characterized as it is by extensive literary quotation and sudden shifts of context. But Peters has made a bold start of it, and anyone who reads his adaptation of “The Burial of the Dead” will be waiting for his adaptations of “A Game of Chess” through “What the Thunder Said.” Though much-scrutinized over the past century, Eliot’s modernist masterpiece (hear Eliot read it here) still tends to confound first-time readers. To them, I always advise considering poetry a visual medium, an idea whose possibilities Peters continues to explore on a much more literal level. Explore it here.

Related content:

Read the Entire Comic Book Adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A Comic Book Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poignant Poem Annabel Lee

W. B. Yeats’ Poem “When You Are Old” Adapted into a Japanese Manga Comic

T. S. Eliot Illustrates His Letters and Draws a Cover for Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

T. S. Eliot Reads His Modernist Masterpieces “The Waste Land” and “TheLovee Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

I don’t know about you, but my YouTube algorithms can act like a nagging friend, suggesting a video for days until I finally give in. Such was the case with this video essay with the tantalizing title: “Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really)”.

First of all, before, during, and after 2017’s Twin Peaks The Return, theories were as inescapable as the cat memes on the Twin Peaks Facebook groups. After the mind-blowing Episode 8, they went into overdrive, including the bonkers idea that the final two episodes were meant to be watched *overlaid* on each other. And I highlighted one in-depth journey through the entire three decades of the Lynch/Frost cultural event for this very site.

So when I finally clicked on the link I balked immediately: Four and a half hours? Are you kidding me? (You might be saying the very thing to yourself now.) But just like the narrator says, bear with me. Over the week, I watched the entire thing in 30-minute segments, not because it was grueling, but because time is precious and there is a lot to chew over. By the end, I was recommending the video to friends only to find some of them were already deep inside Twin Perfect’s analysis.

So here we are, with me highly encouraging you to invest the time (providing you have watched all three seasons of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me), but also not wanting to ruin some of Twin Perfect’s theories, which he lays out like a prosecutor, walking us through a general theory of Lynch.

However, I will make a few points:

• In 2019, we posted a video in which Lynch explains both the Unified Field Theory and Transcendental Meditation. There are at least two major sequences that Twin Perfect suggests reflect the Unified Field.
• Lynch’s obsession with electricity and fire is essential to the theory.
• The One-Armed Man’s quote “I mean it as it is, as it sounds,” doubles as Lynch’s approach: Twin Perfect does a masterful job showing many, many examples where Lynch is directly explaining his use of metaphor and symbol to us. Sometimes that is straight into the camera.
• We now know why Season Three featured a three-minute shot of a man sweeping up peanuts from a bar floor.
• I’ve always felt that The Return was an exploration of the dangers of nostalgia, and this essay confirmed it for me. There was something missing at the center of the Third Season, indeed.
• Twin Perfect reads all quotes from the director in a mock-Lynch voice. For some this will grate; for me it was A BEAUTIFUL THING (wiggly finger gesture).

Twin Perfect puts much more effort into this than most graduate students:

I have been working on this video for two years, writing and researching and editing. I’ve been reading and watching and listening to every creator interview and AMA, every DVD extra and featurette, every TV special, every fan theory, blog, and podcast — any and all Twin Peaks-related posts I could find — trying to hone and polish my script to be the best I thought it could possibly be. I focus-grouped my video with people, challenging them to poke as many holes in my arguments as they could so that I could better illustrate my ideas. I tried my best to create something others would find of value, something that would add to the ongoing mystery and spark new discussions about my favorite series.

Are there some problems with the theory? Sure. But for every “I don’t know, man,” I said to myself, he immediately followed it up with something spot on. I think he deserves that MFA in Twin Peaks Studies.

So brew up some strong coffee and cut yourself a slice of cherry pie, and get stuck in.

Related Content:

Twin Peaks in the Form of Japanese Coffee Commercials" href="https://www.openculture.com/2015/11/david-lynch-directs-a-mini-season-of-twin-peaks-in-the-form-of-japanese-coffee-commercials.html" rel="bookmark">David Lynch Directs a Mini-Season of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japanese Coffee Commercials

David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

Three Days in Twin Peaks: An In-Depth Journey Through the Evocative Locations of David Lynch’s TV Series

Twin Peaks" href="https://www.openculture.com/2017/01/ourney-through-twin-peaks.html" rel="bookmark">Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Making & Mythology of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts., You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills.

Als je als klant meer RAM-geheugen gebruikt dan contractueel was overeengekomen, heeft je hostingprovider of ict-dienstverlener dan een informatieplicht over d ekosten? Nee, niet als je zelf weet hoe dat zit. Dat maak ik op uit een recent arrest (via) van het Hof Den Bosch. Ik ben opgehouden te tellen hoe veel zorgplicht-arresten er zijn, ondertussen.

Hoe kun je nou per ongeluk meer werkgeheugen in gebruik nemen dan waar je contractueel recht op had? In grootzakelijke situaties kan dat, zo ook hier. Die extra geheugencapaciteit is dan gereserveerd, maar niet daadwerkelijk gebruikt (“powered off”). Het doel was in dit geval uitwijkcapaciteit bij calamiteiten.

Op zeker moment had de klant deze reservecapaciteit daadwerkelijk geactiveerd en in gebruik genomen. De leverancier stuurde daarop een rekening, want hoeveelheid gebruikt geheugen was contractueel een punt waarvoor gefactureerd mocht worden.

Allereerst maakte de klant daartegen bezwaar omdat zij de meting niet kon verifiëren. Alleen de leverancier had de logs, en dat voelde oneerlijk. Dat is echter voor de rechter te weinig, zeker omdat in de algemene voorwaarden afgesproken was dat logs binden tenzij tegenbewijs wordt geleverd. Bovendien – en belangrijker – zag het hof wel degelijk mogelijkheden voor de klant om eigen meetgegevens over in gebruik zijnde geheugen te verzamelen.

Ten tweede stelde de klant dat de ict-leverancier, als specialist en voorzien van logging en monitoring, haar had moeten waarschuwen over de toegenomen hoeveelheid werkgeheugen (en de bijkomende kosten). En inderdaad, het is deel van je zorgplicht om duidelijk te maken wat je levert en wat de (meer)kosten zijn. Een klant die per ongeluk over een limiet gaat, daar moet je wat mee – en wel meer dan alleen een meerfactuur sturen.

Hier speelde dat echter niet. Het Hof ziet duidelijk bewijs dat het aanmaken en uitbreiden van de hoeveelheid daadwerkelijk gebruikt werkgeheugen een actieve handeling was die op een eigen interne afdeling van [de klant] plaatsvond. Dat handelen van de eigen afdeling van [de klant], en de wetenschap omtrent uitbreidingen van het werkgeheugen die bij die afdeling bestond, moet aan [de klant] worden toegerekend. Immers, in een van de mails tussen klant en leverancier ging het hier over: Daarbij wordt ook gesteld, zo verstaat het hof, dat men bij [de klant] niet erg verbaasd is over het feit dat meer werkgeheugen wordt gebruikt dan waarvoor is gefactureerd, omdat het aanmaken en uitbreiden van werkgeheugen bij [de klant] gebeurt en men er bij [de klant] vanuit ging dat [de leverancier] het maximaal te gebruiken werkgeheugen had gelimiteerd en er daarom nooit een controle op heeft plaatsgevonden. Als je zelf op de knop moet drukken en weet wat er dan gebeurt, dan houdt de zorgplicht van de leverancier daar op. De veronderstelling dat er een harde limiet zit op wat je kunt afnemen is er eentje die je zelf moet verifiëren (of navragen), daar mag je niet blind op vertrouwen.

In dit geval met grote gevolgen: een rekening achteraf van een slordige vijf ton. Voor andere bedrijven wellicht een prikkel om even na te vragen hoe hun ict-omgeving ingericht is en welke zachte (zelf uit te zetten) limieten daarbij bestaan?

Arnoud

Het bericht Meerverbruik werkgeheugencapaciteit en de zorgplicht van de ICT-leverancier verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.

Chinese government hackers penetrated the networks of several large US-based Internet service providers and may have gained access to systems used for court-authorized wiretaps of communications networks, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. "People familiar with the matter" told the WSJ that hackers breached the networks of companies including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen (also known as CenturyLink).

"A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of US broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests," the WSJ wrote. "For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful US requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter."

These "attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic Internet traffic," according to the WSJ's sources. The attack is being attributed to a Chinese hacking group called Salt Typhoon.

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Two years ago, a NASA spacecraft smashed into a small asteroid millions of miles from Earth to test a technique that could one day prove useful to deflect an object off a collision course with Earth. The European Space Agency launched a follow-up mission Monday to go back to the crash site and see the damage done.

The nearly $400 million (363 million euro) Hera mission, named for the Greek goddess of marriage, will investigate the aftermath of a cosmic collision between NASA's DART spacecraft and the skyscraper-size asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission was the first planetary defense experiment, and it worked, successfully nudging Dimorphos off its regular orbit around a larger companion asteroid named Didymos.

But NASA had to sacrifice the DART spacecraft in the deflection experiment. Its destruction meant there were no detailed images of the condition of the target asteroid after the impact. A small Italian CubeSat deployed by DART as it approached Dimorphos captured fuzzy long-range views of the collision, but Hera will perform a comprehensive survey when it arrives in late 2026.

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The Alien franchise is about uncaring monsters, unfeeling corporations, and horrific, claustrophobic terror. Given this setting, it almost made sense, what happened to the original Alien: Isolation.

The game was released to almost universally positive reviews, considered one of the best games ever made, and sold more than 2 million copies within its first few months. Despite this, Isolation only got "close to break-even or just about in the black," then-Creative Assembly studio director Tim Heaton told GamesIndustry.biz a year after release. With the rapid evolution of AAA game development, that wasn't enough. And so, like a salvage team diverted to a bio-weapon recovery mission, Isolation and its momentum were seemingly abandoned.

Abandoned, that is, until today, the 10th anniversary of that game's 2014 release. The appropriately named Al Hope, creative director of Isolation studio Creative Assembly, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that his team had "heard your distress calls loud and clear," and could confirm that "a sequel to Alien: Isolation is in early development."

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