Bishma

Stratasys is claiming infringements on patents it owns (included ones acquired from Makerbot) on things like purge towers, heated beds, and force detection. Many of them things common to most FFF/FDM 3D printers.

Its an interesting coincidence that this lawsuit against one printer maker is happening on the same day as a new product announcement (the Prusa MK4s) from another major printer maker.

In two complaints, filed in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, against six entities related to Bambu Lab, Stratasys alleges that Bambu Lab infringed upon 10 patents that it owns, some through subsidiaries like Makerbot (acquired in 2013). Among the patents cited are US9421713B2, "Additive manufacturing method for printing three-dimensional parts with purge towers," and US9592660B2, "Heated build platform and system for three-dimensional printing methods."

There are not many, if any, 3D printers sold to consumers that do not have a heated bed, which prevents the first layers of a model from cooling during printing and potentially shrinking and warping the model. "Purge towers" (or "prime towers" in Bambu's parlance) allow for multicolor printing by providing a place for the filament remaining in a nozzle to be extracted and prevent bleed-over between colors.

These days, our biometric data is valuable to businesses for security purposes, to enhance customer experience or to improve their own efficiency.

Facial recognition technology [...] scans images or videos from devices including CCTV cameras and picks out faces.

From supermarkets to car parks and railway stations, CCTV cameras are everywhere, silently doing their job. But what exactly is their job now?

Businesses may justify collecting biometric data, but with power comes responsibility and the use of facial recognition raises significant transparency, ethical, and privacy concerns.

If your password gets stolen, you can change it. If your credit card is compromised, you can cancel it. But your face? That’s permanent. Biometric data is incredibly sensitive because it cannot be altered once it’s compromised. This makes it a high-stakes game when it comes to security.

A lawsuit filed in California by concert giant AXS has revealed a legal and technological battle between ticket scalpers and platforms like Ticketmaster and AXS, in which scalpers have figured out how to extract “untransferable” tickets from their accounts by generating entry barcodes on parallel infrastructure that the scalpers control and which can then be sold and transferred to customers.

By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS.

So Ticketmaster and AXS are suing to maintain their monopoly on scalping?

We recently had an unfortunate situation where an external magnetic hard drive was dropped while spinning. I knew before we even checked that the heads were gonners, and sure enough the drive seems dead. Unfortunately this was a drive inherited from a deceased relative that were starting to backup at the time the accident happened and now a lot of family photos are inaccessible if not gone forever.

I'm just getting my feet wet trying to find potential recovery services to get quotes, but I thought it was worth asking you fine folks if you have any experience that might help out. Companies to avoid or who may be worth it even if their quote is high.

One specific question I have pertains to what's recovered (since most of these services seem to charge based on the amount recovered): We're only concerned with photos but this was, at one point, the single drive in Mac, so there's tons of OS and other files we don't want or need. Are we likely to get charged for it anyway?

informed employees of the filing late Friday [...] that it had filed for a debtor-in-possession loan — a way for companies that are reorganizing after filing for bankruptcy to secure additional working capital to meet payroll. [...] employees have been waiting for paychecks since June 21st [...] it’s not certain that the company will be able to secure such a loan.

Chicken Soup took on $325 million in debt when it acquired Redbox in 2022 and has since been sued over a dozen times over unpaid bills.

Found via the author's Mastodon Post

Generally, the media has focused on the (mainly) men whose names and desires were taken from the company’s subscriber database and shared with the world. [...] Ashley Madison was never really about that. Avid Life Media, its parent company, wasn’t in the business of sex, it was in the business of bots. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the only messages that get through are auto-generated ads.

A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.

The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.

ICQ will stop working on June 26. It's encouraging users to migrate to a messaging app from Russia-based VK, its parent company.

I stopped using ICQ in the very early 00s. I didn't know anything of it still remained.

The Chrome team says they're not going to pursue Web Integrity but...

it is piloting a new Android WebView Media Integrity API that’s “narrowly scoped, and only targets WebViews embedded in apps.”

They say its because the team "heard your feedback." I'm sure that's true, and I can wildly speculate that all the current anti-trust attention was a factor too.

Alternate title: Microsoft closes barn door after last horse seen leaving and starting a bot farm.

Microsoft is now announcing a huge cybersecurity effort, dubbed the Secure Future Initiative (SFI). This new approach is designed to change the way Microsoft designs, builds, tests, and operates its software and services today. It’s the biggest change to security efforts inside Microsoft since the company announced its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) in 2004 after Windows XP fell victim to a huge Blaster worm attack that knocked PCs offline in 2003.

Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.

This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.

This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.

There's been a string of security blunders in Azure in the last couple years but leaking a signing key and then trying to downplay it is really beyond the pale