Day: December 21, 2024

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NEW YORK — A prolonged and closely watched copyright case involving an online library’s unauthorized offering of free e-books has ended after the defendant, Internet Archive, decided not to challenge an appeal’s court’s ruling against it.
In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a Manhattan federal court’s decision that found the Archive in violation of copyright law and granted a permanent injunction. The Archive had until this week to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but declined to do so.
In 2020, four major publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House — sued the Archive, alleging that it had illegally provided free copies of more than 100 books, including fiction by Toni Morrison and J.D. Salinger. The Archive had contended that its program of scanning and sharing books, “controlled digital lending,” was protected by fair use law.
“After five years of litigation, we are thrilled to see this important case rest with the decisive opinion of the Second Circuit, which leaves no room for arguments that ‘controlled digital lending’ is anything more than infringement,” Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.
The Archive’s director of library services, Chris Freeland, posted a brief statement on the Archive’s web site saying that “While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion,” they would “continue to honor” an agreement to “remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests.”
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Ohio State vs. Tennessee live updates: CFP first-round game score, odds and predictions – The Athletic  The New York Times
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Jeremiyah Love overcomes injury and illness to propel Notre Dame into 1st Sugar Bowl since 2007  WWLP.com
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New warning hits millions of Windoes users
The FBI has just issued a new email attack warning, advising users how to stay safe, as holiday season attacks surge. Alarmingly, phishing emails and malicious websites are now aided by new AI tools that make everything more likely to trick users into becoming victims. Multiple warnings in recent weeks have confirmed this is the most dangerous holiday season ever for email and web attacks.
Against this backdrop, Microsoft is again pushing Windows users to switch to Edge, which it says “helps you stay protected while you browse by blocking phishing and malware attacks.” This has become a repeated theme—system messages that push Microsoft’s products under a security pretext. It’s a definite grey area.
As spotted by Windows Latest, “new references to some potential new pop-ups in Edge encourage users to get back to Microsoft Edge. One reference is titled ‘msNurturingDefaultBrowserBannerUX2OneBtn,’ and likely points to some button in the browser encouraging people to set it as the default browser.” This it says is “all part of the tech giant’s efforts to bring more people to Microsoft Edge.” Albeit these latest changes are still in development and have not been released yet.
While Edge has been creeping up on Chrome—to an extent, Google’s browser still dominates the Windows desktop market with four-times the number of Edge users, even as Microsoft’s browser has grown its market share a couple of points in 2024.
“Could this help change the tide and encourage more people to try Microsoft Edge?” Windows Latest asks. “It’s possible.” Yes, possible but unlikely. Despite campaign after campaign, and even with multiple privacy and security stories over recent years, Chrome’s user base has shown itself to be as hard to shake as Windows 10’s.
Microsoft browser completely with giant cursor
But there is potential change in the coming months, and it has nothing to do with Microsoft’s popups or its security and safety campaign. The biggest threat to Chrome remains a regulatory one, with the DOJ still threatening to force its divestment from Google. A move Google says would be an “extreme” remedy.
Meantime, Windows users will likely just have to ignore the latest popup campaign, even with the giant cursor per Windows Latest’s screenshots. “What even is that,” they say—and rightly so. The bigger issue even than the huge cursor is the button choice. ‘Confirm’ changes the default browser to Edge, while ‘Set Later’ means “you’re basically confirming your approval for another follow-up pop-up in Microsoft Edge. This doesn’t mean you do not want Edge as your default browser, and unfortunately, it’s not possible to remove these messages.”
Almost all Microsoft’s Edge pushes have used security as their driving theme. The same has been seen in the Chrome setup process on a new Windows install. While arguably there are security advantages in Edge over Chrome, Google is narrowing the gap. Its latest AI-powered scam detection echoes the same feature coming to Edge.
Where Microsoft is likely to find more success is the enterprise market, where it argues that a joined-up solution comprising its various security platforms and services is a safer bet for a CISO than a mixed bag of offerings. Clearly if people get used to Edge at work they may do the same at home.

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The Harry Potter Movies, Ranked By Rewatchability  CBR
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Christmas gifts distributed to hundreds of families at Rescue Mission event  Frederick News Post
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“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, everywhere you go…”
Those that have read our past Christmas columns know our love for nostalgic 1940s holiday films. Although they are limited in number, there is no doubt that they capture the heartbreak and joy found throughout the United States in the WWII era. Films like “Remember the Night” (1940), “Holiday Inn” (1942), “Meet Me in St Louis” (1944), “Christmas in Connecticut” (1945), “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), “The Bishop’s Wife” (1947), and “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947) may be old chestnuts, but we still watch them every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas day.
That’s not to say there are no modern Christmas classics. Recent successful Christmas films include: “A Christmas Story” (1984), the first two “Home Alone” films (1990, 1992), “The Santa Claus” (1994), “Elf” (2003), “Bad Santa” (2003), and Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993). And leave it to Hallmark to flood the television airways with over 500 dull Christmas movies on their multiple channels beginning in October each year. Most have production values and storylines best reserved for the dustbin of television history. To counter those, let’s explore a few of our favorite Christmas movies from the past 40 years.
Take One
One of the stranger Christmas movies to have emerged in the past two decades is a small Norwegian thriller (yes, that’s right), called “Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale” from 2010. This one is about as far as you can get from traditional feel-good fare. Indeed, in this small Norwegian village, Santa Claus is a demonic spirit who regularly butchers’ children to feed his pagan overlords. If that doesn’t sound like a terrifying rewrite of all Christmas lore, it is, if nothing else, tons of fun to watch an anthropomorphic, spider-like Santa Claus mow down straphangers by the dozens. Unless you happen to be a fan of the Norwegian zombie franchise “Dead Snow,” the cast and crew will be foreigners to Hollywood audiences, and the film has remained a bit of an anomaly to anyone except die-hard horror fans.
Our first Christmas column, three years ago, we wrote about short Christmas movies; the animated “Peace on Earth”(1939) and “Star in the Night”(1947). In that vein, the next one is easy to find, and that’s because it’s only three minutes long. SNL, at the peak of their mid-2000s heyday, took a break from lampooning Bush and Kerry to craft a gemstone parody of a music video called “Christmastime for the Jews.” Based directly off the Darlene Love/Phil Spector-produced “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” and all the more magical because Darlene Love actually sings the parody herself! Shot in the Claymation style of many 1960s television shorts, the song is a playful takedown of the Christmas-Industrial-Complex by portraying Dec. 25th as the one day in which city-dwelling Jews can have fun and enjoy themselves without the bother of all those pesky gentiles. Wry lyrics by Robert Smigel keeps it witty, but it’s Darlene Love’s commitment that makes it soar.
Take Two
Our family always kicks off the holiday season with “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” (1989) starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Juliette Lewis, and Johnny Galecki as the Griswold family. Every holiday mishap known to mankind befalls the Griswolds as they host both sets of grandparents, as well as their lovable but repulsive cousin Eddie, marvelously embodied by Randy Quaid. The disaster of securing a real Christmas tree deep in the forests, decorating the outside of the house (“exterior illumination”), Clark’s shopping for ladies’ “unmentionables,” and the general chaos of having three generations under the same roof are all givens. And, for us, the delight is in picking apart and commenting on every flaw throughout the film. (Mountains in… Chicago??). Hearing Mavis Staples’ far-too-wonderful “Christmas Vacation” theme and watching the entertaining animated opening credits means it really is Christmas time.
One film of the past 25 years that will likely endure as a Christmas classic is “Love Actually” from 2003. With an ensemble cast that includes Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, Keira Knightley, Colin Firth, Laura Linney and a dozen more international actors in 10 different storylines, set in and around London, and all interwoven into a single narrative. Director Richard Curtis’ various storylines involve drama, humor, music and the exploration of human longings that pull on the fabric of our love-seeking society. I especially enjoy the storylines involving Hugh Grant as the Kennedy-like Prime Minister of England, and Liam Neeson as the widowed father of a 12-year-old lovesick stepson. But Colin Firth and Lucia Moniz steal the movie as two language-challenged lost souls who find each other in a lakeside cottage in France. Throughout the film you lament jumping from scene-to-scene only to be quickly swept up in the next narrative.
All films are available on Amazon Prime and YouTube.
(This column is written jointly by a baby boomer, Denny Parish, and a millennial, Carson Parish, who also happen to be father and son.)

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‘Let’s Talk Bitcoin’: North County meetup group engages cryptocurrency community  FOX 5 San Diego
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The advent of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies has changed the way individuals interact with digital devices. Despite their capabilities, these systems often demand significant computational power and resources. This makes them inaccessible to users with constrained devices or limited access to cloud-based solutions. This disparity underscores an urgent need for innovations that deliver high-quality ASR without heavy reliance on computational resources or external infrastructures. This challenge has become even more pronounced in real-time processing scenarios where speed and accuracy are paramount. Existing ASR tools often falter when expected to function seamlessly on low-power devices or within environments with limited internet connectivity. Addressing these gaps necessitates solutions that provide open-source access to state-of-the-art machine learning models.
Moonshine Web, developed by Hugging Face, is a robust response to these challenges. As a lightweight yet powerful ASR solution, Moonshine Web stands out for its ability to run entirely within a web browser, leveraging React, Vite, and the cutting-edge Transformers.js library. This innovation ensures that users can directly experience fast and accurate ASR on their devices without depending on high-performance hardware or cloud services. The center of Moonshine Web lies in the Moonshine Base model, a highly optimized speech-to-text system designed for efficiency and performance. This model achieves remarkable results by utilizing WebGPU acceleration for superior computational speeds while offering WASM as a fallback for devices lacking WebGPU support. Such adaptability makes Moonshine Web accessible to a broader audience, including those using resource-constrained devices.
Moonshine Web’s user-friendly design extends to its deployment process. Hugging Face ensures developers and enthusiasts can quickly set up the application by providing an open-source repository. Below are the steps and code required for deployment:
1. Clone the Repository
2. Navigate to the Project Directory
3. Install Dependencies
4. Run the Development Server  
The application should now be running locally. Open your browser and go to ‘http://localhost:5173’ to see it in action.
In conclusion, the development of Moonshine Web also highlights the importance of community engagement in advancing technological solutions. Incorporating an audio visualizer, adapted from an open-source tutorial by Wael Yasmina, exemplifies the collaborative ethos driving this project. Such contributions enhance the application’s functionality and inspire further innovations within the open-source ecosystem. Bridging the gap between resource-intensive models and user-friendly deployment paves the way for more inclusive and equitable access to cutting-edge technologies.
Check out the Model on Hugging Face. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group. Don’t Forget to join our 60k+ ML SubReddit.
🚨 Trending: LG AI Research Releases EXAONE 3.5: Three Open-Source Bilingual Frontier AI-level Models Delivering Unmatched Instruction Following and Long Context Understanding for Global Leadership in Generative AI Excellence….
Aswin AK is a consulting intern at MarkTechPost. He is pursuing his Dual Degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He is passionate about data science and machine learning, bringing a strong academic background and hands-on experience in solving real-life cross-domain challenges.

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