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      Krypto steals the show (again) in Superman trailer

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 14 May • 1 minute

    David Corenswet stars as Clark Kent in director James Gunn's Superman .

    We're about to enter a new era for DC Studios with the July release of Superman , writer/director James Gunn's fresh take on one of the most iconic superheroes. And after months of tantalizing teases, we finally have the first official trailer, featuring a bickering Clark Kent and Lois Lane, plenty of action, villains being villains, kaiju , and of course, our favorite flying super-pup, Krypto.

    As previously reported , Gunn has described his take as less of an origin story and more of a journey, with Superman struggling to reconcile his Kryptonian heritage and aristocratic origins with his small-town adoptive human family. Gunn tapped David Corenswet to play Clark Kent/Superman at 25, a bit more established than the young cub reporter of Smallville , for instance. Rachel Brosnahan plays Lois Lane, Skyler Gisondo plays Jimmy Olsen, and Nicholas Hoult is arch-nemesis Lex Luthor. Luthor's sidekicks are played by Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher and Terence Rosemore as Otis.

    The cast also includes Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (sporting a disastrous bowl haircut); Anthony Carrigan as Rex Mason/Metamorpho, who can transmute elements in his body to change forms; Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl; Edi Gathegi as Michael Holt/Mister Terrific, an inventor turned superhero; Maria Gabriela de Faria as Angela Spica/The Engineer, whose abilities stem from embedded nanotechnology; and Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell as Clark's parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, respectively. We'll also see Frank Grillo reprise his role as Rick Flag Sr. from the animated series Creature Commandos ; Sean Gunn as Maxwell Lord; and Milly Alcock as Superman's cousin, Kara Zor-El/Supergirl.

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      VPNSecure owner says it had to cancel unsustainable lifetime subscriptions

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 14 May

    The CEO of the company that purchased VPNSecure in 2023 and claimed to not know that the VPN service provider had previously sold lifetime subscriptions has some regrets.

    Earlier this week, Ars Technica reported on VPNSecure canceling thousands of lifetime subscriptions , starting in March. In an email to customers, VPNSecure said that it couldn't afford to maintain the subscriptions and that the current owners, InfiniteQuant Ltd, weren't told about the subscriptions when they bought VPNSecure. The sudden deactivation of accounts resulted in customer backlash online, including, as of this writing, 24 pages of one-star reviews on Trustpilot.

    “… maybe, honestly, we should have just walked away from this 'opportunity,’” Romain Brabant, the CEO of InfiniteQuant Ltd, told Ars Technica when asked if he would have handled things differently in hindsight.

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      A privately developed Australian rocket is ready for a historic launch

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 14 May

    Gilmour Space, a venture-backed startup based in Australia, is about to launch a small rocket from its privately owned spaceport on a remote stretch of the country's northeastern coastline.

    It's the first time anyone has attempted to reach orbit with a rocket designed and built in Australia. Gilmour's three-stage rocket, named Eris, could launch at any time during a 10-hour window Thursday, local time. In the United States, the launch window runs from 5:30 pm EDT Wednesday until 3:30 am EDT Thursday.

    The debut launch of Gilmour's Eris rocket is purely a test flight. Gilmour has tested the rocket's engines and rehearsed the countdown last year, loading propellant and getting within 10 seconds of launch. But Gilmour cautioned in a post on LinkedIn early Wednesday that "test launches are complex." Gilmour added on social media that "weather, systems checks, or technical issues may delay the flight—sometimes by hours, days, or longer."

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      Judge admits nearly being persuaded by AI hallucinations in court filing

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 14 May • 1 minute

    A plaintiff's law firms were sanctioned and ordered to pay $31,100 after submitting fake AI citations that nearly ended up in a court ruling. Michael Wilner, a retired US magistrate judge serving as special master in US District Court for the Central District of California, admitted that he initially thought the citations were real and "almost" put them into an order.

    These aren't the first lawyers caught submitting briefs with fake citations generated by AI. In some cases, opposing attorneys figure out what happened and notify the judge. In this instance, the judge noticed that some citations were un-verifiable but was troubled by how close he came to including the bogus citations in an order.

    "Directly put, Plaintiff's use of AI affirmatively misled me," Judge Wilner wrote in a May 5 order . "I read their brief, was persuaded (or at least intrigued) by the authorities that they cited, and looked up the decisions to learn more about them—only to find that they didn't exist. That's scary. It almost led to the scarier outcome (from my perspective) of including those bogus materials in a judicial order. Strong deterrence is needed to make sure that attorneys don't succumb to this easy shortcut."

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      Valve takes another step toward making SteamOS a true Windows competitor

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 14 May

    We've known for months now that Valve is expanding its Linux-based SteamOS operating system beyond the Steam Deck to other handheld PCs, starting with some versions of the Asus ROG Ally . This week, Valve began making some changes to its Steam storefront to prepare for a future when the Deck isn't the only hardware running SteamOS.

    A new " SteamOS Compatible " label will begin rolling out "over the next few weeks" to denote "whether a game and all of its middleware is supported on SteamOS," including "game functionality, launcher functionality, and anti-cheat support." Games that don't meet this requirement will be marked as "SteamOS Unsupported." As with current games and the Steam Deck, this label doesn't mean these games won't run, but it does mean there may be some serious compatibility issues that keep the game from running as intended.

    Valve says that "over 18,000 titles on Steam [will] be marked SteamOS compatible out of the gate," and that game developers won't need to do anything extra to earn the label if their titles already support the Steam Deck.

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      Marvel drops Ironheart trailer ahead of June release

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 14 May

    Dominique Thorne is back as Riri Williams in Ironheart .

    Ryan Coogler is riding high as his new film Sinners lights up the box office , and he's got another major TV project waiting in the wings: the Marvel limited series Ironheart . And the studio has dropped a shiny new trailer ahead of the show's June release. The six-episode series stars Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, aka the titular Ironheart, a teen tech genius who is a protégé of Tony Stark in the comics. It's the final TV series in Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Five.

    (Some spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever below.)

    The series was first announced in December 2020 and originally slated for a 2023 release. But then Marvel began rethinking its long-term strategy and decided to scale back on content to counter suggestions of market saturation, and Ironheart was delayed until now. It has been described as "a crime show with an Iron Man twist at the center," based on footage revealed at 2024's D23 convention.

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      An $8.4 billion money launderer has been operating for years on US soil

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 14 May • 1 minute

    As the underground industry of crypto investment scams has grown into one of the world's most lucrative forms of cybercrime, the secondary market of money launderers for those scammers has grown to match it. Amid that black market, one such Chinese-language service on the messaging platform Telegram blossomed into an all-purpose underground bazaar: It has offered not only cash-out services to scammers but also money laundering for North Korean hackers, stolen data, targeted harassment-for-hire, and even what appears to be sex trafficking. And somehow, it's all overseen by a company legally registered in the United States.

    According to new research released today by crypto-tracing firm Elliptic, a company called Xinbi Guarantee has since 2022 facilitated no less than $8.4 billion in transactions via its Telegram-based marketplace prior to Telegram’s actions in recent days to remove its accounts from the platform. Money stolen from scam victims likely represents the “vast majority” of that sum, according to Elliptic's cofounder Tom Robinson. Yet even as the market serves Chinese-speaking scammers, it also boasts on the top of its website—in Mandarin—that it's registered in Colorado.

    “Xinbi Guarantee has served as a giant, purportedly US-incorporated illicit online marketplace for online scams that primarily offers money laundering services,” says Robinson. He adds, though, that Elliptic has also found a remarkable variety of other criminal offerings on the market: child-bearing surrogacy and egg donors, harassment services that offer to threaten or throw feces at any chosen victim, and even sex workers in their teens who are likely trafficking victims.

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      After back-to-back failures, SpaceX tests its fixes on the next Starship

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 13 May

    SpaceX fired six Raptor engines on the company's next Starship rocket Monday, clearing a major hurdle on the path to launch later this month on a high-stakes test flight to get the private rocket program back on track.

    Starship ignited its Raptor engines Monday morning on a test stand near SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in South Texas. The engine ran for approximately 60 seconds, and SpaceX confirmed the test-firing in a post on X : "Starship completed a long duration six-engine static fire and is undergoing final preparations for the ninth flight test."

    SpaceX hasn't officially announced a target launch date, but maritime warnings along Starship's flight path over the Gulf of Mexico suggest the launch might happen as soon as next Wednesday, May 21. The launch window would open at 6:30 pm local time (7:30 pm EDT; 23:30 UTC). If everything goes according to plan, Starship is expected to soar into space and fly halfway around the world, targeting a reentry and controlled splashdown into the Indian Ocean.

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      “Google wanted that”: Nextcloud decries Android permissions as “gatekeeping”

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 13 May

    Nextcloud is a host-your-own cloud platform that wants to help you "Regain control over your data." It contains products that allow for video chat, file storage, collaborative editing, and other stuff that reads a lot like a DIY Google Workspace replacement.

    It's hard to offer that kind of full replacement, though, if your Android app can't upload anything other than media files. Since mid-2024, Nextcloud claims, Google has refused to reinstate the access it needs for uploading and syncing other file types.

    "To make it crystal clear: All of you as users have a worse Nextcloud Files client because Google wanted that," reads a Nextcloud blog post from May 13, attributed to its team. "We understand and share your frustration," but there is nothing we can do."

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