Month: March 2022

Enlarge / The main newsroom of Sputnik news in Moscow on April 27, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Mladen Antonov)

Google said today that YouTube is blocking RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik throughout Europe. “Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, we’re blocking YouTube channels connected to RT and Sputnik across Europe, effective immediately,” Google Europe announced on Twitter. “It’ll take time for our systems to fully ramp up. Our teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to take swift action.”

Russia’s government has been cracking down on news coverage of its invasion of Ukraine, telling media outlets not to call it “an attack,” “invasion,” or “declaration of war.” The US government has called RT and Sputnik “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.”

YouTube’s move follows European Union officials saying they are “banning Russia Today and Sputnik from broadcasting” in the EU. “The state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik, as well as their subsidiaries, will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war and to sow division in our Union,” EU President Ursula von der Leyen said on Sunday.

Enlarge / Samsung’s Galaxy Book2 series of laptops. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung will refresh its Galaxy Book line of thin-and-light laptops with the help of Intel’s long-awaited Arc graphics, the company announced this week. It’ll join the likes of Acer, whose Swift X laptop is one of the first to use the Arc mobile GPU.

We’re still waiting to hear more about Arc, but this month, Team Blue promised to ship its GPUs in Q1 of this year, with desktop Arc graphics cards to ship in Q2 and workstation GPUs in Q3.

That puts Samsung’s newly announced 15.6-inch Galaxy Book2 Pro right on schedule and should make it one of the first Arc-based laptops when it comes out on April 1. This is a thin-and-light laptop, not a gaming one, measuring just 0.52 inches thick and weighing 2.58 pounds, so we wouldn’t expect it to show the full capabilities of Intel’s Alchemist architecture.

Enlarge / OK, open your eyes. Surprise! Now you have to pay local sales taxes on your virtual land purchase! (credit: Linden Labs)

Second Life, the long-lived online metaverse that still attracts nearly a million monthly active users, has announced it will start charging US users local sales tax on many in-game purchases for the first time since its launch in 2003. That could be a significant drag on the online universe’s robust in-game economy and serve as a warning for other nascent metaverse efforts hoping to sell virtual goods to US residents.

In announcing the move Monday, Second Life developer Linden Labs cited the 2018 Supreme Court decision South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., Et Al. That decision established that states and localities could charge sales tax even for products sold by online companies that don’t have a physical presence in that state. Following that decision, Linden Labs says it has “done our best to shield our residents from these taxes as long as possible, but we are no longer able to absorb them.”

As such, starting March 31, Second Life users will be billed for local taxes on recurring billings such as subscriptions and land fees. Linden Labs will continue to absorb any taxes charged on one-time purchases like name changes and purchases of L$ in-game currency. But those costs will be passed on to users “at some point in the future” Linden Labs writes.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Late last night, an Airbus A340-300 took off from Munich International Airport in Germany. It’s possible that the plane was empty apart from the crew, though it may have been carrying a passenger who was looking to get out of town quickly. The brown-and-white jet, named “Bourkhan,” is owned by Alisher Usmanov, who has been known to visit spas in the Bavarian Alps. At the time of the takeoff, the Russian oligarch had been banned from travel in the European Union five hours earlier. 

Twenty minutes later, a Twitter bot created by a college student dutifully fired off a tweet notifying anyone who was watching that Usmanov’s plane was headed east. Hours later, it touched down in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, Usmanov’s hometown.

Usmanov’s plane isn’t the only one tracked by @RUOligarchJets. The bot is tweeting updates whenever the movements of 46 jets owned or leased by more than 20 Russian oligarchs hit ADS-B Exchange, a site that collects data from aviation enthusiasts who run their own equipment to monitor airplane movements. Many of the oligarchs have been hit with sanctions and travel bans.