Author: easyfilo

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Over Zoom, Australia’s communications minister, Paul Fletcher, has the air of a man in the middle of a victory speech. He credits his team and the country’s competition regulator for succeeding where others had failed: forcing tech giants to pay for news. “There were a lot of people saying you can’t really succeed in taking on the global digital giants,” he says, sitting beneath strip lighting in his Sydney constituency office. But Fletcher and Australia’s federal treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, persevered. In 2020, when the Australian government asked the competition regulator to develop a law that would force tech giants to pay for the news that appears on their feeds, Fletcher was aware of the stories others used as warnings. When Germany’s biggest news publisher, Axel Springer, tried to block Google from running snippets of its articles in 2014, it backtracked after just two weeks once traffic plunged. When Spain tried to force Google to pay for news in 2014, the search giant just left—blocking Google News in the country for seven years.

Google threatened Australia with even more drastic action. In January 2021, the tech giant suggested Australians could lose access to its entire search engine if Fletcher and Frydenberg’s “news media bargaining code,” which would force platforms to pay news publishers for links, came into force. Facebook also lobbied hard against the code, arguing that news makes up less than 4 percentof the content people see in their news feed. On February 17, Australians woke up to discover that all news links had been wiped off the platform, leaving the Facebook pages of the country’s biggest media companies completely blank. Traffic to news websites sank 13 percent, illustrating exactly what the government said it was worried about. Facebook’s actions “confirm for all Australians [the] immense market power of these media digital giants,” Frydenberg said at the time.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It’s the weekend, which means it’s time for another Dealmaster. The latest update to our roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes Bose’s QuietComfort 45 for $279 at various retailers. This deal matches the one we saw over Presidents Day weekend and again equals the lowest price we’ve tracked for the company’s latest set of wireless noise-canceling headphones.

We continue to recommend the QuietComfort 45 to those who are willing to trade a little battery life—this pair lasts around 20 hours, compared to 30+ hours on options like Sony’s WH-1000XM4—for a more generally comfortable design. The headphones’ sound profile is more neutral than that of the XM4 by default, too, but Bose recently added a customizable EQ feature for those who prefer more bass or treble. Sony’s pair is a bit better at muting outside noise, so it remains our top pick, but the QuietComfort 45 is still a commendable alternative for the right person.

Besides that, our roundup also includes a rare deal on Seagate’s 512GB Storage Expansion Card for the Xbox Series X/S, which is down to $110 at B&H with an on-page coupon. That comes out to a $29 discount. These proprietary NVMe cards are still not great values compared to traditional SSDs with the same capacity, but if you need more space for your new Xbox games, they are Microsoft’s only official solution, for better or worse. B&H pauses online checkout until 7pm ET on Saturdays, but we’re noting the discount here so you can take advantage when it becomes available again.

Enlarge / Russian workers assemble a Soyuz rocket for the launch of satellites for the European Space Agency in December 2021. (credit: European Space Agency)

Russia has decided to suspend cooperation with European launch officials, and says it will withdraw its personnel from Europe’s main spaceport.

The chief of Russia’s main space corporation, Dmitry Rogozin, announced the decision on Twitter Saturday morning, saying his country was responding to sanctions placed on Russia by the European Union. Europe, the United States, and other nations around the world issued significant sanctions on Russia this week after the country’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Approximately two dozen Russian technicians and engineers work at Russian facilities in French Guiana. This spaceport, called the Guiana Space Center, is where Europe launches its fleet of orbital rockets, including a “Europeanized” version of the Russian Soyuz vehicle for medium-lift missions. The Russians had been working to prepare a Soyuz rocket to launch two Galileo satellites for the European Union on April 6.

Enlarge / Valheim (credit: Iron Gate AB)

Kylan Coats came up with a plan to start a studio before he had even made a game, as an undergrad spending summers as a QA tester between classes. Back then, his mid-thirties seemed like the age to make this transition. If things went to plan, he would have the experience to succeed, but if everything exploded, he could still return to a AAA career. Coats worked in the industry for 14 years, but it was only after an unforeseen layoff from Obsidian Entertainment that his husband reminded him of this conviction. “He brought it up like, ‘Hey, you’ve been talking about starting your own studio for the longest time, why not now?’” Coats says.

After a good year doing contract work, more profitable than any year previous, he started Crispy Creative. His first game was an idea he’d been mulling over for a while. “Every dev always has a few of their own game ideas,” he says. A Long Journey to an Uncertain End is a queer narrative space opera, in Coats’ words. Players control a rogue spaceship fleeing between colorful Mœbius-like planets; tasks include shuttling drag queens off on grand adventures. It’s not the type of game a bigger studio would touch, he says. With Crispy, not only is he free to be creative, but his work environment is healthy: Staff don’t have to kill themselves to meet a deadline, and he can nurture mental health and inclusivity. He’d been critical of leadership in the past, so starting Crispy was the moment to put up or shut up, he says.

Enlarge / Zebra finches sitting together on a tree branch and sunning. (credit: sagarmanis | Getty Images)

In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessential human capacity for language, scientists are finding that the most tantalizing clues lie farther afield.

Human language is made possible by an impressive aptitude for vocal learning. Infants hear sounds and words, form memories of them, and later try to produce those sounds, improving as they grow up. Most animals cannot learn to imitate sounds at all. Though nonhuman primates can learn how to use innate vocalizations in new ways, they don’t show a similar ability to learn new calls. Interestingly, a small number of more distant mammal species, including dolphins and bats, do have this capacity. But among the scattering of nonhuman vocal learners across the branches of the bush of life, the most impressive are birds—hands (wings?) down.

Parrots, songbirds, and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations. The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have even more in common with human language, such as conveying information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the elements of human language such as phonology, semantics, and syntax. And the similarities run deeper, including analogous brain structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning.