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Technology

Microsoft trackers run after DuckDuckGo, get added to blocklist

Microsoft trackers run after DuckDuckGo, get added to blocklist

Microsoft trackers run after DuckDuckGo, get added to blocklist

Aurich Lawson

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-minded search company, says it will block trackers from Microsoft in its desktop web browser, following revelations in May that certain scripts from Bing and LinkedIn were getting a pass.

In a blog post, DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg says that he’s heard users’ concerns since security researcher Zach Edwards’ thread that “we didn’t meet their expectations around one of our browser’s web tracking protections.” Weinberg says that, over the next week, the company’s browser will add Microsoft to the list of third-party tracking scripts blocked by its mobile and desktop browsers, as well as extensions for other browsers.

“Previously, we were limited in how we could apply our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection on Microsoft tracking scripts due to a policy requirement related to our use of Bing as a source for our private search results,” Weinberg writes. “We’re glad this is no longer the case. We have not had, and do not have, any similar limitation with any other company.”

There are a lot of pervasive, identifying things that load up on most modern webpages. At issue in DuckDuckGo’s apps was its default blocking of scripts from companies like Facebook and Google loading on third-party websites. DuckDuckGo, which uses Microsoft’s Bing as one of its sources for search results, had to allow some of Microsoft’s trackers to load “due to a policy requirement.” In a Reddit response at the time of the revelation, Weinberg noted that Microsoft’s trackers were still blocked in most ways, like utilizing third-party cookies for fingerprinting visitors.

There’s more to the delicate dance between DuckDuckGo and Microsoft than just trackers, however. Microsoft also provides ads that run on DuckDuckGo’s search results. To allow advertisers to see when someone has clicked an ad on DuckDuckGo and arrived at their page, the DuckDuckGo apps won’t block requests from bat.bing.com. Weinberg notes that you can avoid this by turning off ads in DuckDuckGo search entirely. The company is working on validating ads in ways that can be non-tracking, Weinberg writes, akin to similar efforts by Safari and Firefox.

Finally, DuckDuckGo aims to be more open about its tracker blocking. The company committed its tracker blocklist to a public GitHub repository yesterday and published a new help doc on its tracking protections.

It can look like a lot of work over two scripts, but then DuckDuckGo lives inside the tricky balance of trying to make its search product convenient and relevant while offering its users as much privacy as websites can stand before breaking. And the 15-year-old company from Paoli, Pennsylvania, can’t just leave Bing behind entirely. Weinberg noted in his May Reddit response that most of its traditional search results and images come from Bing. “Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index” due to the billion-dollar cost, Weinberg wrote. Every company that wants to provide search to the world faces either a duopoly or a very long journey.

Microsoft, meanwhile, continues to expand its advertising markets, most recently to Netflix, and, potentially, into its own operating system. Its advertising revenue was $3 billion for the quarter ending June 30, an increase of 15 percent year over year but the lowest growth rate in more than a year.

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Entertainment

The Seekers lead singer Judith Durham died at 79, six decades after the formation of the group

The Seekers lead singer Judith Durham died at 79, six decades after the formation of the group

Judith Durham, one of Australia’s best-loved entertainers, has died at the age of 79.

Born in Essendon in Victoria, Durham recorded her first EP at 19 and went on to worldwide fame as the lead singer of folk music group The Seekers selling more than 50 million records.

As part of The Seekers, Durham was one of the first Australian artists to achieve international success, with songs like Georgy Girl, I’ll Never Find Another You and The Carnival Is Over.

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The Seekers — comprising Athol Guy, Bruce Woodley and Keith Potger in addition to Durham — moved to the UK in 1964, having formed in 1962.

After recording I’ll Never Find Another You at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, The Seekers went to number one on the UK and Australian charts.

On their return to Australia in 1967, The Seekers set an Australian record when a crowd of more than 200,000 watched their performance at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl.

They were later named joint Australians of the Year for 1967.

But just over a year later, Durham stunned the music world by leaving the group at the height of its success.

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Over the past three decades, The Seekers played a series of comeback concerts.

In 1995, they were inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, with I’ll Never Find Another You added to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia’s Sounds of Australia registry in 2011.

In 2013, during The Seekers’ Golden Jubilee tour, Durham suffered a stroke, which affected her ability to read and write, while not diminishing her singing skills.

Members of The Seekers, including Durham, were honored as Officers of the Order of Australia in 2014.

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Sports

Watch as Australia’s Donna Lobban and Scottish husband Greg embrace after unique Commonwealth Games squash clash

Watch as Australia's Donna Lobban and Scottish husband Greg embrace after unique Commonwealth Games squash clash

Marital harmony will doubtless prevail once more in the Lobban household. eventually.

But for one night only, it was Australian Donna Lobban who earned the bragging rights over Scottish husband Greg at the Commonwealth Games in squash’s ultimate game of (un)happy families – not that she was out to rub a unique victory in his face.

Watch the couple’s touching post-match moment in the video above

Stream Seven’s coverage of the Commonwealth Games 2022 for free on 7plus >>

“We’re not signing divorce papers after that – I think we’re still alright,” smiled the victorious Donna after she and her cousin Cameron Pilley defeated Greg Lobban and Lisa Aitken in a tense, tetchy, hugely entertaining mixed doubles quarter-final at Birmingham University.

She even forgave him for accidentally smacking her on the back of the leg with his racquet, during the physical close-quarters battle won by Australia’s reigning champions 9-11 11-8 11-8.

It was the only light-hearted moment in a compelling, intense contest, with Greg giving Donna an apologetic hug as Pilley pointed towards Greg gravely: “Oh, you’re in trouble now…”

Greg had to apologize to his wife midway through the match after an accidental strike. Credit: james ross/AAP

Naturally, on a day when Games historians desperately tried to recall when a husband and wife had ever gone head-to-head in sporting combat for different countries at a major championship, Donna ended up with the utmost sympathy for hubby.

“Usually you’d be just going ‘yeeeees!’ after a win like that but my heart kind of sunk. I was happy but gutted we were the ones who put them out of the tournament. Didn’t feel good,” she said.

After his defeat, Greg enjoyed a long embrace with Donna in the center of the court and told her: “I’m proud of you – now go on and win it.”

Greg’s kind words in this post-match hug may have just saved his marriage. Credit: james ross/AAP

EVERYEVENT: Check out the full Commonwealth Games schedule

TALLY MEDAL: Every gold, silver and bronze at Birmingham 2022

LATEST RESULTS: Detailed breakdown of every event at the Games

The match turned on a couple of controversial ‘no let’ calls from the referee late on which Greg had the odd wee cross word with the official.

Ironically, Donna felt she’d been the victim of a huge wrong call earlier in the day when she and Rachael Grinham were knocked out of the women’s doubles quarters.

On the final sudden-death point, a heartless ‘no let’ call granted victory to their Malaysian opponents Rachel Arnold and Aifa Azman which prompted Lobban, quite uncharacteristically, to hurl her racquet in fury flush against the backcourt glass.

Later, she protested they’d been “robbed” and had to cool herself down, regroup and get ready for a redemptive match six hours later.

Greg, who’d been watching in the morning, had helped her get back in the right frame of mind.

“I’m her husband – I support her every day, today’s no different – and I’ll be supporting her tomorrow in the semis,” he said.

In the video below: ‘Embarrassing’ penalty shootout farce helps Aussies

‘Embarrassing’ penalty shootout farce helps Aussies

‘Embarrassing’ penalty shootout farce helps Aussies

Donna said: “People were watching anything to talk about so we weren’t giving them too much.

“Er, I did whack me in the thigh but I’ll take that!

“Might have to put up with him being in a terrible mood for a while – but if I’d have lost, it would have been him putting up with me being in a terrible mood!”

She’d also made a bet with Greg before the match that if he lost, he’d have to make dinner for the next month.

Already she’s regretting it.

“I don’t know if I want him to cook actually – pretty grim,” Donna said.

“I should have made the bet that if I win, I’d get to shave off his mullet and his mustache! I don’t know why I didn’t think of that… too late now.”

Just like Tokyo 2020 on Seven, there will be one destination to watch every epic feat, every medal moment, every record attempt and every inspiring turn from the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.

7plus is the only place to watch up to 30 live and replay channels of sport, see what’s on when, keep up to date with the medal tally, create a watchlist to follow your favorite events and catch up on highlights.

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US

Attorney general’s office calls Nashua woman’s death suspicious

Attorney general's office calls Nashua woman's death suspicious

The attorney general’s office said Friday they are investigating a Nashua woman’s suspicious death. Investigators are at a house on Kinsley Street. The road is blocked off by police. The death is unrelated to Friday morning’s shooting at a gas station on Amherst Street in Nashua. The attorney general’s office did not release any information identifying the woman or how she died. New Hampshire Senior Assistant Attorney General Peter Hinckley said the suspicious death investigation is ” all very preliminary at this time.” “It is very early in the investigation,” Hinckley said. “We are trying to confirm the adult female’s identity of her, still trying to find evidence in terms of eyewitnesses who may have some information as to what led to the circumstances of her death of her.” This story is breaking. Keep an eye on this page, and we will update it with more information.

NASHUA, NH—

The attorney general’s office said Friday they are investigating a Nashua woman’s suspicious death.

Investigators are at a house on Kinsley Street. The road is blocked off by police.

The death is unrelated to Friday morning’s shooting at a gas station on Amherst Street in Nashua.

The attorney general’s office did not release any information identifying the woman or how she died.

New Hampshire Senior Assistant Attorney General Peter Hinckley said the suspicious death investigation is “all very preliminary at this time.”

“It is very early in the investigation,” Hinckley said. “We are trying to confirm the adult female’s identity of her, still trying to find evidence in terms of eyewitnesses who may have some information as to what led to the circumstances of her death of her.”

This story is breaking. Keep an eye on this page, and we will update it with more information.

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Categories
Technology

game changers! A year in gaming – 1997 – STACK

Game changers! A year in gaming – 1997

While the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 consoles got down to serious business, backed up with several top-notch game releases, SEGA were concentrating on opening something quite big in Sydney…

Game Changers - Gran Turismo

Japanese racing game fans got a nice Christmas present to go with their traditional KFC dinners in the form of Polyphony Digital’s PlayStation masterpiece Grand Touringoriginally subtitled The Real Racing Simulator. That was a bold claim, but the racer – which took five years to develop – delivered, offering realistic (for the time) racing in either arcade or more simulation-based modes. Still one of the highest ranked racers of all time, there were 140 real-world vehicles to collect and race on 11 tracks (22 counting their reversed variants). Aussies finally got to join in the fun in May of 1998.

Game Changers - GoldenEye

Arriving two years after the James Bond movie of the same name, there wasn’t much expected from golden eye 007 on Nintendo 64. Then people got to play it… A first-person shooter with a dedicated single-player campaign, it combined shooting and stealth as the player stepped into the shoes of Bond, James Bond, to save London and the world from an economic meltdown. While that was super-fun, what really sold the game was the split-screen multiplayer, where up to four players could get their deathmatch on in various scenarios. Highly-awarded, it’s now seen as an important ground zero in the evolution of multiplayer shooters on consoles.

Game Changers - SEGA World

With the Mega Drive just deleted and the Saturn failing to take it off outside of Japan, it may have seemed a strange time to open a bespoke SEGA-themed amusement center in the heart of Sydney. However, on March 6, 1997 SEGA World opened at Darling Harbour, with a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog themed bits and bobs, the requisite plethora of arcade games and a selection of larger attractions that mostly eschewed any of SEGA’s many top-notch IPs. There was, however, the Sonic Live in Sydney musical, featuring Eggman crashing into, and subsequently trying to take over, Sydney. SEGA World closed in November 2000, and the striking red building was demolished in 2008.

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Entertainment

Social media posts suggest Milli Lucas’ doctor Charlie Teo is engaged

Social media posts suggest Milli Lucas' doctor Charlie Teo is engaged

Sydney neurosurgeon Charlie Teo could be trading scrubs for a wedding suit soon after revealing social media posts hinted he has recently become engaged to his girlfriend Traci Griffiths.

The couple met when Ms Griffiths sought Dr Teo’s expert advice in 2009, although they did not begin dating until 11 years later after the brain surgeon split from his wife.

Dr Teo previously operated on WA girl Amelia ‘Milli’ Lucas, who captured the hearts of the nation during her brave cancer battle. The 14-year-old lost her cancer battle in January 2021.

Wedding rumors have followed the well-known surgeon and his former patient for more than a year, but it appears there may now be some truth to the whispers.

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Categories
Sports

Saliba and Zinchenko fire Arsenal’s early-season hopes in sultry opener | Arsenal

Yis: the rumors are true. The Premier League, which never really went away, has returned. And it felt pretty good on a sultry Friday night, watching an Arsenal team of eager new moving parts do an excellent job of raising some tender early-season hopes at Selhurst Park.

It was 24 degrees in South London as kick-off approached on the earliest date the English top tier has ever begun. This was a desiccated kind of heat, the grass scorched white, the sky a deathly blue. The English summer does at least have a sense of irony. To avoid the Gulf sun the Premier League will instead play through a heatwave in England.

For all that this was a fun, breezy start to the season. If last week’s Community Shield felt like a kind of visitation, football reimagined as a 90-minute Sopranos dream sequence, there was a familiar tang to this. To London derby. A densely bound systems manager. That sallow summer sun. Maybe this was real after all.

It is a question that might also apply to Arsenal in a season that will define the work to this point of Mikel Arteta. They kicked off with a bold starting 11, the kind of 11 that gets bandied around on fan chats, the hopeful 11, the cake for breakfast 11. Saliba! Martinelli! No filler! Except maybe Granit Xhaka! But that’s fine, he’s also good now!

By the end of a hard-fought 2-0 victory, a scoreline that fails to reflect Crystal Palace’s resilience between the goals, it felt as though something might just be stirring here. Gabriel Jesus was good. Oleksandr Zinchenko was good for a while. William Saliba was very good, and he will draw the most attention.

Saliba made seven clearances without ever having to make a tackle. His passing from him was solid. He didn’t look flustered or even very tired by the end, a step up on the fraught, snot-stained showings of Arsenal centre-backs past. He cruised through this, teasing things out a few seconds in advance inside his head. This is good. Where have you been again?

If the game was reassuringly brisk, for opening-day TV viewers there were some disconcerting developments in the Sky Sports coverage. Before kick-off Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher were dispatched to do vox pops with fans, a step up from going out to fetch some milk, but a watering down of the role of expert analyst. Why not go all the way and just stick them in a pub somewhere?

Oleksandr Zinchenko gets away from Jordan Ayew during an assured debut.
Oleksandr Zinchenko gets away from Jordan Ayew during an assured debut. Photograph: David Klein/Reuters

Gaz and Carra did their best. But frowning blokes in replica shirts are in plentiful supply outside the paywall. Forensic, graphics-laden content is what people pay their subs for.

Then there was the weird, claustrophobic prospect of Patrick Vieira being forced to mouth breathless platitudes at half-time. This was unpleasant for all concerned. Scallop doesn’t want to do this. He isn’t part of the spectacle at that stage. This is not American wrestling just yet. Stop over-producing this thing. The game is good. Trust it.

And both of these teams were good, Arsenal right from the start. Gabriel Jesus did something brilliant with three minutes gone, stealing the ball 40 yards from goal and producing a nutmeg and a sidestep. For long periods those pink away shirts, the color of heat-damaged processed ham, found neat zippy little triangles. Zinchenko was excitingly mobile, taking more touches in the opening half hour than anyone else on the pitch.

He had a hand in the opening goal, finding five yards of untended space by making a looping run from the edge of the box. I have headed the ball back. Martinelli said it in.

Jesus was also quick on his feet, and desperate to dribble and turn. He is in outline exactly what Arsenal have needed: pressing, edge, authority. Perhaps people have forgotten how good he is, or how good he was meant to be. Between them Jesus and Martinelli had eight dribbles and four shots in the opening half hour of the season. They played together for Brazil against Japan in Tokyo in June. They should be this good.

Palace have been depleted by injury and the loss of players. Expectations are low, which might just be a useful place to be, but Vieira really does seem to know what he’s doing and which players to trust. They pressed Arsenal back either side of half-time, and used Wilfried Zaha as a weapon against Ben White. But it was also a chance for Saliba to show his qualities about him. Plus Arsenal have Saka, who made the second goal, forcing Marc Guéhi to deflect a hard low cross into his own net.

For Arteta the trajectory is clear from here, at a time to deliver on the investment in time and resources. But they have a style of play and a blueprint. The shadow of the great Arsène has passed. The flaws here are this team’s flaws, the strengths those Arteta has grafted on. Whisper it, but this was actually quite encouraging.

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Australia

Bogie shooting: Police charge Darryl Young with murders of Mervyn and Maree Schwarz, Graham Tighe

Bogie shooting: Police charge Darryl Young with murders of Mervyn and Maree Schwarz, Graham Tighe

New details have emerged about the man police accuse of murdering a respected farming family in far-north Queensland.

Darryl Young, 59, has been charged with murdering Mervyn Schwarz, 71, his wife Maree, 59, and her son Graham Tighe, 35, at the gates of his property in Bogie, which bordered the Schwarz’s farm.

Mr Tighe’s brother, Ross, was shot in the stomach, but miraculously survived after driving more than 40km to a neighboring farm to raise an alarm.

He was flown to Mackay hospital and underwent emergency surgery on Thursday night.

Police said there was a long-running boundary dispute between Young and the Schwarz’s, who purchased the sprawling 30,000ha farm for $10 million last year.

Police said Young, the Schwarz’s and the Tighe’s agreed to meet at the fence of Young’s property in a phone conversation on Wednesday evening.

Police will allege Young shot the four victims “execution-style” with a rifle.

Young is listed to appear in the Proserpine Magistrates Court on Monday.

On Friday he was charged with three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, after five people were initially taken into custody.

Young is a long-time Bogie resident who reportedly lives with his daughter, believed to be in her 20s, outside of Bowen.

He is said to be well-known in the farming community, having owned property as far south as Gladstone.

Read related topics:Brisbane

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US

Man Charged With Killing Worker Over Duck Sauce Found Dead, Police Say

Man Charged With Killing Worker Over Duck Sauce Found Dead, Police Say

A man charged with murder last month in the killing of a Chinese food delivery worker amid a dispute over duck sauce was found dead on Friday after shooting himself in his Queens apartment, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

The man’s lawyer confirmed that his client appeared to have killed himself.

The authorities found the man, Glenn Hirsch, 51, while checking on him after he failed to appear in court in the murder case, the lawyer, Arthur L. Aidala, said. An official cause of death had not been determined as of Friday afternoon, the medical examiner’s office said. Mr. Hirsch left behind a note, according to the two people with knowledge of the matter.

At the time he was found, Mr. Hirsch was free on bail with an ankle-bracelet monitor after being arraigned in June on murder and other charges in the killing of the delivery worker, Zhiwen Yan. He had pleaded not guilty and was facing up to life in prison if convicted on the murder charge.

“Glen Hirsch and I had an excellent relationship and it saddens me that he took this route when we were very well prepared to fight this in the courtroom,” Mr. Aidala said. “He consistently maintained his innocence of him.”

A lawyer for Mr. Yan’s family, Jennifer Wu, said they were “in shock” after learning of the apparent suicide. She declined further comment.

According to prosecutors, Mr. Hirsch fatally shot Mr. Yan on April 30 amid a dispute stemming from Mr. Hirsch’s feeling that he had not gotten enough duck sauce with an order he placed several months before at Great Wall, the Chinese restaurant where Mr. Yan had worked for over two decades.

Mr. Yan was on his scooter at a stoplight when Mr. Hirsch approached him on foot from across the street and fired several shots at him before driving off in a car, prosecutors said. Mr. Yan was taken to Elmhurst Hospital Center, where he was pronounced dead, officials said.

Mr. Hirsch had been involved in previous altercations with Great Wall employees, slashing one worker’s car tires and saying to employees on another occasion, “I have a gun,” prosecutors said. On one occasion, he pointed a gun at a worker who was shoveling snow outside the restaurant, prosecutors said.

Mr. Yan’s death shocked the middle-class section of Forest Hills where it occurred. Local leaders denounced the killing as a troubling example of the increase in violence against food delivery workers, many of them Asian Americans, during the coronavirus pandemic, and to the rise in bias attacks against Asian Americans more broadly.

Mr. Yan was a native of Fuzhou in southeastern China. Friends and co-workers described him as working seven days a week to support his wife and three young children and sometimes helping his wife with her job de ella at a nearby laundromat when things were slow at the restaurant.

Chelsia Rose Marcius and William K Rashbaum contributed reporting.

Categories
Technology

Jigsaw Puzzle-Solving Robot Has the Fun for You

Jigsaw Puzzle-Solving Robot Has the Fun for You

Jigsaw puzzles are a lot of fun and completing them takes a surprising amount of problem-solving skills that humans are uniquely suited for. With a typical jigsaw puzzle, the printed image acts as a key reference for determining piece location. But there are special jigsaw puzzles that are all a solid color, forcing solvers to find piece location based solely on the unique shape of the edges. Such puzzles take months of trial and error to solve — and that is for a human. Building a robot to solve those solid-color jigsaw puzzles is quite the challenge, but Shane Wighton’s engineering skills were up to the task.

As Wighton says, this is the future and robots should be able to have fun for us. But this is still quite the engineering challenge. To explain how Wighton made this work, we’ll start with the simplest part of the equation: the motion system. The robot resembles a large CNC router and that is pretty close to what it is in practice. The sturdy wood table supports a CoreXY kinematic motion system, which allows for very fast movement. It can pick up individual jig saw pieces using a vacuum suction end effector like you’d find on a pick-and-place machine. A vacuum suction table, like the kind used to hold plywood down on CNC routers, keeps the pieces i place after the robot drops them.

That’s all very impressive and it was easy compared to the rest of the robot. For this robot to solve the puzzle, it must compare every edge of every piece to every edge of every other piece. For a 5,000 piece puzzle like this, with 4 sides on each piece, the result is about 1.82×1077337 comparisons. If the robot made one comparison per second, it would take 4.2×1077319 times the age of the universe to complete the comparisons. Wighton’s algorithm performs comparisons much faster than once per second and presumably takes shortcuts like omitting solved edges and pieces, but he still estimates that it would take around 3,000 years to solve the puzzle. In his next video of him, he plans to improve the algorithm and will go into more detail at that time.

Until then, it is worth understanding how the robot compares pieces. Wighton designed a magazine for the robot to grab pieces. It then places the pieces on a backlit window to take a photo. A regular camera would distort the image and make the edge measurements inaccurate, so Wighton used a specialized (and very expensive) telecentric lens. That lens produces an image that looks as if it were taken from infinitely far away, removing all distortion so every edge is perfectly perpendicular to the plane of the image. With that distortion-free image, Wighton could use computer vision software to detect the piece edges and gather accurate measurements for his solving algorithm.

To demonstrate that, Wighton made a custom 45-piece jigsaw puzzle. The robot solved that puzzle successfully, but even this small puzzle took around an hour and a half to complete. The time per additional piece increases exponentially, not linearly. To see how Wighton manages to overcome that overwhelming hurdle, be sure to catch his next video of him.