Bizarro Devs - 🐙 Google Wins Underdog Copyright Case - Plus, Time-Lapse of London from Roman Town to Megacity

Heya,

This month, we've got no one special, just me. I did find some interesting things for you tho. Including:

🔮 Oracle loses an 11-year copyright case. Unfortunately, to Google.
🖼️ The entire Louvre oeuvre of your favorite artist is now available online.
❤️ Ranking the Muppets.

Enjoy,

Chris.

📰 From the Newsroom

Oracle's imperfect vision leads them to court loss against Google in copyright case 👩‍⚖️

The road was long: Oracle's copyright case against Google started back in 2010 over the use of Java APIs in Android. Over the course of three trials and two appeals, Oracle argued for copyright over 11,500 lines in Android's codebase.

Money saver: Had a 2018 ruling held up, Google might have paid $8.8 bn in damages. As it stands, Google and programmers everywhere can continue to use APIs to build new programs without fear.

If only they could see the future: Back in the 90s, Oracle argued that APIs shouldn't be covered by copyright.

Facebook data leak by the numbers.

How many users were affected? Roughly 533 million people are now connected to a whole range of other people from darker corners of the web. Chances that they are better than the CA dudes? 40%.

What did they get? Everything from phone numbers, email addresses, home towns, birth dates, and full names.

When did it happen? To be fair, it's hard to say. It could just be data that was exposed in April 2019. Or, it's probably just recycled from the 419 million records scraped in 2018.

But it wasn't: It turns out that it was from a different incident from 2019. Those bad actors managed to use a contact importer tool to scrape profiles and gain "limited information".

Did they get my "limited information"? The affected accounts have been added to the have i been pwned database.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

The Russian version of LotR.
The secret of synchronization.
18,000 NPR listeners voted for the best Muppet. Yes, it is controversial. The Count is a top 10 Muppet at least.
A useful list of Canva alternatives.
Who could resist a title like this: "We can do better than sociopathic business as usual".
A great time to be alive if you like portraits of smug aristocrats. The Louvre put its entire collection online
Ranking the Kindles.
Animated time-lapse of London's growth from Roman town to megacity.
The hitchhiker's guide to online anonymity.
Saltscapes: mirrors reflect the Sky in an Australian salt flat lake.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

“It potentially will eliminate the need for water consumption in data centers, so that’s a really important thing for us,”.

🧮 The numbers game

7,000 individuals from nearly 2,000 public agencies have used Clearview AI to search for people.
130 million tonnes : predicted carbon emissions from Bitcoin mining in China by 2024.
65% of surveyed European startup founders rated VCs as “low value-add” who “tried, but failed” to bring anything of value beyond money.

Outro

That's it for the week. If you have links to share, then my emails are always open. Simply reply to this email to land in my inbox.

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Have a great month, Chris.