Millions of accounts associated with video sharing site Dailymotion, one of the biggest video platforms in the world, have been stolen. From a ZDNet report: A hacker extracted 85.2 million unique email addresses and usernames from the company’s systems, but about one-in-five accounts — roughly 18.3 million– had associated passwords, which were scrambled with the bcrypt hashing function, making the passwords difficult to crack. The hack is believed to have been carried out on October 20 by a hacker, whose identity isn’t known, according to LeakedSource, a breach notification service, which obtained the data. Dailymotion launched in 2005, and is currently the 113rd most visited website in the world, according to Alexa rankings. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs
Netflix announced last week that it is getting offline video downloads support. The company has since shared that it is using VP9 video compression codec to ensure that the file sizes don’t weigh a lot. An anonymous reader shares an article on Slashgear (edited): For streaming content, Netflix largely relies on H.264/AVC to reduce the bandwidth, but for downloading content, it uses VP9 encoding. VP9 can allow better quality videos for the same amount of data needed to download. The challenge is that VP9 isn’t supported by all streaming providers — it is supported on Android devices and via the Chrome browser. So to get around that lack of support on iOS, Netflix is offering downloads in H.264/AVC High whereas streams are encoded in H.264/AVC Main on such devices. Netflix chooses the optimal encoding format for each title on its service after finding, for instance, that animated films are easier to encode than live-action. Netflix says that H.264 High encoding saves 19% bandwidth compared to other encoding standards while VP9 saves 36%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs
Canonical Sues Cloud Provider Over ‘Unofficial’ Ubuntu Images
An anonymous reader quotes OStatic’s update on Canonical’s lawsuit against a cloud provider: Canonical posted Thursday that they’ve been in a dispute with “a European cloud provider” over the use of their own homespun version of Ubuntu on their cloud servers. Their implementation disables even the most basic of security features and Canonical is worried something bad could happen and it’d reflect badly back on them… They said they’ve spent months trying to get the unnamed provider to use the standard Ubuntu as delivered to other commercial operations to no avail. Canonical feels they have no choice but to “take legal steps to remove these images.” They’re sure Red Hat and Microsoft wouldn’t be treated like this. Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, wrote in his blog post that Ubuntu is “the leading cloud OS, running most workloads in public clouds today, ” whereas these homegrown images “are likely to behave unpredictably on update in weirdly creative and mysterious ways… We hear about these issues all the time, because users assume there is a problem with Ubuntu on that cloud; users expect that ‘all things that claim to be Ubuntu are genuine’, and they have a right to expect that… “To count some of the ways we have seen home-grown images create operational and security nightmares for users: clouds have baked private keys into their public images, so that any user could SSH into any machine; clouds have made changes that then blocked security updates for over a week… When things like this happen, users are left feeling let down. As the company behind Ubuntu, it falls to Canonical to take action.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Canonical Sues Cloud Provider Over ‘Unofficial’ Ubuntu Images
Lisa From TSA Wants You to Pick Up Your Laptop, Thanks
In October and November, around 70 people left their laptops at a single airport security checkpoint at the Newark Airport. It’s not only the cheap stuff that’s gets abandoned—a fair amount of Macbooks are getting left behind as well. Read more…
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Lisa From TSA Wants You to Pick Up Your Laptop, Thanks
Chrome 55 Now Blocks Flash, Uses HTML5 By Default
An anonymous reader quotes Bleeping Computer: Chrome 55, released earlier this week, now blocks all Adobe Flash content by default, according to a plan set in motion by Google engineers earlier this year… While some of the initial implementation details of the “HTML5 By Default” plan changed since then, Flash has been phased out in favor of HTML5 as the primary technology for playing multimedia content in Chrome. Google’s plan is to turn off Flash and use HTML5 for all sites. Where HTML5 isn’t supported, Chrome will prompt users and ask them if they want to run Flash to view multimedia content. The user’s option would be remembered for subsequent visits, but there’s also an option in the browser’s settings section, under Settings > Content Settings > Flash > Manage Exceptions, where users can add the websites they want to allow Flash to run by default. Exceptions will also be made automatically for your more frequently-visited sites — which, for many users, will include YouTube. And Chrome will continue to ship with Flash — as well as an option to re-enable Flash on all sites. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Chrome 55 Now Blocks Flash, Uses HTML5 By Default
Lawyer Sues 20-Year-Old Student Who Gave a Bad Yelp Review, Loses Badly
20-year-old Lan Cai was in a car crash this summer, after she was plowed into by a drunk driver and broke two bones in her lower back. She didn’t know how to navigate her car insurance and prove damages, so she reached out for legal help. Things didn’t go as one would have liked, initially, as ArsTechnica documents:The help she got, Cai said, was less than satisfactory. Lawyers from the Tuan A. Khuu law firm ignored her contacts, and at one point they came into her bedroom while Cai was sleeping in her underwear. “Seriously, it’s super unprofessional!” she wrote on Facebook. (The firm maintains it was invited in by Cai’s mother.) She also took to Yelp to warn others about her bad experience. The posts led to a threatening e-mail from Tuan Khuu attorney Keith Nguyen. Nguyen and his associates went ahead and filed that lawsuit, demanding the young woman pay up between $100, 000 and $200, 000 — more than 100 times what she had in her bank account. Nguyen said he didn’t feel bad at all about suing Cai. Cai didn’t remove her review, though. Instead she fought back against the Khuu firm, all thanks to attorney Michael Fleming, who took her case pro bono. Fleming filed a motion arguing that, first and foremost, Cai’s social media complaints were true. Second, she couldn’t do much to damage the reputation of a firm that already had multiple poor reviews. He argued the lawsuit was a clear SLAPP (strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Ultimately, the judge agreed with Fleming, ordering the Khuu firm to pay $26, 831.55 in attorneys’ fees. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Lawyer Sues 20-Year-Old Student Who Gave a Bad Yelp Review, Loses Badly
We Just Found Out There Are ‘Bees’ in the Sea
In case you thought we’d figured out life in the oceans even a little bit, a new study published in Nature Communications sets the record straight. For the first time, scientists have found experimental evidence of underwater pollination. There are bees in the sea—or at least creatures that perform the same kind of… Read more…
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We Just Found Out There Are ‘Bees’ in the Sea
Carnival Cruises to Pay $40 Million Fine for Secretly Dumping Shit Water Since 2005
Cruises are like floating piles of shit and piss that you pay to ride for a week. But sometimes cruises need to release a bit of that shit and piss so that the ship doesn’t sink. Dumping of bilge water is tightly regulated when cruises are near populated areas. But Princess Cruises, owned by Carnival Corp, just spent… Read more…
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Carnival Cruises to Pay $40 Million Fine for Secretly Dumping Shit Water Since 2005
Watch Chernobyl’s Huge Radiation Shield Slide in and Enclose the Damaged Nuclear Reactor
We already saw how the new $1.6 billion sarcophagus —the 843-foot wide, 354-foot tall steel shield that entombs the radioactive material leaking from the damaged nuclear reactor left over from the Chernobyl disaster—was going to be put in place to replace the old concrete structure that enclosed the damaged reactor… Read more…
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Watch Chernobyl’s Huge Radiation Shield Slide in and Enclose the Damaged Nuclear Reactor
VLC Media Player Previews 360-degree Video Support
VideoLAN has released a technical preview of VLC Media Player 3.0 with 360-degree video support. The new build handles videos following the Spatial Video format, and photos and panoramas following the Spherical spec (the official test page has sample files). From an article on SoftwareCrew:The files play back just like any other video, but you can now left-click and drag within the screen or use the numeric keypad arrows to look around. VideoLAN says there are multiple display modes — Zoom, Little Planet and Reverse Little Planet — although we couldn’t immediately see how they were activated. This initial release is only available for Windows and Mac, but eventually 360-degree support will arrive for Android, iOS and Xbox One, with VR headset support likely to arrive in 2017. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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VLC Media Player Previews 360-degree Video Support