Tag: brides-cond

So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015

This week WordPress released the latest edition of its recurring transparency report , revealing 43 percent  of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests it received have been rejected in the first six months of 2015. It’s the lowest six-month period shown in the report, though it only dates back to 2014. However, WordPress said this headline figure would be even higher if it “counted suspended sites as rejected notices.” That change in calculation would bump the WordPress DMCA denial rate to 67 percent between January 1 and June 30, 2015. In total, the publishing platform received 4,679 DMCA takedown requests as of June 30, identifying 12 percent of those as “abusive.” The top three organizations submitting these requests were Web Sheriff, Audiolock, and InternetSecurities. “Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by third party take down services, many of whom use automated bots to identify copyrighted content and generate takedown notices,” WordPress noted. The company wrote at length about this practice in April, both explaining and condemning the general procedure. “These kind of automated systems scour the Web, firing off takedown notifications where unauthorized uses of material are found—so humans don’t have to,” WordPress wrote . “Sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t always work out as smoothly in practice. Much akin to some nightmare scenario from the Terminator , sometimes the bots turn on their creators.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015

AT&T gets DirecTV merger approval, must deploy fiber to 12.5M customers

AT&T’s $48.5 billion purchase of DirecTV is a done deal, as the Federal Communications Commission today announced that it has voted to approve the merger. The FCC imposed conditions on the acquisition, saying they ensure the combination will be in the public interest. AT&T will become the largest pay-TV company in the nation with about 26 million subscribers, jumping ahead of Comcast.”As part of the merger, AT&T-DirecTV will be required to expand its deployment of high-speed, fiber optic broadband Internet access service to 12.5 million customer locations as well as to E-rate eligible schools and libraries,” the FCC’s announcement said. (The federal E-rate program provides discounts on Internet service. AT&T will also have to provide discounted broadband to low-income customers.) AT&T had proposed the fiber build condition itself, though it has said the total number of planned fiber connections is just 2 million more than the amount it would have built even if the merger had not been approved. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T gets DirecTV merger approval, must deploy fiber to 12.5M customers

Qualcomm quarterly profits plummet 47 percent year-over-year

Qualcomm, the world’s largest supplier of chips for mobile phones, is reeling after announcing a 47 percent drop in quarterly profit compared to the same period in 2014. On Wednesday, the San Diego-based firm said that it made $1.2 billion in net income during the third fiscal quarter of 2015, down from $2.2 billion a year ago. As a way to bounce back, the company also announced that it would be cutting 15 percent of its workforce, and would “significantly reduce [our] temporary workforce.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Qualcomm quarterly profits plummet 47 percent year-over-year

Bug in latest version of OS X gives attackers unfettered root privileges

A bug in the latest version of Apple’s OS X gives attackers the ability to obtain unfettered root user privileges, a feat that makes it easier to surreptitiously infect Macs with rootkits and other types of persistent malware. The privilege-escalation bug, which was reported in a blog post published Tuesday by security researcher Stefan Esser, is the type of security hole attackers regularly exploit to bypass security protections built into modern operating systems and applications. Hacking Team, the Italian malware-as-a-service provider that catered to governments around the world, recently exploited similar elevation-of-privileges bugs in Microsoft Windows . When combined with a zero-day exploit targeting Adobe’s Flash media player , Hacking Team was able to pierce security protections built into Google Chrome , widely regarded as the Internet’s most secure browser by default. According to Esser, the OS X privilege-escalation flaw stems from new error-logging features that Apple added to OS X 10.10. Developers didn’t use standard safeguards involving additions to the OS X dynamic linker dyld , a failure that allows attackers to open or create files with root privileges that can reside anywhere in the OS X file system. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bug in latest version of OS X gives attackers unfettered root privileges

British man receives world’s first bionic eye implant for macular degeneration

A British man has become the first person in the world to receive a bionic eye implant that corrects for age-related macular degeneration (AMD)—the most common cause of vision loss in adults. The implant was a success: previously, the patient had no central vision at all; now, he has low-resolution central vision. The operation was carried out at Manchester Royal Eye Hospital; the recipient of the implant was Ray Flynn, aged 80. The macula is at the back of the eye, in the central region of the retina. It is responsible for all of your high-resolution central vision—that is, when you gaze directly at something, it is the visual receptors in the macula that turn the light that reaches them into vision. With AMD, detritus (called drusen) slowly builds up between the vascular layer of the eye (the choroid) and the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE)—the layer that rods and cones are attached to. If too much drusen builds up, blood blow to the RPE is reduced enough that the rods and cones wither. AMD happens quite slowly, but eventually it can result in a complete loss of central vision, which makes it hard to recognise faces, read books, interact with computers, and so on. AMD is common amongst older people, and as our average life expectancy continues to increase, so does the number of people with AMD: about 500,000 people have it in the UK, and between 2 and 3 million people have it in the US. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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British man receives world’s first bionic eye implant for macular degeneration

The iPod lives! Mid-year bump adds new colors and 128GB 64-bit iPod Touch

The iPod lineup hasn’t gotten a significant hardware update since 2012, if you can believe it. For the Shuffle and the Nano, this isn’t a big deal; dedicated music players stopped evolving pretty much the minute the iPhone started to go mainstream. For the iPod Touch, it was more unfortunate—it’s a fully-fledged iDevice and one of the cheapest entry points into the ecosystem, so saddling it with the same Apple A5 SoC as the iPhone 4S for three years was rather unfortunate. That changes today. Apple has just updated the entire iPod lineup, including new colors for the (essentially unchanged) Nano and Shuffle as well as a significant internal overhaul for the iPod Touch. It picks up a 64-bit chip and an 8MP camera, both of which should make it run iOS 9 and future versions much better than the previous Touch. All the new iPods come in Space Gray, silver, gold, pink, blue, and red enclosures. The gold color, new to the iPod lineup, looks like the same finish used on iPhones and iPads and MacBooks. The pink, blue, and red shades all look darker and more saturated than they did before. The new iPod Touch runs iOS 8.4 and costs $199, $249, $299, or $399 for 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB. The 128GB option is exclusive to Apple, which means you won’t find it in a Best Buy or Wal-Mart. The Nano costs $149 for 16GB, and the Shuffle costs $49 for 2GB. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The iPod lives! Mid-year bump adds new colors and 128GB 64-bit iPod Touch

Here’s what Windows 10’s DVD and USB packaging will look like

Glorious purple for the Windows 10 Pro DVD. @MicrosoftInside Windows 10 will be available on both DVD and USB memory stick for the first, and possibly even the last, time. By the time the next version of Windows is released— if there is one —it’s hard to imagine that optical media will still be abundant, but this release comes on both the old shiny disc and the new USB key. Mundane blue for the Windows 10 Home DVD. @MicrosoftInside The different media have different packaging, and Twitter user @MicrosoftInside  has posted pictures of what they’ll look like. The DVD boxes will include a screenshot of the operating system on the front. The USB version will stick with a simple logo. The two versions of the operating system, Home and Pro, will sport different colors. The Pro version’s superiority is affirmed through its striking purple color, leaving Home to blue mediocrity. And the USB media get a simpler look. @MicrosoftInside   Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Here’s what Windows 10’s DVD and USB packaging will look like

Breaking: Ellen Pao steps down as reddit CEO

Embattled reddit CEO Ellen Pao has stepped down from her position at the privately held company, effectively immediately. A spokesperson for reddit indicated that the separation was mutually agreed upon and that Pao will be replaced by original reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman. According to the New York Times,  Pao will continue to advise reddit’s board until the end of the year. In an interview with Re/code’s Kara Swisher, Pao is quoted as saying that her departure stems from a disagreement with reddit’s board of directors on the direction reddit should go. “They had a more aggressive view than I did,” said Pao. The move comes one week after a massive user-led protest left large swaths of the site inaccessible to the public. The protest was sparked by the firing of Victoria Taylor , a reddit employee who facilitated the site’s “Ask Me Anything” question-and-answer chats (called “AMAs”). Volunteer moderators of the /r/IAmA subreddit took the discussion area offline to try to figure out a way forward without Taylor’s help, characterizing Taylor’s dismissal as the latest in a long string of poorly communicated moves by reddit’s administrators. Other subreddit moderators quickly followed suit in a show of solidarity, and by last Thursday evening, one-third of the site’s “default” subreddits were inaccessible. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Breaking: Ellen Pao steps down as reddit CEO

Adobe Flash exploit that was leaked by Hacking Team goes wild; patch now!

Adobe Systems has updated its Flash media player to patch a vulnerability that attackers started exploiting soon after attack code leaked from the devastating Hacking Team breach. As Ars reported Tuesday morning, the previously unknown Flash vulnerability was part of some 400 gigabytes of data dumped on the Internet by unknown attackers who hacked Hacking Team over the weekend. By Tuesday afternoon, the critical flaw was being targeted in the wild by an array of malware titles, including the Angler and Nuclear exploit kits, as first documented by the security researcher known as Kafeine . The exploit has also been folded in to the Metasploit hacking framework . The vulnerability is cataloged as CVE-2015-5119 and is active in Flash versions 18.0.0.194 and earlier. According to security firm Rapid 7, it stems from a use-after-free bug that can be exploited while Flash is handling ByteArray objects. The update is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems. Adobe has credited Google’s Project Zero and Morgan Marquis-Boire, director of security, First Look Media, for reporting the critical bug and working to protect Flash users. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Adobe Flash exploit that was leaked by Hacking Team goes wild; patch now!

Chicago Netflix customers: Your bill is about to go up 9 percent

Starting Wednesday, the city of Chicago’s new ” cloud tax ” went into effect: it imposes a 9-percent tax on “patrons of amusement,” including those services that are “delivered electronically.” In short: Netflix users in Chicago will be paying a little extra for their subscriptions pretty soon. “We will be adding it to the cost we charge subscribers,” Anne Marie Squeo, a Netflix spokeswoman, told Ars in a statement. “Jurisdictions around the world, including the US, are trying to figure out ways to tax online services. This is one approach.” Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chicago Netflix customers: Your bill is about to go up 9 percent