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Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box

Gone, but not forgotten. For the longest time, one of the things that people liked to poke fun at in Windows was a dialog box used to add fonts to the system. The rarely used dialog used Windows 3.1-era icons and fonts, even in Windows Vista, making it a weird anachronism. Microsoft tidied up that bit of Windows legacy in Windows 7 by removing the box entirely, but other relics remain. One of the most annoying is the environment variables dialog. This box hasn’t been updated for what feels like millennia, and it’s cramped and awkward to use as a result. Environment variables can be lengthy, and they almost never fit in the current dialog. This is particularly acute for one of the most important variables, PATH. The PATH variable stores the names of all the directories that the system should search when hunting for executables, and many applications and development tools like to add their directories to the PATH. It quickly gets unwieldy. The current annoying dialog. And unlike the add font dialog, which people only ever looked at just to point and laugh—it was rarely used to actually install fonts—the environment variables box is actually useful, as it’s the easiest and best way of changing Windows environment variables. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box

Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

The songwriter who co-wrote Megan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” alleged on Tuesday that he only cleared $5,679 from over 178 million streams of the song on Spotify. (credit: YouTube ) A Tuesday copyright roundtable discussion, hosted by Nashville’s Belmont University and led by the House Judiciary Committee, opened with one of the past year’s most successful songwriters announcing just how little money he’d made from over 178 million streams of a song he co-wrote: $5,679. That means Nashville songwriter Kevin Kadine, the co-writer of the hit 2014 Megan Trainor song “All About That Bass,” made close to $31.90 for every million streams. According to a report by The Tenneseean , Kadine didn’t clarify to the roundtable’s five members of the House of Representatives exactly how the songwriting proceeds were split between himself and Trainor (who shared songwriting credits on “Bass”), but he did allege that the average streaming-service payout for a song’s songwriting team is roughly $90 per million streams. “That’s as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career, and number one in 78 countries,” Kadine said. “But you’re making $5,600. How do you feed your family?” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

Documentarian wipes out Warner’s $2M “Happy Birthday” copyright

(credit: From court records in Good Morning to You v. Warner/Chappell) More than two years after a documentary filmmaker challenged the copyright to the simple lyrics of the song “Happy Birthday,” a federal judge ruled Tuesday that the copyright is invalid . The result could undo Warner/Chappell’s lucrative licensing business around the song, once estimated to be $2 million per year. The company is likely to appeal the ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. US District Judge George King held  that the two sisters who authored the song, Patty and Mildred Hill, gave the melody and piano arrangements to Summy Co., which was eventually acquired by Warner/Chappell. But King wrote that there’s no evidence they ever transferred a copyright on the words. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Documentarian wipes out Warner’s $2M “Happy Birthday” copyright

Backblaze to sell cloud storage for a quarter the price of Azure, Amazon S3

Online backup provider Backblaze is branching out today with a new business: an infrastructure-as-a-service-style cloud storage API that’s going head to head with Amazon’s S3, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud Storage. But where those services charge 2¢ or more per gigabyte per month, Backblaze is pricing its service at just half a cent per gigabyte per month. Backblaze’s business is cheap storage. We’ve written about the company’s hard disk reliability data a few times over the years ; the company has found that regular consumer hard drives are more than up to the demands of providing cloud storage, though there is substantial variation between the different manufacturers and models. Backblaze has designed (and documented ) its storage hardware for the lowest possible cost, using software to provide the necessary protection against failures. It currently has more than 150 petabytes of storage. This low-cost storage means that the company can offer its $5/month unlimited size backup plan profitably. Now the company plans to sell that same cheap storage to developers. Its new B2 product is very much in the same vein as Amazon’s S3: cloud storage with an API that can be used to build a range of other applications. And the price difference is significant. Amazon S3’s cheapest online storage—reduced redundancy, for customers storing more than 5 petabytes—costs 2.2¢ per gigabyte per month. Backblaze’s B2 storage costs 0.5¢ per gigabyte per month, with the first 10GB free. This is cheaper even than Amazon’s Glacier and Google’s Nearline storage, at 1¢ per gigabyte per month, neither of which supports immediate access to data. Bandwidth costs are the same; inbound bandwidth is free, outbound is charged at 5¢ per gigabyte. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Backblaze to sell cloud storage for a quarter the price of Azure, Amazon S3

Samsung’s 950 Pro M.2 SSD pairs NVMe with V-NAND for eye-popping performance

The Samsung 950 Pro SSD—the follow up to the legendary Samsung 850 Pro SSD—has been unveiled by the company at its annual SSD summit in Seoul, Korea. The 950 Pro will be available at retail in October, with MSRPs of $199.99 (probably ~£150) for the 256GB version, and $349.99 (~£280) for the 512GB version. UK pricing is yet to be confirmed. Based on Samsung’s V-NAND technology and available in 512GB and 256GB capacities, the 950 Pro shuns the common 2.5-inch form factor and SATA interface for cutting-edge M.2 2280 and PCIe 3.0 x4. It also makes use of the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface, better known as NVMe. Most SSDs still make use of the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) architecture, which was originally developed for spinning platter SATA hard drives back in 2004. While AHCI works fine for traditional hard drives, it was never designed for low latency NAND chips. As flash speeds have increased, AHCI has become a performance bottleneck. NVMe exploits both the PCIe bus and NAND flash memory to offer higher performance and lower latency. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s 950 Pro M.2 SSD pairs NVMe with V-NAND for eye-popping performance

Air Force fighters will carry Laser cannons, cyber weapons by 2020

An artist’s rendering of HELLADS, a General Atomics-built laser weapon now in ground testing. Air Force leaders say a laser pod based on the technology could be aboard fighter aircraft within five years. DARPA Sometime very soon, combat aircraft may be zapping threats out of the sky with laser weapons. “I believe we’ll have a directed energy pod we can put on a fighter plane very soon,” Air Force General Hawk Carlisle said at this week’s Air Force Association Air & Space conference in a presentation on what he called Fifth-Generation Warfare. “That day is a lot closer than I think a lot of people think it is.” Some low-power laser weapons were on display in mock-up on the exposition floor of the conference, including a system from General Atomics that could be mounted on unmanned aircraft such as the Predator and Reaper drones flown by the Air Force. But the Air Force is looking for something akin to a laser cannon for fighter aircraft, more powerful systems that could be mounted on fighters and other manned Air Force planes within the next five years, Air Force leaders said. Directed-energy weapons pods could be affixed to aircraft to destroy or disable incoming missiles, drones, and even enemy aircraft at a much lower “cost per shot” than missiles or even guns, Carlisle suggested. The Air Force isn’t alone in seeking directed energy weapons. The US Navy has already deployed a laser weapon at sea aboard the USS Ponce, capable of a range of attacks against small boats, drones, and light aircraft posing a threat—either by blinding their sensors or operators, or heating elements to make them fail or explode. Other laser weapons are also being tested by the Office of Naval Research for use on helicopters to protect against man-portable antiaircraft missiles. (And there’s a railgun , but that’s not really a directed=energy weapon, and it’s too massive to be mounted on an aircraft). Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Air Force fighters will carry Laser cannons, cyber weapons by 2020

Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

Getting companies’ names to show up higher in search engine results is the field of the lucrative business known as search engine optimization, or SEO. There’s a range of SEO practices, from “white hat” ones that are endorsed by search engines, to “black hat” practices that, while they may not be illegal, violate search engine rules. Now Google is taking a rare legal action against one Southern California SEO company it says went too far and broke the law. In its complaint (PDF) , Google says that Tustin, California-based Local Lighthouse has bombarded consumers with “incessant, unsolicited automated telephone calls” since mid-2014, making “false guarantees of first-page placement in Google search results.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

iOS 9, thoroughly reviewed

Andrew Cunningham iOS 8 wasn’t the smoothest operating system rollout in Apple’s history. It’s true, any other ecosystem would kill for Apple’s OS adoption figures—as of this writing, 87 percent of the userbase is running some version of iOS 8. But it had a slower start than past versions of iOS, it required a ton of free space to install, and it had a few unfortunate bugs early in its life cycle that gave it a bad reputation. Like  iOS 7  this was a big release, and with any big change comes the potential for big bugs. Viewed from that lens, iOS 9 feels kind of like iOS 6 did. This is a necessary spit-and-polish release that followed two bigger, transformative releases. There’s some good stuff here, but nothing that’s quite as all-encompassing as iOS 7’s complete redesign or iOS 8’s introduction for Handoff and Continuity and Extensions. Read 180 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 9, thoroughly reviewed

New Android lockscreen hack gives attackers full access to locked devices

Software bugs that allow attackers to bypass smartphone lockscreens are common enough for both Android and iOS devices, but like a fender bender on the highway, many of us can’t resist the urge to gawk anyway. There’s a  newly disclosed way  for someone who has a few uninterrupted moments with a handset running most versions of Android 5.x to gain complete control of the device and all the data stored on it. The hack involves dumping an extremely long string into the password field after swiping open the camera from a locked phone. Unless updated in the past few days, devices running 5.0 to 5.1.1 will choke on the unwieldy number of characters and unlock, even though the password is incorrect. From there, the attacker can do anything with the phone the rightful owner can do. The following video demonstrates the attack in action. The technique begins by adding a large number of characters to the emergency call window and then copying them to the Android clipboard. (Presumably, there are other ways besides the emergency number screen to buffer a sufficiently large number of characters.) The hacker then swipes open the camera from the locked phone, accesses the options menu, and pastes the characters into the resulting password prompt. Instead of returning an error message, vulnerable handsets unlock. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Android lockscreen hack gives attackers full access to locked devices

Chicago citizens sue to halt new “Netflix tax,” an increase of 9 percent

michel Six Chicagoans have sued the Windy City over its new 9 percent tax levied as part of the “Amusement Tax Ruling ” that went into effect on September 1. The tax, which the city of Chicago maintains is “not an expansion of the laws,” imposes an additional surcharge on various online services, including Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, Xbox Live, and others. “We will be adding it to the cost we charge subscribers,” Anne Marie Squeo, a Netflix spokeswoman, previously 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 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chicago citizens sue to halt new “Netflix tax,” an increase of 9 percent