Copyright holders were not shy about asking Google to remove pirated content in 2014. Last year, there were over 345 million requests to take down infringing content, according to a Torrent Freak summary of Google’s weekly transparency reports . That’s a 75 percent increase from 2013. Google honored most of the requests. Read more…
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Copyright Holders Asked Google to Remove 345 Million Links Last Year
An anonymous reader writes The Pirate Bay’s crew have remained awfully quiet on the recent raid in public, but today Mr 10100100000 breaks the silence in order to get a message out to the world. In a nutshell, he says that they couldn’t care less, are going to remain on hiatus, and a comeback is possible. In recent days mirrors of The Pirate Bay appeared online and many of these have now started to add new content as well. According to TPB this is a positive development, but people should be wary of scams. Mr 10100100000 says that they would open source the engine of the site, if the code “wouldn’t be so s****y”. In any case, they recommend people keeping the Kopimi spirit alive, as TPB is much more than some hardware stored in a dusty datacenter. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science Insider: New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences — and geography — of scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don’t get cited much. The system attempts to rule out certain kinds of innocent copying: “It’s a fairly sophisticated machine learning logistic classifier, ” says arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Cornell University. “It has special ways of detecting block quotes, italicized text, text in quotation marks, as well statements of mathematical theorems, to avoid false positives.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Study of Massive Preprint Archive Hints At the Geography of Plagiarism
jones_supa writes As anticipated, Linus Torvalds officially released Linux 3.18. The new version is now out there, though that nasty lockup issue has still yet to be resolved. Dave Jones is nearing the end of bisecting the issue, but since it also affects Linux 3.17 and not too many people seem to get hit by the lockups, Linus Torvalds decided to go ahead and do the 3.18 release on schedule. Linus was also concerned that dragging out the 3.18 release would then complicate the Linux 3.19 merge window due to the holidays later this month. Now the Linux 3.19 kernel merge window is open for two weeks of exciting changes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Linux 3.18 Released, Lockup Bug Still Present
An anonymous reader writes: On Friday a U.S. federal judge approved a settlement in the Apple ebook price-fixing case that could see the technology giant paying $450 million. $400 million of that would go to the roughly 23 million consumers thought to be affected by the price fixing, and the rest would go to lawyers. Though the case is now settled, the dollar amount is not necessarily final — an appeals court still has to rule on a previous verdict. If the appeals court finds in Apple’s favor, then the total settlement drops to only $70 million. If they find against Apple, then it’s the full amount. “The settlement appeared to reflect fatigue by Apple, the Justice Department, state attorneys general and class-action lawyers eager to conclude a case that has dragged on, largely because of delays by Apple.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Judge Approves $450M Settlement For Apple’s Ebook Price Fixing
vinces99 writes A couple of years ago a scientist looking at dozens of MRI scans of human brains noticed something surprising: A large fiber pathway that seemed to be part of the network of connections that process visual information that wasn’t mentioned in any modern-day anatomy textbooks. “It was this massive bundle of fibers, visible in every brain I examined, ” said Jason Yeatman, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. “… As far as I could tell, it was absent from the literature and from all major neuroanatomy textbooks.'”With colleagues at Stanford University, Yeatman started some detective work to figure out the identity of that mysterious fiber bundle. The researchers found an early 20th century atlas that depicted the structure, now known as the vertical occipital fasciculus. But the last time that atlas had been checked out was 1912, meaning the researchers were the first to view the images in the last century. They describes the history and controversy of the elusive pathway in a paper published Nov. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You’d think that we’d have found all the parts of the human body by now, but not necessarily. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Major Brain Pathway Rediscovered After Century-old Confusion, Controversy
An anonymous reader writes After Disney objected to musician Joel Zimmerman [aka Deadmau5]’s trademark application in the U.S. (his logo is already properly trademarked in many other countries), a battle of trademarks and copyrights ensued. Apparently, Disney was (URL has since been disabled, as per DMCA law requires) hosting a video containing a remix of music which Zimmerman claims ownership of. Not only that, but the Deadmau5 logo was prominently displayed next to said video. The mouse fight was on and a few hours ago Deadmau5 retaliated with a rather surprising counter attack. As it turns out, Disney is hosting a Deadmau5 video on their website, without permission. “Disney prominently features the deadmau5 Mark next to the Infringing Video. implying a non-existent endorsement by Zimmerman, ” the letter reads. “Again. we are unaware of any license allowing you the right to reproduce, distribute or otherwise exploit the deadmau5 Mark or to exploit Zimmerman’s name and likeness in connection with same.” At the time of writing Disney hasn’t complied with the request, but it seems that they have no other option than to comply. Whether it will change anything in their stance towards the DJ’s mouse ear trademark application is doubtful though. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Deadmau5 Accuses Disney of Pirating His Music
itwbennett (1594911) writes In a follow-up to yesterday’s story about the Chinese hackers who stole hospital data of 4.5 million patients, IDG News Service’s Martyn Williams set out to learn why the data, which didn’t include credit card information was so valuable. The answer is depressingly simple: people without health insurance can potentially get treatment by using medical data of one of the hacking victims. John Halamka, chief information officer of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network, said a medical record can be worth between $50 and $250 to the right customer — many times more than the amount typically paid for a credit card number, or the cents paid for a user name and password. ‘If I am one of the 50 million Americans who are uninsured … and I need a million-dollar heart transplant, for $250 I can get a complete medical record including insurance company details, ‘ he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Why Chinese Hackers Would Want US Hospital Patient Data
MediaPortal 1.9.0 Pre Release Attached to this news you will find the Pre Release version of MediaPortal 1.9.0. Pre Releases are provided as a way for the community to test and give feedback on all the exciting things we have lined up for the next release. We allocate about one month for Pre Release testing with your help. For this Pre Release we’ve put our focus once more on Bug fixing and improved stability. However, there are a couple of new features. Skin designers will like the new and functions. There are enhancements to the video resolution logos that will give you more information about the video you are watching. There is a new sort method in My Videos called Name with Duration. There are several improvements to logging, and a significant number of bug fixes. Scroll down to the ‘Full list of changes’ to read up on all of them! Highlights of this release UNC Streaming for Live TV The default protocol for LiveTV streaming on a multi-seat setup is RTSP. MediaPortal has an option to change this to UNC for those that experience problems with RTSP. In the last release, we fixed some long-standing issues with UNC paths. Therefore, this option (which was previously hidden) is now present in configuration. Thumbnails Thumbnails are a really important way for you to get feedback about video files, and these have been improved in several ways in this release. Individual plugins can now use their own default thumbs. Issues with large thumbnail creation are fixed. Content Protection We found a number of issues with content protection. It wasn’t working properly in date view in ‘Pictures’. Also, the PIN code was shown unencrypted in the configuration files. This is all now fixed, and the PIN code now supports letters as well as numbers. However, you will need to reset all your PIN codes for this release. Titan Extended The Titan team have decide to stop development on Titan Extended. Therefore it has been removed from the installer. If you already have Titan Extended, this won’t affect you. For clean installs you will need to download Titan Extended manually from the plugins repository in order to find skin files for plugins. For 1.9.0, plugin developers will need to provide the Titan skin files as part of their own installers. Titan TNC will be the new skin name of the Titan Extended theme, and this will be released as a stand-alone skin, probably at the same time as the 1.9 Final release. Full list of changes You can review the complete change log for 1.9.0 Pre Release by using the link below: Changelog: MediaPortal Documentation of new features can be found at the following link: What’s new for MediaPortal 1.9.0 (Pre Release ) Installation, Upgrade, Download and Feedback Installation Since we switched to .NET4 you need to make sure you have.NET4 installed on your computer (not needed if you are on Windows 8 because it comes with .NET4, but you NEED the .NET 3.5 features enabled! ). Otherwise you are not able to install MediaPortal and the installer just quits. Download-Link: Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (Standalone Installer) Aside from that when doing a clean installation of the 1.9.0 Pre Release there is nothing else to worry about. Upgrade Upgrading from 1.2.x, 1.3.0 Alpha/Beta/RC/Final, 1.4.0 until 1.8 to 1.9.0 Pre Release All MediaPortal 1.2.x, 1.3.0 Alpha/Beta/RC/Final, 1.4.0 till 1.8 installations can be upgraded to 1.9.0 Pre Release, without losing your settings. Plugins: If you are running MediaPortal 1.6.0 or earlier, then it is possible that some of your previously installed plugins will be shown as incompatible after the upgrade to 1.9.0 Pre Release! Whether or not a plugin is incompatible depends on the MediaPortal subsystems the plugin uses. All plugins that work for the 1.8 release, should also work with the 1.9.0 Pre Release. Skins: Warning! Due to the new features and changes introduced in 1.4.0, none of the 1.3.x skins are compatible with 1.9.0 Pre Release! Please contact the author of the skin you use for further information and updates. Upgrading Extensions: The easiest way to upgrade your extensions is by launching the MediaPortal Extension Installer , and let it check for updated versions. However this only works for extensions that use our MPEI system. If the author of the extension releases it as a stand alone installer, you must contact them for an updated version. Upgrading from 1.2.0 Alpha or earlier to 1.9.0 Pre Release All MediaPortal installations starting with 1.1.0 RC1 can be upgraded to 1.9.0 Pre Release, without losing your settings. If you are running MediaPortal 1.2.0 Alpha or earlier, then none of your extensions (plugins and skins) will work after the upgrade to 1.9.0 Pre Release! You must update your extensions after the upgrade! So, please make sure that 1.9.0 Pre Release compatible versions of your extensions are available before you start the upgrade! General note about Upgrades Manually stop TV-Service! On some systems our installer is not able to update the TV-Server installation because its files are locked or the service can not be stopped. For upgrades to 1.9.0 Pre Release we recommend that you manually stop the TV-Service and make sure, via Windows Task Manager (enable the “all users” option), that the TvService.exe process is really gone before starting to upgrade. Custom TV-Service properties If you manually changed the properties of the TV-Service (like restart on error options) , then you must redo these changes after the upgrade. The installer is not able to save and restore your custom service properties when it installs the new version of the TV-Service. Feedback If you think you found a bug then please post a detailed report in our Bug Reports Forum . Make sure your report includes all the required information . Incomplete reports will be removed to keep the forum clean. Download Finally – the download. We hope that you took the time to read this release news entirely because it includes vital information about the major changes. If you would like to support MediaPortal, we would be happy to receive a small donation ! The Team wishes you a lot of fun with this new release! .::. Download – MediaPortal 1.9.0 Pre Release .::. :: Post a Comment ::
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MediaPortal 1.9.0 Pre Released
An anonymous reader writes Facebook posted a career application which, in their own words is ‘seeking a Linux Kernel Software Engineer to join our Kernel team, with a primary focus on the networking subsystem. Our goal over the next few years is for the Linux kernel network stack to rival or exceed that of FreeBSD.’ Two interesting bullet points listing “responsibilities”: Improve IPv6 support in the kernel, and eliminate perf and stability issues. FB is one of the worlds largest IPv6 deployments; Investigate and participate in emerging protocols (MPTCP, QUIC, etc) discussions, implementation, experimentation, tooling, etc. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Facebook Seeks Devs To Make Linux Network Stack As Good As FreeBSD’s