Firefox 51 Arrives With HTTP Warning, WebGL 2 and FLAC Support

Reader Krystalo writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 51 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The new version includes a new warning for websites which collect passwords but don’t use HTTPS, WebGL 2 support for better 3D graphics, and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) playback. Mozilla doesn’t break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say “half a billion people around the world” use the browser. In other words, it’s a major platform that web developers target — even in a world increasingly dominated by mobile apps. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Firefox 51 Arrives With HTTP Warning, WebGL 2 and FLAC Support

Bitcoin Is Crashing

An anonymous reader writes: Bitcoin is getting smashed. The cryptocurrency was down 18% to about $892 per coin as of 8:17 a.m. ET on Thursday. It is the biggest drop in two years. Earlier this week, on its first trading day of the new year, Bitcoin crossed above the $1, 000 mark for the first time since 2013, but it has now tumbled below that level. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Is Crashing

HandBrake 1.0.0 Released After 13 Years Of Development

HandBrake, popular open source video transcoder, has finally hit version 1.0.0 affter spending roughly more than 13 years in development. HandBrake 1.0.0 brings tons of new presets and support for more devices and file types. From a report: HandBrake 1.0.0 comes with new web and MKV presets. The official presets from HandBrake 0.10.x can be found under ‘Legacy.’ New Jason-based preset system, including command line support, has been added. The additional features of HandBrake are title/chapter selection, queuing up multiple encodes, chapter markers, subtitles, different video filters, and video preview. Just in case you have a compatible Skylake or later CPU, Intel QuickSync Video H.265/HEVC encoder support brings performance improvements. HandBrake 1.0.0 also brings along new online documentation beta. It’s written in a simple and easy-to-understand language.You can download it here. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HandBrake 1.0.0 Released After 13 Years Of Development

Bitcoin Circulation Hits Record High Of $14 Billion

Bitcoin, the digital currency that most people have never actually used, has hit a record value of $14 billion after jumping 5 percent on Thursday. From a report on The Guardian: The price of one bitcoin reached $875 on the Europe-based Bitstamp exchange, its strongest level since January 2014, putting the cryptocurrency on track for its best daily performance in six months. That compared with levels around $435 at the start of the year, with many experts linking bitcoin’s rise with the steady depreciation of the Chinese yuan, which has slid almost 7% in 2016. Data shows the majority of bitcoin trading is done in China, so any increase in demand from there tends to have a significant impact on the price. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Circulation Hits Record High Of $14 Billion

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

British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Thousands of British TV programs are to be digitized before they are lost forever, the British Film Institute says. Anarchic children’s show Tiswas and The Basil Brush Show are among the programs in line for preservation. The initiative was announced as part of the BFI’s five-year strategy for 2017-2022. “Material from the 70s and early 80s is at risk, ” said Heather Stewart, the BFI’s creative director. “It has a five or six-year shelf life and if we don’t do something about it will just go, no matter how great the environment is we keep it in. “Our job is make sure that things are there in 200 years’ time.” The BFI has budgeted $14.3 million of Lottery funding towards its goal of making the UK’s entire screen heritage digitally accessible. This includes an estimated 100, 000 of the “most at-risk” British TV episodes and clips held on obsolete video formats. The list includes “early children’s programming, little-seen dramas, regional programs and the beginnings of breakfast television.” The issue for the BFI, Ms Stewart added, was also to do with freeing up storage space. “We have a whole vault which is wall-to-wall video. If we digitized it, it would be in a robot about the size of a wardrobe, ” she said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear

Amazon Bans Incentivized Reviews Tied To Free Or Discounted Products

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon is making a significant change to its Community Guidelines, announced today, which will eliminate any incentivized reviews, except for those that emerge from within its own Amazon Vine program. This program allows Amazon — not the seller or vendor — to identify trusted reviewers, and has a number of controls in place in order to keep bias out of the review process. Amazon has historically prohibited compensation for reviews — even going so far as to sue those businesses who pay for fake reviews, as well as the individuals who write them, in an effort to make its review and rating system fairer and more helpful to online shoppers. However, it has allowed businesses to offer products to customers in exchange for their “honest” review. The only condition was that those reviewers would have to disclose their affiliation with the business in question in the text of their review. Reviewers were generally offered the product for free or at a discounted price, in exchange for their review. Although, in theory, these reviewers could write their true opinion on the product — positive or negative — these incentivized reviews have tended to be overwhelmingly biased in favor of the product being rated. Amazon says that, going forward, the only incentivized reviews will be those from Amazon Vine. These don’t work the same way, however. For starters, Amazon selects who will be allowed to review products, and it does so mainly to boost the review count on new or pre-release products that haven’t yet generated enough sales to have a large number of organic reviews. Vine reviewers are invited to join the program only after having written a number of reviews voted as “helpful” by other customers, and tend to have expertise in a specific product category. In addition, vendors don’t have any contact with Vine reviewers, nor do they get to influence which reviewers will receive their products, which are submitted directly to Amazon for distribution. These changes will apply to all product categories other than books, as Amazon has always allowed advance copies of books to be distributed, the retailer notes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon Bans Incentivized Reviews Tied To Free Or Discounted Products

Probe Of Leaked US NSA Hacking Tools Examines Operative’s Mistake

Joseph Menn and John Walcott, reporting for Reuters: A U.S. investigation into a leak of hacking tools used by the National Security Agency is focusing on a theory that one of its operatives carelessly left them available on a remote computer and Russian hackers found them, four people with direct knowledge of the probe told Reuters. The tools, which enable hackers to exploit software flaws in computer and communications systems from vendors such as Cisco Systems and Fortinet Inc, were dumped onto public websites last month by a group calling itself Shadow Brokers. The public release of the tools coincided with U.S. officials saying they had concluded that Russia or its proxies were responsible for hacking political party organizations in the run-up to the Nov. 8 presidential election. On Thursday, lawmakers accused Russia of being responsible. Various explanations have been floated by officials in Washington as to how the tools were stolen. Some feared it was the work of a leaker similar to former agency contractor Edward Snowden, while others suspected the Russians might have hacked into NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Probe Of Leaked US NSA Hacking Tools Examines Operative’s Mistake

The Ham Radio Parity Act Unanimously Passed By US House

This week the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed “The Ham Radio Parity Act” — a huge victory for grass-roots advocates of amateur radio. Slashdot reader bobbied reports: This will allow for the reasonable accommodation of amateur radio antennas in many places where they are currently prohibited by homeowner associations or private land use restrictions… If this bill passes the Senate, we will be one step closer to allowing amateur radio operators, who provide emergency communications services, the right to erect reasonable antenna structures in places where they cannot do so now. The national ham radio association is now urging supporters to contact their Senators through a special web page. “This is not just a feel-good bill, ” said representative Joe Courtney, remembering how Hurricane Sandy brought down the power grid, and “we saw all the advanced communications we take for granted…completely fall by the wayside.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Ham Radio Parity Act Unanimously Passed By US House