Tag: feeds

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

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

France tells Google to remove search results globally, or face big fines

Public domain. Google’s informal appeal against a French order to apply the so-called “right to be forgotten” to all of its global Internet services and domains, not just those in Europe, has been rejected. The president of the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), France’s data protection authority, gave a number of reasons for the rejection , including the fact that European orders to de-list information from search results could be easily circumvented if links were still available on Google’s other domains. CNIL’s president also claimed that “this decision does not show any willingness on the part of the CNIL to apply French law extraterritorially. It simply requests full observance of European legislation by non European players offering their services in Europe.” As you’ve probably gathered,  Google disagrees  with CNIL’s stance. In a July blog post regarding the case, the company’s global privacy chief, Peter Fleischer, wrote: “If the CNIL’s proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom. In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place. We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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France tells Google to remove search results globally, or face big fines

Computer systems outage grounds American Airlines at major hubs

American Airlines’ information systems outage is affecting its website as well as flights. An information systems outage at Chicago’s O’Hare International has grounded many American Airlines flights today. As the company tries to restore service, flights from at least three major hub airports—O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Miami—are on a “ground stop” because of the problem. At 1:32pm Eastern Time, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that American had requested a ground stop for flights out of the three airports: FAA Air Traffic Alert: @AmericanAir requested a ground stop for all of their traffic in and out of DFW/ORD/MIA due to their computer issue. — The FAA (@FAANews) September 17, 2015 During the issue, American’s Twitter feed was filling up with responses to customers: “We’re working to resolve technical issues and apologize for the inconvenience.” Some of the complaints had nothing to do specifically with the grounded flights, however—it appears the outage has also affected parts of American’s website, blocking access to frequent flyer accounts and other customer data. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Computer systems outage grounds American Airlines at major hubs

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”

Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

ZMap.io The highly clandestine attacks hitting Cisco Systems routers are much more active than previously reported. Infections have hit at least 79 devices in 19 countries, including an ISP in the US that’s hosting 25 boxes running the malicious backdoor. That discovery comes from a team of computer scientists who probed the entire IPv4 address space for infected devices. As Ars reported Tuesday, the so-called SYNful Knock router implant is activated after receiving an unusual series of non-compliant network packets followed by a hardcoded password. By sending only the out-of-sequence TCP packets but not the password to every Internet address and then monitoring the response, the researchers were able to detect which ones were infected by the backdoor. Security firm FireEye surprised the security world on Tuesday when it first reported the active outbreak of SYNful Knock. The implant is precisely the same size as the legitimate Cisco router image, and it’s loaded each time the router is restarted. It supports up to 100 modules that attackers can tailor to the specific target. FireEye found it on 14 servers in India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Ukraine. The finding was significant, because it showed an attack that had long been theorized was in fact being actively used. The new research shows it’s being used much more widely, and it’s been found in countries including the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and China. The researchers wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

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

Zuckerberg confirms a form of “dislike” button coming to Facebook

Facebook In recent interviews, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the social network’s “like” button, which users can use to quickly acknowledge posts or messages—but which also lacks a certain amount of nuance for more sensitive or sad content. As recently as December, Zuckerberg said that he wasn’t interested in a “dislike” button, but a Tuesday “town hall” Q&A saw the cofounder change his tune. “People have asked about the dislike button for many years,” Zuckerberg told a crowd on Tuesday at Facebook’s Menlo Park office (and a livestream crowd at the event’s official site ). “We’ve finally heard you, and we’re working on this.” Like in prior interviews, Zuckerberg commented on fears that a form of “dislike” button would be used to “downvote” posts à la Reddit, but on Tuesday, he acknowledged growing interest in a simple interaction that better fits sad posts—he mentioned topics ranging from personal trauma to international tragedies—that offers “the ability to express empathy.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Zuckerberg confirms a form of “dislike” button coming to Facebook

Xcode’s iOS simulator reports 2GB RAM for iPhone 6S, 4GB for iPad Pro

Developer Hamza Sood built a demo app that would display the amount of memory reported by difference iDevice simulators. Hamza Sood Apple doesn’t talk much about its SoCs beyond basic “chip X is Z percent faster than chip Y” comparisons—this is unfortunate, since Apple’s new chips are typically as fast or faster than the best high-end chips from Qualcomm and Intel when they’re released. One place where Apple has historically been stingy, though, is RAM. Even last year’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus shipped with 1GB of memory, at a time when comparable Android phones were shipping with 2 or 3GB. That may be changing for the new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus , according to some sleuthing by developer Hamza Sood . Using a custom app and the iPhone 6S simulator included with the Xcode 7.1 beta, Sood has apparently confirmed that the iPhone 6Ses will include 2GB of RAM, and the developer offers more evidence pointing to 4GB of RAM for the iPad Pro. The iPad Air 2 was the first iDevice to ship with 2GB RAM, and since the new iPad Mini 4 supports Split View multitasking we can assume that it includes at least 2GB of RAM as well (Xcode doesn’t included dedicated simulators for the iPad Mini lineup, presumably since any app running on a standard iPad will look and act the same way on an iPad Mini). This isn’t a guarantee that the new iPhones will include 2GB of RAM, but Sood’s tool running in the iPhone 6 simulator does correctly state that last year’s phone has just 1GB of RAM. It’s as close to a confirmation as we can get before we actually have hardware to test with. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Xcode’s iOS simulator reports 2GB RAM for iPhone 6S, 4GB for iPad Pro