Tag: feeds

With vinyl sales on the rise, this startup lets anyone press their own LP

We often talk about the lost magic of owning a physical thing , whether that’s books, CDs, or the wondrous black slab of plastic that is the vinyl record. Holding that object in your hand, flicking through its dog-eared pages and admiring its intricately crafted artwork, imparts a sense of ownership that you just can’t replicate with a Kindle or a convenient subscription to Spotify. The trouble is, making physical objects is hard , not to mention expensive. That’s especially true of the vinyl record, where pressing plants aren’t exactly ten a penny. And yet, despite the high cost of manufacturing and end price to the consumer, vinyl sales are very much on the up. According to Nielsen , vinyl album sales in the US have grown an impressive 260 percent since 2009, reaching 9.2 million units last year, while in the UK sales reached a 20-year high of 1.29 million in 2014 . Of course, these numbers are but a tiny fraction of music sales as a whole, but—regardless of whether it’s customers chasing that creamy analogue sound, or there are just a lot more hipsters around these days—there’s a demand to be satisfied. But if you’re not a big record label with deep pockets, getting the capital together to produce a run of vinyl is tricky. Even if you do raise the cash, how do you decide how many to make? Too few and people are left wanting; too many and you’re left with stock you can’t sell. It’s a problem that the recently launched Qrates  is hoping to solve. Qrates is an intriguing mix of the old and the new, consisting of a vinyl pressing service, a crowdfunding system, and a digital store all rolled into one. Using the site’s online tool, you can upload your music, design the label and sleeve, choose your preferred playing speed (33 or 45), the weight and colour of the actual record, and how many you’d like (there’s currently a nice low minimum order of 100). Qrates gives you an estimated cost, and then works with a regional pressing plant to fulfil your order. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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With vinyl sales on the rise, this startup lets anyone press their own LP

Comcast to pay you $20 each time a technician is late for an appointment [Updated]

UPDATE : After publication, we learned Comcast has been making the $20 guarantee for more than two years  before this week’s announcement. The other parts of the announcement, including the hiring boost, store renovations, and changes to technology and training, appear to be new. Comcast is once again pledging to overhaul its legendarily bad customer service, hiring more than 5,500 new customer service employees and making “major investments in technology and training,” the company announced yesterday . Part of the hiring boost will add “hundreds of additional technicians across the country,” with a goal to always be on time for customer appointments by Q3 2015, sometime between July and August. To prove how serious it is, Comcast is making a new promise: “If a technician doesn’t arrive on time for an appointment, Comcast will automatically credit the customer $20,” the cable company said. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast to pay you $20 each time a technician is late for an appointment [Updated]

How Selerity reported Twitter’s earnings—before Twitter did

Selerity reported Twitter’s Q1 2015 quarterly earnings results On April 28, 2015. #BREAKING : Twitter $TWTR Q1 Revenue misses estimates, $436M vs. $456.52M expected — Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015 Besides the news itself (Twitter’s revenues were disappointing to some investors) the event was noteworthy because it occurred at 3:07 pm New York time—almost an hour before the close of trading . While it’s rare for companies to release during market-hours there is no official policy prohibiting it and early announcements do happen occasionally. In the case of Twitter’s earnings, it was apparently the result of an accident by NASDAQ’s investor relations subsidiary , Shareholder.com. Most of the media coverage to date has focused on the process by which Selerity obtained the earnings press release so quickly. Some of that coverage has been speculative or inaccurate. In particular it’s important to understand that this was not a “hack.” That term implies a circumvention of laws or privacy, something Selerity would never do. Nor was it a “leak” by Selerity—it had already been published in the expected manner in the expected location. It was just early. We did not “guess” the URL that contained Twitter’s quarterly earnings results. Anyone with a web-browser and an Internet connection could have followed the links from the main investor relations page to the same PDF file that Selerity found. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Selerity reported Twitter’s earnings—before Twitter did

Behold: the drop-dead simple exploit that nukes Google’s Password Alert

Less than 24 hours after Google unveiled a Chrome extension that warns when user account passwords get phished , a security researcher has devised a drop-dead simple exploit that bypasses it. This benign proof-of-concept exploit looks almost identical to a Google login page, and is typical of a malicious phishing page that attempts to trick people into entering their user name and password. If Google’s freely available Password Alert extension was better designed, it would provide a warning as soon as someone tried to log into the page with their Google password. Instead, the warning is completely suppressed. (Note: although Ars fully trusts the researcher, readers are strongly advised not to enter passwords for Google accounts they use for anything other than testing purposes.) A video of the bypass exploit is here Bypassing Google’s Password Alert “Protection” “It beggars belief,” Paul Moore, an information security consultant at UK-based Urity Group who wrote the exploit, told Ars. “The suggestion that it offers any real level of protection is laughable.” He went on to say Google would do better devoting its resources to supporting the use of password managers, since most of them provide much more effective protections against phishing attacks. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Behold: the drop-dead simple exploit that nukes Google’s Password Alert

Grooveshark, bowing to RIAA, shuts down and apologizes for “serious mistakes”

Grooveshark, the free online music streaming service that allowed users to upload their own songs, announced on Thursday that it was shutting down. Josh Greenberg and Sam Tarantino founded the streaming service in 2006, and the site attracted tens of millions of users. Grooveshark called itself “the world’s largest on-demand and music discovery service.” But the service not only allowed users to upload any song; the founders also apparently demanded that employees upload popular songs  in an effort to expand the site’s music library. The service came under fire in recent years for allowing copyrighted material on the site. Several record companies, including Warner Bros., Sony, and Universal Music Group, sued Grooveshark in 2011 . Now the record companies have come to an agreement with Grooveshark under which it shut down the site and remove all copyrighted songs. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Grooveshark, bowing to RIAA, shuts down and apologizes for “serious mistakes”

Raspberry Pi gets a remote Windows desktop client from Parallels

Parallels today is unveiling an RDP (remote desktop protocol) client for the Raspberry Pi, allowing the tiny computer to remotely access Windows desktops and applications. Although the Pi has appealed to hobbyists and developers, this product is for businesses, turning the Pi into a thin client for virtual desktop deployments. The pricing isn’t aimed at individuals. The Pi client works with the Parallels 2X Remote Application Server , which costs $75 per concurrent user, requiring a minimum of 15 users, making the minimum price $1,125. But there does seem to be an exception that allows free use for small groups and individuals. There’s a 30-day free trial that supports 50 concurrent users, and “After 30 days, you can continue using 2X Remote Application Server for three concurrent users with the FREE license key that you will receive via email after registration,” the 2X download page says . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Raspberry Pi gets a remote Windows desktop client from Parallels

Spam-blasting malware infects thousands of Linux and FreeBSD servers

Several thousand computers running the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems have been infected over the past seven months with sophisticated malware that surreptitiously makes them part of a renegade network blasting the Internet with spam, researchers said Wednesday. The malware likely infected many more machines during the five years it’s known to have existed. Most of the machines infected by the so-called Mumblehard malware are believed to run websites, according to the 23-page report issued by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During the seven months that they monitored one of its command and control channels, 8,867 unique IP addresses connected to it, with 3,000 of them joining in the past three weeks. The discovery is reminiscent of Windigo, a separate spam botnet made up of 10,000 Linux servers that Eset discovered 14 months ago. The Mumblehard malware is the brainchild of experienced and highly skilled programmers. It includes a backdoor and a spam daemon , which is a behind-the-scenes process that sends large batches of junk mail. These two main components are written in Perl and they’re obfuscated inside a custom “packer” that’s written in assembly , an extremely low-level programming language that closely corresponds to the native machine code of the computer hardware it runs on. Some of the Perl script contains a separate executable with the same assembly-based packer that’s arranged in the fashion of a Russian nesting doll. The result is a very stealthy infection that causes production servers to send spam and may serve other nefarious purposes. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spam-blasting malware infects thousands of Linux and FreeBSD servers

Rogue Silk Road DEA agent arrested with “go bag,” 9mm pistol

SAN FRANCISCO—Federal prosecutors successfully argued Wednesday that Carl Mark Force, the former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who allegedly went rogue during the investigation of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, should not be granted bail. “I am not prepared to release him today,” United States Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte said during the Wednesday hearing. She heard 90 minutes of argument from government lawyers and from one of Force’s defense attorneys. After the hearing, Force was transferred from Santa Rita Jail in nearby Alameda County to San Francisco County Jail. Read 36 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rogue Silk Road DEA agent arrested with “go bag,” 9mm pistol

Solar powered Blue Cell provides cellular backhaul without wires

As we mentioned in our earlier coverage of LINK , Bell Labs is expecting that the near future will bring a lot of growth in cellular devices, like smart appliances and sensors. Part of its solution to this flood of new devices is to give them their own chunk of the spectrum to keep them from getting in the way of user-driven devices, like phones and tablets. But that’s only part of the solution; phone and tablet traffic is going to climb as well. The solution there is simply to create more cells so that there are fewer devices talking to a single base tower. But adding more access points isn’t a simple matter. Each requires power and a network connection, and constructing large towers can be a headache of siting permits and contracts. To address this, a research effort at Bell Labs called “Blue Cell” is attempting to simplify cellular access points by getting rid of the wires. As solar panel prices have plunged, getting rid of the power cord has gotten a lot easier. Of course, siting a large solar panel can be just as much trouble as siting a cell phone tower, so one of the major goals of the research was to reduce the energy requirements of a cellular access point. Examining the existing hardware, engineers found that the biggest energy draw was the digital signal processor, which converts the cellular signal into something that can be sent over network cables. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Solar powered Blue Cell provides cellular backhaul without wires