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Rightscorp agrees to pay $450,000 for illegal robocalls

(credit: SRU.edu ) Online copyright enforcer Rightscorp has agreed to pay $450,000 to end a lawsuit accusing the company of making illegal calls to cell phones. Morgan Pietz, an attorney who played a key role in bringing down Prenda Law, sued Rightscorp in 2014 , saying that the company’s efforts to get settlements from alleged pirates went too far. Rightscorp’s illegal “robocalls” violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a 1991 law that limits how automated calling devices are used. The class-action lawsuit claimed that some Rightscorp targets were receiving one robocall on their cell phone per day. It’s generally illegal to have automated devices call cell phones. Earlier this week, Pietz and his co-counsel filed court papers outlining the settlement. Rightscorp will pay $450,000 into a settlement fund, which will be paid out to the 2,059 identified class members who received the allegedly illegal calls. Each class member who fills out an “affidavit of noninfringement” will receive up to $100. The rest of the fund will pay for costs of notice and claim administration (about $25,000) and attorneys’ fees and costs, which cannot exceed $330,000. Rightscorp will also “release any and all alleged claims” against the class members. The company had accused the 2,059 class members of committing 126,409 acts of copyright infringement. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rightscorp agrees to pay $450,000 for illegal robocalls

Multi-gigabit cable modems ready to help you blow past your data cap

(credit: CableLabs ) Next-generation cable modems that can deliver multi-gigabit speeds have been certified by CableLabs, the cable industry’s research and development lab. The new modems use version 3.1 of DOCSIS (the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification), cable’s answer to fiber Internet speeds. The first DOCSIS 3.1 certifications were earned by Askey, Castlenet, Netgear, Technicolor, and Ubee Interactive, according to the announcement by CableLabs . The group’s testing confirms that the modems comply with the new DOCSIS spec. DOCSIS 3.1 reduces network latency and will enable “high-speed applications including Virtual and Augmented Reality, advanced video technologies such as Ultra High Definition 4K television, tele-existence and medical imaging, and gaming,” CableLabs said. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Multi-gigabit cable modems ready to help you blow past your data cap

David Bowie’s ISP, as remembered by the guy who helped create “BowieNet”

David Bowie. (credit: davidbowie.com ) When David Bowie became an Internet service provider in 1998, a man named Ron Roy helped him start the business. Now, three days after the legendary musician’s death at age 69, we’ve interviewed Roy about how “BowieNet” came to life and why it was so important to the artist. “David was tremendously involved from day one,” Roy told Ars via e-mail. Roy appeared in some of the first press releases that followed BowieNet’s US and UK launches; we tracked him down at his current business, Wines That Rock . It was a lot easier to become an Internet service provider in 1998 than it is today. Instead of the enormous expense of  deploying fiber or cable throughout a city, ISPs could spring to life by selling dial-up connections to anyone with a telephone line. BowieNet’s dial-up service sold full access to the Internet for $19.95 a month (or £10.00 in the UK), but it was also a fan club that provided exclusive access to David Bowie content such as live video feeds from his studio. Customers who already had a dial-up Internet provider and didn’t want to switch could buy access to BowieNet content separately for $5.95 a month. BowieNet had about 100,000 customers at its peak, Roy said. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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David Bowie’s ISP, as remembered by the guy who helped create “BowieNet”

Autonomous car makers hand over data on glitches and failures to California DMV

Delphi’s autonomous vehicle. (credit: Delphi ) If you want to build a self-driving car and test it on public roads in California, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles says that every year you have to submit a disengagement report—basically a list of every time the human driver had to take over for the car. This year, Bosch, Delphi, Google, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, and Volkswagen Group were required to submit disengagement reports, and the results are largely what you’d expect from a novel and complicated technology. Google, as the company that’s driven the most miles on public roads in California, said it experienced 341 significant disengagement events over 424,000 miles of driving  (PDF). Similarly, Nissan reported that it drove 1,485 miles on public roads in California and it experienced 106 disengagements. Delphi’s two autonomous vehicles drove 16,662 miles and the company reported 405 disengagements. Tesla, for its part, reported no disengagements  (PDF) from fully-autonomous mode from the time it was issued a permit to test self-driving cars in California. While it’s tempting to use those numbers as a comparison point as to how good a company’s autonomous vehicles are, there are many variables that could obscure an otherwise accurate comparison. The numbers only reflect miles driven on California roads and disengagements that happen in that state. If a company primarily tests its public road driving in another state, those numbers won’t be reflected in these reports. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Autonomous car makers hand over data on glitches and failures to California DMV

Scientists discover 2,100-year-old stash of “fine plucked” tea

Chunks of ancient tea are on the left, and the tomb where they were excavated near Xi’an is on the right. (credit: Houyuan Lu) Researchers in China have positively identified a block of ancient vegetable matter as tiny tea buds that were lovingly tucked away in Han Yangling Mausoleum, a sumptuous tomb north of Xi’an. The city Xi’an was once known as Chang’an, seat of power for the Han Dynasty, and stood as the easternmost stop on the vast trade routes known today as the Silk Road. Previously, the oldest physical evidence of tea came from roughly 1,000 years ago. Coupled with another ancient block of tea found in western Tibet’s Gurgyam Cemetery, this new discovery reveals that the Han Chinese were already trading with Tibetans in 200 BCE, trekking across the Tibetan Plateau to deliver the luxurious, tasty drink. Though the tea was excavated over a decade ago, it wasn’t until recently that researchers had access to tests that could determine whether the vegetable matter was in fact tea. By untangling the chemical components of the leaves, including their caffeine content, the researchers were able to verify that both blocks of leaves, from China and Tibet, were tea. In fact, they even figured out what kind of tea it probably was. In Nature Scientific Reports , they write: The sample contains a mixture of tea, barley ( Hordeum vulgare , Poaceae) and other plants. Therefore, it is likely that tea buds and/or leaves were consumed in a form similar to traditionally-prepared butter tea, in which tea is mixed with salt, tsampa (roasted barley flour) and/or ginger in the cold mountain areas of central Asia. Of course, methods of brewing and consuming tea varied from culture to culture along the Silk Road . We also know the tea was what people today would call “fine plucked” or “Emperor’s Tea,” because it consisted only of the plant’s buds with a few small leaves. These parts of the plant are considered the most valuable and are used to make especially high-grade tea. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Scientists discover 2,100-year-old stash of “fine plucked” tea

Oculus cofounder building a -43° propane phase-change-cooled PC

Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus VR and creator of the Oculus Rift, somewhat unsurprisingly, is a fully paid-up member of the PC Master Race . During a recent Reddit AMA , Luckey was asked about the hardware specs of his PC. The first part of his response was to be expected, and probably straight out of the company’s PR playbook: I have lived on the bleeding edge of PC hardware for as long as I could scrape the money together, but for VR, I am sticking to hardware that sticks to our recommended specs: https://www.oculus.com/en-us/oculus-ready-pcs/ That way, I get the same experience as most of my customers. I don’t want to become disconnected from the reality of how our hardware and software performs. On the side, though, Luckey is working on something just a little bit more exciting: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Oculus cofounder building a -43° propane phase-change-cooled PC

Big names gamble big bucks on blood tests for early cancer detection

Forget biopsies, ultrasounds, mammograms, pap smears, rectal exams, and other unpleasant cancer screenings—the race is now on for simple, affordable blood tests that can detect all sorts of cancers extremely early. On Sunday, genetic sequencing company  Illumina Inc. announced the start of a new company called Grail, which will join dozens of companies developing such blood tests. Toting big-name investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Illumina’s high-profile startup raised more than $100 million to get Grail going. The company hopes that Grail’s tests will be on the market by 2019 and cost around $500 a pop. Though researchers have recently questioned the benefits of early cancer screening—showing in some cases that early detection does not generally save lives —Illumina is confident that the science behind the blood-based screens is at least possible. Illumina Chief Executive Jay Flatley, who will be Grail’s chairman, said Illumina has been working on the tests for about a year and a half. “We’ve made tremendous progress, which gives us the confidence that we can get to the endpoint that we expect.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Big names gamble big bucks on blood tests for early cancer detection

Ars talks self-driving car technology with Ford at CES

Wayne Williams from Ford shows us one of the company’s fully autonomous Fusion research vehicles. Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link) LAS VEGAS—As we’ve noted elsewhere, CES has now evolved to be part car show. But not just any car show—the focus is on how technology is transforming the car, and nowhere is that more evident than in autonomous driving. The goal is to get to “level four”—the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s highest level of self-driving vehicle, capable of getting from point A to point B without any human driver intervention. We’re not there yet—no one in the industry Ars has spoken to recently thinks the tech challenges are quite solved yet—but research vehicles from companies like Google , Delphi , Audi , and Ford are testing out the hardware and software necessary to get us to that point. With that in mind, we spoke to Wayne Williams, who gave us a quick tour of one of Ford’s fully autonomous hybrid Fusions. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ars talks self-driving car technology with Ford at CES

Finally, over-the-air software updates for your car are becoming a reality

Harman’s Yoram Berholtz explains how Harman is helping the car industry stay current with over-the-air software updates. Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link) LAS VEGAS—A constant bugbear in automotive tech is how inconvenient it is to have to take one’s car to the dealership to get a software update—something Tesla owners often gloat about since their cars don’t suffer that problem. Well, have faith, non-Tesla owners, because it looks like the auto industry is moving in the right direction. To find out more, we spoke to Harman’s Yoram Berholtz at CES. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Finally, over-the-air software updates for your car are becoming a reality

Two months after FBI debacle, Tor Project still can’t get an answer from CMU

Proof of connection: the site check.torproject.org will show you if you’re connected via Tor. (credit: Tor) Shari Steele, Executive Director of the Tor Project (credit: EFF ) It’s been quite a few months for the Tor Project. Last November, project co-founder and director Roger Dingledine  accused the FBI of paying Carnegie Mellon computer security researchers at least $1 million to de-anonymize Tor users and reveal their IP addresses as part of a large criminal investigation. The FBI dismissed things, but the investigation in question is a very high-profile matter focused on members of the  Silk Road  online-drug marketplace. One of the IP addresses revealed belonged to Brian Farrell, an alleged Silk Road 2 lieutenant. An early filing in Farrell’s case, first reported  by Vice Motherboard, said that a “university-based research institute” aided government efforts to unmask Farrell. That document fit with Ars reporting  from January 2015, when a Homeland Security search warrant affidavit stated  that from January to July 2014, a “source of information” provided law enforcement “with particular IP addresses” that accessed the vendor-side of Silk Road 2. By July 2015, the Tor Project managed to discover and shut down this sustained attack. But the Tor Project further concluded that the attack resembled a technique described by a team of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers who a few weeks earlier had canceled a security conference presentation on a low-cost way to deanonymize Tor users . The Tor officials went on to warn that an intelligence agency from a global adversary also might have been able to capitalize on the vulnerability. Read 59 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Two months after FBI debacle, Tor Project still can’t get an answer from CMU