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Spaniard fatally gored while trying to film bull run on smartphone

While the Spanish town of Pamplona hosts the world’s most well-known running of the bulls, other cities in Spain, Portugal, and nearby nations host their own annual runs where bulls run through city streets while locals and tourists run alongside—or away from—the giant beasts. For one participant of a Sunday bull run in Villasecra de la Sagra, Spain, trying to share his experience by way of a smartphone recording ended traumatically. According to details ascertained from a local Spanish-language report , an English-language AFP report , and bystander video of the incident, a 32-year-old man was gored from behind while attempting to film that city’s annual bull run. The bystander video, posted Sunday on Instagram (not linked here due to its graphic nature), showed the currently unidentified victim standing near a barricade so that he was behind other viewers and away from the general fray of the bull run. However, a stray bull appeared to become separated from the general herd, at which point it ran at full speed behind the crowd and struck the 32-year-old while he was holding a smartphone to film in the opposite direction. According to reports, after receiving brief treatment at a nearby bullring’s medical center, the victim was transferred to a hospital in nearby Toledo, where he was soon pronounced dead from neck and thigh wounds. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spaniard fatally gored while trying to film bull run on smartphone

In just 2 years, Zynga’s daily average users have fallen by half

Have you played any Zynga games lately? Yeah, we didn’t think so. And that’s exactly the problem: in two years, the social gaming company’s daily average users (DAU) has plummeted from 39 million to 21 million. Consequently, on Thursday, Zynga announced that it had lost $26.8 million in the second quarter of 2015, and a total of $73.3 million in the first half of the year. Assuming that rate of loss holds, the company is on pace to lose over $150 million in 2015, and that’s on top of the over $472 million the company already lost from 2012 through 2014. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In just 2 years, Zynga’s daily average users have fallen by half

Last New Zealand coal plant reaches the end of the line

Yesterday, one of New Zealand’s major energy producers announced that it is planning on shuttering the last of the country’s coal-fired power stations in 2018. The plant’s extended life comes despite the fact that running it has become economically marginal—the company that runs it says it is locked into a coal delivery contract until mid-2017 and has substantial stockpiles on site. New Zealand is fortunate to have abundant renewable energy sources, including a number of large hydroelectric plants. Fossil fuels have mostly been used to supplement the hydroelectric production during years of lower rainfall. But the country has also benefitted from trends that are seen in most other industrialized nations. Energy demand has largely been stable due to increased efficiency, while the cost of other renewable power sources has dropped. In New Zealand’s case, those new sources are wind and geothermal (part of the country sits atop a subduction zone). As the costs of developing wind and geothermal have dropped, the coal fired plant was being used less frequently. “These units have largely been operating at the margin of the market for a number of years, at very low utilisation rates,” said company CEO Albert Brantley. Shuttering them is expected to save the company over NZ$20 million a year. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Last New Zealand coal plant reaches the end of the line

Is Buck Rogers in the public domain? New movie hangs in the balance

Last month, science fiction fans gave a collective thumbs-up when Team Angry Filmworks announced that it was planning to produce a new Buck Rogers flick— Armageddon 2419 A.D. The Rogers character, originally known as “Anthony Rogers,” first appeared in the 1928 novella by the same name, Armageddon 2419 A.D . It was penned by science fiction author Philip Francis Nowlan and appeared in the magazine Amazing Stories . And producer Don Murphy, who was behind Natural Born Killers , The Transformers , and other films, seemed dead set on recreating the science fiction spaceman. But Nowlan’s heirs say the potential blockbuster needs a license from the Dille Family Trust, which owns the rights to the Buck Rogers namesake and the original Armageddon 2419 A.D, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles.   Team Angry Filmworks, on the other hand, contends that the character has fallen out of copyright and is in the public domain, free for anybody to exploit. The Hollywood studio wants a federal judge to declare that the character is in the public domain. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Is Buck Rogers in the public domain? New movie hangs in the balance

A new polymer that can boost capacitors

From hybrid and electric vehicles to underground exploration of fossil-fuels, our search for energy solutions has increasingly placed us in situations demanding electricity storage and delivery under extreme conditions. Though batteries are the reigning storage technology, capacitors are an alternative with several advantages: they’re lightweight, they can be charged and discharged relatively quickly, and they don’t lose their storage capacity over time. In order to function properly, capacitors require dielectric materials, which behave as insulators and are essential for charge storage. Polymeric dielectrics have enhanced performance over other materials, and they can operate under more intense electric fields without failing (termed higher breakdown strength) and greater reliability. They also have the added benefit of practicality, being scalable, lightweight, and easily manipulated. Right now, their major drawback as a material is their inability to work at high temperatures, like those required in many applications. But a composite polymer has finally been developed that seems to break down the traditional limitations of these materials, promising to open up a broader range of uses. Scientists made the new material by crosslinking a traditional polymer embedded with flakes of boron nitride nano sheets. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A new polymer that can boost capacitors

Where broadband is a utility, 100Mbps costs just $40 a month

There’s been a lot of debate over whether the United States should treat Internet service as a utility . But there’s no question that Internet service is already a utility in Sandy, Oregon, a city of about 10,000 residents, where the government has been offering broadband for more than a decade. “ SandyNet ” launched nearly 15 years ago with DSL and wireless service, and this summer it’s putting the final touches on a citywide upgrade to fiber. The upgrade was paid for with a $7.5 million revenue bond, which will be repaid by system revenues. Despite not being subsidized by taxpayer dollars, prices are still low: $40 a month for symmetrical 100Mbps service or $60 a month for 1Gbps. There are no contracts or data caps. “Part of the culture of SandyNet is we view our citizens as owners of the utility,” City IT Director and SandyNet GM Joe Knapp told Ars in a phone interview. “We’ve always run the utility on a break-even basis. Any profits we do have go back into capital improvements and equipment upgrades and things like that.” Read 34 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Where broadband is a utility, 100Mbps costs just $40 a month

Chrome tests “discarding” background tabs to save memory

How many tabs do you have open right now? I’m currently writing and researching this article, writing and researching another, longer article, listening to SoundCloud, and monitoring Ars chat, TweetDeck, and Parsely—so I’ve got 71 tabs open across my six monitors  taking up 10GB of RAM. (I admit that I’m probably on the upper end of things.) I’m not  using  all of those tabs right now, but I do need them open—open tabs are my to-do list. The problem is that Chrome keeps all of these tabs up and running at 100% whether I’m using them or not. This is bad for memory usage and—if you’re running on a laptop—power usage. A new feature being tested in the nightly “Canary” version of Chrome seems like a boon for heavy tab users like me: it will “discard” tabs that aren’t being used when it encounters a low-memory situation. “Discarding” a tab doesn’t mean forcibly closing a tab, just suspending it and unloading it from memory. The tab itself would still be visible in the tab bar, but unloading it would save your computer the work of keeping it running. The feature has existed in Chrome OS for some time, but now it’s moving over to Windows and Mac OS, with a Linux implementation coming soon. Chrome has a tab ranking system, and it would automatically suspend your “least interesting” tabs when it hits a low-memory situation. A Chromium.org page lists the ranking system for tabs: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chrome tests “discarding” background tabs to save memory

So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015

This week WordPress released the latest edition of its recurring transparency report , revealing 43 percent  of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests it received have been rejected in the first six months of 2015. It’s the lowest six-month period shown in the report, though it only dates back to 2014. However, WordPress said this headline figure would be even higher if it “counted suspended sites as rejected notices.” That change in calculation would bump the WordPress DMCA denial rate to 67 percent between January 1 and June 30, 2015. In total, the publishing platform received 4,679 DMCA takedown requests as of June 30, identifying 12 percent of those as “abusive.” The top three organizations submitting these requests were Web Sheriff, Audiolock, and InternetSecurities. “Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by third party take down services, many of whom use automated bots to identify copyrighted content and generate takedown notices,” WordPress noted. The company wrote at length about this practice in April, both explaining and condemning the general procedure. “These kind of automated systems scour the Web, firing off takedown notifications where unauthorized uses of material are found—so humans don’t have to,” WordPress wrote . “Sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t always work out as smoothly in practice. Much akin to some nightmare scenario from the Terminator , sometimes the bots turn on their creators.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015

AT&T gets DirecTV merger approval, must deploy fiber to 12.5M customers

AT&T’s $48.5 billion purchase of DirecTV is a done deal, as the Federal Communications Commission today announced that it has voted to approve the merger. The FCC imposed conditions on the acquisition, saying they ensure the combination will be in the public interest. AT&T will become the largest pay-TV company in the nation with about 26 million subscribers, jumping ahead of Comcast.”As part of the merger, AT&T-DirecTV will be required to expand its deployment of high-speed, fiber optic broadband Internet access service to 12.5 million customer locations as well as to E-rate eligible schools and libraries,” the FCC’s announcement said. (The federal E-rate program provides discounts on Internet service. AT&T will also have to provide discounted broadband to low-income customers.) AT&T had proposed the fiber build condition itself, though it has said the total number of planned fiber connections is just 2 million more than the amount it would have built even if the merger had not been approved. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T gets DirecTV merger approval, must deploy fiber to 12.5M customers

Bug in latest version of OS X gives attackers unfettered root privileges

A bug in the latest version of Apple’s OS X gives attackers the ability to obtain unfettered root user privileges, a feat that makes it easier to surreptitiously infect Macs with rootkits and other types of persistent malware. The privilege-escalation bug, which was reported in a blog post published Tuesday by security researcher Stefan Esser, is the type of security hole attackers regularly exploit to bypass security protections built into modern operating systems and applications. Hacking Team, the Italian malware-as-a-service provider that catered to governments around the world, recently exploited similar elevation-of-privileges bugs in Microsoft Windows . When combined with a zero-day exploit targeting Adobe’s Flash media player , Hacking Team was able to pierce security protections built into Google Chrome , widely regarded as the Internet’s most secure browser by default. According to Esser, the OS X privilege-escalation flaw stems from new error-logging features that Apple added to OS X 10.10. Developers didn’t use standard safeguards involving additions to the OS X dynamic linker dyld , a failure that allows attackers to open or create files with root privileges that can reside anywhere in the OS X file system. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bug in latest version of OS X gives attackers unfettered root privileges