There is a moment between when you click on a video and when it starts playing. That moment is the worst part of your day. The agony of waiting! The torture of anticipation! YouTube understands that, and on a visit to YouTube HQ in San Bruno, CA, we got a look at what’s coming to make that awful moment pass before you know it happened. Read more…
View article:
Inside YouTube’s Master Plan to Kill Lag Dead
1sockchuck writes “A big chunk of the Azure cloud will be living on the plains of Iowa. Microsoft will invest another $700 million to expand its Iowa data center campus near Des Moines, marking the third major server farm for the state this year. Facebook recently announced a new data center in Altoona. The same day, Google said it would put another $400 million into its facility in Council Bluffs. Why Iowa? Aggressive tax incentives and a central location to bridge the distance between these companies’ east and west coast server footprints.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
Server Farms Flourish In Iowa: Microsoft Plows $700M More Into Des Moines
melios writes “Using a two-light-beam method a company claims to have overcome Abbe’s Law to dramatically increase the storage density for optical media, to the 9 nm scale. From the article: ‘The technique is also cost-effective and portable, as only conventional optical and laser elements are used, and allows for the development of optical data storage with long life and low energy consumption, which could be an ideal platform for a Big Data centre.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the original post:
New Technique For Optical Storage Claims 1 Petabyte On a Single DVD
colinneagle writes “A recent GigaOm report discusses Verizon’s ‘peering’ practices, which involves the exchange of traffic between two bandwidth providers. When peering with bandwidth provider Cogent starts to reach capacity, Verizon reportedly isn’t adding any ports to meet the demand, Cogent CEO Dave Schaffer told GigaOm. ‘They are allowing the peer connections to degrade,’ Schaffer said. ‘Today some of the ports are at 100 percent capacity.’ Why would Verizon intentionally disrupt Netflix video streaming for its customers? One possible reason is that Verizon owns a 50% stake in Redbox, the video rental service that contributed to the demise of Blockbuster (and more recently, a direct competitor to Netflix in online streaming). If anything threatens the future of Redbox, whose business model requires customers to visit its vending machines to rent and return DVDs, it’s Netflix’s instant streaming service, which delivers the same content directly to their screens.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the original post:
Verizon Accused of Intentionally Slowing Netflix Video Streaming
That’s the claim from TechCrunch, which says that Facebook’s special press event on June 20 will be focused in part on video and Instagram. [Read more]
Continued here:
Facebook to unveil Instagram video on June 20, report says
An anonymous reader writes “Sony claims that both the new 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch models of its Haswell-equipped Vaio Pro ultrabooks are the world’s lightest. The 11.6-inch model weighs in at 1.9lb (0.87k , where as the 13.3-incher is a little heavier at just 2.33lb (1.06kg). But it’s the battery life on offer here that really makes the new Pros stand out. The 11.6-inch Vaio Pro offers 11 hours of battery life as standard, while the 13.3-inch achieves 8 hours. However, Sony is also offering a sheet battery you can connect to the base of the ultrabooks. On the 13.3-inch Pro that increases battery life to 18 hours, but on the 11.6-inch you get a true day-long amount of juice with 25 hours of battery life claimed.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Excerpt from:
Sony Touts 25 Hour Battery Life For Haswell-Equipped Vaio Pro
Etherwalk writes “Huang Chengqing, China’s top internet security official, alleged that cyberattacks on China from people in the U.S. are as serious as those from China on the U.S. ‘We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse the U.S., but it’s not helpful in solving the problem.’ Huang, however, does not necessarily attribute them to the U.S. government just because they came from U.S. soil, and he thinks Washington should extend the same courtesy. ‘They advocated cases that they never let us know about. Some cases can be addressed if they had talked to us, why not let us know? It is not a constructive train of thought to solve problems.’ In response to the recent theft of U.S. military designs, he replied with an observation whose obviousness is worthy of Captain Hammer: ‘Even following the general principle of secret-keeping, it should not have been linked to the Internet.'” A few experts think China’s more cooperative attitude has come about precisely because the U.S. government has gone public with hacking allegations. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the article here:
China Criticizes US For Making Weapon Plans Steal-able, Alleges Attacks From US
mask.of.sanity writes “Vulnerabilities in Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV television sets have been found that allow viewers’ home networks to be hacked, the programs they watched spied on, and even for TV sets to be turned into Bitcoin miners. The laboratory attacks took take advantage of the rich web features enabled in smart TVs running on the HbbTV network, a system loaded with online streaming content and apps which is used by more than 20 million viewers in Europe.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Yesterday, I wrote about an expert witness’s report on Prenda Law ( previously ), the notorious porno copyright trolls (they send you letters accusing you of downloading porn and demand money on pain of being sued and forever having your name linked with embarrassing pornography). The witness said that he believed that Prenda — and its principle, John Steele — had been responsible for seeding and sharing the files they accused others of pirating. After hearing about this, the administrators for The Pirate Bay dug through their logs and published a damning selection of log entries showing that many of the files that Steele and his firm accused others of pirating were uploaded by Steele himself, or someone with access to his home PC. The Pirate Bay logs not only link Prenda to the sharing of their own files on BitTorrent, but also tie them directly to the Sharkmp4 user and the uploads of the actual torrent files. The IP-address 75.72.88.156 was previously used by someone with access to John Steele’s GoDaddy account and was also used by Sharkmp4 to upload various torrents. Several of the other IP-addresses in the log resolve to the Mullvad VPN and are associated with Prenda-related comments on the previously mentioned anti-copyright troll blogs. The logs provided by The Pirate Bay can be seen as the missing link in the evidence chain, undoubtedly linking Sharkmp4 to Prenda and John Steele. Needless to say, considering the stack of evidence above it’s not outrageous to conclude that the honeypot theory is viable. While this is certainly not the first time that a copyright troll has been accused of operating a honeypot, the evidence compiled against Prenda and Steel is some of the most damning we’ve seen thus far. The Pirate Bay Helps to Expose Copyright Troll Honeypot [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]
View the original here:
Pirate Bay outs porno copyright trolls: they’re the ones pirating their own files
To create the map of Liberty City, creators stitched together nearly 80,000 in-game screenshots into around 3,000 panoramic views. [Read more]