privacy-rights – Page 13

Xbox streaming on Windows 10 has a hidden “very high quality” setting

In reviewing Windows 10’s new “Streaming from Xbox 10” feature , Ars’ Sam Machkovech complained that “streamed Xbox One games look significantly worse through Windows 10, even at the highest-quality setting.” Apparently, though, Sam wasn’t actually testing the “highest quality” setting available in the streaming app. That’s because there’s a newly uncovered “very high quality” option that can be unlocked by tinkering with some of the Xbox app’s configuration files. Reddit user OomaThurman has publicized the method for unlocking this hidden quality setting, which involves editing the “userconsoledata” file in your Xbox app folder. You can activate the new higher-quality setting by setting the “IsInternalPreview” flag from “false” to “true,” a naming convention that strongly suggests this feature is part of an early test that will be formally rolled out to all Windows 10 users in the future. We’ll be trying out this hidden feature for ourselves soon, but the folks at Digital Foundry already found a marked jump in quality when using the “very high” setting, saying it “appears to transmit full 1080p imagery.” Comparison shots published by Digital Foundry show a noticeable increase in sharpness of details like faces, hair, and edges, which are much closer to the “source” image with the new setting. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

No more endless CDs for pennies: Columbia House files for bankruptcy

It’s a sad day for the musical childhood of many generations. The Associated Press is reporting that the parent company of Columbia House, the organization behind the famous music and DVD clubs of yore, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The move comes after nearly 20 years of declining sales according to the AP. Filmed Entertainment (Columbia House’s parent company) told the wire service that revenue hit a high of $1.4 billion in 1996. In 2014, that figure fell to $17 million (or roughly 1 percent of its peak, the AP notes). While Chapter 11 protection doesn’t necessarily mean Filmed Entertainment intends to go out of business, it’s not looking good. Companies like RadioShack and Kodak have done this in recent years to obtain a certain period of time within which to rebuild itself and shield itself from creditors. Kodak at least emerged from its situation. The service started in 1955 with vinyl records, and Columbia House introduced pop culture fans to many, many film and music entities over the years through its service. It operated on offers like eight CDs for 1¢ (plus shipping!) or an 8-track tape of the month club (relying on a “return or pay to keep” philosophy). But physical media at large has gradually fallen out of favor over the years, and services from Napster to Netflix to iTunes all overlap with what Columbia House intended to do. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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No more endless CDs for pennies: Columbia House files for bankruptcy

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

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

Ebola vaccine trial in Guinea suggests it’s 100% effective

Today, The Lancet released the results of a large field trial of a vaccine against Ebola, and the results are more than promising. Within the limitations of the study, the vaccine appears to be 100 percent effective. The results were so good that the trial itself has been stopped, and the vaccine is now being used to control the spread of the disease. The vaccine is made by the pharmaceutical giant Merck, which licensed it from the Public Health Agency of Canada. It was developed through what has become a fairly standard approach. A harmless virus ( vesicular stomatitis virus , or VSV) was engineered so that it also carried the gene for Ebola’s major surface protein, simply called glycoprotein. When people receive the vaccination, a harmless infection follows, which triggers an immune response. This response targets not only VSV but the Ebola protein as well. Ideally, once the infection is eliminated, the immune system is able to recognize both VSV and Ebola. The trial, performed in southern Guinea, ran from April through July 20th of this year (the analysis, paper writing, and peer review must have proceeded at a staggering pace). It used what is called a “ring” design: once an infected individual was identified, a ring of potentially exposed individuals around them was identified. These individuals lived with the infected one, had contact with them after symptoms appeared, or came in contact with their clothes, bedding, or bodily fluids. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ebola vaccine trial in Guinea suggests it’s 100% effective

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

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

New iPod Touch’s A8 CPU running at 1.1GHz, includes 1GB of RAM

The new iPods that Apple announced this morning were outed a couple of weeks ago, but the insides of the new iPod Touch were still a surprise: Apple put an A8 in the new Touch, the same SoC that powers the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The iPod Touch is quite a bit smaller than either iPhone, though, and preliminary benchmarks suggest that the chip’s speed has been reduced somewhat to keep the temperature down and the battery life up. Geekbench tests run by TechCrunch say the A8 in the Touch is running at about 1.1GHz, down from 1.3GHz in both iPhones. They also confirm that the A8 includes 1GB of RAM, the same amount as the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The scores in that Geekbench run suggest that the slowed-down A8 is roughly equivalent to the 1.3GHz Apple A7 chip in the iPhone 5S , which if accurate still represents a substantial improvement over the A5 in the fifth-generation Touch (Primate Labs’ John Poole told us that he believes the listed clock speed to be accurate). What we don’t know is whether the GPU’s speed has been similarly reduced and how aggressively the A8 in the Touch will throttle its speed as it warms up. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New iPod Touch’s A8 CPU running at 1.1GHz, includes 1GB of RAM

The iPod lives! Mid-year bump adds new colors and 128GB 64-bit iPod Touch

The iPod lineup hasn’t gotten a significant hardware update since 2012, if you can believe it. For the Shuffle and the Nano, this isn’t a big deal; dedicated music players stopped evolving pretty much the minute the iPhone started to go mainstream. For the iPod Touch, it was more unfortunate—it’s a fully-fledged iDevice and one of the cheapest entry points into the ecosystem, so saddling it with the same Apple A5 SoC as the iPhone 4S for three years was rather unfortunate. That changes today. Apple has just updated the entire iPod lineup, including new colors for the (essentially unchanged) Nano and Shuffle as well as a significant internal overhaul for the iPod Touch. It picks up a 64-bit chip and an 8MP camera, both of which should make it run iOS 9 and future versions much better than the previous Touch. All the new iPods come in Space Gray, silver, gold, pink, blue, and red enclosures. The gold color, new to the iPod lineup, looks like the same finish used on iPhones and iPads and MacBooks. The pink, blue, and red shades all look darker and more saturated than they did before. The new iPod Touch runs iOS 8.4 and costs $199, $249, $299, or $399 for 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB. The 128GB option is exclusive to Apple, which means you won’t find it in a Best Buy or Wal-Mart. The Nano costs $149 for 16GB, and the Shuffle costs $49 for 2GB. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The iPod lives! Mid-year bump adds new colors and 128GB 64-bit iPod Touch

Ken May

Tag: privacy-rights