Tag: privacy-rights

Pandora, fresh off one copyright win, loses its rate case to BMI

Songwriters’ group Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) has beaten online radio provider Pandora after a two-year legal battle, winning a substantially larger copyright royalty rate of 2.5 percent. That’s a large increase from the 1.75 percent Pandora was paying before. It’s also a stark contrast to Pandora’s win in a similar case against BMI’s rival, the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers, or ASCAP. It was just last week that a federal appeals court upheld Pandora’s win in that case, finding that the royalty rate should rise to only 1.85 percent. The judge’s opinion in BMI v. Pandora  isn’t yet public, but both sides have put out statements about the results. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See original article:
Pandora, fresh off one copyright win, loses its rate case to BMI

How the USPS targeted a drug dealer via his IP address

A federal drug case in Massachusetts has shed new light on how the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) law enforcement unit uses something as simple as IP logs on the postal tracking website to investigate crimes. According to a December 2013 affidavit  of an ongoing federal criminal case in Rockland, Massachusetts (20 miles southeast of Boston), one alleged drug dealer named Harold Bates was found out simply by his digital trail left on the USPS’ Track n’ Confirm website. The affidavit was added to the court docket in January 2015, and the case was first reported on by Motherboard . Bates was charged back in March 2014 with conspiracy to import methylone (also known as “molly”), importation of methylone, and possession with intent to distribute methylone, among other crimes. Last month, the judge in the case ruled against Bates in his attempt to supress evidence seized in those packages. Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View original post here:
How the USPS targeted a drug dealer via his IP address

House votes 338-88 to stop bulk phone surveillance

Nearly two years after the US government’s collection of telephone calls became public following the Edward Snowden leaks, the US House of Representatives has passed, by a vote of 338-88, a bill that would end the program. An exact roll call of votes is not yet available, but votes opposing the USA Freedom Act were generally split between Democrats and Republicans, many of whom argue the proposal doesn’t go far enough to protect civil liberties. Policymakers on all sides of the surveillance debate were under pressure to make some kind of move, with relevant portions of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of this month. The USA Freedom Act ends the bulk phone database but doesn’t include many other wished-for reforms, such as a privacy advocate at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was in an earlier version of the bill. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View the original here:
House votes 338-88 to stop bulk phone surveillance

Don’t look now, but 3DS emulation is becoming a thing

Given enough time and attention from the development community, it’s practically inevitable that any video game console can and will be emulatable on a general-use computer. Hardware makers, always wary of the piracy implications of such a development, may hope that doesn’t happen until many years after that console ceases to be commercially viable. Unfortunately for Nintendo, that seems unlikely in the case of the 3DS. The Citra emulation project has been in the works for at least a year , but developers reached a breakthrough last December when they managed to load Ocarina of Time 3D for the first time. That title has now been shown running at nearly full speed on Citra with the help of an OpenGL renderer (though some visual artifacts still exist). Since then, compatibility work has continued on a seemingly game-by-game basis.  Virtual Console titles were shown off in February, and just this week team members posted evidence of Animal Crossing New Leaf , Super Monkey Ball 3D , and even the system’s home menu  running through emulation. There are a few homebrew demos available as well, including emulators for other systems running inside of the 3DS emulator and the kind of Minecraft port that’s seemingly required for all emulation projects these days. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continued here:
Don’t look now, but 3DS emulation is becoming a thing

Nvidia turns on 1080p 60 FPS streaming for its Grid cloud gaming service

Starting today, Nvidia has enabled 1080p 60 FPS streaming from its Grid cloud gaming service . To use the new mode, you need to be part of the public Shield Hub beta group , have a Shield device, and at least a 30Mbps connection to the Internet. For the moment, around 35 Grid games support 1080p60 streaming, with Nvidia promising that rest (another 14 at the moment) will get a resolution bump after a server-side hardware refresh. Nvidia won’t say what that hardware refresh entails, but did confirm that its servers would be using the same Kepler-based Grid GPUs. Grid streaming remains free until June 30, after which Nvidia will offer a paid-for premium tier in addition to the free service. While Nvidia still won’t spill the beans on exactly what the premium tier gets you, or how much it’ll cost, we can confirm that 1080p streaming will not require a premium subscription. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Excerpt from:
Nvidia turns on 1080p 60 FPS streaming for its Grid cloud gaming service

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

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

AT&T finally ramps down throttling of unlimited LTE customers

AT&T’s long-standing policy of throttling LTE service for unlimited data customers has finally been changed so that customers are throttled only when they connect to congested cell towers. Until now, AT&T customers who used 5GB of data in a single monthly billing period were throttled for the rest of the month at all times, receiving barely usable service, despite paying for “unlimited” data. AT&T is facing a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission over the practice and has denied wrongdoing , but it promised that it would change the policy to make it more lenient before the end of 2015. AT&T did not make any official announcement of the change, but it is now apparent in the policy detailed on its website : Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
AT&T finally ramps down throttling of unlimited LTE customers

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

See more here:
How Selerity reported Twitter’s earnings—before Twitter did

Boeing 787 Dreamliners contain a potentially catastrophic software bug

A software vulnerability in Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner jet has the potential to cause pilots to lose control of the aircraft, possibly in mid-flight, Federal Aviation Administration officials warned airlines recently. The bug—which is either a classic integer overflow or one very much resembling it—resides in one of the electrical systems responsible for generating power, according to memo the FAA issued last week . The vulnerability, which Boeing reported to the FAA, is triggered when a generator has been running continuously for a little more than eight months. As a result, FAA officials have adopted a new airworthiness directive (AD) that airlines will be required to follow, at least until the underlying flaw is fixed. “This AD was prompted by the determination that a Model 787 airplane that has been powered continuously for 248 days can lose all alternating current (AC) electrical power due to the generator control units (GCUs) simultaneously going into failsafe mode,” the memo stated. “This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Link:
Boeing 787 Dreamliners contain a potentially catastrophic software bug

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

See original article:
Spam-blasting malware infects thousands of Linux and FreeBSD servers