Tag: privacy-rights

GOG’s managing director: Gamer resistance to DRM is stronger than ever

GOG.com’s Guillaume Rambourg giving Jenga advice. Digital games distribution site GOG (Good Old Games) has spent the last five years offering classic videogame titles DRM-free to its customers. Earlier in 2013, the site launched an indie publishing platform which allowed independent developers to submit their games for sale through GOG—an alternative to Steam’s contentious Greenlight initiative . Wired.co.uk spoke to Guillaume Rambourg, managing director of GOG.com, to discuss DRM, anti-sales, and why exactly the site was offering the original Fallout games free of charge. Wired.co.uk: What was the story behind setting up the GOG.com website? Rambourg: It all began in the mid-90s, when friends Marcin Iwinski and Michal Kicinski started their business as retail distributors in Poland. Back then, Poland was a very highly pirated market, with most gamers using outdated hardware and not having too much money to spend on games. That’s a tough market to break into: one where people aren’t used to paying for games. Read 32 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GOG’s managing director: Gamer resistance to DRM is stronger than ever

Why NSA spied on inexplicably unencrypted Windows crash reports

The National Security Agency’s X-KEYSCORE program gives the spy agency access to a wide range of Internet traffic. Any information that isn’t encrypted is, naturally, visible to passive Internet wiretaps of the kind the NSA and other intelligence agencies use. This in turn will typically expose such things as e-mails, online chats, and general browsing behavior. And, according to slides published this weekend by Der Spiegel , this information also includes crash reports from Microsoft’s Windows Error Reporting facility built in to Windows. These reports will tell eavesdroppers what versions of what software someone is running, what operating system they use, and whenever that software has crashed. Windows also sends messages in the clear whenever a USB or PCI device is plugged in as part of its hunt for suitable drivers. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why NSA spied on inexplicably unencrypted Windows crash reports

Apple’s incremental 2013—and what to expect in 2014

The trouble with the Apple beat is that everyone wants it to be as exciting and newsworthy as it was in 2007 when Apple announced the iPhone, or in 2010 when the original iPad dropped. Among both the tech press and enthusiasts, Apple is a victim of its own success—every year that the company doesn’t redefine a product category, the pundits get a bit more bored. In 2013, almost every one of Apple’s new hardware and software releases refined something that came before. While that might seem boring to early adopters, Apple continues to be a master of iteration, improving its products in noticeable and useful ways every single year. Here, we’ll look back at everything Apple has put out this year—and what we might expect in 2014. The iPhone Apple put a whole lot of marketing muscle behind the iPhone 5C, which is essentially a year-old phone. Andrew Cunningham In the strictest sense, Apple actually delivered two new iPhones this year: the iPhone 5S and the  iPhone 5C . The 5S was the only truly new one, though—it delivered the expected improvements to the SoC and the camera while introducing a new hardware feature in the form of the TouchID fingerprint sensor. In contrast, the 5C is just an iPhone 5 with slightly upgraded cellular hardware and some colorful plastic. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple’s incremental 2013—and what to expect in 2014

Game of Thrones illegal downloads exceed TV viewers for second year

The most-torrented shows of 2013, according to Torrent Freak. Torrent Freak Game of Thrones again turned out to be the most-pirated TV show of 2013, according to a report from Torrent Freak. The show was downloaded an estimated 5.9 million times, besting its proportion of conventional television viewers, which clocks in at 5.5 million. That is a 37 percent increase from 2012, when Torrent Freak estimated Game of Thrones was downloaded 4.28 million times. As the New York Times points out , illegal downloads grew about 10 percent in 2013, with 327 million unique users navigating 13.9 billion webpages that handle pirated movies and TV. The shows Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, The Big Bang Theory , and Dexter contributed another 14.3 million downloads between them. 2013 also saw plenty of industry leaders endorsing illegal downloading in one way or another. Game of Thrones director David Petrarca said the show thrives on “cultural buzz” in part generated by pirates; Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said that Game of Thrones ’ status as the most pirated show was “ better than an Emmy ;” Netflix stated that it uses piracy statistics to determine what types of shows to produce or license; Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan said piracy ” helped… in terms of brand awareness .” The Walking Dead executive producer Gale Ann Hurd disagreed , calling the idea that piracy does good for content a “mistaken belief” and saying the activity is not something “we should encourage.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Game of Thrones illegal downloads exceed TV viewers for second year

Scientists make exotic chemicals with high-pressure salt

Everything around you is made of elements that scientists have studied in quite some detail over the last 200 years. But all that understanding breaks down when these elements are subjected to high pressure and temperature. Now, using an advanced theoretical understanding and extreme conditions, researchers have converted table salt into exotic chemicals. Salt is made from one part sodium (Na) and one part chlorine (Cl). If somehow salt were transported to the center of the Earth, where the pressure is three million times that on the surface, its crystalline structure would change but the ratio of those two elements would remain the same. Vitali Prakapenka at the University of Chicago and his colleagues wanted to find out what would happen if there were an excess of either sodium or chlorine at such high pressures. Would the ratio between the elements change? “It might,” said Prakapenka, “because chemistry completely changes in such conditions.” If it did, the result would not just be formation of a new compound, but a serious revision of what we think about chemistry. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Scientists make exotic chemicals with high-pressure salt

After sailing the domain name seas, Pirate Bay returns to Sweden

Aurich Lawson After nearly two weeks of bouncing its domain name around the globe, The Pirate Bay has returned to its home port. The notorious BitTorrent site originally went from .se to .sx (Sint Maarten), but it didn’t stop there—in recent days, it has shifted from .ac (Ascension Island) to .pe (Peru) to .gy (Guyana). Now, as of Thursday, it’s back to the comforts of .se (Sweden). Neither The Pirate Bay blog nor its Twitter feed offered any explanation. The move to .sx originally took place back in April 2013 when a Swedish prosecutor filed a motion to seize thepiratebay.se, piratebay.se, and thepiratebay.is. The registrar, the Internet Infrastructure Foundation, has said previously that it would only do so after being served by a Swedish court. “Our actions would largely be determined by the contents of the order and the issuing party,” the agency wrote in June 2012. “Accordingly, we will assess the situation on a case-by-case basis if such an order is issued.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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After sailing the domain name seas, Pirate Bay returns to Sweden

Report: Facebook set to finally launch auto-play video ads in news feeds

Caress this chipmunk’s cheeks with your pointer? Facebook wants to know about it. Facebook is due to announce the launch of video advertisements in users’ news feeds on Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal , citing anonymous sources. The newspaper added that the new program, which has been anticipated for some time now, is set to launch on Thursday on mobile applications as well as on the desktop browser. The ads apparently are designed to play automatically—a move that is surely bound to irritate many users of the social network. Ad Age reported in September 2013 that Facebook video ads had been originally slated for October 2013, but were then delayed. The Journal , which added that Facebook would charge $2 million per day to let advertisers reach its data-rich user based, noted that a teaser for the Lions Gate film “Divergent” is expected to be one of the first ads. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Report: Facebook set to finally launch auto-play video ads in news feeds

Exponential algorithm making Windows XP miserable could be fixed

Tom Carden Windows XP is really old, and we would suggest that you don’t use it unless you really have no option. For the most part, however, that age doesn’t really manifest itself. Sure, the operating system is missing the security features, hardware acceleration, and built-in support for things like USB 3 that newer versions of Windows have, but old software doesn’t have the same issues as, say, old cars. Old software generally runs as well today as it did when it was brand new. But Windows XP users have noticed that this isn’t entirely true. A bunch of them have found that the old operating system is working considerably worse than when it was released in 2001. The problem is that—especially among those who are still using Internet Explorer 6 or 7—each time you boot your Windows XP machine, it slows to a crawl. There’s a built-in process, svchost.exe, chewing up the entire processor, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. Wait long enough after booting and the machine will eventually return to normalcy. But an hour can be a long time to wait. Loss of horsepower and trouble starting up are common enough problems in old cars, but we don’t really expect the same things to happen on old PCs. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Exponential algorithm making Windows XP miserable could be fixed

North Korea attempts to purge online memory of executed leader

Kim Il Sung (left) is the founder of modern North Korea and the grandfather of current dictator Kim Jong Un. Tormod Sandtorv On Thursday, foreign policy watchers worldwide  were stunned when North Korea announced the execution of Jang Song Taek , a top government official. Jang was the uncle of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s young dictator, and also served as vice chairman of the National Defense Commission of North Korea . However, beyond the whims of North Korea’s leader, the Hermit Kingdom appears to have now also taken the unusual step of attempting to remove all references to Jang Song Taek from state-controlled Internet outlets, primarily the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). The KCNA website , which is hosted in Japan, appears to have suffered an outage briefly on Friday , and subsequently, past articles appeared scrubbed of mentions of Jang. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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North Korea attempts to purge online memory of executed leader

British Library sticks 1 million pics on Flickr, asks for help making them useful

In 2008, the British Library, in partnership with Microsoft, embarked on a project to digitize thousands of out-of-copyright books from the 17 th , 18 th , and 19 th centuries. Included within those books were maps, diagrams, illustrations, photographs, and more. The Library has uploaded more than a million of them onto Flickr and released them into the public domain. It’s now asking for help. Though the library knows which book each image is taken from, its knowledge largely ends there. While some images have useful titles, many do not, so the majority of the million picture collection is uncatalogued, its subject matter unknown. Next year, it plans to launch a crowdsourced application to fill the gap, to enable humans to describe the images. This information will then be used to train an automated classifier that will be run against the entire corpus. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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British Library sticks 1 million pics on Flickr, asks for help making them useful