Tag: privacy-rights

Game over for Zynga? Firm loses 25 percent of daily active users in one quarter

It’s been a rough year for Zynga, which ousted founder Mark Pincus earlier this month. Fortune Live Media In its latest earnings statement filed Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Zynga reported the number of daily average users (DAU) dropped to 39 million in the second quarter of 2013—the lowest ever since the company began keeping track. Last quarter, the DAU fell to the then-lowest record,   52 million users . The fall to 39 million means that 25 percent of its daily user base stopped using Zynga products in just one quarter. Not surprisingly, Zynga’s bottom line fell too. The company sustained a net loss of $15.8 million in Q2 2013. (Last quarter, the gaming firm profited just $4.1 million.) The market wasn’t too thrilled with these numbers: in after-hours trading, Zynga’s stock price plummeted by nearly 15 percent. The once top-dog has gone through a bit of a rough patch during the last year. In the summer of 2012, the company quickly  lost  a bunch of executives and managers. That October, the company  announced that it had overpaid for OMGPOP (maker of  Draw Something ). More recently, Mark Pincus, the company’s founder, was  ousted  as CEO in early July 2013. Then Zynga  suddenly shut down OMGPOP  last month as well. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Game over for Zynga? Firm loses 25 percent of daily active users in one quarter

LibreOffice 4.1 is released, borrows new sidebar from OpenOffice

LibreOffice 4.1 was released today, with the open source office suite borrowing a new sidebar from its rival, OpenOffice. As we wrote yesterday , the sidebar was debuted in OpenOffice 4.0 after being contributed by IBM developers. In LibreOffice, it’s only an experimental feature thus far, and it can be enabled in the settings. Enabling the sidebar. “LibreOffice 4.1 is … importing some AOO [Apache OpenOffice] features, including the Symphony sidebar, which is considered experimental, ” the Document Foundation said in the LibreOffice 4.1 announcement . “LibreOffice developers are working at the integration with the widget layout technique (which will make it dynamically resizeable and consistent with the behaviour of LibreOffice dialog windows).” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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LibreOffice 4.1 is released, borrows new sidebar from OpenOffice

Texas man raised over $4.5M in Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, feds allege

If you don’t follow the often-shady world of Bitcoin , you may not be familiar with Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST), a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam. BTCST shut down in August 2012, and on Wednesday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) formally charged its founder, Trendon Shavers, with running a Ponzi scheme. In a statement , the SEC said Shavers “raised at least 700, 000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold.” The government’s financial regulator alleges that Shavers violated a number of federal financial regulations. In court documents , the SEC wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Texas man raised over $4.5M in Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, feds allege

Apple blames days-long Developer Center outage on “intruder”

Apple Since Thursday, registered Apple developers trying to download OS X 10.9, iOS 7, or any other Apple software from the company’s developer portal have been greeted with a notice that the site was down for “maintenance.” Today, the company issued a brief statement (above) blaming the extended outage on an “intruder, ” and that Apple “[has] not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed.” The notice says that “sensitive” information could not be accessed by the intruder because it was encrypted, and the company told MacWorld that the system in question is not used to store “customer information, ” application code, or data stored by applications. Anecdotal reports (including one from our own Jacqui Cheng ) point to a sudden spike in password reset requests for some Apple IDs, suggesting that email addresses have in fact been accessed and distributed but that passwords were not. In any case, we generally recommend that users change their passwords when any breach (or suspected breach) like this one occurs. “In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database, ” the statement said. Apple has also given week-long extensions to any developers’ whose program subscriptions were scheduled to lapse during the outage, which will keep those developers’ applications from being delisted in Apple’s various App Stores. Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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Apple blames days-long Developer Center outage on “intruder”

VLC media player returns to the iOS App Store after 30-month hiatus

A selection of videos on VLC 2.0 running on an iPad. VLC After disappearing the better part of three years ago, the VLC media player app for iOS has made its triumphant return to Apple’s App Store. Its version number has been bumped to 2.0, and the app now includes features like Wi-Fi and Dropbox syncing as well as the ability to download files from the Web. A version of VLC created by the company Applidium first made its debut on the App Store back in November 2010, but it was pulled in January 2011 due to a licensing dispute . All versions of VLC were then open-source and licensed under GPLv2; the App Store imposes its own licensing and DRM restrictions on apps. One of VLC’s original developers, Rémi Denis-Courmont, claimed that the licensing policies did not mesh and filed a complaint against the app. It was shortly removed. VLC 2.0 for iOS is licensed under both the Mozilla Public License v2 as well as the GNU General Public License v2 (or later). “The MPLv2 is applicable for distribution on the App Store, ” Felix Paul Kühne of VideoLAN told Ars. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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VLC media player returns to the iOS App Store after 30-month hiatus

The cops are tracking my car—and yours

Aurich Lawson OAKLAND, CA—The last time the Oakland Police Department (OPD) saw me was on May 6, 2013 at 6:38:25pm. My car was at the corner of Mandana Blvd. and Grand Ave. , just blocks away from the apartment that my wife and I moved out of about a month earlier. It’s an intersection I drive through fairly frequently even now, and the OPD’s own license plate reader (LPR) data bears that out. One of its LPRs—Unit 1825—captured my car passing through that intersection twice between late April 2013 and early May 2013. I have no criminal record, have committed no crime, and am not (as far as I know) under investigation by the OPD or any law enforcement agency. Since I first moved to Oakland in 2005, I’ve been pulled over by the OPD exactly once—for accidentally not making a complete stop while making a right-hand turn at a red light—four years ago. Nevertheless, the OPD’s LPR system captured my car 13 times between April 29, 2012 and May 6, 2013 at various points around the city, and it retained that data. My car is neither wanted nor stolen. The OPD has no warrant on me, no probable cause, and no reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, yet it watches where I go. Is that a problem? Read 73 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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The cops are tracking my car—and yours

ISS spacewalk aborted when water begins to fill astronaut’s suit

American Chris Cassidy and Italian Luca Parmitano were forced to call off this morning’s planned spacewalk outside the International Space Station when Parmitano suddenly reported that there was water inside of his suit helmet. “My head is really wet and I have a feeling it’s increasing, ” he radioed about an hour into the spacewalk. Video of the aborted EVA, starting with the discovery of the water. The call to terminate EVA comes at 12:45. Station airlock opens at 44:48. The EVA, designated EVA-23, was one of the ones that Ars watched astronauts Cassidy and Parmitano train for late last year. That was during our visit to  NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory , the giant swimming pool where NASA simulates spacewalks in microgravity. According to NASASpaceFlight’s recounting of events , Parmitano was in the process of running data cabling to connect the as-yet-unlaunched Russian Nauka module when the water began to make itself apparent. The quantity of liquid in Parmitano’s helmet rapidly increased, with Parmitano noting that it had begun to enter his eyes, nose, and mouth. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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ISS spacewalk aborted when water begins to fill astronaut’s suit

Virtualization startup puts desktop apps seamlessly in the cloud

For software developers, cloud services solve all sorts of problems. They make it easy to ensure license compliance, they keep customers running up-to-date software, and they skip the need for downloads and installations. But cloud services also have their issues. It’s hard for cloud services to take advantage of local compute resources such as fast CPUs and powerful GPUs. A compute-intensive cloud service will need to buy a lot of computation. They also lack the vast array of rich, complex desktop applications that already exist. Starting today, a startup is aiming to create the best of both worlds with a cloud offering it’s describing as “Native as a service.” Numecent claims that it can take almost any desktop application and convert it into a cloud offering within a few hours. The software is delivered to end-user PCs using Numecent’s “cloudpaging” technology , which downloads applications on a piecemeal, as-needed basis. The downloaded portions of the application are retained client-side in an encrypted store. This enables Numecent to also enforce license conditions and prevent piracy. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Virtualization startup puts desktop apps seamlessly in the cloud

Female scammer who taunted US authorities online finally caught in Mexico

A Southern California woman who mocked American authorities via Twitter—after having fled the country—was finally arraigned on Monday in a San Diego courtroom. Wanda Lee Ann Podgurski, 60, was arrested in Rosarito, Mexico on July 4, 2013. This was a month after she tweeted “ Catch me if you can , ” seemingly directed at San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis , apparently the only person Podgurski followed on Twitter at the time. A superior court judge sentenced Podgurski in absentia on June 21, 2013 to 20 years and four months in state prison. She was  convicted (PDF) of 29 felony counts stemming from an insurance fraud scam. Podgurski worked as a clerk for Amtrak and held health insurance policies with six different companies, then she filed claims with all of them after she declared that she was disabled from supposed fall in her home in August 2006. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Female scammer who taunted US authorities online finally caught in Mexico

Verizon would end “century of regulation” by killing wireline phone, says NY AG

Hurricane Sandy caused widespread damage in Fire Island, New York. Fireisland.com New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman this week accused Verizon of trying to “depart from a century of telephone service regulation” by ending wireline telephone service in a part of Fire Island devastated by Hurricane Sandy in October, 2012. In addition, Schneiderman has accused Verizon of violating a state order by telling customers outside of Fire Island that they should accept wireless phone service instead of repairs to their landline service. He says Verizon should be fined $100, 000 per customer, per day. Verizon says it has not violated the state order, and that its offer of wireless service outside Fire Island is strictly optional. Verizon is, however, trying to gain state approval to end wireline service entirely in western Fire Island. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon would end “century of regulation” by killing wireline phone, says NY AG