Tag: reprints

Last New Zealand coal plant reaches the end of the line

Yesterday, one of New Zealand’s major energy producers announced that it is planning on shuttering the last of the country’s coal-fired power stations in 2018. The plant’s extended life comes despite the fact that running it has become economically marginal—the company that runs it says it is locked into a coal delivery contract until mid-2017 and has substantial stockpiles on site. New Zealand is fortunate to have abundant renewable energy sources, including a number of large hydroelectric plants. Fossil fuels have mostly been used to supplement the hydroelectric production during years of lower rainfall. But the country has also benefitted from trends that are seen in most other industrialized nations. Energy demand has largely been stable due to increased efficiency, while the cost of other renewable power sources has dropped. In New Zealand’s case, those new sources are wind and geothermal (part of the country sits atop a subduction zone). As the costs of developing wind and geothermal have dropped, the coal fired plant was being used less frequently. “These units have largely been operating at the margin of the market for a number of years, at very low utilisation rates,” said company CEO Albert Brantley. Shuttering them is expected to save the company over NZ$20 million a year. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Last New Zealand coal plant reaches the end of the line

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

Where broadband is a utility, 100Mbps costs just $40 a month

There’s been a lot of debate over whether the United States should treat Internet service as a utility . But there’s no question that Internet service is already a utility in Sandy, Oregon, a city of about 10,000 residents, where the government has been offering broadband for more than a decade. “ SandyNet ” launched nearly 15 years ago with DSL and wireless service, and this summer it’s putting the final touches on a citywide upgrade to fiber. The upgrade was paid for with a $7.5 million revenue bond, which will be repaid by system revenues. Despite not being subsidized by taxpayer dollars, prices are still low: $40 a month for symmetrical 100Mbps service or $60 a month for 1Gbps. There are no contracts or data caps. “Part of the culture of SandyNet is we view our citizens as owners of the utility,” City IT Director and SandyNet GM Joe Knapp told Ars in a phone interview. “We’ve always run the utility on a break-even basis. Any profits we do have go back into capital improvements and equipment upgrades and things like that.” Read 34 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Where broadband is a utility, 100Mbps costs just $40 a month

NSA report shows China hacked 600+ US targets over 5 years

NBC has released a 2014 slide from a secret NSA Threat Operations Center (NTOC) briefing—a map that shows the locations of “every single successful computer intrusion” by Chinese state-sponsored hackers over a five-year period. Over 600 US businesses and institutions were breached during that period. The slide was provided to NBC by an unnamed “intelligence source,” who said the briefing “highlighted China’s interest in Google and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, and in air traffic control systems… [and] catalogued the documents and data Chinese government hackers have exfiltrated,” the network reported. The report suggests that the NSA has been tracking Chinese cyber-attacks for years and that its own network surveillance of China gives the agency the ability to correlate those attacks with specific sources. The briefing shown to NBC listed locations for the sources of each of the “exploitations and attacks,” NBC reported. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NSA report shows China hacked 600+ US targets over 5 years

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

Man arrested after filming fatal crash from inside car

Paul Pelton Lorain Police Department Whether Paul Pelton is a Good Samaritan is beside the point. The 41-year-old Ohio man was charged Wednesday in connection to him going inside a vehicle in the immediate aftermath of a car crash to film the two teen victims before one of them died in the grisly mishap. All the while, Good Samaritans were struggling to rescue the boys as the car caught fire. It’s not unlawful to film a crime scene with a mobile phone. And it’s not illegal to try to sell the footage of a heinous crime scene, which police suggest was Pelton’s motive. But it is illegal to trespass on a crime scene, the Lorain Police Department said. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Man arrested after filming fatal crash from inside car

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

Here’s what Windows 10’s DVD and USB packaging will look like

Glorious purple for the Windows 10 Pro DVD. @MicrosoftInside Windows 10 will be available on both DVD and USB memory stick for the first, and possibly even the last, time. By the time the next version of Windows is released— if there is one —it’s hard to imagine that optical media will still be abundant, but this release comes on both the old shiny disc and the new USB key. Mundane blue for the Windows 10 Home DVD. @MicrosoftInside The different media have different packaging, and Twitter user @MicrosoftInside  has posted pictures of what they’ll look like. The DVD boxes will include a screenshot of the operating system on the front. The USB version will stick with a simple logo. The two versions of the operating system, Home and Pro, will sport different colors. The Pro version’s superiority is affirmed through its striking purple color, leaving Home to blue mediocrity. And the USB media get a simpler look. @MicrosoftInside   Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Here’s what Windows 10’s DVD and USB packaging will look like

Breaking: Ellen Pao steps down as reddit CEO

Embattled reddit CEO Ellen Pao has stepped down from her position at the privately held company, effectively immediately. A spokesperson for reddit indicated that the separation was mutually agreed upon and that Pao will be replaced by original reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman. According to the New York Times,  Pao will continue to advise reddit’s board until the end of the year. In an interview with Re/code’s Kara Swisher, Pao is quoted as saying that her departure stems from a disagreement with reddit’s board of directors on the direction reddit should go. “They had a more aggressive view than I did,” said Pao. The move comes one week after a massive user-led protest left large swaths of the site inaccessible to the public. The protest was sparked by the firing of Victoria Taylor , a reddit employee who facilitated the site’s “Ask Me Anything” question-and-answer chats (called “AMAs”). Volunteer moderators of the /r/IAmA subreddit took the discussion area offline to try to figure out a way forward without Taylor’s help, characterizing Taylor’s dismissal as the latest in a long string of poorly communicated moves by reddit’s administrators. Other subreddit moderators quickly followed suit in a show of solidarity, and by last Thursday evening, one-third of the site’s “default” subreddits were inaccessible. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Breaking: Ellen Pao steps down as reddit CEO