Tag: score2

Netflix’s US Catalog Has Shrunk by More Than 2,500 Titles in Less Than 2.5 Years

According to a report on AllFlicks, a website that lists and categorizes Netflix content, the streaming service’s library for American subscribers has shrunk by a third since 2014. The report claims that in March 2014, the US Netflix library consisted of about 6, 500 movies and 1, 600 television shows. As of this month, the same library offers 4, 330 movies and 1, 200 TV shows. An article on Quartz explains the shrinkage: The reason is that securing international streaming rights to shows and movies is exceedingly difficult — laws and regulations differ by country, as does the type of content that people around the world consume. Netflix hopes that its library in other countries will eventually rival its comprehensive selection in the US. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Netflix’s US Catalog Has Shrunk by More Than 2,500 Titles in Less Than 2.5 Years

AMOLED Displays Are Now Cheaper To Produce Than LCD

An anonymous reader quotes an article on AndroidAuthority: Optics pundits have been crowing about AMOLED destroying LCD for a while now: they are thinner, brighter, more energy efficient and arguably offer better colors, higher contrast, and deeper saturation than LCD. The biggest barrier stopping AMOLED from taking over as the smartphone display technology of choice has been price. Until now that is. As predicted two years ago, it has only taken 24 months for AMOLED production costs to fall below that of LCD. Production costs in the first quarter for a 5-inch Full HD smartphone display are $14.30 for an AMOLED panel and $14.60 for an LCD display. In the fourth quarter of 2015, these figures were $17.10 and $15.70, respectively. With AMOLED production costs dropping below LCD for the first time, AMOLED panels will soon become the default display technology choice for manufacturers on their mid-range and entry-level devices as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMOLED Displays Are Now Cheaper To Produce Than LCD

Starboard Launches Proxy Fight To Remove Entire Yahoo Board

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP moved on Thursday to overthrow the entire board of Yahoo Inc, including Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who has struggled to turn around the company in her nearly four years at the helm. Starboard, which has been pushing for changes at Yahoo since 2014 and owns about 1.7 percent of the company, said it would nominate nine candidates for the board. The proxy fight comes as Yahoo is pressing ahead with an auction of its core Internet business, which includes search, mail and news sites. Yahoo and Starboard could still come to an agreement before the company’s annual meeting, expected to be in late June. If they cannot avoid a proxy fight and the Yahoo board election is taken to a shareholder vote, attention will swing to the large mutual and index funds that own the stock and will carry heavy weight in the final tally. Yahoo and Starboard representatives met on March 10 to discuss ways the two sides could avoid a proxy fight, according to people familiar with the matter. But those talks broke down, in part because Starboard was upset by Yahoo’s announcement that same day that it appointed two new board directors, these people say. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Starboard Launches Proxy Fight To Remove Entire Yahoo Board

CCTV DVR Vulnerabilities Traced To Chinese OEM Which Spurned Researchers’ Advice

An anonymous reader writes: RSA security researcher Rotem Kerner has identified a common vulnerability in the firmware of 70 different CCTV DVR vendors, which allows crooks to execute code and gain root privileges on the affected devices. The problem was actually in the firmware of just one DVR sold by Chinese firm TVT. The practice of “white-labeling” products helped propagate this issue to other “manufacturers” who did nothing more than to buy a non-branded DVR, tweaked its firmware, slapped their logo on top, and sold it a their own, vulnerability included. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CCTV DVR Vulnerabilities Traced To Chinese OEM Which Spurned Researchers’ Advice

How One Dev Broke Node and Thousands of Projects In 11 Lines of JavaScript

An anonymous reader quotes an article written by Chris Williams for The Register: Programmers were left staring at broken builds and failed installations on Tuesday after someone toppled the Jenga tower of JavaScript. A couple of hours ago, Azer Koculu unpublished more than 250 of his modules from NPM, which is a popular package manager used by JavaScript projects to install dependencies. Koculu yanked his source code because, we’re told, one of the modules was called Kik and that apparently attracted the attention of lawyers representing the instant-messaging app of the same name. According to Koculu, Kik’s briefs told him to take down the module, he refused, so the lawyers went to NPM’s admins claiming brand infringement. When NPM took Kik away from the developer, he was furious and unpublished all of his NPM-managed modules. ‘This situation made me realize that NPM is someone’s private land where corporate is more powerful than the people, and I do open source because Power To The People, ‘ Koculu blogged. Unfortunately, one of those dependencies was left-pad. It pads out the lefthand-side of strings with zeroes or spaces. And thousands of projects including Node and Babel relied on it. With left-pad removed from NPM, these applications and widely used bits of open-source infrastructure were unable to obtain the dependency, and thus fell over. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How One Dev Broke Node and Thousands of Projects In 11 Lines of JavaScript

Bitcoin Trading Platform Announces Huge Downtime Following Cyber-Attack

An anonymous reader writes: BitQuick, a US-based Bitcoin trader has announced that it will shut down its platform for up to 2 to 4 weeks following a cyber-attack this week. The platform took this step because it has not yet identified how the hackers infiltrated their systems. It is unusual for companies to take down their systems for weeks, but after the recent Cryptsy and LoanBase hacks, the company is not willing to lose millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. BitQuick announced clients of the incident, and 97% already withdrew their funds from the platform. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Trading Platform Announces Huge Downtime Following Cyber-Attack

Cinema-Quality Unity Engine ‘Adam’ Demo Claims To Run Real-Time On GeForce GTX 980

MojoKid writes: This week at GDC 2016 the team at Unity revealed their stable release of the Unity 5.3.4 game engine along with a beta of Unity 5.4. There are a number of upgrades included with Unity 5.4 including in-editor artist workflow improvements, VR rendering pipeline optimizations, improved multithreaded rendering, customizable particles which can use Light Probe Proxy Volumes (LPPV) to add more realistic lighting models and the ability to drop in textures from tools like Quixel DDo Painter. But for a jaw-dropping look at what’s possible with the Unity 5.4 engine, check out the short film “Adam” that Unity has developed to demo it. The film showcases all of Unity Engine 5.4’s effects and gives a great look at what to expect from Unity-based games coming in 2016. Unity will showcase the full film at Unite Europe 2016 in Amsterdam. But what’s most impressive about Adam perhaps is that Unity says that this is all being run in real-time at 1440p resolution on just an upper-midrange GeForce GTX 980 card. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cinema-Quality Unity Engine ‘Adam’ Demo Claims To Run Real-Time On GeForce GTX 980

Millions of Android Devices Vulnerable To New Stagefright Exploit

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers have found yet another flaw in Android’s Stagefright. The researchers were able to remotely hack an Android phone by exploiting the bugs. According to their estimation, the flaw exposes devices running Android software version between 5.0-5.1, or 36% of 1.4 billion, to security attacks. “I would be surprised if multiple professional hacking groups do not have working Stagefright exploits by now. Many devices out there are still vulnerable, so Zimperium has not published the second exploit in order to protect the ecosystem, ” Zuk Avraham, chairman of Zimperium, the firm which found the first Stagefright exploit told Wired. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Millions of Android Devices Vulnerable To New Stagefright Exploit

Security Firms Say Chinese Hackers Behind U.S. Ransomware Attacks

An anonymous reader writes: According to four leading security firms, some of the recent ransomware attacks against U.S. companies have been performed by hacking groups working at the behest of China’s government. From the report, “Security firms Attack Research, InGuardians and G-C Partners, said they had separately investigated three other similar ransomware attacks since December. Although they cannot be positive, the companies concluded that all were the work of a known advanced threat group from China.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Security Firms Say Chinese Hackers Behind U.S. Ransomware Attacks

Autonomous Cars? How About Autonomous Bikes?

R3d M3rcury writes: So we’ve all heard about the brave new world of autonomous cars which will be at our beck-and-call. But how about an autonomous bike? The i-Bike (not to be confused with the iBike computer) is the winner of KPIT Sparkle 2016, the All India Science and Engineering Student Contest. It started off as a bicycle suitable for use by people with disabilities. If you could use a smartphone, you could ride a bike. But the developers realized that this could be part of a bike-sharing system. You could rent a bike at the train station, ride to work, and then have the bike automatically return to the train station for the next person. Of course, the obvious question is: Will the bike stop at stop signs? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Autonomous Cars? How About Autonomous Bikes?