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Couple sues Pandora and SiriusXM over copyright in pre-1972 songs

(credit: Getty Images) An Illinois couple who owned several recording companies specializing in doo-wop, jazz, and rhythm and blues have filed suit against the major satellite and Internet radio companies over their playing of pre-1972 songs. It’s the third lawsuit that highlights how the patchwork of state copyright laws over older music is putting a drag on Internet radio—sound recordings made before 1972 aren’t protected by federal copyright but are protected by many states. On Monday, Arthur and Barbara Sheridan filed two lawsuits in New Jersey federal court: one against Pandora and Sirius XM (PDF) and another against iHeartMedia (PDF), the parent company of online music service iHeartRadio. Their lawsuits seek class action status, looking to represent owners of pre-1972 songs. The companies have derived “significant benefits,” including “millions of dollars in annual revenue,” by playing those songs without permission, the suit alleges. “The Pre-1972 Recordings, when created, were the novel product of mental labor embodied in material form,” the complaint against Sirius and Pandora states. “Plaintiffs and the Misappropriation Class thus have property rights in them as recognized by New Jersey common law.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Couple sues Pandora and SiriusXM over copyright in pre-1972 songs

Breaking 512-bit RSA with Amazon EC2 is a cinch. So why all the weak keys?

(credit: martinak15 ) The cost and time required to break 512-bit RSA encryption keys has plummeted to an all-time low of just $75 and four hours using a recently published recipe that even computing novices can follow. But despite the ease and low cost, reliance on the weak keys to secure e-mails, secure-shell transactions, and other sensitive communications remains alarmingly high. The technique, which uses Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service , is described in a paper published last week titled Factoring as a Service . It’s the latest in a 16-year progression of attacks that have grown ever faster and cheaper. When 512-bit RSA keys were first factored in 1999, it took a supercomputer and hundreds of other computers seven months to carry out. Thanks to the edicts of Moore’s Law – which holds that computing power doubles every 18 months or so – the factorization attack required just seven hours and $100 in March, when “FREAK,” a then newly disclosed attack on HTTPS-protected websites with 512-bit keys , came to light. In the seven months since FREAK’s debut, websites have largely jettisoned the 1990s era cipher suite that made them susceptible to the factorization attack. And that was a good thing, since the factorization attack made it easy to obtain the secret key needed to cryptographically impersonate the webserver or to decipher encrypted traffic passing between the server and end users. But e-mail servers, by contrast, remain woefully less protected. According to the authors of last week’s paper, the RSA_EXPORT cipher suite is used by an estimated 30.8 percent of e-mail services using the SMTP protocol , 13 percent of POP3S servers . and 12.6 percent of IMAP-based e-mail services . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Breaking 512-bit RSA with Amazon EC2 is a cinch. So why all the weak keys?

Android 6.0 re-implements mandatory device encryption for new devices

(credit: Google) Shortly after the announcement of iOS 8 in 2014, Google made headlines by saying that it would make full-device encryption mandatory for new Android devices running version 5.0. It then made more headlines several months later when we discovered that the company backed down , “strongly recommending” that Android device makers enable encryption but stopping short of actually requiring it. Now Google has published an updated version of the Android Compatibility Definition Document ( PDF ) for Android 6.0, and it looks like mandatory encryption is back with a couple of exceptions. New devices that come with Marshmallow and have AES crypto performance above 50MiB-per-second need to support encryption of the private user data partition (/data) and the public data partition (/sdcard). The relevant portion of the document, emphasis ours: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Android 6.0 re-implements mandatory device encryption for new devices

Scientists grow functional kidney organoid from stem cells

A drawing shows the complex structure of a kidney. (credit: Wikimedia commons ) There are many diseases that attack specific organs, landing patients on a transplant list. Unfortunately, our bodies have markers that identify an organ as “self,” which makes it difficult to find an organ match. Many individuals die waiting for an organ transplant because a match can’t be found. Research on stem cells—a type of cell that is able to transform into nearly any cell type—has raised hopes of treating organ failure. Researchers envision using these cells to grow fully functional organs. A functional organ is similar to a machine. Organs contain many interacting parts that must be positioned in a specific configuration to work properly. Getting all the right cell types in the appropriate locations is a real challenge. Recently, a team of scientists has met that challenge by using stem cells to grow a tissue, termed an organoid, that resembles a developing kidney. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Scientists grow functional kidney organoid from stem cells

Unionized video game voice actors overwhelmingly approve strike vote

Members of the SAG-AFTRA union have overwhelmingly approved a measure authorizing an “interactive media” strike that could have wide-ranging impact on the availability of professional voice talent for video game projects. The union announced today that 96.52 percent of its members voted in favor of the strike. That’s well above the 75 percent threshold that was necessary to authorize such a move, and a result the union is calling “a resounding success.” Despite the vote, union members will not strike immediately. Instead, a strike can now be called whenever the union’s National Board decides to declare it. Armed with that knowledge, SAG-AFTRA will be sending its Negotiating Comittee back to talk with major game publishers including EA, Activision, Disney, and Warner Bros., which are signatories to a current agreement with the union. After their old agreement technically expired at the end of 2014, both sides have failed to reach a new understanding in negotiation sessions in February and June. SAG-AFTRA is looking for a number of concessions from the game industry, including “back end bonus” royalties for games that sell at least two million units, “stunt pay” for “vocally stressful” work, and more information to be provided about projects before time-consuming auditions are scheduled. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Unionized video game voice actors overwhelmingly approve strike vote

Sprint continues decline, plans job cuts and cost cuts of $2.5 billion

(credit: Sprint) Sprint’s place among the big four US wireless carriers continues to be a precarious one, with news reports saying the company now aims to reduce its number of employees and cut between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in costs over the next six months. A memo from Sprint management to staff said there will be a hiring freeze and “job reductions,” according to The Wall Street Journal . Sprint announced days ago that it will skip a major auction of low-band spectrum, a decision that could push the company further behind its rivals. Sprint has licenses to more spectrum than any other carrier, but AT&T and Verizon control a large majority of low-band spectrum, which is ideal for providing coverage over long distances and indoors. T-Mobile says it intends to buy enough low-band spectrum to cover the entire nation; Sprint says it can improve coverage with its existing spectrum by increasing the number of cell towers. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint continues decline, plans job cuts and cost cuts of $2.5 billion

Sprint offers $2.1 billion to acquire the rest of Clearwire

As most observers expected , Sprint has finally made a formal offer to acquire the rest of Clearwire. On Thursday, Sprint said it would pay $2.1 billion for the remaining 49.7 percent of Clearwire that it does not currently control. As we reported yesterday , the move is widely seen as a play for Sprint to acquire Clearwire’s valuable 2.5 GHz spectrum, which it would use to offer LTE and strengthen its position against Verizon and AT&T. The bid works out to $2.90 per share—higher than the company’s closing price on Wednesday—but analysts say the offer may not be good enough. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

iOS 9’s space-saving “app slicing” disabled for now, will return in future update

Enlarge / Apple’s sample universal binary here is just 60 percent of its original size when downloaded to an iPad or iPhone. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Back in June, we wrote a bit about App Thinning , a collection of iOS 9 features that are supposed to make iOS 9 apps take up less space on iDevices. Apple has just announced to developers that one of those features, “app slicing,” is not available in current iOS 9 versions due to an iCloud bug. It will be re-enabled in a future iOS update after the bug has been resolved. App slicing ensures that your iDevice only downloads the app assets it needs to work. In older versions of iOS, all devices downloaded “universal” versions of apps that included all of the assets those apps needed to work on each and every targeted iDevice. If you downloaded an app to your iPhone 5, for example, it could include larger image assets made for the larger-screened iPhones 6 and 6 Plus, 64-bit code that its 32-bit processor couldn’t use, and Metal graphics code that its GPU didn’t support. That’s all wasted space, a problem app slicing was designed to resolve. Apple says the iCloud bug affects users who are restoring backups to new devices—if you moved from that iPhone 5 to a new iPhone 6S, for example, iCloud would restore iPhone 5-compatible versions of some apps without the assets required by the newer, larger device. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 9’s space-saving “app slicing” disabled for now, will return in future update

Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box

Gone, but not forgotten. For the longest time, one of the things that people liked to poke fun at in Windows was a dialog box used to add fonts to the system. The rarely used dialog used Windows 3.1-era icons and fonts, even in Windows Vista, making it a weird anachronism. Microsoft tidied up that bit of Windows legacy in Windows 7 by removing the box entirely, but other relics remain. One of the most annoying is the environment variables dialog. This box hasn’t been updated for what feels like millennia, and it’s cramped and awkward to use as a result. Environment variables can be lengthy, and they almost never fit in the current dialog. This is particularly acute for one of the most important variables, PATH. The PATH variable stores the names of all the directories that the system should search when hunting for executables, and many applications and development tools like to add their directories to the PATH. It quickly gets unwieldy. The current annoying dialog. And unlike the add font dialog, which people only ever looked at just to point and laugh—it was rarely used to actually install fonts—the environment variables box is actually useful, as it’s the easiest and best way of changing Windows environment variables. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box

Supermassive black holes found spiraling in at seven percent light speed

Simulation of the pair of supermassive black hole binary system, PG 1302-102. The smaller shines more brightly because it’s farther from the center of mass, and thus closer to the outer disk of gas. This gas accretes onto the black hole, heating up as it falls in, and thus emits more light. The more massive black hole, therefore, is starved of gas and doesn’t glow as brightly. (credit: Zoltan Haiman, Columbia University ) Data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer ( GALEX ) and the Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the presence of a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other so closely that they’re moving at relativistic speeds—a significant fraction of the speed of light. Supermassive black holes are expected to come in pairs pretty often. That’s because every galaxy has its own supermassive black hole, and galaxies often merge, bringing the two together. These mergers are very slow processes that distort both galaxies until their stars settle into new orbits (a process known as “violent relaxation”). While this is happening, extremely heavy objects, such as supermassive black holes, will tend to move in toward the center of the new galaxy. The new galaxy would end up with two supermassive black holes, one from each original galaxy, orbiting each other at its core. Objects have been observed which look a lot like supermassive black hole binaries, matching the prediction. These objects have a lot of mass—billions of times the mass of the Sun, as we’d expect from a pair of supermassives—and they’re periodic, meaning the amount of light the object produces rises and falls with a predictable time period. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Supermassive black holes found spiraling in at seven percent light speed

Ken May

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