Tag: wired

Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

The songwriter who co-wrote Megan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” alleged on Tuesday that he only cleared $5,679 from over 178 million streams of the song on Spotify. (credit: YouTube ) A Tuesday copyright roundtable discussion, hosted by Nashville’s Belmont University and led by the House Judiciary Committee, opened with one of the past year’s most successful songwriters announcing just how little money he’d made from over 178 million streams of a song he co-wrote: $5,679. That means Nashville songwriter Kevin Kadine, the co-writer of the hit 2014 Megan Trainor song “All About That Bass,” made close to $31.90 for every million streams. According to a report by The Tenneseean , Kadine didn’t clarify to the roundtable’s five members of the House of Representatives exactly how the songwriting proceeds were split between himself and Trainor (who shared songwriting credits on “Bass”), but he did allege that the average streaming-service payout for a song’s songwriting team is roughly $90 per million streams. “That’s as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career, and number one in 78 countries,” Kadine said. “But you’re making $5,600. How do you feed your family?” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

France tells Google to remove search results globally, or face big fines

Public domain. Google’s informal appeal against a French order to apply the so-called “right to be forgotten” to all of its global Internet services and domains, not just those in Europe, has been rejected. The president of the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), France’s data protection authority, gave a number of reasons for the rejection , including the fact that European orders to de-list information from search results could be easily circumvented if links were still available on Google’s other domains. CNIL’s president also claimed that “this decision does not show any willingness on the part of the CNIL to apply French law extraterritorially. It simply requests full observance of European legislation by non European players offering their services in Europe.” As you’ve probably gathered,  Google disagrees  with CNIL’s stance. In a July blog post regarding the case, the company’s global privacy chief, Peter Fleischer, wrote: “If the CNIL’s proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom. In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place. We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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France tells Google to remove search results globally, or face big fines

Computer systems outage grounds American Airlines at major hubs

American Airlines’ information systems outage is affecting its website as well as flights. An information systems outage at Chicago’s O’Hare International has grounded many American Airlines flights today. As the company tries to restore service, flights from at least three major hub airports—O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Miami—are on a “ground stop” because of the problem. At 1:32pm Eastern Time, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that American had requested a ground stop for flights out of the three airports: FAA Air Traffic Alert: @AmericanAir requested a ground stop for all of their traffic in and out of DFW/ORD/MIA due to their computer issue. — The FAA (@FAANews) September 17, 2015 During the issue, American’s Twitter feed was filling up with responses to customers: “We’re working to resolve technical issues and apologize for the inconvenience.” Some of the complaints had nothing to do specifically with the grounded flights, however—it appears the outage has also affected parts of American’s website, blocking access to frequent flyer accounts and other customer data. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Computer systems outage grounds American Airlines at major hubs

Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

Getting companies’ names to show up higher in search engine results is the field of the lucrative business known as search engine optimization, or SEO. There’s a range of SEO practices, from “white hat” ones that are endorsed by search engines, to “black hat” practices that, while they may not be illegal, violate search engine rules. Now Google is taking a rare legal action against one Southern California SEO company it says went too far and broke the law. In its complaint (PDF) , Google says that Tustin, California-based Local Lighthouse has bombarded consumers with “incessant, unsolicited automated telephone calls” since mid-2014, making “false guarantees of first-page placement in Google search results.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

ZMap.io The highly clandestine attacks hitting Cisco Systems routers are much more active than previously reported. Infections have hit at least 79 devices in 19 countries, including an ISP in the US that’s hosting 25 boxes running the malicious backdoor. That discovery comes from a team of computer scientists who probed the entire IPv4 address space for infected devices. As Ars reported Tuesday, the so-called SYNful Knock router implant is activated after receiving an unusual series of non-compliant network packets followed by a hardcoded password. By sending only the out-of-sequence TCP packets but not the password to every Internet address and then monitoring the response, the researchers were able to detect which ones were infected by the backdoor. Security firm FireEye surprised the security world on Tuesday when it first reported the active outbreak of SYNful Knock. The implant is precisely the same size as the legitimate Cisco router image, and it’s loaded each time the router is restarted. It supports up to 100 modules that attackers can tailor to the specific target. FireEye found it on 14 servers in India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Ukraine. The finding was significant, because it showed an attack that had long been theorized was in fact being actively used. The new research shows it’s being used much more widely, and it’s been found in countries including the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and China. The researchers wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

Here’s why you can’t delete native iOS apps from your iPhone

Megan Geuss If you’re an iOS user, you may have a junk folder on your device full of rarely used, native apps from Apple. Banishing them to their own cluster is just about the only course of action since these apps cannot be deleted. Now, we know more about why that’s the case: in an interview with Buzzfeed, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that deleting native apps would essentially cause a domino effect in other programs on the device, possibly breaking things elsewhere in iOS. “There are some apps that are linked to something else on the iPhone,” Cook told Buzzfeed . “If they were to be removed, they might cause issues elsewhere on the phone.” While Cook didn’t detail which preinstalled apps were linked to other functions, he went on to say that not every app is connected in this way. Eventually, Apple may allow some native apps to be deleted. “Over time, I think with the ones that aren’t like that, we’ll figure out a way [for you to remove them]. … It’s not that we want to suck up your real estate.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Here’s why you can’t delete native iOS apps from your iPhone

Apple announces iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, with 3D Touch and A9 SoC

SAN FRANCISCO—Apple has officially unveiled its newest iPhones, the 6S and 6S Plus. Like the 3GS, 4S, and 5S before them, the phones are visually similar to their predecessors, and the devices focus mainly on internal upgrades and tweaks. The new phones will be available for preorder on September 11 and will officially launch on September 18. The new phones are built out of the same 7000-series aluminum used in the Apple Watch, a change which should make them sturdier and less prone to bending. The phones retain their 4.7- and 5.5-inch screens, though, as well as the TouchID sensor and button layout used in the iPhone 6. A new color option joins the line-up, too: Rose Gold. This brings the iPhone more in line with the Apple Watch’s exterior appearance options (especially important if you’re the kind of person who clutches their pearls at the idea of your phone’s color not coordinating with your watch). Unlike the Apple Watch,though, the iPhone’s Rose Gold is just annodized aluminum, not actual-for-real Apple Gold . The front of the devices has been given a new type of glass—one which Apple calls “dual ion-exchange” glass. Behind the new face, the phones’ also have Force Touch-style pressure sensitivity, which is called “3D Touch.” The new devices also provide tactile feedback via a Taptic Engine similar to the one in the Apple Watch. In the Apple Watch, Force Touch is usually used to bring up menu items, and 3D Touch provides similar functionality on the new iPhones. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple announces iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, with 3D Touch and A9 SoC

Static RAM created out of carbon nanotubes

We’re already at the point where the features we etch into processors are about the same size as some molecules—hemoglobin, for example, is five nanometers across. Too much smaller, and the behavior of electrons will become dominated by quantum effects, potentially causing some unpredictable behavior. One potential solution to this is to actually use individual molecules to create the features on chips. Carbon nanotubes are promising candidates, as they naturally come in both semiconducting and metallic forms. But getting the right kind of nanotubes into a structure where they perform consistently has been a challenge. Now, a team has shown that the properties of nanotubes can be manipulated and preserved in a way that could make them useful for electronics. While the work was done with populations of nanotubes rather than single molecules, it did manage to turn the nanotubes into functional RAM. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Static RAM created out of carbon nanotubes

Bitcoin cyberextortionists are blackmailing banks, corporations

A number of large UK corporations and institutions, such as Lloyds Bank and BAE systems, have reported a “marked increase” in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from the Bitcoin extortionist group DD4BC, which has been operational since last year . The increased aggressions appears concurrent with reports from other organisations. A cybersecurity case study released by Akamai identified 114 DD4BC attacks against the company’s customers since April 2015, with 41 cases taking place in June alone. In comparison, there were only 5 attacks in January and February 2015. “The latest attacks—focused primarily on the financial service industry—involved new strategies and tactics intended to harass, extort and ultimately embarrass the victim publicly,” said Akamai Security Division executive Stuart Scholly in a press release. 58% of DD4BC’s targets are financial institutions, according to Akamai. The group begins with ransom emails that state their demands, which vary anywhere between 1 and 100 bitcoins (about £160 to £16,000), a deadline for compliance, and warning of a “small, demonstrative attack.” Should the victim prove uncooperative, the figure is raised and a more forceful show of force is made. This technique is particularly effective against financial institutions as DD4BC threatens to publicise their attacks, negating the institution’s reputation and trustworthiness. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin cyberextortionists are blackmailing banks, corporations

Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade

Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet’s DNS servers should enable access. A few days ago, TorrentFreak reported that the Oslo District Court had sided with several Hollywood studios and domestic Norwegian rights holders in a case that sought to block a number of sites, including The Pirate Bay, Viooz, and ExtraTorrent. The court ordered that the country’s major ISPs, including Telia, TeliaSonera, NextGenTel, and Altibox, must block the sites. The Norwegian Pirate Party, as you can probably imagine, isn’t happy with the court-ordered block. In response, it has set up an unblocked DNS server—dns.piratpartiet.no—and a website that shows you how to change your DNS server settings on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade