Die neue Version 4.4 des Linux-Kernels enthält einen freien Grafiktreiber für das Raspberry Pi und ermöglicht Grafikbeschleunigung in virtuellen Maschinen. Verbessert worden sind der RAID- und BPF-Code, geplant ist außerdem die Langzeitpflege der Version. (Linux-Kernel, Dateisystem) 
Die neue Version 4.4 des Linux-Kernels enthält einen freien Grafiktreiber für das Raspberry Pi und ermöglicht Grafikbeschleunigung in virtuellen Maschinen. Verbessert worden sind der RAID- und BPF-Code, geplant ist außerdem die Langzeitpflege der Version. (Linux-Kernel, Dateisystem) Vor rund zwei Jahren hat Facebook die native Windows-Version seines Messengers eingestellt. Seitdem können Desktopnutzer die Website messenger.com nutzen, wenn sie mit Freunden chatten wollen. Eine Mac-Desktopanwendung scheint jedoch bereits intern getestet zu werden. (Instant Messenger, Soziales Netz) 
Vor rund zwei Jahren hat Facebook die native Windows-Version seines Messengers eingestellt. Seitdem können Desktopnutzer die Website messenger.com nutzen, wenn sie mit Freunden chatten wollen. Eine Mac-Desktopanwendung scheint jedoch bereits intern getestet zu werden. (Instant Messenger, Soziales Netz) BlackEnergy was key ingredient used to cause power outage to at least 80k customers.
The people who carried out last month's first known hacker-caused power outage used highly destructive malware to gain a foothold into multiple regional distribution power companies in Ukraine and to delay restoration efforts once electricity had been shut off, a newly published analysis confirms.
The malware known as BlackEnergy allowed the attackers to gain a foothold on the power-company systems, said the report, which was published by a member of the SANS industrial control systems team. The still-unknown attackers then used that access to open circuit breakers that cut power. After that, they likely used a wiper utility called KillDisk to thwart recovery efforts and then waged denial-of-service attacks to prevent power-company personnel from receiving customer reports of outages. In Saturday's report, SANS ICS Director Michael J. Assante wrote:
The attackers demonstrated planning, coordination, and the ability to use malware and possible direct remote access to blind system dispatchers, cause undesirable state changes to the distribution electricity infrastructure, and attempt to delay the restoration by wiping SCADA servers after they caused the outage. This attack consisted of at least three components: the malware, a denial of service to the phone systems, and the missing piece of evidence of the final cause of the impact. Current evidence and analysis indicates that the missing component was direct interaction from the adversary and not the work of malware. Or in other words, the attack was enabled via malware but consisted of at least three distinct efforts.
The report stresses there's no evidence BlackEnergy or its recently developed KillDisk component was the direct cause of the outage, which so far has been shown to affect about 80,000 customers. The analysis also cautioned that evidence showing some past BlackEnergy infections relied on booby-trapped Microsoft Office documents to spread are no indication such a vector was used in the recent Ukrainian power-grid attacks. Still, this weekend's report leaves little doubt the blackout was the result of a highly coordinated hacker attack that relied on BlackEnergy as a key ingredient.
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The ever-repeated parrot statement from the copyright industry is that “authors must be paid”. This ignores the existence of Wikipedia and about three billion smartphones, and is therefore simply false.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
The parroted question-and-assertion from the copyright industry continues to be “authors must be paid” and “how will the authors get paid?”
This question-and-assertion isn’t just irrelevant, it’s also a sickening existential defense from an industry that makes sure that 99.99% of music authors never see a single cent in royalty. (A more proper question would be how a music author or composer can possibly earn a living with the copyright industry still in existence.)
Nevertheless, the question and assertion assume that the copyright monopoly exists with the purpose of making sure somebody gets paid. That’s not why it exists. More importantly, the question and assertion also assume that no culture, knowledge, or technology would get created without the copyright monopoly (or outside of the copyright industry).
The purpose of the copyright monopoly is clear: it’s worded quite explicitly in the United States Constitution, article 8. Its purpose is “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts”. The purpose is not for anybody to get rich, or make a living, or paid at all. The purpose is and was always to benefit the public. To generate progress, with the implicit meaning of making that progress available to everyone (or it wouldn’t be progress in any meaningful sense of the word).
Now, it has been assumed – as asserted by the copyright industry – that the only way to achieve this effect, across all fields and disciplines, is to lock the authorship up in a time-limited* monopoly. Various government officials have accepted this narrative.
The copyright industry therefore has two customers: first, it sells the idea of its unique capability of producing culture and knowledge to the government, in exchange for a monopoly when it does so. Second, it sells monopolized copies of that culture and knowledge to people in exchange for money. It’s important to realize that the copyright industry has two different sets of customers, and the first set has every reason to revisit the dishonest deal and get a new supplier.
Linux and Wikipedia (as well as other, less known achievements) show unambiguously that the idea of requiring any kind of payment for great tools, culture, or knowledge to come into being is an utter falsehood. It may be true in some cases. But the cases where it hasn’t been true have all shown that the basic premise, that the copyright monopoly is any kind of necessary, is the purest oxen fecalia.
And these projects, free in all aspects as they are, now underpin the Android operating system which powers three billion smartphones and well over half of the world’s servers in various incarnations of the GNU/Linux operating system. They support every lower- and higher-level education on the planet.
According to the copyright industry, these projects do not and cannot exist, as the authors weren’t paid.
According to reality, the copyright industry is wrong.
Let’s be clear here: the most common operating kernel for servers and mobile smartphones, which underpin the entire IT industry today, was written completely outside the copyright monopoly context with no need for anyone to get paid. The richest source of knowledge available, which underpin all college educations even if unofficially, was written completely outside the copyright monopoly context with no need for anyone to get paid.
This doesn’t mean that nobody should be allowed to sell anything. Quite to the contrary! But it can be conclusively deduced that government officials have been completely in the wrong when accepting the copyright industry’s assertion that nothing will ever get produced without a strong copyright monopoly. It can also be conclusively deduced that the business models that are based on free tools, culture, and knowledge are worth enormously much more to the economy than a manufacturing industry still trying to sell round pieces of silly data-carrying plastic when their competition ship the medialess information across the world in seconds.
Government officials should just stop buying the idea from the copyright industry that a monopoly is required for progress to take place. They should get a new deal from another supplier, and as is the case when this happens, the supplier being ditched – the copyright industry – has no say whatsoever about the new supplier or the new deal. More specifically, it’s more beneficial to a government to not hand out any kind of copyright monopoly at all, as more culture and knowledge – more progress – is created without it.
The copyright monopoly has demonstrated that it’s not just unnecessary, but downright harmful to progress, to the economy, and to civil liberties. The copyright industry should not be allowed to get away with its further Norwegian Blue parroting of “how should the authors get paid”. The question is not relevant.
Any honest business model is built without a legal monopoly in any case. Make money, good for you. But you don’t get to do so with a monopoly that cuts down on my rights, especially not with blatant lying.
*eternal
About The Author
Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.
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It wowed us at the LA Auto Show, and wowed us again at CES
LAS VEGAS—If you kept a look out for it, you could find a few examples of augmented reality on display at CES this year. There were concept cars with AR heads-up displays (JVC Kenwood and McLaren Automotive had a modified 675LT with such a system), but little of it was production-ready. That's not the case with Hyundai's new virtual owner's manual.
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Panasonic’s ToughBook and ToughPad line of ruggedized laptops and tablets are designed for use in industrial, outdoors, or other environments where a regular computer might not survive the kind of abuse it would be exposed to. But they tend to be pretty expensive. Now Panasonic is offering a slightly more affordable option for customers that […]
Panasonic ToughPad FZ-Q1 is a 12.5 inch semi-rugged Windows tablet for $1000 and up is a post from: Liliputing
Panasonic’s ToughBook and ToughPad line of ruggedized laptops and tablets are designed for use in industrial, outdoors, or other environments where a regular computer might not survive the kind of abuse it would be exposed to. But they tend to be pretty expensive. Now Panasonic is offering a slightly more affordable option for customers that […]
Panasonic ToughPad FZ-Q1 is a 12.5 inch semi-rugged Windows tablet for $1000 and up is a post from: Liliputing
Anti-piracy outfits such as the U.S. based Copyright Alliance claim to champion the rights of creators, which includes giving credit to those contributing content to the web. However, it appears that despite putting in endless hours of work to create original content, news resources such as this one deserve no such protection.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Since this piece is about TorrentFreak content, we need to make it clear that any reader is free to do what they like with our material within the bounds of our Creative Commons license. Were not only happy for you to do that, we’re very proud that you’re sharing us with others.
However, some of our readers – those in the copyright lobby – like to make use of our content while doing their best not to give us credit. While hat-tips from them aren’t what we’re striving for here, it should be a concern to everyone when they’re prepared to throw the standards they impose on others out of the window.
In this instance i’m talking about the powerful Copyright Alliance, the US-based anti-piracy organization which counts the MPAA, RIAA and a who’s-who of industry companies among its members.
For weeks now the group’s Twitter account has been the cause of wry smiles behind this keyboard since despite the spending of the endless hours that go into producing TorrentFreak, the Copyright Alliance has gone out of its way to avoid crediting the site for its work.
At the very thin end of the scale, on several occasions TF has been the first to break news only to see the Copyright Alliance Twitter account promoting other sites reporting on the same stories much later. But all that really shows is that they’re slow to respond – big deal.
No, the major irritant is when the Copyright Alliance promotes our original content to its readers but then gives others the credit, which by their own standards is taking things too far.
As you can see, despite IBTimes clearly citing us as the source for their short summary of our exclusive on how the UK’s most prolific pirates were caught, the Copyright Alliance deliberately credited them, not us.
Nevertheless, that wasn’t the instance that caused the most eye-rolling.
While trying to ensure TF had fresh content every day over Christmas, we came up with a post debunking some of the most persistent piracy myths. Within hours another website took the piece, plagiarized it, and presented it as their own work.
But so what? If they can make a couple of bucks from it, good for them. It doesn’t hurt us and might even get file-sharing news out to a fresh audience somewhere. Perhaps more importantly, that site doesn’t claim to be “championing artists’ and creators’ rights.”
No, what actually lit the touch paper was the creators’ champions at the Copyright Alliance using their Twitter account to promote the plagiarized version over ours.
To be extremely clear, we aren’t looking for a pat on the back from the Copyright Alliance. But when they publish articles titled Giving Credit (and Hat Tips) Where Credit is Due containing the words “It’s a positive sign that people are recognizing the importance of crediting creative content and it’s origins…”, someone needs to hold them to their own standards.
And amazingly they’re standards they simply can’t maintain.
Just as this article was nearing completion on Friday, the Copyright Alliance did it again by deliberately linking to a piece in Metro covering our report from earlier in the week, despite that piece clearly citing us as the source.
Again, we aren’t getting any traffic from them and don’t want or need their support, but the Copyright Alliance are showing time and again that they do not practice what they preach. And this is only what we see in public.
Love them or loathe them, anti-piracy outfits have a right to exist and a right to go about their business. And, as annoying as it might be to some, governments across the world accept their legitimacy in a way that pirates can only dream of. As a result they tend to occupy the moral high-ground almost everywhere they tread.
But what this little episode shows is that unlike a site like this, which promotes both positive and negative news about copyright and piracy issues, organizations like the Copyright Alliance are only interested in pushing their own agenda in the way they see fit.
And if that means trampling on the rights of creators whom they don’t like (or don’t get paid by), so be it.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Keiner der bekannten Let's Player, sondern Sony Computer Entertainment hat offenbar versucht, in den USA Markenschutz für den Begriff "Let's Play" zu bekommen - vorerst erfolglos. (
Wer von Android zu iOS wechseln will, kann seit einiger Zeit eine Apple-App dazu nutzen. Nun soll Apple auch für den umgekehrten Weg von iOS zu Android eine App entwickeln. (
Apple hat in den USA Patentschutz für ein iPhone beantragt, das mit zwei Hauptkameras ausgerüstet ist. Damit ließen sich nicht nur Weitwinkel- und Teleaufnahmen parallel anfertigen, sondern auch Zeitlupen- und Zeitrafferaufnahmen gleichzeitig. (