Das rundenbasierte Strategiespiel Xcom 2 setzt den Krieg gegen Außerirdische fort: In der Erweiterung Alienjäger kämpfen Spieler in einer storybasierten Mission gegen neue Feindtypen mit unvorhersehbaren Verhaltensmustern. (Xcom, Games) Month: May 2016
Trotz Routerfreiheit: Spekulationen über Zertifizierung von Kabelmodems
Smartwatch: Skintrack macht den Arm zum Touchpad
Forscher haben ein System entwickelt, das die Bedienung einer Smartwatch auf den kompletten Arm ausweitet: Mit Skintrack lassen sich so Touch- und Hover-Gesten auch außerhalb eines kleinen Displays ausführen. Marktreif ist die Technik aber noch nicht. (Wissenschaft, Internet)
Forscher haben ein System entwickelt, das die Bedienung einer Smartwatch auf den kompletten Arm ausweitet: Mit Skintrack lassen sich so Touch- und Hover-Gesten auch außerhalb eines kleinen Displays ausführen. Marktreif ist die Technik aber noch nicht. (Wissenschaft, Internet) Hearthstone & Co: Activision Blizzard und die 544 Millionen MAUs
Auf Augenhöhe mit Netflix: Keine Verkaufszahlen, sondern aktive Nutzer und Zuschauerstunden stehen derzeit bei Activision Blizzard im Mittelpunkt. Titel wie Hearthstone, Call of Duty und Candy Crush Saga sorgen für gute Geschäftszahlen. (Activision Blizzard, Call of Duty)
Auf Augenhöhe mit Netflix: Keine Verkaufszahlen, sondern aktive Nutzer und Zuschauerstunden stehen derzeit bei Activision Blizzard im Mittelpunkt. Titel wie Hearthstone, Call of Duty und Candy Crush Saga sorgen für gute Geschäftszahlen. (Activision Blizzard, Call of Duty) Australian ISPs Refuse to Pay For Pirate Site Blocking
Australian ISPs hit with demands to block several ‘pirate’ sites including The Pirate Bay and Torrentz say they don’t want to bear the costs. One ISP says it could block for around AUS$50 per domain, but another put the bill as high as $AUS800. With dozens of domains involved, costs could get out of control.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Website blocking applications are active in many countries around the world and they are often complex beasts, with negotiations drawn out over months and in some cases years.
Legislation passed last year in Australia aimed to formalize the process but that doesn’t appear to have detracted from the complexity of getting sites blocked under Section 115A of the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015.
Two cases are currently testing the legal machine at the Federal Court. Roadshow Films (the movie division of Village Roadshow) and TV giant Foxtel are both seeking to have several pirate sites blocked at the ISP level. The latter wants to render The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and TorrentHound inaccessible while the former is targeting streaming portal Solarmovie.
The Internet service providers involved – TPG (including subsidiary iiNet), Optus, Telstra and M2 – have today confirmed that while they don’t intend to accept the blocking applications made by Roadshow and Foxtel they don’t intend to oppose them either, a move which leaves the matter in the hands of the Court.
But even with opposition out of the way, things aren’t necessarily progressing smoothly. Just as the issue of costs made a mess of Australia’s three-strikes regime and eventually shelved it, the ISPs are now insisting that they shouldn’t be forced to pay for the entertainment industries’ blocking efforts either.
While talks have been underway between the parties since last year, the ISPs feel that as innocent parties they shouldn’t be the ones picking up the bills. Quite how much those costs will rise to is also a matter for debate.
In Court today TPB/iiNet said it could carry out DNS blocking relatively cheaply at just AUS$50 (US37) per domain. M2, on the other hand, said its costs would be AUS$400 (US$295) per domain in the best case scenario and could climb to AUS$800 (US$590) in the worst.
While other ISPs have yet to put in their estimates (they will do so in the coming weeks), the sheer amount of blocking that will eventually take place in Australia must be a point of concern. After several years there are now around a 1,000 domains on the UK’s unofficial blocklist and that number is increasing every month. Deciding who pays at this early stage is definitely an important exercise.
As a result all parties will return to Court for an additional hearing on the blocking application on June 23. In the meantime, however, further discussion on site-blocking will continue in a parallel case brought by the music industry.
Last month members of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and Australasian collecting society APRA AMCOS teamed up to file their first site-blocking application at the Federal Court. Record labels Universal, Warner, Sony, and Albert & Son targeted KickassTorrents.
After describing KickassTorrents as the “worst of the worst”, they too demanded
a close to nationwide ISP blockade of the famous torrent site and its associated proxy sites. A case management hearing in that case will take place on June 6.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
SpaceX: Der Falke ist gelandet
SpaceX landet wieder eine Raketenstufe. Nach dem Start des 4,7 Tonnen schweren Satelliten JCSAT-14 hofft SpaceX damit auf eine Normalisierung des Landebetriebs. (SpaceX, Raumfahrt)
Atlas Air Worldwide: Amazon verdoppelt die Größe seiner Luftfrachtflotte
Erst hat sich Amazon 20 Luftfrachtflugzeuge verschafft, jetzt wird die Anzahl verdoppelt. Bei zwei Fluggesellschaften hat sich der Internethändler hohe Unternehmensanteile gesichert. (Amazon)
Erst hat sich Amazon 20 Luftfrachtflugzeuge verschafft, jetzt wird die Anzahl verdoppelt. Bei zwei Fluggesellschaften hat sich der Internethändler hohe Unternehmensanteile gesichert. (Amazon) Because failure is an option SpaceX can do stuff like land rockets on a boat
In the middle of the night, amid fire and smoke, a second rocket appeared on a boat.

The Falcon 9 rocket sliced a dazzling arc through the early morning Florida sky on Friday. (credit: SpaceX)
NASA’s legendary flight director Gene Kranz entitled his memoir Failure is Not an Option, referring to his days in mission control from the Mercury missions through the Apollo program. That mindset helped Kranz and teams of engineers at Johnson Space Center heroically return the crew of Apollo 13 safely home. But there is a belief among some that, since the heady Apollo days, such an attitude has made NASA’s managers too timid, and too risk averse.
More than a decade ago, even before the failure of his first Falcon 1 rocket, Elon Musk had already made it clear he did not adhere to this belief. During an interview for a 2005 article in Fast Company, the founder of SpaceX gave what has become one of his most enduring quotes: "There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA,” Musk said. “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."
That attitude was on full display early Friday morning when a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral along the Florida coast, beneath a black sky full of stars. As the rocket thundered upward, back on Earth, a few hundred miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, a barge about the size of a football field waited to catch it. But this would be no easy grab.
iPad und iPhone: Apple und SAP verkünden Kooperation
Apple und SAP wollen enger zusammenarbeiten. “Wir sehen dies eindeutig als eine sehr wichtige Wachstumschance”, sagte Apple-Chef Tim Cook. (Apple, IBM)
Antimalware software works, hackers still trying to exploit 6-year-old bugs
Latest Microsoft security report confirms: There’s a lot of malware out there.
Microsoft has released the latest edition of its twice-annual Security Intelligence Report, its survey of the security landscape and threats around the world. The survey has a ton of data about what malware is infecting people, which parts of the world are seeing more attacks, and more.
For the first time, this report includes data that Microsoft has collected from its cloud operations. Azure Active Directory, handling logins for corporate Office 365 customers, has some 550 million users across 8.24 million customers and handles 1.3 billion logins a day. The Microsoft Account system used for consumer products handles more than 13 million logins per day.
This generates a ton of data, and Microsoft uses this data in machine learning systems to build models of what normal user behavior looks like and detect anomalies. Capabilities like this are used in the new Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, and today's SIR gives some quantification to them.
Wenige Monate vor Abschaffung des Routerzwangs gibt es immer noch keine Schnittstellenbeschreibung für die Kabelnetze. Nun befürchten die Routerhersteller offenbar, dass Netzbetreiber nur zertifizierte Geräte zulassen könnten. (
SpaceX landet wieder eine Raketenstufe. Nach dem Start des 4,7 Tonnen schweren Satelliten JCSAT-14 hofft SpaceX damit auf eine Normalisierung des Landebetriebs. (
Apple und SAP wollen enger zusammenarbeiten. "Wir sehen dies eindeutig als eine sehr wichtige Wachstumschance", sagte Apple-Chef Tim Cook. (