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Deals of the Day (12-07-2015)

With a list price of $150, the Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet isn’t exactly expensive. But Amazon is now offering a more-is-less kind of package for folks looking for a tablet that they can use to read eBooks… among other things. For $250 you can now get a Fire HD 8 Readers Edition tablet. In […]

Deals of the Day (12-07-2015) is a post from: Liliputing

Level-5: Ni No Kuni 2 mit neuen Abenteuern

Das grandiose, durchaus auch für Erwachsene interessante Rollenspiel Ni No Kuni bekommt einen Nachfolger. In Teil 2 verbünden sich der junge König und ein mysteriöser Reisender zum großen Abenteuer. (Ni No Kuni, Rollenspiel)

Nexus 5X hack gives the phone stereo speakers… kind of

The Nexus 5X smartphone has an amazing camera, decent battery life, a speedy fingerprint scanner, and support for stock Android software delivered straight from Google. But the $379 smartphone doesn’t have all the features available on the more expensive Google Nexus 6P: there’s no support for image stabilization and the cheaper phone has only a […]

Nexus 5X hack gives the phone stereo speakers… kind of is a post from: Liliputing

NASA official warns private sector: We’re moving on from low-Earth orbit

Top human spaceflight official says companies should take advantage of space station.

Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, at the agency's headquarters in 2013.

NASA has flown the International Space Station for the last 15 years, and during that time it has offered private industry a pretty sweet deal. The space agency pays transportation costs to and from the station for experiments and provides astronaut time to tend to that research. And when NASA needed new spacecraft to get its astronauts on board the station, it paid private companies to develop their own vehicles for that purpose. NASA, in some sense, has become the Chamber of Commerce for outer space.

But all good things must come to an end, so the free ride in low Earth orbit for private industry may stop as soon as a decade from now. “We’re going to get out of ISS as quickly as we can,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight, last week. “Whether it gets filled in by the private sector or not, NASA’s vision is we’re trying to move out.”

Gerstenmaier made those comments during a meeting of NASA’s advisory council in early December at Johnson Space Center, which Ars attended. The comments are striking because, while the remarks reflect NASA’s desire to see US commercial industries thrive in the space around Earth, it is not the agency’s top priority to ensure that happens. Gerstenmaier said NASA is committed to moving humans deeper into space to the vicinity of the Moon, an area known as cislunar space.

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Minecraft: Weltenbauen auf der Wii U

Gefühlt gibt es Minecraft schon für jede Plattform, aber das stimmt nicht: Besitzer der Nintendo Wii U bekommen ihre Version erst Mitte Dezember 2015. Dafür erscheint die Portierung gleich mit einigen der wichtigsten Zusatzpaketen. (Minecraft, Nintendo)

Mozilla retires Firefox’s sponsored tiles, hunts for new revenue streams

Mozilla will now focus on “reimagining content experiences.”

Way back in 2014, Firefox rolled out an unpopular feature to its nightly builds: sponsored tiles on its "new tab" page. The feature, which was opt-in by default, showed ads that were based on your browsing history. Eventually, after a very long beta testing period, the sponsored tiles were loosed upon all 500 million-or-so Firefox users in May this year.

Now, just a few months later, the feature is being retired. Sponsored tiles will continue to appear for the next few months while Mozilla "fulfils its commitments" (i.e. clears out ad inventory), but then they'll be gone entirely. Writing on the official Mozilla blog, vice president Darren Herman explains that, "advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn’t the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users."

An example of a sponsored tile in Firefox.

Later in the blog post, which was probably published on Friday afternoon in an attempt to dodge the news cycle, Herman repeats the refrain that we've heard many times over the last few years: "We believe that the advertising ecosystem needs to do better ... Mozilla will continue to explore ways to bring a better balance to the advertising ecosystem for everyone’s benefit, and to build successful products that respect user privacy and deliver experiences based upon transparency, choice and control."

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$139 Lumia 550 is the cheapest Windows 10 phone to date

Microsoft already sells a few phones that ship with Windows 10 Mobile software, but if the $549 starting price for the Lumia 950 line of phone seems a bit steep, now there’s a cheaper option. The Microsoft Lumia 550 launches today in select markets for $139. The phone will initially be available in Europe, but […]

$139 Lumia 550 is the cheapest Windows 10 phone to date is a post from: Liliputing

Denmark’s Largest Torrent Site Closes “To Protect Users”

Denmark’s largest torrent site and one of the country’s largest overall says it has shut down in order to protect tens of thousands of users. NextGen had been in operation for more than four years, offering a broad range of content including the latest movies and TV shows. But the heat got to the site and as usual, controversy is not far away.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

myster While sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents are viewed as the public face of large-scale file-sharing, hidden away behind passworded fronts lies the private tracker community.

Many hundreds – possibly thousands – of so-called ‘private trackers’ exist on the Internet today, each serving their own unique blend of users and often focusing on specialist mix of content.

Since these are closed-door communities, few make the headlines. But despite their growth being artificially restricted by strict rules on who can enter, some swell to a significant size. The Denmark-based tracker ‘NextGen‘ is one such site and is currently the country’s 225 most-visited site overall.

Those successes, however, are now in the past. For reasons best known to its operators the site (NG) has now closed its doors, but the notice handed out to more than 40,000 users suggests that all is not well.

“Due to much attention on NG and therefore its users recently, we have decided to shut down the tracker. This is done solely and exclusively for your safety, as during the last few weeks NG has attracted much extra attention,” the site’s operators said in a statement.

“This means not only a greater risk for the staff but also you as users. That is why we have decided that we will no longer take the risk that we or you must end up in a situation that none of us would like. We would like to thank you for the time we have had together, with the hope of a reunion soon.”

While it is fairly common for sites to shut down without giving much of an explanation, in the informational vacuum that follows rumors begin to fly.

For instance, in some quarters much is being made of Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm’s alleged connections to the site. As seen in the image below, his name is indeed present in the site’s domain listings.

But this fact alone is almost certainly not a sign of his direct involvement. In the past, NextGen had dealings with PRQ, a company historically owned by Gottfrid. Over the years countless dozens of sites opted to have PRQ and the Pirate Bay founder’s name as contact details on their domain instead of their own.

That being said, for a successful site to close down so quickly it’s likely that pressure from the authorities had been mounting for some time. As far back as 2011, Danish police arrested then 19-year-old law student Halfdan Timm, accusing him of spreading illegal information on a blog and suggesting he was the NextGen operator.

“At first, they tried to figure out whether I was leading the tracker, searching for hidden equipment in the apartment, but when they realized that wasn’t the case, they tried to get as much information as possible about the actual owners,” he told TF at he time.

For an earlier article, Timm had indeed interviewed an operator of NextGen in-depth, which led the police to believe there had been a connection. However, several years later potentially more damaging information began appearing online about the operators of NextGen and their alleged activities.

After it was alleged they were making upwards of $200,000 a year from the NextGen, two men were publicly linked to the site by anonymous critics. A document purporting to detail how NextGen accepted Bitcoin through a ‘front’ web-hosting company is now doing the rounds. If accurate (and it’s hard to say either way), that ‘doxxing’ certainly won’t have helped the security of the site – or its operators.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Netzausbau: Telekom bietet Vectoring für 1,4 Millionen Haushalte

Die Telekom wird bis Jahresende weitere Fortschritte beim Vectoring-Ausbau machen. Der Vectoring-Ausbau sei um den Faktor 5 schneller und den Faktor 10 günstiger als ein reiner Glasfaser-Ausbau, sagte Niek Jan van Damme. (Vectoring, DSL)

Mutations that change your heart and your brain

Babies with congenital heart disease often develop neural problems.

Thirteen percent of newborns with congenital heart disease (CHD) also have congenital abnormalities that don't affect the heart. This is twice the rate at which they appear in newborns without heart problems. Infants with CHD are also at an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders later in life, like motor, social, language, and cognitive impairments.

These elevated risks were thought to be caused by poor circulation during gestation or the stresses imposed by postnatal therapies. But a new study suggests that both types of abnormality are actually due to mutations in genes highly expressed in the developing heart and brain. Results are published in Science.

Researchers looked at the protein-coding DNA (called the exome) of 1,213 babies with CHD and their unaffected parents. The results were compared to 900 control babies and parents. They looked for new mutations that appeared only in babies with CHD, babies with CHD accompanied by extracardiac congenital abnormalities, babies with CHD and neurodevelopmental disabilities, or both.

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