Copyright Group Call For More Domain Based Anti-Piracy Actions

A group backed by the MPAA and RIAA has called for more action to be taken by domain name registrars when it comes to stopping piracy sites.Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s Internet subcommittee, the Coalition for Online Accounta…



A group backed by the MPAA and RIAA has called for more action to be taken by domain name registrars when it comes to stopping piracy sites.

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s Internet subcommittee, the Coalition for Online Accountability (COA) says that domain name registrars are not following the own rules, and that the privacy of registrants should not be respected if there are copyright violation allegation against the site.

The membership of the COA is a virtual who's who of anti-piracy lobbying, including the previously mentioned RIAA and MPAA for the music and movie industries, as well as the Entertainment Software Association and the Software and Information Industry Association, copyright lobbyists for the gaming and software industries respectively. The group's main aim is to promote the "effective enforcement against online infringement of copyrights and trademarks."

And it appears the first target for the COA will be domain name registrars, which the group says is not doing enough to combat online piracy.

COA counsel Steve Metalitz's testimony calls on registrars to be more responsive to rights-holders, and to suspend domain names when requested. Metalitz says that registrars are signatories to the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), and the 2013 revision of the agreement asks registrars to take on more responsibility in tackling the piracy problem - something that registrars have not been abiding by, according to Metalitz. 

Metalitz provided an example relating to a Romanian music piracy website and how the RIAA's complaint was largely ignored.

"By August of last year, RIAA had notified the site of over 220,000 infringements of its members’ works (and had sent similar notices regarding 26,000 infringements to the site’s hosting providers). At that time, RIAA complained to the domain name registrar (a signatory of the 2013 RAA), which took no action, ostensibly because it does not host the site," Metalitz testified.

The COA also believes that domain privacy services, which protect the identify of registrants, should be forced to hand over user details when requested. Metalitz asked for "ground rules for when the contact points of a proxy registrant will be revealed to a complainant in order to help address a copyright or trademark infringement."

Arguing against these proposals, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that the organisation responisble for managing domain names worlwide, ICANN, and individual registrars should not be made responsible for anti-piracy policing. The EFF says that should these proposals be adopted, it would in effect by bringing back some of the worst elements of the controversial SOPA bill, which was overwhelmingly rejected by the public when it was to be voted on in 2011.

"As advocates for free speech, privacy, and liberty on the global Internet, we ask the Committee to resist calls to impose new copyright and trademark enforcement responsibilities on ICANN. In particular, the Committee should reject proposals to have ICANN require the suspension of Internet domain names based on accusations of copyright or trademark infringement by a website," the EFF writes in a letter to the committee. 

"This is effectively the same proposal that formed the centerpiece of the Stop Online Piracy Act of 2011 (SOPA), which this Committee set aside after millions of Americans voiced their opposition. Using the global Domain Name System to enforce copyright law remains as problematic in 2015 as it was in 2011," says the EFF.

A preview of features for Flightgear 3.6

Flightgear is constantly under development and as the feature freeze for the next 3.6 release approaches, it is becoming increasingly clear what the next version will have to offer to users:

(to avoid misunderstandings – this is a selection of features currently under development, not a release note, i.e. there is no guarantee that all items will appear in 3.6, nor is are the features of 3.6 limited to what is listed here)

A complete makeover for the default aircraft

The C-172p has always been Flightgear’s default plane, as it is easy to fly and great to learn the basics …
Read the rest… >>

Flightgear is constantly under development and as the feature freeze for the next 3.6 release approaches, it is becoming increasingly clear what the next version will have to offer to users:

(to avoid misunderstandings – this is a selection of features currently under development, not a release note, i.e. there is no guarantee that all items will appear in 3.6, nor is are the features of 3.6 limited to what is listed here)

A complete makeover for the default aircraft

The C-172p has always been Flightgear’s default plane, as it is easy to fly and great to learn the basics of aviation. Thanks to a joint effort of several gifted developers, it just got a lot better. The revised version offers improved flight dynamics with the ability to bring the plane into spins. It makes good use of the latest state of the art of Flightgear’s rendering frameworks, including hires textures, the new internal shadow effect for ALS, environment dependent fogging of the windshield and of course support for the Rembrandt rendering engine.

And it comes with a damage model, creating a very visual impression of what happens if you land too hard:

A new user interface / instructor station

Using Flightgear’s inbuilt web-server, Phi is a new way to access Flightgear from an external device. You can run a web browser on your pad, connect to a running FG instance on your PC and access everything you need from there. This makes for a great training setup in which the instructor can select challenging conditions for the student, monitor the flight or cause failures which need to be responded to. Phi supports pre-flight checklists, environment settings, a moving map widget and many features more.

‘Houston, the Atlantis has reached orbit.’

Launching vertically like a rocket, capable of limited maneuvering in orbit and entering the atmosphere again to land like a plane, the Space Shuttle is a truly unique flying experience. Based on a large body of public domain wind tunnel data by NASA, Flightgear now offers the possibility to take the Shuttle into low orbit and back in a highly realistic simulation.

Experience the strength of the aerodynamical forces during launch as thrust vectoring keeps the Shuttle on its ascent path, learn about the inherent yaw instability of the Shuttle during the hypersonic entry phase and the crucial role of the RCS jets and the body flap, explore how elevon deflection changes the airstream at the aft fuselage and alters roll and yaw stability, or simply start in orbit, enjoy the view or do a spacewalk.

The simulation includes all mission phases with many different digital autopilot settings to control thrust vectoring, RCS jets or airfoils, checks on aerodynamical and structural limits as well as damage and failure simulation in case of limit violations – basically the Shuttle can be flown by the Crew Operations Manual. A 3d cockit is already in place, and work is underway to provide the original avionics.

Rain on the windshield

The Atmospheric Light Scattering rendering framework is rolling out a new suite of effects to render the cockpit interior in more detail. These include a glass shader which renders interior reflection, damage and dirt, glare, raindrop splashes, frost and temperature-dependent fogging and an interior effect capable of drawing shadows, light filtering through colored glass or caustics as well as panel backlight illumination. Enjoy the enhanced immersion into the simulation these features provide!

Regional textures for Latin America

Thanks to local users, the whole of Latin America is receiving more realistic local textures. Look forward to the typical red roofs or urban terrain, to seeing dramatic changes in the water color where the dark Rio Negro meets the muddy Rio Solimoes close to Manaus and to many other nice touches in the area. If you haven’t done it yet, schedule a flight in South America after the next release, there’s lots to explore!

New and improved aircraft

The Citation II provides a new cockpit, making use of plenty of the new effects. Enjoy Flightgear in this nice business jet!

The new F-15 comes with a detailed JSBSim flight dynamics model with lots of wind tunnel data worked in as well as a detailed 3d cockpit with tons of functionality.

And many improvements more

* work on an integrated launcher, specifically making life easier on newer Mac OS distributions
* the aircraft center, a tool to download and manage aircraft in-sim
* expanded functionality of the Canvas 2d rendering framework
* …

Stay tuned as we fly towards our next release!

New Piracy Record Broken by 'Game of Thrones'

The pre-release leak of the first four Game of Thrones episodes may have split downloaders’ attentions, and prevented the season premier from “winning” any day-one piracy records, it hasn’t taken long for the hit HBO show to break new piracy …



The pre-release leak of the first four Game of Thrones episodes may have split downloaders' attentions, and prevented the season premier from "winning" any day-one piracy records, it hasn't taken long for the hit HBO show to break new piracy records.

Media intelligence firm Tru Optik collated publicly available torrent swarm data and found that the season premier, plus the pre-release leaked episodes (as well as the "A Day in the Life" documentary on the show) managed to account for 32 million downloads during the first week of release, breaking new ground in terms of piracy.

While the leaked episodes grabbed the most attention when it came to downloaders, those that had waited to download after the show aired predominantly went for the 720p or 1080p versions of the episode. This is easily explained by the fact that those willing to wait would have mostly done so in order to download higher quality versions of the episode, as opposed to the leaked episodes, which were sourced from standard definition DVD screeners.

43.5 percent of post-broadcast downloads were for the 720p version, with 31.4% opting for the even higher resolution 1080p version, compared to 35.1% for the SD 480p version.

On a per capita basis, Australia was once again top of the piracy chart. Of all the viewers that watched the season premier, on legal and illegal channels, 32 percent were pirates. This compares to only 8% in the United States.

With that said, most of the downloaders did come from the US, despite the availability of HBO's unbundled streaming service HBO Now. While that appears to be disappointing from HBO's point of view, the fact that the season premier's ratings were the highest on record for the show, indicates that paying customers are also increasing in numbers too.

And Tru Optik also believes that US pirates are the core demographic that HBO Now will try to win over, and will do so given time, giving HBO a glimmer of hope in their battle against piracy.

Google Blocks DVDFab Downloads, Servers

Following a recent U.S. federal court’s decision to seize more domain names and social media accounts owned by DVDFab, a Blu-ray and DVD ripping tool, Google appears to have taken further action against the company.Users trying to download th…



Following a recent U.S. federal court's decision to seize more domain names and social media accounts owned by DVDFab, a Blu-ray and DVD ripping tool, Google appears to have taken further action against the company.

Users trying to download the DVDFab software this week using Google's Chrome browser were met with some unexpected warnings. Chrome first warns users that DVDFab's download mirrors may contain "harmful programs", and then even if users proceeded with the download (against Google's advice), the download itself is blocked by Chrome. The block refers to the file as "malicious" and warns users that it could harm their browsing experience.

This isn't the first time Google's Chrome has controversially blocked software that rights-holders considers to be a nuisance. Last July, Chrome blocked the uTorrent client for an unspecified amount of time.

Google recently added more warnings to downloads that it considers "malicious", adding not just malware programs to their blacklist, but also programs that contains toolbars or additional software offers. DVDFab's recent block, at first glance, appears to be related to this new feature.

However, the Google owned VirusTotal, a web service that scans files for malicious content using dozens of well respected anti-malware scanners, says that the latest DVDFab download is completely safe and free from malware or adware, suggesting that Google's block may have other intentions.

The download is unaffected for users of IE and Firefox.

A message on DVDFab's official download page suggests that Chrome's block is a "false positive" and that the company is trying to rectify the situation.

"Recently, we found certain versions of Google Chrome were occasionally reporting that our website contains some harmful programs. We believe this is a false positive alert. We're trying to find out the reason and get this fixed as soon as possible. Please switch into IE or Firefox, or just simply go ahead. Our website is 100% safe," the message on the DVDFab website reads.

Simulating the ever-changing scenery

The secrets of the environment settings

If you look at aerial imagery of a region every day for a year, it never changes. Yet if you would fly over the same region in reality every day, it would almost never look the same twice. In reality, nature is a dynamically changing environment, and what you see from a cockpit reflects this.

Some of these changes have to do with weather – on a cloudy day, the light is different from bright sun, the shadows are muted, the amount of haze may change so that faraway terrain looks fainter… and these …
Read the rest… >>

The secrets of the environment settings

If you look at aerial imagery of a region every day for a year, it never changes. Yet if you would fly over the same region in reality every day, it would almost never look the same twice. In reality, nature is a dynamically changing environment, and what you see from a cockpit reflects this.

Some of these changes have to do with weather – on a cloudy day, the light is different from bright sun, the shadows are muted, the amount of haze may change so that faraway terrain looks fainter… and these are readily captured by the weather simulation.

Yet there are more subtle effects. For instance, snow may linger on the ground even on a sunny day with temperatures above freezing if the original layer was thick enough. Snow may fall, but not remain on the ground if the ground is warm enough. In essence, whether you see snow or not depends not so much on how the weather is now, but how it has been the last days, weeks or even months.

Such changes to the scenery in FG are taken care of by the environment settings which control how the terrain is shown. You can find the menu as an entry under Environment.

Currently, the full range of environment effects is only implemented for the Atmospheric Light Scattering (ALS) framework starting from medium quality settings, however the snow effect is available for all rendering frameworks.

Let’s explore some of the things this can do:

Seasonal changes

This is how the default terrain is shown without any environment effects – a summer day in Grenoble:

Moving the season slider somewhat to the right brings autumn coloring into the scene – deciduous tree patches change colors to orange-red, fields and grass appear yellowish:

Changing to a yet later season causes deciduous trees to shed leaves and changes most of the vegetation to a dull brown:

Modifying the snow line and thickness allows to add a sprinkle of snow to the valleys, simulating the first snowfall of late fall:

Finally, adding more snow changes the whole scene into deep winter:

In coastal regions, the appearance of water can also be changed. Here is the coast of Norway near Bergen in summer:

Using the snow and ice sliders allows to simulate winter with lots of drift ice in the sea:

Using a combination of the season and snow settings, it is hence possible to simulate a lot of the seasonal changes during the year. But that’s not all.

Dust and greenery

Have you noticed how colors fade during a long spell of dry weather, to be restored only when rain washes the dust away? Or how a desert might look green for a few weeks after rainfall, to change to its usual dusty appearance later? The environment system also provides those options – let us take a look at the Sierra Nevada. This is how the chain appears from China Lake (with a good measure of snow added to the peaks):

Using the dust slider makes all the colors fade and lets the scene appear dry:

Using the vegetation slider instead gives a fresh green touch to the desert as if after a rainfall:

Changes may be subtle and affect more than just color. Consider this close-up of a dry runway:

The environment settings allow to make it wet (this will happen automatically when the weather predicts rain, but terrain can be wet without current rainfall). This creates puddles and alters the whole reflectivity of the surface – look at how the light changes:

Finally, adding snow covers the runway partially in snowdrifts:

Why can’t this happen automatically?

The environment subsystem just renders as it is told, it is hence easy to misuse it – think snowfall and ice cover on Caribbean islands for instance. Sometimes, the question gets asked why this is implemented that way, and why parameters aren’t just set automatically.

The answer to that is – based on what should they be set? Flightgear does not include a global climate simulation as would be needed to determine how likely it was that there was e.g. snowfall during the last days or weeks, or that there was a dry summer and hence everything should look dusty.

The idea is that the user can adjust these settings, either based on how the scene currently looks at a location, or based on what the user wants to experience (it’s a simulation after all – there’s nothing wrong with simulating a tropical day in Hawaii on a bleak winter day).

If used with some care, the environment settings offer a chance to experience the same scenery in a hundred different ways, each time subtly different.

If misused, the settings deliver weird to crazy results of course.

For the sake of completeness, for low-performance systems which are unable to run shader effects, using the commandline option –season=winter offers at least the choice between the default summer textures and a snow-covered set of textures, although no control over snowline and thickness.

FlightGear v3.4 Released

av9DBjV

The FlightGear development team is delighted to announce the v3.4 release of FlightGear, the free, open-source flight simulator. This new version contains many exciting new features, enhancements and bugfixes. Highlights in this release include frame-rate improvements on some systems, reduced memory usage and enhancements to the built-in web server.

Founded in 1997, FlightGear is developed by a worldwide group of volunteers, brought together by a shared ambition to create the most realistic flight simulator possible that is free to use, modify and distribute. FlightGear is used all over the world by desktop flight simulator enthusiasts, for research in universities and


Read the rest… >>

av9DBjV

The FlightGear development team is delighted to announce the v3.4 release of FlightGear, the free, open-source flight simulator. This new version contains many exciting new features, enhancements and bugfixes. Highlights in this release include frame-rate improvements on some systems, reduced memory usage and enhancements to the built-in web server.

Founded in 1997, FlightGear is developed by a worldwide group of volunteers, brought together by a shared ambition to create the most realistic flight simulator possible that is free to use, modify and distribute. FlightGear is used all over the world by desktop flight simulator enthusiasts, for research in universities and for interactive exhibits in museums.

FlightGear features more than 400 aircraft, a worldwide scenery database, a multi-player environment, detailed sky modelling, a flexible and open aircraft modelling system, varied networking options, multiple display support, a powerful scripting language and an open architecture. Best of all, being open-source, the simulator is owned by the community and everyone is encouraged to contribute.

Download FlightGear v3.4 for free from FlightGear.org

FlightGear – Fly Free!

Major enhancements in this release

Performance

  • Improved frame-rates on some systems from more efficient use of Uniforms
  • Reduced memory occupancy for scenery tiles
  • AI models are now rendered based on display size rather than range
  • AI/MP models may now define objects as being part of the interior, which will not be rendered at large distances

Usability

  • Built-in web server now includes a moving map, a screenshot grabber, and supports SVG-based panels
  • In-application launcher for Mac, based on Qt5

Graphics

  • Improved rendering of runway and other lights under ALS
  • Landing and spotlight support for ALS

Scenery

  • Improved materials XML format making customer material definition easier
  • Procedural rock material definition

JSBSim

  • Synchronization with latest JSBSim

Highlighted new and improved aircraft

  • Extra EA-500
  • North American P-51D Mustang
  • Cessna Citation II
  • F-14b

Other

  • Firewall exceptions are automatically added during setup on Windows systems
  • Aircraft moved to a SVN repository.

Bug fixes

  • See our bugtracker for an extensive, yet incomplete, list of the bugs fixed in this release.

HBO Streaming Now Available on Selected Blu-ray Discs

For those that can’t wait for HBO’s standalone streaming product, there’s now a new way to enjoy some of HBO’s shows via the Internet – by using your Blu-ray disc?Those with a connected Blu-ray player, and one of the HBO Blu-ray box sets that supp…



For those that can't wait for HBO's standalone streaming product, there's now a new way to enjoy some of HBO's shows via the Internet - by using your Blu-ray disc?

Those with a connected Blu-ray player, and one of the HBO Blu-ray box sets that supports the "HBO Sampler" feature (currently including: 'Game of Thrones: The Complete Third Season,' 'True Blood: The Complete Sixth Season,' 'True Blood: The Complete Seventh Season,' 'Boardwalk Empire: The Complete 4th Season,' 'Boardwalk Empire: The Complete Fifth Season,' 'The Newsroom: The Complete Second Season' and 'True Detective.') will be able to use the "BD Live" feature of these discs to sample HBO content, including premier episodes of shows like 'Girls', 'Game of Thrones' and 'True Detectives', for free.

The selected sample episodes available for streaming will also be updated quarterly with new episodes, new shows, and even new original programming, as well as trailers and exclusive bonus content.

HBO sees this as a way to entice fans of one HBO series to watch other shows they may not be that familiar with.

"This also provides us with an opportunity to introduce fans of specific HBO and Cinemax series to other shows they may enjoy," said Sofia Chang, EVP and GM of HBO Home Entertainment.

Nintendo's Next Console May Be Coming Sooner Than You Think

Nintendo started talking to third-party hardware suppliers 18 months ago about the successor to the Wii U, according to Digital Foundry.Nintendo may have talked to two hardware manufacturers, AMD and Imagination Technologies, about providing hardw…



Nintendo started talking to third-party hardware suppliers 18 months ago about the successor to the Wii U, according to Digital Foundry.

Nintendo may have talked to two hardware manufacturers, AMD and Imagination Technologies, about providing hardware for Nintendo's next console. 

This follows hints released by AMD a few weeks ago regarding a new processor that the hardware firm has designed for a new console to be released in 2016.

According to the analysis by Digital Foundry, Nintendo's new console is likely to be more "adaptable, flexible and capable" to run the same code across both mobile and home based platforms, much like how Android and iOS apps work on smartphones as well as big screen tablets. The fact that Nintendo is working with Imagination Technologies, makers of the PowerVR chip used on iPads and iPhones, seems to provide confirmation of their design philosophy for the new console.

The current Wii U console has been lagging behind in sales compared to the current top two consoles, the PS4 and the Xbox One. With game developers also largely ignoring the platform, Nintendo will hope that a new console, possibly set for a 2016 release date, will help the company turn things around.