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Just days after launching a Kickstarter campaign to build a handheld gaming PC running Steam OS software, the developers of the Smach Z have decided to put the project on hold. The current crowdfunding campaign has been canceled while the team reevaluates its hardware and funding options. In an update on the Kickstarter page, the […]
Smach Z handheld gaming PC put on hold is a post from: Liliputing
Just days after launching a Kickstarter campaign to build a handheld gaming PC running Steam OS software, the developers of the Smach Z have decided to put the project on hold. The current crowdfunding campaign has been canceled while the team reevaluates its hardware and funding options. In an update on the Kickstarter page, the […]
Smach Z handheld gaming PC put on hold is a post from: Liliputing
A new report has revealed how companies across a range of industries are participating in BitTorrent file-sharing networks. Educational establishments come out on top with close to 60% participation alongside more than a quarter in the government and political space. Luckily the company behind the report has a solution.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Millions of people use BitTorrent networks every day to obtain and share all kinds of media, from the latest movies and TV shows to music and even research papers. The majority do so from the comfort of their own home but that’s not always the case.
People who spend a lot of time at work, whether that’s in a regular office, factory, warehouse or even shopping environment, often get access to the Internet. And, if rules don’t explicitly or technically prohibit it, some will use that access to share files online.
This kind of activity isn’t always welcomed by employers, with concerns ranging from the productivity of staff to the security of networks, both from technical and legal standpoints.
This morning IT security rating company BitSight Technologies brought these issues into focus with a new report titled “Peer to Peer Peril: How BitTorrent File Sharing Impacts Benchmarking and Vendor Risk.”
According to the report, out of more than 30,700 companies and organizations rated by BitSight for security performance, 23% demonstrated some online activity using the BitTorrent protocol.
“Many organizations explicitly ban this activity, yet there is evidence that in some industries over a quarter of companies are currently sharing files over the BitTorrent protocol. While some of these files are likely legitimate, many of them are labeled as movies, games and other copyrighted material,” the company explains.
To identify trends in each sector, BitSight has broken down industries into various categories including Media/Entertainment, Education, Government, Retail, Energy/Utilities etc. The rates of sharing are shown in the image below.
Unsurprisingly, educational establishments come out on top (or bottom, depending on perspective) when it comes to BitTorrent usage with around 58% of organizations demonstrating some level of participation. It’s worth noting that only one instance of sharing in the past six month is enough to appear in BitSight’s report.
That being said, BitSight reports that around 32% of government entities demonstrate some level of file-sharing with close to 28% on BitTorrent. The media and entertainment sector is also an eye-opener, with around 23% of companies showing BitTorrent activity. Whether that’s due to employees sharing content or spying on others while doing so is impossible to say.
The BitSight report goes into some detail when it speaks of the risks of file-sharing in the corporate space, not least the dangers of employees downloading copyrighted and potentially malware-infested content. The company carried out its own tests and concluded that “43% of applications and 39% of games were carrying malicious code.”
The big question, however, is BitSight’s motivation to produce this kind of report. Obviously threat analysis is its business but information accompanying the report provides a more immediate answer – BitSight has a new product to sell within its Security Ratings platform.
According to the company the module allows customers to “monitor and assess” BitTorrent activity on their own and third party vendor networks. In fact, the module goes a whole lot further than providing a basic outline of employee activity.
“An overview of observed file sharing activity including applications, books, games, movies, music, TV and other files is now available to all customers using the BitSight platform,” the company explains.
“Users can also subscribe to additional forensic information, allowing them to identify torrent names, event dates, peer IP information and other details.”
It seems likely that when employees know that they are being subjected to this level of scrutiny, many will seriously consider changing their behavior. That being said, BitSight still have to convince companies to install their software in the first instance.
The report (pdf), which also attempts to associate BitTorrent usage with botnet prevalence, might yet achieve that.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
List includes Doritos Crash Course and 15 less exciting games.
Don't question it... just do it!
In November, when Microsoft announced the first 104 Xbox 360 titles that would be newly compatible with the Xbox One, the company announced further compatibility would be added "on a regular basis" starting this month. That process began Thursday, with the announcement of 16 additional Xbox 360 titles now supported by Microsoft's newest console. Those titles are:
Though Microsoft says some games require slight tweaks to Microsoft's emulation system to allow for compatibility, the major factor slowing down the rollout seems to be securing permission from the various publishers of each game. Indeed, today Microsoft said it is "continuing to work with our publishing partners to grow our library of Xbox One Backward Compatibility titles, so stay tuned for more."
At the current rate of 16 newly compatible games per month, it would take about five years for the 1,000 or so Xbox 360 titles released in North America to be fully supported on the Xbox One.
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Chinese device maker Huawei is a big name overseas, but the company’s smartphones haven’t exactly been widely available in the US… at least not until Huawei partnered with Google to produce the Nexus 6P. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Huawei is hoping to make a big push in the US next year. Huawei is holding an […]
Huawei to offer more phones in America in 2016 is a post from: Liliputing
Chinese device maker Huawei is a big name overseas, but the company’s smartphones haven’t exactly been widely available in the US… at least not until Huawei partnered with Google to produce the Nexus 6P. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Huawei is hoping to make a big push in the US next year. Huawei is holding an […]
Huawei to offer more phones in America in 2016 is a post from: Liliputing
You can now be ushered out of a shop even if you haven’t done anything wrong yet.
(credit: Minority Report / 20th Century Fox)
As you may know, we're big fans of CCTV in the UK. At the last count there was around 6 million CCTV cameras in the UK, or about one for every ten people living here. Most of these cameras are passive: they don't actually do anything, except for constantly recording to a tape or hard drive.
The big exceptions are real-time police and intelligence cameras, such as the the UK's automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system. Here, in addition to storing the data on hard drives, number plates are actively interrogated and matched against a database of missing vehicles and wanted people.
The UK's police and intelligence agencies probably have similar real-time matching abilities with other private and public CCTV networks, though that information is obviously hard to come by. Most recently, though, the Metropolitan Police asked for access to Transport for London's ANPR network so that it can carry out real-time facial recognition on all motorists entering London.
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$750/pill CEO accused of illegally using assets from former company to pay debts.
Martin Shkreli, chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC, exits federal court in New York, US, on Thursday, December 17, 2015. Shkreli was arrested on alleged securities fraud related to Retrophin Inc., a biotech firm he founded in 2011. (credit: Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In a seven-count indictment unsealed Thursday, Martin Shkreli, the embattled CEO and founder of Turing Pharmaceuticals, has been charged by the FBI with securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and wire fraud conspiracy for allegedly orchestrating three interwoven schemes. In what the Department of Justice terms “Ponzi-like” schemes, Shkreli allegedly defrauded investors of two former hedge funds he managed and misappropriated $11 million in assets from the biopharmaceutical company he once headed, Retrophin, all in the course of about five years.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years, Robert Capers, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a press conference Thursday.
Also included in the indictment are charges against Evan Greebel, who served as outside counsel for Retrophin. Greebel, who allegedly helped Shkreli pull off the schemes, is charged with wire fraud conspiracy.
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Chinese conglomerate buys Riot Games’ remaining equity.
The developers behind popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) League of Legends now belong entirely to Tencent, the Chinese conglomerate behind similarly popular QQ instant messenger. The news was actually revealed tangentially, when Riot released an article explaining that there would be changes to the company’s equity program.
The succinct post detailed how they will be moving from a “Riot equity program” to a “cash-based incentive program” that would allow employees to share in Riot’s successes. What this entails exactly has not been clarified. But Tencent’s move to purchase the remaining equity shares is not surprising given Riot Games’ track record.
In 2014, it was reported that League of Legends had about 67 million monthly players and more than 7.5 million concurrents, making it arguably the biggest name in e-sports. So big, in fact, that BBC Three saw fit to cover the League of Legends World Championships semi-finals. VentureBeat writes that the game netted $946 million (£633 million) in in-game spending revenues last year, a number that is likely to rise as Riot Games works on an overhaul for League of Legends.
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Even an rsync-lifer admits ZFS replication and rsync.net are making data transfers better.
In mid-August, the first commercially available ZFS cloud replication target became available at rsync.net. Who cares, right? As the service itself states, "If you're not sure what this means, our product is Not For You."
Of course, this product is for someone—and to those would-be users, this really will matter. Fully appreciating the new rsync.net (spoiler alert: it's pretty impressive!) means first having a grasp on basic data transfer technologies. And while ZFS replication techniques are burgeoning today, you must actually begin by examining the technology that ZFS is slowly supplanting.
Revisiting a first love of any kind makes for a romantic trip down memory lane, and that's what revisiting rsync—as in "rsync.net"—feels like for me. It's hard to write an article that's inevitably going to end up trashing the tool, because I've been wildly in love with it for more than 15 years. Andrew Tridgell (of Samba fame) first announced rsync publicly in June of 1996. He used it for three chapters of his PhD thesis three years later, about the time that I discovered and began enthusiastically using it. For what it's worth, the earliest record of my professional involvement with major open source tools—at least that I've discovered—is my activity on the rsync mailing list in the early 2000s.
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Codemasters geht zurück zu den Wurzeln: Dirt Rally folgt nicht mehr den spaßigen, aber kaum realistischen Dirt-Rennspielen der vergangenen Jahre, sondern orientiert sich an den frühen Colin-McRae-Titeln. Das sorgt für viel Realismus – und einen knackigen Schwierigkeitsgrad. (Dirt Rally, Spieletest) 
Codemasters geht zurück zu den Wurzeln: Dirt Rally folgt nicht mehr den spaßigen, aber kaum realistischen Dirt-Rennspielen der vergangenen Jahre, sondern orientiert sich an den frühen Colin-McRae-Titeln. Das sorgt für viel Realismus - und einen knackigen Schwierigkeitsgrad. (Dirt Rally, Spieletest) 
Da waren's plötzlich zwölf: Die europäische Raumfahrtagentur Esa hat zwei weitere Satelliten für das Satellitennavigationssystem Galileo in den Orbit geschossen. (
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