Month: November 2015

Das iPad Pro besitzt keinen gewöhnlichen Lightning-Anschluss, der wie bei den anderen iPads nur eine Übertragungsgeschwindigkeit von USB 2.0 bietet. Die Schnittstelle soll auch USB-3.0-Geschwindigkeiten bieten, doch mit herkömmlichen Kabeln ist sie nicht erreichbar. (iPad Pro, USB 3.0)

Die Bundesregierung plant nach einem Medienbericht, Käufern von Elektroautos bis zu 5.000 Euro zu zahlen. Das Ziel, bis 2020 eine Million Elektroautos auf deutsche Straßen zu bringen, dürfte anders kaum noch zu erreichen sein. Zudem sollen herkömmliche Antriebe stärker belastet werden. (Elektroauto, GreenIT)

Almost exactly one year ago, Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Nordisk Film and the Swedish Film Industry teamed up against Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget (Broadband Company).

In a lawsuit filed at the Stockholm District Court, the entertainment industry plaintiffs argued that Bredbandsbolaget should be held liable for Internet piracy carried out by its own subscribers. The companies argued that if the ISP wants avoid liability it should block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay and streaming portal Swefilmer.

Telenor subsidiary Bredbandsbolaget (Broadband Company) has fought the action every step of the way and will find out at the end of November whether those efforts have paid off.

Should it prevail the decision will be a historic one – no other ISP in Europe (complex Netherlands’ case aside) has managed to avoid blocking The Pirate Bay following a legal battle. If the ISP loses (and the odds suggest that it will) the provider will be required to censor the site, something it is desperate to avoid.

In a joint statement this week Patrik Hofbauer, CEO of Telenor and Bredbandsbolaget, and Anna Bystrom, company legal counsel, warned that an adverse ruling could put the model of a free and open Internet at risk.

“When a judgment becomes precedent a trial is about so much more than an Internet service provider and two controversial websites,” the executives begin.

“If the media companies are given the right it will lead to absurd consequences and Internet subscribers will ultimately end up using a severely censored Internet.”

Hofbauer and Bystrom highlight the fact that should the case go the plaintiffs’ way, Bredbandsbolaget and other Internet providers will be regarded as accomplices to infringement committed on sites such as Swefilmer and The Pirate Bay. However, the implications stretch far beyond those two domains.

“A conviction that makes us criminals because we do not block these sites is very dangerous and opens a door must remain closed,” they explain.

“Moving forward, will ISPs then be forced to block social media if we are deemed to contribute to copyright infringement, threats and defamation that may occur there?”

Indeed, copyright is the tip of the iceberg. Could ISPs’ liability stretch further still, to controversial sites such as Wikileaks for example?

“Will sites where whistle-blowers can reach out with secret classified material also need to be blocked? If so, Sweden would then be subjected to a harsh level of censorship unique in the EU,” Hofbauer and Bystrom warn.

While the copyright holders in the legal action are clear on their goals, it’s clear that Bredbandsbolaget is concerned that this case represents the thin end of a wedge, one that starts with copyright but has the potential to expand into unforeseen areas. Once the genie is out of the bottle, the company argues, the threat to the open Internet could be great.

Bredbandsbolaget says the legal and ethical choices it is confronted with are not always easy ones and it sometimes finds itself in the middle of contradictory demands from legislators on one side and stakeholders on the other. But on this issue, initially involving The Pirate Bay but with the potential to spread much further, the ISP’s position has been easy.

“Our role in society should be about making information available and we can not risk engaging in censorship,” the ISP explains.

“When we faced pressure from individual players in this case, we put our values ​​to the test. We are against piracy, but the idea that under threat of punishment ISPs must make assessments of the sites that Swedish people visit is absurd.”

In conclusion and while welcoming a positive outcome to the case, the executives say that if they’re forced to bend to the whims of outside influences, people may have to kiss goodbye to a free and open Internet.

“The day when we and other operators must be guided by private interests, that may represent the beginning of the end for what we in Sweden know as the open Internet. With that said, we welcome a decision that will hopefully strengthen our conviction,” Hofbauer and Bystrom conclude.

Whichever way it goes, there’s only two weeks left to find out.

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

Wir haben diese Woche viel Fallout 4 gespielt, waren zweimal im Kino - und nebenbei haben wir auch noch ein bisschen richtig gearbeitet und Blackberrys erstes Smartphone mit Android sowie das iPad Pro getestet. Sieben Tage und viele Meldungen im Überblick. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Spieletest)

The release of a new Halo game (and exclusive) for the Xbox One helped Microsoft's console beat the PS4 to become the October's best selling console for the U.S. market.

'Halo 5: Guardians' was the month's best selling game, despite being an Xbox One exclusive, and this helped push the Xbox One to the top spot for the first time this year, the NPD group reports. While no specific hardware numbers were given by NPD or by the game console companies themselves, Microsoft was quick to point out they're just had a rare victory against the PS4, thanks largely to what the company calls their best gaming line-up ever.

"The strength of the greatest games lineup in Xbox history drove record Xbox Live usage for October and made Xbox One the best-selling console in the U.S. with 81 percent growth compared to October 2014," said Xbox marketing boss Mike Nichols in a statement. "We saw amazing fan excitement, commercial success, and critical acclaim in October for Halo 5: Guardians, which was the best-selling game in the U.S., and other Xbox One titles launching earlier this fall, including Forza Motorsport 6, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Harmonix’s Rock Band 4, and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate."

Despite the Xbox One's victory in October, the full list of top 10 game sales reveal just how much work Microsoft still must do in order to catch up to Sony's wildly successful console. 6 of the 7 multi-platform games in the top 10 saw sales of the game on the PS4 lead sales of the same games on the Xbox One.

Overall console sales were down from $271.1 million last October to $270.3 million, largely due to falling sales of portable game consoles (home based console sales rose by 3 percent). Game sales were down by 3 percent for the same comparison period.

There’s a limit to how big a battery you can stuff in a smartphone, so companies have been focusing on two ways to let you spend less time charging your phone: making their devices more efficient and making the charging process faster. Huawei has announced a major breakthrough on the latter front: the company says […]

Huawei unveils new batteries that charge in minutes is a post from: Liliputing

Steam Machines are gaming computers that ship with Valve’s Linux-based Steam OS software. It’s designed to run on a big-screen display and put your gaming experience front and center. The idea is to make gaming PCs a bit more like game consoles… and for the most part Steam Machines seem to do that. But now […]

Lilbits 312: Steam Machines would be faster as Windows Machines is a post from: Liliputing

Phone maker HTC has been flirting with the wearable space for a while, but the company has yet to release a smartwatch or activity tracker. Earlier this year the company did unveil a fitness band that it was developing with Under Armor, but that product was later canceled before it ever hit the streets. Now […]

An HTC fitness band hits the FCC is a post from: Liliputing

Late last month one of the biggest piracy icons ended its operation.

Faced with a multi-million dollar lawsuit from Hollywood the operator of YTS and the YIFY release group decided to throw in the towel.

However, that doesn’t mean that these famous have disappeared for good. Several unrelated sites are trying to take over YIFY’s dedicated followers, with YTS.ag being the most successful thus far.

The site, which is connected to the people who hijacked EZTV earlier this year, want the public to believe that they are the real YTS. They misleadingly use the name of a member of the real YTS team, for example, and suggest that YTS simply decided to move to a new domain.

This strategy appears to have worked since hundreds of thousands of visitors have viewed the site already. And after the ‘fake’ YTS decided to encode their own rips, many believe that it’s business as usual.

Hoping to push the traffic numbers up even further, YTS.ag also contacted several of the most popular torrent sites, asking if they can release their torrents there as well.

In their email the operators make it clear that they have nothing to do with the original YTS/YIFY team. However, they say they would like to pick up where the original group left off.

“Do we have acknowledgement from previous YIFY team to do this? The answer is that we could not reach them,” the email reads.

“We do our best to continue their work, thus so far we have uploaded our own encodes/releases with very similar quality/size of previous YTS team and even improving a bit the audio part of the encodes. We have our own seedboxes and upload very fast the releases.”

The YTS.ag team offers the torrent sites a “partnership” and hopes it will be able to add their releases to these sites, using the popular YTS brand.

“You have a very strong community and your users are searching daily for new YTS releases. Even though they can find them at yts.ag we would like to partnership with you and add our new releases to your website,” they write.

TF spoke with several torrent site operators who say they will not allow YTS.ag to publish on their websites with a YTS or YIFY inspired tag, stating that it would be inappropriate.

RARBG isn’t allowing any YTS.ag rips on their site and ExtraTorrent is banning YTS and YIFY impostors as well.

“They are cheap groups who want to benefit and make a quick name by jumping on something that was already there,” the ET team tells us, adding that the same thing happened when aXXo disappeared several years ago.

“They will fade away, even though many downloaders will fall prey to the scam,” they add.

KickassTorrents is another site taking a similar stance. The KAT team says it will only accept releases if YTS.ag uses an unrelated name.

“Here at KAT we don’t think it’s a good idea for a release group to use the name of the other group confusing our users. So no platform will be provided at least until they choose another name,” the team informs us.

KAT moderator Mr. Black understands that other groups want to trade on the popular YIFY/YTS name but adds that in addition to the possible confusion, KAT would never allow it out of respect for the original group.

“This is something that is always going to happen but we also understand that the quality of these groups will never be the same. To allow this would be insulting to the original release group who we trusted in the past and gained so much respect with us,” he says.

“Over the past weeks we thanked YIFY for his input to our site over the years. His reply was that the appreciation from ourselves made them pleased and he thanked us for having trust in them.”

That being said, KAT can’t ban regular users from uploading the releases.

None of the torrent sites we spoke with will allow YTS.ag to take over from the old group but the releases are presently appearing on some automated search engines including isoHunt.

While the operators and moderators at the major torrent sites are quite loyal, many users don’t seem to care. They are happy as long as they can get their weekly dose of pirated movies.

At the time of writing thousands of people are sharing the YTS.ag releases as if nothing ever happened.

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

The latest version of Google’s smartwatch operating system is the first to support cellular connectivity. Google already told us that much. But it turns out there’s a lot more to Android 1.4. It’s also the first version of Android Wear to be based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow , it adds support for new wrist gestures, and […]

Android Wear 1.4 adds support for speakers, new wrist gestures is a post from: Liliputing