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Samsung’s Galaxy A line of smartphones are upper mid-range phones that offer premium design elements, but which generally have features that aren’t quite competitive with the company’s more expensive Galaxy S phones. But some premium features are starting to trickle down to Samsung’s mid-range phones. Samsung has unveiled three new Galaxy A phones which will launch […]
Samsung Galaxy A smartphones gain fingerprint sensors, optical image stabilization is a post from: Liliputing
Samsung’s Galaxy A line of smartphones are upper mid-range phones that offer premium design elements, but which generally have features that aren’t quite competitive with the company’s more expensive Galaxy S phones. But some premium features are starting to trickle down to Samsung’s mid-range phones. Samsung has unveiled three new Galaxy A phones which will launch […]
Samsung Galaxy A smartphones gain fingerprint sensors, optical image stabilization is a post from: Liliputing
District Court Judge Liam O’Grady has just issued a detailed memorandum explaining why Cox isn’t entitled to a safe harbor defense. He ruled that Cox willingly failed to disconnect repeat or flagrant ‘pirate’ subscribers, a decision that could have an enormous impact on all U.S. Internet providers.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Today marks the start of a crucial trial that may define how U.S. Internet providers deal with pirating subscribers in the future.
Internet provider Cox Communications is facing a lawsuit from BMG Rights Management which accuses the ISP of failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who frequently pirate content.
BMG claimed that Cox gave up its DMCA safe harbor protections due to this inaction, something District Court Judge Liam O’Grady agreed on last week in a summary judgment.
This order puts the Internet provider at a severe disadvantage while facing millions of dollars in damages. In a memorandum published a few hours ago Judge Liam O’Grady justified his decision.
According to the court there is enough evidence to conclude that Cox did not terminate the access of repeat infringers under appropriate circumstances.
“The record conclusively establishes that before the fall of 2012 Cox did not implement its repeat infringer policy. Instead, Cox publicly purported to comply with its policy, while privately disparaging and intentionally circumventing the DMCA’s requirements,” the memorandum (pdf) reads.
Judge O’Grady notes that Cox had a policy in place to deal with repeat infringers, but that in reality these users would simply be reconnected upon request. They would then start over with a clean slate.
“Cox employees followed an unwritten policy put in place by senior members of Cox’s abuse group by which accounts used to repeatedly infringe copyrights would be nominally terminated, only to be reactivated upon request.”
“Once these accounts were reactivated, customers were given clean slates, meaning the next notice of infringement Cox received linked to those accounts would be considered the first in Cox’s graduate response procedure,” O’Grady adds.
The Judge cites several emails and other communication from Jason Zabek, Cox’s Manager of Customer Abuse Operations, who instructs employees not to be too harsh. Keeping customers on board appears to be a prime motivation.
Below is a snippet from an email Zabek sent to a group of employees:
“After termination of DMCA, if you do suspend someone for another DMCA violation, you are not wrong. However, if the customer has a cox.net email we would like to start the warning cycle over, hold for more, etc. A clean slate if you will. This way, we can collect a few extra weeks of payments for their account. ;-)”
In other emails asking about whether repeat infringers should be reconnected Zabek replied with statements such as “It is fine. We need the customers,” “DMCA = reactivate,” and “You can make him wait a day or so if you want. ;-).”
In 2012 Cox abandoned this unofficial reactivation policy but that didn’t have a positive impact on the number of account terminations, on the contrary in fact.
The record shows that the number of disconnections dropped significantly, to less than one per month on average. In addition, emails show instances where Cox prefers to keep frequently pirating customers on board as they provide a significant revenue stream.
“BMG has identified specific instances in which Cox knew accounts were being used repeatedly for infringing activity yet failed to terminate,” Judge O’Grady writes.
“Cox does not seriously challenge these examples. Labeling them as ‘nothing more than conjecture and hyperbole,’ Cox argues that these snippets of conversations do not show what actions call centers actually took against accounts,” he adds.
For its part, Cox argued that it’s up to a court to decide that the appropriate response to infringement is the termination of the account of a subscriber, noting that copyright holder complaints may not always be accurate.
But Judge O’Grady disagrees and notes that when an ISP has actual knowledge that an account holder is a persistent pirate, his or her account should be terminated.
“Appropriate circumstances arise when an account holder is repeatedly or flagrantly infringing copyrights. Thus, when Cox had actual knowledge of particular account holders who blatantly or repeatedly infringed, the responsibility shifted to Cox to terminate their accounts,” he writes.
While BMG also submitted several other arguments, Judge O’Grady found the above sufficient to rule that Cox is not entitled to DMCA safe harbor protection.
The ruling means that it will be more difficult for Cox to defend itself against BMG’s copyright infringement claims. However, it will also raise alarm bells at various other U.S. Internet providers. At the moment it’s rare for ISPs to disconnect pirating users and this case has the potential to alter the landscape.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Stake in Alibaba is worth more than Yahoo’s core business.
Would you like to buy this historic website?
Web pioneer Yahoo may sell its core business, as the company's latest turnaround efforts continue to stall, The Wall Street Journal reported last night.
Sources familiar with the plans say the board is meeting today through Friday "to consider selling off the company’s flagging Internet businesses and how to make the most of its valuable stake in Chinese e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.," the Journal wrote. "Directors are likely to discuss whether to proceed with a plan to spin off its investment in Alibaba, currently worth more than $30 billion, find a buyer for Yahoo’s gaggle of Web properties, or both."
A Yahoo spokesperson declined to comment on the report when contacted by Ars this morning.
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Microsoft has released plenty of smartphones under its own brand since acquiring Nokia’s phone business in 2014. Up until now most of those phones have been devices designed by the team that used to be part of Nokia. But there have been rumors that the team responsible for Microsoft’s Surface tablets and Surface Book are […]
Report: Microsoft’s “Surface Phone” could be 6-12 months away is a post from: Liliputing
Microsoft has released plenty of smartphones under its own brand since acquiring Nokia’s phone business in 2014. Up until now most of those phones have been devices designed by the team that used to be part of Nokia. But there have been rumors that the team responsible for Microsoft’s Surface tablets and Surface Book are […]
Report: Microsoft’s “Surface Phone” could be 6-12 months away is a post from: Liliputing
After two seaborne attempts, company hopes to stick a land-based return.
SpaceX didn't quite stick the landing of its Falcon 9 rocket in April, 2015. Now it wants to try doing so on land. (credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX’s ambitions are nothing if not oversized. Not content with just trying to come back from the June failure of its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX will also try to return that booster to land for the first time later this month. The rocket company twice tried to land its Falcon 9 booster, without success, on a seaborne platform.
The company has not confirmed its intent, but NASA officials said that SpaceX will try to return the booster of its next rocket launch at a Cape Canaveral location it has designated Landing Complex 1. “Their plan is to try to land (the next booster) out here on the Cape-side,” Carol Scott of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program told Florida Today. The landing attempt is contingent upon SpaceX obtaining regulatory clearance from the US Air Force, which manages Cape Canaveral.
SpaceX officials have described the company’s two water landing attempts on an autonomous drone ship as “practice” for land-based return efforts. The company hopes to eventually make its Falcon 9 boosters reusable, a step that could slash its launch costs by more than half as most of the expense in any launch is in the hardware rather than fuel.
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Viel Leistung für besonders kompakte Workstations: AMDs neue FirePro W4300 ist eine Profi-Grafikkarte, etwa für CAD-Rendering. Dank flacher Low-Profile-Bauweise nimmt sie wenig Platz ein. (Grafikhardware, AMD) 
Viel Leistung für besonders kompakte Workstations: AMDs neue FirePro W4300 ist eine Profi-Grafikkarte, etwa für CAD-Rendering. Dank flacher Low-Profile-Bauweise nimmt sie wenig Platz ein. (Grafikhardware, AMD) 
More than 200 cases were filed Monday, mostly by “patent trolls” in East Texas.
Patent lawsuits filed by month. (credit: Lex Machina)
New patent lawsuits hit an all-time high in November, with many plaintiffs likely hoping to avoid new pleading rules that came into effect yesterday. A whopping 790 lawsuits were filed last month, with at least 212 filed on a single day: Monday, November 30.
For those who watch the patent landscape, it will come as no surprise that most of the lawsuits filed last month come courtesy of "patent trolls"—oddly named LLCs with no business other than litigation. Also no surprise: a big majority of the cases were filed in Eastern Texas.
The huge jump, and in particular the November 30 spike, is likely tied to significant changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for patent cases, which took effect on December 1. The changes by the Judicial Conference of the United States will require patent plaintiffs to provide more information in their lawsuits to survive a motion to dismiss. In particular, the lenient "Form 18" has been eliminated in patent cases. That form allowed patent lawsuits to be filed without naming which specific claims were infringed, or naming a specific product accused of infringing.
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WD subsidiary outs world’s largest normal PMR drive. Seagate eagerly awaits HAMR.
Western Digital's HGST division has released the world's first helium-filled 10TB hard drive for everyday use—assuming you have about £600 burning a hole in your pocket, anyway. Meanwhile, despite reiterating that it would have a 10TB drive on the market this year, Seagate hasn't yet moved past the 8TB mark.
The Ultrastar He10 is notable for two reasons: it's hermetically sealed and filled with helium, which is still a rather novel idea; and it has seven platters crammed into a standard-height 25.4mm (1-inch) hard drive.
The platters themselves are impressive, too: instead of using shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to boost areal density, these platters use conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). PMR has been the standard hard drive recording tech since 2005, when it replaced longitudinal recording. The move to PMR has increased the maximum platter density by an order of magnitude—from about 100Gb per square inch to 1000Gb—but now, alas, we're beginning to hit the limits of PMR.
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Experts unsure if disease simply peaked or prevention campaigns working
(credit: Steven Depolo/Flickr)
After more than a quarter of a century of rising diabetes rates, the number of new cases seems to be on a downward trend.
From 1980 to 2009, the annual number of new diabetes cases more than tripled in the US, going from 493,000 to 1.7 million diagnoses a year in people aged 18 to 79. But since 2009, case numbers appear to have slumped, though the decline had not registered as statistically significant. Now, using newly released data from 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that case numbers are definitely on their first sustained decline. In 2014, the number of diagnosed cases was down to 1.4 million.
“It seems pretty clear that incidence rates have now actually started to drop,” said Edward Gregg, one of the CDC’s top diabetes researchers told the New York Times. “Initially it was a little surprising because I had become so used to seeing increases everywhere we looked.”
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Similar legal action may be taken against Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
(credit: Aurich Lawson)
The Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems has sent complaints to the data protection agencies in three EU countries—Ireland, Germany, and Belgium—asking them to suspend the flow of personal data from Facebook's operations in Ireland to the US. This follows his earlier success at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which ruled that the Safe Harbour framework under which personal data was being transferred was no longer valid because of mass surveillance of EU citizens by the NSA. Subsequently, the Irish High Court said that the Irish data protection commissioner (DPC) was obliged to investigate Schrems' earlier complaints.
His letter to the authorities in Ireland, where Facebook has its European headquarters, asks the Irish data protection agency "to suspend all data flows from 'Facebook Ireland Ltd' to 'Facebook Inc'." Schrems makes the same request to the data protection agencies in Germany and Belgium. In a release accompanying his complaints, Schrems explains why he has taken this unusual approach of involving several data protection agencies (DPAs): "My personal experience with the Irish DPC are rather mixed, which is why I felt involving more active DPAs make proper enforcement actions more likely. I hope the DPAs will cooperate in this case."
Schrems' unhappiness with the way the Irish DPC has dealt with his earlier complaints, and his fear that it still might not implement the CJEU ruling, is evident in a section of his new submission that is headed "Misconduct in public office." It contains the following extraordinary passage:
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