Month: December 2015

Piracy site Aurous is disabled forever, according to lawsuit settlement. (credit: Aurous)

A music piracy site for the truly lazy that debuted two months ago agreed Wednesday to shut down and to forfeit its domain to the Recording Industry Association of America, which brought a lawsuit that is now being settled. The deal also calls for the Aurous site's developer, Florida resident Andrew Sampson, and others associated with the site to pay the RIAA $3 million in damages. Although it's a sum that likely won't ever be paid, it's a judgement hanging over their heads and a sum that the RIAA believes sends a message of deterrence.

"Aurous appropriately agreed to shut down," Cary Sherman, the RIAA chairman, said in an e-mailed statement. "It was the right thing to do. We hope this sends a strong signal that unlicensed services cannot expect to build unlawful businesses on the backs of music creators."

The law is clearly on Sherman's side, too. Under the US Copyright Act, the site's backers faced monetary damages of up to $150,000 per track.

Enlarge (credit: rootservers.org)

Early last week, one of the most vital organs of the Internet anatomy came under an unusual attack. On two separate occasions lasting an hour or more each, a flood of as many as many as five million queries per second hit multiple domain name system root servers that act as the final and authoritative reference for determining which IP address is returned when a user types a domain name into a browser.

The first barrage took place on Monday, November 30, and lasted for about two hours and 40 minutes. The second one happened a day later and lasted for almost exactly an hour. Most but not all of the 13 root servers that form the Internet's DNS root zone were hit. The attacks started and stopped on their own and consisted of billions of valid queries for just two undisclosed domain names, one for each incident. There's no indication of who or what was behind the attack.

While the load was large enough to be detected on external systems that monitor the Internet's root servers, they ultimately had little effect on the billions of Internet end users who rely on them. That's partly because root servers provide IP translations only when a much larger network of intermediate DNS servers fail to do so and partly because of the robust design of the hundreds of servers that run the dozen-plus root authorities.

(credit: Torquing Group)

In a first, Kickstarter has hired a journalist to look into how its largest-funded European project ever suddenly imploded.

Last month, Kickstarter said it was baffled as to how British drone startup Torquing Group raised $3.4 million—only to totally fall apart in less than a year. Kickstarter's announcement of its bewilderment came weeks after the startup's cofounder and CEO Ivan Reedman abruptly left the company, citing “personal health issues and irreconcilable differences.”

Ars visited the company's headquarters in western Wales in April 2015, months before they were supposed to be shipped, but did not get to see a working prototype.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. (credit: Business Insider)

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts defended his company's much-criticized data caps yesterday, saying that consumers should pay for Internet access based on how much data they use, just like they do with gas or electricity.

"Just as with every other thing in your life, if you drive 100,000 miles or 1,000 miles you buy more gasoline. If you turn on the air conditioning to 60 vs. 72 you consume more electricity," Roberts said. "The same is true for [broadband] usage." Cellular data is already billed this way, "the more bits you use, the more you pay," he said. So why not cable Internet, too?

Roberts was being interviewed by Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget at the publication's Ignition conference. (Video is available here.)

Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo. (credit: Google+)

One of Yahoo’s best decisions was investing in a large chunk of Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba before it went public last year. Alibaba broke records with its initial public offering, and now Yahoo’s 15 percent stake in the company is worth $31 billion, according to the New York Times.

For the past year, CEO Marissa Mayer and Yahoo’s Board of Directors have been working to make that chunk of their business more valuable for investors, originally planning to spin-off the Alibaba shares into a separate holding company. But according to Nasdaq, in September the US Internal Revenue Service "declined to grant advance approval for the tax-free spin-off” of Alibaba.

This morning, Yahoo’s Board of Directors announced that it would reverse course, instead spinning Yahoo’s core businesses off and leaving the original Yahoo as a holding company for Alibaba shares. Yahoo’s assets and liabilities would form a separate public company, "the stock of which would be distributed pro rata to Yahoo shareholders,” Yahoo wrote in its press release.