February 2016 – Page 8 – news.buyenne.com

Ars Cardboard classics—the stupid fun Monty Python Fluxx

Complete with outrageous accents and rude songs, it’s perfectly stupid.

It was 11am on Christmas Day, and the sounds drifting across the table were anything but melodic: "Sit on my face and tell me that you love me..."

My two eldest started laughing. Donna, my wife, went bright red. I may have been slightly drunk. It is possible that I chose the song for maximum embarrassment. But it was absolutely true that I wanted those two extra cards.

And that, ladies and gentleman is the joy of Monty Python-themed Fluxx. Fluxx is a game that is nearly 20 years old, so for those of you who follow card and board game news, this will be nothing new. For those of you who don't, this is your chance to nearly enter the 21st century.

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File-Sharing Site’s PayPal Account Returns After EFF Intervention

The EFF has successfully intervened in a dispute between classic file-sharing service Soulseek and PayPal. In 2015 and after 14 years of business together PayPal nuked Soulseek’s ability to receive donations, apparently over copyright concerns. While Soulseek is now a PayPal customer once more, others in the same sphere may not be so lucky.

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

For much of the last decade, PayPal was used on hundreds of file-sharing sites and services in order to accept donations from users. It was convenient for everyone concerned but copyright holders were less than impressed.

Slowly but surely PayPal, along with payment processors including Visa and Mastercard, were put under pressure to either server their links with piracy-focused sites or raise the bar so that sites operating in potential gray areas would find it difficult to meet strict criteria. PayPal later required that file-sharing services obtain pre-approval before using their facilities.

After 14 years of doing business with PayPal, in 2015 veteran P2P file-sharing software Soulseek found itself a victim of the payment processor’s tightening grip. The non-commercial music-swapping service had used its PayPal account to receive donations from users but all that came to an end when PayPal abruptly closed its account.

After being stonewalled by PayPal who had permanently limited the service’s account, Roz Arbel (who runs Soulseek with husband Nir) reached out to the EFF, who intervened on the service’s behalf. The decision worked wonders.

“Thanks entirely to Rainey Reitman, the EFF’s Activism Director, we are very happy to announce that our PayPal account has been restored!!!” Soulseek announced.

“As the EFF has helped us many times in the past, it seemed natural to reach out to Rainey, who has written a number of EFF blog posts specifically about PayPal and credit card companies. We want to send a shout-out to Rainey Reitman and the EFF for all that they do.”

In a piece penned by Rainey Reitman herself, the EFF says that the actions against Soulseek represent a rising threat to free speech.

“Threats to free expression online can come in many forms, but shutting down or limiting a law-abiding website is censorship,” Reitman writes.

“While the situation with Soulseek turned out well in the end, we’re concerned about the many websites we haven’t heard from that may be facing similar problems. It’s time for the payment providers to start erring on the side of supporting legal speech and let courts — not arbitrary corporate policies — decide what content should be censored.”

It’s been known for some time that PayPal now requires file-sharing and related services to obtain pre-approval to a set of strict standards, but Soulseek was actually given a questionnaire to complete in order to validate its service with PayPal.

Reproduced in full below, it’s the clearest indication yet that copyright holders are breathing heavily down PayPal’s neck and if they didn’t actually write the questionnaire themselves, they certainly played a massive role in its production.

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1. Business Overview. Please provide a general overview of your business, identifying all related website URLs or apps, describing the services you offer and how revenue is earned, and indicating how you use or would like to use PayPal’s services. (The terms “you” and “your” refer to your business in the remainder of this questionnaire.)

2. Typical Usage. Please describe the kinds of files that are most often stored or transferred using your services (indicating, for example, typical file types, sizes, content and/or other relevant attributes) and, to the extent of your knowledge, the typical purposes that your customers have for using your services.

3. Incentives for Uploaders. Do you offer rewards, cash payments or other incentives to some or all users who upload files? If so, please describe your related practices, including the criteria used to determine the nature and amount of incentives that users are entitled to receive.

4. Membership Tiers and Benefits. Please describe any membership tiers, subscription plans or service levels that you offer (e.g., “free,” “premium,” etc.), indicating for each any payments required and the main benefits users receive. Are paying users entitled to enhanced benefits related to downloading or otherwise accessing files uploaded by other users, such as faster access speeds, higher allowances for total amount of data accessed, or the reduction/elimination of wait times, captchas or advertising? If so, please describe the related terms.

5. Forum Codes. Do you offer “forum codes,” “URL codes,” “HTML codes” or other features that facilitate the incorporation of links to uploaded files on third-party websites? If so, please describe such features.

6. Link Checker. Do you offer users a link checker or other functionality that helps users determine whether links to uploaded files have been disabled. If so, please describe such functionality.

7. File Deletion. Please describe any practices you employ related to the expiration, purging or other automated deletion of uploaded files. Is the timing of a file’s deletion influenced by the frequency with which it is downloaded or otherwise accessed? If so, please explain.

8. Information Collection. Do you collect information about the uploaders of files? If so, please describe your related practices, including whether you collect any of the following: name, postal address, email address and IP address.

9. Repeat Infringement. Please describe any practices you employ to prevent users of your system from uploading copyright infringing files on multiple occasions. Please include information about any technological methods you use to identify repeat infringers, such as methods involving the IP addresses of computers used to upload files. If a policy or other information related to repeat infringement is available on your website, please provide a link.

10. Copyright Infringement Reports. Please describe your practices related to soliciting, receiving and responding to reports from third parties about copyright-infringing files accessible through your service. If a policy, reporting instructions or other information related to such practices (e.g., a DMCA policy) is available on your website, please provide a link.

11. Illegal File Reports. Please describe your practices related to soliciting, receiving and responding to reports from third parties about illegal files accessible through your service (other than reports of copyright infringement covered by Item 10 above). If a policy, reporting instructions or other information related to such practices is available on your website, please provide a link.

12. Monitoring. Do you employ any practices involving the monitoring of uploaded files to identify and remove copyright infringing files or other illegal files? If so, please describe those practices, including any manual review or automated scanning of files performed by your staff or by any third-party firms. Please indicate the names and website URLs of any such third-party firms.

13. Law Enforcement Cooperation. Please describe your practices with respect to responding to requests or orders from law enforcement, courts or other government bodies, such as information requests, discovery orders, search warrants and subpoenas.

14. Child Exploitation. Please describe any actions you take if you become aware that a file uploaded to your system involves child exploitation or any sexually-oriented depiction of a minor.

15. Other Controls. If you employ any processes or controls not otherwise covered in your responses to this questionnaire that are aimed at preventing or otherwise addressing any actual or potential use of your system for the storage or transfer of illegal files or for other illegal activities, please describe them.

16. Point of Contact. Please identify and provide contact information (including phone number and email address) for a person who will serve as PayPal’s point of contact with respect to our review of your business and any future inquiries or concerns we may have.

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

Pentium? Core i5? Core i7? Making sense of Intel’s convoluted CPU lineup

It defies simple explanation, but here’s how to know what you’re getting.

Intel's Skylake-based Pentium G4500. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Our creative director Aurich Lawson is building a PC to power a custom arcade cabinet, and he was having trouble picking a processor. Not because he didn’t know what he needed, but because he was having trouble matching what he needed (the cheapest quad-core CPU that meets the recommended requirements for Street Fighter V) with what Intel was offering (five different obfuscated brands spread out over multiple sockets and architectures).

And if you’re building a PC now after having been out of the game for a few years, it can be exceptionally confusing. Around the turn of the millennium you just had Celeron and Pentium. One name meant “cut-down low-end” and one meant “high-end, more features,” and you just bought the fastest one you could reasonably afford. Things got a little more confusing in the Core and Core 2 days (the Core branding continues to survive alongside the Celeron and Pentium brands), but you could at least use names like “Core Solo” and “Core 2 Quad” to guess which architecture and how many cores you were getting. Now there are three separate Core brands, Pentium and Celeron brands, and a long series of letters that you need to know to figure out what CPU you’re getting.

It's been a few years since the last time we demystified Intel’s CPU lineup, and in truth things haven’t changed too much. In broad strokes, the rules are the same. But Intel has introduced and retired a few CPU architectures and brands since then. We’ll run down the basics for both desktops and laptops to help you make some sense of things whether you’re building a computer or buying one from someone else.

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In comeback bid, Shkreli’s old company gets OK to buy life-saving drug

Amid outcry, KaloBios may jack the drug’s price and make millions off FDA voucher.

(credit: Glenn Seplak)

After firing the infamous Martin Shkreli as its CEO, filing for bankruptcy, and getting delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange, KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, Inc. may now be poised for a comeback—thanks to a Shkreli-inspired plan to jack-up the price of a life-saving drug and exploit a federal voucher system.

On Friday, KaloBios’ bankruptcy court in Delaware authorized the pharmaceutical company to enter into a binding deal to buy the worldwide rights to one of only two drugs used to treat Chagas disease, a neglected and life-threatening parasitic infection. With the deal, which was planned by Shkreli prior to his departure, the company plans to raise the price of the drug possibly by 600-fold or more. It will also use the drug’s status as one that treats a neglected tropical disease to earn a voucher from the Food and Drug Administration. Such vouchers allow drug companies to move through the drug-approval process faster, and they could be sold to other pharmaceutical companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.

When KaloBios and Shkreli first revealed the plan late last year, it sparked outcry from public health experts and infectious disease doctors who feared that the new cost would make it difficult for the millions of patients in Central and South America to get the drug. Those fears were put on ice following KaloBios’ series of troubles stemming from Shkreli’s arrest on fraud charges in December, but Friday’s news is likely to reignite concern as the company moves forward as planned.

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“Aren’t you a little too old for that?” Two decades of playing Pokémon

From the archives: Pokémon came to the US 20 years ago—I’ve been around for most of it.

On August 27, 1998, Topeka, Kansas became Topikachu for one day—a ceremonial renaming to celebrate the US arrival of a new video game franchise, Pokémon. While popular previously in Japan, the franchise's impact has been felt in the US ever since. To remember this gaming landmark, we're resurfacing this classic Ars tale of franchise fandom over Labor Day Weekend. The piece re-emerged once before in February 2016 for the 20th anniversary of the original release of Pokémon Red and Green in Japan, and it originally ran in October 2013.

I’ve been playing Pokémon games since I was 13, and I’ve felt just a little too old for the games pretty much the entire time. Having an eight-year-old brother slavishly devoted to the games, and the anime, and the trading cards, told Young Andrew all he needed to know about the age of kids who were into Pokémon. Even once he (er, me) finally gave in to his curiosity and began playing Pokémon Blue (via the No$gmb emulator on the computer), he only played it with headphones in and the door to his bedroom closed. That experience set the tone for the next decade-plus of Pokémon playing: done in secret, kept to myself, a source of shame.

I’ve never watched the anime. I don’t collect the cards. I don’t play the weird offshoot games like Pokémon Snap, Pokémon Rumble, or Hey You, Pikachu! or whatever. My possession of Pokémon merchandise is limited to a handful of figurines I picked up when I went to Japan in 2010. But every time a new game in the main RPG series has come out, I’ve been there. The games have been with me through childhood into adolescence and adulthood, and while they’ve changed (and I’ve changed) the things I enjoy about them haven’t.

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Raspberry Pi 3: Bastlers Liebling endlich mit WLAN

Ein FCC-Bericht bestätigt die Gerüchte um ein neues Raspberry-Pi-Modell. Es wird über WLAN und Bluetooth verfügen. Abstriche an anderer Stelle wird es deswegen wohl nicht geben – im Gegenteil. (Raspberry Pi, Debian)

Blackberry und Nokia: Whatsapp stellt Support für mehrere Plattformen ein

Der Abstieg von Nokia und Blackberry geht auch an populären Apps nicht vorbei. Whatsapp will sich in Zukunft auf die drei vorherrschenden Plattformen und mehr Sicherheitsfeatures konzentrieren. (Whatsapp, Blackberry)

Most software already has a “golden key” backdoor—it’s called auto update

Software updates are just another term for cryptographic single-points-of-failure.

(credit: martinak15)

Leif Ryge is an artist, hacker, and journalist living in Berlin. He used to tweet as @wiretapped but is on hiatus until Twitter stops suspending Tor users' accounts.

In 2014 when The Washington Post Editorial Board wrote "with all their wizardry, perhaps Apple and Google could invent a kind of secure golden key they would retain and use only when a court has approved a search warrant," the Internet ridiculed them. Many people painstakingly explained that even if there were somehow wide agreement about who would be the "right" people and governments to hold such an all-powerful capability, it would ultimately be impossible to ensure that such power wouldn't fall in to the "wrong" hands.

Yet, here is a sad joke that happens to describe the reality we presently live in:

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Selektorenaffäre: BND soll EU-Außenbeauftragte Ashton ausgespäht haben

Die Liste der angeblich vom BND ausgespähten prominenten Politiker wird immer länger. Nun will ausgerechnet dessen Vizechef der neue Geheimdienstkontrolleur des Bundestags werden. (NSA, Internet)

You can now read the entirety of sci-fi magazine If for free

All 176 issues of the magazine, which ran from 1952 to 1974, are available to download.

The middle of the 20th century was an exciting time for science fiction, filled with experimentation and new ideas, an endeavour helmed by genre icons like Harlan Ellison and Frank Herbert. If magazine, which ran between 1952 and 1974, played home to many of these names along with a myriad of now-historic work. And now, it’s all available for free in a variety of file formats.

According to BoingBoing, all 176 issues of If have been made available via the Internet Archive, including the ones edited by Hugo Award-winning Frederik Pohl. His greatest contribution to the magazine was, perhaps, the introduction of the "If-first" series, which showcased new authors. A number of these writers went on to become extremely well-known, most notably Larry Niven, who published his first story in the magazine.

What’s really interesting about If, however, is how its content parallels the optimism of the era. At the time, science was exciting, not dystopian—a gateway into new possibilities. Even as Russia and the United States rushed to be the first to put a man on the Moon, the world dreamt in unison of a better tomorrow. The stories in If reflected this sensibility to some extent, being very much action-packed and sometimes even geared towards a younger audience.

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