Month: May 2016

(credit: Google Maps)

The Italian data protection authority has ordered Facebook to provide an Italian user with all of their data, including the personal information, photos, and posts of a separate fake account set up in that person's name by somebody else.

In addition, the US social network must provide details of how the personal data was used, including who it was sent to or might have obtained knowledge about it.

Facebook refused to comment on the Italian order, instead sending us a standard boilerplate response.

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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at World Economic Forum in 2014. (credit: Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

There's been little light for Yahoo in the time Marissa Mayer has been at its helm. The company is trapped in a spiral of declining revenues, and in February it said that its core assets are up for sale.

On Friday, the company disclosed the packages that will be available to key executives if they are ousted in the event of a sale. Mayer will be paid $54.8 million in cash and stock if she's removed from her job within a year of a sale.

Yahoo has no deadline for reaching a decision on a sale, but The Associated Press reported Friday that analysts "expect a deal to be struck within the next two months at a price ranging anywhere from $4 billion to $10 billion."

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(credit: [puamelia])

Europe’s police agency Europol has been given enhanced cyber powers to track down terrorists and other criminals.

The new governance rules were approved by the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee on Thursday by a massive majority. MEPs claimed that the new powers come with strong data protection safeguards and democratic oversight.

Last November, the draft rules were given the green light by the European Union's 28 member states. Now the panel's politicos have overwhelmingly thrown their weight behind the measures, by 40 votes to three, with two abstentions.

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Facebook has disputed a UK-based app's registration of the name LitterGram by claiming that it infringes the trademark of its photo-sharing service Instagram.

LitterGram's creator Danny Lucas responded to the complaint with a video plea to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to allow the app to keep on trucking with its current name.

The app—which was launched in 2014—allows users who snap photos of languishing litter in a public area to upload the images, add a location tag, and make local authority officials aware of the problem. LitterGram is also used to name and shame litter bugs, especially drivers who toss stuff from their cars.

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MV Tokitae. (credit: Bob Jensen)

A man who pointed a high-powered blue laser at a Washington State Ferry last year has been ordered to pay a $100,000 civil penalty by the US Coast Guard in Seattle.

The civil penalty was issued to Mark Raden of Freeland, Washington, who was determined by Coast Guard investigators to have shot a high-powered blue laser at the ferry Tokitae while it was on a run from Mukilteo to Clinton in October. Raden pointed the laser from the deck of another ship, the Kitsap, which was passing by the Tokitae.

The laser hit the ferry master and first mate of the Tokitae, and the incident resulted in eye injuries to both men. The chief mate's vision still hadn't recovered fully a week after the laser strike, according to statements by Washington State Ferry officials at the time.

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On April 21 the world lost one of its greatest musical icons. Aged just 57, Prince passed away at his Paisley Park home.

Having shifted just 1,400 albums in the 72 hours prior to his passing, the days that followed saw Prince dominate both the news and the hearts of millions of fans.

In the four days after his death Prince sold 650,000 albums plus 2.8 million songs, led by classics Purple Rain (330,000) and When Doves Cry (245,000).

Of course, not everyone was keen (or had the means) to put their hands in their pockets and as a result unauthorized downloading of Prince tracks was also brisk. The day after his death saw an estimated 100,000 people download a Prince torrent, with Prince music dominating the top five most-shared music file slots on KickassTorrents.

But while Prince may be gone his musical machine lives on. His tracks and albums remain available to buy and the anti-piracy protection they’ve enjoyed for years continues.

Famous for working with anti-piracy outfit Web Sheriff while he was alive, Prince’s instructions to protect his music from Internet pirates continue after his death. As part of a long-running campaign to make Prince music harder to find, Web Sheriff has been hitting Google with requests to remove thousands of URLs linking to unauthorized copies since 2014.

During the past year most Web Sheriff notices have included anything from a handful to a few hundred links per notice but in the days directly after Prince’s passing, Web Sheriff reporting to Google surged to a thousand in a single notice. One has to track back to 2014 to find similar levels.

As ever, the most popular targets are URLs on the hundreds of torrent sites in operation today. The content targeted includes anything from singles and albums, right up to entire discographies and full video collections listed on The Pirate Bay.

For keen Prince fans there are also some oddities that can’t be found anywhere else, legally at least. In addition to rare bootlegs, remixes and 12″ collections, there are torrents which provide access to live recordings, TV shows, rehearsals, outtakes and other unreleased tracks.

Finally, in February and March, Google received four Web Sheriff notices containing around 450 requests for URL takedowns. These are listed under the name of the Web Sheriff but with a warning sign next to each. For reasons that aren’t yet clear, Google believes that these notices were either sent by an imposter or amounted to some other abuse of the takedown system.

We pointed out these anomalies to the Web Sheriff on Thursday but by the time of publication we were yet to receive an explanation.

Update: Comment from Web Sheriff

“It seems to have been an error as to which Web Sheriff accounts [Google] have ‘accepted’ as being bona fide for complaints etc and which is being rectified,” the company said.

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

It’s a special Sunday edition of the daily deals roundup… because Amazon is offering its cheapest Fire tablet for 20 percent off today, which brings the price down to $40. And because I didn’t feel like writing a whole post just to say that, I decided to look for a few other deals.

Here’s what I found.

Amazon hardware

• Fire Tablet for $40 – Amazon
• Fire HD 6 for $70 – Amazon
• Fire Kids Edition tablet for $80 – Amazon
• Fire HD 6 Kids Edition for $120 – Amazon
• Fire HD 10 for $180 – Amazon
• Fire TV for $85 (or $15 off all Fire TV bundles) – Amazon
• Kindle for $60 – Amazon
• Kindle Paperwhite for $100 – Amazon
• Kindle for Kids bundle for $80 – Amazon

Other hardware

• Toshiba Chromebook 2 w/13″ FHD display, 4GB RAM for $249 – Best Buy
• Toshiba Satellite Click 10 2-in-1 Windows tablet w/FHD display, 64GB, Atom x5 for $220 – NeweggFlash
• Microsoft Surface 3 w/128GB for $500 – Best Buy
• Apple iPad mini 4 w/64GB for $400 – Best Buy
• HP Pavilion x2 10″ 2-in-1 Windows tablet for $250 – Best Buy
• Lenovo IdeaPad 100s 11.6″ Windows notebook w/32GB for $150 – Best Buy
• Lenovo IdeaPad 100s 14″ Windows notebook w/64GB for $180 – Best Buy
• UE Roll Bluetooth speaker for $50 – Best Buy

//

You can find more bargains in our daily deals section.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (5-01-2016) at Liliputing.

The DragonBox Pyra is a portable computer that looks like a cross between a tiny laptop and a Nintendo DX game console… and it kind of works like a cross between those devices as well. It’s got a 5 inch display, a QWERTY keyboard, a Linux-based operating system that can handle desktop apps as well as games, and physical gaming buttons.

It’s been under development for several years, and it’s expected to be available for purchase soon for about 500 Euros (plus VAT).

Continue reading DragonBox Pyra pre-orders begin (open Source handheld gaming PC) at Liliputing.

Framestore's rather low-key office in Soho. The company's 1990s-era logo is still in the window. (credit: Alan Travers)

Adult entertainment in Soho has now been squeezed down to just a couple of small streets

In a darkened room on the backstreets of London's red light district, Mike McGee stared at a screen. Surrounded by a thick wall of cigarette smoke and impatient chain-smoking clients, he swiped a pen across the table, his movement replicated with surprising accuracy as a pixel-perfect line on the screen above. The clients—TV producers from the BBC—were impressed. In just a few short minutes, McGee had transformed a single frame of video into the beginnings of a title sequence. In a world where labour-intensive optical effects and manual rotoscoping were the norm, this was a revelation.

For 12 years, McGee worked out of this room, painting onto the screen, his eyes left bloodshot and burning from the smoke as runners dashed in and out to empty overflowing ashtrays. It was a painstaking process; the Quantel Paintbox and its pressure-sensitive stylus were groundbreaking pieces of technology when they were released in 1981, but they had their limitations. The huge 14-inch platter hard drive could store 160MB of data, enough for just over six seconds of video at 25 FPS. Longer pieces required playing out each frame to tape before wiping the hard drive, a risky process that resulted in McGee and his staff working eight-hour shifts around the clock to minimise cockups.

The Paintbox and its multi-frame follow up Harry—which could store up to 30 seconds of footage and manipulate multiple frames of animation at once—would come to dominate the TV industry throughout the 1980s and early '90s, defining the decade's iconic visual style (see Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" video). It would even star in its own TV show on the BBC, Painting with Light, alongside artists like David Hockney. And for McGee, a graduate of the famous Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the Paintbox would spark a career in the visual effects industry spanning nearly three decades.

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