July 2016 – news.buyenne.com

Reboots be damned, Stranger Things shows a better way to do nostalgia

And as a bonus, the show adds some needed credence to the Netflix model.

This trailer is completely fine, but the series is so much more charming.

Warning: This post contains minor spoilers for Stranger Things' first season.

New Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things wastes no time transporting viewers to a time, place, and feeling. There are vinyl records and cassette tapes, endless freedom via fixed gear bikes, and AV Club devotees with ham radios and walkie-talkies. The first episode even uses an epic, demogorgon-loaded Dungeons & Dragons campaign as both a delightful pop-culture reference and as an obvious call-out to some expected character tropes from the '80s.

Our four kid heroes represent well-established kid-movie roles: the quiet one (Will), the cynic (Lucas), the optimist (Mike), and the realist (Duncan). They have awkward, older siblings at opposite ends of the popularity spectrum, and they interact with adults we already kind of know at first blush—a flawed but capable sheriff, a stressed but determined single mom, a sage-like science teacher. Add allusions to Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, and a bevy of other era-appropriate pop culture entities, and you'd be forgiven for thinking you know how this "set in 1983" series will play out.

One of many, many videos you can find citing and explaining the pop culture allusions in Stranger Things

After all, this is a story that could happen (and has happened) in any era. A kid has gone missing, some dark forces seem to be at play, and it'll take a village (or at least a team of adults, our D&D nerds, and their siblings) to figure everything out. But what makes Stranger Things stand out after its eight-episode first season is that the show only uses the familiar as a backdrop; it doesn't wallow in it or simply retread known stories. This isn't Ready Player One, new Ghostbusters, or any of the upcoming Star Wars onslaught. Instead, Netflix's lovely homage to 1980s genre fiction deploys nostalgia only to speed up and deepen world-building. Its story, by contrast, feels fresh by including enough twists and turns to keep even the most capable pop-culture detectives guessing and entertained.

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Nvidia offers $30 to GTX 970 customers in class action lawsuit over RAM

Graphics card spec discrepancy could lead to a small payout for customers.

A class action lawsuit brought against Nvidia over a slow RAM partition has resulted in a proposed settlement (PDF) that could pay $30 to anyone who bought the company’s GTX 970 graphics card before its troubles came to light.

In early 2015, a group of customers found that the GTX 970—which was advertised to have 4GB of high-speed GDDR5 RAM—experienced performance issues when pushed to the limits of that memory allotment. It then came to light that the graphics card only had 3.5 GB of the high-speed RAM, with the remaining 0.5 GB running roughly 80 percent slower, as Ars Technica reported last year.

Nvidia claimed at the time that there was an error in communication between the company’s engineers and its technical marketing team, but that it had not been intentionally misleading. A year later, that position hasn’t changed: according to the motion for preliminary approval of the settlement filed in Northern California District Court last week, Nvidia “[continues] to vigorously deny all of the claims and contentions alleged in this Action.” The company, however, “considered the risks and potential costs of continued litigation of this action,” and decided to work toward a settlement, the motion adds.

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Peter Sunde’s Pirate Innovation Dream Won’t Happen Anytime Soon

This week, Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde reiterated his belief that the pirate scene and its sites will need to innovate and collaborate to stay alive. Intrigued, TF spoke with several players in the torrent scene to see if something like this might emerge sometime soon. The upshot: don’t hold your breath.

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

Every time a major torrent site goes down, millions of people mourn the loss. Last week, when the owner of KickassTorrents was arrested in Poland, was no exception.

Following events like these, several repeat questions come to the forefront. Will the site come back? Will there be a replacement? How can other torrent sites avoid the same fate?

While the first two questions mostly originate from users, the latter is perhaps the most important in terms of the torrent scene in general. After all, if people don’t learn from history, how can they stop it repeating itself? And if it does indeed repeat, how much more damage can the scene take?

In response to the KAT shutdown, this week Peter Sunde called for action. Speaking on the Steal This Show podcast, the Pirate Bay co-founder said that innovation, decentralization, and cooperation is needed to safeguard the future of piracy.

“If one of the big sites goes down a lot of smaller sites are hit as well because they are just a copy of the original database. We need lots of sites that federate all the data instead of having to depend on the higher-ups,” Sunde said.

But just how likely is it that Sunde’s dream will come true? To find out, TorrentFreak spoke with some large and long-standing smaller players in the torrent scene.

The operator of one major site outlined many perceived weaknesses in the way that sites operate and provided some interesting thoughts on how these issues might be fixed. Interestingly, he doesn’t believe that decentralization is the key, instead preferring a “network-over-network” model for both server operation and downloads.

“Decentralization is not the key here. A network-over-network is. Decentralization means no back-updates and [issues with advertising],” he explains.

“Instead, imagine a private network running on the normal internet. You connect to a node, which joins you into a VPN-like network. Like TOR, but you don’t actually use the users to push the traffic.”

The site operator also went into considerable detail about other aspects, particularly in respect of preserving the security of users with a similar “network-over-network” model. However, overcoming technical issues doesn’t appear to be the main stumbling block. Instead, there’s a problem with cooperation.

“You have to understand that torrents are no longer the answer to these type of threats. Sure you can upgrade everything related to torrents to a more secure and better way of usage by promoting to users how they should use you through your new type of network etc, but at some point the protocol should upgrade,” he says.

“However, unless there is an agreement from at least three major sites, none of the requirements to push this new system to enough users will be done. There is currently no agreement to do anything between any torrent site.”

And it appears that even in the wake of KAT’s demise, there is still no momentum to innovate.

“[The major sites] are not interested in building a non-raidable, permanent domain system for users. They are not interested in a new protocol. No one works with anyone. They simply don’t care,” he says.

“Only [one major site, redacted] expressed some basic interest, but that’s only if all [other sites] agree. Which will never happen?”

In parallel, TF spoke with some site operators further down the chain but anyone hoping for some good news there will be pretty disappointed. While most agreed that doing something innovative would be a positive thing, most expressed a combination of pessimism and apathy.

“I find it hard enough to work with my own staff, so working with several other sites will not be possible I’m sure,” one said. “My site is a dictatorship (LOL) so I don’t need others outside telling me what I must do.”

Another admin, who operates two sites in the private scene, said that even building trust across sites will be an almost impossible task.

“It won’t happen. Why should any sysop trust [other sysops]? Who are they? I don’t know who they are. They don’t know who I am. And do you think that the bigger sites will agree to what smaller sites say? No. They will keep their [dominant] position and keep the best pie for themselves no matter what great system someone can make. I would. Who wouldn’t?” he said.

Generally, however, the overall feeling is that while there’s always a threat, things aren’t quite that bad yet. TF asked when people might feel compelled to do something dramatic. The answer seems to be “when people really have to.”

That notion is shared by Peter Sunde. He’s repeatedly called for the closure of The Pirate Bay to spark innovation but the closure of KickassTorrents alone (which was a bigger site) failed to have the desired effect. Maybe it will take another really big bombshell to finally provoke people into action but until then it seems unlikely that much will happen.

In the meantime, however, most of the people we spoke with were enthusiastic about the potential offered by Zeronet and IPFS. In the absence of any coordinated effort, perhaps the future is already here.

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

There are limits to 2FA and it can be near-crippling to your digital life

Even 2FA can run up against limitations—like this Find My iPhone attack.

A video demonstration of the vulnerability here, using a temporary password. (credit: Kapil Haresh)

This piece first appeared on Medium and is republished here with the permission of the author. It reveals a limitation in the way Apple approaches 2FA, which is most likely a deliberate decision. Apple engineers probably recognize that someone who loses their phone won’t be able to wipe data if 2FA is enforced, and this story is a good reminder of the pitfalls.

As a graduate student studying cryptography, security and privacy (CrySP), software engineering and human-computer interaction, I've learned a thing or two about security. Yet a couple of days back, I watched my entire digital life get violated and nearly wiped off the face of the Earth. That sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but honestly it pretty much felt like that.

Here’s the timeline of a cyber-attack I recently faced on Sunday, July 23, 2016 (all times are in Eastern Standard):

That’s a pretty incidence matrix (credit: Kapil Haresh)

3:36pm—I was scribbling out an incidence matrix for a perfect hash family table on the whiteboard, explaining how the incidence matrix should be built to my friends. Ironically, this was a cryptography assignment for multicast encryption. Everything seemed fine until a rather odd sound started playing on my iPhone. I was pretty sure it was on silent, but I was quite surprised to see that it said “Find My iPhone Alert” on the lock screen. That was odd.

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Nach Insolvenz: Verkauf von Unister soll schnell abgewickelt werden

Je länger die Unsicherheit bei Unister anhält, desto mehr sinkt der Wert der Marken und Portale des insolventen Internetkonzerns. Der Insolvenzverwalter will Investoren deshalb möglichst schnell den Zuschlag geben. (Unister, Internet)

The basics of the thorny relationship between science and philosophy

Meaning of Science offers a quick tour of big questions about why science works.

A lot of things that try to pass themselves off as science, like homeopathy, clearly aren't scientific. But it might surprise you to know that there's no simple checklist or flow chart that lets you separate the scientific from the nice-try-but-not-quites. It's not for lack of trying; for decades, philosophers worked to figure out how a decidedly human activity could produce such reliable information, but all the big-name thinkers in the field have come up short.

Understanding why they failed is the subject of multiple graduate-level seminar classes. But if you're just interested in a brief overview, Tim Lewens can help you out.

Dr. Lewens is a philosopher of science at Cambridge University (and a Ford driver, as we discover) who's written a book called The Meaning of Science. It's meant for a general audience, yet it tackles hairy issues in the philosophy of science and throws in ruminations on the nature of humanity for free. The Meaning of Science is an odd mix that doesn't quite hang together as a coherent whole, but it's not a bad read for anyone interested in a quick-and-painless introduction to the mystery of why science works.

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Smach Z handheld gaming PC coming to Kickstarter (again)

It’s been more than half a year since the team behind the Smach Z handheld gaming computer launched a Kickstarter campaign… and then canceled it two days later.

Now they’re ready to try again. This time they’ve got a prototype, outside investors, more details about the hardware they’re using, and some thoughts about stretch goals for the campaign.

For example, the Smach Z is designed to run the Linux-based SteamOS. But if the project raises enough money, the developers will consider offering Windows or Android-based models.

Continue reading Smach Z handheld gaming PC coming to Kickstarter (again) at Liliputing.

It’s been more than half a year since the team behind the Smach Z handheld gaming computer launched a Kickstarter campaign… and then canceled it two days later.

Now they’re ready to try again. This time they’ve got a prototype, outside investors, more details about the hardware they’re using, and some thoughts about stretch goals for the campaign.

For example, the Smach Z is designed to run the Linux-based SteamOS. But if the project raises enough money, the developers will consider offering Windows or Android-based models.

Continue reading Smach Z handheld gaming PC coming to Kickstarter (again) at Liliputing.

iPhone: Whatsapp vergisst nicht gut genug

Gelöscht ist gelöscht – das gilt auf dem Computer selten. Und auch bei Whatsapp auf dem iPhone lassen sich gelöschte Chatverläufe wiederherstellen. Es gibt aber einige Möglichkeiten, sich zu schützen. (Whatsapp, iPhone)

Gelöscht ist gelöscht - das gilt auf dem Computer selten. Und auch bei Whatsapp auf dem iPhone lassen sich gelöschte Chatverläufe wiederherstellen. Es gibt aber einige Möglichkeiten, sich zu schützen. (Whatsapp, iPhone)

uTorrent Quietly Ditches Rating and Comment Features

Without alerting its users, the team behind the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent has removed the software’s widely used comment and rating functionality. It’s unclear why the functionality was stripped, but it’s possible that spam issues or legal concerns played a role.

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

With more than 150 million active users a month, uTorrent remains the leading torrent client, by far.

Despite its popularity, the introduction of new features has stalled in recent years. In fact, some of the more prominent changes date back five years, when uTorrent launched its long awaited 3.0 version.

Among other things, this release introduced a commenting and rating feature. This allowed users to rate the quality of torrents and discuss their contents from within the application.

Both the comments and ratings were shared via trackers, which means that they were not centrally stored but distributed among peers, just like the download itself.

“µTorrent 3.0 adds an extension message for distributing comments within the swarm. All clients that support this extension message store all comments they have seen, per torrent,” uTorrent’s engineering team informed TorrentFreak at the time.

A handy addition, which was appreciated and used by millions of users in recent years. However, out of nowhere, the uTorrent team has decided to ditch the feature in their latest versions.

uTorrent comments and ratings

While it’s up to uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. to decide what to do with their client, it’s at least a bit odd that users haven’t been informed about the change. There is no mention in the release log of the stable version either.

The only reference we could find was listed in the release log for the beta version a few weeks ago.

Hoping to find out more about the motivation to retire the feature we contacted BitTorrent Inc a few days ago, but thus far without response. The company doesn’t seem very keen to speak about uTorrent, as our inquiries about the hacked forum also remained unanswered.

Disable Rating

disablerating

The above leaves us with no other option than to speculate about the mysterious removal. Perhaps BitTorrent Inc. decided that the feature was no longer relevant, or maybe the system was flooded by spam comments?

On the other hand, perhaps there’s a legal reason why the company doesn’t want users to rate and discuss potentially infringing content from within the client?

Without an official comment from BitTorrent we’ll never know what the true reason is. It’s clear, however, that users who want to comment can no longer do so from the uTorrent application itself.

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

Windows 10: Hintertür ermöglicht weiter kostenfreies Upgrade

Am Angebot für das kostenfreie Windows 10-Upgrade sind Nutzer in den vergangenen Monaten kaum vorbeigekommen. Auch nach dem Ende der offiziellen Frist ist ein Upgrade über einen bestimmten Weg immer noch möglich. (Windows 10, Microsoft)