Apple lädt wieder zu seinem jährlichen, spätsommerlichen Event ein, bei dem diesmal vermutlich das iPhone 7 und neue Versionen von iOS, MacOS, tvOS und watchOS vorgestellt werden. Auch die Präsentation der Apple Watch 2 wäre denkbar. (Apple, Mac OS X) Month: August 2016
Sony crowdfunds its second watch with an ePaper display (and strap)
Sony’s FES Watch is a wristwatch with a customizable look thanks to an electronic paper display that can show a variety of different watch faces, and an ePaper strap which can handle a variety of designs.
Sony launched the original FES Watch using the company’s own First Flight crowdfunding platform in 2015 and began selling the watch in limited quantities later in the year.
Now the company has a new model with a more solid-looking frame, a water resistant design, and a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery (rather than the coin cell battery used in the original).
Continue reading Sony crowdfunds its second watch with an ePaper display (and strap) at Liliputing.
Sony’s FES Watch is a wristwatch with a customizable look thanks to an electronic paper display that can show a variety of different watch faces, and an ePaper strap which can handle a variety of designs.
Sony launched the original FES Watch using the company’s own First Flight crowdfunding platform in 2015 and began selling the watch in limited quantities later in the year.
Now the company has a new model with a more solid-looking frame, a water resistant design, and a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery (rather than the coin cell battery used in the original).
Continue reading Sony crowdfunds its second watch with an ePaper display (and strap) at Liliputing.
Grumpy Cat Wants $600k From ‘Pirating’ Coffee Maker
Grumpy Cat is not pleased, yet. Her owners have asked a California federal court to issue a $600,000 judgment against a coffee maker which allegedly exploited their copyrights. In addition, they want damages for trademark and contract breach, and a ban on the company in question from selling any associated Grumpy Cat merchandise.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
There are dozens of celebrity cats on the Internet, but Grumpy Cat probably tops them all.
The cat’s owners have made millions thanks to their pet’s unique facial expression, which turned her into an overnight Internet star.
Part of this revenue comes from successful merchandise lines, including the Grumpy Cat “Grumppuccino” iced coffee beverage, sold by the California company Grenade Beverage.
The company licensed the copyright and trademarks to sell the iced coffee, but is otherwise not affiliated with the cat and its owners. Initially this partnership went well, but after the coffee maker started to sell other “Grumpy Cat” products, things turned bad.
The cat’s owners, incorporated as Grumpy Cat LLC, took the matter to court last year with demands for the coffee maker to stop infringing associated copyrights and trademarks.
After Grenade Beverage failed to properly respond to the allegations, Grumpy Cat’s owners moved for a default, which a court clerk entered early June. A few days ago they went ahead and submitted a motion for default judgment.
A memorandum (pdf) supporting the new motion repeats many of the allegations that were listed in the original complaint. Among other things, it accuses the coffee maker of manufacturing and selling Grumpy Cat merchandise without permission.
“Not only was the Infringing Product never approved by Plaintiff under the License Agreement, but the packaging and marketing materials for the Infringing Product, as depicted in the example below, primarily and exclusively incorporate Plaintiff’s exclusive intellectual property, including the Grumpy Cat Copyrights and the Grumpy Cat Trademarks,” the memorandum reads.
At the time of writing, the coffee maker’s Grumpy Coffee website is offline. In addition, the associated social media accounts also went quiet late last year, when the lawsuit was first announced.
Nevertheless, Grumpy Cat and her owner still hold the company responsible for its previous infringements. In their motion they list four copyrights, claiming the maximum of $150,000 in statutory damages for each.
“Here, the magnitude of Grenade’s willful infringement of Plaintiff’s Grumpy Cat Copyrights, willful disregard of this Court’s authority, and refusal to stop its blatant infringement renders Plaintiff entitled to a $150,000 statutory damages award for each of the Grumpy Cat Copyrights, in a total amount of $600,000,” the motion reads.
This number is repeated in the proposed default judgment (pdf) as well, which the court still has to sign off on.
In addition to the copyright infringements, Grumpy Cat also asks for actual and treble damages for trademark infringements, damages for contract breach, and injunctive relief to prevent the coffee maker from selling Grumpy Cat products in the future.
Since it’s a request for a default judgment, there is a good chance that the judge will approve the demands. While it’s unlikely that Grumpy Cat herself will care, her owners will definitely be happy if that’s the case.
Still, a default judgment doesn’t mean the end of the Grumpy Cat dispute. Defendants Paul and Nick Sandford, who are affiliated with Grenade Beverage, did respond to the original complaint and are not yet throwing in the towel.
Together with the non-party company Grumpy Beverage, they filed a counterclaim asking for declaratory judgments affirming that they are the rightful owner of various Grumpy Cat coffee-related trademarks and copyrights, as well as several disputed domain names.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Meet USBee, the malware that uses USB drives to covertly jump airgaps
Technique works on virtually all USB drives with no modifications necessary.
Enlarge / Illustration of USBee, in which an ordinary, unmodified USB drive (A) transmits information to a nearby receiver (B) through electromagnetic waves emitted from the drive data bus. (credit: Guri et al.)
In 2013, a document leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden illustrated how a specially modified USB device allowed spies to surreptitiously siphon data out of targeted computers, even when they were physically severed from the Internet or other networks. Now, researchers have developed software that goes a step further by turning unmodified USB devices into covert transmitters that can funnel large amounts of information out of similarly "air-gapped" PCs.
The USBee—so named because it behaves like a bee that flies through the air taking bits from one place to another—is in many respects a significant improvement over the NSA-developed USB exfiltrator known as CottonMouth. That tool had to be outfitted with a hardware implant in advance and then required someone to smuggle it into the facility housing the locked-down computer being targeted. USBee, by contrast, turns USB devices already inside the targeted facility into a transmitter with no hardware modification required at all.
"We introduce a software-only method for short-range data exfiltration using electromagnetic emissions from a USB dongle," researchers from Israel's Ben-Gurion University wrote in a research paper published Monday. "Unlike other methods, our method doesn't require any [radio frequency] transmitting hardware since it uses the USB's internal data bus."
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Google Cast for Chrome browser doesn’t require an extensino anymore
Google Cast is the protocol that lets you stream internet media to a TV or speaker plugged into a Chromecast. You can use Google Cast with Android or iOS phones or tablets. And you can also use it with the Chrome web browser: just find an online video you want to stream, for instance, and hit an icon to send it to your TV.
Up until recently you’ve needed to install a Google Cast extension for Chrome to use the feature in a web browser.
Continue reading Google Cast for Chrome browser doesn’t require an extensino anymore at Liliputing.
Google Cast is the protocol that lets you stream internet media to a TV or speaker plugged into a Chromecast. You can use Google Cast with Android or iOS phones or tablets. And you can also use it with the Chrome web browser: just find an online video you want to stream, for instance, and hit an icon to send it to your TV.
Up until recently you’ve needed to install a Google Cast extension for Chrome to use the feature in a web browser.
Continue reading Google Cast for Chrome browser doesn’t require an extensino anymore at Liliputing.
Facebook fires human editors, algorithm immediately posts fake news
Facebook makes its Trending feature fully automated, with mixed results.
Enlarge / This morning, Trending promoted this as its top story related to the trending topic "Megyn Kelly." The story was up for several hours, and is completely false. (credit: Washington Post)
Earlier this year, Facebook denied criticisms that its Trending feature was surfacing news stories that were biased against conservatives. But in an abrupt reversal, the company fired all the human editors for Trending on Friday afternoon, replacing them with an algorithm that promotes stories based entirely on what Facebook users are talking about. Within 72 hours, according to the Washington Post, the top story on Trending was about how Fox News icon Megyn Kelly was a pro-Clinton "traitor" who had been fired (she wasn't).
The original accusations of bias came from a disgruntled ex-editor at Facebook, who leaked internal Trending training materials to Gizmodo. The training package offered tips on, among other things, how to curate news from an RSS feed of reputable sources when the stories provided by Facebook users were false or repetitive. Though the human editors were always expendable—they were mostly there to train the Trending algorithm—they were still engaging in quality control to weed out blatant falsehoods and non-news like #lunch. And after Trending latched on to the fake Kelly scoop, it appears that human intervention might still be required to make Facebook's algorithms a legitimate source of news after all.
In a post about the changes, Facebook said the early move to eliminate human editors was a direct response to "the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year," an oblique reference to the raging controversy unleashed by the Gizmodo revelations. Facebook explained that the new, non-human Trending module is personalized "based on a number of factors, including Pages you’ve liked, your location (e.g., home state sports news), the previous trending topics with which you’ve interacted, and what is trending across Facebook overall." Instead of paying humans to "write topic descriptions and short story summaries," the company said "we’re relying on an algorithm to pull excerpts directly from news stories." Which is why millions of Facebook readers this morning saw the "news" that Megyn Kelly is a traitor who has been fired.
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Woman shoots drone: “It hovered for a second and I blasted it to smithereens.”
Woman used a .410 shotgun against trespassing aircraft thought to be paparazzi.
Enlarge / Jennifer Youngman, 65, used a .410 gauge shotgun like this to take out a drone. (credit: Big Swede Guy)
With a single shotgun blast, a 65-year-old woman in rural northern Virginia recently shot down a drone flying over her property.
The woman, Jennifer Youngman, has lived in The Plains, Virginia, since 1990. The Fauquier Times first reported the June 2016 incident late last week. It marks the third such shooting that Ars has reported on in the last 15 months—last year, similar drone shootings took place in Kentucky and California.
Youngman told Ars that she had just returned from church one Sunday morning and was cleaning her two shotguns—a .410 and a .20 gauge—on her porch. She had a clear view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and neighbor Robert Duvall’s property (yes, the same Robert Duvall from The Godfather). Youngman had seen two men set up a card table on what she described as a “turnaround place” on a country road adjacent to her house.
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Deals of the Day (8-29-2016)
The Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 12 is a convertible notebook with a 12.5 inch touchscreen display and a 360 degree hinge that allows the screen to fold back so you can hold the computer like a tablet. As a ThinkPad, it also has Lenovo’s Trackpoint system with a pointing stick in the center of the keyboard.
Introduced in 2015, the laptop isn’t currently offered by Lenovo anymore. But Woot is selling a pretty impressively-specced model for close to half the list price at the moment.
Continue reading Deals of the Day (8-29-2016) at Liliputing.
The Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 12 is a convertible notebook with a 12.5 inch touchscreen display and a 360 degree hinge that allows the screen to fold back so you can hold the computer like a tablet. As a ThinkPad, it also has Lenovo’s Trackpoint system with a pointing stick in the center of the keyboard.
Introduced in 2015, the laptop isn’t currently offered by Lenovo anymore. But Woot is selling a pretty impressively-specced model for close to half the list price at the moment.
Continue reading Deals of the Day (8-29-2016) at Liliputing.
ZTE Axon 7 mini launches (in Germany, at least)
The $400 ZTE Axon 7 smartphone offers a lot of bang for your buck, including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 5.5 inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel display.
But what if you’re looking for something a little smaller? Then there’s the ZTE Axon 7 Mini… which is a little smaller, and generally less impressive.
ZTE hasn’t brought the new Axon 7 mini to the US yet, but Roland Quandt noticed that the phone is now available in Germany.
Continue reading ZTE Axon 7 mini launches (in Germany, at least) at Liliputing.
The $400 ZTE Axon 7 smartphone offers a lot of bang for your buck, including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 5.5 inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel display.
But what if you’re looking for something a little smaller? Then there’s the ZTE Axon 7 Mini… which is a little smaller, and generally less impressive.
ZTE hasn’t brought the new Axon 7 mini to the US yet, but Roland Quandt noticed that the phone is now available in Germany.
Continue reading ZTE Axon 7 mini launches (in Germany, at least) at Liliputing.
FCC admits defeat in municipal broadband, won’t appeal court loss
Cities seeking to expand broadband could still appeal judges’ decision, though.
(credit: Getty Images | Yuri_Arcurs)
The Federal Communications Commission has decided not to appeal a court decision that allows states to impose laws restricting the growth of municipal broadband.
The FCC in February 2015 voted to block laws in North Carolina and Tennessee that prevent municipal broadband providers from expanding outside their territories, but the states convinced a federal appeals court to keep the laws in place. The FCC could have asked for another appeals court review or gone to the Supreme Court but will instead let the matter drop.
"The FCC will not seek further review of the [US Court of Appeals for the] Sixth Circuit's decision on municipal broadband after determining that doing so would not be the best use of Commission resources," an FCC spokesperson told Ars today. The decision was also reported yesterday in The New York Times.
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