September 2016 – Page 60 – news.buyenne.com

Elon Musk scales up his ambitions, now planning to go “well beyond” Mars

Musk may soon detail the architecture he hopes will colonize the solar system.

For most of its 14 year existence, SpaceX has focused on designing and developing the hardware that will lead to its ultimate goal: colonizing Mars. These plans have remained largely secret from the general public, as company founder Elon Musk has dropped only the barest of hints. But that is expected to change on Sept. 27, during a session at the International Astronautical Congress, when Musk details some of these plans for the first time in a public forum.

However, on the eve of the meeting, Musk dropped a surprise on Twitter. The workhorse spacecraft that will carry approximately 100 tons of cargo or 100 people to the surface of Mars, which until now has been popularly known as the Mars Colonial Transporter, can't be called that, Musk said. "Turns out MCT can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name..." he tweeted on Friday evening. By Saturday evening he had a new name dubbing the spacecraft the "Interplanetary Transport System," or ITS.

Mars, it turns out, isn't the solar system's only marginally habitable world for would-be new world colonists. The Moon, Venus, the asteroid Ceres, and outer Solar System moons Titan and Callisto all have some advantages that could allow for colonies to subsist. However, Mars has generally been the preferred destination—due to its relative proximity to Earth, a thin atmosphere, and sources of water ice. Musk now seems to be suggesting that some of these more distant destinations, especially moons around Jupiter and Saturn, might be reachable with the Interplanetary Transport System.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Unedited videos reveal the sophisticated tool-using behavior of Hawaiian crows

‘Alalā, or Hawaiian crows, are among the only birds in the world that use tools to catch prey.

Here's some news that will justify your corvid love. A new research project in Hawaii, described in a recent issue of Nature, has revealed that crows throughout the world are capable of evolving tool use under the right environmental circumstances. Zoologist Christian Rutz has worked for years with crows on the Pacific island of New Caledonia, who routinely use specially-crafted sticks and serrated leaf edges to retrieve bugs and larvae from hard-to-reach spots in logs. Though Rutz and his colleagues speculated that other crows must use tools, there were no recorded observations of the practice. Until now.

In this unedited clip, a Hawaiian crow or 'Alalā spontaneously uses a stick to tug a tasty treat from a hard-to-reach spot in a log.

Rutz and a team of researchers worked with a group of 104 'Alalā, or Hawaiian crows and discovered that they used sticks in ways that are very similar to New Caledonian crows. Though the two species are not closely related, they have a few traits in common. Both have long, straight beaks and eyes that are very mobile, which the researchers believe make them particularly adept at using their beaks to guide sticks. To grab a tasty grub out of a log, a crow has to find a stick of the right length, smooth it by removing bark or branches, and then thread it into a small opening to root around and yank out the unlucky invertebrate. 'Alalā and New Caledonian crows also share similar ecosystems: both are island birds, who live in areas with few predators. Unfortunately, human disturbances in the Hawaiian environment have driven 'Alalā extinct in the wild. Rutz and his team worked with birds who live in two different enclosures on the Big Island, using a special "testing log" full of nooks and crannies, to see how they used tools to get at food.

Here are several crows engaged in what the researchers call "the manufacture of tools." They choose and discard sticks, but also smooth the sticks, change their sizes by breaking them, and create bark flakes for other tasks.

One question is whether 'Alalā learn to use tools from their families, or start using tools spontaneously. The latter would suggest that tool use is essentially a heritable behavior, passed down through genetics rather than socialization. To find out, the researchers reared 7 'Alalā in an enclosure without adults. Within months, all of them began to use sticks to retrieve food. Though adult 'Alalā no doubt help their young learn the best ways to prepare and find sticks, it's clear that this isn't exclusively a learned behavior. The birds will do it even without any training. Because 'Alalā and New Caledonian crows are so distantly related, their tool use is a clear example of convergent evolution, where similar traits arise in two unrelated populations.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

NYPD can’t count cash they’ve seized because it would crash computers

Despite multimillion dollar evidence system, NYPD have no idea how much cash they seize.

The New York City Police Department takes in millions of dollars in cash each year as evidence, often keeping the money through a procedure called civil forfeiture. But as New York City lawmakers pressed for greater transparency into how much was being seized and from whom, a department official claimed providing that information would be nearly impossible—because querying the 4-year old computer system that tracks evidence and property for the data would "lead to system crashes."

The system, the Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS), was built on top of SAP's enterprise resource planning software platform and IBM's DB2 database by Capgemini in 2012, and was used as a flagship case study by the company. PETS replaced the long-established paper-based evidence logging system used by the department, and was supposed to revolutionize evidence and property tracking. It was even submitted for the 2012 Computerworld Honors, an awards program honoring "those who use Information Technology to benefit society."

Even with the system, however, the NYPD's Assistant Deputy Commissioner Robert Messner told the New York City Council's Public Safety Committee that the department had no idea how much money it took in as evidence, nor did it have a way of reporting how much was seized through civil forfeiture proceedings—where property and money is taken from people suspected of involvement in a crime through a civil filing, and the individuals whom it is seized from are put in the position of proving that the property was not involved in the crime of which they were accused.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Anti-Piracy Outfits Caught Fabricating Takedown Notices

Not all anti-piracy vendors play fair when it comes to removing copyright-infringing content from the Internet. In fact, there is clear and convincing evidence that several companies ‘make up’ links that have never even existed, perhaps in part to boost their own numbers.

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

fraudalert Every hour of the day dozens of anti-piracy outfits scour the web to find copyright-infringing content, so they can target it with takedown notices.

Since they’re dealing with such as massive volume of often automated requests, it’s no surprise that every now and then an error is made.

In recent years we have frequently pointed out such mistakes, some more serious than others. In a few cases, however, reporting organizations appear to make very little effort to be correct.

In fact, we’ve discovered that some are deliberately and automatically fabricating links to broaden their scope.

A few weeks ago we reported that defunct torrent cache services were receiving takedown notices for files that never existed, but it appears that the problem is much broader than first thought. Various torrent proxy and clone sites, dead or alive, are also receiving similar treatment.

For example, take the website Torrentz2.eu, which is a clone of the original Torrentz.eu that shut down a few weeks ago. The site links to plenty of copyrighted content, drawing the attention of rightsholders including the anti-piracy department at NBC Universal.

Below is a takedown notice sent out by NBC recently, one of many that come in the same format.

One of NBCUniversal’s takedown notices

torrentz2-eu

For most outsiders this may look like a proper notice. However, upon closer inspection it’s clear that the URL structure of the links is different from the format Torrentz2 uses. The notice is question lists this URL:

http://torrentz2.eu/dv/2012+dvdrip+battleship+mp4-q

On Torrentz2, however, the search “2012 dvdrip battleship mp4” generates the following URL, which is clearly different.

https://torrentz2.eu/search?f=2012+dvdrip+battleship+mp4

The link NBC Universal reports has never existed and simply returns a blank page. TorrentFreak reached out to the operator of the site who confirmed that they have never used this URL format.

This ‘mistake’ can be explained though. The URL structure NBCUniversal uses comes from the original Torrentz site, meaning that NBC simply did a search and replaced the old domain with a new one, without checking if the URLs exist.

In other words, they fabricated these links.

Further research reveals that this practice is rather common for clones and proxy sites. In the past we’ve already raised suspicions about long lists of URLs with the same structure, which appeared to be automatically generated.

Since most of these did link to actual content, it was hard to proof that they were being made up. However, when takedown notices are sent long after a site has gone offline, targeting content that didn’t exist when the site was still up, it becomes crystal clear what’s happening.

Take the domain name Extratorrent.space, for example. This was part of a ring of thousands of proxy sites that all shut down last year. However, anti-piracy groups are still targeting these URLs with new takedown requests.

In fact, there are many recent takedown requests that list content that wasn’t available at the time the site was operating. This is indisputable proof that these URLs are fabricated.

Ghost proxies

deadlinks

The screenshot above is just a random request that came in this week, seemingly targeting pirated copies of X-Men: Apocalypse. However, the proxy site domains in question have been offline for a long time, some close to a year.

Please note that these are not isolated or rare ‘mistakes.’ Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of fabricated links to these proxy sites have been sent out over the past several months, inflating Google’s takedown numbers.

So why are these fabricated notices being sent? One reason might be laziness. Anti-piracy outfits discover the URL structure of a site and simply keep sending notices without checking if the sites are still up.

Another motivation for anti-piracy outfits could be to boost their numbers. Many get paid based on the volume of notices they send out, so more links means extra cash.

Whatever the case is, the fabricated links above are just another example of the carelessness of some rightsholders and reporting organizations when it comes to the DMCA takedown procedure, skewing the actual numbers.

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

Board game breakup: Why the Fantasy Flight/Games Workshop split matters

A marriage made in ~~heaven~~ the grimdark future finally ends.

Last week, one of the best things in board gaming—hell, in all of gaming as a whole—quietly came to a sad end. Two giants of the cardboard-and-plastic world, Games Workshop (GW) and Fantasy Flight Games (FFG), announced they were ending their eight-year partnership. The divorce seems amicable, but it cuts adrift a large and unimpeachable back catalogue of games which combined GW’s much-copied-but-never-bettered IP with FFG’s production values and visual flair.

It’s a tragedy for the hobby.

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Creative Commons licenses under scrutiny—what does “noncommercial” mean?

Commercial v. noncommercial use of CC licenses. Where’s the line of demarcation?

By all accounts, Great Minds is an educational stalwart that has developed K-12 curriculum used by schools across the US. The materials developed from the Washington, DC-based nonprofit hold US copyrights but are made publicly available under a Creative Commons (CC) license, which theoretically allows them to be freely shared and reproduced for noncommercial uses as long as the original source is credited. That CC license is known as BY-NC-SA 4.0.

But it seems that Great Minds can't make up its mind on whether it truly wants its materials to be a part of free culture. Or, in the alternative, it's reading the CC license a little too literally. That's because it's suing Federal Express, claiming the Texas-based delivery and copying company is reproducing its materials for teachers and schools without paying royalties to Great Minds. The educational company says that because FedEx is making a profit from reproducing the materials, it's violating the CC license. That's according to a federal lawsuit (PDF) the company has lodged against FedEx.

This explicit limitation of the License to noncommercial use requires that commercial print shops, like FedEx, negotiate a license and pay a royalty to Great Minds if they wish to reproduce the Materials for commercial purposes—i.e., their own profit—at the request of their customers. Thus, this limitation benefits Great Minds and the public, too, by providing Great Minds with additional financial resources to develop new curricula, which in turn can be made available nationwide for free, noncommercial use, and otherwise to further its educational mission.

Great minds adds that it "would not make the materials or its other curricula materials available to the public for free, noncommercial use if in doing so it gave up its right to charge a royalty for commercial reproduction."

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The power of protocol analyzers

Network problems require something better than trial-and-error troubleshooting.

In the complicated world of networking, problems happen. But determining the exact cause of a novel issue in the heat of the moment gets dicey. In these cases, even otherwise competent engineers may be forced to rely on trial and error once Google-fu gives out.

Luckily, there’s a secret weapon waiting for willing engineers to deploy—the protocol analyzer. This tool allows you to definitively determine the source of nearly any error, provided you educate yourself on the underlying protocol. The only catch for now? Many engineers avoid it entirely due to (totally unwarranted) dread.

What is a protocol analyzer?

A protocol analyzer, or “packet sniffer,” is a tool used to intercept traffic, store it, and present it in a decoded, human-readable state. Modern protocol analyzers like Wireshark can even spot rudimentary problems on their own and then perform statistical analyses with captured data.

Read 55 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Hands-on with the HP Elite Slice modular desktop PC

HP’s Elite Slice computer is a desktop PC that crams an Intel Skylake processor, up to 8GB of RAM and up to 500GB of storage into a a case that’s just 6 inches across and 1.5 inches deep.

Worried that there’s no room for things like an optical disc drive? The HP Slice is a modular PC system: you add features by purchasing additional modules and snapping them into place.

HP recently started taking orders for the Elite Slice computer, and I got a chance to check out the modular PC at an event in New York this week.

Continue reading Hands-on with the HP Elite Slice modular desktop PC at Liliputing.

HP’s Elite Slice computer is a desktop PC that crams an Intel Skylake processor, up to 8GB of RAM and up to 500GB of storage into a a case that’s just 6 inches across and 1.5 inches deep.

Worried that there’s no room for things like an optical disc drive? The HP Slice is a modular PC system: you add features by purchasing additional modules and snapping them into place.

HP recently started taking orders for the Elite Slice computer, and I got a chance to check out the modular PC at an event in New York this week.

Continue reading Hands-on with the HP Elite Slice modular desktop PC at Liliputing.

Has the EU Just Outlawed ‘Fully-Loaded’ Kodi Boxes?

Android devices with modified Kodi software installed continue to prove popular among the pirating masses. However, a ruling from the EU Court this week will make life more difficult for suppliers. That’s the opinion of Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, who say that sellers will now have to verify if the links contained in such devices are infringing.

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

While millions of people around the globe share files using BitTorrent every day, there are some who prefer to stream their content instead.

These users can easily visit any one of thousands of streaming portals via a desktop web browser but for those looking for complete convenience, set-top boxes offer a perfect solution.

These devices, often Android-based, regularly come with the Kodi media center already installed. However, Kodi provides no illegal content – custom addons do – and it’s their inclusion in the package that provides users with what they want – free (or cost reduced) movies, TV, and sports.

One of the groups trying to crack down on so-called “fully loaded” boxes is Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN. The organization has threatened legal action against several local suppliers and has had one case referred to the European Court. However, a decision in a separate case last week could have big implications for “fully loaded” box supply across Europe, BREIN says.

The case, which involved Dutch blog GeenStijl.nl and Playboy, resulted in an important ruling from the European Court of Justice.

The Court found that when “hyperlinks are posted for profit, it may be expected that the person who posted such a link should carry out the checks necessary to ensure that the work concerned is not illegally published.” In other words, posting links to infringing content in a commercial environment amounts to a communication to the public, and is therefore illegal.

For groups like BREIN, the ruling opens up new avenues for anti-piracy action. For sellers of piracy-capable boxes and related IPTV subscriptions across the EU, trouble could lie in wait.

“Copyright protection organization BREIN holds suppliers of IPTV devices responsible for verifying whether their sources for internet TV channels are legal or not. In general, this is not the case,” BREIN said in a statement this week.

“Suppliers advertise that when buying their service you do not have to pay separately for pay-channels for films, TV shows, and sports. Such a compilation costs a fraction of the total sum of subscriptions to the individual channels.”

BREIN says that following the decision of the European Court of Justice last week, commercial suppliers of IPTV boxes are now obliged to verify whether the sources being linked in their devices are authorized by the content providers. If they are not, the seller could be held liable for infringement.

If BREIN’s interpretation of the decision proves correct, sellers of “fully-loaded” Kodi and other IPTV boxes face a minefield of uncertainty.

There is absolutely no way vendors can check every single link contained in the software present in the boxes they sell. Furthermore, those links are often updated automatically, meaning that what is legal on the day they are sold might not be legal when the software updates tomorrow.

But while it’s certainly possible that BREIN’s take on the decision will prove to be correct, actually enforcing the law against hundreds or even thousands of suppliers is likely to prove impossible. Big suppliers are easily targeted though, which may send out a warning.

“BREIN has written letters to suppliers of IPTV subscriptions to warn them that they are required to verify beforehand whether the sources for the IPTV channels they use are legal. If the suppliers are not willing to do so, then BREIN will institute court proceedings,” BREIN says.

However, more often that not “fully loaded” boxes are offered for sale on eBay and Amazon by regular people out to make a few bucks. Taking action against every single one is not realistic.

But even if all infringing boxes were wiped from sale, that wouldn’t stop people selling blank devices. These can be easily setup by the user to stream all of the latest movies, sports and TV shows with a few clicks, rendering a smart supplier immune from liability.

And of course, anyone with VLC Media Player and the ability to Google can find plenty of dedicated IPTV streams available online, without paying anyone a penny.

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

HP: Drucker verweigern Zusammenarbeit mit Fremdtinte

HP-Drucker sollen ein fest einprogrammiertes Ausfalldatum haben, wenn Kunden die Drucker mit Tinte eines anderen Herstellers verwenden. Tintenpatronen von Drittanbietern sollen dann als fehlerhaft bezeichnet und nicht länger genutzt werden können. HP begründet das mit einer neuen Firmware. (HP, Drucker)