January 2017 – Page 12 – news.buyenne.com

Quadcopter entflogen: Drohne verursacht Unfall auf Autobahn

Auf der A99 bei Germering sind am Samstag ein Auto und eine Drohne zusammengestoßen. Der Pilot meldete sich nach einem Aufruf der Polizei. Ihm war die Drohne entflogen und auf der Autobahn gelandet. (Drohne, Technologie)

Geschwindigkeit reguliert: EU erwägt automatische Bremssysteme für Autos

Die EU-Kommission überlegt, Autos in einigen Jahren automatisch bremsen zu lassen, wenn Fahrer das Tempolimit überschreiten. Das System könnte Pflicht werden. (Auto, Technologie)

3D Xpoint: Intel liefert bald Optane-SSDs und Optane-DIMMs aus

Im laufenden Jahr sollen Produkte basierend auf 3D-Xpoint-Speicher rund 10 Prozent von Intels Umsatz ausmachen, richtig los geht es 2018. Bis dahin gibt es kleine SSDs als Schreib-Cache für Notebooks und Sample-DIMMs für Cloud-Anbieter. (3D Xpoint, Intel)

Tech sector bosses decry Trump immigration order on Muslim countries

“It’s painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues.”

President Donald Trump's order Friday banning immigrants and visitors from seven Muslim nations is being met by both harsh and somber verbal resistance from top tech sector leaders—from Apple to Y Combinator. The move was racist, affected perhaps thousands of tech workers, and was un-American, the executives said in tweets, e-mails, Facebook posts, blog posts, and in LinkedIn entries.

Steve Altman, president of the startup mentorship program Y Combinator, urged the tech sector to "take a stand" against the order that has launched a wave of chaos throughout the immigration system and prompted protests nationwide.

Altman said the executive order "is tantamount to a Muslim ban and requires objection. I am obviously in favor of safety and rules, but broad-strokes actions targeted at a specific religious group is the wrong solution, and a first step toward a further reduction in rights."

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BitChute is a BitTorrent-Powered YouTube Alternative

YouTube is without doubt one of the Internet’s best platforms, but it does have its weaknesses, particularly when it comes to monetizing controversial content. Using BitTorrent under the hood to avoid expensive bandwidth bills, could the recently launched BitChute become a viable alternative?

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

YouTube attracts over a billion visitors every month, with many flocking to the platform to view original content uploaded by thousands of contributors. However, those contributors aren’t completely free to upload and make money from whatever they like.

Since it needs to please its advertisers, YouTube has rules in place over what kind of content can be monetized, something which caused a huge backlash last year alongside claims of censorship.

But what if there was an alternative to YouTube, one that doesn’t impose the same kinds of restrictions on uploaders? Enter BitChute, a BitTorrent-powered video platform that seeks to hand freedom back to its users.

“The idea comes from seeing the increased levels of censorship by the large social media platforms in the last couple of years. Bannings, demonetization, and tweaking algorithms to send certain content into obscurity and, wanting to do something about it,” BitChute founder Ray Vahey informs TorrentFreak.

“I knew building a clone wasn’t the answer, many have tried and failed. And it would inevitably grow into an organization with the same problems anyway.”

As seen in the image below, the site has a familiar layout for anyone used to YouTube-like video platforms. It has similar video controls, view counts, and the ability to vote on content. It also has a fully-functioning comment section.

Of course, one of the main obstacles for video content hosting platforms is the obscene amounts of bandwidth they consume. Any level of success is usually accompanied by big hosting bills. But along with its people-powered philosophy, BitChute does things a little differently.

Instead of utilizing central servers, BitChute uses WebTorrent, a system which allows people to share videos directly from their browser, without having to configure or install anything. Essentially this means that the site’s users become hosts of the videos they’re watching, which slams BitChute’s hosting costs into the ground.

“Distributed systems and WebTorrent invert the scalability advantage the Googles and Facebooks have. The bigger our user base grows, the more efficiently it can serve while retaining the simplicity of the web browser,” Vahey says.

“Also by the nature of all torrent technology, we are not locking users into a single site, and they have the choice to retain and continue sharing the files they download. That puts more power back in the hands of the consumer where it should be.”

The only hints that BitChute is using peer-to-peer technology are the peer counts under each video and a short delay before a selected video begins to play. This is necessary for the system to find peers but thankfully it isn’t too intrusive.

As far as we know, BitChute is the first attempt at a YouTube-like platform that leverages peer-to-peer technology. It’s only been in operation for a short time but according to its founder, things are going well.

“As far as I could tell, no one had yet run with this idea as a service, so that’s what myself and few like-minded people decided. To put it out there and see what people think. So far it’s been an amazingly positive response from people who understand and agree with what we’re doing,” Vahey explains.

“Just over three weeks ago we launched with limited upload access on a first come first served basis. We are flat out busy working on the next version of the site; I have two other co-founders based out of the UK who are supporting me, watch this space,” he concludes.

Certainly, people will be cheering the team on. Last September, popular YouTuber Bluedrake experimented with WebTorrent to distribute his videos after becoming frustrated with YouTube’s policies.

“All I want is a site where people can say what they want,” he said at the time. “I want a site where people can operate their business without having somebody else step in and take away their content when they say something they don’t like.”

For now, BitChute is still under development, but so far it has impressed Feross Aboukhadijeh, the Stanford University graduate who invented WebTorrent.

“BitChute is an exciting new product,” he told TF this week. “This is exactly the kind of ‘people-powered’ website that WebTorrent technology was designed to enable. I’m eager to see where the team takes it.”

BitChute can be found here.

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

Science off to a rough start in the Trump administration

It’s too soon to say which policies are permanent, but here’s what we know.

Every day seems to bring more bad news for science in the US. Websites vanish, funding is cancelled, and scientists are denied the ability to address the public. But each time something terrible happens, we only have to wait a few days before half of these ideas gets changed or completely rescinded. It can be hard to tell what's going on and what that means for the future of science in the world's leading producer of the stuff.

The fact is, it's perfectly reasonable to expect some approaches to communicating with the public to change with a turnover in administration. It's also not unreasonable to limit communications until the new people can set policies and determine how to communicate them.

At the same time, the Trump transition team seems to be unusually chaotic. Questionable policies have been disavowed in a surprising number of instances once senior officials were installed. And some of the things that have been left in place are clearly problematic.

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Ex-cop: it’s “bizarre” if we can’t explain to public what our snooping gear does

The police liaison to Oakland’s Privacy Commission sits down with Ars.

For years, Ars has been examining how surveillance technology is used in practice in Oakland, California.

In March 2015, Ars published a feature on license plate readers and what a large LPR dataset, as obtained from the Oakland Police Department, can reveal.

In January 2016, the city codified a Privacy Advisory Commission to "Provide advice and technical assistance to the City of Oakland on best practices to protect citizen privacy rights in connection with the City’s purchase and use of surveillance equipment and other technology that collects or stores citizen data."

It is believed to be a rare instance of outside citizen-driven oversight on surveillance in a major American city. This past week, we were able to sit down with Timothy Birch, a former police officer, and current civilian employee, who serves as the commission's liaison to the Oakland Police Department.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Can you tell me your name and who you are and what you do?

My name is Timothy Birch. I am the research and planning manager for the Oakland Police Department.

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Raspberry Pi: Dritte Generation hält Einzug in Industrierechner

Die emPC-A/RPI-Serie des Herstellers Janztec ist zukünftig auch mit einem Raspberry Pi 3 erhältlich. Der Industrierechner ergänzt den Pi um weitere Schnittstellen. (Raspberry Pi, PC)

Building a local Steam caching server to ease the bandwidth blues

A bit of Linux, a bit of Nginx, and boom—fast and free Steam downloads.

If you play games on PC, where God intended them to be played, chances are you’ve got Steam installed. Since its troubled launch in 2003, Valve’s publishing platform has gone from a thing we had to grudgingly put up with in order to play Half Life 2 to the most popular digital game distribution tool on the planet. Most of us—me included—interact with it pretty much daily.

But as game distribution was shifting from physical to digital, ISPs also began implementing data caps—usually under the guise of “network management” (though anyone who thinks caps aren’t a pure revenue play should send me an e-mail, because I’ve got a bridge to sell you, cheap!). Steam is fast, Steam is easy, and Steam is ubiquitous—but if you’ve just rebuilt a PC or reinstalled an OS and you need to reinstall your games, Steam will obligingly help you put a giant dent in your cap—very quickly.

But there’s an alternative to having to re-download all your Steam games from the Internet: you can set up a local Steam caching server, so that once you download something, you’ve got it on your LAN instead of having to reach for it across the net and incur usage fees.

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Before the 760mph Hyperloop dream, there was the atmospheric railway

Clever use of atmospheric pressure differential made motor-less trains possible.

B. Corpet : illustration, auteur T. Delangle, ouvrage de Louis Figuier publié par Furne, Jouvet et cie, 1867

A while back, a reader e-mailed me about a Hyperloop article I had written. He said the article reminded him of an experimental railway system—called an “atmospheric railway”—that was constructed in London in the 1840s. The system essentially connected a train to a piston which lived inside a semi-sealed tube placed along the length of the track, between the track’s two rails. A pumping station at the end of the train’s route pumped air out of the tube while air was allowed into the tube at the other end. This created an atmospheric pressure differential in front of and behind the piston that moved the piston—and the train connected to it—down the rails.

I was intrigued. Running trains through tubes using unconventional methods of propulsion is hardly an idea unique to the Hyperloop, but the handful of atmospheric railway systems built in the mid-19^th century prove that humans have been trying to manipulate contained atmospheres for transportation purposes for centuries.

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