Month: January 2017

An almost simultaneous release of DVD screeners on piracy sites means that almost all of the Oscar nominated films are now available to pirate.

'Moonlight', 'Arrival', 'La La Land', 'Patriots Day' and 'Hidden Figures' have all been made available to download in the past week, and all were most likely sourced from award season DVD screeners sent out to Hollywood insiders.

And there is a suggestion that the leaks come from more than just one person, as several release groups, including Hive-CM8 and new group '4rrived', have been responsible for the releases.

These pirated versions have already been downloaded thousands of times, despite some of these films only opening recently in theaters.

Screeners are usually sent out much earlier, and in previous years, the leaks have occurred earlier too. This year has been especially quiet in regards to screener leaks, which may be down to the decision by prolific release group Hive-CM8 to no longer release anything that hasn't yet opened at the box office.

While it is expected that the group already has access to other films, they are still seeking new sources, promising not to compromise the individuals that choose to share.

"We are looking for the guys sitting at home with all the 30 discs and posting pictures all over the net, but not sharing with anyone. Not sure why you are hiding it can be done safe and secure, for private viewing only if requested. Just msg us if you need help, we dont bite," says the group.

NASA

I was sitting with Apollo 7 veteran Walt Cunningham in his west Houston living room on Monday afternoon when his wife, Dot, stepped tentatively in. "I'm sorry for interrupting," she said. "But Gene's dead."

She meant Eugene Cernan, the US Navy Captain who commanded Apollo 17, and the last person to walk on the Moon. He was 82 and had been ill for about six months.

Enlarge / Brian Armstrong, as seen here in 2014, is the CEO of Coinbase. (credit: TechCrunch)

Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, has estimated that it will cost the company between $100,000 and $1 million to defend its customers from what he described as an “overly broad subpoena.”

Last month, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Coinbase could be ordered, at the request of the Internal Revenue Service, to provide years of data that would reveal the identities of all its active United States-based users.

The IRS is concerned that some of Coinbase’s customers may have used its service to circumvent or mitigate tax liability. Federal investigators say they need Coinbase’s records to be able to identify some Bitcoin wallets and to check against tax records to make sure Coinbase’s users are paying any and all proper taxes on their Bitcoin-related income.

Enlarge / Ars' Kyle Orland tries out the Nintendo Switch in its portable mode. (credit: Jennifer Hahn)

After multiple hands-on events around the world on Friday, press and fans alike now have an idea of how the Nintendo Switch plays and feels. It has games (though not many new ones). It has a nice screen and a slim portable form factor. It has an interesting controller proposition.

Underlying all of those, however, is a problem. The Nintendo Switch has an identity crisis. Worse, Nintendo is actively pumping fuel and fire into this problem. The company's confusing—and apparently stubborn—system launch strategy revolves around a packed-in peripheral that adds cost, bulk, and use-case confusion, and it goes so far as to point out the system's technical limitations.

This is the kind of problem that should seem incredibly familiar to fans of the gaming industry. That's right: Nintendo is on the verge of its own Kinect-like moment.

Windows 7's extended support ends on January 14, 2020. The operating system left mainstream support in 2014, meaning that for the last two years—and next three—it only receives security fixes. But Microsoft is telling corporate customers that even with those security updates, the 2009 operating system isn't really cut out for the world of today. According to Redmond, enterprises should plan to move to Windows 10 sooner, rather than later.

The reason, according to Markus Nitschke, head of Windows at Microsoft Germany, is that Windows 7 "does not meet the requirements of modern systems, nor the security requirements of IT departments."

There are two elements to this. Companies buying new hardware using Intel's Skylake or Kaby Lake processors have little choice but to use Windows 10. Installation and driver support for Windows 7 and 8.1 is limited to certain systems since changes in the Skylake platform, such as the integrated USB 3 controllers and processor-controlled power management, aren't supported in Windows 7. PC OEMs can still make the older operating system work, but it requires extra effort on their part. AMD's new Ryzen processors and Windows machines built using the Qualcomm 835 processor will similarly need Windows 10.

Beware its furry cyber-wrath. (credit: Washington State)

WASHINGTON, DC—For years, the government and security experts have warned of the looming threat of "cyberwar" against critical infrastructure in the US and elsewhere. Predictions of cyber attacks wreaking havoc on power grids, financial systems, and other fundamental parts of nations' fabric have been foretold repeatedly over the past two decades, and each round has become more dire. The US Department of Energy declared in its Quadrennial Energy Review, just released this month, that the electrical grid in the US "faces imminent danger from a cyber attack."

So far, however, the damage done by cyber attacks, both real (Stuxnet's destruction of Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges and a few brief power outages alleged to have been caused by Russian hackers using BlackEnergy malware) and imagined or exaggerated (the Iranian "attack" on a broken flood control dam in Rye, New York), cannot begin to measure up to an even more significant cyber-threat—squirrels.

That was the message delivered at the Shmoocon security conference on Friday by Cris "SpaceRogue" Thomas, former member of the L0pht Heavy Industries hacking collective and now a security researcher at Tenable. In his presentation—entitled, "35 Years of Cyberwar: The Squirrels Are Winning"—SpaceRogue revealed the scale of the squirrelly threat to worldwide critical infrastructure by presenting data gathered by CyberSquirrel 1, a project that gathers information on animal-induced infrastructure outages collected from sources on the Internet.

Enlarge / President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Drew Angerer)

President-elect Donald Trump's transition team is reportedly pushing a proposal to strip the Federal Communications Commission of its role in overseeing competition and consumer protection.

Multichannel News has what it calls an exclusive report that says the incoming Trump administration has "signed off on an approach to remaking the Federal Communications Commission." The plan, offered by transition team members appointed by Trump, "squares with the deregulatory philosophies of FCC Republicans Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly," who will take a 2-1 majority after Trump's inauguration on Friday, the report said.

Besides restructuring FCC bureaus, the majority of the transition team wants to "eventually move functions deemed 'duplicative,' like, say, competition and consumer protection, to other agencies, particularly the Federal Trade Commission," Multichannel news reported. The story cites "sources familiar" with a recent meeting involving Trump officials and FCC transition team members. The Trump team has not made any on-the-record statements about specific plans for the FCC.