February 2017 – Page 109 – news.buyenne.com

RIAA Labels Sue Hip-Hop Mixtape Download Site Spinrilla

A group of major record labels including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros. Records, and Universal Music Group has filed a lawsuit against Spinrilla, a popular hip-hop mixtape site and app. Helped by the RIAA, the labels accuse the site’s owners of copyright infringement, demanding damages that could reach millions of dollars.

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

spinrilla For several decades, mixtapes have formed an integral part of the hip-hop culture.

In the eighties and early nineties this was mostly done through cassettes, later followed by CDs, and in the present day and age a mixtape often comes in the form of MP3 files.

One of the most popular mixtape portals on the Internet today is Spinrilla. The service, which allows users to stream and download tracks through its website or mobile apps, has hundreds of thousands of users per month.

Although Spinrilla notes that its takes “copyright infringement very seriously,” this couldn’t prevent the service from running into legal trouble.

A group of well-known labels is now targeting the site over alleged copyright infringement. The coalition of record labels including Sony Music, Warner Bros. Records, and Universal Music Group have filed a lawsuit against Spinrilla.

In the complaint (pdf) submitted to a Federal Court in Georgia late last week, the labels describe Spinrilla as a business that facilitates copyright infringement. the site allegedly offers more than 21,000 tracks of artists such as from Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West, without permission of the owners.

“By offering free access to copyrighted content, Defendants drive a tremendous and growing number of visitors to their website and apps. Spinrilla.com receives nearly two million visits a month, a majority from U.S.-based visitors,” the labels write in the complaint.

“The Spinrilla apps have been downloaded millions of times. Users like Spinrilla’s service for obvious reasons. To quote one reviewer of the Spinrilla app: ‘It has all the hot music for free,” they add.

The labels estimate that the Spinrilla Android app has been downloaded and installed between 5 and 10 million times. This means that it’s among the most popular music apps offered on the Google Play store, ranking higher than Apple’s Music app, the Amazon Music app, and the SiriusXM Radio app.

This isn’t the first time that the RIAA labels have gone head to head with a website that offers music for free. However, Spinrilla is not your typical “shady” MP3 download portal.

The service was founded by Dylan Copeland from Atlanta and is incorporated in the United States. The company earns money through advertising and recently partnered with AOL to optimize its revenue, with success.

“Video has proven to be the highest paying & most engaging form of ad for us without ruining the user experience. Users understand that they’re getting access to free streaming music, so one video ad every 60 minutes isn’t seen as a problem,” Copeland comments in a case study AOL published.

According to the RIAA, however, it is clear that Spinrilla has crossed a line by offering copyrighted music without permission. They hope the labels will be properly compensated through the lawsuit and that an injunction will pull it offline swiftly.

“Spinrilla specializes in ripping off music creators by offering thousands of unlicensed sound recordings for free,” the RIAA said in a public statement, which HWR first reported.

“Fans today have access to millions upon millions of songs from innovative platforms and services that pay creators — this kind of illicit activity has no place in today’s music marketplace.”

Spinrilla itself has yet to comment on the case.

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

UK government seeks stronger anti-laser strike laws through new bill

Law would hew closer to US regulations; UK cops wouldn’t have to prove aircraft danger.

In the UK, people caught shining lasers at pilots and bus and train drivers will face harsher punishments if a newly proposed law from the British government is waved through by parliament.

The Department for Transport (DfT) estimates there to be around 1,500 laser attacks on aircraft per year in the country, a crime which comes with a fine of up to £2,500 (~$3,100). However, UK police believe they do not currently have sufficient powers to investigate or prosecute laser attacks on other forms of transportation, and they feel the rules surrounding attacks on aircraft are too limited.

At present, British police looking to charge someone for an attack have to prove that a suspect has endangered the aircraft when shining a laser at it. Under the government's new proposals, police "will only have to prove the offence of shining the laser."

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Cyanogen Inc seems to be rebranding as Andrasta

The developers of the popular Android-based, open-source CyanogenMod operating system recently left the project and started something new called LineageOS. The move comes after a separation with Cyanogen Inc, a company that was originally started as a …

After a bitter falling out, the community-based CyanogenMod wanted to avoid trademark issues and needed to move to new hardware since there was no longer any support from Cyanogen Inc.

Continue reading Cyanogen Inc seems to be rebranding as Andrasta at Liliputing.

Lenovo Yoga A12 is a bigger, cheaper Yoga Book with a touch keyboard

Lenovo’s Yoga Book made a splash when the laptop launched in 2016 for $500 and up, thanks to its unusual design: the 10 inch notebook features a Wacom digitizer where you’d normally find a keyboard. This allows you to write or draw with a pen or type on a virtual keyboard that lights up only when you want it.

At the time Lenovo introduced two models: one with Android and another with Windows 10.

Continue reading Lenovo Yoga A12 is a bigger, cheaper Yoga Book with a touch keyboard at Liliputing.

At the time Lenovo introduced two models: one with Android and another with Windows 10.

Continue reading Lenovo Yoga A12 is a bigger, cheaper Yoga Book with a touch keyboard at Liliputing.

Playstation 4 Pro: Boost Mode verbessert Leistung nicht optimierter Spiele

Sony hat der Playstation 4 Pro eine neue Beta-Funktion spendiert, die reguläre PS4-Titel mit höheren Taktraten darstellt. Das verbessert die Geschwindigkeit und das Spielgefühl, kann aber in einigen Fällen auch Probleme bereiten. (Playstation 4, The Witcher 3)

Japan’s fishing line experiment in space fails to make a catch

Alas, the tether didn’t deploy.

After a trash-laden Japanese cargo spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station in late January it still had one task to perform before it burned up in the atmosphere—test an innovative space debris removal technology.

The HTV-6 spacecraft left the station on January 27 after delivering 5 tons of food, water, experiments, and more. After its release, the HTV-6 moved away from the station and descended into a lower orbit. There, it was to conduct the KITE (Kounotori Integrated Tether Experiment) test, in which a 20kg mass would move away from the spacecraft and unspool a 700-meter tether.

This tether, built with the assistance of a fishing line company, was made of thin wires of stainless steel and aluminium. The general idea is that the electrodynamic tether would attract electrons from the ambient plasma in the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere and that these electrons could power a "current drive." With this small but limitless source of power, engineers believed a tether could grapple onto space debris and nudge it into a lower orbit so that it would burn up in the atmosphere.

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Nvidia Quadro GP100: Big Pascal, HBM2, and NVLink comes to workstations

Big Pascal on a PCIe interface is coming for those that need 64-bit double precision math.

Nvidia has brought its biggest fully enabled Pascal GPU out of the custom server-only market and into workstations. Dubbed the Quadro GP100, the new graphics card features the same GPU as the Tesla P100, but it comes packed into Nvidia's trademark blower-style shroud, complete with a standard PCIe interface. The Quadro P6000 was the previous top-end Quadro card, and it was based on the GP102 GPU used in the consumer-focused Titan X Pascal.

The Quadro GP100 has a very different architecture and focus compared to Nvidia's consumer-facing cards, or even other Quadros. Instead of every Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) containing a collection of CUDA cores dedicated to the single precision (FP32) floating point calculations favoured by computer graphics applications like video games, the Quadro GP100 has an additional 32 FP64 CUDA cores per SM. This, Nvidia says, results in around 5 teraflops of FP64 performance or half the FP32 rate—a dramatic increase over the 1/32 FP32 rate of the P6000.

Typically, FP64 is favoured in scientific applications where 64-bit double precision math is required. The Quadro P100 also features double-speed (packed) FP16 instructions.

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Patente: Netflix wird wegen Offline-Videos verklagt

Netflix hat Ärger mit einem sogenannten Patenttroll. In einer Klage wird Netflix vorgeworfen, die eigene Offline-Funktion verstoße gegen ein 17 Jahre altes Patent. Es wird aber wohl kaum zu einem Gerichtsverfahren kommen, der Kläger verfolgt ein anderes Ziel. (Netflix, Streaming)

Stranger Things Season 2 will haunt Netflix on Halloween

A reportedly $5M Super Bowl teaser trailer shows Eleven and co. are back on Oct. 31.

The Stranger Things Season 2 Super Bowl advert.

The weekend delivered good news for fans of Netflix's critically acclaimed '80s-style, horror nostalgia-fest, Stranger Things—Season 2 will return on October 31, 2017.

The Halloween release date was accompanied by a teaser trailer that aired during the Super Bowl—an event best described as an endless stream of needlessly expensive advertising loosely tied together by short excerpts of brawny men throwing a ball around a field. According to the New York Times, a 30-second ad like the one for Stranger Things Season 2 costs an eye-watering $5 million (£4 million) to air.

Still, it's money well spent for those eager to glean any information about the new season. There's a short excerpt of an Eggo Waffles advert, an upside-down Eleven, and plenty of creepy horror imagery. Plus, there's a shot of the boys dressed up in Ghostbusters outfits, complete with makeshift Proton Packs, for the ultimate in '80s nostalgia feels.

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CPU-Architektur: RISC-V soll dominierende Architektur werden

Keine Lizenzgebühren, keine Anwälte, keine Probleme. Damit preist der Entwickler Arun Thomas die Vorzüge der freien CPU-Architektur RISC-V an. Dieser Vorteil soll dabei helfen, alle anderen Architekturen langfristig zu verdrängen. (RISCV, Prozessor)