Month: March 2017

After legal settlement, Redflex’s six-month losses jump by nearly 10X

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has also loaned the red light camera firm $7.5M.

Enlarge / ––A sign posted on traffic signals at the corner of Aero Drive and Murphy Canyon Road near the I–-15 in San Diego.

Redflex Holdings Limited, the Australian corporate parent of the embattled red-light camera company, announced in official financial filings on Tuesday that it had lost over A$26.2 million ($19.8 million) during the first half of its 2017 fiscal year, which concluded at the end of 2016.

A notable factor that explains the company’s massive drop in profits—compared to a loss of A$2.7 million (~$2 million) during the same period a year earlier—is the recent $20 million settlement that the company reached with the City of Chicago as part of a corruption investigation.

Redflex also noted decreased revenue in the United States and largely flat revenue everywhere else. In a statement written by Adam Gray, the company’s chairman, Redflex would now seek increased opportunities in Latin America to try to make up for it.

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Blue Origin: Jeff Bezos will zum Mond fliegen

Vergesst Amazon Prime Air – hier kommt Amazon Prime Space: Jeff Bezos will einen Lieferdienst zum Mond einrichten. In weniger als zehn Jahren will sein Unternehmen Blue Origin einen Raumtransporter entwickeln, der eine Mondkolonie versorgen soll. (Blue…

Vergesst Amazon Prime Air - hier kommt Amazon Prime Space: Jeff Bezos will einen Lieferdienst zum Mond einrichten. In weniger als zehn Jahren will sein Unternehmen Blue Origin einen Raumtransporter entwickeln, der eine Mondkolonie versorgen soll. (Blue Origin, Nasa)

UK Police Claim 64% Drop in Mainstream Advertising on 200 Pirate Sites

City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit is claiming success in denying potential revenue to more than 200 ‘pirate’ sites. As a result of Operation Creative, the division says that in the past twelve months there has been a 64% decrease in advertising placed by the UK’s top ad spending companies.

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

For the past several years, authorities in the UK have been clamping down pretty hard on Internet piracy. Officers have arrested dozens of individuals involved in running sites and those supplying piracy-enabled hardware.

Much of this action has emanated from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) under the banner Operation Creative, a multi-pronged initiative to reduce piracy using a variety of tactics, including the targeting of domains and the disruption of revenue streams.

Part of that task has involved making it harder for pirate site operators to generate funding from advertising. That’s being achieved via the Infringing Website List (IWL), a blacklist of websites distributed to potential advertisers and agencies who are asked to boycott the domains in the name of supporting creators.

In an announcement yesterday PIPCU claimed success in this area, noting that research from data company whiteBULLET indicates that there has been a 64% decrease in advertising from the UK’s top ad spending companies on more than 200 copyright-infringing websites.

“This shows the great impact our work has on protecting the creative industries in the UK and across the world,” said DCI Pete Ratcliffe, head of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

“Operation Creative is about taking away the revenue that these criminals use to undermine one of the most important industries to the UK economy.”

Noting the cooperation shown by brands and advertisers, Ratcliffe said that Operation Creative will be stepping on the gas even more this year, with the aim of negatively affecting close to 1,300 sites on the IWL.

Jo Johnson MP, Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, said that illegal sites have a negative impact on the UK’s creative industries and that when advertising appears on them, it legitimises criminal operations.

“The naming and shaming of infringing websites sends a clear message: criminal activity will not be tolerated. PIPCU and their enforcement partners will continue to track down, de-legitimise and disrupt advertising revenues on these infringing sites,” Johnson said.

“I commend PIPCU and their partners for these continued efforts to disrupt funding of illegal streaming sites by dramatically reducing rates of advertising that appear on them.”

The news comes on the heels of a report in January that PIPCU had paid visits to several companies that had been found to be advertising on pirate sites. Each reportedly pledged to stop advertising on 1,232 pirate sites in the wake of the contact from PIPCU.

PIPCU says that the figure of 64 per cent reported yesterday was based on comparing 205 websites on the Infringing Website List in both January 2016 and January 2017. However, the unit does not release information on which sites were counted (such as their names or their size) so it’s impossible to say whether these were big or small players or what the overall effect was.

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

VR-Headset von LG ausprobiert: Mit “Für Elise” in die virtuelle Realität

Ein weiterer Konzern steigt ein ins Geschäft mit den Virtual-Reality-Headsets: LG arbeitet mit Valve an einem noch namenlosen Gerät. Golem.de konnte den Prototyp mit Beethoven ausprobieren. (VR, OLED)

Ein weiterer Konzern steigt ein ins Geschäft mit den Virtual-Reality-Headsets: LG arbeitet mit Valve an einem noch namenlosen Gerät. Golem.de konnte den Prototyp mit Beethoven ausprobieren. (VR, OLED)

Produktentwicklung: Amazon arbeitet angeblich an Überwachungskamera

Amazon hat mit Alexa bereits einen digitalen Assistenten entwickelt, der in die Wohnung gehört. Nun könnte noch eine Kamera dazukommen, wenn ein geleaktes Produktfoto echt ist. Es zeigt eine kleine Überwachungskamera für zu Hause. (Amazon Alexa, Videoüberwachung)

Amazon hat mit Alexa bereits einen digitalen Assistenten entwickelt, der in die Wohnung gehört. Nun könnte noch eine Kamera dazukommen, wenn ein geleaktes Produktfoto echt ist. Es zeigt eine kleine Überwachungskamera für zu Hause. (Amazon Alexa, Videoüberwachung)

Mike Pence used an AOL e-mail account for state business and it got hacked

As a candidate, Trump VP castigated Clinton for use of a private e-mail server.

Enlarge (credit: Gage Skidmore)

As the Republican vice presidential candidate, Mike Pence vigorously chastised Hillary Clinton for using a personal server to send and receive official e-mails while she was Secretary of State. Not only was the arrangement an attempt to escape public accountability, he said, it also put classified information within dangerous reach of hackers.

Now, come revelations that Pence routinely used a private AOL account to conduct government business while he was governor of Indiana and that the account was hacked last summer, just months before he turned the heat on his Democratic rival over her personal e-mail server. Use of the AOL account for state business came to light in a 2,100-word articlepublished Thursday evening by The IndyStar. The news outlet based its report on e-mails it received under a public records request. State officials declined to release an unspecified number of e-mails because the state considers them confidential and too sensitive to release to the public.

Pence used the account starting in the mid 1990s and continued using it until it was hijacked in 2016, three years into Pence's four-year tenure as governor, the news outlet reported. The hackers who compromised the account used it to send a scam e-mail to Pence's contacts, falsely claiming that the governor and his wife were stranded in the Philippines and in urgent need of financial assistance. Pence then abandoned that account and opened a new AOL account.

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Digitaler Assistent: Google Assistant setzt gutes Mittelklasse-Smartphone voraus

Die meisten Einsteiger-Smartphones werden ausgeschlossen, wenn es um den Google Assistant geht. Aber auch so manches Mittelklasse-Gerät wird den digitalen Assistenten nicht erhalten. Die von Google genannten Mindestanforderungen setzen hier entsprechende Grenzen. (Google Assistant, Google)

Die meisten Einsteiger-Smartphones werden ausgeschlossen, wenn es um den Google Assistant geht. Aber auch so manches Mittelklasse-Gerät wird den digitalen Assistenten nicht erhalten. Die von Google genannten Mindestanforderungen setzen hier entsprechende Grenzen. (Google Assistant, Google)

Netflix CEO Talks Buffering, Piracy, AI Threat

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has declared a mission to end the suffering of buffering, as he touts the company’s hard work to make it a thing of the past.Speaking at the Mobile World Congress where Hastings was a keynote speaker, and just days after the c…



Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has declared a mission to end the suffering of buffering, as he touts the company's hard work to make it a thing of the past.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress where Hastings was a keynote speaker, and just days after the company won its first Oscar for the documentary 'The White Helmets', Netflix's CEO took the time to cover a wide range of subject matters in an effort to outline the company's current and future strategy.

At the top of Netflix's hit list is buffering. Hastings believes that buffering no longer has a place in today's modern Internet world, and the company is investing in servers, video encoding technology and content delivery mechanisms in order to make buffering "a relic like that dial tone".

With AT&T recently throttling some of their unlimited plans to only 3 Mbps and other clamping down on excessive data usage, Hastings says they're on top of this development too, with the company already able to deliver good quality video at 0.5 Mbps, and working on getting it down to as low as 0.2 Mbps.

On the piracy front, Hastings confirmed the company's strategy of enticing pirates to start paying for content by offering something that's seen as good value for those that have been relying on illegal downloads.

"We're focusing on the carrot of offering a great service," he said.

And finally, on the issue of Artificial Intelligence, Hastings offered a curious if slightly disturbing take on the issue.

"I'm not sure if (in the future) we're going to be entertaining you or entertaining AI," he quipped, signalling that Netflix will continue to serve entertainment content even in the event of an AI takeover of the world.

[via CNET]

Blizzard: Burgen, Zwerge und eine neue Heldin für Overwatch

Das Ende von Project Titan und immer diese Zwerge: Blizzard hat in einem Vortrag über den handgemachten Grafikstil von Overwatch gesprochen – und eine neue Heldin vorgestellt. (Overwatch, Blizzard)

Das Ende von Project Titan und immer diese Zwerge: Blizzard hat in einem Vortrag über den handgemachten Grafikstil von Overwatch gesprochen - und eine neue Heldin vorgestellt. (Overwatch, Blizzard)