Wer ein Smartphone mit Mobile-HDR-Unterstützung besitzt, sollte einen Blick auf HDR-Videos bei Youtube werfen: Die Videoplattform beginnt aktuell, die Funktion zu verteilen. Bei uns hat es auf einem Galaxy Note 8 von Samsung bereits funktioniert. (Youtube, Film) Month: September 2017
Lyft’s ambitious plans to win the self-driving wars
Lyft wants lots of self-driving car companies to build on its open network.
Enlarge (credit: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Lyft)
On Thursday, Lyft announced a new self-driving car partnership with the Mountain View-based startup Drive.ai. In the coming months, Lyft customers in San Francisco will occasionally have their hails answered by Drive's experimental self-driving cars—albeit with a safety driver in the front seat.
On its own, this isn't huge news. Drive.ai is not a well-known company and the deal will initially involve only a handful of cars. But the announcement illustrates how Lyft is positioning itself to win the autonomous vehicle wars of the coming decade.
Tesla and Uber want to be the Apple of self-driving cars
A technician sits in an Uber self-driving car on September 13, 2016 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (credit: ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images)
Many experts expect that ride-sharing will be a major part of the self-driving car business. With no need to pay drivers, ride-sharing services can be a lot more affordable than taxis are today. And a ride-sharing approach will allow companies more flexibility in when, where, and how they roll out self-driving technology.
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Huawei: Neue Details zum kommenden Mate 10
Huawei selbst hat schon einiges zu seinem kommenden Smartphone Mate 10 verraten, jetzt sind ein großer Teil der technischen Spezifikationen und die Modellübersicht geleakt. Offenbar könnte es bis zu drei Mate-10-Modelle geben. (Huawei, Smartphone)
Huawei selbst hat schon einiges zu seinem kommenden Smartphone Mate 10 verraten, jetzt sind ein großer Teil der technischen Spezifikationen und die Modellübersicht geleakt. Offenbar könnte es bis zu drei Mate-10-Modelle geben. (Huawei, Smartphone) I’ve fallen in love with a laptop—the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga
Review: Lenovo has built the platonic ideal of a modern laptop.
When writing a review, whether of a computer game, a film, a book, or a piece of hardware, there is always a certain amount of pressure to be "objective," to write from some kind of non-personal, neutral viewpoint divorced from any kind of emotional response.
I've never subscribed to this view myself. Here at Ars, we don't try to review every piece of hardware that hits the market; our selection of review products is implicitly skewed toward those that we think are likely to be good, or if not good, then in some sense significant due to their profile, their positioning within the market, or whatever other factors we deem to be relevant. As such, someone reading the laptop reviews at Ars will always see a somewhat skewed representation of the market without being exposed to its full breadth. The same goes for laptop reviews virtually anywhere.
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ICAO: UN-Luftfahrtbehörde will globale Drohnen-Datenbank
Die Internationale Zivilluftfahrtorganisation (ICAO) setzt sich dafür ein, eine weltweite Datenbank zur Erfassung von unbemannten Flugdrohnen und deren Besitzern einzurichten. Damit sollen auch weltweit einheitliche Standards für Multicopter geschaffen werden. (
YouTube Doesn’t Have to Expose IP-Addresses of Movie Pirates, Court Rules
YouTube doesn’t have to hand over the IP-addresses of infringing uploaders to a German filmmaker, the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt has ruled. The Court argues that IP-addresses can not be used to send a written message to people, so under local law the video streaming platform only has to share their email addresses.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
YouTube is known to be a breeding ground for creators. At the same time, however, it’s also regularly used to share copyrighted material without permission, including full-length films.
If these “pirating” YouTube users are caught they generally get a slap on the wrist by Google, or have their YouTube accounts terminated at worst. Sometimes, however, rightsholders can take things a bit further.
This is what happened in Germany, where a German filmmaker went after three YouTube users. These account holders had uploaded two movies without permission, which were then viewed thousands of times.
Through a local court, the filmmaker tried to obtain the identity of the alleged infringers, presumably to take further action. It demanded that Google and YouTube should share the emails, IP-addresses, and phone numbers that were tied to these accounts.
Initially, this request was turned down by the Frankfurt District Court, but the Higher Regional Court recently ruled that YouTube has to hand over the associated email addresses. The video streaming service is not required to hand over the IP-addresses or phone numbers, however.
The reasoning for this decision (pdf) is based on Article 101 of the German Copyright Act. The law specifies that a service provider can be ordered to hand over the name and address of an infringer.
The legislation, put in place in 1990, specifically references “written” communication and while it doesn’t mention email, the court argued that email addresses are covered.
The same reasoning doesn’t apply to IP-addresses. Although they have the term “address” in the name, they can’t generally be used to send a written message to a person, at least not directly.
“In the case of IP addresses – despite the word component ‘address’, this is not an ‘address’, since the IP address does not have any communication function, and it serves solely to identify the terminal from which a particular web page is accessed,” the Court clarifies.
The judgment of the Higher Regional Court is not yet legally binding. Golem reports that, due to the importance of the case, the Federal Court of Justice has to review it first.
For the filmmaker, the ruling comes as a disappointment since an email address alone is probably not enough to identify the infringer in question.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no other options. In the United States, it’s relatively easy to obtain information from copyright infringers with a DMCA subpoena, for example.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Die Woche im Video: Mäßige IT-Gehälter und lausige Wahlsoftware
Nicht nur über die Schwächen in der Wahlsoftware zur Bundestagswahl 2017 haben wir uns diese Woche geärgert, sondern auch über die ersten Ergebnisse des Gehaltschecks von Golem.de. Gut, dass wir ein paar interessante Dinge testen konnten! (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Internet)
Nicht nur über die Schwächen in der Wahlsoftware zur Bundestagswahl 2017 haben wir uns diese Woche geärgert, sondern auch über die ersten Ergebnisse des Gehaltschecks von Golem.de. Gut, dass wir ein paar interessante Dinge testen konnten! (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Internet) Destiny 2 im Test: Dominus und die Schickimicki-Hüter
Ein bisschen Fortsetzung plus viel Feinschliff: Die Konsolenversion von Destiny 2 gleicht auf fast schon merkwürdige Art ihrem Vorgänger – bietet nun aber immerhin mit dem Kampf zwischen einem Darth-Vader-ähnlichen Außerirdischen und den Hütern eine gelungene Kampagne. (Destiny 2, Spieletest)
Ein bisschen Fortsetzung plus viel Feinschliff: Die Konsolenversion von Destiny 2 gleicht auf fast schon merkwürdige Art ihrem Vorgänger - bietet nun aber immerhin mit dem Kampf zwischen einem Darth-Vader-ähnlichen Außerirdischen und den Hütern eine gelungene Kampagne. (Destiny 2, Spieletest) WordPress Reports Surge in ‘Piracy’ Takedown Notices, Rejects 78%
WordPress has published new data revealing that the number of piracy takedown notices it receives has doubled in a year. Interestingly, this increase is not caused by legitimate complaints. Of all the DMCA requests copyright holders sent, a massive 78% were rejected due to mistakes or abuse.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress.com blogging platform, receives thousands of takedown requests from rightsholders.
A few days ago the company published its latest transparency report, showing that it had processed 9,273 requests during the first half of 2017.
This is more than double the amount it received during the same period last year, which is a significant increase. Looking more closely at the numbers, we see that this jump is solely due to an increase in incomplete and abusive requests.
Of all the DMCA notices received, only 22% resulted in the takedown of allegedly infringing content. This translates to 2,040 legitimate requests, which is less than the 2,342 Automattic received during the same period last year.
This logically means that the number of abusive and incomplete DMCA notices has skyrocketed. And indeed, in its most recent report, 78% of all requests were rejected due to missing information or plain abuse. That’s much more than the year before when 42% were rejected.
WordPress prides itself on carefully reviewing the content of each and every takedown notice, to protect its users. This means checking whether a takedown request is properly formatted but also reviewing the legitimacy of the claims.
“We also may decline to remove content if a notice is abusive. ‘Abusive’ notices may be formally complete, but are directed at fair use of content, material that isn’t copyrightable, or content the complaining party misrepresents ownership of a copyright,” Automattic notes.
During the first half of 2017, a total of 649 takedown requests were categorized as abuse. Some of the most blatant examples go into the “Hall of Shame,” such as a recent case where the Canadian city of Abbotsford tried to censor a parody of its logo, which replaced a pine tree with a turd.
While some abuse cases sound trivial they can have a real impact on website operators, as examples outside of WordPress show. Most recently the operator of Oro Jackson, a community dedicated to the anime series “One Piece,” was targeted with several dubious DMCA requests.
The takedown notices were sent by the German company Comeso and were forwarded through their hosting company Linode. The notices urged the operator to remove various forum threads because they included words of phrases such as “G’day” and “Reveries of the Moonlight,” not actual infringing content.
Fearing legal repercussions, the operator saw no other option than to censor these seemingly harmless discussions (starting a thread with “G’day”!!), until there’s a final decision on the counter-notice. They remain offline today.
It’s understandable that hosting companies have to be strict sometimes, as reviewing copyright claims is not their core business. However, incidents like these show how valuable the skeptical review process of Automattic is.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
US forecast models have been pretty terrible during Hurricane Irma
NOAA’s best weather model seems to be getting worse with hurricanes, not better.
Enlarge / This is the latest forecast released by the European model at 2pm ET Friday, showing an Irma landfall in Everglades National Park on Sunday afternoon. (credit: Weather Bell)
We have written a fair amount at Ars recently about the superiority of the European forecast model, suggesting to readers that they focus on the ensemble runs of this system to get a good handle on track forecasts for Hurricane Irma. Then we checked out some of the preliminary data on model performance during this major hurricane, and it was truly eye-opening.
Brian Tang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Albany, tabulates data on "mean absolute error" for the location of a storm's center at a given time and where it was forecast to be at that time. Hurricane Irma has been a thing for about a week now, so we have started to get a decent sample size—at least 10 model runs—to assess performance.
The model data
The chart below is extremely busy, but when you understand how to read it, the data is striking. It shows the average position error (in kilometers) at forecast lead times of 12, 24, 48, 72, 96, and 120 hours (so, out to five days). It compares several different classes of models, including global models that forecast conditions around the planet, nested models focused on hurricanes, and consensus forecasts. Specifically, the models are referenced as follows:
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