Month: July 2018

Dotcom at an extradition hearing in Auckland in 2015. (credit: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)

A New Zealand appeals court has dealt another blow to file sharing mogul Kim Dotcom in his years-long fight against extradition to the United States on copyright charges. The court agreed with a lower court judge that Dotcom was eligible for extradition under New Zealand law, taking Dotcom a step closer to facing justice in the United States.

"We are disappointed with today’s Judgment by the New Zealand Court of Appeal," Dotcom's US lawyer, Ira Rothken, said in an emailed statement. "We look forward to seeking review with the New Zealand Supreme Court. We think that ultimately Kim Dotcom will prevail."

The case dates back to 2012, when authorities staged a spectacular raid on Dotcom's rented mansion in the Auckland area. Dotcom had built a massively successful company called Megaupload that had become a popular platform for illicit sharing of copyrighted movies.

Glosten

Sandia National Laboratories says a hydrogen fuel cell-powered research boat is technically and economically feasible today.

The lab network has released a report describing the specifications of an ideal hydrogen fuel-cell research vessel. Currently, research boats are largely powered by diesel, but a shift to hydrogen fuel cells could offer some significant advantages over traditional technologies. Not least among these could be a complete reduction in carbon dioxide and other emissions that contribute to global warming and sea pollution during use.

Enlarge (credit: Toolstotal)

Charter Communications launched its mobile broadband service on June 30, and it's throttling all video streams to DVD quality.

"DVD-quality video streaming is supported. Video typically streams at 480p," Charter notes in the "Pricing & Other Info" section of its mobile sign-up page. The quality limit is similar to one just imposed by Comcast, which previously did not impose any video quality limits on its mobile service.

Comcast is letting existing customers get 720p video streams "on an interim basis at no charge," and the company announced plans to charge extra for longer-term access to HD quality. But Charter hasn't announced any plans to let customers stream in HD over its mobile service, for free or otherwise.

HD, so like... a high-definition floppy?

It's the day after Independence Day in the US, and much of our staff is just returning to their preferred work machines. If this was 1997 instead of 2018, that would mean booting up BeOS for some. The future-of-operating-systems-that-never-was arrived just over 20 years ago, so in light of the holiday, we're resurfacing this geek's guide. The piece originally ran on June 2, 2010; it appears unchanged below.

The Be operating system file system, known simply as BFS, is the file system for the Haiku, BeOS, and SkyOS operating systems. When it was created in the late '90s as part of the ill-fated BeOS project, BFS's ahead-of-its-time feature set immediately struck the fancy OS geeks. That feature set includes:

• A 64-bit address space
• Use of journaling
• Highly multithreaded reading
• Support of database-like extended file attributes
• Optimization for streaming file access

A dozen years later, the legendary BFS still merits exploration—so we're diving in today, starting with some filesystem basics and moving on to a discussion of the above features. We also chatted with two people intimately familiar with the OS: the person who developed BFS for Be and the developer behind the open-source version of BFS.