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There was a time when MX Player was one of the best apps for watching videos downloaded to an Android phone or tablet. But these days there are plenty of other options, including the excellent VLC media player from Videolan, which happens to be a free …
There was a time when MX Player was one of the best apps for watching videos downloaded to an Android phone or tablet. But these days there are plenty of other options, including the excellent VLC media player from Videolan, which happens to be a free and open source application with versions available for most […]
The post Android video app MX Player is becoming a streaming video platform for the Indian market appeared first on Liliputing.
Apples neuer USB Restricted Mode soll eigentlich unbefugte Datenverbindungen zum iPhone und iPadverhindern. Ein unangenehmer Nebeneffekt kann aber sein, dass das Smartphone nicht mehr aufgeladen wird. Passiert das häufiger, kann die neue Sicherheitsfun…
Apples neuer USB Restricted Mode soll eigentlich unbefugte Datenverbindungen zum iPhone und iPadverhindern. Ein unangenehmer Nebeneffekt kann aber sein, dass das Smartphone nicht mehr aufgeladen wird. Passiert das häufiger, kann die neue Sicherheitsfunktion einfach abgestellt werden. (Apple, iPhone) Nach der Entfernung der Klinkenbuchse hatte Apple seine iPhones stets mit einem Adapter ausgeliefert, um Klinken-Kopfhörer an die Lightning-Buchse anzuschließen. Dieser soll in Zukunft nicht mehr beiliegen, meldet ein Finanzinstitut unter Bezugnahme au…
Syed Muzaffar struck a family while driving through San Francisco on December 31, 2013.
Enlarge / A woman walks into the Uber Corporate Headquarters building in San Francisco, California on February 05, 2018. (credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images)
A now-former Uber driver who struck a San Francisco family with his car on December 31, 2013—killing a six-year-old girl named Sophia Liu in the process—was convicted of vehicular manslaughter on August 2.
In addition to the fatality, driver Syed Muzaffar also seriously injured Liu's mother, Huan Hua Kuang, and her five-year-old brother, Anthony, while driving a Honda Pilot SUV through a crosswalk at Polk and Ellis Streets. In January 2014, the family sued Muzaffar and Uber for wrongful death and other complaints.
As Ars reported previously, Muzaffar had only been an Uber driver for a month and did not have anyone in his car at the time of the accident. Uber has previously argued that because Muzaffar "was not providing services on the Uber system during the time of the accident," the company is not responsible. That lawsuit was ultimately settled in July 2015.
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Der Beitragsservice von ARD, ZDF und Deutschlandradio hat im Laufe des Sommers 2018 rund 800.000 Menschen angeschrieben, um herauszufinden, ob sie Rundfunkgebühren zahlen müssen oder nicht. Aktuell gleicht der Beitragsservice seine Daten mit denen der …
Though up for “Game of the Year,” some question whether it’s a game at all.
Enlarge / Numbers. On cards. And that's... basically the game! (credit: Charlie Theel)
Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.
When I first heard The Mind described, it didn't make sense. This little German game has players cooperate to play cards from their hands in ascending order, without talking—and that’s about it. The concept sounds farcical in its simplicity, particularly when paired with the amount of furor the game has generated.
Then I played the thing, and it wouldn't get out of my head.
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Die Nasa hat bekannt gegeben, welche Amerikaner mit den ersten kommerziellen Raumschiffen ins Weltall fliegen sollen. Der genaue Starttermin bleibt unsicher. (Nasa, Boeing)
Auch Android-Nutzer sollen bald Fortnite spielen können, müssen dafür aber die APK manuell herunterladen und installieren. Als Grund gibt CEO Tim Sweeney den direkten Kontakt zu den Nutzern an – und finanzielle Gründe. (Fortnite, Android)
Video games have deployed a number of techniques over the years to deter pirates, with some more entertaining than others. Evil Bite, the small developer team behind the ‘Depraved’ city builder game, have got in on the action with a time-bomb DRM that slowly fills the game’s warehouses with pirate hats to render them useless.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
For as long as computer software has existed in commerical form, pirates have been keen to reap the benefits without handing over cash.
This is particularly true for video games which have been enthusiastically copied for several decades no matter whether they’ve been made available on tape, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs or digital downloads.
Stopping pirates is no easy task although that doesn’t stop companies from trying. Denuvo is perhaps the most recognizable system and one of the most fiendish. However, there are other ways of stopping pirates in their tracks without completely alienating your customer base.
Earlier this week TF received a tip about a torrent on The Pirate Bay. It links to the city builder game ‘Depraved‘ which is ordinarily available on Steam. Interestingly, the top comment on the torrent indicates that the release may not work as intended.
“This copy contains the developers DRM whereby after building a warehouse, it will start to slowly fill up with pirate hats which are irremovable thereby making the warehouse slowly useless,” the comment reads.
Depraved is created by Germany-based development team Evil Bite, which was founded in 2015 and consists of just two individuals, Danilo and David Tondl.
Speaking with TF, Evil Bite confirms that the claimed ‘pirate hat’ DRM does indeed exist.
“The pirate hats protection is real. It is a really cheap protection, but what can I say, it works,” Danilo says.
“We wanted to give the player a kind of demo. So the game works a bit until the pirate hats appear with a nice tooltip ‘Please support our 2 man development team’.”
Despite describing the protection as “cheap”, Danilo doesn’t want to reveal too much about how it works. However, the idea wasn’t to completely stop pirates but to let them get to a point where they’ve at least had a chance to test the game, hopefully in advance of a genuine purchase. This also involved fooling those who remove the protection from games.
“The protection waits in the background and ‘blocks’ or informs the player later in the game. That way the cracker thinks: ‘oh, ok it is working’ and moves on to the next title. I guess no cracker has time to play the game a couple of hours to test if there is some other protection,” he reveals.
The practice of using copy protection to convert potential pirates is probably the only type of DRM that isn’t universally pilloried by legitimate and pirate players alike. Evil Bite is pragmatic about the situation and hopes that its light-hearted approach is able to win over those considering a purchase.
“We really believe that there are people in the world who don’t have the money for such a game but on the other side there are people have the money but never bought a game because it is so easy to ‘steal’ it and in the end of the day it is our money we are losing,” Danilo notes.
“For us this DRM is more a joke than a real DRM and ‘money saver’. And like I said earlier, it is more like a demo. A lot of pirates want to test a game first before they buy it even with the Steam refund system.
“Is it worth it? I don’t know. We had at least one player who thought it was funny and bought the game because of it,” he concludes.
Danilo is the first to admit that the concept of dropping some pranks into a copy-protection method isn’t new. Several other developers have done similar things in the past, with varying levels of success (1,2).
What’s absolutely certain, however, is that this kind of approach towards copy-protection is generally better tolerated than that taken by the infamous Denuvo.
With the system criticized for reportedly being resource-hungry, the company behind Denuvo recently resorted to filing a criminal complaint against Bulgaria-based cracker Voksi.
Until last week, Voksi had been dismantling Denuvo’s efforts with relative ease so if nothing else, the company’s actions suggest that there is actually no technological solution to the piracy problem. It also means that its piracy problems are likely to return, sooner rather than later.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
A sizable group of Americans now consume all their home video content via SVOD, a new report by research firm NPD has found.17 percent of consumers are now no longer buying movies on discs, renting them or buying digital content, and instead, rely sole…
A sizable group of Americans now consume all their home video content via SVOD, a new report by research firm NPD has found.
17 percent of consumers are now no longer buying movies on discs, renting them or buying digital content, and instead, rely solely on SVOD services like Netflix for their video viewing needs, according to the NPD's "Entertainment Trends in America" report. This was up from 11% just a year ago.
For now, traditional ways to source video content remains more popular, with 24% of consumers relying solely on transactional methods, buying movies and TVs shows on discs or on digital format. 32% use a combination of transactional and SVOD to fulfill their viewing needs.
The report also found that 40% of SVOD subscribers only subscribe to one service (most likely Netflix), while 37% subscribed to two, and 24% subscribed to three or more services.
While Millennial consumers (ages 25 to 34) were the most likely to subscribe to three or more services, the age group 35 to 55 (Generation X) saw the biggest growth in terms of 3 or more subscriptions.
[via Media Play News]
Nach der Entfernung der Klinkenbuchse hatte Apple seine iPhones stets mit einem Adapter ausgeliefert, um Klinken-Kopfhörer an die Lightning-Buchse anzuschließen. Dieser soll in Zukunft nicht mehr beiliegen, meldet ein Finanzinstitut unter Bezugnahme auf den Hersteller der Dongles. (
Der Beitragsservice von ARD, ZDF und Deutschlandradio hat im Laufe des Sommers 2018 rund 800.000 Menschen angeschrieben, um herauszufinden, ob sie Rundfunkgebühren zahlen müssen oder nicht. Aktuell gleicht der Beitragsservice seine Daten mit denen der Meldeämter ab. (
Die Nasa hat bekannt gegeben, welche Amerikaner mit den ersten kommerziellen Raumschiffen ins Weltall fliegen sollen. Der genaue Starttermin bleibt unsicher. (
Auch Android-Nutzer sollen bald Fortnite spielen können, müssen dafür aber die APK manuell herunterladen und installieren. Als Grund gibt CEO Tim Sweeney den direkten Kontakt zu den Nutzern an - und finanzielle Gründe. (
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