Month: August 2018

Sehr lange SSDs, die in Server-Racks geschoben werden: Das Ruler-Format heißt nun EDSFF und existiert in sechs Varianten. So beträgt die Speicherdichte pro Höheneinheit bis zu 1 Petabyte, wenn 32 SSDs eingesteckt sind. (Solid State Drive, Intel)

Einige der Erfinder von Diablo waren für die ersten beiden Torchlight verantwortlich, nun plant die Serie neue Wege: Mit dem Namenszusatz Frontiers soll es Kämpfe in einer Onlinewelt voller Monster und Gefahren geben. (Torchlight, Diablo)

Neben dem Galaxy Note 9 und der Galaxy Watch hat Samsung auch seinen ersten Smart-Speaker vorgestellt: Der Galaxy Home kommt mit Samsungs Sprachassistenten Bixby und markanten Standfüßen. Zu den technischen Details ist noch wenig bekannt. (Samsung, Smart Home)

Er hat ein Display als Gesicht, er fährt auf Ketten, er kommuniziert - aber er ist nicht Cozmo: Anki hat einen neuen sozialen Roboter vorgestellt. Auf Kickstarter ist der Cozmo-Nachfolger Vector bereits ein Erfolg. (Roboter, Technologie)

Last December, TF reported on SitesBloqueados (Blocked Sites) a web portal run by Revolução dos Bytes (Bytes’ Revolution), a group of anti-censorship activists in Portugal.

Internet censorship is common in the country, with more than 1,700 sites banned from regular Internet access for reasons ranging from copyright to gambling. The process does not require intervention from the courts so Revolução dos Bytes decided to keep an eye on things with its Ahoy! Chrome and Firefox extension.

“Ahoy! basically bypasses any traffic to a blocked site through our own proxies, allowing the users to navigate in a free, uncensored internet,” team member Henrique Mouta previously told TF.

Not only is Ahoy! able to unblock sites, it can also detect newly blocked domains and feed information back, so that its unblocking abilities are always up to date.

Things had been going well. After servicing 100,000 users last December, Ahoy! grew to almost 185,000 users this year. However, progress and indeed the project itself is now under threat after arbitrary action by Google.

“Google decided to remove us from Chrome’s Web Store without any justification”, Henrique informs TF.

“We always make sure our code is high quality, secure and 100% free (as in beer and as in freedom). All the source code is open source. And we’re pretty sure we never broke any of the Google’s marketplace rules.”

Users being to plumment after Google takedown

Henrique says he’s tried to reach out to Google but finding someone to help has proven impossible. Even re-submitting Ahoy! to Google from scratch hasn’t helped the situation.

“I tried and resubmitted the plugin but it was refused after a few hours and without any justification,” Henrique says.

“Google never reached us or notified us about the removal from Chrome Web Store. We never got a single email justifying what happened, why have we been removed from the store, or/and what are we breaching and how can we fix it.”

TorrentFreak reached out to Google asking why this anti-censorship tool has been removed from its Chrome store. Despite multiple requests, the search giant failed to respond to us or the Ahoy! team.

The negative effect on the project following removal by Google has been swift. Before the takedown, Ahoy! had around 185,000 users with around 500 installations per day. That progress has now been reversed.

“Right now, we have 174k active users on Chrome, quickly dropping (around 500 each day). We are being contacted every day by our users asking where they can now download the Chrome version, and asking what happened. I can tell you that we’ve noticed a web traffic drop on our API of about ~25%,” Henrique says.

Whatever problem Google has with the Chrome version of Ahoy!, the same cannot be said of its Firefox variant. The extension is living happily on that platform and no ToS breach has been advised.

That seems to suggest the team has done little wrong but with Google refusing to provide an explanation, they have no chance of fixing an issue, if one exists.

“The source code is 100% open source, so it’s easy to see that we’re not doing anything sketchy, we really care about our users’ privacy and security. If we’re doing something wrong, we don’t know what,” Henrique complains.

The issue is critical, not least since 98% of Ahoy! users access it via Chrome. So, until Google provides some kind of explanation, Chrome users will have to install the extension manually via a new site set up for the purpose.

“We have many users asking what happened and how can they download this extension [from the Chrome Store] and I have no answers for them. We’re losing our user base every day, and if we don’t find a solution our project will probably die,” Henrique concludes.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

A new study that surveyed more than 35,000 consumers has found that enforcement measures designed to stamp out piracy may not be having the desired effect in reducing piracy. Instead, improving legal consumption options may be having a far greater effect in solving the piracy problem.

The Global Online Piracy Study, published by researchers at the University of Amsterdam, looked at consumer habits and legal measures in 13 countries and was not able to conclusively establish that legal measures were working.

"Still, despite the abundance of enforcement measures, their perceived effectiveness is uncertain. Therefore, it is questionable whether the answer to successfully tackling online copyright infringement lies in additional
rights or enforcement measures, especially if these will not lead to additional revenue for copyright holders and risk coming into conflict with fundamental rights of users and intermediaries. Instead, it might be sensible to search for the answer to piracy elsewhere – in the provision of affordable and convenient legal access to copyright-protected content," the report stated.

The study did find "strong links" between "piracy and the availability and affordability of content", suggesting that better and more affordable legal options seem to do more to reduce piracy than law enforcement.

As with the findings of many similar studies in the past, the researchers also found that pirates and legal content consumers are actually one and the same, and that in fact, the people who purchased the most content are also often the ones that pirate the most.

"Moreover, pirates and legal users are largely the same people: demographically, pirates resemble legal users quite closely, although on average they tend to be somewhat younger and more often male. More
importantly, for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non-pirating legal users," concluded the report.

Overall, the researchers found that, despite high piracy levels, the market for music, film and video games have grown in the years 2014 to 2017, largely led by an increase in digital sales (as the expense of physical sales).

[via Techdirt]

Amazon will mit einer Open-Source-Version des Alexa Automotive Core (AAC) SDK oder Auto SDK Automobilherstellern helfen, den Sprachassistenten in Autos und ihre Infotainment-Systeme zu integrieren. Bisher ist Alexa in der Automobilwelt nur sporadisch vertreten. (Amazon Alexa, Amazon)

Nachdem er Tesla den Rücken zugekehrt hat, geht Ex-Chefingenieur Doug Field zu Apple zurück, um am Projekt Titan mit Bob Mansfield zu arbeiten. (Tesla, Elektroauto)

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