Amazon bekommt in New York keine 3 Milliarden US-Dollar an Steuergeschenken, und New York City deshalb keine Amazon-Konzernzentrale in Long Island City. Der Konzern reagiert beleidigt. (Amazon, Wall Street)
Amazon bekommt in New York keine 3 Milliarden US-Dollar an Steuergeschenken, und New York City deshalb keine Amazon-Konzernzentrale in Long Island City. Der Konzern reagiert beleidigt. (Amazon, Wall Street)
Amazon’s entry-level Fire TV Stick sells for $40 and lets you stream 1080p content from the internet to your TV, while controlling everything using buttons or your voice, thanks to the company’s Alexa voice remote. But you know what’s…
Amazon’s entry-level Fire TV Stick sells for $40 and lets you stream 1080p content from the internet to your TV, while controlling everything using buttons or your voice, thanks to the company’s Alexa voice remote. But you know what’s better than a $40 media streamer? A $25 one. That’s how much Woot is selling the […]
South Korea will expand its site blocking measures with SNI eavesdropping, so HTTPS sites can be blocked as well. The new measure, which will also affect pirate sites, has generated widespread opposition. While it’s more effective than standard DNS blocking, it’s certainly not impossible to circumvent.
When it comes to pirate site blocking, South Korea is one of the most active countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
According to recent data from the Motion Picture Association, the country has blocked 456 sites to prevent the public from accessing pirated material.
These blocking orders are sanctioned by the Korean Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), which also oversees other blocking efforts, including those targeted at porn or illegal gambling sites.
While the ISP blockades work well for regular HTTP sites, they are fairly easy to bypass on HTTPS connections, something most sites offer today. For this reason, the Korean authorities are now stepping up their blocking game.
This week the Government announced that it will start eavesdropping on SNI fields, which identify the hostname of the target server. This allows ISPs to see which HTTPS sites users are trying to access, so these can be blocked if they’re on the Korean blocklist.
The new measures will apply to 895 foreign websites that are linked to porn, gambling or copyright infringement.
“The SNI blocking is a method of checking and blocking the target server in the SNI field. It is not related to communication interception and data packet interception,” the Government writes.
“In particular, the new method plans to block illegal sites related to child pornography, video piracy, and illegal gambling,” the translated press release adds.
The new blocking measures were already announced early last year as a new tool to deal with pirate sites, and are expected to take effect on February 22. From then on, users who access a blocked HTTPS site will be redirected to the following warning page.
The warning page
The new blocking policy is meeting quite a bit of resistance locally. A petition that was launched earlier this week has been signed by over 180,000 people already and this number is growing rapidly.
The petition warns that this type of censorship is limiting freedom of expression. At the same time, however, it notes that people will find ways to bypass the blockades.
“We will continue to bypass and evade Internet censorship. The new https blocking can also be bypassed through VPN programs or by activating ESNI. Do you really think limiting this way is effective?” it reads.
Indeed, SNI eavesdropping and blocking is useless when people use a VPN. In addition, more modern browsers and companies such as Cloudflare increasingly support encrypted SNI (ESNI). This prevents ISPs from snooping on SNI handshakes.
The nightly build of Firefox added support for ESNI last October, for example. As Bleepingcomputer notes, this is a more pressing issue now for South Koreans, which is exemplified by a recent message on Firefox’s bug tracker.
While it is no surprise that many South Koreans are not happy with the changes, at least their Government and ISPs are transparent about the matter. In Europe and elsewhere, HTTPS blocking is also fairly common, but it’s not always clear what measures are used.
Amazon is canceling its controversial plan to build a new corporate campus in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens. The plan, which included almost $3 billion in subsidies and tax breaks, provoked a grassroots backlash.
"The commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term," Amazon said in a statement. "While polls show that 70 percent of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project."
In 2017, Amazon announced that a single city would be chosen for Amazon's "HQ2," a second headquarters that would be an equal of Amazon's original Seattle location and employ as many as 50,000 people. But Amazon ultimately decided to split this "headquarters" up into two pieces, announcing plans to build one campus in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC and the other in Queens. Each location was slated to get around 25,000 new jobs.
Wargroove, Paladins makers say they’re just waiting on Sony’s OK to open up.
Enlarge/ On the right, Wargroove developers asking for Sony to open up cross-platform support on the PS4. On the left, Sony.
Last September, after years of fighting the idea, Sony finally announced that "cross-platform gameplay, progression, and commerce" would be coming to the PlayStation Network, with Fortnite as the first example. Now, though, some third-party developers are saying Sony is still standing in the way of letting the PS4 versions of their games play nicely with other platforms.
"We just launched Wargroove with crossplay between PC, Switch, and Xbox," Chucklefish CEO Finn "Tiy" Brice wrote on the ResetEra forums. "We made many requests for crossplay (both through our [Sony] account manager and directly with higher-ups) all the way up until release month. We were told in no uncertain terms that it was not going to happen."
Brice's comments came days after new Hi-Rez Studios CEO Stew Chisam tweeted at Sony that the studio was "ready to go when you are" for cross-play on Smite, Paladins, and Realm Royale. "It's time to stop playing favorites and tear down the crossplay/progression wall for everyone," he said.
Die Behörden in China haben zwei Berufe anerkannt, die mit E-Sports zu tun haben: Observer organisieren Veranstaltungen, Professionals sind die Spieler. Bei Letzteren wurde auch das eigentlich als Cheat verbotene Account Boosting ins Berufsbild mit auf…
Die Behörden in China haben zwei Berufe anerkannt, die mit E-Sports zu tun haben: Observer organisieren Veranstaltungen, Professionals sind die Spieler. Bei Letzteren wurde auch das eigentlich als Cheat verbotene Account Boosting ins Berufsbild mit aufgenommen. (E-Sport, Games)
The intent is to put the Web content first. This sounds familiar.
Enlarge/ Both the new dark view and light view look good. (credit: Opera)
Opera has unveiled a new look and feel for its browser. Expected to ship in version 59 and codenamed "Reborn 3" (R3), the new appearance adopts the same square edges and clean lines that we've seen in other browsers, giving the browser a passing similarity to both Firefox and Edge.
The principles of the new design? "We put Web content at center stage," the Opera team writes on its blog. The design is pared down so that you can browse "unhindered by unnecessary distractions." Borders and dividing lines have been removed, flattening out parts of the browser's interface and making them look more uniform and less eye-catching. The new design comes with the requisite dark and light modes, a welcome trend that we're glad to see is being widely adopted.
Being Web-centric is not a bad principle for an application such as a browser, where the bulk of the functionality and interest comes from the pages we're viewing rather than the browser itself. At first blush, I think that Opera has come up with something that looks good, but it does feel like an awfully familiar design rationale.
Weil Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) ein künftiger Standard für Festplatten wird, rüstet Hoya auf: Eine weiteres Werk soll 3,5-Plattern aus Glas herstellen. Die sind nötig, um die Kapazität weiter zu steigern. (Festplatte, Speichermedien)
Weil Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) ein künftiger Standard für Festplatten wird, rüstet Hoya auf: Eine weiteres Werk soll 3,5-Plattern aus Glas herstellen. Die sind nötig, um die Kapazität weiter zu steigern. (Festplatte, Speichermedien)
Absent a time machine, it’s hard to truly wrap your head around what the future climate will be like. Climate projection numbers carry a lot of information, but those numbers can seem abstract—what does 2.5º warmer actually feel like?
One way to understand that information is to hop in the car (even if it’s not a DeLorean). There are a huge variety of local climates around the world, and it’s possible to find a location today that ought to feel a lot like your hometown will in a few decades. A new study by Matt Fitzpatrick and Rob Dunn applies this “climate analog” approach to 540 cities in the US and Canada—which means about 250 million people can use a Web map to look for an analog to their future climate.
Present and future climates
There are multiple ways you could imagine defining such a comparison. In this case, the researchers broke the data down by season, calculating minimum/maximum temperatures and total precipitation averaged over 1960-1990. This is basically the seasonal weather you’re used to.
Chinese phone maker Vivo unveiled a new sub-brand called IQOO this week, but the company didn’t say much about what kind of devices it would sell under that brand. Now a series of images posted to Chinese social media site Weibo may have the answ…
Chinese phone maker Vivo unveiled a new sub-brand called IQOO this week, but the company didn’t say much about what kind of devices it would sell under that brand. Now a series of images posted to Chinese social media site Weibo may have the answer. They depict a smartphone with a flexible display that folds […]
Amazon bekommt in New York keine 3 Milliarden US-Dollar an Steuergeschenken, und New York City deshalb keine Amazon-Konzernzentrale in Long Island City. Der Konzern reagiert beleidigt. (Amazon, Wall Street) 
When it comes to pirate site blocking, South Korea is one of the most active countries in the Asia-Pacific region. 
Die Behörden in China haben zwei Berufe anerkannt, die mit E-Sports zu tun haben: Observer organisieren Veranstaltungen, Professionals sind die Spieler. Bei Letzteren wurde auch das eigentlich als Cheat verbotene Account Boosting ins Berufsbild mit aufgenommen. (
Weil Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) ein künftiger Standard für Festplatten wird, rüstet Hoya auf: Eine weiteres Werk soll 3,5-Plattern aus Glas herstellen. Die sind nötig, um die Kapazität weiter zu steigern. (
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