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The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending March 23, 2019, are in. A surprising animated hit with some innovative visuals and a killer soundtrack was the week’s top seller, narrowly beating the long-aw…
The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending March 23, 2019, are in. A surprising animated hit with some innovative visuals and a killer soundtrack was the week's top seller, narrowly beating the long-awaited return of a classic character. Find out which movie it was in our weekly DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales stats and analysis feature.
Google lässt mit seinen Kamerafahrzeugen wieder deutsche Straßen abfahren. Veröffentlicht werden die Aufnahmen nicht, sie dienen der Verbesserung von Kartenmaterialien. (Google Street View, Google)
Google lässt mit seinen Kamerafahrzeugen wieder deutsche Straßen abfahren. Veröffentlicht werden die Aufnahmen nicht, sie dienen der Verbesserung von Kartenmaterialien. (Google Street View, Google) Event raises serious questions about security practices of the US Secret Service.
Enlarge (credit: The White House / Flickr)
A woman carrying four cellphones, two Chinese passports, and a thumb drive containing malware was arrested over the weekend after gaining access to President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort under false pretenses, a court document alleged.
The woman, identified as 32-year-old Yujing Zhang, on Saturday afternoon told a US Secret Service agent she was there to use the pool and produced the passports, a criminal complaint filed in US District Court for the Southern District of Florida alleged. She was admitted past a security checkpoint after a resort security manager verified that her last name matched the surname of a club member. A “potential language-barrier issue” raised the possibility she was the daughter of the member. She didn’t give a definitive answer when asked if she was there to meet anyone and was escorted to a front desk in a golf cart.
When questioned by a receptionist inside the club, Zhang said she was there to attend a United Nations Chinese American Association event later that evening, according to the complaint. The receptionist confirmed that no such event was scheduled and was unable to find Zhang’s name on any list of people approved to be past the security checkpoint.
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Conduct egregious enough that a judge doesn’t even wait for a trial.
Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
It used to be that publishing a scientific journal was a significant undertaking, requiring infrastructures for peer review, printing, and distribution, and the costs were often defrayed by charging authors for the honor of publishing. Now, it's possible to simply convert submissions to PDFs and throw them online. With those barriers gone, science quickly became plagued by predatory publishers who decided to eliminate peer review as well. Instead, they simply published anything from people who have the money to cover the publication fees.
The profits of these "predatory publishers" come from a mixture of genuine scientists who are unwary, people who want to pad their publication records, and fringe scientists who just want to see their ideas in the literature regardless of their lack of merit. All of them can end up putting misinformation into the scientific record and confusing a public that generally doesn't even know about the existence of predatory publishers.
Now, the Federal Trade Commission has won a summary judgement that just might cause some predatory publishers to step back from their business model. An India-based predatory publisher has been hit with a $50 million dollar judgement for deceptive business practices, along with permanent injunctions against most of the activities that made it money.
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Intel wants to sell you more than just some CPUs for your servers.
Enlarge / Left-to-right: Cascade Lake Xeon AP, Cascade Lake Xeon SP, Broadwell Xeon D-1600, and up front Optane DC Persistent Memory. (credit: Intel)
Intel today launched a barrage of new products for the data center, tackling almost every enterprise workload out there. The company's diverse range of products highlights how today's data center is more than just processors, with network controllers, customizable FPGAs, and edge device processors all part of the offering.
The star of the show is the new Cascade Lake Xeons. These were first announced last November, and at the time a dual-die chip with 48 cores, 96 threads, and 12 DDR4 2933 memory channels was going to be the top spec part. But Intel has gone even further than initially planned with the new Xeon Platinum 9200 range: the top-spec part, the Platinum 9282, pairs two 28 core dies for a total of 56 cores and 112 threads. It has a base frequency of 2.6GHz, a 3.8GHz turbo, 77MB of level 3 cache, 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0 expansion, and a 400W power draw.
The new dual-die chips are dubbed "Advanced Performance" (AP) and slot in above the Xeon SP ("Scalable Processor") range. They'll be supported in two socket configurations for a total of 4 dies, 24 memory channels, and 112 cores/224 threads. Intel does not plan to sell these as bare chips; instead, the company is going to sell motherboard-plus-processor packages to OEMs. The OEMs are then responsible for adding liquid or air cooling, deciding how densely they want to pack the motherboards, and so on. As such, there's no price for these chips, though we imagine it'll be somewhere north of "expensive."
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Once upon a time, Android apps ran on phones, and GNU/Linux apps ran on PCs. Things are a lot blurrier these days, thanks things like Chromebooks, which can run Android, Chrome OS, and Linux apps on a single device. If you want to run Android apps on y…
Once upon a time, Android apps ran on phones, and GNU/Linux apps ran on PCs. Things are a lot blurrier these days, thanks things like Chromebooks, which can run Android, Chrome OS, and Linux apps on a single device. If you want to run Android apps on your non-Chromebook laptop, there have been ways to […]
The post SPURV allows Android apps to run on desktop Linux operating systems appeared first on Liliputing.
It’s a small iPad Air on the outside and an upgraded iPad mini 4 on the inside.
Opening up the new iPad mini. [credit: iFixit ]
iFixit has published its teardown of the new, fifth-generation iPad mini—the first update to Apple's smaller-sized tablet since 2015. The iFixit team—which sells gear for repairing and servicing gadgets and uses these teardown series to promote said gear—noted that the iPad mini looks on the outside like a smaller version of the new iPad Air. But on the inside, it's an updated iPad mini 4, the team wrote.
On opening the tablet up, iFixit discovered a 19.32Wh battery—the same capacity as the previous-generation iPad mini. But there are some notable changes. The front-facing camera module has been updated to a 7-megapixel ƒ/2.2, like the 10.5-inch iPad Pro. That's a marked improvement over the iPad mini 4. There's also Apple's A12 Bionic system-on-a-chip (the same found in the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR) with 3GB of LPDDR4X DRAM.
The updated microphone array has been moved near the selfie cam, and new ambient light sensors support the True Tone feature, which adjusts the white balance of the display based on ambient light conditions for user comfort.
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A few years ago Microsoft built support for reading eBooks into its Edge web browser, and began selling eBooks through the Microsoft Store. Today the company stopped selling eBooks. It’s canceled pre-orders. And it’ll start issuing refunds …
A few years ago Microsoft built support for reading eBooks into its Edge web browser, and began selling eBooks through the Microsoft Store. Today the company stopped selling eBooks. It’s canceled pre-orders. And it’ll start issuing refunds for any books you might have purchased. While that last bit sounds downright consumer-friendly, this next bit doesn’t: any […]
The post Periodic reminder that you DRM means you don’t really own eBooks, movies, or other content (Microsoft’s eBook store is shutting down) appeared first on Liliputing.
When Huawei unveiled the P30 Pro smartphone last week, the company spent a lot of time talking about its triple-camera system which supports long-exposure shots without a tripod, 5X optical zoom, 10X hybird zoom, and up to 50X digital zoom, and the abi…
When Huawei unveiled the P30 Pro smartphone last week, the company spent a lot of time talking about its triple-camera system which supports long-exposure shots without a tripod, 5X optical zoom, 10X hybird zoom, and up to 50X digital zoom, and the ability to capture bright photos in the dark without turning on the LED […]
The post Lilbits 356: Huawei’s new smartphone camera can practically see in the dark appeared first on Liliputing.
UK-based anti-piracy company MUSO is suggesting it may be time for gaming companies to stop using anti-consumer DRM like Denuvo and consider deploying takedown technologies instead. However, there’s another system on the horizon that has the potential to be more effective than both.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
According to a December 2018 report, the video games industry was set to generate around $135 billion last year.
It’s undoubtedly a huge market, and a growing one too. The 2018 forecasts outperform 2017’s figures by almost 11%.
Of the three major sectors – mobile, PC, and console – the latter enjoyed the largest growth, with revenues increasing around 15% on the previous year. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the latter is the least affected by piracy, with most major consoles relatively secure against pirate players.
The same cannot be said about PC titles, however. This sector accounts for 25% of the global market, according to market analysts Newzoo, but still managed growth in 2018, increasing revenues by 3.2% to $33.4 billion. Nevertheless, PC games piracy is widespread, largely due to the relatively open nature of its native platform.
To combat this issue, games companies often deploy (to a greater or lesser extent) some kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution. These software-based systems are designed to defeat attempts to ‘crack’ gaming titles, but evidence shows that effectiveness can vary greatly.
One of the most formidable and notorious systems is Denuvo. Countless articles have been written about the DRM solution, with many arguing it harms the gaming experience and only has a negative effect on genuine buyers.
Many publishers, however, see it as the last line of defense against pirates determined to download free games whenever they can. The big question, of course, is whether it achieves that goal
While Denuvo is undoubtedly fiendish and impossible for Joe Public to defeat, dedicated cracking teams see it as a mountain to be climbed and time and again they’ve shown that it can be scaled – quickly too. On the other hand, Denuvo claims that AAA games not using its technology face huge losses.
Interestingly, anti-piracy company MUSO published a piece today that suggests that there may be a more consumer-friendly alternative to DRM.
Titled “DRM, The Cracks Are Starting to Show” and written by Adam Hitchen, Technical Services Executive at MUSO, the piece questions whether DRM is the right approach to PC game piracy, especially given both the apparent ease it’s now being cracked and the restrictions it places on genuine players – such as having to remain online for a game to play.
Highlighting the leak of what would’ve been a Denuvo-protected Devil May Cry 5 recently, which fell to pirates on the very first day of its release (while revealing a performance advantage without the protection), Hitchen asks:
“With this precedent set, combined with the frustration it induces in players, is DRM really worth it?
“Games studios and distributors need to protect their content online, and take a stand against piracy, but the chosen strategy should not undermine the core product or hijack the conversation around a release,” Hitchen adds.
“Gaming creates huge and passionate fan bases which need to be nurtured; fans should not be left feeling as though their gameplay is being hindered.”
Given that Denuvo is arguably the most successful DRM around today, the fact that it’s regularly being cracked close to ‘Day One’ for major AAA gaming titles must be a concern for those who believe that DRM is the only way to protect their investment. MUSO, however, believes there is another way.
“With immediate availability of cracks to work-around DRM, and hackers choosing to proactively target releases using DRM, it’s time to change the conversation,” the company says.
“Content protection strategies should be non-invasive and data-driven. Rather than embedding mechanisms within the games themselves, studios can effectively remove illegal content as it appears by crawling for copies.
“Taking this approach keeps fans onboard, doesn’t impact gameplay and still ensures that piracy is stamped out – the things that really matter,”
Hitchen concludes.
There’s no doubt that this is a highly controversial topic that has no simple solutions or indeed any perfect ones. One way or another it appears that PC content is going to be pirated. But MUSO’s piece definitely raises some good points.
If DRM, like Denuvo, is going to regularly fall very close to a game’s release date moving forward, it becomes somewhat useless. While some titles will remain protected, it currently seems like the cracking groups are the ones with the power
They increasingly appear to be the arbiters of whether time gets put into cracking games – or not. This is not the balance of power games publishers relish when investing millions into their new creation.
However, will they be prepared to take MUSO’s advice by releasing DRM-free content into the market to keep paying customers happy, in the hope of rendering pirate copies inaccessible with takedowns?
MUSO clearly hopes so – but then it would because this is one of the company’s areas of expertise. The company is right that this problem for the gaming industry perhaps needs a fresh set of eyes but in the meantime, many eyes will be turning to Google’s Stadia.
This cloud-based gaming system seems to have the potential – one day in the distant future – to deal with the piracy problem once and for all. Until then it’s takedowns or DRM or both – and pirates don’t like either of them.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
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