On Monday, automotive parts supplier Bosch announced that it would be partnering with a company called PowerCell to manufacture fuel cells for commercial and passenger vehicles.
Currently, there's not a huge market for hydrogen fuel cells, but a number of automotive leaders believe that hydrogen, which can be transformed into electrical energy through fuel cell stacks, will play a significant role in the transportation of the future if we want to curb carbon emissions in the face of climate change.
PowerCell, a Sweden-based company spun-off from Volvo in 2008, has been building hydrogen fuel cell stacks for a decade. Bosch has also worked to supply makers of fuel cell stacks. Together, the companies will jointly develop a polymer-electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell stack for mass-production by 2022. (Currently, PowerCell manually produces its fuel cells, and it hopes to move to semi-automatic manufacturing as a result of its partnership with Bosch.)
The Office of the United States Trade Representative has published its yearly Special 301 Report, highlighting countries that fail to live up to US copyright protection standards. The administration signals piracy related issues around the world, listing 36 countries in total. Canada has been downgraded from the Priority Watch List to the regular Watch List after signing a new trade agreement.
Every year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes its Special 301 Report highlighting countries that aren’t doing enough to protect US intellectual property rights.
The format remains the same as in previous years and lists three dozen countries that, for different reasons, threaten the intellectual property rights of US companies.
“The identification of the countries and IP-related market access barriers in the Report and of steps necessary to address those barriers are a critical component of the Administration’s aggressive efforts to defend Americans from harmful IP-related trade barriers,” USTR writes.
The topics reported in the yearly overview are much broader than online piracy. They also cover counterfeiting and other IP related issues, including patents and protection of trade secrets. Our coverage is limited to piracy, however, which remains one of the key issues.
The USTR highlights stream-ripping as a significant problem, as well as pirate IPTV services and “illicit streaming devices” in general. The latter are sold throughout the world but are often manufactured in China, which is listed on the USTR’s Priority Watch List.
“Stakeholders continue to report rampant piracy through ISDs, including in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, the Dominican Republic, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, the UAE, and Vietnam. China, in particular, is a manufacturing hub for these devices,” the USTR writes.
Camcording piracy, where people record films at movie theaters, remains a significant problem as well. Russia, India, Mexico, and China are called out as frequent sources, but the problem applies to other countries as well.
The USTR notes that countries including Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Taiwan do not effectively criminalize unauthorized camcording, and hopes that this will soon change.
“The United States urges countries to adopt laws and enforcement practices designed to prevent unauthorized camcording, such as laws that have been adopted in Canada, Japan, and the Philippines,” the USTR writes.
Most of these observations and comments are not new. They are made year after year in some cases. Apparently, it’s a strategy that has some effect. For example, India recently updated is camcording legislation to allow a three-year prison sentence for those who get caught.
The full list of countries which lack proper IP protection totals 36. Eleven are listed on the most severe Priority Watch List with the rest placed on the regular Watch List.
The 301 watch lists
Canada has been downgraded from the Priority to the regular Watch List this year. The most important step forward taken by Canada, according to the US, is signing the provisions in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which will extend the local copyright term to 70-years + life.
However, problems remain as well. Among other things, the US sees Canada’s copyright exception for educational purposes as a grave concern.
“The United States remains deeply troubled by the ambiguous education-related exception added to the copyright law in 2012, which has significantly damaged the market for educational publishers and authors,” the office writes.
Switzerland also remains on the Watch List. While the country generally has strong intellectual property protection, the U.S. remains concerned about its online copyright protection and enforcement, as we’ve highlighted previously. This appears to be the only remaining barrier at this point.
If countries fail to address the issues the USTR has highlighted, the U.S. says it will take appropriate actions in response. No concrete measures are mentioned, but they can include enforcement actions under Section 301 of the Trade Act or pursuant to World Trade Organization rules, for example.
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A copy of USTR’s full 2019 Special 301 Report is available here (pdf).
Transphobia, homophobia, and racism aren’t Microsoft’s core values.
Every Minecraft player's worst nightmare. (credit: Kyle Orland)
Blocky sandbox game Minecraft is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and Microsoft is planning to celebrate with a press event at the Mojang studio in Stockholm on May 17. But according to Variety, one notable person won't be there: Markus "Notch" Persson, who sold the game he created and the company he built to Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5 billion.
This is no accident. A Microsoft spokesperson told Variety that the reason for his exclusion is the "comments and opinions" Persson has expressed on Twitter, saying that they "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang, and are not representative of Minecraft."
Back in March, a number of references to Persson were removed from the game. Microsoft made no statement at the time, but it's believed to be for the same reason.
A New York judge has ordered Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange that shares a parent company with the "stablecoin" Tether, to turn over a bunch of documents to New York Attorney General Letitia James. James announced the order in a Thursday press release. She also unsealed her office's legalfilings requesting the order.
Those documents suggest that Bitfinex could be in serious financial trouble. The company has been unable to recover $851 million in cash it had entrusted to a little-known Panamanian payment processor called Crypto Capital. James' office writes that information uncovered during the investigation "raised serious questions about the viability of Bitfinex as an ongoing concern."
In a statement, Tether said that the filings from New York's attorney general were "written in bad faith and are riddled with false assertions." According to Tether, the missing $851 million "are not lost but have been, in fact, seized and safeguarded." The company added that "both Bitfinex and Tether are financially strong."
Eine Milliarden US-Dollar mehr hatte man an der Börse von Google erwartet. Der Konzern enttäuscht die Analysten fast nie beim Quartalsbericht. (Google, Börse)
Eine Milliarden US-Dollar mehr hatte man an der Börse von Google erwartet. Der Konzern enttäuscht die Analysten fast nie beim Quartalsbericht. (Google, Börse)
But getting them on your iDevice requires a bit of extra work.
Doom 3 running on iOS via Tom Kidd's recent port.
A lone coder has ported many of id Software's classic shooters to Apple's iOS and tvOS, though you'll have to do a bit of work to get them working on your iDevices.
The porting story goes back to 2009, when id Software brought official versions of Wolfenstein 3D and the original Doom to the iOS App Store. Updates for those ports stopped in 2014, though, and that became a problem in 2017, when iOS 10.3 officially stopped supporting "legacy" apps developed with a deprecated 32-bit codebase.
That sunsetting inspired mobile developer Tom Kidd, who noted that both Wolfenstein 3D and Doom had long been available as open source apps on id Software's GitHub page, complete with the iOS versions of their respective engines. "I went and did the work to update them and get them working in the latest versions of iOS," Kidd wrote last year. "This wound up being both harder and easier than I expected."
Retro game consoles are all the rage these days, with Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and SNK all getting on the action by offering modern replicas of their classic game systems. But there are also some interesting things happening in the third-party space. For …
Retro game consoles are all the rage these days, with Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and SNK all getting on the action by offering modern replicas of their classic game systems. But there are also some interesting things happening in the third-party space. For example, the upcoming Retro Champ is a handheld that plays actual NES cartridges. […]
SpaceX has received Federal Communications Commission approval to halve the orbital altitude of more than 1,500 planned broadband satellites in order to lower the risk of space debris and improve latency.
SpaceX's satellite project, named Starlink, aims to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband around the world. In a statement on the new FCC approval, SpaceX said that "Starlink production is well underway, and the first group of satellites have already arrived at the launch site for processing."
SpaceX last year received FCC approval to launch 4,425 low-Earth-orbit satellites at several different altitudes between 1,110km to 1,325km. However, the FCC approval was contingent on SpaceX filing a more detailed debris mitigation plan.
“Photographing, or sharing images, from operations is grounds for termination.”
Enlarge/ In 2011, media representatives vie for the best positions for their camera tripods at Press Site 1 near Space Launch Complex 17B on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. (credit: NASA)
NASA appears to be clamping down on the public sharing of images and videos taken by its employees at Kennedy Space Center, a location known for its wealth of opportunities to photograph spacecraft under construction, as well as rocket tests and launches.
On Monday, a software engineer and amateur photographer at Kennedy Space Center named K. Scott Piel expressed his frustration with the new policy on Twitter, saying: "From this point forward, employees are no longer permitted to photograph or share images from *any* operations at KSC without authorization. Regardless of source. Photographing, or sharing images, from operations is grounds for termination. *Only* authorized media may do so."
Whether these restrictions represent a new policy or the enforcement of an existing regulation is not clear. A woman who answered the media hotline at KSC asked for a screenshot of the tweet and seemed to be familiar with the issue, but she would not offer any substantive comment on the matter. She also said she was not sure whether the center's press office would be commenting at all.
Russian scientist admits it probably escaped from Russian Navy research effort.
A beluga whale discovered off Norway's coast, wearing a harness that had an adapter for a GoPro camera, according to authorities. [credit:
Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries ]
Evidence suggests that the Russian Navy has been looking for new ways to leverage what amounts to the original underwater "drone"—militarized cetaceans. Norwegian fishermen discovered a friendly beluga whale in the Barents Sea off the northeast coast of Norway on April 25. Belugas are native to the Barents, so the whale's presence wasn't the surprise—the surprise was that it was fitted with a camera harness with Russian markings.
The beluga kept approaching fishing boats and rubbing against them in an apparent effort to remove the harness. After failed attempts to remove the harness themselves, fishermen sent photos to a marine biologist with Norway's Directorate of Fisheries, and they reported that the whale was in distress. A Fisheries boat was in the area and responded, as reported by a Directorate of Fisheries spokesperson on Facebook:
The Directorate of Fisheries' oversight boat Rind was in the area and was asked to assist to release the whale for the tight straps. The crew of the Marine Service are trained to free whales from ropes and fishing gear. After a little lure with cod fillets, and with the fisherman Joar Hesten getting into the water wearing a survival suit, the inspectors Jørgen Ree Wiig and Yngve Larsen from the Marine Service and the Horse managed to release the whale…
The whale has probably escaped from Russia where it may have been trained to perform different missions such as underwater photography.
Video from Norwegian television of an attempt to remove the harness on a beluga.
The harness was reportedly marked with the label "Equipment St. Petersburg" and had an attachment point for a GoPro camera. Audun Rikardsen, a professor at the Norwegian Arctic University in Tromsø (UiT), told Norway's VG that neither Norwegian nor Russian academic researchers put harnesses on whales. "I have been in contact with some Russian researchers," Rikardsen said. "They can confirm that it is nothing they are doing. They tell me that most likely is the Russian Navy in Murmansk."
Every year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes its Special 301 Report highlighting countries that aren’t doing enough to protect US intellectual property rights.
Eine Milliarden US-Dollar mehr hatte man an der Börse von Google erwartet. Der Konzern enttäuscht die Analysten fast nie beim Quartalsbericht. (
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