Month: August 2020

Ars readers on the present and future of work

“It will suck, until it suddenly stops sucking.”

Ars readers on the present and future of work

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about how best to manage the current state of work and what companies will need to do in the near and not-too-distant future to adjust to post-pandemic reality. As expected, our readers had some opinions on these topics, too—ranging from insightful to inciteful.

So, in the interest of better surfacing the wisdom of our particular crowd, I’ve curated some of the thoughts of the Ars community on the topics of working better from home and what our shared experiences have taught us about the future of collaboration technology and the future nature of the corporate office. As always, we hope you’ll share additional wisdom in the comments here, as they may guide some future coverage on issues related to the realities of future work.

Home office adjustments

It came as no surprise that many of our long-time readers have had relatively no difficulty adjusting to working from home over the past six months—some already did, while others already may have had more computing power in their home environment than some companies’ data centers can muster. And there was a fairly consistent theme of improved productivity. As veteran Arsian Zippy Peanut commented:

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Fitbit’s 3 new trackers want to destress you and eventually diagnose you

Fitbit aims to improve daily health and hopes to soon screen for COVID-19.

Lifestyle photo of Fitbit Sense.

Lifestyle photo of Fitbit Sense.

Fitbit has just launched three new fitness trackers: the Inspire 2, Versa 3, and the brand-new Fitbit Sense. While they focus on the requisite tracking metrics we’ve come to expect from Fitbit, the company is also hoping they’ll further impact users’ mindfulness of stress and, eventually, recognize warning signs for COVID-19, among other illnesses.

The Fitbit Sense retails for $330 and offers sensors for ECG (to be activated pending FDA clearance), skin temperature, and electrodermal activity (EDA) for quantifying stress levels. The Versa 3 comes in at $100 less for $230 and lacks those three sensors, while the Versa 2 still offers nearly the same features as its successor at a more amenable $180. Lastly, the Inspire 2—with its more simplistic, OLED touchscreen and better battery life—can be had for $100.

All three trackers come with complimentary memberships for new Fitbit Premium users, which lends insight into longer health trends and offers guided workouts and even one-on-one health coaching with tailored fitness regimens and consultations. The Sense and Versa 3 only get six free months, while Inspire 2 owners get even more bang for their buck with 12 months included. Fitbit users can also opt in to the company’s study, which tracks various biological metrics in an attempt to detect COVID-19 infection before the onset of more demonstrative symptoms.

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Amtsgericht München: 5.000 Euro für die Nutzung eines Films über eine Tauschbörse

Es habe sich um “einen selbständigen Datentransfer oder einen Hackerangriff gehandelt”, erklärte die Beschuldigte. Doch das genügte dem Amtsgericht München nicht. (Filesharing, P2P)

Es habe sich um "einen selbständigen Datentransfer oder einen Hackerangriff gehandelt", erklärte die Beschuldigte. Doch das genügte dem Amtsgericht München nicht. (Filesharing, P2P)

Bundestagsfraktionen klammern sich an Direktmandate

“Lokalkolorit” nannte Telepolis-Autor Peter Grassmann die Direktmandate – und forderte ihre Abschaffung. Abgeordnete halten wenig davon. Hier ihre Argumente

"Lokalkolorit" nannte Telepolis-Autor Peter Grassmann die Direktmandate - und forderte ihre Abschaffung. Abgeordnete halten wenig davon. Hier ihre Argumente

USTVNow No Longer “Recommends” Kodi, Sends Legal Threat to TVAddons

Streaming service USTVNow has caused confusion among some users by recommending the use of a third-party Kodi add-on for years and then suddenly changing direction. In fact, the TVAddons repo recently received an aggressive cease-and-desist notice from USTVNow, alleging trademark infringement and piracy, simply for promoting an add-on that’s still available on the official Kodi repo.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

USTVNow logoUSTVNow brands itself as a legal video streaming service providing TV for “US Military and US citizens abroad.”

The platform is also popular with viewers outside these groups, many of whom access the service using the convenience of third-party Kodi add-ons designed for the task.

However, in recent weeks there has been a considerable amount of confusion over the use of Kodi add-ons with the USTVNow service.

A dedicated USTVNow add-on has been promoted by or made available from at least two official/semi-official locations – the actual Kodi team repository (where it remains today) and a page on unofficial Kodi add-on resource TVAddons. That has now been removed for reasons we’ll explain shortly but first some background.

USTVNow Kodi Add-ons Have Been Flaky For a While

For many months, users of USTVNow who use a Kodi add-on to access the service have been complaining loudly via Twitter that compatibility is poor and errors are widespread.

Back in February, for example, a user based at an electronics store (Hydra Electronics) complained that after filing a complaint with USTVNow, the streaming service sent him back to the Kodi team to fix the problem, since they’re supplying the add-on.

Since then there have been many other complaints but on July 30, USTVNow responded, clearly recommending the add-on located at Kodi.tv but noting that it doesn’t provide any support for it, which is fair enough.

On August 4, however, everything changed, with USTVNow changing its position on Kodi altogether by not recommending the use of it at all.

What prompted this sudden turnaround isn’t clear but one obvious explanation could be that having Kodi add-ons maintained by a third-party is just too much trouble.

However, activity behind the scenes also indicated that when third-party groups offer and promote Kodi add-ons for USTVNow, that might also present legal problems – at least for them.

For many years, third-party Kodi add-on site TVAddons not only offered or linked to a free add-on for the USTVNow service (which required an official USTVNow account) but has continually encouraged users to become customers of USTVNow.

On August 12, however, USTVNow operator Dutch Phone Holdings Inc. sent TVAddons an aggressive email titled “USTVNOW Enforcement”.

USTVNow Accuses TVAddons of Trademark Infringement and Piracy

“It has come to our attention that you are promoting your services through your website using our trademark USTVNOW and our official logo,” the email begins.

“USTVnow doesn’t have or support any app. Our customer [sic] can watch live TV streams directly from our website. This fake app is misguiding our 1.6 million customers. You are also pirating our content from our website, ustvnow.com, and directing consumers to apps that appear to be DutchPhone’s USTVNOW apps.”

According to the email, TVAddons ‘use’ of USTVNow’s “trademark and content” is grounds for numerous legal claims including (but not limited to), trademark infringement, copyright infringement, unfair competition, and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

“DutchPhone takes this matter seriously and will take all measures necessary to enforce its intellectual property rights. We demand that you take down your page mentioned above and all other pages on your website talking about USTVnow within seven (7) days of this letter. Otherwise, DutchPhone will have no choice but to take further action,” the communications concludes.

A response to USTVNow, shared by TVAddons with TF, shows the Kodi add-on repository immediately complying with the request, within hours. Nevertheless, the site also had its say, including by pointing out that for “several years”, USTVNow’s official documentation actually linked to TVAddons and promoted the add-on for its customers to use.

“We also sent you thousands of paying subscribers, for which we never asked for nor received a dollar,” the response reads.

“That being said, we will stop promoting you immediately, and instead send our users to your competitors. You could have asked us nicely, instead of sending us a threatening legal letter.”

Only making matters worse, instead of contacting TVAddons directly, USTVNow sent its legal threats to Cloudflare, which also forwarded the complaint to TVAddons’ hosting provider.

That doesn’t appear to have had an immediate negative effect on its relationships with those companies but certainly won’t have helped TVAddons remain visibly squeaky clean in light of its historical legal problems with rightsholders.

Same USTVNow Add-On Still Available on the Official Kodi Site

In the early days, TVAddons promoted a USTVNow Kodi add-on created by a developer known as Mhancor7 but according to the third-party platform, that was discontinued long ago and hasn’t been distributed for years.

Instead, the site has been promoting the same add-on as recommended via the official Kodi team at Kodi.tv. Curiously, that add-on can still be found here.

Whether the developers of Kodi will also stand accused of trademark infringement and piracy in due course remains to be seen but it’s clear that without a semi-official option to watch USTVNow via Kodi, that platform’s users will be left worse off for choice, or may even choose to migrate elsewhere, perhaps even to illegal options.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

A Chrome feature is creating enormous load on global root DNS servers

Google is doing to DNS what D-Link once did to NTP.

The Chromium browser—open source, upstream parent to both Google Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge—is getting some serious negative attention for a well-intentioned feature that checks to see if a user's ISP is "hijacking" non-existent domain results.

The Intranet Redirect Detector, which makes spurious queries for random "domains" statistically unlikely to exist, is responsible for roughly half of the total traffic the world's root DNS servers receive. Verisign engineer Matt Thomas wrote a lengthy APNIC blog post outlining the problem and defining its scope.

How DNS resolution normally works

These systems are the final authority for resolving any .com or .net domains.

These systems are the final authority for resolving any .com or .net domains. (credit: Jim Salter)

DNS, or the Domain Name System, is how computers translate relatively memorable domain names like arstechnica.com into far less memorable IP addresses, like 3.128.236.93. Without DNS, the Internet couldn't exist in a human-usable form—which means unnecessary load on its top-level infrastructure is a real problem.

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