Month: September 2020

Taking 5G to work, in offices, and on the factory floor—will it help?

Hazy predictions start to coalesce around some concrete realities.

Artist's impression of 5G.

Enlarge / Artist's impression of 5G. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

In our last 5G explainer, we talked about the potential impact of the 5G cellular protocol—and the various bands over which it operates—on gaming. Today, we're going to explore what the improved throughput and latency associated with 5G networks might mean for work rather than play.

For the most part, the improvements are iterative, not revolutionary—and they're the same ones we talked about in the gaming piece. Upgraded equipment in towers means lower network latency, and mmWave connections to outside devices mean less contention for sub-6GHz devices inside buildings.

This person is adding additional Gs to a transmission tower.

This person is adding additional Gs to a transmission tower. (credit: morfous / Getty)

Where mmWave connections to devices are possible—which for the most part, will mean "outdoors, in high population areas"—users can expect extremely high throughput and low latency. But mmWave has far lower range and penetration than the sub-6GHz connections we're familiar with, and we don't expect indoor users to be able to get a connection. You don't necessarily need a clean line of sight to a tower—the massive MIMO antenna arrays mmWave deployments use are highly directional and can make good use of RF reflections to get around obstacles—but punching through an exterior wall to an indoor space is almost certainly too much to expect.

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Verbraucherschützer: Teslas neue Assistenzsysteme noch zu unzuverlässig

In den USA gibt es Kritik an Teslas Werbeversprechen beim autonomen Fahren. Manche Funktionen seien “richtig gefährlich”, sagen Verbraucherschützer. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (Autonomes Fahren, Technologie)

In den USA gibt es Kritik an Teslas Werbeversprechen beim autonomen Fahren. Manche Funktionen seien "richtig gefährlich", sagen Verbraucherschützer. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (Autonomes Fahren, Technologie)

From Pong to Civilization: How I made “one more turn” work on consoles

A chapter reprint from Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games, now in stores.

Be still our hearts with this 8-bit cover art.

Enlarge / Be still our hearts with this 8-bit cover art.

Today, legendary game developer Sid Meier's first memoir arrives at bookstores and digital platforms, complete with the appropriately goofy name, Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games. It's everything you might expect from the brain responsible for PC gaming series like Civilization, Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and Alpha Centauri: comprehensive, thoughtful, detailed, and with just enough humor and heart to pace out the dry, technical bits.

In good news, instead of us telling you what we think of the book (TL;DR: thumbs-up), we thought we'd let Meier himself regale you with an exclusive Ars Technica reprint of a chapter. Most of the book's chapters combine Meier's personal stories with a focus on a specific game, and this one, about 2008's Civilization Revolution, is as much an explanation of its PC-to-console transition as it is a lesson on game-industry history and on game design.

My own first exposure to video games was, like most people my age, the venerable black-and-white tennis match known as Pong. There was a small restaurant down the street from General Instrument where some of us would hang out and have dinner after work, and at some point they installed this weird little table in the lounge with a television screen facing upward underneath the plexiglass surface. The idea was you could set your drinks and bar snacks on it while you played, but it seemed irreverent to eat on the surface of a TV, so most evenings we would just wander over to play a few rounds before returning to our normal, wooden tables. The most memorable thing about it was that one side of the cabinet had somehow ended up wired backwards, sending the little white line to the left side of the screen when the player turned the knob to the right. So we had always agreed that whoever was more skilled had to sit on the broken side to compensate—perhaps my earliest experience in balancing gameplay.

Rotating dial controls were sometimes called “spinners” in arcade hardware terminology, and truly inveterate nerds recognized them as either potentiometers or rheostats, depending on their function. But to the general public, they were incongruously known as “paddles,” due to their original table tennis associations. A year after Pong’s release, the first four-way gaming joystick—a word which, oddly enough, had its roots in early airplane controls—made its debut in the arcade game Astro Race. It caught on quickly, and by 1977, the Atari 2600 home console offered a standardized plug that could support a potentially limitless number of third-party controllers, in addition to the five different styles produced by Atari themselves.

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Stream-Rippers, IPTV and Cryptocurrency Flagged as Growing Piracy Threats

The latest IP Crime and Enforcement Report, published by the UK Government, signals a wide variety of ongoing and emerging piracy threats. Pirate IPTV services remain a growing problem that could become worse with the rollout of 5G, it reads. There are also concerns about the use of cryptocurrencies and the growth of stream-rippers.

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

crime and enforcement report 2020Last week the UK Government’s Intellectual Property Office published its annual IP Crime and Enforcement Report.

The report provides an overview of the latest anti-piracy achievements of copyright holders and also signals emerging threats.

Like every year, the general consensus is that piracy and counterfeiting remain a problem. However, specifics and priorities change over time. When the first report was published fifteen years ago P2P file-sharing was the top concern. Today, this is a relatively small part of the piracy landscape.

The 120-page report covers a wide range of “IP crimes” but we will zoom in on some of the top piracy threats and responses as reported by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), and PRS for Music.

The Growing IPTV Piracy Problem

To begin, FACT highlights that the number of IPTV piracy complaints increased sharply over the past few years. In 2014 there were just three complaints but by last year this number had grown to 682.

“Over the past 6 years, FACT has seen a steady year-on-year increase in public complaints regarding suppliers of illegal IPTV services,” the group notes, showing that its intel on these IPTV services has grown as well.

iptv intel fact

As a result of this development, FACT’s enforcement efforts are prioritized on IPTV piracy. This has resulted in various successes including “Operation Saturn” where several people associated with IPTV services stopped their activities after a visit from FACT investigators.

PIPCU, the dedicated IP-crime department of the City of London Police, also mentioned IPTV as a growing threat. According to the police, this problem may worsen when 5G is rolled out across the UK.

“IPTV services are likely to increase, a reason for this is that 5G is being rolled out across the country allowing broadband to increase in availability,” the police unit forecasts in the report.

Police Keep an eye on Cryptocurrencies

The use of cryptocurrencies by pirate sites and services is far from new. The Pirate Bay, for example, started accepting Bitcoin donations many years ago and various pirate services have a cryptocurrency payment option.

In the most recent IP Crime and Enforcement Report, cryptocurrencies receive several noteworthy mentions nonetheless. The report highlights these financial mechanisms as part of sophisticated business models that are used by copyright infringers.

According to PIPCU, the police are keeping a close eye on these crypto transactions, which they signal as a threat that will get worse over time.

“Payment using cryptocurrencies has now been a feature of PIPCU investigations. It is predicted that payment by cryptocurrency will be an increasing threat due to the level of anonymity cryptocurrency provides,” the report reads.

PRS also mentions cryptocurrencies as a problem. The music group notes that the majority of the stream-ripping sites, which include YouTube rippers, rely on advertising as the prime source of revenue but cryptocurrencies are up and coming.

“Donations by cryptocurrency have been observed for the first time as a revenue source for 3% of stream-ripping services,” PRS reports.

Stream-Ripping is the Music Industry’s Main Piracy Threat

These same stream-ripping sites remain the music industry’s top anti-piracy priority. They were identified as the top threat years ago but the problem has only increased. According to new data shared by PRS, stream-rippers account for more than 80% of all top music pirate sites. This is a significant increase compared to a few years ago.

This dominance is also reflected in the graph below, where other pirate sites follow at a distance. The website y2mate.com is seen as the largest threat of all with the most traffic, according to PRS.

stream rippers

Aside from dedicated sites, stream-ripping apps and browser add-ons are also viewed as a major threat. However, on this front, the enforcement efforts of PRS’s Rights Protection Unit have been rather effective.

“By using a range of methods, the RPU’s greatest successes have been in tackling stream-ripping plug-ins and stream-ripping download apps where a 100% success rate in both areas was achieved.

“Stream-ripping plug-ins were removed from the Google Chrome browser and stream-ripping download apps were removed or the ripping functionality was disabled from the apps available on the Apple App store,” the report adds.

All in all, the latest IP Crime and Enforcement Report doesn’t include many surprises. It is mostly a summary of past achievements paired with a broad overview of the current piracy landscape. However, it does clearly show where the current priorities lie, and how these have changed over time.

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