Month: December 2023

Smartphone manufacturers still want to make foldables a thing

Foldables are barely 1% of the market, but that’s not stopping anyone but Apple.

Huawei MateX 5

Enlarge / A Huawei Technologies Co. Mate X5 smartphone arranged in Hong Kong, China, on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty)

Every large smartphone maker except Apple is betting that “foldable” phones will help revive a lackluster mobile market, despite the devices still largely failing to attract mainstream consumers.

Foldables, which have a screen that opens like a book or compact mirror, barely exceed a 1 per cent market share of all smartphones sold globally almost five years after they were first introduced.

But Samsung has doubled down on the product, investing heavily in marketing this year. In July, the Korean group released its 5G Galaxy Z series.

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Aaarr matey! Life on a 17th century pirate ship was less chaotic than you think

Ars chats with historian Rebecca Simon about her most recent book, The Pirates’ Code.

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There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Pirates! Specifically, an interview with historian Rebecca Simon on the real-life buccaneer bylaws that shaped every aspect of a pirate's life.

One of the many amusing scenes in the 2003 film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl depicts Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) invoking the concept of "parley" in the pirate code to negotiate a cease of hostilities with pirate captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush). "The code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules," he informs her. Rebecca Simon, a historian at Santa Monica College, delves into the real, historical set of rules and bylaws that shaped every aspect of a pirate's life with her latest book. The Pirates' Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship.

Simon is the author of such books as Why We Love Pirates: The Hunt for Captain Kidd and How He Changed Piracy Forever and Pirate Queens: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Her PhD thesis research focused on pirate trails and punishment. She had been reading a book about Captain Kidd and the war against the pirates, and was curious as to why he had been executed in an East London neighborhood called Wapping, at Execution Dock on the Thames. People were usually hung at Tyburn in modern day West London at Marble Arch. "Why was Captain Kidd taken to a different place? What was special about that?" Simon told Ars. "Nothing had been written much about it at all, especially in connection to piracy. So I began researching how pirate trials and executions were done in London. I consider myself to be a legal historian of crime and punishment through the lens of piracy."

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DNS Block: Canal+ Sues Cloudflare, Google & Cisco to Fight Piracy

When broadcaster Canal+ obtained injunctions to block popular sports streaming sites including Footybite and Streamcheck, French ISPs were required to implement DNS blocking. In response, some users switched to third-party DNS providers, a hole that Canal+ now wants to plug. Through a lawsuit filed at a Paris court, the broadcaster hopes to compel Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco to implement similar DNS blocking measures.

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

The music industry obtained a pioneering injunction to compel Danish ISPs to implement site-blocking measures back in 2006.

The goal was to limit access to unlicensed Russian music download platform AllofMP3, but the action also represented the thin end of a site-blocking wedge still being tapped in today.

Broadcaster and site-blocking proponent Canal+ believes that when service providers implement technical measures to prevent access to pirate sites, that helps to reduce piracy rates. Unfortunately, online roadblocks reliant on technical tweaks always run up against other technical tweaks designed to circumvent them.

Protecting Live Sports

A report from the French news outlet l’Informé outlines a fairly typical framework adopted by rightsholders in Europe. To limit access to pirated live sports streams, this year Canal+ went to court in France arguing that local ISPs should prevent customers from accessing several pirate streaming sites.

Through Footybite.co, Streamcheck.link, SportBay.sx, TVFutbol.info, and Catchystream.com, internet users were able to watch Premier League and Champions League football, plus matches from the Top 14 rugby union club competition, without paying Canal+, the local rightsholder.

After the decisions went in favor of Canal+, ISPs including Orange, SFR, OutreMer Télécom, Free, and Bouygues Télécom, were required to implement blocking measures. This meant that when the ISPs’ customers attempted to visit any of the above domains, the ISPs’ respective DNS resolvers provided non-authentic responses, thereby denying customers access to the sites.

Circumvention and New Legal Action

The response to ISP blocking by increasingly savvy customers was to change their network settings to replace their ISPs’ DNS servers with those offered by unaffected third-party providers. By switching to DNS servers offered by Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco (OpenDNS), the domains functioned as expected. This entirely predictable response is now being countered by another.

After tapping in the wedge just far enough to obtain the initial blocking orders, Canal+ has now returned to court hoping to resolve the blocking orders’ shortcomings. After failing to achieve voluntary cooperation, l’Informé reports (paywall) that Canal+ is now suing Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco at the Paris judicial court, to compel similar DNS blocking measures.

Legal Basis: Article L333-10

According to Article L333-10 of the French Sports Code (active Jan 2022), when there are “serious and repeated violations” by an “online public communication service” whose main objective is the unauthorized broadcasting of sporting competitions, rightsholders can go to court to demand “all proportionate measures likely to prevent or put an end to this infringement, against any person likely to contribute to remedying it.”

Proportionate measures include blocking, deleting or deindexing communication services (in this case pirate streaming sites) when they meet the above criteria.

The judicial court may order these measures to be implemented “for each of the days appearing in the official calendar of the competition or sporting event, within the limit of a period of twelve months.” In respect of the competitions Canal+ hopes to protect, that means until May 19, 2024, for the Premier League, until June 1, 2024, for the Champions League, and until June 29, 2024, for Top 14.

How Serious is the Circumvention Situation?

According to detailed reports published by telecoms regulator Arcom, ISP-only DNS blocking measures have enjoyed massive success in France.

Published in May 2023, Arcom’s report for 2022 noted that the overall audience for illicit sports broadcasts decreased by 41% between 2021 and 2022, down from 2.8 million internet users on average to 1.6 million.

Arcom-streams-2022

On circumvention of blocking measures, in May 2023 Arcom reported that when confronted with a blocked site, almost half of all infringing Internet users (46%) completely abandoned the idea of watching the content.

Of all infringing users, just 6% attempted to circumvent blocking measures using an alternative DNS, VPN or similar method.

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While circumvention of blocking measures doesn’t seem to be an especially big problem in France right now, Arcom notes that it will remain vigilant moving forward.

For the sake of curiosity, we searched for signs of blocking in France using data supplied by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI). The system appears to detect pirate site blocking in France as an ‘anomaly’ (yellow) rather than confirmed, outright blocking (red).

France blocking-circ

The green sections may indicate that a relatively small number of users are managing to access domains well-known for their links to piracy. Whether that volume warrants dragging third-party DNS providers to court is another matter.

However, it can’t be ruled out that there’s also a strategic element to the Canal+ complaint; another tap of the wedge, more incremental progress, and then ever-expanding DNS blocking in preparation for whatever comes next.

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

Sicherheitslücke bei Kuno: Gesperrte Bankkarten ließen sich einfach entsperren

Neben der Kartensperrung über die Bank gibt es noch einen weiteren Weg, um unerwünschte Abbuchungen zu verhindern. Doch der Dienst Kuno ließ sich auf recht einfache Weise hacken. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (Security, Sicherheitslücke)

Neben der Kartensperrung über die Bank gibt es noch einen weiteren Weg, um unerwünschte Abbuchungen zu verhindern. Doch der Dienst Kuno ließ sich auf recht einfache Weise hacken. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (Security, Sicherheitslücke)

A cat video highlighted a big year for lasers in space

NASA has invested more than $700 million in testing laser communications in space.

Taters, the orange tabby cat of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee, stars in a video beamed from deep space by NASA's Psyche spacecraft. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche’s orbital path, Palomar’s telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater’s heart rate, color, and breed are also on display.

Enlarge / Taters, the orange tabby cat of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee, stars in a video beamed from deep space by NASA's Psyche spacecraft. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche’s orbital path, Palomar’s telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater’s heart rate, color, and breed are also on display. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

It's been quite a year for laser communications in space. In October and November, NASA launched two pioneering demonstrations to test high-bandwidth optical communication links, and these tech demos are now showing some initial results.

On December 11, a laser communications terminal aboard NASA's Psyche spacecraft on the way to an asteroid linked up with a receiver in Southern California. The near-infrared laser beam contained an encoded message in the form of a 15-second ultra-high-definition video showing a cat bouncing around a sofa, chasing the light of a store-bought laser toy.

Laser communications offer the benefit of transmitting data at a higher rate than achievable with conventional radio links. In fact, the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment on the Psyche spacecraft is testing technologies capable of sending data at rates 10 to 100 times greater than possible on prior missions.

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