Month: June 2024

Company heads hoped return-to-office mandates would make people quit, survey says

1,504 workers, including 504 HR managers questioned.

Man and woman talking at an office water cooler

Enlarge / RTO mandates can boost workers' professional networks, but in-office employees may also spend more time socializing than remote ones. (credit: Getty)

A new survey suggests that some US companies implemented return-to-office (RTO) policies in the hopes of getting workers to quit. And despite the belief that such policies could boost productivity compared to letting employees work from home, the survey from HR software provider BambooHR points to remote and in-office employees spending an equal amount of time working.

BambooHR surveyed 1,504 full-time US employees, including 504 human resources (HR) workers who are a manager or higher, from March 9 to March 22. According to the firm, the sample group used for its report "The New Surveillance Era: Visibility Beats Productivity for RTO & Remote" is equally split across genders and includes "a spread of age groups, race groups, and geographies." Method Research, the research arm of technology PR and marketing firm Method, prepared the survey, and data collection firm Rep Data distributed it.

Trying to make people quit

Among those surveyed, 52 percent said they prefer working remotely compared to 39 percent who prefer working in an office.

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Redfox Disappearance Puts a Spotlight on Defiant StreamFab

RedFox, the outfit behind popular ripping software AnyStream and AnyDVD, seems to have disappeared. The domain name is inaccessible after A records were removed, and its mail server is unreachable too. Despite days of downtime, there is no sign of enforcement action and no word from the developers either. Meanwhile, its competitor, StreamFab, is picking up new users.

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

redfoxMore than a decade ago, decryption licensing outfit AACS began to crack down on DVD and Blu-Ray ripping software.

Founded by Disney, Warner Bros, Intel, and Microsoft, among others, the licensing outfit put legal pressure on the makers of AnyDVD and DVDFab, which were the key players at the time.

AACS eventually booked a legal victory against DVDFab in a US court, but that did little to stop the operation. Pressure on AnyDVD’s parent company Slysoft, meanwhile, did yield results as the software was taken down. That was only temporary, however, as some of AnyDVD developers restarted the business under a new name, RedFox.

For the next eight years, the DVDFab and AnyDVD products managed to survive. With online streaming taking over, both outfits also launched new software to rip streaming content, in addition to old-fashioned discs.

RedFox, for example, offered the AnyStream tool, which proved to be quite popular. Streaming platforms, including Netflix, worked hard to make these tools unusable, resulting in a seemingly endless cat-and-mouse decryption game.

RedFox Disappears

Without prior warning, the RedFox website suddenly ‘disappeared’ late last week. There is no sign that the software outfit ran into legal trouble, but some of its products have been rendered useless. This isn’t the first time that RedFox has suffered downtime, but after more than five days, many users fear the worst.

Over the past few days, we have tried to find out what’s going on, but unfortunately, the RedFox team remains quiet. An email sent to our contact there never arrived, as the mail server is unreachable as well.

There is no shortage of speculation online to explain the downtime. While we prefer not to entertain these theories, there are a few things worth highlighting.

First, there is no evidence that the RedFox site was pulled offline by an external force. The site isn’t working because the domain name’s A records were removed on June 6, and the same is true for the MX records.

As a result, browsers and email clients don’t know where to send requests.

redfox dns

It’s not clear who removed these records, but external interventions by domain registries and registrars are generally marked with ICANN codes, and we don’t see any here. Since this is a domain name configuration issue, there is no sign that there’s a hosting problem either.

Without any signs of external interventions, there is not much to report on. For now, everyone except the RedFox team is in the dark, and time will tell whether the site will resurface or not.

StreamFab Gains Users (and pressure)

The RedFox trouble hasn’t gone unnoticed at the DVDFab/StreamFab team. Looking for an alternative stream ripping tool, AnyStream users are checking out the competition now, similar to what happened when Slyfoft shut down AnyDVD many years ago.

This puts a new spotlight on DVDFab, which it probably doesn’t mind. The company has been around for more than 20 years now and seems unfazed by any legal pressure.

After ignoring the initial court order in favor of AACS issued a decade ago, DVDFab continued to exist. The same can be said for the legal troubles.

While StreamFab doesn’t appear to circumvent AACS’s Blu-Ray decryption, DVDFab and related tools do. In recent years, the legal battle continued at a federal court in New York, resulting in a massive damages verdict and a broad injunction a few months ago.

Last summer, U.S. District Court Judge Vernon Broderick ruled in favor of AACS, ordering DVDFab and its presumed operator Lanny Chen to pay nearly $15 million in damages.

dvdfab judgement

In addition, the court ordered the operation to shut down. This injunction also required banks, domain registrars, and other intermediaries to cease working with the software company.

StreamFab wasn’t specifically covered by the injunction but, since it’s linked to the same operators, it’s not immune to the broad injunction, which expands to hosting providers and payment services too.

As a result of the injunction, DVDFab lost some of its domain names, including dvdfab.com which was put on ‘serverHold’ by the domain registry. However, other domains survived and the software company continues to operate to this day. That includes StreamFab.

This lawsuit and the resulting injunction have nothing to do with RedFox’s recent troubles. There is no AACS lawsuit against RedFox that we know of. If anything, however, it indicates that it’s not easy to shut down a software company that’s determined to stay online.

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

Microsoft Gaming CEO: “I think we should have a handheld, too”

More than just streaming, playing games locally “is really important” to Spencer.

The "Xbox Series V" was a social media hoax, but the idea of a portable Xbox seems to still have legs inside Microsoft.

Enlarge / The "Xbox Series V" was a social media hoax, but the idea of a portable Xbox seems to still have legs inside Microsoft. (credit: Reddit)

The extremely long-standing rumors regarding Microsoft making a portable game console got a strong shot in the arm over the weekend from none other than Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer. Speaking on stage as part of an IGN Live interview, Spencer said directly that "I think we should have a handheld, too."

The comment stops just short of an official announcement that Microsoft is actively working on portable gaming hardware for the first time. But if anyone is in a position to make an "I think we should..." into an operational reality, it's Spencer.

"The future for us in hardware is pretty awesome," Spencer continued during the IGN presentation. "And the work that the team is doing around different form factors, different ways to play, I'm incredibly excited about it."

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Microsoft pulls release preview build of Windows 11 24H2 after Recall controversy

Release Preview version of 24H2 was the only one where Recall could be enabled.

The Recall feature provides a timeline of screenshots and a searchable database of text, thoroughly tracking everything about a person's PC usage.

Enlarge / The Recall feature provides a timeline of screenshots and a searchable database of text, thoroughly tracking everything about a person's PC usage. (credit: Microsoft)

On Friday, Microsoft announced major changes to its upcoming Recall feature after overwhelming criticism from security researchers, the press, and its users. Microsoft is turning Recall off by default when users set up PCs that are compatible with the feature, and it's adding additional authentication and encryption that will make it harder to access another user's Recall data on the same PC.

It's likely not a coincidence that Microsoft also quietly pulled the build of the Windows 11 24H2 update that it had been testing in its Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. It's not unheard of for Microsoft to stop distributing a beta build of Windows after releasing it, but the Release Preview channel is typically the last stop for a Windows update before wider release.

Microsoft hasn't provided a specific rationale for pulling the update; the blog post says the pause is "temporary" and the rollout will be resumed "in the coming weeks." Windows Insider Senior Program Manager Brandon LeBlanc posted on social media that the team was "working to get it rolling out again shortly."

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Virgin Galactic has ceased flying its only space plane. Now what?

This is a bold bet on the future, but it’s by no means a certain one.

Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spacecraft launches on Saturday.

Enlarge / Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spacecraft launches on Saturday. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

On Saturday, the VSS Unity space plane made its final flight, carrying four passengers to an altitude of 54.4 miles (87.5 km) above the New Mexico desert. The spacecraft will now be retired after just seven commercial space flights, all made within the last year.

Although the flight was characterized by its chief executive Michael Colglazier as a "celebratory moment" for Virgin Galactic, the company now finds itself at a crossroads.

After an impressive but brief flurry of spaceflight activity—seven human spaceflights in a year, even to suborbital space, is unprecedented for a private company—Virgin Galactic will now be grounded again for at least two years. That's because Colglazier and Virgin Galactic are betting it all on the development of a future "Delta class" of spaceships modeled on VSS Unity.

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Pironman 5 Review: This case turns the Raspberry Pi into a mini-tower PC with enhanced cooling, RGB lighting, and NVMe support

The Raspberry Pi 5 is a single-board computer with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 processor, up to 8GB of RAM, and a PCIe interface that makes it possible to add SSDs, hard drives, AI accelerators, wireless adapter, or other peripherals. In other words, i…

The Raspberry Pi 5 is a single-board computer with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 processor, up to 8GB of RAM, and a PCIe interface that makes it possible to add SSDs, hard drives, AI accelerators, wireless adapter, or other peripherals. In other words, it’s the most powerful, versatile Raspberry Pi to date. Raspberry Pi sells an […]

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