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Firefox OS developer provides a (not so) brief history of the operating system

Firefox OS is pretty much dead at this point, but when Mozilla first unveiled plans for the operating system (initially known as Boot to Gecko), the plan was to provide an open alternative to Android and iOS designed to run web apps. Eventually Firefox OS-powered phones were shipped… and sold poorly. There was a tablet […]

Firefox OS developer provides a (not so) brief history of the operating system is a post from: Liliputing

Verkehr: Eine Ampel mit Kamera und Gesichtserkennung

Rot heißt rot: Weil in China so viele Verkehrsunfälle an roten Ampeln passieren, haben die Behörden in Shenzhen eine Ampel installiert, die Fußgänger erkennt und erfasst, die bei Rot nicht stehenbleiben. (Verkehr, Datenschutz)

Alcatel A5 LED: Someone, somewhere wants a phone that doubles as a mobile disco

It’s a decent lower-midrange phone, but its vivid LED backlights make it stand out.

Andrew Williams

BARCELONA, Spain—It’s not easy for a phone to stand out when once-impressive features such as multiple cameras and sub-8mm thickness are now normal. Alcatel manages it, however, with the A5 LED by using a completely different tactic: it has a bunch of RGB LEDs that perform a light show whenever you get a notification or play music, or pretty much whenever else it has even the slightest excuse to fire them up.

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Orange: Antenne der Uni Duisburg-Essen bringt Hochleistungs-WTTx

Eine Antenne, die die letzte Meile fast verlustfrei überbrückt, arbeitet beim französischen Netzbetreiber Orange. Das optische Signal wird ohne optoelektronische Basisband-Konversion und elektronische Signalverarbeitung umgewandelt und brachte 1 GBit/s in den Haushalt. (Technologie, Glasfaser)

A Wii U owner’s send-off to a deeply flawed but essential Nintendo console

Zelda: Breath of the Wild caps off a unique console that never found its footing.

I haven't taken a poll or anything, but I suspect I'm the only person on the Ars staff who happily and without reservation plunked down for the Wii U version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild instead of springing for a copy of the game and a brand-new Nintendo Switch.

Though the game was originally developed as a Wii U game, it's clear that this version is being released almost as an afterthought. The Wii U version comes with the same content as the Switch version and the DLC will be available for both platforms, but the pricey Special and Master Editions are Switch-exclusive. Breath of the Wild will be a quiet coda for Nintendo's least successful home console since the company helped birth the modern game industry back in the 80s. This is a system that Nintendo pretty much gave up on before concrete details on its successor had even been announced.

But somehow, I think history will vindicate the Wii U; at the very least, it should go down as a "good" failure like the Dreamcast rather than a "bad" one like the Virtual Boy. It was and is a system that's worthy of attention, it was just done in by poor timing and messaging and a central gimmick that nobody (Nintendo included) ever really managed to figure out.

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Vialight Communications: Die Daten kommen per Laser vom Himmel

Wie das Wetter auch sein mag: Die Internetversorgung sollen künftig Satelliten, Drohnen und Ballons übernehmen – mit Technik aus Bayern. Bedarf dafür gibt es nicht nur in Afrika oder Asien, sondern auch bei uns. Ein Bericht von Werner Pluta (Satelliteninternet, Google)

Wie das Wetter auch sein mag: Die Internetversorgung sollen künftig Satelliten, Drohnen und Ballons übernehmen - mit Technik aus Bayern. Bedarf dafür gibt es nicht nur in Afrika oder Asien, sondern auch bei uns. Ein Bericht von Werner Pluta (Satelliteninternet, Google)

After legal settlement, Redflex’s six-month losses jump by nearly 10X

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has also loaned the red light camera firm $7.5M.

Redflex Holdings Limited, the Australian corporate parent of the embattled red-light camera company, announced in official financial filings on Tuesday that it had lost over A$26.2 million ($19.8 million) during the first half of its 2017 fiscal year, which concluded at the end of 2016.

A notable factor that explains the company’s massive drop in profits—compared to a loss of A$2.7 million (~$2 million) during the same period a year earlier—is the recent $20 million settlement that the company reached with the City of Chicago as part of a corruption investigation.

Redflex also noted decreased revenue in the United States and largely flat revenue everywhere else. In a statement written by Adam Gray, the company’s chairman, Redflex would now seek increased opportunities in Latin America to try to make up for it.

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Blue Origin: Jeff Bezos will zum Mond fliegen

Vergesst Amazon Prime Air – hier kommt Amazon Prime Space: Jeff Bezos will einen Lieferdienst zum Mond einrichten. In weniger als zehn Jahren will sein Unternehmen Blue Origin einen Raumtransporter entwickeln, der eine Mondkolonie versorgen soll. (Blue…

Vergesst Amazon Prime Air - hier kommt Amazon Prime Space: Jeff Bezos will einen Lieferdienst zum Mond einrichten. In weniger als zehn Jahren will sein Unternehmen Blue Origin einen Raumtransporter entwickeln, der eine Mondkolonie versorgen soll. (Blue Origin, Nasa)

UK Police Claim 64% Drop in Mainstream Advertising on 200 Pirate Sites

City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit is claiming success in denying potential revenue to more than 200 ‘pirate’ sites. As a result of Operation Creative, the division says that in the past twelve months there has been a 64% decrease in advertising placed by the UK’s top ad spending companies.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

For the past several years, authorities in the UK have been clamping down pretty hard on Internet piracy. Officers have arrested dozens of individuals involved in running sites and those supplying piracy-enabled hardware.

Much of this action has emanated from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) under the banner Operation Creative, a multi-pronged initiative to reduce piracy using a variety of tactics, including the targeting of domains and the disruption of revenue streams.

Part of that task has involved making it harder for pirate site operators to generate funding from advertising. That’s being achieved via the Infringing Website List (IWL), a blacklist of websites distributed to potential advertisers and agencies who are asked to boycott the domains in the name of supporting creators.

In an announcement yesterday PIPCU claimed success in this area, noting that research from data company whiteBULLET indicates that there has been a 64% decrease in advertising from the UK’s top ad spending companies on more than 200 copyright-infringing websites.

“This shows the great impact our work has on protecting the creative industries in the UK and across the world,” said DCI Pete Ratcliffe, head of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

“Operation Creative is about taking away the revenue that these criminals use to undermine one of the most important industries to the UK economy.”

Noting the cooperation shown by brands and advertisers, Ratcliffe said that Operation Creative will be stepping on the gas even more this year, with the aim of negatively affecting close to 1,300 sites on the IWL.

Jo Johnson MP, Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, said that illegal sites have a negative impact on the UK’s creative industries and that when advertising appears on them, it legitimises criminal operations.

“The naming and shaming of infringing websites sends a clear message: criminal activity will not be tolerated. PIPCU and their enforcement partners will continue to track down, de-legitimise and disrupt advertising revenues on these infringing sites,” Johnson said.

“I commend PIPCU and their partners for these continued efforts to disrupt funding of illegal streaming sites by dramatically reducing rates of advertising that appear on them.”

The news comes on the heels of a report in January that PIPCU had paid visits to several companies that had been found to be advertising on pirate sites. Each reportedly pledged to stop advertising on 1,232 pirate sites in the wake of the contact from PIPCU.

PIPCU says that the figure of 64 per cent reported yesterday was based on comparing 205 websites on the Infringing Website List in both January 2016 and January 2017. However, the unit does not release information on which sites were counted (such as their names or their size) so it’s impossible to say whether these were big or small players or what the overall effect was.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Cloud-Storage: Tippfehler für AWS-S3-Ausfall verantwortlich

Menschliches Versagen hat zum Ausfall zahlreicher Internetdienste geführt: Ein falsch eingegebenes Kommando legte die Metadatenverwaltung des AWS-S3-Speichers lahm. (AWS, Storage)