
Zu wenig Zulassungen: Bundesumweltministerin plädiert für Quote für Elektroautos
Könnten mehr Elektroautos in Deutschland verkauft werden, wenn Hersteller verpflichtet würden, eine Quote zu erfüllen? Diesen Ansatz verfolgt Bundesumweltministerin Barbara Hendricks (SPD). (Elektroauto, Technologie)

U.S. Homeland Security ‘Harbors’ BitTorrent Pirates
Information provided by a torrent monitoring outfit reveals that pirates are linked to places where you don’t expect them. To the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, for example, which helped to take down KickassTorrents website a few months ago.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Due to the public nature of BitTorrent transfers, it’s easy to see what people behind a certain IP-address are downloading.
Last month we reported about a new website that puts this information on public display. According to its operators, this information can help rightholders and law enforcement to track down pirates.
In response, we decided to do some field work to see if downloads are also linked to more unusual locations, and the answer is YES.
To the Department of Homeland Security, for example, which helped to bring down KickassTorrents a few months ago. While it’s not a place where you would expect people to be torrenting, the spy tool suggests otherwise.
We could easily spot several IP-addresses that list over a dozen recent ‘downloads’ of copyrighted material. This includes popular films, TV-series and music, but also porn and far more worrying content.
The screenshot below lists an overview of the recent torrents that are tied to a single Homeland Security IP-address. As you can see, it lists several files including the film ‘Gone Girl’ and ‘Bad Santa.’ But we’ve also seen a copy of the film Let’s Be Cops and a discography of the heavy metal band Dio.

It’s worth mentioning that BitTorrent monitoring tools are regularly discredited for being prone to errors. They often don’t check whether a full copy has been downloaded, for example.
Mistakes also appeared in the ‘I Know What You Download‘ database, which previously listed downloads for several non-routable IP-addresses they picked up via DHT tracking.
However, the company’s Marketing director Andrey Rogov is confident that the DHS IPs are indeed sharing (parts of) these files.
“These reports are accurate,” Rogov tells us. “They contain information about the downloading or distribution activities of IP-addresses, for all torrents which we could classify for the last 30 days.”
The company also provided us with extra information showing combinations of specific ports and IP-addresses, which refutes the defense that a tracker added these IP-addresses as fake data.
Since Homeland Security employs more than 230,000 people, finding a pirating IP-address is hardly a surprise. In fact, there are many more in the ‘I Know What You Download’ database. This is also true for other United States Government branches.
Take The House of Representatives, for example, where adult material, Snoop Dogg, and several movies are listed as recent downloads. Again, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In the end, the most sensible conclusion is that you’re going to find pirates in any large organization or institution. Even in the very place that just dismantled the largest torrent site on the Internet.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Martin Shkreli harasses Teen Vogue writer, has Twitter account suspended
Before suspension, Shkreli describes his Duca-related posts as “unrequited love.”

Enlarge / Shkreli's apparent shrine to Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca after trying, and failing, to invite her to Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony. (credit: Twitter)
Martin Shkreli's Twitter account was temporarily suspended on Sunday morning. Ars has confirmed that Twitter suspended the account after the reviled pharmaceutical executive targeted Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca on the social media platform.
Shkreli's posts about and to Duca apparently began on Thursday in the form of a private, direct message sent by Shkreli, inviting her to be his date for president-elect Donald Trump's impending inauguration ceremony. Shkreli, a professed Trump supporter, may have specifically targeted Duca due to her articles about Trump at Teen Vogue, including her December editorial titled "Donald Trump is gaslighting America."
Shkreli followed Duca's public decline of the invite ("I would rather eat my own organs") by turning his Twitter profile into an apparent Duca shrine. His "header" image became a collage of various photos of Duca, covered with apparently romantic lyrics from the ballad "I Swear" ("For better or worse / 'til death do us part / I'll love you with every beat of my heart"), while his profile image was changed to a photo of Duca with her husband, only with Shkreli's face digitally inserted where the husband's should be.
Alaska Airlines: Apples iMessage und WhatsApp sind in der Luft kostenlos
Alaska Airlines hat mit dem Beta-Test seines Free Chat genannten Produkts begonnen. In den Jets der nordamerikanischen Fluggesellschaft können insgesamt drei Kurznachrichtendienste kostenlos verwendet werden. Bilder funktionieren allerdings nicht und es gibt weitere Einschränkungen. (Internet im Flugzeug, Whatsapp)

Closer look at the HP Z2 Mini Workstation PC
The HP Z2 Mini G3 Workstation is a small desktop computer with NVIDIA Quadro graphics, up to a 6th-gen Intel Xeon processor, and up to 32GB of RAM.
But what I find most interesting about this 8.5″ x 8.5″ x 2.3″ computer is just how easy it is to upgrade: you can open the lid without a screwdriver. And once you’re inside the case you can lift the fan to get at the two SODIMM slots to add or replace memory.
Continue reading Closer look at the HP Z2 Mini Workstation PC at Liliputing.

The HP Z2 Mini G3 Workstation is a small desktop computer with NVIDIA Quadro graphics, up to a 6th-gen Intel Xeon processor, and up to 32GB of RAM.
But what I find most interesting about this 8.5″ x 8.5″ x 2.3″ computer is just how easy it is to upgrade: you can open the lid without a screwdriver. And once you’re inside the case you can lift the fan to get at the two SODIMM slots to add or replace memory.
Continue reading Closer look at the HP Z2 Mini Workstation PC at Liliputing.
Dell’s latest XPS 13 DE still delivers Linux in a svelte package
Review: The HiDPI model can even get too bright indoors, but it’s a beauty to use.

Enlarge / Behold, Dell's seventh edition of the XPS 13 DE. (credit: Scott Gilbertson)
Over the course of its four-year lifespan, Dell's extremely popular XPS 13 Developer Edition line has become known for one thing—bringing a "just works" Linux experience to the company's Ultrabooks.
Of course, today Dell is just one of many manufacturers producing great Linux machines. System76 makes the Oryx Pro (still my top pick for anyone who needs massive power), and companies like Purism and ZaReason produce solid offerings that also work with Linux out of the box. Even hardware not explicitly made for Linux tends to work out of the box these days. I recently installed Fedora on a Sony Vaio and was shocked that the only problem I encountered was that the default trackpad configuration was terribly slow.
Admittedly, the Vaio is a few years old, which means there has been time for hardware issues to be addressed. Getting Linux to run on bleeding edge hardware in 2017 remains tricky—or it requires running a bleeding edge distro like Arch. That's where efforts like Dell's Project Sputnik, led by developer Barton George, come in handy. With the XPS 13 Developers Edition, the hardware is already vetted. Drivers are pre-installed and configured for a great out-of-the-box experience.
People still use the Amiga today, and new Viva Amiga documentary shows why
Debuting at MAGfest this weekend, new film gathers devs and fans across Amiga decades.

An example of the wonderful renderings you can expect in Viva Amiga. (credit: Zach Weddington)
Many years ago when I began writing the History of the Amiga, I was surprised there were so few accounts of what was truly a remarkable computing platform. Fortunately, time, nostalgia, and Kickstarter have combined to make many more recollections possible. Case in point: director Zach Weddington was able to raise funds in 2011 to make a documentary called Viva Amiga, and it’s now available to watch in 12 languages and several streaming formats. The movie premiered at this week's MAGfest, an annual games and music celebration outside of DC.
Viva Amiga is a wonderful look at the the history of the platform, the people who built it, and the users who loved it. The opening title says it all: "One Amazing Computer. One chance to save the company. One chance to win the PC wars." This message sets the stage nicely for a dramatic and passionate tale.
Viva Amiga starts with the dramatic launch party for the Amiga 1000 at Lincoln Center in 1985, next jumping back in time to cover how Jay Miner and his colleagues started the Amiga project. It highlights the Amiga’s strengths in graphics and video, saving a special mention for the Video Toaster. The excitement of Amiga developers and users at the time comes through clearly in the documentary. One of them describes the most passionate users as "people who weren’t striving to be millionaires. [They were] people who were striving to express themselves in new and creative ways."
Op-ed: The desktop CPU isn’t dead, it just needs a swift kick in the butt
Progress is slowing down, but there are still options.

Enlarge / The Core i7-7700K. Underwhelming? Maybe. Harbinger of death for the desktop CPU? Probably not.
Our review of Intel’s new flagship consumer desktop CPU, the Kaby Lake-based Core i7-7700K, was less-than-favorable. Out of the box, the chip runs faster than the i7-6700K that preceded it, but that’s just because it ships at a higher default clock speed. When running at the same clock speed—something easily achievable because these chips are specifically intended for overclocking—CPU and GPU performance is identical.
This feeds into a growing perception that, after several years of modest-at-best performance improvements, Intel is having trouble making its processors faster. Granted, that's not a problem for many casual-to-moderate PC users, and it's not like Intel's chips haven't improved in other big ways in the last half-decade. Power consumption is down, battery life is up, and integrated graphics performance isn't nearly as laughable as it was ten years ago. But for high-end pro users who don't want to spend $1,000 or more on a processor, the lack of performance improvements in Intel's mainstream quad-core desktop processors in particular has been frustrating.
This is an unfortunate reality brought on by the difficulties Intel is having switching to new process architectures. Moving from the 22nm process to the 14nm process in 2013 and 2014 caused several delays that pushed back the launch of the Broadwell architecture and protracted its rollout. The move from 14nm to 10nm is proving even more difficult, breaking Intel's longstanding “tick-tock” development model in which it changed manufacturing processes every two years. If leaked roadmaps are correct, “Cannonlake” laptop chips may move to the 10nm process at the tail end of 2017. But the “Coffee Lake” desktop chips will remain on the 14nm process until well into 2018.
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