It looks like the Play Store is headed to Chrome OS with “millions” of apps

Google Play integration clues pop up in the source code and on users’ devices.

Google first brought the ability to run Android apps on Chrome OS with a project called the "App Runtime for Chrome (ARC)." Google build an Android runtime on Chrome OS and partnered with select developers to port a handful of Android apps. Now it sounds like Google is ready to unleash millions of Android apps onto the platform by bringing the entire Play Store to Chrome OS.

In the Chrome OS subreddit, users are reporting some interesting behavior in their Chromebooks. "TheWiseYoda" noticed that when the settings first load up, an option quickly flashes on screen that reads "Enable Android apps to run on your Chromebook." The option immediately disappears, so it's not possible to click on normally. We were able to replicate this on our 2nd-gen Chromebook Pixel running the developer build.

After some hunting in the Chrome OS source code, Mr. Yoda found a few strings in this file (starting at line 6522) that mention the arrival of Google Play on Chrome OS. The most important message seems to be this one:

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National HPV vaccination program would provide big benefits

HPV vaccines for boys and girls in states with low vaccination rates boosts herd immunity

(credit: Global Panorama)

The HPV vaccine provides effective protection from the human papilloma virus and the cancers it can induce. Because HPV is transmitted sexually, inclusion in mandatory vaccination schedules has been a controversial issue, and legislation varies by state. Complicating matters further, companies have continued to improve the vaccine, expanding the list of viral strains that it protects against. A new study in PNAS finds that having states require the latest, most protective HPV vaccine for girls and boys would be highly cost-effective and would lead to better health outcomes at the national level.

HPV is the most prevalent sexually transmitted infection in the US, with over 100 viral strains circulating in the population. Over half of cervical cancer cases in the US are thought to be caused by HPV, which can also cause vaginal cancer, penile cancer, anal cancer, and cancers of the mouth and throat.

Fortunately, several vaccines for HPV are now available, including bivalent, quadrivalent, and nonavalent—these protect against two, four, and nine strains of HPV respectively. These vaccines can protect women from 66-81 percent of cervical cancers, depending on the number of strains that are included in the formulation.

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YIFY Speaks: Confessions Of A Movie Piracy Icon

For several years YTS/YIFY was one of Hollywood’s biggest arch-rivals, but that suddenly ended late last year after its founder was threatened with a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Today, YIFY speaks for the first time after the shutdown. About how it all started, fans, haters, movie piracy and his accomplishments.

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

yifyIn 2010 a fresh movie piracy ‘group’ started to gain traction. Borrowing work from the so-called ‘Scene’, YIFY started to publish dozens of popular movies to popular torrent sites.

Not much later the group launched its own torrent website under their new brand YTS, featuring high quality releases of the latest movies. Hundreds of them, and later thousands.

As the years went by the group amassed a huge following and a year ago its website was generating millions of pageviews per day. A true success story, but one that ended abruptly last October.

Hollywood sources tracked down the founder of YIFY and filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit in New Zealand. This case was quickly settled out of court, but it effectively meant the end of YIFY and YTS.

Today, YIFY speaks in public for the first time after the shutdown. He was kind enough to discuss a variety of topics with TorrentFreak, ranging from the early beginnings to YIFY’s demise and beyond.

The beginning

YIFY tells us that he started uploading torrents for the first time while he was in his late teens, when he was still in school. It started very small, as a hobby, and at the time he couldn’t imagine that it would quickly grow out of proportion.

“Back in early 2010 I was at university doing the first year of my four year computer science degree,” YIFY says.

“It wasn’t really a big deal at the time, just regular uploads on TPB, Demonoid, ET, and 1337x. My friends always knew what I was doing and who I was. At the time it was nothing worth bragging about.”

However, a year later the YIFY tag started to become noticed. New movie releases came out at a regular frequency and were downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people.

“A year in is when friends started to see it as something more, and YIFY started becoming a well-known name on the internet. At no point in time did I try to hide this, if anything I was proud and happy to even brag about it,” he says.

The bragging part is not something that’s common with torrent uploaders, due to the risks involved. However, YIFY was not too concerned about the consequences and made little effort to hide his real identity. He didn’t even bother to use a VPN or other privacy tools.

As time went by more people got involved and in 2014 the group had a dozen “staff” members, including moderators, developers and encoders.

The old staff page (2014)

yify-staff

Over the years many people came and went but YIFY always remained in charge.

“There was always only a single person ‘leading’ the project and who ultimately called the shots. After all, it was my baby,” he tells us.

Stealing From The Scene

With the popularity also came controversy. Some people praised YIFY for its video quality and others hated the group for it. Another often heard complaint is that YIFY was “stealing” from the Scene.

Looking back, YIFY doesn’t necessarily disagree with the critique. The quality wasn’t all that good and the group never denied that it used Scene movies for its own releases. YIFY admits that he downloaded movies from groups such as SPARKS, AMIABLE, GEKOS, and used these for his own work.

While YIFY appreciates and respects the work of these Scene groups, he never wanted to be a part of them. He found his own ‘niche’ instead, with an audience of millions of users.

“Technically we were ‘stealing’ from the Scene. I respect what they did and would thank them a bunch in person if I could. However, we never followed any Scene rules and we did not really care to be part of their elitist club either,” he says.

“Ultimately, the way I saw it, the YIFY brand was simply filling another niche. It was no secret that most of our sources were from normal Scene uploaders,” YIFY adds.

YIFY did collaborate with the P2P group PublicHD in the past, and on some occasions they had their own sources, releasing content before the Scene got their hands on it.

“There were occasions, back when PublicHD were active, that we would partner up. PublicHD were not Scene either, but there were multiple occasions that they were able to get disks even sooner than the Scene would, and would upload them to public torrent sites,” YIFY says.

“When this was a thing, I was able to get access to the rips, and the PublicHD guys always waited for me to finish encoding and uploading before they fully seeded their large high quality version. When PublicHD went away so did my source.”

The lawsuit, the end

October last year YIFY and its YTS website disappeared without warning or explanation. The mystery was eventually solved after a few days, when it became apparent that the MPAA was the driving force behind the shutdown.

Not much later we were able to confirm that the group’s founder had signed a private settlement with the movie studios, effectively ending the case. However, details of the deal were never disclosed.

Today YIFY is not going to comment on the settlement or the exact circumstances either, most likely because he is not allowed to do so. The only thing he was able to say on the final days is the following.

“I always in my mind and to my peers said ‘As soon as someone properly asks you to stop, you stop and walk away from it’. This is essentially how it all played out.”

YIFY Fakes and YTS Impostors

Soon after YIFY closed its doors many others jumped in to hijack the brand. Several sites mimicked the look of the defunct YTS site and started to release movies of their own. This includes YTS.ag, a site that remains popular today.

YIFY was not pleased to see these impostors emerge, and initially thought he might have been hacked.

“My initial thoughts was ‘Oh shit, how did they even get this?! was I hacked??’ I was very impressed initially. After a while, and realizing they simply cloned this from the internet-archive Wayback Machine, that magic feeling went away,” he says.

The official YTS site in 2015

ytshome

The initial fear later turned into anger, but there was of course little he could do. Still, speaking on the issue today he would advise people to stay away from any of these sites.

“When the fakes started to claim they were the real YIFY rather than saying they were there and wanted to continue as a different entity, I was a little angry. But at the end of the day it was inevitable, and in their defense they did a really good job of what they attempted at, even fooling me at the start.”

“That said, if someone comes up to me and asks about the fakes I tell them to stay away,” YIFY adds.

Hollywood and Piracy

In five years YIFY grew out to become one of Hollywood’s main arch rivals. Today the group doesn’t pose a threat anymore, but its demise didn’t make piracy go away, and according to YIFY it never will.

“Piracy is not going away. Ever. I think that instead of trying the impossible, shutting down torrent sites and the like in an attempt to ‘kill’ piracy, the movie industry should focus on making their offerings irresistible to users and giving them zero excuses for piracy.”

“This will never have a 100% success rate, but its the only way to win the war.”

Making movies widely available in a timely manner and for a decent price is the ultimate solution according to YIFY, who notes that the music industry is far ahead in this respect.

“Look at Spotify for example. Can you imagine yourself (in 2016) at work, wanting to listen to your favorite jam and going to a torrent site and getting it that way? No way. You open Spotify or YouTube and listen; sure you will get ads, but it’s totally worth avoiding going to a torrent site for songs.”

“For the most part, torrenting is inconvenient. It’s a multiple step process and nobody wants to see those crappy Pirate Bay ads while they’re at work. So you use Spotify,” YIFY says.

Movie fans should also have a place where most movies are available for a few dollars per month, but thus far progress has been slow on this front. Netflix in the US, for example, lacks all Oscar best picture winners of this millennium in their library. In addition, they don’t make movies available globally.

“Now, Netflix is definitely getting there, but there are still the geoblock limitations, which make a lot of content inaccessible for a lot of people. That’s not something that most media consumers stand for nowadays, and why would they when the content is freely available elsewhere?

“I understand this is a really tricky situation, but it just needs patience. Netflix and other streaming platforms will eventually have the same victory Spotify did for the music industry, but it will take time and require the full commitment of the industry bodies and decision makers at the forefront of the debate.”

Proud Accomplishments

Looking back, YIFY is proud of what he achieved, also from a technical perspective. Towards the end the YTS website had 7 to 8 million pageviews per day, on a pretty tidy setup.

“I am most proud of the technical infrastructure I created. I was able to host a massively busy website on a single back-end server,” YIFY says.

“Experimenting with things like the Cloudflare bypass and having the ability to set up something that was resilient to attacks from the outer internet – that stuff was awesome.”

YIFY was kind enough to give some more information about the infrastructure stack, which was made up of the following:

– Linux (Debian) for all the servers
– Nginx as reverse proxy for the all the front ends
– Mysql (percona fork) for the back-end data-store
– Elasticsearch for search and indexing
– Memcached for caching
– Varnish for full page cache (life saver for API when popcorn time got big)

Aside from the tech part, there was also a social aspect. YIFY made many friends along the way and is sorry that he had to cut his ties so suddenly. After the shutdown, he immediately distanced himself from all YIFY players and legacy users.

However, when he participated in a Reddit AMA today he suddenly realized that there was another social aspect to YIFY, one that he is certainly proud of.

Aside from a barrage of questions, which are well worth reading, there were also numerous comments from people who thanked him for his work. Some of these saw YIFY as one of the few options to access Hollywood films.

“I never really knew that the movies that I uploaded were helping people in need,” YIFY says.

“For example, a person in Iran who otherwise wouldn’t be able to watch movies because of sanctions, or a war veteran in a wheel chair that kept busy by watching the movies, or someone who was dying and was able to find some escape in the movies we uploaded.”

“Seeing that something I have done, moral or not, had such an effect on people is an amazing feeling that I will forever remember,” YIFY concludes.

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

SpaceX is ready to try another rocket landing

This time the Falcon 9 will be coming hotter, with less fuel to maneuver.

Camera images from the drone ship show the Falcon 9 first stage coming in on target April 8. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space on April 8, and after the first stage delivered its payload, the vehicle descended back to Earth and landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Now the company hopes to repeat that sea-based feat under more dynamically challenging conditions. The launch earlier this month carried a Dragon spacecraft, destined for the International Space Station about 400km above the surface. With a launch tentatively set for May 3 during the early morning hours, SpaceX plans to deliver a Japanese broadcast satellite into orbit 22,000km above the planet's surface.

This means that the first stage will accelerate to a greater velocity, moving almost parallel to the surface and away from the launch site, before it releases the second stage and the primary payload. This trajectory will leave the vehicle with far less fuel to arrest this horizontal motion, and to control its descent to the barge waiting below.

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Entering the matrix: CJ Wilson Racing launches a virtual racing series

The team has recreated its car in Forza and is holding an e-racing championship.

If you're an up-and-coming racing team, and you want to make new fans, what better way than to set up an e-sports series featuring a digital version of your real race car? The team in question is CJ Wilson Racing, which has partnered with Logitech and The Online Racing Association (TORA) to run the CJ Wilson Racing Cayman Cup—a 10-race series that gets underway on April 27th. We spoke to some of the people involved in order to find out more, particularly about how they arrived at their Forza Motorsport 6 version of the real race car.

The e-racing community might not have the same following—or prize fund—as something like Dota 2. But e-sports are being taken more and more seriously by the people that run real-word racing. As far back as 2008, Nissan and Sony in Europe were using Gran Turismo tournaments to find promising young racing drivers. TORA was officially recognized by the UK's Motor Sports Association in 2010, and even the FIA (which runs international motorsport) recently announced it would sanction a new series in the next Gran Turismo game.

How accurately racing games recreate the experience of driving the real thing is a topic we've tackled a few times. For 2016, CJ Wilson Racing switched cars, from the Mazda MX-5s it had been running in the Continental Tire Sportscar Challenge to a pair of Porsche Cayman GT4s. The Cayman GTS just came back to Forza 6, but there isn't actually a Cayman GT4 in the game. So, we wondered, how did the team recreate it?

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King under the mountain: Building Colorado’s Cold War command center

A fortress in Colorado rock was a feat of engineering in the 1960s.

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO—Across the highway from the US Air Force Academy is a tiny cluster of buildings that represents one of Colorado Springs' earliest claims to fame: mining.

The Western Museum of Mining and Industry (WMMI) looks out onto a glorious expanse of the Rocky Mountains and is home to all manner of antique equipment that extracted minerals from those mountains.

But on a balmy April night, as a spring snowstorm rolled in from the west, Ars attended a lecture at the museum about a nearby mining marvel that was not intended to extract riches, but to bury something more valuable beneath the unyielding rock—knowledge.

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Sonos on the cheap: How Chromecast Audio breathes new life into old speakers

A few synced, $35 audio repeaters can turn any home into a party house.

Chromecast Audio! Identical size to the standard 2015 Chromecast. Those vinyl-like grooves are purely intentional. (This one also requires power via a USB mini cable.) (credit: Sam Machkovech)

I received my Google Chromecast Audio for review at the end of September, and I buried my impressions of it in an article about the Chromecast's 2015 refresh. Not a ton to say, really: it provides Chromecast-like functionality... but only for audio. Chromecast Audio. Got it.

However, Google didn't really tell critics about the Chromecast Audio's most interesting feature, possibly because it wasn't yet ready or tested. Roughly a month after its October launch, Google rolled out a "group" synced-audio update. The update wirelessly daisy-chains an unlimited number of Chromecast Audio dongles so that their audio is synced across an entire house. For $35 a pop, you can turn an old speaker with a 3.5mm audio jack into an audio repeater.

It's too late for super-fresh impressions, but my month of Chromecast Audio has proven so fruitful, I wanted to share my experience and offer recommendations so that you too can rock a party-ready house like mine.

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A recipe for global cooling—put seafloor on dry land near the equator

Tectonic plate collisions could explain 40 million years of climatic history.

Oceanic crust sometimes ends up on land—like the Ingalls Peak area in Washington. This stuff pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as it weathers. (credit: brookpeterson)

Earth’s climate has stayed within a pretty narrow range of temperatures over its history if you compare it to the inhospitable heat and cold found elsewhere in our Solar System. This relative stability has been maintained by an intricate system of interactions. On geologic timescales, the chemical commerce between the atmosphere and the rock of Earth’s crust acts as a thermostat. The weathering of common minerals includes a reaction that removes CO2 from the atmosphere. High temperatures (caused by higher CO2) mean faster weathering, which gradually brings CO2 and temperature back down. It’s a moderating influence.

But plate tectonics also fiddle with the dial on that thermostat. Arcs of volcanoes along subduction zones (where one plate dives beneath the other) provide a constant source of CO2, and subduction zones come and go over time. Research using tough zircon crystals as records of volcanic arcs has found a correlation with climate over geologic time. In fact, a new study published this week in Science extends that comparison over the last 720 million years by finding evidence that volcanic activity rises and falls with the great swings in Earth’s climate.

A second study—published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by MIT’s Oliver Jagoutz—looks at the flip side of the equation: the ability of plate tectonics to strengthen the weathering feedback that eats CO2. Although climate change can increase or decrease the rate of weathering, the amount of exposed and easily weatherable rock makes a huge difference. The igneous rocks that make up oceanic crust, for example, make excellent CO2 sponges—or at least they would, if they weren’t at the bottom of the sea.

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More Remix OS laptops on the way?

More Remix OS laptops on the way?

There’s no shortage of low-cost laptops on the market today, but most run Google’s Chrome OS or Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating systems. But last year some Chinese device makers started offering models with Jide’s Remix OS as an option, and it looks like more models may be on the way.

Charbax from ARMDevices got a chance to check out a few reference designs from chip maker Allwinner.

These laptops have entry-level specs, low price tags, and a custom version of Android that adds desktop-style features like a taskbar, desktop, and support for running most Android apps in resizeable windows.

Continue reading More Remix OS laptops on the way? at Liliputing.

More Remix OS laptops on the way?

There’s no shortage of low-cost laptops on the market today, but most run Google’s Chrome OS or Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating systems. But last year some Chinese device makers started offering models with Jide’s Remix OS as an option, and it looks like more models may be on the way.

Charbax from ARMDevices got a chance to check out a few reference designs from chip maker Allwinner.

These laptops have entry-level specs, low price tags, and a custom version of Android that adds desktop-style features like a taskbar, desktop, and support for running most Android apps in resizeable windows.

Continue reading More Remix OS laptops on the way? at Liliputing.

BSI: Unternehmen immer häufiger Opfer von Ransomware

Der neue BSI-Chef warnt, dass größere mittelständische Unternehmen immer häufiger das Ziel von Ransomware-Angriffen seien. Ganze Maschinensteuerungsanlagen könnten so lahmgelegt werden. (Ransomware, Malware)

Der neue BSI-Chef warnt, dass größere mittelständische Unternehmen immer häufiger das Ziel von Ransomware-Angriffen seien. Ganze Maschinensteuerungsanlagen könnten so lahmgelegt werden. (Ransomware, Malware)