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Verizon talking to cities about fiber expansion after years of stagnation

Verizon’s fiber plans are as much about wireless as they are about FiOS.

As Verizon plans a fiber expansion in Boston, CEO Lowell McAdam yesterday said the company is talking to other cities about potentially building fiber networks.

Verizon stopped expanding its FiOS fiber-to-the-home Internet, TV, and phone service several years ago, making it a surprise when in April the telco announced plans to replace its copper network in Boston with fiber. In an earnings call yesterday (see transcript), McAdam said, "We are talking to other cities about similar partnerships."

Verizon's fiber expansion plans are as much about improving backhaul to its more profitable mobile network as they are about bringing wired Internet to people's homes. "We will create a single fiber-optic network platform capable of supporting wireless and wireline technologies and multiple products," McAdam said.

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Deals of the Day (7-27-2016)

The days when we could get excited about a $150 Android tablet are long gone. These days you can find Windows 10 tablets for about half that price.

Of course, you can’t get a very good Windows tablet for $80… but that doesn’t mean you have to break the bank to get a high-quality Windows tablet. Right now Micro Center is selling a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 model with a Core i5 Skylake processor for $750… and students with an .edu email address can get it for just $600.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (7-27-2016) at Liliputing.

The days when we could get excited about a $150 Android tablet are long gone. These days you can find Windows 10 tablets for about half that price.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (7-27-2016) at Liliputing.

Streaming Sites Dominate Movie and TV-Show Piracy

For many years torrent sites were the go-to destination for most movie and TV-show pirates. However, new data shows that this is no longer the case. The vast majority of unauthorized videos are now consumed through pirate streaming sites, good for more than 57 billion visits during last year alone.

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

streamingkey A decade ago online video streaming was still a relatively new phenomenon. YouTube had just celebrated its first anniversary and Netflix hadn’t even rolled out its streaming service.

The piracy landscape also looked quite different at the time. Streaming sites were pretty much non-existent and the vast majority of all movie and TV-show piracy was torrent related.

This has drastically changed in recent years. According to a new report published by piracy tracking outfit MUSO, streaming sites have taken over as the prime source of video piracy.

New figures released publicly this week are part of the company’s annual report, which shows that nearly three quarters of all movie and TV-show traffic now goes to streaming sites.

The data from MUSO covers visits to 14,000 of the largest global piracy websites from 226 countries. In total, the company recorded 141 billion visits to pirate sites last year.

More than half of these visits relate to video piracy, which includes movies and TV-shows. The vast majority of these, 57.84 billion (74%), are visits to pirate streaming sites.

According to MUSO, there is a clear transition away from P2P sites and services to streaming. This can in part be explained by improved Internet connectivity across the globe.

Despite the availability of legal services, the United States tops the list of video pirates, representing 12% of total traffic, which is good for nearly 10 billion visits.

Torrent site traffic is slowly declining, for video content at least. Roughly 17% of the traffic went to torrent sites, and MUSO reported a clear downward trend during 2015. Direct download sites account for 8% of video piracy visits, which is relatively stable.

The data further reveals that both streaming pirates and torrent users predominantly use desktop machines to visit these sites, 72 and 77 percent respectively. This means that mobile piracy remains relatively small.

Visits to streaming sites by device (Muso.com)

musostream

The movie and TV-show figures are in line with the overall trend MUSO revealed earlier, where pirates move away from torrent sites to other distribution platforms.

“Piracy audiences are becoming better connected, more tech savvy, and know what they want, which is why so many of them have chosen to stream infringing content, rather than download it illegally,” MUSO’s CCO Christopher Elkins says.

Overall, MUSO’s report concludes that the piracy ecosystem is rapidly changing. It will be interesting to see how the reported traffic trends develop during the years to come.

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

Here WeGo: Here Maps kommt mit neuem Namen und neuen Funktionen

Here Maps heißt jetzt Here WeGo und bietet einige neue Funktionen. So werden Routen jetzt nicht mehr nur für Autos, Fahrräder oder den öffentlichen Nahverkehr berechnet, auch Carsharing-Anbieter finden sich unter den Optionen – inklusive Kosten und Tankanzeige. (Here, Android)

Here Maps heißt jetzt Here WeGo und bietet einige neue Funktionen. So werden Routen jetzt nicht mehr nur für Autos, Fahrräder oder den öffentlichen Nahverkehr berechnet, auch Carsharing-Anbieter finden sich unter den Optionen - inklusive Kosten und Tankanzeige. (Here, Android)

Massive genome analysis suggests life began in hot springs

The first cells may have been anaerobic, heat tolerant, and hydrogen-fed.

Features of how DNA, RNA, and proteins are built and metabolized are common to every living thing we've looked at, suggesting they were inherited through common descent. While life may have arisen more than once, it appears that only one lineage has survived down to the present day.

If you could trace living lineages back far enough, you'd arrive at an organism that's the ancestor to every living thing: the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. This idea has naturally led to a lot of speculation about what LUCA might have looked like. In the latest effort to offer some informed opinion, scientists have performed a clever genomic analysis to identify some of the genes that were probably in LUCA. Those genes, in turn, allow us to infer something about how LUCA lived and what environments it inhabited.

Building trees

Various analyses have indicated that organisms with complex cells (eukaryotes) are a relatively recent development on Earth—assuming you're willing to call something over two billion years old "recent." Two other lineages, bacteria and archaea, go back much further. LUCA sits at the point where bacteria and archaea started to diverge. So if you can identify genes that have been inherited by both of these lineages, they probably were present in LUCA's genome as well.

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Microsoft Pix camera app uses AI to snap better photos (iOS now, Android later)

You can take some remarkable photographs using a smartphone… if you’re a good photographer and now how to line up your shot, be aware of lighting issues, and adjust a bunch of settings before snapping the photo. Microsoft’s new camera app is designed to help those of us who aren’t great photographers.

It’s caller Microsoft Pix, and it uses the company’s artificial intelligence to adjust settings before you take a picture and then automatically apply enhancements after the image is captured.

Continue reading Microsoft Pix camera app uses AI to snap better photos (iOS now, Android later) at Liliputing.

It’s caller Microsoft Pix, and it uses the company’s artificial intelligence to adjust settings before you take a picture and then automatically apply enhancements after the image is captured.

Continue reading Microsoft Pix camera app uses AI to snap better photos (iOS now, Android later) at Liliputing.

Mesuit: Chinesischer Hersteller bietet Android-Hülle für iPhones an

Kürzlich als Bastelei vorgestellt, bietet der chinesische Hersteller Haimawan tatsächliche eine Hülle an, die auf iPhones Android zum Laufen bringt. In der Hülle ist quasi ein zweites Smartphone eingebaut, samt zusätzlichem SIM-Slot. (iPhone, Smartphone)

Preliminary price tag on SpaceX’s Red Dragon mission: $300 million

SpaceX remains on a very aggressive schedule if it is to launch in 2018.

In April, when SpaceX announced an ambitious mission to land an uncrewed Dragon spacecraft on Mars by 2018, one of the biggest questions was how much the private rocket company would spend on this venture. Now we have a ballpark estimate: $300 million.

During a meeting of NASA's Advisory Council Tuesday, one of the agency's deputy associate administrators, Jim Reuter, provided an overview of NASA’s agreement with SpaceX, SpaceNews reports. NASA estimated that it would spend about $32 million on the mission, with SpaceX spending about 10 times as much.

The agency and the company have a Space Act agreement that bars the transfer of funds, but the agreement will allow NASA to assist SpaceX with some technical advice. NASA can also gather critical information about the Martian atmosphere and get tips on how to slow a large spacecraft descending toward the planet's surface. It's also likely that NASA, with its assets in orbit around Mars, will help facilitate communication between the Red Dragon and Earth.

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Pokémon Go: Pikachu versus Bundeswehr

Auf der Jagd nach Pokémon verlieren Spieler immer wieder den Blick für ihre Umwelt. Das alarmiert die Bundeswehr, die sogar einen internen Sicherheitshinweis verschickt und vor Spielern, Spionen und Poké-süchtigen Soldaten warnt. (Pokémon Go, Nintendo)

LeEco acquires TV maker Vizio for $2 billion

LeEco has started to make a name for itself in China recently, where the company’s phones, smart TVs, and even smart bicycles are generating buzz. The company also started showcasing its products in the US this year, hinting at plans to enter the US market in a big way later this year.

Now it looks like the company is taking a shortcut: it’s acquiring one of the top makers of smart TVs and related products.

Continue reading LeEco acquires TV maker Vizio for $2 billion at Liliputing.

Now it looks like the company is taking a shortcut: it’s acquiring one of the top makers of smart TVs and related products.

Continue reading LeEco acquires TV maker Vizio for $2 billion at Liliputing.