Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music

Musical perception is, surprisingly, not shared by all humans.

(credit: Josh McDermott)

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates how Western music lives in our brains.

The notes used in Western music—or, more accurately, the relationships between the notes used in Western music—have a strange power. Bobby McFerrin demonstrated this dramatically by showing that an audience somehow knows what notes to sing when he jumps around the stage. He remarked that “what’s interesting to me about that is, regardless of where I am, anywhere, every audience gets that.”

He’s suggesting that something about the relationships between pitches is culturally universal. All people seem to experience them the same way, regardless of where they're from or whether they have musical training. The question of universals in music perception is important because it can help us determine how much of our perception is shaped by culture and how much by biology. A paper in this week’s Nature reports on the surprising finding that a form of musical perception long thought to be common across all humans might not be so universal after all.

In music, relationships between notes can be used in two different ways. If pitches are played in sequence, the relationships between them are melodic, like the difference between each successive note in "Mary had a Little Lamb." When notes are played simultaneously, like a single strum of all the strings on a guitar or a choir singing, the relationships are harmonic. Different musical traditions have different rules about which melodic and harmonic relationships are permissible.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

How to set up your own VoIP system at home

An exhaustive guide to setting up all manner of at-home phone trickery.

(credit: Philippe Put)

The landline phone may seem an anachronism to many, but if like me you work from home it can still be an essential business tool. Even if you're not a regular home worker, many people still like to have a phone that's separate to their mobile. In a family house or shared house, it can sometimes also be useful for different people to have their own number too.

In the past, your choices were fairly stark—either multiple analogue phone lines, which is what I had when I first moved into my flat, or ISDN. While the latter was very popular in parts of Europe, it never really took off in the UK or US. BT's pricing was part of the problem, together with a lack of equipment. Nevertheless, for many years, I used a small German ISDN PBX at home. It made it simple to separate business and work calls, and thanks to the 10 number blocks BT issued as standard with ISDN2 lines, my lodger could have a number too.

Pricing was the killer for ISDN in the home, unless you could claim it as a business expense. Now, however, VoIP services make it much easier to provide the same sort of functionality at a fraction of the cost, and it's much easier than you might have thought, too. Here's how I did it.

Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Notebooks: Nvidia bringt Pascal-Grafikchips für Mobile im August

Gleiche Hardware-Ausstattung wie im Desktop-Segment mit einer Ausnahme: Nvidia plant, die Geforce GTX 1080, GTX 1070 und GTX 1060 für Notebooks schon im nächsten Monat zu veröffentlichen. (Nvidia Pascal, Grafikhardware)

Gleiche Hardware-Ausstattung wie im Desktop-Segment mit einer Ausnahme: Nvidia plant, die Geforce GTX 1080, GTX 1070 und GTX 1060 für Notebooks schon im nächsten Monat zu veröffentlichen. (Nvidia Pascal, Grafikhardware)

The 2016 “Board Game of the Year” nominees, reviewed

Ars Cardboard’s comprehensive six-game roundup of the Spiel des Jahres hopefuls.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

(credit: Thinkstock)

While the worldwide board gaming community has plenty of awards ceremonies, arguably the most important is still the "Spiel des Jahres" (Game of the Year) award issued by German-speaking game critics from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Past winners have included everything from Catan to Qwirkle, and winning ensures solid sales and (very occasionally) fame and fortune.

Nominees aren't necessarily guaranteed to be everyone's favorite games from the past year. But as far as the influential German board gaming establishment is concerned, these are the best of the best when it comes to games that everyone can enjoy. We decided to put all six nominees to the test by rounding up some past coverage, adding some new reviews, and rolling the whole thing together into a massive one-stop shop for all things SdJ.

Read 62 remaining paragraphs | Comments

SK Hynix: HBM2-Stacks mit 4 GByte ab dem dritten Quartal verfügbar

SK Hynix hat seinen Produktkatalog mit High Bandwidth Memory mit 4 GByte Kapazität und 2 GHz Takt aktualisiert. Der schnelle Stapelspeicher für Grafikkarten soll ab Herbst ausgeliefert werden. (Hynix, CAD)

SK Hynix hat seinen Produktkatalog mit High Bandwidth Memory mit 4 GByte Kapazität und 2 GHz Takt aktualisiert. Der schnelle Stapelspeicher für Grafikkarten soll ab Herbst ausgeliefert werden. (Hynix, CAD)

BitTorrent Users Present a Goldmine of Marketing Opportunities

Most file-sharers are aware they’re being watched but that doesn’t always have to be as bad as it sounds. Speaking with TorrentFreak, analytics company Peerlogix says it monitors millions of “well educated and tech-savvy” torrent users and leverages their content consumption habits for marketing purposes.

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

swarmAfter years of aggressive litigation against hundreds of thousands of file-sharers, by now the message should be sinking in. Peer-to-peer networks, BitTorrent included, are very public and anyone with the know-how can look in.

Commonly, most of the people doing the monitoring have anti-piracy motives. Some aim to assess how much business may or may not be disappearing due to unauthorized sharing. Others spy with the sole intention of extracting cash settlements from users. US-based Peerlogix has a different agenda.

“We formed the company in 2013 out of a need of independent film studios. The types you see with $100k to maybe $1M budgets. We wanted to show them how to sell their films better,” says Peerlogix CEO and Co-founder William Gorfein.

With no chance of a Netflix deal, Gorfein says these studios often relied on sales to foreign countries that had a demand for American films.

“The problem is, these guys are artists, not analytics pros. Where would the movie be popular? Germany? South Korea? Because these guys typically didn’t have a clue, we felt there would be room for us to step in. We’d be the analysis side,” he explains.

“A film would be released, we could see the countries it’s popular in, and we’d then make introductions to key people in international markets to help broker film distribution deals. That was the idea at least, and our business model was to make money on the analytics.”

In 2014, Peerlogix became a measurement company, similar to Nielsen and comScore, but one gathering data from BitTorrent networks, the only fully international means to obtain video and music content online.

“Going to plan a new tour for an up and coming artist? Let us use this information together to help plan the cities the artist should be in. Trying to produce and finance a movie for international markets? Let’s finally use this activity to see which A and B list actors are popular in foreign markets,” Gorfein says.

In the music sector, Peerlogix has undertaken digital advertising projects for music festivals, gathering consumption data from torrent swarms to improve sales.

“Our goal is to show artists that there’s an entire segment of fans they’re not reaching. That the demographics look great, and that extra tickets and merchandise can be sold as a result of reaching them,” Gorfein explains.

“Your YouTube efforts are garnering X ROI, your social media efforts are giving you Y ROI – but how about the fans on torrents? There are millions, so we’ve been showing artists that there’s an equivalent ROI that can be realized from torrenters (without lawsuits!) and that it’s a necessary strategy to incorporate.”

For those more interested in the mechanics, Peerlogix told us that they’re close to being able to monitor every publicly available torrent.

“As far as protocols go, this includes conventional tracker servers, DHT (and subsequent magnet links), and Peer Exchange (PEX). DHT, by and large, makes up the bulk of the incoming data we collect,” Gorfein says.

“The conventional tracker servers were the simplest to track and mine. We were able to get that ability launched and running after our first few months and with relative ease. DHT is far trickier.”

Once harvested, the data is crunched and shared with third party companies, typically agencies who target individuals with advertising on multiple platforms.

“Does a consumer products company want to advertise to all viewers of Modern Family on ABC? If so, they will need to incorporate the 20% of the viewers that choose to do so via torrents, and that’s where we come in,” Gorfein says.

In order to add value to their service, Peerlogix works with other companies to augment harvested torrent information with demographic and behavioral data. That has provided some valuable insights into the nature of BitTorrent users.

“A eureka moment occurred when we saw that the demographics behind torrent households are borderline incredible – well educated, large discretionary dollars to spend and tech-savvy,” Gorfein says.

“Did you know that homes watching Real Housewives on torrent also have high affinities for fishing? Or that downloaders of Tomb Raider have a 3.3x greater likelihood of watching Game of Thrones? Or that these same Tomb Raider players love the X-Men and Hunger Games series? Me neither but the numbers speak for themselves,” he concludes.

Being monitored for advertising purposes is a daily occurrence for everyone using the Internet, whether that’s on the web or even BitTorrent. Not everyone likes it, but when a timely job opportunity lands on the mat due to the latter, things might not be so bad.

More information on Peerlogix can be found here.

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

Die Woche im Video: Wirbel um Wasserwerke, Pokémons und Autopiloten

Wir haben Sicherheitsprobleme in Kraftwerken aufgedeckt. Tesla verteidigt sein Assistenzsystem. Und Pokémons besetzen Deutschland. Sieben Tage und viele Meldungen im Überblick. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Internet)

Wir haben Sicherheitsprobleme in Kraftwerken aufgedeckt. Tesla verteidigt sein Assistenzsystem. Und Pokémons besetzen Deutschland. Sieben Tage und viele Meldungen im Überblick. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Internet)

MPAA Plan Could Make It Easier for You to Find Pirated Movies on YouTube

The MPAA wants YouTube to get tough, not only on pirated movies, but also on fake pirated movies uploaded onto the site to trick users.Most YouTube users should be aware of these fake uploads, where from the preview image and even the video’s length, i…



The MPAA wants YouTube to get tough, not only on pirated movies, but also on fake pirated movies uploaded onto the site to trick users.

Most YouTube users should be aware of these fake uploads, where from the preview image and even the video's length, it appears to be the correct content. But playing the movie will only result in a blank video, usually with a message to visit a third party site to obtain the actual movie. Users who throw caution to the wind and follow the links will rarely find what they're looking for, and will be instead met with malware or unrelated downloads.

The presence of fakes on YouTube also makes it increasingly hard for pirates to find real pirated content, and contributes to giving piracy its bad reputation when it comes to malware. It may in fact be one of the best ways to deter users from going down the piracy route, at least on YouTube.

Which is why is was unexpected that Hollywood, via the MPAA, has made fake pirated uploads an issue in its on-going war against Google. The MPAA tweeted an article written by Vox Indie's Ellen Seidler, who went into detail just why fake uploads are a problem, not just for pirates, but for content owners too.

The crux of the problem, according to Seidler, is the fact that YouTube's anti-piracy system, Content ID, can fill up with these fake videos when rights-holders try to manage content removal.

"Removing them is an incredibly time-consuming task as it seems YouTube has purposely chosen to make the Content ID dashboard as inconvenient as possible for users," writes Seidler.

It appears Seidler and the MPAA both want YouTube to take proactive action against these fake uploads, even if it could make YouTube movie piracy viable again. The MPAA may also see any proactive action on YouTube's part as a thin-wedge in its campaign to get Google to proactively remove pirated content, not just from YouTube, but from its search results too.

[Via Vox IndieMPAA]

Sorry, there’s no more porn with your Starbucks latte

Coffee chain’s move follows McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Panera Bread, and Subway.

(credit: Bradley Fulton)

Starbucks said Friday it would soon add porn-blocking filters to its public, in-store Wi-Fi. The move follows McDonald's, which disclosed this week that it had blocked the hamburger-eating public from accessing Wi-Fi-enabled porn at its restaurants.

"Once we determine that our customers can access our free Wi-Fi in a way that also doesn't involuntarily block unintended content, we will implement this in our stores," Starbucks said in a statement. "In the meantime, we reserve the right to stop any behavior that interferes with our customer experience, including what is accessed on our free Wi-Fi."

The group Enough is Enough and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation have been putting pressure on companies that provide free Wi-Fi to the public to block porn sites.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Mobile carriers aren’t doing enough to fight robocalls, senators say

Republican and Democrat ask CTIA to prevent robocalls to reassigned numbers.

Two US senators are urging the mobile phone industry to fight robocalls and texts by creating a database of phone numbers that have been reassigned from one customer to another.

Reassigned numbers are one of the major contributors to unwanted calls and texts, and carriers haven't done enough to fight the problem, said US Senators John Thune (R-S.D.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The lawmakers wrote a letter today to CEO Meredith Attwell Baker of CTIA–The Wireless Association, a lobby group that represents AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, Sprint, and other mobile carriers.

Thune and Markey "believe wireless carriers may have an opportunity to provide consumers and businesses more needed relief by establishing a reassigned numbers database, containing a list of cell phone numbers that have changed ownership," they wrote. "Periodically, consumers receive unwanted robocalls and robotexts because the previous holder of the phone number provided consent. Not only are robocalls and robotexts to reassigned numbers a nuisance to consumers, but they also create liabilities for calling parties."

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments