Stress may push us towards putting on a tinfoil hat

But the association between stress and conspiracy theories is pretty limited.

There's no one single cause that drives us to strap on a tinfoil hat—instead, a variety of factors interact with each other to push us in that direction. A recent paper in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences reports a correlation between stress and conspiracy theory belief, suggesting that a very common experience could be one of these factors.

It’s possible that believing in conspiracy theories could make people more stressed, says Pascal Wagner-Egger, a conspiracy belief researcher who wasn’t involved in this paper. “Conspiracy theories are not very reassuring beliefs,” he points out. But the authors of the study think it’s likely that causality runs in the other direction here—that stress makes people predisposed to believing in conspiracy theories.

Untangling the knot

It’s pretty difficult to do an experiment on the causality of conspiracy theories; it’s not like you're likely to get useful information by asking people what they think about the Moon landing, stressing them out, and then asking again. It’s possible that a long-term study could track the development of beliefs alongside stressful life changes like job loss, but longitudinal studies like these are difficult and expensive. That means correlational studies, despite their limitations, are the low-hanging fruit for early exploration.

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YI 4K: Xiaomi greift mit 4K-Actionkamera GoPro an

Der chinesische Hersteller Xiaomi hat mit der YI 4K eine Actionkamera vorgestellt, die fast die gleichen Funktionen wie die GoPro Hero4 bietet. Sie ist nur deutlich günstiger zu bekommen. (Xiaomi, Digitalkamera)

Der chinesische Hersteller Xiaomi hat mit der YI 4K eine Actionkamera vorgestellt, die fast die gleichen Funktionen wie die GoPro Hero4 bietet. Sie ist nur deutlich günstiger zu bekommen. (Xiaomi, Digitalkamera)

Yahoo: Warren Buffett will Yahoo mit übernehmen

Prominente Konkurrenz für Verizon: Ein neues Konsortium will für das angeschlagene Internetunternehmen Yahoo mitbieten. Ihm gehört einer der bekanntesten Investoren an. (Yahoo)

Prominente Konkurrenz für Verizon: Ein neues Konsortium will für das angeschlagene Internetunternehmen Yahoo mitbieten. Ihm gehört einer der bekanntesten Investoren an. (Yahoo)

UK Govt Targets Google and Facebook in Piracy Crackdown

The UK Intellectual Property Office is investigating how search engines and social media networks can step up their game to deter piracy. The Government is pushing for voluntary anti-piracy agreements between major Internet companies and entertainment industry groups, but will consider a legislative approach if these fail.

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

uk-flagLast week the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) published its strategy for tackling copyright infringement over the next four years.

Among other things, the government said that it would work with search engines and social media platforms to reduce the availability of infringing content on their services.

However, new information just made available suggests that this cooperation may not take place on entirely voluntary basis.

In fact, the Government is considering the introduction of updated anti-piracy legislation if the measures taken by Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other tech stakeholders prove insufficient.

Civil servants at the IPO have started to collect evidence for ministers to document potential gaps in current legislation which need to be addressed, The Times reports today.

According to Ros Lynch, director of copyright and enforcement at the IPO, not all tech companies are doing as much as they should.

“A number of companies do have procedures in place and they are taking some action. I’m not saying they’ve been wholly effective. Some are not doing as much as they could,” Lynch says.

In recent months the UK Government has hosted talks with tech companies and entertainment industry players, hoping to reach voluntary agreements. Thus far these meetings have been without result.

Google, one of the primary targets of the movie and music industry companies, maintains that the current takedown system is both effective and efficient enough to deal with infringing content.

However, UK music group BPI would like to see a more pro-active anti-piracy stance from various intermediaries. Search engines, for example, should make sure that content doesn’t re-appear under a new URL once it’s been removed.

“This damaging situation can only be remedied by Google themselves changing strategy and proactively pursuing a ‘notice and stay down’ approach, so that once a piece of content has been notified for removal by the BPI, it isn’t indexed again for the same site and stays removed,” the BPI noted previously.

How UK law could be amended to address these concerns is unclear, but the major search engines and social networks are likely to push back hard against more restrictive policies.

This is not the first time that the UK Government has warned major Internet companies over their lacking anti-piracy policies. Former UK Culture Secretary Sajid Javid issued a similar “legislative” threat two years ago, without much effect.

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

Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 05/16/16

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent are in again. ‘Captain America: Civil War’ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘How To Be Single’ ‘Deadpool’ completes the top three.

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

capt1This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Captain America: Civil War is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking (last week) Movie IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1 (…) Captain America: Civil War (TC) 8.4 / trailer
2 (1) How To Be Single (Web-DL) 6.2 / trailer
3 (…) The Huntsman: Winter’s War (Webrip) 6.2 / trailer
4 (…) London Has Fallen (Web-DL) 6.0 / trailer
5 (2) Zoolander 2 (Web-DL) 5.0 / trailer
6 (4) Zootopia (TS) 8.3 / trailer
7 (3) Deadpool 8.6 / trailer
8 (7) Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (TS) 7.5 / trailer
9 (10) The Jungle Book (TS) 8.3 / trailer
10 (5) 10 Cloverfield Lane (Webrip) 7.6 / trailer

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

SpaceX puts its third booster in a barn—and the result is dazzling

The company now must test these landed boosters to see when they can fly again.

SpaceX

SpaceX has now successfully landed three first stage boosters.

9 more images in gallery

SpaceX has now successfully landed three rockets from space—one by land and two by sea. That has given the company quite a collection of boosters in its Hangar 39A at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This weekend, the rocket company released some photos of the three boosters together after the Falcon 9, which delivered a Japanese communications satellite transfer orbit some 35,786km above the Earth earlier this month, was towed back to the Florida coast and brought into the hangar. This success led Musk to muse on Twitter: "May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar."

These three landings have marked an important step toward a key goal of SpaceX and other new space companies—reusability. This would completely remake the economics of spaceflight because launch costs are driven by hardware, not propellants. The cost to fuel a Falcon 9 rocket with liquid oxygen and kerosene propellant is about $200,000, Musk said. The company’s commercial launch price is $61 million.

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HTML5 by default: Google’s plan to make Chrome’s Flash click-to-play

Top 10 sites will be whitelisted, everything else will default to HTML5.

Google will be taking another step towards an HTML5-only Web later this year, as the systematic deprecation and removal of Flash continues.

In a plan outlined last week, Flash will be disabled by default in the fourth quarter of this year. Embedded Flash content will not run, and JavaScript attempts to detect the plugin will not find it. Whenever Chrome detects that a site is trying to use the plugin, it will ask the user if they want to enable it or not. It will also trap attempts to redirect users to Adobe's Flash download page and similarly offer to enable the plugin.

There will be a few exceptions to this policy, with Google planning to leave Flash enabled by default on the top 10 domains that depend on the plugin. This list includes YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and Amazon. Even this reprieve is temporary. The plan is to remove sites from the list whenever possible—Twitch, for example, is switching to HTML5 streaming, so should start to phase out its use of Flash—and after one year the whitelist will be removed entirely. This means that after the fourth quarter 2017, Flash will need to be explicitly enabled on every site that tries to use it.

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IBM Patents Printer That Doesn’t Copy Infringing Content

IBM has submitted an application to expand its portfolio with a rather peculiar patent. To protect rightsholders the technology company has invented a printer that doesn’t copy or print any copyright infringing text or images.

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

ibmEvery week hundreds of million of people copy and print documents, even though they officially don’t always have the rights to do so.

This unauthorized printing can be problematic for copyright holders, such as book authors, IBM says, and this week the company filed a patent application for a technology that aims to counter the problem.

Simply titled “Copyright Infringement Prevention,” the patent’s main goal is to ‘restrict’ the functionality of printers, so they only process jobs when the person who’s printing them has permission to do so.

It works as follows. When a printer receives a print job, it parses the content for potential copyrighted material. If there is a match, it won’t copy or print anything unless the person in question has authorization.

“The computer, in response to identifying any text, images, or formatting indicative of potential copyrighted material, identifies potential copyrighted material within the file.”

“The computer determines whether the file may be printed based, at least in part, on the identified potential copyrighted material,” the patent description adds.

The patent describes various variations on this approach, and IBM notes that ISBN numbers, United States Copyright Office records, and other public resources could be used to define the copyright status of a work.

Image from IBM’s patent

ibmpatent

IBM sees a wide variety of applications for their printer patent. For example, it may also include a feature that provides users with “options to acquire permissions” to print or copy something.

In addition, the printer can also scan through large amounts of texts, much like the plagiarism checkers many schools use nowadays.

The patent doesn’t go into detail about the potential market for these type of printers, but we doubt that the general public will be very interested in a printer or scanner that limits what they can do.

That said, it may be more suitable for a business environment, where preventing infringements and limiting rights or users often has a higher priority.

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

Blade Box is a Chinese game console that runs Windows 10

Blade Box is a Chinese game console that runs Windows 10

Chinese software company Tencent is working with chip maker Intel on a new game console platform called the TGP Box (Tencent Games Platform).

The first model is a system manufactured by Haier called the Blade Box, and while it looks like a game console, it’s  basically a Windows 10-powered computer with an Intel Skylake processor.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a blurring of the lines between game consoles and desktop PCs.

Continue reading Blade Box is a Chinese game console that runs Windows 10 at Liliputing.

Blade Box is a Chinese game console that runs Windows 10

Chinese software company Tencent is working with chip maker Intel on a new game console platform called the TGP Box (Tencent Games Platform).

The first model is a system manufactured by Haier called the Blade Box, and while it looks like a game console, it’s  basically a Windows 10-powered computer with an Intel Skylake processor.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a blurring of the lines between game consoles and desktop PCs.

Continue reading Blade Box is a Chinese game console that runs Windows 10 at Liliputing.