Blu-ray, Ultra HD Blu-ray sales stats for the week ending 16th April 2016

The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending 16th April 2016 are in. Justice League vs. Teen Titans was the top selling new release for the week, but it failed to outsell last week’s number one (and…



The results and analysis for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray sales for the week ending 16th April 2016 are in. Justice League vs. Teen Titans was the top selling new release for the week, but it failed to outsell last week's number one (and one of the best selling Blu-ray titles on record), Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Read the rest of the stats and analysis to find out how DVD, Blu-ray, Ultra HD Blu-ray did.

Hacking group “PLATINUM” used Windows’ own patching system against it

Unknown group attacked South East Asian targets, sometimes for years at a time.

Platinum mass & well-formed crystals from Russia. (public display, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA) (credit: James St. John)

Microsoft's Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team works to track down and identify hacking groups that perpetrate attacks. The focus is on the groups that are most selective about their targets and that work hardest to stay undetected. The company wrote today about one particular group that it has named PLATINUM.

The unknown group has been attacking targets in South East Asia since at least 2009, with Malaysia being its biggest victim with just over half the attacks, and Indonesia in second place. Almost half of the attacks were aimed at government organizations of some kind, including intelligence and defense agencies, and a further quarter of the attacks were aimed at ISPs. The goal of these attacks does not appear to have been immediate financial gain—these hackers weren't after credit cards and banking details—but rather broader economic espionage using stolen information.

Microsoft doesn't appear to know a great deal about the team doing the hacking. They have often used spear-phishing to initially penetrate target networks and seem to have taken great pains to hide their attacks. For example, they've used self-deleting malware to cover their tracks, customized malware to evade anti-virus detection, and malware that limits its network activity to only be active during business hours, so its traffic is harder to notice. Redmond suggests that the adversary is likely a government organization of some kind, due to its organization and the kinds of data it has sought to steal.

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Turn a $35 Raspberry Pi into a Chromebox with Chromium OS for SBC

Turn a $35 Raspberry Pi into a Chromebox with Chromium OS for SBC

Google’s Chrome OS operating system may not exactly be open source, but it’s based on the open source Chromium OS. And if you know what you’re doing, you can adapt Chromium OS into an operating system that can run on all sorts of devices.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can let other developers do the heavy lifting, and just download and install their pre-compiled builds. For example, want to turn a Raspberry Pi into a Chromebox?

Continue reading Turn a $35 Raspberry Pi into a Chromebox with Chromium OS for SBC at Liliputing.

Turn a $35 Raspberry Pi into a Chromebox with Chromium OS for SBC

Google’s Chrome OS operating system may not exactly be open source, but it’s based on the open source Chromium OS. And if you know what you’re doing, you can adapt Chromium OS into an operating system that can run on all sorts of devices.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can let other developers do the heavy lifting, and just download and install their pre-compiled builds. For example, want to turn a Raspberry Pi into a Chromebox?

Continue reading Turn a $35 Raspberry Pi into a Chromebox with Chromium OS for SBC at Liliputing.

Slower iPhone, iPad, and Mac sales drive Apple’s revenue down in Q2 2016

Pretty much anything would look bad compared to Q2 of 2015, though.

Apple's two biggest moneymakers, the iPhone and iPad, are down year-over-year. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has just released its earnings report for the second quarter of fiscal 2016, which runs from the beginning of January to the end of March. As CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri warned in last quarter's earnings call, iPhone sales were down year-over-year for the first time since the product's launch in 2007. Since the iPhone accounts for around two-thirds of Apple's revenue, this means that Apple is also reporting its first year-over-year quarterly revenue decline since 2003, something CEO Tim Cook referred to as a "pause in [Apple's] growth." iPad and Mac sales are also down, though the Services and "Other products" categories ticked upward.

Apple made $10.5 billion in profit and $58 billion in revenue, compared to $13.6 billion in profit and $58 billion in revenue in Q1 of 2015. Its gross margin was 39.4 percent. These results beat the low end of Apple's guidance for the quarter, which predicted revenue between $50 billion and $53 billion and a profit margin between 39 and 40 percent.

The company predicts that the year-over-year quarterly decline will continue next year—Apple expects it will make between $41 and $43 billion in revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2016 with profit margins between 37.5 and 38 percent. This is well below the $49.6 billion in revenue that Apple made in Q3 of 2015.

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Quartalszahlen: Apple meldet erstmals Rückgang beim iPhone-Absatz

Apples über dreizehn Jahre dauernde Wachstumsphase ist unterbrochen. Umsatz, Gewinn und iPhone-Absatz sind gefallen. Doch der Konzern macht weiterhin einen Quartalsgewinn von 10,5 Milliarden US-Dollar. (Apple, Börse)

Apples über dreizehn Jahre dauernde Wachstumsphase ist unterbrochen. Umsatz, Gewinn und iPhone-Absatz sind gefallen. Doch der Konzern macht weiterhin einen Quartalsgewinn von 10,5 Milliarden US-Dollar. (Apple, Börse)

Fullscreen’s video subscription service is packed with YouTube-driven shows

Shane Dawson and Grace Helbig among the stars to produce shows on Fullscreen.

(credit: Fullscreen)

YouTube Red isn't the only digital video service to put YouTube stars at the forefront of its content. The media company Fullscreen launched its online video subscription service featuring shows that star YouTube personalities, including Grace Helbig and Shane Dawson. The ad-free subscription service will be free for the first month and then users can pay $4.99 per month to continue watching.

Fullscreen started out as a type of talent agency that worked with social media stars to secure ad-sponsored deals on free sites like Instagram. Fullscreen's founder George Strompolos told the BCC, "Social media is a great place to make quick, inexpensive content to engage a fanbase. But when it comes to longer form or premium productions, the economics of producing it on the free web just don't work out." Now, with the company's roster of more than 75,000 partners (many of which are from YouTube), it will create a "premium destination" with original content featuring a lot of online personalities that young people already know, as well as licensed shows and movies.

Fullscreen didn't waste time in going for the big stars on YouTube. Comedian and personality Shane Dawson of ShaneDawsonTV has a huge following of more than 7.3 million subscribers, one movie under his belt with another on the way, and a podcast he's been recording for the past three years. Fullscreen will take his Shane and Friends podcast and produce it in video format, so fans who want to watch Dawson and his cohost Jessie Buttafuoco interact with guests can do so, while others can still listen to the podcast for free on iTunes or Soundcloud.

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ZTE Axon Pro 2 makes an appearance at TENAA website

ZTE is expected to launch an update soon for its Axon smartphone with high-end specs and an upper mid-range price. We already have a good idea of what to expect from the ZTE Axon Pro 2 (or whatever it will be called), thanks to a leak from the GFXBench…

ZTE Axon Pro 2 makes an appearance at TENAA website

ZTE is expected to launch an update soon for its Axon smartphone with high-end specs and an upper mid-range price. We already have a good idea of what to expect from the ZTE Axon Pro 2 (or whatever it will be called), thanks to a leak from the GFXBench website.

Now we also have an idea of what the phone will look like, thanks to a listing at the website for Chinese wireless regulatory agency TENAA.

Continue reading ZTE Axon Pro 2 makes an appearance at TENAA website at Liliputing.

As FDA preps e-cigs rules, scientists and Congress rally to support vaping

Fierce debate erupts as sides fight to protect children and smokers from tobacco.

(credit: Kieran McCarthy)

The 2017 Agriculture Appropriations Bill may not seem like a stirring piece of legislation to most, but it raised quite a few eyebrows last week as it passed through a House subcommittee with a key amendment—one that aims to spare the vast majority of electronic cigarettes from impending federal regulations.

The bipartisan effort to protect the burgeoning e-cig market is just the latest in a long-smoldering debate reignited by the Food and Drug Administration’s plans this year to begin regulating the new devices as it does traditional tobacco products. The crux of the controversy is about whether e-cigarettes act more as a gateway into or a ticket out of dangerous tobacco use, the single largest cause of preventable deaths in the US.

Proponents argue that the new FDA regulations will protect children from bad habits. For instance, one of the proposed rules will prevent e-cig makers from using youth-based marketing—like edgy, rebellious ads and candy-flavored e-cigs—that can hook kids into lifelong nicotine addictions and deadly tobacco habits. Such marketing strategies were first used by tobacco companies decades ago and were highly successful until the FDA banned the practice. With e-cig companies already copying the tactics, many politicians and public health experts have chided the FDA for not rolling out regulations faster. The agency first proposed rules back in 2014.

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NSA-Affäre: BND-Chef Schindler muss offenbar gehen

Es wäre die bislang größte personelle Konsequenz aus der NSA-Affäre: BND-Präsident Schindler muss angeblich seinen Posten räumen. Sein vermuteter Nachfolger kommt aus einem Ministerium, das bislang wenig mit den Geheimdiensten in Verbindung gebracht wurde. (NSA, Datenschutz)

Es wäre die bislang größte personelle Konsequenz aus der NSA-Affäre: BND-Präsident Schindler muss angeblich seinen Posten räumen. Sein vermuteter Nachfolger kommt aus einem Ministerium, das bislang wenig mit den Geheimdiensten in Verbindung gebracht wurde. (NSA, Datenschutz)

Dropbox will now show all your files locally without using any disk space

Dropbox will pick up OneDrive’s best feature after Microsoft removed it.

Dropbox will soon be adding support on both Windows and OS X for placeholder files that create a full view of your cloud-synced files, even if they're not available locally.

OneDrive (or rather SkyDrive, as it was called then) in Windows 8.1 was a significant step forward in improving the cloud storage experience for desktop users thanks to its novel handling of cloud-synced files. Within Explorer and at the command prompt, every file stored on OneDrive was shown, even if it wasn't synced locally. Double-clicking a file (or using File... Open within an application) would automatically download it so that it could be read and edited as normal.

This system provided a great increase in usability, especially on machines with limited local storage. Instead of requiring you to pick and choose which files or folders to sync manually in order to avoid filling the local disk, you could see all your files and folders in your OneDrive folder. Only the ones that you actually opened locally would occupy their full size; everything else was shrunk to a few bytes of metadata.

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