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DJI shows off the semi-automated Phantom 4—leave the flying to the drone

The new Phantom has a computer vision system that can detect and avoid objects.

Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

NEW YORK—DJI has just announced the Phantom 4, the latest in the company's line of camera-equipped quadcopters. Of course the newer version flies faster for longer and has a better camera, but the headline feature is the addition of new autonomous flight features that make the drone easier to fly, easier to film, and harder to crash.

Two optical sensors now sit just above the two front legs of the Phantom 4. Combined with a computer vision system, these sensors make a volumetric map of the environment in front of the drone. This allows it to "see" and react to objects in front of it, allowing the drone to take measures to avoid a crash while flying.

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Stupid Patent of the Month: 100+ companies sued over “personalized content”

Patent owner says EFF “calls inventors names” to help the “anti-patent movement.”

(credit: USPTO via EFF)

"Personalized content" is a phrase so vague that it could mean just about anything. That quality makes it just about perfect for use by a patent troll. This month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's patent lawyers have honed in on a patent describing a way of "presenting personalized content relating to offered products and services," owned by Phoenix Licensing LLC, a patent-holding company controlled by Richard Libman, an Arizona man who's sued more that 100 companies.

The main claim of US Patent No. 8,738,435 is little more than a description of sending a "communication" with "identifying content" to a "plurality of persons." The patent essentially describes any type of personalized marketing, as long as it involves a "computer-accessible storage medium."

In other words—personalized marketing, but on a computer.

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Men behind Diffie-Hellman key exchange receive top computer science prize

Pioneering work 40 years ago lead to PGP, TLS, and all your fav crypto protocols.

Before Diffie-Hellman, symmetric cryptography—as exemplified by this Nazi-era Enigma machine—was the norm. (credit: Michele M. F.)

On Tuesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the nation’s leading organization for computer science, awarded its annual top prize of $1 million to two men whose name will forever be immortalized in cryptography: Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.

The 2015 ACM Turing Award, which is sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing," was awarded to a former chief security officer at Sun Microsystems and a professor at Stanford University, respectively.

In their landmark 1976 paper, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange was the first to explore ideas of "public-key cryptography." That concept underpins much of modern cryptography, including PGP encrypted e-mail, TLS, and more. Public-key cryptography, also known as asymmetric cryptography, relies on two keys, one a freely shareable public key, the other a secret private key, thus eliminating the historic key management problem of the same key being kept by both the recipient and sender.

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John McAfee better prepare to eat a shoe because he doesn’t know how iPhones work

John McAfee’s plan to crack the iPhone will not even begin to work.

John McAfee announces a rather implausible plan.

Former antivirus developer and presidential wannabe John McAfee claimed a couple of weeks ago to have the perfect solution to the FBI-Apple stand-off. He offered to crack the iPhone for the FBI for free. This would let the government agency gain access to the phone while freeing Apple from any demands to assist. So confident was McAfee of his ability to help out that he said he'd eat a shoe on TV if he couldn't get into the phone.

It will probably not come as much of a surprise to anyone to learn that the FBI has not been beating down McAfee's door.

Perhaps they were unconvinced by the strategy that the man outlined. He said that he and his team would primarily use "social engineering," which is to say, manipulating people into telling you what you want to know through gaining their trust. It can be a powerful technique, but it certainly isn't a panacea. It's often less effective when the victims are aware that you're trying to socially engineer them (for example, by announcing your intent to do so on the Internet). It's less effective still when the people holding the information are in fact dead. McAfee may be persuasive, but probably not so persuasive as to be able to coax a corpse to give up its PIN.

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FBI is asking courts to legalize crypto backdoors because Congress won’t

The most lawmakers have done is float bill to create a “commission” to study issue.

FBI Director James Comey in the hot seat Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee. (credit: C-SPAN3)

James Comey, the FBI director, told a House panel on Tuesday that the so-called “Going Dark” problem is “grave, growing, and extremely complex.” (PDF)

His prepared testimony to the House Judiciary Committee is not surprising. There’s been a chorus of government actors singing that same song for years. But what we didn't hear was the bureau director ask Congress for legislation authorizing encryption backdoors. That’s because there’s no congressional support—which underscores why the President Obama administration is now invoking a 1789 obscure law in federal courthouses asking judges to do what Congress has declined to do.

"If I didn't do that, I oughta be fired," Comey told the panel during his live testimony. The panel's hearing, "Encryption Tightrope: Balancing Americans' Security and Privacy," was largely dedicated to the FBI's legal battle with Apple. He said if the bureau had the capability to bypass iPhone passcode locks in the dozens of pending cases where they've gone to court, "We wouldn't be litigating if we could."

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GameFly game streaming coming to webOS (on LG TVs)

GameFly Streaming is a service that lets you pay a monthly fee to stream a few dozen games over the internet. When it launched in mid-2015, GameFly Streaming was exclusively available to Amazon Fire TV users. Then GameFly added support for Samsung Smart TVs. Now LG has announced that GameFly Streaming is coming to its […]

GameFly game streaming coming to webOS (on LG TVs) is a post from: Liliputing

Streit um Whatsapp Daten: Facebook-Manager in Brasilien festgenommen

Ein Facebook-Manager wurde in Brasilien festgenommen, weil Whatsapp sich weigert, einer richterlichen Anordnung nachzukommen. Das Unternehmen soll Gesprächsverläufe von Drogenhändlern herausgeben. (Whatsapp, Verschlüsselung)

Play: A P2P Distributed Torrent Site That’s Impossible to Shut Down

An interesting torrent site has just debuted which has the honor of being almost shutdown-proof. ‘Play’ has just appeared on Zeronet, a server-less P2P network that utilizes Bitcoin cryptography and BitTorrent technology. As a result Play might well be the first torrent site that offers magnet links while being hosted by its users.

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

More than two years ago The Pirate Bay revealed a plan to revolutionize its status on the web. Continually dogged by the threat of shutdown and blocking, the site’s operators said they were working on a plan to create their own P2P network.

The concept is certainly interesting. When a user loads a website on the network that data will be also be served to other users accessing the site from the user’s machine. In BitTorrent terms, people accessing the site (leechers) also serve the site (seeders) to other users, meaning that there is no central server and no one point of failure.

While The Pirate Bay’s plan hasn’t come to fruition, others have been working on a similar system. Based out of Budapest, Hungary, Zeronet offers “real-time updated, P2P websites using Bitcoin cryptography and the BitTorrent network.” The slide below describes some of the key features.

A full explanation of how the system works can be found here but for those looking to jump in at the deep-end the process is very simple. Visit Zeronet.io and follow the simple instructions and the whole thing is up and running in a couple of minutes.

Once Zeronet is launched (it appears in your chosen web browser), users are confronted not with a Google search box, but the Zeronet ‘homepage’.

Not only are Zeronet users viewing this website but they’re also hosting it too, so that when others join the network and ask for the page, they retrieve it from other Zeronet users. It functions in a similar way to sharing using BitTorrent, although as yet there is no ‘swarming’ technology in place. In the image below, 96 other people are sharing the page.

This piece isn’t intended to be a guide on using Zeronet, others can help there. However, what piqued our interest is what appears to be the very first torrent site to appear on the Zeronet network. It’s not exactly clear how long ‘Play’ has been in development but its existence has been made known in the past few hours.

‘Play’ is accessed via a Zeronet URL which only works if the Zeronet software is installed. Once on the site it is indistinguishable from any other similar site working on a central server. The site doesn’t offer a tracker (that would create new problems) but instead serves magnet links sourced from RARBG.

As one might expect, the site is the usual fare with the latest movies presented in varying qualities, along with YouTube trailer links where applicable.

As a straightforward website ‘Play’ wouldn’t get a mention here but the way it’s delivered to users is somewhat exciting, especially since this is what The Pirate Bay and indeed BitTorrent Inc.’s Project Maelstrom has been promising for some time. However, before users get too excited, there are some caveats.

While Zeronet sites won’t get taken down as long as someone is ‘seeding’ them, the Zeronet website-serving network is not anonymous. That means that users’ IP addresses are public unless they choose the Tor option or double up with a VPN. Additionally, torrent transfers function in an identical fashion to any other site and are just as public as they ever were.

From a legal perspective Zeronet itself has no issues but of course a site like Play infringes on copyright law just as any other similar site would, even if its operators can remain anonymous. Interestingly though, while someone, somewhere has created Play, its users (not a server company) are now effectively hosting it via their local machines. This raises questions of liability for torrent site hosting in the future.

Finally, Zeronet also offers users a one-click solution to site cloning. This sounds like it might be a real headache for copyright holders but it could also be an equally large headache for the Internet’s spam department. Time will tell how that will play out.

Zeronet’s homepage can be found here.

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

AMD FreeSync: Samsungs 1800R-Curved-Monitore beherrschen FreeSync für HDMI

Mit einem 1.800-Millimeter-Radius sind Samsungs neue Curved-Monitore CF591 und CF390 sehr stark gewölbt. Als erste Displays unterstützen sie die AMD-Technologie FreeSync für HDMI. (Display, AMD)

Pebble Time smartwatches get a $50 price cut (now starting at $150)

Pebbls is cutting the prices of its smartwatches with color screens. Now you can pick up a Pebble Time smartwatch for $150 or a Pebble Time Round for $200. That represents a $50 drop in the prices for each watch, and makes the watches more competitive with other budget smartwatches (and much cheaper than an entry-level […]

Pebble Time smartwatches get a $50 price cut (now starting at $150) is a post from: Liliputing