Through August 18, SoftBank’s latest creation is rolling around a Palo Alto store.
Nevertheless, being face-to-face with SoftBank Robotics’ new “social robot” named Pepper was exciting and a bit odd.
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Corkscrew light may increase bandwidth, but it needs special fibers.
(credit: NASA)
We live and die by data these days. Data rates and latencies are everything, with data centers and chips designed to maximize communication speeds.
The hero in the world of data is the optical fiber. Thanks to light's very high base frequency, it is possible to modulate it very quickly without using a huge amount of bandwidth. Optical fiber's ability to modulate light quickly allows network designers to choose a wavelength band, divide it up into slots, and use each slot to communicate its own data. So a typical fiber will carry several channels, each operating at multi-gigabit-per-second speeds. This approach, already many, many years old, has served us very well.
But all good things come to an end. Researchers are always looking for ways to carry more information, and one idea—that one, at the back of the class, ignored by all the other ideas—is to use special states of light to encode information. These orbital angular momentum (OAM) states have the potential to vastly increase bandwidth, but they are difficult to handle. Some recent research, however, suggests that we might well be using OAM states before too long.
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Scenes from the four-day celebration of Nintendo’s long-lived fighting franchise.
Not many gaming franchises can sustain an entire fan convention on their own. The second annual Super Smash Con proves that Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. is one of those franchises.
A diverse audience of thousands of fans descended on Chantilly, Virginia for the four-day event this weekend. Most were there for the multi-tiered double-elimination tournaments, fought on everything from the Wii U to the Nintendo 64 where Super Smash Bros. first appeared. Other attendees were there for a celebration of gaming's past and present, including a bustling arcade, fully stocked classic gaming vendors, a variety of game-themed musical and variety acts, and a selection of indie "platform fighters" inspired by the Smash phenomenon.
Attendees mixed and mingled between both parts of the convention throughout the day. But every time the tournament audience let out a loud, synchronized "Ohhhh!" at some amazing takedown or comeback, minglers from around the convention hall literally came running to see what the fuss was about. As fun as it is to watch Smash Bros. tournaments on a livestream, nothing compares to the electricity of a live crowd.
Read on Ars Technica | Comments
Amazon’s eReaders, tablets, and other hardware tend to be competitively priced since Amazon hopes to make money selling you eBooks, videos, games, and Prime memberships. But the company still has a habit of discounting its devices from time to time.
Today the company is running sales on several eReaders, tablets, and other products.
Here are some of the best deals:
There’s also a new deal that lets you score a free Amazon Echo (worth $180) when you sign up for select sources from The Princeton Review.
Continue reading Some Amazon Kindle, Tap, and Fire devices on sale today at Liliputing.
Amazon’s eReaders, tablets, and other hardware tend to be competitively priced since Amazon hopes to make money selling you eBooks, videos, games, and Prime memberships. But the company still has a habit of discounting its devices from time to time.
Today the company is running sales on several eReaders, tablets, and other products.
Here are some of the best deals:
There’s also a new deal that lets you score a free Amazon Echo (worth $180) when you sign up for select sources from The Princeton Review.
Continue reading Some Amazon Kindle, Tap, and Fire devices on sale today at Liliputing.
Facebook soll Nutzerdaten gar nicht oder nur zögerlich an deutsche Sicherheitsbehörden herausgeben. Bundesinnenminister de Maizière will hier den Druck erhöhen. (Facebook, Instant Messenger)
Facebook soll Nutzerdaten gar nicht oder nur zögerlich an deutsche Sicherheitsbehörden herausgeben. Bundesinnenminister de Maizière will hier den Druck erhöhen. (Facebook, Instant Messenger) This week The Pirate Bay quietly celebrated its 13th anniversary. Where other giants have fallen in the past, the notorious Pirate ship has stayed afloat. Today we chat with the TPB-team to discuss their remarkable achievement.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Hollywood hoped that it would never happen, but this week The Pirate Bay quietly turned thirteen years old.
The site was founded in 2003 by Swedish pro-culture organization Piratbyrån (Piracy Bureau). The idea was to create the first public file-sharing network in Sweden, but the site soon turned into the global file-sharing icon it is today.
Over the years there have been numerous attempts to shut the site down. Following pressure from the United States, Swedish authorities raided the site in 2006, only to see it come back stronger.
The criminal convictions of the site’s founders didn’t kill the site either, nor did any of the subsequent attempts to take it offline.
The Pirate Bay is still very much ‘alive’ today.
That’s quite an achievement by itself, looking at all the other sites that have fallen over the years. Just last month KickassTorrents shut down, followed by Torrentz a few days ago.
Many KickassTorrents and Torrentz users are now turning to TPB to get their daily dose of torrents. As a result, The Pirate Bay is now the most visited torrent site, once again.
TorrentFreak spoke to several members of the TPB-crew. While they are not happy with the circumstances, they do say that the site has an important role to fulfil in the torrent community.
“TPB is as important today as it was yesterday, and its role in being the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site will continue for the foreseeable future,” Spud17 says.
“Sure, TPB has its flaws and glitches but it’s still the go-to site for all our media needs, and I can see TPB still being around in 20 or 30 years time, even if the technology changes,” she adds.
Veteran TPB-crew member Xe agrees that TPB isn’t perfect but points to the site’s resilience as a crucial factor that’s particularly important today.
“TPB ain’t perfect. There are plenty of things wrong with it, but it is simple, steadfast and true,” Xe tells TorrentFreak.
“So it’s no real surprise that it is once more the destination of choice or that it has survived for so long in spite of the inevitable turnover of crew.”
And resilient it is. Thirteen years after the site came online, The Pirate Bay is the “King of Torrents” once again.
Finally, we close with a yearly overview of the top five torrent sites of the last decade. Notably, the Pirate Bay is the only site that appears in the list every year, which is perhaps the best illustration of the impact it had, and still has today.
1. TorrentSpy
2. Mininova
3. The Pirate Bay
4. isoHunt
5. Demonoid
1. Mininova
2. isoHunt
3. The Pirate Bay
4. Torrentz
5. BTJunkie
1. The Pirate Bay
2. Mininova
3. isoHunt
4. Torrentz
5. Torrentreactor
1. The Pirate Bay
2. Torrentz
3. isoHunt
4. Mininova
5. BTJunkie
1. The Pirate Bay
2. Torrentz
3. isoHunt
4. KickassTorrents
5. BTJunkie
1. The Pirate Bay
2. Torrentz.com
3. KickassTorrents
4. isoHunt
5. BTJunkie
1. The Pirate Bay
2. KickassTorrents
3. Torrentz
4. ExtraTorrent
5. 1337X
1. The Pirate Bay
2. KickassTorrents
3. Torrentz
4. ExtraTorrent
5. YIFY-Torrents
1. KickassTorrents
2. Torrentz.com
3. ExtraTorrent
4. The Pirate Bay
5. YTS
1. KickassTorrents
2. The Pirate Bay
3. ExtraTorrent
4. Torrentz
4. RARBG
1. The Pirate Bay
2. ExtraTorrent
3. RARBG
4. YTS.AG
5. 1337X
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Der neue Flug einer Falcon-9-Rakete war erfolgreich und endete mit der sechsten erfolgreichen Landung. Inzwischen bereitet sich SpaceX nicht nur auf die Wiederverwendung der ersten Stufe vor. (SpaceX, Raumfahrt)
Behind the scenes, groups of individuals are trying to make BitTorrent better with steady, incremental updates. A new proposal tabled by P2P developer Luca Matteis envisions a tweak to the protocol that would allow greater resilience in the BitTorrent ecosystem.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Regardless of differing opinions on what kind of content should be shifted around using the protocol, few will contest the beauty of BitTorrent.
Thanks to the undoubted genius of creator Bram Cohen, it is still extremely robust some 15 years after its debut.
But while some may assume that BitTorrent is no longer under development, the opposite is true. Behind the scenes, groups of developers are working to further develop the protocol via BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals (BEPs).
Early BEPs, such as those covering DHT, PEX and private torrents, have long since been implemented but the process continues today.
Just one of the P2P developers involved is Luca Matteis. He lives in Rome, Italy, where he studies Computer Science at the Sapienza University and works part-time on various projects.
Passionate about P2P and decentralized systems, Luca informs TorrentFreak that his goal is to enable people to share and communicate in a censorship resistant manner. His fresh proposal, Updating Torrents Via DHT Mutable Items, was submitted last month and aims to live up to that billing.
We asked Luca to explain what his group’s proposal (it’s a team effort) is all about and he kindly obliged. It begins with the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and a previous enhancement proposal.
“So currently the DHT in BitTorrent is used as a peer discovery mechanism for torrents, and it has really nice decentralized properties. It works just like a tracker, with the difference being that trackers are on central servers with a domain name, and therefore can be easily shut down,” Luca begins.
“[An earlier enhancement proposal] BEP44 added some interesting properties to the DHT network, namely the feature of being able to store arbitrary data. So instead of just storing IP addresses of people downloading specific torrents, we can now store any kind of data (max 1000 bytes per item).”
Luca says that so far this functionality hasn’t been used by torrent clients. uTorrent apparently has it under the hood, with some developers believing it’s there for reasons connected to BitTorrent Inc’s Bleep software. At this point, however, it only exists at the network level.
Importantly, however, Luca says that BEP44 allows one to store changing values under a key.
“We call these mutable items. So what you could do is generate a public key, which can be thought of as your address, and share this with the world. Then you use this public key to store stuff in BitTorrent’s DHT network. And, because it’s your public key, you (and only you) can change the value pointed by your public key.”
As mentioned earlier, only a 1000 bytes can be stored (less than 1kB), but Luca points out that it’s possible to store the info hash of a torrent, 79816060EA56D56F2A2148CD45705511079F9BCA, for example. Now things get interesting.
“At this point, your public key has very similar properties to an HTTP URL [a website address], with the difference that (just like trackers before) the value does not exist on a single computer/server, but is constantly shared across the DHT network,” he explains.
“Our BEP46 extension is an actual standardization of what the value, pointed by your public key, should look like. Our standard says it should be an info hash of a torrent. This allows for a multitude of use cases, but more practically it allows for torrents to automatically change what they’re downloading based on the public key value inside the DHT.”
While the technically minded out there might already know where this is going, Luca is kind enough to spell it out.
“Torrent sites (such as The Pirate Bay) could share a magnet link they control, which contains their public key. What they would store at this ‘address’ is the infohash of a torrent which contains a database of all their torrents,” he says.
“Users who trust them would bookmark the magnet link, and when they click on it, a torrent will start downloading. Specifically, they’d start downloading the database dump of the torrent site.”
While that might not yet sound like magic, the ability to change the value held in the DHT proves extremely useful.
“The cool thing is that when the torrent site decides to share more torrents (new releases, better quality stuff, more quality reviews), all they need to do is update the value in the DHT with a new torrent containing a new .rss file.
“At this point, all the users downloading from their magnet link will automatically be downloading the new torrent and will always have an up-to-date .RSS dump of torrents,” he says.
But while this would be useful to users, Luca says that sites like The Pirate Bay could also benefit.
“For torrent sites, this would be an attractive solution because they wouldn’t need to maintain a central HTTP server which implies costs and can be easily shut down. On the other hand, their mutable torrent magnet link cannot be easily shut down, does not imply maintenance costs, and cannot be easily tracked down,” he concludes.
For those interested in the progress of this enhancement proposal and others like it, all BEPs can be found here.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Mobilfunklöcher erwartet man im Jahr 2016 eher in Wüsten oder auf hoher See. Wir wollten wissen, wie es sich eine Woche lang in einem Funkloch mitten in Deutschland lebt, und warum es so etwas noch gibt. (
Seit mehr als 35 Jahren sind die USA und der Iran offiziell verfeindet. Aber viele Iraner finden Produkte aus dem Land gut - besonders iPhones. Der Schwarzmarkt boomt. Nun will auch die Regierung in Teheran von den Geschäften profitieren. (
Der neue Flug einer Falcon-9-Rakete war erfolgreich und endete mit der sechsten erfolgreichen Landung. Inzwischen bereitet sich SpaceX nicht nur auf die Wiederverwendung der ersten Stufe vor. (