Laster mit Stromabnehmer: Hybrid-Lkw mit Oberleitung startet in Schweden

Ein zwei Kilometer langer Autobahnabschnitt in Schweden ist von Siemens mit einer Oberleitung versehen worden, damit spezielle Lkw dort Strom für ihren Elektroantrieb beziehen können. Abseits der Strecke nutzen die Hybrid-Lkw Verbrennungsmotoren. (Siemens, Technologie)

Ein zwei Kilometer langer Autobahnabschnitt in Schweden ist von Siemens mit einer Oberleitung versehen worden, damit spezielle Lkw dort Strom für ihren Elektroantrieb beziehen können. Abseits der Strecke nutzen die Hybrid-Lkw Verbrennungsmotoren. (Siemens, Technologie)

Studios & ISPs Clash Over Aussie Pirate Bay Blockade

The Pirate Bay and other leading torrent sites will be eventually blocked in Australia but the mechanics are far from decided. This week rightsholders and ISPs have been in court fighting over the details. Predictably they’re poles apart, and still arguing over who will pay.

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

ausAfter new legislation was passed last year, the first site-blocking cases were filed in Federal Court during the early part of 2016.

Two major industry players are putting the legislation to the test, with Roadshow Films (the movie division of Village Roadshow) and TV giant Foxtel both seeking to have several pirate sites blocked at the ISP level.

Foxtel wants to render The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and TorrentHound inaccessible in Australia. Roadshow is targeting streaming portal Solarmovie.

After a hearing in March, entertainment companies and local ISPs appeared in court again this week to thrash out the details. The ISPs aren’t putting up a fight against blocking per se, but there are still many practical issues to be agreed.

Section 115a of the Copyright Act states that ISPs can be forced to block an overseas “online location” if its purpose is to infringe copyright. To future-proof the law against new technologies, the term “online location” is intentionally broad. No surprise then that rightsholders argued this week that it encompasses blocking more than just IP addresses and URLs.

“[It’s] a broader shorthand reference for the idea that those responsible for the publication of the digital content at the website accessible by various URLs and IP addresses are within the broader definition of online location,” said Foxtel and Roadshow counsel Richard Lancaster.

What rightsholders are striving for is a situation similar to the one in the UK, where sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents are blocked but proxies and other workarounds can be easily added to existing injunctions. To date, rightsholders and ISPs have been unable to reach agreement on how such a mechanism can be implemented in Australia.

Today, there was further legal argument, and not unexpectedly the ISPs are at odds with several of the studios’ demands.

To cut down on costs, rightsholders want the ability to swiftly add mirrors and proxies to existing blocking orders after formally advising ISPs. They say this will streamline the process and ensure that new blocks are put in place within 15 days.

However, ISPs Telstra, Optus, TPG and M2 say that rightsholders should have to obtain new court orders for each “workaround” site that appears.

Counsel for Telstra said that taking the official route would not entail much more work than informally filing a request with ISPs. According to an ITNews report, the rightsholders disagreed.

“This is a known problem in the real world. It will be a problem that arises in the implementation of your honor’s orders,” Richard Lancaster said.

“And we’re concerned – given this is the first [blocking] case – that a procedure be adopted that will not create a real administrative burden for the future in having to do something unnecessary and elaborate such as the [ISPs] suggest.”

Arguing the case for a simplified process, Lancaster said that in the unlikely event of a problem while executing an informal website block, any issues could be quickly be presented to the court for resolution.

“It’s not a proportionate response to the likelihood that these secondary [proxy and mirror] sites will be popping up for the copyright owners to be required to brief lawyers, pay them to prepare an affidavit, file it and serve it and so on. An out of court notification is sufficient by way of technical notice and practical operation.”

While the sides continue to butt heads over the mechanics of blocking, the not insignificant matter of who will pay also persists. Predictably, rightsholders feel that ISPs should foot the bill. ISPs think otherwise.

Arguing that ISPs are “successful and wealthy organizations,” Lancaster said that the costs of blocking are both minimal and “comfortable” for them to bear. And if ISPs are paying, that will provide them with an incentive to keep costs down.

“In England the rights holders don’t have to pay for implementation because it’s regarded as being part of the business of carrying out the business of an ISP,” Lancaster said.

“The [rights holders] can’t control the cost of implementation. If the [ISPs] bear the cost, that will encourage the most efficient and cost effective way of blocking. It’s appropriate that if the law requires that illegal or infringing content be blocked or stopped, and that requires some action on the part of [ISPs], they should bear those costs.”

And the rightsholders aren’t stopping there. Not only do they want ISPs to cover the costs of blocking, they want them to foot all of the legal bills too.

“They’re the ones that turned it into a contested hearing, putting on evidence and rounds of hearings,” Lancaster told the court.

The hearings continue.

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

Hohe Verluste: Blackberry-Chef will Plan B noch nicht umsetzen

Trotz hoher Verluste will Blackberry weiter auf das Smartphone-Geschäft setzen. Auch die Verkaufszahlen der eigenen Geräte gehen weiter zurück. Der Blackberry-Chef hat einen Plan B parat, den er aber vorerst nicht umsetzen möchte. (Blackberry, Smartphone)

Trotz hoher Verluste will Blackberry weiter auf das Smartphone-Geschäft setzen. Auch die Verkaufszahlen der eigenen Geräte gehen weiter zurück. Der Blackberry-Chef hat einen Plan B parat, den er aber vorerst nicht umsetzen möchte. (Blackberry, Smartphone)

Apple retires the Thunderbolt Display without announcing a replacement

Apple tells users to look elsewhere instead of replacing the 5-year-old screen.

Enlarge (credit: iFixit)

Apple has yet to announce an updated version of 2011's Thunderbolt Display, but pretty soon it won't be selling the old one either. The company will sell through any existing stock in the online and brick-and-mortar Apple Stores, but it doesn't plan to continue manufacturing the current model.

According to a statement given to TechCrunch, Apple is pointing its users toward third-party monitors. There are plenty of these and they come in all different sizes and screen resolutions and panel qualities and prices, though none offer actual Thunderbolt activity; regular USB hubs are far more common.

Some pre-WWDC scuttlebutt indicated that Apple is working on a 5K Retina version of the Thunderbolt Display, possibly with its own dedicated GPU to work around bandwidth limitations of the DisplayPort 1.2 spec. That monitor never materialized, but it could still show up as part of a Mac-related push when Apple updates its MacBook Pros and other computers. These refreshes are said to be coming later this year.

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Sandisk Ixpand Memory Case: Speicherhülle macht das iPhone modular

Sandisk hat eine iPhone-Hülle vorgestellt, die eigenen Flash-Speicher enthält und einen Zusatzakku aufnehmen kann, um die Laufzeit des Smartphones zu verlängern. Bis zu 128 GByte Speicher lassen sich so aufrüsten. (Sandisk, Mobil)

Sandisk hat eine iPhone-Hülle vorgestellt, die eigenen Flash-Speicher enthält und einen Zusatzakku aufnehmen kann, um die Laufzeit des Smartphones zu verlängern. Bis zu 128 GByte Speicher lassen sich so aufrüsten. (Sandisk, Mobil)

Postauto: Schweiz erprobt autonome Busse im Alltag

Zwei autonome Kleinbusse fahren durch das schweizerische Sitten und befördern Fahrgäste mit maximal 20 km/h. Ein menschlicher Aufpasser kann jedoch jederzeit den Notausschalter drücken. (Autonomes Fahren, Technologie)

Zwei autonome Kleinbusse fahren durch das schweizerische Sitten und befördern Fahrgäste mit maximal 20 km/h. Ein menschlicher Aufpasser kann jedoch jederzeit den Notausschalter drücken. (Autonomes Fahren, Technologie)

GM shares fuel cell research to US Navy to develop unmanned undersea vehicles

A partnership between auto company and military aims to extend vehicles’ range.

General Motors, the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory announce Thursday, June 23, 2016, they are cooperating to incorporate automotive hydrogen fuel cell systems into a next-generation of Navy unmanned undersea vehicles, or UUVs. Hydrogen fuel cells convert high-energy hydrogen efficiently into electricity, resulting in vehicles with greater range and endurance than those powered with batteries. (Office of Naval Research File Photo) (credit: Office of Naval Research File Photo)

On Thursday, Detroit automaker General Motors and the US Navy announced a partnership in which the Navy would be able to take advantage of hydrogen fuel cell research from GM to develop a long-endurance unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV).

According to Karen Swider-Lyons, the head of the Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) Chemistry Division of its Alternative Energy Section, the Navy is looking for “weeks if not months of endurance” from a UUV. She stressed that research and testing is still in early stages, and that the Navy had not yet pinpointed a single application it wanted to apply fuel-cell powered underwater drones to. “As the technology becomes available we’ll see,” Swider-Lyons said on a conference call this morning. “You can look at the history of unmanned air vehicles and guess.”

Fuel cell technology has been lauded as a potentially revolutionary energy source for zero-emissions vehicles, using hydrogen to create electricity and emitting H2O as waste. While fuel-cells are more energy dense than batteries, batteries have generally won out when it comes to building zero-emissions cars because hydrogen refueling centers are scarce and storing hydrogen itself can require a high-pressure container or very cold temperatures.

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“Godless” apps, some found in Google Play, root 90% of Android phones

Malware family packages a large number of exploits that give all-powerful root access.

(credit: greyweed)

Researchers have detected a family of malicious apps, some that were available in Google Play, that contain malicious code capable of secretly rooting an estimated 90 percent of all Android phones.

In a recently published blog post, antivirus provider Trend Micro said that Godless, as the malware family has been dubbed, contains a collection of rooting exploits that works against virtually any device running Android 5.1 or earlier. That accounts for an estimated 90 percent of all Android devices. Members of the family have been found in a variety of app stores, including Google Play, and have been installed on more than 850,000 devices worldwide. Godless has struck hardest at users in India, Indonesia, and Thailand, but so far less than 2 percent of those infected are in the US.

Once an app with the malicious code is installed, it has the ability to pull from a vast repository of exploits to root the particular device it's running on. In that respect, the app functions something like the many available exploit kits that cause hacked websites to identify specific vulnerabilities in individual visitors' browsers and serve drive-by exploits. Trend Micro Mobile Threats Analyst Veo Zhang wrote:

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What if we treated online harassment the same way we treat spam?

Ars Technica Live #3: Sarah Jeong believes there are technical solutions to the online harassment problem.

Ars Technica Live #3. Filmed by Chris Schodt, edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

In our third episode of Ars Technica Live, your intrepid hosts Annalee Newitz and Cyrus Farivar talked to journalist Sarah Jeong about online harassment. Jeong is the author of The Internet of Garbage, a book about how companies and online communities are using technology to cope with harassment and bullying. Watch the video, filmed before a live audience of Ars readers in Oakland, California at Longitude Bar.

Editor's Note: Our apologies for the sound issues. You can hear everything, but there are some crackles and annoyances. We promise to have that fixed for our episode next month.

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Pluto might have a semi-frozen ocean lurking under its icy shell

Understanding the dwarf planet’s interior based on modeling and clues at its surface.

(credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

The pictures that came from New Horizons' flyby of Pluto have set off a scramble to make sense of the dwarf planet's terrain. Pluto's clearly geologically active, with mountains and fresh surfaces that haven't been pummeled by impacts yet. One of those features, Sputnik Planum, appears to be an ocean of frozen nitrogen, fed by nitrogen glaciers that line its shores. But a new analysis suggests that this isn't the only ocean on the dwarf planet.

An analysis of the internal structure and heating of Pluto indicates that there are two likely probabilities: either it has a deep ocean of liquid water, or the water on Pluto has frozen solid and compacted into a dense form of ice called ice II. And the authors of the analysis suggest that the liquid ocean makes more sense given Pluto's surface features.

The analysis was done in a similar manner to the ones that tackled Sputnik Planum: figure out Pluto's composition and its heat budget and trace the effects of the heat as it escapes to the surface. The heat itself comes from Pluto's rocky core, which carries some of the same radioactive isotopes that help keep the Earth's core nice and toasty. Above that, however, Pluto is mostly water, with difficult-to-determine fractions of things like ammonia and methane.

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