Der Gründer von Android-x86 ist der neue Technikchef von Remix OS. Damit wird die Zusammenarbeit zwischen dem Android-x86-Projekt und Jide weiter intensiviert. Auch soll Android auf dem Desktop vorangetrieben werden. (Remix OS, Android) Category: Uncategorised
High IQ Countries Have Less Software Piracy, Research Finds
Researchers have found that software piracy is directly linked to intelligence on a national scale. Covering more than 100 countries, the study shows that software piracy rates are lower in more intelligent nations. However, that doesn’t mean that ‘dumb’ countries have no option to curb this trend.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
There are hundreds of reasons why people may turn to piracy. A financial motive is often mentioned, as well as lacking legal alternatives.
A new study from a group of researchers now suggests that national intelligence can also be added to the list.
The researchers report their findings in a paper titled “Intelligence and Crime: A novel evidence for software piracy,” which offers some intriguing insights.
In a rather straightforward analysis, the research examines the link between national IQ scores and local software piracy rates, which are reported by the Business Software Alliance. As can be seen below, there’s a trend indicating that countries with a higher IQ have lower software rates.
“We find that intelligence has statistically significant negative impact on piracy rates,” the researchers confirm in their paper, drawing a causal conclusion.
There are some notable outliers, such as China, where piracy rates and IQ are both relatively high. On the other end of the spectrum we find South Africa, with a low national IQ as well as low piracy rates.
The general trend, however, shows a direct relation between a country’s average IQ and the local software piracy rates.
“After controlling for the potential effect of outlier nations in the sample, software piracy rate declines by about 5.3 percentage points if national IQ increases by 10 points,” the researchers note.
To rule out the possibility that the link is caused by external factors, the researchers carried out robustness tests with various variables including the strength of IP enforcement, political factors, and economic development. However, even after these controls the link remained intact.
Luckily for copyright holders, ‘dumb’ countries are not ‘doomed’ by definition. If the ruling elite is smart enough, they can still lower piracy rates.
“[The results] should not be taken as universal evidence that society with higher intelligent quotient is a requirement to alleviate software piracy,” the researchers write.
“Our findings indicate that if ruling elite enforces policies to decrease software piracy, intelligence provides a credible proxy of the degree of consent of such policies.”
Interestingly, if these results hold up, with a bit of luck software piracy may solve itself in the long run.
Previous research found that software piracy increases literacy in African countries, which may in turn raise the national IQ, which will then lower piracy rates. Or… will that lower literacy again?
The full paper is available here (pdf).
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Mali Egil: ARMs Video-Kern unterstützt HDR-Videos auf Smartphones
Decoding und Encoding von HEVC- sowie VP9-codierten Inhalten mit 10 Bit Farbtiefe: ARMs neuer Mali-Videokern Egil unterstützt HDR und 4K-UHD-Videos mit 120 fps, gedacht ist er für Smartphone-Chips. (ARM, Instant Messenger)
Decoding und Encoding von HEVC- sowie VP9-codierten Inhalten mit 10 Bit Farbtiefe: ARMs neuer Mali-Videokern Egil unterstützt HDR und 4K-UHD-Videos mit 120 fps, gedacht ist er für Smartphone-Chips. (ARM, Instant Messenger) Mobilfunk: Telefónica droht Bußgeld wegen überhöhter Roaming-Gebühren
Manche O2- und Base-Nutzer zahlen zu hohe Roaming-Gebühren. Davon geht die Bundesnetzagentur aus und will dem Mutterkonzern Telefónica Deutschland ein Zwangsgeld verordnen, damit die gesetzlichen Bestimmungen künftig eingehalten werden. (Telefónica, Verbraucherschutz)
Manche O2- und Base-Nutzer zahlen zu hohe Roaming-Gebühren. Davon geht die Bundesnetzagentur aus und will dem Mutterkonzern Telefónica Deutschland ein Zwangsgeld verordnen, damit die gesetzlichen Bestimmungen künftig eingehalten werden. (Telefónica, Verbraucherschutz) Weekly News Roundup (19 June 2016)
From zombie madness to Xbox value, read the news roundup for the week ending 19 June 2016
Continue reading …
From zombie madness to Xbox value, read the news roundup for the week ending 19 June 2016
Jeff Bezos finds the perfect Father’s Day gift: A New Shepard launch
Company opens up to let the world watch its experimental launch.
"Hey guys, do you think we can land with just two of those?" (credit: Blue Origin)
On Sunday morning, Blue Origin plans to continue pushing the capabilities of its New Shepard launch system, as well as the boundaries of the company's own transparency.
The company conducted the first two flights of New Shepard, which consists of a propulsion module and a capsule that can make a suborbital flight, in secret, only announcing the results afterward. During the third flight in April, founder Jeff Bezos announced the launch from west Texas in advance and live-tweeted its progress. Now for the vehicle's fourth flight, Blue Origin plans a webcast, set to begin at 9:45am ET, with liftoff planned for 10:15am ET (3:15pm UK time). The webcast will be embedded in this post when it's available.
The rocket company is also continuing to push the fault tolerances of its propulsion module and spacecraft. This time the primary objective is determining whether the crew vehicle can land with one of its three parachutes intentionally failing. "There are three strings of chutes, and two of the three should still deploy nominally and, along with our retrothrust system, safely land the capsule," Bezos explained in an e-mail. "Works on paper, and this test is designed to validate that."
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Smile, you’re in the FBI face-recognition database
Driver license, passport, visa pics in database—despite no criminal affiliation.
(credit: National Institutes of Health)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has access to as many as 411.9 million images as part of its face-recognition database. The bulk of those images are photographs of people who have committed no crime, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The report says the bureau's Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation Services Unit contains not only 30 million mug shots, but also has access to driver license photos from 16 states, the State Department's visa and passport database, and the biometric database maintained by the Defense Department.
The GAO report, titled "FACE RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY: FBI Should Better Ensure Privacy and Accuracy," comes nearly two years after the bureau said its facial recognition project graduated from a pilot project to "full operational capability." The facial recognition project is combined with a fingerprint database. Here's how the GAO report summarized the program:
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E3 in photos: Blimps, porn, and LEGO towns at the USA’s largest games expo
Ars wades through lines and enormous, expensive booths so you don’t have to.
LOS ANGELES—Another E3 is officially in the books, and we at Ars are still forming opinions and parsing the real content from the hype and illusions. While we work on writing impressions and picking conference favorites, please enjoy our gallery of photos from the event's weirdest and largest stations. Click through to see selections from all three major publishers, along with a mix of indie fare, weird costumes, and, er, sex toys as game controllers.
Don't worry, the giant NES controller was back this year.
64 more images in gallery
These galleries are missing a few photos, including shots from EA's off-site event, as well as photos and videos we've already included in other E3 pieces, like our hands-on look at the new Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, coming in 2017 for Wii U and Nintendo NX.
We've included an additional gallery for any of you who want a better look at Microsoft's new Xbox Design Lab, which lets fans pick and choose colors and accents for every element of an Xbox One controller. It's one thing to see the product's website, but getting to handle the controllers and see how the colors pop is another. Full disclosure: Ars' Sam Machkovech placed an order after going hands-on with these suckers.
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Google Sees DMCA Notices Quadruple In Two Years
Google is being overloaded with DMCA takedown requests. The company has seen the number of takedown notices from rightsholders quadruple over the past two years. In 2016 alone, Google is projected to process over a billion reported pirate links, most of which will be scrubbed from its search index.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
In an effort to keep people away from pirate sites, copyright holders are overloading Google with DMCA takedown notices.
Since 2011 Google has removed more than a billion “pirate” links from its search results, and the two billion mark is only a few months away.
The number of requests from rightsholders has increased dramatically, up to the point where Google now handles around three million “pirate” links every day.
To illustrate this growth, we processed all the weekly takedown requests as reported in the search engine’s Transparency Report. This shows that 5.1 million pirate URLs were reported to Google in first week of June, 2014, a figure that increased to over 22 million two years later.
The weekly numbers fluctuate but the graph below illustrates the upward trend. If the current pattern continues then Google is expected to process over a billion reported links this year alone.
The surge in takedown notices has also gained the attention of the U.S. Government. A few months ago the Copyright Office launched a public consultation in order to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the current DMCA provisions.
This prompted heavy criticism from copyright groups, but Google itself maintains that the current system is working fine.
“The notice-and-takedown process has been an effective and efficient way to address online infringement,” the company informed the Copyright Office in April.
“The increasing volume of URLs removed from Search each year demonstrates that rightsholders are finding the notice-and-takedown process worthwhile, efficient, and scalable to their needs.”
While Google believes that the millions of reported URLs per day are a sign that the DMCA takedown process is working properly, rightsholders see it as a signal of an unbeatable game of whack-a-mole.
A coalition of hundreds of artists and music group has characterized the DMCA law as obsolete, dysfunctional and harmful.
“The notice-and-takedown system has proved an ineffective tool for the volume of unauthorized digital music available, something akin to bailing out an ocean with a teaspoon,” they wrote.
Together with many other rightsholders they are opting for broad revisions. Among other things they want advanced technologies and processes to ensure that infringing content doesn’t reappear elsewhere once it’s removed, a so-called “notice and stay down” approach.
Until that’s the case, they will probably keep the flood gates wide open.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Self-driving tractors and data science: we visit a modern farm
Farming isn’t the low-tech endeavor some might think.
Jonathan Gitlin
This tractor is planting seeds according to a precise GPS-based map of the field.
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Despite misperceptions to the contrary, farming in the 21st century is a high-tech endeavor. We're not just talking about genetically modified crops or biotech-derived pesticides though; farm vehicles like tractors and combines are now networked to the cloud and in many cases are even capable of driving themselves. To find out more about what the modern technofarm is all about, I drove up to Clear Meadow Farm in Harford County, Maryland to meet farmer Greg Rose and his self-driving John Deeres.
Rose and his family have been farming in the area for decades, and Clear Meadow is an 8000-acre farm that grows corn, soy, wheat, barley, sunflowers and sorghum in addition to raising Black Angus cattle (which you might find in Whole Foods). "We first dipped our hand into precision agriculture with yield monitors in 2000," Rose told me as I checked out a gigantic combine, its tires taller than me. His description of the job is as much data science as it is field work. Complex field maps are informed by a multitude of sensors from different farm machines, all gathering data to feed it to Rose via the cloud. The setup allows for extremely precise seed and nutrient prescriptions that can vary multiple times across the same field.
"The combine has load sensors in it that sense the volume of crop coming in, recording that as you go across the field," Rose said. That tells him how many bushels per acre each field is producing, data that gets fed into multi-year maps of each field that are color-coded to indicate different yields. "We take several years of data and make composite maps of a given field, then divide it into zones. You can manage those zones individually—taking soil samples to measure nutrient levels, and from there you know how much nutrients you need to apply in different areas," he told Ars.
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