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(credit: Google Fiber)

Google Fiber announced plans on Wednesday to offer Internet service in San Francisco apartments, condos, and affordable housing properties.

Instead of installing its own fiber cables, Google said it will use existing fiber, allowing it to bring service to the city more quickly. Google may need to do some work outside and inside buildings to connect properties to the existing fiber, but otherwise not much construction will be required.

This is similar to a deal Google announced with a city-owned utility in Huntsville, Alabama. But in the San Francisco case, Google is not saying what entity it is leasing or buying fiber from or when it will start offering service.

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Samsung and LG both announced their flagship smartphones for 2016 this week, and both the LG G5 and Samsung Galaxy S7 feature microSD card readers… which wasn’t a given. Samsung has long included support for removable storage in its smartphones, but last year’s Galaxy S6 did not have a microSD card slot. But it looks like both […]

Orphaned storage? Samsung Galaxy S7 and LG G5 skip Android 6.0’s “adoptable storage” is a post from: Liliputing

(credit: Tor Project)

A federal judge in Washington has now confirmed what has been strongly suspected: that Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers at its Software Engineering Institute were hired by the federal government to do research into breaking Tor in 2014. The judge also made a notable statement in his court order that "Tor users clearly lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in their IP addresses while using the Tor network."

However, some of the details that Tor alleged previously seem to be wrong: the research was funded by the Department of Defense, not the FBI. Tor Project Director Shari Steele told Ars earlier this year that the organization still couldn't get straight answers from CMU. According to the judge, that research was then subpoenaed by federal investigators.

The Tor Project did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. Meanwhile, Kenneth Walters, a CMU spokesman, refused to answer Ars' questions, referring us only to the university's last statement, from November 2015, which hinted that the university was served with a subpoena.

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The dust around the binary star system HD 142527. (credit: ALMA)

At the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Rice University's Andrea Isella began his talk with words that can start a brawl among astronomy fans: "Everybody knows we have these eight beautiful planets in our Solar System." But he continued with words we can all agree on: we'd like to know how they got here and whether they represent a typical assortment we'd expect to see around other stars.

To answer both of these questions, we need to understand planet formation. And the best way to do that is to image as many systems as we can find that are in the process of forming planets. That process poses a number of challenges, however. In astronomical terms, planet formation is fast, taking place in 10 million years or so, and the process takes place in a diffuse, dusty disk that makes it difficult to do observations at visible wavelengths.

But we now have staggeringly precise images of these disks, thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA. ALMA is capable of identifying the chemical composition of the disks, along with irregularities in their distribution and the motion of different parts of the disk. Isella and other researchers were on hand to tell what we've learned from this sort of information.

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Jolla may be getting out of the hardware business, but it looks like the company’s Sailfish OS software will live on as promised… at least for a little while. The company announced this week that Intex will release a smartphone called the Aqua Fish that run Sailfish OS. Jolla is also partnering with Mi-Fone to […]

Jolla unveils new Sailfish OS smartphone, partnerships is a post from: Liliputing

Around the world there are periodic arrests of people who are alleged to have been involved in the running of ‘pirate’ sites but the general file-sharing public is usually subjected to much lighter treatment.

Often part of so-called ‘graduated response’ schemes, emailed warnings are the most common weapon of choice for copyright holders to get a “we’re watching you” message to relatively small time pirates. Japan, however, likes to do things a little differently.

According to an announcement by the National Police Agency (NPA), in recent days officers across Japan carried out raids against individuals believed to have downloaded and shared a variety of content without obtaining permission from copyright holders.

In a three-day long crackdown between February 16 and 18, police in 29 prefectures searched 93 locations, eventually arresting a total of 44 people. All are suspected of engaging in online piracy of either movies, music, anime, manga or computer software. All were detained under the Copyright Act.

A wide variety of heavyweight industry groups were behind the action including the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPAJ), the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), the Japan Video Software Association (JVA) and the Software Alliance (BSA).

According to the Association of Copyright for Computer Software (ACCS) the large-scale crackdown on Internet pirates is the seventh of its type since 2009.

Those detained include a 55-year-old office worker who along with the others faces fines between $1,785 and $89,200 (200,000 to 10 million yen) and jail sentences of up to ten years, depending on their offense.

Until 2012 only uploading was considered a criminal offense in Japan but in that same year local authorities upgraded mere downloading to a crime carrying jail sentences of up to two years.

It’s an important point then that police report the suspects as mostly using “shared folder” style P2P applications, a method of sharing that has remained popular in Asia despite the worldwide rise of software such as BitTorrent. Users of this software tend to both share and distribute content for extended periods of time, thus opening them up to the harshest sentences.

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