Lengthy probe concludes that Apple’s tax benefits are illegal.
(credit: Andrew Cunningham)
BRUSSELS—Europe’s competition chief has ordered Ireland to reclaim €13 billion in back taxes from Apple.
It comes despite the US treasury department warning last week that it would “consider its options” in such an eventuality.
Speaking at the European Commission's headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday, Margrethe Vestager said: “Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies—this is illegal under EU state aid rules."
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Der Videostreamingdienst Netflix bewertet den Videocodec H.265 in den meisten Belangen als besser als den freien Codec VP9 von Google. Letzterer erreicht dennoch so gute Ergebnisse, dass sich ein freier Codec auf lange Sicht durchsetzen könnte. (Open Source, H.264)
Der Videostreamingdienst Netflix bewertet den Videocodec H.265 in den meisten Belangen als besser als den freien Codec VP9 von Google. Letzterer erreicht dennoch so gute Ergebnisse, dass sich ein freier Codec auf lange Sicht durchsetzen könnte. (Open Source, H.264) Gibt es Leben unter dem Eis des Jupitermondes Europa? Forscher des DFKI in Bremen haben Roboter entwickelt, die das herausfinden sollen. Bevor die aber auf fremden Himmelskörpern zum Einsatz kommen, könnten irdische Forscher sie nutzbringend einsetzen. (Roboter, Technologie)
Gibt es Leben unter dem Eis des Jupitermondes Europa? Forscher des DFKI in Bremen haben Roboter entwickelt, die das herausfinden sollen. Bevor die aber auf fremden Himmelskörpern zum Einsatz kommen, könnten irdische Forscher sie nutzbringend einsetzen. (Roboter, Technologie) Subscribers of TIDAL usually need the platform to listen to their favorite tracks on repeat, but a teenager from Germany has other ideas. Coder and recent high-school student Lordmau5 has just debuted TiDown, a piece of software that allows Tidal tracks to be permanently downloaded to a desktop machine.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
After years of music only being made available on CD or permanent digital download, streaming services are now all the rage.
Platforms such as Spotify, Pandora and Deezer are particularly well-known in the market today but relative new-comer TIDAL has also been making waves. The platform, launched by artists including Jay Z, Kanye West, Beyonce and Madonna, is perhaps best known for its exclusives.
TIDAL comes in two flavors – TIDAL Premium (lossy quality) and TIDAL HiFi, a lossless CD quality service for the audio connoisseur. In ordinary circumstances both of these services are streaming only, but thanks to a coding upstart from Germany, users of the service can now download music from TIDAL to keep.
A recent high school leaver, Lordmau5 previously created a tool for downloading music from Spotify. He’s been coding for six years already, starting out with Visual Basic and moving onto Java and lots of Minecraft modding.
Lordmau5 informs TorrentFreak that Spotify later improved its security so after being prompted by others he decided to see if downloads from TIDAL were a possibility.
“I recently looked into some potential APIs and found out that it’s super simple to get the stream-/offline-URL for the tracks [from TIDAL] and… well… that’s when the coding began,” he says.
The end result is TiDown, a tool that allows users to quickly download music from TIDAL in lossy or lossless formats. It’s a command line tool but comes with all necessary instructions.
Lordmau5 says that a few other streaming downloaders are available but these tend to require the user to listen to every track all the way through, a somewhat laborious task. TiDown is different, he says.
“This is an actual downloader – you are logging into TIDAL through the tool and you get the direct ‘stream-URLs’ that can then be downloaded,” Lordmau5 explains.
Over the past few days in advance of TiDown’s release, Lordmau5 has been having a bit of a laugh at the expense of people who didn’t believe he had created a proper working downloader.
To support his trolling he created the most ancient-looking website possible alongside a deliberately trashy ‘promo’ video.
Of course, tools like TiDown tend not to last very long once they’re discovered. So will TIDAL stop TiDown?
“I assume so,” Lordmau5 says. “I really hope the tool will work for around a month – since that’s the free trial for TIDAL.”
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Sicherheitsforscher haben eine Schadsoftware entdeckt, die Geldautomaten gleich dreier Hersteller infizieren soll. Vieles deutet darauf hin, dass Kriminelle mit Hilfe der Malware in Thailand Geld im Wert von mehr als 300.000 Euro entwenden konnten. (Ge…
Sicherheitsforscher haben eine Schadsoftware entdeckt, die Geldautomaten gleich dreier Hersteller infizieren soll. Vieles deutet darauf hin, dass Kriminelle mit Hilfe der Malware in Thailand Geld im Wert von mehr als 300.000 Euro entwenden konnten. (Geldautomat, Virus) Das könnte teuer werden für Apple: Die EU-Kommission hält die Vereinbarungen über Steuererleichterungen in Irland für unzulässig. Im schlimmsten Fall muss das Unternehmen mehrere Milliarden US-Dollar nachzahlen. (Apple, Politik/Recht)
Das könnte teuer werden für Apple: Die EU-Kommission hält die Vereinbarungen über Steuererleichterungen in Irland für unzulässig. Im schlimmsten Fall muss das Unternehmen mehrere Milliarden US-Dollar nachzahlen. (Apple, Politik/Recht) Das Auslieferungsverfahren über Kim Dotcom darf fast live im Internet gezeigt werden – das hat ein Gericht in Neuseeland entschieden. Dotcom selbst spricht von einem “Meilenstein”. (Kim Schmitz, Urheberrecht)
Das Auslieferungsverfahren über Kim Dotcom darf fast live im Internet gezeigt werden - das hat ein Gericht in Neuseeland entschieden. Dotcom selbst spricht von einem "Meilenstein". (Kim Schmitz, Urheberrecht) Kim Dotcom’s request for his extradition hearing to be live streamed on the Internet has been granted by a New Zealand High Court judge. Beginning tomorrow, proceedings will be broadcast live on YouTube, despite protests from the United States that the stream could prejudice Dotcom’s criminal trial in the U.S. should he be extradited.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Last week, Kim Dotcom indicated that he’d like his extradition hearing to be broadcast live on the Internet.
“Because of global interest in my case we have asked the High Court to allow live-streaming of my 6 weeks of copyright extradition hearings,” he wrote on Twitter.
Yesterday morning, just before the hearing got underway, Dotcom’s lawyer Ron Mansfield again raised the issue. He said that a complex case of this nature might not receive fair reporting so a live stream could help restore the balance and ensure public scrutiny. Mansfield suggested YouTube as the perfect platform.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the U.S. government opposed Dotcom’s application, stating that the coverage might prejudice the criminal trial in the United States should Dotcom be extradited. In particular, the U.S. said footage from the hearing could threaten a potential jury pool.
But despite U.S. objections, earlier today Justice Murray Gilbert said the stream could go ahead, on YouTube. There will be some restrictions, however.
Guidelines for broadcasting from New Zealand courts mandate a 10-minute delay, but in Dotcom’s case that will be extended to 20 minutes. This will ensure that the court has the opportunity to suppress anything deemed unfit for public consumption.
Dotcom took to Twitter to celebrate.
Live streaming of my hearing is a milestone. We're breaking new ground. Please treat the court with respect. Let's make this the new normal.
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) August 30, 2016
But while the judge has granted Dotcom’s wishes, there will be restrictions. In addition to the delay, the comments section on YouTube will be disabled and footage from the hearing will not be permitted to remain online after the hearing has taken place.
Of course, neither option will be possible to control completely. Discussion of live events can easily take place elsewhere, notably on Twitter where the action takes place in real-time. Furthermore, people will undoubtedly rip the live stream from YouTube, so keeping that offline after the hearing has passed will prove entirely impossible.
Nevertheless, the transparency the stream will provide is being welcomed by many, not least Dotcom’s US-based lawyer Ira Rothken.
“It provides everybody in the world with a seat in the gallery of the New Zealand courtroom,” Rothken said. “It’s democracy at its finest.”
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
So glatt verlief noch kein Start einer Erweiterung für World of Warcraft: Blizzard hat das sechste Addon Legion veröffentlicht. Es bietet unter anderem einen neuen Kontinent und eine weitere Klasse: den Dämonenjäger. (
Unser Autor hat versucht, potenzielle Sicherheitslücken im Paketmanager RPM zu melden, der von Red Hat, Suse und weiteren Linux-Distributionen genutzt wird. Doch das war gar nicht so einfach. Für einen Stack-Buffer-Overflow steht nach wie vor kein Fix bereit. (