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Comment Better registration? U.S. price raised $35 to $55. (Score 1) 49

by Futurepower(R) (#50185581) Attached to: Modernizing the Copyright Office
The copyright office in the U.S. recently raised its prices for copyright registration enormously. If you submit 2 short articles, that is a now called a "compilation", and the price is raised from $35 to $55, even though the total may be only 2 or 3 pages.

Also, the U.S. Copyright Office takes months to respond, makes frequent mistakes, and has a web site that is in some ways poorly written.

Can you recommend a copyright office in another country?

Submission + - Windows 10's automatic updates for NVidia drivers could break your computer (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: One of the features that has been removed from Windows 10 — at least for home users — is the ability to pick and choose when updates are installed. Microsoft has taken Windows Update out of the hands of users so the process is, for the most part, completely automated.

In theory, this sounds great — no more worrying about having the latest patches installed, no more concerns that a machine that hasn’t been updated will cause problems for others — but an issue with NVidia drivers shows that there is potential for things to go wrong. Irate owners of NVidia graphics cards have taken to support forums to complain that automatically-installed drivers installed have broken their computers.

Comment Price raised from $35 to $55. (Score 1) 1

by Futurepower(R) (#50183797) Attached to: Modernizing the Copyright Office
The copyright office in the U.S. recently raised its prices enormously. If you submit 2 short articles, that is a now called a "compilation", and the price is raised from $35 to $55, even though the total may be only 2 or 3 pages.

Also, the U.S. Copyright Office takes months to respond, makes frequent mistakes, and has a web site that is in some ways poorly written.

Can you recommend a copyright office in another country?

Submission + - Modernizing the Copyright Office (ssrn.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Joshua Simmons has written a new article discussing the growing consensus that it is time to modernize the Copyright Office. It reviews the developments that led to the last major revision of the Copyright Act; discusses Congress's focus since 1976 on narrower copyright bills, rather than a wholesale revision of U.S. copyright law, and the developments that have led to the review hearings; and considers the growing focus on Copyright Office modernization.

Submission + - Plan To Run Anti-Google Smear Campaign Revealed in MPAA Emails

Submitted by vivaoporto
vivaoporto writes: Techdirt reports a plan to run anti-Google smear campaign via Today Show and WSJ discovered in MPAA Emails.

Despite the resistance of the Hollywood studios to comply with the subpoenas obtained by Google concerning their relationship with Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood (whose investigation of the company appeared to actually be run by the MPAA and the studios themselves) one of the few emails that Google have been able to get access to so far was revealed this Thursday in a filling. It's an email between the MPAA and two of Jim Hood's top lawyers in the Mississippi AG's office, discussing the big plan to "hurt" Google.

The lawyers from Hood's office flat out admit that they're expecting the MPAA and the major studios to have its media arms run a coordinated propaganda campaign of bogus anti-Google stories:

Media: We want to make sure that the media is at the NAAG meeting. We propose working with MPAA (Vans), Comcast, and NewsCorp (Bill Guidera) to see about working with a PR firm to create an attack on Google (and others who are resisting AG efforts to address online piracy). This PR firm can be funded through a nonprofit dedicated to IP issues. The "live buys" should be available for the media to see, followed by a segment the next day on the Today Show (David green can help with this). After the Today Show segment, you want to have a large investor of Google (George can help us determine that) come forward and say that Google needs to change its behavior/demand reform. Next, you want NewsCorp to develop and place an editorial in the WSJ emphasizing that Google's stock will lose value in the face of a sustained attack by AGs and noting some of the possible causes of action we have developed.

As Google notes in its legal filing about this email, the "plan" states that if this effort fails, then the next step will be to file the subpoena (technically a CID or "civil investigatory demand") on Google, written by the MPAA but signed by Hood.

As Google points out, this makes it pretty clear that the MPAA, studios and Hood were working hand in hand in all of this and that the subpoena had no legitimate purpose behind it, but rather was the final step in a coordinated media campaign to pressure Google to change the way its search engine works.

Comment "Gigabit service" is FRAUD. (Score 2) 120

by Futurepower(R) (#50180453) Attached to: Gigabit Internet Access Now Supported By 84 US ISPs
"... the oversell model ... CAN deliver UP TO..."

At OSCON 2015 last week, I talked with several people about technology companies being wildly mis-managed and very poorly communicated.

There is apparently no "Gigabit" service. "Gigabit" only refers to the electrical connection speed. The real speed of actual data delivery is whatever the providers want it to be.

My experience is that speedtest.net exaggerates the actual speed of delivery. Numion is realistic.

Submission + - AMD clocks 500x spreadsheet speed boost via hardware acceleration in LibreOffice (amd.com)

Submitted by samtuke
samtuke writes: AMD processors get rated and reviewed based on performance. It is in our self-interest to make things work really, really fast on AMD hardware. AMD engineers contribute to LibreOffice, for good reason. Think about what happens behind a spreadsheet calculation. There can be a huge amount of math. Writing software to take advantage of a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for general purpose computing is non-trivial. We know how to do it. AMD engineers wrote OpenCL kernels, and contributed them to the open source code base. Turning on the OpenCL option to enable GPU Compute resulted in a 500X+ speedup, about ¼ second vs. 2minutes, 21 seconds.

Submission + - Chinese tourist crashes drone into Taipei 101 skyscrapper (yibada.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A Chinese tourist is under remand for crashing his drone into the Taipei 101 sky scrapper, and ordered to pay a fine of $48,000 (NT $1.5 Million)

Yan Yungfan, a 30-year-old man from eastern China's Fujian Province, was supposedly attempting to film Taipei's cityscape on Tuesday morning with a remotely controlled Phantom 3 UAV when he lost control of the drone, causing it to hit the side of Taipei 101 at around the 30th floor

No one was injured in the incident and only minor damage was sustained by the building's glass windows, but the video immediately became a viral sensation after it was uploaded online

Taipei 101 said in a statement that there have been three incidents of drones crashing around the building since mid-June, with the first two cases taking place on June 15 and June 20. No injuries were reported for both incidents, although the UAV that crashed on June 15 fell less than two meters from pedestrians

Submission + - Researchers Claim to Have Developed Faster, More Secure Tor

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and University College London published a paper this week describing a faster and more secure version of Tor called HORNET. On one hand, the new onion routing network can purportedly achieve speeds of up to 93 gigabits per second and "be scaled to support large numbers of users with minimal overhead". On the other hand, researchers cannot claim to be immune to "confirmation attacks" known to be implemented on Tor, but they point out that, given how HORNET works, perpetrators of such attacks would have to control significantly more ISPs across multiple geopolitical boundaries and probably sacrifice the secrecy of their operations in order to successfully deploy such attacks on HORNET.

Submission + - Apple Yanks Nest From Stores in Favor of Fussy HomeKit (programmableweb.com)

Submitted by linkchaos
linkchaos writes: Late Thursday, news broke that Apple had fully removed Nest products from its retail stores and website. Nest, now owned by Google, includes the Nest camera, thermostat and smoke detector. All three are connected devices for the home that can be controlled via smartphone apps. We're talking about the Internet of Things here, folks, and Nest's products have been popular as long as they've been in the market.

Submission + - Don't bring your drone to New Zealand (stuff.co.nz)

Submitted by NewtonsLaw
NewtonsLaw writes: Drones such as the Lilly Camera, DJI Phamtom and (to a lesser extent, because of its size) DJI Inspire are changing the way we experience our vacations. Instead of toting along a camcorder or a 35mm DSLR, more and more people are just packing a GoPro and, increasingly, a drone on which to mount it.

This is fine if you're going to a drone-friendly country but be warned that (when/if they finally ship), your Lilly Camera will get you into big trouble in Thailand (where all use of drones by the public is banned outright) and now New Zealand, where strict new laws regarding the operation of drones and even tiny toys like the 20g Cheerson CX10, come into effect on August 1.

Under these new rules, nobody can operate a drone or model aircraft without getting the prior consent of the owner over which property it is intended to fly — and (this is the kicker) also the permission of the occupiers of that property. So you can effectively forget about flying down at the local park, at scenic locations or just about any public place. Even if you could manage to get the prior permission of the land-owner, because we're talking "public place", you'd also have to get the permission of anyone and everyone who was also in the area where you intended to fly.

Other countries have produced far more sane regulations — such as limiting drone and RC model operators to flying no closer than 30m from people or buildings — but New Zealand's CAA have gone right over the top and imposed what amounts to a virtual death-sentence on a hobby that has provided endless, safe fun for boys (and girls) of all ages for more than 50 decades.

Of course if you are prepared to pay a $600 fee to become "Certified" by CAA then the restrictions on where you can fly are lifted and you don't need those permissions. It seems that the government here is taking away our rights and simply selling them back to us as "privileges" that can be purchased by paying a fist-full of cash to the appropriate government agency.

When reading the linked news story, remember that as far as CAA in New Zealand is concerned, *everything* that flies and is remotely controlled is now deemed to be a "drone" — so that includes everything from a tiny 20g toy quadcopter to a huge octocopter.

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