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Submission + - EU new VAT regulation ends up helping Amazon (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Last year the EU passed a new legislation which was supposed to punish entities such as Amazon (which has its EU base in Belgium and thus not paying appropriate taxes in other EU countries) but ironically the same legislation which comes into effect 1st Jan of this year ends up helping Amazon

Microbusinsses (small shops dotted around the EU countries) simply couldn't cope with the complication of having to comply with each and every kind of VAT regulation in each and every EU country (plus local version of VATs)

Most of the microbusinesses may end up shutting their digital businesses, and those who hang on, opted to sell their wares on sites such as E-Bay or Amazon — the very entities the new EU regulation tried to punish

Submission + - Your Stolen Identity Goes for $20 on the Internet Black Market

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Keith Collins writes at Quartz that the going rate for a stolen identity is about twenty bucks on the internet black market. Collins analyzed hundreds of listings for a full set of someone’s personal information—identification number, address, birthdate, etc., known as “fullz” that were put up for sale over the past year, using data collected by Grams, a search engine for the dark web. The listings ranged in price from less than $1 to about $450, converted from bitcoin. The median price for someone’s identity was $21.35. The most expensive fullz came from a vendor called “OsamaBinFraudin,” and listed a premium identity with a high credit score for $454.05. Listings on the lower end were typically less glamorous and included only the basics, like the victim’s name, address, social security number, perhaps a mother’s maiden name. Marketplaces on the dark web, not unlike eBay, have feedback systems for vendors (“cheap and good A+”), refund policies (usually stating that refunds are not allowed), and even well-labeled sections. "There is no shortage of hackers willing to do about anything, computer related, for money," writes Elizabeth Clarke. "and they are continually finding ways to monetize personal and business data."

Submission + - LinkedIn (temporarily) backs down after uproar at contact export removal (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: LinkedIn caused a storm a couple of days ago when it removed the option to instantly download contacts. Many users of the professional social network were more than a little irked to discover that while contact exporting was still available, a wait of up to three days had been put in place.

Unsurprisingly, users revolted, having been particularly upset by the fact the change was implemented with no warning or announcement. But the company has managed to turn things around by quickly backtracking on its decision after listening to a stream of complaints on Twitter.

Submission + - How Amazon Echo Could Become The Next-Gen Selfie Stick

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Interesting story on TechCrunch joining the dots on Amazon's interest in computer vision and its connected speaker-plus-virtual assistant in-home device, the Amazon Echo. The author speculates that if Amazon adds a camera to the Echo the device could be used for augmented reality-powered virtual try-ons of products such as clothes, streaming the results to the user's phone or TV.

From the article: "The product development process for Microsoft’s Kinect sensor took around four to five years from conception to shipping a consumer product. The computer vision field has clearly gained from a lot of research since then, and Woodford reckons Amazon could ship an Echo sensor in an even shorter timeframe — say, in the next two years — provided the business was entirely behind the idea and doing everything it could to get such a product to market."

Submission + - Intel, Microsoft working to squash Windows 10 battery life bug (pcworld.com)

Submitted by amirmustiaf
amirmustiaf writes: On Thursday, an Intel spokesman confirmed that the company is working to patch a minor bug that will reduce the battery life of some Windows 10 machines by less than 10 percent.Â

The good news is that, once fixed, Intel expects the battery life of a Windows 10 PC to be on par with a Windows 8 system, the Intel spokesman said.

With the Windows 10 launch just days away on July 29, Intel, Microsoft, app developers, and hardware makers are working to finalize drivers and fix bugs. Microsoft, for example, issued an update for Intelâ(TM)s HD Graphics integrated GPU on Thursday for its Surface lineâ"along with a firmware update that failed to update for many people.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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 + - EU may become a single digital market of 500 million people.

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: The Guardian is reporting that the EU is becoming increasingly vociferous in it's opposition to "geo-blocking" — the practice of making media services available in some areas but not in others.

“European consumers want to watch the pay-TV channel of their choice regardless of where they live or travel in the EU,”

That adds up to a block of nearly 500 million first-world media consumers. They don't necessarily all speak the same language, but English is probably the most commonly understood single language. And the important thing for American media companies to remember is that they're not American in thought, taste or outlook.

Submission + - HEVC Advance Announces H.265 Royalty Rates (streamingmedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The HEVC Advance patent pool has announced the royalty rates for their patent license for HEVC (aka H.265) video. HEVC users must pay these fees in addition to the license fees payable to the competing MPEG LA HEVC patent pool. With HEVC Advance's fees targeting 0.5% of content owner revenue which could translate to licensing costs of over $100M a year for companies like Facebook and Netflix, Dan Rayburn from Streaming Media advocates that "content owners band together and agree not to license from HEVC Advance" in the hope that "HEVC Advance will fail in the market and be forced to change strategy, or change their terms to be fair and reasonable." John Carmack, Oculus VR CTO, has cited the new patent license as a reason to end his efforts to encode VR video with H.265.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Top NASA boffin: It's time to make Pluto a proper planet again - The Register (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

The Register
Top NASA boffin: It's time to make Pluto a proper planet again
The Register
Supporters of Pluto's readmission into the Solar System as a full-blown planet got a boost from NASA's planetary scientists on Friday. "It's very hard not to call an object with this level of complexity in its geology, and such complex seasons, a ...
New Pluto photos reveal hazes, ice flows similar to Earth's glaciersCTV News
New Horizons discovers exotic flowing ice and vast haze across the surface of ... Times Gazette
NASA's New Horizons Team Finds Haze, Flowing Ice On PlutoSpaceCoastDaily.com
Sydney Morning Herald-Montreal Gazette-Echo Examiner
all 938 news articles

Submission + - AMD Starts Rolling Out New Linux Driver Model, But Many Issues Remain (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the upcoming Linux 4.2 kernel will be the premiere of the new "AMDGPU" kernel driver to succeed the "Radeon" DRM kernel driver, which is part of AMD's long talked about new Linux driver architecture for supporting the very latest GPUs and all future GPUs. Unfortunately for AMD customers, there's still much waiting. The new open-source AMDGPU Linux code works for Tonga/Carrizo GPUs but it doesn't yet support the latest R9 Fury "Fiji" GPUs, lacks re-clocking/DPM for Tonga GPUs leading to low performance, and there are stability issues under high-load OpenGL apps/games. There's also the matter that current Linux users need to jump through hoops for now in getting the code into a working state with the latest kernel and forked versions of Mesa, libdrm, new proprietary microcode files, and the new xf86-video-amdgpu user-space driver.

Submission + - HardenedBSD Completes Strong ASLR Implementation (hardenedbsd.org)

Submitted by HardenedBSD
HardenedBSD writes: A relatively new fork of FreeBSD, HardenedBSD, completed their Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) feature. Without ASLR, applications are loaded into memory in a deterministic manner. An attacker who knows where a vulnerability lies in memory can reliably exploit that vulnerability to manipulate the application to doing the attacker's bidding. ASLR removes the determinism, making it so that an attacker knows that a vulnerability exists, but doesn't know where that vulnerability lies in memory. HardenedBSD's particular implementation of ASLR is the strongest form ever implemented in any of the BSDs.

With HardenedBSD having completed their ASLR implementation, the next step is to update documentation and submit update the patches they have already submitted upstream to FreeBSD. ASLR is the first step in a long list of exploit mitigation technologies HardenedBSD plans to implement. HardenedBSD has also implemented other exploit mitigation, security, and general hardening features, providing great security for FreeBSD.

Submission + - Senate Passes 'No Microsoft National Talent Strategy Goal Left Behind Act'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Microsoft is applauding the Senate's passage of the Every Child Achieves Act, a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind Act, saying the move will improve access to K-12 STEM learning nationwide. The legislation elevates Computer Science to a "core academic subject", opening the door to a number of funding opportunities. The major overhaul of the U.S. K-12 education system, adds Microsoft on the Issues, also "advances some of the goals outlined in Microsoft’s National Talent Strategy," its "two-pronged" plan to increase K-12 CS education and tech immigration. Perhaps Microsoft is tackling the latter goal in under-the-radar White House visits with the leaders of Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC, like this one, attended by Microsoft's William "It's Our Way Or the Canadian Highway" Kamela and FWD.us President Joe "Save Us From Just-Sort-of-OK US Workers" Green.

Submission + - Twitter censors plagiarized tweets that repeat copyrighted joke (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Can a joke be copyrighted? Twitter seems to think so. As spotted by Twitter account Plagiarism is Bad a number of tweets that repeat a particular joke are being hidden from view. The tweets have not been deleted as such, but their text has been replaced with a link to Twitter's Copyright and DMCA policy.

The joke in question? "Saw someone spill their high end juice cleanse all over the sidewalk and now I know god is on my side." Perform a search for the text and, while you will find several tweeted instances of it available at the moment, there are many examples of tweets that have been censored.

Submission + - HP conversion to corporate hell complete as R&D dress code enforced. 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: HP was once known as a research ant technology giant, a company founded in a garage by a pair of engineers and dominated by researchers. Whilst a part of that lives on in Agilent any hope for the rest of the company has now died with the announcement that HP R&D will have to dress in business "smart casual" with T-shirts, baseball caps, short skirts, low cut dresses and sportsware all being banned.

Submission + - Olympic Organizer Wants to Feed Athletes Fukushima Produce (yahoo.co.jp)

Submitted by Grady Martin
Grady Martin writes: Toshiaki Endo, Japan's government-appointed parliament member in charge of planning for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, has expressed hopes of supplying the Olympic/Paralympic village with foods grown in Fukushima, stating, "Using foods from Fukushima in the village is another possibility. I wish to strengthen ties with ground zero in numerous ways."

This is a resubmission sans spin.

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