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Businesses

New Zealand ISPs Back Down On Anti-Geoblocking Support 50

Posted by samzenpus from the go-ahead-and-watch dept.
angry tapir writes: A number of New Zealand Internet service providers will no longer offer their customers support for circumventing regional restrictions on accessing online video content. Major New Zealand media companies SKY, TVNZ, Lightbox and MediaWorks filed a lawsuit in April, arguing that skirting geoblocks violates the distribution rights of its media clients for the New Zealand market. The parties have reached an out-of-court settlement.
Open Source

NVIDIA Begins Supplying Open-Source Register Header Files 77

Posted by samzenpus from the opening-it-up dept.
An anonymous reader writes: NVIDIA's latest mark of their newly discovered open-source kindness is beginning to provide open-source hardware reference headers for their latest GK20A/GM20B Tegra GPUs while they are working to also provide hardware header files on their older GPUs. These programming header files in turn will help the development of the open-source Nouveau driver as up to this point they have had to do much of the development via reverse-engineering. Perhaps most interesting is that moving forward they would like to use the Nouveau kernel driver code-base as the primary development environment for new hardware.
Android

Microsoft Brings Office To Android Smartphones For Free 85

Posted by samzenpus from the coming-together dept.
Mark Wilson writes: After a few weeks in preview, Microsoft Office is now available for Android smartphones. Despite Microsoft's mobile-first, cloud-first philosophy, it has actually taken some time to bring the world's most popular office suite to Android phones — it joins the tablet version of the suite that was released last year. Just like the tablet editions, the phone versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint won't cost you a penny, allowing for the viewing and editing of a range of files when on the move. There is a cloud focus with support for not only OneDrive, but also Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box, and Microsoft says it has made changes based on the feedback received during the preview period.
Android

IT Pros Blast Google Over Android's Refusal To Play Nice With IPv6 287

Posted by Soulskill from the do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do dept.
alphadogg writes: The widespread popularity of Android devices and the general move to IPv6 has put some businesses in a tough position, thanks to Android's lack of support for a central component in the newer standard. DHCPv6 is an outgrowth of the DHCP protocol used in the older IPv4 standard – it's an acronym for 'dynamic host configuration protocol,' and is a key building block of network management. Nevertheless, Google's wildly popular Android devices – which accounted for 78% of all smartphones shipped worldwide in the first quarter of this year – don't support DHCPv6 for address assignment.
Security

Emergency Adobe Flash Patch Fixes Zero-Day Under Attack 71

Posted by Soulskill from the film-at-11 dept.
msm1267 writes: Adobe has released an emergency patch for a Flash zero-day used in targeted attacks by APT3, the same group behind 2014's Clandestine Fox attacks. Adobe said Flash Player 18.0.0.161 and earlier for Windows and Macintosh systems are affected, as is 11.2.202.466 for Linux 11.x versions.

The current iteration of Clandestine Fox attacks shares many traits with last year's attacks, including generic, almost spam-like phishing emails intent on snaring as many victims as possible that can be analyzed for their value before additional attacks are carried out. The two campaigns also share the same custom backdoor called SHOTPUT, as well as an insistence on using a throwaway command and control infrastructure.
Censorship

Australia Passes Site-Blocking Legislation 57

Posted by timothy from the status-quo-but-more-of-it dept.
ausrob writes: Cementing their position as Australia's most backwards and dangerous government in recent memory comes this nasty bit of legislation, riddled with holes (which is nothing new for this decrepit Government): "The legislation allows rights holders to go to a Federal Court judge to get overseas websites, or "online locations", blocked that have the "primary purpose" of facilitating copyright infringement. If a rights holder is successful in their blocking request, Australian internet providers, such as Telstra and Optus, will need to comply with a judge's order by disabling access to the infringing location." Adds reader Gumbercules!! links to another story on the legislation, writing: Aside from the sheer inefficiency of trying to spot piracy by blocking individual sites, there's also the risk that servers which house other, more legitimate sites, will be caught up in the net. Unsurprisingly, the bill does nothing to remedy the fact that Australians pay far more for access to media than other places in the World or that media is often not available or extremely delayed, here.
Google

YouTube Algorithm Can Decide Your Channel URL Now Belongs To Someone Else 272

Posted by timothy from the spartacus-gets-really-confusing dept.
An anonymous reader writes: In 2005, blogger Matthew Lush registered "Lush" as his account on the then-nascent YouTube service, receiving www.youtube.com/lush as the URL for his channel. He went on to use this address on his marketing materials and merchandise. Now, YouTube has taken the URL and reassigned it to the Lush cosmetics brand. Google states that an algorithm determined the URL should belong to the cosmetics firm rather than its current owner, and insists that it is not possible to reverse the unrequested change. Although Lush cosmetics has the option of changing away from their newly-received URL and thereby freeing it up for Mr. Lush's use, they state that they have not decided whether they will. Google has offered to pay for some of Mr. Lush's marketing expenses as compensation.
Cellphones

Political Polls Become Less Reliable As We Head Into 2016 Presidential Election 292

Posted by Soulskill from the but-how-can-I-know-if-my-team-is-winning dept.
HughPickens.com writes: Cliff Zukin writes in the NY Times that those paying close attention to the 2016 election should exercise caution as they read the polls — election polling is in near crisis as statisticians say polls are becoming less reliable. According to Zukin, two trends are driving the increasing unreliability of election and other polling in the United States: the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys. Coupled, they have made high-quality research much more expensive to do, so there is less of it. This has opened the door for less scientifically-based, less well-tested techniques.

To top it off, a perennial election polling problem, how to identify "likely voters," has become even thornier. Today, a majority of people are difficult or impossible to reach on landline phones. One problem is that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted by the Federal Communications Commission to prohibit the calling of cellphones through automatic dialers, in which calls are passed to live interviewers only after a person picks up the phone. To complete a 1,000-person survey, it's not unusual to have to dial more than 20,000 random numbers, most of which do not go to actual working telephone numbers.

The second unsettling trend is rapidly declining response rates, reaching levels once considered unimaginable. In the late 1970s, pollsters considered an 80 percent response rate acceptable, but by 2014 the response rate has fallen to 8 percent. "Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven't figured out how to replace it," concludes Zukin. "In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we're off base. What this means for 2016 is anybody's guess."
Censorship

In 6 Months, Australia Bans More Than 240 Games 136

Posted by timothy from the it-gets-easier dept.
dotarray writes with this snippet from (apropos) Player Attack: In the 20 years from 1995 to January 2015, there were 77 games Refused Classification in Australia. After January though, more than 240 games have been effectively banned by the Classification Board — an average of 40 per month. Most of these games are mobile- or digital-only releases you're unlikely to have ever heard of, with names like League Of Guessing, 'w21wdf AB test,' Sniper 3D Assault Zombie, Measure Bra Size Prank, and Virtual Marijuana Smoking showing up in just the first few pages. What games are banned in your country?
Books

Amazon Is Only Going To Pay Authors When Each Page Is Read 172

Posted by Soulskill from the more-lucrative-ways-to-slice-up-the-pie dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has a new plan to keep self-published authors honest: they're only going to pay them when someone actually reads a page. Peter Wayner at the Atlantic explores how this is going to change the lives of the authors — and the readers. Fat, impressive coffee table books are out if no one reads them. Thin, concise authors will be bereft. Page turners are in.
Media

Turning Neural Networks Upside Down Produces Psychedelic Visuals 75

Posted by Soulskill from the not-literally-upside-down dept.
cjellibebi writes: Neural networks that were designed to recognize images also hold some interesting capabilities for generating them. If you run them backwards, they turn out to be capable of enhancing existing images to resemble the images they were meant to try and recognize. The results are pretty trippy. A Google Research blog post explains the research in great detail. There are pictures, and even a video. The Guardian has a digested article for the less tech-savvy.
The Media

Sunday Times Issues DMCA Takedown Notice To the Intercept Over Snowden Article 125

Posted by Soulskill from the best-defense-is-a-hilariously-weak-offense dept.
An anonymous reader writes: On Sunday, British newspaper The Sunday Times published an article citing anonymous UK government sources claiming that the cache of documents taken by Edward Snowden was successfully decrypted by the Russians and Chinese. Shortly thereafter, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept published scathing criticism of the article. In Greenwald's article, he included a photograph of the newspaper's front page, where the story was featured. Yesterday, The Intercept received a DMCA takedown notice from News Corp alleging that the photograph infringed upon their copyright. The Intercept is refusing to comply with the takedown demand.
Security

Report: Aging Java Components To Blame For Massively Buggy Open-Source Software 130

Posted by timothy from the bit-rot-multiplier-applies-here-too dept.
itwbennett writes: The problem isn't new, but a report released Tuesday by Sonatype, the company that manages one of the largest repositories of open-source Java components, sheds some light on poor inventory practices that are all-too-common in software development. To wit: 'Sonatype has determined that over 6 percent of the download requests from the Central Repository in 2014 were for component versions that included known vulnerabilities and the company's review of over 1,500 applications showed that by the time they were developed and released each of them had an average of 24 severe or critical flaws inherited from their components.'
E3

Bethesda Unveils New Doom Game, Announces Dishonored 2 113

Posted by Soulskill from the knee-deep-in-the-sequels dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Bethesda kicked off this year's E3 expo by unveiling the new Doom game they've been working on and announcing a sequel to the popular fantasy action-adventure game Dishonored. They've posted a gory trailer (YouTube) for Doom, and shared several minutes of gameplay footage as well. The game is due out in Spring 2016 for Xbox One, PS4, and PCs, and it will include an editor that will let players make new maps and gameplay modes. Dishonored 2 has a trailer as well, though fewer details have been shared about the game. Bethesda also added details to their recent announcement of Fallout 4. It's been given a release date of November 10th (2015), and they did a live demo on stage at E3 (YouTube) with a bunch of game footage.
Education

Freedom of Information Requests Turn Up Creationist Materials In Schools 479

Posted by Soulskill from the beyond-the-Scopes-of-their-curriculum dept.
An anonymous reader writes: In 2008, Louisiana passed a law that was designed to let teachers introduce creationism into public classrooms alongside evolution. Zack Kopplin, a student at the time, decided to fight the law by sending Freedom Of Information Act requests to the schools, asking for anything mentioning creationism or the law itself. While most ignore him, he has received documents showing a clear anti-science stance from school officials. "In one, which appears to contain a set of PowerPoint slides, there's a page titled "Creationism (Intelligent Design)" that refers students to the Answers in Genesis website, along with two other sites that are critical of that group's position. In another, a parent's complaint about a teacher who presents evolution as a fact is met by a principal stating that 'I can assure you this will not happen again.'"

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