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Submission + - Buenos Aires issues a 'Netflix tax' for all digital entretainment 1

Submitted by DoILookAmused
DoILookAmused writes: A few years ago, the Argentinean government implemented a 35% tax on all offshore buys using a credit card. In yesterday's press release, the city of Buenos Aires announced it will charge a 3% gross income tax for all streaming or media purchase abroad allegedly to bring it to "competitive prices with local media companies". This tax doesn't supersede the national 35% tax, which has sparked several reactions.
Science

Submission + - 3D TV, Without the Glasses (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you've pondered whether to sink a cool couple of grand into a fancy new three-dimensional TV but didn't want to mess around with those dorky glasses, you may want to sit tight for a few more years. Researchers at Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, report that they've come up with a new 3D technology that not only doesn't require viewers to wear special glasses, but it also can be viewed from a wide variety of angles. The advance could propel the development of mobile 3D devices as well as TVs.
DRM

Submission + - Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards (eff.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "There's a new front in the battle against digital restrictions management (DRM) technologies. These technologies, which supposedly exist to enforce copyright, have never done anything to get creative people paid. Instead, by design or by accident, their real effect is to interfere with innovation, fair use, competition, interoperability, and our right to own things. That's why we were appalled to learn that there is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped."
Software

Submission + - EA CEO's Departure Might Be Good for the Company (dice.com)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello might have resigned in the wake of the company’s disastrous SimCity launch, but his departure might not be a bad thing for EA as the company. On Glassdoor, his 59 percent rating was 9 points below the average. One outside recruiter says Riccitiello’s taken the fun out of the game maker’s culture. “They’ve never had a problem getting good talent and that’s not likely to change,” says the recruiter, who requested anonymity because of his business dealings with the company. “But, they’ve had problems getting great talent and that’s not likely to change.” Let this be a lesson to gaming executives everywhere: if you’re going to launch a popular title that needs to be constantly connected to online servers, make sure you have enough backend infrastructure in place to actually handle the load."
Google

Submission + - Revealed: Google Chrome WAS Exploited at Pwnium 2013 (internetnews.com)

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Sean Michael Kerner has revealed an inconvenient truth: earlier this month, 'Google Chrome running Chrome OS was hailed as being a survivor in the Pwnium/Pwn2own event that hacked IE, Firefox and Chrome browsers on Windows. Apple's Safari running on Mac OS X was not hacked and neither (apparently) was Chrome on Chrome OS. Google disclosed this morning that Chrome on Chrome OS had in fact been exploited — albeit, unreliably. The same researcher that took Google's money last year for exploiting Chrome, known publicly only as 'PinkiePie' was awarded $40,000 for exploiting Chrome/Chrome OS via a Linux kernel bug, config file error and a video parsing flaw.' So, was it really Google Chrome, or was Linux to blame?
KDE

Submission + - What's going on in KDE Plasma Workspaces 2? (vizzzion.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "While moving its codebase to Qt5, the KDE Development Platform is undergoing a number of changes that lead to a more modular codebase (called KDE Framework 5) on top of a hardware-accelerated graphics stack. In this post, you’ll learn a bit about the status of Frameworks 5 and porting especially Plasma — that will be known as Plasma Workspaces 2, paying credit to its more convergent architecture."
Cellphones

Submission + - We Should Be Allowed to Unlock Everything We Own (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When cell phone unlocking became illegal last month, it set off a firestorm of debate over what rights people should have for phones they have legally purchased. But this is really just one facet of a much larger problem with property rights in general. 'Silicon permeates and powers almost everything we own. This is a property rights issue, and current copyright law gets it backwards, turning regular people — like students, researchers, and small business owners — into criminals. Fortune 500 telecom manufacturer Avaya, for example, is known for suing service companies, accusing them of violating copyright for simply using a password to log in to their phone systems. That’s right: typing in a password is considered "reproducing copyrighted material." Manufacturers have systematically used copyright in this manner over the past 20 years to limit our access to information. Technology has moved too fast for copyright laws to keep pace, so corporations have been exploiting the lag to create information monopolies at our expense and for their profit. After years of extensions and so-called improvements, copyright has turned Mickey Mouse into a monster who can never die.' We need to win the fight for unlocking phones, and then keep pushing until we actually own the objects we own again.
DRM

Submission + - Options for setting up an XBMC PVR in a fully DRM'ed area?

Submitted by AlphaWolf_HK
AlphaWolf_HK writes: I own an HDHomeRun Prime tuner, and unfortunately I live in an area where the cable provider (Cox) blanket flags all channels to be copy restricted. Most cable providers don't do this, and in fact Cox only does this in certain areas. I've managed to talk to some people within Cox who say that even though those in charge of one area turn the flag on, and those in charge of another area turn it off, both say they are following corporate policy. The FCC won't help on this matter, in spite of the fact that I am fairly certain (but can't prove) that Cox simply wants to charge me a $20 a month premium for using their in-house DVR's. In any case, I'm tired of using Windows Media Center due to bugs and other problems, but since the channels are flagged it is the only option. Satellite is of course not an option at all (no cablecard or similar standard.) I've already begun moving most of my content watching to XBMC in the form of using sickbeard and couchpotato, both of which do an amazing job even with torrents now that usenet has been getting hit pretty hard. To match this, I've already dropped my cable tier to the lowest possible for some basic digital channels that people in my household still watch and aren't available over torrents (e.g. CNN, fox news — yes, we like all perspectives) but ideally I'd like to cut the cord completely as the service is otherwise useless. (Note: I was and still am willing to pay for cable and otherwise wouldn't be using torrents, but I refuse to use their scientific atlanta DVR's or windows media center, both of which are terrible, and I'm done with tivo for similar reasons.) That said, are there any options for obtaining this content without physically moving to comcast territory where they don't do this? Or perhaps any workarounds for the CCI flag? Ideally anything that allows XBMC with digital content and no transcoding.
Piracy

Submission + - The Pirate Bay's 'Move' To Korea Was A Prank (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "The Pirate Bay's announcement that it was moving to North Korea was a prank, making fun of gullible readers. Admitting the hoax, the site said "You can’t seriously cheer the “fact” that we moved our servers to bloody North Korea. Applauds to you who told us to f*** off. Always stay critical. Towards everyone!”""
Space

Submission + - ESA's Herschel mission: the end is near

Submitted by Trapezium Artist
Trapezium Artist writes: The European Space Agency's far-infrared space observatory, Herschel, will soon run out of its liquid helium coolant, ending observations after more than three years of highly successful scientific operations. Predictions by ESA engineers are that Herschel will run out of helium later in March, at which point its instruments will warm up, rendering them effectively blind.

Herschel was launched in 2009 along with ESA's Planck satellite to the Sun-Earth L2 point, roughly 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. At that location, the Sun and Earth remain along a more or less constant vector with respect to a spacecraft, meaning that it can cool to very low temperatures behind a sunshield. At such a large distance from Earth, however, there is no way of replenishing the coolant, and Herschel will be pushed off the L2 point to spend its retirement in a normal heliocentric orbit.

With the largest monolithic mirror ever flown in space at 3.5 metres diameter and three powerful scientific instruments, Herschel has made exciting discoveries about the cool Universe, ranging from dusty starburst galaxies at high redshifts to star-forming regions spread throughout the Milky Way and proto-planetary disks of gas and dust swirling around nearby young stars. And with an archive full of data, much of it already public, Herschel is set to produce new results for years to come.
OS X

Submission + - 0install reaches 2.0

Submitted by tal197
tal197 writes: Zero Install, the decentralized cross-platform software installation system, announced 0install 2.0 today after 2 years in development. 0install allows authors to publish directly from their own web-sites, while supporting familiar features such as shared libraries, automatic updates, dependency handling and digital signatures. With more than one thousand packages now available, is this finally a viable platform?
Google

Submission + - Microsoft: The 'Scroogled' Show Must Go On

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Microsoft says that the death of its 'Scroogled' ad campaign against Google has been greatly exaggerated. 'Scroogled will go on as long as Google keeps Scroogling people,' said a Microsoft spokesperson. 'Nearly 115,000 people signed a petition asking Google to stop going through their Gmail.' So, is Microsoft's scare campaign justified? Well, in a recently-published patent application for a Method and System for Dynamic Textual Ad Distribution Via Email, Google explains how its invention can be used to milk more money from advertisers by identifying lactating Moms, which might make some uneasy. Google also illustrates how advertisers can bid on access to those suffering from breast cancer, bi-polar disorder, depression, and panic anxiety. Hey, what could possibly go wrong?

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