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In case you missed, Google and Mozilla have decided to rename the .bro extension to .br because a feminist told me so. Below, you will find some of the best comments from the reddit thread. Well i’m glad they finally addressed one of the biggest issues with Firefox. Now it’s perfect ! Also Br is […]

While the US military continues to develop new and awesome ways of blowing aerial drones to smithereens, not many of these systems can easily be adapted to use in the civilian realm. That's why Battelle has developed the DroneDefender, a shoulder-m...

The Google Translate app has been updated with a couple of new and useful features, including instant visual translation between English (or German) and Arabic, and support for Split View on iPad. The updated app now lets you instantly translate printed text between the aforementioned languages. You can use this feature by simply opening the app, clicking on the camera, and pointing it at the printed text you need to translate. You'll see that the translation will happen in real-time. The update also brings along split view support on compatible iPads, allowing you to use the Google Translate app side-by-side with another app. "So if you're sending an email or text and need to translate, you can see both apps at the same time. And it even works with text from online books or websites," Google said in a blog post. The update has begun rolling out for both iOS and...

A US jury has found Apple guilty of infringing a patent owned by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's licensing arm in its iPhone 5s, 6, and 6 Plus smartphones, as well as several iPad versions. Anadolu Agency—Getty Images The patent in question is from 1998, and is related to improving chip efficiency. It was alleged that the Cupertino-based company's A7, A8 and A8X processors - used in the aforementioned products - violate the patent. While Apple denied any form infringement, terming the patent as invalid, the jury decided otherwise. Now it will be determined how much fine the iPhone maker will have to pay - a recent ruling suggested that the amount could be as much as $862.4 million. It's worth mentioning that Apple is also separately facing a similar lawsuit over the technology used in its A9 and A9X chipsets that power the newly-launched iPhone 6s/6s Plus smartphones, and the iPad...

An anonymous reader writes: Wikileaks has released the finalized Intellectual Property text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which international negotiators agreed upon a few days ago. Unfortunately, it contains many of the consumer-hostile provisions that so many organizations spoke out against beforehand. This includes the extension of the copyright term to life plus 70 years, and a ban on the circumvention of DRM. The EFF says, "If you dig deeper, you'll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding. That paragraph on the public domain, for example, used to be much stronger in the first leaked draft, with specific obligations to identify, preserve and promote access to public domain material. All of that has now been lost in favor of a feeble, feel-good platitude that imposes no concrete obligations on the TPP parties whatsoever." The EFF walks us through all the other awful provisions as well — it's quite a lengthy analysis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You never know who may be behind those cosplay masks at comic conventions -- until they reveal themselves on social media.

Both Jared Leto (Suicide Squad's Joker) and Mark Ruffalo (the MCU's Hulk) crashed this weekend's New York Comic Con in disguise and then posted photos with unsuspecting fans to their social media accounts.

A masked Leto tweeted a photo of himself with a guy cosplaying as his incarnation of Joker in next summer's Suicide Squad movie.

Ruffalo also donned a mask to walk the floor of NYCC incognito. Check out their posts below.

He had no idea. :) #NYCC2015 pic.twitter.com/zFWsrTbSGv

— JARED LETO (@JaredLeto) October 11, 2015

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If fingerprints can identify individual people, imagine what a brain-print could reveal -- namely, how you think and how intelligent you are. Neuroscientists studied fMRI scans of 126 patients in the Human Connectome Project, a consortium helping t...

This is the world we live in. When it comes to the first world browser problems, there are certainly more important things to talk about than ditching plugins, abandoning flash, and so on… Just recently, Google revealed a new and open source web compression algorithm called Brotli, which is around 25% than Zopfli, a now […]

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Dmytro Panchenko Following the uproar of the VW emissions scandal, four more carmakers have also been found to make diesel models that "emit more pollution on the road than in regulatory tests". A new study has revealed that diesel cars produced by Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi and Mercedes-Benz also emit more NOx than originally recorded... continue reading

Dell has agreed to buy EMC Corporation for a deal worth $67 billion. While EMC isn't a household name, some of its products and subsidiaries are. In addition to selling cloud services, storage and analytic solutions to enterprise companies, EMC own...

For the past three years, London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has maintained a 24/7 presence outside the Ecuadorean embassy in an attempt to arrest Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange on sexual assault charges. It's been a costly operation:...

The following is a comment I just filed on FCC Docket 15-170, “Amendment of Parts 0, 1, 2, 15, and 18 of the Commission’s Rules et al.”

Thirty years ago I had a small hand in the design of the Internet. Since then I’ve become a senior member of the informal collegium that maintains key pieces of it. You rely on my code every time you use a browser or a smartphone or an ATM. If you ever ride in a driverless car, the nav system will critically depend on code I wrote, and Google Maps already does. Today I’m deeply involved in fixing Internet time service.

I write to endorse the filings by Dave Taht and Bruce Perens (I gave Dave Taht a bit of editorial help). I’m submitting an independent comment because while I agree with the general thrust of their recommendations I think they may not go far enough.

The present state of router and wireless-access-point firmware is nothing short of a disaster with grave national-security implications. I know of people who say that could use firmware exploits to take down targeted and arbitrarily large swathes of the public Internet. I believe them because I’m pretty sure I could figure out how to do that myself in three weeks or so if I wanted to.

So far we have been lucky. The specialized technical knowledge required for Internet disruption on a massive scale is mostly confined to a small cadre of old hands like Vint Cerf and Dave Taht and myself. *We* don’t want to disrupt the internet; we created it and we love it. But the threat from others not so benign is a real and present danger.

Cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism are on the rise, with no shortage of malefactors ready to employ them. The Communist Chinese are not just a theoretical threat, they have already run major operations like the OPM crack. Add the North Koreans, the Russians, and the Iranians to a minimum list of those who might plausibly acquire the know-how to turn our own infrastructure against us in disastrous ways.

The effect of locking down router and WiFi firmware as these rules contemplate would be to lock irreparably in place the bugs and security vulnerabilities we now have. To those like myself who know or can guess the true extent of those vulnerabilities, this is a terrifying possibility.

I believe there is only one way to avoid a debacle: mandated device upgradeability and mandated open-source licensing for device firmware so that the security and reliability problems can be swarmed over by all the volunteer hands we can recruit. This is an approach proven to work by the Internet ubiquity and high reliability of the Linux operating system.

In these recommendations I go a bit beyond where Taht and Perens are willing to push. Dave Taht is willing to settle for a mandate of *inspectable* source without a guarantee of permission to modify and redistribute; experience with such arrangements warns me that they scale poorly and are usually insufficient. Bruce Perens is willing to settle for permitting/licensing requirements which I believe would be both ineffective and suppressive of large-scale cooperation.

The device vendors aren’t going to solve the security and reliability problem, because they can’t profit from solving it and they’re generally running on thin margins as it is. Thus, volunteer hackers like myself (and thousands of others) are the only alternative.

We have the skill. We have the desire. We have a proud tradition of public service and mutual help. But you have to *let us do it* – and, to the extent it is in your remit, you have to make the device vendors let us do it.

There is precedent. Consider the vital role of radio hams in coordinating disaster relief. The FCC understands that it is in the public interest to support their and enable their voluntarism. In an Internetted age, enabling our voluntarism is arguably even more important.

Mandated device upgradeability. Mandated open source for firmware. It’s not just a good idea, it should be the law.

The airship is making a comeback. Take the British Airlander10, which uses 20 percent of fuel burned by conventional aircraft and can be fitted with solar panels. Airlander can stay airborne for five days while carrying a maximum payload of 20,000 pounds. It is much safer than its 1930’s cousin and can operate in adverse weather. Combined with GPS navigation and tracking, an unmanned Airlander could stay airborne for up to two weeks, carrying cargo vast distances, including hard-to-reach places. The British manufacturer is already working on an airship that could carry up to 100,000 pounds of cargo – roughly equivalent to the payload of two 20 foot containers. A vast fleet of Airlanders moving silently through the air 24/7 could dramatically decrease the cost of transport (they are faster than ships and much more cost effective than aircraft), while connecting places without ports or runways. Find out more about the declining cost of air travel at www.humanprogress.org. 

 

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Photo credit: Zoom.in Zoom.in No one enjoys being caught up in a traffic jam, especially when you're on your drive home from work. Sometimes, the frustration is simply too much to bear. Perhaps tuning into Classic FM would help? Listening to the soothing melody of a violin could be the answer to curing road rage. continue reading

Paul Reubens of Pee-wee Herman fame will reprise his role as The Penguin's father, Tucker Cobblepot, in this season of Gotham. Reubens previously played the wealthy Cobblepot in Tim Burton's 1992 film Batman Returns, which is actually where the character himself debuted.

Robin Lord Taylor, who plays Oswald Cobblepot (The Penguin) on Gotham, revealed the news during a New York Comic-Con panel on the hit television show.

Gotham first aired last year on Fox and launched its second on September 21st.

For more news from New York Comic-Con, stay tuned to IGN.

Chloi Rad is a Staff Writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @_chloi.

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Mark Hamill will definitely be reprising his role as the Trickster in The Flash's second season.

After a photo of Hamill posing with a Flash crew member sprung up on Reddit, Hamill himself confirmed the news in a now deleted Tweet (as nabbed by TheFlashPodcast.com). He has since recirculated others reporting the news on Twitter.

Hamill first starred as the Trickster in the John Wesley Shipp series in 1990, and went on to play the character - spectacularly -  in an episode of The CW's speedster show.

Lucy O'Brien is Entertainment Editor at IGN’s AU office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.

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Photo credit: Toyota Toyota has showcased its TS040 Hybrid Le Mans race car in an interesting and different way - by making breakfast for 171 people. To make people aware of the amount of energy generated produced by the race car, Toyota decided to utilise it to cook breakfast for a huge crowd. continue reading

According to documents leaked by Wikileaks -- specifically, the TPP's finalized chapter on Intellectual Property -- the days of filesharing sites could quickly be coming to a close. Per the agreement, which would be enforced across all 12 member st...

How Netflix works

Eight million events per second, and billions of metrics every minute. That's the staggering size of video streaming service Netflix, which now claims 37% of peak hours internet bandwidth in the US – and it's pushing towards being used by close to half the population.

The streaming video service, whose recent raising of its prices was headline news, is popular and expanding globally fast, but how does it work?

How big is Netflix?

"We're in 60 countries and expect to be in 200 by the end of 2016, so 65 million will turn to 100 million in a few years," says Josh Evans, Director of Operations Engineering at Netflix, speaking at AWS reInvent 2015 in Las Vegas in October. "We've just launched in Japan and we're going to launch in four other Asian countries in 2016."

Early 2016 will see Netflix launch in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, though some say Netflix is cherry-picking 'low hanging fruit', only operating in highly developed countries where a monthly subscription is affordable.

According to the most recent Sandvine Global Internet Phenomena Report, Netflix is making gains in new European markets they entered late last year, with the service now accounting for almost 10% of peak downstream traffic in both Austria and France.

"At peak we consume 37% of internet bandwidth in the US," says Dave Hahn, Senior Engineer, Critical Operations and Response Engineering Team (CORE) at Netflix in Los Gatos, California, who spoke to us after his talk 'A Day in the Life of a Netflix Engineer'.

The need for speed

There are thousands of people clicking play at the same time, with activity peaking in the evening, though as a global platform it's a constant peak.

The challenge is how to run a service with zero loss while processing over 400 billion events daily, and 17GB per second during peak.

"Starts per second is the heartbeat of Netflix," says Evans. Pressing play is big business.

How the user interface works

You might have noticed that the way you interact with the Netflix user interface has recently changed.

"We created what we call our 'Darwin' user interface, moving form vertical to horizontal box shots, and we tuned our algorithms … a lot of innovation went in," says Evans.

The same kind of interface is on the website, too, creating what Evans calls the 'Akira' user interface.

"All the information you need is at your fingertips," he says. It sounds simple, but it's built on advanced telemetry, real-time analytics and advanced machine learning.

Is Netflix in the cloud?

Yes, but here comes the weird bit – Netflix is hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), whose Amazon Prime Instant Video it competes with.

"Everything that is Netflix from an operational standpoint lives on AWS with the exception of the video bits," says Hahn. It might seem odd, but Amazon actually helps Netflix address the unpredictable peaks in traffic.

"We rely on Amazon's elastic infrastructure to help us scale when we need to," says Hahn. "We go to them for the heavy lifting – for us to build a datacenter and run it really well doesn't help our customers enjoy entertainment, so we're more than happy to have a partner in Amazon that does that stuff for us."

However, it's perhaps a mistake to see AWS and Amazon as partners; the former only regards the latter as one of its customers.

Where does the video come from?

All video is cached and stored on Netflix's own OpenConnect content delivery network (CDN), which connects directly to Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This is the core of Netflix; it's where everything is stored, and it comes complete with cloud management, a delivery engine, and an automation platform.

"Everything else runs on top of AWS," says Hahn. "We built this CDN over the last few years with hardware that works with ISPs around the world."

The CDN is global, so wherever you are in the world, when you request a video the system selects the nearest location to stream it from.

It's in stark contrast to Netflix's past; which started as a DVD rental service, and then racked and stacked its own servers when it began streaming.

Has Netflix always been on Amazon?

No – it used to sit on Netflix's own data centres, specifically one single location on the West Coast of the USA.

This was five years ago, when Netflix wasn't the phenomenon in developed countries that it currently is.

Given its aggressive expansion plans, an easily expandable infrastructure like AWS was the answer. "We started building in 2009 and we had the first devices connect to AWS in 2010," says Hahn.

How does Netflix cope with regional content licensing?

It's complicated.

Hollywood and the movie and TV industry generally is one of the last vestiges of digital geography, which is why some shows are on Netflix US, Netflix Sweden or Netflix Canada, but not on Netflix UK, or vice versa.

It's often a case of there being multiple rights owners, where the studio who produced the movie having rights to sell in one country while a distributor has exclusive rights in another.

However, Netflix is trying to get around this archaic model by producing its own shows like Orange is the New Black, Marco Polo and the not-as-good-as-it-was House of Cards.

Some Netflix users try to get round geolocation restrictions by using a VPN to mask their location and thus browse Netflix libraries not technically available to them, but Netflix has to oppose this, at least officially.

Is it Netflix Vs Amazon Prime Instant Video?

It might appear that way, but since both services are built and run from AWS, Amazon is all too keen to support its main global video streaming rival.

Perhaps that's no surprise given its size, though there is evidence that streaming on Amazon Prime Instant Video is more popular.

Hulu Plus (USA only), the BBC iPlayer (UK only) and other territory-specific rivals aside, there's also iFlix, a startup in South East Asia that's aiming to gain traction in markets that Netflix has thus far ignored.

So far launched into Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, iFlix charges a few dollars per month for everything from South Korean soap operas to Hollywood blockbusters (and several Hollywood power brokers sit on its advisory board).

Netflix won't completely dominate the globe, but video streaming likely will.

How much does Netflix know about what is being watched?

It knows everything.

Every time you watch, browse or view a trailer, Netflix knows. By analysing its global streaming data it can tell the exact point that a show takes-off.

Think it's all about a great pilot show?

"No one was ever hooked on the pilot," says Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer for Netflix, who studied data from 20 shows across 16 markets. "This gives us confidence that giving our members all episodes at once is more aligned with how fans are made."

In short, binge-watching is what it's all about, or so says the data.

Netflix engineers managed to identify 'hooked' episodes where 70% of viewers who watched that episode went on to complete season one.

What's coming next for Netflix

While 65 million people might sound a lot, it's a drop in ocean compared to the amount of people Netflix could be streaming to, so growth (most immediately in Asia) is in Netflix's future.

Netflix streaming is also being made available to airline passengers with phones, tablets or laptops on 10 of Virgin America's new Airbus A320 aircraft in the US, though it's only free until beta testing on its new ViaSat inflight WiFi system ends in March 2016 (expect high prices thereafter for such a data-intensive app).

More important for Netflix as a whole is a more lively UI.

"You'll see more video incorporated into the user interface embedded directly into the UI, and all of this requires growth in the backend infrastructure," says Evans, who shows us a graphic of what the Netflix architecture looks like.

"That's simplified," he says of the complex, spiderweb-like image. "It's more like an organism than a computer programme."

We've also got HDR on the way next year, as Netflix works with the UHD Alliance to help finalise the broadcast standards. As well as an intermediary resolution between HD and Ultra HD for those without the bandwidth to go for the full UHD/HDR monty.

It's also working on new high-efficiency mobile encoders, because it doesn't believe its customers really want to go for the download route if they can stream without completely destroying their mobile data allowances.

And it's going to need a whole lot more Amazon space as it swallows up more and more of the internet.

Straight from its debut at the New York Comic Con panel for the series, IGN has the exclusive online premiere of the trailer for Syfy's upcoming series, Hunters.

From executive producer Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, Aliens, The Walking Dead) and executive producer and showrunner Natalie Chaidez (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, 12 Monkeys), Hunters is based on author Whitley Strieber's Alien Hunter books. In the series, a group of terrorists (the "Hunters" of the title) are in fact truly an alien force, as we focus on members of the Homeland Security-backed group trying to stop them - and find out their true agenda.

Nathan Phillips (The Bridge, Wolf Creek) and Britne Oldford (American Horror Story: Asylum, The Flash) star in Hunters, which debuts in April 2016 on Syfy.

New York Comic Con 2015 attendees were treated to a screening of the premiere episode of The Expanse, a 10-part series airing in December on Syfy, as well as a Q&A with the series' stars Thomas Jane (Det. Miller), Florence Faivre (Julie Mao), Steven Strait (James Holden), Cas Anwar (Alex Kamel), as well as executive producers Mark Fergus and Hawk Otsby.

The Expanse is a multi-layered story that focuses on three prominent yet seemingly disparate arcs that will eventually intertwine as the series progresses. It should appeal to fans of hard sci-fi as it shares many elements from such prominent franchises as Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica and Alien.

Part detective story, part political thriller and part outer space adventure, The Expanse takes place 200 years in the future after the solar system has been colonized and Earth and Mars are on the brink of war. Life is pretty grim for those who live on Ceres, a colonized asteroid teeming with bleakness and poverty, or those who work on space freighters, searching for food and water to help keep humanity alive.

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The most sophisticated technologies in the world of "Game of Thrones" may be the watermill and the forge -- but it still has a surprising amount in common with Silicon Valley today. 

In both, brilliant strategists jockey for power. They are arraying powerful forces -- mostly young men -- in every corner of the continent. A war is brewing. Its outcome could determine the fate of humanity.

That, at least, is the theory behind the amusing video above from Vanity Fair. They reimagined the iconic, Emmy-winning credits sequence of HBO's hit series as an intro to the drama of huge tech companies battling for our wallets and souls. 

It's fun stuff, even if the parallels they draw don't quite line up with the action on "Game of Thrones." After all, they place burgeoning social media startups like Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat in The North -- which everyone knows is the most ancient, sleepiest part of Westeros!

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It seems paradoxical that you'd have to ship cloud data, but plenty of companies do -- it's sometimes faster for them to send a courier than to wait days for a massive upload to finish. And Amazon knows it. The internet giant just revealed the Sn...

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When Dyson isn't turning its R&D-heavy hand to new interests, it likes to go about improving upon existing products. Case in point: the new "Pure Hot + Cool," which combines Dyson's bladeless fan, heater and air purification technologies into t...

A legal framework used to justify the movement of user data across the Atlantic has just been ruled invalid by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The Safe Harbor agreement, as it's known, let companies like Facebook and Twitter freely move your i...