Maxim Bange

En nemen gelijk Shoutcast mee. Beide zijn nu in Belgische handen.

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Many schools are dedicating valuable IT resources to countering the anonymous proxies that have become a popular way to evade web content filtering systems, a survey of UK and US institutions has found.

Firm promises security updates until mid-2015 following user backlash

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Tens of thousands of Ukrainians are rallying in the center of Kiev, in defiance of recent legislation that significantly curbs their rights to protest.

Last week President Viktor Yanukovych caused an uproar at home and abroad when he approved a number of laws that limit Ukrainians' rights to protest, civic activism and free speech. The U.S. called that legislation "undemocratic."

The move was aimed at quashing the protests calling for his ouster, which have rocked Kiev and other cities in Ukraine for nearly two months. The protests were sparked by Yanukvoych's decision to freeze ties with the European Union and embrace Russia instead. They were intensified by police violence.

Opposition as well as civic and religious leaders exhorted Ukrainians on Sunday to keep up the protest and fight for democracy.

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A US court has ruled against the FCC's Open Internet regulations, putting the future of net neutrality completely up in the air.

Every single one of a sample of large multinational firms investigated by Cisco for its latest Security Report showed signs of malicious traffic on their networks, the networking company has revealed.

"Creepypasta," as Will Wiles explains in Aeon Magazine, is "a widely distributed and leaderless effort to make and share scary stories." It is a phenomenon powered by the internet — the word itself derives from the neologism "copypasta," short pieces of writing or images posted multiple times across the internet — but Wiles argues that the best creepypastas echo the same principles of horror laid down by authors such as H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James. Wiles' report on the subject charts the worst of the creepypasta practice — its tendency for artless gore and its repetition of existing themes — but also its best. He lauds the "mind-boggling intertextuality" of innovative creepypastas such as the Slenderman, calling them "a way...

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Registration invitations to stress test Respawn Entertainment's Titanfall on the Xbox One are reportedly being sent out to EA Origin account holders, numerous users claim.

According to a screenshot of the reported email taken by Twitter user Lazar Odic, the invitation states that the user has been selected "to take part in an exclusive trial for an upcoming title on Microsoft's Xbox One."

Interested users are then prompted to the click register button and follow the required steps. The email advises that account holders will receive an email containing a trial account code, start date of the test and instructions on how to join the game if they are selected to participate.

The registration link redirects users to an "alpha...

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Police in the UK, US, and Australia have dismantled an international ring of pedophiles accused of streaming live video of child abuse from the Philippines. As BBC News reports, authorities have so far arrested 29 people as part of "Operation Endeavor," an investigation spanning 14 countries. The investigation into the Philippines network was launched in 2012 by the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA), the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Australian Federal Police.

The suspects in question are accused of paying to see children being abused online, in what the NCA describes as "significant and emerging threat," particularly in the developing world. Payments totaled more than £37,500 ($61,268), authorities say, with some of...

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EINDHOVEN - Ryanair gaat vanaf begin april 2014 drie nieuwe routes vliegen vanaf Eindhoven Airport. Dit heeft de Ierse prijsvechter donderdag bekendgemaakt. Het zijn Murcia (IATA-code MJV) in Spanje, het Griekse eiland Corfu (CFU) en Venetië (Treviso - TSF). Ryanair komt hiermee deze zomer op 32 bestemmingen vanaf Eindhoven. Eerder werd al aangekondigd dat in april Knock in het westen van Ierland en het Italiaanse Catania, op Sicilië, worden opgenomen in het routenetwerk.

Here's a fun chart from BofA/ML (via @Fgoria)

The chart is a bit unfair, since it's comparing global robots to US manufacturing jobs. Just looking at the number of robots in the US would be better.

But even stripping out the comparison, the rise of the installed base of global robots is worth watching, especially as the next few years are expected to see major growth.

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Maar advocaat blijft erbij: Bitcoin is legitiem.

MANAMA (Reuters) - Saudi Gulf Airlines, a new carrier born of the deregulation of Saudi Arabia's aviation market, has signed a $2 billion deal with Canada's Bombardier Inc <BBDb.TO> to buy 16 CSeries jets with options for 10 more, the airline's owner said on Thursday.

The deal is a boost for Bombardier, which has so far seen slow orders for the CSeries after several months of development delays, with potential customers waiting for flight test data to confirm fuel and cost saving claims.

Delivery of the CS300 jets, which seat between 130 and 160 passengers, is expected between the end of 2015 and the start of 2016, said Samer al-Magali, president of the Abdel Hadi al-Qahtani group.

Dammam-based Saudi Gulf is expected to start operating later this year or next year, Magali told reporters at the Bahrain International Airshow, saying the $2 billion referred to the list price for the planes and options.

The group is ready to buy or lease around six other planes until the CSeries jets are delivered, he added.

"Saudi Gulf will be launched once we have the technical licence from the civil aviation authority," said Magali, a former chief executive of Bahrain's national carrier Gulf Air

<GULF.UL>.

Saudi Arabia started opening up its aviation market in 2012 by awarding additional carrier licences. Population growth and rapidly rising incomes mean there is considerable room for expansion, analysts believe.

Currently, only national carrier Saudi Arabian Airlines and budget airline National Air Services serve a domestic market of about 27 million people. Foreign carriers can only fly in and out of Saudi Arabia, not within the country.

The Bombardier order will initially be funded by the al-Qahtani group but the main funding will come from lenders, Magali said without elaborating. The planes will be used within Saudi Arabia and the region.

The CSeries is a narrow-body jetliner aimed at competing with the smaller planes built by aerospace giants Boeing <BA.N> and Airbus <EAD.PA>.

Bombardier has said it expects to have 300 firm orders by the time the CSeries boards its first commercial passenger, currently slated for next autumn.

(Writing by Andrew Torchia and Sylvia Westall; Editing by Jason Neely and Mark Potter)

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Targeting an American independent oil and gas corporation

The Twitter account of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has deleted a controversial tweet that said the world had "surrendered to [the] Iranian nation's will" in coming to an interim agreement on the country's nuclear energy program.

The tweet made rounds in the U.S., but the statement was part of remarks Rouhani delivered Tuesday in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan. News reports framed the statement as an effort to bring around hard-liners in Iran who believe that the interim agreement infringes upon Iran's enrichment capabilities. 

White House press secretary Jay Carney was asked about Rouhani's statements on Tuesday in the first question of his briefing. He too framed it as a likely attempt for Rouhani to appeal to hard-liners in his country. 

"It's not surprising to us, nor should it be to you, that the Iranians are describing the agreement in a certain way for their domestic audience. They did the same thing following the agreement of the Joint Plan of Action in November, and we certainly expected they would do the same thing this time," Carney said.

"The fact is the agreement marks the first time in a decade that Iran has agreed to specific actions that halt progress on its nuclear program and roll back key aspects of the program, stopping the advance of the program and introducing unprecedented transparency into Iran's nuclear activities while we negotiate a long-term comprehensive solution.

"So, again, as I said yesterday, it doesn’t matter what they say; it matters what they do."

The statement came at a time when the U.S. Congress is deeply divided over the possibility of imposing new sanctions on the Iranian regime. The Iran sanctions bill currently being floated in the Senate has 59 bipartisan co-sponsors. President Barack Obama has threatened to veto any new sanctions legislation passed by Congress as long as the interim deal is in effect.

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Studying more than 45,000 projects, researchers at Georgia Tech found the best phrases people should use to help them get money for a Kickstarter project.

Assistant professor Eric Gilbert and doctoral candidate Tanushree Mitra discovered that positive and negative language in the "pitch letter" section of each Kickstarter project greatly affects the fundraising success of the project

Pebble's kickstarter campaign was used as the gauge for success projects while.

A phrase like "given the chance" generated greater interest from donors, as it implies you have a revolutionary product.

Negative connotations such as "hope to get" scare off contributors since it emphasizes you are desperate for cash.

Ultimately, the research showed that language played a role in the success of 58.56% of projects that reached their goals. If you're interested in learning more about the study, you can read the full report here.

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Focus matters enormously for success in life, and yet we seem to give it little attention.

Daniel Goleman’s book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, explores the power of attention. “Attention works much like a muscle,” he writes, “use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows.”

To get the results we want in life, Goleman argues we need three kinds of focus.

Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the larger world. A (person) tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.

How we deploy attention shapes what we see. Or as Yoda says, “Your focus is your reality.”

Goleman argues that, despite the advantages of everything being only a click away, our attention span is suffering.

An eighth-grade teacher tells me that for many years she has had successive classes of students read the same book, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Her students have loved it — until five years or so ago. “I started to see kids not so excited — even high-achieving groups could not get engaged with it,” she told me. “They say the reading is too hard; the sentences are too complicated; it takes a long time to read a page.”

She wonders if perhaps her students’ ability to read has been somehow compromised by the short, choppy messages they get in texts. One student confessed he’d spent two thousand hours in the last year playing video games. She adds, “It’s hard to teach comma rules when you are competing with World of WarCraft.”

Here is a telling story. I was in a coffee shop just the other day and I noticed that when two people were having a conversation they couldn’t go more than a few minutes without picking up their phone. Our inability to resist checking email, Facebook, and Twitter rather than focus on the here and now leads to a real life out-of-office. Sociologist Erving Goffman, calls this “away,” which tells other people “I’m not interested” in you right now. Another example, from later in the day, comes from the post office. I was waiting patiently in line to pick up a parcel. Finally my turn came and the phone rang. The attendant, of course, ran to the phone making me feel less important than the mystery person on the phone.

“While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish.”

We continually fight distractions. From televisions on during supper, text messages, emails, phone calls … you get the picture. This is one reason I’ve changed my media consumption habits in 2014.

It seems like we’re going through life in, in the words of one All Things D(igital) conference in 2005, a “continuous partial attention.” We’re there but not really there. Unaware of where we place our attention.

I once worked with the CEO of a private organization. We often discussed board meetings, agendas, and areas of focus. I sensed a disconnect between what he wanted to happen and what was actually happening so I went back over the last year of board meetings and categorized each scheduled agenda item. It turned out that ‘scheduled time’ was almost the complete inverse of where he wanted to place attention.

Goleman also points to some of the implications of our modern world.

The onslaught of incoming data leads to sloppy shortcuts, like triaging email by heading, skipping much of voice mails, skimming messages and memos. It’s not just that we’ve developed habits of attention that make us less effective, but that the weight of messages leaves us too little time simply to reflect on what they really mean.

In 1977, foreseeing what was going to happen, the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon wrote:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

William James, a pioneer of modern psychology, defined attention as “the sudden taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”

We naturally focus when we’re lost. Imagine for a second the last time you were driving in your car without your GPS and you got lost. Think back to the first thing you did in response. I bet you turned off the radio so you could increase your focus.

Goleman, paraphrasing research, argues there are two main varieties of distractions: sensory and emotional.

The sensory distractors are easy: as you read these words you’re tuning out (our sponsor and all of the text on the right). Or notice for a moment the feeling of your tongue against your upper palate—just one of an endless wave of incoming stimuli your brain weeds out from the continuous wash of background sounds, shapes and colors, tastes, smells, sensations, and on and on.

More daunting is the second variety of lures: emotionally loaded signals. While you might find it easy to concentrate on answering your email in the hubbub of your local coffee shop, if you should overhear someone mention your name (potent emotional bait, that) it’s almost impossible to tune out the voice that carries it — your attention reflexively alerts to hear what’s being said about you. Forget that email. The dividing line between fruitless rumination and productive reflection lies in whether or not we come up with some tentative solution or insight and then can let those distressing thoughts go — or if, on the other hand, we just keep obsessing over the same loop of worry.

The more our focus gets disrupted, the worse we do.

To focus we must tune out emotional distractions. But not at all costs. The power to disengage focus is also important.

That means those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional turbulence, more able to stay unflappable in a crisis and to keep on an even keel despite life’s emotional waves.

Failure to drop one focus and move on to others can, for example, leave the mind lost in repeating loops of chronic anxiety. At clinical extremes it means being lost in helplessness, hopelessness, and self-pity in depression; or panic and catastrophizing in anxiety disorders; or countless repetitions of ritualistic thoughts or acts (touch the door fifty times before leaving) in obsessive-compulsive disorder. The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.

We’ve all seen what a strong selective focus looks like. It’s the couple in the coffee shop mentioned above, eyes locked, who fail to realize they are not alone.

It should come as no surprise that we learn best with focused attention.

As we focus on what we are learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know, making new neural connections. If you and a small toddler share attention toward something as you name it, the toddler learns that name; if her focus wanders as you say it, she won’t.

When our mind wanders off, our brain activates a host of brain circuits that chatter about things that have nothing to do with what we’re trying to learn. Lacking focus, we store no crisp memory of what we’re learning.

Goleman goes on to discuss how we connect what we read to our mental models, which is the heart of learning.

As we read a book, a blog, or any narrative, our mind constructs a mental model that lets us make sense of what we are reading and connects it to the universe of such models we already hold that bear on the same topic.

If we can’t focus we’ll have more holes in our understanding. (To find holes in your understanding, try the Feynman Technique, which was actually an invention of George Eliot’s but I’ll save that for another day.)

When we read a book, our brain constructs a network of pathways that embodies that set of ideas and experiences. Contrast that deep comprehension with the interruptions and distractions that typify the ever-seductive Internet.

The continuous onslaught of texts, meetings, videos, music, email, Twitter, Facebook, and more is the enemy of understanding. The key to understanding, argues Nicolas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, is “deep reading.” And the internet is making this nearly impossible.

There is, however, perhaps no skill better than deep and focused thought. “The more information that’s out there,” says Tyler Cowen, author of Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation, “the greater the returns to just being willing to sit down and apply yourself. Information isn’t what’s scarce; it’s the willingness to do something with it.” Deep thought must be learned. In order to do that, however, we must tune out most of the distractions and focus.

Goleman reminds us that some of this too was foreseen.

Way back in the 1950s the philosopher Martin Heidegger warned against a looming “tide of technological revolution” that might “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be … the only way of thinking.” That would come at the loss of “meditative thinking,” a mode of reflection he saw as the essence of our humanity.

I hear Heidegger’s warning in terms of the erosion of an ability at the core of reflection, the capacity to sustain attention to an ongoing narrative. Deep thinking demands sustaining a focused mind. The more distracted we are, the more shallow our reflections; likewise, the shorter our reflections, the more trivial they are likely to be. Heidegger, were he alive today, would be horrified if asked to tweet.

The rest of Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence goes on to narrow in on “the elusive and under-appreciated mental faculty in the mind’s operations” known as attention and its role in living “a fulfilling life.”

SEE ALSO: 5 Tips For Clearing Mental Clutter And Regaining Focus

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Kevin Richardson is an animal behaviorist who has become famous for getting up-close to wild animals, including lions and hyenas.

In a viral video, taken by a GoPro camera, the so-called "lion whisperer" can be seen hugging and cuddling two lions that he rescued as cubs when their mother abandoned them.

The lions are now 10 years old.

Despite all of this time living in the wild in South Africa, the lions still respond to Richardson's voice. He calls the animals' names and they come running to greet him.

Richardson's methods are controversial since interacting with wild animals is obviously dangerous.

But on his website, Richardson argues that developing personal relationships with lions brings attention to their plight in captivity and the wild.

A large study published in the journal Science this week found that three-quarters of the world's top predators, including lions, are going extinct. This is largely due to habitat loss. 

You can watch Richardson stroking and kissing his lion friends like house cats in the video below:

SEE ALSO: How Cats See The World Compared To Humans [PICTURES]

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Patching all it can before end of support in April

Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that started as a joke but has since gone on to play a far more important role than anyone could've predicted, is on a total tear in transaction volume.

There are more Dogecoins in existence than there are all other cryptocoins combined. According to this chart from BitinfoCharts, the next-most-plentiful currency is Quarkcoin, with almost 250 million coins in circulation.

But this doesn't stack up against Dogecoin for a minute — it boasts almost 28 billion coins.

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Last year, Sir Richard Branson promised Virgin Galactic’s first commercial mission would rip through the atmosphere in 2014. That goal has edged ever closer with SpaceShipTwo’s latest trip beyond the sound barrier, where it shot past previous records and hit an altitude of 71,000 feet. This recent dry-run was the maiden voyage for a set of newly designed thrusters (used to keep the vessel on-course in space), and a new coating for the tail section that reflects heat from the rocket engine. As the company tells it, the purpose of this flight was to gather more transonic and supersonic data — it isn’t certain how many more test flights are needed, though. Given that Branson and his kids will be Galactic’s first passengers, however, we’ve a hunch he’ll keep tinkering ’til everything’s just right.

Filed under: Misc, Transportation, Science, Alt

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Via: Sploid, NBC News

Source: Virgin Galactic

The post Virgin Galactic tests new thrusters, further disregards gravity (video) appeared first on AIVAnet.

Winamp, the popular music player of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, was supposed to shut down on December 21st, but it has lived on into 2014. Following rumors of a potential Microsoft acquisition, Radionomy confirms that it has acquired the media player from its owner AOL along with Shoutcast, an internet radio broadcasting service that AOL also owned. The precise details of the deal are not public, but the Belgian publication De Tijd reports that AOL took a partial stake in Radionomy as part of a recent funding round.

The confirmation comes after Winamp forum users spotted that the DNS entries for winamp.com had been switched to Radionomy’s own servers last month. Radionomy launched in late 2012 as a free service to generate...

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Magic: The Gathering kicked off the trading card game craze way back in 1993, by turning collectible cards into powerful magic spells and fantastic creatures used in a deep, strategic game. Even today, the franchise rakes in money with a never-ending series of expansion sets and tournaments, and it might be getting even bigger soon. The Hollywood Reporter writes that Fox has obtained the rights to produce a Magic: The Gathering movie.

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While blockbuster titles like "Call of Duty" and "Grand Theft Auto" get all the press, the rise of relatively open software stores on PCs, consoles, tablets, and smartphones has allowed for a major increase in the viability of games made by smaller, independent developers.

Developers like Kent Hudson. Last month, Hudson released "The Novelist," his first game as an indie game designer. Business Insider sat down with Hudson to discuss the game at length. 

"The Novelist" doesn't have the big action set pieces or cinematic cutscenes used to tell stories in most games. Instead, the player drives the story directly through gameplay.

The game puts players in control of a nigh-invisible, "Paranormal Activity"-like entity (see: character above) haunting a house on the coast of Oregon. As the game begins, a novelist and his wife and son move into the home for the summer.

The novelist, Dan Kaplan, is struggling to complete his second book. Meanwhile, his marriage is going through a rough patch and his son is having trouble in school, both socially and with his work. Basically, it's not a good time for the Kaplan family.

Of course, none of this is told to the player outright. Instead, the player has to sneak up on the Kaplans to "uncover memories" via possession and find clues laid around the house. Letters to and from family, diary entries, and the son's crayon drawings slowly reveal what each of the family members are thinking about and what they want in life.

Things get interesting when you know what each character really wants. That's because the player can influence the Kaplans' lives by telling Dan what do to while he sleeps. The only problem: you can't make everyone happy in every situation.

In fact, the game only lets players make one character happy in any given situation. Whether it's giving Dan time to work on his book, taking the Kaplans' son to an amusement park or going for a hike on a trail Dan's wife picked out, the options available to the player are almost all mutually exclusive. 

If you're careful about finding out each character's wants, you can try to find ways to compromise between them. While you still can't make more than one person happy, compromises let you keep one of the others from being unhappy.

That's an important distinction to make. Each character has a "happiness score" based on the player's decisions. Fulfilling a want adds to that score, finding a compromise maintains it, and ignoring a character's wants lowers it.

That score affects the ending of the game. In my play through, I tried to give Dan time to work on his novel but kept worrying about the state of his marriage and the lack of attention his son was getting, so most of my suggestions focused on improving those aspects of his life. 

In the end, his book was a failure (ending his career as an author) but his marriage became stronger than ever and his son grew up to become a famous graphic novelist. 

Apparently, I care about family more than having a successful career. But others will have different priorities, and those priorities can play out through eight different endings that range from everyone being happy to the Kaplans falling into ruin.

After nearly two years in development, the game is receiving praise from critics and coverage from major gaming publications liking Polygon, Game Informer, and GameSpot.

While Hudson has spent more than a decade as a game designer — with big games like "Bioshock 2" and "Thief: Deadly Shadows" under his belt — making a game by himself still proved to be a challenge.

To make the game, Hudson employed Unity, a game engine favored by a number of independent game developers for its ease of use and incredibly active and helpful community. He isn't a programmer, so to put together the game's logic he used uScript, an add-on for Unity that lets game developers connect bits of logic visually rather than using thousands of lines of code.

According to Hudson, it took him about a week to become familiar with Unity. That's lucky, because figuring out what he was going to make in the first place took months.

When he first left his job at 2K Games after becoming fed-up with the avoidance of experimentation in traditional studio-based game development, Hudson thought he was going to start his indie career by making a simple game for the iPad. After a few false starts, he decided to tackle to problem of giving players "agency" in the stories they play through in video games.

Tired of games where the story happens around the player in cutscenes instead of being driven by their decisions during gameplay, Hudson came up with a concept a lot like "The Novelist" but with eight characters, each fitting a distinct stereotype — novelist, painter, old millionaire, etc. But that proved to be far too complex to tackle by himself.

"There would have been far too many permutations of the story to keep track of during writing," Hudson told me over coffee. "And with that many characters, it's hard to make the player care about the wants of any individual."

So he stripped it down to a far simpler group: the nuclear family, by many standards the building block of social interaction and community.

"That made the system behind the gameplay much easier to work with, because with only three characters it became a balanced equation: one character would be happy in any given situation, one character could remain neutral, and one character would become unhappy."

Many of the struggles faced by the game's titular character are reflections of Hudson's own problems and anxieties. After all, there isn't a huge gap between what goes into writing a book and writing the story for a game. In fact, at one point the player finds a bunch of inspirational and self-deprecating post-it notes in front of Dan's typewriter — Hudson says that those are actual notes he had at his desk that he wrote into the game when he was struck with a bout of writer's block.

Of course, not every scenario is inspired by Hudson's life. For instance, he's not a father. To create a realistic-feeling family dynamic, he surveyed friends who are parents and spoke to their kids about what it's like to be a parent and a six-year-old kid.

The result is a game that truly captures the emotional ups and downs of finding balance in one's life, whether it's between work and family or even between one's spouse and one's child.

While it's not heavy on action  — the primary game mode requires the player to find creative ways to keep out of the Kaplans' sight, though there's also a mode that lets non-gamers simply wander about the house freely to experience the story without worrying about hiding — the game offers satisfaction by showing that their decisions really matter, just as in real life.

For the price of a trip to the movies — $14.99 on Hudson's site, available on PC and Mac — "The Novelist" provides 2-4 hours of gameplay per playthrough. While I'm not sure if I'm going to go through it again any time soon (simply because the choices I made were all gut reactions, making the story feel like my own), completionists will enjoy playing through the game to see the different endings.

Bottom line: For gamers who enjoy piecing together an emotional story, "The Novelist" is one of 2013's must-buys.

See a trailer for "The Novelist":

SEE ALSO: 14 PS3 games you should buy instead of spending $400 on a PlayStation 4

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In Nederland is vorig jaar 32 miljoen euro opgehaald met crowdfunding, het online vergaren van kapitaal bij een grote groep kleine investeerders. Dat is meer dan een verdubbeling ten opzichte van 2012.

In 2012 werd 14 miljoen euro opgehaald. Dat zegt adviesbureau Douw&amp;Koren dat adviezen geeft op het gebied van crowdfunding. In 2011 werd er nog 2,5 miljoen euro opgehaald.

Volgens het adviesbureau is crowdfunding vooral toegenomen bij commerciële ondernemingen. Crowdfunding bij goede doelen en creatieven projecten steeg minder sterk.

Oersoep

Een voorbeeld van een succesvol crowdfundingproject is Oersoep in Nijmegen. Deze bierbrouwerij begon ooit klein, maar heeft inmiddels bijna 200 bierrecepten.

De initiatiefnemers benaderden kennissen, familie en andere belangstellenden voor een investering. Er werd uiteindelijk 150.000 euro opgehaald.

Het bier wordt geëxporteerd naar onder meer Italië en binnenkort doet Oersoep mee aan een groot brouwersfestival in de VS.

Vastgoed en natuur

Voor de toekomst voorziet adviesbureau Douw&amp;Koren vooral een groei op het gebied van sport en design.

Ook vastgoed- en natuurprojecten zullen naar verwachting vaker met crowdfunding worden gefinancierd.

Bohemia Interactive sold more than one million copies of DayZ within four weeks of its Early Access release, creator Dean Hall announced today, telling Polygon that the milestone is a "shots fired moment" against the traditional publishing model.

".... we're just blown away with the success of it," Hall told Polygon in an email today. "We obviously knew that there was strong interest in the concept, but weren't sure whether that interest was just ‘hype' or whether it would actually translate into real sales. I remember when we finally pushed the button, I had this moment of panic when I wondered if many people would really buy it."

DayZ stemmed from a mod for Bohemia's Arma 2 which rolled out in 2012, with the standalone announced...

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Cloud's platform as a service (PaaS) market hasn't even grown up yet, but already some people are saying it's doomed.

De wapenwet in België dreigt roet in het eten te gooien van de 100-jarige herdenking van de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Buitenlandse groepen willen in België veldslagen gaan naspelen, maar door een nieuwe, strengere wet is het erg moeilijk de historische wapens het land in te krijgen.

De organisatoren van '100 jaar Groote Oorlog' maken zich grote zorgen, melden Belgische media. Beroemde re-enactmentgroepen, die gebeurtenissen uit het verleden met veel oog voor detail naspelen, zijn uitgenodigd. De groepen komen onder meer uit Nieuw-Zeeland, Groot-Brittannië en Canada.

Nepwapens

"Die verenigingen dreigen af te haken", zegt organisator Blieck in Het Nieuwsblad. "Ze vrezen juridische problemen, boetes, tot zelfs inbeslagname van hun wapens."

Om de wapens te mogen invoeren, moet een lange procedure worden doorlopen, waarbij allerlei diensten in instanties een akkoord moeten geven. Het is volgens de organisatie geen optie om de buitenlandse acteurs te vragen nepwapens mee te nemen. "Het zijn geen carnavalsgroepen. Het zijn mensen die er bijzonder trots op zijn dat zelfs de kleinste details van hun uitrusting historisch volledig correct zijn", zegt Blieck.

Noodwet

Minister van Justitie Turtelboom zegt dat ze op de hoogte is van de problematiek en dat er hard wordt gewerkt aan een oplossing. Mogelijk komt er een noodwet, want in België lijkt iedereen er wel van overtuigd dat het spektakel hoe dan ook moet doorgaan.