De Universiteit Twente heeft kabels ontwikkeld die veel minder opwarmen dan verwacht waardoor de supergeleiding intact blijft bij gebruik bij een kernfusie-energiecentrale. De verwachting is dat het Twentse systeem een wereldwijde standaard zal worden.
This is bad news for central banks that have been diversifying their foreign reserves to include gold, but at a slower pace than in 2012.
A new report from the World Gold Council showed that year-to-date central bank gold reserves increased by nearly 300 tonnes.
Global official gold holdings totaled 31,913.5 tonnes as of December 2013, according to the latest report from the World Gold Council.
We pulled the numbers on the 10 biggest official reserves.
Note: CBGA refers to the Central Bank Gold Agreements. The first Agreement (CBGA 1) ran from September 27, 1999 to September 26, 2004. The second Agreement (CBGA 2) ran from September 27, 2004 to September 26, 2009. The third Agreement (CBGA 3) will run for five years from September 2009.
10. India
Official gold holdings: 557.7 tonnes
Percent of foreign reserves in gold: 8.4%
The government has been trying to deter people from purchasing the precious metal and some like Jim Rogers attribute the price decline to lowered emerging market demand. Gold imports have been blamed for the nation's high current account deficit. India's central bank governor Raghuram Rajan has previously said the country can pay off its debt in gold.
A large portion of the Netherlands' gold reserves are held in the U.S, and some are held in Canada and the UK. About 10% is expected to be held in Amsterdam. Earlier this year the Netherlands wanted to repatriate its gold.
Japan's gold reserves were at just 6 tonnes in 1950, and its central bank registered its first serious jump in gold holdings in 1959, with purchases increasing by 169 tonnes from the previous year.
In 2011, the Bank of Japan sold gold to pump ¥20 trillion into the economy to calm investors after the tsunami and nuclear disaster.
WICHITA - De nieuwe Textron-AirLand Scorpion heeft donderdag voor het eerst gevlogen. Het in het diepste geheim gebouwde tweemotorige straalvliegtuig wordt in de markt gezet om zowel de rol van strategische verkenner (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, ISR) als die van een licht aanvalsvliegtuig (Strike) te kunnen vervullen.
Een wet die polygamie verbiedt in de Amerikaanse staat Utah is voor een deel in strijd met de grondwet. Dat heeft een federale rechter bepaald. Voorstanders van polygamie zijn opgelucht door de uitspraak.
De zaak was aangespannen door een groep fundamentalistische Mormonen, onder wie Kody Brown en zijn vier vrouwen, bekend van de reality-show 'Sister Wives'. Zij geloven dat polygamie in de hemel beloond wordt.
Godsdienst
Volgens de rechter zijn belangrijke delen van het verbod in strijd met de vrijheid van godsdienst zoals die in de grondwet is geregeld.
Belangengroepering voor polygamisten reageren opgelucht. Volgens hen zijn veel gezinnen jarenlang bang geweest om opgepakt te worden.
Heiligen
In Amerika wonen naar schatting 38.000 fundamentalistische Mormonen die aan polygamie doen. De meesten wonen in de staat Utah. De officiële Mormoonse kerk, de Kerk van Jezus Christus van de Heiligen der Laatste Dagen, veroordeelt polygamie.
Het is nog onduidelijk of de openbaar aanklager in Utah in beroep gaat tegen het vonnis.
Enterprise customers will still have access to long term help through their support channels.
For everyone else, you should upgrade to Java SE 7 and remove Java SE 6 - remember Java doesn’t remove older versions by default.
Malware exploiting vulnerabilities in Java isn’t new. We’ve written about Java vulnerabilities on this blog before. In fact, since July this year Exploit:Java/CVE-2013-2465 has been making the rounds and targeting Java SE 6.
Oracle has done a great job of releasing Java updates to patch these vulnerabilities.
However, Java SE 6 is about seven years old, and Java SE 7 was released more than two years ago. This means it’s time to think about alternatives for the aging version.
This includes the updates that help protect your PC against security risks and malware. It’s a good time to think about installing Windows 8 on your PC.
jones_supa writes "SteamOS has been further inspected to see what kind of technical solutions it uses. The Debian-based OS uses Linux 3.10, shipping with a heap of patches applied, with the most focus being on real-time-like features. The kernel is also using aufs and they seem to be sitting on some bug fixes for upstream on top of that. The kernel is not using the new Intel P-State driver, with the reported reason being, 'it causes issues with sound being choppy during BigPicture trailer video playback.' SteamOS is using SysVinit as its init system. The desktop is backed by X.Org server 1.12.4 and a custom desktop compositor which seems to be a 4,200-line patch on xcompmgr. Catalyst and Mesa components can be found on the system, but so far only NVIDIA is officially supported. The system boots into Big Picture Mode, but the user can drop into a GNOME desktop. Responsible for a great deal of the kernel changes, SteamOS compositor work, and other SteamOS code is Pierre-Loup A. Griffais, a.k.a. 'Plagman'. He was a NVIDIA employee dealing with their Linux support. Another Valve employee doing lots of the SteamOS system-level work is John Vert, who up until last year was a Microsoft employee since 1991. There's also other former Microsoft employees on Valve's Linux team, like Mike Sartain."
FOWLERVILLE, Mich. (AP) — A hardware store in Fowlerville is closing after 122 years in business.
The economy and competition with big-box stores were too much for Fowlerville True Value Hardware to overcome, the owners told the Livingston County Daily Press & Argus of Howell ( http://bit.ly/190cHmq ).
The business owned by the Burnie family for the past 69 years closed Dec. 7 to prepare for liquidation sales starting Monday, said Doug Burnie, who owned the store from 1974 to 2008.
Current owner Jim Burnie signed a purchase agreement with the Fowlerville Downtown Development Authority in 2007 to expand the store, but he withdrew it the next year when Wal-Mart opened a 184,000-square-foot store in the village.
"We never really recovered so it was profitable," Doug Burnie told the newspaper. "The bottom line is that customer bases dwindled simply because they are deciding to go to one-stop big-box stores."
Doug Burnie, who acquired the store from his father in 1974, said he always looked forward to going in to work.
"If your heart is in the hardware business, when someone walks in the front door and has a problem, it becomes your problem," he said.
Fowlerville Downtown Development Authority Director Fred Dillingham said it's sad for many in the community to see the store close.
"I don't think it's fair to call it a big-box-store-versus-small-business issue," he told the newspaper. "The business environment in small communities has changed over many years, and there's new opportunities businesses have to take advantage of."
The store will permanently close once nearly everything is sold.
According to state-run media outlet Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), Iran successfully launched its second monkey to space and back, the country's latest step toward sending humans into orbit. The monkey, named Fargam, was flown on Iran's liquid-fueled Pajohesh rocket for a 15-minute mission that took him approximately 72 miles into space. Scientists on the ground measured vital signs and signals from the rocket before before it returned to Earth safely.
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani congratulated the scientists, Iran, and Iran's religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Twitter this morning:
China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation
Late Saturday night in Beijing, China's Chang'e 3 moon lander touched down on the lunar surface at the Bay of Rainbows in the Moon's northern hemisphere. China is now the third nation to have landed on the moon.
Chang'e 3 is carrying the six-wheeled, solar-powered Yutu rover, which will spend three months touring the lunar body's surface equipped with cameras, a robotic arm, scientific equipment, and a radar system.
The landing went smoothly, with Chang'e 3 taking about 12 minutes to get from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon on autopilot. The Moon lander had launched from Earth on December 2, and it spent about 6 days in lunar orbit preparing for landing. The soft landing was the first on the Moon's surface in 37 years.
In the run up to Marine Gen. James Mattis' deployment to Iraq in 2004, a colleague wrote to him asking about the "importance of reading and military history for officers," many of whom found themselves "too busy to read."
His response went viral over email.
Security Blog "Strife" out of Kings College in London recently published Mattis' words with a short description from the person who found it in her email.
Their title for the post:
With Rifle and Bibliography: General Mattis on Professional Reading
[Dear, "Bill"]
The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.
Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.
With [Task Force] 58, I had w/ me Slim’s book, books about the Russian and British experiences in [Afghanistan], and a couple others. Going into Iraq, “The Siege” (about the Brits’ defeat at Al Kut in WW I) was req’d reading for field grade officers. I also had Slim’s book; reviewed T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”; a good book about the life of Gertrude Bell (the Brit archaeologist who virtually founded the modern Iraq state in the aftermath of WW I and the fall of the Ottoman empire); and “From Beirut to Jerusalem”. I also went deeply into Liddell Hart’s book on Sherman, and Fuller’s book on Alexander the Great got a lot of my attention (although I never imagined that my HQ would end up only 500 meters from where he lay in state in Babylon).
Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun.
For all the “4th Generation of War” intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc, I must respectfully say … “Not really”: Alex the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying (studying, vice just reading) the men who have gone before us.
We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession. As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don’t know a hell of a lot more than just the [Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures]? What happens when you’re on a dynamic battlefield and things are changing faster than higher [Headquarters] can stay abreast? Do you not adapt because you cannot conceptualize faster than the enemy’s adaptation? (Darwin has a pretty good theory about the outcome for those who cannot adapt to changing circumstance — in the information age things can change rather abruptly and at warp speed, especially the moral high ground which our regimented thinkers cede far too quickly in our recent fights.) And how can you be a sentinel and not have your unit caught flat-footed if you don’t know what the warning signs are — that your unit’s preps are not sufficient for the specifics of a tasking that you have not anticipated?
Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.
This is not new to the USMC approach to warfighting — Going into Kuwait 12 years ago, I read (and reread) Rommel’s Papers (remember “Kampstaffel”?), Montgomery’s book (“Eyes Officers”…), “Grant Takes Command” (need for commanders to get along, “commanders’ relationships” being more important than “command relationships”), and some others.
As a result, the enemy has paid when I had the opportunity to go against them, and I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.
Hope this answers your question…. I will cc my ADC in the event he can add to this. He is the only officer I know who has read more than I.
Like the Nexus devices which were updated to Android 4.4.2 last week, the HTC One Google Play Edition is receive its update to the KOT49H build today. Android 4.4.2 for HTC One Google Play Edition brings in all the expected updates and for anyone keeping track, the HTC One update was actually released first. The OTA update should be appearing soon, or if you can’t wait, you can download it from the Google servers at the link below:
There doesn’t seem to be any fixes that are specifically for the HTC One Google Play Edition but as with the other devices that received Android 4.4.2, the update addresses quite a lot of bugs and security vulnerabilities that have been brought up since Android KitKat‘s release, most notably a fix for the SMS DOS bug that caused quite a lot of anxiety when it was discovered.
If you download the update, be sure to let us know how you find it in the comments.
In a world where all kinds of entertainment media is available for free download with a couple of clicks, we have been led to believe that competing with such a reality is not just hard, but virtually impossible.
So who could have imagined then that after its birth five years ago today (during the glory years of The Pirate Bay no less) Spotify would develop into a hugely successful consumer product that has not only proven popular with music lovers around the world, but with pirates past and present.
Against the odds, Spotify has gone beyond turning many dedicated file-sharers into revenue-generating customers, it has made them happy ones too.
Earlier this year Spotify revealed it had signed up 24 million users worldwide, 18 million to the ad-supported service and 6 million to a paid subscription. But as revealed by company founder Daniel Ek, even greater goals are being eyed.
“My goal is to not just convert the 24 million into buying a subscription,” Ek said. “My goal is to get 1 billion using streaming services rather than a piracy service.”
But during the early days in Spotify’s Swedish homeland, a problem persisted. By failing to respond to customer needs a content availability vacuum had formed, and it came as no surprise to Spotify’s Scandinavia CEO Jonathan Forster that sites like The Pirate Bay were thriving.
“It is a society that loves music and when the internet exploded it was no surprise that it took place in Sweden. In the absence of a legal service, people used whatever was available,” Forster told Metro today.
But despite a huge customer base in waiting and a dream of luring people away from unauthorized sources en masse, Spotify faced problems with the labels.
“When I started at Spotify and realized that we really had not even talked to any of the majors, I felt that this would be difficult,” Forster explains.
So Spotify embarked on a mission to convince the record companies that making their catalogs available on an ad-supported basis would be the way to go. However – and perhaps unsurprisingly given the track records of some of their countrymen before them – they were instead treated as if they were creating a piracy service of their own.
“[The labels] were very polite, but utterly amazed at what we wanted to do,” Forster recalls. “In their eyes we were just a bunch of Swedes who wanted to take their music and give it away for free. We were no different than the people behind the Pirate Bay for them.”
But Spotify refused to give in and two years later the company netted its first license agreements and is now promoted heavily by the labels. According to Rasmus Fleischer, former Piratbyran member and author of award-wining thesis “The music’s political economy,” some of Spotify’s success in Sweden can be attributed to the entertainment companies’ legal victories against The Pirate Bay and the streaming service’s reputation for stirring things up.
“On a symbolic level, it was incredibly significant,” Fleischer says. “The history of Spotify has been built in the Swedish press and media as a rebel company that has rebelled against an outdated recording industry.”
The art of rebellion against the entertainment industries was perfected by The Pirate Bay during the last decade and as a result the site made itself some dangerous rivals. But interestingly while the most powerful forces in the world have failed to take it down, it’s companies like Spotify that could end up becoming its most serious adversary yet.
That, however, will rely on the company maintaining its rebellious streak, positive image and excellent product at a fair price. It will be interesting to see if it can keep that up.
To celebrate the Lego Minifigure's 35th anniversary, DK Books has crafted a tiny version of its new commemorative Lego book. Created with a keen sense for detail, the book contains the same content as the full-sized version, and is also able to be gripped in any Minifigure's claw-like hands. The miniature hardcover measures just 20mm x 17mm, or less than a square inch — the perfect size for the discerning Minifigure's coffee table. Lego Minifigure Year by Year: A Visual History catalogues the tiny characters' changes and iterations since their introduction in 1978. It's available in stores now.
Lots of apps have offered the promise of reading text faster, but a Chrome extension called Beeline Reader is using an unexpected tool to get there: colored text. Built on top of the Readability code, the extension works by reformatting the text on a page into a single stripped-down column, then color-coding alternating lines of text to ensure readers never get lost. According to a recent study, that's enough to get the average person through a block of text ten percent faster.
While the trick itself is simple, there's a surprising amount of psychological background to it. The developer tells Fast Company that he was inspired by the Stroop Test in psychology, which shows that readers inevitably perceive the color of the text they're...
A few days ago, word got out that Google was building a robotics division. Now, it's already making huge waves in the industry: the New York Times reports that Google has acquired Boston Dynamics, one of the most advanced robotics companies to date. The company will join the new Robotics Division, headed by former Android chief Andy Rubin.
Boston Dynamics has typically done work for DARPA and the Pentagon. The company is mostly known for their noisey, 4-legged robots, with names like BigDog and AlphaDog. The robots can traverse difficult terrain like snow, muddy mountainside, and ice, and they can even stay upright after a surprise kick from a human. BigDog can carry up to 340 lbs and was originally developed for DARPA as a military pack mule. They've since affixed an arm to BigDog which can throw a cinder block up to 17 ft. The company has also worked on faster 4 legged robots, like the Cheetah, which can hit 28.3 mph—a little faster than the fastest human.
Boston Dynamics has also worked on humanoid robots. Their coolest humanoid is probably Petman, a robot designed to test clothing for the military. While testing clothing may not seem particularly exciting, Petman is interesting because of its walking motion. While many robots, like ASIMO tend to have a timid, awkward walking motion, Petman walks with style, yet still manages to be stable even when pushed. Atlas is particularly impressive: a 2 legged bot that can cross uneven, rocky terrain.
In de staten waar de Amerikaanse Mega Millions-loterij wordt gehouden, stijgt de spanning onder de deelnemers. Voor de 21ste keer achter elkaar is de jackpot niet gevallen. De pot is inmiddels opgelopen tot 550 miljoen dollar.
De jackpot is overigens nog geen record. Vorig jaar werd een prijs van 640 miljoen dollar gedeeld door drie winnaars, uit de staten Maryland, Kansas en Illinois.
600 miljoen
De Mega Millions-loterij wordt gehouden in 43 staten, het District of Columbia en de Amerikaanse Maagdeneilanden. Elke keer als de jackpot niet valt, neemt het aantal gokkers toe. Aangenomen wordt dat de pot voor de volgende trekking de 600 miljoen dollar zal overschrijden. Een lot kost 1 dollar.
Een deel van de opbrengst van de loterij komt ten goede aan de staten, die het geld besteden aan zaken als onderwijs en ouderenzorg.
Koning Willem-Alexander heeft vanochtend langs de kist van Nelson Mandela gelopen. Hij stond samen met andere staatshoofden in de rij om de oud-president de laatste eer te bewijzen.
Het lichaam van Mandela ligt opgebaard in het regeringsgebouw in de Zuid-Afrikaanse stad Pretoria. Duizenden mensen stonden langs de route die de rouwstoet aflegde van het mortuarium naar het regeringscentrum.
Nadat alle hoogwaardigheidsbekleders bij de kist waren geweest, mocht iedereen langs de kist lopen. Ook donderdag en vrijdag kunnen mensen afscheid nemen van Mandela. Hij wordt zondag begraven.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said Friday saying she was "very sorry" for this week's Yahoo Mail outage, which she implied has affected roughly one million users.
De hoeveelheid huisafval die Nederlanders produceren, is vorig jaar opnieuw afgenomen. Per inwoner werd in 2012 518 kilo huisvuil aan de straat gezet, blijkt uit cijfers van het CBS.
De hoeveelheid huisvuil per inwoner daalt al jaren. In 2010 en 2011 was het 535 kilo. De grootste hoeveelheid kregen de verbrandingsovens in 2000 te verwerken; toen leverde een inwoner gemiddeld 562 kilo.
Opvallend is dat de afvalproductie afneemt sinds het begin van de economische crisis in 2008. In Hengelo zetten bewoners bijvoorbeeld vorig jaar 490 kilo afval aan de straat, tegen 629 kilo voor de crisis. In Venlo produceerden bewoners 140 kilo minder dan in 2008 en in Opmeer 88 kilo minder.
Wadden
Op de Waddeneilanden wordt het meeste huisafval per inwoner geproduceerd. Zo komt Vlieland op 1371 kilo per inwoner, Terschelling op 882 kilo en Texel op 700. Van Ameland en Schiermonnikoog zijn geen gegevens beschikbaar. Waarschijnlijk hebben de cijfers te maken met het grote aantal toeristen op de eilanden, waar relatief weinig mensen wonen.
De grote steden blijven onder het gemiddelde. Zo wordt in Amsterdam 437 kilo per inwoner opgehaald en in Den Haag en Utrecht iets minder dan 460 kilo.
Tony Teunis, VP of Operations at All Western Mortgage, had a problem.
Intra-office email was getting out of control. Gargantuan email threads were getting in the way of his and his employees' productivity. Workday progress slowed to a halt as everyone tried to stay on the same page.
"I’d say it was kind of a mosh pit of communication methods," said Teunis. "[We used] email, private instant messaging systems, bulletin boards, snail mail even believe it or not. It was very difficult to communicate with the size of operation we are plus how we’re spread out geographically throughout the globe."
So he changed the tone of communication at the office. He banned email and implemented a product called Unison, an application for workplace collaboration (we've previously profiled it here). It pulls together text chat, Skype-like voice chat, and in-app messaging that can accommodate companies of nearly any size.
The go-to statistic from Unison is that it can generally reduce office email by 80%, but All Western Mortgage smashed that in an effort to cut out email entirely. Now that everyone is communicating on the same platform, work gets done more quickly.
Teunis said, "If an underwriter underwrites a loan, can’t make a decision, and posts it and the loan committee at 7 am, it might already be out of the loan committee by 8:05. In the traditional world we had to set a loan committee meeting twice a week that took place in our offices. Now we’re not held to the constraints of traditional meetings and conference calls that we were in the past."
During the 2012 campaign, the commander-in-chief commented on the White House's aggressive targeted killing policies when he reportedly told aides that he's "really good at killing people."
Over the last six months, estimates for the number of classified files Snowden stole from NSA systems have been upwardly revised from 10,000 to "as many as 200,00" to a staggering 1.7 million.
But according to a new report by Mark Mazzetti and Michael Schmidt of The New York Times, the U.S. government really doesn't know how many files the 30-year-old took because of outdated systems in Hawaii and Snowden's ability to cover his tracks.
From The Times:
“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” a senior administration official said. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”
What they are certain of is that the "hacker got into the store room," and the subsequent theft could turn out to be the largest breach of classified information in American history.
In 2010 when x264 really started to take off, an opportunity was spotted by an individual called YIFY. The codec allowed the spreading of movies in a compact filesize, something which proved popular with the masses.
By August 2011 YIFY releases had become so popular they justified a platform of their own. A site bearing the same name was born and quickly grew to become a major player. By 2013 the site was receiving 700,000 visitors a day, something which placed it on Hollywood’s radar.
Perhaps inevitably, on November 22, 2013, the popular torrent site was blocked by the UK’s leading ISPs following a High Court order obtained by the major Hollywood studios. Anyone wanting to access the site could now only do so by using a web proxy, reverse proxy, VPN, or other anti-censorship tool. YIFY-Torrents wanted to do something about that.
“Our user base is the most important and integral part of Yify-Torrents, so having access restricted by major ISPs not only in the UK but also other places around the world was a big worry for us and we almost immediately started looking for solutions to the problem,” YIFY’s tech team told TorrentFreak.
“As most of us here at Yify-Torrents are based outside the focuses of large anti-piracy groups it was difficult for us to assess what was happening. Our first step was to figure out exactly how widespread the blocking was and how they were doing it.”
YIFY says their first guess was backed up a TorrentFreak report detailing findings by EZTV that ISPs were carrying out their own DNS scrapes to update their blacklists, something which later led to the accidental blocking of TorrentFreak. Time to carry out some tests.
“After a day of coding up a small test application we sent it out to some UK visitors that had reached out and expressed their interests in aiding in any way possible. Within a day we had results for two major ISPs in the country, Sky and TalkTalk. This provided the first real insight into the issue and was when we hit our first milestone!”
YIFY discovered that DNS lookups for YIFY-Torrents.com still responded with the site’s IP addresses meaning that they could rule out DNS tampering. Also, pings to YIFY’s infrastructure were replied to, meaning that the ISPs weren’t simply dropping traffic to blacklisted IP addresses. With no DNS tampering, YIFY had opportunity to bypass the blocks.
“After all the testing we came to the conclusion that Sky (and others) regularly pull IPs listed on our DNS servers and add them to their block list. This block list is then used by an advanced proxy system that redirects any requests to the blacklisted IPs to a webserver that the ISP owns and returns a stock ‘blocked page’ message,” YIFY explains.
“What this meant for us was that if we added new IPs behind yify-torrents.com they would work until Sky and friends updated their blacklist. This was our second edge on Sky. Because they did the blocking on an IP level and didn’t do anything related to domain names, we could do some fancy DNS trickery to keep the site online.”
People attempting to access YIFY-Torrents.com during the next few hours from the leading ISPs should find out the site has been unblocked. At the time of writing Virgin Media is for some reason causing problems, but a solution to that (and any others that might appear) is just a couple of clicks away.
“We have set-up a new domain name for inhibited visitors: yify-torrents.im, which should already be accessible to all. This domain was and still is running completely separately from the main site. What we were originally betting on was that in order for our new domain to be blocked, anti-piracy groups would need to get another court order to get it taken down, something that doesn’t happen overnight,” YIFY says.
But what YIFY wanted was a more permanent solution and for this they are currently using CloudFlare
“CloudFlare is an amazing CDN and security provider for small to large sites. They offer caching of services so that any static content is loaded from CloudFlare instead of the origin server,” YIFY explains.
“Along with this it offers protection because instead of the IPs of your real server being public, CloudFlare’s IPs are seen instead. This offers protection from plenty of web nasties like DDoS attacks. In fact, CloudFlare have and still do harbor some notorious sites like LulzSecurity’s site. Whilst the protection isn’t perfect (people can still submit DMCA notices and get real IP addresses), this wasn’t a problem for us as we already have a setup where the only public IPs listed are those of our front-end caches.”
At this point, YIFY returns to the EZTV story referenced earlier and why blocking CloudFlare IP addresses to get at YIFY-Torrents would be a particularly bad idea.
“Because CloudFlare provide services to something like 1,000,000 customers, any downtime would affect a large portion of the Internet. Everything from Imgur to gaming forums who use their services would go down.”
But while YIFY could use CloudFlare exclusively, they are choosing not to thanks to something called Geo DNS.
“GeoDNS allows us to hand out different IP addresses based on the location of the visitor. Our new system uses this to hand out CloudFlare IPs and only CloudFlare IPs to any UK visitor that hits our site, whilst the rest of the world gets to use our existing network.”
Details shared with TorrentFreak this morning shows that there is a real cat and mouse game going on behind the scenes, with YIFY doing everything they can to unblock their site and measures being taken by certain ISPs to hinder them. The site acknowledges that there still might be issues over the next few days while the system is fine-tuned but they hope that by sharing some of their findings other sites will able to take similar measures to thwart censorship. In any event, they believe that overall the sites will prevail.
“It’s really a giant game of cat and mouse with the supposed ‘good guys’ always playing catch up. ISPs have exhausted every single tactic in keeping sites censored and are bordering on affecting other legitimate sites like was seen with TorrentFreak and EZTV. When that sort of stuff starts happening, there really is nothing more they can do.
“Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all smooth sailing from here on out, but we are happy to have the site up and running back in the UK for now and will keep on pushing against the ever growing censorship that is happening everywhere we look,” YIFY concludes.
Lieve lieve mensen, landgenoten en overige lezerts. De lijnen zijn weer open. Roept u maarrr. U mag nomineren voor de Dhimmi van het Jaar Verkiezing. Na het eclatante succes van vorig jaar gaan wij ook deze december 2013 weer op...
Ah, man. Selfies. Breek ons de duckface niet open. Waar komt die drang toch vandaan om heel de wereld te tonen hoe verschrikkelijk gewoontjes je wel niet bent? Hoe dan ook, sinds kort te koop: de Selfie Kit. Echt waar....
Dan Niel explains why driving Audi’s otherwise marvelous Audi RS7 Quattro in cold weather is like a little baby reindeer taking its first unsteady steps onto a frozen lake.
FOWLERVILLE, Mich. (AP) — A hardware store in Fowlerville is closing after 122 years in business.
In the run up to Marine Gen. James Mattis' deployment to Iraq in 2004, a colleague wrote to him asking about the "importance of reading and military history for officers," many of whom found themselves "too busy to read."
There doesn’t seem to be any fixes that are specifically for the HTC One Google Play Edition but as with the other devices that received Android 4.4.2, the update addresses quite a lot of bugs and security vulnerabilities that have been brought up since Android KitKat‘s release, most notably a fix for the SMS DOS bug that caused quite a lot of anxiety when it was discovered.
In a world where all kinds of entertainment media is available for free download with a couple of clicks, we have been led to believe that competing with such a reality is not just hard, but virtually impossible.
In 2010 when x264 really started to take off, an opportunity was spotted by an individual called YIFY. The codec allowed the spreading of movies in a compact filesize, something which proved popular with the masses.
“After all the testing we came to the conclusion that Sky (and others) regularly pull IPs listed on our DNS servers and add them to their block list. This block list is then used by an advanced proxy system that redirects any requests to the blacklisted IPs to a webserver that the ISP owns and returns a stock ‘blocked page’ message,” YIFY explains.
At this point, YIFY returns to the EZTV story referenced earlier and why blocking CloudFlare IP addresses to get at YIFY-Torrents would be a particularly bad idea.
