SpaceX, the space exploration startup helmed by ex-PayPal founder Elon Musk, has confirmed that it has raised $1 billion in new funding, in a round including Google and Fidelity, who join existing investors Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Valor Equity Partners and Capricorn. Google and Fidelity get an ownership stake just shy of 10 percent in exchange for their investment. A report… Read More
As of last week, Björk's upcoming album Vulnicura was slated to come out in March. Unfortunately, in what has become a trend, the full album leaked yesterday. In response, Vulnicura is now available on the iTunes UK store and will be rolling out to other countries in the next 24 hours.
The folks behind Sharebot, a simple 3D printer, have taken to Indiegogo to introduce Sharebox3D, a system for sharing 3D printers with remote users. The app, which works on smartphones and tablets, allows you to choose a model and print it just as you would print a document on a 2D printer. The app lets you store model files (STLs) and slice them on the fly, turning them into models that a… Read More
Get ready to strap into a pixelated X-Wing — digital game store GOG.com has just released a trio of classic Star Wars games, all available digitally for the very first time. The games making their debut include X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, X-Wing Alliance, and Galactic Battlegrounds Saga, all of which are available DRM-free for Windows machines. The service also launched three other Star Wars games today, which have been previously available on services like Steam, including Battlefront II, Dark Forces, and the sequel to the seminal RPG Knights of the Old Republic.
expect to see more releases in the coming months
This is actually the second batch of Lucasarts games released through GOG.com. Last October the service announced a new deal with...
It's 2015 and it would be nice to think that people had learned what makes a good password by now. They haven't. And this list of the 25 most popular passwords of 2014—maybe also make that the worst—proves it.
SplashData's annual list compiles the millions of stolen passwords made public throughout the year and assembles them in order of popularity. A glance down the list reveals that we're all still morons, with "123456", "password", "12345", "12345678" and "qwerty" making up the top five. No, really.
Now is clearly a good time to remind yourself not to be one of those morons, and start using sensible passwords, LastPass or some other system to keep your personal information safe. But anyway, enough of that, here's the list. You're welcome.
Psychological factors affect the decisions we make every day. Of course, most of us are blissfully unaware of the tendencies that influence our actions. However, businesses can use the hidden psychology driving our behaviors to yield big profits. Read More
Schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder have more in common than previously thought. Not only are they linked through shared genes, the genetic mutations associated with them also work together to govern immunity, brain signaling, and genome function later in life, according to a Nature Neuroscience study. The new finding may mean that only one drug will be required to treat all these disorders in the future.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
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Looking for the previous roundup editions? Find them here.
When a high quality screener of American Sniper leaked online days before the theatrical release the filmmakers probably feared the worst.
After all, recent history has ‘shown’ that early leaks can have a devastating impact on box office revenues. The Expendables 3, for example, grossed a disappointing $16 million during the opening weekend.
At the time many insiders and experts blamed the pre-release leak for the disappointing numbers. Millions of people had downloaded pirated copies and skipped the box office, they argued.
“This is really a clear situation where this had an impact. It’s hard to measure, but the ripple effect, not only of the downloads, but of the word-of-mouth that spread as a result, can be seen in the soft opening,” BoxOffice.com vice president Phil Contrino said at the time.
With American Sniper things turned out quite differently though. Sure, the film was downloaded millions of times before its premiere, perhaps even more than The Expendables 3. However, all these unauthorized downloads couldn’t prevent the film from grossing record numbers.
From Friday to Sunday, American Sniper grossed $90.2 million, making it the largest opening weekend in history for the December through February winter period. This means that it beats Avatar, The Hobbit trilogy and all other previous winter blockbusters.
For some reason these record numbers were possible despite rampant piracy. How can that be?
First of all, the impressive opening doesn’t necessarily mean that the pre-release piracy had no impact at all. Perhaps the film would have raked in an additional $5 million without piracy.
On the other hand, some may argue that piracy may even have helped to promote the film through word-of-mouth advertising. In the end we simply don’t know what effect piracy had on the opening weekend.
It’s telling though, that every time a film flops piracy is brought into the discussion as one of the main reasons for the disappointing results. But if records are broken, piracy isn’t mentioned at all.
In other words, piracy is often a convenient scapegoat used selectively to cover up failures that probably have very little to do with illegal streams or downloads. But there’s nothing new there.
Customers of UK mobile operator EE are to receive a share of around £1 million after they were wrongly charged VAT. Those who happened to be outside the EU and used data on their plans between October 2012 and October 2014 were affected by a "billing system error." It's reported that 0.5 percent of EE customers were overcharged.
Sid Meier is heading back to outer space. Following the release of last year's Civilization: Beyond Earth, the famed designer has announced his Firaxis studio is working on another sci-fi strategy game called Sid Meier's Starships. While Beyond Earth focused on what would happen when humans first left earth and started colonizing planets, Starships is set much farther in the future.
"An experience that focuses on starship design and combat."
"What happens after we colonize our new home and eventually build starships to take to the stars?" he said. "What has become of our long-lost brothers and sisters from the planet Earth? My goal was to create an experience that focuses on starship design and combat within a universe filled with...
Amazon Studios is going to start making movies, and you'll be seeing them in theaters before they become available for streaming on Prime. Fresh off Golden Globe wins for its original series Transparent, the company today announced it will produce and acquire full-length feature films for theatrical release. Amazon Original Movies, which "focus on unique stories, voices, and characters from top and up-and-coming creators," will become available to US Prime subscribers just 4 to 8 weeks after they premiere in theaters — a shorter transition to streaming than you'd see from the major movie studios.
The company behind UK mobile operator Three, Hutchison Whampoa, is reportedly looking to purchase competitor O2, which is currently owned by Telefonica. The deal could be worth as much as $13.6 billion to Telefonica, who The Financial Times reports to have enlisted the aid of investment bank UBS to analyze available options, including partnership and flotation of the business.
HTC is set to unveil this year's flagship — likely to be called the HTC One M9 — on March 1 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. According to Bloomberg, the device will feature impressive hardware, and will not be the only new product HTC showcases at MWC, as the Taiwanese vendor is alleged to also unveil its first smartwatch.
I had an interesting exchange of opinions with a copyright industry lawyer the other day.
In what appeared to be a private conversation on Twitter between colleagues I was called out as evil, claiming that all the anti-copyright-monopoly sentiment on the Internet came from me personally.
Of course, knowing how Twitter works, anybody mentioning my name gets an immediate highlight on my screen, and so I took the liberty of butting in to the conversation a few seconds later.
I explained patiently that the Pirate Party could not possibly exist if there wasn’t already a widespread sense of information liberty; that the sentiment of the Internet already was that the copyright monopoly was there to constrict and punish rather than anything else.
To my surprise, the copyright industry lawyer responded that the entire Internet would not have existed at all without the copyright monopoly. This was a statement that would have been trivial to ridicule to smithereens (“please explain how Al Gore fits into it?”), but it made me genuinely curious. How do these people think, anyway?
So when I asked which part of the Internet Mr. Shrum referred to – DARPA (ARPAnet), TCP/IP, or CERN [sic, referring to the birth of WWW but I didn’t write that out], he surprised me even more by saying “All of them”.
Somewhat to my surprise, this lawyer also picked up on the “monopoly” moniker as can be seen above, not trying to argue against that characteristic at all. So being aware that there was a monopoly, this copyright industry lawyer still argued that no part of the Internet would have been created without that monopoly.
Of course, this goes completely counter to actual history: particularly with regards to the World Wide Web, which was specifically created in Switzerland to circumvent the monopoly previously held by University of Minnesota in the US, where a similar technology by the name of Gopher had been developed. When somebody claims exclusive rights to a standard on the Internet, that standard is generally dropped like a bad habit and replaced by something else immediately. That has happened several times, and the WWW standard was such a replacement.
However, I gained a lot of understanding from this short exchange. It would appear the people we are debating in the copyright industry are reasoning something like this:
1 – the Progress Clause (the justification for the copyright monopoly in article 8 in the US Constitution, allowing Congress to create exclusive rights in order to “Promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts”) means that any law created using that justification automatically has the effect of also promoting such progress in all its applications and spheres of influence.
2 – therefore, anything created in an environment where such a law exists, created under a monopoly regime covering expressions of ideas, could not have been conceived without the existence of the law in question.
If this is the actual reasoning – and it would appear that it is – then it becomes comprehensible why net liberty activists who fight for the freedom to create without permission are seen as evil by the copyright industry. If they genuinely believe that everything that exists was created because the copyright monopoly exists, then somebody who wants to take away that monopoly regime would plunge the world into darkness where nothing more is created, ever.
Stop laughing.
This explains the worldview we’re going up against when discussing the topic, and as such, it was valuable to understand. It fits well in with my observation that copyright monopoly maximalists are acting like religious fundamentalists a few years back – especially given the apparent non-need to check on actual facts, when all the “facts” could be easily deduced from the certainty that everything created was created because there is a copyright monopoly.
At some point later in the discussion, a colleague in the copyright industry butted in and subtly suggested that this lawyer might want to stop arguing the point that the Internet was created because of the copyright monopoly before reading up on the actual history.
That was the end of that discussion.
About The Author
Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.
In a surprise move, the US Attorney General has ordered police departments to cease the practice of civil forfeiture (basically, stealing stuff and selling it) unless the forfeiture is related to a specific warrant or charge.
Read the rest
I’m filled with wonder at the engineering and imagination needed to create the magical eye candy of pop-up books. Elaborate scenes come alive as I unfold each page.
The Case of the Vanishing Private Eyes: How 19th-century America's biggest, most dogged detective agency went on to get unceremoniously acquired 100 years later by a Swedish conglomerate
Danielle and Alexander Meitiv have two kids, age six and ten. They let them walk home together from the park. Someone saw the kids walking without an adult chaperone and called the cops.
Amazon has a slate of new shows available now on its Instant Video streaming service, which includes 13 new comedy, drama, documentary and kids shows. This is the first of its so-called “Pilot Season” slates for 2015 – collections of programs which it creates initial episodes for, and which it releases in order to gather data about their reception and decide which to select… Read More
Former Wall Street analyst Steve Wang has just launched Wavelength, a free movie-sharing service, or, as Wang is calling it, "the first social movie service."
Wavelength is powered by Ultraviolet, a cloud locker created by movie studios in 2010 that allows users to buy one copy of a movie and stream it to multiple devices. Users can post a listing of all the movies they have in their Ultraviolet libraries to Wavelength, allowing their friends to browse and watch. Instead of hosting the movies, Wavelength sends users to an online portal run by the film's original retailer, like Walmart's Vudu or Flixster. Up to three people can watch the same movie posted by a shared friend.
So long, Windows 7. After six years, Microsoft has started phasing out this version of its desktop operating system.
Independent security analyst Graham Cluley points out that “mainstream support” for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 has just ended, according to this Microsoft webpage. However, if you bought a PC with this version last October, when the last Windows 7 consumer computers shipped, don’t despair: At least extended support will continue for another five years.
Microsoft explains that extended support covers critical security updates, so current users will still be able to receive those. Mainstream support covered those patches along with new features and free technical support.
Extended support for Windows 7 will expire on January 14, 2020.
Launched on July 22, 2009, Windows 7 replaced the much maligned Windows Vista, criticized for being slow and bloated. Microsoft ceased individual sales of the software in 2013, and the last consumer computer with it preloaded shipped last October.
Lead photo by Brent Schmidt; screen capture of Microsoft website by Adriana Lee for ReadWrite
Free public WiFi has become one of the more popular ways that cafes, shops and other public places attract users and then use the connections to serve ads and collect other kinds of anonymised analytics. Now, a startup out of the UK called Purple WiFi has raised some funding for its own twist on the idea: letting people log in using social IDs from Facebook, Twitter, Google or Instagram… Read More
Many people are satisfied with just one Google account, but not all – especially in a world where many work and enterprise accounts are handled via Google, people often find the need to switch among two or more. Back in August, Chrome’s Beta releases started to incorporate an Account Switcher that allows users to easily change which account they use to manage their… Read More
SpaceX, the space exploration startup helmed by ex-PayPal founder Elon Musk, has confirmed that it has raised $1 billion in new funding, in a round including Google and Fidelity, who join existing investors Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Valor Equity Partners and Capricorn. Google and Fidelity get an ownership stake just shy of 10 percent in exchange for their investment. A report… Read More
The folks behind Sharebot, a simple 3D printer, have taken to Indiegogo to introduce Sharebox3D, a system for sharing 3D printers with remote users. The app, which works on smartphones and tablets, allows you to choose a model and print it just as you would print a document on a 2D printer. The app lets you store model files (STLs) and slice them on the fly, turning them into models that a… Read More
Psychological factors affect the decisions we make every day. Of course, most of us are blissfully unaware of the tendencies that influence our actions. However, businesses can use the hidden psychology driving our behaviors to yield big profits. Read More
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
When a high quality screener of American Sniper leaked online days before the theatrical release the filmmakers probably feared the worst. 
I had an interesting exchange of opinions with a copyright industry lawyer the other day. 
Amazon has a slate of new shows available now on its Instant Video streaming service, which includes 13 new comedy, drama, documentary and kids shows. This is the first of its so-called “Pilot Season” slates for 2015 – collections of programs which it creates initial episodes for, and which it releases in order to gather data about their reception and decide which to select… Read More
Free public WiFi has become one of the more popular ways that cafes, shops and other public places attract users and then use the connections to serve ads and collect other kinds of anonymised analytics. Now, a startup out of the UK called Purple WiFi has raised some funding for its own twist on the idea: letting people log in using social IDs from Facebook, Twitter, Google or Instagram… Read More
Many people are satisfied with just one Google account, but not all – especially in a world where many work and enterprise accounts are handled via Google, people often find the need to switch among two or more. Back in August, Chrome’s Beta releases started to incorporate an Account Switcher that allows users to easily change which account they use to manage their… Read More