The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn about 80 percent of all revenue from recorded music, as I wrote in “The Shazam Effect.” But the market for streamed music is not so concentrated. The ten most-popular songs accounted for just shy of 2 percent of all streams in 2013 and 2014.
via Digital music sales on iTunes and beyond are now fading as fast as CDs. – The Atlantic.
Microsoft this morning announced a deal to buy Revolution Analytics, the top commercial provider of software and services for the open-source R programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics.
via Microsoft to buy Revolution Analytics, pushing further into big data – GeekWire.
WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client, FTP client, WebDAV client and SCP client for Windows. Its main function is file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers scripting and basic file manager functionality.
via Introducing WinSCP :: WinSCP.
This is a very useful program to get files off a PC and onto a Linux server which supports these services out of the box. I find Samba to be too clunky, unreliable, and very noisy on an open network by broadcasting packets to everyone. Only now did I have a need for something like this and SCP solves my problem and is more secure and easier to use than standard ftp. I still map drives using Samba on my closed network but I may try out the windows version of sshfs sometime in the future. The user interface on this tool is very intuitive and works well.
“The impact of these laws is that a community that moves forward opens itself up to years of litigation as courts will have to figure out what such poorly conceived laws mean,” Mitchell added. “So the danger isn’t so much the cost of additional dollars but the exposure to years of court room wrangling.”
Here is a map showing all the states with anti-municipal broadband laws Obama wants the FCC to go after, along with brief descriptions of the restrictions in place in each state.
via Inside Obama’s ambitious plan to make your Internet suck less.
Anousheh is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder and chairman of Prodea Systems, a company that will unleash the power of the Internet to all consumers and dramatically alter and simplify consumer’s digital living experience. Prior to founding Prodea Systems, Anousheh served as co-founder, CEO and chairman of Telecom Technologies, Inc. The company successfully merged with Sonus Networks, Inc., in 2000.
via Anousheh Ansari – About Anousheh Ansari.
This is an amazing story of accomplishment. It appears from her Prodea Systems website the company sells home automation and now Internet of Things which is a popular buzzword nowadays. This company made her enough money so she could buy a trip to ISS in 2006.
Saving data, especially e-mail and informal chats, is a liability.
It’s also a security risk: the risk of exposure. The exposure could be accidental. It could be the result of data theft, as happened to Sony. Or it could be the result of litigation. Whatever the reason, the best security against these eventualities is not to have the data in the first place.
via The importance of deleting old stuff—another lesson from the Sony attack | Ars Technica.
These real-time applications, according to Donna Dillenberger, a distinguished engineer at IBM’s Watson lab, can be done in a mainframe environment. They are not yet possible on clusters of smaller, industry-standard computers, she said. But there are several open-source software projects, like Apache Spark, that focus on real-time data processing across large numbers of computers.
via IBM Introduces z13, a Mainframe for the Smartphone Economy – NYTimes.com.
He estimates the total cost of ownership including hardware, software and labor will be 50 percent less with a mainframe than on his “sprawling server farm,” given the growing complexity of managing hardware and software from several suppliers.
Frustrated over the number of Internet providers that are available to you? If so, you’re like many who are limited to just a handful of broadband companies. But now President Obama wants to change that, arguing that choice and competition are lacking in the U.S. broadband market. On Wednesday, Obama will unveil a series of measures aimed at making high-speed Web connections cheaper and more widely available to millions of Americans. The announcement will focus chiefly on efforts by cities to build their own alternatives to major Internet providers such as Comcast, Verizon or AT&T — a public option for Internet access, you could say.
via Obama wants to help make your Internet faster and cheaper. This is his plan. – The Washington Post.
Engineers at Russia’s chief manned spacecraft contractor are developing a habitable orbital laboratory, which could serve as the cornerstone of a future deep-space outpost. The new 20-ton module is scheduled to dock at the Russian segment of the International Space Station, ISS, in 2017 or 2018.
The vulnerability that Drake outlines rises from a poorly coded service, infosvr, which is used by ASUS to facilitate router configuration by automatically monitoring the local area network (LAN) and identifying other connected routers. Infosvr, Drake explains, runs with root privileges and contains an unauthenticated command execution vulnerability. In turn this permits anyone connected to the LAN to gain control by sending a user datagram protocol (UDP) package to the router.
via Root command execution bug found across wireless router range.
This seems more like a designed in feature not implemented correctly. Transferring config information on an unsecure network is difficult to implement without some kind of flaw.
This kind of hack is well above the capability of your average hacker. Very unlikely they could do much more than Man In the Middle which they could do anyway without hacking the router. I do not chase updates on SOHO routers because it’s pointless, a waste of time that possibly introduces different bugs.