Technology

A new paper suggests that box office revenues were negatively impacted after the shutdown of Megaupload. The dip in revenues was most visible for average size and smaller films. According to the researchers this may have been caused by the loss of word-of-mouth promotion by people who used the popular file-hosting site to share movies. For blockbuster movies the Megaupload shutdown had the opposite effect.

In common with every file-sharing service, Megaupload was used by some of its members to host copyright-infringing movies.

For this reason the MPAA was one of the main facilitators of the Megaupload investigation, which ultimately led to the shutdown of the company in January.

The movie industry was quick to praise the government’s actions, but a new report suggests that Megaupload’s demise actually resulted in lower box office revenues.

Researchers from Munich School of Management and Copenhagen Business School published a short paper titled Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload. The study analyses weekly data from 1344 movies in 49 countries over a five-year period, to asses the impact of the Megaupload shutdown on movie theatre visits — via redwolf.newsvine.com

NC State researchers have created WiFox, which monitors the amount of traffic on a WiFi channel and grants an access point priority to send its data when it detects that the access point is developing a backlog of data. The amount of priority the access point is given depends on the size of the backlog — the longer the backlog, the higher the priority. In effect, the program acts like a traffic cop, keeping the data traffic moving smoothly in both directions.

The research team tested the program on a real WiFi system in their lab, which can handle up to 45 users. They found that the more users on the system, the more the new program improved data throughput performance. Improvements ranged from 400 percent with approximately 25 users to 700 percent when there were around 45 users.

This translates to the WiFi system being able to respond to user requests an average of four times faster than a WiFi network that does not use WiFox — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Stanford University material scientists have devised the first synthetic, plastic skin that is conductive, sensitive to touch, and capable of repeatedly self-healing at room temperature. The most immediate applications are in the realm of smart, self-healing prosthetic limbs that are covered in this synthetic skin — but in the long term, the plastic might be used to make self-healing electronic devices, or you might even elect to replace your fingertips (or other piece of skin) with the synthetic, bionic equivalent.

There are two important innovations here: a synthetic material that can repeatedly self-heal, and the fact that it’s electrically conductive — meaning it can detect changes in pressure and temperature (ie: its sensitive, like real skin). We’ll tackle the self-healing bit first — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Welcome to AChecker. This tool checks single HTML pages for conformance with accessibility standards to ensure the content can be accessed by everyone. See the Handbook link to the upper right for more about the Web Accessibility Checker

Use this file to prevent your computer from connecting to selected internet hosts. This is an easy and effective way to protect you from many types of spyware, reduces bandwidth use, blocks certain pop-up traps, prevents user tracking by way of web bugs embedded in spam, provides partial protection to IE from certain web-based exploits and blocks most advertising you would otherwise be subjected to on the internet.

Notorious shock site of a bygone internet Goatse.cx has pulled opened its doors as an email provider.

An Aussie IT consultant, who paid $10,200 for Goatse, will attempt to recoup his costs by selling email addresses using the domain: anyone interested in one can bag an @goatse.cx addy provided they can stretch to $5 a year.

Honestly, it’s safe to look at now: goatse.cx is just an email sign-up screen.

Between 1999 and 2004, the domain hosted hello.jpg, an infamous image that showed a stark-naked bloke bending over to expose his rather cavernous back pasage to the camera. The pic spread on Usenet, was hosted on the goat-sex .cx domain as a whim in 1999, and then linked to from all over the internet to troll victims, particularly those on Christian dating sites, who were not expecting to see an xxx-rated gaping rear-end. It became a defining image of Web 1.0 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Micro-blogging site Twitter experienced record traffic as the results of the 2012 US Presidential election were announced on Tuesday night, but the service never faltered despite the increased load — something Twitter engineers credit to the company’s move from Ruby to Java for its backend software.

According to a blog post by Mazen Rawashdeh, Twitter’s VP of infrastructure operations engineering, Twitter users posted an average of 9,965 messages per second between the hours of 8.11pm and 9.11pm Pacific Time.

During a single second at 8:20pm, Twitter users produced 15,107 new posts, Rawashdeh writes, and during the peak traffic period of the evening they generated 874,560 posts in a single minute.

Such numbers are unusual for Twitter, Rawashdeh says, and they represent an evolution in how customers use the service. While in the past Twitter has experienced brief traffic spikes to mark particular events, such as New Year’s Eve or the close of a sporting event, this was the first time such heavy traffic lasted for such a sustained period. It was also the highest volume of traffic during an election since Twitter launched — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A team of scientists working out of Bangor University in Wales has developed a commercially affordable method of using Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OOFDM) over fibre optic lines, which could deliver broadband ISP speeds that are 2,000 times faster than current services.

But the three-year project (OCEAN) is not the first to make use of OOFDM, which typically splits a laser down to multiple different optical frequencies. The data can then be broken up and sent in parallel streams via the different frequencies. Last year a team of Sydney University scientists found an energy-efficient way of using a single laser to transfer data down a 50km long single-mode fibre optic cable at speeds of up to 26Tbps (Terabits per second).

The key difference with OCEAN is that this work is capable of “significantly saving the network installation and maintenance cost for both [ISPs] and equipment vendors” by using low-cost off–the-shelf components and end-to-end real-time OOFDM transceivers via currently installed fibre networks (FTTH etc.). It also provides a Green” solution due to the “significant reduction in electrical power consumption

— via redwolf.newsvine.com