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AmiMoJo writes: All 24 movies from the iTunes exclusive 4K "James Bond Collection" have leaked online. This is further evidence to suggest that pirates have found a way to decrypt 4K source files from the iTunes store. How, exactly, remains a mystery. While most regular releases can be ripped or decrypted nowadays, 4K content remains a challenge to breach. Up until a few days ago, pirate sites had never seen a decrypted 4K download from Apple's video platform. However, a flurry of recent leak...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The domestic box office rebounded in 2018 in a recovery fueled by blockbusters such as "Black Panther" and "Incredibles 2." Ticket sales in the U.S. climbed 7% to top out at a record $11.9 billion, according to a new report by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). That helped off-set declines in overseas markets in Europe and Latin America, pushing the global box office to $41.1 billion, a year-over-year improvement of a percentage point. The M...

For software engineers, lack of friction is an aesthetic joy, an emotional high, the ideal existential state. It's what drives them, and what shapes our world. An excerpt from an upcoming book on coding, via Wired: The thrust of Silicon Valley is always to take human activity and shift it into metabolic overdrive. And maybe you've wondered, why the heck is that? Why do techies insist that things should be sped up, torqued, optimized? There's one obvious reason, of course: They do it because o...

More than 850 scientists and statisticians told the authors of a Nature commentary that they are endorsing an idea to ban "statistical significance." Critics say that declaring a result to be statistically significant or not essentially forces complicated questions to be answered as true or false. "The world is much more uncertain than that," says Nicoole Lazar, a professor of statistics at the University of Georgia. An entire issue of the journal The American Statistician is devoted to this ...

A new study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology suggests that humans can sense the Earth's magnetic field. "We have not as a species lost the magnetic sensory system that our ancestors [millions of years ago] had," said Prof Joseph Kirschvink, leader of the research from the California Institute of Technology. "We are part of Earth's magnetic biosphere." The Guardian reports: Writing in the journal eNeuro, Kirschvink and colleagues in the U.S. and Japan describe how the...

dryriver shares a report from CNN: About 1,600 people have been secretly filmed in hotel rooms in South Korea, with the footage live-streamed online for paying customers to watch, police said Wednesday. Two men have been arrested and another pair investigated in connection with the scandal, which involved 42 rooms in 30 accommodations in 10 cities around the country. Police said there was no indication the businesses were complicit in the scheme. Cameras were hidden inside digital TV boxes, w...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Officials in San Francisco have proposed a new law to ban e-cigarette sales until their health effects are evaluated by the U.S. government. The law appears to be the first of its kind in the U.S. and seeks to curb a rising usage by young people. Critics, however, say it will make it harder for people to kick addiction. A second city law would bar making, selling or distributing tobacco on city property and is aimed at an e-cigarette firm rent...

Slashdot reader grasshoppa writes: Kyle Bennett, long-time owner/operator of one of the last independent review sites, HardOCP, announced that effective April 1st he will be leaving it behind to start a new career at Intel. "Effective April 1, 2019 I will be taking on the position of Director of Enthusiast Engagement for Intel's Technology Leadership Marketing group," Bennett writes. "Intel wants to reconnect with the top of the high-performance consumer pyramid which contains hardware enthus...

At an Economic Club event in Washington, DC today, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was interrupted on stage by a robocall, pausing an interview in front of dozens of people and driving home that absolutely no one is safe from the spam epidemic. From a report: Over the past few months, regulators at the Federal Communications Commission have been feeling the pressure from lawmakers and consumers who are urging them to put an end to the relentless onslaught of robocalls people receive every day. La...

Volvo is installing cameras and sensors in its cars from the early 2020s, monitoring drivers for signs of being drunk or distracted and intervening to prevent accidents. These new safety features come a couple weeks after the automaker announced it will limit the top speed to 112mph on all its new cars from 2020 to help reduce the number of accidents. Reuters reports: Head of R&D Henrik Green said cameras will be installed on all Volvo models built on its SPA2 platform for larger cars, starti...

Sherwin Siy and Jan Gerlach, writing for the Wikimedia Foundation: Volunteer editor communities in four language Wikipedias -- German, Czech, Danish, and Slovak -- have decided to black out the sites on 21 March in opposition to the current version of the proposed EU Copyright Directive. Those language editions of Wikipedia will redirect all visitors to a banner about the directive, blocking access to content on Wikipedia for 24 hours. A final vote on the directive is expected on 26 March. Th...

Microsoft announced its Xcloud game-streaming service last August, with the ambition of streaming console-quality games to gamers wherever they are. Yesterday, Google made its foray into the space with the announcement of Stadia. Google promises that Stadia will be "coming [in] 2019," potentially stealing a march on Xcloud, which is due only to enter public trials this year. But in an internal email sent to rally the troops, Phil Spencer, Microsoft's gaming chief, seemed unsurprised and appar...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: A new survey on Europeans' attitudes towards technology found that a quarter of people would prefer it if policy decisions were made by artificial intelligence instead of politicians. The Center for the Governance of Change at Spain's IE University polled 2,500 adults in the UK, Spain, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands in January. The results reflect an intense anxiety about the changes brought about by advances in tech, with...

China's fleet of electric buses appear to be denting oil demand more than electric cars. "By the end of this year, a cumulative 270,000 barrels a day of diesel demand will have been displaced by electric buses, most of it in China," reports Bloomberg, citing a new report published by BloombergNEF. "That's more than three times the displacement by all the world's passenger electric vehicles (a market where Tesla has a share of about 12 percent)." From the report: Despite rapid growth, the impa...