The Financial Times reported on Monday (paywall) that YouTube has paid out $1 billion to copyright holders in a program that allows them to monetize unauthorized use of their copyrighted material.

YouTube introduced ContentID in 2007 to scan user-generated uploads for copyright infringement. When ContentID finds an upload that may have unauthorized copyrighted material on it, it alerts rights holders and gives them the option to either have the video taken down or to place ads on the video and make money off those views.

Over 5,000 copyright holders, like music labels and TV and movie studios, participate in the program. “All of the big US TV networks and movie studios” are included, the Financial Times notes. Over the last seven years, $1 billion has been paid to those participants, in some cases making unauthorized uses on YouTube an important revenue stream for the rights holders.

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Bureau of Ocean Energy Management One of the more unusual recent developments in ocean conservation has been the use of artificial reefs. Old ships and even old subway cars have been used to create environments for fish to congregate in areas of the seafloor that are otherwise featureless. But it's not clear whether these habitats provide a place for fish to gather or actually boost the fish populations in the area.

A new study looked at the productivity of a different sort of artificial reef: the oil and natural gas rigs that dot the state's coastline. The report finds that the oil rigs are the most productive fisheries ever measured—not only in California but in the entire world. The report notes that many of these platforms will be obsolete over the coming decades, and we might want to think about what we do when we're done using them for their original purpose.

There are different ways of measuring an ecosystem's productivity. One is primary productivity, or how much carbon dioxide is converted into useful organic molecules by plants and other photosynthetic organisms. Then there's secondary productivity, defined as how much of that finds its way to herbivores and predators. In this case, the authors were interested in fish, so they focused on secondary productivity.

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Websites focused on the involuntary publication of nude photos already had the attention of lawmakers in recent years, even before last month's leak of stolen photos of various celebrities. Now the United Kingdom is ready to pass the first national law banning the practice, making it punishable by up to two years in jail.

"The fact that there are individuals who are cruelly distributing intimate pictures of their former partners without their consent is almost beyond belief," said Justice Secretary Chris Grayling in a statement. "We want those who fall victim to this type of disgusting behavior to know that we are on their side and will do everything we can to bring offenders to justice."

Grayling's statement also notes that depending on circumstances, distribution of nude photos without a subject's consent may already violate other British laws, including the Communications Act of 2003.

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We're now close to two weeks into the game industry's critical holiday quarter, and if your wallet isn't crying yet, it likely will be when the flood of games continues through November and into December. A new offer from Microsoft has the potential to cushion that blow a little bit, offering $15 in Xbox Live Rewards for Xbox 360 and Xbox One games pre-ordered through the Microsoft Store website.

To get the deal, you have to link your Xbox Live account to the Xbox Live Rewards program, which gives additional online store credit for other online activities. Use that Rewards account e-mail when pre-ordering Xbox games on MicrosoftStore.com starting today and you'll get 15,000 Reward points, worth $15 in Xbox Live store credit, for each of up to three pre-orders. After that, you can still take advantage of the same $10 gift card or Xbox Live credit being offered to anyone who pre-orders from the site.

More details are available on Xbox Wire and on the Xbox Live Rewards site. It's not clear how long the bonus rewards offer will last, so if you're planning on pre-ordering an Xbox game anyway, you might as well take advantage sooner than later.

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If you can't beat 'em... @Snappening

An Indianapolis-based events planning search engine startup is seeing huge upticks in Web traffic and social media activity this week, attracting thousands of new visitors from over 150 countries—though not because it knocked its marketing goals out of the park. In the midst of a campaign to roll out nationally, Snappening has been getting a lot more eyeballs, and most of them are searching for something other than a wedding planner.

Since the Snapchat photo leak that was dubbed “the Snappening” on 4Chan last week, Snappening has seen 100,000 new visitors to its site. Evidently a few trolling posters on 4Chan offered up the company's website as the location for gigabytes of stolen Snapchat photos pulled from the website SnapSaved.com.

For the company's role in all this, Snappening CEO Crystal Graves has certainly tried to capitalize on all the new exposure. She's helped Snappening latch onto the situation by attempting to embrace hashtag #TheSnappening with what she calls a “squeaky clean” meme. “It’s given us an opportunity to have the entire world find us in an unexpected way, follow us on multiple social media channels and learn about what we do,” Graves said. “That’s unusual enough for a startup! We’ll take it.”

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LAPD in action. Flickr user: John Liu

This piece originally appeared in Pro Publica.

In 2007, as it pushed to build a state-of-the-art surveillance facility, the Los Angeles Police Department cast an acquisitive eye on software being developed by Palantir, a startup funded in part by the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm.

Originally designed for spy agencies, Palantir's technology allowed users to track individuals with unprecedented reach, connecting information from conventional sources like crime reports with more controversial data gathered by surveillance cameras and license plate readers that automatically, and indiscriminately, photographed passing cars.

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xlibber

For the first time, the government is removing seven Americans from the no-fly list to comport with a federal judge's ruling that the methods to challenge placement on the watch list were "wholly ineffective."

Federal authorities notified the American Civil Liberties Union—which is representing 13 people who sued to get off the list—of its decision (PDF) late Friday. The government has until January to deal with the other six plaintiffs the ACLU is handling.

The government's actions are in response to a June decision by US District Judge Anna Brown of Oregon, who ruled that the Traveler Redress Inquiry Program run by the Department of Homeland Security was unconstitutional and does not provide "a meaningful mechanism for travelers who have been denied boarding to correct erroneous information in the government's terrorism databases."

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Scientists are warning that an army of shrimps and mussels from Turkey and Ukraine is poised to invade Britain's waterways and kill off native species.

Every second, the Earth is being struck by cosmic rays, high energy particles that slam into the atmosphere. Understanding where they come from and how they're generated could provide information about some of the most energetic processes in the Universe. But Earth's atmosphere protects us from them, ensuring that they don't make it to the surface. Instead, we have to look for the shower of photons and particles that the cosmic rays create when they hit the atmosphere.

Even large detectors, however, only capture a few traces of the high energy particles that reach the Earth, meaning that careful studies of their origin can take years, possibly even decades. So some researchers decided it might be possible to take advantage of a large population of non-specialized detectors that are pre-positioned all over the world: cell phone cameras.

The researchers from the University of California have drafted a paper in which they describe testing whether a smartphone camera can detect high energy photons and particles of the sort produced by cosmic rays. Testing with radioactive isotopes of radium, cobalt, and cesium showed that the detector easily picked up gamma rays (and you didn't even have to point the phones at the source!). They also put a phone inside a lead box and showed that they could detect high energy particles. Finally, they took a phone up on a commercial flight and were able to obtain a particle track across the detector.

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Apple Pay is the most important thing to launch with iOS 8.1. Apple

9to5Mac has received training materials “from a reliable source” that were given out by Apple to acquaint its employees with the ins and outs of the company's forthcoming Apple Pay service. These training materials have some interesting new details about the service, specifically mentioning that expired credit cards will be updated automatically in Apple Pay by the card issuer.

Keeping credit card information current shows an interesting level of commitment from banks to making Apple Pay work. On competing platforms, once a credit card has expired, that card will be declined until the updated information is entered manually.

The leaked document also shows that Apple Pay will be closely integrated with Apple's Passbook app. “Apple Pay can be set up via the Passbook application through both the initial iOS 8 setup process or in a new Settings.app tab called Passbook & Apple Pay,” 9to5Mac reports. Passbook will apparently take cards that are already on file through iTunes, or users can upload card details by taking a picture of the card. Users can then store up to eight debit or credit cards, which they will be able to select at checkout when using Apple Pay.

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Netflix's payments to Verizon for a direct connection to its network didn't result in immediate improvements for the companies' joint subscribers, but they're finally paying off with better video performance. Verizon FiOS actually topped all other major ISPs in Netflix performance in September with an average stream rate of 3.17Mbps, Netflix said today.

Netflix

Although Verizon FiOS led all large ISPs in Netflix performance, Google Fiber is still No. 1 among all ISPs regardless of size with a 3.54Mbps average in September.

In August, Netflix streamed at an average of 2.41Mbps on Verizon FiOS, ranking tenth out of 16 major ISPs. In July, Netflix speed on Verizon FiOS was 1.61Mbps and in June it was 1.58Mbps, ranking 12th in both months. The Netflix/Verizon deal was announced in late April. When performance continued to get worse after the interconnection agreement, Verizon said it might take until the end of 2014 to get all the proper network connections in place to speed up video.

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Posters to 4Chan’s /b/ forum continue to pore over the contents of thousands of images taken by users of the Snapchat messaging service that were recently leaked from a third-party website. Meanwhile, the developer behind that site, SnapSaved.com, used a Facebook post to say it was hacked because of a misconfigured Apache server. The statement also gets into the extent of the breach, while playing down reports that personal information from the users involved was also taken.

“I sincerely apologize on behalf of SnapSaved.com,” the developer’s spokesperson wrote. “We did not wish to cause Snapchat or their users harm, we only wished to provide a unique service.”

SnapSaved’s developer said there was no substance to claims by some 4Chan posters that a searchable database of the images stolen from the service’s server was being developed. “The recent rumors about the snappening are a hoax,” the developer wrote. “The hacker does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims of creating a searchable database.” The developer also said that the service actively “tried to cleanse the database of inappropriate images as often as possible…SnapSaved has always tried to fight child pornography, [and] we have even gone as far as reporting some of our users to the Swedish and Norwegian authorities.”

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Everywhere you look in this game, there's another stunning vista.

Even though it only has two games to its name, Borderlands was already kind of feeling set in its ways. The 2012 sequel to the 2009 original largely provided more of the same mix of shooting action, RPG-style leveling, and a ridiculously huge selection of ever-more-powerful guns. It's not that the Borderlands games are bad—on the contrary, they provide some of the most finely tuned, all-out shooting insanity this side of the Serious Sam series, especially when played cooperatively with friends.

It's just that, even after only two games, Borderlands was already feeling like the kind of franchise that was going to stick to a predictable, proven formula, perhaps for decades—the kind of series where if you'd played one game, you'd feel like you played them all.

So more power to the team at Gearbox and 2K Australia for taking that formula and leaving it on solid ground while they traveled to the freaking moon.

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During September we managed to get hold of some Haswell-EP samples for a quick run through our testing suite. The Xeon E5 v3 range extends beyond that of the E5 v2 with the new architecture, support for DDR4 and more SKUs with more cores. These are generally split into several markets including workstation, server, low power and high performance, with a few SKUs dedicated for communications or off-map SKUs with different levels of support. Today we are testing two 10 core models, the Xeon E5-2687W v3 and the Xeon E5-2650 v3.

The U.S. National Security Agency has worked with companies to weaken encryption products at the same time it infiltrated firms to gain access to sensitive systems, according to a purportedly leaked classified document outlined in an article on The Intercept.

The document, allegedly leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, appears to be a highly classified summary intended for a very small group of vetted national security officials according to details included in The Intercept article, which was published this weekend. The document outlines six programs at the core of the NSA's mission, collected under the name Sentry Eagle.

The Intercept claims the document states "The facts contained in [the Sentry Eagle] program constitute a combination of the greatest number of highly sensitive facts related to NSA/CSS’s overall cryptologic mission."

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Look closely at the large chip near the middle of the board—it's fuzzy, but it says "A8X." Apple.club.tw

We're three days out from Apple's next event, which means it's time for the supply chain and rumor mill to go into overdrive. Over the weekend, Taiwanese blog apple.club.tw republished photos of what are supposedly components from a new iPad, including shots of the TouchID button and cable and the logic board. The logic board shot revealed an interesting detail, assuming it's genuine—Apple is apparently building a new "A8X" processor to power at least one of its new tablets.

When the iPad went Retina back in 2012, Apple needed to amp up its processors’ graphics power to account for the higher-resolution screens. The result was the A5X, which used the same CPU cores as the A5 but included more GPU cores and a wider, 128-bit memory interface. The A6X did the same thing to the A6 in the iPhone 5. It’s safe to assume the A8X would upgrade the Apple A8 in the same way.

The existence of an A8X would come as a surprise. Last year Apple was able to standardize on the A7 across the iPhone and iPad lineup, which had obvious benefits—the company only had to design one chip, and that chip used less silicon than would a larger A7X. Ordering one part instead of two increases volume discounts and simplifies the supply chain, too.

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A new species of mussel has been found in the UK which could be hugely damaging to British wildlife.

Ready to rock? My Electric Loog arrives, just shy of a year after the Kickstarter launch—and after a long stay in a container at the Port of Los Angeles. Sean Gallagher

A little less than a year ago, I backed a Kickstarter project launched by Rafael Atijas, a New York-based designer. The project was the Electric Loog, a small, three-string electric guitar designed for children (and adults) to jam with. It seemed like a perfect project—Atijas created the Loog as part of a master's thesis at NYU, and he was working on refining the design for production.

The risks seemed minimal. Atijas already successfully executed an acoustic version of the Loog in 2011, and that knocked its funding goal out of the park. This time, for $150, I'd get an instrument for my collection with plenty of upside. I could build the Loog and share it with my daughter. Maybe I could even take it along with me while I travel for Ars, jamming in hotel rooms with headphones on. I happily said "Shut up and take my money," then sat back and waited for an anticipated May delivery.CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});

This past week, after a series of twists, turns, and delays, my Loog arrived. Following Atijas' updates along the way has been the equivalent of reading a business case study in why it's so hard to execute what is essentially a "maker" project as a mass-produced product. The Loog encountered manufacturing problems in China, a port strike in Los Angeles, and quality control issues during production ramp-up that resulted in a few small flaws in the delivered guitars. Atijas had to make what he characterized as a "flash" trip to China just last week when the latest issues emerged. Now his New York company is unboxing everything left in the first shipment to check for issues, and Atijas is preparing to ship out replacements to backers with flawed guitars in order to make good on his promise.

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Megan Geuss

Two weeks ago, I heard about a new company called Yondr that was making lightweight smartphone socks-with-locks that prevent the smartphone's user from accessing the device during a concert, movie, or party.

At the time, Yondr had quietly teamed up with two Bay-area music venues—Milk Bar in San Francisco and Stork Club in Oakland—for a pair of trial runs in which concert-goers would be asked to place their phones in the Yondr case before entering the venue in order to create a phone-free space. I was curious—would people even go for this?

Preventing fans from accessing their phones during a show might seem like an extraordinary step, especially in tech-centric San Francisco. But even the most compulsive texters among us can say that they've seen That Person: the guy in front of you at the concert who holds up his iPhone to record eight minutes of video, forcing you to watch your favorite band through his tiny screen, or the girl whose phone lights up with texts while you're in the theater trying to watch an important scene.

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"Play. Create. Share" has long been the three-word slogan for the charming, if a bit well-worn, LittleBigPlanet games. For most players it's likely more than a motto, it's an actual schedule of events as well. You play the game to get a feel for what's possible, then mess around with the creation tools, and finally share it with the community in the hope that it's worth the effort.

About a year after LittleBigPlanet's 2008 release, Microsoft tried its own hand at the design-your-own-game game with Kodu Game Lab, a $5 download doomed to the backwater of the Xbox 360's Indie Games program. I spent $5 and an ounce of curiosity on that release back in the day, and I can't say I came away impressed. I was expecting a magic wand to impart knowledge and power in the wizardry of "coding" in a way that I could understand as someone with no real experience in programming or game design. Instead, Kodu was a bare bones logic learning tool that threw me in to the deep end of ifs, thens, and whens with little guidance and little ability to build anything with real depth.

Project Spark, the free-to-play design lab that Microsoft first showed at its E3 2013 press conference, is everything I wanted Kodu to be at the time. Spark is a learning tool, sure, but it's also a genuine platform for making games.

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