After game streaming site Twitch's surprise announcement yesterday that it would be muting the sound on all historic videos that contained unlicensed audio, its CEO, Emmett Shear, had an "Ask Me Anything" session on reddit. In the immediate wake of such an unpopular change, it was no surprise that there were quite a few questions for him.

The AMA wasn't universally well-received, with many of Shear's answers being bombarded by a barrage of downvotes. The juicy question of whether Twitch is being bought by Google was also deemed off-limits. However, he revealed some good news for Twitch users.

The audio muting system isn't going to go away, but Shear said that it is going to get better. It currently blocks audio in half-hour chunks. Twitch videos are internally divided into half-hour segments, and the audio matching system appears only to identify entire segments, so if any part of a segment has licensed music in it, the entire thing is silenced. Shear wrote that this is something that Twitch hopes to fix, working with Audible Magic (the company that provides the music matching service) to allow finer-grained muting.

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Version:3.15.9 (stable) Released:2014-08-07 Source:linux-3.15.9.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.15.9.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.15.9.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.15.9

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BBC News tells the story of the construction of one of the seven wonders of the modern world.

Reed Hastings' Facebook update boasting about Netflix's (possibly temporary) victory over its unwilling adversary.

Netflix has surpassed HBO in subscriber revenue, according to a status update from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday. The company is now pulling in $1.146 billion compared to HBO's $1.141 billion, and it boasts 50.05 million subscribers, according to its second-quarter earnings reported in July.

Netflix has long seen HBO as a competitor in terms of audience and, more recently, in produced content. While HBO has slowly started to come down from the ivory cable tower and be more flexible about how it offers its subscriptions, Netflix has been making gains.

Hastings acknowledged that HBO still surpasses Netflix "in profits and Emmy's [sic], but we are making progress." Hastings has said many times before that he considers HBO to be a media company that is well-positioned in the changing distribution landscape, where power is shifting away from cable providers and toward Internet streaming.

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Hundreds of thousands of websites running a popular WordPress plugin are at risk of hacks that give attackers full administrative control, a security firm warned Thursday.

The vulnerability affects Custom Contacts Form, a plugin with more than 621,000 downloads, according to a blog post by researchers from Sucuri. It allows attackers to take unauthorized control of vulnerable websites. It stems from a bug affecting a function known as adminInit(). Hackers can exploit it to create new administrative users or modify database contents.

"The vulnerability was disclosed to the plugin developer a few weeks ago, they were unresponsive," Sucuri researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas wrote. "The developers were unresponsive so we engaged the WordPress Security team. They were able to close the loops with the developer and get a patch released, you might have missed it."

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Yahoo Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos announced today at Black Hat 2014 that starting in the fall of this year, the purple-hued company will begin giving users the option of seamlessly wrapping their e-mails in PGP encryption. According to Kashmir Hill at Forbes, the encryption capability will be offered through a modified version of the same End-to-End browser plug-in that Google uses for PGP in Gmail.

The announcement was tweeted by Yan Zhu, who has reportedly been hired by Yahoo to adapt End-to-End for use with Yahoo Mail. Zhu formerly worked as an engineer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that has consistently been outspoken in its call for the widespread use of encryption throughout the Web and the Internet in general.

@bcrypt

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Stamos acknowledged that the introduction of encryption will require some amount of education for users to make sure their privacy expectations are set appropriately. For example, he explained that PGP encryption won’t cloak the destination of your e-mail. "We have to make it clear to people it is not [a] secret you’re emailing your priest, but the content of what you’re e-mailing him is secret," Stamos said.

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Microsoft has supported Internet Explorer for an awfully long time. Each new version of Windows comes with a minimum of five years of mainstream support and five years of extended support. That support window covers all bundled and integrated software—including Internet Explorer—and any software updates.

Windows Server 2003, for example, is supported until July 2015. As such, Internet Explorer 6 (bundled with that operating system), Internet Explorer 7 (available as an update for that operating system), and Internet Explorer 8 (likewise, an update) are all supported until July 2015.

But all that is set to change under a new support policy announced today that is scheduled to take effect in about 18 months. Starting January 12, 2016, only the newest version of Internet Explorer for any given version of Windows will be supported. Older versions will cease to receive security fixes and other updates.

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Palestinian and Israeli officials are continuing indirect talks in Cairo on a long-term truce in Gaza, as the three-day ceasefire enters its last 24 hours.

A Spanish priest infected with Ebola while working in Liberia returns home, as Liberia's president declares a state of emergency over the the world's worst ever outbreak of the virus.

Casey Hudson, one of the people most responsible for the direction and tone of the popular Mass Effect series, announced today that he will be leaving BioWare after a 16-year career with the EA-owned studio.

"After what already feels like a lifetime of extraordinary experiences, I have decided to hit the reset button and move on from BioWare," Hudson said in a statement. "I’ll take a much needed break, get perspective on what I really want to do with the next phase of my life, and eventually take on a new set of challenges."

BioWare Studios General Manager Aaryn Flynn added in a statement that "Casey’s focus on production quality, digital acting technology, and emotionally engaging narrative has made a substantial impact on BioWare and the video game industry as a whole."

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For avid readers who can't find the time to visit their local library or struggle to carry giant tomes of awesomeness around with them, eBooks have become a convenient way to consume books. Whether it's on a Kindle, a Nook or in an app on your phone, eBooks are the ultimate in portability. Sometimes, however, it can be difficult to find the book you want in a format you can read. more>>

Which one do you want to see before starting a Hearthstone match?

Of all the strategic debates constantly swirling around Blizzard's Hearthstone, there's one question that seems simple on the surface but generates a surprising amount of debate among players. That question: is it better to go first or go second in a match?

The fact that there's such a debate shows just how effective Blizzard's in-game solution for inter-turn balance has been. The player that goes first has an important tempo advantage in Hearthstone, getting access to mana crystals before the opponent has a chance to respond with the same resources (i.e. the first player gets to use three mana crystals on Turn 3 before the opponent has the same chance). To make up for that difference, the designers at Blizzard give the second player a free extra card draw at the start of the game, as well as "The Coin," a card that gives a free one-time-use mana crystal.

There are enough pros and cons to each turn order position that even serious players can't seem to agree on which side has an advantage. There is an answer to this question, though, and Blizzard has addressed it a few times in the Hearthstone's short history. Last September, early in the game's closed beta, Hearthstone Lead Designer Ben Brode shared statistics showing a slight advantage for the first player, which becomes even more negligible when you reach expert-level play:

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FishPlaysPokemon via Kotaku

Earlier this year, a user on the Twitch game streaming site made a figurative splash when he created a system that allowed all of the users in the stream’s chatroom to play Pokémon Red. Now, another stream has made a literal splash by rigging a system to allow a fish to play Pokémon Red.

The “Fish Plays Pokemon” stream is manned by Grayson Hopper, a fish who can make button presses by swimming around in a webcam stream split into a three-by-three grid. Each square is mapped to a specific Game Boy button, and when Grayson swims into a square that button is pressed. According to the stream’s creators, the project was created in about 24 hours for hackNY, a “hackathon” for students organized by NYU and Columbia faculty members.

So far Grayson has been playing for more than 130 hours, in which time he has chosen and named a Charmander (an interesting choice, since Grayson is most likely a Water-type) and defeated his rival’s Squirtle. Given the fish’s totally random button inputs, the length of the game, and the average lifespan of every fish I’ve ever owned, it seems unlikely that Grayson will ever make it to the end of the game.

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Google

Google is releasing a preview version of the Google Fit SDK, the company's cloud-powered fitness tracking service. Google Fit, like Google Play Games, is a back-end set of APIs that Google wants developers to plug into.

The service aims to be a one-stop shop for fitness data. Google Fit gives developers high-level access to sensors from Android devices and wearables, allowing them to save fitness data to the cloud and read back that data. The cloud component isn't ready yet, so for now only local fitness history is available.

Google describes the existing APIs this way:

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The Federal Communications Commission is taking public comments and petitions regarding AT&T's proposed $48.5 billion purchase of DirecTV until September 16, the commission announced today.This is one of the first steps of a review process in which the FCC will determine whether the acquisition is in the public's interest.

You can submit filings to the FCC at this link. Comments began coming in shortly after AT&T announced the deal, but today's announcement sets a deadline.

By September 16, all initial comments and petitions to deny the merger must be submitted. Responses to initial comments and oppositions to petitions can be filed until October 16. A third round consisting of replies to the responses and oppositions will then begin and continue until November 5.

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The NEC EA244UHD is the first UltraHD (UHD) monitor from NEC. While it's not from their professional line, it has many of the features we've come to expect in their monitors: uniformity compensation, a wider color gamut but also sRGB and AdobeRGB support, and many user configurable settings. It also has a few things NEC has never done before including SpectraView calibration support on an EA-series model and full USB 3.0. Read on for our full review.

Greetings, Arsians! Our partners at LogicBuy are back with a ton of offers this week. The top deal is a Haswell-powered Dell XPS 8700 desktop computer with a 23-inch 1080p monitor for just 849.99. That's about $270 off the MSRP.

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Laptops, desktops and tablets

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