Category Archives: IT news

IT news

BBC iPlayer experiences first declination in popularity since 2007

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There is report showed that BBC iPlayer may lose its dominant position on the market in the near future. It is one of the most popular video catch-up services in the UK.

This BBC iPlayer came to the market in 2007. There is data claimed that its platform has experienced its first decline in popularity recently. This is not good news for BBC iPlayer publisher.

According to the latest statistics seem to state that the number of streaming requests in March drop to 7% that compared to the same period in 2014.

Because of iPlayer’s slowest quarterly growth on record at only 2 percent, which lead to the number of requests also dropped to 230 million.

The explanation on the report came from BBC showed that iPlayer continue perform strongly, but there is economic downturn of this variations of factors.

The BBC recently addressed that the company would close its subscription-based Global iPlayer soon, and this news comes to the public after its announcement.

There is evidence showed that the EU plans streaming services across Europe. While BBC iPlayer is included. The EU hopes to make more streaming services available to all Europeans. That will be a new revolution of video catch-up around the European countries.

IT news

ThreatExchange was built on Facebook for companies sharing cybersecurity threat data

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facebook Facebook has built a platform where the corporations can share security threats they encounter. This practice is aimed at defending cyberattacks. Many companies, through specialized industry groups, share information attacks. However, this act will also bring bad influence on these companies although they blindly attack companies in other industries.

On Tuesday, Facebook built this new platform, ThreatExchange. Nevertheless, more than one year ago, when several companies, Facebook included, were trying to propose a solution to stop a botnet to send spam, this idea of building a new platform was came out.

ThreatExchange was built on Facebook providing corporations with APIs (application programming interfaces) for checking or uploading new threat data. This information contains malicious domain names, malware samples and other indicators of compromise. Mark Hammell, a manager of the Threat Infrastructure team at Facebook, posted a blog Wednesday. In the blog he said “We quickly learned that sharing with one another was key to beating the botnet because parts of it were hosted on our respective services and none of us had the complete picture, during our discussions, it became clear that what we needed was a better model for threat sharing.”

Companies can only share certain information with select groups of organizations, because this is under control of mechanisms that built on the platform. Twitter, Yahoo, Tumblr and Pinterest joined in the program in the early time and they have tested the program when it was still being developed. Box and Bitly have participated recently.

ThreatExchange is designed to make organizations all over the world use ThreatExchange to learn from each other and make their systems safer, Hammel said. He also called on companies to work together on security, because when one company gets stronger, so do the rest of others.

IT news

Reading with fingertips: MIT is developing special equipment FingerReader for the blind

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Scientists of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing an audio reading device, so that visually impaired people can access the text directly. And this equipment called FingerReader is prototypes created by 3D printers, like a ring with a small camera which designed for scanning text, and can be worn on the finger of the user. With FingerReader, when you leave your home or office, it is able to reads the text out loud for you, as well as quickly translates books, restaurant menus, or other information needed in daily life. Continue reading →