Netflix Says HBO Is Not A Threat. Yeah, Right

Netflix released its earnings for the first quarter of 2015 today, and the numbers look good. The streaming giant added a record 4.9 million subscribers globally, bringing more viewers than expected to the service thanks in part to its growing international audience.

Despite its apparent health, however, Netflix felt the need to make one thing clear: HBO is absolutely, totally, definitely not a threat—even with its new standalone streaming service HBO Now.

“As we have said in the past, Netflix and HBO are not substitutes for one another given differing content,” CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells wrote in a letter to investors. “We think both will continue to be successful in the marketplace, as illustrated by the fact that HBO has continued to grow globally and domestically as we have rapidly grown over the past 5 years.”

The dedicated paragraph in the relatively succinct letter seems to signal worry—or at the very least an awareness of the possibility of concern on the part of investors. And its make-nice tone is a world away from the time not so long ago when Hastings joked that HBO was Netflix’s “bitch.”

And yet the threat from HBO is greater than ever before. Prior to the launch of its HBO Now streaming service, HBO may have seemed too different to be a worry. Netflix’s streaming service has always catered to cord-cutters (or cord-nevers), while HBO’s service was still linked with cable, even through HBO Go. That all changed last week when HBO launched HBO Now for $14.99 a month, compared to Netflix’s monthly $7.99 fee for streaming.

While Netflix may want to claim that HBO’s offerings are complementary, HBO Now offers far more than just Girls and Game of Thrones. The service has a wealth of documentaries, premium TV shows, and films. Yes, Netflix has amassed an audience looking for exclusive shows like Orange is the New Black and House of Cards. But when it comes to high-quality original content, HBO still sets the standard.

So, yes, Netflix is doing great. But it’s hard to imagine that HBO Now couldn’t steal at least some of that thunder. The world may have room for both. But there’s no doubt that they’re now fighting on the same turf.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. GIF and a Graf: Melinda May’s Ultimate Sacrifice

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. GIF and a Graf: Melinda May’s Ultimate Sacrifice

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We’re only about two weeks away from a Avengers: Age of Ultron, so naturally things are ramping up on its sister show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Last night things got turned up to 11 with the long-awaited reveal of what happened to Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) in Bahrain that earned her the nickname “The Cavalry” (and also eroded her softer side). It probably doesn’t tie into Ultron directly—though there is passing talk of Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) and the Avengers Initiative and his interest in people with powers—but it’s the kind of connective tissue that gets people excited about the Marvel universe on all fronts. We won’t spoil everything, but the bottom line is May became the Cavalry the day she went into a room alone to save an entire S.H.I.E.L.D. team from a very young (and insane) Inhuman girl named Katya who had them all under mind control. She won the day, but lost herself.

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The Piracy ‘Problem’ With Periscope Really Isn’t One

Piracy is a serious issue. Live-streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat have plenty of sticky societal implications. These are two indisputable facts! Let’s not make the mistake, though, of assuming that they overlap.

This week, HBO confirmed that it sent takedown notices to Periscope, the Twitter-owned emporium of bored iPhone owners showing off their cats in real time. At issue were several streams of the network’s Game of Thrones season five premiere that had found their way onto the service, thanks to a handful of unscrupulous users.

Devoting serious resources to Periscope and Meerkat piracy is like swatting away a ladybug in a room full of vipers.

If you’re not familiar with Periscope or Meerkat, or know of them but haven’t actually used them, you’re in the vast majority and should be applauded for your restraint and/or focus on more vital aspects of human existence. You should also, though, be aware that while watching a live-stream from a smartphone can be fun and engaging under certain circumstances, watching someone else’s television or computer is not one of them. Even setting aside the mind-numbing absurdity of looking at your screen through someone else’s screen to yet another screen, consider the quality, or lack thereof.

No matter how big a Periscope pirate’s TV is, it’s going to look might small on your smartphone’s display. Streaming quality has come a long way over the years, but trusting both your connection and a Periscoper’s to hold up for a full hour is a fool’s game. And unless you’re dealing with someone who has either a smartphone tripod or wrist supports, you’re going to be shaking all the way from King’s Landing to Winterfell.

None of which prevented people from streaming the Game of Thrones premiere last weekend. Although Periscope wouldn’t provide WIRED with the number of associated takedowns it issued, there were reportedly dozens of accounts broadcasting the episode as it aired. What’s not clear is how many people actually watched those streams, or how much self-loathing it took to make it through more than a few minutes of the blurry, bouncy, bite-sized mess.

Yes, Piracy is bad, and HBO is fully justified in protecting its lavish Daenerys and Dragons spectacle, as is Periscope in swiftly responding to valid, copyright-related takedown requests. But there are wildly varying degrees of bad in this world, and devoting serious resources to Periscope and Meerkat piracy is like swatting away a ladybug in a room full of vipers.

Game of Thrones provides helpful context here, too, and not just because of the cutthroat power-mongering. If you really truly wanted to watch the first episode of season five—or in this case, the first four episodes—without paying, it was available on torrent sites before it ever hit television sets. Imagine that! A clear, crisp, full-screen, downloadable version, instead of one that features occasional sneezes from an invisible stranger death-gripping his Droid Turbo.

Unless you’re dealing with someone who has a smartphone tripod, you’re going to be shaking all the way from King’s Landing to Winterfell.

Those torrents, popular and pervasive, are of genuine concern to content providers everywhere. According to piracy-tracking site TorrentFreak, the Game of Thrones premiere alone was downloaded over a million times within 18 hours of its release. Periscope piracy, by contrast, is (if anything) a reminder that hey, yeah, I bet this would be really fun under remotely watchable circumstances. It’s shakeycam movie DVD bootlegs without the reusable jewel case.

At least some potential Periscope and Meerkat piracy victims realize that the issue’s not yet serious. After a WSJ report that Major League Baseball would police live-streaming of its games—an MLB.tv subscription tops out at a hefty $130 per year, after all—MLB executive Bob Bowman later clarified that it wasn’t an actual concern. And rightly so; spending an entire baseball game recording with your smartphone not only defeats the purpose of going to a baseball game (along with demolishing your battery and data plan), but watching a stream like that would be unthinkable. You’d be better off with a box score and a vivid imagination.

A better argument could be made for following an illicit stream of a big pay-per-view event, like Wrestlemania, or a big boxing match if boxing ever becomes popular again. You can usually find higher quality versions of those on the internet already, though, if you’re already intent on law-breaking. The only Periscope piracy live event stream even remotely worth following would be Spike Lee recording at a Knicks game, because he is both an iconic filmmaker and has good seats. But even then, you’d have to watch the Knicks.

There will almost certainly come a day when live-streaming quality advances to the point that a Periscope feed of your favorite show or event isn’t excruciating to watch. There will just as certainly still be higher-fidelity, more easily attained options that lead to the same ends. If you want to fight piracy, spend your energies there. For now, at least, watching Game of Thrones through someone else’s lens is punishment enough.

Bacterial raincoat discovery paves way to better crop protection

Fresh insights into how bacteria protect themselves -- by forming a waterproof raincoat -- could help develop improved products to protect plants from disease.

Researchers have discovered how communities of beneficial bacteria form a waterproof coating on the roots of plants, to protect them from microbes that could potentially cause plant disease.

Their insights could lead to ways to control this shield and improve its efficiency, which could help curb the risk of unwanted infections in agricultural or garden plants, the team says.

Scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee studied the protective film formed by the common soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis. They found it incorporates proteins that change shape as they reach the film surface. This exposes an impervious surface on the protein molecules, enabling them to slot together like a jigsaw puzzle, to protect bacteria underneath.

The film is able to repel water -- which means other potentially harmful molecules also bounce off. Researchers say that being able to control the production of the biofilm in agricultural products could enable improved protection for plants.

The study, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team behind the finding plans to research further applications for their discovery.

Professor Cait MacPhee, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, said: "Such a controlled shape change in a protein is unusual. This protein only responds in exactly the right way and in the right place. It protects microbes from the outside world, but the ability to control the creation of a water-repellent film has many possible applications."

Dr Nicola Stanley-Wall, of the University of Dundee's Division of Molecular Microbiology, said: "Our findings highlight one of the amazing mechanisms that bacteria have evolved to provide protection from changes in their environment. It also demonstrates the advances that can be made when biologists and physicists work together on a problem of mutual interest."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Edinburgh . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: Orphan Black

Orphan Black begins at a train station, where a down-on-her-luck British punk named Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) sees an exact physical copy of herself commit suicide by jumping on the tracks. Turns out she’s a clone—in fact she’s one of many, many identical clones (all played by Maslany) with very different nationalities, personalities, and lives, but the same face.

If you’re guessing that sounds like the beginning of a pretty addictive show, you’d be right. Much like Sarah, you’ll likely start off BBC America’s critically beloved series with a lot of questions: Where did these clones come from? Why were they created? And who is killing them off? Throughout the past two seasons, Orphan Black has gone about answering those questions—and asking all new ones—at a breakneck pace. And if you’re ready to start binge-watching now, you can get caught up on what has and hasn’t been revealed just in time to start watching Season 3 when it premieres on Sunday.

But getting into Orphan Black means something else, too. It means finally being able to understand why all those fans were up in arms when Maslany wasn’t nominated for an Emmy. What she offers is not a mere performance but an emotional and physical Venn diagram of performances, and the creation of an entire cast of characters who seem distinct down to their tiniest mannerisms. Not only does she pull off mind-boggling scenes where they interact physically, she often ends up playing them when they’re pretending to be each other. It’s not easy to convey the idea that you’re a British punk who’s pretending to be a Canadian cop who’s pretending to be a soccer mom, but she does. Without skipping a beat.

So, whaddya say? Ready to join the Clone Club? Think you might be a Clonesbian? Here’s how to binge-watch Orphan Black to find out.

Orphan Black

Number of Seasons: 2 (20 episodes)

Time Requirements: The first two seasons will set you back 20 hours, which could take you anywhere from a weekend to a week or two, depending your level of determination/commitment.

Where to Get Your Fix: Amazon Prime

Best Character to Follow:

Of all the versions of Tatiana Maslany we’ve met, Helena is the most difficult to ignore—or forget. While we don’t want to spoil too much about her backstory, she’s a blonde, Ukrainian, Jell-O-loving terror who has a lot of baggage, and you won’t be able to take your eyes off her. If we have to pick a non-Maslany character, Sarah’s occasionally scandalous adopted brother Felix (Jordan Gavaris) is a total delight.

Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:

There’s only 10 episodes per season, and pretty much every one involves some sort of revelation or major plot development, so it might not be a good idea to skip many of them. But if you do, make sure you read a summary or recap somewhere online. That said, there are a couple less-than-stellar episodes in the bunch.

Season 2: Episode 7, “Knowledge of Causes, and Secret Motion of Things” There’s a plot point involving Dr. Aldous Leekie (Matt Frewer!) that you should probably find out about, but everything involving Sarah’s perpetually annoying ex-boyfriend Vic (Michael Mando) and his stint at a substance abuse center is deeply missable.

BBC America

Seasons/Episodes You Can’t Skip:

Season 1: Episode 1, “Natural Selection” It’s the pilot, so … yeah, you have to watch it.

Season 1: Episode 2, “Instinct” The family of known clones doubles in this episode, and Sarah continues to live out that nightmare where you show up for a test but you haven’t studied, except that she shows up for an inquest into a police shooting where everyone thinks she’s the cop who fired the bullet and she has no idea what happened. Whoops.

Season 1: Episode 3, “Variation Under Nature” This is the episode where Sarah finally learns about the clones, and the broader arc of their secret history begins. If the police drama isn’t quite doing it for you, hold on—things are going to get a lot more interesting.

Season 1: Episode 6, “Variations Under Domestication” If you enjoy the suburban drama of soccer mom clone Alison, then this is the episode where it goes full Desperate Housewives at a neighborhood party that collides directly with clone drama. We also meet the Neolutionists, who believe in human evolution through technology. This will be important.

Season 1: Episode 9, “Unconscious Selection” A lot of secrets get revealed in ways that unravel the lives of the various clones—and in same cases, help them knit their lives back together.

Season 1: Episode 10, “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” The first season finale kicks things up a notch in ways that involve interventions, murders, and major familial revelations.

Season 2: Episode 1, “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed” The Season 2 premiere hits the ground running, with a thrilling episode where Sarah infiltrates the dangerous inner sanctum of her enemy.

Season 2: Episode 6, “To Hound Nature in Her Wanderings” This episode is worth watching for the bar scene alone, where Helena finally meets a nice boy—and ends up kicking the crap out of Those Guys (you know the ones) at the bar.

Season 2: Episode 8, “Variable and Full of Perturbation” Meet Tony. He’s kind of a big deal.

Season 2: Episode 9, “Things Which Have Never Yet Been Done” The bizarre relationship between Alison and her husband Donnie goes to unexpected new places, Sarah’s daughter Kira ends up in danger again, and Helena unleashes the whirlwind.

Season 2: Episode 10, “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried” The Season 2 finale isn’t quite as strong as the episode that precedes it, but there’s a big twist to set up the third season, not to mention the famous clone dance party.

Why You Should Binge:

Orphan Black is a compelling sci-fi drama all on its own, but watching the virtuosic versatility of Maslany as she carries entire scenes—and most of the show—while acting opposite herself is akin to watching a feat, and one that wows again and again. It’s the sort of thing that Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse wanted to pull off, but never quite did.

Best Scene—Clone Dance Party:

The four-clone dance party from the season two finale is just fabulous. Spoilers, kind of, but all they do is groove.

The Takeaway:

Orphan Black is a thunderous counter to the skepticism of anyone who thinks a female character can’t (or shouldn’t) anchor a show. But OB also goes much further: It proves that a single woman can be almost the entire cast, and still knock it out of the park.

If You Liked Orphan Black, You’ll Love:

Other sci-fi/speculative shows like Fringe, Continuum, Black Mirror, and The X-Files. Do not watch Dollhouse. We can’t stress this enough.

Hackers Could Commandeer New Planes Through Passenger Wi-Fi

An Airbus A350 on an assembly line, in Toulouse, France, April 11, 2015. Remy Gabalda/AFP/Getty

Seven years after the Federal Aviation Administration first warned Boeing that its new Dreamliner aircraft had a Wi-Fi design that made it vulnerable to hacking, a new government report suggests the passenger jets might still be vulnerable.

Boeing 787 Dreamliner jets, as well as Airbus A350 and A380 aircraft, have Wi-Fi passenger networks that use the same network as the avionics systems of the planes, raising the possibility that a hacker could hijack the navigation system or commandeer the plane through the in-plane network, according to the US Government Accountability Office, which released a report about the planes today.

A hacker would have to first bypass a firewall that separates the Wi-Fi system from the avionics system. But firewalls are not impenetrable, particularly if they are misconfigured. A better design, security experts have warned for years, is to air gap critical systems from non-critical ones—that is, physically separate the networks so that a hacker on the plane can’t bridge from one to the other, nor can a remote hacker pass malware through the internet connection to the plane’s avionics system. As the report notes, because the Wi-Fi systems in these planes connect to the world outside the plane, it opens the door for malicious actors to also remotely harm the plane’s system.

“A virus or malware planted in websites visited by passengers could provide an opportunity for a malicious attacker to access the IP-connected onboard information system through their infected machines,” according to the report.

Members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee requested the report from the GAO out of growing concern that modern transportation systems, including planes, trains and automobiles, are becoming increasingly computerized and therefore susceptible to some of the same vulnerabilities and attacks that have long plagued desktop and laptop systems.

Boeing responded to the GAO report with a statement saying that a pilot manual override system would prevent someone from successfully commandeering its planes in this way.

This is not the first time the issue of aviation Wi-Fi security has come up for Boeing. In 2008, while Boeing was in the final stages of production on its new Dreamliner line of planes, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a report directing Boeing to address concerns about the passenger Wi-Fi system. The report was a “special conditions” document that the FAA produces whenever it encounters new aircraft designs and technologies that aren’t addressed by existing regulations and standards.

That report was pointing out the same problem that’s getting the company in trouble today. Boeing’s design for the Dreamliner’s Wi-Fi network, the FAA noted in the document, connected it to the plane’s control, navigation and communication systems, thereby establishing “new kinds of passenger connectivity to previously isolated data networks” that are critical to the safe operation of the plane. The FAA called on Boeing at the time to demonstrate that it had resolved this issue before the new line of planes could be put into service.

Boeing spokeswoman Lori Gunter told WIRED in 2008 that the company did indeed design a solution to address the FAA concerns. She wouldn’t go into detail about how Boeing was tackling the problem but said Boeing was employing a combination of solutions that involved some physical air-gapping of the networks as well as software firewalls. “There are places where the networks are not touching, and there are places where they are,” she had said.

Gunter added that although data could pass between the networks, “there are protections in place” to ensure that the passenger internet service didn’t access the maintenance data or the navigation system “under any circumstance.”

But security experts had warned at the time that software firewalls were still insufficient to separate critical networks from the Wi-Fi network.

It’s unclear if the authors of the new GAO report tested or examined Boeing’s solution and found it was still vulnerable to hacking or if they simply based their report on statements from experts that any design that doesn’t involve complete air-gapping of networks is vulnerable to hacking.

Boeing responded to the GAO report with a statement saying that “Boeing airplanes have more than one navigational system available to pilots” and that “[n]o changes to the flight plans loaded into the airplane systems can take place without pilot review and approval. In addition, other systems, multiple security measures, and flight deck operating procedures help ensure safe and secure airplane operations.”

Airbus also released a statement, which said only that it “constantly assesses and revisits the system architecture of our products, with an eye to establishing and maintaining the highest standards of safety and security. Beyond that, we don’t discuss design details or safeguards publicly, as such discussion might be counterproductive to security.”

Verizon: Mobile Malware Isn’t a Problem

In its annual breach investigations report, Verizon suggests that the threat of mobile malware for phones and tablets is much less than the providers of mobile security products would have us believe.

Contrary to claims from companies like Lookout that provide mobile security solutions and who have for years warned about the rapid and massive growth of mobile malware, Verizon found virtually no iOS malware for iPhones or iPads in the data it examined from Verizon mobile customers last year, and virtually no Android malware either.

“We’re seeing that the exploits just aren’t happening,” Bryan Sartin, head of Verizon’s RISK team told reporters in a phone call today discussing the company’s annual Breach Investigations Report.

As you might guess, Verizon’s annual report card is rarely optimistic—and, in fact, this year was mostly no different: one major finding of the report suggests that the time it takes for hackers to get into a system and siphon data, on average, is mere minutes and seconds. But this mobile malware finding serves as an unexpected bright spot. In a section of the report titled, “I’ve Got 99 Problems and Mobile Isn’t Even 1% of Them,” Verizon says although it found hundreds of thousands of malware infections for mobile devices, most of them were simply annoying adware programs. The really big mobile threats didn’t materialize.

“The reality was when we talk about really truly malicious [code], it was really 0.03 percent of Android devices per week,” Sartin said during the press call. “That’s a blip. That’s virtually nothing.” And the Android malware they did find far outnumbered any that targeted iOS devices.

Although Verizon’s dataset was limited—it involved just six months worth of data from Verizon Wireless customers and the tens of millions of devices they use to connect to the Verizon network—the authors of the report note that their findings are consistent with the analysis of other forensic firms like FireEye who also say that mobile devices just don’t show up in their forensic investigations. “This report is filled with thousands of stories of data loss—as it has been for years—and rarely do those stories include a smartphone,” the Verizon authors write.

Despite the fact that serious vulnerabilities have been found in mobile devices over the years, Verizon found little evidence that attackers were actually releasing exploits to attack them—for now. But this means, Sartin said during the press call, that companies have an opportunity to stay ahead of mobile attackers if they act now to secure and monitor their devices before the mobile attack waves strike.

But mobile security firm Lookout says that Verizon and other forensic firms likely don’t have the infrastructure or controls needed to properly detect mobile malware.

“It’s unsurprising that enterprises haven’t seen the more concerning, targeted threats because few of them actually have the mobile security controls in place that would detect these,” said Lookout CEO John Hering.