Unrelated to the whiskey.
4DX theater tech, which brings additional sensory thrills to the movie-going experience, is coming to the US. Can your body handle it? Find out here. The post What It’s Like to See Batman v Superman in Butt-Punishing 4DX appeared first on WIRED.
Source: Wired.com Top Stories
Late last year several pirated copies of 4K videos started to leak from both Netflix and Amazon. These leaks were unusual as online 4k streams were always well protected against pirates.
While it’s still not clear how these videos were copied, several sources suggested that one of LegendSky’s latest HDFury devices may have been involved.
These suspicions were corroborated a few weeks ago when Warner Bros. and Intel daughter company Digital Content Protection (DCP) sued the HDFury manufacturer over its ability to “strip” the latest HDCP encryption.
The Chinese hardware manufacturer refutes this claim and has pointed out that its tools merely allow users to convert HDCP encryption, which would be fair use and permitted by law.
While the case continues in court, a pirate group has stepped up to add some fuel to the fire. In an NFO file packaged with a recent release of the Netflix film “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” Scene group ‘Team QCF’ thanks HDFury while describing it as one of its sponsors.
“We like to give a shout out to our sponsors without them this is not possible :p,” the NFO file reads, linking to the controversial HDFury 4k splitter.
While the release in question is 1080p, the controversial hardware makes it possible to use a 4K source to get a better encode.
The nfo
In addition, Gatorade also gets a plug. “Drink Gatorade it will help your encodes,” the NFO file adds, linking to the Gatorade website.
Team QCF doesn’t normally list any sponsors, and it’s pretty unlikely that HDFury or Gatorade have intentionally contributed to the Scene group. However, the wink to HDFury suggests that the devices are indeed used to rip 4K content from Netflix.
At least, the group felt the urge to respond to the recent controversy over the HDFury devices.
It is doubtful that the “endorsement” will be featured in court though. As an anonymous source, Team QCF may just as well be putting up a smokescreen for fun, or perhaps to divert attention from another vulnerability.
That said, LegendSky is probably going to be unhappy with the fact that their HDFury devices are now openly being plugged by a well-known Scene group.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Source: TorrentFreak
Underlying a multitude of strategies designed to limit traffic to pirate sites, there is a strong belief among copyright holders that operators only keep their sites online due to how profitable they are.
Since most portals don’t make their motivations public it’s unclear as to how many sites this applies. However, it can’t be denied that the largest sites are pulling in decent revenues via advertising so with this in mind there is an ongoing and concerted effort by authorities to “Follow the Money.”
Part of this strategy is ensuring that major brands and smaller companies refrain from placing their advertising on infringing sites. In addition to funding the sites in question, copyright holders insist that having “household name” branding appearing alongside pirate content suggests that sites are not only legitimate but somehow endorsed by their advertisers.
While the US has its own initiatives underway, the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) maintains the Infringing Website List (IWL), a database of sites that police and copyright holders have deemed to breach copyright law.
PIPCU earlier claimed to have placed warning ads on these domains to deter would-be downloaders and is now receiving help from the government to reach more advertisers.
In a new video published by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), the Internet is described as the most powerful communication tool ever invented, noting that by 2020 the total Internet advertising spend will outstrip that of TV. But while reaching billions of consumers has its benefits, the IPO says that advertisers need to be aware of the problems being caused by IP crime.
Starting with an image of a presumably unlicensed pharmaceutical site, the video quickly moves on to the world of torrents, with an image of a fake website called “Super Torrent”.
Somewhat ironically the screenshot from the video shown above is actually a copy of ExtraTorrent (the world’s 3rd largest torrent site) but with a name switch. In fact, those who look closely will see that on the left hand side of the image where ExtraTorrent displays its news feed, there’s even a link directing people to find more news on TorrentFreak.
“Illegal websites offering copyright infringing content, illegal websites facilitating fraud, organized crime, even terrorism,” the voiceover warns. “You wouldn’t want your brand, your client’s logo, your hard-earned reputation mixed up with that, would you?”
The video continues by stating that of the top 500 infringing websites, 294 carried advertising for recognized brands, 43 of which were businesses in the top 1000 for advertising spend. By placing ads on such websites, advertisers give them legitimacy while tarnishing their images by associating themselves with viruses and malware, the IPO adds.
Of course, knowing which sites are considered a risk isn’t always easy for advertisers and that’s where copyright holders and the police step in.
“The Infringing Website List lists all known websites determined by the police to be illegal on the basis of copyright infringement. It’s the first of its kind in the world,” the IPO says.
“Sites are identified by the creative industries, evidenced and verified by the police. The IWL then provides an up to date list of copyright-infringing websites to enable advertisers, agencies and brands to cease advert placement on illegal websites.”
The idea is that ad agencies can integrate the IWL into their ad placement systems in order to boycott pirate sites, something which can prevent direct advertising on designated platforms. However, the advertising world isn’t as straightforward as that and the use of various middle-men ensures that advertising often makes it onto pirate sites, even though they have been ‘blacklisted’ in Europe and the United States.
Nevertheless, the IPO and PIPCU say they are making progress and in August 2015 reported that top UK advertisers were placing 73% fewer ads on pirate sites. More current stats aren’t presented in the video but the message from the IPO remains the same.
“Stop funding criminals, sign up to the IWL,” the IPO concludes.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Source: TorrentFreak
The government announced today that an alternative method for breaking into the phone has worked. The post The FBI Drops Its Case Against Apple After Finding a Way Into That iPhone appeared first on WIRED.
Source: Wired.com Top Stories
No telescopes or cameras captured the incident that sent JAXA’s Hitomi satellite spinning out of control. But tracking data could help scientists nail down an explanation. The post Space Detectives Are Figuring Out What Borked Japan’s Hitomi Satellite appeared first on WIRED.
Source: Wired.com Top Stories
We went to the inaugural Silicon Valley Comic Con to get a glimpse at what might be the new big-ticket convention. Here’s what we found. The post Here’s Everything You Missed at the Inaugural Silicon Valley Comic Con appeared first on WIRED.
Source: Wired.com Top Stories
The cop-show pun-a-thon has grown (and groaned) into a slaphappy tribute to the spoof comedies of the ’80s. The post Angie Tribeca Does Dumb Comedy in the Smartest Way Possible appeared first on WIRED.
Source: Wired.com Top Stories
Maybe the best Batman was this little plastic minifig the whole time? The post Better Than Batfleck: There’s a New Lego Batman Trailer! appeared first on WIRED.
Source: Wired.com Top Stories
During the summer of 2014 LionsGate suffered a major setback when a high quality leak of the then unreleased Expendables 3 film appeared online.
Fearing a massive loss in revenue the movie studio sued the operators of several websites that allegedly failed to remove the infringing files.
Since most of the defendants failed to appear in court, LionsGate asked for a default judgment against the alleged operators of LimeTorrents and the defunct Dotsemper and Swankshare sites.
While the websites are not responsible for the original leak, they failed to respond to a slew of takedown requests sent by the movie studio in the days after the film first appeared online.
Last week United States District Judge Otis Wright granted the default judgment (pdf), ordering Muhammed Ashraf (LimeTorrents), Tom Messchendorp (Dotsemper), and Lucas Lim (Swankshare) to pay the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 each.
The maximum amount in statutory damages is appropriate, according to the Judge, because the movie studio likely suffered substantial losses as a result of the pre-release leak of The Expendables 3.
“In light of the fact that the film garnered over $575 million dollars in worldwide box office revenues, the ‘value of the copyright’ strongly favors a high award of statutory damages,” Judge Wright notes.
“Defendants hosted the anticipated film available online prior to its theatrical release for the purpose of enabling users to illegally download it, which more than likely diminished Plaintiff’s revenue substantially,” he adds.
Judge Otis Wright’s order
In addition, the maximum in damages may serve as a deterrent for the defendants and any other site operators that link to or host infringing content.
“Moreover, an award of the enhanced statutory damages will likely serve to deter Defendants and others from infringing Plaintiff’s rights in the future,” Judge Wright’s order reads.
The court also issued a permanent injunction on top of the damages, forbidding the men from operating their sites going forward, as well as any other websites through which The Expendables 3 is being made available.
Whether this injunction will be very effective is doubtful. TorrentFreak previously spoke with the LimeTorrents operator, who informed us that his site will remain online, no matter what the outcome is.
“We want to keep the site up and running, and we don’t care about default judgment because we don’t have any faith in the United States,” Ashraf told us.
The site operator, who also runs Torrentdownload.biz, said that the “Expendables 3” keyword was already banned from appearing in the search results, and that he doesn’t intent to pay any damages.
“We already took action and blocked their keyword, so we don’t have a penny to pay them for their own leak problem,” the operator said.
At the time of writing LimeTorrents and Torrentdownload indeed remain operational. LimeTorrent’s .com domain name was locked earlier, but the site is still accessible via a new .cc TLD.
Dotsemper and Swankshare previously shut down. The operators of these sites live outside of the United States and haven’t been responsive, so whether LionsGate will recoup much of the $450,000 is highly doubtful.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Source: TorrentFreak
If copyright holders had their way the world’s leading torrent sites would be blocked by Internet service providers in every country of the world. That goal remains in the distance but there can be little doubt that the process is moving forward.
Several countries around Europe are now blocking between dozens and hundreds of ‘pirate’ sites and surprisingly, given the country’s traditional attitude to infringement, Russia is also becoming a blocking front-runner.
But while copyright holders remain enthusiastic about the implementation of bans, millions of Internet users are only interested in circumventing them. VPNs, proxies and mirrors are all playing their part but it now appears that Russian torrent giant RuTracker is about to deploy an alternative system to beat the censors.
In addition to other counter-measures already being deployed, RuTracker is reportedly working on a bot system that will deliver torrents to users via the encrypted instant messaging service Telegram.
Financed by Russian Facebook (vKontakte) founder Pavel Durov, Telegram is a multi-platform messaging system that has grown from 100,000 daily users in 2013 to an impressive 100 million users in February 2016.
“Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security, it’s super-fast, simple and free. You can use Telegram on all your devices at the same time — your messages sync seamlessly across any number of your phones, tablets or computers,” Telegram explains.
The attractiveness of Telegram for RuTracker lies in its reach. In addition to sending any kind of file (doc, zip, mp3, torrent, etc), it can broadcast such content to an unlimited audience. It’s believed that the site will use Telegram to distribute magnet links, which makes sense after the site added them in recent months.
The big question now is how RuTracker will be received by Telegram’s operators. While the platform is generally anti-censorship and refuses to comply with local government restrictions on freedom of speech, it does have rules about infringing content.
Private chats between groups of users up to 5,000 members are strictly off-limits, so any exchanges there are not subjected to any takedowns. However, something more public could fall foul of the site’s rules.
“Our mission is to provide a secure means of communication that works everywhere on the planet. To do that in the places where it is most needed (and to continue distributing Telegram through the App Store and Google Play), we have to process legitimate requests to take down illegal public content (sticker sets, bots, and channels) within the app,” Telegram’s ToS reads.
While it remains to be seen how the service will view the transmission of magnet links, entertainment industry bosses are already beginning to chime in with their opinions. Alexander Blinov, General Director of Gala Records / EMI, told news outlet Izvestia that if Telegram doesn’t take action against RuTracker, his company will take the fight to Google and Apple.
“The appearance of RuTracker in Telegram is not good and if RuTracker continues to distribute illegal content through this channel, we will have to take the necessary measures, in particular filing complaints with Apple and Google,” Blinov said.
“Working relationships with these companies have already been established. However, response times are unpredictable: sometimes they act quickly, and sometimes they do not pay attention to complaints.”
According to Alexei Byrdin of the Internet Video Association, Telegram is an international project so will need to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. There are no mentions of that legislation anywhere on the Telegram site but it’s certainly possible that Google and Apple could inflict the terms of the DMCA upon the service.
In any event, the move by RuTracker is certainly an interesting one. The site hasn’t really concerned itself with too much innovation over the years but in recent months has responded aggressively after receiving a lifetime block in Russia. Necessity really is the mother of invention.
Image credit: John Palmer
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Source: TorrentFreak