Month: February 2016

After having fought pressure from Hollywood for over a decade, SlySoft threw in the towel earlier this week.

The company shut down its main website at Slysoft.com and ceased to provide new updates to its popular Blu-Ray ripping tool AnyDVD. An announcement posted in the forums suggests that the decision is part of a deal.

“We were not allowed to respond to any request nor to post any statement, but now it is official: SlySoft has been shut down after almost 13 years,” SlySoft’s Tom announced.

“I am really sorry for that, but this is final. SlySoft is gone..,” he adds

To most laypeople the news may be easily discarded as ‘just’ another company falling victim to Hollywood’s copyright enforcement. However, insiders warn that it may have a massive impact on millions of movie pirates.

For many years AnyDVD (HD) has been the go-to tool to crack Blu-Ray encryption, pretty much without competition.

In recent days TorrentFreak has spoken to several prominent release group insiders who fear that future Blu-Ray releases will take much longer to appear because their copy protection will be harder to circumvent.

“This will delay things for new releases that have updated AACS protection or completely kill AACS decryption from SlySoft,” the operator of a popular P2P group informed TF.

“Alternatives usually delay updates two to three months. If they don’t pick up the slack Hollywood have just won a huge victory, because future releases that have updated AACS protection will be delayed,” he adds.

Another insider confirms the concerns, noting that SlySoft has often gone to great lengths to ensure that new copy protections are cracked as soon as possible.

“Over the past decade SlySoft has been the main ripping tool for Scene groups, P2P groups and just about everyone,” our second source says.

While it’s currently unclear what will happen during the weeks and months to come, a feeling of uncertainty appears to dominate among many pirate movie release and distribution groups.

“The loss of SlySoft is being rapidly discussed among all movie pirate groups and there is no consensus yet for what is to come next, just concern,” our source says.

As for the future, there are a few things that may happen.

It’s possible for competitors such as DVDFab to pick up the slack and release their copy protection cracks in a timely fashion. However, the latter has already announced that it won’t break the copy protection of Ultra HD Blu-Ray discs, so there’s not much faith in this option.

It’s also possible that AnyDVD will make a comeback in some shape or form. Or perhaps defiant members of the old team will re-brand it and continue their work from another jurisdiction. Alternatively, they could continue to offer their services in the background, without a public facing website.

The third option is a more grim scenario for pirates, one in which copy protection becomes more effective, possibly delaying pirate Blu-Ray releases by weeks or months.

This is the scenario AACS and Hollywood are hoping for.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

(credit: NASA)

As part of his ongoing fight with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) sent a February 22 letter that demanded documents related to the agency's analysis of global temperature data. NOAA handed over 301 pages of e-mails between NOAA officials (but not scientists) pertaining to a study published last year in the journal Science. There apparently wasn’t anything juicy in those e-mails, however, because Rep. Smith is now asking for a great deal more.

A new letter (initially acquired by the Union of Concerned Scientists) complains that “[i]t seems unlikely that documents and communications would be so scarce,” and Smith directs NOAA to cast a wider net. He requests e-mails and documents not just from officials in the offices that had been targeted by the previous requests but also from “agency employees” across a broad swath of NOAA. The list includes the National Centers for Environmental Information that houses the scientists behind NOAA's global temperature dataset—a group Rep. Smith has accused of manipulating data.

NOAA had apparently searched for e-mails including “hiatus”, “global temperature”, and “climate study”, but Rep. Smith wants that list expanded dramatically. Now, he wants NOAA to hand over anything that contains “Karl” (the name of the lead NOAA scientist on the Science paper), “buoy”, “ship”, “Night Marine Air Temperature”, “temperature”, “climate”, “change”, “Paris”, “U.N.”, “United Nations”, “clean power plan”, “regulations”, “Environmental Protection Agency”, “President”, “Obama”, “White House”, and “Council on Environmental Quality”.

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This VR version of Pac-Man is kind of hard on the wrists... (credit: USPTO / Sony)

As someone who has tried a lot of virtual reality demos, trust me when I say that the ability to see your hands—and to use them to reach out and interact with the virtual world—makes all the difference. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Sony Computer Entertainment has filed a patent application for a "glove interface object" that could help provide accurate virtual reality hand tracking without the need to actually hold a controller.

PlayStation VR already has a hand-tracking solution, of course, in the form of the PlayStation Move controllers that were first released for the PlayStation 3 in 2010. But this glove offers a bit more functionality than those handheld wands, including sensors that can "identify a flex of at least one finger portion," contact sensors that can detect when you touch a thumb to another fingertip, and sensors that measure the user's "finger position pose" (which can then be rendered on the screen).

The end goal is to "simply provide a way of touching, holding, playing, interfacing or contacting virtual objects shown on a display screen or objects associated with documents, text, images, and the like," according to the patent application.

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Last month Netflix announced that it would increase its efforts to block customers who circumvent geo-blockades.

As a result it has become harder to use VPN services and proxies to access Netflix content from other countries, something various movie studios have repeatedly called for.

With the application of commercial blacklist data, Netflix already blocks IP-addresses that are linked to such services, something which also affects well-intentioned customers who merely use a VPN to protect their privacy.

Instead of providing access to the latest video entertainment, Netflix then serves the following error message to these blocked users.

In recent weeks TorrentFreak has kept a close eye on the expanding blockade and its aftermath. We’ve learned that servers belonging to many popular commercial VPN services have been added to the blocklist, including ExpressVPN, Mullvad, Private Internet Access and StrongVPN.

While the blocks are being rolled out in phases, it’s already clear that some VPN users can’t access Netflix, even if the VPN server is located in the same country as they are. This means that Americans can no longer use a U.S. VPN server to protect their privacy.

Ironically, Netflix is even restricting access to its own original series, despite being the primary rightsholder.

This approach is meeting fierce resistance from many sides. To coordinate the protest Digital rights organization OpenMedia has started an OpenMedia petition urging Netflix to rethink its approach, which has already been signed by more than 33,000 people.

“Privacy is a huge priority for us as a digital rights organization, and that VPNs are probably the simplest, most user-friendly way for everyday Internet users to safeguard their online activities,” OpenMedia spokesperson David Christopher informs TorrentFreak.

“Given that a huge percentage of the population uses Netflix, if they were all forced to stop using VPNs, that would represent a major setback for privacy,” he adds.

OpenMedia itself has been affected by the new measures as well, as some of their staff members can no longer watch Netflix without having to turn off their VPN.

The group is concerned that Internet users are being forced to give up their privacy when they are not even trying to circumvent any geo-blockades. A better way would be to restrict content based on people’s credit card addresses, which doesn’t require any VPN blocking.

“We’re cooking up plans to take this message directly to Netflix and hope that if enough people speak up, Netflix will listen to their customers and find a better way,” Christopher says.

Meanwhile, the complaints keep pouring in on social media. There are even reports from users who are blocked without even using a VPN. In addition, several people claim to have ended their Netflix subscriptions due to the restrictive policies, and some hint at going back to their old pirate ways.

Despite the public outrage, Netflix said that it’s not worried about a subscriber exodus. “I don’t think we will see any impact,” CEO Reed Hastings said in a shareholders’ interview last month.

In the long-term the company hopes to make the entire geo-blocking discussion obsolete by offering movies and TV-shows worldwide. But given Hollywood’s reluctance to adapt, it may take a few years before this will be realized.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

(credit: Joe Brusky)

The New York Times is reporting that Obama administration officials are close to agreeing on new rules that would allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to share surveillance information more freely with other federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, without scrubbing Americans’ identifying information first.

In 2008, President George W. Bush put forth an executive order that said such a change to the rules governing sharing between agencies could occur when procedures had been put in place. When the Obama administration took over, it started "quietly developing a framework” to carry out the proposed change in 2009, according to the Times.

For the past decade, the NSA has collected massive amounts of phone metadata, e-mail, and other information from a variety of sources—sometimes directly from the companies that make such communication possible, sometimes through overseas taps on lines that connect to data centers outside of the US. Currently when an agency wants information on a foreign citizen, it requests that data from the NSA, and the NSA theoretically scrubs it of any incidental references to American citizens who are not being targeted. This process is known as “minimization.”

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(credit: Chris Yarzab)

In a short interview on NPR's Morning Edition on Friday, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said there is a "reasonably good chance that there is nothing of any value on the phone."

Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook reiterated the company’s firm commitment to privacy and its resolve to fight a new court order issued earlier this month. If the order stands up to legal challenges, Apple would be forced to create a new customized iOS firmware that would remove the passcode lockout on a seized iPhone as part of the ongoing San Bernardino terrorism investigation. On Thursday, Apple filed its formal legal response and set the stage for an important court hearing in nearby Riverside next month.

However, this morning Burguan articulated the general law enforcement perspective that it is "not fair to the victims and their families," and the government should "leave no stone unturned in the investigation."

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Part of a report of a September near-miss between an Airbus passenger jet and a "helicopter drone" very close to Heathrow. (credit: UK Airprox Board)

File this under the category of "drone pilots trying to ruin it for everybody." According to a safety incident report published by the United Kingdom's Airprox air safety board, an Airbus A319 landing at Heathrow International Airport last September narrowly avoided a collision with a drone flying at an altitude of 500 feet as the jet was on its final approach. The pilots reported the small hovering helicopter-style drone passed about 25 yards to the left of the cockpit and just 20 feet above the aircraft.

The A319's wingspan is 112 feet, so that would mean the drone missed the airliner by as little as 30 feet. The pilot reported that there was no time once the drone was sighted to take evasive action. The pilot reported the drone to air traffic controllers, and the police were dispatched. However, the drone pilot was not found. The incident was classified as meeting risk category A—the highest level incident covered by the reporting system short of an actual collision.

The drone was not detected by air traffic control radar, so the only details of the event and how close the aircraft came to striking the drone are the pilot's estimate of distance. In the UK, drones are limited to flight below 400 feet and are banned from flying in controlled airspace (like that around Heathrow) without permission from air traffic controllers. As the report noted, UK Civil Aviation Authority rules require a drone to stay within visual line of sight of the pilot—a maximum of 500 meters (1,640 feet) horizontally and 400 feet vertically from the operator.

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