April 2016 – Page 67 – news.buyenne.com

Judge Allows Popcorn Time “Pirate” to Keep on Torrenting

A federal court in Oregon has signed off on a judgment against a Popcorn Time user who streamed a copy of the Adam Sandler movie The Cobbler. While both parties have already agreed on a permanent injunction, the judge in question stripped the parts requiring the defendant to remove all BitTorrent clients from her computer while observing a P2P software ban in future.

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

popcornt Lawsuits against alleged file-sharers are a common occurrence in United States federal courts.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been accused in recent years, most after using standard BitTorrent clients.

More recently there’s been a specific focus on Popcorn Time users. They were targeted in a series of lawsuits this summer.

One of the cases was filed by the makers of The Cobbler, who listed the IP-addresses of several Popcorn Time users in their complaint. The goal of the filmmakers is to identify the account holders and settle the dispute out of court, which many have done already.

Recently, another Popcorn Time user settled with the movie studio. While the scale of the agreement was not disclosed they usually range between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars.

The defendant in question was allowed to remain anonymous but admitted that her IP-address was indeed used to download and distribute the movie in question. To end the lawsuit, both parties agreed to a ‘consent judgment’ which was signed off by a District Court judge.

While this is a common procedure, Magistrate Judge Stacie Beckerman decided to make several crucial changes to the proposed permanent injunction, even though both parties already agreed on it.

Among the stricken parts is a line that would order the defendant to remove all BitTorrent clients from her computer and observe a ban on P2P software in the future (order: pdf).

“DOE-73.180.17.189 is hereby directed to immediately delete all unlicensed content in which Voltage has any rights or interest including plaintiffs motion picture, together with any and all BitTorrent clients on any computer(s) she owns or controls together with all other software used to obtain media through the Internet by peer-to-peer exchange,” it read.

In recent cases many other judges left this language intact, but for Judge Beckerman it appears to have gone too far.

In addition, the Judge also removed the line preventing the defendant from engaging in any infringing BitTorrent transfers in the future, limiting the scope of the permanent injunction only to titles to which Voltage Pictures holds the copyrights.

While the defendant still has to pay, the changes are important as it allows her to keep using BitTorrent and P2P software in general, which of course have many legitimate purposes as well.

It’s also good to see that judges are not blindly signing off on any order they see before them.

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

Baffling genetic glitch creates stuttering mice w/ human-like speech disorder

Researchers hope the stammering rodents help find a cure for the speech problem.

(credit: UK Film Council )

Mice that can stutter like humans may seem pretty striking. But what really renders researchers speechless is the enigmatic genetic glitch that causes stuttering.

Researchers led by Terra D. Barnes of Washington University discovered that their genetically-engineered mice stutter due to DNA defects in a humdrum “housekeeping” gene. This gene codes for a protein that simply places a "routing tag" on certain enzymes that shred cellular trash. The tag ensures that the shredding enzymes end up in chambers called lysosomes, basically the cell’s garbage disposal. It’s a mundane cellular activity, yet mutations in the same process in humans have also been linked to stuttering—a bizarrely specific condition for such a general gene. And, so far, scientists have no idea why the two are linked.

Nevertheless, the engineered mice presented with similar symptoms as humans who stutter. Though mice obviously don’t talk as humans do, they emit ultrasonic and squeaky whistle-like songs that are coded with information. Researchers have already spent plenty of time studying these songs in detail. In particular, they’ve studied the “isolation calls” belted out by newborn mice when their mothers aren’t around.

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San Francisco wants to collect over $3.3M each year from Uber, Lyft drivers

City: If drivers are independent contractors, they should pay registration fees.

(credit: Sergio Ruiz)

Attention, Uber and Lyft drivers! San Francisco wants to rake in money from you.

On Friday, the treasurer for the City and County of San Francisco announced that he had begun mailing out business registration notices to the "nearly 37,000" people who drive for "Transportation Network Companies," the formal name in California for such on-demand companies.

The city says that these drivers are required to pay an annual business registration fee of $91 per year for operating a business in the city—which includes being a driver for a company like Uber or Lyft. Assuming full compliance, the new fee collection would result in new annual revenue of over $3.3 million per year.

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Tree of life shows that trees are a rarity

A new tree of life shows that this poorly understood group is enormous.

Enlarge / All life with complex cells, including us, is part of the little green rounding error in the lower right. (credit: Banfield/Nature Microbiology)

Despite the best efforts of Walt Disney and Elton John, it is the tree of life, not the circle, that remains the primary way that organisms are classified and by which their evolutionary relationships are depicted. The tree was initially made by categorizing life forms with similar features into groups; this method distinguished not only amphibians from reptiles but also protists from amoeba.

Genetic data expanded the tree by allowing us to use similarities in genetic sequences—we didn’t have to actually see anything in order to determine how everyone is related to each other. Now, genomic studies have expanded the tree still further, allowing us to place species we can’t even grow in the lab onto their proper branch.

It is hardly news that most life on Earth is unicellular. But the newest tree of life, published in Nature Microbiology, reveals that most of life's diversity is bacterial and that much of it belongs to a recently discovered branch of especially tiny bacteria that no one has ever grown or seen under a microscope. All we have is their DNA, mixed in with the DNA of everything else that inhabits the same ecosystem.

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Beam: Die ISS hat ein neues Modul

Jetzt heißt es pusten: Die US-Raumfahrtbehörde Nasa hat das aufblasbare Modul Beam an die ISS angedockt. Im kommenden Monat soll der Anbau mit Luft gefüllt werden. (ISS, Nasa)

HP is building that new Chromebook with 16GB of RAM, not Google

You can often find hints about upcoming Chromebooks and other Chrome OS devices by scanning the Chromium OS source code commits and discussions. And a few weeks ago we started to see hints that a new model with 16GB of RAM and an Intel Skylake processor was on the way.

Maybe it’s not surprising that a lot of people assumed it would be a next-gen Google Chromebook Pixel, since Google is one of the few companies that offers Chromebooks with high-end specs.

Continue reading HP is building that new Chromebook with 16GB of RAM, not Google at Liliputing.

Maybe it’s not surprising that a lot of people assumed it would be a next-gen Google Chromebook Pixel, since Google is one of the few companies that offers Chromebooks with high-end specs.

Continue reading HP is building that new Chromebook with 16GB of RAM, not Google at Liliputing.

Raumfahrt: Bremer Paraffin-Rakete ist gestartet

Nach mehreren Startabbrüchen hat es geklappt: Am 16. April 2016 konnte die Rakete aus Bremen mit dem Paraffin-Antrieb abheben. (Raumfahrt)

Chiphersteller: Intel will offenbar tausende Stellen streichen

Großer Kehraus beim Chiphersteller: Intel will laut einem Medienbericht seine Belegschaft deutlich verringern. Die ersten Kündigungen könnten schon in Kürze ausgesprochen werden. (Intel)

Zulieferer: Apple rechnet weiter mit weniger iPhone-Verkäufen

Trotz des Verkaufsstarts des neuen iPhone SE verlängert Apple laut einem unbestätigten Bericht seinen Sparkurs bei den Zulieferern in Japan. Die können ein weiteres Quartal 30 Prozent weniger Displays, Speicher und Bildsensoren verkaufen. (iPhone, Smartphone)

vKontakte Appears to Be Cracking Down on eBook Piracy

Social networking giant vKontakte appears to be taking action to end eBook piracy on its platform. The site has become known as a great place to download unauthorized copies but according to industry sources, vKontakte appears to have initiated some kind of “takedown-staydown” mechanism.

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

While movies, music and TV show downloading grabs most of the headlines, a growing subset of Internet pirates like to obtain eBooks online for free.

With the growth of dedicated readers such as Kindle and eBook-capable hardware such as iPads, tablets and smartphones, eBooks are easily downloaded from torrent and file-hosting sites in a few seconds and consumed on the go.

One site where eBooks are particularly easy to find is Russian social networking platform vKontakte. The site often appears in searches for popular book titles and downloads are mostly direct and speedy. For this reason vKontakte has found itself embroiled in various copyright-related disputes.

Now, however, there are signs that the platform is taking steps to do something about the phenomenon.

According to a report coming out of Russia, vKontakte has introduced a system that not only takes content down following rightsholder complaints, but also stops that same content becoming available for download in the future. Users are reportedly able to upload previously-flagged content but it is not made available for download.

At the moment vKontakte is refusing to comment on the reports but according to Izvestia the existence of the system has been confirmed by both rightsholders and operators of social network-based eBook communities.

Any user of vKontakte is allowed to upload eBooks in a range of formats and embed these in their pages. These can then be downloaded directly from vKontakte’s servers. However, according to the report there are increasing problems with content disappearing, with VK reporting that files have been deleted following requests from copyright holders.

Interestingly the development is having an impact externally too, with a prominent anti-piracy outfit reporting a shift in availability.

“We have noticed that our monitoring service is sending fewer claims [to VK] and we are now analyzing the cause to discover the reason,” says Maxim Ryabyko, Director General of the Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPO).

Back in February, AZAPO reported vKontakte to the Moscow City Court after the platform allegedly failed to take solid measures to protect copyright. AZAPO’s aim was to force the social network into negotiations.

“Our goal is to urge vKontakte to adequately interact with the book industry,” Ryabyko said at the time.

What has prompted the disappearance of books from the platform remains unclear but Ryabyko says that he doesn’t rule out a link between recent developments and AZAPO’s legal action against vKontakte. Another possibility is that some kind of deal has been reached with book owners.

Last year publishers offered several opportunities for VK to monetize content on its platform, including via an all-you-can-eat subscription model. Other offers included an ad-supported mechanism and a partner program, which would see samples of books diverting to publisher platforms.

It is not clear whether these offers were attractive to VK but if pirate content is disappearing from the site, publishers will be happy.

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