Month: November 2016

Prolific Dutch anti-piracy agency BREIN has a new target in its sights - Facebook. 

The agency has targeted at least nine Facebook groups that have been accused of illegally sharing music, and Facebook has been responsive, closing down the nine groups with immediate effect.

Replacing Internet forums that used to house discussions involving the sharing of pirated music, social networks such as Facebook have become thriving places where music sharing occurs.

Realizing the new dangers, BREIN appears to be targeting Facebook groups, most of them quite visible publicly, that have been engaged in illegal music sharing, even if most of the infringement occurs in the form of link sharing.

"Links to infringing files hosted on cloud services were indexed on the pages. Knowingly posting links to infringing files is itself a violation," says BREIN.

Not just content with closing down the Facebook groups, BREIN are also investigating whether the owners of these Facebook groups are also involved in the uploading of copyright material, and if so, this could lead to more legal actions in the foreseeable future.

"The posters of the infringing links are also often the illegal uploader of unauthorized files [on cyberlocker sites] ... Illegally offering free links and files causes damage to authors, rights holders and legal online services. They should realize that this can be expensive," warned BREIN.

[via TorrentFreak]

Enlarge / The Charge 2 is a slightly bigger version of Fitbit's Alta. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

In Thursday afternoon trading, Fitbit’s stock price lost more than one-third of its value after the company announced a significant drop in profits.

According to its latest quarterly numbers, the company made $26.1 million in the third quarter of 2016 compared with $45.8 million during the same quarter a year ago.

In mid-September, the company released the Fitbit Charge 2, a mid-range $150 device.

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Dystopian corporate surveillance threats today come at us from all directions. Companies offer “always-on” devices that listen for our voice commands, and marketers follow us around the web to create personalized user profiles so they can (maybe) show us ads we’ll actually click. Now marketers have been experimenting with combining those web-based and audio approaches to track consumers in another disturbingly science fictional way: with audio signals your phone can hear, but you can’t. And though you probably have no idea that dog whistle marketing is going on, researchers are already offering ways to protect yourself.

The technology, called ultrasonic cross-device tracking, embeds high-frequency tones that are inaudible to humans in advertisements, web pages, and even physical locations like retail stores. These ultrasound “beacons” emit their audio sequences with speakers, and almost any device microphone—like those accessed by an app on a smartphone or tablet—can detect the signal and start to put together a picture of what ads you’ve seen, what sites you’ve perused, and even where you’ve been. Now that you’re sufficiently concerned, the good news is that at the Black Hat Europe security conference on Thursday, a group based at University of California, Santa Barbara will present an Android patch and a Chrome extension that give consumers more control over the transmission and receipt of ultrasonic pitches on their devices.

Beyond the abstract creep factor of ultrasonic tracking, the larger worry about the technology is that it requires giving an app the ability to listen to everything around you, says Vasilios Mavroudis, a privacy and security researcher at University College London who worked on the research being presented at Black Hat. “The bad thing is that if you’re a company that wants to provide ultrasound tracking there is no other way to do it currently, you have to use the microphone,” says Mavroudis.  “So you will be what we call ‘over-privileged,’ because you don’t need access to audible sounds but you have to get them.”

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Stretching between London and Frankfurt, there is a private, mysterious network that is twice as fast as the normal Internet. The connection, provided by a series of microwave dishes on masts, was once completely secret: only one very rich company was allowed to use it, and no one else knew about it.

A couple of years later though, a competitor completed its own microwave link between the two cities—and thus the first company, not wanting to lose out on potential business, revealed that it too had a link between the cities. If a competitor had never emerged, that first link would probably still be shrouded in secrecy today.

Similar stories can be found all over the world, but because these networks are privately owned, and because they're often used by financial groups trying to find an edge on the stock market and eke out a few extra billions, you have to dig deep to find them.