Month: December 2016

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

On Christmas Eve, we revealed the top 10 news stories and features published on Ars Technica in 2016, with a couple of surprising entries. But pageviews only tell part of the story. There were several stories on Ars this year that, while not among the top in pageviews, got our readers talking. Here are the top stories of 2016 by number of comments. (Comment counts are as of December 21.)

20. Through the Ars lens: Looking at Justice Scalia's opinions, dissents, by David Kravets

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. (credit: Shawn)

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly while on a hunting trip in Texas in February. Like him or not, the man left an immense legacy on the Supreme Court, and some of his opinions covered areas that are near and dear to Ars readers. Those included TV-antenna service Aereo, video games, GPS tracking, thermal imaging, drug dogs, Second Amendment rights, Obamacare, and DNA.

Ars readers had plenty to say about Scalia's legacy, as evidenced by the 21-page comment thread.

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Ho! Ho! Ho! Many happy returns and Merry Christmas to all our readers. It’s Christmas Day once again and it’s been a pretty eventful year in file-sharing and copyright.

While we wish things were different, there hasn’t been much positive news to report in 2016. There’s been the occasional ray of light here and there, but overall it’s been a cascade of negativity. Today, however, we promise not to spoil anyone’s Christmas lunch or well-deserved day off.

In fact, this morning we can confidently report that for at least the next 48 hours, no one will be fined, detained, arrested, extradited, or otherwise screwed around with by rightsholder groups and their affiliates. Instead, we have a rather crazy mystery to solve, one that we really hope you can help us solve.

On November 23, the movie Bad Santa 2 was released in the United States to a somewhat lukewarm reception. Despite the average reviews, it’s a Christmas movie so pirates were still looking for something seasonal to watch.

Three weeks ago a copy surfaced in Russia with local dubbing but this week pirates obliged with an English language edition of the Billy Bob Thornton movie. However, something embedded in one of the sundry copies left us both surprised and scratching our heads here at TF.

Within seconds of the movie starting and for the next couple of minutes, a giant watermark appears on screen. Filling the entire width of the print from border to border, the watermark then slowly makes its way up the screen until it disappears off the top.

Of course, watermarks are usually put in place to indicate some kind of ownership. Studios use visible and invisible watermarks on screener copies of movies to literally stamp their name on pre-release versions of movies. However, we have absolutely no idea why someone would put our site name on a cam copy of a movie.

TorrentFreak spoke with releasers and even a couple of site operators to find out who might be behind this little surprise but we’ve had no success getting to the bottom of the mystery. It’s certainly possible that the “Streetcams” reference at the start of the watermark could hold the secret, but we’ve had no success in identifying who or what could be behind that particular brand either.

The watermark eventually scrolls away but at the end of the movie it reappears, beginning its journey from the bottom of the screen to the top in all its glory.

From there, who knows where it goes but we are aware that the “streetcams” watermark has appeared elsewhere, although not with additional TorrentFreak branding. It’s more difficult to see when compared to Bad Santa 2, but here it is on a cam copy of the movie Shut In.

So with logs on the fire and gifts on the tree, can you help us solve this cam mystery?

Merry Christmas and other celebrations to all our readers

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

Hot on the heels of news that Cyanogen OS is effectively dying at the end of the year, the developers of the open source CyanogenMod operating system have announced the end of that project as well… kind of.

The team plans to fork the existing CyanogenMod code, eliminate reliance of Cyanogen services, make some other changes, and then relaunch as a new Android-based operating system called Lineage.

In fact, you can already check out the Lineage source code at Github, but the team hasn’t officially released a ROM that you can install on phones or tablets yet.

Continue reading CyanogenMod is dead… but Lineage will pick up where CM leaves off at Liliputing.

With millions of monthly views, Putlocker is the go-to video streaming site for many people.

Earlier this year the site mysteriously disappeared, but after several weeks it eventually made a comeback on a new domain, Putlockers.ch.

As one of the largest ‘pirate sites’ on the Internet, Putlocker is a thorn in the side of rightsholders, and this week the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) put it on its annual list of “notorious markets.” At least, that was the goal.

In reality, the U.S. Government listed an unrelated domain with a similar but different name; Putlocker.ch (no ‘s’ at the end).

“The operator of Putlocker is believed to be based in Vietnam and appears to be taking actions to evade enforcement measures,” the USTR writes in its overview.

“For example, in 2016 Putlocker hopped domains from the country code top-level domain of Iceland (.is) to Switzerland (.ch) and started using reverse proxy services to obscure the location of its hosting provider.”

TorrentFreak reached out to the owner of Putlocker.ch, a domain name that’s parked at SEDO and doesn’t link to any infringing content.

He explains that his company Marshall Domains LTD specializes in buying domains names which are monetized through type-in traffic. They buy all sorts of names, with worried.com being one of their latest additions.

Clearly, Putlocker.ch is a good choice when it comes to type-in traffic, as it even confused the Trade Representative enough to include it in his notorious markets review.

Unfortunately, this is not the only unusual domain in the ‘notorious market’ review. The USTR report also lists several domain names that are no longer operational. Yet, they are classified as some of the world’s worst piracy havens.

The Novamov.com domain for example, hasn’t been operational since January, almost a year. Instead, the site now redirects to Auroravid.to. Similarly, Divxstage.to, Videoweed.es and Movshare.net have been redirecting to other sites for months too.

And then there’s Nowdownload.ch, which has been parked for a while, serving no infringing content at all.

It almost seems like the USTR simply copied and pasted some of these URLs from last year’s report, without checking if they were still online. That wouldn’t be a surprise, as some of the other text is identical to last year as well.

Whatever the reason, it certainly is sloppy for a document which aims to urge foreign Governments to change their local laws.

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

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Enlarge / Sulfurous gases leak from a fumarole near Naples, Italy. (credit: leolumix)

Waking up is, in the sage words of Sum 41, hard to do. The experience leaves many of us temporarily irritable, such that many of us choose to leave certain loved ones alone until they’ve had time to completely reach a conscious state. Volcanoes are not entirely dissimilar. After lying dormant for decades or more, they can wake up violently—and the best case scenario for people in the vicinity is to get out of their way. But while the alarm clock can give you a good idea of when a human may wake up, a volcano's wake up schedule remains frustratingly and frighteningly cryptic.

Campi Flegrei is a caldera—a collapsed volcanic crater—near Naples, Italy that formed 39,000 years ago in the biggest eruption in Europe’s last 200,000 years. It now sports fields of gaseous vents indicating that the volcano is still alive below the surface. The volcano has been closely monitored—for good reason—and its activity in recent decades has given geologists a lot to study.

In the 1950s, the surface above the caldera began swelling, rising by a total of more than 3 meters since. In 1983 and 1984, its pace quickened, and a flurry of shallow earthquakes and other activity made for a worrying change. That was the end of it, though, and Campi Flegrei slumbered quietly until 2005. Since then, the surface has risen another 0.4 meters, the pace accelerating slowly.

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Enlarge / The game's dividers separate the two teams of sub hunters. (credit: Ted Olsen)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

The greatest temptation when playing Captain Sonar doesn’t come during the game itself. It comes when you’re trying to find another seven people to play. You’ll want to call this a party game version of Battleship—and that’s an apt description. Like the best party games, Captain Sonar features a wonderful mix of yelling, cooperation, deception, role-playing, deduction, and speed. And, like Battleship, you put your naval vessel on a grid and hope the other team doesn’t luck into finding it.

But don’t fall into the temptation. Nobody wants to play a group variant of Battleship any more than they want to play a group variant of Candyland. Instead, tell people that Captain Sonar is a great submarine-themed party game. Gamers will go in thinking of Subterfuge. Gen-Xers will launch into their worst impression of Sean Connery’s “Russian” accent in The Hunt for Red October. That one guy in every game group will start arguing that Kelsey Grammer’s 1996 Down Periscope was superior to Das Boot.

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