Month: February 2017

Anti-piracy operations come in all shapes and sizes but it’s movies, music and TV shows that grab the majority of the headlines. Games, software, and eBooks trail closely behind, but it’s rare that other types of digital print see enforcement action.

Italy, one of the most aggressive countries when it comes to sweeping anti-piracy actions, has just changed all that with one of the largest enforcement operations ever seen in the publishing niche.

Following an investigation carried by rightsholders and the Public Prosecutor of Rome, a total of 50 domains involved in the unlawful distribution of news and magazine content have been seized by the country’s Special Unit for Broadcasting and Publishing.

According to an announcement by the authorities, all of the sites have now gone dark after offering “vast quantities” of material originally published by major newspapers and periodicals including Cosmopolitan, Fashion Magazine, and Vanity Fair.

The operation, dubbed “Odyssey 2”, was carried out under the directives of the Special Command Units of the Guardia di Finanza, a militarized police force under the authority of the Minister of Economy and Finance.

Fulvio Sarzana, a lawyer with the Sarzana and Partners who specializes in Internet and copyright disputes, says that the sites were probably under the control of separate entities.

“The variety of sites and the diversity of hosting and domain registrations leads me to think that these are different cases,” Sarzana informs TorrentFreak.

“The methods vary but generally the digital kiosks work this way; someone buys the paper or digital versions of newspapers through a duly registered account and then makes them available on the website.”

Until now, Italy has employed the same “follow-the-money” approach used by authorities in other jurisdictions, whereby site owners are identified via payments made by advertisers and similar business partners. Now, however, it claims to have developed a ‘new’ “follow-the-hosting” approach, which allows it to identify site operators, even when they use Cloudflare to hide the location of their servers.

While details on the techniques used by the authorities are thin, uncloaking server locations in this way is nothing new and can be achieved when Cloudflare is ordered to do so by a competent court.

The sites in question, which were not named by the authorities, are said to have served millions of users with pirated content. This, to a background of national media groups losing a third of their turnover over the past five years.

Big anti-piracy operations to protect publishers are extremely rare but with their market closing in and ad revenues falling, more could certainly follow in the future.

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

Twelve South hat mit dem Gehäuse Magicbridge eine Lösung vorgestellt, mit der die schnurlose Tastatur Apple Wireless Keyboard und das Magic Trackpad 2 miteinander verbunden werden können. Auch an Linkshänder ist gedacht worden. (Mac, Apple)

Präsentieren wie mit einer Wii-Fernbedienung: Logitechs Spotlight soll durch Neigungssensoren und Software Präsentationen steuern können und bietet anpassbare Tasten und Makrofunktionen. Wir haben beim Testen des Presenters dadurch gleich weitere Anwendungsgebiete entdecken können. Ein Test von Oliver Nickel (Logitech, Eingabegerät)

The once inpenetrable Denuvo gaming DRM, or more precisely, the gaming anti-tampering system, appears to be on the verge of being useless as a new game gets cracked in record time.

In just five days after release, new game 'Resident Evil 7: Biohazard' has been uploaded to the usual piracy outlets, stripped of its Denuvo protection.

This marks a dramatic difference to when Denuvo first started getting noticed, when games that were usually pirated days after (or even before) release, remain uncracked. Some games from a few years ago, even to this day, remain protected by Denuvo.

This made Denuvo achieve legendary status among game publishers, and many signed up to license its code to use in their games in the hope of at the very least defeating zero day piracy.

This also made Denuvo a tempting target for game hackers, keen to crack the system and claim this much valued scalp. With intense effort aimed at targeting Denuvo, progress was being made, and slowly, one by one, Denuvo protected games started to get cracked, even if it took the better of five months to do so (by which time, game publishers were no longer too concerned about piracy).

Then, all of a sudden, a major development in cracking Denuvo seems to have occurred, and the puzzle platformer game 'Inside' was cracked in a record six weeks. Other Denuvo games, including 'Doom' and 'Mirror's Edge Catalyst', were soon cracked too.

Six weeks is still a long time for a new game, and keeping these early weeks piracy free is all that game publishers need most of the time. But the cracking of 'Resident Evil 7: Biohazard' changes the game completely, and the spectre of zero day releases is rearing its ugly head once again.

[via TorrentFreak]

Lexar hat eine Speicherkarte nach dem Standard CFast 2.0 vorgestellt, die Daten mit 525 MByte/s lesen kann. Beim Schreiben ist sie nicht ganz so schnell. Dafür bringt sie bis zu 512 GByte Speicher mit sich. (CFast, Speichermedien)

Daimler will Uber in der Zukunft selbstfahrende Mercedes zur Verfügung stellen. Die Fahrzeuge dürften dann Taxidienste übernehmen. Uber erforscht jedoch auch selbst das autonome Fahren. (Autonomes Fahren, Technologie)

Hollywood-Filme über die Nasa-Historie müssen nicht immer von Männern in Raumanzügen handeln. Hidden Figures erzählt mit großartigen Darstellern und heiterer Leichtigkeit die nicht ganz so wahre Geschichte dreier Heldinnen, die mit Mut und Mathematik das Weltraumrennen zwischen Russland und den USA mitentschieden haben. Eine Rezension von Daniel Pook (Filmkritik, IBM)

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments