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From help coming from an unlikely quarter to a likely set of sales results, read the news roundup for the week ending March 26, 2017
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From help coming from an unlikely quarter to a likely set of sales results, read the news roundup for the week ending March 26, 2017
The oldest torrents on The Pirate Bay are turning thirteen years old, which means that they’re ‘teenagers’ now. While it’s not unprecedented for a website to be online for this long, keeping a torrent ‘alive’ through all these years is a rather impressive accomplishment.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
The Pirate Bay is one of the most established brands on the Internet, but this certainly wasn’t the case 13 years ago.
The notorious torrent site was originally founded by Swedish pro-culture organization Piratbyrån, during the summer of 2003.
It was first hosted in Mexico, where Gottfrid Svartholm operated the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. After a few months, it moved to Sweden, where Fredrik Neij ran the site and tracker from a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB of RAM.
While some of the site’s current users weren’t even born at the time, several of the torrents that were uploaded back then are still available today. This week the site’s longest surviving torrents turn thirteen years old. In other words, they’re teenagers now.
Below are the oldest listed torrents as of this week. An episode of “The High Chaparral” has the honor of being the oldest torrent. The file was originally uploaded on March 25, 2004, and although it lists zero seeders in the search results, there are still several people sharing it.
The ‘unofficial’ record hasn’t gone unnoticed to Pirate Bay users. Several commenters refer to the torrent’s achievement as the oldest surviving torrent on the site.
“Well, I guess since this is a part of TPB history i’ll add it to my Raspberry Pi torrent server to seed forever. Hopefully others will do the same,” one person writes in the comment section.
Other torrents that will soon reach teenager status are a copy of the first season of “Oz,” a book with “Top Secret Recipes,” and the “Revolution OS” documentary, which covers the history of Linux, GNU and the free software movement.
What’s most remarkable is that people are still sharing these files after all this time. A torrent only remains available if there’s at least one person sharing it. Over the years millions of torrents have stopped working, but these have weathered all the storms.
To give an idea of how many older torrents are still listed on The Pirate Bay, we looked at one of the site’s most recent database dumps.
Of the 60,000 torrents that were initially available on TPB at the end of 2004, roughly 3,000 are still online today. This number goes up to 10,000 for the 2006 torrents, and 300,000 of all torrents that were uploaded last year are still around.
Given the iconic status of the “High Chaparral” torrent, it’s not unthinkable that this one will live on to become an adult. That is, if The Pirate Bay itself is still operational in 2022.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Original version’s patch to 1.18 will make it free; remastered gameplay revealed.
Enlarge / It finally exists. (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)
A long-rumored StarCraft remaster for computers was finally unveiled on Saturday by Blizzard Entertainment, set for launch in "summer 2017." No pricing info was announced, but Blizzard has confirmed quite a few other details about the 4K-friendly release.
For one, it will be preceded by a patch to the 19-year-old StarCraft: Brood War client, and this new 1.18a client will reportedly not change the mechanics of the game. To prove that out, this patched version will still be able to connect to players using the existing 1.16 patch (which came out all the way back in 2009). Among other tweaks, like better compatibility with newer versions of Windows, the new patch will include two important updates: the ability to connect to and play against owners of the upcoming remastered version, and the change to a wholly free product. Once the patch goes live, the original StarCraft Anthology will be free-as-in-beer to download and play in both single- and multiplayer modes.
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Perhaps to celebrate the New Year eve, Sony is reported to cut down their tablet S price starting on the new year and you can get the 16GB model at a much cheaper price. According to our source, Sony has slashed down $100 from the original price of $499, so you can now get Sony […]
ASUS has caught in a conflict with the Android modding community recently because the the community has found out that ASUS has properly encrypted their Transformer Prime tablet so no unofficial or unsigned ROMs could be installed. This by far is the first case on a WiFi-only device to get such thing as encrypted bootloader. […]
Pluto’s surface features become clear at the terminator, under the twilight Sun.
Enlarge / New Horizons' high-resolution farewell to Pluto. (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University APL/Southwest Research Institute)
Even though all of the New Horizons spacecraft data taken during its 2015 flyby of Pluto has been downloaded to Earth for months, scientists are still piecing it all together. Now two scientists, Tod Lauer and Alex Parker, have processed some of the New Horizons data to produce a stunning look back at the dwarf planet.
This departure shot was constructed from a mosaic of six black-and-white images captured by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager as the spacecraft moved away from Pluto. Color has been added from a lower resolution Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera. At the time the pictures were taken, New Horizons was only about 200,000km away from Pluto, or about 3.5 hours after the closest approach on July 14, 2015. The resolution of the images stitched together is about 1km per pixel.
In this composite photo, Pluto is illuminated from behind by the Sun, almost as if the world is producing an annular eclipse for New Horizons. The image showcases a beautiful blue "haze" which, according to planetary scientists, is smog produced by sunlight interacting with methane and other molecules in Pluto's atmosphere. These larger molecules scatter blue sunlight.
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The new CEO of failing anti-piracy Rightscorp has signed a deal that will see him being paid large sums of money if he can turn the company around. How that will be achieved remains to be seen, but with the pool of file-sharers getting smaller and ever-harder to track, a more aggressive approach may help the company reach its goals.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp is famous for tracking pirates on BitTorrent networks and sending them bills attached to ISP DMCA notices. They ask for a relatively small amount, around $20 to $30, in the hope that people settle quickly.
Unfortunately for them, the company is a miserable performer and has lost millions over the past few years. On a good day its stock is worth around $0.04. On a bad one, barely half of that.
Last June, Rightscorp announced that it had hired a new chief financial officer. Cecil Bond Kyte, a former CEO and Chairman of Save the World Air, Inc. (STWA), was said by the company to possess unique and valuable skills, particularly in the fields of company management experience and capital raising.
“Under his stewardship, STWA grew from roughly $10 million in market capitalization in 2007 to an in excess of $350 million by 2013,” Rightscorp said.
At the time, the CEO of Rightscorp was Christopher Sabec. However, on February 14, 2017, Sabec resigned to take up the position of company president. Immediately, Cecil Kyte took over as CEO.
One month later and Rightscorp’s new CEO has signed a rather interesting deal with the company. In a March 18 filing, Rightscorp reveals it has entered into a three-year deal with Kyte, which on completion will renew every year. However, it’s the financial aspects that are perhaps most interesting.
Kyte will initially receive an annual base salary of $150,000. However, that will increase to $250,000 if the company can generate $100,000 in gross monthly revenue for three consecutive months.
Rightscorp is due to publish its latest set of financial results, which may reveal some improvement. However, during the three months ended September 30, Rightscorp struggled to generate just $139,834 in total, around $46K per month. On that basis, Kyte needs to double turnover to get his $250,000 salary.
The incentives do not stop there, though. If the company’s new CEO can guide Rightscorp beyond $2,500,000 in gross revenue in any one year period, he can take home a salary of $350,000. That will increase to $500,000 “upon the Company’s receipt of an aggregate of $10,000,000 in cumulative gross revenue.”
Although his $50k signing bonus will have been welcomed by Kyte (not to mention the five million shares of common stock he’ll receive “upon execution of the employment agreement”), achieving these kinds of figures seems like a big ask.
In the year ended 2014, Rightscorp had revenues of $930,729 but made a loss of $2,852,705. In the year ended 2015, Rightscorp generated lower revenues of $832,215 but somehow managed to lose even more – $3,434,567. Interestingly, however, Kyte’s deal doesn’t appear to be linked to Rightscorp turning a profit in any way, since it’s a turnover-focused arrangement.
That being said, with so many shares involved it’s clearly in Kyte’s interest to see Rightscorp develop into a successful company, but can that be achieved? A few clues exist.
Last March, when the anti-piracy outfit was explaining away another set of terrible results, it made several observations.
First, that there had been “changes in the filesharing software intended to defeat detection of copyrights being illegally distributed.” That was interpreted as a reference to increased uptake of anonymity services, such as VPNs. If Rightscorp is looking for an improvement in this area, it probably needs to reassess.
Second, the company said that the “shutting down of some filesharing network infrastructure” had made it more difficult to track pirates. Rightscorp didn’t elaborate, but it’s possible that the demise of several large torrent trackers during the previous year made Rightscorp’s job of harvesting IP addresses a lot more difficult.
Third, the company said that fewer ISPs were passing on its notices, but this is an area that might potentially offer Rightscorp a ray of hope. Although the battle is still ongoing, Rightscorp customer BMG has booked some significant legal wins against Cox Communications in the United States, something which might persuade other ISPs to play ball with Rightscorp in the future.
The other big unknown is whether Rightscorp will change its business model or, more specifically, the pricing structure for its fines.
As the company notes, the pool of torrent users it can track for payment is currently diminishing. While there are still plenty to go at, trying to extract $40, $50 or $60 from each pirate (instead of $20 or $30) would do wonders for turnover with little to no extra costs involved.
And, with other companies getting involved in the space demanding around $300 per shot, an inflated Rightscorp ‘fine’ might start being perceived as a bit of a bargain, if pirates begin to take them seriously.
Only time will tell how Kyte’s influence will play out in public, but with Rightscorp’s annual results due very soon, it’s expected that the company could be very close to reaching its do-or-die moment. In avoiding the latter, it could be pirates that suffer.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Oceans in the northern hemisphere are supposed to still be cold from the winter
Enlarge / The European model shows the formation of a subtropical cyclone next Tuesday in the Atlantic Ocean. (credit: Weather Bell)
Just one hurricane has ever formed in the northern Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, or the Gulf of Mexico in the month of March—a time when the oceans are still cold from the winter months in the northern hemisphere. This occurred in 1908 with an unnamed hurricane that, according to the Atlantic Hurricane database, reached sustained winds of 100mph and caused damage in the Caribbean islands.
As the 1908 cyclone formed long before the National Hurricane Center existed, there has never been a "named" storm in March. That could change next week, as an area of low pressure may develop several hundred miles to the east of Florida, in the Atlantic Ocean. This storm system is unlikely to be a major threat to landmasses, with the possible exception of Bermuda. Due to the rarity of March cyclones, however, it would garner significant attention.
Any cyclone that forms next week would almost certainly be classified as a "subtropical storm" (the Miami-based National Hurricane Center began naming subtropical storms, in addition to tropical storms, in 2002). It would originate from a mass of cold air that recently moved off of the United States, eastward, into the subtropical area of the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike "tropical" storms, subtropical storms have cold air at their centers and generate energy from the interaction of cold and warm air masses. (By contrast, a tropical cyclone derives energy from latent heat, as water vapor evaporates from the ocean's surface and condenses into liquid water).
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Investigate Cthulhu and his buddies in 1930s Arkham.
Enlarge (credit: 8th Summit)
Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com—and let us know what you think.
You're just an ordinary 1930s inhabitant of the ordinary town of Arkham, Massachusetts—a plain New England place where nothing unusual ever happens. Well, except for that one infestation of hood-wearing cultists hoping to usher an angry Elder God into our world. Or that little problem with the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. Or those 17th-century witches who don't seem to be quite dead yet. Or that matter of the snake god Yig.
When occult trouble threatens, Miskatonic University's aging librarian, Professor Henry Armitage—the kind of man who runs a "restricted section" featuring books like the human-skin-covered Necromomicon—beckons you to his office. In his kindly way, he asks if you would be so good as to poke around Arkham, ask some questions, visit a few locations—in other words, clear this whole mystery up. Of course, it's probably nothing...
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Die Umsatzerwartungen von Nintendo hat Super Mario Run laut Firmenchef Tatsumi Kimishima nicht erfüllt. Trotzdem sollen künftige Titel mit dem gleichen Bezahlmodell erscheinen - und das, obwohl Free-to-Play bei einem anderen Titel offenbar prächtig funktioniert. (
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