Month: April 2017

While regular members of the public are free to grab a McDonalds in old sportswear or visit a store without full makeup, the mere suggestion of such sloppy behavior has the potential to make an A-List celebrity sweat like a PwC accountant at the Oscars.

Indeed, for people like Kanye West or Kim Kardashian, getting mistaken in public for a drunken bum could have catastrophic financial consequences. If annoying members of the public record and then upload such footage to the Internet, sponsors could back away, horrified at how regular they look without Photoshop.

But for those needing to maintain a perfect public image at all times, both in public and on YouTube, all is not lost. A new app being trialed in the US aims to stop interfering ‘citizen journalists’ in their tracks, rendering embarrassing celebrity footage all but useless.

Under development for iOS and Android, the app is made up of two modules. The first is a tool that downloads the most popular pop track of the week (currently Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’) from one of many pirate sites.

The second is a clever piece of coding that allows the track to be played extremely loudly through the phone’s own speaker, but with a novel twist.

Whenever Kim needs to go out without her hair done, all she needs to do is pop her phone in her pocket and activate the app. The software then transposes the pirate audio to surpass 15 kHz, beyond the normal range of human hearing but within reach of recording equipment utilized by the public.

It’s at this stage the app comes into its own. As soon as the potentially embarrassing footage is recorded and uploaded to YouTube, the site’s recently upgraded Content ID system swings into action.

Completely unfazed by the massive shift in pitch, YouTube’s filtering system spots the pirate song playing in the background and flags the video as a copyright infringement. Thanks to a less tolerant approach to infringers, it’s immediately taken off the site, keeping the celebrity’s image intact.

At the moment the app is being trialed by a few hand-picked public figures who are said to be particularly image-conscious. Their feedback has been largely positive, with a number asking for specific enhancements.

One nameless politician, who has been caught on camera a number of times saying inappropriate things about women, inquired whether the app could be upgraded to play a quickly medley of three or four songs instead of just one. This would ensure that people lose their YouTube account under the site’s tightened three-strike rule. Take that.

Looking towards the possibility of a future takedown/staydown regime, another tester suggested that rather than culling pirate tracks from the Internet, the app could play a unique sequence of notes previously copyrighted by the celebrity.

Once that ‘tune’ has been registered with YouTube’s Content ID, it would be trivial for the public figure to have the app rolling on his or her phone all the time. This would enable them to be excluded from YouTube on a permanent basis, perfect for the politician who likes to act with impunity.

A video of the app in action can be found here.

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

Microsoft schließt den Dienst Codeplex. Ab sofort können keine neuen Projekte mehr angelegt werden, Ende des Jahres ist dann endgültig Schluss. Wer den Dienst noch nutzt, bekommt Hilfe beim Umzug. (codeplex, Microsoft)

Glasfaser für alle, aus nachhaltiger und fairer Produktion - das will das Kreuzberger Startup Fair To The Home (FTTH) erreichen. Zudem sollen schicke Leitungen für Innenräume produziert werden. (Glasfaser, Internet)

Die große Koalition muss sich sputen, wenn das "Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz" noch im diesjährigen Wahlkampf greifen soll. Doch für eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit den Schwächen des Gesetzes scheint keine Zeit mehr zu sein. Von Friedhelm Greis (Facebook, Video-Community)

Founded in 2008, torrent search engine Bitsnoop was one of the fastest growing torrent sites at the beginning of the decade.

When the site first came online it indexed roughly a million torrents, and it continued to expand in the years that followed.

Earlier this week the site still served a healthy 23,862,834 torrents, but a few hours ago it stopped. According to a message posted on the site’s homepage, Bitsnoop decided to shut down.

“It’s been a nice ride, but all things eventually come to an end,” the message reads.

TorrentFreak contacted the operator of the site to find out more, but he preferred not to comment. On the site we read, however, that not all of the site’s content has been lost for good.

Bitsnoop has shared its data with their friends at fellow torrent search engine Zooqle, who may add it to their database later on.

“For now check out Zooqle – these guys seem to know their stuff. They took our data and said they will index it eventually,” Bitsnoop’s operator writes.

Bitsnoop’s farewell

With Bitsnoop’s shutdown the torrent community loses another familiar name. Over the years the site has been featured in our top ten of most-visited torrent sites a few times, but in recent years traffic dropped.

Like many other sites, BitSnoop is blocked by ISPs in several countries including the UK and Italy, and it was close to being blocked in Australia as well.

As for Zooqle, this site is a relative newcomer. It first appeared online last year and had been steadily expanding since, thanks to traffic from other sites including meta-search engine Torrentz2.

—

Note: The “farewell” message was first posted on March 31, which is close to April 1st, but we couldn’t see any hints suggesting that it’s a prank.

Zooqle

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

Da das europäische Leistungsschutzrecht zu scheitern droht, müssen Medien andere Einnahmequellen finden. Golem.de schafft daher die kostenlose Verlinkung von Inhalten ab. Allerdings bieten wir Möglichkeiten an, weiterhin ohne Gebühr Links anzuklicken. (Golem.de, Applikationen)

DVB-T wird abgeschaltet, und im Kino sind wir auch unzufrieden, dafür beschäftigen wir uns mit Explosionen im Datencenter. Sieben Tage und viele Meldungen im Überblick. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Freenet)

A non profit organization that represents tech startups and the general tech community has spoken out against rights-holder calls in the U.S. for piracy filters to be made mandatory for internet service providers and websites.

The non-profit, Engine, says that not only are piracy filters prone to false positives, they will also be so costly that it will hurt nascent companies and stifle innovation in the process.

"Reversing two decades of sensible copyright policy to require OSPs to deploy tools that are costly, easily circumvented, and limited in scope would deeply harm startups, users, and content creators alike," says Engine.

In Engine's report, the startup lobby group cites a recent case study which found a false positive rate of 1 to 2 percent when piracy filters are used.

This may not sound like a lot, but considering many sites deals with millions of user generated files, this could lead to tens of thousands legitimate files being filtered for no reason.

"Accordingly, a 1–2 percent false positive rate for an automated filtering procedure is problematic for the same reasons, as such a technique would result in filtering legitimate content at rates that would frequently obstruct speech," Engine's report states.

Engine also estimates the cost of implementing a filter for a medium sized file sharing service would be $10,000 and $25,000 in licensing fees alone, something that will be out of reach for smaller startups.

An expensive filter that's prone to false positives could also be easily made redundant, with new file formats escaping the filter's attention, and it would not stop sites outside of the U.S. not beholden to the country's copyright laws from offering pirated files.

[via TorrentFreak]