Month: April 2017

Der Entwickler der 360VR Toolbox für Final Cut Pro, Tim Dashwood, geht zu Apple. Die Software seines Unternehmens, die für die Erstellung und Bearbeitung stereoskopischer 3D-Videos gedacht ist, verschenkt er. (Final Cut, Apple)

Founded by BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen, BitTorrent Inc. is best known for its torrent clients uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline, from which it made millions over the years.

Unlike most file-sharing startups the company was well funded from the start. Accel was one of the early investors from early on, and BitTorrent was part of a fund that also included Facebook and Dropbox.

However, over the past decade, BitTorrent Inc. didn’t transform into a multi-billion dollar business. This prompted Accel to step away, taking a loss, while “getting rid of it.”

This is exactly what happened. In 2015 Accel handed over its stake in the company to a group of outside investors who promised to pay $10 million in a year, which they would take from future profits.

The outsiders included Jeremy Johnson and Robert Delamar. They became BitTorrent’s new CEOs and reportedly spent a ton of cash in the months that followed. Soon after it became clear that they had burned through way more money than they’d brought in and they left their positions, a saga that Backchannel documented in detail.

Speaking with TorrentFreak’s Steal This Show, Bram Cohen first talks about what went down in public, and his account doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

“You know the truth is we’ve actually been doing fine for quite a while now. We haven’t had technology problems or business problems, we’ve had investor problems. That’s been our problem,” Cohen notes.

“Basically, Accel took their share in BitTorrent and pretty much just gave it away to these total strangers who they didn’t know. And not only gave away their stock but gave away control of the company.”

While the new co-CEOs of the company spent a bunch of cash, Cohen doesn’t believe they had a real plan.

“Plan, why do you think they had a plan?” They were kids in a candy store. Their plan was like; Oh my god, we got money, we got power, we’re such geniuses, we can do everything here, we’ll make it great,” Cohen says.

The cynical rant continues for a while after that, but the bottom line is that BitTorrent’s inventor had little faith in the capabilities of the newcomers. They took BitTorrent to Hollywood and thought that aligning themselves with celebrities was the key to success, something Cohen isn’t particularly fond of.

“Human beings are a bunch of starfuckers, right? The United States has become this celebrity-obsessed culture, and everyone’s all about, oh, we’ll gain access. That’ll be great, and we’ll make money off of it, everybody thinks this.

“It’s like, how can I find some biz dev people who aren’t humans, so they don’t sell their soul?” Cohen adds.

According to Cohen, Accel’s attempt to close their fund nearly destroyed the company. When it was time for the new CEOs and their investment company to pay up, the money wasn’t there.

“They were just incompetent fuckups. I mean they’re losers,” he blasts, noting that it certainly wasn’t impossible to turn a decent profit in a year.

While the account is a one-sided view, it’s clear that the newcomers weren’t very welcome, or liked, by BitTorrent’s inventor. He goes on to detail how thousands of dollars were spent on first class tickets, private chauffeurs, and parties.

Cohen himself stayed far away from the razzmatazz and continued coding, back at the dull gray office in San Francisco.

“I had nothing to do with any of this. This was all just like, starfucker bullshit,” Cohen says.

When Steal This Show host Jamie King pushed one final time to ask if the new management really didn’t have a plan, the answer wasn’t much more flattering.

“Go around LA being big swinging dicks. Go to 1 Oak and spend a few thousand dollars a night on drinks. I mean, people think that there must be some like rational thought here, beyond being a talking chimpanzee,” Cohen concludes.

—

The full interview with Bram Cohen is available here, or on the Steal This Show website.

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

^{If you enjoy this episode, consider becoming a patron and getting involved with the show. Check out Steal This Show’s Patreon campaign: support us and get all kinds of fantastic benefits!}

In this episode we meet Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, to discuss the origins of BitTorrent in the Mojo Nation project, why BitTorrent is still relevant given our increasingly low-cost bandwidth environment, how Big Content could have competed with Free, but chose not to – and the bumpy last years at Bram’s company BitTorrent Inc, including a near-death foray into content licensing and production.

—

Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis.

The guests for our news discussions will vary, and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the great innovators and minds.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Bram Cohen

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Riley Byrne
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Siraje Amarniss

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

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Mittlerweile haben die meisten Mainboard-Hersteller neue UEFI-Versionen für ihre Ryzen-Platinen veröffentlicht. Diese nutzen die Agesa 1004a, die Microcode enthält, der den Systemstart beschleunigt und die DDR4-Kompatibilität verbessert und den FMA3-SMT-Fehler unter Windows behebt. (AMD Zen, Prozessor)

Activion hat ein neues CoD angekündigt: Call of Duty WWII ist wie die frühen Teile im Zweiten Weltkrieg angesiedelt. Der Shooter soll einen Singleplayer, einen Coop- und einen Multiplayer-Modus enthalten. Erstes Material gibt es schon in wenigen Tagen. (Call of Duty, Playstation 4)

Anti-piracy enforcement comes in all shapes and sizes and there can be little doubt that’s it’s an extremely challenging and complex arena. Little surprise then that screw-ups are pretty common.

This week’s facepalm moment arrives courtesy of IP Arrow, an anti-piracy outfit working on behalf of clients including California-based movie company Lionsgate.

For some time, IP Arrow has been sending takedown notices to Google asking it to delist thousands of ‘pirate’ URLs for the movie Mechanic: Resurrection. In the main, the company appears to have done a good job, but like so many similar operations, at times it struggles to tell the difference between pirate copies of a movie and completely non-infringing content.

This week, the operator of troll defense blog Fight Copyright Trolls pointed out to fellow troll defenders DieTrollDie that IP Arrow had reported the site to Google for being a copyright infringer, which it most clearly is not.

The problem began in January when DieTrollDie (DTD) published an article about numerous trolling cases filed by ME2 Productions, the company that holds rights to Mechanic: Resurrection.

ME2 has been suing BitTorrent users all over the United States, so the cases naturally came to the attention of DTD, which offered its usual critique of the company’s actions thus far. However, in explaining certain flaws in some cases, the site referenced the hash value (B5201111ACEC1E5025DE3087B15DF84612C02579) of one of the pirate copies of Mechanic: Resurrection floating about on the Internet.

This was enough for IP Arrows’ bots to flag DTD as a pirate site and report it to Google. While this was probably a simple error, this is an extremely sensitive area so it’s easy to see how some might view the takedown as an attempt to silence ME2’s critics.

Certainly, that’s the view of DTD’s operator, who informs TF that he was surprised that IP Arrow had targeted his site.

“I was a bit surprised that IP Arrow asked Google to remove the listing of one of my pages. I knew there was absolutely no reason to justify it,” he told TF.

“They claim that they wanted the links removed because, ‘These links are facilitating piracy of my client’s work.’ What they actually wanted removed was one of the ‘Tags’ I used to index an article concerning the BT copyright troll cases for Mechanic: Resurrection.”

But whatever the conclusion, the problems don’t stop there. The same takedown notice filed against DTD makes matters worse by also targeting yet another website setup to help people targeted by copyright trolls.

Troll-Defense.com is operated by Lybeck, Pedreira & Justus, a Washington law firm that’s extremely unlikely to be infringing upon Lionsgate or ME2 copyrights. Nevertheless, the site was also reported to Google for copyright infringement.

Bizarrely, in each case the target of the infringement notices were court papers referencing ME2’s Mechanic: Resurrection cases against alleged copyright infringers. As in the reporting of DTD, it doesn’t look good that sites offering legal help to citizens are being targeted by companies with connections to the content in question.

“At first I thought IP Arrow was too stupid to understand what a hash file is. But after seeing that they also tried to remove search listings to publically available court documents, it looks like an effort to hide information concerning their copyright trolling operation,” DTD’s operator says.

“They are probably of the opinion that if you throw enough crap at a target, something is eventually going to stick.”

DTD also expressed concern that considering the volumes of notices being received by Google, it’s likely that innocent sites will fall victim to errors like these. It turns out that those concerns are well founded.

Torrent-Defense has been targeted by IP Arrow on several occasions (1,2,3), with Google delisting pages 100% of the time.

This hasn’t pleased lawyer Benjamin Justus, who operates the site for Lybeck, Pedreira & Justus.

“With courts and consumers already concerned that mass copyright suits by ME2 and its affiliates are being pursued in arbitrary fashion, I think that ME2’s agents’ targeting innocent parties with baseless takedown notices will only further the skepticism that these companies are not engaged in legitimate enforcement efforts,” he concludes.

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

From a new software that requires expensive hardware to a new piece of hardware that's being outsold by software, read the news roundup for the week ending April 23 2017

Continue reading ...