Steam Direct wird für Spieleentwickler jeweils nach Projekt abgerechnet. Wer ein Spiel in das System einbringen will, muss 100 US-Dollar zahlen, was Missbrauch verhindern soll. Ab einem gewissen Umsatz gibt es das Geld von Valve zurück. (Steam, Computer) Month: June 2017
Biometrie: Airlines wollen Ausweis durch Fingerabdruck ersetzen
Delta Airlines und Finnair arbeiten daran, Ausweisdokumente am Flughafen überflüssig zu machen. Stattdessen soll der Fingerabdruck oder eine Gesichtserkennung als biometrisches Identifizierungsmerkmal herhalten. Erste Tests laufen. (Biometrie, Technologie)
Delta Airlines und Finnair arbeiten daran, Ausweisdokumente am Flughafen überflüssig zu machen. Stattdessen soll der Fingerabdruck oder eine Gesichtserkennung als biometrisches Identifizierungsmerkmal herhalten. Erste Tests laufen. (Biometrie, Technologie) Denuvo Accused of Using Unlicensed Software to Protect its Anti-Piracy Tool
In what could be a severe case of irony overload, anti-piracy company Denuvo is being accused of using unlicensed software to protect its infamous anti-piracy tool. A developer of VMProtect, software which itself protects against reverse engineering and cracking, says that Denuvo has been using the product without obtaining the necessary permission.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Just recently, anti-piracy outfit Denuvo has been hitting the headlines every few weeks, but for reasons the Austrian company would rather forget.
As a result of providing the leading anti-piracy solution for games, the company is now well and truly in the spotlight of pirates, each desperate to defeat Denuvo protection on new games as quickly as possible. Now, however, the company has a rather different headache to contend with.
According to a post on Russian forum RSDN, Denuvo is accused of engaging in a little piracy of its own. The information comes from a user called drVanо, who is a developer at VMProtect Software, a company whose tools protect against reverse engineering and cracking.
“I want to tell you a story about one very clever and greedy Austrian company called Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH,” drVano begins.
“A while ago, this company released a protection system of the same name but the most remarkable thing is that they absolutely illegally used our VMProtect software in doing so.”
drVano says that around three years ago, VMProtect Software and Denuvo entered into correspondence about the possibility of Denuvo using VMProtect in their system. VMProtect says they were absolutely clear that would not be possible under a standard $500 license, since the cost to Denuvo of producing something similar for themselves would be several hundred thousand dollars.
However, with no proper deal set up, drVano says that Denuvo went ahead anyway, purchasing a cheap license for VMProtect and going on to “mow loot” (a Russian term for making bank) with their successful Denuvo software.
“Everything went well for Denuvo until we notified them that their VMProtect license had been canceled due to a breach of its licensing conditions. Options were offered for solving the problem, including paying modest compensation to us. Our proposal was ignored,” drVano says.
Interestingly, drVano says that VMProtect then took what appears to be a rather unorthodox measure against Denuvo. After cooperation with Sophos, the anti-virus vendor agreed to flag up the offending versions of Denuvo as potential malware. VMProtect says it has also been speaking with Valve about not featuring the work of “scammers” on its platform.
In a nutshell, Denuvo is being accused of using pirated versions of VMProtect in order to create its own anti-piracy software. It’s one of the most ironic claims ever made against an anti-piracy company and it will be intriguing to see how this plays out. According to VMProtect, legal action might not be far away.
“Through our long-standing partners from Intellect-C, we are starting to prepare an official claim against Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH with the prospect of going to court. This might be a very good lesson for ‘greedy’ developers who do not care about the intellectual property rights of their colleagues in the same trade,” drVano concludes.
Just last week, the latest version of Denuvo was cracked by rising star Baldman, who revealed what a toll the protection was taking on video gaming hardware. The protection, which according to reports is the only recent version of Denuvo that doesn’t use VMProtect, collapsed in less than a week.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week on BitTorrent – 06/05/17
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent are in again. ‘John Wick: Chapter 2′ tops the chart this week, followed by ‘The Boss Baby’. ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales’ completes the top three.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
This week we have two newcomers in our chart.
John Wick: Chapter 2 is the most downloaded movie for the second week in a row.
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.
RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
This week’s most downloaded movies are:
| Movie Rank | Rank last week | Movie name | IMDb Rating / Trailer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Most downloaded movies via torrents | |||
| 1 | (1) | John Wick: Chapter 2 | 8.0 / trailer |
| 2 | (3) | The Boss Baby | 6.5 / trailer |
| 3 | (…) | Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (TS) | 7.1 / trailer |
| 4 | (2) | Logan | 8.6 / trailer |
| 5 | (4) | The Fate of the Furious (subbed HDRip) | 6.7 / trailer |
| 6 | (5) | A Cure For Wellness | 6.5 / trailer |
| 7 | (…) | Life | 6.8 / trailer |
| 8 | (7) | Ghost in The Shell (Subbed HDRip) | 6.9 / trailer |
| 9 | (8) | Kong: Skull Island (Subbed HDRip) | 7.0 / trailer |
| 10 | (6) | T2 Trainspotting | 7.7 / trailer |
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Apple’s new iOS file manager coming this fall as part of iOS 11
iPhone and iPad file manager provides access to local files and cloud storage.
Enlarge / This mostly empty App Store stub suggests Apple will add a file explorer to iOS 11.
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference gets underway in just a few hours, but it's never too late for leaks! iOS developer Steve Troughton-Smith has discovered an App Store entry for an Apple-published app called "Files." The listing appears to be a stub used to re-enable pre-installed first-party applications that you choose to delete, something Apple added support for last year in iOS 10.
There's not a whole lot of information up right now, but the name of the app and its icon strongly suggest that Apple plans to add some kind of local file manager to iOS 11. There are dummy screenshots listed for both iPhone and iPad versions of the app, so it shouldn't be an iPad-only feature.
The Files app will presumably be more or less similar to the iCloud Drive app Apple added to iOS 9—it would just offer access to local apps and files instead of those stored in Apple's cloud. The app will also presumably stop short of exposing iOS' filesystem to the extent that the macOS filesystem is exposed; even so, an iOS file manager is a longstanding request of many power users, and any app that provides this kind of functionality is a welcome development.
Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No, Netflix Hasn’t Won The War on Piracy
Netflix offers a great alternative to piracy, and for dozens of millions of people it’s a favorite pastime. However, recent claims that the company is winning the war on piracy may be a bit overstated. In fact, the rapid rise of streaming piracy poses a grave threat, as millions of people regularly watch Netflix content through unofficial sites and apps.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Recently a hacker group, or hacker, going by the name TheDarkOverlord (TDO) published the premiere episode of the fifth season of Netflix’s Orange is The New Black, followed by nine more episodes a few hours later.
TDO obtained the videos from Larson Studios, which didn’t pay the 50 bitcoin ransom TDO had requested. The hackers then briefly turned their attention to Netflix, before releasing the shows online.
In the aftermath, a flurry of articles claimed that Netflix’s refusal to pay means that it is winning the war on piracy. Torrents are irrelevant or no longer a real threat and piracy is pointless, they concluded.
One of the main reasons cited is a decline in torrent traffic over the years, as reported by the network equipment company Sandvine.
“Last year, BitTorrent traffic reached 1.73 percent of peak period downstream traffic in North America. That’s down from the 60 percent share peer-to-peer file sharing had in 2003. Netflix was responsible for 35.15 percent of downstream traffic,” one reporter wrote.
Even Wired, a reputable technology news site, jumped on the bandwagon.
“It’s not that torrenting is so onerous. But compared to legitimate streaming, the process of downloading a torrenting client, finding a legit file, waiting for it to download, and watching it on a laptop (or mirroring it to a television) hardly seems worth it,” the articles states.
These and many similar articles suggest that Netflix’s ease of use is superior to piracy. Netflix is winning the war on piracy, which is pretty much reduced to a fringe activity carried out by old school data hoarders, they claimed.
But is that really the case?
I wholeheartedly agree that Netflix is a great alternative to piracy, and admit that torrents are not as dominant as they were before. But, everybody who thinks that piracy is limited to torrents, need to educate themselves properly.
Piracy has evolved quite a bit over the past several years and streaming is now the main source to satisfy people’s ‘illegal’ viewing demands.
Whether it’s through pirate streaming sites, mobile apps or dedicated media players hooked to TVs; it’s not hard to argue that piracy is easier and more convenient than it has even been in the past. And arguably, more popular too.
The statistics are dazzling. According to piracy monitoring outfit MUSO there are half a billion visits to video pirate sites every day. Roughly 60% of these are to streaming sites.
While there has been a small decline in streaming visits over the past year, MUSO’s data doesn’t cover the explosion of media player piracy, which means that there is likely a significant increase in piracy overall.
TorrentFreak contacted the aforementioned network equipment company Sandvine, which said that we’re “on to something.”
Unfortunately, they currently have no data to quantify the amount of pirate streaming activity. This is, in part, because many of these streams are hosted by legitimate companies such as Google.
Torrents may not be dominant anymore, but with hundreds of millions of visits to streaming pirate sites per day, and many more via media players and other apps, piracy is still very much alive. Just ask the Motion Picture Association.
I would even argue that piracy is more of a threat to Netflix than it has ever been before.
To illustrate, here is a screenshot from one of the most visited streaming piracy sites online. The site in question receives millions of views per day and featured two Netflix shows, “13 Reasons Why” and the leaked “Orange is The New Black,” in its daily “most viewed” section recently.
If you look at a random streaming site, you’ll see that they offer an overview of thousands of popular movies and TV-shows, far more than Netflix. Pirate streaming sites have more content than Netflix, often in high quality, and it doesn’t cost a penny.
Throw in the explosive growth of piracy-capable media players that can bring this content directly to the TV-screen, and you’ll start to realize the magnitude of this threat.
In a way, the boost in streaming piracy is a bigger threat to Netflix than the traditional Hollywood studios. Hollywood still has its exclusive release windows and a superior viewing experience at the box office. All Netflix content is instantly pirated, or already available long before they add it to their catalog.
Sure, pirate sites might not appeal to the average middle-class news columnist who’s been subscribed to Netflix for years, but for tens of millions of less fortunate people, who can do without another monthly charge on their household bill, it’s an easy choice.
Not the right choice, legally speaking, but that doesn’t seem to bother them much.
That’s illustrated by tens of thousands of people from all over the world commenting with their public Facebook accounts, on movies and TV-shows that were obviously pirated.
Of course, if piracy disappeared overnight then only a fraction of these pirates would pay for a Netflix subscription, but saying that piracy is irrelevant for the streaming giant may be a bit much.
Netflix itself is all too aware of this it seems. The company has launched its own “Global Copyright Protection Group,” an anti-piracy division that’s on par with those of many major Hollywood studios.
Netflix isn’t winning the war on piracy; it just got started….
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
What to expect from Apple’s WWDC 2017 keynote on Monday
We know many of the broad strokes, but the details will be a surprise.
Enlarge / The stage at WWDC 2016. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Of the two-to-four product events that Apple holds in a typical year, WWDC is usually the most interesting. Every June, company executives get up in front of the public (and a live audience of loyal developers who paid $1600 a head to get in) and lay out Apple's vision for how all of its major platforms will evolve over the next year.
Apple’s policy of offering all of its operating system updates for free to all supported hardware gives company’s WWDC announcements a much wider reach and bigger impact than any individual hardware launch, and its ability to offer those updates (particularly iOS updates) to everyone makes the WWDC announcements more important than, say, hearing about another Android update that most people won’t see for two years.
As always, we'll run down the current state of rumors ahead of the show tomorrow, telling you what we know about what to expect. News about the software updates is unusually light on the ground, but (atypically for WWDC) it also looks like we’re in for some hardware refreshes and maybe even something entirely new. Let’s dive in.
Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Saturday’s SpaceX launch carried a secret payload—a Chinese experiment
US company has ensured that Chinese experiment cannot transfer tech from station.
Bill Ingalls/NASA
The reuse of a Dragon spacecraft captured most of the headlines after Saturday's SpaceX launch of its Falcon 9 rocket on a supply run to the International Space Station. But this particular Dragon made history in another way: by carrying a Chinese science experiment to the station for the first time. US-China space cooperation has been a taboo until now.
The experiment will study the effects of space radiation on DNA, specifically the rate at which DNA mutates in the space environment, which could have implications for long-duration human spaceflight. Led by Deng Yulin of the Beijing Institute of Technology, the experiment will run for about 30 days on the space station before it returns to Earth aboard the Dragon spacecraft.
Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
VPC’s MongoosT-50 joystick: A rare Russian-style controller for skies or space
Belarusian stick works with a Thrustmaster Warthog base and comes in a lefty variant.
Enlarge / The MongoosT-50 stick in a Warthog base, left, compared to a standard Thrustmaster Warthog stick at right. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)
I had an epiphany when Ars Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson asked me to review the VPC MongoosT-50 flight stick grip, which he had sitting on his desk awaiting its turn at the front of the review queue. As I removed the mounting plate of my Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog from its place on the right side of my VolaireSim cockpit, I looked over at the empty space it had occupied, then at the handmade Eastern European MFG Crosswind rudder pedals nestled at the base of my cockpit, and then to the HTC Vive and its now-dusty Oculus DK2 predecessor hanging off the side of my nearby desk.
The epiphany was this: Lee had pulled me down into his special crazy place where dropping hundreds of dollars on flight sim accessories, all to play a single game, seemed like a totally normal and sane thing to do.
This time around, the newest shiny in my office isn’t shiny at all, it's rather a svelte matte black: the VPC MongoosT-50 BE Grip, the Black Edition of the new company’s freshman-effort flight sim controller. Unlike most flight sticks for sale on the US market, which tend to be based with varying levels of verisimilitude on US fighter aircraft control columns, the MongoosT-50 is built to mirror the control stick on Russian aircraft—specifically, the fifth-generation Russian Sukhoi Su-35 and PAK FA (T-50). Few existing peripheral manufacturers offer Eastern-style controls, so this stick from Belarus-based VirPil Controls (VPC) is a bit of a rarity.
Read 37 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Latest Gigabyte Brix Gaming is a compact, VR-ready desktop PC
Gigabyte’s BRIX line of computers are tiny desktop PCs that often aren’t much larger than a small stack of CD cases. But the company also has a few models with higher-power CPU and graphics capabilities that require a little more room to breathe. Last year Gigabyte introduced the Brix Skylake UHD with NVIDIA graphics and a […]
Latest Gigabyte Brix Gaming is a compact, VR-ready desktop PC is a post from: Liliputing
Gigabyte’s BRIX line of computers are tiny desktop PCs that often aren’t much larger than a small stack of CD cases. But the company also has a few models with higher-power CPU and graphics capabilities that require a little more room to breathe. Last year Gigabyte introduced the Brix Skylake UHD with NVIDIA graphics and a […]
Latest Gigabyte Brix Gaming is a compact, VR-ready desktop PC is a post from: Liliputing
You must be logged in to post a comment.