Month: July 2017

Vodafone verzeichnet einen Rückgang beim Mobilfunk, kann aber besonders im Kabelnetz wachsen. Mehr als die Hälfte der Neukunden wollen 200 oder 400 MBit/s. (Streaming, DSL)

Das war es für Intel-basierte Smartwatches: Der Hersteller hat die Wearables-Sparte geschlossen, stattdessen steht Augmented Reality nun im Fokus der New Technologies Group. Vorausgegangen waren überhitzende Geräte am Handgelenk von Kunden. (Intel, Server)

Norwegen gilt als das Land mit dem höchsten Anteil an Elektroautos: Während bei uns ein Elektroauto ein Hingucker ist, sind sie dort häufig zu sehen. Grund dafür sind eine fehlende Autoindustrie und eine massive staatliche Förderung. Doch auch bei uns werden sich die Elektroautos durchsetzen, sagt ein Experte. Eine Analyse von Werner Pluta (Elektroauto, Tesla)

Forenbeiträge und ein offenes Homebrew-SDK für die Playstation 4 als Kollateralschaden: Bei der (legitimen) Jagd auf die Entwicklersoftware SDK 4.5 sind Anwälte von Sony laut einem Medienbericht offenbar übers Ziel hinausgeschossen. (Sony, Homebrew)

In einer halben Stunde vom Zentrum New Yorks in das Zentrum Washingtons: Elon Musk hat angekündigt, er wolle einen Tunnel für das Hochgeschwindigkeitsverkehrsmittel Hyperloop bauen - und hat damit einige der Beteiligten verblüfft. (Elon Musk, Technologie)

Der neue Neural Compute Stick ist praktisch die fertige Variante des ursprünglichen Movidius-Modells. Intel hat ein paar Optimierungen vorgenommen, beispielsweise können mindestens Deep-Learning-Sticks an einem USB-Port betrieben werden. (Movidius, Intel)

Müssen Händler Kunden über möglicherweise unsichere Software auf Smartphones informieren? Das soll eine Zivilklage gegen eine Media-Markt-Filiale klären. Verbraucherschützer hoffen auf eine Signalwirkung. (Verbraucherschutz, Android)

Für Facebook scheint die Idee eines modularen Smartphones noch nicht vom Tisch zu sein: In einem Patentantrag beschreibt das Unternehmen ein Gerät, das sich mit verschiedenen Modulen bestücken lässt - unter anderem einer Kamera, einem Touchscreen und einem GPS-Empfänger. (Facebook, Smartphone)

Last Sunday, the long-awaited seventh season of the hit series Game of Thrones aired in dozens of countries worldwide.

The show has broken several piracy records over the years and, thus far, there has been plenty of interest in the latest season as well.

Like every year, the torrent download figures quickly ran into the millions. However, little is known about the traffic that goes to streaming portals, which have outgrown traditional file-sharing sites in recent years.

One of the main problems is that it’s impossible for outsiders to know exactly how many visitors pirate streaming services get. Traffic data for these sites are not public, which makes it difficult to put an exact figure on the number of views one particular video has.

Piracy monitoring firm MUSO hasn’t shied away from this unexplored territory though and has now released some hard numbers.

According to MUSO, the premiere episode of the seventh season of Game of Thrones has been pirated more than 90 million times in only three days. A massive number, which is largely driven by streaming traffic.

Exactly 77,913,032 pirate views came from streaming portals, while public torrent traffic sits in second place with 8,356,382 downloads. Another 4,949,298 downloads are linked to direct download sites, while the remaining 523,109 come from private torrents.

Why other platforms such as Usenet are not covered remains unexplained in the press release, but without these the total is already quite substantial, to say the least.

MUSO reports that most pirate traffic comes from the United States, with 15.1 million unauthorized downloads and streams. The United Kingdom follows in second place with 6.2 million, before Germany, India, and Indonesia, with between 4 and 5 million each.

Andy Chatterley, MUSO’s CEO and Co-Founder, notes that the results may come as a surprise to some industry insiders, describing them as “huge.”

“There is no denying that these figures are huge, so they’re likely to raise more than a few eyebrows in the mainstream industry, but it’s in line with the sort of scale we see across piracy sites and should be looked at objectively.

“What we’re seeing here isn’t just P2P torrent downloads but unauthorized streams and every type of piracy around the premiere. This is the total audience picture, which is usually unreported,” Chatterley adds.

While there is no denying that the numbers are indeed huge, it would probably be better to view them as estimates. MUSO generally sources its data from SimilarWeb, which uses a sample of 200 million ‘devices’ to estimate website traffic. Website visits are then seen as “downloads,” and the sample data is extrapolated into the totals.

This also explains why other types of download traffic, such as Usenet, are not included at all. These are not web-based. Similarly, the data doesn’t appear to cover all countries. Game of Thrones piracy is very substantial in China, for example, but in its previous reports, MUSO didn’t exclude Chinese traffic.

Taking the caveats above into account, MUSO’s data could be a good estimate of the total (web) pirate traffic for the Game of Thrones premiere. This would suggest some pretty high piracy rates in some countries, but we’ve seen stranger things.

—

Note: TorrentFreak reached out to MUSO for further details on its methodology. The company confirmed that its data is based on traffic to 23,000 of the most-used piracy sites. The data is collected from over 200 million devices, located in over 200 countries. This appears to confirm that it is indeed SimilarWeb data.

—

Countries with the highest GoT piracy activity, according to MUSO:

United States of America: 15,075,951
United Kingdom: 6,252,903
Germany: 4,897,280
India: 4,335,331
Indonesia: 4,286,927
Philippines: 4,189,030
Canada: 3,182,851
France: 2,881,467
Turkey: 2,802,458
Vietnam: 2,436,149
Australia: 2,241,463
Russian Federation: 2,196,799
Netherlands: 1,881,718
Brazil: 1,796,759
Malaysia: 1,737,005

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

Klaustrophobisch enge Gänge, wenig Bewegungsfreiheit und der Blick durch das Periskop: Die TV-Serie Das Boot wird Ende 2018 fortgesetzt, parallel dazu soll ein Virtual-Reality-Spiel entstehen. Umsetzungen für klassische Plattformen sind ebenfalls angedacht. (VR, Film)