Month: September 2017

Datavalet Wi-Fi Blocks TorrentFreak Over ‘Criminal Hacking Skills’

Datavalet, a public wi-fi provider that offers its service to several major companies and organizations, is actively blocking TorrentFreak. According to the company, the blockade is triggered by “criminal skills” and “hacking,” which sounds rather ominous.

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

At TorrentFreak we regularly write about website blocking efforts around the globe, usually related to well-known pirate sites.

Unfortunately, our own news site is not immune to access restrictions either. While no court has ordered ISPs to block access to our articles, some are doing this voluntarily.

This is especially true for companies that provide Wi-Fi hotspots, such as Datavalet. This wireless network provider works with various large organizations, including McDonald’s, Starbucks, and airports, to offer customers free Internet access.

Or rather to a part of the public Internet, we should say.

Over the past several months, we have had several reports from people who are unable to access TorrentFreak on Datavalet’s network. Users who load our website get an ominous warning instead, suggesting that we run some kind of a criminal hacking operation.

“Access to TORRENTFREAK.COM is not permitted as it is classified as: CRIMINAL SKILLS / HACKING.”

Criminal Skills?

Although we see ourselves as skilled writing news in our small niche, which incidentally covers crime and hacking, our own hacking skills are below par. Admittedly, mistakes are easily made but Datavalet’s blocking efforts are rather persistent.

The same issue was brought to our attention several years ago. At the time, we reached out to Datavalet and a friendly senior network analyst promised that they would look into it.

“We have forwarded your concerns to the proper resources and as soon as we have an update we will let you know,” the response was. But a few years later the block is still active, or active again.

Datavalet is just one one the many networks where TorrentFreak is blocked. Often, we are categorized as a file-sharing site, probably due to the word “torrent” in our name. This recently happened at the NYC Brooklyn library, for example.

After a reader kindly informed the library that we’re a news site, we were suddenly transferred from the “Peer-to-Peer File Sharing” to the “Proxy Avoidance” category.

“It appears that the website you want to access falls under the category ‘Proxy Avoidance’. These are sites that provide information about how to bypass proxy server features or to gain access to URLs in any way that bypass the proxy server,” the library explained.

Still blocked of course.

At least we’re not the only site facing this censorship battle. Datavelet and others regularly engage in overblocking to keep their network and customers safe. For example, Reddit was recently banned because it offered “nudity,” which is another no-go area.

Living up to our “proxy avoidance” reputation, we have to mention that people who regularly face these type of restrictions may want to invest in a VPN. These are generally quite good at bypassing these type of blockades. If they are not blocked themselves, that is.

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

Lenovo’s Yoga 920 comes in Star Wars Rebel and Imperial designs

Thinner, lighter, and with quad-core Intel CPUs starting at $649.

Enlarge

Lenovo's latest high-end Yoga convertible is here. The Yoga 920 improves on the 910 in design, while also incorporating some internal upgrades. The 920's design looks nearly identical to that of the 910, but it now measures 13.9mm thick and weighs 3.02 pounds. That makes it ever so slightly lighter and thinner than the 910, but otherwise it has a lot of the same external features: a 13.9-inch 4K IPS touchscreen that's compatible with the optional Active Pen, that signature Lenovo watchband hinge that allows it to lie flat when opened at a 180-degree angle, and a Windows Hello-ready fingerprint sensor.

Two issues I had with the Yoga 910 were the lack of Thunderbolt 3 ports and the extra-large chin bezel under the display. Lenovo appears to have fixed one of those two problems: the 920 has two Thunderbolt 3 ports that support data transfer and charging, which is a great upgrade from the single USB Type-C port on the 910. The 920's bottom bezel is still its largest, but its webcam has been moved to the tiny top bezel. We prefer this placement for video chatting since you won't get those unattractive up-the-nose shots like you would with a bottom-placed webcam. The only time this placement won't come in handy is when the display is turned upside-down while in tent mode.

Lenovo

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The psychology of Soylent and the prison of first-world food choices

Why are some repulsed by Soylent, but others desperate to receive their orders?

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Lee Hutchinson / Thinkstock)

Back around Labor Day 2013, Senior Editor Lee Hutchinson passed on the various grilled and barbecue delights of a holiday weekend. Instead, he spent seven days testing a peculiar new nutritional meal substitute—Soylent. The product has only grown in notoriety and evolved in its composition since. This long weekend, we're resurfacing Hutchinson's reflection from several months after that initial experience (originally published in May 2014). If interested in some of our Soylent coverage since then, here are a few highlights:

I’ve spilled a lot of virtual ink on Soylent over the past year—I count thirteen pieces, including the five-day experiment from last summer when I ate nothing but the stuff for a full week. This, though, is probably the last Soylent-specific piece that I’ll write for a while. It’s the piece that I’ve wanted to do all along.

Here we're going to talk about how the final mass-produced Soylent product fits into my life, without any stunts or multi-day binges. More importantly, we're going to take a look at exactly what might drive someone in the most food-saturated culture in the world to bypass thousands of healthy, normal, human-food meal choices in favor of nutritive goop. It's something a lot of folks simply can't seem to wrap their heads around. Today it's relatively easy to make a healthy meal, so why in the hell would anyone pour Soylent down their throat?

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Neanderthals were distilling tar 200 thousand years ago in Europe

These early humans were using tar to make tools long before Homo sapiens did.

Paul Kozowyk

Despite many recent discoveries that show Neanderthals were technologically and socially sophisticated, there's still a popular idea that these heavy-browed, pale-skinned early humans were mentally inferior to modern Homo sapiens. Now we have even more corroboration that they were pretty sharp. A fascinating new study reveals that Neanderthals were distilling tar for tool-making 200 thousand years ago—long before evidence of tar-making among Homo sapiens. And an experimental anthropologist has some good hypotheses for how they did it, too.

One of humanity's earliest technological breakthroughs was learning to distill tar from tree bark. It was key to making compound tools with two or more parts; adhesives could keep a stone blade nicely fitted into a wooden handle for use as a hoe, an axe, or even a spear. Scientists have discovered ancient beads of tar in Italy, Germany, and several other European sites dating back as much as 200 thousand years, which is about 150 thousand years before modern Homo sapiens arrived in Western Europe. That means the people who distilled that tar had to be Neanderthals.

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Book review: The Changeling makes baby photos, trust in Internet disappear

Check out this book about creepy, Internet-fueled surveillance ahead of its TV version.

Victor LaValle's new novel The Changeling starts out as a gentle romance and a good-natured look at fatherhood in the age of smartphones. After Apollo Kagwa's son is born, he gets swept up in the performativity of being a "New Dad," a Baby Bjorn-wearing father who posts endless baby pictures on Facebook. But when Apollo's wife Emma starts to receive mysterious pictures of their son via her smartphone, that's your first clue that something terrible is happening.

The creepy smartphone pictures—which disappear as soon as Emma looks at them, and not because they're on Snapchat—are just the first step in a horrifying journey. The Changeling has all of the qualities of a good page-turner, replete with twists, turns, and surprises (some grotesque and violent). Without giving any major spoilers, LaValle's novel eventually lives up to the fairytale implications of its title, but it also keeps coming back to themes of social media and voyeurism.

In fact, The Changeling is the perfect reimagining of the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen for the modern oversharing era. Much of the menace and dread in this book come from the realization that we all reveal way too much about ourselves on Facebook and other sites—and meanwhile, unscrupulous people are out there who can use our own technology to spy on us, even beyond the limits of our exhibitionism.

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Pirate Sites and the Dying Art of Customer Service

With many pirate sites developing reputations for instability recently, there’s an increasing need among users for more information about problems and downtime. However, the trend is the opposite, with users left guessing about site outages while communication channels stay silent. But really – are pirates in any position to demand high-quality customer service?

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

Consumers of products and services in the West are now more educated than ever before. They often research before making a purchase and view follow-up assistance as part of the package. Indeed, many companies live and die on the levels of customer support they’re able to offer.

In this ultra-competitive world, we send faulty technology items straight back to the store, cancel our unreliable phone providers, and switch to new suppliers for the sake of a few dollars, pounds or euros per month. But does this demanding environment translate to the ‘pirate’ world?

It’s important to remember that when the first waves of unauthorized platforms appeared after the turn of the century, content on the Internet was firmly established as being ‘free’. When people first fired up KaZaA, LimeWire, or the few fledgling BitTorrent portals, few could believe their luck. Nevertheless, the fact that there was no charge for content was quickly accepted as the standard.

That’s a position that continues today but for reasons that are not entirely clear, some users of pirate sites treat the availability of such platforms as some kind of right, holding them to the same standards of service that they would their ISP, for example.

One only has to trawl the comments section on The Pirate Bay to see hundreds of examples of people criticizing the quality of uploaded movies, the fact that a software crack doesn’t work, or that some anonymous uploader failed to deliver the latest album quickly enough. That’s aside from the continual complaints screamed on various external platforms which bemoan the site’s downtime record.

For people who recall the sheer joy of finding a working Suprnova mirror for a few minutes almost 15 years ago, this attitude is somewhat baffling. Back then, people didn’t go ballistic when a site went down, they savored the moment when enthusiastic volunteers brought it back up. There was a level of gratefulness that appears somewhat absent today, in a new world where free torrent and streaming sites are suddenly held to the same standards as Comcast or McDonalds.

But while a cultural change among users has definitely taken place over the years, the way sites communicate with their users has taken a hit too. Despite the advent of platforms including Twitter and Facebook, the majority of pirate site operators today have a tendency to leave their users completely in the dark when things go wrong, leading to speculation and concern among grateful and entitled users alike.

So why does The Pirate Bay’s blog stay completely unattended these days? Why do countless sites let dust gather on Twitter accounts that last made an announcement in 2012? And why don’t site operators announce scheduled downtime in advance or let people know what’s going on when the unexpected happens?

“Honestly? I don’t have the time anymore. I also care less than I did,” one site operator told TF.

“11 years of doing this shit is enough to grind anybody down. It’s something I need to do but not doing it makes no difference either. People complain in any case. Then if you start [informing people] again they’ll want it always. Not happening.”

Rather less complimentary was the operator of a large public site. He told us that two decades ago relationships between operators and users were good but have been getting worse ever since.

“Users of pirate content 20 years ago were highly technical. 10 years ago they were somewhat technical. Right now they are fucking watermelon head puppets. They are plain stupid,” he said.

“Pirate sites don’t have customers. They have users. The definition of a customer, when related to the web, is a person that actually buys a service. Since pirates sites don’t sell services (I’m talking about public ones) they have no customers.”

Another site operator told us that his motivations for not interacting with users are based on the changing legal environment, which has become steadily and markedly worse, year upon year.

“I’m not enjoying being open like before. I used to chat keenly with the users, on the site and IRC [Internet Relay Chat] but i’m keeping my distance since a long time ago,” he told us.

“There have always been risks but now I lock everything down. I’m not using Facebook in any way personally or for the site and I don’t need the dramas of Twitter. Everytime you engage on there, problems arise with people wanting a piece of you. Some of the staff use it but I advise the contrary where possible.”

Interested in where the boundaries lie, we asked a couple of sites whether they should be doing more to keep users informed and if that should be considered a ‘customer service’ obligation these days.

“This is not Netflix and i’m not the ‘have a nice day’ guy from McDonalds,” one explained.

“If people want Netflix help then go to Netflix. There’s two of us here doing everything and I mean everything. We’re already in a pinch so spending time to answer every retarded question from kids is right out.”

Our large public site operator agreed, noting that users complain about the most crazy things, including why they don’t have enough space on a drive to download, why a movie that’s out in 2020 hasn’t been uploaded yet, and why can’t they login – when they haven’t even opened an account yet.

While the responses aren’t really a surprise given the ‘free’ nature of the sites and the volume of visitors, things don’t get any better when moving up (we use the term loosely) to paid ‘pirate’ services.

Last week, one streaming platform in particular had an absolute nightmare with what appeared to be technical issues. Nevertheless, some of its users, despite only paying a few pounds per month, demanded their pound of flesh from the struggling service.

One, who raised the topic on Reddit, was advised to ask for his money back for the trouble caused. It raised a couple of eyebrows.

“Put in a ticket and ask [for a refund], morally they should,” the user said.

The use of the word “morally” didn’t sit well with some observers, one of which couldn’t understand how the word could possibly be mentioned in the context of a pirate paying another pirate money, for a pirate service that had broken down.

“Wait let me get this straight,” the critic said. “You want a refund for a gray market service. It’s like buying drugs off the corner only to find out it’s parsley. Do you go back to the dealer and demand a refund? You live and you learn bud. [Shaking my head] at people in here talking about it being morally responsible…too funny.”

It’s not clear when pirate sites started being held to the same standards as regular commercial entities but from anecdotal evidence at least, the problem appears to be getting worse. That being said and from what we’ve heard, users can stop holding their breath waiting for deluxe customer service – it’s not coming anytime soon.

“There’s no way to monetize support,” one admin concludes.

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

Anker-Powerbank mit USB-C: Leichtere Akkus mit Power-Delivery und Passthrough

Noch in diesem Jahr will Anker zwei neue externe Akkus mit dem Namen Powercore+ II herausbringen. Beide sind leichter, und einer unterstützt eine höhere Leistungsübertragung per USB Typ C samt USB Power Delivery. (Ifa 2017, USB Typ C)

Noch in diesem Jahr will Anker zwei neue externe Akkus mit dem Namen Powercore+ II herausbringen. Beide sind leichter, und einer unterstützt eine höhere Leistungsübertragung per USB Typ C samt USB Power Delivery. (Ifa 2017, USB Typ C)

Android 8.0: Google bestätigt unvollständige Bild-in-Bild-Funktion

Lange hat sich Google geziert. Nun hat der Hersteller zugegeben, dass die neue Bild-in-Bild-Funktion in Android 8.0 alias Oreo noch nicht in allen unterstützten Apps funktioniert. Das wird sich erst in den nächsten Wochen ändern. (Android 8.0, Google)

Lange hat sich Google geziert. Nun hat der Hersteller zugegeben, dass die neue Bild-in-Bild-Funktion in Android 8.0 alias Oreo noch nicht in allen unterstützten Apps funktioniert. Das wird sich erst in den nächsten Wochen ändern. (Android 8.0, Google)

Jabra Elite 25e im Hands On: Bluetooth-Headset mit 18 Stunden Akkulaufzeit

Jabra hat den Nachfolger des Halo Smart vorgestellt, der nun Elite 25e heißt. Das neue Nackenbügel-Headset hat verbesserte Ohrstöpsel erhalten, und die ohnehin lange Akkulaufzeit des Bluetooth-Headsets soll noch einmal verlängert worden sein. Ein Hands on von Ingo Pakalski (Ifa 2017, Bluetooth)

Jabra hat den Nachfolger des Halo Smart vorgestellt, der nun Elite 25e heißt. Das neue Nackenbügel-Headset hat verbesserte Ohrstöpsel erhalten, und die ohnehin lange Akkulaufzeit des Bluetooth-Headsets soll noch einmal verlängert worden sein. Ein Hands on von Ingo Pakalski (Ifa 2017, Bluetooth)