Month: September 2017

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In the 2009 movie Star Trek, Captain Kirk and Sulu plummeted down toward the planet Vulcan without a parachute. “Beam us up, beam us up!” Kirk shouted in desperation. Then at the last second, after a tense scene of Chekov running top speed to the transporter room, their lives were saved moments before they hit the doomed planet’s rocky surface.

Is Trek's transporter a bit like Futurama's suicide booth? (credit: 20th Century Fox )

But can beaming out save someone’s life? Some would argue that having one’s “molecules scrambled," as Dr. McCoy would put it, is actually the surest way to die. Sure, after you’ve been taken apart by the transporter, you’re put back together somewhere else, good as new. But is it still you on the other side, or is it a copy? If the latter, does that mean the transporter is a suicide box?

These issues have received a lot of attention lately given Trek’s 50^th Anniversary last year and the series' impending return to TV. Not to mention, in the real world scientists have found recent success in quantum teleporting a particle’s information farther than before (which isn’t the same thing, but still). So while it seems like Trek's transporter conundrum has never had a satisfying resolution, we thought we’d take a renewed crack at it.

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Enlarge / Clouds hover above the surrounding geothermal waters at the Blue Lagoon near Reykjavik, Iceland in 2008. (credit: Matt Cardy / Getty Images)

For the last six weeks, the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer has struggled to find a permanent domain name. The site lost its original .com address last month after site editor Andrew Anglin wrote a post mocking Heather Heyer, victim of the deadly hit-and-run attack in Charlottesville. The site bounced around from domain to domain, with each registrar canceling the site's service within a few hours or days of registration.

But for the last week, the site has been available at an address at Iceland's .is domain. ISNIC, Iceland's domain authority, is pondering how to handle the situation.

“What we worry about is the reputation of the .is domain,” ISNIC CEO Jens Pétur Jensen told the Reykjavik Grapevine. “ISNIC does not want to have the reputation that we’re a safe haven for criminals.”

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Enlarge / Fortnite's new Battle Royale mode includes this explosive splash screen. (credit: Epic Games)

It's inevitable: every time a wildly successful video game comes along, imitators quickly follow in its footsteps. The tradition began with Pong and Pac-Man clones, and that practice has continued on PCs, consoles, and smartphones ever since. "Homages" at best and "blatant ripoffs" at worst have always been a part of the game industry.

I couldn't help but think of this after my first thrilling time playing PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds in May of this year. You may have heard about this PC game: it's a somewhat familiar-looking military shooter, albeit with clever rules that gradually force dozens of players to a giant island's random "center" point. The result feels like a video game version of the Japanese film Battle Royale. The "early access" game is also setting records for concurrent player counts on Steam—which is particularly wild considering it costs $39.99, as opposed to popular free-to-play games like Dota 2.

Before the player counts climbed sky-high, however, I had already predicted a very PUBG future. "How long until other games rip this off?" I said to my online team via voice chat, shortly after I was sniped while foolishly running across one of PUBG's open fields.

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For most torrent fans around the world, The Pirate Bay is the big symbol of international defiance. Over the years the site has fought, avoided, and snubbed its nose at dozens of battles, yet still remains online today.

But there is another site, located somewhere in the east, that has been online for nearly as long, has millions more registered members, and has proven just as defiant.

RuTracker, for those who haven’t yet found it, is a Russian-focused treasure trove of both local and international content. For many years the site was frequented only by native speakers but with the wonders of tools like Google Translate, anyone can use the site at the flick of the switch. When people are struggling to find content, it’s likely that RuTracker has it.

This position has attracted the negative attention of a wide range of copyright holders and thanks to legislation introduced during 2013, the site is now subject to complete blocking in Russia. In fact, RuTracker has proven so stubborn to copyright holder demands, it is now permanently blocked in the region by all ISPs.

Surprisingly, especially given the enthusiasm for blockades among copyright holders, this doesn’t seem to have dampened demand for the site’s services. According to SimiliarWeb, against all the odds the site is still pulling in around 90 million visitors per month. But the impressive stats don’t stop there.

Impressive stats for a permanently blocked site

This week, RuTracker celebrates its 13th birthday, a relative lifetime for a site that has been front and center of Russia’s most significant copyright battles, trouble which doesn’t look like stopping anytime soon.

Back in 2010, for example, RU-Center, Russia’s largest domain name registrar and web-hosting provider, pulled the plug on the site’s former Torrents.ru domain. The Director of Public Relations at RU-Center said that the domain had been blocked on the orders of the Investigative Division of the regional prosecutor’s office in Moscow. The site never got its domain back but carried on regardless, despite the setbacks.

Back then the site had around 4,000,000 members but now, seven years on, its ranks have swelled to a reported 15,382,907. According to figures published by the site this week, 778,317 of those members signed up this year during a period the site was supposed to be completely inaccessible. Needless to say, its operators remain defiant.

“Today we celebrate the 13th anniversary of our tracker, which is the largest Russian (and not only) -language media library on this planet. A tracker strangely banished in the country where most of its audience is located – in Russia,” a site announcement reads.

“But, despite the prohibitions, with all these legislative obstacles, with all these technical difficulties, we see that our tracker still exists and is successfully developing. And we still believe that the library should be open and free for all, and not be subject to censorship or a victim of legislative and executive power lobbied by the monopolists of the media industry.”

It’s interesting to note the tone of the RuTracker announcement. On any other day it could’ve been written by the crew of The Pirate Bay who, in their prime, loved to stick a finger or two up to the copyright lobby and then rub their noses in it. For the team at RuTracker, that still appears to be one of the main goals.

Like The Pirate Bay but unlike many of the basic torrent indexers that have sprung up in recent years, RuTracker relies on users to upload its content. They certainly haven’t been sitting back. RuTracker reveals that during the past year and despite all the problems, users uploaded a total of 171,819 torrents – on average, 470 torrents per day.

Interestingly, the content most uploaded to the site also points to the growing internationalization of RuTracker. During the past year, the NBA / NCAA section proved most popular, closely followed by non-Russian rock music and NHL games. Non-Russian movies accounted for almost 2,000 fresh torrents in just 12 months.

“It is thanks to you this tracker lives!” the site’s operators informed the users.

“It is thanks to you that it was, is, and, for sure, will continue to offer the most comprehensive, diverse and, most importantly, quality content in the Russian Internet. You stayed with us when the tracker lost its original name: torrents.ru. You stayed with us when access to a new name was blocked in Russia: rutracker.org. You stayed with us when [the site’s trackers] were blocked. We will stay with you as long as you need us!”

So as RuTracker plans for another year online, all that remains is to celebrate its 13th birthday in style. That will be achieved tonight when every adult member of RuTracker is invited to enjoy Chinese meal at the Tian Jin Chinese Restaurant in St. Petersburg.

Turn up early, seating is limited.

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

Enlarge / CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at Facebook's 2016 "F8" conference. (credit: Facebook)

Mark Zuckerberg is giving up on an audacious plan to sell most of his Facebook shares without diminishing his total control over the company. The plan, which Facebook announced last year, would have given shareholders two new non-voting shares for each voting share they owned. Zuckerberg hoped to sell these shares to finance his charitable ambitions.

But shareholders sued, arguing that the plan would further consolidate power in Zuckerberg's hands with no benefits to other shareholders. Zuckerberg was scheduled to testify in court in the case on Tuesday. Abandoning the plan saves Zuckerberg from having to do that.

Most companies operate according to a one-share-one-vote principle. But several high-profile technology companies, including Google, Facebook, and Snap, give extra per-share voting rights to founders and early investors. These extra votes give Larry Page and Sergey Brin a majority of Google's voting power even though they own much less than half of Google's shares. The same is true at Snap, where co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy together exercise a majority of the company's votes, giving them total control over the company's management.

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Enlarge / Um, yes, that was Adobe PSIRT's private PGP key on their website. Best get their new public key.

Having some transparency about security problems with software is great, but Adobe's Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) took that transparency a little too far today when a member of the team posted the PGP keys for PSIRT's e-mail account—both the public and the private keys. The keys have since been taken down, and a new public key has been posted in its stead.

The faux pas was spotted at 1:49pm ET by security researcher Juho Nurminen:

Oh shit Adobe pic.twitter.com/7rDL3LWVVz

— Juho Nurminen (@jupenur) September 22, 2017

Nurminen was able to confirm that the key was associated with the psirt@adobe.com e-mail account.

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