US-Grenzbeamte dürfen künftig nur noch bei einem begründeten Verdacht ein Mobilgerät sehr genau untersuchen. Eine neue Regelung schränkt die Befugnisse der Beamten etwas ein. Einen Durchsuchungsbeschluss, wie ihn die Bürgerrechtsorganisation ACLU gern …
US-Grenzbeamte dürfen künftig nur noch bei einem begründeten Verdacht ein Mobilgerät sehr genau untersuchen. Eine neue Regelung schränkt die Befugnisse der Beamten etwas ein. Einen Durchsuchungsbeschluss, wie ihn die Bürgerrechtsorganisation ACLU gern hätte, brauchen sie aber immer noch nicht. (Politik/Recht, Security)
Down the hatch, coffee can jump start a day. But, according to dubious advice from Gwyneth Paltrow’s posh lifestyle and e-commerce site, Goop, the popular brew can also kick off a whole year—when taken up the bum.
Yes, Goop suggests that a coffee enema is a “clutch” way to “supercharge” your “annual goop detox” and start the year in tip-top health. In its latest guide for “deep detoxification,” the Goop team recommends a device called an “Implant O’Rama” for squirting coffee up your keister at home. The product, sold by Implant O’Rama LLC for a bargain $135, is merely a glass bottle with silicone tubing attached.
Twitter verbietet offene Drohungen. Das gilt aber nicht für alle Nutzer: Ein höchst umstrittener Tweet von US-Präsident Donald Trump wird nicht gelöscht. Twitter begründet das mit dem öffentlichen Interesse an den Äußerungen von Politikern. (Twitter, S…
Twitter verbietet offene Drohungen. Das gilt aber nicht für alle Nutzer: Ein höchst umstrittener Tweet von US-Präsident Donald Trump wird nicht gelöscht. Twitter begründet das mit dem öffentlichen Interesse an den Äußerungen von Politikern. (Twitter, Soziales Netz)
Forking out for every premium media service around is a hugely costly affair but some people are getting them all for just pennies each. That’s thanks to so-called account generating platforms, where access to Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, HBO, Xbox Live, EA Origin, TIDAL, WWE, and UFC, among dozens of others, cost next to nothing.
Gaining free access to copyrighted material is not a difficult task in today’s online world. Movies, TV shows, music, games, and eBooks are all just a few clicks away, either using torrent, streaming, or direct download services.
Over the years, however, the growth of piracy has been at least somewhat slowed due to the advent of official services. Where there was once a content vacuum, official platforms such as Netflix, Spotify, HBO, TIDAL, Steam, and others, are helping users to find the content they want.
While most services present reasonable value, subscribing to them all would be a massive strain on even the most expansive of budgets. But what if there was a way to access every single one of them, for just a few dollars a year – in total? Believe it or not, such services exist and have done for some time.
Described as ‘Account Generators’, these platforms grant members with access to dozens of premium services, without having to pay anything like the headline price. The main ones often major on access to a Netflix subscription as a base, with access to other services thrown in on top.
How much a year?
The screenshot above shows one ‘generator’ service as it appeared this week. On the far right is a Netflix offer for $2.99 per year or $4.99 for a lifetime ‘private’ account (more on that later). That is of course ridiculously cheap.
On the near left is the ‘All Access’ plan, which offers access to Netflix plus another 69 online services for just $6.99 per month or $16.99 per year. The range of services available is impressive, to say the least.
Movies and TV Shows: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO Now, Crunchyroll, DIRECTV/Now, Stream TV Live, CBS All Access, Funimation, Slingbox, Xfinity.
On the sports front: BT Sports, Fubo.tv, F1 Access, MLB.TV, NBA League Pass, NFL Game Pass, UFC Fight Pass, WWE Network.
For music, access is provided to Spotify, Deezer, Napster, Pandora, Saavn, SoundCloud, and TIDAL.
A small selection of the services available
How these services gain access to all of these accounts is shrouded in a level of secrecy but there’s little doubt that while some are obtained legitimately (perhaps through free trials or other account sharing), the roots of others are fairly questionable.
For example, when these services talk about ‘shared and ‘private’ Netflix accounts, the former often appear set up for someone else, with individual user accounts in other people’s names and suggestions for what to watch next already in place. In other words, these are live accounts already being paid for by someone, to which these services somehow gain access.
Indeed, there are notices on account generator platforms warning people not to mess with account passwords or payment details, since that could alert the original user or cause an account to get shut down for other reasons.
“Origin brings you great PC and Mac games. Play the latest RPGs, Shooters, Sim games, and more. These accounts are private (1 per person), however you MUST NOT change passwords,” one warning reads.
Since Origin has just come up, it’s probably a suitable juncture to mention the games services on offer. In addition to EA’s offering, one can gain access to Xbox Live, ESL Gaming, Good Old Games, League of Legends, Minecraft Premium, Steam (game keys) and Uplay.
And it doesn’t stop there.
Need a BitDefender key? No problem. Access to Creative Market? You got it. Want to do some online learning? Queue up for Chegg, CourseHero, Lynda, Mathway, Udemy, and more. There’s even free access to NYTimes Premium. As the image below shows, thousands of accounts are added all the time.
Thousands of accounts, all the time…
While these generator platforms are undoubtedly popular with people on a budget, almost everything about them feels wrong. Staring into someone’s private Netflix account, with what appear to be family names, is unsettling. Looking at their private email addresses and credit card details feels flat-out criminal.
Quite how these services are able to prosper isn’t clear but perhaps the big question is why the platforms whose accounts are being offered haven’t noticed some kind of pattern by now. Maybe they have, but it’s probably a pretty difficult task to sweep up the mess without a lot of false positives, not to mention the risks of ensnaring those who pay for their accounts officially.
The video below, from late 2016, gives a decent overview of how an account generator platform works. Even for many hardcore pirates, especially those who demand privacy and respect the same for others, parts of the viewing will be uncomfortable.
Triebwerkstest in der kommenden Woche, Start Ende des Monats: SpaceX bereitet den Erstflug seiner Schwerlastrakete Falcon Heavy vor. Erst muss aber eine andere Rakete des Raumfahrtunternehmens fliegen. (SpaceX, Elektroauto)
Triebwerkstest in der kommenden Woche, Start Ende des Monats: SpaceX bereitet den Erstflug seiner Schwerlastrakete Falcon Heavy vor. Erst muss aber eine andere Rakete des Raumfahrtunternehmens fliegen. (SpaceX, Elektroauto)
Gleich zu Beginn 2018 gibt es einen Anwärter auf den Titel Sicherheitslücke des Jahres, und im Netz beginnt das große Löschen. Wer kann uns da ein bisschen Eskapismus mit Games und Filmen verübeln? (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Sicherheitslücke)
Gleich zu Beginn 2018 gibt es einen Anwärter auf den Titel Sicherheitslücke des Jahres, und im Netz beginnt das große Löschen. Wer kann uns da ein bisschen Eskapismus mit Games und Filmen verübeln? (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Sicherheitslücke)
Three class action complaints have been filed against Intel over the Meltdown and Spectre CPU security flaws that were discovered by researchers earlier this year and widely publicized earlier this week.
The three lawsuits—filed in California, Indiana, and Oregon (PDF)—cite not just the security vulnerabilities and their potential impact, but also Intel's response time to them. Researchers notified Intel about the flaws in June. Now, Intel faces a big headache. The vast majority of its CPUs in use today are impacted, and more class action complaints may be filed beyond these three.
The three complaints also cite suggestions that devices using Intel's CPUs will see significant slowdown as a result of addressing the security flaws. However, that point is in some dispute. In the course of its various public efforts to mitigate damage and address concerns, Intel has publicly said in a statement that these concerns are overblown:
With no answers from Playgrounds‘ devs, we sleuth out the weirdest Switch patch yet.
Saber Interactive just updated its NBA Playgrounds game on the Switch, but not via a patch. You'll have to re-download the game after manually searching for it. The result: You can end up with both of these icons on your home screen. (The slightly glowier one is the "updated" one, if you're wondering.) (credit: Saber Interactive)
As a modern portable-gaming device, Nintendo Switch has its share of quirks and missing features, but one thing it's good at is serving easily downloaded patches and updates for games and apps. A major exception emerged on Thursday, however, with the bizarre introduction of a "new" game that actually serves as a patch and fix for an existing one.
NBA Playgrounds: Enhanced Edition launched on Nintendo's eShop store on Thursday with a promotional price of $10, though owners of the original NBA Playgrounds, which launched last May, see a different price: $0. The game's developers at Saber Interactive confirmed via their official Facebook page that this version of the game is effectively an "upgrade" of the original, complete with the new content and patches that already arrived for the game's other platforms.
One or more of the security vulnerabilities disclosed this week affect nearly every modern smartphone, PC, and server processor. Intel processor are vulnerable to both Meltdown and Spectre attacks. AMD chips are vulnerable to Spectre attacks. And the A…
One or more of the security vulnerabilities disclosed this week affect nearly every modern smartphone, PC, and server processor. Intel processor are vulnerable to both Meltdown and Spectre attacks. AMD chips are vulnerable to Spectre attacks. And the ARM-based processors that are used in most modern smartphones can fall prey to a Spectre attack as […]
Canadian software company Corel, known for iconic products such as CorelDRAW and Winzip, has a new anti-piracy patent. Instead of implementing tougher restrictions, the company proposes to reach out to pirates through a messaging system, offering ‘amnesty’ to those who are willing to pay up.
In recent years we have covered a wide range of newly-assigned patents with a clear anti-piracy angle.
From IBM’s printer that doesn’t copy infringing content, through NBC Universal’s piracy detection system, to Philips’ ambient lighting solution to camcording pirates in theaters.
Today we add another newly-awarded patent from software vendor Corel to the list. Known for its signature CorelDRAW and WinZIP software, the company has quite a bit of experience with sketchy pirates. This has cost a lot of money over the years, Corel claims.
“Software piracy has become a financial burden to the software industry as well. Popular software programs, sold in the tens or hundreds of millions, may have pirated versions numbering in the millions,” the company writes.
The software company notes that current anti-piracy tools are often easy to break or bypass, which makes them inadequate. In their patent, titled: “Software product piracy monetization process,” they, therefore, take a different approach.
Instead of blocking pirates outright, Corel proposes to engage with these people more directly. By sending a message in the form of a pop-up, for example.
“The message may include instructions to change the state of a feature property of the software product to alert a user that the software product is not legitimate,” the patent reads.
If pirate, then…
If someone is running a product with an invalid serial, he or she can be informed by the software. This can be a friendly note, but also one that threatens criminal charges unless the pirate agrees to an amnesty deal.
This creates a win-win situation where the pirate escapes prison and the publisher is paid, so to speak.
“The amnesty offer may, for example, agree not to bring criminal charges in exchange for the user purchasing a legitimate copy of the product,” Corel writes.
“In this manner, the user of the pirated version is given the opportunity to purchase a legitimate copy which, if acted on, increases revenue for the manufacturer.”
While the patent was recently awarded, the idea to monetize piracy in this way isn’t new. In fact, Malwarebytes has sent messages to pirating users for years, and also offered them amnesty and a free upgrade in the past.
Whether Corel has any intentions of implementing their own idea is yet unknown.
US-Grenzbeamte dürfen künftig nur noch bei einem begründeten Verdacht ein Mobilgerät sehr genau untersuchen. Eine neue Regelung schränkt die Befugnisse der Beamten etwas ein. Einen Durchsuchungsbeschluss, wie ihn die Bürgerrechtsorganisation ACLU gern hätte, brauchen sie aber immer noch nicht. (Politik/Recht, Security) 
Twitter verbietet offene Drohungen. Das gilt aber nicht für alle Nutzer: Ein höchst umstrittener Tweet von US-Präsident Donald Trump wird nicht gelöscht. Twitter begründet das mit dem öffentlichen Interesse an den Äußerungen von Politikern. (
Triebwerkstest in der kommenden Woche, Start Ende des Monats: SpaceX bereitet den Erstflug seiner Schwerlastrakete Falcon Heavy vor. Erst muss aber eine andere Rakete des Raumfahrtunternehmens fliegen. (
Gleich zu Beginn 2018 gibt es einen Anwärter auf den Titel Sicherheitslücke des Jahres, und im Netz beginnt das große Löschen. Wer kann uns da ein bisschen Eskapismus mit Games und Filmen verübeln? (
In recent years we have covered a wide range of newly-assigned patents with a clear anti-piracy angle.
You must be logged in to post a comment.