Month: June 2018

While torrent sites were once the next big thing, streaming is now at the height of fashion.

A shocking number of platforms now offer instant access to massive movie and TV shows libraries, something the authorities seem powerless to do much about. Over in Ukraine, authorities say they have made a start.

For the past nine years Onlainfilm has been serving up movies to the masses but this week all that came to an end when local cyberpolice shut the operation down.

Government and police investigators report that after detecting “members of a criminal group” behind the site, police carried out five raids in the city of Khmelnytskyi located in the west of Ukraine.

One of the searched locations

“Online movie theater ‘Onlainfilm’ was among the five most-visited sites in several countries,” police said in a statement.

“Every day, the site was visited by half a million Internet users, and the number of video views exceeded two million. The total amount of videos posted on the site exceeded 50 TB.”

While police haven’t yet announced how many people were arrested, the image below reveals that hardware, money, and other items were seized during their searches.

Like many other sites of a similar nature, Onlainfilm took precautions to reduce the chances of detection. Police say that its operators used a reverse proxy server which enabled it to relay visitors’ requests to other servers hidden elsewhere.

In such cases, prosecutors and copyright holders tend to lead up front with claims of millions in lost revenues caused by sites such as Onlainfilm. However, authorities say those figures won’t be released until “the necessary investigative actions” have been carried out.

Ukraine’s reputation for low levels of intellectual property crime protection has placed the country firmly in the crosshairs of the United States Trade Representative.

The country is currently on the Priority Watch List with the USTR recently reporting that Ukraine had failed to “implement an effective means to combat the widespread online infringement of copyright” in the country.

Although Ukraine was featured quite heavily for other reasons, Onlainfilm was not listed in the USTR’s 2017 list of Notorious Markets.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

In der Debatte um die EU-Urheberrechtsereform sind die Rollen klar verteilt. Während die Netzpolitiker in den Parteien gegen Leistungsschutzrecht und Uploadfilter sind, setzen sich Rechtspolitiker der Union und die Regierung dafür ein. Trotz des anderslautenden Koalitionsvertrags. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (Leistungsschutzrecht, Urheberrecht)

In der Debatte um die EU-Urheberrechtsereform sind die Rollen klar verteilt. Während die Netzpolitiker in den Parteien gegen Leistungsschutzrecht und Uploadfilter sind, setzen sich Rechtspolitiker der Union und die Regierung dafür ein. Trotz des anderslautenden Koalitionsvertrags. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (Leistungsschutzrecht, Urheberrecht)

A hacker has confirmed that Nintendo's Switch console now has code that can detect piracy and permanently ban your console from connecting online.

The hacker, SciresM, posted his findings on reddit after examining the Switch's code and explained just how Nintendo plans on stopping pirates.

Switch gamecarts are signed with a certificate that could be banned if Nintendo detects you're not using a legitimate copy. Games will connect online to an authentication server to check for the game's legitimacy. Repeated offences could see your console banned from connecting to online services.

Nintendo's drastic anti-piracy actions are in reaction to the jailbreaking of the Switch late last year, which has now allowed homebrew and pirated games to work on the popular console.

The hacking group that discovered the flaw, Team Xecutor, eventually released the SX Pro dongle that allows it to run custom firmware, SX OS to allow all this to happen. Both the device and the software are not free, which is why Team Xecutor may have taken the unusual step to put copy protection features in a software that disables copy protection.

UK-based security researcher Mike Heskin found out the hard way that such a security feature existed, when his Switch console was bricked by the copy protection code. The SX OS's copy protection will lock the Switch with a randomly generated password if it detects someone is trying to hack or reverse engineer the code. 

Heskin believes that even with normal usage of the custom firmware, the lock may engage and brick your console. Team Xecutor has since acknowledged the existence of the bricking code, but denied that it could be triggered by normal usage, while Heskin has confirmed that the bricking process can be reversed.

Heskin has also accused Team Xecutor of plagerising code.

[via The Inquirer, TorrentFreak]

Google Pay startet in Deutschland, Apple Pay nicht. VW schickt ein Auto auf einen Berg. Sieben Tage und viele Meldungen im Überblick. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Internet)

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Samsung’s DeX platform lets you connect some of the company’s latest smartphones to a dock to use the phone like a desktop computer. Soon you may be able to do the same thing with a Samsung tablet. According to SamMobile, the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 will be the first Samsung tablet with DeX support. […]

The post Report: Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 has DeX support, will work as secondary monitor appeared first on Liliputing.

The entertainment industries have repeatedly accused Google of not doing enough to limit piracy while demanding tougher action.

Ideally, groups including the MPAA and RIAA want search engines to remove clearly infringing websites from their search results entirely, especially if courts have previously found them to be acting illegally.

While Google doesn’t want to remove whole sites, the critique did prompt the company to make changes.

For example, in 2014 it updated its core algorithms aimed at lowering the visibility of “pirate” sites. Using the number of accurate DMCA requests as an indicator, these sites are demoted in search results for certain key phrases.

“Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results. This ranking change helps users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily,” Google explained.

While the effects were felt immediately, it’s been unclear how many sites were affected by the algorithmic change. This week, the search engine is filling in some of these blanks.

In a comment to Australian media, Google states that it has demoted 65,000 sites in search results, a list that’s still growing every week. In total, the company received DMCA takedown requests for over 1.8 million domain names, so a little under 4% of these are downranked.

The result of the measures is that people are less likely to see a pirate site when they type “watch movie X” or “download song Y.” This means that these sites see a drop in visitors from Google and a quite significant one too.

“Demotion results in sites losing around 90 percent of their visitors from Google Search,” a Google spokesperson told The Age.

Indeed, soon after the demotion signal was implemented, pirate sites were hit hard. However, pirates wouldn’t be pirates if they didn’t respond with their own countermeasures.

In recent years, many infringing sites have hopped from domain to domain, in part to circumvent the downranking efforts. In addition, Google’s measures also created an opportunity for smaller, less reputable, sites to catch search traffic that would otherwise go to the main players.

Overall, however, it’s probably safe to argue that Google’s demotion efforts lowered the search engine’s referrals to pirate sites.

That said, demands to do more won’t subside. In Australia, Village Roadshow co-chief Graham Burke has been especially vocal. He has accused Google of profiting from piracy-related traffic and wants the search engine to permanently remove infringing sites from search results.

Blaming piracy for declining revenues, Burke noted this week that there are “empty desks everywhere … we can’t compete with stolen goods being sold for free.” And he is not alone.

Google sees things differently of course. The company has repeatedly highlighted that it has taken several measures to address the piracy concerns, while noting that the entertainment industries have a responsibility of their own as well.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

The gaming-oriented Intel Hades Canyon NUC with an Intel Kaby Lake-G processor is technically the first of Intel’s min computers to feature an 8th-gen Intel processor. But the company’s first mainstream NUC systems with 8th-gen chips are coming later this year. While most older NUC systems featured the same kind of 15 watt processors you’d typically find […]

The post Intel’s next-gen NUC mini PCs will have 28W Coffee Lake processors appeared first on Liliputing.