Month: August 2018

Zu den Olympischen Spielen 2020 in Tokio sollen selbstfahrende Taxis die Besucher transportieren. An einer ersten kommerziellen Testlinie gibt es großes Interesse. (Autonomes Fahren, Nvidia)

Vierfache 4K-Auflösung mit aktueller Panel-Technologie: LG hat einen 88-Zoll-Fernseher mit OLED vorgestellt, Samsung die neue QLED-Generation mit 65 Zoll bis 85 Zoll und eigenem Chip für 8K-Upscaling. (8K, OLED)

Playing retro games is a popular pastime of some of the most avid game fanatics, who can’t always feed their urge through official channels.

Some titles are more than two decades old and no longer legally available. This gap has always been filled by emulators and ROMs sites. However, these have come under fire recently.

Last month Nintendo filed a complaint at a federal court in Arizona, accusing LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co of massive copyright and trademark infringement.

This case might soon be settled, but not without causing collateral damage. Following the legal campaign, several sites stopped offering ROMs, to avoid millions of dollars in potential damages.

While these decisions are understandable, not everyone is equally impressed by the show of legal force. The niche pirate site ‘Good Old Downloads,’ for example, sees the ROMs controversy as a good opportunity to expand its catalog. With retro games.

Coming soon…

The new section is “coming soon” according to the site’s homepage. While no further details are listed, it is now linked to a Tweet which makes it rather clear what motivated ‘Good Old Downloads’ to add retro-titles.

The tweet embeds a video showing recent press coverage of the Nintendo lawsuit and the related shutdowns. Towards the end, it shows a clip from “Age of Ultron” where Thanos’ face is replaced by the site’s logo.

“Fine, I’ll do it myself,” he says.

The head..

Should've gone for the head.

Video Credit: MnSXx pic.twitter.com/iteEfXpNkp

— Good Old Downloads (@goddownloads) August 23, 2018

In recent weeks, thousands of gamers have been deprived of their favorite ROM sources. They will surely welcome Good Old Download’s most recent expansion plans.

That said, ROMs haven’t been particularly hard to find through traditional pirate sources. For example, shortly after Nintendo announced its lawsuit, one Demonoid user uploaded torrents featuring thousands of ROMs to the site, including tiles belonging to the Japanese game giant.

Nintendo is obviously not going to like this public deviance. But whether they will act on it is another matter.

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

Hebt Uber in zwei Jahren in Paris ab? Oder wird eher eine indische oder japanische Metropole das Testfeld für den Dienst Uber Air? In einigen Monaten will Uber bekanntgeben, wo außerhalb der USA die Lufttaxis des Fahrdienstes abheben werden. (Boeing, Technologie)

Google bringt nach langer Wartezeit seinen smarten Lautsprecher Home Max nach Deutschland. Im Vergleich mit Apples Homepod sowie der Klangreferenz zeigt sich: Der Home Max hat tolle Mikrofone und einen guten Klang - aber nicht den besten. Ein Test von Ingo Pakalski (Home Max, Google)

Google hat ein Update für Android Wear 2 angekündigt. Damit soll die Bedienung vereinfacht werden; der Smartwatch-Nutzer soll schneller als bisher an seine Informationen gelangen. (Ifa 2018, Google)

Wie bei der Vorstellung des U12+ angekündigt, bringt HTC in diesem Jahr kein weiteres Topsmartphone in den Handel. Stattdessen hat der Hersteller auf der Ifa das U12 Life vorgestellt, ein gut ausgestattetes Mittelklasse-Smartphone mit Dualkamera und interessant geschliffener Rückseite. Ein Hands on von Tobias Költzsch (Ifa 2018, Smartphone)

The VPN industry is highly competitive. Combined with a userbase which tends to be more suspicious than the average Internet user, this is a volatile mix.

In recent weeks there have been a series of allegations lodged against NordVPN. The company is being linked to Lithuanian tech company Tesonet, which offers a wide range of services and products. According to the allegations, Tesonet owns NordVPN, a claim the latter denies.

This turns out to be problematic for some, as Tesonet is involved in data mining practices, and the company also runs a residential proxy network. While there is no evidence that NordVPN is involved in any of that, it’s enough to feed conspiracies.

The situation didn’t improve when Tesonet was sued by Luminati, the company behind the “not so private” VPN service Hola. The complaint accuses Tesonet of infringing Luminati’s proxy patents and NordVPN is listed is the suit as well, with the claim that it had a business relationship with Hola.

TorrentFreak previously asked NordVPN about the allegations and the company said that they are operated by the Panamese company Tefincom, which also has the NordVPN trademark. Tesonet is closely related to the company, but it doesn’t legally own and never owned NordVPN.

NordVPN initially opted not to comment publicly but that changed when a new storm of mostly ‘fake’ Twitter accounts (many of which were created years ago but have only tweeted on this particular issue) made themselves heard over the past days.

“We realized that remaining silent is no longer an option and we must respond for the sake of our reputation,” NordVPN wrote in a recent blog post.

NordVPN responds to several claims including that they are operating the same way as Hola, by selling users’ bandwidth. This is something anyone can verify independently, they say, by monitoring their traffic via a network monitoring application.

“Anyone with Wireshark (or any other similar app) and some networking knowledge can perform a network scan, check all requests made by the NordVPN application, and verify their destinations. The results will prove that the web scraping accusations are false,” the company writes.

The patent infringement lawsuit, which these allegations can be traced back to, doesn’t mention NordVPN as one of the proxying apps. However, it does claim that HolaVPN and NordVPN had a business relationship. This is “misleading,” the VPN states in its response.

“HolaVPN was one of many minor affiliate partners and would refer users who canceled Hola to NordVPN. We would pay a small commission for the referral,” NordVPN writes.

While NordVPN admits that Tesonet is a partner, it stresses that they were never in any way been related to other projects developed by Tesonet.

The company describes the allegations as an organized smear campaign and points out that this was in large part driven by competitors. To back up its position and address any doubt, they are also taking concrete action.

“We understand that these facts alone may not be enough to clear our name,” NordVPN writes.

“Therefore, we are hiring one of the largest professional service firms in the world to run an independent audit and verify our ‘no logs’ claim. The audit is expected to be completed within 2 months and will independently verify that the accusations are false.”

NordVPN’s full response is available on the company’s blog. A copy of the aforementioned patent infringement complaint can be found here (pdf).

—

TF note: We do not make a habit of reporting on these type of issues but felt that since NordVPN is one of our sponsors, we should address it. This article was written independently, as per standard TF policy. We trust that people can make up their own minds.

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

Mit seiner dritten Smartwatch WSD-F30 setzt Casio nicht nur die Tradition des sperrigen Namens fort, sondern entwickelt seine Outdoor-Uhr auch weiter. Das Dual-Display kann im akkuschonenden LCD-Modus nicht mehr nur die Zeit anzeigen, sondern auch Messwerte. Preiswert und klein ist die Uhr allerdings nicht. Ein Hands on von Tobias Költzsch (Ifa 2018, OLED)

Das Safety Critical Project for Linux OS (SCL) von Intel soll eine neue Linux-Distribution mit Fokus auf Sicherheit erstellen. Diese Distribution soll in autonomen Robotern, Drohnen, Autos und kritischer Infrastruktur zum Einsatz kommen. (Intel, Linux)