Grindr Will Now Have to Sue Fuckr to Keep Controversial Tool Down

The company behind dating app Grindr recently filed a DMCA notice to have the allegedly-infringing Fuckr desktop application taken down from Github. With Grindr playing Whac-a-Mole with more than 90 forks of Fuckr, the company has a new and bigger problem. The creator of Fuckr has contested Grindr’s copyright claim, meaning that Grindr will now have to sue to stop it reappearing.

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

Released back in 2015, the Fuckr desktop application provides enhanced access to the popular Grindr dating service. However, the extra features offered by the software are controversial, to say the least.

Fuckr gives users the ability to precisely locate hundreds of Grindr users to an accuracy of just a few feet. In addition, Fuckr offers access to a trove of information about Grindr users not freely available, including photos, HIV status, and even their preferred sexual position.

Early September, following an exposé by Queer Europe, Grindr decided to end Fuckr’s party. The company filed a DMCA notice with Github, where the application’s code was hosted. This resulted in Fuckr being taken down.

As reported Tuesday, Grindr is still battling availability of the software. Dozens of ‘forks’ of Fuckr were still available for download from Github so, in response, Grindr filed a new notice with the coding platform. It targeted around 90 Fuckr clones, all of which were taken down by Github. Now, however, Grindr has another problem on its hands.

When content is taken down following the filing of a DMCA notice, the target of the notice (in this case a user called ‘tomlandia’) has the right to issue a DMCA counter-notice. This is a challenge to the statement of facts in the original notice and will usually point out deficiencies therein.

In its original complaint, Grindr claimed that Fuckr “facilitate[s] unauthorized access to the Grindr app by circumventing Grindr’s access controls,” adding that the software was primarily designed for the purpose of “circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work” protected under the Copyright Act.

In a DMCA counter-notice filed this week, ‘tomlandia’ argues that Grindr’s claims are false. After confirming that he is indeed the creator of Fuckr, the Github user offers a short rejection of the dating app’s copyright complaint..

“Fuckr does not bypass any technical access control mechanism and does not access any work copyrighted by Grindr LLC,” the notice reads.

“I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good-faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.”

Fuckr DMCA counter-notice

While DMCA takedown notices themselves can be filed at will with almost no consequences when they’re inaccurate, DMCA counter-notices open up a can of worms for those who file them, as Github explains.

“Submitting a DMCA counter notice can have real legal consequences. If the complaining party disagrees that their takedown notice was mistaken, they might decide to file a lawsuit against you to keep the content disabled,” the code platform says.

“You should conduct a thorough investigation into the allegations made in the takedown notice and probably talk to a lawyer before submitting a counter notice.”

Neither Grindr or TF has been able to contact ‘tomlandia’ to ask whether he sought legal advice but by submitting the counter-notice, he opens himself up to potential legal action. Github explains that copyright complaints can prove complicated, highlighting the very reason given by Grindr for taking Fuckr down.

“Sometimes a takedown notice might allege infringement in a way that seems odd or indirect. Copyright laws are complicated and can lead to some unexpected results,” Github notes.

“In some cases a takedown notice might allege that your source code infringes because of what it can do after it is compiled and run. For example: The notice may claim that your software is used to circumvent access controls to copyrighted works.”

While the argument over whether that really is the case with Fuckr probably lies with lawyers and ultimately the Court, the counter-notice from ‘tomlandia’ now sets in motion a process in which Grindr will either have to put up or shut up.

For the next 10 to 14 days, Github will keep the Fuckr repository down and if the company doesn’t hear anything from Grindr during that period, the repository will go back up. However, if Grindr believes its claim is valid, it will be forced to take swift legal action against ‘tomlandia’ to ensure Github doesn’t reactivate the repo.

If ‘tomlandia’ is in the United States, his counter-notice states that he consents for legal action to go ahead in the “jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which [his] address is located” or the Northern District of California where GitHub is located.

Only time will tell where the battle, if one is to take place, will be fought.

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

California amends rules to push vehicles toward hydrogen, electricity, biofuel

Utilities will earn credits for electric car charging stations and subsidize EV purchases.

Electric car being charged

Enlarge / Detail of the plug of an electric car being charged (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, California's Air Resources Board (CARB) announced that it would tighten restrictions on transportation fuels in the state in the hopes of spurring adoption of electric, hydrogen, and biofuel-based cars, trucks, buses, and even planes.

Since 2011, CARB has had a Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) on the books that requires a 10 percent reduction in "carbon intensity" for all fuels sold in California by 2020. Carbon intensity for fuels takes into account lifecycle carbon emissions, including any emissions created processing oil into gasoline, processing feedstock into ethanol, or transporting a fuel from a refinery to the point of sale.

With CARB's decision on Friday, the lifecycle emissions for transportation fuels needs to drop by 20 percent by 2030.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Strands of hair shed light on doomed 19th-century Arctic expedition

The final days of Franklin’s 1846 expedition have long been a tragic mystery.

Article intro image

Enlarge (credit: John Wilson Carmichael)

Lead poisoning may have made life difficult for the doomed men of John Franklin’s 1845 expedition, which got lost in the Arctic while in search of the Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But it probably didn’t contribute much to their inevitable fates. That’s the conclusion of a new study of lead concentrations in the hair of one of the men who died while the expedition was stranded on King William Island between late 1846 and early 1848.

129 Doomed Men

Captain Sir John Franklin’s expedition wasn’t the first to sail north in search of a passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and it wasn’t the last. But its disappearance left behind a compelling mystery, one kept in the public consciousness for years by the tireless efforts of Franklin’s widow. For years in the late 19th century, the search for the lost sailing ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus nearly rivaled the search for the Northwest Passage itself.

Thanks to a note found in 1869 on King William Island, we know that all was well on the wooden ships in May of 1847, aside from being stuck in the ice. But by April of 1848, 24 men had died, including Franklin and the expedition’s assistant surgeon, naturalist Harry Goodsir. The remaining 105 had abandoned their trapped ships and set off across the ice to try to reach Back River on the Canadian mainland. Neither ship would be seen again for over 150 years. A century and a half later, historians are still debating exactly what went wrong.

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The US would suffer some of the biggest costs of climate change

The exact cost estimates vary, but the US consistently ranks near the top.

Satellite view of a hurricane.

Enlarge / Hurricane Florence the morning of Sept. 12 as it churned across the Atlantic in a west-northwesterly direction with winds of 130 miles an hour. (credit: NASA Johnson)

Climate change is a classic tragedy of the commons: every country acting in its own self-interest contributes to depleting a joint resource, making the world worse for everyone. If you’ve ever lived with bad roommates, the concept will be easy to grasp. The social cost of carbon (or SCC) is a way to put a price tag on the result of that tragedy, quantifying just how much climate change will cost the world over the coming generations.

But a paper in Nature Climate Change this week tries to bring the cost closer to home by estimating what the SCC could be for each different country. These new calculations point to a wide range of different cost possibilities but with a few consistent messages: the cost is likely to be higher than previous estimates; the US will be one of the worst-hit countries; and many of the countries contributing the least to the problem will be slammed regardless.

Transparency, uncertainty, and rigor

The concept of SCC has been around for a long time, with a huge range of different ways to calculate it. Because it’s impossible to know for sure what the future holds, those estimates end up with quite different outcomes depending on the assumptions they make. For instance, it’s impossible to know for sure what economic growth will be, and so different educated guesses about that will lead to different SCC estimates.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

These 19th-century astronomical drawings show the beauty of cosmos

French illustrator Étienne Léopold Trouvelot wanted to capture public’s imagination.

Étienne Léopold Trouvelot

We live in a golden age of astrophotography, with a feast of jaw-dropping images from the farthest reaches of space crossing our news feeds on a daily basis. But sometimes it's good to revisit the imagery of our pre-photographic past—in this case, the work of 19th-century illustrator Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. The Frenchman, once dubbed the "prince of observers," produced some 7000 astronomical illustrations over his lifetime, and we're featuring some of the best of them here.

Trouvelot was born in Aisne, France, but his political leanings put him at odds with Napoleon Bonaparte. After Napoleon's 1852 coup d'état, Trouvelot fled the country with his family in 1855 and landed in the Medford suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Trained as an artist, nature illustrator, and printmaker, Trouvelot fell in love with astronomy after witnessing several auroras, and he began illustrating the amateur observations he spied through his small telescope.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ars vs. bugs round 2: We taste scorpions, meal worms, and ants

Prepped by an expert chef, bugs can fade into a complex dish.

Chips and guacamole sprinkled with crickets.

Enlarge / Yes, those are crickets adorning this otherwise standard chips-and-guac. (credit: John Timmer)

Around this time last year, one of our intrepid staff members took on something that's on the verge of being a culinary trend: eating bugs. In Beth's case, this involved incorporating cricket-based flour into a traditional muffin recipe. The results were anything but positive.

Still, that was just one implementation of a single type of bug—we hadn't really given eating them the traditional Ars "thoroughly reviewed" exploration. So, when an opportunity presented itself to try a much larger assortment of insects (and a couple arachnids) prepared in a variety of ways, I quickly signed up.

Why bugs, why now?

Part of the reason is that it isn't actually "now." Cultures all over the world have been incorporating insects into their cuisine for ages. Many of us have only become aware of bug-eating as a result of the development of travel-eating as a television genre, popularized by people like Andrew Zimmerman and the late Anthony Bourdain.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Funklöcher: 1.100 neue Mobilfunkstandorte werden errichtet

Hessen fördert den Mobilfunkausbau auf dem Land. Auch die drei Netzbetreiber haben eine Absichtserklärung abgegeben. Die Telekom setzt auch auf Single-RAN-Technik mit LTE 900. (Long Term Evolution, Telekom)

Hessen fördert den Mobilfunkausbau auf dem Land. Auch die drei Netzbetreiber haben eine Absichtserklärung abgegeben. Die Telekom setzt auch auf Single-RAN-Technik mit LTE 900. (Long Term Evolution, Telekom)

Office-Paket: Microsoft stoppt Arbeit an Touch-Versionen von Office

Für die Touch-Versionen von Microsofts Office-Software wird es keine neuen Funktionen geben. Der Hersteller bietet die Versionen weiterhin an, konzentriert sich aber bei der weiteren Arbeit auf andere Plattformen. (Office, Microsoft)

Für die Touch-Versionen von Microsofts Office-Software wird es keine neuen Funktionen geben. Der Hersteller bietet die Versionen weiterhin an, konzentriert sich aber bei der weiteren Arbeit auf andere Plattformen. (Office, Microsoft)

Einigung mit Börsenaufsicht: Elon Musk muss als Verwaltungsratschef zurücktreten

Einige Tweets kosten Tesla 40 Millionen US-Dollar und Elon Musk sein Amt als Verwaltungsratschef beim Elektroautobauer. CEO darf Musk aber bleiben. Beinahe wären er und Tesla wesentlich günstiger davon gekommen. (Elon Musk, Börse)

Einige Tweets kosten Tesla 40 Millionen US-Dollar und Elon Musk sein Amt als Verwaltungsratschef beim Elektroautobauer. CEO darf Musk aber bleiben. Beinahe wären er und Tesla wesentlich günstiger davon gekommen. (Elon Musk, Börse)

Suchmaschine im iPhone-Browser: Google zahlt Apple geschätzte 9 Milliarden US-Dollar

Die Verträge sind streng geheim, daher gibt es nur Schätzungen. Google soll in diesem Jahr 9 Milliarden US-Dollar an Apple zahlen, damit iPhone-Nutzer im Safari-Browser standardmäßig die Google-Suche verwenden. Im nächsten Jahr erhöht sich die Zahlung …

Die Verträge sind streng geheim, daher gibt es nur Schätzungen. Google soll in diesem Jahr 9 Milliarden US-Dollar an Apple zahlen, damit iPhone-Nutzer im Safari-Browser standardmäßig die Google-Suche verwenden. Im nächsten Jahr erhöht sich die Zahlung deutlich. (Apple, Google)