Month: October 2018

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Released back in 2015, the Fuckr desktop application provides controversial enhanced access to the popular Grindr dating service.

Among other things, Fuckr gives Grindr users the ability to precisely locate hundreds of other users while revealing usually hidden information such as photos, HIV status, and even preferred sexual positions.

Early September, Grindr hit Fuckr with a DMCA notice, targeted at its official Github repository. Fuckr was taken down by Github but perhaps surprisingly, its developer ‘tomlandia’ chose to fight back.

Responding with a DMCA counter-notice, ‘tomlandia’ denied Grindr’s assertion that Fuckr “facilitate[s] unauthorized access to the Grindr app by circumventing Grindr’s access controls” and refuting that it circumvents “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work” protected under the Copyright Act.

Github policy determines that this counter-notice would trigger the reinstatement of Fuckr within 14 days but as highlighted in our earlier article, it also opened up a can of worms for both Grindr and ‘tomlandia’.

If Grindr wanted to keep the tool down it would have to sue ‘tomlandia’ in the United States, meaning that an expensive legal process would ensue. It would be a put-up-or-shut-up moment for both parties, but with Grindr clearly having the most resources, the experience would probably prove financially uncomfortable for ‘tomlandia’ at best and potentially ruinous if a court eventually ruled against him.

It now transpires that ‘tomlandia’ wants no part in this kind of war. Probably recognizing the impossible situation he finds himself in, the developer has now backed away. In a fresh communication with Github, ‘tomlandia’ suggests that having his software reinstated on Github isn’t a big enough prize to warrant a fight with Grindr’s lawyers.

“I wish to retract my DMCA counter notice concerning my repository tomlandia/fuckr,” he writes.

“While I don’t believe my code infringes Grindr LLC’s copyright in any way, I am no longer willing to face legal action in a foreign court simply to keep this project hosted on Github.”

There are a couple of interesting pieces of information in the retraction, not least the suggestion that ‘tomlandia’ isn’t located in the United States. Being sued in a foreign court is rarely fun and never cheap, so financial considerations certainly played a part in this withdrawal.

Perhaps more importantly, however, is that ‘tomlandia’ still maintains that his software creation does not infringe on Grindr’s copyrights in any way. Of course, this is the kind of thing that would need to be determined by a court, which brings us back to the potential David versus Goliath battle that ‘tomlandia’ is trying to avoid.

The situation is certainly interesting, since it raises important questions about the nature of the DMCA.

While copyright holders often complain about the law’s ineffectiveness, DMCA takedown notices (when filed against sites like Github) wield considerable power. They have the ability to neutralize allegedly infringing content almost immediately but if targets dare to dispute the notice, they immediately sign up to an expensive legal battle.

This situation may be tolerable if both parties are healthy corporations but when a company like Grindr targets a Github developer, the former is almost certainly in a position to outgun the latter. Put simply, unless you’re prepared to lose everything, fighting one of these cases is completely out of the question for most people.

We’ll probably never know if Fuckr was indeed infringing Grindr’s copyrights but due to the way the DMCA works, victory, in this case, has been determined by those with the deepest pockets. And all they had to do was send a single email to Github and let fear do the rest.

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

Enlarge / Archaeologists excavated the skeleton from a fifth-century cemetery in the Umbria region of Italy. (credit: David Picked/Stanford University)

Archaeologists have discovered the skeleton of a 10-year-old child at an ancient Roman site in Italy with a rock carefully placed in its mouth. This suggests those who buried the child—who probably died of malaria during a deadly fifth century outbreak—feared it might rise from the dead and spread the disease to those who survived. Locals are calling it the "Vampire of Lugnano."

"This is a very unusual mortuary treatment that you see in various forms in different cultures, especially in the Roman world," says Jordan Wilson, a graduate student in bio-archaeology at the University of Arizona who studied the remains. He added that this could "indicate a fear that this person might come back from the dead and try to spread disease to the living."

Pretty much every culture on Earth has some version of a vampire (or proto-vampire) myth. Chinese folklore has the k'uei, which are reanimated corpses that rise from the grave to prey on the living; one type has sharp fangs, the better to bite into the neck of said prey. Russian, Albanian, Indian, and Greek folklore have similar undead monsters. Russian villagers in the Middle Ages often drove stakes into the bodies of suspected vampires upon burial to keep them from rising again.

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Enlarge / The Apple TV 4K and remote. (credit: Samuel Axon)

As we observed in our review last year, the Apple TV 4K has so much potential for gaming. Its hardware is actually pretty powerful given the type of device it is. It shares development tools and infrastructure with one of the most successful gaming marketplaces in the world—the iPhone and iPad App Store. But a recent announcement shows that, instead of thriving as a gaming platform, Apple TV is struggling.

Last month, users who logged in to the Apple TV version of Minecraft were greeted with a message telling them that the game's support for the Apple TV would end. Minecraft is one of the most popular video games, and its particular resonance with families and its relatively undemanding hardware requirements made it seem like a natural fit for the platform.

Unfortunately, that fit was not to be. This is the message users saw:

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During the early days of BitTorrent, bandwidth was relatively scarce.

Torrent sites encouraged users to keep their clients running, to ensure that downloads would finish in ‘just’ a few hours.

Torrent streaming requires even more bandwidth. To address this, a group of top researchers came up with a new idea. What if we treated bandwidth as a currency?

“P2P dies or thrives depending on how much upload people donate. By introducing electronic ‘currency’ for uploads the researchers think they can make P2P HDTV Video on Demand possible,” we wrote, back in 2007.

That idea from the Tribler team was first shared with the world more than ten years ago. It wasn’t without controversy. Some loved it, but others, including someone going by the name of BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen, were rather skeptical.

“This will never work. Tit-for-tat is perfect. Give-to-get won’t work because the top dogs would take all the upload for themselves, thus you get no swarm,” he wrote, before adding some more context in follow-up comments.

The commentary didn’t stop the researchers. Working from Harvard University and the main research lab at Delft University of Technology, they raised millions in funding to continue the project. And it’s still thriving today.

The Tribler team currently has more than 45 masters students, various thesis students, five dedicated scientific developers, and several professors involved. Aside from the ‘bandwidth as currency’ idea, Tribler also implemented several anonymity features over the years.

In January they released their first version with an integrated blockchain and tokens. This week, they moved a step further. The latest Tribler 7.1 release now has a fully functional token market, which allows users to convert bandwidth into Bitcoin.

“This is now slowly becoming a reliable and sustainable token economy,” Tribler leader professor Johan Pouwelse tells TF.

The Tribler torrent client is unique in that it’s entirely decentralized. The search results that appear when users type in a keyword don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come directly from other peers.

Users of the application can exchange data with users of other clients, of course, but the tokens are only shared within the network.

The blockchain approach is not unique. While Tron’s proposal is catching most headlines, also because of its acquisition of BitTorrent Inc., there are others working on similar sharing economies.

“Tron is the latest team to begin working on this idea. Many teams are dreaming of turning idle computers into cash cows. Filecoin, Sia, Storj, MaidSafe, and Tron are all presenting their own version of this concept. All incompatible. All different,” professor Pouwelse says.

One of the reasons why bandwidth is extra valuable in the Tribler network is due to the built-in anonymity options. Tribler provides users with pseudo-anonymity by routing the transfers through other users. This means that the amount of bandwidth used by the application increases as well.

To support this Tor-like onion routing, the Tribler team itself operates several exit nodes. These already generate at least one terabyte per day, as can be seen below, and the network is slowly moving to end-to-end encryption.

The project doesn’t have a budget that can compete with major crypto projects. However, they have been in this game the longest of all and, operating from a stable academic environment, they’re not in any rush either.

“There is one thing more precious than money, and that’s time,” Pouwelse notes, adding that there are hundreds of students available who can contribute to the Tribler project for free, as part of their education.

“With 950 starting computer science students and 75 ‘Blockchain Engineering’ masters graduating each year, Delft University is now the number one blockchain powerhouse in Europe,” professor Pouwelse says.

Whether time or money is the main advantage, the success of all these blockchain-related projects relies on how good they really are, and how they work on a broader scale. Will they mostly benefit the ‘bandwidth-rich,’ or does the entire ecosystem profit?

Quite frankly, there is no answer to this question yet.

Perhaps it’s a good idea to end with a comment from Bram Cohen as well, again dating back 11 years.

“I wish the Tribler team the best of luck. They’re going to need it. :) Over and out.”

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

Enlarge / Danny Rand (Finn Jones), aka the Immortal Iron Fist, will not be fighting evil on Netflix anymore. (credit: Netflix)

We here at Ars were quite pleased with the vastly improved second season of Iron Fist, arguably the least popular of all the Netflix Defenders series. The writing and fight choreography were better in season 2, the characters and their relations were more fully developed, and it had a thematically interesting premise in its exploration of the nature of power. Plus it ended with one hell of a plot twist.

So we were looking forward to how the writers built on all that in season 3. Alas, Netflix has abruptly canceled the series, informing the cast just a few hours after the odd decision, Deadline reports. It's the first time the axe has fallen for one of the Netflix Defenders series.

Here is the joint statement from Netflix and Marvel in full:

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