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As expected, Barnes & Noble is getting back into the tablet game. The new B&N NOOK Tablet 10.1 is up for pre-order for $130 and it should start shipping November 18th. You might want to wait though — B&N has already announced it’…
As expected, Barnes & Noble is getting back into the tablet game. The new B&N NOOK Tablet 10.1 is up for pre-order for $130 and it should start shipping November 18th. You might want to wait though — B&N has already announced it’ll be on sale for $10 if you buy the tablet between Nov […]
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Amazon’s starting to spill the beans on some upcoming Black Friday deals (expect $24 Amazon Echo Dots, $35 Amazon Fire TV 4Ks, and $50 Amazon Fire HD 8 tablets, among other things). Something to keep in mind is that the company offers some deals …
Amazon’s starting to spill the beans on some upcoming Black Friday deals (expect $24 Amazon Echo Dots, $35 Amazon Fire TV 4Ks, and $50 Amazon Fire HD 8 tablets, among other things). Something to keep in mind is that the company offers some deals exclusively to Amazon Prime members… but another thing to keep in […]
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The single-board computer space has sort of blown up in the six years since Raspberry Pi released its first credit card-sized computer. Over the past year, we’ve seen a number of models powered by Rockchip’s RK3399 hexa-core processor. But …
The single-board computer space has sort of blown up in the six years since Raspberry Pi released its first credit card-sized computer. Over the past year, we’ve seen a number of models powered by Rockchip’s RK3399 hexa-core processor. But the latest isn’t so much a single-board PC as an entire ecosystem of products designed around […]
The post Khadas Edge is a hacker-friendly single-board PC… and ecosystem (crowdfunding) appeared first on Liliputing.
The director of The Man From Earth and The Man From Earth: Holocene has done a complete 180 on the benefits of movie piracy. In 2007, the first movie soared in popularity due to word-of-mouth marketing by BitTorrent users so the sequel was put up on torrents by its makers early this year. Now, however, pirates apparently pose an “existential threat” to all creators.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
With a backdrop of Hollywood waging war on pirates and pirate sites, 2007 delivered a ray of light for BitTorrent users and filmmakers alike.
After being produced on a tiny budget, an almost unknown independent sci-fi film called “The Man From Earth” appeared on pirate sites after someone obtained a promotional screener and uploaded it to the Internet, weeks before its official release.
While this type of development is often labeled as disastrous by movie executives, The Man From Earth director Richard Schenkman was very upbeat indeed.
“A week or two before the DVD’s ‘street date’, we jumped 11,000% on the IMDb ‘Moviemeter’ and we were shocked,” Schenkman told TorrentFreak at the time.
Piracy had been labeled as a great promotional vehicle before but the team behind the movie really embraced it, with producer Eric Wilkinson writing to the operators of RLSlog, a once-popular piracy links site – to thank them for their support.
“Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download,” Wilkinson said.
“Most of the feedback from everyone who has downloaded ‘The Man From Earth’ has been overwhelmingly positive. People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the net!”
The Man From Earth went on to win multiple awards and did really well on Netflix, so it was a nice development when the movie’s sequel – The Man from Earth: Holocene – appeared on The Pirate Bay upon release earlier this year. This time, however, the team had decided to ‘leak’ the movie themselves, hoping to follow the success of the original more than ten years earlier.
“It was going to get uploaded regardless of what we did or didn’t do, and we figured that as long as this was inevitable, we would do the uploading ourselves and explain why we were doing it,” Schenkman told TF.
“And, we would once again reach out to the filesharing community and remind them that while movies may be free to watch, they are not free to make, and we need their support.”
The team hoped that pirates would flock to the movie’s ‘tip jar’ while using word-of-mouth advertising to ensure that the sequel did as well as the original. When speaking to TF in January 2018, Schenkman was really upbeat and enthusiastic but somewhere on the way, something went wrong – very wrong indeed.
In a new piece published by pro-industry, anti-piracy alliance Creative Future, Schenkman rips into pirates big and small. While noting that the sci-fi sequel has been downloaded almost a million times with uncounted streaming views on top, just 7,000 people supported it with donations.
“If each one of the illegal downloaders (to say nothing of the streamers) had donated just one dollar, we would have already broken even on Holocene and been well on the road toward making our next film. Alas, most people aren’t willing – or able – to pay even that much,” Schenkman says.
But while individual pirates didn’t dig as deeply as Schenkman would’ve liked, he says his venture also fell victim to commercially motivated pirates who took his movie, hired actors, and had it professionally dubbed in Russian – all without permission.
“[I] learned through this experiment that there are people who don’t merely pirate a film, but who are willing to take full advantage of producers like us – who, remember, are offering our movie for free – for their own profit,” he explains.
“I’m talking about Green Ray, a Russian ‘distribution company’ that created a dubbed version of Holocene and offered it on their website. Not only did they do so without any permission, but they removed my donation preface and replaced it with an advertisement so they could monetize it.”
Schenkman says he wrote to Green Ray’s operators, suggesting that in the absence of them leaving the donation elements intact, a revenue-sharing arrangement might be in order. To date, the site has not offered a response.
While it could be argued that Green Ray’s adaption of The Man from Earth: Holocene ensured the movie could be enjoyed by a new audience, the commercial exploitation of the movie in this manner is extremely blatant, to say the least, so it’s hardly a surprise that Schenkman is disappointed.
“Clearly, there is an audience in Russia who cares about seeing a high-quality version of our movie. Perhaps this same audience would have even been willing to pay the actual filmmakers behind the movie to watch it. Now, we will never know,” he says.
Despite his early love affair with pirates (which appeared to still exist early this year), the director now finds himself singing the same anti-piracy tune as the majority of film creators around him. Movies aren’t free to make, he points out, so people need to understand they can’t be free to watch either.
“The lion’s share of films that get released aren’t studio blockbusters, but super low-budget projects from independent filmmakers who struggled just to get their films produced in the first place – and who are very lucky if they break even on them,” he says.
Of course, it’s difficult for Schenkman to deny that the original movie benefited greatly from pirates and that his team believed that the sequel could follow in its footsteps. But now, barely 10 months on, he’s done a complete 180, noting that if there’s no financial support for the people who make them, movies like his won’t be made.
“We need to educate our audience to understand that we are the same as them: working people who love cinema. Piracy poses an existential threat to all of us,” he concludes.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a high-end camera powered by Android, but Chinese device maker Yongnuo seems to have a new one one the way. The company’s new mirrorless camera supports interchangeable lenses and has a 16MP Four Thi…
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a high-end camera powered by Android, but Chinese device maker Yongnuo seems to have a new one one the way. The company’s new mirrorless camera supports interchangeable lenses and has a 16MP Four Thirds image sensor and support for RAW image capture and 4K video at 30 frames […]
The post Yongnuo YN450 is an Android-powered mirrorless camera appeared first on Liliputing.
Gab continues to be popular with antisemites.
Enlarge / A woman stands at a memorial outside the Tree of Life synagogue after a shooting there left 11 people dead in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh on October 27. (credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
Gab, the "free speech" social media site that's popular with the alt-right, is back online.
"We will never get [sic] up, we will never give in," founder Andrew Torba wrote in a Sunday evening post on the site. "Free speech and liberty will always win."
Gab was forced offline in the wake of last month's deadly shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The shooter appears to have been a Gab user, and his final Gab post prior to the shooting attacked the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a non-profit refugee resettlement group: "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
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Antibodies made in a llama protected mice from sixty flu strains.
Enlarge / The flu virus, showing the H and N proteins on its surface. (credit: CDC)
Llama antibodies are different from ours. Our antibodies are a mix of two pairs of proteins, heavy and light, wrapped around each other. Llamas, camels, and sharks all use only a pair of heavy chains. Because they are smaller, they can wedge into molecular crevices that our larger antibodies can’t access. Perhaps that’s why scientists based at The Scripps Institute decided to use them as a basis for flu protection.
There are four types of influenza viruses, creatively termed A, B, C, and D. Influenzas A and B are responsible for seasonal epidemics in humans, and influenza A is the one that causes pandemics. Influenza A viruses are further divided into subtypes based on two proteins on the surface of the virus: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). There are 18 different hemagglutinin subtypes and 11 different N subtypes, leading to nomenclature like H3N1.
Current flu vaccines generate antibodies to the head of the hemagglutinin protein, which is highly variable. This is why we need to get a new shot every year: it ensures we make antibodies that bind to and counteract the strain in circulation that year. Broadly neutralizing antibodies that recognize all forms of hemagglutinin have been made and tested, but they don’t combat influenza B, and they don’t last for very long in our upper airways.
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Since its shape defines its state, a Bose Einstein qubit may be unbreakable.
Enlarge (credit: Vesna Jovanovic / EyeEm)
I know I have a reputation for liking lasers. But I’m a bit of a philanderer—I have a secret and unrequited love for Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). BECs are to physicists what lasers were in 1970: an amazing new tool that we are only now coming to grips with.
BECs are not formless clouds of atoms. They are carefully sculpted into pretty shapes that aren’t just beautiful; a BEC’s shape, in a sense, defines its quantum properties. New shapes mean new properties and maybe new applications. A recipe created by a group of theoreticians for creating BEC donuts should have physicists licking their chops.
Absolutely everything, and you don’t need to say that again.
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Aus dem Wechsel ins Innenministerium wird nun doch nichts. Innenminister Seehofer kann an Verfassungsschutzchef Maaßen nach einer umstrittenen Rede nicht mehr festhalten. (Verfassungsschutz, Internet)
Aus dem Wechsel ins Innenministerium wird nun doch nichts. Innenminister Seehofer kann an Verfassungsschutzchef Maaßen nach einer umstrittenen Rede nicht mehr festhalten. (Verfassungsschutz, Internet) But lawsuits over Pai’s net neutrality repeal and California law will continue.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | acilo)
The US Supreme Court has declined to hear the broadband industry's challenge of Obama-era net neutrality rules.
The Federal Communications Commission's 2015 order to impose net neutrality rules and strictly regulate broadband was already reversed by Trump's pick for FCC chairman, Ajit Pai. But AT&T and broadband industry lobby groups were still trying to overturn court decisions that upheld the FCC order.
A win for the broadband industry could have prevented future administrations from imposing a similarly strict set of rules. The Trump administration supported the industry's case, asking the US Supreme Court to vacate the Obama-era ruling.
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