February 2019 – Page 59 – news.buyenne.com

When Building a Torrent Site, Streaming Service, or App, Intent is Almost Everything

Every few weeks, plans for starting new torrent sites, streaming platforms, and apps, appear on Internet discussion platforms. While most have lofty goals, few consider what might happen when they hit the jackpot. Initial intent is crucial so careless actions early on can easily come back to haunt and then undermine successful projects.

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

Several weeks ago, former BitTorrent Inc. executive Simon Morris published a series of articles on Medium, discussing his time at the company and thoughts for the future.

By any standard, his articles are absolutely first class and a must-read for anyone interested in the resilience of the BitTorrent protocol, decentralization, and how ‘breaking rules’ can create both winners and losers.

The third piece in the series raises an extremely important issue – that of initial intent when creating disruptive platforms or technologies.

Perhaps most notably and despite his technology facilitating the sharing and downloading of billions of dollars worth of content, BitTorrent protocol inventor Bram Cohen was never sued for his work. Cohen set out to solve the problem of transferring big files in an efficient way, there was never any talk of piracy.

The same can be said of BitTorrent Inc., which despite controlling uTorrent, the world’s most recognizable file-sharing client, has never been taken to court for its activities. Considering the scale of infringement that’s now accidentally associated with the work of Cohen and his now-former company, it’s notable – but not that surprising – that the lawyers have stayed away.

That didn’t happen by chance. Neither Cohen or his former company have ever advocated the use of their technologies for infringing purposes.

This valuable lesson, of not promoting a tool or service for illegal uses, should never be underestimated. Intent, as mentioned earlier, is almost everything. No matter if a product passes the test of having “substantial non-infringing uses”, incriminating statements made by its creator (even before a project even gets off the ground) can come back to haunt – indefinitely.

Regularly, on various online discussion platforms, technically gifted individuals report that they are about to launch a new torrent site, streaming service, app, or similarly functional platform. Invariably they explain their project’s progress thus far (sometimes with links to Github) and then seek opinions on what users might find useful in a finished product.

However, more often than not, they also shoot themselves in the foot by talking about piracy-related matters. While it’s undoubtedly useful to consider how the law might view such a platform in the future, very often the conversations step over the line, with the effect of forever associating the finished product with copyright infringement.

Admittedly, the odds of site/service/app operators getting sued are relatively small, given the large number of sites out there that continue to operate both blatantly and with impunity versus the number of lawsuits filed.

However, given the importance of intent, especially that which is made public in discussions when a project is getting off the ground, the chances of any subsequent prosecution being successful increases exponentially.

Given that people launching such sites and services must be pretty familiar with the hostile legal environment surrounding these platforms, it seems entirely counter-intuitive to state from the outset that the intent is to infringe, or at least assist others in their infringing activity. But herein lies the problem.

As Morris suggests, those who set out to break rules (disrupting big business or even governments with cryptocurrency, to take his example) essentially have two choices.

They can either do so without displaying ‘evil’ intent while throwing plenty of positive reinforcement into the mix (promotion of legal activity). Or they can do so anonymously, so a potentially incriminating past doesn’t catch up with them later.

While anonymity is an option for those intending to create piracy-focused platforms, it isn’t a simple position to maintain long-term, especially for those whose aim is to generate and ultimately enjoy revenue.

Also, not promoting a ‘pirate’ service for piracy purposes means that the intended audience won’t easily flock aboard to make the site or service a success, since there are so many competitors obviously doing so already.

So, while the headline of this piece states that ‘intent’ is almost everything, in today’s environment it could be argued that for prospective ‘pirate’ site operators, anonymity is even more important.

A third option, which is generally underrated, is obscurity – but that’s way too boring for those seeking notoriety on the high seas.

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

Welcome to the cyber world: The real-world tech behind Alita: Battle Angel

Producer James Cameron wanted his fictional tech to be grounded in the real world.

The futuristic cyborg world depicted in <em>Alita: Battle Angel</em> has some promising real-world analogues.

The CGI-heavy cinematic world of Alita: Battle Angel, is chock-full of the kinds of cyberpunk toys most of us only dream about. But while much of the technology in Alita is futuristic, it's deliberately grounded in the real-world technology of today, per producer James Cameron's vision.

(Mildest of spoilers for Alita: Battle Angel below. You can read Sam Machkovech's largely spoiler-free review here.)

Set some 600 years in the future, the cyberpunk world of Alita: Battle Angel is a dystopian society where people in Iron City scavenge for anything useful—especially technology—in the Scrapyard, which holds everything dumped from the floating city of Zalem, where the "elite" reside. There's a series of tubes where products are sent from the Iron City to Zalem (in exchange for the latter's refuse), but otherwise the two worlds never really mix. The Scrapyard is where a kind doctor finds cyborg Alita's head, holding her carefully preserved human brain. He knows immediately he's looking at highly advanced technology from three centuries earlier, lost in time, and rehabilitates her. The plot follows her journey from amnesiac innocent to fierce warrior.

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The Samsung Galaxy S10 is coming! Here’s what to expect

Four phones. Wait maybe five phones. There are going to be a lot of phones.

On February 20, Samsung is throwing a huge party in San Francisco, where it will take the wraps off its flagship smartphone lineup for 2019. Given the unbelievable amount of leaks that poured forth, we know just about everything Samsung is planning to show off. We're going to learn all about the Galaxy S10.

This year we're not just getting a device in two sizes but a big lineup of phones. As usual, there's a Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus but also a downmarket version expected to be called the "Galaxy S10e." Upmarket, there's expected to eventually be a bigger, 5G version of the Galaxy S10, but it's unclear how much we'll hear about this model at this week's show. Also in the high end of the spectrum is Samsung's foldable smartphone, which will be at this event in some form.

That's the short version. Now, let's talk details!

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Pirate Site Slammed for Meddling with DRM-Free Games, Circumvention Ensues

Pirate site IGG-Games, which sits among the top 1,500 sites in the world, is under fire for meddling with pirate releases. One particular example involves the DRM-free game The Eternal Castle, which has been modified not to run if people remove IGG-Games’ advertising code. The site says it needs to do this to prevent other sites “stealing” its releases but pirates are not impressed. In fact, they’ve developed a tool to remove this ‘DRM’.

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

When piracy groups or sites release games online, consumers (despite paying nothing for the pleasure) expect certain standards.

On a base level the game must work as advertised, any DRM should be removed, and no one should add any unwanted extras – particularly not malware, spyware, or forced advertising.

In the vast majority of cases, pirate releases tend to conform to these standards but a popular pirate site called IGG-Games (Ranked the 1,500th most popular site in the world by SimilarWeb) has been widely accused of not playing by the accepted rules for quite some time now.

According to those familiar with the site’s releases, IGG-Games regularly includes some in-game extras of its own, to ensure that it gets the recognition for distributing (in many cases, re-distributing) pirated games.

In fact, if users try to remove any of the files placed in releases that contain or facilitate the displaying of advertising for the site, the pirated games break and will not run.

Removing credits for piracy breaks IGG-Games’ releases (Via Reddit user)

While this type of practice is frowned upon in pirate circles, IGG-Games seems to have hit the negative publicity jackpot by adding the above ‘system’ (which many are describing as a type of DRM) to what are ordinarily DRM-free games.

One example involves the relatively low budget title The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] which is distributed via Steam and has been pretty well received by gamers. It isn’t protected as standard but the addition of custom code means that removing advertising placed in the release by IGG-Games actually stops the game from running.

People have been complaining of this and similar issues on IGG-Games itself for some time but reports suggest that those who get too vocal are finding themselves banned from the platform. However, a team member admitted this week that the code had been put there on purpose to ensure advertising for the site isn’t removed from ‘their’ pirate releases.

“The games that have that dynamic library [DLL], are those that were acquired with administration resources, it starts when the game is executed and verifies the existence of the text files of Igg,” the moderator wrote.

While some are describing this mechanism as DRM, that’s probably a step too far since the titles can still be easily copied as they stand. However, most pirates do not like releases being meddled with. Any code should be functional in a positive way and if any extras are included, they should enhance the experience, not detract from it. Messing with a DRM-free game is never accepted behavior.

There’s also a niggling belief among some pirates that when release groups or sites are prepared to go to this extent to protect ‘their’ content, other nefarious code might also be present in their releases. IGG-Games has been shown to put their own advertising, watermarks and logos in-game, as the site itself admits.

“We used the money to buy these games, so we added watermarks to restrict other sites to grab it and upload to their site. But we only add the watermark to the Menu or the Loading of the game, so it does not affect your game experience at all,” IGG-Games notes.

Despite claims to the contrary, we haven’t seen any solid evidence that IGG-Games releases contain any malware. That being said, the point of all the advertising is to drive traffic to the IGG-Games site, which is ‘interesting’ to visit without a decent ad-blocker, to say the least.

In the meantime, however, pirates are fighting back against IGG-Games’ ‘DRM’. Two threads published on Reddit this week (here and here) detail techniques and software to remove the unwanted code, both of which have been met with enthusiasm by those who enjoy ‘clean’ piracy.

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

The replication crisis may also be a theory crisis

Theory protects from “personal intuitions and culturally biased folk theories.”

A jumbled jigsaw puzzle, AKA the state of theory in the behavioral sciences.

A replication crisis has called into question results from behavioral (and other) sciences. Complaints have focused on poor statistical methods, the burying of negative results, and other “questionable research practices” that undermine the quality of individual studies.

But methods are only part of the problem, as Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich argue in a paper in Nature Human Behaviour this week. It’s not just that individual puzzle pieces are low in quality; it’s also that there’s not enough effort to fit those pieces into a coherent picture. "Without an overarching theoretical framework,” write Muthukrishna and Henrich, “empirical programs spawn and grow from personal intuitions and culturally biased folk theories.”

Doing research in a way that emphasizes joining the dots constrains the questions you can ask in your research, says Muthukrishna. Without a theoretical framework, “the number of questions that you can ask is infinite.” This makes for a scattered, disconnected body of research. It also feeds into the statistical problems that are widely considered the source of the replication crisis. Having too many questions leads to a large number of small experiments—and the researchers doing them don't always lay out a strong hypothesis and its predictions before they start gathering data.

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Uploadfilter: EU-Kommission bezeichnet Reformkritiker als “Mob”

In der Debatte über die Reform des EU-Urheberrechts verschärft sich der Ton. Während die EU-Kommission Vergleiche mit dem Brexit-Referendum zieht und Unions-Politiker von Fake-Kampagnen sprechen, gehen Tausende Gegner von Uploadfiltern in Köln auf die …

Starz‘ Counterpart has been canceled—which is bad, because the show is good

JK Simmons’ spy skills haven’t saved Counterpart yet, but the second half of Season 2 should.

He may not constantly be the central focus of the narrative (as he was in S1), but Howard(s) is still tangled up in all the larger happenings within Counterpart.

Warning: This story contains minor spoilers for Counterpart S2.

This week, genre TV fans received a bit of bad news. Counterpart, the JK Simmons-led Starz drama combining sci-fi realism with pseudo-Cold War spy thrills, would not be getting a third season.

Deadline reported Starz' decision to cancel came in early January. Presumably execs had already read scripts if not viewed the rest of the season, but the timing certainly wasn't ideal for Counterpart's chances. After a strong S1 that mixed intriguing world-building, a ticking-clock bit of action (via a mysterious assassin), stunning visuals, and an even more beautiful individual discovery arc executed in the capable hands of Simmons, the start of S2... well, it felt flat.

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Private cabins, flying bars, and hundreds of seats—farewell, Airbus A380

Enjoy this photo gallery in memory of the now-cancelled airliner.

In 2005 the first A380 was unveiled at the Airbus factory in Toulouse, France. [credit: Pascal Le Segretain|Getty Images ]

On Valentine's Day, Airbus confirmed that production of the massive A380 airliner will come to an end, breaking some plane nerds' hearts. When it was unveiled to the world in 2005, Airbus touted its efficiency over twin-engined long-haul planes, but this mighty carbon-fiber double-decker never lived up to expectations. Not all airports could accommodate its physical size, and getting the self-loading cargo on and off could take a while.

Unlike the 747, it doesn't appear set to have a continued career carrying cargo, either. You'd expect the biggest passenger plane of the skies to make a pretty decent freighter. But there's no folding nose variant, so you can't take full advantage of its commodious interior to carry really big stuff. In 2021, the last A380 will depart final assembly in Toulouse, France. By then, more than 300 of these carbon composite skywhales should have been delivered, and so we expect they'll remain a regular sight at airports they already service.

The Airbus superjumbo never really captured the public's heart the way the 747 has, and there's no denying the decision to put the cockpit on the lower deck gives the plane a hydrocephalic appearance. But the complex curvature of the wing is a thing of beauty, and it's always wonderful to see something so large land so gracefully. (If you time your visit to the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy annex for the right time of day, you can watch them come in up on the observation deck.)

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Lilbits 349: The 5G smartphones are coming

Mobile World Congress is a little more than a week away, and we’ll likely see new phones from companies including Samsung, Huawei, HMD (Nokia), and others, as well as other devices (Microsoft, for example, is expected to introduce its next-gen Ho…

The post Lilbits 349: The 5G smartphones are coming appeared first on Liliputing.

A natural selection: Evolution evolves from board game to digital app

Years in development, this is a terrific app adaption of the board game.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

North Star Games has been developing the app version of its popular board game Evolution (read our review) for years, showing demos as far back as PAX Unplugged in November 2017. Now the game is out for Steam, iOS, and Android—and the results have been well worth waiting for. The final version is immaculate in look, feel, and ease of play. Even if you didn’t love the cardboard version, the digital adaptation offers a new and better gameplay experience.

Players in Evolution compete to create and grow their species to consume more food tokens, which are worth points at the game’s end and which become scarcer as the game progresses. Each species can have up to three Trait cards that give it extra powers or makes it harder to attack. One of the Traits makes species (which are herbivores by default) into Carnivores, which feed by attacking other species—including your own, if you can’t feed them by attacking species belonging to other players.

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