March 2019 – Page 92 – news.buyenne.com

Label Apologizes For All The Cracked Software Visible in Rapper’s YouTube Video

Music production software is both notoriously expensive and heavily pirated, quite often by those just getting into the game. However, if you’re an already famous performer and screenshots of your desktop appear on the Internet, removing evidence of cracked apps is probably a good move.

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

Once upon a time, people with an interest in music production could get into the game cheaply.

Back in the 80s, Amiga users (like myself) could mess around with tools like SoundTracker or OctaMED for hours, producing music at home that could be potentially fit for human consumption, if it wasn’t for a lack of talent.

Later, software like Cubase began to gain traction, since it was often bundled (in cut down form) with PC sound cards. But, of course, times moved on and in the short years that followed an avalanche of amazing tools became available; Fruity Loops and Reason, to name just two.

These days users are spoiled for choice but great production software in the 2010s often has great prices attached too, meaning that many turn to torrent and similar sites for their fix. Anyone who’s visited a back street studio will also let you know – they are often rammed with pirate software.

While controversial, pirate software gets many people into the music production business and, in common with those familiar with Windows or Adobe products, also trains people to stick with products when they can afford to pay. Some, however, forget to clean up the mess after.

Earlier this month, K-pop star Jeon So-yeon (Soyeon) learned that lesson the hard way. The rapper, singer, songwriter and general all-round star is signed to Cube Entertainment, which had put out a video on the label’s official YouTube channel (now deleted) which included a snapshot of her desktop. That turned out to be a big mistake.

Not only is Soyeon’s workspace the most cluttered in human history, eagle-eyed fans noticed that the star had some interesting additions that should’ve been kept away from the public eye.

Pirate software galore – *Full size (Credit: Asian Junkie)*

The revelations in the video left the star having to explain why she had cracked copies of Native Instruments’ Komplete, Kontakt, and several other pieces of pirated production software on her desktop.

Like many before her, Soyeon’s excuse was that she made mistakes with pirated software before she became famous a few years ago, and forgot to clean up the free stuff she’d trained herself with.

“First of all, I would like to sincerely apologize for causing any worry due to such disgraceful news,” she said, as translated by Asian Junkie.

“I remember using many different programs back when I first started learning how to compose music. For reasons that I neither deleted nor organized these files in the past, and for not even having consciously thought about it, I sincerely reflect back on it with remorse.”

While it’s certainly not unusual for starting musicians to learn their trade using pirated software, it becomes a bigger issue when they use that software to sell records. Soyeon, however, insists that wasn’t the case with her.

“Ever since I began in earnest to produce music, up to the recent songs that I have made, I have only used official programs, but I apologize once again for worrying you with an ignorance of copyright issues as a creator, no matter what the circumstances. From now on, I will study and act more carefully, never to use or own any kind of illegal file in the future.”

In an apology, Cube Entertainment sang the same tune.

“The program in question were downloaded when Soyeon was a trainee and was just beginning to learn about composing music in the process of her using various programs and learning about them. The program was never used again after Soyeon began seriously committing to musical composition,” the company said.

“We have confirmed that all of Soyeon’s compositions that have been released till now were created with a licensed Logic program, instruments we own, as well as Splice, which requires a monthly subscription fee.”

Fans don’t seem to be too concerned about Soyeon’s use of pirated software but of course the news will be an embarrassment to her label which will have piracy issues of its own. That said, she certainly isn’t the first artist to get caught using pirated production tools.

Stars including Kanye West, Avicii (rip) and Martin Garrix have all been caught using less-than-licensed software in the past. They certainly won’t be the last.

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

Dealmaster: Nintendo discounts a bunch of Mario games for “MAR10 Day”

$20 off sale runs through this week, includes another Switch console bundle.

Today is March 10, and for fans of video games and calendar-based puns, that means it’s time to celebrate gaming’s favorite plumber, golfer, race car driver, doctor, boxing referee, and typing instructor: Mario.

Nintendo has declared this date “Mario Day” for the past few years (March 10 = Mar10 = Mario), but today the company is once again paying homage to its most famous character by launching a number of discounts on games featuring the little guy.

The deals include $20 off the following Mario titles for the Nintendo Switch:

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E-Mail-Marketing: Datenbank mit 800 Millionen E-Mail-Adressen online

Wozu sammelt ein völlig unbekanntes Unternehmen Hunderte Millionen E-Mail-Adressen und weitere Nutzerdaten? Dahinter steckt eine Dienstleistung, die für Spammer nützlich ist. (Passwort, Spam)

Past its expiration date: Infiniti QX80 review

This full-size SUV needs another refresh.

As the old saying goes: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. When I climbed into the Infiniti QX80 for the first time, one of the first things I saw was a monochromatic LCD display smack-dab in the middle of the instrument panel. I looked at the Monroney sticker sitting on the passenger seat and saw a price tag north of $90,000. The juxtaposition of a display that would look at home in the decade-old cars in my garage with the luxurious interior trim left me with the impression that Infiniti made some odd choices with the QX80—an impression that I never managed to shake in my week with the vehicle.

The QX80 is the flagship of Infiniti's SUV lineup. It's a true full-size, three-row SUV, competing with the Mercedes GLS, Lexus LX, and Lincoln Navigator for the hearts and wallets of large families and folks who want a massive, spacious vehicle to tool around in. The QX80 underwent an overhaul for the 2018 model year, getting an exterior redesign that elongated the body and made it appear longer. For 2019, Infiniti added a Limited model with dark, machine-finished 22-inch wheels.

Pricing for the QX80 starts at $65,100 for a front-wheel-drive model; if you want all-wheel drive, you'll need to fork out another $3,000. Our review model was the QX80 Limited, which comes with all the fixin's—theater package, driver-assist, the aforementioned 22-inch wheels, and more—and a price tag of $91,450. This expensive beast is powered by a 5.6-liter V8 capable of 400hp (298kW) at 5,800rpm and 413lb-ft (560Nm) of torque at 4,000rpm. That's paired with a seven-speed automatic transmission, which I prefer to the continuously variable transmission in the QX50 and QX60. If you need to drive your QX80 over some nasty terrain, it has a crawl ration of 1.0 in 4WD high and 2.7 in 4WD low.

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A brief history of Wi-Fi security protocols from “oh my, that’s bad” to WPA3

Enjoy our primer on the ups and downs of Wi-Fi protocols since the mid-1990s.

Thanks to upcoming developments in Wi-Fi, all of us connectivity-heads out there can look forward to getting familiar with new 802.11 protocols in the near future. Ars took a deep look at what's on the horizon last fall, but readers seemed to have a clear request in response—the time had come to specifically discuss the new Wi-Fi security protocol, WPA3.

Before anyone can understand WPA3, it's helpful to take a look at what came before it during The Dark Ages (of Internet)—a time with no Wi-Fi and unswitched networks. Swaths of the Internet today may be built upon "back in my day" ranting, but those of you in your 20s or early 30s may genuinely not remember or realize how bad things used to be. In the mid-to-late 1990s, any given machine could "sniff" (read "traffic not destined for it") any other given machine's traffic at will even on wired networks. Ethernet back then was largely connected with a hub rather than a switch, and anybody with a technical bent could (and frequently did) watch everything from passwords to Web traffic to emails wing across the network without a care.

Don't let the cheerful-looking ivory chassis fool you; these were dark days, friend.

Closer to the turn of the century, wired Ethernet had largely moved on from hubs (and worse, the old coax thinnet) to switches. A network hub forwards every packet it receives to every machine connected to it, which is what made widespread sniffing so easy and dangerous. A switch, by contrast, only forwards packets to the MAC address for which they're destined—so when computer B wants to send a packet to router A, the switch doesn't give a copy to that sketchy user at computer C. This subtle change made wired networks far more trustworthy than they had been before. And when the original 802.11 Wi-Fi standard released in 1997, it included WEP—the Wireless Encryption Protocol—which supposedly offered the same expectations of confidentiality that users today now expect from wired networks.

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Bilderdienst: Flickr nimmt alle CC-Fotos von Limit aus

Der Bilderdienst Flickr will alle Fotos mit einer Creative-Commons-Lizenz dauerhaft speichern. Ein Lizenzwechsel wird den Nutzern allerdings schwerer gemacht. (Flickr, Yahoo)

Uploadfilter: Reform bedroht Foren und Lehrmittelangebote im Netz

Nach und nach wird deutlich, welche Konsequenzen die EU-Urheberrechtsreform für die verschiedenen Webangebote haben könnte. Ein Kahlschlag bei ehrenamtlichen Projekten und kleinen Diensten durch die Uploadfilter-Pflicht droht. (Wikipedia, Urheberrecht)

SXSWarren: A day later, Elizabeth Warren defends her Big Tech breakup proposal

“The monopolists will make less monopoly money, boo hoo.”

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at SXSW 2019.

AUSTIN, Texas—"So yesterday you made a pretty big announcement about tech. Then like the gangster you are, you flew down to a tech conference... "

Time Editor-at-Large Anand Giridharadas led with that at his South by Southwest conversation with Massachusetts Senator and 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren. The politician didn't miss a beat. Barely 24 hours after she made headlines by publicly proposing that the US should break up companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook as part of a plan to regulate tech platforms as utilities, Warren took the opportunity to further emphasize her idea.

"Today, we have companies like Amazon: they have a platform. I buy a coffee maker and use it all the time, but Amazon also sucks out an incredible amount of info about every buyer and every seller. Then, Amazon makes the decision to have a competing coffee machine and drive out the business in that space," she explained. "They have this incredible advantage from the information they get from their platform and the fact they can also manipulate the platform, putting themselves on page 1 and put the competitor on page 16 where no one ever goes... My view is break those things apart, and we'll have a more robust market in America."

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An email marketing company left 809 million records exposed online

150GB database included mortgage amounts, info on credit ratings.

(GERMANY OUT) Leerstehendes Fabrikgebäude im Bonner Stadtteil Friesdorf. Vernagelte Eingangstüre mit zerschlagenen Scheiben (Photo by JOKER / Karl-Heinz Hick/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

By this point, you've hopefully gotten the message that your personal data can end up exposed in all sorts of unexpected internet backwaters. But increased awareness hasn't slowed the problem. In fact, it's only grown bigger—and more confounding.

Last week, security researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia discovered an unprotected, publicly accessible MongoDB database containing 150 gigabytes of detailed, plaintext marketing data—including 763 million unique email addresses. The pair went public with their findings this week. The trove is not only massive but also unusual; it contains data about individual consumers as well as what appears to be "business intelligence data," like employee and revenue figures from various companies. This diversity may stem from the information's source. The database, owned by the "email validation" firm Verifications.io, was taken offline the same day Diachenko reported it to the company.

While you've likely never heard of them, validators play a crucial role in the email marketing industry. They don't send out marketing emails on their own behalf, or facilitate automated mass email campaigns. Instead, they vet a customer's mailing list to ensure that the email addresses in it are valid and won't bounce back. Some email marketing firms offer this mechanism in-house. But fully verifying that an email address works involves sending a message to the address and confirming that it was delivered—essentially spamming people. That means evading protections of internet service providers and platforms like Gmail. (There are less invasive ways to validate email addresses, but they have a tradeoff of false positives.) Mainstream email marketing firms often outsource this work rather than take on the risk of having their infrastructure blacklisted by spam filters, or lowering their online reputation scores.

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Kodi Users at Risk From Github Repo ‘Hijack’ But Solution is Already Available

Many Kodi add-ons are hosted on Github but when a developer deletes his or her account, other developers are sometimes stepping in to exploit the situation, to pass their product off as the original. However, Github says it will not tolerate any exploits and will take action in response complaints.

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

While many pirates appear to get along with each other just fine, parts of the Kodi addon community regularly descend into chaos.

This so-called ‘drama’ happens on a regular basis and gets covered on various blogs that cover the scene far more closely than we do here on TF.

However, every now and again an issue raises its head that’s worthy of additional coverage, particularly when it has the potential to affect a broad range of users of popular Kodi addons.

Developers of Kodi add-ons, of all types and intent, regularly host their tools on coding platform Github. The US-based service is ideal for development and when users sign up, they’re allocated a unique URL, which can be referenced (just like a regular URL), all over the Internet.

These URLs can also be used to pull updates to add-ons that are installed on users’ machines. However, there is a loophole that can allow add-ons to pull updates that weren’t supplied by the original developer.

The problem was highlighted at least a couple of years ago when famous Kodi add-on developer MetalKettle deleted his Github repo. Shortly after, a third-party signed up to the platform with the same username (something which Github expressly allows) to obtain the same URL.

This meant that this third-party was allowed to push updates to people using MetalKettle add-ons in their Kodi setup. It’s not difficult to see the problem when a previously-trusted URL is suddenly placed in the hands of a potentially malicious third-party.

This ‘hijacking’ of accounts has happened several times since but things boiled over again recently when the popular ’13Clowns’ repo was deleted by its developer, only to be quickly re-registered on Github with the same name and, indeed, the same URL.

As the pair of images below show, the original repo (first) and imposter repo (second) are quite different, despite having the same username and appearing on the same URL.

The original 13Clowns repo (previously at https://github.com/13Clowns)

The imposter 13Clowns repo, using the exact same Github URL

The software hosted in the new repo began sending updates to former users of ’13Clowns’, which included a fork of the Exodus add-on and, controversially, tools that originate from TVAddons, the under-fire Canada-based Kodi add-on indexing site.

Those familiar with the add-on scene see TVAddons as what the Brits might describe a ‘marmite’ resource – people either love it, or hate it – and there is no shortage of Kodi users expressing both opinions.

Those that hate the site immediately claimed that the existence of TVAddons tools in the update means that the site was logically involved in the ‘hijack’, with KodiTips going as far as publishing a guide on how to remove the software pushed by the update. The software doesn’t seem malicious as such, but it does help TVAddons.

In response, those in support of TVAddons claimed that anyone could’ve ‘hijacked’ the repo (which is true, of course), with TVAddons itself going to great lengths to deny the allegations.

They state they have nothing to do with it, while suggesting that a TVAddons supporter could be responsible. Or, alternatively, it might be a “copyright holder trying to destroy the Kodi community through the most effective method to date: in-fighting.”

The truth is that only the people behind this somewhat underhand tactic know exactly what has happened here, so we’ll leave the speculation to other publications. However, perhaps of more interest is the manner in which this situation came to pass via Github allowing people to re-register accounts with not only the same username as a former user, but also granting access to the same URL.

As a law-abiding company, Github is known for quickly responding to takedown requests, fully in line with the requirements of the DMCA. That being said, this loophole can also be exploited by developers of completely legitimate add-ons too, should they decide to delete their accounts.

TorrentFreak contacted Github with an outline of the problem and asked whether it would be possible to implement measures that might reduce the risk, such as disallowing the re-use of usernames and identical URLs for a period of six months following deletion.

While the company didn’t respond directly to this suggestion, TorrentFreak was informed that systems are already in place to deal with this type of abuse.

The company’s repository namespace retirement policy supports mitigating this issue while its Acceptable Use Policy prohibits any kind of exploit. We can confirm that reusing a previously registered repo name to deliver add-ons to Kodi in the manner highlighted above is considered an exploit.

Therefore, this problem – which has caused so much conflict recently – can be dealt with under Github’s existing systems. Anyone sending a detailed complaint to Github via this form can have it investigated by the company, with offending repos being taken down.

In the meantime, it appears that those holding much of the power here are the developers themselves. By not deleting their Github accounts they constantly remain in charge of their own repos, meaning that no imposters can come in to masquerade as them.

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