Starz Doesn’t Like News About Leaked TV-Shows, Takes Down TorrentFreak Tweet

A few days ago we reported on several major leaks of unreleased TV-shows. This included several episodes from the Starz original show “American Gods”. Apparently, however, Starz didn’t like our news reporting. To stop it from spreading any further, a representative asked Twitter to take down our tweet, stating that the article in question infringes its copyrights.

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

At TorrentFreak, we have been covering copyright and piracy related news for well over a decade. 

We write about things that copyright holders are not happy with, and similarly, we report on bad news for pirates as well. The leading factor is always whether we believe something is newsworthy, or not.

Earlier this week we published an article that definitely fits that category. In the span of a few days, several TV-show episodes leaked online before their official release, which is something that rarely happens. 

Due to the leak, complete seasons of unreleased TV-shows such as “The Spanish Princess,” “Ramy,” and “The Red Line,” surfaced on pirate sites. In most cases, there were visible signs revealing that the leaks were sourced from promotional screeners, but other than that information remains scarce. 

Among the treasure trove of leaks were also several unreleased episodes of the Starz hit series “American Gods.” This is obviously not the type of news the American entertainment company wanted to see published, but in our niche, it’s a big deal nonetheless. 

As with all our news articles, we automatically posted a link to it on Twitter, to share it with the audience there. The tweet was just a simple description, with an image and a link to the news report. Nothing out of the ordinary, one would think. 

The tweet

To our surprise, however, this tweet is now no longer available. Twitter informed us a few hours ago that The Social Element Agency asked it to remove the “infringing” tweet on behalf of Starz

The social media platform complied with the request and as a result, our tweet is now “withheld,” or removed if you will.

Withheld

According to the takedown notice, Starz argues that the tweet is infringing because it links to an article where people can see “of images of the unreleased episodes” and find more “information about their illegal availability.”

From the DMCA takedown notice

For the record, our article only includes a single identifiable frame from a leaked “American Gods” episode, to show the screener watermarks, which are central to the story. That’s just 0.001% of the episode in question, without audio, which is generally seen as fair use, especially in a news context.

As for the claim that the article includes information about the shows’ “illegal availability”, we only mention that they are being shared on pirate sites, without giving any names or links. That’s no ground for a takedown request.

Luckily, our analysis is backed up by Kit Walsh, who’s a Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

“Starz has no right to silence TorrentFreak’s news article or block links to it. The article reports that there are people on the Internet infringing copyright, but that is a far cry from being an infringement itself,” Walsh says.

“The screenshots are important parts of the reporting that validate the facts being reported. Starz should withdraw its takedown and refrain from harassing journalists in the future,” she adds.

As for Starz attempt to ‘silence’ our reporting. This turns out to be quite counterproductive. Without their takedown notice, we probably wouldn’t have brought up the leaks again.

We have reached out directly to the Starz representative who sent the DMCA notice to request comment and further information. At the time of writing, we have yet to hear back.  If Starz doesn’t withdraw its takedown notice we will consider appropriate follow-up steps. 

In the meantime, anyone who’s interested in learning more about the TV-show leaks can find our news report here

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

Acer unveils TravelMate P6 – a 2.4 pound laptop with discrete graphics

The Acer TravelMate P6 is a thin and light laptop aimed at the business and enterprise market. but with design features borrowed from the company’s Swift 7 line of ultraportable consumer notebooks. It’s a 2.4 pound laptop that measures just…

The Acer TravelMate P6 is a thin and light laptop aimed at the business and enterprise market. but with design features borrowed from the company’s Swift 7 line of ultraportable consumer notebooks. It’s a 2.4 pound laptop that measures just about 0.6 inches thick, thanks to a magnesium alloy chassis. But Acer says it’s also […]

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Acer’s ConceptD computers are for creative professionals who want the power of gaming PCs

Acer is launching a new line of laptops aimed at creative professionals this summer. It’s called ConceptD, and the concept came together after Acer realized that a lot of people who were buying the company’s gaming PCs were using them for n…

Acer is launching a new line of laptops aimed at creative professionals this summer. It’s called ConceptD, and the concept came together after Acer realized that a lot of people who were buying the company’s gaming PCs were using them for non-gaming activities including image and video editing. In fact, Acer says that 15 percent […]

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Dealmaster: Get a Dell gaming laptop with 16GB of RAM and a GTX 1060 for $799

Plus deals on God of War, mesh Wi-Fi routers, Lenovo ThinkPads, and more.

Dealmaster: Get a Dell gaming laptop with 16GB of RAM and a GTX 1060 for $799

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Update (2:37pm ET 04/11/2019): Shortly after this article was published, Walmart lowered the price of our featured deal by another $50 to $799. We've updated our headline and the article below to reflect this.

Original article: Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a deal on Dell's G5 15 gaming laptop—a configuration with Intel's Core i5-8300H CPU, 16GB of RAM, and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GPU is down to $799 at Walmart. Dell usually sells this model for $1,100, so this is about a $300 discount.

To be clear, this is technically Dell's last-gen G5 15—the company slightly refreshed most of its gaming lineup earlier this year—and the notebook isn't without flaws. The chassis is mostly plastic, the 15.6-inch 1080p display isn't exactly high-end, and, this being a gaming laptop, the whole thing isn't very thin (0.98 in.) or light (5.76 lbs.). Its fans will make some noise, too. But such is life with a budget gaming laptop. What you're really paying for here is the ability to play newer games in 1080p—preferably on high, not ultra, settings—on the (relative) cheap. The 6GB GTX 1060 is Nvidia's lower-powered Max-Q variant, and it's not the most cutting-edge card these days, but until notebooks with newer GPUs like the GTX 1660 become more prevalent, it's still powerful enough to get the job done. The laptop itself includes a Thunderbolt 3 port and should get about five hours of battery through Web browsing. All told, it feels like a good value at this price.

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Google+ is back! Meet the enterprise-focused “Google Currents”

Consumers may have been kicked off of the service, but G+ lives on for the enterprise.

Google+ may have shut down its consumer side earlier this month, but the code base still lives on at Google. After diving into the social media wars and getting routed, Google+ will live out its retirement as "Google Currents"—it's the Google+ code base, but with an enterprise focus. The reborn Google+/Currents will now do battle with Facebook again, this time with the enterprise version of Facebook, called "Workplace," and also Microsoft's Yammer. Surely things will go differently this time.

Google Currents is uh, currently launching as a beta service that G Suite admins can request access to. The enterprise focus means it's for paying G Suite customers only. Google's blog post says Currents "enables people to have meaningful discussions and interactions across your organization, helping keep everyone in the know and giving leaders the opportunity to connect with their employees." Currents looks exactly like Google+, but with a new logo and maybe a slightly whiter color scheme.

Currents is now the second big enterprise communication tool from Google. The other is Google Hangouts Chat, which is a Google's version of a Slack clone. Just like Currents, Hangouts Chat is closely associated with a dying consumer Google product, Google Hangouts. (Why does it seem like G Suite is getting all the consumer leftovers?) Both products will greatly benefit from their association with G Suite, which pulls in enterprise customers with killer apps like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Drive. The sales pitch is basically "Since you're already paying for that sweet Gmail account with a custom domain, why not try out these social apps, too?"

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MIT says we’re overlooking a near-term solution to diesel trucking emissions

All-electric semis may take too long to get on the road, researchers say.

Trucks lined up at a truck stop.

Enlarge / Interstate 55, Dixie Truck Stop, parking lot. (credit: Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/UIG via Getty Images)

Transportation is one of the major causes of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and medium- and heavy-duty trucks account for about a quarter of all transportation-related emissions. At present, semis and other long-haul trucks are mostly diesel-powered, so they emit nitrogen oxides and particulates that aren't just bad for the climate; they're bad for human health as well.

Tesla made a splash in 2017 when it introduced its all-electric semi truck, and announcements from other trucking companies followed. Daimler sold small electric delivery trucks and has an electric Cascadia in development, Nikola announced a hydrogen-powered fuel cell truck, and Siemens debuted a catenary system for freight. Yet two years later, trucking in the US is still driven by diesel-fueled, compression-ignition (CI), internal combustion engines.

Daniel Cohn and Leslie Bromberg, a pair of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published a paper with the Society of Automotive Engineers, suggesting that the best way forward is not to wait for all-electric or hydrogen-powered semis, but to build a plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) truck with an internal combustion engine/generator that can burn either gasoline or renewable ethanol or methanol.

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Acer: Gaming-Notebooks mit Schiebetastatur vorgestellt

In New York hat Acer neue Modelle der Serien Nitro und Helios vorgestellt. Letztere gibt es jetzt auch mit einer ausziehbaren Tastatur, was Ergonomie und Kühlung begünstigen soll. (Acer, Notebook)

In New York hat Acer neue Modelle der Serien Nitro und Helios vorgestellt. Letztere gibt es jetzt auch mit einer ausziehbaren Tastatur, was Ergonomie und Kühlung begünstigen soll. (Acer, Notebook)

The nutrition study the $30B supplement industry doesn’t want you to see

Vitamins and minerals have health benefits—but only when eaten in foods.

The nutrition study the $30B supplement industry doesn’t want you to see

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Roberto Machado Noa)

A decade-long observational study of more than 30,000 people finds that certain vitamins and minerals may help extend your life and keep you from dying of cardiovascular disease—but only if you get those beneficial nutrients from foods, not supplements.

The study, published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is yet another to find that taking supplemental vitamins and minerals—either individually or in multivitamins—offers no discernible benefits in terms of reducing risks of death generally or death from cardiovascular disease and cancers, specifically. Simply put, popping pills can’t take the place of eating a healthy diet—an unflashy takeaway that likely won’t please the massive, $30 billion supplement industry.

Moreover, the study didn’t just find a lack of benefits from supplements. It also found potential harms. Getting high doses of calcium (1,000 mg or more per day) from supplements—but not from foods—was linked to higher cancer mortality risks in the study. Likewise, people taking vitamin D supplements who didn’t have vitamin D deficiencies may have higher risks of all-cause mortality and death from cancers.

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You can now buy Intel’s priceless, power-hungry i9-9990XE

Intel auctioned the chips to system builders; one builder has decided to sell them.

Extreme close-up photograph of computer chip against a black background.

Enlarge / This is a 10-core Skylake-X processor. It uses the low core count (LCC) version of the Skylake-SP die. (credit: Fritzchens Fritz / Flickr)

We learned in January that Intel was planning a new top-end Core i9 Extreme Edition processor: the i9-9990XE. Though it would have fewer cores than the previous top—14 cores and 28 threads compared to the i9-9980XE's 18 cores and 36 threads—it would make up for this in clock speed. The i9-9990XE is clocked at 4.0 to 5.0GHz, compared to 3.0 to 4.5GHz. Power consumption has increased as well, to 255W, 95W more than the 160W i9-9980XE. The price of the new chip? Undetermined. Instead of selling them to end users, Intel's plan was to auction them to high-end system builders, such that the chips would only be sold in complete systems.

But now we have a price. Anandtech reports that one of those high-end system builders, CaseKing.de, has decided to sell the bare chip anyway. The price of this monster? €2,999 (about $3,400).

The bespoke, high-end computer market is a slightly strange one. These systems, often water cooled and factory overclocked, typically have all the trappings of a gamer system, including windowed cases and multicolored lights. Wealthy gamers and streamers are certainly part of their audience. However, another significant market is much less interested in the lights and colors—the systems are sold to high-frequency traders and others within the finance world. These groups put a high premium on single-threaded performance and large caches, and they will spend large sums to be slightly faster than their competitors.

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Russland: Parlament nimmt Gesetz für eigenständiges Internet an

Russland soll sein eigenes, unabhängiges Internet bekommen. Ein entsprechendes Gesetz passierte heute die zweite entscheidende Lesung im Parlament. Kritiker befürchten Zensur. (Zensur, Server)

Russland soll sein eigenes, unabhängiges Internet bekommen. Ein entsprechendes Gesetz passierte heute die zweite entscheidende Lesung im Parlament. Kritiker befürchten Zensur. (Zensur, Server)