Police in the Netherlands on Thursday arrested a Tesla driver who had apparently fallen asleep at the wheel while driving down the highway. A Dutch police agency reported the arrest on Instagram.
A 50-year-old man was spotted driving close to the car ahead of him on the A27 road. "When we came alongside, the driver appeared to have fallen asleep," the police said.
Police signaled for the driver to pull over, but he didn't seem to notice. Eventually, the officers managed to wake the driver up using a siren, the Instagram post says. Police administered a blood alcohol test and found the driver to be under the influence of alcohol. (The Instagram post cites a BAC level of 340ug /l, which—if my math is right—is a BAC of 0.34 percent in American units.)
Rightscorp, the infamous anti-piracy company that hounded hundreds of thousands of alleged file-sharers for cash settlements, seems to be waiting for the grim reaper to arrive. At the time of writing, its shares are worth $0.0025 each and its website account has been suspended.
For many years, anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp has been on a mission to turn piracy into profit.
The company monitors BitTorrent networks, captures IP addresses, then asks ISPs to forward cash settlement demands to its subscribers.
While some companies in the same niche have “gone big” by demanding hundreds or even thousands of dollars for each alleged infringement, Rightscorp deployed a “speeding fine” model. To make Rightscorp go away, the company regularly demanded settlements of between $20 and $30, shared with rightsholders 50/50.
These, of course, mounted up. According to a set of financial results covering the three months ended September 30, 2017, Rightscorp had closed more than 230,000 alleged cases of infringement.
What happened after that is unclear, as the company opted not to report any further financial details in public. If it had, they probably wouldn’t have made pretty reading.
During the nine months ended September 30, 2017, Rightscorp recorded a net loss of $1,448,899. During the same period a year earlier, it lost $1,380,698. As a result, the company had just $3,147 left in cash at the end of September 2017.
Against the odds, however, Rightscorp appears to have kept going, although what that means on an operational level is anyone’s guess. Now, however, the writing appears to be on the wall.
A cursory visit to Rightscorp’s website today doesn’t yield any detailed information. Or, indeed, any information at all.
Most pages are completely blank apart from a solitary line of text on its investor page. An ironic one too given how Rightscorp frequently demanded that ISPs should suspend the accounts of subscribers who refuse to pay up.
Those who called for those to be suspended, have been suspended
We’re not aware of any public explanations being made by Rightscorp but things don’t look bright and sunny on the investor front either.
In January 2012, Rightscorp shares (RIHT) reached the dizzy heights of $0.80 each. At the beginning of 2015, they were worth $0.074, falling to $0.017 in January 2017.
From there, things only got worse. At the time of writing Rightscorp stock is currently worth just $0.0025.
So what next for Rightscorp? It seems unlikely the company is still sending out settlement demands, without a working website it can’t handle any payments. But even if it could, the amounts probably wouldn’t amount to much.
During its last reporting period covering the three months to September 2017, it collected just $45,848 from BitTorrent users but paid out $22,924 of that amount to copyright holders.
Finally (and whatever happens to the company next), it’s important to note that Rightscorp data is still being utilized in various copyright infringement lawsuits filed by music companies against ISPs in the United States, including against Cox Communications and Grande Communications.
Indeed, the data collated for use against Grande customers cost the RIAA $700,000. That was considerably better value for Rightscorp than scraping $20 from each infringer and then having to pay $10 straight back out. That last big deal might’ve been the last throw of the dice but only time will tell.
Meanwhile, Rightscorp founder and former CEO Christopher Sabec is currently advising “cannabis cultivators, manufacturers and other licensees” over at Fox Rothschild LLP, an appointment that was announced this March.
Tardar Sauce was an avatar of the days of the goofy Web.
Enlarge/ Grumpy Cat poses on the set as she makes her broadway debut in "Cats" on Broadway at The Neil Simon Theatre on September 30, 2016 in New York City.
In 2012, America was halfway through President Obama's time in office. The first Avengers movie came out, and Hunger Games premiered. Hope was high, and Reddit—the Web's "front page"—was where anyone with a cute pet could get thousands of upvotes. Cats were the most popular, but occasionally a dog or two would slip in. Then, in September of that year, Bryan Bundesen posted a picture of his sister Tabatha's cat, Tardar Sauce, an 11-month old tabby with feline dwarfism that perpetually looked annoyed. The Internet was enraptured with Grumpy Cat.
That's how life on social media used to be. The biggest memeswere funny looking cats like Tardar and Lil Bub, or Mohawk Guy, and "Call Me Maybe." Memes weren't yet weapons of mass disruption (at least not on the scale that they came to be in 2016) and we still knew what a troll was. Now, Grumpy Cat is dead—the feline's owners announced her passing today on Twitter—and with her goes an era in which the Internet was more a place of joy than hate, uplift rather than harassment.
In the Chinese science fiction film The Wandering Earth, recently released on Netflix, humanity attempts to change the Earth’s orbit using enormous thrusters in order to escape the expanding Sun—and prevent a collision with Jupiter.
The scenario may one day come true. In five billion years, the Sun will run out of fuel and expand, most likely engulfing the Earth. A more immediate threat is a global warming apocalypse. Moving the Earth to a wider orbit could be a solution—and it is possible in theory.
But how could we go about it and what are the engineering challenges? For the sake of argument, let us assume that we aim to move the Earth from its current orbit to an orbit 50% further from the Sun, similar to Mars’.
Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.
One of the defining aspects of Star Wars is its dramatic sense of adventure. Hopping from planet to planet, quarreling with local cultures, and getting swept up in something greater than yourself are all essential to the property’s Midichlorian-infused DNA. That’s why it’s surprising to realize that we’ve never had a proper Star Wars adventure game.
But the new Star Wars: Outer Rim is just that, a star-hopping frolic in the vein of classic titles Talisman and Runebound. You select your pilot from an eclectic mix drawn from both the big and small screen. Favorites such as Boba Fett and Han Solo are of course included, but we’re also offered Ketsu Onyo from the Rebels television show and Doctor Aphra from a beloved comic series.
Die jüngst eingeheimste Finanzierung von 2,7 Milliarden US-Dollar gibt Tesla nur weitere zehn Monate, um die Gewinnschwelle zu überschreiten. Entsprechend nervös dürfte Firmenchef Elon Musk sein, der weiter auf der Suche nach Einsparungspotenzial bei s…
Die jüngst eingeheimste Finanzierung von 2,7 Milliarden US-Dollar gibt Tesla nur weitere zehn Monate, um die Gewinnschwelle zu überschreiten. Entsprechend nervös dürfte Firmenchef Elon Musk sein, der weiter auf der Suche nach Einsparungspotenzial bei seinem Unternehmen ist. (Tesla, Elektroauto)
Auf einer “Käufe”-Seite listet Google Einkäufe von Nutzern auf, auch wenn diese nicht über das Unternehmen selbst erfolgt sind – mithilfe von Rechnungen, die sich teilweise im Archiv des Gmail-Postfachs befinden. In unserem Fall sind das Hunderte Beste…
Auf einer "Käufe"-Seite listet Google Einkäufe von Nutzern auf, auch wenn diese nicht über das Unternehmen selbst erfolgt sind - mithilfe von Rechnungen, die sich teilweise im Archiv des Gmail-Postfachs befinden. In unserem Fall sind das Hunderte Bestellungen, die bis 2012 zurückreichen. (Google, Gmail)
More than 20,000 Linksys wireless routers are regularly leaking full historic records of every device that has ever connected to them, including devices' unique identifiers, names, and the operating systems they use. The data can be used by snoops or hackers in either targeted or opportunistic attacks.
(credit: Troy Mursch)
Independent researcher Troy Mursch said the leak is the result of a persistent flaw in almost three dozen models of Linksys routers. It took about 25 minutes for the Binary Edge search engine of Internet-connected devices to find 21,401 vulnerable devices on Friday. A scan earlier in the week found 25,617. They were leaking a total of 756,565 unique MAC addresses. Exploiting the flaw requires only a few lines of code that harvest every MAC address, device name, and operating system that has ever connected to each of them.
The flaw allows snoops or hackers to assemble disparate pieces of information that most people assume aren’t public. By combining a historical record of devices that have connected to a public IP addresses, marketers, abusive spouses, and investigators can track the movements of people they want to track. The disclosure can also be useful to hackers. The Shadowhammer group, for instance, recently infected as many as 1 million people after hacking the software update mechanism of computer maker ASUS. The hackers then used a list of about 600 MAC addresses of specific targets that, if infected, would receive advanced stages of the malware.
In den vergangenen Monaten wurden in den Truppen der deutschen Bundeswehr neue Smartphones verteilt – viel mehr als die vormals genutzten Handys können die Geräte momentan aber noch nicht: Aus Sicherheitsgründen ist die Internetverbindung deaktiviert. …
In den vergangenen Monaten wurden in den Truppen der deutschen Bundeswehr neue Smartphones verteilt - viel mehr als die vormals genutzten Handys können die Geräte momentan aber noch nicht: Aus Sicherheitsgründen ist die Internetverbindung deaktiviert. (Bundeswehr, Smartphone)
One of the most-visited movie piracy sites in the world shut down this week. Egy.best, which was extremely popular in Arabic speaking countries, threw in the towel without any further explanation, leaving millions of movie and TV-show fans behind.
To most people in the West, Egy.best may not ring a bell, but in Arabic speaking countries, it’s been a piracy beacon for years.
The site, which proudly boasted a “Made in Egypt” tagline, offered access to pirated copies of movies and TV-shows. These could be downloaded and streamed for free, often with subtitles.
Egy.best was most popular in Egypt where it was among the ten most visited sites in the country. In addition, it was also the number one pirate site in many neighboring countries, including Algeria, Kuwait, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
This week, however, the site’s operators decided to throw in the towel, without prior warning. Those who access Egy.best today only see the site’s logo, with النهاية. underneath it, which means “the end.”
It’s unclear why the site, dubbed by some as the Netflix for the poor, took this drastic decision.
In a message on the site’s official Facebook account, which has since been removed, the site mentioned that several Egyptian ISPs has started to block the site. Shortly after, the site shut down, but whether there’s a connection remains uncertain.
ISP blockades were indeed put in place recently. They didn’t just target Egy.best, but also other sites including Arab Lions, Akoam, Movies land, Arab Seed, Mazzika Today, Shahid4u, and Cima4up. Some of these switched to new domain names subsequently, but Egy didn’t.
Egy.best
Some people assumed that the blockades triggered the shutdown, but that would be a rather unusual response. This is also what a follow-up message in the Facebook comment section suggests. There, a site operator noted that it’s bigger than just the blocking efforts in Egypt.
Without an official statement on the reason for the shutdown, people can only speculate. The most likely explanation, perhaps, is some kind of legal pressure, but until the operators share more details, that remains a guess.
Whatever the real reason might be, for millions of people the site’s closure is a big blow. Twitter is littered with messages from people mourning the site’s demise. Not just from Egypt, but from many other Arabic speaking countries as well.
“Whoever did it & was reason of closing it [sic], you take some good prayers from many of us in this Ramadan..,” one commenter noted, with someone else adding that “Summer without #egybest will be a sad summer.”
Others expressed their state of mind through memes.
Egy.best’s gone
Considering the massive size of the site, there’s a huge void to be filled and several ‘copycats’ and competitors are eager to jump in. We’ve already seen several people hijacking the #egybest hashtag on Twitter to promote alternative streaming sites and piracy portals.
There’s little doubt that many of Egy.best’s users will ultimately find a new home, but considering the massive response on social media, the original will be missed.
Die jüngst eingeheimste Finanzierung von 2,7 Milliarden US-Dollar gibt Tesla nur weitere zehn Monate, um die Gewinnschwelle zu überschreiten. Entsprechend nervös dürfte Firmenchef Elon Musk sein, der weiter auf der Suche nach Einsparungspotenzial bei seinem Unternehmen ist. (
Auf einer "Käufe"-Seite listet Google Einkäufe von Nutzern auf, auch wenn diese nicht über das Unternehmen selbst erfolgt sind - mithilfe von Rechnungen, die sich teilweise im Archiv des Gmail-Postfachs befinden. In unserem Fall sind das Hunderte Bestellungen, die bis 2012 zurückreichen. (
In den vergangenen Monaten wurden in den Truppen der deutschen Bundeswehr neue Smartphones verteilt - viel mehr als die vormals genutzten Handys können die Geräte momentan aber noch nicht: Aus Sicherheitsgründen ist die Internetverbindung deaktiviert. (
To most people in the West, Egy.best may not ring a bell, but in Arabic speaking countries, it’s been a piracy beacon for years.
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