Month: July 2019

When the folks behind the F(x)tec Pro 1 first unveiled their Android smartphone with a touchscreen display and a slide-out keyboard that hides behind the screen when it’s not in use, they promised the F(x)tec Pro 1 would ship in July, 2019. That’s not going to happen. But the company has been showing off working […]

The post F(x)tec Pro 1 smartphone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard delayed (but beta testing starts soon) appeared first on Liliputing.

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Millions of people in the UK cite football (soccer for those over the pond) as their favorite sport. Every week, huge numbers head off to grounds far and wide but for the travel averse, watching matches on TV is the only option.

Broadcasters like Sky and BT Sport would like consumers to choose their premium offerings but that can be prohibitively expensive. Even then, the Premier League’s top games played on a Saturday afternoon are banned from TV, thanks to the somewhat archaic “3pm blackout“.

As a result, pirate IPTV services, which all but eliminate high costs while completely ignoring the blackout, are thriving. In response, the Premier League obtained a pioneering injunction from the High Court in 2017 that compelled the largest ISPs to block ‘pirate’ servers for a season. It has obtained permission to continue along the same lines twice since.

Based on information made available in the initial injunction, we previously provided a rough guide on how the system operates. However, the High Court also accepted that other details were secret and agreed to them not being detailed in public.

Since then, TF has received various pieces of information about how the blocking system works in practice but recently a new source came forward offering much more detail, from both the perspective of IPTV providers dealing with the technology and based on information that we’re told was leaked from inside an anti-piracy company.

TF was able to review copies of some of the information. We have been unable to confirm the manner in which the leaks allegedly took place but a secondary source, who has proven reliable in the past, acknowledged that a leak had taken place. It therefore seems likely that the company in question, which we have also chosen not to name, is already familiar with the circumstances.

We’re told that the original source of the leaks, with whom TF has had no contact and whose identity is unknown to us, went AWOL a number of months ago and stopped providing data. Exactly why is unclear but at this point, the details aren’t particularly important.

Inside the Blocking System

In a detailed analysis, our source explained that, unsurprisingly, the anti-piracy company first needs to become a customer of the providers it targets. That means signing up to services in the usual manner and handing over money to what are essentially illegal services.

Documents reviewed by TF also suggest the use of fake online social media accounts which solicit IPTV providers for trials. One particular account, created less than a week before the new season began in August 2017, had nothing but these kinds of requests in its timeline. At least one provider responded in public, apparently unaware of the nature of his potential customer.

Other information supplied suggests that in some instances PayPal accounts with fake details were used to sign up to IPTV providers. This, the source says, probably caused problems because the details on the accounts didn’t match real people’s identities, so they would eventually fail PayPal’s checks and become much less useful.

Once signed up, the anti-piracy company could act like any other subscriber but this didn’t go unnoticed. TF was shown a screenshot from an IPTV service’s customer panel, dated sometime in 2018, which revealed a suspect subscriber who had been a member for many months. The last login was actioned from a particular IP address which, according to current public WHOIS information, remains registered to the anti-piracy company in question.

An invoice for between 10 and 20 euros, dated 2019, which the source says was issued to one of the anti-piracy accounts, gave a name plus an address in London. The supplied postcode relates to an address in another country of the UK. When all put together it is clearly a fake account, although we weren’t able to positively link it to a specific anti-piracy operative.

Nevertheless, it seems clear from the supplied channel surfing logs (which we were told were retained and supplied by a cooperative third-party IPTV provider) that a normal human viewer almost certainly wasn’t behind the subscription.

The logs show that sports channels were systematically selected, presumably to be analyzed back at base, and then skipped to fresh channels over pretty precise set periods. According to our source, these durations were sometimes varied, in his opinion to avoid detection as a computerized system.

Of course, not all attempts at subscribing to channels for anti-piracy purposes are spotted early by the affected IPTV providers. Once in, we’re informed that the preferred method of scanning for infringement is via the humble .m3u playlist file, with channels to be monitored being captured for set periods and then rotated.

The scanning system reportedly allows for a VPN to be assigned to each .m3u line/account, in order to make detection more difficult. VPNs are also sometimes used to sign up and/or used for contact via customer support services offered by the providers.

According to the source, captured frames from ‘pirate’ streams are compared with a direct source from the original content. If there’s an automatic match (sometimes manual intervention is required) then the source server’s IP address is logged and sent to the big six ISPs in the UK for blocking.

We’re told that an email is also sent to the hosting companies of the servers informing them of the block, accompanied by a link to the High Court order. Often these notices aren’t passed on to the operators of IPTV services.

According to one IPTV provider, the process for checking for infringing streams begins around 15 minutes before a match begins and continues for 15 minutes after. Further checks are conducted in the interim to catch any IP address or other network changes carried out by the providers.

However, while infringing streams are apparently blocked in just a “few seconds”, it can take a couple of hours for them to become unblocked by ISPs after the games have finished.

While reports online indicate that some services have been affected by this type of blocking, it has also had some unintended consequences that may have made IPTV providers more resilient and more adept at countering the blocking program. We’ll cover some of those next time.

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

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Zwei weitere Congstar-Tarife erhalten bis Ende Juli eine kostenpflichtige LTE-Option. Bisher war dies nur den teuren Congstar-Tarifen vorbehalten - gegen Aufpreis. (Congstar, Smartphone)

Die Bürgerrechtsorganisation Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fordert Google auf, einen besseren Trackingschutz in Android zu integrieren. Android Q bekomme zwar Verbesserungen im Bereich Datenschutz, diese reichten aber nicht aus. (Android, Google)

Das Markt smarter Türöffnungssysteme könnte bald einen Teilnehmer weniger haben. Das Münchner Startup Locumi Labs GmbH hat einen Eigeninsolvenzantrag gestellt. Das Unternehmen ist für die smarte Türöffnung Nello One verantwortlich. (Startup, Wirtschaft)

In May, new legislation was tabled in the U.S. House and Senate that introduces the creation of a “small claims” process for copyright offenses.

The CASE Act, short for “Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement,” proposes to establish a copyright claim tribunal within the United States Copyright Office.

If adopted, the new board will provide an option to resolve copyright disputes outside the federal courts, which significantly reduces the associated costs. Supporters say that this will be ideal for smaller creators, such as photographers, to address copyright infringement.

Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor of the CASE Act, which means that the bill is now heading to the Senate.

The positive vote was welcomed by many rightsholders. The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), for example, said that it’s a great first step to get this bill written into law. 

“If enacted into law, for the first time photographers, graphic artists, illustrators, authors, songwriters and other individual creators and small businesses would have an affordable and accessible venue to protect their creative efforts from infringement,” ASMP noted.

ASMP and others see the CASE Act as a missing piece in the copyright enforcement puzzle. They believe that many creators are not taking action against copyright infringers at the moment, because filing federal lawsuits is too expensive.

Taking their complaint to the proposed tribunal at the US Copyright Office would be much cheaper. This issue is also highlighted by Keith Kupferschmid, CEO of the Copyright Alliance.

“Right now, few small creators have that ability because the law requires them to sue in federal court and federal court is much too costly and complex, especially when compared to the relatively small size of the claims at issue,” Kupferschmid tells TorrentFreak.

However, there is also significant pushback against the new bill. Several digital rights activists, for example, warn that the Copyright Office is not the most objective venue to resolve copyright disputes. Another common complaint is that a small claims court invites “copyright-trolling,” with rightsholders potentially filing a flurry of complaints.

EFF‘s manager of policy and activism Katharine Trendacosta notes that, although people can opt-out from participating in the tribunal, rightsholders will find those who don’t and prey on these people.

“It encourages copyright trolling by inviting filing as many copyright claims as one can against whoever is least likely to opt-out—ordinary Internet users who can be coerced into paying thousands of dollars to escape the process, whether they infringed copyright or not,” Trendacosta notes.

While potential damages are lower than in a federal court, they are still substantial. The Tribunal can award damages of $15,000 per infringement, or $30,000 per case, which could easily bankrupt families according to Re:Create‘s Executive Director Joshua Lamel.

“It is not small claims when it could bankrupt over half of American families for sharing a photograph online if they were subject to the CASE Act. It is not constitutional when the tribunal could get the law wrong and a defendant will have no recourse to appeal to the courts,” Lamel stresses.

The new bill creates a familiar tension between rightsholder groups and digital activists, with both refuting each other’s arguments.

According to the Copyright Alliance’s Keith Kupferschmid, opponents use scare tactics and intentionally misstate and omit details about the bill to gin up resistance.

“The bill will neither create or exacerbate a copyright troll problem or result in massive default judgments. The bill includes numerous safeguards to prevent such a thing. In fact, it includes many more safeguards than presently exist today when someone sues in federal court,” Kupferschmid tells us.

One of the main safeguards is the fact that people can opt-out. However, the opponents, for their part, believe that this is meaningless. They counter that many people may simply have no clue what to do. They would prefer to see an opt-in system instead.

“The average person is not really going to understand what is going on, other than that they’ve received what looks like a legal summons,” EFF’s
Trendacosta notes.

Some opponents believe that the new bill will give rightsholders an easier way to take down content and keep it down permanently. If a copyright holder files a takedown request after it starts a small claims action, the platform will have to keep the content down until the action is resolved

The Copyright Alliance, of course, sees things differently. It doesn’t believe that it’s logical for rightsholders to pay a fee to simply take a single piece of content down. And if rightsholders file inaccurate claims, they can easily lose a case.

Instead, Kupferschmid counters that the CASE Act could actually help creators to fight abusive takedowns. If people have their content taken down, from YouTube, for example, they can use the small claims court to cheaply dispute this.

Opponents of the bill are not impressed by this argument, however. EFF Senior Staff Attorney  Mitch Stoltz tells TorrentFreak that such claims are rare and often hard to prove.

“The proposal to have the new Board hear claims of false takedowns sounds good on paper, but it won’t help people in practice. Legal claims against people for sending false takedowns are very rare, but that’s not because of the expense of a lawsuit – it’s because the legal standard for a false takedown is very narrow and hard to prove,” Stoltz says.

We can go on and on with arguments from both sides, but it’s clear that the bill is creating quite a bit of tension between both camps.

What we do want to stress, however, is that the CASE Act will be useless to the copyright trolls who go after alleged BitTorrent pirates. Unlike an earlier version of the bill, there is no subpoena power. This means that rightsholders can’t start a case against a John Doe who’s only known by an IP-address.

In other words, the proposed small claims court, if adopted, can only be used against infringers who are known by name. That leaves out the millions of traditional file-sharers and downloaders.

As the CASE Act moves forward, be can expect more lobbying from both sides. Which position lawmakers will be most susceptible to will eventually decide whether it’s turned into law, or not.

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

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Folks have been hacking the Nintendo Switch and running Linux on it for nearly a year and a half. A few months ago someone started porting Windows 10 to run on the portable game console. And now you can run Android on a Switch. Switchroot LineageOS 15.1 from basically turns the Switch into an Android […]

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