Can a cellular connection linking past and future help a grieving man revise history?
A grieving police detective receives a mysterious call from the past in Don't Let Go from Blumhouse Productions.
A cell phone connection serves as a link between the past and present for a police detective and his dead niece in Don't Let Go, a new supernatural thriller from Blumhouse Productions that debuted at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It's a little bit Frequency, a little bit Looper, with a smidgen of good old-fashioned crime drama thrown in for good measure.
(Mild spoilers below.)
The film stars David Oyelowo (Selma) as Detective Jack Radcliff, who looks out for his young niece Ashley (Storm Reid, A Wrinkle in Time, Euphoria). Ashley's father (and Jack's brother), Garrett (Brian Tyree Henry, Atlanta, Joker), is bipolar with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, as well as the occasional bit of drug running. He's been on the straight and narrow for several years now, but Jack still gives Ashley a cell phone so she can call him if she needs him—like when her dad forgets to pick her up from the movies after dark. One day Jack gets a panicked phone call from Ashley, and rushes to his brother's house, only to find Garrett has shot his wife and daughter, and then himself, apparently in the midst of a manic episode. It's ruled a murder/suicide, but something about the case feels wrong to Jack and he starts poking around, to the annoyance of his boss, Howard (Alfred Molina, Species, Da Vince Code).
The FCC regulates cell phone signal booster, but it’s easy to find unauthorized devices.
Enlarge/ You really can find anything in a stock image library: "Antennas of mobile cellular systems with Wi-Fi hot spot repeater and blue sky." (credit: Just_One_Pic / Getty Images)
Cell phone signal boosters are powerful devices. Installed in a home or office, they can potentially amplify one signal bar into five. In rural areas with poor cell coverage, or in buildings where signals have trouble penetrating, they can be lifesavers, providing reliable access to communication networks and emergency services.
But boosters also have a dark side: If misconfigured or poorly manufactured, they can knock out service for everyone who happens to be nearby. That’s why the Federal Communications Commission began regulating the devices five years ago. Today, all consumer signal boosters sold and marketed in the United States must meet the agency’s strict technical standards. Doing so can get expensive, and many FCC-authorized boosters cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Ecommerce sites like Amazon offer cheaper options. The only problem is, they’re not always compliant.
The FCC requires booster manufacturers to get their products certified as safe, and it publishes each valid certification on its website. WIRED found a number of sellers offering boosters on Amazon that are not listed as certified by the FCC. Their models often cost less than $200, compared to $300 or more for FCC-certified versions. A number of them have been top sellers in the signal booster category, and some are promoted with a badge reading “Amazon’s Choice.”
A new article, published in the American University International Law Review, suggests that affordability and availability are the key drivers to decrease piracy. Focusing on the supply-side is more effective than enforcement options such as lawsuits, infringement notices, and website blocking, the researchers conclude.
Piracy is an intriguing phenomenon. On the one hand, it is seen as an existential threat by the entertainment industries. However, pirates are often heavy consumers of legal content as well.
Over the past several years, a vast array of studies have tried to determine to what extent piracy hurts legitimate revenue streams and, equally importantly, how it can be stopped.
There are no definitive answers but each study adds a small piece of the puzzle. One recent article, published by University of Amsterdam researchers João Pedro Quintais and Joost Poort, suggests that affordability and availability are key drivers.
The researchers analyzed a wealth of data and conducted surveys among 35,000 respondents, in thirteen countries. What they found was that, between 2014 and 2017, self-reported piracy rates have dropped in all the European countries that were surveyed, except Germany.
In a 70-page paper, published in American University International Law Review, the researchers try to pinpoint the most likely explanation for this decline, starting with enforcement.
% Pirates on Internet population 2014 / 2017
In a detailed literature overview, the paper begins by discussing various enforcement activities, ranging from pirate site blockades, criminal enforcement, to civil suits against individual file-sharers. While some of these studies suggest that enforcement works, others reveal a limited effect or nothing at all.
This article doesn’t have space for a full review of all the literature, but the conclusion from the report’s authors is clear. Enforcement is not the silver bullet that will stop piracy.
“Despite the abundance of enforcement measures, their perceived effectiveness is uncertain. Therefore, it is questionable whether the answer to successfully tackling online copyright infringement lies in additional rights or enforcement measures,” the report notes.
Instead, the researchers believe that other factors are likely responsible for the decline in piracy rates. Specifically, they point to affordability and availability of legal content.
Through the extensive surveys, conducted in France, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, UK, Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand, they find several clues that this may indeed be the case.
Many of the data presented by the researchers have been published before. For example, they show that piracy rates are higher when the gross national income of a country is lower. This effect is particularly visible for lower incomes, as shown below.
Pirates per legal user / GNI in 2014 and 2017
The authors further observe a clear increase in spending on legal content where piracy rates dropped. In addition, they point to an earlier study that shows how music piracy declined in the Netherlands between 2008 and 2012, while piracy rates were still increasing for films and series. By 2012, Spotify had been introduced in the Netherlands (early 2010) but Nexflix not yet and HBO only just.
Based on their analysis, the researchers conclude that affordability and availability are indeed key drivers for declining piracy rates. In particular, they found no conclusive evidence that anti-piracy enforcement is effective.
“The main takeaway from our research is that online piracy is declining. The key driver for this decline is the increasing availability of affordable legal content, rather than enforcement measures,” their paper concludes.
When the conditions are right, people will eventually consume more content legally, it’s argued. This is also backed by the finding that 95% of the self-proclaimed pirates in their survey were legal consumers as well. Many of these turn to piracy due to lacking availability or high costs.
“Where the legal supply of content is affordable, convenient and diverse, there is increasing consumer demand for it. Under the right conditions, consumers are willing to pay for copyright-protected content and to abandon piracy,” the paper reads.
This means that policymakers and copyright holders should direct their efforts more to the supply side, instead of enforcement activities.
“The crucial policy implication here is that policy makers should focus their resources and legislative efforts on improving those conditions. In particular, they ought to shift their focus from repressive approaches to tackle online infringement towards policies and measures that foster lawful remunerated access to copyright-protected content,” the researchers conclude.
This isn’t a new thought. Over the past several years, many people have hammered on the importance of appealing legal options. The new research confirms this. However, it is worth noting that the paper itself doesn’t provide any data showing that the recent drop in piracy is in fact caused by improved legal availability.
In other words, the empirical evidence doesn’t back either anti-piracy strategy conclusively.
For example, when we look at a graph of the piracy rates among legal users and the gross national income in different countries between 2014 and 2017 (shown above), we see that Sweden experienced the most pronounced piracy drop. However, there’s no clear change in legal availability compared to other countries, as far as we know.
TorrentFreak spoke to Joost Poort, one of the authors of the paper, who agreed that the lack of direct evidence is indeed a weak point. While there are several hints that the recent drop in piracy is mostly caused by better legal options, there is no hard data to back it up in this specific case.
Analyzing the effects of piracy is complicated, and there are signs that enforcement might also work in some cases. For example, just last week we reported on a study that showed how website blocking can motivate some pirates to sign up for a paid streaming service.
For many, however, it’s tempting to conclude that focusing on the carrot rather than the stick is the way forward.
That said, it’s also possible that the solution to piracy includes a little bit of both. While one may be more effective than the other, it’s safe to conclude that the puzzle isn’t solved yet.
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The full paper by João Pedro Quintais and Joost Poort titled: “The Decline of Online Piracy: How Markets – Not Enforcement – Drive Down Copyright Infringement”, is available here.
“I don’t know if we could’ve written it ourselves—it took a risk maybe we aren’t willing to.”
The band YACHT, named for a mysterious sign seen in Portland around the turn of the century. [credit:
YACHT / Google I/O 2019 ]
The dance punk band YACHT has always felt like a somewhat techy act since debuting in the early 2000s. They famously recorded instrumental versions of two earlier albums and made them available for artists under a Creative Commons license at the Free Music Archive. Post-Snowden, they wrote a song called “Party at the NSA” and donated proceeds to the EFF. One album cover of theirs could only be accessed via fax initially (sent through a Web app YACHT developed to ID the nearest fax to groups of fans; OfficeMax must’ve loved it). Singer Claire L. Evans literally wrote the book (Broad Band) on female pioneers of the Internet.
So when Evans showed up at Google I/O this summer, we knew she wasn’t merely making a marketing appearance ala Drake or The Foo Fighters. In a talk titled “Music and Machine Learning,” Evans instead walked a room full of developers through a pretty cool open secret that awaited music fans until this weekend: YACHT had been spending the last three years writing a new album called Chain Tripping (out yesterday, August 30). And the process took a minute because the band wanted to do it with what Evans called “a machine-learning generated composition process.”
“I know this isn’t the technical way to explain it, but this allowed us to find melodies hidden in between songs from our back catalog,” she said during her I/O talk. “Here’s what the user-facing side of the model looked like when we recorded the album last May—it’s a Colab Notebook, not the kind of thing musicians usually bring into the studio.”
“My whole town back home knows,” one alleged victim said. “This ruined my life.”
Enlarge (credit: Anca Gabriela Rafan / EyeEm / Getty)
Almost two dozen women say they were tricked into appearing in pornographic videos on the prominent porn site GirlsDoPorn. They sued the owner of the site, Michael Pratt, for fraud in 2016. The trial began in mid-August and is expected to run for more than a month.
One of the victims wrapped up her testimony in a San Diego courtroom on Monday.
“If I had known that they were posting it on the Internet, that my name would be attached to it, that it would be in the United States," the woman identified as Jane Doe 15 said in court, according to the Daily Beast. "If I had known that it was more than 30 minutes of filming, if I had known any of that, just any one of those, I wouldn't have done it.”
US broadcaster DISH Networks seems determined to keep its lawyers busy by suing yet more suppliers of ‘pirate’ TV streams. The latest targets are Florida-based One Box TV and Virginia-based supplier Miracle Box. The latter is said to be a reseller of the recently-sued IPGuys service.
Unlicensed IPTV services are now billed as one of the biggest threats faced by producers of movies and television shows.
There are numerous cases pending against alleged operators of ‘pirate’ services actioned under copyright law.
However, in the United States, DISH Networks and NagraStar are increasingly using the Federal Communications Act to target companies and individuals who it claims are involved in the capture and subsequent rebroadcasting of its satellite signals via ‘pirate’ IPTV services.
The latest targets are One Box TV, LLC and alleged sole manager Donna Fogle, both of Florida. It’s alleged that One Box TV sold $19 per month IPTV subscriptions containing unlicensed DISH programming and Android-style boxes configured with the same features for around $275.
In common with another recent DISH case filed against unlicensed IPTV provider IPGuys, the broadcaster claims that it was able to use technical means determine that at least some of the content offered by One Box TV was illegally sourced from its satellite broadcasts.
“The DISH Programming distributed on the OneBox service was received from DISH’s satellite communications without authorization from DISH,” the complaint reads.
“During testing of the OneBox service, encoded messages incorporated into DISH’s satellite communications of the Willow Cricket channel, for example, were detected on the Willow Cricket channel retransmitted to customers of the OneBox service, thereby confirming this content originated from DISH’s satellite communications.”
While One Box TV is an LLC, the company doesn’t appear to have particularly grand premises. According to DISH, the company operates from a booth at a flea market and websites including OneBoxLive.com and OneBoxTV.com.
OneBoxTV.com..before it disappeared
A note in the complaint indicates that DISH had a “pre-suit discussion” with One Box TV during which the company said that it had the ability to “remove channels” from its service. It’s not clear when that communication took place but if customer complaints posted to the Better Business Bureau website are any indicator, One Box TV went down during May.
“When we purchased our TV streaming box, we were promised lifetime updates. Our box needs updated [sic], and we can’t find this seller. E-mails returned. We paid $175 cash for the OneBox about 2-3 years ago. Model No. OneBoxTVPlus. We were promied lifetme updates [sic], but we cannot find the seller,” one reads.
Another complainant indicated that they went to the company’s place of business, but left disappointed.
“We received notice of them stopping their business. We went to see what’s up and the booth they were at is empty. We are out over $350 on our equipment. Sales rep was Donna F. She sold us 2 boxes and a monthly service and now we get an email saying they are discontinuing their business. We are out $350 for equipment,” a complaint posted May 13 reads.
Yet another complaint says that the company took back a previously-sold box to update it, but then closed down without returning the device. Subsequent phone calls went unanswered and the company’s voicemail was reportedly full.
DISH is now demanding a broad permanent injunction against One Box TV and its alleged operator, plus actual or statutory damages of between $10,000 and $100,000 per violation, plus costs.
Finally, the DISH case against IPGuys reported last week listed Miracle Box Media as a reseller of that service. Court records indicate that Virginia-based Miracle Box Media LLC and alleged operator Melvin Crawley Jr. are also being sued by DISH along broadly similar lines.
The One Box TV and Miracle Box complaints can be found here and here.
The LOUDEST movie ever made gets a new cut and a new, cutting-edge format.
Severed heads. Skulls on stakes. Surfers in a gun battle. A bridge rebuilt and blown up every night. Painted faces. A jungle swallowed in flame. Wagner. The Doors. Sweat. Malaria. And so many helicopters, their blades pounding relentlessly. Only Crazy Grenade-Launcher man knows "who's in charge here," and he ain't saying.
Yes, Apocalypse Now is back. For its 40th anniversary, the movie has been remastered in 4K digital and re-edited before heading to Blu-ray and 4K/Ultra HD discs. The nightmarish Vietnam War epic is the quintessential example of the "cinema of endurance": long, grueling, magnificent, and LOUD. When Apocalypse Now first hit theaters in 1979, it ran about 2.5 hours, but its 2001 re-release (dubbed Apocalypse Now Redux and presented in 35mm) clocked in at a whopping 3 hours and 22 minutes. The newest version, Apocalypse Now Final Cut, comes in at about 3 hours.
Martin Sheen stars as Captain Willard. Sheen is best known for being Paula Abdul's father-in-law from 1992 to 1994. [credit:
Lionsgate
]
The Sony 4K Laser
Before heading to home video, Final Cut gets a brief theatrical run so you can watch it the way God and Director Francis Ford Coppola intended: on a huge screen in a dark room with no ability to hit pause and escape. Many theaters are also showing it on Sony's cutting-edge 4K Laser Cinema Projectors, which only hit the market about a year ago. Although most cinema projectors are already 4K, the 4K Laser replaces the xenon bulbs used by most projectors with a longer-lasting, brighter, and more-consistent laser.
Wie geht die Geschichte um den Hacker Elliot, der Evil Corp. und Mr. Robot aus? Das können Fans der Serie ab Oktober in der finalen Staffel erfahren. In den 13 Episoden sind auch wieder Rami Malek und Christian Slater zu sehen. (Prime Video, Amazon)
Wie geht die Geschichte um den Hacker Elliot, der Evil Corp. und Mr. Robot aus? Das können Fans der Serie ab Oktober in der finalen Staffel erfahren. In den 13 Episoden sind auch wieder Rami Malek und Christian Slater zu sehen. (Prime Video, Amazon)
Der Account des Twitter-CEOs Jack Dorsey wurde von einer Hacker-Gruppe gesteuert. Sie postete in seinem Namen rassistische und rechtsradikale Äußerungen. Schuld sei eine Sicherheitslücke beim Mobilfunfanbieter gewesen. (Jack Dorsey, Soziales Netz)
Der Account des Twitter-CEOs Jack Dorsey wurde von einer Hacker-Gruppe gesteuert. Sie postete in seinem Namen rassistische und rechtsradikale Äußerungen. Schuld sei eine Sicherheitslücke beim Mobilfunfanbieter gewesen. (Jack Dorsey, Soziales Netz)
Was hat Bill Gates zur Gründung von Microsoft bewegt? Was ist seine größte Angst? Netflix hält das Leben des Unternehmers und Milliardärs in einer dreiteiligen Dokumentation fest – angefangen in seiner Kindheit. Sie soll diese und weitere Fragen beantw…
Was hat Bill Gates zur Gründung von Microsoft bewegt? Was ist seine größte Angst? Netflix hält das Leben des Unternehmers und Milliardärs in einer dreiteiligen Dokumentation fest - angefangen in seiner Kindheit. Sie soll diese und weitere Fragen beantworten. (Bill Gates, Microsoft)
Wie geht die Geschichte um den Hacker Elliot, der Evil Corp. und Mr. Robot aus? Das können Fans der Serie ab Oktober in der finalen Staffel erfahren. In den 13 Episoden sind auch wieder Rami Malek und Christian Slater zu sehen. (
Der Account des Twitter-CEOs Jack Dorsey wurde von einer Hacker-Gruppe gesteuert. Sie postete in seinem Namen rassistische und rechtsradikale Äußerungen. Schuld sei eine Sicherheitslücke beim Mobilfunfanbieter gewesen. (
Was hat Bill Gates zur Gründung von Microsoft bewegt? Was ist seine größte Angst? Netflix hält das Leben des Unternehmers und Milliardärs in einer dreiteiligen Dokumentation fest - angefangen in seiner Kindheit. Sie soll diese und weitere Fragen beantworten. (
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