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As the year draws to a close, so does the Epic Games Store’s free-game-of-the-week promotion. But if you’ve been following along for the last week or two, odds are you picked up a whole bunch of titles during the end of year daily giveaways…
As the year draws to a close, so does the Epic Games Store’s free-game-of-the-week promotion. But if you’ve been following along for the last week or two, odds are you picked up a whole bunch of titles during the end of year daily giveaways. Today Epic is giving away one more game — Yooka-Laylee and […]
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There’s no shortage of cheap wearable devices that you can use as step counters, fitness trackers, or smartwatch companions to your smartphone. But for the most part they’re designed to run proprietary software. If you’re looking for …
There’s no shortage of cheap wearable devices that you can use as step counters, fitness trackers, or smartwatch companions to your smartphone. But for the most part they’re designed to run proprietary software. If you’re looking for something a little more versatile/hackable, the LILYGO TTGO T-Wristband may be up your alley. At first glance, it […]
The post This $18 wristband is a programmable smart bracelet appeared first on Liliputing.
During 2019, TorrentFreak has regularly reported on the controversial DMCA-related takedown efforts of entertainment companies and their anti-piracy partners. This year several were targeted at our own site, having been filed against us with Google. We can proudly (but sadly) report that every single one of them was completely bogus.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
Every year we publish around 800 articles here at TorrentFreak, all of them covering copyright, piracy, privacy and closely related issues.
Over the course of 2019, many have detailed the efforts of content companies and their anti-piracy partners who have filed lawsuits, copyright complaints, and DMCA-type takedown notices to have content removed from allegedly-infringing sites.
In many cases those legal efforts were warranted but there have been some obvious screw-ups too.
Time and again, anti-piracy companies have overstepped the mark, attempting to have legitimate content removed. And, yet again, TorrentFreak.com has also been targeted by companies, their bots, or even individuals who simply can’t tell the difference between pirated content and legitimate news and informational pieces.
In previous years we’ve received erroneous complaints from the likes of Amazon, Electronic Arts, Disney, Entertainment One, Vertigo Films, Magnolia Pictures, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and even BBC Worldwide. This year we can add more.
According to Google’s Transparency Report, in 2019 Google received a further 11 DMCA takedown notices targeting our domain, sent on behalf of Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures, and sundry others. All of them were completely bogus.
In January, we were accused of infringing the rights of Dreamworks, among others, after simply mentioning that a DVD Screener copy of the movie Green Book was the 9th most popular movie downloaded using BitTorrent during the first week of 2019.
In March, a complaint sent on behalf of Columbia Pictures told Google that an archive page referencing Boss Baby downloads (dating back to 2016) was somehow infringing their rights.
In April we were the dubious recipient of two complaints, both from the Estonian Organization for Copyright Protection. The first claimed that we were offering the CBS movie Five Feet Apart, simply because we have a content tag on the site mentioning torrent site YTS.
The second claimed we’d somehow helped to distribute the Finnish movie The Eternal Road after publishing a list of the top 10 most popular torrent sites of 2016.
After a whole month of peace, Google received yet another bogus complaint about TF in June, this time from Japanese company ‘유니콘미디어” stating that we were offering the Illumination/Universal Pictures title The Secret Life of Pets for download. We were not.
In July we received two complaints, both on behalf of Sony Pictures. The first because we referenced the movie Inferno and the second because we did the same for the movie Breathe.
The complaint filed against us in August was even more absurd than the others. Fourteen years ago, back in 2005 when TorrentFreak was in its formative years, we published a list of public domain movies that are not only free but also legal to download and share.
However, according to a complaint filed by movie company Vertigo Releasing, that article included pirate links to the 2019 movie ‘The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil’. Why? We have no idea but there were a total of five public domain movies in that list that included either the word ‘cop’ or ‘devil’ in their titles.
A DMCA notice filed with Google in October set pulses racing. According to an adult content creator called ‘LittleSubGirl’, our 2018 article explaining how Netflix was dominating Internet traffic infringed her copyrights. It’s really not the kind of dominating we had in mind when the piece was written, honest.
In November a shockingly broad notice was sent to Google targeting not only us but Facebook, Beatport, TrustPilot, RottenTomatoes and a swathe of others. It claimed that we were offering John Wick 3 for download but was immediately flagged by Google as suspect.
“We believe that an impostor or someone else abusing the process submitted this request. We report it here for the sake of completeness and to provide a view into one kind of abuse of the DMCA process,” the company advised.
Finally, December brought yet another complaint from a company that can’t tell the difference between a news report detailing the most popular titles being shared on BitTorrent and a pirate site offering links to the same.
Grand total: 11 DMCA complaints filed in 2019, all of them completely bogus.
See you next year folks….
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
While ECS has been showing off its Liva Z3 line of tiny desktop computers with Intel Comet Lake chips for a few months, the company has revealed details specs ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, which begins next week. The ECS Liva Z3 Plus is a 5&#…
While ECS has been showing off its Liva Z3 line of tiny desktop computers with Intel Comet Lake chips for a few months, the company has revealed details specs ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, which begins next week. The ECS Liva Z3 Plus is a 5″ x 4.6″ x 1.4″ computer with support for up […]
The post ECS is bringing its Liva Z3 Comet Lake mini PCs to CES 2020 appeared first on Liliputing.
Ten years can transform a discipline.
Enlarge / Artist conception of Kepler-186f, the first Earth-size exoplanet found in a star's "habitable zone." (credit: NASA/Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech)
The last ten years will arguably be seen as the "decade of the exoplanet." That might seem like an obvious thing to say, given that the discovery of the first exoplanet was honored with a Nobel Prize this year. But that discovery happened back in 1995—so what made the 2010s so pivotal?
One key event: 2009's launch of the Kepler planet-hunting probe. Kepler spawned a completely new scientific discipline, one that has moved from basic discovery—there are exoplanets!—to inferring exoplanetary composition, figuring out exoplanetary atmosphere, and pondering what exoplanets might tell us about prospects for life outside our Solar System.
To get a sense of how this happened, we talked to someone who was in the field when the decade started: Andrew Szentgyorgyi, currently at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where he's the principal investigator on the Giant Magellan Telescope's Large Earth Finder instrument. In addition to being famous for having taught your author his "intro to physics" course, Szentgyorgyi was working on a similar instrument when the first exoplanet was discovered.
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Die USA führen einen kalten Krieg gegen Huawei. Trotzdem konnte das Unternehmen seinen Umsatz auf mehr als 122 Milliarden US-Dollar steigern. (Wirtschaft, Huawei)
Die USA führen einen kalten Krieg gegen Huawei. Trotzdem konnte das Unternehmen seinen Umsatz auf mehr als 122 Milliarden US-Dollar steigern. (Wirtschaft, Huawei) A sinkhole near Mayan ruins contains 2000 years of data on nearby hurricanes.
The year is 150 CE. It’s a humid summer day in Muyil, a coastal Mayan settlement nestled in a lush wetland on the Yucatan Peninsula. A salty breeze blows in from the gulf, rippling the turquoise surface of a nearby lagoon. Soon, the sky darkens. Rain churns the water, turning it dark and murky with stirred-up sediment. When the hurricane hits, it strips leaves off the mangroves lining the lagoon’s sandy banks. Beneath the tumultuous waves, some drift gently downward into the belly of the sinkhole at its center.
Nearly two millennia later, a team of paleoclimatologists have used sediment cores taken from Laguna Muyil’s sinkhole to reconstruct a 2,000-year record of hurricanes that have passed within 30 kilometers of the site. Richard Sullivan of Texas A&M presented the team's preliminary findings this month at AGU’s Fall Meeting. The reconstruction shows a clear link between warmer periods and an increased frequency of intense hurricanes.
This long-term record can help us better understand how hurricanes affected the civilization that occupied the Yucatan Peninsula for thousands of years. It also provides important information to researchers hoping to understand how hurricanes react to long-term climate trends in light of today’s changing climate.
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With 2019 nearing its end, we take a look at the most-read news articles posted on TorrentFreak this year. There was a lot of interest in enforcement actions, including the raid against Xtream Codes, as well as various shutdowns including that of Openload. At the same time, articles about leaked content were also well-read.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
Every year we write over 800 articles here at TorrentFreak, and some are more popular than others.
On the brink of the new year, we look back at 2019 by going over the 19 most read news items of the year.
All in all, it was quite a controversial year once again. There were some very prominent enforcement actions and shutdowns, with Xtream Codes, Openload, Gears Reloaded, CotoMovies, Vaders and many others being targeted.
In addition, there was a lot of interest in leaks as well, especially those of Avengers: Endgame and screeners of the TV-shows American Gods, The 100, Bless This Mess, and Knightfall.
But what will 2020 bring?
Police in Italy announced a huge anti-piracy operation against the company operating popular IPTV service management system Xtream Codes. Searches were conducted in several countries including Italy, the Netherlands, France and Bulgaria, in a claimed effort to dismantle the company’s entire infrastructure.
Just hours after Avengers: Endgame premiered in China, a cammed copy appeared online. Data reviewed by TorrentFreak revealed that the movie was initially shared by exclusively China-based torrent users, but it soon spread all over the world.
YouTube sensation and founder of ‘pirate’ IPTV Gears Reloaded ‘OMI IN A HELLCAT’ said he was raided by the FBI who “took everything”, including his huge car collection. According to him, the FBI are investigating a variety of issues including the IPTV service, tax filings, and money laundering.
Openload, one of the largest file-hosting sites on the Internet, agreed to shut down its service. Openload.co and several related domains, including Streamango, were taken over by global anti-piracy coalition ACE.
The international law enforcement action against Xtream Codes and what appear to be several entities using its services, turned out to be a complex affair.
Our yearly overview of the logging policies and other privacy and security features of dozens of VPN providers.
Reddit banned its popular /r/mmastreams sub-Reddit. Following numerous copyright infringement complaints, the 165,000 member community must now find a new home. After a controversial Twitter outburst, some believed that an ex-UFC fighter should shoulder part of the blame.
Popular movie piracy app CotoMovies shut down following legal pressure. The app’s developer issued an apology to filmmakers while urging former users to switch to legal services instead. CotoMovies further stated that it would transfer user data to the copyright holders.
Unreleased episodes of several high-profile TV-shows including American Gods, The 100, Bless This Mess, and Knightfall leaked online. The leaks came from promotional screeners, some of which carried revealing watermarks.
RARBG began adding what first appear to be .exe files to their torrents. Considering that these executables are often linked to malware, some people started to panic.
In addition to traditional magnet links, many Pirate Bay titles started to feature a streaming button, which allows users to stream movies and TV shows directly in the browser on a new site called BayStream.
When Disney’s exclusive streaming service launched millions of users signed up. However, others went to pirate sites instead. For some, this is the only way to watch the highly anticipated Mandalorian series.
1337x.to, one of the world’s most popular torrent sites, was blocked by anti-malware company MalwareBytes. The tool claimed that 1337x is engaged in “fraud” and that it tries to steal people’s information or credit card details.”
A developer going by the handle ‘Urban Guacamole’ launched Torrent-Paradise, a torrent index that is powered with IPFS. Short for InterPlanetary File System, IPFS is a decentralized network where users make files available among each other.
The Pirate Bay’s upload functionality broke down for several days. This meant that users were unable to upload any new torrents to the site.
Vader, one of the leading providers of pirate IPTV services, shut down. The service insisted that no customer information would fall into the wrong hands. It was later revealed that the platform was targeted by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.
The massively popular manga comic scanlation platform Manga Rock announced its pending shutdown. The site’s operators say that they now realize how much damage piracy does. They are committed to relaunching as an authorized service, MR Comics, in the near future.
The Pirate Bay ditched its old and mostly unreadable Onion domain for something more recognizable and potentially more permanent. The switch was reported to TorrentFreak after Pirate Bay proxy sites noticed extended downtime on the old domain.
Netflix released Bandersnatch. The latest installment of the Black Mirror series was interactive, allowing viewers to make choices. One of the big questions is whether the format poses a big challenge for pirates to replicate.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
Augsburg hat eine Mobilitäts-Flatrate für das innere Stadtgebiet eingeführt. Bürger können Busse und Straßenbahnen kostenlos nutzen, dazu gibt es eine Leihfahrrad- und Carsharing-Flatrate. (ÖPNV, Leihfahrrad)
Augsburg hat eine Mobilitäts-Flatrate für das innere Stadtgebiet eingeführt. Bürger können Busse und Straßenbahnen kostenlos nutzen, dazu gibt es eine Leihfahrrad- und Carsharing-Flatrate. (ÖPNV, Leihfahrrad) Ein Leserrekord, eine Akademie und ein Kraftact: Wir haben uns dieses Jahr aus der Nachrichtenecke herausgewagt und ganz neue Dinge ausprobiert. (Golem.de, Internet)
Ein Leserrekord, eine Akademie und ein Kraftact: Wir haben uns dieses Jahr aus der Nachrichtenecke herausgewagt und ganz neue Dinge ausprobiert. (
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