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Asrock hat die Spezifikationen der Radeon RX 5600 XT versehentlich offengelegt: Demzufolge entspricht sie einer Radeon RX 5700, hat aber ein von 256 auf 192 Bit verkleinertes Speicherinterface. (AMD Navi, AMD)
Can these taxes really make a dent in obesity, diabetes, and other ailments?
Can taxes really break our collective desire for sugary, syrupy soda? (credit: flickr user: davesag)
They’re cloyingly sweet, nutritionally empty—and, increasingly, subject to taxation. More than 35 countries and seven cities in the US—starting with Berkeley, California, in 2015—now impose a tax on soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages, and several more places are considering it.
Public health researchers and organizations such as the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics see these taxes as low-hanging fruit in the battle against obesity and the health problems, such as diabetes, that often come with it. In the United States, nearly 40 percent of adults are obese, which adds $147 billion to the nation’s annual healthcare spending, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The problem is complex, but the widespread consumption of foods packed with added sugars—which add calories but no essential nutrients—plays a major role, and beverages account for nearly half the added sugar in the American diet.
“It’s really hard to shift these behaviors, and taxes are, if not the single most, one of the most impactful and important policies to move the needle on unhealthy eating habits,” says Christina Roberto, a behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Taxes have helped to reduce the public health impact of alcohol and tobacco, and many public health researchers say there’s good reason to think they can mitigate the harms of sugary beverages, too.
At the same time, there are also reasons why soda taxes might not have the impact on public health that advocates hope for. The current taxes may be too low to affect purchasing behavior. People could switch to other unhealthy foods. Or, in some cases, they could simply buy their soda in a neighboring city that doesn’t tax them.
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In vielen europäischen Ländern ist Disney+ noch gar nicht verfügbar, da wird der Termin für die zweite Staffel von Star Wars The Mandalorian angekündigt: Sie soll im Herbst 2020 ausgestrahlt werden. (Star Wars, Disney)
Bei illegalen Hackertools ist schon der Besitz strafbar. Doch wie wird aus einem Dual-Use-Tool ein illegales Hackertool? Auf dem Hackerkongress 36C3 erklärte ein Rechtsanwalt, warum eine Software nicht im falschen Forum vorgestellt werden sollte. Von …
Bei illegalen Hackertools ist schon der Besitz strafbar. Doch wie wird aus einem Dual-Use-Tool ein illegales Hackertool? Auf dem Hackerkongress 36C3 erklärte ein Rechtsanwalt, warum eine Software nicht im falschen Forum vorgestellt werden sollte. Von Moritz Tremmel (Politik/Recht, Internet) The online piracy wars have claimed many victims over the years, from regular file-sharers to anti-piracy companies that collapsed under their own controversies. But perhaps the most obvious are the many pirate sites, platforms and services that have gone down due to a firestorm of litigation, overwhelming threats, or raids by law enforcement authorities. Here are the Top 19 casualties of 2019.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
For as long as pirate sites and services have been around, entertainment industry groups have poured significant resources into having them closed down.
When Napster went down in flames 20 years ago, some people thought that was mission accomplished. In 2005, when the MGM vs Grokster case went all the way to the Supreme Court and went in MGM’s favor, many people believed that file-sharing had received its fatal blow.
Today, 15 years later, the blows are still being delivered but the wars continue. In many respects, piracy is stronger than ever. In others, notably music, the industry is finally meeting piracy head-on with value-for-money services that in terms of quality, presentation, and ease of use, pirates cannot easily compete with.
As we take a look today at the Top 19 most significant piracy shutdowns of 2019, the emphasis is clear. The overwhelming majority of pirate site and service closures during the past 12 months have been at the hands of entertainment companies involved in the supply and distribution of movies, TV shows, and sporting events.
January – Reddit’s /r/soccerstreams bites the dust
Reddit’s /r/soccerstreams was once a discussion platform catering to around 420,000 subscribers and many more casual visitors. Among other things, the sub-Reddit allowed users to post links to live games, making it easy for soccer/football fans to watch matches for free.
As a result, the forum (or more accurately, Reddit itself) was inundated with DMCA complaints from rightsholders, demanding that links be removed. Reddit’s admins ultimately lost patience, informing the mods of /r/soccerstreams to take decisive action or face being banned. In the end, the sub fell on its own sword and shut itself down.
May – One Step TV
After what appeared to be a 2018 launch, pirate IPTV service OneStepTV grew to offer around 600 TV channels and 20,000 pieces of VOD content for $25 per month or less. While the service attracted plenty of initially happy customers, things started to go sour in April 2019.
After experiencing difficulty processing payments, One Step TV ultimately stopped doing business due to threats by the legal team of the Alliance of Creativity and Entertainment.
May – Vader Streams
As far as IPTV ‘brands’ go, Vaders was one of the most recognizable in the space. With a large customer base and reportedly reliable service, Vaders disappeared into thin air early May, leaving little but rumors and educated guesses in its wake.
In August, however, it was revealed that the Alliance for Creativity took the platform down, leaving Vaders’ operators with an alleged $10 million settlement bill.
June – Convert2MP3
Despite the huge popularity of legal music streaming services such as Spotify, so-called YouTube-ripping platforms remain a thorn in the side of the world’s major recording labels. By facilitating the downloading of tracks to users’ machines, both labels and YouTube are said to lose revenue due to these services.
With dozens of monthly visitors, Convert2MP3 was one of the biggest. As a result it attracted the negative attentions of music groups IFPI and BVMI, which sued the platform in Germany. A court handed down a preliminary injunction against Convert2MP3 but then the ripping service settled the case by shutting down, handing over an unspecified amount in compensation, and surrendering its domain.
June – IPTV Bulgaria
In common with similar operations against other illicit IPTV providers in Eastern Europe, a June operation in Bulgaria was based in criminal law rather than civil lawsuits.
Supported by Europol’s Intellectual Property Crime Coordinated Coalition (IPC3) and the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA), the raids reportedly took down a pirate IPTV service with an estimated 700,000 worldwide subscribers. It was never named and no follow-up investigation has yet been made public.
July / August – eBook.bike
Legal actions against sites dedicated to eBooks are relatively rare. Those that see the parties duel it out in public beforehand are almost non-existent. For this reason alone, the lawsuit filed by author John Van Stry against former Pirate Party Canada leader Travis McCrea is easily one of the most unusual cases of the year.
A brief summary of the case is that someone uploaded Van Stry’s books to McCrea’s eBook download platform eBook.bike. Van Stry accused McCrea of not doing enough to control piracy on his platform, McCrea asked to be sued and Van Stry complied.
For reasons unknown, in July or August eBook.bike shut down, seemingly voluntarily. The case, documented in detail here on TF, is not only still ongoing but also one of the most unorthodox lawsuits we’ve ever covered. How it will end is up for debate but if the aim was to shut down eBook.bike, victory was achieved months ago.
September and ongoing – Manga Rock
Given the focus on traditionally famous large sites such as The Pirate Bay or RARBG, Mango Rock may have seemed like an insignificant player, but nothing could be further from the truth. According to data from MUSO, the so-called ‘scanlation’ site was even more popular than The Pirate Bay.
The demise of the platform is unusual in several respects, not least that the operators of the platform announced that they’d come to the realization that piracy is damaging. To remedy that they are now working on a legal platform as Manga Rock, which is still operational, is phased out.
September – Xtream Codes and other IPTV players
The huge police operation that spread across Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Bulgaria in September sent shockwaves through the IPTV community. More than two dozen people were arrested and at least 180 servers were seized.
While it wasn’t the only target, Xtream Codes, the software/system utilized by a reported 5,000 IPTV services and their 50 million customers, was wiped out leaving swathes of the IPTV scene in chaos. Little has been heard of the operation since but it does seem that many providers have found alternative solutions and are now back in business.
September – Coto Movies
While browser-based sites and services remain popular with pirates, apps for both Android and iOS are a convenient option for those seeking a straightforward consumption experience. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by entertainment companies who have targeted several over the years in an attempt to stem the tide.
Early September, third-party iOS app store TweakBox removed several movie piracy apps in response to legal pressure. Following that news, the people behind the CotoMovies app decided to close down. It later transpired that the makers of the films Hellboy and Angel Has Fallen forced the move.
The operator of CotoMovies issued an apology but then poured fuel on the fire by stating he would be handing over user data so that the movie companies could “enforce their valuable intellectual property.”
October – Share-Online.biz
As Germany’s largest file-hosting site serving between six and ten million users, Share-Online.biz had a target on its back. In 2017, anti-piracy group GVU filed a criminal complaint against the platform. Two years later, the platform was shut down following police raids in Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
Three suspects in their forties and fifties were reportedly placed under investigation.
October – Pirate CDNs
Founded in 2013, Moonwalk acted as a back-end for pirate streaming sites. Back in February, TF was informed that it was offering more than 33,000 movies and TV shows to site operators who embedded Moonwalk content and advertising into their own sites.
In Russia, Moonwalk was said to have serviced around 80% of pirate streaming platforms but in October it was all over. BREIN, the MPA and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment teamed up, leaving Moonwalk to announce that it would “NEVER be up again.”
Later that month the Moonwalk closure proved infectious, with several other ‘pirate’ CDNs also shutting down.
October – RapidVideo
RapidVideo was one of the most popular file-hosting sites around but like many of its competitors, it had plenty of entertainment industry rivals. Under pressure from the MPA and ACE while facing a lawsuit in Germany filed by Warner Bros. and Netflix, RapidVideo threw in the towel, leaving millions of users behind.
October – Openload / Streamango / StreamCherry
Already known to millions of users generating around 65 million hits per month, Openload hit the mainstream headlines in 2018 when it was claimed to be generating more traffic than Hulu and HBO Go.
Previously branded a “notorious market” by the USTR, this year Openload decided to stop paying uploaders. The move was controversial but nothing compared to what followed.
At the end of October, following some kind of agreement with the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, Openload suddenly shut down, surrendered its domains, and paid “significant damages”. At the same time, hosting sites Streamango, StreamCherry, and VeryStream also disappeared.
October – Boom Media
Boom Media was once one of the most recognizable brands in the IPTV reseller space, offering packages from providers including Nitro, Epic, Beast, MFG, and Vaders. In October, however, it found itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit filed by DISH Network.
Despite signs that it might put up a fight, Boom Media shut itself down but the lawsuit hasn’t gone away.
November – Movie2free.com, Thailand’s largest pirate site
With millions of views per day, Movie2Free.com was not only popular in Southeast Asia, it was also one of the largest pirate sites on the Internet, period. However, in early November all that changed when Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation confirmed that the streaming portal had been shut down following a request from the Motion Picture Association.
November – Omniverse One World Television
In February 2019, several major Hollywood studios under the ACE banner filed a lawsuit against IPTV service Omniverse One World Television.
The company put up a spirited defense, claiming that it acted entirely legally and had appropriate licensing deals in place. In the end, however, ACE prevailed. Alongside a reported $50 million settlement agreement, Omniverse shut itself down.
November – Gears Reloaded
Finally, the strange story of YouTuber and entrepreneur Bill Omar Carrasquillo, otherwise known as OMI IN A HELLCAT. Carrasquillo is the self-confessed founder of IPTV service Gears Reloaded, a business that he claims to this day was fully legal.
In November he announced that he’d been raided by the FBI and IRS who “took everything” as part of a copyright infringement and tax evasion investigation.
Despite witnesses and Carrasquillo himself appearing on TV to discuss the raids, rumors persist that he made the whole thing up. Meanwhile, the authorities are refusing to confirm anything, one way or the other.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
Mit einer Strafanzeige gegen den Staatstrojaner-Hersteller Finfisher soll der Export von Überwachungssoftware in bestimmte Länder aufgeklärt werden. Der CCC hat nun nachgewiesen, dass in der Türkei eingesetzt Software wohl aus Deutschland stammt. Ein …
Mit einer Strafanzeige gegen den Staatstrojaner-Hersteller Finfisher soll der Export von Überwachungssoftware in bestimmte Länder aufgeklärt werden. Der CCC hat nun nachgewiesen, dass in der Türkei eingesetzt Software wohl aus Deutschland stammt. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (36C3, Urheberrecht) Interaction between rising air, ambient winds determines how quickly a fire spreads.
Enlarge / Flames spread up a hillside near firefighters at the Blue Cut Fire on August 18, 2016 near Wrightwood, California. (credit: David McNew/Getty Images)
From a physics and chemistry standpoint, fire is an incredibly complicated phenomenon—so much so that 19th century physicist Michael Faraday built an entire series of six lectures around the flame of a single candle at the Royal Institution in 1848. Fuel, heat, and oxygen, combined under the right conditions, ignite into a sustained chemical reaction: fire. Add in factors like conduction, convection, radiation, and any number of environmental factors, and that fire can rapidly spread out of control.
Scientists have been trying to better delineate how wildfires spread for decades, and understanding the complicated fluid dynamics at work is key to those efforts. Rodman Linn, an atmospheric scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, does computational modeling of how fires interact with the surrounding atmosphere to predict how a given fire behaves. It's a challenging phenomenon to model, since it involves the interaction of several different processes. Linn described the various factors that influence how a wildfire spreads in an article in the November issue of Physics Today.
Most models currently in use are based on seminal work done back in 1972 by Richard Rothermel, an aeronautical engineer who developed the first quantitative tool for predicting the spread of wildfires. Every kind of fuel has an ignition point (also known as a flash point), a measure of how much energy is required to ignite that fuel. Rothermel's model determined that ignition point, and then factored in wind speed, the slope of the ground, and other critical factors to calculate the rate of ignition required for a nascent wildfire to spread quickly.
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For the seventh year Game of Thrones has taken the crown for the most pirated TV-show on the Internet. This will also be the last time, as the series has ended, but there’s a newcomer eager to take its place. Disney’s Star Wars series Mandalorian is currently in third place, which is in part due to the limited availability of the new streaming service.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
Since the release of the first episode back in 2011, Game of Thrones has conquered the hearts of many people. Unfortunately for HBO, not all of those fans enjoyed it through legal channels.
For several years Game of Thrones has been the most pirated TV-show. This year, when the final season aired, the interest was once again overwhelming.
As highlighted in the past, Game of Thrones is good for many millions of downloads per week. The show is so popular on pirate sites that it visibly boosted traffic this year.
This will be the last year that the HBO show tops the chart though. The series has ended which means that the most-torrented title will be up for grabs in 2020. There are a few strong contenders for this spot, including Disney’s The Mandalorian.
The Disney-exclusive show is listed in third place this year but whether it will maintain its momentum remains to be seen. This year’s numbers may in part be boosted by the fact that Disney+ is not available globally yet.
The Walking Dead saw a dip in official TV ratings and has been passed in the ‘pirate’ list by a few shows including The Big Bang Theory and newcomer Chernobyl. The latter did very well as a mini-series, but won’t return in the coming years.
It’s worth noting that BitTorrent traffic only makes up a small portion of the piracy landscape. A lot of people use streaming sites and services nowadays, which generally do not report viewing stats.
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Below we have compiled a list of the most torrented TV-shows worldwide (single episode). The ranking is based on several sources, including statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers. Full season downloads are not included.
| rank | last year | show |
|---|---|---|
| torrentfreak.com | ||
| 1 | (…) | Game of Thrones |
| 2 | (…) | Chernobyl |
| 3 | (…) | The Mandalorian |
| 4 | (3) | The Big Bang Theory |
| 5 | (4) | Vikings |
| 6 | (1) | The Walking Dead |
| 7 | (2) | The Flash |
| 8 | (…) | Rick and Morty |
| 9 | (…) | Supergirl |
| 10 | (6) | Arrow |
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.
Sicherheitsforschern ist es gelungen, Code auf Wi-Fi- und Bluetooth-Chips von Broadcom auszuführen – sogar aus der Ferne. Mit einer neuen Software könnten sie in Zukunft noch mehr solcher Sicherheitslücken in Funkchips entdecken. Von Moritz Tremmel (3…
From sitcoms and sci-fi to prestige drama, it was a banner year for peak TV.
Enlarge / #BestDramaticStaresOf2019 (credit: NBC Universal / HBO / Netflix / Disney)
Warning: This story discusses a handful of specific moments from TV in 2019. There are major spoilers for the final season of Game of Thrones. Although we’ve otherwise done our best to avoid spoiling anything too major, please note this list includes specific references to The Mandalorian, The Good Place, The Orville, Barry, Fleabag, Counterpart, Mindhunter, The Santa Clarita Diet, Daybreak, and Russian Doll, among others.
Is it possible to out-peak peak TV? If so, 2019 might just have attained that goal. This year saw the launch of two new streaming platforms into an already crowded market: Apple TV+ and Disney+, along with so much original programming that it was easy for promising fledgling shows to simply get lost in the firehose of fresh content. There's bound to be some shakeups and consolidation in the years ahead, because the current explosive rate of growth is likely unsustainable. But for now, let's revel in the glorious smorgasbord of quality shows—offered below in no particular order—that captured our heads and hearts this year.
Anson Mount plays the tough but fair Captain Pike on Star Trek: Discovery. (credit: CBS/All access)
Star Trek: Discovery's second season isn't perfect. The heavy amount of retconning around the original Star Trek series feels contrived at times, and certain romantic pairings the show tries desperately to sell have all the chemistry of a pile of wet sand.
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Asrock hat die Spezifikationen der Radeon RX 5600 XT versehentlich offengelegt: Demzufolge entspricht sie einer Radeon RX 5700, hat aber ein von 256 auf 192 Bit verkleinertes Speicherinterface. (
In vielen europäischen Ländern ist Disney+ noch gar nicht verfügbar, da wird der Termin für die zweite Staffel von Star Wars The Mandalorian angekündigt: Sie soll im Herbst 2020 ausgestrahlt werden. (
Sicherheitsforschern ist es gelungen, Code auf Wi-Fi- und Bluetooth-Chips von Broadcom auszuführen - sogar aus der Ferne. Mit einer neuen Software könnten sie in Zukunft noch mehr solcher Sicherheitslücken in Funkchips entdecken. Von Moritz Tremmel (
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