Month: March 2020

ACE Coalition Seizes Four More ‘Pirate’ IPTV Domains

The Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment has been quietly comandeering more pirate site domains, presumably as part of settlement arrangements with their former owners. One domain relates to a previously announced case but three others, all connected to pirate IPTV, are reported today for the first time.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

The Alliance for Creativity Entertainment (ACE) is the largest anti-piracy coalition in history. It pools the resources of all the major Hollywood studios plus Netflix, Amazon and dozens of other companies to tackle piracy on a global scale.

ACE has made many announcements over the past couple of years celebrating successful conclusions to multiple operations. Most relate to closures of file-hosting services, IPTV providers and other platforms involved in the unlicensed streaming of movies and TV shows.

However, for reasons best known to the coalition, not all of its investigations are publicized. Many fly under the radar until visitors to once-active websites find themselves being directed to the ACE anti-piracy portal when they expected to find a ‘pirate’ platform.

According to information obtained by TorrentFreak, four new domains have recently begun redirecting to ACE. The first, ausmediastreaming.com.au, comes as no surprise. In early March, ACE revealed that it had secured the closure of the IPTV supplier following a cease-and-desist order.

“The closure of Aus Media Streaming is the latest in a series of victories that can protect Australian creators and ensure that legal services can continue to thrive,” said Karyn Temple, Senior Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel of the Motion Picture Association.

The second fresh domain under ACE/MPA control is watchmoviesfree.com.au. When it was online, the site asked prospective customers whether they wanted to watch “Every single movie, TV show, sporting event, documentary, kids TV and movie ever made, free?”

Concluding that the answer must be “Of course you do”, the site then went on to offer Android-based set-top devices named Octo-Ninja and Ninja-Quad. It’s unclear what was in those devices but either a pre-loaded setup and/or a subscription-based IPTV service seems likely. Before it was taken down, the domain offered an Australian telephone number for people to get in touch.

EmpireTV.ca is the third domain. According to its now disappeared website and Facebook pages, it claimed to be the “top streaming service in Canada”, offering over 5,000 channels plus on-demand movies, TV shows, PPV and more from $9.99 per month.

Various packages were made available by the site, varying in price according to subscription length and levels of content available. The site was previously targeted in a DMCA complaint after supplying German football content without permission. It also had a detailed disclaimer that clearly didn’t cut much ice with ACE.

“We have no association with any of the IP channels shown or any of these products. TV channels and video content of the services are being provided without any liability from us regarding copyrights,” it began.

“Per our knowledge all channels provided by the server sellers abide by all relevant countries copyright laws and any copyright issues must be taken up directly with the server owners. EMPIRETV.CA does not take any liability as to what is aired on the servers and EMPIRETV.CA have NO control over the servers or streams.”

With EmpireTV.ca now redirecting to the ACE portal, the fourth domain to be placed under the anti-piracy group’s control (or more accurately, that of the MPA) is ZeddIPTV.com. Little is known about this supplier but given that it was previously offered via classified listings in Australia, it may have been focused on that region.

Although nothing has been officially confirmed by ACE in respect of ‘seizing’ any of these domains, it seems likely that following pressure from the anti-piracy group, domains were handed over as part of a settlement. ACE has shuttered close to three dozen operations to date but publicized just a few.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

US weather outlook highlights spring flooding risk

NOAA’s seasonal outlook shows warm temperatures and rain inequality.

Below-average snowpack in the Sierra Nevada on March 3.

Enlarge / Below-average snowpack in the Sierra Nevada on March 3. (credit: NASA EO)

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put out its latest monthly update Thursday, this time focused primarily on the flooding risk around the US as spring arrives. The unusually warm winter has put the country in a bit of a split personality: some parts of the US are at risk for flooding, while others can expect worsening drought, instead.

With the notable exception of cooler weather in Alaska, the continental US ended up at the sixth warmest winter (December, January, February) on record. Although warmer temperatures meant below-average snowfall for a good portion of the country, the eastern half saw above-average precipitation overall—more of it simply fell as rain.

The western US, meanwhile, saw low precipitation in many areas, contributing to drought conditions. That includes California, where the snowpack is currently well below average despite a round of good snowfall this week.

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The doctor who helped defeat smallpox explains what’s coming

We can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.

Producer Larry Brilliant speaks onstage at the HBO Documentary "Open Your Eyes" Special Screening At The Rubin Museum at Rubin Museum of Art on July 13, 2016 in New York City.

Enlarge / Producer Larry Brilliant speaks onstage at the HBO Documentary "Open Your Eyes" Special Screening At The Rubin Museum at Rubin Museum of Art on July 13, 2016 in New York City. (credit: Paul Zimmerman | Getty Images)

Larry Brilliant says he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick," he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”

Now the unthinkable is here, and Brilliant, the Chairman of the board of Ending Pandemics, is sharing expertise with those on the front lines. We are a long way from 100 million deaths due to the novel coronavirus, but it has turned our world upside down. Brilliant is trying not to say “I told you so” too often. But he did tell us so, not only in talks and writings, but as the senior technical advisor for the pandemic horror film Contagion, now a top streaming selection for the homebound. Besides working with the World Health Organization in the effort to end smallpox, Brilliant, who is now 75, has fought flu, polio, and blindness; once led Google’s nonprofit wing, Google.org; co-founded the conferencing system the Well; and has traveled with the Grateful Dead.

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Coronavirus: Amazon begrenzt Bestellungen in Frankreich und Italien

Amazon will mit einer Einschränkung bei den versandten Produkten in Frankreich und Italien die eigenen Mitarbeiter vor einer Ansteckung mit dem Coronavirus schützen. (Amazon, Anti-Virus)

Amazon will mit einer Einschränkung bei den versandten Produkten in Frankreich und Italien die eigenen Mitarbeiter vor einer Ansteckung mit dem Coronavirus schützen. (Amazon, Anti-Virus)

Animal Crossing New Horizons im Test: Eskapismus für Einsteiger

Das neue Animal Crossing schickt uns auf der Nintendo Switch auf eine Trauminsel – prall gefüllt mit Entdeckungen der unbeschwerten Art. Von Peter Steinlechner (Nintendo Switch, Spieletest)

Das neue Animal Crossing schickt uns auf der Nintendo Switch auf eine Trauminsel - prall gefüllt mit Entdeckungen der unbeschwerten Art. Von Peter Steinlechner (Nintendo Switch, Spieletest)

Google Removes Official Kodi Download Page After “Bogus” Copyright Complaint

Google has removed the official Kodi download page from its search results, following a complaint from a copyright holder. The team behind the perfectly legal open-source software is disappointed that they’re being inaccurately lumped together with pirate services. The same takedown notice also targeted the VLC media player, but those requests were rejected.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

Millions of people use the Kodi media player for their daily entertainment needs.

While the open-source software is content-neutral, some third-party addons have given the tool a bad reputation by using it to offer pirated content.

This isn’t anything the Kodi development team has control over. Luckily, most copyright holders realize this, but every now and then one appears having apparently missed the boat. And for Kodi, that can result in real damage.

For example, this week we noticed that the official Kodi download page is no longer listed in Google’s search results. Looking more closely, we spotted that it was removed by Google following a DMCA takedown request.

The takedown notice was sent a few weeks ago on behalf of the Turkish pay-TV service Digiturk, which is owned by the beIN Media Group. BeIN is known for its strong stance against piracy but in this case, it was too aggressive.

“The infringed content is sports content (illegal video stream) branded and watermarked with the trademark/logo BEIN SPORTS HD,” Digiturk writes.

The request identifies a series of URLs, many of which are associated with seemingly unauthorized IPTV services. However, it also lists kodi.tv/download, Kodi’s official download page.

Generally speaking, Google is pretty good at spotting such errors but in this case the URL was removed, as mentioned at the bottom of related search results.

Interestingly, Kodi was not the only legal open-source project that was targeted. The same notice also lists two Videolan.org URLs, which is the home of the popular media player VLC. Again, the download pages of the software were listed.

Luckily for VLC, Google flagged these requests as incorrect, meaning that the pages remain available in Google’s search results.

Kodi’s Keith Herrington is disappointed that their software is once again hit by the piracy stigma.

“It’s unfortunate content companies continue to lump us and VLC together with services who are clearly in violation of copyright law by not only providing streams to their content but using their logo, etc and that Google doesn’t even bother to check or validate, they just remove.

“It feels like a very ‘guilty until proven innocent’ model which I do not agree with,” Herrington adds.

The Kodi Foundation has submitted a DMCA counter-notice to Google and hopes that their download page will reappear in search results in due course.

TorrentFreak reached out to Digiturk for a comment on its unusual requests. While they could be intentional, it’s also possible that the company simply targeted these open source projects by mistake.

Talking about mistakes, Digiturk also sent takedown notices for its own website in the past, more than once actually. That’s another error they may want to pay attention to going forward.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.