Month: May 2020

Pirated ‘DVD Screeners’ Will be History After Next Year’s Oscars

The Academy announced this week that DVD and Blu-Ray screeners will be banned after the next Oscars ceremony. This marks the end of a long-standing tradition. Not just in the movie business, but also on pirate sites where the DVDscr tag is closely watched. Although Oscar DVD Screeners may soon be history, this doesn’t mean that screener leaks will be thing of the past.

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

The Oscars is the most watched awards show of the year. It’s widely covered in the press and highly anticipated by movie fans.

In the weeks leading up to the awards ceremony, movie pirates also have something to be excited about: screener leaks.

Many Oscar screeners, which are sent to Academy members as part of the voting process, end up in the hands of pirates. When that happens, the leaked screeners are typically shared by millions of people.

The leaks are often tagged “DVDscr,” referring to the DVD screener source format which is still in use. While streaming screeners have become more and more common, tens of thousands of physical screener copies are still sent out via mail.

This year, plenty of discs will be shipped too but, after the upcoming Oscars ceremony, that will be a thing of the past. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this week that physical screeners will no longer be allowed in 2021.

“[T]he 93rd Awards season will be the final year DVD screeners will be allowed to be distributed; these mailings will be discontinued starting in 2021 for the 94th Academy Awards,” the Academy writes.

The Oscars follow the same path as the Emmys, which already made the switch this year. According to the Academy, the transition is part of its sustainability efforts. This also includes a ban on physical music CDs, hard copies of screenplays, paper invites, and other things that possibly hurt the environment.

Banning physical screeners will indeed be much more sustainable. Manufacturing tens of thousands of discs and shipping these all over the country takes up more resources than sharing a link to an online screener. As an added benefit, it also saves the studios a lot of money.

Piracy is not mentioned by the Academy but the transition does mean that the infamous ‘DVDscr’ tag will eventually be obsolete for Oscar screeners. That marks the end of an era.

Whether piracy was considered as a factor at all remains a guess. Some insiders believe that digital screeners are easier to protect and therefore more secure, but that is up for debate.

There may be fewer leak opportunities in the distribution process, but it’s common knowledge that streaming platforms can be easily compromised. In fact, we have already seen several screeners being leaked from online sources. This was corroborated by pirate release group EVO last year.

“We had access to digital screeners and they are indeed easy to leak. The DRM on it is a joke. We had an account last year with three screeners on it and they were pretty much MP4 ready to encode,” the EVO team informed us at the time.

Whether streaming or physical screeners are more secure ultimately depends on the type of protection measures that are implemented for each. The safest conclusion, for now, is that piracy will likely remain a problem no matter what the distribution platform is.

Two years from now, we’ll likely know more. During the upcoming season, however, there will likely several ‘DVDscr’ leaks again.

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

Sprachassistentin: Siri klingt jetzt netter

Eine weichere und akzentuiertere Stimme – dieses Update hat Apple seinem Sprachassistenten Siri nach knapp drei Jahren zukommen lassen. (Siri, Apple)

Eine weichere und akzentuiertere Stimme - dieses Update hat Apple seinem Sprachassistenten Siri nach knapp drei Jahren zukommen lassen. (Siri, Apple)

Natürliche Treibstoffe: Jetzt kommen Bakterien in den Tank

Bonner Forscher haben eine überraschende Entdeckung gemacht. Mikroorganismen können Öl herstellen, eine Fähigkeit, die bisher ausschließlich Pflanzen zu haben schienen. Von Wolfgang Kempkens (Wissenschaft, Technologie)

Bonner Forscher haben eine überraschende Entdeckung gemacht. Mikroorganismen können Öl herstellen, eine Fähigkeit, die bisher ausschließlich Pflanzen zu haben schienen. Von Wolfgang Kempkens (Wissenschaft, Technologie)

Das Spiel mit den Bienchen

Video Chats sind derzeit eine Notwendigkeit, aber sie sind auch schwer angesagt und das neue “online”. Zeit, sie auch für andere Dinge zu nutzen

Video Chats sind derzeit eine Notwendigkeit, aber sie sind auch schwer angesagt und das neue "online". Zeit, sie auch für andere Dinge zu nutzen

ICANN blocks controversial sale of .org domain to a private equity firm

ICANN concludes privatizing .org domain isn’t in the public interest.

ICANN blocks controversial sale of .org domain to a private equity firm

Enlarge (credit: dalton00 / Getty)

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit organization that oversees the Internet's domain name system, has rejected a controversial proposal to sell the .org domain to a private equity group for more than $1 billion. It's a serious—quite possibly fatal—blow to a proposal that had few supporters besides the organizations that proposed it.

Currently, the .org domain registry is run by the Public Interest Registry, a non-profit subsidiary of another non-profit called the Internet Society. PIR was created in 2002 to run the .org domain and has been doing so ever since. But last fall, the Internet Society stunned the non-profit world by announcing it would sell the PIR—and, effectively, ownership of the .org domain—to a new and secretive private equity firm called Ethos Capital for more than $1 billion.

The announcement created a swift and powerful backlash. In its resolution formally rejecting the transaction, ICANN says it received its first letter opposing the deal just two days after it was announced. The group would eventually receive letters from at least 30 groups opposing the deal, as well as numerous negative comments during public hearings. Meanwhile, ICANN says, the deal has received "virtually no counterbalancing support except from the parties involved in the transaction and their advisors."

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LockBit, the new ransomware for hire: a sad and cautionary tale

You’ve probably never heard of LockBit, but that’s likely to change.

A ransom note is plastered across a laptop monitor.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Ransomware has emerged as one of the top threats facing large organizations over the past few years, with researchers reporting a more than a fourfold increase in detections last year. A recent infection by a fairly new strain called LockBit explains why: after it ransacked one company’s poorly secured network in a matter of hours, leaders had no viable choice other than to pay the ransom.

A report published by McAfee documents the effectiveness of this newcomer ransomware. Incident responders with Northwave Intelligent Security Operations aided in the analysis. LockBit is most prevalent in countries including the US, the UK, France, Germany, Ukraine, China, India, and Indonesia.

(credit: McAfee)

Attackers started out by researching potential targets with valuable data and the means to make big payouts when faced with the dim prospect of losing access to it. The attackers then used a list of words in hopes of gaining access to one of the accounts. Eventually, they hit the jackpot: an administrative account that had free rein over the entire network. The weak account password, combined with the lack of multi-factor authentication protection, gave the attackers all the system rights they needed.

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