June 2020 – Page 14 – news.buyenne.com

Court Grants Groups Permission to Intervene in Canadian Pirate Site Blocking Lawsuit

Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal is allowing several high-profile groups and organizations to intervene in the country’s first pirate site blocking case. This includes rightsholder representatives including IFPI and the Premier League, as well as blocking opponents such as Canada’s domain registry and CIPPIC. In a novel ruling, parties with a similar stance are instructed to work together to file joint submissions.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

canada pirate Last year Canada’s Federal Court approved the first pirate site blocking order in the country.

Following a complaint from major media companies Rogers, Bell and TVA, the Court ordered several major ISPs to block access to domains and IP-addresses of the pirate IPTV service GoldTV.

TekSavvy Appeals

There was little opposition from Internet providers, except for TekSavvy, which quickly announced that it would appeal the ruling. The blocking injunction threatens the open Internet to advance the interests of a few powerful media conglomerates, the company said.

Soon after, the landmark case also drew the interest of several third parties that all wanted to have their say. These include copyright holder groups, which are in favor of site blocking, as well as legal experts, civil rights activists, and the Canadian domain registry, which oppose the injunction.

All groups shared their arguments with the Federal Court, asking to be officially heard. This week, the Court granted this request, but with a twist.

Interveners Are Grouped Together

In a sixteen-page order (pdf), Justice David Stratas applauds his own Court for various procedural innovations, the current case included. The overall conclusion is that all six groups are allowed to intervene. However, some will have to work together to come up with a joint filing.

The Court has divided the interveners into three groups. The first includes rightsholder representatives such as Music Canada, IFPI, which already filed a joint submission, the Premier League, and representatives from the local movie industry. These are all in favor of site blocking.

The second group consists of the University of Ottowa’s legal clinic CIPPIC and the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. These are both against site blocking. That’s also true for the third ‘group,’ the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, whose opposition mainly revolves around freedom of expression.

“Allowing all six to intervene separately with separate counsel would result in lack of economy and duplication,” Justice Stratas notes, adding that the collaborations will “create useful synergies and a more compact submission.”

Court’s Advance Warnings and Critique

The order is also rather critical at times. For example, the initial submission from the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association is described as “problematic” and “rather vague” when it comes to international law.

Also, the order stresses that the intervening parties are not allowed to bring up new evidence or make statements without supporting evidence. Again, this comes with a sting, although it’s not clear who this is directed at.

“We enforce this strictly and for good reason. We have seen some try to dupe us by smuggling academic articles containing untested social science evidence into a book of authorities,” Justice Stratas writes.

“We have seen others try to slide submissions of mixed fact and law past us without any supporting facts in the evidentiary record,” he adds.

CIPPIC is Pleased With the Order

TorrentFreak reached out to several of the parties involved for a comment on the ruling. None of the copyright holder groups we contacted responded, but the counsel of CIPPIC informed us that the clinic is happy with the order.

“CIPPIC is pleased to have been afforded the opportunity to speak to the important legal issues raised in this case, which is the first of its kind in Canada,” CIPPIC counsel James Plotkin tells us.

“CIPPIC’s position is that, given the balance struck in the copyright act and the legislated role of intermediaries therein, site blocking orders are not the sort of remedy courts should grant, and certainly not on an interlocutory basis.”

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

TikTok and 53 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data

Passwords, bitcoin addresses and anything else in clipboards are free for the taking.

Stock photograph of a smartphone being used in the dark.

In March, researchers uncovered a troubling privacy grab by more than four dozen iOS apps including TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media and video-sharing phenomenon that has taken the Internet by storm. Despite TikTok vowing to curb the practice, it continues to access some of Apple users’ most sensitive data, which can include passwords, cryptocurrency wallet addresses, account-reset links, and personal messages. Another 53 apps identified in March haven't stopped either.

The privacy invasion is the result of the apps repeatedly reading any text that happens to reside in clipboards, which computers and other devices use to store data that has been cut or copied from things like password managers and email programs. With no clear reason for doing so, researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk found, the apps deliberately called an iOS programming interface that retrieves text from users’ clipboards.

Universal snooping

In many cases, the covert reading isn’t limited to data stored on the local device. In the event the iPhone or iPad uses the same Apple ID as other Apple devices and are within roughly 10 feet of each other, all of them share a universal clipboard, meaning contents can be copied from the app of one device and pasted into an app running on a separate device.

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Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana” released (New features for file sharing, NVIDIA graphics, and high-res displays)

The latest version of the popular Linux Mint operating system is here and Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana” brings a handful of new features including a new tool called Warpinator that makes it easy to quickly share files with other computers connecte…

Empirical analysis tells Reviewer 2: “Go F‘ Yourself”

“Pennywise the Clown, combined with el chupacabra, wrapped in the Blair Witch.”

Peer review is often the key hurdle between obtaining some data and getting it published in the scientific literature. As such, it's often essential to keeping questionable results out of the scientific literature. But for vast numbers of scientists with solid-but-unexciting results, it can be a hurdle that raises frustrations to thermonuclear levels. So it's no surprise that many scientists privately wish that certain reviewers would end up engaged in activities that aren't mentionable in a largely family-friendly publication like Ars.

What was a surprise was to see a peer-reviewed publication make this wish public. Very public. As in entitling the paper "Dear Reviewer 2: Go F’ Yourself" levels of public.

Naturally, we read the paper and got in touch with its author, Iowa State's David Peterson, to find out the details of the study. The key detail is that the title's somewhat misleading: it's actually Reviewer 3 who's the heartless bastard that keeps trying to torpedo the careers of other academics. For the rest, well, read on.

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"Es geht nicht ganz ohne soziale Normen"

Der Psychiatrieprofessor Ludger Tebartz van Elst über die Theorie und Praxis seines Fachs

Gegen Huawei: USA wollen weiter Ericsson oder Nokia kaufen

Die US-Regierung probiert weiter auf verschiedenen Wegen, ihren Rückstand bei 5G zu überwinden. Doch es gibt Zweifel an der Überlebensfähigkeit von Ericsson und Nokia. (Huawei, Netzwerk)

The rocket motor of the future “breathes” air like a jet engine

This theoretical engine could drastically reduce the cost of getting to space.

There's a small airfield about a two-hour drive north of Los Angeles that sits on the edge of a vast expanse of desert and attracts aerospace mavericks like moths to a flame. The Mojave Air & Space Port is home to companies like Scaled Composites, the first to send a private astronaut to space, and Masten Space Systems, which is in the business of building lunar landers. It’s the proving ground for America’s most audacious space projects, and when Aaron Davis and Scott Stegman arrived at the hallowed tarmac last July, they knew they were in the right place.

The two men arrived at the airfield before dawn to set up the test stand for a prototype of their air-breathing rocket engine, a new kind of propulsion system that is a cross between a rocket motor and a jet engine. They call their unholy creation Fenris, and Davis believes that it’s the only way to make getting to space cheap enough for the rest of us. While a conventional rocket engine must carry giant tanks of fuel and oxidizer on its journey to space, an air-breathing rocket motor pulls most of its oxidizer directly from the atmosphere. This means that an air-breathing rocket can lift more stuff with less propellant and drastically lower the cost of space access—at least in theory.

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Surface: Alle Microsoft Stores werden endgültig geschlossen

Microsoft gibt seinen Plan von einer eigenen Ladenkette nach rund 11 Jahren auf. (Surface, Microsoft)

MangaDex Develops P2P System to Distribute Manga Sharing Bandwidth Costs

MangaDex, a scanlation platform with tens of millions of monthly visitors, has developed an innovative solution to help satiate its users’ thirst for content. The site’s newly open sourced MangaDex@Home peer-to-peer project allows users to volunteer use of their PCs or servers to help ease the pressure on the site’s cache servers.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Serving a reported tens of millions of visitors each month, unofficial ‘scanlation’ platform MangaDex is a sizeable operation.

This manga community site offers translated copies of manga comics to a worldwide audience, something that comes with its own set of complications and hurdles to overcome.

Earlier this year the platform permanently lost access to Cloudflare and for a while had to change domain.

After these issues had been put behind them, the operators of the site began to experience problems with bandwidth too. This month they revealed that during the coronavirus / COVID-19 lockdown, traffic increased by 15%. Then, a month later, MangaRock finally threw in the towel, an event that increased traffic to MangaDex by another 15%.

Adding insult to injury, the site learned that one of its providers could no longer cache its image archive traffic, something which led to “dismal loading times for old chapters.” At the same time, however, the site revealed an extremely interesting innovation called MangaDex@Home.

“MangaDex@Home is a P2P (peer-to-peer) system where users will be able to volunteer the usage of either their personal computers or servers to act as cache server nodes to alleviate the stress on our own cache servers. Over time, we envisage that the majority, if not all, of the older chapters will be served by MangaDex@Home,” the site announced.

For people familiar with the mechanics of BitTorrent distribution, the MangaDex@Home system will certainly ring some bells. Rather than content being hosted centrally, those running the dedicated MangaDex client (participation is voluntary) will host content on their own machines, acting as servers from where regular users can access content, thereby distributing bandwidth stresses and costs.

“You will be hosting a client that acts as a P2P system for older chapters,” MangaDex revealed. “Basically, your machine will act as a server where a tiny portion of older MangaDex chapters will be stored and when a reader wants to read an older chapter, it will be ‘fetched’ from your machine and served to the reader.”

At the moment, MangaDex is recruiting volunteers with specific resources at their disposal, including a minimum network speed of 80Mbps up/down, at least 40GB of dedicated storage space, and a promise that the PC or server will be online 24/7.

Earlier this month and just after launch, the site reported a combined output of 6650Mbps and over 18TB of cache space but noted that more capacity would be needed in the future. According to the most recent update, uptake has been impressive.

“The amount of people volunteering servers to participate in MangaDex@Home is greater than we could have imagined,” the platform announced. “Currently all users and all guests are set to receive images from the MangaDex@Home network and the initiative itself has brought our cache server traffic down to acceptable levels.”

That the MangaDex community has responded in this fashion shouldn’t come as a surprise. While they all share a love for manga, many have also been involved in another distributed computing project.

The Folding@Home project uses idle computing resources to help combat diseases such as cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Influenza, and more recently, COVID-19. In May, the MangaDex team broke into the top 500 contributors.

This week MangaDex announced that the MangaDex@Home project is now open-source, meaning that anyone can contribute to its development moving forward.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Doomscrolling is slowly eroding your mental health

Checking your phone for an extra two hours every night won’t stop the apocalypse.

It's 11:37pm and the pattern shows no signs of shifting. At 1:12am, it’s more of the same. Thumb down, thumb up. Twitter, Instagram, and—if you’re feeling particularly wrought/masochistic—Facebook. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic left a great many people locked down in their homes in early March, the evening ritual has been codifying: Each night ends the way the day began, with an endless scroll through social media in a desperate search for clarity.

To those who have become purveyors of the perverse exercise, like The New York Times’ Kevin Roose, this habit has become known as doomsurfing, or “falling into deep, morbid rabbit holes filled with coronavirus content, agitating myself to the point of physical discomfort, erasing any hope of a good night’s sleep.” For those who prefer their despair be portable, the term is doomscrolling, and as protests over racial injustice and police brutality following the death of George Floyd have joined the COVID-19 crisis in the news cycle, it’s only gotten more intense. The constant stream of news and social media never ends.

Of course, a late-night scroll is nothing new—it’s the kind of thing therapists often hear about when couples say one or the other isn’t providing enough attention. But it used to be that Sunday nights in bed were spent digging through Twitter for Game of Thrones hot takes, or armchair quarterbacking the day’s game. Now, the only thing to binge-watch is the world's collapse into crisis. Coronavirus deaths (473,000 worldwide and counting), unemployment rates (around 13 percent in the US), protesters in the street on any given day marching for racial justice (countless thousands)—the faucet of data runs nonstop. There are unlimited seasons, and the promise of some answer, or perhaps even some good news, always feels one click away.

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