Month: November 2020

All the best Cyber Monday 2020 deals we can find [Updated]

We’ve sifted through the junk to pick out the tech deals most worth your time.

All the best Cyber Monday 2020 deals we can find [Updated]

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Update 2 (2:20pm ET): We've completed another sweep of our deals roundup, adding nice discounts on premium gaming mice and keyboards we like, a quality 27-inch monitor from HP, Dell's G5 15 gaming laptop, and a recommended Bluetooth speaker from Marshall, among others offers.

Update 1 (8:05am ET): We've completed the first major refresh of our Cyber Monday deals roundup, adding noteworthy discounts on recommended charging gear, Bluetooth speakers, and indoor security cameras from Anker; the OnePlus 8 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S20; a nice gaming headset from HyperX, and more. We're also seeing additional discounts on various video games, making titles like Ghost of Tsushima and The Last of Us Part II a few dollars cheaper than they were on Black Friday. Everything we've added is highlighted with the "NEW" tag below.

Original post: Cyber Monday has arrived. To help you shop smarter this holiday season, the Dealmaster has sifted through hundreds of junky offers, researched countless products, and ignored the retailer hype to pick out the best Cyber Monday 2020 deals on gadgets, games, and tech gear we like.

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Streaming Site Shuts Down, Offers Unique Perspective on Anti-Piracy Pitfalls

Earlier this month, popular streaming site Time2Watch closed its doors, vowing never to return. While a pirate site shutting down is nothing out of the ordinary, the operators of the platform bowed out with a lengthy goodbye note containing words of advice for those considering setting up a similar site of their own. Pitfalls, it seems, are not hard to find.

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

Pirate KeyBack in March we reported on an order handed down by a Paris court. It required France’s leading ISPs to prevent their customers from accessing around three dozen pirate sites.

In addition to blocking internationally famous torrent sites YTS and EZTV, the order also covered many locally important streaming sites, among them Time2Watch, a site that was once one of France’s top 300 sites, period. According to information made public by the site’s operators, this resulted in delisting activity by Google at the request of French anti-piracy group ALPA.

This prompted the site to switch domains but the mitigation action continued, with the site also losing two Twitter accounts. Interestingly, the site admits that although DNS blocks are often described as ineffective, when combined with domain issues the effect can be significant. In fact, through a combination of factors, Time2Watch decided to throw in the towel earlier this month, leaving some rather interesting information behind.

DNS Blocking – More Effective Against New Users Than Existing

According to Time2Watch (T2W), when it was blocked by ISPs and delisted by Google, traffic dropped by 20%. Blocking in France isn’t particularly tough, especially when compared to that deployed in the UK since it only targets DNS. However, T2W says that the mantra of “just change domain” or “change to a new DNS” doesn’t provide a solution when site-blocking by DNS is dynamic, i.e updatable by rights holders to include new domains.

When combined, these methods cause a site to die “little by little”, since when organic traffic gets hit again and again, sites are forced to resort to more and more advertising, not to mention lower quality advertising and money-making schemes that can be detrimental to users. This can develop into a downwards spiral as the pressure mounts, something that isn’t conducive to growth.

Anonymity and Measures For Prospective Site Operators

Running any type of pirate site has its risks but according to T2W, some streaming and torrent site operators aren’t taking the necessary precautions. Simply by using publicly available information, the site says it could’ve easily closed several down due to carelessness, if it was that way inclined – which it is not.

T2W doesn’t name names, but it points to people being careless with their pasts – Facebook pages, names, addresses, and Twitter accounts, for example. It also highlights the dangers of using past nicknames or avatars (especially ones that are unique) that can be linked to more recent pirate activity. In contrast, the site recommends using nicknames that are very common so they don’t stand out on Google.

In addition to using a good VPN at a minimum, the site also cautions against spilling out personal details to those who know about operators’ piracy activities. This friendliness may seem innocent enough at the time but could come back to haunt people.

“Don’t trust anyone. Do not go to Discord servers, do not try to be popular, do not brag to your friends or certain communities who know what you’re doing. Keep a low profile, share your files, and don’t commit an error that could fall on you even in the very distant future,” the advice reads.

The Myth that Cloudflare Protects Pirate Sites

Over the past couple of years, rightsholders have been complaining that CDN service Cloudflare helps to protect pirate sites, giving their operators anonymity. However, T2W says this is simply a lie.

“Cloudflare will not protect you, NOT FOR A SECOND. They will hand over the name of your host, and otherwise the IP address of your server, to any authority which requests it. And even in some cases your connection IP address, your account data, means of payment, etc,” T2W warns.

“One type of silliness that we see a lot for people who get into the business is to buy a server with their PayPal or bank account, usually at OVH, thinking that they will be safe with Cloudflare in front. Run away poor fools, while there is still time!”

In summary, T2W says that users of Cloudflare must only connect their ‘front-end’ server to the company and this should be a reverse proxy to the rest of the infrastructure, one that can be changed at any time.

Interestingly, T2W says that in choosing an actual host, the best advice comes from the MPA. Referencing a recent TorrentFreak article detailing the MPA and RIAA’s submissions to the USTR for its notorious markets list, T2W says that various hosts are nominated there for good reason.

The same can be said for domain registrars. Again, pointing to the industry groups’ complaints about Peter Sunde’s Njalla, T2W notes that the company made it to the list by “annoying them with their resistance.”

Time2Watch Disappears Into the Night

For those interesting in reading the entire ‘goodbye’ statement, it’s available here in French (pdf). However, those hoping for some kind of reincarnation will be disappointed, since that doesn’t appear on the agenda.

“Time2Watch has closed and will never reopen in any other form,” T2W’s statement reads.

“The database was destroyed as well as the site’s source code, and they were not transmitted to anybody, so impossible to see a Time2Watch return. All the sites you will see in the future resembling ours (with a domain name or a similar design) will only be clones that will hate your wallet.

“Beware of scams,” the team concludes.

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

WarGames for real: How one 1983 exercise nearly triggered WWIII

From the archives: Say hello to the KGB software model that forecasted mushroom clouds.

WarGames for real: How one 1983 exercise nearly triggered WWIII

Update, 11/29/20: It's a very different Thanksgiving weekend here in 2020, but even if tables were smaller and travel non-existent, Ars staff is off for the holiday in order to recharge, take a mental afk break, and maybe stream a movie or five. But five years ago around this time, we were following a newly declassified government report from 1990 that outlined a KGB computer model... one that almost pulled a WarGames, just IRL. With the film now streaming on Netflix (thus setting our off day schedule), we thought we'd resurface this story for an accompanying Sunday read. This piece first published on November 25, 2015, and it appears unchanged below.

"Let's play Global Thermonuclear War."

Thirty-two years ago, just months after the release of the movie WarGames, the world came the closest it ever has to nuclear Armageddon. In the movie version of a global near-death experience, a teenage hacker messing around with an artificial intelligence program that just happened to control the American nuclear missile force unleashes chaos. In reality, a very different computer program run by the Soviets fed growing paranoia about the intentions of the United States, very nearly triggering a nuclear war.

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David Prowse, the original Darth Vader, is dead at 85

George Lucas dubbed in James Earl Jones to provide Vader’s voice.

  • David Prowse as Darth Vader and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia filming the original "Star Wars." [credit: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images ]

David Prowse, who played Darth Vader in the first three Star Wars films, has died at the age of 85. Prowse's agent confirmed the news to the Hollywood Reporter on Saturday evening.

Prowse was a body builder who stood six feet, seven inches tall when he won the Vader role for the original 1977 Star Wars. Prowse also played Vader in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

In 2016 interview, Prowse said that George Lucas offered him a choice between playing Darth Vader or Chewbacca. Prowse chose Vader, and the Chewbacca role went to Peter Mayhew, who died last year.

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Cretaceous birds were thought to have small bills—except this one

This creature lived long before modern birds evolved large beaks.

Precise anatomical profile of a prehistoric bird.

Enlarge / Artist's depiction of Falcatakely forsterae. (credit: Mark Witton)

Given the unusual attention granted to turkeys this week, let’s talk dinosaurs. Today’s birds are, of course, descendants of the only branch of the dino tree that made it through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. In the dinosaurs’ halcyon days, the early birds were a bit different, still retaining teeth and foreclaws among some subtler anatomical differences with their modern descendant. A new fossil find reveals an unexpected bird from that time—one with a whopping-great, toucan-like beak.

The fossil, named Falcatakely forsterae, comes from late Cretaceous rocks in Madagascar. Many of the early bird fossils we've discovered so far come from older, early-Cretaceous rocks in China, with the timeframe between then and the end-Cretaceous extinction more of a question mark. The new fossil is a nicely preserved head of a crow-sized bird with a strikingly long, tall, and narrow beak.

The early Chinese bird fossils don’t show much diversity in beak shape. That’s a big contrast with modern birds, which have a wild variety of beak shapes befitting their many different ecological niches. Pelicans, woodpeckers, and parrots have very different diets that require a beak adapted to the job. It had been thought that enlarged beaks may not have been possible until some anatomical shifting in the parts of the skull took place, meaning that the early birds were simply limited. But the new find shows that wasn’t entirely true. This species could have inhabited an ecological niche that was empty after the extinction—until a more modern bird drifted back into it much later.

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