Month: January 2021

MPA Seeks Network Engineer to Help Expose Online Pirates

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is hoping to recruit a network engineer to assist in its war against online piracy. Among other things, the Hollywood group is looking for a candidate with knowledge of VPNs, reverse proxies, Whois privacy services, and Internet registries such as RIPE and ARIN. Part of the job description is to find suitable targets for civil and criminal lawsuits.

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

In its quest to combat online piracy, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) continues to expand and evolve its anti-piracy toolbox.

This is a necessity since pirates have also learned to adapt over the years and are increasingly taking far-reaching measures to hide their identities.

One major problem is that pirate sites and their operators are often hard to locate and identify. The same is true for illegal streaming services. These regularly use all sorts of tools to avoid detection, including VPNs, reverse proxies, complicated network setups, and various privacy services.

This means that, in order to catch these people, the MPA needs in-house experts who can help to uncover their targets. That’s not always possible, but someone with the right knowledge can certainly be a great asset.

In a recent job offer, the MPA is looking for such an expert. Specifically, the anti-piracy company outfit is seeking to recruit an “Internet Investigator” with a network engineering background.

“The ideal candidate for this position will approach traditional Internet investigations from a technical perspective by creatively applying their skills and knowledge in network engineering to uncover additional evidence,” the MPA writes.

The person who gets this job will become part of the Global Content Protection team which carries out detailed investigations into key piracy players. The goal is to identify the people and organizations that run these pirate services and, just as importantly, the technical infrastructure behind them.

When new and suitable targets are found, these can be referred up the chain. This can result in cease and desist letters, civil lawsuits, or in the most extreme cases a criminal referral to law enforcement agencies.

“Identify cases suitable for further investigation or escalated actions, including civil and criminal actions,” says the MPA of one key responsibility.

mpaa job offer

The ideal candidate should also be able to proactively identify new targets. This requires knowledge of trends and new developments in the piracy ecosystem as well as the right network engineering skills. The latter is also reflected in the job offer.

The MPA is looking for someone with detailed knowledge of network protocols and services, including VPNs, TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, load balancing, MPLS, HTTP, and SSL. He or she should also be familiar with Whois and DNS lookups, tracerouting, and packet capture analysis by using tools such as WireShark and tcpdump.

In addition, experience with and knowledge of IP addresses, hosting providers, domain name registries, ICANN, IANA, RIPE, ARIN, reverse proxy providers, and whois privacy protection are also welcome.

It’s clear that the MPA is looking for a technical network expert with investigative skills who can at least match the knowledge of pirate site operators.

To win this key position in the anti-piracy apparatus, people can apply through the official MPA website, provided that they possess the highest level of integrity and are able to keep confidential information to themselves.

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

DDoSers are abusing Microsoft RDP to make attacks more powerful

DDoS amplification attacks have abused all kinds of legit services. Now, it’s Windows.

Stylized illustration of a hooded figure at a laptop.

Enlarge / Hacker attacking server or database. Network security, Database secure and personal data protection (credit: Getty Images)

DDoS-for-hire services are abusing the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol to increase the firepower of distributed denial-of-service attacks that paralyze websites and other online services, a security firm said this week.

Typically abbreviated as RDP, Remote Desktop Protocol is the underpinning for a Microsoft Windows feature that allows one device to log into another device over the Internet. RDP is mostly used by businesses to save employees the cost or hassle of having to be physically present when accessing a computer.

As is typical with many authenticated systems, RDP responds to login requests with a much longer sequence of bits that establish a connection between the two parties. So-called booter/stresser services, which for a fee will bombard Internet addresses with enough data to take them offline, have recently embraced RDP as a means to amplify their attacks, security firm Netscout said.

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Corona-Strategie: Exit oder Vollbremse?

Lockdown-Frust wächst, einige CDU-Politiker fordern neue Perspektive für Mitte Februar. Von Merkel bestellte Virologen haben jedoch ganz andere Vorstellungen

Lockdown-Frust wächst, einige CDU-Politiker fordern neue Perspektive für Mitte Februar. Von Merkel bestellte Virologen haben jedoch ganz andere Vorstellungen

What’s the technology behind a five-minute charge battery?

The company behind a new battery isn’t saying much, but we figured a few things out.

Image of a set of battery racks.

Enlarge (credit: StoreDot)

Building a better battery requires dealing with problems in materials science, chemistry, and manufacturing. We do regular coverage of work going on in the former two categories, but we get a fair number of complaints about our inability to handle the third: figuring out how companies manage to take solutions to the science and convert them into usable products. So, it was exciting to see that a company called StoreDot that was claiming the development of a battery that would allow five-minute charging of electric vehicles was apparently willing to talk to the press.

Unfortunately, the response to our inquiries fell a bit short of our hopes. "Thank you for your interest," was the reply, "we are still in pure R&D mode and cannot share any information or answer any questions at the moment." Apparently, the company gave The Guardian an exclusive and wasn't talking to anyone else.

Undeterred, we've since pulled every bit of information we could find from StoreDot's site to figure out roughly what they were doing, and we went backwards from there to look for research we've covered previously that could be related. What follows is an attempt to piece together a picture of the technology and the challenges a company has to tackle to take research concepts and make products out of them.

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The art and science of boarding an airplane in a pandemic

Researchers and airlines obsessed over efficiency now worry about safety, too.

During the pandemic, several airlines have switched boarding procedures to create more distance between passengers.

Enlarge / During the pandemic, several airlines have switched boarding procedures to create more distance between passengers. (credit: Nicholas Economou | NurPhoto | Getty Images)

Jason Steffen studies planets in other solar systems. His most famous work—OK, second-most famous work—was with NASA’s Kepler Mission, a survey of planetary systems. But you’re more likely to have heard of Steffen, a professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, in a very different context: as a student of the airplane boarding process. Years ago, after waiting in yet another line on a jam-packed jetway, the physicist thought to himself, “There has to be a better way than this.”

Airlines are invested in boarding times—and to a lesser extent, offboarding—because time equals money. Flying people around the world is a low-margin business, and the faster you can get a flight loaded, into the air, and then emptied on the ground, the faster you can get the next round of paying customers into the air.

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