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32 Kerne für Server-CPUs, eine Videobeschleunigung für Notebooks und sogar SSDs: In Moskau wird die Elbrus-Plattform vorangetrieben. Ein Bericht von Marc Sauter (Prozessor, Server)
Spanish football league La Liga has been successful in its application to have Italian ISPs block access to five pirate IPTV providers distributing its games online without permission. It’s estimated that the services attracted more than a million visits per month in Italy alone. No court process was necessary.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Top-tier football is massive business in Europe with a handful of major leagues in key regions grabbing the lion’s share of the market.
For example, the Premier League has dominance in the UK while in Italy and Spain, Serie A and La Liga control the purse strings to their lucrative broadcasting rights. But while the clubs in all leagues are necessarily rivals in competition, all have something in common – the ongoing fight to prevent unlicensed streaming providers from broadcasting matches to the public.
Live sports broadcasts, including football, have been available on web-based streaming sites for years but the rise of subscription-based IPTV providers is now the major threat. Premier League, Serie A and La Liga are all involved in countermeasures, which include legal action (both civil and criminal) plus site-blocking in various countries.
This week it was revealed that Serie A had been successful in its legal action against Cloudflare, requiring the CDN company to block access to providers offering its games illegally in Italy. It now transpires that Spain’s La Liga has booked progress of its own in Italy, albeit by a different mechanism.
For more than half a decade it’s been possible to file an application with local telecoms watchdog AGCOM to have pirate sites and services added to a national ISP blacklist. This is somewhat controversial since, in contrast to other countries around Europe, there is no need for rightsholders to go to court.
Instead, AGCOM can review cases and grant injunctions without judicial overview, which it does on a regular basis. Indeed, according to comments made by anti-piracy group FAPAV this week, in 2020 it obtained permission to have 376 ‘illegal sites’ blocked by ISPs via this route.
This process is also being utilized by La Liga which according to reports this week, has just been successful in an application to have five pirate IPTV providers blocked by Italian ISPs. The blocking request dates back to October 2020 and after a few months’ wait, has now come into force.
In keeping with Italy’s general position of not openly publicizing the IPTV services it targets, no names were detailed this week. However, according to comments from local anti-piracy group FAPAV, the five platforms are good for more than a million visits per month each, in Italy alone. This adds to the growing list of IPTV providers targeted in Italy by various legal means (1,2,3).
“We are of the belief that audiovisual recordings of sporting events deserve solid protection through the application of intellectual property rules and, more precisely, copyright. La Liga has been working for more than five years to ensure that this protection is recognized,” says Juan José Rotger, La Liga’s Global Content Protection Manager.
“This new result in Italy is a reflection of the constancy and commitment in the network with the local authorities. Serie A has been doing an excellent job in the country for some time and has also helped us in this scenario. The success is that there is less piracy and that these rights continue to be recognized worldwide.”
La Liga is no stranger to blocking procedures. In a collaboration with Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, the Spanish league obtained a first-of-its-kind ISP blocking injunction in Denmark in 2019.
It targeted nine pirate providers and required local ISP Telenor to restrict subscriber access to the platforms. However, under the Danish ISP Code of Conduct, other major ISPs in Denmark were also required to implement blocks against the sites listed in the complaint as part of a voluntary agreement.
In February 2020, a Spanish court gave dynamic blocking the green light in another football related case, authorizing the modification of injunctions to counter circumvention and evasion techniques.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Während Lockdowns kaum Wirkung zeigen, bremst nun der erhebliche Anteil derer, die nach einer Infektion immun sind, die Ausbreitung des Virus
Polizeigewalt ist auch in Deutschland ein Problem. Gegen eine kritische Studie gibt es Widerstand – nicht nur aus Kreisen der Polizeigewerkschaft.
After several years’ hiatus, the major Hollywood studios of the MPA have obtained a new site-blocking injunction at the HIgh Court in London. Apparently handed down this month, the order compels local ISPs to block several web-based streaming sites using the ‘123movies’ branding.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
After years of regularly visiting the High Court in London in search of injunctions to compel ISPs to block pirate sites, the MPA appeared to lose interest in the strategy.
Interested in why this was the case, in 2019 we approached the MPA requesting information and background on the reasons for the hiatus. We were informed that the Hollywood group would use a “range of methods as appropriate in the UK” to ensure that filmmakers everywhere “are compensated for their work.”
Given that the UK is often held up by the MPA as a prime example illustrating how blocking can be implemented effectively, it came as a surprise that a year after our inquiries on the topic, many pirate sites were flourishing in the absence of new blocking orders.
So we spoke with the MPA again but the group was remaining non-committal, describing site-blocking as “just one pillar” of its anti-piracy strategy.
While the Hollywood studios and the MPA are yet to make an official statement, it appears that site blocking in the UK is now back on the agenda. Unsurprisingly, the targets are web-based streaming portals operating under the ‘123Movies’ branding. It is currently unclear whether these sites have any connections other than their names, but four appear to have been considered a big enough problem for the MPA to return to the High Court.
The news was revealed quietly by Sky Broadband, a UK ISP that is regularly required to block ‘pirate’ sites of all kinds, from torrent and streaming portals to considerably more fluid subscription-based IPTV providers.
According to Sky, following an application at the High Court by Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.; Disney Enterprises, Inc.; Netflix Studios, LLC; Paramount Pictures Corporation; Universal City Studios Productions LLLP; and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., it is now blocking four more streaming portals.
They are: www9.0123movies.com, w5.123movie.cc, 123moviesfun.is, and wvw1.123movies.net
The big question, given the general prevalence of streaming sites, is why this quartet was singled out for action by the movie and TV show companies.
Back in November 2020, TorrentFreak learned that the MPA and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment had obtained a DMCA subpoena from a US court.
The aim of the request was to compel Cloudflare, which all of the sites used, to hand over the personal details of individuals believed to be operating the platforms. Within that list were several ‘123Movies’ branded sites, including 0123movies.com and 123movies.net, which now form part of the injunction reportedly obtained by the MPA – presumably due to their significance in the UK market.
0123Movies.com, for example, currently enjoys millions of visits per month, with around a quarter of those hailing from the UK. 123movies.net is an even bigger affair, with around six million visits per month according to SimilarWeb. Again, close to 25% of its traffic comes from the UK. 123movie.cc and 123moviesfun.is are considerably smaller traffic-wise but the studios clearly see them as a problem to be stamped out.
This is the second time in a matter of days that the existence of a website-blocking order has been revealed by UK ISPs. Earlier this week, ISP TalkTalk reported that it would be blocking Sci-Hub.se following an application for injunction filed by publishers Elsevier and Springer Nature.
The court is yet to publish that decision or the latest one involving the MPA. The existence of the injunctions hasn’t been acknowledged by the companies involved either but confirmation and the relevant details are expected in due course.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
With no payload, analysts are struggling to learn what this mature malware does.
Enlarge (credit: Jayson Photography / Getty Images)
A previously undetected piece of malware found on almost 30,000 Macs worldwide is generating intrigue in security circles, which are still trying to understand precisely what it does and what purpose its self-destruct capability serves.
Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload on any of the infected 30,000 machines, leaving the malware’s ultimate goal unknown. The lack of a final payload suggests that the malware may spring into action once an unknown condition is met.
Also curious, the malware comes with a mechanism to completely remove itself, a capability that’s typically reserved for high-stealth operations. So far, though, there are no signs the self-destruct feature has been used, raising the question why the mechanism exists.
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Anders als in Großbritannien herrscht in Deutschland Impfstoffmangel. Diesen soll nun ein Sonderstab beseitigen
Das Gesundheitsportal des Bundes sei noch kein Problem, die Kooperation mit Google hingegen schon, meint der Wissenschaftliche Dienst. (Google, Suchmaschine)
Das Gesundheitsportal des Bundes sei noch kein Problem, die Kooperation mit Google hingegen schon, meint der Wissenschaftliche Dienst. (Google, Suchmaschine) Der Automobilindustrie und den Zulieferern soll bei der Digitalisierung und dem Umstieg auf den Elektroantrieb mit Steuergeldern geholfen werden. (Auto, Elektroauto)
Der Automobilindustrie und den Zulieferern soll bei der Digitalisierung und dem Umstieg auf den Elektroantrieb mit Steuergeldern geholfen werden. (Auto, Elektroauto) Without federal strategy or enough funding, US sequencing superpowers don’t work.
Enlarge (credit: Bing Guan | Bloomberg | Getty Images)
Across the US, the coronavirus is in retreat. The pandemic is still raging, mind you, with more than 70,000 new cases still reported each day. But since the post-holiday peak in mid-January, the seven-day average of new cases has fallen by nearly 64 percent. Hospitalizations have plunged too. And with vaccinations accelerating, there is a glimmer of hope that this downward trend might be the start of Covid’s long slide toward containment, at least in the US and other wealthy countries that are hogging the shots.
But retreat does not always mean defeat. And the emergence of several worrisome new coronavirus variants with new tricks for spreading faster or evading immune responses presents another possibility: that the current reprieve will only be temporary. Public health experts are urging governments to prepare for a possible new wave of infections driven by variants like B.1.1.7, which has already been identified in more than 1,200 US cases and in nearly every state, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control.
That’s more than double the number reported two weeks earlier. But the real number is likely far higher. How much higher? No one knows. That’s because the only way to tell which version of the coronavirus is causing an infection is to sequence its genome. In this country, that should be easy enough—the US is a sequencing superpower. It has dozens of academic institutions and massive commercial labs with the capacity to crank out genomes at a rapid clip. But the federal government’s response through much of the pandemic didn’t include a plan to mobilize America’s DNA-mappers into a coordinated coronavirus-monitoring corps. SARS-CoV-2 surveillance, well, sucked.
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32 Kerne für Server-CPUs, eine Videobeschleunigung für Notebooks und sogar SSDs: In Moskau wird die Elbrus-Plattform vorangetrieben. Ein Bericht von Marc Sauter (
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