November 2021 – Page 44 – news.buyenne.com

Herpesviruses steal one cell’s protein, use it to infect another

Without protein theft, the virus can’t get to the nucleus of nerve cells.

Image of a black circle surrounded by small grey spheres.

One of the defining features of viruses is that they rely on host proteins in order to reproduce. A host cell will often copy viral genes into RNAs and then translate those RNAs into proteins, for example. Typically, a mature virus that's ready to spread to another cell has little more than viral proteins, the virus's genetic material, and maybe some of the host's membrane. It doesn't need much else; all the proteins it needs to reproduce further should be present in the next cell it infects.

But some data released this week may have found an exception to this pattern. Members of the herpesvirus family appear to latch on to a protein in the first cell they infect and then carry this protein along with them to the next cell. This behavior might be helpful because of the normal targets of herpesviruses—neurons, which have a very unusual cell structure.

A long way to the nucleus

Like other viruses, herpesviruses start off by infecting cells that are exposed to the environment. But from there, they move on to nerve cells, where they take up residency, persisting even when there's no overt indications of infection. These infected cells then serve as a launching point for re-establishing active infections, causing lifetime problems for anyone unfortunate enough to have been infected.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Griechenland: Wie Verschwörungsmythen und anderer Irrsinn zunimmt

Und welchen Anteil Vertreter der Regierung Mitsotakis an dieser Entwicklung haben

Kanada: Krankenhausangestellte gegen Impfzwang

Ontario und Quebec setzen Impfpflicht aufgrund des Widerstands zehntausender von Pflegekräften aus. Impfpolitik auch vor den Gerichten

Piracy Reporter Retracts Takedown Notices After Misconfiguration Targets Legitimate Sites

Piracy tracking firm MUSO recently asked Google to remove tens of thousands of non-existing URLs, including those of mainstream sites such as Amazon, Variety, Billboard, the Huffington Post, and ABC News. The company explains that the incorrect DMCA notices are the result of a misconfiguration that has since been addressed. Meanwhile, the company is working with Google to ensure that the incorrect reports are retracted.

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

red cross The UK piracy tracking firm MUSO has quite a balanced view on the piracy problem, framing it as an opportunity rather than a threat.

MUSO believes that by understanding what motivates pirates, copyright holders can gain great insights that will ultimately help to generate new revenue streams.

At the same time, however, the company offers classic anti-piracy services. This includes sending DMCA notices to Google for potentially infringing links that appear in the popular search engine.

Working on behalf of prominent rightsholders, MUSO has reported more than 100 million infringing URLs to Google over the years. This usually goes quite smoothly but this week we were alerted to a concerning pattern.

Non-existing URLs

In a series of quite unusual DMCA notices the company reported more than 100,000 URLs that flagged non-existing links on pirate sites. These URLs pointed to hundreds of domains and often used repetitive keyword strings, such as the examples shown below.

When we attempted to load these pages they nearly all resulted in 404-type errors. In some cases that’s not really a surprise, including the questionable example below.

These takedowns don’t really harm the targeted sites since the content doesn’t exist. However, more flagged links on a domain could be that these sites are further demoted in Google’s search results. That’s a serious concern.

Takedowns Target Legitimate sites

The issue is not limited to pirate sites either. Tucked away in the long lists of ‘pirate’ links we also find several legitimate websites. These include ABC News, Amazon, Billboard, Redfin, Variety, the Red Cross, and the UK National Archives.

Below are a few examples from a single notice, but there are many more.

^{http://amazon.co.uk/3253571-after-we-fell-2021-720p-webrip-x264-xbet.html

http://www.abcnews.go.com/search-movies/Heart%20of%20Champions%202021.html

http://billboard.com/3253571-after-we-fell-2021-720p-webrip-x264-xbet.html

http://huffingtonpost.com/3253571-after-we-fell-2021-720p-webrip-x264-xbet.html

http://globalnews.ca/3253571-after-we-fell-2021-720p-webrip-x264-xbet.html

http://redcrossblood.org/3253571-after-we-fell-2021-720p-webrip-x264-xbet.html

http://redfin.com/3253571-after-we-fell-2021-720p-webrip-x264-xbet.html

http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/3253571-after-we-fell-2021-720p-webrip-x264-xbet.html}

Misconfiguration

We reported our findings to MUSO earlier this week and the company informed us that these URLs should not have been targeted. Apparently, a batch of incorrect listings were sent out as the result of a misconfiguration

“These delistings are part of a batch of incorrect delistings sent out due to a misconfiguration within our service. We have identified the incorrect delistings and issued retractions with Google to have these incorrect delisting requests voided,” a spokesperson said.

Following up on this answer we requested a full overview of the incorrect delistings. In addition, we asked whether MUSO checks whether a URL is responding properly before a notice is sent.

While we didn’t get a direct answer to these questions, MUSO said that there are multiple processes and checks in place to identify mistakes. The company also reaffirmed that all mistakes will be retracted.

TorrentFreak spoke to the operator of one of the affected sites. He didn’t immediately notice a negative effect from the takedown notices. However, he points out that Google’s transparency report sometimes suggests that the URLs are indexed by the search engine, which isn’t the case.

Prevous Issues

From what we can gather, the takedown system wrongfully matched keyword strings to the wrong base URLs. This can work for some proxy sites that use the same URL structure but, in this case, something clearly went wrong.

This reminds us of a similar issue that popped up a few years ago. At the time, keyword string takedowns targeted many non-existing URLs as well but legitimate sites were not hit at the time.

While these types of mistakes should be avoided, we have to applaud MUSO for being open and transparent about it. Mistakes can happen and it’s always better to focus on a fix rather than a cover-up.

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

Star Trek: Discovery is tearing the streaming world apart

Season 4 boldly goes where no multibillion-dollar franchise has gone before, angers fans.

Pictured: Oyin Oladejo as Lt. Joann Owosekun, Sonequa Martin Green as Burnham, and Emily Coutts as Lt. Keyla Detmer of the Paramount+ original series <em>Star Trek: Discovery</em>.

Dan Leckie has been a Star Trek fan since he pressed play on a VHS tape of the original TV show during Christmas of 1991. Leckie, from Aberdeen, Scotland, was instantly hooked on the sci-fi series and its subsequent iterations and regularly attends conventions to meet up with fellow fans. But on November 16 he noticed something weird: Netflix had stopped promoting the first three seasons of Star Trek: Discovery—and previews of season four, due to launch on November 18, had also vanished.

What Leckie had spotted would soon become a point of outrage for Star Trek fans the world over: Netflix had lost the rights to the fourth season of Discovery outside of the US, and the previous seasons, too. They would now appear on Paramount+, the streaming service formerly known as CBS All Access and owned by ViacomCBS—but not until 2022, and even then, not everywhere. (In the US, Star Trek: Discovery has always streamed exclusively on Paramount+/CBS All Access.) And Star Trek is just the beginning. What’s bad news for Discovery fans now is yet another glimpse of the increasingly muddled future of streaming.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments