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Bei der Stichwahl im südamerikanischen Land heute könnte der Polithasardeur Hernández an die Macht kommen. Das wäre nicht nur für sein Land gefährlich.
Die deutsche Verachtung des Pazifismus hat Tradition. Das Münsterland und Clemens August von Galen im Ersten Weltkrieg – Kirche & Weltkrieg, Teil 11
Christian Lindner will die Prämie beim Kauf von E-Autos abschaffen – die Autohersteller finden das nicht so gut und pochen auf den Koalitionsvertrag. (Elektroauto, Internet)
Christian Lindner will die Prämie beim Kauf von E-Autos abschaffen - die Autohersteller finden das nicht so gut und pochen auf den Koalitionsvertrag. (Elektroauto, Internet) Warum gerade wir Deutschen Emmanuel Macron heute Abend einen möglichst deutlichen Wahlsieg wünschen sollten
Pirate site blocking is widely regarded as an effective tool to combat online piracy. But just how effective is it? Data show that a recent torrent site blocking order in the Netherlands had no visible impact on local downloading and sharing activity. Old habits die hard apparently; especially when there are still plenty of alternatives.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
In March, a Dutch court ordered local ISP Delta to block access to the torrent sites 1337x, LimeTorrents, YTS, RARBG, Kickasstorrents and EZTV.
In addition to the main domains, a long list of proxies and mirrors are included as well. And if new domains pop up, these can be swiftly blocked too.
This is the second site blocking order in the Netherlands and a big win for local anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The anti-piracy group has spent more than a decade getting a Pirate Bay blockade in place and is now pushing through with new requests.
With help from a covenant, signed last year, all major Dutch Internet providers agreed to voluntarily comply with orders issued against rival ISPs. On top of that, Google also helps by removing blocked sites from its search results.
The wave of enforcement efforts must be frustrating for local pirates but does this means that they simply give up their old habits?
To find out how the March blocking order affected local torrent traffic, we used the torrent monitoring service IKnow, which provides a daily overview of how many people download files on BitTorrent. In this case, we only looked at Dutch activity[*].
The data in question has nothing to do with website visits. It’s simply a representation of how many Dutch file-sharers show up in public torrent swarms on any given day, irregardless of where the .torrent files come from.
The blocking order was issued on March 24 and Delta had five days to implement it. It’s not clear when each ISP started blocking, but the major ISPs followed soon after. KPN already had its blockade in place before the end of that month.
If the blocking measures impacted torrenting activity there should be a noticeable change in Dutch activity around the end of March. However, the data doesn’t reflect this at all. Between March 14 and April 24, the torrent activity remained relatively stable and there is no visible decline.
These numbers suggest that people still know where to find torrents, likely through alternative sites that are still available. Or they found a way to bypass the blockades via a VPN, generic proxy, or any other tool.
It’s simply not realistic to expect that people will kick year-long habits from one day to another. That said, the blocking measures may reduce the number of people who start using these sites for the first time.
The lack of an instant effect may be a disappointment for rightsholders but it is not entirely unexpected. Academic research from Carnegie Melon University has shown that blocking only starts to be effective when a large number of sites is targeted. The more sites blocked, the bigger the impact is.
BREIN Director Tim Kuik is aware of this as well and previously highlighted this study, partly as a motivation to continue the blocking efforts.
“If an illegal source is made inaccessible, some of the traffic will move to other illegal sources, but in practice, this waterbed effect becomes less and less if more sources are blocked. In combination with sufficient legal supply, illegal use decreases when you act against illegal providers,” Kuik said.
This is also why BREIN has already started work on additional site-blocking orders. The anti-piracy group hopes that, when enough sites are included, pirating activity will eventually start to decline.
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*Note: The location data is based on IP addresses. The number of unique addresses per swarm is counted by Iknow. It’s possible that foreign VPN subscribers with a Dutch IP address are included. While this would overestimate the number of Dutch IPs, this overestimation is constant so that does not change the conclusions.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
In den USA hat die Belegschaft eines Apple Stores erfolgreich darüber abgestimmt, sich gewerkschaftlich zu organisieren. (Apple Store, Apple)
In den USA hat die Belegschaft eines Apple Stores erfolgreich darüber abgestimmt, sich gewerkschaftlich zu organisieren. (Apple Store, Apple) Auf der diesjährigen Lego Con hat der Klemmbausteinhersteller zahlreiche neue Sets vorgestellt – unter anderem für Star-Wars-Fans und Nostalgiker. (Lego, Star Wars)
The steel industry is testing new technologies that don’t rely on fossil fuels.
Enlarge (credit: Monty Rakusen/Getty)
In the city of Woburn, Massachusetts, a suburb just north of Boston, a cadre of engineers and scientists in white coats inspected an orderly stack of brick-sized, gunmetal-gray steel ingots on a desk inside a neon-illuminated lab space.
What they were looking at was a batch of steel created using an innovative manufacturing method, one that Boston Metal, a company that spun out a decade ago from MIT, hopes will dramatically reshape the way the alloy has been made for centuries. By using electricity to separate iron from its ore, the firm claims it can make steel without releasing carbon dioxide, offering a path to cleaning up one of the world’s worst industries for greenhouse gas emissions.
An essential input for engineering and construction, steel is one of the most popular industrial materials in the world, with more than 2 billion tons produced annually. This abundance, however, comes at a steep price for the environment. Steelmaking accounts for 7 to 11 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, making it one of the largest industrial sources of atmospheric pollution. And because production could rise by a third by 2050, this environmental burden could grow.
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F1 in VR, quirky puzzles, drunken dodgeball fights, and lots more.
Enlarge / Kiosks, controllers, masks, and games: Gaming-preview events hit a little different in 2022, but we'll take whatever we can get. (credit: Summer Game Fest: Play Days + Seth Cuddeback)
LOS ANGELES—The past week's Summer Game Fest has mostly been a virtual affair, full of trailers for video games that may or may not launch in the next 18 months. Still, as the game industry draws closer to convention-preview normalcy, we scored invites to two early-June events with playable coming-soon games.
You may have already seen my biggest hands-on highlights from those events: Street Fighter 6, which is fantastic, and Sonic Frontiers, which is weird but promising. This article sums up the "best of the rest," based on hands-on tests at the Summer Game Fest Play Days event in Los Angeles and a series of remote-connection Tribeca Games Festival demos.
The events were missing some of the world's biggest developers and publishers—arguably because many of their games have been pushed to 2023. Despite this list skewing more to the indie side, we stand behind these game preview highlights thanks to how they felt to play.
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Unterdrückung, Krieg und Massenmord gibt es auch ohne Faschismus im politikwissenschaftlichen Sinn. Was Anhänger des woken Kapitalismus nicht wahrhaben wollen.
Auf der diesjährigen Lego Con hat der Klemmbausteinhersteller zahlreiche neue Sets vorgestellt - unter anderem für Star-Wars-Fans und Nostalgiker. (
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