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Energie und Klima – kompakt, Teil 2: Die fossil angetriebene Schuldenkrise, leere Versprechungen vom Bundesfinanzminister und Landespolitiker ohne Schamgefühl.
Discmaster lets you sift through 11 terabytes of CD-ROM and floppy disk archives.
Enlarge / Search through millions of vintage files with Discmaster. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more.
Discmaster opens a window into digital media culture around the turn of the millennium, turning anyone into a would-be digital archeologist. It's a rare look into a slice of cultural history that is often obscured by the challenges of obsolete media and file format incompatibilities.
The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years. The new site pulls them together behind a search engine with the ability to perform detailed searches by file type, format, source, file size, file date, and many other options.
Discmaster lets you sift through 11 terabytes of CD-ROM and floppy disk archives.
Enlarge / Search through millions of vintage files with Discmaster. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more.
Discmaster opens a window into digital media culture around the turn of the millennium, turning anyone into a would-be digital archeologist. It's a rare look into a slice of cultural history that is often obscured by the challenges of obsolete media and file format incompatibilities.
The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years. The new site pulls them together behind a search engine with the ability to perform detailed searches by file type, format, source, file size, file date, and many other options.
Microsoft is rolling out a number of Windows 11 updates bringing support for new features like tabs in File Explorer and the return of old features like the ability to open the Task manager from the Taskbar. In addition to launching new iPad Pro and e…
Microsoft is rolling out a number of Windows 11 updates bringing support for new features like tabs in File Explorer and the return of old features like the ability to open the Task manager from the Taskbar. In addition to launching new iPad Pro and entry-level iPad models, Apple is now taking pre-orders for a new […]
The post Lilbits: Lenovo Yoga Paper E Ink tablet leaked, Windows 11 File Explorer tabs arrive, Apple TV 4K gets a major spec bump appeared first on Liliputing.
Netflix scheint die Wende geschafft zu haben. Doch der Kundenzuwachs ist geringer als im Vergleichszeitraum des Vorjahres. (Netflix, Streaming)
Son of 72-year-old in Saudi prison says Biden admin did little to help.
A US citizen who traveled to Saudi Arabia to visit family reportedly received a 16-year prison sentence for posting tweets critical of the Saudi government. The sentence was imposed on 72-year-old Saad Ibrahim Almadi, according to his son, Ibrahim Almadi.
Ibrahim Almadi spoke to several news organizations about the sentence imposed on his father, who reportedly holds both US and Saudi citizenship and has lived in the US since the 1970s. He alleges that his father was tortured in Saudi prison and that the US State Department mishandled the case. The punishment is due to tweets that expressed "mild opinions about the government," his son said.
President Biden "sold my father for oil," Ibrahim Almadi told the New York Post. "Biden just cares about votes. He doesn't care about my father, he doesn't care about American citizens." (Almadi also said he is a Democrat who voted for Biden.)
Microsoft is rolling out a set of updates to Windows 11 that bring a number of new features that had previously only been available to members of the Windows Insider preview program. The Windows 11 File Explorer finally supports tabs, it’s easie…
Microsoft is rolling out a set of updates to Windows 11 that bring a number of new features that had previously only been available to members of the Windows Insider preview program. The Windows 11 File Explorer finally supports tabs, it’s easier to share files to nearby devices, and Microsoft is bringing back support for […]
The post Microsoft brings tabs to the Windows 11 File Explorer, along with Taskbar, sharing, and Photos improvements appeared first on Liliputing.
PrimeWire had outmaneuvered several Hollywood blocking injunctions but a complaint in the U.S. tightened the screws and never let go. An MPA investigation to identify the site’s operator was met with sophisticated countermeasures. It ended at a UK property that has been publicly linked to other crimes worth billions of dollars. And a site called KickassTorrents.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
For almost a year we’ve documented Hollywood’s legal battle to permanently shut down movie and TV show streaming site, PrimeWire.
Paramount, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Disney, and Netflix teamed up to file the complaint in 2021, hoping to shut down a site that had endured blocking injunctions since 2014 while serving millions of users worldwide.
All members of the MPA, the studios won a default judgment and injunction in April 2022. PrimeWire’s efforts to stay alive were numerous, but the MPA met them at every step of the way. The determination of MPA investigators at the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has been apparent throughout but new information rarely shared in public takes things to a whole new level.
When PrimeWire failed to respond to the MPA’s lawsuit, losing the case and being found liable for damages was inevitable. The MPA has been conducting discovery against entities doing business with PrimeWire to establish the identity of its operator and any profits attributable to copyright infringement. To say that proved less than straightforward is a massive understatement.
After obtaining permission from the court in late April, MPA investigators began serving third-party subpoenas on advertising brokers including Amobee, Exponential Interactive, Oracle Corporation, Yahoo Ad Tech, AdSupply, Aragon Advertising, Insticator, and Outbrain, plus Amazon and Google.
Jan van Voorn, head of Global Content Protection and Enforcement Operations at the MPA, informed the court this week that the results from that investigation told only a small part of the overall story. The process also confirmed that measures had been put in place to ensure that PrimeWire’s operator was always one step ahead, and potentially several steps away.
The MPA says that PrimeWire follows a long-established practice of switching between ad brokers, in the United States and elsewhere. The number of ad brokers involved not only hindered efforts to identify a single significant source of income, but also presented new problems.
Most of those served with MPA subpoenas turned out to be intermediaries between supply-side advertising platforms (serving advertisers) and demand-side advertising platforms (serving website owners), meaning they had no direct relationship with PrimeWire at all.
“As intermediaries, they did not make any payments to individual website operators like [PrimeWire], instead serving to connect larger groups of advertisers to websites, with the payments flowing through different channels and not directly traceable to PrimeWire,” van Voorn informed the court.
The MPA did find signs of “minimal contact” with ad brokers, but that was frustrated by PrimeWire using multiple aliases including ‘Tyler’ and ‘Andy Andy’. Ultimately, none of the ad brokers could provide a comprehensive assessment of revenues associated with PrimeWire, but one did produce a document of interest.
The document revealed that ad broker Insticator had paid $10,376.61 to an entity called Oksara LP in August 2015. The money was transferred into a bank account operated by Versobank AS in Tallinn, Estonia.
“After receiving this document, [MPA] investigators attempted to identify who might be behind Oksara LP. Oksara LP appears to be a shell entity that is no longer in operation,” van Voorn added.
Oksara LP’s registration documents, available on the UK’s Companies House portal, list B2B Consultants Ltd and BTD Enterprises Ltd as Oksara LP partners. As the MPA would’ve realized only too quickly, if something straightforward is connected to these entities, it’s probably a freak accident.
The document obtained by the MPA claims that Oksara LP’s address is 1, Straits Parade, Bristol, BS16 2LA, an unassuming property but ideally located for lovers of fried chicken. It’s also one of many UK addresses that have been publicly linked to industrial-scale money laundering operations.
The MPA says that a Latvian national named Alise Ilsley completed the paperwork for the Oksara LP partnership. Subsequent reports have linked her and B2B Solutions entities to money laundering schemes linked to the same Bristol address, including one that drained $1 billion from three of Moldova’s banks in 2014.
There is no suggestion that PrimeWire is connected to any of these crimes in any way. That being said, shell companies and partnerships like these are designed to frustrate investigations, including this one carried out by the MPA. And another from 2016 that featured a piracy ‘brand’ with an even bigger profile.
Following the surprise shutdown of KickassTorrents in 2016, details of the FBI investigation revealed some of the inner workings of the site and its business dealings.
The MPA’s filing doesn’t mention the company by name but notes that a business sharing the same Bristol address as the others was previously linked to KickassTorrents by the FBI. For the curious, the company was called Glomeratus Ltd, it used an Estonian bank, and was reportedly involved with KickassTorrents’ advertising revenue.
Beyond circumstantial connections, the MPA does not attempt to link PrimeWire with KickassTorrents or any other enterprise but notes that by using shell corporations, PrimeWire showed intent to hide profits attributable to infringement.
“All of this is consistent with Defendants using sophisticated measures to hide their identities and information regarding the extent to which they have profited from their infringing conduct. Combined with the wire transfer, the evidence appears to confirm that Defendants have utilized the services of a business known to facilitate money laundering through which to funnel their revenues from PrimeWire’s operations,” the filing adds.
The MPA lawsuit seeks damages relating to infringement of 138 movies and TV shows offered via PrimeWire. To put that into perspective, earlier this year the site offered access to more than 10,000 titles owned by the plaintiff studios and in October 2021, enjoyed 20 million visitors from the United States alone.
The MPA proposes a judgment consisting of $20.7 million in damages plus $417,600 to cover attorneys fees. The group admits that showing PrimeWire’s actual profits is close to impossible but after considering the above, the judge seems unlikely to suggest no one tried.
The MPA’s proposed judgment and supporting declaration can be found here (1,2, pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Is the Google Assistant in trouble? It’s true that it doesn’t make any money…
Google is facing turbulent times due to CEO Sundar Pichai's decision to cut costs across the company. We first got word of this belt-tightening in August, and since then, we've seen the "Area 120" incubation lab get cut in half, a spinoff of what was left of Project Loon, the death of the Pixel laptop division, and the dramatic shutdown of Google Stadia. A new report from The Information details more changes Pichai's budget cuts are having across the company, with some divisions surviving and others getting ominous resource cuts. There's plenty to go over.
First, we have news that the hardware division, other than losing laptops, seems mostly safe. Google's biggest Android partner, Samsung, is in decline in many established markets, and Apple is hitting an all-time high in US market share last quarter. The report says Google views Apple as more of a problem than it has in the past, thanks to worries that regulators might shut down the usual multi-billion-dollar Google/Apple agreement to put Google Search on iPhones. If iPhones stop showing Google ads, the rise of Apple and fall of Samsung is one of the few things that could actually be a major problem for Google's revenue.
According to the report, Google views itself as the solution to this problem. As a hedge against what the report calls the "further decline" of Samsung, Google is "doubling down" on its investment in Pixel hardware. Google is apparently doing this by "moving product development and software engineering staff working on features for non-Google hardware to work on Google-branded devices." The goal here is to not spend more money, so Google is apparently sacrificing partner devices to focus on the Pixel division. (Making your business a Google partner just seems like you're asking for trouble, doesn't it?)
Is the Google Assistant in trouble? It’s true that it doesn’t make any money…
Google is facing turbulent times due to CEO Sundar Pichai's decision to cut costs across the company. We first got word of this belt-tightening in August, and since then, we've seen the "Area 120" incubation lab get cut in half, a spinoff of what was left of Project Loon, the death of the Pixel laptop division, and the dramatic shutdown of Google Stadia. A new report from The Information details more changes Pichai's budget cuts are having across the company, with some divisions surviving and others getting ominous resource cuts. There's plenty to go over.
First, we have news that the hardware division, other than losing laptops, seems mostly safe. Google's biggest Android partner, Samsung, is in decline in many established markets, and Apple is hitting an all-time high in US market share last quarter. The report says Google views Apple as more of a problem than it has in the past, thanks to worries that regulators might shut down the usual multi-billion-dollar Google/Apple agreement to put Google Search on iPhones. If iPhones stop showing Google ads, the rise of Apple and fall of Samsung is one of the few things that could actually be a major problem for Google's revenue.
According to the report, Google views itself as the solution to this problem. As a hedge against what the report calls the "further decline" of Samsung, Google is "doubling down" on its investment in Pixel hardware. Google is apparently doing this by "moving product development and software engineering staff working on features for non-Google hardware to work on Google-branded devices." The goal here is to not spend more money, so Google is apparently sacrificing partner devices to focus on the Pixel division. (Making your business a Google partner just seems like you're asking for trouble, doesn't it?)
Netflix scheint die Wende geschafft zu haben. Doch der Kundenzuwachs ist geringer als im Vergleichszeitraum des Vorjahres. (
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