Month: November 2022

Cable company’s accidental email to rival discusses plan to block competition

Cable One: Fighting publicly funded rivals one of our “most important tasks.”

Cable company’s accidental email to rival discusses plan to block competition

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

On October 17, Jonathan Chambers received an email that wasn't meant for him.

Chambers is one of the top executives at Conexon, a broadband company that has built and operates dozens of fiber networks in rural parts of America. Conexon recently won one of the Louisiana state government's GUMBO grants to deploy fiber-to-the-home service in East Carroll Parish, where the poverty rate of 37.6 percent is over three times the national average.

"This isn't our biggest project anywhere. But in many ways it's our most important," Chambers told Ars in a phone interview. Conexon primarily works with electric cooperatives, favoring a business model in which the local community owns the fiber network and Conexon operates it under a lease agreement.

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Is Ubisoft thwarting cheaters with “100 versions” of Rainbow Six Siege?

New versions “every two hours” could feature small, obfuscating code changes.

One side of this image is the cheat-makers' and one is the Ubisoft developers', but we're frankly not sure which is which...

Enlarge / One side of this image is the cheat-makers' and one is the Ubisoft developers', but we're frankly not sure which is which...

Last week, Ubisoft announced an "important security update" to prevent cheating on the popular Rainbow Six Siege. And while Ubisoft said it "cannot share details of the update in order to protect its integrity," anti-cheat watchers think the developer might be thwarting cheat-makers using an interesting form of code obfuscation and frequent, semi-randomized game updates.

The popular Anti-Cheat Police Department Twitter account (ACPD) noted last week that "every 2 hours, a new unique build of R6 shows up," citing SteamDB tracking data showing dozens of updates over a matter of days. The game's frequent Steam updates seem to have stopped just as Ubisoft temporarily rolled back its new security features in order to implement fixes Wednesday, further establishing the link.

Prominent Rainbow Six data-mining account ScriptLeaksR6 also explained last week that Siege "has a new system in place where some [PC players] get custom builds of the game." The proliferation of dozens of different versions of the game in a short period means "cheat devs effectively need to update 100 versions of the game to get their cheat to work," as ScriptLeaksR6 puts it.

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Acer Aspire 3 is the first budget laptop with an AMD Mendocino processor

The new Acer Aspire 3 (A315-24P-R75B) is a budget laptop with a 15.6 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS LCD display, 8GB of RAM, at least 128GB of solid state storage, and a starting price under $400. It’s also one of the first laptops to hit the marke…

The new Acer Aspire 3 (A315-24P-R75B) is a budget laptop with a 15.6 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS LCD display, 8GB of RAM, at least 128GB of solid state storage, and a starting price under $400. It’s also one of the first laptops to hit the market featuring an AMD Mendocino processor. That’s a new line […]

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Qualcomm teases “Oryon” CPU for next-gen devices

Qualcomm’s next chip for flagship phones will start to arrive before the end of the year. But in the grand scheme of things, the recently-announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 represents a relatively modest update when compared with Qualcomm’s next…

Qualcomm’s next chip for flagship phones will start to arrive before the end of the year. But in the grand scheme of things, the recently-announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 represents a relatively modest update when compared with Qualcomm’s next-gen processors which may start to arrive in 2023 and 2024. And now the chip maker has given […]

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DNS:NET: Überbau bei Glasfaser durch die Telekom droht zuzunehmen

Alternative Netzbetreiber fürchten eine Welle des Überbaus ihrer Netze durch die Deutsche Telekom. Das werde unter den Konkurrenten der Telekom nicht gemacht. (Glasfaser, Open Access)

Alternative Netzbetreiber fürchten eine Welle des Überbaus ihrer Netze durch die Deutsche Telekom. Das werde unter den Konkurrenten der Telekom nicht gemacht. (Glasfaser, Open Access)

Major Pirate IPTV Service Raided, Four Arrests, 95 Resellers Face Investigation

In a joint operation carried out by Spain’s Policía Nacional and EUROPOL, a major pirate IPTV service serving half a million users across Europe has been shut down. Police say packages included 2,600 live TV channels and a 23,000-item VOD library, generating annual profits of more than €3 million for the operators. Four people have been arrested and 95 resellers placed on alert.

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

IPTVIn the wake of Italian police shutting down a 900,000 user pirate IPTV service last week, police in Spain have followed up with an operation of their own.

Information provided by Policía Nacional and EUROPOL does not include the service’s name but according to the numbers, the operation appears significant. The IPTV service had more than 500,000 subscribers all over Europe, serviced by a network of resellers.

Police say they disabled 10 administration panels connected to 32 servers located in France, the Netherlands and Spain. Those locations are reported as playing host to “illegal television content” and related computer equipment.

spain iptv decoders

Packages bought by subscribers gave them access to 2,600 live TV channels plus a library of 23,000 movies and TV shows. An interesting factor is the reported age of the service – at least a decade of operations according to Spanish police.

Investigation Launched in 2020

The investigation began in 2020 following a complaint from the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. Police say that they uncovered a network, operating through various companies, that had been fraudulently commercializing video content since 2012.

Websites were used to advertise and sell the illegal subscription packages and like many similar IPTV platforms working at scale, a network of resellers helped to cascade sales from the top-level service into the consumer market below. Police say that than 95 resellers represented the service in Spain, UK, Malta, Portugal, Cyprus, and Greece.

Big Service, Big Money

Numbers provided today by Policía Nacional will almost certainly change, if and when a case goes to trial, but by most standards they remain significant.

Annual profit – not revenue – is currently estimated at 3,000,000 million euros. Investigators say the money was laundered in Spain and elsewhere.

iptv raid spain

Through bank accounts held by companies in Spain, the suspects allegedly transferred money to bank accounts held by other companies under their control, located in unnamed paraísos fiscales, aka tax havens. Profits also funded luxury homes in the Malaga region of Spain and the formation of new companies to support criminal activity.

Arrests and Seizures

Police say they seized two high-end vehicles with an estimated value of 180,000 euros along with 2,800 euros in cash, IT-related materials, and other documentation. Eight bank accounts were frozen and four people were placed under arrest.

“The operation ended with four detainees in the Málaga municipalities of Benahavís (2), Mijas (one person arrested and another under investigation) and Benalmádena (1),” a police statement reads.

Efforts to identify more people involved in the organization continue in other countries.

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

FTX lacked “accurate list” of bank accounts, failed at basic bookkeeping

Employee expenses were approved by posting emoji in Slack channels, DMs.

FTX lacked “accurate list” of bank accounts, failed at basic bookkeeping

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images via Getty)

Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed FTX business empire misused customer funds and lacked trustworthy financial statements or any real internal controls, according to the new boss of the collapsed $32 billion crypto exchange.

John Ray III, a veteran insolvency professional who oversaw the liquidation of Enron, said in a US court filing on Thursday that FTX was the worst case of corporate failure that he had seen in his more than 40-year career.

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” he wrote.

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