July 2023 – Page 74 – news.buyenne.com

Klimakrise: Von Termitenhügel lernen

Nicht zu warm, nicht zu kühl im Haus und das alles ohne Klimaanlagen und Heizungssysteme: Forscher haben sich die Luftströme in Termitenhügeln angesehen und sie aufs Bauwesen übertragen. (Fortschritt, Wissenschaft)

Over 50% of Young Danes Have Streamed or Downloaded Content Illegally

Despite repeated piracy crackdowns in Denmark, local pirates don’t appear ready to budge. The percentage of young Danes who have downloaded or streamed content illegally has surpassed 50%. The number of pirates active over the past year is growing too, with legitimate social media platforms acting as a convenient gateway.

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

Three years ago, Danish law enforcement carried out a series of raids and arrests, effectively dismantling several popular torrent trackers.

These actions were supported by the local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, which eventually declared victory, noting that all notable pirate sites with Danish roots had reportedly shut down.

Such statements can be dangerous since pirates can be quite resilient, but there is no doubt that the law enforcement actions and subsequence convictions left a mark. So does that mean online piracy lost its appeal too? According to a recent survey, that isn’t the case.

Study: Pirates are Stubborn

The Danish Chamber of Commerce conducts a bi-annual study to track the piracy habits of locals. The most recent results for 2022 were just released and show that illegal streaming and downloading remain prevalent.

Roughly a third of the respondents (33%) admit to having downloaded or streamed something in the past and 15% did so over the past year. The last figure is up from 12% during the previous survey in 2020, and in 2018 it was only 10%.

These figures suggest that, if anything, the number of people who download or stream pirated content is increasing. It should be noted, however, that in the most recent version, people between the ages of 15 and 17 were included too, while earlier samples started at 18 years.

Age certainly matters when it comes to online piracy. Younger people typically pirate more and that’s also reflected in the Danish survey.

56% of Respondents Have Piracy Experience

More than half (56%) of the 15-29 year-olds admit they have downloaded or streamed pirated content in the past. For the 30-39 year-olds, this figure is still relatively high at 52%, but in the higher 50-74 year category, it drops to just 14%.

Younger Danes don’t just pirate more than their older counterparts, piracy prevalence also grows within the group. In 2020, fewer young Danes said they had downloaded or streamed pirated content.

There are also substantial differences between men and women. Men are twice as likely to have pirated something over the past year than women. For some categories, the difference is even more pronounced. For example, men are five times more likely to pirate music.

Social Media

In recent years, the authorities have managed to crack down on local file-sharing communities but that ‘distribution’ role now seems to have shifted to social media platforms.

“In the last two years, police have handed out more [file-sharing] sanctions and investigated more in the area. However, the consequence has been that Danish pirates have moved their illegal behavior on the internet to a new platform, social media,” the survey notes.

Of the 15% who admit to having pirated something over the past year, more than half used social media. YouTube is the most cited piracy gateway, followed by Facebook, TikTok, messenger services, Instagram, and Snapchat. As expected, the use of social media is most prevalent in the youngest age cohort.

Commenting on these findings, Rights Alliance director Maria Fredenslund calls on social media platforms to take more responsibility, or else.

“Now that the police’s [Special Crime Unit] has stopped the dedicated Danish file-sharing services, it is a real shame that illegal consumption is moving to legal social media,” Fredenslund says.

“This calls for increased efforts from these platforms both in terms of informing users and stopping the distribution of illegal content. It requires the platforms to take an active role, and if there are platforms that do not live up to that responsibility, it may be necessary to involve the authorities.”

You Wouldn’t Steal…

Casper Klynge, Deputy Director of the Danish Chamber of Commerce, notes that streaming piracy presents a huge problem. He believes that it deserves more attention from the authorities, as the unbridled ‘stealing’ threatens the production of future content.

“Streaming digital content without paying for it is basically the same as walking past a store and grabbing items to take home without paying for them,” Klynge says.

This isn’t the first time that piracy is compared to stealing. Interestingly, however, the Chamber of Commerce study shows that many people do see a difference between piracy and shoplifting.

Of all people who participated in the survey, 89% believe that it’s unacceptable to steal candy from a store, while ‘only’ 63% see sharing digital content without permission from rightsholders as unacceptable.

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

Activision Blizzard: Call of Duty vertraglich für Playstation gesichert

Sony und Microsoft haben sich geeinigt: Call of Duty erscheint weiter für Playstation. Der Vertrag ist schon unterschrieben. (Call of Duty, Microsoft)

It’s crafty, fish-stealing sharks vs. anglers in NatGeo’s Bull Shark Bandits

Depredation behavior offers evidence that bull sharks are more intelligent than we thought.

Spydro camera image of a bull shark stealing a fish on the team's line.

Weipa is a small coastal mining town in Queensland, located in northeastern Australia, particularly favored by sports fisherman because of its annual competition, the Weipa Fishing Classic. But in recent years, fishermen have reported an increasing number of incidents where local bull sharks are pulling off audacious underwater raids, literally waiting until a fish is hooked and chomping it off the line. Some fisherman estimate they can lose as much as 70 percent of their catch to the sharks, which seem to specifically target fishing boats.

(Some spoilers for the documentary below the gallery.)

It's atypical behavior for bull sharks and it raises an interesting question: is this evidence that this species of shark—known (a bit unfairly) in the popular imagination for being aggressive "mindless killers"—are more intelligent than previously assumed? That's one of the questions that shark biologists Johan Gustafson and Mariel Familiar Lopez set out to answer, and their initial field work has been documented for posterity in Bull Shark Bandits, part of National Geographic's 2023 SHARKFEST programming. SHARKFEST is four full weeks of "explosive, hair-raising and celebratory shark programming that ... showcase the captivating science, power and beauty of these magnificent animals," per the official description.

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Bizarre ancient sea creature brings evolution mystery to the surface

A new tunicate fossil, a close relative of vertebrates, is half a billion years old.

image of an undersea habitat, focused on a colony of blue, tube-shaped organisms.

Beneath the waves, there are strange, almost alien creatures that raise questions about the evolution of life on Earth and our own earliest origins. The answers might be hiding in tunicates.

Tunicates are filter-feeding invertebrates that include sea squirts and salps. The more common ascidiacean species are sessile and attach to rocks or the seafloor, while the appendicularian species swim freely. Yet all of them spawn as larvae that vaguely resemble tadpoles. Motile tunicates tend to grow into something that looks like a larger version of the larva. The others eventually faceplant onto a surface and absorb their own tails while morphing into a sessile, tubelike form with two siphons.

Despite all this weirdness, there is now strong evidence that tunicates are the closest relatives to vertebrates, but a mystery still surrounds them. How did they evolve, and what did they evolve from? A 500 million-year-old fossil is now telling us more about the evolution of these peculiar life forms.

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The heat wave scorching the US is a self-perpetuating monster

Record highs in the US are due to a heat dome—and it’s expected to worsen.

The sun sets during a heatwave in Peoria, Arizona,

Just weeks after a third of the US population was hit with air-quality alerts thanks to smoke from climate-change-fueled fires in Canada, 100 million Americans are now under heat alerts. A cap of extra-hot air, known as a heat dome, has settled over the West and South, pushing temperatures relentlessly higher.

The map below shows excessive heat warnings in purple and heat advisories in orange, and the forecast is that things will get worse through the weekend. Highs will stay above 110° Fahrenheit in Phoenix; California’s Death Valley is flirting with 130°; and Texas’ grid is struggling to keep the AC on.