Month: November 2023

MPA Recognizes France, Italy and Philippines for Site Blocking Innovations

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is one of the key proponents of pirate site blocking. The group, which counts Hollywood studios and Netflix as its members, recently met with several international stakeholders at a “site blocking conference”. The event wasn’t widely publicized but TorrentFreak learned that France, Italy and the Philippines were recognized for their innovations.

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

clappingWebsite blocking has become the go-to anti-piracy measure for the entertainment industries when tackling pirate sites on the internet.

The practice has been around for well over 15 years and has gradually expanded to more than forty countries around the world.

Thus far, pirate site blocking is notably absent in the United States. However, American-funded forces are active elsewhere in the world to forge new blocking initiatives, through voluntary agreements or the courts.

Philippine Blocking Measures

The resulting blocking measures are immediately noticeable to the public at large but there’s also quite a bit of information sharing and discussion taking place behind closed doors. In this regard, a recent letter from the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) is particularly noteworthy.

IPOPHL is the main facilitator of a new site-blocking regime established under a memorandum of understanding (MOU). As part of the agreement, set to come into effect later this month, Internet providers agreed to voluntarily block access to known pirate sites.

The Philippine Government is determined to tackle online piracy, a goal reiterated in a recent IPOPHL letter to the U.S. Trade Representative which contained additional background information.

MPA and ACE Guide Blocking Efforts

It transpires that the blocking measures were made possible thanks to assistance from the Motion Picture Association and ACE, its affiliated anti-piracy arm. Among other things, the movie industry group provided technical expertise.

“This [site blocking] mechanism was realized with the support of the Motion Picture Association through the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) who worked with IPOPHL in providing information on similar mechanisms and best practices in other jurisdictions,” the letter reads.

“ACE also conducted a training on site-blocking to equip the IPOPHL’s IEO personnel with technical knowledge on site-blocking mechanisms.”

ipohl

It’s no secret that the MPA is heavily involved in rolling out site-blocking initiatives around the world. What we hadn’t heard until recently is that the industry group also brings stakeholders together in an ‘Annual Global Site Blocking Strategy Conference’.

MPA Recognizes ‘Innovations’ at Site Blocking Conference

The conference, which took place last month, came up in IPOPHL’s letter mentioning the MPA’s recognition of the Philippines’ site-blocking progress.

“At the [MPA’s] Annual Global Site Blocking Strategy (GSS) Conference held in Amsterdam on October 3, 2023, the Philippines (through IPOPHL) was a recipient of one of the awards this year, for pushing for site blocking legislation and for the coordination and roll out of the voluntary site blocking MoU.

“Every year, the MPA hands out a few awards to those countries or counsels which have excelled in the field of site blocking,” the letter adds.

The conference and the accolades were not reported publicly, but the MPA confirmed to us that the Asian country was indeed praised for its achievements. Aiming to avoid confusion with the annual MPA awards, the group stressed that the award isn’t official.

An MPA EMEA spokesperson notes that the Philippines agreement shows that voluntary collaboration between the MPA, governments, and Internet providers can have the desired effect.

“The voluntary siteblocking MOU, made possible thanks to the leadership and support of the Philippines Intellectual Property Office is yet another example of the MPA, authorities and ISPs working together in the fight against piracy.

“Siteblocking has proven to be an effective tool against large scale content theft and we applaud the Philippines for taking action to support creativity,” MPA’s spokesperson adds.

In addition to the Philippines, countries including France and Italy were also ‘recognized’ for their innovations in site blocking, but more specific details are not available.

Overall, it’s clear that MPA is determined to help countries around the world roll out effective site-blocking measures. Whether it will be able to use this wealth of knowledge in the United States anytime soon is unknown. But that’s nothing new.

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A copy of the letter sent by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) to the U.S. Trade Representative is available here (pdf)

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

The FCC says new rules will curb SIM swapping. I’m pessimistic

SIM swaps and port-out scams are a fact of life. New rules aren’t likely to change that.

Illustration of a smartphone with the word

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Panuwat Sikham)

After years of inaction, the FCC this week said that it's finally going to protect consumers against a scam that takes control of their cell phone numbers by deceiving employees who work for mobile carriers. While commissioners congratulated themselves for the move, there’s little reason yet to believe it will stop a practice that has been all too common over the past decade.

The scams, known as "SIM swapping" and "port-out fraud," both have the same objective: to wrest control of a cell phone number away from its rightful owner by tricking the employees of the carrier that services it. SIM swapping occurs when crooks hold themselves out as someone else and request that the victim's number be transferred to a new SIM card—usually under the pretense that the victim has just obtained a new phone. In port-out scams, crooks do much the same thing, except they trick the carrier employee into transferring the target number to a new carrier.

This class of attack has existed for well over a decade, and it became more commonplace amid the irrational exuberance that drove up the price of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. People storing large sums of digital coin have been frequent targets. Once crooks take control of a phone number, they trigger password resets that work by clicking on links sent in text messages. The crooks then drain cryptocurrency and traditional bank accounts.

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Aitekx Robotruck: Cybertruck-ähnliches Fahrzeug vorgestellt

Das Start-up Aitekx hat einen Prototyp seines elektrischen Pick-ups vorgestellt, der eine verblüffende Ähnlichkeit mit dem umstrittenen Cybertruck von Tesla aufweist. (Auto, Elektroauto)

Das Start-up Aitekx hat einen Prototyp seines elektrischen Pick-ups vorgestellt, der eine verblüffende Ähnlichkeit mit dem umstrittenen Cybertruck von Tesla aufweist. (Auto, Elektroauto)

SpaceX: Auch der zweite Flug des Starship bleibt erfolglos

Deutliche Fortschritte gegenüber dem ersten Versuch und spektakulärere Explosionen – aber auf einen Erfolg muss SpaceX weiter warten. Von Frank Wunderlich-Pfeiffer (Starship, Raumfahrt)

Deutliche Fortschritte gegenüber dem ersten Versuch und spektakulärere Explosionen - aber auf einen Erfolg muss SpaceX weiter warten. Von Frank Wunderlich-Pfeiffer (Starship, Raumfahrt)

Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

Microsoft CEO Nadella “furious”; OpenAI President and three senior researchers resign.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI Chief Scientist, speaks at Tel Aviv University on June 5, 2023.

Enlarge / Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI Chief Scientist, speaks at Tel Aviv University on June 5, 2023. (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman in a surprise move that led to the resignation of President Greg Brockman and three senior scientists. The move also blindsided key investor and minority owner Microsoft, reportedly making CEO Satya Nadella furious. As Friday night wore on, reports emerged that the ousting was likely orchestrated by Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever over concerns about the safety and speed of OpenAI's tech deployment.

"This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity," Sutskever told employees at an emergency all-hands meeting on Friday afternoon, as reported by The Information.

Since its founding, OpenAI has pursued the development of artificial general intelligence (or AGI), which is a hypothetical technology that would be able to perform any intellectual task a human can do, potentially replacing a large number of humans at their jobs.

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Leaked Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G12 shows redesigned keyboard and TrackPoint

Lenovo has regularly updated the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, its flagship thin and light business-class laptop, since its debut in 2012.  Usually that means a processor refresh and maybe some modest changes to the physical design. But it looks like the 12th-g…

Lenovo has regularly updated the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, its flagship thin and light business-class laptop, since its debut in 2012.  Usually that means a processor refresh and maybe some modest changes to the physical design. But it looks like the 12th-generation X1 Carbon may bring some small, but significant changes to the keyboard and trackpad, […]

The post Leaked Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G12 shows redesigned keyboard and TrackPoint appeared first on Liliputing.

Globalism vs. the scientific revolution

A recent book takes a dim view of the Europe-centric view of the origin of science.

Image of a line drawing of a person in medieval clothing measuring a sphere.

Enlarge (credit: duncan1890)

How did science get started? A few years back, we looked at one answer to that question in the form of a book called The Invention of Science. In it, British historian David Wootton places the origin within a few centuries of European history in which the features of modern science—experiments, models and laws, peer review—were gradually aggregated into a formal process of organized discovery.

But that answer is exquisitely sensitive to how science is defined. A huge range of cultures engaged in organized observations of the natural world and tried to identify patterns in what they saw. In a recent book called Horizons, James Poskett places these efforts firmly within the realm of science and arrives at his subtitle: "The global origins of modern science." He de-emphasizes the role of Europe and directly dismisses Wootton's book via footnote in the process.

Whether you find Poskett's broad definition of science compelling will go a long way to explain how you feel about the first third of the book. The remaining two-thirds, however, are a welcome reminder that, wherever it may have started, science quickly grew into an international effort and matured in conversation with international cultural trends like colonialism, nationalism, and Cold War ideologies.

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