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You’re driving somewhere, eyes on the road, when you start to feel a tingling sensation in your lower abdomen. That extra-large Coke you drank an hour ago has made its way through your kidneys into your bladder. “Time to pull over,” you think, scanning for an exit ramp.
To most people, pulling into a highway rest stop is a profoundly mundane experience. But not to neuroscientist Rita Valentino, who has studied how the brain senses, interprets, and acts on the bladder’s signals. She’s fascinated by the brain’s ability to take in sensations from the bladder, combine them with signals from outside of the body, like the sights and sounds of the road, then use that information to act—in this scenario, to find a safe, socially appropriate place to pee. “To me, it’s really an example of one of the beautiful things that the brain does,” she says.
Scientists used to think that our bladders were ruled by a relatively straightforward reflex—an “on-off” switch between storing urine and letting it go. “Now we realize it’s much more complex than that,” says Valentino, now director of the division of neuroscience and behavior at the National Institute of Drug Abuse. An intricate network of brain regions that contribute to functions like decision-making, social interactions, and awareness of our body’s internal state, also called interoception, participates in making the call.
Spain’s Ministry of the Interior says eight people have been arrested after police dismantled a €5.3m pirate IPTV network serving local expats. Authorities aren’t naming the service but if the name TVMucho rings any bells, people are on the right track. That police identified the owner of the service is no surprise. The Dutchman has never hidden away and has continuously claimed his service operates legally. If only in part, it’s still streaming channels right now.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
A press release issued by Spain’s Ministry of the Interior on Friday initially sounds straightforward.
Based on a complaint filed by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, in November 2022 an investigation was launched to identify those responsible for two websites that marketed a service that allegedly violated the rights of ACE members.
“The complex computer and banking investigation carried out, together with several police investigation techniques, allowed the specialists of the Central Cybercrime Unit to prove that the websites investigated were registered, controlled and operated from several companies directed by the main suspect, a citizen of Dutch origin,” the statement reads.
“This man allegedly led a business and criminal network, made up of citizens living mainly in Gran Canaria, which appeared to be a legitimate business structure with which he managed to earn more than 5,300,000 euros.”
International TV Channels, Movies, TV Series
The press release describes an “international criminal organization” operating a pirate IPTV network using “the latest technology and the most advanced technical devices” to capture satellite signals from various countries.
“They subsequently amplified them and decrypted the multimedia content they transported, content that they then distributed publicly and illegally. In total, more than 130 international television channels and thousands of movies and series that they made available to citizens around the world,” the Ministry continues.
The service, which isn’t named by the Ministry, reportedly had more than 14,000 subscribers who paid between 10 and 19 euros per month, resulting in “damage to the rights of the authors, producers and distributors of these artistic works.”
Service Dismantled, Eight People Arrested
The Ministry of the Interior says that eight people, described as the main members of the network “who held or had held positions of responsibility” have now been arrested.
They were targeted in raids on addresses in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Madrid, Oviedo, and Málaga. Two home searches, executed simultaneously, led to the seizure of a vehicle and two computers. Bank accounts containing 80,000 euros were frozen.
“Likewise, the servers of the online platforms investigated were seized and blocked. Sixteen web pages controlled by this criminal organization were also blocked, so that when their users currently try to access them, their access is prevented. It redirects them to a National Police website where a message is displayed informing them that this page has been intercepted,” the government ministry concludes.
Service Targeted Was TVMucho, Recently Rebranded as Teeveeing
Supplied by the Ministry of the Interior, the video above is much like many others depicting raids against pirate IPTV services. In this case we can confirm the target was the service formerly known as TVMucho and more recently known as Teeveeing.
Launched around 2015 and originally incorporated in London as TVMucho Ltd early 2016, the company ran for 18 months before shutting down. Company data in Spain reveals that TVMucho Sociedad Limitada began trading just under nine years ago and was registered to an address in Las Palmas.
Unless there was a lot more going on than its public image suggested, TVMucho didn’t seem to exist for the purpose of usurping traditional pay TV providers or the likes of Netflix.
The premise was simple; expats away from home with zero access to the free-to-air channels they had come to rely on, could subscribe to TVMucho and the service would pipe those channels to them over the internet for viewing in Spain.
At least as far as we’re aware, the channels on offer from TVMucho were the channels expats would receive simply by switching on a TV at home. While a TV license would be required to view them in the UK, for example, none required a subscription or payment over and above that.
Beyond a handful of free minutes as a promotion, TVMucho did cost money to view but with no official alternative, the service proved popular.
Citing ‘Insurmountable Challenges’ TVMucho Shuts Down
In a message that appeared on its homepage in October 2023, TVMucho spoke of “unsurmountable challenges” presented by a company in the U.S. and advised its customers the company had ceased trading with immediate effect.
Since the authorities have refrained from revealing the identity of the main suspect, we won’t be naming him here either. However, the paragraph that references the “often misunderstood” business model is something the Dutch owner of TVMucho has spoken about for years.
We will revisit his position on legality at a later time once the charges against him have been made clear; what we can confirm is that while he believed that the law protected his business, major rightsholders have repeatedly argued quite the opposite.
TVMucho is Dead, long Live TeeVeeing?
The sudden demise of TVMucho was matched by the equally sudden appearance of an almost identical platform called TeeVeeing.
All former subscribers of TVMucho needed to do was agree to new terms and conditions and according to reports, normal service was resumed.
The marketing material pretty much confirmed that everything would remain the same, including access to the same free-to-air content from back home (but unavailable in Spain), all laid out nicely in a glossy EPG.
For reasons that still aren’t clear, the TeeVeeing app is still available on Apple’s App Store and still free to download from Google Play. That doesn’t seem to dovetail particularly well with the emphasis being placed on “dismantled” services and blocked websites in Spain.
Yet, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment confirms that this action is indeed about TVMucho and TeeVeeing and the “125 channels, including major networks like BBC, ITV, Sky, and RTL” offered by the service(s).
The report avoids mentioning that the channels are all free-to-air but notes that due to the work of the Spanish National Police, “the access to infringed content and 15 related domains were blocked.”
Dismantled, or Just Dismantled a Bit?
When putting together this report on Friday, we had zero problems accessing the TVMucho website. We had zero problems accessing the website of TeeVeeing too, which in view of the statements about its dismantling is a bit of an issue. Through our Spanish contacts we asked if the websites were accessible in Spain and whether by pure luck or otherwise, neither were blocked.
While that’s not a particularly big deal for TVMucho’s website, the same can’t be said about that of TeeVeeing; quite obviously it’s still online and as the screenshot sent to us independently confirms, a live event that was taking place in the UK on Friday afternoon was being shown live, in browser, no complications.
Which 16 websites the Spanish government is referring to as blocked is unclear. The same seems to hold true for the dismantled services that, as least as far as we can tell, doesn’t include the main one. Other questions can be addressed in due course, including the claim that the suspects captured satellite broadcasts.
It’s possible they did just that, but there’s also information to suggest that content was more easily obtained from at least one other IPTV service.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Carbon dioxide dropped after colonial contact wiped out Native Americans.
Enlarge/ A slice through an ice core showing bubbles of trapped air. (credit: British Antarctic Survey)
Did the massive scale of death in the Americas following colonial contact in the 1500s affect atmospheric CO2 levels? That’s a question scientists have debated over the last 30 years, ever since they noticed a sharp drop in CO2 around the year 1610 in air preserved in Antarctic ice.
That drop in atmospheric CO2 levels is the only significant decline in recent millennia, and scientists suggested that it was caused by reforestation in the Americas, which resulted from their depopulation via pandemics unleashed by early European contact. It is so distinct that it was proposed as a candidate for the marker of the beginning of a new geological epoch—the “Anthropocene.”
But the record from that ice core, taken at Law Dome in East Antarctica, shows that CO2 starts declining a bit late to match European contact, and it plummets over just 90 years, which is too drastic for feasible rates of vegetation regrowth. A different ice core, drilled in the West Antarctic, showed a more gradual decline starting earlier, but lacked the fine detail of the Law Dome ice.
Amazons Alexa kann bald keine Einkaufs- und Aufgabenlisten von Drittanbietern mehr mittels Sprachbefehl verwalten. Falls es Abhilfe gibt, wird es viel komplizierter. (Amazon Alexa, Amazon)
Amazons Alexa kann bald keine Einkaufs- und Aufgabenlisten von Drittanbietern mehr mittels Sprachbefehl verwalten. Falls es Abhilfe gibt, wird es viel komplizierter. (Amazon Alexa, Amazon)
Amazons Alexa kann bald keine Einkaufs- und Aufgabenlisten von Drittanbietern mehr mittels Sprachbefehl verwalten. Falls es Abhilfe gibt, wird es viel komplizierter. (
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