Month: February 2025

Cyberangriffe auf Webanwendungen gehören zu den größten Risiken in der IT-Sicherheit. Ein zweitägiger Workshop zeigt Webentwicklern, wie sie ihre Anwendungen gegen Bedrohungen absichern - im Februar mit 15 Prozent Rabatt. (Golem Karrierewelt, Security)

Vorwerk führt nach sechs Jahren eine neue Version seiner Küchenmaschine ein. Der Thermomix TM7 kommt mit einigen technischen Neuerungen auf den Markt. (Vorwerk, Technik/Hardware)

Fifteen years ago, Google processed 250,000 takedown notices in an entire year. Today, it only needs 36 minutes to reach the same number.

Despite several attempts to make piracy less visible in its search engine, the problem isn’t going away. On the contrary, takedown notices continue to increase at a rapid pace.

From 250k to 3.5bn

Last February, we reported that Google had processed its 8 billionth DMCA takedown. A year later, the number of notices processed surpassed 11.5 billion. That translates to nearly 10 million takedown notices per day, every day.

The graph below shows that it took more than a decade for Google to process 6 billion DMCA notices. After that, the proverbial floodgates were open.

Takedown notices (2012-2025)

The absolute number should be seen in perspective, of course. Google likely indexes hundreds of trillions of pages, so a few billion here or there is little more than a blip. That said, the recent rise stands out and is a significant increase from earlier years.

Google typically doesn’t comment in detail on these milestones. The company informed us that it complies with the law, while offering full transparency on what is taken down and by whom.

The large number of requests is undeniable, but Google notes that this partially covers content that wasn’t indexed yet.

Publisher Driven

Looking at the data itself, there are a few noticeable changes as well. As highlighted earlier, most of the recent takedown requests come from publishers, including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Princeton University Press.

These organizations are represented by the anti-piracy firm Link-Busters.com, which leads all competitors in takedown volume. In recent weeks, the company has sent more takedown notices to Google than all other senders combined.

Most of this takedown activity targets shadow libraries such as Anna’s Archive and Z-Library. These sites index millions of books and articles, across multiple domain names. That brings us to the next explanation for the recent takedown surge.

Anti-Piracy Measures Fuel Takedowns

Ironically, it appears that anti-piracy measures are partly responsible for the takedown notice surge. While this sounds contradictory, it makes complete sense.

For example, a few years ago, music companies started to mass-delete URLs of MP3-rippers from Google search results. The sites responded to the removals by continuously changing their URLs, resulting in a perpetual whack-a-mole that continues to this day.

The purge wasn’t especially visible in Google’s overall numbers, as the number of URLs was limited for these sites. However, it showed that a single homepage of a site can trigger dozens, if not hundreds, of takedowns.

URL variations

The same theory applies to site blocking efforts. When websites are blocked by ISPs, they typically release alternative domain options to bypass the restrictions, at least temporarily. As a result, there can be hundreds of domains, effectively linking to the same content. These are all subject to takedown notices.

The same logic also applies to domain name seizures. When Z-Library’s domains were seized by U.S. authorities in 2022, many alternative domains began to surface. Several months later that led to another round of domain seizures and the appearance of yet more additional domains.

As a result, Google’s crawlers picked up hundreds of Z-Library domains, prompting rightsholders to send millions of additional DMCA takedown notices.

Multiple Domains

All in all, we would conclude that the recent takedown surge is the result of increased activity by publishers, paired with the response of pirate site operators to anti-piracy measures. Whether this will continue at this pace is hard to predict, but for now Google has its hands full.

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

Die Entlassungswelle unter Trump und Musk trifft immer mehr US-Behörden. Bei der Aufsicht über die Atomwaffen ist Chaos entstanden. (Doge, Politik)

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For now, Priester’s will have to stick to its famous pecans in Fort Payne, Alabama. But maybe not for long.

Priester’s Pecans, an Alabama staple, is one of more than half a dozen sites across the state slated to receive millions of dollars in federal funding to expand access to chargers for electric vehicles.

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For years, Maciej "Groobo" Maselewski stood as the undisputed champion of Diablo speedrunning. His 3-minute, 12-second Sorceror run looked all but unbeatable thanks to a combination of powerful (and allowable) glitch exploits along with what seemed like some unbelievable luck in the game's randomly generated dungeon.

But when a team of other speedrunners started trying and failing to replicate that luck using outside software and analysis tools, the story behind Groobo's run began to fall apart. As the inconsistencies in the run started to mount, that team would conduct an automated search through billions of legitimate Diablo dungeons to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Groobo's game couldn't have taken place in any of them.

"We just had a lot of curiosity and resentment that drove us to dig even deeper," team member Staphen told Ars Technica of their investigation. "Betrayal might be another way to describe it," team member AJenbo added. "To find out that this had been done illegitimately... and the person had both gotten and taken a lot of praise for their achievement."

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US-Präsident Donald Trump ist mit seinem Netzwerk Truth Social noch alles andere als erfolgreich. Dem Aktienkurs schadet das derzeit nicht. (Truth Social, Börse)

Meta hat das Projekt Waterworth angekündigt - ein Tiefseekabelnetz, das sich über 50.000 Kilometer zwischen fünf Kontinenten erstrecken soll. (Seekabel, Instant Messenger)

Apples Pläne, Siri mit KI-Fähigkeiten auszustatten, stehen vor erheblichen technischen Herausforderungen, die den Zeitplan gefährden. (Apple Intelligence, Apple)

Die Ursache ist noch unklar: Android-Nutzer wurden in Brasilien von einer Erdbebenwarnung aus dem Schlaf gerissen. (Android, Smartphone)