Month: March 2025

The giant extinct shark species known as the megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public alike, even inspiring the 2018 blockbuster film The Meg. The species lived some 3.6 million years ago and no complete skeleton has yet been found. So there has been considerable debate among paleobiologists about megalodon's size, body shape and swimming speed, among other characteristics.

While some researchers have compared megalodon to a gigantic version of the stocky great white shark,  others believe the species had a more slender body shape. A new paper published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica bolsters the latter viewpoint, also drawing conclusions about the megalodon's body mass, swimming speed (based on hydrodynamic principles), and growth patterns.

As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodons were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives.

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Mit Entra ID lassen sich Benutzeridentitäten, Zugriffskontrollen und Sicherheitsrichtlinien in hybriden und Cloudumgebungen effizient verwalten. Dieser Workshop vermittelt die Funktionen und Best Practices für IT-Admins. (Golem Karrierewelt, Microsoft)

Elon Musk nutzt die Proteste vor Tesla-Läden, um die Spendenplattform der Demokraten anzugreifen. Seine Behauptungen sind unbelegt. (Elon Musk, Elektroauto)

Three years ago, pirated Blu-ray copies of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” began circulating on pirate sites, weeks before their official release.

The early online leaks were attributed to the infamous release group EVO, that was known for distributing copyrighted movies and TV shows, including pre-release content.

EVO was dismantled by the Portuguese authorities in late 2022, leading to multiple arrests. However, there is no evidence that EVO’s demise had anything to do with the Spider-Man leak.

The source of this highly unlikely breach also remained unknown, until this week, when the U.S. Department of Justice indicted the alleged wrongdoer.

U.S. Indicts Blu-ray Production Employee

Pre-release leaks generally attract the attention of law enforcement, and the Spider-Man leak was no exception. Following an in-depth investigation by the FBI, the authorities pinpointed the alleged source in Memphis, Tennessee.

In an indictment unsealed last week, now 37-year-old Steven Hale is accused of stealing several Blu-rays and DVDs from his former employee. The defendant worked at a disc manufacturing and distribution company in Memphis between 2021 and 2022, which provided him with access to pre-release discs.

Hale allegedly stole numerous pre-release discs of popular films including Spider-Man: No Way Home, F9: The Fast Saga, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Godzilla v. Kong, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Dune, and Black Widow.

The indictment charges Hale with two counts of criminal copyright infringement and one count of interstate transportation of stolen goods. If found guilty, maximum penalties for these crimes include up to 20 years of imprisonment.

From eBay to Pirate Sites?

In a press release, the Department of Justice alleges that Hale sold the DVDs and Blu-rays through e-commerce platforms. This is interesting because we previously observed that Spider-Man Blu-rays were sold on eBay before being leaked online.

Below is one of the eBay listings that was online at the time, but there may have been more. Whether these are connected to the defendant is unknown.

U.S. authorities suggest that one of the sold physical copies was ripped, presumably by a third party, and subsequently released online. This may have been how EVO eventually got their hands on the movie.

“At least one pre-release Blu-ray that Hale allegedly stole and sold, ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home,’ was ‘ripped’ — that is, extracted from the Blu-ray by bypassing the encryption that prevents unauthorized copying — and copied,” the DoJ writes.

“That digital copy was then illegally made available over the internet more than a month before the Blu-ray’s official scheduled release date. Copies of ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ were downloaded tens of millions of times, with an estimated loss to the copyright owner of tens of millions of dollars.”

Spider-Man No Way Home.2022.1080p.Bluray.DTS-HD.MA.5.1.X264-EVO

Unanswered Questions

The indictment doesn’t mention the name of the company where Hale worked, the only reference is to “victim 1”. However, there are not many large disc manufacturing and distribution companies in Memphis, so it’s not difficult to make an educated guess.

The e-commerce platforms also go unnamed in the indictment. The FBI investigation appears to be ongoing, so it’s likely that additional details will emerge in future filings, as the case progresses.

This may also shed more light on the sales of these stolen pre-release DVDs and Blu-rays, and who ripped and shared “Spider-Man: No Way Home” copy that was eventually posted online through EVO and others.

For now, Hale is presumed innocent, as is the case for all criminal defendants. On Thursday, the Tennessee federal court determined that he was unable to pay for a lawyer to represent him, so a public defender was appointed instead.

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A copy of the indictment, dated February 13 and unsealed law week at the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, is available here (pdf)

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

Im vergangenen Jahr sind so viele Beschwerden wie nie über DHL eingegangen. Das Unternehmen will dennoch 8.000 Stellen streichen. (Post, Bundesnetzagentur)

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be.

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself—and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

“Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, “that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.”

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Die bundesweite Einführung der elektronischen Patientenakte sollte im April erfolgen. Doch das scheint nicht mehr zu klappen. (Elektronische Patientenakte, CCC)

Union und SPD setzen auf "Technologieoffenheit" beim Auto, wollen aber E-Mobilität fördern. Das Digitalministerium wird nicht erwähnt. Von Friedhelm Greis (Bundestagswahl 2025, Vorratsdatenspeicherung)

OpenAI stellt den Advanced Voice Mode fast flächendeckend zur Verfügung, spart aber weiterhin in einigen Ländern an Funktionen. Wir haben ihn ausprobiert. Ein Praxistest von Fabian Deitelhoff (ChatGPT, KI)

Der Kinofilm Stargate war der Start für ein großes Science-Fiction-Franchise. Vor allem optisch ist er nach wie vor ein Highlight. Von Peter Osteried (Science-Fiction, Film)