Month: March 2025

Apteras Solar-unterstütztes Elektroauto hat in einem Roadtrip eine stattliche Entfernung zurückgelegt. Die Solarpanels luden mit bis zu 545 Watt. (Elektroauto, Solarenergie)

Movies recorded directly from cinema screens are identifiable online by the tag ‘cam’ and for those prepared to download them, often notable for their poor quality.

As theatrical windows are now fairly short compared to those of just a few years ago, the prospect of ruining a movie for the sake of a few weeks has made cams less attractive than they once were. Yet in the summer of 2022, when at least four cam copies were spotted online and then traced back to two cinemas in the UK, this turned into a major incident.

The ‘cammed’ copies were some of the best to appear online in years so when a 24-year-old man was convicted in 2023 for fraud and copyright offenses, it’s likely that the UK cinema industry breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Film Content Protection Agency

Working alongside the Film Distributors’ Association (FDA), the Film Content Protection Agency (FCPA) is responsible for ensuring that when movies are shown in UK cinemas, nobody is able to walk away with a copy recorded from the big screen.

Given that copies have a tendency to end up on the internet, the stakes are very high indeed and could even affect day-and-date premieres in the UK. The good news for FDA/FCPA is that security is now holding up really well. Indeed, after the events of 2022, the remainder of that year through to the end 2023 was an all-round success with not a single leak from any cinema in the UK and Ireland.

Source: FCPA Newsletter

“The success of the FCPA program was very apparent during 2023, with all theatrical releases being protected across the territory over the year,” says Simon Brown, director at the Film Content Protection Agency.

Two Years of Excellent Results

With 2022 fading into history, data shows near flawless FCPA performance for both 2023 and 2024.

“The last high-impact case, identified by film-forensics, was back in August 2022 involving a series of incidents at two cinemas in Liverpool. The end of 2023 marked an incredible and unprecedented 16-month period of protection from piracy in cinemas.”

The image on the right appears in the Film Distributors’ Association’s 2024 Yearbook. It demonstrates that even if ‘cammers’ aren’t caught in the act, once recordings appear online it’s technically quite trivial to identify the source of the recording, including the exact screen and time of day.

CCTV and suspects’ general conduct – including booking online, paying for a ticket by credit card, or preference for certain seating, can all play a part in their demise.

Other persistent risks concern diligent cinema staff. In addition to specific training on how to spot potential cammers, cash rewards help to keep everyone alert in the event of a live security breach.

“One of the FCPA’s core objectives focuses on the development and delivery of anti-piracy awareness and vigilance amongst those who work in cinemas across the UK and Ireland,” FCPA/FDA reports.

“In 2024, FCPA delivered 48 training events to in excess of 1,500 cinema staff, and the impact of this was evident in the 105 incidents reported by sites where staff had successfully spotted and disrupted illegal recording activity.”

Film exhibitors reported 155 piracy-related security incidents in 2023 so that may suggest that at least some would-be pirates lost interest or were deterred in 2024. Of those prepared to shoulder the risk, from a total of 105 incidents seven people were arrested and five led to police cautions.

The One That Got Away

The only incident that led to a leak in 2024 was traced back to a cinema in Scotland. In May 2024, film forensics investigators discovered that the audio track of a movie recorded in Glasgow was being made available online having been synced with the video of the same movie ‘cammed’ at a cinema in Mexico.

Busted (source: FCPA)

“The availability of local-language soundtracks often enhance a pirated film’s potential value and desirability, and cases such as this demonstrate the organized nature of the criminal networks in this field, and often internationally,” FCPA/FDA continue.

“The attractiveness of an infringing English soundtrack in particular is an added threat for cinemas here due to this vulnerability. The subsequent FCPA investigation in Glasgow quickly identified two suspects and work is ongoing with Police Scotland to progress this early in 2025.

“The recent Glasgow case represents the only high-impact case (albeit audio-only) over the past 29 months. Much of this successful protection can be attributed to the robust anti-piracy work being done in cinemas,” the cinema groups conclude.

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

Das HP Chromebook x360 vereint Tablet- und Laptopfunktionen in einem flexiblen Gerät und ist nur noch heute für unter 180 Euro im Angebot. (Convertible, Notebook)

Die deutsche Wirtschaft blickt mit wachsender Sorge auf die Zukunft des Datenaustausches zwischen der EU und den USA. (Datenschutz, Politik)

Netzwerke bilden das Rückgrat jeder IT-Infrastruktur. Ein fünftägiger Online-Workshop vermittelt praxisnahes Wissen zu Protokollen, Hardware, Sicherheit und Monitoring - ideal für IT-Fachkräfte mit technischem Fokus. (Golem Karrierewelt, WLAN)

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

He has also co-authored scores of academic papers on a diverse range of research fields, including cryptography, systems security, and data privacy, including the protection of human genomic data. I have personally spoken to him on three occasions for articles here, here, and here.

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Anna’s Archive is a meta-search engine for shadow libraries that allows users to find pirated books and other related sources.

The site launched in the fall of 2022, just days after Z-Library was targeted in a U.S. criminal crackdown, to ensure continued availability of ‘free’ books and articles to the broader public.

In late 2023, Anna’s Archive expanded its offering by making information from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database available online. The site’s operators took more than a year to scrape 2.2 terabytes of data and published roughly 700 million unique records online, for free.

This ‘metadata’ heist was a massive breakthrough in the site’s quest to archive as much published content as possible. However, OCLC wasn’t pleased and responded with a lawsuit at an Ohio federal court, accusing the site and its operators of hacking, unjust enrichment, and breach of contract.

The non-profit says that it spent more than a million dollars responding to Anna’s Archive’s alleged hacking efforts. Even then, it couldn’t prevent the data from being released through a torrent.

“Defendants, through the Anna’s Archive domains, have made, and continue to make, all 2.2 TB of WorldCat® data available for public download through its torrents,” OCLC wrote in its complaint filed at an Ohio federal court.

Default Requested

Over the past year, the operators of Anna’s Archive haven’t responded in court. The only named defendant flat-out denied all connections to the site, and OCLC receive no response from any of the official Anna’s Archive email addresses previously served.

Meanwhile, the pirate library continued to offer the WorldCat® data, which is a major problem for the organization. With no prospect of a two-sided legal battle, OCLC therefore moved for a default judgment.

OCLC said that it is fighting an unknown defendant who is unwilling to show up in court. Therefore, a default judgment, with damages that could potentially run to millions of dollars, is the only option it has available.

Ohio Federal Court Slams on the Brakes

The matter was presented as a straightforward case, but in an order released last week, Judge Watson finds the path to judgment far from clear.

In a detailed “Opinion and Order” (pdf) Judge Watson shared his uncertainty about applying established Ohio legal principles in a data scraping context. He explicitly stated that the case poses “novel and unsettled” issues of Ohio law, noting that “no Ohio court has ever applied its law as OCLC would have this Court do.”  

The judge is concerned that a new state law could be created through a federal court. He systematically dismantled OCLC’s arguments for default judgment; not necessarily because they are wrong, but due to the lack of guiding Ohio precedent for each of its claims.

For example, the court questions whether OCLC’s contract claim, which relies on the Terms and Conditions that prohibit scraping, are enforceable. These terms are “browserwrap” available without an “I agree” button, which means that defendants may not have been privy to it.

The contract Terms and Conditions might also be preempted by copyright law, as is true for other claims, including the claim for unjust enrichment.

“As with OCLC’s contract claim, whether federal copyright law preempts its unjust enrichment claim depends on the state-law interests that claim serves. So the Court will invite OCLC and the Supreme Court of Ohio to elaborate on those interests,” Judge Watson writes.

Many Unanswered Questions

Judge Watson further questioned whether copying scraped data, especially publicly accessible data, can be considered legally “unjust”? Finding no guidance in Ohio law, he asked several hypothetical questions in response.

“Candidly, the Court does not know how to begin evaluating whether ‘unjust circumstances’ are present here. Is it ever unjust to retain publicly available data? If so, when?” Judge Watson writes.

“The Court presumes that it may sometimes be unjust to retain private data, but the Court imagines that the line between public and private data is not easy to draw. For example, is it unjust for someone with a properly obtained password to scrape data from the password-protected parts of a site? What if they terminate their subscription?”

Since Ohio law offers no guidelines on how to answer these questions, the Court decided to seek guidance from the Supreme Court of Ohio.

Bad Facts Can Make Bad Law

Based on the presented information, Judge Watson denied OCLC’s motion for default judgment. The same applies to the motion to dismiss, filed by the named defendant. These motions can be refiled later, once the Supreme Court of Ohio clarifies the legal questions.

While Judge Watson expressed sympathy for the problems faced by OCLC, he stressed the need to avoid creating ‘bad law’ based on potentially challenging facts.

“The Court is sympathetic to OCLC’s situation: a band of copyright scofflaws cloned WorldCat’s hard-earned data, gave it away for free, and then ignored OCLC when it sued them in this Court. But mindful that bad facts sometimes make bad law, the Court requests that an Ohio court intervene before this Court makes any new state tort, contract, property, or criminal law.

“The Court resolves to certify the novel Ohio-law issues identified above to the Supreme Court of Ohio,” Judge Watson adds, noting that the details of the questions have yet to be determined.

In practice, this means that there will likely be a significant delay before this matter is resolved. The court’s hesitation also highlights that web scraping remains a legal gray area that requires careful consideration. In the meantime, Anna’s Archive remains online, with all the scraped OCLC data intact.

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

OpenWrt is an open source, Linux-based operating system designed for routers and other wireless devices. It’s been around for more than two decades and for most of that time it’s been offered primarily as an operating system that you could install as a replacement for the firmware that ships with existing devices. But last year […]

The post OpenWrt Two will be a higher-performance router with 10 Gigabit LAN and WiFi 7 support appeared first on Liliputing.

Microsoft Teams ist ein zentrales Tool für Kommunikation und Zusammenarbeit. Wie sich Teams, Chats, Meetings und Dateiablagen optimal nutzen lassen, zeigt dieser Workshop - inklusive praktischer Übungen und Troubleshooting-Tipps. (Golem Karrierewelt, Microsoft)

Microsoft Teams ist ein zentrales Tool für Kommunikation und Zusammenarbeit. Wie sich Teams, Chats, Meetings und Dateiablagen optimal nutzen lassen, zeigt dieser Workshop - inklusive praktischer Übungen und Troubleshooting-Tipps. (Golem Karrierewelt, Microsoft)