Month: April 2025

Der US-Verteidigungsminister soll eine ungesicherte Internetverbindung für private Geräte im Pentagon verwendet haben, über die auch Signal-Chats liefen. (USA, Sicherheitslücke)

Die kostenlose Amazon Visakarte mit erhöhter Startgutschrift ist zurück. Wer sie jetzt beantragt, sichert sich direkt bis zu 40 Euro Guthaben. (Kreditkarte, Amazon)

The internet has made video entertainment more accessible than ever before. With plenty of legal streaming services releasing new content every week, there’s no shortage of options.

While this is good news, choice brings its own difficulties. Because there are a myriad of legal options available today, paying several monthly subscription fees can become a costly endeavor. As a result, pirate streaming sites and services are thriving.

Hollywood and other copyright holders are trying to tackle this problem through enforcement. This has resulted in both large crackdowns and smaller successes, but new threats are always lurking around the corner. Sometimes they pop up in unexpected places.

A Piracy Optimized Browser?

Browser app Seekee has attracted quite a lot of attention recently, particularly on social media where people have noticed that the app is surprisingly good at accessing pirated content.

The app advertises itself as a fast and safe browser with built-in AI capabilities. While that sounds intriguing, the true appeal appears to lie in its entertainment offering, which is accessible via a single click on the “movies and series” and “animes” tabs.

Seekee

These tabs take users to an overview of trending content, which can be watched instantly. There’s no indication that Seekee hosts any of the content it links to, but videos from third-party pirated sources are conveniently organized.

In fact, trying to find links to legal alternatives is quite a challenge. When we searched for “The Last of Us”, we had to scroll down past a list of pirate sources, before the Wikipedia and IMDb entries finally appeared.

For good measure, users can also watch the offerings listed by streaming platform, including Netflix, Prime Video, and Max, but links to these official services are not presented anywhere near the top of results.

Hot Streaming

The videos we checked were being streamed from the unknown h5.swplayer.com domain and similar variants. In addition to subtitles and original audio, many videos are also available with Portuguese and Spanish audio. This may explain why the app is particularly popular in Latin America, both on social media and in the press.

Google Play & iOS App Store

When we started writing this article, the Seekee app had five million downloads in the Google Play store, most of which were added this month. However, it appears that this exposure turned out to be too much. The app was deleted without explanation, possibly following rightsholder complaints. APK versions are still floating around, however.

Five Million Users… Gone

In the iOS store, Seekee remains available for now, listed as a fast and safe browser with intelligent search, AI creation, and multimedia processing. That includes the aforementioned streaming options.

“Easily search for movies and TV resources across the entire network and get accurate and reliable results. With a massive library updated daily, you can seamlessly access entertainment anytime, anywhere,” the iOS listing reads.

Seekee in the App Store

The app is published by the Chinese company Xiji Information Technology Co., Ltd, which also has a web presence with a privacy policy and user agreement. We reached out to the company requesting additional information on its unique offering, but we didn’t hear back.

At What Cost?

Aside from copyright concerns, using new apps from unknown developers always comes with risks. In this case, the privacy policy mentions that users have to give up a lot of information, including the following selection of data;

Advertising IDs, cookies, identifiers, IP addresses, social media IDs and profile pictures, IMEI/OAID, GAID numbers, IMSI numbers, MAC addresses, serial numbers, system versions and types, ROM versions, Android versions, Android ID, Space ID, SIM card operator and region, screen display information, device model name, activation time, network operator, connection type, hardware details, sales channels, CPU data, storage info, battery usage, screen resolution, temperature, camera model, and wake/unlock frequency.

Again, that’s just a selection, there is more.

While this is a lot of data, quite a few apps list such broad data collection practices in their privacy policies, so it’s not completely out of the ordinary. Then again, it may very well explain why the app is free; the user and their data are the product.

It is hardly groundbreaking for apps like these to attract millions of users, with help from social media. However, the people who fall for the hype should be aware of the potential risks and trade-offs, especially if they are not bombarded by ads.

At the end of the day, someone is making money from the app. In this case, it’s not the people who make the films, series and anime, but some unknown people in a land far, far away.

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

Power Solutions zeigt eine imposante Gewinnentwicklung. Interessant ist die Firma aber vor allem, weil sie es geschafft hat, sich komplett neu auszurichten. Eine Analyse von Björn Meschkat (Geld anlegen, Börse)

Digitale Rückteile für Analogkameras sind in der Regel teuer und nur für bestimmte Modelle geeignet. I'm Back Film ist universell, günstig und gut. Ein Test von Tobias Költzsch (Digitale Fotografie, Kameras)

Mit dem LPIC-1-Zertifikat bestätigt das Linux Professional Institute fundierte Kenntnisse in der Systemadministration. In fünf Tagen bereitet dieser Onlinekurs gezielt auf die Prüfungen LPI 101 und 102 vor. (Golem Karrierewelt, Linux)

The US military launched a long-range hypersonic missile Friday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a test flight that, if successful, could pave the way for the weapon's operational deployment later this year.

The Army's Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon fired out of a canister on a road-mobile trailer shortly after sunrise on Florida's Space Coast, then headed east over the Atlantic Ocean propelled by a solid-fueled rocket booster. Local residents shared images of the launch on social media.

Designed for conventional munitions, the new missile is poised to become the first ground-based hypersonic weapon fielded by the US military. Russia has used hypersonic missiles in combat against Ukraine. China has "the world's leading hypersonic missile arsenal," according to a recent Pentagon report on Chinese military power. After a successful test flight from Cape Canaveral last year, the long-range hypersonic weapon (LRHW)—officially named "Dark Eagle" by the Army earlier this week—will give the United States the ability to strike targets with little or no warning.

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As of Friday, April 25, the US has confirmed over 900 measles cases since the start of the year. The cases are across 29 states, but most are in or near Texas, where a massive outbreak continues to mushroom in close-knit, undervaccinated communities.

On April 24, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had tallied 884 cases across the country. Today, the Texas health department updated its outbreak total, adding 22 cases to its last count from Tuesday. That brings the national total to at least 906 confirmed cases. Most of the cases are in unvaccinated children and teens.

Overall, Texas has identified 664 cases since late January. Of those, 64 patients have been hospitalized, and two unvaccinated school-aged children with no underlying medical conditions have died of the disease. An unvaccinated adult in New Mexico also died from the infection, bringing this year's measles death toll to three.

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A lawyer representing MyPillow and its CEO Mike Lindell in a defamation case admitted using artificial intelligence in a brief that has nearly 30 defective citations, including misquotes and citations to fictional cases, a federal judge said.

"[T]he Court identified nearly thirty defective citations in the Opposition. These defects include but are not limited to misquotes of cited cases; misrepresentations of principles of law associated with cited cases, including discussions of legal principles that simply do not appear within such decisions; misstatements regarding whether case law originated from a binding authority such as the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; misattributions of case law to this District; and most egregiously, citation of cases that do not exist," US District Judge Nina Wang wrote in an order to show cause Wednesday.

Wang ordered attorneys Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster to show cause as to why the court should not sanction the defendants, law firm, and individual attorneys. Kachouroff and DeMaster also have to explain why they should not be referred to disciplinary proceedings for violations of the rules of professional conduct.

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There's a curious contradiction at the heart of today's most capable AI models that purport to "reason": They can solve routine math problems with impressive accuracy, yet when faced with formulating deeper mathematical proofs found in competition-level challenges, they often fail.

That's the finding of eye-opening preprint research into simulated reasoning (SR) models, initially listed in March and updated in April, that mostly fell under the news radar. The research serves as an instructive case study on the mathematical limitations of SR models, despite sometimes grandiose marketing claims from AI vendors.

What sets simulated reasoning models apart from traditional large language models (LLMs) is that they have been trained to output a step-by-step "thinking" process (often called "chain-of-thought") to solve problems. Note that "simulated" in this case doesn't mean that the models do not reason at all but rather that they do not necessarily reason using the same techniques as humans. That distinction is important because human reasoning itself is difficult to define.

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