Month: June 2025

With almost no exceptions, people criminally prosecuted in the UK for serious pirate IPTV offenses say that it’s an absolutely horrendous experience.

The process drags on forever, often gets worse as it does so, and due to the Proceeds of Crime Act, doesn’t necessarily end when sentences are served. Reports of multi-year sentences are supposed to act as a deterrent, but only tell half the story.

When Liverpool man Mark Brockley fled the UK rather than face trial for reselling IPTV subscriptions in 2023, that wasn’t exactly a big surprise. Nor was it likely to end well.

The Social Media Curse

According to the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) at City of London Police, their investigation was triggered by a November 2018 referral by BT Sport (now TNT).

The company had spotted a Twitter account with the username @Infinity_IPTV advertising £15 per month subscriptions, promising an all-you-can-eat bonanza of movies, TV shows and live sports.

Also available via app

Eight months later on July 24, 2019, PIPCU officers raided Brockley’s Liverpool home, seizing devices including a laptop and a mobile phone, £1,200 in cash, and evidence linking the 54-year-old to the Twitter account reported by BT.

To avoid anything self-incriminating being used in evidence at trial, Brockley offered no comment throughout his interview. In June 2021 after two years in limbo, police arrested and then charged the Liverpool man with fraud and copyright offenses.

On the plus side, Brockley was released on bail but still had to wait almost two additional years before heading to trial. Four years from arrest to trial isn’t particularly uncommon in these types of cases; some describe the waiting as a sentence in itself.

You’ll Never Take Me Alive, Coppers

How many times Brockley was absent is unclear, but after being bailed in 2021, PIPCU notes that multiple failures to appear in court led to the biggest of them all; a May 2023 criminal trial by jury conducted in Brockley’s absence.

Police believed Brockley had likely fled to France, but his exact whereabouts were unknown.

£237,000 is a considerable amount

By failing to appear at his own trial, Brockley avoided what was always likely to be a stressful experience, one with virtually no chance of success. However, a defendant not having their say in court can be damaging, mitigation may be the only hope left.

Five-Year Sentence

Brockley was accused of being part of a “pyramid selling scheme” which saw him advertise subscriptions and sell them to individuals lower down. Published on the day of his sentencing, PIPCU’s calculations on the scale of the offending reads as follows:

The unit identified that Brockley had made 5,251 sales with a total value of £237,058 from 24 October 2014 to 8 May 2019. Of these, 1,408 sales, worth a total of £50,479, made a clear reference to IPTV services, but officers from PIPCU believe that the remaining payments were also related to the sale of these services.

The court heard that Brockley’s activities caused BT to lose an estimated £3m in revenue. The distinction between revenue on one hand, and profit on the other, can become less clear when presented in the media. Revenue takes no account of costs, so while BT reportedly ‘lost’ £3m, Brockley was said to have ‘made’ or ‘pocketed’ all of his £237K revenue.

In reality he made a non-specific amount of “tens of thousands” but as his solicitor pointed out at sentencing, Brockley’s failure to appear effectively destroyed any chance of a suspended sentence. The court handed down a five-year prison sentence; that raises the prospect of every £10,000 profit earning Brockley another year behind bars.

As an opportunity for deterrent messaging with impact, this may have been overlooked.

Ladies and Gentlemen: We Got Him

In a statement this Wednesday, City of London Police revealed details of an operation to locate Brockley and bring him back to the UK to serve his sentence.

“Financial investigations revealed that Brockley had been using bank accounts based in France. Further digital inquiries eventually traced him to an apartment block in Spain. In August 2024, he was located and arrested in Girona during a coordinated operation involving the PIPCU, National Crime Agency (NCA), Europol, and Interpol,” the statement reads.

Brockley filed an appeal against his extradition back to the UK and was released on bail. Replicating his absences in the UK, he reportedly failed to appear at multiple court hearings in Spain, making him a wanted man there too.

“In a coordinated effort between UK and Spanish authorities, Brockley was eventually arrested at Barcelona Airport while attempting to board a flight to the UK last week (Friday, 20 June),” City of London Police report.

“He was remanded in custody at Heathrow Airport and will now commence his five-year sentence.”

Nature of Offending Becomes More Serious With Time

A comparison of the police statements published on May 5, 2023, (immediately post sentencing) and this week on June 25, 2025, reveal differences that not only alter the nature of Brockley’s offending but also increase the amount of revenue generated.

The screenshots below show the 2025 statement on the left and the 2023 statement on the right, with relevant paragraphs from each placed side by side for clarity (originals here and here for reference).

Immediately after sentencing, it was reported that Brockley “made” £237,000. Yet, two years later, he’s reported as having “pocketed” £300,000.

Aside from the terminology implying significantly larger profits, an additional £63,000 has been added seemingly from nowhere in 2025.

During the past two years, Brockley’s status in the illicit IPTV market also appears to have undergone a promotion.

Immediately after sentencing, Brockley was described as an “IPTV reseller” who “sold subscriptions”. Yet two years later in his absence, it’s now alleged that he “ran a subscription-based IPTV service.” These aren’t just semantics; a person who sells tickets for Disneyland does not “run a Florida-based theme park.”

Strangely, even Brockley’s reseller brand has changed: Infinity Streams versus aFINITY IPTV today. The name change is cosmetic and may have a straightforward explanation; crucially it means very little in the context of the trial.

The previous discrepancies transform Brockley from a lower-tier player to the top man in his network, and then boost revenue by more than a quarter.

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A Call For Basic Transparency

Details like the above are important but not straightforward to verify independently.

Basic transparency and relevant court documents should be routinely made available to the public in the UK, at minimum when the reported outcome is a matter of public interest.

Piracy cases like these are part of the deterrent strategy in the UK; as a result, original documents should be made available publicly by default.

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

Vom 21. Juni bis 21. September bietet die Golem Karrierewelt 25 Prozent Rabatt auf zahlreiche Kurse und E-Learning-Pakete - ideal für alle, die digitale Kompetenzen gezielt und selbsbestimmt ausbauen möchten. (Golem Karrierewelt, Unternehmenssoftware)

Over the past two decades, the VPN industry has grown spectacularly, with plenty of competition between providers.

The days when a review of VPN logging policies was a novelty are long gone.

While new VPN services launch frequently, it’s rare to see one with a truly unique technical approach. That’s why VP.net warrants a closer look. Unlike most VPN providers, it doesn’t ask users for their trust; it relies on hardware-enforced privacy instead.

Trust

When you use a VPN, your internet traffic is encrypted between your device and the VPN’s server. This is great for protecting your data from snooping on public Wi-Fi and your internet provider. However, to route your traffic to its final destination on the internet, the VPN server must decrypt it first.

At this decryption point, it’s technically possible for the VPN provider to access information about your online activity. This is common knowledge and requires that you trust your VPN. It’s also why using shady free VPN apps from unknown companies should be avoided; the user may end up being the product.

For a successful VPN service to thrive, trust, security, and privacy are paramount. Reputable VPN companies build their entire business model on trust, knowing that a breach would be catastrophic for their reputation.

But what if trust was taken out of the equation entirely? This is what VP.net promises to do, at least up to a point.

VP.net

Like most VPNs, VP.net hides your real IP-address, replacing it with the address of the server you connect to. This connection is encrypted using the popular open-source WireGuard protocol and can’t be spied on by outsiders.

What makes VP.net stand out from many regular VPNs is its special use of a technology called Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). SGX enclaves are private areas of memory that essentially act as a secure black box and not even the operators of the service can see what’s happening inside.

VP.net

The system within the SGX enclave is reportedly built to map user identities to temporary, anonymous tokens. This means the part of the system which knows that “User X is connected” is structurally walled off from the part that knows “someone is accessing website Y.” The design goal is that no one, not even the VPN company, can link “User X” to “Website Y.”

The use of SGX as a verifiable, hardware-enforced separation of user identity and web traffic, is a new concept for a VPN.

‘Verified Privacy’

VP.net essentially promises “verified privacy” with this technical setup. If everything works as described, it’s not technically possible for the owners of the server, typically the VPN provider, to log who is doing what and when.

The new VPN service is operated by the American company VP.NET LLC, which in turn is owned by TCP IP Inc, which holds the intellectual property rights. That includes pending patents, including one of ‘hardware-based anonymization of network addresses.”

The idea to use SGX as a privacy shield comes from Andrew Lee, the chief privacy architect at VP.net. As the founder of Private Internet Access, which he sold to Kape a few years ago, Lee has a long history in the VPN space. However, he believes this new concept is a breakthrough.

“Our zero trust solution does not require you to trust us – and that’s how it should be. Your privacy should be up to your choice – not up to some random VPN provider in some random foreign country,” Lee says.

VP.net says it cannot link traffic data to users, even if it wanted to. If a court order requested such data, the company would first scrutinize its legality but, after that, the only data it has access to are unlinked details, such as payment info and email addresses, provided by the user.

The new VPN company is led by CEO Matt Kim. The company also lists the contentious Bitcoin veterans Roger Ver and Mark Karpelès in their team, who both have had their legal issues in the past.

Novel, Secure, but Not Infallible

VP.net’s source code is open to the public. To address the challenge of showing that this open-source code is the same as the code running on their servers, VP.net relies on a key SGX feature called ‘remote attestation’.

In essence, this mechanism allows the user’s client to receive cryptographic proof from the server’s hardware, verifying that it is a genuine SGX ‘safe’ and is running the exact, untampered code that was publicly available. This shifts the trust from the company’s promise to a verifiable, hardware-backed process.

The trust through technology aspect is certainly intriguing, but no technology is infallible. The code needs to be functional and secure, as a software flaw could lead to potential security issues.

Another potential problem lies on the hardware side. Intel SGX itself is a physical product that is part of the CPU, which in turn relies on firmware. Like any piece of hardware, vulnerabilities have been discovered in SGX in the past.

VP.net is aware of this and says it actively monitors the security of its software and infrastructure, while keeping systems fully up-to-date.

Of course, the true test will be speed and transparency when responding to the next major SGX vulnerability, a scenario for which all users should be prepared.

It’s safe to say that one should never have 100% trust in any VPN solution. In this case, VP.net promises to offer an extra layer of privacy but, in the end, even the most secure systems can be breached.

That said, it is interesting to see a novel approach to the ‘no logging’ discussions. Whether this novelty will scale and be embraced more broadly remains to be seen.

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

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, director Ron Howard's masterful love letter to NASA's Apollo program in general and the eponymous space mission in particular. So we're taking the opportunity to revisit this riveting homage to American science, ingenuity, and daring.

(Spoilers below.)

Apollo 13 is a fictional retelling of the aborted 1970 lunar mission that became a "successful failure" for NASA because all three astronauts made it back to Earth alive against some pretty steep odds. The film opens with astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) hosting a watch party in July 1969 for Neil Armstrong's historic first walk on the Moon. He is slated to command the Apollo 14 mission, and is ecstatic when he and his crew—Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton)—are bumped to Apollo 13 instead. His wife, Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan) is more superstitious and hence less thrilled: "It had to be 13." To which her pragmatic husband replies, "It comes after 12."

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Stephen Hawking, a British physicist and arguably the most famous man suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), communicated with the world using a sensor installed in his glasses. That sensor used tiny movements of a single muscle in his cheek to select characters on a screen. Once he typed a full sentence at a rate of roughly one word per minute, the text was synthesized into speech by a DECtalk TC01 synthesizer, which gave him his iconic, robotic voice.

But a lot has changed since Hawking died in 2018. Recent brain-computer-interface (BCI) devices have made it possible to translate neural activity directly into text and even speech. Unfortunately, these systems had significant latency, often limiting the user to a predefined vocabulary, and they did not handle nuances of spoken language like pitch or prosody. Now, a team of scientists at the University of California, Davis has built a neural prosthesis that can instantly translate brain signals into sounds—phonemes and words. It may be the first real step we have taken toward a fully digital vocal tract.

Text messaging

“Our main goal is creating a flexible speech neuroprosthesis that enables a patient with paralysis to speak as fluently as possible, managing their own cadence, and be more expressive by letting them modulate their intonation,” says Maitreyee Wairagkar, a neuroprosthetics researcher at UC Davis who led the study. Developing a prosthesis ticking all these boxes was an enormous challenge because it meant Wairagkar’s team had to solve nearly all the problems BCI-based communication solutions have faced in the past. And they had quite a lot of problems.

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Der deutsche Hersteller TQ hat ein neues Motorsystem für E-Bikes vorgestellt, das mit nur 1,17 Kilogramm als besonders leicht beworben wird. (E-Bike, Mobilität)

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