Month: June 2025

On Tuesday, IBM released its plans for building a system that should push quantum computing into entirely new territory: a system that can both perform useful calculations while catching and fixing errors and be utterly impossible to model using classical computing methods. The hardware, which will be called Starling, is expected to be able to perform 100 million operations without error on a collection of 200 logical qubits. And the company expects to have it available for use in 2029.

Perhaps just as significant, IBM is also committing to a detailed description of the intermediate steps to Starling. These include a number of processors that will be configured to host a collection of error-corrected qubits, essentially forming a functional compute unit. This marks a major transition for the company, as it involves moving away from talking about collections of individual hardware qubits and focusing instead on units of functional computational hardware. If all goes well, it should be possible to build Starling by chaining a sufficient number of these compute units together.

"We're updating [our roadmap] now with a series of deliverables that are very precise," IBM VP Jay Gambetta told Ars, "because we feel that we've now answered basically all the science questions associated with error correction and it's becoming more of a path towards an engineering problem."

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Despite the widespread availability of legal options, online piracy remains rampant. Every day, pirate sites are visited hundreds of millions of times.

Website visits are only part of the full piracy picture, as IPTV streaming is popular too. Nonetheless, traffic trends can provide valuable insight, especially when there are clear divergences across content categories.

216 Billion & America First

Fresh data released by piracy tracking outfit MUSO shows that pirate sites remain popular. In a report released today, MUSO reveals that there were 216 billion pirate site visits globally in 2024, a slight decrease compared to the 229 billion visits recorded a year earlier.

TV piracy remains by far the most popular category, representing over 44.6% of all website visits. This is followed by the publishing category with 30.7%, with film, software and music all at a respectable distance.

Piracy by Category

Pirate site visitors originate from all over the world, but one country stands tall above all the rest: America. The United States remains the top driver of pirate site traffic accounting for more than 12% of all traffic globally, good for 26.7 billion visits in 2024.

India has been steadily climbing the ranks for years and currently sits in second place with 17.6 billion annual visits, with Russia, Indonesia, and Vietnam completing the top five.

Visits per country

As a country with one of the largest populations worldwide, it’s not a complete surprise that the U.S. tops the list. If we counted visits per internet user, Canada and Ukraine would top the list.

Manga Piracy Booms

While pirate site visits dipped by more than 5% in 2024, one category saw substantial growth. Visits to publishing-related pirate sites increased 4.3% from 63.6 to 66.4 billion.

The increase is largely driven by the popularity of manga, which accounts for more than 70% of all publishing piracy. Traditional book piracy, meanwhile, is stuck at 5%.

The publishing piracy boom is relatively new. Over the past five years, the category grew by more than 100% while the overall number of global pirate site visits remained relatively flat.

Publishing piracy growth

Looking at the global demand, we see that the U.S. also leads the charge here, followed by Indonesia and Russia. Notably, Japan, the home of manga, ranks fifth in the publishing category. This stands out because Japan is not listed in the global top 15 in terms of total pirate site visits.

Music & Film Piracy Tank

In the other content categories, MUSO’s data shows a dip in pirate site visits. The changes are relatively modest for TV (-6.8%) and software (-2.1%) but the same isn’t true for the music and film categories.

In 2024, there were 18% fewer visits for pirated movies compared to a year earlier. MUSO notes that this is due to a “lighter blockbuster calendar” which reduced piracy peaks. “The drop in demand is as much about what wasn’t released as it is about access,” the report explains.

The music category saw a 19% decline in piracy visits year over year, with a more uplifting explanation for rightsholders. According to MUSO, the drop can be partly attributed to “secure app ecosystems” and the “wide adoption of licensed platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.”

Piracy Leads The Way

MUSO’s business model is to market these piracy data to rightsholders so they can use piracy as a market signal. Piracy is not necessarily triggered by unavailability; legal channels, pricing, and fragmentation are also key drivers.

“Piracy continues to reveal unmet demand: where audiences want content, but legal channels are too slow, too fragmented, or too expensive,” the company explains in a blog post.

There’s also a more practical application for the piracy data. Since MUSO tracks which pirate sites are most popular, rightsholders can use the data for their site blocking efforts.

“With monthly updated insights at the country and category level, alongside access to site-level intelligence, our data empowers rightsholders, regulators, and ISPs to prioritize action where it has the most impact,” MUSO writes.

Whether blocking access will stop people from trying to find piracy alternatives is up for debate. Perhaps pirate site blocking plans in the U.S. will provide more insight, if they come to fruition.

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A copy of MUSO’s 2024 Piracy Trends and Insights report can be requested through the official website.

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

In 1965, Ted Nelson submitted a paper to the Association for Computing Machinery. He wrote: “Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.” The paper was part of a grand vision he called Xanadu, after the poem by Samuel Coleridge.

A decade later, in his book “Dream Machines/Computer Lib,” he described Xanadu thusly: “To give you a screen in your home from which you can see into the world’s hypertext libraries.” He admitted that the world didn’t have any hypertext libraries yet, but that wasn’t the point. One day, maybe soon, it would. And he was going to dedicate his life to making it happen.

As the Internet grew, it became more and more difficult to find things on it. There were lots of cool documents like the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Internet, but to read them, you first had to know where they were.

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