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The music and movie industry's top copyright groups, together with some of the largest ISPs in the U.S., jointly announced the end of the controversial 'six strikes' graduated response system.

Known officially as the 'Copyright Alert System' (CAS), it was first introduced in 2011, and ever since, it has been clouded in secrecy, or have come under heavy criticism from many quarters.

CAS monitors user activities online and allows rights-holders to issue warnings to users, via ISPs, before more action can be taken. Users are permitted to receive five warnings, with the "sixth strike" leading to tougher, but often unspecified, action. Many ISPs opted to join the program in order to relieve the pressure heaped upon them by rights-holders, who feel ISPs are complicit and were profiting from the illegal activities of their subscribers. Thousands of warnings are estimated to have been sent out in the four years the program was active.

What is hasn't done, is to provide solid evidence that it has worked to prevent piracy and educate users to pay for content.

Despite this, the MPAA, RIAA and top U.S. ISPs this weeks lauded the program for being a success, despite making the decision to end this "success" this week.

"After four years of extensive consumer education and engagement, the Copyright Alert System will conclude its work," read a statement by the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), a group created to implement the CAS.

"The program demonstrated that real progress is possible when content creators, Internet innovators and consumer advocates come together in a collaborative and consensus-driven process," continued the CCI.

The CCI has remained tight-lipped in regards to how the CAS has benefited rights-holders, or even the precise number of warnings sent. In their concluding remark, the CCI promised to continue working with ISPs to address the piracy issue.

"We want to thank everyone who put in the hard work to develop this program and make it a success, including past and present members of our Advisory Board. While this particular program is ending, the parties remain committed to voluntary and cooperative efforts to address these issues," the CCI concluded.

[via TorrentFreak]

The Nextbit Robin.

Remember Nextbit? The startup smartphone manufacturer that released the quirky Nextbit Robin a year ago? The company was just aquired by Razer, the PC gaming company.

Nextbit gets borged with the Razer color scheme. (credit: Razor)

In a forum posting, Nextbit said it would "operate as an independent division inside Razer" and would do "exactly what we’ve been doing all along, only bigger and better." Razer’s co-founder and CEO, Min-Liang Tan, gave an interview to Techcrunch and indicated the Nextbit brand would be sticking around. Razer might not have a choice since Motorola's "Razr" trademarks probably present a barrier to "Razer" branded smartphones.

Razer is halting sales of the Nextbit Robin, but promises to fulfill warranties for 6 more months and software updates through February 2018. The Nextbit Robin came with 100GB of cloud storage, which was deeply integrated into the Android-based OS. The Robin's gimmick is that it would automatically upload and download apps and other data to Nextbits servers as needed. There's no word on what will happen to the servers now that Nextbit has been acquired.

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Shelfie is an app that lets you snap a picture of books you already own and get eBook versions of some titles for free (and others for low prices). Or at least, that used to be what Shelfie did. Because on January 31st, the service is shutting down.

You have until the end of that day to download any of your DRM-free eBooks from the service. As for books that use DRM? Yeah, they’ll stop working.

Continue reading Shelfie Shuts down Jan 31st, takes your DRM-laden eBooks with it at Liliputing.

Enlarge / Account recovery programs like this one from United Airlines pose a significant threat to users. (credit: Dan Goodin)

Facebook is unveiling a new service that remedies one of the biggest headaches facing online users today—the forgotten password.

Starting Tuesday, Facebook will offer a service that allows users who lose their GitHub login credentials to securely regain access to their accounts. The process takes only seconds and uses a handful of clicks over encrypted HTTPS Web links. To set it up, Facebook users create a GitHub recovery token in advance and save it with their Facebook account. In the event they lose their GitHub login credentials, they can reauthenticate to Facebook and request the token be sent to GitHub with a time-stamped signature. The token is encrypted so Facebook can't read any of the personal information it stores. After the request is sent, the GitHub account is restored. With the exception of Facebook's assertion that the person recovering the GitHub account is the same person who saved the token, Facebook and GitHub don't share any personal information about the user.

The service is designed to eliminate the hassle and significant insecurity found in most account recovery systems that exist now. One common recovery method involves answering security questions. Many of the questions—for instance, "What is your favorite sport?" and "What is your favorite pizza topping?" asked by United Airlines—are easily guessed. That leaves people susceptible to account takeovers. Other methods, such as delivering security tokens by e-mail or SMS text message, lack the kind of end-to-end encryption that's increasingly expected for secure communications.

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