Bundeswirtschaftsminister: Gabriel will weltweit beste Internet-Infrastruktur

Sigmar Gabriel fordert mit “Gigabitnetzen die beste digitale Infrastruktur der Welt” für Deutschland. Davon ist das Land noch sehr weit entfernt. Das Geld dafür soll aus dem Juncker-Fonds kommen. (Cebit 2016, Telekom)

Sigmar Gabriel fordert mit "Gigabitnetzen die beste digitale Infrastruktur der Welt" für Deutschland. Davon ist das Land noch sehr weit entfernt. Das Geld dafür soll aus dem Juncker-Fonds kommen. (Cebit 2016, Telekom)

Does ‘Piracy’ Make Copyright Infringers Sound Cool?

According to the IFPI’s head of anti-piracy, calling illegal downloading “piracy” has become somewhat of a hindrance. Those confronted with the term are more likely to romanticize the topic, Graeme Grant suggests, but can simply changing the name of something really change the beast?

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

piratewipesWhen Steven Spielberg’s timeless classic E.T was released in 1981, those of us who were kids at the time wanted only one thing – to watch it on the silver screen. That, however, was easier said than done.

As alien a concept to today’s youngsters as E.T was to us back then, queues to watch the movie snaked hundreds of yards beyond our local cinema. The infrastructure simply couldn’t cope with the popularity of this cute extra terrestrial and after not making it to the doors after queuing for hours, some moms were reluctant to try again.

That’s when we learned about pirates. Us kids never saw one in the flesh but we knew they existed. Rumor had it that a friend of a friend of a friend knew someone who knew a pirate “who got stuff from America”. And he had a copy of E.T on both VHS and Betamax videotape. Like….wow.

After emerging from legend, slowly but surely the mythical tapes got passed around and although the quality was almost unwatchable, everyone agreed that this pirate guy must be someone special. Even then we knew that he was probably doing something at least a little wrong. None of the kids cared though. Pirates were mysterious – and fun.

Of course, pirates existed long before then. Pirate radio stations had been around for decades and in the eighties they gave us teenagers the only chance to listen to the imported house music that the big stations couldn’t be bothered with. To us that was very cool indeed and not for a second was it ever equated with theft.

Pirates operated outside the law, we knew that, so when the DJs suddenly went silent we understood that an 80s version of a Pirate Bay raid might have just taken place. Would they ever come back? We never knew. But whether it was E.T or community radio, piracy and pirates were undoubtedly exciting.

So with that in mind, have the entertainment industries picked entirely the wrong term to describe the analog and now digital buccaneers who take their products and give them away for free? Graeme Grant, head of anti-piracy operations at IFPI, appears to think so.

Speaking this week at the MarkMonitor Annual Spring Symposium in London, Grant said that referring to today’s illegal downloading as ‘piracy’ had “made it cool.”

“People think of piracy and think of action films about pirates,” Grant said. “In a sense calling it that has been a hindrance because people think they are doing something cool.”

While some might argue that much of the romance has ebbed away alongside piracy’s mainstream exposure, piracy probably remains reasonably ‘cool’ for millions of people. Thirty years on it still provides a way for people to access movies playing in cinemas and it still provides outlets for niche content that mainstream platforms can’t be bothered with.

But does the term “piracy” in itself help to sustain the magic? TorrentFreak contacted people who are all considered pirates by the entertainment industries to find out if the term helps, hinders or even annoys them. Spud17 of The Pirate Bay definitely doesn’t have a problem with it.

“I don’t mind people calling us a pirate site, we are The Pirate Bay and have a pirate ship as our logo after all,” Spud17 says.

“Everything is down to perception, and I personally don’t have time to argue with people who think piracy is bad, wrong etc, because they have no clue what we’re about in the first place.”

At the other end of the scale casual torrent site user ‘Paul’ told us that he doesn’t consider what he’s doing as being piracy and that the term should be reserved for more serious infringers.

“I think of myself as a downloader. I download music and films for my own personal use. I don’t see it as romantic or anything. I think people who run the sites are pirates and giving me the same name isn’t really fair,” he explains.

On the other hand, two seasoned music releasers told us that they have no problem with the term piracy. Both are happy to be called pirates with one conceding that there is a certain kudos attached to the label.

“We get accused of wearing the pirate label as a badge of honor and I’m guilty as charged. It makes it easy to call yourself a pirate [since the Pirate Bay do it] and it’s also more fun than being a ‘music thief’ or whatever,” one said.

Interestingly, the operator of another of the world’s largest torrent sites was a little less happy over the use of the term.

“I don’t care what anyone calls a site like mine. If they think I’m a pirate site, sure, I don’t really care,” he said.

“It’s a bad thing being branded as a pirate in front of the law without due process by a major conglomerate/any big company. Pirates steal. Sites don’t.”

It was a little unexpected to hear the releasers and the site operator both viewing each other as the pirates. However, the idea that ‘pirate’ sounds more appealing than “content thief” was definitely more predictable.

That latter phrase has been gaining popularity among copyright holders in recent years but ‘copiers’ being branded thieves is rarely well received, not least at The Pirate Bay.

“The media portray users of our site as ‘broke teens,’ ‘digital thieves,’ and a range of other ignorant and uneducated terms,” Spud17 says.

“Theft is the permanent removal of something without consent; piracy, or filesharing/copying, is about copying something and sharing it with others, something that humans have done since we were invented. We have always shared culture with each other, our peers.”

To those who have grown up being serviced by helpful pirates in a massively under-served market, it’s no surprise that there’s still a little romance in the air. It’s certainly something that the folks at The Pirate Bay can relate to.

“Sure, you can find all the latest games, TV shows and movies on TPB, but you can also find shows and movies from around the world that would never be broadcast in your own country, or that have been censored/banned by your particular government. This is about free access to everything, for everyone,” Spud17 says.

“They can call us what they like, we’ve been doing it since before the digital age and we’ll continue. Pirate or file-sharer/copier, the terms aren’t important, what we do, is.”

That is something that people on all sides of the piracy debate will agree on.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

RFT: Kabelnetzbetreiber bietet 400 MBit/s im gesamten Netz

Ein lokaler Kabelnetzbetreiber hat sein gesamtes Netz auf eine hohe Datenrate ausgebaut. Der Zugang kostet 89 Euro, die ersten drei Monate werden nicht berechnet. Doch den Tarif gibt es nur für Neukunden. (Kabelnetz, Glasfaser)

Ein lokaler Kabelnetzbetreiber hat sein gesamtes Netz auf eine hohe Datenrate ausgebaut. Der Zugang kostet 89 Euro, die ersten drei Monate werden nicht berechnet. Doch den Tarif gibt es nur für Neukunden. (Kabelnetz, Glasfaser)

Free Textra SMS App Threatens To Report Android Pirates

A free Android SMS app that has been downloaded millions of times is spooking people using cracked versions. In a threatening message Textra SMS tells pirate users it has a policy of reporting repeat violators unless they install a legitimate copy in three days. Needless to say, some users are running scared.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

textraMillions of Android apps are downloaded from the Play Store everyday which is hardly a surprise given the huge choice and massive userbase of the Google platform.

Many Android users happily go through life without spending a penny on software, mainly because there are adequate free or ad-supported versions available for many top titles.

Of course, millions of users prefer to bypass Google Play altogether by installing raw .APK files from third party sources. With this option they lose the convenience of Google Play but gain the ability to install premium software without paying for it, potentially at the risk of malware.

Strangely, not only do people pirate premium titles but they also pirate free software too. Case in point, Textra SMS from Delicious Inc. Self-described as a “seriously beautiful, feature rich SMS and MMS app”, Textra SMS is a smash hit having been downloaded between five and ten million times according to Google.

Nevertheless, plenty of people are installing Textra from third-party sources, largely to remove the ads that allow the software to be offered for free. However, those that have done so are being greeted with a surprise. Postings in dozens of locations around the web from what appear to be Textra pirates indicate that their activities haven’t gone unnoticed.

textra

While anti-piracy notices in software are nothing new, the warning and ticking clock from Textra has a few people worried. One Reddit thread has a warning that pirating online apps is extremely dangerous.

“Pirating something that requires you to being online is a suicide mission. They will probs send a fine of $250 or something,” one commenter said, somewhat pessimistically.

This assessment is amusingly over-bleak but it doesn’t sit in isolation. In other discussions people question whether it is possible for Textra to track down pirates down through the app, whether they could be reported to their ISP, Google, and in one case even whether they could get in trouble with the police.

While finding the prospect of someone being reported to law enforcement for pirating a free app somewhat amusing, TF contacted Delicious Inc. for comment. Firstly, was the message their doing?

“Sure there are a bunch of ‘cracked’ versions of Textra available on the web. If you search on Google for cracked or pirated or ad-free you’ll find them,” Textra’s Max told TF.

“They are hacked in respect the APK has been modified and code injected to bypass the licensing checks. Periodically we check for these and send out a notification to users. Some of which may not even be aware of the fact, for example a friend downloaded it for them.”

So having established that the messages aren’t fake, we again pushed Max on the threats. The notice says that the company considers piracy a serious matter and has a policy to “report repeated violations.” It also suggests that users can avoid issues by downloading the official version of Textra from Google Play within three days.

TF asked what happens if users don’t comply with the deadline and the response we received suggests that Delicious would simply prefer that users install the official, free product.

“Legally there are a whole raft of options all the way from DMCA takedown requests to civil proceedings. It’s not a big issue for us, but on occasions we try our best to encourage users to ‘do the right thing’ that’s all,” Max said.

Of course, making absolutely sure of no action is literally just a click away (an install link is provided in the notice) and since Textra SMS is free, users have nothing to lose.

While there are probably better ways to get customers on board than threatening them, in this case it’s likely that the warning had plenty of pirates quickly installing the official version.

Textra wouldn’t be drawn on stats but it’s hard not to see pirating this excellent free app as unfair to the devs. We tested the official version and didn’t see any ads at all but apparently when they do appear they’re pretty unobtrusive.

“The app is free, so you’d wonder why a user would risk installing an APK that’s been modified (and the risks of injected code like key recorders, password sniffers etc). Why would you do that!?” Max asks.

It’s a pretty good point.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

AMD: Drei Konsolen-Chips für 2017 angekündigt

Neue Systems-on-a-Chip für Spielekonsolen: AMD arbeitet an drei SoCs, von denen einer die Playstation Neo sein dürfte und einer noch 2016 in Produktion gehen soll. Bleibt die Frage nach den anderen beiden – denn zusammen sollen sie AMD 1,5 Milliarden US-Dollar einbringen. (Spielekonsole, AMD)

Neue Systems-on-a-Chip für Spielekonsolen: AMD arbeitet an drei SoCs, von denen einer die Playstation Neo sein dürfte und einer noch 2016 in Produktion gehen soll. Bleibt die Frage nach den anderen beiden - denn zusammen sollen sie AMD 1,5 Milliarden US-Dollar einbringen. (Spielekonsole, AMD)

Alice Isn’t Dead review: Gorgeously eerie work from the creators of Night Vale

If you like creeping, consuming terror, this serial podcast is for you.

There’s a certain mystique to American motorways. Endless expanses of asphalt with nothing but the radio and the stars for company; a anonymous landscape of diners, truck stops, and ramshackle motels; flat plains that rise into mountainous ranges or dip into valleys lush with forests; a freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want. It’s no wonder that so much fiction pivots on the axis of the road trip.

However, such places can also be terrifying. It’s easy to get lost here, easy to vanish into that topography of intersections and one-pub towns, easy to meet the wrong person and be reduced to a missing person’s report. And this is where the new serial fiction podcast Alice Isn’t Dead finds us. Not in the potential of travel, but its worst outcome.

The basic premise of the show is simple: a truck driver is travelling the United States looking for the wife she’d assumed was dead. Because it shares a creator with the darkly comedic Welcome To Night Vale (which we absolutely love), you’d be forgiven if you expected something relatively humorous. I certainly did. But where the former is a mix of the macabre and the morbidly funny, the latter … isn’t.

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When the next Twitterbot loses it, remember that its tweets are protected

Op-Ed: No laws limit the speech of AI or autonomous programs, but that could change.

Bots have been using computers for a long time (see The Invisible Boy), but the Constitution is even older. (credit: Getty Images)

John Frank Weaver is Boston-based attorney focusing on artificial-intelligence law.

Last month, the Internet was briefly ablaze with the news that Tay, a Microsoft-built Twitterbot designed to interact with 18-24 year-olds in the persona of a teenaged girl, had interacted with the Twitterverse and become a racist conspiracy theorist in less than 24 hours. Microsoft understandably pulled the plug on the experimental AI, but that doesn’t end the creation of autonomous tweets of questionable value. There are numerous other Twitterbots that, with little to no human input, create original ideas, only some of which are truly worthwhile. These bots include:

• An AI-powered Donald Trump emulator (@DeepDrumpf) that analyzes the real Donald’s Twitter production and attempts to create new tweets that he could have said.

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Windows 10: Neue Insider-Preview verbessert Stift-Unterstützung

Microsoft hat eine neue Insider-Preview für Windows 10 veröffentlicht, die umfassende Neuerungen und Verbesserungen beinhaltet. Neu sind Erweiterungen bei der Stift-Unterstützung Windows Ink sowie beim Startmenü und Cortana. (Windows 10, Microsoft)

Microsoft hat eine neue Insider-Preview für Windows 10 veröffentlicht, die umfassende Neuerungen und Verbesserungen beinhaltet. Neu sind Erweiterungen bei der Stift-Unterstützung Windows Ink sowie beim Startmenü und Cortana. (Windows 10, Microsoft)

Long after his accident, Sam Schmidt takes the wheel again thanks to Project SAM

Sam Schmidt was paralyzed in a testing accident in 2000. Now he can drive again.

Sam Schmidt smiles from the driver's seat of Project SAM, the Corvette Stingray that's been modified to let him drive it, despite being paralyzed from the neck down. (credit: Arrow)

In the late 90s, Sam Schmidt had a promising career as an IndyCar driver, finishing fifth in the championship in 1999 after taking his first win in Las Vegas. In off-season, however, his ascension in the sport was derailed. During testing that following January, an accident at Walt Disney World Speedway in Florida left Schmidt a quadriplegic.

In the years since, Schmidt has continued to go racing but as a team owner. He's watched from the pit as drivers like Simon Pagenaud and James Hinchcliffe brought home glory for Schmidt Peterson Motorsport. But recently a collaboration with his team's title sponsor, Arrow Electronics, has placed Schmidt back where he belongs—behind the wheel of a car on track.

The car is a 2014 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, and the initiative is called Project SAM for "Semi-Autonomous Motorcar." However, don't be fooled into thinking this is a self-driving vehicle. Instead, the core of Project SAM is about mapping the dynamic range of the car's inputs—steering, throttle, brake—and translating them to a different control format, in this case one suitable for a quadriplegic driver. "We needed to be able to control any feature of the car by using electronic signals and software," said Chakib Loucif, Arrow's VP of engineering.

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