Judge: RIAA and MPAA Can’t Copy Megaupload’s Servers, Yet

The legal battles between the RIAA, MPAA and Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload have been put on hold for another six months. Virginia District Court Judge Liam O’Grady agreed to stay the cases, but did not grant a request from the industry groups to allow them to copy Megaupload’s data which remains stored at its former hosting provider.

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

megaupload-logoWell over four years have passed since Megaupload was shutdown, but all this time there has been no real progress on the legal front.

Last December a New Zealand District Court judge ruled that Kim Dotcom and his colleagues can be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges, a decision that’s currently under appeal.

With the criminal case pending, the civil lawsuits against the major record labels and Hollywood’s top movie studios have been halted as well.

Fearing that they might influence criminal proceedings, Megaupload’s legal team have had these cases put on hold since 2014, with permission from the copyright holders. However, when Megaupload’s counsel recently opted for another stay, the RIAA and MPAA objected.

Instead of simply signing off on another extension, the movie and music industry groups asked for permission to subpoena Megaupload’s former hosting provider Cogent Communications. Suggesting that the data might not be safe, they asked to make a backup of some crucial evidence the provider has in storage.

“To avoid the risk of substantial prejudice to Plaintiffs from the potential loss of the relevant data in Cogent’s possession, the Court should carve out of any further stay of this case the permission for Plaintiffs to subpoena Cogent for a forensic copy of that data,” both groups informed the court.

The MPAA and RIAA even offered to pay the costs of such a backup, which they estimate to be in the range of $20,000 or less.

Megaupload’s legal team, however, rejected the proposal. Among other things, they argued that privacy sensitive data on their former customers should not be freely shared, and asked the court not to issue a subpoena.

Last Friday both parties presented their case during a hearing and after careful deliberation District Court Judge Liam O’Grady has now decided (pdf) not to issue a subpoena.

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Instead, he decided that things should stay as they are, meaning that Cogent will be the only party that has a copy of the Megaupload data in question. RIAA, MPAA or Megaupload should, however, inform the court if they have concrete evidence that this data is at risk.

“…if any party gains knowledge that any potential evidence in this case, including digital evidence currently being held by Cogent Communications, Inc., is being or might be destroyed, it should notify the Court immediately.”

This decision can be seen as win for Megaupload and Kim Dotcom, as they have successfully averted an attempt from the movie and music companies to gain access to crucial evidence in the case before the official discovery process begins.

“We are pleased that the Federal Court granted the Megaupload defendants’ request for a stay of the civil copyright cases and denied the MPAA and RIAA plaintiffs’ request for early discovery,” Ira Rothken, Megaupload’s Lead Global Counsel, informs TorrentFreak

“The stay will assist the orderly conduct of parallel criminal related proceedings,” he adds.

As requested by Megaupload, Judge O’Grady agreed to put the civil cases on hold for another six months, after the appeal of the New Zealand extradition decision is heard.

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

The Division appears to be broken at a fundamental level, enabling cheats

Networking expert suggests the game is broken at a fundamental level.

A video demonstrating how trivial it is to hack the naive online infrastructure of The Division.

Since the release of The Division last month, Ubisoft has been scrambling to stem the widespread use of hacks, cheats, and exploits that have ruined much of the PvP experience in the online-focused multiplayer shooter. But an analysis of client-side cheating programs by an experienced network gaming developer suggests the game may need a "complete rewrite" to fix major holes in its online security.

Glenn Fiedler is a game-networking consultant with credits on Sony's God of War series, Respawn's Titanfall, and more. In a detailed blog post this week, he lays out what he sees as a core problem of client-side trust in the way The Division's basic networking is structured.

For his analysis, Fiedler makes reference to a recent hacking video that which shows a client-side program modifying local memory locations to give a player infinite health, infinite ammo, the ability to warp around the level and shoot through walls, and more. These kinds of demonstrations suggest to Fiedler that the game is using a trusted client network model, where the server essentially accepts the client-side reports of in-game events like player position, weapon fire rates, item inventory, and even when players are hit with bullets.

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SpaceX plans to send its Dragon spacecraft to Mars

Elon Musk’s company finally reveals the first details of its Mars architecture.


SpaceX announced Wednesday that it intends to begin sending uncrewed Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018. This is the first step in the company's plan to one day land humans on Mars, which is the goal founder Elon Musk set for SpaceX when he created the company in 2002.

According to the company, these initial test missions will help demonstrate the technologies needed to land large payloads propulsively on Mars. This series of missions, to be launched on the company's not-yet-completed Falcon Heavy rocket, will provide key data for SpaceX as the company develops an overall plan to send humans to the red planet and colonize Mars.

One of the biggest challenges in landing on Mars is the fact that its atmosphere is so thin it provides little braking capacity. To land the 900kg Curiosity rover on Mars, NASA had to devise the complicated sky crane system that led to its "Seven Minutes of Terror." A Dragon would weigh much more, perhaps about 6,000kg. To solve this problem SpaceX plans to use an upgraded spacecraft, a Dragon2 powered by eight SuperDraco engines, to land using propulsion.

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Deals of the Day (4-27-2016)

Deals of the Day (4-27-2016)

It’s not uncommon got find Windows tablets selling for under $100 these days… but it is still a little unusual to find a model in that price range with a full HD display. That’s exactly what the Microsoft Store is currently offering, though.

The NuVision TM800W56L Signature Edition tablet features an 8 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel display, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and an Intel Atom Z3735F Bay Tril processor.

Sure, it’s not exactly a tablet that can replace your laptop… but it’s a cheap device that you could use to surf the web, play some games, or watch some movies, among other things.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (4-27-2016) at Liliputing.

Deals of the Day (4-27-2016)

It’s not uncommon got find Windows tablets selling for under $100 these days… but it is still a little unusual to find a model in that price range with a full HD display. That’s exactly what the Microsoft Store is currently offering, though.

The NuVision TM800W56L Signature Edition tablet features an 8 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel display, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and an Intel Atom Z3735F Bay Tril processor.

Sure, it’s not exactly a tablet that can replace your laptop… but it’s a cheap device that you could use to surf the web, play some games, or watch some movies, among other things.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (4-27-2016) at Liliputing.

How to land on Mars? Don’t ask NASA—the Senate just cut its test program

Parochial interests trump tech funding when it comes to reaching the Red Planet.

Senator Barbara Mikulski has worked hard to ensure funding for Goddard Space Flight Center. (credit: NASA)

The US Senate talks a good game about sending humans to Mars. The group holds itself up as the protector of NASA and a champion for the space organization's grand exploration aims. For example, as part of this spring's appropriations process, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee with oversight of NASA's budget chided Charlie Bolden, the space agency's administrator, when his budget request didn't amply fund exploration.

"Mr. Administrator, you have traveled around the country in recent months touting NASA’s strong support for the SLS and Orion missions, when in reality this budget will effectively delay any advancement in a NASA-led human mission to Mars, or anywhere at all," Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican senator from Alabama, told Bolden during a hearing in March.

Shelby was upset with Bolden because the president's budget request did not seek a stratospheric level of funding for the Space Launch System rocket, which is being designed at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. And if there were any doubt about his parochial intent, consider Shelby's own position statement on NASA: "The ability of NASA to achieve our goals for further space exploration has always been and always will be through Marshall Space Flight Center."

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German nuclear plant’s fuel rod system swarming with old malware

At least the fuel rod system’s not connected to the Internet, so nothing happened.

Fortuately, the computer systems at the Gundremmingen nuclear power facility in Germany don't have Internet access, because they certainly weren't secure. (credit: Felix König)

A nuclear power plant 75 miles from Munich has been harboring malware—including remote-access trojans and file-stealing malware—on the computer system that is used to monitor the plant's fuel rods. Fortunately, as Reuters reported, the computer isn't connected to the Internet, and the malware was never able to be activated.

The malware was discovered on computer systems at the Gundremmingen nuclear power facility by employees of the German electrical utility company RWE. It included Conflicker, a worm first detected in 2008 designed to steal user credentials, personal financial data, and turn infected computers into "bots" to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. W32.Ramnit, a worm that provides attackers with a remote access tool and allows them to steal files and inject code into webpages to capture banking data, was also discovered on the system.

In addition to the infected computer system, last upgraded in 2008, malware was discovered on 18 USB removable storage devices. Both Conflicker and W32.Ramnit spread themselves through USB drives. The malware did no harm because it required Internet access to contact a command-and-control network, and it appears that the plant was not specifically targeted by attackers since the malware was focused largely on financial fraud.

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7 million unsalted MD5 passwords leaked by Minecraft community Lifeboat

Worse still, service recommended “short, but difficult to guess passwords.”

(credit: Lifeboat)

As security breaches go, they don't get more vexing than this: 7 million compromised accounts that protected passwords using woefully weak unsalted MD5 hashes, and the outfit responsible, still hadn't disclosed the hack three months after it came to light. And as if that wasn't enough, the service recommended the use of short passwords. That's what Motherboard reported Tuesday about Lifeboat, a service that provides custom, multiplayer environments to gamers who use the Minecraft mobile app.

The data circulating online included the e-mail addresses and hashed passwords for 7 million Lifeboat accounts. The mass compromise was discovered by Troy Hunt, the security researcher behind the Have I been pwned? breach notification site. Hunt said he had acquired the data from someone actively involved in trading hacked login credentials who has provided similar data in the past.

Hunt reported that some of the plaintext passwords users had chosen were so weak that he was able to discover them simply by posting the corresponding MD5 hash into Google. As if many users' approach to passwords were lackadaisical itself, Lifeboat's own Getting started guide recommended "short, but difficult to guess passwords" because "This is not online banking."

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AT&T loses postpaid phone subscribers as T-Mobile takes away customers

DirecTV is up, U-verse TV down, and wireless grows despite postpaid phone loss.

(credit: Mike Mozart)

AT&T started the year with a mix of subscriber gains and losses in its core businesses, with losses in TV and postpaid phone customers to go along with increases in DirecTV and its overall total of wireless subscriptions.

In wireless, AT&T ended the quarter with 363,000 fewer postpaid phone subscribers, the company said yesterday. This loss coincided with T-Mobile USA adding 877,000 postpaid phone customers, mostly at the expense of AT&T. "According to [T-Mobile CEO John] Legere, approximately 80 percent of postpaid port-ins come from rival carriers AT&T and Verizon, with the lion’s share coming from AT&T," Wireless Week reported yesterday. (Verizon Wireless lost 8,000 postpaid phone customers in the quarter, though it added 640,000 retail postpaid customers overall.)

On the plus side for AT&T, most of its postpaid phone losses came from customers with feature phones. The average smartphone subscriber pays AT&T twice as much as a feature phone user. Overall, AT&T has 58.3 million postpaid smartphone subscribers, accounting for 88 percent of its postpaid phone customers. That proportion is growing, as smartphones accounted for 97 percent of AT&T's new phone sales in the quarter.

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Datenschutz: Payback und Verbraucherschützer einig über Like-Button

Payback will den Gebrauch des Like-Buttons von Facebook auf seinen Seiten ändern. Damit vermeidet das Unternehmen einen Rechtsstreit – und gibt dem Druck von Verbraucherschützern nach. (Payback, Soziales Netz)

Payback will den Gebrauch des Like-Buttons von Facebook auf seinen Seiten ändern. Damit vermeidet das Unternehmen einen Rechtsstreit - und gibt dem Druck von Verbraucherschützern nach. (Payback, Soziales Netz)

Intel’s proposed USB-C audio solution could lead to versatile, expensive headsets

Intel’s proposed USB-C audio solution could lead to versatile, expensive headsets

LeEco recently introduced a new line of smartphones with no 3.5mm headphone jack. Instead, you can plug headphones into the LeEco Le 2, Le 2 Pro, and Le 2 Max using the phones’ USB-C ports. Or you can just use Bluetooth headsets.

But LeEco isn’t the only company that thinks 3.5mm ports are on the way out. Apple is said to be working on upcoming iPhones that use Lightning ports for headphones. And AnandTech notes that Intel introduced its own proposal for using USB Type-C connectors for digital audio output.

Continue reading Intel’s proposed USB-C audio solution could lead to versatile, expensive headsets at Liliputing.

Intel’s proposed USB-C audio solution could lead to versatile, expensive headsets

LeEco recently introduced a new line of smartphones with no 3.5mm headphone jack. Instead, you can plug headphones into the LeEco Le 2, Le 2 Pro, and Le 2 Max using the phones’ USB-C ports. Or you can just use Bluetooth headsets.

But LeEco isn’t the only company that thinks 3.5mm ports are on the way out. Apple is said to be working on upcoming iPhones that use Lightning ports for headphones. And AnandTech notes that Intel introduced its own proposal for using USB Type-C connectors for digital audio output.

Continue reading Intel’s proposed USB-C audio solution could lead to versatile, expensive headsets at Liliputing.