This year’s first batch of anti-science education bills surface in Oklahoma

“Teach the controversy” is once again dressed up as “academic freedom.”

The Oklahoma State Capitol building. (credit: Getty Images)

The first state bills of the year that would interfere with science education have appeared in Oklahoma. There, both the House and Senate have seen bills that would prevent school officials and administrators from disciplining any teachers who introduce spurious information to science classes.

These bills have a long history, dating back to around the time when teaching intelligent design was determined to be an unconstitutional imposition of religion. A recent study showed that you could take the text of the bills and build an evolutionary tree that traces their modifications over the last decade. The latest two fit the patterns nicely.

The Senate version of the bill is by State Senator Josh Brecheen, a Republican. It is the fifth year in a row he's introduced a science education bill after announcing he wanted "every publically funded Oklahoma school to teach the debate of creation vs. evolution." This year's version omits any mention of specific areas of science that could be controversial. Instead, it simply prohibits any educational official from blocking a teacher who wanted to discuss the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Gesetzesvorschlag: US-Politiker stört sich an Smartphones ohne Hintertür

Ein Mitglied der State Assembly in Kalifornien will den Verkauf von verschlüsselungsfähigen Smartphones ohne Hintertür verbieten und hat dafür einen Gesetzesvorschlag erarbeitet. Ihm geht es vor allem darum, Menschenhandel zu verhindern, denn die Beweise finden sich in verschlüsselten Smartphones. (Verschlüsselung, Smartphone)

Ein Mitglied der State Assembly in Kalifornien will den Verkauf von verschlüsselungsfähigen Smartphones ohne Hintertür verbieten und hat dafür einen Gesetzesvorschlag erarbeitet. Ihm geht es vor allem darum, Menschenhandel zu verhindern, denn die Beweise finden sich in verschlüsselten Smartphones. (Verschlüsselung, Smartphone)

World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

A fan-created ASCII version of the 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix is the oldest known torrent that’s still active. Created more than 12 years ago, the file has outlived many blockbuster movies and is still downloaded a few times a week, even though the site from where it originated has disappeared.

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

matrix-ascii-smallBitTorrent is an excellent distribution mechanism, but for a file to live on at least one person has to keep sharing it.

This means that most torrents eventually die after the public loses interest. However, some torrents seem to live on forever.

More than ten years ago TorrentFreak reported on a fan-made ASCII version of The Matrix, describing it as a really old torrent. This torrent had survived for 696 days, which was a rarity.

At the time BitTorrent had only a fraction of the users it has now so it was harder to keep them active. A lot of things have changed in the decade since, but the torrent in question is still going strong.

The torrent file of The Matrix ASCII was created more than 12 years ago (4,419 days) on December 20, 2003. Even though the original site is no longer online, it still has 8 active seeders at the time of writing.

There are also people actively downloading the file, most likely after they found a copy of the release on one of the torrent sites where it remains available. To the best of our knowledge, this means that The Matrix ASCII is the oldest torrent that’s still being actively shared.

The.Matrix-ASCII screencapmatrix-ascii-large

The 12-year-old release of The Matrix ASCII comes with a DVD cover and insert. While there are no accurate statistics available it is believed to have been downloaded by tens of thousands of people over its lifetime.

Perhaps worried that Hollywood wouldn’t appreciate the effort, the torrent includes a small disclaimer.

“This work is a parody. As such I do not believe that this DVD has any possibility of competing with the original in any market. It is not for sale,” the disclaimer reads.

Prospective downloaders have very little to worry about though. Warner Bros. is not known to go after this type of fan-art that’s created for non-commercial use and the creator has never been targeted either.

The people who’ve downloaded a copy of The Matrix have thus far responded mostly positively after watching the ASCII movie. That is, those who knew what to expect. Those looking for the original Matrix movie are less appreciative.

“Dude, tell me what to do with this Matrix ASCII, cause the picture is all green n stuff, can’t even see what’s going on. And, its in 4 VOB files, but why?” was the response of one unhappy downloader.

The fact that this torrent has been able to survive for so long is a testament to the resilience of BitTorrent. For us, The Matrix ASCII has become an iconic release and we’ll certainly keep an eye on how it fares in the future.

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

New Study: Piracy Boosts Digital Music Sales

A new paper published by the Economics department of Canada’s Queen’s University has found that music piracy may actually help boost digital music sales, although it may have a modest negative affect on physical media sales.The paper written by Jonatha…



A new paper published by the Economics department of Canada's Queen's University has found that music piracy may actually help boost digital music sales, although it may have a modest negative affect on physical media sales.

The paper written by Jonathan Lee, a searcher at Queen's, is titled Purchase, Pirate, Publicize: The Effect of File Sharing and uses data from 4.8 million illegal download, from 250,000 albums on a popular private BitTorrent tracker.

Looking at top-tier artists, Lee found that far from hurting digital sales, piracy actually boosts it, suggesting that the "the word-of-mouth effect is most relevant for the digital market". Physical sales did seem to be negative affected by piracy, applying a "statistically significant but economically modest negative" pressure on these sales.

But more importantly, Lee's research seems to suggest that the effect of piracy not only varies significantly depending on the type of media (digital of physical), but also the popularity of the artists, with the mega stars being better off than the lesser known.

"Top-tier artists lose sales, but the loss is partially offset by an increase in digital sales and the overall effect is small," Lee writes in the paper.

"Mid-tier artists are helped slightly and bottom-tier artists are significantly hurt by file sharing, which could indicate that file sharing helps lesser-known artists only if they are actually talented," says Lee.

This seem to indicate that users are using piracy as a discovery tool, and money is only going towards artists whose work is actually worth paying for, in the minds of these pirates.

Mission: Red Planet brings steampunk Martian domination to your tabletop

Ars Cardboard gets steampunk with the second edition of a great board game.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

Admit it: you would secretly love to launch a private army to Mars. Luckily, Mission: Red Planet lets you do so as part of a steampunk Victorian mining conglomerate. Along the way, you'll sabotage the rockets carrying other astronauts, redirect opponents' ships to unimportant patches of Martian soil, take over Phobos, and just generally run riot in your quest to exploit the Red Planet's hidden resources.

To do this, each player gets nine role cards. The roles each grant a set of specific moves, such as placing three astronauts on the same docked rocket ("Travel Agent") or placing one astronaut in a rocket and then killing another player's astronaut on Mars and then moving three of your own astronauts down from Phobos onto the Red Planet itself ("Soldier"). Other roles let you destroy docked ships ("Saboteur"), force not-yet-full ships to launch early ("Secret Agent"), or change the destination of a rocket even in flight ("Pilot").

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Creative Kids Turn MIT Website Into a ‘Piracy’ Haven

In recent weeks the music industry has started to target the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) website over tens of thousands of copyright infringements. The deviant behavior doesn’t come from typical pirates though, but from children using the Scratch project to share ‘their’ creative expressions.

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

spongepirateKids love to be creative and in today’s world, tablets and computers offer a wealth of options to do so.

One of these creative playgrounds is the visual programming language Scratch, which has been in development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for over a decade.

“With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community,” the project explains.

Scratch targets children between the ages of 8 and 16, who can create and remix works of art through an easy to use web-based interface. The tool has become quite popular in recent years with over 12 million projects being shared.

More recently, however, it also gained the attention of copyright holders. Over the past months music industry group BPI sent tens of thousands of takedown notices targeting the creative playground, pointing out the use of various pirated tracks.

Indeed, upon closer inspection it appears that many kids projects feature songs of popular artists.

“Credit to the Internet for pictures”

creditinternet

Many of the young creators may not be aware of their infringing acts, but the major music labels certainly are. MIT doesn’t publish any details on takedown notices but Google alone has received close to 40,000 alerts referencing infringing “scratch.mit.edu” URLs.

This makes the MIT website one of the top pirate sites on the Internet, and definitely the most infringing educational domain.

Interestingly, the youngsters are not completely oblivious to the concept of copyright. One user addresses the issue in the Scratch forums, asking whether it’s okay to use copyrighted music in his creations.

Other members quickly chimed in concluding that this type of use is permitted.

“Yep! Scratch has a special license that lets you use copyrighted music and other things – just be sure to give credit to anything you don’t own,” one commenter wrote.

“We’re technically protected under fair use because scratch is ‘educational’,” another comment added.

While this may sound reassuring it’s also a bit misguided. Scratch certainly doesn’t have a license to use all copyrighted music and even the educational argument could be contested in court.

The people behind the Scratch project seem to be aware of the potential issues. The site has a DMCA takedown policy in place which allows rightsholders to remove content, but not before giving it a second thought.

“In assessing whether or not a Scratch user has violated your copyrights, please keep in mind that Scratch is an educational and not-for-profit initiative, seeking to aid children’s learning by providing the tools for them to learn and express themselves using digital technology,” the Scratch project writes.

“We hope you also see Scratch not only as a good way of popularizing your creations/website but also as an opportunity to do something good for children’s education,” it adds.

If copyright holders still want to take down the kids’ creations they are welcome to do so, but they should think of the children first…

Luckily for the BPI and other copyright groups Scratch isn’t all bad. They would certainly appreciate this home-made anti-piracy PSA created by one Scratcher, for example.

“Don’t steal things”

scratchpirate

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

Cute to “a little sinister”—the beauty of US spy satellite rocket launch logos

For example: 2004 mission logo depicts a sword-wielding, big-breasted redhead with wings.

The patch for the NROL-39 mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex-3E in California. It took off Dec. 5, 2013 carrying the Government Experimental Multi-Satellite (GEMSat) payload to "perform a variety of unique scientific experiments and demonstrate high-technology operational concepts," (PDF) according to the NRO.

12 more images in gallery


When the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) launched an Atlas V ferrying a GEMSat classified payload in December 2013, the mission's logo set off a public firestorm of sorts.

The mission logo, or patch, from the launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is of a giant, orange-ish-colored octopus sitting atop Earth. "Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach," read the logo for the NROL-39 mission. The office of the Director of National Intelligence published a picture of the logo-patch on Twitter hours before launch, tweeting that the "Atlas 5 will blast off just past 11PM, PST carrying an classified NRO payload (also cubesats)."

The launch came as the Guardian was publishing one leak after the other from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The leaks detailed that the US National Security Agency was, among other things, exercising digital domination across the world's fiber optic lines. So a spy agency's cartoon depicting total world domination was an untimely public relations failure given the focus Snowden was bringing to the US surveillance state.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

At the Sundance Film Festival? You can try Airbus and Uber’s new helicopter ride

“It’s a pilot program, but we’ll see where it goes,” says Airbus chief.

European aerospace giant Airbus and Uber are partnering to offer the public what will indubitably be an expensive breed of services: on-demand helicopter rides. According to The Wall Street Journal, the project will be launched during the upcoming Sundance Film Festival, which will take place in Utah this week. No details have been revealed in regards to what financial agreements have been reached by the two companies—nor how much the chopper rides will cost—but Airbus chief Tom Enders describes the venture as “pretty exciting.”

A spokesperson from Airbus said that the company would be offering Airbus H125 and H130 helicopters for use in the project, while Uber will be dispatching cars to deliver passengers to and collect them from their aerial voyages. Neither company has spoken about what the potential cost of such a journey might be, but Uber has charged between a few hundred to a few thousand pounds for similar services. In 2013, for example, you could pay £2,000 for a helicopter ride from a helipad in New York City to the Hamptons on Long Island, where an SUV would be waiting to take you to your final destination.

This unusual collaboration is, at least in part, potentially the result of low oil prices. The Wall Street Journal writes that oil and gas companies have traditionally been a key market for Airbus, but sales have suffered in the last two years. As for Uber, this could potentially be another move to diversify its portfolio of available vehicles. In the past, the company has tried offering auto-rickshaw services in Delphi (the service was shut down late last year) and luxury boats in Turkey. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, Uber offered chopper rides during CES in Las Vegas.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Internet of Things security is so bad, there’s a search engine for sleeping kids

Shodan search engine is only the latest reminder of why we need to fix IoT security.

Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams.

The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores, according to Dan Tentler, a security researcher who has spent several years investigating webcam security.

"It's all over the place," he told Ars Technica UK. "Practically everything you can think of."

Read 44 remaining paragraphs | Comments