Category: Uncategorised

Am 19. und 20. April dreht sich beim Golem.de Tech Summit alles um Deep Learning und künstliche Intelligenz. Aufgrund der großen Nachfrage von Studierenden gibt es jetzt Ermäßigungen beim Ticket-Kauf. (Quo Vadis, KI)

Gleitschirm- und Drachenflieger sorgen sich um ihr Hobby und ihre Sicherheit, weil Quadcopter der Deutschen Post in ihrem Luftraum operieren, um Sendungen in entlegene Gebiete zu bringen. Die Tourismusbranche wehrt sich schon länger gegen die Drohnen. (Drohne, Technologie)

Fueled by poor official content availability and unfair pricing, millions of Aussie citizens have turned to unauthorized channels to get their content fix, mainly via torrent and streaming sites.

As a result and after being stirred up largely by Hollywood in the United States, two anti-piracy strategies have emerged. The first involves local ISPs being ordered to block The Pirate Bay and similar sites.

The second is a “three strikes” style warning scheme that would see regular Internet users being monitored by anti-piracy companies and then sent escalating warning notices by their respective ISPs. The idea is that after receiving several these warnings, Internet subscribers will eventually change their ways.

But while site blocking is currently full-steam ahead with The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt, TorrentHound and SolarMovie being targeted in Federal Court, negotiations over the warning scheme have labored for years and yielded few results.

In February it was revealed that three-strikes (or graduated response as its often known) would not be immediately going ahead. As has been the case for years, rightsholders and ISPs simply couldn’t agree over who would pay for what was clearly going to be an expensive system.

This raises the somewhat extraordinary situation that having pleaded with the Australian government for “three strikes”, having submitted a draft to the Australian Communications and Media Authority a year ago, and having missed the government-mandated deadline for implementation last September 1, rightsholders and ISPs are now having to lobby the government to put it on hold.

According to ITNews, earlier today Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton told the CommsDay summit that rightsholders and ISPs were working on a joint approach to the government to ask for the “three strikes” scheme to be suspended for another 12 months.

“[The plan is to say] ‘given that the focus is on website blocking at the moment, let’s put that draft code into abeyance and not have the [Australian Communications and Media Authority] seek to further examine it for possible registration, and we’ll come back in 12 months and see whether it makes sense to try and reinvigorate those commercial discussions’,” Stanton says.

Stanton’s statement is clearly trying to focus on the potential gains to be had via a site-blocking regime but discussions on “three strikes” preceded blocking plans by several years and have always been favored by rightsholders. Indeed, even in countries where blocking is already in place, moves to bring in warning notices have continued unabated. But, as always, the real issue revolves around who will pay.

“Hopefully [the suspension] will give us at least a good holding position, and we’ll see in a year’s time whether there really is a problem of scale that needs to be dealt with by a costly and complex scheme,” Stanton explains.

The problem has always been about costs. Rightsholders strongly believe that ISPs should pay a large proportion of the scheme but that position is rarely supported by the ISPs themselves. Even in countries where notice schemes are going ahead, limits on the numbers of notices are often put in place. Which, given the projected cost in Australia, wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

“At the moment, [the warning system] is manual,” Village Roadshow co-chief executive Graham Burke said in February. “And it’s just so labor intense, that it’s somewhere in the vicinity of $16 to $20 per notice, which is prohibitive. You might as well give people a DVD.”

Reading between the lines it seems possible that rightsholders and ISPs will seek to come up with a more cost-effective automated system during the next year. The agreement to have some kind of system is now in place but it will all rest on the price tag. If that can be brought down to a few cents per warning then it will be all systems go.

In the meantime, troll activity and plans by Village Roadshow to take a few people court not withstanding, Australians appear to have at least another year of trouble-free downloading – if they can get round the site blocks.

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

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the most downloaded movie for the second week in a row.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(1)	Star Wars: The Force Awakens	8.3 / trailer
2	(2)	Deadpool (HDrip subbed)	8.6 / trailer
3	(9)	Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Cam/TS)	7.5 / trailer
4	(4)	The Revenant (Web-DL)	8.2 / trailer
5	(3)	Ice Age: The Great Egg-Scapade (Web-DL)	6.1 / trailer
6	(…)	Hail Caesar! (Webrip)	6.8 / trailer
7	(6)	Kung Fu Panda 3 (Web-DL)	8.0 / trailer
8	(…)	Pandemic (Web-DL)	4.6 / trailer
9	(8)	The Hateful Eight	8.0 / trailer
10	(5)	The 5th Wave (HDrip)	5.4 / trailer

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

Die US-Bundespolizei FBI hat anderen Strafverfolgungsbehörden Unterstützung angeboten, wenn ein iPhone für Ermittlungen entsperrt werden muss. Vermutlich macht sich das FBI eine bislang nicht geschlossene Sicherheitslücke zunutze. (Apple vs. FBI, Apple)

Proceed 1 heißt die Straßenlaterne, die mit einem kleinen Windkraftrad auf der Spitze und einem Akku ihren Betriebsstrom selbst generieren soll. Auf der Insel Juist soll sie nun erprobt werden. (Indiegogo, Technologie)

Tesla Motors hat sich beim Elektroauto Model 3 verschätzt und muss die Produktionskapazitäten neu überdenken, schreibt Elon Musk. Mittlerweile sind über 275.000 kostenpflichtige Reservierungen eingegangen. Auch neue Details zu dem Fahrzeug wurden bekannt. (Elektroauto, GreenIT)

Es soll das größte Datenleck aller Zeiten sein: 100 Medien werten weltweit die Unterlagen zu mehr als 200.000 Briefkastenfirmen in Panama aus. Unter den Nutznießern sind hochrangige Politiker und weltbekannte Sportler. (Wikileaks, OCR)

Asus seems to be preparing a follow-up to the popular Zenfone 2 smartphone, as well as a new thin-and-light notebook as part of the Zenbook family. The Asus Zenfone 3 and Zenbook UX330 are both listed on the Red Dot Design awards website, even though neither product has been officially launched yet. That’s the same […]

Asus Zenfone 3, ZenBook UX330 outed a bit early is a post from: Liliputing

For more than two decades online piracy has been a widely debated topic in the entertainment industries.

This problem has motivated several companies to sue downloaders or target them with takedown requests, which are sometimes bundled with settlement demands to extract some money in return.

In the United States and Canada a new player recently appeared on this front. The Swiss based outfit “Contra Piracy” is targeting local Internet users with hefty fines for allegedly sharing pirated movies via BitTorrent.

The company operates in a network of law firms and anti-piracy tracking outfits such as Canipre and Logistep. The latter is banned from tracking BitTorrent users in its home country, but has been very active abroad.

Contra Piracy is working with a variety of rightsholders and TorrentFreak has seen notices for several film titles including Anger Of The Dead and Turbo Kid. It’s also the first outfit to apply this scheme for games in North America, as shown by this settlement request for “Metro: Last Light.”

These notices are sent to ISPs who then forward them to their customers, often with the settlement demand included. Internet subscribers in the U.S. and Canada are among the targets, and with proposed settlements of several hundred dollars they are significantly more expensive than competitors such as Rightscorp.

Settlement Request

While it may appear otherwise, Contra Piracy uses DMCA or notice and takedown emails in order to contact subscribers via their ISPs. This is an easy way to get the settlement requests to thousands of alleged pirates at minimal cost but it also means that they don’t know who the subscriber is.

While copyright holders certainly have the right to protect their works, the Contra Piracy operation seems to be rather sloppy.

The company’s website is littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, which becomes apparent from the following quote taken from their questions section.

“You accept all legal risk shoudl a cause of action be issued at a court of relevent jurisdiction. If a claim is issued against you, you will be required to defend that action abd you may become subject to payment of attorney fees and costs associated through poursuit of civil enforcement.”

In addition, the settlement notices are sometimes sent months after the actual infringement took place. For example, a notice received last week lists a file that was allegedly pirated last September, which means that some ISPs will not be able to link the IP-address to a customer.

Finally, Contra Piracy appears to invest very little effort in gaining credibility. The company produced a video advertising how piracy may devastate the livelihoods of filmmakers. Judging from the video below, Contra Piracy itself is low on creative resources too.

Contra Piracy Promo…

Still, the company probably generates enough income to continue its operation in the U.S. and Canada. With a minimal investment, they are able to rake in substantial revenue.

Contra Piracy isn’t completely unknown to torrenting pirates in America. The same outfit was previously involved in a classic copyright trolling case which was thrown out of court.

With the new scheme this is no longer a problem, as the takedown notice approach helps them to bypass the judicial system.

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