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During the summer of 2011 the MPAA and RIAA teamed up with five major Internet providers in the United States, announcing their a plan to “educate” BitTorrent pirates.

The parties launched the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) and agreed on a system through which Internet account holders are warned if their connections are used to download pirated content.

After five or six warnings ISPs take a variety of repressive measures, including bandwidth throttling and temporary disconnections.

The system has been in place for several years now and last summer the agreement was set to expire. However, the CCI informs TorrentFreak that the program will continue and earlier this month it was extended again until March 22.

This is a relatively short extension, suggesting that the parties are close to a new agreement. However, CCI was not able to confirm this.

“While this extension is shorter than prior extensions, it is still a matter of routine business that will allow us to maintain the program as we work together to refine the system,” a spokesperson informed us.

The negotiations have been ongoing for months so it’s clear that the new deal will include some changes. We can only speculate what these are, but it would be no surprise if the MPAA and RIAA have asked for more serious consequences for repeat infringers.

Under the current system a user will no longer receive any warnings after the 6th copyright alert, and permanent disconnections are not part of the program.

This made sense five years ago when the original terms were negotiated. However, just a few weeks ago Cox Communications was held liable for pirating customers because they failed to terminate their accounts, which puts the old agreement in a new light.

There has also been explicit critique from some copyright holders. A few months ago several independent movies studios called for an end to the “six strikes” scheme, describing it as an ineffective “sham”.

According to the movie studios the copyright alerts are highly ineffective because only a small fraction of the piracy notices are forwarded to the Internet providers.

Time will tell whether any of the upcoming changes will address these concerns.

For CCI, however, the core task remains educating consumers and shifting norms and behavior, pointing them towards legal sites and services.

“The members of CCI are committed to this voluntary effort to educate consumers about copyright and how they can access and enjoy digital content. We are proof positive that collaboration can work, and we are excited about the future of the organization,” CCI’s spokesperson says.

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

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Mattel re-invented the View-Master for the virtual reality age in 2015 by introducing a Google Cardboard-like headset that could hold a smartphone and turn it into a display for VR experiences. Now there’s a new model on the way, and, among other things, it’s designed to work better with phones featuring a range of screen […]

2nd View-Master VR will support more phones, more features is a post from: Liliputing

Seit fast drei Jahren testet der Verfassungsschutz die NSA-Spionagesoftware XKeyscore. Ohne Ergebnis. Dabei wollte er das mächtige Überwachungsinstrument einst unbedingt. (Politik/Recht, Datenschutz)

When an Argentinian news site tipped us off about a new streaming platform last month, first impressions were good.

Wefre (now defunct) was beautifully presented and managed to provide the user with a Spotify-like streaming service for free.

Admittedly lots of other sites try to do similar things but with all the artwork, albums, playlist features and embedded videos in one place, Wefre seemed pretty unique. However, following a tip from a reader it soon became evident that nothing could be further from the truth.

Instant music site

Although our tipster didn’t name it, TF was informed that Wefre was the product of a new script so we set about tracking it down. We eventually found it for sale on the CodeCanyon marketplace where it made its debut in November.

Called YouTubify (YouTube/Spotify combined), the script allows almost anyone to set up a free Spotify-like service with a minimum of fuss.

YouTubify – YouTube/Spotify Mashup Script

“Youtubify allows you to create your own music streaming website in minutes with no coding knowledge,” the sales pitch reads.

“It has an impressive feature set that rivals and even surpasses other biggest streaming services on the market.”

According to figures presented on CodeCanyon, YouTubify has been sold 310 times on that platform alone, which raises the possibility of there being hundreds of YouTubify ‘clone’ sites on the Internet today, Wefre being just one of them.

Indeed, further investigation revealed dozens of similar sites, all with their own style of presentation and color schemes and little addons here and there. But the fact remains that every single one was borne from exactly the same script costing just $38.00.

Aside from the fact that the script makes streaming site ownership so easy (potential legal issues aside, of course), for casual users there’s also the opportunity to look behind the scenes.

CodeCanyon provides a live demo of the platform in action and those logging in with the username: ‘admin@admin.com’ and the password: ‘admin’ can check out what it’s like to operate one of these sites from the inside.

While the admin panel could do with some tidying up, it looks very straightforward to use and even provides the user with an opportunity to monetize their site by injecting ads. However, there’s no getting away from the fact that this is the ‘coding’ equivalent of painting by numbers and is unlikely to bring any long-term reward for the experienced site operator.

But if instant music site ownership isn’t your thing, there other options too. The author of YouTubify also has some other products up his sleeve, a few of which are clearly aimed at the file-sharing market.

There’s BeDrive – a script while allows users to create their own file-sharing and cloud storage site “in minutes with no coding knowledge.”

Also available is MTDb, a similar script which in conjunction with another plug-in allows the creation of a “fully functional” movies and TV show streaming site. We haven’t tested it but that sounds like a pretty big claim. (demo here).

These products do appear interesting at first view but whether they will encourage innovation will remain to be seen. It has to be noted though that most private trackers started off life as a pre-made script but were then developed by their owners into something unique and in many cases extremely powerful.

This doesn’t feel like that kind of scenario to be honest, but stranger things have happened.

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

Mitte März 2016 kommen ein neues iPhone und ein neues iPad auf den Markt. Beide Produkte sollten laut einem Bericht nur wenige Tage nach der Präsentation verfügbar sein. Das wäre eine grundlegende Änderung von Apples bisheriger Strategie. (iPhone, Smartphone)

Apple tauscht bestimmte USB-Typ-C-Ladekabel aus, weil diese Probleme machen können. Ein Konstruktionsfehler im Kabel sorgt dafür, dass der Akku in einem Macbook nicht oder nur gelegentlich geladen wird. (Apple, Mobil)