Under the UK's new Snoopers Charter (AKA the Investigatory Powers Bill), the Secretary of State will be able to order companies to introduce security vulnerabilities into their software ("backdoors") and then bind those companies over to perpetual secrecy on the matter, with punishments of up to a year in prison for speaking out, even in court. (more…)
Pagefair is an ad-blocking circumvention tool that publishers can use to track readers who've taken technological countermeasures to protect their privacy. The company has sold its service to many publishers -- including the Economist -- by deploying moral arguments about the evils of ad-blocking. (more…)
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Special guest appearance by City Face
I have a new album of music out, you should listen to it and buy it if you like it
Hovertext: I'm off to a honeymoon to convince a couple they probably aren't soulmates!
Only ten days left to get your Weiner signed!
For decades, engineer Nelson Tyler has kept the jetpack dream alive, most recently with the company Jetpack Aviation. Above, video of the company's CEO David Mayman flying the latest model, the JB-9 JetPack, over Manhattan.
Luke.stirlingThis is some grade A bullshit here. "[P]resented the woman in a degrading manner" my arse. It's that Anglo culture has some huge hang ups over female sexuality, and is totally intimidated by any reference to it. That this is presented as somehow in the interests of protecting women is vestigial thinking from Nineteenth Century Victorian sexual mores.
The U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority has banned winemaker Premier Estates' "Taste the Bush" advertisement, created by agency Saatchi Masius. According to the government agency, the phrase is understood "to be a reference to oral sex, particularly given that it was accompanied with the image of the wine glass positioned directly in front of the woman's crotch" and that the "ad presented the woman in a degrading manner."
Of course, the value of the ad's earned media, aka free publicity, has far exceeded anything Premier Estates could have paid for.
ASA Ruling on Budge Brands Ltd t/a Premier Estates Wine (via Huffington Post)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmcGwBjL7W0
New comic!
I tend to not like having people over in my cave. My partners, of course, and a handful of close friends, but this will never be a space we can throw parties in or anything.
Anyways, the first 3 panels of this are accurate. But it turns out there’s at least 3 people I like enough…
As previously reported, huge Russian torrent site RuTracker has been having some serious legal issues with copyright holders, not least the music industry.
Labels including Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI want the tracker to stop infringing their copyrights. This, or face being blocked by Russian ISPs – for eternity.
After the filing of a lawsuit at the Moscow City Court last month, RuTracker was faced with a dilemma. On the one hand the site could delete around 320,000 torrents to comply with the labels’ wishes. On the other they could leave the content intact and face a ban.
Late last month the site polled its members and the response was clear. While 33% were prepared to delete the torrents, 67% said no way, voting in favor of accepting a blockade and then circumventing it.
At the time of writing 983,400 people have voted, all of them members for at least one month to avoid rigging. RuTracker’s operators believe this could be one of the biggest online votes in the entire history of the Russian Internet.
But RuTracker’s problems aren’t only with the music industry. Earlier, local publishing giant ‘Eksmo‘ also filed a legal complaint after content wasn’t quickly removed from the site.
So with defiance on the table the Court had a simple decision to make. Given that it agrees that RuTracker isn’t removing copyrighted content as it should, Russian law now allows for strict measures to be taken against the site. Earlier this morning that’s exactly what happened.
After repeatedly infringing Eksmo’s rights, the Moscow City Court handed down an order which instructs local ISPs to block RuTracker, forever. The site is currently still accessible in Russia and will remain so for at least the next 30 days, a period in which the site will have an opportunity to consider its options.
On the one hand RuTracker could appeal the decision, although considering the polling of its users on the music matter and the desire of the majority not to delete torrents, that seems unlikely. On the other it has a month to train its Russian users on how to access the site after a blockade, whether that’s through Tor, VPNs, proxies, or other similar tools.
Not only does the latter seem more likely, RuTracker has just made a historic move which will allow new users of the site, wherever they may be, to access it much more easily.
Previously, users needed an account to use the site, which wasn’t really a problem for those who can speak Russian. However, RuTracker has now removed the need to sign up, meaning that anyone with a browser and Google translate can easily find content in the site’s forums and download it by clicking on a link.
For now unregistered users can only download via magnet links but with users of most torrent sites already prepared with a compatible client, that’s unlikely to provide much of an obstacle.
Even more simply, RuTracker’s forums are all indexed by Google and since the titles of English language content appear in English, a “site:rutracker.org” search is an extremely easy option.
Add this to the fact that Google receives relatively few takedown requests for the domain, RuTracker could quickly gain more popularity outside Russia. That is not what the book publishers or major record companies had in mind when they pressed for a national and permanent blockade against this enduring torrent site.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
As we pick through the secret, 2,000-page treaty, we're learning an awful lot of awfulness, but this one is particularly terrible. (more…)
Digital commissioner Günther Oettinger (CDU – EPP) is joining with European Parliament president Martin Schulz (SPD – S&D) in pressing the European Commission to create a copyright interest in links, meaning that making a link to a Web-page that contains infringing material would expose you to liability for copyright infringement yourself. (more…)
The executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police has upped the ante in the ongoing feud with filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who recently said some deaths in police custody were murders.
"Tarantino has made a good living out of violence and surprise," Jim Pasco told The Hollywood Reporter. "Our offices make a living trying to stop violence, but surprise is not out of the question."
The FOP, based in Washington, D.C., consists of more than 330,000 full-time, sworn officers. According to Pasco, the surprise in question is already "in the works," and will be in addition to the standing boycott of Tarantino's films, including his upcoming movie "The Hateful Eight."
"Something is in the works, but the element of surprise is the most important element," says Pasco. "Something could happen anytime between now and [the premiere]. And a lot of it is going to be driven by Tarantino, who is nothing if not predictable.
Odd to see Tarantino's point about the police reinforced, by the police, in such hamfisted fashion. There's even a preemptive invocation of the abuser's creed: "you made us do it."
That the police are out of control and care little for the consent of the policed seems obvious. That they're so perfectly nasty and obvious about it is becoming a sick joke.
After reporting on thousands of file-sharing related stories around the globe for almost ten years, the folks here at TF have a ‘feel’ for how certain scenarios play out. With that in mind, something doesn’t feel right with the ongoing drama involving YTS / YIFY.
When sites as big as YTS get taken down by the MPAA, RIAA, or their partners around the world, these organizations usually order their PR departments to repeatedly bash the big button marked “CONGRATULATIONS TO US”. Yet for weeks following the YTS shut down there was complete silence.
Details of the multi-million dollar lawsuit supposedly filed in New Zealand are nowhere to be found either. And if one was expecting the usual “Shut down by ICE/FBI/DELTA FORCE” banner to appear on YTS.to instead of the usual YIFY movie rips, then there’s only disappointment there too.
Ok, the MPAA have this week admitted they’re behind the shutdown, but the way it’s being handled is extremely puzzling. The announcement from MPAA chief Chris Dodd was muted to say the least and the somewhat compulsory gloating at having taken down one of the world’s most important piracy sites is almost non-existent.
This is odd for a number of reasons, not least when one considers the nature and scale of the operation. YIFY / YTS released as many as five thousand copies of mainstream movies onto the Internet. Between them they were shared dozens of millions of times, at least. Over the past decade those kinds of numbers – and a lot less – have seen people jailed for up to five years in the United States and elsewhere.
Yet according to credible sources the operator of YTS – a 21-year-old who for unknown reasons isn’t even being named – has already settled his beef with the MPAA. This, despite running a site that has been repeatedly listed as a worldwide notorious market in the USTR’s Special 301 Report.
Of course, the operator of YTS isn’t in the United States, he’s in New Zealand, but geographical boundaries are rarely an issue for Hollywood. Take the drama surrounding Kim Dotcom and his former site Megaupload, for example.
Like the operator of YTS, Dotcom also lives in New Zealand. Importantly, it’s never been claimed that Dotcom uploaded anything illegal to the Internet (let alone thousands of movies) yet he was subjected to a commando-like raid on his home by dozens of armed police. He’s also facing extradition to the United States where he faces decades in jail.
Now, think of the flamboyant Dotcom what you will. Then feel relieved for the admin of YTS, who by many accounts is a thoroughly nice guy and has somehow managed to save his own skin, despite providing much of the content for global phenomenon Popcorn Time.
But then try to get a handle on how differently these two people are being treated after allegedly committing roughly the same offenses in exactly the same country. One case is still dragging on after almost four years, with tens of millions spent on lawyers and no end in sight. The other was a done deal inside four weeks.
Earlier this week TorrentFreak spoke with Kim Dotcom who told us he’d been following the YTS story in the media. Intrigued, we wanted to know – how does it feel to be raked over the coals for close to four years, have all your property seized, face extradition and decades in jail, while someone just up the road can walk away relatively unscathed from what would’ve been a slam-dunk case for the MPAA?
“It’s a double standard isn’t it?” Dotcom told TF.
“I think our case has chilled law enforcement and Hollywood against pursuing the criminal route in cases such as this. Quick civil settlements seem to be the new way to go.”
Dotcom may well be right and the fact that New Zealand already has a massive headache because of his case may well have been a factor in the decision not to make a huge example of the YTS operator. At the moment no one is talking though, and it’s entirely possible that no one ever will.
That makes a case like this all the more unsettling. Are we witnessing Hollywood’s ability to switch on a massive overseas law enforcement response in one case and then reel in the United States government in another? It’s worth saying again – YTS was a ‘notorious market’ in the eyes of the USTR yet apparently that be dealt with privately these days.
But with all that being said, it is quite possible that the U.S. government has learned lessons from its heavy-handed actions in 2012 and doesn’t want to repeat them again, least of all in New Zealand, a country whose judges must be growing tired of the Dotcom debacle.
“As the DOJ admitted the Megaupload case is a test case. The test isn’t going well for them,” Dotcom concludes.
And for that the guy behind YTS must be thanking his lucky stars.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Zoe Quinn, sometime Boing Boing and Offworld contributor and object of pants-wetting apoplexy by Gamergate's jerk-squad, has sold a memoir telling her tale of being targeted for one of the Internet's most grotesque and cowardly pile-ons, and had the film-rights snapped up by Pascal Pictures, with rumors that Scarlett Johansson will play Quinn. (more…)
In The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World published this week in Current Biology, academic researchers from the US, Canada, Qatar, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey and China report on a study of about 1,200 children from around the world in which a "robust" correlation between religious upbringing in either Christianity or Islam and a lack of altruism was demonstrated. (more…)
In the past few days there have been a flurry of stories about the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai peninsula, which investigators reportedly think may have been caused by a bomb. Notably, anonymous US officials have been leaking to journalists that they believe ISIS is involved, and it’s a perfect illustration of the US government’s rank hypocrisy when it comes to the Edward Snowden disclosures.
Log in to Facebook, create a post, and type in “Tsu.co.” Facebook will censor the link on all its platforms. That means facebook.com, as well as Messenger, Instagram, and the Facebook apps for iOS and Android.
Facebook did something a lot scarier, too. The retroactively censored over a million Facebook posts which mentioned Tsu.co. So those Facebook posts, and associated images, videos, or comments? All deleted by Facebook. Gone.
A woman holding a power drill looking confused. A woman on a beach in a skimpy bikini making a suggestive face. A woman sitting, in a wedding dress, on top of a groom, choking him. A woman with a fresh blowout and a face full of makeup doing crunches at the gym while grinning widely, clearly having the time of her life…
Frustration over how women in stock photography are portrayed has only been amplified in recent years; we've all seen The Hairpin's now-iconic photo essay Women Laughing Alone with Salad. These kinds of critiques have become commonplace as editors doing photo research for, say, a story about feminism can only find images of women in bad suits climbing ladders. But instead of waiting for stock photography companies to change their editorial policies — which some are indeed starting to do — sites like Bustle are taking matters into their own hands.
A big problem with stock art is the pervasive porn-style humor: a unfunny jokiness that seems intended to excuse what it is, but only makes it even less appropriate.
In a decision that environmental activists see as a hard-won victory, President Obama today announced he is rejecting the request from a Canadian company to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The news ends a seven-year review process that was a focal point in the debate over the Obama administration's climate policies.
Mailvelope is a browser extension that is described as the easiest way for mere mortals to send PGP-encrypted messages. Researchers at Brigham Young University brought in a group of people unfamiliar with Mailvelope and observed them try to install it and use it to send an encrypted email. Almost everyone was unable to do it. The researchers concluded that "modern PGP tools are still unusable for the masses."
From the study:
In our study of 20 participants, grouped into 10 pairs of participants who attempted to exchange encrypted email, only one pair was able to successfully complete the assigned tasks using Mailvelope. All other participants were unable to complete the assigned task in the one hour allotted to the study. This demonstrates that encrypting email with PGP, as implemented in Mailvelope, is still unusable for the masses.
Image: Wikipedia
This is wonderful. When Stoney Emshwiller was 18 years old, he filmed himself interviewing his older self. Thirty-eight years later a 56-year-old Stoney completed the interview by answering his younger self's questions. He's funded the production of a movie, called "Later That Same Life."
"Got hit while at a red light, and had my car towed. 4 weeks later I get a speeding ticket in the mail."
Syd Mead, the designer of Blade Runner, is one of my heroes. Chances are, if you’re into sci-fi and LEGO then you’ll have tried to recreate one of his famous designs – The Sulaco from Aliens, the light-cycles from Tron, or this, the Police Spinner from Blade Runner.
Tyler (aka Legohaulic) has posted a fantastic image of his updated version of this iconic vehicle. The model is pure class, with just the right level of detail and sticker use, and some custom elements working nicely on the Deckard figure. Importantly, the car looks the right scale to sit two minifigs, something other LEGO versions of this often miss.
Aside from the build itself, this was worth blogging for the photography and editing. It’s such a sharp, crisp image I had to double-check it wasn’t a render, and the glow off the lights and the puddle reflection are lovely touches.
This is a welcome return from Tyler who’s been quiet on the building front recently. Good to have him back.
