Maxim Bange

Paranoia can be high in the file-sharing world so it will come as no surprise that there are regular rumors that site X or user Y cannot be trusted. While it’s almost certain that on some sites there are staff members who don’t have the community’s best interests at heart, evidence of serious foul play is a rare occurrence.

Today, however, the owner of a file-sharing discussion forum confirmed that his site was actually a pirate honeypot, setup with the aim of gathering otherwise confidential information on uploaders, file-hosts and web companies involved in the piracy ecosystem. Adding insult to injury, that site and the admin’s services have been acquired by a U.S.-based anti-piracy company.

WDF, real name unknown, is the founder of UploaderTalk.com, a web forum designed to attract individuals who like to make money from uploading files to file-hosting sites. Part of the idea is that they join the site and interact with others with similar aims, such as representatives from file-hosting sites touting their affiliate schemes.

UploaderTalk was founded pretty much a year ago today after WDF was banned from a similar but much larger site called WJunction, probably the largest uploader/file-hosting hangout anywhere on the web.

However, WDF wasn’t any old member. After joining up to WJunction in September 2011, WDF later became a moderator then super moderator on the site, meaning that he had access to a lot of private information such as email and IP addresses. The implications for file-hosting sites and uploaders hardly need to be pointed out.

It’s not clear why WDF was eventually removed from WJunction but there was clearly some kind of falling out. Shortly after WDF’s departure around 12 months ago internal leaks of information from WJunction were published on the web, ostensibly from some kind of third party hack.

UploaderTalk reported on these leaks regularly including the November 2012 revelations by Robert King of the StopFileLockers anti-piracy campaign which claimed to contain the identities of WJunction’s owners and backers.

UT, as UploaderTalk became known, was never destined to challenge WJunction as the leading site of its kind. However, in addition to its regular readers, over the past 12 months the site gathered nearly 1,000 fully signed up members of the uploading and file-hosting community. For them today’s announcement will be an unpleasant one.

“UT is now closed. UT was set up for a number of reasons. But mostly to be a sounding board, proof of concept.[.].and to collect data,” WDF said in a statement today.

“That’s right the biggest swerve ever. I, WDF, work for the anti-piracy people! I have collected information on many of you. I collected info on file hosts, web hosts, websites.”

The official announcement from WDF confirmed what many people have suspected for some time – that WDF had been playing on both sides of the fence.

“How is it I was able to protect some sites and people? Because I was working for the other side!” WDF said.

“How is it I knew so many things? Well think about it, I suckered shitloads of you. I built a history, got the trust of some very important people in the warez scene collecting information and data all the time.”

It’s unclear what WDF intends to do with the information obtained so far but for now it has to be presumed that he will be sharing it with his new employer, NukePiracy LLC, a company registered on October 2013 in Nashville, Tennessee.

“So what happens now? I am already working with a different ID, a new persona, and still collecting data. You never know who I will be or where I will turn up. I work for Nuke Piracy now, this is very bad for anyone profiting from piracy,” WDF concludes.

Source: File-Sharing Site Was A Year-Long Pirate Honeypot

Met het online bestellen van autobanden kunnen consumenten tot zo'n 40% aan...

Voor een artikel in de Digitaalgids van januari 2014 zijn we op zoek naar computergebruikers...

Consumenten hebben nauwelijks zicht op de daadwerkelijke prijs van een ziekenhuisbehandeling....

In case there was any doubt, Microsoft's earnings report makes it clear the company is all about the enterprise. 

Microsoft's revenue from PC makers was down 7% during the quarter, which is actually better than Microsoft expected. Microsoft was expecting a 15% drop. 

The 7% drop in Windows revenue was entirely due to weakness with the consumer PC market. Microsoft said it had a 22% drop in consumer Windows revenue, while sales to enterprises was actually up 6%. 

This is a mixed bag of news, but on the whole, it seems positive. 

Microsoft reported record September quarter earnings despite the weakness in the Windows group. The quarter's revenue growth was driven by increases in cloud business, servers, and software to enterprises. 

These businesses make up a strong core for Microsoft, and show the company is in good shape for whoever takes it over once the board finds a replacement for current CEO Steve Ballmer, who is on his way out.

However, the weakness in the consumer market is a long term, looming threat. Microsoft has always been quick to point out that there is a "consumerization of IT" trend out there. This means that people are starting to use their personal devices at work.

If consumers are no longer buying Microsoft products for their homes, then in the not too distant future, they'll stop using Microsoft products at work. 

But, for now, enterprises are buying Windows. They're using Office. And Microsoft is selling servers. So, the weakness in the consumer PC market is not a killer.

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Alienware expanded its cash trade-in offer recently to include current generation consoles, allowing anyone who trades in a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 and purchases PC hardware to get up to $200, according to the company's website.

The trade-in program is currently accepting working-condition PS3s and Xbox 360 Slim models in addition to a handful of different desktop PC units and laptops.

Participants can get up to $200 for the current-gen console trade in — the full amount will be determined by entering information and getting a quote off the Alienware website — after purchasing Alienware PC hardware and presenting the receipt. After doing so, players can log on to the Alienware Trade website and enter their invoice and bank...

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iFixit has performed more of its traditional high-quality teardowns on both the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro and new 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, revealing various improvements to the components of both that enhance performance, but also unsurprisingly make both harder to manually repair.

One of the more interesting changes relative to the new 13-inch model is that Apple has apparently reversed its decision to move the 13-inch model’s battery away from the trackpad as seen in the previous generation of the laptop, instead choosing to glue the entire battery assembly into the case. This design is very similar to the battery of the original 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, which was heavily criticized by iFixit for being extremely difficult and time-consuming to remove without puncturing the cells.

13-inch Retina MacBook Pro
As Apple stated during its press event, the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro now uses faster PCIe flash storage, but is still proprietary as seen in the previous generation and does not allow for easy replacement. Other changes to the new version of the laptop include Intel’s i5 Haswell processor and Iris Graphics, the inclusion of only one fan as opposed to two in the last generation, a rearranged cabling system, and a slight update to the MagSafe 2 connector.

15-inch Retina MacBook Pro
Meanwhile, the new 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro reveals a similar internal layout to the 13-inch model, but includes higher grade components such as Intel’s i7 Haswell processor and Iris Pro graphics. The glued-in battery system and the soldered RAM as seen in the previous generation are also still included, which indicates that no improvements have been made to the accessibility of the new model.

Overall, the teardowns of both new Retina MacBook Pros otherwise yield few surprises compared to the previous models, and the similar challenges of proprietary pentalobe screws, soldered RAM, an integrated display, and glued-in battery system have led iFixit to award each of the new 13-inch and 15-inch models a repairability score of 1 out of 10. Compared to the teardowns of last year’s models, the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro has scored one point lower than the last generation, while the 15-inch MacBook Pro scored the same as the previous model.

The post Teardowns of Late 2013 Retina MacBook Pros Reveal No Improvements in Accessibility appeared first on AIVAnet.

A patch fixing a problematic save bug in Pokemon X and Y is now available for download through the Nintendo 3DS eShop, a post on NeoGAF pointed out this morning.

Polygon has verified the Pokemon X/Y 1.1 update's availability and that it requires 229 blocks of free memory. The update removes a glitch that was locking up files if players saved their game while in the outer ring of Lumiose City. The update will restore save files that have already been corrupted by the glitch.

The update also fixes a GTS bug that would cause the game to crash while attempting to trade Pokemon found through filtering methods. The patch is listed as an available update in the 3DS eShop on logging in and should auto-install itself.

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Would undo the Finnish phone firm's success in the smartphone market

Het parlement van Groenland heeft een 25-jaar oud verbod op de winning van uranium opgeheven. Het eiland in de Atlantische Oceaan wil economisch minder afhankelijker worden van voormalig kolonisator Denemarken.

Groenland wil eigenlijk andere zeldzame aardmetalen kunnen delven die gebruikt worden voor de productie van elektronische apparaten zoals smartphones. Omdat die grondstoffen in de aardbodem vaak vermengd zijn met uranium, blokkeerde het verbod op uraniumwinning de exploitatie.

Onafhankelijkheid

Op dit moment produceert China meer dan 90 procent van de metalen. Deskundigen schatten dat een mijn in het zuiden van Groenland de grootste voorraad aardmetalen buiten China is.

Groenland heeft sinds 2009 vrijwel volledig zelfbestuur, maar subsidie van voormalig kolonisator Denemarken is de belangrijkste inkomstenbron. Veel Groenlanders willen de nieuwe inkomsten gebruiken om minder afhankelijk te worden van Denemarken.

Gevolgen

Milieubeschermers zijn bang dat de winning grote negatieve gevolgen gaat hebben voor Groenland. Greenpeace wil dat Groenland wetgeving invoert over de maximaal toegestane hoeveelheid radio-actieve straling en de afvoer van afvalwater.

Microsoft has published its Q1 2014 earnings report, revealing that it made $5.24 billion in net income on $18.53 billion in revenue. Both are increases from this quarter last year, when Microsoft saw $4.47 billion in net income and $16.01 billion in revenue. "Our devices and services transformation is progressing and we are launching a wide range of compelling products and experiences this fall for both business and consumers," CEO Steve Ballmer says in a statement.

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Microsoft’s big bet on paid subscriptions for Office appears to be on the right track. While the company reported early signs of success with 1 million Office 365 Home Premium subscribers back in May, that number has now doubled to over 2 million. Subscribers pay $9.99 a month or $99.99 per year to download and install Office software on PCs and smartphones, alongside access to Microsoft's cloud services to store documents and settings.

Office 365 Home Premium sales are still a small percentage of the overall Office sales to enterprise customers and other businesses, but the transition to the cloud is going steady. It’s a key part of Microsoft’s new “devices and services” strategy to sell hardware to consumers and services on...

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Het volledig anonieme gebruik van internetdiensten maakt het bijna onmogelijk om kinderporno aan te pakken. Het maken en het gebruik van kinderporno is daardoor een "risicoloze misdaad". Dat zegt Troels Oerting, hoofd European cybercrime van de Europese politie-organisatie Europol.

Oerting wijst op het zogenoemde 'darknet' van internetdiensten en -netwerken die mensen volledig anoniem kunnen gebruiken. Criminelen gebruiken die netwerken, maar bijvoorbeeld ook activistische groepen die niet ontdekt willen worden.

Privacy

Vandaag maakte Europol de onderzoeksresultaten bekend naar de werkwijze van producenten en gebruikers van kinderporno. Steeds vaker voeren criminelen bestellingen uit van klanten. Zij 'bestellen' kinderen, bepalen welke handelingen met hen moeten worden verricht en bekijken het misbruik live via de webcam.

Volgens Oerting maakt dit de aanpak van kinderporno bijna onmogelijk: "Bij het plaatsen en terugkijken van filmpjes is vaak nog het IP-adres te achterhalen. Deze nieuwe praktijk is dus een probleem voor de politie. De daders zijn niet meer te vinden."

Oerting pleit voor een politieke discussie over de wenselijkheid van volledige anonimiteit op internet. "We accepteren nu, omwille van de privacy, dat mensen die dit soort dingen doen niet gepakt kunnen worden. Maar moeten we dat in de toekomst nog wel accepteren?"

McLaren’s base of operations for both car development and production lies a few minutes outside of Woking, an unassuming mid-sized town in the middle of the UK. The low-rise, stylish facilities appear from nowhere, and as I sit inside a company car, waiting to get waved through one of many security checkpoints, it dawns on me that the entire complex looks like a work of science fiction. The combination of keycards, white anonymous corridors and multiple lifts that follow add to the top-secret atmosphere. Imagine somewhere between Portal and Men In Black and you’re about there. There’s a “no cameras inside” rule, as development for future cars, not to mention continuous improvements to its F1 race cars, are progressing in rooms nearby.

Following a protracted series of teasers, leaks and its eventual official reveal last year, it’s the company’s P1 that I’m here to take a closer look at (with or without a camera). McLaren is pitching its “hypercar” as a step above your typical supercar, with an unprecedented focus on engineering, design, materials and black carbon-fiber paneling so tight you could see the car’s veins, if it had any. When you see the vehicle in real life, those black accents on the doors and bumper are made even more eye-catching by the signature McLaren yellow that surrounds them.

That muscular body also encases the company’s new petrol-electric V8 engine, one that’s capable of running on charge alone. The P1 is one of several high-end, high-performance supercars that are going hybrid, and its electric motor is integrated to the primary motor to augment the overall driving performance. It should drive better because it’s a hybrid, not despite it. If you factor in the tech drip-down from McLaren’s Formula One arm, encompassing the car’s structure, design, brakes and engine, you start to see exactly what McLaren’s offering for that $1.3 million price tag. %Gallery-slideshow47737%

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The post Making ‘the best driver’s car in the world’: A closer look at McLaren’s P1 hypercar appeared first on AIVAnet.

Bad though it has been, the AIDS epidemic would have been a great deal worse but for a strange and unexplained quirk.

Infected mothers, it was feared, would transmit HIV, the AIDS-causing virus, to their children when suckling them. 

Mothers' milk carries the virus, and suckling may last two years--which is plenty of time for transmission to happen. And indeed it does, but not nearly as often as was originally suspected. 

Less than 10% of infants suckled by untreated infected mothers (those not on antiretroviral drugs, which suppress the virus's reproduction) pick up HIV.

Why that should be has remained mysterious. But Genevieve Fouda of Duke University, in North Carolina, and her colleagues think they have the answer. 

If they are right, many children have been spared AIDS by a fluke--but a fluke that could be used to develop a new weapon to attack it.

Clearly, something in milk disables HIV. Previous experiments had identified proteins that do this to a certain extent, but nowhere near enough to explain all the data. Those earlier searches must therefore have missed something crucial. Dr Fouda, as she describes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, set out to find what it was.

Milk is a complex mixture of chemicals, so her problem was how to isolate one of them without knowing in advance which was responsible. That meant running raw milk through a series of processes, each of which divided it into smaller and smaller fractions, and testing each fraction for its HIV-neutralising quality on the way. That quality, it turns out, is concentrated in a single protein called tenascin-C. Further experiments showed that this protein disables HIV by locking onto a protein on the virus's surface, and that it is as effective at doing so as antibodies generated by the immune system for that specific purpose.

This was a surprise, because tenascin-C is not an antibody, nor had it been suspected of having any antiviral function. Its known jobs are to help the development of the fetal brain and to assist in wound healing. That it is also the right shape to attach itself to HIV's envelope protein seems a complete coincidence--which, indeed, it must be because AIDS is such a recent disease that evolution could not have had time to throw up a novel (and also ubiquitous) anti-HIV protein of this sort.

Whether tenascin-C, or something derived from it, can be deployed against HIV by doctors, rather than just by nature, remains to be seen. As far as possible, infected mothers are now given antiretroviral drugs--both for their own health and for the health of their suckling infants--so Dr Fouda's discovery will probably not affect them directly.

For the wider campaign against AIDS, however, it could be of great importance. The generals running that campaign are now shifting their approach from defence to attack, and are talking of ways to bring about an AIDS-free world. For them, a natural human protein that neutralises the virus will be interesting indeed.

Click here to subscribe to The Economist.

SEE ALSO: This Simple Sitting Test Could Predict How Long You'll Live

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Josh Sundquist is a paralympic skier and motivational speaker who likes to have some fun with his Halloween costumes.

"In every waking moment I'm on the lookout for amputee-related humor, including funny shapes that I can make with my unusually shaped body," he said in an email to Business Insider. 

Creating this year's flamingo costume was no easy feat.

"I practiced for months, but we still had to take hundreds of photos to get the position just right," he said.  

Sundquist was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer when he was nine, and the chemotherapy treatments he went through changed his life forever. His left leg had to be amputated, but he was declared cured of the disease by the time he was 13. He took up skiing soon after and competed in the 2006 Paralympics in Turino, Italy.  

Now, Sundquist travels across the country to give motivational speeches. He wrote a best-selling book about his experiences called "Just Don't Fall," and his comedic YouTube videos have an active following. 

"I think every amputee has to go on a personal journey to learn how to cope with being different. For me, I used to wear a prosthesis and be so afraid people would find out I was missing a leg," he said. "Now I've embraced what I look like and who I am. I even call attention to it with these costumes."

Sundquist has had some clever Halloween getups in the past. Last year, he donned fishnet stockings to dress up as the leg lamp from "A Christmas Story," and in 2010 he was a gingerbread man whose leg had been eaten. 

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One of every four words you say or write is probably one of these: "the," "be," "to," "of," "and," "a," "in," "that," "have," and "I."

Those ten words, listed in order of frequency, comprise around 25% of the recorded English language, according to an ambitious project at Oxford University.

The project, called the Oxford English Corpus, is a growing database of examples from 21st-century English, ranging from literature and scientific journals to emails. The Corpus contains more than two billion instances of words, called "tokens."

"A type is a unique string of letters, regardless of how often it is used.  A token is a single occurrence of a type. The sentence 'the cat sat on the mat' contains six tokens but five types, because there are two occurrences of the type 'the,'" Professor Patrick Hanks, former editor of English dictionaries at the Oxford University Press, told Business Insider. 

The Corpus hit two billion tokens in 2010. Lexicographers then deduced the ten words that appear the most. But a Harvard professor named George Kingsley Zipf had already predicted the result back in 1935.

 "The weak version of Zipf's Law says that words are not evenly distributed across texts; instead, there are a few words that are very common and a very large number of words that are very rare. And there is a neat curve linking the two extremes. Useful words such as 'useful' and 'curve' are quite low on the curve; boring words like 'thing,' 'go,' 'say,' 'give' and 'take' are quite high on the curve," Hanks said.

Hanks doesn't mean "neat" as a outdated form of "cool," either. He means orderly, organized, statistically beautiful.

The ten aforementioned words comprise about 25% of our language. Going further, the top 100 words comprise about 50% of our language, while 50,000 words comprise 95% of our language. To account for the last 5%, we need a vocabulary of more than a million words.

To test the theory, I counted the number of times each of the ten words appears in this article — 98 out of 391. Thus, "the," "be," "to," "of," "and," "a," "in," "that," "have," and "I" make up about 25.06% of this article. Right on the money.

If we consider "content words" (words with tangible meaning) instead of "function words," the top ten list changes to include: "time," "person," "year," "way," "day," "thing," "man," "world," "life," and "hand."

SEE ALSO: 9 Words With Totally Unexpected Origins

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With a variety of manufacturers and service providers bringing new offerings to the market, Smart Home Heating appears to be creating a buzz here in the UK. The post EvoHome From Honeywell Brings Smart Control to Home Heating appeared first on We Got Served.

The mother of American Kenneth Bae, jailed by North Korea, says his health has improved but fears he will be returned to a labour camp.

Greenland gives UK-based London Mining a 30-year licence to build and operate an iron ore mine, employing up to 3,000 mainly Chinese workers.

Archaeologists in Peru find two mummies thought to be more than 1,000 years old at an ancient burial site in a suburb of the capital, Lima.

Visitors are in a compromised position

British police have seized a 3D printer and components "suspected to be a 3D plastic magazine and trigger." Police made what they're calling a "milestone" discovery when executing a number of warrants in the Manchester suburb of Baguley late last night. The Greater Manchester Police says it's the first seizure of this kind in the UK, where personal firearms are illegal. The parts have been sent for forensic analysis to establish if they could be used to construct a genuine firearm, and a man has been arrested "on suspicion of making gunpowder."

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Bij zijn eerste rapport na de reorganisatie slaagt Microsoft met vlag en wimpel. Winst tijdens de pc-krimp komt uit de cloud.

The U.S. monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders, according to a National Security Agency document provided by its former contractor, Edward Snowden, according to The Guardian newspaper.

Horror icon Clive Barker is writing the script for a new Hellraiser movie. The English author and director took to Facebook to confirm that his pitch for a reboot of 1987's original Hellraiser was successful and that the resulting film would be "darker and richer" than the first.

The only confirmed role is Cenobite antagonist Pinhead, who'll be played — once again — by the character's longtime actor, Doug Bradley. Barker has yet to specify exactly how the movie will be different, but said that it won't be "awash with CGI," and that he remained "as passionate about the power of practical makeup effects" as he was in 1987.

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Is Wikipedia in decline? At Technology Review, Tom Simonite says the site's base of editors has been declining since 2007, when it peaked at 51,000 — this summer, it was at 31,000. As the project has grown, so has the bureaucracy, and Wikipedia is almost uniformly seen as unwelcoming to new editors. Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardner has undertaken a project to make the interface, and by extension the site, less intimidating, but some core users resent what they see as a patronizing attitude. And is the decline in editors is actually hurting Wikipedia? Gardner and others have pointed to underwritten articles about women or places outside Europe and North America, but cutting through bureaucracy and attracting new members has...

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Bill passes through House of Lords without comment

Raises $225m in funding to boost mobile services

De politie heeft vier mannen opgepakt die honderden frauduleuze overboekingen op bankrekeningen van rekeninghouders uitgevoerd zouden hebben via de zogeheten TorRAT-malware. Ook zijn Bitcoins in beslag genomen. De schade bedraagt mogelijk 1 miljoen euro.