Items tagged with pirates
There’s no question that former NASA engineer Mark Rober is a gift from the geek gods, and a person that no one should EVER cross. We’ve seen his science- and tech-filled hijinks against porch pirates on multiple occasions, and now he’s going after another class of pirates – only these thieves aren’t human. We’re talking about squirrels, of course, who are known for their aerial acrobatics, devious nature, and never-ending quest to ravage bird feeders for tasty seed. Although there are a number of bird feeders on the market that are designed to be squirrel-proof, nearly all of them are no match for a wily squirrel. Rober found...
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Internet service providers (ISPs) and music labels alike are keeping a close eye on the outcome of a lawsuit BMG filed against Cox Communications. Following a week of trial hearings, BMG has asked the court to confirm that Cox failed to disprove that it's responsible for illegal sharing of copyrighted music that occurs on its network. If Cox is held responsible, it could face a fine of more than $200 million. That proposed amount takes into consideration 1,397 copyrighted songs that are part of the suit, each of which carries a maximum $150,000 in damages. All tallied, it comes to precisely $209,550,000, assuming a max penalty in each instance. BMG's lawsuit claims that tracking company Rightscorp...
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Take a look at your coworker sitting in the cubicle next to you. Is he a software pirate? Would you classify him as a nincompoop? If neither of those apply, then statistically speaking, it's you that fits into one or both of those categories. Don't go shooting the messenger, we're just paraphrasing the Business Software Alliance's annual Global Software Piracy Study. According to the BSA's study, the commercial value of PC software piracy jumped up 14 percent around the globe in 2010 to a whopping $59 billion. That's a big figure, and so the BSA wanted to find out what was going through the minds of software pirates as they made off with billions of dollars in unlicensed code. What they found...
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Ah yes, music piracy. But if your own star isn't exactly close-mouthed (pun intended) with his new tracks, what can you do? U2 has recently put the finishing touches to their first studio album in four years. Four of those songs found their way to the Internet after Bono played the songs a bit too loudly on his stereo at his villa in the south of France. A sharp-eared passerby recorded the songs and apparently posted the songs to YouTube, according to The Sun. Of course, they didn't stick around on YouTube very long. The upcoming album is called "No Line On The Horizon." While this is, of course, offbeat and funny news, it's hardly that important a leak. Assuming what's on the web is current...
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A recently published study on the DVD movie copying habits of consumers in the U.S. and U.K. finds that roughly one third of the survey respondents admit to copying commercial DVDs within the last six months. The survey was conducted by Futuresource Consulting and was sponsored by Macrovision--a company that has a vested financial stake in convincing DVD distributors that they are losing revenue by people making copies of discs.The demographic group that is most likely be a DVD copier is 18 to 24-year old males. Curiously, 36 percent of U.K. respondents admitted to copying DVDs, while only 32 percent of U.S. respondents 'fessed up. Either the Brits believe stronger in their right to copy or perhaps...
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According to a forum post at the IsoHunt website, the good folks at AMD were nice enough to hook up the admins with a pair of pre-production B3-stepping Opteron 2352 processors, what appear to be the first processors of their type to be "out in the wild". AMD's B3 stepping is supposed to fix the TLB errata affecting current quad-core Opteron and Phenom processors. But what's more interesting is that IsoHunt - a site that facilitates piracy - apparently got the processors directly from AMD to power their servers. "I'd like to thank the nice people at AMD for allowing us to have 2 pre-production engineering samples of their Opteron 2352 CPUs. These cpus have been installed in our primary...
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Microsoft has removed the requirement for WGA validation when downloading Internet Explorer 7, meaning users of pirated copies of Windows XP can now experience tabbed browsing Microsoft-style. "IE7 was released to the public nearly a year ago, but has yet to overtake its predecessor as the most used Web browser. The removal of the WGA requirement is sure to boost install numbers over IE6, and -- as Microsoft notes -- in turn protect more users from security threats on the Web." Although it continues to update IE6 for Windows XP with security fixes, the aging operating system is nearing the end of its mainstream support. In addition, IE7 includes a phishing filter that Microsoft says protects...
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Sweden has convicted its first 'pirate' since the country made the downloading of music and movie files illegal in 2005. 45-year-old Jimmy Sjostrom was charged last October with infringing upon intellectual property rights when he allowed four music files to be shared from his computer. The penalty, a fine of a whopping 20,000 Swedish crowns ($2,843), is being seen by the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) as a victory in their war against file-sharing. The verdict only concerns four songs and it costs the one sentenced about 20,000 crowns in fines -- that is 5,000 crowns per song," IFPI said in a statement. "Illegal file-sharing...
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For years people have used the internet to pirate all kinds of things, and until fairly recently the pirates rarely got in any serious trouble despite all the new anti-piracy laws passed in dozens of countries. It seems like all of that is starting to change and it's hard to go a week without hearing about some new high profile case against online pirates like this: "We recently published an article that reported the U.S. FBI busted a Chicago resident who allegedly uploaded four episodes of "24" to the Internet. Working under the online alias of ECOtotal, Romero uploaded the four episodes to LiveDigital.com, which made them available more than a week before the TV premiere. Jorge Romero...
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YouTube has been a marvelous success. That's why Google paid 1.65 billion dollars to get their hands on it. Well, Google has decided to try to identify copyrighted material on their shiny new toy, and in a very serious way: A technology designed to detect copyright material could give YouTube a needed dose of legal legitimacy and calm any concerns Google Inc. has about spending $1.65 billion on the Internet video site. But that same technology could hurt YouTube's edgy appeal. While YouTube is known as the place to find almost any kind of video clip, recent agreements with high-profile content creators require YouTube to deploy an audio-signature technology that can spot a low-quality copy...
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