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Even having an IP address is playing the lottery every day with these guys. https://torrentfreak.com/the-p...

I am not involved in anything dodgy, but I keep a set of very clean social media accounts just for purposes of job interview, security checks and because some people I really don't want to interact with and the best way to avoid them is just give them my "clean" social media identity which I almost never use. update them maybe once every few months.

  why do it? well I like to have open and honest discussions with friends as well as joke around and I want to do that without having to be concerned that something politically incorrect said or posted by me or a friend is taken out of context or used against me at a later date. Once it is posted under your name it is near impossible to remove it.

It's cute the way you think a database like the one possessed by Facebook (or anything remotely similar) can't be used to prove that the same person created both accounts. That too could be used against you at a later date, by openly linking what you thought were separate accounts instead of merely covertly linking them like what they do today.

If you are truly dedicated to the kind of hardcore opsec it would take to never form such correlations, bearing in mind that a single innocent mistake you made years ago is all it would take, that "mistake" tends to include "used the same computer and/or IP address even once", well, then you likely would value security more than using social media in the first place.

While it's rather basic, you may find this interesting. Bear in mind that these are criminal charges. The standard of proof to link two social media accounts is even lower.

It's a classic example of methodological incompetence. Got your popcorn? Let's start the show.

Their dependent variable is piracy rates (between 0 and 100) as published by the BSA. Not one word about measurement uncertainty in those data. Remember how the MPAA and the BSA used to estimate sales losses due to piracy? That's right: list_price x (penetration_fraction x population of PC's - license sold). I kid you not. And they calmly rely on piracy data from those sources.

Then their explanatory variable: the so-called IQ measure. They cite the "seminal" work of Lyn,R. VanHaanen, T ()

Unfortunately for the authors of the latest "correlation paper", the work of Lyn and VanHaanen is anything but uncontroversial. I quote from one of the Lyn and VanHaanenpapers:

First, we believe that these estab- lish beyond reasonable doubt the validity of our national IQ. This was initially disputed by a number of critics. For in- stance, Ervik (2003, pp. 405â"6) asked âoeare people in rich countries smarter than those in poorer countries?â and con- cluded that âoethe authors fail to present convincing evidence and appear to jump to conclusions.â Nechyba (2004, p. 1178) wrote of the âoerelatively weak statistical evidence and dubious presumptions.â Barnett and Williams (2004, p.) rejected our national IQ as âoevirtually meaninglessâ; Volken (2003, p. 411) described them as âoehighly deficientâ; and Hunt and Sternberg (2006, pp. 133, 136) rejected them as âoetechnically inadequate⦠and meaninglessâ. The answer to these criticisms is that our national IQs are validated by their high correlations with scores in tests of mathematics, science and reading, as shown in Table 1, and also with the numerous other economic and social phenom- ena documented in subsequent tables. These high correla- tions would not be present if our national IQs were meaningless.

Gettit? The fact that there are high correlations "proves" the validity of their inference that there are meaningful relationships. Did they go to Trump University or what?

In this vein I especially like the high correlation (see http://www.tylervigen.com/spur... ) between per-capita cheese consumption and people who died by becoming entangled in their bedsheets.

I wonder if the authors thought to control for that.

As far as serious research is concerned, this is the end of the line, but lets go on and have a look at their model, shall we?

They model the value of a fraction through a straightforward regression model: SP_i = \alpha + \beta IQ_i + \lambda X_i + \epsilon_i

Oops, and there we have the little matter of using straightforward regression to model a fraaaaction, instead of something like logistic regression. For those who don't immediately spot the problem, see e.g. here: http://www.theanalysisfactor.c...

Ordinary linear models are simply unsuitable to model fractions. A point that's common knowledge with statisticians, but one that's apparently lost on the authors (and the authors on which they base their work).

Right, lets continue and look at the graph they show with their regression line. Each country counts as one (China has the same weight as the e.g. Senegal and the US has the same weight as the Comores. Look ma, no weights! Sounds good eh? When you look at their graph, China shows up as one serious outlier with an "IQ" score of about 110 and a "piracy" score of about 80%. Only 1 bln people up there. Close by, in the bottom-right corner of their graph is the good ole US of A, weighing in at about 270 mln people, with almost the same score

It's a classic example of methodological incompetence. Got your popcorn? Let's start the show.

Their dependent variable is piracy rates (between 0 and 100) as published by the BSA. Not one word about measurement uncertainty in those data. Remember how the MPAA and the BSA used to estimate sales losses due to piracy? That's right: list_price x (penetration_fraction x population of PC's - license sold). I kid you not. And they calmly rely on piracy data from those sources.

Then their explanatory variable: the so-called IQ measure. They cite the "seminal" work of Lyn,R. VanHaanen, T ()

Unfortunately for the authors of the latest "correlation paper", the work of Lyn and VanHaanen is anything but uncontroversial. I quote from one of the Lyn and VanHaanenpapers:

First, we believe that these estab- lish beyond reasonable doubt the validity of our national IQ. This was initially disputed by a number of critics. For in- stance, Ervik (2003, pp. 405â"6) asked âoeare people in rich countries smarter than those in poorer countries?â and con- cluded that âoethe authors fail to present convincing evidence and appear to jump to conclusions.â Nechyba (2004, p. 1178) wrote of the âoerelatively weak statistical evidence and dubious presumptions.â Barnett and Williams (2004, p.) rejected our national IQ as âoevirtually meaninglessâ; Volken (2003, p. 411) described them as âoehighly deficientâ; and Hunt and Sternberg (2006, pp. 133, 136) rejected them as âoetechnically inadequate⦠and meaninglessâ. The answer to these criticisms is that our national IQs are validated by their high correlations with scores in tests of mathematics, science and reading, as shown in Table 1, and also with the numerous other economic and social phenom- ena documented in subsequent tables. These high correla- tions would not be present if our national IQs were meaningless.

Is there evidence that the US government has used TLD control to shut people up at will? That would be a compelling argument.

Yes, Homeland security took 84000 .org TLDs down by mistake under the Pro-IP act.

The key emphasis is original content. Most YouTube content creators aren't creating original content, but using someone else's copyrighted content, slapping some commentary on it, and calling it fair use. And later scream bloody murder when the copyright owner dings them. You want to make money on YouTube, do it the hard way with original content.

IANAL, but from my understanding of fair use, depending on the amount of commentary, it could very well be fair use. Besides, the current system is that it is nearly impossible to get fair use protections even on things that are very solidly fair use, or even original work from years before the work it is supposedly infringing upon.

After finding that link, I realize that you are probably just mad that people are making probably bogus fair use claims, but it comes across as, "Never, ever, ever make use that goes under fair use: only original work is creative", which is a view that few /.ers can tolerate.

If you read the defense's legal filing, it sounds as if the plaintiff was negotiating with the defense's lawyer for the polygraphy, the defense asked for 14 days and only got 7. When the defense agreed to the polygraph on the condition the plantiff pays for it, plaintiff immediately files for entry of default judgement.

Plaintiff also is accused of making bad faith verbal promises that they reneged on that they would dismiss the case if he tool the polygraph. That is why further filings weren't made initially as timely as they could have been.

If you read the whole thing, previous case law would seem like the defendant likely will get the default judgement set aside. Courts rather get things right and hear a case rather than just give the case to one side without good cause.

This is a complete media beat up about Australians pirating GOT more than any country. The source of the information https://torrentfreak.com/game-... quoted its statistics after collecting only HALF A DAY'S worth of data - ie. while Australia was awake and the rest of the English speaking world asleep. The exact same controversy happened last year, with the exact same source and statistical integrity.

Was already reported on TF https://torrentfreak.com/micro... last month.

From the TorrentFreak article:

Additionally, KeRanger appears to still be under active development and it seems the malware is also attempting to encrypt Time Machine backup files to prevent victims from recovering their back-up data.

Let's see... FBI takes over Onion servers, supposedly paid universities for "research", managed to find the operator to silk road 2.0, and managed a rather large bust of criminals. Then you've got the issue of "fake tor clients"... Seems to me that considering tor (be it with a VPN before or after) is really irrelevant and that the underlying technology of tor has just been under attack for two long and needs to be replaced.

LMGTFY: https://torrentfreak.com/kanye...

Said judge revoked their safe harbor

https://torrentfreak.com/cox-h...

I don't know what's really behind the appointment of this guy, but, this is interesting that he owns a torrent site, and is against web-blocking for being piracy, cited the current bad situation of the economy.

I don't know what's really behind the appointment of this guy, but, this is interesting that he owns a torrent site, and is against web-blocking for being piracy, cited the current bad situation of the economy.

Right next to the title https://torrentfreak.com/googl...

Hopefully they will go back to putting links in the summary shortly.

Its the same logic used when a murderer often gets 2-3 years and someone who committed copyright infringement can get 7 years.

https://torrentfreak.com/87-mo...

Yeah, otherwise known as a "software patent". It's worth clarifying what a software patent is not, the better to understand what it is and why it's so pernicious and why they're banned (yes, they are) in the EU and pretty much everywhere else in the world except AU. and JP.

Software patents are not patents on specific ways for causing a machine to perform a useful function. That type of IP is the IP we call "copyright". Copyright does prevent your code, your (virtual) machine, from being ripped off.

So with copyright you're not issued a patent on the concept of any wheel, you're issued a patent on your wheel's unique and specific implementation. If you stop and think about it, it's a really amazing how well copyright serves as the natural vehicle for IP in the computer industry. You cannot just steal another person's original work. Stealing includes *near copying with just a few things changed*. You have to find a relatively original way to achieve the same effect, but the *idea* of what you're doing is not patentable. Copyright naturally delivers all that to computer IP.

Software patents are patents on all ways to cause a machine to perform a generally describable function. It's not the specific implementation performing the useful function that is being protected- it's the ability to achieve the same ends in any way whatsoever.

So like the RIM patent debacle, this patent covers things unbelievably abstract and covers things like this:

http://torrentfreak.com/images...

For people who don't follow links, it's a picture of little labeled boxes representing computers, with arrows being drawn between the little boxes to signify what info gets passed between what computers and when. That's what they're patenting. That's what the patent in the 750 million dollar RIM/NTP case did- took THIS info out of a data base NOW and sent it to THAT computer who did THIS with that info.

That's right folks, we are patenting flowcharts. Read it and weep-

https://www.scribd.com/doc/294...

This is exactly why in the EU computer-related inventions must control some physical, industrial process and then only that physical industrial process is patented, not the code which drives it. Otherwise you're patenting processes defined by flowcharts. You're patenting results. You're patenting ideas.

We know for a fact we don't need these patents for software to progress and for companies to becomes powerful, even monopolistically so, since prior to 1987-1990 or so very few software patents were permitted. Yet we had the invention of EVERYTHING and we had gigantic corporations reaping huge profits also.

This is about regulatory capture and the corporate coffers it fills (with what would have otherwise been your money).

https://news.vice.com/article/...

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Interestingly Kim Dotcom was creating his own much fairer music service/label before the seizure of the servers etc in January 2012.

Here is the best article I could find on google about it and the MegaUpload song takedown on YouTube.

There were questions about whether this was the real reason the takedown happened. For anyone who doesn't remember.

as they recently sent out DMCA takedown notice to Twitter and Facebook for a picture taken of a store-bought Star Wars action figure... https://torrentfreak.com/lucas...

While 14496-2 has been used for some time, the use of MP4 is relatively new

We could always ban computers since crime is worse if its done with a computer than in person.

That would help right?
https://torrentfreak.com/is-ru...
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

Them computers be evil!

Should go for Tony Krvaric

He is already an established politician and have some first hand experience with copyright infringement.

Some other AC wrote some time ago:
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

Out of all the people who responded to my comment here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

I'll respond here. Really, this shit should be put on the front page of Slashdot maybe some old school readers would actually be interested.

That link hairyfeet added above is the last piece of the puzzle. The Czech guy checked here http://localghost.org/posts/a-...

In that article is this:

Information transmitted

All text typed on the keyboard is stored in temporary files, and sent (once per 30 mins) to:

oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com

Ok so you look for whois nsatc.net

NSATC.NET - Domain Informationnew
Domain NSATC.NET [ Site Info Traceroute RBL/DNSBL lookup ]
Registrar MARKMONITOR INC. MarkMonitor, Inc.
Registrar URL http://www.markmonitor.com/
Whois server whois.markmonitor.com
Created 27-Sep-2001
Updated 01-Dec-2014
Expires 27-Sep-2015
Time Left 30 days 0 hours 4 minutes
Status clientDeleteProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clien... clientTransferProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clien... clientUpdateProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clien... clientUpdateProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited) clientTransferProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited) clientDeleteProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited)
DNS servers A.NS.NSATC.NET 199.93.44.45
B.NS.NSATC.NET 8.12.212.49
C.NS.NSATC.NET 64.152.2.44
D.NS.NSATC.NET 205.128.93.51
E.NS.NSATC.NET 212.187.162.134
G.NS.NSATC.NET 205.128.88.25
L.NS.NSATC.NET 8.255.48.47
g.ns.nsatc.net 205.128.88.25
e.ns.nsatc.net 212.187.162.134
d.ns.nsatc.net 205.128.93.51
a.ns.nsatc.net 199.93.44.45
b.ns.nsatc.net 8.12.212.49
l.ns.nsatc.net 8.255.48.47
c.ns.nsatc.net 64.152.2.44

Now who is MarkMonitor, Inc?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.popsci.com/technolo...
https://torrentfreak.com/torre...

Ok so what happened? Microsoft took consumers money for decades of virus-laden shitware. Botnets, anti-virus suites, ransomware, all that shit.... you bought it hook line and sinker. They profited. Now they used the money consumers gave them to hire career lawyers. World gov's said hey, what the fuck? Anti-trust, etc.. then they started fuckin.

You will want to uninstall your Windows 10 "The Spyware of all Spywares Edition" because the only anti-virus that will work is Linux or other *nix.

If you installed Windows 10 because of lies about being free, or DX12, your homework is:
https://www.google.com/#q=roll...

You have 30 days after you took the spyware upgrade to roll back or it self-deletes the backup files.

You may or may not decide to keep any Windows at all... but you won't want any new ones. Microsoft surely should by fried for this gig, but they used consumer money to buy lawyers so you can see how they do shit. You can't buy a ticket to the Resurrection according to Tony Montana in Scarface.

distrowatch.com
KDE on Linux for anything that's not a Windows game.

There was that case where researchers were able to use some manner of spoofing to attract DMCA complaints claiming that their networked printer was engaging in file-sharing. There's a TorrentFreak article about it here which links to the PDF of the paper they published.

A textbook case as to why anyone that issues a DMCA take down should be held liable. Probably a good case for regulation of DMCA and paying a fee to issue a DMCA take down.

Liable to whom? It's their own material they're taking down, the only wronged party I can think of is Google who had to go through the pain of a pointless DMCA request.

This is one of the more comical cases that demonstrates how random DMCA takedowns are, but if you want a textbook case use the takedown of an independent film from 2006.

From section three:

---
(v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

'(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
---

The perjury part applies only to (vi) - that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder and that the contents of the claim are accurate. The actual infringement needs only a good faith belief. It's arguable if an automated enforcement system can really be called that, as the use of fully automated takedown bots was not envisioned when the legislation was created, but I have never heard of any prosecution for that, and I can't find any with a bit of googling

The DMCA makes it clearly illegal to knowingly submit a false DMCA claim, but there is no offense committed for submitting false complaints due to incompetence, haste or cost-cutting. This is not just my own uneducated reading: It's the defense used by some major copyright holders who have committed exactly the same overzealous errors in the past: https://torrentfreak.com/warne...
The judge in that case never decided if that defense was valid, as the parties reached a settlement.

Facebook and Twitter as well -- internally, but they do use it.

Facebook and Twitter as well -- internally, but they do use it.

It was certainly an exclusive. In fact, Mega has defended itself just some minutes ago, by tweeting a reference to this article: https://torrentfreak.com/kim-d...

'Aside from Furious 7, the same notice targets “copyright infringing” links to the movie Hacker. Here, the movie studio also made an unfortunate mistake asking Google to remove a news article from Techdirt, covering the Hacking Team leak.'

"And while we’re on the topic of self censorship, it’s worth noting that Universal Pictures also asked Google, in a separate notice, to remove127.0.0.1 from the search results. ref

As long as you can get a court to agree with you you can ...

Apparently the argument was essentially that the UK law breaks the EU Copyright Directive, which the UK has signed up to: Record biz wants to tax Brits for copying their own music (linked from the main article). I'd guess the problem is the EU Copyright Directive (and the UK agreeing to it), rather than the UK courts.

> Thank you, pirates. You got your freebies, but you destroyed everything in the process and killed the music industry as a whole.

Gee, let's conveniently ignore the facts:

* http://www.bbc.com/news/techno... or http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...
* https://torrentfreak.com/bitto...
* http://business.time.com/2013/...

All the numbers relating piracy to lost sales are complete imaginary and bullshit. There has never been a financial statement listing the dollar amount of piracy.

There are probably more, but DMCA notices against a company made by the same company are fun in that same way http://torrentfreak.com/micros...

I'm willing to bet consumption, both legitimate and illegitimate, is up; so I wonder how much damage this "rise in piracy" is actually doing.

Quite a bit less than the whiny "we want to be last to market" bitches that keep suing their customers and otherwise treat them like crap. If you ignore the paid-for "studies" the effect is actually net positive. You have to remember that these are intangible "culture goods" that gain value with sharing.

That is, such goods make more money for the owners if more people have access to them. It's no secret that "airplay" is the be-all end-all for artists on radio and tv. Yet the focus of the big content cartel is on tightly controlling the material.

The late owner of Baen Books did the reverse, giving away for free a number of electronic books, calling it a license to print money.

IOW, if you ignore their own propaganda, the available sources, studies, and indications paint the sharing-decriers a bunch of doodie-heads.

If I was a publisher I'd be far more worried that this incentivises me to read older, public domain books.

Well, there's one reason why copyrights get extended every time the mouse threatens to become public domain. In fact, eg. google books considers re-issues of old, even centuries old, material to come with fresh copyright so things like the Illiad in a recent publication is considered protected under current terms as if it was published yesterday.

Yet at the same time over in Europe there's various countries that have country-wide rules propping up book prices to enable retention of large back-catalogues. So you pay more for every book including new ones because, you know, retaining old books in print is otherwise not profitable, or so the narrative goes. Make of that what you will.

EZTV was taken over by scammers so careful what you download from there
http://torrentfreak.com/eztv-s...

The district judge's order in this case was littered with star trek references. Here's one three-line example:

"Third, though Plaintiffs boldly probe the outskirts of law, the only enterprise they resemble is RICO. The federal agency eleven decks up is familiar with their prime directive and will gladly refit them for their next voyage."

That's 5 references in 2 sentences.

We really have a sitting judge who can't seem to separate their bloodlust for a TV show from their job?

What's next, a requirement for bilingual court reporters fluent in Klingon?

It wouldn't matter what criminal charges I was facing, I would be boldly laughing in the face of this moron who feels the need to go all "sci-fi" while at work, as if the Star Trek embellishments somehow helped here.

Perhaps a lawyer needs to boldly go and inform this court that they now need to waste taxpayer money translating the sci-fi bullshit presented as a legal argument. You know, for the rest of the planet that doesn't know what a Tribble is.

"Third, though Plaintiffs boldly probe the outskirts of law, the only enterprise they resemble is RICO. The federal agency eleven decks up is familiar with their prime directive and will gladly refit them for their next voyage."

That's 5 references in 2 sentences.

Apple will surely be updating shortly to close the loophole that has people installing PopcornTime on their iPhones...

Link

I'm surprised this isn't bigger news.

Basically, set up two VMs, the first only gets networking through the second, and the second is configured to run everything through TOR and TOR alone.

Now this has been made easy and "done for us" so to speak (but always, ymmv, everything has bugs, security is a mindset, etc etc etc):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

From the whonix homepage: "Whonix is an operating system focused on anonymity, privacy and security. It's based on the Tor anonymity network[1], Debian GNU/Linux[2] and security by isolation. DNS leaks are impossible, and not even malware with root privileges can find out the user's real IP. "
https://www.whonix.org/

For latest developments, here is where it's at:
https://www.whonix.org/blog/ma...
https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Qu...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q...

PS, some current "wisdom" (but check out the cutting edge above, which also more generic solutions):
https://blog.torproject.org/bl...
https://torrentfreak.com/tribl...
http://torguard.net/howtodownl...
http://www.tribler.org/
http://tor.stackexchange.com/q...
https://wiki.vuze.com/w/Tor_Ho...
http://www.howtogeek.com/76801...

Seriously, we live in abundance - enjoy :)

Everyone wanting to comment on this decision should read the TorrentFreak article - https://torrentfreak.com/under... - as it seems to have the most information. Many typical sites and blogspam make it act as though PayPal did this through its own volition, when it is really the case of the US Gov't and financial services (banks, payment processors) who put pressure on PayPal - in this case, the US Gov't is acting as the enforcer for the Entertainment industry (MPAA/RIAA etc.) , further evidence of governments being little more than tools for wealthy private interests. . This is much the same thing that happened to donations to WikiLeaks and a large amount of other advocacy and privacy related groups; despicable though it is. Its a horrid, unjust practice that shows yet that many governments, and the corporate and financial cartels that pull their puppet strings, are completely in opposition to the public good.

That said, I think it is an interesting quandary that MEGA's encryption seems to be the focal point here; I'm not sure this is the issue. After all, there are other services that are not on the end of this rebuke that offer "zero knowledge" encryption, where the user's keys are not held by the "cloud" business. For instance, SpiderOak - isn't its encryption protocol very similar to MEGAs? Both services are cloud storage providers that are homed in US and/or Five Eyes nations (so it isn't like they're being targeted for being in a non-compliant jurisdiction like Switzerland, the Seychelles, Hong Kong etc.), have client-side exclusive encryption/decryption purportedly, so any encrypted files server side should in theory not be accessible, while neither of them are completely Free Software, both offer some open source (it seems that SpiderOak has been more transparent than MEGA from my inspection). ? If anyone knows of detailed technical reasons why one would be more secure/private than the other, I'd be interested to know, but they both seem to have similar status.

So why go after MEGA and leave SpiderOak alone? I think the reason here is purely political, not encryption related. For instance, if you look at the document that prompted this, it is regarding "evil, evil piracy cyber-locker" services. You won't see Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft, Box, or SpiderOak listed. Why? because these are the "good guys", made for individual back up and syncing. Sure, they may have some sharing features, affiliates, and may or may not offer anonymity/guest services but this isn't their focus. On the other hand there are the "sleasy file locker types", RapidShare, FileGator, Netload, and hundreds of others...including Kim Dotcom's now defunct MegaUpload - one of the largest of its type during its reign. These services are, rightly and wrongly depending on particular services, characterized as for facilitating piracy and having monetization strategies that are often sleazy, such as pay-per-download/upload, reselling of premium accounts, click through, spam, and even porn and malware ad networks set up as gateways. This is probably the crux of the issue.

  As the Torrent Freak article notes, MEGA is listed next to a bunch of these file-locker services. This is likely not because of its encryption or other technical features, but because of its name/marketing/history of" Mega Upload" that came before, regardless of how different the current MEGA site may be. This is even more likely because the one who comprised the report that caused the gov't to act - "Digital Citizens Alliance and Netnames" - are already heavily biased towards anything that in their eyes, enables piracy and/or any of the other behaviors online that threaten the hegemony of their masters. Thus, those "legit" appearing "cloud sites" are the good guys, where the "evil piracy producing file lockers" are the bad guys, and because of MEGA's links, no matter how tenuous, they've been improperly dropped into the second category.

Not really sure that any extensions that I install are particularly "useful". However, here's a list of tools that I find especially useful that have to do with web browsing.

• Fiddler (now Fiddler4). Still a solid debugging proxy.
• PrivateInternetAccess or any other system-level VPN. Running it as a browser extension seems risky, even given the WebRTC issue with VPNs.
• On Chrome, the browser extension "Cookies", which enables reasonable cookie management when debugging.
• WGET and cURL

OK, I snuck an actual browser extension in there. But it really only enables what should be core functionality.

Uh, what about this: https://torrentfreak.com/dvd-r...

Cinavia's not really important anyway because it only blocks you if you use a Blu-Ray player for playback. All you have to do is play the the files on a computer with a FLOSS video player like mplayer or vlc and the Cinavia will be ignored.

It seems they have problems with the staff though.
More info here

Someone, like maybe torrent freak, did an exhaustive survey of seemingly EVERY VPN. They were specifically asking about what logs the company keeps and what laws govern their operation. A stunning majority of them log virtually everything you do, keep the logs for months, and are conveniently incorporated in the US. (Convenient for spying, not convenient for privacy).

OF COURSE there was absolutely no way to prove the one's that claim to be reputable aren't actually the worst of all. But it is worth at least trying.

PS Here's an updated survey.
http://torrentfreak.com/which-...

Some people are on a crusade against using the word "steal" to refer to copyright infringement, patent infringement, or trademark infringement. Larceny, copyright infringement, patent infringement, and trademark infringement are defined in separate areas of law, and they aren't even crimes under the same circumstances. A judge agreed that the term "theft" misleads jurors.

It's not always about Free Speech, sometimes it's just copyright infringement.

Go on, tell us when it's permissible for copyright infringment to trump free speech. I'll buy this argument only in the straight-up "somebody distributes copyrighted material which I own and does so without my express permission".

In particular I don't buy this argument for just about everything else, like "oh that looks like it might be our copyright so we'll issue some takedown requests, in fact we'll automate that process entirely for our convenience."

Moreso because the applicable law contains rather specific wording that seek to put the culpability for misdetermining the applicability (ie whether the claimed copyright is actually the owned copyright) on the complainer. Start with rigorously enforcing that provision, especially on the big copyright holding companies and the surrounding cottage industry, and you may start to have an argument.

If all notices are treated as a whole, making no distinction between real freedom issues and pirates abusing the system, the battle will be lost.

This implies that (you think) publishing copyright infringment takedown notices themselves are copyright infringment. What inherent right to obscurity does complaining about infringment have? Why is this different from, oh, court records, that by default are open? In fact, we can see in recent court history that many times requests for sealing are dubious at best, especially when asked for by (and too often incongruously granted to) large parties with something to hide, like the government, or large corporations. That is, lack of transparency and thereby guaranteeing lack of accountability is rather bad for the rest of us.

And if you wonder why that is bad, you may peruse this discussion of copyright and the US constitution for some roundabout enlightenment. The copyright monopoly isn't a right, it's a privilege, with a distinct goal that is not remotely equal with "making lots of money for big corporations".

ISPs now MUST share subscriber name and address and info with the complaintant.

Actually, no. They need to ask an actual judge for a warrant first.

https://torrentfreak.com/canad...

Granted it's not an SCC ruling, but given the SCC just said even the police need a warrant, I'd say it's pretty solid.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/201...

Don't ask the submitter, they clearly didnt write this articule. Its a copy paste from The original news

Anybody remember this:

The Pirate Bay 'Moves' to North Korea (Updated)
The Pirate Bay admits to North Korean hosting hoax

So before you make any accusations, you better be very very sure. Otherwise you risk another Iraq/Afghanistan/etc. disaster.