‘Depraved’ City Builder on Steam Features ‘Pirate Hat’ DRM
For as long as computer software has existed in commerical form, pirates have been keen to reap the benefits without handing over cash. This is particularly true for video games which have been enthusiastically copied for several decades no matter whether they’ve been made available on tape, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs or digital downloads. Stopping pirates is no easy task although that doesn’t stop companies from trying....
U.S. Wraps Up Criminal Prosecution of Pirate App Store Operators
During the summer of 2012, the FBI took down Appbucket, Applanet, and SnappzMarket, some of the largest pirate app stores at the time. In the years that followed several people connected to the Android app sites were arrested and indicted, resulting in prison sentences for some. Aside from the initial announcement, the cases have been handled relatively quietly by the US Government. We can report, however, that after six years all...
After Five Years of Blocking Sites, Russia’s No Closer to Beating Piracy
For reasons best known to rightsholders internationally, site-blocking is now one of the most favored anti-piracy mechanisms. Five years ago, Russia decided that it too would join the movement, hoping to put a dent in rampant online sharing of copyrighted content. August 1, 2013, new legislation came into force which allowed rightsholders to block video content that had been posted online illegally. A year later, the same protections...
NASA open sources its Mars rover, Rome adopts LibreOffice, and more news
In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at NASA’s open source mars rover, Rome’s latest open source efforts, two new research projects, and more. NASA open sources design for a Martian rover Do you want to build your own Mars rover? Of course you do! And now you can, thanks to NASA’s JPL Open Source Rover (OSR for short). read...
Top 10 July must-reads: Killer tools and practical guides for admins, Skype alternatives, Slackware turns 25, and more
Opensource.com brought in 776,198 unique visitors who generated 1,253,209 page views in July, a 22% year over year increase. We published 85 articles in July, and welcomed 14 new authors. More than 56% of our content was contributed by members of the open source community, and our community moderators contributed 22 articles. read...
