German Anti-Piracy Outfit GVU Files For Bankruptcy, Despite Many Historic Victories
While the vast majority of movie and TV show piracy occurs on the Internet today, back in the mid 1980s it was VHS and Betamax tapes causing headaches for copyright holders. Desperate to rein in what then-MPAA head Jack Valenti described as the Bostom Strangler of the movie industry, the video cassette recorder (VCR) found rivals on both sides of the Atlantic. In Germany, that role fell to Gesellschaft zur Verfolgung von...
The Pirate Bay Has Made it Harder to Find Stuff
After more than a month of downtime, The Pirate Bay’s .org domain started working again recently. This was good news for the site’s millions of users, but the comeback has resulted in some frustrations as well. As previously reported, the site’s operator – also known as Winston – used the downtime to rewrite some code. While these changes appear to be minimal at first sight, the site’s usability...
Woman Who Sold Access to Pirated Books on Dropbox Handed Suspended Sentence
Regular eBooks are among the cheapest items of digital content available to buy today but due to their cost, the underground market for academic textbooks continues to thrive. Pirated textbooks are relatively easy to find on the open web and via dedicated pirate sites. However, some people are creating their own libraries in an effort to make money, offering online access to such material in exchange for a fee. Danish anti-piracy...
Simplify remote meetings with open source voice chat
For science fiction fans, it feels like video chat was a long time coming, but now it’s safe to say that a video call is indeed a great way to communicate remotely. Just as advertised by Star Trek and countless Philip K. Dick novels, the human face conveys a lot of information that the human voice doesn’t. There’s a human connection established through a video call that doesn’t quite happen with text or even...
10 ways to analyze binary files on Linux
“There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.” We work with binaries daily, yet we understand so little about them. By binaries, I mean the executable files that you run daily, right from your command line tools to full-fledged applications. Linux provides a rich set of tools that makes analyzing binaries a breeze! Whatever might be your job role, if you are working on...
