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      Elon Musk publie un torrent de 318 Go et rend Grok open source

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Monday, 18 March - 08:55

    En guerre contre OpenAI et ses modèles commerciaux, Elon Musk avait promis début mars qu'il rendrait le modèle de langage derrière Grok, son chatbot, open source. Promesse tenue.

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      The World’s Oldest Active Torrent Turns 20 Years Old

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Saturday, 23 September, 2023 - 21:24 · 3 minutes

    fanimatrix In 2003, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. Dial-up connections were still the default and YouTube, Facebook, and Gmail had yet to be invented.

    There was a new technology making waves at the time. BitTorrent made it much easier for people to transfer large files, opening the door to unlimited video-sharing without restraints.

    Many people started experimenting with BitTorrent by sharing pirated films and TV shows. These files made their way all over the world and remained available as long as all pieces were shared in the swarm.

    Most of these early releases remained available for a few days or weeks, and some lasted well over a year before people lost interest. In extreme cases, some torrents have managed to survive for over a decade.

    The Fanimatrix Torrent Turns 20

    The oldest surviving torrent we have seen is a copy of the Matrix fan film “ The Fanimatrix ”. The torrent was created in September 2003 and will turn 20 years old in a few days. A truly remarkable achievement.

    The film was shot by a group of New Zealand friends. With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days.

    While shooting the film was possible with these financial constraints, finding a distribution channel proved to be a major hurdle. Free video-sharing services didn’t exist yet and server bandwidth was still very costly.

    Technically the team could host their own server, but that would cost thousands of dollars, which wasn’t an option. Luckily, however, the group’s IT guy, Sebastian Kai Frost, went looking for alternatives.

    Promising New Technology

    Frost had a bit part in the film and did some other work as well, but the true breakthrough came when he stumbled upon a new technology called BitTorrent. This appeared to be exactly what they were looking for.

    “It looked promising because it scaled such that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution,” Frost told us earlier.

    After convincing the crew that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent on September 28, 2003. He also compiled a tracker on his own Linux box and made sure everything was running correctly.

    fanimatrix-torrent

    Today, more than twenty years have passed and the torrent is still up and running with more than a hundred seeders. As far as we know, it’s the oldest active torrent on the Internet, one that deserves to be in the history books.

    A Proper Celebration for the 25th?

    Initially, there was a plan to celebrate the 20th anniversary but that hasn’t come to fruition. Some of the original cast members have fairly successful careers now and are scattered around the world, so getting the team back together is a challenge.

    Director and writer Rajneel Singh, who is still active in the film industry, would like to do something special for the 25th anniversary. Frost says that there is a plan to get the cast together to shoot and release a new clip, perhaps coupled with some fresh “Fanimatrix” merchandise.

    Whether the torrent will still be going by that time is unclear, but Frost will do everything in his power to make that happen.

    “I never expected to become the world’s oldest torrent but now it’s definitely become a thing I’d love to keep carrying on. So I’ll be keeping this active as long as I physically can,” Frost tells us.

    There were a few times that the torrent almost died but after the news broke that this was the oldest active torrent, dozens of people stepped forward to donate their bandwidth.

    “It’s really heartening seeing the community pull together around this torrent, despite its usually low transfer count, and work together to keep it alive and kicking. It warms my heart on the daily.”

    “We’re super pumped that it’s still going and that people still take an interest in it. Looking forward to the 25th and having something special to share with the world,” Frost concludes.

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      Téléchargement illégal : Google a fermé plus d’un milliard de sites pirates cette année

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · Thursday, 10 August, 2023 - 09:30

    unsplash-sergey-zolkin-158x105.jpg piratage-bot-hack-cybercriminel

    Google a supprimé plus d'un milliard de sites illégaux cette année, et la tendance s'accélère.

    Téléchargement illégal : Google a fermé plus d’un milliard de sites pirates cette année

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      Créer son propre Netflix : rencontre avec les nouveaux rois du piratage

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Saturday, 3 June, 2023 - 11:05

    drapeau-piratage-pirate

    Insatisfaits par les services de streaming et leur multiplication, voire pour des raisons idéologiques, nombreux sont ceux qui continuent d’avoir recours au piratage. [Lire la suite]

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      DMCA Takedowns Target Torrent Release of ‘Dark and Darker’ Playtest

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Sunday, 16 April, 2023 - 18:33 · 2 minutes

    dark darker Upcoming first-person shooter game Dark and Darker is scheduled to launch later this year, but even at this early stage it’s causing controversy.

    Last month, police in South Korea raided the offices of local game studio Ironmace . According to reports , the developers allegedly stole assets from their former employer, game publisher Nexon , which is allegedly working on a similar project too.

    A few days later, Nexon sent a DMCA takedown notice to Valve, asking it to remove the Dark and Darker project from Steam. The detailed takedown notices accused Ironmace of copyright infringement and stealing trade secrets.

    “This letter is to inform you of Ironmace’s misconduct, constituting misappropriation of Nexon’s trade secrets and copyright infringement and to request that Valve take down all versions of Dark and Darker from Steam,” the company wrote (pdf) .

    takedown nexon valve

    Steam swiftly complied, but the enforcement action and follow-up legal pressure didn’t stop ‘Dark and Darker’ development. Ironmace refuted the accusations in detail and continued to work on the game.

    This weekend, Ironmace was ready to share the latest Alpha release with its fans. Without Steam access, Ironmace had to choose a different distribution method and after some internal deliberation, opted to go “ old school ” with a BitTorrent release.

    “Unfortunately, due to the complexities of our situation, especially across international lines, it is taking time to resolve the Steam situation. In order for us to keep our promise to our fans we’ve had to go old school this time,” Ironmace wrote.

    The developers typically share these types of announcements with their large Discord following . In this case, however, users had to go to Twitter for the actual magnet torrent link , as Discord apparently doesn’t support torrents.

    Twitter has no torrent restrictions so the magnet link was posted there . The torrent link also made its way to Steam , where the developers provided additional background information, as well as a recommendation to use the qBitTorrent client.

    planz

    In the hours that followed, tens of thousands of fans used the torrent link to download a copy of the playtest release. At the time of writing, the release still has close to 20,000 people actively seeding it. This is a massive success in terms of distribution but not without controversy.

    Shortly after the torrent link was posted to Twitter, ‘someone’ sent a DMCA notice to the social media platform, requesting its removal. The notice hasn’t been published yet, but it seems reasonable to assume that Nexon may be behind it.

    Instead of the magnet link, people now see ‘tweet withheld’ in Ironmace’s Twitter timeline . In addition, a follow-up Twitlonger post with a magnet link for a hotfix was also removed.

    withheld

    Since the torrent release itself is immensely popular, the Dark and Darker team is not giving up. After their tweet was removed, the magnet link was posted on Discord in a base64 encoded message.

    “Thank you for your patience! To download the playtest please follow these instructions,” Ironmace’s Garysun writes, pointing people to a public base64 decoder .

    base64

    At the time of publication, the Discord message is still online, but given Nexon’s stance on the matter, that may not be the case for long.

    The torrent swarm is impossible to take down, however. At least in theory, Nexon could ask trackers to blacklist the hash, but that’s never going to happen. Even if they did manage to pull off the impossible, the files can still be shared – old school – through DHT and PEX .

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      Unpaid taxes could destroy porn studio accused of copyright trolling

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 3 January, 2023 - 20:53 · 1 minute

    Unpaid taxes could destroy porn studio accused of copyright trolling

    Enlarge

    Over the past decade, Malibu Media has emerged as a prominent so-called “copyright troll ,” suing thousands of “John Does” for allegedly torrenting adult content hosted on the porn studio’s website, “X-Art.” Whether defendants were guilty or not didn’t seem to matter to Malibu, critics claimed , as much as winning as many settlements as possible. As courts became more familiar with Malibu, however, some judges grew suspicious of the studio’s litigiousness. As early as 2012, a California judge described these lawsuits as “essentially an extortion scheme ,” and by 2013, a Wisconsin judge ordered sanctions , agreeing with critics who said that Malibu’s tactics were designed to “harass and intimidate” defendants into paying Malibu thousands in settlements.

    By 2016, Malibu started losing footing in this arena—and even began fighting with its own lawyer. At that point, file-sharing lawsuits became less commonplace , with critics noting a significant reduction in Malibu's lawsuits over the next few years. Now, TorrentFreak reports that Malibu’s litigation machine appears to finally be running out of steam—with its corporate status suspended in California sometime between mid-2020 and early 2021 after failing to pay taxes . Last month, a Texas court said that Malibu has until January 20 to pay what's owed in back taxes and get its corporate status reinstated. If that doesn’t happen over the next few weeks, one of Malibu’s last lawsuits on the books will be dismissed, potentially marking the end of Malibu’s long run of alleged copyright trolling.

    According to TorrentFreak, this lawsuit is one of only two Malibu Media lawsuits still open, and it's the only lawsuit that Malibu still appears to be acting on. The other lawsuit was apparently stalled after a court asked Malibu to “provide more evidence of infringement beyond a simple IP-address,” TorrentFreak reported. (Since at least 2014, courts have reminded Malibu that IP addresses aren’t people .)

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      Hollywood recense les pires sites de piratage qu’il faudrait neutraliser

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Friday, 14 October, 2022 - 05:45

    pirate

    Comme tous les ans, le lobby des studios de cinéma aux USA alerte le gouvernement américain sur les plateformes en ligne accusées d'être des havres du piratage. [Lire la suite]

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