Tag Archives: BP

Security and Human Behavior (SHB 2018)

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/05/security_and_hu_7.html

I’m at Carnegie Mellon University, at the eleventh Workshop on Security and Human Behavior.

SHB is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson, and myself. The 50 or so people in the room include psychologists, economists, computer security researchers, sociologists, political scientists, neuroscientists, designers, lawyers, philosophers, anthropologists, business school professors, and a smattering of others. It’s not just an interdisciplinary event; most of the people here are individually interdisciplinary.

The goal is to maximize discussion and interaction. We do that by putting everyone on panels, and limiting talks to 7-10 minutes. The rest of the time is left to open discussion. Four hour-and-a-half panels per day over two days equals eight panels; six people per panel means that 48 people get to speak. We also have lunches, dinners, and receptions — all designed so people from different disciplines talk to each other.

I invariably find this to be the most intellectually stimulating conference of my year. It influences my thinking in many different, and sometimes surprising, ways.

This year’s program is here. This page lists the participants and includes links to some of their work. As he does every year, Ross Anderson is liveblogging the talks. (Ross also maintains a good webpage of psychology and security resources.)

Here are my posts on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth SHB workshops. Follow those links to find summaries, papers, and occasionally audio recordings of the various workshops.

Next year, I’ll be hosting the event at Harvard.

Integrating JFrog Artifactory with AWS CodePipeline

Post Syndicated from Erin McGill original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/integrating-jfrog-artifactory-with-aws-codepipeline/

When I talk with customers and partners, I find that they are in different stages in the adoption of DevOps methodologies. They are automating the creation of application artifacts and the deployment of their applications to different infrastructure environments. In many cases, they are creating and supporting multiple applications using a variety of coding languages and artifacts.

The management of these processes and artifacts can be challenging, but using the right tools and methodologies can simplify the process.

In this post, I will show you how you can automate the creation and storage of application artifacts through the implementation of a pipeline and custom deploy action in AWS CodePipeline. The example includes a Node.js code base stored in an AWS CodeCommit repository. A Node Package Manager (npm) artifact is built from the code base, and the build artifact is published to a JFrog Artifactory npm repository.

I frequently recommend AWS CodePipeline, the AWS continuous integration and continuous delivery tool. You can use it to quickly innovate through integration and deployment of new features and bug fixes by building a workflow that automates the build, test, and deployment of new versions of your application. And, because AWS CodePipeline is extensible, it allows you to create a custom action that performs customized, automated actions on your behalf.

JFrog’s Artifactory is a universal binary repository manager where you can manage multiple applications, their dependencies, and versions in one place. Artifactory also enables you to standardize the way you manage your package types across all applications developed in your company, no matter the code base or artifact type.

If you already have a Node.js CodeCommit repository, a JFrog Artifactory host, and would like to automate the creation of the pipeline, including the custom action and CodeBuild project, you can use this AWS CloudFormation template to create your AWS CloudFormation stack.

The project code can be found in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-codepipeline-custom-job-worker-for-jfrog-artifactory.

 

The AWS CodePipeline workflow

This figure shows the path defined in the pipeline for this project. It starts with a change to Node.js source code committed to a private code repository in AWS CodeCommit. With this change, CodePipeline triggers AWS CodeBuild to create the npm package from the node.js source code. After the build, CodePipeline triggers the custom action job worker to commit the build artifact to the designated artifact repository in Artifactory.

 

This blog post assumes you have already:

·      Created a CodeCommit repository that contains a Node.js project.

·      Configured a two-stage pipeline in AWS CodePipeline.

The Source stage of the pipeline is configured to poll the Node.js CodeCommit repository. The Build stage is configured to use a CodeBuild project to build the npm package using a buildspec.yml file located in the code repository.

If you do not have a Node.js repository, you can create a CodeCommit repository that contains this simple ‘Hello World’ project. This project also includes a buildspec.yml file that is used when you define your CodeBuild project. It defines the steps to be taken by CodeBuild to create the npm artifact.

If you do not already have a pipeline set up in CodePipeline, you can use this template to create a pipeline with a CodeCommit source action and a CodeBuild build action through the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). If you do not want to install the AWS CLI on your local machine, you can use AWS Cloud9, our managed integrated development environment (IDE), to interact with AWS APIs.

In your development environment, open your favorite editor and fill out the template with values appropriate to your project. For information, see the readme in the GitHub repository.

Use this CLI command to create the pipeline from the template:

aws codepipeline create-pipeline --cli-input-json file://source-build-actions-codepipeline.json --region 'us-west-2'

It creates a pipeline that has a CodeCommit source action and a CodeBuild build action.

Integrating JFrog Artifactory

JFrog Artifactory provides default repositories for your project needs. For my NPM package repository, I am using the default virtual npm repository (named npm) that is available in Artifactory Pro. You might want to consider creating a repository per project but for the example used in this post, using the default lets me get started without having to configure a new repository.

I can use the steps in the Set Me Up -> npm section on the landing page to configure my worker to interact with the default NPM repository.

 

 

 

Custom actions in AWS CodePipeline

A custom action in AWS CodePipeline contains:

·      custom action definition

Describes the required values to run the custom action. I will define my custom action in the ‘Deploy’ category, identify the provider as ‘Artifactory’, of version ‘1’, and specify a variety of configurationProperties whose values will be defined when this stage is added to my pipeline.

·      custom action job worker

Polls CodePipeline for a job, scanning for its action-definition properties. In this blog post, after a job has been found, the job worker does the work required to publish the npm artifact to the Artifactory repository.

 

My custom action definition in JSON:

{
    "category": "Deploy",
    "configurationProperties": [{
        "name": "TypeOfArtifact",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
        "secret": false,
        "description": "Package type, ex. npm for node packages",
        "type": "String"
    },
    {   "name": "RepoKey",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Name of the repository in which this artifact should be stored"
    },
    {   "name": "UserName",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Username for authenticating with the repository"
    },
    {   "name": "Password",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": true,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Password for authenticating with the repository"
    },
    {   "name": "EmailAddress",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Email address used to authenticate with the repository"
    },
    {   "name": "ArtifactoryHost",
        "required": true,
        "key": true,
	"secret": false,
	"type": "String",
	"description": "Public address of Artifactory host, ex: https://myexamplehost.com or http://myexamplehost.com:8080"
    }],
    "provider": "Artifactory",
    "version": "1",
    "settings": {
        "entityUrlTemplate": "{Config:ArtifactoryHost}/artifactory/webapp/#/artifacts/browse/tree/General/{Config:RepoKey}"
    },
    "inputArtifactDetails": {
        "maximumCount": 5,
        "minimumCount": 1
    },
    "outputArtifactDetails": {
        "maximumCount": 5,
        "minimumCount": 0
    }
}

There are seven sections to the custom action definition:

  • category: This is the stage in which you will be creating this action. It can be Source, Build, Deploy, Test, Invoke, Approval. Except for source actions, the category section simply allows us to organize our actions. I am setting the category for my action as ‘Deploy’ because I’m using it to publish my node artifact to my Artifactory instance.
  • configurationProperties: These are the parameters or variables required for your project to authenticate and commit your artifact. In the case of my custom worker, I need:
    • TypeOfArtifact: In this case, npm, because it’s for the Node Package Manager.
    • RepoKey: The name of the repository. In this case, it’s the default npm.
    • UserName and Password for the user to authenticate with the Artifactory repository.
    • EmailAddress used to authenticate with the repository.
    • Artifactory host name or IP address.
  • provider: The name you define for your custom action stage. I have named the provider Artifactory.
  • version: Version number for the custom action. Because this is the first version, I set the version number to 1.
  • entityUrlTemplate: This URL is presented to your users for the deploy stage along with the title you define in your provider. The link takes the user to their artifact repository page in the Artifactory host.
  • inputArtifactDetails: The number of artifacts to expect from the previous stage in the pipeline.
  • outputArtifactDetails: The number of artifacts that should be the result from the custom action stage. Later in this blog post, I define 0 for my output artifacts because I am publishing the artifact to the Artifactory repository as the final action.

After I define the custom action in a JSON file, I use the AWS CLI to create the custom action type in CodePipeline:

aws codepipeline create-custom-action-type --cli-input-json file://artifactory_custom_action_deploy_npm.json --region='us-west-2'

After I create the custom action type in the same region as my pipeline, I edit the pipeline to add a Deploy stage and configure it to use the custom action I created for Artifactory:

 

 

 

 

I have created a custom worker for the actions required to commit the npm artifact to the Artifactory repository. The worker is in Python and it runs in a loop on an Amazon EC2 instance. My custom worker polls for a deploy job and publishes the NPM artifact to the Artifactory repository.

 

The EC2 instance is running Amazon Linux and has an IAM instance role attached that gives the worker permission to access CodePipeline. The worker process is as follows:

  1. Take the configuration properties from the custom worker and poll CodePipeline for a custom action job.
  2. After there is a job in the job queue with the appropriate category, provider, and version, acknowledge the job.
  3. Download the zipped artifact created in the previous Build stage from the provided S3 buckets with the provided temporary credentials.
  4. Unzip the artifact into a temporary directory.
  5. A user-defined Artifactory user name and password is used to receive a temporary API key from Artifactory.
  6. To avoid having to write the password to a file, use that temporary API key and user name to authenticate with the NPM repository.
  7. Publish the Node.js package to the specified repository.

Because I am running my custom worker on an Amazon Linux EC2 instance, I installed npm with the following command:

sudo yum install nodejs npm --enablerepo=epel

For my custom worker, I used pip to install the required Python libraries:

pip install boto3 requests

For a full Python package list, see requirements.txt in the GitHub repository.

Let’s take a look at some of the code snippets from the worker.

First, the worker polls for jobs:

def action_type():
    ActionType = {
        'category': 'Deploy',
        'owner': 'Custom',
        'provider': 'Artifactory',
        'version': '1' }
    return(ActionType)

def poll_for_jobs():
    try:
        artifactory_action_type = action_type()
        print(artifactory_action_type)
        jobs = codepipeline.poll_for_jobs(actionTypeId=artifactory_action_type)
        while not jobs['jobs']:
            time.sleep(10)
            jobs = codepipeline.poll_for_jobs(actionTypeId=artifactory_action_type)
            if jobs['jobs']:
                print('Job found')
        return jobs['jobs'][0]
    except ClientError as e:
        print("Received an error: %s" % str(e))
        raise

 

When there is a job in the queue, the poller returns a number of values from the queue such as jobId, the input and output S3 buckets for artifacts, temporary credentials to access the S3 buckets, and other configuration details from the stage in the pipeline.

 

Here is an example of the return response:

{
	'jobs': [
		{
			'nonce': '3',
			'data': {
				'inputArtifacts': [
					{
						'name': 'Output',
						'location': {
							'type': 'S3',
							's3Location': {
								'objectKey': 'ArtifactoryNPMwithCo/Output/Key,
							'bucketName': '123456789012-codepipelineartifact-us-west-2'
							}
						}
					}
				],
				'pipelineContext': {
						'action': {
							'name': 'Deploy'
						},
						'pipelineName': 'ArtifactoryNPMwithCodeDeploy',
						'stage': {
							'name': 'Deploy'
						}
				},
				'actionTypeId': {
					'category': 'Deploy',
					'owner': 'Custom',
					'version': '1',
					'provider': 'Artifactory'
				},
				'outputArtifacts': [
					{
						'name': 'ArtifactoryOut',
						'location': {
							'type': 'S3',
							's3Location': {
								'objectKey': 'ArtifactoryNPMwithCo/Artifactor/Key,
								'bucketName': '123456789012-codepipelineartifact-us-west-2'
							}
						}
					}
				],
				'actionConfiguration': {
					'configuration': {
						'UserName': 'admin',
						'ArtifactoryHost': 'https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com',
						'Password': 'xxx',
						'EmailAddress': '[email protected]',
						'TypeOfArtifact': 'npm',
						'RepoKey': 'npm'
					}
				},
				'artifactCredentials': {
					'secretAccessKey': 'SECRET',
			               'sessionToken':‘FQoDYXdz...XdndMF',
					'accessKeyId': 'ACCESSKEY'
					}
				},
				'id': 'a0eb',
				'accountId': '123456789012
			}
		],
		'ResponseMetadata': {
			'RetryAttempts': 0,
			'HTTPStatusCode': 200,
			'RequestId': a88b-cdbd5d08b9de',
			'HTTPHeaders': {
				'x-amzn-requestid': '77343c2d-eff4’,
				'content-length': '2461',
				'content-type': 'application/x-amz-json-1.1'
			}
		}
}

 

After successfully receiving the job details, the worker sends an acknowledgement to CodePipeline to ensure that the work on the job is not duplicated by other workers watching for the same job:

def job_acknowledge(jobId, nonce):
    try:
        print('Acknowledging job')
        result = codepipeline.acknowledge_job(jobId=jobId, nonce=nonce)
        return result
    except Exception as e:
        print("Received an error when trying to acknowledge the job: %s" % str(e))
        raise

With the job now acknowledged, the worker publishes the source code artifact into the desired repository. The worker gets the value of the artifact S3 bucket and objectKey from the inputArtifacts in the response from the poll_for_jobs API request. Next, the worker creates a new directory in /tmp and downloads the S3 object into this directory:

def get_bucket_location(bucketName, init_client):
    region = init_client.get_bucket_location(Bucket=bucketName)['LocationConstraint']
    if not region:
        region = 'us-east-1'
    return region


def get_s3_artifact(bucketName, objectKey, ak, sk, st):
    init_s3 = boto3.client('s3')
    region = get_bucket_location(bucketName, init_s3)
    session = Session(aws_access_key_id=ak,
                      aws_secret_access_key=sk,
                      aws_session_token=st)

    s3 = session.resource('s3',
                          region_name=region,
                          config=botocore.client.Config(signature_version='s3v4'))
    try:
        tempdirname = tempfile.mkdtemp()
    except OSError as e:
        print('Could not write temp directory %s' % tempdirname)
        raise
    bucket = s3.Bucket(bucketName)
    obj = bucket.Object(objectKey)
    filename = tempdirname + '/' + objectKey
    try:
        if os.path.dirname(objectKey):
            directory = os.path.dirname(filename)
            os.makedirs(directory)
        print('Downloading the %s object and writing it to disk in %s location' % (objectKey, tempdirname))
        with open(filename, 'wb') as data:
            obj.download_fileobj(data)
    except ClientError as e:
        print('Downloading the object and writing the file to disk raised this error: ' + str(e))
        raise
    return(filename, tempdirname)

 

 

Because the downloaded artifact from S3 is a zip file, the worker must unzip it first. To have a clean area in which to work, I extract the downloaded zip archive into a new directory:

def unzip_codepipeline_artifact(artifact, origtmpdir):
    # create a new temp directory
    # Unzip artifact into new directory
    try:
        newtempdir = tempfile.mkdtemp()
        print('Extracting artifact %s into temporary directory %s' % (artifact, newtempdir))
        zip_ref = zipfile.ZipFile(artifact, 'r')
        zip_ref.extractall(newtempdir)
        zip_ref.close()
        shutil.rmtree(origtmpdir)
        return(os.listdir(newtempdir), newtempdir)
    except OSError as e:
        if e.errno != errno.EEXIST:
            shutil.rmtree(newtempdir)
            raise

The worker now has the npm package that I want to store in my Artifactory NPM repository.

To authenticate with the NPM repository, the worker requests a temporary token from the Artifactory host. After receiving this temporary token, it creates a .npmrc file in the worker user’s home directory that includes a hash of the user name and temporary token. After it has authenticated, the worker runs npm config set registry <URL OF REPOSITORY> to configure the npm registry value to be the Artifactory host.  Next, the worker runs npm publish –registry <URL OF REPOSITORY>, which publishes the node package to the NPM repository in the Artifactory host.

def push_to_npm(configuration, artifact_list, temp_dir, jobId):
    reponame = configuration['RepoKey']
    art_type = configuration['TypeOfArtifact']
    print("Putting artifact into NPM repository " + reponame)
    token, hostname, username = gen_artifactory_auth_token(configuration)
    npmconfigfile = create_npmconfig_file(configuration, username, token)
    url = hostname + '/artifactory/api/' + art_type + '/' + reponame
    print("Changing directory to " + str(temp_dir))
    os.chdir(temp_dir)
    try:
        print("Publishing following files to the repository: %s " % os.listdir(temp_dir))
        print("Sending artifact to Artifactory NPM registry URL: " + url)
        subprocess.call(["npm", "config", "set", "registry", url])
        req = subprocess.call(["npm", "publish", "--registry", url])
        print("Return code from npm publish: " + str(req))
        if req != 0:
            err_msg = "npm ERR! Recieved non OK response while sending response to Artifactory. Return code from npm publish: " + str(req)
            signal_failure(jobId, err_msg)
        else:
            signal_success(jobId)
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
       print("Received an error when trying to commit artifact %s to repository %s: " % (str(art_type), str(configuration['RepoKey']), str(e)))
       raise
    return(req, npmconfigfile)

 

If the return value from publishing to the repository is not 0, the worker signals a failure to CodePipeline. If the value is 0, the worker signals success to CodePipeline to indicate that the stage of the pipeline has been completed successfully.

For the custom worker code, see npm_job_worker.py in the GitHub repository.

I run my custom worker on an EC2 instance using the command python npm_job_worker.py, with an optional --version flag that can be used to specify worker versions other than 1. Then I trigger a release change in my pipeline:

From my custom worker output logs, I have just committed a package named node_example at version 1.0.3:

On artifact: index.js
Committing to the repo: https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm
Sending artifact to Artifactory URL: https:// artifactoryhost.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm
npm config: 0
npm http PUT https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm/node_example
npm http 201 https://artifactory.myexamplehost.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm/node_example
+ [email protected]
Return code from npm publish: 0
Signaling success to CodePipeline

After that has been built successfully, I can find my artifact in my Artifactory repository:

To help you automate this process, I have created this AWS CloudFormation template that automates the creation of the CodeBuild project, the custom action, and the CodePipeline pipeline. It also launches the Amazon EC2-based custom job worker in an AWS Auto Scaling group. This template requires you to have a VPC and CodeCommit repository for your Node.js project. If you do not currently have a VPC in which you want to run your custom worker EC2 instances, you can use this AWS QuickStart to create one. If you do not have an existing Node.js project, I’ve provided a sample project in the GitHub repository.

Conclusion

I‘ve shown you the steps to integrate your JFrog Artifactory repository with your CodePipeline workflow. I’ve shown you how to create a custom action in CodePipeline and how to create a custom worker that works in your CI/CD pipeline. To dig deeper into custom actions and see how you can integrate your Artifactory repositories into your AWS CodePipeline projects, check out the full code base on GitHub.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to us through the AWS CodePipeline forum.

Erin McGill is a Solutions Architect in the AWS Partner Program with a focus on DevOps and automation tooling.

BPI Wants Piracy Dealt With Under New UK Internet ‘Clean-Up’ Laws

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/bpi-wants-music-piracy-dealt-with-under-uk-internet-clean-up-laws-180523/

For the past several years, the UK Government has expressed a strong desire to “clean up” the Internet.

Strong emphasis has been placed on making the Internet safer for children but that’s just the tip of a much larger iceberg.

This week, the Government published its response to the Internet Safety Strategy green paper, stating unequivocally that more needs to be done to tackle “online harm”.

Noting that six out of ten people report seeing inappropriate or harmful content online, the Government said that work already underway with social media companies to protect users had borne fruit but overall industry response has been less satisfactory.

As a result, the Government will now carry through with its threat to introduce new legislation, albeit with the assistance of technology companies, children’s charities and other stakeholders.

“Digital technology is overwhelmingly a force for good across the world and we must always champion innovation and change for the better,” said Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

“At the same time I have been clear that we have to address the Wild West elements of the Internet through legislation, in a way that supports innovation. We strongly support technology companies to start up and grow, and we want to work with them to keep our citizens safe.”

While emphasis is being placed on hot-button topics such as cyberbullying and online child exploitation, the Government is clear that it wishes to tackle “the full range” of online harms. That has been greeted by UK music group BPI with a request that the Government introduces new measures to tackle Internet piracy.

In a statement issued this week, BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor welcomed the move towards legislative change and urged the Government to encompass the music industry and beyond.

“This is a vital opportunity to protect consumers and boost the UK’s music and creative industries. The BPI has long pressed for internet intermediaries and online platforms to take responsibility for the content that they promote to users,” Taylor said.

“Government should now take the power in legislation to require online giants to take effective, proactive measures to clean illegal content from their sites and services. This will keep fans away from dodgy sites full of harmful content and prevent criminals from undermining creative businesses that create UK jobs.”

The BPI has published four initial requests, each of which provides food for thought.

The demand to “establish a new fast-track process for blocking illegal sites” is not entirely unexpected, particularly given the expense of launching applications for blocking injunctions at the High Court.

“The BPI has taken a large number of actions against individual websites – 63 injunctions are in place against sites that are wholly or mainly infringing and whose business is simply to profit from criminal activity,” the BPI says.

Those injunctions can be expanded fairly easily to include new sites operating under similar banners or facilitating access to those already covered, but it’s clear the BPI would like something more streamlined. Voluntary schemes, such as the one in place in Portugal, could be an option but it’s unclear how troublesome that could be for ISPs. New legislation could solve that dilemma, however.

Another big thorn in the side for groups like the BPI are people and entities that post infringing content. The BPI is very good at taking these listings down from sites and search engines in particular (more than 600 million requests to date) but it’s a game of whac-a-mole the group would rather not engage in.

With that in mind, the BPI would like the Government to impose new rules that would compel online platforms to stop content from being re-posted after it’s been taken down while removing the accounts of repeat infringers.

Thirdly, the BPI would like the Government to introduce penalties for “online operators” who do not provide “transparent contact and ownership information.” The music group isn’t any more specific than that, but the suggestion is that operators of some sites have a tendency to hide in the shadows, something which frustrates enforcement activity.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the BPI is calling on the Government to legislate for a new “duty of care” for online intermediaries and platforms. Specifically, the BPI wants “effective action” taken against businesses that use the Internet to “encourage” consumers to access content illegally.

While this could easily encompass pirate sites and services themselves, this proposal has the breadth to include a wide range of offenders, from people posting piracy-focused tutorials on monetized YouTube channels to those selling fully-loaded Kodi devices on eBay or social media.

Overall, the BPI clearly wants to place pressure on intermediaries to take action against piracy when they’re in a position to do so, and particularly those who may not have shown much enthusiasm towards industry collaboration in the past.

“Legislation in this Bill, to take powers to intervene with respect to operators that do not co-operate, would bring focus to the roundtable process and ensure that intermediaries take their responsibilities seriously,” the BPI says.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and the Home Office will now work on a White Paper, to be published later this year, to set out legislation to tackle “online harms”. The BPI and similar entities will hope that the Government takes their concerns on board.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Kodi-Addon Developer Gives Up Piracy Defense Due to Lack of Funds

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/kodi-addon-developer-gives-up-piracy-defense-due-to-lack-of-funds-180521/

Last year, American satellite and broadcast provider Dish Network targeted two well-known players in the third-party Kodi add-on ecosystem.

In a complaint filed in a federal court in Texas, add-on ZemTV and the TVAddons library were accused of copyright infringement, with both facing up to $150,000 for each offense.

While TVAddons operator Adam Lackman responded to the allegations last week, ZemTV’s developer ‘Shani’ decided not to reply.

Shahjahan Durrani, Shani for short, never denied that he was the driving force behind the Kodi-addons ZemTV, LiveStreamsPro, and F4MProxy. While the London-based developer had never set foot in Texas, he initially planned to put up a defense. Financially, however, this was a problem.

ZemTV’s developer launched a fundraiser last fall to crowdsource the legal battle. While he was able to raise close to £1,000, the legal costs already exceeded that the case even got fully underway.

Without the ability to pay the legal costs Shani is unable to put up a proper defense. But speaking with TorrentFreak, he explains that after the motion to dismiss was denied, he didn’t have much hope for a fair trial anyway.

“I was shocked and disappointed, not only by reading that the court dismissed my jurisdiction appeal, they did so with just one sentence. It seems unfair and doesn’t give any confidence to me that the court/judge would be fair,” Shani tells us.

This left the developer with two options. Find a way to fund the legal battle, money which may never be recovered, or give up the fight and face a default judgment. Shani chose the latter option.

Shani told his attorney Erin Russel to cease all activity on the case and to take no further steps on his behalf.

“I don’t have enough resources to fight this case completely with four kids that I am raising and anything more I do will be seem to be submitting to the US Courts which I am not going to do unless I have enough money to fight the case,” the developer wrote in an email to Russel.

The attorney informed the court of this decision late last week and withdrew from the case.

This means that the lawsuit is steering towards a default judgment, and indeed, Dish has already moved for an entry of default.

“To date, Durrani has not filed an answer or other responsive pleading or requested additional time to do so,” Dish’s motion reads. “Accordingly, the Clerk should enter a default against Durrani.”

Shani still hopes that Dish will not push through. The developer stresses that he never operated any of the servers that provided copyright-infringing streams, nor has he ever made money from his addons.

“I hope they would let the matter go as the addon code has been taken down for more than a year now. Plus, they already know by the return of the subpoena to the servers that none of them were handled or paid by me,” Shani says.

“This was an open source addon and no one would pay hundreds of pounds to host the servers/streams in the hope that people would donate. I actually never ever asked for any donation and never ever earned a single penny from Kodi addons.”

ZemTV, like many other addons, merely offered the interface that makes it possible to watch third-party streams on the Kodi platform. While that may be infringement or not, the developer notes that despite the lawsuit, these third-party streams are still online.

“The irony of all this mess is that those servers and apps are still functional and working while I am dealing with this illogical case,” Shani concludes.

If the Texas District Court enters the default, Dish will demand a judgment which likely includes thousands of dollars in damages. However, since Durrani lives in the UK and has no assets in the US, these damages may be hard to recoup.

—

Dish’s request for an entry of default is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

All Systems Go! 2018 CfP Open

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original http://0pointer.net/blog/all-systems-go-2018-cfp-open.html

The All Systems Go! 2018 Call for Participation is Now Open!

The Call for Participation (CFP) for All Systems Go!
2018 is now open. We’d like to invite you
to submit your proposals for consideration to the CFP submission
site.

ASG image

The CFP will close on July 30th. Notification of acceptance and
non-acceptance will go out within 7 days of the closing of the CFP.

All topics relevant to foundational open-source Linux technologies are
welcome. In particular, however, we are looking for proposals
including, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Low-level container executors and infrastructure
  • IoT and embedded OS infrastructure
  • BPF and eBPF filtering
  • OS, container, IoT image delivery and updating
  • Building Linux devices and applications
  • Low-level desktop technologies
  • Networking
  • System and service management
  • Tracing and performance measuring
  • IPC and RPC systems
  • Security and Sandboxing

While our focus is definitely more on the user-space side of things,
talks about kernel projects are welcome, as long as they have a clear
and direct relevance for user-space.

For more information please visit our conference
website!

EC2 Instance Update – C5 Instances with Local NVMe Storage (C5d)

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-instance-update-c5-instances-with-local-nvme-storage-c5d/

As you can see from my EC2 Instance History post, we add new instance types on a regular and frequent basis. Driven by increasingly powerful processors and designed to address an ever-widening set of use cases, the size and diversity of this list reflects the equally diverse group of EC2 customers!

Near the bottom of that list you will find the new compute-intensive C5 instances. With a 25% to 50% improvement in price-performance over the C4 instances, the C5 instances are designed for applications like batch and log processing, distributed and or real-time analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding. Some of these applications can benefit from access to high-speed, ultra-low latency local storage. For example, video encoding, image manipulation, and other forms of media processing often necessitates large amounts of I/O to temporary storage. While the input and output files are valuable assets and are typically stored as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) objects, the intermediate files are expendable. Similarly, batch and log processing runs in a race-to-idle model, flushing volatile data to disk as fast as possible in order to make full use of compute resources.

New C5d Instances with Local Storage
In order to meet this need, we are introducing C5 instances equipped with local NVMe storage. Available for immediate use in 5 regions, these instances are a great fit for the applications that I described above, as well as others that you will undoubtedly dream up! Here are the specs:

Instance Name vCPUs RAM Local Storage EBS Bandwidth Network Bandwidth
c5d.large 2 4 GiB 1 x 50 GB NVMe SSD Up to 2.25 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps
c5d.xlarge 4 8 GiB 1 x 100 GB NVMe SSD Up to 2.25 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps
c5d.2xlarge 8 16 GiB 1 x 225 GB NVMe SSD Up to 2.25 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps
c5d.4xlarge 16 32 GiB 1 x 450 GB NVMe SSD 2.25 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps
c5d.9xlarge 36 72 GiB 1 x 900 GB NVMe SSD 4.5 Gbps 10 Gbps
c5d.18xlarge 72 144 GiB 2 x 900 GB NVMe SSD 9 Gbps 25 Gbps

Other than the addition of local storage, the C5 and C5d share the same specs. Both are powered by 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum 8000-series processors, optimized for EC2 and with full control over C-states on the two largest sizes, giving you the ability to run two cores at up to 3.5 GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Technology.

You can use any AMI that includes drivers for the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVMe; this includes the latest Amazon Linux, Microsoft Windows (Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016), Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, and CentOS AMIs.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about the local NVMe storage:

Naming – You don’t have to specify a block device mapping in your AMI or during the instance launch; the local storage will show up as one or more devices (/dev/nvme*1 on Linux) after the guest operating system has booted.

Encryption – Each local NVMe device is hardware encrypted using the XTS-AES-256 block cipher and a unique key. Each key is destroyed when the instance is stopped or terminated.

Lifetime – Local NVMe devices have the same lifetime as the instance they are attached to, and do not stick around after the instance has been stopped or terminated.

Available Now
C5d instances are available in On-Demand, Reserved Instance, and Spot form in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), US East (Ohio), and Canada (Central) Regions. Prices vary by Region, and are just a bit higher than for the equivalent C5 instances.

— Jeff;

PS – We will be adding local NVMe storage to other EC2 instance types in the months to come, so stay tuned!

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from ris original https://lwn.net/Articles/754653/rss

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (dhcp), Debian (xen), Fedora (dhcp, flac, kubernetes, leptonica, libgxps, LibRaw, matrix-synapse, mingw-LibRaw, mysql-mmm, patch, seamonkey, webkitgtk4, and xen), Mageia (389-ds-base, exempi, golang, graphite2, libpam4j, libraw, libsndfile, libtiff, perl, quassel, spring-ldap, util-linux, and wget), Oracle (dhcp and kernel), Red Hat (389-ds-base, chromium-browser, dhcp, docker-latest, firefox, kernel-alt, libvirt, qemu-kvm, redhat-vertualization-host, rh-haproxy18-haproxy, and rhvm-appliance), Scientific Linux (389-ds-base, dhcp, firefox, libvirt, and qemu-kvm), and Ubuntu (poppler).

Some notes on eFail

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/05/some-notes-on-efail.html

I’ve been busy trying to replicate the “eFail” PGP/SMIME bug. I thought I’d write up some notes.

PGP and S/MIME encrypt emails, so that eavesdroppers can’t read them. The bugs potentially allow eavesdroppers to take the encrypted emails they’ve captured and resend them to you, reformatted in a way that allows them to decrypt the messages.

Disable remote/external content in email

The most important defense is to disable “external” or “remote” content from being automatically loaded. This is when HTML-formatted emails attempt to load images from remote websites. This happens legitimately when they want to display images, but not fill up the email with them. But most of the time this is illegitimate, they hide images on the webpage in order to track you with unique IDs and cookies. For example, this is the code at the end of an email from politician Bernie Sanders to his supporters. Notice the long random number assigned to track me, and the width/height of this image is set to one pixel, so you don’t even see it:

Such trackers are so pernicious they are disabled by default in most email clients. This is an example of the settings in Thunderbird:

The problem is that as you read email messages, you often get frustrated by the fact the error messages and missing content, so you keep adding exceptions:

The correct defense against this eFail bug is to make sure such remote content is disabled and that you have no exceptions, or at least, no HTTP exceptions. HTTPS exceptions (those using SSL) are okay as long as they aren’t to a website the attacker controls. Unencrypted exceptions, though, the hacker can eavesdrop on, so it doesn’t matter if they control the website the requests go to. If the attacker can eavesdrop on your emails, they can probably eavesdrop on your HTTP sessions as well.

Some have recommended disabling PGP and S/MIME completely. That’s probably overkill. As long as the attacker can’t use the “remote content” in emails, you are fine. Likewise, some have recommend disabling HTML completely. That’s not even an option in any email client I’ve used — you can disable sending HTML emails, but not receiving them. It’s sufficient to just disable grabbing remote content, not the rest of HTML email rendering.

I couldn’t replicate the direct exfiltration

There rare two related bugs. One allows direct exfiltration, which appends the decrypted PGP email onto the end of an IMG tag (like one of those tracking tags), allowing the entire message to be decrypted.

An example of this is the following email. This is a standard HTML email message consisting of multiple parts. The trick is that the IMG tag in the first part starts the URL (blog.robertgraham.com/…) but doesn’t end it. It has the starting quotes in front of the URL but no ending quotes. The ending will in the next chunk.

The next chunk isn’t HTML, though, it’s PGP. The PGP extension (in my case, Enignmail) will detect this and automatically decrypt it. In this case, it’s some previous email message I’ve received the attacker captured by eavesdropping, who then pastes the contents into this email message in order to get it decrypted.

What should happen at this point is that Thunderbird will generate a request (if “remote content” is enabled) to the blog.robertgraham.com server with the decrypted contents of the PGP email appended to it. But that’s not what happens. Instead, I get this:

I am indeed getting weird stuff in the URL (the bit after the GET /), but it’s not the PGP decrypted message. Instead what’s going on is that when Thunderbird puts together a “multipart/mixed” message, it adds it’s own HTML tags consisting of lines between each part. In the email client it looks like this:

The HTML code it adds looks like:

That’s what you see in the above URL, all this code up to the first quotes. Those quotes terminate the quotes in the URL from the first multipart section, causing the rest of the content to be ignored (as far as being sent as part of the URL).

So at least for the latest version of Thunderbird, you are accidentally safe, even if you have “remote content” enabled. Though, this is only according to my tests, there may be a work around to this that hackers could exploit.

STARTTLS

In the old days, email was sent plaintext over the wire so that it could be passively eavesdropped on. Nowadays, most providers send it via “STARTTLS”, which sorta encrypts it. Attackers can still intercept such email, but they have to do so actively, using man-in-the-middle. Such active techniques can be detected if you are careful and look for them.
Some organizations don’t care. Apparently, some nation states are just blocking all STARTTLS and forcing email to be sent unencrypted. Others do care. The NSA will passively sniff all the email they can in nations like Iraq, but they won’t actively intercept STARTTLS messages, for fear of getting caught.
The consequence is that it’s much less likely that somebody has been eavesdropping on you, passively grabbing all your PGP/SMIME emails. If you fear they have been, you should look (e.g. send emails from GMail and see if they are intercepted by sniffing the wire).

You’ll know if you are getting hacked

If somebody attacks you using eFail, you’ll know. You’ll get an email message formatted this way, with multipart/mixed components, some with corrupt HTML, some encrypted via PGP. This means that for the most part, your risk is that you’ll be attacked only once — the hacker will only be able to get one message through and decrypt it before you notice that something is amiss. Though to be fair, they can probably include all the emails they want decrypted as attachments to the single email they sent you, so the risk isn’t necessarily that you’ll only get one decrypted.
As mentioned above, a lot of attackers (e.g. the NSA) won’t attack you if its so easy to get caught. Other attackers, though, like anonymous hackers, don’t care.
Somebody ought to write a plugin to Thunderbird to detect this.

Summary

It only works if attackers have already captured your emails (though, that’s why you use PGP/SMIME in the first place, to guard against that).
It only works if you’ve enabled your email client to automatically grab external/remote content.
It seems to not be easily reproducible in all cases.
Instead of disabling PGP/SMIME, you should make sure your email client hast remote/external content disabled — that’s a huge privacy violation even without this bug.
Notes: The default email client on the Mac enables remote content by default, which is bad:

Leaking securely, for White House staffers

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/05/how-to-leak-securely-for-white-house.html

Spencer Ackerman has this interesting story about a guy assigned to crack down on unauthorized White House leaks. It’s necessarily light on technical details, so I thought I’d write up some guesses, either as a guide for future reporters asking questions, or for people who want to better know the risks when leak information.

It should come as no surprise that your work email and phone are already monitored. They can get every email you’ve sent or received, even if you’ve deleted it. They can get every text message you’ve sent or received, the metadata of every phone call sent or received, and so forth.
To a lesser extent, this also applies to your well-known personal phone and email accounts. Law enforcement can get the metadata (which includes text messages) for these things without a warrant. In the above story, the person doing the investigation wasn’t law enforcement, but I’m not sure that’s a significant barrier if they can pass things onto the Secret Service or something.
The danger here isn’t that you used these things to leak, it’s that you’ve used these things to converse with the reporter before you made the decision to leak. That’s what happened in the Reality Winner case: she communicated with The Intercept before she allegedly leaked a printed document to them via postal mail. While it wasn’t conclusive enough to convict her, the innocent emails certainly put the investigators on her trail.
The path to leaking often starts this way: innocent actions before the decision to leak was made that will come back to haunt the person afterwards. That includes emails. That also includes Google searches. That includes websites you visit (like this one). I’m not sure how to solve this, except that if you’ve been in contact with The Intercept, and then you decide to leak, send it to anybody but The Intercept.
By the way, the other thing that caught Reality Winner is the records they had of her accessing files and printing them on a printer. Depending where you work, they may have a record of every file you’ve accessed, every intranet page you visited. Because of the way printers put secret dots on documents, investigators know precisely which printer and time the document leaked to The Intercept was printed.
Photographs suffer the same problem: your camera and phone tag the photographs with GPS coordinates and time the photograph was taken, as well as information about the camera. This accidentally exposed John McAfee’s hiding location when Vice took pictures of him a few years ago. Some people leak by taking pictures of the screen — use a camera without GPS for this (meaning, a really old camera you bought from a pawnshop).
These examples should impress upon you the dangers of not understanding technology. As soon as you do something to evade surveillance you know about, you may get caught by surveillance you don’t know about.
If you nonetheless want to continue forward, the next step may be to get a “burner phone”. You can get an adequate Android “prepaid” phone for cash at the local Walmart, electronics store, or phone store.
There’s some problems with such phones, though. They can often be tracked back to the store that sold them, and the store will have security cameras that record you making the purchase. License plate readers and GPS tracking on your existing phone may also place you at that Walmart.
I don’t know how to resolve these problems. Perhaps the best is grow a beard and on the last day of your vacation, color your hair, take a long bike/metro ride (without your existing phone) to a store many miles away and pick up a phone, then shave and change your color back again. I don’t know — there’s a good chance any lame attempt you or I might think of has already been experienced by law enforcement, so they are likely ahead of you. Maybe ask your local drug dealer where they get their burner phones, and if they can sell you one. Of course, that just means when they get caught for drug dealing, they can reduce their sentence by giving up the middle class person who bought a phone from them.
Lastly, they may age out old security videos, so simply waiting six months before using the phone might work. That means prepaying for an entire year.
Note that I’m not going to link to examples of cheap burner phones on this page. Web browsers will sometimes prefetch some information from links in a webpage, so simply including links in this page can condemn you as having interest in burner phones. You are already in enough trouble for having visited this web page.
Burner phones have GPS. Newer the technology, like the latest Android LTE phones, have pretty accurate GPS that the police can query (without a warrant). If you take the phone home and turn it on, they’ll then be able to trace back the phone to your home. Carrying the phone around with you has the same problem, with the phone’s location correlating with your existing phone (which presumably you also carry) or credit card receipts. Rumors are that Petraeus was partly brought down by tracking locations where he used his credit card, namely, matching the hotel he was in with Internet address information.
Older phones that support 3G or even 2G have poorer GPS capabilities. They’ll still located you to the nearest cell tower, but not as accurately to your exact location.
A better strategy than a burner phone would be a burner laptop computer used with WiFi. You can get a cheap one for $200 at Amazon.com. My favorite are the 11 inch ones with a full sized keyboard and Windows 10. Better yet, get an older laptop for cash from a pawn shop.
You can install chat apps on this like “Signal Desktop”, “Wire Desktop”,  or “WhatsApp” that will allow you to securely communicate. Or use “Discord”, which isn’t really encrypted, but it’s popular among gamers so therefore less likely to stand out. You can sit in a bar with free WiFi and a USB headset and talk to reporters without having a phone. If the reporter you want to leak to doesn’t have those apps (either on their own laptop or phone) then you don’t want to talk to them.
Needless to say, don’t cross the streams. Don’t log onto your normal accounts like Facebook. If you create fake Facebook accounts, don’t follow the same things. Better yet, configure your browser to discard all information (especially “cookies”) every time you log off, so you can’t be tracked. Install ad blockers, or use the “Brave” web browser, to remove even more trackers. A common trick among hackers is to change the “theme” to a red background, as a constant subliminal reminder that you using your dangerous computer, and never to do anything that identifies the real you.
Put tape over the camera. I’m not sure it’s a really big danger, but put tape over the camera. If they infect you enough to get your picture, they’ve also infected you enough to record any audio on your computer. Remember that proper encryption is end-to-end (they can’t eavesdrop in transit), but if they hack the ends (your laptop, or the reporter’s) they can still record the audio.
Note that when your burner laptop is in “sleep” mode, it can still be talking to the local wifi. Before taking it home, make sure it’s off. Go into the settings and configure it so that when the lid is closed, the computer is turned completely off.
It goes without saying: don’t use that burner laptop from home. Luckily, free wifi is everyone, so the local cafe, bar, or library can be used.
The next step is to also use a VPN or Tor to mask your Internet address. If there’s an active investigation into the reporter, they’ll get the metadata, the Internet address of the bar/cafe you are coming from. A good VPN provider or especially Tor will stop this. Remember that these providers increase latency, making phone calls a bit harder, but they are a lot safer.
Remember that Ross Ulbricht (owner of dark website market Silk Road) was caught in a library. They’d traced back his Internet address and grabbed his laptop out of his hands. Having it turn off (off off, not sleep off) when the lid is closed is one way to reduce this risk. Configuring your web browser to flush all cookies and passwords on restart is another. If they catch you in mid conversation with your secret contact, though, they’ll at least be able to hear your side of the conversation, and know who you are talking to.
The best measure, though it takes some learning, is “Tails live”. It’s a Linux distribution preconfigured with Tor and various secure chat apps that’ll boot from the USB or SD card. When you turn off the computer, nothing will be saved, so there will be no evidence saved to the disk for investigators to retrieve later.
While we are talking about Tor, it should be noted that many news organizations (NYTimes, Washington Post, The Intercept, etc.) support “SecureDrop” accessed only through Tor for receiving anonymous tips. Burner laptops you use from bars from Tails is the likely your most secure way of doing things.
Summary

The point of this post was not to provide a howto guide, but to discuss many of the technological issues involved. In a story about White House people investigating leaks, I’d like to see something in this technological direction. I’d like to know exactly how they were investigating leaks. Certainly, they were investigating all work computers, accounts, and phones. Where they also able to get to non-work computers, accounts, phones? Did they have law enforcement powers? What could they do about burner phones and laptops?
In any case, if you do want a howto guide, the discussion above should put some fear into you how easily you can inadvertently make a mistake.

[$] Using user-space tracepoints with BPF

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/753601/rss

Much has been written on LWN about dynamically instrumenting kernel
code. These features are also available to user-space code with a
special kind of probe known as a User Statically-Defined Tracing
(USDT) probe. These probes provide a low-overhead way of
instrumenting user-space code and provide a convenient way to debug applications
running in production. In this final article of the BPF and BCC series
we’ll look at where USDT probes come from and how you can use them to
understand the behavior of your own applications.

Judges Refuse to Unmask Alleged Pirates, Citing Privacy Concerns

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/judges-refuse-to-unmask-alleged-pirates-citing-privacy-concerns-180507/

Since the turn of the last decade, numerous people have been sued for illegal file-sharing in US courts.

These cases are generally filed by a small group of rightsholders and this year “Strike 3 Holdings” has proven itself to be one of the most active litigants.

The company, which distributes its works through various adult websites, has filed cases against hundreds of alleged defendants over the past several months.

As is common in these cases, the copyright holder only knows the defendant by an IP-address. It then asks the courts to grant a subpoena, allowing it to ask Internet providers for the personal details of the alleged offenders, so it can send a settlement request.

In most district courts this established process is usually just a matter of filing boilerplate paperwork but in Minnesota, this didn’t go as easily as Strike 3 had expected.

Late last month, Magistrate Judge Franklin Noel denied such a discovery motion. As a result, Strike 3 is not allowed to ask the ISP, Comcast in this case, for the personal details of the account holder associated with the IP-address.

According to Judge Noel, these cases present a conflict between the copyright protections of the DMCA on the one hand and the privacy rights of the public as set out in the Communications Act. Here, the scale tips in the favour of the latter.

“This Court concludes that the conflict between the statutes, DMCA and the Communications Act, compels it to deny Plaintiff’s instant ex parte motion,” Judge Noel wrote.

This order didn’t go unnoticed. Last week Magistrate Judge David Schultz cited the ruling in two similar cases, also filed by Strike 3. Again, the subpoena requests were denied to secure the privacy of the alleged BitTorrent pirates.

“From this Court’s perspective there are obvious tensions between DMCA, the Communications Act, and Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45,” Schultz’s orders read.

“The Court is not unsympathetic to Plaintiff’s need to discover the actual identity of the infringer of its copyright; however, the discovery sought by Plaintiff through a Rule 45 subpoena directly collides with federal privacy protections.”

In the orders, which are all nearly identical, the magistrate judges note that unless there’s a binding precedent from the Eighth Circuit or further guidance from Congress, they have no other option than to deny these discovery requests.

While this is good news for the defendants in these cases, copyright troll watcher ‘FCT’ notes that it’s too early to celebrate. Since issuing these subpoenas is a well-established procedure, the district judge or an appeal court may reverse the denials.

This lack of agreement is also apparent from another ruling that came in right before the weekend, where another Minnesota Magistrate Judge granted a similar subpoena request from Strike 3, witch the caveat that the defendant should be able to proceed anonymously.

That said, if the orders from Magistrate Judges Noel and Schultz stand, it’s a clear win for the defendants in these cases. While it won’t stop Strike 3 from continuing it’s business, at least a few people are spared from receiving settlement demands in the mail.

—

The denials are available here (pdf 1,2,3) and the order granting the subpoena can be found here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

2018-05-03 python, multiprocessing, thread-ове и забивания

Post Syndicated from Vasil Kolev original https://vasil.ludost.net/blog/?p=3384

Всеки ден се убеждавам, че нищо не работи.

Открих забавен проблем с python и multiprocessing, който в момента още не мога да реша чий проблем е (в крайна сметка ще се окаже мой). Отне ми прилично количество време да го хвана и си струва да го разкажа.

Малко предистория: ползваме influxdb, в което тъпчем бая секундни данни, които после предъвкваме до минутни. InfluxDB има continuous queries, които вършат тази работа – на някакъв интервал от време хващат новите данни и ги сгъват. Тези заявки имаха няколко проблема:
– не се оправят с попълване на стари данни;
– изпълняват се рядко и минутните данни изостават;
– изпълняват се в общи линии в един thread, което кара минутните данни да изостават още повече (в нашия случай преди да ги сменим с около 12 часа).

Хванаха ме дяволите и си написах просто демонче на python, което да събира информация за различните бази какви данни могат да се сгънат, и паралелно да попълва данните. Работи в общи линии по следния начин:
– взима списък с базите данни
– пуска през multiprocessing-а да се събере за всяка база какви заявки трябва да се пуснат, на база на какви measurement-и има и докога са минутните и секундните данни в тях;
– пуска през multiprocessing-а събраните от предния pass заявки
– и така до края на света (или докато зависне).

След като навакса за няколко часа, успяваше да държи минутните данни в рамките на няколко минути от последните секундни данни, което си беше сериозно подобрение на ситуацията. Единственият проблем беше, че от време на време спираше да process-ва и увисваше.

Днес намерих време да го прегледам внимателно какво му се случва. Процесът изглежда като един parent и 5 fork()-нати child-а, като:
Parent-а спи във futex 0x22555a0;
Child 18455 във futex 0x7fdbfa366000;
Child 18546 read
Child 18457 във futex 0x7fdbfa366000
Child 18461 във futex 0x7fdbfa366000
Child 18462 във futex 0x7fdbfa366000
Child 18465 във futex 0x7fdbf908c2c0

Това не беше особено полезно, и се оказа, че стандартния python debugger (pdb) не може да се закача за съществуващи процеси, но за сметка на това gdb с подходящи debug символи може, и може да дава доста полезна информация. По този начин открих, че parent-а чака един child да приключи работата си:


#11 PyEval_EvalFrameEx (
[email protected]=Frame 0x235fb80, for file /usr/lib64/python2.7/multiprocessing/pool.py, line 543, in wait (self== 1525137960000000000 AND time < 1525138107000000000 GROUP BY time(1m), * fill(linear)\' in a read only context, please use a POST request instead', u'level': u'warning'}], u'statement_id': 0}]}, None], _callback=None, _chunksize=1, _number_left=1, _ready=False, _success=True, _cond=<_Condition(_Verbose__verbose=False, _Condition__lock=, acquire=, _Condition__waiters=[], release=) at remote 0x7fdbe0015310>, _job=45499, _cache={45499: < ...>}) a...(truncated), [email protected]=0) at /usr/src/debug/Python-2.7.5/Python/ceval.c:3040

Като в pool.py около ред 543 има следното:


class ApplyResult(object):

...

def wait(self, timeout=None):
self._cond.acquire()
try:
if not self._ready:
self._cond.wait(timeout)
finally:
self._cond.release()

Първоначално си мислех, че 18546 очаква да прочете нещо от грешното място, но излезе, че това е child-а, който е спечелил състезанието за изпълняване на следващата задача и чака да му я дадат (което изглежда се раздава през futex 0x7fdbfa366000). Един от child-овете обаче чака в друг lock:


(gdb) bt
#0 __lll_lock_wait () at ../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/x86_64/lowlevellock.S:135
#1 0x00007fdbf9b68dcb in _L_lock_812 () from /lib64/libpthread.so.0
#2 0x00007fdbf9b68c98 in __GI___pthread_mutex_lock ([email protected]=0x7fdbf908c2c0 ) at ../nptl/pthread_mutex_lock.c:79
#3 0x00007fdbf8e846ea in _nss_files_gethostbyname4_r ([email protected]=0x233fa44 "localhost", [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcb8e0, [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcb340 "hZ \372\333\177",
[email protected]=1064, [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcb8b0, [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcb910, [email protected]=0x0) at nss_files/files-hosts.c:381
#4 0x00007fdbf9170ed8 in gaih_inet (name=, [email protected]=0x233fa44 "localhost", service=, [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcbb90, [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcb9f0,
[email protected]=0x7fdbecfcb9e0) at ../sysdeps/posix/getaddrinfo.c:877
#5 0x00007fdbf91745cd in __GI_getaddrinfo ([email protected]=0x233fa44 "localhost", [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcbbc0 "8086", [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcbb90, [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcbb78)
at ../sysdeps/posix/getaddrinfo.c:2431
#6 0x00007fdbeed8760d in socket_getaddrinfo (self=, args=) at /usr/src/debug/Python-2.7.5/Modules/socketmodule.c:4193
#7 0x00007fdbf9e5fbb0 in call_function (oparg=, pp_stack=0x7fdbecfcbd10) at /usr/src/debug/Python-2.7.5/Python/ceval.c:4408
#8 PyEval_EvalFrameEx (
[email protected]=Frame 0x7fdbe8013350, for file /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/urllib3/util/connection.py, line 64, in create_connection (address=('localhost', 8086), timeout=3000, source_address=None, socket_options=[(6, 1, 1)], host='localhost', port=8086, err=None), [email protected]=0) at /usr/src/debug/Python-2.7.5/Python/ceval.c:3040

(gdb) frame 3
#3 0x00007fdbf8e846ea in _nss_files_gethostbyname4_r ([email protected]=0x233fa44 "localhost", [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcb8e0, [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcb340 "hZ \372\333\177",
[email protected]=1064, [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcb8b0, [email protected]=0x7fdbecfcb910, [email protected]=0x0) at nss_files/files-hosts.c:381
381 __libc_lock_lock (lock);
(gdb) list
376 enum nss_status
377 _nss_files_gethostbyname4_r (const char *name, struct gaih_addrtuple **pat,
378 char *buffer, size_t buflen, int *errnop,
379 int *herrnop, int32_t *ttlp)
380 {
381 __libc_lock_lock (lock);
382
383 /* Reset file pointer to beginning or open file. */
384 enum nss_status status = internal_setent (keep_stream);
385

Или в превод – опитваме се да вземем стандартния lock, който libc-то използва за да си пази reentrant функциите, и някой го държи. Кой ли?


(gdb) p lock
$3 = {__data = {__lock = 2, __count = 0, __owner = 16609, __nusers = 1, __kind = 0, __spins = 0, __elision = 0, __list = {__prev = 0x0, __next = 0x0}},
__size = "\002\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\[email protected]\000\000\001", '\000' , __align = 2}
(gdb) p &lock
$4 = (__libc_lock_t *) 0x7fdbf908c2c0

Тук се вижда как owner-а на lock-а всъщност е parent-а. Той обаче не смята, че го държи:


(gdb) p lock
$2 = 0
(gdb) p &lock
$3 = (__libc_lock_t *) 0x7fdbf9450df0
(gdb) x/20x 0x7fdbf9450df0
0x7fdbf9450df0 : 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000
0x7fdbf9450e00 <__abort_msg>: 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000
0x7fdbf9450e10 : 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000
0x7fdbf9450e20 : 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000
0x7fdbf9450e30 : 0x001762c9 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000

… което е и съвсем очаквано, при условие, че са два процеса и тая памет не е обща.

Та, явно това, което се е случило е, че докато parent-а е правел fork(), тоя lock го е държал някой, и child-а реално не може да пипне каквото и да е, свързано с него (което значи никакви reentrant функции в glibc-то, каквито па всички ползват (и би трябвало да ползват)). Въпросът е, че по принцип това не би трябвало да е възможно, щото около fork() няма нищо, което да взима тоя lock, и би трябвало glibc да си освобождава lock-а като излиза от функциите си.

Първоначалното ми идиотско предположение беше, че в signal handler-а на SIGCHLD multiprocessing модула създава новите child-ове, и така докато нещо друго държи lock-а идва сигнал, прави се нов процес и той го “наследява” заключен. Това беше твърде глупаво, за да е истина, и се оказа, че не е…

Около въпросите с lock-а бях стигнал с търсене до две неща – issue 127 в gperftools и Debian bug 657835. Първото каза, че проблемът ми може да е от друг lock, който някой друг държи преди fork-а (което ме накара да се загледам по-внимателно какви lock-ове се държат), а второто, че като цяло ако fork-ваш thread-нато приложение, може после единствено да правиш execve(), защото всичко друго не е ясно колко ще работи.

И накрая се оказа, че ако се ползва multiprocessing модула, той пуска в главния процес няколко thread-а, които да се занимават със следенето и пускането на child-ове за обработка. Та ето какво реално се случва:

– някой child си изработва нужния брой операции и излиза
– parent-а получава SIGCHLD и си отбелязва, че трябва да види какво става
– главния thread на parent-а тръгва да събира списъка бази, и вика в някакъв момент _nss_files_gethostbyname4_r, който взима lock-а;
– по това време другия thread казва “а, нямам достатъчно child-ове, fork()”
– profit.

Текущото ми глупаво решение е да не правя нищо в главния thread, което може да взима тоя lock и да се надявам, че няма още някой такъв. Бъдещото ми решение е или да го пиша на python3 с някой друг модул по темата, или на go (което ще трябва да науча).

Pirates Taunt Amazon Over New “Turd Sandwich” Prime Video Quality

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-taunt-amazon-over-new-turd-sandwich-prime-video-quality-180419/

Even though they generally aren’t paying for the content they consume, don’t fall into the trap of believing that all pirates are eternally grateful for even poor quality media.

Without a doubt, some of the most quality-sensitive individuals are to be found in pirate communities and they aren’t scared to make their voices known when release groups fail to come up with the best possible goods.

This week there’s been a sustained chorus of disapproval over the quality of pirate video releases sourced from Amazon Prime. The anger is usually directed at piracy groups who fail to capture content in the correct manner but according to a number of observers, the problem is actually at Amazon’s end.

Discussions on Reddit, for example, report that episodes in a single TV series have been declining in filesize and bitrate, from 1.56 GB in 720p at a 3073 kb/s video bitrate for episode 1, down to 907 MB in 720p at just 1514 kb/s video bitrate for episode 10.

Numerous theories as to why this may be the case are being floated around, including that Amazon is trying to save on bandwidth expenses. While this is a possibility, the company hasn’t made any announcements to that end.

Indeed, one legitimate customer reported that he’d raised the quality issue with Amazon and they’d said that the problem was “probably on his end”.

“I have Amazon Prime Video and I noticed the quality was always great for their exclusive shows, so I decided to try buying the shows on Amazon instead of iTunes this year. I paid for season pass subscriptions for Legion, Billions and Homeland this year,” he wrote.

“Just this past weekend, I have noticed a significant drop in details compared to weeks before! So naturally I assumed it was an issue on my end. I started trying different devices, calling support, etc, but nothing really helped.

“Billions continued to look like a blurry mess, almost like I was watching a standard definition DVD instead of the crystal clear HD I paid for and have experienced in the past! And when I check the previous episodes, sure enough, they look fantastic again. What the heck??”

With Amazon distancing itself from the issues, piracy groups have already begun to dig in the knife. Release group DEFLATE has been particularly critical.

“Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to start fucking with the quality of their encodes. They’re now reaching Netflix’s subpar 1080p.H264 levels, and their H265 encodes aren’t even close to what Netflix produces,” the group said in a file attached to S02E07 of The Good Fight released on Sunday.

“Netflix is able to produce drastic visual improvements with their H265 encodes compared to H264 across every original. In comparison, Amazon can’t decide whether H265 or H264 is going to produce better results, and as a result we suffer for it.”

Arrr! The quality be fallin’

So what’s happening exactly?

A TorrentFreak source (who tells us he’s been working in the BluRay/DCP authoring business for the last 10 years) was kind enough to give us two opinions, one aimed at the techies and another at us mere mortals.

“In technical terms, it appears [Amazon has] increased the CRF [Constant Rate Factor] value they use when encoding for both the HEVC [H265] and H264 streams. Previously, their H264 streams were using CRF 18 and a max bitrate of 15Mbit/s, which usually resulted in file sizes of roughly 3GB, or around 10Mbit/s. Similarly with their HEVC streams, they were using CRF 20 and resulting in streams which were around the same size,” he explained.

“In the past week, the H264 streams have decreased by up to 50% for some streams. While there are no longer any x264 headers embedded in the H264 streams, the HEVC streams still retain those headers and the CRF value used has been increased, so it does appear this change has been done on purpose.”

In layman’s terms, our source believes that Amazon had previously been using an encoding profile that was “right on the edge of relatively good quality” which kept bitrates relatively low but high enough to ensure no perceivable loss of quality.

“H264 streams encoded with CRF 18 could provide an acceptable compromise between quality and file size, where the loss of detail is often negligible when watched at regular viewing distances, at a desk, or in a lounge room on a larger TV,” he explained.

“Recently, it appears these values have been intentionally changed in order to lower the bitrate and file sizes for reasons unknown. As a result, the quality of some streams has been reduced by up to 50% of their previous values. This has introduced a visual loss of quality, comparable to that of viewing something in standard definition versus high definition.”

With the situation failing to improve during the week, by the time piracy group DEFLATE released S03E14 of Supergirl on Tuesday their original criticism had transformed into flat-out insults.

“These are only being done in H265 because Amazon have shit the bed, and it’s a choice between a turd sandwich and a giant douche,” they wrote, offering these images as illustrative of the problem and these indicating what should be achievable.

With DEFLATE advising customers to start complaining to Amazon, the memes have already begun, with unfavorable references to now-defunct group YIFY (which was often chastized for its low quality rips) and even a spin on one of the most well known anti-piracy campaigns.

You wouldn’t download stream….

TorrentFreak contacted Amazon Prime for comment on both the recent changes and growing customer complaints but at the time of publication we were yet to receive a response.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

IsoHunt Founder Returns With New Search Tool

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-founder-returns-with-new-search-tool-180419/

Of all the major torrent sites that dominated the Internet at the beginning of this decade, only a few remain.

One of the sites that fell prey to ever-increasing pressure from the entertainment industry was isoHunt.

Founded by the Canadian entrepreneur Gary Fung, the site was one of the early pioneers in the world of torrents, paving the way for many others. However, this spotlight also caught the attention of the major movie studios.

After a lengthy legal battle isoHunt’s founder eventually shut down the site late 2013. This happened after Fung signed a settlement agreement with Hollywood for no less than $110 million, on paper at least.

Launching a new torrent search engine was never really an option, but Fung decided not to let his expertise go to waste. He focused his time and efforts on a new search project instead, which was unveiled to the public this week.

The new app called “WonderSwipe” has just been added to Apple’s iOS store. It’s a mobile search app that ties into Google’s backend, but with a different user interface. While it has nothing to do with file-sharing, we decided to reach out to isoHunt’s founder to find out more.

Fung tells us that he got the idea for the app because he was frustrated with Google’s default search options on the mobile platform.

“I find myself barely do any search on the smartphone, most of the time waiting until I get to my desktop. I ask why?” Fung tells us.

One of the main issues he identified is the fact that swiping is not an option. Instead, people end up browsing through dozens of mobile browser tabs. So, Fung took Google’s infrastructure and search power, making it swipeable.

“From a UI design perspective, I find swiping through photos on the first iPhone one of the most extraordinary advances in computing. It’s so easy that babies would be doing it before they even learn how to flip open a book!

“Bringing that ease of use to the central way of conducting mobile search and research is the initial eureka I had in starting work on WonderSwipe,” Fung adds.

That was roughly three years ago, and a few hours ago WonderSwipe finally made its way into the App store. Android users will have to wait for now, but the application will eventually be available on that platform as well.

In addition to swiping through search results, the app also promises faster article loading and browsing, a reader mode with condensed search results, and a hands-free mode with automated browsing where summaries are read out loud.

WonderwSwipe


Of course, WonderSwipe is nothing like isoHunt ever was, apart from the fact that Google is a search engine that also links to torrents, indirectly.

This similarity was also brought up during the lawsuit with the MPAA, when Fung’s legal team likened isoHunt to Google in court. However, the Canadian entrepreneur doesn’t expect that Hollywood will have an issue with WonderSwipe in particular.

“isoHunt was similar to Google in how it worked as a search engine, but not in scope. Torrents are a small subset of all the webpages Google indexes,” Fung says.

“WonderSwipe’s aim is to find answers in all webpages, powered by Google search results. It presents results in extracted text and summaries with no connection to BitTorrent clients. As such, WonderSwipe can be bigger than isoHunt has ever been.”

Ironically, in recent years Hollywood has often criticized Google for linking to pirated content in its search results. These results will also be available through WonderSwipe.

However, Fung says that any copyright issues with WonderSwipe will have to be dealt with on the search engine level, by Google.

“If there are links to pirated content, tell search engines so they can take them down!” he says.

WonderSwipe is totally free and Fung tells us that he plans to monetize it with in-app purchases for pro features, and non-intrusive advertising that won’t slow down swiping or search results. More details on the future plans for the app are available here.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Google Search Receives Fewer Takedown Notices Than Before

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/google-search-receives-fewer-takedown-notices-than-before-180414/

In recent years Google has had to cope with a continuous increase in takedown requests from copyright holders, which target pirate sites in search results.

Just a few years ago the search engine removed ‘only’ a few thousand URLs per day. This has since grown to millions and has kept growing, until recently.

Around a year ago Google received a billion takedown requests a year, and for a while, it stabilized at roughly 20 million requests per week. By October last year, Google search had processed over three billion DMCA requests since it started counting.

After that, it appears that things calmed down a little. Where Google’s weekly takedown chart went up year after year, it’s now trending in a downward direction.

During the past half year, Google received ‘only’ 375 million takedown requests. That translates to roughly 15 million per week or 750 million per year. This is a 25% decrease compared the average in 2016.

Does this mean that copyright holders can no longer find enough pirated content via the search engine? We doubt it. But it’s clear that some of the big reporting agencies are sending in less complaints.

Degban, for example, which was at one point good for more than 10% of the weekly number of DMCA requests, has disappeared completely. Other big players, such as the Mexican anti-piracy outfit APDIF and Remove Your Media, have clearly lowered their volumes.

APDIF’s weekly DMCA volume

Of all the big players, UK Music Group BPI has been most consistent. Their average hasn’t dropped much in recent years, but is certainly not rising either.

It’s too early to tell whether this trend will hold, but according to the numbers we see now, Google will for the first time have a significant decrease in the number of takedown requests this year.

Despite the decrease, Google is under quite a bit of pressure from copyright holders to improve its takedown efforts. Most would like Google to delist pirate site domains entirely.

While the search engine isn’t willing to go that far, it does give a lower ranking to sites for which it receives a large volume of takedown requests. In addition, the company recently started accepting ‘prophylactic’ DMCA requests, for content that is not indexed yet.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

If YouTube-Ripping Sites Are Illegal, What About Tools That Do a Similar Job?

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/if-youtube-ripping-sites-are-illegal-what-about-tools-that-do-a-similar-job-180407/

In 2016, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry published research which claimed that half of 16 to 24-year-olds use stream-ripping tools to copy music from sites like YouTube.

While this might not have surprised those who regularly participate in the activity, IFPI said that volumes had become so vast that stream-ripping had overtaken pirate site music downloads. That was a big statement.

Probably not coincidentally, just two weeks later IFPI, RIAA, and BPI announced legal action against the world’s largest YouTube ripping site, YouTube-MP3.

“YTMP3 rapidly and seamlessly removes the audio tracks contained in videos streamed from YouTube that YTMP3’s users access, converts those audio tracks to an MP3 format, copies and stores them on YTMP3’s servers, and then distributes copies of the MP3 audio files from its servers to its users in the United States, enabling its users to download those MP3 files to their computers, tablets, or smartphones,” the complaint read.

The labels sued YouTube-MP3 for direct infringement, contributory infringement, vicarious infringement, inducing others to infringe, plus circumvention of technological measures on top. The case was big and one that would’ve been intriguing to watch play out in court, but that never happened.

A year later in September 2017, YouTubeMP3 settled out of court. No details were made public but YouTube-MP3 apparently took all the blame and the court was asked to rule in favor of the labels on all counts.

This certainly gave the impression that what YouTube-MP3 did was illegal and a strong message was sent out to other companies thinking of offering a similar service. However, other onlookers clearly saw the labels’ lawsuit as something to be studied and learned from.

One of those was the operator of NotMP3downloader.com, a site that offers Free MP3 Recorder for YouTube, a tool offering similar functionality to YouTube-MP3 while supposedly avoiding the same legal pitfalls.

Part of that involves audio being processed on the user’s machine – not by stream-ripping as such – but by stream-recording. A subtle difference perhaps, but the site’s operator thinks it’s important.

“After examining the claims made by the copyright holders against youtube-mp3.org, we identified that the charges were based on the three main points. [None] of them are applicable to our product,” he told TF this week.

The first point involves YouTube-MP3’s acts of conversion, storage and distribution of content it had previously culled from YouTube. Copies of unlicensed tracks were clearly held on its own servers, a potent direct infringement risk.

“We don’t have any servers to download, convert or store a copyrighted or any other content from YouTube. Therefore, we do not violate any law or prohibition implied in this part,” NotMP3downloader’s operator explains.

Then there’s the act of “stream-ripping” itself. While YouTube-MP3 downloaded digital content from YouTube using its own software, NotMP3downloader claims to do things differently.

“Our software doesn’t download any streaming content directly, but only launches a web browser with the video specified by a user. The capturing happens from a local machine’s sound card and doesn’t deal with any content streamed through a network,” its operator notes.

This part also seems quite important. YouTube-MP3 was accused of unlawfully circumventing technological measures implemented by YouTube to prevent people downloading or copying content. By opening up YouTube’s own website and viewing content in the way the site demands, NotMP3downloader says it does not “violate the website’s integrity nor performs direct download of audio or video files.”

Like the Betamax video recorder before it that enabled recording from analog TV, NotMP3downloader enables a user to record a YouTube stream on their local machine. This, its makers claim, means the software is completely legal and defeats all the claims made by the labels in the YouTube-MP3 lawsuit.

“What YouTube does is broadcasting content through the Internet. Thus, there is nothing wrong if users are allowed to watch such content later as they may want,” the NotMP3downloader team explain.

“It is worth noting that in Sony Corp. of America v. United City Studios, Inc. (464 U.S. 417) the United States Supreme Court held that such practice, also known as time-shifting, was lawful representing fair use under the US Copyright Act and causing no substantial harm to the copyright holder.”

While software that can record video and sounds locally are nothing new, the developments in the YouTube-MP3 case and this response from NotMP3downloader raises interesting questions.

We put some of them to none other than former RIAA Executive Vice President, Neil Turkewitz, who now works as President of Turkewitz Consulting Group.

Turkewitz stressed that he doesn’t speak for the industry as a whole or indeed the RIAA but it’s clear that his passion for protecting creators persists. He told us that in this instance, reliance on the Betamax decision is “misplaced”.

“The content is different, the activity is different, and the function is different,” Turkewitz told TF.

“The Sony decision must be understood in its context — the time shifting of audiovisual programming being broadcast from point to multipoint. The making available of content by a point-to-point interactive service like YouTube isn’t broadcasting — or at a minimum, is not a form of broadcasting akin to that considered by the Supreme Court in Sony.

“More fundamentally, broadcasting (right of communication to the public) is one of only several rights implicated by the service. And of course, issues of liability will be informed by considerations of purpose, effect and perceived harm. A court’s judgment will also be affected by whether it views the ‘innovation’ as an attempt to circumvent the requirements of law. The decision of the Supreme Court in ABC v. Aereo is certainly instructive in that regard.”

And there are other issues too. While YouTube itself is yet to take any legal action to deter users from downloading rather than merely streaming content, its terms of service are quite specific and seem to cover all eventualities.

“[Y]ou agree not to access Content or any reason other than your personal, non-commercial use solely as intended through and permitted by the normal functionality of the Service, and solely for Streaming,” YouTube’s ToS reads.

“‘Streaming’ means a contemporaneous digital transmission of the material by YouTube via the Internet to a user operated Internet enabled device in such a manner that the data is intended for real-time viewing and not intended to be downloaded (either permanently or temporarily), copied, stored, or redistributed by the user.

“You shall not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit any Content for any other purposes without the prior written consent of YouTube or the respective licensors of the Content.”

In this respect, it seems that a user doing anything but real-time streaming of YouTube content is breaching YouTube’s terms of service. The big question then, of course, is whether providing a tool specifically for that purpose represents an infringement of copyright.

The people behind Free MP3 Recorder believe that the “scope of application depends entirely on the end users’ intentions” which seems like a fair argument at first view. But, as usual, copyright law is incredibly complex and there are plenty of opposing views.

We asked the BPI, which took action against YouTubeMP3, for its take on this type of tool. The official response was “No comment” which doesn’t really clarify the position, at least for now.

Needless to say, the Betamax decision – relevant or not – doesn’t apply in the UK. But that only adds more parameters into the mix – and perhaps more opportunities for lawyers to make money arguing for and against tools like this in the future.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Police Assisted By MPAA Shut Down Pirate TV Box Sellers

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/police-assisted-by-mpaa-shut-down-pirate-tv-box-sellers-180404/

Piracy configured set-top boxes are the next big thing, today. Millions have been sold around the world and anti-piracy groups are scrambling to rein them in.

Many strategies are being tested, from pressurizing developers of allegedly infringing addons to filing aggressive lawsuits against sites such as TVAddons, a Kodi addon repository now facing civil action in both the United States and Canada.

Also under fire are companies that sell set-top boxes that come ready configured for piracy. Both Tickbox TV and Dragon Media Inc are being sued by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) in the US. At this stage, neither case looks promising for the defendants.

However, civil action isn’t the only way to deal with defendants in the United States, as a man and woman team from Tampa, Florida, have just discovered after being arrested by local police.

Mickael Cantrell and Nancy Major were allegedly the brains behind NBEETV, a company promising to supply set-top boxes that deliver “every movie, every tv show that’s ever been made, plus live sports with no blackouts” with “no monthly fees ever.”

As similar cases have shown, this kind of marketing spiel rarely ends well for defendants but the people behind NBEE TV (also known as FreeTVForLife Inc.) were either oblivious or simply didn’t care about the consequences.

A company press release dated April 2017 advertising the company’s NBPro 3+ box and tracked down by TF this week reveals the extent of the boasts.

“NBPRO 3+ is a TV box that offers instant access to watch every episode of any TV show without paying any monthly bill. One just must attach the loaded box to his TV and stream whatever they want, with no commercials,” the company wrote.

But while “Free TV for Life” was the slogan, that wasn’t the reality at the outset.

NBEETV’s Kodi-powered Android boxes were hellishly expensive with the NBPRO 1, NBPRO 3, NBPRO 5 costing $199.00, $279.00 and $359.00 respectively. This, however, was presented as a bargain alongside a claim that the “average [monthly] cable bill across the country is approximately $198.00” per month.

On top of the base product, NBEETV offered an 800 number for customer support and from their physical premises, they ran “training classes every Tuesday and Thursdays at 11:00” for people to better understand their products.

The location of that building isn’t mentioned in local media but a WHOIS on the company’s FreeTVForLife domain yields a confirmed address. It’s one that’s also been complained about in the past by an unhappy customer.

“Free TV for LIFE [redacted]..(next to K-Mart) Hudson, Fl.. 34667. We bought the Little black box costing $277.00. The pictures were not clear,” Rita S. wrote.

“The screen froze up on us all the time, even after hooking straight into the router. When we took the unit back they kept $80 of our money….were very rude, using the ************* word and we will not get the remainder of our money for 14-28 days according to the employee at the store. Buyers beware and I am telling everyone!!!”

While this customer was clearly unhappy, NBEETV claimed to be a “movement which is spreading across the country.” Unfortunately, that movement reached the eyes of the police, who didn’t think that the content being offered on the devices should have been presented for free.

“We saw [the boxes] had Black Panther, The Shape Of Water, Jumanji was on there as well,” said Detective Darren Hill.

“This is someone blatantly on the side of the road just selling them, with signage, a store front; advertising on the internet with a website.”

Detective Hill worked on the case with the MPAA but even from TorrentFreak’s limited investigations this week, the couple were incredibly easy to identify.

Aside from providing accurate and non-hidden address data in WHOIS records, Mickael Cantrell (also known as Michael Cantrell) put in his real name too. The listed email address is also easily traced back to a company called Nanny Bees Corporation which was operated by Cantrell and partner Nancy Major, who was also arrested in the NBEETV case.

Unfortunately for the couple, the blundering didn’t stop there. Their company YouTube channel, which is packed with tutorials, is also in Cantrell’s real name. Indeed, the photograph supplied to YouTube even matches the mugshot published by ABC Action News.

The publication reports that the Sheriff’s Office found the couple with around 50 ‘pirate’ boxes. The store operated by the couple has also been shutdown.

Finally, another curious aspect of NBEETV’s self-promotion comes via a blog post/press release dated August 2017 in which Cantrell suddenly ups the ante by becoming Michael W. Cantrell, Ph. D alongside some bold and unusual claims.

“Dr. Cantrell unleashes his latest innovation, a Smart TV Box that literally updates every ten minutes. Not only does the content (what you can view) but the whole platform updates automatically. If the Company changes an icon you receive the change in real time,” the release reads.

“Thanks to the Overlay Processor that Dr. Cantrell created, this processor named B-D.A.D (Binary Data Acceleration Dump) which enhances an Android unit’s operating power 5 times than the original bench test, has set a new industry standard around the world.”

Sounds epic….perhaps it powered the following video clip.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Introducing Backblaze’s Rapid Ingest Service: B2 Fireball

Post Syndicated from Ahin Thomas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-backblazes-rapid-ingest-service-fireball/

Introducing Backblaze Fireball

Backblaze’s rapid ingest service, Fireball, graduates out of public beta. Our device holds 70 terabytes of customer data and is perfect for migrating large data sets to B2 Cloud Storage.

At Backblaze, we like to put ourselves in the customer’s shoes. Specifically, we ask questions like “how can we make cloud storage more useful?” There is a long list of things we can do to help — over the last few weeks, we’ve addressed some of them when we lowered the cost of downloading data to $0.01 / GB. Today, we are pleased to publicly release our rapid ingest service, Fireball.

What is the Backblaze B2 Fireball?

The Fireball is a hardware device, specifically a NAS device. Any Backblaze B2 customer can order it from inside their account. The Fireball device can hold up to 70 terabytes of data. Upon ordering, it ships from a Backblaze data center to you. When you receive it, you can transfer your data onto the Fireball using your internal network. Once your data transfer is complete, you send it back to a Backblaze data center. Finally, inside our secure data center, your data is uploaded from the Fireball to your account. Your data remains encrypted throughout the process. Step by step instructions can be found here.

What is Fireball?

Why Use the Fireball?

“We would not have been able to get this project off the ground without the B2 Fireball.” — James Cole, KLRU (Austin City Limits)

For most customers, transferring large quantities of data isn’t always simple. The need can arise as you migrate off of legacy systems (e.g. replacing LTO) or simply on a project basis (e.g. transferring video shot in the field to the cloud). An common approach is to upload your data via the internet to the cloud storage vendor of your choosing. While cloud storage vendors don’t charge for uploads, you have to pay your network provider for bandwidth. That’s assuming you are in a place where the bandwidth can be secured.

Your data is stored in megabytes (“MB”) but your bandwidth is measured in megabits per second (“Mbps”). The difference? An 80 Mbps upload connection will transfer no more than 10 MB per second. That means, in your best case scenario, you might be able to upload 50 terabytes in 50 days, assuming you use nearly all of your upload bandwidth for the upload.

If you’re looking to migrate old backups from LTO or even a large project, a 3 month lag time is not operationally viable. That’s why multiple cloud storage providers have introduced rapid ingest devices.

How It Compares: Backblaze B2 Fireball vs AWS Snowball vs GCS Transfer Appliance

“We found the B2 Fireball much simpler and easier to use than Amazon’s Snowball. WunderVu had been looking for a cloud solution for security and simplicity, and B2 hit every check box.” — Aaron Rhodes, Executive Producer, WunderVu

Every vendor that offers a rapid ingest service only lets you upload to that vendor’s cloud. For example, you can’t use an Amazon Snowball to upload to Google Cloud Storage. This means that when considering a rapid ingest service, you are also making a decision on what cloud storage vendor to use. As such, one should consider not only the cost of the rapid ingest service, but also how much that vendor is going to charge you to store and download your data.

Device Capacity Service Fee Shipping Cloud Storage
$/GB/Month		 Download
$/GB
Backblaze B2 70 TB $550
(30 day rental)		 $75 $0.005 $0.01
Amazon S3 50 TB $200
(10 day rental)		 $? * $0.021
+320%		 $0.05+
+500%
Google Cloud 100 TB $300
(10 day rental)		 $500 $0.020
+300%		 $0.08+
+800%

*AWS does not estimate shipping fees at the time of the Snowball order.

To make the comparison easier, let’s create a hypothetical case and compare the costs incurred in the first year. Assume you have 100 TB as an initial upload. But that’s just the initial upload. Over the course of the year, let’s consider a usage pattern where every month you add 5 TB, delete 2 TBs, and download 10 TBs.

Transfer Cost Cloud Storage Fees Total Transfer +
Cloud Storage Fees
Backblaze B2 $1,250
(2 Fireballs)		 $9,570 $10,820
Amazon S3 $400
(2 Snowballs)		 $36,114 $36,514
+337%
Google Cloud $800
(1 transit)		 $39,684 $40,484
+374%

Just looking at the first year, Amazon is 337% more expensive than Backblaze and Google is 374% more expensive than Backblaze.

Put simply, Backblaze offers the lowest cost, high performance cloud storage on the planet. During our public beta of the Fireball program we’ve had extremely positive feedback around how the Fireball enables customers to get their projects started in a time efficient and cost effective way. We hope you’ll give it a try!

The post Introducing Backblaze’s Rapid Ingest Service: B2 Fireball appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.