Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/731126/rss
The first stop in the search for a free accounting system that can replace
QuickBooks is a familiar waypoint: the GnuCash application. GnuCash has been
around for many years and is known primarily as a personal-finance tool,
but it has acquired some business features as well. The question is: are
those business features solid enough to allow the program to serve as a
replacement for QuickBooks?
Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/court-cracks-down-on-future-pirate-mayweather-mcgregor-streams-170821/
This weekend, the undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. will go head-to-head with UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
The fight is not just about prestige, but also about money. Some predict that the unusual matchup could pull in a staggering one billion dollars.
A significant portion of this will go to each of the fighters, but rightsholders such as Showtime benefit as well.
People who want to stream the event live over the Internet will have to cough up between $89.95 and $99.99. This will generate millions of dollars in revenue but the numbers would be even higher if it wasn’t so easy to stream the fight through pirate sites.
This is why Showtime took some of the most brazen pirate sites to court last week, demanding an injunction to stop the pirated streams before they even start. In its complaint, the cable TV provider listed 44 domain names which advertise the fight, urging the court to shut them down pre-emptively.
After reviewing the application, United States District Judge André Birotte Jr. approved the preliminary injunction, which forbids the site’s operators from offering infringing streams. The injunction stays in place until August 28, two days after the event.
While the order is a clear win for Showtime, it’s unclear how effective it will be. The sites in question are all believed to be connected to LiveStreamHDQ and its alleged operator “Kopa Mayweather,” who Showtime have battled before.
At the time of writing, the sites are all still online, although the language appears to have changed. Many now have articles explaining how the fight can be watched legally. Whether it remains that way has to be seen.
Interestingly, the injunction doesn’t mention any domain name registrars or registries. When Showtime applied for similar measures in the past, the company specifically asked to take control of domain names, so these couldn’t be used for any infringing activity.
That said, the current order applies to the defendants and any others who are “in active concert or participation” with them, so this might be enough for domain registrars and other parties to take appropriate action.
Showtime also has the possibility to request updates to the injunction, if needed, but with only a few days to go this has to happen swiftly.
As mentioned earlier, this is not the first time that Showtime has gone after alleged pirates before they get a chance to commit an offense. The company launched similar cases for the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao and Mayweather vs. Berto matchups in 2015.
While these efforts were successful in taking a few pirate sites down, there were plenty of unauthorized streams available when the events started. This time it’s not likely to be any different. With hundreds of live streaming sites and tools out there, piracy will remain undefeated.
—
A copy of the preliminary injunction is available here (pdf).
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/healthy-aussie-pirates-set-to-face-cash-fines-poor-sick-should-be-ok-170821/
One of the oldest methods of trying to get people to stop downloading and sharing pirated material is by hitting them with ‘fines’.
The RIAA began the practice in September 2003, tracking people sharing music on early peer-to-peer networks, finding out their identities via ISPs, and sending them cease-and-desist orders with a request to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Many thousands of people were fined and the campaign raised awareness, but it did nothing to stop millions of file-sharers who continue to this day.
That’s something that Village Roadshow co-chief Graham Burke now wants to do something about. He says his company will effectively mimic the RIAA’s campaign of 14 years ago and begin suing Internet pirates Down Under. He told AFR that his company is already setting things up, ready to begin suing later in the year.
Few details have been made available at this stage but it’s almost certain that Village Roadshow’s targets will be BitTorrent users. It’s possible that users of other peer-to-peer networks could be affected but due to their inefficiency and relative obscurity, it’s very unlikely.
That leaves users of The Pirate Bay and any other torrent site vulnerable to the company, which will jump into torrent swarms masquerading as regular users, track IP addresses, and trace them back to Internet service providers. What happens next will depend on the responses of those ISPs.
If the ISPs refuse to cooperate, they will have to be taken to court to force them to hand over the personal details of their subscribers to Village Roadshow. It’s extremely unlikely they’ll hand them over voluntarily, so it could be some time before any ISP customer hears anything from the film distributor.
The bottom line is that Village Roadshow will want money to go away and Burke is already being open over the kind of sums his company will ask for.
“We will be looking for damages commensurate with what they’ve done. We’ll be saying ‘You’ve downloaded our Mad Max: Fury Road, our Red Dog, and we want $40 for the four movies plus $200 in costs’,” he says.
While no one will relish any kind of ‘bill’ dropping through a mail box, in the scheme of things a AUS$240 settlement demand isn’t huge, especially when compared to the sums demanded by companies such as Voltage Pictures, who tried and failed to start piracy litigation in Australia two years ago.
However, there’s even better news for some, who have already been given a heads-up that they won’t have to pay anything.
“We will identify people who are stealing our product, we will ask them do they have ill health or dire circumstances, and if they do and undertake to stop, we’ll drop the case,” Burke says.
While being upfront about such a policy has its pros and cons, Burke is also reducing his range of targets, particularly if likes to be seen as a man of his word, whenever those words were delivered. In March 2016, when he restated his intention to begin suing pirates, he also excluded some other groups from legal action.
“We don’t want to sue 16-year-olds or mums and dads,” Burke said. “It takes 18 months to go through the courts and all that does is make lawyers rich and clog the court system. It’s not effective.”
It will remain to be seen what criteria Village Roadshow ultimately employs but it’s likely the company will be asked to explain its intentions to the court, when it embarks on the process to discover alleged pirates’ identities. When it’s decided who is eligible, Burke says the gloves will come off, with pirates being “pursued vigorously” and “sued for damages.”
While Village Roadshow’s list of films is considerable, any with a specifically Australian slant seem the most likely to feature in any legal action. Burke tends to push the narrative that he’s looking after local industry so something like Mad Max: Fury Road would be perfect. It would also provide easy pickings for any anti-piracy company seeking to harvest Aussie IP addresses since it’s still very popular.
Finally, it’s worth noting that Australians who use pirate streaming services will be completely immune to the company’s planned lawsuit campaign. However, Burke appears to be tackling that threat using a couple of popular tactics currently being deployed elsewhere by the movie industry.
“Google are not doing enough and could do a lot more,” he told The Australian (subscription)
Burke said that he was “shocked” at how easy it was to find streaming content using Google’s search so decided to carry out some research of his own at home. He said he found Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk with no difficulty but that came with a sting in the tail.
According to the movie boss, his computer was immediately infected with malware and began asking for his credit card details. He doesn’t say whether he put them in.
As clearly the world’s most unlucky would-be movie pirate, Burke deserves much sympathy. It’s also completely coincidental that Hollywood is now pushing a “danger” narrative to keep people away from pirate sites.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/tvaddons-decimated-without-trial-heres-a-view-of-the-damage-170820/
On June 2, a collection of Canadian telecoms giants including Bell Canada, Bell ExpressVu, Bell Media, Videotron, Groupe TVA, Rogers Communications and Rogers Media, filed a complaint in Federal Court against Montreal resident Adam Lackman, the man behind TVAddons.
They claimed that by developing, hosting, distributing or promoting Kodi add-ons, Lackman infringed their copyrights.
On June 9 the Federal Court handed down an interim injunction against Lackman which restrained him from various activities in respect of TVAddons. The process took place ex parte, meaning in secret, without Lackman being able to mount a defense.
The plaintiffs were also granted an Anton Piller order, a civil search warrant that granted access to Lackman’s premises and allowed him to be interrogated.
As previously reported, the plaintiffs abused the process and only later did a court recognize that the search was designed as both a fishing exercise and a means to take down TVAddons, in advance of any trial on the merits of the case.
In the meantime, with the process grinding through an early appeal, the plaintiffs’ aim of destroying TVAddons has been at least partially achieved. After prolonged downtime, Lackman recently brought the site back under a new URL, TVAddons.co. However, he informs TF that serious damage has been done to a project that previously enjoyed great momentum.
“Google is the most popular site on the internet. If Google was down for a day, you’d check back tomorrow. If it was down for a week, you’d check back a week later. If it was down for a month, maybe you’d try once in a while,” Lackman says.
“However, if Google was down for more than six months, would you return in a year from now? Probably not. And that’s Google, not a small community site like TVAddons.”
Some people are coming back to the site now, but in nowhere near the volumes it previously enjoyed. Here’s a traffic analysis for a typical day at TVAddons.ag before the takedown.
And here is how the traffic for TVAddons.co looked a few days ago, a little two weeks after its revival and ten weeks after the initial takedown.
Part of the problem is not being able to get in touch with former users. In addition to taking control of TVAddons’ domains, the legal process also deprived the site of its social media accounts.
For example, TVAddons’ original Twitter account is now dormant. It still has 141K followers but with its passwords in the hands of lawyers, Lackman has been forced to open a new account, TVAddonsco. However, he’s only been able to attract just over 8,000 followers.
Facebook tells a similar story. With no access to the old account (which had 174,229 likes), the new account facebook.com/tvaddonsco is stalling at around 1,600. The situations on YouTube and Instagram are just as bleak.
“They’ve completely muzzled us, there was never anything questionable on our social media, seizing it without actually winning a lawsuit against us is nothing less than censorship,” Lackman says.
“Since we never required user registration, we don’t have the ability to reach the majority of our users without having access to our old social media accounts and notification system, which doesn’t work without our domain name being active.”
Also seized were TVaddons’ Feedburner account, which was used to manage the site’s 100,000 RSS feed subscribers.
“It was in the same account as Google+ and YouTube so we lost that too. We could have easily used it to forward our RSS feed and keep all the subscribers otherwise,” Lackman adds.
This has left TVAddons having to do its best to spread the details of its new locations via social media and a contest that has thus far gained more than 87,000 entries and may be helping things along.
While it’s now common knowledge that many TVAddons-related domains and accounts were seized following the search, Lackman now reveals that other non-connected projects were affected too. Included were the social media pages of several unrelated businesses, the domain name of a hosting website that was around seven years old, and an entirely legal “cord-cutting” information resource.
“Since the cord-cutting phenomenon conflicts with their business interests, seizing that specific social media page effectively destroyed their direct competition,” Lackman says.
“The plaintiffs are trying to destroy their competition rather than innovating. TVAddons provided a lot of legitimate competition for them in terms of content for cordcutters, they’re trying to keep a grasp on the market at any cost.
“Their failure at innovating can be immediately demonstrated by the fact that the NFL recently canceled all broadcast contracts with Canadian TV operators, in favor of DAZN, a new legal sports streaming service that charges half the price they did, with way more content than their sports packages ever offered.”
But despite the setbacks, Lackman appears determined to continue not only with the resurrected TVAddons, but also the legal fight against the Canadian broadcasting giants intent on his destruction.
At the time of writing the site’s fundraiser has generated more than $27,000 in 15 days but TF understands that this might only be 5 to 10 percent of the final sum required when all bills are counted. It’s hoped that new methods of donating and assistance from friendly website operators might give the campaign an additional boost but in the meantime, Lackman is expressing gratitude for the efforts so far.
I am honoured to see so much support from so many people whom I have never met. Thank you and G-d Bless you all.
— Adam Lackman (@adamlackman) August 4, 2017
It’s hard to say whether TVAddons will once again reach the heights achieved at its peak but after taking years to build up a following, the odds are certainly stacked against it.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/rightscorp-bleeds-another-million-borrows-200k-from-customer-bmg-170819/
Anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp is one of the many companies trying to turn Internet piracy into profit. The company has a somewhat novel approach but has difficulty balancing the books.
Essentially, Rightscorp operates like other so-called copyright-trolling operations, in that it monitors alleged offenders on BitTorrent networks, tracks them to their ISPs, then attempts to extract a cash settlement. Rightscorp does this by sending DMCA notices with settlement agreements attached, in the hope that at-this-point-anonymous Internet users break cover in panic. This can lead to a $20 or $30 ‘fine’ or in some cases dozens of multiples of that.
But despite settling hundreds of thousands of these cases, profit has thus far proven elusive, with the company hemorrhaging millions in losses. The company has just filed its results for the first half of 2017 and they contain more bad news.
In the six months ended June 2017, revenues obtained from copyright settlements reached just $138,514, that’s 35% down on the $214,326 generated in the same period last year. However, the company did manage to book $148,332 in “consulting revenue” in the first half of this year, a business area that generated no revenue in 2016.
Overall then, total revenue for the six month period was $286,846 – up from $214,326 last year. While that’s a better picture in its own right, Rightscorp has a lot of costs attached to its business.
After paying out $69,257 to copyright holders and absorbing $1,190,696 in general and administrative costs, among other things, the company’s total operating expenses topped out at $1,296,127 for the first six months of the year.
To make a long story short, the company made a net loss of $1,068,422, which was more than the $995,265 loss it made last year and despite improved revenues. The company ended June with just $1,725 in cash.
“These factors raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern within one year after the date that the financial statements are issued,” the company’s latest statement reads.
This hanging-by-a-thread narrative has followed Rightscorp for the past few years but there’s information in the latest accounts which indicates how bad things were at the start of the year.
In January 2016, Rightscorp and several copyright holders, including Hollywood studio Warner Bros, agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over intimidating robo-calls that were made to alleged infringers. The defendants agreed to set aside $450,000 to cover the costs, and it appears that Rightscorp was liable for at least $200,000 of that.
Rightscorp hasn’t exactly been flush with cash, so it was interesting to read that its main consumer piracy settlement client, music publisher BMG, actually stepped in to pay off the class-action settlement.
“At December 31, 2016, the Company had accrued $200,000 related to the settlement of a class action complaint. On January 7, 2017, BMG Rights Management (US) LLC (“BMG”) advanced the Company $200,000, which was used to pay off the settlement. The advance from BMG is to be applied to future billings from the Company to BMG for consulting services,” Rightscorp’s filing reads.
With Rightscorp’s future BMG revenue now being gobbled up by what appears to be loan repayments, it becomes difficult to see how the anti-piracy outfit can make enough money to pay off the $200,000 debt. However, its filing notes that on July 21, 2017, the company issued “an aggregate of 10,000,000 shares of common stock to an investor for a purchase price of $200,000.” While that amount matches the BMG debt, the filing doesn’t reveal who the investor is.
The filing also reveals that on July 31, Rightscorp entered into two agreements to provide services “to a holder of multiple copyrights.” The copyright holder isn’t named, but the deal reveals that it’s in Rightscorp’s best interests to get immediate payment from people to whom it sends cash settlement demands.
“[Rightscorp] will receive 50% of all gross proceeds of any settlement revenue received by the Client from pre-lawsuit ‘advisory notices,’ and 37.5% of all gross proceeds received by the Client from ‘final warning’ notices sent immediately prior to a lawsuit,” the filing notes.
Also of interest is that Rightscorp has offered not to work with any of the copyright holders’ direct competitors, providing certain thresholds are met – $10,000 revenue in the first month to $100,000 after 12 months. But there’s more to the deal.
Rightscorp will also provide a number of services to this client including detecting and verifying copyright works on P2P networks, providing information about infringers, plus reporting, litigation support, and copyright protection advisory services.
For this, Rightscorp will earn $10,000 for the first three months, rising to $85,000 per month after 16 months, valuable revenue for a company fighting for its life.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from Tara Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-the-winners-of-the-aws-chatbot-challenge-conversational-intelligent-chatbots-using-amazon-lex-and-aws-lambda/
A couple of months ago on the blog, I announced the AWS Chatbot Challenge in conjunction with Slack. The AWS Chatbot Challenge was an opportunity to build a unique chatbot that helped to solve a problem or that would add value for its prospective users. The mission was to build a conversational, natural language chatbot using Amazon Lex and leverage Lex’s integration with AWS Lambda to execute logic or data processing on the backend.
I know that you all have been anxiously waiting to hear announcements of who were the winners of the AWS Chatbot Challenge as much as I was. Well wait no longer, the winners of the AWS Chatbot Challenge have been decided.
May I have the Envelope Please? (The Trumpets sound)
The winners of the AWS Chatbot Challenge are:
Diving into the Winning Chatbot Projects
Let’s take a walkthrough of the details for each of the winning projects to get a view of what made these chatbots distinctive, as well as, learn more about the technologies used to implement the chatbot solution.
BuildFax Counts by Joe Emison
The BuildFax Counts bot was created as a real solution for the BuildFax company to decrease the amount the time that sales and marketing teams can get answers on permits or properties with permits meet certain criteria.
BuildFax, a company co-founded by bot developer Joe Emison, has the only national database of building permits, which updates data from approximately half of the United States on a monthly basis. In order to accommodate the many requests that come in from the sales and marketing team regarding permit information, BuildFax has a technical sales support team that fulfills these requests sent to a ticketing system by manually writing SQL queries that run across the shards of the BuildFax databases. Since there are a large number of requests received by the internal sales support team and due to the manual nature of setting up the queries, it may take several days for getting the sales and marketing teams to receive an answer.
The BuildFax Counts chatbot solves this problem by taking the permit inquiry that would normally be sent into a ticket from the sales and marketing team, as input from Slack to the chatbot. Once the inquiry is submitted into Slack, a query executes and the inquiry results are returned immediately.
Joe built this solution by first creating a nightly export of the data in their BuildFax MySQL RDS database to CSV files that are stored in Amazon S3. From the exported CSV files, an Amazon Athena table was created in order to run quick and efficient queries on the data. He then used Amazon Lex to create a bot to handle the common questions and criteria that may be asked by the sales and marketing teams when seeking data from the BuildFax database by modeling the language used from the BuildFax ticketing system. He added several different sample utterances and slot types; both custom and Lex provided, in order to correctly parse every question and criteria combination that could be received from an inquiry. Using Lambda, Joe created a Javascript Lambda function that receives information from the Lex intent and used it to build a SQL statement that runs against the aforementioned Athena database using the AWS SDK for JavaScript in Node.js library to return inquiry count result and SQL statement used.
The BuildFax Counts bot is used today for the BuildFax sales and marketing team to get back data on inquiries immediately that previously took up to a week to receive results.
Not only is BuildFax Counts bot our 1st place winner and wonderful solution, but its creator, Joe Emison, is a great guy. Joe has opted to donate his prize; the $5,000 cash, the $2,500 in AWS Credits, and one re:Invent ticket to the Black Girls Code organization. I must say, you rock Joe for helping these kids get access and exposure to technology.
Hubsy by Andrew Riess, Andrew Puch, and John Wetzel
Hubsy bot was created to redefine and personalize the way users traditionally manage their HubSpot account. HubSpot is a SaaS system providing marketing, sales, and CRM software. Hubsy allows users of HubSpot to create engagements and log engagements with customers, provide sales teams with deals status, and retrieves client contact information quickly. Hubsy uses Amazon Lex’s conversational interface to execute commands from the HubSpot API so that users can gain insights, store and retrieve data, and manage tasks directly from Facebook, Slack, or Alexa.
In order to implement the Hubsy chatbot, Andrew and the team members used AWS Lambda to create a Lambda function with Node.js to parse the users request and call the HubSpot API, which will fulfill the initial request or return back to the user asking for more information. Terraform was used to automatically setup and update Lambda, CloudWatch logs, as well as, IAM profiles. Amazon Lex was used to build the conversational piece of the bot, which creates the utterances that a person on a sales team would likely say when seeking information from HubSpot. To integrate with Alexa, the Amazon Alexa skill builder was used to create an Alexa skill which was tested on an Echo Dot. Cloudwatch Logs are used to log the Lambda function information to CloudWatch in order to debug different parts of the Lex intents. In order to validate the code before the Terraform deployment, ESLint was additionally used to ensure the code was linted and proper development standards were followed.
PFMBot by Benny Leong and his team from MoneyLion
PFMBot, Personal Finance Management Bot, is a bot to be used with the MoneyLion finance group which offers customers online financial products; loans, credit monitoring, and free credit score service to improve the financial health of their customers. Once a user signs up an account on the MoneyLion app or website, the user has the option to link their bank accounts with the MoneyLion APIs. Once the bank account is linked to the APIs, the user will be able to login to their MoneyLion account and start having a conversation with the PFMBot based on their bank account information.
The PFMBot UI has a web interface built with using Javascript integration. The chatbot was created using Amazon Lex to build utterances based on the possible inquiries about the user’s MoneyLion bank account. PFMBot uses the Lex built-in AMAZON slots and parsed and converted the values from the built-in slots to pass to AWS Lambda. The AWS Lambda functions interacting with Amazon Lex are Java-based Lambda functions which call the MoneyLion Java-based internal APIs running on Spring Boot. These APIs obtain account data and related bank account information from the MoneyLion MySQL Database.
ADP Payroll Innovation Bot by Eric Liu, Jiaxing Yan, and Fan Yang
ADP PI (Payroll Innovation) bot is designed to help employees of ADP customers easily review their own payroll details and compare different payroll data by just asking the bot for results. The ADP PI Bot additionally offers issue reporting functionality for employees to report payroll issues and aids HR managers in quickly receiving and organizing any reported payroll issues.
The ADP Payroll Innovation bot is an ecosystem for the ADP payroll consisting of two chatbots, which includes ADP PI Bot for external clients (employees and HR managers), and ADP PI DevOps Bot for internal ADP DevOps team.
The architecture for the ADP PI DevOps bot is different architecture from the ADP PI bot shown above as it is deployed internally to ADP. The ADP PI DevOps bot allows input from both Slack and Alexa. When input comes into Slack, Slack sends the request to Lex for it to process the utterance. Lex then calls the Lambda backend, which obtains ADP data sitting in the ADP VPC running within an Amazon VPC. When input comes in from Alexa, a Lambda function is called that also obtains data from the ADP VPC running on AWS.
The architecture for the ADP PI bot consists of users entering in requests and/or entering issues via Slack. When requests/issues are entered via Slack, the Slack APIs communicate via Amazon API Gateway to AWS Lambda. The Lambda function either writes data into one of the Amazon DynamoDB databases for recording issues and/or sending issues or it sends the request to Lex. When sending issues, DynamoDB integrates with Trello to keep HR Managers abreast of the escalated issues. Once the request data is sent from Lambda to Lex, Lex processes the utterance and calls another Lambda function that integrates with the ADP API and it calls ADP data from within the ADP VPC, which runs on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Python and Node.js were the chosen languages for the development of the bots.
The ADP PI bot ecosystem has the following functional groupings:
Employee Functionality
HR Manager Functionality
DevOps Functionality
Summary
Let’s all wish all the winners of the AWS Chatbot Challenge hearty congratulations on their excellent projects.
You can review more details on the winning projects, as well as, all of the submissions to the AWS Chatbot Challenge at: https://awschatbot2017.devpost.com/submissions. If you are curious on the details of Chatbot challenge contest including resources, rules, prizes, and judges, you can review the original challenge website here: https://awschatbot2017.devpost.com/.
Hopefully, you are just as inspired as I am to build your own chatbot using Lex and Lambda. For more information, take a look at the Amazon Lex developer guide or the AWS AI blog on Building Better Bots Using Amazon Lex (Part 1)
Chat with you soon!
– Tara
Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/porn-producer-says-hell-prove-that-amc-tv-exec-is-a-bittorrent-pirate-170818/
When people are found sharing copyrighted pornographic content online in the United States, there’s always a chance that an angry studio will attempt to track down the perpertrator in pursuit of a cash settlement.
That’s what adult studio Flava Works did recently, after finding its content being shared without permission on a number of gay-focused torrent sites. It’s now clear that their target was Marc Juris, President & General Manager of AMC-owned WE tv. Until this week, however, that information was secret.
As detailed in our report yesterday, Flava Works contacted Juris with an offer of around $97,000 to settle the case before trial. And, crucially, before Juris was publicly named in a lawsuit. If Juris decided not to pay, that amount would increase significantly, Flava Works CEO Phillip Bleicher told him at the time.
Not only did Juris not pay, he actually went on the offensive, filing a ‘John Doe’ complaint in a California district court which accused Flava Works of extortion and blackmail. It’s possible that Juris felt that this would cause Flava Works to back off but in fact, it had quite the opposite effect.
In a complaint filed this week in an Illinois district court, Flava Works named Juris and accused him of a broad range of copyright infringement offenses.
The complaint alleges that Juris was a signed-up member of Flava Works’ network of websites, from where he downloaded pornographic content as his subscription allowed. However, it’s claimed that Juris then uploaded this material elsewhere, in breach of copyright law.
“Defendant downloaded copyrighted videos of Flava Works as part of his paid memberships and, in violation of the terms and conditions of the paid sites, posted and distributed the aforesaid videos on other websites, including websites with peer to peer sharing and torrents technology,” the complaint reads.
“As a result of Defendant’ conduct, third parties were able to download the copyrighted videos, without permission of Flava Works.”
In addition to demanding injunctions against Juris, Flava Works asks the court for a judgment in its favor amounting to a cool $1.2m, more than twelve times the amount it was initially prepared to settle for. It’s a huge amount, but according to CEO Phillip Bleicher, it’s what his company is owed, despite Juris being a former customer.
“Juris was a member of various Flava Works websites at various times dating back to 2006. He is no longer a member and his login info has been blocked by us to prevent him from re-joining,” Bleicher informs TF.
“We allow full downloads, although each download a person performs, it tags the video with a hidden code that identifies who the user was that downloaded it and their IP info and date / time.”
We asked Bleicher how he can be sure that the content downloaded from Flava Works and re-uploaded elsewhere was actually uploaded by Juris. Fine details weren’t provided but he’s insistent that the company’s evidence holds up.
“We identified him directly, this was done by cross referencing all his IP logins with Flava Works, his email addresses he used and his usernames. We can confirm that he is/was a member of Gay-Torrents.org and Gayheaven.org. We also believe (we will find out in discovery) that he is a member of a Russian file sharing site called GayTorrent.Ru,” he says.
While the technicalities of who downloaded and shared what will be something for the court to decide, there’s still Juris’ allegations that Bleicher used extortion-like practices to get him to settle and used his relative fame against him. Bleicher says that’s not how things played out.
“[Juris] hired an attorney and they agreed to settle out of court. But then we saw him still accessing the file sharing sites (one site shows a user’s last login) and we were waiting on the settlement agreement to be drafted up by his attorney,” he explains.
“When he kept pushing the date of when we would see an agreement back we gave him a final deadline and said that after this date we would sue [him] and with all lawsuits – we make a press release.”
Bleicher says at this point Juris replaced his legal team and hired lawyer Mark Geragos, who Bleicher says tried to “bully” him, warning him of potential criminal offenses.
“Your threats in the last couple months to ‘expose’ Mr. Juris knowing he is a high profile individual, i.e., today you threatened to issue a press release, to induce him into wiring you close to $100,000 is outright extortion and subject to criminal prosecution,” Geragos wrote.
“I suggest you direct your attention to various statutes which specifically criminalize your conduct in the various jurisdictions where you have threatened suit.”
Interestingly, Geragos then went on to suggest that the lawsuit may ultimately backfire, since going public might affect Flava Works’ reputation in the gay market.
“With respect to Mr. Juris, your actions have been nothing but extortion and we reject your attempts and will vigorously pursue all available remedies against you,” Geragos’ email reads.
“We intend to use the platform you have provided to raise awareness in the LGBTQ community of this new form of digital extortion that you promote.”
But Bleicher, it seems, is up for a fight.
“Marc knows what he did and enjoyed downloading our videos and sharing them and those of videos of other studios, but now he has been caught,” he told the lawyer.
“This is the kind of case I would like to take all the way to trial, win or lose. It shows
people that want to steal our copyrighted videos that we aggressively protect our intellectual property.”
But to the tune of $1.2m? Apparently so.
“We could get up to $150,000 per infringement – we have solid proof of eight full videos – not to mention we have caught [Juris] downloading many other studios’ videos too – I think – but not sure – the number was over 75,” Bleicher told TF.
It’s quite rare for this kind of dispute to play out in public, especially considering Juris’ profile and occupation. Only time will tell if this will ultimately end in a settlement, but Bleicher and Juris seemed determined at this stage to stand by their ground and fight this out in court.
Complaint (pdf)
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/731052/rss
Power-efficient workqueues were first introduced in the
3.11 kernel release; since then, fifty or so
subsystems and drivers have been updated to use them. These workqueues
can be especially useful on handheld devices (like tablets and
smartphones), where power is at a premium.
ARM platforms with power-efficient workqueues enabled on Ubuntu and
Android have shown significant improvements in energy consumption (up to
15% for some use cases).
Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-aussie-isps-to-block-dozens-of-pirate-sites-170818/
Rather than taking site operators to court, copyright holders increasingly demand that Internet providers should block access to ‘pirate’ domains.
As a result, courts all around the world have ordered ISPs to block subscriber access to various pirate sites.
This is also happening in Australia where the first blockades were issued late last year. In December, the Federal Court ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay and several other sites, which happened soon after.
However, as is often the case with website blocking, one order is not enough as there are still plenty of pirate sites and proxies readily available. So, several rightsholders including movie studio Village Roadshow and local broadcaster Foxtel went back to court.
Today the Federal Court ruled on two applications that cover 59 pirate sites in total, including many popular torrent and streaming portals.
The first order was issued by Justice John Nicholas, who directed several Internet providers including IINet, Telstra, and TPG to block access to several pirate sites. The request came from Village Roadshow, which was backed by several major Hollywood studios.
The order directs the ISPs to stop passing on traffic to 41 torrent and streaming platforms including Demonoid, RARBG, EZTV, YTS, Gomovies, and Fmovies. The full list of blocked domains is even longer, as it also covers several proxies.
“The infringement or facilitation of infringement by the Online Locations is flagrant and reflect a blatant disregard for the rights of copyright owners,” the order reads.
“By way of illustration, one of the Online Locations is accessible via the domain name ‘istole.it’ and it and many others include notices encouraging users to implement technology to frustrate any legal action that might be taken by copyright owners.”
In a separate order handed down by Federal Court Judge Stephen Burley, another 17 sites are ordered blocked following a request from Foxtel. This includes popular pirate sites such as 1337x, Torlock, Putlocker, YesMovies, Vumoo, and LosMovies.
The second order also includes a wide variety of alternative locations, including proxies, which brings the total number of targeted domain names to more than 160.
As highlighted by SHM, the orders coincide with the launch of a new anti-piracy campaign dubbed “The Price of Piracy,” which is organized by Creative Content Australia. Lori Flekser, Executive director of the non-profit organization, believes that the blockades will help to significantly deter piracy.
“Not only is there decreasing traffic to pirate sites but there is a subsequent increase in traffic to legal sites,” she said.
At the same time, she warns people not to visit proxy and mirror sites, as these could be dangerous. This message is also repeated by her organization’s campaign, which warns that pirate sites can be filled with ransomware, spyware, trojans, viruses, bots, rootkits and worms.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from Matt Guanti original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/enabling-identity-federation-with-ad-fs-3-0-and-amazon-appstream-2-0/
Want to provide users with single sign-on access to AppStream 2.0 using existing enterprise credentials? Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 3.0 can be used to provide single sign-on for Amazon AppStream 2.0 using SAML 2.0.
You can use your existing Active Directory or any SAML 2.0–compliant identity service to set up single sign-on access of AppStream 2.0 applications for your users. Identity federation using SAML 2.0 is currently available in all AppStream 2.0 regions.
This post explains how to configure federated identities for AppStream 2.0 using AD FS 3.0.
After setting up SAML 2.0 federation for AppStream 2.0, users can browse to a specially crafted (AD FS RelayState) URL and be taken directly to their AppStream 2.0 applications.
When users sign in with this URL, they are authenticated against Active Directory. After they are authenticated, the browser receives a SAML assertion as an authentication response from AD FS, which is then posted by the browser to the AWS sign-in SAML endpoint. Temporary security credentials are issued after the assertion and the embedded attributes are validated. The temporary credentials are then used to create the sign-in URL. The user is redirected to the AppStream 2.0 streaming session. The following diagram shows the process.
In this post, use domain.local as the name of the Active Directory domain. Here are the steps in this walkthrough:
This walkthrough assumes that you have the following prerequisites:
First, create an AppStream 2.0 stack, as you reference the stack in upcoming steps. Name the stack ExampleStack. For this walkthrough, it doesn’t matter which underlying fleet you associate with the stack. You can create a fleet using one of the example Amazon-AppStream2-Sample-Image images available, or associate an existing fleet to the stack.
The first thing you need is the metadata file from your AD FS server. The metadata file is a signed document that is used later in this guide to establish the relying party trust. Don’t edit or reformat this file.
To download and save this file, navigate to the following location, replacing <FQDN_ADFS_SERVER> with your AD FS s fully qualified server name.
https://<FQDN_ADFS_SERVER>/FederationMetadata/2007-06/FederationMetadata.xml
Save the file to a local location that you can access from the AWS Management Console later.
Next, create the SAML provider in IAM, using the console. You could also create it using the AWS CLI.
In the IAM console, choose Identity providers, Create provider.
On the Configure Provider page, for Provider Type, choose SAML. For Provider Name, type ADFS01 or similar name. Choose Choose File to upload the metadata document previously downloaded. Choose Next Step.
Verify the provider information and choose Create.
You need the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the identity provider (IdP) to configure claims rules later in this walkthrough. To get this, select the IdP that you just created. On the summary page, copy the value for Provider ARN. The ARN is in the following format:
arn:aws:iam::<AccountID>:saml-provider/<Provider Name>
Next, configure a policy with permissions to the AppStream 2.0 stack. This is the level of permissions that federated users have within AWS.
In the IAM console, choose Policies, Create Policy, Create Your Own Policy.
For Policy Name, enter a descriptive name. For Description, enter the level of permissions. For Policy Document, you customize the Region-Code, AccountID (without hyphens), and case-sensitive Stack-Name values.
The following screenshot shows how to create a policy that gives users permissions to only a single AppStream 2.0 stack, named ExampleStack. For more information, see the Step 2: Configure Permissions in AWS for Your Federated Users topic.
For Region Codes, use one of the following values based on the region you are using AppStream 2.0 (the available regions for AppStream 2.0):
Choose Create Policy and you should see the following notification:
Here, you create a role that relates to an Active Directory group assigned to your AppStream 2.0 federated users. For this configuration, Active Directory groups and AWS roles are case-sensitive. Here you create an IAM Role named “ExampleStack” and an Active Directory group named in the format AWS-AccountNumber-RoleName, for example AWS-012345678910-ExampleStack.
In the IAM console, choose Roles, Create new role.
On the Select Role type page, choose Role for identity provider access. Choose Select next to Grant Web Single Sign-On (WebSSO) access to SAML providers.
On the Establish Trust page, make sure that the SAML provider that you just created (such as ADFS01) is selected. For Attribute and Value, keep the default values.
On the Verify Role Trust page, the Federated value matches the ARN noted previously for the principal IdP created earlier. The SAML: aud value equals https://signin.aws.amazon.com/saml, as shown below. This is prepopulated and does not require any change. Choose Next Step.
On the Attach policy page, attach the policy that you created earlier granting federated users access only to the AppStream 2.0 stack. In this walkthrough, the policy was named AppStream2_ExampleStack.
After selecting the correct policy, choose Next Step.
On the Set role name and review page, name the role ExampleStack. You can customize this naming convention, as I explain later when I create the claims rules.
You can describe the role as desired. Ensure that the trusted entities match the AD FS IdP ARN, and that the policy attached is the policy created earlier granting access only to this stack.
Choose Create Role.
Important: If you grant more than the stack permissions to federated users, you can give them access to other areas of the console as well. AWS strongly recommends that you attach policies to a role that grants access only to the resources to be shared with federated users.
For example, if you attach the AdministratorAccess policy instead of AppStream2_ExampleStack, any AppStream 2.0 federated user in the ExampleStack Active Directory group has AdministratorAccess in your AWS account. Even though AD FS routes users to the stack, users can still navigate to other areas of the console, using deep links that go directly to specific console locations.
Next, create the Active Directory group in the format AWS-AccountNumber-RoleName using the “ExampleStack” role name that you just created. You reference this Active Directory group in the AD FS claim rules later using regex. For Group scope, choose Global. For Group type, choose Security
Note: To follow this walkthrough exactly, name your Active Directory group in the format “AWS-AccountNumber-ExampleStack” replacing AccountNumber with your AWS AccountID (without hyphens). For example:
AWS-012345678910-ExampleStack
In this section, you configure AD FS 3.0 to communicate with the configurations made in AWS.
Open the AD FS console on your AD FS 3.0 server.
Open the context (right-click) menu for AD FS and choose Add Relying Party Trust…
On the Welcome page, choose Start. On the Select Data Source page, keep Import data about the relying party published online or on a local network checked. For Federation metadata address (host name or URL), type the following link to the SAML metadata to describe AWS as a relying party and then choose Next.
https://signin.aws.amazon.com/static/saml-metadata.xml
On the Specify Display Name page, for Display name, type “AppStream 2.0 – ExampleStack” or similar value. For Notes, provide a description. Choose Next.
On the Configure Multi-factor Authentication Now? page, choose I do not want to configure multi-factor authentication settings for this relying party trust at this time. Choose Next.
Because you are controlling access to the stack using an Active Directory group, and IAM role with an attached policy, on the Choose Issuance Authorization Rules page, check Permit all users to access this relying party. Choose Next.
On the Ready to Add Trust page, there shouldn’t be any changes needed to be made. Choose Next.
On the Finish page, clear Open the edit Claim Rules dialog for this relying party trust when the wizard closes. You open this later.
Next, you add the https://signin.aws.amazon.com/saml URL is listed on the Identifiers tab within the properties of the trust. To do this, open the context (right-click) menu for the relying party trust that you just created and choose Properties.
On the Monitoring tab and clear Monitor relying party. Choose Apply. On the Identifiers tab, for Relying party identifier, add https://signin.aws.amazon.com/saml and choose OK.
In this section, you create four AD FS claim rules, which identify accounts, set LDAP attributes, get the Active Directory groups, and match them to the role created earlier.
In the AD FS console, expand Trust Relationships, choose Relying Party Trusts, and then select the relying party trust that you just created (in this case, the display name is AppStream 2.0 – ExampleStack). Open the context (right-click) menu for the relying party trust and choose Edit Claim Rules. Choose Add Rule.
This claim rule tells AD FS the type of expected incoming claim and how to send the claim to AWS. AD FS receives the UPN and tags it as the Name ID when it’s forwarded to AWS. This rule interacts with the third rule, which fetches the user groups.
Claim rule template: Transform an Incoming Claim
Configure Claim Rule values:
Claim Rule Name: Name ID
Incoming Claim Type: UPN
Outgoing Claim Type: Name ID
Outgoing name ID format: Persistent Identifier
Pass through all claim values: selected
This rule sets a unique identifier for the user. In this case, use the E-Mail-Addresses values.
Claim rule template: Send LDAP Attributes as Claims
Configure Claim Rule values:
Claim rule name: RoleSessionName
Attribute store: Active Directory
LDAP Attribute: E-Mail-Addresses
Outgoing Claim Type: https://aws.amazon.com/SAML/Attributes/RoleSessionName
This rule queries Active Directory and returns the groups to which the user is assigned, such as AWS-012345678910-ExampleStack .
Claim rule template: Send Claims Using a Custom Rule
Configure Claim Rule values:
Claim Rule Name: Get Active Directory Groups
Custom Rule:
c:[Type == "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/windowsaccountname", Issuer == "AD AUTHORITY"] => add(store = "Active Directory", types = ("http://temp/variable"), query = ";tokenGroups;{0}", param = c.Value);
This rule converts the value of the Active Directory group starting with AWS-AccountNumber prefix to the roles known by AWS. For this rule, you need the AWS IdP ARN that you noted earlier. If your IdP in AWS was named ADFS01 and the AccountID was 012345678910, the ARN would look like the following:
arn:aws:iam::012345678910:saml-provider/ADFS01
Claim rule template: Send Claims Using a Custom Rule
Configure Claim Rule values:
Claim Rule Name: Roles
Custom Rule:
c:[Type == "http://temp/variable", Value =~ "(?i)^AWS-"] => issue(Type = "https://aws.amazon.com/SAML/Attributes/Role", Value = RegExReplace(c.Value, "AWS-012345678910-", "arn:aws:iam::012345678910:saml-provider/ADFS01,arn:aws:iam::019517892450:role/"));
In this walkthrough, “AWS-” returns the Active Directory groups that start with the AWS- prefix, then removes AWS-012345678910- leaving ExampleStack left on the Active Directory Group name to match the ExampleStack IAM role. To customize the role naming convention, for example to name the IAM Role ADFS-ExampleStack, add “ADFS-” to the end of the role ARN at the end of the rule: arn:aws:iam::012345678910:role/ADFS-.
You should now have four claims rules created:
By default, AD FS 3.0 doesn’t have RelayState enabled. AppStream 2.0 uses RelayState to direct users to your AppStream 2.0 stack.
On your AD FS server, open the following with elevated (administrator) permissions:
%systemroot%\adfs\Microsoft.IdentityServer.Servicehost.exe.config
In the Microsoft.IdentityServer.Servicehost.exe.config file, find the section <microsoft.identityServer.web>. Within this section, add the following line:
<useRelayStateForIdpInitiatedSignOn enabled="true" />
The edit should look like the following:
In the AD FS console, verify that forms authentication is enabled. Choose Authentication Policies. Under Primary Authentication, for Global Settings, choose Edit.
For Extranet, choose Forms Authentication. For Intranet, do the same and choose OK.
On the AD FS server, from an elevated (administrator) command prompt, run the following commands sequentially to stop, then start the AD FS service to register the changes:
net stop adfssrv net start adfssrv
Now that RelayState is enabled, you can generate the URL.
I have created an Excel spreadsheet for RelayState URL generation, available as RelayGenerator.xlsx. This spreadsheet only requires the fully qualified domain name for your AD FS server, account ID (without hyphens), stack name (case-sensitive), and the AppStream 2.0 region. After all the inputs are entered, the spreadsheet generates a URL in the blue box, as shown in the screenshot below. Copy the entire contents of the blue box to retrieve the generated RelayState URL for AD FS.
Alternatively, if you do not have Excel, there are third-party tools for RelayState URL generation. However, they do require some customization to work with AppStream 2.0. Example customization steps for one such tool are provided below.
CodePlex has an AD FS RelayState generator, which downloads an HTML file locally that you can use to create the RelayState URL. The generator says it’s for AD FS 2.0; however, it also works for AD FS 3.0. You can generate the RelayState URL manually but if the syntax or case sensitivity is incorrect even slightly, it won’t work. I recommend using the tool to ensure a valid URL.
When you open the URL generator, clear out the default text fields. You see a tool that looks like the following:
To generate the values, you need three pieces of information:
The IDP URL string is the URL you use to hit your AD FS sign-on page. For example:
https://<ADFSInstance>/adfs/ls/idpinitiatedsignon.aspx
In this configuration, use the following:
https://adfs01.domain.local/adfs/ls/idpinitiatedsignon.aspx
This value is always the following:
https://signin.aws.amazon.com/saml
This is the RelayState link to your AppStream 2.0 stack. The format for this URL is as follows:
Ultimately, the URL looks like the following example, which is for us-east-1, with a stack name of ExampleStack, and an account ID of 012345678910. The stack name is case-sensitive.
https://appstream2.us-east-1.aws.amazon.com/saml?stack=ExampleStack&accountId=012345678910
For more information, see Step 5: Configure the Relay State of Your Federation.
Input these values into the URL generator, and generate a RelayState URL.
Generated URL (case sensitive):’
The generated RelayState URL can now be saved and used by users to log in directly from anywhere that can reach the AD FS server, using their existing domain credentials. After they are authenticated, users are directed seamlessly to the AppStream 2.0 stack.
Create a new AD user in Domain.local named Test User, with a username TUser and an email address. An email address is required based on the claim rules.
Next, add TUser to the AD group you created for the AWS-012345678910-ExampleStack stack.
Next, navigate to the RelayState URL and log in with domain\TUser.
After you log in, you are directed to the streaming session for the ExampleStack stack. As an administrator, you can disassociate and associate different fleets of applications to this stack, without impacting federation, and deliver different applications to this group of federated users.
Because the policy attached to the role only allows access to this AppStream 2.0 stack, if a federated user were to try to access another section of the console, such as Amazon EC2, they would discover that they are not authorized to see (describe) any resources or perform any actions, as shown in the screenshot below. This is why it’s important to grant access only to the AppStream 2.0 stack.
If you are using AD FS 4.0, there are a few differences from the procedures discussed earlier.
Do not customize the following file as described in the Enable RelayState and forms authentication of the AD FS 3.0 guide:
%systemroot%\adfs\Microsoft.IdentityServer.Servicehost.exe.config
Enable the IdP-initiated sign-on page that is used when generating the RelayState URL. To do this, open an elevated PowerShell terminal and run the following command:
Set-AdfsProperties -EnableIdPInitiatedSignonPage $true
This enables the following URL referenced earlier:
https://<ADFSInstance>/adfs/ls/idpinitiatedsignon.aspx
Next, enable Relay States. To do this, run the following command from an elevated PowerShell terminal:
Set-AdfsProperties -EnableRelayStateForIdpInitiatedSignOn $true
To register these changes with AD FS, restart the AD FS service from an elevated PowerShell terminal (or command prompt):
net stop adfssrv net start adfssrv
After these changes are made, AD FS 4.0 should now work for AppStream 2.0 identity federation.
If you are still encountering errors with your setup, below are common error messages you may see, and configuration areas that I recommend that you check.
This error message can occur when the IAM policy does not permit access to the AppStream 2.0 stack. However, it can also occur when the stack name is not entered into the policy or RelayState URL using case-sensitive characters. For example, if your stack name is “ExampleStack” in AppStream 2.0 and the policy has “examplestack” or if the Relay State URL has “examplestack” or any capitalization pattern other than the exact stack name, you see this error message.
Error: Bad Request.(Error Code: INVALID_RELAY_STATE);Status Code:400
This URL must contain the region-specific Relay State endpoint exactly as listed in the Step 5: Configure the Relay State of Your Federation topic.
If you see this error message, check to make sure that the AccountId number is correct in the Relay State URL.
In this post, you walked through enabling AD FS 3.0 for AppStream 2.0 identity federation. You should now be able to configure AD FS 3.0 or 4.0 for AppStream 2.0 identity federation. If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.
Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/artists-protest-riaa-for-trampling-on-their-moral-rights-170817/
Most people who create something like to be credited for their work. Whether you make a video, song, photo, or blog post, it feels ‘right’ to receive recognition.
The right to be credited is part of the so-called “moral rights,” which are baked into many copyright laws around the world, adopted at the international level through the Berne Convention.
However, in the United States, this is not the case. The US didn’t sign the Berne Convention right away and opted out from the “moral rights” provision when it eventually joined.
Now that the U.S. Copyright Office is looking into ways to improve current copyright law, the issue has been brought to the forefront again. The Government recently completed a consultation to hear the thoughts of various stakeholders, which resulted in several noteworthy contributions.
As it turns out, the RIAA doesn’t want artists, such as songwriters, to have moral rights. Crediting everyone who’s involved in making a song can be confusing and complicated the group notes, arguing against the addition of a new statutory attribution right.
The RIAA highlights that it would be costly for streaming services to credit everyone involved in the creative process. In addition, they stress that the likes of Spotify might not have the screen real estate to attribute all creators, without ruining the user experience with long lists of names.
“If a statutory attribution right suddenly required these services to provide attribution to others involved in the creative process, that would presumably require costly changes to their user interfaces and push them up against the size limitations of their display screens,” the RIAA writes.
These comments don’t sit well with songwriters and other creators around the world, who feel that the RIAA is putting trivial metadata issues above their rights. In a protest against the RIAA’s stance, several songwriter groups around the world are now joining hands to show their discontent.
The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA), Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC), Songwriters Guild of America (SGA), Music Creators North America (MCNA), Council of Music Creators (CMC), and several others, have sent a strongly worded open letter to the RIAA accusing the record label group of betrayal.
“The RIAA’s argument prioritizes the inconvenience of dealing with accurate metadata over the principle of the protection of the rights of the people upon whose work the music business is built,” the letter reads.
“More fundamentally, RIAA’s comments are taken by many in the music creator community as a betrayal of our joint commitment to expand opportunities for creators. Unfortunately, this divergence of views gives our common adversaries an opportunity to divide our community.”
The groups warn that without proper attribution, songwriters and other contributors risk not receiving any compensation for the work they do. This puts the RIAA in the same camp as those who want to weaken copyright in general, the letter notes.
“Without accurate metadata, contributors to a work risk not getting paid. That’s a moral dilemma intrinsically linked to the issue of moral rights — and on this issue the RIAA has now aligned itself with those who seek to enfeeble IP rights.”
The RIAA’s stance goes even further than that of Creative Commons and the “copyleft,” according to the groups.
“Even anti-copyright groups like Creative Commons understand the importance of attribution. If the RIAA is seen as less artist-friendly than Creative Commons, the copyleft and all who seek to undervalue our work will benefit.”
While Creative Commons has more flexible views on copyright than the average entertainment industry company, describing it as “anti-copyright” goes a bit far. Still, the groups send a strong message to the RIAA, that the organization’s stance on moral rights is abhorrent.
The songwriter and artist groups stress that the RIAA might shoot itself in the foot, as it’s distancing the people it needs to further its interests around the globe. As for the metadata problems, they believe that the streaming platforms and other services will come up with a proper solution eventually.
“We believe there’s no doubt music platforms will come up with innovative and effective ways to give credit. Certainly there’s no need to set expectations at rock bottom as the RIAA did in their comments,” the groups write in their letter.
The groups urge the RIAA to revise its views and start collaborating with creators to address specific implementation problems. The record labels and creators should stand together as one, instead of going against each other.
It will be interesting to see if and how the RIAA responds to the critique.
While the US Government has yet to decide on the moral rights issue, in other countries the attribution right is taken very seriously. Just recently, a District Court in Isreal awarded a local music composer $223,000 in statutory damages because his name was removed from the credits of an online kids animation series.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from Brent Meyer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ses/announcing-dedicated-ip-pools/
The Amazon SES team is pleased to announce that you can now create groups of dedicated IP addresses, called dedicated IP pools, for your email sending activities.
Prior to the availability of this feature, if you leased several dedicated IP addresses to use with Amazon SES, there was no way to specify which dedicated IP address to use for a specific email. Dedicated IP pools solve this problem by allowing you to send emails from specific IP addresses.
This post includes information and procedures related to dedicated IP pools.
In order to understand dedicated IP pools, you should first be familiar with the concept of dedicated IP addresses. Customers who send large volumes of email will typically lease one or more dedicated IP addresses to use when sending mail from Amazon SES. To learn more, see our blog post about dedicated IP addresses.
If you lease several dedicated IP addresses for use with Amazon SES, you can organize these addresses into groups, called pools. You can then associate each pool with a configuration set. When you send an email that specifies a configuration set, that email will be sent from the IP addresses in the associated pool.
Dedicated IP pools are especially useful for customers who send several different types of email using Amazon SES. For example, if you use Amazon SES to send both marketing emails and transactional emails, you can create a pool for marketing emails and another for transactional emails.
By using dedicated IP pools, you can isolate the sender reputations for each of these types of communications. Using dedicated IP pools gives you complete control over the sender reputations of the dedicated IP addresses you lease from Amazon SES.
There are two basic steps for creating and using dedicated IP pools. First, create a dedicated IP pool in the Amazon SES console and associate it with a configuration set. Next, when you send email, be sure to specify the configuration set associated with the IP pool you want to use.
For step-by-step procedures, see Creating Dedicated IP Pools in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.
If you do not use dedicated IP addresses with Amazon SES, then your email sending process will not change.
If you use dedicated IP pools, your email sending process may change slightly. In most cases, you will need to specify a configuration set in the emails you send. To learn more about using configuration sets, see Specifying a Configuration Set When You Send Email in the Amazon SES Developer Guide.
Any dedicated IP addresses that you lease that are not part of a dedicated IP pool will automatically be added to a default pool. If you send email without specifying a configuration set that is associated with a pool, then that email will be sent from one of the addresses in the default pool.
Dedicated IP pools are now available in the following AWS Regions: us-west-2 (Oregon), us-east-1 (Virginia), and eu-west-1 (Ireland).
We hope you enjoy this feature. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment on this post, or let us know in the Amazon SES Forum.
Post Syndicated from Dillon Morrison original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/analyzing-aws-cost-and-usage-reports-with-looker-and-amazon-athena/
This is a guest post by Dillon Morrison at Looker. Looker is, in their own words, “a new kind of analytics platform–letting everyone in your business make better decisions by getting reliable answers from a tool they can use.”
As the breadth of AWS products and services continues to grow, customers are able to more easily move their technology stack and core infrastructure to AWS. One of the attractive benefits of AWS is the cost savings. Rather than paying upfront capital expenses for large on-premises systems, customers can instead pay variables expenses for on-demand services. To further reduce expenses AWS users can reserve resources for specific periods of time, and automatically scale resources as needed.
The AWS Cost Explorer is great for aggregated reporting. However, conducting analysis on the raw data using the flexibility and power of SQL allows for much richer detail and insight, and can be the better choice for the long term. Thankfully, with the introduction of Amazon Athena, monitoring and managing these costs is now easier than ever.
In the post, I walk through setting up the data pipeline for cost and usage reports, Amazon S3, and Athena, and discuss some of the most common levers for cost savings. I surface tables through Looker, which comes with a host of pre-built data models and dashboards to make analysis of your cost and usage data simple and intuitive.
With Athena, there’s no need to create hundreds of Excel reports, move data around, or deploy clusters to house and process data. Athena uses Apache Hive’s DDL to create tables, and the Presto querying engine to process queries. Analysis can be performed directly on raw data in S3. Conveniently, AWS exports raw cost and usage data directly into a user-specified S3 bucket, making it simple to start querying with Athena quickly. This makes continuous monitoring of costs virtually seamless, since there is no infrastructure to manage. Instead, users can leverage the power of the Athena SQL engine to easily perform ad-hoc analysis and data discovery without needing to set up a data warehouse.
After the data pipeline is established, cost and usage data (the recommended billing data, per AWS documentation) provides a plethora of comprehensive information around usage of AWS services and the associated costs. Whether you need the report segmented by product type, user identity, or region, this report can be cut-and-sliced any number of ways to properly allocate costs for any of your business needs. You can then drill into any specific line item to see even further detail, such as the selected operating system, tenancy, purchase option (on-demand, spot, or reserved), and so on.
By default, the Cost and Usage report exports CSV files, which you can compress using gzip (recommended for performance). There are some additional configuration options for tuning performance further, which are discussed below.
If you want to follow along, you need the following resources:
First, enable the Cost and Usage report. For Time unit, select Hourly. For Include, select Resource IDs. All options are prompted in the report-creation window.
The Cost and Usage report dumps CSV files into the specified S3 bucket. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours for the first file to be delivered after enabling the report.
In addition to the CSV file, AWS also creates a JSON manifest file for each cost and usage report. Athena requires that all of the files in the S3 bucket are in the same format, so we need to get rid of all these manifest files. If you’re looking to get started with Athena quickly, you can simply go into your S3 bucket and delete the manifest file manually, skip the automation described below, and move on to the next section.
To automate the process of removing the manifest file each time a new report is dumped into S3, which I recommend as you scale, there are a few additional steps. The folks at Concurrency labs wrote a great overview and set of scripts for this, which you can find in their GitHub repo.
These scripts take the data from an input bucket, remove anything unnecessary, and dump it into a new output bucket. We can utilize AWS Lambda to trigger this process whenever new data is dropped into S3, or on a nightly basis, or whatever makes most sense for your use-case, depending on how often you’re querying the data. Please note that enabling the “hourly” report means that data is reported at the hour-level of granularity, not that a new file is generated every hour.
Following these scripts, you’ll notice that we’re adding a date partition field, which isn’t necessary but improves query performance. In addition, converting data from CSV to a columnar format like ORC or Parquet also improves performance. We can automate this process using Lambda whenever new data is dropped in our S3 bucket. Amazon Web Services discusses columnar conversion at length, and provides walkthrough examples, in their documentation.
As a long-term solution, best practice is to use compression, partitioning, and conversion. However, for purposes of this walkthrough, we’re not going to worry about them so we can get up-and-running quicker.
In your AWS console, navigate to the Athena service, and click “Get Started”. Follow the tutorial and set up a new database (we’ve called ours “AWS Optimizer” in this example). Don’t worry about configuring your initial table, per the tutorial instructions. We’ll be creating a new table for cost and usage analysis. Once you walked through the tutorial steps, you’ll be able to access the Athena interface, and can begin running Hive DDL statements to create new tables.
One thing that’s important to note, is that the Cost and Usage CSVs also contain the column headers in their first row, meaning that the column headers would be included in the dataset and any queries. For testing and quick set-up, you can remove this line manually from your first few CSV files. Long-term, you’ll want to use a script to programmatically remove this row each time a new file is dropped in S3 (every few hours typically). We’ve drafted up a sample script for ease of reference, which we run on Lambda. We utilize Lambda’s native ability to invoke the script whenever a new object is dropped in S3.
For cost and usage, we recommend using the DDL statement below. Since our data is in CSV format, we don’t need to use a SerDe, we can simply specify the “separatorChar, quoteChar, and escapeChar”, and the structure of the files (“TEXTFILE”). Note that AWS does have an OpenCSV SerDe as well, if you prefer to use that.
Once you’ve successfully executed the command, you should see a new table named “cost_and_usage” with the below properties. Now we’re ready to start executing queries and running analysis!
Setting up Looker is a quick process, and you can try it out for free here (or download from Amazon Marketplace). It takes just a few seconds to connect Looker to your Athena database, and Looker comes with a host of pre-built data models and dashboards to make analysis of your cost and usage data simple and intuitive. After you’re connected, you can use the Looker UI to run whatever analysis you’d like. Looker translates this UI to optimized SQL, so any user can execute and visualize queries for true self-service analytics.
Now that the data pipeline is configured, you can dive into the most popular use cases for cost savings. In this post, I focus on:
Purchasing Reserved Instances vs On-Demand Instances is arguably going to be the biggest cost lever for heavy AWS users (Reserved Instances run up to 75% cheaper!). AWS offers three options for purchasing instances:
When purchasing a Reserved Instance, you can also choose to pay all-upfront, partial-upfront, or monthly. The more you pay upfront, the greater the discount.
If your company has been using AWS for some time now, you should have a good sense of your overall instance usage on a per-month or per-day basis. Rather than paying for these instances On-Demand, you should try to forecast the number of instances you’ll need, and reserve them with upfront payments.
The total amount of usage with Reserved Instances versus overall usage with all instances is called your coverage ratio. It’s important not to confuse your coverage ratio with your Reserved Instance utilization. Utilization represents the amount of reserved hours that were actually used. Don’t worry about exceeding capacity, you can still set up Auto Scaling preferences so that more instances get added whenever your coverage or utilization crosses a certain threshold (we often see a target of 80% for both coverage and utilization among savvy customers).
Calculating the reserved costs and coverage can be a bit tricky with the level of granularity provided by the cost and usage report. The following query shows your total cost over the last 6 months, broken out by Reserved Instance vs other instance usage. You can substitute the cost field for usage if you’d prefer. Please note that you should only have data for the time period after the cost and usage report has been enabled (though you can opt for up to 3 months of historical data by contacting your AWS Account Executive). If you’re just getting started, this query will only show a few days.
The resulting table should look something like the image below (I’m surfacing tables through Looker, though the same table would result from querying via command line or any other interface).
With a BI tool, you can create dashboards for easy reference and monitoring. New data is dumped into S3 every few hours, so your dashboards can update several times per day.
It’s an iterative process to understand the appropriate number of Reserved Instances needed to meet your business needs. After you’ve properly integrated Reserved Instances into your purchasing patterns, the savings can be significant. If your coverage is consistently below 70%, you should seriously consider adjusting your purchase types and opting for more Reserved instances.
One of the great things about AWS data storage is that it’s incredibly cheap. Most charges often come from moving and processing that data. There are several different prices for transferring data, broken out largely by transfers between regions and availability zones. Transfers between regions are the most costly, followed by transfers between Availability Zones. Transfers within the same region and same availability zone are free unless using elastic or public IP addresses, in which case there is a cost. You can find more detailed information in the AWS Pricing Docs. With this in mind, there are several simple strategies for helping reduce costs.
First, since costs increase when transferring data between regions, it’s wise to ensure that as many services as possible reside within the same region. The more you can localize services to one specific region, the lower your costs will be.
Second, you should maximize the data you’re routing directly within AWS services and IP addresses. Transfers out to the open internet are the most costly and least performant mechanisms of data transfers, so it’s best to keep transfers within AWS services.
Lastly, data transfers between private IP addresses are cheaper than between elastic or public IP addresses, so utilizing private IP addresses as much as possible is the most cost-effective strategy.
The following query provides a table depicting the total costs for each AWS product, broken out transfer cost type. Substitute the “lineitem_productcode” field in the query to segment the costs by any other attribute. If you notice any unusually high spikes in cost, you’ll need to dig deeper to understand what’s driving that spike: location, volume, and so on. Drill down into specific costs by including “product_usagetype” and “product_transfertype” in your query to identify the types of transfer costs that are driving up your bill.
When moving between regions or over the open web, many data transfer costs also include the origin and destination location of the data movement. Using a BI tool with mapping capabilities, you can get a nice visual of data flows. The point at the center of the map is used to represent external data flows over the open internet.
AWS provides the option to apply custom tags to individual resources, so you can allocate costs over whatever customized segment makes the most sense for your business. For a SaaS company that hosts software for customers on AWS, maybe you’d want to tag the size of each customer. The following query uses custom tags to display the reserved, data transfer, and total cost for each AWS service, broken out by tag categories, over the last 6 months. You’ll want to substitute the cost_and_usage.resourcetags_customersegment and cost_and_usage.customer_segment with the name of your customer field.
The resulting table in this example looks like the results below. In this example, you can tell that we’re making poor use of Reserved Instances because they represent such a small portion of our overall costs.
Again, using a BI tool to visualize these costs and trends over time makes the analysis much easier to consume and take action on.
Saving costs on your AWS spend is always an iterative, ongoing process. Hopefully with these queries alone, you can start to understand your spending patterns and identify opportunities for savings. However, this is just a peek into the many opportunities available through analysis of the Cost and Usage report. Each company is different, with unique needs and usage patterns. To achieve maximum cost savings, we encourage you to set up an analytics environment that enables your team to explore all potential cuts and slices of your usage data, whenever it’s necessary. Exploring different trends and spikes across regions, services, user types, etc. helps you gain comprehensive understanding of your major cost levers and consistently implement new cost reduction strategies.
Note that all of the queries and analysis provided in this post were generated using the Looker data platform. If you’re already a Looker customer, you can get all of this analysis, additional pre-configured dashboards, and much more using Looker Blocks for AWS.
Dillon Morrison leads the Platform Ecosystem at Looker. He enjoys exploring new technologies and architecting the most efficient data solutions for the business needs of his company and their customers. In his spare time, you’ll find Dillon rock climbing in the Bay Area or nose deep in the docs of the latest AWS product release at his favorite cafe (“Arlequin in SF is unbeatable!”).
Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-kicking-daily-stormer-is-bad-news-for-pirate-sites-170817/
“I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet.”
Those are the words of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who decided to terminate the account of controversial Neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer.
Bam. Gone. At least for a while.
Although many people are happy to see the site go offline, the decision is not without consequence. It goes directly against what many saw as the core values of the company.
For years on end, Cloudflare has been asked to remove terrorist propaganda, pirate sites, and other possibly unacceptable content. Each time, Cloudflare replied that it doesn’t take action without a court order. No exceptions.
“Even if it were able to, Cloudfare does not monitor, evaluate, judge or store content appearing on a third party website,” the company wrote just a few weeks ago, in its whitepaper on intermediary liability.
“We’re the plumbers of the internet. We make the pipes work but it’s not right for us to inspect what is or isn’t going through the pipes,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince himself said not too long ago.
“If companies like ours or ISPs start censoring there would be an uproar. It would lead us down a path of internet censors and controls akin to a country like China,” he added.
The same arguments were repeated in different contexts, over and over.
This strong position was also one of the reasons why Cloudflare was dragged into various copyright infringement court cases. In these cases, the company repeatedly stressed that removing a site from Cloudflare’s service would not make infringing content disappear.
Pirate sites would just require a simple DNS reconfiguration to continue their operation, after all.
“[T]here are no measures of any kind that CloudFlare could take to prevent this alleged infringement, because the termination of CloudFlare’s CDN services would have no impact on the existence and ability of these allegedly infringing websites to continue to operate,” it said.
That comment looks rather misplaced now that the CEO of the same company has decided to “kick” a website “off the Internet” after an emotional, but deliberate, decision.
Taking a page from Cloudflare’s (old) playbook we’re not going to make any judgments here. Just search Twitter or any social media site and you’ll see plenty of opinions, both for and against the company’s actions.
We do have a prediction though. During the months and years to come, Cloudflare is likely to be dragged into many more copyright lawsuits, and when they are, their counterparts are going to bring up Cloudflare’s voluntary decision to kick a website off the Internet.
Unless Cloudflare suddenly decides to pull all pirate sites from its service tomorrow, of course.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/do_the_police_n.html
The US Supreme Court is deciding a case that will establish whether the police need a warrant to access cell phone location data. This week I signed on to an amicus brief from a wide array of security technologists outlining the technical arguments as why the answer should be yes. Susan Landau summarized our arguments.
A bunch of tech companies also submitted a brief.
Post Syndicated from Simon Long original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-stretch/
It’s now just under two years since we released the Jessie version of Raspbian. Those of you who know that Debian run their releases on a two-year cycle will therefore have been wondering when we might be releasing the next version, codenamed Stretch. Well, wonder no longer – Raspbian Stretch is available for download today!
Debian releases are named after characters from Disney Pixar’s Toy Story trilogy. In case, like me, you were wondering: Stretch is a purple octopus from Toy Story 3. Hi, Stretch!
The differences between Jessie and Stretch are mostly under-the-hood optimisations, and you really shouldn’t notice any differences in day-to-day use of the desktop and applications. (If you’re really interested, the technical details are in the Debian release notes here.)
However, we’ve made a few small changes to our image that are worth mentioning.
Version 3.0.1 of Sonic Pi is included – this includes a lot of new functionality in terms of input/output. See the Sonic Pi release notes for more details of exactly what has changed.
The Chromium web browser has been updated to version 60, the most recent stable release. This offers improved memory usage and more efficient code, so you may notice it running slightly faster than before. The visual appearance has also been changed very slightly.
In Jessie, we used PulseAudio to provide support for audio over Bluetooth, but integrating this with the ALSA architecture used for other audio sources was clumsy. For Stretch, we are using the bluez-alsa package to make Bluetooth audio work with ALSA itself. PulseAudio is therefore no longer installed by default, and the volume plugin on the taskbar will no longer start and stop PulseAudio. From a user point of view, everything should still work exactly as before – the only change is that if you still wish to use PulseAudio for some other reason, you will need to install it yourself.
The default user account in Raspbian has always been called ‘pi’, and a lot of the desktop applications assume that this is the current user. This has been changed for Stretch, so now applications like Raspberry Pi Configuration no longer assume this to be the case. This means, for example, that the option to automatically log in as the ‘pi’ user will now automatically log in with the name of the current user instead.
One other change is how sudo is handled. By default, the ‘pi’ user is set up with passwordless sudo access. We are no longer assuming this to be the case, so now desktop applications which require sudo access will prompt for the password rather than simply failing to work if a user without passwordless sudo uses them.
In the last Jessie release, we added the offline version of Scratch 2. While Scratch 2 itself hasn’t changed for this release, we have added a new extension to allow the SenseHAT to be used with Scratch 2. Look under ‘More Blocks’ and choose ‘Add an Extension’ to load the extension.
This works with either a physical SenseHAT or with the SenseHAT emulator. If a SenseHAT is connected, the extension will control that in preference to the emulator.
A couple of months ago, a vulnerability was discovered in the firmware of the BCM43xx wireless chipset which is used on Pi 3 and Pi Zero W; this potentially allows an attacker to take over the chip and execute code on it. The Stretch release includes a patch that addresses this vulnerability.
There is also the usual set of minor bug fixes and UI improvements – I’ll leave you to spot those!
As this is a major version upgrade, we recommend using a clean image; these are available from the Downloads page on our site as usual.
Upgrading an existing Jessie image is possible, but is not guaranteed to work in every circumstance. If you wish to try upgrading a Jessie image to Stretch, we strongly recommend taking a backup first – we can accept no responsibility for loss of data from a failed update.
To upgrade, first modify the files /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list. In both files, change every occurrence of the word ‘jessie’ to ‘stretch’. (Both files will require sudo to edit.)
Then open a terminal window and execute
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade
Answer ‘yes’ to any prompts. There may also be a point at which the install pauses while a page of information is shown on the screen – hold the ‘space’ key to scroll through all of this and then hit ‘q’ to continue.
Finally, if you are not using PulseAudio for anything other than Bluetooth audio, remove it from the image by entering
sudo apt-get -y purge pulseaudio*
The post Raspbian Stretch has arrived for Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/public-figure-threatened-with-exposure-over-gay-piracy-fine-170817/
Flava Works is an Illinois-based company specializing in adult material featuring black and Latino men. It operates an aggressive anti-piracy strategy which has resulted in some large damages claims in the past.
Now, however, the company has found itself targeted by a lawsuit filed by one of its alleged victims. Filed in a California district court by an unnamed individual, it accuses Flava Works of shocking behavior relating to a claim of alleged piracy.
According to the lawsuit, ‘John Doe’ received a letter in early June from Flava Works CEO Phillip Bleicher, accusing him of Internet piracy. Titled “Settlement Demand and Cease and Desist”, the letter got straight to the point.
“Flava Works is aware that you have been ‘pirating’ the content from its website(s) for your own personal financial benefit,” the letter read.
[Update: ‘John Doe’ has now been identified as Marc Juris, President & General Manager of AMC-owned WE tv. All references to John Doe below refer to Juris. See note at footer]
As is often the case with such claims, Flava Works offered to settle with John Doe for a cash fee. However, instead of the few hundred or thousand dollars usually seen in such cases, the initial settlement amount was an astronomical $97,000. But that wasn’t all.
According to John Doe, Bleicher warned that unless the money was paid in ten days, Flava Works “would initiate litigation against [John Doe], publically accusing him of being a consumer and pirate of copyrighted gay adult entertainment.”
Amping up the pressure, Bleicher then warned that after the ten-day deadline had passed, the settlement amount of $97,000 would be withdrawn and replaced with a new amount – $525,000.
The lawsuit alleges that Bleicher followed up with more emails in which he indicated that there was still time to settle the matter “one on one” since the case hadn’t been assigned to an attorney. However, he warned John Doe that time was running out and that public exposure via a lawsuit would be the next step.
While these kinds of tactics are nothing new in copyright infringement cases, the amounts of money involved are huge, indicating something special at play. Indeed, it transpires that John Doe is a public figure in the entertainment industry and the suggestion is that Flava Works’ assessment of his “wealth and profile” means he can pay these large sums.
According to the suit, on July 6, 2017, Bleicher sent another email to John Doe which “alluded to [his] high-profile status and to the potential publicity that a lawsuit would bring.” The email went as far as threatening an imminent Flava Works press release, announcing that a public figure, who would be named, was being sued for pirating gay adult content.
Flava Works alleges that John Doe uploaded its videos to various BitTorrent sites and forums, but John Doe vigorously denies the accusations, noting that the ‘evidence’ presented by Flava Works fails to back up its claims.
“The materials do not reveal or expose infringement of any sort. [Flava Works’] real purpose in sending this ‘proof’ was to demonstrate just how humiliating it would be to defend against Flava Works’ scurrilous charges,” John Doe’s lawsuit notes.
“[Flava Works’] materials consist largely of screen shots of extremely graphic images of pornography, which [Flava Works] implies that [John Doe] has viewed — but which are completely irrelevant given that they are not Flava Works content. Nevertheless, Bleicher assured [John Doe] that these materials would all be included in a publicly filed lawsuit if he refused to accede to [Flava Works’] payment demands.”
From his lawsuit (pdf) it’s clear that John Doe is in no mood to pay Flava Works large sums of cash and he’s aggressively on the attack, describing the company’s demands as “criminal extortion.”
He concludes with a request for a declaration that he has not infringed Flava Works’ copyrights, while demanding attorneys’ fees and further relief to be determined by the court.
The big question now is whether Flava Works will follow through with its threats to exposure the entertainer, or whether it will drift back into the shadows to fight another day. Definitely one to watch.
Update: Flava Works has now followed through on its threat to sue Juris. A complaint filed iat an Illinois court accuses the TV executive of uploading Flava Works titles to several gay-focused torrent sites in breach of copyright. It demands $1.2m in damages.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from Sara Rodas original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-online-tech-talks-august-2017/
Welcome to mid-August, everyone–the season of beach days, family road trips, and an inbox full of “out of office” emails from your coworkers. Just in case spending time indoors has you feeling a bit blue, we’ve got a piping hot batch of AWS Online Tech Talks for you to check out. Kick up your feet, grab a glass of ice cold lemonade, and dive into our latest Tech Talks on Compute and DevOps.
August 2017 – Schedule
Noted below are the upcoming scheduled live, online technical sessions being held during the month of August. Make sure to register ahead of time so you won’t miss out on these free talks conducted by AWS subject matter experts.
Webinars featured this month are:
Thursday, August 17 – Compute
9:00 – 9:40 AM PDT: Deep Dive on [email protected].
Monday, August 28 – DevOps
10:30 – 11:10 AM PDT: Building a Python Serverless Applications with AWS Chalice.
12:00 – 12:40 PM PDT: How to Deploy .NET Code to AWS from Within Visual Studio.
The AWS Online Tech Talks series covers a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. These sessions feature live demonstrations & customer examples led by AWS engineers and Solution Architects. Check out the AWS YouTube channel for more on-demand webinars on AWS technologies.
– Sara (Hello everyone, I’m a co-op from Northeastern University joining the team until December.)
Post Syndicated from Ben Snively original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/harmonize-query-and-visualize-data-from-various-providers-using-aws-glue-amazon-athena-and-amazon-quicksight/
Have you ever been faced with many different data sources in different formats that need to be analyzed together to drive value and insights? You need to be able to query, analyze, process, and visualize all your data as one canonical dataset, regardless of the data source or original format.
In this post, I walk through using AWS Glue to create a query optimized, canonical dataset on Amazon S3 from three different datasets and formats. Then, I use Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight to query against that data quickly and easily.
AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for query and analytics. You can create and run an ETL job with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Point AWS Glue to your data stored on AWS, and a crawler discovers your data, classifies it, and stores the associated metadata (such as table definitions) in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. After it’s cataloged, your data is immediately searchable, queryable, and available for ETL. AWS Glue generates the ETL code for data transformation, and loads the transformed data into a target data store for analytics.
The AWS Glue ETL engine generates Python code that is entirely customizable, reusable, and portable. You can edit the code using your favorite IDE or notebook and share it with others using GitHub. After your ETL job is ready, you can schedule it to run on the AWS Glue fully managed, scale-out Spark environment, using its flexible scheduler with dependency resolution, job monitoring, and alerting.
AWS Glue is serverless. It automatically provisions the environment needed to complete the job, and customers pay only for the compute resources consumed while running ETL jobs. With AWS Glue, data can be available for analytics in minutes.
During this post, I step through an example using the New York City Taxi Records dataset. I focus on one month of data, but you could easily do this for the entire eight years of data. At the time of this post, AWS Glue is available in US-East-1 (N. Virginia).
As you crawl the unknown dataset, you discover that the data is in different formats, depending on the type of taxi. You then convert the data to a canonical form, start to analyze it, and build a set of visualizations… all without launching a single server.
To analyze all the taxi rides for January 2016, you start with a set of data in S3. First, create a database for this project within AWS Glue. A database is a set of associated table definitions, organized into a logical group. In Athena, database names are all lowercase, no matter what you type.
Next, add a new crawler and have it infer the schemas, structure, and other properties of the data.
The crawler runs and indicates that it found three tables.
If you look under Tables, you can see the three new tables that were created under the database “nycitytaxianalysis”.
The crawler used the built-in classifiers and identified the tables as CSV, inferred the columns/data types, and collected a set of properties for each table. If you look in each of those table definitions, you see the number of rows for each dataset found and that the columns don’t match between tables. As an example, bringing up the blog_yellow table, you can see the yellow dataset for January 2017 with 8.7 million rows, the location on S3, and the various columns found.
Create an ETL job to move this data into a query-optimized form. In a future post, I’ll cover how to partition the query-optimized data. You convert the data into a column format, changing the storage type to Parquet, and writing the data to a bucket that you own.
| Old Name | Target Name | Target Data Type |
| tpep_pickup_datetime | pickup_date | timestamp |
| tpep_dropoff_datetime | dropoff_date | timestamp |
In this case, AWS Glue creates a script. You could also start with a blank script or provide your own.
Because AWS Glue uses Apache Spark behind the scenes, you can easily switch from an AWS Glue DynamicFrame to a Spark DataFrame and do advanced operations within Apache Spark. Just as easily, you can switch back and continue to use the transforms and tables from the catalog.
To show this, convert to a DataFrame and add a new field column indicating the type of taxi. Make the following custom modifications in PySpark.
Add the following header:
Find the last call before the the line that start with the datasink. This is the dynamic frame that is being used to write out the data.
Let’s now convert that to a DataFrame. Please replace the <DYNAMIC_FRAME_NAME> with the name generated in the script.
In the last datasink call, change the dynamic frame to point to the new custom dynamic frame created from the Spark DataFrame:
Save and run the ETL.
To use AWS Glue with Athena, you must upgrade your Athena data catalog to the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Without the upgrade, tables and partitions created by AWS Glue cannot be queried with Athena. As of August 14, 2017, the AWS Glue Data Catalog is only available in US-East-1 (N. Virginia). Start the upgrade in the Athena console. For more information, see Integration with AWS Glue in the Amazon Athena User Guide.
Next, we’ll go into Athena and create a table there for the new data format. This shows how you can interact with the data catalog either through Glue or the Athena.
If you do a query on the count per type of taxi, you notice that there is only “yellow” taxi data in the canonical location. Convert “green” and “fhv” data:
In the AWS Glue console, create a new ETL job named “NYCityTaxiGreen”. Choose blog_green as the source and the new canonical location as the target. Choose the new pickup_date and dropoff_date fields for the target field types for the date variables, as shown below.
In the script, insert the following two lines at the end of the top imports:
Find the last call before the the line that start with the datasink. This is the dynamic frame that is being used to write out the data.
Let’s now convert that to a DataFrame. Please replace the <DYNAMIC_FRAME_NAME> with the name generated in the script.
In the last datasink call, change the dynamic frame to point to the new custom dynamic frame created from the Spark DataFrame:
Notice that it matches the last line in the commands that you pasted earlier. After the ETL job finishes, you can require the count per type through Athena and see the sizes:
What you have done is taken two datasets that contained taxi data in different formats and converted them into a single, query-optimized format. That format can easily be consumed by various analytical tools, including Athena, EMR, and Redshift Spectrum. You’ve done all of this without launching a single server.
You have one more dataset to convert, so create a new ETL job for that. Name the job “NYCityTaxiFHV”. This dataset is limited as it only has three fields, one of which you are converting. Choose “–” (dash) for the dispatcher and location, and map the pickup date to the canonical field.
In the script, insert the following two lines at the end of the top imports:
Type the following line before the last sink calls:
In the last datasink call, change the dynamic frame to point to the new custom dynamic frame created from the Spark DataFrame:
After the third ETL job completes, you can query the single dataset, in a query-optimized form on S3:
Here’s a query:
Within a second or two, you can quickly see the ranges for these values.
You can see some outliers in the total amount and distances that are = 0. In the next query, don’t include those when calculating things like average cost per mile:
Interesting note: you aren’t seeing FHV broken out yet, because that dataset didn’t have a mapping to these fields. Here’s a query that’s a little more complicated, to calculate a 99th percentile:
Amazon QuickSight is a data visualization service you can use to analyze the data that you just combined. For more detailed instructions, see the Amazon QuickSight User Guide.
You can now visualize this dataset and query through Athena the canonical dataset on S3 that has been converted by AWS Glue. Selecting HourOfDay allows you to see how many taxi rides there are based on the hour of the day. This is a calculated field that is being derived by the time stamp in the raw dataset.
You can also deselect that and choose type to see the total counts again by type.
Now choose the pickup_date field in addition to the type field and notice that the plot type automatically changed. Because time is being used, it’s showing a time chart defaulting to the year. Choose a day interval instead.
Expand the x axis to zoom out. You can clearly see a large drop in all rides on January 23, 2016.
In the post, you went from data investigation to analyzing and visualizing a canonical dataset, without starting a single server. You started by crawling a dataset you didn’t know anything about and the crawler told you the structure, columns, and counts of records.
From there, you saw that all three datasets were in different formats, but represented the same thing: NY City Taxi rides. You then converted them into a canonical (or normalized) form that is easily queried through Athena and QuickSight, in addition to a wide number of different tools not covered in this post.
If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.
Learn how to harmonize, search, and analyze loosely coupled datasets on AWS.
Ben Snively is a Public Sector Specialist Solutions Architect. He works with government, non-profit and education customers on big data and analytical projects, helping them build solutions using AWS. In his spare time he adds IoT sensors throughout his house and runs analytics on it.
Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/showtime-seeks-injunction-to-stop-mayweather-v-mcgregor-piracy-170816/
It’s the fight that few believed would become reality but on August 26, at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Floyd Mayweather Jr. will duke it out with UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor.
Despite being labeled a freak show by boxing purists, it is set to become the biggest combat sports event of all time. Mayweather, undefeated in his professional career, will face brash Irishman McGregor, who has gained a reputation for accepting fights with anyone – as long as there’s a lot of money involved. Big money is definitely the theme of the Mayweather bout.
Dubbed “The Money Fight”, some predict it could pull in a billion dollars, with McGregor pocketing $100m and Mayweather almost certainly more. Many of those lucky enough to gain entrance on the night will have spent thousands on their tickets but for the millions watching around the world….iiiiiiiit’s Showtimmme….with hefty PPV prices attached.
Of course, not everyone will be handing over $89.95 to $99.99 to watch the event officially on Showtime. Large numbers will turn to the many hundreds of websites set to stream the fight for free online, which has the potential to reduce revenues for all involved. With that in mind, Showtime Networks has filed a lawsuit in California which attempts to preemptively tackle this piracy threat.
The suit targets a number of John Does said to be behind a network of dozens of sites planning to stream the fight online for free. Defendant 1, using the alias “Kopa Mayweather”, is allegedly the operator of LiveStreamHDQ, a site that Showtime has grappled with previously.
“Plaintiff has had extensive experience trying to prevent live streaming websites from engaging in the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of Plaintiff’s copyrighted works in the past,” the lawsuit reads.
“In addition to bringing litigation, this experience includes sending cease and desist demands to LiveStreamHDQ in response to its unauthorized live streaming of the record-breaking fight between Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and Manny Pacquiao.”
Showtime says that LiveStreamHDQ is involved in the operations of at least 41 other sites that have been set up to specifically target people seeking to watch the fight without paying. Each site uses a .US ccTLD domain name.
Showtime informs the court that the registrant email and IP addresses of the domains overlap, which provides further proof that they’re all part of the same operation. The TV network also highlights various statements on the sites in question which demonstrate intent to show the fight without permission, including the highly dubious “Watch From Here Mayweather vs Mcgregor Live with 4k Display.”
In addition, the lawsuit is highly critical of efforts by the sites’ operator(s) to stuff the pages with fight-related keywords in order to draw in as much search engine traffic as they can.
“Plaintiff alleges that Defendants have engaged in such keyword stuffing as a form of search engine optimization in an effort to attract as much web traffic as possible in the form of Internet users searching for a way to access a live stream of the Fight,” it reads.
While site operators are expected to engage in such behavior, Showtime says that these SEO efforts have been particularly successful, obtaining high-ranking positions in major search engines for the would-be pirate sites.
For instance, Showtime says that a Google search for “Mayweather McGregor Live” results in four of the target websites appearing in the first 100 results, i.e the first 10 pages. Interestingly, however, to get that result searchers would need to put the search in quotes as shown above, since a plain search fails to turn anything up in hundreds of results.
At this stage, the important thing to note is that none of the sites are currently carrying links to the fight, because the fight is yet to happen. Nevertheless, Showtime is convinced that come fight night, all of the target websites will be populated with pirate links, accessible for free or after paying a fee. This needs to be stopped, it argues.
“Defendants’ anticipated unlawful distribution will impair the marketability and profitability of the Coverage, and interfere with Plaintiff’s own authorized distribution of the Coverage, because Defendants will provide consumers with an opportunity to view the Coverage in its entirety for free, rather than paying for the Coverage provided through Plaintiff’s authorized channels.
“This is especially true where, as here, the work at issue is live coverage of a one-time live sporting event whose outcome is unknown,” the network writes.
Showtime informs the court that it made efforts to contact the sites in question but had just a single response from an individual who claimed to be sports blogger who doesn’t offer streaming services. The undertone is one of disbelief.
In closing, Showtime demands a temporary restraining order, preliminary injunction, and permanent injunction, prohibiting the defendants from making the fight available in any way, and/or “forming new entities” in order to circumvent any subsequent court order. Compensation for suspected damages is also requested.
Showtime previously applied for and obtained a similar injunction to cover the (hugely disappointing) Mayweather v Pacquiao fight in 2015. In that case, websites were ordered to be taken down on the day before the fight.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
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