Tag Archives: young people

Piracy Narrative Isn’t About Ethics Anymore, It’s About “Danger”

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-narrative-isnt-about-ethics-anymore-its-about-danger-170812/

Over the years there have been almost endless attempts to stop people from accessing copyright-infringing content online. Campaigns have come and gone and almost two decades later the battle is still ongoing.

Early on, when panic enveloped the music industry, the campaigns centered around people getting sued. Grabbing music online for free could be costly, the industry warned, while parading the heads of a few victims on pikes for the world to see.

Periodically, however, the aim has been to appeal to the public’s better nature. The idea is that people essentially want to do the ‘right thing’, so once they understand that largely hard-working Americans are losing their livelihoods, people will stop downloading from The Pirate Bay. For some, this probably had the desired effect but millions of people are still getting their fixes for free, so the job isn’t finished yet.

In more recent years, notably since the MPAA and RIAA had their eyes blacked in the wake of SOPA, the tone has shifted. In addition to educating the public, torrent and streaming sites are increasingly being painted as enemies of the public they claim to serve.

Several studies, largely carried out on behalf of the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), have claimed that pirate sites are hotbeds of malware, baiting consumers in with tasty pirate booty only to offload trojans, viruses, and God-knows-what. These reports have been ostensibly published as independent public interest documents but this week an advisor to the DCA suggested a deeper interest for the industry.

Hemanshu Nigam is a former federal prosecutor, ex-Chief Security Officer for News Corp and Fox Interactive Media, and former VP Worldwide Internet Enforcement at the MPAA. In an interview with Deadline this week, he spoke about alleged links between pirate sites and malware distributors. He also indicated that warning people about the dangers of pirate sites has become Hollywood’s latest anti-piracy strategy.

“The industry narrative has changed. When I was at the MPAA, we would tell people that stealing content is wrong and young people would say, yeah, whatever, you guys make a lot of money, too bad,” he told the publication.

“It has gone from an ethical discussion to a dangerous one. Now, your parents’ bank account can be raided, your teenage daughter can be spied on in her bedroom and extorted with the footage, or your computer can be locked up along with everything in it and held for ransom.”

Nigam’s stance isn’t really a surprise since he’s currently working for the Digital Citizens Alliance as an advisor. In turn, the Alliance is at least partly financed by the MPAA. There’s no suggestion whatsoever that Nigam is involved in any propaganda effort, but recent signs suggest that the DCA’s work in malware awareness is more about directing people away from pirate sites than protecting them from the alleged dangers within.

That being said and despite the bias, it’s still worth giving experts like Nigam an opportunity to speak. Largely thanks to industry efforts with brands, pirate sites are increasingly being forced to display lower-tier ads, which can be problematic. On top, some sites’ policies mean they don’t deserve any visitors at all.

In the Deadline piece, however, Nigam alleges that hackers have previously reached out to pirate websites offering $200 to $5000 per day “depending on the size of the pirate website” to have the site infect users with malware. If true, that’s a serious situation and people who would ordinarily use ‘pirate’ sites would definitely appreciate the details.

For example, to which sites did hackers make this offer and, crucially, which sites turned down the offer and which ones accepted?

It’s important to remember that pirates are just another type of consumer and they would boycott sites in a heartbeat if they discovered they’d been paid to infect them with malware. But, as usual, the claims are extremely light in detail. Instead, there’s simply a blanket warning to stay away from all unauthorized sites, which isn’t particularly helpful.

In some cases, of course, operational security will prevent some details coming to light but without these, people who don’t get infected on a ‘pirate’ site (the vast majority) simply won’t believe the allegations. As the author of the Deadline piece pointed out, it’s a bit like Reefer Madness all over again.

The point here is that without hard independent evidence to back up these claims, with reports listing sites alongside the malware they’ve supposed to have spread and when, few people will respond to perceived scaremongering. Free content trumps a few distant worries almost every time, whether that involves malware or the threat of a lawsuit.

It’ll be up to the DCA and their MPAA paymasters to consider whether the approach is working but thus far, not even having government heavyweights on board has helped.

Earlier this year the DCA launched a video campaign, enrolling 15 attorney generals to publish their own anti-piracy PSAs on YouTube. Thus far, interest has been minimal, to say the least.

At the time of writing the 15 PSAs have 3,986 views in total, with 2,441 of those contributed by a single video contributed by Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel. Despite the relative success, even that got slammed with 2 upvotes and 127 downvotes.

A few of the other videos have a couple of hundred views each but more than half have less than 70. Perhaps most worryingly for the DCA, apart from the Schimel PSA, none have any upvotes at all, only down. It’s unclear who the viewers were but it seems reasonable to conclude they weren’t entertained.

The bottom line is nobody likes malware or having their banking details stolen but yet again, people who claim to have the public interest at heart aren’t actually making a difference on the ground. It could be argued that groups advocating online safety should be publishing guides on how to stay protected on the Internet period, not merely advising people to stay away from certain sites.

But of course, that wouldn’t achieve the goals of the MPAA Digital Citizens Alliance.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Piracy Brings a New Young Audience to Def Leppard, Guitarist Says

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-brings-a-new-young-audience-to-def-leppard-guitarist-says-170803/

For decades the debate over piracy has raged, with bands and their recording industry paymasters on one side and large swathes of the public on the other. Throughout, however, there have been those prepared to recognize that things aren’t necessarily black and white.

Over the years, many people have argued that access to free music has helped them broaden their musical horizons, dabbling in new genres and discovering new bands. This, they argue, would have been a prohibitively expensive proposition if purchases were forced on a trial and error basis.

Of course, many labels and bands believe that piracy amounts to theft, but some are prepared to put their heads above the parapet with an opinion that doesn’t necessarily tow the party line.

Formed in 1977 in Sheffield, England, rock band Def Leppard have sold more than 100 million records worldwide and have two RIAA diamond certificated albums to their name. But unlike Metallica who have sold a total of 116 million records and were famous for destroying Napster, Def Leppard’s attitude to piracy is entirely more friendly.

In an interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell has been describing why he believes piracy has its upsides, particularly for enduring bands that are still trying to broaden their horizons.

“The way the band works is quite extraordinary. In recent years, we’ve been really fortunate that we’ve seen this new surge in our popularity. For the most part, that’s fueled by younger people coming to the shows,” Campbell said.

“We’ve been seeing it for the last 10, 12 or 15 years, you’d notice younger kids in the audience, but especially in the last couple of years, it’s grown exponentially. I really do believe that this is the upside of music piracy.”

Def Leppard celebrate their 40th anniversary this year, and the fact that they’re still releasing music and attracting a new audience is a real achievement for a band whose original fans only had access to vinyl and cassette tapes. But Campbell says the band isn’t negatively affected by new technology, nor people using it to obtain their content for free.

“You know, people bemoan the fact that you can’t sell records anymore, but for a band like Def Leppard at least, there is a silver lining in the fact that our music is reaching a whole new audience, and that audience is excited to hear it, and they’re coming to the shows. It’s been fantastic,” he said.

While packing out events is every band’s dream, Campbell believes that the enthusiasm these fresh fans bring to the shows is actually helping the band to improve.

“There’s a whole new energy around Leppard, in fact. I think we’re playing better than we ever have. Which you’d like to think anyway. They always say that musicians, unlike athletes, you’re supposed to get better.

“I’m not sure that anyone other than the band really notices, but I notice it and I know that the other guys do too. When I play ‘Rock of Ages’ for the 3,000,000 time, it’s not the song that excites me, it’s the energy from the audience. That’s what really lifts our performance. When you’ve got a more youthful audience coming to your shows, it only goes in one direction,” he concludes.

The thought of hundreds or even thousands of enthusiastic young pirates energizing an aging Def Leppard to the band’s delight is a real novelty. However, with so many channels for music consumption available today, are these new followers necessarily pirates?

One only has to visit Def Leppard’s official YouTube channel to see that despite being born in the late fifties and early sixties, the band are still regularly posting new content to keep fans up to date. So, given the consumption habits of young people these days, YouTube seems a more likely driver of new fans than torrents, for example.

That being said, Def Leppard are still humming along nicely on The Pirate Bay. The site lists a couple of hundred torrents, some uploaded more recently, some many years ago, including full albums, videos, and even entire discographies.

Arrr, we be Def Leppaaaaaard

Interestingly, Campbell hasn’t changed his public opinion on piracy for more than a decade. Back in 2007 he was saying similar things, and in 2011 he admitted that there were plenty of “kids out there” with the entire Def Leppard collection on their iPods.

“I am pretty sure they didn’t all pay for it. But, maybe those same kids will buy a ticket and come to a concert,” he said.

“We do not expect to sell a lot of records, we are just thankful to have people listening to our music. That is more important than having people pay for it. It will monetize itself later down the line.”

With sites like YouTube perhaps driving more traffic to bands like Def Leppard than pure piracy these days (and even diverting people away from piracy itself), it’s interesting to note that there’s still controversy around people getting paid for music.

With torrent sites slowly dropping off the record labels’ hitlists, one is much more likely to hear them criticizing YouTube itself for not giving the industry a fair deal.

Still, bands like Def Leppard seem happy, so it’s not all bad news.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Break a world record with Moonhack 2017

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/moonhack-2017/

The team at Code Club Australia set a world record last year by gathering 10,207 Australian kids together to participate in their coding event Moonhack. But they are not going to rest on their laurels: this year, they’ve set their sights even higher with their event on 15 August.

Moonhack Code Club Australia

What is Moonhack?

In honour of the Apollo 11 landing, Code Club Australia created a series of space-themed coding activities for their Moonhack event in July 2016. Their aim? To bring together as many kids as possible from all over Australia, to get them to code and have fun, and to hopefully establish a world record along the way.

Code Club Australia #MoonHack

Watch the Sunrise coverage of Code Club Australia World Record ‪#‎Moonhack‬ event – Launching Wed 20th July 2016 18:00 AEST – Register Now: www.moonhack.com.au

And they did exactly that! 10,207 kids completed Moonhack projects, which constitutes the largest number of children coding on one day ever recorded.

Moonhack 2017

With the success of the 2016 event spurring them on, the Code Club Australia team have scaled up their efforts this year. By opening Moonhack to kids across the globe, they want to spread enthusiasm for coding everywhere. And why not break their own world record in the process? Every kid in the world can take part in the event, as the website explains:

“Moonhack is for everyone. Moonhack is inclusive, not exclusive, because coding is for everyone, no matter their skill level or age – kids new to code, coding whizz kids, and anyone who wants to try out coding for the first time, or coding pros who want to get creative.”

Participants between the ages of 8 and 18 are invited to form teams and create their own space-themed project – or use one of the provided examples in Scratch, ScratchJr, or Python. If you’re outside the age range, don’t worry – you can still take part, but your project won’t be counted toward the world record attempt.

Moonhack Code Club Australia

The sky is no longer the limit…

Participating teams submit their complete project to the Moonhack website as a link, screenshot, or file upload. All successful participants will receive a certificate to print and hang proudly on their wall. Woohoo!

How do we take part?

Teams will need to be registered on the website by a facilitator. Registering will give the facilitator access to a whole host of helpful tips for how to help their team out. Then, on Moonhack day, 15 August, the facilitator can upload the team’s completed project. If you can’t host an event for your team on 15 August, don’t worry – simply get the kids to complete the project beforehand. For more information go to the Moonhack website, where you can also find coding projects in several human and programming languages.

So what are you waiting for? Get together with the code-loving young people in your life, put your thinking hats on, get programming, and have the chance to set a new world record!

The post Break a world record with Moonhack 2017 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

How To Get Your First 1,000 Customers

Post Syndicated from Gleb Budman original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-get-your-first-1000-customers/

PR for getting your first 1000 customers

If you launch your startup and no one knows, did you actually launch? As mentioned in my last post, our initial launch target was to get a 1,000 people to use our service. But how do you get even 1,000 people to sign up for your service when no one knows who you are?

There are a variety of methods to attract your first 1,000 customers, but launching with the press is my favorite. I’ll explain why and how to do it below.

Paths to Attract Your First 1,000 Customers

Social following: If you have a massive social following, those people are a reasonable target for what you’re offering. In particular if your relationship with them is one where they would buy something you recommend, this can be one of the easiest ways to get your initial customers. However, building this type of following is non-trivial and often is done over several years.

Press not only provides awareness and customers, but credibility and SEO benefits as well

Paid advertising: The advantage of paid ads is you have control over when they are presented and what they say. The primary disadvantage is they tend to be expensive, especially before you have your positioning, messaging, and funnel nailed.

Viral: There are certainly examples of companies that launched with a hugely viral video, blog post, or promotion. While fantastic if it happens, even if you do everything right, the likelihood of massive virality is miniscule and the conversion rate is often low.

Press: As I said, this is my favorite. You don’t need to pay a PR agency and can go from nothing to launched in a couple weeks. Press not only provides awareness and customers, but credibility and SEO benefits as well.

How to Pitch the Press

It’s easy: Have a compelling story, find the right journalists, make their life easy, pitch and follow-up. Of course, each one of those has some nuance, so let’s dig in.

Have a compelling story

How to Get Attention When you’ve been working for months on your startup, it’s easy to get lost in the minutiae when talking to others. Stories that a journalist will write about need to be something their readers will care about. Knowing what story to tell and how to tell it is part science and part art. Here’s how you can get there:

The basics of your story

Ask yourself the following questions, and write down the answers:

  • What are we doing? What product service are we offering?
  • Why? What problem are we solving?
  • What is interesting or unique? Either about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, or for who we’re doing it.

“But my story isn’t that exciting”

Neither was announcing a data backup company, believe me. Look for angles that make it compelling. Here are some:

  • Did someone on your team do something major before? (build a successful company/product, create some innovation, market something we all know, etc.)
  • Do you have an interesting investor or board member?
  • Is there a personal story that drove you to start this company?
  • Are you starting it in a unique place?
  • Did you come upon the idea in a unique way?
  • Can you share something people want to know that’s not usually shared?
  • Are you partnered with a well-known company?
  • …is there something interesting/entertaining/odd/shocking/touching/etc.?

It doesn’t get much less exciting than, “We’re launching a company that will backup your data.” But there were still a lot of compelling stories:

  • Founded by serial entrepreneurs, bootstrapped a capital-intensive company, committed to each other for a year without salary.
  • Challenging the way that every backup company before was set up by not asking customers to pick and choose files to backup.
  • Designing our own storage system.
  • Etc. etc.

For the initial launch, we focused on “unlimited for $5/month” and statistics from a survey we ran with Harris Interactive that said that 94% of people did not regularly backup their data.

It’s an old adage that “Everyone has a story.” Regardless of what you’re doing, there is always something interesting to share. Dig for that.

The headline

Once you’ve captured what you think the interesting story is, you’ve got to boil it down. Yes, you need the elevator pitch, but this is shorter…it’s the headline pitch. Write the headline that you would love to see a journalist write.

Regardless of what you’re doing, there is always something interesting to share. Dig for that.

Now comes the part where you have to be really honest with yourself: if you weren’t involved, would you care?

The “Techmeme Test”

One way I try to ground myself is what I call the “Techmeme Test”. Techmeme lists the top tech articles. Read the headlines. Imagine the headline you wrote in the middle of the page. If you weren’t involved, would you click on it? Is it more or less compelling than the others. Much of tech news is dominated by the largest companies. If you want to get written about, your story should be more compelling. If not, go back above and explore your story some more.

Embargoes, exclusives and calls-to-action

Journalists write about news. Thus, if you’ve already announced something and are then pitching a journalist to cover it, unless you’re giving her something significant that hasn’t been said, it’s no longer news. As a result, there are ‘embargoes’ and ‘exclusives’.

Embargoes

    • : An embargo simply means that you are sharing news with a journalist that they need to keep private until a certain date and time.

If you’re Apple, this may be a formal and legal document. In our case, it’s as simple as saying, “Please keep embargoed until 4/13/17 at 8am California time.” in the pitch. Some sites explicitly will not keep embargoes; for example The Information will only break news. If you want to launch something later, do not share information with journalists at these sites. If you are only working with a single journalist for a story, and your announcement time is flexible, you can jointly work out a date and time to announce. However, if you have a fixed launch time or are working with a few journalists, embargoes are key.

Exclusives: An exclusive means you’re giving something specifically to that journalist. Most journalists love an exclusive as it means readers have to come to them for the story. One option is to give a journalist an exclusive on the entire story. If it is your dream journalist, this may make sense. Another option, however, is to give exclusivity on certain pieces. For example, for your launch you could give an exclusive on funding detail & a VC interview to a more finance-focused journalist and insight into the tech & a CTO interview to a more tech-focused journalist.

Call-to-Action: With our launch we gave TechCrunch, Ars Technica, and SimplyHelp URLs that gave the first few hundred of their readers access to the private beta. Once those first few hundred users from each site downloaded, the beta would be turned off.

Thus, we used a combination of embargoes, exclusives, and a call-to-action during our initial launch to be able to brief journalists on the news before it went live, give them something they could announce as exclusive, and provide a time-sensitive call-to-action to the readers so that they would actually sign up and not just read and go away.

How to Find the Most Authoritative Sites / Authors

“If a press release is published and no one sees it, was it published?” Perhaps the time existed when sending a press release out over the wire meant journalists would read it and write about it. That time has long been forgotten. Over 1,000 unread press releases are published every day. If you want your compelling story to be covered, you need to find the handful of journalists that will care.

Determine the publications

Find the publications that cover the type of story you want to share. If you’re in tech, Techmeme has a leaderboard of publications ranked by leadership and presence. This list will tell you which publications are likely to have influence. Visit the sites and see if your type of story appears on their site. But, once you’ve determined the publication do NOT send a pitch their “[email protected]” or “[email protected]” email addresses. In all the times I’ve done that, I have never had a single response. Those email addresses are likely on every PR, press release, and spam list and unlikely to get read. Instead…

Determine the journalists

Once you’ve determined which publications cover your area, check which journalists are doing the writing. Skim the articles and search for keywords and competitor names.

Over 1,000 unread press releases are published every day.

Identify one primary journalist at the publication that you would love to have cover you, and secondary ones if there are a few good options. If you’re not sure which one should be the primary, consider a few tests:

  • Do they truly seem to care about the space?
  • Do they write interesting/compelling stories that ‘get it’?
  • Do they appear on the Techmeme leaderboard?
  • Do their articles get liked/tweeted/shared and commented on?
  • Do they have a significant social presence?

Leveraging Google

Google author search by date

In addition to Techmeme or if you aren’t in the tech space Google will become a must have tool for finding the right journalists to pitch. Below the search box you will find a number of tabs. Click on Tools and change the Any time setting to Custom range. I like to use the past six months to ensure I find authors that are actively writing about my market. I start with the All results. This will return a combination of product sites and articles depending upon your search term.

Scan for articles and click on the link to see if the article is on topic. If it is find the author’s name. Often if you click on the author name it will take you to a bio page that includes their Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or Facebook profile. Many times you will find their email address in the bio. You should collect all the information and add it to your outreach spreadsheet. Click here to get a copy. It’s always a good idea to comment on the article to start building awareness of your name. Another good idea is to Tweet or Like the article.

Next click on the News tab and set the same search parameters. You will get a different set of results. Repeat the same steps. Between the two searches you will have a list of authors that actively write for the websites that Google considers the most authoritative on your market.

How to find the most socially shared authors

Buzzsumo search for most shared by date

Your next step is to find the writers whose articles get shared the most socially. Go to Buzzsumo and click on the Most Shared tab. Enter search terms for your market as well as competitor names. Again I like to use the past 6 months as the time range. You will get a list of articles that have been shared the most across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+. In addition to finding the most shared articles and their authors you can also see some of the Twitter users that shared the article. Many of those Twitter users are big influencers in your market so it’s smart to start following and interacting with them as well as the authors.

How to Find Author Email Addresses

Some journalists publish their contact info right on the stories. For those that don’t, a bit of googling will often get you the email. For example, TechCrunch wrote a story a few years ago where they published all of their email addresses, which was in response to this new service that charges a small fee to provide journalist email addresses. Sometimes visiting their twitter pages will link to a personal site, upon which they will share an email address.

Of course all is not lost if you don’t find an email in the bio. There are two good services for finding emails, https://app.voilanorbert.com/ and https://hunter.io/. For Voila Norbert enter the author name and the website you found their article on. The majority of the time you search for an author on a major publication Norbert will return an accurate email address. If it doesn’t try Hunter.io.

On Hunter.io enter the domain name and click on Personal Only. Then scroll through the results to find the author’s email. I’ve found Norbert to be more accurate overall but between the two you will find most major author’s email addresses.

Email, by the way, is not necessarily the best way to engage a journalist. Many are avid Twitter users. Follow them and engage – that means read/retweet/favorite their tweets; reply to their questions, and generally be helpful BEFORE you pitch them. Later when you email them, you won’t be just a random email address.

Don’t spam

Now that you have all these email addresses (possibly thousands if you purchased a list) – do NOT spam. It is incredibly tempting to think “I could try to figure out which of these folks would be interested, but if I just email all of them, I’ll save myself time and be more likely to get some of them to respond.” Don’t do it.

Follow them and engage – that means read/retweet/favorite their tweets; reply to their questions, and generally be helpful BEFORE you pitch them.

First, you’ll want to tailor your pitch to the individual. Second, it’s a small world and you’ll be known as someone who spams – reputation is golden. Also, don’t call journalists. Unless you know them or they’ve said they’re open to calls, you’re most likely to just annoy them.

Build a relationship

Build Trust with reporters Play the long game. You may be focusing just on the launch and hoping to get this one story covered, but if you don’t quickly flame-out, you will have many more opportunities to tell interesting stories that you’ll want the press to cover. Be honest and don’t exaggerate.
When you have 500 users it’s tempting to say, “We’ve got thousands!” Don’t. The good journalists will see through it and it’ll likely come back to bite you later. If you don’t know something, say “I don’t know but let me find out for you.” Most journalists want to write interesting stories that their readers will appreciate. Help them do that. Build deeper relationships with 5 – 10 journalists, rather than spamming thousands.

Stay organized

It doesn’t need to be complicated, but keep a spreadsheet that includes the name, publication, and contact info of the journalists you care about. Then, use it to keep track of who you’ve pitched, who’s responded, whether you’ve sent them the materials they need, and whether they intend to write/have written.

Make their life easy

Journalists have a million PR people emailing them, are actively engaging with readers on Twitter and in the comments, are tracking their metrics, are working their sources…and all the while needing to publish new articles. They’re busy. Make their life easy and they’re more likely to engage with yours.

Get to know them

Before sending them a pitch, know what they’ve written in the space. If you tell them how your story relates to ones they’ve written, it’ll help them put the story in context, and enable them to possibly link back to a story they wrote before.

Prepare your materials

Journalists will need somewhere to get more info (prepare a fact sheet), a URL to link to, and at least one image (ideally a few to choose from.) A fact sheet gives bite-sized snippets of information they may need about your startup or product: what it is, how big the market is, what’s the pricing, who’s on the team, etc. The URL is where their reader will get the product or more information from you. It doesn’t have to be live when you’re pitching, but you should be able to tell what the URL will be. The images are ones that they could embed in the article: a product screenshot, a CEO or team photo, an infographic. Scan the types of images included in their articles. Don’t send any of these in your pitch, but have them ready. Studies, stats, customer/partner/investor quotes are also good to have.

Pitch

A pitch has to be short and compelling.

Subject Line

Think back to the headline you want. Is it really compelling? Can you shorten it to a subject line? Include what’s happening and when. For Mike Arrington at Techcrunch, our first subject line was “Startup doing an ‘online time machine’”. Later I would include, “launching June 6th”.

For John Timmer at ArsTechnica, it was “Demographics data re: your 4/17 article”. Why? Because he wrote an article titled “WiFi popular with the young people; backups, not so much”. Since we had run a demographics survey on backups, I figured as a science editor he’d be interested in this additional data.

Body

A few key things about the body of the email. It should be short and to the point, no more than a few sentences. Here was my actual, original pitch email to John:

Hey John,

We’re launching Backblaze next week which provides a Time Machine-online type of service. As part of doing some research I read your article about backups not being popular with young people and that you had wished Accenture would have given you demographics. In prep for our invite-only launch I sponsored Harris Interactive to get demographic data on who’s doing backups and if all goes well, I should have that data on Friday.

Next week starts Backup Awareness Month (and yes, probably Clean Your House Month and Brush Your Teeth Month)…but nonetheless…good time to remind readers to backup with a bit of data?

Would you be interested in seeing/talking about the data when I get it?

Would you be interested in getting a sneak peak at Backblaze? (I could give you some invite codes for your readers as well.)

Gleb Budman        

CEO and Co-Founder

Backblaze, Inc.

Automatic, Secure, High-Performance Online Backup

Cell: XXX-XXX-XXXX

The Good: It said what we’re doing, why this relates to him and his readers, provides him information he had asked for in an article, ties to something timely, is clearly tailored for him, is pitched by the CEO and Co-Founder, and provides my cell.

The Bad: It’s too long.

I got better later. Here’s an example:

Subject: Does temperature affect hard drive life?

Hi Peter, there has been much debate about whether temperature affects how long a hard drive lasts. Following up on the Backblaze analyses of how long do drives last & which drives last the longest (that you wrote about) we’ve now analyzed the impact of heat on the nearly 40,000 hard drives we have and found that…

We’re going to publish the results this Monday, 5/12 at 5am California-time. Want a sneak peak of the analysis?

Timing

A common question is “When should I launch?” What day, what time? I prefer to launch on Tuesday at 8am California-time. Launching earlier in the week gives breathing room for the news to live longer. While your launch may be a single article posted and that’s that, if it ends up a larger success, earlier in the week allows other journalists (including ones who are in other countries) to build on the story. Monday announcements can be tough because the journalists generally need to have their stories finished by Friday, and while ideally everything is buttoned up beforehand, startups sometimes use the weekend as overflow before a launch.

The 8am California-time is because it allows articles to be published at the beginning of the day West Coast and around lunch-time East Coast. Later and you risk it being past publishing time for the day. We used to launch at 5am in order to be morning for the East Coast, but it did not seem to have a significant benefit in coverage or impact, but did mean that the entire internal team needed to be up at 3am or 4am. Sometimes that’s critical, but I prefer to not burn the team out when it’s not.

Finally, try to stay clear of holidays, major announcements and large conferences. If Apple is coming out with their next iPhone, many of the tech journalists will be busy at least a couple days prior and possibly a week after. Not always obvious, but if you can, find times that are otherwise going to be slow for news.

Follow-up

There is a fine line between persistence and annoyance. I once had a journalist write me after we had an announcement that was covered by the press, “Why didn’t you let me know?! I would have written about that!” I had sent him three emails about the upcoming announcement to which he never responded.

My general rule is 3 emails.

Ugh. However, my takeaway from this isn’t that I should send 10 emails to every journalist. It’s that sometimes these things happen.

My general rule is 3 emails. If I’ve identified a specific journalist that I think would be interested and have a pitch crafted for her, I’ll send her the email ideally 2 weeks prior to the announcement. I’ll follow-up a week later, and one more time 2 days prior. If she ever says, “I’m not interested in this topic,” I note it and don’t email her on that topic again.

If a journalist wrote, I read the article and engage in the comments (or someone on our team, such as our social guy, @YevP does). We’ll often promote the story through our social channels and email our employees who may choose to share the story as well. This helps us, but also helps the journalist get their story broader reach. Again, the goal is to build a relationship with the journalists your space. If there’s something relevant to your customers that the journalist wrote, you’re providing a service to your customers AND helping the journalist get the word out about the article.

At times the stories also end up shared on sites such as Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, or become active conversations on Twitter. Again, we try to engage there and respond to questions (when we do, we are always clear that we’re from Backblaze.)

And finally, I’ll often send a short thank you to the journalist.

Getting Your First 1,000 Customers With Press

As I mentioned at the beginning, there is more than one way to get your first 1,000 customers. My favorite is working with the press to share your story. If you figure out your compelling story, find the right journalists, make their life easy, pitch and follow-up, you stand a high likelyhood of getting coverage and customers. Better yet, that coverage will provide credibility for your company, and if done right, will establish you as a resource for the press for the future.

Like any muscle, this process takes working out. The first time may feel a bit daunting, but just take the steps one at a time. As you do this a few times, the process will be easier and you’ll know who to reach out and quickly determine what stories will be compelling.

The post How To Get Your First 1,000 Customers appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Taking the first step on the journey

Post Syndicated from Matt Richardson original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/taking-first-step-journey/

This column is from The MagPi issue 58. You can download a PDF of the full issue for free, or subscribe to receive the print edition in your mailbox or the digital edition on your tablet. All proceeds from the print and digital editions help the Raspberry Pi Foundation achieve its charitable goals.

About five years ago was the first time I unboxed a Raspberry Pi. I hooked it up to our living room television and made space on the TV stand for an old USB keyboard and mouse. Watching the $35 computer boot up for the first time impressed me, and I had a feeling it was a big deal, but I’ll admit that I had no idea how much of a phenomenon Raspberry Pi would become. I had no idea how large the community would grow. I had no idea how much my life would be changed from that moment on. And it all started with a simple first step: booting it up.

Matt Richardson on Twitter

Finally a few minutes to experiment with @Raspberry_Pi! So far, I’m rather impressed!

The key to the success of Raspberry Pi as a computer – and, in turn, a community and a charitable foundation – is that there’s a low barrier to the first step you take with it. The low price is a big reason for that. Whether or not to try Raspberry Pi is not a difficult decision. Since it’s so affordable, you can just give it a go, and see how you get along.

The pressure is off

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system kernel, talked about this in a BBC News interview in 2012. He explained that a lot of people might take the first step with Raspberry Pi, but not everyone will carry on with it. But getting more people to take that first step of turning it on means there are more people who potentially will be impacted by the technology. Torvalds said:

I find things like Raspberry Pi to be an important thing: trying to make it possible for a wider group of people to tinker with computers. And making the computers cheap enough that you really can not only afford the hardware at a big scale, but perhaps more important, also afford failure.

In other words, if things don’t work out with you and your Raspberry Pi, it’s not a big deal, since it’s such an affordable computer.

In this together

Of course, we hope that more and more people who boot up a Raspberry Pi for the first time will decide to continue experimenting, creating, and learning with it. Thanks to improvements to the hardware, the Raspbian operating system, and free software packages, it’s constantly becoming easier to do many amazing things with this little computer. And our continually growing community means you’re not alone on this journey. These improvements and growth over the past few years hopefully encourage more people who boot up Raspberry Pis to keep exploring.
raspberry pi first step

The first step

However, the important thing is that people are given the opportunity to take that first step, especially young people. Young learners are at a critical age, and something like the Raspberry Pi can have an enormously positive impact on the rest of their lives. It’s a major reason why our free resources are aimed at young learners. It’s also why we train educators all over the world for free. And encouraging youngsters to take their first step with Raspberry Pi could not only make a positive difference in their lives, but also in society at large.

With the affordable computational power, excellent software, supportive community, and free resources, you’re given everything you need to make a big impact in the world when you boot up a Raspberry Pi for the first time. That moment could be step one of ten, or one of ten thousand, but it’s up to you to take that first step.

Now you!

Learning and making things with the Pi is incredibly easy, and we’ve created numerous resources and tutorials to help you along. First of all, check out our hardware guide to make sure you’re all set up. Next, you can try out Scratch and Python, our favourite programming languages. Feeling creative? Learn to code music with Sonic Pi, or make visual art with Processing. Ready to control the real world with your Pi? Create a reaction game, or an LED adornment for your clothing. Maybe you’d like to do some science with the help of our Sense HAT, or become a film maker with our camera?

You can do all this with the Raspberry Pi, and so much more. The possibilities are as limitless as your imagination. So where do you want to start?

The post Taking the first step on the journey appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Get social: connecting with Raspberry Pi

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/connecting-raspberry-pi-social/

Fancy connecting with Raspberry Pi beyond the four imaginary walls of this blog post? Want to find ways into the conversation among our community of makers, learners, and educators? Here’s how:

Twitter

Connecting with us on Twitter is your sure-fire way of receiving the latest news and articles from and about the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Code Club, and CoderDojo. Here you’ll experience the fun, often GIF-fuelled banter of the busy Raspberry Pi community, along with tips, project support, and event updates. This is the best place to follow hashtags such as #Picademy, #MakeYourIdeas, and #RJam in real time.

Raspberry Pi on Twitter

News! Raspberry Pi and @CoderDojo join forces in a merger that will help more young people get creative with tech: https://t.co/37y45ht7li

YouTube

We create a variety of video content, from Pi Towers fun, to resource videos, to interviews and program updates. We’re constantly adding content to our channel to bring you more interesting, enjoyable videos to watch and share within the community. Want to see what happens when you drill a hole through a Raspberry Pi Zero to make a fidget spinner? Or what Code Club International volunteers got up to when we brought them together in London for a catch-up? Maybe you’d like to try a new skill and need guidance? Our YouTube channel is the place to go!

Getting started with soldering

Learn the basics of how to solder components together, and the safety precautions you need to take. Find a transcript of this video in our accompanying learning resource: raspberrypi.org/learning/getting-started-with-soldering/

Instagram

Instagram is known as the home of gorgeous projects and even better-looking project photographs. Our Instagram, however, is mainly a collection of random office shenanigans, short video clips, and the occasional behind-the-scenes snap of projects, events, or the mess on my desk. Come join the party!

When one #AstroPi unit is simply not enough… . Would you like to #3DPrint your own Astro Pi unit? Head to rpf.io/astroprint for the free files and assembly guide . . . . . . #RaspberryPi #Space #ESA @astro_timpeake @thom_astro

1,379 Likes, 9 Comments – Raspberry Pi (@raspberrypifoundation) on Instagram: “When one #AstroPi unit is simply not enough… . Would you like to #3DPrint your own Astro Pi unit?…”

Facebook

Looking to share information on Raspberry Pi with your social community? Maybe catch a live stream or read back through comments on some of our community projects? Then you’ll want to check out Raspberry Pi Facebook page. It brings the world together via a vast collection of interesting articles, images, videos, and discussions. Here you’ll find information on upcoming events we’re visiting, links to our other social media accounts, and projects our community shares via visitor posts. If you have a moment to spare, you may even find you can answer a community question.

Raspberry Pi at the Scottish Learning Festival

No Description

Raspberry Pi forum

The Raspberry Pi forum is the go-to site for posting questions, getting support, and just having a good old chin wag. Whether you have problems setting up your Pi, need advice on how to build a media centre, or can’t figure out how to utilise Scratch for the classroom, the forum has you covered. Head there for absolutely anything Pi-related, and you’re sure to find help with your query – or better yet, the answer may already be waiting for you!

G+

Our G+ community is an ever-growing mix of makers, educators, industry professionals, and those completely new to Pi and eager to learn more about the Foundation and the product. Here you’ll find project shares, tech questions, and conversation. It’s worth stopping by if you use the platform.

Code Club and CoderDojo

You should also check out the social media accounts of our BFFs Code Club and CoderDojo!


On the CoderDojo website, along with their active forum, you’ll find links to all their accounts at the bottom of the page. For UK-focused Code Club information, head to the Code Club UK Twitter account, and for links to accounts of Code Clubs based in your country, use the search option on the Code Club International website.

Connect with us

However you want to connect with us, make sure to say hi. We love how active and welcoming our online community is and we always enjoy engaging in conversation, seeing your builds and events, and sharing Pi Towers mischief as well as useful Pi-related information and links with you!

If you use any other social platform and miss our presence there, let us know in the comments. And if you run your own Raspberry Pi-related forum, online group, or discussion board, share that as well!

The post Get social: connecting with Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Half of All Football Fans Have Watched Illegal Streams

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/half-of-all-football-fans-have-watched-illegal-streams-170704/

Being a fan of top-flight football in the UK is an expensive proposition. In 2016, the average price of a season ticket was just shy of £500 a season while watching on TV can cost more than £60 per month.

Of course, there are good reasons for these high prices. Premier League footballers are notoriously highly-paid and with TV rights recently changing hands for more than £5.3bn, money has to be recouped in the most basic of ways – from the fans’ pocket.

While this is a success up to a point, there’s a growing factor upsetting the money men. The rise of online streaming is a thorn in the side of English Premier League, who are having to deal with large numbers of fans obtaining live matches for free via the Internet. But just how many fans are going down this route?

The results of a new survey carried out by the BBC reveal some shocking but perhaps not entirely unexpected results. Carried out online by ComRes between 7 and 15 March among 1,000 fans, it shows that large numbers of fans prefer the free option.

The headline figure is that 36% of football supporters stream Premier League matches online illegally at least once every month, a figure that reduces to just under a quarter (22%) when the frequency is once a week.

However, when fans were asked whether they had ever watched a match through an unofficial online provider, close to half (47%) said they had done so. That’s certainly a worryingly high number for the Premier League.

And if one removes older fans from the equation, things only get worse.

Almost two-thirds (65%) of younger fans aged 18 to 34 say they illegally stream live football matches online at least once a month. Among older fans aged 34 to 54 the figure improves to 33%, dropping to just 13% for the over 55s.

With 29%, the top reason fans gave for streaming content illegally was because “a friend/family member does it and they just watch.” Whether this is fans simply being coy is unclear, but it does suggest that watching football illegally has become a communal pastime, something which can likely be attributed to the rise of set-top boxes running software like Kodi.

Almost a quarter (24%) believe that TV sports packages do not represent good value for money but the only shock here is that the number isn’t higher. It’s certainly possible that many ‘streaming’ fans would never have paid in the first place, so pricing might be less of a factor for them.

Interestingly, 25% of respondents say they stream matches illegally because the quality is good. This is interesting since while illicit streams are both cheap and convenient, quality and reliability isn’t usually high up the checklist. That being said, the BBC research doesn’t differentiate between free streams and cheap IPTV streams, and the latter can indeed rival an official service.

There are also a few interesting revelations when it comes to fans’ opinions on the legality of illicit streaming.

A small 12% of fans think the practice is legal, almost three times less than the number who say it is illegal (34%). Almost three-quarters (32%) don’t know the legal status of streaming from an illicit source.

Following a recent ruling from the European Court of Justice, it is now clear that streaming from an unlicensed source amounts to copyright infringement.

However, enforcing that legislation against people in their own homes would provide similar challenges to prosecuting people who ‘tape’ a friend’s record collection or watch pirate DVDs. It’s just not realistic.

Interestingly, 10% believe it is legal to watch but illegal to upload a stream. That was believed to be the case before the ECJ ruling, but the former has now been clarified.

Uploading streams is very, very much illegal (as is supplying ‘pirate’ boxes) and in the right circumstances could lead to a custodial sentence. However, no regular consumer does this through conventional streaming (through a Kodi-powered device, for example), so it’s a moot point.

A tiny 4% of people believe that unauthorized streaming is not breaking the law but that Sky or BT could still fine them if they found out, which is technically wrong on both counts.

That being said, proving someone watched a stream is extremely difficult and since copyright law in the UK requires that infringers compensate for the losses they’ve caused, any ‘fine’ imposed might only amount to the cost of a match, for example.

Again, the chances of this happening in any way are very unlikely and have certainly never happened to date, even though millions are watching streams via their computers and set-top boxes loaded with Kodi. This is something the Premier League wants to change.

“Fans should know that these pre-loaded boxes enable pirate broadcasts of Premier League football, and other popular content, and are illegal. People who supply them have been jailed or ordered to pay significant financial penalties,” a spokesman told the BBC.

“We are increasingly seeing prominent apps and add-ons being closed down as the law catches up with them, leading to consumers being out of pocket.

“The Premier League will continue to protect its copyright, and the legitimate investment made by its broadcasting partners. Their contribution allows our clubs to develop and acquire players, invest in facilities and support the wider football pyramid and communities – all things that fans enjoy and society benefits from.”

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

The Code Club International movement

Post Syndicated from Katherine Leadbetter original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/code-club-international/

Over the past few years, Code Club has made strides toward world domination! There are now more than 10,000 Code Clubs running in 125 countries. More than 140,000 kids have taken part in our clubs in places as diverse as the northernmost tip of Canada and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

In the first video from our Code Club International network, we find out about Code Clubs around the world from the people supporting these communities.

Global communities

Code Club currently has official local partners in twelve countries. Our passionate and motivated partner organisations are responsible for championing their countries’ Code Clubs. In March we brought the partners together for the first time, and they shared what it means to be part of the Code Club community:

You can help Code Club make a difference around the world

We invited our international Code Club partners to join us in London and discuss why we think Code Club is so special. Whether you’re a seasoned pro, a budding educator, or simply want to give back to your local community, there’s a place for you among our incredible Code Club volunteers.

Of course, Code Clubs aren’t restricted to countries with official partner communities – they can be started anywhere in the world! Code Clubs are up and running in a number of unexpected places, from Kosovo to Kazakhstan.

Code Club International

Code Club partners gathered together at the International Meetup

The geographical spread of Code Clubs means we hear of clubs overcoming a range of different challenges. One club in Zambia, run by volunteer Mwiza Simbeye, started as a way to get kids off the streets of Lusaka and teach them useful skills. Many children attending had hardly used a computer before writing their first line of code at the club. And it’s making a difference! As Mwiza told us, ‘you only need to see the light shine in the eyes of [Code Club] participants to see how much they enjoy these sessions.’

Code Club International

Student Joyce codes in Scratch at her Code Club in Nunavut, Canada

In the Nunavut region of Canada, Talia Metuq was first introduced to coding at a Code Club. In an area comprised of 25 Inuit communities that are inaccessible via roads and currently combating severe social and economic deprivation, computer science was not on the school timetable. Code Club, along with club volunteer Ryan Oliver, is starting to change that. After graduating from Code Club, Talia went on to study 3D modelling in Vancouver. She has now returned to Nunavut and is helping inspire more children to pursue digital making.

Start a Code Club

Code Clubs are volunteer-led extra-curricular coding clubs for children age 9 to 13. Children that attend learn to code games, animations, and websites using the projects we provide. Working with volunteers and with other children in their club, they grow their digital skillset.

You can run a Code Club anywhere if you have a venue, volunteers, and kids ready to learn coding. Help us achieve our goal of having a Code Club in every community in the world!

To find out how to start a Code Club outside of the UK, you can visit the Code Club International website. If you are in the UK, head to the Code Club UK website for more information.

Code Club International

Help the Code Club International community grow

On the Code Club site, we currently have projects in 28 languages, allowing more young people than ever to learn programming in their native language. But that’s not enough! We are always on the lookout for volunteers to translate projects and resources. If you are proficient in translating from English and would like to help, please visit the website to find out more.

We are also looking for official local partners in Italy and Germany to join our international network – if you know of, or are a part of an enthusiastic non-profit organisation who might be interested to join us, you can learn more here.

The post The Code Club International movement appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

CoderDojo Coolest Projects 2017

Post Syndicated from Ben Nuttall original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/coderdojo-coolest-projects-2017/

When I heard we were merging with CoderDojo, I was delighted. CoderDojo is a wonderful organisation with a spectacular community, and it’s going to be great to join forces with the team and work towards our common goal: making a difference to the lives of young people by making technology accessible to them.

You may remember that last year Philip and I went along to Coolest Projects, CoderDojo’s annual event at which their global community showcase their best makes. It was awesome! This year a whole bunch of us from the Raspberry Pi Foundation attended Coolest Projects with our new Irish colleagues, and as expected, the projects on show were as cool as can be.

Coolest Projects 2017 attendee

Crowd at Coolest Projects 2017

This year’s coolest projects!

Young maker Benjamin demoed his brilliant RGB LED table tennis ball display for us, and showed off his brilliant project tutorial website codemakerbuddy.com, which he built with Python and Flask. [Click on any of the images to enlarge them.]

Coolest Projects 2017 LED ping-pong ball display
Coolest Projects 2017 Benjamin and Oly

Next up, Aimee showed us a recipes app she’d made with the MIT App Inventor. It was a really impressive and well thought-out project.

Coolest Projects 2017 Aimee's cook book
Coolest Projects 2017 Aimee's setup

This very successful OpenCV face detection program with hardware installed in a teddy bear was great as well:

Coolest Projects 2017 face detection bear
Coolest Projects 2017 face detection interface
Coolest Projects 2017 face detection database

Helen’s and Oly’s favourite project involved…live bees!

Coolest Projects 2017 live bees

BEEEEEEEEEEES!

Its creator, 12-year-old Amy, said she wanted to do something to help the Earth. Her project uses various sensors to record data on the bee population in the hive. An adjacent monitor displays the data in a web interface:

Coolest Projects 2017 Aimee's bees

Coolest robots

I enjoyed seeing lots of GPIO Zero projects out in the wild, including this robotic lawnmower made by Kevin and Zach:

Raspberry Pi Lawnmower

Kevin and Zach’s Raspberry Pi lawnmower project with Python and GPIO Zero, showed at CoderDojo Coolest Projects 2017

Philip’s favourite make was a Pi-powered robot you can control with your mind! According to the maker, Laura, it worked really well with Philip because he has no hair.

Philip Colligan on Twitter

This is extraordinary. Laura from @CoderDojo Romania has programmed a mind controlled robot using @Raspberry_Pi @coolestprojects

And here are some pictures of even more cool robots we saw:

Coolest Projects 2017 coolest robot no.1
Coolest Projects 2017 coolest robot no.2
Coolest Projects 2017 coolest robot no.3

Games, toys, activities

Oly and I were massively impressed with the work of Mogamad, Daniel, and Basheerah, who programmed a (borrowed) Amazon Echo to make a voice-controlled text-adventure game using Java and the Alexa API. They’ve inspired me to try something similar using the AIY projects kit and adventurelib!

Coolest Projects 2017 Mogamad, Daniel, Basheerah, Oly
Coolest Projects 2017 Alexa text-based game

Christopher Hill did a brilliant job with his Home Alone LEGO house. He used sensors to trigger lights and sounds to make it look like someone’s at home, like in the film. I should have taken a video – seeing it in action was great!

Coolest Projects 2017 Lego home alone house
Coolest Projects 2017 Lego home alone innards
Coolest Projects 2017 Lego home alone innards closeup

Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland Raspberry Jam group ran a DOTS board activity, which turned their area into a conductive paint hazard zone.

Coolest Projects 2017 NI Jam DOTS activity 1
Coolest Projects 2017 NI Jam DOTS activity 2
Coolest Projects 2017 NI Jam DOTS activity 3
Coolest Projects 2017 NI Jam DOTS activity 4
Coolest Projects 2017 NI Jam DOTS activity 5
Coolest Projects 2017 NI Jam DOTS activity 6

Creativity and ingenuity

We really enjoyed seeing so many young people collaborating, experimenting, and taking full advantage of the opportunity to make real projects. And we loved how huge the range of technologies in use was: people employed all manner of hardware and software to bring their ideas to life.

Philip Colligan on Twitter

Wow! Look at that room full of awesome young people. @coolestprojects #coolestprojects @CoderDojo

Congratulations to the Coolest Projects 2017 prize winners, and to all participants. Here are some of the teams that won in the different categories:

Coolest Projects 2017 winning team 1
Coolest Projects 2017 winning team 2
Coolest Projects 2017 winning team 3

Take a look at the gallery of all winners over on Flickr.

The wow factor

Raspberry Pi co-founder and Foundation trustee Pete Lomas came along to the event as well. Here’s what he had to say:

It’s hard to describe the scale of the event, and photos just don’t do it justice. The first thing that hit me was the sheer excitement of the CoderDojo ninjas [the children attending Dojos]. Everyone was setting up for their time with the project judges, and their pure delight at being able to show off their creations was evident in both halls. Time and time again I saw the ninjas apply their creativity to help save the planet or make someone’s life better, and it’s truly exciting that we are going to help that continue and expand.

Even after 8 hours, enthusiasm wasn’t flagging – the awards ceremony was just brilliant, with ninjas high-fiving the winners on the way to the stage. This speaks volumes about the ethos and vision of the CoderDojo founders, where everyone is a winner just by being part of a community of worldwide friends. It was a brilliant introduction, and if this weekend was anything to go by, our merger certainly is a marriage made in Heaven.

Join this awesome community!

If all this inspires you as much as it did us, consider looking for a CoderDojo near you – and sign up as a volunteer! There’s plenty of time for young people to build up skills and start working on a project for next year’s event. Check out coolestprojects.com for more information.

The post CoderDojo Coolest Projects 2017 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

MPAA Chief Praises Site-Blocking But Italians Love Piracy – and the Quality

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-chief-praises-site-blocking-but-italians-love-pirate-quality-170606/

After holding a reputation for being soft on piracy for many years, in more recent times Italy has taken a much tougher stance. The country now takes regular action against pirate sites and has a fairly aggressive site-blocking mechanism.

On Monday, the industry gathered in Rome and was presented with new data from local anti-piracy outfit FAPAV. The research revealed that while there has been some improvement over the past six years, 39% of Italians are still consuming illicit movies, TV shows, sporting events and other entertainment, at the rate of 669m acts of piracy every year.

While movie piracy is down 4% from 2010, the content most often consumed by pirates is still films, with 33% of the adult population engaging in illicit consumption during the past year.

The downward trend was not shared by TV shows, however. In the past seven years, piracy has risen to 22% of the population, up 13% on figures from 2010.

In keeping with the MPAA’s recent coding of piracy in 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 variants (P2P as 1.0, streaming websites as 2.0, streaming devices/Kodi as 3.0), FAPAV said that Piracy 2.0 had become even more established recently, with site operators making considerable technological progress.

“The research tells us we can not lower our guard, we always have to work harder and with greater determination in communication and awareness, especially with regard to digital natives,” said FAPAV Secretary General, Bagnoli Rossi.

The FAPAV chief said that there needs to be emphasis in two areas. One, changing perceptions among the public over the seriousness of piracy via education and two, placing pressure on websites using the police, judiciary, and other law enforcement agencies.

“The pillars of anti-piracy protection are: the judicial authority, self-regulatory agreements, communication and educational activities,” said Rossi, adding that cooperation with Italy’s AGCOM had resulted in 94 sites being blocked over three years.

FAPAV research has traditionally focused on people aged 15 and up but the anti-piracy group believes that placing more emphasis on younger people (aged 10-14) is important since they also consume a lot of pirated content online. MPAA chief Chris Dodd, who was at the event, agreed with the sentiment.

“Today’s youth are the future of the audiovisual industry. Young people must learn to respect the people who work in film and television that in 96% of cases never appear [in front of camera] but still work behind the scenes,” Dodd said.

“It is important to educate and direct them towards legal consumption, which creates jobs and encourages investment. Technology has expanded options to consume content legally and at any time and place, but at the same time has given attackers the opportunity to develop illegal businesses.”

Despite large-scale site-blocking not being a reality in the United States, Dodd was also keen to praise Italy for its efforts while acknowledging the wider blocking regimes in place across the EU.

“We must not only act by blocking pirate sites (we have closed a little less than a thousand in Europe) but also focus on legal offers. Today there are 480 legal online distribution services worldwide. We must have more,” Dodd said.

The outgoing MPAA chief reiterated that movies, music, games and a wide range of entertainment products are all available online legally now. Nevertheless, piracy remains a “growing phenomenon” that has criminals at its core.

“Piracy is composed of criminal organizations, ready to steal sensitive data and to make illegal profits any way they can. It’s a business that harms the entire audiovisual market, which in Europe alone has a million working professionals. To promote the culture of legality means protecting this market and its collective heritage,” Dodd said.

In Italy, convincing pirates to go legal might be more easily said than done. Not only do millions download video every year, but the majority of pirates are happy with the quality too. 89% said they were pleased with the quality of downloaded movies while the satisfaction with TV shows was even greater with 91% indicating approval.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Raspberry Pi and CoderDojo join forces

Post Syndicated from Philip Colligan original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-and-coderdojo-join-forces/

We’ve got some great news to share today: the Raspberry Pi Foundation is joining forces with the CoderDojo Foundation, in a merger that will give many more young people all over the world new opportunities to learn how to be creative with technology.

CoderDojo is a global network of coding clubs for kids from seven to 17. The first CoderDojo took place in July 2011 when James Whelton and Bill Liao decided to share their passion for computing by setting up a club at the National Software Centre in Cork. The idea was simple: provide a safe and social place for young people to acquire programming skills, learning from each other and supported by mentors.

Photo: a mentor helps a child at a CoderDojo

Since then, James and Bill have helped turn that idea into a movement that reaches across the whole world, with over 1,250 CoderDojos in 69 countries, regularly attended by over 35,000 young Ninjas.

Raspberry Pi and CoderDojo have each accomplished amazing things over the last six years. Now, we see an opportunity to do even more by joining forces. Bringing together Raspberry Pi, Code Club, and CoderDojo will create the largest global effort to get young people involved in computing and digital making. We have set ourselves an ambitious goal: to quadruple the number of CoderDojos worldwide, to 5,000, by the end of 2020.

Photo: children and teenagers work on laptops at a CoderDojo, while adults help

The enormous impact that CoderDojo has had so far is down to the CoderDojo Foundation team, and to the community of volunteers, businesses, and foundations who have contributed expertise, time, venues, and financial resources. We want to deepen those relationships and grow that community as we bring CoderDojo to more young people in future.

The CoderDojo Foundation will continue as an independent charity, based in Ireland. Nothing about CoderDojo’s brand or ethos is changing as a result of this merger. CoderDojos will continue to be platform-neutral, using whatever kit they need to help young people learn.

Photo: children concentrate intently on coding activities at a CoderDojo event

In technical terms, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is becoming a corporate member of the CoderDojo Foundation (which is a bit like being a shareholder, but without any financial interest). I will also join the board of the CoderDojo Foundation as a director. The merger is subject to approval by Irish regulators.

How will this work in practice? The two organisations will work together to advance our shared goals, using our respective assets and capabilities to get many more adults and young people involved in the CoderDojo movement. The Raspberry Pi Foundation will also provide practical, financial, and back-office support to the CoderDojo Foundation.

Last June, I attended the CoderDojo Coolest Projects event in Dublin, and was blown away by the amazing projects made by CoderDojo Ninjas from all over the world. From eight-year-olds who had written their first programs in Scratch to the teenagers who built a Raspberry Pi-powered hovercraft, it was clear that CoderDojo is already making a huge difference.

Photo: two girls wearing CoderDojo t-shirts present their Raspberry Pi-based hovercraft at CoderDojo Coolest Projects 2016

I am thrilled that we’re going to be working closely with the brilliant CoderDojo team, and I can’t wait to visit Coolest Projects again next month to meet all of the Ninjas and mentors who make CoderDojo possible.

If you want to find out more about CoderDojo and how you can get involved in helping the movement grow, go here.

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Hello World issue 2: celebrating ten years of Scratch

Post Syndicated from Carrie Anne Philbin original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/hello-world-issue-2/

We are very excited to announce that issue 2 of Hello World is out today! Hello World is our magazine about computing and digital making, written by educators, for educators. It  is a collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Computing at School, part of the British Computing Society.

We’ve been extremely fortunate to be granted an exclusive interview with Mitch Resnick, Leader of the Scratch Team at MIT, and it’s in the latest issue. All around the world, educators and enthusiasts are celebrating ten years of Scratch, MIT’s block-based programming language. Scratch has helped millions of people to learn the building blocks of computer programming through play, and is our go-to tool at Code Clubs everywhere.

Cover of issue 2 of hello world magazine

A magazine by educators, for educators.

This packed edition of Hello World also includes news, features, lesson activities, research and opinions from Computing At School Master Teachers, Raspberry Pi Certified Educators, academics, informal learning leaders and brilliant classroom teachers. Highlights (for me) include:

  • A round-up of digital making research from Oliver Quinlan
  • Safeguarding children online by Penny Patterson
  • Embracing chaos inside and outside the classroom with Code Club’s Rik Cross, Raspberry Jam-maker-in-chief Ben Nuttall, Raspberry Pi Certified Educator Sway Grantham, and CPD trainer Alan O’Donohoe
  • How MicroPython on the Micro:bit is inspiring a generation, by Nicholas Tollervey
  • Incredibly useful lesson activities on programming graphical user interfaces (GUI) with guizero, simulating logic gates in Minecraft, and introducing variables through story telling.
  • Exploring computing and gender through Girls Who Code, Cyber First Girls, the BCSLovelace Colloqium, and Computing At School’s #include initiative
  • A review of browser based IDEs

Get your copy

Hello World is available as a free Creative Commons download for anyone around the world who is interested in Computer Science and digital making education. Grab the latest issue straight from the Hello World website.

Thanks to the very generous support of our sponsors BT, we are able to offer a free printed version of the magazine to serving educators in the UK. It’s for teachers, Code Club volunteers, teaching assistants, teacher trainers, and others who help children and young people learn about computing and digital making. Remember to subscribe to receive your free copy, posted directly to your home.

Get involved

Are you an educator? Then Hello World needs you! As a magazine for educators by educators, we want to hear about your experiences in teaching technology. If you hear a little niggling voice in your head say “I’m just a teacher, why would my contributions be useful to anyone else?” stop immediately. We want to hear from you, because you are amazing!

Get in touch: [email protected] with your ideas, and we can help get them published.

 

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Fail your way to perfection

Post Syndicated from Olympia Brown original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/fail-perfection/

As educators and makers at Raspberry Pi, we think a lot about failure and how to deal with it constructively. Much has been written about the importance of failure to design and engineering projects. It is undoubtedly true that you can learn a lot from your mistakes, like getting the wrong size of part, mistyping your code, or not measuring when doing your DIY. The importance of failure has even become a bit of a common trope: just think of those slightly annoying inspirational quotes attributed to famous historical figures which you find all over social media.

I-have-not-failed—Edison

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. Thomas Edison.

Failure can be good!

But, as with many a cliché, there is an underlying truth that it is worth revisiting. Designing, engineering, and creating all involve making mistakes along the way. Even though failures feel bad, by reaching out when something goes wrong, you can call on the expertise of your community, learn, and make the final result better.

However, we often think failing also makes us look bad, so we don’t talk about it as an essential part of the process that got us to the end stage. We make things shiny and glossy to big-up our success, putting all the focus on the result. This tendency is, however, not necessarily helpful if we want to help educate others. As Jonathan Sanderson of NUSTEM puts it:

Jonathan Sanderson on Twitter

stem educators: worth noting: confessions of rank stupidity in digital making get responses, sympathy, offers of help on Twitter. (1/2)

Jonathan Sanderson on Twitter

yet our write-ups only feature the things we did right. Mis-steps and recovery from failure are key parts of process. (2/2)

The NUSTEM team truly believes in this: when sharing their builds, they include a section on what they would do differently next time. By highlighting the journey, and the mistakes made along the way, they are not only helping those that also want to go on that journey, they are also demystifying the process a bit.

Celebrate your fails

Because failure feels bad, we don’t routinely celebrate it. But there are niches where failure is celebrated: Simone Giertz’s (slightly sweary) YouTube videos are a great example. And then there is Hebocon, the Japanese competition for cruddy robots. In fact, the organisers of Hebocon make a great point: crafts that do not go as intended are interesting.

This is as much true when working with young people as it is in the wider world. In Pioneers, we also want to do our bit to celebrate failure. Our judges don’t just watch the teams’ videos to see how they overcame what went wrong along the way, they also have an award category that celebrates wrong turns and dead ends: ‘We appreciate what you’re trying to do’. Our first challenge‘s winning entry in this category was PiCymru’s We Shall Overcomb:

PiCymru : Make us Laugh Challenge

The video of the PiCymru teams Pioneer challenge entry! The team wasn’t able to get things to work the way they hoped, but wanted to share the joy of failure 🙂


The category name was suggested by our lovely judge from the first cycle, stand-up comedian Bec Hill: it’s one of the accepted heckles the audience can shout out at her stand-up scratch nights. Scratch nights are preview events at which a comedian tests new material, and they are allowed to fail on stage. We may not often think of comedy as embracing failure, but comedians do scratch nights specifically to learn from their mistakes, and to make the final product all the better for it. Interestingly, scratch nights are hugely popular with audiences.

So, if you’re working with a group of young people, what can you do to encourage learning from failure and not let them give up?

Helping you to fail better

In our book Ideas start here, for Pioneers mentors, we’ve given a few tips and phrases that can come in useful. For example, if someone says, “It isn’t working!”, you could respond with “Why not? Have you read the error log?” RTFM is a real thing, and an important skill for digital life.

We agree with engineer Prof Danielle George, who believes in being honest about your failures and highlighting their importance to where you’ve got now. “I fail a lot,” she says. “The trick is to embrace these failures; we don’t have to succeed the first time. We learn from our mistakes and move forwards.”

If, as a mentor, you’re not sure how to encourage and support those not used to failing, this article also has some more tips.

If nothing else helps, but you need to feel inspired, think about what someone said to Karen, who sucks at surfing:

Karen, you are actually pretty good at surfing. Keep in mind that billions of other humans wouldn’t dare even try.

How about you? If you have a story of what you learned from failure in one of your projects, share it in the comments!

Mistakes GIF – Find & Share on GIPHY

Discover & Share this Mistakes GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

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Growing Code Club

Post Syndicated from Philip Colligan original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/growing-code-club/

In November 2015 we announced that the Raspberry Pi Foundation was joining forces with Code Club to give more young people the opportunity to learn how to make things with computers. In the 18 months since we made that announcement, we have more than doubled the number of Code Clubs. Over 10,000 clubs are now active, in communities all over the world.

Photo of a Code Club in a classroom: six or seven children focus intently on Scratch programs and other tasks, and adults are helping and supervising in the background

Children at a Code Club in Australia

The UK is where the movement started, and there are now an amazing 5750 Code Clubs engaging over 85,000 young people in the UK each week. The rest of the world is catching up rapidly. With the help of our regional partners, there are over 4000 clubs outside the UK, and fast-growing Code Club communities in Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, France, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Ukraine. This year we have already launched new partnerships in Spain and South Korea, with more to come.

It’s fantastic to see the movement growing so quickly, and it’s all due to the amazing community of volunteers, teachers, parents, and young people who make everything possible. Thank you all!

Today, we are announcing the next stage of Code Club’s evolution. Drum roll, please…

Starting in September, we are extending Code Club to 9- to 13-year-olds.

Three girls, all concentrating, one smiling, work together at a computer at Code Club

Students at a Code Club in Brazil

Those in the know will remember that Code Club has, until now, been focused on 9- to 11-year-olds. So why the change?

Put simply: demand. There is a huge demand from young people for more opportunities to learn about computing generally, and for Code Club specifically. The first generations of Code Club graduates have moved on to more senior schools, and they’re telling us that they just don’t have the opportunities they need to learn more about digital making. We’ve decided to take up the challenge.

For the UK, this means that schools will be supported to set up Code Clubs for Years 7 and 8. Non-school venues, like libraries, will be able to offer their clubs to a wider age group.

Growing Code Club International

Code Club is a global movement, and we will be working with our regional partners to make sure that it is available to 9- to 13-year-olds in every community in the world. That includes accelerating the work to translate club materials into even more languages.

Two boys and a woman wearing a Code Club T-shirt sit and pose for the camera in a classroom

A Code Club volunteer and students in Brazil

As part of the change, we will be expanding our curriculum and free educational resources to cater for older children and more experienced coders. Like all our educational resources, the new materials will be created by qualified and experienced educators. They will be designed to help young people build a wide range of skills and competencies, including teamwork, problem-solving, and creativity.

Our first step towards supporting a wider age range is a pilot programme, launching today, with 50 secondary schools in the UK. Over the next few months, we will be working closely with them to find out the best ways to make the programme work for older kids.

Supporting Code Club

For now, you can help us spread the word. If you know a school, youth club, library, or similar venue that could host a club for young people aged 9 to 13, then encourage them to get involved.

Lastly, I want to say a massive “thank you!” to all the organisations and individuals that support Code Club financially. We care passionately about Code Club being free for every child to attend. That’s only possible because of the generous donations and grants that we receive from so many companies, foundations, and people who share our mission to put the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world.

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Raspberry Jam round-up: April

Post Syndicated from Ben Nuttall original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-jam-round-up-april/

In case you missed it: in yesterday’s post, we released our Raspberry Jam Guidebook, a new Jam branding pack and some more resources to help people set up their own Raspberry Pi community events. Today I’m sharing some insights from Jams I’ve attended recently.

Raspberry Jam round-up April 2017

Preston Raspberry Jam

The Preston Jam is one of the most long-established Jams, and it recently ran its 58th event. It has achieved this by running like clockwork: on the first Monday evening of every month, without fail, the Jam takes place. A few months ago I decided to drop in to surprise the organiser, Alan O’Donohoe. The Jam is held at the Media Innovation Studio at the University of Central Lancashire. The format is quite informal, and it’s very welcoming to newcomers. The first half of the event allows people to mingle, and beginners can get support from more seasoned makers. I noticed a number of parents who’d brought their children along to find out more about the Pi and what can be done with it. It’s a great way to find out for real what people use their Pis for, and to get pointers on how to set up and where to start.

About half way through the evening, the organisers gather everyone round to watch a few short presentations. At the Jam I attended, most of these talks were from children, which was fantastic to see: Josh gave a demo in which he connected his Raspberry Pi to an Amazon Echo using the Alexa API, Cerys talked about her Jam in Staffordshire, and Elise told everyone about the workshops she ran at MozFest. All their talks were really well presented. The Preston Jam has done very well to keep going for so long and so consistently, and to provide such great opportunities and support for young people like Josh, Cerys and Elise to develop their digital making abilities (and presentation skills). Their next event is on Monday 1 May.



Manchester Raspberry Jam and CoderDojo

I set up the Manchester Jam back in 2012, around the same time that the Preston one started. Back then, you could only buy one Pi at a time, and only a handful of people in the area owned one. We ran a fairly small event at the local tech community space, MadLab, adopting the format of similar events I’d been to, which was very hands-on and project-based – people brought along their Pis and worked on their own builds. I ran the Jam for a year before moving to Cambridge to work for the Foundation, and I asked one of the regular attendees, Jack, if he’d run it in future. I hadn’t been back until last month, when Clare and I decided to visit.

The Jam is now held at The Shed, a digital innovation space at Manchester Metropolitan University, thanks to Darren Dancey, a computer science lecturer who claims he taught me everything I know (this claim is yet to be peer-reviewed). Jack, Darren, and Raspberry Pi Foundation co-founder and Trustee Pete Lomas put on an excellent event. They have a room for workshops, and a space for people to work on their own projects. It was wonderful to see some of the attendees from the early days still going along every month, as well as lots of new faces. Some of Darren’s students ran a Minecraft Pi workshop for beginners, and I ran one using traffic lights with GPIO Zero and guizero.



The next day, we went along to Manchester CoderDojo, a monthly event for young people learning to code and make things. The Dojo is held at The Sharp Project, and thanks to the broad range of skills of the volunteers, they provide a range of different activities: Raspberry Pi, Minecraft, LittleBits, Code Club Scratch projects, video editing, game making and lots more.

Raspberry Jam round-up April 2017

Manchester CoderDojo’s next event is on Sunday 14 May. Be sure to keep an eye on mcrraspjam.org.uk for the next Jam date!

CamJam and Pi Wars

The Cambridge Raspberry Jam is a big event that runs two or three times a year, with quite a different format to the smaller monthly Jams. They have a lecture theatre for talks, a space for workshops, lots of show-and-tell, and even a collection of retailers selling Pis and accessories. It’s a very social event, and always great fun to attend.

The organisers, Mike and Tim, who wrote the foreword for the Guidebook, also run Pi Wars: the annual Raspberry Pi robotics competition. Clare and I went along to this year’s event, where we got to see teams from all over the country (and even one from New Mexico, brought by one of our Certified Educators from Picademy USA, Kerry Bruce) take part in a whole host of robotic challenges. A few of the teams I spoke to have been working on their robots at their local Jams throughout the year. If you’re interested in taking part next year, you can get a team together now and start to make a plan for your 2018 robot! Keep an eye on camjam.me and piwars.org for announcements.

PiBorg on Twitter

Ely Cathedral has surprisingly good straight line speed for a cathedral. Great job Ely Makers! #PiWars

Raspberry Jam @ Pi Towers

As well as working on supporting other Jams, I’ve also been running my own for the last few months. Held at our own offices in Cambridge, Raspberry Jam @ Pi Towers is a monthly event for people of all ages. We run workshops, show-and-tell and other practical activities. If you’re in the area, our next event is on Saturday 13 May.

Ben Nuttall on Twitter

rjam @ Pi Towers

Raspberry Jamboree

In 2013 and 2014, Alan O’Donohoe organised the Raspberry Jamboree, which took place in Manchester to mark the first and second Raspberry Pi birthdays – and it’s coming back next month, this time organised by Claire Dodd Wicher and Les Pounder. It’s primarily an unconference, so the talks are given by the attendees and arranged on the day, which is a great way to allow anyone to participate. There will also be workshops and practical sessions, so don’t miss out! Unless, like me, you’re going to the new Norwich Jam instead…

Start a Jam near you

If there’s no Jam where you live, you can start your own! Download a copy of the brand new Raspberry Jam Guidebook for tips on how to get started. It’s not as hard as you’d think! And we’re on hand if you need any help.

Raspberry Jam round-up April 2017

Visiting Jams and hearing from Jam organisers are great ways for us to find out how we can best support our wonderful community. If you run a Jam and you’d like to tell us about what you do, or share your success stories, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Email me at [email protected], and we’ll try to feature your stories on the blog in future.

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Third of EU Citizens OK With Piracy When There Are No Legal Options

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/third-of-eu-citizens-ok-with-piracy-when-there-are-no-legal-options-170327/

The European Union Intellectual Property Office has published the findings of a new study commissioned from Deloitte which aims to better understand how EU citizens perceive intellectual property issues.

The report is the product of 26,500 interviews with citizens aged 15 and over and paints a fairly positive picture for rightsholders and other businesses that rely on the exploitation of intellectual property.

The striking headline figure is that 97% of respondents believe that content creators should be able to protect their rights in order to get paid for their work. Alongside almost total support for IP rights, an impressive 83% indicate they would prefer to access digital content through legal services when there is an affordable option available.

Across the EU, just 10% of respondents said they’d deliberately obtained content from illegal sources during the past 12 months, a figure that jumps to 27% among 15 to 24-year-olds. A similar survey carried out in 2013 produced close to the same results.

But while 10% is the average percentage of pirates across all EU countries, several major EU members buck the trends in interesting ways.

France, for example, has many years’ experience of the state-sponsored Hadopi “three strikes” anti-piracy program. With millions of notices sent to ISP subscribers, the program was supposed to educate citizens away from piracy. However, 15% of French citizens admit to downloading or streaming from illegal sources, five percentage points higher than the EU average.

In Germany, where copyright trolls have been running rampant for many years and claiming a deterrent effect, just 7% say they download or stream from illegal sources. While this figure lower than the EU average might seem the logical conclusion, the same percentage is shared with Italy where there is no trolling or state-sponsored anti-piracy scheme.

In Spain, a country that is trying to shake off a reputation of being a piracy haven, 16% of citizens admit to online piracy. That’s double the 8% of UK citizens who admit to consuming unauthorized content online.

As usual, however, there are significant gray areas when it comes to content consumption and whether or not people can be labeled as hardcore pirates.

Just under a third (32%) of the those surveyed said they access content online, whether that’s from a legal or illegal source. Under a quarter (22%) say they use only authorized services. Just 5% use illegal sources alone and 5% said they use a mix of paid lawful and illegal sources.

“This suggests that respondents are willing to switch between legal and illegal sources in order to gain access to content,” the study found.

Also of interest are the significant numbers of citizens who feel that piracy is acceptable under particular sets of circumstances.

A not insignificant 35% of respondents said that it’s acceptable to obtain content illegally as long as it’s only for personal use. Since millions of citizens are already taxed via a private copying levy, the notion that copying for yourself is acceptable shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, although the charge itself applies to blank media, not illegal downloads.

Interestingly, close to a third (31%) believe that it’s acceptable to obtain content illegally if there are no immediately available legal alternatives. So, if a distributor chooses to bring content late to a region or makes content otherwise difficult to obtain, millions believe it’s ok for citizens to help themselves. While that’s probably a concern for rightsholders, it’s a problem that can be fixed.

Overall, an encouraging 71% of pirate respondents said they would stop obtaining content from illegal sources if there was an accessible and affordable legal alternative. Around 20% said they would not necessarily go legal, even if there was an available and affordable option.

“The availability of affordable content from legal offers as the top reason for stopping the behavior is most strongly cited by respondents in the following categories: respondents aged 25 to 39 (74 %), employed (76 %), living in large urbanized cities (75 %), and the most educated (72 %), which is in line with the profile of a typical online user,” the survey notes.

Close to 30% believe that being better informed could help them back away from illegal sources while just 5% said they could never be stopped, no matter what.

But while many consumers want to “do the right thing”, there appears to be confusion when it comes to assessing whether an online service is legal or not. Almost a quarter (24%) of Europeans surveyed said they’d questioned whether an online source was legal, a five-point increase over the earlier 2013 study.

That being said, there’s a perception that legal services can provide a better product. When comparing the quality of content offered on legal and illegal platforms, 69% said that licensed services come out on top, an opinion shared by illegal downloaders and legal consumers alike.

However, when it comes to diversity of content, just over half of respondents (56%) said that legal services do a better job, a figure that drops to 45% among those who illegally download some content. Making a broader range of content available online could address this particularly lukewarm response.

António Campinos, Executive Director of EUIPO, said that the results of the survey show that EU citizens generally have respect for intellectual property but there is still room for improvement.

“Overall, we see that support for IP rights is high among EU citizens,” he said.

“But we also see that more needs to be done to help young people in particular understand the importance of IP to our economy and society, especially now, when encouraging innovation and creativity is increasingly the focus of economic policy across our European Union.”

The full report can be downloaded here (pdf)

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

P.A.R.T.Y.

Post Syndicated from Philip Colligan original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/p-a-r-t-y/

On 4 and 5 March 2017, more than 1,800 people got together in Cambridge to celebrate five years of Raspberry Pi and Code Club. We had cake, code, robots, explosions, and unicorn face paint. It was all kinds of awesome.

Celebrating five years of Raspberry Pi and Code Club

Uploaded by Raspberry Pi on 2017-03-10.

It’s hard to believe that it was only five years ago that we launched the first Raspberry Pi computer. Back then, our ambitions stretched to maybe a few tens of thousands of units, and our hope was simply that we could inspire more young people to study computer science.

Fast forward to 2017 and the Raspberry Pi is the third most successful computing platform of all time, with more than twelve and a half million units used by makers, educators, scientists, and entrepreneurs all over the world (you can read more about this in our Annual Review).

On 28 February, we announced the latest addition to our family of devices, the Raspberry Pi Zero W, which brings wireless connectivity and Bluetooth to the Pi Zero for an astonishing $10. You seemed to like it: in the four days between the product launch and the first day of the Birthday Party, we sold more than 100,000 units. We absolutely love seeing all the cool things you’re building with them!

Raspberry Pi Zero W

Celebrating our community

Low-cost, high-performance computers are a big part of the story, but they’re not the whole story. One of the most remarkable things about Raspberry Pi is the amazing community that has come together around the idea that more people should have the skills and confidence to get creative with technology.

For every person working for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, there are hundreds and thousands of community members outside the organisation who advance that mission every day. They run Raspberry Jams, volunteer at Code Clubs, write educational resources, moderate our forums, and so much more. The Birthday Party is one of the ways that we celebrate what they’ve achieved and say thank you to them for everything they’ve done.

Over the two days of the celebration, there were 57 workshops and talks from community members, including several that were designed and run by young people. I managed to listen to more of the talks this year, and I was really impressed by the breadth of subjects covered and the expertise on display.

All About Code on Twitter

Big thanks to @Raspberry_Pi for letting me run #PiParty @edu_blocks workshop and to @cjdell for his continuing help and support

Educators are an important part of our community and it was great to see so many of our Certified Educators leading sessions and contributing across the whole event.

Carrie Anne Philbin on Twitter

Thanks to my panel of @raspberry_pi certified educators – you are all amazing! #piparty https://t.co/0psnTEnfxq

Hands-on experiences

One of the goals for this year’s event was to give everyone the opportunity to get hands-on experience of digital making and, even if you weren’t able to get a place at one of the sold-out workshops, there were heaps of drop-in and ask-the-expert sessions, giving everyone the chance to get involved.

The marketplace was one of this year’s highlights: it featured more than 20 exhibitors including the awesome Pimoroni and Pi Hut, as well as some great maker creations, from the Tech Wishing Well to a game of robot football. It was great to see so many young people inspired by other people’s makes.

Child looking at a handmade robot at the Raspberry Pi fifth birthday weekend

Code Club’s celebrations

As I mentioned before, this year’s party was very much a joint celebration, marking five years of both Raspberry Pi and Code Club.

Since its launch in 2012, Code Club has established itself as one of the largest networks of after-school clubs in the world. As well as celebrating the milestone of 5,000 active Code Clubs in the UK, it was a real treat to welcome Code Club’s partners from across the world, including Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, France, New Zealand, South Korea, and Ukraine.

Representatives of Code Club International at the Raspberry Pi fifth birthday party

Representatives of Code Club International, up for a birthday party!

Our amazing team

There are so many people to thank for making our fifth Birthday Party such a massive success. The Cambridge Junction was a fantastic venue with a wonderful team (you can support their work here). Our friends at RealVNC provided generous sponsorship and practical demonstrations. ModMyPi packed hundreds of swag bags with swag donated by all of our exhibitors. Fuzzy Duck Brewery did us proud with another batch of their Irrational Ale.

We’re hugely grateful to Sam Aaron and Fran Scott who provided the amazing finales on Saturday and Sunday. No party is quite the same without an algorave and a lot of explosions.

Most of all, I want to say a massive thank you to all of our volunteers and community members: you really did make the Birthday Party possible, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

One of the things we stand for at Raspberry Pi is making computing and digital making accessible to all. There’s a long way to go before we can claim that we’ve achieved that goal, but it was fantastic to see so much genuine diversity on display.

Probably the most important piece of feedback I heard about the weekend was how welcoming it felt for people who were new to the movement. That is entirely down to the generous, open culture that has been created by our community. Thank you all.

Collage of Raspberry Pi and Code Club fifth birthday images

 

 

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Study: 70% of Young Swedish Men Are Video Pirates

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/study-70-of-young-swedish-men-are-video-pirates-170217/

As illustrated by the ruling handed down against ISP Bredbandsbolaget by the country’s Patent and Market Court of Appeal this week, piracy is still considered a big problem in Sweden.

Despite better access to legal services such as Spotify and Netflix, some citizens still prefer to get their fix from pirate sites. Whether that’s via The Pirate Bay and torrents or newer streaming-based portals, piracy is still a popular route for obtaining media.

According to figures just released by media industry consultants Mediavision, in January 2017 almost a quarter of all Swedes aged between 15 and 74 admitted either streaming or downloading movies from ‘pirate’ sites during the past month.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tendency to do so is greater among the young. More than half of 15 to 24-year-olds said they’d used a torrent or streaming site during December. When concentrating that down to only young men in the same age group, the figure leaps to 70%

Mediavision has been tracking the piracy habits of Scandinavians since 2010 and actually reports an overall increase in piracy over the past seven years. However, piracy levels have remained relatively static during the past three years, with roughly 25% of citizens admitting to engaging in the practice.

The company, which previously reported on the activities of Popcorn Time users, says that illegal consumption of media is far more prevalent in Sweden than in the neighboring Nordic countries of Norway, Denmark and Finland.

“The ruling against Bredbandsbolaget is a big thing in this context,” says Natalia Borelius, Project Manager at Mediavision.

“The measures taken to date, with, for example, shutting down illegal websites, has been shown to have limited effect on illegal consumption. In Finland and Denmark, where site blocking has been in place for years, piracy is less than half as prevalent as in Sweden.”

As a result of this week’s decision, rightsholders now have the opportunity to obtain injunctions against all Swedish Internet service providers, barring them from providing customer access to not only The Pirate Bay, but other allegedly infringing sites worldwide.

While this may have some effect on the habits of casual pirates, it remains to be seen how the masses respond. Blocking a couple of sites via one ISP certainly won’t have the desired effect, a conclusion supported by various studies (1, 2). Expect more blocking then, sooner rather than later.

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Research into the Root Causes of Terrorism

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/02/research_into_t_1.html

Interesting article in Science discussing field research on how people are radicalized to become terrorists.

The potential for research that can overcome existing constraints can be seen in recent advances in understanding violent extremism and, partly, in interdiction and prevention. Most notable is waning interest in simplistic root-cause explanations of why individuals become violent extremists (e.g., poverty, lack of education, marginalization, foreign occupation, and religious fervor), which cannot accommodate the richness and diversity of situations that breed terrorism or support meaningful interventions. A more tractable line of inquiry is how people actually become involved in terror networks (e.g., how they radicalize and are recruited, move to action, or come to abandon cause and comrades).

Reports from the The Soufan Group, International Center for the Study of Radicalisation (King’s College London), and the Combating Terrorism Center (U.S. Military Academy) indicate that approximately three-fourths of those who join the Islamic State or al-Qaeda do so in groups. These groups often involve preexisting social networks and typically cluster in particular towns and neighborhoods.. This suggests that much recruitment does not need direct personal appeals by organization agents or individual exposure to social media (which would entail a more dispersed recruitment pattern). Fieldwork is needed to identify the specific conditions under which these processes play out. Natural growth models of terrorist networks then might be based on an epidemiology of radical ideas in host social networks rather than built in the abstract then fitted to data and would allow for a public health, rather than strictly criminal, approach to violent extremism.

Such considerations have implications for countering terrorist recruitment. The present USG focus is on “counternarratives,” intended as alternative to the “ideologies” held to motivate terrorists. This strategy treats ideas as disembodied from the human conditions in which they are embedded and given life as animators of social groups. In their stead, research and policy might better focus on personalized “counterengagement,” addressing and harnessing the fellowship, passion, and purpose of people within specific social contexts, as ISIS and al-Qaeda often do. This focus stands in sharp contrast to reliance on negative mass messaging and sting operations to dissuade young people in doubt through entrapment and punishment (the most common practice used in U.S. law enforcement) rather than through positive persuasion and channeling into productive life paths. At the very least, we need field research in communities that is capable of capturing evidence to reveal which strategies are working, failing, or backfiring.

Lifelong Learning

Post Syndicated from Matt Richardson original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/lifelong-learning/

This column is from The MagPi issue 54. You can download a PDF of the full issue for free, or subscribe to receive the print edition in your mailbox or the digital edition on your tablet. All proceeds from the print and digital editions help the Raspberry Pi Foundation achieve its charitable goals.

When you contemplate the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s educational mission, you might first think of young people learning how to code, how computers work, and how to make things with computers. You might also think of teachers leveraging our free resources and training in order to bring digital making to their students in the classroom. Getting young people excited about computing and digital making is an enormous part of what we’re all about.

Last year we trained over 540 Certified Educators in the UK and USA.

We all know that learning doesn’t only happen in the classroom – it also happens in the home, at libraries, code clubs, museums, Scout troop meetings, and after-school enrichment centres. At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we acknowledge that and try hard to get young people learning about computer science and digital making in all of these contexts. It’s the reason why many of our Raspberry Pi Certified Educators aren’t necessarily classroom teachers, but also educate in other environments.

Raspberry Pis are used as teaching aids in libraries, after-school clubs, and makerspaces across the globe

Even though inspiring and educating young people in and out of the classroom is a huge part of what we set out to do, our mission doesn’t limit us to only the young. Learning can happen at any age and, of course, we love to see kids and adults using Raspberry Pi computers and our learning resources. Although our priority is educating young people, we know that we have a strong community of adults who make, learn, and experiment with Raspberry Pi.

I consider myself among this community of lifelong learners. Ever since I first tried Raspberry Pi in 2012, I’ve learned so much with this affordable computer by making things with it. I may not have set out to learn more about programming and algorithms, but I learned them as a by-product of trying to create an interesting project that required them. This goes beyond computing, too. For instance, I needed to give myself a quick maths refresher when working on my Dynamic Bike Headlight project. I had to get the speed of my bike in miles per hour, knowing the radius of the wheel and the revolutions per minute from a sensor. I suspect that – like me – a lot of adults out there using Raspberry Pi for their home and work projects are learning a lot along the way.

Internet of Tutorials

Even if you’re following a tutorial to build a retro arcade machine, set up a home server, or create a magic mirror, then you’re learning. There are tons of great tutorials out there that don’t just tell you what to type in, but also explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it at each step along the way. Hopefully, it also leaves room for a maker to experiment and learn.

Many people also learn with Raspberry Pi when they use it as a platform for experimental computing. This experimentation can come from personal curiosity or from a professional need.

They may want to set up a sandbox to test out things such as networking, servers, cluster computing, or containers. Raspberry Pi makes a good platform for this because of its affordability and its universality. In other words, Raspberry Pis have become so common in the world that there’s usually someone out there who has at least attempted to figure out how to do what you want with it.

MAAS Theremin Raspberry Pi

A Raspberry Pi is used in an interactive museum exhibit, and kept on display for visitors to better understand the inner workings of what they’re seeing.

To take it back to the young people, it’s critical to show them that we, as adults, aren’t always teachers. Sometimes we’re learning right beside them. Sometimes we’re even learning from them. Show them that learning doesn’t stop after they graduate. We must show young people that none of us stops learning.

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