Popcorn Time, a popular piracy website for movies and TV shows that once put Netflix on alert, has shut down.
On Tuesday, the group behind the app emailed reporters declaring its end. A goodbye note posted by Popcorn Time, with an illustration of a bag of movie-theater popcorn with X marks for eyes, proclaims “R.I.P.” at the top of the page. The site also contains a chart of interest over time measured in online searches for the app, similar to the one Netflix sent to investors in 2015.
Andrew Brandt reports on a new malware campaign that isn’t like your typical malware. This one blocks people from accessing many popular pirating websites.
We weren’t able to discern a provenance for this malware, but its motivation seemed pretty clear: It prevents people from visiting software piracy websites (if only temporarily), and sends the name of the pirated software the user was hoping to use to a website, which also delivers a secondary payload.
Looks like this is aimed more towards Windows users. The malware takes the form of .EXE executables, and may display a message saying the victim is missing an important .DLL file.
Library Genesis (LibGen) is a pirate website containing 33 terabytes of books, comics, scientific papers, and more. Countries and science publishers are constantly trying to take it down, along with its sister site SciHub. But a new project has been launched to help LibGen with seedboxes.
Two seedbox companies (services that provide high-bandwidth remote servers for uploading and downloading data), Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox, stepped in to support the project. A week later, LibGen is seeding 10 terabytes and 900,000 scientific books thanks to help from Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox.
LibGen also teamed up with another massive online archiving project, The-Eye, to facilitate the tracking, storage, and seeding of LibGen’s scientific archive.
Music labels like Sony, Universal, and Warner are suing Charter, arguing that high internet speeds make it easier to pirate content.
A pirate copy of Aquaman circulating among torrent sites could suggest that iTunes DRM has been broken, and tvOS could be to blame.
The list of websites that should be banned for copyright infringement is kind of funny. And also scary because politicians don’t understand technology.
Plenty of pirated content is available on the platform, and some accounts are asking for donations.
Over the next week or so AT&T will kick some customers off its network because of copyright infringement.
If you’re planning on playing Super Mario Run on your next flight the plane better have WiFi because it requires an always-on internet connection. Nintendo says that’s by design because they want to prevent game piracy.
