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Old 20-04-23, 06:40 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 22nd, ’23

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April 22nd, 2023




Nintendo Wins Case Against French Filesharing Service Hosting Pirated Games

Dstorage was appealing a 2021 decision.
Matt Wales

A French court has sided with Nintendo in an appeal launched by filehosting website operator Dstorarge, which was previously ordered to pay €935,500 (around £826k) after it refused to withdraw access to pirated Nintendo games.

Nintendo initially took legal action against Dstorarge after it ignored copyright notifications demanding it remove illegal copies of Nintendo games hosted on its 1fichier service. The Judicial Court of Paris ultimately ruled in Nintendo's favour, saying filehosting services such as 1fichier were responsible for blocking access to pirated content and ordering Dstorage pay the Mario maker €935,500 in damages.

Dstorage, in turn, launched an appeal against the ruling, and, two years on, that appeal has now failed. The Paris Court of Appeals has once again sided with Nintendo, ordering Dstorage to pay the company €442,750 (£391k) in compensation, plus €25,000 (£22k) to cover legal fees.

"Nintendo is pleased with the decision of the Paris Court of Appeals," the company wrote in a statement following the court's decision (thanks GI.biz), "as it again sends a clear message that in refusing to remove or withdraw access to unauthorised copies of video games despite prior notification, sharehosting services such as Dstorage (1fichier) are liable under French law and must remove or block access to such content and may be liable to pay compensation to those rights holders whose intellectual property rights have been infringed."

"The Court's finding of liability against Dstorage is significant not only for Nintendo," it continued, "but also for the entire games industry. It will prevent sharehosters like 1Fichier from claiming that a prior decision from a court will be needed before pirated content has to be taken down, and additionally the Court decision confirms what rights holders have to give notice of when claiming that notified content infringes copyright or trademark rights."

Today's ruling comes during an eventful few weeks for Nintendo's legal team, which has been busy earning its keep by demanding Discord divulges details of a Zelda art book leaker, spamming a Breath of the Wild multiplayer modder with copyright claims on YouTube, and reportedly pressuring GameStop into firing an employee who leaked word of a Zelda Switch.
https://www.eurogamer.net/nintendo-w...-pirated-games





Red Alert: ICANN and Verisign Proposal Would Allow Any Government In The World To Seize Domain Names
George Kirikos

ICANN, the organization that regulates global domain name policy, and Verisign, the abusive monopolist that operates the .COM and .NET top-level domains, have quietly proposed enormous changes to global domain name policy in their recently published “Proposed Renewal of the Registry Agreement for .NET”, which is now open for public comment.

Either by design, or unintentionally, they’ve proposed allowing any government in the world to cancel, redirect, or transfer to their control applicable domain names! This is an outrageous and dangerous proposal that must be stopped. While this proposal is currently only for .NET domain names, presumably they would want to also apply it to other extensions like .COM as those contracts come up for renewal.

The offending text can be found buried in an Appendix of the proposed new registry agreement. Using the “redline” version of the proposed agreement (which is useful for quickly seeing what has changed compared with the current agreement), the critical changes can be found in Section 2.7 of Appendix 8, on pages 147-148. (the blue text represents new language) Below is a screenshot of that section:
Proposed Changes in Appendix 8 of the .NET agreement
Proposed Changes in Appendix 8 of the .NET agreement

Section 2.7(b)(i) is new and problematic on its own (and I’ll analyze that in more detail in a future blog post – there are other things wrong with this proposed agreement, but I’m starting off with the worst aspect). However, carefully examine the new text in Section 2.7(b)(ii) on page 148 of the redline document.

It would allow Verisign, via the new text in 2.7(b)(ii)(5), to:

” deny, cancel, redirect or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold or similar status, as it deems necessary, in its unlimited and sole discretion” [the language at the beginning of 2.7(b)(ii), emphasis added]

Then it lists when it can take the above measures. The first 3 are non-controversial (and already exist, as they’re not in blue text). The 4th is new, relating to security, and might be abused by Verisign. But, look at the 5th item! I was shocked to see this new language:

“(5) to ensure compliance with applicable law, government rules or regulations, or pursuant to any legal order or subpoena of any government, administrative or governmental authority, or court of competent jurisdiction,” [emphasis added]

This text has a plain and simple meaning — they propose to allow “any government“, “any administrative authority” and “any government authority” and “court[s] of competent jurisdiction” to deny, cancel, redirect, or transfer any domain name registration (as I noted above, this is currently proposed for .NET, but if not rejected immediately with extreme prejudice, it could also find its way into other registry agreements like .COM which the abusive monopolist Verisign manages).

You don’t have to be ICANN’s fiercest critic to see that this is arguably the most dangerous language ever inserted into an ICANN agreement.

“Any government” means what it says, so that means China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Pitcain Islands, Tuvalu, the State of Texas, the State of California, the City of Detroit, a village of 100 people with a local council in Botswana, or literally “any government” whether it be state, local, or national. We’re talking about countless numbers of “governments” in the world (you’d have to add up all the cities, towns, states, provinces and nations, for starers). If that wasn’t bad enough, their proposal adds “any administrative authority” and “any government authority” (i.e. government bureaucrats in any jurisdiction in the world) that would be empowered to “deny, cancel, redirect or transfer” domain names. [The new text about “court of competent jurisdiction” is also probematic, as it would override determinations that would be made by registrars via the agreements that domain name registrants have with their registrars.]

This proposal represents a complete government takeover of domain names, with no due process protections for registrants. It would usurp the role of registrars, making governments go directly to Verisign (or any other registry that adopts similar language) to achieve anything they desired. It literally overturns more than two decades of global domain name policy.

ICANN policy is supposed to be determined through an open and transparent multistakeholder process through the GNSO (Generic Names Supporting Organization), which has representatives from non-commercial organizations, registrars, registries, businesses, and other stakeholders. It is not supposed to be determined through bilateral private and opaque negotiations between ICANN staff and Verisign.

Let me provide a few examples of what the “new world order” for domain names would be under the world envisioned by ICANN staff and Verisign:

1. The government of China orders domain names operating websites that are critical of its policies to be suspended (or simply transferred to the Chinese government).
2. The government of Russia, at war with Ukraine, orders the transfer of pro-Ukrainian domain names to the control of the Russian government.
3. The government of Ukraine, at war with Russia, orders the transfer of pro-Russian domain names to the control of the Ukrainian government.
4. The government of Texas orders pro-abortion domain names to be transferred to the Texas government.
5. The Taliban government in Afghanistan orders pro-abortion domain names, and those promoting education for girls, to be transferred to the government.
6. The government of Iran orders all domain names around the world with “adult” content (i.e. pornography) to be transferred to the Iranian government.
7. The government of Tuvalu, (which already licenses the .TV registry in order to raise funding) facing an economic crisis due to climate changes, orders that every 2-letter, 3-letter, and one-word dot-net be transferred to the Tuvalu government, in order to auction off the domain names to raise new funding for themselves.
8. A government in Argentina launches a new program whose name happens to be identical to the domain name owned by a French company for the past 25 years. The government of Argentina orders that the domain name be transferred to them, without compensation for the expropriation.
9. The government of Italy is upset about a social media company operating from China, and orders that the Chinese company’s domain name be transferred to the Italian government.
10. The UK government is upset that software published by a Swedish company has end-to-end encryption. It orders the domain name of the Swedish company be transferred to the UK government.

I’m sure readers can come up with their own examples of what would happen if governments are able to censor or seize domain names they don’t like or expropriate domain names that they covet, without due process for registrants.

Now, you might be thinking “Hey, I don’t live in or have any connection to China, Russia, or Afghanistan — those governments have no jurisdiction over me.” That’s how things are at present. ICANN and Verisign propose to overturn centuries of legal debate over the nature of liability across jurisdictions with their outrageous proposal

Next, you might be thinking “If they take my domain, I will sue Verisign, ICANN, or my registrar.” However, that would be quite difficult, given that the one-sided registrar agreements forced upon us by ICANN prevents that! (one might get sympathy from courts, if they’re deemed to be unconscionable “contracts of adhesion”).

Using the red-line agreement again, section 2.7(b)(iii) of Appendix 8 (page 148, literally below the screenshot above!) contains the following text:

“a provision requiring the Registered Name Holder to
indemnify, defend and hold harmless Verisign and its subcontractors, and its and their directors, officers, employees, agents, and affiliates from and against any and all claims, damages, liabilities, costs and expenses, including reasonable legal fees and expenses arising out of or relating to, for any reason whatsoever, the Registered Name Holder’s domain name registration. The registration agreement shall further require that this indemnification obligation survive the termination or
expiration of the registration agreement.” [emphasis added]

Verisign, ICANN, and registrars want to be immune from liability, and thus your registration agreement with your registrar contains one-sided terms which protect Verisign, ICANN and registrars.

Next, you might think “If a government in China, Russia, or Iran, or anywhere else takes my domain name, I will get a lawyer and sue them in my country’s court system!”

Unfortunately, that is also going to be very problematic, because of the notion of “sovereign immunity” which generally makes it nearly impossible to start an action against a foreign government outside the courts of their own nation. We saw this in the context of domain names when the US Supreme Court would not allow the dispute over the France.com domain name to be heard in US courts. If the Iranian government took your domain, you’d have to go to the courts of Iran to seek relief. If the Chinese government took your domain, you’d have to go to the courts of China for justice, and so on. This is why I was so opposed to the proposal relating to IGOs, which would also harm domain name owners’ rights to have disputes decided by courts, due to alleged IGO immunity. [see my extensive analysis of that sham policy change, which is now before the ICANN Board, which will likely rubberstamp it, throwing registrants under the bus].

This proposal is even more egregious because domain name registrars take a very thoughtful and nuanced approach to jurisdiction, in order to protect the due process rights of registrants. My company is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and all my company’s domain names are registered with Tucows/OpenSRS. I would expect that if Tucows/OpenSRS was approached by the government of Iran, China, Russia, etc. about one of my company’s domain names, they’d be told to take their dispute to an Ontario court, particularly given that domain names are property in Ontario, Canada.

Indeed, there is an active dispute between various registrars and the government of India, because those registrars (including Tucows, Dynadot, NameCheap) insist that plaintiffs get US court orders to takedown various sites. Those registrars are even facing being blocked by ISPs in India, in order to protect the rights of registrants to due process in their own jurisdiction and national courts.

ICANN staff and Verisign are trying to sneak through this major policy change which has enormous negative implications for domain name rights without any serious debate. If you re-read the announcement page for the public comment period, it appears to simply be a routine renewal. Here’s a screenshot of what ICANN staff claims are the “key provisions” that are “materially different” from the current agreement.

Did ICANN staff highlight the enormous negative ramifications that I’ve pointed out in this article? Of course not! Instead, they bury major policy changes in an appendix near the end of a document that is over 100 pages long (133 pages long for the “clean” version of the document; 181 pages for the “redline” version). I’ve been ICANN’s fiercest critic (and Verisign’s too!) for two decades (see pages 4-5 of a recent comment submission which lists some of the “highlights”, including sounding the alarm over tiered pricing, SiteFinder, etc.) When I saw the ICANN summary, it seemed at first glance like a routine renewal with no big changes. But, I had some time on the weekend to go through the redline version and was astonished at the changes.

ICANN and Verisign appear to have deliberately timed the comment period to avoid public scrutiny. The public comment period opened on April 13, 2023, and is scheduled to end (currently) on May 25, 2023. However, the ICANN76 public meeting was held between March 11 and March 16, 2023, and the ICANN77 public meeting will be held between June 12 and June 15, 2023. Thus, they published the proposal only after the ICANN76 public meeting had ended (where we could have asked ICANN staff and the board questions about the proposal), and seek to end the public comment period before ICANN77 begins. This is likely not by chance, but by design.

Few others would have noticed what’s going on, so once again I’m sounding the alarm.

What can you do? You can submit a public comment, showing your opposition to the changes, and/or asking for more time to analyze the proposal. [there are other things wrong with the proposed agreement, e.g. all of Appendix 11 (which takes language from new gTLD agreements, which are entirely different from legacy gTLDs like .com/net/org); section 2.14 of Appendix 8 further protects Verisign, via the new language (page 151 of the redline document); section 6.3 of Appendix 8, on page 158 of the redline, seeks to protect Verisign from losing the contract in the event of a cyberattack that disrupts operations — however, we are already paying above market rates for .net (and .com) domain names, arguably because Verisign tells others that they have high expenses in order to keep 100% uptime even in the face of attacks; this new language allows them to degrade service, with no reduction in fees).

You can also contact your registrar, so that they are encouraged to voice their opposition to this proposed agreement. You can also blog about this, or participate on message boards to educate and inform other domain name owners about the great dangers should this proposed agreement be adopted unchanged, so that they too can submit comments opposing the proposed agreement. You can also follow me on Twitter for further updates.

Verisign is an abusive monopolist. They’re already getting guaranteed 10% permitted annual registry fee increases, due to past weak negotiations by ICANN. The management of the .NET (and .COM) TLDs should be put out to a competitive public tender.

In the alternative, ICANN and Verisign should simply renew the existing contract with absolutely no changes.

I will be writing to the ICANN Board to express my concerns, and asking for at least an extension of the comment period. ICANN staff should also hold a public webinar where they can explain these changes.

As I noted earlier, these changes are either (i) by design, or (ii) unintentional. If by design, the ICANN staff who negotiated this agreement, which attacks registrars, registrants and usurps the role of the GNSO, should be removed from their position. Such a dangerous proposal to give governments unprecedented powers over domain names should not have seen the light of day if ICANN staff were true custodians of the domain name system. If instead these proposed changes are unintentional, then the ICANN staff (including any external lawyers reviewing their work) are grossly incompetent to put forth a document that they didn’t understand. Gross incompetence should lead to immediate dismissal. It’s time to hold ICANN’s staff, and ICANN’s board accountable for this sloppy proposal that they’re attempting to sneak through to the detriment of domain name owners. Someone has to take the fall for this unprecedented attack on the rights of domain name owners.

Update #1: I’ve submitted a “placeholder” comment to ICANN, to get the ball rolling. There’s also a thread on NamePros.com about this topic, if you had questions, etc.
https://freespeech.com/2023/04/19/re...mes/#more-1213





WhatsApp and Other Messaging Apps Oppose 'Surveillance'
Shiona McCallum & Chris Vallance

WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging services have urged the government to rethink the Online Safety Bill (OSB).

They are concerned that the bill could undermine end-to-end encryption - which means the message can only be read on the sender and the recipient's app and nowhere else.

Ministers want the regulator to be able to ask the platforms to monitor users, to root out child abuse images.

The government says it is possible to have both privacy and child safety.

"We support strong encryption," a government official said, "but this cannot come at the cost of public safety.

"Tech companies have a moral duty to ensure they are not blinding themselves and law enforcement to the unprecedented levels of child sexual abuse on their platforms.

"The Online Safety Bill in no way represents a ban on end-to-end encryption, nor will it require services to weaken encryption."

'Mass surveillance'

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) provides the most robust level of security because nobody other than the sender and intended recipient can read the message information.

Even the operator of the app cannot unscramble messages as they pass across its systems - they can be decrypted only by the people in the chat.

In an open letter published on Tuesday, the operators of encrypted messaging apps warn: "Weakening encryption, undermining privacy and introducing the mass surveillance of people's private communications is not the way forward."

It is signed by:

• Element chief executive Matthew Hodgson
• Oxen Privacy Tech Foundation and Session director Alex Linton
• Signal president Meredith Whittaker
• Threema chief executive Martin Blatter
• Viber chief executive Ofir Eyal
• head of WhatsApp at Meta Will Cathcart
• Wire chief technical officer Alan Duric

In its current form, the OSB opens the door to "routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance" of personal messages, the letter says.

The bill risks "emboldening hostile governments who may seek to draft copycat laws".

And while the UK government say technological ways can be found to scan messages without undermining the privacy of E2EE "the truth is that this is not possible".

Mr Hodgson, of UK company Element, called the proposals a "spectacular violation of privacy... equivalent to putting a CCTV camera in everyone's bedroom".

• 'The Online Safety Bill will create a honeypot of unencrypted material'

Mr Cathcart has told BBC News WhatsApp would rather be blocked in the UK than weaken the privacy of encrypted messaging.

Ms Whittaker has said the same - Signal "would absolutely, 100% walk" should encryption be undermined.

And Swiss-based app Threema has told BBC News weakening its security "in any way, shape, or form" is "completely out of the question".

"Even if we were to add surveillance mechanisms - which we won't - users could spot and remove them with relatively low effort because the Threema apps are open source", spokeswoman Julia Weiss wrote.

'Refusing service'

Other companies have also told BBC News of their unwillingness to comply.

Email services are exempt - but Europe-based Proton best known for its encrypted email service worries features in its Drive product may bring it within scope of the bill.

The company's Andy Yen has suggested, as a last resort, it could leave the UK if the law comes into force unamended, as it would no longer be able "to operate a service that is premised upon defending user privacy".

That could mean "refusing service to users in the UK, shutting down our legal entity in the UK and re-evaluating future investments in infrastructure", Proton said.

'High bar'

Liberal Democrat digital-economy spokesman Lord Clement-Jones, who is backing an amendment to the bill, said: "The OSB as it stands could lead to a duty to surveil every message anyone sends.

"We need to know the government's intentions on this."

It was important properly encrypted services were retained, he told BBC News, and he expected Ofcom to issue a code of practice for how it intended to use the law.

The bill would enable Ofcom to make companies scan messages - text, images, videos and files - with "approved technology" in order to identify child sexual abuse material. However, the communications regulator told Politico it would do so only if there was an "urgent need" and "would need a high bar of evidence in order to be able to require that a technology went into an encrypted environment".

It is widely assumed this will mean messages are scanned by software on a phone or other device before they are encrypted - a technique called client-side scanning.

But many services say this would mean re-engineering their products just for the UK.

'British internet'

"Global providers of end-to-end encrypted products and services cannot weaken the security of their products and services to suit individual governments," the letter says.

"There cannot be a 'British internet' or a version of end-to-end encryption that is specific to the UK."

Reacting to news of the letter the Prime Minister's official spokesperson said Tuesday powers to scan encrypted messages would only apply where no other "less intrusive measures" could achieve the "necessary reduction" in child abuse content.

Asked if there were concerns that it would open up encrypted messaging platforms to hacking from foreign states, the spokesman said there would be "requisite safeguards" so that end-to-end encryption was not weakened "by default".

And children's charities say encrypted-messaging companies could do more to prevent their platforms' misuse.

There were record levels of online child sexual abuse, Richard Collard, of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), said, with the victims, mostly girls, targeted at an increasingly young age.

"The front line of this fight to keep our children safe is private messaging - and it would be inconceivable for regulators and law enforcement to suddenly go into retreat at the behest of some of the world's biggest companies," he said.

"Experts have demonstrated that it's possible to tackle child abuse material and grooming in end-to-end encrypted environments."

And the argument children's fundamental right to safety online could be achieved only at the expense of adult privacy was tired and false.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65301510





Happy 100th Birthday, 16-Millimeter Film

The format was initially a boon to amateurs. Now, with moviemaking gone digital, it’s the choice of auteurs like Darren Aronofsky and Kelly Reichardt.
Devika Girish

One hundred years ago, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced a shiny new camera that promised to revolutionize moviemaking. The company had been selling filming devices for more than two decades by then, but this novel contraption — the Cinι-Kodak camera, sold with the Kodascope projector — offered a new thrill: the ability to make and screen movies at home, with no special expertise.

The technical marvel, however, wasn’t just the camera but also the film inside. Until 1923, the film used most commonly in motion pictures was 35 millimeters wide. That year, Kodak produced a new format that was only 16 millimeters. The image wasn’t as sharp when you blew it up on the big screen, but it allowed for smaller, cheaper and more portable cameras.

16 millimeter ushered in a new era of movies made outside the Hollywood system. Regular folks could now record their own lives, journalists and soldiers could film in the midst of war, and activists could shoot political documentaries in the street. Until digital video arrived in the late 1990s, 16-millimeter film was the mainstay of the amateur or independent filmmaker, requiring neither the investment nor the know-how of commercial cinema.

Last week, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which holds thousands of 16-millimeter reels in its collection, the film archivist Elena Rossi-Snook projected some shorts for a group of undergraduates from Marymount Manhattan College. As the projector whirred, a beam of light cut through the darkened room, painting the screen with scenes from the 1946 animated “Boundary Lines,” a stirring movie by Philip Stapp about social integrity in the wake of World War II. That was followed by “The End,” an antiwar stoner comedy directed by a teenager, Alfonso Sanchez, in 1968. The third film, “Black Faces” from 1970, was an ebullient, one-minute montage of portraits of Harlem residents.

These productions, precious documents of the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans, have endured, Rossi-Snook explained, because their makers had relatively cheap and convenient access to film, a medium that can last hundreds of years if stored properly.

Today, 16 millimeter is no longer optimal for the amateur filmmaker. Analog film is increasingly expensive, fewer and fewer labs can process it, and the format doesn’t allow the nearly unlimited shooting and instant playback that video does. But even as it turns 100, 16 millimeter still has a unique look that neither 35-millimeter film nor video can rival.

When projected on the screen, analog film has a three-dimensional, pointillist texture called “grain,” a product of its synthetic makeup. There is more grain in 16 millimeter than in 35 millimeter, resulting in a fuzzier, flickering picture. In the 20th century, that was a drawback for professional filmmakers seeking crisp, theatrical images. But today, as high-definition media saturate our lives, some directors choose 16 millimeter precisely for its rougher look. It reminds us that what we’re watching is not the world as is, but filtered and transformed, with great creativity, through a chemical process.

The filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has shot several movies on 16-millimeter film, including “The Wrestler” (2008), “Black Swan” (2010) and “Mother!” (2017). But when he was making his debut feature, “Pi” (1998), 16 millimeter was a necessity, not a choice. The resolution of available digital cameras wasn’t good enough for feature filmmaking at the time, and Aronofsky couldn’t afford 35 millimeter. But he and his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, soon realized that 16 millimeter — especially the high-contrast stock they used called reversal film — emphasized the hallucinatory style of “Pi,” a black-and-white psychological thriller that delves into the obsessions of a paranoid number theorist.

“We decided to really lean into 16 millimeter,” Aronofsky said in a phone interview. “I wanted the big grain and the contrast-y look. It’s funny, because we just had the 25th anniversary of the film, and we blew it up for IMAX. And the IMAX people were nervous because of how grainy it was. They wanted to know if I wanted to clear out some of the grain with computer technology. And we said, absolutely not. We loved the look of it.”

Several TV shows from the late ’90s and early 2000s, including “The O.C.” and “Sex and the City,” used Super 16, a variation of 16 millimeter with a larger picture area that gave them a sense of real-time immediacy. The first 10 seasons of “The Walking Dead” were also largely shot on 16 millimeter to capture the grimy, crumbling feel of classic horror cinema.

The cinematographer John Inwood, who filmed 150 episodes of the comedy “Scrubs,” recalled that 16-millimeter cameras, which are smaller and lighter than their 35-millimeter counterparts (and even many contemporary professional video cameras), were crucial in developing the series’s frenetic mockumentary style.

“It was good for ‘Scrubs’ because we moved the cameras a lot, and we were sometimes in tight spaces,” he told me. “We shot in an actual hospital, the former North Hollywood hospital, and we shot in every square inch of it, even down to the morgue.”

As digital cameras have become sharper and more versatile, many filmmakers have turned to 16 millimeter to evoke the analog past and the blurry, precarious nature of memory. In an interview with Gold Derby, Newton Thomas Sigel, who filmed Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” (2020), said the director had insisted to Netflix that they use 16-millimeter reversal film for the sequences set amid the Vietnam War, despite the costs and logistical challenges. The film had to be shipped from Vietnam to an American lab for processing, and by the time the crew members could see what they had shot, Chadwick Boseman’s acting schedule had already ended. But Lee was adamant that the scenes look authentic, like archival newsreels filmed in the field in the 1970s.

The veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman used Super 16 on two of his collaborations with the director Todd Haynes, both of them period dramas: the mini-series “Mildred Pierce” (2011), and “Carol” (2015), which garnered him an Academy Award nomination.

On both projects, the format was chosen to mimic photographic images from the 1940s and ’50s, and the grittiness of postwar America. But Lachman realized that the grain also brought “tension to the surface of the image,” paralleling the repressive qualities of the characters in both “Mildred Pierce” and “Carol.”

For Lachman, the appeal of 16 millimeter transcends nostalgia. It comes down to cinema’s status as an art, meant to stylize rather than simply reproduce reality. He likened film to painting, and grain to brushstrokes. “The grain changes in each frame with exposure,” he said. “It’s like breathing, almost like an anthropomorphic quality.”

The filmmaker Kelly Reichardt recalled that when she started shooting her 2016 feature, “Certain Women,” she didn’t have the budget for 16 millimeter. But when she and her cameraman, Christopher Blauvelt, did test shoots in Montana, where the film is set, Reichardt was horrified at how “flat” the snow looked on video.

“With film stocks, things weren’t so real looking,” Reichardt said. “A lot of it is grain, and 16 has more grain than 35. So when you blow it up, you don’t get the hard lines that you get in HD, which is what you see in sports.”

A grant ultimately allowed Reichardt to shoot “Certain Women” on 16 millimeter. It made the production more laborious, but the results — soft, textured images of wide roads, snowy mountains and grassy plains, all shimmering with light, dust and shadow — made it worth it.

“I guess it’s about beauty, in a way,” Reichardt said. “I remember on ‘30 Rock’ they did a little thing where Lemon walks in front of the HD camera, and it’s like, she’s a skeleton hag. You know? You see every single thing. It’s very unforgiving. For nature, too.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/m...niversary.html





Lost Movies

Almost three quarters of the golden age of Hollywood has been lost. Preservation only began when film came to be seen as art.
Alexander Lee

On 3 November 1927, Hollywood stars were out in force for the premiere of the silent film The Devil Dancer. Directed by Fred Niblo – who had recently wowed audiences with Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) – it was a spectacular tale of romance and derring-do set high in the mountains of Tibet. It was an instant hit. The critics loved it. The New York Times gushed over its ‘rich … scenery’ and ‘wonderfully convincing …atmosphere’. Everyone agreed it was in a class of its own. At the first Academy Awards the following year, it was nominated for Best Cinematography – and was only pipped at the post by F.W. Murnau’s ground-breaking Sunrise. Yet just as its place in film history seemed assured, it suddenly disappeared. No one could say when, or even how, it was lost. All we know is that not a single frame of it is left.

When The Devil Dancer was released, American silent films were at the peak of their popularity. In 1917 alone, almost 1,000 films were released: an average of nearly three per day. Their success was phenomenal. By the mid-1920s, an average of 46 million cinema admissions were recorded per week, out of a total population of 116 million. Film stars enjoyed an unheard-of celebrity. In 1926, Colleen Moore, whose feisty manner helped define the flapper style, was receiving 10,000 fan letters every week and was earning upwards of $40,000 per month – the equivalent of well over $650,000 today. As the psychologist William Moulton Marston remarked, ‘[n]ot even the church’ had such a hold over the popular imagination.

Yet sadly, The Devil Dancer’s fate was not unusual. For all their popularity, silent films were alarmingly vulnerable. During the golden age of the silent movie (1912-29), 10,919 silent feature films of American origin are known to have been released in the US. Of these, only 2,749 (25.2 per cent) survive as complete films, either in their original 35mm domestic release version, or in some other format. A further 562 (5.1 per cent) are incomplete, lacking one or more reels. The remaining 8,114 (74.3 per cent) have been lost – a staggeringly high proportion.

There was no pattern to the losses. It didn’t matter whether a film was a success or a failure. Blockbusters were just as likely to disappear as flops. In fact, many of the period’s greatest hits are missing. Annette Kellerman’s ‘million-dollar movie’ A Daughter of the Gods (1916), which was filmed on location in Jamaica and which featured the first nude scene by a major actress, has been lost without a trace. Nor was genre a factor. Popular Westerns like The Phantom Riders (1918) vanished just as often as comedies and experimental pieces. Even star power was no guarantee of survival. Popularly known as ‘The Vamp’, Theda Bara was one of cinema’s earliest sex symbols, earning $4,000 per week in her prime; yet only two of her 39 films have come down to us. So why were so many films lost?

Few, fragile, flammable

One reason is that there were never more than a handful of copies to start with. Today, Hollywood films tend to be released in a large number of cinemas simultaneously, meaning that a lot of prints are in circulation at any given time. Quite the opposite was true of silent movies. Early production companies based their business model on building excitement through scarcity. Rather than being released all at once, films were released in stages. First, they would be shown in downtown cinemas, then in the suburbs and finally in more rural areas. This way, tickets for earlier screenings could be sold at a higher price, and a steady interest maintained across the country. Sometimes, it would take as long as two years for a film to reach the whole country. The effect was to reduce the number of copies that were needed, even for the most successful titles. And the fewer prints there were, the more likely films were to be lost, mislaid or destroyed.

It didn’t help that early films were also very fragile. Until as late as 1951, the film base of most movies was made from cellulose nitrate. This had the advantage of being colourless, transparent and flexible, but it was also highly unstable. Over time, the base reacts with the air to produce nitric acid – a highly corrosive substance which gradually eats away at the film. First, the image fades, then a sticky gloop begins to form and, finally, the whole reel disintegrates. With the proper care this process can often be slowed; but once it has started, it can’t be stopped – with the result that many silent films simply turned to dust, sometimes before completing a single screening run.

To make matters worse, cellulose nitrate is highly flammable, too. During screenings, it was not unknown for a film to get too hot passing through the projector and burst into flames. But films could also ignite even when in storage. On 9 July 1937, during an especially hot summer, a fire broke out in a 20th Century Fox vault in New Jersey. It took 150 firefighters more than three hours to extinguish the blaze. Among the thousands of films destroyed were nearly all those directed by Gordon Edwards, and most of the Westerns starring Tom Mix. Almost as devastating was the fire which broke out at the MGM vault in Culver City, California, on 10 August 1965. Caused by an electrical short, this claimed the only known copies of several hundred titles, including The Divine Woman (1928) starring Greta Garbo and Tod Browning’s horror mystery London After Midnight (1927).

Not worth saving

The main reason so many silent films were lost, however, is that almost no one thought they were worth saving.

For most film-goers, silent feature films were fun, even exciting, but never anything more than ephemeral. As soon as you’d seen one, you’d forget it and move on to the next. They certainly weren’t ‘art’. As the Los Angeles Times critic Edwin Shallert put it:

Making pictures is not like writing literature or composing music or painting masterpieces. The screen story is essentially a thing of today and once it has had its run, that day is finished. So far there has never been a classic film in the sense that there is a classic novel or poem or canvas or sonata. Last year’s picture, however strong its appeal at the time, is a book that has gone out of circulation.

Since novelty was clearly the key to success, studios saw no point in holding onto their old titles. It was expensive to store films properly, reruns were rare and, after the ‘talkies’ came along in 1929, there wasn’t even any scope to reuse old footage in new productions. It made no commercial sense to cling onto such useless reels. As the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn explained: ‘I cannot rest on the laurels of the past.’ Whenever a film became too worn, or started to decompose, studios simply wrote it off. Either they chucked it straight in the bin, or they tried to recover what money they could by reclaiming the silver content of the base. Several companies specialised in this and, if done on a large enough scale, it could yield a decent sum. As the film historian David Pierce has noted, in one case: ‘United Artists sent 130 well-worn prints of Suds (1920), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921), Rosita (1923), and other older [Mary] Pickford titles to the Kodak recovery centre in Rochester. The resulting income was a modest, but undoubtedly welcome, $302.74.’ The cost to film history was incalculable, however.


For art’s sake?

It took a long time for anyone to start talking seriously about preservation, due largely to the unwillingness to see film as an art form. When the idea was first mooted back in 1893 the goal had merely been to secure copyright protection. It was suggested that copies should be deposited in the Library of Congress, not so that they could be seen again – much less appreciated – but for the sake of guarding against imitation. And even this was slow to take off. Not until a little later did anyone raise the possibility of preserving films for their own sake. In 1895, W.K.L. Dickson proposed that a national film collection should be established. He pictured this as a gigantic visual library, where people might view films as easily as they read books. But it was clear that what he had in mind were ‘documentary’ films (newsreels, footage of eminent people, events etc.), rather than fictional narratives. Trusting naively to the camera’s fidelity, he wanted to create a repository capable of preserving history ‘free of the historian’s cant and with greater precision than written texts’ (!) – not a collection of aesthetically or dramatically valuable films.

The release of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) marked a turning point of sorts. Though now reviled for its unrepentant racism, this epic Civil War drama caused an immediate sensation and became the most popular film of its day, earning a record $20 million in receipts. Its success rested, to a large degree, on its technical virtuosity. It pioneered the use of closeups and fadeouts, featured hundreds of extras and was the first film to be issued with its own score. For many critics, it illustrated the artistic potential of cinema and led some to query film’s status. Granted, it didn’t cause studios, or even the government, to think any differently about preservation. Though politicians like the former postmaster general Will Hays regularly called for the creation of a national film archive in the 1920s, they too were interested only in films showing ‘historical or otherwise noteworthy event[s]’. But such was the visual impact of The Birth of a Nation that it nevertheless stirred private enthusiasts into action instead. Later that year, Columbia University opened its first film programme and began assembling its own movie collection. Meanwhile, film societies began springing up, especially in Europe. Small groups would gather regularly to watch and discuss films, and many created their own archives. Naturally, these tended to be fairly eclectic. Yet they helped to foster an appreciation of cinema’s artistic elements among intellectuals and journalists at a time when most studios and filmgoers were oblivious to all but its most commercial aspects.

This proved decisive. Thanks to critics such as Iris Barry, the notion that silent films deserved not only to be recognised as artworks in their own right, but also preserved for posterity began to gather momentum. When the Museum of Modern Art was founded in New York in 1929, it was recognised that film deserved a place in its collection. Accordingly, in 1935, The Film Library was established under Barry’s leadership to ‘trace, catalog, assemble, exhibit, and circulate … films … in exactly the same manner’ as ‘paintings, sculpture, architectural photographs, and …reproductions’. This transformed attitudes, so much so that in 1960 MGM began an ambitious programme to preserve any silent films still in its vaults; and, in 1965, the American Film Institute was established specifically to safeguard the legacy of the American film industry.

It is largely thanks to these institutions – and the European film societies – that any silent films from America’s golden age have survived at all. It is just a pity they did not start earlier. Looking back at what has perished, it is hard not to think of Sunset Boulevard (1950) and weep with Norma Desmond, if not for the demise of the silent movie star, then certainly for the loss of so many silent movies.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive...es/lost-movies






RIP Legit Torrents 2005-2023

TL;DR - The server was null routed at the host and with no time and no 1 click way spin it up again I decided to throw in the towel. The rest is a fun look back.
en3r0

I started Legit Torrents in the Fall of 2005. I was still in high school and back then there was no 100% legal torrent tracker that anyone could easily submit to. There was legaltorrents.com, but if memory serves me correctly, it was more of a curated thing.

I was super cheap back then, not even wanting to shell out for a domain name, so the original URL was virtenu.dyndns.org/lt. Eventually I bought the .info for $0.99 after the site picked up some speed a few months later.

After some convincing, my brother was kind enough to be my 3rd user (after the default admin account and my own personal user account) and obliged me in posting comments to make it seem more lively. Thanks bro.

A few more shout outs to the XBT project that provided the high performance backend, as well as the XBTIT project for the front end which is still going strong.

I ran it out of my bedroom at my parents house for a long time, eventually switching over to a VPS sometime when I moved out. I cannot state enough how much I learned from running this site and others. Way better than a degree in my opinion. Web development, marketing, server administration, ect. It was one of my first exposures to implementing SEO (what I now do for a living), which funny enough was mostly copied tags from The Pirate Bay and modified to be about legal torrents instead.

The early days was where a lot of time was spent trying to tell people about the website. Some of my fondest memories are of being at school on Digg.com (back before the v4 fiasco of course) and posting comments to the Upcoming / Hot section where stories were at right before they hit the front page. Almost always the first comments in the thread would become the top comments, with no way to sort, and I would always sign my comment with legittorrents.info. Then later I would come back and check the Google Analytics stats to see those sweet sweet traffic spikes.

This site was also how I made my first dollar online. Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago.

Later on I redesigned the site to have a very cool custom Web 2.0 style, something I worked quite diligently on after graduating from a local college. I left it that way from then on and I still think it's pretty rad.

I had a routine in the early years, to check through a list of sites for new torrents to add to my site. I had always wanted to automate it, but never succeeded in doing so. Being a digital hoarder has it perks though, and that folder is still a part of my bookmarks. Looking through it most of them are dead of course, but a few of my favorites were:

• PlaneShift
• Revision3
• gameupdates.org
• vodo.net
• Pure Pwnage
• Cube 2: Sauerbraten
• Linuxtracker

Of course, I always enjoyed seeing what super random things people would upload also.

I helped my friends launch an album that they produced, which I had “pinned” to the torrents page for a long time. Not sure it really helped them gain international fame or anything, but it was cool to see people download and enjoy the music. Someone kept seeding or trying to download it it recently actually which was entertaining since it was from 2008 I think.

One time I got a take down from “The Web-Sheriff” and used it as a chance to get some publicity. Probably not the right thing to do, but that turned into an article on TorrentFreak, which I thought was pretty cool to be on.

In the end there were about ~50,000 registered users, ~5,500 torrents, ~22M tracked pageviews over the course of time. It doesn't seem like much when its typed out like that, at least compared to platforms nowadays, but pretty cool still.

It's not an easy thing to say goodbye to this silly site. It has been a part of my entire adult life. For ~17 years it was always there for me to check on, moderate, and take care of. It had me feeling like I was doing a part of something good for the internet I suppose. That is confirmed as I look through mentions of the site with a Google search.

If you ever used Legit Torrents, I sincerely hope it helped you. My mission in life is love Jesus and love others, and I think Legit Torrents did that in some weird techy way.

If you have something to share about the site, please drop me a line, I would love to hear it: en3r0[DOT]x[AT]gmail[DOT]com .
https://www.legittorrents.info/





Mullvad VPN Hit With Search Warrant in Attempted Police Raid

However, Swedish law enforcement left with nothing after learning Mullvad VPN has a strict no-logging policy when it comes to customer information.
Michael Kan

The risk of law enforcement raiding a VPN provider to try and obtain customer data nearly became real this week for Mullvad VPN.

The company today reported(Opens in a new window) that Swedish police had issued a search warrant two days earlier to investigate Mullvad VPN's office in Gothenburg, Sweden. “They intended to seize computers with customer data,” Mullvad said.

However, Swedish police left empty-handed. It looks like Mullvad’s own lawyers stepped in and pointed out that the company maintains a strict no-logging policy on customer data. This means the VPN service will abstain from collecting a subscriber’s IP address, web traffic, and connection timestamps, in an effort to protect user privacy. (It’s also why Mullvad VPN is among our most highly ranked VPN services.)

“We argued they had no reason to expect to find what they were looking for and any seizures would therefore be illegal under Swedish law,” Mullvad said. “After demonstrating that this is indeed how our service works and them consulting the prosecutor they left without taking anything and without any customer information.”

Even if police had seized the company’s server, it “would not have given them access to any customer information” due to the no-logging policy, Mullvad VPN said.

It remains unclear what Swedish police were looking for. But hackers and fraudsters can also subscribe to VPN services to mask their internet presence and conduct cybercrime. Hence, local police were probably trying to uncover evidence for a specific investigation. We reached out to Swedish police and will update the story if we hear back.

Although the search attempt may unnerve users of Mullvad, the incident also shows how the company’s no-logging policy can thwart potential police raids. “Mullvad has been operating our VPN service for over 14 years. This is the first time our offices have been visited with a search warrant,” the company added.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/mullvad-v...ed-police-raid

















Until next week,

- js.



















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