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Join Date: May 2001
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![]() Early Edition ![]() June 10th, 2023 ![]() ![]() Movie Marauders Examining the MVHS community’s personal experiences with pirating movies Samika Bhatkar and Vincent Zhao Besides streaming, renting and going to the movie theater, resorting to websites that use digital piracy is one of many options for media consumers. Piracy is the act of downloading or distributing copyrighted material without paying for it. In the early 1990s, digital piracy made its way through new technology, particularly the MP3 computer file that compressed data and allowed users to download copyrighted material and upload it onto the internet. Throughout the years, piracy has become increasingly common as overall viewership of pirated content hits an average of 230 billion views a year. Out of a survey of 103 students at MVHS, 69% admitted to copyrighting entertainment. Sophomore Saanvi Goyal confesses to pirating entertainment and is an avid user of Soap2Day and 123Movies. Goyal finds that the convenience of not having to pay for a streaming service and the variety of the websites motivates her to pirate media such as the TV show “Young Sheldon.” “It’s typically easier to just grab [entertainment] from Soap2Day than to have to go through actually having to buy all the content,” Goyal said. “With 123Movies, typically they’ll have the mainstream films two or three weeks after they get released. They have a lot of sports content and a good amount of TV shows that are fairly popular. It has a pretty wide range of content.” Similarly, sophomore Rohin Garg and anonymous junior Student A, both admit to pirating content through Soap2Day and other domains for the convenience factor. Garg uses the platform to watch pirated sports content while Student A uses it to watch the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy.” “I feel like piracy is an option for people who can’t afford streaming services including people on low income salaries,” Student A said. “It would just be easier for them to pirate since they can’t buy or purchase the content.” Goyal agrees and notes the benefits: Not only do people who pirate get content for free but the implications of pirating aren’t expected. Goyal feels that although she knows she is accessing illegally obtained content, she doesn’t fear facing direct consequences. As Goyal, Garg and Student A each use these websites, they have noticed the poor security and risks that accompany them. Garg and Student A say that frequent pop-up advertisements occur on “Soap2Day.” While Student A simply ignores them, Garg uses an ad blocker to work around these ads. To protect themselves from the poor security of these websites, they use a VPN to hide their browsing history. Since VPNs encrypt the user’s IP address, they prevent the user’s browsing activity from being monitored by their Internet Service Provider. In particular, Goyal has noticed other security risks and ensures that she practices safe measures while using Soap2Day. “I don’t sign up for any accounts or anything like that,” Goyal said. “A lot of these sites will ask you for your credit card information even though it’s free. I try to keep my information anonymous and just use the guest setting on all these websites to prevent them from being able to have access to my information.” Although Garg and Student A know they could face consequences for using these illegal streaming websites, their parents’ more lenient opinions on illegal streaming spare them some worry. For Garg’s parents, their only concerns are cybersecurity risks. Similarly, Student A notes that their parents don’t see the point in buying streaming services because they are deemed unnecessary if they already use pirating websites. However, Goyal’s parents don’t know she pirates content as they are more averse to piracy. Goyal’s parents have two streaming services and when they feel like watching a new movie release, they use Red Box or rent a DVD. As each of these students are aware of the consequences of piracy, they are also aware of the ethical and moral dilemmas that accompany engaging in piracy. Goyal feels although piracy isn’t completely ethical, it doesn’t cause major harm and allows people to get access to content they’d have to pay for otherwise. Furthermore, Garg and Goyal try to stray away from pirating content from smaller filmmakers that suffer more noticeable losses to piracy compared to larger, blockbuster-type films. Specifically, Goyal has noticed piraters on YouTube take advantage of smaller content creators. “If you’re pirating things like big shows or big movies, it probably isn’t going to hurt the corporations that produce them that much,” Goyal said. “But for smaller films, for example, on YouTube, there are channels that will pirate movies from small filmmakers, and they’ll do 10-minute movie recaps and people watch that instead. I think that is probably ethically the worst kind of piracy.” Garg agrees and feels the morality of people pirating movies depends on the context. Typically, he believes that if viewers want to view a smaller industry-level film, it’s worth it to buy the movie rather than to pirate. Although Goyal believes streaming websites can try to lower prices and offer smaller plans to media consumers so they don’t suffer significant losses due to piracy, Student A feels there is no solution. “No one’s going to have a website where everything’s free legally, right?” Student A said. “In the context of capitalism, I highly doubt that solution would even exist.” https://elestoque.org/2023/05/30/ent...vie-marauders/ ![]() Hackers Breach Encrypted File-Sharing Software Cybersecurity experts are bracing for a potential wave of extortion demands after a vulnerability was discovered in encrypted file-sharing software, a flaw that hackers have already used to target a string of high-profile victims, including British Airways and the BBC. Several companies and a Canadian province said on Monday that they were dealing with breaches related to the secure file transfer product MOVEit from Progress Software Corp, according to statements from several of the affected entities. The vulnerability allowed hackers to steal files that companies had uploaded to MOVEit, according to Progress. The flaw had prompted security alerts in recent days from the US Department of Homeland Security, the UK National Cyber Security Centre, Microsoft Corp, and Mandiant, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc's Google Cloud. Progress released a patch for the software last week. "When we discovered the vulnerability, we promptly launched an investigation, alerted MOVEit customers about the issue and provided immediate mitigation steps," spokesperson John Eddy said in a statement. Microsoft said the hackers responsible for the attacks on MOVEit servers also run the Clop extortion website. Clop is the name of a ransomware variant that has been deployed against companies and organisations around the world, and it also sometimes refers to the hacking gang that uses it. Hackers affiliated with the group also steal data and threaten to publish it on its website if a ransom isn't paid. The group has primarily targeted the health care and financial sectors and has existed since February 2019, according to Trend Micro Inc. The same attackers were responsible for previous hacks of two other secure file transfer products developed by Accellion Inc, and Fortra LLC, said Allan Liska, senior intelligence analyst at Recorded Future Inc. Publicly available data sources show there are thousands of vulnerable MOVEit servers that could have been affected by the software flaw, Liska said. The criminal hackers are expected to begin contacting companies and demanding payment in cryptocurrency in exchange for not uploading the company's stolen data online, he said. An internet search of publicly visible MOVEit servers performed by Bloomberg News shows that law firms, health-care organisations and IT firms are among its users. - Gang provides few details - A representative for the extortion gang said in an email to Bloomberg News that it deleted data stolen from "military, GOV, children's hospitals, police." It wasn't possible to verify the group's claim. When asked how many companies were breached, the representative replied, "You all recognise them if they refuse to pay, they will appear on our blog." Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant, said the earliest observed exploitation of MOVEit occurred on May 27. "We're expecting the extortion communications to start anytime within the next four weeks or so," he said. "There is a lot of data that the threat actor has to sort through. When the extortion starts, it will probably carry on for a few months." British Airways, the pharmacy chain Boots, and the BBC told thousands of staff that personal information may have been compromised by a cyberattack on their payroll provider, Zellis. In a statement, Zellis said a "small number of customers" have been impacted. "Once we became aware of this incident we took immediate action, disconnecting the server that utilises MOVEit software and engaging an expert external security incident response team to assist with forensic analysis and ongoing monitoring," according to a statement. British Airways said in a statement that the incident occurred "because of a new and previously unknown vulnerability in a widely used MOVEit file transfer tool." The government of Nova Scotia said it is investigating the theft of personal information related to the MOVEit vulnerability. "Government is working to determine exactly what information was stolen and how many people have been impacted," according to a statement. At British Airways, the hack led to the disclosure of employees' personal information, including names, surnames, dates of birth and potentially banking details, according to a spokesperson for the carrier, which employs around 35,000 people. Boots, with more than 50,000 workers, said employees' personal details were affected. The server was disabled and staff have been made aware, said a spokesperson for Boots, which is owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. The BBC confirmed it had been affected by the attack on Zellis. A spokesperson said it was urgently trying to establish the extent of the data breach. "This is a typical case of a supply chain attack targeting multiple companies at once that hold extremely sensitive data on employees," said Jake Moore, a UK-based cybersecurity expert and global adviser to the cybersecurity firm ESET. "The security patch on offer is absolutely vital and should have now been installed by all affected companies to remain protected." https://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/258...aring-software ![]() Scholarly Paper Pirating Spikes in Japan, but Critics Slam Journals' 'Double-Take' Fees Illicit free downloads of academic papers are skyrocketing in Japan, reaching some 7.2 million in 2022, a Mainichi Shimbun investigation has found. And while the surge casts doubt on the ethics of the scholars involved, the trend is also believed to be fueled by the relentless increase in academic journal subscription fees. The site providing download access to paywalled journal articles is "Sci-Hub," established in 2011 by researchers in Kazakhstan. The site can bypass those paywalls using access credentials provided by people at universities that have subscriptions to the journals. And as of June this year, Sci-Hub was giving free and open download access to over 88 million articles. The site's activities do infringe on the journals' copyrights, and some publishers have filed claims for damages overseas. According to a Mainichi investigation, China had the largest number of downloads with some 467.41 million in 2022, followed by the United States, Russia, Brazil, and India. Japan's roughly 7.2 million downloads ranked 14th. According to research by a University of the Ryukyus team and other scholars, in 2017 there were about 1.27 million illicit downloads in Japan, or just one-fifth of the number in 2022. Observers believe the soaring cost of subscriber access to research papers is likely behind the spike. According to the Japanese education ministry and other organizations, subscription fees paid by Japan's national, public, and private universities in academic 2021 totaled some 32.9 billion yen (about $235.9 million) for online journals alone, more than five times the figure for academic 2004. And this is at the same time as the Japanese government has been cutting university operating expense subsidies. All this means that researchers in Japan who can't access journals because of funding and other problems are increasingly backing Sci-Hub. Masamitsu Kuriyama, a former professor of library and information science at Tokyo Metropolitan University, who has analyzed Sci-Hub data, said that while illicitly downloading journal articles is "unforgivable, it cannot be attributed to Sci-Hub or its users alone. And behind all this are structural problems in the system for distributing academic knowledge." Researchers' problems do not end at subscription fee hikes. In recent years, a new burden has been introduced: publication fees, levied by journal publishers on paper authors to make their research "open access," or keeping the authors' work outside the paywall to facilitate broad access. And these fees can be extremely hefty, ranging from more than 100,000 yen to hundreds of thousands of yen (hundreds to thousands of dollars). Renowned British scientific journal Nature charges around 1.4 million yen (approx. $10,000) to make an article open access. According to the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE), Japanese researchers laid out an estimated 5.7 billion yen (around $40.86 million) in these fees in 2020, or about 5.6 times more than they did in 2012. The journal publishing model of taking subscription fees from universities and making researchers pay publication fees has been criticized as a "double-take." The publishers, however, claim that they need the revenue to handle the sharp increase in the number of presented papers, which hit around 1.9 million in natural sciences alone in 2020, an almost fivefold increase from 1981, when the statistic began being tracked. "Without making a profit, we can't develop new technologies and improve the paper submission system to respond to the shift to openness," one publisher executive told the Mainichi. Meanwhile, Japanese national university budgets remain tight. Converted into education corporations in academic 2004, they have since seen their government funding shrink. Journal subscription fees are now funded by expenses distributed to each university in proportion to the amount of government scientific research grants won by its scholars. But increasing journal prices made all the more expensive by the recent depreciation of the yen are exerting serious pressure on these funds. "We've managed to hold onto our subscriptions for now, but there is nothing we can do because the budget is so small," one university library worker told the Mainichi. Current researchers are also eager to voice their frustrations. Ibaraki University zoology professor Atsushi Toyoda told the Mainichi, "I have no choice but to buy the journals I really want to read out of my own pocket." Meanwhile, the average per-article open access publication fee of 300,000-400,000 yen (about $2,150-$2,870) paid to publishers is "almost equivalent to an entire year of the research budget I get from the university. It's to the point where I can't do research without getting external funding," Toyoda said. Under these circumstances, attempts are being made to reduce the burden on researchers. In Japan, four universities including Tohoku University signed a "conversion contract" with major academic publishing houses in 2022. Under this system, the subscription and publication fees that had hitherto been paid separately by the universities and their researchers are shouldered by the schools, to enable a certain number of papers to be published in open access format. However, the system has yet to catch on more broadly. At a meeting of Group of Seven science and technology ministers held in Sendai in May, the Japanese government announced its support for the immediate conversion of publicly funded papers and data to open access. In Europe and the U.S., this issue is being addressed at the national level, and Amane Koizumi, a specially appointed professor at the National Institute of Natural Sciences who is familiar with the academic journals issue, urged that "Japan also negotiate collectively as a country." (Japanese original by Shimpei Torii, Lifestyle, Science and Environment News Department) https://mainichi.jp/english/articles...0m/0na/016000c ![]() Google Un-Bans Downloader App, but Developer still Mad about “Broken” DMCA Downloader app for TVs "was offline for 20 days, all because the DMCA is broken." Jon Brodkin Google has reversed the suspension of an Android TV app that was hit with a copyright complaint simply because it is able to load a pirate website that can also be loaded in any standard web browser. The Downloader app, which combines a web browser with a file manager, is back in the Google Play Store after nearly a three-week absence. As we previously reported, Google suspended the app based on a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint from several Israeli TV companies that said the app "allows users to view the infamous copyright infringing website known as SDAROT." But that same website could be viewed on any standard browser, including Google's own Chrome app. "The app was removed on May 19th due to the DMCA takedown request," developer Elias Saba wrote in a blog post today. "Instead of recognizing the absurdity of the claim that a web browser is somehow liable for all the unauthorized use of copyrighted content on the Internet, Google took a backseat and denied my appeal to have the app reinstated." The free app has been downloaded over 5 million times on Google Play and is available on the Amazon app store for devices such as Fire TVs. In addition to the rejected appeal, Saba filed a DMCA counter-notification with Google. That "started a 10-business-day countdown for the [TV companies'] law firm to file legal actions against me," Saba wrote today. "Due to the app being removed on a Friday and the Memorial Day holiday, 10 business days had elapsed with no word from the law firm on June 6th and I contacted Google to have the app reinstated." Google made one more mistake, developer says Saba said he was informed by Google yesterday that "the app was no longer suspended but that now it was rejected by Google due to an invalid data safety form." This was another mistake, according to Saba's blog post: In yet another example of the Google Play Store's absurdity, Google had determined that my app collected email addresses without declaring so. Since there is no way for my app itself to collect email addresses, and without any additional information or help from Google, I can only assume that Google is referring to the email mailing list signup form on this website, which loads by default in the web browser of the Downloader app. Fearing that another appeal would be like "argu[ing] with a brick wall," Saba said he "accepted defeat and updated the Play Store data safety form for my app and declared that the app collects email addresses." That means Downloader is now flagged by the Google Play Store as collecting and sharing personal information. "I assure you, the Downloader app itself does not collect or share any of your personal information," Saba wrote. "Well, unless you plan to file your taxes using the built-in web browser in Downloader because, apparently, once again, what is done in the web browser on the Internet is somehow the fault of my app." Saba said he updated the data safety form yesterday and that the app was restored today. “The DMCA is broken” Saba advised users who sideloaded Downloader while it was unavailable to uninstall the sideloaded version and reinstall the Google Play version. "The app was offline for 20 days, all because the DMCA is broken with no consequences for people, or TV corporations half a world away, that choose to abuse it for their own benefit," he complained. "While it was only unavailable for about 3 weeks, the app has now lost 47 percent of its active users compared to the day before it was removed." Google seems to have followed its standard process for complying with valid DMCA requests even though the complaint in this case essentially blamed a web browser for being able to browse the web. As Saba told us for our previous article, "There is no way to view content in the app other than to use the web browser to navigate to a website. The app also doesn't present or direct users to any website, other than my blog at www.aftvnews.com, which loads as the default homepage in the web browser." In an email response to Ars today, Google said it followed the process set out by the DMCA and "allowed both parties to exercise their options under that law." Google noted that its standard approach is to forward any counter-notification like the one Saba filed to the complainant and wait 10 business days for the complainant to seek a court order or file a claim of infringement with the US Copyright Office Copyright Claims Board. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...t-broken-dmca/ Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - June 3rd, May 27th, May 20th, May 13th Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black
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