UV has reached 800,000 accounts

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The industry analyst company IHS has claimed that UltraViolet (UV) has reached 800,000 user accounts in the US.   At CES 2012, UV announced to already have 750,000 user accounts.   Each account has in average 1.25 titles.   This low value can have several explanations:

  • The catalog of available title is currently small (I found last week about 30 BD titles on Amazon which could be redeemed).  Most probably, the majority of new released BD titles will be UV ready
  • The first UV title appeared only end of 2011 (Warner’s Horrible Bosses).  In view of this short period, 800,000 seems impressive to me.
  • Many people experiment.  If ever you purchased a BD/DVD that is UV ready, why would you not try it.  Its for free.

 

The interesting trend to monitor is the number of average titles per account.  As more new titles will be available, this will show the people buy-in to the concept.  If the depth increases, then UV may become successful.

PST 2012

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Usually, I do not make advertisement for conference and call for papers.  But for Privacy Security & Trust 2012 (PST 2012), I will make an exception.  If you go on the site, you will understand easily why  :Wink:

The preferred topics are:

  • Privacy Preserving / Enhancing Technologies
  • Critical Infrastructure Protection
    Network and Wireless Security
    Operating Systems Security
    Intrusion Detection Technologies
    Secure Software Development and Architecture
    PST Challenges in e-Services, e.g. e-Health, e-Government, e-Commerce
    Network Enabled Operations
    Digital forensics
    Information Filtering, Data Mining and Knowledge from Data
    National Security and Public Safety
    Security Metrics
    Recommendation, Reputation and Delivery Technologies
    Continuous Authentication
    Trust Technologies, Technologies for Building Trust in e-Business Strategy
    Observations of PST in Practice, Society, Policy and Legislation
    Digital Rights Management
    Identity and Trust management
    PST and Cloud Computing
    Human Computer Interaction and PST
    Implications of, and Technologies for, Lawful Surveillance
    Biometrics, National ID Cards, Identity Theft
    PST and Web Services / SOA
    Privacy, Traceability, and Anonymity
    Trust and Reputation in Self-Organizing Environments
    Anonymity and Privacy vs. Accountability
    Access Control and Capability Delegation
    Representations and Formalizations of Trust in Electronic and Physical Social Systems

The submission deadline is 18 March 2012.

BTJunkie is down!

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After the closure of MegaUpload last month, another iconic site is closing: BTJunkie.   BTJunkie was the fifth P2P tracker site.   This is what appears on the site:


2005 – 2012
This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!

Are these two events correlated ?  Is this correlated to the signature of the ACTA ?  To the best of our knowledge, BTJunkie was not under any current legal suit.

The PirateBay is still active.  They will replace torrent-files by magnets on the 29th February.  Another movement in this arena.  (I’ll come back on this one later)

 

Megaupload is down

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Yesterday, FBI launched a vast operation to stop Megaupload.   Megaupload is one of the most important Direct Download (DDL) sites or cyberlocker.   It offers the possibility to store content, and to allow others to access it.  Nevertheless, DDL sites do not offer a method to explore the content or a catalog.  The links to the stored data are published by other means such as dedicated sites, and even twitter.

 

A US grand jury indicted 7 individuals and two societies of

engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.

Four individuals have been arrested in Aukland (New Zealand) and will be hand over to the US.   Servers have been seized in the US, the Netherlands, and Canada.

This is probably the most impressive operation against copyright infringement of the last years.  Currently DDL traffic exceeds P2P traffic.  This a strong message against piracy.  It will be interesting to see whether there will be any retaliation from the Darknet.

Update (Friday 3.50pm):

As we could have expected, Anonymous started the retaliation operation with a large scale DDoS.  Many sites are down such as the DoJ, some studios and recently the French Hadopi.

 

Update of the French law related to private copy

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On 29 November 2011, the French Assembly approved the text 776.  On 20 Dec ember 2011, the French Senate approved the “LOI n° 2011-1898 du 20 décembre 2011 relative à la rémunération pour copie privée (1)”.  This law fixes the current law about private copy.

 

The most interesting part is in article 1.  

… le mot : « réalisées » est remplacé par les mots : « réalisée à partir d’une source licite »

It states that a private copy has to be done from a lawful source.  This was not the case for the previous version.  The main point for the private copy was that its use should be personal.  this modification closes a nice hole.  Interestingly, the source has to be lawful, but not necessarily yours.  This opens some interesting possibilities, for instance for public libraries that have lawful sources.  See the French post: Copie privée et licéité de la source : des conséquences inattendues pour les bibliothèques ?

Wolverine, the final episode of the leakage?

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In April 2009, a work in progress version of movie “Wolverine” appeared on P2P sites.  This leakage did not prevent Wolverine to become a commercial success.  Nevertheless, Fox was really unhappy.

On December16,  2009, Gilberto Sanchez was arrested by FBI for having posted a copy of the movie on Megaupload.  According to him, he purchased the movie on a counterfeit DVD for $5.  Then, he uploaded it on Megaupload on sent the links to friends.  Soon, it became a blockbuster on the Darknet. 

In December 2011, he has been sentenced to one year in a federal prison and one year of supervised release.  For memory, Kerry Gonzalez who leaked out Hulk in 2003 was sentenced 6 months of jail, a $2,000 fine and $5,000 of restitution to Videndi. 

Gilberto Sanchez is a glass installer.  Thus, he is not in the media industry and cannot be the initial point of leakage of the movie. Thus, the actual infringer is still free.

The objective of this escalation in punishing clearly to deter uploading and illegally sharing copyrighted content. One year of jail is a serious sentence.

You have downloaded

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The site youhavedownloaded is starting to make some buzz.  This is especially true, since Torrent Freak reported that some people at Fox, Google, or NBCU did download copyrighted content (or at least IP addresses registered by these companies).  Of course, with the heated debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), this has been used by the opponents.

The site claims to have collected information about downloaded content on BitTorrent for more than 55 million users (or rather 55 million IP addresses).  When you visit the site, it displays the allegedly downloaded content for the currently presented IP address of the visitor.  You can check the records for any IP address.  The site even offers a banner to display the results to the visitors of your site (nice way to make friends :Weary: ).

Is it serious?  The authors announce

Don’t take it seriously

The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything.

However, if you have a better idea — don’t hesitate to contact us.

I would love to see a person who would claim that”yes!  the claimed content are true”.  The likelihood of such a person is low.  Serious or not, this site highlights that it is possible to collect such data by using the BitTorrent DHT and trackers.  I am doubtful about the story of large companies downloading copyrighted content.  I would expect that the proxy/firewall of such companies would ban P2P traffic or at least restrict it for trusted users.

Oh, by the way, the site did report that Technicolor did not download copyrighted content. :Angel:

Update 20-dec:  Is it serious?

With the team, we did some experiments, and found at least one positive evidence that the site has true data (using a long-tail type content)/