Author: kenmay

Kickass Torrents returns after a whole day offline

A day after an expensive, multinational police effort to remove KickAssTorrents from the net culminated in the arrest of its founder and the confiscation of its domains, the inevitable happened . It’s back online. This morning the founder of kat.cr was arrested in Poland. It is another attack on freedom of rights of internet users globally. We think it’s our duty not to stand aside but to fight back supporting our rights. In the world of regular terrorist attacks where global corporations are flooded with money while millions are dying of diseases and hunger, do you really think that torrents deserve so much attention? Do you really think this fight worth the money and resources spent on it? Do you really think it’s the real issue to care of right now? We don’t! You don’t have to believe the rhetoric to understand how futile it is trying to push cybertoothpaste back in the cyberbottle. Effectively, all the attempt did here was turn an underground piracy site into a mainstream phenomenon, its mirrors linked to by every major news site on the internet.

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Kickass Torrents returns after a whole day offline

Fortune 500 Company Hires Ransomware Gang To Hack the Competition

It’s no secret that ransomware hackers are in the business to make money. But a new business arrangement hitting the news today may surprise many. Vice’s Motherboard, citing research and investigation (PDF) from security firm F-Secure, is reporting that a Fortune 500 company, the name of which hasn’t been unveiled, hired a ransomware gang to hack its competitors. From the article: In an exchange with a security researcher pretending to be a victim, one ransomware agent claimed they were working for a Fortune 500 company. “We are hired by [a] corporation to cyber disrupt day-to-day business of their competition, ” the customer support agent of a ransomware known as Jigsaw said, according to a new report by security firm F-Secure. “The purpose was just to lock files to delay a corporation’s production time to allow our clients to introduce a similar product into the market first.”In a statement to Motherboard, Mikko Hypponen said, “If this indeed was a case where ransomware was used on purpose to disrupt a competitor’s operation, it’s the only case we know of.” F-Secure adds that the consumer representative noted that “politicians, governments, husbands, wives — people from all walks of life contract [them] to hack computers, cell phones.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fortune 500 Company Hires Ransomware Gang To Hack the Competition

‘Pokémon Go’ has most first-week downloads in App Store history

Despite only being available in the United States, Australia and New Zealand for its first week, Apple has officially confirmed that Pokémon Go had the most downloads in its first week of any in the App Store’s history. Considering that the game has launched in over 26 countries since then, including opening in Japan today , it might just keep breaking records. The success has led to billions of dollars in stock gains for Nintendo, which saw its share value double before creeping back down, which has even gotten stock “shorters” to start playing with it . And companies are starting to see their value boosted by association: the game launched in Japan today with a heavy McDonald’s promotion partnership, and the burger giant saw a subsequent 20 percent leap in its stock value. Despite criticism that Nintendo just cashed in on a franchise name without bringing over real gameplay , the game continues its onslaught as a mobile juggernaut. Source: TechCrunch

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‘Pokémon Go’ has most first-week downloads in App Store history

Malicious computers caught snooping on Tor-anonymized Dark Web sites

Enlarge / A map of hidden services directories detected as malicious. The trust of the Tor anonymity network is in many cases only as strong as the individual volunteers whose computers form its building blocks. On Friday, researchers said they found at least 110 such machines actively snooping on Dark Web sites that use Tor to mask their operators’ identities. All of the 110 malicious relays were designated as hidden services directories, which store information that end users need to reach the “.onion” addresses that rely on Tor for anonymity. Over a 72-day period that started on February 12, computer scientists at Northeastern University tracked the rogue machines using honeypot .onion addresses they dubbed “honions.” The honions operated like normal hidden services, but their addresses were kept confidential. By tracking the traffic sent to the honions, the researchers were able to identify directories that were behaving in a manner that’s well outside of Tor rules. “Such snooping allows [the malicious directories] to index the hidden services, also visit them, and attack them,” Guevara Noubir, a professor in Northeastern University’s College of Computer and Information Science, wrote in an e-mail. “Some of them tried to attack the hidden services (websites using hidden services) through a variety of means including SQL Injection , Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) , user enumeration, server load/performance, etc.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious computers caught snooping on Tor-anonymized Dark Web sites

What’s the Difference Between a $5000 Guitar and a $150 Guitar?

I think the moral of the story (to my peasant ears, at least) in comparing a $5000 Martin D-42 guitar vs a $150 Motion TD-107 guitar is that if you know how to play the guitar, you can make any damn thing with strings sound good. But if you have better ears for audio quality than me, listen to Paul Davids compare the two guitars and see if you can hear the difference in sound. And if you can, is it worth $4850? Read more…

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What’s the Difference Between a $5000 Guitar and a $150 Guitar?

This Milk Lasts Up to Nine Weeks Without Spoiling

Refrigerated pasteurized milk typically lasts about two to three weeks before turning into a wretched hive of scum and villainy. A new process developed by researchers at Purdue University extends the shelf life of milk up to 63 days—and without the benefit of added chemicals. Read more…

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This Milk Lasts Up to Nine Weeks Without Spoiling

NVIDIA’s new top-end graphics card is the $1,200 Titan X

If you recently bought a $599 NVIDIA GTX 1080 in order to have the fastest rig around, I have bad news. NVIDIA has revealed the latest Titan X , a graphics card with 12GB of GDDR5X memory and 3, 584 cores running at 1.53 GHZ, yielding an absurd 11 teraflops of performance. That easily bests the 8.9 teraflops of the GTX 1080, which itself put the last-gen Titan X to shame . You probably won’t feel too bad, however, when we tell you that the new card has a price tag of $1, 200, double that of its now-second-best sibling. The Titan X has 12 billion transistors and runs at 250W, meaning it burns around 40 percent more power than the GTX 1080. It carries DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b and DL-DVI ports, though the company hasn’t yet detailed the configuration. NVIDIA has now unveiled four cards (the GTX 1060 , 1070 , 1080 and Titan X) in just over two months, which is a pretty frenetic launch rate. To hammer home the point about brute horsepower, NDIVIDA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang did a surprise unveil of the Titan X at a meetup of artificial intelligence experts at Stanford University. That’s fitting, because it’s starting to blur the line between its gaming cards and Tesla GPU accelerators used for deep learning in servers and supercomputers. The card will go on sale August 2nd in North America and Europe for $1, 200, but only on NVIDIA’s site and via “select system builders.” Source: NVIDIA

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NVIDIA’s new top-end graphics card is the $1,200 Titan X

Someone Already Made a Kickass Torrents Clone

The game of whack-a-mole continues. Less than 24 hours after being taken down in an international sting operation , Kickass Torrents (KAT) is back—well, sort of. The popular torrent link site isoHunt has created a mirror for KAT at KickassTorrents.website . Read more…

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Someone Already Made a Kickass Torrents Clone

US Navy Faces $600M Lawsuit For Allegedly Pirating 3D VR Software

An anonymous reader quotes a report from HotHardware: The U.S. Navy has been accused of pirating 3D software after first testing a software package offered by Germany company Bitmanagement Software GmbH. The company is suing the United States of America for nearly $600 million. HotHardware reports: “According to the court filing, Bitmanagement licensed its BS Contact Geo software for use on 38 Navy computers from 2011 to 2012. This limited rollout was ‘for the purposes of testing, trial runs, and integration into Navy systems.’ While this test period was underway, the Navy reportedly began negotiating to license the software for use on thousands of additional computers. However, even as the negotiations were ongoing, the Navy decided to go ahead and initiate its full-scale rollout without actually paying for the software. In total, the initial 38 computers allegedly swelled to 104, 922 computers by October 2013. As of today, BS Contact GEO is claimed to be installed on 558, 466 Navy computers, although ‘likely this unauthorized copying has taken place on an even larger scale’ according to the filing. As if the unauthorized installation of software onto hundreds of thousands of computers wasn’t enough, Bitmanagement is alleging that the Navy during 2014 began disabling the Flexwrap software that is tasked with tracking the use of BS Contact Geo and helping to prevent it from being duplicated. When this software piracy was taking place, the retail price of a single BS Contact Geo license was $1067.76. With nearly 600, 000 computers now in play, Bitmanagement is seeking a whopping $596, 308, 103 in damages. The lawsuit, which alleges willful copyright infringement was filed on July 15th.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Navy Faces $600M Lawsuit For Allegedly Pirating 3D VR Software

Tesla Master Plan pt. 2 explains how everyone gets an electric car

Back in 2006 Elon Musk casually revealed the plans for what Tesla Motors has mostly accomplished in the decade since, and now (after some teasing) he’s back with part two . While the original “Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan” explained how the company’s vision extended beyond its Roadster to cars that would become the Model S and Model 3 , what’s next is even bigger. Besides adding a compact SUV and pickup truck to its model line, don’t expect to see any Tesla’s coming out that are cheaper than the Model 3. Instead, as Musk envisions, the rollout of fully self-driving automobiles will allow owners to put their car to work when they’re not using it, and make ownership economically viable for anyone. Tesla Master Plan, Part Deux https://t.co/XQeTlsoEdE — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2016 Tesla’s also working on a heavy duty cargo truck under the name “Tesla Semi, ” and a bus, both of which Musk expects to unveil in 2017. The truck is supposed to “deliver a substantial reduction in the cost of cargo transport, while increasing safety and making it really fun to operate.” An autonomous electric bus would make the driver a “fleet manager, ” provide added seats and better acceleration, and even take people all the way to their destination or respond to summon buttons placed at existing bus stops. Developing… Source: Tesla Blog

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Tesla Master Plan pt. 2 explains how everyone gets an electric car