Late last year, a redditor called Deepfakes gained notoriety for the extremely convincing face-swap porn videos he was making, in which the faces of mainstream Hollywood actors and rockstars were convincingly overlaid on the bodies of performers in pornography. (more…)
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Deepfakes has democratized the creation of extremely realistic video faceswapping, especially in porn
Compuserve’s sprawling, paleolithic forums were acquired along with Compuserve itself by AOL in 1998, and their fossil remains were augmented, year after year, decade after decade, by die-hard users who continued to participate there. (more…)
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Verizon is finally killing Compuserve Forums
Yesterday’s massive ransomware outbreak of a mutant, NSA-supercharged strain of the Petya malware is still spreading, but the malware’s author made a mere $10K off it and will likely not see a penny more, because Posteo, the German email provider the crook used for ransom payment negotiations, shut down their account. (more…)
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Ransomware crook’s email provider shuts down account, so now no one can pay their ransom
In a post to the venerable NANOG list (mirrored since to Dave Farber’s Interesting People list), anti-spam researcher Ronald F. Guilmette posts the results of his investigation into the IP addresses claimed by a mysterious company called host-offshore.com — IP addresses assigned to “various parties within the nation of Columbia (including the National University thereof)” but, strangely, routed through Bulgaria. (more…)
The entire nation of Ethiopia — a corrupt, oligarchic state with the distinction of being “the world’s first turnkey surveillance state” where spy technology from the “free world” is used to spy on the whole country — just dropped off the internet. (more…)
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Ethiopia shuts down national internet "to prevent exam cheating"
Dominic Tarr is a developer who lives on a self-steering sailboat in New Zealand; he created Scuttlebutt, a secure messaging system that can run without servers, even without ISPs. (more…)
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Scuttlebutt: an "off-grid" P2P social network that runs without servers and can fall back to sneakernet
Last week, the San Francisco Municipal Light Rail system (the Muni) had to stop charging passengers to ride because a ransomware hacker had taken over its network and encrypted the drives of all of its servers. (more…)
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The hacker who took over San Francisco’s Muni got hacked
An Indian certificate authority in the Microsoft root of trust has been caught issuing fake Google subdomain certificates that would allow nearly undetectable eavesdropping on “secure” connections to services like Google Docs. Read the rest
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Fake Google subdomain certificates found in the wild
Once again, the “piracy-stricken” motion picture association has had a banner year , with box office revenue breaking all records (as they’ve done in most recent years). The biggest gains this year come from China — a market condemned by the studios as a hive of piracy. Some of the best news in the report is that American movies are seeing success in China, which has become the first international market to reach more than $3 billion in movie sales. The Chinese enthusiasm for US-produced movies comes despite the fact that China continues to restrict the number of foreign-made films that can be released in theaters to 34 imports a year. But the country at the top of the MPAA’s sales charts is also at the top of its piracy target list. Last year, the MPAA placed China on the list of the “most notorious” markets for distributing pirated movies and TV shows. As reported by the LA Times , MPAA spokesperson Michael O’Leary has explained: The criminals who profit from the most notorious markets through the world threaten the very heart of our industry and in doing so threaten the livelihoods of the people who give it life. These markets are an immediate threat to legitimate commerce, impairing legitimate markets’ viability and curbing US competitiveness. Despite prolific piracy, China’s increase in sales has been positively “meteoric,” MPAA chief Chris Dodd said at a press conference yesterday , noting a 27 percent increase. Piracy notwithstanding, MPAA enjoys a “very strong year”—again [Joe Silver/Ars Technica]
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Motion picture industry continues to stagger under piracy with mere record-breaking income
The Turkish government has doubled down on its Internet censorship program, blocking all of Youtube in addition to its ban on Twitter . Despite theories about the political theatre of blocking Twitter , it seems like Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is also genuinely concerned with suppressing a recording of a conversation with his son in which he conspires to hide the money he is thought to have received through corrupt dealing. As with the Twitter block, this one was undertaken as an administrative order from the PM’s office, without judicial oversight. The Twitter ban has since been rescinded by the Turkish courts, but the block may not be lifted before the elections. There is still no official announcement by TİB, the government authority in charge of internet regulation and the organ who implements blocking decisions. However, YouTube’s URL and title appeared on BTK’s (higher organ that includes TİB) web page where the blocked URLs are listed. The site is still accessible through some ISPs, but the blocking is expected to be implemented fully in an hour’s time by all ISPs. The government banned Twitter last week on the grounds that the company fails to remove ‘illegal’ content according to Turkish authorities. Yesterday, an administrative court ruled for the suspension of the execution of Twitter blocking. Last week, Google Inc. has announced that it declined the requests coming from the Turkish government in recent weeks to remove YouTube videos revealing extensive corruption involving PM, his family, ministers, businessmen and several government officials, the Wall Street Journal reported. Turkish government takes down YouTube too [updated] [Noyan Ayan/Webrazzi] ( via Engadget )