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Few days back, Viacom forced a tiny clip showing Transformers 3 being shot in public to be taken down from YouTube, claiming copyright violation. Now, a case has been filed against Viacom for allegedly ripping off a whole movie, with no credit or royalties to the rightful owner (per the copyright laws Viacom supports) of the story.


Movie studios, which are the biggest lobbyists of draconian copyright laws (which they use to threaten unsuspecting users all over the internet) are slowly starting to taste how it feels to be on the other side of the table – yes, they are starting to take friendly fire, which are a result of the very same copyright laws they support.

A case has been filed at New York District Court by American Rights Management Company, alleging that the Bollywood (Indian) movie “Singh is Kinng” which was released 20 months back and made $108 million is based on a short story “Madame La Gimp” written by Damon Runyon in 1929 and its derivatives. This movie was financed and distributed by Viacom along with a few other companies, with music by US rapper Snoop-Dogg.

Yet again, Viacom strikes with a totally insane copyright claim – on a clip which shows few seconds of the making of Transformers 3, which happened in public.

Source

Paramount recently began the filming of Transformers 3 in LA, for which Michael Bay and his crew were filming an action shot of flipping a smart car down an alley. Ben Brown and Micki Krimmel who work in a building on the same alley were obviously excited to see this happen. Just like you or I would do, they got their iPhones out, to film a very small clip. Both of them uploaded their clips to YouTube.

Doesn’t this all sound very normal to you? Well no, Viacom (parent company of Paramount) issued a take down notice to Ben Brown, and YouTube took down the clip, claiming “matched third party content”. The ridiculousness of this claim is just multi-fold. How could a clip of a movie being filmed, which is not finished, match the movie (to be logical enough to issue a DMCA claim)? How can footage being shot in a public space violate copyright ever?

Windows has long been a hacker’s favorite target. Now Microsoft called for a Cybercrime Framework. With IE market share crashing like a BSOD and PowerPoint making the military stupid, Microsoft is laughing. Let’s laugh with them, or cry, or run scared….


Microsoft Windows has long been a hacker’s favorite target. The majority of computers have Windows as the operating system. Microsoft OS is the low hanging, easy-to-hack, fruit.

According to Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report Volume 8, the company’s software scanned some 500 million PCs worldwide in the second half of 2009. Of those, Microsoft caught and cleaned 1.7 million more infected PCs in the second half than it did in the first half of last year. However, despite Microsoft tooting their own horn, their growing successes in removing malware from infected PCs is but a small dent in a larger trend of ballooning cyber threats and scams.

The never ending war between content creators and alleged infringers has been heating up lately. UK recently passed the Digital Economy Act 2010, which covers various aspects of internet, televisions or other forms of digital media. One major area it overhauls is with respect to internet piracy. For example, the bill requires ISPs to suspend connections to alleged copyright infringers, which makes operating public WiFi connection at stores, libraries etc impossible.

Outraged by the passing of this bill and with questions, a concerned citizen wrote to his MP (Emily Thornberry). The MP forwarded the letter to the Department for Business Innovation & Skills, which is behind the passing of the bill.

In reply (addressed to Emily) the MP responsible for the Department for Business Innovation & Skills, Stephen Timms (Digital Britain’s chief) sent a letter which explains how a copyright owner would be able to track down the alleged infringer(s). Whether a conceptual error or a typo, the letter had a very contextually relevant mistake, making us think, if IP addresses should be traceable at all. Given below is the letter in its entirety.

You buy a new game and the first step you meet with your game play is the “difficulty” setting. You pick the best estimated difficulty and start playing, to only realize later that this setting is either too easy or too tough. Ever felt, “I wish there was a setting between easy and medium”? Can walkthroughs be made obsolete?


Few games (Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Lego Star Wars II) have tried to handle situations like above by making the game harder according to the gamers success, however they do not respond to specific advanced skill sets possesed by the player or the lack of.

Most non player characters (NPCs) are built with a very limited set of capabilities and navigation. A different or unconventional approach used by a gamer often leaves NPCs lost. For example, in several FPS, advanced gamers would seek a good & safe vantage point which attracts a good number of opponents (NPCs) to take them down off-guard (spawn camping, sniping etc). Gamers engage in this as they see a lot of opponents in the vicinity, they have got a good vantage point and they are sure that the AI of the game would keep sending almost all of the NPCs in the vicinity (in most cases through the same path). How interesting would the game be, if the AI was able to detect that the gamer now has a vantage point, lure him into a different/difficult location rather than sending more NPCs. Considering a novice gamer who lands up with no ammunition very quickly, if the AI could see that the gamer was wasting way too much ammunition, control the power of the autonomous weapons to limit the ammunition wastage when there is no NPC in clear view and thus lessen the frustration the gamer would experience.

What would work best against digital piracy, in a country which is culturally very different from the States? This was the question, researchers wanted to address. To no surprise, just as in US, legal options against the pirates do not help at all, but two other factors seem to significantly help.


In a developing Gulf country filled with moderate and conservative Muslims, piracy is just a very normal affair. Pirated CDs and DVDs could be easily obtained, though not on public display after recent pressure from US through WTO etc. The cultural differences between this country and USA are well documented and are several folds. This raised the question to the researchers, if this cultural change will give a different way to approach the fight against digital piracy.

In a business college in Kuwait, researchers recruited 12 classes of students (319 students). They were then split into four groups with each group consisting of a freshman, a sophomore and a junior level class in it. All groups were given a pre-questionnaire at the beginning of the semester, which evaluated their intention to pirate in the near future. At the ending of the semester, except for one group (control group) every other group got a treatment (a statement being read in the class). The legal/law group was informed about the new laws/regulations/enforcements of new laws related to digital piracy. The religion group was informed about a new edict/fatwa which considers digital piracy to be immoral from a religious point of view. The last group, awareness group was informed about the consequences of piracy. Upon the “treatment”, all of the groups were administered the post-questionnaire, which again evaluated their intention to pirate in the near future.

We are not sure if this is true or a joke, however this video clip shows an ex-employee from Microsoft claiming that he was fired for not pronouncing “Bing” in a way Stevel Ballmer likes. True or not, it’s funny as hell!

Researchers have developed a very accurate and robust model to classify any given webpage as a blog, newspaper site, forum, FAQ, e-shop, listing, personal home page etc and this would extend the limited search results classification (e.g., Google News) available now.

Search results classified by genre are not something new; however most of the classification is manual. For instance, sites/pages listed in Google News are manually submitted and approved links, rather than auto classification. Manual classification of every single page on the web into several genres is impossible. Such a classification will help users easily access information based on very specific needs.

A group of researchers from Greece have implemented and tested a model, which used textual and structural information. This combination of information has leaded to a very high accuracy (96.5%) on the tests conducted. Previous attempts on this had limited success due to the lack of pre classified list of websites for testing.

The research used two different set of classifications (corpora) named 7Genre and KI-04. 7Genre had seven different genres – blog, e-shop, FAQs, online newspaper frontpage, listing, personal home page and search page, with each group having 200 pages for testing and training of the model. KI-04 had eight genres – article, download, link collection, portrayal-private, discussion, help, portrayal-non private and shop. Both of these corpora were used to auto train the model and then test on the success of the model.

To test the robustness of this method, cross testing was performed as well, where in training was done on one corpora and testing was done on a different corpora. Such a setup helped identify the possibilities of using such a system in a real life situation. This testing also produced significantly accurate results.

This model does not need any manual selection of features that best capture the stylistic properties of text or structure of webpages. This enables adapting to specific properties of either a given general or focused collection of genres. The time taken for training is analogous to the size of the corpus; however the cross check experiments show that training on smaller and different corpora is sufficient enough for training. The auto training enables evolving of the model to the ever changing web and can be used for any language.

RIAA and anti-p2p companies have constantly engaged in various methods to thwart sharing of albums and movies over BitTorrent. Detailed research on one of the popular methods (leecher attack) has proven that, the time and money spent on this method is just a waste. The researchers also suggest methods to completely nullify these attacks.

With law suits against BitTorrent users being very unpopular and legal action against every tracker being impossible, RIAA and record labels have long been using anti-p2p companies such as Media Defender, Safenet and Macrovision to engage in online attacks on various components of the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Of the many attacks used, a few are popular. Seeder attack focuses on attacking the seeder (uploader), in order to prevent the file reaching other users; however this attack needs to initiated at the very early stages of protecting an album or movie from propagating and seeders are usually experienced p2p users. Tracker attack involves flooding the tracker, however most trackers employ high bandwidth servers and many BitTorrent clients have employed other mechanisms such as distributed hash tables and gossips (letting other peers know about the peers discovered by a client). Uploading fake torrents to trackers is one other method used, however this only just frustrates the users but does not prevent or block the sharing of their valued content. Leecher attack is one of the most popular attack, for that it attempts to attack the majority of the BitTorrent ecosystem, the users actively downloading parts of a movie or album. Researchers have paid special attention to leecher attacks, due to this reason.

Researchers have demonstrated that with minimum efforts and skill, teachers can create educational serious games, by just modding existing first person shooter games, which are very popular among students. Students who tested felt that, this could be used in high schools, however male testers reacted different as compared to female testers.

Gaming technology has been heavily focused on “entertainment games”, while the other type of games – “serious games”, are heavily ignored mainly due to the less monetary profit got from them. Educational serious games, whose purpose is to be educative, have been characterized with realistic activities, such as performing experiments in a laboratory or the like. However the games as such do not offer anything interesting (other than education) as compared to the entertainment games, especially first person shooters. First person shooters are very popular among students and are usually very task/mission oriented. Teachers and researchers have been hoping to tap into this interest among students towards the first person shooters, to use them for educative purposes.

However, game development is not an easy task and involves heavy resources, which makes it almost impossible for teachers to handle with. A group of researchers saw this need and decided to try to mod an existing game and test the efficiency. Unreal Tournament is already popular among the research community and has been analyzed for it physics capabilities, suggesting that UnrealEd (the map editor of the game) could be used in classrooms to demonstrate various physics theories and properties.