No matter how hard movies like Hackers, Blackhat, and Unfriended may work to convince you otherwise, there’s nothing especially cinematic about using the internet. As immersive and time-consuming as “being online” can be, when you zoom out, it’s mostly just people with bad posture hunched over computer terminals, clicking and …
Read More »Taylor Swift Concert Terror Plot Was Thwarted by Key CIA Tip
Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the communication app Telegram, was arrested in France on Saturday as part of an investigation into his and Telegram’s alleged failure to moderate illegal content on the platform, among other allegations. After being detained for four days, he was charged on Wednesday evening, …
Read More »The Pirate Party Survived Mutiny and Scandal. Now It’s Trying to Rewrite the Rules of the Web
It’s 5 PM in Prague, and Czechia’s deputy prime minister for digitalization is dancing alone onstage to a soundtrack of chest-rattling bass, his dirty-blond dreadlocks swinging down his back. A former trance DJ and punk-band frontman, 44-year-old Ivan Bartoš is one of the most recognizable figures in the Pirate Party, …
Read More »Makers of Popular Switch Emulator Agree to Pay $2.4 Million to Settle Nintendo Lawsuit
The makers of Switch emulator Yuzu say they will "consent to judgment in favor of Nintendo" to settle a major lawsuit filed by the console maker last week. In a series of filings posted by the court Monday, the Yuzu developers agreed to pay $2.4 million in "monetary relief" and …
Read More »Nintendo Sues Makers of the Wildly Popular Yuzu Emulator
Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze, the makers of the popular Yuzu emulator that the Switch-maker claims is “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.” The federal lawsuit—filed Monday in the District Court of Rhode Island and first reported by Stephen Totilo—is the company's most expansive and significant argument …
Read More »Apple Pulls Popular Movie Piracy App Kimi From the App Store
Watching pirated movies on your iPhone just got a little harder. After climbing the charts of Apple’s App Store, the trendy Kimi app, with its collection of bootlegged movies, has just disappeared. Pretending to be a spot-the-difference vision-testing game, the widely downloaded app ranked above Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime …
Read More »Music Piracy Is Back in a Big Way—Especially From YouTube
This weekend, dozens of artists are set to descend on Los Angeles for the 66th annual Grammy Awards. Trevor Noah will tell jokes, musicians will get trophies—and somewhere on the internet, someone will be downloading their music for free. There were more than 17 billion visits to music piracy websites …
Read More »'The Last of Us' Was the Most Pirated Show of 2023
HBO’s post-apocalyptic mushroom-zombie series The Last of Us was easily the network’s most popular show of 2023. It averaged just over 30 million viewers per episode, the largest for any series on HBO/Max since the final season of Game of Thrones in 2019. However, that per-episode average doesn’t fully represent …
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