Cinema in Tonga shutdown by German Police

Today around 14:50 GMT the popular german moviez site "kino.to" went down. Press is reporting about the arrest of 13 individuals and is charging them for the foundation of a criminal association. While the website was target of numerous hacker attacks in the past, and i haven't found reliable sources to confirm that it was actually a official intervention (and btw no SPIEGEL ONLINE is really not a reliable source for me), it seems that it was an official act.

Requiem

However a short kino.to-requiem and future outlook on the warez scene. kino.to was a phenomena: It was longer present than any other warez site i have ever seen, usually this pages do not last long because - hey - the contain WAREZ! But due to a nice loophole in law kino.to was not responsible for the hosting of the actual contents. In fact there was a redundant variety of hosters, which shared a specific content.

Most of them i.e. megavideo have premium systems to pay the server bills. Furthermore kino.to provided a respectable stability: over the years it evolved into the casual warez plattform and yet did not go down. Super casual idiots could use kino.to without any problem, because it was easy to find. But kino.to was like a raised middle finger to all german or even international copyright laws. So it was clear that someday this would happen.

Will Warez become a hacker domain again?

As I wish it would go this way, we can not say this right now. There are a few options:

• kino.to is coming back, which is think is very likely, because of the TPB cases. They can do that as well. All casuals will continue to watch movies and whatnot in their little Flashplayer windows, hoping flash won't crash. All village idiots will be happy, and we'll have another case of this in a few years.
• There will be another pendant (hint: a few are still out there *nudge nudge wink wink*), which might can live up to the kino.to-legacy-traffic (i kinda doubt that). As they'll get more popular, its the same thing.
• Jurisdiction will actually change (not likely, or better not likely because law's people's watches are ticking somehow slower) + there is always a place on earth where this will be possible. If we can't even enforce weapon regulations or human rights all over the world, piracy won't be such a problem to circumvent.
• Remember the good old days of face2face sharing? if your friend had a film and made a copy for you... on optical drives? aww noo that would be degeneration..
• All the kino.to-retard-watchers will go back to watching videos in the cinema and buying stuff, which is kind of a mentality-thing, and won't happen... unfortunately..

Buffering...

I really hope warez will become a hacker-domain again... but i dont think it will. It will also nice to see whether the so called "hacktivists" will respond in some way, because SONY is kinda all hacked out atm I guess.

PS: Dear german police: iso-8859-15 is bad and so are layout tables! (But this might be an indirect confirmation, that it was made by officials)
PPS: Ah.. and there is still child pornography out there, I guess harmless porn-free warez sites just make better headlines.
PPPS: Angela Merkel received the "Presidential Medal of Freedom" today... unrelated irony?!

A friend of mine, Cornelius Dämmrich, has won the Chevrolet / Young Creative Contest 2011 for the best Video.

Chevrolet Anniversary / 'Hundred' from Cornelius Dämmrich on Vimeo.

Title: 'Hundred'
Client: Chevrolet / YCC Contest
Director/Editor/Art Direction/Post/Director of Photography: Cornelius Dämmrich
Original idea/Concept: Cornelius Dämmrich, Robin Assmus
Music: Kroenen ( kroenen.net )

Folgende Beispielrechnungen habe ich, für Kommilitonen angefertigt. Vieleicht nützen sie ja noch irgendwem.

• Koordinatenabbildung eines Vektors bezüglich einer geordneten Basis
• Abbildungsmatrix einer linearer Abbildungen mit gg. geordneten Basen bestimmen
• Berechnung des ggT von Polynomen

Socio-cultural diversification

While the term ”Nerd“ in the past has been often used with a negative connotation, nowadays ”being a nerd“ is super cool and everyone suddenly refers to himself as such.

The “Nerd“-character became all trendy and hipster, and generally socio-cultural tolerated. THIS SUCKS! Everyone, who watched a single Star Wars Film or can remember that William Shatner has something to do with Star Trek is calling himself a nerd. The stereotypic Horn-rimmed glasses have become a mode accessory. TV-Series like The-Big-Bang-Theory gave the nerd stereotype a very certain attention but also a sympathy boost.

The connotation and terminology of ”Nerd“ or ”being a nerd“ has tremendously changed. If we think back to the (good) old days: A nerd is -by definition [1]- a person with a common interest in science and technology With a huge sense of interest. Often the Nerd-Stereotype is attached to certain grades in school, high intelligence or knowledge about general computer science. Old-School Nerds know Linux, Math, the periodic Table and can read large numbers in binary. Old-School Nerds are always right. Old-School Nerds do not just memorize Star-Wars, they memorize the Books as well. Old-School Nerds are always right. Old-School Nerds are totally creepy, anti-social, Nerds have cool Gadgets!

Privacy is dead... get over it!

The iPhone uses both, GPS and Skyhook - you can’t hide – the only way to hide from this is to take out the battery – oh, wait a second … you can’t take the battery out of an iPhone!

A lot of people are saying you cannot disable this phone-home behavior. This is not quite correct. In fact when installing iTunes you are asked whether or not you want to send anonymous diagnostic and usage information about your iPhone to Apple. The common annoyed user will click disagree and continue. This is somehow veiled, I grant, but you can turn it off. What you cannot not turn off is the cache on the iPhone being generated (but im almost sure there will be an update very soon), which is in fact a security problem or at least a privacy problem. However according to Apple there is no user identifier send, so all this to a certain level stays anomynous.

To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services.

... what Google does

Following the latest days internet outrage to the revelation that the iPhone (iOS) has a cache for it's location service, I decided to have closer look at another front or in particular: what Google does.

In the case of Google, according to new research by security analyst Samy Kamkar, an HTC Android phone collected its location every few seconds and transmitted the data to Google at least several times an hour. It also transmitted the name, location and signal strength of any nearby Wi-Fi networks, as well as a unique phone identifier. [...] Google seems to be taking a different approach, to judge from the data captured by Mr. Kamkar. Its location data appears to be transmitted regardless of whether an app is running, and is tied to the phone’s unique identifier.

So there's a reason Google can shut down its Street View cars and still maintain a quality geolocation service on mobile devices: they are crowdsourcing the location data.

Mobile-phone (mainly Android) and some notenbook users who use Google applications to get a fix on their position or share their location with friends are helping Google build out a database of Wi-Fi hot spots. Try it! Users generally understand when they are sharing their own location with Google or its partners, but they may not realize they are also helping Google match Wi-Fi hot-spot location data with GPS coordinates by transmitting the location of any Wi-Fi access point in wireless range. But thats only a social factor of general human stupidity and of no interest here.

In fact WiFi tracking seems be more accurate than GPS and cell tower positioning. GPS needs a line of sight (problematic indoors) and cell tower positioning is only accurate in a area with many towers and still lacks detail accuracy then.

While it sometimes can be cool or handy to have an application (i.e. route planner tools) know you current location the security aspect of this is devastating, at least for people who still believe there is actual privacy (fyi: no, there isn't): movement profiles, no lying about your location, surveillance. Easy to implement once your device is compromised.

Furthermore hackers can easly weight the potential of their possible targets by looking up mac-adress with the "Android Map" tool by Samy Kamkar (MySpace Samy Worm, "How i met your girlfriend").

Conclusion

I really don't care about privacy whatsoever, but I'm kinda amused by the public outcry that happened when the iPhone revelation happened, but noone seems to care about what Google does or not, since Google is already known as a data collecting monster.

The good thing about Android is that you actually can turn the geolocation service off in your phone:

UPDATE: And now it's becoming a running gag: Windows Phone Collects Location Data, Too | Windows Phone 7 Reviews