Saturday, 19 October 2013

USAHitman | Conspiracy News

B.C. file-sharing website IsoHunt to pay Hollywood $110 million

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:01 PM PDT

By Jesse Brown
Vancouver’s Gary Fung built isoHunt.com 10 years ago, when he was still an engineering student. It soon became one of the top places to find links to torrent files on the Internet. Not long after that, the lawsuits came. The Motion Picture Association of America and the Canadian Recording Industry Association filed copyright violation suits against Fung, and he spent the next seven years fighting them in court. His argument was predicated on the fact that he was not distributing copyrighted material, merely providing a search tool where people could find links to torrents of all kinds, illicit and legitimate (but mostly illicit). If that makes him guilty, argued Fung, then so is Google, since you can use their engine to find torrent files as well. The MPAA argued “inducement”: though isoHunt wasn’t providing bootlegged files directly, it was encouraging and enabling others to do so, which, they argued, counts as infringement. The U.S.Courts agreed, and Fung’s fight is now over. He has agreed to pay the Hollywood studios $110 million, and isoHunt is to be shut down.
The most surprising aspect of all this is the suggestion that isoHunt has $110 million to give. The site’s revenue streams seem to be limited to $1/month premium memberships, T-shirt sales, and down-market banner ads for off-brand e-cigarettes and the like. To be clear: Fung agreeing to pay $110 million does not guarantee that he has $110 million. But the settlement, and the court’s and the MPAA’s acceptance of it, does make one curious about just how profitable isoHunt was, and how profitable it might have become as a legitimized content site.
If indeed Fung was generating tens of millions a year based largely on banner ads, then the traffic on isoHunt must have been staggering. This is not so hard to believe. BitTorrent traffic is estimated to comprise as much as 40 per cent of all data transferred on the Internet. Most torrent transfers begin with a visit to a tracker site, and isoHunt has been listed as the Internet’s third most popular tracker. In a wider sense, according to web ranking site Alexa, isoHunt is currently the No. 423 most popular website in the world, and it cracked the top 100 regularly, before legal woes grew overly burdensome. Considering that Google indexes more than 50 billion web pages, this puts isoHunt in some pretty rare company. Hulu.com, for example, comes in at No. 340, and Netflix.com is No. 96. IsoHunt is therefore among a handful of top sites that people in the world visit in order to find movies and television, and Hollywood just killed it.
Sound familiar? It’s the exact same tactic the RIAA took against Napster, the storied peer-to-peer service that for one magic moment was home to every music lover on the Internet. Napster wanted to strike a deal with the music business and go legit. Instead, it was destroyed and its fans were scattered to the wind.
The music industry realized too late that pirates and paying music fans are the exact same people. After Napster, downloaders began to use dozens of different file-sharing sites and apps. The music industry has been chasing down these new services one by one ever since, through legitimate efforts including Pandora, Songza, Rdio, and hundreds more, each one lacking the critical mass of Napster.
Read More Here

US quietly releases $1.6bn in aid to Pakistan after thaw in relations

Posted: 18 Oct 2013 05:00 PM PDT

The US has quietly decided to release more than $1.6bn (£1bn) in military and economic aid to Pakistan that was suspended when relations between the two countries disintegrated over the covert raid that killed Osama bin Laden and deadly US air strikes against Pakistani soldiers. Officials and congressional aides said ties have improved enough to allow the money to flow again.
US and Nato supply routes to Afghanistan are open. Controversial US drone strikes are down. The US and Pakistan recently announced the restart of their “strategic dialogue” after a long pause. Pakistan’s new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, is travelling to Washington for talks this coming week with President Barack Obama.
But in a summer dominated by foreign policy debates over the coup in Egypt and chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the US has not promoted its revamped aid relationship with Pakistan. Neither has Pakistan.
The silence reflects the lingering mutual suspicions between the two.
The Pakistanis do not like being seen as dependent on their heavy-handed partners. The Americans are uncomfortable highlighting the billions provided to a government that is plagued by corruption and perceived as often duplicitous in fighting terrorism.
Congress has cleared most of the money, which should start moving early next year, officials and congressional aides said.
Over three weeks in July and August, the State Department and the US Agency for International Development informed Congress that it planned to restart a wide range of assistance, mostly dedicated to helping Pakistan fight terrorism. The US sees that effort sees as essential as it withdraws troops from neighbouring Afghanistan next year and tries to leave a stable government behind.
Other funds focus on a range of items, including help for Pakistani law enforcement and a multibillion-dollar dam in disputed territory.
US-Pakistani relations have weathered numerous crises in recent years. There was a months-long legal battle over a CIA contractor who killed two Pakistanis, in addition to the fallout from Bin Laden’s killing in the Pakistani military town of Abbottabad in May 2011. The Pakistani government was outraged that it received no advance warning of the Navy Seal raid on Bin Laden’s compound.
Adding to the mistrust, the US mistakenly killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers in November 2011. Islamabad responded by shutting land supply routes for troops in Afghanistan until it received a US apology seven months later.
The State Department told Congress that the US had not conducted any significant military financing for Pakistan since the “challenging and rapidly changing period of US-Pakistan relations” in 2011 and 2012. The department stressed the importance now of enhancing Pakistan’s anti-terrorism capabilities through better communications, night vision capabilities, maritime security and precision striking with F16 fighter jets.
The department told Congress on 25 July that it would spend $295m to help Pakistan’s military. Twelve days later it announced $386m more. A pair of notifications arriving on 13 August and worth $705m centred on helping Pakistani troops and air forces operating in the militant hotbeds of western Pakistan, and other counterinsurgency efforts.
The administration had until the end of September to provide Congress with “reprogramming” plans at the risk of forfeiting some of the money, which spans federal budgets from 2009-2013.
State Department officials said the renewal of aid was not determined by any single event. But they noted a confluence of signs of greater cooperation, from Pakistan’s improved commitment to stamping out explosives manufacturing to its recent counterterror offensive in areas bordering Afghanistan that have served as a primary sanctuary for the Taliban.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk publicly about the aid relationship ahead of Sharif’s visit. They said the money would start reaching Pakistan in 2014 but take several years to disburse fully.
In its notifications to Congress, the department described fighting terrorism as a mutual concern but said little about the will of Pakistan’s government, army and intelligence services to crack down on militant groups that often have operated with impunity in Pakistan while wreaking havoc on US and international forces across the border in Afghanistan.
Read More Here

Interest in Obamacare Drops 88 Percent in Two Weeks

Posted: 15 Oct 2013 05:02 PM PDT

by John Sexton
A new estimate by an independent web analysis firm says public interest in Healthcare.gov is waning.
According to the Washington Post “The number of visitors to the federal government’s HealthCare.gov Web site dropped 88 percent between Oct. 1 and Oct. 13…” The site reportedly drew 9.4 million unique visitors in its first week of operation but in the 2nd week “the site attracted 4.1 million visitors, or less than half of what it garnered its first week.”
The Obama administration has repeatedly refused to say how many people have signed up for coverage on the federal exchange. Their sole response to questions about enrollment is to cite the total number of unique visitors to the website and claim this shows “intense demand.” But looked at over time it is clear that demand is declining fairly quickly, at about the pace one might expect box office receipts of a new film to drop off week after week.
No doubt some of the drop off is the result of frustration by consumers unwilling to spend hours trying to access their accounts. What remains to be seen is whether those individuals will come back and what message might bring them back.
Published estimates for the amount of time it will take to fix the current problems with the federal exchange range from a couple weeks to several months.
Source

EADS, Siemens Plot Way To Hybrid-Electric Propulsion

Posted: 15 Oct 2013 05:00 PM PDT

By Graham Warwick
Manufacturers and researchers appear to be in agreement: The way to develop electric propulsion for aircraft is to start small. But with the pace at which technology is developing, electric-powered aircraft may not stay small very long.
In September 2010, EADS Innovation Works (IW) and Aero Composites Saintonge (ACS) flew a single-seat, 375-lb. Cri-Cri modified with four electric motors in place of its two 9-hp piston engines. By the end of this year, EADS IW and ACS plan to fly the E-Fan, a two-seat training aircraft purpose-designed around electric-powered ducted propellers.
The Cri-Cri and E-Fan are battery-powered, but in June 2011 EADS teamed with Siemens and Diamond Aircraft to fly the DA36 E-Star, an HK36 Super Dimona motor glider modified to test a hybrid-electric drive system. A year later, in June 2012, the team flew the improved E-Star 2 with an 80-kw (107-hp) serial-hybrid drive system based on a small Wankel engine, generator and batteries.
The E-Fan and E-Star are among “E-aircraft” research projects under way at EADS as it evaluates different approaches to reducing aviation carbon-dioxide emissions. Another is the E-Thrust concept study with Rolls-Royce into a distributed propulsion system in which a turbine engine powers six electrically driven fans integrated into the wings of a commercial airliner to reduce weight and drag.
EADS and Siemens also have partnered with the Technical University of Munich to establish the PowerLab at the nearby Ludwig Boelkow Campus in Ottobrun. This four-year project is dedicated to developing and testing lightweight, high-efficiency generators and motors in the 300-600-kw class.
Read More Here