5M pirated discs in Asia-Pacific sting
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Authorities have seized nearly 5 million pirated discs and arrested 870 people in a two-month anti-piracy operation in about a dozen Asia-Pacific nations.
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(InfoWorld) - Hard drives full of confidential data are still turning up on the second-hand market, researchers have reported. Investigations carried out on behalf of BT by the University of Glamorgan in the U.K., Edith Cowan University in Australia, and Longwood University in the U.S., found that 37 percent of drives surveyed had traces of personal data on them. Damningly, this figure is much the same as it was for the same surveys undertaken by the universities in each of the last two years, suggesting that either companies are ignoring the issue or simply lack the tools to adequately wipe data before resale. Sensitive information retrieved included salary details, financial data of specific companies, credit card numbers, medical data, visa applications, details of online purchases, and inevitably, online pornography. The sample totalled 350 hard drives acquired in online auctions. "Given the level of exposure that the subjects of security and identity theft has received in recent times, and the availability of suitable tools to ensure the safe disposal of information, it is difficult to understand why disks are still not being effectively cleaned before they are disposed off," said BT's security research head, Dr Andy Jones. "When organizations dispose off surplus and obsolete computers and hard disks, they must ensure that adequate procedures are in place to destroy any data and also to check that the procedures that are in place are effective -- whether they are handled by internal resources or through a third party contractor," he said. The full report -- which has yet to be made publically available -- reveals that buying second-hand disks is an unreliable way to get hold of storage. Of the 133 disks bought in the U.K., 44 percent of them didn't even work. But of those that did, 19 percent had enough information on them to identify the organization from which they had come, 65 percent had enough data to identify named people, and 17 percent contained "illicit" data. Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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BEIJING - Chinese law enforcement agencies destroyed nearly 13 million pirated compact discs, DVDs and computer software Saturday in the government's latest campaign to curtail rampant theft of intellectual property, state media reported.
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Dirty deeds done dirt cheap The adage about no honour among thieves also applies to hackers, it would seem. Pirates are flogging knocked-off copies of the MPack hacker toolkit at a discount of up to 85 per cent, according to anti-virus experts at net security firm Symantec.â¦
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That&#39;s right. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has become the latest victim of piracy, with illegal copies of the game, its manual, and its cover appearing on various Web sites.
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Swedish prosecutors have until Thursday to file charges against The Pirate Bay, one of the most widely used search engines for locating music and movies on the Internet.The deadline was set by a Swedish court last year after&#160;The Pirate Bay asked the authorities to return servers seized in a raid, said Peter Sunde, one of The Pirate Bay&#39;s operators, on Monday.Prosecutors may charge up to five people associated with The Pirate Bay with aiding copyright infringement, Sunde said. However, Sunde maintains the Pirate Bay does not violate Swedish law.&quot;There&#39;s nothing that says what we are doing is illegal,&quot; Sunde said.The Pirate Bay is a search engine for torrents, which are small information files that enable content to be downloaded via the BitTorrent protocol.The content isn&#39;t hosted on The Pirate Bay&#39;s servers but instead on users&#39; computers. The torrent, when dropped into a BitTorrent software program, will initiate the download of a file from other computers sharing it on the BitTorrent network.Torrent search engines have come under legal fire before, and the Pirate Bay has since set up servers outside the country to avoid further trouble with Swedish authorities. Sunde said he has received 4,000 pages of material from the prosecutors documenting their investigation.The Pirate Bay has been targeted by music and movie industry associations, which say it enables piracy of content under copyright and should be shut down.BitTorrent itself is now a fledgling company that legally uses p-to-p&#160;(peer-to-peer) technology. In 2005, it reworked its search engine, removing links to torrents that pointed to copyright content.The Pirate Bay generates money from advertising on the site, although Sunde said the revenue only covers hosting and hardware costs. The site recently announced it has reached 10 million users with about 1 million torrents.It&#39;s not the only legal case involving The Pirate Bay. Last September, The Pirate Bay filed a criminal complaint against content companies that hired MediaDefender, a company that specializes in disrupting P-to-P networks in hopes of making file sharing too frustrating.The Pirate Bay alleges that MediaDefender attacked its operations by distributing fake torrent files and other methods.&#160;
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There's a new kind of theft growing in popularity -- be careful!
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HD DRM: RIP A lone hacker has unlocked the master key preventing the copying of high-definition DVDs in a development that is sure to get the entertainment industry's knickers wrapped tighter than a magnet's coil. What's more, the individual was able to defeat the technology with no cracking tools or reverse engineering, despite the millions of dollars and many years engineers put into developing the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) for locking down high-definition video.â¦
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Makers of computer software report that piracy rates, while still high, declined slightly in both China and Russia last year, but that global losses from the use of illegal computer software rose to &#36;34 billion.
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Rampant movie piracy in the Asia-Pacific region cost western film producers more than &#36;718 million in lost revenue in 2003, up from &#36;574 million in 2000, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) said on Friday.
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They start with a single stolen file and pump out pirated games and movies by the millions. Jeff Howe from Wired magazine looks at the 'topsites' that are terrorizing the entertainment business.
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MPAA's disc dogs are back in U.S. after sniffing out $6 million worth of bootlegged DVDs in Malaysia.
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Chinese law enforcement agencies destroyed nearly 13 million pirated compact discs, DVDs and computer software Saturday in the government's latest campaign to curtail rampant theft of intellectual property, state media reported.
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Would-be pirates, beware: Redmond says its own sleuthing role helped to bring down phony software outfits in 22 countries around the world.
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A state media report says Chinese law enforcement nabbed and destroyed millions of pirated software discs, CDs and DVDs in a campaign against intellectual property theft.
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An unsuspecting movie file-swapper is now facing criminal charges in Hong Kong, with BitTorrent facilitating the download. The 38-year-old man has been accused of grabbing several digital movies, including "Daredevil," "Red Planet" and "Miss Congeniali...
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Government admits disc containing details of suspected foreign criminals was mislaid for a year