Google has stripped autocomplete searches featuring the term "Kodi" from its search engine in an effort to address piracy associated with the software. Though Kodi itself is not a piracy tool, it has become associated with add-ons that make it easy to find pirated content, causing the general public to associate it with illegally uploaded videos and music.
Piracy is a problem that has hounded the entertainment and software industry for decades and there doesn’t seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel yet. Different people have different opinions on how to cut or at least curb it and tools have come and gone with mixed effectiveness. One software maker, however, may have gone a bit too far in its quest stop a pirate. Popular slight sim maker Flight Sim Labs admitted to shipping an installer that included a tool that, under very specific circumstances, would collect a specific user’s passwords stored on Google Chrome and send them back to the company.
For as long as consoles have been around, people have been hacking them. Nintendo in particular has a long and storied history with hackers, especially with its more modern consoles. Healthy homebrew scenes popped up around the Wii, DS, and 3DS, and now that the Switch is on the scene, hackers have turned their attention to it.
Just over a month ago The Pirate Bay's website was found to be using visitors' CPU cycles to mine cryptocurrency while they browsed the site. At the time, the practice was said to be a limited test in order to see if digital currency mining could be a new source of revenue to replace traditional advertising. However, without notice Pirate Bay has returned to mining and offers no opt-out option to visitors.
Torrent and piracy websites are in a difficult situation when it comes to raising money. The more they grow in popularity, the bigger the costs of operation get, but they can't exactly depend on advertising revenue to survive. While donations via Bitcoin have been the preferred option for some time now, it appears The Pirate Bay may be moving to a more direct method for generating funds: using visitor's CPU cycles to mine digital currency.
Long before YouTube Red was a thing, many casual pirates filled their MP3 players with music ripped from YouTube videos. Though the earliest methods of getting this audio were cumbersome, websites quickly appeared online that made the process as simple as providing a YouTube URL and clicking a download button. The most popular of these websites is being shut down for good.
While most indie game developers would prefer that players didn't pirate their titles, the three-person team calling itself Acid Wizard Studio have done things a bit differently. They've taken their recently released horror game Darkwood and put it up for free on the popular torrent site Pirate Bay, all without any DRM. The reason? They simply want everyone who's interested to play their game, even if they can't afford it.
Four individuals have been arrested in India over allegedly leaking a new episode of Game of Thrones. According to a statement from local police, these individuals were in possession of official credentials that gave them access to the new episode. The group is said to have worked for an entertainment company located in Mumbai that would provide access to the episode once it aired in the country.
One of the most popular television shows is also one of the most pirated television shows: Game of Thrones. The series has been marred by piracy in various ways throughout its life, not the least of which was the major leak that resulted in a handful of episodes hitting torrents networks before airing on HBO. Now that the seventh and final season is underway, HBO is in overdrive trying to protect its property, and it has its sights set on pirates.
In a bizarre turn of events, at least in light of the company's anti-piracy actions, Google Search shows users the best torrenting websites in a single, convenient scrolling set of cards. These cards appear at the top of Google Search when users query 'best torrenting/torrent sites,' and they include things like isoHunt, Demonoid, The Pirate Bay, and more.
Fame does have a price, as the Kodi, formerly XBMC, community is now finding out the hard way. The popularity of cord-cutting and set-top boxes led to the popularity of the open source Kodi home theater platform, which, in turn, lead to explosion of third-party add-ons. Not all add-ons, however, are created equal and some of them carry some legal liability. The worst case scenario did happen and one such add-on has been sued, causing other add-ons to quickly abandon ship before matter got worse.
The recently released adventure-puzzle game Rime has brought light to the subject of DRM and anti-piracy software this last week. Shortly after release, those playing the PC version began complaining about noticeable performance issues with the game as a result of the Denuvo software, which checks to make sure the DRM is still intact. Rime's makers then promised to remove the software if it was cracked. Now, only five days later, they're keeping their word.