Court Case eases up on Piracy

What is a downloaded movie worth? What is a reasonable punishment for a person who downloads a movie, and one that uploads a movie? Is piracy theft, or should it just be consider plagiarism?

Internet piracy is still a relatively new phenomenon, most countries are currently far from nailing down their legislation on the spectacle, and the debate is well under way on how piracy should be treated in the justice system. Sweden, being a fore runner when it comes to both Internet piracy, and piracy prevention, is still leagues from a solid answer.

Therefore, leading judgments are important, and since the Internet and information sharing is global, it is very interesting to examine how other countries deal with their cases of piracy. A case well worth putting under the microscope is a subpoena from the U.S.; Malibu Media Llc vs. John Does.

Malibu Media Llc saw how some of their movies (and other IP products) were leaked on the Internet. The company then tracked the IP-address used for sharing these files over a Bittorrent protocol, and based on that IP-address the company found the uploader. This time it happened to be a home user rather than a public hotspot. Subsequently geo-location was used to find the physical address, and the subscription service used, and thereby identified the physical person behind the uploads.

Or so they thought.

The law suit is as a classic example of what may cause many pirates to choose to hide their IP-address, i.e. example via VPN services, but interestingly enough, the judge in Florida decided to go a different route. The judge ruled that although the address was correctly identified, you cannot rule out the possibility that someone else used the computer. Home networks and home computers are after all often shared by several people.

Similar judgments have been identified previously in the U.S., and seems to be increasingly common. In Sweden we have had relatively few court cases of piracy that had been triad on the basis of IP-address, but this case may be setting the stage for how these cases can come to be interpreted.

What do you think about internet piracy? Please comment below. 

Login of Choice

It is almost universal now that we will be on a site wanting to comment on something and we are given the chance to login using our Facebook accounts. This avoids the need for creating a whole new account on this new website with all your details already stored. Well, many of us take that route and of course other social media sites have caught on and started to offer the same service.

Now that everyone else is in on the act Facebook is starting to lose its dominance as the Login site of choice with a very noticeable shift in the past year. Around this time last year Facebook accounted for 54% of the Login With activity, but just 12 months on that stat has dropped to 45%. This is a drop of almost 10% and it would appear that Google+ is the main site breathing down Facebook’s neck.

Google+ is the 2nd most popular site for Logging in with at 33% of the overall share at present. It would appear that Google+ picked up the vast majority of the 9% shift. However indicators do show that Google+ has stagnated a little over the past 3 months in terms of growth.

Conversation Prism

This is for all you Brian Solis-fans out there. Those who may not have heard of Brian, he coined the words “PR 2.0” and was regarded in the early years of web 2.0 evolution as “a founding father of PR 2.0 concept".

A few years back Solis created what today is know as the Conversation Prism, which is a display of channels, platforms and websites that fall under Social Media. Thankfully it is also the subject to regular updates, the latest one now in 2013. The prism describes all forms of social media with the most important websites and channels covered. It clearly shows how diverse and large the world of online conversation is. Enjoy!

Sentinal WarFare

I recently came across a very interesting thread on a forum for gamers. The story involves the extremely popular game Quake III Arena, along with a massive bit of unexpected sentinel awareness.

A few years back, a gamer set up a bot-vs-bot match on his Quake III Arena server, and let the match run to see how the bots would adapt over a long period of time. The bot AI (artificial intelligence) in Quake III Arena is designed to adapt to new scenarios and situations, all to work out player strategies and combat these exact strategies. This results in a ramping difficulty for the players since the AI actively learns the moves and tactics of the player.

However, something came up (most likely lunch or dinner) and the gamer forgets all about the server he set up, until four years later when he decides to login and see what’s happening.

What he discovers is seriously puzzling: the bots on both teams are simply standing still, not doing anything. The server is running fine and the game isn’t frozen. The bots are simply standing there, not killing one another. The gamer reports his findings to his Quake community forum, and they all unanimous encourage him to logon and see what happens. Said and done, our anonymous gamer opens the server and logs on to the tranquil battle field.

Here things just keep getting stranger. When he enters, the bots don’t fire on him—instead, they rotate to turn and look at him, and continue to look at him as he walks around the map.

Encourage again by his community friends the gamer decides to “frag” (gamer for kill) one of the bots, again just to see how the rest would react. In one swift blow all the bots undivided retaliate, instantly sending the gamer out of the battle. Sadly this is also where the story ends, because before the gamer could log back on again, the server crashes. Presumably the bots returned to their calm non-aggressive state.

There is no way to tell if this story is true or not; there is no video evidence to accompany the strange phenomenon, and therefore nothing to directly validate the occurrence. However, the truth of the story isn’t as important to me as the questions it raises:

Is it possible that video game bots, designed to provide human players with some non-human competition, could evolve over four years to “learn” that the best way to stay alive is to not kill? Did artificial intelligence discover the secret to world peace in a forgotten video game server?

Some of you may already have bridged the obvious WarGames parallel; yet another fact sadly pushing this story closer to the feigned area of story-telling. In WarGames (a movie from 1983 starring Matthew Broderick) a hacker uploads a tic-tac-toe game to an army super computer. What is pivotal to note here is that in a game of tic-tac-toe you cannot win unless your opponent makes a mistake. The computer then simulates a nuclear war and, using the knowledge gained from tic-tac-toeing, realizes that the only way to win is not to play.

A computer trained and aimed at killing and defeating all opponents, discovering that non-violence was a better logical approach to survival, would be a pretty spectacular thing. To answer this question we would however need to know what the bots were thinking in that vital moment, the second after the gamer was fragged and the servers terminated. Did they in fact go back to a submissive non-violent stage, or would the introduction of a new, unknown element be the spark that ignited the carnage all over again?

Luckily we may have the answer to this. One crucial piece of evidence was saved before the server crashed; the bots’ log files. These logs track the decisions previously made by the AI, guiding them to come up with new tactics and strategies; essentially the core of the logic behind ramping up the difficulty for the players. Apparently also the logic behind the submissive peaceful end-state.

The log files are however massive; 512 MB per bot with 16 bots – that makes 8 GB of unstructured information. As a comparison, this article, written in Word, and saved as a .docx takes up just about 14KB. To go through the log files would be equivalent of reading this article just under 600 000 times.

Is there sentinel life within those log files? Perhaps - as of right now, no one really knows. Reading the entire log file is an huge task itself, analyzing and finding the right line of code that supports sentinel presence; now that is an whole other story. Fortunately for us, the combat-hardened, destruction-driven AI we have created, for all intents and purposes, seems logically peaceful.

Cant be Googled = unGoogleable?

A few weeks ago a global controversy arose in the northern outskirts of the world. A small language was challenging the entire existence of one of the worlds largest corporations - and they where not having any of it!

Many search engine users are currently googling "ungoogleable" following a lexical skirmish between Google and Swedish wordsmiths – a spat sparked by the proposed word ogooglebar - Swedish for "unGoogleable".

The Language Council of Sweden was considering the word, defined as something that cannot be found with any search engine, among their annual list of new entries to the Swedish language. But Google contested, arguing that the definition should be narrowed to refer only to information that cannot be found on the wildly popular Google search engine. What's more, they argued, the dictionary entry should come with a disclaimer that notes Google is a trademarked word.

The council promptly pulled the word from its list of contenders, but news of the disagreement nevertheless created what the Swedish call a Bloggbävning – in English: a "blogquake", or "the process by which a topic explodes in the blogosphere and is then picked up by more mainstream media outlets," according to The Atlantic. 

How this will end is not yet settled. The initial chock has now subsided, however there will surly be after chocks and trembles. However, it seems clear to me that no one, not even the company itself, can decided upon how to use the search language, nor what truly is unGoogleable!