PirateBay’s OscarTorrents - download the Oscars

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Cory Doctorow:
OscarTorrents is an audacious new site from The Pirate Bay: a search-engine for torrents of this year's Oscar nominees:


To those worried about downloading in case they get sued: by our calculations, your chances of getting nailed are way less than your chances of winning the lottery. Don't think twice about it.

To all intellectual property landlords: we are aware that OscarTorrents might annoy you -- but contain your righteous indignation for a while, and think: we're only linking to torrents that already exist. Face it: your membrane has burst, and it wasn't us who burst it. Your precious bodily fluids are escaping.

You haven't beaten us, so why not join us? Think of a new business model that doesn't involve overpriced pieces of plastic and skanky cinemas hawking cheap carbohydrates while relying on $6/hr projectionists who can't keep a film in focus -- not to mention insulting your audiences by (to pick a few examples) surveilling us with nightvision glasses, searching bags, 30 minutes of commercials and bombarding us with ridiculous anti-piracy propaganda. Take a look at yourselves. Is it really any wonder we're winning?


Link

(Thanks Hoag!)

(Via Boing Boing.)

Hackers attempt to break the internet, fail miserably

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Alright folks, you should all be well aware by now that the internet ain't nothin' to mess with, but apparently a few folks in the South Korea area have just learned that the hard way. In what is being called the most severe attack on the web since the barrage of 2002, the same 13 "root servers" were targeted within the past 24 hours in a presumed attempt to disrupt global network traffic. Hackers were able to "briefly overwhelm" three of the 13 computers managing virtual thoroughfare with a series of "powerful attacks lasting as long as 12 hours," and while even the Homeland Security Department confirmed that it had witnessed "anomalous" internet traffic, most of the digital world hummed along without a care. Motives for the attack still aren't clear, but initial reports are suggesting that extortion of data or other malicious intent is probably unlikely, and what's more probable is a few folks trying to disguise data coming from South Korea were just having a bit of frowned-upon fun. Now, who else in the world thinks they can single handedly dismantle the internet?

(Via Engadget.)