While other providers in the UK and Ireland aim to compete, those requiring the absolute fastest fibre optic broadband coupled with a comprehensive TV package will probably find themselves considering Virgin Media.

Despite sporting Richard Branson’s Virgin brand, the company has been owned by US-based Liberty Global since 2013. It previously earned the title of first quad-play media company in the United Kingdom, offering broadband, TV, fixed-line and mobile telecoms packages.

Today, however, the company has a small piracy-related embarrassment to address.

Like several of the large telecoms companies in the region, Virgin Media operates a number of bricks-and-mortar stores which are used to drum up sales for Internet, TV and phone packages while offering support to new and existing customers. They typically look like the one in the image below.

Virgin Media store (credit: Virgin)

The outside windows of Virgin stores are usually covered with advertising for the company’s products and regularly carry digital displays which present the latest deals. However, one such display spotted by a passer-by carried a little extra.

In a now-deleted post on Reddit, a user explained that when out and about he’d passed a Virgin Media store which sported a digital display advertising the company’s impressive “Full House” package. However, intruding at the top of the screen was a notification from one of the most impressive piracy apps available, Terrarium TV.

Busted: Terrarium TV notification top and center

For those out of the loop, Terrarium TV is one of the most feature-rich Android-based applications available today. For reasons that aren’t exactly clear, it hasn’t received the attention of ‘rivals’ such as Popcorn Time and Showbox but its abilities are extremely impressive.

As the image shows, the notification is letting the user know that two new movies – The Star and The Stray – have been added to Terrarium’s repertoire. In other words, they’ve just been listed in the Terrarium app for streaming directly to the user’s installation (in this case one of Virgin’s own displays) for free, without permission from copyright holders.

Of course, Virgin Media definitely won’t have authorized the installation of Terrarium TV on any of its units, so it’s most likely down to someone in the store with access to the display, perhaps a staff member but possibly a mischievous customer. Whoever it was should probably uninstall it now though, if they’re able to. Virgin will not be happy about this.

The person who took the photo didn’t respond to TorrentFreak’s request for comment on where it was taken but from the information available in the image, it seems likely that it’s in Ireland. Virgin Media ads elsewhere in the region are priced in pounds – not in euros – so a retail outlet in the country is the most likely location. The same 99 euro “Full House” deal is also advertised on Virgin’s .ie website.

Terrarium TV

While a display running a piracy application over the top of an advert trying to sell premium access to movies and TV shows is embarrassing enough, Virgin and other ISPs including Eircom, Sky Ireland, and Vodafone Ireland are currently subject to a court order which compels them to block several pirate sites in Ireland.

The sources used by Terrarium to supply illicit copies of movies are not part of that order but since ISPs in the region don’t contest blocking orders when rightsholders apply for them, it’s reasonable to presume they’re broadly in favor of blocking pirate sites.

Of course, that makes perfect sense if you’re a company trying to make money from selling premium access to content.

Update: We have a lengthy statement from Virgin Media:

“Virgin Media takes copyright very seriously and does not condone illegal streaming.

Our new Tallaght Store is due to officially open later this month and currently does not currently have Virgin Media network connectivity.

Over the weekend, an advertising screen display in this Store was being set up by a contractor.

The contractor took it on themselves to use their own 4G device to set up the screen, ahead of the store being connected to our fibre services this week.

At some stage, it seems an unwanted pop-up appeared on the screen from an illegal streaming site. To be clear, this was not on the Virgin Media network.

Other than as outlined above, this occurrence has no connection whatsoever with Virgin Media. We have notified the contractor regarding this incident.”

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Back in January 2017, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced a 14-month campaign to crack down on ‘unauthorized’ Internet platforms.

China said that Internet technologies and services had been expanding in a “disorderly” fashion, so regulation was required. No surprise then that the campaign targeted censorship-busting VPN services, which are used by citizens and corporations to traverse the country’s Great Firewall.

Heralding a “nationwide Internet network access services clean-up”, China warned that anyone operating such a service would require a government telecommunications business license. It’s now been more than a year since that announcement and much has happened in the interim.

In July 2017, Apple removed 674 VPN apps from its App Store and in September, a local man was jailed for nine months for selling VPN software. In December, another man was jailed for five-and-a-half years for selling a VPN service without an appropriate license from the government.

This week the government provided an update on the crackdown, telling the media that it will begin forcing local and foreign companies and individuals to use only government-approved systems to access the wider Internet.

Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) chief engineer Zhang Feng reiterated earlier comments that VPN operators must be properly licensed by the government, adding that unlicensed VPNs will be subjected to new rules which come into force on March 31. The government plans to block unauthorized VPN providers, official media reported.

“We want to regulate VPNs which unlawfully conduct cross-border operational activities,” Zhang told reporters.

“Any foreign companies that want to set up a cross-border operation for private use will need to set up a dedicated line for that purpose,” he said.

“They will be able to lease such a line or network legally from the telecommunications import and export bureau. This shouldn’t affect their normal operations much at all.”

Radio Free Asia reports that state-run telecoms companies including China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, which are approved providers, have all been ordered to prevent their 1.3 billion subscribers from accessing blocked content with VPNs.

“The campaign aims to regulate the market environment and keep it fair and healthy,” Zhang added. “[As for] VPNs which unlawfully conduct cross-border operational activities, we want to regulate this.”

So, it appears that VPN providers are still allowed in China, so long as they’re officially licensed and approved by the government. However, in order to get that licensing they need to comply with government regulations, which means that people cannot use them to access content restricted by the Great Firewall.

All that being said, Zhang is reported as saying that people shouldn’t be concerned that their data is insecure as a result – neither providers nor the government are able to access content sent over a state-approved VPN service, he claimed.

“The rights for using normal intentional telecommunications services is strictly protected,” said Zhang, adding that regulation means that communications are “secure”.

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FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate.

Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.

No registration necessary.

 

FOSDEM 2018 – Presentations

Below are the three presentations listed that our three Team Mebers will be holding on Saturday 3 February. Should you whish to attent better make sure you  are on time to have a seat. Full is full!

 

3 February 2018: Wayland client basics – How to natively speak Wayland in your application, from the bottom up

Wayland, the next-generation display server protocol, is slowly but surely taking over the Linux desktop. Preexisting and new applications will have to adapt to this new environment that is fundamentally different from how things used to work on X11 for a long time. This talk gives you the basics of programming native Wayland clients in 2018: the Wayland architecture and protocol world including recent developments, what you can and cannot do, the steps to get something visible on the screen, and why you might not want to do a native application after all.

The presentation is intended to give a conceptual overview of things that any Wayland client programmer will have to look at. The architecture and design of Wayland will be shown and compared to X11. However, rather than porting applications from X11 to Wayland, the focus here will be on building native Wayland programs from the ground up. The Wayland ecosystem and relevant compositors will be described and suggestions for testing will be given. Furthermore, the process of getting a surface to the compositor for drawing it on the screen will be explained and all basic protocols needed for this such as the global registry, shared memory, surfaces, and shell surfaces including xdgwmbase will be introduced.

The talk will not go too deeply into programming specifics and the libwayland C API, but some common pitfalls and best practices will be mentioned.

Speaker: Philipp Kerling
Location: K.4.401
Time: 10:30 – 10:55
Event link: click

 

3 February 2018: Kodi v18 features and improvements – What we’ve been busy with

A short walk through of what we have been doing past year since v17 release and what we are still planning to do.

During the time we worked towards the final release of v17 some of our developers already took a head start for v18. During past year developers in and outside of the Kodi Team have been steadily refactoring and working on new features that will be included in the upcoming V18. Various parts have already been published in articles on our website though we will also sum up some parts that are in the pipe line. In total will try to do a brief rundown on what we hope will be included.

Speaker: Martijn Kaijser
Location: H.1309
Time: 12:30 – 12:55
Event link: click

 

3 Februrary 2018: Kodi and Embedded Linux – Moving Towards Common Windowing and Video Acceleration

In a world where a new single board computer (SBC) comes out every month it has become impossible to maintain all the proprietary methods that are used with the boards. A movement towards a unified windowing method and unified decoding methods has started. For Kodi version 18 a Direct Rendering Manager / Kernel Mode Setting (DRM/KMS) windowing method has been implemented. This allows any device that has a Linux kernel DRM driver to run kodi. The next step is video decoding, where each SBC has it’s own specific decoder and software to run it. The Linux kernel implements a Video4Linux2 (V4L2) subsystem where drivers can register a decoder to be used under a common API. Kodi needs to be able to use a zero-copy path in order to display these decoded frames on the screen. For this to happen we need to use DRM-PRIME buffer sharing and specific EGL extensions such as EGLEXTimagedmabuf_import to present the frames. All this together will allow Kodi 18 to run on a vast variety of SBCs that have DRM driver and a V4L2 driver available.

In order for Kodi to present decoded frames along with the GUI multiple planes have to be used. To use multiple planes an atomic DRM system has to be used. Atomic DRM allows control over each page flip and what is presented by each plane within one atomic commit. In Kodi this allows showing the Kodi GUI in the overlay plane and the decoded video frames in the primary plane. The decoded video frames exit the decoder in a semi-planar YUV format called NV12 (other formats may be possible as well). These NV12 frames can be presented directly in the primary plane and the DRM subsystem handles things like scaling and rotation.

Presenting directly to a DRM plane has some downsides that need to be addressed. Depending on the DRM driver things like scaling and deinterlacing may not be supported. In these cases a separate rendering method has to be used. This other rendering method is entirely done in OpenGLES using the EGL extension EGLEXTimagedmabuf_import. This method allows directly importing the NV12 video frame into OpenGLES and manipulation can be done from there via GLSL shaders. Kodi already implements shaders that do the YUV to RGB conversion needed to output the image to the display. These shaders also implement scaling via various methods (lanczos, spline36, etc) and deinterlacing via bobbing.

All this together will allow SBCs such as NXP i.MX6, Allwinner H3, Rockchip 3288 and 3328, Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c, and many more to work with Kodi without implementing any new methods. This work is underway is largely merged into Kodi master already.

Speaker: Lukas Rusak
Location: K.4.401
Time: 16:00 – 16:50
Event link: click

 

 

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Kodi-powered set-top boxes are a great way to to stream video content to a TV, but sellers who ship these devices with unauthorized add-ons give them a bad reputation.

According to the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), an anti-piracy partnership comprised of Hollywood studios, Netflix, Amazon, and more than two dozen other companies, Tickbox TV is one of these bad actors.

Last year, ACE filed a lawsuit against the Georgia-based company, which sells Kodi-powered set-top boxes that stream a variety of popular media.

According to ACE, these devices are nothing more than pirate tools, allowing buyers to stream copyright-infringing content and being advertised as such. The coalition, therefore, asked the court for an injunction to prevent Tickbox from facilitating copyright infringement by removing all pirate add-ons from previously sold devices.

This week US District Court Judge Michael Fitzgerald issued a preliminary injunction, which largely sides with the movie companies. According to the Judge, there is sufficient reason to believe that Tickbox can be held liable for inducing copyright infringement.

One of the claims is that Tickbox promoted its service for piracy purposes, and according to the Judge the movie companies provided enough evidence to make this likely. This includes various advertising messages the box seller used.

“There is ample evidence that, at least prior to Plaintiffs’commencement of this action, TickBox explicitly advertised the Device as a means to accessing unauthorized versions of copyrighted audiovisual content,” Judge Fitzgerald writes.

In its defense, Tickbox argued that it merely offered a computer which users can then configure to their liking. However, the Judge points out that the company went further, as it actively directed its users to install certain themes (builds) to watch movies, TV and sports.

“Thus, the fact that the Device is just a ‘computer’ that can be used for infringing and noninfringing purposes does not insulate TickBox from liability if [..] the Device is actually used for infringing purposes and TickBox encourages such use.”

Taking these and several other factors into account, the Court ruled that a preliminary injunction is warranted at this stage. After the lawsuit was filed, Tickbox already voluntarily removed much of the inducing advertisements and addons, and this will remain so.

The preliminary injunction compels TickBox to the current version of the user interface, without easy access to pirate add-ons. The devices should no longer contain links to any of the themes and addons that the movie companies have flagged as copyright infringing.

Tickbox had argued that a broad injunction could shut down its business, but the court counters this. Customers will still be able to use the box for legitimate purposes. If they are no longer interested it suggests that piracy was the main draw.

“[A]n injunction of this scope will not ‘shut down Defendant’s business’ as TickBox contends. In the event that such an injunction does shut TickBox down, that will be indicative not of an unjustifiably burdensome injunction, but of a nonviable business model,” Judge Fitzgerald writes.

The preliminary injunction is not final yet as there are several questions still unanswered.

It’s unclear, for example, if and how Tickbox should remove addons from previously sold devices. The Court, therefore, instructs both parties to attempt to reach agreement on these outstanding issues, to include them in an updated injunction.

The above findings are preliminary and apply specifically to the injunction request and the case itself will continue. However, the Court’s early opinion suggests that Tickbox has plenty of work ahead to prove its innocence.

—

A copy of the preliminary injunction is available here (pdf), and Judge Fitzgerald’s findings can be found here (pdf).

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For the past eight years, Austria has been struggling with the thorny issue of pirate site blocking. Local ISPs have put up quite a fight but site blocking is now a reality, albeit with a certain amount of confusion.

After a dizzying route through the legal system, last November the Supreme Court finally ruled that The Pirate Bay and other “structurally-infringing” sites including 1337x.to and isohunt.to can be blocked, if rightsholders have exhausted all other options.

The Court based its decision on the now-familiar BREIN v Filmspeler and BREIN v Ziggo and XS4All cases that received European Court of Justice rulings last year. However, there is now an additional complication, this time on the net neutrality front.

After being passed in October 2015 and coming into force in April 2016, the Telecom Single Market (TSM) Regulation established the principle of non-discriminatory traffic management in the EU. The regulation still allows for the blocking of copyright-infringing websites but only where supported by a clear administrative or judicial decision. This is where T-Mobile sees a problem.

In addition to blocking sites named specifically by the court, copyright holders also expect the ISP to block related platforms, such as clones and mirrors, that aren’t specified in the same manner.

So, last week, after blocking several obscure Pirate Bay clones such as proxydl.cf, the ISP reported itself to the Austrian Regulatory Authority for Broadcasting and Telecommunications (RTR) for a potential net neutrality breach.

“It sounds paradoxical, but this should finally bring legal certainty in a long-standing dispute over pirate sites. T-Mobile Austria has filed with regulatory authority RTR a kind of self-report, after blocking several sites on the basis of a warning by rights holders,” T-Mobile said in a statement.

“The background to the communication to the RTR, through which T-Mobile intends to obtain an assessment by the regulator, is a very unsatisfactory legal situation in which operators have no opportunity to behave in conformity with the law.

“The service provider is forced upon notification by the copyright owner to even judge about possible copyright infringements. At the same time, the provider is violating the principle of net neutrality by setting up a ban.”

T-Mobile says the problem is complicated by rightsholders who, after obtaining a blocking order forcing named ISPs to block named pirate sites (as required under EU law), send similar demands to other ISPs that were not party to court proceedings. The rightsholders also send blocking demands when blocked sites disappear and reappear under a new name, despite those new names not being part of the original order.

According to industry body Internet Service Providers Austria (ISPA), there is a real need for clarification. It’s hoped that T-Mobile reporting itself for a potential net neutrality breach will have the desired effect.

“For more than two years, we have been trying to find a solution with the involved interest groups and the responsible ministry, which on the one hand protects the rights of the artists and on the other hand does not force the providers into the role of a judge,” complains Maximilian Schubert, Secretary General of the ISPA.

“The willingness of the rights holders to compromise had remained within manageable limits. Now they are massively increasing the pressure and demanding costly measures, which the service providers see as punishment for them providing legal security for their customers for many years.”

ISPA hopes that the telecoms regulator will now help to clear up this uncertainty.

“We now hope that the regulator will give a clear answer here. Because from our point of view, the assessment of legality cannot and should not be outsourced to companies,” Schubert concludes.

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