Russian Pirates Received a Final Warning

Russian government issued “a final warning” for people operating illegal websites. The local copyright legislation was amended again to not just protect more content, but also enable authorities to permanently block websites making copyrighted content available.

Following massive pressure from the copyright owners all over the world, a couple years ago Russia started taking attempts to improve its reputation of the highly pirated nation. Back in 2013, a new IP law was introduced in the country, which outlined a mechanism to block the sites by intermediaries if those failed to comply with takedown notices within 3 days.

Over the first year, preliminary interim injunctions were imposed against 175 websites, but only 12 file-sharing domains were blocked. Now the law was further amended – from May 2015, it will cover not only video? but all multimedia content (except pictures).

Under the amended law, the intermediaries (Internet service providers and webhosts) can be ordered to permanently block sites that continually make unauthorized content available online.

Russian authorities officially explained the legislation’s reach, saying that the law enables to block access to online services providing access to copyright-infringing videos, TV shows and from May 1 – to music, books and software as well. The upgraded law also states that the systematic violation of intellectual property rights will lead to permanent blockage of the infringing portals.

The operators of torrent and other file-sharing websites received a particular notice. The authorities warned they have until May 1 to enter into constructive dialogue with copyright owners who are open to cooperation. The authorities underline that the common goal of the industry is to ensure that all copyright works are adequately rewarded and successful books, music and software bring profits to their creators, and not the pirates. If the website operators fail to start a legal business, the response of the government will become quite obvious.

In the meantime, the industry observers note that the first attempt of the country at website blocking legislation didn’t produce any apocalyptic conclusion. Now we’ll see how these latest amendments work out for Russian file-sharing sites.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

Hackers Believe that Obama's and Clinton's Communications Are Secure

According to cybersecurity experts and even hackers themselves, both Obama’s government emails and Clinton’s private, encrypted email system are secure enough to withstand the attack from foreign powers. For example, Obama carries a specially secured BlackBerry device, which so far has proved safe from cyber spies.

Even the National Security Agency admitted that the president’s BlackBerry has a satisfactory level of security. Recently, the US government had to admit that hackers attacked systems at the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department, but the breach in question related to the lowest-level unclassified email.

Meanwhile, controversy continues to rage over Hillary Clinton using a private email system while serving as the secretary of state. Nicknamed her “home brew” clintonemail.com system, it has sophisticated cyber “shields” to protect Clinton’s emails from prying eyes. The private domain has been used by her to conduct government business for four years, though it is not clear to what extent. Perhaps, now she would not be using this system as much, because it can appear vulnerable to some kind of hack, although it has still not been knocked offline or breached.

At the moment, the security experts are trying to work out how the hackers gained access to White House communications recently. One suggestion is that they could have infected the computer systems through the staffers while they were working on government business outside the office. Another suggestion is that they used an intrusion method called social engineering in order to lure staffers into clicking on a malicious link.