DIRECTOR WANTS HIS FILM ON THE PIRATE BAY, PIRATES DELIVER…

A few days ago a Dutch movie director asked people to upload a copy of one of his older films onto The Pirate Bay. The filmmaker had become fed up with the fact that copyright issues made his work completely unavailable through legal channels. To his surprise, pirates were quick to deliver.

suzyDutch movie director Martin Koolhoven sent out an unusual request on Twitter a few days ago.

While many filmmakers fear The Pirate Bay, Koolhoven asked his followers to upload a copy of his 1999 film “Suzy Q” to the site.

“Can someone just upload Suzy Q to The Pirate Bay?” Koolhoven asked.

The director doesn’t own all copyrights to the movie himself, but grew frustrated by the fact that his film is not available through legal channels.

The TV-film, which also features the film debut of Game of Thrones actress Carice Van Houten, was paid for with public money but after the music rights expired nobody was able to see it anymore.

The main problem is with the film’s music, which includes tracks from popular artists such as The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. This prevented the film from being released in movie theaters and on DVD, and the TV-network also chose not to extend the licenses for the TV rights.

Since the music was no longer licensed it couldn’t be shown anymore, not even on the websites of the public broadcasters.

“To me, it felt like the movie had died,” Koolhoven tells TorrentFreak.

Hoping to bring it back to life, Koolhoven tweeted his upload request, and it didn’t take long before the pirates delivered. Within a few hours the first copy of the film was uploaded, and several more were added in the days that followed.

“I had no idea the media would pick it up the way they did. That generated more media attention. At first I hesitated because I didn’t want to become the poster boy for the download-movement. All I wanted was for people to be able to see my film,” Koolhoven says.

Unfortunately the first upload of the movie that appeared on The Pirate Bay was in very bad quality. So the director decided to go all the way and upload a better version to YouTube himself.

“I figured it would probably be thrown off after a few days, due to the music rights issue, but at least people could see a half decent version instead of watching the horrible copy that was available on The Pirate Bay,” Koolhoven tells us.

Interestingly, YouTube didn’t remove the film but asked the director whether he had the right to use the songs. Since this is not the case the money made through the advertisements on YouTube will go to the proper rightsholders.

“We’re a few days later now and the movie is still on YouTube. And people have started to put higher quality torrents of Suzy Q on Pirate Bay. Even 720p can be found, I’ve heard,” Koolhoven notes.

While the director is not the exclusive rightsholder, he does see himself as the moral owner of the title. Also, he isn’t shying away from encouraging others to download and share the film.

In essence, he believes that all movies should be available online, as long as it’s commercially viable. It shouldn’t hurt movie theater attendance either, as that remains the main source of income for most films and the best viewing experience.

“I know not everybody cares about that, but I do. The cinema is the best place to see movies. If you haven’t seen ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ on the big screen, you just haven’t seen it,” Koolhoven says.

In the case of Suzy Q, however, people are free to grab a pirated copy.

“Everyone can go to The Pirate Bay and grab a copy. People are actually not supposed to, but they have my permission to download Susy Q,” Koolhoven said in an interview with Geenstijl.

“If other people download the movie and help with seeding then the download time will be even more reasonable,” Koolhoven adds.

Moore's Law -- the ability to pack twice as many transistors on the same sliver of silicon every two years -- will come to an end as soon as 2020 at the 7nm node, said a keynoter at the Hot Chips conference here.

While many have predicted the end of Moore's Law, few have done it so passionately or convincingly. The predictions are increasing as lithography advances stall and process technology approaches atomic limits.

"For planning horizons, I pick 2020 as the earliest date we could call it dead," said Robert Colwell, who seeks follow-on technologies as director of the microsystems group at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "You could talk me into 2022, but whether it will come at 7 or 5nm, it's a big deal," said the engineer who once managed a Pentium-class processor design at Intel.

Moore's Law was a rare exponential growth factor that over 30 years brought speed boosts from 1 MHz to 5 GHz, a 3,500-fold increase. By contrast, the best advances in clever architectures delivered about 50x increases over the same period, he said.

Exponentials always come to an end by the very nature of their unsustainably heady growth. Unfortunately, such rides are rare, Colwell said.

"I don't expect to see another 3,500x increase in electronics -- maybe 50x in the next 30 years," he said. Unfortunately, "I don't think the world's going to give us a lot of extra money for 10 percent [annual] benefit increases," he told an audience of processor designers.

Colwell poured cold water on blind faith that engineers will find another exponential growth curve to replace Moore's Law. "We will make a bunch of incremental tweaks, but you can't fix the loss of an exponential," he said.

DARPA tracks a list of as many as 30 possible alternatives to the CMOS technology that has been the workhorse of Moore's Law. "My personal take is there are two or three promising ones and they are not very promising," he said.

"You should be able to use the Web without fear that a criminal or state-sponsored actor is exploiting software bugs to infect your computer, steal secrets, or monitor your communications," writes Google security researcher Chris Evans. To help make that a reality, Google has put together a new team of researchers whose sole purpose is to find security flaws in software—any software—that's used on the Internet.

Google employees have found and reported security flaws in the past, but only as a part-time effort. The new "Project Zero" team will be dedicated to hunting for the kind of exploitable flaws that could be used to spy on human rights activists or conduct industrial espionage. Aiming to disrupt targeted attacks, the team will look at any software that's depended on by a large number of people.

Project Zero will report bugs it finds only to the software vendor, and it will give those vendors 60 to 90 days to issue patches before public disclosure. This time frame may be reduced for bugs that appear to be actively exploited.