Month: January 2022

Internet Piracy Is Surging, Researchers Say

Image: Pixen

Piracy is complicated. It flourishes and declines for many reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic kept people home and out of theaters, but many of the most pirated films were available to watch at home the same day they hit the cinema. There’s so many different streaming services now that it can be hard to keep track and watching a specific film or TV show can entail signing up for a specific service to watch one show. Faced with the prospect of paying another $10 a month to catch up on a TV show or watch the latest Marvel movie, many people chose piracy and decided to watch for free instead.

Matthew Gault @mjgault

https://www.vice.com/en/article/93bd8v/internet-piracy-is-surging-researchers-say

Linktree Is Kicking Many Sex Workers Off Its Site

Image via Linktree

As so many platforms and services shut sex workers out, more workers are creating their own websites, including link sites that they own the URLs for and host themselves, instead of relying on third-party platforms that can kick them off at any moment.

Samantha Cole @samleecole

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmjpk/linktree-banned-removed-inappropriate-use-sex-work

Zynga founder Pincus cashes in on acquisition after 15 years navigating boom-bust cycle

Image: via CNBC

In the 15 years since he started Zynga as a poker game for Facebook, Mark Pincus twice gave up the CEO role while guiding his gaming company through early rocket ship growth, a historically disappointing post-IPO stretch and a choppy history of pricey acquisitions.

But one thing he never did was dump the majority of his stock.

Ari Levy @levynews

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/11/zyngas-mark-pincus-cashes-in-after-15-years-of-boom-bust-cycle.html

Cryptocurrency Investors Try to Turn Private Islands Into Blockchain Utopias

Image: Cryptoland Youtube Video

For as long as cryptocurrencies have existed, libertarians have dreamed of using them to create communities, seasteads, and cities free from the prying eyes of the state and its tax collectors. We’ve seen crypto-inspired attempts to claim disputed lands as tax havens, use UFOs and fireworks to christen a new tax-free Bitcoin town, build cities with DAOs, and establish communities inside of U.S. colonies to avoid taxes. But there’s now a wave of attempts to buy entire islands and build the next crypto “paradise.” 

Edward Ongweso Jr @bigblackjacobin

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3n38x/cryptocurrency-investors-try-to-turn-private-islands-into-blockchain-utopias

BlackBerry phones once ruled the world, then the world changed

Image: Wojciech30 / Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

… BlackBerry is shutting down its remaining services, and users running BlackBerry devices with BlackBerry OS 7.1 and BlackBerry 10 — and you have to wonder just how many there were left — will no longer have access to data or even the once famous BlackBerry messaging service, among other things. It’s all getting shut off tomorrow [January 4, 2022].

… BlackBerry phones went from top of the smartphone heap to single digits in the blink of an eye, losing large swaths of market share as it got completely disrupted by Apple and Android touchscreens.

Ron Miller @ron_miller

https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/03/blackberry-phones-once-ruled-the-world-then-the-world-changed