Daily Archives: January 18, 2018

The Man from Earth Sequel ‘Pirated’ on The Pirate Bay – By Its Creators

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More than a decade ago, Hollywood was struggling to get to grips with the file-sharing phenomenon. Sharing via BitTorrent was painted as a disease that could kill the movie industry, if it was allowed to take hold. Tough action was the only way to defeat it, the suits concluded.

In 2007, however, a most unusual turn of events showed that piracy could have a magical effect on the success of a movie.

After being produced on a tiny budget, a then little-known independent sci-fi film called “The Man from Earth” turned up on pirate sites, to the surprise of its creators.
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“A week or two before the DVD’s ‘street date’, we jumped 11,000% on the IMDb ‘Moviemeter’ and we were shocked.”

With pirates fueling interest in the movie, a member of the team took an unusual step. Producer Eric Wilkinson wrote to RLSlog, a popular piracy links site – not to berate pirates – but to thank them for catapulting the movie to fame.

“Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download. Most of the feedback from everyone who has downloaded ‘The Man From Earth’ has been overwhelmingly positive. People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the net!” he wrote.
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“Once we realized what was going on, we asked people to make donations to our PayPal page if they saw the movie for free and liked it, because we had all worked for nothing for two years to bring it to the screen, and the only chance we had of surviving financially was to ask people to support us and the project,” Schenkman explains.

“And, happily, many people around the world did donate, although of course only a tiny fraction of the millions and millions of people who downloaded pirated copies.”

Following this early boost The Man from Earth went on to win multiple awards. And, a decade on, it boasts a hugely commendable 8/10 score on IMDb from more than 147,000 voters, with Netflix users leaving over 650,000 ratings, which reportedly translates to well over a million views.
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Yesterday the team behind the movie took matters into their own hands, uploading the movie to The Pirate Bay and other sites so that fans can help themselves.

“It was going to get uploaded regardless of what we did or didn’t do, and we figured that as long as this was inevitable, we would do the uploading ourselves and explain why we were doing it,” Schenkman informs TF.

“And, we would once again reach out to the filesharing community and remind them that while movies may be free to watch, they are not free to make, and we need their support.”

The release, listed here on The Pirate Bay, comes with detailed notes and a few friendly pointers on how the release can be further shared. It also informs people how they can show their appreciation if they like it.

Source: The Man from Earth Sequel ‘Pirated’ on The Pirate Bay – By Its Creators – TorrentFreak

And this is how you make money in the digital age!

Crypto-cash exchange BitConnect pulls plug amid Bitcoin bloodbath

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Amid a cryptocurrency price correction that has seen the price of Bitcoin drop by half from its mid-December peak, UK-based cyber-cash lending and exchange biz BitConnect said it is shutting down.

The firm, dogged by accusations that it is a Ponzi scheme, cited bad press, regulatory orders, and cyber attacks for its market exit this week.

BitConnect said it has received two cease-and-desist letters from US financial watchdogs: one from the Texas State Securities Board, and one from the Securities Division of North Carolina’s Secretary of State.

The letter from Texas authorities, an emergency cease-and-desist order sent January 3, 2018, charges the company with fraud and misleading investors.

The letter from North Carolina authorities observes that BitConnect’s purported rate of return amounts to about 3,000 per cent annually.

Noting that such rates “are extremely unusual in financial markets,” the North Carolina letter stated: “Guaranteed annual compounded investment returns of over 3,000 per cent are a known ‘red-flag’ for fraud, specifically for the risk that the investment may be a ‘Ponzi scheme.'”

Source: Crypto-cash exchange BitConnect pulls plug amid Bitcoin bloodbath • The Register

Computer program that tries to determine if you reoffend is racist, wrong and been in use since 2000.

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One widely used criminal risk assessment tool, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS; Northpointe, which rebranded itself to “equivant” in January 2017), has been used to assess more than 1 million offenders since it was developed in 1998. The recidivism prediction component of COMPAS—the recidivism risk scale—has been in use since 2000. This software predicts a defendant’s risk of committing a misdemeanor or felony within 2 years of assessment from 137 features about an individual and the individual’s past criminal record.

Although the data used by COMPAS do not include an individual’s race, other aspects of the data may be correlated to race that can lead to racial disparities in the predictions. In May 2016, writing for ProPublica, Angwin et al. (2) analyzed the efficacy of COMPAS on more than 7000 individuals arrested in Broward County, Florida between 2013 and 2014. This analysis indicated that the predictions were unreliable and racially biased. COMPAS’s overall accuracy for white defendants is 67.0%, only slightly higher than its accuracy of 63.8% for black defendants. The mistakes made by COMPAS, however, affected black and white defendants differently: Black defendants who did not recidivate were incorrectly predicted to reoffend at a rate of 44.9%, nearly twice as high as their white counterparts at 23.5%; and white defendants who did recidivate were incorrectly predicted to not reoffend at a rate of 47.7%, nearly twice as high as their black counterparts at 28.0%. In other words, COMPAS scores appeared to favor white defendants over black defendants by underpredicting recidivism for white and overpredicting recidivism for black defendants.
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We have shown that commercial software that is widely used to predict recidivism is no more accurate or fair than the predictions of people with little to no criminal justice expertise who responded to an online survey.
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Although Northpointe does not reveal the details of their COMPAS software, we have shown that their prediction algorithm is equivalent to a simple linear classifier. In addition, despite the impressive sounding use of 137 features, it would appear that a linear classifier based on only 2 features—age and total number of previous convictions—is all that is required to yield the same prediction accuracy as COMPAS.

The question of accurate prediction of recidivism is not limited to COMPAS. A review of nine different algorithmic approaches to predicting recidivism found that eight of the nine approaches failed to make accurate predictions (including COMPAS) (13). In addition, a meta-analysis of nine algorithmic approaches found only moderate levels of predictive accuracy across all approaches and concluded that these techniques should not be solely used for criminal justice decision-making, particularly in decisions of preventative detention
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When considering using software such as COMPAS in making decisions that will significantly affect the lives and well-being of criminal defendants, it is valuable to ask whether we would put these decisions in the hands of random people who respond to an online survey because, in the end, the results from these two approaches appear to be indistinguishable.

Source: The accuracy, fairness, and limits of predicting recidivism | Science Advances