Daily Archives: July 10, 2019

Prenda Law bosses in jail for seeding porn videos to d/l sites and then suing the downloaders

Posted on by

One of the former attorneys behind dodgy copyright-demand factory Prenda Law has been sentenced to 60 months in prison. Yes, the same Prenda Law that seeded file-sharing networks with smut flicks it owned the rights to in order to extract eye-watering copyright infringement settlements from downloaders.

Judge Joan Ericksen, of a US federal district court in Minnesota, on Tuesday this week handed down the five-year term, along with two years of supervised release and a $1,541,527.37 restitution bill, after Steele copped to one count each of conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. While technically given two 60-month sentences, Steele, 48, is being allowed to serve both terms at the same time.

Steele, who has since been disbarred, admitted that from 2011 to 2014 he and co-conspirator Paul Hansmeier, operating as Prenda Law, set up a series of shell companies and studios that either purchased the rights to existing pornographic films or funded the making of original films with the intent of anonymously sticking the dirty movies on the Pirate Bay.

The duo then tracked down people who had downloaded the films and threatened them with copyright infringement suits unless the target agreed to pay out a $3,000 settlement. When the piracy scam started to flounder, the pair took things a step further by accusing targets of hacking their shell companies’ machines.

“To facilitate their phony ‘hacking’ lawsuits, the defendants recruited individuals who had been caught downloading pornography from a file-sharing website, to act as ruse ‘defendants’,” US prosecutors noted.

“These ruse defendants agreed to be sued and permit Steele and Hansmeier to conduct early discovery against their supposed ‘co-conspirators’ in exchange for Steele and Hansmeier waiving their settlement fees.”

Both lawyers would eventually be found out, and charged with fraud and money laundering for their roles in the scheme. By the time the operation was dismantled, it is estimated the duo was able to extort nearly $3m in payouts from randy web-surfers.

While five years behind bars can hardly be considered a slap on the wrist, Steele’s willingness to cooperate with authorities allowed him to win a considerably lighter term than his co-conspirator 37-year-old Hansmeier, who last month was sentenced to 14 years incarceration for convictions on the same set of charges. ®

Source: Prenda Law boss John Steele to miss 2020 Olympics… unless they show it in prison • The Register

AI Trained on Old Scientific Papers Makes Discoveries Humans Missed

Posted on by

In a study published in Nature on July 3, researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used an algorithm called Word2Vec sift through scientific papers for connections humans had missed. Their algorithm then spit out predictions for possible thermoelectric materials, which convert heat to energy and are used in many heating and cooling applications.

The algorithm didn’t know the definition of thermoelectric, though. It received no training in materials science. Using only word associations, the algorithm was able to provide candidates for future thermoelectric materials, some of which may be better than those we currently use.

[…]

To train the algorithm, the researchers assessed the language in 3.3 million abstracts related to material science, ending up with a vocabulary of about 500,000 words. They fed the abstracts to Word2vec, which used machine learning to analyze relationships between words.

“The way that this Word2vec algorithm works is that you train a neural network model to remove each word and predict what the words next to it will be,” Jain said. “By training a neural network on a word, you get representations of words that can actually confer knowledge.”

Using just the words found in scientific abstracts, the algorithm was able to understand concepts such as the periodic table and the chemical structure of molecules. The algorithm linked words that were found close together, creating vectors of related words that helped define concepts. In some cases, words were linked to thermoelectric concepts but had never been written about as thermoelectric in any abstract they surveyed. This gap in knowledge is hard to catch with a human eye, but easy for an algorithm to spot.

After showing its capacity to predict future materials, researchers took their work back in time, virtually. They scrapped recent data and tested the algorithm on old papers, seeing if it could predict scientific discoveries before they happened. Once again, the algorithm worked.

In one experiment, researchers analyzed only papers published before 2009 and were able to predict one of the best modern-day thermoelectric materials four years before it was discovered in 2012.

This new application of machine learning goes beyond materials science. Because it’s not trained on a specific scientific dataset, you could easily apply it to other disciplines, retraining it on literature of whatever subject you wanted. Vahe Tshitoyan, the lead author on the study, says other researchers have already reached out, wanting to learn more.

“This algorithm is unsupervised and it builds its own connections,” Tshitoyan said. “You could use this for things like medical research or drug discovery. The information is out there. We just haven’t made these connections yet because you can’t read every article.”

Source: AI Trained on Old Scientific Papers Makes Discoveries Humans Missed – VICE

Scientists 3D-print human skin and bone for Mars astronauts

Posted on by

Scientists from the University Hospital of Dresden Technical University in Germany bio-printed skin and bone samples upside down to help determine if the method could be used in a low-gravity environment. It worked. ESA released videos of the printing in action.

The skin sample was printed using human blood plasma as a “bio ink.” The researchers added plant and algae-based materials to increase the viscosity so it wouldn’t just fly everywhere in low gravity.

“Producing the bone sample involved printing human stem cells with a similar bio-ink composition, with the addition of a calcium phosphate bone cement as a structure-supporting material, which is subsequently absorbed during the growth phase,” said Nieves Cubo, a bioprinting specialist at the university.

These samples are just the first steps for the ESA’s ambitious 3D bio-printing project, which is investigating what it would take to equip astronauts with medical and surgical facilities to help them survive and treat injuries on long spaceflights and on Mars.

“Carrying enough medical supplies for all possible eventualities would be impossible in the limited space and mass of a spacecraft,” said Tommaso Ghidini, head of ESA’s Structures, Mechanisms and Materials Division. “Instead, a 3D bioprinting capability will let them respond to medical emergencies as they arise.”

Source: Scientists 3D-print human skin and bone for Mars astronauts – CNET