Khan Academy Teamed Up With BitTorrent Inc.

Someone else chose to team up with BitTorrent Inc.: the Khan Academy has released its own video catalogue app, which will provide more than two thousand educational videos to the BitTorrent users.

When BitTorrent Inc. introduced the App Studio to the BitTorrent community, it immediately started looking for ways to cooperate with musicians and other content creators, offering them a new distribution instrument enabling the artists reach millions of Internet users throughout the globe.

Now BitTorrent Inc. has teamed up with the Khan Academy. Their collaboration resulted in a new video catalogue app release that will offer more than two thousand award-winning educational videos. Salman Khan, founder and executive director at the Khan Academy, believes that BitTorrent is one of the best platforms to help the Academy fulfill its mission of providing high-quality education to people wherever they are and whoever they are. The Academy also confirmed that BitTorrent Inc. provides video creators and publishers an excellent opportunity to promote. For example, this technology lets users to download heavy video files with good speeds, without requiring costly hosting or any infrastructure on their end, which is considered an important factor for non-profit organizations.

Thus far, the Academy made the following classes available for BitTorrent users:

1. Scale of the Galaxy

2. Evolution and Natural Selection: Introduction

3. Algebra: Solving Inequalities

4. Atom: Introduction

5. History of the French Revolution

Currently the Khan Academy app can be reached through both the BitTorrent mainline and uTorrent applications.

Chief strategist at BitTorrent, Shahi Ghanem, admitted that the company was honored to help the Khan Academy bring knowledge and education to anyone throughout the world. He called the project a perfect example of why the company launched its App Studio platform. The main goal of the platform introduction was to help content creators connect with the huge user base of BitTorrent Inc. This way, the company also enjoys the advantage of empowering the Academy to provide millions of Internet users with free access to world-class educational content. Since BitTorrent believes it’s a truly worthy cause, it is looking forward to further cooperation with the Khan Academy and inviting other socially-conscious content creators to employ this innovative content distribution model.

MPAA Threatened To Disconnect Google

Within recent months, Google has been reported to receive dozens of copyright infringement notifications from the MPAA-affiliated film studios. Although such warnings are largely directed at users of the company’s public Wi-Fi service, some of them still seem to be directed at employees located at its headquarters. The warning letters say that the entertainment industry is unhappy and notifies Google that it might get disconnected from the web.

The largest movie studios and record labels constantly send out thousands of notifications to users alleged of sharing their copyrighted content through BitTorrent networks. Such notices are only meant to inform of wrongdoing, working as follows. The rights owner hires some firm to track down Internet users sharing certain files on file-sharing networks. Such firms simply join the swarm and request these files from others. After having someone sharing a piece of the file with them, the company logs the IP-address, look up the Internet service provider and automatically send it a warning.

While major part of the warnings is sent out to the largest broadband providers, asking to forward them to the users in question, Google also appears receiving quite a few. Over a hundred of those automated messages have been sent to the search giant within the past several months.

As the company offers Wi-Fi hotspots in some places, the infringers usually don’t actually share content directly from Google’s headquarters, but some of the notices do appear to be aimed at the company’s employees. This is, at least, a very awkward situation for a search giant trying to help out the copyright holders by implementing a censorship policy towards some of the BitTorrent-related terms. It may sound funny, but Google runs the risk of losing its Internet connection, as the movie companies believe that copyright violation also means a violation of Google’s ISP’s terms of service and should cause a disconnection from the Internet.

A few of the warnings sent to Google’s headquarters are published on ChillingEffects, so it’s not clear whether the search giant has forwarded them to employees or not. Meanwhile, the most recent warnings received by Google have been sent on behalf of Columbia Pictures and Paramount Pictures for the illegal sharing of “The Green Hornet” and “The Fighter” accordingly. On the whole, the search giant has published over twenty of these notifications in the last month.

Sony Turned To Rootkits Again?

Sony’s problems with PlayStation 3 began when its root keys were discovered and published in the Internet. Today the company is making another effort to fight against jailbreakers – the rumors are that Sony is using the latest firmware update to upload rootkit on to the console in order to spy on users.

In fact, it seems like the troubles of 2005 are all over again. 6 years ago Sony tried to curb music piracy of its albums, encoding the CDs with the infamous SunnComm/MediaMaxx technology, which was highly questionable under law. Actually, the mentioned technology installed a rootkit on to users’ PCs, unable to be detected by any anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Once this was discovered in the technology, virus writers simply hid their malware in rootkits and anti-virus software had no power against it. In other words,

Sony’s protections schemes went too far, which led to litigation in many countries. Finally, by 2007, the lawsuits against the company were settled.

Now the situation is similar: after the root keys to Sony’s PS3 had been posted online by a user nicknamed GeoHot, it became clear that games not authorized by the company can now be played. The company required that the tools used to find the root keys be handed over, but the user said it makes no sense because the keys are now public.

Although it seemed like there’s little Sony can do about it, it was wrong. CNet suggested that the company has been distributing a new firmware update, which is reported to contain rootkit technology, again. It would spy on users’ consoles to make sure they are playing only authorized games. Meanwhile, the report of CNet mentions that Sony has yet to activate this code.

If it is really so, this could cause more legal problems for the company. First of all, the very idea that some piece of software could spy on gamers will raise several legal privacy concerns. So far it is doubtful that such technology would be legal in the United States. Meanwhile, Canada has even tougher privacy laws, which also decreases the chances of such scheme being legal. By the way, privacy concerns became a huge problem for the company in Canada 6 years ago.

Actually, it’s really quite striking that the company might even consider choose this way again. If Sony really decides to try this, it would have to go over privacy legislation in every country to ensure it isn’t breaking any laws, at the very least.