Movie streaming site is like 'Netflix for pirates': Dan Misener

By Dan Misener, CBC News Posted: Mar 11, 2014 9:24 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 11, 2014 3:50 PM ET

Dan Misener
Spark

Dan Misener is a technology journalist at the CBC. He works on Spark, CBC Radio’s technology show, and is also a columnist for CBCNews.ca.

It's been called “Netflix for pirates."

Popcorn Time is a new open source app for downloading and watching movies. It's dead simple: a list of movie genres on the left and a wall full of movie posters on the right. That's it. Click a poster, and you're presented with the option to "Watch it now."

Under the hood, Popcorn Time runs BitTorrent software optimized for streaming. This means almost no waiting for a download to finish; the movie starts playing immediately.

This immediacy and simplicity is by design.

"I have a lot of friends who don't understand torrents and I wanted to make it easy and effortless to use torrent technology," says one of the app's designers, going only by the name Sebastian, in an interview with TorrentFreak.

"It reminds me of Napster. It's so easy," says Gil Zvulony, a Toronto-based internet lawyer who has seen the application.

It may be easy, says Zvulony, but's it's not legal.

"Its primary use is to make copyrighted material available. It doesn't have any other use. It clearly infringes copyright according to the Canadian copyright act."

Screenshots on the Popcorn Time website show movie posters for very old public domain movies such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and The Three Stooges: Malice in the Palace (1949).

But if you actually download the software and look at what's available, it's almost exclusively pirated material, including recent Oscar nominees such as 12 Years a Slave, American Hustle, Gravity, Frozen… almost all of it copyrighted.

The Popcorn Time website carries a loud, yellow warning: "Downloading copyrighted material may be illegal in your country. Use at your own risk."

Zvulony thinks the app's creators are playing dumb, and are aware that people will use their software to infringe copyright.

Using Popcorn Time to download and watch movies may infringe copyright, but here in Canada, the financial risk to individuals is small. Back in 2012, Bill C-11 capped damages for non-commercial copyright infringement at $5,000.

"That's really for the worst type of case," explains Zvulony. Realistically, he says, "you're looking at $100 or $200 in terms of damages awarded, which makes it extremely uneconomical for movie studios to go after individual downloaders."

Though BitTorrent has a reputation as a "pirate" tool, it also has many non-infringing uses, such as the distribution of educational content for non-profit organizations. That said, piracy and copyright infringement seems to get the most attention.

For me, Popcorn Time feels significant because of how it pulls BitTorrent movie piracy from a world of sketchy torrent sites full of porn ads and scammy pop-ups into a simple, streamlined interface.

For years, services like iTunes and Netflix have been able to compete with piracy by offering the paid options in a cleaner, safer environment.

With Popcorn Time, it seems as though the bar has been raised on the pirates' side.

"It's like an arms race," says Zvulony. "There's always new innovation."

March 15: Beyond Antibiotics Mar. 12, 2014 12:06 PM This week on Quirks & Quarks, we look at the threat of a post-antibiotic world, and what new strategies researchers are looking at to cope with a world where antibiotics no longer work.

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'Phone spoofing' scammers disguise as local callers

Phone spoofing scammers use simple software to disguise their calls as local numbers. (CBC News)

Phone scammers are using software to mask their real identities by displaying a fake telephone number.

The trick is called 'phone spoofing.' It's a tool used by fraudsters to mislead people into thinking the call is from a reputable business or person. 

'They do not quit. It's about driving me to the brink of sanity,'- Mike Boychuk

Sometimes the number the scammer uses already belongs to a real person. 

Mike Boychuk, a real estate agent in Saskatoon, has been a victim of phone spoofing.

It all began last year when Boychuk started getting suspicious calls with the Saskatchewan 306 area code coming through on his work cell phone, personal cell phone and home number. When he would answer, an automated voice would inform him he had won a cruise or offer an exclusive deal on air miles.

"I'd get a call from a local —what appeared to be — cell phone," Boychuk said.

Mike Boychuk, a Saskatoon-based real estate agent, is a victim of phone spoofing. (Mikeboychuk.ca)

?Boychuk told CBC News he tried to ignore the calls, but a couple days after the calls started, regular people started calling him.

"I started getting people phoning me... they'd say 'I'm just calling you back', and I'd say 'who is this?'" Boychuk said. "I thought it was really strange because I hadn't made any calls."

After these sorts of calls persisted, Boychuk contacted his cell phone carrier, Telus Mobility.

Boychuk said Telus told him he was a victim of phone spoofing and assured him that the scammers usually used a particular number for only one or two weeks before they'd move on to another.

Chris Gerritsen, a spokesperson for Telus Mobility, told CBC News it is difficult for the company to actually help its customers who are repeatedly victims of the popular phone scam.

"It's very, very difficult to trace," Gerritsen said. "These spoofing applications are software that an individual loads onto their computer to use...it can't really be discerned which company is providing the spoofing service."

Telus Mobility said it is concerned about phone spoofing and has asked its customers to take precautionary measures against the scam.

"Don't give out your cell number to anyone other than those you trust," Gerritsen said.

However, precautionary measures won't help people like Boychuk. He said the calls still come on a regular basis.

"They do not quit ... It's about driving me to the brink of sanity because they call every number I have, my two cell phone numbers and my home number, maybe, at least twice a week," Boychuk said.

Canada's Anti Fraud Centre said victims of phone spoofing should immediately call their phone company when they realize what is happening.

"Your telephone or internet service provider may have the ability to determine the true IP address or telephone number but they must be informed quickly before this information is overwritten on their database," Canada's Anti Fraud Centre explains on its website.

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Oceans' worth of water stored deep in Earth

A dirty, $10 diamond with a prize inside has helped reveal that there are vast quantities of water stored deep inside the Earth.

The diamond formed in the "transition zone" around 410 to 660 kilometres below our planet's surface. Analysis of a mineral grain trapped inside it suggests that it came from surroundings that were about one per cent water, report researchers led by University of Alberta geochemist Graham Pearson. They published their  findings online in the journal Nature today.

If the sample is representative of that part of the deep Earth, the amount of water there could be "about the same as the mass of all the world’s oceans combined," wrote Hans Keppler, a geophysicist at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, in an analysis article.

That, in turn, changes our understanding of the way water cycles through our planet, and has implications for the way tectonic plates and volcanoes behave, Pearson notes.

Previously, geophysicists had debated about whether there could be water in the transition zone. Geophysical measurements from the surface had provided conflicting results.

The diamond has a bumpy surface, sculptured by corrosive fluids in the Earth's mantle on its way to the surface. (Richard Siemens, University of Alberta)

The new, hard evidence that there is water deep in the Earth comes from a tiny grain of rock — just four-hundredths of a millimetre in diameter — trapped inside the diamond.

That grain was made of ringwoodite — a form of the green mineral peridot that has never before been found on Earth, except in meteorites from space. That's because, like a diamond itself, it can only be made under extremely high pressures like those found so deep inside the Earth that they are inaccessible to humans.

"You can't run a field trip to those areas," Pearson said in a phone interview. "No one's ever even going to drill to those areas."

Typically, the amount of water in peridot is "vanishingly small," Pearson added.

But he and his colleagues probed the ringwoodite in the diamond with different kinds of light and looked for the signature of water. Their analysis showed the sample contained 1.5 per cent water by weight, suggesting that the transition zone where it formed is about one per cent water.

The layers of Earth above and below the transition zone, called the upper and lower mantles respectively, are each known to be "a desert for water," Pearson said.

'It actually looks as though it's been to hell and back, which it literally has.'- Graham Pearson, University of Alberta

"What we've found is an oasis of water in the transition zone."

A lot of that water was likely carried down by tectonic plates that were originally at the bottom of the oceans, Pearson said — "water that we would call recycled, that comes from Earth's surface and then is put back down into the Earth."

Although scientists hadn't acknowledged until recently that the planet's water might make these kinds of underground voyages, it makes sense, Pearson added. That's because huge amounts of water from the depths of the Earth are constantly being spewed by volcanoes into the oceans and atmosphere.

"If that weren't replenished, then the interior of the Earth would just become a dry desert," he said. "So it's part of what we call the water cycle."

The water now known to exist deep in Earth may help scientists better understand major geological processes.

"Really it's the essence of how plate tectonics works, because water weakens rocks," Pearson said. "And also, water lowers the melting point of rock, so water dictates where many of the Earth's volcanoes are found."

Ringwoodite is a form of the mineral found on Earth's surface as peridot (the birthstone for the month of August) or olivine. In fact, the grain trapped inside the diamond likely started its life as an ordinary grain of olivine on a plate at the bottom of the ocean, Pearson said.

At some point, the plate was pushed down to the transition zone. There, the high pressure compresses the peridot into a different kind of crystal — one that is mostly denser than regular peridot, but features regularly spaced pores that allow it to suck up surrounding water like a sponge: ringwoodite.

The grain of ringwoodite became trapped in a diamond that has kept it preserved under high pressure. The diamond eventually transported it up to Earth's surface via a type of volcanic rock called kimberlite, which can erupt very quickly from extreme depths.

The diamond, a bumpy, dirty brown stone, just three millimetres wide, eventually ended up in the gravel at the bottom of a shallow river in Mato Grosso, Brazil, where it was scooped up by artisan miners in 2008.

"It actually looks as though it's been to hell and back, which it literally has," said Pearson, who estimates his research team bought the 90-milligram (0.45 carat) diamond for about $10.

Back at the University of Alberta, his graduate student John McNeill examined the rock using an instrument called a Raman microscope in the hopes that it might contain a calcium-rich mineral that would provide information about how old the diamond was.

The instrument belonged to Enrica Nestola, who happened to walk into the lab while McNeill was puzzling over what he was seeing.

That was a stroke of luck.

Nestola "is one of the handful of people in the word who would have known instantly what that was and identified it as ringwoodite," Pearson said. "And if that hadn't happened, then we would have just put this diamond on the pile and kept looking for what we were supposed to be looking for."

Pearson, who is a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Arctic Resources, added that the story illustrates the importance of basic and not just applied research, since scientists often make major discoveries "almost by chance" while looking for something completely different.

"But of course," he said, "you don't make discoveries like that unless you're looking in the first place."

A cross-section of Earth shows the location of ringwoodite, which makes up approximately 60 per cent by volume of the lower transition zone. The diagram also shows how water gets transported down to those depths, and how diamonds and water move back to the surface. (Kathy Mather)

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