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<\/p>\nWelcome to another edition of the WNR. We have quite a bit to go through today, everything from a Chinese\u00a0’50 Shade of Grey’ to Blu-ray malware.\u00a0It’s nice to have news stories to write about.<\/p>\n
No time to waste, so let’s get started.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>50 Shades of Grey – Chinese Style!<\/p><\/div>\n
Those not wanting to give money to anyone involved with the ’50 Shades of Grey’ phenomenon (book of film), or those that are simply too embarrassed to go see it at the cinema\u00a0will have been waiting for a good quality pirated version of the film. The morality of illegal downloading aside, the news that a very good quality HD version of the film ripped straight from a legal streaming outlet who had early access to the film will have been received as a piece of very good news indeed. But there’s a catch<\/a> – this newly uploaded version is\u00a0the PG-13, censored,\u00a0airline version of the film, or to be more precisely, the Chinese government approved version of the film.<\/p>\n In other words, it’s the version with all the “good” bits removed, nudity, sex scenes or pretty much the only reason you’d ever even consider watching a film like this. If there’s one Chinese censor approved\u00a0film\u00a0this year that you have to\u00a0watch, this film is not it.<\/p>\n ——<\/p>\n The sleazy\u00a0world of political lobbying has been revealed by Google’s lawsuit against the state Attorney General of Mississippi\u00a0Jim Hood. Hood\u00a0started an investigation last year to discover whether\u00a0Google\u00a0is guilty of helping to distribute copyrighted content, but it was later revealed (ironically via the hacked Sony emails) that the MPAA was the one pulling all the strings<\/a>, even going as far as creating an astroturf group (the\u00a0Digital Citizens Alliance) and helping Hood draft letters that the AG was signing and sending to Google. All of this was an attempt by the MPAA to bring back SOPA.<\/p>\n Going back to AG Hood’s original claims, while there is no doubt that you can find pirated content via Google,\u00a0but you can also find pretty much everything\u00a0else on Google (um, that’s what a search engine does). It’s like making Yellow Pages\u00a0responsible for\u00a0all the actions of every company listed in the phone book.<\/p>\n Google promptly sued Hood to stop his investigation, and this week, a Federal court judged granted a temporary injunction against the investigation<\/a>. While this is definitely a victory (judges don’t tend to grant temporary injunctions, and may even throw\u00a0out the case altogether, if there’s nothing backing Google’s claims), it’s only a minor one as\u00a0this\u00a0TR only issued to ensures the “status quo”, as the judge puts it. A full trial will still be needed to determine whether\u00a0Attorney General\u00a0Hood and his MPAA buddies will get to blame Google for everything that’s wrong with the world today.<\/p>\n The Big cinema chains,\u00a0AMC, Regal, Cinemark and Carmike, are starting to get increasingly worried about the death of the release window,\u00a0especially now that Netflix is getting into the movie releasing business in a very serious way this year. Netflix has several first-run movies planned for simultaneous theatrical and streaming release set for this year, including the sequel to ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. The chains, worried that their monopoly on movies released during the typical 90-day release window, are boycotting any film that does not have this exclusive window.<\/p>\n Movie cinema chains have Netflix in their sights<\/p><\/div>\n The latest release to get banned<\/a> is\u00a0‘Beasts of No Nation’, starring The Wire’s Idris Elba and directed by True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga, a drama following the tale of a\u00a0child soldier in Africa. Netflix purchased the rights to the film and will be making it a streaming exclusive when it is released later in the year, but has been seeking a theatrical release for the film that many considers an Oscar contender. With the\u00a0big cinema chains all boycotting the film, it will be up to the smaller independent chains to pick up the slack, with around 250 screens set to show the film (a drop in the ocean\u00a0compared to the number of screens owned by the big chains – Regal, the biggest chain, has more than 7,300 screens alone in North America).<\/p>\n So instead of giving viewers the choice between legal streaming and the full theatrical experience, the big chains appear willing to use their market power to maintain their precious release window, not realising that\u00a0they’d still have to “compete” with another form of free digital movie viewing – piracy.<\/p>\n ——<\/p>\n A warning for those that download Blu-ray ISOs to burn their own discs, you could be burning a disc that launches malware on any computer, or selected Blu-ray hardware disc players, that plays it. Security consultants have found a vulnerability<\/a> that allows malicious code to be launched via a Blu-ray movie’s BD-J interactive content. The most obvious attack vector is though the PC based Blu-ray player software PowerDVD, where a flaw in the software allows BD-j applets to run outside of the normal sandboxed environment and access the OS and file systems. Those with hardware Blu-ray players are not immune either, as a second vulnerability allows root access to Blu-ray players when the malicious code is launched.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n