News written by Petteri Pyyny (November, 2019)

In our article series, we're digging into AfterDawn's news archive and looking what happened exactly 20 years ago. This article series also celebrates AfterDawn's 20th anniversary.

So, we're digging into our news archive and trying to figure out what was hot and what was not, back in November, 1999 when our site was only four months old. I'd like to remind you, our readers, that back then, AfterDawn was strictly focused on digital audio and video technologies and reporting events in those genres. More generic "all about tech" arrived to our site much later.

New file sharing software pop up almost daily

As Napster has grabbed the headlines across the world, competitors appear on almost daily basis to take a slice of the growing file sharing business. Legal or not, there's a goldrush among software developers those days, hoping that somehow, file sharing would be deemed legal and one of the players would emerge out of the wars as the winner.

In our news back in November, 1999, we covered several software releases related to file sharing software. One of the strongest players back then was CuteMX. Software itself didn't live for very long, as the developers decided to call it quits after Napster's troubles with the law started to grow. But for a very short time, back then, it was considered as the top contender to Napster - superior technically in many ways.

Read more...

In one of those "WHAT?" decisions, Google has removed one of the most popular torrent client, LibreTorrent from its Android app store.

LibreTorrent has become extremely popular among Android users simply bacuse it doesn't use aggressive advertising and it simple works as should. So, as the app has a good reputation, it has sparked tons of copycats in Google Play store, with name variations created from LibreTorrent's official name. Typically, those clones use 3rd party torrent code and come bundled with massive pile of aggressive advertising, creating a bad user experience.

One would imagine that Google would clean its store by kicking out the copycats?

Nope. Instead, Google has decided to remove the official LibreTorrent from its store.

After this rather surprising move, the developer of the app filed an appeal to get his app listed back to the Play store. Google, however, refused to do so, stating that "We don't allow apps that spam users or Google Play, such as apps that are duplicative and low-quality".

Good reasoning. Only problem with that is the fact that it applies to all the LibreTorrent clones, not to the official product itself. Only way for the author to get the app listed again would be to change its name and add it as a completely new app to the Play Store - losing the millions of downloads, reviews and the name recognition of the app. The very name recognition that caused the mess in the first place.

Read more...

It was kinda inevitable, really. TV series piracy is booming again, thanks to a one TV series that is availabke only in handful of countries.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this one out. Star Wars universe has always been extrenely popular - and in recent years, even more so. In fact, the final movie in the original movie series is set to hit the movie theaters in December, 2019. Then, you create a first live action, made-for-adults TV series to the Star Wars universe, with massive budget. Series gets extremely good ratings in IMDB (pilot has the average of 9.3/10 and two other episodes have also average around 8.5/10).

Only legal way to watch the series is recently launched Disney+ service.

And Disney+ service is only available in five countries in the world.

What happens? You have a massive amount of people who are eager to watch the show, no matter what.

So, even those people who kinda dropped the whole torrenting business half a decade ago or so - when Netflix et al finally arrived to most countries, providing a legal way to binge-watch movies and TV shows - are back into the piracy game again. Disney+ is currently available only in United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand.

Read more...

Facebook who owns the extremely popular messaging app WhatsApp has announced that they have found a potentially very dangerous security problem with WhatsApp.

Issue is related to video playback within the WhatsApp software and namely, to a buffer overflow problem related to MP4 videos. Malicious party can send a specially crafted MP4 video file to the recipient and hijack the phone, without user even knowing about it.

The video itself would play just fine, but in the background, the specially crafted MP4 file could open the phone operating system for hackers to run their own code on the phone. Such malicious code can be pretty much anything: mining cryptocurrency for the criminals, sending out millions of spam emails to other recipients, to be part of a denial-of-service attacks against other services, etc.

The bug is related to parsing the elementary stream metadata of MP4 video files.

There's a patched version of WhatsApp available for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone users.

Affected versions:

• Android versions prior to 2.19.274
• iOS versions prior to 2.19.100
• Enterprise Client versions prior to 2.25.3
• Windows Phone versions before and including 2.18.368

So, head to your phone's app store immediately and update your WhatsApp right away!