HomeWeekly News Roundup (February 12, 2017)
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. For those lucky enough to have a special someone that deserve special treatment on the day, I hope you’ve already got plans in motion, bookings made (or it’s going to be crazy trying to book something on the day). For those that feel happy to be alone on the day, I hope you have a relaxing night with a good movie (I recommend ‘Gone Girl’).
As for the news this week, it’s nice and short again this week …
Decision to delay hit movie could see massive piracy surge
Not nice and not short is the delay us Australians have to put up with if we want to watch The LEGO Batman Movie. At least if we want to watch it legally. In order to release the movie closer to our school holidays, media company Village Roadshow decided to delay the movie from its original February 10th release date to March 30th, some 48 days after the U.S. release. 42 other countries will get to watch the movie before it’s available in the country, despite the fact that a large part of the movie was actually made in Australia.
Consumer group CHOICE wants ordinary Aussies angered by the delay to voice their concerns to Village Roadshow, a media company whose co-founder Graham Burke has been a vocal advocate of tougher copyright laws. CHOICE says that instead of lobbying politicians to introduce laws that would grant “excessive website blocking powers” to rights-holders, the same rights-holders should take a good look at themselves to see if there are simple actions that they can take to prevent piracy.
Simple actions such as not making us wait 48 days for an eagerly anticipated movie, might be a good start!
Denuvo in the news lately for all the wrong reason
Speaking of simple actions, content protection company Denuvo really should have taken the simple actions to protect their own website, that most web admins would have done straight away when setting up a new website. Without disabling directory listings, and having sensitive files web viewable without any sort of protection, Denuvo’s website was made wide open and several sensitive files, including confidential emails. A list of game companies (and their email, phone numbers) that wanted Denuvo’s services were obtained from the emails, which also surprisingly included a request from Google for more information on the company’s security products.
It’s an embarrassing, but so far not too damaging, development for Denuvo, who have suffered some major setbacks recently in regards to their gaming DRM-but-not-a-DRM. The company is said to be rolling out a more secure version of its game protection engine following the record five day cracking of the protection for the game Resident Evil 7.
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And that’s about it for this nice and short week. See you in seven!