All Activity

Rumors are suggesting that AMD has renamed the AMD Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards to RX 9000. The RX 9070 XT GPU is likely to launch with FSR 4. It was rumored from a year now that AMD’s next-gen series of desktop graphics cards will be named RX 8000 and it won’t come with top range flagship models. However, just a day ago, VideoCardz reported how the most expensive graphics card in the next-gen AMD Radeon RX lineup will not be RX 8800 XT. Instead, it would be RX 9070 XT. This suggests a branding rename. Later, well known leaker @All_The_Watts has revealed the model names of the next-gen AMD Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards. Which basically confirms the renaming. The multiple tweets reveal that AMD is going to launch at least of 5 graphics cards in the RX 9000 series for desktops: AMD Radeon™ RX 9070 XT Graphics AMD Radeon™ RX 9070 Graphics AMD Radeon™ RX 9060 Series Graphics AMD Radeon™ RX 9050 Series Graphics AMD Radeon™ RX 9040 Series Graphics In a followup tweet, it’s also revealed that AMD is planning to release at least two new models are a refresh in the current RX 7000 series for desktops: AMD Radeon™ RX 7750 Series Graphics AMD Radeon™ RX 7650 Series Graphics In yet another tweet, it’s revealed that: RX 9070 XT is going to be slower than RX 7900 XT. RX 9070 XT will equal or will be faster than RX 7900 GRE. RX 9070 will have similar performance as that of RX 7800 XT. RX 9070 XT will have a bus-width of 256-bits. RX 9070 will have a bus-width of 192-bits. The lower powered Navi 44 GPUs will come with a bus-width of 128-bits and 96-bits. Navi 48 graphics cards (RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT) will cost min $449 to max $649. Navi 44 graphics cards (RX 9060 XT and lower) will cost min $179 to max $349. RX 9070 XT Performance In another tweet, @All_The_Watts has shared possible benchmark results from 3DMark TimeSpy. Going by that data, Tomasz Gawroński has shown that RX 9070 XT is likely to be: 12% faster than RX 7800 XT 2% faster than RX 7900 GRE 16% slower than RX 7900 XT 6% faster than RX 6950 XT 16% faster than RX 6800 XT 1% faster than RTX 4070 Ti 5% slower than RTX 4070 Ti Super 5% faster than RTX 3090 Ti 9% faster than RTX 4070 Super RX 9000 GPU Series To Launch With FSR 4 & 9000X3D CPU Another well known leaker, @AnhPhuH has shared something important too. The tweet reveals that the RX 9070 XT, which is possibly going to be the first graphics card in the RX 9000 series and is expected to release in early January next year, is going to launch with FSR 4. We had reported earlier that AMD is already working on FSR 4 and it’s going to be AI based. Unlike current-gen FSR 3 and FSR 2 that mostly rely on the GPU’s processing power alone to run it. So while FSR 4 releasing so early might be a surprise for many, it’s not unexpected. The other thing that the tweet reveals that the RX 9070 XT graphics card is going to launch along with R9 X3D CPU. With Ryzen 9800X3D already launched with good reviews, we expect the CPU to be Ryzen 9900X3D or Ryzen 9950X3D or both. Conclusion AMD renaming the RX 8000 series to RX 9000 series is fine. After all, it matches the CPU series. Problem is that they have renamed the models too. The RX 9070 XT should have been RX 9700 XT. But AMD went the Nvidia way in naming the models. This is bad marketing. Especially because the series which follows the RX 9000 series might have an entirely new series name. So shifting the model names like this for just one series makes no sense. As for performance and price. It’s said that there are no good or bad graphics cards. There are good or badly priced graphics cards. If AMD wants to compete with Nvidia, it has to price them aggressively. Something we don’t see AMD doing here. FSR 4 is much welcome. It’s likely that it will be exclusive to the RX 9000 series due to it being AI based. But it’s to be seen what AMD can do with it. Meanwhile, VideoCardz has reported how AMD has already mistakenly revealed the images of the RX 9070 XT in an advertisement posted online. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Google is offering a far more pared-down solution to the court’s ruling that it illegally monopolized search. After its victory against Google in an antitrust trial earlier this year, the Department of Justice recently proposed a sweeping set of changes its search business. The DOJ put a lot on the table, demanding that Google sell its Chrome browser, syndicate its search results, and avoid exclusive deals with companies like Apple for default search placement. It even kept open the possibility of forcing an Android sale. Now, Google has responded with a far simpler proposal: prohibit those default placement deals, and only for three years. A court found Google liable for unlawfully monopolizing online search, and its remedies are supposed to reset the market, letting rivals fairly compete. Google (obviously) disagrees that it’s running a monopoly, but before it can appeal that underlying conclusion, it’s trying to limit the fallout if it loses. Google’s justification is that search deals were at the heart of the case, so they’re what a court should target. Under the proposal, Google couldn’t enter deals with Android phone manufacturers that require adding mobile search in exchange for access to other Google apps. It couldn’t require phone makers to exclude rival search engines or third-party browsers. Browser companies like Mozilla would be given more flexibility in setting rival search engines as defaults. Perhaps the biggest concession is that this agreement would specifically end Google’s long-running multibillion-dollar search deal with Apple. It would bar Google from entering agreements that make Google Search the default engine on any “proprietary Apple feature or functionality, including Siri and Spotlight” in the US — unless the deal lets Apple choose a different default search engine on its browser annually and “expressly permits” it to promote other search engines. And in a nod to some DOJ concerns about Google locking out rival AI-powered search tools and chatbots, Google proposes it should be disallowed from requiring phone makers to add its Gemini Assistant mobile app in order to access other Google offerings. The government has proposed ten years of restrictions, but Google’s counterproposal is only three — it argues nothing more is necessary because “the pace of innovation in search has been extraordinary” and regulating a “fast-changing industry” like search would slow innovation. If the court accepts Google’s streamlined proposal over the DOJ’s, the company could lose out on some lucrative or strategically advantageous deals, but its business would remain intact. It wouldn’t have to spin out its Chrome browser or have the threat of an Android divestment order hanging over it. And it wouldn’t need to share many of the underlying signals that help it figure out how to serve useful search results, so that rivals could catch up and serve as a true competitive pressure, as the DOJ hopes. Both Google and the DOJ’s proposals are essentially starting points from which the judge can work. But Google is betting it could have an easier time selling a simple proposal that addresses a major, specific problem raised in the trial. It’s positioning the government’s proposals as extreme and reaching beyond the scope of the judge’s earlier decision, perhaps — Google will likely tell the court — even in a way that could get overturned on appeal. This hasn’t been received well by at least one of Google’s rivals, the search engine company DuckDuckGo. “Google’s proposal attempts to maintain the status quo and change as little as possible,” spokesperson Kamyl Bazbaz said in a statement. Both sides will argue their case in a federal court in Washington, DC beginning on April 22. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

A YouTuber claims that Honey intercepts money from affiliates and that it ignores better deals in favor of its own coupons. The PayPal Honey browser extension is, in theory, a handy way to find better deals on products while you’re shopping online. But in a video published this weekend, YouTuber MegaLag claims the extension is a “scam” and that Honey has been “stealing money from influencers, including the very ones they paid to promote their product.” Honey works by popping up an offer to find coupon codes for you while you’re checking out in an online shop. But as MegaLag notes, it frequently fails to find a code, or offers a Honey-branded one, even if a simple internet search will cover something better. The Honey website’s pitch is that it will “find every working promo code on the internet.” But according to MegaLag’s video, ignoring better deals is a feature of Honey’s partnerships with its retail clients. MegaLag also says Honey will hijack affiliate revenue from influencers. According to MegaLag, if you click on an affiliate link from an influencer, Honey will then swap in its own tracking link when you interact with its deal pop-up at check-out. That’s regardless of whether Honey found you a coupon or not, and it results in Honey getting the credit for the sale, rather than the YouTuber or website whose link led you there. Paypal VP of corporate communications Josh Criscoe said in an email to The Verge that “Honey follows industry rules and practices, including last-click attribution.” MegaLag isn’t the first to make such claims. A 2021 Twitter post advises using Honey’s discount codes in a different browser to avoid it taking the affiliate credit. A Linus Media Group employee also explained in a 2022 forum reply that Linus Tech Tips dropped Honey as a sponsor over its affiliate link practices. Honey’s convenience has resulted in the extension being recommended widely, including in almost 5,000 Honey-sponsored videos across about 1,000 YouTube channels, according to MegaLag. We’ve even recommended it here at The Verge; now we do not. Here is Criscoe’s full statement: Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

440-pound 1980s behemoth rescued from an Osaka restaurant days before demolition. At this point, any serious retro gamer knows that a bulky cathode ray tube (CRT) TV provides the most authentic, lag-free experience for game consoles that predate the era of flat-panel HDTVs (i.e,. before the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era). But modern gamers used to massive flat panel HD displays might balk at the display size of the most common CRTs, which tend to average in the 20- to 30-inch range (depending on the era they were made). For those who want the absolute largest CRT experience possible, Sony's KX-45ED1 model (aka PVM-4300) has become the stuff of legends. The massive 45-inch CRT was sold in the late '80s for a whopping $40,000 (over $100,000 in today's dollars), according to contemporary reports. That price means it wasn't exactly a mass-market product, and the limited supply has made it something of a white whale for CRT enthusiasts to this day. While a few pictures have emerged of the PVM-4300 in the wild and in marketing materials, no collector has stepped forward with detailed footage of a working unit. The PVM-4300, seen dwarfing the tables and chairs at an Osaka noodle restaurant. Credit: Shank Mods Enter Shank Mods, a retro gaming enthusiast and renowned maker of portable versions of non-portable consoles. In a fascinating 35-minute video posted this weekend, he details his years-long effort to find and secure a PVM-4300 from a soon-to-be-demolished restaurant in Japan and preserve it for years to come. A confirmed white whale sighting Shank Mods' quest started in earnest in October 2022, when the moderator of the Console Modding wiki, Derf, reached out with a tip on a PVM-4300 sighting in the wild. A 7-year-old Japanese blog post included a photo of the massive TV that could be sourced to a waiting room of the Chikuma Soba noodle restaurant and factory in Osaka, Japan. The find came just in time, as Chikuma Soba's website said the restaurant was scheduled to move to a new location in mere days, after which the old location would be demolished. Shank Mods took to Twitter looking to recruit an Osaka local in a last-ditch effort to save the TV from destruction. Local game developer Bebe Tinari responded to the call and managed to visit the site, confirming that the TV still existed and even turned on. Quite possibly the world's largest game of Duck Hunt (which doesn't work on stock flat-panel TVs). Credit: Shank Mods After a nerve-wracking quest to contact the restaurant's owner, Shank Mods confirmed that he could take possession of the TV if he could manage to handle the shipping himself. That left Shank Mods with two weeks to figure out how to get a 440-pound TV (and its specially designed, reinforced 171-pound stand) down from the second floor of an Osaka restaurant and to a safe location. Luckily, Tinari had a friend who worked for a company that regularly shipped large-scale industrial equipment internationally that would be able to help. Shank Mods wouldn't detail the precise cost they quoted to get the TV down the stairs, to a warehouse, crated up for air shipment to the US, and then shipped via truck to the garage of his (very tolerant) parents. But he did say that the "used car amount of money" that he was quoted was fronted by a video sponsor, helping him save this piece of television history from the bottom of a Japanese landfill. Shank Mods' full video detailing the PVM-4300 rescue process. It belongs in a museum The full video includes lots of footage and details of the shipping and unboxing process, and confirmation that the TV still works after its incredible journey. Shank Mods also includes a breakdown of the internal design and processing hardware that went into such a uniquely large CRT and an extended discussion of the intricate process of calibrating and tuning the tube to deliver a sharp, color-corrected picture after years of magnetic and electron beam drift. Shank Mods mentions multiple times in the video that this gigantic CRT looks much better in person than on a YouTube video. We can only hope he can raise the funds to turn his parents' garage into a public museum for classic gaming enthusiasts eager to make a pilgrimage to see the one-of-a-kind find for themselves. Or maybe an old-fashioned whistle-stop tour of the countryside can be arranged, hopefully on a specially designed train car with a reinforced floor. Let's make it happen, people! Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Venom: The Last Dance' tops the chart, followed by 'Red One'. 'Kraven The Hunter' completes the top three. The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources. This week we have two newcomers on the list. “Venom: The Last Dance” is the most shared title. The most torrented movies for the week ending on December 23 are: Movie Rank Rank last week Movie name IMDb Rating / Trailer Most downloaded movies via torrent sites 1 (2) Venom: The Last Dance 6.1 / trailer 2 (1) Red One 6.6 / trailer 3 (…) Kraven The Hunter 5.4 / trailer 4 (4 Carry On 6.6 / trailer 5 (3) Heretic 7.1 / trailer 6 (7) Gladiator II 6.9 / trailer 7 (…) Anora 8.0 / trailer 8 (5) Deadpool & Wolverine 8.2 / trailer 9 (8) Alien: Romulus 7.2 / trailer 10 (9) The Wild Robot 8.4 / trailer Note: We also publish an updating archive of all the list of weekly most torrented movies lists. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Windows users who are not satisfied with the stock UI in Windows 11 have plenty of apps to choose from to improve the default experience. StartAllBack is one such application, and it offers plenty of customization and improvements. With the latest update to version 3.9, StartAllBack received even more. StartAllBack 3.9, which is now available for download, introduces a "plump taskbar" option. It increases the taskbar margins and uses the stock Windows 11 pill-shape indicator to run apps. You can also switch between the attached and detached taskbar, with the latter having a small gap between the taskbar and the bottom edge of the screen for a floating look. Those who miss the fancy UI effects of Windows 7's taskbar can now enable Aura, which changes the highlight based on the app icon's primary color. Finally, with the latest update, you can restore the classic drive grouping from Windows 7's File Explorer. When enabled, this feature places removable drives into a separate group, making it easier to distinguish internal drives from removable, such as USB thumb drives, external SSDs, etc. In modern Windows versions, the OS crams them all into a single "Devices and drives" category, which is frankly inconvenient, especially when you have many drives. Here is the full changelog: Other features in StartAllBack include a proper dark mode for the entire operating system, different taskbar and Start menu styles, improved context menus, a more responsive user interface, Control Panel enhancements for Windows 11 users, and more. You can download StartAllBack from the official website. Alternatively, run Windows Terminal and type winget install startallback. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

A few days ago, Microsoft fixed a Microsoft Account (MSA)-related bug wherein users with legitimate Office 2024 licenses would apparently be unable to install the software. You can find the details about the issue in this article here. Besides that, the company also said that it was investigating another Microsoft 365-related bug wherein Office apps like Word, among others, would show a deactivation message that said: "Your Microsoft 365 license will be deactivated soon.... most features of Word will be disabled. Ask your Admin to reactivate your license". At the time, Microsoft had provided a workaround and urged affected users to help them. It looks like the investigation has paid off as the tech giant has now closed the issue and as such the bug has been labelled as fixed. A patch that is supposed to fix the deactivation problem has been deployed on the server side. However, it still encourages affected users to get in touch with the engineering team that is working on such bugs. It writes: You can find the updated status report of the bug in this article here on Microsoft's website. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Despite loud proclamations, AI on smartphones is still mostly a sideshow. I’ve spent the past year covering every major phone launch in the US, and each one loudly declared the same thing: AI is here, and ours is the AI phone you’ve been waiting for. Each was followed by much applause and favorable stock price movement. But when I got those phones into my hands, the AI was underwhelming, to say the least. The theory is that smartphones as we know them are evolving into something new: AI smartphones. An AI smartphone will be a new kind of device that doesn’t force you to interact with a grid of apps all day long; you’ll be able to ask it to order pizza or send an email just by using an AI-imbued voice assistant. You’ll be able to point your camera at a flyer for a show, have the AI check whether you’re free, and add it to your calendar. You’ll ask it about something a friend said to you — maybe in an email or a text, you’re not sure which — and it will go find the information for you. Google’s Gemini assistant has steadily improved since launch but still falls short of a true AI assistant. Personally, all of the above sounds great to me. I’d love some help with the chores I carry out a hundred times a day on my phone — and with the firehose of incoming information and notifications I deal with. But AI smartphones are not here yet, not by a long shot, despite what you may have heard. Instead, what we have feels like a collection of loosely associated tech demos. Right now, AI on your phone can help you write and rewrite an email to sound more professional or react to a text with a disco pigeon emoji. There’s AI to translate phone calls, which kind of works and is actually pretty neat. And there’s AI that can turn a nice picture of food into something horrifying. AI on our phones has offered one weird trick after another: sometimes funny, sometimes interesting, but hardly the platform shift we’ve been promised. The (supposedly) AI smartphones of 2024 All of the major phone makers are at fault. Samsung opened the year with its Galaxy S24 launch in January, declaring “Galaxy AI is here” at a hockey arena-appropriate volume. To be sure, the devices it announced are good smartphones, and they run a blend of Samsung and Google’s Gemini Nano models on-device, but I wouldn’t call them AI smartphones. Supposedly, they can help you take distractions out of your photos — but you might end up with something even more distracting instead. The live language interpreter feature for phone calls could come in handy for something like making a dinner reservation. But it also translated a statement from my colleague as “I am eating my chair.” (She was not.) Most users will find that these AI features fade into the background once the novelty wears off. Sometimes AI gets it right — it correctly identifies an artificial plant here. Later in 2024, fall hardware season arrived early with AI-ified Pixels. Google has made much of AI on its phones for the past couple of years, but the company’s Gemini AI is absolutely everywhere on the Pixel 9 series. There’s an AI-generated summary at the top of the weather app, a new app that saves and tags your screenshots using AI, a new AI-powered default assistant, and lots of AI image generation tools — from silly to seriously worrying. Some of it does feel useful, particularly the screenshots app, which is the kind of thing you might find handy if you tend to keep infinite Chrome tabs open on your phone as bookmarks. But these features, siloed into their respective apps, don’t feel like they have much to do with each other. Gemini sort of connects the dots with extensions, but support for different apps is being added slowly — and even with an extension, Gemini can only do so much for you. Apple Intelligence started shipping a month after the iPhone 16, but its blockbuster features won’t arrive until 2025. Last but not least, we met the iPhones “built for Apple Intelligence” in September. I think it says a lot about the state of Apple’s AI that the iPhone 16 initially shipped without Apple Intelligence. AI features finally arrived in late October with iOS 18.1. And if anyone was waiting with bated breath, this first update was probably underwhelming. Right now, Apple Intelligence includes summaries for notifications and emails, tools to alter the style of your writing, and a new glowing UI for Siri. Notification summaries can be useful, but usually they’re just funny. The writing tools are standard fare at this point, and Siri is basically the same old assistant with a new coat of paint. There’s more to come, but what’s here now certainly doesn’t add up to an AI smartphone. A messy year for AI It’s not just phones; this is a messy moment for AI in general. Depending on who you ask, AI is either a massive bubble that’s about to burst or a few months away from evolving into digital God. AI is being foisted on us in every direction: surfacing in Google search results, lurking in every Meta product, greeting you by name in the Spotify app. It’s hard to separate the signal from the noise when it comes to AI, because the noise is everywhere and it’s so goddamn loud! And there really might be a signal in there — especially when it comes to our phones. Siri really might become more useful, with an Apple Intelligence update this spring that will allow it to take action in apps through something known as App Intents. Developers will be able to surface certain actions — like ordering the pizza that AI proponents keep promising — so they’re accessible at the system level by Siri. Google seems to be preparing a similar framework in Android 16, which could help bridge the gap between Gemini and individual apps without the apps needing an entire extension. And who knows? Maybe Bixby will get in the game, too. The trouble is, after a full year of supposedly game-changing AI on our mobile devices that amounted to nothing, it’s starting to sound like the phone makers are crying wolf. The real AI smartphones need to stand up pretty soon — before our collective patience starts to run out. Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Nvidia has released a new hotfix driver to address issues with the recently launched Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PC (it recently received an update that enabled Path Tracing for systems with high-end Nvidia graphics cards). According to the company, some users are experiencing intermittent stuttering when playing the game. There is also another patch that improves stability in Ubisoft games that use the Snowdrop engine. Here is the changelog: Nvidia 566.45 hotfix is based on the recently released driver 566.36 WHQL (check its full release notes here). Therefore, it contains all the patches, fixes, and known bugs as version 566.36. If you do not need these specific improvements, you can skip this update. Changes in hotfix releases usually arrive later with the next WHQL driver update. You can download the Nvidia GeForce Hotfix 566.45 driver from the official website (direct link). It is available on systems with 64-bit Windows 10 and 11 versions and the following graphics cards: Architectures RTX Series GTX Series TITAN Series Ada Lovelace Ampere Turing Pascal Maxwell GeForce RTX 40 Series GeForce RTX 30 Series GeForce RTX 20 Series GeForce GTX 16 Series GeForce GTX 10 Series GeForce GTX 900 GeForce GTX 700 GeForce GTX TITAN X TITAN RTX TITAN V TITAN Xp TITAN X (Pascal) The official support page with the changelog is available here. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

X has announced that it will increase the Premium+ subscription prices globally, with the new pricing structure taking effect on December 21, 2024. New subscribers will have to pay the revised rates immediately. However, if you are an existing X Premium+ subscriber and your next billing cycle starts before January 20, 2025, your prices will remain the same, and the new prices will be applicable on your next billing cycle. Reportedly, the new X Premium+ pricing structure has come into effect after significant changes introduced by the platform for the Premium+ tier. Premium+ subscribers enjoy a completely ad-free experience, ensuring uninterrupted browsing. Additionally, on top of being ad-free, the Premium+ subscribers will also get access to some exclusive features such as "Radar," which will enjoy high-priority support from @Premium and access to advanced Grok AI capabilities. Here's why X has hiked the Premium+ subscription prices: With the new prices coming into effect, a Premium+ subscription in the US, which earlier cost $16/month, will now cost $22 a month (37.5% change). Also, the annual subscription cost has been hiked from $168 to $229. However, X hasn't tweaked the pricing structure of the basic subscription and it starts at $3. As noted by Tech Crunch, in some countries the price hike is pronounced. For instance, the Premium+ subscription in Nigeria has jumped from ₦7,300 to ₦34,000/month (365.75% change). Similarly, users in Turkey will have to pay ₺770/month for a Premium+ subscription up from ₺300/month (156.67% change). For detailed pricing details, you can head over to the official X website. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Once-thriving Usenet provider NSE was targeted by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN many years ago. Under legal pressure, the provider felt forced to shut down its successful business. Though NSE ultimately triumphed in court, that victory came years later. NSE is now demanding millions of euros to compensate for the alleged damage to its business. BREIN, however, sees things differently. The legal saga of News-Service Europe (NSE) and anti-piracy group BREIN has taken another dramatic turn. Once a titan in the Usenet world, NSE was forced to shut down in 2011 after BREIN took legal action on behalf of the movie and music industries. In its initial verdict, the Court of Amsterdam concluded that NSE willingly facilitated online piracy through its services. As a result, the company was ordered to remove all copyrighted content and filter future posts for possible copyright infringements. According to the Usenet provider, this filtering requirement would’ve been too costly to implement so it shut down its service but appealed the case. NSE Wins Appeal After several more years of litigation, the Amsterdam appeals court ruled that NSE wasn’t liable for users’ pirating activities after all, but NSE was required to offer a responsive and effective notice and takedown procedure, possibly with additional measures. Unhappy with the outcome, BREIN decided to take the matter to the Dutch Supreme Court. While NSE was no longer a threat, the case could prove crucial for many other Usenet providers. Last year, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Usenet provider shouldn’t be held liable for pirating users. The fact that NSE had a decent takedown procedure and no apparent knowledge of infringement, weighed in its favor. The Court also confirmed that NSE didn’t curate any content, nor did it specifically promote copyright infringement. NSE Sues BREIN for Millions in Damages NSE’s victory was bittersweet; its operation had long been shut down due to BREIN’s legal pressure. Now, after years of legal battles and a final vindication, NSE is back in court once again. In a lawsuit filed today, NSE demands damages from BREIN that could potentially reach millions of euros. According to NSE, BREIN’s lawsuit essentially forced the service to shut down, even though the case was appealed. As a result, the entire team lost their jobs and the company’s owners faced expensive legal bills. Although the court’s requirements led to the shutdown, NSE sees BREIN as the main instigator, because the anti-piracy group didn’t want to wait for the appeal to play out. “BREIN deliberately made it impossible for us to continue,” NSE co-founder and former CEO Patrick Schreurs says. “BREIN decided not to wait for the appeal and to force us to comply with the verdict immediately. That was completely unnecessary. We have always found that incomprehensible.” NSE co-founder Wierd Bonthuis, who previously served as CFO, notes that the Supreme Court confirmed that BREIN was wrong. To fully set the record straight, the Usenet provider now seeks full compensation. “The confirmation of the highest Dutch court is a great first step towards complete justice. This will happen if BREIN fully compensates us for the damage that its stubbornness has caused,” Bonthuis says. “We look forward to the verdict in the case filed today with great confidence,” he adds. BREIN Sheds a Different Light on the Case BREIN has not yet seen the summons, but in an initial response it believes that NSE was never able to simply restart its original service. Instead, it should have taken measures against the enormous amount of unauthorized content on its servers. The parties never finalized discussions on what an effective takedown policy would entail. Instead of engaging in court-mandated negotiations, BREIN director Bastiaan van Ramshorst says that NSE decided to shut down its service. “BREIN awaits the summons in confidence. The fact remains that all that copyright-protected content, including films, TV series, books, games and software, made it attractive for consumers to take out a subscription with a commercial Usenet provider. “The loss of profit by not being able to offer illegally offered protected content of others is of course no basis for a lawsuit,” Van Ramshorst adds. All in all it’s clear that, after more than 15 years, the newly filed lawsuit adds yet another chapter to what is already one of the longest running piracy lawsuits in history. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of November): 5,298 news posts RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend