Tag: news

U.S. District Court Grants Win to Authors Guild Members, Amazon Publishing, and Penguin Random House in Kiss Library Piracy Suit  Business Wire
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Latest news and announcements
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New Digital Pop-Up Library at the Mineta San José International Airport
San José Public Library Provides SJC Travelers Free eBook Downloads – No Library Card Required
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Amazon's Kindle e-reader is a popular device that has been on the market since 2007, with approximately 100 million Kindles in use around the world today.

The primary purpose of the Kindle is to enable users to read books. Slava Makkaveev, security researcher at Check Point Software Technologies, had another idea, though; he wanted to see if he could load a book that would exploit the Kindle. At the DEF CON 29 conference, Makkaveev outlined the process by which he was able to exploit a Kindle with a malicious eBook that he was able to create.

"Personally, I use Kindle a lot, but I've never heard about a malicious eBook," Makkaveev said. "That was the reason for me to research how to create such a book that could be used to gain root access remotely and take full control of a Kindle device."

Makkaveev noted that typically users connect their Kindle devices to a Wi-Fi network. While Wi-Fi could have potentially been used as an entry point to attack the Kindle, in his view using an eBook to reach the device is much easier and will also enable mass attacks.

There are multiple ways that Kindle users can get books, including directly via Amazon, transferred via USB, or via an email. There are also free online libraries that are open, where it's easy for anyone to upload and download eBooks.

"An attacker can easily upload a malicious book for free access, because no one expects to see malware targeting the Kindle," Makkaveev said. "Most libraries only care about the correctness of the metadata in the uploaded the book, so when downloading an eBook from an online library you can never be sure of its content."

Makkaveev explained that basically the Kindle operating system is the Linux kernel
with a set of native programs, mainly provided by the BusyBox open source framework.

The way that many eBooks are read by the Kindle operating system is as a PDF file. There are many different things that can be embedded within a PDF file, so Makkaveev focused his research on learning how the Kindle actually parses the data to show users. During his research he discovered a pair of vulnerabilities.

The first vulnerability is identified as CVE-2021-30354 and is an integer overflow in the Kindle's JBIG2 decoding algorithm for rendering the words from a PDF file. The overflow could enable an attacker to potentially overwrite specific bits of memory on a Kindle device.

"Now we have remote code execution vulnerability in the context of the PDF reader process," Makkaveev said.

With the first vulnerability it's possible to access special internal files on a Kindle, but an attacker would still be somewhat limited. What Makkaveev wanted was to be able to gain remote root access on a Kindle, free of any restrictions. That's where the second vulnerability comes in, providing a local privilege escalation exploit identified as CVE-2021-30355.

In a brief demo, Makkaveev showed how the whole attack works, where he was able to load a malicious eBook on a Kindle and then take over the device remotely. Once the users click on the book, the malicious payload hidden in the book connects to a remote server, providing the reverse shell that locks the user screen with a window.

"As you can see, we gain the root permissions, so we can do whatever we want," he said.

An attacker could potentially steal a victim's Amazon account, delete books, convert the Kindle into a bot to attack other devices, or simply just brick the device, rendering it useless.

Makkaveev concluded his presentation by noting that he reported the issues to Amazon in February 2021 and they have now been fixed.

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30 Best Places to Find Free eBooks Online – Where to Find Free VeBooks  Parade Magazine
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Looking to snag a great deal online or trying to shift some old junk? Craigslist isn’t what it used to be, but these alternative apps are great!
For years, buyers and sellers have flocked to Craigslist. However, Craigslist hasn’t kept up with the digital age. The website is outdated and the Craigslist app is buggy. Not to mention that Craigslist is one of the top places for scams, and not much has been done to reduce this risk.
Craigslist is also full of bots, which can make buying and selling even more difficult. Luckily, there are several great apps like Craigslist that are not only alternatives, but better options!
If you want to buy and sell locally, be sure to check out these Craigslist alternatives.
OfferUp is a fantastic app for buying and selling things locally. For sellers, it’s incredibly easy to post a listing, as all you need to do is take a picture. You don’t even need to pick a title for your listing; OfferUp’s AI feature will write one for you based on what it detects in the picture. In just a few seconds, your listing can be up and in front of thousands of people.
For buyers, OfferUp makes it easy to find what you’re looking for and find listings close by.
Related: The Best Sites Like Craigslist to Find Used Items for Sale
Letgo, one of the most popular buy and sell apps, was actually purchased by OfferUp, and now OfferUp has users from both platforms in one place. If you had an account on Letgo you will also keep your previous reviews, meaning you can show buyers and sellers that you are trustworthy.
Download: OfferUp for iOS | Android (Free, in-app purchases available)
Facebook is one of the most popular platforms in the world, and its marketplace has a wide variety of products in just about every category. The marketplace is also built into the traditional Facebook app, if you already have that downloaded. If not, you will need a Facebook account to use Facebook Marketplace. The app has features to save listings and post easily, and since many people use Facebook daily you are more likely to get a quicker response.
Related: Useful Tips for Buying and Selling on Facebook Marketplace
Facebook Marketplace also has fewer scammers than Craigslist, as you need a Facebook profile that’s verified to post. Craigslist only asks for an email.
Download: Facebook for iOS | Android (Free, in-app purchases available)
Similar to OfferUp, 5miles is a local buying and selling app with active users in every metropolitan area. While OfferUp does have more listings, 5miles has a directory of sellers, which is great for those who plan on repeat purchases. You also have the ability to follow sellers and get notified when they post something new.
There are additional features that set it apart from other apps like Craigslist as well. Including the option to earn reward coins through 5miles for buying, selling, and logging into the app. You can exchange coins for Amazon gift cards or credit to purchase things within the app!
Download: 5miles for iOS | Android (Free)
Nextdoor is known as a chatroom for neighbors and is a great place to post about lost pets or community events. It’s such a popular app that you might even have it downloaded right now. You may have not been aware, but Nextdoor also has a great selling feature that’s getting more popular by the day. The best part about Nextdoor is that everyone who is interested in whatever you’re selling will be close by, and you’ll be able to buy things close by as well.
Download: Nextdoor for iOS | Android (Free)
While Craigslist can be a great site, it’s not updated for the modern audience. Not to mention the stigma associated with Craigslist listings. Luckily, there are great alternatives available on iOS and Android devices. These alternatives are in many cases superior to Craigslist. Whether you’re a buyer or seller, you can be confident that downloading one of these apps will help you sell your goods or find your next great purchase.
Joe is a former web designer and current entrepreneur and freelance writer. He is passionate about making technology accessible for everyone. When not writing for MakeUseOf, he can be found skateboarding, hiking, and attending graduate school.
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Autodesk Maya 2022: Free Download of the Full Version  All3DP
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Digital reading exploded in the COVID-19 era, and ebooks, which were once called “disruptive,” are stealing the spotlight again. As readers or consumers, have you ever wondered if you really own the ebooks that you buy? Can you build a collection of them outside of the Amazon ecosystem?
Before we answer the million-dollar question, we must first understand how the digital book publishing industry works.
Let me start by saying I am knowledgeable of all the aspects of ebook development; I produced hundreds of ebooks when I was a publisher. I converted print books into ebooks and distributed them to ebookstores. Hence, I can shed some light on the matter.
When you buy an ebook on stores such as Amazon, Google Play Books, or Kobo, they usually come with Digital Rights Management (DRM), and sometimes watermarking. Some publishers opt out of using them, though, so not all ebooks have DRM protection. If you’re unfamiliar with the nitty-gritty details about ebooks and DRM, you can read the article I wrote not long ago. But if you’re pressed for time, let me break it down for you: DRM is simply the use of technology to protect copyrighted digital content such as music, movies, ebooks, etc.
Watermarking is a process where identifiable marks are encoded to an ebook copy to make it traceable to the person who bought it.
These two forms of protection have become the industry standards a decade ago. DRM works when a raw ebook file, such as ePub, is protected by a software to make it unreadable to other systems. Amazon employs DRM, if the publisher wants to use it on their ebooks, so that you can’t take your DRM-protected ebooks from them to another platform, basically making it a walled garden.
DRM also works by placing restrictions on the ebooks that you buy. While it gives you access to read the content, it doesn’t allow downloading of the raw copy. You do not own the ebook, as you would with a print book. You are only paying license to read the content.
In 2019, technology giant Microsoft finally shuttered its ebookstore, prompting a discussion on digital ownership. “Isn’t it strange? If you’re a Microsoft customer, you paid for those books. They’re yours. Except, I’m afraid, they’re not, and they never were,” wrote the BBC at the time.
Meanwhile, watermarking (sometimes mistakenly called soft or social DRM) uses watermarks and other less sophisticated forms of technology to mark an individual ebook file. Though you still own the ebook, you can’t distribute it around the web as your copy is identifiable. The marks may or may not be visible to the naked eye, so you should think twice in sharing it with friends. If your copy gets shared around, publishers would be able to know that it’s you who did the deed.
Piracy has never been more prevalent in the digital age. Though the term is widely associated with music and movies, piracy extends to ebooks as well. In fact, U.S. publishers are losing $300 million a year because of ebook piracy. What some savvy readers do is use sophisticated tools to “crack” the DRM of ebook files and profit from them — which is illegal.
But while DRM is the only robust protection against unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted works, it sometimes backfires.
“DRM acts as an incentive to pirate content,” author Kate Sheehan wrote in her book The Ebook Revolution: A Primer for Librarians on the Front Lines in which she cited a study. Content protection provider Viaccess Ocra agrees as well: “One of the most-effective ways of dealing with piracy is by removing the incentive for the consumers to look for pirated content,” they wrote on their blog.
The easiest way to really own your ebooks is to buy ones that are DRM-free. Many independent publishers are now open to publishing ebooks sans the said technology. Indie platform Smashwords and, sometimes, Kobo also sell them. Classics in digital format produced by the Project Gutenberg are always DRM-free.
When you download ebooks from the aforementioned platforms, you get to keep the files even after you change or lose your devices. That’s true ownership in a digital sense.
Another option is…not buying ebooks at all, which might not be an option for some. But until we get an innovative form of security that satisfies both parties — the publisher and the reader — we’re stuck with the good old DRM.

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Source: Apple TV+
Fans of the new Apple TV+ show Severance can now learn all about the company at the center of the drama by reading a “tell-all” book about it.
With Severance now streaming on Apple TV+, Apple Books has gotten in on the act by releasing a “free tell-all from inside the Lumon office, the company behind the controversial severance procedure.”
Apple shared the announcement via Twitter and the book is now available for download. You can find it in the Apple Books app or via direct link.
Tomorrow, @AppleBooks will release a free tell-all from inside the Lumon office, the company behind the controversial #Severance procedure. They have been a mystery to all “outies”, but one brave whistleblower risked everything to expose the truth. Available on eligible devices. pic.twitter.com/pTt03Fo5kj
Those who haven’t yet taken in the drama can watch Severance on Apple TV+ right now. You’ll need to be an Apple TV+ subscriber, priced at $4.99 per month, or have the streaming service available to you via the Apple One subscription bundle.
From Ben Stiller and creator Dan Erickson, Severance centers around Mark Scout (Adam Scott), a leader of a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives.
This experiment in ‘work-life balance’ is called into question as Mark finds himself at the center of an unraveling mystery that will force him to confront the true nature of his work… and of himself
If you want to enjoy Severance in style, be sure to check out our list of the best Apple TV deals on the market today.
100% exclusive content for the price of a cup of coffee.
With TV+, you can watch well-produced, big-budget TV shows from famed directors, and starring award-winning actors and actresses across all your Apple devices and with up to six members of your Family Sharing group.
We may earn a commission for purchases using our links. Learn more.
Instagram has announced changes to the way it ranks content as well as improvements to product and people tags that will open them up to more people than ever before.
Apple has dropped another trailer for the hotly-anticipated ‘Prehistoric Planet’.
New analysis reveals that half of Apple’s top 200 suppliers have facilities in and around Shanghai and could be at risk of disruption from COVID lockdowns.
Binge watch the latest season of Ted Lasso and so much more with the best streaming devices that support the Apple TV app.
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Good e-Reader
June 25, 2020 By Michael Kozlowski 2 Comments

Many people download free royalty free ebooks from Project Gutenberg. It is the largest site in the world for this type of content and offers downloads in EPUB and MOBI for Kindles.  One of the best alternatives is Standard Ebooks who reformats ebooks from PG and edits them, adjusts the typesetting, add better cover art and metadata.
The Standard Ebooks project is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the public domain, and Standard Ebook dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing whole ebooks files themselves into the public domain.
The Standard Ebooks project differs from Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. They focus on typesetting, cleaned of ancient and irrelevant ephemera, take full advantage of modern e-reading technology, are formatted according to a detailed style guide, and that are each held to a standard of quality and internal consistency. Standard Ebooks include carefully chosen cover art based on public domain artwork, and are presented in an attractive way on your ebookshelf. For technically-inclined readers, Standard Ebooks conform to a rigorous coding style, are completely open source, and are hosted on GitHub, so anyone can contribute corrections or improvements easily and directly without having to deal with baroque forums or opaque processes.
Ebooks from their catalog can be downloaded as EPUB, AZW3 (for Kindles), KEPUB (for Kobo) and EPUB 3. You can visit the site from your e-reader, using the internet browser to download content directly to your e-reader, without the need of using a PC.

Michael Kozlowski( Editor-in-chief )

Michael Kozlowski has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past twelve years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Michael Kozlowski has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past twelve years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Filed Under: E-Book News

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Published August 4, 2021
Geoffrey Morrison
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As the entertainment industry shifts its distribution strategy to let people buy or rent movies closer to—or simultaneously with—their release in theaters, you may find yourself amassing a larger digital library than you’ve had in the past. But when you buy a movie from a digital service like Amazon Prime Video or Vudu, does it really belong to you? What if you buy a song on iTunes or download one to your phone from Spotify? Are these files yours forever? If you cancel the service or, as unlikely as it may seem, one of these huge companies goes out of business, what then?

The answer is a little complex, but the short version is, no, you don’t actually own the digital media files that you purchase. This doesn’t mean you’re imminently at risk of losing every digital movie and TV show you’ve ever bought at the whim of a megacorp, but it is possible. Here’s what you need to know.
What do we mean, exactly, when we talk about owning something digital? Everybody knows—or hopefully everybody knows—that it doesn’t mean you can turn around and sell that digital item to someone else, broadcast it, or otherwise distribute it en masse. You don’t need to dig far into any terms-of-service agreement to find such actions expressly forbidden.
For this discussion, to own a digital file is to be able to watch or listen to that content anytime you want, with no further payments, in perpetuity—or at least as long as you can get a device to convert that ancient 4K video file into something that your brand-new holodeck on your space yacht can read.
By that definition, well, you still don’t own anything. Not really. What you’re purchasing in most cases is a license to watch that video or listen to that song. Effectively that license is good for as long as it really matters. I mean, let’s be honest: If an 8K sensurround remaster of The Lord of the Rings comes out in 2030, are you going to care about the 1080p version you bought on Vudu?
Let's take a look at the FandangoNow/Vudu terms of service, which are fairly typical. I’ve bolded the important parts.
When you order or view Content and pay any applicable fees, you will be granted a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-commercial, limited license to access, use and/or view the Content in accordance with any usage rights contained herein and additional terms that may be provided with your devices and/or with such Content (“Usage Rights”).
Pretty standard stuff. You can watch the item as often as you want, but the terms specify that you can’t “sell, rent, lease, distribute, publicly perform or display, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any right to the Content to any third party.” You probably already know this: Just because you purchased and downloaded a movie doesn’t mean you can burn it to a DVD and sell the DVD—among other reasons, because you would have to crack the digital rights management on the file, which is also expressly forbidden. Digital rights management, or DRM, allows a company to restrict what you can do with a digital file, such as preventing copying or permitting you to watch it only a certain number of times.
In the FandangoNow/Vudu terms of service, there is one additional section worth looking at, under “Viewing Periods”:
Fandango's authority to provide Content to you is subject to restrictions imposed by the movie studios and other distributors and providers that make Content available to Fandango (“Content Providers”). These Content Providers may designate periods of time when Fandango is prohibited from renting, selling, enabling downloading and/or streaming certain Content to you, including Fandango/Vudu Purchased Content, and you agree that these limitations can limit your Content access.
The “including Fandango/Vudu Purchased Content” part is the big one. What this means is that if Disney, for example, decides it doesn’t want to allow Vudu to sell its movies anymore, the company can have Vudu turn off Disney movies. Unlikely as that may be, theoretically the service could block access to movies you’ve already purchased—as the terms state, “[Y]our ability to stream or download Content may terminate if our licenses terminate, change or expire.”
Here’s how Amazon says the same thing. Again, the bold emphasis is mine:
“Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.
A case about this is working its way through California courts.
And here is Google’s version, for media content sold through its Play store:
Content that you purchase or install will be available to you through Google Play for the period selected by you, in the case of a purchase for a rental period, and in other cases as long as Google has the right to make such Content available to you. In certain cases (for example if Google loses the relevant rights, a service or Content is discontinued, there are critical security issues, or there are breaches of applicable terms or the law), Google may remove from your Device or cease providing you with access to certain Content that you have purchased. For Content sold by Google LLC, you may be given notice of any such removal or cessation, when possible. If you are not able to download a copy of the Content before such removal or cessation, Google may offer you either (a) a replacement of the Content if possible or (b) a full or partial refund of the price of the Content. If Google issues you a refund, the refund shall be your sole remedy.
Interestingly, Google says that it may offer you a refund if it deletes your content without asking.
How likely is any of this to happen? Not very, which we’ll discuss in a moment.
There is some media content that you are absolutely, flat-out renting. On the music side, Spotify is a good example. If you cancel your subscription, you no longer have access to any files you’ve downloaded to your phone. Your subscription lets you lease these files, with no option to buy. The music industry loves this arrangement, by the way, as you’re continually paying to listen to the same songs, albeit a fraction of a penny each time. I’ve singled out Spotify, but all streaming music services are like this—in contrast to download services such as iTunes or Amazon Music (see below).
Streaming video, obviously, is another category in which you don’t own anything, even if you download content to watch on your mobile device or computer. For example, if you cancel your Netflix service, anything you’ve downloaded gets locked out, just as with Spotify. The same with Disney+’s Premier Access. Even though you’re paying a price that’s closer to a purchase fee (usually $30), it’s still more like a rental that’s accessible only as long as you keep your Disney+ subscription.
Going one step further, if you go to a different country, even if you’re just on vacation, you might get locked out of content you could watch in your original country. A VPN might help with that by geoshifting your location; then again, it might not.
It’s unlikely that any corporation would willingly nuke the presumed assets of millions of customers, despite how much these companies might love for you to buy all your movies yet again. The backlash would be substantial, and the resulting lawsuits would likely take years and millions of dollars to resolve. Corporations, for the most part, would be reluctant to alienate and anger such a huge customer base.
That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. Just take the squabbles between Roku and Warner, or Roku and Google, as two of many examples in which consumers are forced to deal with the fallout between bickering companies.
A more likely scenario is that a media company goes out of business. In this case the most probable course is that some other corporation buys up the digital-media portion of the business and carries over your right to watch the content you bought. This already happened with Vudu, which was owned by Walmart for over a decade and is now owned by Fandango Media, a corporation itself owned by NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia … which are owned by Comcast and AT&T, respectively.
But if you’re still worried about losing access to your purchased content, the solution is to go physical. It’s a lot harder for companies to stop you from watching a physical disc, though that has been tried in the past. Although digital rights management is built into Blu-ray and DVD players and receives periodic updates via the web, if you don’t connect the player to the web, it should be able to continue playing any compatible disc format. Some discs even come with a code that unlocks a digital copy, which is certainly convenient—though as we’ve discussed, you can’t expect those copies to last forever (most discs even have a date by which you need to activate the code).
Audio is even easier. Shocking as it may seem, you can still buy CDs. Rip them to a hard drive, and you have digital copies for as long as your hard drive lasts (and presumably, the CD will last even longer). Alternatively, you can buy and download DRM-free music and convert it to whatever file format you like or trust. iTunes and Amazon Music files are DRM-free, as are the downloads from many smaller music sites, many of which offer even higher-quality audio files. For older music downloads that have DRM, you can typically convert them to a DRM-free format such as FLAC or WAV.
So, no, you don’t own your digital files, and theoretically you could at some point be prevented from watching or listening to them. In reality, your digital collection is probably safe for the foreseeable future—but if the very idea of a company locking you out of your movies and music makes you angry, we suggest embracing physical media such as 4K Blu-rays and CDs, which will likely survive any digital-media apocalypse.
Further reading
by Chris Heinonen
by Chris Heinonen and Lauren Dragan
by Adrienne Maxwell
by Chris Heinonen and Daniel Varghese
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