Thursday, September 6, 2012

Teens charged in numerous larcenies

English: The Coleman Bridge as seen from Yorkt...
English: The Coleman Bridge as seen from Yorktown as it connects with Gloucester Point. © 2005 Wyatt Greene (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Gloucester County sheriff’s deputies have arrested two teens in connection to multiple crimes in the Gloucester County area.
According to Capt. Ryan Cookson with the Gloucester County Sheriff’s Office, Holden Michael Patrick, 18, and Aaron Sekou Starks, 18, both of Gloucester, are facing several charges stemming from crimes dating back to July.
On Aug. 20,  deputies responded to the Powhatan Chimney subdivision for a report of two people that seemed to be trying to break into vehicles. At the same time, deputies received a call for a burglary in the 6700 block of Powhatan Drive. A vehicle was said to have been stolen from the home.
Cookson said the stolen vehicle was located on the York County side of the Coleman Bridge and a pursuit ensued with York County deputies. The vehicle was later stopped behind Yorktown Middle School, where three suspects ran.
Patrick was apprehended by the York County Sheriff’s Office and the stolen vehicle was recovered.
Further investigation revealed Starks as a second suspect and both Starks and Patrick were linked to the following crimes, according to deputies:
CLICK HERE for the rest of the story.


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Gloucester, VA - Three in custody following Gloucester armed robbery


10:00 a.m. EDTSeptember 4, 2012

GLOUCESTER — A Hampton teen, a Gloucester man and a New York man are in custody on armed robbery charges after they allegedly brandished handguns early Saturday morning before taking cash and other items from victims sitting in a vehicle at Damon's Sports Bar & Grill.
The Gloucester County Sheriff's Office received the report of the armed robbery at 2:49 a.m., said Lt. Scott Little. The victims said three perpetrators ran up to their vehicle with bandannas covering faces while flashing handguns.
After obtaining cash and other items, the three suspects left in a dark Nissan Sentra. A short time later on Hickory Fork Road, Gloucester Sheriff's deputies saw a vehicle matching that description traveling east and attempted to stop it. A short pursuit followed until the vehicle stopped on Ashley Street.  
One suspect fled from the vehicle while the other three were taken into custody, Little said. Arrested on charges of robbery, grand larceny, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony were Morris Kristen Persaud, 25, of Queens, N.Y., and Malcolm William Minerve, 24, of Sherwood Drive in Gloucester


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GVLN - Are Torrents Destroying Hollywood? Part 4

Blu-ray disc front
Blu-ray disc front (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In our last article we left off with the promise that we would explain what is legal and what is not legal in the way of films.  Here is what is legal.  It is legal to make one backup copy of any disk that you own.  Whether that disk is a video, music software or what have you.  Now here is the catch.  Even though you have the right to make one backup copy of any disk you own, you do NOT have the right to break any copyright protection on any disk here in the USA.  That means that when you buy a DVD or a Blu Ray movie, most all of them contain some form of copyright protection.  So you do not have the right to make a copy of those disks by breaking the copyrighted protection on those disks.

  Now, if you can make a copy of those disks while keeping the copyright protection on them, then you are fine.  However, most all of the software out there that allows you to make backup copies of movies or software work by stripping off the copyright encryption that blocks you from making a copy of those disks.  When you backup a copy of say a Hollywood film, you have removed the encryption therefore violating the software owners rights.

  To date we have yet to find one software program that allows you to copy a disk and still maintain the original copyright protection.  We have heard of one, but have not been able to locate it.  So what does one do?  We have recently learned that through Wal Mart and their on line business, VUDU, you can now take a copy of any DVD you own and for a fee, have a digital copy made and stored on line.  The digital copy is good on any device.

  The draw back?  Wal Mart has to have agreements with the studio for that particular DVD title.  If Wal Mart does not have an agreement with that movie studio or for that title?  No copy.  CLICK HERE to see more about the service.
On the bright side?  Wal Mart is the first company to be doing this and your purchase remains in the cloud for many years to come.  The fees are very low starting at $2.00 per copy.

The bottom line is this.  If you purchase a DVD or Blu Ray disk, software or music that contains copy protection and you also buy software to crack that protection to make copies just for your own use and do not distribute any of the copies in any way including lending them to friends, then you will be breaking the law, but no one is going to come after you for it.

Maintaining backup copies is a good idea.  A new Blu Ray title is not cheap.  If you want to take a few disks with you on vacation it is a lot cheaper to have copies stolen than to have your originals stolen.  There isn't much of a market for copies of films already released.  If you are just making a digital version for your PSP, it's up to you to decide which is the best way to go.  If it's in the cloud through VUDU, you still have it in the cloud and can have it on your PSP as well.

Our final article will be on whether or not the disk is dead.



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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

GVLN - Are Torrents Killing Hollywood? Part 3

Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase
Hollywood Sign
Hollywood Sign (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In our last article, we asked the question about how films are getting on the Internet before they are even out on the retail shelves?  Here we are going to partially answer that question.  From what we have learned there are legitimate reasons for sending files of any film over the Internet.  Hollywood film executives, producers, promoters and others share films before they are even released on the Silver Screen.  Sometimes it is to get professional comments, get extra financial backing, further promotions, planning cover or poster design art work and or graphics and many other reasons.  These folks will also send out copies of the films as part of a resume,  to raise financing for their next film, even thank you's to friends and plenty of other fair reasons.

  Now what happens all to often, is those who receive these copies also share them with their friends, family and others.  Eventually these earlier releases find their way to sites that are more than happy to share these films with the world.  What is interesting is that intellectual property rights is a western civilization concept.  It is not shared by a great majority of the world.  Even many in western civilization do not share or understand the concept.  Therefore there are many people who do not consider sharing a copyrighted film to be of any issue.

  A great case in point is the country of China.  The vast majority of China has no concept at all of intellectual property rights which is why copycat items flood so many markets that come out of China.  China is a mecca for forged items of every sort.  Even with over 20 years of western influence now having raged over China, this is still a major issue that all western companies face and will continue to face.

  Are torrents the only way that films are being violated?  Not at all.  There are now a host of new ways that films are being exploited for illegal downloads all over the Internet and the wave is growing.  We have recently learned of some new software that will download a copy of any streaming film.  Films are being hosted on more illegal sites everyday.  You Tube now hosts more TV shows and movies on the site.  Many of them are copyright violations.  The movies on the site are usually legal, the TV shows are not unless uploaded by the studios if they feel that the retail market is not longer there for DVD sales.

   On recent reviews throughout the You Tube site however, we found numerous TV shows that were all uploaded by independent individuals not authorized to upload these shows.  In You Tubes defense?  It is the job of the executives to police the site for violations and ask You Tube to block and prevent further uploads of the copyright owners works.  There are so many ways to download content from You Tube these days that it has become ridiculous.

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  It is estimated that the number one way for getting video through 2015 is illegal downloads.  But there is a new battle now being waged that will catch a lot of people by surprise.  A new technology that is now about 2 years old developed by a one of our nations leading technology universities has developed a high frequency identification technologies that can not be stripped out by copying or transcoding videos.  The high frequency is not audible to the human ear, but is able to be tracked throughout the Internet.

  If a film has the technology loaded onto it and the film is put up for file sharing or playing on another site, the copyright owners can track exactly the originating source and all sources that have both downloaded and further uploaded that film. CLICK HERE for some general information on how this works.  The process described on the site is not the exact technology being used now in films and music, but is similar in it's nature and structure.  Each legal digital download can now have these signals built into them that identifies the purchaser, so if you upload the video onto another site or through a torrent, the copyright owners are able to track it instantaneously.

  For DVD and Blu Ray disks, a generic version is being implemented that identifies the title of the film as well as tracking technology.  So even when one breaks the encryption on these disks, the software used to break the encryption does not remove the high frequency tracking codes.  The new technology will end up short lived however as developers of software will eventually implement a two phase system of stripping out the frequency and then loading a scrambled frequency back onto the cracked encrypted files.

  So how does Hollywood fight these new threats?  This is exactly what destroyed the music industry and now it looks to destroy Hollywood films as well.

In part 4 of this series we will cover what is legal and what is not and we will end the series with answering the question, is the disk really dead?

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Friday, August 24, 2012

GVLN - Are Torrents Destroying Hollywood? Part 2

English: Underside of a DVD-R disc, modified t...
English: Underside of a DVD-R disc, modified to have transparent background. Français : Dessous d'un DVD (sur fond transparent) Frysk: DVD/dûbelskiif (Unterkant) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Upload / Download
Upload / Download (Photo credit: johntrainor)
In our last article we looked at torrents and a site where nearly 2,000 videos are hosted for free downloads.  We discussed the quality of the files and the file types.  In this section we are going to go further into the quality of the video files themselves and once again you will be shocked at what we have found.  On testing the videos, we found the quality of the films to be outstanding.  So we wondered if the quality could be maintained if these files were transferred into DVD format to play on any DVD player.  In many cases, you end up losing a good amount of quality when transferring up.

Our first test on one of the films we downloaded didn't work to well.  The quality of the picture was fine, however, the sound did not transfer to the DVD.  There were also compatibility issues with some of the DVD players we tested the video on.  We switched to a different program that took longer but gave us much more control over.  On that end we had a tremendous amount of success.  We were able to make a great DVD copy from the torrent video.  We were able to put a new menu and scene selection as well as a play button.  On test, the new DVD passed as being excellent.

  What that means.  In our last section we talked about the lead time on the video, The Avengers.  This video is released one month before it's retail scheduled release and while it is still playing in some movie theaters.  This means an average person can take one of these downloaded torrent files and turn it into a viable copy.  Once the copy is made, it's not hard to press about 20 copies per day on the average desktop home computer.  Give a person 5 days and one can press about 100 copies by the weekend.

  As Saturday hits, those 100 copies can easily make their way to any flea market for sale.  If it costs about $3.00 per copy to produce, one can sell copies for about $8.00 each making $5.00 profit per copy.  That $8.00 price tag is much lower than the $18.00 new release price that the stores will be asking so if the flea market is a good location, one could easily sell all 100 copies over the weekend.  Profit to the pirate?  About $500.00 minus expenses for the space at the flea market plus travel and food.  On Monday, the process starts all over again.  So within a 4 week lead time period, it's very possible for a pirate to pocket about $2,000.00 just on one video.

  Think $2,000.00 isn't a big deal?  Let's look at that from a real perspective.  Once again, all one has to do is look at how many people a day are already downloading a copy of this one video.  Thousands of people a day.  If 100 people decide the pirate the video for profit, $2,000.00 become $200,000.00.  100 people making 400 copies and selling them over a 4 week period means 40,000 lost retail sales or  at a price of $18.00 each, $729,000.00.  That's nearly three quarters of a million dollars in lost sales from pirating.


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  That still does not account for the lost sales from the people who illegally downloaded a free copy who now will not be buying or renting this film.  So it's fair to say that the net loss just from this one torrent site alone is in the millions of dollars.  This is only one torrent site.  There are hundreds of sites hosting torrents all over the world.  Once it's on one, it;s easy to put it on others.  Now let's once again go back to all the other videos on this one site alone and you see the pirates have an entire industry to plunder.

  This now leads to our next question.  How did the people hosting the torrents get a hold of a copy of the film before it's release date?  The copy we downloaded was not shot in a movie theater.  It's as clean as they come.  Others on the site one would say is obviously hacked from disk.  Not that hard to do.  But this being a film not yet out on disk and not being a film copied to a video camera from a movie theater, it's not hacked.  This is were we will begin our next section of this story.



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Gloucester, VA Sheriff's Race - Two Candidates Now On The Ballet

Republican Party (United States)
Republican Party (United States) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Clarence Bowser and Darrell Warren are the two candidates now seeking election this fall for the Sheriff's position.  Clarence Bowser is running as an independent and Darrell Warren is running under the Republican platform.  There are no other challengers to Darrell Warren from inside the Sheriff's Office this time although Clarence Bowser is an ex sheriff's deputy from the Gloucester County Sheriff's Office.

This is not the first time Clarence Bowser has run for this position but he gets very little local press compared to other candidates in past campaigns.  Clarence has written a book and it is available on Amazon.  The name of that book is Penalty of Justice: The Pro Se.  CLICK HERE to see the title on Amazon.  You can also read a good section of the book to get a feel for it right on the Amazon site.


























A section above seems to have a misspelled word after star which should read medal.  In the opening is a misused word, tricky should read trickery.  The above is re printed under fair use laws for this news story.


    
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GVLN - Are Torrents Destroying Hollywood? Part 1

Hollywood Sign
Hollywood Sign (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Are torrents destroying Hollywood?  There have been a number of articles we have been reading all around in regards to just his subject.  Some complain that torrents aka peer to peer file sharing is costing Hollywood movie studios billions of dollars in revenue.  Others complain that Hollywood is doing it to itself.  We set out to see exactly what the real deal was as we have seen a lot of holes in all the stories out there.  You are going to be surprised at what we have found.   

We began by searching out a torrent software product that has an excellent overall rating.  Once we found the software and loaded it the rest was easy.  What we found was a real shocker.  We came across a host web site that could easily be compared to the Amazon of movies.  Though the selection was limited to just under 2,000 videos, the selection was still very impressive and hosted on an incredibly well laid out site where a great deal of both time and money was spent on the site.

The image to the right here is a sample screen shot of the listings from the site we are presently talking about.  If you click on the image, you will get an enlarged view.  This site has it all.  If you choose to view the info on the movie, you go to a new page where a brief synopsis of the movie is on the page along with usually 3 screen shots from the actual film.

You also have an option to watch a preview of the film you are considering.  The majority of the previews we have watched are the actual trailers for the film with only a few that were done by someone from outside of the movie studios.  Again, when you opt for the film preview, a new pop up window appears and the preview plays on the pop up.  This is some nice expensive software and design.  Again, look at the picture above.  That is a very well thought out site design.

  This site above is where we ran the vast majority of our tests.  Again the site is extremely well laid out and no expenses seem to have been spared.  Yet there is no charge for downloading any of these movies.  You read that right, no charge for downloading any of the movies on this site.  This site also has a very large Facebook fan page where they announce all their latest releases.

  On the torrent software, there are an average of between 200 and 400 seeds or people at any given time of the day or night that are both downloading these films as well as uploading them.  The way the torrent software works as you are downloading something, you are also uploading a smaller section of that same file to someone else as well as other films you have in your torrent list that others are looking to download.

  It's an exchange service of sorts.  The site we are discussing here makes the entire process seem very legitimate because of it's incredible professionalism.  What really shocked us is the new video release that showed up on the site a few days ago.  The Avengers.  This film is still being played in some movie theaters and has a release date of September 25th, 2012.  This torrent site already has the entire video available for download for free.  With hundreds of people downloading this video at any given moment during a 24 hour period, that means that thousands of people a day are getting this film before it even hits the store shelves.

  So on that end, yes, Hollywood is suffering huge losses on the potential sales of this and other titles before it even hits the shelves.  Plus as we have already said, this film is still playing in some movie theaters.  That affects the sales of tickets at the theaters as well.  The picture here shows the download from the torrent site.


This site usually offers the film in two to three formats.  1080 P full high definition, 720 P standard high definition and when available, 3D 1080 P.   The site has all three formats available for the Avengers film on line now.  More than a month before it's scheduled release date.  Amazon has a pre order price on the 3D Blu Ray version of 29.96 with free shipping and you have to wait for it.  It won't ship until release date.

  How do you estimate the loss on this one title alone?  We ran our tests for two weeks.  We were able to download about 50 films with a retail value of somewhere around one thousand dollars.  Again that was only for two weeks and we did not spend all day every day doing so.  We downloaded about 4 or 5 per day.  About 3 to 4 hours worth of time each day.

  We checked a number of items during this time.  We checked for back door attacks, viruses, open port hacks, malware, spyware and anything else that could go wrong.  We had no issues on any of the files or any of the times we downloaded and uploaded the torrents.  What about quality?  Here is where once again we were very shocked.  The quality of the torrents are extraordinarily good and the file formats used on just about everyone of these films were a universal MP4 format.  Only a couple of the films was in an mkv format.  The mkv format is not a common format and one will not be able to play the video without a special codec or video player to handle the file format.

  MP4 videos are about as universal to operating systems as MP3 audio is.  Microsoft, Apple and Linux systems can all handle these formats.  Even Andriod enabled products have no issues with this file format.  Every film we checked played very smoothly and was of true HD quality.  Only the mkv file formats had some motion issues.


Ending notes:  This ends part one of this series.  We have not mentioned the name of the exact torrent software nor the name of the site in this discussion for a reason.  The site contains illegal downloads that do hurt legitimate companies and their employees.  It is not our intention to teach people how to download illegal video files, but to educate people in the problems associated with these types of sites and issues.  We have since deleted the torrent software from our own system and will soon be deleting the downloads once this series is over.



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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Gloucester, VA History 1893 E-Book


Now here is a very rare book we have just finished editing.  Written in 1893 by Sally Nelson Robins, it has some history in this book that we were not even aware of.  Example is that in 1710, Gloucester, Virginia was the most populated and most prosperous area in all of Virginia.  Gloucester Place was the former home of President John Tyler and located right off of 

Gloucestertowne Road.  This book is a great resource not only from an historical standpoint, but also from a genealogy standpoint as well as it contains a great deal of old family names and places.  We spent a lot of time on correcting both spelling errors and punctuation errors however there are plenty of places we could not fix or where text is completely missing as well as some pictures.  If we are able to find these in the future, we will update the book.  You are welcome to download this book for free from our Slideshare page as it comes with a Creative Commons License 3.0.  
  We have a huge library of old and rare books on Gloucester and area history that we will be working on for some time to come.   Once they are done, we will be publishing them here on this site.















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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

GVLN - An Army psychiatrist says Facebook hurts our troops

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

Last Updated: 10:24 AM, August 19, 2012
Posted: 10:20 PM, August 18, 2012

Our soldiers are being devastated on an unexpected front: Facebook.
Troops who have survived shellings and shootings can find themselves emotionally wounded by online photos of spouses partying with strangers and innuendo-laden updates that betray a very different “status” than that of a devoted girlfriend back home.
Access to social media has created famous problems for the military — from pictures of soldiers acting disrespectfully, to troops inadvertently releasing the names of American dead before families were notified.
But just as problematic is the damage social media is causing soldiers’ psyches. Military psychiatrists have reported that Facebook on the front lines has played a part in a host of problems, including depression and suicide in active-duty military personnel.

“About 80% of all of our intake had some Facebook flavor,” said psychiatrist Dr. Valeh Karimkhani, an Army reserve major who has served two tours of duty in Iraq.
Karimkhani, who served in 2008 and again in 2010, said the damage was apparent when she watched troops using Skype and Facebook at the Al Asad Airbase.
“When you’re on the other side of the world and you see all these pictures of your wife or husband with a new group of people, new friends, it becomes really concerning,” Karimkhani said. “They would become depressed and paranoid and end up in psychiatry, saying, ‘I’m going to kill myself.’ ”
Military psychiatrists are now able restrict troops’ access to social media, change a soldier’s password — even force a mediated phone call with a warring spouse.
“Sometimes after contacting the spouse, they could see it was innocent,” she said.
Of course, there are times when suspicions are accurate. One soldier received a Facebook message from her husband on their anniversary, telling her he’d fallen in love with another woman and wanted a divorce.

“That was particularly cold,” said Karimkhani, chief of psychiatry liaison services at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, Calif.
The risks are even higher if it’s the soldier who is bragging about exploits online: Adultery by military personnel can be punishable by jail time.
“I am always amazed at the things people would put on Facebook, thinking it wasn’t a public forum,” Karimkhani said. “People would put some sort of back-and-forth innuendo with a new girlfriend on their wall and then be surprised that people would find out. I always want to say, ‘Hey, buddy, this isn’t your journal.’ You’re basically taking a bullhorn to say, ‘Hey everybody this is what’s happening in my life!’ ”

CLICK HERE for the rest of the story.

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