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Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

I've gotten several alerts over the past week about a pirate site that's new to me (though not new: this warning was first published in September 2017): Kiss Library, where many authors are finding unauthorized electronic versions of their books.

Kiss Library differs from the typical pirate site in a couple of ways. Unlike, say, Ebook Bike, run by serial copyright thief and "information wants to be free" ideologue Travis McCrea, it doesn't simply offer pirated books for free download, but appears actually to be selling them. Also unlike Ebook Bike and other pirate sites, it seems to promptly respond to DMCA notices.

I found two of my own books listed.

I filled out the form on Kiss's DMCA page, and within minutes my books vanished from the site. I also received this email:

Awwww. How nice. They're contrite! It's not their fault! They'll pay back the illicit profits! They are so transparent about the whole thing!

Except...it's bullshit. They send the exact same response to everyone. Here's someone who got it in July:


A friend of mine got it in March. Someone else got it in 2018. Kiss seems to have concluded that it's better to lose a few listings (which can always be reinstated later) than to make waves by ignoring authors or telling them to f*ck off. It's a different strategy from the "fight everything" stance of many pirates, or those that send takedown notices into oblivion--and it's probably why Kiss, with its huge, monetized catalog of pirated books, hasn't sparked the uproar other pirate sites have.

It's been suggested that Kiss doesn't actually take down disputed books: it simply blocks the IP addresses of anyone who sends a DMCA request so they can't see that the books are still on offer. I've no idea if this is true.

Also, there's the question of whether Kiss really offers the books at all--whether it's nothing more than an elaborate phishing scheme that uses books as bait. I followed purchase links all the way to the point of providing credit card info, but I didn't dare do more. This anti-piracy service, however, did:

An interesting fact is that they actually don't even have the books they are selling! The catalog is automatically generated from indexing Amazon author pages.
We know this because we tried to buy a clients ebook out of curiosity..

— DMCA | Anti-Piracy Service | Pirat.io (@pirat_io) August 8, 2019

Exactly! This why we tried to purchase one of our authors eBooks to see if they could deliver the content.
We never received anything. -Eric

— DMCA | Anti-Piracy Service | Pirat.io (@pirat_io) August 8, 2019

So if you visit the site, be careful. Send the DMCA if you find your books, but don't try to test the system by buying anything.

Kiss's About page features a photo of smiling millennials and a Canada address. Kiss originally had a .com domain, registered in 2017 by a Gibraltar-based registrar that was shut down by ICANN this past March. Its current .net domain, which is just 6 months old, is registered to Legato LLC, a Russian company. Make of that what you will.

UPDATE: An update from the anti-piracy service:

Hi Victoria, sorry for the late reply. I wanted to ask the dev and legal dpt. regarding this. The website didn't seem to be hosting any phishing or malware. Its just an elaborate scheme profiting from pirated content. We also used a dummy PayPal account for this testing. -Eric

— DMCA | Anti-Piracy Service | Pirat.io (@pirat_io) August 9, 2019

So maybe there's no content on the site--just book covers--and all they're doing is taking the money and running.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Per this Facebook post from Tamara Thorne, the Authors Guild is aware of Kiss Library and is preparing a statement on the status of the matter and steps they are taking. I'll link to or post it here when it's released.

UPDATE 8/10/19: Well, that didn't take long. Thanks to an alert commenter, I visited Kiss Library this evening and found this:


Not only have they reinstated the two books I DMCA'd (with different covers; they're both backlist books that I re-published with Open Road Media), they've added my two other Open Road backlist books, and a pair of fake books put up by a Writer Beware-hating troll a few years ago as part of a harassment campaign. Think the Kiss Library folks know about this post?

UPDATE 8/11/19: Oops, gone again (except for the two fake books that use my name). Someone is following Writer Beware!

More than 160,000 suspicious emails have been reported to a new scam-busting service in two weeks.

More than 10 leading bodies say porn sites stream content featuring child sexual abuse and sex trafficking.

Close to a week after the September 7 Kurla wall collapse that injured four people, the notorious hawkers who played a part in causing it are back. mid-day observed this on a visit to the site of the incident outside the railway station on Thursday. All of the hawkers are sitting within 150 metres of the railway station, despite a 2017 Bombay High Court ban on the same. The Central Railway (CR) has alerted the BMC about their presence.

Local MLA Mangesh Kudalkar said, "The wall was leaning. I'd alerted the railways in June 2017 and done regular follow-ups, but the issue kept moving from one department to another. And then, this happened," he said. CR had held the hawkers partly responsible for the collapse, saying they'd drilled holes into the structure, thus weakening it. In addition to them, two old trees, whose roots got entangled in the concrete wall had also weakened it.

Railway officials said preliminary inquiry into the collapse had revealed that the wall had been damaged. "This wall is made of brick masonry. Hawkers used the outer face of this wall for hanging their goods on thick nails and hooks and weakened it. Moreover, there are two old peepal trees near this boundary wall. Some roots of these trees also entered this wall, which may have weakened it further. We've already begun work on building a new wall and have also spoken to BMC about the hawkers' issue," said a railway official. mid-day reached out to the civic body, but they remained unavailable.

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Representational picture

San Francisco: Facebook has announced a new tool for website owners and developers that will alert them about phishing attacks on their platforms. "We are extending the capabilities of our 'Certificate Transparency Monitoring' tool to make it easier for developers to learn about new domains that are maliciously created to implement phishing attacks," security engineer David Huang and software engineers Bartosz Niemczura and Amy Xu said in a blog post late on Wednesday.

Phishing websites try to trick people into revealing their passwords, credit card numbers, or other sensitive information.

The tool, announced during the F8 annual developer conference in San Jose, alerts website owners of these scams so that they can take action to protect their domain and the people who use their websites.

"Certificate Transparency Logs" are designed to keep a record of all valid security certificates issued by publicly-trusted Certificate Authorities.

"We have been using these logs to monitor certificates issued for domains owned by Facebook and have created tools to help developers take advantage of the same approach," the post said.

Using these tools, developers can learn about certificates that are mis-issued for the domains they control.

"We are extending the capabilities of our tool to send alerts when certificates are issued for potential phishing domains," the post added.

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Bollywood legend Rishi Kapoor passed away on April 30, 2020, after battling cancer for two years. The actor was admitted in a hospital in Mumbai where he breathed his last at the age of 67. But before this, Rishi Kapoor had been seeking treatment at a hospital in New York for almost a year in 2019. This is when several of Rishi Kapoor's friends from the industry visited him in NYC. But one celebrity who never visited him in the hospital was Amitabh Bachchan, and the superstar has revealed the reason in his latest blog post.

Amitabh Bachchan, in a post titled 'In Memorium', wrote, "Joie de vivre... the exuberant enjoyment of life, was a gene he inherited from his father... the Legend, the Ultimate Showman the Iconic Raj Kapoor... I never visited him in Hospital... I never wanted to see the distress on his smiling cherubic face... But I am certain... when he went, he must have gone with a gentle smile…"

Big B also shared the post on his Twitter account:

T 3517 - in Memoriam ..https://t.co/du9e3GHhof

— Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) April 30, 2020

Reminiscing about how he met Rishi Kapoor, Big B wrote, "I had seen him at his home Deonar Cottage, Chembur, a young energetic, bubbly, mischief in his eyes Chintu, on those rare moments when I was privileged to have been invited to an evening at Raj ji's house..."

Amitabh Bachchan worked with Kapoor in a number of films including Amar Akbar Anthony, Coolie, Naseeb, and more recently 102 Not Out. Their chemistry was infallible, and audiences loved watching the pair on-screen together.

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Superstar Mahesh Babu is one of the most critically acclaimed actors of the southern film industry and cherishes a humongous fan following throughout India. His social media is popular to spread messages that support certain social causes. The actor and his fans are known to storm social media with their social campaigns.

Recently, Mahesh Babu took to his social media to share a post about wiping away fake news and gossip websites that often spread misinformation and lies about celebrities.

These blogs or gossip websites leech off the actor's popularity and spread misinformation about them to gain views on their respective pages. It is crucial that these websites and rumors be put to a stop so that they can stop spreading fake rumors. Mahesh Babu shared the post on social media under the tag of "#KillFakeNews" against misinformation being spread with the caption.

Have a look at his tweet right here:

I stand by you brother @TheDeverakonda #KillFakeNews #KillGossipWebsites https://t.co/mk5enwj5Pm pic.twitter.com/ESYodVIQbw

— Mahesh Babu (@urstrulyMahesh) May 4, 2020

It's highly commendable someone has finally spoken against these lies and false news!

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31/01/2020

Using CRISPR/Cas9, a gene editing tool gene, the FREP1 gene can be inactivated to reduce mosquitoes vulnerability to Plasmodium parasite, a genus that causes malaria in humans.

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Entire Tollywood has come in support of Vijay Deverakonda and have said that an action plan is needed immediately to stop gossip websites.

The visit launched a joint induction programme to assist Ukraine in the implementation of the new international standards, namely the BEPS package, and the standards for exchange of information on request and for the automatic exchange of financial account information (the “Common Reporting Standard”).

On 16 October 2017, an OECD delegation met in Tbilisi the Georgian First Deputy Minister and Head of Georgia Revenue Service Giorgi Tabuashvili and Deputy Minister Lasha Khutsishvili to discuss the progress of the country in implementing the new international standards to combat tax avoidance and tax evasion.

Growth momentum picking-up in several advanced economies and strengthening in major emerging economies

Stronger signals of growth momentum picking-up in several major OECD economies