Once A Thief Torrent

So, John Woo, one of, if not the greatest Hong Kong action director, directed a comedy. An action comedy, this is still Woo after all, but still a comedy. The story going that there are these three orphans, who have two foster fathers. One of them a criminal overlord, one a police officer. Initially they lean more towards the former, being master art thieves, but the influence of the latter cannot be denied.This is a peculiar movie to review. I mean, John Woo is John Woo. When you see one of his movies you expect iron tight action scenes, grim urban settings and tough antiheroes. And while this movie does have all of those, it doesn't feature them in a prominent role. It almost feels like a silly parody of a John Woo film, except that the man himself directed it. And yet at the same time it kinda works. Kinda sorta. I mean, it's silly beyond belief, but the action scenes, when they happen, are of the usual Woo goodness - though admittedly he doesn't bring in his A-game here.The actors are also charismatic and talented - with Chow Yun-fat once again stealing the show. The silliness of the story means that there are no great character moments, but then again I'd say that there is enough substance here to please those that require three-dimensional characters in order to enjoy a movie.Once a Thief is a barrel of laughs. Is it John Woo's best work? Not even close. Nevertheless, it's an enjoyable way to spend an hour or two and it certainly doesn't pale in comparison with Western action comedies.

Once a Thief torrent

French heartthrob Alain Delon made his US leading man debut in this adaptation of Zekial Marko's novel "Scratch a Thief" about an ex-thief in San Francisco trying to stay out of trouble but fingered for the murder of a Chinese storekeeper by the police sergeant (Van Heflin) who hates him. Meanwhile, the thief's shady older brother (Jack Palance) is in town, needing the kid's help in pulling off a job. Ordinary crime plot given amusingly jazzy, frenetic direction by Ralph Nelson, who sets the scene with a flashy nightclub drum solo that is crazy-cool. Screenwriter Marko really lays on the '60s-era jive talk, some of it mind-boggling, while Nelson's quasi-European handling gives the picture an arresting look in vivid black-and-white. Some of the interesting supporting characters include a fey platinum-blond punk (years ahead of his time), plus Ann-Margret as Delon's put-upon wife. The talky lulls are given a boost by the slangy dialogue, and the location shooting in San Francisco is a big asset. **1/2 from ****

Casual games used to fall into three camps: the Bejeweled clone, the Diner Dash clone, and the Mystery Case File clone. It was and still is a clone-based market, and few are better at producing successful incarnations than PopCap. Its version of the Mystery Case File games began with Mystery P.I. - a hidden object game in which you're tasked with finding particular objects in an extremely cluttered scene. That sort of thing seems perfect for the DS, and it's surprising there haven't been hundreds already. Now PopCap has released two at once.

As you progress through the nonsensical story about suspects, thieves, and leads (all told through dull text onscreen), you're given access to a number of locations at once. There's a certain number of objects total that must be found, with completists given the option to hunt them all down if so desired. And all within a generous time limit. The advantage of multiple locations is taking a break from staring at one screen and starting afresh on another. It saves you from going too mad, as you somehow fail to spot a hummingbird in a café. (You can always use the hints, but they're for wimps.)

The DS version's most distinct difference from its PC origin is the scrolling screen. As things would be too tiny to see if the whole location were visible at once, things zoom right in letting you swish around with the stylus. And this is done well. Randomly tapping on the screen is considered cheating, so the game will penalise your score if you do, but there's never any confusion between scrolling and tapping, so you never get an unfair punishment for looking around. It changes how you approach the game, of course, and slows you down slightly, but soon it feels right enough.

However, for the same casual hunting, it all works fine. Don't play it in one giant go, but rather as something you pick up for a bus ride, and it'll do its job. The lack of grouping levels does it a real disservice, and once again that it's a remix of an old PC game with a new title isn't enamouring. But the same hypnotic power is present here, and even now, having played the stupid thing to death, I've a horrible suspicion that if I loaded it again I'd end up playing all over again.

Go into your equipment screen once you have the Spectral Steed Whistle and look at the bottom for your quickselect item slots. You should see your Flask of Crimson Tears and Flask of Cerulean Tears in the first two slots. Find an empty slot, open it, and equip the Spectral Steed Whistle. After this, scroll to the Whistle by pressing down on the D-pad until it is selected.

Torrents have become synonymous with copyright abuse and piracy, but the underlying technology is not in itself illegal. Perfectly legal file sharing and torrent sites do exist and are used on a regular basis, such as SXSW and media that falls under the public domain.\nIf you frequent ThePirateBay, uTorrent, RARBG, Putlocker, Zooqle, 1337X or KickassTorrents, however, chances are what you download from these torrenting sites is not legal. Government authorities can fine you for committing a civil offense, while ISPs and copyright holders will threaten and in some cases follow through on legal action. While it's unlikely that a record company will take someone to court, they might seek damages through settlements.\nHere's a quick breakdown on torrenting laws in several\u00a0countries:\nUnited States\nDownloading copyrighted material is illegal in the United States. ISPs often have a three-strike rule if they catch users who illegally download torrents. Non-copyrighted material is completely legal to download.\nAccording to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) website, making unauthorized copies of music recordings could result in a civil lawsuit. It might even land you in jail for up to five years and you could be hit with a fine of up to $250,000.\nCopyright holders often act through copyright trolls, which record IP addresses of torrenters and send settlement letters requesting remuneration. These entities have the right to sue on behalf of the copyright holder, but because an IP address does not legally constitute an identity in the US, the best option for recipients is to ignore them.\nCanada\nThe Copyright Modernization Act passed in January 2014 requires ISPs to send notices to copyright violators on their networks. The recipients' identities are stored on ISP servers for six months. Copyright holders cannot sue for damages of more than $5,000 when the copy is used for non-commercial purposes, which in most cases simply isn't worth the time or effort.\nThe notification system is more educational than legal, but ISPs can still penalize torrenters by choking bandwidth.\nUnited Kingdom\nLarger ISPs are required by law to notify subscribers when the British Phonographic Industry\u00a0catches them downloading torrents in the form of a cease and desist order. ISPs reserve the right to throttle bandwidth and disconnect users. ISPs with fewer than 400,000 subscribers are not subject to this law, however.\nCopyright holders have the right to sue uploaders and downloaders for damages even if no monetary gain was involved.\nMajor ISPs block popular torrent trackers such as ThePirateBay in the UK, but these can still be accessed through a VPN service.\nAustralia\nPiracy is a crime in Australia, but there's little enforcement. It's not completely unheard of for a copyright holder to successfully sue ISPs for torrenters' identities, whom they can then request remuneration from using a practice called speculative invoicing, but it's rare.\nA \"three-strikes\" rule in which ISPs would notify torrenters on behalf of copyright holders was canned earlier this year due to disputes over implementation costs.\nISPs have blocked some torrent trackers and other sites containing infringing content under a court order, such as The Pirate Bay. In 2016, a federal court in Australia ordered ISPs to block BitTorrent tracker sites including ThePirateBay,\u00a0Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt and SolarMovie. These can still be accessed with any of the VPN providers we listed above.\nIn late 2018, Parliament passed an amendment to the Copyright Act. This amendment lets ISPs censor proxy servers and mirror sites---duplicates of torrent trackers put up after the original site is blocked---without needing to return to court for each injunction. Likewise, Google and other search engines must demote or remove links to infringing sites including their proxies and mirrors.\nThe Netherlands\nWe're adding a section about the Netherlands because there's a huge misconception that pirating copyrighted materials is legal there. As of 2014, it is not. Doing so is considered a civil offense not a criminal one, so you will not be sought out by law enforcement for doing so, but you can be fined.\nHowever, the law states that fines cannot be artificially high, so damages that copyright holders can exact are capped. Early in 2018,\u00a0Netherlands\u2019 privacy watchdog, Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), gave permission to Dutch Filmworks to collect IP addresses of anyone illegally downloading content. The company can hand out fines to users and have decided on a fee of 150 Euros per film.\nGermany\nDownloading copyrighted material without permission is illegal in Germany. Enforcement is usually handled by law firms that act on behalf of copyright holders (see: copyright trolls). Fines typically range up to 1,000 Euros.\nSimilar to the US, copyright trolls send threatening letters to torrenters after identifying their IP address. While we're not legal experts in German law, the consensus of what to do if you receive a letter is also similar to the US: if it doesn't identify you by name and doesn't come directly from the police, ignore it and just let the statute of limitations period expire.\nNote that if someone pirates content on an unsecured wifi network, the owner of the wifi network can be held liable for damages, even if they were not aware of the illegal activity taking place. This fine is usually around 100 Euros.\nRelated: Best VPNs for Germany\nIndia\nOnline piracy laws are a little fuzzy in India. A slew of news reports from 2016 suggested that even viewing certain web pages or torrent files (not the copyrighted content itself) was enough to penalize netizens with heavy fines and jail time. This is not true, however; the rumor arose from a poorly-worded warning from Indian ISPs that appeared when users tried to access blocked sites.\nPiracy in India is illegal like anywhere else and could conceivably result in fines or jail time, but the emphasis of enforcement seems to be on redistribution, e.g. bootlegging and selling pirated content, rather than personal consumption.\nRelated: Best VPN for India\nRead more: Is torrenting safe?\nComparitech does not condone or encourage piracy. Please stick to legal torrents.","author":"@type":"Person","name":"Paul Bischoff","description":"Paul is Comparitech\u2019s editor and a regular commentator on cyber security and privacy topics in national and international media including New York Times, BBC, Forbes, The Guardian and many others. He's been writing about the tech industry since 2012 for publications like Tech in Asia, Mashable, and various startup blogs. \nPaul has an in-depth knowledge of VPNs, having been an early adopter while looking to access the open internet during this time in China.\nHe previously worked in Beijing as an editor for Tech in Asia, and has been writing and reporting on technology for the last decade. He has also volunteered as a teacher for older adults learning basic tech literacy and cyber awareness. You can find him on Twitter at @pabischoff.\n","url":"https:\/\/www.comparitech.com\/author\/paul-bischoff\/"}},"@type":"Question","name":"Are any free VPNs good for torrenting?","answerCount":1,"acceptedAnswer":"@type":"Answer","text":"Using a free VPN for anonymous torrenting is generally a no-no. Due to the large amount of bandwidth required, many free VPN services prohibit P2P activity. Others aren't secure, and many have data caps. The common adage that comes with free services is that if you don't buy the product, then you are the product. This is especially true because a VPN isn't just a piece of software, it's an ongoing service that requires continuous resources and maintenance.\nTunnelBear, Windscribe, and Hide.Me's free tiers are all a bit more reputable, but they have speed or data caps that aren't ideal for torrenting. TunnelBear and VPNGate, a community-run VPN project, explicitly prohibit P2P file sharing.\nWe passed on several paid VPN providers as well. PureVPN, VyprVPN, HideMyAss, Overplay, and Hotspot Shield all failed to make the cut due to their logging policies. IronSocket and BolehVPN were left out due to performance concerns.\nOther so-called free VPNs for torrenting can actually degrade your privacy rather than improve it. Some of them keep logs of your activity, inject tracking cookies into your web browser, insert advertisements on web pages, or even carry malware payloads.\nHola\nSome unscrupulous free VPN providers could well be scraping users' personal data and selling it to third parties. One such high-profile case was Hola, a free VPN provider based in Israel. Hola was caught selling users' bandwidth, and it was criticized for being opaque about how each Hola user became a node on the network rather than hosting its own dedicated VPN servers.\nVPNGate\nVPNGate is a fantastic academic initiative out of Japan that aims to uncensor the web for people living under oppressive anti-free speech regimes. It uses a network of volunteer nodes around the world as relays. It discourages P2P file sharing activities that would hog the network, however, and it keeps logs for up to three months to help weed out abuse and criminal wrongdoing.\nIronSocket\nIronSocket doesn't keep logs, but the majority of its servers expressly prohibit P2P activity. Those non-P2P servers block all P2P connections. Even if it doesn't keep logs, that means it is monitoring your activity at some level.\nRead our full review of IronSocket.","author":"@type":"Person","name":"Paul Bischoff","description":"Paul is Comparitech\u2019s editor and a regular commentator on cyber security and privacy topics in national and international media including New York Times, BBC, Forbes, The Guardian and many others. He's been writing about the tech industry since 2012 for publications like Tech in Asia, Mashable, and various startup blogs. \nPaul has an in-depth knowledge of VPNs, having been an early adopter while looking to access the open internet during this time in China.\nHe previously worked in Beijing as an editor for Tech in Asia, and has been writing and reporting on technology for the last decade. He has also volunteered as a teacher for older adults learning basic tech literacy and cyber awareness. You can find him on Twitter at @pabischoff.\n","url":"https:\/\/www.comparitech.com\/author\/paul-bischoff\/","@type":"Question","name":"How do VPNs protect your privacy when torrenting?","answerCount":1,"acceptedAnswer":"@type":"Answer","text":"A VPN protects your privacy when torrenting in two key ways.\nFirst, it prevents your ISP and anyone else on your local and ISP network from seeing that you are torrenting. Because all of the files you download and upload via BitTorrent are encrypted when they pass through your ISP's server networks, their contents cannot be identified. It would take a monumental time- and resource-consuming effort for an ISP to even attempt to crack the encryption put in place by your VPN service.\nSecondly, a VPN prevents other users from downloading and\/or uploading the same files as you from seeing your IP address. BitTorrent is a P2P, or peer-to-peer, protocol. That means everyone who uses the same torrent file is connected in what's known as a \"swarm\". Each device connected to the swarm can see all of the other IP addresses of all the other devices in the swarm. Many BitTorrent clients even allow you to view a list of other devices you're connected to when leeching or seeding files on the network.\nWithout a VPN, your real IP address can be used to identify your approximate location and internet service provider. This is how copyright trolls are able to find torrenters and send them threatening settlement letters (read about how to respond to these in our torrenting safety and legal guide).\nA VPN masks your IP address so that other devices in the swarm only see the IP address of the P2P VPN server. The best VPNs for torrenting typically use shared IP addresses, meaning dozens and even hundreds of users are assigned the same IP address. This large pool of users makes it next to impossible to trace torrenting activity back to a single person. Furthermore, if you use one of the logless VPNs on this list, the VPN provider won't have any user information to hand over should a third party request it.\nMasking your IP address also protects you from hackers that would use it as a backdoor into your system, find out personal information about you, or even harass you at your home. Your IP address is like your home address, but for your computer. Someone who knows it can find out where you are.","author":"@type":"Person","name":"Paul Bischoff","description":"Paul is Comparitech\u2019s editor and a regular commentator on cyber security and privacy topics in national and international media including New York Times, BBC, Forbes, The Guardian and many others. He's been writing about the tech industry since 2012 for publications like Tech in Asia, Mashable, and various startup blogs. \nPaul has an in-depth knowledge of VPNs, having been an early adopter while looking to access the open internet during this time in China.\nHe previously worked in Beijing as an editor for Tech in Asia, and has been writing and reporting on technology for the last decade. He has also volunteered as a teacher for older adults learning basic tech literacy and cyber awareness. You can find him on Twitter at @pabischoff.\n","url":"https:\/\/www.comparitech.com\/author\/paul-bischoff\/","@type":"Question","name":"Why hide your IP address when torrenting?","answerCount":1,"acceptedAnswer":"@type":"Answer","text":"Torrenting is often associated with piracy, and piracy is theft. What's more, torrenting exposes you to files from unknown sources so protecting your identity is usually desirable. We strongly recommend you only torrent content you have the legal right to access to avoid landing yourself in hot water.\u00a0 If someone gets caught, it probably won't be the police or the copyright owner who comes knocking.\nCopyright holders are often large media companies that outsource piracy litigation to shifty law firms dubbed \"copyright trolls\". Copyright trolls monitor popular torrents for the unique IP addresses of devices that connect to the swarm to upload or download files. They then match those IP addresses to the internet service providers that assigned them to customers. The copyright troll goes through the ISP to send a settlement letter or a copyright violation notice to each torrenter. Settlement letters demand money and threaten legal action i