Amazon is making movies for the theaters with a faster release online master plan, but could this sink Prime streaming?

Plus how the NSA takes over botnets without a trace & hacks the hackers.

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Amazon announces plans to make movies for theaters, Prime streaming

Amazon Studios is going to start making movies, and you’ll be seeing them in theaters before they become available for streaming on Prime.Fresh off Golden Globe wins for its original series Transparent, the company today announced it will produce and acquire full-length feature films for theatrical release. Amazon Original Movies, which “focus on unique stories, voices, and characters from top and up-and-coming creators,” will become available to US Prime subscribers just 4 to 8 weeks after they premiere in theaters — a shorter transition to streaming than you’d see from the major movie studios.

And Amazon’s not exactly starting small; it plans to produce up to 12 movies each year as part of the new initiative, and those efforts will kick off in earnest later this year. “Not only will we bring Prime Instant Video customers exciting, unique, and exclusive films soon after a movie’s theatrical run, but we hope this program will also benefit filmmakers, who too often struggle to mount fresh and daring stories that deserve an audience,” said Roy Price, VP of Amazon Studios.

Report: NSA not only creates, but also hijacks, malware

One of the secret documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by Der Spiegel contains details about a covert NSA program called DEFIANTWARRIOR that’s used to hijack botnet computers and use them as “pervasive network analysis vantage points” and “throw-away non-attributable CNA [computer network attack] nodes.”

This means that if a user’s computer is infected by cybercriminals with some malware, the NSA might step in, deploy their own malware alongside it and then use that computer to attack other interesting targets. Those attacks couldn’t then be traced back to the NSA.

According to the leaked document, this is only done for foreign computers. Bots that are based in the U.S. are reported to the FBI Office of Victim Assistance.

Sometimes the NSA also uses the servers of unsuspecting third parties as scapegoats, Der Spiegel reported. When exfiltrating data from a compromised system, the data is sent to such servers, but it is then intercepted and collected en route though the NSA’s vast upstream surveillance network.

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