Police assisted by the Federation Against Copyright Theft showed up in large numbers to arrest an alleged movie pirate in the UK this week. Armed with an emergency search warrant issued out of hours by a judge, five undercover police vehicles containing detectives and FACT officers were deployed to arrest…
This week a new "anonymous" BitTorrent client was released to the public. TrafficPrivacy allows users to hide their IP-address directly from within their client, at the price of a standard proxy or VPN service. The TrafficPrivacy team says its main goal is to provide an all-in-one anonymity solution for a…
A law firm hoping to secure the identities of Internet users who allegedly shared copyright material without permission is likely to find itself in a sticky situation today. The firm has reportedly approached ISPs in Australia with demands that they hand over subscribers' details, but according to their own published…
In a new lawsuit Voltage Pictures, the company behind The Hurt Locker, say they have not only tracked down a "prolific proponent" of widespread BitTorrent piracy, but have identified him as a practicing attorney based in Portland, Oregon. The defendant, who describes himself as an expert in two martial arts,…
Kim Dotcom has announced that he is the inventor of the so-called two-step authentication system and has a patent to prove it. The Megaupload founder says the security mechanism, which has just been introduced by Twitter, is being used by U.S. companies more than a billion times every week without…
To mark the occasion of 20 million URL takedown notices sent to Google by RIAA member companies, the organization has complained that search engines still aren't doing enough to reduce the piracy problem. The RIAA says it is using a bucket to deal with "an ocean of illegal downloading", one…
Twitter and Facebook, not to mention the TorrentFreak inbox, are currently alive with complaints that The Pirate Bay has been blocked, taken down, censored or otherwise silenced. Actually the site works perfectly for us but is clearly experiencing a couple of issues. There’s always panic when people can’t access The…
New tax records reveal that the RIAA has made heavy employee cuts after revenue dropped to a new low. Over the past two years the major record labels have cut back their membership dues from $33.6 to $23.6 million. RIAA staff plunged from 107 to 60 workers in the same…