In front of an audience of music industry insiders the Minister commented on the Pirate Bay verdict. “This may not be appreciated by everyone, but I was one of those who was pleased with the verdict in the Pirate Bay case,” she said.

While some of the audience cheered after hearing the Minister’s statement, others frowned, probably realizing that she is not supposed to give her personal opinion on an ongoing court case. In Sweden there is a so called rule of ministers (Ministerstyre) which makes it unconstitutional for ministers and other members of parliament to influence individual cases handled by government agencies. This means that Adelsohn-Liljeroth may have overstepped the line with her recent comments.

The Minister of Culture gave the speech during a dinner attended by 450 guests including copyright holders, artists and legislators. The atmosphere, including some of the other talks, was already pretty hostile towards everything file-sharing related. So, in a way the Minister’s comments fitted in nicely. However, the Minister’s statement could have political consequences.

Marie Demker, professor of political science at University of Gothenburg told SVD in a comment, “Since the verdict has been appealed, the process of justice isn’t concluded. In that case, it’s a very gray area to take side in an issue that’s politically discussed, both with the issue of bias and as an important topic in the EU elections.”"

“This will spread throughout social media and it will affect voters. The Minister’s comment is like an elephant stomping through a china shop,” Demker said. Indeed, it is not unlikely that the Swedish voters will distance themselves even more from established politicians such as Adelsohn-Liljeroth, which may benefit the Pirate Party’s march towards Brussels.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“It is extremely serious,” District Court’s chief Lena Berke said in a comment. “This is a breach of confidentiality, and therefore, we intend to notify the police,” she added, noting that it hasn’t influenced the court’s ruling in any way.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde believes that there might have been more people who knew about the outcome beforehand. Just 10 minutes after the verdict was announced, movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted told a Swedish newspaper that the 107 was very well written, and that it would hold up all the way to the Supreme Court. “It wouldn’t surprise me if she wrote the verdict,” Peter said.

Peter Sunde’s lawyer Peter Althin was unpleasantly surprised and said he found it totally unacceptable that a verdict could be released in advance like this. He said that he is unaware of any previous cases where this has happened before. Sunde himself was not that bothered and joked about the leak. “Really, it’s a bit LOL,” he wrote on Twitter. “It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.”

The Pirate Bay crew had anticipated a defeat in the case, but the jail time was unexpected. Nevertheless, Peter is still positive about the outcome of the appeal and he’s going to wrap up the tumultuous day with a party in his hometown Malmo. “I’m gonna play some techno,” he said.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Legal Affairs Committee in the European Parliament has approved the resolution to extend the copyright term, as we have discussed in the past, from 50 years to 95 for recordings. This will now move on to a plenary vote in March.

Opposition for the extension has been considerable. Last month, the Open Rights Group (ORG) held a roundtable with several academics and MEPs, including at least one member of the Legal Affairs Committee, while scathing critiques on the proposal have appeared in influential newspapers over the past year.

Crucially, the main ‘benefit’ touted by Commissioner McCreevy – that it’s for the benefit of session musicians and the like – is significantly weakened by an amendment from the committee that gives the administration over to collecting societies. Of course, that’s assuming you can prove your entitlement to this money. According to veteran producer and musician Mike Collins, speaking at the ORG roundtable, records relating to session musician participation were not common until recently.

Perhaps worst of all, the commission has now been asked by the committee to perform an impact study based around extending the term of video performances by a similar amount. Although the study will doubtless find that there will be little benefit to any but the major content producers in performing such an extension, it will likely be ignored (as the study that said the same thing in this case was ignored) and the proposal will proceed.

There is a slight ray of hope though, in that there is a requirement to review the social situation of artists in 3 years time, and then every 4 years, to see how this has improved things. This might curtail any further extension on this subject, but the non-existent change in artist benefits from this, might prompt them to put things back how they were. Or, they could decide to make the terms even longer….

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Both the MPAA and RIAA have pushed other countries to adopt similar legislation as well, but it will be hard for them to succeed in Europe. In April, the European Parliament spoke out against these anti-piracy measures, by saying it would be “conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness”. Yesterday, this statement was backed up by an official vote.

The amendment, drafted by Guy Bono and other members of the European Parliament, was adopted by an overwhelming majority. 573 parliament members voted in favor while only 74 rejected. Satisfied with this outcome, Bono stated in a response to the vote: “You do not play with individual freedoms like that,” and said that the French government should review its three-strikes law.”

The vote was welcomed in other member states as well. Swedish EU parliamentarian Christofer Fjellner said in a comment: “What’s important about this decision is that now it’s clear that you can’t force [internet service] providers to ban people from the Internet without a legal process.”

It is scary to see how lobby groups are awarded powers that should only belong to law-enforcement agencies. Evidence should never be collectedly by parties who gather it in their own interests, and it is a relief to see that the European Parliament agrees on this.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One of the most under-reported is Atlantic V Anderson, which has taken over 3 years from start to finish. The RIAA eventually dropped it with prejudice, meaning they accept the fault was theirs in this case. A similar thing happened in the case against another alleged filesharer, Foster, but both cases were relatively under-reported in mainstream media.

Copyright law, like most other aspects of civil law, allows for the prevailing party to recoup legal fees and costs incurred in the case. This is exactly what Foster and Anderson did, with success. The Foster case was awarded over $68,000 in attorney fees and costs. Likewise, the Anderson case was awarded fees and costs but of a substantially greater amount; $107,834 to be precise, in an order dated July 28th 2008.

It is encouraging to finally hear that last night, the RIAA and the member companies that were involved in the case finally paid the fees (they refused first), putting an end to this protracted legal wrangling. The amount paid was not, however, $107,834 but a figure of $107,951 , a figure which takes into account interest accrued due to delay.

It should be noted that while this is the end of Atlantic V Anderson, it is not the end of Anderson V Atlantic, the case where Ms Anderson is taking her former accusers to task over their practices in this field. It is a heartening victory, and one that is spurring the tide.

So, with Thomas looking to head to a mistrial, making the $222,000 judgment null and void, the two largest decisions in the RIAA’s ‘war on downloading’ have been against them. In both cases the RIAA admitted it was wrong, and ordered to pay the fees.

Thanks to Recording Industry Vs People

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

However, in a testament to its structure and security, BitTorrent is almost immune from these type of attacks and that is why you never hear the RIAA and IFPI talk about viruses and BitTorrent in the same announcement. In terms of sharing files and avoiding malware, BitTorrent does really well.

This recent malware attack revolved around people downloading files which were renamed to look like music and movies, but instead engineer a situation where lots of other stuff gets installed on the host PC, causing all sorts of problems. While viewing some of the filenames listed by McAfee, I had to remind myself that I was a novice once too – but it was still a stretch for me to believe so many people would download files that look like these:

preview-t-3545425-adult.mpg
preview-t-3545425-changing times earth wind .mp3
preview-t-3545425-meet bambi in kings harem.mp3
preview-t-3545425-middle eastern chick.mpg
preview-t-3545425-theme godfather.mp3
t-3545425-bentley bizzle.mp3
t-3545425-haloween special.mp3
t-3545425-just got lucky.mp3
t-3545425-peanut butter jelly amende.mp3

The good news is that the chances of these type of files appearing on BitTorrent are very low as trackers have moderators who remove such junk, something which is largely impossible on Gnutella (LimeWire) and eMule (ed2k). As long as the ‘infected’ users keep this stuff in their shared folder, there is little that can be done to stop it spreading. If they don’t clean this stuff out, no-one will, and it’s in this department BitTorrent comes out tops – again.

First of all, BitTorrent isn’t a ‘folder sharing’ client like LimeWire or KaZaA, which means that the user needs to use a torrent site to distribute (publish) his torrent. If the content is legitimate (and there are very few rules in most places, save obviously illegal material) the .torrent file will be up for all to download, with links to malware and viruses mostly filtered out by humans – otherwise known as ‘mods’ or ‘moderators’.

BitTorrent has thousands of hard working and largely unpaid moderators, who work tirelessly to make sure that files like these don’t make it to the BitTorrent user’s computer. In reality, files presented like the ones above could never slip by the site mods, they would see them a mile away and remove them quickly.

BitTorrent isn’t 100% malware free but compared to Gnutella and ed2k, it is astonishingly healthy and that is largely down to the strength of the system and the mods, who work non-stop behind the scenes to keep BitTorrent an enjoyable experience.

For the few small things that slip through the net, try our guides.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The message from the Moderate Party MPs to their AntipiratbyrÃ¥n supporting colleagues was “be careful, they will never be satisfied”, drawing parallels to the earlier attempts to ban MP3 players, and VCRs, both areas in which, having failed to ban, industry groups are now making a profit from selling content.

Karl Sigfrid told TorrentFreak that the APB proposals make no practical sense. “I think it could be solved in theory. However, in reality, you would need such a surveillance system to achieve this that it would be all out of proportion. So I don’t think there’s a feasilbe way of stopping individuals copying. The cause for file sharing is basically that it’s possible. People have always done it to the extent that they’ve been able to. With cassette tapes 20 years ago and electronically today. Copyright laws preventing individuals from sharing information have never been legitimate in the eyes of most people.”

When asked about if it was down to content industries being slow to change their business practices, he replied: “It’s hard to say what would have happened if the content industries had been quicker releasing their material online, before the P2P networks grew mainstream. Probably the illegal filesharing would be less extensive, but it’s possible that it would still have been increasingly difficult for iTunes and such services to compete with free downloading. The change needed might be so radical that it’s no longer about selling copies of immaterial products at all.”

Rickard Falkvinge, of the Swedish Pirate Party was understandably upbeat about it. “Karl Sigfrid’s taking a stand marks a major turning point. For the first time, an established politician shows deep-down understanding of the real conflict, instead of cluelessly humming along with a technophobical luddite industry. Some other Swedish mainstream politicians have previously talked in terms of how it’s unreasonable to declare war on an entire generation. Sigfrid is the first to understand why.” His enthusiasm is understandable as, one Swedish torrent user put it “a bunch of members of The Conservative Party have started listening to the policies of The Pirate Party, and they want to jump on their bandwagon, as it’s gaining popularity”.

Gaining popularity it is, as yesterday, thirteen members of Parliament joined in another attack (Swedish only, no English translation at present) on the likes of the APB, and recording industries, saying “The record labels are obviously opposed to a development that makes them obsolete.” However, not everyone has been celebrating. Pirate Bay administrator Brokep was skeptical, saying “I’m intrigued that the debate is sparking up again. There’s been a lot of lies from the politicians. Promises and nothing has happened, so at least this will put the debate back on the map.”

The initial seven MPs were Karl Sigfrid. Margareta Cederfelt. Ulf Berg. Lena Asplund. Staffan Appelros. Lisbeth Grönfeldt Bergman and Göran Montan. Tuesdays additions were Marie Weibull Kornias,Finn Bengtsson, Ann-Charlotte Hammar Johnsson, Sven Yngve Persson, and Anders Hansson.

**UPDATE** Sorry, forgot to add this translation of the second piece, available here

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Other people get other problems such as torrents never finishing or when they watch a downloaded video it turns out to be completely the wrong thing – i.e the file was deliberately mislabeled. Sometimes the video download is of such poor quality it’s simply unwatchable and of course all this adds up to a lot of frustration and wasted time.

There are many techniques employed by experienced file-sharers to ensure that the torrent is what it says it is and of a good enough quality to even bother with. We’ll look at just a few of them here.

Remember that sharing certain types of media via BitTorrent may not be legal in your country.

1. Always read the comments

Before downloading any torrent, it’s always prudent to read the comments on the site. It only takes a few seconds but it’s time well spent. Very often there are requests from previous downloaders for a password to access the file or some might be asking where to download a special video player to view it. Movies should never come as .zip or an .exe file, if they do there is every chance the file comes with some sort of catch. If the movie won’t play with VLC Media Player there’s every chance it’s a fake. Any files needing 3WPlayer, DomPlayer or any that direct to other sites and ask you to fill in forms or install stuff, are also fake.

2. Can the source be trusted?

A good way to find out if a .torrent is real or not is to find out who uploaded the file. There are several well known users that always release new torrents on the same account, aXXo and EZTV are some good examples of such users. If the user is anonymous, you could look at the tracker, and see if it’s widely used. There is no guarantee that files on a well known trackers are safe, but you can almost be certain that files tracked by trackers such as bittorrent.isthebe.st are fake.

3. Is the file actually released already?

Many people use sites such as VCDQuality and Nforce.nl (sites that rates the quality of media releases on the internet) to not only ensure that the video is of a good quality, but also to weed out malfunctioning releases and identify real ones. Recently a movie producer was grateful to the BitTorrent community for spreading his movie ‘The Man From Earth‘, so we can use this movie as an example:

The VCDQ page shows a lot of information but let’s look at the box marked ‘folder’. Here you can see the release name. By copying and pasting this exact filename into Google, a list of almost guaranteed non-fake torrents appear.

4. TorrentSpam?

Another place to check is TorrentSpam. If you already have a torrent file in your possession, you can either paste the full name (or hash value, obtainable from the ‘general’ tab in uTorrent) into their search engine and if someone has reported this as a bad torrent, the results will be shown. Equally, if despite all the measures you still end up downloading a bad torrent, its possible to report this fact for the benefit of other TorrentSpam users in the future.

Do you have any tips or tricks not mentioned here that you would like to share? Feel free to leave a comment!

4. Other suggestions

We asked Matthijs from Mininova for some good tips on how to avoid downloading fake or scammy torrents and he came up with the following suggestions in addition to what we already posted.

In the end it’s experience alone that helps identify the fakes. Most people who have been file-sharing for a little while can easily spot these bad torrents but it’s clearly not so easy for the novice, judging by the number of emails we get at TorrentFreak each week. Let’s hope that number reduces soon.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In short, every communications network operator will have to log and store data about all of their users. Whilst the contents of the messages are not currently expected to be stored, everything from the IDs of either end of the communication, anything to identify the type of equipment used, the time and length of the call, and, perhaps most importantly, the location of cellular telephone handsets when used.

The Piratpartiet’s Rick Falkvinge stresses this last point as a large privacy concern. “We’re rapidly descending into a surveillance society. We know exactly where this road leads – we’ve seen it in Europe’s recent history. When the Berlin wall came down, we were rejoicing that the oppressed Eastern bloc would become like Western democracies. It was never supposed to be the other way around.”

What makes things even more uncertain, is that at present no-one knows how long the Swedish bill will require information to be held. The EU Directive states anywhere from 6 to 24 months. Of equal uncertainty is the legal threshold for obtaining information stored under these measures.

Speakers at the Malmö rally included Swedish IP entrepreneur Jonas Birgersson, CEO of ISP Bredband2, as well as the annonymiser Relakks, whilst Stockholm had Falkvinge, and other Pirate Party board members.

The demonstration echo’s similar protests in other European countries, such as the 15,000 that marched in Berlin in late September. More demonstrations are due in Germany on the 6th in more than 30 cities. With information like this being stored, it will potentially magnify the guilty until innocent approach already being used in file sharing trials. If the jury in the Thomas trial had been shown a record of a communication logged through such a system, they may have pressed for even higher damages per song. The major drawback with these systems, however, was pointed out in a recent court motion by the Oregon Attorney General , whilst you can identify the technological devices used, that still doesn’t identify the person using it. Furthermore, in any well planned criminal incident (which covers terrorism) it’s not unknown to use equipment which does not belong to you. Stolen credit cards, false numberplates, cloned cell phones. As with DRM, it only causes problems, without solving any.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In March we reported in some detail about the case of 500 UK file-sharers being legally pursued following claims that they uploaded games from the German publisher ‘Zuxxez’ onto file-sharing networks.

Since then, many people have been in touch with the law firm who sent the threatening letters, demanding evidence that they actually did something. TorrentFreak has obtained copies of the latest letters and within the claimed evidence is a description of how the anti-piracy system used by Logistep AG (the company hired to track the alleged pirates) is supposed to work.

The cleverly named “File Sharing Monitor” is the system being used by Logistep to gather evidence against file-sharers. It is actually just a modified version of the Shareaza P2P application that is configured to search for infringing files, and collect the information from the hosts that share these files.

The “File Sharing Monitor” only targets Gnutella and eDonkey users, so it is still unclear how they track down BitTorrent users. Here is how it works:

1. The client connects to the P2P network, searches for sources of the infringing file, and collects the IP addresses that were gathered through the search.
2. The client requests to download (a piece of) the file from the host that was found through the search.
3. The filename, file size, IP-address, P2P protocol, P2P application, time, and the username are automatically inserted into a database, if the host permits the download.
4. This is the “best” part. The application does a WHOIS search for the ISP information and automatically sends an infringement letter to the ISP if needed.

The claim is that the “File Sharing Monitor” is totally foolproof and that it can provide forensic-quality information to a court in order that file-sharers be punished. The question remains whether an IP-address is sufficient evidence to sue a person for downloading copyrighted material. Recent cases suggest that the RIAA and the MPAA will need more evidence than that.

Here is the ‘evidence’ for the functioning of the Logistep system. You decide.

-Link to PDF.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Founded in 2001, Antipiratbyrån (APB) is a Swedish non-governmental anti-piracy group, its members consisting of representatives from dozens of Swedish media companies. APB rose to infamy in March 2005 when the police conducted an anti-piracy raid against Swedish ISP Bahnhof, only to be presented with evidence that APB themselves had hired someone to plant copyright material. APB are well known (and most hated) for their activities in working to put ThePirateBay BitTorrent tracker offline.

Audible Magic tout themselves as a leading provider of content protection and management solutions. Of interest to file-sharers is their ‘Copysense’ identification technology, which identifies media by matching an electronic ‘fingerprint’ unique of the particular content, to that of a ‘fingerprint’ stored in their claimed 5 million-strong registered database. It is being widely reported that Google will be employing Audible Magic’s technology to screen videos submitted to YouTube.

Silicon Valley based BayTSP trumpets its ability to identify and track infringing content on the internet and take it down. They do a lot of tracking of content distributed via the BitTorrent protocol and regularly send out copyright infringement notices (link PDF) to users via their ISP, ordering the content to be taken down. BayTSP also claim to be able to track first uploaders of copyright works on the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks via their ‘First Source’ technology. It is unclear how this system operates but it is believed to be relatively primitive – BayTSP searches for filenames (in torrents or ed2k links) which imply infringing content and then download the content to confirm that is indeed the case. The user’s ISP would then be contacted with a takedown demand in the usual way . The quality of the methods used by BayTSP appear suspect in certain situations.

The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has claimed the scalps of many small torrent sites in the Netherlands. They can be quite aggressive in their war on Piracy. One of the most used tactics is to track down the owner of the site, and send a letter stating that they face several years in prison if they don’t stop serving torrents, and expose the users. Up until now, BREIN has not yet taken action to the bigger torrent sites in The Netherlands. Last January, BREIN won a lawsuit, and the Dutch ISP “KPN” was forced to hand over the name and address of the dutchtorrent.org admin.

The British Phonographic Industry or BPI claims to have pursued hundreds, if not thousands of UK file-sharers accused of uploading copyright material. Previously, BPI General Counsel Geoff Taylor said that the BPI had no desire to drag people through the courts. The number of people who have actually settled with the BPI (i.e paid a ‘fine’) is unclear. What is clear is that not everyone who receives a complaint from the BPI actually settles and so far, no-one has ever appeared in a UK court to answer such a complaint. It appears that threats from the BPI to P2P’ers have a somewhat empty quality about them.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry or IFPI throws its net wide, targeting users of many networks including BitTorrent, eDonkey, DirectConnect, Gnutella, Limewire and SoulSeek. After carrying out what was claimed to be the largest ever worldwide legal action against filesharers in 2005 – effectively doubling the number of people being sued to over 4,000 – 2006 saw its biggest assault yet, with the IFPI targetting a further 8000 with enforcement actions.

Macrovision, as far as p2p is concerned, is a company trying to keep DVDRips off file-sharing networks. It claims that its anti-piracy solution called Ripguard can recover 97% of all revenue lost due to DVD ripping piracy. In reality Ripguard is easily defeated.

While Macrovision is failing to keep DVDRips off P2P networks, the Dolby subsidiary Cinea is using watermarks to track the source of DVD Screeners uploaded to the internet. The CineFence system from Philips does a similar thing, except it tracks the source of a camcorded movie back to the theater it was filmed in.

If filling file-sharing networks with unwanted junk is your thing then Media Defender Inc takes some beating. Purchased by ArtistDirect in 2005, they are currently working with labels such as Suretone Records to spam file-sharing networks with partial videos and music in an attempt to generate traffic to their website. Additionally, they were embarrassed recently when their involvement in operating fake MPAA torrents was revealed.

MediaSentry is a company offering similar services to BayTSP. Where BayTSP is used a lot by the likes of the MPAA, MediaSentry is popular with the RIAA. Monitoring file-sharing networks for infringements of their clients media, they identify and trace IP addresses they claim are engaged in such activity. MediaSentry’s effectiveness has been called into question, notably in Foundation v. UPC Nederland link

The MPAA is a well known anti-piracy lobbying organization, that protects the rights of its members, the “big six” movie studios. February 2006, the MPAA announced lawsuits (PDF) against Torrentspy, Torrentbox and Isohunt, three of the most popular BitTorrent search engines. The MPAA was also involved in the raid on The Pirate Bay this May. They even sent a letter (PDF) to Sweden’s State Secretary this March in which they kindly requested that The Pirate Bay be taken down. In 2005 the MPAA successfully shut down Lokitorrent, Btefnet, and Elitetorrents. But the MPAA does not have a clean slate either. They violated the linkware license of the “Forest Blog” blogging engine.

File-sharers tend to have long memories and even if an anti-piracy company decides to change strategy, it can be difficult to shake off a tarnished image. French anti-piracy group Retspan and its subsidiary PeerFactor became known in 2004 after reports it was giving file-sharers financial incentives to spread fake files, a claim it later denied. Even though Peerfactor tried to ‘go straight’ in 2006 with a uTorrent deal, it’s the original connection with Retspan which prevails in the mind of many sharers. For in 2004 it was Retspan who dared to take on the now-legendary Suprnova, trying to get it shut down by reporting it to the FBI and by sending threats to sites hosting Suprnova mirrors.

The RIAA protects the rights of a large group of record labels and distributors. The RIAA seems to use law suits merely as threats, a way to “bully” people (dead or alive) into paying their exorbitant fines. Most of their victims do not have the money to fight back. They often offer people a chance to settle for $3000 or $4000, leaving them broke, but avoiding a real case. This trick seems to work well for the RIAA, they easily collect money without having to prove (they have no clue) that the defendant is actually someone who engaged in peer to peer file sharing of copyrighted music without authorization.

Finnish Venture Cup winner ViralG burst onto the scene in 2005 with a claim that it could end 99% of all file-sharing. It uses technology that enables it to exploit poor hashing technology employed by the likes of the moribund Kazaa but appears unable to do a thing about files found on other networks, including the mighty BitTorrent.

ViralG – like many anti-p2p companies – seem to make wild claims about the effectiveness of their systems. Ask anyone who visits a search engine such as mininova and they will tell you: to a greater or lesser extent, the anti-p2p companies have failed. Miserably.

And finally, I wanted to end this article on a lighter note and happily I can do so with the inclusion of the one, the only – Web Sheriff!!, the company that shot to fame via the publication of its copyright complaints made to ThePirateBay, or more accurately, the comedy value of the responses. Well worth a read. White Stripes/Web Sheriff

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The problem with the mainline client is that it’s not a Universal application, so running it on an Intel Mac is like watching cheese ferment. There is a Universal beta, but is still very buggy and refuses to close, you have to force quit it. And Azureus is a memory hog, partly because it’s written in Java and partly because it’s such a feature-full application.

So, there is a need for a lighter alternative. Well, we’ve found an alternative, and it’s as light as it gets. A developer by the name of Wojtek has released a widget that makes creating torrents as easy as dragging and dropping a file or folder onto your Dashboard. It’s called CreateTorrent and is really simple to use.

The only thing you need to do once you’ve downloaded and installed it on your Dashboard is add an announce (tracker) URL. Just flip it around and you’ll see three input boxes: Announce URL, Port and Output Filename. The only one you need to change is the Announce URL, ie. a tracker address. Mininova compiles a list of “frequently used” public and private trackers that you can use. Most people just use The Pirate Bay’s tracker:

http://tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

Initially, the widget just refused to work. But then, I wanted to find out what exactly was wrong and opened it with Azureus instead of Transmission, the client I normally use. Turns out, it was an issue with libtransmission, the core library of the two BitTorrent clients I tried to seed the torrent with, Transmission and Acquisition. When I opened the torrent with Azureus, it just worked.

Download the torrent I made with CreateTorrent: Noite de Carnaval by Code (.torrent).

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

One of the btjunkie admins has found a unique way to identify trackers that host these fake files, which makes it easy to efficiently remove them.

Virtually all the servers that spread these fake files are located in Southern California and Las Vegas. The administrators of these servers follow patterns that make it easy to identify them. The content of the trackers and seed amounts make them stand out. There are more unique characteristics, but we wont reveal all the tricks because they could take counter measures. Here are some examples of servers that host and track fake torrents:

Tracker 1, Tracker 2, Tracker 3 & Tracker 4. (Screenshots: One & Two)

All the information was provided to me by one of the admins of btjunkie, who works together on this with other torrent site admins. He says that the MPAA and friends use a variety of tactics. The tracker will either stall everyone at around 90% or the content will just be a blank monochrome screen.

“I really think this is being done by professionals with a budget, that’s a lot of servers to setup and it takes some expertise to setup in the manner that they did it,” says the btjunkie admin. “I don’t think I really need to say who would spend money on something like this.”

Here are some good examples of how these fake torrents clutter up the search results. Virtually all of those X marked torrents are coming from the ip-ranges we mentioned, and are fake files. The good thing is that Torrentportal’s report system is well used by their users.

The server boxes that host these torrents fall in serveral ip-ranges. Here are a few of the ranges that were discovered recently. You can easily add these to the blocklist of your torrent client (if it supports one), filewall, or blocklist manager.

The anti-piracy servers use hostnames like 101tracker.dhcp.biz, aplustorrents.qhigh.com, bitnova.squirly.info, bittorment.ocry.com, and pirate-trakkrz.leet.la. All these hostnames can be traced back to the same IP Ranges, these ranges contain possibly hundreds of fake trackers, so feel free to block them:

A list of infohashes of fake torrents can be found over here.

Note that it’s not only MPAA material that is hosted on these fake trackers. It is more likely that the servers are owned and operated by an organization that logs IP addresses for several copyright owners and or anti-piracy organizations.

Update: according to one of out readers these ip-ranges belong to “Media Defender“, a company that is hired by copyright owners, to log IP-addresses. This reader, who worked for Media Defender until recently, confirmed that some of the torrents that were mentioned, are indeed on the MPAA’s list.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

TorrentFreak: Where are you from, and what do you do when you aren’t running Opensubtitles?

Brano: First of all, I’d like to say hello to your readers and all movie fans out there. OK, back to your question. I am from Slovakia, currently working in a company as a SAP (ABAP) programmer. If I am not coding something for a company, I work on the Opensubtitles website. Apart from this, I go out, drink some beer, sometimes I watch movies (with subtitles ofcourse:), and I go to music parties…

TorrentFreak: When, why and how did you came up with the idea to start OpenSubtitles.org?

Brano: OpenSubtitles.org was established last year, at the beginning of 2005. I sat in some pub with my friends, talking about how hard it is to get subtitles, how bad subtitle web sites are, and what the perfect subtitle website would look like. We philosophized a bit about downloading subtitles, searching systems, and how good it will be if there would be a program that exactly knows which subtitles belongs to „my” movie.

Then, after some beers, we came up with the first idea , I decided to do something about it, and design the perfect subtitle website. We’re not there yet, but the project has the potential to change the whole system of finding and downloading subtitles.

TorrentFreak: Why the name OpenSubtitles.org?

Brano: Well, the main reason is that the content is open. This means every page on the site is available in XML format, just by adding /xml extension into URL. XML is far better for data processing than HTML. The main reason to use XML is for the translation of the site to other languages. Opensubtitles is currently available in 21 foreign languages, but we would like to have even more translations. The translating would not have been possible without the great help of our community!

When I created OpenSubtitles.org my target was to create an easy and understandable website. I didn’t want any flashing ads and banners and I hate registering, so almost all functions work without registration. And although the site may look simple, we so have some great features under the hood. For example, RSS and email results based on search criteria. There was a period in my life, when I used to downloaded subtitles before the movies, so I wanted feature like: find all subtitles in these languages, for thriller movies not older than 2 years, which have IMDB rating higher than 7. This all is possible, just click on this link Another cool feature is multisearch, just try this: make directory listing with movies (dir /b > out.txt), copy and paste this listing into the multisearch, and our server will list all subtitles found sorted by IMDB rating. IMDB is the basis of the whole website, so it is not possible to have the same movie saved under two different titles.

TorrentFreak: Are you currently collaborating with torrent sites?

Brano: I collaborate with mybittorent.com. For now this is only one site, but in the future it is possible to partner with more BitTorrent sites. I think that BitTorrent sites are missing subtitles for their movies. So it should be better for the users, if they can find/download matching subtitles directly from that site. It is possible to make unique identifier (imdb number/filesize). If there are torrent sites out there who are interested in cooperating, just contact me.

TorrentFreak: You only started a few months ago. How many visitors do you have at this point?

Brano: Good question. Immediately after launching website I saw, that one dedicated server is simple not enough. Right now we have two dedicated servers. Back to daily statistics. 40.000 Visitors and around 300.000 pageviews. Is it too few? For me – yes. Servers are still having some spare power than handle more, load is still around 1, so I’d like to see 1.000 visitors online at the same time in the future.

TorrentFreak: You offer a free subtitle manager called “SubDownloader” at your site. What is SubDownloader and why it so special?

Brano: SubDownloader is opensource program coded in python. The basic idea is: the user selects movie and SubDownloader downloads the matching subtitles for this movie. So users don’t need go to website and find the subtitles, the program will do this all for them.

Users are able to download subtitles for a movie, or they can select a directory on their hard drive where movies are stored, and the program will find all subtitles for them. It is based on unique (CRC64 + filesize), which is the same as hash used in MPC; but I’d suggest stronger one , based at least on MD5 or SHA1. Of course downloading is not the only one feature it has. Another important feature is that you’re able to upload subtitles to our server, so other people are able to download them. This is all automated, the program will automatically scan for an NFO file, and will extract other useful information from the filename for example.

TorrentFreak: When and how did you get the idea to open source the content of your website?

Brano: I like the idea of opensource. OpenSubtitles.org is not really opensource, we should call it opencontent. A month after the website was launched, Ivan Garcia from Spain (currently in Vietnam) contacted me a he volunteered to code a plugin to VLC player. Of course, I accepted his offer, because I made this site exactly for this. We discussed some details and we agreed on developing an opensource program, which will run on every operating system with a python interpreter. I coded XMLRPC interface for the website, and described functions. He wrote some basic routines and SubDownloader was slowly turning into a real application. The current version is 1.2.2, but I think 1.2.3 will be released very soon , the feedback we get is amazing.

TorrentFreak: What’s your message for future users of OpenSubtitles.org?

Brano: It is like P2P, but I call this system U2U , Users 2 Users. The more people will upload subtitles with SubDownloader, the more subtitles will be found correctly. We have further plans, making a commandline script (you will write something like subdownloader-console ,auto *.*) to autodownload subtitles for example. I am in in touch with XBOX community (XBMC), so they could make such a plugin. My dream is that the DirectShow filter will use this website, which would have similar functions as SubDownloader has , this should be a big progress , just open the movie and automatically download subtitles and watch movie immediately with them. I am a big fan of movies and so on, but dedicated servers cost some money, and I pay that from my own cash, I want to minimize the ads on the site. People who donate do this for a good cause. I also plan to make some t-shirts, so we could recognize each other on street. We are also looking for skilled programmers who can help us.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for the interview, and good luck with the website

Brano: You’re welcome.

Links:

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

I seriously wonder how they came up with these numbers, since it is not that easy to track down the source of a camcorder recorded movie (they can) but like they say “it’s an estimate”. But it wouldn’t be the first time that the MPAA makes up their own stats to justify their doubtful actions.

The impressive figures inspired the MPAA and the NYPD to pay some extra attention to the whereabouts of these pirates. They even teamed up with the Office of Special Enforcement (OSE) to track down the pirate networks, and bring them to court.

And to complete the circle, the City of New York announced that they plan to introduce legislation to amend the penal law. Convicted pirates then will face jail time up to one year, and up to four years in prison, for previously convicted pirates.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

and a lot more

The router comes with a setup utility, thus configuring the router is pretty easy. The goal of this article is to review the BitTorrent related functionalities of the router, but I have to say that the router does pretty much everything it promises. To name a few things:

But now the BitTorrent part. The Asus WL-700gE comes with a “download master” utility that supports ftp, http, and BitTorrent downloads. There are two ways to download torrents, you can upload a torrent with the “download master” utility on your pc or you can access the “download master” in your web browser.

The progress of the downloads can be monitored in the transfer panel of the download master. It lists the filename, progress, size, speed and ETA. The web-based download master has a few extra monitoring options (peers!, download/upload).

Download Master

Web Download Master

The transfer monitoring is quite buggy, the speed and filesize update every 10 seconds or so, but the torrents have the strange tendency to stop downloading if you watch the transfer progress for more than a minute. They resume downloading as soon as you minimize the window.

And there are more bugs. About 50% of all the torrents I paused, never resumed after the pause. This means I had to redownload all the data.

The overall speed is ok, and it shouldn’t matter too much, since most people will use it to download torrents overnight.

There is not much to tweak. The only option you have is to set the time the torrent should seed once the download is finished (default is 1 hour). Too bad they didn’t include a ratio seed setting.

Conclusion:
Overall I would say the router performs very well and is worth the money (I paid approximately $300). However, the BitTorrent client is very buggy and limited. It works but it could and should be improved significantly. The router would not yet replace my regular torrent client, but it does the job at night.

pro’s:

con’s

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“BREIN used the application to link the files with user’s IP addresses, a practice which came under fire from expert testimony as well as the Dutch court,” says DigitalMusicWebLog, pointing out MediaSentry software, “has been widely criticized for being too limited and simplistic, taking filenames at face value and violating the legally protected privacy of users in some countries by ’scanning’ entire shared directories of specific users”.

The way MediaSentry collected and processed IP addresses were had no lawful basis under European privacy laws, adds the story.

But this is nothing new.

Media sentry presented, “shoddy and, ultimately, extremely costly, results to one of its clients,” we posted last November, going on:

“It blew the game for the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) in 2004 when the latter demanded that a Canadian court order five ISPs to hand over the names of clients. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein was singularly and quotably unimpressed by MediaSentry ‘evidence’.

“Then the company blew it again in Holland when the District Court of Utrecht decided MediaSentry’s investigation of p2p file sharing wasn’t only flawed, it was ‘unlawful,’ ruling that Dutch ISPs didn’t have to provide customer information to the CRIA’s Netherlands counterparts.”

p2pnet.net

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Download a P2P streaming player from the forum Football Streaming Info, which is stuffed full of links to downloads and tips if you get into technical trouble. TvAnts is a front-runner due to its ease of use — a big plus is that the channel menu is mostly in English, unlike many of the other players which seem to be in Chinese.

Once you have a player installed, a clear and detailed schedule of the day’s games and where to view them can be found at BoxtoBox.

Wired also points their readers to BitTorrent. The World Cup matches are posted on several trackers within a few minutes. No real-time streaming, but very useful if you miss a game.

Over at tvRSS you can find some matches in hr.hdtv, and subscribe to the world cup rss feed.

Update:

In a previous article I pointed to the article in Wired, with some tips and tricks to watch the world cup online. But it seems that quite a lot of people still have problems watching world cup streams online. Don’t worry, there’s another p2p world cup stream player, and it’s easier to use.

People from the UK can use the BBC streams. The rest of the world should try the TVUplayer.

Tune in to the ESPN2 channel for English commentary, and you’re ready to go.

And yes, some people say it’s illegal…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

3 Players

I’ve tested three players on how “BitTorrent friendly” they are.

-Democracy
-Fireant
-I’M

They all do what they are supposed to. You can download and watch shows fairly easy, but in my opinion only fireant is really BitTorrent compliant.

Why?

Well, it’s pretty easy. When you want to download BitTorrent feeds you must be able to specify your network and connection preferences. I think it’s useless to have BitTorrent support without being able to edit your maximum up- and download speed, port ranges, simultaneous connections, etcetera. Fireant is the only player where you’re able to do this.

When you configure fireant the right way it’s pretty easy to get the same speeds as you do with any other client.

How to use it

Well, I must say that I’m not a big fan of these players myself. I dont see the need, at least not for BitTorrent feeds. In fact, the only advantage is the built in video player, but the preview function doesn’t work because bitorrent downloads random pieces of the file.

It does allow you to subscribe to BitTorrent feeds so you will be notified when the latest torrents are published, but that’s supported in most torrent clients nowadays (rss).

But still, Fireant sounds like the best option, and it’s worth a try.

How to set it up? All you have to do to suscribe to your favorite TV-show is to copy the rss url from tvrss (lost hdtv), burn it with feedburner to create a readable feed, and import it into Fireant.

The good thing is that it all works, the bad thing is that Fireant wont let you play the TV show “fullscreen”. And that’s probably even a bigger problem that not being able to configure your network and connection settings!

Conclusion

Internet TV players are not ready for BitTorrent yet. They all support it, but the problem is that IM and Democracy are not (yet) configurable, and Fireant doesn’t have a fullscreen option.

I know that these players are still BETA, but for now they still can’t compete with the regular clients + a proper media-player.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Source Tags

These tags indicate the source and are an indication of the “quality” of the rip.

TVRip: Recorded from analog TV, lowest quality of all TV rips

DSRip: Recorded from Digital Satellite, good quality rip

PDTV: Recorded from Pure Digital Source, but not HDTV. The quality is similar to a DSRip

HDTV: Recorded from a HDTV source. High video and sound quality. The video resolution is often 624×352, and the audio stream 128kb/s MP3

HR.HDTV: Best Quality There is. Recorded from a HDTV source. The video resolution is often around 960×540 which is half the size of the original HDTV broadcast. A 45 minute show is often 700MB instead of 350MB like the other releases.

Release Group Tags

The groups that release the episodes often include their group tag. The 10 most active tv-release groups are:

LOL, LOKi, TCM, XOR, FQM, UMD, CRiMSON, RiVER, TBS, CTU

Market Share (cte)

Compression

Sometimes the filename has some info about the compression format. For video you will often see Xvid or Divx, this means that you need these codecs if you want to play the file. An example of an audio tag is AC3.5.1. The audio tag is often included in high quality rips to indicate that the audio is not compressed.

Other

Proper: The proper tag is to indicate that the show is released before by a different release group, but that this release is of higher quality.

Repack: The Repack tag indicates that this is an improved version of an earlier release. If the initial release contains sound or video errors for example, the second release will have a repack tag.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.