A BPI investigation led to a police swoop on members of the group. They were subjected to searches, seizure of their computers and other assorted items, and later questioned at length.

The suspects were charged with Conspiracy to Defraud (the music industry), released on bail and ordered to reappear at later dates. One was later released with a police warning and told that charges would not be pressed against him.

In the meantime the alleged leader of DV8 had his bail pushed back to mid November pending further investigations. TorrentFreak’s previously-reliable sources positioned close to the case have now informed us that the individual answered his bail a few days ago and was subjected to another day of questioning. He has allegedly been charged with ‘defrauding the music industry’, although the conspiracy element appears to have been dropped.

Earlier we reported that two more arrests were made of suspected pre-release music suppliers to DV8. One of those individuals was an executive at a record label. Our information is that this executive has now lost his job, but no charges have been brought against him.

It was believed that the delay in charging the alleged leader of the group was due to the police needing more time to track down additional suppliers, one of which we were told works for a major media outlet. Indeed, we are now being informed that during the last few weeks there have been further raids on people linked to the group.

One is reportedly a writer at a music publication, who allegedly supplied music to the leader of the group. We are told he was raided 2 weeks ago.

Another is a US member of DV8 who left months before the first raid. He was arrested several weeks ago but is understood to have been released without charge.

Court dates are pending for those charged, but could arrive as quickly as early 2010.

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

However, those who thought that these landmark cases would change public opinion towards file-sharing are wrong. In fact, not even the draconian anti-piracy legislation that went into effect in Sweden this spring could change social norms towards downloading movies and music without the permission of copyright holders.

These findings are the result of the Cyber Norms sociological research project carried out by Swedish researchers. They conducted survey interviews among 1,000 people between the ages of 15 and 25 to measure the strength of the social norms towards illegal file sharing. The aim was to find out whether the newly implemented anti-piracy legislation (IPRED) had been successful in reducing the gap between legal and social standards.

The findings of the surveys show that despite stronger anti-piracy legislation, the attitudes of young Swedes towards piracy haven’t changed.

“Despite the intensive efforts of the government during the six-month performance period, social support for copyright law in relation to file sharing is still at a record low. Young people in the survey do not feel any social pressure to refrain from interchange, whether from adults or peers,” researcher Måns Svensson comments.

Interestingly, the new law does seem to have an effect on the file-sharing habits of the younger Swedes. The percentage of people who say they don’t download any files illegally has increased from 22 percent in February to 39 percent in September. However, as the norms do not reflect the letter of the law it will be hard to maintain compliance, which could result in an increase in piracy in the months to come if people feel less threatened by possible punishments.

“In cases where the law is not supported by the social norms, it makes it extremely difficult to maintain compliance. Humans tend to follow social pressure rather than the letter of the law. With regard to intellectual property and copyright provisions, the Internet and file sharing technologies have created new conditions. In a short time, the social norms have developed in a direction that gives very little support of the law,” Svensson explained.

The study emphasizes that the law does not reflect what the general public considers to be legal, fair use, or even moral. Most people don’t feel that they’re doing anything wrong when they download an MP3 or share a movie, often because the legal alternatives are hard to find, full of DRM or simply overpriced.

So, as long as the entertainment industries fail to innovate and offer some real competition to piracy, the social norms wont change.

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

Last Friday we reported that The Pirate Bay was forced to move outside of Sweden, and that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker had found a new home in the Ukraine. Unfortunately this was a short-lived solution, with TPB now moving to Cyberbunker.

CyberBunker is located in a former military nuclear warfare bunker in The Netherlands. The facility was built by NATO in the 50s to survive a nuclear war, but after the nuclear threats were over it was sold to its current owners. The bunker is now used as a webhosting data center.

The bunker is equipped with Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) shielding and Nuclear/Biological/Chemical (NBC) air filtration to guarantee that the servers they host stay up no matter what happens. As of this week it is also the new home of The Pirate Bay.

According to Sven Kamphuis, one of the owners of CB3ROB/Cyberbunker, there were some initial troubles with setting up The Pirate Bay in its new location as several carriers refused to pass on the relay information after they received threats from the entertainment industry led by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

Despite these troubles the site is now accessible again in most locations, and Cyberbunker will continue to host the site and does not intend to cave in to the threats of the entertainment industry.

“I don’t expect BREIN to do pretty much anything at this point. The last conversation we had with them was about some mp3 site they wanted to have shut down somewhere in 2001/2002. It took around 3 hours at 2am at night and the end result was that both parties agreed not to agree,” Kamphuis told TorrentFreak.

Whether The Pirate Bay is actually located in one of the server racks at the bunker or another hideout was not confirmed.

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

Lily has managed to capture the imaginations of both sides – people are talking about this issue and that is always a good thing.

Debate, discussion and hopefully understanding will bring this file-sharing ‘war’ to an end one day but in the meantime let’s not forget what this is ultimately all about – the music. We all love it and that’s why you’ll love this too;

“After Lily’s hectic week I’ve made a pro-filesharing song and video calling her up on a few of the claims she’s made,” UK musician Dan Bull explains to TorrentFreak.

“I’ve also tried to outline some of the main moral arguments for filesharing in the lyrics. Hope you enjoy, and hope the readers do too.”

The song is brilliant in my opinion, and, ironically I suppose, i’d like to give Dan some money for his work, he deserves it. Let’s hope this song gets to Internet #1 this weekend and he reaps the benefit. Now if I can just get the chorus out of my head…..

…or if you prefer, download the MP3 here.

Dan’s MySpace page can be found here and his album ‘Safe’ is available from FreshNut but can also be downloaded digitally from iTunes, Amazon and Napster.

You can grab it free of charge here or using Mininova.

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

In a reply to our criticism Lily wrote the following blog entry in which she entirely missed the point we tried to make.

“I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS [sic] THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN , HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSIITE I ACQUIRED THE PIECE FROM.”

Judging from her response it is “quite obvious” that Lily doesn’t have a clue about copyright. Lily seems to argue that we accused her of plagiarism, but we only meant to point out that she infringed on Techdirt’s copyright by copy/pasting their article without attribution.

Also, this is not the only infringement on her blog. While she’s trying to point out how much damage ‘pirates’ do to the music industry she blatantly infringed the copyrights of a number of newspapers by posting scanned articles.

To make things even more absurd Techdirt discovered that Lily is pirating music herself by offering some unauthorized mixtapes (tape 1 and tape 2) on her website LilyAllenMusic.com. The tracklist of one of the mixtapes reveals a list of no less than 19 unauthorized tracks. This means the RIAA can easily sue her for millions.

Please Lily, explain to us why it is okay for you to copy, paste and pirate others work, while you label people who do the same as thieves? Are we missing something here, or do you really think that copyright is limited to your own music?

What about the poor people working at the newspapers who might lose their job because you are pasting scanned articles online? Not to mention the poor artists that ended up on your mixtape who’s lives are ruined because of your selfish actions.

Update: Lily Allen killed her weblog and career.

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

Following a BPI investigation, police (without fanfare or media reports) swooped on members of the group, the earliest back in May. Another seemingly significant arrest took place in June.

In early morning raids, as many as a dozen officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Hi-Tech Crime Unit and BPI investigators conducted searches on the addresses and took the suspects away for questioning, along with seized computers, cell phones, CDs and MP3 players, bank statements and sundry other items.

After extended questioning the police charged the suspects with Conspiracy to Defraud (the music industry). They were released on bail and ordered to reappear at later dates.

Around a week after our article, IFPI issued their own press release (which was used as the basis of dozens of other news articles) which largely confirmed our earlier report but in much lower detail, instead preferring to include quotes from David Lammy MP, Minister of State for Intellectual Property, and the heads of the IFPI and BPI’s anti-piracy operations.

DV8, like many release groups, specialized in pre-release piracy – in this case the publication of music on the Internet before official release dates. No-one needs to be reminded of the hatred the music industry holds for these type of leaks, after all when OiNK was raided it was the availability of pre-release material that dominated the news and was often provided as the justification for taking the site down.

In order to put the material on to the Internet in this way, Scene groups and individual uploaders need contacts somewhere in the supply chain, so-called industry insiders who act as suppliers for pre-release material. In the case of the OiNK uploaders, they had simply purchased CDs legitimately from online retailers who shipped products a day or two early, possibly in error. But to have the really juicy leaks, people more deeply involved in the supply chain can prove invaluable.

Based on information provided by our previously-reliable sources in this investigation, today we are able to reveal that during late August two more arrests were made of individuals the police believe acted as suppliers to DV8. One of those individuals is an executive at a record label.

In the meantime the alleged leader of DV8 has seen his bail pushed back to mid November pending further investigations. Our sources believe that this delay is due to the police needing more time to track down additional suppliers, one of which we are told works for a major media outlet.

Another member of DV8 who was initially arrested back in June and was the subject of the one and only triumphant IFPI press release mentioned earlier, has been rather more fortunate. He has been released with a police warning and told that charges would not be pressed against him. IFPI are unlikely to issue an updated press release about this release of a suspect though – they have also never mentioned the earliest and most important arrest made by the police in this investigation.

After word spread of the initial raids, the remaining members of the DV8 team went into hiding, taking their servers down and removing their topsite accounts. However, these type of groups can be remarkably resilient and can be quick to reform.

Indeed, while DV8 may be ‘dead’, some of its members live on and the releases have continued under a new group name – around one hundred of them so far, including some very big releases indeed.

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

In an attempt to fulfill this need and to convert illegal file-sharers into paying customers, the UK ISP Virgin Media recently announced that it will offer an unlimited music download service to all their subscribers. Such a service would allow customers to download all the music they want and keep it permanently.

Universal and several smaller labels are backing Virgin’s plan, but not all the major labels are as happy. NMA reports that insiders at EMI and Sony Music don’t think that Virgin’s unlimited download service will convert illegal music downloaders into legitimate customers. They say that the model is flawed and will hurt existing digital sales.

“We want to work with Virgin Media as a partner but any deal has to sit comfortably with how we value our assets against how it values its customers,” an EMI insider said. “We have to evaluate each deal as it comes in and make sure we’re happy with the overall value of the proposition.”

An insider at Universal doesn’t think that the worries expressed by EMI and Sony Music are justified, as customers with unlimited access will only download a few dozen tracks per month. On the other hand he stressed that it is vital for the labels to innovate and compete with piracy.

Virgin Media meanwhile is undeterred by the rift between the different labels and will go full steam ahead. They hope to release their unlimited music download service by the end of the year. “We’re forging new ground and want to provide a truly compelling offering for consumers and industry,” a Virgin Media spokeswoman said.

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

In reality however, DRM simply amounts to an annoyance for legitimate customers, while those people who weren’t planning to buy but pirate, have plenty of ways to hack or crack the copy protection schemes. Luckily more content providers have started to realize this. But not all of them.

Meet Austin Meyer, the brain behind X-Plane flight simulator and CEO of the software company that develops the game. Meyer is someone who values input from the people who buy his products, and after he received several complaints about the DVD that had to be in the drive in order to play X-Plane, he came up with a brilliant solution.

For a measly $29 the company decided to sell optional USB-drives with a copy of the DVD that can be used instead of the DVD itself. “The keys are only $29, so I am making this affordable,” Meyer commented in a press-release.

We can of course dispute the cheapness of a $29 DRM-tool, but what’s even more interesting is how Meyer responded to some of the questions reporter Dave Duck posed when he tried to find out more about the companies motivations in charging its customers for DRM on a USB drive.

“The usb key is designed to STOP that annoyance by freeing up the drive, WITHOUT requiring anyone to lie, cheat, or steal,” Meyer wrote in one of his replies.

But he structurally ignored the biggest question asked by the reporter. “Given the wide availability of X-Plane torrents, doesn’t this sort of scheme just piss off loyal customers AND fail to stop pirates?”

Indeed, like any other program X-Plane has been pirated and the software is widely available on BitTorrent sites without any DRM. The new DRM on a drive does nothing to change this situation, and is just an extra charge for DRM that only affects legitimate customers.

Like many other software manufacturers Meyer fails to see the problem, and frankly he doesn’t even seem to care whether the DRM works or not. When the reporter asked him about the effectiveness of X-Plane’s copy protection he got the following reply:

“Holy shit you are an idiot where did I ever say, imply, or ever so much as HINT that ANYTHING actually WORKS????????????????????????????????????”

As a true gentleman the CEO refused to elaborate any further on how he turned a failed DRM scheme into something that will cost legitimate customers even more money. “I’m just filtering your email now you aren’t worth talking to,” Meyers wrote in his last reply.

We wonder whether if he treats all of his customers similarly?

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

Now, according to a report, the leak has been confirmed by Simon Cowell’s Syco, part of Sony BMG.

The report in Britain’s The Sun tabloid, says that ‘hackers’ targeted computers at Syco and lifted the track and later put it on the Internet, but the author seems a little confused over how these things work.

Sure, the assertion that there can be “huge kudos” to be gained by the ‘hackers’ in leaking a track like this is absolutely correct, but the article goes on to say that there is a huge financial motive too.

“Dodgy file-sharing websites pay hackers top dollar for stolen tracks as they try to attract more downloaders to the site so they can rake in more money from advertisers,” is the claim from the article.

But everyone familiar with these situations understand, as soon as a track is leaked onto the Internet word gets round very quickly. Soon everyone has a copy and the track is available from dozens of other sites, probably within minutes. It’s very difficult to imagine that paying a hacker “top dollar” would be a worthwhile investment for any site – their offering would be pirated in seconds.

A Syco spokesman confirmed that the label is working with IFPI, BPI and the police to track down the leakers. “We will certainly look to bring charges against those who are responsible. We cannot give any more details at this stage for operational reasons,” he said.

At this point it seems that Syco are doing a reasonable job of containing the leak of the mp3 itself – scanning various sites which have listed the track as available reveals that most have been subject of takedown notices from Sony. At this point it appears that the track didn’t leak via the Scene, as searches on the usual release databases reveal no sign of the song.

Despite the evil hackers and investigations by anti-piracy police and the real police, coupled with rantings by Cowell, anyone can listen to the leaked song on YouTube. Go figure.

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

Soundike and GoMusicNow are very much like the AllofMP3 alternatives we wrote about a while ago. They all offer dirt cheap music for direct download with tracks as low as 9 cents each with further discounts for whole album purchases.

Adding insult to injury, many of these sites carry content which would be more at home on a torrent site, such as a full length ‘Michael Jackson Memorial Mix’ bootleg being sold by Soundike for $0.12. So-called ‘Scene’ rips can be found on these sites in abundance.

Needless to say, the music industry in most parts of the world hate these sites and isn’t averse to taking legal action against them to shut them down or in this case, get them blocked from the Internet. Hindering this process is the fact that many such sites are licensed in Russia by the Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems, which they claim allows them to operate legally, at least inside Russia.

Despite the noise being made by RISA, South African ISPs aren’t about to comply with their requests. On behalf of its members the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) wrote to RISA rejecting the demands.

“It isn’t up to ISPA to decide whether or not websites should be blocked. It is up to ISPA to assist and advise its members in dealing with take-down notices made in terms of the ECT Act,” Mybroadband reports ISPA GM Ant Brooks as saying.

Brooks went on to explain that copyright law only allows for removal of content hosted on the network to which any takedown complaint is sent and cannot be used to block access to material on other networks or indeed, in other countries.

ISPA has informed its members that the music industry demands are invalid and will be rejected. However, blocking sites is possible, just not via the route RISA would like.

In common with other attempted blocks around the world on various sites (including the recent proposed block of The Pirate Bay in The Netherlands) courts in South Africa do have the power to block websites although that would require some expensive due process, something RISA would like to avoid.

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

While some, such as the BPI’s Geoff Taylor, have shown at least some sign of regret (although not necessarily backed up by actions), others are adamant that crushing the file-sharing pioneer was the right thing to do.

Despite making some uncharacteristically pragmatic comments about P2P last year when his album ‘Death Magnetic’ appeared on the Internet, and despite trying file-sharing himself fairly recently when he downloaded the album using BitTorrent, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich has no regrets over his part in the neutering of Napster.

Ulrich and Metallica generated years of hate with their aggressive anti-Napster stance in the early part of the century, after discovering their entire back catalogue was available through the service.

But now, speaking with Kerrang!, Ulrich says he did the right thing in bringing Napster down, standing firmly behind his decision, expressing pride where others today are expressing cautious regret.

“Being right about Napster doesn’t mean that much to me. I don’t find any particular glory in being proved right about it,” he said.

Turning to Napster’s management, Ulrich said he admired them for managing to paint the band as greedy rock stars who were behind the times, although it hardly seems fair to give Fanning and friends all the credit for that – the band did more than enough to nurture that impression too.

“You have to give props to the other side because they did run a brilliant campaign, and they did portray me and Metallica as being greedy rock pigs and luddites who were completely behind what was happening technologically,” said Ulrich.

“But I am proud of what we did, and what we stood up for,” he added.

Indeed, today’s file-sharing community owes a debt of gratitude to Ulrich and Metallica, because without their efforts to destroy Napster there wouldn’t have been the massive effort by others to create the many improved replacements available today.

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

Tomas Wennström of What’s Next managed to secure a recorded audio interview with The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde. In it Peter says why the site was sold, talks a little about the future for the site and touches on the huge disappointment being expressed by the site’s fans. It’s a very interesting interview, although in common with everything else going on today, it raises even more questions.

Some key points from the interview:

GGF approached The Pirate Bay with a deal several weeks ago. TPB considered GGF to be the correct company to bring the project “to the next level” since they didn’t feel capable of doing it themselves. Peter said he feels that GGF share the same values as TPB.

Peter said that TPB have been approached by companies before to sell out, but they didn’t understand the value of TPB. He said the value of the site is to be found in the userbase and nothing else. He added that if a company is interested in buying that userbase they have to keep up spirits or they will find themselves owning something that rapidly decreases in value.

Tomas Wennström said that he found it crazy that TPB would become a listed company. Peter responded that they think the concept is “super funny” and that’s one of the main reasons they are doing this.

Peter said in the past they’ve had to hide the financial details of the site and who is doing what “for legal reasons” but says that in the future there will have to be more transparency about how the operation is run, adding that people now not only have the chance to share files, but also buy shares in the site.

Peter explained that he and the original owners of TPB disposed of the site in 2006. He refused to name who took the site but referred to a single owner in one of his responses, using the word “he”.

Peter noted that the site hadn’t yet been sold to GGF and the company will have to find funding inside 4 weeks. He said he doesn’t know who the financial backers are, but if GGF cannot find the money then everything goes back to exactly the way it was before.

Peter said that the perfect situation would be if the users of the site set up something to buy The Pirate Bay. Certainly, with all the previous fund raising for buying islands etc this might have been a possibility but this has never even been put forward as an option. The idea seems optimistic considering the backlash among the users.

Currently the site is down after suffering a minor DDoS attack, and TPB’s TiAMO told TorrentFreak that the site’s load balancer had crashed .

Peter says running Pirate Bay has resulted in ‘bad pay’, i.e minus SEK 30 million in fines – incidentally an identical amount to the cash payment part of the deal with GGF.

Tomas Wennström put a scenario to Peter – what if GGF screws up and makes all that is good about The Pirate Bay go away – which seemed like a veiled reference to the availability of the usual TPB content.

“I’m agnostic about it, I think it could be true, could be faulty, but whatever happens at least something happens, which is the big thing here. I’d rather see The Pirate Bay die in a chance of becoming better, than just dying.”

For the time being The Pirate Bay crew will assist the new owners in operating the site. In addition a new tracker will be launched as well as a new torrent hosting service.

The interview can be downloaded here.

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

Now, according to information leaked to TorrentFreak, one of the most prolific music release groups around has suffered a significant setback after police quietly started arresting members during the last month. The latest arrest came yesterday, as police and BPI investigators conducted an early morning raid on a senior member of the group.

At this stage we cannot publish the group’s name (see update at the bottom of this article for group name) but we believe that they are responsible for more than 3,000 single and album releases. The group was relatively young and had a membership of less than ten individuals, although they aren’t all based in the UK.

The first arrest happened mid-May and the most recent yesterday, conducted in a similar fashion to earlier raids against those involved in the TV Links and AradiTracker cases.

In early morning raids, officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Hi-Tech Crime Unit backed up by senior investigators from the BPI took the suspects by surprise. Sources close to the investigation told TorrentFreak that as many as 15 officers conducted searches on the target addresses, arresting suspects and taking them away for questioning.

Hardware was of great interest to the police as they seized large amounts of electrical equipment including all computers, cell phones, various CDs and MP3 players, bank statements and sundry other items from the addresses.

After hours of questioning by police in the presence of BPI investigators, in common with the OiNK uploaders the suspects were charged with Conspiracy to Defraud (the music industry), bailed and ordered to reappear at later dates.

According to sources, all remaining group members have gone into hiding, all servers are now offline and topsite accounts have been deleted.

More on this breaking story as we get it.

Update: Our sources have agreed to let us name the group – it is DV8. Their latest release was Brokencyde-Im_Not_A_Fan_But_The_Kids_Like_It-2009-DV8 – time will tell if it will be the last.

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

In Denmark, negotiations between copyright holders and ISPs are underway, with ITEK (the Danish information technology, telecommunications, electronics and enterprise federation) acting as intermediary in the setting up of a ‘Pirate Board’, designed to settle disputes without the need for lengthy court battles. According to Computerworld, examples of the type of extended litigation they would like to avoid in future are the domain-blocking cases against AllofMP3 and The Pirate Bay.

On the rights holders side are companies such as Sony and EMI, with ISPs TDC, Telenor and Telia on the other. ITEK spokesman John Kristensen confirmed that that talks are underway. “I can confirm that we are working on a joint industry initiatives. But I can’t be precise on the details yet,” he said.

Although negotiations are reported as “intense” there are areas where the two sides remain far apart, mirroring the situation in other countries in Europe where these type of discussions ended without agreement. At the moment the summer is being eyed for a conclusion, but that seems very optimistic since at the moment, Denmark’s ISPs seem determined not to become Internet policeman on behalf of the copyright holders.

Other proposals involving the ‘Pirate Board’ surround the hot issue of a 3 Strikes-style regime for file-sharers, but with a twist. Rather than rights holders sending warnings to alleged file-sharers via ISPs, instead these would be issued by the Pirate Board. If the recipients of these warnings then fail to respond, they wouldn’t be disconnected from the Internet but instead find themselves in a traditional court case.

Which is the exact place this Pirate Board aims to prevent everyone ending up. Stay tuned….

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

So Tuesday last week, May 26th, the Russian Federation Ministry of Internal Affairs Investigation Committee under the Ministry of Internal Affairs conducted a raid against the founders the Interfilm BitTorrent tracker.

During the raid on the site’s Moscow headquarters, the police arrested the founders of Interfilm, a married couple known online as ‘Ripper’ and ‘Nadezhda’ and several site staff. The authorities claim that the Interfilm tracker is a major source of cammed movies and also has an arrangement with piracy groups outside the country to exchange the latest releases.

Russian anti-piracy group RAPO (a founder member of the MPA) claims that the site carried advertising and although users had free access to the site, higher download speeds could be achieved by making a payment to the site’s owners.

Although Interfilm reportedly went down after the raid, it is now apparently fully operational, hosted by LeaseWeb in The Netherlands.

Russian media is speculating that the owners of Interfilm are facing up to six years in jail and a fine of 500,000 rubles (approx $16,200) if convicted under Part 3 of Article 146 of the Criminal Code.

According to lawyer Victor Naumov, a legal loophole which saved the owners of AllofMP3 is unlikely to help the operators of Interfilm. “In the past there were different interpretations of legislation in the field of copyright, but now if a distributor of films or music is not in a licensing agreement with the rights holders, the violation is right there,” he said.

Following the arrests, the Producers Guild of Russia says it intends to push for changes in the law which would force ISPs to prevent illegal file-sharing.

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

In July 2008, security researcher Laurent Gaffié found a bug in two of the latest versions of the official software – Soulseek 157 NS & 156. The problem was so serious he informed the Soulseek developer on 3rd September 2008. Unfortunately, Laurent heard nothing back so on 14 October 2008 he contacted the developer again. He appears to have been ignored. On 16 May 2009 Laurent tried again to contact the Soulseek team – yet again he had no response so decided to reveal his findings.

So what exactly is the problem? First of all it’s necessary to understand a little about how the Soulseek search works. When a user searches for an MP3 via their contact list or on a Soulseek IRC channel, their Soulseek client sends the query to the Soulseek server. The server then sends a distributed search query on the whole channel.

Laurent told TorrentFreak, “The P2P Soulseek bug is critical because of the nature of the bug. It appears when you send an overly long search request to the server, and it redirects it directly to everyone without checking the length of the request, then a memory corruption happens in every client that received this query.”

“By corrupting the Soulseek memory it becomes possible to control the program memory flow and redirect it anywhere you want,” Laurent explained. “In this case, you redirect the program to a shellcode you’ve placed in the memory and then code execution occurs. The problem with this type of “buffer overflow” is the nature of it, it’s a SEH overflow (Exception Handler) which will work on most Windows platforms.”

Laurent told TorrentFreak that there is no need to have any interaction with a targeted channel or user, it’s just possible to log on and send the distributed search. This makes the Soulseek vulnerability perfect for a very fast spreading worm scenario.

“I’ve released a very limited proof of concept, to avoid scripts-kiddies problem on the Soulseek network,” notes Laurent, “but this doesn’t avoid a worm scenario, because this binary protocol is not so hard to reverse.”

Apart from being a perfect scenario for a fast spreading worm or mass Soulseek client exploitation, Laurent told us this attack can be used to remotely control any machine connected to the Internet with a Soulseek client. Let’s hope the Soulseek team take notice and get this fixed.

In the meantime, worried Soulseek users can avoid this vulnerability by ditching the official client and using the Python Nicotine Plus client instead.

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

In their most recent writeup TechCrunch published new details which were provided by another source, and in the article they hint at the following doomsday scenario. “Their parent company [CBS] supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users.” TechCrunch makes it sound really scary, but how useful is this data really in a court of law?

Let’s start with a little background. Last.fm’s data is provided by its users who report their recently listened-to songs to allow the site to track their listening habits. The data comes from the ID3 tags or similar metadata formats that MP3s and other digital music files carry. These list the artist name, title of the track, name of the album and more info related to the music file.

So what can the RIAA do with this data? Since the metadata doesn’t state that a track was pirated, only pre-release tracks that appear on Last.fm would be worth looking into. However, since the RIAA only have access to metadata reported to the site there is not much they can prove with it, even if they have access to Last.fm’s entire database.

The RIAA would only be able to check which IP addresses played a music file tagged as ‘track X’ by ‘artist Y’, but since everyone can easily edit these tags they can never really be certain that an individual was indeed in possession of the track, let alone that they shared it with others.

So, suggesting that the RIAA is going to use Last.fm’s data (if they indeed got their hands on it) to go after file-sharers is complete nonsense. As evidence, Last.fm’s data is not going to be worth much in court. In fact, there are plenty of better ways to track down copyright infringers and the RIAA is well aware of that. They are experts by now.

The only thing the RIAA has to do is hire someone to monitor various public BitTorrent trackers where the music is traded, and they can easily catch thousands of people in the act. The upside of this method is that they can verify that the person on the other end is actually sharing the data. Plus, they will know that the files are indeed the titles they are looking for.

The RIAA of course knows all of this, and if they indeed requested the data it was for purposes other than taking legal action. So, assuming that the RIAA was indeed requesting data from Last.fm, why would they want to know what music people are listening to on their computers?

Most likely the RIAA is interested in the business intelligence value of the data. For years record labels have been tailoring their music releases to the listening habits of ‘pirates’, and it is not unlikely that they are interested in Last.fm’s data for similar purposes. IP-addresses can come in handy here to spot some of the regional differences in popularity of artists or tracks.

Whatever their reasons are, dragging pirates to court is not likely to be one of them. Perhaps the TechCrunch tipster is an insider at one of the record labels who wants to scare the shit out of Last.fm’s users? Or has Michael Arrington himself been hired as one of the footsoldiers in the RIAA’s war on piracy? Who knows, but anything is more plausible than the RIAA taking people to court for reporting “copyright infringing” metadata to Last.fm.

Update: Apparently Last.fm’s official client also does fingerprinting as LANjackal points out. However, the ‘evidence’ would still be far from usable in court.

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

But there are other more subtle ways for the company to benefit from copyright infringement. Who remembers our article from 2008, when we showed an aXXo release being used to sell Macs in a John Lewis store? Well, now it looks like another retailer had the same idea – why spend money on real DVDs when you can just download them?

On a visit to the Rivas H2Ocio shopping mall in Madrid, Miguel Ángel Moro walked into a Saturn store. There, in the Apple section, he saw demo machines – and they were all running pirate movies.

Miguel told TorrentFreak, “This is not the first time I’ve seen this stuff in MediaMarkt/Saturn, a big consumer electronics store in Europe. They sell from computers to washing machines, including DVD and Blu-ray discs.”

Displaying their own DVDs is illegal without clearance, so they might as well grab a copy off BitTorrent and safe a few bucks – right? Sharing copyrighted files is legal in Spain, but not for commercial use which is clearly the case here.

Below is a photograph taken by Miguel of a ‘Cars’ Blu-ray movie rip running on VLC Media Player, on a Macbook, in the store.

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

Since all of the mp3s are available for download on the festival’s site, it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running. Last year it was Greg Hewgill who took the time and effort to put all the MP3s into one big torrent, and for the 2009 edition Ben Stolt did the same.

Since there’s over 6 GB of DRM-free music, using torrents makes it much easier than laboriously downloading every MP3 separately. In addition, using BitTorrent instead of the server based system saves SXSW money in bandwidth costs. The good news is that, for once, the RIAA isn’t watching over your shoulder when downloading music.

There are three torrents for the 23rd SXSW edition which contain a record breaking 1267 MP3s of both upcoming, as well as established artists who will appear at this year’s festival. Needless to say there should be something to suit everyone’s tastes, and all in all it’s a great way to expand your horizons and discover new and upcoming artists, all for free.

This year’s SXSW music festival takes place from March 18-22 in Austin Texas. All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their iPod without having to invest thousands of dollars.

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

Sure, we could make fun of these people. Or we could help them with an easy way to download torrents without having to know about the pros and cons of enabling DHT in uTorrent. Littleshoot decided to try the latter approach with a new BitTorrent browser plug-in that is being unveiled today.

Littleshoot’s BitTorrent plug-in has been in the making for quite some time now. The company behind it was founded by the former Limewire developer Adam Fisk who initially set out to develop an application for sharing data within a circle of friends. Littleshoot eventually changed directions towards general purpose, browser-based P2P and finally launched last November, albeit without BitTorrent integration.

The plug-in’s first iteration looked a little like a solution that didn’t really know which problem it wanted to solve. Littleshoot offered Gnutella downloads through your browser as well as the capability of publishing data on a separate P2P network that is based on the open source SIP protocol. Both were great in theory, but people hardly shared any data via Littleshoot, and when it comes to media sharing Gnutella isn’t exactly the first choice anymore either.

Enter BitTorrent. Fisk teamed up with Julian Cain for this release, who previously developed the Mac torrent client BitRocket as well as Kazaa’s never-released OS X client and who has also been involved in a bunch of other P2P projects over the years. Their ambitious goal is to transform Littleshoot into something like the Flash player of the BitTorrent world. Install it once, then forget about it, and it will work with any content, on any site.

I’ve had a chance to test multiple builds of the client over the last couple of weeks, and I must say Littleshoot has come a long way towards achieving this goal. Install the client, visit any torrent site, click on a torrent download link – and Littleshoot starts do download the files in question right within your browser on a Web 2.0-ish download page. The client even automatically starts a Flash-based audio player if you download an MP3 file, and files can be easily forwarded through Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

It also offers a search page that makes it possible to simultaneously search isoHunt, Youtube, Flickr, Yahoo Video and the Littleshoot P2P network, or any subset of these services. This search page may not be that useful to advanced users that prefer sites other than Isohunt, but again, it’s a great feature for beginners.

Littleshoot doesn’t come with any configurable options at this time. All data is saved in a default download directory, and the client seeds files indefinitely. However, Fisk told me that future versions of Littleshoot will offer the option to shut down the client after a certain ratio is reached. The current download page already offers details about your ratio as well as your up-and download rates. Speaking of future changes: Littleshoot is still clearly in beta stage. The Windows version seemed especially rocky in earlier builds that I got to test, but most things seem to be working when it comes to the final version that has been made available today.

So what’s the final verdict? Littleshoot may still have some room for improvement, but it’s definitely promising. Not only because this is the first BitTorrent client your mom will be able to use, but also because the Littleshoot team definitely has its eyes set on bigger goals.

One of the plans for future releases is an SDK that will make it possible for website owners to offload the distribution of any file to Littleshoot. Just drop a few lines of Javascript in your blog, and your MP3 file will be available as a P2P download. Says Fisk: “If a site relies on P2P services, they’ll display an “install plugin” window, just like the user sees when they don’t have Flash on sites that require it.” Kinda makes you wonder how long it will take for a torrent site to integrate something like this for all of its files.

The new version of Littleshoot is currently available on this beta page and will launch on the Littleshoot home page later today.

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Guest author Janko Roettgers is a Los Angeles-based journalist. He is also the editor of P2P Blog.

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