Although there has been some mainstream news coverage in the past, this week the press have really stepped up, helped along by the UK Lords who labeled the ACS:Law scheme “legal blackmail” – not exactly a shining endorsement.

Nevertheless, ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley has stood his ground, telling the media that his campaign will continue. Following criticism that so far he has taken a grand total of zero cases to court, Crossley told the BBC that cases are pending.

“It has been said that we have no intention of going to court but we have no fear of it,” he said.

While Crossley may not be scared of taking a couple of cut and dried cases of infringement against minnows to court to prove his point, it’s not entirely true that in all cases he has no fear of a court battle. In the words of the Lords, Crossley is engaged in a bullying scheme and, like all bullies, when the big boys step up to fight, the bullies shrink away.

On November 19th at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Crossley made NPO (Norwich Pharmacal Order) applications to force ISPs to hand over the names and addresses of subscribers the company claims had infringed their client’s rights. The NPO’s related to approximately 25,000 IP addresses harvested from UK ISP BT’s customer base and a further 5,000 from various other ISPs, covering approximately 291 movie titles. The order was granted and ACS:Law are now chasing these individuals for cash payments of around £500 each.

Someone present at the hearing provided TorrentFreak with information which suggested that several ISPs including Be, O2, BT, Plusnet, Enternet and Kingston were not opposed to the court order forcing them to hand over their customers’ private details to ACS:Law.

However, UK ISP Tiscali, whose customers had also been caught up in the ACS:Law dragnet, were strangely dropped from the court order. “Not seeking against Tiscali (previously respondent #8 in the application),” said the comment.

Tiscali were bought by TalkTalk for £236m last year. TalkTalk, as everyone must know by now, are absolutely against elements of the Digital Economy Bill and are refusing to sell their customers down the river on mere allegations of file-sharing. Could they be standing up to ACS:Law too?

We contacted TalkTalk and their response proved very interesting indeed.

“TalkTalk is the only major ISP which has refused to divulge customers’ information to lawyers pursuing alleged copyright infringers. We have held this position since the issue came into view and we continue to stick by this policy,” Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk’s executive director of strategy and regulation told TorrentFreak.

“If we are ever ‘instructed’ to disconnect or throttle a customer who has not been found guilty in a court of law, we will refuse to do so and challenge the instruction through the courts if necessary,” he added.

So, while the above-mentioned ISPs – and BT in particular – are collectively handing over thousands of their customers to be “legally blackmailed” by ACS:Law, TalkTalk will not and are prepared to fight for the rights of their customers.

TorrentFreak contacted BeingThreatened, a consumer group assisting those wrongfully accussed by ACS:Law.

“What the public want to see is a clear commitment from ISPs that they will protect their customers from the actions of these overly-litigious lawyers exploiting legal loopholes to demand money using groundless threats of court action. Given the tens of thousands of letters that have already been sent and the massive heartache caused as a result of this scheme, BeingTheatened would expect to see a concrete commitment from all ISPs,” spokesman James Bench told us.

“After all, TalkTalk’s stated position merely reflects the view of the wider industry (as stated by the ISPA) that the ‘evidence’ presented by these companies is unreliable,” he added.

“We are happy to see that one company has indicated an apparent willingness to display a degree of corporate integrity in looking after the data that its customers entrust to it and not to make this available to anyone that simply asks for it,” he concluded.

So, if you and your family are looking for an ISP run by people who are prepared stand up for your rights, look no further than TalkTalk. While Mr Crossley may not fear going to court against a lowly individual, it seems incredibly unlikely that he’ll take on TalkTalk’s lawyers.

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

Although the threats and accusations are often sent to the wrong people due to the shoddy evidence gathering techniques employed, thousands have paid off the copyright holders fearing they would end up being in more trouble if they ignored the threats. The scheme has proven to be profitable for all parties involved, except those receiving the letters.

Leaked documents have shed light on these practices, revealing that the core motivation of the companies involved is simply to generate as much cash as possible.

It will hardly surprise anyone when we allege that ACS:Law and fellow anti-piracy outfits are clearly abusing copyright for profit. However, it is good to see that our views are being supported by several Lords in the UK.

In recent weeks the law firm sending out these mass copyright infringement notices has been discussed in the UK House of Lords. The video below shows Lord Clement-Jones labeling the operation as a scam.

It is surprising that in the UK, copyright holders – some of which have ‘leased’ copyrights from other companies for the sole purpose of cashing in on allegations of file-sharing – can demand the personal details of thousands of alleged file-sharers without having to provide hard evidence. In most other countries this would be prohibited due to privacy concerns.

Lord Lucas has raised this problematic issue, saying that the Lords must do something to ensure that citizens’ personal details are not given out to companies like ACS:Law “willy-nilly”.

Like many file-sharers, some Lords would like to put an end to this copyright abuse, with Lord Lucas accusing the law firm involved of “harassment, bullying and intrusion”. But the criticism of ACS:Law didn’t stop there.

Noting that it could cost around £10,000 for those accused to protest their innocence, but a payment of ‘only’ £500 to make the accusations go away, Lord Lucas called the scheme “straightforward legal blackmail”.

For the public’s sake we hope they come up with a solution to end this madness. In the meantime, anyone accused by ACS:Law can learn exactly how this scheme operates and how to defend themselves efficiently, by downloading the ‘Speculative Invoicing Handbook‘ from consumer group BeingThreatened.

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

In reality, the truth proved somewhat different.

No one could argue Grokster had been defeated, but the consequences for file-sharing were limited. The real impact was that providers of file-sharing services could now be held liable if it could be shown that they promoted their products for infringing purposes. Careful advertising was all that was required. Furthermore, the decision only affected the United States. Considering the epic scale of the case and the supposed victory, the results were far from devastating.

And now, 4 years later, Mininova, another file-sharing giant that rode on the crest of the BitTorrent wave since the Grokster verdict, has effectively been forced to close down the vast majority of its site, prompting many to feel that BitTorrent is heading for its twilight years.

However, with careful consideration, it may just be possible to create another Mininova that avoids its namesake’s fate, since the court’s decision was not solely related to the existence of links to infringing content, i.e the .torrent files.

The DMCA is widely known in BitTorrent circles. It is the US copyright act (but accepted by many indexers and trackers regardless of location) which many sites quote when offering to take down torrents that link to infringing content. “If you’re the content owner, let us know,” they say, “..and we’ll take down torrents that link to your works.” Complying with so-called ‘DMCA takedown requests’ is widely accepted as a way to stay within the law.

Although Mininova operated such a system, comments by the site’s staff on their forums called their commitment to it into doubt. There are many samples given in the court’s decision, here are just a few. It’s worth noting that many of them date back to 2005, when users, staff and site admins would have been much more relaxed.

“May have been just a take down request (…) i’d say just re upload it (…) thanks for sharing” (posted by site moderator)

“Thanks for reporting, I deleted the fake version and uploaded the correct one” (posted by site admin)

“I made a mistake of downloading a shareware version of Monopoly Jr. only to find out it only allows you to play it for 15 minutes and then it becomes useless,” said a user. “Check the site, it’s there now” (posted by site admin).

Mininova also took pride in their efforts to proactively filter fake files (including in the decision are comments by staff who admit to downloading material to check if it is indeed as labeled), viruses, malware, pornographic and drug-related material, but this seems to have backfired by the corresponding lack of commitment to proactively filter copyright content in the same manner.

The site also carried some very specific categories for its torrents. Not just ‘movies’ or ‘TV’, but also sections such as “CSI” and “Desperate Housewives” which are widely known to be copyright works. One section highlighted in the decision was labeled ‘Disney’. The court decided that since so little Disney material is copyright-free, the section could have little other use than to infringe.

Mininova has never denied making profits (it is a company after all) and the court ruled that the site encouraged and profited “from infringements of copyrights and related rights of the holders represented by Brein.”

To see things from a different perspective, TorrentFreak has been discussing the closure of Mininova with Aldor Nini at digital distribution and anti-piracy solutions company, Easycom, who has been following the case closely.

Interestingly, Aldor informs us that 8 out of 10 torrents on Mininova were not covered by the BREIN lawsuit, which makes us wonder if the site could’ve stayed alive if the other 2 out of 10 were removed before the court’s hand was forced.

“We are very sorry to see a platform like Mininova shut down millions of torrent files,” he told TorrentFreak. “Based on our research we have found out that only 21% of the content was infringing rights of content owners for content used in the proceedings by BREIN. This 21% could probably be the most popular files on the platform, but we cannot confirm this for sure.”

“However, Mininova’s decision to completely remove everything was to 100% conform with what the judge has ruled. A 100% working filter was requested, and the removal of all non moderated user submitted torrents is the only 100% filter available nowadays,” he told us.

In a similar way that file-sharing applications similar to Grokster’s continue to flourish post the ‘big’ 2005 verdict, torrent sites can follow suit, if they are prepared to adapt.

“We do not think that this judgment will directly apply to other torrent portals at all,” Aldor told us, “but rather the way Mininova was operated as a torrent portal.”

Aldor has some interesting thoughts on how torrent sites can continue, without making the same mistakes as Mininova. He argues that torrent sites should behave neutrally, meaning that if they remove fake and spam comments they should filter copyrighted content too.

Based on Aldor’s reasoning, it seems another option is for sites to switch to user-based moderation, where content is automatically removed after a fixed number of downvotes. The bottom line is that the site’s operators (or moderators) should stay neutral.

Further suggestions are to take the takedown procedure seriously and make it easy to use. Sites should notify users that copyrights are to be respected and refrain from using specific categories (such as Disney). Again, based on the basis that site staff should stay neutral, user submitted tags should be fine.

Other more problematic ideas are the increased co-operation with content owners and to “stop thinking in black and white” – surely great advice for both sides and ultimately, the only long term solution.

Not making any profit or donating part of the site’s income to innovative music artists and film makers, and steering clear of scammy advertisers could be further plus points.

Aldor concludes that the lessons are there to be learned from Mininova’s demise.

“The next torrent portals, which will cover the next millions of torrent files, will hopefully learn from this situation. All in all Mininova’s partial shut-down will not influence the worldwide BitTorrent activity, it has just set up the rules for the successors of Mininova.”

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

While the evidence gathering techniques differ from agency to agency, they all have one thing in common. None of them can provide proof that the account holder has actually committed copyright infringement. In fact, some anti-piracy outfits cannot even prove that the IP-address they have on file was used in an actual file transfer, although they claim otherwise.

The Video Protection Alliance’ (VPA) belongs to the latter group. Instead of simply warning the alleged infringers, they take it one step further and actually ask for cash to settle immediately on behalf of the copyright holder, a known extortion-like technique that is also used by spammers.

The process used by VPA and others is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other file-sharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share their clients’ copyright works. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer.

“Someone using this account has engaged in illegal copying or distribution (downloading or uploading) of [title],” the VPA writes in one copyright/settlement notice, adding: “The information in this notification is accurate.”

But is it really accurate? We beg to differ and we’re certainly not the only ones.

As outlined in an elaborate article posted on on Freedom to Tinker earlier this week, the VPA does not verify whether the IP-address is actually uploading or downloading content. They simply take it from the swarm list reported by the tracker.

This is wrong for several reasons. First of all, some trackers are known to insert random IP-addresses into swarm reports to provide plausible deniability. Secondly, anyone can easily create a url that would put someone in the swarm list when it’s clicked. This link can be posted everywhere on the Internet and it wouldn’t even require the recipient to have a BitTorrent client installed.

Of course, this information is nothing new to people who are familiar with these anti-piracy evidence gathering techniques. Last year researchers from the University of Washington revealed the same flaws, but outfits such as VPA apparently don’t see the need to back up their claims with solid evidence.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of these notices are sent out every year, some of which include cash requests to settle the case. Even worse perhaps, in countries that adopt three-strike legislation millions face the threat of being disconnected by their ISP, based on shoddy and unverified evidence, and without judicial oversight.

Unfortunately, the outfits that collect the evidence for the copyright holders are not very open about the techniques they use. When the RIAA’s evidence was disputed (pdf) in court earlier this year they decided to drop the case and settle with prejudice for $0.00. How convenient.

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

Titled “Escape From Terror Byte City” the book tells the story of two young boys who attempt to download the latest Transformers movie from a P2P website. Of course, when the two fire-up their file-sharing software all hell breaks loose.

Surprisingly, the story itself has nothing to do with the consequences of copyright infringement. The comic book that is supposed to educate children about file-sharing is nothing more than a scary story about viruses, worms, trojan horses and identity theft.

It’s quite sad really when you think about it. Apparently the MPA and their anti-piracy partners have decided to give up on the message that piracy hurts their business in the hopes that horror stories about infected computers will deter youngsters from downloading copyrighted works instead.

That aside, the risks of being exposed to viruses and malware on P2P networks have always been greatly exaggerated. If we follow the logic of the MPA we might as well ban email because of all the trojans and phishing scams that are sent around. Or stop selling USB drives because people might lose them and potentially expose personal information that shouldn’t be on there in the first place.

The comic is conveniently avoiding the word copyright, perhaps because the 10 year crusade against copyright infringement hasn’t led to any results. The propaganda doesn’t work without providing alternatives, and every parent knows that forbidding something quite often leads to the opposite result.

Still, the entertainment industry seems unconcerned with innovation and new ways to adapt to the digital era. Instead they prefer to focus on promoting new ways to punish potential consumers. Aside from pushing the comic book, the Hollywood lobbyist also lobbied for the return of the controversial ‘3-strikes’ legislation which was scrapped earlier this year after public pressure.

Will they ever learn? A scanned copy of the full comic book is available on Mininova. This one’s going to be a collectors item, for sure.

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

Torrent sites have been the target of these removal requests more than once, and Google usually removes the ‘infringing’ torrent detail pages from their search results fairly quickly.

According to Google the altered search results are caused by DMCA complaints the company receives from copyright holders. One of the most recent takedown requests, sent by a company that protects the copyrights of porn producers, was targeted at The Pirate Bay.

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed X result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org,” Google users can now read beneath the search results for The Pirate Bay and similar terms.

Now this wouldn’t be that odd if only a few adult film torrents were removed from the search results. However, those who take a closer look will notice that the takedown request resulted in a ban of the Pirate Bay frontpage from the search results.

As can be seen from the picture above the rest of the Pirate Bay domain is still indexed, but not the frontpage. This is not the end of the world of course but since there are no torrents listed on the Pirate Bay frontpage, Google has clearly made a mistake here.

The details of the takedown notice that was sent by Removeyourcontent are not yet available, but it may be that it included the Pirate Bay frontpage and that Google removed it without checking whether the claim was legitimate.

TorrentFreak has contacted Google for a response, but thus far we haven’t heard back from them. If it is indeed a mistake we assume that it will be corrected soon. Perhaps they can delete the scammy PirateBay.com site while they’re at it?

Update: Destined Enterprises, the company that operates the site that sent the takedown requests according to Google, claims they haven’t asked Google to remove the Pirate Bay homepage from the search results (although they are not completely sure). In a letter (pdf) the company’s lawyer has sent to Google a few minutes ago, they request a copy of the takedown notice, fearing that someone else might use their name to send these takedown notices.

Update 2: Google has lifted the Pirate Bay ban. The homepage appears in the search results again. The DMCA notice in question is also published and the Pirate Bay homepage is not listed there, so it’s likely that Google made a mistake.

Update 3 Google says the mistake was due to “takedown request that erroneously listed thepiratebay.org.” The company that sent the takedown notice denies this. “They are blaming us but it’s ok. We are used to it,” they told TorrentFreak.

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

Targets of the scam receive an unsolicited email purporting to come from notorious anti-piracy company MediaDefender. The email, which is simply addressed “Dear User!” claims the individual has been monitored on any of several torrent sites while engaging in anything from copyright infringement, through to simply browsing the sites.

Of course, citing MediaDefender is a nonsense, since that company doesn’t get involved in anti-piracy warning letters – its specialty was spoofing on BitTorrent networks.

Additionally, most of the sites listed don’t even operate a tracker, so committing any type of copyright infringements on them is almost impossible. Here is the body of the email;

Dear User!

Your recent internet activity was logged on the following sites:

* Btjunkie
* SumoTorrent
* isoHunt
* Btscene
* Mininova
* Fenopy
* Monova
* Yotoshi
* GetInvites
* Btmon

hxxp://XXXXX.net/report_78478XX.exe (XX added by TorrentFreak)

We have a report about the copyrighted movies, music, softwares you downloaded or searched on these webpages. We strongly advise you to stop any future activities regarding the downloading of illegal content or you can expect prosecution by 17 U.S.C.512,1201?1205,1301?1332; 28 U.S.C. 4001 laws.

Sincerely,

MediaDefender Inc.

So what is this scam all about? Attached to the email is a logfile which supposedly provides additional information about the user’s infringements, but of course this is a lie – the log is really a virus.

This type of scam is nothing new – the same type of thing has been tried before, probably by the same people. However, this time the virus is different. Here is the report, courtesy of ThreatExpert;

Threat characteristics of ZBot – a banking trojan that disables firewall, steals sensitive financial data (credit card numbers, online banking login details), makes screen snapshots, downloads additional components, and provides a hacker with the remote access to the compromised system. Creates a startup registry entry. Contains characteristics of an identified security risk.

Savvy Internet users will hopefully realize the email is a scam fairly quickly, but hardened file-sharers should smell a rat even earlier due to the omission of demands for money.

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

With denial-of-service attacks against Scientology various websites and viral YouTube videos they’ve made it very clear that they are determined to dismantle the Church. As of today they are announcing a new round of “attacks” that will be pirate themed, with pirate support.

In true Pirate style The Pirate Bay has decided to back the operation with a banner linking to Anonymous’ latest campaign “Operation Sea Arrrgh 2″ on their home page. New protests on and offline are will be executed soon, staring this weekend.

“Our next protests are all pirate themed. Our flyers and other material will mostly be about their ship the Freewinds and the many abuses that have taken place on there, and then of course the rest of the scams and atrocities they have committed and continue to perpetrate,” Anonymous told TorrentFreak.

Operation Sea Aarrrgh 2: Cruise Control is the latest in a ongoing series of protests Anonymous has organized against the Church of Scientology in its continuing mission to educate the public about the criminal behavior and unethical tactics of the cult’s management.

“We appeal to our fellow pirates because this is and has always been a battle of the Internets, and we believe many of the filesharing pirates out there share our ideology of an open society, where information can be free,” Anonymous said.

So pirates, set sail towards Seaarrgh to find out more about Operation Sea Aarrrgh 2 and find out about protests near you at the forums. Arrrr!

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

In November 2008, someone used a forged CA driver’s license to take over Torrentz.com, and put some of his own ads on the site. Luckily, the hijack took less than a day to bring to an end and things were back to normal before most users even noticed that something was wrong. But Torrentz is not the only torrent site to interest hackers.

NowTorrents, a torrent meta-search engine that recently acquired a spot among the 10 most visited torrent sites on the Internet, is facing a similar problem. This morning, the admin of the site noticed that he was no longer in control of the domain name as it was transferred to a new registrar, GoDaddy.

Coincidentally, the admin also had two of his email accounts hacked, which could very well be the cause of the domain troubles. He told TorrentFreak that he is doing all he can to resolve the issues. Google has reinstated one of his email accounts after some emails back and forth.

GoDaddy, where the domain was transferred after it was hijacked, is currently looking into the case. It can usually take up to a week before the domain gets transferred back to the rightful owner, the admin said. However, by putting in some calls to a supervisor at GoDaddy he hoped to speed up this process a little.

How the ‘hacker’ gained access to the domains remains a mystery for now. The email password was secure and not really guessable, and all signs currently point to a keylogger. It wouldn’t be the first time that this has happened to an admin of a torrent site.

Nevertheless, the admin of NowTorrents is confident that he will soon regain access to his site. Meanwhile its users will have to be patient and look for alternatives until the site comes back.

Update: the site is coming back slowly, waiting for the DNS to propagate.

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

Sadly, ACS:Law don’t appear to be practicing what they preach, despite taking the moral high-ground with the hundreds of recipients of their letters.

In an article published on their site entitled “20th Century Fox hit by illegal downloads” (Google cache copy here, since the page has been removed after we published this). ACS:Law appear to have taken the easy option and instead of writing their own article, chose to cut and paste paragraph after paragraph of other people’s work, passing it off as their own, without so much as a link to any source or a mention of an author’s or publication name.

Paragraph 1 of ACS:Law article

Almost a month before Wolverine hit the movie theaters a workprint copy of the movie was “leaked” onto the Web. It was a copy that was half finished as far as the special effects were concerned with green screens and wire framed character models visible for all the world to see. The great fight scene at the top of the nuclear reactor was more stickman like drawing that anything to do with the actors. In the end it was an incomplete movie that really only left the majority of those that watched it wanting to see the real thing

Original source article: Written by Steven Hodson over at inquisitr.com

Paragraph 2 of ACS:Law article

AFACT’s director of operations Neil Gane thanked the member of the public who had called attention to the racket and claimed Australian businesses suffered greatly from piracy.

Original source article: Written by Suzanne Tindal for zdnet.com.au

Paragraph 3 of ACS:Law article

“That pirated copies of X-Men Origins: Wolverine were discovered amongst the haul is especially disappointing. The film was made in Australia, employed over 1000 Australians, engaged over 100 Australian companies and contributed over $80 million to the local economy. The flagrant sales of pirated copies of the film is a slap in the face to the hard work and creativity that so many Australians put into the movie,” he alleged in a statement. The film has not yet been shown in cinemas worldwide

Original source article: Written by Suzanne Tindal for zdnet.com.au

Paragraph 4 of ACS:Law article

The woman’s arrest and the discovery of the discs led police to what was allegedly a disc burner lab in Sydney’s Westmead. The lab allegedly had the potential to produce 378,000 pirated discs a year, worth $1.8 million on the street.

Original source article: Written by Suzanne Tindal for zdnet.com.au

Paragraph 5 of ACS:Law article

Marketed as one of this summer’s blockbusters, downloads topped 75,000 within hours of the film being uploaded to BitTorrent and 20th Century Fox, the studio behind Wolverine, said the uploaded version was “stolen, incomplete and early”

Original source article: Fraser McIntyre and Jennifer Whitehead for The Scotsman

Paragraph 6 of ACS:Law article

The computer-generated imagery had not been added, there were missing scenes, sound and music and Wolverine himself had not yet acquired his enhanced strength with the wires attached to the actor Hugh Jackman still visible on screen.

Original source article: Fraser McIntyre and Jennifer Whitehead The Scotsman

Paragraph 7 of ACS:Law article

Reviews based on an unfinished film and which have already cost influential Fox News columnist Roger Friedman his job. He was fired for commenting on illegal footage. Richard Mollet is from record label trade body the BPI. He says the industry lost around £200m last year because of illegal downloading.The illegal copy became available on the internet on March 30. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “at last year’s average ticket price of $7.18, the piracy could conceivably – though not likely – have cost Fox $28.7 million.”

Original source article: Fraser McIntyre and Jennifer Whitehead The Scotsman

Even though there are clearly no references to any sources, links back to the original articles or mention of the author’s name in the ACS:Law article, TorrentFreak contacted all three publications to double check that permission had not been granted. Of the trio, Duncan Riley editor of Inquisitr.com was most vocal, telling TorrentFreak;

“No, we have not given permission for the content to be used. What perhaps is the height of hypocrisy, besides the wholesale theft of the text word for word, is that the paragraph they have taken is from a post that argues that piracy helped Wolverine, and then they’ve added anti-piracy statements to the end.”

We must admit we are very confused. On the one hand ACS:Law speak constantly about how their clients suffer at the hands of copyright infringement, yet the company itself appears to have a different approach when it comes to its own dealings.

Just recently, a support site set up to help recipients of ACS:Law letters cope with their predicament was ordered to stop its activities by ACS:Law (under threat of legal action) after they objected to the link between the site’s domain name (beingscammed.com) and their firm. The owner of the site was forced to publish an apology on the site’s homepage. As expected, another site has taken its place.

ACS:Law have forced others to publish an apology on their site too after comments were made that the law firm objected to. In the interests of fairness, it seems fitting that that Mr Andrew Crossley, as main partner of ACS:Law, publishes his own apology on his site’s homepage for making use of other people’s copyright works and exploiting them for commercial gain.

Andrew Crossley was already fined by the UK’s Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) for engaging in “conduct unbefitting a solicitor” (pdf) back in 2006. We believe that a law firm claiming to uphold copyright law on behalf of its clients but infringing copyright in the process warrants the same label, but we’ll let the Conduct Investigation Unit at the SRA decide.

And to those that think these infringements by ACS:Law are small ones to be brushed off or discounted, then in an ideal world, yes, you would be absolutely correct. No one should care about small infringements of copyright. No-one should have to write articles about petty copyright infringement, but these are the depths to which this arena has sunk.

But consider which games these threats and lawsuits are all about. Two Worlds from Reality Pump is available on Amazon for £12, Topware’s Dream Pinball 3D is available for under £10, Call of Juarez by Techland much less than that. At absolute best ACS:Law has evidence that copyright was infringed via an IP address for a mere second on a few kilobytes of these titles. For these equally small infringements, ACS:Law demand around £600 from the public to satisfy them and their clients, backed up by the threat of ruination in court.

That’s how low we’ve sunk. It must stop, all of it.

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

One of the more recent attacks targets the weak spot of the average BitTorrent user, as it promises to increase the download speed of one’s torrents significantly. By registering hundreds of bogus accounts, BitTorrentBooster(.com) spammed the torrent comments on The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites with the same fake promises.

“Try BitTorrentBooster and increase you download speed by UP TO 100%,” they claim – all while quietly promoting their adware package, or they embed an image similar to the one below.

The moderators at The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that they do all they can to get rid on the spammers by banning IP-addresses, images and optimizing the spam filter. However, the BitTorrentBooster folks keep coming back with more aggressive and less obtrusive comments to promote their adware. Unfortunately, hundreds of naive BitTorrent users fall for their speed trap.

This magic speed increase is never going to happen of course. If a BitTorrent client is configured correctly, most users will easily max out their connection if the swarm is healthy enough, or they will at least come close to the average swarm speed. Simply put, there is no application that can miraculously boost your BitTorrent speed by 100% like BitTorrentBooster promises.

Nevertheless, there are always people who want to try these things out to see whether the application makes a difference or not. The site offers several memberships, including a free one that claims it will still increase your download speeds by 15%. However, that’s not all it does – the adware bundle that comes with it is guaranteed to annoy anyone who installs it.

As stated in the application’s EULA, every user agrees to receive all kinds of pop-up ads in their web browser and permit BitTorrentBooster to change the default search engine. As if that’s not enough, it will also turn all their users into their very own marketing machine.

“The Software may add to all computers’ outgoing and incoming emails, to forums and social networks posting, regardless of local or online service, one to Two text lines which carry advertisement information and a link to the advertiser,” the EULA reads.

This basically means that you allow the software vendors to add adverts to your outgoing and incoming emails, and even grant them the right to use your social networking accounts to post ads for them. According to the threat blog the software does indeed interact with Myspace’s “add comment” feature, and they’ve also confirmed that it attaches adverts to your outgoing email messages.

Needless to say the BitTorrentBooster people, who also host the wonderful “Smileys Toolbar” are not really concerned with making your downloads faster. They are spamming The Pirate Bay and other sites for only one reason – to make as much money as possible.

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

The aXXo brand has achieved cult status and for some has become synonymous with quality. Over the years aXXo has grabbed the attention of scammers, the mainstream press and even documentary makers. So, when he goes silent it is quickly noticed and the demand from his fans for news or an update quickly grows.

This isn’t the first time that aXXo has taken a break from releasing. Last year there were no new releases for a full four months but eventually aXXo made a glorious return with the topical release of “I Am Legend.” Little is known about the reasons behind aXXo’s current absence, although he has not disappeared completely.

We can confirm that aXXo has been logging into his account at Mininova, which means that we can safely conclude that aXXo is still among us. When he plans to surface again is unclear, but time will tell.

It is fascinating to see how aXXo has gathered a following of millions of people in the years after he started uploading his first torrent. As always, opinions differ and controversy always surrounds aXXo. He is God to some, while others despise him for his lack of crediting ‘The Scene’ but it’s difficult to criticize his commitment or appreciate the pressure he is undoubtedly under on a daily basis.

Fact is, however, that every aXXo upload is good for a guaranteed entry in our movie download charts, adding up to millions of downloads in a few weeks. It may be Hollywood’s worst nightmare, but many independent film producers will dream of having their films ripped by aXXo, ensuring that they are associated with a global brand with an unprecedented reach on BitTorrent.

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

There have been many cases where bands and music labels have been publicly vocal about the fact that their album has been heavily pirated. Complaining that their business has been torn apart, most of them appear to ignore the link between accumulating many unauthorized downloads and the retail success of their product. Short and sweet – if your product is good, thousands will buy it. If your product is good, thousands will pirate it too – the two scenarios go hand in hand.

One band who thought that evil pirates were taking all their money are Sweden-based Stockholm Stoner. In a recent interview picked up by brokep of The Pirate Bay, the band explained that since releasing their album on January 21st this year, they had sold a pretty-unimpressive 379 copies.

Apparently, however, their music is a smash hit on BitTorrent, racking up an impressive 80,000 downloads. This ratio of legal to unauthorized downloads seems unprecedented and the band were quick to express their dismay. While noting that they aren’t specifically against P2P networks, the band said it “would be fun” to get paid for their work and that “adults must understand that they can not steal,” while saying that the Internet should be filtered – “..the Chinese can do it after all,” they said.

But this is the Internet, and not everything is how it seems. What could be worse than getting pirated 210 copies to every one sold? How about… not getting pirated at all? Unfortunately for the band the download stats for their album were gathered from entirely the wrong place, via scammy links on a torrent meta search engine. As can be seen from this search for Stockholm Stoner, the site shows many thousands of downloads. They are fake – you can type anything in that search box and the site will return ’stats’.

Rather than being relieved, I can’t help but think that having found out that they’re not popular with pirates after all, the band would be hugely disappointed. Searching in the usual places, TorrentFreak couldn’t find any significant downloads of this band at all. Better to be popular and downloaded, than not downloaded at all, surely?

Another artist who claims to be hugely popular with pirates is Indiana “The Internet Police Are Coming” Gregg. In an interview with the BBC, Gregg claimed that one of her albums had been downloaded 250,000 times – a figure we found just too outrageous to be taken seriously, with our own calculations indicating this assessment was inflated by around 240,000 downloads.

Using the publicity from her spat with The Pirate Bay to great effect, Gregg went on to create Kerchoonz – a site paid for by £250,000 of public money where people could download and listen to music for free. Trying to convert ‘pirates-with-morals’ to the site, every listen or download would result in the artists getting paid, emphasized Gregg.

Indiana Gregg herself is touting her own music on the site and is actually the #4 artist in the Kerchoonz ‘Top 100′ list. Since she’s so popular with pirates (250,000 downloads remember?) she must be tearing it up on Kerchoonz. Wrong. Current stats indicate that her tracks have been streamed 1180 times and downloaded just 310 times. Presuming she’s getting paid at the same rates as the other artists on the site, Gregg netted $2 for this effort, which is exactly $2 more than she accused The Pirate Bay of giving her.

Overall it seems that getting heavily pirated is an indication of success, and a pointer that good money is to be made at retail – The Dark Knight was pirated at least a million times but has already made over $1 billion dollars worldwide.

If no-one wants to pirate your music or download it for free, don’t expect to be able to sell it either. Come back pirates, the music industry needs you.

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

Uploading fakes to a BitTorrent network is relatively easy, but keeping the torrents active is a much more difficult task. The moderation teams on private trackers remove fakes as soon as they appear – if people are stupid enough to even try to upload them. Other directories such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova, however, are more difficult to police due to their open nature but these sites continually battle fakes too.

There are several forces driving this phenomenon. Of course, the likes of the MPAA and their partners like to upload fakes in order to waste downloader’s time and to monitor their activities. That said, there are others who are uploading fakes in order to make themselves money, with many of the fakes simply encouraging the use of malware such as Domplayer, or sending the user ostensibly to get passwords to view the video, but in reality directing them to spammy sites.

Unless you’ve been on Mars for a few years, you will be aware that aXXo is one of the strongest BitTorrent-related brands and as such, the aXXo name is ripe to be exploited with fake torrents and the schemes behind them. This morning, Mininova was bombarded with hundreds of fake aXXo torrents linking to various malware and spam schemes. Luckily the moderation staff at Mininova are very much on the ball, and their skills and experience allowed them to remove them very quickly. Indeed, the thousands of users at Mininova also help by informing the site that a torrent is not what it should be, but it’s an on-going battle.

When a fake is removed from the site, the IP address of the uploader is also banned, meaning that unless the uploader gets himself a new IP, he won’t be able to upload any more. However, the problem is a lot deeper than just the odd person here and there uploading a fake. Just recently malware and spam peddlers have been advertising online for people to work for them on a freelance basis, uploading fakes to torrent sites and getting paid for each one. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have taken them up on their offers, getting paid around 20 cents for each successful upload. The scammers mitigate the effects of their worker’s IPs being banned by torrent sites by advertising for people with dynamically assigned IP addresses, while encouraging them to use proxies.

We spoke with Moe1210 at Mininova who told us that for them, although time consuming, the aXXo fakes are easiest to spot, and they are often removed from the site in a matter of minutes. However, due to these teams of hired individuals doing the uploading, the sheer number of fake torrents is significant. Even though the mod team are checking the site every 5 minutes, sometimes in that period 50 fakes could’ve been uploaded. On a regular day, the amount of fakes uploaded can reach 2,500.

In the ongoing battle the scammers are getting a little smarter, adjusting the way they operate as the challenge is met by Mininova. They became aware that at certain times of the day the fakes stayed on Mininova for longer periods before being removed, which was down to fluctuating staffing levels due to people having to sleep, rest and venture back into real-life every now and again. To counter this, Mininova now have a worldwide team which cover the major time zones.

Speaking of fake aXXo torrents, Moe1210 told TorrentFreak, “It’s a pretty pointless task uploading a torrent with aXXo in the title trying to trick people [on Mininova]. I’d say that 75% – 80% of our members know that if the torrent is not from aXXo’s account, its fake – meaning, if they check the ‘general’ tab and aXXo’s name is not in red letters, it’s fake! They [the scammers] have no way of spoofing this.”

Many fake torrents are using a tracker located at http://bt9.c7q.fast1010.info, which is hosted with Ecatel in The Netherlands. In order to trick users into believing the torrents it tracks are real, the tracker is faking the download statistics, as can be seen with this fake on TorrentPortal, which at the time of writing is reporting 76278 seeders and 82380 leechers.

The torrent contains an unusable video and a password.html file which claims to reveal a password to play the file, but instead leads the user into a quagmire of spammy sites.

Users looking to avoid these fakes should read our previous article entitled Stop Downloading Fakes and Junk From BitTorrent. In the meantime be aware that the same people behind the aXXo fakes are behind file names such as ‘Race to Witch Mountain 2009 DVDRIP XviD BangeR’, and ‘Watchmen 2009 DVDRIP SeedeRz’.

As a final thought, TorrentFreak asked Ecatel if they intend to do anything about the fakes tracker. They told us, “Ecatel does not allow any spam and malware in its network.” And then it became clear. The tracker hosted at Ecatel doesn’t host the content, the users do – like all trackers. Sometimes the law’s such an ass.

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

While the added search is not a particular good way to find torrents, its addition to the site is an interesting move by BitTorrent Inc. Not so long ago, uTorrent removed the search boxes to sites like Mininova and isoHunt from their client, as per requests from copyright holders. However, since BitTorrent Inc. closed its video store, there is now no need to please Hollywood and they are free to link to torrent sites again.

Last December we reported that BitTorrent.com added a torrent search engine that works with Ask.com, and uTorrent.com now follows with a Google powered search engine. Neither site hosts any files, they simply act as a meta-search engine. Below is an example of a search for aXXo on uTorrent. Ironically, the Google ad that appears here links to a uTorrent scam site.

Google-powered search engines are nothing new, though. There are a few dozen sites that use Google’s coop program, such as TorrentScoop. All these sites display ads from Google’s Adsense program, ads that are not allowed on ‘regular’ torrent sites because they would violate Google’s terms of service. In fact, a few weeks ago isoHunt lost their Google ad feed which ran through Ask because some advertisers complained.

Double standard or not, the search engine on uTorrent’s homepage is bound to get some decent traffic. Let’s hope that they will keep an eye on the scammy ads though, we know from experience that it requires continuous attention.

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

One business model in operation for some time now is the selling of otherwise free software to unsuspecting entrants to file-sharing and P2P. Unaware that everything they need can be legitimately acquired for free, they hand over payments for access to public sites such as Mininova or The Pirate Bay. Equally, they end up paying for uTorrent or other P2P clients via credit card or other methods.

Recently there has been an increase in sites offering these type of services, but utilizing premium rate SMS to collect revenue. One such site being complained about right now is Bittorrent-net.info. The site offers downloads of most of the popular P2P clients including uTorrent, Vuze/Azureus, LimeWire, eMule and Ares.

However, the downloads have a sting in the tail. Once downloaded and the installer is run, the software package requires the user to SMS a provided number via cellphone to get codes to ‘activate’ the software. The site has sections for users around the world, but for UK users this sequence of events ends up costing individuals around £9 in call charges. Spot the deliberately obscure gray-on-gray prices in the screenshot below, written in letters instead of numbers so they don’t attract the eye.

On closer inspection of the rarely viewed ‘Legal Terms‘ section of the site which is buried away in the usual legalese, it does indeed say that that the ’service’ will cost £9. Unfortunately for the site this just isn’t enough to give it legality under regulations just introduced in the UK.

Under new rules from premium-rate phone regulator PhonepayPlus, hiding away charges as BitTorrent-net.info has done is strictly disallowed. In effect now is this rule:

Clearer pricing – No matter where you see a mobile phone-paid service advertised (whether it’s in a magazine or newspaper, on TV, on the internet or somewhere else), the pricing of the service must be given just as much space and attention as the rest of the advert – the cost shouldn’t be hidden in small print. Also, providers must not say a service or download is ‘free’ unless there really are no other costs involved.

The number that people have to SMS to obtain ‘activation codes’ is 78881, which is currently operated by mBlox Ltd. Touting itself as “The world’s largest mobile transaction network” and the company behind delivering the ‘Crazy Frog’ ringtone, mBlox does not provide the content or schemes behind such SMS’s, merely the infrastructure.

In a response to rising complaints as outlined in this article, mBlox provides an online tool to find the companies behind these numbers. Unfortunately our searches using this method drew a blank, but two company names kept cropping up linked to these operations – Netlink Network Corp. and Panama-based Soletto Group SA.

TorrentFreak’s calls for comment from mBlox have so far gone unanswered but we did managed to discuss the situation with SMS regulator PhonepayPlus, who gave us this statement:

Following intervention from PhonepayPlus, as a result of public complaints and its own internal monitoring, this service has been suspended from operation. Readers [in the UK] affected by this service should contact PhonepayPlus on 0800 500 212 (Mon-Fri, 8am-6pm), or at www.phonepayplus.org.uk

We are unable to confirm at this stage if people affected will be able to get a refund, but it certainly looks like the chances of people getting scammed by this method in the future are diminishing.

On other sites using the same business model the software BitComet, BitSpirit, Frostwire and Kceasy feature, but unfortunately this scheme doesn’t stop at P2P clients. Messenger Plus! Live, WinAce, WinZip, 7Zip, DirectX, CDex, and Adobe Acrobat have all appeared with similar installers.

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

In addition, the company ran banner campaigns on several websites that were never paid for – TorrentFreak included. Myka’s Dan Lovy contacted us last year to ask if we were interested in promoting Myka through a banner campaign. After several emails back and forth we agreed on a good rate, and put the banner up in the sidebar. The campaign ran for over a month, but we had no choice but to remove it when Dan went silent.

We never received any money for the banner campaign, and we were not the only site Myka scammed into advertising their ‘product’ for free. From then on all emails remained unanswered, until May 2008 when Dan emailed us to say that they had received a round of funding, and that he would pay up soon. That was the last time we heard from him.

Around the same time, a discussion on DigitalSpy got quite heated when someone seemed keen to promote the device and was confronted by users who were concerned at the lack of a real company name, amateur website, no real-world address and no contact details other than an email address. Indeed, even the Myka.tv domain details are protected. Not exactly confidence inspiring.

Then the whole project seemed to die. Customers who had ordered the device never heard from the company again, and the website was never updated. Only a month ago NewTeeVee reported that they were still promising to ship the pre-orders in the Summer of 2008, while through neglect the Myka forums were taken over by spammers.

Six months later after being informed of the mess on their forums, someone claiming to be Dan Lovy posted on CrunchGear yesterday, saying “I’m Dan Lovy, chief cook and bottle washer at Myka. Just spent a lovely evening cleaning out the forum. YES, the factory is springing to life.”

But what inspired this reappearance by Mr Lovy? In an unforeseen turn of events, Myka has announced it is ready to ship their set-top box in the coming weeks. The news was picked up by Engadget and the previously-mentioned Crunchgear, with Dan Lovy himself encouraging people to order a box, saying “Have you ordered your MYKA today?”

No thanks. When building a business and embracing partners and customers alike, you have to build trust. Our advice; don’t buy on their promises, they break them. Time and again.

Update: Only a few minutes after we published this article Dan Lovy contacted us to say [insert all possible excuses here].

So, he is alive, and we have no doubt that he’s a real person. We did find out that he never got the funding he told us about a while back. Last week he wrote this at the Small Business Ideas Forum: “Most recently I launched www.myka.tv We generated hundreds of news articles and orders (alas, in this economic climate we have been unable to raise the money needed).”

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

In a nutshell, a representative from VPN4Life claimed they were about to offer a fast, 128 bit encrypted, fully unlimited and anonymous PPTP service – all for just a one-off payment of $50.00. It seemed to good to be true and in our report we said as much, warning people away from the service.

Nevertheless, since the offer was so cheap, some people decided to take the chance. After handing their cash over via PayPal, customers did not receive a PPTP VPN service, but an executable file named ‘VPN 4 Life PC.exe’. Sadly, this was neither new nor original code, but a piece of software designed to protect people’s privacy when using public WiFi networks. The ad-supported software, called Hotspot Shield, is already available for free from AnchorFree.com. The scammers at VPN4Life simply renamed the file to make it look like their own work.

Confirmation that the two files are identical can be obtained by checking the MD5 checksum, which can be viewed as a type of digital fingerprint. The results for each file are identical.

4b34079841d43799e5d0849ac16feb61 HSS-1.10-install-anchorfree-76-conduit.exe
4b34079841d43799e5d0849ac16feb61 VPN 4 Life PC.exe

The VPN4Life site now has a note on it stating that if anyone is unhappy with the service, that’s too bad. “No refunds will be given if you are dissatisfied with our services,” says the site’s recently-added Terms and Conditions. However, according to reports from purchasers, a complaint to PayPal seems to do the trick.

Too good to be true? You bet.

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

A good VPN service offering unlimited data transfers and healthy speeds usually costs around $10 to $20 per month, so when a new service launched this week, offering all this for a one-off payment of $29.00 (introductory price), it warranted further investigation.

According to their website, the people behind VPN4Life are entrepreneurs “striving to free the world from ISP monitoring, government restrictions, and capitalism’s growing influence on the Internet, one account at a time.” Offering unlimited bandwidth and 128 bit encryption through servers in the UK, Germany and Singapore with a 99.7% uptime guarantee, it certainly looked attractive. The official site carries little detail, so we contacted VPN4Life and asked a number of questions.

First of all, the $29.00 payment looked like an introductory offer, so how much would the service cost normally? VPN4Life told us the 20mb/sec fully BitTorrent compatible unlimited bandwdith PPTP service would cost “between $45 and $50″, while confirming that the payment is indeed a one-off for a lifetime subscription.

Since there is no privacy policy on the site we asked a few questions along those lines. VPN4Life told us that they do not log what any of their customers do. We asked about the lack of a displayed Terms of Service and their response was it wasn’t needed. “Customer pays, we provide VPN,” they told us, while assuring that they would never divulge any customer information to 3rd parties, since they have nothing stored to give them.

$50.00 for life sounds an amazing offer – but is this super-low price sustainable? The immediate difficulty with a lifetime subscription is that once off the ground, the company is then responsible for providing a service to thousands of members forever who paid very little in the first place. More and more new signups are then required to pay for the spiraling hardware and bandwidth costs and since VPN4Life offer unlimited bandwidth, it’s difficult to see how the whole operation can be sustained.

As far as the real costs of bandwidth go, we spoke with Bruce at VPN provider Perfect Privacy who told us: “There is a reason why we currently charge about EUR 10.00 to EUR 15.00/month (depending if you pay for 3 or 24 months in advance), namely that 1 mbps of dedicated bandwidth in the West costs about EUR 10.00 to US$ 15.00 at the very minimum. In Asia it costs about US$ 80.00/mbps. That’s US$ 1,500 (U.S/Europe) to US$ 8,000 (Asia) every month just for 100 mbps.”

In the face of these figures, the VPN4Life offer starts to look vulnerable indeed. “How are they going to pay for their ever increasing bandwidth needs if the number of paying members becomes ever smaller in relation to the total number of members?” asked Bruce, rhetorically. He has a very, very good point. It looks impossible, much like the classic pyramid scheme.

Some might feel that at $50.00 this service is worth a try but I strongly believe that if something looks too good to be true, then it probably is. Time will tell, but I won’t be changing provider, that’s certain.

Update: Important – Anyone considering purchasing should read here first

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

In the past we’ve reported on the P2P advertising attempts of MediaDefender, but they are not the only company trying to make money from ads on filesharing networks. Last month, P2Pwords launched their adwords service, and more recently, PeerMatrix launched another advertising application targeted at P2P users. Although there is doubt that this type of advertising can be very effective, it’s the ideal cash cow for malware peddlers.

According to a press release from last Friday, PeerMatrix uses a “…revolutionary technology that morphs the name of an ad file to match whatever a P2P user is searching for, thereby dramatically increasing the probability that your ad file will be downloaded and viewed”.

In other words, with this (patented) “revolutionary technology” advertisers will have the possibility to rename their Viagra advert to ‘The Dark Knight Trailer.avi’, if that’s what the user is searching for. Even worse, the advertiser can do this with every file type, including executable malware applications, or trojan horses. The opportunities to use this piece of software to pollute search results are endless.

Angel Leon, lead developer at FrostWire told TorrentFreak that he is not impressed by PeerMatrix’s marketing pitch. Instead, he is worried. “We wouldn’t call this a “revolutionary technology,” he told us. “This is nothing but good old fake search results, otherwise known as spam, and it’s always been in the interest of the community to remove these results.”

PeerMatrix offers their application for free, and it runs on all recent Windows operating systems including Vista and XP. PeerMatrix’s business model is to make money by inserting a small percentage of their own ads along with the files that the ‘advertisers’ choose to spread.

We can’t help but see this application as the ultimate spamming tool. Luckily, most developers of Gnutella based filesharing applications agree with this view. “We’ll try our best to have FrostWire clients recognize these fakes and keep the experience clean, just the way it should be. If a search result doesn’t indicate in some way it’s an advertisement, it’s clearly a deceptive form of spam,” Leon said.

Bernard Trest, President of PeerMatrix disagrees with this description. “YouTube has also been experimenting with overlays and many websites use a similar overlay concept,” he told us. “Essentially the person does not request ads on YouTube however they are forced to view the ad anyhow. If what we are doing is “spam” then Google, Yahoo, and even YouTube are spamming.”

The problem with PeerMatrix, however, is that there is no control over the content that the advertisers put on the P2P networks, even executable files are not a problem. In addition, Trest admitted to us that the ads inserted by their software are not listed as ads in the search results. “The advertising, whether targeted or untargeted, is not designated as advertising,” he said.

If this isn’t the ultimate spamming tool, then what is? We sincerely hope that the developers of filesharing applications will keep a close eye on this new spamming tool, and filter it from the results wherever possible. If that proves to be a problem, many P2P users might have to switch to BitTorrent.

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