The site has grown steadily over the years and continues to do so, despite a setback in court this summer. In fact, today the 10 billionth torrent file was downloaded from Mininova, an impressive achievement to say the least.

Although the site is still going strong, with the increasing visitor numbers month after month, things have definitely changed behind the scenes.

When asked for a comment on whether they had predicted the site would grow this rapidly, Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak: “We never really expected anything. We don’t really tend to focus on these numbers, we are just trying to run the site the best way we can.”

Previously the Mininova team welcomed these download records with more enthusiasm, but times have changed. In common with their counterparts at the Pirate Bay, we get the impression that the torrent site is not their core business anymore, which is not really that surprising considering the legal troubles Mininova faces.

In August, Mininova lost in court against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The judge ruled that the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer had to clean up its site and remove all torrents that link to infringing content. Mininova has yet to decide whether or not they will appeal the case.

Possibly related to this uncertain future, Erik said that they are not going to release any new features or major upgrades to the site anytime soon. “At the moment we are mainly focusing on other projects besides Mininova,” he informed us.

This year has undoubtedly been a turbulent one for Mininova. Nevertheless, we want to congratulate the Mininova team for reaching this new milestone, whether they like it or not.

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

Despite this success, The Pirate Bay operators today decided to pull the plug and close down the tracker permanently. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has made trackers redundant they say, as BitTorrent downloads work well with trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.

Aside from this shutdown, there is also another major development quietly under discussion.

TorrentFreak has learned that behind the scenes the Pirate Bay operators are talking to other BitTorrent site owners to encourage them to follow suit and completely ditch torrents in the future. BitTorrent has reached a point where trackers and torrents are no longer needed to download files successfully. Supported by all of the major BitTorrent clients, DHT and PEX can handle the transfers and Magnet links can largely replace traditional torrent files.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT+PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

Switching to trackerless and torrentless downloading on public BitTorrent sites does indeed seem to be an option. Previously, many people thought that BitTorrent would collapse if a dominant tracker like the Pirate Bay went down, but this doomsday scenario never unfolded. In fact, the recent downtime of the tracker did not slow down or stop many transfers, as DHT and PEX seamlessly took over.

Those BitTorrent users who don’t want to go trackerless just yet can of course still use OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent, or indeed one of the many other alternative trackers currently available.

Whether or not The Pirate Bay and others will move away from torrent files in the future, the closure of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is nevertheless a milestone in the history of the Internet. Starting today, the Pirate Bay has changed its tagline from “The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” to “The world’s most resilient (magnetic) BitTorrent site.”

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

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.

Just over a month has passed since the first stable public release of the software and PeerBlock has now managed to clock up more than 100,000 downloads. To mark this milestone, TorrentFreak caught up with Mark from the project for the lowdown.

Mark told us that the creation of PeerBlock was inspired by him upgrading his PC from 32 to 64 bit in order to utilize 6gb of RAM. Everything worked fine – until he tried to get PeerGuardian (another IP blocker) to work.

Having hacked away and jumped through hoops to get around driver-signing it would still only work half the time and often crashed without warning. As a software engineer who has worked in the commercial sector for more than 13 years, Mark – who admits to being “an arrogant bastard who truly believes he can do just about anything better than just about anybody,” decided he could find a solution. It was “put up or shut up time,” he told TorrentFreak.

Noticing that the PeerGuardian code was open-source but hadn’t been touched for a couple of years, Mark contacted another developer who had the same thing in mind, but having heard nothing back, he went at it alone.

“I started setting up a Sourceforge.net project for it so we could get free source-control, but they took too long to set it up for me so I instead created a project over at Google Code where it was ready within minutes,” he told us.

Having heard from a few people who were interested in helping out with the development side – “night_stalker_z” who’d earlier started trying to hack the PG2 code into shape, “DarC” / “DisCoStu” who wanted to help out with fixing up the installer, XhmikosR who rewrote the installer, and some testers, things moved forward.

After facing troubles due to the lack of a “signed driver” for 64-bit versions of Vista (which resulted in Mark having to set up a registered company before they were allowed to buy a $230 code-signing certificate), a couple of blogs wrote articles on PeerBlock which attracted some much-needed publicity to the project. This resulted in 10,000 downloads in just one weekend.

“We’re still getting donations from people and we now have enough to pay for next year’s annual code-signing certificate, and we’re saving up to be able to rent our own VPS with full root access etc, upon which we’ll be able to build a ‘real’ online-update system, a custom web-app to tie our forums/issue-tracker/website all together, and some other neat things,” Mark explains.

The first stable release of PeerBlock came out on September 27th, and as of November 5th had clocked up an impressive 100,000 downloads. The site now receives up to 7,000 visitors each day.

Aside from fixing one or two bugs, the team has lots of new features planned for PeerBlock. Anyone that has tried to surf the web with a blocklist in place will know how painful that can be, so PeerBlock will have some new features which allow the “whitelisting” of certain apps, such as a browser, the creation of a proxy server to let users configure PeerBlock to listen on certain ports, possibly an integral “AdMuncher” style ad-blocking feature on a per URL basis (as opposed to just an IP-address), and an encrypted chat feature.

TorrentFreak asked Mark why users should choose PeerBlock over the competition.

“Well, first off we need to ask ‘Who IS the competition?’ The only ones I’m really aware of are: Protowall by the folks over at Bluetack which is closed-source and I don’t believe was ever updated for Vista, and Outpost Firewall, which is closed-source and basically just a hack add-on to a more professional firewall product,” he responded, while noting that uTorrent’s built-in IP-filtering feature only handles one manually-updated list.

“We protect your entire machine, and give you the option to try out any P2P app you want – this freedom of choice is a very important thing, I think. And since it does everything automatically, including list-updates, it’s one less thing to think about,” he added.

Another important question relates to the blocklists that have to be used in conjunction with PeerBlock in order for it to block anything.

He told TorrentFreak that he’s a big fan of iblocklist, who serve up a staggering 10TB of blocklists every month for free. The site doesn’t create the lists, but does offer those from Bluetack, including the Level1 list (renamed to ‘P2P’ in PG2/PeerBlock, which contains both Gov and Anti-P2P IP-addresses) and others.

Mark admits that even in a best case scenario, the available blocklists aren’t 100% effective. That said, there have been studies which show that using blocklists along with software such as PeerBlock can help speed up downloads, but no-one knows how many of the potential “bad IPs” are covered by currently available blocklists.

P2P aside, Mark says there has been feedback to suggest that PeerBlock discovered a Conficker infection on a user’s machine that their anti-virus programs missed, and can also stop ads appearing in browsers that lack in-built blocking.

One other exciting thing for the future of PeerBlock is porting it to the Mac. Mark says they’re saving all the donations for additional development and this is the most-requested request right now.

Users of PeerBlock are encouraged to give as much feedback as possible to Mark’s team, via their forums, IRC (#peerblock on freenode.net) or email.

PeerBlock can be downloaded here.

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

Ink was downloaded more than 400,000 times last week and ended up in fourth place in our weekly chart of most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, where Zombieland occupied the top spot.

Zombieland co-writer Rhett Reese has been following our most pirated movies chart as well, and thus the online success of his film. “Zombieland currently the most pirated movie on bit torrent. Over one million downloads and counting,” he tweeted a few hours ago.

However, unlike the makers of Ink, Reese is not pleased with this achievement, claiming that this piracy disaster may very well prevent a Zombieland sequel from being shot. “Beyond depressing. This greatly affects the likelihood of a Zombieland 2,” he wrote.

Reese’s comments are the classic Hollywood response we wrote about yesterday. Piracy is causing billions of dollars in lost revenue and prevents new movies from being funded, is the doomsday scenario they often paint. But is there any truth in this hunch, or is it just another Hollywood performance? Facts seem to support the latter.

More piracy is not necessarily linked with a drop in box office grosses or DVD sales. ‘The Dark Knight’, which was the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent in 2008 sold millions of DVDs, and grossed a record breaking billion dollars in cinemas worldwide. But what about Zombieland?

The Hollywood Insider wrote that the movie is “alive and kicking” at the box office, putting its success down in part to “strong word-of-mouth”. The release also marks the most successful debut of Woody Harrelson’s career, hitting the No.1 spot and taking $9.4m on its first day and a worldwide $84m to date – all this on a production budget of less than $24m.

Zombieland grossed more than $60.8 million in 17 days, even surpassing the remake of the Dawn of the Dead to become the top-grossing zombie film in history. That does not really sound like something that will prevent a sequel to us.

On the contrary, if anything success on BitTorrent has a direct relation with success at the box office. Since unauthorized ripped versions of virtually all movies appear on the Internet nowadays, it would be a really bad sign if no pirate would want to download it.

But of course, Reese and others could still argue that they would have made even more money if there was no piracy. There are no hard facts to refute this, but with the box office revenue steadily increasing since P2P file-sharing became mainstream, it has to be doubted as well. The same can be said for the claim that less films receive funding.

As many independent filmmakers have already experienced, BitTorrent and the Internet in general can be a boon to the film industry. Instead of seeing it as a threat Hollywood might want to embrace it before it’s too late.

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

“They must capture important evidence on a computer at the scene of an investigation before it is powered down and removed for later analysis. ‘Live’ evidence, such as active system processes and network data, is volatile and may be lost in the process of turning off a computer. How does an officer on the scene effectively do this if he or she is not a trained computer forensics expert?”

Using COFEE, of course.

The Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE) is a piece of software designed for the use of law enforcement agencies, and provided to the same free of charge by Microsoft. And, largely because of its mystique, has been a much sought-after piece of code.

Indeed, on the private tracker What.cd, users had offered a huge bounty (a reward for finding and sharing something) of 1.6 terabytes.

During the last day or so, a user – who had only been a member for a matter of weeks – uploaded COFEE.

However, What.cd then took the unusual step of removing the torrent. Not just an unusual step but, in my opinion, a very sensible step indeed.

“Suddenly, we were forced to take a real look at the program, its source, and the potential impact on the site and security of our users and staff,” said What.cd management in a statement.

“And when we did, we didn’t like what came of it. So, a decision was made. The torrent was removed (and it is not to be uploaded here again),” they added.

According to the site’s staff, neither them or their host was threatened by Microsoft or law enforcement. The decision was taken purely on the issue of site and member security.

Of course, the tool is now widely available from other sources and while some are saying that the tool is useless to regular Internet users, there are others who disagree. It certainly won’t take long for a detailed analysis to appear.

There will doubtless be lots of finger-wagging and complaints that this tool has become available in this way, but as with unexpected leaks of anything from software, to movies, to music, rarely is the finger pointed at the initial supplier of the material. That is usually way too embarrassing to reveal.

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

Svenne-Redcross is a movie release group who have been active for nearly ten years, a long time to remain undetected and uninfiltrated. Their first serious release was a DVDRip (converted to SVCD) of ‘Richard Gere’s Dr T and the Women’ in December 2000. Its last appears to be Swedish movie ‘Johan Falk – GSI ‘ released just over two weeks ago.

But, as they say, all good things come to an end.

Scene release groups use NFOs, which are small text files commonly used to provide information about pirate releases. The NFO’s can also be used as a so-called ‘Scene Notice’, a type of message which can be passed around Scene groups to inform them of important information – even if half the time they are simply used to flame other groups or individuals.

This weekend Svenne released an NFO/Scene notice themselves, but the content was highly unusual, even if it started off with bad, if unremarkable news;

“After ten years on the Scene we’re stepping down and leaving it forever,” the group wrote. “We have been exposed by the Swedish Antipiracy Bureau whom have identified all of our members and sites.”

The Swedish Antipiracy Bureau – Antipiratbyrån (APB) – is home to the infamous Henrik Pontén who has taken many actions against pirates, including a raid earlier this year against a large Swedish topsite.

At the time Pontén said that APB had managed to identify the people running the server and noted that it was now up to the police to investigate. But strangely, even though APB appear to know a lot about Svenne, it seems that the police won’t be getting involved.

“The good thing is that we have had the possibility to make a settlement. Our activity is immediately ceased,” Svenne announced.

Why APB have offered Svenne a deal is unclear, and there is currently little public knowledge of its nature or the terms imposed. However, what is clear is that APB required Svenne to do some public grovelling – it’s hard to imagine that they would make this kind of statement voluntarily, especially since just 2 weeks ago they said how proud they were of their achievements;

“We apologies to all Swedish and foreign movie producers for the damage we have caused,” wrote the group. But they didn’t stop there – APB also required some valuable FUD to be spread, to scare others in The Scene;

“Those of you who are still involved in the Scene – close down. None of you are safe out there,” warns Svenne in their apparent neck-saving statement.

Of course, while this announcement seems designed to spread fear, the threat may not be entirely hollow. Svenne has connections to lots of other groups, so the strong possibility remains that some of those could be compromised too.

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

In 2002 he launched TuckerMax.com, a site where millions read about his real-life drunken and sexual antics, including one article about his earlier relationship with Katy Johnson, Miss Vermont 1999, which led to a lawsuit which fortunately for him, was later withdrawn.

Of course, Tucker Max had plenty more outrageous alcohol-fueled exploits to blog about, in fact so much so that in 2006 he released his book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell which became a NY Times Bestseller in the same year.

Tomorrow, Max will bring his unique blend of entertainment to the big screen with the movie release of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. It will be a ‘limited’ release, which means that initially the movie will be available on a small number of screens then increasing as (hopefully) the movie grows in popularity.

However, at the moment the movie will only be available in the US, and initially only in Chicago. A Canadian release will take place in two weeks, which Max described as “stupid” while stressing that he has zero control over foreign distribution, “In ANY country.”

So what if you’d like to see the movie and it’s not available in your country?

Pirate it on the Internet.

“If you live outside the US and are desperate to see the movie and can’t find the release date in your country, then just pirate the movie and watch it online. I am serious. I have no issue with that,” says Max on the movie’s website. He also says the way to market a great movie is through word of mouth.

“Put it in front of people, let them see it, and have them tell their friends how much they liked it. That’s why we did the premiere tour. There is no better way to market quality, and by starting with a smaller release, it allows word of mouth to build and develop. This strategy has worked great with movies like ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and ‘Juno’,” says Max.

Of course, there’s no reason why the same can’t be true with BitTorrent. But there are plenty of other movies around, why watch this one?

“Go see this movie,” says Max. “At the very least, you will laugh a lot and you will definitely see the most epic shit scene in movie history.”

I’m there.

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

However, the Pirate Bay ’spirit’ doesn’t end at the borders of the Internet. To prove this, the people behind the Kiosk of Piracy installed a copy of the site on a local WiFi network that is open to the public but not actually connected to the Internet.

“The Kiosk is not connected to the Internet in any way, but the interested public is invited to use the service in a WiFi-radius around it,” the people behind the project write on their weblog.

Even in a worst case scenario where anti-piracy outfits manage to shut down the Internet because it assists in copyright infringement, people will still be able to trade files. As the Kiosk of Piracy people explain:

“With our newest project, we are joining the work of the dear people and groups which managed to duplicate the contents of The Pirate Bay on other places in the Net. We want to show in a very physical way that the Internet is neither a machine nor controllable in any way – it is just a system of agreements which work in any circumstances. We don’t need the Internet – the magic can happen anywhere.”

The downside is that this old fashioned file-sharing network will cause some logistical problems, unless you live in Weimar, Germany. But then again, everyone can setup a similar system in his or her backyard by using some old hardware.

For those interested in visiting the Kiosk of Piracy, a map of the exact location is available below. Detailed download instructions are available on the spot.

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.

The next phase was to write to the individuals and threaten them with legal action, unless they paid several hundred pounds. Some panicked and paid up, most did not. Only a handful of these cases actually went to court and DL won them all, because the individuals didn’t defend themselves.

After masses of bad publicity peaking in a controversy over gay porn, Davenport Lyons appeared to have had enough, and withdrew from this business model to limit the damage to their brand and reputation.

In May, new kid on the block ACS:Law appeared and promptly took over where DL left off, and again, hundreds – maybe thousands – of threatening letters went out, demanding cash payment from alleged file-sharers. But this time things wouldn’t be quite so easy for the lawyers and their clients.

The scheme wasn’t new anymore and various support structures for letter recipients flourished, including forums and dedicated sites such as the excellent BeingThreatened.com. Due to the increased knowledge and awareness brought about through news articles such as those read here on TorrentFreak and on the aforementioned platforms, pay-up rates from those accused fell to as little as 15%, as it became clear that the chances of actually being taken to court were minimal.

But now, after months of being told to “put up or shut up”, it seems that ACS:Law are, if they are to be believed, about to flex their legal muscles and actually litigate against certain individuals. They need their symbolic “head on a pike” to ensure the overall pay up rates make the scheme worthwhile.

“The first batch [of] claims have been prepared and were filed at court on Friday, 4 September 2009. Service of the proceedings will be made by first class post and will be with defendants by Tuesday, 8 September 2009 at the very latest,” the company said in a statement, adding, “The second batch of defendants will be selected on Monday, 14 September 2009.”

While many recipients may have ignored previous correspondence from ACS:Law or DL, individuals receiving documents in the post today or tomorrow (presuming the threats actually come to something) are strongly advised not to ignore them, especially if they are court documents.

Failure to respond to court documents could result in a default judgment being issued in the future and this could prove very costly indeed – possibly mounting to several thousand pounds.

So what should recipients of court documents do? Firstly it would be prudent to seek legal advice – Lawdit Solicitors can offer advice and guidance since they have been assisting people against these claims for some time now, but any lawyer with a sound knowledge of copyright issues will prove invaluable.

For those individuals who maintain they are innocent, a vigorous defense can be mounted against any allegations. In the majority of cases, all ACS:Law will have as evidence is an IP address harvested by an untested system in a foreign country, and that may not be enough to prove their case.

Indeed, the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) recently told Which?, “We’re not convinced of the efficacy of the software and not confident in its ability to identify users.”

However, ACS:Law will select potential defendants very carefully and will likely focus on individuals with the weakest cases, have compromised or damaged their defense in some way, or have chosen not to respond to previous letters.

If you receive court documents in connection with an ACS:Law case during the next few days, do not panic. Please feel free to get in touch with us here at TorrentFreak in complete confidence. Your privacy will not be breached and we will point you in the right direction.

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

After being held in custody for a day, the 33 year old from Västerås was later released on charges of copyright infringement. During his interrogation he said that he had no knowledge of the movies, instead believing the server to contain only games.

The police who carried out the raid were acting on a tip from Sweden’s Anti-Piracy Bureau (Antipiratbyrån) who said they believe the man could be part of a larger network, probably within the notorious ‘warez scene’, although at this stage no other arrests have been made. Antipiratbyrån also says the server has links to another investigation carried out in Norway.

Antipiratbyrån lawyer Henrik Pontén is now claiming that the server contained around 10,000 movies totaling some 88 terabytes – a huge amount to be contained on a single server.

“We regard the man as one of the leaders in the warez scene,” said Pontén, adding, “A number of respected release groups were able to connect to the server.”

Pontén is celebrating the seizure as the biggest ever in Sweden and “probably one of the largest in Europe.”

Antipiratbyrån feels that the haul will seriously disrupt material becoming available on The Pirate Bay. Similar claims have been made in the past but have proven hollow.

The copies of the movies on this server will all have been copied from other places, and they too will be copied and distributed via other means. They will appear via The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites in the unlikely event they haven’t already – and that’s guaranteed.

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.

“This is our preemptive strike with a narrowly defined petition for Declaratory Relief that we do not infringe, in anticipation they are going to file their own lawsuit that we do infringe (their copyright),” Fung told TorrentFreak at the time.

In March 2009, isoHunt and the CRIA appeared in court. IsoHunt asked the court to decide whether BitTorrent search engines could be held liable for .torrent files that might point to copyrighted data, but the CRIA demanded a full trial against the BitTorrent site.

In the end the judge felt that the issues were too complex and consequences too far reaching not to move to a full trial.

IsoHunt appealed that decision but yesterday were turned down by the appeal court.

“The issues involved in this case are fundamental to the rights of creators to earn a living from their work,” said CRIA president Graham Henderson. “A matter of this importance should be considered by a court with access to all the facts and not, as isoHunt had argued, to only one party’s version of the facts. A lower court agreed with us and now so has the court of appeal,” he added.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, isoHunt’s Gary Fung said that the decision was not that sad and was expected.

“We didn’t lose (the case),” he told us, “only a motion on a form of litigation and we’ll have news soon enough on how we are to proceed suing CRIA in self defense”

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

Founded in 2003, isoHunt is one of the oldest BitTorrent sites that remains around today. The site has millions of pageviews a day and searches through more than 2 million torrent files, which totals an impressive 1729 terabytes of data.

Gary Fung, the founder of the site, is in charge of daily operations from his hometown Vancouver in Canada. Below is a picture of Gary sitting behind his 2008 Mac Pro hooked up to a Dell 30″ LCD monitor (3008WFP).

What’s really keeping the site up and running is not his Mac though, rather the 14 servers located in Ontario, Canada. Below is a picture of the server rack currently in use. Gary told us that he is working on adding another cluster in Europe soon.

isoHunt is currently using four dual quadcore Opteron 2352’s for the web servers. The site’s database runs on three additional servers, two Opteron and one Intel Nehalem based. Four old dual core AMD nodes are used for various background processing, one Intel, dualcore Xeon is used by the search backend and two more for load balancing.

Below you’ll find another picture isoHunt’s server rack, all wired up. We thank Gary for sharing this with us, and we will continue our behind the scenes series this weekend with a brand new workspace of another torrent site admin.

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

“So this is my mission control, believe it or not I bought most of this stuff with baccarat winnings,” he told TorrentFreak, while sharing two pictures of his home base with us. Below he walks us through his current setup.

Desktop 1: My fastest desktop is a Dell XPS 630 with Intel® Core™2 E8400, 2GB RAM, 500GB SATA + 1TB external., and Dual nVidia GeForce 9800GT video card. This machine is hooked up to the very nice 25.5″ Samsung Syncmaster 2693HM monitor.

Desktop 2: The computer next to the XPS is a home built Athlon 64 3GHz, 1GB RAM, 250GB SATA, and it’s hooked up to 17″ Samsung SyncMaster 173P.

Laptop: The laptop is the Samsung X460: Intel Core2 Duo P7350, 3GB RAM, 14″ WXGA screen, and weighs only 1.29kg.

Server: The server I’m setting up to send to a data center is the IBM 326m with Opteron 280, 4GB RAM, 73GB 15K SCSI.

Misc: I have a little apple in my diet, I use my jail broken iphone for monitoring servers & tethering on the go. For all my paper work I use the Canon MP620. The speakers & sub are the Altec Lansing VS4221.

To top it off the BTjunkie founder told us that his Internet connection was just upgraded to a 30Mbit connection. Below are the pictures of his current setup and links to the larger sized images. In a few days we continue this series with the workstation of isoHunt’s Gary Fung.

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

So how would Mashboxx work? According to Rosso the application would work like many other P2P clients of the day. Users would be able to search for, upload and download tracks but also buy WMA-encoded and fingerprinted music tracks for around $1 each, all while employing Shawn Fanning’s SnoCap technology. Those tracks, it was claimed, could then be legally distributed to other users on the network, utilizing the buyer’s upload bandwidth.

But it wasn’t to be. Three years later the Mashboxx site is in the same condition as it was in 2006 when the last press release went up announcing that EMI had “agreed to make its entire catalog of digital recordings available to Mashboxx, a legal peer-to-peer (P2P) service currently in development.” Another casualty of P2P that never even got off the ground, Mashboxx was rumored to have died due to lack of investment.

But now in 2009, Wayne Rosso is back in what appears to be somewhat similar circumstances. Like almost everyone, when the news broke that GGF would buy The Pirate Bay and turn it into a legitimate service, Rosso says he was pessimistic. “Those poor bastards have no idea what they’re in for,” he recalls.

But then, two days after the announcement, Rosso’s phone rang. On the other end was none other than GGF CEO Hans Pandeya. At first Rosso says he couldn’t grasp what Hans is trying to accomplish but now he does and describes the plans as “pretty ingenious”. It’s fairly well-known by now that Pandeya plans to harness New Pirate Bay users’ bandwidth and computing resources in order to subsidize their media consumption costs.

“Long story short, I am now working with Hans to facilitate the model and helping to make the Pirate Bay site legit,” says Rosso. “So Jaws is back. And I’m sure a lot of people won’t be so thrilled about that!”

So now, in a replay of events in 2004/2006, Rosso is meeting with content providers and “big players” in the international music scene in order to make New TPB’s future a little more certain. And here’s the thing – according to Rosso every one of them has been supportive. He even goes as far as to say they are “excited” at the proposition.

“They see that it could really work. I left a label meeting Tuesday unlike any I have ever had. They were fantastic!” says Rosso.

An enthusiastic Rosso says he is working with people he describes as “real partners” who will not tie up him and GGF “in Gordian knots that would drive all the users away.”

It remains to be seen if the current users will subscribe to even testing the New Pirate Bay, but Rosso is characteristically enthusiastic and optimistic, to levels not seen since, well, 2004.

Praising the attitude of his music industry partners, Rosso concludes: “It was truly incredible and exciting and when the time is right I will go out of my way to give these guys the credit that they deserve, because, together, we’re going where no mortals have ever traveled.”

Time will tell if the result is sci-fi, or just sigh.

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.

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.