In short, Doctorow argues that the copyright industry’s fight isn’t against copying, but against general-purpose computers. As more and more devices we buy are general-purpose hardware devices with custom software designed to make that hardware do certain things out of the box, that custom software that drives the device is also custom-izable software that lets the hardware be recoded and repurposed to do completely different things.

Shortly, we’ll see basically every industry trying to crack down on the freedom to tinker, to keep the products they sold us in the same state as they were before we owned them. This is exactly where we’re headed if the current trends continue.

The problem is that many people don’t understand what a general-purpose computer is. Legislators still think in terms of hardware: A cassette player can only play a cassette. Therefore, a music player today must only play music.

That’s wrong of course. A music player today can be recoded to play, stream, receive, remix, or do other things with music. Or, for that matter, it could probably be recoded to become a networked earthquake early-warning sensor instead, if its microphone was sensitive enough to sense the low-frequency sounds that forebode earthquakes.

This idea — that an off-the-shelf entertainment device can be repurposed to become an earthquake early-warning sensor with just the copying of a file — is mind-boggling to today’s legislators. It is just so far out it doesn’t reflect sunlight any more. And it is with this mindset that they legislate that breaking any DRM — repurposing devices that you own — should be punishable with jail time.

This is the reason that I keep reminding the world why we need to ban DRM altogether. It is corporations writing their own laws restricting your property.

But it goes beyond that. Let’s return to the concept of the general-purpose computer. In the mindset of today’s oldish legislators, if you want to kill the possibility of broadcasting music from a music player, you remove some piece from that device. Just like you would remove a “stream” button from a keyboard.

But as we know, it doesn’t work like that. If you want to prevent a general-purpose computer from running a certain type of code, you have to add something to it. You have to add code that prevents it from running this type of code, which it has been designed to do, after all.

And this is where it gets interesting. Since you own the general-purpose computer, you can run any code on it — including code that removes the code preventing you from running some types of code. These instructions that kill the DRM restrictions, seen from the device’s point of view, is just any kind of code that the device will execute happily.

And so protection for the removal of the DRM code is built in next, like Sony did with its criminal rootkit in 2005 (which is why Sony is on my permanent blacklist). So then that code is removed first by the person owning the device, followed by the DRM code.

The general-purpose computer is, by its very definition, a device where DRM will never work.

The major problem is that legislators don’t understand this. They don’t understand that you need to add something to the device to make it less functional, and that this something can easily be removed by an end-user to restore full functionality again. So we get an endless nightmare where legislators mandate more code, more laws, more code, and yet more laws to try to add restricting code to our general-purpose devices, code that we can easily remove.

We need to shift the viewpoint and narrative on this story — we need to make legislators understand the concept of a general-purpose computer, and that by definition, you can’t restrict it from running code. We need a Freedom to Code at the citizen level, at the same constitutional level as Freedom of Speech, even if it goes against corporate interests. No, scratch that: especially when it goes against corporate interests.

Of course, one might argue that a general freedom to code would also be a freedom to code those pesky DRM restrictions. That is true on a philosophical level. The fight here, however, is to get an understanding of the general-purpose computer on a conceptual level into legislatures.

Source: Doctorow’s Omen Shows Why We Need To Ban DRM

By early September 2011, ISP account holders on their first strike from Hadopi had swelled to 650,000, while those on their second numbered 44,000.

If Hadopi carry on at the current rate, by this time next year around one in 20 households in France will have received at least one warning, and it could be argued that most people will be aware of someone near to them having received one.

This kind of mass-awareness is a potential goldmine for scammers, and it hasn’t taken them long to swing into action.

Internet users have just started receiving emails which claim to be from Hadopi. The emails clearly state that the account holder in question is guilty of copyright infringement.

“Your internet access has been used to make available, reproduce or provide access to cultural works protected by copyright,” says the email.

“This use may have been made without your permission or without your knowledge, perhaps even by an untrained user. But in any case, as the holder of the subscription to the Internet, you are legally responsible for the use made of it,” it continues.

“You must ensure that your Internet access is not subject to misuse, taking every precaution to secure it. This is a legal requirement, sanctioned by the courts.”

The email then invites the user to follow a link where they are presented with the Hadopi website. Except it’s not, it’s a clever fake.

As noted by Marc Rees on PCInpact, genuine warnings contain “no clickable link, no proposal to purchase software, no request to pay a sum of money and no proposal to connect to a personalized space on the website.”

The fake page is sitting on the server of what appears to be a legitimate online store. They have almost certainly been hacked and are unaware of the problem.

The Hadopi imposter pulls in real pages from the official Hadopi resource when required so that users are drawn in by the apparent authenticity. The sting in the tail, however, comes from a custom page from where the scam takes place.

“To access your file please have the file number, access code and the confirmation code ready,” the page explains.

“To get the access code by SMS: Send CODE to 81083. For the confirmation code by SMS: send CODE to 81015. To get the access code by phone: call the following number: 0899 230 141. Confirmation code by phone: call the following number: 0899 230 148.”

Of course, these are premium numbers that could leave a nice dent in a caller’s cellphone account although we’re not about to call them to find out exactly how much. TorrentFreak discovered that these SMS numbers have previously been used for another scam where people are offered access to warez.

In another sign that the fake Hadopi page is indeed fake, the only link disabled is the one to the real Hadopi site which shows users how to detect if an email they received is a scam.

Update: The fake site has been taken down and the number has been blocked by the authorities, but will no doubt reappear on another compromised server with a new number in due course.

Source: Scammers Try To Trick Cash From Surprised ‘File-Sharers’

The phrase above has been written a few dozen times here on TorrentFreak, and it’s now supported by an academic report.

Researchers from Rice and Duke University looked into the effect of digital restrictions on music piracy. In their paper “Music Downloads and the Flip Side of Digital Rights Management Protection” they conclude that DRM doesn’t prevent piracy at all. Quite the opposite.

“Only the legal users pay the price and suffer from the restrictions. Illegal users are not affected because the pirated product does not have DRM restrictions,” the researchers write in their report.

Ditching DRM and other restrictions would actually reduce piracy according to the analytical model developed by the researchers.

“In many cases, DRM restrictions prevent legal users from doing something as normal as making backup copies of their music. Because of these inconveniences, some consumers choose to pirate,” DinahVernik, assistant professor of marketing at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business says.

So without DRM, more people would be buying music. And aside from this direct effect, the researchers predict that DRM-free music will increase competition between retailers, which then results in lower prices.

“Removal of these restrictions makes the product more convenient to use and intensifies competition with the traditional format (CDs), which has no DRM restrictions,” says Vernik. “This increased competition results in decreased prices for both downloadable and CD music and makes it more likely that consumers will move from stealing music to buying legal downloads.”

Since the paper has yet to be published we can’t review all aspects of the analytical model. But unlike the researchers suggest, their findings are hardly surprising as the effect they describe has already unfolded in real life..

Even the most dedicated copyright protectionists concluded a long time ago that music DRM is a thing of the past. Most notably, IFPI said two years ago that stripping DRM would “significantly boost download sales.”

And indeed, those who look around will find that there’s hardly any music being sold with classic DRM in place. Even the RIAA admitted that DRM is an endangered species, probably because what the researchers report today is rather accurate.

The late Steve Jobs already knew this a long time ago. “DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy,” he said back in 2007.

Source: Eureka! Ditching DRM Decreases Piracy

However, one of his latest ideas for his jailbreak of Apple’s upcoming iOS 5 is causing excitement of a quite different kind.

The notion of blocking Installous, the software used by millions to install cracked apps on iPhone and iPad, is naturally a controversial one. It’s perhaps needless to say that Apple would quietly welcome such a development. Equally, those using Installous probably wouldn’t be so keen.

Hackulous, the people behind Installous, think it’s an outright bad idea.

“The entire premise behind jailbreaking is that you’re able to do whatever you want with your device. It’s your device, you own it and you should be able to manipulate the software in any way that you like,” Hackulous admin Dissident told TorrentFreak.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean everything you do with it is legal, but that the manufacturer of the software and the hardware has no place in telling you how you use the device.”

Dissident says that when jailbreaks removed Apple’s restrictions, a large and thriving community of developers came along, making plugins, themes and other “cool stuff.”

“If a jailbreak author decides to add [his own] DRM to it, they are being extremely hypocritical,” he concludes.

Dissident told us this week that he believes i0n1c is a really talented guy but the idea that he should introduce new anti-Installous DRM is a significant one since at last count an estimated 11 million iDevice owners are using it. If they are suddenly unable to use Installous resources, they won’t be happy bunnies.

But just as Apple’s DRM gets broken despite their huge coding firepower, Dissident says that any efforts by i0n1c would be neutralized in the same fashion. Not only are several high-profile members of the jailbreaking scene said to be opposed to the suggestion of any new DRM, but Dissident warns that a small army of reverse engineers would appear, all dedicated to breaking any restrictions put in place at the jailbreak level.

While this would remove any obstacles put in place by ic01c, Dissident says this type of situation would be most undesirable.

“Something interesting about this upcoming exploit [from i0n1c on iOS5] is that it’s based on a PDF vulnerability. We’ve seen two of these jailbreaks in the past, on a website called jailbreakme.com. You just go to it on your iDevice and the device is jailbroken using the PDF vulnerability”

Dissident explains that in layman’s terms this means that undesirables can put such an exploit on their website and get root access to a user’s Apple device, opening up the potential for malware attacks.

But the bottom line is that any additional security will be broken eventually and ultimately a jailbreak without restrictions will prove much more popular than one with DRM. Market forces would sideline a crippled jailbreak, Dissident believes.

So what does i0n1c (real name Stefan Esser) have to say on the matter? We put a list of questions to him in the hope of countering some of Dissident’s points and vice-versa, but the response we received was quite unexpected.

Esser began by pointing us towards some of the abuse he’s been getting from some people in the jailbreaking community. These “nasty idiots”, as Esser describes them, certainly overstep the mark; disagreeing with someone’s stance can be achieved perfectly well without a flame war, but some don’t care much for sugar-coating. (It’s worth pointing out that Dissident does not engage in such behavior and was unfailingly polite throughout our discussions about Esser’s work.)

Esser went on to tell us that most of the people who have abused him (the “nasty idiots”) are into jailbreaking for one reason only – they want to pirate applications. In order to deal with their abuse it seems that Esser has developed an interesting payback tool – trolling.

“When I am bored I think up tweets that will maximally annoy these people,” he told us.

So does that mean that having taken the word of Esser at face value, people like Dissident are worried over nothing? Not necessarily.

Esser told us that he is busy with “more important stuff” at the moment and that he is not planning to release any jailbreaks for a while. However, in keeping with his plan to annoy his detractors, there still might be a trick up his sleeve.

“In that line of thought, releasing a jailbreak that is only useful for people not into
piracy would be a way to maximally annoy the bad people inside the jailbreaking community,” Esser told us with a palpable air of mischievousness. Or maybe seriousness, it’s hard to tell.

But perhaps with a nod to Dissident’s earlier predictions, Esser eventually straightened his trollface and appeared to acknowledge the frailty of DRM and even the amusement to be had from it.

The ability to annoy in this way, he concedes, “..would only last for a while.”

Source: Hacker Mulls Banning Pirate Apps With iOS 5 Apple Jailbreak

He was referring to the DRM present in certain versions of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, the hot new title from CD Projekt. His calculations revealed the following:

* With SecuROM: 41 sec game launch, 16 sec savegame, 16-43 fps
* Without SecuROM: 9 sec game launch, 8 sec savegame, 24-73 fps

Although the performance hit is dramatic, only retail versions of the game are affected since Steam versions and those from GOG.com are supplied DRM-free.

“I bought the game from Amazon,” said our concerned reader. “I am an idiot, apparently.”

However, after listening to complaints like these around the web, today CD Projekt will release a patch which will remove DRM from all versions of the game.

“Our goal is to make our fans and customers happy and to reward them for buying our game and DRM schemes does not support our philosophy as they might create obstacles for users of legally bought copies,” reports CD Projekt’s Adam Badowski, refreshingly.

“Our approach to countering piracy is to incorporate superior value in the legal version. This means it has to be superior in every respect: less troublesome to use and install, with full support, and with access to additional content and services. So, we felt keeping the DRM would mainly hurt our legitimate users.”

Interestingly, TorrentFreak had already been in contact with CD Projekt who told us their main concern was avoiding a pre-release situation, something they achieved.

“Nowadays most PC games are available for download with a working crack at least couple of days before official release,” Agnieszka Szostak of CD Projekt told us. “We’re happy we were able to avoid it with our game.”

While CD Projekt’s approach to DRM in this instance is to be commended, and piracy can indeed be deterred by making it more worthwhile to get the official copy, this announcement should perhaps not be read in isolation.

As reported last year, CD Projekt already warned that DRM aside, they might take another and even more controversial approach to dealing with piracy.

“Of course we’re not happy when people are pirating our games, so we are signing with legal firms and torrent sneaking companies,” CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski explained at the time.

“In quite a few big countries, when people are downloading [The Witcher 2] illegally they can expect a letter from a legal firm saying, ‘Hey, you downloaded it illegally and right now you have to pay a fine’,” Iwinski added.

A couple of weeks ago TorrentFreak heard rumors that a pre-released but uncracked version of a Witcher 2 torrent on The Pirate Bay had been put there as “a trap”. Our investigations didn’t show any evidence to back up that claim. So, along with a link to the company’s earlier statements about getting law firms involved, we contacted CD Projekt and asked them outright – is this torrent a trap and do you still intend to go ahead with tracking illegal file-sharers?

We received no answer on the first question, but we did on the second.

“Yes we will track illegal file-sharing hoping people will find the game good enough to actually change their mind and be willing to pay for it,” Agnieszka Szostak told us.

If CD Projekt do indeed go ahead with their threats, this will be the second time that a Witcher title has been involved in these so-called “pay-up-or-else” schemes. In 2008, large numbers of Internet users started receiving letters from notorious file-sharing lawyers Davenport Lyons in the UK demanding cash settlements. Among those letters were demands for payment on an Atari game with a familiar title – The Witcher.

We asked CD Projekt if that scheme had been successful. We received no response.

Source: Witcher 2 DRM Dumped, But CD Projekt Is Watching Torrents

Nintendo says that “any existing or future unauthorized technical modification of the hardware or software of your Nintendo 3DS System, or the use of an unauthorized device in connection with your system, will render the system permanently unplayable.”

The folks over at Defective By Design (DBD) are very disappointed by the stance taken by Nintendo and are running a campaign to get the company to reverse its decision.

For every donation they receive, DBD are sending large ‘bricks’ to Reggie Fils-Aime, President and COO of Nintendo of America, which are meant to represent the usefulness of modified 3DS consoles after Nintendo makes good on their threat.

For those who don’t want to send bricks, there is another and arguably more effective protest that costs much less money – don’t buy a 3DS.

Source: Nintendo Boss Sent Bricks In DRM Protest

SABAM hoped that through aggressive legal action, funded by its paymasters in the international music industry, that it could force Scarlet to install filtering devices in its network to monitor customer communications and stop them if they attempt to send or receive copyrighted music.

In 2007 they succeeded, with the Brussels Court ruling that Scarlet should install the industry-approved Audible Magic music fingerprinting system. The ISP objected, saying that by spying on its customers it would be acting illegally. Adding insult to injury, Audible Magic did not perform meaning that Scarlet could not comply with the court order to stop all infringement with the tools it had been given.

The court reversed its decision and the case went to the Brussels Court of Appeal which immediately handed it over to the European Court Of Justice. The outcome would be crucial, since it would indicate whether ISPs could be held responsible for subscriber behavior and be forced to block or introduce filters.

In the last 24 hours, an advocate general of the European Court of Justice has handed down his advice in the case.

Advocate General Cruz Villalón said that “the installation of that filtering and blocking system is a restriction on the right to respect for the privacy of communications and the right to protection of personal data, both of which are rights protected under the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

“By the same token, the deployment of such a system would restrict freedom of information, which is also protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights.”

Villalón said that the rights within the Charter can be restricted, “on condition, inter alia, that any such restriction is ‘in accordance with the law’” and if it were “adopted on a national legal basis which was accessible, clear and predictable.”

Villalón also expressed concern that decisions made by the filter would be made without judicial oversight.

The court order would apply “…in abstracto and as a preventive measure, which means that a finding would not first have been made that there had been an actual infringement of an intellectual property right or even that an imminent infringement was likely.”

Furthermore, Villalón said that a pro-filtering ruling would not only affect Scarlet users in Belgium but those contracted to other ISPs in different countries, since Scarlet customers may very well be communicating with them on the Internet

Taking the above into consideration, Advocate General Cruz Villalón ruled that the installation of this kind of blocking and filtering systems would amount to a restriction on the right to privacy and the right to protection of personal data, both of which are rights protected under the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

“By the same token,” adds Villalón, “the deployment of such a system would restrict freedom of information, which is also protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights.”

The European Court of Justice are not obliged to act on the advice given by Advocate General Villalón but his opinion will add significant weighting to the decision process.

Court of Justice Release (.pdf)

Source: ISP Cannot Be Forced To Block Copyright Infringing Files

On the back of the recent announcement that 360 cracking could get a whole lot more difficult due to new disc security measures, some news at the weekend shows that Microsoft is going after the very heart of modding – DVD drive flashing.

According to a discussion thread on the Xbox-Scene forums, two new versions of the Xbox 360 dashboard are actually capable of re-flashing previously hacked drives, erasing the resident custom firmware and replacing it with an official, piracy-disabled alternative.

Very clever stuff.

Read More

Source: Microsoft v Hackers Xbox 360 Battle Steps Up a Gear

In recent times, however, it has become increasingly clear that these strategies aren’t working. Suing Internet users proved both ineffective and counter-productive and sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and Newzbin simply refuse to give in, despite the studios throwing millions of dollars away trying to destroy them.

So, if sites are to remain online and users refuse to stop accessing them, it’s time for a new plan – get in the middle of sites and their users and physically stop them from communicating with each other.

In the UK, while the faltering Digital Economy Act stumbles around in its own mess, discussions behind the scenes are focused on the entertainment companies and ISPs formulating a voluntary code to have domain names conveniently blocked.

UK communications watchdog Ofcom is currently considering whether or not website blocking is actually feasible, but other countries who already have experience of such measures have decided that it probably isn’t. One of those is Denmark, a country already subjected to court-ordered ISP DNS blocks of both The Pirate Bay and Russian MP3 vendor, AllofMP3.com, various foreign gambling sites and illicit pharmaceutical vendors.

This week, an MPs consultation on blocking sites has been underway in Denmark. There was a broad consensus that DNS blocking is easily circumvented and is therefore not a viable solution to the problem. So where is there left to go?

During the consultation, Niels Elgaard Larsen, Chairman of the IT-Political Association, suggested an alternative – enhanced browser malware filtering.

“We know of course that when Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome visits a page with a virus, we get a warning that there is virus on the site. This is not filtered by the network, but by browser vendors who maintain lists of viral sites, which then sit in the browser,” Larsen subsequently told Computerworld.

“One must of course be critical of suppliers’ blacklists, but it is much smarter that users have a list of banned sites in their browsers because the approach both warns users and respects their privacy,” he added.

Who has the authority to place domains on such a list is a whole new can of problematic worms, but the idea has received cross-party support with Liberal IT spokesman Michael Aastrup-Jensen suggesting that the issue should be raised at the EU level. To have the required effect, he added, agreement and support must be sought from, among others, the United States.

Of course, the United States has its own take on the issue. Rather than blocking domain names it has simply been seizing them, but even that hasn’t had the required effect.

It’s not inconceivable, however, if one looks far enough down the road and amalgamates the UK, Danish and US approaches (voluntary blocking, court-ordered DNS blocks, enhanced ‘malware’ type web browser blocks and domain seizures) it could become quite difficult to access many piracy-related domains.

But this statement is only true for the layman and no matter what route is taken, ways around these blocks will be found by the tech-savvy. Indeed, it’s an absolute certainty that new products and services will appear immediately to circumvent all of these measures.

So as they look to their ideal future of an Internet filtered in their favor, the entertainment industries will find their magic numbers when taking the numbers of subscribers who can’t understand or be bothered learning how to get around blocks, and adding up how many of those will head off to authorized media sources instead. Will it be worth all the effort?

Source: Proposal Suggests Browsers Should Block Users From BitTorrent Sites

Under the flag of “Operation In Our Sites” the authorities shut down a dozen file-sharing and streaming sites, as well as close to 80 sites selling counterfeit goods. After two months of silence on the domain seizure front, the MPAA has now applauded the US authorities for their “successful” enforcement efforts.

“Operation In Our Sites has not only put illegal sites out of business, but has raised public awareness about this specific form of crime on the Internet. Most importantly, these enforcement efforts have resulted in most of these entities ceasing their illegal activity,” wrote the MPAA two days ago in a letter to the US Government.

In more ways than one, the above statement from the movie studios is a gross twist of reality. For one, the public awareness that was raised mostly concerned the realization that the Government was willing to sacrifice a lot, including first amendment rights, to protect the interests of the entertainment industries. The seizures resulted in heavy critique from journalists, legal experts, senators and most prominently, the public.

It is of course hardly a surprise that the MPAA is misrepresenting the truth in their favor, but adding that the domain seizures “resulted in most of these entities ceasing their illegal activity” goes too far. Let’s take a look at what really happened to the allegedly infringing file-sharing and streaming sites that had their domains seized, starting in reverse chronological order.

It wasn’t hard for the affected sites to continue their operations. Since their servers had not been touched physically it was a simple matter to change a few settings to make the sites available to the public again under a new domain, something achieved in a few minutes. This is exactly what most of the streaming and file-sharing related sites have done.

During the latest round of seizures under the “Operation In Our Sites” flag in February, a total of 10 domain names were targeted, belonging to 6 different sports streaming services. Despite the thousands of dollars in tax payer money that were spend on the enforcement effort, all of the sites were back up in no time under new domains.

As of today, only one of the six is no longer accessible and that is the site of Bryan McCarthy, who was arrested by the feds last month. McCarthy initially continued his Channelsurfing.net website under a new domain at Channelsurf.eu. The day after his arrest this site was still up and running and it is believed that due to the circumstances he took it offline himself after he was bailed out.

So, although all the sites noticed an initial dip in traffic due to the seizures, the actions of the US Government did little to actually stop the streaming services from operating. This was no different to the situation November last year when 82 domain names were seized. Although most of the targets were sites selling counterfeit goods, 4 file-sharing related domains were also seized, including Torrent-Finder.com.

As mentioned previously, the operator of Torrent-Finder immediately announced he would fight the seizure in court and continued operating under the Torrent-Finder.info domain. Of the three other ‘piracy’ related sites that were seized, two – OnSmash and Rapgodfathers – came back on another domain, carrying on where they left off. Again, the seizures appear to have had little effect.

If we look back at the first round of “Operation In Our Sites” seizures in June last year, a similar pattern emerges. Of the 8 movie streaming services that were targeted at least 3 have continued, and it wouldn’t be a big surprise if the smaller sites that didn’t return immediately started over under a new name.

The above clearly illustrates that a domain seizure is not the ultimate anti-piracy tool the authorities and the MPAA claim it is. Most of the piracy related sites simply continued under new domains, undeterred. This raises the question whether the costs involved warrant the mediocre outcome.

Aside from the tens of thousands of dollars in tax money being spent on the enforcement actions, the unconstitutionality of the seizures are also a cost that has to be factored in. And with the seizures failing to achieve the desired outcome, one has to question whether it’s all worth it.

Source: US Government’s ‘Pirate’ Domain Seizures Failed Miserably

However, if website blocking should prove ineffective at reducing infringement these requests would become pointless even if authorized. So, to ascertain the effectiveness of blocking, Secretary of State for Culture Jeremy Hunt asked communications watchdog Ofcom to look into the matter and report back by spring.

But as the wheels and processes slowly turn, accompanied by calls from the Open Rights Group for citizens to challenge the proposals, those unencumbered by layers of bureaucracy are acting quickly.

As widely predicted, a way around website blocking has been found quicker than it has even been assessed, let alone implemented. First up, one the MPAA’s primary blocking targets – Usenet indexing site Newzbin2.

“Since web blocking seems to be the new DRM for the Dirty Half Dozen and our name has featured high as a prospective victim of a domain name grab or a block, we thought we’d address the problem by the use of the free speech tool Tor,” Mr White from Newzbin2 told TorrentFreak today.

“We have set up a hidden Tor service accessible at http://sc3njt2i2j4fvqa3.onion,” he added.

Without going into huge amounts of detail, what Newzbin2 have done is set up what is known as a ‘hidden service’ with the world-famous TOR anonymity network. This means that by using the above URL with a TOR-enabled browser, anyone can access Newzbin2, even if its domain name is blocked or seized.

For those that don’t want to install TOR there is also another solution. By exchanging the .onion pseudo-TLD with tor2web.org (e.g http://sc3njt2i2j4fvqa3.tor2web.org), .onion URLs can be accessed from a normal browser with no addons whatsoever.

“By running a hidden service we make the MPA’s attempt to knock our name off the web entirely futile,” says Mr White.

“Newzbin2: 1 Stupids: 0,” he concludes.

Source: Newzbin2 Uses TOR To Kill Domain Blocking Before It Even Happens

“You are worse than the MAFIAA’s scare tactics,” one annoyed reader wrote to me in response. “Why all the paranoia, nothing is this bad? You make people terrified.”

Three years on and not only are the points in the article even more relevant than they were in 2008, but in hindsight should have been taken on board by more than just admins.

Earlier this month the Swedish authorities and local anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyran revealed that a major uploader to the now-defunct Swebits tracker – one the oldest BitTorrent sites – had been arrested by the police. The 25-year-old now stands accused of uploading more than 1,000 movies and, if prosecutor Henrik Rassmusson is to be believed, catching him was a breeze.

“He had been using his personal Internet account, and he had a static IP address associated with an ISP, so it was not hard to get hold of him,” Rassmusson told Swedish Radio yesterday.

While trying to be sympathetic to this guy (who is undoubtedly in pretty serious trouble) isn’t conducting this kind of activity unencrypted or without some level of anonymity simply crazy these days? Isn’t using a VPN or proxy in a foreign land a standard requirement now? Isn’t presuming and preparing for the worst a required skill in 2011? Perhaps it should be.

In the 2008 article our friendly admin said he would never pick up his emails without hiding his IP address and again, some people said that was going too far. The recently arrested admin of ChannelSurfing.net might disagree. Google coughed up his records to the feds last month in the blink of an eye.

Going even further, the admin said he took precautions to hide his IP address not just on his own site, but when on those operated by others too. Some people laughed – the admin was clearly a paranoid fool, they argued.

But roll on to 2011 and many completely innocent fans of PS3 hacker Geohotz are about to have their IP addresses handed over to Sony by Google, YouTube and Twitter. Suddenly it’s not so amusing anymore.

When Internet users aren’t even free to watch videos on YouTube and read comments on Twitter without being exposed to the prying eyes of big corporations like Sony and their aggressive lawsuits, isn’t it time to consider some level of anonymity as a prerequisite to even going online?

No? We’ll report back in another 3 years. You will have changed your mind – guaranteed.

Source: Major BitTorrent Uploader Used No Anonymity – Bring Out The Straightjacket?

In a show of openness, big companies such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Digg began sending DMCA takedown notices they received to Chilling Effects. In 2010 the clearing house received more than 12,000 such cease-and-desist notices which in turn contained thousands of links to content to be removed. At times this archive makes fascinating reading, as highlighted today by occasional TorrentFreak contributor SearchFreak.

The URL http://chillingeffects.org/dmca512c/notice.cgi?NoticeID=31773 shows a DMCA notice sent by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation to Google which contains a list of URLs which allegedly link to the movie Avatar. Fox demanded that Google should take them all down from its index, which it appears to have done.

However, if one enters this URL into a Google search, the only results listed are where other pages refer to this URL. The actual page with this URL is nowhere to be found. Indeed, as can be seen from the screenshot below, Google has removed the result due to a DMCA takedown complaint.

Fortunately we can see what this complaint was about and who sent it by, ironically, going to ChillingEffects. The DMCA complaint in question was sent by Fox to Google and contains dozens of links its anti-piracy division has culled from the web, allegedly linking to their movie Avatar.

However, deep into the complaint Fox has demanded that Google take down links to two pages on Chilling Effects (1) (2). Their crime? Containing links to the Avatar movie.

So, let’s have a little recap since this is becoming like an episode from Soap.

Chilling Effects is setup to stop the ‘chilling effects’ of Internet censorship. Google sees this as a good thing and sends takedown requests it receives to be added to the database.

Fox sends takedown requests to Google for pages which the company says contain links to material it holds the copyright to. Those pages include those on Chilling Effects which show which links Fox wants taken down.

Google delists the Chilling Effects pages from its search engine, thus completing the circle and defeating the very reason Chilling Effects was set up for in the first place.

Fox has repeated this somewhat ridiculous ‘error’ several times (1) (2) (3) (4) but they are not on their own. It seems that the UFC have also been trying to have ChillingEffects notices removed (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) but currently they remain listed by Google.

While the Fox takedowns happened a while ago, those sent by UFC are just a few weeks old. Let’s hope that when receiving these requests in future Google simply throws them in the trash, where they belong.

Source: Fox DMCA Takedowns Order Google to Remove Fox DMCA Takedowns

Once the malware had found .torrent files, it used their filenames to generate a fake ‘copyright infringement’ report warning the user that their ‘offenses’ could result in 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Of course, in the true spirit of all pay-up-or-else schemes, they were also given the option to make the whole thing go away by paying a ‘fine’ of around $400, as can be seen from the screenshot below

The whole scam was run by an outfit calling themselves the ICCP Foundation and now, thanks to a report from security expert Brian Krebs, we can see what kind of money was involved in this scam.

Last year, thousands of documents were leaked from Chronopay, Russia’s largest processor of online payments, and Krebs managed to get his hands on them. They revealed that Chronopay is up to its neck in the operations of “high-risk” industries – ones with the greatest chance of credit-card chargebacks and the companies involved doing high-speed disappearing acts.

Krebs notes that Chronopay “handsomely profited from the market for scareware, programs that infiltrate victim PCs to display fake security alerts in a bid to frighten users into paying for worthless security software,” so it comes as no surprise that ICCP Foundation – or ICCP-Online as they are referred to in Chronopay’s documents – are partners of the payment processor.

As can seen from the cropped screenshot below, hundreds of people fell for the scam, with 451 people using Visa to pay nearly $220,000 and 129 using Mastercard to hand over just under $63,000.

With 580 people paying $283,000, each payment works out to around $483, which sounds roughly right given the sample screenshots given to TorrentFreak when we first reported the scam. Krebs points out that the message in Russian at the top of the email says that the calculation formula may have been producing errors, but this appears to be a reference to the fraud counts as highlighted in yellow on the full screenshot which can be found here.

Its worth mentioning that these figures only show 2 active months for the scam, so the true amounts could actually be higher.

If anything, the above shows how easy it is to extract money from BitTorrent users, whether one is a legitimate lawyer, a scam artist, or one of the copyright trolls that fall in between.

Source: Leaked Docs Show Results of Fake ‘RIAA/MPAA’ BitTorrent Scam

Last September it was revealed, much to the delight of millions of iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users, that a version of VLC would now be available on Apple devices through the company’s App Store. Developed in the open source spirit and offered for free by mobile company Applidium, the app was given the blessing of VideoLAN. The reach of the mighty VLC had been extended and users far and wide rejoiced, but not for long.

One of the original developers of VLC, Rémi Denis-Courmont, angrily pointed out that incompatibilities exist between Apple’s DRM policies and the terms of the GNU General Public License under which VLC is offered. While the GNU license allows Apple to offer an iOS version of VLC, the layer of DRM it puts over the top of the application was a no-no.

“Today, a formal notification of copyright infringement was sent to Apple Inc. regarding distribution of the VLC media player for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch,” wrote Denis-Courmont on October 26th 2010, adding that the likely outcome would be that Apple would be forced to pull the free app from the App Store.

And yesterday, that’s exactly what happened.

In a post titled “There’s no app for that (anymore),” Denis-Courmont celebrates his victory.

“At last, Apple has removed VLC media player from its application store,” he wrote. “Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved – the hard way. I am not going to pity the owners of iDevices, and not even the MobileVLC developers who doubtless wasted a lot of their time. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone.”

While disclosing that i’m the fairly happy user of three iOS devices, i’m going to take the stance of the layman here and risk incurring the wrath of the hardcore supporters of the GNU public license. For the man in the street this decision sucks and this statement from Denis-Courmont is insensitive to say the least.

Look, I loathe Apple’s restrictive practices and DRM with a passion too but the vast majority of Apple users – the vast majority of regular computer users, period – couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this kind of dispute. And why should the layman care? DRM? Open source what? GNU? Isn’t that some kind of cattle?

The net result is that a perfectly good product, a free product wrapped in DRM that serves no practical use in this case, is no longer available to the masses. And understandably the man in the street won’t give a damn about the great philosophy of freedom behind the GNU license nor the evils of DRM. He will care only that VLC is not available any more and he can’t play his videos.

The great irony here is that it’s these kind of disputes, between the interests of one company and those of another, that causes all sorts of complex licensing issues in the music and movie industries. Those issues cause distribution problems and an inability to fulfil demand. The result is gaps in the market which cannot be served because of legal issues.

And what fills that void every time? Piracy.

It’s no surprise then that the free, open source VLC for iDevices is only easily available from the likes of Installous. What has the world come to?

Source: Apple Users Forced to Pirate VLC Player? Whatever Next?

The Big Music (RIAA) labels make their fortunes by promoting and marketing artists who usually only pocket a few percent of album sales. Their control over the distribution channels has given them a great deal of power, but the Internet is taking this monopoly away bit by bit. Today, independent artists and labels can easily reach millions of customers, something unimaginable only a decade ago.

That said, the advancement of the Internet has also brought in new threats. Apple. for example, is taking a big chunk of the revenue music generates online and their growing power is frustrating artists more and more. Musicians are forced to cut up songs because Apple deems them too long, and track listings are shuffled by mistake without an option for the artist to restore his art.

One of the first musicians who revolted publicly against Apple was Benn Jordan aka The Flashbulb, who found his album on iTunes in early 2008 without being aware or paid for it. In a counter move Jordan decided to share all his music on BitTorrent for free, which turned out to be one of the best business decisions he has made in his career.

On Christmas eve, where sharing is on the minds of millions of people, we sit down with Benn to talk about what has happened in the past three years. How did he fare financially? Has his opinion towards Apple or the RIAA labels changed? Where does he think the music industry is heading?

TF: You first published your music for free on BitTorrent nearly three years ago. Could you take us back to that moment and explain why you took this decision?

Jordan: I just figured that if someone was going to upload my new album to these sites, it may as well be me. I can make sure the rip is a good one and I can personalize it with a message. It wasn’t marketing or anything political at first either. Trent Reznor and some other big names released stuff in a similar fashion a few months later and the same crowd applauded, but I felt like it was more about marketing.

TF: How has this decision changed your stance toward “piracy”?

Jordan: It oddly put me in a hot seat for a bit and for a limited time, made me an pseudo expert in a field of study that doesn’t really exist yet. Again, this was all undeserved and weird. Music piracy is still a huge issue and people want answers, but they’re not sure who to ask.

I’m grateful now because it made me think, generally, file trading is just a peephole to a much larger picture. Copyright, in its current state, holds information at ransom for monetary value. While in music it can stifle culture and art, with literature and education it can be nothing more than a weapon of class warfare.

TF: How are you doing financially compared to three years ago? Have you benefited from giving away your music?

Jordan: In this particular case, yes. It expanded the amount of people who pirate my music, therefore it has expanded those who bought CDs, donated to me, or came out to shows. Another interesting thing is that it wound up in some licensing company’s hands that I’ve never worked with before, and got me additional placement in TV/film/etc, which is a good portion of my income.

TF: What are your thoughts on the big labels. Are they good or bad for the majority of artists?

Jordan: I have to be honest. Big labels that aren’t being innovative are little more than delusional laughing stocks at this point. Their numbers get worse and worse, and they push the artists to do dumber and dumber stunts to try and stay on top of things.

The shows and festivals they book are sponsored by 8 different alcoholic beverages and 10 different energy drinks, and they just punish their customers while validating their own demise. I’m not worried about them and neither should you. Its a dozen senior citizens trying to stop a stampede of fresh culture. Good luck boys.

TF: And what about Apple?

Jordan: Apple, love or hate their products, is fucking scary. On one hand, hats off. They’re business and marketing geniuses. On the other hand, they might single handedly be the worst thing that has happened to entertainment media in the last 3 years. The major record industry collapsing should also mean that artists are more free to do what they want.

For example, iTunes completely screwed up the track listing of my last album Arboreal. Their network is so influential that over half of the people who have bought the CD from my label now have botched track titles on their mp3 players. Apple doesn’t have ANY accessible artist support to deal with things like this.

They reject my cover art if I don’t have my name and the title in bold. If I want to sell a 30 minute long track (Louisiana Mourning, for example), they require me to split it up into a bunch of separate tracks. Their distribution system is so unorganized that artists have to pay business like Tunecore upwards of $40 per album (and annual fees) to do Apple’s job for them.

Again, its genius on the business side. But they’ve wedged themselves in so well that now, if I don’t have an album on iTunes (under their insane rules and lack of support), a large portion of my listeners simply won’t know how to put my music on their iPods/iPhones.

I know I sound preachy, but think about it, how is that any better than what existed 15 years ago? I still maintain that I’d rather have my stuff “illegally” downloaded than have to go down that path.

TF: What advise do you have for artists who consider giving away their music?

Jordan: That being a “consideration” is always funny to me. You either release it knowing it will be distributed for free or you keep it locked up on your hard drive. If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that no amount of bitching, threatening, lobbying, suing, or file protecting is going to stop information from being spread to those who want it.

The way I look at it is, if hundreds of thousands of people are downloading my album, I’m contributing to culture and my music will likely outlive me. Money is pretty insignificant in the face of immortality.

TF: What changes in the industry would you like to see in the coming years?

Jordan: It makes me nervous because I feel like we’re at a really big crossroad. We’re facing three big issues at the same time that are eventually going to be connected: Net-neutrality, free speech, and piracy/copyright laws. We need to make a bigger deal about it because we don’t want information to be controlled by an entity that only exists for its investors.

We don’t want a situation where if Amazon refuses to carry a book, nobody will be able to read it. Or if iTunes refuses to carry an unabridged album, nobody will be able to hear it. Most importantly, we don’t want poor people to continue being less educated than wealthy people because of the illusion created that information has a monetary value. News, history, media, and culture is made by everyone, and it is intolerable to me that we allow the messengers to hold it from us at such a high price, whether monetarily or contextually .

Now’s the time to get involved.

Source: Music Is Better Off On BitTorrent, Than With Apple or Big Music

Like a breath of fresh air and bucking the trend of more and more prohibitive and invasive protection schemes, CD Projekt intend to release The Witcher 2 in May 2011 without any DRM. This impressed our readers.

“A lot of gamers, even many of those in, or in favour of, the torrent/filesharing community seem to be looking at this as an opportunity to show the industry that a company can release a game completely without DRM and still see it become a huge success,” reader Ben H told TorrentFreak.

“The message, I think, isn’t ‘don’t pirate’ but rather ‘let’s prove our point’ by supporting a developer who’s willing to treat its customers as customers, rather than criminals by default,” he concluded.

Although more of a console gamer, the name The Witcher did ring a bell with me, but not for any good reason. A couple of years ago, large numbers of Internet users started receiving letters from notorious file-sharing lawyers Davenport Lyons demanding cash settlements, a scheme that most readers will be familiar with and one which has gotten the company in a lot of trouble.

Among those letters were demands for payment on an Atari game with a familiar title – The Witcher.

Needless to say, alarm bells started to ring and since I was travelling, I quickly emailed Ben H back and told him what I remembered.

“I didn’t know that was related to The Witcher – after digging a little deeper it seems that Atari were the ones chasing up file-sharers, while the actual game developers maintain a much more positive and realistic position on piracy,” he told me in response.

“Atari are ‘marketing and distributing‘ The Witcher 2 as well, so I wonder if the DRM-free release indicates that CD Projekt have more control over things this time, or if their relatively file-sharer-friendly stance is actually quite shallow in practice,” he concluded.

As it turns out, those alarm bells were ringing for good reason.

“Of course we’re not happy when people are pirating our games, so we are signing with legal firms and torrent sneaking companies,” CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski told Eurogamer today.

“In quite a few big countries, when people are downloading it illegally they can expect a letter from a legal firm saying, ‘Hey, you downloaded it illegally and right now you have to pay a fine.’

“We are totally fair, but if you decide you will not buy it legally there is a chance you’ll get a letter.”

What Iwinski means by “totally fair” (using the Davenport Lyons operation as a guide) is that his “sneaking companies” will harvest IP addresses from torrent swarms with no oversight whatsoever and farm them out to ISPs via the courts.

The ISPs will then try their best, for a fee, to match them with their customer records, but will occasionally make mistakes and identify the wrong one. Letters will then be sent out by a lawfirm to ISP account owners who may or may not have done any sharing at all, and will be told that they are responsible for what happens on their connection. Then, in order to make nasty court cases go away, subscribers will be asked to pay a cash settlement.

So, while lack of DRM might be a great idea, sending out these awful letters is the absolute opposite. Mark our words, CD Projekt aren’t going to get an easy ride with this and nothing good will come out of it, especially if they dare to try this again in the UK.

In theory a DRM-free game should give consumers less incentive to download it illegally, but it’s also easier to share. We can’t look inside the minds of CD Projekt’s bosses but it’s not totally inconceivable that they secretly hope that many people will pirate their games. After all, the pay-up-or-else schemes are more profitable than actually selling games.

The Witcher 2 comes out in May 2011, which means that CD Projekt have plenty of time to change their minds. Let’s hope they do.

Source: Is Witcher 2 DRM-Free To Lure In Pirates?

Many torrent sites list huge amounts of ‘fakes’ that when downloaded often encourage users to travel to various websites for ‘activation’ or to install suspicious ‘codecs’ in order to watch, well, not even a movie in most cases. But in recent times BitTorrent users have become susceptible to a more advanced type of revenue generation at their expense, the highly questionable but probably legal “pre-settlement letter” business.

If you asked companies such as ACS:Law what they’re up to they would tell you that they’re operating a legitimate business first tracking and then requesting cash settlements from infringers. But to the many innocent victims caught up in the dragnet, it’s less of a scheme and more of a scam, indistinguishable from the many scams already circulating the Internet which demand or manipulate money from their victims.

Today we bring news of a new operation which takes the work of companies such as ACS:Law as inspiration and uses the fear they generate to frighten Internet users to part with their money.

In an email titled “Investigation Against You” which at first glance appears to come from a bona fide law firm, supposed file-sharers are put on notice that they’re in trouble.

According to the text that follows, the email is being sent by the Rechtsanwalt Florian Giese law firm who claim to be representing the interests of Videorama GmbH, a 40 million euro legitimate company based in Essen, Germany.

“The subject of our assignment is that your Internet connection was used on a so-called peer-to-peer network and committed copyright infringement on works held by our clients,” explains the email which goes on to cite various elements of German law which show that the alleged activity is illegal.

Further information suggests that the recipient’s IP address has been tracked downloading multiple music tracks and that based on this evidence a complaint has been made about him or her to the prosecutor.

Your IP address when the crimes were committed: 84.190.XX.XXX

Illegally downloaded music pieces (mp3): 13

Illegally uploaded music pieces (mp3): 21

“As you may have already noticed from the media, today copyright infringement cases in court usually lead to a large fine and court costs,” warns the letter.

This worrying eventuality is backed up by the citing of a real case from early 2010 where the District Court of Magdeburg sentenced a father to pay 3,000 euros because his son shared 132 MP3s on a file-sharing network some years earlier.

The letter adds that to avoid things getting much worse, including possible house searches and court hearings, the copyright holder is prepared to settle out of court – for 100 euros.

It’s suggested that in order to pay “safely and easily” the letter recipient should deposit the money via Ukash or alternative pay with Paysafecard. The letter is signed ‘Rechtsanwalt Florian Giese’, who are a real-life German law firm.

Except the whole thing is a scam from beginning to end.

“Rechtsanwalt Florian Giese is not responsible for the fraudulent e-mails with the subject ‘investigation against you’. These are spam emails from fraudsters,” the company said in response to the news. The lawfirm also confirmed that Videorama GmbH are also not involved in this scam.

However, the scammers are going to some lengths to give the impression they are legitimate, especially by their use of the email addresses “giese@ra-giese.info”, “zahlung@ra-giese.info”, “Giese@lawyer-giese.info and zahlung@rechtsanwalt-giese.info. The lawfirm points out that they only use the domains giese.de and giese.com.

These phony settlement emails have been sent out in large numbers and as a result the Hamburg police are now involved in the investigation. The domain used in connection with the scam, lawyer-giese.info, has been deleted.

To the innocent and particularly the vulnerable with no experience of such matters, this email would seem indistinguishable from the type of correspondence sent out by the likes of ACS:Law. All the elements are there – claims of infringements, very little evidence to back up the claims, threats that things are about to get a whole lot worse and finally an offer to make it all go away for a relatively small amount.

Innocent people have paid up in both scenarios.

Source: Scammers Want File-Sharers To Pay Cash Fines

After Lily Allen stirred up a file-sharing hornet’s nest with her anti-piracy rhetoric, Dan put together ‘Dear Lily‘. This open letter received several hundred thousand views on YouTube alone and a month later Dan followed it up with a dressing down of Peter Mandelson over the Digital Economy Act.

In recognition of his ability to connect with an audience, Midlands-based Dan was soon commissioned by ISP TalkTalk to create a track to protest against the proposed disconnection of file-sharers.

Now, just over 6 months later he’s back again with a brand new track. ACTA is in the spotlight this time and as usual, Dan takes his subject matter apart with insightful and often biting lyrics delivered with expert clarity and timing.

But before we get our first taste of the track D.O.A.C.T.A (Death of ACTA) with its accompanying video, here is Dan with some thoughts on the Treaty.

TF: What are your feelings on how ACTA has developed and where it appears to be going?

Dan: ACTA is being worked on behind closed doors, in a totally undemocratic fashion. What we’ve seen so far is very worrying though. It’s clearly been put together by people who don’t know or care how the internet works. Not only that, but it means that you can be punished for a newly created crime without any evidence that you’ve committed it. Just an accusation from an industry lawyer is enough – and we’ve already seen with ACS Law how irresponsible and inaccurate they are. Do we really want companies like ACS Law given the power of judge, jury and executioner?

However, it’s not too late to contact your representatives in government – start putting the pressure on and let them know this kind of secret, unelected and irresponsible policy making is unacceptable.

TF: Do you think that ACTA will actually change anything?

Dan: It’s not going to change things in the way it’s meant to. Filesharing and piracy will carry on as before – the law is always one step behind technology. The only thing ACTA will do is stifle innovation and communication. How could sites like YouTube and Flickr exist if the owners of those sites are held liable for everything their users upload? It’s like saying that Bic is responsible if someone writes a death threat using one of their pens. It’s a load of bollocks.

The funny thing is that the entertainment industry is only a fraction of the size of the technology and communications industry. Yet this tiny sector is managing to force through ridiculously backward protectionist laws that make things harder for everyone else except themselves.

TF: How do you feel that the people will respond to ACTA’s introduction?

Dan: I can’t imagine there are many people outside the entertainment industry who support it. In fact I’m surprised the technology sector hasn’t rallied together to fight against it. People who don’t know the facts about it should be told, and people who know the facts should be gravely concerned.

TF: Do you think that legislation has the ability to mould and control people’s behavior and creativity?

Dan: Yes, but only in useless ways. Filesharers won’t be swayed, they’ll just find other ways to carry on doing what they were doing before. ACTA is going to damage creativity though – pretty much all creative work is derivative of previous work, so by criminalising copyright infringement, ACTA will bring us into a ridiculous situation where all artists are criminals. Even walking to work whilst whistling a tune you heard on the radio is technically an unauthorised performance of a copyrighted work, and once ACTA is in place, it’s a crime you could theoretically go to prison for.

TF: Tell us a little about the video that accompanies the song.

Dan: The video was filmed at The Golden Hinde in London, which is a replica of Sir Francis Drake’s ship. My friend Russ Houghton came up with the pirate ship concept, and also produced and directed the video, with the help of a couple of his colleagues, who work in television. Thanks very much to them for helping out.

TF: Cheers for chatting with us Dan, keep up the good work.

The MP3 of D.O.A.C.T.A can be downloaded here and you can follow Dan on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Beer money gratefully accepted here, along with any spare Flattrs.

Source: The Death of ACTA

Operation Payback began during the third week of September with DDoS assaults against the MPAA, RIAA and anti-piracy company AiPlex Software. Those attacks were later replicated against lawfirms engaging in ‘pay-up-or-else’ schemes.

While the DDoS attacks have been largely effective – most notably against the Ministry of Sound and the knock-on effects of the email leak at ACS:Law – they came so quickly that after a while most of the press found it hard to keep up, perhaps a little jaded by their frequency.

Today, however, the group – which does have some ringleaders and decision makers – have taken a slightly different track to further their protests. While earlier action has consisted largely of overwhelming force to swamp websites with traffic, their latest effort is a little more delicate.

CopyProtected.com is a site owned by the MPAA and was set up to promote DRM on DVD and Blu-ray discs. It is hosted on a server containing a large number of other MPAA-linked sites and until a few hours ago looked like this:

It now looks like this:

“Site got haxed,” one of the Anonymous ring-leaders told TorrentFreak in an email. Indeed, instead of its pages promoting the ‘Copy Protection Awareness Icon’, it now displays a message from those behind Operation Payback. The page long missive accompanying the now-familiar logo seen above concludes:

“What must the people do to be heard? To what lengths must they go to have their pleads taken seriously? Must they to take to the streets with noose and handgun before those in power take notice?

“You are forcing our hand by ignoring the voice of the people. In doing so, you bring the destruction of your iron grip of information ever closer. You have ignored the people, attacked the people and lied to the people. For this, you will be held accountable before the people, and you will be punished by them.”

Adding insult to injury, just a few seconds after the page loads it redirects visitors to the homepage of The Pirate Bay.

Earlier this week a new DDoS attack was launched against KISS frontman Gene Simmons in response to some of his recent anti-filesharing comments. Interestingly, this attack caused some dispute within Anonymous, with the main group distancing themselves from the assault with a declaration that artists should not become a target, regardless of their opinions.

While an anarchic structure is desirable for these attacks to work, clearly the lack of a distinct hierarchy can sometimes have its drawbacks and that was illustrated perfectly here. No one can control all of the people, all of the time, and that seems to apply to pirates and anti-pirates alike.

No one seems to know when Operation Payback will end, but it seems certain that in order to keep capturing the imaginations of the mainstream media and those they wish to influence, a certain creativity may be required. Judging by the ‘chatter’ in the IRC channel, they may provide just that.

Update: The MPAA took notice and redirected the hacked site to the MPAA homepage.

Source: MPAA Copy-Protected DRM Site Hacked By Anonymous

Named after the French MEP Marielle Gallo, the report could help turn the Internet into a copyright police state. It offers local governments and lobbyists an excuse to introduce harsher anti-piracy measures targeted at illicit file-sharers.

As is often the case, various entertainment industry lobby groups were involved in pushing Members of Parliament in favor of the report. In doing so, they fabricated artists support in faked petitions, (ab)using the names of various artists who are dead, underage, unaware or simply non-existent.

Unfortunately the sleazy tactics came out too late to have an impact on the result of the vote, but we don’t want to withhold them from our readers. Below are some of the things that have been uncovered thus far, thanks to La Quadrature.

One of the petitions in support of the Gallo report was sent in by Eurocinema, representing film and television producers in Europe. A close inspection of this list cast doubt on the legitimacy of the document, to say the least.

Among the signatories of the petition we find the Hungarian filmmaker László Kovács, who died three years ago, long before the Gallo report was introduced. More suspicion is raised by the fact that one third of all names on the list are Hungarian. For some, Google didn’t return any results, so it’s unclear whether they exist at all.

To find out more about the apparent huge support for the report from Hungary, Amelia Andersdotter of the Pirate Party decided to contact two people listed on the petition. Interestingly, the Hungarian directors Ibolya Fekete and Attila Janisch both told her that they never signed a petition.

Another petition from the entertainment industry was submitted by the music industry lobby group IFPI. Like their counterpart Eurocinema, the names included on IFPI’s petition raise some doubts as well.

For starters, the petition includes the name of the 7-year old Moldovan singer Cleopatra Stratan. Apparently the Moldovan youth is very involved with European politics, even though they can barely read.

Aside from a pre-teen signatory the petition also included a few duplicate names, several non-EU citizens, some artists who don’t even seem to exist, and the French singer Michel Sardou who previously said “I’m a pirate.”

It is unbelievable that lobby groups get away with manipulating the European Parliament in this fashion. Can they get much lower than this? Both IFPI and Eurocinema were contacted to explain the irregularities pointed out above, but it’s unlikely that we will ever get a reply.

Source: Anti-Pirates List Dead and Pre-Teen Artists as Petition Signatories

Thankfully, some of the leading players in the industry paid attention to our call. Akamai’s Bill Wishon contacted us in response to the article to discuss “some inaccuracies … that needed correction.” Some of the issues that were discussed during this call were summarized by Wishon in a comment here. While we welcome Akamai’s efforts to help us address potential “inaccuracies”, we feel that it is a little one-sided.

Here are excerpts from their statement which attempts to address the transparency issue:

Akamai has had a user bill of rights and design principles published on our website for a few years now and have been using them to guide our development and design decisions. The guidelines you posted from Solid State Networks seem to align with these principles and perhaps take a more gaming centric perspective…

The NetSession EULA does state that our software runs as a background service, this is also stated in the technical info on our site.

Transparency: Our software is visible in the normal places you would expect to manage a system service on the platform you are on.

The problem with Akamai’s statement is that it does nothing to address the frustration expressed by so many users that do not appreciate that P2P software has been installed on their systems without their knowledge. Instead, it seems to imply that Akamai believes that its “commitment” to transparency has been met through the EULA disclosure.

Of course, this might be true if one assumes that every user carefully reads the EULA to learn that a system service is being installed by Akamai. But it also assumes that all users will understand what a service is and how and where a service operates on their system. This is just not a realistic expectation for almost any subset of Internet users, including online gamers. And nowhere in the EULA are the implications of a having a continuously running P2P client on the user’s system conveyed.

Also, upon examining Akamai’s user “Bill of Rights” we are informed that “Users have the right to know what their Akamai NetSession Interface is doing at all times.” This sounds great, until we read on to find that this functionality is provided through a command line tool. This hardly seems aligned with the model of transparency advocated within Solid State Networks’ best practices as Bill Wishon suggests.

It is apparent from the number of blog and forum posts available from Google searches that both Pando and Akamai have been aware for some time that many consumers are upset by their stealth operational tactics. TorrentFreak reader Delusion points us to his own run-in with Pando and response from Pando management which is detailed on his blog back in February.

There simply are no valid technical reasons that prevent either of these companies from providing a real-time and accessible view of their applications’ activity and its impact on user resources. Therefore, one might conclude that the lack of visibility of their P2P applications is by design and that they are most concerned with their own self-interests at the expense of all consumers. After all, these companies stand to profit a great deal from selling their services using end user’s bandwidth that ultimately costs them nothing.

It is time for Akamai and Pando to acknowledge their shortcomings and start to live up to their claims of transparency and control. More importantly, game publishers need to be held accountable for how they choose to implement P2P software with their games. Several TorentFreak readers have named other offenders, including ijji’s Reactor, Square Enix’ Final Fantasy XIV, and THQ’s City of Heroes as examples of games that natively use P2P in a manner that lacks a display of respect for their players.

We truly applaud Akamai for taking the time to explain their side of the story to us, but to reach true fairness and transparency they (and others) will have to step it up a notch. Also, we advise individual employees not to suggest that we were paid for bringing this issue up in the comment section. Clearly we must have hit a sore spot, but that shouldn’t lead to more unfairness should it?

Source: Akamai: Gamers Aren’t P2P Bandwidth Slaves

Yesterday Hypebot had an email exchange with Zaptune’s media spokesperson Anand Patel who said that the site’s downloads “had been licensed from the appropriate major and indie labels.” But Zaptunes also says it offers music from The Beatles, an Internet impossibility as we all know.

“We have a contract with Sony Music, who hold the rights to most of the Beatles music,” said Patel. “I am sorry, but right now I can not give you more details about this contract.”

That’s because there is no contract and Mr Patel is mistaking people for fools. Here’s a short list of 13 unlucky reasons why (be sure to check out number 12 especially) and feel free to add more in the comments, there are dozens.

1. Zaptunes.com claims to be a San Francisco, CA based start-up. “With about $5 million in funding from various Venture Capitalists, we have steadily grown and made a strong foothold in the music industry,” they claim.

In fact, Zaptunes appeared just a few weeks ago on July 19th and despite $5 million in funding still begged people on Twitter to advertise for them with a tempting $10,000 prize due to be paid out August 22nd. No winners yet? We are surprised….

Tip: Try speaking to the press Zaptunes, they advertise your product for free….

2. Zaptunes isn’t confident that they’ll be around long. They registered their domain on July 19th 2010 – it expires on the same date next year. There’s stability for you.

3. Even though TheBeatles Twitter account with 109,000 followers follows the Zaptunes Twitter account, that doesn’t mean Zaptunes is legit, it just means people are keeping an eye on them. Zaptunes says it offers Beatles tracks. It does not.

4. Zaptunes promotes the availability of Eminem tracks, even though it has none. Zaptunes copied its entire Eminem fact page from an article they found using Google.

Their latest blog post was ripped from Last.fm and the one below that is ripped from MusicByDay. In fact, none of their posts are their own work.

Last.fm content is very popular on Zaptunes – it seems that much of the album art is ripped from there.

5. Other dodgy domains connect to Zaptunes.com including CaptainSam.com, which was registered by Tarandeep Singh Gill living at the rather official sounding 1 Something Road, Some City, California 94127. Even more reassuring is the Zaptunes.co.tv domain which also links to ZapTunes.com and is registered to ‘person surname’ living in ‘londra, GB’ – wherever that is.

6. Zaptunes says it offers tracks for free from the major labels. Anyone with any knowledge of the Big Four know full well that they never, ever give their music away en masse.

7. Zaptunes says it has a unique business model which enables it to offer unlimited downloads. None of the big labels together agree to unlimited downloads on a download service at any price.

8. Zaptunes’ search engine suggests they offer both unreleased tracks and a selection of bootlegs. The major labels love this kind of thing from their partners.

9. Despite all the claims, Zaptunes doesn’t offer ANY music whatsoever. From its own site:

ZapTunes.com does not provide any downloads from its servers. ZapTunes.com just enables its members to find free or paid music available on the Internet. The Artists/Tracks displayed on the home page and other parts of the website are for promotional purposes only and may not be available for free or paid download.

ZapTunes.com has a database of websites that offer free and legal music downloads. Whenever a registered members looks for a song, ZapTunes searches for that song in the database, and if it finds a website offering a legal download of that song, it is displayed it to the user. If not, then ZapTunes looks for that song on Amazon, iTunes and various other paid to download websites, and displays the user their options. ZapTunes is not helping or promoting piracy in any way.

10. ZapTunes says its name is a registered trademark. Our searches with the United States Patent and Trademark Office drew a big blank.

11. Most of the site’s Privacy Policy was cut-and-pasted from here and the ‘Terms of Use‘ on ZapTunes should be read very, very closely. Anyone giving over their credit card details could be in for a very nasty surprise. DON’T DO IT!

12. Another URL that redirects to Zaptunes is www.24hfunds.com. Readers of this discussion thread on TalkGold will see that by page 6, the scheme promoted by its owner was deemed to be a scam. A search on Google for ’24hfunds and scam’ turned up 5,000 results.

13. Those unlucky enough to have given their details over already will see charges on their credit card account from TrackYourPics.com – the following is currently displayed on their site, spelling errors intact:

“Did you see a charge on your credit card with TRACKYOURPICS.COM? It is because you either signed up on trackyourpics.com or ZapTunes.com. All the subscriptions have been cancelled, so you will not see any furher charges on your credit card. Also, we are in the process or reversing the charges already made.”

TrackYourPics is registered to an address in San Francisco, California. Google seems to think that location is a drain cover.

A fitting place for Zaptunes. Stay well away.

Source: 13 Unlucky Reasons Why Zaptunes is Bullshit

Both claimed that such technologies, and the file-sharing networks that sprung up to support them, have decimated their industries. And yet both groups have never been healthier financially.

With the increasing popularity of e-book readers such as Apple’s iPad, the Barnes & Noble Nook and Amazon’s Kindle, many in the publishing industry are starting to make the same claims as their music and film brethren.

At the start of the year CNN ran an article about e-books, their increasing sales and the fears of piracy. But how realistic are these fears? After conducting some early research on download statistics after the iPad introduction, we also touched on the subject and concluded ‘”Don’t worry about things.” It’s a position that seems to be borne out by the evidence. Let’s look at an example.

At the end of June, David Weber’s novel “Mission of Honor” was published by Baen books. Baen is a big supporter of e-books and has run a free e-book library of some of their titles over the last 10 years, called The Baen Free Library strangely enough. One of the other ways they support e-books is to include a bound-in CD with certain hardcover editions, containing the e-book files of that title in several formats including several DRM-free ones.

Mission of Honor had one of those CDs. Mission’s CD didn’t just contain one e-book though, it had e-books for a good chunk of the author’s published works, including all the previous books in the series. Again all these files were in multiple (DRM-free) formats – there’s even an occasionally audiobook version (and yes, you guessed it, no DRM on it either).

Here’s the kicker though, Baen has no problems with people distributing the contents of the CD in non-commercial ways. Fellow author, David Drake put it best in the Orientation on one of the earlier CD’s.

The files on this CD are not encrypted. Jim [Baen] doesn’t understand the logic of making his books hard for people to read. Neither do I, though we seem to be in the minority among publishers and authors. Read them. Copy them. Give them to your friends.[..]

You’re not supposed to sell the files. “Who’d be stupid enough to buy something they could have for free?” you may well ask yourself. If you do sell them, you are a Bad Person and may later exhibit signs of wanting to run for political office; but between you and me, I’m not going to come hunt you down.

If e-book pirates are killing the industry as some people seem to believe, this free CD would have guaranteed that the book will sell badly, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The hardcover went on sale June 20th and the e-book CD went up the same day. Yet the book was #13 on the New York Times (NYT) bestseller list for July 2nd. It had slipped a bit to #24 the next week, and then to #26 the week after. But if e-books are killing the industry, how could a niche book (book 12 in a sci-fi series) sell so well? Especially when sci-fi fans are the ones most likely to be technologically oriented, and thus more likely to read e-books?

Can e-books improve the publishing industry? Without a doubt. One of the more innovative methods Baen uses to promote books is a teaser section. It’s not ‘official’ but it’s strongly supported by Baen. Three times a week, sections of a chapter of upcoming books are uploaded to a website called “Collected Driblets of Baen: A Frankly Promotional Endeavor…” and the author decides how much or little of his as-yet unpublished work will be previewed. In the case of Matter of Honor the previews started in February 2010 and ran until July 2nd – scoring some 71,000 hits over the publication of the 18 chapters.

The preview concept is relatively new, but it could be a huge boon for the publishing industry. Never before has it been so easy to tease potential readers, and sell more books because of it. Aside from the previews, another advantage is that people can buy books on their e-book readers and start reading straight away. This as opposed to waiting a day or two for a book to arrive, or going to an actual book store.

The question then is how best publishers should act to encourage people to buy e-books and physical books. As with films and music publishers they should address the concerns of the buying public, and treat them with respect instead of pushing DRM and revocable licenses. Trying to hide away from e-books has not worked for Harry Potter or Twilight, so pre-empt readers and convert them.

In that way, music and TV/movies differ from books in that the physical object of a book is different from the digital version; holding a book in your hands is different from holding and reading an e-book. Rather than treating e-books like the great Satan (as many publishers and authors do), or a replacement (as Amazon currently does), Baen has done very well by treating them as promotion. Eric Flint, author, editor, and ‘Librarian’ of the Baen Free Library made the following observation back in 2000.

“Dave Weber’s On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a “loss leader” for Baen’s for-pay experiment “Webscriptions” for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it’s become Baen’s most popular backlist title in paper!

And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.

Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a “gesture of solidarity. “But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren’t worried about the small cost — once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )

E-books have the potential to increase sales of physical books as well as provide their own source of income. That is, if authors and publishers are willing to accept them and deal with their users fairly, instead of hiding behind curiously high prices or DRM. E-books are the future. Last month Amazon reported it was selling more e-books than hardcovers. E-books are not going to go away any time soon, nor are they a flash in the pan. The lessons should have been learned from the 10+ year music fight. Throwing money at enforcement and litigation doesn’t work. Instead embracing the medium can be beneficial.

Source: E-books, Piracy Peril or Promotional Possibilities?

One line of attack used by anti-piracy groups against The Pirate Bay, for example, has been to try to have its domain blocked by various ISPs. In Italy, police recently went a step further by seizing the domain of a Pirate Bay proxy.

In Russia recently the whole process of taking a domain was streamlined, when the authorities simply took control of the Torrents.ru domain without any court rulings whatsoever. Although some may label these type of actions against BitTorrent domains as “evil”, if news coming out of Russia today is to be believed, anti-torrent activities have just moved to a whole new level.

According to staff at Russian BitTorrent site LostFilm, on May 3rd their owner was lured to neighboring Ukraine under false pretenses. There he had a 3 day ordeal at the hands of a criminal group who apparently had their eyes on some of his property.

The LostFilm.tv domain is close to breaking into the Top 100 sites in Russia and is one of the country’s most popular sites for foreign movies. It seems the criminal group wanted it pretty badly. Reportedly kidnapped then beaten at gunpoint, the site’s owner was ordered to transfer the domain to a third party.

The next day, May 4th, the domain transfer began and at the same time the kidnappers gained access to the site’s servers. But all did not go smoothly.

Instead of being able to take control of the domain in a single day as hoped, the transfer was delayed by its registrar – the process was going to take 5 to 10 days – so the kidnappers decided to move to plan B.

On May 5th, the gang contacted the admin’s family in order to demand a ransom payment, on the understanding that the admin would go free and later transfer the domain to his kidnappers. Later that day an amount was paid via electronic transfer.

The LostFilm owner was subsequently set free and staff at the site were able to block the kidnappers out of their servers. Both are believed to be safe and well and the case has reportedly been handed over to the prosecutor’s office in St. Petersburg.

There is little doubt that if true, this is a sensational story. However, although the Russian press aren’t questioning it, there are those who believe it could be a PR stunt. LostFilm built up its reputation on the series Lost, and everyone knows what happened to that yesterday.

Source: BitTorrent Site Admin Kidnapped & Beaten at Gunpoint

In fact what they really do is operate a scam to extort money from BitTorrent users.

Right at this moment we are unsure of the exact route of infection, but somehow malware (probably in either fake file or attached virus form) is displaying a “copyright violation alert” on the victim’s screen, locking it, and redirecting users to the ICPP site where they are told they have been caught infringing copyright.

There they are warned their offenses could result in 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine and are given the option to take the (fake) case to court. They are also offered a chance to make the whole thing go away for the payment of a ‘fine’ of around $400. Victims are also prompted to give their name, address and full credit card details – it is unclear how this information is further abused but it doesn’t look good.

If they select the court option, they are scared with this screen:

So that that this evil software (believed to be located at C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\IQManager\iqmanager.exe) more accurately targets BitTorrent users rather than just random users, it appears to scan the user’s hard drive for .torrent files and displays these as ‘evidence’ of an earlier infringement.

In order to boost their credibility, icpp-online.com claim to be affiliated with influential partners – the RIAA, MPAA, and The Copyright Alliance. Of course, this is a complete fabrication.

This whole approach seems very similar to that employed by so-called ‘rogue software‘ or ‘scareware’ which attempt to frighten users into parting with cash for often useless software. And it seems the links to malware don’t stop there.

A WHOIS on the ICPP-Online domain reveals some contact data which shows up elsewhere in connection to other questionable activities.

Details on this new threat are scarce at the moment, so if any readers can discover more about this malware or the operation behind it, please collate the information and send it over to tips@torrentfreak.com.

Source: Malware Extorts Cash From BitTorrent Users

Often when people are wrongfully accused there is speculation that the individual’s wireless router could have been compromised and used to carry out an infringement. However, many other instances of wrongful accusations go unexplained.

Understandably fingers then get pointed at the quality of evidence being gathered. How foolproof are these systems? How much time and effort has gone into their creation? Do they live up to their ‘forensic-quality’ claims?

In the vast majority of cases these questions go completely unanswered, since the innards of such software and systems are never opened up for public scrutiny. This is naturally a concern for those trying to protest their innocence.

Many times here on TorrentFreak we’ve covered the activities of ACS:Law, the lawyers making a huge noise in the UK right now as they chase BitTorrent users for hundreds of pounds each. One person involved heavily in this work at ACS:Law is Terence Tsang, who previously worked on similar file-sharing cases with lawyers Davenport Lyons.

Tsang is also involved in other online businesses, including Japanese car sales and other computing-based projects and regularly requests work from freelancers, as can be seen from these examples on his Freelancer.com page.

One of these – Nonpublic project #245939 (account required, screenshot) – is of particular interest.

“Create a bit-torrent client for me which will obtain details about file sharers of certain torrents. Server is Linux. The torrent client just needs to monitor IP addresses and take information which is then placed in a database,” writes Tsang in his request.

“The information needed is as follows: Host IP, Hit Date and time (GMT time), Provider network name (i believe whois search will help with this – can you think of a better way?), P2P Client, File name, File size, MD5 of file,” he adds.

“So we need to get the software to monitor a number of specific torrents it needs to create a database of the above information. The database needs to be able to import into a database file like csv. I am only interested in UK IP addresses. Easy job if you have the skills,” he concludes.

We cannot confirm if Tsang bought this code on behalf of DL, ACS:Law or indeed himself for some kind of lone operation. Since no information is ever offered about the tracking systems used to gather evidence, we cannot say which cases, if any, this code was used for either. What we do know is that there were 4 bids for the work and the job was eventually awarded.

The average settlement from a single letter recipient is $900, so how much was paid for this valuable piece of code which must clearly perform perfectly?

Between $250 and $750.

Source: Code To Track BitTorrent Users Bought For $750 (Max)

These games often have erotic and downright sexual elements and Cross Days from developer 0verflow is no different. The game suffered several delays before release, apparently so that it could be launched along with a special, ahem, USB ‘hands-free’ device for experiencing ‘climax scenes’ (NSFW: Male and female versions) but it was finally released just a few days ago.

Of course, not everyone would acquire the game through the official channels and many turned to file-sharing networks for their erotic gaming fix. Some, who were not particularly careful about the item they were downloading, were in for a pretty big shock.

Alongside the pirated versions of Cross Days can be found some software which claims to be the installer for the game, but is actually a piece of pretty vicious malware which appears to try to punish would-be pirates.

When run, the installer pretends to be the game but using personal information gathered from the victim’s computer (including IP address), it presents a survey which asks for more personal information – including their email address and password.

Once completed, the information is uploaded to a website for all the Internet to see – accompanied by a screenshot of the victim’s desktop. Samples of the information uploaded by the trojan can be viewed here and although much of it is in Japanese, there’s enough pictures and English text to entertain most readers and thoroughly embarrass the unlucky reader of Keily’s Plant.

Adding insult to injury, according to a report the installer’s terms of service agreement actually states that all these things happen, but as we all know, hardly anyone reads them.

Although it is possible to have the would-be pirate’s personal information taken down from the website, first the user has to effectively apologize for having tried to illegally download Cross Days.

Adding to the confusion, developer 0verflow are reporting that users of Avast! anti-virus software receive a false-positive warning (Win32: Trojan-gen) when installing the real game.

This isn’t the first time Japanese file-sharers have been targeted by malware writers. In 2007 a bizarre virus was released which threatened to kill people who illegally download using P2P.

Source: Fake Game Installer Punishes Pirates Via Epic Privacy Breach

There was a short blocking incident two years ago when Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay were hijacked and redirected to the leading Chinese search engine, Baidu. However, this issue was solved in a matter of days without an official explanation.

In the years that followed the Chinese government mainly targeted local BitTorrent sites, leaving the previously mentioned sites unharmed. According to reports from isoHunt’s owner Gary Fung, this tolerant stance might have changed as visits from China to isoHunt have plunged dramatically.

The drop in traffic is so significant that any technical difficulties have to be ruled out. Last Saturday, isoHunt had only 1,349 visitors from China compared to 131,362 the week before, a massive 99% decrease.

Despite the signs that this ban of isoHunt is intentional, there hasn’t been any official word from the Chinese authorities on the situation. Whether it has anything to do with the recent P2P site crackdown in China, where the authorities shut down hundreds of local sites including some of the biggest BitTorrent trackers, is unknown.

IsoHunt owner Gary Fung told TorrentFreak that he recommends that Chinese users who want to continue using the site should access it through a foreign proxy. Gary said that China was never a huge source of traffic for his site, but sees the ban as a “big deal” for the ongoing net censorship debate.

Although China’s authorities are not known for their democratic principles, speaking out against the ban might help. “China has flipflopped between site bans, so putting on pressure and people voicing opinions do matter,” Gary added, referring to China’s previous banning and unbanning of websites such as Wikipedia.

The Pirate Bay, BTjunkie and all the other major foreign BitTorrent sites are unaffected and remain accessible in China. For now.

Update: We learned that The Pirate Bay is blocked in at least some parts of China as well.

Source: IsoHunt Stuck Behind China’s Great Firewall

The new plans were welcomed with skepticism by fellow game developers and the majority of gamers. Instead of hindering piracy the DRM only restricts legitimate customers from playing the game how and where they want, most people agreed.

A survey among members of the Subsim community regarding the DRM on Silent Hunter 5 shows that, if anything, the new DRM is putting off customers from actually buying the game. Only 15% of the respondents said that the DRM wouldn’t affect their plans to buy Silent Hunter 5, while 85% said they would delay or cancel their purchase until a DRM-free version becomes available.

From these responses it could be concluded that many potential customers would prefer to use a DRM-free (pirated) copy instead of the legitimate product, which is the opposite of what Ubisoft wanted to accomplish.

Silent Hunter 5 was released on Tuesday and just a few hours later a cracked version of the game was published on many file-sharing sites. Ubisoft, worrying that DRM-haters would download the game illegally, quickly responded to the news about the cracked DRM and released a statement in which they downplay ‘the issue’.

“You have probably seen rumors on the web that Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 have been cracked. Please know that this rumor is false and while a pirated version may seem to be complete at start up, any gamer who downloads and plays a cracked version will find that their version is not complete,” Ubisoft quickly responded.

While many downloaders report that the game works just fine, Ubisoft’s statement does hold some truth because in their view the game is obviously ‘not complete’ without the DRM. At this point it is not entirely clear what else could be “missing” in the cracked version, but that is beside the point.

The bottom line is that their revolutionary DRM invention was cracked in a matter of hours, and although the crack might not be perfect yet, it will be eventually. The end result will be that the pirated version of the game will be more appealing and less restrictive than the actual retail product. Thus, the DRM is encouraging and increasing piracy instead of putting a halt to it.

It looks like Ubisoft has made a massive mistake with their strong focus on DRM. In fact, the time and effort spent on fine-tuning the DRM would have been better spent on game development, so that they didn’t have to release a patch with bugfixes a day after the game was released.

Let’s hope Ubisoft quickly comes to its senses and releases another patch that removes the needless DRM from the game.

Source: Ubisoft’s Uber DRM Cracked Within a Day

We also reported on BitTorrent clients such as Torrent101, BitRoll and GetTorrent, which also caused caused a whole load of trouble for those who installed them – even uTorrent and WinZip users were in the sights of malware offloaders.

In an email yesterday to TorrentFreak, a reader pointed us to a problem torrent located here (removed). The file is clearly labeled as ‘The Wolfman DVDrip 2010 aXXo’ but it is a fake, a fact which can be quickly learned by reading the comments underneath the torrent. Nevertheless, we thought it might be interesting to demonstrate how it’s possible to look a little deeper.

The file is tracked by a whole range of trackers but one sticks out immediately.

http://tracker.torrentq.com/announce.php currently lists 48,416 seeds and 37,496 seeders for the supposed ‘The Wolfman’ movie, a highly attractive proposition for those inexperienced in dealing with fake torrents.

Of course the stats are faked, and are run from a tracker set up especially to deliver fake torrents. Indeed, it’s run on a subdomain of TorrentQ, a bad client we featured in an earlier article. Here’s a quick step-by-step of the method we used to investigate the tracker. There are other ways, but this is pretty simple so anyone can try this out.

It’s possible to find information about the files indexed on many trackers by using ‘scrape’. In the case of the TorrentQ tracker, the scrape URL is located at http://tracker.torrentq.com/scrape.php. So first off, go to this URL and you’ll get the option to download a file, in this case ‘scrape.php’ – download it.

In this file will be information about the files being seeded on this tracker.

Next use DeHackEd’s nice little online tool called DumpTorrentCGI. Browse to the ‘scrape’ file on your hard drive, change output type to ‘/scrape’ and click the ‘decode’ button. You should get this report;

Immediately you can see that all the files are apparently hugely popular, but of course, all of these stats are faked. To prove that, one can use a site like Torrentz.com, which creates its torrent URLs by using a torrent’s hash value. Simply test each torrent by using http://www.torrentz.com/ followed by the hash value, as shown below, and check the comments.

http://www.torrentz.com/0366eb6bdbab88f2ccd9397a0b421b3947c82e06

The torrents TorrentQ tracks are for Wolfman, Legion, My Name is Khan, The Book of Eli, From Paris With Love, Ninja Assassin, Edge of Darkness, Shutter Island and Dear John.

Every single one is flagged as a fake by commenters on Torrentz.com.

Source: How To Quickly Investigate A Fake BitTorrent Tracker

As with most DRM, Ubisoft’s new anti-piracy solution needlessly hurts legitimate customers. Pirates will always find a way around the access restrictions and will be able to play the game offline without running into trouble. Because of this, Ubisoft’s plans were welcomed with skepticism among fellow game developers.

Gaming magazine Develop has asked several gaming industry figures what they think about Ubisoft’s new DRM. While some are against it and others showed support, the overall sentiment is that DRM itself is not going to stop piracy.

Gusto Games’ Luke Maskell is the most outspoken of them all. “I’m firmly against Ubisoft’s announcement, I think it’s a huge violation of privacy and is only punishing the legitimate customer; the pirates won’t have to worry about being online as they’ll find a way around pretty sharpish,” he commented.

Maskell was not the only one with reservations though. Adrian Hirst, Managing Director at Weaseltron, also stressed that the danger of DRM is that the pirated copy turns into a more desirable product than the retail version.

“Previous draconian attempts at copy protection have only served to outrage our very customers. Copy protection that makes the cracked copy of the game more appealing to the customer than the genuine one threatens to turn them away from purchasing at all,” he said.

Most of the other gaming insiders that were interviewed agreed with this assessment. DRM will only hurt the game if legitimate customers have to face more restrictions than those who choose to download a copy illegally.

“I don’t believe that online DRM on it’s own will ever stop piracy – your game will simply have that functionality stripped out by various hacking groups,” Ben Ward of Bizarre Creations said. “The only way that DRM will be accepted by consumers is if it is delivered inside a service which brings tangible, real-world benefits with it.”

Others were less outspoken against Ubisoft’s new DRM but everyone noted that it will be counter-effective if it’s too obtrusive or cumbersome. To us at TorrentFreak, these different opinions clearly suggest that for a long time the digital entertainment industry has chosen the wrong path to counter piracy.

Instead of trying to add more restrictions to the products they sell to customers, they should add in extra features for those who pay for the product. UbiSoft actually made it half way already by adding several advantages for players who play online, but they’re not quite there yet.

Logged in customers who play Ubisoft’s new games online will be able to save it remotely, so they can continue playing the game on other PCs. Continuing along these lines the company could easily include other benefits and extra features for online players. If they then drop the requirement to play online, they might actually have a superior product compared to the pirated version.

In the end it’s all about finding a way to frame or sell DRM as an advantage instead of a restriction.

The music streaming application Spotify is a great example of how ‘DRM’ can be an advantage. Spotify users can only access music when they’re logged in, which is the ultimate DRM. Still, no one has even brought this issue up because the service offers so many advantages over most other legitimate and illegitimate ways of enjoying music.

If those in the gaming and other digital entertainment industries start thinking in terms of adding benefits for paying customers instead of useless restrictions to keep pirates out, they would have a lot more satisfied customers. Perhaps even more importantly, they could sell a lot more products.

Source: Game Developers Skeptical About Ubisoft’s New DRM

Set on a moon under siege by humans determined to exploit its resources, this science fiction epic has been in the planning for many years and was even delayed as Cameron waited until the technology became available to realize his dream.

When the movie goes on full release this week the wait will finally be over, but some lucky individuals have already been enjoying advance previews. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of some who hoped to witness the 3D version of the movie in Germany yesterday, as instead of technology enabling a jaw-dropping extra-dimensional experience, it brought the whole thing to a standstill.

According to a report, 3D digital versions of the movie were delivered to certain cinemas but a problem with their encryption meant that they could not be watched at all the theaters.

The complex DRM system, which involves several certificates and server-delivered time-sensitive keys for hard drives and projectors, failed in a way consistent with the movie’s epic status. Unfortunately, after working for several hours cinema workers failed to decrypt 150 gigabytes of data, which resulted in at least one location reverting back to the 2D version.

DRM strikes again, this time in 3D.

“We regret the failures and the associated discomfort, but we are confident that we will be able to play the premiere both in 2D and in 3D,” Oliver Fock, general manager of CineStar group said in a comment to the fiasco. And indeed, according to the latest reports the problems have been fixed just in time for the public premiere.

Source: DRM Fiasco Ruins James Cameron’s Avatar 3D Preview

Cory Doctorow, blogger, author and columnist, is not shy of technology or the Internet. His last book, Little Brother, covered the internet, RFID, terrorism and even the Pirate Party. Doctorow also served as the European Director for the EFF and co-founded the ORG. When it comes to DRM, he knows his stuff, and he also knows that DRM doesn’t work

So, when he wanted to release an audio version of his new book ‘Makers’ without DRM, it seemed a fairly simple prospect. The publishers, Random House Audio, were amenable to it. The problem was one of distribution. There are two major players in this area, Audible and Apple. Unlike the publishers, they are not so keen on the ‘no DRM’ position.

Audible, writes Doctorow in Publishers Weekly, turned them down flat when it came to a DRM-free version of Little Brother last year. Since they’re the only retailer on the iTunes music store, that locked out an huge market. When it came time for ‘Makers,’ this time they said yes. Apple, however, said No. audiobooks have to have DRM.

Doesn’t matter what the author or publisher wants, Apple wants DRM, so it’s DRM or nothing.

The backup plan then was just to sell via Audible. The problem then, writes Doctorow, is that while the files might not contain DRM, they come with an End User Licensing Agreement (EULA), which effectively does the same thing – DRM by contract.

DRM might be be gone from music as apple proudly proclaimed early this year, but it’s still alive and kicking. Often not because of the artist or the publisher wants it, but because it’s a store requirement. Indeed, Mr Doctorow is very happy with his publisher, telling TorrentFreak “Random House Audio has been remarkably flexible and committed to letting me sell my audiobooks without DRM and I’m incredibly grateful to them and to my editor, Amy Metsch, for all their hard work.”

Now for Apple and Audible to similarly be flexible and hard working, after all, they didn’t create the work, they’re just selling it.

Source: Apple Says Audiobooks Must Have DRM

Henrik Anderson told TorrentFreak that in order to force his government’s hand on laws which allow him to copy DVDs for his own personal use, but forbid him to remove the DRM in order to do so, he decided to turn himself in.

Henrik informed the Danish anti-piracy outfit Antipiratgruppen that he had broken the DRM on more than one hundred legally-purchased DVD movies and TV shows for use on his home media center, an act forbidden – but seemingly also allowed – under Danish laws, both detailed below;

12.–(1) Anyone is entitled to make or have made, for private purposes, single copies of works which have been made public if this is not done for commercial purposes. Such copies must not be used for any other purpose.

§ 75 c. It is not permitted without the consent of the rightholder to make circumvention of effective technological measures

“I’ve started this because I don’t want to be a criminal,” Henrik told us, in his own similarly and deliberately contradictory way, noting that he’d requested a response from the group by today, December 1st 2009, indicating whether or not they intend to prosecute him.

However, in the period up to today, Henrik heard nothing from Antipiratgruppen, although their lawyer Thomas Schlüter did speak to the Danish press, saying that it was a political matter but had nevertheless reported the issue to the Association of Danish Videodistributors for consideration. In response, their chairman, Poul Dylov, said they would have a meeting to decide whether to report the matter to the police.

Antipiratgruppen said it would reply to Henrik by they date he requested. It seems they have broken their promise.

“Today was the last chance for the anti-piracy group to come up with an answer,” Henrik told TorrentFreak a few minutes ago. “And although, as you know, they told the press that they would give me an answer before the 1st of December, they have not done that.”

Henrik told us that even though he has broken the law, Antipiratgruppen doesn’t seem interested in responding. “They are obviously aware that there will be an outrage if they reported me to the police,” he points out.

The other possibility, he says, is that Antipiratgruppen themselves don’t see his actions as illegal – but this creates another problem. The Ministry of Culture have already written to Henrik informing him that breaking DRM in this way is against the law.

Clearly frustrated, Henrik told us: “But who should I follow? Those that determine the laws in this country? Or those who are lawyers for the companies that i’m committing a crime against?”

But Henrik has a solution to their inaction.

“I decided to try to see if I can report myself directly to the police, for the case must be resolved,” he told us.

Henrik feels that the situation he is trying to draw attention to can only be solved by him going to trial. Hopefully then the Minister for Culture and the Danish parliament will see that the law has to be changed.

Source: Anti-Piracy Group Refuses Bait, DRM Breaker Goes To Police

Less than a month after it was launched the office has already seized more than 4 million pirated teaching materials. As a result a massive 182 printing companies were shut down as well as 100,000 stalls where the illegal teaching materials were sold.

“The situation of illegal publications is generally under control… However, pirate issue is still obvious. Those pirated teaching materials especially harm the healthy development of the country’s youth,” Li Baozhong, vice director of the National Anti-Pornography and Anti-Illegal Publications Office, said at a press conference earlier this week.

Baozhong did not elaborate on how knowledge and education will harm children’s health, but we assume that it has something to do with content that the Government may not approve of. How educational materials could hurt one’s health remains a mystery though.

China is of course known for its censorship and notoriously blocks websites that may ‘harm’ its citizens including Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook. Interestingly, BitTorrent sites have never been targeted and almost all of the are still accessible today.

Source: Pirated Teaching Materials Threaten Health of China’s Youth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: DRM On a USB Drive: Now Just $29

“We’ve reviewed µMonitor and determined that we cannot post this version of your application to the App Store at this time because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store,” Apple wrote to the developer after a 4 month review process.

This is not the first time that Apple has excluded a BitTorrent-related product from its store. In May they also banned an application designed to remotely-control the Transmission BitTorrent client for the same reasons outlined above.

Interestingly Apple has no problem allowing Usenet related applications in their store. myNZB for example is an application that is available from the App Store although it’s similar in functionality to the BitTorrent apps that were rejected.

Despite Apple’s blockade, there is still a way to get µMonitor on your iPhone. Instead of throwing months of hard work overboard, µMonitor’s developer has recently decided to bypass the Apps Store and make the application available to ‘jailbroken’ iPhone users from the Cydia repository.

Thanks to Apple, uTorrent users who want to control their torrent via an iPhone application have no other option than to jailbreak their phone. Detailed instructions on how to get µMonitor working on your phone can be found on Claudio’s website.

Source: uTorrent iPhone App Rejected by Apple, Goes Underground

“DRM serves all sorts of pro-consumer purposes,” he said at the time, without going into detail about the alleged benefits.

However, in the year that followed the numbers of consumers calling for DRM-free music increased and more labels and music services started to offer music without digital restrictions. Still, the RIAA was not convinced that there could be a future without it, and predicted a comeback for DRM last year.

Quite the opposite happened. Although DRM is still present in the majority of the legal music stores, most of the big players have decided to ditch it. Most importantly Apple announced in early 2009 that all music sold via the iTunes store would be free of DRM. This time even the RIAA doesn’t believe that it can be resurrected.

Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA declared DRM dead, when he was asked about the RIAA’s view on DRM for an upcoming SCMagazine article. “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Lamy said, referring to the DRM-less iTunes store and other online outfits that now offer music without restrictions.

Update July 20: Yes, it seemed to good to be true and it is. We just learned the the RIAA never used the word dead in its reply to the reporter. Lamy told TorrentFreak that he only said that there is almost no DRM on (downloaded) music anymore nowadays. In other (our) words: it’s an endangered species, not extinct.

When the most vocal forefighters of DRM say so, it must be for real. Although this is the first time that the RIAA have actually said on record that DRM is dead, other players in the music industry have seen the light before them. Most notable IFPI, who said earlier this year that stripping DRM would “significantly boost download sales.”

In this we have to agree with them. All DRM has ever done is annoy consumers who actually paid for their music. No single piece of DRM has ever stopped anyone from pirating music, it’s quite the opposite as the music industry now realizes.

Source: DRM is ****, RIAA Says

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.

Source: MediaDefender Virus Scam Targets Torrent Site Users

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Soulseek P2P Application Vulnerable to Remote Takeover

Quite common by now are the watermarking techniques used by the studios to track down the origin of cams. Through these watermarks the theaters where the movies are recorded can be identified, and every now and then an arrest is made. Recent technological advances even make it possible to get a fairly accurate estimation of the location of the camcorder equipment using audio watermarks. These audio watermarks have not been implemented yet since they require a lot of extra paperwork in order to work well.

In a recent blog post John August, the director of hit movie The Nines, discusses some of the anti-piracy tools the movie studios are using to decrease or deter camcording in theaters. August himself has a fairly balanced view on illegal downloading. In a previous interview with TorrentFreak he said that he wouldn’t think bad of people who downloaded his movie using BitTorrent. In talks with other studio insiders, however, he discovered something that made our jaws drop.

We’ve mentioned many times before that when a movie hits the theater, or a DVD or TV show debuts in one country before it does in another, this is a major incentive for people to turn to BitTorrent. People don’t like waiting for something that other people already have, especially if the solution to that is just a few clicks away. However, instead of putting time and effort into making their content premiere globally, the studios are purposely delaying movie releases in some countries because a lot of cam releases originate there.

So, instead of working towards solving the problem, the studios are actually encouraging piracy by restricting access to millions of potential customers. Like many others, August himself acknowledges that delayed premiere dates in some locations might actually encourage people to pirate movies and TV-shows.

Instead of adding restrictions and thereby alienating their customers, the movie and TV studios should focus on dropping the release windows for their content. It may have been possible to keep people and countries apart pre-Internet, but not any more. People worldwide are closer together today than ever before – and only getting closer.

Source: Fear of Movie Piracy Delays Theater Releases

The blacklist contains around 2,400 entries and presuming that the URLs are descriptive of the material they link to, the list appears to be dominated by pornography, with a couple of legal YouTube-like adult sites making the list. Of course there are also a worrying number of sites appearing to deal with images of child abuse and no-one could seriously complain about their inclusion – but that was never really an issue.

What bothers people more are the significant number of sites on the list that don’t seemed to be linked to this type of abuse. In addition to religious sites (both pro and anti), various Wikipedia pages, euthanasia sites and a travel agent, a dentist’s website even made the list.

Other inclusions include several poker sites and UK-based betting site, Betfair.com, which was banned in Western Australia during January 2007. The company appealed saying the ban was unconstitutional and in March 2008 it was overruled. However, Betfair.com remains on the list.

Speaking of the leak, Australia’s Broadband and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the list is not the official ACMA blacklist. He says that while the published list has around 2,400 blocked URLs, the official ACMA blacklist contains roughly 1,050.

“There are some common URLs to those on the ACMA blacklist,” he said. “However, ACMA advises that there are URLs on the published list that have never been the subject of a complaint or ACMA investigation, and have never been included on the ACMA blacklist,” he said.

Censorship of any type can lead to claims of undemocratic behavior and as discussion over these blacklists grew during recent months, there were concerns that many torrent sites would end up being blocked as the ‘system’ short-cutted ineffective copyright law, but it appears that this has not come about on a significant scale.

However, two BitTorrent sites – the now-defunct TorrentSpy.com and TorrentFive.com – both appear on the leaked list but it’s impossible right now to say if they appear on the ‘real’ ACMA list. There is no indication why these sites are marked to be blocked, but presumably at some point someone objected to some content indexed. Neither site operated a tracker so banning the sites’ URLs would not achieve much, since the content would be already available elsewhere – the sites in question offered an index, much like Google.

TorrentFreak itself is no stranger to being included on various blocklists, even though the site operates completely legally. We have no proof why companies, schools and other organizations would add us to their blocklists, but suspect that it’s purely because we have ‘torrent’ in our URL. And here lies the problem.

The worry remains that without overview and without those that maintain these blacklists being held to account, many other legal sites could have their domains blocked too. It’s just a shame that the only way people can find out if they are blocked is if individuals leak these lists for all to see – then of course the lists become a magnet for those drawn to illegal, sickening content. It really is a double-edged sword.

Hopefully no more torrent sites will be added to these blacklists – the censorship of criminal material they conduct themselves is more than sufficient and the torrent community is as keen as everyone else to keep their sites safe for all.

Source: Torrent Sites End Up on Aussie Blacklist

A Google search on the same pages returns, “This site may harm your computer.”

So what exactly is the problem? TorrentFreak spoke with Peter Sunde (brokep) who told us that right now they don’t have a clear idea of what is causing the problem although they are working hard on fixing it. Current thinking by some says that the problems are being caused by malicious ads from third parties which are embedded in the site.

Google has made its own analysis and is reporting that the /user sections of the TPB site were listed once for suspicious activity, yesterday 14th March 2009. Of 699 pages tested, it found that 2 pages resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. Google goes on to say that the malicious software includes 68 scripting exploits although they report that a successful infection resulted in zero new processes on the target machine.

The malicious software in question is said to be hosted on 3 domains; savelocity.com, seekerfeed.com, and xoads.com, with another 6 reported as distribution intermediaries including parkneed.com, yieldmanager.com and zxxds.net.

This type of problem is nothing new on torrent sites. Last year we reported how Google and Firefox blocked Empornium, the world’s largest porn tracker, when they suffered similar problems at the hands of outsiders. Just yesterday, the h33t.com torrent site suffered a similar problem, but that now appears to be fixed after we tipped off the staff there.

We will add to this post during the day to include the latest updates.

Source: The Pirate Bay User Pages Blocked by Google, Firefox

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.

Source: Fake aXXo Torrents Bombard BitTorrent

To resolve the issue Mark contacted Nuance’s support. To his surprise however, they didn’t want to help him straight away, instead asking him to take pictures of the CD in order to prove that the company owned a legitimate copy.

“I couldn’t believe my ears,” Mark told TorrentFreak. “After arguing with support for a while on how ridiculous it was, I still had to have the license within the day. To make a long story short I finally got them to unlock 2 licenses after 2 days of repeated calls and sending the picture of the CD multiple times.”

Upset at how he was treated by customer support, Mark decided to send an email to Nuance’s CEO Paul Ricci to inform him that alienating customers like this is not going to help him sell more products. The picture of the CDs that Mark had to supply was also sent to Ricci.

Dear Mr Ricci,

Our company has been using your product for nearly a decade. We have estimated that it is safe to say we have spent $3000 over the years on your product. We are by far not the biggest customer but in today’s economy we think every customer counts. We recently bought several PaperPort 11 licenses which we have used. We have upgraded our computers and the procedure is to uninstall paper port (While online) in order to free a license for the new computer. Sadly this did not work. My efforts at consulting with your technical support department were very time consuming, confusing, and ultimately pointless. To my surprise, they wanted me to take a PICTURE of the CDs we have. As an IT professional, I found this archaic exercise in futility to be absolutely appalling. Not only do your anti-piracy methods completely fail (There is no known anti-piracy method that works to this day, anything can be downloaded) but they cost me; the legitimate customer time and frustration. Attached is the picture I had to send in. This is to let you know that we are completely disgusted with your company’s procedures, and are no longer going to do any business with Nuance.

Just to let you know, being a computer engineer, I can guarantee you these statistics:

Pirates Stopped = 0
Legitimate Customers totally alienated = Thousands.

You may want to take a look at your stock trends of late, Mr. Ricci. Perhaps this poor customer service MIGHT explain some of that.

Ricci received the email in good order, and passed it on to the chief marketeer at Nuance, who wrote back to Mark. “I appreciate your note and will use it as a flashpoint for us to reevaluate this processes that you have correctly pointed out as archaic,” was his reply, and he offered some free copies of PaperPort, PDF and OmniPage “as a gesture of goodwill.”

Nuance has clearly recognized that they made a mistake and although it’s probably too late for some customers, we hope they’ve learned from it. Mark said that in hindsight his email to Ricci might have been a little bit over the top. But, it did make them realize that they were making a mistake, asking people to take pictures of their CDs.

“I was very upset and under a lot of pressure. My job is to solve problems in the quickest amount of time.. and taking pictures of CD’s or sticking them in a copier isn’t something anyone should ever have to do with their software,” Mark said.

“It just doesn’t make sense.”

Source: How To Turn Customers Into Pirates

There were mixed opinions on the news. Some thought that it was great that there was an increased potential for a flood of cracked iPhone software, but a significant number of people expressed concerns that software developers would shy away from the format if they couldn’t guarantee a revenue stream.

Of course, the piracy/anti-piracy cat-and-mouse game was inevitable and today a new DRM system has been launched by Ripdev, promising to thwart those pesky iPhone pirates.

iPhone developer Ripdev says that its new ‘Kali Anti-Piracy’ system has been in development for some months now and today sees its official ‘beta’ launch. Ripdev acknowledges it has become trivial now for anyone to become a “cool hax0r” by cracking iPhone app DRM and distributing the results worldwide, but believes that with Kali, it has the answer.

According to Ripdev, the Kali system is a server-side service which can take any App Store application and place it inside another protection wrapper which, Ripdev claim, will prevent it from being pirated. Claimed to be fully compliant with the Apple iPhone SDK, Ripdev says that Kali-protected apps meet Apple’s approval process. The company adds that it has been protecting its own software (such as Kate, i2Reader Pro, iPref and Installer) with it for months and no-one has yet cracked any of them.

There is a one-off charge for developers to start using the system. If they sell their app for $9.99 or less it’s $100. Over $9.99 and it goes up to $300. Ripdev are also taking additional ‘royalties’ for each copy protected with Kali (in order to “keep the hackers on their toes”) of between 1% and 5% of the developer’s 70% cut.

Ripdev also has a message for would-be pirates;

“Expect more and more apps to be much, much harder to crack in the near future. ;)”

The trouble is that sounds awfully like a challenge. I’d put money on that being taken up. Quickly.

Source: New iPhone App DRM Claims to Thwart Pirates

The DRM in question involves a certificate with a hardcoded date – January 28 2009 – as its time to expire. Now that this certificate has expired the game will not load, giving the following error message.

[installpath]\Gears of War\Binaries\wargame-g4wlive.exe: You cannot run the game with modified executable code. Please reinstall the game

Of course, reinstallation does nothing, as the certificate has still expired. Of greater interest is why there is a certificate with expiration date in the game at all, especially as it’s expired just 15 months after the games release.

After this was pointed out on Epic’s forums, joeGraf, a ‘super moderator’ (and presumably staff member of Epic) stated that they are now aware of this, and “are working with Microsoft to get it resolved.” Just what form that resolution will take is also not clear; be it an updated certificate with later date, an open ended certificate, or removing such certificates. If a new dated certificate is issued, then it can only be expected that we will have the same problems again when it too expires.

This may also raise a question mark over other ‘Games for Windows’ titles released since Gears of War – which include Crysis and Grand Theft Auto IV – over their inclusion of such certificates, but only time will tell.

In the meantime, those of you that wish to play can do so by setting your system date back to January 27 or earlier. Also, in between playing, remember you can drop the FTC a line and tell them about this experience with DRM.

DRM only usually punishes legitimate purchasers, so this screw up with Gears of War is quite unique. We’ve just discovered that the pirated ‘razor1911′ release is also affected, meaning that it’s taken down every copy available. Great work. It must be well hidden if the usually alert crackers didn’t spot it, begging the question “how many more games have an expiration date?”

Source: DRM Jams the Gears of War: Crysis and GTA IV Next?

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.

Source: BitTorrent Scam Shutdown After SMS Regulations Breach

The story is the same everywhere; DRM has been a hindrance to those who encounter it on original product. However, it is not a hindrance to those that obtain their media via torrents and other peer-to-peer methods, since the files traded on the net don’t contain DRM. These versions are free from restrictions, and that is one of the reasons why Spore was pirated so often.

With DRM having gotten such bad press in general, and probably after receiving lots of complaints, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided to learn more about it. It has announced a town hall meeting, to take place at the University of Washington Law School, in Seattle. The meeting, which will take place in late March, will also be webcast online.

More unusually, to those who have experienced government meetings on these sorts of topics, they’re adopting a very open policy. Not only are they accepting submissions for consideration, but the panelists are not set. In fact, they’re openly accepting requests from those wishing to be panelists, saying they’ll be selecting based on qualifications and the various perspectives. The deadline for responses on both of these is January 30th though, so TorrentFreak readers eager to get involved had better not hang around.

The FTC has discussed DRM before. In 2006, as part of a conference titled “Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade”, there was a panel discussion into DRM and its impact on consumers. Some argued it was good for consumers, allowing them to pay a reduced price for limited access – such as a book someone would only read once (clearly someone hadn’t heard about libraries). Others pointed to a study saying people would pay more for products without DRM, highlighting the fact that prior to DRM, they didn’t have to pay more. Quote of that event though, was Microsoft’s Andrew Moss, who said “What [DRM] is intended to do is give people choices”. Unfortunately, where DRM is concerned, that choice is usually centered around the decision to pirate rather than buy.

The agenda for the new meeting indicates that it will not be plain sailing for those touting DRM. It mentions the burdens on consumers, before it mentions any benefits. That alone should set warning bells ringing in the offices of DRM manufacturers up and down the country. It may be that 2009 will bring the technological change many have hoped for, with common sense finally triumphing over corruption, and giving consumers what they want, not the scraps that copyright owners want to toss them.

Source: DRM Troubles Lead to FTC Discussion