TorrentFreak

US authorities have resumed “Operation In Our Sites” and have seized several domain names associated with copyright infringement or counterfeit related crimes. Among the new targets are two sites that linked to copyrighted films hosted on third party streaming sites such as megavideo.com and veoh.com. Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has yet to officially announce the new operation.

Exactly a week ago, French anti-piracy company Trident Media Guard experienced a security breach after they failed to properly secure their servers. As reports begin to surface that TMG intend to sue the alleged ‘hacker’, the target of their intentions informs TorrentFreak that having backed themselves into a corner, the company will not take legal action against him.

Following a weekend security breach at Trident Media Guard, the outfit spearheading data collection for France’s 3 strikes anti-piracy drive, the country’s HADOPI agency has severed interconnection with the company. This means that, pending an enquiry, French file-sharers are no longer being tracked, a major embarrassment for the government.

The private company entrusted to carry out file-sharing network monitoring for the French government has been hacked. Trident Media Guard, which is responsible for gathering data for so-called 3 strikes warnings, now has some of its scripts and secrets out in the wild, an event which has the potential to upset the smooth of Hadopi.

Former ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley has been fined by the Information Commissioner’s Office for allowing the details of around 6,000 Internet users to be leaked onto the Internet. However, since Crossley has pleaded poverty his £200,000 fine was reduced to £1,000. Interesting, particularly since TorrentFreak has seen documents which show Crossley as jointly owning a house worth £750,000.

Internet censorship is a hot topic in 2011, but also one that reveals the disturbing double-standards of politicians and governments around the world. This week U.S. Senator Dick Durbin sent China’s largest search engine a letter asking them to stop censoring their search results. A noble attempt, but at the same time U.S. politicians are encouraging Google to censor piracy related terms from their search results.

Geremi Adam, the movie cammer for the Scene release group ‘maVen’, will go down in history as a grand master of his art. Despite difficulties in pinning a crime on him, eventually Adam was arrested. According to a cable released by Wikileaks, that arrest was carried out as “a personal favor” to a movie industry official, setting off a tragic chain of events which would ultimately lead to Adams’ death.