After traveling 200 miles from their London base, PIPCU officers were assisted by Greater Manchester Police in raid carried out on a residential address in the Cheetham Hill area.

Their target was Zain Parvez, a 27-year-old whom police believed was the operator of a series of websites (CoolSport.se, CoolSport.tv and KiwiSportz.tv) which allegedly offered unauthorized access to subscription-only TV services, including matches from the Premier League.

Following Parvez’s arrest, police used the word “industrial” to describe the scale of the operation, having seized 12 servers said to have illegally streamed sports globally. The picture below was released to the press to underline the gravity of the situation.

Instead of releasing him on bail, Parvez was kept in custody under suspicion of offenses under the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988, engaging in money laundering, conspiracy to defraud and possessing or controlling an article for use in fraud.

But now, six weeks later, a surprising development appears to have undermined the case. After an appearance before magistrates the case went to Manchester Crown Court, at which point it was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

“Following consultations with the CPS, a decision has been made to cease the initial charges put before the court in relation to a man arrested by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit on September 1 in Manchester,” a PIPCU spokesperson said.

PIPCU says the investigation into Parvez’s alleged operation is still ongoing but with all the main charges now dropped, it’s unclear where the case can now go.

Parvez’s detention marked the third occasion an alleged streaming site operator had been arrested in the UK, but to date there has been no news of a successful prosecution.

The domains previously operated by Parvez are now all redirecting to a suspicious-looking site promoting Alibaba share deals, not City of London Police’s ‘seized site’ banner as previously might have been expected.

TorrentFreak contacted Parvez for comment and will update this article with any response.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In move reminiscent of the RIAA’s war on the public during the last decade, hundreds of thousands of Internet users are now receiving demands for cash settlements after allegedly downloading and sharing copyright-infringing content.

Alongside traditional ‘trolls’ such as the now-infamous Malibu Media, US-based Rightscorp Inc. has been recruiting copyright holders to pursue alleged pirates for relatively modest sums. As previously reported, in emails sent via their ISPs, subscribers are asked for $20.00 to settle copyright complaints.

One of the more recent additions to the Rightscorp fold is US-based entertainment company Miramax. The distributor has hundreds of movies in its catalog, with the image below representing just a tiny sample.

As can be seen top right, the Tarantino classic Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a Miramax title and one that is now being handled by Rightscorp. The company has been sending out cash demands to alleged sharers via their ISPs and some have taken to file-sharing sites including The Pirate Bay to send warnings to other potential downloaders.

“I got [a settlement demand] sent to me recently via email. This file is being tracked,” a user of the Pirate Bay explained.

Tracing back the details the user posted in the comments section of a Blu-ray ‘YIFY’ release led TF to the relevant settlement page on the Rightscorp website. As shown below, the company wants $20.00 to settle the case.

The extent to which Miramax has exposed its hundreds of other titles to Rightscorp is currently unknown, but in the particular case detailed above the company won’t be picking up any cash. The settlement page is yet to be filled in suggesting that the recipient simply ignored the demand which, incidentally, was sent to his ISP Charter Communications.

And here lies the problem. Although Rightscorp currently claims to have “closed” 100,000 infringement cases, in the majority of instances recipients are free to ignore the company’s demands since their identities remain a mystery to the anti-piracy outfit.

While thousands have undoubtedly paid up, the company refuses to reveal what percentage do not. Even investors on a recent conference call with the company were told the figures were a trade secret.

While companies like Miramax are testing out the cheap settlement option, there are signs that investor confidence could be much better. Since the company went public (NASDAQ) late 2013, the trend after the first quarter of 2014 is all downhill, with a particularly steep drop off at the end of last month.

The $20 request is an attractive amount for people to put a complaint completely behind them, and Rightscorp clearly know that, but discussions on community sites suggest that file-sharers are beginning to realize that paying up a few bucks might only be the beginning.

Rightscorp often send users a $20 claim for a single track and then once that amount is paid their target discovers that they’re on the hook for the rest of the songs on the album they downloaded, at $20 per track thereafter.

Only time will tell if the Rightscorp strategy will pay off, but if the company finds itself in worsening conditions it wouldn’t be a surprise if the amounts demanded for settlement begin to increase, alongside an even more aggressive pay-up-or-else tone.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

But in early 2012, following a huge backlash from the public and technology sector, the dream turned into a nightmare. SOPA was not only dead and buried, but Hollywood had made new enemies and re-ignited old rivalries too.

In the period since the studios have been working hard to paint the technology sector not as foes, but as vital partners with shared interests common goals. The aggressive rhetoric employed during the SOPA lobbying effort all but disappeared and a refocused, more gentle MPAA inexplicably took its place.

Yesterday, in ongoing efforts to humanize the behind-the-scenes movie making industry as regular people out to make a living, “Beyond the Red Carpet: TV & Movie Magic Day” landed on Capitol Hill.

Among other things, the event aimed to show lawmakers that those involved in the movie making process are not only vital to the economy, but are the real victims when it comes to piracy. The message is laid out in this infographic from the Creative Rights Caucus.

As co-chair of the caucus, U.S. Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif. will be hoping to maintain momentum on issues such as tax incentives to keep film production in California, but yesterday the words of MPAA CEO Chris Dodd provided the most food for thought.

In comments to The Wrap, Dodd said that the MPAA is no longer seeking anti-piracy legislation from Congress.

“The world is changing at warp speed. We are not going to legislate or litigate our way out of it,” Dodd said.

For an organization that has spent more than a decade and a half tightening up ‘Internet’ copyright law in its favor, the admission is certainly a notable one, especially when the favored alternatives now include winning hearts and minds through education.

“We are going to innovate our way out by educating people about the hard work of people,” the MPAA CEO said.

“In this space everyone has to contribute to ensure that peoples’ content can be respected. Instead of finger pointing at everybody and arresting 14-year olds, the answer is making our product accessible in as many formats and distributive services as possible at price points they can afford. We are discovering that works.”

This tacit admission, that the industry itself has contributed to the piracy problems it faces today, is an interesting move. Over in Australia content providers and distributors have also been verbalizing the same shortcomings and they too have offered promises to remedy the situation.

But the development of new services doesn’t exist in a vacuum and time and again, across the United States to Europe and beyond, the insistence by Hollywood is that for legal services to flourish, use of pirate sources must be tackled, if not through legislation, by other means.

And here’s the key. Successfully humanizing the industry with lawmakers will provide Hollywood with much-needed momentum to push along its agenda of cooperation with its technology-focused partners.

ISPs will be encouraged to engage fully with the six-strikes “educational” program currently underway across America and advertising companies and big brands will be reminded to further hone their systems to keep revenue away from pirate sites.

But perhaps the more pressing efforts will entail bringing companies like Google on board. Voluntary agreements with the search sector can certainly be influenced by those on Capitol Hill, but with Google’s insistence that Hollywood moves first, by providing content in a convenient manner at a fair price, the ball is back in the movie industry’s court.

Dodd, however, is now promising just that, so things should start to get interesting. And in the meantime the MPAA can continue to fund groups such as the Copyright Alliance, a non-profit which regularly testifies before Congress on copyright and anti-piracy matters and of which the MPAA is a founding member.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

To prevent their IP-addresses from being visible to the rest of the Internet, millions of people have signed up to a VPN service. Using a VPN allows users to use the Internet anonymously and prevent snooping.

Unfortunately, not all VPN services are as anonymous as they claim.

Following a high-profile case of an individual using an ‘anonymous’ VPN service that turned out to be not so private, TorrentFreak decided to ask a selection of VPN services some tough questions.

By popular demand we now present the third iteration of our VPN services “logging” review. In addition to questions about logging policies we also asked VPN providers about their stance towards file-sharing traffic, and what they believe the most secure VPN is.

Last update: October 7, 2014 (added partial Russian translation)

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1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you to match an IP-address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold and for how long?

2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?

3. What tools are used to monitor and mitigate abuse of your service?

4. In the event you receive a DMCA takedown notice or European equivalent, how are these handled?

5. What steps are taken when a valid court order requires your company to identify an active user of your service?

6. Is BitTorrent and other file-sharing traffic allowed on all servers? If not, why?

7. Which payment systems do you use and how are these linked to individual user accounts?

8. What is the most secure VPN connection and encryption algorithm you would recommend to your users?

—

What follows is the list of responses from the VPN services, in their own words. Providers who didn’t answer our questions directly or failed by logging everything were excluded. Please note, however, that several VPN companies listed here do log to some extent. The order of the lists holds no value.

Private Internet Access

1. We absolutely do not log any traffic nor session data of any kind, period. We have worked hard to meticulously fork all daemons that we utilize in order to achieve this functionality. It is definitely not an easy task, and we are very proud of our development team for helping Private Internet Access to achieve this unique ability.

2. We operate out of the US which is one of the few, if only, countries without a mandatory data retention law. We explored several other jurisdictions with the help of our professional legal team, and the US is still ideal for privacy-based VPN services.

We severely scrutinize the validity of any and all legal information requests. That being said, since we do not hold any traffic nor session data, we are unable to provide any information to any third-party. Our commitment and mission to preserve privacy is second to none.

3. We do not monitor any traffic, period. We block IPs/ports as needed to mitigate abuse when we receive a valid abuse notification.

4. We do not host any content and are therefore unable to remove any of said content. Additionally, our mission is to preserve and restore privacy on the Internet and society. As such, since we do not log or monitor anything, we’re unable to identify any users of our service.

5. Once again, we do not log any traffic or session data. Additionally, unlike the EU and many other countries, our users are protected by legal definition. For this reason, we’re unable to identify any user of our service. Lastly, consumer protection laws exist in the US, unlike many other countries. We must abide by our advertised privacy policy.

6. We do not discriminate against any kind of traffic/protocol on any of our servers, period. We believe in a free, open, and uncensored internet.

7. Bitcoin, Ripple, PayPal, Google Play (Mobile), OKPay, CashU, Amazon and any major Gift Card. We support plenty of anonymous payment methods. For this reason, the highest risk users should definitely use Bitcoin, Ripple or a major gift card with an anonymous e-mail account when subscribing to our privacy service.

8. We’re the only provider to date that provides a plethora of encryption cipher options. We recommend, mostly, using AES-128, SHA1 and RSA2048.

Private Internet Access website

TorGuard

1. TorGuard does not store any IP address or time stamps on any VPN and proxy servers, not even for a second. Further, we do not store any logs or time stamps on user authentication servers connected to the VPN. In this way it is not even possible to match an external time stamp to a user that was simultaneously logged in. Because the VPN servers utilize a shared IP configuration, there can be hundreds of users sharing the same IP at any given moment further obfuscating the ability to single out any specific user on the network.

2. TorGuard is a privately owned company with parent ownership based in Nevis and our headquarters currently located in the US. Our legal representation at the moment is comfortable with the current corporate structuring however we wouldn’t hesitate to move all operations internationally should the ground shift beneath our feet. We now offer VPN access in 23+ countries worldwide and maintain all customer billing servers well outside US borders.

We would only be forced to communicate with a third-party in the event that our legal team received a court ordered subpoena to do so. This has yet to happen, however if it did we would proceed with complete transparency and further explain the nature of TorGuard’s shared VPN configuration. We have no logs to investigate, and thus no information to share.

3. Our network team uses commercial monitoring software with custom scripts to keep an eye on individual server load and service status/uptime so we can identify problems as fast as possible. If abuse reports are received from an upstream provider, we block it by employing various levels of filtering and global firewall rules to large clusters of servers. Instead of back tracing abuse by logging, our team mitigates things in real-time. We have a responsibility to provide fast, abuse-free VPN services for our clients and have perfected these methods over time.

4. In the event of receiving a DMCA notice, the request is immediately processed by our abuse team. Because it is impossible for us to locate which user on the server is actually responsible for the violation, we temporarily block the infringing server and apply global rules depending on the nature of the content and the server responsible. The system we use for filtering certain content is similar to keyword blocking but with much more accuracy. This ensures the content in question to no longer pass through the server and satisfies requirements from our bandwidth providers.

5. Due to the nature of shared VPN services and how our network is configured, it is not technically possible to effectively identity or single out one active user from a single IP address. If our legal department received a valid subpoena, we would proceed with complete transparency from day one. Our team is prepared to defend our client’s right to privacy to the fullest extent of the law.

6. BitTorrent is only allowed on select server locations. TorGuard now offers a variety of protocols like http/socks proxies, OpenVPN, SSH Tunnels, SSTP VPN and Stealth VPN (DPI Bypass), with each connection method serving a very specific purpose for usage. Since BitTorrent is largely bandwidth intensive, we do not encourage torrent usage on all servers. Locations that are optimized for torrent traffic include endpoints in: Canada, Netherlands, Iceland, Sweden, Romania, Russia and select servers in Hong Kong. This is a wide range of locations that works efficiently regardless of the continent you are trying to torrent from.

7. We currently accept payments through all forms of credit or debit card, PayPal, OKPAY, and Bitcoin. During checkout we may ask the user to verify a billing phone and address but this is simply to prevent credit card fraud, spammers, and keep the network running fast and clean. After payment it is possible to change this to something generic that offers more privacy. No VPN or Proxy usage can be linked back to a billing account due to the fact we hold absolutely no levels of logging on any one of our servers, not even timestamps!

8. For best security we advise clients to choose OpenVPN connections only, and if higher encryption is called for use AES256 bit. This option is available on many locations and offers excellent security without degrading performance. For those that are looking to defeat Deep Packet Inspection firewalls (DPI) like what is encountered in countries such as China or Iran, TorGuard offers “Stealth” VPN connections in the Netherlands, UK and Canada. Stealth connections feature OpenVPN obfuscation technology that causes VPN traffic to appear as regular connections, allowing VPN access even behind the most strict corporate wifi networks or government regulated ISPs.

TorGuard website

IPVanish

1. IPVanish has a no-log policy. We keep no traffic logs.

2. IPVanish is headquartered in the US and thus operates under US law.

3. IPVanish has no monitoring in place. To elaborate, IPVanish does not sniff or monitor any user’s traffic or activity for any reason.

4. IPVanish keeps no logs of any user’s activity and responds accordingly.

5. IPVanish, like every other company, has to follow the law in order to remain in business. Only US law applies.

6. P2P is permitted. IPVanish in fact does not block or throttle any ports, protocols, servers or any type of traffic whatsoever.

7. PayPal and all major credit cards are accepted. Payments and product use are in no way linked. User authentication and billing info are help on completely different and independent platforms.

8. OpenVPN generally provides the strongest encryption algorithm, so that is the recommended encryption protocol. IPVanish also allows a choice between TCP and UDP, and UDP is generally recommended for better speed.

IPVanish website

BTGuard

1. We do not keep any logs whatsoever.

2. The jurisdiction is Canada. Since we do not have log files, we have no information to share. We do not communicate with any third parties. The only event in which we would even communicate with a third-party is if we received a court order. We would then be forced to notify them we have no information. This has not happened yet.

3. If serious abuse is reported we enable tcpdump to confirm the abuse and locate the user. These dumps are immediately removed. If the user is abusing our service they will be terminated permanently but we have never shared user information with a 3rd party.

4. We do not have any open incoming ports, so it’s not possible for us to “takedown” any broadcasting content.

5. We take every step within the law to fight such an order.

6. Yes, all types of traffic our allowed with our services.

7. We accept PayPal and Bitcoin. All payments are linked to users accounts because they have to be for disputes and refunds.

8. 256-bit AES is the most secure. However 128-bit blowfish is plenty good. If you’re concerned about surveillance agencies such as the NSA, their capabilities are shrouded in secrecy and claiming to be able to protect you is offering you nothing but speculation. As far as what’s publicly available for deciphering encryption, both of the encryptions I mentioned are more than sufficient.

BTGuard website

Privacy.io

1. We do not log any information on our VPN servers. The only scenario is if a technical issue arises, but we request permission from the user first, and we only do it for the duration of the job, and then it is removed.

2. We are in the process of moving jurisdictions away from Australia at present as we are unsure what our current government plans to do in regards to our privacy. We have not decided where yet.

3. Only SMTP port 25 is filtered to mitigate spam, but we are working on some tools to make it easier for users to send mail.

4. Any DMCA request is ignored, as we have no logs to do anything about them.

5. Same as above, as we do not log, so we are unable to provide any information. If the law attempts to make us do such things, we will move our business to a location where that cannot occur, and if that fails we will close up shop before we provide any information.

6. All protocols are allowed with our service, with the only exception of SMTP port 25 currently being filtered.

7. At present we only accept PayPal and CC (processed by PayPal), but we are looking into alternative types of payments. We go out of our way to make sure that PayPal transactions are not linked to the users, we generate a unique key per transaction to verify payment for the account is made, and then nuke that unique key. Bitcoin and Litecoin are also on the agenda.

8. At present we offer 128 bit for PPTP and 256 bit for OpenVPN, We plan to offer stronger encryption for the security conscious.

Privacy.io website

VikingVPN

1. No. We run a zero knowledge network and are unable to tie a user to an IP address.

2. United States, they don’t have data retention laws, despite their draconian surveillance programs. The only information we share with anyone is billing information to our payment gateway. This can be anonymized by using a pre-paid anonymous card. If asked to share specific data about our users and their habits, we would be unable to do so, because we don’t have any logs of that data.

3. That is mostly confidential information. However, we can assure our users that we do not use logging to achieve this goal.

4. In the event of a DMCA notice, we send out the DMCA policy published on our website. We haven’t yet received a VALID DMCA notice.

5. We exhaust all legal options to protect our users. Failing that, we would provide all of our logs, which do not actually exist. If required to wiretap a user under a National Security Letter, we have a passively triggered Warrant Canary. We would also likely choose to shut down our service and put it up elsewhere.

6. Yes. Those ports are all open, and we have no data caps.

7. We currently only take credit cards. Our payment provider is far more restrictive than we ever imagined they would be. We’re still trying to change payment providers. Fortunately, by using a pre-paid credit card, you can still have totally anonymous service from us.

8. A strong handshake (either RSA-4096+ or a non-standard elliptic curve as the NIST curves are suspect). A strong cipher such as AES-256-CBC or AES-256-GCM encryption (NOT EDE MODE). At least SHA1 for data integrity checks. SHA2 and the newly adopted SHA3 (Skein) hash functions are also fine, but slower and provide no real extra assurances of data integrity, and provide no further security beyond SHA1. The OpenVPN HMAC firewall option to harden the protocol against Man-in-the-Middle and Man-on-the-Side attacks.

VikingVPN website

IVPN

1. IVPN’s top priority is the privacy of its customers and therefor we do not store any connection logs or any other log that could be used to associate a connection to a customer.

2. IVPN is incorporated in Malta. We would ignore any request to share data unless it was served by a legal authority with jurisdiction in Malta in which case we would inform them that we don’t have the data to share. If we were served a subpoena which compelled us to log traffic we would find a way to inform our customers and relocate to a new jurisdiction.

3. We use a tool called PSAD to mitigate attacks originating from customers on our network. We also use rate-limiting in iptables to mitigate SPAM.

4. We ensure that our network providers understand the nature of our business and that we do not host any content. As a condition of the safe harbor provisions they are required to inform us of each infringement which includes the date, title of the content and the IP address of the gateway through which it was downloaded. We simply respond to each notice confirming that we do not host the content in question.

5. Assuming the court order is requesting an identity based on a timestamp and IP, our legal department would respond that we don’t have any record of the user’s identity nor are we legally compelled to do so.

6. We ‘allow’ BitTorrent on all servers except gateways based in the USA. Our USA network providers are required to inform us of each copyright infringement and are required to process our response putting undue strain on their support resources (hundreds per day). For this reason providers won’t host our servers in the USA unless we take measures to mitigate P2P activity.

7. We currently accept Bitcoin, Cash and PayPal. No information relating to a customers payment account is stored with the exception of automated PayPal subscriptions where we are required to store the subscription ID in order to assign it to an invoice (only for the duration of the subscription after which it is deleted). Of course PayPal will always maintain a record that you have sent funds to IVPN but that is all they have. If you need to be anonymous to IVPN and don’t wish to be identified as a customer then we recommend using Bitcoin or cash.

8. We recommend and offer OpenVPN using the strongest AES-256 cipher. For key exchange and authentication 4096-bit RSA keys are used.

IVPN website

PrivatVPN

1. We don’t keep ANY logs that allow us or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user our service. The only thing we log are e-mails and user names but it’s not possible to bind an activity on the Internet to a user.

2. We operate in Swedish jurisdiction. Since we do not log any IP addresses we have nothing to disclose. Circumstances doesn’t matter in this case, we have no information regarding our customers’ IP addresses and activity on the Internet. Therefore we have no information to share with any 3rd party.

3. If there’s abuse, we advise that service to block our IP in the first instance, and second, we can block traffic to the abused service.

4. This depends on the country in which we’re receiving a DMCA takedown. For example, we’ve received a DMCA takedown for UK and Finland and our response was to close P2P traffic in those countries.

5. If we get a court order to monitor a specific IP then we need to do it, and this applies to every VPN company out there.

6. Yes, we allow Torrent traffic.

7. PayPal, Payson and Plimus. Every payment has an order number, which is linked to a user. Otherwise we wouldn’t know who has made a payment. To be clear, you can’t link a payment to an IP address you get from us.

8. OpenVPN TUN with AES-256. On top is a 2048-bit DH key.

PrivatVPN website

PRQ

1. No. Wo do not log anything and we only require a working e-mail address to be a customer.

2. Swedish. We do not share information with anyone.

3. Not disclosed.

4. Put it in the trash where it belongs!

5. None, since we do not have any customer information and no logs.

6. We host anything as long as it’s not SPAM related or child porn.

7. Visa/Mastercard, Bitcoin, PayPal. No correlation between payment data and customer data.

8. We provide OpenVPN services (along with dedicated servers and other hosting services).

PRQ website

tigerVPN

1. Absolutely not! We built tigerVPN to purge all data once the transmission of a IP package was completed successfully. Its impossible to trace back any customer. On top of that we decided to use shared IPs in order to further randomize and anonymize our customers. The combination of having absolutely no logs at all and multiple customers per IP, wipes our customers digital footprint

2. We are a limited liability company in Slovakia. Slovakia does not have any data retention programs and furthermore encourage ISP’s to protect their customers privacy on the net. We are not required to share any information with 3rd party hence it would be illegal thanks to the law of telecom secrecy.

3. Since we don’t keep logs, we can’t monitor abusive behavior, which is the price for building a customer secure environment!

4. We can’t comply since we can’t identify customers, therefore it’s pointless to follow any requests. We have a specific folder for these eMails ;-)

5. Same as above. We seriously can’t tell which customer did what, when, where, at any given time.

6. It’s allowed on all servers although we gently ask our customers to use either Romania or Netherlands. Some infrastructure service providers do not want file sharing so it happened to us that we were asked to move our servers due to file sharing. We found some reliable partners in Romania and Netherlands which tolerate p2p so we kindly ask our customers to use these server parks.

7. Customers can pay with Visa, Mastercard and Debit. On top of that we also use PayPal. We use hash keys and tokens to identify a payment but it’s not logged or linked to the customer. We had to do this anyway hence we are a PCI Level 1 compliant merchant. Therefore we are not allowed to store any card or payment data with the records of our customers. These keys are pointless for anyone else so there is no chance to build a connection.

8. We offer PPTP, L2TP and OpenVPN, while out of nature OpenVPN comes with the highest encryption and algorithm. L2TP and OpenVPN are 256bit SSL encrypted while PPTP comes with a solid 128bit. Although our customers are individual and have their own sense of why and what to use, we recommend L2TP as solid protocol. It’s less geeky and more secure than PPTP, but our customers can pick any of them in all the 47 network nodes around the globe.

tigerVPN website

Mullvad

1. No. This would make both us and our users more vulnerable so we
certainly don’t. To make it harder to watch the activities of an IP address from the outside we also have many users share each address, both for IPv4 and our upcoming IPv6 support.

2. Swedish jurisdiction. Under no circumstance we will share information with a third-party. First of all we take pains to not actually possess information that could be of interest to third parties, to the extent possible. In the end there is no practical way for the Swedish government to get information about our users from us.

3. We don’t monitor our users. In the rare cases of such egregious network abuse that we can’t help but notice (such as DoS attacks) we stop it using basic network tools.

4. There is no such Swedish law that is applicable to us.

5. We make sure not to store sensitive information that can be tied to publicly available information, so that we have nothing to give out. We believe it is not possible in Swedish law to construct a court order that would compel us to actually give out information about our
users. Not that we would anyway. We started this service for political reasons and would rather discontinue it than having it work against its purpose.

6. Yes.

7. Bitcoin (we were the first service to accept it), cash (in the mail), bank transfers, and PayPal / credit cards. Payments are tied to accounts but accounts are just random numbers with no personal information attached that users can create at will. With the anonymous payments possible with cash and Bitcoin it can be anonymous all the way.

8. We use OpenVPN. We also provide PPTP because some people want it but we strongly recommend against it. Encryption algorithms and key lengths are important but often get way too much attention at the expense of other important but harder to measure things such as leaks and computer security.

Mullvad website

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

PIPCU, as the unit is known, teamed up with police in the north of England to swoop on what is being described as a major sports streaming operation.

Early Monday, some 200 miles away from London, officers teamed with police in Manchester to raid a property in Cheetham Hill. Their target was an unnamed 27-year-old said to be providing access to subscription TV services.

In their announcement, police used terms including “industrial scale” to describe the size of the operation after seizing 12 computers servers and other equipment. Police withheld the arrested man’s name and the sites involved.

The streaming operation shutdown on Mondaycredit

Yesterday, however, Zain Parvez of Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester, appeared before Manchester magistrates court charged with running the operation that was shut down earlier in the week.

Things certainly don’t look good for the 27-year-old. Not only has Parvez been charged with offenses under the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988, he also faces allegations of money laundering, conspiracy to defraud and possessing or controlling an article for use in fraud.

In respect of the names of the sites Parvez allegedly controlled, the pieces have been coming together all week but with no straightforward way of joining the dots. We can now confirm that the domains involved are CoolSport.se, CoolSport.tv and KiwiSportz.tv.

As can be seen from the Alexa data below, CoolSport.tv dropped off the radar in July with Coolsport.se immediately taking over, a domain switch that was announced on the site’s Twitter account.

Parvez, who has been in custody since his arrest, will be further detained until he appears before Manchester Crown Court on September 16.

This week’s arrest is the third involving a streaming site in the UK. Although the sites in previous actions were not announced by police, TorrentFreak previously revealed that the operator of BoxingGuru.co.uk, boxingguru.eu, boxingguru.tv and nutjob.eu was arrested during April in the north of England.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Those carrying out the attacks have a variety of motives, from extortion and blackmail to “the lulz“, and a dozen reasons in between. Often the reasons are never discovered.

During the past few days several sites involved in the unauthorized sharing of anime have been targeted by DDoS-style attacks. Swaps4 reported that Haruhichan, Tokyo Toshokan and AnimeTake were under assault from assailants unknown, although all now appear to be back online.

A far more serious situation has played out at NYAA.se, however. The site is probably the largest public dedicated anime torrent index around and after being hit with an attack last weekend it remains offline today. The attack on NYAA had wider effects too.

NYAA and leading fan-subbing site HorribleSubs reportedly shared the same hosting infrastructure so the DDoS attack took down both sites. That’s significant, not least since at the end of August HorribleSubs reported that their titles had been downloaded half a billion times.

As the image above shows it now appears that HorribleSubs has recovered (and added torrent magnet links) but the same cannot be said about NYAA. The site’s extended downtime continues with no apparent end in sight. This has resulted in a backlash from the site’s fans and somewhat inevitably accusatory fingers are being pointed at potential DDoS suspects.

As far-fetched as it might sound, one of the early suspects was the Japanese government itself. The launch of a brand new anti-piracy campaign last month in partnership with 15 producers certainly provided a motive, but a nation carrying out this kind of assault seems unlikely in the extreme.

Quickly, however, an announcement from HorribleSubs turned attentions elsewhere.

“Chill down. It’s not just us. Every famous anime sites [are] getting DDoS attacks, but that doesn’t mean this is the end,” the site’s operator wrote on Facebook.

“We have located where DDoS are coming from. It’s from ‪#‎Crunchyroll‬ and ‪#‎Funimation‬ Employees.”

Update: HorribleSubs inform TF that the Facebook page listed is “in no way managed nor affiliated with HorribleSubs and as such all opinions and views expressed on that page does not reflect the views and opinions of the HorribleSubs management.”

Funimation is an US television and film production company best known for its distribution of anime while Crunchyroll is a website and community focused on, among other things, Asian anime and manga. While both could at least have a motive to carry out a DDoS, no evidence has been produced to back up the HorribleSubs claims. That said, HorribleSubs admits that its key motivation is to annoy Crunchyroll.

“We do not translate our own shows because we rip from Crunchyroll, FUNimation, Hulu, The Anime Network, Niconico, and Daisuki,” the site’s about page reads, adding: “We aren’t doing this for e-penis but for the sole reason of pissing off Crunchyroll.”

Shortly after, attention turned to anti-piracy outfit Remove Your Media (RYM). The company works with anime companies Funimation and Viz Media, which includes the sending of millions of DMCA notices to Google. The spark came when the company published a tweet (now removed) which threatened to send “thousands” of warning letters to NYAA users once the site was back online.

This doesn’t seem like an idle threat. A few weeks ago the company posted a screenshot on Twitter containing an unredacted list of Comcast, Charter and CenturyLink IP addresses said to have been monitored infringing copyright. Due to the NYAA downtime, RYM later indicated it had switched to warning users of Kickass.to.

This involvement with anime companies combined with the warning notice statement led to DDoS accusations being directed at RYM. TorrentFreak spoke to the company’s Eric Green and asked if they knew anything about the attacks.

“The short answer is No. In fact we were waiting for [NYAA] to go back
online to begin monitoring illegal transfers again. Sorry to disappoint but we
had no involvement,” Green told TF.

Just a couple of hours ago RYM made a new announcement on Twitter, stating that the original tweet had been removed due to false accusations.

“Nyaa post deleted due to all the Ddos libel directed at this account. Infringement notices continue to ISPs, for piracy, regardless of tracker,” they conclude.

Although it’s impossible to say who is behind the attacks, it does seem improbable that an anti-piracy company getting paid to send notices would do something that is a) seriously illegal and b) counter-productive to getting paid for sending notices.

That said, it seems likely that someone who doesn’t appreciate unofficial anime sites operating smoothly is behind the attack. Who that might be will remain a mystery, at least for now.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Most of the time problems arise with companies making the odd embarrassing mistake. At other times things get more serious. Today we bring news of another mess that would’ve ordinarily flown under the radar.

On its Twitter account, Total Wipes Music Group claims to work with 800 music labels and cooperates with major digital music stores such as iTunes, Beatport and Juno. Early July the company began sending DMCA notices to Google and out of more than 15,000 URLs sent so far the majority have been rejected.

In an early notice the company asked Google to remove website pages of several of its partners including BeatPortCharts, Napster (UK and Germany), Rhapsody and TraxSource. Other notices targeted both iTunes and Apple.

In this notice, which claims to protect this content, Total Wipes launched a full frontal assault on anyone daring to use any words used in the title of their clients’ track “ROCK THE BASE & BAD FORMAT”. The results are awful.

In April this year DJ E-Z Rock, best known for the track ‘It Takes Two’ with partner Rob Base, sadly passed away. MTV, Rolling Stone and a number of news outlets all wrote about the event but in their notice Total Wipes demand that Google de-list all of their reports. They also attack a wide range of other random sites, some which dared to mention “rock” climbing and others which mentioned a rock festival on a military “base”.

For no apparent reason, another notice targeted The School of Performance and Cultural Industries at Leeds University in the UK, stopping off to admonish music mag Pitchfork Media and the evil PC gaming bloggers over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Perhaps the weirdest notice, currently being processed by Google, sees the music outfit target a wide range of sites with the word ‘coffee’ in their URLs. Cariboucoffee, cartelcoffeelab, clivecoffee, coavacoffee, coffee.org, coffeeandtealtd, coffeebean and coffeegeek are just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Quite what Ikea, Walmart, Fair Trade and Dunkin Donuts did to warrant inclusion is a mystery, but our money is on their connections to coffee. Github’s crime will be revealed in due course.

The end result is that Google has rejected what appears to be the lions’ share of more than 15,000 URLs sent by Total Wipes, even those that appear to target well-known ‘pirate’ sites.

There are far too many URLs for us to check individually but some poor soul at Google is probably going to have to do just that. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As the world’s leading search engine, Google receives millions of DMCA-style notices every week. Its internal systems, both automated and human-reviewed, then attempt to assess the validity of the notices before removing URLs from its indexes.

What these notices all have in common is that they refer to infringements that have already taken place, since that’s the nature of a takedown. However, a notice that recently appeared in Google’s Transparency Report reveals that for at least one organization, looking into the future is now also on the agenda.

The notice was sent by an anti-piracy company working on behalf of World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE as it’s more commonly known. The notice aimed to tackle piracy of a WWE Event titled Money In The Bank 2014, which took place on June 29, 2014. However, the notice was sent to Google two days before, on June 27.

“The following links infringe on WWE’s copyrighted Pay Per View event Money In The Bank 2014, set to air this Sunday, June 29, by one or more of the following means,” the notice begins.

WWE then sets out three potential infringements.

“Providing a link to a free (pirated) stream of this event” is misleading since it’s impossible to link to an event that hasn’t aired yet. Conceivably an advance static link could have been setup to air the event come June 29, but on June 27 the event had definitely not aired, hence no piracy.

“Providing a promise of DIRECT free streaming of this event on the identified site” seems no different from the allegation made above. It’s certainly possible that some of the sites promised to illegally stream the event, but at the date of the notice that would have been impossible.

The fact that WWE resorted to telling Google that the event’s predictions show was the source material being infringed upon shows that no actual live event infringements had yet taken place.

The final claim – “Using copyrighted images, logos and celebrity photos to promote the site” – is one that carries far more weight than the two key instances of infringement alleged above. Some of the sites listed did use WWE artwork to promote their upcoming streams, but there were some notable omissions, not least the homepage of Justin.tv. Google refused to comply in this and three other instances.

The notice from WWE, which can be viewed here, illustrates the problems faced by companies airing live events. While outfits such as WWE often know where streams and links to streams will appear once an event goes live, taking them down quickly once it actually begins may not always go as smoothly as they would like.

While attempts at a pro-active DMCA-style notice like this might work on a small scale, it’s not difficult to imagine the chaos that would ensue if all rightsholders tried to have unauthorized content removed before it even appeared online.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

First and foremost, the movie was completely unreleased meaning that private screenings aside, it had never hit a theater anywhere in the world. Getting a copy of a movie at this stage is very rare indeed. Secondly, the quality of the leaked DVD was very good indeed.

Third, and we touched on this earlier, are the risks involved in becoming part of the online distribution mechanism for something like this. Potentially unfinished copies of yet-to-be-released flicks can be a very serious matter indeed, with custodial sentences available to the authorities.

And yet this week, David Pierce, Assistant Managing Editor at The Verge, wrote an article in which he admitted torrenting The Expendables 3 via The Pirate Bay.

“The Expendables 3 comes out August 15th in thousands of theaters across America. I watched it Friday afternoon on my MacBook Air on a packed train from New York City to middle-of-nowhere Connecticut. I watched it again on the ride back. And I’m already counting down the days until I can see it in IMAX,” he wrote.

Pierce’s article, and it’s a decent read, talks about how the movie really needs to be seen on the big screen. It’s a journey into why piracy can act as promotion and how the small screen experience rarely compensates for seeing this kind of movie in the “big show” setting.

Pierce is a great salesman and makes a good case but that doesn’t alter the fact that he just admitted to committing what the authorities see as a pretty serious crime.

The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 refers to it as “the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.”

The term “making it available” refers to uploading and although one would like to think that punishments would be reserved only for initial leakers (if anyone), the legislation fails to specify. It seems that merely downloading and sharing the movie using BitTorrent could be enough to render a user criminally liable, as this CNET article from 2005 explains.

So with the risks as they are, why would Pierce put his neck on the line?

Obviously, he wanted to draw attention to the “big screen” points mentioned above and also appreciates plenty of readers. It’s also possible he just wasn’t aware of the significance of the offense. Sadly, our email to Pierce earlier in the week went unanswered so we can’t say for sure.

But here’s the thing.

There can be few people in the public eye, journalists included, who would admit to stealing clothes from a Paris fashion show in order to promote Versace’s consumer lines when they come out next season.

And if we wrote a piece about how we liberated a Honda Type R prototype from the Geneva Motor Show in order to boost sales ahead of its consumer release next year, we’d be decried as Grand Theft Auto’ists in need of discipline.

What this seems to show is that in spite of a decade-and-a-half’s worth of “piracy is theft” propaganda, educated and eloquent people such as David Pierce still believe that it is not, to the point where pretty serious IP crimes can be confessed to in public.

At the very least, the general perception is that torrenting The Expendables 3 is morally detached from picking up someone’s real-life property and heading for the hills. And none of us would admit to the latter, would we?

Hollywood and the record labels will be furious that this mentality persists after years of promoting the term “intellectual property” and while Lionsgate appear to have picked their initial targets (and the FBI will go after the initial leakers), the reality is that despite the potential for years in jail, it’s extremely unlikely the feds will be turning up at the offices of The Verge to collar Pierce. Nor will they knock on the doors of an estimated two million other Expendables pirates either.

And everyone knows it.

As a result, what we have here is a crazy confession brave article from Pierce which underlines that good movies are meant to be seen properly and that people who pirate do go on to become customers if the product is right. And, furthermore, those customers promote that content to their peers, such as the guy on the train who looked over Pierce’s shoulder when he was viewing his pirate booty.

“He won’t be the last person I tell to go see The Expendables 3 when it hits theaters in August,” Pierce wrote. “And I’ll be there with them, opening night. I know the setlist now, I know all the songs by heart, but I still want to see the show.”

Pierce’s initial piracy was illegal, no doubt, but when all is said and done (especially considering his intent to promote and invest in the movie) it hardly feels worthy of a stay in the slammer. I venture that the majority would agree – and so the cycle continues.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In 2001, that began to change with the advent of Chilling Effects, an archive created by activists who had become concerned that increasing volumes of cease-and-desist letters were having a “chilling effect” on speech.

In the decade-and-a-third that followed the archive grew to unprecedented levels, with giants such as Google and Twitter routinely sending received notices to the site for public retrieval.

However, while Chilling Effects strives to maintain free speech, several times a month rightsholders from around the world (probably unintentionally) try to silence the archive in specific ways by asking Google to de-index pages from the site.

As can be seen from the tables below, Home Box Office has tried to de-index Chilling Effects pages 240 times, with Microsoft and NBC Universal making 99 and 65 attempts respectively.

The ‘problem’ for these copyright holders is two-fold. Firstly, Chilling Effects does indeed list millions of URLs that potentially link to infringing content. That does not sit well with copyright holders.

“Because the site does not redact information about the infringing URLs identified in the notices, it has effectively become the largest repository of URLs hosting infringing content on the internet,” the Copyright Alliance’s Sandra Aistars complained earlier this year.

However, what Aistars omits to mention is that Chilling Effects has a huge team of lawyers under the hood who know only too well that their archive receives protection under the law. Chilling Effects isn’t a pirate index, it’s an educational, informational, research resource.

Thanks to Google, which routinely throws out all attempts at removing Chilling Effects URLs from its indexes, we are able to see copyright holder attempts at de-indexing.

Earlier this month, for example, Wild Side Video and their anti-piracy partners LeakID sent this notice to Google aiming to protect their title “Young Detective Dee.” As shown below, the notice contained several Chilling Effects URLs.

Each URL links to other DMCA notices on Chilling Effects, each sent by rival anti-piracy outfit Remove Your Media on behalf of Well Go USA Entertainment. They also target “Young Detective Dee”. This is an interesting situation that offers the potential for an endless loop, with the anti-piracy companies reporting each others’ “infringing” links on Chilling Effects in fresh notices, each time failing to get them removed.

The seeds of the “endless loop” phenomenon were also experienced by HBO for a while, with the anti-piracy company sending notices (such as this one) targeting dozens of Chilling Effects pages listing notices previously sent by the company.

While publishing notices is entirely legal, the potential for these loops really angers some notice senders.

On April 10 this year a Peter Walley sent a notice to Google complaining that his book was being made available on a “pirate site” without permission. Google removed the link in its indexes but, as is standard practice, linked to the notice on Chilling Effects. This enraged Walley.

None of these rantings had any effect, except to place yet another notice on Chilling Effects highlighting where the infringing material could be found.

It’s a lesson others should learn from too.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.