However, since last week some random person managed to gain control over the page’s administration.

“Last Thursday FilesTube fanpage on facebook was hacked. We call all the fans and people who care about our site to help us to stop the hackers who are posting on our fanpage without any rights,” FilesTube writes on its blog.

FileTube staff told TorrentFreak that they have no idea how it happened. Thus far they have been unable to get in touch with Facebook to resolve the issue.

As a last resort, the search engine now turns to its users to resolve the issue.

FilesTube asks its “fans” to report the issue and the person who allegedly hijacked the page via Facebook’s feedback system.

More details are available at the FilesTube blog.

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

Founded in 2007, the Polish-operated site is the largest meta-search engine for content hosted on cyberlockers such as Hotfile, 4Shared and Mediafire. FilesTube refers a significant amount of traffic to these sites, but not all of them are very happy about it.

In fact, Mediafire don’t want to be indexed at all, took action to block all incoming traffic from FilesTube last month.

“As a private service MediaFire was never designed to be indexed which is why we don’t have an index,” Mediafire co-founder Tom Langridge explains to TorrentFreak.

“Our meta tags for file access are set to not-indexable and services like Google, Bing and other search engines honor this. FilesTube was not honoring this and thus we were forced to block them.”

While the decision makes sense from Mediafire’s point of view, it would be naive not to relate the recent change to the increased debate about the legality of cyberlockers’ business models. After the Megaupload raids and arrests Mediafire and other file-hosting services have been publicly scrutinized by Hollywood.

Mediafire was among the five cyberlockers labeled as rogue sites by the movie studios recently. Mediafire was quick to refute the allegations and emphasize that they run a perfectly legitimate business.

This week the debate continues when RapidShare published a set of guidelines cyberlockers should follow to deter mass-copyright infringement.

While we assume Mediafire’s recent change is in part aimed at deterring infringement, it is no silver bullet.

The FilesTube block stops users from clicking through to Mediafire, but it doesn’t prevent links being indexed, as FilesTube gathers this information from third-party sources. This means that FilesTube users can still find content on MediaFire, but instead of clicking on a direct link they have to manually paste the URL in their browsers.

FilesTube points out this workaround on their Facebook page.

Update: The article was updated to make clear that Mediafire made these changes last month.

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

On the list were the usual suspects including Pirate Bay, MegaUpload, MegaVideo, DepostFiles and PutLocker. Now it appears that another has been added – cyberlocker search site FilesTube.com.

“We were extremely surpised when we received information from our fans in Malaysia that we were blocked,” a FilesTube spokesperson told TorrentFreak. “We do not host files but we act like a search engine, like Google.”

As reported in our earlier article, FilesTube is no stranger to censorship. The service’s URL was blocked by Yahoo! Messenger.

“Our statement is clear: we can not believe that the freedom of speech on the Internet is not observed. Malaysia is a big and civilized country but they are starting to act like China,” FilesTube add.

To this end FilesTube have activated a new domain – FilesTube.me – so that Malaysians can circumvent the blockade of the .com domain.

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

Although this might sound like a good idea to some, Yahoo! appears to disagree. Those who try to paste a FilesTube link to their contacts in the Messenger app will notice that it never reaches its destination. The link goes directly into Yahoo’s dark hole and neither end of the conversation is alerted to this “feature”.

For those not familiar with the site, FilesTube is arguably the largest meta-search engine for content hosted on cyberlockers. Founded in 2007, the Polish-operated search engine serves millions of users every day, and this number is on the up.

The big question of course is why Yahoo! Messenger users are prohibited from sending their contacts links to the site. FilesTube is merely a meta-search engine and does not host any content on its servers. It even abides by the U.S. DMCA by honoring takedown requests from copyright holders.

TorrentFreak contacted Yahoo! to try and shed some light on the issue, but since we haven’t heard back yet all we can do at this point is speculate. Theoretically there could be a non-copyright related reason for the blocking, but we have failed to come up with one. On the other hand, in tests where we sent our contacts links to similar sites did not produce the same results, which is odd.

Although not very logical, such a selective censorship attempt would not be entirely new. Just a few months ago Google decided to arbitrarily block a few piracy related keywords from their “instant” and “suggest” features while leaving direct and just as popular alternatives unharmed.

Whatever the reason is for Yahoo! monitoring private conversations and then swallowing FilesTube links, censorship is an up and coming tool that will be used increasingly to protect the interests of the entertainment industries. It complements other indirect but effective anti-piracy strategies, and despite the constitutional issues that may arise, the anti-piracy lobby will not rest before their goals are completed.

Update: Arkadiusz Senko, CEO of Red – Sky, the owner FilesTube got back to us with the following message:

“I was surprised to have adopted information about blocking FilesTube.com by Yahoo Messenger. FilesTube.com is a legal search engine, meets all the legal requirements of both European and American. We are shocked by Yahoo Messenger to censor the Internet, and thus the actions of our users who use FilesTube.com for legal media. We would like to point out that we also have a video section, where the aggregated videos from YouTube or Dailymotion are placed. It seems to us that Yahoo has taken action to block links to competing sites. In such a situation it lefts us nothing but to recommend users to use other instant messengers, respectful of freedom of the Internet. You can find the alternatives for Yahoo Messenger on our new search engine alternative.to.”

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