The music companies who asked for the blockade hope it will decrease piracy significantly, but it is doubtful whether this wish will come true.

Already we’ve seen a massive increase in traffic to proxy-websites from the UK, and this is only expected to increase during the coming days. In addition, The Pirate Bay team isn’t sitting still either. They’ve now rolled out a new site which circumvents the UK measures before they’ve even started.

In most countries where The Pirate Bay is blocked it’s done by a domain and IP-address filter. But, since TPB added a new IP-address at 194.71.107.80, blocked subscribers can access the site again without problems. At least for now that is, since in some cases the copyright holders have the power to add new domains and addresses upon request.

The Pirate Bay team is no stranger to this. However, circumventing the blockades directly is not the main reason the IP-address was added. Regular users of TPB will notice that the site hosted on the new address is slightly different from the standard site.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that the new site is setup to guarantee maximum compatibility with the many proxy sites that are out there.

“It is made so the people who setup proxies can use the new IP-address instead of coming up with complicated rewrites for static content and stuff. Instead of pointing their proxies to thepiratebay.se they should point it to that IP-address,” we were told.

Aside from making it easier to setup a proxy, the new page is also optimized for proxies in other ways. It will only show links to magnet files for example, and the login, register, comment and upload functions are disabled for security reasons.

So, even if the new IP-address is added to the various blocklists, the new site still functions as a basis for proxy sites.

The above once again shows that it’s virtually impossible to completely prevent people from accessing The Pirate Bay. There are simply too many options for people to route around the block. From visiting a proxy, to simply adding a few lines to their “hosts” file to access the site directly.

It appears that the only working option to stop people from accessing the site is to DDoS it into oblivion. But then again, that’s not really sustainable.

Source: Pirate Bay Simplifies Circumvention of ISP Blockades

In an attempt to take these proxies offline the Hollywood funded anti-piracy group BREIN obtained an injunction against one of the sites and used this to convince others to shut down as well.

The list of secondary targets included the local Pirate Party, who initially refused to give in to the demands but were later ordered to take their reverse proxy offline by the court. The Pirate Party claimed that the case against them amounted to a restriction of their freedom of speech, and sued BREIN over the order.

Today the Court of The Hague delivered its verdict, which confirms most of the earlier injunction. The Pirate Party is now forbidden from encouraging the public to circumvent the Pirate Bay blockade and from listing or hosting tools that can enable others to do so.

The Court specifically ruled that the Party’s reverse proxy has to remain offline. It was further ordered that Pirate Bay domains and IP-addresses have to be filtered from the Pirate Party’s generic proxy. In addition the Pirate Party can’t link to other websites that allow the public to bypass the blockade. These orders are only valid when paired with an encouragement to circumvent.

Should the Pirate Party fail to comply with the Court’s ruling it faces fines of €5,000 per day to a maximum penalty of €250,000.

“For many who where hoping for the law to come to the rescue of basic civil liberties, today must be a rough awakening,” Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot told TorrentFreak in a comment. “This ridiculously broad verdict allows BREIN to take down any site that is posting information that displeases their censors.”

“A first in Dutch law is that a judge has now also ordered a generic proxy to filter internet traffic as well. BREIN has created jurisprudence that will now allow them to come after any open proxy they have set their sights on.”

Pirate Bay proxies are a hot topic, and not just in the Netherlands. Last week the UK High Court also ordered local ISPs to prevent subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay website. As a result the proxy site of the UK Pirate Party became overloaded with visitors.

Whether BREIN’s equivalent in the UK will act against this and other proxies is unknown.

The ruling against the Dutch Pirate Party is the second today regarding The Pirate Bay. This morning the Court of The Hague ordered five more Dutch Internet providers to censor the torrent site. This means that pretty much all Dutch Internet users are now affected by the blockade.

The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, continues to share alternative means for blocked users to access the site. At the same time, the press attention is resulting in millions of extra visitors for the notorious BitTorrent site.

Source: Court Forbids Linking to Pirate Bay Proxies

These evils take many forms, from rich African dignitaries looking to share their wealth with strangers, to a worried ‘PayPal’ advising users to enter their username and password to ensure their accounts are still secure.

In the file-sharing world, however, things are often a little more subtle. People’s bank accounts aren’t usually emptied, but novices to the pastime are often taken for a ride for relatively small sums of money by people out to make a quick buck. Often these people take advantage of changes in the market, upsets in the status quo, and times of uncertainty to deliver their payload.

When the blockage of The Pirate Bay in the Netherlands became the hot topic in recent weeks, thousands of people were looking for ways to access the site. Inevitably lists of proxies appeared, most of which worked particularly well. But thanks to opportunists, some were problematic.

Although perhaps not technically a straightforward proxy, one site – ThePirateBay.ee (note the .ee extension) – became particularly popular. The site first appeared during the last quarter of 2011 and was an almost perfect clone of TPB with identical functionality. Intermittently, however, it pulled a sly little trick.

Sometimes the magnet / torrent links would disappear and up would come a box that wouldn’t clear until people made a ‘donation’. Seasoned Pirate Bay users aren’t so easily fooled of course, but countless others have been sucked in. TorrentFreak asked The Pirate Bay about this site and they weren’t impressed.

“Charging money for free downloads is against the whole philosophy of the internets. We do not condone anything like that. This site is a bad copy of other sites, like TPB, and it’s totally meaningless. Go for another site,” they told us.

The .EE is not the only fly in the ointment either. The Pirate Bay now say that they’ve found at least three sites charging for access. It also seems that in return the team are having a little fun at those sites’ expense.

The TPB crew say they have “re-hijacked” visitors to one and are now directing them back to their official blog. Furthermore, ThePirateBay.ee appears to have been visited by a pirate David Blaine who has made all ‘their’ content disappear.

However, just in case the .EE data reappears in a second puff of smoke, Greasemonkey users can use a couple of scripts to remove cash demands and replace them with torrent and magnet links instead. Really, though, it’s better not to use the site at all.

As the proxy wars heat up, The Pirate Bay renamed itself The Hydra Bay today, linking off its main page to PirateReverse.info, an information site dedicated to helping people to access not just TPB, but several other leading torrent sites too.

Source: Pirate Bay Slaps Pathetic Proxies and Scammy Copies

The big change now is that there’s a formalized process under the name ‘copyright alerts‘. It basically boils down to a warning system that will notify people when their connection is suspected of being used for illegal file-sharing. After six warnings the ISP may then take a variety of repressive measures, which include disconnecting the offender’s connection temporarily.

The question remains, however, whether the plan will be effective.

While there will be significant numbers of individuals who will not even realize they are being monitored until they get their first warning, others will be more savvy from the start. Somewhere down the road the two groups are likely to converge and begin mulling some of the options available which remove the risk of receiving further warnings.

These users have plenty of options to avoid the warnings.

BitTorrent proxies and VPNs appear to be the preferred way for people to remain anonymous while downloading. As these services replace a user’s home IP-address with one provided by the proxy service, tracking companies won’t be able to identify who is doing the file-sharing meaning that no copyright alerts can be sent.

A recent survey in France, where Internet users can actually lose their connection after three strikes, revealed that only 4% of the polled file-sharers said they stopped pirating. Instead, many users signed up with proxies and VPNs to avoid detection.

TorrentFreak spoke to several owners of VPN services who all report a huge increase in clients in recent years, some of which can be directly linked to news about copyright enforcement efforts. It would therefore come as little surprise if their revenues grew even more after the “six-strikes” system is rolled out in the US.

And there is another type of business that will benefit from the MPAA/ RIAA anti-piracy plan. Since the alerts system only targets P2P file-sharing, which is pretty much limited to BitTorrent in the US, it means that people who use direct download sites won’t be affected.

Over the past several years one-click download sites, or cyberlockers as some call these services, have outgrown even the largest torrent sites by number of daily visitors. As with BitTorrent sites, sites like 4Shared, RapidShare and Hotfile are also used to share copyrighted material.

But despite their ever-increasing user bases, sharing on these sites can’t be tracked by third parties. This means that their users wont receive any strikes, ever. This also means that if BitTorrent users make the switch to using cyberlocker sites to avoid receiving warnings, revenues for these companies will go up.

Similar to one-click download sites, streaming portals are becoming more and more popular. Several streaming portals are indexing links to copyrighted movies and TV-shows and millions of people use these on a daily basis. Again, outsiders can’t legally spy on the users of these sites so they don’t have to be afraid of receiving a copyright alert.

The above is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are a range of other options for ‘pirates’ to get their daily fix and bypass the six-strikes system.

We’re not saying that the copyright alert system will have no effect whatsoever, in fact, it may be quite effective in deterring a small percentage of casual ‘pirates’. However, we expect that the overwhelming majority of copyright infringers will simply take measures to avoid being caught, while continuing their downloading habits.

Source: MPAA / RIAA To Boost Cyberlocker and VPN Revenues

From SOPA to Megaupload, there is a growing uncertainly about the future of sharing.

While many BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers continue to operate as usual, there is a growing group of users who are expanding their horizons to see what other means of sharing are available if the worst case scenario becomes reality.

Anonymous, decentralized and uncensored are the key and most sought-after features. For some this means signing up with a VPN to make their BitTorrent sharing more private, but new clients are also generating interest.

Earlier this month we wrote about Tribler, a decentralized (not anonymous) BitTorrent client that makes torrent sites obsolete. We’ve covered Tribler for more than half a decade, but it was only after our most recent post that it really took off with more than a hundred thousand downloads in a few days.

But there are more file-sharing tools that are specifically built to withstand outside attacks. Some even add anonymity into the mix. RetroShare is such a private and uncensored file-sharing client, and the developers have also noticed a significant boom in users recently.

The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend.

In other words, it’s a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders.

RetroShare founder DrBob told us that while the software has been around since 2006, all of a sudden there’s been a surge in downloads. “The interest in RetroShare has massively shot up over the last two months,” he said.

“In January our downloads tripled when interest in SOPA was at its peak. It more than doubled again in February, when cyberlockers disabled sharing or shut down entirely. At the moment we are getting 10 times more downloads than in December 2011.”

RetroShare’s founder believes that there is an increased need for security, privacy and freedom among file-sharers, features that are at the core of his application.

“RetroShare is about creating a private space on the Internet. A social collaboration network where you can share anything you want. A space that is free from the prying eyes of governments, corporations and advertisers. This is vitally important as our freedom on the Internet is under increasing threat,” DrBob told TorrentFreak.

“RetroShare is free from censorship: like Facebook banning ‘obscene’ breast-feeding photographs. A network that allows you to use any pseudonym, without insisting on knowing your real name. A network where you will not face the threat of jail, or being banned from entry into a country for an innocent tweet.”

It’s impossible to accurately predict what file-sharing will look like 5 years from now. But, a safe assumption is that anonymity will play a more central role than it ever has.

Recent crackdowns have made operators of central file-sharing sites and services more cautious of copyright infringement. Some even went as far as shutting down voluntarily, like BTjunkie.

In the long run this might drive more casual downloaders to legitimate alternatives, if these are available. Those who keep on sharing could move to smaller communities, darknets, and anonymous connections.

Source: Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing is Booming

Last month, the American Assembly, a non-partisan public policy forum affiliated with Columbia University, released a paper titled “Copyright Infringement and Enforcement in the US” which came to the same conclusion. To define the local piracy culture researchers conducted 2,303 telephone interviews, and they found that roughly half of all adults can be branded a pirate.

Sharing files among friends and family is the most common form of copyright infringement, and just over 13 percent of all respondents admitted to using file-sharing software such as BitTorrent to download content. File-sharing seems to be most popular among the younger demographic as can be seen in the graph below.

A section of the report that particularly piqued our interest concerns the use of tools to hide ones IP-address online. The original report shows that about 5 percent of the general population use these tools, but we expected this figure to be significantly higher among file-sharers.

The American Assembly was kind enough to share additional data with us which confirmed this suspicion. Among the people who use file-sharing software, little over 15 percent use tools to hide their IP-address online. In other words, one in 7 file-sharers in the US is anonymous.

Further analysis reveals that in particular younger adults hide their IP-addresses. A quarter of all file-sharers between the ages of 18 and 24 say they share files anonymously, while less than 5 percent of file-sharers older than 44 years hide their IP-address.

TorrentFreak talked to several VPN and proxy providers who all say they have witnessed substantial growth throughout the past year. The leading BitTorrent VPN and proxy service BTGuard even doubled its customer-base during the past 12 months.

“BTGuard has been consistently growing since we started. Compared to 2010, we increased by around 200% in 2011. The growth has really picked up lately which I contribute to SOPA and other censorship efforts,” BTGuard’s founder says.

“We grew 25% this month. If SOPA or something similar actually passes, the flood of Internet users seeking asylum from oppression would be staggering to say the least. Hopefully that doesn’t happen, the Internet is far more important to us then business.”

This uptick is not limited to the US either. All around the world BitTorrent users have become more aware of their privacy, as a survey among Pirate Bay users recently confirmed.

Although the data obtained through the American Assembly survey says nothing about people’s motivations to download anonymously, it is indeed safe to assume that the increased talk about anti-piracy laws, copyright alerts and file-sharing lawsuits are high up the list.

In the US alone over 250,000 BitTorrent users have been sued for alleged copyright infringements because their IP-address was captured by anti-piracy outfits. And in the coming year millions of sharers are expected to receive warnings through their Internet providers as part of a deal the major ISPs struck with copyright holders to educate and punish BitTorrent users.

A promising outlook for providers of VPN and proxy services, but whether these measures will have a significant effect on the prevalence of piracy remains to be seen.

Source: 15 Percent of US File-Sharers Hide Their IP-Address, More to Folllow

The Cybernorms group researches how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are or should be reflected in relevant legislation. Ultimately, the researchers hope the collated knowledge and insights will help legislators draft more sensible laws.

In just a few days 75,000 people responded and TorrentFreak was given the opportunity to share some results on the topic of anonymity. The respondents were asked whether they use services to make their BitTorrent downloads anonymous, or whether they were interested in using such services.

The results of the survey reveal that nearly 70 percent of The Pirate Bay users utilize a VPN or proxy, or are interested in doing so in the future. Of this group 4.8 percent already use a paid service, while 13 percent use a free solution. Another 51.5 percent do not use an anonymizer service, but are interested in doing so in the future.

Only 18.4 percent of the respondents said they were not interested in appearing anonymous online, and the remaining 12.4 percent weren’t familiar with terms like VPN, or were undecided about their usefulness.

Looking at some of the regional differences a few interesting patterns appear.

Pirate Bay users from North America and Africa are most anonymous, 22.6 and 21.2 percent respectively. Within North America there are some striking differences as well. Only 14.7 percent of the Canadians use BitTorrent anonymously, versus 24.7 percent in Central U.S.

Within Europe there’s a great variation between the use of free and paid anonymizer services. In Russia free services (11.2%) are favored over paid services (1.9%), but in Northern Europe Pirate Bay users are more likely to use a paid (8.2%) than a free (7.7%) service.

The largest group that say they do not care about anonymity online can be found in Central and South America, with 27.8 percent. This group is the smallest in the U.S. and Oceania with 14.7 and 15.6 percent respectively.

Finally, we see that the more often people upload files themselves, the more likely they are to do so anonymously. Nearly a third of the Pirate Bay users who upload files nearly every day use an anonymizer service, versus 14 percent of the people who never upload files at all.

Overall, the results of the survey show that the vast majority of The Pirate Bay users do value anonymity, but that many of these users are currently not downloading and sharing anonymously. However, this could change at any time.

“We interpret this as a type of readiness by quite a lot of people in the file-sharing community to become more anonymous. This could happen when the risk of getting caught would increase or perceived as a more significant threat,”Stefan Larsson, co-founder and researcher at the Cybernorms research group told TorrentFreak.

There is definitely a large number of potential clients out there for proxy and VPN services, and with the increase of lawsuits and three-strikes policies this group may become even larger.

Source: The Pirate Bay Users Long for Anonymity

BTGuard does not have any bandwidth or volume restrictions, and while we briefly tested the service (from Europe), the speeds were almost equal to an unsecured connection. Setting it up is fairly easy, the only thing you need to do is enter the username and password provided by BTGuard, and you’re ready to go. Please note that this is only a proxy service, so the traffic between the user and the server is not encrypted, which means that ISPs can (potentially) still monitor it.

TorrentFreak asked one of the founders of the project why they launched the service, he told us: “More and more, people find their privacy being invaded on the Internet and we find it to be a very disturbing, unethical trend. There are some countries that still actively protect privacy, one of which is Canada.”

The BTGuard team decided to setup in Canada not only for privacy protection, but also its close network proximity to the US. “The US is experiencing a privacy invasion epidemic more so than most. ISPs are issuing disconnection notices with little regard for privacy or the accuracy of those who notified them.”

“Companies like MediaSentry collect IP addresses on P2P protocols like BitTorrent; right holders then send the IPs to your ISP. However, MediaSentry systems and techniques have no governments’ authority and are certified by no one and many institutions have received false claims. Companies like this should not be allowed to go around and make or break your Internet connection. These days, some people’s lives depend on it. This is where BTGuard comes in. The only IP companies such as MediaSentry will see is ours.”

BTGuard works differently then some other similar services like VPNOut or Smarthide. Most notably it does not VPN your entire Internet connection. You simply configure your BitTorrent client to route through their servers, so it will only effect your BitTorrent downloads. BTGuard says it has received reports that it effectively bypasses throttling but at this point they cannot confirm that it works in all cases (please let us know in the comments if it does).

BtGuard offers a free trial, and they welcome people to try it, so you can see if it’s works for you. After the trial it costs 4.75 Euro per month which is cheaper than most other services, and a small price to pay for privacy.

Source: Anonymize BitTorrent Transfers with BTGuard