By August 2011 YIFY releases had become so popular they justified a platform of their own. A site bearing the same name was born and quickly grew to become a major player. By 2013 the site was receiving 700,000 visitors a day, something which placed it on Hollywood’s radar.

Perhaps inevitably, on November 22, 2013, the popular torrent site was blocked by the UK’s leading ISPs following a High Court order obtained by the major Hollywood studios. Anyone wanting to access the site could now only do so by using a web proxy, reverse proxy, VPN, or other anti-censorship tool. YIFY-Torrents wanted to do something about that.

“Our user base is the most important and integral part of Yify-Torrents, so having access restricted by major ISPs not only in the UK but also other places around the world was a big worry for us and we almost immediately started looking for solutions to the problem,” YIFY’s tech team told TorrentFreak.

“As most of us here at Yify-Torrents are based outside the focuses of large anti-piracy groups it was difficult for us to assess what was happening. Our first step was to figure out exactly how widespread the blocking was and how they were doing it.”

YIFY says their first guess was backed up a TorrentFreak report detailing findings by EZTV that ISPs were carrying out their own DNS scrapes to update their blacklists, something which later led to the accidental blocking of TorrentFreak. Time to carry out some tests.

“After a day of coding up a small test application we sent it out to some UK visitors that had reached out and expressed their interests in aiding in any way possible. Within a day we had results for two major ISPs in the country, Sky and TalkTalk. This provided the first real insight into the issue and was when we hit our first milestone!”

YIFY discovered that DNS lookups for YIFY-Torrents.com still responded with the site’s IP addresses meaning that they could rule out DNS tampering. Also, pings to YIFY’s infrastructure were replied to, meaning that the ISPs weren’t simply dropping traffic to blacklisted IP addresses. With no DNS tampering, YIFY had opportunity to bypass the blocks.

“After all the testing we came to the conclusion that Sky (and others) regularly pull IPs listed on our DNS servers and add them to their block list. This block list is then used by an advanced proxy system that redirects any requests to the blacklisted IPs to a webserver that the ISP owns and returns a stock ‘blocked page’ message,” YIFY explains.

“What this meant for us was that if we added new IPs behind yify-torrents.com they would work until Sky and friends updated their blacklist. This was our second edge on Sky. Because they did the blocking on an IP level and didn’t do anything related to domain names, we could do some fancy DNS trickery to keep the site online.”

People attempting to access YIFY-Torrents.com during the next few hours from the leading ISPs should find out the site has been unblocked. At the time of writing Virgin Media is for some reason causing problems, but a solution to that (and any others that might appear) is just a couple of clicks away.

“We have set-up a new domain name for inhibited visitors: yify-torrents.im, which should already be accessible to all. This domain was and still is running completely separately from the main site. What we were originally betting on was that in order for our new domain to be blocked, anti-piracy groups would need to get another court order to get it taken down, something that doesn’t happen overnight,” YIFY says.

But what YIFY wanted was a more permanent solution and for this they are currently using CloudFlare

“CloudFlare is an amazing CDN and security provider for small to large sites. They offer caching of services so that any static content is loaded from CloudFlare instead of the origin server,” YIFY explains.

“Along with this it offers protection because instead of the IPs of your real server being public, CloudFlare’s IPs are seen instead. This offers protection from plenty of web nasties like DDoS attacks. In fact, CloudFlare have and still do harbor some notorious sites like LulzSecurity’s site. Whilst the protection isn’t perfect (people can still submit DMCA notices and get real IP addresses), this wasn’t a problem for us as we already have a setup where the only public IPs listed are those of our front-end caches.”

At this point, YIFY returns to the EZTV story referenced earlier and why blocking CloudFlare IP addresses to get at YIFY-Torrents would be a particularly bad idea.

“Because CloudFlare provide services to something like 1,000,000 customers, any downtime would affect a large portion of the Internet. Everything from Imgur to gaming forums who use their services would go down.”

But while YIFY could use CloudFlare exclusively, they are choosing not to thanks to something called Geo DNS.

“GeoDNS allows us to hand out different IP addresses based on the location of the visitor. Our new system uses this to hand out CloudFlare IPs and only CloudFlare IPs to any UK visitor that hits our site, whilst the rest of the world gets to use our existing network.”

Details shared with TorrentFreak this morning shows that there is a real cat and mouse game going on behind the scenes, with YIFY doing everything they can to unblock their site and measures being taken by certain ISPs to hinder them. The site acknowledges that there still might be issues over the next few days while the system is fine-tuned but they hope that by sharing some of their findings other sites will able to take similar measures to thwart censorship. In any event, they believe that overall the sites will prevail.

“It’s really a giant game of cat and mouse with the supposed ‘good guys’ always playing catch up. ISPs have exhausted every single tactic in keeping sites censored and are bordering on affecting other legitimate sites like was seen with TorrentFreak and EZTV. When that sort of stuff starts happening, there really is nothing more they can do.

“Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all smooth sailing from here on out, but we are happy to have the site up and running back in the UK for now and will keep on pushing against the ever growing censorship that is happening everywhere we look,” YIFY concludes.

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

Traditionally these pirated released were leaked from “the Scene,” but in recent years the landscape has evolved bringing many new groups to the forefront.

These P2P groups release their own pirated versions and often beat the Scene to it. The primary motivation, however, is the competition element of being the first to get a movie out there in top quality.

YIFY doesn’t fit into either of these categories. Unlike most other groups they are not motivated by the competition and the credits that come with it, but by serving their ‘audience’ the best way they can.

This approach appears to work, as millions of people are now following the group’s releases. Their own website YIFY-torrents is now among the top ten most-visited torrent sites on the Internet, and on sites such as KickassTorrents the term YIFY constantly appears as one of the top searches.

To find out how it all came to be and what makes this group tick, TorrentFreak caught up with its founder. Using the handle YIFY, he tells us that one of the main goals is to make films accessible in all parts of the world, combining relatively small file-sizes with good quality.

“We aim to bring Hollywood films to the masses at smaller file-size. Our primary goal is to enable users from all parts of the world, who have bandwidth or hard drive limitations, to download and enjoy this content,” YIFY says.

YIFY started three years ago by releasing movies on various torrent sites and quickly added its own website a year later.

“It all started in 2010 when x264 started to gain significant popularity. I saw the potential application of using this codec to spread films at a smaller size. By August 2011, YIFY releases had gained enough popularity to launch our own website, serving as a platform for our releases.”

The steady release of popular titles in an easily digestible size and format piqued the interest of many movie pirates. Around this time last year the number of visitors to YIFY’s own site had grown to 200,000 a day, and over the past year this exploded to 700,000.

Together with the hundreds of thousands of followers on other sites, it is safe to say that YIFY caters to the demands of millions of people.

YIFY currently uploads its releases to its own site and five other public indexes: PublicHD, KickassTorrents, 1337x, The Pirate Bay, and ExtraTorrent. The group posts dozens of new and older films every month, a schedule that appears to appeal to a wide audience.

The high volume of searches for YIFY shows that more people actually search for the group tag than for specific movie titles, so in a way the group is guiding people’s viewing habits.

“I personally think that many people are following and downloading YIFY encodes due to the consistency we offer in our releasing. Everything from the consistent film cover art, to the information layout, and ultimately to the file-size of our encodes,” YIFY says.

“I believe this is important because people like stability and assurance with what they are downloading. By adding consistency to a reasonable file-size, we have filled a spot in the community, which seemingly has a lot of demand.”

Behind the scenes there’s a lot going on before a release is published on the Internet. YIFY doesn’t reveal specific sources but says it mostly relies on “leaked Blu-ray disks from friends.” A set of automated scripts then handles the encoding and subsequent uploading.

In many ways the popularity of YIFY is reminiscent of aXXo, the uploader that gathered an immense popularity during the latter half of the last decade. YIFY is flattered by this comparison, but personally he believes that’s too much credit.

“aXXo revolutionized the file-sharing community with highly accessible releases, while we are just a popular name; we have not actually introduced anything new to the community,” YIFY says.

Of course there’s also a darker side to YIFY’s newly gained fame. The group is clearly in the cross-hairs of Hollywood since the UK anti-piracy group FACT has already asked the court to block the site in the UK. At the same time, more radical legal steps can certainly not be excluded.

YIFY notes that their legal issues are limited to DMCA requests for now, which they comply with as other torrent sites do. Their biggest challenge at the moment is keeping the site online, which is easier said than done with the rapid increase in visitors.

“One year ago we were getting around 250,000 visitors daily on the website, presently we get around 700,000. Setting up our system to handle this growth in traffic has been the main challenge thus far,” YIFY says.

As for Hollywood, YIFY points out that the movie industry would be wise to move away from expensive per item sales, and focus more on free access models such as Hulu and Netflix-style subscription models in countries where these are not yet available.

“I do not think that Hollywood needs to learn anything specifically from our success. Rather, I think that our success is just a symptom of a much wider, and fast growing, worldwide phenomenon. I think that this demonstrates that people all around the world are no longer willing to pay a premium for their digital media,” YIFY concludes.

For the time being, YIFY is happily filling this gap.

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

Last month it was discovered that the BPI had begun planning another wave of web blockades and now it appears that the movie industry is doing the same.

Yesterday, TorrentFreak received a tip that rightsholders had approached some of the leading ISPs in the UK with a request to block a further two sites – EZTV.it and YIFY-Torrents. An email from Mark Jackson of ISPreview that came in soon after revealed that ISPs had confirmed the news.

EZTV

EZTV is one of the most-loved torrent sites around. It first appeared during 2005 in the wake of legal threats made by the MPAA against several torrent sites offering TV shows. EZTV made it to #7 in our Top Torrent Sites list of 2013 and was the only site to do so by indexing one type of content.

As can be seen from the image below, EZTV’s traffic fluctuates throughout the year in line with TV show release schedules.

EZTV is currently the 578th most-popular site in the UK according to Alexa. Interestingly its Australian rank is 167, a sign that Aussies are being left hungry for TV shows when compared to the rest of the world.

YIFY-Torrents

This lesser known site was launched in 2011 and has a relatively low profile when compared to many of the bigger sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents. However, this site is somewhat of a street-sleeper.

Although it didn’t make our Top 10 list for 2013 it did receive a mention as an important newcomer and as illustrated by the chart below, the site has been growing rapidly ever since. In terms of traffic it’s closing in on EZTV and is currently ranked the 876th most popular site in the UK.

Attractive layout aside, the site has gained popularity due to the distribution of its own video rips (and re-rips), hundreds of which can be found indexed on dedicated user accounts on The Pirate Bay and KickAssTorrents.

Due to the desirability of these torrents among those looking for ‘aXXo’-style branding but at arguably higher quality, the term ‘YIFY’ is currently riding high at #17 in KickAssTorrent’s June 2013 Trends list.

Although there’s no solid evidence at this stage, it’s fairly safe to say that due to the content indexed by the sites the MPA is probably behind the blocking request. The ISPs have said in every previous instance that they won’t block sites without a court order but these days getting one of those is becoming somewhat of a formality.

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