In a surprise move, The Pirate Bay decided to add a cryptocurrency miner to its website last weekend. The notorious torrent site wanted to see whether this could replace the ads on the site. A controversial idea, but how much money can a site like The Pirate Bay make through mining?
Draft proposals from Belgium's Deputy Prime Minister could see the country taking a tougher line against pirate sites. In addition to building a blacklist of infringing sites and associated proxies, Kris Peeters envisions local ISPs diverting Internet traffic away from pirate sites and towards legitimate content sources.
The movie and TV industries still largely depend on windowing releases so, to enforce their "territories", VPN users have to be banned. As Hollywood is considering letting people stream newly released movies in their homes, precise location data becomes even more important. This is one of the reasons why GeoGuard and Skyhook are combining traditional blocking tools with Wi-Fi access point location data.
RuTracker, Russia's largest torrent site, is celebrating its 13th year online. The huge site, which creates torrents at a rate of more than 170,000 per year, has more than 15 million registered members. Every single one over the age of 18 is invited to St. Petersburg tonight to enjoy a Chinese meal together.
Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the use of set-top boxes with pirate channels and add-ons. This has also affected Roku, but the popular media player is doing its best to keep its system pirate free. Two new job postings reveal that the company is putting together its own anti-piracy team.
Dutch Internet service providers Ziggo and XS4ALL have been ordered to block The Pirate Bay. A ruling handed down today by The Court of The Hague compels the ISPs to block the infamous site within 10 days or face significant fines. The blocks will remain in place pending a final decision from the Supreme Court.
One of the most important aspects of online piracy is whether it affects sales. So, when the EU Commission spends 360,000 euros on a study to find out, one might think it would be useful to publish the results. Instead, Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda had to jump through hoops to obtain them. Why all the secrecy?
Following in the footsteps of The Pirate Bay, streaming link search engine Alluc has also added a cryptocurrency miner, hoping to generate some extra revenue through its visitors. This begs the question: Are these cryptocurrency miners the future for pirate sites?