They are now greeted with this disappointing message when they turn their receiver to Sky One:

Thanks to Sky, some of the non-premium Sky channels, like Sky One and Sky News are no longer available. They’ve picked up their ball and gone home. We believe that Sky want to limit your choice and force consumers into switching service.

Indeed, the only hope for Virgin subscribers to see these programs is to take out a second subscription with arch-rival BSkyB. Or they could do it Pirate style, power up their BitTorrent client and visit a BitTorrent site, where they’re absolutely spoilt for choice.

A search on the popular BitTorrent site Mininova returns 642 hits for ‘Battlestar Galactica’, 1106 hits for Lost and 612 hits for ’24′. That means every single show that has aired in the United States (and the UK always gets its shows much later on, so is currently way behind) is now available for the Virgin Media customer with an internet connection, regardless of the disputes in their suppliers’ boardroom.

And UK TV addicts are not new to downloading TV shows. According to Envisional research, in 2005 some 18% of all TV show downloaders were in the UK and it warned “In effect, the Internet is now a global video recorder, perhaps more accurately, a free global PVR or Tivo. It has brought immense power to the individual TV viewer, but immense problems for the television industry.” In this case the reverse is true, the problems have been caused by the TV industry and will likely be sorted out by the tech-savvy with the aid of a BitTorrent client.

Arrr!

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

One of the btjunkie admins has found a unique way to identify trackers that host these fake files, which makes it easy to efficiently remove them.

Virtually all the servers that spread these fake files are located in Southern California and Las Vegas. The administrators of these servers follow patterns that make it easy to identify them. The content of the trackers and seed amounts make them stand out. There are more unique characteristics, but we wont reveal all the tricks because they could take counter measures. Here are some examples of servers that host and track fake torrents:

Tracker 1, Tracker 2, Tracker 3 & Tracker 4. (Screenshots: One & Two)

All the information was provided to me by one of the admins of btjunkie, who works together on this with other torrent site admins. He says that the MPAA and friends use a variety of tactics. The tracker will either stall everyone at around 90% or the content will just be a blank monochrome screen.

“I really think this is being done by professionals with a budget, that’s a lot of servers to setup and it takes some expertise to setup in the manner that they did it,” says the btjunkie admin. “I don’t think I really need to say who would spend money on something like this.”

Here are some good examples of how these fake torrents clutter up the search results. Virtually all of those X marked torrents are coming from the ip-ranges we mentioned, and are fake files. The good thing is that Torrentportal’s report system is well used by their users.

The server boxes that host these torrents fall in serveral ip-ranges. Here are a few of the ranges that were discovered recently. You can easily add these to the blocklist of your torrent client (if it supports one), filewall, or blocklist manager.

The anti-piracy servers use hostnames like 101tracker.dhcp.biz, aplustorrents.qhigh.com, bitnova.squirly.info, bittorment.ocry.com, and pirate-trakkrz.leet.la. All these hostnames can be traced back to the same IP Ranges, these ranges contain possibly hundreds of fake trackers, so feel free to block them:

A list of infohashes of fake torrents can be found over here.

Note that it’s not only MPAA material that is hosted on these fake trackers. It is more likely that the servers are owned and operated by an organization that logs IP addresses for several copyright owners and or anti-piracy organizations.

Update: according to one of out readers these ip-ranges belong to “Media Defender“, a company that is hired by copyright owners, to log IP-addresses. This reader, who worked for Media Defender until recently, confirmed that some of the torrents that were mentioned, are indeed on the MPAA’s list.

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