Amazon became big by selling books and in recent years eBooks have become some of the fastest selling items. However, pirates are now directly targeting the company’s successful business model.

With a new Chrome extension pirates are entering Amazon, effectively transforming it into a pirate ‘store.’

When the LibGen extension is installed, it adds a new row on top of the Amazon product page of books that are also available through unauthorized sources.

The plugin uses data from the Libgen.org search engine which lists over a million books. Below is a screenshot of an Amazon book page, with a new row on the top linking to pirated downloads of the same title.

LibGen, short for Library Genesis, lists a wide variety of pirate sources for most books, including direct downloads, torrents and magnet links. It appears to work well, although there are occasional mismatches where links to books with similar titles are listed.

Needless to say book publishers are not going to be pleased with Amazon’s unofficial feature. Whether Amazon plans to take any action to stop the extension has yet to be seen.

The idea to transform Amazon into a pirate site is not entirely new. A few years ago a Firefox plugin integrated Pirate Bay download links into the site, which also worked for music and movies. This plugin was quickly taken offline quickly after the news was picked up by the mainstream media.

There are still other extensions floating around with the same functionality. Torrent This, for example, enhances Amazon with links to Pirate Bay download pages for all sorts of media, much like the “Pirates of the Amazon” plugin did.

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

However, since this weekend the number of installs must have dropped quite a bit after Google Chrome began warning users away from the software. According to Chrome the BitTorrent client poses a serious risk.

“uTorrent.exe is malicious and Chrome has blocked it,” the browser informs those who attempt to download the latest stable release.

Chrome does give users the option to restore the file but not without another warning. The browser is convinced that the file is harmful and suggests that the uTorrent website may have been hacked.

“This file will harm your computer. Even if you have downloaded files from this website before, the website may have been hacked. Instead of recovering this file you can retry the download later.”

The first reports of Chrome’s block came in three days ago and at the time of writing the problems persist. The warnings appear for the latest stable release (3.4.2.32354) and no other releases appear to be affected.

Currently there is no indication why the software has been flagged, but a scan by more than 50 of the most popular anti-virus services reveals no active threats.

Google’s safe browsing diagnostic page claims that the uTorrent website was involved in malware distribution in recent months, but no further details on the nature of the supposed malware are provided.

“This site has hosted malicious software over the past 90 days. It infected 4 domain(s), including kioskea.net/, ziggi.uol.com.br/, majorgeeks.com/,” the diagnostics page reads.

This isn’t the first time that uTorrent has reported problems with Chrome. The same happened late last year when the malware blocking feature was still in beta. At the time uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. managed to resolve the issues after several days.

Thus far, none of the developers have responded to user complaints in the uTorrent forums.

Update We discovered that uTorrent occasionally serves other versions as well, these are not blocked. The vast majority of the downloads are still blocked though.

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

A series of malware alerts, sent to Google, have resulted in sites being flagged by their content advisory service.

If you’re on Chrome, the advisory is alarmist, and contains the phrase “visiting this page now is very likely to infect your computer with malware”

Thankfully, Firefox is LESS alarmist, and calls it an attack page saying “many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners”

So, what happened? Firefox gives the answer, linking to the Google safe browsing diagnostic for bayimg, which paints a very different picture than the page generated by Chrome as a result.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that it’s related to one of their ad partners who “screwed up.” There should be no malware threats now and eventually the warnings should disappear too.

As often happens, it’s an issue with ad networks, but Chrome’s warning underscores the problems, again, of automated systems, in that they’re geared to specifics, and miss nuances. And they’re easy to subvert for unintended use. Meanwhile the unintended consequences continue, with sites using bayimg also getting flagged as a result.

Just another reason automated tools aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

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

The extension allows users to find torrents fast, with just a few keystrokes and without having to go to a torrent site.

Torrent Turbo Search functions as a meta search engine and searches several torrent sites at once, including The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and KickassTorrents.

In addition to searching for torrents, the Chrome extension can also search cyberlockers such as Rapidshare, Hotfile and 4Shared.

Although Torrent Turbo Search works as advertised, it does miss several key features such as the ability to order by seeds and peers. However, that didn’t stop thousands of people from installing it.

Strange people these torrent users…

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