In addition to all the latest movies and music from just about every musician ever, BitTorrent and other similar networks play host to lots of documentaries, rare footage, document caches, long-discontinued pieces of software and other digital rarities.

But of course, in addition to these undoubted jewels P2P networks also have the ability to turn up the unexpected, as one poor teacher in France learned the hard way last Friday.

The woman, a kindergarten teacher at a school in France, decided she would acquire a movie for her pupils to watch in class. Like many people these days she turned to the Internet and downloaded what she thought was a cartoon suitable for her 3 to 5-year-olds.

It didn’t go well.

After turning up at class she played the file in question but immediately left the room to answer a telephone call, leaving the children to ‘enjoy’ it alone. However, when she returned “five minutes at the most” later she realized that the file she had downloaded was not the ‘cartoon’ she expected, but a full-on porn movie.

A spokesperson for the school described the disaster as an “extremely regrettable accident.” Understandably some parents are claiming that their children were shocked by what they had seen.

As highlighted by our friends at Numerama the error is an easy one to make, especially with file-sharing clients that do not rely on websites to index their content.

On these networks files are identified by a hash but can be superficially renamed by anyone to pretty much anything. This means that malicious users can easily change the title of a porn movie to resemble that of a Disney classic, setting in motion a chain of events such as the one detailed above.

While it is unclear which file-sharing system the teacher used, the same error is unlikely to have taken place is she had put her faith in BitTorrent. Had she done so she would have visited an indexing site (such as The Pirate Bay) where not only would the porn be found in a section on its own, but users of the site would’ve already flagged the file as badly named and had it removed by the site’s moderators.

But of course, the porn industry doesn’t make things any better either. Fancy watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Well if you do please take care, there is an adult movie of exactly the same name. Beauty and the Beast? Check. Little Red Riding Hood? Check.

The moral of the story is this: If you don’t want a nasty surprise, use an indexing site where possible, read the comments section thoroughly, and if you want to be double sure, paste the hash of the file being downloaded into Google. You’re not just avoiding porn here, but malware and other nasties.

Oh, and don’t expect technology to do an intelligent babysitting job, even for five minutes.

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

Named after the French MEP Marielle Gallo, the report could help turn the Internet into a copyright police state. It offers local governments and lobbyists an excuse to introduce harsher anti-piracy measures targeted at illicit file-sharers.

As is often the case, various entertainment industry lobby groups were involved in pushing Members of Parliament in favor of the report. In doing so, they fabricated artists support in faked petitions, (ab)using the names of various artists who are dead, underage, unaware or simply non-existent.

Unfortunately the sleazy tactics came out too late to have an impact on the result of the vote, but we don’t want to withhold them from our readers. Below are some of the things that have been uncovered thus far, thanks to La Quadrature.

One of the petitions in support of the Gallo report was sent in by Eurocinema, representing film and television producers in Europe. A close inspection of this list cast doubt on the legitimacy of the document, to say the least.

Among the signatories of the petition we find the Hungarian filmmaker László Kovács, who died three years ago, long before the Gallo report was introduced. More suspicion is raised by the fact that one third of all names on the list are Hungarian. For some, Google didn’t return any results, so it’s unclear whether they exist at all.

To find out more about the apparent huge support for the report from Hungary, Amelia Andersdotter of the Pirate Party decided to contact two people listed on the petition. Interestingly, the Hungarian directors Ibolya Fekete and Attila Janisch both told her that they never signed a petition.

Another petition from the entertainment industry was submitted by the music industry lobby group IFPI. Like their counterpart Eurocinema, the names included on IFPI’s petition raise some doubts as well.

For starters, the petition includes the name of the 7-year old Moldovan singer Cleopatra Stratan. Apparently the Moldovan youth is very involved with European politics, even though they can barely read.

Aside from a pre-teen signatory the petition also included a few duplicate names, several non-EU citizens, some artists who don’t even seem to exist, and the French singer Michel Sardou who previously said “I’m a pirate.”

It is unbelievable that lobby groups get away with manipulating the European Parliament in this fashion. Can they get much lower than this? Both IFPI and Eurocinema were contacted to explain the irregularities pointed out above, but it’s unlikely that we will ever get a reply.

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

The code the article refers to is SeedFucker, which is intended to poison BitTorrent swarms with fake peers. For years, these type of ‘exploits’ have been mainly used to to promote malware and other dubious torrents by making it look like there are thousands of people sharing the torrents in question.

This code can insert thousands of random IP-addresses into a swarm which is great for spammers, but useless for people who want to hide their own IP-address. No matter how this code is rewritten, one’s actual IP-address will always be reported to the tracker.

In theory, SeedFucker could cause problems for the anti-piracy outfits that track BitTorrent downloads because they would run into many fake peers. However, most reputable tracking companies confirm whether the material in question is actually being shared from a particular IP-address.

“It might seem to some that this is a major change, but in reality it’s nothing new, nothing that isn’t already done by some trackers themselves,” an experienced BitTorrent developer told TorrentFreak when commenting on the code, adding, “It doesn’t substantively change anything, and will not change things in the conceivable future.”

Indeed, all trackers based on the Opentracker software already insert fake peers, a setup that stems from the times when anti-piracy tracking outfits didn’t confirm that actual transfers were going on. With these fake peers, BitTorrent users would have plausible deniability if they were taken to court.

Aside from the fact that it’s utterly useless in terms on anonymity, the SeedFucker exploit will not work at all on most major BitTorrent trackers as they don’t honor the “ip=” parameter used in the code. If anything, the use of this code will trick BitTorrent users into believing that files are more popular than they are in reality, which can only lead to problems and a lot of frustration.

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

The Danish company is not limiting its services to the RIAA though. It is also working with an Irish ISP to support their “3 strikes” regime, and in Australia the company also conducted investigations against alleged pirates.

Apart from their pirate tracking activities, DtecNet also has a business intelligence unit to help their entertainment industry clients “Understand what’s happening and where, and to develop smarter strategies to guide their development, marketing, retailing, distribution and investment initiatives.” The intelligence unit utilizes its insights into the file-sharing community to help out, but unfortunately the unit is not that knowledgeable.

In fact, the whitepaper (pdf) that was published by the DtecNet unit and mirrored all around the web during the last 24 hours, clearly shows that they have no clue about BitTorrent.

In the paper that deals with the recent downtime of the Pirate Bay tracker and how this affects BitTorrent usage, they make several false claims, draw bogus conclusions and report inaccurate statistics. Bogus reports from anti-piracy companies are nothing new, but this is definitely one of the worst we’ve ever seen thus far, and it is already being cited by several respected news outlets.

Let’s take a look at some of the things DtecNet claims and why these claims are bogus, inaccurate or just plain stupid.

Claim: — “After Swedish authorities forced the Internet disconnection of The Pirate Bay, online piracy worldwide dropped substantially on BitTorrent networks as file traders scrambled to find replacement trackers.”

This claim is based on a graph presented by DtecNet (see below) which shows that the number of infringements recorded by the company dropped significantly. This is of course a direct effect of the Pirate Bay tracker downtime. Companies like DtecNet use the tracker to find and report pirates and if it goes down there are less recorded infringements. However, there is no evidence that piracy went down. Most BitTorrent transfers were working fine due to the wonders of DHT (trackerless torrents), including the ones that were using only the Pirate Bay tracker.

Claim: — “The impact of the shutdown is strongly obvious, [...] file trading on BitTorrent, easily the world’s most popular peer-to-peer protocol, dropped virtually overnight by nearly 80 percent.”

This second claim is even more absurd because it suggests that BitTorrent usage dropped by 80 percent based on a graph of recorded infringements. Remember, DtecNet doesn’t track any BitTorrent traffic data. The only thing that their data proves is that, because of the tracker downtime, DtecNet was unable to connect to some of the trackers listed in their database of torrents. Again, the torrents might have worked just fine for users because of DHT.

Claim: — “Over time, infringements through that network [BitTorrent] began to rise again as new trackers became available.”

This seems to suggest that after the Pirate Bay trackers went down several new trackers have appeared, which is simply not true. In fact, DtecNet uses OpenBitTorrent and the Denis Stalker tracker as an example in their paper, two trackers that are hosted on the same network as The Pirate Bay tracker. The only reason the number of recorded infringements began to rise is that these trackers also suffered downtime from which they recovered. DtecNet however seems to be unaware of the relation between the three trackers.

Claim: — DtecNet has created a nice graph (below) that “illustrates the chaos the shutdown caused among various BitTorrent tracker networks, and how more recently the situation appears to be clarifying itself as users find new favorite sites.”

The only confusion we see here is at the DtecNet offices. The company apparently fails to understand that a tracker is something different than a site. There is absolutely no indication that BitTorrent users were looking for new sites (note that The Pirate Bay site was still up), but even if they were this does not mean that there will be any changes in the usage of the various trackers.

Claim: — “About two weeks after the Pirate Bay shutdown, two of the successor trackers – OpenBitTorrent and DenisStalker – temporarily shut down, possibly because they could not handle rising demand.”

This claim is almost hilarious. As pointed out earlier, OpenBitTorrent and DenisStalker are hosted on the same network as The Pirate Bay. It takes no genius to figure this out, and this should be especially obvious for an outfit that deals with BitTorrent trackers on a daily basis, trying to catch pirates. So, the two successor trackers did not collapse under the increased load at all, they went down together with The Pirate Bay.

We could go on for hours refuting pretty much every sentence in the report and we are not the only ones who dispute the know-how of DtecNet’s self-proclaimed business intelligence unit. P2P expert Dr. Pouwelse of the Tribler team at Delft University of Technology looked into the report as well and told TorrentFreak: “They are completely technically incompetent, they are just trying to get sensational press coverage, or both.”

“Mixing up terms like trackers versus website and failure to do basic homework like DNS lookups means they would fail our master course in P2P. Their work suffers from a fundamental methodological error: what our company can’t see does not exist, thus we can make wild absolute claims on a complex global phenomena,” Pouwelse said.

Companies such as DtecNet are earning millions of dollars from the entertainment industry thanks to their piracy tracking activities and the business intelligence they claim to offer. Considering this position it is striking to see how little they actually know about what’s going on, and we fear that this amateurish white paper might actually lose @DtecNetBI some customers, instead of adding new clients to their portfolio.

Chances are, DtecNet will be responsible for gathering evidence against British file-sharers so that Peter Mandelson can have them kicked off the Internet in 2011. Nice to know that important job will be in safe hands.

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

In reality however, DRM simply amounts to an annoyance for legitimate customers, while those people who weren’t planning to buy but pirate, have plenty of ways to hack or crack the copy protection schemes. Luckily more content providers have started to realize this. But not all of them.

Meet Austin Meyer, the brain behind X-Plane flight simulator and CEO of the software company that develops the game. Meyer is someone who values input from the people who buy his products, and after he received several complaints about the DVD that had to be in the drive in order to play X-Plane, he came up with a brilliant solution.

For a measly $29 the company decided to sell optional USB-drives with a copy of the DVD that can be used instead of the DVD itself. “The keys are only $29, so I am making this affordable,” Meyer commented in a press-release.

We can of course dispute the cheapness of a $29 DRM-tool, but what’s even more interesting is how Meyer responded to some of the questions reporter Dave Duck posed when he tried to find out more about the companies motivations in charging its customers for DRM on a USB drive.

“The usb key is designed to STOP that annoyance by freeing up the drive, WITHOUT requiring anyone to lie, cheat, or steal,” Meyer wrote in one of his replies.

But he structurally ignored the biggest question asked by the reporter. “Given the wide availability of X-Plane torrents, doesn’t this sort of scheme just piss off loyal customers AND fail to stop pirates?”

Indeed, like any other program X-Plane has been pirated and the software is widely available on BitTorrent sites without any DRM. The new DRM on a drive does nothing to change this situation, and is just an extra charge for DRM that only affects legitimate customers.

Like many other software manufacturers Meyer fails to see the problem, and frankly he doesn’t even seem to care whether the DRM works or not. When the reporter asked him about the effectiveness of X-Plane’s copy protection he got the following reply:

“Holy shit you are an idiot where did I ever say, imply, or ever so much as HINT that ANYTHING actually WORKS????????????????????????????????????”

As a true gentleman the CEO refused to elaborate any further on how he turned a failed DRM scheme into something that will cost legitimate customers even more money. “I’m just filtering your email now you aren’t worth talking to,” Meyers wrote in his last reply.

We wonder whether if he treats all of his customers similarly?

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

The efforts are paying off nicely though. The night vision goggles helped to spot Batman and Bond pirates and a Virgina teenager was busted a while back for recording a few seconds of the movie Transformers on her cell-phone. The only thing she wanted to do was show it to her 13 year old brother, however, the alert theater staff called in the police and the girl was arrested.

With one of the latest inventions by Prof. Babaguchi and colleagues, catching cammers might become even easier. While video-based watermarks are already used in theaters in order to determine which screen the movie was recorded from, new technology makes it possible to watermark the audio of films too.

The audio watermarks go much further though, as they can pinpoint almost the exact location that the pirate was in when he recorded the movie. This so called spread-spectrum audio watermarking does not spoil the subjective acoustic quality and is fairly accurate in estimating where the offender was seated.

With a mean estimation error of only 44 centimeters, it might be a seat off every now and then, but those are worries for later. To use the technology successfully, however, the theater has to keep a database with info on the identity and seating position of each member of the public so the offenders can be handed over to the police afterwards.

These administrative tasks can of course take place while waiting in line for the metal-detector, and might even come in handy to contact someone who forgot to pick up his phone after the movie ended. The movie-goers can still enjoy a great night out if they pass all the nice security checks and they wont be bothered by any buzzing camcorders anymore.

Everyone wins really.

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