“Our hearts go out to the Scantleberry family for their loss,” says RIAA mouthpiece Jonathan Lamy unblushingly in what will certainly go down as one of the most disgustingly fulsome statements ever to be issued by an organization that’s infamous for its bald-faced lies.

“We had decided to temporarily suspend the productive settlement discussions we were having with the family,” says Lamy, quoted in Boing Boing.

“Mr. Scantleberry had admitted that the infringer was his stepson, and we were in the process settling with him shortly before his passing. Out of an abundance of sensitivity, we have elected to drop this particular case.”

“Query,” posts Ray Beckerman on Recording Industry vs The People.

“What do they mean by ‘this particular lawsuit’? The lawsuit against the decedent would have had to be withdrawn anyway. Are they going to now sue Mr. Scantlebury’s son? Or have they given the Scantlebury family enough grief’?”

Stay Tuned…

P2Pnet

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

Smirnov comments on Relakks at the US Pirate Party site”

First, both the Relakks site and the announcement make it very clear that the service is supposed to provide anonymous access to the Internet. What isn’t as clear is that Relakks is just a PPTP (VPN) provider. Customers sign up, pay €5 a month and get on their merry way. All of their traffic is encrypted to the Relakks servers, at which point it travels the Internet like regular traffic.

As far as I can tell, all your traffic carries a Swedish Relakks IP, presumably mapped to your real IP somewhere on a Relakks computer. Now you can’t connect to Relakks anonymously, because then they’d have no way of verifying you are a paying customer (plus VPN authentication is based on identity verification), so Relakks knows who you really are when all your traffic goes through them.

Let’s compare this to something that has been traditionally called an anonymous network — Tor, a program implementing onion routing. With Tor you connect to an onion router, which then builds a path for you through other onion routers to your destination, in such a way that it makes it very hard to determine both the sender and the receiver of an on-going communication. The entire link is encrypted, unless of course you are outproxying to the intenet (then traffic has to be decrypted either way when it leaves the outproxy). But at least with Tor, it is very hard for the outproxy to figure out where the real request came from.

Today, the Swedish Pirate Party launched a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged.

The problem is that since Relakks knows who I really am, and that any outgoing connections from them are unencrypted, I really do have something to fear.. Relakks. What is the difference between trusting them and trusting my own ISP not to give me away?

Relakks could be logging behind the scenes, turning on a silent switch without telling anyone. Even in a case where we do trust Relakks not to keep the logs of the actual data that goes through, they will still have mappings between Relakks IPs and Real IPs at any point in time — this is just begging for an organization such as the antipiratbyran or the MPAA/RIAA to set up honeypots across various torrent sites, until finally they have enough Relakks IPs information to be able to sue them in court if they have a real IP, at which point the Swedish police could raid the Relakks location and get those real IPs.

If Relakks did not have their own direct connection to the internet, their outgoing ISP could be tapped and then setting up such a honeypot would be trivial. Otherwise, multiple peers could actively participate in swarms on sites such as the Pirate Bay, logging actively all of the IPs of the seeds and the superseeds on such swarms.

Secondly, the Relakks service is called a “Darknet.” After reading the paper that originally introduced the term Darknet at http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_tech/msdrm/darknet.htm, I am hard pressed to understand what makes a VPN tunnel a Darknet.

The idea of the darknet is based upon three assumptions:

1. Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form that permits copying.
2. Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so.
3. Users are connected by high-bandwidth channels.

This seems to me to describe a subset of P2P services, perhaps F2P. A program such as Waste, facilitating connections to your friends would fit the bill, but a general-connectivity tunnel? Would that not be akin to calling IPSec or IPv4 a darknet solution because it allows programs such as Freenet to operate under it? Would that not make any low level Internet protocol a Darknet then?

The service allows people to use an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified.

Yet I do not recall Darknets having to be anonymous. Pseudononymous, perhaps, but only because that is a side effect of keeping the connections limited to a group of friends. Even if a Darknet had to be anonymous though, as I said earlier, Relakks hardly keeps your identity safe — they have to know who you are at all times (unlike say Tor)!

Lastly, I have some less related comments I wish to share with you:

The PPS does not own Relakks, they seem to be affiliated and perhaps will get a share of each person they refer to Relakks?

I wonder what political repercussions the PPS is hoping to achieve by actively promoting a network which will incentivize users to engage in illegal activities (such as unauthorized works distribution) behind the scenes of a “trusted” outproxy.

P.S. My views do not represent the official views, positions, standings or otherwise, of the Pirate Party US, unless otherwise stated by an appropriate party official.

Via p2pnet

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

The inquirer writes:

The cashless site runs on a simple points system. Members receive one point for sending a book, and pay a point when they receive a book. Books sent internationally and books on members’ favourite books lists are worth two points, which provides extra incentive to supply these. Members also earn a point for every ten books they list on BookMooch. Membership is free.

There is a problem, and thus a significant difference from the real BitTorrent: The books have to go from A to B, and that costs money.

So if you’re a real bookworm with a not-to-delicate book taste, it is probably cheaper to have an additional library membership. But the idea is great, and if it has the potential to become the biggest library in the world. BookMooch founder John Buckman even thinks about launching “MoochFests”.

I was thinking of “MoochFests” where a group of people meet physically, say at a cafe, to exchange a pile of books they’ve all decided to mooch from each other. That would be a way to avoid postage, but more importantly, meet people with similar book tastes and possibly make friends.

BookMooch

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

You can use your web browser to read detailed information about each program on the CD: what the program does, its key features, useful related websites, view a screenshot, find links to the program’s website and to download/install the program from the TTCS OSSWIN CD.

The CD (burnable ISO) includes a broad range of applications in the following categories: desktop, educational, games, graphics, internet, server, sound and video, and utilities.

Great stuff, read more about the CD, and check out some screenshots on the TTCS homepage. The torrent can be found on the download page.

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

SqrtBoy is known for his work on Torrent Trader Lite, VBTT, IPBTT and other several BitTorrent tracker php/mysql scripts. It is great to see that someone is proposing a standard for BitTorrent rss feeds.

Every webmaster probably has his own thoughts about how the perfect rss feed would look, but this document is definitely a step forward.

SqrtBoy told TorrentFreak:

I have found that each rss feed was different from one site to another, and from a BitTorrent script to another. The multiplication and organization of different feeds formats was leading to confusion and was making it difficult to read in rss clients, and also some other feed indexing applications. The purpose of this document is to give some recommendations to webmasters on how a rss 2.0 BitTorrent related feed should be designed, so maybe we can see a standard appearing.

I think it is extremely important to have a proper standard for BitTorrent rss feeds, especially since the number of people that get their latest torrents though feedreaders, media players and BitTorrent clients is growing.

Using the same feed style will only benefit the usability of BitTorrent & rss, and their implementation in feed based TV players like Democracy, Fireant and IM.

BitTorrent RSS 2.0 Feed Specifications White Paper

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

Guba recently signed a deal with Warner Bros. to spread DRM loaded movies and TV-shows online.

According to the press release “GUBA is filtering movies and TV shows using a proprietary technology, codenamed “Johnny.” Johnny analyzes video in digitized form and generates a unique fingerprint for each video. Once Johnny has scanned a video, that video is blocked from illegal file trading or distribution on GUBA’s site”.

The MPAA responded:

“Providing consumers legitimate ways to get movie and television programming online is essential to our industry,” said Chairman and CEO of MPAA, Dan Glickman. Collaborating with GUBA has given us an opportunity to test new technology that will help ensure consumers can freely share videos without being exposed to illegal programming, which could lead to copyright infringement.”

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

In the documentary “done the impossible” the fans tell their part of this success story. They explain why and how they managed to get their Firefly heroes on the white screen in the popular movie Serenity.

The makers of the documentary offer a free, Creative Commons licensed .torrent download of their film. They state:

In our opinion, the modern state of copyright is counter productive to creativity and free culture. It puts unnatural restraints on “fair use”, hinders the creative process and has fundamentally destroyed an entire industry before it was even born.

Personally I’m impressed with the quality of this documentary, I highly recommend this one if you are interested in the story behind Firefly and Serenity.

You can view the trailer over here or download (.torrent) Done the impossible

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

The great thing about the project is that the movie is made entirely using Open Source software.

The movie is 11 minutes, including the credits, and they offer an impressive high definition AC3 5.1 surround copy.

The graphics are absolutely stunning but I found the story a bit disappointing. You can grab the .torrent over here

elephantsdream.org

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

Ownage.

Torrent Raiders is an arcade-style video game and a dynamic network visualization. Driven in real-time by the activity of bit torrent swarms, Torrent Raiders takes place on the ad-hoc networks created by bit torrent users. Torrent Raiders playfully addresses issues of domestic surveillance, amidst the recent revelation of the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping and the increasingly Orwellian nature of our so-called “homeland security”. Players take on the role of a government agent tasked with surveilling the ad-hoc networks generated by torrents linked to copyrighted material.

A Beta built of the game will be ready January 2007.

Torrent Raiders

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

The extension is currently in the Beta-testing phase.

Dmitri Popov, one of the Allpeers Beta testers wrote a reviewed the extension om NewsForge. He concludes:

there are some kinks in the AllPeers extension that must be sorted out before the public release (most notably, re-installing the extension requires a manual reset of your account at AllPeers’ end), the software looks very promising, indeed.

Let’s wait and see…

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