Month: March 2016

Since 2005 the SXSW music festival has published thousands of free tracks from participating artists.

For some of the first releases the festival organizers created the torrents for the artist showcases themselves, but since 2008 this task has been taken over by the public.

Luckily all of the SXSW showcase MP3s are still freely available on the festival’s site for sampling purposes, so it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running.

For the past several years Ben Stolt has taken the time and effort to put all the MP3s on BitTorrent, and the latest 2016 release consists of two torrents containing 1,593 tracks.

That’s a record-breaking 10.39 gigabytes of free music in total, almost four times the file size of the first torrent in 2005.

All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their harddrives without having to invest thousands of dollars. The 2005 – 2016 archives now total more than 69 gigabytes.

Every year SXSW torrents are a great success, with many thousands of music aficionados downloading gigabytes of free music across virtually every genre from both established acts and upcoming bands.

TorrentFreak spoke to Ben Stolt who spends several hours preparing the releases each year, in part for his personal pleasure.

“My motivation is in part selfish, because, like many others, my friends and I all use the contents of the torrent to prepare for our week at SXSW Music. But without fail the emails start coming in January and February asking if there will be a torrent,” Stolt says.

“Many people come back every year, so I can’t leave them hanging,” he adds.

The job comes witch challenges though. SXSW doesn’t always make it easy to publish the tracks. For example, a few years ago Stolt had to start re-writing the ID3 tags based on the artist pages, as SXSW stopped doing so.

“Without that, the tracks would be a giant mess and mostly unidentifiable since the file names on the SXSW site are purely numeric. Also in 2014 they abruptly switched to using SoundCloud for the samples, but that was thankfully short-lived and things were back to normal the next year,” Stolt notes.

The efforts pay off though. Many people love the SXSW torrents which attract tens of thousands of downloaders each year. For some, it almost makes up for not being able to attend the festival in person.

“Appreciate the amount of work involved to make it happen. Can’t get to SXSW, so having these torrents available are the next best thing,” one downloader responds.

This year’s SXSW music festival is currently underway in Austin, Texas and ends on Sunday. The torrents, however, are expected to live on for as long as there are people sharing.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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In 2010 a fresh movie piracy brand began to conquer the Internet. Bypassing the so-called ‘Scene’, YIFY joined a new breed of release groups who publish their work directly to torrent sites.

In fact, YIFY, which later rebranded to YTS, started its own torrent website featuring high quality releases of the latest movies.

As the years went by the group amassed a huge following, and a year ago its website generated millions of pageviews per day. A true success story, but one that ended abruptly last October.

Hollywood sources tracked down the founder of YIFY and filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit in New Zealand. This meant the end of YIFY and YTS, but surprisingly the case was never heard in court.

Instead, both parties agreed to a private settlement outside of court, keeping the identity of one of YIFY’s key players out of the public eye. However, this didn’t last long.

Last week a New Zealand court confirmed the identity of the YIFY founder to the local Sunday Star Times. The news outlet reported that the movie studios filed their lawsuit against Yiftach Swery, a 23-year-old app and website developer.

Several years ago YIFY told TorrentFreak that the name was “just a random alias” but this explanation is hard to maintain now.

While we have always doubted the randomness of the popular tag, Yiftach Swery leaves little room for speculation.

Indeed, we confirmed with someone in the know that the YIF part is derived directly from the founder’s name. In theory, the same could be said for YTS but this stands for “YIFY Torrents Solutions,” our source says.

It’s worth noting that Yiftach was not the only person behind YIFY. In fact, towards the end he was no longer actively involved in encoding and uploading movies.

How many other people were involved in the group remains unknown. TorrentFreak did hear that other people connected to YIFY have been “approached” by the movie industry over the years, but Yiftach is the only one who signed a settlement deal.

One thing is very clear though, the original YIFY team is not coming back. Instead, Yiftach and his former colleagues will probably focus on picking up their regular lives again.

That said, the YIFY name lives on in the memories of million of pirates. While most of its shine has been lost, YIFY will certainly go down in history.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Forscher haben einen Quadcopter gebaut, der über mehrere Monate lang in einer Tiefe von über 100 Metern in Salzwasser verbleiben kann. Anschließend taucht Cracuns auf und fliegt los - ohne Korrosionsschäden. (Drohne, Luftfahrt)

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Südkorea will bis 2020 über einen Fonds 760 Millionen Euro in die Förderung von künstlicher Intelligenz in der Industrie investieren. (Alpha Go, KI)

Bei Twitter werden auch künftig keine Nachrichten mit mehr als 140 Zeichen möglich sein. Als Alternative bleibt Nutzern, die mehr zu sagen haben, weiterhin der Screenshot. (Twitter, Microblogging)

Wer gestern sein Windows-8-Smartphone nicht auf Microsofts Liste der für ein Upgrade auf Windows 10 Mobile in Frage kommenden Geräte entdeckt hat, wird es wohl auch nicht mehr tun: Die Liste ist final - Microsoft hat damit sein anfängliches Versprechen klar gebrochen. (Windows 10 Mobile, Smartphone)

This week following further intense discussions on how to bring Internet piracy under control, rights holders submitted new proposals for amendments to local copyright law.

Supported by communications watchdog Roskomnadzor, one of the key aims of the working group is to bring an end to the game of whac-a-mole caused by the country’s site blocking regime.

Ending the proxy wars

Like other countries, once pirate sites are blocked by local ISPs, proxies, mirrors and clones of those sites reappear elsewhere, rendering the blockades ineffective. This means that copyright holders have to head back to court to obtain a new blocking order if they are to keep up with the pirates.

As is already loosely the case in the UK, rightsholders with interests in Russia want mirror and proxy sites to be classified as extensions of the original blocked site and given the same illegal standing. This would mean they could be quickly blocked without need for a new trial.

Currently the courts require an individual process for each site, a position highlighted recently when ISPs were ordered to permanently block huge torrent site RuTracker but several sites appeared online which effectively circumvented the blockade.

“The Working Group proposes to simplify the blocking procedures in respect of mirrors of sites that have already been recognized by the court as illegal resources,” National Federation of the Music Industry (Sony, Universal, Warner, EMI) chief Leonid Agronov explains.

Circumventing blockades? You can’t talk about that

While the proposed measures against mirrors, clones and reverse proxy sites are not unexpected, demands being made by anti-piracy group Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPO) really take things to the next level.

Just as sites can take measures to avoid being blocked, users can circumvent blocks with a variety of tools including VPNs, TOR and other proxies. People learn about these techniques online but if AZAPO has its way – and that looks likely – telling people how to circumvent web-blocking measures will become an illegal act.

In a document penned by AZAPO, approved by telecoms watchdog Rozkomnadzor, and seen by Gazeta.ru, the anti-piracy group says that banning discussion of workarounds will enhance the country’s blocking regime.

“The introduction of [a system of fines] for those who promote methods for bypassing Internet blockades will enhance the effectiveness of blocking prohibited Internet resources,” the group writes.

At this stage the proposals suggest fines ranging from around $70 for “entrepreneurial individuals” right up to $14,500 for those operating within a legal entity but it’s not yet clear how these fines will be managed or enforced.

While discussion of circumvention could soon be off-limits, there’s no intention of banning circumvention tools outright. Noting that they have legitimate uses, Rozkomnadzor says it simply wants to draw a line in the sand over the way they’re promoted online.

“These technical software tools have a wide range of useful applications. But advertising these as a way to bypass website blocks should not be a legitimate action,” a spokesperson said.

Not surprisingly, representatives from the Internet industry see things somewhat differently. Karen Ghazaryan, principal analyst at the Russian Association of Electronic Communications, told Gazeta that tightening of the law will only lead to further dissemination of information detailing how to bypass blockades.

Indeed, there would be little the authorities could do about advice pages appearing outside the country, unless they wanted to enter into the biggest game of whac-a-mole ever seen.

Crucially, clamping down on discussion is unlikely to stimulate the market for legal content consumption among consumers, Ghazaryan says.

Presented this week, the draft proposals will now be sent to the Ministry of Communications for subsequent discussion in the State Duma.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.