Month: December 2016

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Australia has been called out as the world’s piracy capital for several years, a trend local copyright holders hope to curb now that several pirate sites have been ordered to be blocked.

Earlier this week the Federal Court ruled in favor of key movie industry players, ordering ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt, SolarMovie, and proxy and mirror services.

The landmark decision will make it harder for torrent users Down Under to visit these sites, but it won’t be impossible. In fact, before the blocks are implemented many of them are already actively looking into countermeasures.

Depending on the blocking methods ISPs will use, bypassing them may be as easy as switching to an alternative DNS service. Another option is to use Tor, or special “pirate browsers,” such as the one RARBG launched earlier.

Alternatively, a VPN service should also do the trick, as that will prevent ISPs from seeing users’ traffic.

This VPN option is in high demand in Australia. Data from Google Trends reveals that interest in anonymizing services has surged, with searches for “VPN” doubling right after the news broke on Thursday.

Aussie VPN searches

TF spoke to several VPN providers who confirm this observation. Many have noticed an increase in both traffic and sales from Down Under.

“We had nearly double the number of visitors from Australia yesterday,” ExpressVPN‘s David Lang informed TF, adding that they have little faith in the effectiveness of the court order.

“We are opposed to Internet censorship in any form, and in this case, we doubt the ruling will have a significant impact on torrent usage in Australia.”

At TorGuard, Benjamin Van Pelt noticed a massive traffic boost too.

“Since the site blocking decision was made official we immediately began seeing a 100% increase in traffic from Australia. I fully expect this trend to continue and we have already begun adding bandwidth in our Sydney and Melbourne data centers to accommodate the influx,” he says.

TorGuard’s traffic spike

NordVPN observed a similar spike in traffic during the same period, which they see as a direct result of Thursday’s ruling.

“There’s 110% increase in new users over the past 24 hours from Australia. The court order made a strong impact and people are in search of privacy it seems,” Iggy Holzman of NordVPN told TF.

Finally, the same is happening at Private Internet Access, where signups increased as well.

“After the news broke, we have definitely seen an increase in the region. I don’t have stats other than overall signups, but nonetheless, that number has increased. Simultaneously, our analytics shows that Australia has increased more as well,” PIA’s Andrew Lee said.

It is safe to conclude that restricting people’s access to pirate sites is not going to change everyone’s piracy habits overnight. Looking at similar cases in the past, that doesn’t come as a surprise really.

Earlier this year, research from Carnegie Mellon University showed that the UK blocks reduced traffic to pirate sites, but that they also significantly increased people’s interest in VPN services.

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Disclaimer: PIA, NordVPN and ExpressVPN are TF sponsors.

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

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Microsoft will die Nutzung von Flash möglichst einschränken. Nach und nach verlangt der Edge-Browser bei allen Websites eine manuelle Aktivierung. (Chrome, Google)

In Berlin arbeiten angeblich 600 Mitarbeiter der Bertelsmann-Tochter Arvato daran, unerlaubte Inhalte aus Facebook zu entfernen. Was sie zu sehen bekommen, ist oft an Grausamkeit nicht zu überbieten und lässt traumatisierte Menschen zurück. (Facebook, Soziales Netz)

After taking the world by storm early 2014, Popcorn Time – the ‘Netflix for Pirates’ – has had a relatively quiet 2016.

After building to a crescendo last year, the original fork of the open source project went down after being targeted by the MPAA, leaving others to continue the mission.

Having previously skipped from time4popcorn.eu and popcorn-time.se, one of the teams still pushing the Popcorn Time project along now operate from Popcorn-time.to. This week they debuted a brand new feature in their latest beta that’s likely to make their software more appealing to an even broader audience.

“Most films are English speaking and most people around the globe do not speak English. Many people who studied English, do not master it well enough to enjoy a movie,” the team announced.

“Until now, we’ve provided a feature which allows the user to watch subtitles which are synced to the show, in the language he reads. But it’s not the same as hearing the texts in the language the user understands. It’s really less pleasing.”

To that end, the team have just added a new feature which adds dubbed audio in several languages to the library of movies available through the platform. French, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese are all supported.

When we first heard that the team were overdubbing different audio tracks over existing torrents, it raised many questions over how this could be achieved from a technical standpoint. Was the audio being pulled in on-the-fly from other sources? If so, how was it being sync’d up with the video?

However, it turns out the team had an altogether more straightforward solution to the problem that in hindsight makes complete sense.

“Popcorn Time constantly searches the web for torrents of a movie with the required language already dubbed. The choice of movies is being increased by the minute,” the team told TF.

“Under the good old subtitles button, you’ll see a new dubbing selection button. Click it, make your choice and push play. It now proceeds normally. Popcorn Time will stream the movie instantly dubbed with the selected language.”

So, in basic terms, when a user selects a new language in the Popcorn Time interface the software begins to download a brand new torrent, one that already has their selected language as the only option.

“It’s certainly good for children’s shows. The little ones can’t read yet. So work is done to provide dubbed movies in more languages. Dubbed children’s movies in German, Dutch, Greek, Estonian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Arabic are expected in the near future,” the team added.

The new feature is currently only available on desktop but an Android version is said to be coming soon.

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

Von wegen Russland: Die Bundestagspolizei geht offenbar nicht davon aus, dass die Unterlagen des NSA-Ausschusses von Hackern an Wikileaks weitergegeben wurden. Einige Fakten sprechen dagegen. (Vorratsdatenspeicherung, Wikileaks)

Galileo! Ist! Gestartet!!!11!einself! Wir waren außerdem im Kino, haben mit dem Smartphone gedaddelt und endlich das Macbook Pro mit Touch Bar getestet. Sieben Tage und viele Meldungen im Überblick. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Internet)

The original team behind KickassTorrents are bringing the torrent site back.

Since the seizure of the original site, and the arrest of the site's owner, staffers who worked on the site have been working on a plan to bring back the site.

They started the site Katcr.co, which housed a community forum that allowed those involved to plan the site's resurrection. And yesterday, their plans came to fruition.

The site has been transformed into a completely operational torrent site, with all the features that you would expect from such a site. And "best" of all, the site is staffed by many of the original KAT team, which means that even with the empty user and torrent database, the site will no doubt be up and running at full steam in no time.

"The majority of our original Staff, Admins and Moderation team joined us after Kat.cr went down - which is something we’re very proud of. This shows the loyalty, dedication and real love for KAT that we all share," The KATcr team told torrent news website TorrentFreak.

With those that coded the site kept separate from the staff and admins, the recreation of the site had to be done from scratch, with no access to the original code. The "new" site, however, looks almost identical to the original, and many of the top uploaders are also now back on the site.

But there is just one problem with the new site - it's just too popular! After going online yesterday, the site is already down due to technical issues caused by the flood of visitors eager to test out the new site. The KATcr team promises the site will be back online as soon as possible.

[via TorrentFreak]