Month: June 2018

For several years, ETTV has been a household name in the torrent community.

The group, which distributes pirated TV-shows, originated at ExtraTorrent but when the site closed it built its own home.

Together with several like-minded uploaders, including ETHD, they launched ETTV.tv last fall. While the groups still distribute their work on other mainstream torrent indexes, the site’s traffic has been growing steadily.

That doesn’t mean that it’s been a smooth ride though. Like many other sites that offer pirated content, ETTV has been subject to various blocking efforts. Some ISPs in India are blocking the site, for example, and this week Australian providers were ordered to do the same.

To counter these efforts ETTV.tv has now launched its own proxy portal at ETTVproxies.com. The site currently lists one operational ‘alternative,’ but a site representative tells TF that other domains will follow.

“We’re going to launch more. This is just the beginning for us,” ETTV informs TorrentFreak.

“The goal here is to bypass these blocks they are trying to do. It’s not hard to evade their blocks at all, but for those that can’t be bothered ..we will have a bunch of domains which they can find us on.”

Generally speaking, ETTV is not overly concerned about the blocking efforts. While they are a nuisance, determined users have several options to circumvent them, even without a proxy site.

“We think the website blockades are useless. Some people are going to evade them using VPNs, some people using public DNS services such as Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google (8.8.8.8), and others are using Tor.”

ETTV is also planning to launch its own Tor version of the site, to make it more resilient. Also, it will keep its proxies out of popular search engines, hoping to stay under the radar as much as possible.

As we highlighted in the past, ETTV, ETHD, and similar groups don’t rip or encode any releases themselves. They’re pretty much automated scripts that take scene releases, and put these out in public.

There’s a broad audience for this content as their torrents are downloaded millions of times every week. This has also inspired some copycats to take away some of their traffic. But, ETTV is not too worried about those.

“They do not provide original content, and they will never gain popularity especially since people know who we are and where to find us, so they will eventually shut down,” ETTV tells us.

The biggest threat are the copyright holders, perhaps. Many torrent sites have come and gone over the past decade and a half, and several operators have paid a high price for stepping into this business.

Again, ETTV doesn’t seem to be too bothered about the ever-looming crackdown.

“Let’s see how much progress they will make by 2028. Last 15 years was a complete failure for them. The only people that got something out of this are the lawyers. Everybody else lost. Some more, some less,” ETTV concludes.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

On Tuesday we reported that several YouTube channels had all their videos blocked worldwide. This included those belonging to MIT OpenCourseWare,’ the ‘Blender Foundation,’ and many others.

The error message that was displayed typically appears for copyright reasons. However, in this case, the problem was more complicated, related to a new license agreement, among other things.

While some prominent channels have now been restored, others still face similar issues. The people at Human Beatbox, for example, tell us that they are experiencing the same problem, which at the time of writing is still not fixed.

YouTube simply informed them that its a “technical issue” which the engineers are trying to resolve. Meanwhile, all videos of theirs and many other channels have been inaccessible for nearly a week…

Whatever the problem is, it’s clearly a ‘mistake’ of epic proportions.

While YouTube probably has no intention to ‘censor’ these channels, it shows what can go wrong if creators put their faith in the hands of a single service. A service they have no control over at all, which removes your content, erroneously or not.

Luckily there are some alternatives that put creators in control again. PeerTube is one of these options.

When the Blender Foundation had all its videos blocked by YouTube earlier this week, a decision was taken to give this alternative a try. In a matter of hours, Blender had a fully operational streaming site, one which they had complete control over.

This prompted TF to take a closer look at PeerTube and what it has to offer.

Put simply, PeerTube allows anyone to set up their own video streaming site. This can run independently, but it can also be linked, or federated, with other PeerTube instances to create a broader reach. All with P2P steaming support.

The first version of PeerTube launched last year. It’s operated by the small French company Framasoft, and thus far it hasn’t really broken through in English-speaking countries. The Blender Foundation’s problems, while very unfortunate, may change that.

“Blender’s example illustrates our main goal: autonomy, independence from external platforms. When you centralize videos and attention, you gain power over the users. Our approach goes the other way,” Framasoft’s Pouhiou tells TF.

PeerTube comes with built-in WebTorrent support. This means that viewers also contribute their bandwidth, which can come in handy if a video goes viral.

To ‘federate’ with other PeerTube instances, the software uses the ActivityPub protocol, which is also used by the popular social networking software Mastodon. This helps to grow the video library if needed, but it’s entirely optional.

“Federation allows diversity in the governances: each PeerTube Instance Hoster can determine their own set of rules, their settings, their moderation policy, etcetera,” Pouhiou says.

The idea behind PeerTube is to let creators regain control over their content. This helps to avoid censorship in the broadest sense of the word, and also “problems” that block videos for days on end.

It’s this spirit that also drives the developers to make the software entirely free and open.

“To us, it is really about taking back the web into our own hands. We have a joke about the ‘Power to the people’ song of John Lennon: PeerTube is kind of ‘Software to the people’,” Pouhiou tells us.

“That’s why PeerTube has to be Free-Libre software: not even we should be able to ‘close’ the code, it would give us way too much power, which we don’t want.”

Of course, there are plenty of downsides to alternatives like PeerTube. For one, in terms of costs, they are not free to operate. Even though WebTorrent can limit the bandwidth bill to a degree, it requires hosting and some technical skills.

Monetizing PeerTube videos will also require more work. You can’t just click a button and magically start earning money. And then there’s the issue of reaching a wide audience, which may be harder for creators who are ‘locked’ into external services.

That said, for outfits such as Blender and MIT OpenSourceWare which are non-profit and have their own sites which people know how to find, it makes a lot of sense.

At the least, everyone who relies on external platforms might want to stop and think for a minute if they really want to put all their eggs in someone else’s basket.

More information on PeerTube can be found on the official site. The company recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to ensure continued development, which has raised over €20,000 at the time of writing.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

For many years, Netflix relied on content supplied by other companies to satisfy its growing userbase. Now, however, that reliance is beginning to take a back seat to productions of its own.

Back in February, Netflix CFO David Wells said that his company was set to spend more than $8 billion on content in 2018, a figure that contributes to the 700 original TV shows and 80 movies it will offer globally this year. There can be little doubt, Netflix is now a powerful creator and commissioner of content in its own right.

This shift in strategy raises some interesting points, not least concerning the company’s attitude toward piracy. While the MPAA has spat venom over the issue for decades, Netflix has appeared somewhat more relaxed. Quietly, however, Netflix understands that scraping every possible dollar from consumers while restricting the availability of pirated content is something it must sink resources into.

Back in 2017, we revealed the existence of Netflix’s Global Copyright Protection Group when the company advertised for a Global Copyright Protection Counsel. Since then the company has recruited more individuals to the cause and this week advertised for another new recruit.

Netflix’s new Copyright and Content Protection Coordinator will work with the Global Copyright & Content Protection Group to protect Netflix Originals, the TV shows and movies for which Netflix owns the rights.

“The ideal candidate will have carried out a similar role at another company and can hit the ground running,” the listing for the position reads.

“He or she should have experience of anti-piracy initiatives and be very well versed in managing an effective notice and take down program and experience of working with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing, VK, Daily Motion and other well known platforms.”

Although Netflix’s business model is somewhat different to that of more traditional studios, the company faces the same problems with pirate links appearing online. To that end, the successful applicant will be expected to disrupt this availability as much as possible, particularly through the management of the company’s DMCA notice sending systems.

The company’s new coordinator will be expected to carry out daily scanning of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Periscope, Google Search, Bing, VK, DailyMotion and other platforms used for piracy. Fingerprinting technologies on YouTube (ContentID) and Facebook (Rights Manager) will also need to be monitored, with attention paid to content that’s uploaded in a way that circumvents those recognition systems.

Of course, these legitimate platforms are just the tip of a very large iceberg. It seems likely that Netflix content is more likely to be found illegally on torrent and streaming platforms so these will need to be tackled too, with Netflix advising that the candidate will gather data on “pirate streaming sites, cyberlockers and usenet platforms.”

While Netflix is now a true competitor to the mainstream Hollywood studios and companies like Amazon, they all have to deal with piracy in roughly the same way. These synergies were formalized last June with the debut of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a coalition of 30 companies dedicated to presenting a united front against piracy.

As a founding member of ACE, Netflix contributes $5m per year to the alliance. This expensive relationship needs to be nurtured so the new coordinator will have responsibilities there too, working with other ACE members to tackle the piracy threat.

The full listing can be found here.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Enlarge / Hellllloooooo Chrome OS tablets. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Chrome OS took over schools with clamshells, but now Google is shaking things up with slabs. After a spring announcement, Acer has built the first Chrome OS tablet, the $329 Chromebook Tab 10, to give teachers and students a more flexible device to use for schoolwork both in and out of the classroom.

Some might perk up at the idea of a lightweight yet durable tablet with a 2048×1536 display and a built-in Wacom stylus running Chrome OS, but this device (like many other Chrome OS devices) will only be sold in the education market. While regular consumers may not be able to get their hands on the Chromebook Tab 10, however, there will be more Chrome OS tablets to come that will be sold to the general public.

After spending some time with this inaugural Chrome OS tablet, it would be remiss to think that it's essentially the same thing as an Android tablet—devices that are largely unsupported at this point. We may not be traditional educators or students at this point, but Ars tested the Chromebook Tab 10 with a few things in mind: how does the Chrome OS experience translate on a tablet sans-keyboard? And, perhaps more importantly, can Chrome OS bring Google's tablet category back from the dead?

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Libre Computer is launching its second single-board computer. Last year the company launched a crowdfunding campaign for a Raspberry Pi-like device called the Renegade last year, and now Libre Computer is following up with the Renegade Elite. The new model has a faster processor, USB Type-C ports, and a new set of expansion header with a […]

The post Libre Computer introduces Renegade Elite single-board computer with RK3399 processor appeared first on Liliputing.

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Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk, seen here in April 2018. (credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Tesla is now wholly refuting the claims made by an ex-employee and self-proclaimed whistleblower who previously leaked information to the press.

In a lengthy statement provided Friday to Ars via a Tesla spokesperson, the company flatly denied that Martin Tripp, the man that the company sued earlier this week for alleged trade secrets violations, had any noble motivations.

"He is nothing of the sort," the company wrote. "He is someone who stole Tesla data through highly pernicious means and transferred that data to unknown amounts of third parties, all while making easily disprovable claims about the company in order to try to harm it."

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