Month: April 2019

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Der Informatiker Joe Armstrong gilt als Erfinder der Programmiersprache Erlang und war Experte für verteilte und fehlertolerante Systeme. Armstrong erlag nun den Folgen einer Lungenerkrankung. (Softwareentwicklung, Internet)

Kurz nach dem Start ist es einem Sicherheitsforscher gelungen, sich unberechtigt bei der Whatsapp-Alternative der französischen Regierung anzumelden. Der Forscher fand weitere vermeintliche Fehler, die laut den Entwicklern der Matrix-Software aber keine sind. (Matrix, Instant Messenger)

Nach den Anschlägen in Sri Lanka wird in dem Land der Zugriff auf Messenger-Dienste wie Whatsapp oder Social-Media-Plattformen wie Facebook blockiert. Das soll die Verbreitung von Falschinformationen verhindern. (Politik/Recht, Instant Messenger)

For more than a decade, copyright holders around the world have pushed Internet service providers to block ‘pirate’ sites.

While users in the United States are yet to experience any blocking on copyright grounds, elsewhere – particularly in Europe – the site blocking phenomenon is in full swing.

Indeed, according to a recent overview by the Motion Picture Association, almost 4,000 websites are blocked by ISPs across 31 countries. The number of domains blocked is more than double that amount, in excess of 8,000 worldwide.

While the action is seen as effective at preventing direct access to sites, plenty of workarounds exist. Alternative ‘pirate’ domains regularly appear, along with mirrors, clones and the rising use of Tor and, of course, VPNs.

Interestingly, however, we received correspondence from the operator of a major ‘pirate’ site this week that indicated that VPN-based traffic is undesirable because it is considered almost worthless by advertising networks.

“Pirate sites need money to operate,” he explained. “Having more VPN users accessing the site doesn’t equal more money.”

According to the operator, ad agencies frown upon such traffic. Instead, they prefer traffic that is easily categorized into geographic regions, with some countries’ traffic being considered more valuable than others.

Users visiting sites from places such as the US, UK, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia, are considered more valuable than those visiting from India and China, for example.

The site operator says that advertisers pay for his traffic on a geographic basis. An example list of geocodes published by Maxmind shows a sample, with the United States listed as ‘US’, United Kingdom as ‘GB’, and Canada as ‘CA’. However, at the top of the list is A1, which stands for Anonymous Proxy.

“Advertisers pay per [geocode] and do campaigns per [geocode]. VPNs are marked with GEO A1 which is outside the scope of those tiers thus no one gets paid for those,” he explained.

Another site operator working in a similar niche told us that in his experience, payment for VPN traffic is patchy. However, he agreed with the overall sentiment.

“It all depends on the network to be honest. I have worked with a few networks before that don’t even show a popup if you’re using a VPN,” he explained.

Of course, the A1 code isn’t just limited to VPNs. TOR also comes under that category and that traffic is frowned up too.

“No ad agency pays for TOR traffic,” we were told. “There are special flags for TOR , anonymous proxies, VPN, dedicated servers, VPS servers. It’s really easy to monitor those networks and changes to them. Everything is public anyway.”

IP2Location sells access to a database for $799 which claims to be able to detect VPNs, proxies, and bots. It also offers a demo, which allows the user to enter an IP address and discover whether it falls into the above categories. We tested it with a diverse range of VPN servers and the tool identified the VPN every single time.

So while visitors may be able to unblock ‘pirate’ sites with VPNs, TOR, and similar tools, it’s clear that many advertisers aren’t partial to this kind of traffic. There are other more creative ways to monetize these visitors through various schemes but for the large site in question, they’re more of a burden.

“More visits, more server load for 0$,” he concluded.

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

Several hours before its official premiere, the second episode of the latest Game of Thrones season is already widely available on torrent and streaming sites.

According to reports from several viewers, the German version of Amazon Prime accidentally made the episode available on the platform a few hours ago.

Apparently, the second episode of the season simply started playing after the first one finished.

After this mistake, it didn’t take long before someone ripped the show, and soon after many links to pirated copies started to appear on the usual torrent and streaming sites.

This isn’t the first time that a Game of Thrones episode has been released early. The popular HBO series has a long history of leaks. The most prominent one dates back to 2015 when the first four episodes leaked from a promotional screener. 

In 2017 a Game of Thrones episode leaked with a “Star India” watermark. This eventually led to the arrests of four people. 

Today’s leak appears to be a mistake by Amazon, but the result is ultimately the same. Pirates will get an early viewing of the latest episode, before those who pay, and spoilers are being widely shared online.

For several years in a row Game of Thrones has been the most pirated TV-show, and this year the interest is overwhelming once again. Data published by piracy tracking company MUSO earlier this week showed that the first episode of this season was pirated 54 million times in just one day.

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

Last week there was quite an uproar when Starz deleted one of our tweets, which linked to a news article about several prominent TV-show leaks.

As reasons for the takedown, the DMCA notice mentioned “images of the unreleased episodes” and “information about their illegal availability,” something that’s generally seen as fair use.

Making matters worse, Starz also sent takedown requests to several people who tweeted links to the article where we complained about the first takedown. This then generated a lot of criticism from journalists, legal scholars, and the public at large.

Starz eventually retracted some of the DMCA notices and apologized for the “misunderstanding” in a public statement. We have yet to hear back from the company directly, despite multiple requests, so we decided to move on. There’s more news to report, after all.

However, a few days after the DMCA notice from Starz, Twitter contacted us with a similar complaint, again from an American media giant. Apparently, Warner Bros. had also asked the social media platform to remove one of our tweets.

The takedown notice, sent by Warner Bros’ anti-piracy partner Marketly, accused us of posting a tweet that made “computer program(s)” available “for copying through downloading,” without permission of the copyright owner.

“We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this software via your company’s network,” the notice added.

At TorrentFreak we simply report news, and looking at the “infringing” tweet in question, we fail to see a link with software piracy. Instead, it’s simply a link to our news article about the previously convicted admins of the movie pirate sites Kinox.to and Movie4k.to.

Still a bit puzzled, we looked back at the DMCA notice again and noticed that it didn’t list any software, but movies and TV-shows instead. That made more sense, but the takedown notice still doesn’t.

We assume that Warner Bros. isn’t happy with Kinox.to and Movie4k.to, which is understandable. However, removing a tweet to a news article that discusses a newsworthy event related to these sites goes too far. 

Especially when you consider that our article doesn’t even link to these sites. The tweet does, ironically, but those links are automatically generated by Twitter. We didn’t put those in. Yet, we are punished for it, adding a copyright ‘strike’ to our Twitter account.

We assume that this is yet another misunderstanding and we kindly request Warner Bros., via Marketly, to sort this out. While we’re at it, we will ask about the mysterious pirated software, because we still haven’t located that either.

Incidents like this show that there is surprisingly little attention paid to the context of potentially infringing content. This was also fairly obvious last week with the Starz drama, which hasn’t been completely resolved yet. On the contrary. 

Some of the tweets linking to our reporting about the leaked TV shows remain unavailable at the time of writing. This includes a tweet from ‘FCT,’ who complained about the situation repeatedly. We requested clarification from Starz on this issue earlier this week but haven’t heard back. 

Starz did remove some of its most recent takedown requests, including one directed at our original tweet. However, at the same time, it also reversed several DMCA notices for content that does appear to be infringing, as shown below. 

It looks like they’re not paying much attention at all.

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

Free and open source racing game SuperTuxKart has been under development for nearly 12 years, and even longer than that if you take into account that it was a fork of the discontinued TuxKart. And for most of that time, it’s been a fun, playable game. So it’s a bit surprising that version 1.0 was just […]

The post SuperTuxKart 1.0 released, brings online play support appeared first on Liliputing.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments