Month: June 2019

Every week, millions of pirates head off to popular torrent sites for their software fix.

Whether they’re looking for the latest operating systems, graphics tools, or DVD/Blu-ray burning software, most things are available for free download.

What most people never question is why these tools are available for free and indeed, who puts them online. Today we can put a little meat on those bones.

We recently spoke with Thumper, aka ThumperTM, one of the longest-standing uploaders on public torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and 1337x. But this isn’t just any uploader. Thumper is responsible for almost 1,000 torrent uploads over the past nine years, leading to millions of downloads across the Internet.

Thumper identifies as female (impossible to confirm, but we’ll proceed on that basis) and sports the profile picture as seen top right. It’s an image used by many Internet users so probably isn’t an accurate depiction. Thumper also claims to be from Switzerland but in this game, such ‘facts’ should be taken with a pinch of salt alongside a knowingly obvious nod to security.

What cannot be denied, however, is the popularity of Thumper’s torrents. If we take her Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2016 release as an example, that has received more than 801,000 downloads on 1337x alone.

“This torrent has been download a few million times from all sites, because Office is one of the must-have programs for most of us,” Thumper informs TF.

Of course, not all torrents are this popular but Thumper’s history goes back around 14 years, when torrents weren’t even a priority for her. Things began on so-called “one-click” hosting sites in 2005, with a progression to torrents in 2007.

“I started uploading torrents at H33t, Demonoid, 1337x, ThePirateBay, and RARBG. Then I started my own site in 2010 (ThumperDC.com and TechTools.NET). Now all of those sites redirect to our legit Windows forum, TheWindowsForum.com,” she explains.

Over the past 12 years, Thumper’s torrents (mainly Windows software uploads) have spread far and wide. She has been uploading on The Pirate Bay since April 2010 and on that site alone has a confirmed 946 torrents, as the private user panel screenshot below shows.

The Pirate Bay is obviously a very high-profile site but Thumper is a bit of a celebrity elsewhere too.

More than nine years ago she joined 1337x and for the last eight has been a trusted moderator there. In the interim, Thumper was also an uploader at the now-defunct original KickassTorrents, but still continues over at that platform’s namesake, KATCR.

Uploading and seeding so many torrents is a big undertaking, especially over a large number of years. There’s also a bit of a stigma attached to software uploads because unlike movies and TV shows, they have the potential to contain a virus or malware.

However, since reputations can be gone in a flash if an uploader lets something nefarious slip through the net, Thumper says that precautions are carried out in advance. Most uploaded software is obtained from friendly crackers (people who remove copy protection) before being run through a virtual machine and then scanned for viruses. Only then is it uploaded.

This perhaps contributed to Thumper earning a “green skull” from The Pirate Bay team around 2011, which is a small logo next to a user name which informs potential downloaders that while releases aren’t guaranteed to be flawless, they are more trusted than others without.

This is particularly important when one considers that people sometimes try to masquerade as Thumper in order to gain traction. We independently confirmed her status on one of the torrent sites she uploads to but most people don’t have that luxury so should proceed with caution when seeing her ‘brand’ online.

“The Pirate Bay has a ton of fake uploads lately, even some of them are infected and uploaded by other users with our tag ‘Windows app name v1.0 [ThumperDC] or [TechTools] or [TheWindowsForum]’, for example,” Thumper explains.

“1337x has other rules for new uploaders, you must apply for uploader status, then we review and decide if x_User is legit. People should always use torrent sites which are safe: 1337x, TPB, KATCR, RARBG, or TorrentGalaxy.  And make sure to download from trusted uploaders.”

Finally, one of the biggest questions is why someone like Thumper keeps releasing torrent after torrent, year after year. What’s in it for her?

Each release does contain links to her own site (which now specializes in discussions and technical support for Windows software), so there’s obviously some benefit there. However, she insists that this isn’t the main motivation.

“Sharing is caring,” she concludes, citing the years-old ‘pirate’ mantra.

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

The GPD Pocket is a tiny laptop with a 7 inch display, a compact keyboard, and a case small enough to fold up and slide into a (fairly large) pocket. Over the past few years GPD and a series of rival companies have released similar mini PCs with more processing power and other upgrades, but […]

The post The littlest Chromebook: GPD Pocket gets an unofficial ChromiumOS port appeared first on Liliputing.

Read 43 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Qualcomm and Lenovo announced plans to bring one of the first laptops with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx processor to market early next year. The new chip should enable better performance than we’ve ever seen from a Qualcomm-powered laptop. But like most Windows PCs with Snapdragon processors, the upcoming Lenovo “Project Limitless” device probably isn’t going […]

The post Qualcomm is working on cheaper chips for laptops appeared first on Liliputing.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Netflix, like many other rightsholders, keeps a close eye on pirate sites.

The company has its own in-house anti-piracy team and also works with third-party companies, to issue takedown requests.

Over the past two years, the streaming giant has sent more than five million of these to Google alone. Many of them ask the search engine to remove links to pirate sites, but this week our eye was drawn to a more unusual request.

The notice in question was sent by the anti-piracy outfit Marketly, on behalf of Netflix, and identifies 250 URLs which presumably link to pirated copies of the movie “Triple Frontier.” However, on closer inspection, many of the reported links are not infringing at all.

The most obvious mistake is that the notice reports Netflix’s own listing of “Triple Frontier” as a pirate copy, requesting Google to remove it from its search index.

Google spotted the mistake and didn’t comply. However, that’s not the only error. The same takedown request also includes a variety of links to other legitimate websites. This article from The Wrap about Netflix’s streaming numbers for example, which mentions Triple Frontier, but isn’t piracy related.

The same is true for several other reported URLs. This includes a Hollywood Reporter story, this top ten list from Variety, this article from The Daily Dot, a Business Insider report, and IMDb’s news page for Triple Frontier. We could go on and on.

These findings could easily be used to once again argue that automated DMCA takedown processes are highly inaccurate. After all, if Google wasn’t sharp enough to spot these errors, legitimate content would have disappeared from the search results.

However, since we have seen our fair share of imposters over the past year, we’re not sure that this notice was sent by Marketly at all, or if Netflix has anything to do with it.

Marketly indeed works for Netflix and the streaming service does own the distribution rights to Triple Frontier. However, neither company is known for its negligence when it comes to these types of takedown efforts, although Marketly took down one of our tweets recently.

Upon closer inspection, our doubts started to grow. For one, the Marketly that sent this takedown requests has a separate listing in Google’s transparency report.

In addition, there have been other Marketly imposters recently. For example, Google has flagged this copycat as being fraudulent.

We’re more than happy and are inclined to chalk this clearly erroneous notice up as another scam attempt. Likely in an effort of a pirate site to punish competitors, as we’ve seen before.

However, that doesn’t make this less of a problem. In fact, if scammers continue to make claims like this, it will likely lead to overbroad takedowns. And with millions of URLs being submitted per day, Google will have a hard time catching them all.

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

Zwei SATA-Anschlüsse, SO-DIMM-Slot und integrierte Apollo-Laker-CPU mit vier Kernen: Das Gigabyte GA-SBCAP3940 könnte sich für manches Selbstbauprojekt eignen. Mit zwei Ethernet-Buchsen wäre zum Beispiel ein NAS-System denkbar. (Mainboard, Intel)

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Piloten in Star Citizen können ihre Raumjäger bald in anderen Farben und mit unterschiedlicher Inneneinrichtung kaufen. Zu Testzwecken beschränkt sich das erst einmal auf das beliebte Schiff Origin 300i. Das kostet vorerst nur echtes Geld, später alternativ auch Ingame-Währung. (Star Citizen, Crowdfunding)

In Zukunft wird es drei Versionen der Asus-Bastelplatine geben: Das Tinker Board Edge R und CR1S-CM-A richten sich mit Google-KI-Chip an Hobbyentwickler und kleinere Industrieanwendungen. Das Tinker Board R hat mit 4 GByte RAM und 2 GByte RAM für den KI-Chip reichlich mehr Reserven. (Asus, Google)