Month: June 2019

Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN is well known for numerous actions against various players in the piracy ecosystem.

The company’s targets have included big sites – The Pirate Bay, for example – through to various individuals and groups that facilitate access to infringing content online. In 2016, that included Netherlands-based torrent release team, 2Lions.

2Lions uploaded thousands of torrents to several popular sites including The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, 1337x, ExtraTorrent, and Demonoid. This attracted the attention of BREIN which targeted several members of the group.

In a 2016 legal process in which the individuals had no input, BREIN obtained ex parte injunctions which prohibited three members of the 2Lions team from infringing the copyrights of BREIN’s members on pain of a 2,000 euros per day fine. That led to negotiations with the team.

In addition to removing as many of their uploaded torrents as possible, the three individuals (and two other team members) agreed to pay BREIN 15,000 euros each as part of a settlement agreement. It’s now been more than three years since that deal was made but according to BREIN, one team member hasn’t met their obligations.

In a session before the Court of The Hague last week, BREIN sought to force the former uploader to pay up via a collection process, one that is likely to prove even more expensive for the person in question.

According to the anti-piracy group, not only will the individual have to pay the originally agreed amount, he or she will also have to pay for these proceedings and subsequent collection costs. That effectively doubles the amount to be paid to BREIN, a payment it can now enforce following the court process.

Rather than immediately pursue most of its targets through the courts, BREIN has regularly announced that groups, platforms and companies have shut down after reaching settlement agreements. IPTV providers, music pirates, torrent sites, and Usenet indexers have all promised to pay up over the past couple of years.

Given the volume of settlements, BREIN is clearly keen to see them honored. During 2018 alone, the Dutch anti-piracy group reached deals with 31 entities which included promises to settle via payments totaling hundreds of thousands of euros. The action last week suggests BREIN is prepared to enforce such payment, should people fail to meet their obligations.

“BREIN has been working with bailiffs and a debt collection office for some time now to keep track of non-paying infringers,” BREIN chief Tim Kuik said in a statement.

“This can concern payments that have been agreed in settlements or court orders. The results are satisfactory. Those who do not meet their payment obligations will be presented with an extra bill for this.”

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

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Dumbo is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(1)	Dumbo	6.5 / trailer
2	(…)	Brightburn (Subbed HDRip)	6.4 / trailer
3	(…)	Escape Plan: The Extractors	4.5 / trailer
4	(3)	Captain Marvel	7.1 / trailer
5	(…)	Toy Story 4 (HDCam)	8.5 / trailer
6	(2)	Pokémon Detective Pikachu	6.9 / trailer
7	(5)	Us (Subbed HDRip)	7.2 / trailer
8	(7)	Avengers: Endgame (HDCam)	9.1 / trailer
9	(10)	Glass	6.9 / trailer
10	(6)	Murder Mystery	6.1 / trailer

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

Microsoft hat eine erste Vorschau auf das neue Windows Terminal für Windows 10 veröffentlicht. Die Open-Source-Anwendung bietet viele moderne Funktionen und eine einheitliche Oberfläche für mehrere Shells. (Windows, Microsoft)

Bose bringt seine Sonnenbrille Frames pünktlich zum Sommeranfang auf den Markt: Sie hat eingebaute Lautsprecher, die überraschend gut klingen, für Musikgenuss ist sie dennoch nur eingeschränkt nutzbar. Interessant sind auch einige der Audio-AR-Apps. Ein Test von Tobias Költzsch (Bose, Audio/Video)

Final Cut Pro X soll durch den Webbrowser Chrome erheblich ausgebremst oder zum Absturz gebracht werden, hat ein Creative Director entdeckt. Läuft der Browser im Hintergrund, wird die Software massiv ausgebremst. Das dürfte sich auch auf andere Videoanwendungen auswirken. (Final Cut, Browser)

The Boring Company hat in der Nähe von Los Angeles einen Tunnel gebaut, in dem ein Model 3 fahren kann. Ein Video zeigt die Fahrt mit rund 190 km/h unter der Erde aber offenbar nicht im autonomen, sondern im manuellen Modus. (The Boring Company, Technologie)

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Der Raspberry Pi 4B ist erschienen und enthält lang erwartete Hardware-Upgrades. Doch nicht jedem dürften die Änderungen gefallen: Denn zwangsläufig wird auch neues Zubehör fällig, und für Bastler stellt sich die Frage nach dem Nutzen der auffälligsten Neuerung. (Raspberry Pi, H.264)

Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system is one of the biggest names in desktop GNU/Linux. But if you plan to play PC games on Linux, you might want to start looking around for a different Linux distro. Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek announced last week that starting with Ubuntu 19:10, which comes out in October, Canonical would no […]

The post Ubuntu is dropping support for 32-bit apps and games, so Steam is dropping support for Ubuntu appeared first on Liliputing.

According to an October 2018 report, Steam has around 90 million active monthly users, making it the largest digital distribution platform for PC games.

Steam user accounts overall are many times more numerous. In April, PCGamesN indicated that the platform had attracted its billionth account, noting that “a significant number of these are undoubtedly spam, scam, alt, and bot accounts.”

Indeed, an activity that appears to have taken root on the platform over the past few months shows that accounts don’t have to be limited to just one type of the above suspicious activity. Steam is the last place one might expect to find links to pirate movies, but that’s part of the trap.

As the image below shows, this Steam page is supposedly offering the movie Escape Room “for FREE online” but that certainly isn’t the case.

Users who scroll down to the bottom find extremely lengthy hyperlinks hidden under a pair of “Watch Now” and “Download” buttons. Since this is clearly some kind of dodgy activity, we truncated those links in order to visit only their final destination.

That led us to another site called “Daily Movie” which appeared to begin playing not Escape Room, but Avengers: Infinity War. After viewing what seemed to be a real movie intro (the lion of MGM in this case), neither movie was presented. Instead, we got the following;

Needless to say, in the context of the offer on Steam (recent Hollywood movies) most of the claims in the above statement are a lie. The ‘continue’ link goes to a subscription content service (Dontra) that has none of the movies previously promised and will only leave users disappointed – after earning the Steam spammer some commission, of course.

Another page, which claims to offer Aquaman for download, contains hyperlinks to what appears to be a full ‘pirate’ streaming site called Cinemago. While the links are not directly functional (and Steam helpfully warns that these go to an external site), it does send users to the Cinemago platform, as shown below.

This site, unsurprisingly, does not offer pirate movies. Instead, when users click any of the film covers they are introduced to a similar “sign up” window and are then re-directed to a site called Funwraith. It is absolutely identical to Dontra and as such has none of the movies offered.

This bait-and-switch subscription trap is repeated on dozens of Steam pages too numerous to outline here. However, if readers want to see more of them (not recommended), typing site:steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ “full movie” into Google will bring up pages and pages of results.

While unusual, legitimate platforms have been abused for piracy and scam schemes in the past. Facebook, Google, Google Maps and even Change.org have all been repurposed in similar fashion.

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