Month: April 2020

Bulgaria Plans to Take Down Top Torrent Sites, with U.S. Assistance

The Bulgarian Government is actively trying to take down several top torrent sites. The country’s Combat Organized Crime Unit are working together with U.S. authorities to shut down servers and seize domain names. Popular local trackers Zamunda.net and ArenaBG are mentioned as prime targets, but RarBG.to and Zelka.org are listed as well.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

Last year, Bulgarian authorities carried out several sting operations to take down key players in the IPTV piracy ecosystem. It also provided key assistance in the police action against Xtream Codes.

The country’s increased efforts to protect copyright holders haven’t gone unnoticed in the United States. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) previously removed Bulgaria from their ‘Special 301 Watch List’ and the country hopes to keep it that way.

This week, TorrentFreak obtained a transcript from the most recent hearing on the 2020 Special 301 review. The Government of Bulgaria also sent a representative to the meeting, Ivo Konstantinov, who informed the USTR about the country’s continued progress.

In addition to mentioning IPTV sting operations and legislative developments, Konstantinov stressed that more work has to be done. Specifically, Bulgaria is working on shutting down several major torrent sites with help from U.S. law enforcement.

“Most important of all, the elephant in our room are two of the largest torrent tracking servers that are operating in our country, whose servers are outside of the country,” Bulgaria’s representative said.

“[O]ur National Police and Combat Organized Crime Unit is preparing requests for legal assistance from the U.S. side to deface them and take them down from their host services, which are here in the United States.”

Konstantinov informed the USTR that “this is coming.” No concrete dates were given but the authorities are also working on indictments, which suggests that criminal prosecutions may follow as well.

During the hearing, no websites were mentioned. However, we managed to track down several USTR filings from earlier this year which identify the two trackers as Zamunda.net and ArenaBG. Both sites are among the top 25 most-visited websites in Bulgaria.

In one document the Bulgarian Government states that it intends to “terminate the activities of the Zamunda and Arena.bg torrent trackers,” adding that “5 pre-trial proceedings were opened” for “intellectual property and tax crimes.”

Bulgaria states that U.S. assistance is required as the sites in question use American services. This includes their domain names. Zamunda currently has a .net domain and ArenaBG operates from a .com domain, for example. Both are maintained by Verisign, which is based in the US.

The domains can also be targeted by going to ICANN, which oversees the entire domain name ecosystem. This route is also covered, as the Bulgarian Prosecutor’s Office and the Organized Crime Unit will request ICANN to withdraw the associated domain names.

Yet more pieces of the puzzle fell into place when we stumbled upon another document the Bulgarian Government sent to the USTR. This shows that the U.S. Department of Justice is already actively involved and that more sites are being targeted.

The document references a business trip Bulgarian representatives made to the US last October. These officials met with US law enforcement and businesses, discussing potential anti-piracy actions.

These actions include domain seizures relating to four websites. The aforementioned Zamunda.net and ArenaBG.com, but also Zelka.org and RarBG.to. The latter is a major target, as it’s one of the most-used torrent sites worldwide.

During the trip, Matthew Lamberti from the US Department of Justice agreed to help, under the mutual legal assistance treaty, to seize the associated domain names.

“During the meeting with Mat Lamberti an agreement was reached that an MLAT will be sent by our country, regarding initiated pre-trials concerning four torrent trackers – with the aim of seizing domains, registered in the USA,” the document reads.

If all goes well, Bulgaria will also enlist assistance from other countries to seize any other associated domain names, including mirrors.

“If the planned procedure is successful and the domains are seized, our country intends to send the MPP to the other countries where the mirror domains of the above are registered.”

Bulgaria also mentioned that Cloudflare, a US-based company, is used by most of the top torrent sites in the world. The sites use the CDN provider to “conceal the actual location” of these “criminalized Internet resources.”

During the USTR meeting in Washington, Konstantinov mentioned that Cloudflare is cooperative as it helps to identify the sites’ true hosting locations. It’s now up to Bulgaria and the US to get the paperwork sorted, so domain names and possibly servers can be seized and shut down, he added.

The documents are remarkable, as they lay out in detail how Bulgaria and the US are working together to try and take down several top torrent sites. All the quotes and references, while not easy to find, have been made public by the USTR itself.

In some instances, the paperwork refers to ‘Arena.bg’ and ‘Rar.bg’ instead of ArenaBG.com and RarBG.to. While that’s confusing, the latter two are the largest sites by far and likely the main targets.

Finally, it’s interesting to note that, in this case, Bulgaria needs assistance from the US to shut target popular pirate sites. Especially, when taking into account that the US frequently points to lacking enforcement actions in other countries.

All in all, we can say that the documents clearly lay out the playbook to target the four torrent sites, but thus far, all targets are still operating as usual.

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The transcript from the USTR hearing is available here (pdf) and the additional documents that were sent to the USTR can be found here (pdf) and here (pdf).

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

Bodyhacking: Prothese statt Drehregler

Bertolt Meyer hat seine Handprothese mit einem Synthesizer verbunden – das Youtube-Video dazu hat viele interessiert. Wie haben mit dem Psychologieprofessor über sein Projekt und die Folgen des Videos gesprochen. Ein Interview von Tobias Költzsch (Body…

Bertolt Meyer hat seine Handprothese mit einem Synthesizer verbunden - das Youtube-Video dazu hat viele interessiert. Wie haben mit dem Psychologieprofessor über sein Projekt und die Folgen des Videos gesprochen. Ein Interview von Tobias Költzsch (Bodyhacking, Musik)

New Peninsula trailer looks just as thrilling as its zombie predecessor

“In an abandoned world, the only rule is survival.”

Trailer for Peninsula.

Fans of the zombie genre (and Asian cinema) are no doubt familiar with the 2016 Korean zombie horror film, Train to Busan, in which passengers aboard a speeding train must fight off ravenous zombies to survive long enough to reach their destination—and safety. Now we have the first trailer for a follow-up film, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula, produced by James Wan (Insidious, Aquaman), and it looks like it will be just as much of a thrill-ride as its predecessor.

(Some spoilers for the 2016 film and animated prequel below.)

Directed by Yeon Sang-ho, the original Train to Busan might be described as Snowpiercer with zombies, with a dash of World War Z and Mad Max: Fury Road thrown in for good measure. But that doesn't really do the film justice. Gong Yoo stars as Seok-woo, a divorced, workaholic fund manager who missed his daughter Su-an's singing recital and decides to take her to visit her mother in Busan for her birthday to make it up to her.

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Security tips every teacher and professor needs to know about Zoom, right now

With Zoom bombing a cultural phenomenon, here’s how to protect your meetings.

Children take part in a video conference on a large TV.

Enlarge (credit: jencu / Flickr)

With the Coronavirus pandemic forcing millions of people to work, learn, and socialize from home, Zoom conferences are becoming a default method to connect. And with popularity comes abuse. Enter Zoom bombing, the phenomenon of trolls intruding into other people's meetings for the sole purpose of harassing attendees, usually by bombarding them with racist or sexually explicit images or statements. A small sample of the events over the past few days:

  • An attendee who disrupted an Alcohol Anonymous meeting by shouting misogynistic and anti-Semitic slurs, along with the statement "Alcohol is soooo good," according to Business Insider. Meeting organizers eventually muted and removed the intruder but only after more than half of the participants had left.
  • A Zoom conference hosting students from the Orange County Public Schools system in Florida that was disrupted after an uninvited participant exposed himself to the class.
  • An online meeting of black students at the University of Texas that was cut short when it was interrupted by visitors using racial slurs

The basics

As disruptive and offensive as it is, Zoom bombing is a useful reminder of just how fragile privacy can be in the world of online conferencing. Whereas usual meetings among faculty members, boards of directors, and employees are protected by physical barriers such as walls and closed doors, Zoom conferences can only be secured using other means that many users are unversed in using. What follows are tips for avoiding the most common Zoom conference pitfalls.

Make sure meetings are password protected. The best way to ensure meetings can be accessed only when someone has the password is to ensure that Require a password for instant meetings is turned on in the user settings. Even when the setting is turned off, there's the ability to require a password when scheduling a meeting. It may not be practical to password protect every meeting, but conference organizers should use this measure as often as possible.

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Tesla beats expectations with strong first-quarter delivery numbers

Deliveries grew 40 percent, year over year, despite the coronavirus.

Aerial photo of a sprawling factory.

Enlarge / The Tesla Factory is an automobile manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, and the principal production facility of Tesla Motors. The facility was formerly known as New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota. Tesla produces all electric automobiles. (credit: Steve Proehl / Getty Images)

Tesla produced 102,672 vehicles in the first quarter of 2020 and delivered 88,400 vehicles to customers, the company announced to investors on Thursday. While the delivery number is down from the previous quarter, the overall results were better than analysts had expected, sending Tesla's stock up more than 10 percent in after-hours trading.

The fall in deliveries isn't surprising. December 31, 2019 was the deadline for Tesla customers to receive a federal electric vehicle tax credit, so customers thinking about buying a Tesla car had a strong incentive to do it before the end of the year. Tesla saw a similar decline in deliveries between Q4 2018 and Q1 2019. That was due in part to an earlier step in the tax credit's year-long phaseout.

And notably, Tesla's latest results are a big increase over its results a year earlier; the company produced 77,100 vehicles in Q1 2019 and delivered 63,000. The growth partly reflects improved productivity at Tesla's flagship factory in Fremont, California. It also represents Tesla's new manufacturing facility in Shanghai, which began operations in late 2019.

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