Month: March 2023

Over the years, copyright holders have tried a multitude of measures to curb online piracy, with varying levels of success.

Site blocking has emerged as one of the preferred solutions. While blocking measures are not perfect, they can pose a large enough hurdle for casual pirates to choose legal options instead.

Argentinian Blocklist Expanded

Blocking measures have spread around the world in recent years and have now arrived in Argentina. After filing a complaint last year, local anti-piracy group Alianza is now celebrating a big win after local ISPs were instructed to block 30 pirate streaming sites.

The order was handed down by the National Court of First Instance in Federal Civil and Commercial Matters in Buenos Aires. The case was filed by the local offices of DirecTV and Spanish football league La Liga, among others, who received support from Alianza.

National telecommunications body ENACOM instructed local Internet providers to block the 30 domain names. These include TV streaming services such as televisionlibre.net and cablegratis.online, plus sports streaming sites such as futbollibre.net and pirlotv.uk.

Several of the targeted pirate streaming portals have (or had) millions of monthly visitors.

Alianza informs TorrentFreak that the order sets a dynamic blocking precedent in Argentina. This means that ISPs can also be required to block mirror sites and new domains these streaming portals may switch to in future.

Much-Needed Dynamic Blocking Order

Alianza executive director Víctor Roldán notes that dynamic blocking orders are more effective than simply seizing or blocking single domain names.

“According to our research, many of these sites continue to operate through mirrors. That is the reason why we prefer to obtain judicial and administrative measures that can be extended to other websites and URLs, instead of the methods that other associations use,” Roldán says.

The ability to update the blocklist is a much-needed feature since many of the domains targeted by the Argentinian order are already outdated. For example, ACE previously shut down USTVGO and seized the domains of futbollibre.net and televisionlibre.net.

The blocklist also features extremotvplay.com and rojadirectatv.tv, which were taken down by the U.S. Government last December, as well as several domain names that are no longer active at the time of writing.

Silver Bullet?

Alianza says that it’s aware of these issues and will try to target mirror sites when they become available. The group is right to note that the dynamic nature of the order makes it more effective than a single-domain seizure. However, there are downsides to site blocking as well.

Unlike domain name seizures, which have a global effect, site blocking is relatively easy to bypass by switching DNS resolvers or using other circumvention tools.

That said, site-blocking orders are certainly better than doing nothing. According to Roldán, the first surveys from anti-piracy outfit NAGRA suggest that the measures are already having an effect.

“Judicial orders are always effective in our experience. We monitor the blocking effects through Nagra and the survey results we received thus far were very promising,” Alianza’s director tells us.

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1) futbollibre.net
2) televisionlibre.net
3) supertelevisionhd.net
4) rojadirectatv.tv
5) ver-television.online
6) photocall.tv
7) futboltv.online
8) cablegratis.online
9) telefullenvivo .com
10) extremotvplay.com
11) televisiongratishd.com
12) cablegratistv.online
13) lateleenvivo.club
14) chiringuitotv.online
15) tvconexion.com
16) futboltvenvivo.com
17) tarjetarojatv online.sx
18) supertelevisionhd.com
19) pirlotvonline.org
20) lacasadeltikitakatv.net
21) telebunker.com
22) televisiongratisen vivo.com
23) futbolparatodos.net
24) rojadirectatv.pro
25) ustvgo.tv
26) pirlotvonline.info
27) xtremostereo.net
28) pirlotv.uk
29) pirlotv.futbol
30) teleriumtv.me

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Enlarge / He looks nice... (credit: HBO)

New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Kyle: Up until now, for the most part, I think the Last of Us TV show has done a good job fleshing out the game's story without really ruining the key moments. That didn't really happen with this episode.

In the games, we get a quick cut from the events of episode 6 to Ellie hunting wild game in the snow. As we take direct control of Ellie for the first time, we don't even know if the unseen Joel is alive or dead.

We also don't know anything about the mild-mannered stranger named David that Ellie stumbles upon while hunting. He even seems like a plausible Joel replacement at points during the early, amenable parts of their in-game team-up.

Seeing everything from Ellie's perspective really heightens the tension and mystery of David's whole arc, and I feel like the show kind of ruined that pacing here.

Andrew: Even with no knowledge of how this plays out in the game, I agree that this episode felt super rushed and uneven in a way that makes me more frustrated about last week’s flashback episode. Not that last week’s episode was bad at all! But this arc clearly wanted another episode to breathe, like the Kansas City arc got. Instead we have to cram all this stuff into a single hour.

David suffers the most. It’s like the show needed to stuff him full of red flags to make sure that viewers really didn’t like him or feel bad for him, but it also makes him into a cartoon character in a show where most of the antagonists have already been a little flat.

We are in need of a more interesting characterization... (credit: HBO)

Kyle: The whole preacher subplot is completely new to the show, as far as I can tell, as is David's baffling vision of a violent teenager as a partner in leading the flock. I can see why they wanted to give his turn to cannibalism some grounding, but yeah, it's another situation where the red flags are a little too overt.

Andrew: Yeah, in a TV show, there are some places where I am more willing and able to suspend disbelief—like when Joel goes from laid-out-on-his-back-delirious-with-infection to full-on Rambo-killing-spree in the space of 45 minutes. A more realistic recovery would take a long time to show and to watch! Bo-ring!

But I did not believe for even one fraction of one second that Ellie was in any danger of joining up with this creepy fundamentalist/mushroom cultist/child-hitter/cannibal guy, and it makes it weirder that the last sequence between them is framed as this big emotional showdown.

And also... this community had a lot of other people in it? Where did they go? A more organic and satisfying version might have had David’s own community seeing what a creep he is and turning on him, rather than a big dramatic one-on-one confrontation between David and Ellie in the world’s most flammable restaurant. It doesn’t sound like that’s how it goes in the games, but it also sounds like the character is just handled fundamentally differently.

Just hanging out... (credit: HBO)

Kyle: Not getting any resolution to what happens to this community of people that have now had their cult leader violently killed does seem like a pretty big dangling plot thread.

Here's my main question for someone going in fresh: Did you ever feel like David was potentially just a nice guy and someone that Ellie could justifiably trust and/or let down her guard in front of? I feel like the game went to great pains to push the player in that direction for a while before the heel turn, and it just didn't work for me here. Then again, I knew some of David's dark secrets from the get-go...

Andrew: I don’t think the audience is meant to believe that David could be a good guy at any point. The scene where you meet him is too full of meaningful looks and ominous pauses, and obvious fear on the part of the other people in the community.

The first scene where David and Ellie meet, on the other hand—I could see it! David (played by Scott Shepherd, a fairly prolific character actor who has one of those “what have I seen him in?” faces) has a certain reassuring avuncular charisma to him. Unfortunately, we’ve already seen too many Bad Guy markers from him, even before you find out that he’s been reading To Serve Man.

That gun looks a bit heavy, Ellie... (credit: HBO)

Kyle: Where this episode does follow the games pretty closely is in leaning more toward the "torture porn" side of the equation than any part of the story so far. Not that there hasn't been plenty of violence previously, but seeing Joel torture and kill two prisoners without any remorse and Ellie's own almost-chopping-and-revenge really takes it to a new level. It also makes you look at both characters in a disturbing new light, I think.

Andrew: Joel is clearly being driven both by his dawning acceptance of Ellie-as-daughter figure (his “baby girl” when they finally meet back up is extremely loaded) and his established trust-no-one views of life post-apocalypse. But that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable to watch. This is a dated reference, but I was reminded of Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer, from the War On Terror-era show 24. Sure, he tortures people, and sure, he seems just a hair too enthusiastic about it, but he gets results!!

And you’re right that Ellie’s butchering of David at the end of the episode goes on just a bit too long for comfort. I’m just not sure what to make of it. Surely Ellie has been traumatized as much as she could possibly need to be for story purposes. It’s not as though David was close enough to her to really betray her. Between the two of them, Joel and Ellie do enough violence this episode to sour their tearful reunion a bit. Which is not really where I wanted to be heading into the season finale of a show I have otherwise mostly liked.

Kyle: There's definitely a certain "War on Terror" mindset that creeps into the narrative from decades past, for sure.

Who doesn't love a good stealth section? (credit: HBO)

Andrew: That was where society ended, something the show occasionally references but doesn’t pick at too much. We’ve had one 9/11 reference and one Pearl Jam album with a lot of anti-Bush stuff on it, so presumably the US had invaded Iraq six months before society fell apart.

Kyle: Now I'm wondering if Osama bin Laden's cave hideout was relatively safe from the Infected. Depends how much cordyceps-infused flour they imported, I guess?

Andrew: It does kind of make me want to see more about how the world outside the US is handling the apocalypse. Maybe we would have, back in the old days of 22-episode seasons.

Kyle: Which gets into what I think has become a pretty big pacing problem with the show. In the games, new characters would pop in and stick around for a while, and you never knew precisely when they would pop out again (usually with a violent death). Here, the structure means the pattern of "here's a new character, they will be dead by the end of this episode (or maybe the next one)" has become way too obvious...

All that death has been building toward the big finale, though. Without getting too spoilery, I wonder if you even remember what Joel and Ellie are trekking for/toward at this point, and if you have any big predictions for the final episode?

Oh yeah, Troy Baker is here, too. (credit: HBO)

Andrew: They still have to get her magic blood out to some Firefly-affiliated scientists! The only thing I’m confident enough to assert is that they’re finally going to get where they’re going, and the scientists are going to end up being weirdo creeps who aren’t totally on the level.

I would love to be pleasantly surprised! Maybe the show has settled into this predictable rhythm to make it especially mind-blowing next week when all the scientists end up being super chill and professional.

Kyle: Not to set your expectations too high, but the conclusion of The Last of Us Part One is what raises it to the level of "All Time Great" game for me, so I'm looking forward to seeing this team of actors and producers tackle it.

Andrew: It’s too late, you’ve set my expectations too high! If I don’t like the finale, it’ll be all your fault.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

When an opponent fails to defend themselves in an ordinary fight, things tend to be over pretty quickly. The same isn’t true for copyright lawsuits.

In early October 2021, MG Premium – a subsidiary of adult entertainment giant MindGeek – filed a copyright complaint at a district court in Washington. It targeted Daftsex.com, an adult ‘tube’ site offering MG-owned videos from the Brazzers and Digital Playground series, among others, to dozens of millions of users every month – for free.

Daftsex had little chance of winning in court and completely ignored the lawsuit. It still took more than a year to conclude but with a damages award of $32 million and a broad injunction that included domain seizures, MG Premium prevailed in the end. In reality, however, very little had changed.

Domain Seizures Immediately Countered

Verisign was ordered to sign several domains over to MG Premium, including Daftsex.com, Artsporn.com, Daxab.com, and Biqle.com. Daftsex responded by switching to new domains – Daft.sex, Dsex.to, biqle.ru and biqle.org. The site took a traffic hit but managed to stay online.

Meanwhile, MG Premium redirected its newly acquired domains (and millions of former Daftsex users) to MindGeek-owned RedTube. Despite an external move to undermine domain transfers, the opportunity to convert pirates into paying customers would’ve been useful.

Unfortunately, further opportunities quickly dried up. Seized domain Daftsex.com received more than 41 million visits in November 2022. A month later, traffic plummeted to 6.5 million. According to SimilarWeb data, in January 2023, just three months after MindGeek took control, the domain received just two million visits.

In parallel, Daftsex continued to rebuild its traffic on new domains. In January 2023, Daft.sex received 22.7m visits and Dsex.to 5.7 million. In the background, MG Premium renewed its legal efforts to take the site down.

Contempt of Court

In December 2022, MG Premium filed a request to reopen the case so that alleged Daftsex owner Vasily Kharchenko held in contempt of court (1). Declarations in support were filed by Jason Tucker of anti-piracy company Battleship Stance, and MG Premium’s Anti-Piracy Strategy Manager, Steven Salway, a former Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit detective (1,2)

In addition to the court holding Kharchenko in contempt, MG Premium requested permission to take over the new Daftsex domains – Daft.sex, Dsex.to, and Biqle.org. Since Daftsex is using a Twitter account to communicate with its user community, MG Premium wants the court to issue an order compelling Twitter to shut down the account or transfer it to MG Premium.

As things stand today, none of those things have happened and Daftsex just keeps on growing. That doesn’t mean that MG Premium is simply letting it happen though.

DMCA Takedown Campaign Begins

Within hours of Daftsex announcing its new domains last November, MG Premium began sending DMCA notices to Google, hoping to make daft.sex, dsex.to, and biqle.org less visible in search results.

That went on to become what is almost certainly the largest and most intense DMCA notice-sending campaign by a copyright holder against a single site since the DMCA was introduced in 1998.

The first DMCA notices targeting daft.sex and dsex.to were sent to Google on November 14 and 21, respectively. In the first week, Google recorded takedown requests for 937,952 Daft.sex URLs and 941,424 URLs belonging to Dsex.to, but that was just a taster of things to come.

Largest Ever Copyright Holder Campaign Against Single Site

According to Google data – an entry dated January 9, 2023, covering a single week – Google received DMCA notices requesting the removal of 4,686,019 Dsex.to URLs. An entry dated January 16, again covering a single week, states that Google received DMCA notices requesting 5,025,742 Daft.sex URLs to be taken down.

Data shown in Google’s charts lag a little behind actual notices received but between November 14, 2022 and February 20, 2023, Google received ~11,000 individual requests from MG Premium targeting daft.sex.

Total daft.sex URLs requested for removal until March 3, 2023: ~45.6 million.

Between November 21, 2022 and February 20, 2023, Google received around ~11,000 individual requests from MG Premium targeting dsex.to.

Total dsex.to URLs requested for removal until March 3, 2023: ~45.6 million

URLs requested for removal overall (both domains combined): 91+ million

To put these figures into perspective, the number of URLs requested for deletion against The Pirate Bay’s .org domain currently sits at 6,008,980 – after being targeted since 2012.

Majority of Notices Had No Immediate Effect

Since Google reports what action it takes after receiving a DMCA takedown notice, we can see that the vast majority of these notices failed to have any immediate effect.

When considering all MG Premium notices sent to Google, targeting both daft.sex and dsex.to URLs, close to 80% were reported by Google as ‘not in index’, meaning that the reported URLs were absent from Google’s search so couldn’t be removed.

That raises the obvious question of why so many URLs reported by MG Premium as infringing were unrecognized by Google.

TorrentFreak requested comment from MG Premium on Saturday evening but received no response, most likely due to the timing.

We’ll publish an update if we receive a response, but we suspect that other factors could be at play here that only MG Premium will be able to properly explain.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.