Sunday, September 30, 2018

Grindr Will Now Have to Sue Fuckr to Keep Controversial Tool Down

Released back in 2015, the Fuckr desktop application provides enhanced access to the popular Grindr dating service. However, the extra features offered by the software are controversial, to say the least.

Fuckr gives users the ability to precisely locate hundreds of Grindr users to an accuracy of just a few feet. In addition, Fuckr offers access to a trove of information about Grindr users not freely available, including photos, HIV status, and even their preferred sexual position.

Early September, following an exposé by Queer Europe, Grindr decided to end Fuckr’s party. The company filed a DMCA notice with Github, where the application’s code was hosted. This resulted in Fuckr being taken down.

As reported Tuesday, Grindr is still battling availability of the software. Dozens of ‘forks’ of Fuckr were still available for download from Github so, in response, Grindr filed a new notice with the coding platform. It targeted around 90 Fuckr clones, all of which were taken down by Github. Now, however, Grindr has another problem on its hands.

When content is taken down following the filing of a DMCA notice, the target of the notice (in this case a user called ‘tomlandia’) has the right to issue a DMCA counter-notice. This is a challenge to the statement of facts in the original notice and will usually point out deficiencies therein.

In its original complaint, Grindr claimed that Fuckr “facilitate[s] unauthorized access to the Grindr app by circumventing Grindr’s access controls,” adding that the software was primarily designed for the purpose of “circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work” protected under the Copyright Act.

In a DMCA counter-notice filed this week, ‘tomlandia’ argues that Grindr’s claims are false. After confirming that he is indeed the creator of Fuckr, the Github user offers a short rejection of the dating app’s copyright complaint..

“Fuckr does not bypass any technical access control mechanism and does not access any work copyrighted by Grindr LLC,” the notice reads.

“I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good-faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.”

Fuckr DMCA counter-notice

While DMCA takedown notices themselves can be filed at will with almost no consequences when they’re inaccurate, DMCA counter-notices open up a can of worms for those who file them, as Github explains.

“Submitting a DMCA counter notice can have real legal consequences. If the complaining party disagrees that their takedown notice was mistaken, they might decide to file a lawsuit against you to keep the content disabled,” the code platform says.

“You should conduct a thorough investigation into the allegations made in the takedown notice and probably talk to a lawyer before submitting a counter notice.”

Neither Grindr or TF has been able to contact ‘tomlandia’ to ask whether he sought legal advice but by submitting the counter-notice, he opens himself up to potential legal action. Github explains that copyright complaints can prove complicated, highlighting the very reason given by Grindr for taking Fuckr down.

“Sometimes a takedown notice might allege infringement in a way that seems odd or indirect. Copyright laws are complicated and can lead to some unexpected results,” Github notes.

“In some cases a takedown notice might allege that your source code infringes because of what it can do after it is compiled and run. For example: The notice may claim that your software is used to circumvent access controls to copyrighted works.”

While the argument over whether that really is the case with Fuckr probably lies with lawyers and ultimately the Court, the counter-notice from ‘tomlandia’ now sets in motion a process in which Grindr will either have to put up or shut up.

For the next 10 to 14 days, Github will keep the Fuckr repository down and if the company doesn’t hear anything from Grindr during that period, the repository will go back up. However, if Grindr believes its claim is valid, it will be forced to take swift legal action against ‘tomlandia’ to ensure Github doesn’t reactivate the repo.

If ‘tomlandia’ is in the United States, his counter-notice states that he consents for legal action to go ahead in the “jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which [his] address is located” or the Northern District of California where GitHub is located.

Only time will tell where the battle, if one is to take place, will be fought.

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Devcon 2018 - Sofia - Part II

Good morning/afternoon/evening/night (delete as appropriate - we're a global community). The world has turned once more, the sun has crawled into the sky, and we're back in the room.

Nate began the day with an update on the Foundation's financial status: income, expenditure, bank balance, sponsorships and revenue sources. The good news is that we're financially stable, but the bad is that we're never going to be rich. Damn this volunteering thing, it's almost like everyone does this for free. Oh, wait...

Next up, garbear took to the stage to talk about the upcoming (and long-anticipated!) RetroPlayer. This is already available in the 18.x "Leia" builds, so you can try it now if you like. As well as a demo to the team, the presentation covered how we're addressing controller topology (including hubbing and mapping), user interface options, configuration, potential for user profiles, binary add-on repository structure, and some potential future features.

Martijn next took us through our current user statistics. Because we do no user tracking, it's always been difficult to get any real numbers, so we're reliant on partial data: Play Store active user counts, Microsoft app store figures, what we see hitting our repos for e.g. scraper or other add-on downloads. We probably have c. 80 million downloads and c. 30 million recently-active users across all platforms and versions - including some active installations on every release since 13.x "Gotham". This presentation also led into a conversation about release management, specifically, the intended schedule for the upcoming 18.x "Leia" release plus very early timing plans for 19.x "M*".

The next presentation was by kib, giving us an update on all things related to the Kodi infrastructure - build servers, download servers, web hosting, caching. He took us through upgrades to the Windows build system, wiki software upgrade, https implementation, the Kodi paste site, LXD containerisation, OS reinstallation and upgrades, changes to mirror up/down detection, CloudFlare, and more.

Finally, a1rwulf rounded out the day by talking about the Kodi databases: the basic architecture, current limitations, and potential changes that we need to consider as new features are introduced.

A shortened day today, with a couple of topics kicked into Sunday for a variety of reasons. Watch this space for an update on those, as we'll add them in due course, either as an update to this post or as a separate one, depending on content.

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Anti-Piracy Group Wipes ‘Torrent9’ From Google With ‘Dubious’ Requests

With millions of visitors per week, Torrent9 is a force to be reckoned with.

The site is most popular in French-speaking countries, which hasn’t gone unnoticed to local copyright holders.

Last year, the Paris Court of First Instance ordered French ISPs to block the site. However, Torrent9 was quick to take countermeasures and moved to a new domain name.

Quite recently, it was operating from Torrent9.blue. This went fine until the site’s owner started to notice that Google traffic had tanked. The torrent site used to get roughly 20% of its visitors through the search engine, but that suddenly dropped to less than 5%.

As it turned out, the French anti-piracy outfit SACEM had sent takedown requests for hundreds of thousands of URLs in the span of a few days. Google then removed these from the search engine, adding a downranking punishment on top.

SACEM’s ‘carpet-bomb’ of takedown requests was clearly targeted and massive in scope. In one week in August, the group asked Google to remove over 350,000 torrent9.blue URLs. For comparison, The Pirate Bay usually gets a tenth of that, from all copyright holders combined.

Torrent9.blue takedowns

While we were taking a closer look at the notices in question, we spotted another peculiarity.

It almost looks like the French anti-piracy group submitted each and every URL they could find, regardless of whether it actually points to works from their music industry members.

Some URLs do indeed point to music, but there are also plenty of others, targeting movies, TV-shows, games, and software. In some cases, the torrents are not even infringing, such as the open source copy of Ubuntu listed below.

Pirated Ubuntu?

Google appears to have removed nearly all URLs including the ones that don’t point directly to copyright infringing content of SACEM members.

The removals were probably automated, but they certainly warrant a closer look. There is no question that Torrent9 offers links to pirated content, but should such broad takedown requests be permitted?

This endeavor left Torrent9 no other choice than to move to another new domain. At the time of writing the torrent site is operating from Torrent9.ph, but this could easily change again in the near future, as SACEM has already started to target the new domain with another carpet-bombing of ‘dubious’ DMCA takedown notices.

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Saturday, September 29, 2018

World’s Oldest Torrent Still Alive After 15 Years

In 2003 the ‘world wide web’ was an entirely different place than it is today.

This was especially true for streaming video. YouTube had yet to be invented, while Netflix only sent out films via the postal service.

It was at this time that a group of New Zealand friends was shooting a fan film of The Matrix, appropriately titled “The Fanimatrix.” With a limited budget of just $800, of which nearly half went into a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days.

There was a problem though. As video streaming services were still non-existent, distribution was a challenge. The makers managed to reduce the filesize down to 150MB, but even that was too expensive.

TorrentFreak spoke to the film’s ‘IT-guy’ Sebastian Kai Frost, who also had a bit part in front of the camera, in addition to being a wire-work counterweight, gopher, and light holder. According to Frost, regular centralized hosting was not an option.

“In New Zealand this would have resulted in a completely unaffordable amount of bandwidth to be used sharing the file via traditional HTTP or FTP methods. Especially given that the entire bandwidth in and out of the country at the time was less than a modern WiFi link,” Frost tells TorrentFreak.

With no budget left they had to find something cheap, or free. Frost, who was working as a network administrator at the time, went looking for a solution and stumbled upon a new technology that could help. Something called “BitTorrent.”

“It looked promising because it scaled such that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution,” Frost says, looking back.

After convincing the crew that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent on September 28, 2003. He also compiled a tracker on his own Linux box and made sure everything was running correctly.

That was fifteen years ago. Today, this torrent is still up and running with a handful of seeders. As far as we know, it’s the oldest active torrent on the Internet. A real piece of history.

Fanimatrix torrent created 15 years ago

In a way, Fanimatrix became one of the first showcases of what BitTorrent can do.

Sure, at the time people were already sharing movies and TV-shows on sites such as Suprnova.org, Donkax.com, Bytemonsoon.com, and Torrentse.cx, but that was mostly pirated stuff. For the Fanimatrix, BitTorrent was a necessity.

“It turns out that using BitTorrent was a really really good idea because the file was downloaded over tens of thousands of times in the first week and then REALLY took off based off feature news articles on both New Zealand and American TV news,” Frost recalls.

In a New Zealand Herald report from 2003, the film’s director Rajneel Singh noted that the torrent had been downloaded 70,000 times is just one week. An impressive statistic, even by today’s standards.

BitTorrent was not only able to handle all the downloads, but it was also a serious cost saver. The film crew did some back-of-the-napkin calculations at the time which showed that BitTorrent saved them roughly $550,000 in bandwidth bills during the first month alone.

Frost and the team were blown away by the experience. And while the film is dated by today’s special effect standards, it’s good to see that people are still interested. Whatever their reason may be.

“The fact that people still seed it after all these years is a good feeling. Though I suspect a lot of people are on board now because they want to be part of keeping the world’s oldest active torrent going. Which is in itself pretty cool,” Frost says.

Frost plans to keep a restored version of the original site and the torrent up and running during the decade to come. It’s a piece of Internet history, after all.

“At the time we had no idea how popular this ‘BitTorrent’ thing would become, but being there at the beginning, and having it still operating and seeding even now is a pretty awesome thing.

“I intend to keep it going as long as I have a seed left to give,” Frost concludes.

Note: If anybody knows of any torrents that beat this record, feel free to let us know.

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Devcon 2018 - Sofia - Part I

<blinks in the light>

What, a year already? Yup, twelve months have passed, we're all a year older, the world is still mad, and we're once again sitting in an overly-warm, windowless, anonymous conference room, discussing everyone's favourite media software while wondering where the coffee is. Welcome to DevCon 2018, coming to you this year from Sofia/Со́фия, the capital city of the beautiful Balkan nation of Bulgaria.

So: Team Kodi Assemble!

We hit the ground running this morning. Mixed in with initial logistics, introductions, and the annual battle with AV and hotel wifi, keith led a conversation about github, and how we could perhaps better use it to track code and project issues. We currently use trac for bugs, which presents more than a few challenges to both casual users and the team; we could also potentially use github for bug reporting/allocation instead, and also use the associated project tracking to also keep better notes of e.g. press conversations, Foundation issues, and similar.

We continued into a conversation about conferences - which are most appropriate, how do we best cover them, what and where, how do we get most benefit. More later on this year's conference experiences.

Martijn then talked about the move from Python 2 to Python 3: approach, milestones, timeline. Python 2 is EOL in 2020, so this is becoming a more urgent task. The intention is to combine this into the normal Kodi rolling release schedule, so expect a significant focus on Python 3 readiness and enforcement as we move past 18 (Leia) and on to 19 (M). If you're an addon developer, specifically, then it's time to pay attention to this as "later" is rapidly becoming "now" - everyone has had ten years to think about this, after all!

The big challenge is how we encourage developers to migrate while not inconveniencing or irritating users. This is a significant change, and some things are likely to break. Blog post here.

We next moved to conduct and standards - not because we believe there are specific problems, but more because it's generally good practice to have some expectations regarding behaviour of team members and contributors: if you follow the news, you won't have missed some of the headlines around what can happen when people go beyond constructive disagreement and move into personal attacks, particularly when social media or public discourse is involved. As such, we're putting in place some clearer ground rules and management policies around our own behaviour, just as we have done around the standards we expect from our forum contributors.

The conversation then moved on to engagement and communication - how we keep people informed, updated, involved. Kodi is a big project, with very many moving parts, and nearly as many ways to interact. That's not just about the code, but it's Foundation stuff, user support, strategy, wiki, external conversations, release management: keeping on top of all of these is undoubtedly a challenge. This is very much an internal Team conversation, but one that we'll continue to progress, as even orientation to the project can potentially be a barrier to new contributors.

Moving on, Martijn led a conversation around issue tracking - trac vs github. While we currently use an internal trac system, and it has some genuine benefits, it's neither the most usable nor maintanable of systems. By contrast, hosting and managing the issues on (public) github means they're more closely linked with code and commits, so we'd get some significant advantages there that should more than offset what we'd be missing. If we do make this change, which is likely, it won't happen overnight, as we've much to decide: what to do with old (and maybe no-longer-valid) bug reports, what labelling/tagging structure we'd need, what systems we'd need to have in place to ensure that we receive "complete" reports going forward, and so on. More to come.

Related to this - because github is, in general, a more public platform than trac - we had a conversation about embracing this as a benefit and how we become more open. Again, Kodi is a hugely-complex project and is very daunting to a potential contributor: where to start? Who to talk to? How to get help? Who are all these people, anyway?? So, many thoughts: github conversations, GSoC experiences, public discussion channels, updated build/"getting started" documentation, code documentation/architecture. If you're a potential developer and feel like you don't know where to begin, please, contact a member of the team to help us address any concerns you have. We can always use some more help, particularly on the features and multiple platform support that everyone values so much.

Returning to a topic introduced earlier in the day, garbear, Razze and yol took the floor to report back on their attendance at VDD (Video Dev Days) earlier this month (also attended by Martijn and RomanVM). This was also touched on in a previous blog post. Sessions included AV1 CODEC development, including the dav1d decoder and rav1e encoder;  the x265 HEVC encoder; VLC 4.0 plans and features; a series of short "lightning talks" on various AV-related topics; and, of course, many networking opportunities across a common community of interest (website hosting and load balancing, request handling/download management, breakouts on FFMpeg, programming languages...). Useful bridges built with like-minded people, which is ultimately good for the whole open source multimedia landscape.

As the day started to draw to a close, mohit-0212, one of our 2018 GSoC students, gave a presentation on his project around episode intro/outro detection. The goal of this project is to improve the user experience by editing out the endless theme tunes and credits you get, particularly when binge-watching a box set. This involves searching for common scene transition points across multiple episodes of a series, and using hashing algorithms on the video stream to work out when the likely sections begin and end. In the first implementation, then, the detection is run and then the user is presented with a "skip" button as a the section begins. Fully-automated skipping would perhaps be a later addition, but more work is needed yet on the code, detection of "edge cases", and UI, and similar.

Finally, natethomas and the other Foundation board members spent some time talking about the board responsibilities: who, what, how, why. The XBMC Foundation has a legal status, and thus there are ongoing administrative, legal and financial activities around our overall direction as a project, non-profit status, trademarks, incorporation status, revenues from sponsorship and donations, approval of expenditure, taxes, PR/press, GSoC admin, Foundation membership and bylaws, internal policies, and any formal legal communications as required.

And that's it for day one. Time to head out into the fading evening light before reconvening in the morning.

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Putin Told That 6,000 Pirate Sites Have Been Blocked in Three Years

As entertainment giants and governments in the West struggle to deal with the ongoing flood of pirate content hitting the Internet, Russia has emerged from the shadows as a surprise front-runner in the anti-piracy wars.

The country has passed several pieces of legislation over the past few years, all designed to limit the availability of pirated content. Court processes are now swift and particularly voluminous, with large numbers of sites ordered to remove illegal content or face the proposition of temporary and indeed permanent blocking.

This week, Alexander Zharov, the head of the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Communications, Information Technologies and Mass Media (better known as Roscomnadzor), met with President Vladimir Putin to provide a one-on-one update on the situation in the country.

Two topics were on the agenda – the protection of personal data held by millions of Russian companies and the thorny issue of intellectual property protection.

Putin & Zharov discussing piracy (Credit:Kremlin)

“For three years already, the law on the protection of intellectual property rights is working. Most of the complaints from copyright holders are related to movies,” Zharov told Putin.

“More than six thousand claims over three years were filed mainly by [local] companies, and a very small percentage of Western companies, that for some reason are suing at the Moscow City Court.”

The Moscow City Court is tasked with receiving lawsuits from copyright holders demanding that sites with infringing content either remove it, or face blocking procedures implemented by local ISPs.

Zharov said that three entities are involved in copyright action in Russia; the copyright holders who file the complaints, the Moscow City Court which decides on what course of action to take, and telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor, which is tasked with executing the orders of the Court. In total, complaints have been filed against 17,000 pirate sites, Zharov told the President.

“A few years ago, the Russian Internet was absolutely a safe haven for pirates. Any premiere immediately appeared on hundreds and thousands of resources, and people watched them for free, even in poor quality, but nevertheless, that’s how it was,” he said.

“Now the situation has changed dramatically: six thousand resources have been blocked and 11,000 have deleted such content. And the numbers speak for themselves.

“For the first time in the history of Russian cinematography, our very good film, the premiere of 2018, ‘Move Up’, raised about three billion rubles (US$45.5m). This is comparable, perhaps, with only one American blockbuster, which raised the same amount.”

Zharov also updated Putin on the development of legal offerings in Russia, claiming that last year legal online streaming services earned 60% more than a year earlier, to the tune of eight billion rubles (US$121.4m). Traditional cinemas are also doing well, he added, noting that 55 million people attended premieres, 40% more than a year earlier.

“We intend to continue this work with rights holders. And, in general, all the largest pirate sites are now blocked. We will continue to clean up the Internet,” he concluded.

The positive messages from the meeting with Putin follow hot on the heels of a rather less optimistic report from Group-IB.

The cyber-security company reported that in 2016, there were ‘only’ 33 Russian cinema leaks via illegal camcording. By 2017, that had increased more than 500% to 211 but in the first eight months of 2018, 280 movies had leaked online – despite site blocking.

“Almost every film released in 2018 has been pirated and leaked to the web. In 2017, the country’s cinemas showed 477 movies, and 211 of them were pirated, which is 6 times more than a year earlier,” Group-IB reported.

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Friday, September 28, 2018

BitTorrent and Tron Hope Other Clients Will Embrace ‘Paid’ Seeding

It’s been only a few weeks since BitTorrent was officially aquired by Tron, a relatively new cryptocurrency.

Both companies were built around decentralization, which makes for a good match. However, it doesn’t stop there.

BitTorrent and Tron plan to integrate blockchain technology into future releases of their torrent clients. In short, they want to make it possible for users to ‘earn’ tokens by seeding. At the same time, others can ‘bid’ tokens to speed up their downloads.

The new plan is dubbed “Project Atlas” and BitTorrent currently has seven people working on it full-time. In theory, the incentives will increase total seeding capacity, improving the health of the torrent ecosystem.

“By adding tokens we’ll make it so that you can effectively earn per seeding and create incentives for users not only to seed longer but to dedicate more of their bandwidth and storage overall,” Project Atlas lead Justin Knoll says.

The idea to merge the blockchain with file-sharing technology isn’t new. Joystream, previously implemented a similar idea and Upfiring is also working on incentivized sharing. BitTorrent itself also considered it before Tron came into the picture.

“Even before the Tron acquisition, our R&D team was looking at ways to add blockchain based incentives to the protocol. Now with the addition of Tron’s expertise, we can accelerate that effort,” Knoll says.

It remains unclear when the project will be ready for the public, but this week the team announced some further details. In particular, BitTorrent and Tron stress that there won’t be any need for BitTorrent users to change their current habits.

The BitTorrent protocol will always remain open and Project Atlas will be implemented as a series of optional protocol extensions. These will be available for anyone to use, much like uTorrent’s previous uTP extension.

This means that users of third-party BitTorrent clients can still download from and seed to blockchain enhanced clients, and vice versa.

“If you want to keep using your current client, it will still work with project Atlas clients. If you don’t want to bid or earn tokens per seeding, you don’t need to,” Knoll clarifies.

Project Atlas

While backward compatibility is a major upside, it seems likely that new clients will prioritize each other, at least in some instances. After all, that’s a requirement to speed up torrents.

BitTorrent says it will start implementing the technology in its desktop clients, such as uTorrent. The next step is mobile. In addition, the company encourages developers of other BitTorrent clients to follow suit.

“We’ll release the details of our implementation and encourage third-party clients and the whole ecosystem to implement this,” Knoll says.

The developer of the third-party torrent client Frostwire previously showed his interest in the idea late August. He asked BitTorrent and Tron whether the technology would be public but never received an answer.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, developer Angel Leon confirmed his interest.

“It’s something we were interested in and that we think is necessary to fulfill a vision of a decentralized Apple Store/Google Play/Amazon Music|Video competitor with BitTorrent as the transport mechanism,” Leon told us.

However, the developments come too late for Frostwire, as the torrent client just shut down. Whether other client developers are also interested, remains a question for now.

In any case, BitTorrent and Tron stress that any changes will be backwards compatible. The protocol and its extensions remain open, the clients will remain free of charge, and there is absolutely no mining involved.

More information about Project Atlas’ plans is expected to be unveiled in a few hours, during a live presentation.

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FrostWire Team Calls it Quits After Google Deletes Android App

Back in 2004, when LimeWire was the file-sharing client of choice for millions of users, a new kid appeared on the block.

FrostWire was originally an open source fork of LimeWire distributed under the GNU General Public License.

In 2006, FrostWire added BitTorrent support and in 2011, as LimeWire drew its final breath under pressure from the RIAA, its Gnutella base was dropped completely in favor of BitTorrent.

Over the years, FrostWire became available on multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. However, a huge problem with their Android variant has now caused the FrostWire team to make a rather sad announcement.

The issues began back on September 18 when the FrostWire Android app was taken down from Google Play following a DMCA takedown request.

“In the notice, the company claimed their content was uploaded to the FrostWire app and provided screenshots of their content being played in the FrostWire Music Player,” the FrostWire team explains.

“Asking for reinstatement, we made it clear that it is technically impossible to upload any content to FrostWire. We explained that FrostWire is a tool, a BitTorrent client, a downloader for a distributed peer-to-peer network and that as such, it does not host, index, nor has the ability to control the content it is technically capable of downloading from third party sources.”

But despite a DMCA counter-notice to Google, the Internet giant stood its ground. Google refused to reinstate the Android app, a surprise decision given FrostWire’s reputation for staying within the law.

After almost eight successful years on the Google Play store, the FrostWire team says they have been left “dumbfounded” by what they say is an “unsubstantiated claim” from a single company.

Sadly, this unfortunate situation appears to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Heavily reliant on their Android variant, the team indicate they will now move away from FrostWire.

“With over 80% of our user-base running on the Android platform, in a world where the majority of android installs occurs through a centralized app store monopoly, we don’t see a viable path forward. After 14 years the team is ready to move on to other passions and challenges,” they reveal.

Thanking users past and present for their support, the FrostWire team say that users should now take the opportunity to update their clients using FrostWire’s Github repository or its SourceForge page.

While this sounds like the beginning of the end for FrostWire, it isn’t the first time that the project has had a run-in with Google over its popular client.

In April 2015, FrostWire was temporarily removed from Google Play in a dispute over YouTube integration. Earlier that year, Amazon removed FrostWire citing copyright concerns.

This reliance on centralized and near monopoly app databases is clearly a big negative for applications like FrostWire. The team hopes that, moving into the future, Internet freedom will come to the forefront.

“We hope that in the end, a free, uncensored and decentralized internet will prevail,” the team concludes.

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Thursday, September 27, 2018

Cox Highlights Double Standard and Wildly Inaccurate Notices in Piracy Case

Last month, Cox ended its piracy liability lawsuit with music company BMG, agreeing to a “substantial settlement.”

That doesn’t mean that the ISP is now in the clear. Cox is also caught up in another lawsuit filed by a group of major music labels, all members of the RIAA.

The labels argue that Cox categorically failed to terminate repeat copyright infringers and that it substantially profited from this ongoing ‘piracy’ activity. All at the expense of the record labels and other rightsholders.

This week Cox submitted a reply to the complaint, denying all these allegations. It requests a declaratory judgment from the court stating that it’s not liable for any copyright infringements carried out by its customers.

“Cox does not control the Internet,” the company writes, adding that it has “no ability to remove or take down infringing content from its customers’ computers” and “cannot restrict, or even detect, the specific content that its customers access or share.”

“Cox does not spy on its customers or monitor their Internet traffic. Even if it could do so — and it cannot — it wouldn’t. Engaging in surveillance in such a fashion would violate Cox’s policies, ethics, and corporate culture.”

The record labels are unlikely to refute any of the above. The real dispute, however, is about whether Cox should have terminated customers for whom it received many notices. The labels previously argued that 20,000 Cox subscribers can be categorized as blatant repeat infringers, some of whom have been ‘warned’ more than 100 times.

Writing to the court, the ISP counters that these notices could not be trusted or easily verified.

“The systems Plaintiffs used to detect infringement and send copyright infringement notices were unreliable, and were known to be unreliable,” Cox writes, adding that it “lacked the ability to verify Plaintiffs’ allegations of infringement.”

“Indeed, studies and published reports show that such notices can be wildly inaccurate,” Cox writes, pointing to an academic report as well as a TorrentFreak article which shows how HBO targeted its own website.

DMCA notice inaccuracies

This critique on the accuracy of DMCA notices is not new. It has repeatedly been highlighted in similar cases.

Perhaps more novel is Cox’s mention of the “six strikes” Copyright Alert System. This was a partnership between US ISPs and copyright holders, including many of the labels, to forward infringing notices to pirating customers.

This groundbreaking deal set a limit on the number of copyright notices ISPs had to process. Perhaps more crucially, it didn’t require the companies to terminate repeat infringers, even after 100+ warnings.

This is an interesting ‘double standard’ angle, as the labels now accuse Cox of failing to terminate repeat infringers, something that was never a requirement under the Copyright Alert System.

This deal (which Cox wasn’t part of) was still active during the time period that’s covered by the lawsuit, and apparently, the RIAA was pretty happy with it at the time.

“In May 2014, RIAA Chairman and CEO Cary Sherman described the Center for Copyright Information as ‘a model for success,’ Cox writes, adding that he lauded program and all its accomplishments.

Fast forward a few years and now ISPs are being sued for adhering to the same standard as set out in the groundbreaking Copyright Alert System.

Based on these and other arguments, Cox requests a declaratory judgment stating that it’s not liable for contributory infringement, and another declaratory judgment clarifying that it’s not vicariously liable for pirating subscribers.

A copy of Cox recent filing is available here (pdf).

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CBS Shuts Down Stage 9, a Fan-Made Recreation of the USS Enterprise

For those unfamiliar with the project, Stage 9 is a beautiful virtual recreation of the Enterprise ship from Star Trek: The Next Generation for Windows, Mac and Linux.

More experience than game, Stage 9 was built by fans over two years in the Unreal Engine.

“There were two things that we were always pretty careful with,” says project leader ‘Scragnog’.

“We made it as clear as we possibly could that this was NOT an officially licensed project. We had no affiliation with CBS or Paramount and the IP we were trying our hardest to treat with respect was not our own. We were fans, just creating fan art.”

In an announcement this week, Scragnog reminded fans that no one involved in the project was in it for any financial reason and everyone was well aware that throwing money into the mix could be a problem. However, the team says it has always known that they could be shut down at any time on the whim of a license holder because in this world, that’s what can happen.

Unfortunately, that day has come all too soon for the impressive project. Stage 9 was hit with an intellectual property complaint from CBS just over two weeks ago and has now been shut down.

“This letter was a cease-and-desist order,” Scragnog explains. “Over the next 13 days we did everything we possibly could to open up a dialog with CBS. The member of the CBS legal team that issued the order went on holiday for a week immediately after sending the letter through, which slowed things down considerably.”

During this interim period, the team began to consider statements made by CBS Vice President for Product Development John Van Citters, who in 2016 indicated that Star Trek owes so much to fans and that fan creations are of value to the brand.

“We want fans to be involved, very much so,” Van Citters said, as cited by Scragnog. “And it’s going to help us evolve and bring Star Trek to a bigger and brighter future.”

“They’re not going to hear from us,” Citters continued. “They’re not going to get a phone call, they’re not going to get an email. They’re not going to get anything that’s going to ruin their day one way or another and make them feel bad, like they’ve done something wrong.”

After noting Van Citter’s friendly approach, the Stage 9 team reached out to him twice to see if Stage 9 could be kept alive in some form. Sadly, the exec did not respond to the team “in any way.”

However, thirteen days after receiving the cease-and-desist, Stage 9 was able to speak with their original contact in the CBS legal department. It proved a complete waste of time.

“We were hoping, perhaps naively, that the elements of Stage 9 that CBS did not approve of would be highlighted to us, so we could be sure to remove these elements from the project and create something that met with, if not their approval, then at least their acceptance,” Scragnog explains.

To keep the project alive, the team were prepared to make any changes ordered by CBS. Sadly, CBS said that the project could not continue in any form, no matter what changes were made. They provided no further details and, as noted by Eurogamer, did not indicate how Stage 9 had violated the fan art guidelines previously published by CBS and Paramount.

“It’s a truly horrible situation to be in when something that tries to respect Star Trek can be eliminated without any opportunity for open dialog,” Scragnog concludes.

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Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Illuminati Kodi Repository Throws in the Towel After ACE Threats

As one of the most popular media players of all time, Kodi has amassed tens of millions of users.

While completely legal in its own right, the open source platform is often augmented with third-party addons that regularly provide access to huge amounts of infringing content. This has attracted the negative attention of copyright holders who are keen to prevent unlicensed content being exploited by the masses.

Since last year, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has been at the forefront of anti-piracy enforcement against such addons. This huge global coalition, made up of 30 of the world’s most powerful entertainment companies, have been knocking on doors (physically in many cases) with letters that order addon developers, addon repositories, and build developers, to cease their activities or face legal consequences.

This week, ACE claimed yet another scalp.

Team Illuminati advertised itself as a great source for the “very best addons” and “stunning” Kodi builds (pre-configured Kodi installers), all available from its own repository.

All previously available from Illuminati

The group built up a decent following but with hundreds of posts on its Twitter account detailing efforts to bring infringing content including movies, TV shows, plus live and recorded sports to the masses, it probably isn’t a surprise they attracted the negative attention of ACE.

Yesterday, in a tweet to the group’s followers, Team Illuminati announced its demise after receiving a visit from the world’s most powerful anti-piracy coalition.

“Sorry guys our entire team got hit with ACE letters today so we’re leaving twitter, this group closes tomorrow AM thanks for your support all,” Illuminati wrote.

While it’s not completely unheard of, it is relatively unusual for Kodi addon developers and repositories to announce that they’ve had a visit from ACE. As recently highlighted, those entering into settlement agreements with ACE are required not to mention they’ve had any contact whatsoever.

It’s not clear whether Illuminati intend to simply cease-and-desist, as others in a similar position have done so previously, or whether its members will eventually sign the ACE settlement agreeement. TF has seen copies of previous agreement letters which indicate that cooperation will be required moving forward, including providing information on others closely connected with the addon, build, repository, or other service.

For now, however, it seems clear that Team Illuminati have thrown in the towel.

Visitors to their repository URL at repo.theunjudged.xyz are simply greeted with a pentagon-shaped ‘Illuminati’ logo, rather than the addons (including the recent ‘Underdog’ addon shown below) they’ve grown accustomed to.

Currently, Android APK (installation files) are accessible from another URL but quite how long these will remain available is yet to be seen.

The takedown of Team Illuminati is the latest in a long line of efforts by ACE to stem the tide of allegedly-infringing Kodi addons. Earlier this month, players known as Blamo and UrbanKingz exited under similar circumstances with several other individuals and groups (1,2,3,4) meeting with a similar fate over the past year.

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BitTorrent Traffic is Not Dead, It’s Making a Comeback

Many Internet traffic reports have been published over the years, documenting how traffic patterns change over time.

One of the trends that emerged in recent years, is that BitTorrent’s share of total Internet traffic decreased.

With the growth of services such as YouTube and Netflix, streaming started to generate massive amounts of bandwidth. As a result, BitTorrent lost a significant chunk of its ‘market share.’

This trend gradually increased, until recently. In some parts of the world file-sharing traffic, BitTorrent in particular, is growing.

That’s what’s suggested by Canadian broadband management company Sandvine, which has kept a close eye on these developments for over a decade. The company will release its latest Global Internet Phenomena report next month but gave us an exclusive sneak peek.

Globally, across both mobile and fixed access networks file-sharing accounts for 3% of downstream and 22% of upstream traffic. More than 97% of this upstream is BitTorrent, which makes it the dominant P2P force.

In the EMEA region, which covers Europe, the Middle East, and Africa there’s a clear upward trend. BitTorrent traffic now accounts for 32% of all upstream traffic. This means that roughly a third of all uploads are torrent-related.

Keep in mind that overall bandwidth usage per household also increased during this period, which means that the volume of BitTorrent traffic grew even more aggressively.

BitTorrent traffic also remains the top upstream source in the Asia Pacific region with 19% of total traffic. Percentage-wise this is down compared to two years ago, but in volume, it’s relatively stable according to Sandvine.

Other popular file-sharing upload sources in the Asia Pacific region are the Korean P2P app “K grid” (7%) and “Afreeca TV” (2%).

In the Americas, BitTorrent is the second largest source of upstream traffic. It has a market share of little over 9% and is most popular in Latin America. BitTorrent is only a fraction behind MPEG-TS, which is used for backhauling data from video cameras and security systems.

BitTorrent dead?

TorrentFreak spoke to Sandvine’s Vice President of Solutions Marketing Cam Cullen, who notes that more details will be released in the upcoming report. However, it’s clear that BitTorrent is not dead yet.

The next question is why BitTorrent traffic is on the rise again? According to Cullen, increased fragmentation in the streaming service market may play an important role.

“More sources than ever are producing ‘exclusive’ content available on a single streaming or broadcast service – think Game of Thrones for HBO, House of Cards for Netflix, The Handmaid’s Tale for Hulu, or Jack Ryan for Amazon. To get access to all of these services, it gets very expensive for a consumer, so they subscribe to one or two and pirate the rest.

“Since these numbers were taken in June for this edition, there were no Game of Thrones episodes coming out, so consider these numbers depressed from peak!” Cullen notes.

And we haven’t even mentioned non-filesharing traffic sources such as cyberlockers and streaming sites, which are even more popular than BitTorrent…

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