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Sunday, July 31, 2016
10 Kodi ADDONS to watch Olympics live – Rio 2016
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Peter Sunde’s Pirate Innovation Dream Won’t Happen Anytime Soon
Following events like these, several repeat questions come to the forefront. Will the site come back? Will there be a replacement? How can other torrent sites avoid the same fate?
While the first two questions mostly originate from users, the latter is perhaps the most important in terms of the torrent scene in general. After all, if people don’t learn from history, how can they stop it repeating itself? And if it does indeed repeat, how much more damage can the scene take?
In response to the KAT shutdown, this week Peter Sunde called for action. Speaking on the Steal This Show podcast, the Pirate Bay co-founder said that innovation, decentralization, and cooperation is needed to safeguard the future of piracy.
“If one of the big sites goes down a lot of smaller sites are hit as well because they are just a copy of the original database. We need lots of sites that federate all the data instead of having to depend on the higher-ups,” Sunde said.
But just how likely is it that Sunde’s dream will come true? To find out, TorrentFreak spoke with some large and long-standing smaller players in the torrent scene.
The operator of one major site outlined many perceived weaknesses in the way that sites operate and provided some interesting thoughts on how these issues might be fixed. Interestingly, he doesn’t believe that decentralization is the key, instead preferring a “network-over-network” model for both server operation and downloads.
“Decentralization is not the key here. A network-over-network is. Decentralization means no back-updates and [issues with advertising],” he explains.
“Instead, imagine a private network running on the normal internet. You connect to a node, which joins you into a VPN-like network. Like TOR, but you don’t actually use the users to push the traffic.”
The site operator also went into considerable detail about other aspects, particularly in respect of preserving the security of users with a similar “network-over-network” model. However, overcoming technical issues doesn’t appear to be the main stumbling block. Instead, there’s a problem with cooperation.
“You have to understand that torrents are no longer the answer to these type of threats. Sure you can upgrade everything related to torrents to a more secure and better way of usage by promoting to users how they should use you through your new type of network etc, but at some point the protocol should upgrade,” he says.
“However, unless there is an agreement from at least three major sites, none of the requirements to push this new system to enough users will be done. There is currently no agreement to do anything between any torrent site.”
And it appears that even in the wake of KAT’s demise, there is still no momentum to innovate.
“[The major sites] are not interested in building a non-raidable, permanent domain system for users. They are not interested in a new protocol. No one works with anyone. They simply don’t care,” he says.
“Only [one major site, redacted] expressed some basic interest, but that’s only if all [other sites] agree. Which will never happen?”
In parallel, TF spoke with some site operators further down the chain but anyone hoping for some good news there will be pretty disappointed. While most agreed that doing something innovative would be a positive thing, most expressed a combination of pessimism and apathy.
“I find it hard enough to work with my own staff, so working with several other sites will not be possible I’m sure,” one said. “My site is a dictatorship (LOL) so I don’t need others outside telling me what I must do.”
Another admin, who operates two sites in the private scene, said that even building trust across sites will be an almost impossible task.
“It won’t happen. Why should any sysop trust [other sysops]? Who are they? I don’t know who they are. They don’t know who I am. And do you think that the bigger sites will agree to what smaller sites say? No. They will keep their [dominant] position and keep the best pie for themselves no matter what great system someone can make. I would. Who wouldn’t?” he said.
Generally, however, the overall feeling is that while there’s always a threat, things aren’t quite that bad yet. TF asked when people might feel compelled to do something dramatic. The answer seems to be “when people really have to.”
That notion is shared by Peter Sunde. He’s repeatedly called for the closure of The Pirate Bay to spark innovation but the closure of KickassTorrents alone (which was a bigger site) failed to have the desired effect. Maybe it will take another really big bombshell to finally provoke people into action but until then it seems unlikely that much will happen.
In the meantime, however, most of the people we spoke with were enthusiastic about the potential offered by Zeronet and IPFS. In the absence of any coordinated effort, perhaps the future is already here.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
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uTorrent Quietly Ditches Rating and Comment Features
Despite its popularity, the introduction of new features has stalled in recent years. In fact, some of the more prominent changes date back five years, when uTorrent launched its long awaited 3.0 version.
Among other things, this release introduced a commenting and rating feature. This allowed users to rate the quality of torrents and discuss their contents from within the application.
Both the comments and ratings were shared via trackers, which means that they were not centrally stored but distributed among peers, just like the download itself.
“µTorrent 3.0 adds an extension message for distributing comments within the swarm. All clients that support this extension message store all comments they have seen, per torrent,” uTorrent’s engineering team informed TorrentFreak at the time.
A handy addition, which was appreciated and used by millions of users in recent years. However, out of nowhere, the uTorrent team has decided to ditch the feature in their latest versions.
uTorrent comments and ratings
While it’s up to uTorrent’s parent company BitTorrent Inc. to decide what to do with their client, it’s at least a bit odd that users haven’t been informed about the change. There is no mention in the release log of the stable version either.
The only reference we could find was listed in the release log for the beta version a few weeks ago.
Hoping to find out more about the motivation to retire the feature we contacted BitTorrent Inc a few days ago, but thus far without response. The company doesn’t seem very keen to speak about uTorrent, as our inquiries about the hacked forum also remained unanswered.
Disable Rating
The above leaves us with no other option than to speculate about the mysterious removal. Perhaps BitTorrent Inc. decided that the feature was no longer relevant, or maybe the system was flooded by spam comments?
On the other hand, perhaps there’s a legal reason why the company doesn’t want users to rate and discuss potentially infringing content from within the client?
Without an official comment from BitTorrent we’ll never know what the true reason is. It’s clear, however, that users who want to comment can no longer do so from the uTorrent application itself.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
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Saturday, July 30, 2016
Quick HP Pavilion 300 Review: good things are expensive
Quick HP Pavilion 300 Review: good things are expensive is a post from htpcBeginner.
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ES File Explorer removed from Fire TV App Store
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Anti-Piracy Group Reveals Personal Details of Counter-Notice Senders
One of the largest archives is maintained at Lumen Database and contains millions of DMCA notices received by companies including Google, Twitter, WordPress and Reddit.
Typically these notices contain the name of the complainant, the title of the content, the URLs where it can be found, and other non-sensitive information. Nevertheless, their publication is still unpopular with some.
In 2014, when Lumen was known as Chilling Effects, the archive was described as “repugnant” by then Copyright Alliance CEO Sandra Aistars.
“[T]he site unfairly maligns artists and creators using the legal process created by Section 512 [of the DMCA] as proponents of censorship,” she said.
While Lumen insists that is not the case, the project still has its enemies. Thanks to the transparency it brings, the work of anti-piracy outfits is made more public. This is an irritant to some, a notion that was made clear this week when US-based Remove Your Media took to Twitter to announce a new project.
As the tweet shows, Remove Your Media has launched its own transparency report which details the counter-notices filed by people it has filed DMCA notices against.
However, while Lumen Database goes to some lengths to protect the personal details (company names aside) of the people who send DMCA notices, Remove Your Media offers no such courtesy.
As can be seen from the screenshot above, the company publishes names, addresses, email address and even personal telephone/cellphone numbers of counter-notice senders. Given the tone of the tweet directed towards Lumen (transparency “works both ways now”), it seems reasonable to presume this is a deliberately provocative move.
What’s more, in practical terms the report is hopeless. The counter-notices published so far don’t contain any information that might allow the public to understand the complaints or whether they’re justified. It’s simply a list of names and other personal details plus a link to the copyright holder involved, no content details are provided.
TorrentFreak contacted Remove Your Media for comment on the aims of the just-launched database but received no response. However, some of those targeted by the company were happy to contribute.
“I run a website called fanart.tv which is community of fans submitting artwork for their favorite media,” site operator ‘Kode’ told TF.
“We are in effect offering free promotion for artists / tv shows / movies and making them look as good as possible.”
Kode told us that he believes the original complaint that triggered the counter-notice might be related to one of three YouTube videos that are already more than four years old.
“To be honest, it’s all a bit confusing as I only very vaguely remember submitting a YouTube counter-notice, and i’m pretty sure it wasn’t even this year. I’m trying to find out where I would see the details of it.”
Strangely, in correspondence with FanArt.tv around a year ago, Remove Your Media promised to whitelist the site from takedowns after acknowledging that there was no issue with its activities. Why the company has chosen to go back on its word now is a mystery.
But while Kode took his personal contact details being outed somewhat in his stride, others were not so relaxed.
“What the hell??? I never gave permission for this, and I doubt anyone else did either. This is illegal. I’ve reported the blog,” another told TF.
“I really don’t know [what this is about]. I have a YouTube account where I used to make [anime videos] years ago but there is no action against them. My account is fine. I don’t recognise the name [Remove Your Media]. As far as I’m concerned it’s BS. And even if they are taking action, my details should not have been published.”
TF is aware that Remove Your Media adopted an aggressive stance against people who sent false DMCA counter-notices in the past, so this move isn’t a complete surprise.
However, if the aim of the report really is transparency, the company should consider publishing its original DMCA complaint alongside a lightly redacted counter-notice. That will allow people to evaluate the credibility (or otherwise) of both claims.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
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