What is Docker: Docker vs VirtualBox, Home Server with Docker

What is Docker, why is it suddenly getting so popular, and how does docker compare to VirtualBox or VMware? Don’t worry we will try to explain all of these in simple terms. We have published extensively on using VirtualBox to build a home server. With docker gaining in popularity, we thought it would be good […]

What is Docker: Docker vs VirtualBox, Home Server with Docker is a post from htpcBeginner.

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What.cd is Dead, But The Torrent Hydra Lives on

During the fall of 2007, tens of thousands of passionate music fans mourned the loss of the private music tracker OiNK.

One of the many avid users of the site was ‘WhatMan,’ who instead of crying in a corner decided to team up with others and build a new music tracker for all OiNK refugees.

“I felt sick to my stomach all morning,” WhatMan said at the time.

“We plan to grow into a large tracker – probably not as large as OiNK, and not as open, but eventually I would like to support at least a hundred thousand users,” he added.

This vision came to pass. Nine years later What.cd had more than 144,000 users, who together amassed 2,675,120 torrents, featuring 885,556 artists. Several users equated it to the Library of Alexandria for digital music.

Two weeks ago this library was burnt to the ground. French military police raided the site’s hosting company and took twelve servers, after which the What.cd team decided to pull the plug for good.

Over the years, What.cd’s music collection had outgrown that of its predecessor many times over but in a matter of a few hours, everything was gone. Or was it?

Soon after the shutdown, discussions began on other private trackers and elsewhere. Most people agreed that a new tracker should follow the path What.cd took nine years ago, and after the weekend was over, several alternatives were already up and running.

One of the new trackers is PassTheHeadphones (PTH), a name that’s obviously inspired by the PassThePopcorn site. As is often the case with private trackers, getting on board isn’t easy. At the time of writing the membership is capped at 10,000 users, but it’s expected that many more will follow.

According to one of the recruitment threads on a private tracker, the site is run by familiar faces in the community.

“Pass The Headphones is a new music tracker that aims to fill the void left in the wake of what.cd shutting down. Run by some familiar faces in the private tracker community, security is at the top of the list of priorities,” the message reads.

The rate at which PTH has been building its music library is impressive. The site is quickly closing in on its 200,000th torrent, which is the same number the original OiNK tracker had at its height.

PTH

Another popular new tracker is Apollo, which was first launched with the name Xanax. This tracker has more users than PTH, but fewer torrents, at least when we last saw the stats.

Both PTH and Apollo run on the Gazelle tracker software, which was originally developed by the What.cd team. The same goes for other, smaller trackers that appeared recently, including the properly named NotWhat.cd tracker that surfaced a few days ago.

The NotWhat team says they’ve postponed their launch in order to beef up security. According to the site’s staff, security of the userbase and infrastructure is their top priority.

“The time has been spent securing the Gazelle codebase, securing the server infrastructure and minimizing personally identifiable information. NotWhat.cd DOES NOT store IRC IP logs, user access logs are wiped on a regular basis and our staff members are vetted, trusted members of the community,” they announced.

These precautions are not unwarranted and something NoStream.co, another aspiring What.cd replacement, learned the hard way.

This new tracker was compromised last week. All users were promoted to sysop and soon after emails of users started leaking online. As a result, Nostream was forced to throw in the towel after a few days.

While it’s too early to call winners or losers, it’s clear that history is repeating itself. You can shut down the largest digital music library in the world but as a result, several new ones have been created, which may grow to become even bigger than the original.

A few years ago WhatMan told TorrentFreak that he was happy to see other trackers using Gazelle. It seems fitting to repeat this as the final words today, to complete the circle.

“It gives me great pleasure to see other trackers running on our code. By releasing the Gazelle frontend and the Ocelot tracker, our goal was to make it easier for admins to run large sites and for users to download content,” WhatMan said at the time.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Steal This Show S02E07: The Early Days of Private Trackers

^{If you enjoy this episode, consider becoming a patron and getting involved with the show. Check out Steal This Show’s Patreon campaign: support us and get all kinds of fantastic benefits!}

In this episode we hear from Joe Matheny, one of the founders of the underground private torrent tracker The Grey Lodge.

Before it shut down, the site was used by millions of people per month in their quest to uncover the esoteric, strange and the downright weird.

Today we discuss the challenges of running a private underground tracker from the earliest days of BitTorrent, how even weirdos eventually get pursued by the MPAA, and how the demise of indie trackers from Grey Lodge to What.CD mean a net loss for our culture.

—

Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis.

The guests for our news discussions will vary, and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the great innovators and minds.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Joe Matheny

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Riley Byrne
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Siraje Amarniss

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Court Overturns ‘Pirate’ Site Blockade Based on EU Ruling

Early November, police in Italy targeted more than 150 sites involved in the unauthorized streaming of movies and sports.

The Special Units of the Guardia di Finanza obtained a mass injunction from a judge in Rome, heralding the largest ever blocking operation in the country.

At the time, Fulvia Sarzana, a lawyer specializing in Internet and copyright disputes, described the move as “sensational.” Since then he’s been defending one of the sites targeted by the sweeping action and now reports success thanks to an EU ruling.

Kisstube.tv is a site that acts an index for movies hosted elsewhere. A cursory skim through its archives reveals plenty of content in both Italian and English, mainly stored on YouTube.

According to Sarzana, until the action last month Kisstube had never received any infringement complaints. Nevertheless, it found itself blocked along with dozens of other sites without any pre-action discussion.

After being hired by Kisstube, Sarzana took the site’s case to the Rome Court of Appeal, arguing that it should have never been ordered to be blocked. At first view and perhaps surprisingly, the Court agreed and overturned the injunction against the site. So what was its reasoning?

Like many other similar sites, Kisstube hosts none of its own content. The site embeds videos that are stored elsewhere, on hosting platforms such as YouTube.

“The Kisstube portal links to YouTube, where there is the Content ID system and a notice and takedown system, just as there is a notice and takedown system on the Kisstube site,” Sarzana informs TorrentFreak.

“I do not know whether they are copyrighted films and allowed on YouTube, but in this case it should have been YouTube that removed any pirated movies. The site that embeds the content can not be held responsible.”

In handing down its decision the Court of Appeals considered two rulings from the European Court of Justice.

The first involved water filtering company BestWater International, who accused two men of copyright infringement after they embedded a Bestwater promotional video in their website in a YouTube frame. Even though the video had been uploaded to YouTube without Bestwater’s permission, the Court found that embedding the content in a third-party site did not amount to infringement.

The second more recent case involved Dutch blog GeenStijl.nl, which published an article linking to leaked Playboy photos which were stored on file-hosting site FileFactory.

“I do not like mass-blocking and am convinced that before a judge you can always explain your case,” Sarzana told TF following his win for KissTube.

However, the lawyer says that the future may be more complex. New rules under discussion have the potential to limit the freedoms of sites that rely on user-uploaded content.

“My fear is that the new EU rules on copyright under discussion are trying to put rules in place which would prohibit any type of linking and embedding to overcome the protection that the EU Court of Justice has guaranteed UGC portals like Youtube,” Sarzana concludes.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Amazon Fire TV Interface gets a makeover with new 5.2.4.0 firmware

A new firmware upgrade for the Amazon Fire OS has been spotted. It is the 5.2.4.0 firmware version. This firmware version for Fire devices is initially rolling out for the Amazon Fire TV 2 and the Amazon Fire TV Stick 2. After some time, it will get to older devices. The main feature that some […]

Amazon Fire TV Interface gets a makeover with new 5.2.4.0 firmware is a post from htpcBeginner.

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Free TV-Show Streaming Hurts Online Sales, Research Finds

Over the past decade, TV and movie companies have taken part in a massive experiment in which they’ve had to reinvent their business models, adopting to rapidly changing demands from consumers.

The first wave of change was triggered by BitTorrent, which allowed downloading huge video files with ease, something that wasn’t possible before.

The movie industry responded by offering their own online video download options, and with bandwidth getting cheaper and more readily available, streaming services soon followed.

However, having legal options available is just a tiny part of the puzzle. The next challenge is to set them up in a way so that people will actually use them, while optimizing revenue long-term. For example, should you allow people to stream your content for free online?

A new study by Carnegie Mellon University researchers aims to provide some empirical evidence on this issue. Using streaming and sales data for the popular show Downton Abbey, provided by PBS, they estimate the impact of free streaming on direct download (EST) sales.

The results, published in a paper for the upcoming International Conference on Information Systems, show that legal streaming options can hurt download sales significantly.

The researchers were able to estimate the impact in a natural experiment, since PBS was required to pull the free streams for all episodes at the same time. This means that some were streamable for more than a month, while others only for a week, or two.

PBS’ free treaming window for Downton Abbey season 5

In addition, they had sales data for several seasons, allowing them to make an alternative comparison between years, where the streaming windows varied. In both cases, they show that free streaming cannibalizes download sales.

“Our analysis in our primary specification indicates that availability in the free streaming window reduces EST sales by 8.4%. Using an alternative specification we find that free availability reduces EST sales by 9.9%,” they write.

The negative effect is not unexpected. However, it doesn’t mean that it is wrong to offer free streaming in the long run, as there are several positive side-effects. That’s where the puzzle starts to get complicated.

“For example, free streaming platforms owned by the broadcast network can draw new users to the platform, providing the network with valuable data about its viewers, and a stronger platform as consumers switch from consumption through broadcast television to online stream,” the researchers note.

“Networks also benefit from advertising sponsorship on their streaming channels. Streaming platforms may also enable customer discovery of other shows, or increase overall consumer goodwill,” they add.

And then there’s still piracy.

While unathorized downloads and streams weren’t factored into this study, the researchers point out that previous research has shown that making content legally available decreases demand for piracy.

For example, a 2015 study revealed that ABC’s decision to add their content to Hulu reduced piracy for this content. This shows that legal streaming may also have a positive long-term effect by decreasing people’s piracy habits.

Although the current results are important from a managerial perspective, it might just leave more questions than it answered. In any case, the puzzle of how to offer video content while maximizing revenues in the long run, is far from solved.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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Spain Announces New Campaign to Fight Internet Piracy

As residents know already and visitors soon learn, the tackling of piracy and counterfeiting isn’t a high priority in Spain. From the fake luxury goods on the streets to openly sold pirate TV services, the sixth most populated country in Europe often has other things on its mind.

This week, however, the government said it would re-focus attention on piracy and a number of related issues, including reform of compensation for private copying and tax breaks for live entertainment.

In an announcement before the Congressional Culture Committee, Iñigo Méndez de Vigo, Minister of Education, Culture and Sports, presented the government’s ‘Culture 20/20 Plan’, the successor to its Strategic Plan for Culture.

Among a basket of cultural-focused measures sits the creation of a special prosecutor’s office, dedicated to fighting piracy and other intellectual property-related offenses.

The Minister said that strengthening the fight against piracy, both online and offline, is an existing project receiving new life as one of the 20/20 Plan’s key objectives.

“It’s an old project with the Ministry of Justice and a clear signal that we’re serious,” he said, adding that the government will boost its human resources and technological means to tackle the problem at hand.

Turning to Internet piracy in particular, the Minister said that between 2012 and 2016 there had been 491 requests to remove illegal content from websites, almost all of which had been resolved. He reported that just over 50 sites had ceased their activities and 200 more had removed illegal content to move into compliance.

While there was no mention of any warning notice campaigns, such as the one underway in the United States and another preparing for launch in the UK, Spain plans to run anti-piracy awareness campaigns, both in the media and in classrooms.

“[We will] raise awareness among schoolchildren to respect property, protect creators and expand cultural heritage,” the Minister said.

“We have to achieve a great sensibility, mainly in the schools, so that the children understand that when they are illegally downloading a song they are stealing. It is an issue of education and awareness in which we will take advantage of the fact that Education and Culture are under the same jurisdiction.”

Also on the agenda is “urgent” reform of unpopular private copying rules and a promise to “respond in a balanced manner to the needs of consumers and the different sectors involved.”

If economic conditions allow, the government also wants to reduce VAT on live entertainment from the current 21% to just 10%.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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