Every year sees periods when sites in the file-sharing sector are subjected to denial of service attacks. The attackers and their motives are often unknown and eventually the assaults pass away.

Early in 2014 many torrent sites were hit, pushing some offline and forcing others to invest in mitigation technology. In May a torrent related host suffered similar problems.

Today it’s the turn of the main open source Popcorn Time fork to face the wrath of attackers unknown. TorrentFreak spoke with members of the project including Ops manager XeonCore who told us that the attack is massive.

“We are currently mitigating a large scale DDoS attack across our entire network. We are currently rerouting all traffic via some of our high bandwidth nodes and are working on imaging and getting our remaining servers back online to help deal with the load,” the team explain.

The attack is project-wide with huge amounts of traffic hitting all parts of the network, starting with the site hosting the Popcorn Time source code.

Attack on the source code site – 980Mbps

Also under attack is the project’s CDN and API. The graph below shows one of the project’s servers located in France. The green shows the normal traffic from the API server, the blue represents the attack.

Attack on the France API server – 931Mbps

Not even the project’s DNS servers have remained untouched. At one point two of three DNS servers went down, with a third straining under almost 1Gbps of traffic. To be sure, a fourth DNS server was added to assist with the load.

Attack on the Dutch DNS server – peaking at 880Mbps

All told the whole network is being hit with almost 10Gbps of traffic, but the team is working hard to keep things operational.

“We’ve added additional capacity. Our DNS servers are currently back up and running but there is still severe congestion around Europe and America. Almost 10Gbps across the entire network. Still working on mitigating. API is still online for most users!” they conclude.

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attack and it’s certainly possible things will remain that way. Only time will tell when the attack will subside, but the team are determined to keep their project online in the meantime.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

More than two months have passed since former Pirate Bay spokesman and co-founder Peter Sunde was arrested on a farm in Sweden by a specialist police unit.

Sunde was transferred to Västervik Norra, the high security prison facility where he is serving the eight-month jail sentence that was handed down in 2012.

Despite the sentencing Sunde has always maintained his innocence. He utilized all legal means at his disposal to fight back, and emphasized that his role in The Pirate Bay didn’t warrant being branded a criminal.

This view is shared by many people including Julia Reda, the new Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Pirate Party. Reda will be visiting Sunde in prison later today to send her support, and points out that he shouldn’t be there in the first place.

“I am visiting Peter Sunde in prison today to express my support. The unnecessarily harsh sentence he was given illustrates that our justice system has completely lost touch with digital culture,” Reda says.

“The tactic of draconian deterrence against file sharing has failed!” she adds.

During her visit the MEP also plans to ask Sunde about his conditions. The Pirate Bay founder previously requested a transfer to a lower security facility as he was losing weight and coping with psychological issues due to his circumstances.

Sunde’s sentencing is a result of a failed witch hunt against online piracy, Reda argues. Instead of embracing those who explore new technologies and business models, authorities have wrongly opted to crack down on people such as Sunde.

The MEP believes that the focus shouldn’t be on deterrence, with authorities doing more to encourage and assist content creators to develop business models that can compete with piracy.

Reda notes that several founders of file-sharing services have become successful entrepreneurs. The developers behind Kazaa later brought Skype and Rdio, and Napster’s Sean Parker served as the first president of Facebook.

Sunde is also a digital pioneer, and actively involved in several startups including the micro-donation service Flattr and the encrypted chat application Heml.is. His contributions to these projects have been halted now, which is not the right way to go according to the MEP.

“I am saddened by the fact that Sweden has chosen to jail this digital pioneer in an attempt to make an example of him,” she says.

We hope to have more details of the MEP’s visit and Sunde’s outlook on the future later this week.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Three weeks ago a high quality leak of the upcoming The Expendables 3 film appeared online.

Fearing a massive loss in revenue, movie studio Lionsgate sued the operators of six websites that allegedly failed to remove the infringing files – Limetorrents.com, Billionuploads.com, Hulkfile.eu, Played.to, Swankshare.com and Dotsemper.com.

A few days ago the court sided with Lionsgate and granted a preliminary injunction to seize the financial assets of the site’s operators. In addition the sites were forbidden from linking to the infringing material. Since this includes user uploaded files, the order effectively means that the sites have to shut down.

Today the broad order claimed its first major casualty in cloud hosting provider Hulkfile. The company informs TorrentFreak that it has disabled access to all visitors from the United States and that it intends to shut down globally during the coming days.

“Hulkfile.eu is no longer accessible in the U.S. and will shut down completely soon. We can’t keep building our business on the weak base the preliminary injunction left us with,” Hulkfile’s operator says.

Hulkfile believes that Lionsgate has painted a tainted picture of its service to the U.S. federal court. The file-storage service says it honors all takedown requests, and even developed a special removal tool for copyright holders which is used by various takedown services.

“We’re not doing anything wrong, it’s a service just like any other cloud storage service in the world. If Hulkfile was started to support piracy, then why would we have created a takedown system which provided access to more than 40 copyright holders and piracy fighters?”

The takedown notices Lionsgate sent for the Expendables leak hadn’t been processed yet due to the vacation period, the hosting service claims. The movie studio could have taken the links down themselves if they used Hulkfile’s removal tool, but Lionsgate’s takedown partner MarkMonitor has apparently shown no interest in using it.

“We showed good faith by providing access to a removal tool which MarkMonitor never asked to gain access to, even after we offered it multiple times. Every day there is a new file-sharing service launching somewhere. The only way for copyright holders to protect their material is to cooperate, not to fight,” Hulkfile tells TF.

With an injunction that basically prevents Hulkfile from operating its service, the company sees no other option than to throw in the towel. Users will get the option to transfer their files to another hosting provider, but Hulkfile will not come back after that.

It seems that Hulkfile is not the only casualty. The smaller file-sharing service Swankshare completely vanished from the Internet shortly after the court issued its preliminary injunction. It’s currently unknown whether this site plans to stay down for good.

While the Expendables leak posed a serious threat to Lionsgate’s revenue, one has to wonder whether this justifies putting several other companies out of business with such broad injunctions. In particular because Hulkfile and others had no real option to defend themselves due to the ex-parte nature of the order.

Considering the ‘success’ booked by Lionsgate in such a small time period it’s safe to expect that more movie companies will use the same strategy in the future.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

With police and trade groups such as the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and the BPI on the prowl, it has to be said that running a file-sharing site in the UK right now is not without its risks.

Earlier this month it became clear that the long-standing private torrent site TorrentShack (TSH) had run its course after FACT managed to track down the site’s operator. As is usually the case, FACT told the site’s operator he could either close down the site and hand over its domain – or face the consequences.

To avoid trouble TSH’s admin agreed to FACT’s terms, and at the time of writing the site is unreachable, presumably as agreed. However, if FACT are thinking of cracking open the champagne, those celebrations might be a bit premature.

A few hours ago the official TorrentShack Twitter account published its final tweet, but it didn’t signal the end of the road.

We are far from gone. This is our last tweet. You know where to find us. //staff

— TorrentShack (@TorrentShack) August 12, 2014

<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

The end result is that a TorrentShack clone is now online. An announcement reveals that the site’s former .net domain is already in FACT’s hands and the old servers and their databases have been taken offline and wiped. However, the former admin of the site was apparently not the only person with a set of keys to the back door.

“Luckily for us though, [the admin] was not the only one with access to the main site box,” the announcement reads.

“In short we have managed to get hold of one of the latest back ups before everything was taken offline.”

So, against the odds, TorrentShack appears to have been resurrected. The site’s operators warn that they currently have no funds but will do their best to get the site back to normal soon. Whether FACT will stand for that remains to be seen.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As President Barack Obama noted yesterday, Robin Williams arrived on our screens as an alien in the 1970s and went on to touch the world with appearances in a string of high profile movies.

His performance in Good Will Hunting earned Williams the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor but there can be few who didn’t warm to him in Mrs Doubtfire or marvel at his energy in Good Morning Vietnam.

However, there’s an old saying that people only truly appreciate something when it’s gone and judging by the response shown yesterday by fans, that certainly holds true for Williams.

Taking a look today at Amazon’s best-selling movie/TV list, we can see that various versions of five different Williams movies currently occupy nine spots in the top 20, but of course there are other ways that people can relive his greatest moments. The quickest and easiest way is to grab something from file-sharing networks, and that’s exactly what’s happening now on a pretty noticeable scale.

At the top of Amazon’s top-selling list is ‘Dead Poets Society’ so it comes as no surprise that this is currently the most popular Williams title being shared using BitTorrent.

The day before news of Williams’ death broke, approximately 100 users worldwide were sharing this 1989 classic on public networks. Yesterday, out of nowhere, it received more than 50,000 downloads. At the time of writing, a ‘YIFY‘ version of Dead Poets Society sits one place ahead of the Liam Neeson movie Non-Stop in The Pirate Bay’s Top 100 most downloaded chart.

In second place, both on Amazon and on public BitTorrent networks, is the 1993 comedy Mrs Doubtfire. The most popular copy is a ‘YIFY’ rip of the Blu-ray edition of the movie that was first uploaded back in September 2012. Again, activity on this release has gone through the roof in the last 36 hours.

Following close on the heels of Mrs Doubtfire both on Amazon and on BitTorrent networks is the 1987 war-comedy Good Morning, Vietnam. Famous for Williams’ improvised and high-energy broadcasts, the movie went on to become one of his most lucrative. Again, the most popular edition on torrent networks comes from YIFY.

Next on Amazon’s list is Good Will Hunting, the movie for which Williams’ earned his Oscar. Yet again this movie’s popularity ranking is mirrored on public BitTorrent networks, sitting a few places down from Mrs Doubtfire as it does on Amazon.

At this point Amazon and BitTorrent diverge a little. At position 13 in Amazon’s Top 20 sits the lesser-known Patch Adams. The title is currently outside The Pirate Bay’s top 100 downloads but with several thousand people now on the most popular torrent, a breakthrough could come at any time.

Finally and also of interest is how the legal market has adapted and is better able to cope with surprise demand. During similar events in the past, sites like Amazon have completely sold out of DVDs and Blu-rays, much as they have with the more popular Williams titles today. However, many of the currently “sold out” movies are also available to watch online, meaning that no one has to miss out.

BitTorrent has always had the same ability, of course, but even today it can offer something not available anywhere else.

A pretty huge torrent released yesterday by RARBG contains a total of 40 Williams movies, from Popeye in 1980 to Shrink in 2009. It’s off to a slow start in terms of seeders (as expected in a torrent of this size) but it probably offers the most comprehensive set of Williams memories available online today.

“Robin Williams was a legend and truly deserving of all our love and adulation,” a commenter on this torrent writes.

“I don’t know what more I can do to honor his memory than to re-watch his old films and reflect on how they shaped my sense of humor, filled my life with joy, and provided me a happy/funny escape from reality in an otherwise bleak and depressing world.”

Robin McLaurin Williams (July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.